Selected Stories (45 page)

He came out on the deck, then, carrying his plate and mug, and all three of them were already there. Angela was dressed in a sapphire-blue leotard; she was doing ballet exercises by the deck railing. Eva was sitting with her back against the wall of the house, spooning up bran flakes out of a soup bowl; she did this with such enthusiasm that many were spilled on the deck floor. Roberta, in a deck chair, had the everlasting mug of coffee clasped in both hands. She had one knee up and her back hunched, and with her dark glasses on she looked tense and mournful. He knows she weeps behind those glasses. It seems to him that she has let the children draw the sap right out of her body. She spends her time placating them, picking up after them; she has to beg them to make their beds and clean up their rooms; he has heard her pleading with them to collect their dirty dishes, so that she can wash them. Or that is what it sounds like to him. Is this the middle-class fashion of bringing up children? Here she was admiring Angela, meekly admiring her own daughter—the
naked, lifted, golden leg, the disdainful profile. If either of his sisters had ventured on such a display, his mother would have belted them.

Angela lowered her leg and said, “Greetings, Master!”

“I don’t see you bumping your head on the ground,” said George. He usually joked with the girls no matter what he felt like. Rough joking was his habit, and it had been hugely successful in the classroom, where he had maintained a somewhat overdrawn, occasionally brutal, consistently entertaining character. He had done this with most of the other teachers as well, expressing his contempt for them so colorfully that they could not believe he meant it.

Eva loved to act out any suggestion of this sort. She stretched herself full length on the deck and knocked her head hard on the boards.

“You’ll get a concussion,” Roberta said.

“No, I won’t. I’ll just give myself a lobotomy.”

“George, do you realize that in four brief days we will be gone?” said Angela. “Isn’t your heart broken?”

“In twain.”

“But will you let Mom take care of Diana when we’re gone?” said Eva, sitting upright and feeling her head for bruises. Diana was a stray cat she was feeding in the barn.

“What do you mean,
let?
” said Roberta, and George at the same time said, “Certainly not. I’ll tie her to the bedpost if she ever tries to go near the barn.”

This cat is a sore point. If Angela sees the farm as a stage for herself, or sometimes as Nature—a begetter of thoughts and poems, to which she yields herself, wandering and dreaming—Eva sees it as a place to look for animals, with some of her attention left over for insects, minnows, rocks, and slugs. Both of them see it, certainly, as vacationland, spread out before them for whatever use or pleasure they can get out of it; neither sees the jobs waiting to be done under their noses. Eva has spent the summer stalking groundhogs and rabbits, trapping frogs and letting them go, catching minnows in a jar, trying to figure out how various animals could be housed in the barn. George holds her responsible—out of the very strength of her desire—for luring the deer out of the bush, so that he had to stop everything else that he was doing and build an eight-foot-high wire
fence around the garden. The only animal she has managed to install in the barn is Diana, rail-thin, ugly, and half wild, whose dangling teats show that she is maintaining a family of kittens elsewhere. Much of Eva’s time has been spent trying to discover the whereabouts of these kittens.

George sees the cat as a freeloader, a potential great nuisance, an invader of his property. By feeding it and encouraging it, Eva has embarked on a course of minor but significant treachery, which Roberta has implicitly supported. He knows his feelings on this matter are exaggerated, even comical; that does not help him. One of the things he has never wanted to be, and has avoided being, is a comic dad, a fulminator, a bungler. But it is Roberta’s behavior that bothers him, more than Eva’s. Here Roberta shows most plainly the mistake she has made in bringing up her children. In his mind he can hear Roberta talking to somebody at a party. “Eva has adopted a horrible cat, a really nasty-looking vagabond—that’s her summer achievement. And Angela spends the whole day doing jetés and sulking at us.” He has not actually heard Roberta say this—they have not been to any parties—but he can well imagine it. She would summon her children up for the entertainment of others; she would make them into characters from whom nothing serious was to be expected. This seems to George not only frivolous but heartless. Roberta, who is so indulgent with her children, who worries constantly that they may find her insufficiently loving, interested, understanding, is nevertheless depriving them. She is not taking them seriously; she is not bringing them up. And what is George to do in the face of this? They are not his children. One of the reasons he has not had children is that he doubts if he could give his attention unreservedly, and for as long as would be needed, to this very question of bringing them up. As a teacher, he knows how to make a lot of noise and keep several steps ahead of them, but it is exhausting to have to do that on the home front. And it was boys, chiefly, whom he learned to outmaneuver; boys were the threat in a class. The girls he never bothered much about, beyond some careful sparring with the sexy ones. That is not in order here.

Aside from all this, he often can’t help liking Angela and Eva. They seem to him confused and appealing. They think him highly amusing,
which irks him sometimes and pleases him at other times. His way with people is to be very reserved or very entertaining, and he believes that his preference is to be reserved. Therefore, he likes the entertainment to be appreciated.

But when he finished his breakfast and got two six-quart baskets and went down to the garden to pick the tomatoes, nobody stirred to help him. Roberta continued her moody thinking and her coffee-drinking. Angela had finished her exercises and was writing in the notebook she uses for a journal. Eva had taken off for the barn.

A
NGELA
sits down at the piano in Valerie’s living room. There is no piano in George’s house, and she misses one. Doesn’t her mother miss one? Her mother has become a person who doesn’t ask for anything.

I have seen her change
, Angela has written in her journal,
from a person I deeply respected into a person on the verge of being a nervous wreck. If this is love I want no part of it. He wants to enslave her and us all and she walks a tightrope trying to keep him from getting mad. She doesn’t enjoy anything and if you gave her the choice she would like best to lie down in a dark room with a cloth over her eyes and not see anybody or do anything. This is an intelligent woman who used to believe in freedom
.

She starts to play the “Turkish March,” which brings to her mind the picture of a house her parents sold when she was five. There was a little shelf up near the ceiling in the dining room, where her mother had set the dessert plates for decoration. A tree, or bush, in the yard had lettuce-colored leaves as big as plates.

She has written in her journal:
I know nostalgia is a futile emotion. Sometimes I feel like tearing out some things I have written where perhaps I have been too harsh in judging certain people or situations but I have decided to leave everything because I want to have a record of what I really felt at the time. I want to have a truthful record of my whole life. How to keep oneself from lying I see as the main problem everywhere
.

During the summer Angela has spent a lot of time reading. She has read
Anna Karenina, The Second Sex, Emily of New Moon, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats, The Happy
Hooker, The Act of Creation, Seven Gothic Tales
. Some of these, to be accurate, she has not read all the way through. Her mother used to read all the time too. Angela would come home from school at noon, and again in the afternoon, and find her mother reading. Her mother read about the conquest of Mexico, she read
The Tale of Genji
. Angela marvels at how safe her mother seemed then.

Angela has one picture in her mind of Eva before Eva was born. The three of them—Angela, her mother, and her father—are on a beach. Her father is scooping out a large hole in the sand. Her father is a gifted builder of sand castles with road and irrigation systems, so Angela watches with interest any projects he undertakes. But the hole has nothing to do with a sand castle. When it is finished her mother rolls over, giggling, and fits her stomach into it. In her stomach is Eva, and the hollow is like a spoon for an egg. The beach is wide, mile after mile of white sand sloping delicately into the blue-green water. No rocky lakefront or stingy bit of cove. A radiant, generous place. Where could it have been?

She proceeds from the “Turkish March” to a try at “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” Roberta, listening to the piano at the same time she’s listening to Valerie talking hurtiorously and despairingly about her fear of Kimberly, her dislike of intruders, her indefensible reluctance to relinquish her children, thinks, No, it wasn’t a mistake. What does she mean by that? She means it wasn’t a mistake to leave her husband. Whatever happens, it wasn’t a mistake. It was necessary. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known.

“This is a bad time for you,” Valerie says judiciously. “There is just a spectacular lot of strain.”

“That’s what I say to myself,” says Roberta. “But sometimes I think that’s not it. It’s not the house, it’s not the children. It’s just something black that rises.”

“Oh, there’s always something black,” says Valerie, grumbling.

“I think about Andrew—what was I doing to him? Setting things up to find the failure in him, railing at him, then getting cold feet and making up. Gradually the need to get rid of him would build again, but I was always sure it was his fault—if he’d just do this or that I could love him. So horrible for him that he turned into—remember what you said he was? A stick.”

“He was a stick,” says Valerie. “He always was. You’re not responsible for everything.”

“I think about it, because I wonder if that’s what George is doing to me. He wants to be rid of me, then he doesn’t, then he does, then he can’t admit that, even to himself; he has to set up failures. I feel I know what Andrew went through. Not that I’d go back. Never. But I see it.”

“I doubt if things happen so symmetrically.”

“I don’t think so either, really. I don’t think you get your punishment in such a simple way. Isn’t it funny how you’re attracted—I am—to the idea of a pattern like that? I mean, the idea is attractive, of there being that balance. But not the experience. I’d like to avoid them.”

“You forget how happy you are when you’re happy.”

“And vice versa. It’s like childbirth.”

G
EORGE
has finished scything and is cleaning the blade. He can hear the piano through the open windows of Valerie’s house, and erratic streams of sweet, cold air are coming up from the river. He feels much better now, either because of the simple exercise or from the relief of feeling unobserved; perhaps it’s just good to get away from the mountainous demands of his own place. He wonders if it’s Roberta playing. The music fits in nicely with what he’s doing: first the cheerful, workaday “Turkish March,” to go along with the scything; now, as he stands cleaning the blade and smelling the cut grass, the subtle congratulations—even if a bit uncertainly delivered—of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” As always, when his mood truly lifts, when the dawn breaks, he wants to go and find Roberta and envelop her, assure her—assure himself—that no real damage has been done. He hoped to be able to do that last night when they went drinking, but he couldn’t; something still held him back.

He recalls Roberta’s first visit to his house. That was in late August or early September, about a year ago now. They staged an indecorous sort of picnic, cooking feasts and playing records, hauling a mattress out into the yard. Clear nights, with Roberta pointing out to him the unlikely ways the stars tie up into their constellations, and every day
pure gold. Roberta saying he must get it all straight now: she is forty-three years old, which is six years too old for him; she has left her husband because everything between them seemed artificial; but she hates saying that, because it may be just cant, she isn’t sure what she means, and above all, she doesn’t know what she’s capable of. She seemed to him courageous, truthful, without vanity. How out of this could come such touchiness, tearfulness, weariness, such a threat of collapse, he cannot imagine.

But the first impression is worth respecting, he thinks.

E
VA AND
R
UTH
are decorating the dinner table on the veranda. Ruth is wearing a white shirt belonging to her brother, his striped pajama bottoms, and a monumental black turban. She looks like a proud but good-natured Sikh.

“I think the table ought to be strewn,” says Ruth. “Subtlety is out, Eva.”

At intervals they set orange and gold dahlias and beautifully striped pepper squash, zucchini, yellow gourds, Indian corn.

Under cover of the music Eva says, “Angela has more problems living here than I do. She thinks that whenever they fight it’s about her.”

“Do they fight?” says Ruth softly. Then she says, “It’s none of my business.” She was in love with George when she was thirteen or fourteen. It was when her mother first became friends with him. She used to hate his wife, and was glad when they separated. She remembers that the wife was the daughter of a gynecologist, and that this was cited by her mother as a reason George and his wife could never get on. It was probably the father’s prosperity her mother was talking about, or the way the daughter had been brought up. But to Ruth the word
gynecologist
seemed sharp and appalling, and she saw the gynecologist’s daughter dressed in an outfit of cold, jagged metal.

“They have silent fights. We can tell. Angela is so self-interested she thinks everything revolves around her. That’s what happens when you become an adolescent. I don’t want it to happen to me.”

There is a pause in Angela’s playing, and Eva says sharply, “Oh, I don’t want to leave! I hate leaving.”