Small Change (7 page)

“He’ll come around,” said Ted.

“No. He won’t.”

“In time.”

“No. He’ll never come around.”

Ted remained reasonable (because I was so unreasonable. He was good because I was bad.)

I told Jill that I thought many women filled this role. They were vessels for their husbands’ antipathy. They lost friends so their husbands could keep them, they slew the dragons of neglect so their husbands could feel benign. Then the husbands, witnessing the exhaustion of their wives under the burden of so much emotion, became patronizing. “Don’t worry about it,” they would say after their wives exploded disgracefully in public. And when pressed, “No. Your outburst didn’t bother me.” The wives would feel relieved, grateful not to be condemned for their lack of self-control, yet at the same time unsatisfied. All that emotion and so little response?

Jill said, “Ted must feel so hurt.”

I said, “But I don’t think he does. That’s the point I’m trying to make.”

Jill said, “Oh, oh. You and Mary McCarthy.” Then she relented a bit. She generalized. She said, “I guess everybody misses the obvious sometimes.”

I persisted. “He
looks
as if it doesn’t bother him.”

“You can’t go by looks,” said Jill. “Hasn’t anybody ever told you that?”

It wasn’t long after this that I had my sudden, long-overdue illumination. The sun was shining, the air was cool and dry, and I was standing beside Ted on the corner of Amsterdam and 105th while the traffic whizzed by. Ted said for the second time, quietly, and staring out at the traffic, “Rudy will come around.” I looked at him and the following words dropped into my head:
He uses optimism to shield himself from pain
.

He’ll come around
didn’t mean, I have faith in him and in the strength of our friendship. It meant,
I don’t want to think about him because it’s too painful. I’ve put him out of my mind
.

What had seemed a gift – the gift of eternal friendship – now seemed like an exquisitely-arrived-at means of survival.

The Chinese smile. The Eskimo smile. Johnny’s smile. For a moment, basking in my revelation on the corner, I floated above Ted and Johnny, and even Rudy. I looked down through their smiles into a cross-section of everything that might have caused them pain and joy. It was the sort of view that appears in storybook illustrations of woodland dwellings or in a doll’s house. I thought: this is how I should visit friends: like a fly on the wall, or a benevolent cloud.

That year Jill spent almost as much time inside the hospital as out. One afternoon when I was visiting her, Johnny came into her room with gifts. He brought
The Lover
, “Little books
are best,” and a muskmelon, “So are little melons,” which he sliced up with a jackknife and handed around. He sat there grinning and chewing, a happy sloppy grin that you’d walk miles to see.

“Have you read it?” he asked her. She hadn’t. It was one of the few books (she was a librarian, remember) that she had never read.

“You see,” he said. “Today’s my lucky day.”

She wanted to know what it was about, and he said a girl from a crazy French family in Vietnam has a rich lover in a black car. They meet on a ferry and have to keep their affair secret, since she is fifteen and white and he is much older and Vietnamese. He said the key to
The Lover
was pacing: Duras took you to the river and onto the ferry, and you didn’t know what was happening and then you did. I said I thought the key to the book was distance. No matter how close Duras was to what was happening, or how removed, she never got in her own way. Getting the right distance is the ticket, I said.

Jill held the little book, I sat in a padded green chair beside her bed, Johnny sat on the foot of the bed. His smile was like sunshine that day, at peace with me and with everything inside him. For an hour, while we kept Jill company, we had nothing to hide or be ashamed of.

A few months later Jill was back in the same hospital, but not in the same room. This time she didn’t have a view. “What do you do,” I asked her, “when you aren’t giving the doctors a hard time?”

She said, “I choose a day from the past and relive it.”

“Any day?”

“Always the same day. I never change a detail. It was a beautiful day in September. Maureen went off to boarding school and my grandfather gave me his ring.”

After Johnny told Jill that he and Lee couldn’t have a baby, Jill said to me, “It’s like a death in the family. A tragedy.” We were having lunch in her kitchen and I felt pushed aside by her compassion. She studied my face for a moment, then took my hand. “Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.”

Thinking back, it doesn’t seem so wrong that I spared myself in her presence. Spared her of my worst self. She would never have believed me anyway. She would have said, “You’re so hard on yourself. Why are you so hard on yourself?” Which always seems to me to miss the point. I wouldn’t be hard on myself if there was nothing to be hard about. Why is there so much to be hard about?

So I smiled. I smiled, and she said, “I’ve always loved your smile. You and Johnny,” she said. “You have the best smiles.”

I
t must have had a small, almost invisible beginning, or else I was so intent on believing that nothing was the matter that I missed it. I remember my growing sense of dismay, and my almost constant inner refrain that children are resilient. And I remember one afternoon that came to seem like the beginning, not of the bad time but of my awareness of the bad time.

I was walking down the street ahead of my daughter Annie and her friend Joyce. We paused many times. Joyce was wearing black patent leather shoes, and every hundred yards she bent down to dust them off. The shoes were tiny and new, and she dusted them with a white handkerchief. She was very small for four. Annie was the same age but much taller and puppy-like.

We weren’t far from home. The street was lined with old trees, the sidewalk was yellow with leaves. I was carrying a bag of groceries in my right hand. Just before we got to the
corner, I felt Joyce’s small hand slide into my free hand, leaving the other one for Annie.

The game unfolded. Annie took my encumbered hand. For a while she said nothing, then whimpered – insisted – that I put the bag in my other hand. I told her not to be silly. Joyce said nothing. She’d said nothing when she ran ahead of Annie to slide her hand into mine, creating this deliberate, wordless, artful triangle.

The two girls were dressed in yellow and pink, and yet they reminded me of dark illustrations in an old storybook.
Dwarf with Dog
would be the caption. I saw my daughter gambolling at the feet of a tiny, dark, compact master. I saw myself in my daughter and my mother in myself – a long and sorry line of tailwagging.

That morning on the front steps Joyce had kept one hand in her bulging pocket.

Annie asked, “What’s in your pocket?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing.”

I lay awake at three in the morning and my daughter’s face floated up, the moment when the two girls were coming down the stairs of Annie’s school. We’ll make hot chocolate, I said to them. Annie turned to Joyce and with a bright smile asked if she wanted hot chocolate. Joyce responded in a low voice. I was ahead of them and didn’t catch the words. I caught the tone. I turned and saw my daughter’s face widen, a pond into which a stone had been thrown.

We walked home. For a while they played, and then Annie asked for her toy phone. She held out her hand and Joyce walked over with it. A foot away Joyce stopped, put the phone to her own ear, turned her back, and began to talk to Wendy and Peter Pan. Annie lay on the sofa holding a doll to her chest. I saw her face wiped clean, glassy, the outermost reaches of the ripple. And did nothing.

Immobilized by the snake – the touch of the snake – the knowledge that someone can turn against you when you’ve done nothing wrong; the cavalier nature of friendship; the arbitrary nature of dislike; the twist of rejection; the fall from grace. All of these were present in that small configuration in the dark living room: one child lying on the sofa with averted eyes, the other talking into the toy phone, her back turned.

I did nothing. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to scold Joyce because she was the daughter of an old friend.

Small hand in mine: soft warm devious hand brushing against mine as though with affection and need. I felt my palm mapped with her ill intentions, implicated in the betrayal of my daughter, pulled into the small child’s canny vindictiveness – an intricate, serious, unhappy world. I played along with her even as I saw the game, drawn into the sophisticated world of the smaller child. Impressed by it.

Impressed by the meticulous words she was able to print, by the drawings, complex with colour and minute shapes. Seduced by the seriousness of the child, and intimidated.

Dwarf. Child/adult simultaneously. The interruption of a natural progression. We see a dwarf and are transfixed by the
sight of adulthood in the form of a child forever estranged from adulthood, and we look away embarrassed and afraid.

Annie comes home. She comes through the door, hangs on the knob, leans into the door and then into me. She says, “Joyce did everything to hurt my feelings,” and her face finally runs with tears.

It wasn’t always this way. We moved into the building in September (drawn by the presence of these old friends, Joyce’s parents) and for two months their friendship flourished in a form of Eden. The bad time – the first and worst bad time – began in November and went on for two months. Joyce would run to her small rocking chair and hiss, “This chair is my chair, this chair is my chair,” low enough so that her mother couldn’t hear but loud enough so that Annie heard, so that I heard – the woman who did nothing. She planted her tiny feet and stretched her arms across the hallway to bar Annie’s passage. She pounced on Annie’s mistakes. “That’s not a jumping, it’s a jumper. That’s not a bicycle, it’s a tricycle. That’s not a skirt, it’s a kilt.”

At night Annie lay in bed under Joyce’s bedroom and listened to the sounds above. She wrapped her handkerchief around her hand pretending it was broken. She breathed on the window, then drew a heart in the moisture and said, “I’m drawing a heart for Joyce.”

Joyce likes to fold towels and pillow cases. I’ve watched her make the corners meet precisely and smooth the surfaces.
She builds neat piles and guards them. After any trip, no matter how short, she goes into her bedroom and touches all the stuffed animals. Her mother has told me this. I suspect she doesn’t have names for them, she isn’t fanciful in that way, but she likes them. When her sisters throw them off the shelf, I’ve seen her grab the nearest arm and pinch. She gets punished but she doesn’t seem to mind this kind of punishment: the sister removed, the door closed, the silence. She puts the animals back on the shelf, always in the same order: soft blue donkey with faded ribbon, rougher older larger bear, white owl, grey rabbit, brown rabbit, cloth rabbit, white lamb, purple hippo – blue, brown, white, grey, brown, pale yellow, white, purple. She arranges colours in her drawings with the same care. When anyone compliments her on her drawings, and they often do, she doesn’t acknowledge the compliment. And she never holds up a drawing to say look at this.

Annie puts her hand in mine and feels the hard ridge of plastic, the reduced space for her own hand, the weight of groceries pulling my arm down, my quick step; and there is Joyce, on the other side, with my free hand all to herself.

The softest part of my hand is the palm and the hardest part is the bottom of the fingers. They are the hardest and coldest part. Annie tells me, “My skin is soft and your skin is hard.”

She brushes against my leather jacket and looks down at the sidewalk which is uneven and dusty. People pass by and say of Joyce, “How adorable, is she yours?” “No,” I say, “she’s a friend.”

Annie tries to take Joyce’s hand. Sometimes Joyce lets her, sometimes she tightens her hand into a fist, or jerks her hand away, or pushes Annie away.

We walk up the steps to our building. We rent the first floor, Joyce’s family has the second, a family with three boys lives on the third, an old couple on the fourth, a woman with her daughter on the fifth. Six wide steps lead up to the blue front door. At the top of the steps, Joyce and Annie scramble for the wealth of menus left by all the Chinese restaurants in the neighbourhood. Joyce gets four, Annie gets two. “Inside you’ll share them,” I say.

In the kitchen Joyce slides into Annie’s chair and says, “I’m the guest.”

Annie looks at me. I look away and say yes, that’s right, Joyce is the guest.

Increasingly, I have been feeling the weight of Joyce’s jacket. It is soft, bright pink, a year old. The weather has turned cold. Today I ask Joyce if she would like to wear her coat and she gives a fierce shake of the head. I drape the coat over the back of the stroller in which the baby is sleeping, and we walk across the street to get Annie. The girls go to different schools, and twice a week I pick up Joyce as well as Annie.

In the hallway I button up Annie’s coat, adjust her hat and say to Joyce, “You can wear the coat or you can put it over your arm but you have to carry it.”