by Nancy Thayer
Carol turned her letters toward Hank. “Do you know what I’d really like to do?” she said. “I’d like to scrub the toilet. Or the kitchen floor.”
“Whatever for?” Hank asked. “Don’t you think my house is sanitary?”
“Oh, it’s not that at all,” Carol said. She rose and went to look out a window. “It’s just that at times like this I like to be doing something that I hate. In order to earn a reward from Fate. You know.” She gestured vaguely and gave Dale a look that said quite clearly: Don’t make me be too precise on this point. Don’t make me say that if I scrub a toilet, which I hate doing, I will in that way save Bob from being killed on an icy road. “It’s an old habit,” she went on. “From school. If you study hard, you are rewarded with good grades. Also, I think the time will pass more quickly if I’m active.”
Dale rose. “The kitchen floor can always use a scrubbing,” she said. “Come on, I’ll show you where the soap is.” But in the kitchen she encountered her own problem: kneeling down below the sink, where she would have kept the floor detergent, she found only a trash sack. This was not her house; it was Hank’s; and she felt strangely slighted. She had to call Hank in from the living room to show her where he kept his mop and cleansers.
The three of them were all gathered about the broom closet in an inordinately serious group when they heard the car come into the driveway. Carol was out the door in an instant, not even stopping to put on her coat. After a few moments she came back in, her arm around Bob, her hair sparkling with snowflakes, her face glowing. They all made a great fuss over Bob, who was exhausted from the drive and delighted to be safe inside a warm house. They talked a bit, then Hank took Bob off to fix him a drink, and Carol and Dale went into the living room to put away the Scrabble game and clear up the wineglasses.
“Carol,” Dale said, as the two women knelt on the floor, putting little wooden squares of letters into the box, “your hands are shaking.”
“I’m so glad he’s alive,” Carol said. “I was so worried. You know how I’ve picked on you about how strongly you feel about Hank, and yet I suppose I’m not so different after all. It’s a surprise—how love can get to you sometimes.”
Dale leaned across the Scrabble board and gave Carol a hug.
“Can we eat right away?” Hank called from the kitchen.
“Of course,” Carol called back, and rose, suddenly her usual efficient self.
Dale stayed on the floor for a moment, holding the folded Scrabble board to her chest as if it were a tangible piece of good luck. What a good night it would be now, she thought, all four of them together, safe in the midst of a snowstorm, safe in the midst of love.
—
The last Friday in March, Margaret sat in the concert hall with her hands resting loosely in her lap. The orchestra was performing Beethoven’s Pastoral, and Margaret was thinking how literature and music called forth different reactions in her. When she read fiction, she lost herself in the lives of other people; but when she listened to music, it seemed that she lost herself in her own life. Her thoughts drifted back and forth through the past events and years of her life without reason, and a surge of music would as often remind her of a fantasy she had once had as of an event that actually happened. Perhaps she was experiencing early senility. A passage of music brought to mind a dress she had wanted when she was twenty, but had never actually even seen: It was a pink dress with ruffles and black velvet bows on the cuffs, neck, and hem. The sort of dress she had never worn and would never wear. But she had wanted that dress when she was twenty, and had even thought of designing it and making it herself. She never had; and she could not imagine why certain musical notes would conjure it up in her thoughts now. Yes, the music acted on her like some sort of drug: she floated free, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, and encountered all sorts of bizarre objects from her real and imagined life.
Now she thought of Daisy; it was the alarm of timpani and brass, no doubt, that brought Daisy to mind. Daisy’s baby was due any day now, and in spite of herself, Margaret continually thought about Daisy with emotions as turbulent and complex as the music now being performed. The birth of a baby was always a dramatic event, and there were always so many possible problems. In spite of modern medicine, women did still die in childbirth. Or the baby could die. Or something could be wrong with the baby. Or everything could be fine. Still the labor and birth were events of certain magnitude. Yet Margaret was fixed in her mind that she would not go back to help Daisy. She did not want to be in charge of a large household and take care of her grandchildren, not now, not anymore. The one thing she would have done for Daisy was impossible: She would have actually had the baby for Daisy. She would have loved the experience of giving birth, of holding a vulnerable and always somehow magical newborn in her arms; she would have loved lying in the hospital with her needs tended to as she tended to those of the baby. But that was not possible, and as much as Margaret worried about Daisy, she realized that she also slightly envied her this ultimate female experience.
She had sent Daisy a check, with a note that more would follow as soon as possible, and now that that decision had been made, Margaret was glad. She felt she had done the right thing. Surely now she could be free to consider her own needs, her own life. Perhaps, she thought, after she received the crucial phone call from Daisy and knew that all was well with her and the baby, perhaps then she would be able to relax and concentrate on herself. She hoped so. Although it was beginning to seem that the tension between her desire for isolation and the necessity of somehow nurturing the world around her would always be present. Even now, as she sat in the concert hall listening to the symphony, she was aware of Anthony’s hand on her arm. As the music built to its climax, Anthony’s hand tightened. He might have been totally unaware of his pressure, but Margaret felt put upon, she felt that Anthony was asking her to be aware of his intense reaction to the music. And when it ended, she would be called upon to discuss it with Anthony and his friends, and to hear in detail just what sensations and memories the music called up in them. She did not especially want to know any of this. She did not want to have to comment on the orchestra’s brilliance or the conductor’s grace. She did not want to have to turn her experience of this music into a structure of words that would be criticized and rearranged by others. She wanted merely to sit listening to the music, appreciating it for itself. For a moment she had a vision of herself as some sort of trapped creature who must continually produce from the world about it food for others’ consumption. Yet she knew that was a slightly mad thought: oh, she knew it was not as bad as all that. She did still enjoy the company of others. She was looking forward to the dinner they would have afterward, and to the conversation. A discussion of the concert would be good for her, Margaret decided; it would keep her mind off Daisy, off her own petty problems. So she sat with her hands in her lap, intently listening, and it seemed her emotions rose and fell with the rhythm of the music.
—
The last Friday in March, Daisy had a date. The baby was five days overdue and Daisy lurched around through life like a whale out of water. She felt enormous, she was enormous, and inside her vast stomach things sloshed and tugged and pulled when she walked. All she wanted to do was to sit with her feet up; her feet ached and ached. She really could not breathe easily, especially after eating, but she was so bored and frustrated that she ate almost constantly anyway. She couldn’t sleep at night because she was so uncomfortable, and because she kept thinking she was feeling the beginnings of labor, and so she went through the days feeling cranky and tired and falling asleep at odd moments whenever she could sit down. During the days she would fall instantly into a sleep as deep as a black hole, and she would awake with a start, not knowing where or who she was. She had taken to keeping the phone receiver off the hook during much of the day because so many people kept calling her to ask, “Are you still home? What’s going on?” Jane and Karen and her other friends called her constantly to see if anything was hap
pening with the baby yet. So Daisy was totally shocked to answer the phone one day and hear a man speaking to her.
The man was Jerry Reynolds, an accountant who worked in the same Milwaukee firm as Paul. She had met him many times at company parties, and she supposed that if she had ever thought of him at all she had simply thought, when talking to him, that he was just a pleasant man who was polite enough never to appear bored when talking with her. Well, he was separated from his wife now, and had heard that Daisy and Paul were getting divorced, and had called to ask her for a dinner date.
“But I’m pregnant,” she had replied, amazed and rather alarmed.
“Well, that’s all right,” Jerry had said.
“But I mean I’m really pregnant,” Daisy said. “I’m nine months along. The baby should come any day now.” What she meant to imply was that not only would she be incapable of sleeping with him, but that she would look unattractive and bulgy, that he wouldn’t even want to be seen with her in public.
“You can still eat and talk, can’t you?” Jerry had said. And then, disarmingly, “I really would like it so much if I could take you out to dinner. I’m feeling rather awkward since this divorce thing, and I’ve always felt comfortable around you, and to tell the truth it would be a relief to me just to be able to go out with a woman who would obviously be just a companion and friend.”
Daisy was touched by his honesty. “Oh, you mean I could be a sort of trial date for you.”
Jerry laughed. “Well, let’s hope it won’t be too much of a trial,” he said. “Really, Daisy, it is partly that—I’ve forgotten everything about ‘dating’—I hate that word—and it’s been years since I’ve so much as sat alone with a woman other than my wife for any period of time. It’s—I’m—well, what it comes down to is a sort of situation like getting thrown from a horse. I mean it’s necessary to get right back on. I mean I don’t want to become afraid of women simply because I’ve forgotten how to deal with them. But I do like you, I always have liked you, and I think we could have a good time together.”
Daisy had been moved by his candor. And, hungry all the time as she was these days, the idea of a good meal at a nice restaurant appealed to her. Jerry seemed so unthreatening on the phone, so almost pitiable. And she remembered that while he was not ugly, he was not uncomfortably handsome, either; he was just pleasant-looking enough so that she would feel good with him in public, but not so handsome that she would feel embarrassed by her own bulbous physical state. She agreed to go.
Sara, one of the girls who had moved into the attic apartment, agreed to babysit for Danny and Jenny. Daisy would of course pay her the regular babysitting fee—they had discussed all this at the time the girls took the apartment, and it was agreed that they would pay the full amount of rent and Daisy would pay them regular babysitting fees, instead of trying to work out some other more complicated arrangement. But Daisy was discovering that all four girls, but especially Sara and Ruth Anne, would be of more help to her than she had ever dreamed. In almost no time at all she had come to think affectionately of her four renters as the “upstairs girls.” They were lonely young women from farms or small towns in the middle of Wisconsin who had come straight from high school to Milwaukee to get good-paying secretarial or department store jobs and to meet professional men; they missed their homes and families and liked hanging around Daisy’s house in the evenings or on weekends, idly playing with Danny and Jenny. They thought Daisy’s children were just so cute and they were forever asking Daisy if they could take the children with them down for a walk on the lakeshore or for a ride with them to do errands and buy ice cream. In return Daisy found herself spending long evening hours sitting at the kitchen table with them, listening to their life stories, offering them sensible advice, doling out sympathy when they complained of problems with their jobs or boyfriends or lack of boyfriends. She had already given Sara, who was her size, three of her old blouses, blouses she would never wear again because they were too frilly and young for her, and twice when two of the other girls had had an especially snazzy date she had lent them her long dresses for the evening. She felt that she had somehow accumulated an extended family about her, and she liked it. She liked it very much. All through the month of March she had seldom found herself alone in the evenings—because even on the weekends it never happened that all four girls had dates—and whoever didn’t have a date ended up coming down from the attic to share a bowl of popcorn and a television movie with Daisy. One Saturday night she had given Melissa a permanent to make her straight hair frizzy; another night she had sat up late with Ruth Anne and Allison, discussing sex and men and contraception. Oh, she liked it all, the companionship, the laughter, the stories which reminded her of her own unmarried youth, even the pleasant, busy sound of footsteps going up and down the back stairs, the hum of blow dryers and the rush of hot water as the girls got ready for dates or the noise of doors opening and closing at all hours of the day and night. It felt good to go to sleep in a house so full of life, with all the prettiness and optimism of the four young girls filling what had once been empty rooms above her, billowing above her like palpable clouds of hope between her and the cold night air. She liked the girls and thought herself quite lucky. And their first month’s rent had paid the largest part of the expense of having the little kitchen installed. April’s rent money would finish off that bill, and there would be some left over for babysitting and gas and food; she was eventually even going to be able to start a small savings account.
She felt lucky. In February she had received a check from her mother large enough to pay Paul most of his share of the equity; Margaret had promised another check soon, which would pay Paul the rest of his equity and reduce the monthly mortgage payments slightly. She felt so supported by her family, her mother, father, sister; she felt so supported by all her friends and now these new friendly upstairs girls. And Danny and Jenny were as happy as clams suddenly to have in the house strong, lithe bodies they could climb on or be swung by, sound healthy enthusiastic girls who would roll on the floor with them or bring them sticks of chewing gum or lollipops. Now from time to time she could afford to go out to dinner or a movie with her own grown-up friends, Karen or Martha or Jane, or to pay a babysitter so she could spend a snowy Saturday afternoon strolling through a warm bright mall without little children tugging on her arms, distracting her from the shop windows. The month of March had been happy for Daisy, and she felt inside her the pain of Paul’s leaving easing off a bit, fading away.
But by the end of March, when the baby still had not come, she began to feel more and more restless and irritable, and then, irrationally, bitter thoughts would start stirring in her mind. And when Jerry Reynolds called again, to tell her what time he would be arriving to pick her up, she realized that the very low, deep tenor of his voice startled her, even annoyed her a bit. She supposed she had been living too long among only women; and as the day for her date approached, she felt herself growing anxious. What did she have in common with this man, after all? What on earth would they talk about?
He arrived at her house on Saturday night at seven o’clock. Daisy opened the door and, with a casual cheerful manner which she had been planning toward all day, asked him in for a drink. At first she was put off by him, by his maleness. He was tall and a little stout, and so very different from the women and girls and children she had spent so much time with that he seemed instantly threatening. Yet as they moved through the house to the kitchen where Daisy poured wine for him and water for her, Daisy noticed how his hair was already receding, and how his ears stuck out in such a way that he would never grow into them, and somehow this endeared him to her. At any rate she felt less nervous. Even if her body was so cumbersome, her face was still pretty, she thought: she was as a woman prettier than he was handsome as a man. This comforted her, and by the time they reached the living room and settled into their chairs by the fire, she felt less and less like snapping at him, like telling him to just go away.
�
�This is a fabulous house,” Jerry said, looking about.
“Yes,” Daisy answered. “I love it.” She looked about it, too, at the bright yellow room she had so recently unpacked and put back together. She told him a bit of the history of the house, and about the work she had done on it, and said that sometime she would show him through it.
“I’m living in a two-room rented apartment in a new complex,” Jerry told her. It was apparent that he was trying to be jolly about it, but his tone was mournful. “It’s quite a change, after living in my own house for so many years, to have two small cardboard boxes to come home to. I even miss shoveling the snow. I miss standing in my own yard with a shovel in my hand, looking at my house and garage, thinking: this is my property, my place. I miss taking care of a home. I miss that feeling of satisfaction that comes from shoveling the snow. That feeling that I have just, through my own hard labor, made it possible for me and my wife to be safely connected to the rest of the world. I don’t think I’m explaining it very well. It must sound silly.”
“No, no, not at all!” Daisy reassured him. As he talked, she had been sneakily evaluating him, checking out her reactions to him, and she decided that he was not sexually attractive to her at all, even if she hadn’t been nine months pregnant. It was not just that he had accumulated a bit of a belly, and a sort of flabbiness about his jaw—she didn’t remember him as flabby, was it possible that he had put on this weight since his divorce, was it possible that like her he sometimes ate for the sake of consolation? But he was so obviously earnest and nervous and sad that she found him touching. “I can understand how hard it must be to give up a house. I was miserable when I thought I had to move from here. But fortunately my parents helped me out financially, otherwise I’d be living in an apartment, too.”
“Well, I’ll be able to get my own house again someday,” Jerry said. “Scotty—my wife, or ex-wife, or whatever she is now—I hate the word ‘estranged,’ it has a mad sound about it to me—Scotty is planning to get married again as soon as our divorce is final, and then of course she’ll have to sell the house she’s living in now, the house we lived in, and I’ll be able to get something for myself. But that’s a few months away. It’s like suddenly living on the moon. Our house wasn’t as big or magnificent as this by a long way, but it was cozy, and it was familiar. In the new apartment complex the walls are all white, and can’t be painted, and the rugs are all dark-brown nylon, and everything seems so thin and transient. I really hate going down to the basement to do my laundry in the coin-operated machines. There are these weird flickering fluorescent lights down there making the place seem spacy, and there’s always something like a man’s lost gray sock lying about, making the place look so lonely—Well, God, I didn’t come here to depress you. It’s not that bad. I’m usually out at work, anyway.” Jerry smiled. “I’ve taken to working at night in my office and I’m doing some personal tax work for people. At least I’m making a bit of extra money. My office seems more like home to me than my apartment now. But I miss the birds. I know this must sound strange, but one of the things I miss most of all, even more than my wife”—he interrupted himself to laugh—”is the birds. I mean I had built several feeders and put them out in the backyard, and I had built a large wooden tray right outside our kitchen windows, and we kept them full of birdseed, and every day there were so many birds around our house. I could eat breakfast and watch the cardinals or sparrows land on the tray and peck at the seed—they were so bright and fluffed out against the cold—” Jerry stopped and looked down at his drink, and Daisy could not tell from his expression whether he suddenly felt embarrassed or sad.
