WE WERE DRINKING COFFEE and finishing our committee work, the strategy for a counterprotest the following week at an abortion clinic in Northport. This time La Rae would do the telephoning, Katherine would prepare the signs and sandwich boards, and I would draw up the formal request to the police for permission to march. The Right-to-Lifers had chosen a Saturday, thank goodness—I guess they had jobs, too.
“I hope they don’t wave those butcher’s aprons at us, like the last time,” Katherine said.
“What I can’t stand are the blown-up pictures,” I said.
“Get pictures made for us, too,” La Rae instructed Katherine.
“Of what?” Katherine asked. “I’m not exploiting abused kids.”
“She’s right, La Rae,” I said. “Our argument isn’t made with shock tactics.”
“I still feel funny about abortions,” Katherine said, closing her notebook. “I can’t help thinking of little Ethan.”
“Oh, please, Katherine,” La Rae said, “spare us the violins, okay? This has nothing to do with your grandchild.”
“Well, it has to do with somebody’s grandchild.”
“No, it doesn’t,” La Rae insisted, “and you know it. It has to do with choice, remember? With women’s bodies.”
Katherine sighed. “I suppose so,” she said. She took off her glasses and polished them with a paper napkin.
“Don’t suppose,” La Rae advised her. “Know. Knowledge is truth, truth is beauty, et cetera, et cetera.”
I didn’t say anything. I remembered briefly considering an abortion when I was pregnant with Jason. It was just before I’d given Howard the news, and everything seemed to depend on his response. He loves us, he loves us not.
“Listen, Katherine,” La Rae said. “Why don’t you bring Ethan with you next week? We could hang a sign on his stroller: Here by choice.”
Katherine was shocked. “I couldn’t!” she said.
“They bring their babies, don’t they?” La Rae said. “To show the difference between their little cherubs and our bloody fetuses.”
“I wouldn’t ever use him that way,” Katherine said.
“Why not?” La Rae asked. “You’d be teaching him about responsibility.”
“He’s only four months old, La Rae,” Katherine said. “I think he has time for that.”
The three of us were sitting in La Rae’s kitchen, where we’d been gathering for years. Long ago, our own babies crawled around our feet under the table, banging spoons against pot covers, while we tried to figure out ways to keep them from ever being drafted. This time, now that our work was done, I drifted off into a troubled reverie. I was living a double life, encouraging Howard to get well while I was planning to leave him. What if he died suddenly, without ever knowing my intentions? But I was being morbid and silly. He was making great progress—he’d started working again that day—which both pleased and disheartened me. It was similar to the conflict I’d felt when the children started kindergarten. I had to let go; it was for everyone’s good. La Rae thought I was overreacting to the whole situation, but I thought that she underreacted, in the extreme, to hers. And I still didn’t want to confide in Katherine, to come up against the judgment I’d see in her face: How had I allowed it to happen again? Mostly, I dreaded that she’d be even more outraged than I was, that she might make me want to come to Howard’s defense. She’d once expressed her angry opinion of La Rae’s permissive arrangement with Frank, and La Rae told her to shut up and mind her own business, that she wasn’t a high-school student in need of guidance. They didn’t speak to one another for two weeks. But they were in the same car pool—music lessons and soccer practice—and one afternoon they were forced to talk about the driving schedule. Katherine threw her arms around La Rae and apologized. She’d only meant to be a good and honest friend. La Rae reminded her that honesty wasn’t always friendly, and that there are places friendship can’t go. Marriage was one of them.
Katherine often pointed out the exceptional strength of her own marriage. She said that she and Tony discussed everything. When their children were still at home, there were family conferences every week in which complaints and confessions were aired. They actually voted on meals and vacations and the distribution of household chores. Years ago, La Rae and I both admitted that although we loved Katherine and Tony, we hated their perfect relationship. We made sly fun of them—“Can this marriage be saved?” La Rae asked when we saw them smooching. And we discovered that we both had secret, mean fantasies about a sudden scandal: Tony was fooling around, was gay, had embezzled money from one of his law clients. But nothing ever happened, except for the drug bust at the high school in which all of our sons were caught with pot in their lockers. And Tony was the one who got them off.
La Rae was reheating the coffee when her father wandered into the kitchen from his room in the garage. He was wraithlike, with that startled crest of white hair, and eerily quiet in his bedroom slippers. “Coffee, Dad?” La Rae asked.
“Hello, Mr. Munson,” Katherine and I chimed, in cheerful chorus.
But he couldn’t stay. He poured himself a glass of water, made a circuit of the kitchen, and wandered out again. He’d been living with La Rae and Frank for ten years, ever since her mother died, and had become more and more withdrawn during that time. After the children moved out, La Rae urged him to take one of their bedrooms, but he refused. He stayed on in the garage, a deposed king on his island of exile. When the door closed behind him, La Rae confessed that she dreamed sometimes of driving her car into the garage again, right over the green shag carpeting, and parking it between her father’s bureau and his easy chair.
We were all silent in contemplation of that scene. I thought of my mother’s solitary confinement, her regular rendezvous with soap-opera stars. She had dizzy spells that might be little strokes. Would she really be able to summon help, if she needed it, with her beeper? I listened, and imagined I heard scratching noises from La Rae’s garage, like mice in the walls.
“I’d kill myself before I’d live with any of my kids,” La Rae said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Katherine said.
“Howard says that we’re never going to put Shadow down, so the children will be merciful to us in our old age,” I said. Howard says. Husband, children, dog. I saw them all in simple lines and primary colors, the stick figures in a child’s drawing of a family. When Howard left us, Jason was four, and he crayoned pictures of himself, Ann, and me inside the house, with Howard floating over the roof, like a Chagall lover, like God.
Katherine went home, and La Rae and I put some of the letters for our columns out on the table. We’d worked together before, reading passages aloud, and offering one another suggestions. Once, at my house, I couldn’t find the antidote for battery-acid stains on car upholstery, even in my Encyclopedia of Spots and Stains. La Rae took a battery out of Jason’s toy robot and smashed it with a hammer. She smeared the acid on some rags, and we spent the afternoon experimenting with possible solutions, like a couple of mad scientists.
My first job at the newspaper had been as La Rae’s secretary, when their offices were still in Mineola. My baby-sitter hadn’t shown up the morning of my interview, and I had to bring the children with me. The baby cried nonstop, I remember, and Jason overturned La Rae’s wastebasket. “Couldn’t you leave them somewhere?” she asked, and I said, angrily, that I’d tried to sell them to some gypsies on Jericho Turnpike but it hadn’t worked out. She laughed and told me that the job was mine.
I’d read La Rae’s lovelorn column before I met her that day, and I expressed surprise that she was so young. “Why does everyone think wisdom comes with age?” she said. We agreed that our mothers had probably started the rumor. La Rae had begun at the paper as a file clerk. She’d invented her own column, out of boredom, writing all the letters to herself for a while, until the thing caught on. After I’d worked as her secretary for six months, she thought up “Paulie’s Kitchen Korner” for me. When I protested that I was no expert on household matters, she picked up my purse and dumped it out onto her desk. A world of domestic litter fell out: keys, a collapsed and dusty pacifier, expired supermarket coupons, a small screwdriver, a rubber dinosaur, a can of V-8 juice. “I rest my case,” La Rae said.
Now I read a letter aloud to her. “Dear Paulie, My stainless-steel sink is anything but stainless! Rust and water spots all over it! Hope you can help. My ninety-year-old Mom and I really enjoy your helpful hints! Sincerely, Betty Jean Rickover.”
La Rae handed me one of her letters. It said, “Dear La Rae Peters, It’s difficult for me to write this letter. Maybe everybody says the same thing, but I really mean it. It’s about my husband. We never had what you would call a thrilling love life. I know Burt works hard and he really is tired, but not all the time, La Rae. I just can’t get him in the mood, as the old song says. Any suggestions? Sign me Frustrated (Real name Mrs. Janet Workman). P.S. Please don’t print that I’m from Chicago—he would know.”
“Oh, poor thing,” I said.
“Yeah, those rust stains can really get you down,” La Rae said.
“Don’t be funny,” I said. “At least I had a wonderful sex life, once. Howard didn’t ever used to be tired.”
“Frank still isn’t.”
I looked up in quick sympathy, but La Rae wasn’t being bitter or ironical, only dreamily proud.
“She can use lighter fluid,” I said, thinking of Betty Jean Rickover’s sink, and trying to change the subject. “Or some white vinegar.”
“Yeah, that really turns them on.”
I laughed. “Dear Frustrated, Get into something flimsy and dim the lights. Then rub a little lighter fluid on those special places.”
“Behind the ears and the knees,” La Rae said. “And don’t forget the pillows.”
“Come on, baby, light my fire!” I sang.
“Do you think Tony is any good in bed?” La Rae asked.
I was used to her habit of veering abruptly around the corners of a conversation. “Probably,” I said, plunging into gloom and jealousy. “But let’s not start picking on Katherine, okay?”
“I just can’t stand her holier-than-thou attitude.”
“What we really can’t stand is her happiness, that she makes marriage seem easy.”
“I’ll admit that’s a neat trick,” La Rae said.
“My favorite little poem goes: ‘So different, this man / And this woman: / A stream flowing / In a field.’ William Carlos Williams.”
“Who else?” she said. “But I know an even shorter one, on the same subject. ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’”
“Well, who else?” I said, and we both laughed.
“Anyway,” La Rae said, “Katherine could have brought Ethan to the clinic.”
“He’s her grandson,” I said. “It’s her choice.”
“Can you imagine being a grandmother, Paulie?”
“No. Yes.” It was probably the only opportunity in life to bestow unconditional love. Howard’s mother doted on our kids long-distance, with adoring letters and phone calls. And she was especially gaga about Jason. Against everyone’s advice, she often tucked crisp ten-dollar bills in with her letters to him. And when he was a baby, my super-critical parents refused to acknowledge his flaws: his wandering eye and the way his feet toed out, like Chaplin’s. “What? Where? I don’t see anything,” my father would say. “He’ll outgrow it,” my mother insisted, as we rushed Jason from the ophthalmologist to the orthopedist. “I wish I could have my own baby,” I told La Rae.
“You still could, couldn’t you? But it would probably have two heads or something. And you’d have to be class mother when you’re sixty. Anyway, who would you have it with?”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t really want a baby, La Rae. I guess I just wish I were young again. You know, all damp … and ready.”
“Like garden soil.”
“Like I used to be.” I meant more than physical youth, though. I meant the constant fever of excitement, the boundlessness of possibility. “I hate getting old.”
“You’re not getting old,” La Rae said, “you’re getting better. You’re only maturing, like Arlene Francis and Hugh Downs.”
“Soon I’ll get into the movies for half price again. And get discounts on dentures and hearing aids.” Live in Ann and Spence’s garage.
“Meals on Wheels!” La Rae shouted.
“Cataracts!” I shouted back.
“Pacemakers!”
“Osteoporosis!”
“Wait until we start the changes,” La Rae said. “My sister Carol goes hot and cold all day, as if her thermostat is shot. And you get all dried out inside, like an old shoe.”
We giggled nervously. I imagined my future single life as a confusion of interior climates, with a tube of lubricating jelly always on hand. “God, I can’t wait. Thanks a lot for cheering me up,” I said.
“Why do they call it menopause?” La Rae wondered. “‘Pause’ makes it sound as if it’s going to start again.”
“Do you know that novel by Thomas Mann?” I asked. “The Black Swan? A middle-aged woman falls in love with her son’s friend, and she starts to feel miraculously young again.”
“Damp and—”
“Yes, and her periods do come back! But it turns out that she really has this terrible cancer.”
“Well, thank you, Miss Merry Sunshine,” La Rae said. And then she said, “Don’t do it, Paulie.”
“What, grow old?”
“No, don’t leave Howard.”
“La Rae, I have to. Before he leaves me again.”
“Maybe he won’t.”
“I’ll never feel safe about that.”
“Well, then don’t leave me.”
“We’ll see each other.”
“Yeah, for lunch, probably. We’ll go shopping. When are you going?”
“Soon,” I said, wondering if it was true.
“Nothing will be the same around here.”
“Everything changes,” I said. “We may even have to grow old gracefully.”
“Not yet,” La Rae said.
“Not yet,” I agreed.
Then the phone rang and it was Howard. “What’s wrong?” I said, forgetting my vow to be calm.
He didn’t sound that calm himself. “Nothing!” he snapped. “Why do you always think something’s wrong?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“I’m only a little tired,” Howard said in a gentler voice.
“Then I’ll come and get you now,” I told him.
“No, no, I’m home already. Mike gave me a ride.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’ll be home soon, too.”
“Take your time,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap, anyway. Take your time,” he repeated.
So I did. La Rae and I drank some more coffee, and the caffeine rushed through my bloodstream, giving me a fast, false surge of energy. We made a pact to live together when we’re both ancient and decrepit. We made another pact to never get that way. And we answered a few of our letters, giving serious attention to the universal problems of love and rust.
When I got home, Howard was awake. The house was heavily, funereally fragrant. “What stinks like that?” I asked, and Howard said that he’d spilled some after-shave. I turned on the exhaust fan and then I started supper.