“I’m not jealous,” he said. “Is that lamb chops I smell? How wonderful.”
“They’re cheap,” Laura told him. “They’re probably stringy.”
Martin picked up the cans of beer and put them on a tray with two glasses and an opener; he walked into the living room carrying the tray, chanting “Poverty, poverty, poverty.”
Stu was halfway down the stairs. He was carrying his jacket and he had begun to loosen his tie. He looked bitterly at Martin. “If you tease me about my car, I’ll kill you.”
“My God!” Martin exclaimed. “Everyone’s so fierce. What for? What does it get you?”
“I don’t know,” Stu said. “It’s ego, I guess.” He sounded slightly ashamed of himself. He dropped his coat and tie on a chair and then looked questioningly at Martin. He was asking if Laura would mind the coat on the chair. Martin shrugged. Stu shrugged, too, and the two of them sat down. Stu selected a small modern chair with wooden arms. He groaned. “This is the world’s most uncomfortable chair, right here, under me, at this very minute.”
“It was cheap,” Martin informed him. “How’s the job going?”
“I went through hell today,” Stu said. “My boss’s secretary is a bloodsucker. She hates me.”
“I know, I know,” Martin said, feeling almost paternal. “Secretaries are sheer hell. My boss’s girl does a lot of work with the eyes, you know. And she has this fake accent, as if she just escaped from the daisy chain.”
“What daisy chain?” Stu asked.
“The one at Vassar, I think,” Martin said. “Hey, Laura!” he called out. “Where do they have the daisy chain?”
“The daisy chain?” said a voice filled with incredulity. “Oh, the daisy chain. I think it’s Bryn Mawr.”
Stu lowered his voice. “My secretary’s not a bad girl. She’s young,” he said deprecatingly. “She’s nice.”
“Pretty?” Martin asked, unconsciously lowering his voice, too.
“So-so,” Stu said. “She’s built, though. She’s really built.”
Laura appeared in the doorway. “I can’t hear what you’re saying. Please talk a little louder.”
Stu blushed and mumbled something about the hydrogen bomb.
“Yeah,” Martin said. “That was some blast. Did you see the photographs in the papers?” Laura disappeared into the kitchen.
“Sure,” Stu said. “The big boom-boom.”
Martin was slouching so much he was practically recumbent. He supported his glass of beer on his belt. “I guess we’re as good as done for,” he said gloomily. “All those crazy slobs in the Pentagon.”
“I know, I know,” Stu said. “But our National Honor is at stake. We’ll all be half rotten with radiation in a few months. Children with two heads—”
“Hey!” Laura called out. “Either you two talk louder or I’ll come in there and let the lamb chops burn.”
“Talk louder, Daddy,” Faith echoed.
“Let’s change the subject,” Martin whispered.
Stu nodded. “Sure.”
“Tell me,” Martin said, “why don’t you sell that car if it makes you so mad?”
“I can’t sell it,” Stu said. “It was too big a bargain.”
There was a sudden, nearly insane peal of laughter from the kitchen. Martin started to laugh, too.
“What is it?” Stu asked, baffled.
“Never mind,” Martin said. “If we explained it, you wouldn’t think it was funny.”
“You know who I saw in Best’s the other day?” Laura asked from the kitchen. “Mary Lou Glover. From Smith. You remember Mary Lou, don’t you?”
“You know what I wonder?” Stu said. “I wonder where all the shlunks come from. You at least have a family to come home to. I’ll tell you what,” he said, suddenly brightening. “Let’s go talk to your daughter….”
Faith was polishing off a bowl of pudding. She looked up somberly at Stu. “Hello, Stu,” she said.
“Uncle Stu,” her mother corrected her.
Stu cupped one hand to his mouth and the other to his ear.
“Brrring,” he said. “Brrring. Your telephone is ringing.”
“Mommy, Uncle Stu is calling me on the telephone,” Faith said ecstatically.
“Hello,” Stu said. “Are you there?”
“Hello,” said Faith, with rapture. “I’m here.”
They were sitting around the dining-room table. It was eight o’clock, and Faith was getting sleepy. Two lighted candles stood on the table, and their flames swayed in the current of air that came through the open windows. The candlelight made Faith and Laura look exactly alike.
“Gee, that was a good dinner,” Stu said. “I can’t tell you how I enjoy being here. All week I’ve been nervous.”
“The chops were a little tough,” Laura remarked, “but they had a nice taste, I thought.” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “I’m not supposed to say that, am I?”
“Sure you are,” Stu said hurriedly. He thought she really was embarrassed, and his face was concerned. “You’re an awfully good cook.”
Laura smiled. She sighed. “Faith,” she said to her daughter, “you have bags under your eyes. I think we should start getting ready for bed.”
Faith pouted. “I don’t want to.” She was glassy-eyed with the long-drawn-out pleasures of the evening. She leaned forward and put her arms around her mother’s neck. “I don’t want to, Mommy.”
“It’s bedtime,” Laura said.
“It’s all right,” Martin said. “Let her stay up another minute or two. I couldn’t bear it if she started to cry just now.”
There was a sudden silence all around them. The candles flickered. Stu sighed.
“The fireflies will be out soon,” Laura said. “It always seems like summer to me then.”
“You put them in a jar,” Stu murmured. “Faith will chase them and catch them.”
“What in a jar?” Faith asked. One small hand rubbed at her eye.
“I used to collect beetles,” Martin said. “I wonder if the rosebush we put in is going to bloom.”
Faith yawned. The moment seemed to spread out around the four people and pause and hold them all.
“I have to put her in bed. She’ll be overtired in another minute.” Laura straightened up in her chair, placed her hands on the table edge, and blinked her eyes. “I have to let the maternal force build up,” she said. “All right, Pumpkin. Bedtime. Allez-oop.” And she stood up, lifting her daughter at the same time in her arms. Faith attempted to cry out, but she was too sleepy and made a tiny drawling sound instead. Her head spilled forward on her mother’s shoulder. Laura carried her upstairs.
The two men looked at each other, almost shyly. “You know,” Martin said, “I have some Scotch. I’ve been saving it.”
He went out to the kitchen and returned with two glasses, a bowl of ice cubes, and the Scotch. He and Stu moved to the couch and made themselves drinks. After a time, Laura tiptoed down the stairs. She cleared the table without looking at the men, and carried the dishes out and piled them in the sink, not bothering to turn on the kitchen light. She stood by the back window and looked out into the dark back yard. She could almost see the fireflies glowing among the leafy branches. Faith would chase them and cry, “Look, Mommy! Look!” Stu’s voice droned on. In a little while, he would get up and go, because he had to drive back to the city. Laura decided she would kiss Stu goodbye. She was filled with emotion; the emotion had haunted her all day. She peered into the darkness to distract herself. And then she would turn to Martin and say—But as she stood there, she realized there wasn’t anything she wanted to say. She just wanted this day to go on forever and ever, unending, with all its joys intact, and no one changing, nothing new happening, just these same things occurring over and over. Because how did you know happiness would come back? Or if it came back, that it would be as good as this? Laura sighed and wiped her eyes surreptitiously. The trouble with being happy was that it made you frightened.
THE DARK WOMAN OF THE SONNETS
LAURA ANDREWS WAS ONE of those tall, big-bodied young women who look so serene. Because of the way her eyes were set, deep, beneath sensible eyebrows, and because of the calm light in them, it was difficult to think of her as moody or frightened or as anything, as a matter of fact, except warm and wise. She also had a certain comic flair, which made people laugh at her even when she was upset, and when they laughed, she became frantic because she believed no one would ever understand her; and her eyes would narrow, and she would quite determinedly set out to prove just how upset she was. Not on purpose, of course, but driven, you might say, by the thought that no one was taking her suffering seriously.
It was six-thirty on a hot August day that had not gone well for Laura. She was pottering around the kitchen, glancing occasionally out the back window to keep an eye on her four-year-old daughter, Faith, who was playing in the sandbox. The third time Laura looked out the window, it seemed to her there were insects in the air everywhere, and, clutching a bottle of insect repellent, she ran out and encased Faith in a thick oily film.
“Mommy, I don’t like this stuff,” Faith cried.
“It’s good for you,” Laura said absently, but after that Faith couldn’t play in the sand because the sand stuck to her and made her itch; and she took to following her mother around the kitchen, clutching at her mother’s skirt, and making whining noises.
This sort of thing had been going on all day.
Laura bore this nobly; she was three months pregnant, and she had told herself she must be careful not to hurt Faith’s feelings now that Faith was going to be displaced. Faith was bewildered by this sudden laxity in the air and grew more and more distraught, and finally burst into tears in the middle of the kitchen. Laura despairingly offered her an orange popsicle to eat, even though she knew it would ruin the child’s appetite for dinner.
At seven, Martin Andrews came up the front walk of their duplex garden apartment, and he knew the minute he entered the house that something was wrong. He was a well-knit and tall young man, with a firm and enterprising face, but suddenly he looked discouraged. Through the kitchen door he saw Laura crouched beside the kitchen table, holding the popsicle out to Faith, whose face was pink and streaked with tears. The vacuum cleaner was lying in the middle of the living-room floor. Cautiously, he put down his briefcase. “Hello, everybody,” he said.
“Oh, hello, dear!” Laura cried, and rose to go to him and kiss him, but Martin was opening and closing the front door to see why it stuck sometimes and sometimes opened freely. “These modern houses are put together with chewing gum,” he said. “I’ve had a foul day.” He kept his eye on the door, closing it slowly, with great care, watching it alertly. “Aha!” he said. “I see where it sticks.”
He looked hollow-cheeked and cowardly, bent over by the door.
“God,” Laura said. “It’s shocking, the way men are so full of self-pity.”
After that, Martin refused to talk to her or to tell her what had gone wrong at the office. In persecuted silence, he went upstairs and changed his clothes and put on bathing trunks. Then he and Faith played with the hose in the back yard, squirting each other and running around on the grass with noisy laughter, while Laura resentfully cooked pork chops for supper, putting out of her mind the fact that she always said that pork was indigestible when the weather was hot.
Martin put on shorts and a sports shirt, and the family had their dinner almost in silence. Faith told her father she had gone to the store with her mommy. “We had a letter from Aunt Dorothy today,” Laura said at one point. Martin raised his eyebrows and said pointedly, “You’re in a poisonous mood, and I’m not going to pretend you’re not.” Pale and haughty, Laura went to work fiercely on her pork chop, hoping that if she cut the pieces small enough they wouldn’t make her sick.
Immediately after dinner, she took Faith up to bed. Outside Faith’s bedroom window was the sunset, all crimson and runny. Laura laid the child in her bed, turned on the air-conditioner, and tiptoed out of the room.
She was wearing a sun dress, and suddenly she couldn’t bear the sight of her bare arms. She went to her bedroom closet and got down the box of her old maternity clothes. They were wrinkled and looked faded; after all, they were four years old, and her waist hadn’t enlarged enough for her to wear maternity clothes yet. Besides, she was keeping her pregnancy a secret so that it wouldn’t seem so long.
She leafed through the dresses in the box and finally pulled out what had been her favorite—her dress-up outfit, with a high white collar and long sleeves, and pleats. It hung loosely on her now, and it smelled of mothballs, but she didn’t care. She descended the stairs, and, in full maternity regalia, sweating, she did the dishes.
Martin was sitting in the back yard in a lawn chair drinking a highball, solitary in the suburban dusk. Laura turned out all the lights in the apartment and went outside. Down the row of apartments, several of the yellow back-door lights were turned on, signifying that the occupants were secreted in their yards, leaving only that light to guide them if their phones should ring.
The evening was no cooler than the day had been. “It’s so hot,” she said. “I’m tired of its being so hot.”
Martin drank from his highball glass. Laura watched the outline of his Adam’s apple in the darkness, and then she clumsily climbed into the hammock and lay there in her maternity dress, an absurd figure, dabbing with a Kleenex at her forehead.
“I would love to hear the sound of a human voice,” she said at last. “The hoofs of the rescue party, sort of.”
Martin stirred in the lawn chair. “I’m sorry. I thought you liked the quiet.”
Laura made a disrespectful noise, a snort. “You’re angry with me and you know it.”
Martin said nothing.
“A penny for your thoughts, you bastard,” Laura said after a while.
Martin laughed abruptly, with obvious discomfort. “Why do you want to know? You’ll only get mad at me because I wasn’t thinking about you.”
Laura was stabbed by that remark—by the fact that he hadn’t been thinking about her. “No, I won’t,” she said. “Tell me.”
“I was thinking about Ferguson.” Ferguson was the head bookkeeper in the office.
“In August? When everyone’s on vacation?” Laura said incredulously.
“Yes,” Martin said, sighing, and picked up his highball glass and clinked the remnants of the ice cubes. The tinkle floated on the air, and Laura said, “Oh, do that again, Martin, please. It was so pretty.”
Martin laughed and did it again. Then he lifted the glass and sucked the ice cubes into his mouth and crunched them up. The noise was strangely sharp and clear in the darkness. All the leaves were absolutely motionless.
She was still hurt because he had been thinking about his office. “You’re a beast,” she said, and began tearing off bits of her Kleenex and dropping them in the grass.
“Me!” Martin was startled. He had thought she was coming out of her mood and growing peaceful.
“You torture me,” Laura said. “You play with my feelings. God, you must hate me!” She stretched out one arm in the darkness.
“Oh, Laura,” Martin said plaintively.
“And the baby, the poor child I carry. I can feel what you’re doing to it. It’s all knotted up. If you only knew how unhappy it is.”
“For God’s sake,” Martin said. “For God’s sake. Laura, do you realize your so-called baby is little more than a fish at this point.”
“Oh, you’re inhuman,” Laura muttered. “You really are.”
“And you’re the dark woman of the sonnets,” Martin said, plucking a handful of grass. He stood up, and, holding his glass in one hand, dropped the grass from his other onto Laura’s hair. “Stop picking on me, honey,” he said and went into the house. Laura lay in the hammock; the grass tickled her ear. Suddenly she was terribly frightened, and not at all sure that Martin would come back. He might get dressed and walk out of the hou
se. He might find a woman somewhere. Laura wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come.
From the house, Martin called, “Laura! I can’t get the ice tray unstuck!”
Laura slid off the hammock. She walked slowly, drowsily, into the house. Martin was bent over the icebox.
“I must have some disease,” he said. “My fingers—Oh!” he said admiringly as Laura did something mysterious that loosened the tray in its bed.
Martin took out the tray and closed the icebox door. “I love the way you do things like that,” he said. “It’s really lovely to see—that flip of the wrist sort of thing. My.”
“You think of me as a clown, don’t you?” Laura sounded infinitely long-suffering and gentle. “I ought to wear floppy shoes and turn somersaults, I think. Would you be sorry if I never looked foolish again?”
“No, of course not,” Martin said unconvincingly, as he ran hot water over the bottom of the ice tray.
“If only—” Laura folded her hands over her bosom—an absurd, perspiring figure in her balloonlike maternity dress, with the smell of mothballs emanating from her, and on her face a look of such matchless calm thoughtfulness that it was impossible to believe she was serious. “God knows, I try to be intelligent, Martin. You should respect the effort I make, if nothing else, and—” But she couldn’t think of what to say next.
“Aunt Dorothy have anything to say in her letter?” Martin asked, sighting carefully as he dropped the ice cubes in his glass.
“They’re going to be in town next week,” Laura said wearily, turning away. “They’d like me to come in and bring Faith.”
“Well, do it, then.”
How sweet the silence of this hot evening was, Laura thought; it seemed to lie around the house like a great, dark cat.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she murmured. “But it’s so hot for a child. And she might catch something. Oh, I’m a terrible mother. I want to take her to see Aunt Dorothy, but I wouldn’t take her in to see most people. I wouldn’t take her in to see Cousin Eleanor, for instance. I use that child for my own purposes.”
First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories Page 13
