by Nancy Thayer
Everything about Laura and her life and her husband, in the end, finally only made Daphne love Joe more. Joe was so romantic, such a wonderful lover, and he did feel as Daphne did, that what their lives were about was their love. No matter how busy he became, or how far from her he seemed to go during his days at the college, there were always a few nights a month when he came back to Daphne, came into Daphne, and went with Daphne back down under, into their submerged and secret deep liquid world. They curled around each other, pulled each other deeper with their legs and embracing arms, they took each other’s breath, they made each other soaking wet. Joe and Daphne loved each other so passionately that one night of love could suffice them—even, still, exhaust them—for weeks.
She had had that with Joe. And she had had her friendship with Laura. Soon she had had her daughter. In those days, Daphne had had so much.
5
Jack was pleased with himself. He had had a good morning. After three weeks into the semester, he had just had three more students sign up for his class, which meant that the word was getting around that he was good. He had started off this Introduction to Neoclassic Literature course by having the students read Pope’s self-satisfied mincing An Essay on Man (“One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right”) while lecturing to them about the general conditions in the British Isles at that time: the lack of sanitation, the plagues and diseases, the absurdly unfair penal code, the contrast between the few very rich and the many chronically poor, the squalor, the illiteracy, and, for the women in his class, the complacent sexism—even Jonathan Swift had said, “A very little wit is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrot.” If he had to teach this stuff, he wanted to get his students interested in it, even fascinated by it, and he had decided to do that by means of irony and rebellion—understanding one’s tyrants.
This morning, before he had introduced Swift’s A Modest Proposal, he had played on his cassette deck the rock group U2’s song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” It was easy to lead from there into a discussion of conditions in Ireland then and now; the music hooked the students and they felt the similarities of this age and the eighteenth century; so they would give this literature, this course, a chance. Hudson Jennings might not approve of his methods, but he couldn’t object to the consequences; the students were reading the stuff, all the way through, and discussing it.
It was almost noon. Jack sat in his office trying to decide whether to eat there, while making notes on an essay he wanted to start work on, or whether to enjoy himself by going down to the cafeteria and getting a decent lunch and having some friendly conversation. Either way, he’d have a long walk. His office was located on the top floor of Peabody Hall, and the concession machines with their expensive cold sodas and stale sandwiches were in the basement, four flights down. Peabody Hall was a strange building, a building like Dorian Gray’s face: the old awful part was hidden in the attic, while the first floor, which everyone saw, stayed beautiful. That was where the gracious faculty lounge was with its long windows and thick Oriental rugs and leather chairs and huge mahogany tables covered with current periodicals. Receptions were held there, in the Peabody Room, and it was also used as a refuge for the faculty during the day. Running the length and half the width of the building, it was so spacious that clusters of chairs and sofas were scattered around, with fresh coffee and hot tea kept in silver urns at one end of the room. It was a graceful room, and Jack went there often. The other half of the first floor was broken into two large lecture rooms and a grand foyer with brass plaques and oil paintings of former presidents of the college on the high walls. The second floor was given over to small classrooms. The third floor, which one always reached in a state of exhaustion, because the ceilings of the first two floors were so high, contained faculty offices. Hudson Jennings had an office with large windows and thick carpet near the top of the stairs. Jack’s office was at the back of a warren of halls and offices; it had one high tiny window and no carpet. But it was his office, and he loved it.
He decided that because he deserved a reward for the way his class had gone this morning, he would go down all those stairs and out of the building and across to the cafeteria. He’d find a friendly face and clever conversation there—but suddenly he heard a commotion in the hallway. It sounded like Alexandra, screaming “Bottle,” but that couldn’t be it.
Jack looked around the door and saw, to his amazement, Hudson Jennings leading Carey Ann, with Alexandra screaming in her arms. Carey Ann was extremely pale and her eyes were glazed so that she looked both blind and powerful.
“Here you are, my dear,” Hudson said, ushering Carey Ann into Jack’s office.
“Daddy!” Alexandra cried with delight, and reached out her arms to be taken and hugged. Jack was pleased by this, because it was flattering that his daughter was so thrilled to see him—and also because she had stopped screaming for her bottle.
“Your wife was having trouble finding your office,” Hudson said.
Carey Ann turned her beautiful wide blue glassy gaze on Hudson and said, “Thank you so much.”
“What a nice surprise,” Jack said. He hadn’t shown Carey Ann his office before—she hadn’t wanted to take the time to come in and see it until she got more organized at home.
Hudson went off down the hall.
Carey Ann shut the door behind her so that the three Hamiltons were enclosed in Jack’s tiny space.
“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann wailed, and tears began to shoot from her eyes. “Alexandra’s been kicked out of playgroup!”
“What?” Jack asked.
Alexandra, knowing she was the subject of conversation, and possibly even aware that she was the source of her mother’s tears, reached up a plump dimpled hand and gently stroked her father’s cheek. “Prickles,” she said.
“I want to die! I want to just die! I want to go home!” Carey Ann said. “I want to go back to Kansas.”
“Oh, Carey Ann, oh, honey,” Jack said, and tried to put his arm around her, consoling, but as he got close to her, his daughter leaned forward with both her little hands (her legs were anchored between Jack’s arm and chest, her little bottom seated on his arm) and pushed her mother gently but firmly away.
“Go way,” Alexandra said.
Carey Ann was crying so hard she didn’t notice anything. Jack managed to pat her shoulder. “I hate everybody here,” she was saying.
“Prickles,” Alexandra said. She climbed up Jack’s body so that her face was directly in front of his, blocking his view of Carey Ann. With both little fat hands she gently rubbed his face. “Daddy prickles.”
How could anybody so cute be kicked out of a play group, for heaven’s sake?, Jack thought as he nibbled on his daughter’s fingers, making her giggle.
Carey Ann, ignored, began to talk loudly. She was actually kind of screaming: “… uptight New England bitches!”
Oh, God, Jack thought, for some of the other English and history teachers were in their offices on this floor now.
“Here,” he said, pulling a heavy wooden office chair up to her. “Sit down, honey.”
He sat down in his squeaky typing chair and found some felt-tip pens and blank white paper. “Here,” he said to Alexandra, drawing a face on the paper, “Lexi draw picture!” He gave his daughter the pen. She looked at him suspiciously, knowing she was being bribed, but, kneeling on his lap, leaned across his desk and began to scribble.
“Now, Carey Ann,” Jack said. “Start from the beginning. I want to hear exactly what happened.”
Carey Ann was digging in her purse for some tissues. She blew her nose, then said, “Well, you know how Madeline Spencer called and asked if I wanted to join their play group. She’s got little Zack, who is just Alexandra’s age, and she had these four other friends who all had kids, and they said if I wanted to I could join their group and it seemed like such a good idea. Madeline seemed all right, in spite of her hair, once I got talking with her. We were going to meet three times
a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and leave all six kids together with two mommies to take care of them, and four mommies could be off, so each mommy could have two days off and one day on, and there’d always be two mommies together so we could talk and things. I really thought it was a neat idea.” Carey Ann succumbed to another moment of sobbing.
“See, Daddy?” Alexandra said, taking her hands and pulling Jack’s face toward her “picture,” which was squiggles and swirls.
“That’s pretty,” Jack told his daughter. “Lexi draw another picture for Daddy.” He gave her another sheet of white paper.
“So today was the first day, and we decided I would be one of the mommies to stay because Alexandra has never been left alone with a group of kids before and we thought she might feel more secure if I was there, and Madeline was the other mommy. And it started off just fine, we were at Madeline’s house, she has this neat huge rec room just off the kitchen. And everything was okay for a while, but then Lexi wanted to go into the other rooms, you know how she likes to explore, and Madeline’s rule was that the kids had to stay in the rec room or maybe go into the kitchen, but not into the rest of the house. Her rec room really is big and all, I don’t know why Lexi didn’t want to stay there and play with the other kids, but she kept trying to go into the dining room off the kitchen, and Madeline asked me not to let her go because she didn’t want the other kids going off, her house would get messy, so I had to stop Alexandra, and she had one of her little temper tantrums.”
Jack shuddered. He knew Alexandra’s “little temper tantrums” well; they would have brought Attila the Hun to a screeching halt. He looked down at his daughter, who was drawing happily, intently, on white paper. He adjusted the pen in her plump hand and brought the pen in to the middle of the paper. “Stay on the paper, Lexi,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
“Then I got her settled down,” Carey Ann was saying, “and it was sort of difficult, for if I paid any attention to the other kids, she got kind of jealous and sort of … I don’t know, I mean she’d come tug on me or hit my legs or something. And I don’t know why, but every time little Zack picked up a toy, Lexi wanted that toy, and she’d go grab it from him and say, ‘Mine,’ and I got embarrassed and tried to stop her, so she had another little tantrum. Madeline told me to just let her cry, and we tried to talk about it, but then Shelby Currier’s baby had to have her diaper changed while Madeline was in the kitchen heating up Kathy Kelly’s baby’s bottle, and I had the little baby on the floor on a towel, and I was trying to change her diaper, and Alexandra came over and started pulling on me, saying, ‘No! My mommy!’ and I tried to explain it to her, that I had to change the baby’s diaper, but Lexi started shoving the baby, trying to get her away from me, and then she picked up a play hammer and hit the baby in the face. She did it so fast I didn’t even see it coming. Oh, God, Jack, that baby screamed, you never heard any baby scream like that, I thought she was killed. And her nose started bleeding, and Madeline was standing in the door with the warm bottle and she rushed over and grabbed the baby up and went off into the kitchen with it and put cold wet towels on its face, and when she came back she said, ‘Alexandra ought to be spanked for that,’ and I said, ‘I’ve never spanked my little girl in my life and I never will,’ so she said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to do something to punish her?’ and I said, ‘She didn’t know what she was doing,’ and Madeline said, ‘She knew exactly what she was doing and if you aren’t going to do something to teach her she was wrong, I don’t believe you and she should stay in this play group.’ So I stood up and took Alexandra in my arms and said, ‘Well, all right, if that’s how you feel about it,’ and she said—oh, this is the worst part, because she stopped being angry and got all friendly and sympathetic, like she was sorry for me or something—‘Carey Ann, I really like you but you’re harming your daughter. You don’t discipline her at all. You’re raising her to be so spoiled she’s absolutely antisocial.’ ” Carey Ann broke off into another fit of sobbing.
Jack watched, feeling ill. Alexandra had stopped drawing and was staring at her mother, fascinated. She turned to stroke her father’s face. “Prickles?” she asked hesitantly.
“And then what happened, honey?” Jack asked. Lexi turned back to her drawing.
“And then … and then,” Carey Ann said, crying so hard she could scarcely speak, “and then I left.”
Jack’s stomach ached. He was baffled. Was his sweet lovely little girl some kind of bad seed? He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to put his arms around his wife and pull her into his lap and hold her and soothe her, but Alexandra always got upset if her parents did that sort of thing, and he wasn’t certain just how much physical affection parents were supposed to demonstrate in front of their offspring. But Carey Ann was truly more miserable than he’d ever seen her, and he’d seen her pretty miserable.
“You know,” he said, musing, as if the thought were just occurring to him, “I think that somehow you and I have been doing the wrong things, honey. I think we’ve just been letting her get away with too much. Maybe we should start spanking her when she does something wrong.”
“My parents never spanked me in my entire life!” Carey Ann said. “Never!”
“Well, my parents spanked me plenty, and I still know they love me,” Jack said. “I’m not saying we should beat her. I’m just saying … oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe we should go to the library and get a book on the subject.”
“Oh, books,” Carey Ann said, shooting him her you’re-the-scum-of-the-earth look. “That’s all you know about. That’s all you can come up with, is books.”
“Well, there are a lot of books on child rearing,” Jack said. “I see them advertised in the newspapers’ book sections. So there must be lots of parents like us who aren’t sure just what to do. You read plenty of books about dieting and your thighs and all,” he persisted. That was the wrong thing to say, he could tell. Carey Ann hated it if he mentioned her diets or her exercises to improve what she thought of as a terrible body (and what he thought of as heaven, the most beautiful thing on this planet). “Or we could go see a psychiatrist,” he suggested.
“Jesus Christ, what do you think, Alexandra’s crazy? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, no, no,” Jack said, trying to calm his wife. “I guess I didn’t mean a psychiatrist, I meant a counselor. Some expert who could give us advice on how to discipline Lexi.”
But Carey Ann was really crying now, insulted by every single thing Jack had had to say in the last few minutes.
He looked down at Alexandra. First he saw her beautiful curling opalescent hair; then he saw that while he had been talking, she had taken the felt-tip pen and drawn squiggles and great sweeping spirals all over his desk blotter.
He physically recoiled, as if from a blow in the stomach. His desk blotter was more than just a functional piece; it had great sentimental value. Last Christmas, when they knew they were going to move back east, Carey Ann had surprised him on Christmas night by bringing out a pile of red- and green-foil-wrapped boxes, presents for him, presents she had not brought to the family gathering around the giant tree in the Skragses’ living room, but had hidden, to be opened when Alexandra was in bed and just the two of them were alone together.
“I want you to know that these presents are from me,” Carey Ann had said before she would let him open them, and she was blushing the entire time she gave them to him. “I mean, I didn’t buy them with your money and I didn’t buy them with my daddy’s money.”
“I’m not sure I understand, honey,” Jack said.
“I mean I got a job for four weeks just before Christmas,” Carey Ann said. “At Hall’s. And you know my father doesn’t own any of that store; he doesn’t even know anybody who owns any of it. I got the job all by myself. In the perfume department. They always need extra help before Christmas.”
“Carey Ann, that’s great,” Jack said, really touched, and touched even more by how serious Carey Ann
was about this, and how intense.
He opened the first set of presents: it was a desk set consisting of blotter, leather pen cup, leather appointment book and address book with refill pages for the next few years, a little leather box full of loose-leaf notepaper, and a leather wastebasket. The leather was a wonderful chocolate brown, thick and fine, without any ornamentation, very masculine.
“That’s for your study at home,” Carey Ann told him. “Now open this set. It’s for your office.”
For just a moment Jack had felt a tingle of fear, for Carey Ann liked stationery with buttercups or elves or lambs on it, and she drew smiling faces on things and bought cards with rainbows and sunbeams on them for every imaginable occasion. What if the set she had bought for the office was in pale blue with gold trim or something?
But it wasn’t—it was just like the other set, except that the leather was all a dark green that was almost black. It was very handsome, and he could tell it was very expensive. Carey Ann had probably spent nearly four hundred dollars for the two desk sets.
Jack had come close to crying that night. He had felt as sentimental and mushy and in love and blessed as he had the night he proposed to Carey Ann and she accepted. He had come to treasure his desk sets. This one had certainly classed up his standard hole of an office.
But now there were these indelible dark blue squiggles and swirls all over his desk blotter, on the thick felt and on the leather. The blotter was ruined.
