The Inseparables

by Stuart Nadler

  The headmistress went directly past Lydia and toward her office without making eye contact. For a brief moment they were in the hallway together, Lydia and her mother, looking at each other, waiting for the office door at the end of the hall to close so that they could hug. The last time they’d seen each other was a month ago, on a visitors’ weekend. Lydia had taken the bus to Aveline and they’d eaten takeout Korean food by the fireplace. For the first time, Lydia had a vision of her future—a future in which she and her mother were adults together, something almost close to friends. After dinner her mother had tried to explain the status of her marriage, speaking in euphemisms about the difficulty of marital togetherness and about spousal cooperation and about the myth of matrimonial compromise and about Gwyneth Paltrow. Before Lydia left for school, they’d agreed to talk every night. Then, when that hadn’t worked out, they agreed on every third day, and then every weekend. She wasn’t sure why they had stopped talking. She wondered sometimes whether a daughter’s innate desire to admire her mother was like a kind of addiction you needed to break eventually. Or whether you got to a certain age and began simply to replace your mother with a regrettable string of people like Charlie Perlmutter, people who were readily willing to say that they loved you, or at least steal a picture of your nude body and deliver it to every inbox they could find.

  When they were finally alone, her mother grabbed hold of her so tightly that Lydia let out a small gasp.

  “Are you all right?” her mother said.

  Lydia took a breath. “You just squeezed me hard, is all.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Lydia.”

  Lydia looked up. “I don’t know what to say. No. Clearly, I’m not fucking okay.”

  Her mother held her at arm’s length, as if inspecting her for visible wounds.

  “Did you send it?” her mother asked her.

  “No,” Lydia managed.

  “People here seem fairly sure that you sent it.”

  “Because Charlie said I did. And because there’s a picture of me floating around. So obviously they’d believe him over me,” she said. “And do you really think I’d do that?”

  “I didn’t think you’d take a picture of yourself like that in the first place.”

  “Wait,” Lydia said. “They showed you?”

  Her mother let go of Lydia. “No, of course they didn’t show us. They’re not criminals.”

  She let out a long breath. She had assumed everyone had seen it. Her mother, realizing this, hugged her to her chest and held on, as if Lydia were about to fall off the edge of a building.

  “Everyone’s very worried about this,” her mother said. “I’m worried about this.”

  “If they’re so worried, why are they suspending me? Like I’m the one who did something wrong. Someone did something to me. This is fucked. Everyone’s seen it. Every person here.”

  “Relax,” her mother said. “Breathe.”

  “Impossible,” Lydia said.

  In her ear, her mother whispered, “And who the hell is this Charlie person? You never said anything about him.”

  Lydia closed her eyes. “He’s nobody,” she said.

  “Your father will probably want to kill him,” her mother said. “I want to kill him.”

  “Where is Dad?”

  “He’s downstairs. Fighting with the dean. Or one of the deans. There’s too many deans at this weird school.”

  “Fighting?”

  “He’s a lawyer. He fights.” Her mother reached out and put her hand in Lydia’s hand. “He’s good at fighting.”

  “Fighting about what?”

  “I don’t know. He started yelling. I got up and left. It’s a reflex of mine at this point.”

  The headmistress came out into the hall, holding both the pink and the black folders. She was Gerta Schiller from Berlin, a supposed expert in educational theory. A celebrated author on the biological tendencies for risk-taking in the teenage brain. Readily armed with statistics about adolescent dopamine levels. So far Lydia had had exactly one interaction with Schiller prior to this, and it was about her grandmother’s novel. Did she know about it? Had she read it? Did she have an opinion on the fact that some Hartwell parents were trying to ban it? Had she been deluded, because of this book, with any outmoded ideas about sex and smut and vice and the human female body? All were questions that seemed at the moment to be especially prescient.

  “I want to go home,” Lydia said. “I don’t want to go in there.”

  Her mother nodded. “I’ll go see what I can do.”

  “Instead of listening to why she should suspend me, maybe you should show her this.” She held up her phone. “Look. Show her what people are writing. Look at the pictures people are sending me.”

  Her mother took the phone and allowed herself the first few messages in Lydia’s inbox. Lydia stood, watching. Her mother’s finger touched the screen gingerly, and then, with every comment or attached picture, her expression fell. Outside, the sky dimmed. Through a small window Lydia could see the roads leading in and out of campus, and far off, beyond that, the thrilling gray snake of the freeway, which signaled escape and freedom and anonymity.

  She heard her mother, beside her, suck for air, out of shock or maybe out of disgust. She’d shut off the phone.

  Again, she reached out for Lydia, clutching her by the arms, not letting go.

  6.

  The first thing Henrietta ever saw of the house was the big field, with the grass long and uncut and heavy in the summer humidity. This was August 1975. They had come up together from the city in a borrowed green Volkswagen, leaving after her morning lecture. Acres of fence line, white and chipped, gave way to fieldstone and the stumps of chopped birch. Harold was thrilled, and because this was how it went when she was with him, Henrietta felt thrilled as well. From the road, the house looked better than she had thought. She had seen pictures, and in the pictures everything looked old. Out in the grass, a tractor rusted. They parked and there were butterflies in the oaks and there were deer out grazing. She had never seen a live deer before. Just Teddy Roosevelt’s deer, stuffed and behind glass on 81st and Columbus. Harold got out first and bent down to rub his hands in the dirt, and then turned with a boyish smile to show her his covered black palms. He knew things about soil and nitrogen levels and about how to change things to make vegetables sweeter. She had grown up Henrietta Horowitz, on the fourth floor of a tenement flat on Orchard Street. Her father collected junk for money. Her mother worked a steam press in a garment factory. She had shared a bedroom with her sister and her aunt until she was sixteen years old. The idea of personal space always seemed theoretical to her. She turned in a full circle, taking everything in—all the good acres and the wind in the trees.

  They were moving because Harold was set to open a restaurant in Boston. Before this, she had always planned to keep teaching after the baby. She had a detailed ten-year plan that included scholarly research, academic appointments in Rome, social agitation. This was the town where he had grown up. It would be good for the baby, he told her. Inexplicably, she felt something close to excitement at the idea.

  The house sat perched at the top of a steep hill. Spreading out, west to east, there were nearly two hundred acres. On the front porch, flowerpots hung from wooden stanchions, and rubber boots caked in mud were lined up near the steps. On the roof, wind spun the weathervane to a blur. It was true that a part of her cried out treason! at the notion of doing this. Or acquiescence. At the prospect of planting watercress and wax beans in the earth, she felt the sting of conformity. It came, deafening and endless, like an invisible chorus. Not you! A woman like her, a professor, almost a scholar, with dirt beneath her fingernails, assuming the retrograde position, a baby on her back, planting and digging and running a wet mop across the hardwood, or a vacuum up the runner on the big staircase. Farming? Gardening? This was not the same Henrietta lecturing most Tuesday afternoons on the political history of reproduction. Or on embedded structural oppress
ion. Before this, she had never considered leaving her life in the city, or following any man anywhere, but here, all of a sudden, was Harold Olyphant, talking about the country, talking about babies running around in the high grass, talking about Henrietta transforming from an urban Poindexter into Laura Ingalls Wilder. This was where they would milk the cows. This was where they would let the chickens run. At any other moment in her life, his asking her to come here would have wrought such a simple answer. In the car up through New England, though, she knew already something elemental had changed. She wanted this because she wanted to make him happy and because, privately, secretly, half shamefully, she thought he was right: that being here, with a life like this, with some goddamned fresh wax beans, might be better for the baby. A month ago, a week ago, twelve hours ago, even, a sentence like this would have bordered on political heresy. Love had unexpectedly rearranged her.

  She walked off into the dirt. She felt the word “fraud” ringing in her ears. The land sloped to the water, wild with goldenrod. Moss carpeted the fieldstone. He told her he would plant apple trees for her. She liked this. Birds passed overhead. She turned. “I like this,” she said.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am surprised,” she said. “I’m very surprised. But I like this. I do.”

  He smiled. “Remember this,” he said.

  “Remember what?”

  “I want you to remember that you just said that out loud.”

  She laughed.

  “It’s temporary,” he said, reminding her of their plan. “I open the restaurant, it does well, then we get a place in the city in a few years.”

  “But maybe I’ll like being a farmer,” she said, smiling. “Maybe I’ll write a book about farming. A social history of agriculture.”

  “I could definitely see it,” he said. “Overalls. Cucumber harvest. Raspberries on the bush. Sure.”

  “You know I tried to grow tomatoes on my windowsill last year. They died. The ones that didn’t die were covered in this weird, grotesque blue mold. I’m guessing they were practically poisonous. People at the university thought I was actually trying to kill my students.”

  “Fine. Maybe I grow the vegetables and you take care of the farm animals,” he said.

  She laughed. “I’m guessing that if I killed the tomatoes, the farm animals won’t fare much better.”

  They walked from the porch down the steep hill. He caught her closing her eyes against the warm sun and the wind. A cow stood out in the yard, staring at her, at both of them, grass in its mouth.

  Harold stood beside her, laughing. “Remember this,” he said again. “You told me you like it. You actually said the words.”

  “I promise,” she said. “I’ll remember.”

  Over Harold’s shoulder the river was full, and she could hear the rush of the current slamming against the stones on the bed. A true city girl, Henrietta did not have a driver’s license. She would need lessons. She watched him. He had the hands of a cook. Burns on his fingers. Knife scars on his knuckles. She did like this. He picked up a long blade of grass, twirled it between his fingers, and put it in his mouth.

  “It doesn’t taste that bad,” he said. “You want to try?”

  Three months later, Henrietta gave birth to Oona in the small aquamarine bedroom on the second floor of the new house. She had not wanted an institutional birth, the antisepsis of a hospital, the divvying up by sex so that the men were in the waiting room with the cigars, and so they did it here, with a midwife, in this small room with music playing and with the windows open to the big field. A hanging pendant light swung in the breeze, and she focused on this as she breathed through the pain. At some point there was the smell of grass through the windows, and dried leaves, and flowers, maybe, all of this, she knew, a hallucinatory sensation caused by pain. Harold pressed a cold wet washcloth to her forehead. “I’m here,” he told her, in a soothing voice, standing off to the side. “You sure as hell better be here,” she told him. Her baby came at noon on the last warm day of fall. Yet another Horowitz woman giving birth at home.

  In the beginning it was good here. They threw parties in the barn. Friends drove up from New York, armed with samizdat and smoked fish and with toys for Oona, all the while regaling Henrietta with stories about their rallies and marches and about their late-night meetings in the basement of the Judson Church. Henrietta did not miss the old life, she said, and when her friends took her for a walk on the river and said out of earshot of Harold that they did not believe her, said that they were in fact worried for her, she said it once again, as convincingly as she could manage. “Life is good here,” she said, picking grass between her fingers and putting it in her mouth. “Really. It’s good. Honestly.”

  During the first spring, they bought baby goats and chicks. Their cows gave birth in the new barn and there was fresh milk. Harold made his own butter. In the summer the restaurant opened and she named it the Feast. On opening night, the line to get in snaked around the block. Afterward, at one in the morning, she sat alone with him at a table in the corner, eating a fresh roasted chicken that they had raised together. Beyond their table, lantern light flickered on the cobblestones and they felt, both of them, as if they were at the start of something honest and good and real.

  She began her book after the Fourth of July, in the cramped office she made for herself off the bedroom. She had painted the room a pale yellow because she had read somewhere that pale yellow inspired creativity. She hung pictures of New York above her desk, not the obvious stuff, not the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset or the cloying postcard view of Central Park, but pictures of her mother in her steam presser uniform, and her aunt Essie on the front steps of the old tenement the day Essie had buried her husband. She wrote longhand, at night, in the creaking quiet, lukewarm coffee in a cup at her elbow, another hanging lightbulb swinging above her, her husband asleep a few feet away, with the baby on his chest, the two of them, more often than not, breathing in time with each other: Harold breathing, then Oona breathing; him breathing, then her.

  Routines emerged. Each morning, Harold went out into the yard before leaving for the restaurant, heading across the meadow to the edge of the woods, where he’d built a pen for the animals and a small hut to keep stacks of firewood. In the cold months, when they needed it, he brought in the wood. In the warm months, he checked on the animals, or else he went to the barn to fetch wine for the house to replace what they’d finished the night before. When he was home at night, meat smoke on his skin, he made the same loop, checking the hut, the river, the oak, checking the animals. This was at two in the morning, usually. Sometimes later. He kept the worst hours. She watched him do this long circuit, morning and night. In the beginning she did this because at first life in Aveline was slow and boring. Then watching him became habit. Mostly it was because he was gone all day, and she stayed at home by herself with the baby for such long hours. Motherhood, in the beginning, was a form of loneliness.

  Their second winter in the house, Henrietta was home with Oona when storms cut the power. Weathermen had been making noise for days about the arctic temperatures. This was Canadian weather, they said. Days of snow. Ice clogged the storm drains, exploded the pipes, flooded the basement. Dispatches on the radio warned of hail and thundersnow. An oak upturned in the yard while Henrietta watched, the huge root-tear of the earth rising up from the lawn like an embankment. She stood in the living room with Oona, eighteen months old by then and hysterical. Henrietta called for Harold at the restaurant but he was busy. The dining room, even in a storm like this, was full. She put music on the battery-powered radio, hoping it might calm the baby. She played her mother’s music, Duke Ellington doing “Blue Goose.” Eventually she needed the batteries for the flashlights. Then the only sound was the uneasy boat-creak of the walls in the wind. She put the stove on for heat. The baby wore two coats and two blankets. Outside: waves of sleet. Pink light above the tree line.

  This was when the roof was hit. When she told the s
tory afterward, she made it more dramatic. She had watched it flutter off, paper in the breeze. She saw it peel away, shingle by shingle. She blinked and then the whole thing vanished. In fact, it had happened over hours. A tiny hole made bigger, gust after gust. Water came in, soaked the second floor, and then eventually the first. She and Oona went to wait in the car, the engine running, warm finally. In the early morning, when Harold came home from the Feast, he sat with them in the car, watching the trees bend, the river whipped up, the barn listing against the blitz. When the weathervane blew off into the meadow, he went and brought it to her and Oona, resting it on the dash, sopping wet, green from the years. “She took a big fall,” Henrietta said, joking. Then Harold went back out to pick up more of the debris from the lawn as the storm passed overhead.

  This was the image she had of him still. Twenty-eight years old. Younger than she was. Burn marks on his hands. Knife scars on his knuckles. Rushing out, laughing, to pick up a meaningless piece of metal. Harold Olyphant amid lightning and hailstorms and Canada wind. Strong and fit and standing on the flagstone. This was the same spot where, eleven months ago, carrying firewood to the front door, he fell.

  She was used to telling the story. It was the slightest thing, she would say. He was coming up the walkway with firewood. It was six in the morning. Not even that much firewood, really, and I watched the whole thing happen. I was standing right there. Where I always stood. It looked like the most minor thing, really. The fall looked so slight. Perhaps if she’d been behind him she might have seen his head smack the flagstone. The door, when she rushed outside after him, had locked behind her. There were marks still on the handle and the edges of the windows from where she’d tried so furiously to break her way back inside. For five minutes he was conscious, talking, woozy. He took her hand while she sat by him. Isn’t it nice here? he asked. Don’t you like it?