by Marge Piercy
Veal marsala, the lemon rice with a chicken base and Parmesan added right at the end, the spinach just wilted with olive oil and touched with garlic: the whole meal took exactly twenty-three extremely busy minutes. Her choreography was exacting but satisfying. Twenty-five minutes later the meal was all on the table and the only flurry was in setting that table in the last minute available.
She sat down and smiled at him, pleased by her own art. In a way seeing him across the table from her in their dining room was a measure of how much had deteriorated between them, that this little ceremony of food and wine should be of a fragile extraordinary character, when formerly this face-to-face leisurely duet over food eaten slowly and savored had been their norm.
She squirmed mentally, trying to stroke the moment with neutral and amiable subjects. She could not discuss anything pressing on her brain, which felt coagulated. She chatted about her cookbook; she questioned him about his work, but he was no more forthcoming on that than usual. She mentioned Torte’s increasing stiffness. She recounted anecdotes from her last several phone calls with Tracy. She described the titmouse that had visited the birdfeeder. She made fun of Annette’s new layered hairdo.
It was disorienting. Was she making conversation with some unsuitable stranger Ross had brought home to impress with a fancy supper? The man across the table was the man around whom her life had revolved since late adolescence. Once there had never been enough hours in the day to communicate all the observations they had to share.
After supper he watched the remainder of the seven o’clock news on NBC, which he had taken to watching after Walter Cronkite retired. When she was home alone, she watched Dan Rather. “Would you like dessert?” She knew what she wanted badly; she wanted him to turn and smile at her, seeing her.
His eyes on the screen he mused, “How about that apple thing?”
“Apple pie? An apple tart?”
“Not exactly a tart. It had slices of fruit on top. With Calvados.”
She noticed that he was pronouncing that word differently than he had used to, as if it was Spanish, Calvádos—a habit picked up from Gail Dogbite? “Clafouti, do you mean?”
“Sounds likely. You used to make that in the big orange skillet?”
She did not point out that it was silly to make a clafouti for two, as she would have baked a wedding cake for two tonight, to prolong the charmed moments. Were they recommencing? Was Annette right? While he watched the news, she made dessert, put it in the oven and rushed back just as he shut off the set. In the hall mirror she saw herself, face flushed, a far more vibrant woman.
It was ridiculous to be surprised that conversation went a little bumpily: the important thing was they were together and trying. She was determined to make more real contact now. “Ross, those tenants in that group—SON?—have they been bothering you for a long time?”
He snorted. “You could say so. Indeedy! The little bastards.”
“When I met with them that time, they said something about a dead rat?”
“Who? Who mentioned it?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t know their names.” She was not sure why she covered for Fay. It was instinct: not to snitch.
“Try to remember. One of the guys, right? That Black queer?”
“I don’t think so. I’m sorry, Ross, I don’t remember.”
“I’d like to take those losers and wring their necks.” His face was animated, as if she had pushed a button and brought him fully to life. He sat upright in his chair, his foot tapping as if to march music. His eyes glowed fiercely blue. His cheeks were full of color.
“They really did that? Mailed a rat?”
“They’re bloody pests, believe me. I’m sorry you had to see them.” He sounded more sympathetic with her than he had in weeks.
This was the wrong time to tell him about visiting Fay. “They weren’t so bad, honey, really. I do think they can be talked to, face-to-face.”
“They got into my office once. Lorraine has orders to keep them out. Don’t you see them again, I mean it. It’s a mistake to talk to troublemakers unless you have your lawyer present.”
“Are you my lawyer?” She laughed, trying to keep everything light. “I wonder if it was the same group who came to your office? What do you know about these people anyway?”
“There’s a bunch of them. Some are welfare freeloaders, like that fat whore Fay Souza.”
She noticed the coarseness of his language, both the political and the sexual insult. That he would use such terms startled her. She stared but he was past noticing.
“Then the real force behind them. Sixties-type commies. Ogilvie, with his Harvard connections.”
“Harvard?”
“He’s writing his thesis on the damned neighborhood. Nowadays education is a joke. They write theses on feces.” He spoke as if it were an old and favorite joke. She had the feeling he had said that about Mac Ogilvie before.
“There was one … Tom Silver?”
“That aging hippie. He doesn’t even have the excuse of being a tenant. Just a professional agitator. He goes around giving interviews to the local rags about fires, as if it isn’t tenants’ carelessness that causes us all a lot of trouble.”
“He did talk about fires. He seemed terrified.”
“What did he say? Exactly.” Ross turned a hard gaze on her.
“Nothing specific I remember.… Oh, about a little boy who had been killed in a building they said we owned.”
“Their parents don’t take care of them anyhow. They breed like the rats their dirt attracts.”
“Ross, how did we ever happen to get stuck with those buildings anyhow?”
“Stuck? Not on your life. I’ll get those losers out, don’t fret. I’m working on it.”
“Working on what?”
“You don’t understand development. Gentrification is in the cards. That land is golden. It’s just that the economy has been sluggish. It’s taken longer to turn than it should. But we’re right on the verge there. We’re merely weathering a temporary setback.”
“But if you’re waiting for the neighborhood to improve, wouldn’t it pay to keep up the buildings?” See, she addressed Fay, I’m trying. She was pleased by their communication, even though she was startled to find how conservative he was growing. But a husband and wife could disagree politically and still love each other. Nina’s father the anarchist had dearly loved his pious Catholic wife. At least they were talking about something real together.
“You don’t understand real estate, Daria, and there’s no reason for you to bother yourself about it now—”
“But I want to learn. I want to share decisions and worries with you. You’ve been carrying too big a burden. I mean to understand your work now.”
“It’s never concerned you before.” He waved his hand. “No reason for you to be troubled now. In fact, Daria, I’m going to move those buildings out of your name. You can stop fretting about them.” He opened the attaché case leaning against his chair and brought out a pile of deeds. “Sign where Lorraine has indicated a penciled X in the margins and you can stop fussing about buildings altogether.”
Slowly she fanned through. “I’ll check the clafouti and be right back. And I’ll turn on the espresso machine.” Why was she reluctant to sign? She was not sure.
She drifted back to the living room. “Maybe fifteen minutes.… Ross, Christmas is coming very soon.”
“Every year,” he said with mock cheer. “Comes around every damn year just about this time. You can count on it.”
“I’d like to count on it. It means a lot to the girls—a real family Christmas.”
“Oh. You too,” he muttered and did not elucidate. Gingerly he touched his bandage.
“I want to know whether you’re going to be here at Christmas. If you’re not, I want to know now. I want a firm commitment from you. Or if you won’t, I want to know in time to make other plans.”
“What other plans? Go to Florida?”
; He’d like that and probably sell the house while she was gone. “I thought I’d have some of my family up here, for a white Christmas.” She was bluffing; Christmas was a busy season at the Blue Lobster.
He stared at the fireplace. There had not been a fire in it for weeks. During previous winters they had a fire every night they were home. “All right. I’ll spend Christmas here. All right. You win that one. But I don’t want your father hanging around trying to put the bite on me.”
“If you’re here, that’s all I ask.” She went to stand by the fireplace. “Wouldn’t you like a fire tonight?” Vaguely she remembered Tom Silver saying something was wrong with the fireplace, a leak. She tried to think how to bring it up with Ross.
The phone rang in his study. As he rose to answer it, she had a sudden guilty conviction it was Fay or Tom calling to check on her veracity. Now they would think she had lied. She followed him to the door of his study, afraid they might say something in anger that would incidate she had seen them again.
“Well, well,” she heard him say. “It’s you, is it?… I’ll say I am.… Did you expect that I’d find it a big joke?… Hold on, just a sec.” He shut the door in her face as she stood there. She felt mortified. Now, now, she said to herself, no rabid indignation. You have spied on him with her, and if you could get away with picking up the receiver quietly enough, you would surely listen now.
She riffled through the deeds he had pulled from his attaché case. On impulse she copied the addresses on the flyleaf of a cookbook she was reviewing for the Washington Post, for an article on what was being billed as the new regionalism in cooking.
Four of the buildings were in the Allston neighborhood and indeed, one of them had Fay’s address. But the fifth and sixth deeds were to buildings in North Cambridge. How many buildings did Ross own? In every case she was supposed to have bought the buildings under her maiden name from one of the trusts she recognized from the cancelled checks: Red Robin, Robert, Walton. He was selling buildings from himself to her, and now he was buying them back. All very peculiar. Lawyers adored generating paper, but this seemed especially perverse. Maybe he no longer trusted her. Maybe he was preparing to divorce her and did not want anything in her name.
According to the attached paperwork, he was applying for mortgages on all but one: that building being renovated where the boy had died. She blinked at the amounts and counted the decimal places, sure she was making some mistake, sure she was reading the numbers incorrectly. Three hundred fifty thousand? For those simple dilapidated buildings? She must have been in every one of them and they simply could not be worth that much, they simply could not. The mortgages were astronomical. Their own house would go on the market for somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred sixty thousand, but these were being mortgaged for amounts two and three times that. Why was he taking out enormous mortgages on ordinary and even on substandard dwellings? The banks must be mad. She wouldn’t lend him money on those old brick apartment houses and those frame two-family or triple-deckers.
He was still on the phone. The buzzer called her into the kitchen. She took the clafouti from the oven, an open-faced confection like a pie crossed with a dessert omelette, drenched with apple brandy. The scent would even have tempted Robin, she thought complacently. She put the clafouti on a rack to cool slightly and then set the coffee table in the living room. Little elegant gilt-rimmed cups for espresso. The machine was ready but she hesitated to make the coffee. He’d been talking for twenty-five minutes. “Dessert’s ready,” she called just outside his study door.
He went on talking. Wandering back into the kitchen she loaded supper plates into the dishwasher, wiped the counters, tidied. Took off her apron and wandered back. Now he had been on the phone for forty minutes and the clafouti was rapidly cooling and sinking on itself.
She marched up to his closed study door and rapped smartly. “Ross! Dessert’s getting cold. It won’t be nice, shortly.”
He bellowed. “I’m on the phone.”
“Can’t you call back some other time? You’ve been on the phone for forty-five minutes!”
“I’m busy. I can’t speak to you now. Leave me be!”
She straightened the living room. Made herself espresso. Cut herself a slice of the room temperature clafouti and ate it in the kitchen, hearing the murmur of his voice through the wall. Although she could make out few words, the tone was not that of a business conversation. He lilted, he murmured, he coaxed. Outside the study Torte whined and pawed at the door, but Ross ignored him.
An hour after the conversation that had to be with Gail had begun, Daria ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom. There was nothing to be recovered from the evening, nothing. She felt like a complete fool. His rudeness hurt, his overpowering arrogant selfish rudeness. She was someone he did not bother to be polite to. He did not give a damn what she did with herself. He ignored her feelings. He commanded a dessert, had her rush about preparing it in vain hopes of pleasing him and then let it grow cold while he cooed to his poopsie. No more, she thought, no more.
In a little while, just a little while longer, Ross, she addressed him through the floorboards, I won’t care. You’re forcing me to cease loving you. You were my life, you damned fool. Now what are you? Someone who lies to me. Someone who lies a lot to a lot of people, I suspect. Someone capable of being vicious and cruel and casually rude. A stranger who invades me and then departs.
The love could still come back, the intimacy, the sense of family, it could be saved, she addressed him through the wide floorboards of this beautiful sturdy house where they had lived for more than a decade, but you must stop at once what you are doing to me. You must stop.
Around ten he knocked on her door. “What do you want?” she called. Did he imagine he could sweet-talk on the phone for two hours and then enter her bed as if it were an old slipper he was shoving his foot in?
“Sorry to bother you. Were you asleep? You forgot to sign those deeds.”
That was all he cared about. She ground her teeth. “You’re behaving like a monster to me and I won’t endure it. Take your deeds and shove them.”
She could hear him shifting from foot to foot outside the door. “But it’s for your own good. To protect you from harassment.”
“I won’t talk to you. Go away! Go talk to your Gail some more.”
“What are you complaining about now? I have a lot of business to conduct. Fine, you can sign the deeds in the morning.” His footsteps crossed the hall, paused. “Hello there, Torte, old boy,” he said in his warmest voice. “What a good old dog, come on, come on.…” He went on fussing over the dog loudly, as if demonstrating what a good man he was with the dog as prop.
13
Never had Christmas arrived in their house with less preparation and less fanfare. In November Daria had forgotten to bake fruitcakes. She did not think of a tree until the twenty-third when Tracy borrowed her car and went out to buy a Scotch pine. Tracy and Daria trimmed it that night. It was the sort of evening Daria had grown used to: Lorraine called at four to say Ross was held up by business. He came home after both of them had gone to bed.
Ross did however appear in midafternoon on Christmas Eve, to admire the tree and carry in his presents. Daria watched astonished as he placed load after load under the tree. He had never bought so many presents. Now he was heaping up several years’ worth. Once again hopes that he might be reconciling began to tease her, but this time she suppressed them roughly. She would see, but she would not allow herself to dangle in his attention. She would reject no honest approach but she would not plead for civility.
In the afternoon Tracy had helped her make a grand Christmas pudding, now steaming in its bright mold. The hard sauce was in the refrigerator, firming. The goose for tomorrow’s dinner they had picked up at Leo’s, together. “That has to be your daughter,” Leo said, and Daria felt proud, showing Tracy off. Tracy’s brown eyes seemed luminous, liquid, her skin rosy with the cold. She not only seemed prettier, but firmer, mo
re resolved.
“No, I can’t,” she heard Tracy say on the kitchen extension. “Nick, I’d love to. How about the day after Christmas? I’ll explain later, but my mother needs me.”
Daria had to lock herself in the bathroom and scrub her face hard to stop snivelling. Tonight, for the eve, she had planned a traditional English dinner of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, of course the plum pudding for dessert. Too much consistency in English food would make anyone dull, so she steamed the brussels sprouts lightly to crunch between the teeth and served them with her own ginger sauce; the potatoes were lyonnaise and the dressing for the salad a light chive vinaigrette.
Robin arrived half an hour late, but Daria had permitted leeway and sailed calmly on through the diminishing tempest of her kitchen. Dinner was a success. Even Robin ate reasonably for once and Tracy and Ross ate steadily and long. She kept a mild conversation going, resorting to music. She put on Telemann, which she hoped would provide the right clarity and mellow briskness she sought. She gathered all of them were prepared to pull their oars for the family, to make the holidays glide on in domestic tranquility.
We are a family, she thought, in spite of our differences and momentary quarrels, still a family. We make a community together. But she glanced from face to face, seeking confirmation.
After the leisurely meal, Robin and Tracy volunteered (with some nudging to Robin) to clean up. Daria took her coffee into the living room, where Ross was starting a fire. She sank in a rocking chair and stared at the small leaping flames, letting her mind clear. So far, so good. In a moment she would rise and switch on the tree lights. Tracy had strung them this year; always that had been Ross’s pleasure. She did not know why she felt so weary: perhaps because she was permitting herself to relax. Relaxation was something she had used to do well. She had tried over the years to teach Ross how to let go and enjoy, unclench.
