Away from Home (33 page)

“Hey, Mama …” Julie said. She called Helen something different every month, this month it was Mama, the month before, Mother, the one before, Mom.

“What?”

“Can I sleep in your room tonight?”

“In my room? Why?”

“I just feel like it.”

“There are two people in that room already, Daddy and me. What’s the matter with your room?”

“I just feel like it. I can sleep in your bed.”

“And who on the floor?” Helen sat down at the table next to Julie and kissed her.

“There’s room. I’m little.”

Helen kissed Julie again and smoothed her hair. “Come on,” she said. “Spit it out. What did I do?”

“Nothing!”

“When we moved into this apartment you wanted the biggest room. You said, ‘I want a big, big room, all to myself.’ And then when you found out Mrs. Graham was going to sleep in here with you instead of with Roger you were furious at me, remember? You said, ‘I’m a big girl, I want to sleep alone.’ Now you want to sleep with
two
of us, in the same bed even. How about that?”

Julie was bent over her jigsaw puzzle, concentrating furiously. She was trying to find the place to put an odd-shaped piece and did not answer. Helen guided her hand to the hole where the piece would fit. “I just do,” Julie muttered finally.

I did something, Helen thought. What did I do? She thinks I don’t love her, she wants to be a baby again. My God, I must be a terrible mother—what did I do?

“That’s no reason.”

“Well … you’ll think I’m a baby if I tell you.”

“I don’t exactly think you’re a middle-aged woman,” Helen said tenderly. “I’d certainly be worried if you didn’t act like a little girl sometimes.”

“Well, Roger doesn’t care. He isn’t afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

Julie held her hands out to embrace an invisible object at least a foot long. “Of Hercules the Cockroach. Tony Burns says his grandmother told him there’s a cockroach in her bedroom
this
big, and at night it climbs up people’s sheets and eats people.”

“Oh, my Lord!” Helen said. She was so relieved she began to laugh, but at the same time she felt like crying. “That’s just a story. Tony Burns’s grandmother just made it up. The day you ever see a cockroach even half that size you tell me right away and we’ll sell it to the horror-movie people in Hollywood and make a million dollars.”

“Do they want big cockroaches?” Julie was beginning to look pleased.

“They’d want anything
that
fantastic.”

“Well, she said it was true.”

“All right. And I say it isn’t. It’s absolutely not true. You’ve seen the cockroaches they have here. You’re the one who picks up bugs and bees and God knows what in your bare hands—I’m not. You’re not afraid of bugs, and there’s no such animal as Hercules the Cockroach.”

“Hey, Mama …”

“What?”

“Are you always right about everything?”

“No. But I’m right about a stupid story one of your friends tells you. I’m right about this. Other things—well, I’m older than you and I know more, and I’m your mother so you have to listen to me. I’ll tell you everything I know and then when you grow up you can go on from there and you’ll know more than I do.”

“Do you know more than your mother?”

Why do children always know so well how to put you on the spot, Helen thought, admiring and a little exasperated. “Some things,” she answered bravely.

Julie looked pleased. Then she became serious again. “Did you tell her?”

“Tell her what, pigeon?”

“That you know more than she does?”

Helen thought for a moment of lying and saying yes, and then she stopped herself. She only lied to Julie in cases of emergency, and hoped they would always be few. “Those things don’t matter so much between grown people—who knows more than who,” she said finally. “It doesn’t matter as much as it does between grownups and children. When grownups think differently about the same thing they each just try to go their own way.”

“Oh,” Julie said. She picked up another piece of her puzzle and stared at it with concentration and then carefully fit it into its place. “Do you want to do one, Mama?”

“Thank you.” She picked up a piece shaped like a heart.

“When I’m grown up,” Julie said, “if I know more than you do, I’ll tell you whatever you don’t know.”

“Yes? Thank you. Meanwhile, for a few years anyway,
I’ll
tell
you
.”

They worked on the jigsaw puzzle together for a while in silence. Then Julie looked up at Helen. On her soft, eight-year-old’s face was a comical look of what Helen recognized as a first attempt at grownup sophistication. “It’s nice once in a while to have a talk together like this,” Julie said. “Woman to woman.”

There was too much time to think. Helen had trained herself to block everything out of her mind but the pleasure of the warm rays of the sun on her body while she lay on the beach, but still, after the first ten or fifteen minutes, thought came anyway. There was a new fad now: splashing Coca-Cola on your skin in order to get a deeper suntan. It would seep into her straw beach mat and collect sand; then she would have something else to think about. But not for long. A few minutes in the surf, toes and heels digging into the shifting sand to keep from being pulled along by the powerful undertow, a short, reckless swim, and she would be cool and clean again, and the thoughts of Sergio would come back. Bert was going away at the end of the week to the Interior. He would be gone at least a week. She knew what Sergio was going to ask her: to come away with him then, at least for a few days.

She was missing Bert in advance, as she always did when he went away, and at the same time she was thinking with forbidden and guilty excitement what it would be like to spend two whole days alone with Sergio. She could say she was going to São Paulo for some shopping. Wives did that at least once a year; the stores there were bigger and better and you could get all the things you couldn’t find in Rio. The children could stay with Mrs. Graham, and Margie could look in on them every day. Margie adored the children. But even as she was planning this imaginary thing Helen was rejecting it, telling herself it was nothing more than a mental exercise. How to run away with your lover. The whole idea was ridiculous. Sergio was not even her lover. But of course he would be if she went anywhere with him.…

Helen had thought about this more and more as the days went by. What frightened her, what really terrified her, was the certainty that if she and Sergio ever became lovers it would not be merely a fling for her to get him out of her system for once and for all, but a bond that would tie her to him for longer than she dared think about and make her love for him inescapable. She was sure now she was in love with him. Even a little bit in love—the thing he had told her would not satisfy him. But could you be a little bit dead? She felt like a schoolgirl. When she thought about him or pictured him she missed whole sections of conversation that was going on around her. When the telephone rang she jumped, her hands shook and became cold, and when it turned out not to be him at all she felt so disappointed she could hardly speak.

She felt independent, almost disassociated, from the rest of her daily life. She did things now by ritual. The only times she felt alive were when she was with the children or with Bert, because then the warmth of her love for them filled her and she became a part of whatever they were doing at the time. But alone she was like a sleepwalker. She was unable to come to a decision either to put Sergio out of her mind forever or to admit him into her life, because secretly she knew what she was going to do and she was afraid to face it. It must be like the last moment before you dived off the high tower into an icy swimming pool for the first time. You saw the space between, you imagined the feeling of falling and the shock of cold, you contemplated retreat. But if you had not intended to jump, why had you climbed up to the tower in the first place? You couldn’t climb down without completing the act. But you kept putting off the moment. You knew that one more step, one graceless involuntary movement of the body, and you would have no choice. If you were going to do it, you might as well dive well, with as much style as you had. You couldn’t fall protesting and struggling into a love affair; it was ridiculous. You had to enjoy it or not do it at all.

I’ve changed, Helen thought. We’ve been away from home almost a year and already I’m planning my life as if home didn’t exist, as if among strangers I’m anonymous. Is that why some people travel, why they rush to Europe with those terribly juvenile comments about “finding” themselves? Maybe those ideas aren’t so juvenile at all.

“Telephone for you, Senhora.”

She walked to the telephone with her heart pounding heavily, and for a moment she hesitated before speaking into the receiver. Her voice was almost inaudible. “Hello.”

“Mrs. Sinclair?” A woman’s voice, slightly shrill and nasal, with an American western twang.

She had a moment of actual physical pulling-away, of shrinking from that probing, friendly voice, and she could not answer.

“Hello? Helen Sinclair? Hello?”

“Yes, I’m here. The connection must be bad.”

“Oh, aren’t the telephones the limit! This is Honor McVitty, from the Book Club. I’m in charge of getting the members shaped up, and I notice from our lists that you haven’t been to the meetings for months. Is there some reason?”

“I’ve … been busy.”

“Well, we’re all
busy
, Mrs. Sinclair. All of us are married women with husbands, and most of us have children to take care of. But we all feel that our intellectual lives can’t be ignored no matter how busy we are. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes,” Helen said weakly.

“Now we need all our members present at our bimonthly meetings so the discussions will be interesting. And we need the money, too, to buy the books. Now if you’re too busy to
read
two books a month, Mrs. Sinclair, you don’t have to actually
read
them. You can just listen to the discussion of the other members who
have
read them, and then you can decide whether you want to read that particular book or not. Quite a few of our busy members do that.”

“I see,” Helen said.

“If you’re worried about the cost, Mrs. Sinclair, I can assure you that chipping in with twenty-five other members to send for these books from the States is really not expensive at all. We all have to watch the pennies, you know, all of us. But we feel culture has no price. And we always get best sellers, right from the bestseller list of
Time
magazine. So you don’t have to worry about
that!
”

“It was very nice of you to call,” Helen said, “but actually I’ve found that I like to do my reading on my own. I’m just used to doing it that way. Thank you anyway.”

“I suppose you think we’re not intellectual enough for you,” Honor McVitty said. She was pretending to be modest and a little amused, but actually her tone revealed genuine resentment. “I want you to know that most of us are college women, Mrs. Sinclair, and very intelligent. I’m sure you won’t find us lacking in intellectual companionship for you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I didn’t say that at all.”

“We have to keep up our cultural lives here. If you won’t help us, Mrs. Sinclair, how do you expect us to get along?”

“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “Really I am.”

“Then come this Thursday afternoon. Two o’clock.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“You know what I think?” Honor McVitty’s voice rose in indignation. “I think you’re a snob! You should talk to some of our women, you’d see how intelligent they are. Some of them even had
jobs
in the States before they came here with their husbands.”

“Look,” Helen said, “
I
didn’t graduate from college.
I
never had a job except as a homemaker or whatever you intellectuals are calling it nowadays. But I happen to like to read by myself, and think about books by myself, without twenty-five women telling me what it all means before I even get a chance to figure it out. Reading alone is just a private vice I seem to have, and I plan to keep it.”

“It’s women like you,” Honor McVitty said shrilly before Helen let the receiver drop back into place, “who give the American colony a bad name!”

Helen went into the living room and lighted a cigarette. The call had disturbed her more than she thought it could. It seemed as though the badly filtered voice of that woman from the Book Club had come from outer space somewhere, from another world.
Shape up
, wasn’t that the phrase she had used? Did she think they were all in the Army? Perhaps that harmless, touchy woman, with her dog-eared passed-around novels and community discussion, was only trying to save herself, just as Helen was doing, just as they all were, Bert in his mines, Margie going to the same movie day after day during those bad secret months. They were all trying, in their own way, to save themselves, because the world that had saved them before, with its train schedules and sinkfuls of dirty dishes and children home with colds and parents and aunts and uncles and friends, was gone. It was far away, far, much farther than the voice of someone named Honor McVitty calling lost American housewives to arms, to shape up, to keep up, to keep the faith.

We’re alone, Helen thought. We’re all alone. Love one another, my children, or ye shall die.

Two days before Bert left for the mine Helen gave a small farewell dinner for Mil Burns. She had been putting it off because she knew that Mil was going to leave Phil for ever, and Phil did not, and giving a going-away party for Mil’s “temporary departure” seemed not only heartless and hypocritical to her but also made Helen feel a little like an accomplice. But how could she ignore Mil’s departure completely? Mil would feel hurt, rejected; and the Burns’s had entertained the Sinclairs at their home, so not to give a farewell dinner would be rude. She invited Margie and Neil, three other couples, and of course Mil’s mother, and then as an inspiration to prove to Mil and Mrs. Penny that there really were charming, lovable Brazilians, she called Leila and invited her, and told her to bring Carlos or anyone else she wanted to escort her.