Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  “You can get me back the money you just spent," he said.

  Jerome looked at her and, hardly moving his lips, smiled a faint smile. He was so relaxed and easygoing about the household and family, and college too, she was sure, that she envied him. She smiled back and he twisted up his lips as though he’d tasted lemon, and then turned to his cards.

  She picked up her coat and went through the back entry, at the head of the basement stairs, into the other side of the house to the bedroom she shared with Susan.

  It was absolutely quiet on this side of the house. Every time she walked through the door, she felt she'd stepped into a private hiding place, a sanctum of her creation that nobody dared disturb. She couldn't hear the television or the sound of voices, and all the clothes seemed to hold silence. They were everywhere. The doors of the closet were thrown back and it bulged with clothes; clean clothes and dirty clothes were piled on the dressers, on the chairs and the beds, which were unmade, and all over the floor; undergarments hung from dresser knobs. Her dad had complained about the condition of the room, especially in the past months, and last week walked in when she was half naked, and shouted, "Gol-dammit, get this crap cleaned up before I throw it out the door!” She saw his reddened face in the mirror and herself holding a shirt over her front, and was as startled as she would have been if he'd actually started throwing; it was the first time he'd used profanity around her, which made her feel more naked than she was, and his face was puffed up, plump, crimson, with a force more than anger at her.

  She tried to clean it then, and made an effort every day since, but it seemed impossible, and, anyway, she was comfortable here. Besides the clothes and the quiet, the room was always well heated, not like some parts of the house—was overwarm, really—and now was filled with a shuddering glow from a candle burning on the vanity.

  The candle was supposed to last for the two weeks of Christmas, but she doubted that it would, unless it could slow itself down; it was already a day and a half ahead. Everything she got for herself was imperfect in some way, it seemed, or destined to break down, like the alarm clock beside the candle, useless, out of alarms, ticks, and the circle of time's company. The vanity was once her mother's and now looked new, thanks to Jerome and Charles, who sanded and stained and refinished it for her over the summer. It was now the same shade as the maple valet. She sat on the vanity bench and put the tip of her index finger into the pool of wax at the top of the candle, and its flame leaped higher. She stared at the finger, turning it to allow the wax to harden, and then held it apart from her others as she pushed back her hair.

  Her face bothered her, and always had. Elaine and older women said she was "adorable" or "pretty as a picture," but she thought she looked awful: "Scary-Mare," Tim used to call her, and that seemed more accurate. Her hairline was uneven, her upper lip looked swollen, her nose too small, though not as small as Susan's, and her eyes too big. It was mostly the eyes, moon eyes, as she thought of them, large and circular, like half dollars, larger even than her father's, which were enormous behind his glasses. Her upper lip made a little peak over the lower one. Was that cute, she wondered.

  She looked at the photograph she'd placed, years ago, under the molding at the bottom of the vanity mirror, and saw her face around it; it was of her mother, standing in front of a snow-capped lilac, dressed in a dark suit that made her look stocky and short, her hands hidden inside a muff. She was smiling out at anybody who wanted to look back into the moment she stood in. When was it taken? And where in North Dakota? Her dad and the boys were always talking about North Dakota, about the big house they had and the happy times there, but all she could remember was freezing her face so badly once she couldn't open her mouth to bawl out how frozen she was.

  This was her favorite photograph of her mother, and she'd taken it from one of the albums and put it here to have it close, so she could remember how her mother looked. She was five when she died—"passed away," they said to her, gone. When she'd put the picture here, she used to stare at it and whisper, as if praying, "Oh, Mom, come back, come back," until she moved herself to tears. But after a while it was too difficult to keep doing, and that made her feel ashamed, unworthy of being her mother's daughter.

  Elaine and Rose Marie would say, "Your mother was a wonderful woman—it's a shame you couldn't have known her better," and that made her feel worse; she couldn't remember her mother or say what she was like, even if her saying of it would have the power to bring her back again. Tim had difficulty remembering her, too, although with him it sometimes seemed purposeful, and when they were children they used to try to re-create the feelings they could recall from when she was alive. Tim would lie on his back and pretend to be ill with rheumatic fever, and she'd come into the room and minister to him as she felt their mother might. Or Tim would cover her and pat her back and sing a lullaby their mother sang, about waking from sleep and riding a silvery pony. He couldn't remember all the verses and made some up about them.

  Once when she was upset, he took her into the closet off the living room—they were home alone—and was holding her and trying to touch her bottom, or comfort her, and then began to talk; all she could make out were his eyes and the shining wand of the vacuum cleaner, as he went on about a picnic, a blanket with pink stripes in it, pebbles around its edge, putting the pebbles in their mouths, their mother walking up and the two of them being locked inside a hot, stuffy car in punishment, and suddenly it seemed the cleaner wand brightened and the closet filled with cotton. Tim knocked open the door and ran outside, and never mentioned their mother again.

  Marie looked at the photograph. Was that you, she thought. Was it you who did that? Could you have? The picture seemed to be smiling wider. In the next instant there'd be a rustle as a hand reached to her, and her mother would say, "Oh, Marie, of course not!" But how could she know for sure? She couldn't even recall the tone of her voice. It was as if her childhood had passed in darkness; there were no details. Every week she paged through the family albums, all three of them, hoping to find some clue to her makeup and emotional texture at that time. The photographs were like scraps of sewing material for a large and elaborate project—a series of patchwork quilts, perhaps—but somewhere in one of the moves, or in the changes that had taken place in all of them, the pattern to the project had been lost. The photographs held a store of hope for her, though; she could look into a pair of eyes and wonder, What are you thinking? Are you happy, are you sad? How is the day around you, and what happened next? And sometime in the future, if she kept at it, perhaps she could assemble the pieces into—

  Whatever it was they were intended to be.

  She picked the wax off her fingertips, putting it back around the wick, and went into the kitchen. Her dad and the boys had taken down mugs and poured their own coffee. The kitchen was smoke-filled now. At her dad's elbow was a loaf of bread, the ketchup, and a jar of mustard with a table knife sticking out of its mouth, all of which she'd neglected to put on the table.

  "Would you like some rye bread?" she asked. "I got some today."

  "No, this is fine."

  "Do you want anything else?”

  "Not right now."

  "Who's winning?"

  "Whom do you presume. Mistress Aberdeen-Anguish?" Tim said, and the corners of her dad's lips compressed with a smile. So they were winning after all.

  "I’ll make some popcorn later," she said.

  "Great," Jerome said. "That sounds good."

  Charles still looked angry at their father.

  She went into the living room and found Susan on her knees under the tree, shaking a package close to her ear while she kept her eyes on the television. "Oh, God,"

  Susan said. "You would walk in just now." She tossed the package under the tree and went back to her chair and slumped down in it, and Marie sat on the couch, behind her, and stared at the television screen. She'd developed a habit of watching it out of the corners of her eyes—"Sidewatcher," Tim called her—because she'd wat
ched so much television when she was a child she'd become skeptical of it; none of the programs were very plausible and she couldn't look at them for long without wondering how people in California or New York could appear inside their living room, engaged in performances she could watch the second they were going on without being able to have any sort of effect on them, except on or off, and this made her lose the thread of what they were up to.

  She glanced around, checking for the detail she was sure she'd overlooked. The gate-leg table was exactly right with the new furniture the boys had bought. A few months ago her dad had described it, and asked if she'd seen it anywhere. "It was built by a neighbor of ours in Courtenay, a carpenter more than eighty years old, for your mother and me when we were married, so it means a lot to me," he said. She found it on the grain doors in the storeroom upstairs, underneath a mattress covered with a tarp, and cleaned it and rubbed it with oil until her reflection appeared over its grain, and then brought it down last week, along with the decorations, and set it up in the Living room as a surprise. "Well," her dad said when he saw it, "I feel as if a part of me has returned at last."

  "Ach!" Susan said to the television. "Baloney on you!”

  She stomped through the living room, through the kitchen, and then Marie heard the door to their bedroom bang. The program must have been a love story; Sue was in tears. It seemed one of the two always was, and their tears had become so commonplace that Tim and her dad ignored them, and she and Susan didn't pay much attention to one another's, either. Susan would say, "Oh, for God's sake, Marie, are you crying again?" and then in a while Susan would be in tears.

  She stared at the shimmer of the table. She liked the design cut with a coping saw from its side supports, like two hourglasses set end to end, and the gold grain that lifted away from the darker wood in another dimension, and then she remembered looking at the table like this another time. It was a Christmas from her past. One of the leaves was raised, and a tiny Christmas tree, sprayed with silver paint, was sitting on its top. There were strings of cranberries and popcorn hung on it. Had she helped thread the strings? She couldn't remember lights, none at all, and the tree was too small for icicles. Were they poor then? Was that in this house?

  She turned to the kitchen and through the doorway saw Tim and Charles and Jerome, but not her dad; all three were talking with expressions that meant their voices had risen, and were slamming down cards, but her mind was so crowded she couldn't hear a sound. The kitchen was brightly lit and from the living room they seemed to be inside a yellow cube, closed off from the rest of the house and her, and she was seeing them for the first time, as an outsider: they were brothers, it was Christmas, their mother was missing, and would always be.

  And then she had an image of her mother whipping batter in a bowl held tight against her side, bending to the oven, carrying a cookie sheet to the kitchen table, where rows of holiday pastries were spread out on cooling racks, slapping her dad's behind with a spatula when he tried to snitch one, and then her laughter at his startled expression. The house was filled with the sweetness of baking for days, and all the while her mother worked she sang Christmas carols and hymns.

  There was a cry of triumph from Tim, and then Jerome shoved away from the table and came and slumped at the other end of the couch. He'd brought along an ashtray from the kitchen (she'd have to remember to put out more ashtrays, please!) and he set it on the couch between them, and then lifted his chin to blow out smoke, the cords of his neck thick with tension.

  "Are you done playing cards already?"

  "They're playing three-handed."

  "Oh."

  "It's harder to cheat that way."

  So he'd known about Tim and her dad all along. She smiled. The light from the television set gave the side of his face a gray, statuelike cast, and she felt sorry for his bad feature, his big lips; they were thick, not mobile or

  expressive, and it sometimes seemed to her he talked so little because he was self-conscious of how they moved. "The house looks really nice," he said. "Oh, thank you."

  "I remember how it used to look two or three years ago."

  "I know. I'm sorry."

  "It wasn't your fault. Nobody picked up after themselves."

  "I was the worst."

  "Mmmm." His mind had jumped beyond the conversation and he was considering something else.

  "You boys are neat now.”

  "Sometimes. Out of necessity." "What do you mean?"

  "To find things."

  "Oh."

  "How long has Dad been this way?" he asked. "How?"

  "Angry at you." "All the time!" "More, lately?" "Yes, I guess."

  He put his cigarette to his lips several times and his exhaled smoke rolled in overlapping clouds toward the Christmas tree.

  "Are you excited about the holidays?" she asked. "Sort of." "I am," she said.

  "You don't seem in a celebrating mood tonight." "Oh—" She stared down and evened her skirt against her knee with her thumbs. "I've just been thinking, is all." "What about?"

  "Oh, I don't know. A lot of things." She kept straightening her skirt as if its straightness could bring clarity to this moment that included them all; she was too uncomfortable to mention their mother in front of Jerome. "About Mom?"

  She looked up. The Christmas-tree lights were reflected in galactic dots on his glasses and she couldn't see his eyes.

  "Yes," she said.

  "What about?"

  "Just her. She made times like this so perfect, it seems. Even if I knew exactly how Dad and you boys wanted Christmas, I'd still ruin it."

  "That's how you feel?"

  "I can't do anything right."

  "Everything you've done around here looks great to me.

  "You're just saying that to be nice."

  "Nnnnn." There was a long silence, more clouds of smoke, and then he said, "She made mistakes all the time." And after a moment added, "Mom."

  "That's not so."

  "Sure it is."

  "It's not!"

  "She made more mistakes than you."

  "You're just saying that!"

  "Huh-uh. She had more opportunity to make them."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Older. Five kids."

  No matter how much she kept brushing her cheeks, left and right, with the backs of her fingers, she couldn't keep them free of tears.

  "When do you think it'll happen?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "Dad get married."

  "This summer!" she said.

  "Really? That soon?"

  "He's practically said so to Susan and me a couple of times."

  "That's what I was thinking."

  "Why?"

  "Nobody seems too happy around here."

  "He does."

  "I'm sure he's worried about a lot of things—especially how we'll all take it."

  "No, he isn't."

  "Sure, Marie. Also, it's his second wife. Maybe he's worried things won't work out as well, or else the same. Oh, God."

  "Why does he have to get married at all? After so many years? Why can't we stay the way we are? We get along just fine!"

  "He's probably been thinking about the rest of his life, and I doubt that he wants to live it alone. He's still young by his standards."

  "Young? What about us?"

  "I'm sure he's considered our feelings a lot."

  "Not Susan's and mine."

  "Especially you two's."

  "But he never talks to us."

  "He will."

  She wanted to close her eyes and rest her head on him. "I was just starting to find out who I was in this family."

  "You'll keep on finding out."

  "I won't have a chance! There'll be too many others to think about."

  "Just Laura. She's nice."

  "She has three kids."

  "Her sons are married."

  "But her daughter will be here. She's younger than Susan!"

  "Mmmm," Jerome said. "Maybe yo
u just don't want to give up the house."

  "I don't! I'd never feel right about it! I don't want her to take it away from Mom!"

  "She's been gone a long time now, Marie."

  "I know she has, I know that! But I'm still here, aren't I? Can't you see that? Can't anybody see that I am?"

  37

  REQUIEM AND FALL

  The dream is very much in season. He's running through a forest where leaves of every color shower down on him from an infinite height. There's a fire in the forest, but he isn't running from it; somebody's at his back, reaching for him, calling his name. The notes of the name come to him down through corridors of green. Then the trees thin and sink and begin to be underbrush, or else the act of running has rendered him gigantic; he's running through leafage the height of his knees, treetops or weeds. They slap at his pants legs and then thin out and are gone altogether and in the silence that comes, with his legs and arms still working at running, he falls through open sky. A hand catches him by the shoulder, and the face of Jerome, huge and pale, hangs above him in the mist, wondering with a susurrus of wind in its whisper, "Are you awake?"

  Do dreams speak outside themselves?

  "Please. My landlord's nephew got me out of bed with a note to call Operator Three in Peoria."

  He knows Jerome will mention these details (isn't it the third time he has?), and as Jerome goes through them now his voice takes on the pattering staccato sound of water falling from a fountain onto the children's pool in Pekin where Jerome and he sit as boys in water to their waists, sullen and unbrotherlike on this overcast August afternoon. Is it the day Charles falls and cuts his forehead?

  "They tried to get you at first. They didn't know your phone is disconnected."

  Jerome's gone home and worked on a carpentry crew for the summer and Charles has stayed in town and helped a widow get her three apartment buildings in shape— repairing wobbly furniture, weaving patches- onto rusted window screens, rehanging doors, fumigating for roaches and silverfish, quieting sibilant water closets, patching plaster and scraping and painting and shifting carpets to relocate cigarette bums under a dresser or bed—jobs that the widow's husband, a carpenter, used to do; and has moved into the manager's quarters, three white-painted rooms, in the smallest of the buildings, and is paid by the hour, "Keep your own time," when he works. Fixing himself up in a job that will pay his room and board, he told his father ("What about when you get caught up on the work?"). Fixing that university regulation about no women in your room, he told everybody else. And now Jerome (this Jerome I must tangle with, he thinks) was living in a large apartment with two other seniors and had money to last the semester, if not the year, while Charles, who's worked less and less, hasn't saved - a cent; and indeed, just last week, was wondering whether to borrow from Jerome to pay his two-month overdue telephone bill (exposure of his situation; shame), when a gray-clad telephone man with a belt of utensils around him— where was he? —appeared at the apartment and unwired the hookup of his phone, and then carried the instrument out the door.