Things Withered (28 page)

I had those boys fixed up in minutes flat and they were in Mac and Rita’s station wagon, pulling out of their drive before Dan was even home from work. I was as tickled with those fifteen minutes alone before Dan got home as I was with the whole rest of the evening without children. A person should never underestimate the joy of a few minutes alone without someone pawing at her skirt, and that includes her husband. It was a real treat, even if Rita felt it necessary to hang around when she dropped the boys off, nearly popping out of her dress fussing over Dan.

But that bad day that I’m thinking of, the day they were re-shingling the roof, it was just us girls and the kids. A beautiful summer day, just a week before Dan would get ten days holiday.

We were all happy that day. Rita and Mac were getting their roof fixed. Rita was going to have three men on top of her house for a week. A week of bringing out lemonade and a little harmless flirting.

(Husbands think the jokes about the milkman and the FedEx man are all funny as hell; thing is, when you’re a young woman home all day with the kids and no reason to take your head out of curlers, a smiling, handsome FedEx man can make a world of difference in your day. Why do you think women had milk delivered? You think we couldn’t walk down the street to the store? Our milkman’s name was Stanley and I gave him a nice tip every week because he never missed a new hairdo.)

Rita was happy, and I was happy because in one week our family would be heading to the Black Hills in South Dakota, a pretty big deal for just folks. I hadn’t stopped talking about it since we’d decided. The driving was the only part I wasn’t looking forward to. Dan was one of those types who wrote down the mileage before he left and set a stopwatch to the whole deal just so he could brag to the bowling team when he got back, how fast he made it to the Black Hills. If you had to pee or eat, you better think of a way to do it through the window. It guaranteed at least one squabble on the way down, with a good hour of silence while one of us punched the buttons on the radio trying to find something to fill the silence (preferably a song called “I Hate You Because You’re Stupid”). But I wasn’t thinking about
that
.

Rita was on the front lawn with coffee for the roofers by eight
A.M.
I had been up an hour already. The boys were planning a scrub baseball game in the field behind the back lane, back when it was still an empty field. It’s all houses now, of course. I think it was all houses not long after then.

By nine I was dressed (my curlers out) and peeking out our front window at Rita, who was staring up at the guys on the roof, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun, the other perched on her hip. Her back was to me, but I knew she was laughing, her mouth lipstick red and turned up in a sexy smirk. (
Why, you big strong boys are just going to have that roof done in no time, I can just tell!
) I watched while she picked up a tray from the lawn and went inside the house.

There were quite a few things on my list yet to do. Lists! No one makes a list like a wife. We were going to be away a week. There was the paper to cancel, the lawn to cut, the camping gear to find, still stashed from the year before, proper luggage for the hotel stay—two nights, one on the way and then on the way home.

And of course, there was the cleaning. There is always the cleaning, for a woman. It wasn’t so much leaving a clean house that mattered, as it was not coming home to a dirty one. Not after a long car trip with Mr. Shaved-Two-Hours-Off-The-Trip.

I dug into the living room first. I would vacuum the rug, sofa, love seat and chair, dust, water plants, polish and oil the table in the dining room. Rita would water the plants while I was away; she and Mac would get our mail and watch the house, all of which we would turn around and do for them in one month’s time, or at least we had in other years. Not that year. God no.

Probably I was thinking that I should wash the floor and not be such a lazy thing, probably beating myself up about it even as I rubbed oil soap into a table that hadn’t been eaten on in six months. When I look back on my life now, I think of all those times when I was rubbing invisible dirt off something when I could have been reading a book, sewing; phoning my husband and hearing his precious voice a minute more, talking to my kids. But I rubbed that table raw. I don’t even have it anymore. It’s in Kerry’s house now and it’s cluttered all the time, like a great big desk, and whenever I see it, I both want to cheer and scream. But I think Kerry’s wife has it right. She’s not going to be able to discuss major days in her life by recalling what she was cleaning and a part of me is shamed that it’s part of the story at all. (’Course, a sliver of me is pleased.)

Complain as I do about the cleaning, and I’ve always been, sad to say, a bit of a complainer about housework, there is a moment in the routine of soak, wring, wipe, rinse, repeat when the world fades away and you are alone with yourself. There’s not much concentration required to polish a table or wash dishes; at some point your brain wanders off on its own. It’s nice. That’s when the problems are solved, when husbands are forgiven, and when, I think, a woman’s life is saved.

I don’t know what it’s like for young women now; I don’t know what different problems being a housewife and mother and career woman bring to the family, and I imagine they are substantial, but there’s the point right there:
substance
. Women have an assumed substance, something automatic, now. We didn’t. We had limited tools to prove our substance and without those moments of knowing who you were, you could feel yourself absolutely floating away. You had to remind yourself,
I am this house, without me they die
, or else you would just disappear into the ether one day. The women you used to see in the supermarket, their eyes staring in that Valium Vacancy? They never got the Zen-dishes thing.

But that’s got nothing to do with what happened. Not really.

I just remember that I was excited about our trip, being an outdoorsy girl myself. That was something Dan and the boys admired about me, that I could paddle a canoe, light a fire, set up a tent and bait a hook.

When I finished the table, I took oil soap and rags into the kitchen and put them in the sink. I stood at the back window of the house listening for the boys until I heard the crack of the bat on the ball—a distinctly summer sound—and then I probably fixed my hair and went across the street to Rita’s place, where they were fixing her stupid roof.

I’m thinking about where Hazel was during all of this. I don’t mean the roof shingling or the summer we were supposed to go to the Black Hills, I mean that
time
. Because it was a time all on its own, and as far as I know there’s never been a recapturing of it, but I don’t know if it was a phase of life that I went through, or a phase of life the world went through. But it was a
time
.

For one thing, I don’t think women stayed home with their houses and children as much after those years. The girls coming up behind me and Rita were getting jobs and apartments, not husbands and babies. Just a few years difference and everything was changing.

Dan and I got married out of high school and the first apartment either of us had ever set foot in was our first home together. We got the place on Burlington when I was pregnant with Kerry.

That was still the norm then, it was only 1965 or thereabouts; girls for the most part still waited for Prince Steady Job in their parents’ home and then married him and stayed at home to raise their children, even if there was already the beginning of rumblings of other options, it hadn’t changed our choices. Not then.

No one talked about it yet, not in the land of plenty where no one went hungry, when the bed you slept in was covered in clean linens and warm blankets, in a country where no one ever bombed you, invaded you, killed your neighbours. We were reminded daily about the instability of life around the world, thanks to television news, which I wouldn’t let the boys watch. We were members of the luckiest society on earth and
goddamn it!
didn’t they remind us. No one was talking yet about how even in the land of plenty there’s a bottom rung on a ladder, and women—specifically housewives—were on it. We were duped, we women. We were told that we were the backbone of society, that without us it would all crumble, that the sacrifice of personal goals, pleasure and achievement was worth it and valued for the greater good of your family, and ultimately, society. With a smoothly running home and well-raised children, who knew what could be accomplished in the outside world? All because Mother gave up her time.

And the crowd goes wild.

What was that old joke? There are three jobs for a woman: nun, mother, witch.

That was what we were fed and we ate it. I don’t even know who fed it to us; I suppose it was from watching the sacrifice of our mothers and assuming that there had to be a reason why she would do it, and a good one.

It all turned out to be unnecessary. It turned out that the fabric of society would not unravel when a woman didn’t wash her floors every week, or wasn’t home with cookies the minute a child ran through the front door and dropped his jacket on the mat. Men did not expire in their dirty underwear because there wasn’t a roast on the table. There’s been a spot of spaghetti sauce on the backsplash of Kerry’s wife’s stove for going on two years now. Doesn’t seem to bother her at all.

Good for the girls of today. It was different for us, and not all bad, we had our ways of coping, cocktails at four notwithstanding, we had each other in a way, I think, that women don’t any more. We were always there.

But where was Hazel? Hazel was Rita and Mac’s neighbour, after all. I don’t remember seeing her that morning, but then she could be a cipher, peering out through her curtains, only to disappear when you glanced up. I would go days without seeing her, even behind her curtains. She could have been worshipping Satan for all I knew, although that would be unlikely.

Cuth’s father had died about a year before we moved into the house on Burlington and I think if we had been there for that particular human drama, that tragedy, I at least would have digested it all a little more naturally. But since I only knew that this slight, white-blonde, wraithlike woman was all alone in the world trying to raise her son I couldn’t stop myself from seeing the pity in it. She was so close to us in age, I could not look at her without imagining myself in her position, a widow, not even quite in my thirties yet. Even in those early days, it bought her a lot of slack.

So I felt sorry for her. But that didn’t change what she said.

I had attempted what Rita used to call a “befriendment” early in the Burlington days. When we were new to the block and I was still unpacking, I would sometimes see her in the yard. I saw all the neighbours in the yard that summer; eventually I realized it wasn’t the most active gardening block ever, but that they were checking us out. We were new. I did it myself later.

Cuthbert was a year older than my oldest, Todd, then and I was getting big with Kerry. I tired easily and so instead of making sure every box was unpacked by ten, I would take it easy. The house was a mess and so Todd and I spent a lot of time in the yard.

I saw her and waved. She raised a tentative hand, flaccidly, like a sick person.

There was no Rita then—Rita was still a year away.

It was several days before Hazel came around, tugging Cuth by his arm.

She’d come to welcome me to the neighbourhood.

I laugh about that now. It was the dog welcoming the cat, except that I’ve always liked dogs and I think it’s cats that are the sly boots. So maybe it was the cat welcoming the dog.

Hello
, she said.
This is Cuthbert. He’s no trouble at all.

I told Dan that night what Hazel said and we couldn’t contain ourselves. I told him how tempted I was to tell her that Todd was a modicum of trouble, but that we were working on him.

In actuality, the visit was uncomfortable and cracking little jokes was the last thing on my mind. Hazel’s visit took the form of a visiting dignitary from another country, giving you their country’s strange but necessary rules and tenets.

For instance, she told me that she used pesticides on her lawn so I might want to stay away. It wasn’t good for the kids and couldn’t be good for my “condition.”

Mr. Larabee, at 370, was a policeman. Just so I knew. In case I did things that were not above board, she said.

Wanda and Matt Purdue at 349 were Jehovah’s Witnesses, so if someone came to my door, I shouldn’t be rude, since they might live on the block.

She suspected the Wilton teenagers were juvenile delinquents. They might even smoke marijuana. She worried because of Mr. Larabee.

And . . . she was a widow. Very matter-of-factly:
I am a widow.
Before I could even comment or offer my sympathies, she asked if my children were normal.

Beg your pardon?
I said.

Your children. This one and the one on the way. Are they normal?

I wanted to say it again:
beg your pardon?
I was so taken aback by the question that I was speechless, anyone would have been. My speechlessness led to the assumption of
something
on Hazel’s part and she nodded some kind of confirmation before I had a chance to even shut my gaping mouth.

Of course
, I said,
they’re perfectly normal—

But I had waited a beat too long before defending them. Now I was lying, no matter what, and Hazel would take a wait-and-see attitude until they were twenty.

(Todd got his Master’s Degree today, Hazel. Oh. Really? Special classes?)

His eyes are a little far apart. I was just wondering, you know, about mongoloidism. Mrs. Duncan on the 400 block has a mongoloid. She takes him to the special Olympics. He’s not even that retarded.

There’s nothing wrong with Todd.

It’s nothing to be ashamed of
, she said calmly. She opened her hands, palms up, in a fell swoop you know, like a magician or salesman. Voila.