In the drawer of the night table Sharon finds a thin phone book for the local area, and the mandatory Bible. She opens the phone book to see if there is anyone listed with the same name as Michael or herself. If there is, she decides, she will take that as a good omen for tomorrow. There isn’t, but she finds a Richard Schaffner and someone with a spelling variation of her father’s name living on Sharon Court. That could mean something, couldn’t it? She wonders about the woman who saw Michael in the parking lot the day before, and if she is listed in the telephone book, too. Sharon imagines calling the number just to hear her voice, and then hanging up again without speaking.
Michael had called her a few hours after his mother’s funeral. He sounded fine at first and then his voice became softer and fainter as if he were traveling swiftly away on a boat or a train, and twice she had to ask him to speak louder. He said that a few neighbors had come to the chapel, and the woman his mother lived with, another practical nurse, had gone to the cemetery with him. She wore her uniform and those rubber-soled shoes. She said that his mother had died from the babies, from sleeping in those small rooms they gave you, and the babies used up all the air. She complained bitterly about eating tainted luncheon meat while the family ate steak, about having only a tiny corner of a closet in which to hang her uniforms, next to stored luggage, ironing boards, and folded bridge tables.
She was crazy. She said she dreamed of poisoning babies or drowning them and what was she supposed to do now that his mother wouldn’t be sharing the rent on their apartment; she couldn’t afford it. And young couples didn’t even wait six weeks postpartum anymore she could hear them going at it through the walls at night.
When he left, she followed right behind him, her shoes squeaking. He gave her some money for a taxi that she tucked into her pocket without even looking at it, and she kept walking alongside the car and talking to him as he drove slowly away. He was afraid she would fall under the wheels.
“I should have come with you,” Sharon said. “You should have let me.”
“No,” he insisted. “It’s all right. I handled it. You had a deadline anyway—”
“But I wanted to,” she said, which wasn’t really true. Maybe she still resented his mother for not protecting him from his father.
“Well, it’s fine, it’s all settled now. I’m on my way,” he told her. “I’ll be home soon.”
The telephone book slides to the floor and Sharon opens the Bible to Ecclesiastes and reads. “Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better.”
When Beau was packing his books, she watched him silently for a while, still reflexively aiming to please. Then she said, in her new, diminished voice, “And what did you admire about her, first?”
One of his hands rested on a volume of John Donne; with the other he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “The usual,” he said. “Her breasts, her skin.”
She closes the Bible and puts it back into the night table drawer. Her hand goes to her heart, to her breast, and then up to the dependable pulse of her throat.
Last year, when her aunt had her breast removed, Sharon went to the hospital to visit her. And they did not talk about the breast, as if it were a mutual friend who had done something offensive and was suddenly in disfavor. They talked about Sharon and Michael instead, and her aunt confessed shyly that she had never liked the other fellow, that poet Sharon used to go out with, and that she was relieved when Sharon and Michael were safely married. And Sharon had begun to brag, exaggerating Michael’s virtues. She told her aunt that it was she who had broken up with Beau and that he had begged and pleaded for another chance. She took extraordinary pleasure in her aunt’s approval, in the lying itself, and in her own intact flesh later that night.
There is a knocking at the door and she realizes she has been asleep. It is past eight o’clock. Dick comes into the room and hugs her. His large mustache scrapes her face and his embrace is amazingly solid.
They drive to a restaurant in the rented car, and Sharon’s appetite is much better than she expected. In fact, she eats everything on her plate and some of Dick’s dinner, too. He’s confident things will work out well the next day. They share a full bottle of Chablis, and there is an inappropriate air of celebration. Dick has done some research. He’s been reading up on the subject and has even called a couple of shrinks he knows. A single, isolated episode of exhibitionism, he tells her, especially following a trauma like the death of one’s mother, doesn’t have to be pathological in origin. He was standing next to his car. There is reasonable consideration about his wish to be apprehended through license plate identification. And did she know that indecent exposure occurs most frequently in the spring?
“A young man’s fancy?” she says, and is further loosened by Dick’s laughter. Oh oh, she thinks.
Back at the motel, she asks him to come to her room to continue talking.
He looks at her speculatively and then follows her inside. “Only for a few minutes,” he says. “I want to be sparkling in the morning. So you won’t be sorry you didn’t bring F. Lee Bailey instead.”
She takes the pack of cigarettes from her purse and empties it carefully onto one of the beds. She selects the joints and shows them to Dick.
“Oy,” he says, clapping his forehead. “Do you want to get us busted, too?” Then he takes matches from his pocket and lights one.
It’s potent stuff, as promised, or perhaps the wine has eased the way. They become high quickly. Sharon feels uncommonly happy and hopeful. But even as she considers this blissful new state, she senses a sobering one approaching from a great distance, like a storm.
What if I come down too quickly? she thinks. What if Dick’s optimism is artificially induced, too? She tries to remember if he was this cheerful and reassuring before dinner. What if he wants to make love to me? And she knows that it is her own desire she contemplates.
Dick takes off his jacket and falls into a chair, lifting his feet onto the bed. He is barrel-chested, growing a little portly.
Sharon is touched by what she sees as the body’s first small concession to aging. She takes off her shoes and lies down on the bed, her feet almost touching Dick’s.
“Freud gave up sex at forty,” Dick says. “My friend Marshall says he was probably screwing his own sister-in-law.”
They both laugh.
“Wow,” Sharon says, and they laugh again.
Dick tells her a joke about a woman who goes to a psychiatrist because she has repeated dreams about long, pointed objects. “You know, like swords, pencils, arrows. ‘That’s very simple, dear lady,’ the psychiatrist says. ‘You are obsessed by phallic symbols.’ ‘By what?’ the woman asks. ‘By symbols of the phallus,’ the psychiatrist tells her. ‘Huh?’ the woman says, and he can see she doesn’t get it. He decides to do something really drastic. So, he gets up and opens his fly. ‘There,’ he says. ‘That’s a phallus!’ ‘Ohhhh,’ says the woman, ‘like a penis, only smaller.’ ” Neither of them laughs.
“I love Anna,” Sharon says. “I really do.”
“Me, too,” Dick says. He stands, picks up his jacket and, leaning precariously over her, kisses her sweetly on the mouth.
After he leaves, Sharon feels restless and she lies awake for a long time. She thinks of an editor she knows who insists she remembers being born. She claims to have understood instantly her mother’s profound sorrow at learning her baby was a girl.
Sharon thinks it’s only hysteria induced by the editor’s own disappointment in her life as a woman, and she argued that such early memory isn’t possible, before language, before the ability to form concepts.
“Listen,” the other woman said. “Dreaming begins in utero.”
What a notion—a tiny, crouched, and floating dreamer! The image has always appealed to Sharon, and thinking of it now, she floats, too, then starts to feel sleepy, the way Beau did whenever she wanted to talk in bed.
Floating. Once, when he was coming, Michael called out,
“Oh, Sharon, your legs are holding me like arms!”
She meets Dick in the coffee shop for breakfast. “How do you feel?” he asks, and it is not a perfunctory question. He wants to know.
“Afraid of how I feel,” Sharon answers. “Maybe more angry than sympathetic. Not loving enough, not Christian. Michael had such a rotten childhood, didn’t he? I mean, his parents should have been arrested. It’s a miracle that he’s such a good person, really, isn’t it? I’m like an evil-minded child in church, trying hard to have holy thoughts. And I feel so selfish now, as if the only crimes that matter are the ones committed against me.”
She is exhausted, self-conscious. It was like a courtroom speech, or one made on a deathbed. “And I’m a little nauseous, besides,” she adds.
Dick signals the waitress for the check.
At the car, he takes the driver’s seat. Leaving the motor running, he gets out and goes into the motel office. When he comes back, he hands her a morning newspaper.
On the front page, there is a photograph of a baby who was born with his heart on the outside of his chest. Not the first recorded case, but still a medical phenomenon. Temporary surgical repair has been done to keep the baby alive until the cavity enlarges enough to hold the heart. Skin taken from his little legs and back has been used to build a thin wall against that terrible beating.
On the way to the jail, Sharon massages her cold hands and thinks about men and how they always wear their parts on the surface of their bodies, indecently exposed and vulnerable, appendages of their joy and their despair. She realizes that she has never regretted being female, as a girl or as a woman. If she were given another shot at it, she wouldn’t choose a different animal form, either, not even a bird’s with its feathered grace and alleged freedom. And she would never be a man for anything.
Except for the barred windows, the jail looks like a schoolhouse. There is a flag flapping outside, and on the corner a policeman, middle-aged and plump, like the friendly ones in children’s primers, directs traffic.
They are taken to a room with a square table and four hard chairs in it. The door is left open, so that they hear the footsteps when a guard approaches with Michael, and she looks up and sees him immediately. He is attempting to smile, and about to weep.
Dick remains seated as Sharon stands and goes to Michael. When he puts his hands on her, she can feel the burning of his palms, and she goes into him, pressing the place where the flowers bloom.
(1979)
Mother
Despite what everyone said, Helen wasn’t sure that she’d seen the baby. Maybe the ether had taken her memory of recent events or maybe she simply couldn’t believe that anything this important had really happened to her. Ten years before, she’d been a spinster, working in a typing pool at a textile company and still living at home in Brooklyn with her father. How he must have pitied and despised her for having his broad, ruddy face, and such a sorry awkwardness in the world of men and women. It was to escape his sympathy that she’d gone to the dance that night and met Jon. Her father had come to the doorway of her room and caught her posing in the mirror, trying on her mother’s crystal beads. When she saw him standing there, stout and pink in his uniform, she felt her face and throat blotch in that awful way. He smiled and said, “Going out tonight, Helen?” She’d had no intention of going anywhere. Nellie, another typist in the pool, had told her about a get-acquainted dance a single women’s club was holding, to celebrate Warren G. Harding’s election. Helen wasn’t interested—she knew the political event was only an excuse for the social one, and she hated standing on the sidelines, wearing a frozen smile of expectation when she expected nothing. But she told her father that she was going out. “Just to a dance,” she muttered.
“Well, that’s nice, dear, that sounds like fun,” he said. He touched his forehead, his chest, and his holster in a kind of nervous genuflection and pushed their hopeless conversation further. “Mother loved to dance in her heyday, you know,” he said. He indicated the box of her mother’s jewelry on the dresser. “Maybe you ought to wear some of that stuff … gussy up a little.”
She pitied and hated him then, too, for pretending that twenty-eight was not a desperate age for a woman, that “gussying up” was the secret of fatal attraction, that he believed her capable of abandoned fun. Her mother had probably never danced. She’d probably never made love, either, with that great, aching hulk in the doorway. Maybe Helen had been born of some chaste, clothed act that produced only lesser beings. Her face blazed up again. Maybe she was going crazy at last, the way they said all lustful virgins eventually did. Her father continued to stand there, smiling.
The very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but its nakedness, and the naked witness of others. And as her father knew her hidden heart, so she knew his. She’d seen him standing for minutes in front of the open, smoking icebox, staring inside as if he expected something beyond butter or milk to be revealed. Then, with a heaving sigh, he always settled for butter and milk. His whole life had whizzed by like a bullet from the gun he’d never fired off the firing range, and here he was: long-widowed, still a foot patrolman, and with a sulky old-maid daughter on his hands. She’d inherited his homely looks, and out of spite she’d deny him his immortality. Her mother had died of pneumonia when Helen was two years old, and all she could recall were a few real or imagined impressions—breast, hair, shadow.
Lying in the maternity ward at Bellevue Hospital, Helen couldn’t conjure up even the vaguest image of the living child they’d said she’d delivered. All the other women in her ward but one had infants at their breasts at regular intervals. The nurses wheeled them in in a common cart, like the vegetables sold by street peddlers. The woman in the bed opposite Helen’s had given birth to a stillborn son. Before the wailing babies were distributed among the new mothers, a three-sided screen was arranged discreetly around her bed, and she could be heard weeping behind it.
Helen felt remote from the celebration around her, as she had felt remote from the festive possibilities of the dance the night she’d met Jon. The ballroom had been romantically lit for the occasion and adorned with political banners and posters. As soon as she walked in, she knew that her dress was wrong—she would disappear in the shadows. It was November and cold, and everyone, all the magazines, said that simple black was always smart and always right. Yet even Nellie and Irene, who lived by the dictates of fashion, wore gaily colored dresses and matching headbands. Oh, what difference did it make? There were so many women, in bright noisy clusters, and only a few men, aside from the band that was just warming up.
Irene glanced around and said, “Boy, I bet we’d find more fellas at a convent.” She and Nellie leaned together, giggling. Helen didn’t see what was so funny. They weren’t beautiful or that popular, either, and the Great War had decreased all of their chances even further. But she was rallying to laugh along with them, to be a good sport, when the huge mirrored ball suspended from the center of the ceiling began to slowly revolve. Facets of light ricocheted off every surface and struck her painlessly on her arms, her dress, her shoes. The band started to play the lively melody of some popular song she couldn’t name, but that she found herself humming. Everyone was wearing the same restless pattern of light. In that way they were all united, like jungle beasts marked by the spots or stripes of their species. Helen felt that something was about to happen. It was in the very air. Harding gazed down at her from the enormous posters like a stern but benevolent chaperone. And look, the ballroom was filling up—so many men were coming in! Irene said it was because they only had to pay half price, but who cared? Couples went whirling by in one another’s arms. Before long, Nellie was pulled into the maelstrom, and a few minutes later Irene was gone, too. Soon someone would come for her, would know intuitively her concealed qualities: that she’d been golden blonde as a child, and her skin attested to it; that she had lovely breasts; that she could type sixty flawless words a minute.
A man seemed to be
coming purposefully in her direction. She felt an immediate affinity with the gawkiness of his stride, the way his cowlick had resisted combing. He appeared hell-bent in his mission and an electric thrill traveled her body. Then she saw that he’d meant someone else, the gyrating flapper in fringed pink standing next to her, who shook her head no at him and turned to another man. Helen drew her breath in deeply and put up her arms, as if he’d meant her all along. He hesitated for the barest moment before he held out his own arms. She was careful not to lead.
They were married on Inauguration Day, and Jon moved in with Helen and her father. He was a typesetter for the Sun, with a modest salary. Their living arrangement enabled them to save money for the house they’d buy after they’d begun their own family. Helen stored their wedding gifts neatly in the walk-in cedar closet, so that everything would still be new no matter when they moved. The closet’s cool, scented interior was like a little forest glade, and she often just stood there in a reverie, surrounded by the artifacts of her future.
Helen didn’t become pregnant, though not for want of trying. Each disappointing month she wept in the privacy of the cedar closet, wiping her eyes carefully on the corner of one of the monogrammed wedding sheets. Old Dr. Kelly insisted she was fine, that nature would take its course, wait and see. When Helen asked if she should see a specialist, he laughed and shook his head. “Isn’t the family doctor best when you want to start a family?” he said. “Didn’t I deliver herself in my little black bag?”
Oh, yes, she thought, and took my mother away in it. He was like a gentle, cheerful priest, his undaunted cheer shaking her faith, but she gave him the wobbly smile he wanted. Finally, though, they did consult a specialist, in his Gramercy Park offices. She gasped during his examination and fainted during the first treatment to expand her fallopian tubes. He prescribed a nerve powder and told Jon that it was inadvisable for Helen to continue working in her condition.
She stayed home for two years, prowling the house like a high-strung watchdog. She’d left her job, but her fingers refused to give up typing. They tapped out imaginary letters about late shipments and damaged goods on the tabletops and the walls. She played game after game of patience, telling herself that if the next hand worked out, she would become pregnant that month. It was a relief to go back to work at last, to give up hope, if not the longing that had impelled it.
Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket Page 9
