Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  “Well,” she said when she saw John.

  He could think of nothing to say that wasn’t a demand or a plea, and so he looked at her, mustering as much antagonism as possible, and said nothing.

  “Are the two-year-olds in? It’s nearly five-thirty.”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What have you been thinking of? For heaven’s sake, John, you make me very angry. Do I have to watch you and instruct you every second of the day? You’re fifteen years old now. I should think . . .” She turned to Peter. “Get that horse put away this instant.”

  “I was just watching,” muttered John.

  “You don’t have time to watch. You have responsibilities, as you well know. We all do. That’s how we can afford, and just barely afford, let me tell you, the privilege of living on a beautiful farm like this. . . .”

  “I didn’t ask to live here.”

  “You sound like a fool.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “‘Well, I didn’t!’ ‘Well, I didn’t!’” The tone of her mockery was squeaking, strident. “No one, not one of my other children tries my patience like you do. I would have to be a saint to put up with your resentments, your foot-dragging, your evil temper. I’m telling you, I can’t stand it anymore!” She was nearly shouting. “Now get down from there and do the task you agreed to do! If you’re late for dinner, so much the worse for you. You’ll get what’s left over!”

  “Why are you yelling at me?” Now it was his turn to shout. “I was just watching! I might as well watch, since I’m not going to get to do any of that stuff—never ride MacDougal, or any other decent horse, never get an extra lesson, never get a chance to win anything. That’s right, I’ll get what’s left over, after he’s finished with what he wants. It’s O.K., though, you just do what you’re planning. You just ship me off to college and get me out of here. That’s exactly what you’d like to do, and since you do everything you want to do and nothing anybody else wants to do, that’s what you’ll do. I’m as good as he is, you know. Every bit as good, and a lot smarter, and a lot shorter too, for that matter.”

  “Then prove it.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to.”

  “You act like a five-year-old. You expect me to hand you everything on a silver platter, and when you don’t get it, you stamp your little foot and cry. All you can say is ‘me! me! me!’ Well, I’m tired of it. When you’ve proven to me that you’re ready for extra experience, then you’ll get it. Right now all you’ve shown is that you can’t even do what’s expected of you so far.” She paused, then suddenly thinking of herself arguing with him, a child, she flamed up more fiercely. “I can’t stand it! Get out of my sight! Do your work! I can’t bear to speak to you!” Her usually strong voice cracked with effort and anger. “Go away!” she choked. He did so. Even this full of hatred, violent, spitting hatred, he feared her granite-chip eyes.

  Her anger was huge, filling the dinner table, the kitchen, the house, annihilating the peace of the entire farm. She said nothing, although the cheese sauce tasted burnt and the children had biscuits instead of bread, and Henry complained that he couldn’t eat his dinner. Her anger was so enormous that Henry’s petulance could not increase it. It seemed, especially to her, monolithic, grotesquely permanent; the place itself seemed fixed in time now: the dinner dishes would never be done, or even cleared from the table, the pantry door would never close upon onions and potatoes that would never sprout or decay, the arrangement of the boots in the corner boot pile was immutable, the selection of notes on the bulletin board a historical artifact. Soon the family would leave the dinner table and vanish, as the charred bodies had vanished from Pompeii. There was the muted requesting of this and that, there were muted thanks and apologies. Kate sat wordless and did not eat. She would, it seemed, sit and sit and sit. When the children had eaten every morsel and drunk every drop on the table, they sat as well. No instructions about the dishes or other after-dinner chores were forthcoming.

  At last Axel said, “I went to see my sweetheart, she met me at the door, her shoes and stockings in her hand, her feet all over the floor.”

  “Oh, daddy!” whispered Margaret, but she covered one bare foot with the other anyway, and pushed both as far as possible under her chair. “I never go outside without them,” she said.

  “Disaster could strike at any moment, and then where would you be?”

  Kate scowled. Things were veering in the direction of levity. The spell of perpetuity was broken, for one thing. In a moment, in a very short moment, she knew that they would cease to take her seriously. They would shrug, say to themselves that she would get over it eventually, and go about their business. Business of some kind, probably the wrong business, and so, soon, she would have to speak. More than anything she could not bear the thought of speaking. She said, “Henry! Dishes.”

  “No,” said Axel.

  “Pardon me?”

  “No. You and I are going to do the dishes. The children can have the evening off, as long as they clear out of the house.”

  “There’s plenty to do around here. . . .”

  “The master has spoken.” He smiled. The role was so unusual for him that the children stared. The spell was indeed broken, simply because there was something of more interest than mother’s anger, after all. They cleared out. The pantry door slammed shut, the boot pile diminished, and, in a moment, children’s voices were to be heard from a distance. In a way, it seemed to Kate a miracle, at least as much of one as all those she was every day declaring to be miracles.

  He did not settle into his chair, plant his elbows beside his plate, and impale her with a monitory gaze. Nor did he seek forgiveness for contradicting her before the children. Instead, he smiled, dropped a fork, picked it up, began gathering together the plates, pushed the butter dish toward her so that she would put it away, stood up humming and turned his back to her.

  “I don’t appreciate . . .” she began.

  He turned the water on full blast.

  When the sink was full and steaming, he closed the taps and said, “Do you remember when Margaret was three and we sent her to nursery school, and they asked her what her name was, and she told them all it was ‘Sweetheart’?”

  Kate could see everything very clearly, and in the first place, since she was the least sentimental person she had ever met, nostalgic references to quaint incidents of their mutual past were not going to soften her up. In the second place, and more importantly, no one knew her husband’s tricks better than she did: the devious nonreference that would eventually lead around to the main subject, the comradely smiles, just slightly self-deprecating, that were meant to induce trust in the victim, the sudden offers to buy something or do something inserted smack in the middle of the argument, which were at least intended to distract one from the point, and at worst intended to bribe. At one time there had been a whole category of ploys involving the touching of her cheek, or the arm about her waist. Innocent, but still cajolery. She pursed her lips. Once he had perfected a whole routine of horrifying but harmless pratfalls, and had teased her into good humor with them for nearly a year. Then they had stopped. One had to admit that he knew to the moment when repetition ceased to be funny and started to be contemptible. She said, “Hmmp.”

  “Bob Baron came into my office today and said that his granddaughter had announced to her day-care group that her name was ‘Shithead.’ ”

  “I don’t like that kind of talk.”

  “Neither did Bob. He was rather horrified, really. He kept saying, ‘Karlson, why did she marry that idiot?’ I didn’t know what to say. Hand me those glasses, would you?”

  Kate wiped the table with short, resentful strokes, on the verge of denouncing this enforced domestic togetherness. To coordinate their actions, to make a minuet of this household task that Henry should be doing, all in the name of something that no longer existed between them, was an abomination.

  He g
rinned. “I had to laugh when he left, though. It is pretty funny.” His grin indicated that fools like himself would laugh at anything. His grin indicated that four children, forty horses, three hundred acres, and an angry wife hadn’t yet encumbered his sense of humor.

  Kate turned her back on him, ostensibly to straighten the pantry shelves. Behind the soup cans, there were onions that had rotted into the wood. “Yecch,” she said, in spite of herself.

  “What’s the matter?” He was at her side instantly.

  “Look.”

  “I’ll clean it up, don’t worry about it.”

  This she should not fall for. This, especially since not five minutes before she had foreseen something of the kind, she should set her face against. There was something so repellent about rotten food, though, that she was grateful in spite of herself. In spite of herself, she said, “When I was little I used to think that this was where snakes came from.” Then it seemed bitter to have allowed him that intimate detail. “I was only four.” And now she was in deeper. He bumped against her. It was intentional.

  “Excuse me,” he said, before she could tell him not to do that, and then he was back at the sink, commendably scrubbing away at the burned cheese sauce. He dared to hum. How could he be so puerile, so playful, so adept at invading her? She wanted to scream about how hard she had worked to make their partnership as smooth and impersonal as it was, how hard she had plotted to maximize everyone’s freedom within the limits of a single family, a single homestead. She wanted to reassert, to nail it into permanent understanding, that no incursions were allowed for or permitted. Life must go on as it had. Who knew what would happen if they tried something new? She wanted to say, “This is not what I want.”

  Nothing, however, could be said. He held up the saucepan, now rinsed and spotless, for her praise. It would be impossible to convince a third party that this was a terribly significant act, insisting upon attention from her that it was a betrayal of herself to give, yet she knew it was. “Oh, good,” she said, as if the vessel had been found mysteriously scoured early one morning. She found the broom and swept, hoping to concentrate and ignore. He continued to hum, and Henry burst in, slamming the back door. “Out,” said Axel.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “You had your chance.” He spoke before she could, saying the words that were on her tongue. It was not significant.

  “Mom, I’m hungry.”

  It galled her to cooperate. The united front they had heretofore presented joined at an abutment. There had been no overlap in years. “Out,” she might say, or “Listen to your father,” or “Have a peanut butter sandwich,” but every utterance she could think of involved the breaking of one rule or another, one custom or another. How could it be so easy for him to destroy her hard-won system? To say nothing was not her way, either. Saying nothing felt like a relinquishing of her due authority. “You’re always hungry,” she said.

  “But now I’m especially hungry. Now I’m really and truly hungry.”

  “Go on,” she said. “Go outside.” There it was, the worst possible kind of weak, wifely support. And it left them alone together. She wanted to scream.

  She swept, he wiped. For a long angry second she beheld with liquid clarity the tableau of the last ten years. Each family member had been like a runner in a lane, moving forward, struggling in solitude with the effort and the pleasure, learning, with each stride, to know him or herself a tad, a point, a dash better. Kate loved the white lines of the track, the way they defined it, guided and limited the runners, and yet were merely lines, not fences, not walls. A foot could not cross the lines, no interference could occur, but a hand could reach out, support or even hold another hand, briefly. All because of the lines. Their family had lived a life described by more rules than the lives of many families: stable management rules, equestrian rules, rules about household duties and schoolwork, religious guidelines and dictates on the subject of good manners, as well as the private code of Kate’s and Axel’s marital relations. Kate felt certain in herself of the loveliness of those rules, of the difficulty and the nearly sensual pleasure in following them, in, indeed, lashing oneself to them. She wanted to say to Axel, “Don’t think it hasn’t been hard,” but that would be a non-sequitur and, worse, a plea.

  She wanted to say, “These children write thank-you notes, these horses are well cared for, we have what we want,” but she couldn’t speak, and Axel resumed his humming.

  When he had rinsed and wrung the sponge, placed it neatly on the rear left corner of the sink, then he turned, smiling, and she stood still with the broom in her hand. “Well!” he said. What would happen to the runners now, after ten years on the track? The vision did not fade, but in his hearty “Well!” she knew that it lost its relationship to reality. The terrain changed. There would be no lines anymore.

  “Honestly,” she said, “John makes me so angry!”

  “He always has.”

  “Oh, really!” She wedged as much contempt as possible into her tone.

  “He always has. He’s like your father.”

  “Nonsense.” It was she, they’d always said, who was like her father. “I don’t believe in all this family resemblance rigmarole.”

  “The horse breeder speaks.” He grasped her arm above the elbow. He could, it appeared, do anything now. First a shoe on the floor of her room, and then the wrenching of her arm. “Katherine!” he said. “Why don’t you forgive . . .”

  “I always forgive him! and then he always angers me again.”

  “Us?”

  “Pardon me?”

  He did not, however, repeat himself. Nor was he any longer gripping her arm. He was, in fact, walking away from her into the living room, the living room with its two other doors and the big French window, with its many distractions, the living room like a sieve. She hurried after him, but between the living room and the front hall she lost him.

  “What if you had some leftover fried chicken,” said Henry. “How long would that last if you were away from the refrigerator?”

  “What?” This was the third of Henry’s questions, though she was ostentatiously paying little attention, and Margaret began to get annoyed with his persistence.

  “How long would leftover fried chicken last outside the refrigerator?”

  “I don’t know. A day, maybe. I’d like to read this, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Margaret turned back a page and reread the paragraph she had missed. The book was called How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

  “What would last the longest?”

  “I’m reading!”

  “Just answer this one question.”

  “Cereal, I suppose. Crackers. Maybe beef jerky or something like that.”

  “Oh.” Henry got to his feet, and, drawing his fingertips over the backs of mother’s books reflectively, left the room. In a moment he was back. “Do you have the two dollars I lent you?”

  “If I give it to you right now, will you leave me alone for the rest of the evening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look in the top left-hand drawer of my desk.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome!” But when he had finally gone, Margaret dropped the book in her lap and rested her gaze on the stack of magazines across the room. They were copies of The Chronicle of the Horse, and she knew that if she thumbed through them or through numbers from previous years, she would find mention of Harrison Randolph and his horses. And it would be nice simply to read his name and to know the names of his various mounts.

  She had not, in the end, either called him or gone to his room (as if she could have gone to his room!) on the last night of the horse show, even though mother’s decision to have dinner with friends from Indiana and to leave the following morning had given Margaret a few hours to herself. During Kate’s absence she had done an odd thing: After brushing off her riding clothes and cleaning her boots, which she tried to do at the end of every show, she had taken
a long hot bath, washed her hair, and scrubbed her body very carefully. She had cleaned under her fingernails, twirled the wax out of her ears with a Q-Tip, rinsed off under the shower, then rubbed some of mother’s hand cream into her skin. She even used a nail file on the calluses of her feet. Then she brushed her hair dry, dressed in her last clean blouse and best slacks, and went for a walk around the motel, though only to the lobby, where she bought a package of Life Savers. Immediately she returned to her room, taken off her fresh clothes, and gotten into her nightgown, turned on the television, and climbed into bed. What was odd, besides her unaccustomed thoroughness, was that she thought happily of Harrison Randolph the entire time, felt almost as if she were preparing for a date with him, except somehow, since she wouldn’t be seeing him, the pleasure of the preparations and the affection of her thoughts weren’t damaged by anxiety. It was enough, at the time, that he wanted to see her again, and that when she went to the lobby of her motel she was fit to be seen. Anything more would have destroyed her equilibrium.

  She had, of course, been silly. In retrospect (and there had been plenty of retrospect) she knew that, but when she thought back to the pure, solitary sense she had had of simply being clean and desirable as she flipped through the New Yorkers and Times on the magazine stand and compared that to the self-disgust she had felt in his presence (as a result of his presence?), she was satisfied. But now she wanted to scour old Chronicles for his name and the names of his horses, to imagine him in his old-fashioned riding clothes guiding impeccable Tidewater steeds over rich, sturdy courses: over brush fences that grew green where they were standing, trimmed like topiary every season, over ditches and rails and chicken coops lit by the wealthy sun of lifelong hunt-club subscriptions, over . . .

  She pursed her lips and cut her fantasy off short. Who knew better than she the true nature of a horse show, the nastiness of the people, the wastefulness of the expense? She picked up her book. He had very nice hands, though. She could picture them perfectly, and she didn’t even remember noticing them.