A Big Storm Knocked It Over

by Laurie Colwin

  “What about lesbians?” said Mokie.

  “It would have given him a heart attack,” said Mrs. Berger. “He came from another world, where those things are not supposed to exist. For instance, black people. Do you know, for all the years he lived on this block, and you know he had a factory—women’s gloves, he made—no black person ever sat down at the table with him? I’m sorry to say this to you, Mokie, but there are such people. Such a shame! Not to be able to sit down with someone who makes such a nice mince pie.”

  “I put up the mince myself,” Mokie said.

  “I hope you don’t take what I said the wrong way,” said Mrs. Berger.

  “Well, you’re sitting here, aren’t you, honey?” Mokie said.

  “I’m very happy,” Mrs. Berger said. “My alternative was to go to my sister in New Jersey, and I’m sorry, but every day I listen to her problems. On the holiday I like to have a little fun. I always ask myself why it seems to be so hard to have a good time with one’s family.”

  This was a question everyone at the table had asked many, many times.

  “You know,” Mrs. Berger said, “my daughter lives in Tel Aviv, and my son is in Haifa. They want me to come and live with them. They say how lonely I must be. But I tell you, I mean I can be perfectly honest, I am extremely happy to be alone. I was a very nice wife and mother, and now I get a little chance to be myself. I could be sitting in New Jersey listening to my sister fight with her daughter, and instead I am here. Now, Edie. May I have another little tiny piece of that lovely cake?”

  She took a nibble of frosting and sat back in her chair.

  “I’m so happy,” she said. “Now you nice children tell me about where you were supposed to be.”

  “Well,” Edie said. “I was supposed to be in the country with my parents and my brothers and my brothers’ wives and my perfect little nephews, and my Uncle George and his wife. I was probably supposed to help with the cooking and chase the boys around and set the table and serve and do the cleaning up while they sat around the fire and drank their coffee because I am a girl and there is no reason to think I shouldn’t be a drudge since I am a lowly pastry chef instead of a prosecutor or a judge.”

  “That’s nice,” said Mrs. Berger. “Next?”

  “I am missing out on a huge family party in Charleston,” Mokie said. “Six thousand aunts and uncles. Fourteen cousins I can’t stand. Too much food. Lots of religion. Of course, if I walked in with Edie they would all drop dead. My parents love her, but our relatives are kind of separatist.”

  “It’s too bad,” Jane Louise said. “What a heavenly wedding you’d have. Your huge, horrible family on one side, and Edie’s huge, horrible family on the other. After dinner, mixed partners for dancing, like a checkerboard. You could have one of those cakes that comes out in little chocolate and vanilla squares.”

  “Eventually we’ll get pregnant and go down to City Hall,” Mokie said.

  Jane Louise gazed at him. “Remember, Edie,” she said, “we’re going to coordinate this.”

  “Don’t do anything without us,” Teddy added.

  “We wouldn’t dream of it,” said Edie.

  A baby! Late in the evening Jane Louise was putting away the dishes while Teddy swatted the sofa pillows back into shape. A baby rounded everything out. Two more places at the table: her baby’s and Edie’s. A Thanksgiving with babies crawling on the floor or playing with blocks while the grown-ups ate. She saw herself floating through the living room, a pregnant woman, full of purpose, just like Erna, who had often reminded her of the woodcut of Dorothie, Great with Manie Children.

  And what, she wondered, was Erna Hendershott doing right this minute? Putting away her dishes—the family Wedgwood—or poking the fire while her happy guests—happy to be in her warm and happy orbit—finished their coffee. Her children would have been sent sleepily off to bed, the youngest with some adorable and worn bed toy, the older with an appropriately elevating and obscure English children’s book. The remains of her turkey would be neatly tied up in cheesecloth and waxed paper. Erna made a point of cheesecloth and waxed paper. In fact, the insides of her fridge reminded Jane Louise—who had once been dispatched to the kitchen during a party to get another bottle of cold champagne—of a foreign country: the eggs in a French wire basket, juice in a Swedish pitcher, butter in an English butter box. The Indian lime pickle, the ricotta draining in a tub. When Jane Louise described this to Teddy, he said: “It isn’t a fridge. It’s the UN.”

  Erna made her feel like a worm. Oh, the safety and surety of that huge dining room table, those pink-cheeked children, that wedding band, thin as a wire, that didn’t ever need to call attention to itself.

  Jane Louise found Teddy lying on the couch reading the morning paper.

  “Did you have any fun?” she asked. He moved over and tried to make room for her, but there wasn’t room so she wedged herself beside him with one foot on the floor.

  “I had lots of fun,” Teddy said.

  “But didn’t you miss being in the country?”

  “About as much as you missed being with your mother and Charlie,” Teddy said. “I think holidays should be abolished.”

  “Maybe it’s us,” Jane Louise said. “I mean me. Maybe I just can’t stand to be around anyone I’m related to for any period of time.”

  “Edie can’t either,” Teddy pointed out.

  “Yes, but her brothers are all over each other constantly,” Jane Louise said. “They play handball together. They meet for lunch. They live in the same neighborhood. Their children go to nursery school together.”

  “No one else can stand them,” Teddy said. “As you know, they haven’t any friends, and their wives look exactly alike.”

  “I guess if you like your family you don’t need friends,” Jane Louise said. “Maybe friends are a modern invention. Maybe they’re just fluff that fills up some empty space where your extended family used to be.”

  “Let’s have a baby,” Teddy said.

  “You mean, right now?” Jane Louise said.

  “Let’s practice,” Teddy said. “Get in shape for it.”

  Jane Louise inwardly swooned. What an odd thing it was to have a husband. This person who was almost like a household object—a pillow or a lamp—who transformed you from a single entity into a unit, whose breathing at night was as reassuring as a clock, to whom you could, of an evening, pay almost no attention at all, and who in one minute, with one look, could turn into what a husband in actuality was: a sexual being.

  Jane Louise’s heart contracted. There was in this arrangement some frightening aspect, some scary way in which this connection went beyond connection and spilled into the larger world.

  Teddy peered at her from his couch pillow. His hair was mussed. His glasses were fogged. She could feel his smooth hard chest under his shirt. She put her arms around him and kissed his sweet mouth.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Let’s.”

  CHAPTER 10

  In the office Sven turned the force of his intense regard on Jane Louise. She felt picked over, ransacked, probed. He seemed to sniff her, like a mother cat. Now that she was married, she felt he saw right through her. She felt that the nights of her married life were as open to him as a book.

  “What’s the scene with him?” she asked Adele, who was herself the X-ray technician of Sven. “He’s all over me.”

  “I think one of his girls quit on him,” Adele said.

  Jane Louise went blank.

  “His lunchtime sweetie,” Adele said.

  Jane Louise was dimly aware that Sven’s lunches, when not with printers and graphic artists, were spent in the company of compliant women of any age. She had once expressed the belief that he went several days a week for psychoanalysis. Adele had set her straight.

  “He meets girls,” Adele said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Do I know what you mean?” Jane Louise had said.

  “He likes it with two girls,” whispered Adele, and Jane Louis
e found this information compelling but scarcely believable.

  Adele now deduced that one of the girls had taken a powder.

  “You mean this twosome is a routine thing?” Jane Louise said.

  “It’s been going on a while,” Adele said. “It started when he told this girl to bring a friend.”

  “Maybe he meant for a friend of his,” Jane Louise said.

  “He doesn’t have any friends,” Adele said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “What about his poker game with Al and Dave?” Jane Louise said.

  “Colleagues,” Adele said. “Sven only has wives, colleagues, and people he goes to bed with.”

  “He had to have a mother,” Jane Louise said. “Isn’t she alive?”

  “Barely, and she calls him ‘Svenny,’” Adele said. “Isn’t that adorable?”

  “Svenny,” said Jane Louise.

  “The reason he’s all over you is because you got married,” said Adele. “Any woman’s husband is his rival—you get it? It’s some primitive force.”

  Jane Louise looked at Adele with pure admiration.

  It was hard to figure out what marriage meant to Sven. On the one hand, he had been married three times. On the other hand, three times was a lot of times. Adele always said that Sven liked to get married because it made him feel more guilty. It was Jane Louise’s opinion that guilt was not in Sven’s emotional repertoire. If he ever felt the merest twinge of remorse, it was like a dab of cologne.

  “I think adultery means a lot to him,” Adele said.

  On this elevating note Jane Louise went back to her office. Her interior life was trisected: She was now a married woman, and with her husband, Theodore Cornelius Parker, she was creating an entity known as “Their Marriage.” It was like a museum stuffed with breakfast conversations, fights about where the extra key had been put, dinners eaten, movies viewed, showers taken together, plans made. In sickness and in health, and in confusion. Decisions were made: to try to conceive a baby in the early summer—a communal decision. Eventually a baby would emerge, and Jane Louise would have another mental section, a quarter section to deal with known as “Their Child.” They would then have an entity to inhabit called “Their Family.”

  Also there was the office, as thick with associations and memories as any home. Her office itself was not as richly furnished as, say, Erna’s, which had family photos, children’s artworks, large fossils from Dorset, a wing chair, a scarlet sofa, and a dozen needlepointed pillows.

  Jane Louise had a photo of Teddy on her desk. She had taken it herself, of him standing by the lake wearing a striped shirt, the wind ruffling his hair. She had a poster of one of Edie’s cakes on the wall. The cake, which cost hundreds of dollars, was called “The Meadow” and had made Edie famous. It was a three-layer cake with shiny, pale green icing. Heaped and scattered everywhere, as if a child had flung a bouquet of wildflowers, were hundreds of spun-sugar-and-buttercream pansies, violets, bladder-wort, primroses, buttercups, and rose rugosa. It was a work of art.

  On her desk was a clay bowl that she had made in art school. It contained paper clips. Her paperweight was a painted bronze elephant on a green base, a gift from Teddy.

  Whatever was left over between office and home was some tiny slice called “Private Life.” Here she absentmindedly filed Sven and his lunchtime trysts. She tried not to think about it, but he had some weird hold on her.

  Weren’t there, in this world, those who were immune to all this? Like Erna, who behaved like a grown-up, created a family, and never looked back, or sideways, and who did not live with the occasional fear that a swine like Sven might lean over again and kiss her neck, making her feel that an electric current had been run through her. Sven, she knew, was lying in wait. He would lie in wait for a long time, because she had not been conquered. She remembered her first months at the office—a youngish woman between attachments. Sven liked to take her out to lunch and make her drink a sip or two of his gin and tonic. He liked to say things like: “I wonder what it will be like when we wake up together.”

  His caressing voice seemed to curl up in her ear. A little voice inside her said, “How corny,” and another voice, a more physical voice, so to speak, realized how effective he was. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.

  Jane Louise had known exactly what to retort. She had said: “You mean, when we fall asleep in the van coming back from sales conference?”

  By that time in her life, lots of lyrical, ridiculous, and persuasive things had been said to her by men. She was neither in the bloom of youth nor the exhaustion of age. She did not feel she was the classic lust-inducing type, but rather a more specific attraction. But Sven would wear her down, like water over rock, until she finally gave in. If she ever slept with him, he would behave the next day as if nothing had happened and she had somehow made the whole thing up.

  Although Jane Louise had never thought of herself as boy crazy, she was certainly someone who had had her share of romance. She had experienced every possible kind: the kind in which you love them better than they love you; in which they love you better than you love them; in which you are madly in love and can’t stand to be in the same room with them; in which they adore you but can’t seem to organize themselves to be with you. Then she met Teddy, the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Although he was frequently silent, prone to a kind of alienating depression, and it was sometimes very hard to have a conversation with him, in many ways Teddy was heaven. He was unencumbered by certain doubts. He and Jane Louise had fallen in love, and therefore it made sense to him that they should live together and plan to get married without any particular distress in the way. Although his parents’ marriage had been a disaster, Teddy did not want to see that sort of gloom in his future. He pointed himself in the direction of a union. Jane Louise, who had always been marriage-shy, slipped right in with him. In some ways Teddy was not like a modern person. He did not have spiritual difficulties. He tended to see a thing clearly, and life in some ways was very clear to him. He had the vision of a sensible grown-up. He certainly did not have impure thoughts about decadent types he worked with, but then plant chemists are not usually surrounded by louche types.

  A husband was someone you could hide behind. You could cover your head with a marriage the way Arab women covered themselves with a veil. You could stamp out unnecessary or wayward emotions. You could dispel untoward thoughts. You could pretend that all of your life was all of a piece and it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. You didn’t have to admit to a thing. Like Dita.

  Dita was amazing to watch in this way. It was known to Jane Louise that Dita had had that brief, quite intense sex wrangle with that silky, seal-like Joe Ching. In fact, Jane Louise was the only person in the whole world who knew about this fling. Dita did not tell her oldest and best friend from boarding school, Peachy Hopkins, because Peachy did not approve of philandering and had two nice children whom she walked to school each day. Eventually, when things got out of hand—when one of Dita’s marriages broke up and a new one began—Peachy was told all.

  This encounter with Joe Ching had eaten up a great deal of Dita’s hot, intense energy. If Joe Ching called late, or was late for an assignation, or did not appear to be in desperate love, Dita went to pieces. Jane Louise had spent a couple of evenings trying to calm her down as she shouted and sobbed and insisted her life was worthless.

  And then Dita turned up at a concert with her lawful wedded husband, the reportage photographer Nick Samuelovich, who had a noble head of white blond hair, clear-framed glasses for his stark blue eyes, and a long black scarf wrapped several times around his neck. He towered over Dita, who was small-boned. She brushed imaginary lint off his camel’s hair coat, and smoothed his shoulders, and, after the concert, took Jane Louise and Teddy, who was still new in her life, off to a tiny Russian café where Dita called her husband Nikosh and Nikita and laughed at his jokes. You would never know a thing. Teddy thought she was pure hell.

  The Arct
ic manuscript sat on Jane Louise’s table, almost glowing with a lurid light, like a phosphorescent mushroom. I ought to take that home and read it, she said to herself, and think up some plain but handsome design.

  Her mind was not on this project. Was it the result of marriage that your attention wandered and you felt that your own consciousness was like a new puppy on a leash?

  She heard a voice and looked up. Sven was standing in the doorway, appraising her. How long had he been there?

  “Get to work,” he said, ambling in.

  “I can’t get to work with you in my office,” Jane Louise said. “And what’s your story? You don’t seem to be very work oriented these days.”

  “It’s the unsettling effect of your marriage,” Sven said. “Puts ideas in a person’s head.”

  “It’s supposed to take ideas out of a person’s head,” Jane Louise said.

  “Oh, yes?” Sven said. “Is that why you got married?”

  “Peace and harmony,” Jane Louise said. “A stitch in the ever-expanding tapestry of human affairs.”

  Sven looked at her. “Men and women are adversaries,” he said. “Like cats and birds.”

  “Really?” Jane Louise said. “Don’t you and Edwina get along?”

  “I get along with all my wives,” Sven said. “It isn’t about ‘getting along.’ It’s about what’s really underneath.”

  “Underneath what?”

  “Rapine,” Sven said. “Hunting and gathering. We are primitive people.”

  “How interesting,” Jane Louise said. “You mean when a boy and girl go out, it’s really about how he kills an animal, she finds some berries, and then he jumps her?”