The Age of Grief (17 page)

I went around the side of the house, placed myself in the shadow of another tree, and watched the window to our bedroom. The shade was drawn, and I willed Dana to come and put it up, to open the window and show me her face without seeing me. She has a thin face, with high, prominent cheekbones and full lips. She has a way of smiling in merriment and dropping her eyelids before opening her eyes and laughing. In dental school I found this instant of secret, savored pleasure utterly beguiling. The knowledge that she was about to laugh would provoke my own laughter every
time. I wonder if the patients swim up out of the haze of nitrous oxide and think that she is pretty, or that she is getting older, or that she looks severe. I don’t know. I haven’t had a cavity myself in fifteen years. Laura cleans my teeth twice a year and that’s it for me. The shade went up, the window opened, and Dana leaned out and took some deep breaths. She put her left hand to her forehead and said, in a low, penetrating tone, “Jesus.” She sighed deep, shuddering sighs, and wrapped her robe tightly around her shoulders. “Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.” I had never heard her express herself with so little irony in my whole life. A cry came from the back of the house, and she pushed herself away from the window, closing it. Moments later, the glow from the hall light shone in Leah’s room.

Now I went back to where I had been standing before. The windows in the children’s rooms faced north and west, and hadn’t received their treatments yet, so everything Dana did was apparent in an indistinct way. She went to the crib and bent over it. She stood up and bent over it again. She held out her arms, but Leah did not come into them. I could hear the muffled staccato of her screams. Dana stood up and put her hands on her hips, perplexed and, probably, annoyed. There was a long moment of this screaming; then Dana came to one of the windows and opened it. She leaned out and said, “David Hurst, goddamn you, I know you’re out there!” She didn’t see me. She turned away, but left the window open, so I could hear Leah shouting, “No! No! Daddy! Daddy!” Now the glow of the hall light appeared in the windows of Lizzie and Stephanie’s room, and then Lizzie appeared next to Dana. Dana bent down and hugged her, reassuringly, but the screaming didn’t stop. At last, Dana picked Leah up,
only with a struggle, though, and set her down on the floor. I didn’t move. I was shivering with the cold, and it took all my will not to move. It was like those nights when Stephanie used to wake up and cry. Each of us would go in and tuck her in and reassure her, then go out resolutely and shut the door. After that we would lie together in bed listening to the cries, sometimes for hours. Every fiber in your body wants to pick that child up, but every cell in your brain knows that if you pick her up tonight, she will wake up again tomorrow night and want to be picked up. Once, she cried from midnight until about seven in the morning. The pediatrician, I might add, said that this was impossible. You could say that it is impossible for a man to pull all of his own teeth with only the help of a few swallows of whiskey. Nothing is impossible. I know a man who dropped his baby in her GM Loveseat down a flight of stairs. Having carried that burden uncountable times myself, having wrapped my arms and my fingers tightly around that heavy, bulky object, I might have said that it was impossible for a father to drop his child, but it happened. Nothing is impossible. And so I didn’t move.

Stephanie got up and turned on the light in her room. Dana turned on the light in Leah’s room. Soon there were lights all over the house. After that, the light of the television, wanly receiving its single channel. I saw them from time to time in the downstairs windows, Dana passing back and forth, pausing once to clench her fists and shout. What she was shouting was, “So shut up, just shut up for a moment, all right?” A sign that she has had it. They always shut up. Then she opens her fists and spreads her fingers and closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. Okay.” She went out of view. The light went on in the kitchen, and she reappeared, carrying glasses of milk.
She went away again. She reappeared carrying blankets and sleeping bags. Then they all must have lain down or sat down on the floor, because all I saw after that was the wall of the living room, with half a Hundertwasser print and the blue of the television flickering across it. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two.

At two thirty, lights began going out again, first in the kitchen, then the dining room. The television went off. Dana passed the window, carrying a wrapped-up child, Leah, because that was the room she went into. She went to the window and closed it. Then she carried up Lizzie and Stephanie, one at a time. Don’t stumble on those blankets going up the stairs, I thought. The living room light went out. The hall light. The bathroom light. The light in our room. It was three by now. The house was dark. I imagined sleep rising off them like smoke, filtering through the roof and ascending to the starry sky. I stayed outside. The sun came up about six. I went inside and made myself a big breakfast. I sat over it, reading the paper from the day before, until nearly eight thirty, when Dana came down. She was furious with me and didn’t speak. I estimated that her pride might carry us through another three or even four days without anything being communicated.

I got up and walked out, leaving all the dirty dishes. Was I furious with her? Was that why I had taken this revenge? In the interests of self-knowledge, I entertained this possibility. Ultimately, however, I didn’t care what my motives were. The main thing was that I had invested a new and much larger sum in my refusal to listen to any communications from my wife, and I saw that I would have to protect my investment rather cannily from now on.

For someone who has been married so long, I remember
what it was like to be single quite well. It was like riding a little moped down a country road, hitting every bump, laboring up every hill. Marriage is like a semi, or at least a big pickup truck jacked up on fat tires. It barrels over everything in its path, zooming with all the purpose of great weight and importance into the future. When I was single, it seemed to me that I made up my future every time I registered for classes. After I paid my fees, I looked down at that little $4,000 card in my hand and felt the glow of relief. It was not that I was closer to being a dentist. That was something I couldn’t imagine. It was that four more months of the future were visible, if only just. At the end of every term, the future dropped away, leaving me gasping.

Dana, however, always had plans. She would talk about them in bed after we had made love. She talked so concretely about each one, whether it was giving up dentistry and going to Mazatlán, or whether it was having Belgian waffles for breakfast if only we could get up two hours hence, at five thirty, in time to make it to the pancake house before our early classes, that it seemed to me that all I had to do was live and breathe. The future was a scene I only had to walk into. What a relief. And that is what it has been like for thirteen years now. I had almost forgotten that old vertigo. I think I must have thought I had grown out of it.

The day after I stayed up all night, which I spent working around the country house, clearing up dead tree limbs and other trash, pruning back this and that, the future dropped away entirely, and I could not even have said whether I would be at my stool, picking up my tools, the next morning. The very biological inertia that propelled me around the property, and from meal to meal, was amazing to me. I was terrified. I was like a man who keeps totting up the days that the sun
has risen and making odds on whether it will rise again, who can imagine only too well the deepening cold of a sunless day. I gather that I was rather forbidding, to boot, because everyone stayed away from me except Leah, who clambered after me, dragging sticks and picking up leaves, and keeping up a stream of talk in her most man-pleasing tones.

Dana supported her spirits, and theirs, with a heroic and visible effort. They drove to one of the bigger supermarkets, about twenty miles away, and brought everything back from the deli that anyone could possibly have wanted—bagels, cream cheese mixed with lox, cream cheese mixed with walnuts and raisins, French doughnuts, croissants with chocolate in them, swordfish steaks for later, to be grilled with basil, heads of Buttercrunch lettuce, raspberry vinegar and olive oil, bottles of seltzer for Lizzie’s stomach,
The New York Times
, the Chicago
Tribune
, for the funny papers. She must have thought she could lose herself in service, because she was up and down all day, getting one child this and another child that, dressing them so that they could go out for five minutes, complain of the cold, and be undressed again. She read them about six books and fiddled constantly with the TV reception. She sat on the couch and lured them into piling on top of her, as if the warmth of human flesh could help her. She was always smiling at them, and there was the panting of effort about everything she did. I wondered what he had done to her, to give her this desperation. Even so, I stayed out of the way. Any word would be like a spark in a dynamite factory. I kept Leah out of her hair. That is what I did for her, that is the service I lost myself in.

At dinner, when we sat across from each other at the old wooden table, she did not lift her eyes to my face. The portions she served me were generous, and they rather shamed
me, as they reminded me of my size and my lifelong greed for food. I complained about the fish. It was a little undercooked. Well, it
was
a little undercooked, but I didn’t have to say it. That was the one time she looked at me, and it was a look of concentrated annoyance, to which I responded with an aggressive stare. About eight we drove back to town. I remember that drive perfectly, too. Leah was sleeping in her car seat beside me, Lizzie was in the back, and Dana had Stephanie in her car. At stoplights, my glances in the rearview mirror gave me a view of her unyielding head. At one point, when I looked at her too long and missed the turning of the light, she beeped her horn. Lizzie said that her stomach hurt. I said, “You can stand it until we get home,” and Lizzie fell silent at once, hearing the hardness in my voice. It was one of those drives that you remember from your own childhood and swear you will never have, so frightening, that feeling of everything wrong but nothing visibly different, of no future. But of course, there is a future, plenty of future for the results of this drive to reveal themselves, like a long virus that visits the child as a simple case of chicken pox and returns over and over to the adult as a painful case of shingles.

I should say that what I do remember about Dana, from the beginning, is a long stream of talk. I don’t, as a rule, like to talk. That is why I preferred those rubber dams. That is why I like Laura. Dana is right, people who don’t talk and rarely smile seem threatening. I am like my mother in this, not my father, whose hardware store was a place where a lot of men talked. They wandered among the bins of traps and U joints and washers and caulk, and they talked with warmth and enthusiasm, but also with cool expertise, about the projects they were working on. My father walked with them, drawing them out about the details, then giving advice about
products. When my father was sick or out of town, my mother worked behind the counter and receipts plummeted. “I don’t know”—that’s what she answered to every question. And she didn’t. She didn’t know what there was or where it might be or how you might do something. It was not that she didn’t want to know, but you would think it was from the way she said it: “Sorry, I don’t know.” Snap. Her eyelids dropped and her lips came together. I suspect that “I don’t know” is the main sentiment of most people who don’t talk. Maybe “I don’t know, please tell me.” That was my main sentiment for most of my boyhood. And Dana did. She told me everything she was thinking, and bit by bit I learned to add something here and there. I didn’t know, for example, until the other night that I don’t smile as much as most people. She told me. Now I know.

What is there to say about her voice? It is hollow. There is a vibration in it, as of two notes, one slightly higher than the other, sounding at the same time. This makes her singing voice very melodious, but the choir director doesn’t often let her sing solo. He gives someone with purer tones the solo part, and has Dana harmonize. These small groups of two or three are often complimented after the choir concerts. It is in this hollow in her voice that I imagine the flow of that thirteen-year stream of talk. She is a talker. I suppose she is talking now to him, since I won’t let her talk to me.

Monday night, after a long, silent day in the office to the accompaniment of extra care by the office staff that made me very uncomfortable, we went to bed in silence. She woke up cursing. “Oh,” she said, “oh shit. Ouch.” I could feel her reaching for her feet. When we were first married, she used to get cramps in her insteps from pointing her toes in her sleep. Some say this is a vitamin deficiency. I don’t know.
Anyway, I slithered under the covers and grabbed her feet. What you do is bend the toes and ankles back, and then massage the instep until the knot goes away. Massage by itself doesn’t work at all; you have to hold on to the toes so that they don’t point by mistake, for about five minutes. I did. She let me. While I was holding on to her feet I felt such a welling up of desire and pain and grief that I began to heave with dry sobs. “Dave,” she said. “Dave.” Her hollow voice was regretful and full of sorrow. In the hot dark under the covers, I ran my thumbs over her insteps and pushed back her toes with my fingers. Your wife’s feet are not something, as a rule, that you are tactilely familiar with, and I hadn’t had much to do with her feet for eight or nine years, so maybe I was subject to some sort of sensual memory, but it seemed to me that I was twenty-five years old and ragingly greedy for this darling person whom I had had the luck to fool into marrying me. Except that I wasn’t, and I knew I wasn’t, and that ten minutes encompassed ten years, and I was about to be lost. When the cramps were out of her feet, I knelt up and threw off the covers, and said, “Oh, God! Dana, I’m sorry I’m me!” That’s what I said. It just came out. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me down on top of her and hugged me tightly, and said in a much evener voice, “I’m not sorry you’re you.”