by Jane Smiley
Leah was still asleep. I remembered that I was still in my opera clothes, as formal as we get where I live, which was khaki pants, light blue shirt, sweater vest. Dana came through the dining room, and when I went up to the shower, she was already there, stepping out of her underpants with a sigh. Her breasts are wrinkled and flat from six years of nursing, but the rest of her is muscular and supple. I said, “May I join you?” Her eyes lifted to my face. It seems to me that they are very beautiful: pale, perfect blue, without a fleck of brown or green. Constant blue. Simultaneously deep-set and protuberant, with heavy, wrinkled lids. Her mother has the same eyes, only even older and therefore more beautiful. I don’t know what I expected her to say. She always says yes. Now she said, “Sure.” She smiled. She got out another towel. I turned on the water, got in first, and moved to the back of the tub. I reached out my hand and helped her in. We got wet, and soaped each other. She was businesslike about it, but friendly. I tried to be the same way. We talked about nitrous oxide, as I remember. We washed our hair, and she washed her face two or three times, asking each time whether the black was off her eyes.
I could not stop looking at her eyes. I wondered if the object of her affections had noticed them yet, in the sense of knowing what he was seeing rather than simply feeling the effect they had on him. She turned her back to me and bent her head under the shower, and I wondered the same thing about her back and shoulders, about the way her neck drops into her shoulders without seeming to spread, like a tulip stem.
Does he appreciate the twist of her wrist when she is picking up little things, the graceful expertise of her fingers working over that mouth, whatever mouth it is? I wondered whether the object of her affections, in fact, was the meditative sort, who separates elements, puts one thing down before picking up another, had it in him ever to have been a dentist, a mere dentist, that laughingstock of the professional community. Every time she saw me looking at her, she smiled, and every time I seemed to be doing something else, she sighed. I said, “Perk up, Dana. There’s always more music.”
“It’s a waltz. That’s what’s so tragic about it. You could dance to it, but you can’t.” She got out, saying, “There’s Leah.” I rinsed off hurriedly and wiped myself down while going to Leah’s room. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting. She was lying on her back with her feet up on the end of the crib, calling, “Daddy! Dave! Daddy!” When she saw me, she smiled and rolled over, noting with pleasure, I suppose, the wet hair, the dripping chest, the towel, the hurry, all the signs that I had been subdued once again.
I lifted her, stripped her of wet clothes, and wiped her off with my towel. She went to the chest of drawers. I opened the bottom one for her. She chose red shorts, green slacks, and two shirts. I chose a pair of underpants and a pair of socks. She put everything on cooperatively, then admired the effect for a moment or two. I was talking the whole time: “Good morning, sweetheart! How did you sleep? What a pretty girl! Ready for breakfast? How about some Cheerios with bananas?” The usual paternal patter. I carried her downstairs, the towel wrapped around my waist, her hands upon my shoulders and her gaze upon my face. We will never know what she sees there until she finds it again, I suppose, in the face of some kid twenty years from now.
Dana was getting ready to go out. She glanced at me, and said with due formality, “I’m going to the store for milk and the newspaper. Who wants to come along?” But they were all in their nightclothes, except Leah, and so she got away without a single one of them. She looked at me and also said the right thing. “Back in a flash. Anything you want special?” I shrugged. She left. I went into the kitchen and sliced a banana with one hand, laying it on the counter and chopping at it with the paring knife, because Leah wouldn’t let me put her down. Then I unscrewed the cap of the milk with one hand, poured the Cheerios with one hand, kissed Leah, and carried her to her high chair, where she consented to be put for the duration of her meal. Dana had not asked me where I spent the night, although she must have noticed that I wasn’t in bed with her.
She was not back in a flash, which has to be interpreted as twenty-five minutes or a half an hour—seven minutes each way to the store, and then a generous ten for milk and newspaper. It took her an hour, and she came back much more serene than she had been since dinner the night before. She carried in her bag, said, “I got doughnuts for good girls. It’s a lovely day out!” and sped into the kitchen. Oh, she was happy, happy, happy, but not exhilarated, not anything blamable or even obvious. She was simply perfectly calm, full of energy, ready for the day. No sighs. No exertion of will. I wondered if he lived nearby, but then I made myself stop wondering about him even before I might start. Leah was standing beside me, and I reached down and swung her into my arms, buried my fatal curiosity in her fleshy, baby smell.
It was a lovely day, and we decided upon a spur-of-the-minute trip to the house, to admire the plaster and the running water and to picnic on the front deck. Lizzie and Stephanie thought it was interesting that you could have a picnic at a house where there was a refrigerator and a stove, and viewed the whole plan as another example of Dana’s peculiar but always instructive way of looking at things. Dana let Lizzie pack the food and Stephanie pack the toys, of which there have to be enough not only for everyone to have something to play with every moment of the trip but also to look at, consider, and disregard. It was fine with me. Dana seemed to me to be sort of like a hot-air balloon. The more weight we could hang on her, in terms of children, houses, belongings, foodstuffs, office equipment, and debts, the harder it would be for her to gain altitude.
The children sat behind us and Dana sat beside me, with her feet on the lunch basket. My strategy was to talk about patients all the way, both to remind her of what we shared and to distract her from her sadness, which sprouted as soon as we passed the city limits and grew with every mile we drove. The older children played together nicely. Lizzie, in fact, read Stephanie Green Eggs and Ham, and Leah was generally cordial, allowing Dana both to talk to her and to give her pieces of apple. When the apple was gone, Dana tentatively reached out her hand, as she had done often in the past, and Leah took it and held it. I drove and talked.
I have found that it is tempting to talk about every minute of the past six weeks as if the passing of every minute were an event, which was what it seemed like. I remember that car ride perfectly—the bright, early spring sunlight flooding all the windows; my own voice rising and falling in a loquacious attempt at wit, concern, entertainment, wooing; my repeated glances at her profile; the undercurrent in all my thoughts of how is she now? And now? And now? As if she were in some terminal condition.
But it was only a car ride, two hours into the country, “a dentist” with “the wife” and “the kids.” It could have been 1950. I remember thinking that then, and wishing that it were—some confused thought about the fidelity of our mothers’ generation, or barring the truth of that, that at least whatever it was that was present would be thirty-five years in the past, if it had taken place in 1950. Well, as I say, every minute had its own separate identity.
Some nights later, we were lying in bed after making love and I was nearly asleep. Her voice rose out of the blackness of coming somnolence like a thread of smoke. She said, “I wish we were closer.” Although I was now wide awake, I maintained my breathing pattern and surreptitiously turned my chest away from her, as if in sleep, so that she couldn’t hear my heart rattling in its cage. Now she would tell me, I thought, and then we would have to act. I let out a little snore, counted to twenty, and let out another one. After a minute or so, when my heart had steadied. I turned, also as if in sleep, and threw my arm over her, and hugged her tightly, as if in sleep. My nose was pressed into the back of her neck. She said, “Dave? David? Are you asleep already?” Then she sighed, and we lay there for a long time until the muscles at the back of her neck finally relaxed and she began to snore for real.
I don’t know when she saw him, but I know that she did, because sometimes her sadness was cu
red. A long time ago, before she joined the choir, when Leah was still nursing five or six times a day, she read a book by some Middle European writer about a man who had both a wife and a mistress. I remember the way she tossed the book down and said, “You know, I always think of men who have wives and mistresses as having everything, but of women who have husbands and lovers as simply being oversubscribed.” Then she laughed and went on: “I mean, where would you fit it in? Would you phone him from the grocery store with two old ladies behind you waiting to call the car service and two kids screaming in the basket?” So where did she fit it in? She was always at home when she was supposed to be. She was always in bed with me all night. She never canceled an appointment with a patient. Sometimes she was late coming home from choir practice, once a week, but she had been late in the past, and she was never more than half an hour late. But sometimes she was desperate with sadness and sometimes she was fine, and these states of mind didn’t have a thing to do with me, or our household, or the office. And in addition to that, she denied that they even existed, that she was ever in turmoil or that she was ever at peace. I don’t mean to say that we spoke of them. I wouldn’t have allowed that under any circumstances. But she would catch me looking at her, and she would stare at me with that same stare I remembered from dental school, defiant, daring me to have any opinions about her at all.
I should say that it didn’t take long for Lizzie to realize that something was up. Lizzie’s situation as the oldest and her observant character make her the point man most of the time, and a lot of our battles have been fought in her digestive tract over the years. The pediatrician, whom I like a lot, does not always go for the psychosomatic explanation. In the case of Lizzie’s stomach, he suggests that some children simply suffer more intense peristaltic contractions than others. Any food triggers digestion, which may or may not be painful. And it is certainly true that Lizzie has stomachaches all times of the year, all seasons of the spirit, and also tends to throw up a lot, as does Dana’s sister, Frances. It has been routine on every car trip for thirty-seven years for whoever is driving Frances to pull over so that Frances can give her all on the side of the road. It is a family joke, and Frances doesn’t get a lot of sympathy for it. Ditto Lizzie. Nature or nurture? My observation is that parents believe religiously in nature, while the hidden family forces that are acting to deform the plastic child are glaringly apparent to any college psych major. At any rate, Lizzie woke up every morning of the week after our trip into the country with a raging bellyache and an equal determination not to go to school, but to stay home and keep her eye on the domestic situation.
Each morning I carried her to school in tears, deposited her in the arms of Mrs. Leonard, brushed off her clutching hands, and turned on my heel to the screams of “Daddy! I need you! I need to be with you!” School, though she always settled down to her work at once, didn’t make her forget my betrayal, and explanations, about how sometimes when mommies and daddies argue it makes the children feel bad, did not convince her that she wasn’t actually sick. We took her temperature morning and night, promising that if it went up so much as a degree she could stay home.
I took her to the pediatrician, who put his arm around her and said that sometimes when mommies and daddies argue it makes the child feel bad. He also felt her stomach and checked her ears and throat, but she wasn’t convinced. I tried to explain to him, because he is rather a friend, and certainly a fellow in the small professional community of our town, that we weren’t exactly arguing, but his gaze—warm, sympathetic, resigned—flickered across my face in disbelief. Here was the child, her stomach, her panicked look, the evidence of forces at work. He said, “The stomach problem she’s always had is going to be the focus of all her uneasiness. Some kids get headaches. Some get accident-prone. Every feeling is in the body as well as in the mind.” His voice kept dropping lower and lower, as if he didn’t know how to speak to me, a medically trained white male, and it’s true, I was rather resentful. More resentful of him than of Dana or the Other. Maybe he was the Other. I wanted to punch him out.
Instead, I took Lizzie to the grocery store and let her pick out dinner. Canned corn, mashed potatoes, pork chops, orange sherbet. Not what I would have chosen, personally. Then I took her home and let her eat a Hershey bar and watch “The Pink Panther” until it was time for Stephanie to come home.
When Stephanie came home, I noticed for the first time that she had her own uneasiness. She wouldn’t look at me or come in the house. She dropped her school bag without showing me any papers and went outside to play on the swings. A few minutes later she saw that one of her kindergarten friends down the street had gotten home as well, and she came and asked to go there, although this is not a friend she particularly likes, and she stayed for the rest of the afternoon, and then called to ask if she could eat dinner there. I suspect that what she would really have liked to do was move in there.
Lizzie began to cry because Stephanie didn’t want to play with her, and then we had an argument about whether Stephanie loves her or not, and then I sent her to her room, and then I went up and explained to her that people have to want to play with you on their own, you can’t make them, and they can’t make you, either. Then I recalled examples of Lizzie not wanting to play with Stephanie, which she denied, and then I gave up, and then I went over to the preschool, leaving Lizzie by herself briefly, and picked up Leah, who, I was told, had put on her shoes and socks all by herself. She was very proud. I was, too.
Since the onset of Leah’s infatuation, we had gotten into the habit of dividing the evening’s tasks child by child. Dana would serve Lizzie and Stephanie and I would serve Leah. That is how it presented itself to me, although, of course, Lizzie and Stephanie had table setting and clearing to do, and were subject to discipline and the apparent dominance of the parental committee. In view of my determination not to have anything irrevocable communicated to me, this was a pretty good system, and one that I clung to. On this particular day, Dana was feeling rather blue. There was some despairing eye contact across the living room and across the kitchen. I took Leah and went out for beer, lingering over the magazine rack and talking at length with a patient I encountered about real estate taxes. I stayed away for an hour. I missed Dana terribly and wanted only to go home.
The next day at the office I missed her, too. She was right in the next room. I should say that in addition to being dentists, parents, home owners, musicians, and potential or actual adulterers, Dana and I are also employers of four people—two dental assistants and two receptionists—and office society is nearly as complex as domestic society, with the added temptation to think, unjustifiably in my experience, that it can be tinkered with and improved by a change of personnel. The receptionists are Katharyn and Dave, eight to one and one to six, six bucks an hour, and the assistants are Laura (mine) and Delilah (Dana’s), eight to two and noon to six, fifteen bucks an hour. Our receptionists are always students at the university, and turn over about every two and a half years. Laura has been my assistant for five years, and Delilah came last year, replacing Genevieve. Both, as I said before, have sets of twins: Laura’s fraternal, twelve years old, and Delilah’s identical, four years old. Laura and Delilah also have pension plans, so, of course, we are also a financial institution, with policy decisions and long-term planning goals and investment strategies. Dave is a flirt. For convenience, he is known as “Dave,” while I am known as “Dr. Dave,” even, at the office, to Dana. Dana is known as “Dana.” Katharyn has been engaged for three years to an Arabian engineer she met during her freshman year. Laura is divorced, edgy, bossy with the patients. Delilah is rounded, soft, an officer in the local Mothers of Twins club, which Laura has never joined. Dave flirts more with Laura than he does with Delilah, which raises the friction potential in the office about twenty-five percent. On the other hand, he is a terrific receptionist—painstaking, well organized, canny about a patient’s fear of dentists. He has a sixth sense about whom to call the day before the ap
pointment, and how to say, “We’ll be expecting you, then,” so that the patient doesn’t dare “forget.” He also does the books, so we have been able to let the bookkeeper go. He is graduating next December, a dark day.
I am so used to Laura by now that I don’t know what to say about her. She has a raucous, smoke-coarsened, ironic voice, which she uses to good effect in lecturing the patients about dental hygiene. “What is this, you don’t floss? You want your gums to turn to cotton candy? Believe me, if you sat in this chair and watched what comes through the door every day, you wouldn’t be so optimistic. Take this. I’m going to show you.” We have never talked about anything but business. Of Delilah I don’t know much. She and Dana talk a lot, it seems to me, and for a long time this whispery murmur from the next office has been a kind of comforting white noise at the end of my workday. During the week, after the opera, it falls silent. Dana doesn’t have much to say, or rather, what she has to say cannot be said, so she says nothing. I look blankly out the window between patients. I am sure that behind the wall Dana is doing the same thing.
What did I think I was doing on that first day of dental school? Why did I choose to pour the formless me into this particular mold? I hadn’t known any dentists except the ones who worked on my own teeth. They didn’t strike me as romantic figures. I was, and still am, rather struck by the mystery of teeth, of their evolution and function, of the precisely refined support system in the gums and jaws that enables a person, every person just about, simply to chew. Senseless, mindless objects, teeth, two little rows of stones in the landscape of the flesh, but as sensitive, in their way, as fingertips or lips.
I also felt the mystery of building houses back then—the way lengths of wood, hammered together with lengths of steel, created a space that people either wanted or didn’t want to be inside of. I thought of architecture, but architecture was making pictures, not making buildings. Most of my fellow biology majors went to medical school or botany school or zoology school. When I considered doctoring, I used to imagine a giant body laid open on the operating table like a cadaver, but alive, and myself on a little diving board above it, about to somersault in. Not attractive. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting with some university administration about the age of my lab equipment.
