The Magician's Girl

by Doris Grumbach

  ‘Another cup, please,’ she said to the counter girl. She was trying to prolong the time out of the car, relax from the compulsively bent driving posture. During the service for Grant, Minna had not been able to keep her mind on her dead son, who seemed absent, somehow, in both body and spirit from the chapel. She was absorbed in remembering something he had told her about funerals in South Korea. ‘Pallbearers wear cotton masks over their mouths, you know, like people in cities who have difficulty breathing the bad air. Pallbearers believe the dead have to be protected from contagion, not the living. It’s a funny sight, those funerals, six masked men bearing a coffin in which you know an unmasked dead man lies.’ Should they all have been wearing masks, she wondered, to protect poor Grant from the contagion of living?

  At nine Minna stopped for the night on the outskirts of Indianapolis. She parked her car at a motel, registered and walked across the street to a place that advertised, in a neon sign, ALL-NITE HAMBURGERS. Too tired to eat, she picked at the meat, setting little pieces of it on top of the pickle she had cut up. She forced down the french fries, drank two cups of black coffee and walked wearily back to the motel. At her door—number 13, she noted grimly—she patted the VW that had done so well so far but had seemed, each time she climbed reluctantly back into it, to be growing smaller and less hospitable. At the end of the drive she had been so tired that the three lanes she was traveling blended into one; she found herself driving on the berm of the road. All the distinguishing marks of Indiana she had thought she might encounter melded into one repetitive landscape: low garages, barns, diners, farmhouses glaring in the brutal sun and set back from the interstate in groves of dusty cottonwood trees, rusting implements and old cars left in corners of summer-browned rough fields.

  ‘Indiana,’ she thought. ‘And across the whole state of Ohio’—turning the key in the lock and putting up the little chain. Richard used to say the whole Middle West could be summed up in one word: ‘corn,’ and if you wanted to be wordy, you might add ‘soybeans.’ ‘Richard,’ Minna said aloud to the mirror that hung crookedly over the Art Deco dresser, searching into it for his face. She realized he stood beside her without leaving an image in the mirror. She lay on the bed, too tired to go through the ritual of teeth, washing and undressing. She never knew whether he lay down beside her or not. She was asleep at once.

  At dawn she was awake. ‘No sense lying here,’ she thought. She got up stiffly, washed her face, left the door of the little box of a room ajar, climbed into the VW, all in one continuous movement because she thought if she gave consideration to these activities she would not be able to perform any one of them. She had gone some miles west on Route 74 before she became aware of Richard sitting beside her, propped up against her boxes of three- by five-inch cards, on which were written, in her careful scholar’s hand, her notes for the study of the lives of five factory workers—all women—who had died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in New York City. She realized he had been sitting there since she left Indianapolis, perhaps even since she pulled out of the Manhattan garage with a false sense of total freedom.

  ‘Richard,’ she said, looking straight ahead. ‘I’m ready to tell you what I feel. I haven’t been able to before, in all the years of our marriage. We never talked of such things, of anything really except things of use. We were too busy, doing for ourselves, for our dinners, for Grant, for our security and our futures, for those we considered our friends, and for our elderly parents. We bought our living spaces, in suburbia and on the coast, all but this last one when we holed up without responsibilities, we told each other, in the Beresford, with Central Park for our garden, the Sheep Meadow for our lawn, the Reservoir for our lake. We decorated, we furnished, we discarded and we bought: coffee makers, and blenders, radios and phonographs as big as coffins, cars that smelled of newness and proud possession. We bought clothes. God, how we bought clothes. We packaged ourselves as attractively as our homes, for our friends’ admiration, and when we were finished with our clothes we gave everything, in great gestures of generosity, to Goodwill and the Salvation Army. We traveled often. But somehow I got more pleasure from making plans and plotting projected itineraries than from the places themselves when we finally arrived. Maybe we were tired from the rigorous preparations and purchases. It was always so. The Caribbean had bad food, the south of France was hot, the Cape was crowded, the water in Maine too cold, London too expensive. But in the months of anticipation, all these places had been without flaw.’

  Richard made no move to reply or to contribute, made no contradictions. Minna went on, ‘Well, I grant you, we did have fun. We walked, sunned, snorkeled, swam, floated and sailed pleasurably, played with our son and waited anxiously for him to learn to walk, acquire teeth and words, and then sentences. Do you remember reading to him endlessly, talking to him about everything in careful sentence structure because we were told what echoes young children were? But he, choosing his silences carefully, talked back very little. We worried until he managed to learn to swim, to ride a bicycle: what anxiety! We loved him and he lived with us patiently, tolerantly. Even as a boy he started to love someone else. We never had a chance at the grown man.

  ‘And our work. Well, we had that. We had parallel careers, which never touched at any point. I disliked your colleagues, you were bored with mine. Your profession was of importance to the world, mine much less. Still, we worked long hours, and when we stopped, played as hard. We listened avidly to chamber music, we read new novels and went to the opera and the ballet (walking down Columbus Avenue to City Center from the Beresford and back again) without having to be part of the taxi battle. We barbecued meat on the spit in one kitchen and before that in our Vineyard garden and made elaborate drinks in the blender. Everything we did, you cutting and suturing, I correcting and lecturing, had the same hard, driving conviction behind it. I cleaned when the maid didn’t come, we cooked on her night out, we marketed, as my mother used to call it, and cooked for our friends to display our skill, and they marveled at the results. We gave them our recipes with secret pride. (Grant, of course, resisted our culinary accomplishments. He ate only foods he could cover with catsup.) We paid our debts and our charges and our taxes, and when your early-April temper grew too hot we hired someone to figure them for us. Once more childless when Grant went off to Brown, we settled into the grassless, elevated apartment, with no attic and no cellar to leak, with flower beds and herbs restricted to boxes outside the windows and a motorized lift in place of staircases, flagstone walks and mowed pathways.

  ‘We passed through childbirth, moves, promotions, mumps and roseola, women’s monthly plague, drink, too much of it, hiatal hernias and hemorrhoids, wandering desires, sleepless nights, periodontists and psychiatrists, laundry crises (a black sock washed with all the white shirts), athlete’s foot, psoriasis and poison ivy, checks that bounced and small gains in the stock market, flus and bronchial phlegms, mosquito bites, yes, and squirrel bites, but no, that was mine and a very long time ago. Baldness afflicted you; my body hair grew sparse after menopause, my temper short; your impatience with fools, nurses and women in general grew noticeable, especially after you passed your fiftieth birthday.

  ‘But look: we have outgrown our guilts, about our parents, about each other. About Grant: I don’t know. Are we responsible? Did some lack in us force him to compensate with a mean girl? We are here, having come through depressions, the Jazz Age, the Crash, wars and the death of Grant. He is gone, a nonachiever from the very start of his life, saved from a war only to succumb to a feminine twist of the knife in the heart. I’ve outlived my now-famous classmate who surrendered too early, who attained fame with her poetry and by gas. I tell all the people who want to interview me about her that I never knew her well, which surely is true. I understand her better now because I’ve outlived her, but I had no part in her interior life, for which I feel some guilt. You’ve outlived your alcohol-sodden college roommate who spent part of every year at a “health farm” dryin
g out. We’ve got past all the pains and breaks and illicit pleasures.’

  At Danville, just over the state line into Illinois, Minna decided to have some coffee and food. The terrible, inexorable demands of Route 74 had set up a percussion behind her eyes. She began to see puddles in the center of the road. She began to wonder if some of the trucks that passed her wanted her VW off the road, whether the low farms, which seemed entirely without people, had been decimated by a bomb just before she passed them. For twenty miles she had not seen a soul on either side of the road. Her imaginings and her paranoia about the trucks grew. ‘I’d better stop, for sure,’ she thought, and took the next exit into Danville.

  ‘All right, Dr. Roman,’ she said to her husband without bothering to look over at him. ‘We’ll stop for a bit. I think I’m getting absentminded. Next thing you know, I’ll drive into somebody’s barn, kill a pig or something and end up in jail. I’ll be fined some outlandish amount. It’ll have been a prize boar he was raising for the Illinois State Fair.’ She laughed foolishly, drove into the first driveway she came to and pulled up in front of a Donut Shoppe.

  That night Minna stayed in Rock Island, a little more than an hour from Iowa City. She was too weary to drive farther. The place she found to stay was close to the river. After a supper of chow mein that made her feel queasy even as she ate, she found a place along the waterfront that was not blocked by parking lots or restaurants. Easing herself down on the rough, stained pier, she took off her shoes and put her feet into the water. It was green with scum, in which floated metal can tops, foam cups, straws and condoms. ‘So I greet the mighty Mississippi,’ she said aloud to the slowly eddying, thick water at her feet.

  Next morning, feeling grateful that she was almost at the end of the terrible trek, she rose at six, had some instant coffee and a Danish pastry, what the motel called a ‘Continental breakfast.’ After she had turned in her key at the desk and come outside to breathe the fresh early-morning air, she noticed the sign over the entrance to the place: DE LUXE BUDGET MOTEL, it read. ‘An oxymoron,’ she thought. ‘Well, hardly, or maybe, or perhaps both, or nothing,’ she said to Richard, who had returned to the seat beside her, silent, as if he were waiting for her to continue her monologue. It seemed to her he was smoking his pipe. ‘Still here, are you? Well, you picked the better place to sleep. That bed was hardly big enough for two of us to share.’ When he failed to comment, she was caught up again in her conversation with him. ‘Share. A good place to start. We believed in it. Share the wealth, share the driveway, share the bed, the responsibility. We bought shares. Everything seemed so safe. Our money was safe. Our retirements, not so far away now, all safe. We have a safe-deposit box and safe investments. Safety in privacy and double locks and sometimes in numbers, in three,’ she reminded Richard. ‘In three we thought and then when that uncrowded number failed, when we buried our broken-up son, you said, “We’ll be all right, we’ll manage. Other people do. We’ll make out all right.” And I said, I remember saying when you held my hand and while we waited for the hired black limousine to take us home from the cemetery, “You think we’ll get over this, don’t you? Well, today I think neither of us will.” You said, “I don’t understand what you mean.” And I said, under my breath, “You’ll see.”’

  The light now sat upon the low hills and draws of the Iowa landscape, beautiful because the cornfields, in various states of growth, made abstract patterns on the gentle rises. The odors from the fields were wet and heavy, vetivernal and lush. The Bug moved more heavily than at the start of its journey, as though it were tired of its burdens and people. To the man sitting jammed between cardboard boxes Minna said, ‘It’s unusual for me to talk like this. For you to listen so patiently is unusual too. We may have survived, as you said that day, but we failed. We failed slowly, not all at once. Our marriage suffered a sluggish, torpid disintegration. Love went first, it always does—isn’t that true? How could it possibly endure for almost four decades? Custom, service, duty, ritual set in, and worst of all, irrational disappointment that the bright light had gone out. We each blamed the other. Next to go was that terrible sidekick of love, jealously. No longer did it plague—or enliven—our passion. Did this happen to us both at once? I cannot remember. My friend Liz used to claim that nothing comes out even, nothing in this life, and she was right, of course. What happened next? Concern, that was it. I grew concerned about everything, like my mother used to be. Except for one thing: when you were sick I felt an odd sort of relief. You were mortal. Someday, I thought, I may be free. I know I didn’t want you to die. I loved you in my way, in my loss-flooded way, but I wanted to be free. When I was sick, you seemed concerned, but, I thought, not deeply. You saw such bad pain where you worked that mine seemed to you exaggerated. Our mutual and constant concern was for Grant. Every one of his illnesses seemed at first to be life-threatening. We always felt we might lose him, we ached at the thought. You saw all possible complications, I saw only one, the possibility he might die. The bond between us weakened under the pressures of my love for him. I tried to hold it in check. But I must have revealed it to you with my concern for his every move and fever and cough. (Didn’t we all read too much Freud, and then fear for the objects of our love?) Mine was true love for that lovely redheaded boy, his blue eyes full of questions and early despair. It came hand in hand with my passionate dislike of his silly, pretty-faced girl-love.’

  Richard may have nodded, she thought, but she could not turn her head away from the road to find out. She felt herself growing empty. She thought she might as well go on until there was nothing more left to say. ‘We have, I admit, had one very good thing. We had all the varied and curious and satisfying pleasures of sex. Almost nightly, all those years, because you brought your medical school instruction to bear on the subject and taught me to believe that long intervals between sexual acts depleted the source, that the more often we “did it,” as you said, the greater would be our pleasure, and the longer our desire would last. It was true. You were right. It did get better, it did last. We accepted no excuses from each other, even the imminence of Grant’s birth, even a short time after his birth. We were at it regularly, it served as our Sominex and our muscle relaxant. After it, I always slept well. Intercourse was the one bond that did not wither: we kept our marriage alive in the pleasures of its variety. I was a wonder to myself and to my friends, who had to listen to my boasting. After menopause, which came, I thought, rather late to me—was I fifty-four, or fifty-five? It was long use of the pill, they said—we went on practicing our private craft with new delight, it seemed to me. You never questioned the success of our marriage. Sex for you was the keystone and core; if it was there and was good, everything held. Now at sixty, during this blessed, long semester’s “leave without pay,” as my college calls it, and after, when it is clear that I have left you (for that is what I am planning to do when this academic stint is over), what I will miss most will be our enduring sexual accomplishments, our mutual enjoyment during four decades of gratification. I suppose that, more than anything, it was a source of pride. I am proud.…’

  NEXT TWO EXITS U. OF IOWA. ‘Which one? Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’ll take the first and see where that gets me.’ Minna looked at the map of the city sent to her by the chairman of the department, and figured out a route into the city and to the place called Iowa House in which a room had been rented for her. After some wrong turns and rerouting because the map did not show one-way streets and even this small town seemed to have a plethora of them, she parked in front of the brick building that sat stolidly on the bank of a river. ‘I’ve made it. I’m here. This begins a new term, the short term, the term of my change into a single person. I’m on my own.’

  Minna turned to her silent rider and said, ‘This is where you get off, friend-husband. No further. Have you listened to my long tirade? Do you know what I am trying to tell you? Probably not. I’m not sure I am clear about it all myself.’ She took two suitcases from the VW. When she loo
ked for Richard, he was gone. She thought she could still smell the tang of his pipe tobacco.

  The room the department chairman had reserved for her in Iowa House, a campus hotel for visitors, was pleasant, cool, very clean and somewhat monastic, especially after the steam-heated overfurnishing of her New York apartment. Two large uncurtained windows looked out to grass and the narrow Iowa River. The bathroom was large and very white, the closet so cool that Minna stored her half-gallon of Beefeater on the floor and needed no ice when it came time for her drink before dinner. She pulled the leatherette chair to the window, put her papers, books and portable Royal typewriter on the large round table beside it. Her clothes and shoes filled half the closet; her luggage and packing cases were piled in the other half. Over the double bed, covered with a chaste white chenille spread, there was a good light; a solid-looking black telephone stood on the stand beside it. There was a low, ample clothes chest, and a long mirror above it. The walls were white and bare of hotel art. The door locked with a key and a chain. Furnished in this way, the room felt spare, almost careful, about itself and its single occupant.

  Minna took her dinner at restaurants in town, and then walked back in the dusk to her room. Sometimes she was too tired to make the trip up and then down the hill to the center of town, so she had supper in the cafeteria downstairs in Iowa House. She found this restful. The room was filled with students and junior faculty, not one of whom knew her. She sat near a window, watching the river ducks come home to their nests under the trees for the night. She thought of her extraordinary freedom from domestic chores and human relationships. With the morning’s copy of The Daily Iowan propped up beside her cup of coffee, she surrendered to long periods of solitary pleasure, congratulating herself on having achieved such eremetic quiet, this sense of reclusiveness. For the first time in her long life she was entirely alone, living alone, eating alone. She was astonished to find she was not in the least lonely.