In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

  Edwin forgot that Dorothy had promised Dr. Dressel she’d work Saturday morning. As he dressed in Bobbie’s dark bedroom on Thursday night, she asked, “Will you come Saturday?”

  “Sure, babe,” he said. He had fallen asleep, but he could tell from Bobbie’s voice that she’d remained awake, lying naked next to him. He leaned over to kiss her, then let himself out, rubbing his hand on his lips and checking for lipstick stains.

  But on Saturday he had to stay with Eileen and Mary Ann, then pick up Dorothy at Dr. Dressel’s office. He was more at ease with the girls in the car than at home. Made restless by his broken promise to Bobbie, he left too early, then had to look after his children in the dentist’s waiting room. He didn’t know how to braid Eileen’s hair and it had not been done that morning; Edwin noticed as he reread the dentist’s posters, which urged him to eat carrots and apples, that one of yesterday’s rubber bands still dangled off Eileen’s mussed hair. He called to her and tried to remove the band without pulling. “You’re hurting me,” she said, though he didn’t think he was.

  At last Dorothy came out in her coat. “I heard them whooping it up,” she said, but she sounded amused. She took two rubber bands from the receptionist’s desk and swiftly braided Eileen’s hair. Leaving the car where it was, they walked to a nearby luncheonette. Dorothy took Edwin’s hand. Sometimes she spoke to him in baby talk; it was a kind of game. “I am going to teach you to bwaid hair,” she said. But he didn’t know how to answer, so she spoke again, now taking his part, in a gruff voice like the Three Bears. “How on earth do you braid hair?” He let go of her hand and put his arm around her shoulders as she answered with elaborate patience, “Well, first you make a center part. . . .” Edwin imagined Bobbie watching them, not jealously. “Squeeze,” the imaginary Bobbie said, and Edwin squeezed his wife’s taut shoulder through the green coat.

  Bobbie didn’t use her mixer often. She was not sufficiently interested in its departure and return to put it away, so she left it on the extra chair next to the kitchen table where Edwin had put it. On Saturday morning she put on makeup and stockings, but he didn’t come. Ordinarily, if Edwin didn’t appear by a quarter to ten, Bobbie took Bradley out, rather than brooding. This Saturday, though, Bradley had a cold. To distract herself, Bobbie called Sylvia, who asked, “Does he have a temperature?” Bobbie’s thermometer was broken, so Sylvia brought hers over. Bobbie made coffee. Bradley sat on the floor in his pajamas, wiping his nose on his sleeve while putting together a jigsaw puzzle, a map of the United States.

  Bobbie offered Sylvia a cookie and she and Bradley said together, “Before lunch?” but then everyone took a Mallomar, since Bobbie said a cookie might cheer her up. Bradley licked his fingers and then placed Florida in the puzzle correctly.

  “Edwin didn’t come today?” Sylvia said, playing with her spoon.

  “Sometimes he’s busy on Saturdays.”

  “You need more.”

  “I manage,” Bobbie said. If Sylvia knew all Edwin’s ways, she thought, she wouldn’t object to him. “He’s worth it.”

  Sylvia laughed, stretching her arm and actually taking a second cookie. “Oh, I know what you mean,” she said. She interrupted herself to supervise Bradley’s placement of California. “I know what you see in your Edwin. I see the way he looks at you.”

  “When you’ve been married a long time,” Bobbie said, “I guess it’s not so exciting.”

  Sylvia laughed. “I know how you feel,” she said again, not scolding.

  “You mean you felt that way about Lou, once.”

  “Well, I suppose.”

  “What did you mean?” Bobbie said.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t say anything,” Sylvia said. She tipped the bowl of her spoon with one finger, making the handle rise.

  “He’s not listening,” Bobbie said, tilting her head toward Bradley. “You mean—someone?”

  “Someone I met at an in-service course.”

  “Another teacher? A man.”

  “He teaches at Midwood.”

  “A high school teacher. You—have feelings?” Bobbie said.

  “Did this ever happen to you?” Sylvia said, now glad—it seemed—to talk. “At night, you know, picturing the wrong person?”

  Bobbie thought she knew what Sylvia meant. She wasn’t sure what an in-service course was, whether it consisted of one occasion or several. “How many times have you seen him?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Sylvia, but then she crouched on the floor. “Doesn’t Colorado belong where you put Wyoming, Bradley?” Wyoming was nice and tight. “Could the map be wrong?”

  “Did you have lunch with him?”

  “Oh, I’m exaggerating, it’s nothing,” Sylvia said. She remained on the floor, helping Bradley with a few more states. Then she got up, reaching out a hand to steady herself on the extra chair. She gave the Mixmaster a pat. “Hey, you didn’t just buy this, did you?”

  “No, I’ve had it for a while.”

  “I might have been able to get you a discount. A client of Lou’s . . .”

  “I bought it last year.”

  “Oh, right.” Sylvia seemed to expect Bobbie to explain why the mixer was on the chair, so Bobbie told in full the story Sylvia had heard only in part: the story of the dress, the walk to the post office, and her return to find Edwin fixing a mixer that wasn’t broken.

  “He took it home? Why did he do that?” Sylvia asked.

  “At home he has tools.”

  “Maybe he took it to a repair place.”

  “Oh, no. I’m sure he fixed it himself,” said Bobbie.

  “You’re sure he brought back the same mixer?”

  “You mean he bought me a new one? I hope not!” Bobbie said.

  “Or he could have bought a used one,” said Sylvia.

  “Oh, stop being so suspicious.” She liked the more tremulous Sylvia who had spoken of the teacher from Midwood High School. She wasn’t ready, yet, for the usual Sylvia. “Of course it’s mine.”

  But as she spoke, as she insisted it was hers, Bobbie suddenly sensed that the mixer on the chair might never have been in her house before, and then, looking hard, she was certain. It was the same, but somehow not the same. It had been cleaned differently, maybe with a sponge, not a dishrag. But that thought was ridiculous. It had been handled in a way that was not Jewish. An even more ridiculous thought.

  Bradley had abandoned the puzzle and left the room. Maybe Sylvia would say more. “Did you have lunch with him?” Bobbie asked again.

  But Sylvia would not be deterred. “Maybe Edwin has another girlfriend,” she said, “and this is her mixer. Hey, maybe he has a wife!” She gave a short laugh.

  “He has a mother. . . .” said Bobbie. His mother didn’t sound like someone who’d plug in a mixer and mix anything. She now remembered that the metal plate with the “Sunbeam” insignia on her mixer was chipped. She looked, and this one was whole. She looked again. “I trust Edwin,” she said.

  “I know you do. Boy, that would be something,” Sylvia said. “If it turned out Edwin was married.”

  But Bobbie was experiencing one of those moments when one discovers the speed of thought by having several in an instant. First she felt ashamed of being stupid. Of course there had been plenty of hints that Edwin was married. Once she allowed herself to consider the possibility, she was sure it was so. Bobbie didn’t need to know whose mixer it was to know that Edwin was married. Then, however, Bobbie felt something quite different. It wasn’t anger at Sylvia, at her sister’s gossipy curiosity.

  She was not angry at Sylvia. She felt sorry for Sylvia, a little superior to Sylvia. All her life, Bobbie had known that Sylvia was smart, so Bobbie must be smart, too, even Bobbie who carried her clothing back and forth to the post office. Once they knew Edwin was married, Sylvia would imagine there was only one way to behave—to laugh bitterly—but Bobbie understood that there were two.

  That there were two different ways to think about Edwin’s marriage—like thinking about th
e stars, which might be spots of light, close together, and might be distant wild fireworlds—struck Bobbie with almost as much force as her sorrow. Sylvia’s way would be to laugh bitterly and tell everyone the story. Edwin’s marriage might be a bad joke on Bobbie, but then Edwin would no longer tip his chair against her sink, or walk her to her bed while his hands grasped all of her body he could reach under her loosened clothes. His marriage might be a bitter joke—or it might be something Bobbie just had to put up with.

  Bobbie would never marry Edwin, but Bobbie had the mixer that worked. She stood and plugged it in, and it made its noise. The years to come, during which she’d keep Edwin’s secret, not letting him know she knew—because it would scare him away—and not letting her sisters know she knew—because they’d scream at her to forget him—became real in her mind, as if she could feel all their length, their loneliness, at once. She would be separated from Edwin, despite Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings. Bobbie turned off the mixer and wept.

  “Oh, of course he’s not married,” Sylvia said, and Bobbie didn’t say that wasn’t why she was crying. “Me and my big mouth, as usual,” Sylvia continued. She stood up and put her arms around Bobbie, and then the sisters were hugging and smiling. “Edwin married,” Sylvia said. “If there’s one man on earth who couldn’t manage being a two-timer, it’s Edwin. Sorry, baby, I love the guy, but that swift he’s not.” And she went on and on, hugging her sister and calling her baby. Baby! The unaccustomed sweetness, like the cookie, comforted Bobbie for a while. Maybe she and Sylvia both had secrets, like Edwin. Maybe life required secrets. What an idea.

  Not Yet, Not Yet

  Visiting from Boston with her baby, Ruth watched as her father uncapped his fountain pen. On a paper napkin, he drew a map of his Brooklyn neighborhood, where she’d grown up. Her father’s large, well-shaped ears stuck out from his bald head, and his chin was pointed, giving him a resemblance to an alert Greek vase. He struck a spot on the map with his finger until it seemed the napkin would shred. But his finger concealed the street Ruth didn’t remember—where her sister, “Lillian with all her troubles,” now lived. It was 1974. Ruth had graduated from Brooklyn College a decade earlier and immediately moved away.

  “So what’s your secret?” said her mother. “How come the psychiatrist says she can see you?”

  “I don’t have a secret,” said Ruth. In a phone conversation, Lilly had said, “I want to see the baby.”

  “She’s a few blocks away, and we haven’t seen her for a year,” said Fanny. She imitated Lillian’s breathy voice. “ ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Not yet.’ ” Fanny left the room.

  Ruth’s baby was asleep in the bedroom. “Don’t wake Laura,” she called. She’d had lunch with her parents and would spend a couple of hours with her sister. Then she and the baby would stay with a friend in the city and take an early train home in the morning. Her parents, hoping for more, had borrowed a Portacrib.

  Her father added streets to his map. When Ruth was a college freshman, she and Lilly had once spent an afternoon in the public library, disputing in whispers the exact kind of Greek vase he resembled. Ruth was writing a paper about Greek art. When she noticed that the vases looked like her father, Lilly put aside her homework to help her choose the best likeness from a chart. Daddy was definitely a kalpis, Ruth had said, pointing and striking the page as her father did now, years later. His face had the shape of a kalpis—round, narrow at the bottom—though the handles on that vase, while they were in the right place, were not shaped like ears.

  But her sister had found a picture of a neck-amphora. “The ears, the ears,” said Lilly, who was babyish, though she was more developed than flat-chested Ruth. Lillian almost wept. The handles of the neck-amphora were high, growing (as it were) out of their father’s temples—but they were earlike: thin curved strips attached at both ends, exactly like outlines of Daddy’s ears.

  Lillian’s adult troubles did not include protruding ears. Ruth had them, but long hair had concealed them from the time she’d first had the brains to look critically in a mirror, around the time of the paper on Greek art. Now she looked at herself more often than she could bear to as a girl, and as her father continued to work on his map, she stared at her own hands, pressed onto the tabletop, and noticed that her mother’s garnet ring was missing from her finger. She suppressed her cry, put her hands in her lap, and glanced behind her, but Fanny had not returned.

  At 1:00 A.M. the night before the paper on Greek art was due, Ruth’s father had demanded that Ruth stop typing or leave his house. “You mean if I leave I can keep typing?” asked Ruth cruelly. They lived in a two-family house, and her father said the family downstairs might be disturbed by the clattering of the old Royal portable. Ruth was a slow typist, especially in those days, before she discovered Corrasable Bond. She erased her frequent mistakes with a pink rubber disk on which a black brush swiveled. With scraps of paper inserted between the first copy and the carbon paper, she protected her carbon copy from smudges, though nobody would ever read it. When her father began to shout, Ruth put down her eraser, got her coat, and left, figuring she’d walk all night, quit college in the morning, and find a job and an apartment. Maybe one of her aunts would take her in. Two of her mother’s sisters, Aunt Sylvia and Aunt Bobbie, lived in the neighborhood.

  But Ruth’s mother had hurried down the stairs behind her. It was a cold night, and Fanny suggested they sit in the car, which was parked in front of the house. After a while she persuaded Ruth to go back upstairs with her. Her father sulked, looking exactly like a kalpis, but didn’t speak as she finished typing.

  Ruth grew her hair after that. “Daddy’s ears don’t stick out and neither do yours,” said Fanny, but Ruth had never been sorry she’d grown her hair. She’d kept it shoulder length when she first had a job, but now she was an editor at the Boston Phoenix, where nobody cared if her hair came down to her butt, which it did. Ruth had moved to Boston to live with a man who made her parents nervous, a carpenter named Charlie who had once been a graduate student of philosophy. Now they were married and had two children: David, who was at his co-op day-care center in Brookline, and Laura, asleep in the borrowed Portacrib.

  Ruth’s father said, “It’s a bad idea, going to Lillian’s neighborhood.”

  “It’s so different from this neighborhood?”

  “Very different. You wouldn’t know. I see a little black boy, I can tell if he’s just fooling around or he has a knife.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dad!” He, a thirties lefty, who used to relish city life, its mixing of races and nationalities!

  Ruth’s mother returned with Laura against her shoulder, the baby’s face hidden in her grandmother’s neck. “Here’s this sleepy girl.” Fanny kissed the origin point of her granddaughter’s hair, the center of a light swirl, then kept her nose there.

  Ruth also liked the smell of her daughter’s scrap of hair, but she said, “Did you wake her?”

  “No, I heard her stirring.”

  “You woke her up!” Ruth glanced at the floor under the table, trying to look for the missing ring without attracting attention.

  “She should eat before you go.”

  Her mother liked watching Ruth breast-feed, though the sight made her explain, each time, why she hadn’t nursed Ruth and Lillian.

  Her parents weren’t old enough to be indulged. They weren’t charming and harmless, like the old people on Ruth’s street in Brookline. One way or another, they had to be responsible for Lilly’s troubles. Ruth dressed the baby, kissed her mother and father, and left, carrying her daughter in one arm while bumping the folded umbrella stroller down the stairs.

  “Don’t you want to drop in on Aunt Sylvia?” her mother called timidly.

  “I don’t have time,” Ruth said. Her parents had suffered so over Lilly. She wished she’d learned to be kind.

  The map was wrong. Ruth pushed the stroller long blocks against an unpleasant wind, pulling her sleeves over her cold hands. At last
she yanked sleeping Laura up the steps of a neglected porch and rang Lillian’s doorbell, and eventually she heard her sister’s steady tread. Lilly opened the door with a big smile. Her round cheeks were red, and a curly reddish permanent surrounded her face. She looked like a clown into whose mouth one might try to throw a ball. Lilly hugged her sister tightly. “This is Laura,” said Ruth.

  “Hi, baby.” Lilly’s voice was low, a little husky, a little ironic. She hugged Ruth again. Ruth stepped into the warm apartment. Laura had slept through wind and bumping, but now she woke and cried. “Let me hold her,” said Lilly. She took Laura, but the baby kept crying. She’d never seen David at this age. She’d been in a hospital all that year.

  “I have to nurse her,” said Ruth.

  Lilly quickly surrendered the baby. “Do you want to go to the bathroom or something?”

  “It’s not like going to the bathroom.”

  “I thought you might need a towel.” Big in a bright green sweater, Lilly suddenly looked worried and helpless, her arms held stiffly at her sides.

  “What I need is a glass of water,” said Ruth. “Nursing makes me thirsty.” They were standing in a mostly bare room that held a table, chairs, and kitchen appliances in one corner, and a sofa in another. The sofa startled Ruth and she pulled out a chair so as to sit at the table. She pushed her hair back over her shoulders, pulled up her sweater, and settled the baby into position. Lilly, looking grateful for instructions, brought a glass of water. Ruth looked again at the sofa. It was upholstered in fake zebra hide. “I presume the zebra isn’t real?”

  “That’s Agatha, my pet.”

  “Better than a pet.”

  “I nap on Agatha. I was napping when you came. Now I’m starving.”

  Ruth would have assumed any member of her family would consider the sofa tasteless and ugly, but now—her opinion reversing in an instant—she wanted to sit on it, to sit together. But she stayed where she was.