The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  For Leah, the misty past is still the present, and no amount of future dredging will bring to the surface her daily events of right now—her friend Tessa, at preschool, whose claim on Leah is that she wears a tiny ponytail smack on the top of her head, for example. Were we to move this year, that might furnish her with a memory of this house—a ghostly sense of lines and the fall of light that would present itself to her in some future half-waking state. I wish that Leah’s state of mind weren’t so unavailable to us all, including herself, because she is driving us crazy.

  Dana was glad to get Leah for her third, because Leah was big and cuddly and slept through on the tenth day. There is no subsequent achievement that parent wants of child with more ardor than the accomplishment of eight hours at a stretch, during the night. Leah slept ten, and then, at three months, fourteen rock-solid nightly hours, and woke up smiling. She didn’t even crawl until ten months, and could be counted on to stay happily in one place when infants who had been neonates with her were already biting electrical cords and falling down the stairs. At one, when she said her first word, it was “song,” a request that Dana sing to her. Since the others were already by this time covering their ears and saying, “Oh, God!” whenever Dana launched into a tune, Dana thought that her last chance for that musical mother’s fantasy was a dream come true. Everyone, especially me, liked the way Leah gave spontaneous hugs and said, “I love you,” at the drop of a hat. She seemed to have an instinctive understanding of your deepest parental wishes, and a need to fulfill them. Patients who had seen her at the office would stop us and say, “That Leah is such a wonderful baby. You don’t know how lucky you are.” My brother would get on the phone from Cincinnati and shout in her baby ear, “Leah! Cheer up!”

  Dana was overjoyed but suspicious. She would say, “No one grows up to be this nice. How are “we going to wreck it?” But she would say it in a smug tone, as if experience alone assured that we wouldn’t. Dana felt especially close to Leah, physically close and blindly trusting. They nursed, they sang, they read books, they got lost in the aisles of the grocery store companionably choosing this and that. “The others are like you,” she often said, “but she is like me, lazy.” That’s what she said, but she meant “everything anyone could want.” Leah was everything she could want and she, as far as she knew, was everything that Leah could want.

  Not long ago, Dana got up first and went into Leah’s room to get her out of her crib, and Leah said distinctly, “I want Daddy.” Dana came back to the bedroom, chuckling, and I got Leah up. The next morning it happened again, but the days went on as before, with Dana sitting in the mornings and me taking the early appointments, then Dana dropping Leah at preschool, where she said, “Bye-bye, Mom, I love you.”

  At three I leave the office and go home to meet the schoolgirls. At five we pick up Leah, at six Dana comes home to dinner. Twelve hours of dentistry at about $100 an hour. We work alternate Saturday mornings, another $500 a week. Simple multiplication will reveal our gross income for parttime work. This is what we went to dental school for, isn’t it? Since they got the dental plan over at the university, people ask me if business is better. I say, “You can’t beat them off with a stick,” meaning new patients. The idea of Dana and myself on the front stoop of our office building beating hordes of new patients off with sticks makes me laugh every time.

  Anyway, other things were going on. They always are. A patient called me at nine thirty in the evening and said that her entire lower face was swollen and throbbing, an abscess resulting from a long overdue root canal. You remove the dead tissue and stir up the bacteria that have colonized the region and they spread. That’s what an abscess is. I met her at the office and gave her six shots of novocaine, which basically numbed her from the neck up. Meanwhile, at home, Leah awakened and began crying out. Dana went in to comfort her, and Leah began crying, “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” as if Dana were a stranger. Dana was a little taken aback, but picked Leah up, to hug and soothe her, and this made Leah so hysterical that Dana had to put her back in bed and tiptoe out, as if in shame.

  By the time I had taken Mrs. Ver Steeg home and put the car in the garage, all was quiet. I was tired. I drank three beers and went to bed, and was thus unconscious for the second bout of the night, and the third. In each instance, Leah woke up crying for me, Dana went to comfort her and was sent packing. The longer she stayed and the more things she tried, the wilder Leah got. The first bout lasted from midnight to twelve thirty and the second from two forty-five until three forty. Leah began calling for me to get her out of bed at six. I woke up at last, wondering what Dana was doing, motionless beside me, and Dana said, “I won’t go to her. You have to go to her.” That was the beginning

  She lay on the living room carpet, rolled in her blanket, watching Woody Woodpecker cartoons from the forties. I drank coffee. She was happy. Between cartoons, she would get up and walk over to me and begin to talk. Some of the words were understandable, the names Lizzie and Stephanie, the words “oatmeal” and “lollipop.” But more intelligible was the tone. She was trying to please and entertain me. She looked into my face for smiles. She gestured with her hands, shrugged, glanced away from me and back.

  When Stephanie and Lizzie came down at seven, attracted by the opening theme from “Challenge of the Superfriends,” she retreated to the couch. When Dana got up and staggered down the stairs in her robe, looking only for a place to deposit her exhaustion, Leah shouted, “No! Go away! Don’t sit here! My couch!” She would take her oatmeal only from me. Only I was allowed to dress her. If Dana or Lizzie or Stephanie happened to glance at her, she would scowl at them and begin to cry. Dana, forgetting herself, happened to kiss her on the forehead, and she exclaimed, “Yuck! Ouch!” and wiped the kiss off. When I went to the bathroom and closed the door, she climbed the stairs behind me, saying, “I go get my daddy back.” We were embarrassed. By eight forty-five, when I was ready to leave for the office, we had run out of little jokes.

  It was not simply that she didn’t want Dana near her, for she would allow that most of the time, it was also that she had exacting requirements for me and was indignant if I deviated from them in the slightest. If she expected to climb the stairs and find me in my bedroom and I made the mistake of meeting her in the hallway, she would burst into tears and shout, “Go back in room! Go back in room!” I would have to go back into the bedroom and pretend to be ignoring her, and wait for her to come find me and announce herself.

  I don’t think this ever happened to my father, who had a plumbing supply business and wore a white dress shirt to work every day. He referred to my brother and sisters and me as “the kids,” in a slightly disparaging, amused tone of voice that assumed alliance with the great world of adult men, the only audience he ever really addressed himself to. I don’t know anyone who calls his children “the kids.” It would be like calling his spouse “the wife,” not done these days. We call them “our children,” “our daughters,” very respectful. Would Leah thrive more certainly on a little neglect? Should we intentionally overlook her romantic obsession, as our parents might have done naturally?

  At any rate, at dinner that night, there seemed no alternative to my serving her food, cutting her meat, sitting as close to her as possible. When I got up and went into the living room without taking her down from her high chair (Dana and Stephanie were still eating, Lizzie wanted me to adjust the television set), she allowed the others to leave the table without asking either of them to get her down. Dana said, “I can get you down, honey. Let me untie your strap here.” Leah said, “No! No! Daddy do it.”

  I stayed in the living room.

  Dana said, “I’ll untie you and you can get yourself down. You’re big enough for that.”

  “No! No!” said Leah. “Tie strap! Tie strap!” Dana tied it again. I stayed in the living room. Leah sat in front of her little bowl for ten minutes. Dana sent first Stephanie, then Lizzie as emissaries, first to ask if they could get her down, then if she, Da
na, could get her down. Leah was adamant, with the two-year-old advantage that no one knew for sure if she knew what she was talking about, or what any of them were offering. This advantage enables her to be much more stubborn than the average speaker, whose eyes, at least, must register understanding.

  After a minute or so, she began calling “Daddy! Daddy!” in a tone of voice that suggested I was far away but willing. Dana and I looked at each other. She looked hurt and resentful, then she shrugged. I got up and took Leah down from her chair. She did not greet me with the elation I expected, but after we went into the living room, she puttered around me, chattering mostly nonsense and looking to me for approval every so often. I said, “Let’s go along with her for a while. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

  Dana lifted one eyebrow and went back to her book.

  It was nearly impossible. At first I thought the worst thing was the grief at parting: “Oh, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” hardly intelligible through the howls of betrayal. I was only going to the lumberyard or the Quiktrip, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. Taking a child turns the errand into a forced march. “She’ll be good with you,” Dana would say, and she would, and the household would be relieved of screaming, but at the price of constant engagement with equipment. A snap, two threadings, and two buckles into the car seat. The reverse for getting out of the car seat. Opening an extra door for the stroller. Unfolding the stroller, locking it into stroller-rictus, wheeling it around the car, a threading and a buckle into the stroller. Up curbs, through doors, down narrow aisles, all to find a package of wood screws or a six-pack of beer. Or I could carry her, thirty-four pounds. Doing an errand by myself came to seem a lot like flying—glorious, quick, and impossible.

  But grief wasn’t restricted to my leaving the house. Leaving the room was enough to arouse panic, and the worst thing about it was that at first I was so unaware, and there was the labor of being trained to alert her that I was going outside or upstairs. Then there came the negotiations. One of the first things she learned to do was to tell me not to do what I had originally intended to do. After all, she had her own activities. “She loves you,” said Dana. “It won’t last.”

  There were three more elements, too. I notice that there is a certain pleasure for a meditative person like myself in laying down one thread and picking up another, as if everything isn’t happening at once. One of these elements was that Dana’s choir group was practicing four days a week so that they might join the chorus of the opera Nabucco, which was being given in our town by a very good, very urban, touring company for one night. Dana’s choir director was a friend of the musical director of the company from their days in graduate school. The text of the chorus had to do with the Hebrews sitting themselves down by the waters of Babylon and weeping. Dana sang it every day, but in Italian. It doesn’t sound as depressing in Italian as it does in English.

  The second element was our summer house, which we had purchased the fall before, in a fit of response to autumnal color. It is in the mountains not far from where we live. Since buying it, we have also bought a well, a lot of plaster, a coat of exterior housepaint, a heavy-duty lawn mower, a set of house jacks, and a wild flower book. We have identified forty-two different species of wild flowers in the area around the house alone.

  The third element was that Dana fell in love with one of her fellow singers, or maybe it was the musical director. She doesn’t know that I know that this was an element.

  Not too long ago, the single performance of the opera Nabucco came and went. Leah stayed home, screaming, with the baby-sitter. Lizzie and Stephanie went along. I paid attention to the music most of the time, and the part that Dana sang about sitting down beside the waters of Babylon was very pretty, to say the least. I closed my eyes, and there were certain notes that should not have ended, that should be eternal sounds in the universe. Lizzie sat in the front seat and fell asleep on the way home. Stephanie leaned against Dana in the backseat, and also fell asleep.

  In the midst of all this breathing, still dressed in her Old Testament costume and with her hair pinned up, Dana said, “I’ll never be happy again.” I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. She was looking out the window, and she meant it. I don’t know if she even realized that she had spoken aloud. I drove into the light of the headlights, and I didn’t make a sound. It seemed to me that I didn’t have a sound to make.

  When we got home, Leah was still awake. She was thrilled to see me, and while Dana put the others to bed and changed her clothing, I sat next to Leah’s crib and held her hand while she talked to me. She talked about the moon, and her books, and her Jemima Puddleduck doll, and something else unintelligible. She perused my face for signs of pleasure. Sometimes she made gestures of ironical acceptance, shrugs of her little baby shoulders. Sometimes she sighed, as if she didn’t quite understand how things work but was willing to talk about it. Are these imitations of our gestures? Or does the language itself carry this burden of mystery, so that any speaker must express it?

  My eyes began to close, but Leah wasn’t finished for the night, and when I slid down the wall to a reclining position, she insisted that I sit up again. It was nearly one by this time. Saturday night. I had root-canaled two, and drilled and filled two, and cleaned two more a very long time before. One of them had insisted upon talking about her sister, who had cancer of the jaw. I had been arduously sympathetic, because, of course, you must. The room was dark and filled with toys. The baby was talking. The moon shone in the window. That was the last real peace I had.

  Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth. Undiluted apple juice in a baby bottle, sourballs, the pH balance of drinking water, tetracycline, sand in your bread if you were in the Roman army, biting seal-gut thread if you are an Eskimo woman, playing the trumpet, pulling your own teeth with a pliers. In their hearts, most dentists are certain that their patients can’t be trusted with their teeth, but you can’t grieve for every tooth, every mouth. You can’t even grieve for the worst of them; you can only send the patient home with as many of the teeth he came in with as possible.

  After a while, Leah’s eyes began to take on that stare that is preliminary to sleep, and her remarks became more desultory. She continued to hold my hand. I thought about the Hebrews sitting down beside the waters of Babylon, and I began to weep, too, although as quietly as possible. I didn’t see how I was going to support the total love of one woman, Leah, while simultaneously relinquishing that of another, Dana. I wasn’t curious. I said my prayer, which was, “Lord, don’t let her tell me about it,” and shortly after that I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was morning and I had a crick in my neck from sleeping by the window all night.

  I crawled over to the half-open door and slithered through, so as not to awaken Leah. I expected to be alone, but I found Dana in her robe at the table. She was eating cold pizza. Her hair was standing up on one side, and she hadn’t managed to get all the makeup off from the night before, so there were smudges around her eyes and her lips were orange. I said, “What time is it? You look terrible.” She gave me a stricken look and said, “I can’t believe it’s over. It was so beautiful. I could sing it every night forever.”

  “Well, you’ll sing other things.” I must have sounded irritable, when I meant to sound encouraging.

  “I don’t want to sing other things.” She sounded petulant, when she must have meant to sound tragic. I have found that there is something in the marriage bond that deflates every communication, skews it toward the ironic middle, where man and wife are at their best, good-humored and matter-of-fact. But maybe there are others who can accommodate a greater range of exhilaration and despair. Tears came into her eyes and then began running down her cheeks. I sighed, probably sounding long-suffering, and sat down beside her and put my arms around her. Sitting down
, it was awkward. I cast around for something to say. What I hit on was this: “Mrs. Hilton needs to go to a gum specialist. I scaled her yesterday for an hour, and she is exposing bone around the second and third molars.”

  “Have I worked on her?”

  “Curly red hair, about thirty?”

  “Eight-year-old X-rays of impacted wisdom teeth?”

  “Won’t have them out till they hurt.”

  “I had her. I didn’t think her gums were that bad. She could go to Jerry.”

  “No dental insurance. Practically no money, I gather.”

  Dana sighed. “Lots of kids, I bet.”

  “Five. Sometimes she brings the eighteen-month-old and the three-year-old.”

  “Yeah.” Now the tears really began to roll down her cheeks, and she closed her eyes tight to stop them. I had only meant to bring up a mouth, not a life. I held her tightly and repeated my prayer, and it was answered, because although she heaved a number of times, and held her breath as if about to say something, she never did.

  Not long after, Lizzie and Stephanie appeared on the scene, the markers came out, the demands for paper, cereal, bananas, and milk went up, and the television went on. Lizzie and Stephanie go head to head on the drawings. Lately, Lizzie’s have a lot of writing on them. Wherever the sky would ordinarily be are Lizzie’s remarks, in blue, about what the figures are doing. Stephanie can’t write yet, but she pays attention. Her skies are full of yellow stars. Dana went into the kitchen and sang her song about the weeping of the Hebrews while dishing up red bowls of Cheerios and bananas. Easter was coming up, and it occurred to me that the choir might go on to something less passionate, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be. They would certainly go on to fewer rehearsals every week—maybe only one.