THE POST OFFICE IN EAST SHELTON reminded me of the one in the little town near my grandparents’ summer home in Maine. In the days of that vanished post office, when I was small, my grandfather was usually the one to drive in and pick up the mail each day; but he almost always took one of us cousins along to row him across the lake, the first leg of the trip—even though at that stage he was still a strong man, a better rower than any of us. We vied for the privilege, the treat of a town visit. Now, as I watched my daughter mount the wooden steps in East Shelton and cross the long narrow front porch—her sandals slapping the boards noisily, her small legs flashing as she ran ahead of me, eager to be first through the door—I remembered the deep pleasure of entering that other post office of long ago; the same array of brass-trimmed letter boxes, the same worn wooden floors, nicked counters; the same grille across the opening where, when you rang the bell, the postmistress would appear from the similarly mysterious bowels of her house. If memory served me, and wasn’t being distorted by the push of the present, the postmistress here even looked like that other one. She was seventyish, skinny and stern, with gray hair and glasses and skin so white, so floury, you half expected her touch would leave powdery prints on the envelopes she slid towards you under the grille.
Here my daughter would ask for the mail, because there was just our name to remember. In that other post office of my memory, after allowing me to ring the bell, my grandfather would greet the postmistress and then pronounce the three or four family names for whose members mail might be waiting. It was the cousin’s job, though, to distribute the mail after the long trip back to camp down the dirt road, across the lake.
It would be lunchtime, the family gathered on the wide screened porch around several tables laden with dishes, food. The lucky mail carrier of the day made the rounds, reading aloud the names on the envelopes; and people with letters were expected to open them then and there and read relevant bits of their correspondence to the assembled group. It amazes me now to think of that strange innocent intimacy. Did none of those aunts or uncles or cousins have an illicit lover, a shady business partner, a possible secret? Apparently not. The letters, mostly to the women, were full of news of invitations, dinners, luncheons, marriages, deaths, births, gifts.
When I pushed open the wooden screen door, the bell attached to its frame jingled faintly. Inside, the postmistress stood leaning forward behind her grille, listening to Molly. In her hands my daughter held a white envelope, but she didn’t turn to me with it yet. She was telling the postmistress about the movie we were going to see. Though the old woman was unsmiling, Molly liked her. Her attention was absolute, and she’d given Molly several presents—once a piece of hard candy, and another time a stack of change-of-address cards. She nodded to me as I approached the grille, and gestured to Molly to hand me my letter. Without interrupting her flow of conversation, Molly did. As soon as I really looked at the envelope, I knew it was about the divorce. There was something antiseptically formal about it, something which smacked of officialdom. I checked the return address quickly before I tucked the letter into my purse. Lloyd, Fine and Eagleston. Yes indeed.
I was in no rush to open it. It couldn’t be anything urgent, since our court date hadn’t even been set yet. Molly and I talked with the postmistress for a while, and then set out on what was by now a routine series of adventures for the afternoon. I forgot all about the letter. We explored the playground on the town green and went to a grainy, light-struck version of Peter Pan, which Molly seemed to like, but slept through half of. It wasn’t until I reached into my purse to put my keys away at the Tip Top Café that I remembered the letter. I got it out and set it on the table, thinking I might read it while Molly ate. But she was in a talkative mood, it turned out, and all through dinner the envelope lay next to my silverware, rectangular and white, like an extra napkin; and I listened to my daughter.
She was kneeling on the patched maroon vinyl booth opposite me—the crisscrosses of duct tape nearly matched its color—playing with the little jukebox attached to the wall above us. When she turned the red plastic wheel on its top, the cards advertising the selections flipped around noisily, so many small revolving doors. She liked this, and was taking a long time to finish what was left of her meal. I didn’t mind. Someone else in the Tip Top, someone with a penchant for country music, was feeding the jukebox, and I was enjoying its cheap emotionality. It reminded me of the music I had listened to in my teens—full of the disasters of love and marriage, full of longing, of heartbreak and betrayal, accidental death. That’s the way popular music had been in the late Fifties, early Sixties, before it got serious or political, or was allowed to be cynical about sex. And I had believed in that early cheap music, knowing nothing else about life. I had expected that these would be the consequences of love.
“What’s this song?” Molly asked, pointing to a title behind the bulging plastic case. I leaned over and looked past her small finger. Her hands and breath smelled of the French fries she was eating.
“It’s called ‘In the Mood,’” I answered.
“Why?” she asked. I noticed that when she removed her finger from the case she left a tiny streak of grease. I wiped at it with my napkin.
“Because when someone wrote that song he was in the mood to call it ‘In the Mood.’”
“Why?” she asked again. She moved back over to her plate and drank some milk. It left a mustache across her top lip. Napkin still in my hand, I resisted the temptation to dab at it too. It would only offend her keen, recently developed sense of independence.
I shrugged. “Who can explain moods?”
“Who can?” she asked. She scuttled on her knees over to the jukebox again and flipped several of the cards around. Whack whack. Then she looked at me, impatient. “Who can, Mommy?”
“I don’t know, baby,” I said.
“Mommy,” she protested. A tiny crease appeared in the smooth skin between her eyes. “I’m not a baby.”
“That’s true, honey,” I said. “I’m wrong again.”
“Ethan is a baby,” she said, naming an infamously immature friend from day care. “But I’m not.”
“Right,” I said, and had another swallow of beer. “You’re much bigger than Ethan.”
The song playing on the jukebox stopped and there was a sense of suspended time in its wake, an absence of tone. Voices in the Tip Top dropped, until from the speakers studding the tiled ceiling a female voice started an a capella lyric. Tammy Wynette. The bass joined in, then violins again.
The Tip Top was full tonight, but we were distinctly the early shift—families with kids, couples on their way to the movies or shopping. No one working very hard at getting drunk, although the Tip Top had a promisingly seedy atmosphere and a little area of bare floor cleared for dancing in front of the upright jukebox at the end of the room.
“What’s this song, Mom?” she asked. I looked again.
“It’s called ‘Love Is a Rose,’” I said.
“Why?” she said.
I had some more beer. “Well,” I said. “I suppose that someone thought you could compare love to a rose: that love is nice, like a rose, and love smells good, like a rose, and love can grow, and love can die.”
She looked at me soberly and long to see whether I was making a joke. Her eyes, like her father’s, were opaque and milky blue, unreadable. “That’s silly. Isn’t it, Mom?” She didn’t really know; she wanted me to tell her.
“If you think it’s silly, then it is,” I said.
She sat back for a moment. I could see only her head and shoulders over the scarred formica between us. She was blond, paler blond than I. Even though she’d turned three a few months before, her hair was still really nothing but wisps clinging to the shape of her skull. But her body was sturdy, and she had delicate, completely regular features. Except for her nose, which was unusually long—strong, I liked to call it—for a child her age. We had called her the Schnozz when she was an infant, in order to mask our fears that she’d grow up to be ugly. Now I couldn’t tell anymore if she was ugly or not. I never tired of looking at her. Sometimes she’d find it annoying, as though I were taking something from her by loving her so greedily with my eyes. “Don’t look at me, Mommy,” she’d say, and cover her eyes with her hands as though then I couldn’t see her anymore.
“You know what?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Who’s what?”
She was blank for a moment, then got it. “Mom,” she protested. “That’s not what I was talking about.” Her voice was prim, disgusted.
“Okay,” I said. “What were you talking about?” The waitress walked by, looked over to see if she could take our plates, and Molly defensively rose to her knees and grabbed another French fry.
“That I can make love all by myself.”
This interested me, even though, or maybe because, I doubted she could mean what I at first thought she meant. “Fantastic,” I said. “Incredible. Tell me how you do it.”
She solemnly ate another French fry, allowing me a full view of her small grayish teeth at work. “L,” she said slowly with her mouth full. “O,” she chewed. “V, and E.”
“That’s great,” I said. “That’s just how I do it too, but I leave out the and.”
“Sometimes,” she said grandly, “I leave out the and.”
For a few minutes she munched silently. I thought again about opening the letter. But then she stood up to look at the young couple in the booth behind her. They had, for a while, pretended to think she was cute. They’d used a game of peekaboo with her over the top of the booth to charm each other with their playfulness. Now they’d forgotten her, though, and they seemed impatient when she’d pop up to say hello again from time to time, unaware that her usefulness to their relationship was over.
“Molly,” I said, before she could start.
“What?” She didn’t turn around.
“I want you to sit down and finish supper now.”
She looked at me, not sure yet whether she’d choose to be cooperative. Her eyes were flat and cold. We might have been enemies.
“Would you like a swig of this here beer, dear?” I asked quickly.
She grinned and nodded and knelt again. I held the mug out across the table. Her hands cupped around it and tilted it into her mouth. She took barely a sip. As she swallowed and released the mug, her eyes filled with tears. Beer, which she loved, always made her eyes water, and this surprising taste for something obviously painful and difficult for her touched me.
“And then after we’re done,” I said, “I thought we’d go and get some ice cream.”
“Ice cream,” she said, and smiled a dreamy smile.
This wasn’t as much a bribe as it would have been normally. We had ice cream nearly every day during those weeks. There was nothing to do but exactly what she and I wanted to do; there was no one to be with but each other. And though I occasionally got tired of being a character in her games, of answering her endless questions, I was, for the most part, happy. The previous four or five months had been ones of real strain for me and her father, though we’d managed to be kind to one another; and this was a reprieve, a retreat, before life began again.
We were staying for three weeks in a rented cottage about ten miles outside the town of East Shelton in New Hampshire. Even the town seemed a part of our suspended reality. It was tiny, unfashionable, unchanged for several decades. When we sat down with our cones on the wooden steps in front of the ice cream store, also the town’s only drugstore, we could have been models for some bucolic calendar scene out of the Forties. I felt a sense of deep nostalgia sweep me as we sat there, Molly with strawberry, I with chocolate, a nostalgia which was absurd: I’d grown up in a large town and a city as unlike East Shelton as they could be. Where did this yearning for a past I’d never had come from?
We finished the cones and rinsed our hands at the granite drinking fountain on the corner. Molly was alert even during the ride home. Her nap in the movie seemed to have fueled her for a long evening. The sky was still light, a bright, even, pale blue above us as we turned down the steep dirt driveway to the cottage. But in the shade of the pines which surrounded the house, it seemed dusky. We went inside, and while the water thundered steamily into the deep tub, I squatted in the house’s twilight and took off Molly’s clothes. Her body seemed insubstantial, gleamed white as a dream as she jumped around naked. When I switched on the yellowing light in the bathroom and she returned, herself, her skin rough and gray on her knees and sunburned pink on her shoulders, I was startled by her solidity. Dust from the worn earth under the swings in the playground was imbedded between her small, wormlike toes.
She played a long time in the bath I’d run for her, while I put away the groceries we’d bought earlier and washed the dishes left from our lunch. The bathroom was just off the kitchen, and her monologue, her tuneless singing floated in to me on the humid air, seemed, like the air itself, the clear medium through which I moved. My face and shoulders were reflected in the window just over the sink, bending, turning, reaching in the shadows under the shaded bulb on the wall, bringing order to the tiny world in which Molly and I were living. I stood motionless for a moment, looking at my warped reflection in the crazed panes of glass. Molly was singing a song her father had taught her about a bullfrog teasing a bulldog. I wanted to freeze the moment, to make myself remember everything about it. It seemed one of those momentary revelations of the harmony and beauty that underlie domestic life, a gift.
I left the dishes to dry and went to wash Molly. The tub was the old freestanding kind with claw feet. Kneeling on the floor next to it, I reached in and rubbed her body with the soapy washcloth. She was quiet, getting sleepy at last, I thought, probably a little drugged by the warm water. She turned her body lazily this way and that when I asked her to, or sometimes just in response to the motion of my hands. But just as I reached down to wash between her legs, she asked abruptly, “When will I see my daddy the next time?”
I stopped, and sat back on my heels. In the low light of the room her pupils were enormous, her eyes dark with the swelling black. I understood. Brian had always been the one to bathe her. Sometimes if he was late getting home from work, I would fill the tub and undress her, help her in; but almost always he was home in time to wash her. They had special songs, special rituals they’d worked up together. She was missing him.
“Do you remember what I told you?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Can you tell me?”
“That Dad’ll come to see me right when we get to the new house in Cambridge. Right the day when.”
“That’s right, honey,” I said. I leaned forward and began to splash water gently on her soap-slicked body.
“But Mom,” she said. I stopped.
“But Mom, how will he find us in the new house?” The little worry line creased her forehead.
I leaned forward and pulled her to a standing position in the tub. As I got a towel and bent to pick her up, I said, “Daddy always knows where to find you, honey. Daddy knows right where the new house is. I don’t want you to worry about it.”
I carried her wrapped in a towel down the long hallway to our bedrooms, and dressed her for the night. Mosquitoes and moths danced outside the screens on Molly’s bedroom windows, tapping them lightly over and over as I read her a story. She leaned against my breast while I read, and her head moved slightly with my every breath, as though she were still part of my body. With one tiny forefinger she rhythmically flicked at the button eye of her stuffed bear, and from time to time she removed her thumb from her mouth long enough to ask about something in the story. When it was finished, I kissed her good night and gave her her pacifier. I turned the lights off and lay beside her in the dark. Outside it seemed to grow lighter and lighter as she fell easily into sleep. Stars, the shapes of trees, the occasional erratic flight of a bat emerged in what had been the blackness behind the screen. When her breathing was completely regular, I got up and walked down the long wood-smelling hallway to the living room.
As I was picking up, I remembered the letter I’d been carrying since early afternoon. I went into the kitchen and fished the gallon jug of white wine out of the refrigerator. The only wine glasses in the house were little jelly jars. I filled one and carried it into the living room. I got the letter out of my purse and sat on the lumpy couch, the pale glass of wine set on its fat arm, to open the envelope.
It contained a short note from Brian’s lawyer and two copies of some last-minute changes we’d agreed to in the divorce settlement. The letter said that the court date had been set, unexpectedly, for the following Tuesday. I needed to sign the copies the lawyer had sent me in front of a notary public, and get them back in the mail special delivery in order to have them incorporated into the agreement.
It would mean a trip back into town early the next morning, that was all, to find a notary public before the post office’s Saturday closing time of noon. Even so, I was aware of a dragging sense of reluctance to confront the chore. But there was, of course, no question of not doing it. I reminded myself of how much of the burden of getting us divorced Brian had taken on himself. It was he who would have to appear in court on Tuesday to see it through.
Throughout the process of filing, my contact with lawyers had been absolutely minimal, at my request. And Brian and I, both impatient for the whole thing to be over, and guilty over our separate reasons for impatience, had worked out with almost no difficulty the details of pulling apart forever: I would have custody of Molly. Brian would send me a monthly check to pay for her upkeep, and, since he had so much more money than I—would always, we assumed, have so much more money than I—he would be responsible for all her major expenses as she grew up—schools, medical care and the like.
But for the first time in my life, I would support myself. I had insisted on it. I had to see a lawyer only once. He went over the terms with me to be sure I understood them. Everything had seemed as reasonable to me as the end of our marriage. The only thing not reasonable, not right, was that we had Molly, and now were tearing her world in two.
We had started thinking of divorce about a year earlier. Typically, it wasn’t any emotional crisis that precipitated the talk. Brian’s office was opening another branch in Washington and he wanted to go there. As he began to discuss the change, I realized I didn’t want to go with him. At first, I spoke of my work, but when we began to argue about it more seriously, and I confronted the reality of my work situation—I was a piano teacher, but I’d never had more than ten pupils at a time—I realized that that really wasn’t it at all. I just didn’t want to go with him. He seemed in every way peripheral to my life. I mentioned a separation, tentatively. He didn’t protest, said he’d think about it. I began to speak about feeling remote from him, feeling unhappy. We held hands and talked about trying harder. And for a period of time, we did try to force ourselves back into being married. But it seemed more and more artificial. And once we began also to talk about divorce, about the possibilities of a divorce, that talk, that arranging, seemed more liberating, more real than the talk about how often to make love, about who we might have over for dinner, about when we might have time for a family picnic. Each tentative confession of a feeling of distance by one of us brought a relieved parallel confession from the other. It began to seem exciting, as though at last we were going towards something in our marriage.
The careful friendly balance tilted abruptly just after we’d filed, around Christmas. At this time, Brian and I hadn’t even figured out how to live apart, except that I would take Molly. We’d been at a party for Brian’s firm and had both drunk a lot of eggnog. He volunteered to drive the babysitter home and I got undressed. I was happy, I remember. A light dry snow had been falling on the way home, transforming the world. The divorce seemed to me a fine, brave thing to do. I had a sense, a drunken irresponsible sense, of being about to begin my life, of moving beyond the claims of my own family, of Brian, into a passionate experiment, a claim on myself. Somehow, in this vision, I romanticized Molly into a sidekick, a companion, Robin to my Batman.
I wandered in my nightgown into the bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth. The bathroom was dark, and in the slanted light falling in from the bedroom, my face, to my own drunk eyes, seemed newly pretty, interesting, a stranger’s. I turned it this way and that, put a bright smile on it, pleased with myself. I began to brush my hair, and heard Brian coming in. I meandered back into the bedroom and sat crosslegged on the bed. After what seemed like an inordinately long stop in the kitchen, Brian walked slowly into the bedroom, a stricken look on his face. I was frightened suddenly. Molly, I thought, though I knew she was safe in her crib. I’d gone into her talcum-smelling room and listened to her even breathing when I’d come in from the party.
“What is it?” I said. I wanted to say “Don’t.”
Standing in the doorway, he began to cry. It was horrible, embarrassing, that raw unexpected sound in our tiny neat bedroom. Somehow, too, though I could see his tears, it seemed false to me.
“Oh, Jesus, Anna,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked again, more coldly this time. My moment of panic was gone.
He gained control of himself, wiped at his eyes. “I’ve wanted to tell you.” His face threatened to crumble again. He tilted it up towards the ceiling and bit his lip. “Oh God.”
“What?”
He looked at me, lifted his hands to me. “I’m going to get married again. When the divorce is final. I’m going to marry Brenda.”
I didn’t say anything. I thought of Brenda, her tidy asexuality. She was a partner at Brian’s firm and she had been at the party we’d just come from. When I’d asked her if she was going to Washington too, she’d blushed and said she supposed she might. She seemed suddenly shy to me, and I’d found that touching in her otherwise crisp, businesslike manner.
“It didn’t start. I want you to know, it didn’t start until after we’d agreed to split up. It’s important to me that you know that. Believe that.”
I started to brush my hair again.
“Do you believe me?”
I nodded.
He began to cry again.
“Please don’t do that,” I said. He looked at me, surprised at my tone. “You look so stupid,” I said. He turned away and went to stand by the window. Beyond him, the snow fell. I brushed my hair over and over, ferociously. “Brian and Brenda,” I said, finally, “It’s very cute.”
He turned toward me. “Don’t,” he whispered hoarsely.
I threw the hairbrush at him. It caught him in the forehead, just above the eyebrow, and his hands rose quickly, covered his pain-struck face. I thought, unexpectedly, of how his face looked when we made love, the same sudden wrench of agony at the end. I stood up and walked across the bed. Standing above him, I hit him several more times before he turned to me and pulled me down. He held me gently, sitting on the edge of the bed, as though I were a child. He was crying again. I understood that he thought I was angry because he’d hurt me, and I tried to cry too, but I couldn’t. I felt miles away from my body, from his sorrow. I was thinking all the wrong thoughts, I knew. I was thinking that now everyone would believe that this was why we were getting divorced. That our kind, careful separation would be public property, would be explained by this ugly twist. That I would seem what I wasn’t—an enraged, abandoned wife. I let Brian hold me and comfort me because of the pain he thought he was causing me, and felt nothing, felt like a woman I didn’t like. But it made palpable for me, finally, the unbridgeable distance between us, and I understood, as I hadn’t understood before, the real emotional necessity for the divorce.
We lay down together after a while, and when he stopped crying we started to talk in a loving way. I let him think I was nobler, more generous and forgiving than I was, because the alternative was to tell him how little it all mattered. I did feel a kind of jealousy of Brenda though. She had taken something I thought was securely mine, even though I wasn’t aware of wanting him anymore, and I envied them both their feelings for each other, their passion. I asked him questions: how it had started, what he felt towards her, what they did together. In the dark, his whispery voice swelled with pleasure to be talking about her, to be telling me things she would have hated for me to know. But it was really not a betrayal. I was his oldest friend; he was glad to be able at last to share his happiness with me. And I was glad for him, in the end. “I’m not surprised, really,” I said, just before I fell asleep. “I mean, it seems only right that you should have wanted someone else.”
“Why?” he whispered.
“Well, the sex between us was always so . . . nothing. So terrible.” I didn’t think of this at the moment as a cruel remark. It seemed so self-evident, so true, that I was certain it would bring, like so many other confessions of the past months, pained agreement. This must be what he had felt all along too.
“I never thought so,” he said.
I was very sleepy, but not so much so that I couldn’t hear the pinched quality in his voice. I remember reaching out to touch his face in silent apology. Later I would wonder if he was not making me pay, in his unconscious way, for my unconscious cruelty then. And after this, we didn’t talk anymore; we were just waiting for the moment which would end it.
I sat with the wine and finished the glass. I’d been drinking a lot in these evenings alone after Molly went to bed. The owners of the cottage had a collection of 78 records that required constant monitoring and changing, and this and the wine had filled my evenings with mindless but true pleasure. I drank and listened to Eartha Kitt singing “Santa Baby”; to Nelson Eddy singing “When I Grow Too Old to Dream”; to Danny Kaye singing “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts.” Who knew what tomorrow would bring, today having brought something as unlikely as this.
When I woke in the morning, the algal smell of Greely’s Pond and the light lapping of the water beginning to stir confused me momentarily; I couldn’t think where I was. But then I heard Molly moving around in her room across the hall, the plastic pads of her pajama feet sliding sibilantly on the wood, the low steady murmur of her voice as she talked to herself, sometimes taking on roles—“I told you not to do that, you dummy”—sometimes just commenting to herself about what she was doing. We had collected pine cones and needles, rocks and acorns to substitute for the toys left in packing boxes in the basement of the apartment in Cambridge, and she had built a whole variety of games around them. She was, then and later, the kind of child whose imagination transforms everything, who sometimes has trouble coming back to the reality of a situation, an object. As I lay there listening to her private play, I felt I was hearing the expression of her independence, the potential for her existence without me. Sometimes in those weeks alone with her, I had felt overwhelmed by her need to use me as playmate (though it was I who had structured it this way, who had romanticized our month together alone in the country). Hearing her that morning, so competent at imagining her own world, made me believe she would be all right, she would heal and recover from what Brian and I were doing to her.
After about half an hour, she came and got into bed with me. For a while she lay still next to me, believing me asleep. Occasionally I opened my eyes and sneaked a look at her. She was sucking her pacifier rhythmically and twisting a strand of thin hair around her finger again and again. Her eyes were steady and blank as she looked up at the ceiling. Finally she sighed, as though called by duty, and turned to me. I opened my eyes again. “I think it’s late enough for you now, Mumma,” she lisped through the thick nipple between her teeth. Her breath smelled sweet and rubbery.
“Then I’m pulling the plug,” I said. I hooked my finger through the ring on the pacifier. She tried to shut her mouth, to hold on, as she always did in this game, but she was smiling and couldn’t maintain the suction. I pulled against her mouth’s weak pull; the pacifier popped out.
Most mornings in the cottage, we had wandered around until late in our night clothes, sometimes even going for short walks on the soft bed of yellowish pine needles around the house before changing into bathing suits and drifting down to the edge of the pond for the morning’s play. Today, though, I hurried us through our routines. Breakfast at the speckled white table in the kitchen, bright orange juice in the little jelly jars, and Cheerios swimming in bluish milk. While Molly laboriously spooned them one by one into her mouth, I had a second cup of coffee. Then we went to her room to get her clothes. On the floor by her bed sat her sandals. Both were full of acorns, and they were surrounded by a ring of pine cones. Boats, she told me. People sailing in boats across the sea. I fetched plastic bowls from the kitchen, and we moved the acorns carefully into them, and got her dressed. She was glad to be going back into town so early. She had her own agenda: she wanted to do exactly what we’d done the day before. I promised her lunch at the Tip Top, and another trip to the park, but told her that first we had to do a special errand for me.
The postmistress named two notaries, Mr. Healey in town, and Mr. Franklin, on a road about ten miles out of East Shelton in the opposite direction from our cottage. We tried Healey first. His house was a large gray frame structure whose wide porch was littered with dried-out rockers. A wooden sign announcing rooms to let hung from an iron post in the front yard. Molly ran down the porch, setting each chair swinging stiffly, wildly back and forth. I tried the bell three or four times. It chimed loudly within, but the house was empty and dark. I gave up and sat next to Molly for a few minutes in the rockers, imagining we looked like two old ladies on the country porches of my youth. Then we got back into the Valiant and drove out to Mr. Franklin’s. It was a trailer, silver and pale green, propped up on cinder blocks. A fat woman with oiled-looking skin answered the door and told me she wasn’t sure when to expect Mr. Franklin. He’d left that morning before she was awake to go fishing. She was still wearing a bathrobe, elaborately ruffled around her neck, and she looked like some overblown but pretty flower. Her toenails, under the long skirt, were painted pink. Canned laughter from a television swelled out merrily behind her.
“You tried Healey, in town,” she said, frowning sympathetically.
“Yes.”
“What, he’s out too?”
“Yes, and I desperately need someone. I’ve got something that has to get in the mail by noon.” In the car Molly jumped up and down in the front seat. She was chanting something, and occasionally a note reached us on the stoop. Mrs. Franklin shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you, dearie,” she said. “Of course you could try Brower.”
“Brower? Is he another notary?”
“That’s right. No one likes to use him, but that’s what he is.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
She gave me directions which would take us back through town and miles past the turnoff to our rented cottage. I thanked her and walked over to the car. Before I got in, I called back, “How come people don’t like to use him?”
“Cats,” she yelled ambiguously, and went inside.
Molly was getting bored. ‘This is too much errands,” she said as I strapped her into her car seat. We stopped in town for an ice cream cone for her. It was ten by the clock in the drugstore. I began to worry about time, so I made her finish the cone in the car while I drove. She wasn’t able to eat it fast enough, though, and thick drops of ice cream rolled down over her clenched fingers and onto her legs. She began to whine. I pulled the car over onto the shoulder once and wiped her fingers and legs with the paper napkins I’d brought with us, but bits of them clung in cottony tufts to her still-sticky hands. When I swung out onto the road again, she began a fussy crying that seemed forced, deliberate to me. For a while I drove along, feeling a familiar hateful anger rise in me, the anger which occasionally tempted me to shake her, to hit her. Stop it, I willed. “Stop it, Molly,” I said.
“I can’t help it, Momma,” she said. “This is too sticky. I hate this sticky stuff,” and she went on with her hoked-up fussing.
When we came to the dirt driveway to our cottage, I turned sharply and we bounced down it. At the bottom, without a word to her, I pulled the keys from the ignition and ran into the cottage. On her bed I found the pacifier. I picked it up and ran back down the long hall, through the steady hum of the kitchen appliances, into the sun-flecked stillness around the car. I opened the door on her side. When she spotted the pacifier, her fussing intensified momentarily. She sounded, really, like a baby. I inserted it. Her noise stopped. Her sticky hand reached up to start twirling her hair. I unbuckled the belt to her car seat.
“Now Miss Whiner,” I said. “Why don’t you climb over into the back seat and lie down while we finish this stupid errand?”
Wordlessly, with a boost from me, she clambered out and over to the back. She rolled down to the crack of the back seat and curled up, her cheeks pulling steadily on the pacifier, her eyes already glazed. I turned the car around and headed noisily up the drive again.
Brower’s place was easy to spot, as Mrs. Franklin had said it would be. It was a tiny white peeling farmhouse with a police cruiser parked prominently in the front yard. A hand-painted sign by his mailbox said Notary Public. When I shut off the engine and turned back to Molly, she was sound asleep. Dirty, sticky, her hair knotted where she had twisted it with ice-cream-coated fingers, she lay heaped on the back seat. I thought of waking her, carrying her in with me half-asleep and fussing, but decided not to. Instead I took my jacket and laid it over her body and bare legs. When I got out of the car, I shut my door quietly in order not to wake her.
There was an enormous brass knocker on Brower’s front door. I lifted it and struck it twice. After a minute, he opened the door. The pungent odor of cat wafted out from the house behind him. Several of the animals had followed me from the car to the house, meowing loudly, and they darted in when the door swung open.
“Help you?” he asked.
He was a skinny man, and he hadn’t shaved yet. His beard prickled white on his chin and cheeks. He must have been around fifty. He was short, shorter than I was, and he seemed to be wearing three or four heavy shirts, underneath which I could see, grimy at his neck, a whitish T-shirt.
“You’re Mr. Brower?” I asked.
“I’d be a liar if I told you no,” he said and smiled.
I smiled back, politely. “I wonder if I could come in for a few minutes,” I said. “I think I have some business with you.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Of course,” he said, and stepped back to let me pass into the almost total darkness of his hall. The cat odor was overwhelming as he shut the front door.
“Come on this way,” he said, passing in front of me. He walked to the back of the dark hall and pushed aside a blanket hanging over a doorway. He held the blanket back for me until I caught it, and then we moved into the room. We were in the kitchen, and I had to squint against the sunlight which flooded the room from a series of grimy windows. They faced out on an overgrown meadow where several rotted-out wheelless cars hunkered down in the tall grass. It was cold in the room. He moved over to a small table.
“Sit down here,” he commanded, pointing to the chair opposite his. A cup sat at his place, with a tea bag and spoon resting in the saucer. A spotted white tin canister sat next to it. Obediently I sat opposite him and looked around the room. It was hard not to stare. It was filthy. The walls were decorated with dozens and dozens of out-of-date calendars featuring country scenes, antique cars, pouty women of the Thirties and Forties in one-piece bathing suits. Five or six cats were in motion over the flecked and littered linoleum floor, and half a dozen others snoozed in the bright patches of sunlight. What seemed to be trash was heaped in the corners of the room. Against the wall twenty deep were cat-food cans, some empty, some with food in them. Several of the animals were picking their way among the cans, eating in that gingerly dainty way cats have.
Brower stood at his place. “You want some tea?” he asked. The rotten fishy smell of the cat food mingled with the odor of cat piss and something else in the kitchen. “No,” I said. “Thanks.”
He sat down and raised his cup. “Well,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“You are a notary public, Mr. Brower?” I asked.
“Well, there are several of us, of course,” he said. “But I’m one of them. Plus,” he set his cup down, “deputy police and now fire marshal too. So you see.”
“You must be very busy,” I said, and reached into my purse for the letter.
“Oh, I just got the fire marshal thingy. I had to pass quite a test up at East Shelton for that, I’ll say. Quite a test.” He eyed me expectantly.
“Oh?” I said. A mistake.
“Yes indeed, I’ll tell you. They used the entire basement of the Elks Hall for this test. Fire station wasn’t big enough. This test was a national test.”
“Well, it’s wonderful you passed.” I set the envelope on the scarred and greasy-looking table. Brower drank some tea. His lips seemed to reach for the edge of the cup and he made a sucking noise as he drank. He set his cup back in its saucer.
“Well, it wasn’t easy, I tell you,” he said. “Point number one, you’re blindfolded. Point number two, they fill the room with this smoke. And you’ve got to wear one of those breather masks, you know.”
I nodded. A cat sprang into my lap. I patted it carefully while Brower talked. It turned around several times to get comfortable, and I had to arch my head back and away from its uplifted tail, its wrinkled pink anus. I stopped patting it when I noticed clumps of loose hair flying off into the dusty sunlight with each stroke, but the cat nestled on my lap anyway and shut its eyes.
“Then you’ve got to crawl around this obstacle course,” he was saying. Where were those famous taciturn New Englanders when you needed them? “Pulling a two-hundred-pound sack of sand—to be like a body—while they drop bricks and wood all around you, even a couple of buckets of water.” He looked at me, his graying eyebrows raised, and waited for a response.
“It sounds awful,” I murmured.
“Wearing your hat, of course,” he added.
I nodded again, as though this had been my assumption all along.
“The point being, as you can no doubt tell, that it’s got to be like what you might one day go through. They don’t want people who don’t know what they’re doing, what they might be up against, fooling around in a real fire.” His expression was stern.
“No.”
“I tell you, that was a rough one.” He shook his head, then slurped some more tea. “Makes that police test look easy.”
“What I came about, Mr. Brower,” I said quickly.
“Oh, you can call me Sammy,” he interrupted. “The people around here generally do. You’re not from around here,” he said, narrowing his eyes.
“No, I’m from Chicago.” In the distance I could hear the yowl of a cat starting a fight.
“I thought so. Somewhere out west, I thought to myself. I’m a good one with accents.”
“What I came about,” I began again, “was getting something notarized.”
“Well, you came to the right place. I can surely do that for you.”
I felt a little wave of relief.
“As long as I can find my seal,” he said. He looked around the kitchen with a befuddled air. My eyes followed his. Then, “These are the documents?” he asked. He was pointing to the envelope I’d laid on the table.
“Yes. I’m supposed to sign them in front of you.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the way you do. Now I assume you’ve got some proof of identification?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. I got out my wallet and found my license. As he took it I noticed that his fingernails were untrimmed, there were black crescents under them. He frowned and stared at the picture on the license.
“Seems like you might have a different color hair in this picture.”
In the distance the yowling intensified, like the crying of a baby. “Yes. Well, no. Not really. I had a permanent then, and it makes my hair look lighter. Made my hair look . . .”
“Now look here,” he grinned suddenly. “Don’t explain. I was just teasing you.” I saw that his teeth and gums were utterly false, front to back, some dentist’s dream of the perfect mouth.
He set down the license and reached over to pick up the envelope. He opened it, spread out the documents over his legs and began to read. I looked down at the cat sleeping on my lap. A flea emerged from the hair around one eye and sat on its eyelid. I remembered reading somewhere that fleas travel daily to their host’s eye for water. I lifted the cat from my lap and set it down on the floor. It looked startled for only a moment, then shook its head vigorously and sat down to lick itself. I realized abruptly that I was breathing unevenly, trying to avoid the smells in the room.
Brower looked up, “These are divorce papers,” he said.
“Yes,” I confessed. In spite of myself, I felt oddly ashamed.
“I don’t hold with that,” he said sternly.
I shrugged. “Well, these things happen, though,” I said. “Do you want me to sign them now?”
“There’s too much of that nowadays, to my way of thinking,” he said. He looked into his teacup. He sloshed its contents around and tilted it down again. He went back to reading the papers.
I found a pen in my purse. “I’m just going to sign them now,” I said, and held out my hand to take them from him.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” he said. He turned quickly in his chair, as though to deny my claim on the papers. A ripple passed among the cats, five or six of them shifting position suddenly in response to his motion.
For a moment I sat silently watching him. A cat eating out of one of the cans scraped it gently across the floor. Brower’s eyes moved slowly back and forth across the lines of print. “Well, the fact is I am in a hurry . . . ,” I said. I had been planning to say Sammy, to strike a note of camaraderie, but at the last moment I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and there was an embarrassing sense of blankness where his name should have been. “I’ve got my little girl waiting for me in the car.”
He nodded, tightening his lips, as though this were something he might have expected of me. “People these days,” he said, “think that the minute things get a little bit rough, they can just walk out. Just leave.” He wouldn’t meet my eye. “Children and all,” he said. “It makes no difference to them.”
“I really need to get going, Mr. Brower,” I said. “I have to get these things in the mail by noon.”
“There’s a fee for this service, you know.” He stared at me suddenly with cold eyes.
“Well, I guess I assumed there might be,” I said. I was struggling for control. Make nice, I thought. The tip of my stomach pinched with tension and nausea at the mingled smells. I got out my wallet again. “How much will it be?”
“The set fee is five dollars.”
His eyes followed every move of my hands. I had a five-dollar bill; I laid it down on the table. He set the papers down and picked up the bill.
I reached out and set my hand on the papers, I slid them over the sticky table to me. He watched. “I’d like to sign these now,” I said.
“It won’t do you no good to sign them unless I can find my seal,” he said.
“Perhaps I can help you look,” I said, desperate. I stood up, as though ready to begin poking through the heaped-up trash, the finger-smeared cabinet drawers. Several cats recoiled in waves from me, arched, frozen in fear.
“You’ll just scare these animals,” he said, looking up at me. There was some threat in the way he said it. “You’d best sit down and let me do it.”
Obediently I sat. To my relief, the skinny man actually got up, went over to the cabinets, pulled out the top drawer. It seemed to be full of jumbled utensils and crumpled papers, old letters, cat-food cans. As he pawed through the debris, he talked to me. I understood that I was to sit and listen. There was no possible response. His back was to me, and the seat of his pants was slick with wear. “In my day,” he said, “we married for better or for worse, and that’s what we meant. Came illness; came poverty; none of it mattered. We stayed. That’s what marriage meant, in those times. Why you people even bother to make those vows is beyond me, when you’ve no intention in the world, none whatsoever as far as I can see, of keeping them. Just so many words to mouth.” He shook his head. The contents of the drawer rustled and clattered as he pushed them around. “Just mouth service. Lip service,” he corrected himself.
It wasn’t in the first drawer. He pulled out the second one and continued his monologue. His voice went on and on. I felt fury rising in me as I listened, and slowly I realized that it had to do not just with how long it was taking to get him to notarize the papers, but with exactly what he was saying, and a rush of defiance I felt against the sense of shame it triggered in me. Everyone in my world had been understanding about the divorce, sympathetic, politically correct. But this man was talking to me as my parents or grandparents might have, and I felt the rebellious, self-righteous fury that an adolescent feels when she’s caught in an act which she knows to be morally doubtful. This was the opinion of the world I’d emerged from, the world I thought I was shaking off. The more he made me feel ashamed, the angrier I got. Twice he turned to me and asked if I had no sense of duty. I’m not sure what I answered. A cat rubbed purring against my legs; the muted yowling continued in the distance. I watched Brower’s trembling dirty hands rifle one drawer after another and tried not to listen to his words, his stupid words. Finally he extracted an immaculate nickel device from the flotsam in the fourth drawer down. For a moment, it looked oddly like a speculum to me, but that was a connection, I later realized, that my sense of shame, of exposure, made for me. He turned and walked slowly back to the table and sat opposite me. He stared at me for a moment, and then his eyes narrowed. “I see you’re still wearing your rings,” he said.
I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t start to cry. “Mr. Brower,” I burst out. “If it’ll make you any happier, I’ll take them off.” I began to pull at the rings. He watched me steadily, his eyes as flat as Molly’s when she was angry. They wouldn’t slide over my knuckle and I finally had to lick my finger and ease them slowly over the slick joint. His eyes took it all in. “There,” I said, putting the rings into my purse. “There. Now I’m going to sign the papers.”
His grizzled face was blank. He would give me no permission.
“I’m signing them now,” I repeated, as though speaking to an idiot, a child. I wrote my name on each one where the lawyer had left a blank for me. Brower pretended not to watch. For another moment we sat in silence. Then I slid the papers and pen over to him.
Slowly, as though aware that this was his last moment of any power over me, Brower picked up his seal and the papers. One at a time, elaborately, he signed and sealed the papers and handed them back to me. The minute I had the second one in my hand, I got up to go. “Thank you,” I said reflexively, in spite of my rage. My mother would have been proud. I tried to think of something more, something cruel and conclusive, but couldn’t. I lifted the blanket and passed through to the hallway.
It was black and close after the bright cold light of the kitchen. I sensed cats moving around my feet. I shuffled slowly through the dark stink, feeling along the walls until I came to the front door. I ran my hands down to the knob, turned it. The door wouldn’t open. I turned the knob again, pulled. Nothing. A cat rubbed against my ankles. I thought I felt the multiple light caress of fleas jumping on my shins. I rattled the door, near desperation.
Suddenly, a dim light entered the hall from behind me. I turned. Brower stood in the kitchen doorway holding the blanket partway back. His shape was outlined against the light from the kitchen windows. “Turn that latch right,” he said curtly.
I found the latch in the dim light and turned it right. The door still wouldn’t open.
“Too far,” he said, and the hall darkened again as he dropped the blanket and walked towards me. I stepped aside and let him work the latch. Light and air rushed in as he swung the door open. I walked past him, saying nothing. Just before he closed the door behind me, he whispered, “You should be ashamed.” I turned, but the door was already shut. Four or five cats had dashed out with me, and I stood on the porch a moment, watching them disperse over the flattened dirt of the yard. Then I started back to the car.
I think that even before I really looked at it, I knew something was wrong. But what I saw as I began to run towards it was that the door to the back seat was hanging open, that my jacket, the one I’d used to cover Molly, was lying on the ground just outside it. I nearly tripped across a cat in my haste; it shrieked and fled off into some bushes.
Incredibly, she still lay in the car. Or not still, I realized, but again. Again. She had been out, and had climbed back in. Now, even dirtier than before, her grimy face striped white with the wash of tears, she lay, sucking in air on each breath with a shuddering sound that told me she’d exhausted herself crying. Looking for me. I thought of the distant yowling I’d heard as I sat in Brower’s kitchen. How long had it gone on? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Her pacifier curled in her hand near her mouth. Her eyelashes were gummed into points, as though she were wearing mascara. Her soft flesh swelled slightly over a long bloody scratch on one cheek.
“Molly,” I whispered, and pulled her to me as I clambered in. Her body began to shape itself to mine, to cling to me, even before she really woke up. “Molly,” I said. “Molly.” And then suddenly, with consciousness, her grip tightened and she started to cry, screaming in sharp pain like a child who’s just fallen, who’s bitten her tongue, who’s put her hand on a hot kettle, who’s lost.
“Mommy!” she screamed, she cried, and held me tighter even than I held her. “Mommy! Mommy!” she shrieked as she would over and over in my memory of this moment. And I sat hunched in the back seat with her in my arms until she was still, feeling only that I could not do this alone, I was not strong enough, good enough to do this alone, I could not do this.
Some things worked out the way I had told Molly they would. Nearly as soon as we got back to Cambridge, her father arrived and found us in the new apartment. It was still full of unpacked boxes, awkwardly placed furniture, stacks of books and kitchen utensils, but I left him and Molly in it, as we’d arranged ahead of time, and went to stay at a friend’s house for the weekend. Brian drove me there in my car. I sat in back with my suitcase. Molly was in front, next to Brian in her car seat. This rearrangement—when we were married, the car seat was always in the back, and Brian and I sat together in front—seemed a reminder, lest we forget, of the deeper disturbances going on in our lives. I wished I’d thought to put the car seat in back before the trip.
It must have made Molly uncomfortable too, because she kept trying to turn her head to see me, and then she’d stare soberly over at Brian. He sat silent at the wheel. The water sparkled deep blue in the river. In our other life he or I would have been pointing out to her the stiff white wings of sailboats, the brightly bobbing ascent of a kite. Instead, from time to time, I’d lean forward and tell Brian about some quirk in the new apartment—you needed matches to light the stove, the toilet handle sometimes needed jiggling. “Okay,” he’d say without turning his head. “Thanks.”
The road swung out of sight of the river; we drove past Mass. General and up onto the highway. Molly stared down at the piers and miniature buildings sprawling far below her. Then abruptly she turned to Brian. She had a brave coquettish smile on her face, and she said, “I really hate my mom, don’t you? We hate her, right?”
My heart seemed to squeeze tight with pain, though I knew it was out of her own hurt and confusion that she spoke: she didn’t know quite what was being asked of her with this changing of the guard. And if she had to choose between us, she’d pick Brian, the one she didn’t see enough of, the one she yearned after. I was just the medium she lived in, as familiar to her, as taken for granted, as air and food.
I wasn’t looking at Brian when he spoke. I’d turned my head towards my window so Molly couldn’t see the quick tears which stung my eyes. But his voice was gentle and loving, just right. “No,” he said. “I can still love Mom even though she and I don’t want to live together anymore. And you can still love her, even though you’re being with me for a few days. You can always love us both.”
Molly didn’t answer, and I didn’t dare look at her. After a moment, I touched Brian’s shoulder to thank him, and he nodded and began to talk to her about the bridge we were going over: what river ran under it, how they’d built it. She responded brightly, as though she too were relieved for the moment to have passed. Through the rest of the drive up, she chattered happily with Brian, and when I leaned into her window to kiss her good-bye, she made loud smacking noises with her mouth against my cheeks and lips. I walked quickly into the house so I wouldn’t have to watch the car pull away, the familiar shape of Brian’s head and shoulders on the driver’s side, and the squared-off top of the car seat standing for Molly in all her vulnerability and confusion.
The house I was staying in, an odd vertical warren of rooms on a twisting street in Marblehead, belonged to a couple who’d been friends of both Brian’s and mine. John was a lawyer too, had been in law school with Brian, actually; and Charlene owned and ran an expensive little shop in Marblehead, a shop full of tasteful hand crafted goods. Brian and I had often driven together up to their house for dinner, sometimes bringing Molly and putting her to sleep on their big bed. Steadily swimming in her dreams, she would slowly work her way across it, so we had to check on her frequently.
John and Charlene were away for the weekend—they rented a share in a country place—and the little house was intimidating in its silence, its sense of abandonment. It wasn’t the same sensation at all that I’d felt walking into the rented cottage in East Shelton. There, almost all clues to the owners’ personalities had been carefully removed. A few odd hints remained—the records for example—but for the most part what they’d left behind were the bare necessities. Here, John and Charlene were everywhere present, but not, and I felt more constrained in their absence than I would have if they’d been there, taking up real space, moving among their possessions. The next morning I noticed that I woke up in almost exactly the same position I’d fallen asleep in, and that I was perched on the very edge of the king-sized bed, as though they were both also in it.
Slowly over the weekend, though, I began to explore their life. Shamelessly I opened bureau drawers and medicine cabinets. I picked up and examined the photographs which sat everywhere. I pawed through the little heaps of objects set around carelessly in saucers and baskets—odd coins, stubs, pills, jewelry, notes, lists. I looked through books, noting which ones were his, which hers, reading the marginal comments. I stopped short of reading their mail, though it seemed like hair-splitting at that point.
Part of it was boredom, part prurience. But in addition, Brian and I had decided that it would be easiest on Molly for me to abandon the apartment to him each time he came up to visit her; and I had the sense of his being able to look at me in my absence as I was looking at Charlene and John. Though I’d barely unpacked at that point, I knew I would slowly begin to claim the ugly apartment with the objects I chose, with possessions which also possessed me. What would I tell him, what secrets would I give away that I hardly knew I had?
I discovered, for instance, that Charlene had both a diaphragm and a stack of cheerful yellow birth control pills on discs. What did it mean? That she had an irrational terror of pregnancy and used both? That she had used one but switched to the other? And what was she using this weekend, having left all this behind? Or were they not making love? Or were they madly making love, but using nothing, trying to get pregnant?
It wasn’t until midday on Sunday that I finally steeled myself to call my parents. I’m not sure why I hadn’t told them earlier. Part of it was certainly the distance I kept from them generally, but part was something more, some specific reluctance and shame which had to do with the meaning of my family to me. Listening to Sammy Brower’s diatribe had given me at least a partial sense of what I’d been avoiding, but it wasn’t until I heard the willed cheerfulness of my mother’s voice on the phone that I understood how difficult it was going to be. It was as if some part of her knew that I’d called with bad news, and she felt that if she just made enough noise, stayed buoyant enough, she could float through, perhaps even prevent me from announcing it.
While she waited for my father to get on the extension, she began to tell me about redecorating their bedroom. She described in careful detail the choices among papers, and what was right and wrong about each. In the midst of this discussion, I heard the click on the line which meant that my father was listening now too, but he didn’t interrupt her and she didn’t acknowledge him until she’d finished her presentation. Then she announced, as though I wouldn’t have known it otherwise, “I think Daddy’s here now, too.”
“Hello, Anna,” he said, on cue.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Well, darling,” my mother said. “What’s up?”
I had rehearsed the lines, and alternate lines too, over and over in front of the mirror. Even so, I was surprised at how stark, how bald they sounded.
“Well, I’m afraid that my news is bad,” I said. A brief pause, but not long enough for them to start imagining anyone’s death. “Brian and I have decided to get a divorce.”
“Oh, don’t tell me that!” my mother cried, and burst into tears. My father said nothing, but after a moment I could hear him clearing his throat. He was always incapacitated by my mother’s tears. I waited for a minute or so, until my mother had calmed herself slightly, and then began to present them with the details. Brian had, in fact, already transferred to Washington. Molly would be with me, and see him several times a month, and for holidays and summer vacations. She seemed to be managing all right. I had a new, less expensive apartment.
Slowly my mother began to be drawn in. Details were what she liked, were what made her comfortable. She asked questions about the new apartment—how much space, what furniture I had for it. I kept comforting her, assuring her that everything would be all right, was all right; and meanwhile, some part of me was standing at a distance and noting how ass-backwards it all seemed. Shouldn’t she be comforting me?
In the middle of a discussion of how the movers had hoisted the piano in, my father interrupted. “I hope he’s going to do the right thing by you and Molly,” he said.
For a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
“You mean Brian,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“You mean money?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “He’ll have a bundle one of these days, and you ought to see some of it.”
“I think we have a fair agreement,” I said.
There was a brief silence. Then he said, “You know best,” as if wiping his hands of the whole affair. I felt stung, and yet regretful. His tone was hurt, and I realized that he had been offering love in the only way he knew. I felt a yearning towards him, a momentary impulse to lie, to say there were things I didn’t understand, needed his help with. But my mother pushed in again to smooth things over.
“Daddy’s just worried about you, darling,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Anna, it’s not your fault,” she said. But I couldn’t help feeling it was. Not just the divorce, but the thousand small misunderstandings out of which my relations with them were made.
“I know,” I said again. I was remembering a visit I’d made to them when I was about six months pregnant with Molly. There was no special reason for it except that I hadn’t seen them in nearly a year. Most of my students were on summer vacation, and Brian was going to be away on business for a week, so I flew to Chicago for a long weekend.
I slept in my old bedroom, On the last day of the visit, I woke early, needing to pee. When I slid back into bed, I lay looking around at the pretty, figured wallpaper, the pale pink curtains, and felt gratefully how much had changed in my life since I would wake in high school feeling trapped by my body, my circumstances, by what my parents seemed to want to make of me. The baby, who I was sure then was a boy, swam and flopped freely inside me, and I lay still and made resolutions about how differently I would raise him from the way I’d been raised. Then I fell asleep again and didn’t wake until late in the morning.
I went down to breakfast at around eleven-thirty or so, wearing my summer nightgown and an old bathrobe that wouldn’t shut over my belly. On my way across the dining room, I stopped in front of the picture window to watch my father in a corner of the yard. He held enormous pruning clippers in his hand and was slowly and carefully decimating the lilac bushes which separated my parents’ property from their neighbors’. Suddenly there was a flash of motion above me and a loud bang. I started, and then looked outside. On the patio lay a bird, stunned. A grackle. I went to the door and stepped outside. The slate patio was cold and damp under my feet. I bent over the bird. Its wings beat the ground at my approach, and then it stilled. One wing was hanging limply off its body. It fluttered its good wing again, moving about a foot over the ground; then collapsed, its small bright eyes seeming to watch me. I stood up. I remembered feeling a sense of vulnerability and fragility because of the pregnancy. Normally I wasn’t squeamish in the least, but I wanted someone else to manage this. I wanted my father. “Daddy,” I called. “Daddy.”
He crossed the yard to me, carrying the clippers. I pointed to the bird, flopping again across the slate. Wordlessly he disappeared into the shed and came back carrying a snow shovel. He raised it over his head and brought it down onto the bird. I turned away quickly, but I could hear the dull thumps, and under them, the repeated click of the bird’s bill against the metal. Three, four times he raised the shovel and brought it down. When he stopped, I turned to him. He looked quickly down at my belly and then away, a flicker of disgust having momentarily touched his face. I looked down too as I tried to pull the bathrobe shut. My belly protruded in the diaphanous nightgown, the extroverted navel like an obscene gesture. It was the only time during my pregnancy that I felt grotesque or unattractive.
Now my mother’s voice interrupted the long silence on the phone. It was edging towards tears again. She said, “I just don’t know how I can write about this to anyone.”
Here was where we’d been heading all along, I thought. “I think I can manage that, Mother,” I said. I could hear the coldness in my tone, the way you can on the telephone.
“Oh, if you would, darling,” she said. “I’d appreciate it so much. If you could just write to everyone.”
“No, that’s fine,” I said.
For a few minutes more, we made the smallest of talk, and then we said good-bye.
“We love you, darling,” she said brightly.
“I know,” I said. “Me too,” and then I heard one click, another, and the phone began to buzz quietly in my hand.