Women and Children First (6 page)

By now the others are all lying on the hillside looking for shooting stars. There aren’t any, not yet. Claire wonders if Dottie is listening to the inner silence, or thinking of past lives; if Raymond is inventing more constellations. She can’t imagine what Joey’s thinking. She herself can’t get her mind off Jeanette the electrician and her boyfriend, drinking wintergreen tea and checking that sliver of moon to see if this is a safe night for love.

On the way in, Joey says, “Lying out there, I remembered this magazine article I read years ago, about Jean Genet at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago. The whole time, he kept staring at the dashboard of the car they were driving him in. And afterwards, when they asked him what he thought about the riots, the beatings and so forth, he just shrugged and said, ‘What can you expect from a country that would make a car named Galaxy?’”

Over coffee, the conversation degenerates into stories they’ve told before, tales of how the children tyrannize and abuse them, have kept them prisoner in their own homes for years at a time. The reason they can talk like this is that they all know: the children are the light of their lives. A good part of why they stay here is that Vermont seems like an easy place to raise kids. Even their children have visionary names: Poppy, Miranda. O brave new world!

When Claire first moved here with Dell, she commuted to New York, where she was working as a freelance costume designer. She likes to tell people that the high point of her career was making a holster and fringed vest and chaps for a chicken to wear on
Hee Haw
. Later she got to see it on TV, the chicken panicky and humiliated in its cowboy suit, flapping in circles while Grandpa Jones fired blanks at its feet and yelled, “Dance!” Soon it will be Halloween and Claire will sew Poppy a costume. So far she’s been a jar of peanut butter, an anteater with pockets full of velveteen ants, Rapunzel. Last fall Claire made her a caterpillar suit with a back that unzipped and reversed out into butterfly wings. Poppy’s already told her that this year she wants to be new wave, so all Claire will have to do is rip up a T-shirt and buy tights and wraparound shades and blue spray-on washable hair dye.

Dottie is telling about the girls making vanishing cream when Joey pretends to hear something in the garden and excuses himself and goes out. Dottie says she wants to stay up for the meteor shower but is feeling tired so she’ll lie down awhile on the living-room couch.

Claire and Raymond are left alone at the table. It takes them so long to start talking, Claire’s glad her crush on Raymond will never be anything more; if they had to spend a day in each other’s company, they’d run out of things to say. Still, it’s exciting. Raymond seems nervous, too.

Finally he asks how her day was, and Claire’s surprised to hear herself say, “Pretty awful.” She hadn’t meant to complain, nor had she thought her day was so awful. Now she thinks maybe it was. “Nothing really,” she says. “One little thing after another. Have you ever had days when you pick up a pen and the phone rings and when you get off, you can’t find the pen?”

“Me?” says Raymond. “I’ve had decades like that.”

Claire says, “I woke up thinking I’d be nice and cook Poppy some French toast. So I open the egg carton and poke my finger through one of those stuck-on leaky eggs. When I got through cleaning the egg off the refrigerator, the milk turned out to be sour. I figured: Well, I’ll make her scrambled eggs with coriander, she likes that. I went out to the garden for coriander and all the tomatoes were lying on the ground. The awful part was that most of them looked fine from on top, you had to turn them over to see they were smashed. You know, first you think it’s all right, and then it isn’t all right.”

“I almost never think it’s all right,” says Raymond. “That’s how I take care of that.”

“Know how
I
took care of it?” says Claire. “I went crying to Joey. Then I went upstairs and got out these star decals I’d been saving. I thought it would make me feel better. I’d been planning to paste them on the ceiling over the tub so I could take a shower with all the lights out and the stars glowing up above, and even in winter it would be like taking a shower outside.” Suddenly Claire is embarrassed by this vision of herself naked in the warm steamy blackness under the faint stars. She wonders if Dottie is listening from the other room and is almost glad the next part is about finding the shampoo bottle.

“That’s life,” says Raymond. “Reach for the stars and wind up with a bottle of piss.”

“That’s what I thought,” says Claire. “But listen.” She tells him about calling the girls in, and when she says “like newborn giraffes,” she really does feel awful, as if she’s serving her daughter up so Raymond will see her as a complicated person with a daily life rich in similes and astonishing spiritual reverses. Now she understands why she hadn’t mentioned the incident to Dottie or Joey. She was saving it for Raymond so it wouldn’t be just a story she’d told before. But Raymond’s already saying, “I know. Sometimes one second can turn the whole thing around.

“One winter,” he says, “Miranda was around two, she was sick all the time. We were living in Roxbury, freezing to death. We decided it was all or nothing. We sold everything, got rid of the apartment, bought tickets to some dinky Caribbean island where somebody told us you could live on fish and mangoes and coconuts off the trees. I thought, I’ll paint shells, sell them to the tourists. But when we got there, it wasn’t mango season, the fish weren’t running, and the capital city was one giant cinderblock motel. There was a housing shortage, a food shortage, an everything shortage.

“So we took a bus across the island, thinking we’d get off at the first tropical paradise, but no place seemed very friendly, and by then Miranda was running another fever. We wound up in the second-biggest city, which looked pretty much like a bad neighborhood in L.A. We were supposed to be glad that our hotel room had a balcony facing main street. Dottie put Miranda to bed, then crawled in and pulled the covers over her head and said she wasn’t coming out except to fly back to Boston.

“At that moment, we heard a brass band, some drums. By the time I wrestled the balcony shutters open, a parade was coming by. It was the tail end of Carnival, I think. The whole island was there, painted and feathered and glittered to the teeth, marching formations of guys in ruffly Carmen Miranda shirts with marimbas, little girls done up like bumblebees with antennae bobbing on their heads. Fever or no fever, we lifted Miranda up to see. And maybe it was what she’d needed all along. Because by the time the last marcher went by, her fever was gone.

“Miranda fell asleep, then Dottie. I went for a walk. On the corner, a guy was selling telescopes. Japanese-made, not like the one out there, but good. They must have been stolen off some boat—they were selling for practically nothing. So I bought one and went down to the beach. The beach was deserted. I stayed there I don’t know how long. It was the first time I ever looked through a telescope. It was something.”

For the second time that day, Claire’s struck speechless. Only this time, what’s astonishing is, she’s in pain. She feels she’s led her whole life wrong. What did she think she was doing? If only she could have been on that beach with Raymond looking through a telescope for the first time, or even at the hotel when he came back. Suddenly her own memories seem two-dimensional, like photographs, like worn-out duplicate baseball cards she’d trade all at once for that one of Raymond’s. She tells herself that if she’d married Raymond, she might be like Dottie now, confused and restless and wanting only to believe that somewhere there is a weed for her need. She remembers the end of the Hammett story: after Flitcraft’s brush with death, he goes to Seattle and marries a woman exactly like the wife he left on the other side of that beam. There’s no guarantee that another life will be better or even different from your own, and Claire knows that. But it doesn’t help at all.

There’s a silence. Claire can’t look at Raymond. At last he says, “If I could paint what I saw through that telescope that night, do you think I’d ever paint another dancing vegetable in my whole fucking life?”

For all Raymond’s intensity, it’s kind of a funny question, and Claire laughs, mostly from relief that the moment is over. Then she notices that Dottie has come in. Dottie looks a little travel-worn, as if she might actually have crossed the steppes from Moscow to Paris. She seems happy to be back. As it turns out, she’s been closer than that. Because what she says is, “Suppose I’d believed that old lady and dropped her off in the middle of Montpelier? What would have happened then?”

Claire wants to say something fast before Raymond starts inventing adventures for a crazy old lady alone in Montpelier. Just then, Joey reappears. Apparently, he’s come back in and gone upstairs without their hearing; he’s got the girls ready for bed, scrubbed and shiny, dressed in long white cotton nightgowns like slender Edwardian angels. Claire looks at the children and the two sets of parents and thinks a stranger walking in would have trouble telling: Which one paints dancing vegetables? Which one’s lived before as a Napoleonic soldier? Which ones have mated for life? She thinks they are like constellations, or like that engraving on Evelyn’s father’s desk, or like sunflowers seen from below. Depending on how you look, they could be anything.

Then Raymond says, “It’s almost midnight,” and they all troop outside. On the way out, Raymond hangs back, and when Claire catches up with him, he leans down so his lips are grazing her ear and says, “I hope this doesn’t turn out to be another Comet Kohoutek.”

Outside, Claire loses sight of them, except for the girls, whose white nightgowns glow in the dark like phosphorescent stars. She lies down on the grass. She’s thinking about Kohoutek and about that first winter she and Joey lived together. How excited he was at the prospect of seeing a comet; and later, how disappointed! She remembers that the Museum of Natural History set up a dial-in Comet News Hotline which was supposed to announce new sightings and wound up just giving data about Kohoutek’s history and origins. Still, Joey kept calling long distance and letting the message run through several times. Mostly he did it when Claire was out of the house, but not always. Now, as Claire tries not to blink, to stretch her field of vision wide enough for even the most peripheral shooting star, she keeps seeing how Joey looked in those days when she’d come home and stamp the snow off her boots and see him—his back to her, his ear to the phone, listening. And now, as always, it’s just when she’s thinking of something else that she spots it—that ribbon of light streaking by her so fast she can never be sure if she’s really seen it or not.

E
VERYONE HAD A LOBSTER
. This was a serious problem. Roy, the SoHo contractor who’d served as a kind of treasurer for the lobster dinner, took Valerie aside and said he was sorry it wasn’t pasta or bouillabaisse, something stretchable. Valerie should have telephoned in advance, they would have bought a lobster for her. Valerie thought: Shut up. Her friend Suzanne—Roy’s girlfriend, in fact—had specifically told her not to arrive till after dinner; she said Valerie should start being discreet about having lived in the summer house for six weeks without having paid any rent.

The others, a lawyer, two therapists, a cameraman, a painter, a contractor, and so forth—were splitting the rent of this mini-Versailles with its enormous restaurant kitchen, its
Citizen Kane
fireplace, its French doors facing on Block Island Sound. But no one seemed to mind that Valerie didn’t contribute. They found her entertaining. They were all around thirty and felt that they used to know more people like her. They said she was right out there, right on the edge, by which they meant she had no income and was a bit manic, lean, a fearless swimmer, she had a terrific tan. Besides, they only saw her on weekends. They worked weeks and came out Friday nights, everyone but Suzanne, who was on vacation from teaching high school and had sublet her place in the city. Weekdays, the house had felt empty, so Suzanne had tracked down Valerie at her parents’. Valerie came for a visit and stayed.

Valerie liked the house, the shore. And Suzanne was her oldest friend. But by August some things about her life here felt like a job, a receptionist’s job, not the chilly receptionists of the rich, but of those borderline businesses that hire you to be constantly cheery and up. Once Valerie had had such a job, at a carpet wholesaler’s. Her boyfriend then often had speed, and she would do just a little before going to work. She wouldn’t take speed now—it was so hard to get and terrible on your teeth—but she’d found an African bark called kavakava you could buy at the health food store and chew and get a noticeable buzz.

She needed it to stay up, especially after a day like this, a whole boiling summer Saturday driving the Long Island Expressway after Suzanne suggested she clear out for the day, keep a low profile for once. Valerie had planned to go to the city; the museums would be air-conditioned and empty. But she didn’t expect so much traffic in that direction, stalled, overheated cars, thirty miles of steam pouring out from under hoods, and her chewing kavakava, so that finally she pulled off the road and followed signs to a state park where she was the only white person on the beach.

At first this was a little disconcerting: She gave the groups of Puerto Rican guys a wide berth, but no one seemed even to notice her, or pay any attention. It was as if she wasn’t just white, but transparent. The point was, everyone was busy with their own good times. She stayed there all day, and later stopped at a Chinese restaurant where she ordered a dish of day-glo orange sweet and sour pork she would have been embarrassed to eat in front of anyone she knew.

She was positive that the people at the summer house would be long finished with dinner, but she walked in to find the table elegantly set, each individual lobster leaking cloudy water onto its individual plate. At least twenty people were seated around the table and at least five or six of them called to Valerie—“Eat! There’s steamers and corn!” Valerie said she’d eaten, relishing the memory of her sweet and sour pork. They would be horrified, or else mistake her pleasure in it for some interest in edible kitsch. They were all very serious about food, they planned elaborate menus, all shopped and cooked like some semipro catering crew. Suzanne and Valerie had always liked cooking and eating, but last week Suzanne told Valerie she was going to strangle the next person who said “radicchio.”