by BRIAN HALL
Hildegard lives in a town in the eastern zone, where conditions are especially hard. She writes long letters about the bombed-out buildings, the food lines, the water shortages, her younger brothers, her ailing father, her depressed and listless mother. Her father is a pastor who opposed the Nazis and was interned during the war. Since marrying Vernon, Imogen has been able to send more goods, and Hildegard’s letters are extravagantly grateful. She recently sent Imogen a photograph of herself. She has been urging Imogen to visit her someday, which Imogen would love to do. Imogen has always wanted to travel abroad. She would especially love someday to see Norway. There was a book she liked when she was a teenager, about Norwegian children during the war sneaking their country’s gold reserves past Nazis by hiding it on sleds. She can’t remember the title, but it was a true story about bravery that for once involved as many girls as boys.
Ihr fotograph ist sehr schön, she writes. Ich möchte soviel gern, jedenzeit in der Zukunft Ihnen besuchen. Vielleicht kann ich das tun, wenn mein Mann sein Phd vollendet hat.
She gets off at 63rd Street, walks the five blocks to the parsonage where she and Vernon are renting a crappy apartment with a nosy sanctimonious parson’s wife for a landlady. (When they told her the fridge thermostat wasn’t working right, she came to check and got huffy when she saw the beer.) It’s half past midnight when she comes through the apartment door. All the lights are off and Vernon is asleep. Poor boy, he’s been telling her how much he misses her on Wednesday evenings. It’s very sweet of him, so she tries not to find it annoying.
1957
She slams the door on her way out, and of course Susan starts crying again.
How can he be like that? Yes, he works all week—but what does he think she’s doing all day every day with Susan—he knows how Susan is. He’s happy to let Imogen get up in the night while he sleeps like a log. He comes home, wants his dinner, eats cheese and crackers while she cooks—he’s getting chubby—and he’s a picky eater, he wants his food bland, meat and potatoes, doesn’t even tolerate lamb, says it’s too gamy, and after dinner, instead of engaging with his daughter he’s tinkering with the stove light, or tightening a belt on the washing machine. If she makes the smallest innocuous complaint—Why does it take so long for the water to get hot in the kitchen sink?—boom! he’s down in the crawlspace, mapping the configuration of the pipes and drawing a diagram and then going on about the plumber’s puzzling choices or unintended consequences or counterintuitive reasons. “I’ll bet I know why they did it that way . . .” he’ll say after an hour of cogitation, and he’s off in Discoveryland, while she’s waiting for the water to get hot so she can wash the dishes and Susan is in the next room fussing.
She plops Susan in the stroller—“Shush, now, come on, just shush up”—and heads up Dimmick Avenue in the Saturday sunshine. It’s beautiful weather and Susan’s been a hellion all week and all Imogen said was, could Vernon maybe take her to the beach or the carousel on the pier for a couple of hours, so she could have a break. I work hard all week, huff huff—he was even a little angry. The hardworking man earns his weekend rest.
She turns right on Dewey Street. There’s a little park up this way. Susan squirms, bleats. “We go to beat! We go to beat!”
“No, we’re not going to the beach right now.”
“I want go to beat!”
“We don’t have the right clothes on.”
“I want go!”
“That’s just tough, missie, ’cause we’re not going.”
“Why can’t we go?”
“Because I said so.”
Imogen can feel her straining against the straps. She’s doing that thing where she arches her back and balls her fists and twists her head half around. She looks like she’s trying to turn herself inside out.
For some reason she’s often more pliable with Vernon. Hasn’t he noticed that? Of course he hasn’t, he hardly notices her at all. “I’m not sure what to do with a girl,” he said once. “Aren’t daughters your job?” What the hell was that supposed to mean? She knows he doesn’t like his sister or mother, but that’s only because they’re a pair of dolts—does he think all females are as stupid as they are? Does he think none of them could share his interests? Because with men it’s always about sharing their interests, isn’t it? Her father has his bridges and highways, his fishing trips. Everything else he just tolerates. When Imogen first met Vernon and he was so good about helping her with her physics homework, she thought it was about her, but really it was about the physics. He’s never shown the tiniest interest in learning anything about horses, for example.
Oh, she knows he loves her, she knows that—
She and Susan reach the park, which is this funny little strip of grass between Dewey and Ozone, with a metal slide and swings and a splintery old roundabout shedding green paint. There are often one or two dogs here with their owners—as today, thank goodness. Susan likes dogs as much as Imogen does. She likes dogs more than she likes her mother.
“Look, honey! Look at the cute dog!” Imogen unstraps her, helps her out. “Hold my hand—no, you have to hold my hand—is he friendly? he is?—well hello there, sweet boy—you have to be more gentle, honey—”
Peace for a while. The sweet sleepy-eyed Lab, then a nervous ingratiating Miniature Schnauzer who takes their pats trembling, then a brainless Cocker Spaniel (overbred bug-eyed poor little things with their silly ears). Then Susan satisfies herself for a while on the slide—“Mommy, watch!”—then fusses and gripes, then eats the box of Sunkist raisins Imogen threw in the bag on her angry way out the door.
And yes, there’s the wonderful weather. They’ve been here for close to a year now, and the weather is the one thing Imogen likes. The RAND men are impossible, the most self-satisfied horses’ asses she’s ever met in her life, and their wives are either gooses in awe of them or disenchanted drinkers. And she’d always heard about Californians and their cars, but really, it’s ridiculous. On all the neighborhood streets there’s parking up and down both sides, and there are also concrete pads between the houses where you might have a side yard instead, and then instead of any backyards—and these are small plots, you would think every square foot counted—there’s another “avenue,” more like a lane, that runs the length of the block, giving automobile access to sheds and garages. Thirty or forty blocks in any direction, it feels like one gigantic parking lot with sunstruck bungalows and potted trees set down on the pavement. Maybe no one likes to keep a yard or garden because it doesn’t rain enough most of the year. In fact, all this sun can get monotonous. She misses cloud formations. The play of shade and sun. The deep color green on a gray day.
And she misses her work. The Victor Chemical research was dull, but it got her out of the apartment, gave her a daily challenge. Her lab colleagues, mostly women doing the drudge work, could be funny. And making her own goddamn money.
Another dog arrives at the park, a Poodle mix, and Susan gets licked in the face and cries. Imogen picks her up to comfort her, but she struggles furiously in her arms, wailing as though she’s being kidnapped, and Imogen plops her firmly back on her feet, “Have it your way.” Susan throws herself on her stomach and performs the full tantrum: a blur of drumming Mary Janes, pounding fists, chin propped forward on the ground to give the scream maximum projection. Christ, can she pour it out. Other mothers and dog walkers look on—yes, she’s my daughter, I’m the mother who can’t handle her, gaze on us and feel superior.
She sits on a bench nearby and ignores it for half a minute, since she knows nothing will stop Susan except exhaustion. Then can’t stand it anymore and pulls her daughter up, hisses furiously in her ear, “Pipe down!,” and stuffs her into the stroller, pressing hard against her heaving chest while she forces the straps around the flailing limbs. “What’s wrong with you?” She pushes the stroller away from the rapt audience. Instead of heading directly back to the house, she turns randomly left a
nd right, keeping up a brisk pace down the narrow streets, letting the bumps and jostles distract Susan, or maybe comfort her the way Imogen can’t, and the child subsides to whimpering and eventually falls asleep. It must have been time for her nap. Isn’t that what parents always say? It’s not me, it’s fatigue. Now she keeps on randomly turning left and right in order to calm herself down.
From the moment Susan was born, Imogen couldn’t comfort her. She tried everything. Her mother was there supposedly to help, but only criticized. And Vernon left her to it, goo-gahing at Susan with a finger or holding her warily for a minute before handing her back to Imogen the moment she started to fuss. And Imogen’s father hung back with his camera for mask and shield. In the photos Imogen looks horribly like her mother, that exact tight smile and iron in her eyes, or no smile at all, in which case she looks like the Bitch of Buchenwald.
They need another child. Susan needs a little brother or sister to love and care for, they all need someone to break up this dynamic of mother vs. daughter. Imogen hopes dearly it’s a boy. Girls are the mother’s job, aren’t they? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?
But Susan was an accident, and Vernon wants to hold off on another child until they have more money. He says ideally they would wait until they owned their own home. He implied that Susan is such a handful, maybe two would be—
“Stop right there, buster,” Imogen said. “Don’t you dare say another word.”
He held up his hands, as though to signal innocently, Geez, why so angry? But she could tell he was angry. He was angry a lot.
“I am not raising an only child, and that’s final,” she said.
She arrives at a corner. Bentley Court and Marine Street. Not sure where that is. She can see a commercial street a block away, which, when she gets to it, turns out to be Lincoln Boulevard. From here she knows how to get back to Ozone. She passes the park again—can’t tell if it’s different people now, fuck them all anyway—and goes back down Dewey to Dimmick to the little stucco box. She parks the stroller with sleeping Susan in the shade just inside the front door.
Vernon is out on the side patio, stretching a screen across a window frame. The worktable there is the first thing he built when they moved in. He’s secured the frame to the table with clamp screws and is manipulating a long dowel to which he’s stapled the leading edge of the screen. She watches him for a few seconds. He’s good with his hands. Imogen mentioned yesterday that insects were getting in through a tear.
“Thank you,” she says.
He starts to talk about the frame, something about the inadequate way it was reinforced at the corners. She waits patiently. Really, what would her life be like without him? She certainly wouldn’t want to be a single mother, would she? And face it, she would never fix anything, any house she lived in would fall apart around her, or she’d have to find the money to hire a handyman.
He leans far across the table and his stomach bulges out from his belt. She wishes he wouldn’t snack so much. He was so lean and square-jawed when they married. The physical side has never been her favorite, and his increasing roundness isn’t helping. “I don’t understand how a person could let himself go like that,” her mother said on her last visit. She deliberately said it in Vernon’s hearing, which made Imogen feel angry at her and defensive of her husband, but also hopeful he might be embarrassed enough to start dieting.
He’s still talking about the frame. He truly thinks she’s interested.
He’s a good man, trying to be kind.
When he got his PhD last year, Imogen thought they could finally go to Norway. Just three weeks, before he started work at RAND, a delayed honeymoon. Her mother had offered to take care of Susan. All the magazine photos and travel agency posters Imogen had looked at through the years—fjords, snowy glaciers, the midnight sun, little seaside villages of red and ocher houses on stilts above the kelp. She and Vernon could take the coastal steamer—didn’t that sound romantic?—and stay in refurbished huts with sod roofs. Then for the last four or five days they could go down into Germany and she could finally meet Hildegard and her family. She’d looked forward for years and years. But Vernon didn’t want to travel. He said they needed furniture. Most of what they had in Chicago belonged to the apartment, and the bungalow they’d agreed to rent in Santa Monica was unfurnished.
We can sleep on the floor, Imogen said.
That makes for a nice story, but have you ever tried it? Vernon said. And what do we eat on? And where does Susan sleep?
For everything Imogen said, he had a reasonable answer. She probably could have insisted—she’d earned about three-quarters of the money during the previous five years—but partly he wore her down with logic, and partly she saw that traveling with him after this disagreement would be no fun at all. So she caved. And the moment she did, he turned with the same tirelessness to the task of buying furniture. He contacted companies, requested brochures, had her pore with him over photos of tables, dressers, bed frames. He made lists of prices and wrote letters to store managers asking for more particulars. One day she came home from work and found him drawing a diagram. He’d contacted the owner of the bungalow and requested measurements of all the rooms, including the placement of the windows and doors. He was cross-checking that diagram with the dimensions of all the furniture candidates she and he had discussed. He was determining the optimal pieces to buy and the best way to arrange them.
She looked at that diagram with its neatly ruled lines and saw the bars of a cage. She saw that he would always be right.
And now when she sets his beef and potatoes down on the green Formica kitchen table, or does her sewing at the dining room table with the driftwood maple finish, or puts Susan in her Hollywood twin bed, or sits on the Naugahyde sofa with him to watch some silly program on TV, or joins his sleeping form late at night on the double extra-long Beautyrest mattress and box spring with the mocha maple headboard, it all reminds her of the trip he wouldn’t let her take.
But also—lying next to him in bed, his oblivious (and therefore, she supposes, innocent) breathing, the dip of the mattress down toward his warm solid bulk—she thinks of the floor that she doesn’t have to sleep on. She sees the dark little house he grew up in, and she remembers that even in his father’s last years, his parents’ money was so tight they couldn’t afford the paint to spruce up one of their bedrooms. She remembers that he helped her find the Victor Chemical job by scouring ads and making lists of addresses and telephone numbers, scouting managers’ names by writing to friends of friends. And years ago, when she mentioned that she occasionally sent care packages to Hildegard, he pitched in with his usual energy and his alarming focus and his sincere interest in the logistics of any project. He drew up more lists, researched nutritional needs and perishabilities, calculated mailing weights and costs. He improved every aspect of her system. Hell, she hadn’t had a system at all, she’d merely shipped stuff to Hildegard.
Long years with any man would be a challenge, right? In many ways—in most ways—she’s lucky.
But they will have another child. That is not negotiable.
1996
God’s in his heaven, Vernon’s in his study.
Vargas lies curled in the padded chair, enjoying the lingering warmth from Vernon’s padded ass. Gen is out for the evening at her so-called Spanish lesson.
All his life he has hated watching other people handle vinyl records. They grip them like Frisbees, rotating them this way and that, their fingers slathering the surface in skin oil and dead cells. Vernon takes the record in its paper sleeve and holds the vinyl-edge against the base of his right palm, supporting the disk from below with middle and pinkie fingers. He pulls the sleeve off with his left hand, allowing it to slide beneath the fingers until—voilà!—he is holding the naked record via edge and label. His ring finger is perfectly positioned for its tip to find the spindle hole. Now, if Vernon wanted, he could throw the s
leeve over his shoulder, feint toward the cat, and duck through the linemen’s gap to the stereo, touchdown!, all with the record secure in his hand.
He brushes side A with a damp cotton cloth. (Wet the cloth, wring it out, roll it up inside a larger dry cloth, wring both. Special cleaning fluids and velvety wands sold by stereo stores are a waste of money.) He places the record on the turntable, lowers the needle, adjusts the volume. Sweeps cat from chair, sits, dons headphones, leans back. Beethoven Opus 127.
Vargas jumps into his lap.
Vernon’s former colleague Eugene came back to the lab for a visit a couple of years ago and they took him out to lunch, but the poor son of a bitch was a doddering shell. “When I can’t understand my old papers, show me the door,” Vernon would say to Frances, and she would make that exasperated gesture. She was difficult. Sometimes when she saw him in the morning, she’d say, “Don’t be depressed today, I can’t handle it right now.” It always surprised him. Was it that obvious?
Frances was the only reason he had published anything in the last decade. She arrived in the early eighties, the first woman in the lab—physicist, that is—and you had to be careful with her, she had a chip on her shoulder. She couldn’t write grammatically. You young people and the English language, he would try to joke with her. But she was a good scientist. She noticed a collection of data he had left over from a series of balloon shots he’d done in the seventies. Along with his target range in the near-UV he’d amassed figures for solar irradiance between 2000 and 3100 angstroms at 40 kilometers.
“J. V.,” she said, “why haven’t you published these?”
He told her he’d checked them against Ackerman and Frimout and they didn’t match very well, so he assumed he’d made a mistake somewhere.
