Women and Children First

by Francine Prose

  “I meant to bring you a book,” says Dottie. Then she says, “A crazy thing happened this morning. I was working in front of the house, digging up those irises by the side of the road so I could divide them. I didn’t hear anything but I must have had a sense because I turned around and there was this old lady—coiffed, polyestered, dressed for church, it looked like. She told me she’d come over from Montpelier with some friends for a picnic and got separated. Now she was lost and so upset.

  “I said, ‘Well, okay, I’ll drive you back to Montpelier.’ We got as far as Barre when suddenly her whole story started coming apart, and I realized: She hadn’t been in Montpelier for twenty years. She was from the Good Shepherd House, that old folks’ home up the road from us. I drove her back to the Good Shepherd—what else could I do? The manager thanked me, he was very embarrassed she’d escaped. Then just as I was pulling out, the old lady pointed up at the sky and gave me the most hateful triumphant smile, and I looked up through the windshield and there was this flock of geese heading south.” Dottie catches her breath, then says, “You know what? It’s August. I’d forgotten.”

  What Claire can’t quite forget is that years ago, the first time she and Joey met Dottie and Raymond, afterward Joey said, “They don’t call her ‘dotty’ for nothing.” It took them both a while to see that what looked at first like dottiness was really an overflow of the same generosity which makes Dottie cook elegant, warming meals and drive senile old ladies fifty miles out of her way to Montpelier. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Dottie goes down to the Academy, she’s a volunteer chauffeur service, picking up classmates—including Jeanette the electrician—from all over central Vermont. Even Joey’s come around to liking her, though Claire’s noticed that he’s usually someplace else when Dottie’s around.

  Now he’s in the garden, tying up some tomatoes that fell last night in the wind. Finding them this morning—perfect red tomatoes smashed on top of each other—had sent her straight to the bathroom with her handful of star decals. That’s the difference between me and Joey, Claire thinks. Thank God there’s someone to save what’s left of the vines.

  Joey doesn’t see Claire watching him but Dottie does and starts to flutter, as if she’s overstayed. She calls up to Miranda, and just when it begins to seem as if they might not have heard, the girls drag themselves downstairs.

  “Why does Miranda have to go?” says Poppy.

  “Because it’s fifteen miles and Miranda’s mom isn’t driving fifteen miles back and forth all day,” says Claire.

  “But I don’t want to go,” says Miranda.

  They stand there, deadlocked, until Poppy says, “I’ve got an idea. I’ll go home with Miranda, and tonight her mom and dad can come to dinner and bring us both back and then Miranda can sleep over.”

  “That’s fine with me,” says Claire.

  “Are you sure?” says Dottie.

  Claire’s sure. As Dottie leans down to kiss her goodbye, Claire thinks once more of sunflowers, specifically of the ones she and Joey and Poppy plant every summer on a steep slope so you can stand underneath and look up and the sunflowers look forty feet tall.

  Washing his hands at the sink, Joey says, “One day she’s going to show up in saffron robes with a begging bowl and her hair shaved down to one skanky topknot and then what?”

  Claire thinks: Well, then we’ll cook up some gluey brown rice and put a big glob in Dottie’s bowl. But this sounds like something they’d say at the New Consciousness Academy, some dreadful homily about adaptation and making do. All she can think of is, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet,” and that’s not it.

  One night, not long after Dottie started attending the Academy, they were all sitting outside and Dottie looked up and said, “Sometimes I feel as if my whole life is that last minute of the planetarium show when they start showing off—that is, showing off what their projector can do—and the moon and planets and stars and even those distant galaxies begin spinning like crazy while they tell you the coming attractions and what time the next show begins. I just want to find someplace where it’s not rushing past me so fast. Or where, if it is, I don’t care.”

  “I hope you find it,” Joey said. “I really do.” Later that night, he told Claire that he knew what Dottie meant. “Still,” he said, “it was creepy. The whole conversation was like talking to someone who still thinks El Topo is the greatest movie ever made.”

  Joey had gone through his own spiritual phase: acid, Castaneda, long Sunday afternoons in front of the tankas in the Staten Island Tibetan museum. All this was before he met Claire. He feels that his having grown out of it fifteen years ago gives him the right to criticize. Though actually, he’s not mocking Dottie so much as protecting her husband Raymond, his best friend. Remote as the possibility seems, no one wants Dottie to follow in Flitcraft’s footsteps.

  Now Claire says, “I don’t think she’d get her hair permed if she was planning to shave it.” Then she steels herself, and in the tone of someone expecting bad news asks if any tomatoes are left. Joey says, “We’ll be up to our ears in tomatoes,” and Claire thinks: He’d say that no matter what.

  One thing she loves about Joey is his optimism. If he’s ever discontented, she doesn’t know it. Once he’d wanted to be on stage, then he’d worked for a while as a landscaper, now he’s a junior-high science teacher—a job which he says requires the combined talents of an actor and a gardener. His real passion is for the names of things: trees, animals, stars. But he’s not one of those people who use such knowledge to make you feel small. It’s why he’s a popular teacher and why Poppy so loves to take walks with him, naming the wildflowers in the fields. Claire knows how rare it is for children to want to learn anything from their parents.

  When Claire met Joey, she’d just moved up to Vermont with a semi-alcoholic, independently wealthy photographer named Dell. Dell hired Joey to clear a half acre around their cabin so they could have a garden and lawn. Upstairs there’s a photo Dell took of them at the time and later sent as a wedding present to prove there were no hard feelings. It shows Claire and Joey leaning against Joey’s rented backhoe; an uprooted acacia tree is spilling out of the bucket. Joey and Claire look cocky and hard in the face, like teenage killers, Charlie Starkweather and his girl. Claire can hardly remember Dell’s face. He always had something in front of it—a can of beer, a camera. If he had only put it down and looked, he’d have seen what was going on. Anyone would have. In the photo, it’s early spring, the woods are full of musical names: trillium, marsh marigold, jack-in-the-pulpit.

  On the day they learned Claire was pregnant and went straight from the doctor’s to the marriage license bureau in Burlington, Joey pulled off the road on the way home and took Claire’s face in his hands and told her which animals mated for life. Whooping cranes, snow geese, macaws, she’s forgotten the rest. Now they no longer talk this way, or maybe it goes without saying. Claire’s stopped imagining other lives; if she could, she’d live this one forever. Though she knows it’s supposed to be dangerous to get too comfortable, she feels it would take a catastrophe to tear the weave of their daily routine. They’ve weathered arguments, and those treacherous, tense, dull periods when they sneak past each other as if they’re in constant danger of sneezing in each other’s faces. Claire knows to hold on and wait for the day when what interests her most is what Joey will have to say about it.

  Some things get better. Claire used to hate thinking about the lovers they’d had before; now all that seems as indistinct as Dell’s face. Though they’ve had eight years to get used to the fact of Poppy’s existence, they’re still susceptible to attacks of amazement that they’ve created a new human being. And often when they’re doing something together—cooking, gardening, making love-Claire comes as close as she ever has to those moments of pure alchemy, that communion Poppy and Miranda must share if they’re storing their pee in bottles.

  Soon they’ll get up and mix some marinade for the chickens they’ll
grill outside later for Dottie and Raymond. But now Joey pours himself some coffee and they sit at the table, not talking. It is precisely the silence they used to dream of when Poppy was little and just having her around was like always having the bath water running or something about to boil over on the stove.

  First the back doors fly open and the girls jump out of the car and run up to Poppy’s room. Then Dottie gets out, then Raymond. From the beginning, Raymond’s reminded Claire of the tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz, and often he’ll stop in the middle of things as if waiting for someone to come along with the oil can. He goes around to the trunk and takes out a tripod and something wrapped in a blanket which looks at first like a rifle and turns out to be a telescope.

  “Guess what!” When Raymond shouts like that, you can see how snaggletoothed he is. “There’s a meteor shower tonight. The largest concentration of shooting stars all year.”

  The telescope is one of the toys Raymond’s bought since his paintings started selling. Raymond’s success surprises them all, including Raymond. His last two shows were large paintings of garden vegetables with skinny legs and big feet in familiar dance situations. It still surprises Claire that the New York art world would open its heart—would have a heart to open—to work bordering on the cartoonish and sentimental. But there’s something undeniably mysterious and moving about those black daikon radishes doing the tango, those little cauliflowers in pink tutus on point before an audience of sleek and rather parental-looking green peppers. And there’s no arguing with Raymond’s draftmanship or the luminosity of his color; it’s as if Memling lived through the sixties and took too many drugs. What’s less surprising is that there are so many rich people who for one reason or another want to eat breakfast beneath a painting of dancing vegetables.

  Claire has a crush on Raymond; at least that’s what she thinks it is. It’s not especially intense or very troublesome; it’s been going on a long time and she doesn’t expect it to change. If anything did change, it would probably disappear. She doesn’t want to live with Raymond, and now, as always when he hugs her hello, their bones grate; it’s not particularly sexual.

  She just likes him, that’s all. When it’s Raymond coming to dinner, she cooks and dresses with a little more care than she otherwise might, and spends the day remembering things to tell him which she promptly forgets. Of course, she’s excited when Dottie, or anyone, is coming over. The difference is, with Dottie, Claire enjoys her food. With Raymond, she often forgets to eat.

  Barbecued chicken, tomatoes with basil and mozzarella, pasta with chanterelles Joey’s found in the woods—it all goes right by her. Luckily, everyone else is eating, the girls trekking back and forth from the table to the TV. The television noise makes it hard to talk. It’s like family dinner, they can just eat. Anyway, conversation’s been strained since Dottie started at the Academy. Claire fears that Joey might make some semi-sarcastic remark which will hurt Raymond more than Dottie. Raymond’s protective of her; they seem mated for life. It’s occurred to them all that Dottie is the original dancing vegetable.

  What does get said is that the meteor shower isn’t supposed to pick up till around midnight. But they’ll set up the telescope earlier so the girls can have a look before they’re too tired to see.

  Joey and Raymond and the girls go outside while Dottie and Claire put the dishes in the sink. Claire asks if Poppy was any trouble that afternoon and Dottie says, “Oh, no. They played in the bathroom so quiet, I had to keep yelling up to make sure they were breathing. Later they told me they’d been making vanishing cream from that liquidy soap at the bottom of the soap dish. I said, you’re eight years old, what do you need with vanishing cream? They said, to vanish. I told them they’d better not use it till they had something to bring them back from wherever they vanished to, and they said, yeah, they’d already thought of that.”

  “Where did they hear about vanishing cream?” says Claire. She feels she ought to tell Dottie—feels disloyal for not telling her—to watch for suspicious-looking shampoo bottles on the upper shelves. But she doesn’t. It’s almost as if she’s saving it for something.

  “Speaking of vanishing,” says Dottie. She hands Claire the book she’d forgotten that afternoon. It’s Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. Claire’s read it before, and it seems like the right moment to ask, so she says, “Does this mean that you’re going to get up from the table one night and climb up in the trees and never come down again?”

  Dottie just looks at her. “Me in the trees?” she says. “With my allergies?”

  They’re amazed by how dark it is when they go outside. “I told you,” says Dottie. “It’s August.”

  The grass is damp and cool against their ankles as they walk across the lawn to where Miranda and Poppy are taking turns at the telescope. “Daddy,” Claire hears Poppy say, “what’s that?”

  Joey crouches down and looks over her shoulder. Claire wonders what they see. Scorpio? Andromeda? Orion? Joey’s told her a thousand times, but she can never remember what’s in the sky when.

  Before Joey can answer, Raymond pulls Poppy away from the telescope and kneels and puts one arm around her and the other around Miranda. “That one?” he says, pointing. “That one’s the Bad Baby. And it’s lying in the Big Bassinet.”

  “Where?” cry the girls, and then they say, “Yes, I see!”

  “And that one there’s the Celestial Dog Dish. And that”—he traces his finger in a wavy circle—“is the Silver Dollar Pancake.”

  “What’s that one?” says Miranda.

  “Remember Superman II?” Raymond’s the one who takes the girls to movies no one else wants to see. “That’s what’s left of the villains after they get turned to glass and smashed to smithereens.”

  “Oh, no,” say the girls, and hide their faces against Raymond’s long legs.

  Claire’s tensed, as if Raymond’s infringed on Joey’s right to name things, or worse, is making fun of him. But Joey’s laughing, he likes Raymond’s names as much as the real ones. Claire steps up to the telescope and aims it at the thin crescent moon, at that landscape of chalk mountains and craters like just-burst bubbles. But all she sees is the same flat white she can see with her naked eye. Something’s wrong with the telescope, or with her. The feeling she gets reminds her of waking up knowing the day’s already gone wrong but not yet why, of mornings when Poppy’s been sick in the night, or last summer when Joey’s mother was dying.

  By now the others are all lying on the hillside looking for shooting stars. There aren’t any, not yet. Claire wonders if Dottie is listening to the inner silence, or thinking of past lives; if Raymond is inventing more constellations. She can’t imagine what Joey’s thinking. She herself can’t get her mind off Jeanette the electrician and her boyfriend, drinking wintergreen tea and checking that sliver of moon to see if this is a safe night for love.

  On the way in, Joey says, “Lying out there, I remembered this magazine article I read years ago, about Jean Genet at the ’68 Democratic convention in Chicago. The whole time, he kept staring at the dashboard of the car they were driving him in. And afterwards, when they asked him what he thought about the riots, the beatings and so forth, he just shrugged and said, ‘What can you expect from a country that would make a car named Galaxy?’”

  Over coffee, the conversation degenerates into stories they’ve told before, tales of how the children tyrannize and abuse them, have kept them prisoner in their own homes for years at a time. The reason they can talk like this is that they all know: the children are the light of their lives. A good part of why they stay here is that Vermont seems like an easy place to raise kids. Even their children have visionary names: Poppy, Miranda. O brave new world!

  When Claire first moved here with Dell, she commuted to New York, where she was working as a freelance costume designer. She likes to tell people that the high point of her career was making a holster and fringed vest and chaps for a chicken to wear on Hee Haw. Later she got to see it on TV, the chic
ken panicky and humiliated in its cowboy suit, flapping in circles while Grandpa Jones fired blanks at its feet and yelled, “Dance!” Soon it will be Halloween and Claire will sew Poppy a costume. So far she’s been a jar of peanut butter, an anteater with pockets full of velveteen ants, Rapunzel. Last fall Claire made her a caterpillar suit with a back that unzipped and reversed out into butterfly wings. Poppy’s already told her that this year she wants to be new wave, so all Claire will have to do is rip up a T-shirt and buy tights and wraparound shades and blue spray-on washable hair dye.

  Dottie is telling about the girls making vanishing cream when Joey pretends to hear something in the garden and excuses himself and goes out. Dottie says she wants to stay up for the meteor shower but is feeling tired so she’ll lie down awhile on the living-room couch.

  Claire and Raymond are left alone at the table. It takes them so long to start talking, Claire’s glad her crush on Raymond will never be anything more; if they had to spend a day in each other’s company, they’d run out of things to say. Still, it’s exciting. Raymond seems nervous, too.

  Finally he asks how her day was, and Claire’s surprised to hear herself say, “Pretty awful.” She hadn’t meant to complain, nor had she thought her day was so awful. Now she thinks maybe it was. “Nothing really,” she says. “One little thing after another. Have you ever had days when you pick up a pen and the phone rings and when you get off, you can’t find the pen?”

  “Me?” says Raymond. “I’ve had decades like that.”

  Claire says, “I woke up thinking I’d be nice and cook Poppy some French toast. So I open the egg carton and poke my finger through one of those stuck-on leaky eggs. When I got through cleaning the egg off the refrigerator, the milk turned out to be sour. I figured: Well, I’ll make her scrambled eggs with coriander, she likes that. I went out to the garden for coriander and all the tomatoes were lying on the ground. The awful part was that most of them looked fine from on top, you had to turn them over to see they were smashed. You know, first you think it’s all right, and then it isn’t all right.”