Jack was pleased with himself. He had had a good morning. After three weeks into the semester, he had just had three more students sign up for his class, which meant that the word was getting around that he was good. He had started off this Introduction to Neoclassic Literature course by having the students read Pope’s self-satisfied mincing An Essay on Man (“One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right”) while lecturing to them about the general conditions in the British Isles at that time: the lack of sanitation, the plagues and diseases, the absurdly unfair penal code, the contrast between the few very rich and the many chronically poor, the squalor, the illiteracy, and, for the women in his class, the complacent sexism—even Jonathan Swift had said, “A very little wit is valued in a woman, as we are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a parrot.” If he had to teach this stuff, he wanted to get his students interested in it, even fascinated by it, and he had decided to do that by means of irony and rebellion—understanding one’s tyrants.
This morning, before he had introduced Swift’s A Modest Proposal, he had played on his cassette deck the rock group U2’s song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” It was easy to lead from there into a discussion of conditions in Ireland then and now; the music hooked the students and they felt the similarities of this age and the eighteenth century; so they would give this literature, this course, a chance. Hudson Jennings might not approve of his methods, but he couldn’t object to the consequences; the students were reading the stuff, all the way through, and discussing it.
It was almost noon. Jack sat in his office trying to decide whether to eat there, while making notes on an essay he wanted to start work on, or whether to enjoy himself by going down to the cafeteria and getting a decent lunch and having some friendly conversation. Either way, he’d have a long walk. His office was located on the top floor of Peabody Hall, and the concession machines with their expensive cold sodas and stale sandwiches were in the basement, four flights down. Peabody Hall was a strange building, a building like Dorian Gray’s face: the old awful part was hidden in the attic, while the first floor, which everyone saw, stayed beautiful. That was where the gracious faculty lounge was with its long windows and thick Oriental rugs and leather chairs and huge mahogany tables covered with current periodicals. Receptions were held there, in the Peabody Room, and it was also used as a refuge for the faculty during the day. Running the length and half the width of the building, it was so spacious that clusters of chairs and sofas were scattered around, with fresh coffee and hot tea kept in silver urns at one end of the room. It was a graceful room, and Jack went there often. The other half of the first floor was broken into two large lecture rooms and a grand foyer with brass plaques and oil paintings of former presidents of the college on the high walls. The second floor was given over to small classrooms. The third floor, which one always reached in a state of exhaustion, because the ceilings of the first two floors were so high, contained faculty offices. Hudson Jennings had an office with large windows and thick carpet near the top of the stairs. Jack’s office was at the back of a warren of halls and offices; it had one high tiny window and no carpet. But it was his office, and he loved it.
He decided that because he deserved a reward for the way his class had gone this morning, he would go down all those stairs and out of the building and across to the cafeteria. He’d find a friendly face and clever conversation there—but suddenly he heard a commotion in the hallway. It sounded like Alexandra, screaming “Bottle,” but that couldn’t be it.
Jack looked around the door and saw, to his amazement, Hudson Jennings leading Carey Ann, with Alexandra screaming in her arms. Carey Ann was extremely pale and her eyes were glazed so that she looked both blind and powerful.
“Here you are, my dear,” Hudson said, ushering Carey Ann into Jack’s office.
“Daddy!” Alexandra cried with delight, and reached out her arms to be taken and hugged. Jack was pleased by this, because it was flattering that his daughter was so thrilled to see him—and also because she had stopped screaming for her bottle.
“Your wife was having trouble finding your office,” Hudson said.
Carey Ann turned her beautiful wide blue glassy gaze on Hudson and said, “Thank you so much.”
“What a nice surprise,” Jack said. He hadn’t shown Carey Ann his office before—she hadn’t wanted to take the time to come in and see it until she got more organized at home.
Hudson went off down the hall.
Carey Ann shut the door behind her so that the three Hamiltons were enclosed in Jack’s tiny space.
“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann wailed, and tears began to shoot from her eyes. “Alexandra’s been kicked out of playgroup!”
“What?” Jack asked.
Alexandra, knowing she was the subject of conversation, and possibly even aware that she was the source of her mother’s tears, reached up a plump dimpled hand and gently stroked her father’s cheek. “Prickles,” she said.
“I want to die! I want to just die! I want to go home!” Carey Ann said. “I want to go back to Kansas.”
“Oh, Carey Ann, oh, honey,” Jack said, and tried to put his arm around her, consoling, but as he got close to her, his daughter leaned forward with both her little hands (her legs were anchored between Jack’s arm and chest, her little bottom seated on his arm) and pushed her mother gently but firmly away.
“Go way,” Alexandra said.
Carey Ann was crying so hard she didn’t notice anything. Jack managed to pat her shoulder. “I hate everybody here,” she was saying.
“Prickles,” Alexandra said. She climbed up Jack’s body so that her face was directly in front of his, blocking his view of Carey Ann. With both little fat hands she gently rubbed his face. “Daddy prickles.”
How could anybody so cute be kicked out of a play group, for heaven’s sake?, Jack thought as he nibbled on his daughter’s fingers, making her giggle.
Carey Ann, ignored, began to talk loudly. She was actually kind of screaming: “… uptight New England bitches!”
Oh, God, Jack thought, for some of the other English and history teachers were in their offices on this floor now.
“Here,” he said, pulling a heavy wooden office chair up to her. “Sit down, honey.”
He sat down in his squeaky typing chair and found some felt-tip pens and blank white paper. “Here,” he said to Alexandra, drawing a face on the paper, “Lexi draw picture!” He gave his daughter the pen. She looked at him suspiciously, knowing she was being bribed, but, kneeling on his lap, leaned across his desk and began to scribble.
“Now, Carey Ann,” Jack said. “Start from the beginning. I want to hear exactly what happened.”
Carey Ann was digging in her purse for some tissues. She blew her nose, then said, “Well, you know how Madeline Spencer called and asked if I wanted to join their play group. She’s got little Zack, who is just Alexandra’s age, and she had these four other friends who all had kids, and they said if I wanted to I could join their group and it seemed like such a good idea. Madeline seemed all right, in spite of her hair, once I got talking with her. We were going to meet three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and leave all six kids together with two mommies to take care of them, and four mommies could be off, so each mommy could have two days off and one day on, and there’d always be two mommies together so we could talk and things. I really thought it was a neat idea.” Carey Ann succumbed to another moment of sobbing.
“See, Daddy?” Alexandra said, taking her hands and pulling Jack’s face toward her “picture,” which was squiggles and swirls.
“That’s pretty,” Jack told his daughter. “Lexi draw another picture for Daddy.” He gave her another sheet of white paper.
“So today was the first day, and we decided I would be one of the mommies to stay because Alexandra has never been left alone with a group of kids before and we thought she might feel more secure if I was there, and Madeline was the other mommy. And it started off just fine, we were at Madeline’s house, she has this neat huge rec room just off the kitchen. And everything was okay for a while, but then Lexi wanted to go into the other rooms, you know how she likes to explore, and Madeline’s rule was that the kids had to stay in the rec room or maybe go into the kitchen, but not into the rest of the house. Her rec room really is big and all, I don’t know why Lexi didn’t want to stay there and play with the other kids, but she kept trying to go into the dining room off the kitchen, and Madeline asked me not to let her go because she didn’t want the other kids going off, her house would get messy, so I had to stop Alexandra, and she had one of her little temper tantrums.”
Jack shuddered. He knew Alexandra’s “little temper tantrums” well; they would have brought Attila the Hun to a screeching halt. He looked down at his daughter, who was drawing happily, intently, on white paper. He adjusted the pen in her plump hand and brought the pen in to the middle of the paper. “Stay on the paper, Lexi,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
“Then I got her settled down,” Carey Ann was saying, “and it was sort of difficult, for if I paid any attention to the other kids, she got kind of jealous and sort of … I don’t know, I mean she’d come tug on me or hit my legs or something. And I don’t know why, but every time little Zack picked up a toy, Lexi wanted that toy, and she’d go grab it from him and say, ‘Mine,’ and I got embarrassed and tried to stop her, so she had another little tantrum. Madeline told me to just let her cry, and we tried to talk about it, but then Shelby Currier’s baby had to have her diaper changed while Madeline was in the kitchen heating up Kathy Kelly’s baby’s bottle, and I had the little baby on the floor on a towel, and I was trying to change her diaper, and Alexandra came over and started pulling on me, saying, ‘No! My mommy!’ and I tried to explain it to her, that I had to change the baby’s diaper, but Lexi started shoving the baby, trying to get her away from me, and then she picked up a play hammer and hit the baby in the face. She did it so fast I didn’t even see it coming. Oh, God, Jack, that baby screamed, you never heard any baby scream like that, I thought she was killed. And her nose started bleeding, and Madeline was standing in the door with the warm bottle and she rushed over and grabbed the baby up and went off into the kitchen with it and put cold wet towels on its face, and when she came back she said, ‘Alexandra ought to be spanked for that,’ and I said, ‘I’ve never spanked my little girl in my life and I never will,’ so she said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to do something to punish her?’ and I said, ‘She didn’t know what she was doing,’ and Madeline said, ‘She knew exactly what she was doing and if you aren’t going to do something to teach her she was wrong, I don’t believe you and she should stay in this play group.’ So I stood up and took Alexandra in my arms and said, ‘Well, all right, if that’s how you feel about it,’ and she said—oh, this is the worst part, because she stopped being angry and got all friendly and sympathetic, like she was sorry for me or something—‘Carey Ann, I really like you but you’re harming your daughter. You don’t discipline her at all. You’re raising her to be so spoiled she’s absolutely antisocial.’ ” Carey Ann broke off into another fit of sobbing.
Jack watched, feeling ill. Alexandra had stopped drawing and was staring at her mother, fascinated. She turned to stroke her father’s face. “Prickles?” she asked hesitantly.
“And then what happened, honey?” Jack asked. Lexi turned back to her drawing.
“And then … and then,” Carey Ann said, crying so hard she could scarcely speak, “and then I left.”
Jack’s stomach ached. He was baffled. Was his sweet lovely little girl some kind of bad seed? He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to put his arms around his wife and pull her into his lap and hold her and soothe her, but Alexandra always got upset if her parents did that sort of thing, and he wasn’t certain just how much physical affection parents were supposed to demonstrate in front of their offspring. But Carey Ann was truly more miserable than he’d ever seen her, and he’d seen her pretty miserable.
“You know,” he said, musing, as if the thought were just occurring to him, “I think that somehow you and I have been doing the wrong things, honey. I think we’ve just been letting her get away with too much. Maybe we should start spanking her when she does something wrong.”
“My parents never spanked me in my entire life!” Carey Ann said. “Never!”
“Well, my parents spanked me plenty, and I still know they love me,” Jack said. “I’m not saying we should beat her. I’m just saying … oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. Maybe we should go to the library and get a book on the subject.”
“Oh, books,” Carey Ann said, shooting him her you’re-the-scum-of-the-earth look. “That’s all you know about. That’s all you can come up with, is books.”
“Well, there are a lot of books on child rearing,” Jack said. “I see them advertised in the newspapers’ book sections. So there must be lots of parents like us who aren’t sure just what to do. You read plenty of books about dieting and your thighs and all,” he persisted. That was the wrong thing to say, he could tell. Carey Ann hated it if he mentioned her diets or her exercises to improve what she thought of as a terrible body (and what he thought of as heaven, the most beautiful thing on this planet). “Or we could go see a psychiatrist,” he suggested.
“Jesus Christ, what do you think, Alexandra’s crazy? Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, no, no,” Jack said, trying to calm his wife. “I guess I didn’t mean a psychiatrist, I meant a counselor. Some expert who could give us advice on how to discipline Lexi.”
But Carey Ann was really crying now, insulted by every single thing Jack had had to say in the last few minutes.
He looked down at Alexandra. First he saw her beautiful curling opalescent hair; then he saw that while he had been talking, she had taken the felt-tip pen and drawn squiggles and great sweeping spirals all over his desk blotter.
He physically recoiled, as if from a blow in the stomach. His desk blotter was more than just a functional piece; it had great sentimental value. Last Christmas, when they knew they were going to move back east, Carey Ann had surprised him on Christmas night by bringing out a pile of red- and green-foil-wrapped boxes, presents for him, presents she had not brought to the family gathering around the giant tree in the Skragses’ living room, but had hidden, to be opened when Alexandra was in bed and just the two of them were alone together.
“I want you to know that these presents are from me,” Carey Ann had said before she would let him open them, and she was blushing the entire time she gave them to him. “I mean, I didn’t buy them with your money and I didn’t buy them with my daddy’s money.”
“I’m not sure I understand, honey,” Jack said.
“I mean I got a job for four weeks just before Christmas,” Carey Ann said. “At Hall’s. And you know my father doesn’t own any of that store; he doesn’t even know anybody who owns any of it. I got the job all by myself. In the perfume department. They always need extra help before Christmas.”
“Carey Ann, that’s great,” Jack said, really touched, and touched even more by how serious Carey Ann was about this, and how intense.
He opened the first set of presents: it was a desk set consisting of blotter, leather pen cup, leather appointment book and address book with refill pages for the next few years, a little leather box full of loose-leaf notepaper, and a leather wastebasket. The leather was a wonderful chocolate brown, thick and fine, without any ornamentation, very masculine.
“That’s for your study at home,” Carey Ann told him. “Now open this set. It’s for your office.”
For just a moment Jack had felt a tingle of fear, for Carey Ann liked stationery with buttercups or elves or lambs on it, and she drew smiling faces on things and bought cards with rainbows and sunbeams on them for every imaginable occasion. What if the set she had bought for the office was in pale blue with gold trim or something?
But it wasn’t—it was just like the other set, except that the leather was all a dark green that was almost black. It was very handsome, and he could tell it was very expensive. Carey Ann had probably spent nearly four hundred dollars for the two desk sets.
Jack had come close to crying that night. He had felt as sentimental and mushy and in love and blessed as he had the night he proposed to Carey Ann and she accepted. He had come to treasure his desk sets. This one had certainly classed up his standard hole of an office.
But now there were these indelible dark blue squiggles and swirls all over his desk blotter, on the thick felt and on the leather. The blotter was ruined.
Jack grabbed the pen from his daughter. “No!” he said. “I said to draw on the white paper, goddamnit!”
He didn’t hurt Alexandra, but he had seldom spoken to her so sharply before, and the little girl jerked her head around to stare at him in amazement. Then she burst into wails. It was absolutely amazing how a child’s face could be transformed in a flash like that, from something so innocent you could suddenly believe in angels, to something so crinkled up and red and blotchy and wide-mouthed and loud that you could suddenly—for sure—believe in devils.
For one pure moment that lifted itself up out of time and hung like a dewdrop above Jack’s head, he hated his little girl. Well, maybe “hate” wasn’t the right word. He thought he probably was losing his mind. Carey Ann was sobbing, Alexandra was screaming, his desk blotter looked like shit, and he didn’t have any idea what to do now.
There was a knock on his door. Of course there was, of course someone would knock on his door right now.
“Here,” Jack said, handing his crying daughter to his crying wife. God, he hoped it wasn’t Hudson. It would be so embarrassing; it would look like Jack was being cruel and abusive to his wife or child. He had gotten a good look at Claire and would bet money she had never cried or made a scene in her life.
It wasn’t Hudson. It was a student, a girl in a baggy sweater. She stood outside Jack’s office, sort of wincing with indecision.
“Mr. Hamilton?” she asked timidly. “Could I sign up for your neoclassic lit course? I’m sorry to bother you now, but this is the last date for late registration,” she hurried to say.
“Sure, we’ve got room for one more,” Jack said. While he took the form from her and signed it and told her what text to buy, she was busy looking anywhere but into his office, where the two other females seemed to have calmed down a little and were only sniffling.
“Thanks so much!” the girl said as she turned to leave. “I really can’t wait to take your course!”
Jack nodded and smiled and then shut the door on her retreating figure. He turned to his wife. Carey Ann was now staring at him with a new look: suspicion? anger?
“Who was that?” she asked, her voice cold. Alexandra stared at her mother.
“Huh? That was just a student,” Jack said. “I didn’t get her name.”
“Do all your students look like that?” Carey Ann asked.
“Well, no,” Jack said, trying for some levity. “Some of them are men.”
“ ‘I just can’t wait to take your course,’ ” Carey Ann mimicked in a simpering high voice.
“What?” Jack asked.
“She probably wants to have an affair with you,” Carey Ann said accusingly.
“Oh, yeah, right!” Jack yelled, losing his temper at last, going berserk. “I mean, I am such a sex object on this campus that they almost didn’t hire me. I mean, no one wants to take my course because I’m a good teacher or anything, they just all want to get in my pants. The guys too—I mean, I’m such a hunk I turn straight guys gay at the sight of me.” He caught himself finally; he was leaning over Carey Ann, yelling right into her face. She had started crying again, quietly, pathetically, the martyred wife.
“I’m sorry, Carey Ann,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder. Alexandra, who had been shocked into silence by his shouting, reached up her fat little hand and pushed his hand off her mother’s shoulder.
“Go way,” Alexandra said.
Jack went over and slumped down in his chair. He looked at his blotter, now a ruin, like his life. “I’m sorry, Carey Ann.”
“You just don’t understand,” she said, digging in her purse for another handkerchief. “I used to be so popular and have a lot of friends and everybody liked me and thought I was pretty, and now here I am and I don’t have any friends and no one to think I’m pretty, and you have these beautiful girls just crawling out of the woodwork to get to you and I can’t even be in a little old play group and pretty soon you’ll stop loving me.”
“I’m not going to stop loving you.” Jack sighed, thinking as he spoke that he halfway wished he could. “And everyone thinks you’re pretty, you’re the prettiest woman on the East Coast. Now let’s settle down and talk about this sensibly,” he said.
He had meant to be soothing, but before he could say another word, Carey Ann bristled, tossed her hair, and shot him a look that could kill. “Don’t you patronize me!” she said. She was so mad now that she stood up and began to pace the tiny office, which was just barely big enough to pace in, especially since she still had Alexandra in her arms. “You want me to settle down and talk sensibly, which means you want me to just go on and act like nothing’s wrong, and I won’t. You think I’m being frivolous or childish or something, the way I’ve been upset since I’ve been here. Well, I want you to understand I’m not being frivolous or childish; I’m having a major problem with my life! I really am. Now, I love you and I know you love me, and we both love each other a whole lot, the same amount, but I was the one who had to give up something in order to spend my life with you. Why is that? Why weren’t you the one to give up things? Who says that just because you have a Ph.D. in English you have to teach it? We could be living in Kansas City right now in a gorgeous house having a lot of fun. Or you wouldn’t even have to go to work for Daddy. You could have kept teaching at the university there. You had friends there, you had students you liked. And I could still have had my friends and family and all the places I know and feel comfortable with, even if we were poor. You are just like a man! You want everything your way and if I’m not fitting into your little plans just perfectly, you think I’m not being sensible!”
Alexandra burst into a grin because with the word “sensible” her mother inadvertently spat on her face, which surprised Alexandra. Also, it was an interesting ride for the little girl, for each time Carey Ann got to the end of the room she turned so fast she whipped around, and pretty soon Alexandra got into the rhythm of it and hung her body out away from her mother’s and grinned when the turn snapped her back against her mother. But Carey Ann’s face was deadly serious.
“You want me to make friends right away—I know you do, and you don’t even understand a thing about friendship. These women here are so stuck-up, they ask me where I’m from and I tell them I’m from Kansas and they get this kind of superior, very amused look on their faces like suddenly they know all about me and what they know is that I go around barefoot carrying slop to the hogs or feeding the chickens.”
All at once Carey Ann ran out of energy and slumped back down in her chair. “You tell me to be sensible,” she said in a softer voice. “What that means is that you want me to hurry up and make lots of friends and make the house look nice and be that mother out of Leave It to Beaver. I can’t do that. I’ve got to go at my own pace. I’ve got to make my own friends. Just ’cause you and I are married doesn’t mean we’re going to like the same people. Like that Daphne Miller that you like so much. I can understand that you would like her ’cause she’s been at the college for about a billion years and can tell you all about it. And she’s so serene and all, like someone who never has had any problems. She just sort of goes floating and smiling through the universe like the old Queen of England, calmly talking to everyone, and I can see she’d be helpful for you to talk to. But if I’m going to have a friend it’s got to be someone like me with some problems. If Madeline Spencer had said to me today, ‘Carey Ann, you have the prettiest hair, I really envy you because I can’t seem to get mine to do anything,’ well, then it would have been easy for me to say to her, ‘Madeline, I know Alexandra needs some discipline, but to be honest, I just don’t know how to go about it.’ Do you understand that at all, Jack?”
Alexandra had curled up in her mother’s lap and was sucking her thumb. Jack wished he still sucked his. He had tried to pay attention to his wife and understand her, but sometimes her logic seemed unique to the point of nuttiness. It was the most he could do to say, “Look, Carey Ann, we’re both strung-out. We’ve got a lot to talk about, but we can’t solve everything right this instant. I’m starving. Let’s go over to the student union and have some lunch. Alexandra will love the french fries.” He held up his hand to forestall another scream. “I’m not trying to get out of discussing all this. I’m just hungry and I think I’ll be able to talk about it all better after I’ve eaten.”
“All right,” Carey Ann said. She stood up, wiping her eyes.
The history department was also in Peabody Hall. The history-faculty offices and secretarial cubicles were on the third floor, along the south side; the English department ran along the north. In between was the huge warm thrumming Xerox room with its massive compliant machines. Jack was on his way at four o’clock to find Daphne’s office, but as he passed by the Xerox room he caught sight of his friend bent over a machine.
“Hi!” he called, and stepped inside.
“Oh!” Daphne jumped, looking over her shoulder.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he apologized.
“I know you didn’t.” She laughed. “You just can’t hear anything when the machine’s going. Besides, you caught me with my shoes off.”
Jack looked down; so he had. Daphne’s brown leather shoes lay on their sides, their long heels pointed at each other, on either side of her stockinged feet.
“Come over here and talk to me,” Daphne ordered. “I’ve got to get this paper copied for Fred. He needs it for some journal.” She leaned close to Jack as he approached. “It is so boring,” she said through her teeth. “The paper, I mean. I had to type it.”
Jack went around to the other side of the Xerox machine. Daphne had a nice rhythm going: she raised the lid, picked up a sheet of paper, put another down, shut the lid, put the paper in a pile, and picked up a new sheet of paper from another pile. The machine hummed and clicked and stuck out a tongue of copied paper into its tray. He watched for a while, admiring her precision and organization. Her movements were almost hypnotic. She was like the machine—efficient, smooth—but unlike the machine with her grace. Next to the machine she seemed very female and curvaceous. Her breasts were right at the level of the lid, right in his line of vision as he watched her work.
“I have a favor to ask you,” he said, shaking away his thoughts. When Daphne looked at him questioningly, he went on, “I wonder if you would babysit for us tonight.” He held up a hand, forestalling any comment she would make. “I hope this isn’t an insult,” he said. “I mean, I know it’s an imposition, and I know you’re not a babysitter. But I’ve been trying all afternoon and I can’t find anyone who can come on such short notice. Hank Petrie gave me some names, but they’re all high-school girls who have to study for tests. And Pauline White gave me a name, but that woman already had plans.”
Daphne just looked at him, a funny smile on her face.
“I guess it’s kind of an emergency,” Jack went on. “To tell the truth, I’m a little desperate. Carey Ann is having a difficult time adjusting to the move and I need to have a long, uninterrupted talk with her. It’s hard to talk with Alexandra around.”
“Did Carey Ann get along with any of those women I introduced her to at the party?” Daphne asked.
“Well …” Jack hesitated, not certain how much to say. He didn’t want to betray Carey Ann; he didn’t know, after all, who might be good friends of Daphne’s—she did seem to know everyone—and he didn’t want to say anything he would mind having repeated.
With a sudden little flurry, Daphne stopped copying, piled up the papers, and flicked a button on the Xerox machine. Silence fell around them.
“Sure I’ll babysit,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the machine. “What time would you like me to come down?”
She was so easy!, Jack thought. Daphne was so easy and pleasant, and on his side. Somehow she had learned the trick of taking the world in stride. And she had such good legs—he watched her step back into her high heels.
“God, this is really good of you,” Jack said. “You’ll have to let us do something for you sometime. I really appreciate this.”
“We country folk have to stick together,” Daphne said, smiling. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure sometime this winter I’ll get sick and ask you or Carey Ann to get me some medicine, something like that. What time do you need me?”
“Six-thirty?” Jack asked. “Is that too early? We all have to get up early tomorrow, so we should make it an early night.”
“Six-thirty is fine.”
Carey Ann was on the floor with Alexandra, helping her put huge wooden pieces into a puzzle that would soon be a rabbit. Alexandra jumped up and ran to Jack as soon as he came in the door.
“We’re going out to dinner. I’ve got a babysitter!” Jack said, picking his daughter up and whirling her above his head. “Daphne Miller’s going to come down.”
He was grinning up at Alexandra, so he couldn’t see Carey Ann’s reaction to this news—he wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. She didn’t say anything.
“I couldn’t find anyone else,” he went on. “I got some names from Hank Petrie—he’s in English too, but his kids are older, but not old enough to babysit. They’re all high-school girls who will come on weekends but not on weeknights. It’ll be good having Daphne—I won’t have a long drive picking her up and taking her home.”
“It’s nice of her,” Carey Ann said slowly. “After working all day and all.”
“She’s coming at six-thirty. So go put on your dancing clothes, mama!” Jack made squeaky kisses on Lexi’s tummy.
The phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Carey Ann said.
Jack carried his daughter into the living room and sank down onto the floor with her. She was having a giggling fit. He lay on his back, drew his knees to his chest, and put Alexandra on his legs, bum against the shelf of his feet. He held on to her hands and bounced his legs, and Alexandra laughed with pleasure.
“Yes, this is she,” Carey Ann was saying. “Oh, yes. Oh.”
Jack paused in his bouncing for a moment, trying to hear the conversation, trying to figure out who was on the other end of the line. But Alexandra screamed, “Go, horsie!” He bounced his legs again. He hoped it wasn’t Daphne, backing out.
He bounced Lexi till his legs grew tired, then lifted her above his head and turned her into an airplane. Finally he said, “Daddy’s tired,” and let her down onto his chest and stomach. He hugged her. She snuggled against him. They both caught their breaths. Carey Ann hung up the phone in the kitchen and came into the living room. She sank down onto the sofa like someone who’d just been turned into jelly. There were tears in her eyes. Oh, no, now what?, Jack thought, his heart sinking.
“Oh, Jack,” Carey Ann said. “You’ll never guess. Oh, I’m so happy.” She smiled radiantly.
“What?” Jack said. He sat up, bringing Lexi up with him. She crawled off his lap and walked over to her mother.
“That was Shelby Currier,” Carey Ann said. “You know, the mother of the little baby that Alexandra hit today? Well, you won’t believe this, but she called to tell me not to worry about it. She said she knew I probably felt awful about it, because she has a little boy—Aaron, he’s four, he’s in preschool—and when he was two, the same sort of thing happened to them. Another little boy pretended to shoot at him with a toy gun, and Aaron said, ‘Don’t you shoot me!’ and picked up a wooden block and threw it and hit the little boy in the face. Made him have a terrible nosebleed. Shelby wanted to die. And the other mother was really awful about it, acted like Aaron was a psychopath or something. Oh, Jack, Shelby’s so nice. Jack, she belongs to this other group. It’s a group of young mothers who get together one night a week just to talk about their kids and their problems. Each week they meet at someone’s house, and they have a theme, like thumb-sucking or discipline or sibling rivalry, and it’s at her house tonight and she wants me to come. Oh, Jack, would you mind if I didn’t go out to dinner with you tonight? I mean, I love you, but …”
Jack grinned at his wife. “I love you, Carey Ann. Even if you prefer someone else to me.”
“Oh, Jack!” She grinned, then jumped up. “What shall I wear?”
Carey Ann had just driven off in her white Mustang convertible and Jack was still standing in the doorway with Alexandra waving in his arms—her entire arm going back and forth like a windshield wiper—when Daphne Miller came walking down the dirt road and into their yard. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and sneakers.
“Oh, God!” Jack said. “I forgot to call you. We had a change in plans. Well, listen, come on in anyway. Have a drink with me. The least I can do is give you a drink.”
Daphne smiled. “All right. It will give me a chance to get to know your daughter better. In case you ever need me to baby-sit again, she’ll be more comfortable with someone she’s familiar with.”
Jack sat Alexandra on the kitchen counter and gave her a slice of lime to entertain her while he fixed vodka tonics. He was suddenly happy—this miracle had happened for Carey Ann, and now he had a pleasant adult to talk to while he babysat his daughter, whom he adored, but who could get a little boring over the course of an evening. He told Daphne where his wife had gone.
“I’m so glad,” Daphne said, taking her drink. She followed Jack into the living room and sat down with him and Alexandra on the floor. “Shelby Currier’s very nice,” she said. “You know, she used to be a model. She married Watson Currier, who must be the homeliest man on the Lord’s earth, and he’s a chemistry prof and shy! The two of them couldn’t be more different. It’s always a mystery when two people choose each other, isn’t it? But Shelby is just as happy as a clam.”
“Well, I’m relieved,” Jack said. He told Daphne about the playgroup incident, using gestures and euphemisms and disguised language so that Alexandra wouldn’t know they were talking about her.
“Oh, it’s the hardest thing to move into a new town,” Daphne said. “I know. When I first moved here, I was a young faculty wife just like Carey Ann. The first semester, all I did was look at wallpaper books and paint the kitchen.” She laughed. “It’s a wonder Joe didn’t leave me then,” she said. “He’d come home from work and I’d have about seventeen billion wallpaper patterns for him to look at, all marked in the book with strips of paper.”
She laughed, and suddenly spread her legs out in a V from her body. She grabbed a ball and held it at her crotch, then rolled it toward Alexandra, who was now sitting that way. “Now, roll it to Daddy and Daddy will roll it to Daphne,” she said. “Watch out for your drink,” she told Jack as he arranged himself for the game.
Alexandra loved the game. Jack and Daphne talked—interrupting themselves constantly to pay attention to Lexi—and after a while Jack made them each another drink and they rolled the ball in the reverse direction. The living-room window gleamed, a wall of light. After a while Daphne said, “I love it when it’s just like this—not quite dark, but not daylight either. It makes the air seem so gentle.” They decided to go out for a little walk. Jack zipped a sweatshirt onto Lexi and stuck her fat feet into their sneakers. Then, Jack holding one of the child’s hands, Daphne the other, the three of them walked down the dirt road toward Daphne’s house. The tunnel of trees was black. They could hear Dickens barking.
“Let’s turn around and go back before he has a heart attack,” Daphne said, and they did. “Hear the birds, Lexi? They’re calling good-night to you.”
It seemed perfectly natural for Daphne to fix them another drink while Jack changed Lexi’s diaper and put her in her sleepers. They were talking about the English department now, and about Hudson, and about different writers. It was a pure relief to Jack to say some things to someone who understood—who knew what college departments were like, what kind of squabbling and rivalries and games went on.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and went up the stairs and carefully lowered his sleeping daughter into her crib. He was surprised, when he came back down the stairs, to see that Daphne was crying. He couldn’t imagine what had happened. It always amazed him how much women cried, and how easily.
“I’m so sorry,” Daphne said. “Forgive me. I just … it was just seeing you like that with your daughter. The way you held her and looked down at her. You love her so much.”
To Jack’s dismay, Daphne bent over and crossed her arms on her lap and sobbed into them. He sat down on the sofa next to her, moving cautiously.
“I guess all fathers aren’t like that, huh?” he said. He didn’t want to probe, but he didn’t want to be aloof, either.
“Cynthia’s father wasn’t,” Daphne said. “Oh, Alexandra’s a lucky little girl!” She raised her head and wiped her eyes. “I’m getting maudlin. I’d better go.”
“No, no, finish your drink. Tell me about Cynthia’s father.” Jack sat at the other end of the sofa, looking at Daphne.
“Joe never wanted children,” Daphne said. “He was always so wrapped up in his work. While I … I hadn’t thought of having children, but all of a sudden this need grew right out of me. For a long time I tried to stifle it, thinking I could cajole Joe into having children. I had this very good friend, my best friend in those days, and she had the most beautiful little boy. While I was thinking about getting pregnant, Laura got pregnant for the second time. She was so thrilled, and I was so happy for her—but so jealous as I watched her growing bigger. And she loved being pregnant and loved talking about it.” Daphne stopped to sip her drink.
“That summer Laura and her husband went to their house on the Vineyard and Joe and I went down to spend a week with them. We had a wonderful time. We biked everywhere, swam—Laura and Otto swam naked when they could, they said they always went to nude beaches in Germany. That seemed so exciting and … oh, chic, to Joe and me, so deliciously wicked. The Krafts were fascinating. We all swam in the ocean and read books and ate enormous amounts of food.”
Daphne scrutinized Jack. “Why am I telling you all this?” she asked, and without waiting for his answer, went on: “Are you sure you want to hear all this? I don’t know why I’m thinking about it all now.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
“One afternoon we went out for a sail in Otto’s boat. Just the four adults; we left Hanno with a sitter. It was a nice big boat, with a cabin with a head and a galley and room to sleep six. It was the most beautiful summer afternoon—there was just enough wind to make us skip right along, yet it wasn’t too choppy. We’d been sailing for perhaps an hour. Suddenly Laura made this sort of grunting sound—so impolite, you know, I laughed with embarrassment for her, and she sat up all of a sudden and said something in German. Then she got up and went down below. I followed her. She went into the head. I stood by the door. ‘Tell Otto to head back to shore,’ she said. ‘Tell him he must hurry.’ ”
Daphne looked down into her drink. “She was losing the baby. She came out and lay on a bunk and I put pillows and towels under her bottom to elevate her, to stop the bleeding. But it didn’t help. By the time we got to shore, she was holding my hand and crying so terribly and writhing. She was in such pain. She thought she was going to die. I thought she was going to die. And she said … Laura said”—Daphne was crying a little now—“she kept saying, ‘Daphne, don’t let this scare you. You must have children. Even if I die this way, don’t be afraid. It’s a fluke. It won’t happen to you. You must have children. That is what life is all about.’
“She didn’t die. We got her to the hospital, and she didn’t die. Though of course the baby did.” Daphne looked up at Jack, her eyes blazing. “Have you ever sat with someone while they are dying?” she asked. “It’s an amazing thing. You feel so intense. You feel you are at the center of the universe. You feel so important—and yet you have no power. You think you will do anything, unimaginable things, to keep this person you love alive.
“I would have had children even if I hadn’t met Laura, of course,” Daphne said, her voice growing lighter. “But that was a crucial moment in my life. So—what I’m trying to get to—I went ahead and got pregnant without Joe’s consent. Without his knowledge, actually. It’s not unusual, you know. Since then I’ve met lots of women who have sort of sneaked their children into this world. But I assumed that Joe would love his child, once he saw her, held her.”
Daphne seemed very tired all at once. She looked into her empty glass. The living room was so dark that Jack, at the other end of the sofa, could hardly see her. “But he didn’t,” she said. “My husband didn’t love his daughter. He didn’t love her at all. That’s why I was crying when I saw you holding Alexandra that way, rocking her that way. It, um, made me long for something I never had. I’m sorry I got so emotional on you. It must have been all these drinks. I really do apologize.”
Jack moved down the sofa and put his arm around Daphne. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “Please don’t apologize. I’m glad you told me. I’m glad you could tell me.”
Then, to his surprise, he took Daphne’s face in his hand, and, meaning simply to get her to meet his eyes so that she could read his sincerity, he began to kiss her. “It’s all right,” he kept saying, kissing her cheeks and her forehead and her chin, and then her mouth. She was trembling—from her crying, he thought—and she sat with her hands docilely in her lap. So it at first was not a matter of desire, but a matter of consolation. But to his surprise, he kept kissing her—God, she was so soft, her limbs were soft, endlessly soft, and he kept saying, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”
When he kissed her for a very long time on her mouth, she put her hands up against his chest as if to push him away, but she did not push him away. Their kissing turned into something very different from consolation, something flew out of their depths, like a bird flushed from the underbrush, flashing up into the air, something like a bird, with a life of its own, and they could kill it or let it live, the decision was theirs, but at first they reacted with their instincts, and they let it live. It was life, as all love is life, like a bird fighting to survive, to fly and be beautiful and have its own way for a while. Jack’s hands were everywhere on Daphne’s body, all the places he had wanted them to be, against the warm plump freckled skin, the full breasts, the rounded limbs.
He pulled up her sweatshirt. He wanted to see her breasts.
Daphne twisted away from him. She stood up and pulled her sweatshirt down. It was so dark they could not see each other except for their outlines, and the gleam of their wet mouths and eyes. Yet their breathing was so heavy they could almost see it; their panting was heavy and alive, like an animal roused in the darkness.
“We can’t do this,” Daphne said. “We can’t ever do this again. We must never do this again.”
Then, stumbling a bit against the furniture in the dark room, she went through the living room to the front door, opened it, and was gone.
Jack sat in the dark for a long time, thinking, wondering what on earth he’d been doing. He sank his head in his hands.
About nine-thirty he got up and turned on some lights. He washed up the glasses and put away some of Lexi’s toys. He thought, as he worked, how the toys were false—gave a false view of the world. For there was the wooden puzzle, and all the pieces fitted together to make a completed picture of a rabbit with a blue bow around its neck and a little wicker basket full of colored eggs in its paw. There was the wooden box with shapes cut into the lid—a three-dimensional X, a square, a circle, an oval, a triangle. Each piece perfectly fitting through its own hole, and absolutely not fitting through any other. The rock-a-stack, where colored plastic rings like inner tubes for dolls fit onto a yellow plastic pole, the largest at the bottom, the smallest at the top. There was no ambiguity in these toys, no duality, no confusion. Was it right to teach a child that the world was structured so clearly, that each thing had its place and only one place, that two contradictory things couldn’t exist simultaneously?
Carey Ann came in the door like a teenager in love for the first time. She was glowing. She took Jack by the hands and pulled him over to the sofa and made him sit down and listen to her. She had had a wonderful time. She had made friends, she had stayed after everyone else left and had a long serious talk with Shelby Currier—Shelby used to be a model and they had so much in common, so much to talk about. Jack listened to his wife, smiling at her eager happiness. He had looked in the mirror about eighty times before she came home, checking to see if anything showed, if there would be any way for Carey Ann to tell that he had been kissing someone else. As far as he could tell, his face looked just the same. At any rate, Carey Ann was so fired up about her new friends, she probably wouldn’t have noticed if a giant purple wart had grown on the end of his nose during the evening. She was going to try the play group again. And tomorrow she and Shelby were going to spend the afternoon at the park; Shelby had such good, sensible ideas about disciplining kids.
“Shelby says we’ve got to stop letting Lexi sleep with us. We’ve got to make her spend the whole night in her own bed, in her own room. She said we should be really firm about it. We can explain it to Lexi very calmly, and every time she crawls in bed with us, we just firmly put her back in her own bed and tell her we’ll see her in the morning. And she says that if she keeps crawling into our bed and doesn’t stay in hers, we should lock the door from the outside, so she can’t come into our room or leave her room. And she says that Lexi will cry and cry and cry enough to break our hearts, but that we can’t give in. She’s got to learn to sleep all night through in her own bed. That way we’ll all get a full night’s sleep and I won’t be so wiped out all the time. She was telling me how hard it is with strong-willed babies, how with Aaron, when he was two, she couldn’t get him to stop grabbing things off the shelves in the grocery store. She spanked his hands—that didn’t work. She tried reasoning with him—that didn’t work. Sometimes when she took things from him to put back on the shelves, he screamed with anger and people looked at her funny. So she did what she read in an early-childhood-behavior book—she told him that if he did it again, she’d put him in the car and leave him there while she shopped. So he grabbed something, and she left her cart right there in the aisle and carried this screaming little boy out to the car and put him in his car seat and locked all the doors, but left the window down for air—it was fall, it wasn’t too hot or too cold—and then she went back into the grocery store. She said you could hear Aaron screaming all over the parking lot. She said when she walked away from that car, other people in the lot looked at her like she was the devil incarnate. She heard people talking about it in the grocery store, how some mother had left a poor little baby alone in a car. She said she was shaking so hard she was nearly in tears, and of course she couldn’t really think about her groceries. She was afraid that someone would kidnap Aaron, or that he’d hurt himself in the car somehow, or that he’d choke to death crying, or any of those things. But she got her groceries, and when she got out to the car, Aaron was still crying like his heart was breaking—he was frightened, he’d gone all red and white. Some ladies were carrying their groceries to a car and one fat old bat said to Shelby, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. What kind of mother are you?’ She felt like a monster. Aaron was so mad at her he screamed all the way home. Shelby was so mad at him she was afraid she’d hurt him. She wanted to shake him. So she took him in and put him in his crib, then brought in the groceries. By the time she had unpacked them, he had fallen asleep with his skin all blotchy and his breath coming in little whimpers and he was sucking his thumb and stroking his blanket for comfort, and she lay down on the floor next to the crib and felt like the worst mother in the universe. And Aaron wasn’t perfect after that in the store, but he was a lot better. If she threatened to take him out to the car, he straightened right up, just because of that one time. Oh, God, Jack, it feels so good to talk to someone about all this!”
It was almost midnight before Carey Ann had cooled down enough to go to bed. Jack came out of the bathroom and had a nice surprise—she was under the sheets without a nightgown on. He couldn’t remember the last time she had come to bed that way, signaling that she wanted him. Seeing Carey Ann waiting in bed for him naked that way was like seeing the sun coming up after a night lost in a swamp. He could find his way again. He got in bed with his wife and began to kiss her and stroke her and touch her. He was nearly nuts with desire for her, and for the first time in months she was just as nuts with desire for him. “Oh Jack oh Jack oh Jack,” she kept saying, and she nuzzled and whimpered and pressed against him and kissed him a million times.
“Daddy?”
He was just about to enter Carey Ann when he heard his daughter’s voice right at his elbow. He jerked his head around so fast his neck cracked.
“Mommy?” Alexandra said, crawling up on the bed toward her mother.
Jack leaned over and switched on the light, carefully holding the sheet against him so he wouldn’t give his daughter some kind of trauma. He grinned at Carey Ann. “I’m not exactly in shape to get out of bed at this moment,” he said.
Carey Ann stood up. She took Alexandra in her arms. “Lexi sleep in Lexi’s bed,” she said, heading for the baby’s room.
“No!” Alexandra yelled. “Lexi sleep with Mommy!”
Jack heard Carey Ann speaking in a reasonable tone of voice. “From now on, Lexi sleeps all night in her own bed. Mommy and Daddy sleep all night in their bed. We have to get a good sleep or we get too tired. Here, Lexi has her bunny to cuddle.”
Jack could hear Lexi trying to scramble out of her crib. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. “Lexi sleep with Mommy!” After a while she changed: “Daddy! Lexi want Daddy!”
Carey Ann was shuffling around out in the hall. When she came back into the bedroom, she was breathing fast, but for a different reason. “I’ve shut her in her room,” she said. “I tied one of my scarves to the doorknob and then to the stair banister—Lexi won’t be able to pull it open. And the other door locks in the bathroom.”
She sat down on the bed next to Jack. For a while they both just sat there listening to Alexandra scream. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?” Carey Ann asked Jack.
“I do,” Jack told her. “I really do. I think it’s probably about time we did this.”
“I don’t think she can hurt herself in there, do you?” Carey Ann asked.
“I’m sure she can’t.”
Jack and Carey Ann sat side by side, naked, on the bed, listening to their daughter scream. It was amazing how loud she could be, and how persistent. Fire departments and burglar-alarm companies ought to tape-record babies screaming, Jack thought; it would be much more effective than any artificial sound. Jack’s hair was practically standing on end. An anger was billowing in him, a desire to hit something. Carey Ann was turning white and shriveling down into the bedclothes. She looked sick to her stomach.
“Isn’t she ever going to stop?” she asked Jack.
The room seemed to be filling with the color red. Alexandra was stopping now and then to gulp more breath—then she screamed some more. Jack’s penis had crawled nearly up inside his body to get away from the noise. He felt like a monster.
He felt even worse, a few minutes later, when Alexandra’s crying changed from angry screaming to pitiful whimpering. “Dad-dy,” she was saying to herself. “Mom-my.” They could envision her lying in her bed, lonely, bereft, betrayed, unloved, confused—traumatized? Were they ruining their little girl for life?
Then: silence. But it was not soothing. It was terrifying.
“Maybe she’s dying,” Carey Ann said. “Maybe she’s stopped breathing. Maybe she’s choked to death.”
“Maybe she fell asleep,” Jack said.
“Don’t be cruel,” Carey Ann said. “This is the first time we’ve ever made her stay in her room.”
“And it worked,” Jack said. “You were strong, Carey Ann.”
“I’ve got to go check her,” Carey Ann said. “I’ve got to be sure she’s okay.”
“Something tells me this is not a good idea,” Jack said. But Carey Ann was up and gone—through the bathroom into the baby’s room. As soon as she opened the door, Lexi, who had been lying in her crib sucking her thumb, jumped up. “Mommy!” she screamed.
“Lexi go to sleep now,” Carey Ann said, shutting the door fast and locking it.
Alexandra began to scream full blast again.
Carey Ann and Jack sat in bed waiting for the screaming to stop. When it finally did, Carey Ann looked at Jack. He shook his head at his wife. So she did not go check on the baby again. They turned off the light and slid down between the sheets. Jack felt as if he’d just climbed out of a Cuisinart. He was both exhausted and jazzed-up. He turned to Carey Ann, wrapped his arms around her.
“I can’t now,” Carey Ann said. “Not now. I’m sorry. I just don’t have any energy for it. I can’t get in the mood. I feel like crying. I feel like a person who’s left a puppy out in the cold.”
You are leaving me out in the cold, Jack said to his wife, but only in his mind. He turned on his side and tried to go to sleep. This is a start, he reminded himself. Marriage is long, and we’ve made one change. This is a start.