Sadly, Nate stacks plates. It’s the rule that when Elizabeth cooks, Nate does the dishes. One of the many rules, subrules, codicils, addenda, errata. Living with Elizabeth involves a maze of such legalities, no easier to understand because some of them are unspoken. Like an unwary pedestrian, he only realizes he’s violated one of these when the bumper hits him, the whistle blows, the big hand descends. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. He imagines Lesje to be without rules.
He sees himself bending to whisper at the bathroom keyhole: I love you. Irrevocable commitment, even though he isn’t sure whether Lesje, barricaded behind the bathroom door where she’d been for the past half-hour, could really hear him. He isn’t sure why she was upset. He’d seen her face as she headed out the door. The coffee stain spreading on the rug behind her; but it wasn’t that.
He’d wanted to reach through the bathroom door, comfort her, he thought about knocking, decided against it. What if she opened the door? If he said that to her face, no wall between, he would have to take action. Even though he meant it. He would find himself in mid-air, hurtled into a future he could not yet imagine, Elizabeth left on the solid earth behind him, feet on the ground where she always claimed they were, a dark hummock, the children’s faces two pale ovals beside her. Receding from him.
He thinks of them (riotously bouncing at this moment on their friend Sarah’s spare bed, in the dark, stifling laughter) and sees, not their daily faces, but two little portraits. In silver frames, birthday-party dresses, the dead hues of a black and white photo tinted. He and Elizabeth do not own any such portraits. His children immobilized, stilled. Bronzed. He tries to remember what it was like before they were born, finds he can’t. He can only go as far back as Elizabeth, trundling through the days and finally climbing ponderously from the car which he’d bought months before for this occasion, doubling over against the hood; himself solicitous and frightened. They wouldn’t let fathers into the delivery room in those days. He walked her to the desk; the nurse looked at him disapprovingly. See what you’ve done. He installed her in a ward room, sat as she clenched and unclenched, watched as she vanished down the corridor in a wheelchair. It was a long labor. He slouched in a chair covered with green vinyl, reading back copies of Sports Illustrated and Parents, feeling his mouth fog up. He wanted a drink badly and all they had was coffee from a machine. Behind doors an earthquake was taking place, a flood, a tornado that could rip his life apart in minutes, and he was shut out from it.
Around him machines wheezed; he dozed. He was supposed to feel anxious and happy, he knew. Instead he found himself wondering: What if they both die? The bereaved young father stood at the graveside, clogged with grief, as the woman once so vibrant and sensuous, who’d smelled of crushed ferns, descended forever into the earth, cradling a stillborn baby the color of suet. He walked down a road, any road, thumbing, heading for some legendary steamer, pack on his back. A broken man.
When he’d finally been allowed in, the event was over. There was a baby where no baby had been. Elizabeth, depleted, was lying propped up in a white hospital gown, a plastic name on her wrist. She looked at him dully, as if he were a salesman or a census-taker.
“Is it all right?” he said, noticing immediately that he’d said “it” rather than “you” or “she.” He hadn’t even said, “Was it all right.” It must have been; she was here, in front of him, she wasn’t dead. They all overestimated it.
“They didn’t give me the needle in time,” Elizabeth said.
He looked down at the baby, wrapped like a sausage roll, held by one of Elizabeth’s arms. He felt relieved and grateful, and cheated. She told him several times afterwards that he had no idea of what it was like, and she was right, he hadn’t. But she acted also as if this was his fault.
He thinks they were closer before the birth of Janet, but he can’t remember. He can’t remember what close means, or rather what it would have meant once with Elizabeth. She used to make omelettes for him at night after he was finished studying and they would eat them together, sitting in the double bed. He remembers that time as good. Love food, she called it.
Nate scrapes leftover boeuf bourguignon into a bowl; later he will put it down the Garb-all. His lapses of memory are beginning to bother him. It’s not only Elizabeth, the way (he deduces) she must have been, that’s slipping away from him. He loved her, he wanted to marry her, they got married, and he can recall only fragments. Almost a year of law school is gone now; his adolescence is hazy. Martha, once so firm and tangible, is transparent, her face wobbles; soon she will dissolve completely.
And the children. What did they look like, when did they walk, what did they say, how did he feel? He knows events have taken place, important events of which he is now ignorant. What will happen to this day, to Elizabeth’s disastrous dinner party, the remains of which are now being ground to shreds by the metal teeth under the sink?
Nate starts the dishwasher, wipes his hands on his pantlegs. He goes to the stairs, quietly before remembering: the children are away for the night. Lesje too is gone, fleeing almost directly from the bathroom, stopping only to snatch her coat, her young man in tow. The bun-faced young man whose name Nate can’t at the moment recall.
Instead of going to his own cubicle, his cell, he pauses at the children’s door, then walks into their room. He knows now that he will leave; it feels, instead, as though they have left him. Here are the dolls, the scattered paint sets, the scissors, the odd socks and rabbit-faced slippers they’ve forgotten in their haste to pack. Already they are on a train, a plane, headed for some unknown destination, being carried away from him at the speed of light.
He knows they will be back tomorrow morning in time for Sunday brunch, that tomorrow anyway everything will go on the same, that he will stand at the kitchen table dishing out scrambled eggs on toast for himself and the girls and for Elizabeth, who will be wrapped in her blue terry-cloth bathrobe, hair only half-brushed. He will dish out the scrambled eggs and Elizabeth will ask him to pour her a second cup of coffee, and it will seem even to him as though nothing is about to happen.
Yet he kneels; tears come to his eyes. He should have held on, he should have held on more tightly. He picks up one of Nancy’s blue rabbit slippers, stroking the fur. It’s his own eventual death he cradles. His lost, his kidnapped children, gone from him, kept hostage. Who has done this? How has he allowed it to happen?