Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “Five months and a week,” she whispered.

  “You are five months pregnant, and you haven’t told me?”

  “Don’t shout, please don’t shout, you’ll wake them up . . . I didn’t know. Please. Paul. I didn’t know myself. I thought I was just . . .” (Old. Fat. Say it. The cold voice inside nudged her, but she disregarded its promptings.) “I only just found out myself. Paul. It’s going to be a girl. A healthy girl. Look at them. Look at them!”

  And there were the upside-down mermaids floating on the wallpaper, and the warm seashell nightlight, and Emma’s papier-mâché model of a human heart on her desk, and Celia’s one-eared blue bunny hanging half off her bed, and two heads on the pillows, one blond, one dark. And as he stood before them, the big hulk of a man, the big husk of a man, his shoulders drooped, his mouth sagged, and she saw defeat in his eyes, and underneath it, possibly, just possibly, the touch of old warmth, of old kindness.

  “Oh, honey,” he said.

  And though he did not move to scoop her into his arms, but took a step back and, sitting down again, stared at the carpet, an immense exhalation of relief shook her. Her panic abated. It would be all right now, she knew. She sighed, and rose, and, going over to him, placed her hand lightly on his hair, ruffling it, willing him to raise his head and look at her, look at her, until he did at last.

  “Let’s name her after your other grandmother,” she said. “It will make your dad happy. He needs all the happiness he can get right now, you know?” She smiled her tremulous relief down at him, then picked up his big, limp, unresisting hand, and pressed it to her stomach.

  “Margaret,” she said.

  32. Kitchen

  After Thanksgiving

  The dining room still overflowed with the festive chaos of cutlery clicking, glasses ringing, younger children screaming with laughter as they licked the last of the pecan pie mush off their plates, but the meal was over now, the table half cleared, and the voices had already begun to spill into the living room and, from there, to fan out all over the house. Mrs. Caldwell could hear her mother’s incredulous “But how we could eat so big bird so quick!” and her mother-in-law’s decorous laughter as she replied, “It happens every time—of course, there are so many of us,” and even a room away, Mrs. Caldwell thought she detected a slight dipping in her polite voice.

  They were one fewer this year: Paul’s father had died in the spring.

  For a minute Mrs. Caldwell stood still in the deserted kitchen, listening to the noises from the other rooms, surveying the piles of dirty plates, the puddles of cranberry sauce and the chunks of sweet potatoes solidifying on the bottom of serving bowls, the graying remains of the turkey. She had cooked the entire feast with her own hands; since they had stopped indulging in frequent takeout meals (Paul’s new job did not pay quite as well), she had discovered in herself an unsuspected culinary talent. The dinner was a success, she thought as she rolled up her sleeves, turned on the hot water, and soaped the first plate. This was her in-laws’ special wedding china, which Paul’s mother had given them after Dick Caldwell’s passing, and it had to be washed by hand; but Mrs. Caldwell did not mind. She liked the sensation of warmth running over her fingers, liked seeing her immaculate kitchen gradually emerge from beneath the disorder, plate by gleaming plate, glass by sparkling glass, pot by scoured pot, liked hearing the sounds of her well-fed family all around her while being alone, free to—not think, exactly, for she was too full and tired to think—free, then, to feel at peace.

  Of course, her solitude never lasted long. Squash and Snuggle, the new puppy, padded into the kitchen, slashing their tails back and forth in whimpering excitement, and she put a couple of greasy trays on the floor for them to nose. Celia burst in giggling, followed by Maggie, who, at two and a half, liked to hurl herself in endless, heedless pursuit of her siblings. Distracted by the sight of her mother’s legs, Maggie swerved aside and stood clutching at Mrs. Caldwell’s skirt, cooing up at her. Mrs. Caldwell’s heart dissolved. She gave the girls caramel apples, even though they had undoubtedly had enough sweets already—but this was part of Thanksgiving, was it not, everything in excess, everyone generous. They settled at the kitchen table slurping and chewing noisily, just as Eugene wandered in to ask whether she had seen his Brief History of Time. She had indeed: he had left it on top of the toaster oven during breakfast, as he was forever leaving a stream of objects behind him in his absentminded, cogitative, preoccupied progress through the house—mainly books and pencils, but also gloves and hats in winter, rocks and bugs trapped in jars in summer, and socks, and homework, and, of late, scraps of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them. “Oh, thanks,” he said, and, picking up the book, perched on the nearest stool and proceeded to read, oblivious of the clamor of cleaning all around him, oblivious too of the prospect of caramel apples. Rich and George, who had just run in, bickering about some game score (“I did!”—“You did not!”—“I did too!”—“You so didn’t!”), were not oblivious of the apples; Rich tried to take a bite from Maggie’s but she snapped her caramel-smeared teeth at him like some feral beastie, and Mrs. Caldwell hurried over to give the boys their own. Both of them, she noticed, had cranberry sauce splattered up and down their new white shirts; she chastised them out of habit, but everyone knew she did not mean it. Emma, gliding in next, the only one of the children to keep her clothes entirely spill- and spot-free after the two-hour meal, declined the apple and offered to help with the dishes instead; Mrs. Caldwell gave her the delicate task of drying the crystal. Her mother tried to take up a towel too, but Mrs. Caldwell would have none of it, bustling her over to the table with a cup of coffee, which she presently dispensed to Emma the elder as well (she had long stopped thinking of Paul’s mother as Mrs. Caldwell).

  Paul was the last to enter the kitchen.

  “So that’s where everyone is,” he said. “I can finish with the washing.”

  “I’m almost done now,” Mrs. Caldwell said. “Here, pass me the carving knife.”

  He stood behind her at the sink, surveying the crowded kitchen.

  “I do believe we need a bigger house,” he said.

  She whipped around, and discovered him smiling, and laughed herself, to make sure that they both knew it was a joke; for she would not be moving anywhere.

  She liked this house, and she liked this life, just as they were.

  Her sense of contentment had crept up on her. After Maggie’s birth, more and more often, she had felt as though she was finally growing into her days. Perhaps the house had simply been too vast for her and she had needed every last one of her children to fill its empty rooms with disarray and light, and, in doing so, to put a stop to her uneasy, strained sensation of being a grain of sand falling through chilly expanses of the hourglass in a place, in a life, not her own. At times she thought of it, half seriously, in terms of destiny: Maybe each person was intended, by God, or the position of stars, or one’s biological nature, to achieve a given number of feats, be it children or scientific discoveries or works of art or anything else of merit. Destiny was not the same as fate, of course, and one was free to fulfill it or to ignore it as one saw fit, but until—unless—all the discrete internal hollows yawning empty with potential were filled, one was bound to feel loose, restless, incomplete, not at ease in one’s own skin. Maybe, according to some mysterious reckoning, she was meant to have six children, and now that she did, she could take a deep breath at last, enjoy the fruits of her labors, embrace her hard-earned role of the capable matriarch, dispenser of food, warmth, and love, the irreplaceable heart of a large, happy family in the bosom of a welcoming house.

  Or maybe she was just too busy to wallow in discontent, and too wise to yearn for the unattainable.

  As for Paul, he now came home early on weekdays and stayed home on weekends, and she no longer cared to sniff his clothes, or worried about the size of her own—just as, having learned at long last how to dri
ve, she no longer dreamed of finding a highway and disappearing into the sunset in a convertible, its roof down, the wind in her hair, but merely used her minivan to transport the children from baseball to ballet.

  “I was only joking about the house,” Paul said, and she could see his mouth growing thin, as it did whenever he thought of their recent financial setbacks. He lowered his voice. “Have you spoken to your mother?”

  “Not yet,” she whispered back. “I will as soon as I get her alone.”

  Later that evening, when everyone else had retired upstairs, she asked her mother to join her for tea. She served it in the familiar porcelain cups of her childhood, which her mother had brought as a gift on a previous visit; though when she had first produced six misshapen bundles from her suitcase and proceeded to unwrap the thick layers of woolen stockings, all the while smiling slyly, like a magician about to bestow some momentous surprise, Mrs. Caldwell had looked at the row of hatching cups and failed to recognize them. They were not as she remembered them from the countless teatimes in the dark, tight entrapment of their Moscow kitchen. There, radiant with gold, bright with paradisiacal flowers and birds, they had stood out as something singular, something precious, that had required conscious handling and admiration amidst the mundane oppression of grimy pots and aluminum forks. Now they were only half a dozen gaudy cups, one of them chipped, lost in her light, spacious kitchen, whose every glass-paneled cabinet glittered with much finer china. All the same, she thanked her mother profusely, and afterward made sure to use the crudely painted cups whenever the two of them had tea together.

  Old people, she knew, became so attached to their old things.

  “Have you thought more of our proposal?” she asked, and blew on her tea. “There is no one to take care of you in Moscow, and at your age . . . Of course, seventy-four isn’t old, but I worry.”

  “I know it makes sense,” her mother said smiling, “but I’m so settled there—it’s my whole life. Did I tell you, by the way, they finally finished with that construction across the road. Only took them half a century. It’s a giant parking garage now, lots of silver Mercedes going in and out. But I sometimes wonder: What was it supposed to be, I mean in the beginning? Something else, don’t you think? Remember, your father used to joke—”

  Mrs. Caldwell waited for her chatter to subside.

  “Yes, but our proposal?” she asked again.

  “Well, I just hate the idea of our apartment lying empty, going to ruin, your father’s books and pipes gathering dust—”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Caldwell, “but of course the apartment would have to be sold.”

  Her mother blinked at her.

  “But you see, it can never be sold,” she said, speaking with exaggerated slowness, as if to someone foreign. “Because it’s our home. And then, your children—it’s all I can leave them, you see. I know it’s small and poor, nothing like this—”

  Mrs. Caldwell gently moved her hand over her mother’s.

  “Mama,” she said. “It’s over, that part of life, it’s just—it’s like one’s childhood or youth, you will always remember it, but you can’t, and you shouldn’t, ever go back. And my children don’t even speak Russian.”

  “But I don’t understand. What do you mean?” her mother muttered, and looked at Mrs. Caldwell with frightened eyes, as though she might have misheard the entire conversation. “You want me to sell our apartment?”

  “I think that would be best,” Mrs. Caldwell replied softly.

  (Her mother thought: Does she not remember? Does she not know? Any place is only a place, four walls, a door, a window—it’s the accumulated living, the weight of memories, that make it magic, that make it yours. The air you breathe within your four walls is like no other air, and your past is not past, and the love you have felt all your life is bright within, and you never age, and you never, ever forget. But she left, and she has forgotten. I shouldn’t have given her my cups. No one can have a future without a past. She is only forty-three, but she has misplaced her childhood and now she looks so old.)

  She looks so old, Mrs. Caldwell thought, and lowered her eyes, her chest tightening. The silence hung thick between them.

  “This needs to be sweeter,” her mother said in a tone of abrupt disapproval, and put a sugar cube into her cup, and stirred it without looking up. Mrs. Caldwell waited for her to speak, but she said nothing else, just drank her tea in silence, her face askew. Having taken the last sip, she stood up, carried the empty cup to the sink, and set about carefully scraping the soggy tea leaves into the trash.

  “Please, just leave everything,” Mrs. Caldwell called out. “I’ll take care of it.”

  But her mother was still standing by the trash, staring into it.

  “You threw away the turkey leftovers again?” she asked. “You promised not to.”

  “But they were mostly bones,” Mrs. Caldwell replied with a slight shrug. “No one would have eaten them tomorrow.”

  “I would have,” her mother said, and now her voice was oddly close to weeping. “Why, why must you always throw everything away? It’s not becoming. It’s a wasteful person’s habit. It’s—it’s a sin.”

  “But Mama—” Mrs. Caldwell began, deeply shocked.

  Without another glance at her daughter, the old woman quit the kitchen.

  33. Son’s Room

  The Wheel of Time

  As she grew older, Mrs. Caldwell noticed a curious thing: time moved differently in different parts of the house. In little-frequented rooms, where living was thin, it pooled like calm, standing water, hardly ever changing; when you peered inside, it would give you back a reflection of yourself at another age. Thus, from the ballroom’s threshold, she sometimes glimpsed a young woman, almost a girl, sitting on the floor by the flames that had turned to ashes many years before, lifting a hesitant hand to the golden choker on her neck, awed by the splendor of it all, afraid to be happy. Other places served as frames to a single bright moment, a flash of desire or pain or fear. The moments themselves were in the past, and the rooms had flowed by on the current of years, obscured by layers of subsequent, dimmer living, no longer supporting the memory precisely; the earthy gloom of the wine cellar had been banished in the glare of new fluorescent lamps, and the twins’ bedroom had long shed its giraffes and monkeys, the cribs replaced by the efficiency of bunk beds, the twins themselves gangly teenagers now. But there time had stopped in its tracks, briefly blinded, and to this day, whenever she entered the cellar to pick a bottle of Riesling for dinner or happened to glance at a clock hanging above Rich’s desk, she felt touched by an emotion—only an echo of the past emotion, to be sure, yet always there.

  She preferred other rooms, where life had not gouged out a permanent scar and where several layers of time coexisted in peace: recollections overlapping, comforting her with a steady knowledge of now and then, nothing lost yet nothing over—a good life having been lived, a good life being lived still. In the girls’ room, she imagined she could see the vanished mermaid wallpaper as a playful shimmer under the current green paint, Celia’s earlier stuffed animals sharing the shelves with her later piles of books, Emma’s elaborate architectural drawings hanging over her kindergarten stick figures in their houses of squares and triangles. She thought her firstborn’s room like that too—a decade and a half of warm, innocent memories present at once, from a toddler napping cheek to cheek with his toy hedgehog to an eighteen-year-old arranging, with shy pride, his chess trophies on the dresser, all visible simultaneously in her mind’s eye, reassuring her with a sense of a happy, wholesome childhood she had helped shape and protect; and when, in his sophomore year, Eugene brought Adriana, his Romanian girlfriend of the past three months, home for a short Christmas visit, it was solely out of reluctance to muddy the memories, not out of any sense of old-fashioned propriety, that she gave Adriana the guest bedroom.

  On the last night of their visit,
Mrs. Caldwell went up to her son’s room. She knocked before entering, but it was a cursory knock: she had left Eugene foraging for a snack in the kitchen, and assumed the room empty. She had misplaced her glasses earlier that evening, and rather suspected that she had forgotten them on his nightstand, resting in the crook of his book, which she had leafed through in a surreptitious moment. All through his stay, she had made mildly disparaging comments about his choice of reading matter whenever she had caught him absorbed in it, and was now hoping to retrieve her glasses before he stumbled upon them, as she preferred to conceal her curiosity about the novel. Secrets, even minute, trivial ones, did not come easy when one was nearing fifty, burdened as one was with failing eyesight and increasing absentmindedness.

  The telltale glasses were indeed there, on her son’s bedside table, sprawled with abandon across the open pages of Olga’s most recent book. She did not, however, notice the glasses, because Adriana was lying in a come-hither pose on top of Eugene’s faded Star Wars duvet, naked but for a tiny triangle of black lace between her startlingly white thighs. That much she had time to glimpse, her hand frozen on the doorknob, Adriana’s inviting smile frozen on her lips, before the girl began to scramble madly, grabbing for her clothes, crying, “Mrs. Caldwell!”

  “I’m so sorry!” Mrs. Caldwell cried in turn, and, leaping back into the hallway, slammed the door shut. Once outside, she stood staring at the doorknob. Twenty-some years before, from the other side of a slammed door, she had assumed that Mrs. Caldwell—the original Mrs. Caldwell of the tweed suit, the pearl necklace, and the rigid haircut—had felt shock and distaste when coming upon her in a similar state of undress; yet she herself felt neither. She was saddened by the loss of the room where stuffed hedgehogs had lived in the shadow of a peeling solar system, and, at the same time, relieved that her bookish, abstracted boy was progressing through life’s stages in a manner befitting a self-sufficient adult male. Then, too, she could not help feeling a bit jealous at being supplanted in her son’s affections, as well as fleetingly bitter—because at her age of forty-six she knew that she would never again inspire that tug of desire in a man, because her days of lolling about in skimpy lingerie had been over before she had known to treasure them fully . . .