Howard’s first wife wouldn’t let him go. Her hold on him wasn’t even sexual—I could have dealt with that. It would have been an all-out war and of course I would have won. There is something final about me, and steadying.
I wondered why he was attracted to her in the first place. It could only have been her pathos. Reenie is little and thin, with large light freckles everywhere. Her bones used to stab him during the night and he couldn’t sleep. Howard says I am the first woman he can really sleep with, in the literal sense of the word. When he loves me, he says that he feels as if he is embracing the universe, that a big woman is essential to his survival. He feeds me tidbits from his plate at dinner, to support my image and keep up my strength.
Reenie called up night and day. She left cryptic messages for Howard. She even left messages with Jason, who was only three or four at the time. Jason called her Weeny, insinuating her further into our lives with that nickname. “Weeny needs ten,” he would tell me.
We gave Reenie plenty of money, although she denied all legal rights to alimony. They were only married seven months and she decided she didn’t deserve alimony after such a short relationship, that you can’t even collect unemployment insurance unless you’ve been on the job for a while. But we were always giving her money anyway—ten here, five there. Ostensibly, they were loans, but Reenie was hard-pressed to repay them.
I suggested to Howard that we adopt her, that it would be cheaper, taxwise and all, but Howard seemed to really consider the idea, getting that contemplative look in his eye, chewing his dinner in a slow, even rhythm. I imagined Reenie living with us, another bed in the converted dinette where the children sleep.
I knew intuitively when Reenie was calling. The telephone had a certain insistence to its ring, as if she were willing me to answer it. She wanted to know if Howard remembered a book she used to have, something she was very sentimental about. Could he possibly have taken it by mistake when they split up? Would I just take a look on the shelf while she held on, it has a blue cover. She called to say that she had swollen glands, that she’d been very tired lately and in fluorescent light she could see right through to her bones.
We sent her ten dollars for the doctor. We sent her five for a new book.
At night, when the children were in bed, talcum-sweet and overkissed, Howard and I staggered into the living room to talk. This was the best time of the day. We couldn’t afford real analysis, so we did each other instead. I was quite classical in my approach: I went back to my childhood, digging up traumas, but Howard liked to deal with the recent past. He took his old life out like a stamp collection and we looked at it together. Howard talked about his first marriage as if he were just begun then himself, and as if he expected me to feel some regret for the poverty of their relationship. I did. I saw them in their marriage bed, ill-fitting like two parts of different jigsaw puzzles. I listened to Reenie talk him out of sleep, pry him from his dreams with the wrench of her voice. “Is this mole getting darker? Listen, Howard, is this a lump?”
She was always a hypochondriac, and Howard began to be one, too. By the time I met him, he was dying from a thousand diseases. I laughed at all of them.
“Are you kidding?” I said.
He was petulant, but hopeful. “How do you know? You’re not a doctor.”
But I wouldn’t allow him a single internal mystery, and he was cured. The laying on of hands, I called it, covering him with my own healing flesh. “Oh, you don’t know!” he cried, but I did, and he was cured of palpitations, bruises, nosebleeds, fears of castration.
Yet Reenie stayed on, a dubious legacy. One morning Jason answered the telephone. “Weeny,” he said, narrowing his eyes, waiting for my reaction.
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “Oh?” I said it coolly, raising my eyebrows. “What does she want?”
She wanted to stay with us for a few days. Some madman was after her. A guy she met at Unemployment, a real psycho.
“I’ll have to speak to Howard about it,” I told her, but that wasn’t true.
Jason and I watched a kids’ television program where they demonstrated how to make a Chinese lantern out of newspaper. We tried to make one, following the easy directions, but it fell apart. I decided to speak to Jason instead. “Reenie wants to stay here for a few days.”
He labored over the lantern, his fingers stiff with paste. “In my bed?”
“Of course not. On the sofa, in the living room. What do you think?”
“I hate this stupid lantern!” he cried, ripping it apart.
The baby was standing in her crib, toes splayed, rattling the bars. “Guess what? Reenie is coming,” I told her, despising my own theatrics.
That night I gave the news to Howard, carefully, as if I believed it might be fatal. He sighed, but I knew he was secretly pleased. He wanted to know how long she would stay, what time she would need the bathroom in the morning, and if I could possibly make some tapioca pudding, her favorite.
“Jesus!” I slammed pots and pans around, and Howard shivered with fear and happiness.
After dinner I called Reenie and told her yes. “Only for a couple of days,” I said severely.
“Oh, you’re a pal,” she cried.
Later, she exclaimed over the pudding and threw Howard a knowing look. Was I a fool? But her bones pushed their knobs through her clothing. Her nostrils were red and crusty from a lingering cold. Under the table I found the sleek truth of my own thigh, and I grew calm again.
Of course the living room was closed to us for our nightly consultation. Reenie was there with a stack of magazines, a dish of that damn pudding, and the radio tuned to some distant and static-shot program.
I drew Howard into the bedroom and shut the door. It was my turn, and I settled into the year I was nine with a minimum of effort. It was a memorable year, because my parents were discussing a possible divorce on the other side of my bedroom wall. How was that for trauma? I was Gloria Vanderbilt, a subject of custody, an object of sympathy. I imagined myself little again, and I invented their conversation. What about the kid? my mother asked. Oh, you’re the one who always wanted a kid, my father answered.
Next to me, Howard moved restlessly. “It’s a good thing Reenie and I never had any children,” he said.
“That’s true,” I conceded, and then I tried to continue my story, but Reenie coughed in the other room, two throat-clearing blasts that pinned us to the pillows.
“What’s that?” Howard asked.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! You broke my train of thought again!”
“I only asked.”
“Forget the whole thing. It’s no use telling you anything anyway.”
“Go ahead,” he said, rubbing my back in conciliation. “Come on. Start from, ‘Oh, you’re the one who always wanted a kid.’ ”
“Forget it.”
“Jesus!” he said. “Just feel this. My pulse is so slow, my blood must be like clay.”
In the morning Reenie was watching the playground from the shelter of the curtains, like a gangster holed up in a hideout.
“I’m a wreck,” she said. “I keep thinking that nut is going to come here.”
“Why should he come here? How could he even know where you are?”
She didn’t answer. She moved to the sink, where she squeezed fresh orange juice into a glass with her bare hands. I wished Howard could have seen that. The untapped strength of that girl!
Jason was a traitor. He ran kisses up her freckled arms. “My Weeny!” he cooed. They drank the unstrained juice in sips from the same glass.
Later, I went downstairs and called Howard at work from a pay phone. “She has to go.”
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”
“I mean forever.”
“Well, what do you want me to do?”
“Nominate her for Miss Subways. Get her deported. I don’t know. Why don’t you find her a husband?”
“Ha-ha. Should I look in the Yellow Pages?”
“Well, you married her.”
“That’s another story,” he said, but I refused to listen.
“Ask around,” I said, and I hung up.
At home again, I tried my own hand. “Stand up straight. Give them both barrels.” But the narrow points of her breasts thrust out like drill bits. “No, no, relax.” I let her try on some of my clothes, but they enclosed her like tents. Instead, we worked on makeup and her psychological approach to men. But it all seemed useless. In ten minutes there were smudges under her eyes from the mascara and lipstick on her teeth.
“Relax,” I told her. “That’s the whole secret,” and she collapsed in a slump as if her spinal cord had been severed.
That night Howard came home with a man from his office. I’d never seen him before. He wore dark glasses and he had a caustic smile: he was divorced, too, and spoke about getting burned once and never playing with fire again.
“Oh, terrific,” I whispered to Howard.
But he shrugged. He had done his share. Now it was up to me. I did the best I could, flaunting my marital joy at this stranger like a bullfighter’s cape. But everything must have seemed bleak to him, through those dark glasses. My dinner was loaded with killer cholesterol, the apartment was overheated and confining, someone was deflating the tires on his car parked two blocks away.
Of course Reenie didn’t help at all. She pretended to be our eldest child, and ate her French fries with her fingers. There was a huge pink stain on the front of her blouse.
“I’ll call you,” the man said to her when he left, a phrase torn from memory. We were all surprised that he bothered.
“You didn’t have to,” Reenie said to Howard later, as if he had brought her a frivolous but thoughtful gift.
In bed, Howard and I listened for night sounds from the other room, and we were rewarded. In her sleep Reenie called out, and I could feel Howard next to me, poised for flight on the edge of the mattress.
Dear Abby/Ann Landers/Dr. Rose Franzblau, What should I do? Signed, Miserable.
Dear Mis, Do you keep up with the national scene? Can you discuss things intelligently with your husband; i.e., name all the cabinet members, the National Book Award nominees, the discoverer of DNA? Have you looked in the mirror lately? Do you make the most of your natural good looks? Go to an art gallery, make an exciting salad for dinner, reline your kitchen shelves with wild floral paper. And good luck!
The days went by somehow and we began to settle in as if things were fine, as if Reenie belonged on our couch every night, leaving those shallow depressions in the cushions.
My mother called to offer some advice. “Get rid of her,” she said.
My father picked up the bedroom extension and listened. I could hear the hiss of his breath.
“Hello, Dad,” I said.
“Are you on, Herm?” my mother asked. “Is that you?”
My father cleared his throat right into the mouthpiece. He was going to offer advice as well, and his style was based on Judge Hardy in the old Mickey Rooney movies. Kindly. Dignified. Judiciously stern. All his days he sat for imaginary Bachrach portraits. In the subway, at the movies. “What I would do …” he said, and then he paused.
My mother waited. I waited. I tapped my foot on the kitchen tile.
“What should she do?” my mother insisted. “Should she throw her out the window? Should she stuff her in the incinerator?”
“I believe I was speaking,” Judge Hardy said.
“Oh, pardon me,” my mother said. “For living.”
“What I would do,” he began again, “is seek professional advice.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Yes,” he said. “Professional advice.” He paced in his chambers.
“It’s not normal,” my mother said. “It’s not nice.” Her opinion about other things as well—homosexuality, artificial insemination, and the hybridization of plants.
The next day I lent Reenie twenty dollars and looked through the classified ads for a new apartment for her. “Change your luck,” I advised, like a fortune-teller.
When the children were napping, the doorbell rang. An eye loomed back at mine, magnified through the peephole. “Who?”
“Reenie there?”
My heart gave tentative leaps, like the first thrusts of life in a pregnancy. I opened the chains and bolts with shaky hands and ran inside. “It’s a man,” I hissed, rebuttoning Reenie’s blouse, combing her hair with my fingers. But it was no use. She still looked neglected and ruined.
The man burst into the room.
“Oh, for God’s sake, it’s you!” Reenie said.
“I told you,” he said. “When I want something, I go after it.”
“Well, just piss off, Raymond.”
“It’s you and me, baby,” he said. “All the way.”
I watched from the doorway. He was a big ox of a man, the kind who invites you to punch him in the belly and then laughs at your broken hand. There was a cartoon character tattooed on his forearm—Yogi Bear or Smokey.
“Call the police,” Reenie said wearily.
“The police?”
“Why fight nature, Reenie?” he asked.
“That’s right,” I said, winking at him.
“He’s a lunatic,” she explained. “He’s the one I told you about. From Unemployment.”
My hope began to ebb. “Well, you could just give him a chance.”
Jason came in from the bedroom then, barefoot, squinting in the assault of new light. “Stop hollering,” he said.
“My intentions are honorable,” the lunatic said, crossing his heart. “Cute kid,” he offered, about Jason.
I reached for that slender thread of hope. “Do you like children?” I asked.
He leaned on his wit. “Say, I used to be one myself!” He laughed and laughed, wiping tears from his eyes.
“Reenie, Reenie,” I said. “Introduce me.”
“He-has-a-prison-record,” she sang in falsetto behind her hand.
They might have been political protest arrests, for all I knew, or something else that was fashionable. I snapped my fingers. “Honi soit,” I said.
“Bad checks,” Reenie said. She was relentless.
I always try to find the good in people and he had nice eyes, hazel with gorgeous yellow flecks. I offered him coffee and he accepted. Reenie sat down finally.
They were married two weeks later. Howard gave the bride away, which may not be traditional, but it meant a lot to me, for the symbolism. I gave them a silver-plated bread tray and sincere wishes for the future. Raymond had a lead on a job in Chicago and they left in a hailstorm of rice for the airport.
“That’s that,” I said, never believing it for a moment.
Two months later, Raymond showed up at the door at three o’clock in the morning. Things didn’t work out, he said, by way of explanation. Reenie was staying in Chicago for a while, to seek new horizons, but she had promised to keep in touch.
Raymond’s feet hung over the arm of the sofa when I tucked him in. He snored and the sofa springs groaned in rhythm with his dreams.
He looks through the want ads every day. He takes the garbage to the incinerator and he picks up the mail for us in the morning. My little talks with Howard are expanded into small but amiable group sessions now. Raymond’s stories are interesting, as I might have suspected, from the tattoo and all. He never even knew his real parents or his true history. We sent him to NYU for a battery of aptitude tests and it seems that he might do well in social research or merchandising.
As for me, I have good days and bad. At the supermarket, I am dazzled by the bounty. In bed, I am a passenger, still ready for cosmic flight. My daily horoscope predicts smooth sailing ahead!
I worry about Reenie, though. Today there was an airmail letter. She is lonely and her body absorbs only the harmful additives in food. After all, Chicago is not her hometown.
(1974)