by Jane Smiley
A Saturday night during the Johnson Administration. Man and wife, woman and husband, protagonist and antagonist, victim and perpetrator, were standing not far from one another. He was wearing a light blue shirt and slacks, opening the refrigerator to take out the milk. She was wearing her pink seersucker bathrobe, and was standing, hands on hips, near the sink. Aside from the light of the refrigerator, only one other light was on, that above the sink. For a moment, in the general gloom of the room, they were both lit up, and at that moment she said, “Pat, I have been having a relationship with Ed Stackhouse, down the road, and I am not going to stop. It is a sexual relationship, and a friendship, too.”
Of course my intentions had something vague and unrealistic to do with Ed; I wouldn’t have had the courage to speak otherwise. Pat did not take the milk out. He closed the refrigerator door and strode over, glass still in hand. He looked staggered and I knew that I had caught him by surprise, for the first time ever. I felt myself relent, as if my vertebrae were unhooking, and I opened my mouth to say something less resolute, when he slapped me so hard across the face that I fell to the month-old flooring. Then he threw the glass against one of the new windows, cracking it and smashing the glass.
On Sunday afternoon there was a tremendous thunderstorm, with pounding rain, thunder crashing and lightning striking almost continuously. There was so much noise from the storm that you couldn’t hear the sirens warning of nearby tornadoes. We were in the basement of the house, huddled under the workbench, for an hour and a half. Pat did not either speak to me or look at me, but we had been married so long that each of us knew exactly how to move, exactly what to expect of the other, how, together, to manage as well as comfort the children. For dinner we ate canned hash; then we put the children to bed. When he was sure they were all asleep, he took me into the kitchen and said, his hands balled into fists at his sides, that he expected me to take my clothes and leave in the morning, after everyone was gone, that if he found me when he came home at noon, he would kill me. As if to make sure that I believed him, he knocked me down again. I believed him. I thought, though, that if I agreed to what he wanted, and gave him time to cool off, he would accept a new life. Others we knew had divorced. Everyone knew it was hard. But the agreements that those couples labored to achieve looked inevitable to the rest of us.
In the morning I kissed Ellen and Daniel and Annie and put them on the day-camp bus with a smile. Annie was to have riding that day; Ellen and Daniel, canoeing. I remember every piece of clothing I found for them. I dressed Michael and Joe. I kissed them. They got into the back seat of the Pontiac. I stood back. Pat rolled down his window. As he was letting out the emergency brake, he looked at me and said, “I mean it.”
I was too proud to call Ed just then. Besides, I suspected that he would disapprove. I went to a friend’s house. On Tuesday, when I called, Pat seemed exhausted but reasonable. He said, “The children were very upset, so I told them your mother had gotten sick again and you’d gone to take care of her. I said you’d be back Sunday. Can we leave it this way for now, and talk Sunday?” I was disarmed by his questioning me, touched by the fatigue, rare and human for Pat. I spent the next few days weighing the two of him, murderous, forgiving, unable really to believe that our parting could go smoothly, but ready to accept that piece of luck if it were available. It never occurred to me to doubt his good intentions, though. The next Sunday, when I called to suggest a time for my return and a strategy for telling the children, I got a disconnect message. I jumped in my car and raced over to the house. It was empty, with a “For Sale” sign at the bottom of the drive. When I phoned the realtor at his home, he said, “Lovely house, three baths. You don’t usually find that in one of these older homes. Completely redone, country kitchen. Sold it already. But I have others I can show you.” Monday morning I drove in a panic to the day camp, but they were gone. Ellen, Daniel, Annie—nowhere among the riders or the swimmers or the canoers or the children making lanyards out of plastic string. I went to the director, making public for the first time the rift in our family, and said, “Where are the Kinsella children?”
“Aren’t you Mrs. Kinsella?”
“Well, yes.”
“Dr. Kinsella informed us early last week that the children would be leaving for their vacation over the weekend.” And she stared at me, unable to mask her confusion. Well, she wasn’t the last official that I questioned to find out where my children were, and those children at their activities were only the first groups that I scanned for familiar faces in the course of the next four years. In the afternoon mail was a note from Pat, saying that he had accepted a position in a teaching hospital elsewhere, and that he was enclosing a check for a thousand dollars. The receptionist at Pat’s lab said that, yes, he had gone on vacation, and then would be taking a leave of absence. His secretary came on the line after a pause, and said, “Is that you, Mrs. K.?”
“Yes, Donna.”
“Did you know about all this? He said you did, but I wondered.”
Now it was my turn to pause. “No, Donna.”
“You don’t know where he’s going, or anything?”
“No.”
“Oh, Lord.” And she hung up.
And what about Ed? It is true that he didn’t know where I was for that week, and must have seen the sign go up on our front lawn. When I called to make a date with him, a lunch date for talking because I was afraid of anything else, he accepted, it seemed to me, with relief that bordered on enthusiasm. The next day he called and said that we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore, even to talk. I had admired the single-minded focus that allowed Ed to write a novel about Alaska in the morning and a book about the White House in the afternoon, so there was a way in which I had to admire the fact that he never spoke to me again.
It was said of people in concentration camps that, if they could not believe that what had happened to them was possible, then they were more likely to die quickly, as if of incredulity. It was true of me that incredulity slowed my mental processes nearly to a halt; in fact, those early days were so strange I didn’t recognize them as mine, much less make plans, devise tactics. I might have thought of my aunt, “down to Norfolk in the State Home,” who must have considered her new circumstances as changeless and beyond her power as mine seemed. I didn’t, though. I had no thoughts, only a bright inner glare, the afterimage of a huge explosion imprinted on the retina. I had left in my blue Corvair with a suitcase of clothes. The rest of my life—children, dogs, house, furniture, mementos, books, pots and pans—went out of my possession like smoke.
About a month later, I got a slip of paper in the mail. It was typed, and it read, “12, Marlboro Crescent, London S.W. 11, England.” It was my first week at a job that it had taken me all of that time to find, typing in the business school at the university. The thousand dollars was used up on the lawyer I had hired to find the children and get them back, the joint bank accounts were closed. My paycheck, eighty-nine dollars per week, covered my rent and my food and the lawyer’s long distance phone bills. The children might as well have been at the South Pole. It took me nine months and a blizzard of letters to persuade Pat to let me even visit them. He must have heard from friends that I was poverty-stricken and gaunt, that Ed had stopped speaking to me, that I didn’t seem to have a new boyfriend, that I had been utterly humbled.
Well, I hadn’t been humbled at all, but I had been reduced to a few clear positions. One of these was relief at the end of married life, the dawn of privacy; another was resolve upon a professional degree and a good job. The third was at least partial custody of at least some of my children. The clarity of these goals and the fact that I was dead to the past gave me one advantage over Pat, who was in a turmoil of longing and fury over what had been lost and how to make it again with another woman. He was a wily and powerful adversary, smarter than I was, as always. I had been foolish to tell him about Ed, foolish to drive away without the children, foolish to hire the inexperienced lawyer that I could affor
d, foolish to underestimate Pat’s desire for revenge. In court, his lawyer made “their removal to England” sound responsible, extraction from an unstable and immoral situation.
More than once I thought he would kill me. In his lawyer’s office one time, he lunged across the table at me, and his lawyer, a burly ex-rower, had to grab him by the coat and then the shoulders and pull him back. I stood there without blinking, small and hard and ready to be killed. By that time I was ready for anything, as ferociously attentive as a marten or a mink—one of those small, vicious northern animals that can never be tamed. For courage, I reminded myself that I had caught him unawares once.
I ceased being surprised at what people are capable of, ceased longing for Pat’s explanation, or Ed’s, or even the opportunity to say one last thing, reach one last understanding. And Pat’s passion ended. It got increasingly convenient for him to let me have more of the children. Joe, whiny then, shy and hard to please, lived with me most of the time. Daniel went through a period of bad behavior—low grades, smoking marijuana, drinking and driving—and was shipped to me in a hurry. Annie spent her sullen stages at my house. With Ellen, Pat was locked in battle. When she made herself horrible enough, he sent her to me. Michael was the prize, Pat’s favorite boy. For years he almost never came, and then it was only the accident and Pat’s burgeoning new family that made it possible. As for separating identical twins, he considered that a positive good, and supported his position with statistics about test scores and theories about brain development. His intention, he said, was to overcome for them the disadvantage of having been born twins, and, furthermore, it was Joe, smaller by a pound at birth, always subordinate and dependent, who would benefit the most from leading his own life. He dismissed my arguments that Joe needed Michael, missed him, yearned for him.
I took what I could get, knowing that, according to the custody agreement, the choice was his. Tatty had babies. I dated Simon Elliott. One by one, the children went to college and graduated and got jobs and mates and even children, and we all got to the point where our ancient agitations were unrecognizable even to ourselves. And unrecognizable, too, my passion for Ed Stackhouse, what his austere little house and travel tales aroused in me. Above his kitchen table was a map of the world, and it was covered with pins, designating places he had visited. Now that I can hardly remember what he looked like or what his bed was like, I’m sure that what I really wanted was not to love him but to be him.
It is nearly midnight when I come down to turn on the hall light. The ground floor is dark—Joe would have thriftily turned out the lights upon leaving—and I don’t bother to turn them on when I go into the dining room and the kitchen to open a few windows to the evening breeze. A dark shape dozing at one end of the couch, I realize before I have the sense to grow afraid, is Ellen. Her head lies back, exposing her neck, and her breathing ruffles with a low snore. All the windows in the room are up, and magazine covers have blown open, papers have slid from my desk to the carpeting. I’m annoyed enough to consider touching her naked throat and startling her, but she is too quick for me. She says, “What time is it?” sits up, and stretches.
“I didn’t know you were here.”
“All the lights were off. I figured you had gone out with Joe and Michael. I did call up the stairs. What were you doing up there?” Her tone is immediately challenging.
“Knitting. Reading. Listening to music.”
“The stereo down here is better. You’ve got this whole big house—”
“Which means that I can sit in my room sometimes.”
“The doors were wide open. Anyone could—”
“Is the front door unlocked? And the side door, too? I told Joe—”
“Well—”
“Well?”
“Well, actually, I came in the back, after trying the other doors. Didn’t you hear the Malones’ dogs barking in their pen?”
“No, and I didn’t hear the doorbell ring, either.”
She ignores this, reaches for the lamp behind her. Its glow reveals that, though her hair is combed, her face is a little puffy. Sweatshirt, no shoes. She says, “Want some ice cream?” and goes into the kitchen.
There is something to be made of this, but I am not going to be the one to make it. Ellen’s unannounced appearance in my house is nothing remarkable, even this late at night, so I am not going to remark upon other signs. On her way to the kitchen, she flips every light switch she passes, a habit she has always had that I suppose is like my own feeling that lots of unused rooms are welcoming. She likes the most distant corners to be ready for her.
She brings back the canister of berry-berry ice cream and two spoons, already diving in, saying with her mouth full, “Mmm. This is good, Mom. You must have made it for your picnic.” There will be more to this. There is. “I bet it was nice, huh.”
“Same as always. That’s a nice spot.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have had a larger group.”
I lick my lips, hiding a tiny smile, then say, “I’m not sure Michael is up to larger groups.”
“Why is everyone acting like this trip is some long illness that he’s recuperating from? How are they getting along, anyway?”
“Fine, I think. They went out with Kevin and Barbara.”
“The senator and his wife?”
“The very same.”
“Feel a little left out?” She catches my gaze over the rim of the ice cream canister and holds it. I cock my head, a type of shrug. She grins happily and sits down, lifts her feet to the edge of the coffee table. She says, conversational now rather than needling, “Jennifer is spending the night.”
“You finally gave in, then.”
“She is so literal-minded. All day long Diane just stood back and watched while Jennifer asked questions. What time is bedtime at your house, Ellen? Is that go-upstairs time, or lights-out time, or go-to-sleep time? Can I get up to go to the bathroom if I want to? Can I get a drink, or should I call you? Is there a glass for me in the bathroom? Where is it?”
I chuckle.
“I looked at her when I was tucking her in, and I thought, Joe would say this is the real thing, so I said, ‘Do you want a kiss good night, Jennifer?’ and she said, ‘Do you mean on the lips or on the cheek?’ Diane is in love.”
I put my feet up on the coffee table and reach a spoon into the ice cream. So. Okay. I am lucky that there is always this comfort to come back to, this incidental bumping on the couch of mother and daughter, this expectation of conversation like silk running through your hands. I admit I am often amused and sometimes annoyed at Ellen’s rudeness, but this is what she is aiming for, this rare comfort between mother and daughter. It might be that we would not have had it had our history been more conventional. As a child she was disputatious and resolute, with a will to have the last word that sometimes bordered on the self-destructive. After Pat brought the children back from England, Ellen embarked upon her mythic wars against his tyranny. At the same time he was fighting me in court for full custody and had twice moved the children secretly so that I couldn’t get in touch with them, Ellen hounded and disobeyed him so relentlessly that she won herself pretty free access to me, and when he moved away to Chicago, a year before the accident, she moved in with me and Joe. I was the spoils of war, and she cherished me accordingly. I felt the same about her, I have to admit. She enjoyed the added conviction that the war had been hers and she had won it; I was grateful for my good luck. Her years with me were delightful—no fights, no teen-age resentment—but I have since thought that she trained herself for a different life from the one she has chosen, and that she has never quite figured out how to beat her swords into plowshares. But I don’t know. The little girl I remember? When she was four, she insisted that she never slept. When I doubted her about it, she spent a month calling to me at all hours of the night, announcing what time it was and declaring that she was wide awake.
I try to accept the mystery of my children, of the inexplicable ways they diverge from
parental expectations, of how, however much you know or remember of them, they don’t quite add up.
Sunday morning I am dressed and rummaging through the pantry as the eastern windows begin to lighten, and I see that it is going to be another lovely morning, hot afternoon. The long grass lies over, gray with moisture. I decide to go out and pick some marigolds for the kitchen table, and my sneakers leave dark tracks in the dew. The Malones cut their lawn yesterday, as every Saturday—there is still a sweet grassy smell lingering in the air, and the marigolds, as I bend down to cut them, give off an intense odor—sweet-acrid—that some people hate but that I love. In Nebraska, of course, my mother’s farm garden was huge and important—rows of cabbages and tomatoes and potatoes and brussels sprouts and turnips, but all of them separated by thick lines of orange and brown marigolds or brightly colored nasturtiums. I press the cushiony little blossoms to my face. Behind me—I don’t have to turn and look, I know what is there—my house is full of sleep.
Well, the fact is that I have been a mother for thirty years, now, half again longer than I was a child, and the last thirty years have given me as many habits and predilections as my childhood did. The bodies in the house, whose presence comforts me, are the bodies of my children, not my mother and father. What comforts me is not my own safety anymore, but theirs.
I have learned, over the last twenty years, to embrace the possible and not to mourn the rest. I don’t often think, as I did last night, of those little five-and-a-half-year-old boys, climbing so trustfully into the back seat of the blue Pontiac. Michael in blue shorts and white T-shirt, carrying a toy metal cement mixer, a crescent-shaped scab on his knee, Joe in khaki shorts and green striped T-shirt, a pad of paper and a short pencil sticking out of his pocket. Even as I turn my attention to Pat, I hear Michael say, “17 plus 27,” and Joe reply, at once, “44.” Joe looks at Michael and smiles, Michael looks at me, attentive, knowing that there is something wrong with me. But that thick, solid world still surrounds them. Their bodies move confidently, expressing the knowledge that the back seat is theirs, the Pontiac is theirs, the house and the yard and the mom and the dad are theirs. They fidget and settle, ready to get started, and, without a backward glance, they are driven into the unknowable future.
