The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  This is what I saw myself doing: sitting here, my back hunched, the office cool and clean, the patient half asleep. I am tinkering. Making something little. But perhaps making little things belittles the self. I’ve noticed at conventions that dentists argue about details a lot. I wish my wife loved me. I wish her constant blue eyes would focus on me with desire instead of regret. I wonder if I haven’t always been a little out of the center of her gaze, a necessary part of the life she wants to lead, but a part, only a part.

  That was a Friday. The last day of a long, trying week. I suspect that Dana and I measured our time differently that week. For her, maybe, the time fell into blocks of unequal length, pivoting about the minutes she spent wherever, wherever it was that she managed to see him. My week, of course, was more orderly, and it was primarily defined by those trips with Lizzie to school each morning and lying in bed with Dana each night, wide awake and pretending to be asleep so that she wouldn’t speak to me. She was, I should add, restless all week. Once, she got up at three and did something downstairs until five ten, then she came back to bed and went back to sleep. My mother used to look at us severely if we complained of not sleeping and say, “So what have you got a guilty conscience about?”

  On Friday the children fell into bed at eight o’clock, practically asleep already. Dana sat knitting in front of the TV. There was an HBO showing of Tootsie. I went in and out, longing to sit down, unable to. Every time I went into the living room, I peered at Dana. She seemed remarkably serene, almost happy. I decided to risk it and sat down beside her on the couch. She glanced at me and smiled, pulled her yarn out of the skein with a quick, familiar snap of her wrist, and laughed at the place in the movie where Teri Garr stands up screaming. I settled into the cushions and put my arm around her shoulders. It was tempting, very tempting, not to know what I knew, but I knew that if I relaxed, she would tell me, and then I would really know it. She said, “Hard week, huh?” She sighed. I squeezed her shoulder.

  “Leah doesn’t make it easy, does she?”

  “What if she’s like this forever?”

  “Remember when we used to say that about Stephanie? When she was waking up and screaming three or four times every night?”

  “Do you think that was the worst?”

  “It was pretty bad when Lizzie swallowed that penny.”

  “But that night when I had to stay in the hospital with her, I didn’t dare think it was bad at all. All those babies in the otolaryngology ward were so much worse.” She bit her lip, looked at the movie, turned her work, looked at me. “You know,” she said, “you scare me a little. You always have. Isn’t that funny?”

  I thought, Compared to whom? But I said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true. You don’t smile much, not the way most people do. You have this way of letting your gaze fall upon people when they attract your attention, but not smiling, nor reassuring them in any way that you aren’t judging them. And you’re awfully tall.”

  “Awfully?”

  “Well, it’s not awful. I mean. That’s just an intensifier. But you’re a lot taller than I am. I don’t think about that much, but you must be eleven inches taller than I am.”

  “But you’ve been married to me for ten years. How can you say that I scare you?”

  “Remember how you used to sit me on the handlebars of your bike and coast down Cloud Street? How can I say that you don’t scare me, after that?”

  “Well, back then I was trying to scare you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you scared me. You scared everybody. You were so fucking smart.”

  She laughed. She turned her work. She said. “Dave, do you like me?”

  I wanted to groan. I said, “I love you.”

  “But do you like me? If you weren’t sleeping with me, would you want to talk to me and have lunch with me and stuff like that?”

  “Sure.”

  She sighed. “But do you think that we’re friends?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked at me, and sighed again.

  “Why are you sighing?” This was risky and could have led to anything, but the temptation to comfort your wife, if you love her, is a compelling one in my experience.

  She thought for a moment, then looked at me and said, “I don’t know. Life. Let’s go to bed.” She put down her knitting, turned off the light and the television, and led me by the hand up the stairs. She took off my shirt and my pants. Reached up to my awfully tall shoulders and ran her fingers across them. I undid the tie of her robe and cupped her breasts in my hands. She ran her hands down my chest, exploring, trying me out, looking at me again, over her shoulder in a way. I’m not going to say that I could even begin to resist.

  I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.

  On Saturday, Dana asked me to take the children up to the house in the country and maybe spend the night. The beds, she said, were made. There was plenty of firewood. We would, she said, have a good time. She would join us for dinner, after the Saturday-morning office hours. It was very neatly done. I said, “Maybe that’s a good idea. But you could take them and let me do the morning work.” Her face fell into her shoes. I said, “No, I would like to go into the country, I think.”

  It was another sunny day, but cold. Each child was bundled against the weather, her coat vigorously zipped, her hat pulled down over her ears with a snap, her mittens put on and tucked into her sleeves. To each one, Dana said, “Now you be nice to Daddy, and don’t make him mad, okay? I’ll finish my work and come for dinner, so I will see you very soon. Tonight we’ll have a fire in the wood stove and make popcorn and have a good time, okay?” And each child nodded, and was hugged, and then strapped in. Leah sat in front, eyeing me with pleasure. We drove off.

  I couldn’t resist looking at Lizzie and Stephanie again and again in the rearview mirror. They were astonishingly graceful and attractive, the way they leaned toward each other and away, the way their heads bent down and then popped up, the way their gazes caught, the way they ignored each other completely and stared out the windows. The pearly glow of their skin, the curve of their cheeks and foreheads, the expressiveness of their shoulders. I felt as if I had never seen them before.

  After about an hour, Lizzie began feeling anxious. She asked for milk, said she was hot, subsided. Stephanie sat forward and said, “Is the pond still frozen, do you think? Can we slide on the pond?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “Daddy, my stomach feels funny.” This was Lizzie.

  “You shouldn’t have drunk so much milk.”

  “I didn’t. I took three swallows.” Then she panicked. “I’m going to throw up! Stop! I’m going to throw up!”

  “Oh, God,” said Stephanie.

  “Oh, God,” said Leah, mi
micking her perfectly. I pulled over. Lizzie was not going to throw up, but I got out of the car, opened her door, took her to the side of the road, bent over her, holding her forehead in one hand and her hair in the other. All the formalities. Her face turned red and she panted, but though we stood there for ten minutes, she neither gagged nor puked. I felt her body stiffen, and we straightened up. There were tears in her eyes, and she said petulantly, “I was going to.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay with Stephanie. As soon as I pulled onto the highway again, she said, “I don’t see why we always have to stop. She never does anything.”

  “I was going to.”

  “You were not.”

  “How do you know? I was.”

  “Were not.”

  “Stephanie—” This was me. I looked in the rearview mirror. Stephanie’s tongue went out. Leah said, admiringly, “Stephanie—” The argument subsided, to be resumed later. They always are.

  Now Lizzie said, “Why are we going to the house? I don’t want to go. We went there last week.”

  “Me, neither,” said Stephanie. “I was going to play My Little Ponies with Megan.” She must have just remembered this, because it came out with a wail.

  “It’ll be fun,” I said, but I wasn’t as convincing as Dana, who must have cast a spell to get us to leave, because I didn’t want to go to the country, either. I glanced at my watch. It was ten o’clock. We could have turned around and been home before lunch, but we didn’t. There was no place for us there. At the next K-mart, I turned into the parking lot with a flourish and took them straight to the toy department.

  After the dinner that Dana missed and the bedtime she failed to arrive for, I turned out all the lights and sat on the porch in the dark, afraid. I was afraid that she was dead. I wished she had a little note on her that said, “My family is at the following telephone number.” But, then, a note could be burned up in the wreck, as could her purse, the registration to the car, all identifying numbers on the car itself. Everything but her teeth. I imagined myself telling the children that she had gone off with another man, then some blue-garbed policeman appearing at the office this week or next with Dana’s jaw. I would recognize the three delicate gold inlays I had put there, the fixed prosthesis Marty Crockett did in graduate school, when her tooth broke on a sourball. I would take her charred mandible in my hand and weigh it slightly. Would I be sadder than I was now?

  Headlights flared across the porch and she drove up with a resolute crunch of gravel. The car door opened. She seemed to leap out and fly up the steps, throw open the door to the dark house, and vanish. She didn’t see me, and I didn’t say a word. I saw her, though. I saw the look on her face as if my eyeballs were spotlights. She was a soul desperate to divulge information. I got up quietly and walked down the steps, avoiding the gravel, and tiptoed across the front meadow to the road.

  So how does the certainty that your wife loves another man feel? Every feeling is in the body as well as in the mind, that’s what he said. But the nerves, for the most part, end at the surface, where they flutter in the breezes of worldly stimulation. Inside, they are more like freeways—limited access, running only from major center to major center. I have to admit that I don’t remember much Gross Anatomy, so I don’t know why it feels the way it feels, as if all your flesh were squeezing together, squeezing the air out of your lungs, squeezing the alveoli so they can never inflate again. More than that, it is as if soon there might be no spaces left inside at all, no conduits for fluids, even. Only the weight of solid flesh, the conscious act of picking up this heavy foot, and then this heavy foot, reaching this cumbersome hand so slowly that the will to grasp is lost before the object is touched. But when the light went on and the door opened and Dana peered into the darkness, I jumped behind a tree as sprightly as a cricket. Every feeling is in the mind as well as in the body. She went back into the house. The light on the stairs went on, then in the upstairs hall, then in the bathroom. A glow from the hall shone in each of the two children’s rooms, as she opened their doors to check on them, then the window of our room lit up. It seemed to me that if I could stay outside forever she would never tell me that she was going to leave me, but that if I joined them inside the light and the warmth, the light and warmth themselves would explode and disappear.

  I went around the side of the house, placed myself in the shadow of another tree, and watched the window to our bedroom. The shade was drawn, and I willed Dana to come and put it up, to open the window and show me her face without seeing me. She has a thin face, with high, prominent cheekbones and full lips. She has a way of smiling in merriment and dropping her eyelids before opening her eyes and laughing. In dental school I found this instant of secret, savored pleasure utterly beguiling. The knowledge that she was about to laugh would provoke my own laughter every time. I wonder if the patients swim up out of the haze of nitrous oxide and think that she is pretty, or that she is getting older, or that she looks severe. I don’t know. I haven’t had a cavity myself in fifteen years. Laura cleans my teeth twice a year and that’s it for me. The shade went up, the window opened, and Dana leaned out and took some deep breaths. She put her left hand to her forehead and said, in a low, penetrating tone, “Jesus.” She sighed deep, shuddering sighs, and wrapped her robe tightly around her shoulders. “Jesus,” she said. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.” I had never heard her express herself with so little irony in my whole life. A cry came from the back of the house, and she pushed herself away from the window, closing it. Moments later, the glow from the hall light shone in Leah’s room.

  Now I went back to where I had been standing before. The windows in the children’s rooms faced north and west, and hadn’t received their treatments yet, so everything Dana did was apparent in an indistinct way. She went to the crib and bent over it. She stood up and bent over it again. She held out her arms, but Leah did not come into them. I could hear the muffled staccato of her screams. Dana stood up and put her hands on her hips, perplexed and, probably, annoyed. There was a long moment of this screaming; then Dana came to one of the windows and opened it. She leaned out and said, “David Hurst, goddamn you, I know you’re out there!” She didn’t see me. She turned away, but left the window open, so I could hear Leah shouting, “No! No! Daddy! Daddy!” Now the glow of the hall light appeared in the windows of Lizzie and Stephanie’s room, and then Lizzie appeared next to Dana. Dana bent down and hugged her, reassuringly, but the screaming didn’t stop. At last, Dana picked Leah up, only with a struggle, though, and set her down on the floor. I didn’t move. I was shivering with the cold, and it took all my will not to move. It was like those nights when Stephanie used to wake up and cry. Each of us would go in and tuck her in and reassure her, then go out resolutely and shut the door. After that we would lie together in bed listening to the cries, sometimes for hours. Every fiber in your body wants to pick that child up, but every cell in your brain knows that if you pick her up tonight, she will wake up again tomorrow night and want to be picked up. Once, she cried from midnight until about seven in the morning. The pediatrician, I might add, said that this was impossible. You could say that it is impossible for a man to pull all of his own teeth with only the help of a few swallows of whiskey. Nothing is impossible. I know a man who dropped his baby in her GM Loveseat down a flight of stairs. Having carried that burden uncountable times myself, having wrapped my arms and my fingers tightly around that heavy, bulky object, I might have said that it was impossible for a father to drop his child, but it happened. Nothing is impossible. And so I didn’t move.

  Stephanie got up and turned on the light in her room. Dana turned on the light in Leah’s room. Soon there were lights all over the house. After that, the light of the television, wanly receiving its single channel. I saw them from time to time in the downstairs windows, Dana passing back and forth, pausing once to clench her fists and shout. What she was shouting was, “So shut up, just shut up for a moment, all right?” A sig
n that she has had it. They always shut up. Then she opens her fists and spreads her fingers and closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. Okay.” She went out of view. The light went on in the kitchen, and she reappeared, carrying glasses of milk. She went away again. She reappeared carrying blankets and sleeping bags. Then they all must have lain down or sat down on the floor, because all I saw after that was the wall of the living room, with half a Hundertwasser print and the blue of the television flickering across it. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two.

  At two thirty, lights began going out again, first in the kitchen, then the dining room. The television went off. Dana passed the window, carrying a wrapped-up child, Leah, because that was the room she went into. She went to the window and closed it. Then she carried up Lizzie and Stephanie, one at a time. Don’t stumble on those blankets going up the stairs, I thought. The living room light went out. The hall light. The bathroom light. The light in our room. It was three by now. The house was dark. I imagined sleep rising off them like smoke, filtering through the roof and ascending to the starry sky. I stayed outside. The sun came up about six. I went inside and made myself a big breakfast. I sat over it, reading the paper from the day before, until nearly eight thirty, when Dana came down. She was furious with me and didn’t speak. I estimated that her pride might carry us through another three or even four days without anything being communicated.