Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  The door slammed with a loud bang, and Mrs. Caldwell was now gasping apologies in the hallway.

  “No, no, please—” As she lunged to grab her bra off the floor, she got entangled in the gown’s silk folds and made an awkward step. There was the terrible sound of something ripping, something popping, which she hoped to all the gods was not audible outside the room. “I—I’m just having some trouble with the buttons. Please, do come in.”

  By the time Mrs. Caldwell edged into the room, she had struggled anew into the imprisonment of the dress, and, her back gaping open, stood in silent mortification, crimson-faced, not meeting the mirrored eyes of Mrs. Caldwell, who for the next minute, the longest minute of her life, strained to button the buttons.

  In the end, it proved much too tight.

  “You couldn’t be any skinnier, my dear,” Mrs. Caldwell repeated for the third time, smiling kindly if somewhat grimly. “People were just frailer in the old days, I think, not as healthy as today . . . We could take it to my tailor, perhaps, see what could be done . . .” There sounded another ominous creak of a seam about to split. “Oh, but we wouldn’t want to tear it. Well, we’ll think of something. Vera Wang makes lovely gowns.”

  Later that night, when Paul stopped by for his—conjugally chaste—good-night kiss, she chose not to tell him of her sartorial misadventure. Later still, already in her nightshirt, she walked along the perimeter of the bed, liberating the impossibly starched, taut sheets, when she stepped on something hard and cool with her bare foot. A tiny silk button the color of spilled milk lay on the carpet. She bent to retrieve it, held it for a moment on her palm, then pushed it deep between the mattresses. She realized, of course, that Mrs. Caldwell could not have failed to notice the damage, but all the same, she did not want anyone stumbling upon the fresh evidence of her crime.

  If I sleep soundly tonight, she thought as she climbed into the bed, it should put to rest my mother’s theory of royal blood in our veins. Though I rather suspect I’ve flunked my princess test already. Ah, that was awful, just awful . . . Well, but I can learn, I can attend princess evening courses, I’m sure if I iron enough curtains, I will get good grades . . . No, I must be asleep, this makes no sense—or does it? She giggled aloud, indeed surprising herself out of a shallow dream, then waded back in, smiling a little into her starched, lacy, color-coordinated pillow.

  14. Living Room

  Gestures of Kindness

  “Do you want any help with the rest?” her mother asked without moving from the armchair.

  “No, thanks. It’s embedded in my muscle memory by now.”

  As her mother turned back to the window, she chose the largest parcel from the remaining pile, ripped off the schoolgirl bows and elaborate cherub-print wrapping, and from beneath it produced a hefty cardboard box, which she proceeded to carve open with a knife and from which she then extracted, like a magician from a hat, never-ending swirls of thick packing paper followed by another box, smaller but still substantial, filled with careful wisps of lavender tissue inside which she could already feel something solid, something metal.

  She fumbled for a purchase, pulled, and screamed.

  “Please, please keep your voice down,” her mother said in an exasperated undertone.

  She glanced at the closed door to the bedroom. “Sorry, I keep forgetting,” she whispered. “But shouldn’t we wake him up already? It’s almost time to eat.”

  “Did I hear a scream?” Paul popped his head in from the kitchen. “What is it now?”

  “Bookends. Or maybe doorstops.” She held out a pair of weighty birds, one in each hand, grasping them by their long tails like hammers. “Unless they are weapons of marital discord. Or idols for the altar of Hera?” She consulted a floral card twined around one of the sturdy necks. “Why would your great-aunt Hazel send us two iron peacocks?”

  “Pewter pheasants,” he said patiently. “They are centerpieces. For the dining table.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You mean, like those glass grapes.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the porcelain rabbits.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the fake apples.”

  “Honey, we don’t have to use any of it. Just put everything back in the boxes and stick them in the closet. I told you we should have had the registry. People have their own ideas of decorating.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I see that now, but why—”

  “Your parents’ farewell dinner is about to burn,” he said, ducking back into the kitchen.

  She set the pheasants down on the overflowing table, next to the jeweled candle extinguisher, the ivory saltshaker shaped like the Taj Mahal, and the set of four fantastically ornate picture frames whose kaleidoscopic lumps of flowers, insects, leaves, and fir cones symbolized the four seasons, and regarded everything with a sinking feeling.

  “The butterfly plates are pretty,” she said doubtfully. “Perhaps you can take them back with you, Tanya might like them. Mama? Mama, are you listening?”

  Her mother was still sitting in the armchair by the window, gazing out at the darkening autumnal street, her empty hands folded in her lap.

  “Mama?”

  “I’m sorry, I was thinking about home. What did you say?”

  “Do you want to take any of these things back to Russia with you?”

  They were speaking in hushed voices, to avoid waking her father.

  “No, the suitcase is already packed. And you can certainly use them yourself. Give this room some personality. It looks like a hotel.”

  Paul’s apartment had come fully furnished, its style contemporary and sparse, and while she had made tentative incursions into the bedroom (library books on the nightstand and pajamas shed on the bed) and the kitchen (half-drunk cups of tea in the sink and apple cores on the counter), the main room, whose glass dining table they never used and whose white leather sofa seemed too immaculate to sit on, retained the untouched sleek quality of a photograph in an interior design magazine.

  “But these are all so . . . so unnecessary,” she said, and sighed, surveying the jumble of opened and unopened boxes. “All this stuff.”

  She understood, of course, that underneath their patina of time and museum veneration, an ancient Egyptian spoon in the shape of a girl was still only a spoon and a Greek amphora in all its laconic glory of heroes and beasts only a vessel for oil; yet she sensed that somewhere in the amorphously defined sphere of applied arts, a thin but clear line was drawn between art and domesticity, between beauty and material ostentation—and once the line was crossed, clutter took over. She wondered how all these trifles would appear to someone far in the future. Would her distant descendants be puzzled as to the purpose of the pheasants and the grapes, would they invent their own, wildly inaccurate, explanations that would be accepted as archaeological verities by people who no longer ate at tables and thus required no centerpieces? In fact, it might be interesting to do a series of short poems, each one describing a simple common object in terms both precise and dense with its inherent mystery, with its material randomness. The titles would offer the only clues to the subjects—lines like “A child’s face floating upside down in its silver convexity” under the succinct heading “Cereal Spoon”—

  Her mother had come up to the table behind her.

  “You aren’t doing this right,” she said, sighing in turn. Though she was nearing sixty, her face was still beautiful, but now it often looked opaque, like a mediocre portrait of itself, missing the light that had flared in the original with dazzling, if infrequent, intensity. “Wedding presents aren’t stuff. They are wishes, gestures of kindness. All these people are aware of your existence, they’ve spared a thought for you, and that thought is now part of your home. It comforts me to think about it. About you not being alone. You seemed so lost before Paul. This is the first time I’m leaving you here with my heart at rest.”

/>   Her own heart seized with a familiar, worn-out ache.

  “I wish you didn’t have to leave at all,” she said.

  “Please, we’ve talked about it enough, I think.” Her mother turned to glance at the closed bedroom door. “Our life is there, you know that.”

  There seemed to be nothing to say after that. For a silent minute, they listened to the practiced clatter of pots in the kitchen. The place was rich with smells of roasted potatoes, caramelized onions, rosemary, sugar, cream—a nearing feast.

  “Shouldn’t we wake Papa up?” she said at last. “He asked us to. It’s past seven.”

  “No, let him sleep until dinner, our flight is so early tomorrow . . . Here, why don’t I give you a hand with these.”

  Together they sliced the remaining boxes open, unearthed more crystal, silver, and porcelain, some of it beautiful, some of it ugly, none of it matching. At the bottom of the pile she discovered a flat white parcel barely larger than a pack of cards, three burgundy-colored stamps with Notre Dame in the upper right corner. She stared at the words “Mrs. Paul Caldwell” written in a shockingly familiar handwriting. There was no return address. “Well, that appears to be everything,” her mother said, and busied herself with gathering up the torn cardboard and crumpled paper. She held on to the parcel’s mystery for one moment longer, not touching it, listening to the whoosh of blood in her ears, then ripped the wrapping off.

  Inside she found a small, prim card of thick cream-colored paper, typed this time, which contained only a terse “Congratulations” in its precise center, and a kit of magnetic poetry—“Original Edition”—the kind one stuck on one’s refrigerator.

  There was nothing else.

  “So, what are your plans, then?” her mother said, her tone insistent, as if this was not the first time she had asked the question.

  “Plans?” she echoed flatly. Through the clear plastic of the lid she could see the rectangles of several words—“scream,” “how,” “you”—and an orphaned “ly.”

  “Yes, plans. Have you two given any thought to children?”

  She flushed with an indeterminate feeling—anger mixed with startling bitterness, and something else underneath, something very different. Jerking open the nearest drawer, she shoved the box with the insidious little words deep, deep into the sideboard’s prosperous recesses agleam with an earlier crop of useless treasures, and swung around to face her mother.

  I don’t ever intend to have children, she wanted to say, fiercely. I will not live a life of platitudes, I will not sink into the plush swamp of a comfortable marriage. I will always walk the harder path. Mine will be a life free of the commonplace and drudgery, full of travel and thought, unstinted in feeling and experience—an artist’s life, do you hear me? But there was a look disturbingly like supplication in her mother’s eyes, so instead she said, her voice taut with suppressed emotion, “Mama, I’m twenty-six years old. We got back from our honeymoon three days ago. There is plenty of time for that later.”

  Paul appeared on the kitchen threshold.

  “Almost ready,” he announced. “Maybe you should wake the professor. And we should eat properly this time, at the dining table, don’t you think? Although . . . uh . . .”

  He looked at the absurdly cluttered table.

  “It’s all right,” she said, picking up the pheasants. Anger still had not loosened its hold on her throat, and she would not look at either Paul or her mother. “It won’t take too long to clear this off.” Paul nodded and vanished into the aromatic cloud that hung over the kitchen. “Mama, why don’t you go and wake him up while I pack everything away—”

  “Let’s use it,” her mother said.

  “What?”

  “All these things. The dessert china. The tea set. The champagne flutes. The deer and the peacocks. Let’s use them.”

  “Pheasants,” she corrected mechanically. “Why would we do that?”

  “Did I ever tell you about my collection of old postcards? They were my grandmother’s. My father gave them to me after her death. I was eight or nine. My grandmother had kept them stored in a striped pink-and-white hatbox, and there were theater programs and dried flowers in there as well.”

  As she talked, she began to push the many-colored glasses of sundry shapes and sizes and the plates, no three alike, into incongruously mismatched islands amidst the cornucopia of gilded fruit, arranging them on embroidered placemats and silver chargers.

  “When I opened the hatbox for the first time and saw what was inside, I was enchanted. There were postcards of castles and moonlit lakes and girls in elegant dresses. The pictures themselves were black-and-white, but the girls’ lips, cheeks, and parasols were rouged red by hand. I had never seen anything like it, and it just took my breath away. But I was a secret hoarder. I didn’t want to squander my enjoyment on just any ordinary day, so I didn’t allow myself to look at anything properly, I just piled it all back into the hatbox, shut the lid, and hid it under my bed. For weeks afterward I went about, pretending nothing was there, all swollen with my secret. And every single day I was just dying to get the box out and pore over my treasure, to look at the beautiful girls, but I didn’t let myself. I thought I had plenty of time, so I would choose a perfect moment, make it a special occasion. My birthday, perhaps, or maybe New Year’s.”

  She watched her mother in silence, without stopping her, without helping her. A chill was starting to creep up her spine. Her mother’s face had hardened into an unfamiliar expression of grim determination, and her movements as she darted about the table, sorting, shifting, rearranging, grew faster and faster.

  “Then one day, when I was at school, my father’s new wife cleaned my room. She found a pile of old junk under the bed, and she threw it all out. So you see, I didn’t have any time, as it turned out. When you put something off to do later, it just doesn’t get done, not in the same way. Because there never is any time, there never is any later . . . There, all finished. Where do you keep your matches? I want to light these now.”

  She stared from her mother to the table, groaning under its mad glittering, gleaming, sparkling weight, and back to her mother.

  Her heart was beating slow and hard.

  “Mama,” she said. “Has something happened?”

  “Five minutes!” Paul trumpeted from the kitchen.

  “We really should wake him up now,” her mother said.

  Together they looked at the closed door of the bedroom. The candle flames bent left, bent right in an invisible breeze. The certainty of an imminent disaster hollowed out her insides. She said, “Something is wrong.”

  “Yes.” Her mother stood still, her hands hanging loose by her sides, as though depleted all at once of her frenzied energy. “Don’t tell him I told you, not yet, I want tonight to be . . . to be like before. I promised him I wouldn’t tell you at all, and I didn’t, not before the wedding anyway, I didn’t want to ruin it for you. But it’s time now, I think. Papa is sick. Really sick. It’s cancer, and not the kind they can . . . That is, they don’t know how long . . . Well. All I wanted to tell you is, if you want Papa to see your children, you should start having them now.”

  “And dinner is served!” Paul announced, carrying in a steaming tureen. “Wow, look at all that, it’s like the cave of Ali Baba! . . . Hey, shouldn’t you wake your dad now?”

  “I’m awake, I’ve been awake,” her father said, entering the room. “I’ve just been resting a little.”

  She heard him shuffling as he walked, but that was only because of Paul’s slippers, of course: they were much too big for him, weren’t they, and his own had been packed away already. She could not bring herself to look into his face at first. When she did, she saw what had escaped her in the fuss of the preceding days. He seemed much older than his sixty-eight years, and his skin had a grayish cast, and his eyelids were shadowed by exhaustion, and his mouth was thin and h
ard. Sorrow washed over her because she knew that she would never again be able to recall his face from before, the way it had been, that he was somehow already lost to her—and then he noticed the outrageous, clashing abundance of the table and laughed, laughed in just that contagious way in which he used to laugh when she was a child, slapping his knee with his hand, his face starting into life with a myriad of wrinkles, his eyes dark with a disarming, childish mirth; and she went all quiet inside.

  The four of them sat in the festive light of a dozen candles, amidst the pewter Thanksgiving pheasants and the bronze Christmas deer and the porcelain Easter rabbits and the glass grapes, and lifted mismatched champagne flutes in a toast to the new couple’s happiness. The bubbles fizzed on her tongue, tasting of innocence and loss.

  “Please, may you pass salt,” said her mother to Paul, exhausting her English.

  “Don’t offend now, but this Taj Mahal thing? Is ugly,” said her father, laughing again.

  Why, she thought, why hadn’t they told her before the wedding? She would not have gone through with it but would have returned home instead, would have added no more days to the careless tally of years she had already missed in her father’s life. But it was too late now, and there was only one way left to hold at bay the numbing grief that was spreading through her like a slow, viscous spill.

  Gods, my gods, sometimes the harder path is the opposite of what it seems.

  15. Bedroom

  Conversation in the Dark at the Age of Twenty-seven

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No. Well, maybe. I guess I am. Is something wrong?”

  “I just can’t sleep. I’ve been lying here thinking.”

  “About?”