Of Time and Memory (19 page)

If she has time. Another month and she will have her new baby to care for. It is amazing to Peggy to think that her mother is going to have a baby. Some mornings when she awakens before anyone else in the house, she stands at the threshold of her parents' bedroom and watches her mother turning in her sleep. Each time the baby rolls over inside her, she rolls in her sleep and her hand moves to her belly. It is as if they are going through the steps of a slow dance, learning the timing of each other's moves. In the morning when her mother awakens she will say, I heard you singing again last night while you were sewing, Peggy. I fell asleep again to the sound of you sewing and singing.

Peggy is making the world smaller. In the months before her wedding, her love for Dick is so complete that she doesn't need to go anywhere. He comes to take her dancing and they
end up sitting on the couch in her father's house, talking until they can't keep their eyes open any longer. She makes him a cup of coffee before he drives home. While the water is coming to a boil she holds him in her arms. Whatever is happening in the large world outside his embrace doesn't matter at moments like this. All the bad things, all the things that frighten her, are beyond the orbit of her love with Dick.

If she goes anywhere at all it is to baby-sit for her uncle Howard and aunt Muriel. The minute they leave the house with Peggy and Dick in charge of their three small boys, it feels like it all belongs to her. The white lace tablecloth on the dining-room table. The blue ceramic teapot on the kitchen counter. The house. The little boys in their footed pajamas.

All they want to do is wrestle on the living-room floor with Dick. The littlest one is just learning to walk. He wobbles on his feet like a town drunk. He goes through Dick's pockets while his brothers are charging and diving on him. Not so hard, Peggy calls to the boys. Don't pull Dick's hair!

Here is when she falls in love with him as a father. Could there possibly be anything better in life than this? No, nothing. They put all three in the tub together, then read them stories. Tonight Dick is reading to them while Peggy is in the kitchen making him a sandwich from some leftovers in the refrigerator. It's just a sandwich, but before she knows it she has practically every utensil out on the counter. Lettuce everywhere. Dick comes up behind her and kisses the back of her neck. When she turns to look into his eyes the thought that fills her mind is how she will never be able to give him in return what he gives her. What can I give you in return? she asks him.

A sandwich, he says.

No, I'm serious. I don't have anything to offer you.

This is how she feels; next to his goodness, his light, and his childlike faith in her, what can she possibly give him in return.

Yourself, he tells her.

This is all that he wants in the world.

Yes, she tells him, yes, of course he can have all of her; in a moment like this it is easy for her to say it. Easy for her to hold nothing back.

They are silly that night. It is so late when Muriel and Howard come home that Peggy and Dick spend the night there. He sleeps on the couch. At two o'clock in the morning she kisses him goodnight. She has never kissed him this late at night, she tells him. Or this early in the morning.

She lies in bed and makes herself stay awake until three. Then she goes back into the living room and wakes him so he can kiss her again.

This crazy happiness that she is feeling is the happiness that often comes when life is in transition. She is taking a journey to a new destination. Her trunk is nearly packed. It is possible for her to believe that when she reaches this new place, her new life, things will be better there, the darkness won't find her there. It is being nowhere, neither the place where she is nor the place she is going to, that allows her the luxury of hope.

In the morning they are off to Atlantic City. It is Labor Day. Already a chill of fall in the air along the shore. The last of summer. Seagulls huddled in the wind. Peggy rides the blue-green waves, her hair in a pale pink bathing cap. She swims straight out from shore, past all the other swimmers, until Dick calls to her to come back. He looks so skinny in his bathing trunks. She can count each of his ribs.

In sweaters they walk the boardwalk. Holding hands. The shopkeepers notice them the way the world notices lovers. They can see their glances linger. And Peggy and Dick can feel the world's interest in them. It is as if the two of them are giving off a light and a heat that remind others of what they once felt.

In front of an old hotel a long line of wheelchairs made of wicker, painted white. Dick tells her about the wounded soldiers who were brought here during the war. Several of the hotels had been requisitioned by the army. The nurses pushed the sad, broken soldiers up and down the boardwalk in the wheelchairs. Imagine their families coming here to visit them, to see their wounds for the first time. And what about their lovers? Will the wounded soldiers still be loved in their brokenness? Who will love them through a long life?

They leave early with the plan of stopping by the furniture store to take one more look at the bedroom set. But then Peggy decides that she wants him to see the farm where her mother grew up.

It is dusk when they arrive. Coming over the last hill they can see lights on in the farmhouse. Something falls inside her. The bank has sold her mother's farm. It is gone. Somehow she had allowed herself to believe that it would be theirs someday. That they would raise their children here. People would drive by and see her in the tire swing with a small child on her lap. People would envy her life.

At that moment when she is beginning to disappear inside this new disappointment, Dick takes her picture. I have seen this photograph of her. The car is parked along the side of the highway, the fields spreading wide behind it. Peggy wouldn't get out of the car for him. He tried everything but she had decided that because she didn't want to have her picture
taken, she was not going to cooperate. Even after such a nice day together at the beach. She has a stern expression on her face. In the day's last slanting sunlight Dick's reflection is caught in the gleaming hubcaps. He is looking down into his box camera. She is glaring past him. A few moments earlier she was pressed against him on the front seat of the car, but now she is a million miles away. His voice is calling to her from another continent, telling her to smile. Smile, Peggy. Please smile. Why won't she give in this one time?

I am told that Dick had the most wonderful, lit-up smile. A quick smile that gave off light. I never saw it myself. I remember him as a man with his head down. When he lost her, he lost his smile forever.

She was hard on him. Her stubbornness is legendary among the people who remember her. They call it that for lack of a better word. Stubbornness. Shall I call it by some other name? Some name that will excuse her? Shall I say that she was prepossessed? Determined? Driven? Do I owe it to her to find the right word that will let her off the hook? Perhaps. But she held this boy's heart in her palm, and she could hurt him deeply.

Peggy climbed over the front seat of the car that day after the photograph and refused to ride next to him the rest of the way home. She lowered her head and wouldn't look up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror. She knew that she had hurt him again but she could not find her way to apologize.

A
udrey is born in early October and Peggy begins getting up even earlier every morning to be awake before the baby. Sewing late into the night, waking early; her days are flying by now. Her time left in this little cramped house on Market Street is drawing to an end. Forty days left. Forty days, after eighteen years beneath her father's roof.

On her way downstairs she stops at her mother's open door and watches her sleeping with the new baby. She stands in the doorway, trying to catch the sound of her breathing. There is the sweet scent of baby powder in the air. The maple-slatted crib is empty. Her mother brought the baby into bed for her middle-of-the-night feeding and she is still asleep between her mother and her father. When the baby is sleeping so peacefully, Peggy cannot pass her without feeling the restless urge to pick her up and press her against her skin. Anyone who ever breathed in the smell of a baby could have invented religion. Once when she was holding her in the first week of her life on this planet her eyes moved in the direction of her mother's voice across the room. So small and new but already aware of the importance of recognizing who is on your side in this world.

This baby is a sister who will always be separated from Peggy by eighteen years. How many times she had asked her
mother for a baby sister when she was a little girl herself, all those years when she and a new sister might have become close friends. Her mother's hair was turning gray by the time she finally got pregnant again. In church the pious ladies drew their heads together and whispered when her mother passed them with her swollen belly out in front of her like someone pushing a wheelbarrow. All of that has only drawn Peggy closer to her mother. The church ladies were concentrating on the next life while her mother was living out the mysteries of this one. Peggy took pride in it, the warm knowledge that some passion had survived in her mother, a passion that connected her to one of life's deep desires.

On one of those autumn days Peggy and her father put up a longer clothesline, one that reaches from the back door of the house to a corner of the little garage in the alley. Since the baby arrived he has been talking about building the house earlier; his original plan was to start the next spring, but now he is thinking about starting right away. With the new baby and grandmother and grandfather living in the tiny house, there is barely room for him to move. No place for him to be alone in his own house. He has begun spending more time in the garage with his tools, which he keeps in perfect order. He is a man with three children now. Someone has told him that once there are three, once the mother and father are outnumbered, everything changes, the operation of the family becomes a full-time job.

Peggy understands his feelings of claustrophobia and she feels bad to be contributing to the clutter in his house. Last night she finished another bridesmaid's dress; she and her mother worked on it together in the kitchen. Peggy stayed up
long after her mother went off to bed because she wanted to finish cleaning up so that when her father got up in the morning he would be able to have his breakfast in a tidy kitchen.

This morning after he has finished with the clothesline he tells her to come to the garage, he has something for her. He is walking ahead of her with his head down. He looks so sad and small to her, getting smaller it seems. There is no way for her to reach him. She will never know who he really is, only the superficial things that he cares about. A clean house, a waxed car, his tools in their proper place on his workbench, the flaps on his shirt pockets ironed so they don't stick out. Maybe at the end of a life these are the things we remember best about a person. These little things contribute to an ordered world. And she shared with him the deep desire to impose some order upon the world. In this way she is her father's child and always will be. She could never be less like him, more carefree, one of those people who drop their clothes on the floor and leave them there. Like Dick. This is something else she admires about him; the material world is of no consequence to him. Except for his precious car, you could strip him of his possessions and it would take him a few months to figure out that he was missing anything. She will be picking up after him all her life, she knows this, though she doesn't know why it is she cares. These little habits of hers, lining her shoes neatly in her closet, folding her clothes at the end of the day, maybe these are the things someone will remember about her someday. More than her ideas or her passions. Because she keeps those ideas and passions and fears carefully concealed behind an ordered world.

Her father has a pair of chopsticks for her. He has taken a pair of drumsticks that he had in the garage, planed them down and sanded them. She had mentioned the other night
that she wanted to try Chinese food for the first time on her honeymoon in New York City and that she wanted to learn how to use chopsticks before the wedding. So, here you go, Peggy, a set of your own chopsticks. Her father doesn't know the proper way to hold them, she'll have to ask her uncle Howard about that, it is a skill he picked up during the war.

She thanks her father. He bows his head again. She should take two steps across the space dividing them and kiss him. Maybe put her arms around him. But she doesn't. Instead she takes the chopsticks up to her room where she wraps them in a blue-and-white-checked dish towel and places them in her hope chest for the life that will begin before too long.

There was always laundry to hang out that fall, and as the days turned toward winter, the cotton diapers turned stiff as they dried. Peggy sets them over the heating grate in the kitchen to thaw. Her baby sister's clothing is no bigger than doll's clothes. The impossibly small T-shirts and socks, proof of the long life we have on this earth. People are forever saying that life is short, but hanging out the baby's laundry confirms something that Peggy may have already suspected is true, that we travel a long way in our life.

Hanging out the laundry is reassuring. It is an elemental and sensible act that places her in the company of every other person on the earth who is caring for a baby. And everyone who has ever cared for a baby. It is not hard to picture her grandmother Swan hanging her mother's baby clothes in the wind that blew across the cornfields on the farm that is now gone. And her mother hanging out hers. It is an act that allows Peggy to see the deep patterns in life and for this reason she does it slowly, never hurrying to finish. And neatly too.
She is a person who hangs all the diapers side by side, then the T-shirts, then the socks. A neatly hung load of laundry is satisfying to her. It's silly, she knows this, but she can't deny that it brings her pleasure. In the backyards up and down Market Street, people seem to be in a silent competition to keep the neatest life. You can see it in the way they care for their lawns as well. It seems that ever since the men came home from the war, order has taken a central place in people's lives. Order to counteract the terrible disorder, the unspeakable disorder of the war.