Women and Children First (16 page)

“Look, sweetheart,” she’s saying. “Look at the lady in the chair!”

Bertie sings when he nurses, a sweet satisfied gulping and humming high in his nose. That night, after the wedding, Anita falls asleep while he’s nursing, and his song turns into the song in her dream.

In her dream, Bertie’s singing “Music, Music, Music” just like Teresa Brewer. He’s still baby Bertie, but he’s up on stage, smiling one of his phony smiles, making big stagey gestures like Shirley Temple or those awful children in
Annie
. One of these gestures is the “okay” sign, thumb and forefinger joined. The circle his fingers make reminds her of the Buddha. It reminds her of a Cheerio.

Anita wakes up laughing, wondering how a little baby could know words like nickelodeon. She gets up, and without detaching Bertie from her breast, slips a bathrobe over both of them and goes downstairs. Except for her parents’ bedroom, where earlier she heard her mother preparing for sleep, every room is lit up. In the kitchen, light is shining from around the edges of the cellar door. Anita and Bertie go down.

Opening the door to the family room, she sees her father sitting cross-legged on the cork-tiled floor. His eyes are shut and tears are shining on his cheeks. But he’s not so out of it that he doesn’t hear her come in. Looking up, he seems frail and embarrassed, an old man caught doing something he’s not supposed to do.

Anita wants to apologize and leave. Then it dawns on her that she’s not down there to bother him. There’s something she wants to ask, but she’s not sure what it is. She wants to ask why all the lights in the house are always on. She wants to ask who he thinks is paying the electric bills.

Anita’s father stands up and dries his eyes with his palm. Then he says, “Hold up your hand.”

Anita holds up her hand and he lifts his, palm facing hers, a few inches away. He asks if she feels anything.

She feels something. A pressure.

She remembers how when she was in labor with Bertie, she held Jamie’s hand. Just before the nurses let her start pushing, she turned to Jamie and said, “I don’t think I can do this.” “Sure you can,” he said, and squeezed her hand so hard she’d thought it was broken. By the time it stopped hurting, the contraction was over and she knew she could go on. Now she sees that Jamie didn’t mean to hurt her. He was scared too.

Her father’s hand is still a few inches away, but its grip feels as tight as Jamie’s. She can almost feel electrons jumping over the space between them, electricity drawing them as close as she is to Bertie, who just at that moment lets go of her breast and sits up, watching them.

W
HEN GILDA TRIES TO IMAGINE
what Phoebe Morrow looks like, she pictures Amelia Earhart in her rumpled jumpsuit, those fetching goggles and helmet rising straight from the cockpit, long scarf floating straight back, until Gilda realizes that what she’s seeing isn’t Phoebe or Amelia Earhart at all, but, rather, Snoopy as the Red Baron. Lately Gilda’s been troubled by this confusion of images. This winter she reread
Madame Bovary
, and Emma’s swoony romantic airs kept bringing to mind Miss Piggy. Gilda blames this on how much of the last dozen years she’s spent among children. Childless women have other problems, she knows, but she’s pretty sure that the inability to distinguish the mythic from the cartoon isn’t one of them. When Phoebe Morrow aims her camera at the horizon, she’s not seeing an untrustworthy line which may at any moment turn into a tightrope for Koko the Clown to bounce on; when Phoebe took those famous photographs of the dead Marines in Beirut, she knew she wasn’t shooting G.I. Joe.

Making a square with her fingers, Gilda frames her living room to see what in that mass of discarded clothes and sports equipment and chewed-up baseball cards might catch Phoebe’s eye. Nothing, she realizes, and anyway, Nathan’s already taken that shot. Nathan’s made his name as a chronicler of everyday disorder, so sometimes it seems unfair that he should chide Gilda for being, alternately, too fussy and not neat enough. The worst argument they ever had was years ago, when Gilda asked Nathan if he’d clean up the downstairs—in fact he
had
been cleaning, but the children were too much for them both—and he’d said, “After the revolution you’ll be the commissar of cleanliness, the minister who makes sure that everyone keeps their houses neat and tidy.” By now they know there won’t be any revolution, not here in northern Pennsylvania, anyway, and if there is, they won’t be the ones to lead it. Since then they’ve had more serious fights, meaner and closer to the bone. But the reason she still considers that one the worst is that whenever she straightens up—as she is doing now, as she does fairly often, to be sure—she remembers what Nathan said, and it spoils her pleasure in the work and in the look of things when she’s done.

Gilda’s looking for reasons to be angry at Nathan because the real reason seems so meanspirited and small: she’s upset that he’s gotten Phoebe Morrow a one-year job at the college, that he’s picking her up at the airport and they’re headed back here for lunch. At times like this she feels like one of those wives who work to send their husbands through medical or law school and then the husbands take their fancy practices and split. It’s not that Nathan’s about to leave her—things feel solid enough, he’s not looking for someone else—or that she’s ever supported him, but rather that his whole career has been built on his photos of her and their family and their house. What cinched his reputation was that series he took when Gilda’s grandfather came to live with them, that terrible year at the end of her grandfather’s life; it seems incredible now that the first time she really knew Pop was dying was when she read it in a review of Nathan’s show. Nathan’s never understood why it bothered her so when critics wrote of Gilda’s face as balancing on the border between the beautiful and the impossibly ugly. But all that, Gilda understands now, was nothing compared to how she’s felt lately when Nathan, criticizing his own work, says it’s all trivial, meaningless, small, come to nothing; Gilda can’t help thinking he means her. She knows it’s why he pressured his colleagues to hire Phoebe Morrow, who’s been to Beirut, Nicaragua, Iraq, whose specialties are guerrilla encampments, free-fire zones, and risking her neck. Not only does Nathan admire Phoebe’s work; he wishes he’d led her life.

That’s what Gilda’s thinking when the doorbell rings and why she has a rictus grin on her face and someone else’s tight voice in her mouth as she says, “Nathan, sweetheart, why didn’t you use your key?” What strikes Gilda right away is that Phoebe
does
look a bit like Amelia Earhart, that same clear wide forehead, those friendly wide-open eyes, and also a little—Gilda’s veering towards the cartoon again—like Betty Boop. What Gilda has been hoping for, of course, was someone more serious-looking, and homelier. Phoebe’s wearing a pink silk shirt, tight jeans, little heels. When Nathan introduces them, Phoebe grasps Gilda’s hand in both of hers, and Gilda wonders how those delicate arms can possibly heft all that heavy camera equipment.

“Gilda?” Phoebe has enormous blue eyes and is shining them straight at Gilda. “Don’t tell me. Your mother saw Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
right before you were born.”

“You got it,” says Gilda graciously, because she thinks she’s scored one off Phoebe: lots of people—movie buffs and nearly everyone over thirty-five—say the same thing. Gilda glances at Nathan to see if he’s noticed, but he’s too busy looking for somewhere to put Phoebe’s expensive-looking luggage. Then Phoebe says, “You know what I can’t stop thinking about? Rita Hayworth having Alzheimer’s. Forgetting all those beautiful nightgowns and how red her hair was and riding around in Ali Khan’s fast cars and getting her picture taken kneeling on those messed-up satin sheets…”

Gilda, who’s been half-poised for a retreat to the kitchen, turns and stops, and it’s at this point that it occurs to her that she might actually
like
Phoebe Morrow. Not only has she been thinking, on and off for months and in much the same terms, about Rita Hayworth’s Alzheimer’s, but there’s something about that kind of thinking—a frank taste for celebrity gossip combined with a certain way of paying attention to the world and in particular to those ironies so appalling they seem both predictable and ultimately bizarre—which appeals to her in people.

“As a matter of fact,” Phoebe says, “I wanted to go out to wherever she is and take pictures—”

“That’d be a real change of pace for you,” says Nathan with a kind of desperate hopefulness which suddenly makes Gilda think of how their youngest son Danny—for years, afraid of the water—would brighten when he heard the other kids deciding it was too cold for them to swim, too.

“But I didn’t think I could handle it,” says Phoebe, and then, noticing the surprise on both Gilda’s and Nathan’s faces, says, “It’s easier taking pictures of dead people.”

There’s a silence during which Gilda thinks—and wonders if Nathan’s thinking—of the bitter disagreement they had when Nathan wanted to take pictures of Gilda’s grandfather in his coffin. Later, when Gilda was finally able to look at them, she understood that the photos were very moving and beautiful and really not ghoulish at all. Nevertheless, when she leafs through the book of Nathan’s photos, as she still occasionally does, she finds herself skipping that page.

“You must be starving,” she says to Phoebe. “Come on, let’s eat.”

It’s only within the last year or so that Gilda’s been able to set the table before guests arrive. She used to wait till they got there, then set out stacks of plates, silverware in a pile; it was a way of pretending she didn’t care. All that casualness was planned; that’s how nervous she is when strangers come to her house. Today she brings out an enormous tureen of hot mushroom soup she spent all yesterday making with heavy cream and mushrooms and fresh-grated nutmeg. She told herself she was giving the flavors an extra day to meld but the truth is, when she cooks the same day guests are coming she can’t eat, can’t even pretend; and though she explains all that, she often wonders if strangers suspect her of covering up some life-threatening appetite disorder.

“Hey,” Nathan says, “this is unbelievably great,” and Gilda thinks how like him that is. He’s generous with everything—with praise, with blame, with enthusiasm, attention for the children. She wants to reach out and touch his hand, but finds it no easier now than it was twenty years ago when they first fell in love. Then it was shyness restraining her; now it’s the tactlessness of indulging in that cozy married-couple stuff in front of the unattached.

“These are real mushrooms, aren’t they?” says Phoebe. “I mean, fresh mushrooms, you must have made this from scratch.” When Gilda nods, Phoebe says, “I’ve never had this before. Not real mushroom soup from scratch. Oh, Gilda, this is perfect, I can’t tell you what it means to me, it’s just what I needed, real hot homemade soup, it’s been years, I don’t think anyone but my mother’s ever made me homemade soup, and even she never made mushroom. When you’re living alone and traveling a lot you don’t get homemade anything.”

The forlornness of this last bit makes Gilda glad she didn’t touch Nathan’s hand. At the same time she’s listening for a hint of the patronizing in all this talk of Mom’s hot homemade soup, and, when she doesn’t hear any, decides Phoebe’s pleasure is genuine. Suddenly Phoebe gets up and, standing on tiptoe, peers down into the soup tureen. It’s a peculiar gesture. Small as she is, Phoebe could see into the tureen if she just stayed flat on her feet. It’s meant to be childlike, meant to charm, but what interests Gilda is that a woman who’s gone on commando raids with Sandinista guerrillas would act like an eight-year-old to charm them. “All this soup for us?” Phoebe says.

“I thought I’d make extra in case the students are hungry when they get here,” says Gilda and immediately regrets it, hating this image of herself: the homey, solid, faculty wife cooking nourishing soup for the students.

“What students?” Phoebe asks.

“We talked about this in the car,” Nathan says. “Some students begged me to let them come by a little later and meet you. I warned them you’d probably be exhausted. But you said it was okay.
Is
it okay? If it isn’t, if you’re tired or anything, it’s fine, I can call and ask them to come some other time—”

“Sure it’s okay. I just forgot.” Phoebe’s voice has taken on such an odd drifty tone that Gilda begins to wonder if she might be suffering slightly from jet lag.

“How long was your trip?” Gilda says.

“Thirty-six hours,” says Phoebe. “We got hung up in the Athens airport. Hijack check. The worst part was sitting next to this big fat Palestinian businessman who kept trying to get me to go back and blow him in the airplane bathroom.”

There’s a silence. Neither Gilda nor Nathan knows quite how to respond. Finally Gilda says, “Yuck,” realizing it’s a word she’s learned from the children. Suddenly she feels the need to bring the children—in spirit—into the room. She knows they’ve become a kind of talisman for her; when things turn unpleasant or even just socially strained, she runs through their names the way Catholics click off their rosaries.

“You know,” Gilda says, “it’s a pleasure to cook soup like this for a change. Mostly I don’t get a chance. The children wouldn’t touch it with a stick.”

“How many kids do you have?” Phoebe says, and Gilda’s—surprisingly—a little stung that Nathan didn’t tell her this in the car. Gilda can’t imagine riding for an hour with a stranger and not getting around to that. Though maybe he did, and maybe Phoebe forgot it the way she forgot the students.

“Four,” Gilda says. “Sophie’s thirteen and Brian’s eleven and Ruthie’s nine and Danny’s seven.” Naming them like this makes Gilda acutely aware of how many there are; she feels like Phoebe’s a late arrival she’s just introduced to a roomful of guests whose names she’ll never remember.

“Four?” says Phoebe, and Gilda waits for her to say more. What she’s found is that people’s responses are so predictable—and so repetitive. In that way having four children is rather like being named Gilda: you get to have the same conversation again and again.