A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  At dinner they talked about Peter’s younger sister, Marjorie. Everyone, it turned out, was concerned about her. She had finished college and then had gone off to study something called animal body work.

  “What’s that?” Teddy said.

  “Well,” Beth said, “it started with horses. The theory is that if you massage an animal it performs better. Marjorie says it’s a big thing at racetracks. Then it spread to cows. The idea is that massaged cows give more milk.”

  “Kobe beef,” said Jane Louise.

  “What’s that?” said Peter.

  “Japanese beef cattle,” Jane Louise said. “They massage them and feed them on corn and beer. They say it’s the best beef in the world, and it costs about a million dollars a pound.”

  “Oh, dear,” Beth said. “I hope Marjorie never hears about that. It would break her heart. These people are vegetarians.”

  “How about cabbage massage, Pete?” Teddy said. “Don’t you notice your cabbages do better with a little healing touch?”

  “I sing to them,” Peter said.

  “I haven’t told you the other part,” Beth said. “Marjorie confided this to me. They do dictation.”

  “Dictation?” Jane Louise said.

  “They feel they understand what the animals say,” Beth said. “Marjorie said that they sort of commune with them and write down what they reveal.”

  “It’s just like Dr. Dolittle,” Jane Louise said. “What do they reveal?”

  Beth cleared her throat. In the candlelight she looked serious and matronly. She wore a sweater she had knitted herself and a necklace made of shells—a piece of jewelry made by one of her daughters. “They say things like: ‘The good grass’ and ‘How fortunate we are to live near such good grass.’”

  “That’s what Steve Bowser used to say when he had his little marijuana plantation over on Three Farms Road,” said Teddy.

  “How fortunate we are to live near such good grass,” said Jane Louise dreamily. “I feel that way all the time, don’t you, Teddy?”

  “I think Marjorie should come and sing to your little cabbages,” said Teddy.

  “I think she should get married and have a baby,” said Beth.

  “I think I’ll go and get the dessert,” said Jane Louise.

  On the town green was a stone marker with a brass plaque listing everyone in Marshallsville who had been in the war. Almost every male from three years younger to three years older than Teddy was listed: Charlie Weil; Teddy; Peter; Ralph Barrados, who ran the family lumber business; George Rozens of Marshallsville Gas and Oil; Melvyn Herman of Herman’s Plumbing. These were Teddy’s childhood friends, and they were still his friends. Even though he had gone to study in Ehgland, and had come back to live in New York, and had married Jane Louise, who was dark and Jewish and, as far as they knew, a city girl, he was their own.

  But not one of these men, not even Teddy or Peter, who were as close as brothers, mentioned being in the war. Every now and again Jane Louise heard them speak of what they referred to as “the military” with a kind of grim cheerfulness, but never at the end of a dinner party did they ever tell a war story, or reminisce about anything that had happened to them there.

  In her first days of courtship, when she and Teddy lay in the ornamental bed in his mother’s guest room and told each other things, he had told her about the war, his buddies, the highlands of Vietnam where he had been stationed, about the Montagnard tribesmen.

  He had given her his Montagnard bracelet—a circle of hammered brass—when he asked her to marry him. She had never taken it off. When Peter had seen it on her wrist he knew at once that they were going to get married. It was after this that he began to call her Janey, and she realized with gratitude that Teddy’s old friends might accept her after all.

  Now she lay in that ornamental bed. Teddy had drifted off to sleep. The dishes were done, the leftovers put away. During dinner it had begun to rain. The drops clattered on the roof, and the last leaves rattled on the trees. There was not another sound.

  Teddy had put hot-water bottles at the foot of the bed, under the covers. The rest of the room was freezing: This was the coldest room in the house. Jane Louise turned toward her sleeping husband. He breathed evenly. She wondered if she made him feel safe.

  Love did not always scatter the barriers of private life. Teddy’s thoughts were only partially accessible to her. How eccentric people were! How unknowable and how amazingly various they were! People suffered, rejoiced, fought wars they never spoke about, and took dictation from animals. They had past love lives and personal histories. They were positively rich with living. Often this thought was a source of exultant happiness to Jane Louise. Often it left her with a pounding headache. Who had carved the bed she was sleeping in, anyway? Why did a person think a headboard ought to have pomegranates and wheat carved into it? Was it a person who felt that a bed’s true purpose was as a place in which to conceive babies? Was it someone who had studied the still lifes of Rembrandt Peale? Or some itinerant cabinetmaker with an eye for odd decoration? Eleanor’s mother had inherited this bed from her mother. Who else had slept in it? Who had been conceived in it? Our lives, Jane Louise thought to herself, are like tiny nail snips. If you can hardly begin to fathom your own husband, how can you know anyone?

  “It is rich with possibility,” she said, quoting something Sven liked to say.

  Teddy stirred in his sleep. Sometimes he had what Jane Louise called his “Victor Charlie” dreams, in which he was being sniped at by the unseeable enemy. In the country he slept like an undisturbed child. The night folded over them. All over Marshallsville, citizens were asleep in their beds and animals were dry in their stalls. Even the coyotes, called coydogs in these parts, were silent, hiding in their burrows.

  Jane Louise sighed. She fitted herself against her warm husband. How fortunate we are to live near such good grass, she said to herself, and fell asleep.

  The next morning she let Teddy sleep: He loved to sleep. It often seemed to Jane Louise that he must have been deprived of it as a child, but the fact was that the state of suspension, the idea of not moving, of not having to relate to anyone, was heaven to him. Besides, he worked very hard, and at the moment his firm was under a great deal of pressure. There was a rumor that they would be bought by a large German natural pharmaceutical company. They were scrambling to create new products, and Teddy was their chief product designer.

  He had designed furniture polish made of citrus oil as well as an extract that nullified other bad smells: This was in constant demand among cat and dog owners. He created non-petroleum-based car waxes as well as agricultural soaps for insect control.

  Jane Louise was an early riser. She liked her hour of solitude. She had lived alone for a good part of her adult life, and she needed that hour to collect her thoughts. She put Teddy’s old cashmere turtleneck over her nightgown, slipped on woolly socks and slippers, and went downstairs to light the stove. The sky was an intense, cloudless blue. The day blazed up before her. She put the kettle on and got the coffee she always brought up to Eleanor’s out of the fridge. Eleanor made the most terrible coffee, and Jane Louise was very particular; she brought her own filters, too.

  Jane Louise had brought her clothes downstairs and set them on a chair by the stove. She dressed, rummaged through Teddy’s jacket for the car keys, and set out for Gartner’s General Store and Butcher, where you could also get the paper. She thought she would make a large pot of bean soup and would leave the leftovers for Eleanor to have when she came home from Boston.

  Out in the car she drove the long way to the store, past the garage, up Winding Road, and down Rattlesnake. Dark gray clouds appeared in the northwest, but that signified nothing in this part of the country. The clouds would roll over; in an instant the sky would be brilliantly clear again.

  Jane Louise had come to know this territory, which was imprinted on her heart. At home in the city she calmed herself to sleep by wandering around the countryside. She imagined t
he seasons: the woods inflamed with red and yellow. The sight of an entire mountainside ablaze. The bare, naked landscape in the winter or the trees hung with snow. Her earliest memory as a child had been the forsythia bush outside her bedroom window encased in ice. She dreamed of skating on Marshallsville’s pond or on Dog Pond, fringed with willows. Last year the ice had frozen five feet thick. Teddy had taken her skating on Dog Pond and had driven the car right out onto the ice. A bonfire blazed out in the middle. She had spent early mornings during mud seasons lying in bed watching the icicles melt.

  Often Jane Louise, who loved living in the city, felt that leaving the country was like tearing the bandage off a wound. The feelings of her childhood overcame her. Being in the country was second nature to her, and she could hardly bear to leave it. But it was not her country: It was not the landscape of her childhood. She had borrowed it from Teddy. In the car she was overwhelmed with desire for a place that was hers, that she had a right to, that she could claim. The feeling washed against her like rain on a windshield. Tiny yellow willow leaves blew up against the windows. She took the turn on River Road and went to get the morning paper to bring home to Teddy.

  CHAPTER 7

  “She takes dictation from horses,” Jane Louise said. She was in her office on the phone to Edie.

  “I often feel that’s what I do all day,” said Edie. “Marjorie was always a little dim. The Teagardens are after me again.”

  “The wilted flowers?”

  “They didn’t wilt,” Edie said. “These people dog their food. They hauled the child off to church and did whatever they do. They dunk the kid’s head or pour water on it or something.”

  “They cast out Satan and all his works,” Jane Louise said.

  “And how do you know that?” asked Edie.

  “Mrs. Samuelovich told me,” Jane Louise said. “She was brought up in rigorous Episcopalianism.”

  “How is Dita?” said Edie.

  “The usual.”

  It was pretty clear that Dita had dumped Jane Louise. Dita had shut up like a fan, although in person she behaved as if nothing had happened. She called Jane Louise by all the old endearments. This drove Jane Louise crazy. Furthermore, Dita was always in motion, and it was impossible to sit down and try to find out what was wrong. Apparently Dita felt nothing was wrong, but Jane Louise noticed that often her door was closed, or if Jane Louise happened to be on the editorial floor and looked into Dita’s office, Dita just happened to be on the telephone and waved in a way that said, cheerfully, Don’t come in here.

  “Strangely enough,” Edie said, “Mokie had to straighten them out on a number of points. You can imagine how well that went over. The Teagardens being counseled in the niceties of christening etiquette by a nig-nog.”

  “How did they take it?” Jane Louise asked.

  “Mokie said they looked at him as if he were a talking dog.”

  “They took dictation from him,” said Jane Louise.

  “Actually, I took dictation from them. The little woman called to ask me what my partner’s background was. She said: ‘He seems so very well versed in these things.’ I said it had nothing to do with his father being an Anglican priest and his brother Paul a doctor of theology. That sort of shut her up, and then she was back on me again. She wanted something called ‘sculpted plates’ for the cake. Apparently you make marzipan roses and daisies and strew them across the plates—you should have seen the plates, darling.”

  “Oh, yes?” said Jane Louise.

  “Flora Danica. Four hundred bucks a throw. Or more.”

  “Isn’t life wonderful?” Jane Louise said. “How my mother would die for those.”

  “Wouldn’t she just,” said Edie. “I guess I’ll talk to you six or seven more times.”

  “And I you,” said Jane Louise. That was their traditional sign-off.

  Jane Louise was in the middle of designing a jacket for one of Dita’s books, Fractured Selves: Psychoanalytic Images of Women, for which she had taken a postcard of the Mona Lisa and another of Whistler’s mother, cut them into strips, and was pasting them next to one another. When she was working on a design Jane Louise felt as focused as a high-intensity lamp. She did not hear Sven come into her office, and she didn’t notice him until he was so close she could feel his breath on her neck.

  “Go away,” she said.

  He picked up her wrist and felt her pulse. “Nice work,” he said, looking at her composite.

  “How about getting your hands off me?” Jane Louise said.

  “I’m trying to determine if you’re pregnant yet,” Sven said.

  “You’ll be the first to know,” said Jane Louise.

  Sven dropped her wrist. “I think Mrs. Samuelovich will very much admire this jacket sketch,” he said. “When she comes back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “Mr. Nick, world-famous photographer and White Russian, took her to Alaska for some last-minute salmon fishing.”

  “Dita went salmon fishing?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sven said. “She stuffed her little Mark Cross suitcase full of the works of Henry James, put on her cashmere sweaters, and off she went. He fishes, she reads. They stay at a lodge run by some other Russians where the food is terrific and a person can lie in front of the fire and read elevating books whilst one’s husband goes out with an expensive Inuit guide. I see that this is news to you. Don’t you two girls confide anymore?”

  Jane Louise was silent.

  “I warned you that she was a dangerous friend,” Sven said. “She’s the kind of person who has three best friends from childhood and the rest are just crazes. Expendable, if you see what I mean. I bet you thought she adored you, right?”

  “Would you mind terribly if I went back to work?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Sven said. “I just fell by to feel your pulse and to tell you that there’s a meeting in the conference room in an hour—you, me, and Erna.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Big Arctic book,” Sven said. “Demanding author. Heavy design values. Be there at eleven.”

  Erna Hendershott was a tall, commanding woman and the editor in chief. Wife of political adviser Alfred Hendershott and mother of four. She was an almost perfect person. She belonged to the Royal Guild of Needleworkers, and her embroidery could be seen on her pillowcases (she had cross-stitched every pillowcase in her house with pine trees and initials) as well as her handkerchiefs and bed linen. If you went to a staff dinner at her house, you might find the fresh pasta she had just rolled and cut hanging over the handlebars of her son’s bicycle to dry. She made towering cakes for the bake sales at her children’s school and sat on the boards of a couple of worthy charities. In her closet hung a number of stately and official-looking gowns for the elaborate parties she said she hated but which, out of duty to her husband, she not only attended but got herself photographed for in the society columns. She had straight, lank hair, pale blue eyes, and the piercing gaze of a hawk.

  Jane Louise watched her with fascination and despair. Erna, she felt, was like a preadolescent, at the mercy of drives she did not understand. Jane Louise thought she had a major crush on Sven. She was constantly batting at him, or cuffing his hand, treating him as if he were one of her children. Sven did his part by driving her crazy. He became languid. He stared into her slightly rattled eyes and smiled what Adele called his “big sex smile.” He treated her as if she were a large, underused horse. This made her blush and stammer and become furious. Their battles, which Sven took in stride and Erna slammed doors over, were legendary.

  But nothing would ever happen. Erna was as safe as a Georgian house on the main street of a prosperous country town. How could a person run the editorial department of a publishing company and cross-stitch pine trees on all the sheets? Jane Louise had seen her at editorial meetings with her embroidery frame, stitching away as others spoke. Erna had attempted this at a design meeting, but Sven had removed it as a mother might take something dirty away from a child, and E
rna had never embroidered in his presence again. For the Christmas party Erna produced a large, English Christmas cake with shiny white frosting. If she gave a party at home, her charmingly dressed children passed the hors d’oeuvres.

  She counted among her friends a score of single or divorced people: lawyers, hatters, poets, bankers, and lieder singers who either had families far away, or families they did not speak to, or no families at all. She gathered them to her table at holidays, making them aware, Jane Louise felt, that they were floating specks in space, while the Hendershotts had achieved the stability of an old piece of fine mahogany furniture.

  Sven lounged at the conference table in a blue-and-white-striped shirt and banana-colored trousers. His socks were rose colored. He was quite a vision.

  It was a freakishly hot day, although it was November. Jane Louise had pulled her hair off her neck in a ponytail and tied it with a piece of silver ribbon she had found lying around in the art department. She wore a shapeless white turtleneck and a plain gray skirt. Erna, whose dresses were made for her by a Swiss woman in her neighborhood, wore a flowered print, with pearls.

  Jane Louise set her pad down on the table, catching sight of Erna’s wedding ring. Erna wore a tiny band of white gold—a ring that announced that she was so married and for so long that the trappings hardly mattered.

  “Well, congratulations and welcome to the club!” Erna said to her cheerily. “I do think marriage is heaven.”

  There was little Jane Louise could say to this.

  “Of course I was almost a baby when Alfred and I got married,” Erna said. “In my parents’ garden. Half an hour before the ceremony it began to pour, and then by a miracle it stopped! There was a rainbow, too. Totally, soppily sentimental. I think everyone should be married.”

  “Even nuns?” asked Sven. “Even wife beaters?”