The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  “I’ve had to hire a service,” Grace confesses, “but I’ll let it go as soon as the rain stops.”

  There’s a moment of silence. Tim’s pay packet is not as full as Gene’s. “Jesus, Grace, how can you stand the stink of the diaper pail?”

  —

  Rosie once told her, without any embarrassment, that she and Tim made love at least once a day. Grace, who immediately felt poorer than Rosie, wondered if that was why her friend always had on a bathrobe. To be ready. One evening, when Grace and Gene were sitting on the porch, she heard a wail from next door that was distinctly sexual. She knew Gene heard it, too, though neither of them said a word. Within a minute, Gene left the porch.

  —

  Grace’s house is a testament to containerization. A playpen with toys in it sits in a corner of the alcove attached to the living room. The Bathinette can be wheeled to the sink. The bassinet stays in the dining room in a corner. The toddler bed with railings is in the children’s room upstairs, as is Tom’s crib. The old wooden high chair that Grace’s mother used sits just to the right of Gene’s chair in the dining room. The small amount of counter space in the kitchen is free of any flour or utensils. She washes clothes at the basement sink and uses a washboard.

  Perhaps because of this, she hates to leave Rosie’s house, with its cereal spilled on the kitchen table, the heap of clothes by the cellar door that the dog sniffs at in search of underwear. The couch is a toss of blankets and pillows and magazines and sometimes a surprise: On previous visits, Grace found a hairbrush and a screwdriver. On the coffee table, cups have made rings, and glasses come off as if stuck. But when she’s in Rosie’s house, she experiences an intensely pleasurable “let-down” sensation in her womb and in her shoulders, not dissimilar to the letting-down of her milk when she briefly nursed Claire. She’d have done a better job of it, she thinks, if she’d lived with Rosie.

  —

  In her own house, over the fireplace mantel, Gene has hung an elevation he did of their own property. It’s framed in simple black, and below that hangs a rifle that doesn’t work. She isn’t sure why Gene has put it there, except that it seems to be a common decoration in New England. Around the fireplace stand an old brass bed warmer and a set of fireplace tools. In the winter, she doesn’t feel truly warm until the fire is lit at night and on Sundays. Together she and Gene picked out the wallpaper in the living room, poring through sample books until the patterns began to blur. She made the slipcovers herself to match the green of the toile walls, and she fashioned the cream drapes at the windows. She learned to sew in high school, but she taught herself the more advanced skills. Sometimes Gene had to help because she had trouble thinking three-dimensionally.

  —

  Rosie is different three-dimensionally than Grace. Grace is softer, though each woman has a slim waist despite two children. As dark as Grace’s features are, Rosie’s are pale orange. She has no visible eyebrows or eyelashes, and her hair, stick straight and thin, needs the boost of pin curls. Rosie dresses herself and the children, when she rouses them all to go out, in navy or dark green. Anything else, and they would appear to float away.

  Grace would spend all day with Rosie if she could, but when she checks her thin gold-colored Timex, she sees that she’s already late for her visit to her mother’s.

  —

  When Grace walks into her mother’s home, she has a sensation of great warmth and safety. This doesn’t occur in her own house despite the fact that at night and on Sundays, there’s a man to protect her. Her mother, Marjorie, doesn’t have a man to protect her and has learned how not to have one. Even in the vestibule and before she has gotten the children out of the carriage, the familiar scent—from the walls, the rugs, the coats hanging on hooks—transports Grace to a universe before she met Gene, before life became uncertain and even a little frightening.

  “Saving the starving of Europe,” Grace says as she hoists aloft the apple pie she made in the morning. She skimped on the height and decoration of the crust edges to allow for enough pastry to make two crosspieces over the fruit. The crust browned up nicely, she thinks. She likes the fact that her mother doesn’t say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have” or “Aren’t you a dear?” Merely “Thank you” does for her mother.

  Some have taken Marjorie’s taciturn manner for a lack of graciousness, but it isn’t, and her good friends know this. There are two, Evelyn and Gladys, women who stayed close to her mother long after the refreshments at the church hall had been eaten and her father lowered into the earth.

  —

  Grace’s father died before the war, his foot catching in a line, the rope hauling him off his lobster boat in forty-degree water in January. Death would have been instantaneous, Dr. Franklin told her mother, which was little solace. The ocean is so cold that most lobstermen don’t even learn how to swim. It took until the war was over and Grace married before her mother’s crippling mourning came to an end. At forty-six, she has said that she will never wed again, and Grace believes her. So apparently do the men of Hunts Beach, for Grace has never heard of one trying to court her. It is as if her husband’s death dragged her mother’s beauty into the ground with him.

  —

  They eat at the old kitchen table, the pie as good as Grace hoped. Better still, the coffee that her mother percolates with a broken egg to catch the grounds. With Claire in her lap, Grace feeds the girl bits of apple and crust, which seems to ratchet up her appetite to an extent she hasn’t seen before. She gives Claire her dish of pie and a child’s spoon. Her daughter falls into a frenzy of lust.

  “Sweet tooth, that one,” her mother says as she croons to Tom. She has her housecoat buttoned up over her gray winter dress. When Tom begins pushing his face into the fabric, she says, “Why don’t you put on a pan of water? You know where the bottles and nipples are. I’ve got fresh milk in the fridge.”

  Claire, finally sated, sits benumbed in the midst of her blocks on the floor. Grace’s mother gets by with monthly donations from the League of Lobstermen, who give part of their paychecks to women who have been left widowed because of the sea. That and the payments from her husband’s death benefits tide her over, the policy a result of a life insurance salesman who knew how to talk to a fisherman.

  —

  Rosebud cups on hooks. Colonial stenciling near the ceiling. A braided rug under the wooden table. The extra sink where her father washed up to get the fish stink off him before he went to his family. The rubber doorstop. The kitchen cupboard with the drawers that stick. The place where the blue and white linoleum has always been cracked. The six-over-six kitchen window at the sink that her mother has always resisted adorning. The cupboard where the cereal is kept. The mica in the oven door. Grace wonders if Tom and Claire will one day visit her and have a similar sensation of home. Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.

  —

  Grace would like to talk about what happens in her marriage bed, but no sexual word has ever passed between mother and daughter, a handicap when Grace was twelve and got her period and had no idea what was going on. Eventually she guessed because of the source of the bleeding. She found, in the bathroom cabinet, hidden behind the towels on the first shelf, a package of Kotex and what looked to be a circular piece of sewing elastic with clips hanging from it. She had no choice but to fasten the pad as best she could. The next morning before school, her mother put her hand on Grace’s shoulder as Grace sat at the kitchen table eating Rice Krispies. The hand lingered, freezing Grace, but signaling to the daughter that the mother knew. Grace was surprised and yet not. The day before, she’d spent an hour and a half in the bathroom.

  —

  While in the bathroom during that hour and a half, Grace explored the cupboard in hopes of finding a less awkward way to secure the pad. She came across, on the top shelf, an aged pink rubber bag with a long hose connected to it, an item that she couldn’t imagine a use for but knew it had to do with sex since i
t had been hidden on the highest shelf. It wasn’t until she was about to be married, and her mother insisted on Grace having a checkup with Dr. Franklin before the wedding (perhaps in hopes that the doctor would impart the facts of life), and Dr. Franklin told her that douching wasn’t necessary, wasn’t even particularly good for the flora of the vagina, that Grace caught on. She blushed, but not for the information. Instead, she colored at the image suddenly planted in her mind of her mother with the apparatus.

  —

  On her way home from her mother’s, Grace asks herself why it is she can’t tell Gene how she feels about the way they make love in bed. After all, there are only two of them in the marriage. Is it that she fears that either Gene or she would explode if she were to do that? Isn’t it enough to know her own distress about sex? If Gene were to die, would she go into a deep rocking mourning as her mother did?

  —

  That night, after Grace has put the children to bed, she slips her slicker from a hook and walks down her front path to the sidewalk. She has maybe a minute before Gene will notice her absence. It isn’t much, but it’s everything. She is who she is, nothing more. Free to note the fog rolling in, the leaves letting go of raindrops. That the older couple across the street have already gone to bed. That her hair is frizzing lightly in the mist. That she doesn’t care. That her children are inside asleep and don’t need her. That by morning she won’t be able to see out the windows. That she will probably never learn to drive. That she can move only the distance her feet can take her. That she could begin to go on long walks with the babies in spite of the weather. That someone will notice these errand-free excursions and begin to wonder. That Gene will say, when she returns to her family in less than a minute, that he is going up. That she must listen to the inflection in his voice and watch his face to know if she is to go up with him, or whether she can sit at the kitchen table and have another cigarette.

  —

  When Grace undresses for bed that night, she doesn’t put on her nightgown, but slides naked into the bed, uncovering her breasts so that Gene, when he climbs the stairs, will see. She doesn’t know if she is doing this because the posture is a challenge to him, or if in remembering the early days together she wants to have that again. Gene, when he reaches the room, looks surprised and turns his back to her to undress. Grace wants to cover herself, but doesn’t. This one night, is that so much to ask?

  Gene comes to bed hard and flings off all the covers. Too late, Grace realizes that there will be nothing gentle tonight. She has set a challenge after all. He enters her at once, when she’s not ready, and the thrust is painful. He pounds, as if knowingly, at the cut necessary to give birth to Claire and Tom, the place where she is most tender, and she has to bite her cheek to keep from crying out. She tries once to shift him, but he pins her arms back behind her head with one of his, and that posture and her helplessness set him off. He roars, lets her arms go, pulls out, and faces the other way, leaving Grace to be the one to locate the covers and pull them up and over.

  When she returns to the bed, she is sore and has to hold the sheet to the place where she suspects she is bleeding. It seems unlikely now that she will ever have a fond nickname for her husband.

  —

  Three weeks after the unspeakable night that has not been repeated, Grace takes what has become her nightly walk to the sidewalk. She notes, in addition to the growing number of puddles that dot the dirt road and the lilac trees bent double with their waterlogged and dead flowers, a swath of blue at the western horizon beneath dark cloud. Her body fills with joy. Tomorrow the wash will hang from an outside line, and she will dry her hair in the sun.

  Dry

  A gap between two rows of houses gives Grace an exuberant pie-shaped view of sparkling water, the sun high in the east over the ocean. She runs out the door in her flower-printed robe and looks at the blue sky and the cherry tree and raises her arms in a mixture of thanks and relief. She catches a glimpse of tangerine, and Rosie is beside her, laughing at Grace and their good fortune. “Thank God,” says Rosie.

  “Finally,” says Grace.

  —

  She opens all the windows to let the fresh air in and dances through the rooms. She empties the linen cabinet, washing the contents and hoping for sun-dried sheets by dinnertime. The towels will dry scratchy in the breezes, the way they should. A soft towel is a coddle, doesn’t get the dead skin off.

  —

  Before ten in the morning, the town of Hunts Beach has happily surrendered, white sheets flapping along with colored towels and blue shirts and pink dresses and gingham aprons and green bedspreads. It’s a marvel, Grace thinks, as she walks the neighborhood streets, the soil underfoot emitting steam in the cool, dry air. Every so often, a slight wind causes a spotty and brief rain shower from tall oaks. Mildew begins to disappear as if by magic. Nearly every window in every house is open, even though the temperature can’t be above fifty degrees. She tips her face to the sun as she walks. Life-giving. Grace thinks the fluttering sheets and clothes are not, after all, a sign of surrender, but instead a symbol of survival.

  —

  Gene comes home early, before Grace has even started dinner. All the wicker baskets she owns are full of loosely folded laundry ready for the iron tomorrow. She sees his car, towing a trailer, from the side window. He parks at the edge of the grass, close to the screened porch. Grace opens the door to see what’s under the tarp, and with a flourish, Gene reveals a secondhand wringer–washing machine, a present to Grace. She knows precisely what the gift represents, a belated apology for a night that doesn’t bear thinking about. But she can’t help but be intrigued by the object, its big agitator tub and its wondrous wooden rollers that squeeze the water out of the wash more efficiently than any pair of practiced hands can do.

  Together, they roll the heavy machine down the shallow ramp of the trailer and stare at it on the grass. All wringer washers are on casters, Gene explains, because they’re meant to be rolled to the sink so the rubber hose can be attached to the spigot. It’s tough going moving a washer across the lawn, but Grace wants to get the job done before too many neighbors see. A wringer washer is a prize. Only Merle, Gene’s mother, and Dr. Franklin’s wife have them as far as Grace knows. She and Gene heft the machine up and over the lip of the screened porch and then again into the kitchen. Claire, in the playpen in the living room, squeals when she hears her father’s voice.

  “We’ll do a small wash now,” he says, “just to test it out.”

  Gene picks up Claire, brings her into the kitchen, and sets her on the floor. She, too, is mesmerized by the device, all white and bigger than a person. Gene demonstrates how to use a series of rubber washers if necessary to tighten the seal between the hose and the spigot. As Grace watches the tub fill with water, Gene runs to the car and returns with a bottle of Vano. “You’ll need this for the machine,” he says.

  He lifts Claire to watch the soapsuds grow until they reach the lip of the barrel. Grace rushes upstairs and collects a pile of pillow slips and tosses them into the tub just the way Gene instructs her. When he plugs the machine in, the agitator begins to turn back and forth.

  “Amazing,” Grace says.

  Claire claps her hands.

  They watch for ten minutes. Gene turns off the spigot and guides the hose over the sill of the kitchen window. He flips a lever near the bottom of the washer. The soapy water empties onto the ground, leaving the pillow slips covered in suds at the bottom. Grace fills the tub half full and agitates the slips to rinse them. Then, with Gene placing his hands over hers, he demonstrates the right amount of tension needed to pull the slips through the wringer.

  With a stiff pillow slip in her hand, Grace feels Gene tilting her face up to his. He leaves a gentle kiss on her lips. He calls her Dove.

  Can a wringer washer save a marriage? She thinks the answer a probable yes.

  —

  Over the next several weeks, Grace happily launders every piece of clothing and line
n in the house, pulling each item through the wringer. She has a few mishaps, such as when the hose with the soapy water falls back into the house and sprays the kitchen, barely missing the radio. Or when, transfixed by the agitator, she drops a piece of toast from a saucer into the washer. She puts her hand in before she stops the agitator and gets a wallop for her trouble. She pulls out the plug and tries to catch the toast with a sieve. The bits disintegrate as she touches them. The next morning when she irons the garments from that wash, she finds tiny studs of toast stuck to her favorite blouse.

  —

  She washes so many clothes that all of the outdoor lines fill. She has to put one across the screened porch and one that again bisects the kitchen. The pile of ironing grows massive.

  Gene, weaving his way through the kitchen and into the living room, tells Grace that water costs money.

  —

  On a summer Saturday, which still seems to Grace like the beginning of the weekend even though Gene goes to work on that day, she dresses the children in light clothing and takes them to the beach. The sand is cool but dry. It seems that everyone from Hunts Beach and beyond has had the same idea because the seawall is lined with cars of every color and make. Grace unfolds the quilt she brought and floats it to the sand. She sets up a tent of gauze for Tom when he falls asleep. Reluctantly, she unbuttons her housedress to reveal her two-piece white bathing suit, the one with the halter top and short skirt. She knows it will flatter her skin when she tans. Though she keeps her eyes fixed on the sea, she’s aware of heads turning her way. She strips Claire to her red polka-dotted suit and together they walk to the water. Though the Atlantic is still frigid, Grace waits until her ankles are numb. She plays with Claire in the shallows, each splashing the other. The sound of the surf calms Grace—it wipes out individual voices. Claire likes the gentle action of the ocean drawing her out and pushing her back in again. Grace sits at the edge of the sea and watches Claire until she lowers herself and lets her body be dragged and drawn with Claire’s. The daughter giggles to see her mother in the water with her, and Grace laughs, too. The movement of the sea is rhythmic and sensual—she remembers this vividly from her own childhood—and before long, she like Claire has sand inside her bathing suit. They kick their feet and create suds. Grace suggests making a castle, but no sooner has Grace upended a pile of packed sand than Claire smashes her hand through it. She seems to think this is the game at hand.