The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  The house that Aidan once called grand, the house that Grace came to appreciate, turns the way that milk does. The house that once held music becomes silent and menacing. No matter how hard she pushes back the curtains, it seems she can’t get enough light inside. She tells herself that the smell and the lack of light are only in her head, that a house is a house and except for mild decay doesn’t change. But the decay in this house has been fast and frightening. She keeps the windows open, the breeze moving the curtains, so that she can breathe.

  —

  Marjorie appears at breakfast better dressed than usual. “Grace, I need to speak to you in private,” she whispers above the children’s heads.

  By the time the children have finished their breakfasts and have gone outside to play, Grace has already worked it out. “You’re thinking of leaving,” she says to her mother.

  “I can’t spend my life upstairs taking care of children, even children I love,” Marjorie declares. “I was willing and happy to do it in the beginning, but now…”

  “You feel stuck up there.”

  “I need to get out, see my friends.”

  “I understand, I do. But where will you go?” Grace asks, leaning against the counter.

  “I’ll stay with Gladys and Evelyn for now, until I can find a place to live. I want to be on my own again. Of course, I’ll visit every chance I get, but I need to be able to breathe,” she answers. “I feel selfish and terrible leaving you in the lurch like this.”

  “Don’t say that. You’ve helped me so much. I can take care of the children and make the meals. I used to do it all the time. Gene is becoming more and more independent, and with each passing day, he seems to be getting stronger. And now the kids can play outside.” She looks down. She’s wrapped a dish towel around her hand and wrist the way Amy might bandage an injury.

  “You’re making this too easy on me.”

  “I can’t make it easy enough.”

  Marjorie embraces Grace. She catches her mother’s scent in her clothes, a natural perfume that has always comforted her. “When are you going?” Grace asks as they pull away.

  “This afternoon.”

  Grace is both surprised and dismayed but refuses to show it. “This is a terrible situation, Mother, but it’s one that involves Gene and me. No one wants to live in the midst of so much unhappiness.”

  “I kept the children happy.”

  “And so will I,” Grace promises.

  —

  With the children napping, Grace steps into her mother’s room. It’s been weeks since she’s been in here. She notes her mother’s sewing basket, a short stack of books on the bedside table, a glass ashtray filled with licorice drops.

  Grace sits on the patchwork quilt. “I want to leave him,” she tells her absent mother.

  “How can you?”

  “I can’t bear it. It’s not his disability—it’s his hatred. Of me, of his situation. It’s become intolerable.”

  “You have to stay,” her mother says calmly.

  “Why?”

  “You’re married.”

  Grace remembers a woman in pin curls and glasses who watched a boisterous sea and told her to hold on to her husband.

  “You made your bed,” her mother adds.

  “I didn’t make this bed,” Grace says.

  —

  It feels like years since Grace experienced the mild weather of June sunshine, the miraculous array of flowers, a wonderment of birds nestled inside the hedge and making a racket. She picks a bouquet of peonies and lilacs and brings them inside to arrange in a vase to put on the kitchen table. On an impulse, she carries the vase into Gene’s room and sets it on the desk.

  “What’s that?” he asks from the bed.

  “Spring flowers. I thought they might brighten up the room.”

  “Get them out of here.”

  Grace is taken aback. Who doesn’t want flowers?

  “I get hay fever, remember?”

  No, Grace does not remember. She removes the vase and carries it back to the kitchen.

  The flowers are glorious.

  —

  One desultory afternoon in the kitchen when Claire and Tom fight over a toy fireman and Gene shouts from his room to keep it down, Grace puts her head in her hands. Tom, for the first time that Grace can remember, looks afraid, his lip quivering. She wants to go to her children, to soothe them, but she can’t. She climbs to the third floor alone and falls onto her cot. She turns onto her side and puts herself into a fetal position and cries and remembers that the only other time she did this was when she lost the baby. She’s amazed that she can weep, that the well isn’t dry. Most of the time she’s numb, refusing to think about her future. But now she sees the reality she’s kept at bay: she and the children will be prisoners here for years.

  She sits up. She’s left the children alone downstairs. When she reaches the kitchen, Claire and Tom lie facedown on the linoleum, holding hands, still awake but not speaking. Grace asks questions, but neither will answer her. They are angry—of course they are—what mother abandons her children? Tom turns his head as if he would smile at Grace, but Claire, lovely little dictator that she is, whispers, “Shush!” and Tom puts his forehead to the floor. Grace tries to remember when she last washed it.

  —

  That night, in the children’s bedroom, now her own, Grace opens all the stuck windows and inserts the screens she found in the closet. As she lies on her cot in her summer nightgown, she refrains from pulling up the sheet and instead allows the soft air to cover her. She feels it move over her face and arms and legs, and it’s as if she’s floating above the earth, aloft in the night, gently buffeted by sweet summer breezes. Her children are near her, asleep in their pj’s. She refuses all thoughts, simply savors the sensation. This is peaceful. I can feel this. I can enjoy this. She drifts, and then she drifts. This is wonderful, she thinks as she begins to dream.

  A man stands over her. She wakes as if seized but instinctively doesn’t yell out because her children are in the room. She covers herself with the sheet and searches for Claire and Tom. Undisturbed, they are sleeping shapes in the dark. The man whispers to her. “Come out into the hall. I need to talk to you.”

  “Gene?”

  “Just come.”

  Grace yanks the sheet from the cot and wraps herself in it. She makes her way to the door and follows her husband into the corridor. Why isn’t it lit?

  “How did you get up here?” she asks, breathless.

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I just wanted us to talk.”

  “Now? In the middle of the night?”

  The kiss is wet, his breath rank. She turns her face, but not in time. His tongue reaches deep inside her mouth. His right arm props him up, his hand next to her ear. She wrenches her head to one side.

  “Come on, Grace, give your hubby a kiss.” He swoops again and catches her eye this time. He doesn’t have another hand with which to overpower her. Does he really imagine that she will somehow help him to have sex with her?

  “Just a little kiss,” he persists. He grabs the back of her hair to hold her head to the wall. “We can start over again,” he coos, “wipe away the past.”

  “Gene, stop. You’ll fall.”

  “But you’ll catch me, won’t you, Dove?”

  The old nickname, the one she hasn’t heard in over a year, fails to move her. She slides out of his grasp and away from him. “Gene, you have to go downstairs. The children are right through this wall.”

  “You should be good to me. I’m your husband.”

  “Let me take you downstairs. We can lie in your bed. The children won’t hear,” she explains. “You don’t want the children to hear us, do you?”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “Of course I’ll help you.”

  “You love me, don’t you?” he asks, sounding oddly like a child.

  She switches the light on. “Let’s just
concentrate on getting you down the stairs. You shouldn’t have come this far.”

  “I had to rest on my mother’s bed,” he says, squinting in the electric light.

  What time is it? she wonders. How long did it take him to get to the third floor? They make the turn on the landing and descend. Trying not to hurry him, she walks with him to his bedroom.

  “Here,” she says, “let’s get you settled, and then I’ll come around and slide in with you.”

  “And you’ll let me kiss you then?” he asks, catching her hand.

  “I will,” she answers, slipping her fingers through his.

  A man has sexual needs. She is his wife. She uncovers the bed and lies next to Gene. He has lowered his pajamas to expose his rigid penis. “Just touch it,” he says.

  There will be no discussion, no loving words. She takes hold of him, makes an open fist and slides it back and forth. He moans. In less than a minute, he jerks and his sperm spills out over her palm and wrist and sheet. He makes the same involuntary motions she sometimes feels inside her when he has finished. She wipes her palm and arm on her side of the bed and stares at her husband.

  He is spent, nearly unconscious. Any woman’s hand would have done. She hates that she had to touch him, that the sexual urge turned a frightful and nasty man into a wheedling beggar. She hates that he can ask her for this.

  No, she was wrong. It wasn’t that any woman’s hand would have done—it has to be her hand. His demand and her hand.

  He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t call her Dove. He gives no indication that she is even in the same room with him.

  She slides out of bed and walks to the stairs. Once there, she takes them two at a time to the third floor. Inside the room, she reaches high on the door for the bolt. She slams it home and leans against the wall. She presses her hand against her breast and can feel her heart hammering. She slides down the wall and sits with her back against it until morning.

  —

  Grace is careful to deliver Gene’s breakfast before he can get up and come into the kitchen. He wakes in a fog. She doesn’t give him a chance to mention the night before.

  —

  Back in the kitchen, Grace collapses onto a chair, paralyzed with indecision. Her thoughts swirl like ribbons inside her head. Trying to catch one to examine seems like a game too difficult for her. If only she could think logically.

  Claire in her pj’s stands at the threshold to the kitchen. “What. Is. Going. On?” she demands in a loud voice, hands on her hips.

  Aping her father.

  “Where’s our breakfast?” she scolds. She turns her hands into little fists and pops them back on her hips. Behind her, Tom studies his fingers, trying to make fists, too. Giving up, he slaps the sides of his diaper.

  Claire misses nothing.

  —

  At lunchtime, Grace finds Gene propped up against the sofa in the sitting room. She sets his meal, pieces of chicken breast, potato chips, and a pickle, on a side table that he can easily reach.

  “I could drag you through divorce court,” Gene says, as if he had absorbed her thoughts in his sleep. “It would destroy you.” He nearly laughs. “Can you imagine what your mother would think? Her friends?” he adds, looking smug.

  “Please,” she says.

  The word might mean “please don’t do that” or it might mean “please divorce me.” She decides to let Gene figure it out for himself.

  —

  An early summer day, and it will be hot. Already Grace can feel, at eight o’clock in the morning, as she passes from the shade of one tree to another, the surprise of the heat wafting up from the grass. She blows up a wading pool she recently purchased and then stands with the hose in her hand, filling it. Nearby, Tom and Claire, in their new bathing suits, hop about in anticipation. Grace has made the decision to keep the children with her at all times. She wouldn’t put it past Gene to snatch one of them and use Claire or Tom as a hostage. Merely the idea of it sickens her.

  How did Gene make it to the third floor? He can stand and walk, but he can’t sit up straight. He must have two-stepped to the top of the house, keeping his left leg and side straight. Is that how he descended? She remembers it seemed to take forever.

  The water up to the edge of the pool, Claire steps in, takes a breath, and then sits. She makes a wide swishing motion to keep Tom out.

  “Claire,” Grace says, “remember what you and I talked about? About being nice to Tom and letting him share? The pool is for the two of you. If you can’t do that, I’ll have to take you out.”

  Claire pouts but allows Tom to step into the pool. He falls in doing so and splashes Claire with his tumble. “Mom, Tom splashed me!” Claire whines.

  “He couldn’t help himself. Just be glad you’re older and have more control.”

  The kids will jump in and out of the water all morning. By the time lunch is ready, the pool will be filled with grass and dirt and buckets and toys, and at least half the water will be gone. For a moment, however, Grace is content to sit in a lawn chair and watch the children. She doesn’t have on a bathing suit. She knows that Gene will come to the kitchen window and look out.

  —

  When she arrives home late one morning, after having taken the children to the playground, Gene, in black silk pajamas, blocks the door. “Where have you been?” he asks. “I needed you.”

  “Claire, take your brother to the backyard,” Grace says. “I’ll call you for lunch.”

  Claire needs no instructions.

  “Let me in,” Grace demands quietly. Gene steps aside. “We went to the playground,” she says, facing her husband.

  “In hose, pumps, and a fancy dress?”

  “This isn’t fancy,” she says, looking down at the navy sleeveless dress she has on. “I thought I might need to stop at the store on the way home.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No, I was hungry. I wanted to make some lunch first. Never a good idea to go to a grocery store when you’re hungry.”

  His hand rests on the wall. He’s barefoot, but he’s wearing his eye patch. A small concession for the children.

  “What did you need?” Grace asks.

  “I needed help getting dressed.”

  “You’ve learned how to dress yourself.”

  “It’s hard. I just wanted some help, is that too much to ask?”

  “I can’t help you now,” she says, turning.

  He grabs a fistful of dress at the back of her shoulder. She can tell by his weight that he’s using her to balance himself. Deliberately making her help him.

  “Gene, I need you to let go of the dress,” she says evenly.

  “Why should I?”

  “Don’t be silly. I need my dress to make lunch. Please let go.”

  With her back to him, Grace relaxes her shoulders. She remembers that the dress has five large white buttons. She undoes them with fast fingers. With a slippery movement, she leaves the dress behind and walks into the kitchen in her slip. She shuts the door behind her.

  She sits heavily in a kitchen chair.

  After lunch, she’ll find her dress on the floor. Or perhaps he’ll have tossed it into the wastebasket. Or maybe he’ll keep it and lay the dress out next to him on the bed in a ghoulish show of marital harmony.

  —

  What if she just walked to the stone wall and shouted for help? Would anyone come?

  —

  Gene doesn’t speak to her when she brings the evening meal. His face is expressionless, as if she were a nurse he didn’t particularly like. She asks him if he needs anything.

  He pretends for a second not to have heard her. “Oh,” he says. “Need anything? From you? Let me see. No.”

  —

  She stands at the sink in her bathrobe eating a piece of toast when she spots, through the window, her husband lying on the waist-high stone wall that today is a backdrop for purple columbine, blue irises, and pink phlox. He has a pillowcase covering the bad side of his face.r />
  She understands that he has every right to want to bathe in the sun. It’s been months since he’s spent any amount of time outside, and were the man not actually Gene, she would go out to him and ask if he would like a glass of water. She might buy him a sturdy chaise longue into which he could maneuver his body. She might, laughing, splash him lightly with water from the pool. But because it’s Gene, Grace understands that he is lying on the stone wall to keep her and the children out of the backyard. He knows that Grace won’t voluntarily enter a place he is in.

  —

  The temperature hits ninety degrees, and the breeze is from the southwest, making it a hot wind. The house fills with humidity, which the children experience as boredom. To stop their crankiness, Grace promises them ice cream cones, which activates them enough to settle themselves in the back of the Buick. But when Grace is ready to back down the driveway, she finds that the car won’t start. She tries again. It’s not the starter, because she can hear the whir. It’s the engine that’s failing to turn over. She tries again, reasoning that humidity might be the cause. She tries again, and the engine catches, but then almost immediately dies. Is she out of fuel? She gets out of the car and walks around to remove the gas cap and check. In the high sun, she sees a reflection of liquid. No, plenty of gas. What then? She tries again, but knows that if she keeps the starter going, the battery will die.

  “Kids,” she says, “how about we go inside and make Popsicles?”

  She anticipates an outcry and gets one. “We want ice cream,” Claire whines, beginning a chant.

  “Well, look,” Grace says, swinging around to confront Claire. “The car won’t start. Period. I have to have someone come fix it. You can either sit here in the hot car whining about how you don’t have an ice cream cone, or you can come inside with Tom and me, I can put on the fan, and we can make Popsicles.”

  With a pout that could put her in the movies, Claire opens the back door and slides out.

  —

  While the children are making Popsicles, Grace watches a man hitch the Buick to a truck and take it slowly down the driveway.

  —

  Not having a car means that Grace cannot get groceries with the children in tow. It means not being able to take the kids to the playground or to visit her mother. It means that she is an actual prisoner now, not just a psychological one. But then she wonders: Wasn’t she always a prisoner of sorts? At Hunts Beach, they had a car, but Grace couldn’t drive it. Gene had to take her to a grocery store every Thursday night. But then again, she had neighbors in Hunts Beach, Rosie for one. She had Gardiner’s, where she could pick up the fixings for dinner. And her mother was within walking distance.