Forty Rooms
Page 19
“Sure,” she said after a moment’s pause.
When she stood, the taffeta pooled stiffly around her feet, making her stumble.
He looked up, seemed to take in her drab maternity bra and the unzipped skirt for the first time, and said smiling, “Maybe you should buy yourself some nice new clothes while I’m away. Something . . . custom-fitted.”
She winced and opened her mouth to reply and closed her mouth again.
“One vodka tonic coming right up,” he said, already walking away—and then Celia wailed as she always did, without any warning: asleep one instant, rending the air with bloodcurdling screams the next. In the blink of an eye Mrs. Caldwell wiggled out of the skirt, tossed it onto the hanger, threw on her robe, and was flying out of the closet. In the doorway she heard a faint metallic rustle and, glancing back, discovered the skirt crumpled on the floor, the hanger, bereft of its weight, swinging lightly; but she did not return to pick it up, vanishing instead around the bend of the hallway.
The woman on the other side of the mirror stared after her thoughtfully. It was sad, she considered, what some lives came to when all was said and done; yet in truth, she failed to muster much sadness on behalf of Mrs. Caldwell. She moved her eyes around the closet shelves, studying the haughty lacquer of red-soled pumps, the soft sheen of cashmere shawls, the dry luster of snakeskin clutches. What if some catastrophe erased at one go all the cushioned comforts of that woman’s oblivious life—some devastating natural disaster or, better yet, a bloody revolution? Her husband would be one of the first to get shot, and she would have to rely on herself alone to feed her brood of starving children. She would have nothing left to her name but a pile of expensive trifles, shards of a beautiful, idle life that could no longer be imagined in the new world of military fatigues, food rations, and sudden death; and she would have to trade each ruffled gown, each jeweled bag, for a crust of bread, for a spoonful of milk, for a sliver of life-giving medicine. There might be a poem here, she thought, happy as always when things shimmered with potential in her mind; but as she glanced again around the closet, she decided against it, already bored with the meaningless clutter of the costly ephemera—bored with Mrs. Caldwell. She picked up her notebook, rubbed the bridge of her nose in a small gesture she had inherited from her father, and left to search for ideas in the wider world.
28. Exercise Room
Conversations with the Dead
“And don’t argue with me, child,” her grandmother said in that habitual tone of disapproval Mrs. Caldwell remembered so well. Whenever she lifted the cigarette to her unevenly painted lips, the pale, expressionless cameo women on her bracelet clattered down her mottled arm. “Your life is unhealthy, I tell you. At your age, you need to meet people, go places, have experiences. You need to be greedy.”
Again Mrs. Caldwell did not answer, hoping that such a demonstrable failure to uphold her end of the conversation might put a stop to the tedious dream. She did not remember falling asleep. She remembered herding the children to bed and mixing drinks and feeling better after the first martini and worse after the second. She remembered Paul, who had again returned from work in a foul mood, lecturing her about the state of the economy, asking whether she had not, of late, spent much too freely, carrying on unintelligibly about mortgages, budgets, overheads and underwrites, or was it overheaders and underwriters, then glancing at her waistline mid-sentence, and glancing away just as quickly. She remembered setting her jaw, making a silent, angry resolution, abandoning her barely touched third martini to change into her workout clothes, and stumbling downstairs to the exercise room. She even remembered plopping down onto the weight bench to tighten her shoelaces—but after that there was a disconcerting blank, and now here she was, running on the treadmill, just as she had intended, except that her late grandmother was sitting on the treadmill’s handlebars, wearing her old purple robe of faded velour and felt slippers the color of dusty roses, and, in turn, lecturing her about life, pulling on her cigarette between admonitions.
“Let me tell you something, child,” her grandmother began anew. “A woman arrived among us recently, and not an old woman either, not a day over sixty—”
“Arrived where?” Mrs. Caldwell interrupted, forgetting her decision not to encourage the unnerving apparition. “Heaven?”
“Never you mind where,” her grandmother replied with irritation. “Anyway, this woman, she spent the last fifteen years of her life lying in bed. Nothing wrong with her, mind you, she just didn’t feel like getting up. Had a live-in nurse bring her meals and clean her messes and tend to her bedsores. Now she’ll be stuck where she is forever. You have to pay to move up, you know, and the currency is memories, stories of your life you must give away, like a kind of scouring, a gradual peeling of onion layers, do you see, to reveal the core within. And no, before you start to argue, there is a world of difference between memories and fantasies. But anyway, this woman, she is like a potato instead of an onion, all bland and mealy inside, so she has nothing to give, nothing whatsoever.”
“Oh, is it like purgatory, then?” Mrs. Caldwell panted, curious in spite of herself.
She had finished the first mile, and was doing the second mile uphill.
Her grandmother ignored her question. “There is an even sadder case, a woman who sat on her toilet for years, refusing to stand up, until her skin actually grew around the seat. Mind-boggling, it is, but I tell you”—and she stabbed the glowing cigarette perilously close to Mrs. Caldwell’s face—“this is exactly where you are heading if you are not careful. Can’t you just stop this senseless trotting in place and listen to me? No matter how fast you run, you won’t run away from yourself, you know.”
Mrs. Caldwell clamped her lips tight, and furtively increased the speed and the incline of the treadmill, hoping that her grandmother might fall off; but the old woman held on.
“It’s not healthy, I tell you,” she repeated. “You need to learn how to drive, you need to get out of the house, you need people around you. And by ‘people’ I don’t mean anyone below the age of ten, or anyone whom you pay, either. Otherwise, before you know it, you’ll start talking to yourself or imagining things that aren’t there, or worse, not being able to tell the two apart. You’re too young to spend your life within four walls.”
At this, Mrs. Caldwell had to speak, had to object.
“I’m thirty-eight, Grandmother. Almost thirty-nine. Hardly young.” To herself, she added: In this place, aging begins early. And earlier still when you have five kids.
“Child, you don’t have the slightest idea of what aging means. And who forced you to have five kids?” her grandmother grumbled, just as though Mrs. Caldwell had voiced her thoughts aloud. She should not have drunk that third martini, she scolded herself dully. “And did you have any of your children for the simple reason that you wanted to have them?” the old woman continued relentlessly. “Indeed you did not. You had the first one to console a sick parent, the second to provide a playfellow for the first, the next two by accident, or maybe out of some self-destructive impulse—let a council of psychiatrists puzzle over that one—and the last, the last out of guilt. Children are not some stoppers you can wedge in wherever your life springs a leak. Next you’ll be having one to fix your failing marriage.”
“My marriage isn’t failing!” Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed with indignation.
Her grandmother was the one to stay silent now, but her silence felt full of gloating.
“Oh, what can you possibly know about it?” Mrs. Caldwell cried, nettled. “You divorced both of your husbands, and only ever had my mother, and you didn’t even raise her, you left her to Grandfather and his second wife to raise, while you went off somewhere, I suppose to have experiences and to be greedy. Well, I have all the experiences I need right here. Of course, I could have had a different life, I could have gone hopping from Paris to Rome to Vienna with that—that genius wannabe who didn’t love me
nearly enough and who was so self-absorbed he probably would never have wanted children. Instead I chose to create a real home, to have a family with a man who makes me feel safe and whole, who will always love me, no matter what—”
Her grandmother’s small eyes glittered like a crow’s, and her voice grew sharp with wicked triumph. “And if he will always love you no matter what, then tell me, my dear, why are you huffing and puffing like that on this infernal contraption?”
And all at once grief was upon her. The monstrous notion of growing old, of losing her husband’s love, of finding herself alone—of having her entire life fall apart—took hold of her roughly. Was it indeed true that she had spent her best years as a fairy-tale princess locked away in a tower—a confinement of her choosing, a confinement with many comforts, but one with barred windows and locked doors all the same? And now, seeing the gates inexplicably open, had she wandered outside, only to find herself, dazed and helpless, in the midst of a dark, frightening forest where wild beasts crouched in wait in the shadow of the night and she herself was no longer young enough, no longer pretty enough, to count on a rescue by a passing knight?
Gods, my gods, how did I come to be in this desolate place, where did my sunlit garden go, did I take a wrong turn somewhere along the way—
“There, there, no need to mope like that,” her grandmother said, patting her sweaty hand. “Bad things happen whenever they get a mind to, but good things don’t happen at all unless you go looking for them. Remember the story I told you about the tree? Why did you stop with those nice little poems you used to write? You shouldn’t give up trying, you know. Go ahead and rhyme a line or two—start with your own small life if it makes you feel better, but do remember to aim higher and higher as you plod along.” She cackled, her crow’s eyes sparkling. “Why, if you take me as your guide, you could become a modern-day Dante someday. Oh, the things I could tell you about heaven and hell . . .”
Abruptly she ceased cackling, dropped her cigarette onto the floor, and glanced over her shoulder, looking half annoyed and half alarmed, as if she had done something wrong and someone was calling her now to come and be chastised. (In the end she would be forgiven yet again. Silly woman, God boomed in her ear, sternly but not unkindly. Why must you always run on so? You told this poor girl enough fairy tales when you were alive. Come now, Gabriel has called everyone to evening tea, and we will be serving your favorite gooseberry jam.)
Mrs. Caldwell looked where her grandmother was looking, but there was nothing there. “What tree, Grandmother?” she asked, turning back, but her grandmother was gone, and she was finishing her second mile on the treadmill, out of breath, crying for some reason, the mirrors all around the exercise room crowded with unmistakably middle-aged women who had swimming, inebriated eyes and unsubtle hints of double chins. The air held telltale traces of smoke. Mrs. Caldwell wiped away the tears with her sleeve, turned off the treadmill, and stepped down, swaying. If Paul finds out that I’ve taken up smoking, he will be upset, she thought, bending to pick the cigarette stub off the floor. Of course, I only ever smoke down here, where he never sets foot, but still . . . She was about to slip the stub into her pocket, to bury it in the depths of the trashcan later, when she noticed that it looked oddly unfamiliar, steely gray instead of the speckled gold of her own preferred brand, and ringed with peach-tinted lipstick. Why, oh why, did she have to start on that fourth martini? Averting her eyes, she tossed the cigarette back on the floor and pushed it under the treadmill with her foot. There, all out of sight now, and everything was well, and no reason to feel so unsettled.
She turned off the lights, and, to her relief, the middle-aged, double-chinned women vanished obediently. “So what if I’m no longer twenty,” she said aloud, arguing with an invisible someone. “So what if I’m no longer skinny. My husband will love me no matter what.”
She slammed the door on her way out.
29. Laundry
The Laundry Cycle
Friday was Mrs. Caldwell’s laundry day.
Unlike some things, it did not become more enjoyable with repetition.
Occasionally, as she threaded collar stays through shirt collars, buttoned cardigan buttons, and ironed creases into Paul’s pants, she pondered a certain paradox: An average woman—or at least an average married woman with children, which, for all she knew, no longer signified an average woman; to rephrase, then, a woman average for most of human history—almost certainly devoted more of her time to the pursuit of laundering than to the pursuit of love; yet for all the thousands and thousands of poems written about love, only a handful had ever been written about laundry. Without a doubt, laundry, as she had learned rather exhaustively, was in its essence not a poetic matter, and most poets were men and knew little about it; but was not imparting beauty and meaning to the mundane and the meaningless one of the most vital missions of poetry?
One day in January, after she had hurried to cram the washer full of her husband’s shirts, she tried her hand at a limerick. She stumbled almost instantly: there seemed to be nothing that rhymed with either “Moscow” or “Russia.” She grew stubborn and for a couple of minutes paced the stuffy laundry room, now and then bumping the ironing board with her hip, until the last syllable fell into place.
There was a young woman from Moscow
Who bought laundry detergent at Costco.
But her clothes turned to mold,
And then she grew old,
That no-longer-young woman from Moscow.
This, of course, was neither beautiful nor particularly meaningful; but every Friday from then on, as she folded and ironed in the small, steamy room with its stacks of damp underwear and pastel-hued seascapes on the white windowless walls, she continued to toy with words—just to while away the time—until, without writing down a line, she had half composed a collection of laundry poems across the genres.
She resolved to set them down on paper when she was done.
February she devoted to the epic and the folk song. The epic installment, written in measured Homeric rhythm, sang of the dawn of the world—rosy-fingered Eos rising over the wine-colored sea, Nausicaa and her handmaidens on the shore stretching linens and laughing, the linens fluttering in the wind, white and fresh like Nausicaa’s purity, and Odysseus, watching her, pierced with an unaccustomed regret, the sheets spotless, the virgin smiling, the words unspoken, the cool air brisk with the flapping of taut cloth, the sweetness of what might have been and what never would be: the recently violent world of war and rapine reined in by the civilizing restraint of a young girl’s domestic perfection. The folk-song fragment was a medieval dirge, the lament of a peasant woman at a half-frozen river, scraping blood off the mail shirt of a conquering Mongol who had burned down her village and slaughtered her husband. In the last week of the month, she dashed off a quick fairy-tale tribute—a happy little ditty trilled by an ever-hopeful, ever-misguided Cinderella over her tub of soapsuds.
In March, she composed some erotic couplets—a courtesan in Renaissance Venice humming to herself as she perfumed her red satin pillows—and a longer tragic poem set in Paris, the whispered prayer of a mother in a dark, rat-infested attic bending over the tiny soiled underclothes of a dead child as revolution swept through the streets outside. While in the French mood, she also amused herself with a short Molière-style comedy, in which sly maids and greedy servants exploited their masters’ bedroom secrets gleaned from love tokens unearthed at the brushing of gold-trimmed petticoats.
She rounded off the month with a quick haiku.
God from his white cloud
watches angels soaping souls,
scrubbing off our sins.
In April and May, she paid cursory tribute to a variety of minor genres, including:
anthropology: a fiercely rhymed chorus of old women gathered in the village square the morning after a wedding to inspect the sheets and stone the errant bride;
and, finally, autobiography: Paul doing his first-ever laundry load, in the early days of their marriage—and, far from separating the reds from the whites, indiscriminately picking up the entire pile of dirty clothes he had dumped on the floor in the hallway and throwing it into the washer, trapping in the midst of the mess her favorite, her only, pair of black leather boots (which she had lined up neatly by the door). The boots had been ruined, and she had been vexed. She had never let him approach the washer again. Now, after having devoted what must have translated into solid weeks of time to laundry duty (a conservative calculation: at three hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year, thirteen and a half years of married life: some eighty-eight days of nothing but laundry), she wondered whether the boot fiasco had been as scatterbrained, as innocent of intent, as she had supposed it in the heat of the moment. Yet the poem was devoid of any traces of anger: it had turned out oddly tender, nostalgic almost.
She did not think it one of her more successful efforts.
In the middle of June, two weeks before her fortieth birthday, she was hunting down the twins’ mismatched socks while working on a children’s song:
The sock monster through the house
Tiptoes quiet as a mouse.
Doorknobs turn and drawers creak,
But you won’t see him if you peek.
He will crawl into the laundry,
He will—he will—he will . . .
And it was while searching for the insistently escaping rhyme to “laundry” that she looked directly at the telltale stains on her husband’s collar, the glinting peach-colored traces resembling a woman’s lipstick—smelling of a woman’s lipstick too, as she verified in the next, unthinking moment, lifting the shirt to her nose before she could divert her attention. And, of course, she had seen them before, these now obvious signs—had glimpsed them, but had not wanted to inspect them closely, thrusting the clothes into the washer with increasingly frantic movements, explaining away the faint whiffs of perfume and the most conspicuous spots—a splash of ketchup on this sweater’s shoulder, a dash of mayonnaise on those pants’ zipper, he had always been an enthusiastic eater—and, on that January day, when she had peered an incautious instant too long at another peach-tinted smear on a shirt’s cuff and found the truth looming dangerously close, occupying her mind with a limerick, then a dirge, then a haiku . . .