The Best Thing for You (30 page)

Then there was the house to prepare.

In the bedroom her husband’s parents had shared she remade the stripped mattress, swathing its faded, faintly stained cabbage roses in a snap and drift of white linen. She gathered up her
mother-in-law’s fripperies – a china goose-girl, a nosegay of dried primrose and clove, a toilet set, lipstickery, framed photographs of the baby Buddy – and hid them in the top drawer of the bureau. It would not matter if she put them back in the wrong places when the time came. She had moved them to dust, she would say, that was all. Anyone could run his finger along the windowsill and see that was true. They had set no assignation yet and as she moved around the room she felt pleasantly detached, mechanical, as though she were carrying out tasks which had been allotted to her but which of themselves meant nothing. Anyone watching her would see nothing out of the ordinary: a woman fixing a room. Even if she chose to go down and open the door to the basement (as she did now) and sit on the top step for a while, the most she could be accused of was curiosity. She had been sent down here once or twice to fetch pickles or a bucket, waving a hand in the absolute dark before her, swatting like a kitten for the string to the single bulb, and once her husband had hidden below in the crook of the unbanistered stairs and grabbed her before she’d found it, snatching her off her feet and down into the darkness with him. That had been a terrible thing to do. Now she sat dreamily in her kerchief, chin in hand, noting the essential (only one door in or out, that she sat in; no windows; concrete walls) and the inessential (her husband’s old toys, train set, a bicycle, skis, preserves, steamer trunks emblazoned with great emblems of locks and corners decked like epaulettes, a mangle and rack). What harm, what crime, in looking? What crime in an act of imagination?

That night she served peaches and pears for dessert.

Are these my own? her mother-in-law asked.

Why, yes. You don’t mind?

Her mother-in-law did not touch her spoon. Preserves are for winter, she said. It’s almost May.

Have I done wrong?

Her mother-in-law lifted her eyes from the fruit and smiled and said softly, You greedy, wasteful girl, and started to cry.

Across a shaved lawn she could see a nurse conducting a game of croquet. The players tapped the balls with their mallets, distance gently disjointing sound’s ball from action’s socket, and stood back out of each other’s way. The intense quiet gave it the aura of a championship match.

Anna!

The players looked up as one. She understood they had been soldiers, boys whose families could afford private care.

Her husband stood on the stone steps of the nearest building, waving her over. The sanatorium was several Victorian buildings set on rolling, discreetly gated grounds. You did not walk from one building to the next but rather took a small bus. In the farthest buildings there were some very sad cases but there were no bars on the windows here, and when she first escaped to this bench a young nurse had come trotting after her, offering to bring a cup of tea out to the lawn. There had been a tiny bit of a scene, inside.

The doctor would like to talk to us, he said, when she reached the portico.

How is she?

She wants a private room.

Inside a second time, then, where the halls smelled acceptably of floor wax and disinfectant. The ceilings were high and to the wall outside the doctor’s office was stapled a large crucifix.

You didn’t mind the little mix-up, I hope? the doctor said. Our patient expressly forbade –

Of course, her husband said.

You must not take it personally, the doctor told Anna, crinkling his face. One of the symptoms of this kind of breakdown is paranoia. Our patient will manifest a strong dislike of a loved one, often triggered by the most trivial incident. Naturally she would refuse to see you. In her current state she barely knows who you are.

She seemed quite rational just now, her husband said in a low voice.

Grieving is a complicated process, a mysterious process. You must think of it as the soul caring for itself.

Yes, of course, Anna said.

They walked back across the lawn to the bus stop.

Did you tell the doctor about the dessert? she asked.

I told him.

I didn’t know it was his favourite. Your father.

Of course you didn’t.

I wouldn’t have put it in front of her if I’d known –

All right.

They watched the shuttle bus toil up the hill, so slowly that it seemed to run not on oil and gas but on a small child’s winding.

Can you fix her house up? he said suddenly. Make it nice?

Her mind scuttled, a spider, reaching in every direction at once.

I just don’t think you should sell it without her consent. It will be one more blow.

They sat in the car on the sandy grass verge of the dirt road watching the waves roll up the beach. Behind them loomed the ancient tangled forest of the University endowment lands. He had driven her here once when they were courting and then lost his nerve. Perhaps because of that first occasion it had become their holy talking place. He liked to trap her here on rainy
Sundays and talk about his dreams and plans for them, and when necessary to pick at such recalcitrant shoelace knots as arose in their lives. He liked to smoke out the open window and talk or just watch the rain through the windshield while she watched his profile, or curled obediently under his arm. He could never see the ugliness in the metal sea, the endlessly dripping trees. Often he would bring his camera and practise while she stayed in the car, curds of headache curling and thickening in her skull.

She could be in there a month, her husband said. I’m cutting corners as it is, putting her in a shared room, but there’s no other way I can afford it.

What’s the room like?

I didn’t think it was bad. There’s a curtain separating the beds. The other woman wasn’t there. The nurse told me she lost a baby.

Oh.

(She wondered if that was the woman they had seen on their way upstairs, before the nurses stopped them, apologetically but firmly, and sent Anna back down; the quite young, dazed woman who had looked directly at Anna as though she recognized her and said, I’m cold.)

How is she?

She was only half-awake because of the medications. But just as I was leaving she said she wanted her own room. She was pretty clear about that.

Maybe she meant she wants to be home. In her own room with her own things.

You don’t want her living with us, is that it?

She said nothing, was silent long enough for him to become repentant. Then she said, Let’s go home.

Are we friends?

Buddy, please, let’s go home.

I’m sorry. But I don’t like arguing with you. It’s all we seem to do any more.

Well, I don’t like it either.

Truce?

She touched his cheek with her hand. It was enough, apparently.

What a lousy day, he said in a more normal voice, turning the key in the ignition.

The boy stood with his pants in his hands, hands pink to the wrist because she had sent him to wash them, they were so cold. He had smelled chokingly of aftershave and she had told him to wash that off too.

Have you got them? she had asked first thing, and he had laughed and pulled an envelope of prophylactics from his jacket pocket and tossed them to her, frightening her a little. She had expected certain things but not playfulness, not
happiness.
She had been reassured by his delivery boy’s bicycle, its wheels glittering in rhythm with her thoughts as he walked it into the back shed as she had directed, but then his face had confused her.

Have you done this before? she asked.

Curiosity killed the cat.

He had actually said that, the very words.

They kissed for a long time in the kitchen. She had decided this would be the worst part, and therefore it was. There was no natural spark between them, no comfort. His hands were clumsy and cold. But even as she doubted curiosity quickened deep in her, a worm in the brain, and again it was as though she could look into darkness and see shining a single thread, a filament of a path through to the other side. If that was the way forward, she would go forward. She would do one thing and the next thing and see what happened then.

He pulled away from her, flushed, almost unrecognizable, and said something thickly that she didn’t catch. When he repeated it she felt a great wincing contraction of pity coupled with an electric eagerness to proceed. The filament glowed white-hot along its length. She sent him to wash.

You’re quiet this evening.

Am I?

Penny, he said. She held out her hand. He rolled his eyes, smiling, and dug in his pockets.

I’ve got a penny, Michael Peretti said.

She reached across the table and let him press it into her palm. Now I’ve got to deliver, she said. She felt less afraid of him now, even though he still held her hand a fraction too long, even under her husband’s eyes.

I want my money’s worth.

You’ll get it, she said. I was thinking about the war.

Is she telling the truth, Pass?

How should I know? her husband said. Grinning, though. Earlier Peretti had enquired after her mother-in-law and expressed his concern like a gentleman. He had rested a hand on her husband’s shoulder and asked for the name of her pavilion so he could send flowers. Did she have a favourite flower? Roses, her husband said apologetically, but he had taken it in stride. Now they were kidding a little in their old way – a first small sweet candy, bittersweet, after their long abstinence.

What about the war, then? he asked. What does she think of the war?

That it will be over soon.

She reads the newspapers.

Smiling: Sometimes she does.

And will we be better or worse off when it’s over?

What a question, she said, and started to clear the table.

What were you really thinking about at supper this evening? her husband asked her later, after Peretti had gone. You were miles away.

Have you taken your pill?

Sitting in bed, he held up his water glass to toast her. She saw him in the mirror of her vanity, where she sat with her back to him, brushing her hair. When he set it down she saw the dim places where his fingerprints had clouded the glass.