Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The hair grew back, in time. I was not very successful at silence. Victor came home from the bar one evening as I was shouting at Althea, “Why do you have to be so selfish about it? Can’t you share things?” Phil sat on the floor banging a spoon on a pot.

  “It’s my book!” Althea yelled back. “My book!”

  “I was trying to help you!”

  He came into the kitchen where I loomed over her, a tiny three-year-old blond thing stamping her foot and waving a coloring book. When he sat down heavily, a screw fell out of the chair. He picked it up and spun it on the table like a dreydl. “What is all this screeching about?”

  “She—” Althea stabbed a menacing finger at me. “She colored in my book!”

  “Oh for Chrissake.” I took the spoon from Phil’s hand and gave him a cracker instead. “I only did one page, Althea. I did a very good job, too.”

  Althea thrust the coloring book at Victor. “See! She did it! She did a whole page. It’s all done.”

  Victor accepted the book and glanced at me in a tired way, his head cocked to one side, his eyes squinting. He sucked his lower lip warily. There were artists we knew who had vehement objections to coloring books on all sorts of grounds—aesthetic, philosophical, even political—but Victor was not one of them. “You don’t have to color in her book, Lydia. If you need to color why don’t you get a book of your own?” He smiled ever so slightly, timorously, as if a wrong move might tilt the room off balance. But it was a sly smile too, the smile of an adder. I grabbed the book from his hands and threw it on the floor.

  “Great! Great! If that’s how you feel you can buy me one.” Phil snatched up the book and prepared to rip it. I snatched it back. “If that’s how you feel you can at least admire my work.” I opened it to my page and tossed it onto the table, in front of Victor. Phil whined and scrambled to get it back, but Victor held it out of reach. Althea was astonished into silence.

  It was a coloring book of nursery rhyme characters, and the picture I had done was the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. The profile of an enormous shoe dominated the page, a worn shoe with a firm square heel and high ankle, like a work boot. I had colored it black. The laces, which I had colored pink, were half-undone and the tongue hung out limply. The shoe had a little door and window with curtains I had colored pink to match the laces. Out of the top of the shoe tumbled children of all sizes. Some scampered down the front; a few rolled on the ground nearby. They were chubby and frolicsome, not like children whose mother habitually whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed. I had colored their play clothes in bright hues, carefully adding contemporary touches—patches, peace symbols, tie-dyed effects. Also, by coloring their skins I had made them interracial—there were black children in various shades, a few I hoped looked Oriental, and one I had attempted, without much luck, to give the brick-like tone of an American Indian. The old woman was not in the picture.

  Victor studied it. “This is pretty good for a first effort, Lydia. You definitely have possibilities. You need to work on your skin tones, though.” He let the book drop and leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “God, I am so exhausted. There was a bunch celebrating something this afternoon. I thought we’d have to float them out on a raft.”

  Althea, made pensive by Victor’s comments, looked at the picture again. “It’s nice. But it’s my book.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have asked first. I had an uncontrollable urge.”

  Victor pounded his fist three times on the table. “Okay! Enough of this! Where’s my dinner? I want a groaning board! Someone go and unsaddle my horse!”

  The children burst out laughing. Phil, sitting at Victor’s feet, pounded his fist three times on the linoleum. “My dinner!”

  I laughed too, though I didn’t want to. To my surprise, Victor’s face relaxed; his eyes lightened with relief. I hadn’t grasped how I had unnerved him. It was a kind of power.

  “Did you children do your spinning today? Did you churn the butter? Shear the sheep?”

  “Oh yes, sire,” said Althea. “We did everything you commanded.”

  “And you, milady? Have you had the plumber to fix the moat?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to play,” I said sullenly. “You’re such a good bartender, why don’t you fix me a drink.”

  “Are you really going to buy Mommy a coloring book?” asked Althea.

  “Why, do you think I should?”

  “Yes!”

  The next day Victor brought home a coloring book. He placed it on the kitchen table along with a small brown paper bag. He came to the stove where I was sauteeing onions for a stew, and bent to kiss me; I tilted my head so he could reach my cheek. From the living room came the voice of Mister Rogers, demystifying for a rapt audience the parts and uses of a toilet. The TV was turned up loud so I could hear it in the kitchen. I liked Mister Rogers; I liked his flat lulling tones, his enchanting dullness. From his supernatural calm I suspected he was strung out on some very high-quality grass, even better than Nina’s, and I fantasized writing to him: Dear Mister Rogers, I wonder if you could put me in touch with the person who supplies you … The seat can go up and down,” he was saying. “We try not to drop it because it makes a very loud noise. Would you like to hear the noise, just once?” Not especially; I heard it every day. “Now that didn’t sound very pleasant, did it?” “Not pleasant at all,” murmured Victor, his arm around my waist, stroking my hip. “Give me some of that onion, Lyd. Oh, it’s good. How are things?” Grease popped and spattered our foreheads.

  I opened his gift at the kitchen table several hours later, after we had cleaned up the remains of dinner, gotten the kids bathed and in bed, mopped up the bathroom floor, picked up the scattered toys, and folded a batch of diapers. I had declined Victor’s invitation to make love. “Too tired to move.” You don’t have to move—I could feel it on the tip of his tongue. I was asking for it. I wanted to hear him say it. But he refrained. No animal, but forever well-bred—Edith’s doing. Score a point.

  The theme of this coloring book was fairy tale characters. I chose the Little Mermaid, sitting on a rock combing the tresses that concealed her breasts, while a few fish gamboled at the surface of the water. In the brown paper bag I found a box of sixty-four Crayolas. How thoughtful. I did the entire Little Mermaid page, including her hair, in marine colors, shades of green and blue; except that in the fish tail beginning below her navel, exempting her from carnal knowledge, I added flecks of yellow for an iridescent cast. I admired the results and turned to Puss in Boots. Gold and maroon would do nicely for the boots. Victor came in from painting, took a beer out of the refrigerator, and peered over my shoulder.

  “I didn’t think you’d really do it, you know. It was just a joke.”

  I kept silent. He said in his calm way, but not as thoroughly calm as Mister Rogers, “You don’t have to stay in the lines.”

  “I know, but I prefer to.”

  He sat down opposite me at the kitchen table and drank from the can. “Do you want anything? Coffee?” I shook my head. “So, are you happy with that, Lydia?”

  I looked up to see him grin. Exquisite, that grin, and at this moment enraging, a blend of dismay, irony, and acceptance. His whole appeal was locked into that grin: as dense and seductive as the very first time I talked to him, in the Lion’s Den with a gang of kids from the Chaucer class, when he perceived me, he later revealed, as similar to him. I thought then that he would be supercilious, shrinking from anything common or distasteful, but I was wrong. He was altogether too tolerant if he could tolerate me and my coloring.

  “Quite happy, yes, thank you. It was very thoughtful of you. Crayons, too.”

  “It doesn’t take much to make you happy.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Look, you could practice in the evening,” he said.

  “I’m too tired.”

  “You could at least look at the scores or listen to some records. You used to do that.”

  “I said I’m tired.”
/>   “Too tired to listen to a record? I don’t understand.”

  “For the way I would have to listen, I’m too tired.” I bent over my coloring.

  “You’re not too tired to go meet your friends over at Nina’s place. Is listening to a record any more demanding?”

  “That’s different. It’s not work, it’s relaxation.”

  “You’re doing this for spite. Whenever I try to talk about it you clam up. You know you could find some women with babies to change off with, and have a few hours to yourself during the day. What about Gabrielle?”

  “I do use her. When I have to take one of them to the doctor, or shop, things like that.”

  “You could do it on a regular basis.”

  “Victor, I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t understand anything about it. What’s the use of working on something three hours a week? That’s a hobby. Would you like to paint three hours a week?”

  “I would if I had to.”

  But he didn’t have to. “Well, this is different. It’s a technique. I mean, there’s a physical skill involved.” I looked at my hands, smudged with crayon. For an instant they ached, the way the body can ache to touch and be touched. “Go paint, and leave me to my coloring.”

  “How many hours a day would you need?”

  “What is this, Let’s Pretend?”

  “How many hours?”

  I shrugged. “Six.”

  “Okay, let me talk to my parents. They’ll loan us the money. Get someone to take care of the kids six hours a day. You can go back to Juilliard.”

  “I don’t want your parents to support my studies. Aren’t I a little old for that? And anyway, they’re your parents. We’ve been through this before.”

  “I know. But this time we’ll do it. Because before you said you’d manage on your own, and you’re not.”

  “No! I know you hate the idea. So do I. Just forget the whole thing.”

  “So I hate the idea. So what? If it’s a matter of your survival we’ll do it and we’ll hate it. People do a lot of things they don’t like, to survive.”

  “Oh, survival. Don’t exaggerate. I’ll survive. And if not, well, what’s the big deal?”

  He stood up and yelled, “I can’t stand when you talk like that! Stop it!”

  “All right, all right. I’m sorry. You’ll wake them.”

  He quieted down. “Listen, I love you. Maybe it slipped your mind. I care about what’s happening to you.”

  “You care more than I do. I’m hardly worth it.”

  “You make me sick.” He squashed the empty beer can in his hand, held it tight for a second as if preparing to hurl it, and then tossed it gracefully into the bag of garbage under the sink.

  “You love me, I make you sick. I can’t, uh, assimilate all that at once. Please leave me alone. It’s been a long day.”

  I did “assimilate” every word he said, though, even if I pretended not to. Two nights later I sat down at the piano. Victor said, “Mommy has to work now,” as he carried the children off for baths. I played a simple sonata by Haydn, who has charms to soothe the savage breast. Like me, he prefers to stay within the lines, and like my coloring, within the lines his music vaults through broad arcs of possibility: rich, ornamental, exalting, and safe, like a cathedral. A pianist can get lost in Haydn, not in any grand emotion but lured into the cunning recesses of the music, and into the trimmings, the trills, the turns, the cadenzas, the sheer gratuitous delight of it. A delight similar to what Victor finds in Matisse, where what begins as decoration pervades and becomes the essential, altering our notions of necessary and contingent. It is possible to be faintly dismissive about Haydn, with all due respect. Program opener, I have heard a few musicians say. Gets the audience in the mood. Formalist. But programs do have to be opened, and forms set, and those who perfect them, decorate them and gild them, are scarcely less original than those who break them, only more serene perhaps.

  I was afraid of what I might hear, but the sound was not too bad. There was a remnant of me. More than a remnant. My fingers still knew what they knew; it was the control I would have to work on, the isolating concentration. At the start of the Andante, Althea appeared, naked.

  “Can I play too?”

  “No, not now.”

  “Play ‘Skip to My Lou.’”

  “Not now.”

  “‘I’ve Got Sixpence’?”

  “Althea, please, just be quiet. This is a different kind of song.”

  She sat down on the floor, sending up potent waves of injury. A moment later she decided to accompany me on her toy xylophone.

  “Althea, please!”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears.

  “Althea, your turn. Come on,” Victor called from the bathroom. She ran off. I was halfway through the third movement when Phil darted in. Soaking wet and naked, he banged a soppy fist on the bass notes. I screamed at him and he fled, howling. I wiped the keys with my shirt and began again, but I could hear him howling, and Victor quieting him, and then the howling once more. I dashed to the bathroom ready to kill; he stood shivering and crying amid wet towels and rubber toys strewn on the floor, while the bathwater, filmed with pinkish bubbles, slowly gurgled its way down. As I threw a dry towel over him, Victor appeared in the hall, holding Althea, one half of her hair combed, the other half a wet tangle.

  “What happened? … I’m sorry, he got away while I was doing her. I told you both,” he said sternly, “Mommy was working and not to bother her.”

  “She wasn’t working, she was playing,” said Althea.

  I sat on the edge of the tub and cried.

  “Look, Lydia, everything is hard at the beginning. You have to persist. We’ll set up a routine and they’ll get used to—”

  “Get out! Get out! It’s not worth it! Just leave me alone!” I slammed the door on them all and locked it. It was a simple hook and eye lock I had screwed in myself, to keep the children out. “I’ve had enough!” I shouted. “Let me get it all over with!”

  Victor pounded on the door. I wouldn’t open, but I opened the medicine cabinet. He would hear the click and the squeak. The bathroom door began to shake. He was heaving his body against it. I watched my hook and eye lock quiver. It rattled. Both parts started to give. All at once I was seized with curiosity, to see which part would surrender first. I bet on the hook, but it was the smaller, eye part that sprang from the frame with a groaning of the wood as Victor burst in, flushed and sweating, and grabbed me by the arm. I was humiliated.

  I had done nothing, no aspirins, no razor blade: I had made a fool of him, and I felt cheap.

  “Let me go!”

  “Get the hell out of here!” He shook me hard. “Go to bed! Go put your head under the covers. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Later he muttered that he was going out for a walk, and left. I didn’t hear him return but he was there, asleep, when I woke in the morning. The dishes were washed, the toys and the towels picked up, the children dressed in pajamas suitable for the season, which was early spring. Except that tucked in a corner of the armchair was a half-drunk bottle of Phil’s. I felt a vicious glee when I found it and scrubbed away the white ring circling the inside. He had not taken care of absolutely everything. I was a mother; I would have found the bottle. It was that minute lapse of attention that left his will the freedom to live and to paint. I had no will left over, and I was wretchedly victorious, as though we were competitors in martyrdom. We were not competitors, though. He had never entered the race. I was running against myself.

  All but the most tenacious depressions can yield to circumstance, and to instinct. Mine was not truly rooted; I knew I didn’t really want to die at all, even figuratively. I looked at my hands and recalled how the Haydn had sounded those fifteen minutes, and how Victor had heaved against the bathroom door. Out of shame as much as desire, I tried. I set up a routine, the children got used to it. It took an incalculable expense of will, but only at the beginning; after that, life carried me. E
sther sent me her portentous notes from Ecclesiastes about the work of the hands, and I practiced till I could get my job back at the Golden Age Club. I used the money to study at Juilliard. Eros wins over Thanatos, as George, another optimist, likes to say. Self-destruction yields to instincts, and I had good instincts, he remarked years and years later.

  “Good instincts! I have horrible instincts. You don’t know the half of it, George. I couldn’t even cope with a baby. How’s that for instinct?” I paused, suppressing. Couldn’t even enjoy nursing a baby. Nursed fantasies of ancient infanticides: exposure, suffocation in a crowded bed. “I’m only grateful Victor didn’t strangle me. He had sufficient provocation. For him, it must have been Eros over Thanatos, though God knows I was hardly erotic.” And I laughed. I was working, and happy, full of banter.

  “No, you don’t understand. You were waiting to die in a more fitting way. That kind of downer just wasn’t … significant enough to destroy you. After all, you’re not just a little trout in the stream who’s too dumb to put up a fight. Remember that? We know you have character, don’t we? Uh, do you mind if I make myself an egg cream?”

  We went to the kitchen, where Vivian sat poring over the illustrations in Now We Are Six. “Do you mean to say I’m waiting for something more worthy?”

  “Do you want an egg cream too, Vivian? Yes? Ah, that’s my girl.” He busied himself with the milk and chocolate syrup. “Didn’t I tell you once before what Freud said about the instinct of self-preservation? Its function might be not so much to keep you alive as to see that you return to an inanimate state in some natural way, a natural death suited to your organism, that is—that you’re not stopped midstream by some extraneous force, a brick falling on your head and such. ‘The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’“ He squirted his beloved seltzer into the two glasses and gave one to Vivian. “Here you go, sweetheart. That was simply not your fashion, Lyd.”