The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  “About half an hour. Dave—”

  “I’m going out. I’ll be back, okay?” Slater wouldn’t have asked in that way for permission. Neither would Dave Hurst, a month ago. I slammed out the back door and got into the car.

  After I left Dana, Slater left me, and Dana joined me. I had hardly seen her back at the house, the whole time I was hovering around her, but now I could practically smell her, feel the vigor of her presence. As a rule, I don’t know what she looks like. I don’t think I have known, since the beginning, before everything about her looks became familiar to me, and saturated with feeling. As I drove along in the car, a picture of what she looks like came to me for the first time in years. And I thought, She is pretty, but she is getting a little prim-looking, with her gold button earrings and the gold chains around her neck. She wears neat blouses in the office, even now, in the midst of passion. And as this picture came to me, it also came to me that this passion was unbearable to her, and that the only way she knew to make it bearable was to pour herself into it as well as everything else, the way she has always done. I stepped on the gas, and soon I was streaming down the interstate at 92 miles per hour. “Lord,” I said, “let me fly. Give me that miracle to ease this pain.” I pushed the car up to 100. I hadn’t had a car into three figures in seventeen years, since Kevin Mills let me gas his father’s Oldsmobile 98 up to 115 the summer after we graduated from high school. I went fast, but I didn’t fly. Instead, I thought of my children and turned back at the next exit. I realized that the object of Dana’s affections had refused her.

  At the dinner table, Slater invaded me again. I was cutting Leah’s meat and she was complaining that the pieces were too large, so I cut them and cut them until they were nearly mush. Then she said, “I don’t like it.” I sat back and looked at her, then around the table at the others, and it seemed to me that I was Slater, visiting for dinner. The woman was blond, sort of pretty and nice enough, I thought, but her children were horrible, the oldest sullen and suspicious—clank, clank-clank went her knife and fork on the plate—the next one an oblivious blonde, masticating her food with annoying languor, and the third irritable and squawking. At last, inevitably, Leah smacked her bowl and it landed upside down on the floor. As Slater, I waited for their mother to do something about it. As my wife, Dana looked at me expectantly. Leah looked at me expectantly. I pretended to be their father. I jumped up and grabbed Leah out of her chair, and said in gruffish tones, “That’s enough. I’m putting you into your bed.” And I carried her upstairs. The windows were dirty and the sills needed vacuuming, and there were toys all over the floor of the child’s room. The responsibility for all this seemed put upon me, and I stomped down the stairs, shouting, “Be quiet! Stop yelling! You can come down in five minutes.”

  “Dave,” said Dana.

  I answered to this name.

  “I don’t think you should shout at her like that.”

  “Somebody has to. Maybe nobody has enough. You don’t. What the fuck is going on around here?”

  Dana looked up fearfully. “Nothing. Nothing is going on, just everything the same. Why don’t you sit down and—”

  Now I really was Slater. “Everything’s more fucked every day.”

  Lizzie and Stephanie had put down their forks and were staring out at me from under their foreheads, as if they couldn’t take the full blast of me in their faces, but couldn’t resist a look.

  Dana said, “Why are you like this? Why are you so angry all the time? It’s unbearable.”

  “I’m not angry all the time! I’m not really angry now.”

  “Listen to yourself! Can’t you hear what you’re saying?”

  “But it’s true, things are more fucked every day! Every day! Every day is worse!”

  “No, it isn’t! It isn’t. Don’t say that. I won’t listen to that! You’ve always said that! I hate it.”

  “I have not always said that. I just realized it today.”

  “You have.” She burst into tears. I was bitterly hurt and angry. Her greatest lifelong sin seemed to me to be that she didn’t agree with me about the way the world is. I thought, I could accept anything else, let her love him, let her fuck him, let her talk to him forever, but give me this little agreement that I’ve never had before. I said, or rather shouted, “Admit that I’m right. Admit that every day is worse!”

  “I won’t!”

  I could kill you, I thought.

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You said you could kill me.” I looked into each horrified face and saw that I had said it, or Slater had said it. I groaned. “I didn’t mean to say it.”

  “But you thought it.”

  “I can’t control my thoughts.”

  “You thought you could kill me.”

  “I don’t know what I thought. I thought a lot of things. I think all the time.” I sat down and looked first at Lizzie and then at Stephanie, and I said, “A person can think anything that they want, because there is no way to make yourself not think things. But you don’t want to do everything you think. I’m sorry. I think I’ll go out for a little while.” And then Slater and I slammed out of the house and got in the car again, although my father always used to say, in every crisis, “At least don’t get in the car.” And he never did.

  Slater kept wanting to stop at a bar. Or at a gas station to pick up a couple of six-packs. Dave didn’t think this was an especially good idea, but he did think he deserved something. What Dave really thought was that a responsible professional man, owner of two homes, employer of four persons, parent of three daughters, and lifelong meditative personality ought to be able to control himself. He also thought that his wife, a responsible professional woman, and ditto ditto ditto, if not ditto, ought to have been able to control herself, too. We stopped, Slater and I, at a rest area about thirty miles up the interstate, and there, without the benefit of a six-pack, we stood back from the road in the gloom of a chilly night and we screamed and screamed and screamed. After screaming, while noticing that we had screamed our throat into raw throbbing, we noticed the stars. They lay across the dark blue sky like sugar and diamonds sprinkled together. And Lord, how they shamed the flesh.

  In the exhausted backwash of all this verbalizing, I realized that my plan not to be communicated with was at greater risk than ever, because I had made myself so unpleasant that it was likely she would flee to him, or at least flee from me at whatever cost. In fact, my success now rested with his resolution not to have her. Only with that. I wondered what it was about her, her circumstances or her person, that gave him pause. Or maybe it was her intrinsic passion. Maybe he had thought he saw in her cool blondness some sort of astringent distance, and now he saw that between Dana and a desired object there was no distance allowed at all. Maybe he was dazzled by the neat blouses and the deft workmanship into not seeing the defiant, greedy stare. Maybe he saw only the established dentist, not the determined dental student, the stainless-steel blonde in the doorway of the classroom, radiating tensile strength like heat. Appearances aren’t deceiving, I think, but you have to know where to look.

  I should say that it was hard for me not to see her as a dramatic figure. I always had seen her that way. Maybe, in fact, he only viewed her as something of a bore, a little thing, a mere woman passing through his life. I don’t know. I never even saw him. I got home about twelve and sneaked into bed. Dana was already asleep. There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time. These days, when I lie awake at night and think about those early spring weeks, the objects of the world as they were then appear to me with utter clarity. Edges sharp, colors bright, movements etched into the silvery mirror of light and air. When I used to think of the word “confusion,” I would think of a kind of gray mist, but that is not what confusion is. Confusion is perfect sight and perfect mystery at the same time. Confusion is seeing without knowing, as if the optic nerves were still attache
d but the hemispheres of the brain were parted. Desire is confusion vibrating in the tissues.

  Confusion and desire also include the inability to keep quiet. One of the things I remember with embarrassing clarity is all the talking I did, all the statements I made about every possible thing. They were all assertions, bombast, a waste of breath. Could I have shut up? The world was beautiful during those weeks—chill, sunny, gold-green, severe undecorated shapes of mountains, tree limbs, stones, clouds, floating together and together in a stream of configurations as the eye rolled past them. If I had it again, I would look at it better.

  About this time we had what Dana would call “an early warning.” News of the impending disaster came first to Laura, through her cousin in California, then to Dave from his mother two states away. Vomiting, high temperatures in both children and adults, lethargy, sore throat, possible ear complications. Dana told Dave to rearrange our schedules for about a week, so that the illness could pass through the body of the family with as little disruption as possible. It isn’t unusual—the note from the school nurse reporting a case of chicken pox, the patient confiding, just before he opens his jaws, that he is feeling a little woozy, and then he leans back and out it comes, the miasma of contagion. Once each winter, if we are lucky, twice if we are not, the great family reunion that is the flu, or strep throat. The family patients have their characteristic styles of illness, and Lizzie is truly the worst, since she can’t stand discomfort but fights the medicine. Dana is hardly any better and seems to get a certain amount of relief from simply cursing, which doesn’t give the rest of us any relief at all. And me? Dana says that I am the one who haunts the house with a martyred air. I ask for a glass of orange juice, she says, and then, before she has a chance to get it, I turn up beside the refrigerator, wounded to the quick by her failure of care, and pour it myself. Yes, yes, yes. I wasn’t eager, given our circumstances, to take on this flu.

  The patients, now transformed into vectors, came without cease. I leaned over them. I picked up one instrument at a time and set each down. I wanted to be careful and not angry. I wanted, in fact, not to be myself, but I didn’t want to be Slater, either. None of the patients really replaced him in the chair, though, and when Dana passed the door, or spoke in the outer office, his ears pricked with that sleazy curiosity of his. “That your wife?” he kept saying. My private revenge against him was that I knew that his front teeth were going to disintegrate, and that his embouchure wouldn’t be his for long, no matter what. Slater was an insensitive fellow, though, and didn’t care what I knew. He also wanted to sit sullenly in the office and eat steak subs with cheese and drink coffee every day for lunch. Dana wasn’t the only staff member pretty fed up with him. Laura didn’t like his manner at all, and Delilah just stayed away. Only Dave didn’t seem to notice.

  Anyway, during those lunch hours, Slater and Dr. Dave were locked in argument. It was not that they couldn’t agree what to do. Neither of them knew what to do. Their concerns were more abstract. Dr. Dave wanted to find reasons for his feelings. It would have relieved him to know, for instance, that steak, cheese, and coffee were biochemical poisons that were deepening his anxiety. Slater had never seen anything, heard anything, or felt anything. Slater had no receptors, only transmitters. He wanted to shout and drive and drink and blow his trumpet. He was marvelously contemptuous of every thread Dr. Dave wanted to look at. What good had it done him, all these years, Slater declared, to pick up one tool at a time? Income, Dr. Dave said, look at my income, look at what people think of me. People, said Slater, think nothing of you. You are just a dentist, another white coat, another small thing. Every day you sit at your stool fashioning things in people’s mouths, and then they close their mouths and stand up, and more than anything they want to forget you, and your work never sees the light of day.

  But you, Dr. Dave said, you know nothing, you stumble through your life without a first notion, pressing yourself and your breath and your music into the world. What good has it done you, Slater, to consume without thought and express without consideration? No good, said Slater. No good. But I know that it does me no good, and you don’t even know that.

  And then I sit with my head against the wall, waiting for the next patient, and I can hardly move or breathe, and when the tears begin rolling down my cheeks, I just turn my head toward the window, I don’t even wonder why they have come or how I might dismiss them. I hear Dana’s step pause beside the door, the step of her $120 Italian high heels, for she is very particular about elegant shoes. I can imagine the flash of her curious blue eyes, but she says nothing, and when Delilah speaks from the other office, she turns and goes out, and both Slater and Dr. Dave feel gaspingly sorry for themselves. There is nothing meditative about it.

  This went on until about Thursday. On Thursday, everyone in the family woke up at a quarter to nine from a sleep that could have been drug- or enchantment-induced. There was no possible consideration of anything except clothing, breakfast, and the fact that the girls were already late for school. Even Lizzie was so somnolent that she gave no thought to the embarrassment of walking into the classroom late. She lifted her arms to receive her sleeves and opened her mouth to receive her Cheerios, and Stephanie wandered around the bathroom as if she didn’t know what she was doing there, and Leah let Dana dress her without a word of protest. Dana kept making toast. I kept eating it. It was buttery and delicious. She wouldn’t let us hurry. She called the office and said I was busy and would be an hour, and a half late, then she called the school and said that the girls would be there in time for recess. She was sleepy, too, and wandered from bathroom to bedroom half-dressed, looking for articles of clothing that were right under her nose. At ten thirty we took Leah early to day care and went to the office together, where Dana worked on the patients I had stood up. I don’t think I thought of Slater or the Other or the crisis of my marriage until well into the second patient, and then the patient’s malocclusion seemed more immediate, and, even, more interesting. Delilah had brought daffodils from her garden and set them on Dave’s desk, and so the day had a refrain, “Aren’t those lovely flowers!”

  When I used to work construction, my boss would tell me about the seventeen-inch rule. The seventeen-inch rule has to do with the construction of staircases. If you add together the width of the tread and the height of the riser, they should come out to seventeen inches. If they do, the step will meet the foot. If they don’t, the foot will stumble. Sometimes, if he had a remodeling job in an old house, I would check out the seventeen-inch rule, and it was always true. The effort of steps that were too steep or too shallow was always perceived by the knees and the tendons, if not by the brain. And so I would say that we had a seventeen-inch day. Patients came on time and opened calmly. Teeth nearly drilled themselves, or jumped out into my hand. Dana and Delilah chattered and murmured in the next office. Laura and Dave teased each other. At lunch, Dana and I found ourselves on the back step of the office, facing the alley, eating peanut-butter sandwiches with raspberry jam and drinking milk. Our shoulders touched. She said, “You know, I think Leah told her first joke today.”

  “What was that?”

  “Well, she was making claws with her hands, and roaring, the way she does, and I said, ‘What’s the name of your monster?’ and she looked at me and said, ‘Diarrhea.’ And then she grinned.”

  We laughed and our shoulders bumped.

  “Do you want the last bite of this?” She held out a piece of her sandwich.

  I nodded and opened my mouth. She put it in. I chewed it. We got up and went inside. An hour and a half later I was finished for the day and half expected to be met by Slater on the steps of the office, but the coast was clear. I took out my list of errands and purchases and walked toward downtown. Everything was on sale, including a very nice blue-and-green plaid Viyella shirt, 16-35, $16 marked down from $50. I put it on in the store, something I never do. As a rule I let new clothes sit in the closet for weeks before wearing them. I kept walking, looking
at yards and houses and daffodils and crocuses, and felt that spurious permanency that comes with the sense of true peace. For dinner I bought boned chicken breasts and frozen pesto sauce. Dana came home and made fresh noodles.

  Leah sat between Stephanie and Lizzie on the couch and they played this game: Lizzie would take Leah’s face between her two palms and say, “Say yes, Leah,” and then she would nod Leah’s face up and down. Then Stephanie would take Leah’s face from the other side and say, “Say no, Leah,” and turn her head gently from side to side. None of the three could stop laughing, the two older girls from the sight of it, and from the feeling of their own power, and Leah, perhaps, from the pleasure of their attention, or perhaps from the rattling perspective shifts she experienced as they manipulated her head. I said, “Careful of her neck.” But they were, without my saying anything. I pretended not to be watching them, but really I was transfixed by the passing of that baby head from hand to hand, by the way Lizzie’s and Stephanie’s fingers spread and flexed, by how strong their hands were with all their childish pudginess, and by how unconscious they were and yet how sensitive. I went into the kitchen. When I came back a few minutes later, the big girls were at their pictures and Leah was coloring her fingernails with a blue marker. I opened my mouth to remind her not to write on her skin, but before the first word was out, she had drawn a line from her ankle to her diaper. She looked up at me. I said, “That’s naughty. Don’t write on yourself.” She knew I would say it, and I did. She refrained from writing on herself then as a formality until I left the room.

  These are the trivia of family life, what the children do and say, how the fragrance of dinner wafts through the house, a view of the yard through the glass of the front door, the border collie across the street barking at the UPS man, a neighbor who has been hardly noticed these last weeks bringing the packets of seed you ordered together, looking at you quizzically and with concern, then turning away, making a joke upon herself. One by one they come upon the senses, charge along the neurons, leap the synapses, electrify the brain, and there is a moment, a moment of a specific duration which I don’t remember, before the synapses jam, when the ear hears, the nose smells, the eyes see, the fingers sense the cool smooth foil of the seed packets.