It Will Come to Me (8 page)

The troubles began in first grade. No, better to say that certain tendencies began to manifest themselves. Any change in the classroom configuration upset him. When one wall was being painted and the reading circle was moved to the other side of the room, for example, Isaac refused to join the class. He planted himself on his usual cushion in his customary place and howled. And when the lockers in the hallway were carted off to make room for new ones he pummeled the workmen with his fists and shrieked. The principal—an idiot, like most of his kind—actually threatened to call the police. That sent Isaac into a state of shivering hiccuping catatonia. Ruth was summoned to take him home.

He was not a sociable child. When Ruth suggested that he share his blocks with another boy in the library children's room he simply shook his head and gathered the blocks close to his body. When she insisted, he stamped his feet and shouted. Other mothers looked up. She had to carry him—kicking hard and gnawing on her shoulder—out to the little yard in back. By the end of second grade he was no longer receiving any birthday-party invitations that were not extended to the whole class.

And yet he did very well in school during those early years. For the most part he was healthy and in his self-contained way he seemed happy, particularly at home. He was content to sit at his parents’ feet in the evenings and look at picture books, or shuffle around the carpet on his knees pushing a plastic car and making quiet urrr-urrr noises. And she, Ruth, was happy too, even later, when things began to go wrong. The truth was that she almost welcomed his problems, if only because they gave her a way to
stay involved in his life. She'd never quite felt able to wear the mantle of successful motherhood, at least not for long. The smug, tranquil maternal style was not for her. She felt more like herself when she had reason to serve as his defender and advocate, to intervene on his behalf, to lurk in the hall waiting for a word with the teacher.

Before Isaac she had ruined every photograph taken of her by smirking or lowering her eyes or turning her head. The “candid” shots from her wedding reception made her wince; how had she managed to contort her mouth that way, and why? But in pictures taken with Isaac she was rarely self-conscious. Even in poses where she was deliberately mugging—squatting behind him as he blew out the candles on his birthday cake or trotting after him as he wobbled along the sidewalk on his first bike—she looked relaxed and sane. She looked like any young mother. Her message to the viewer of these photographs was no longer the insupportable “Here am I.” Instead it was “Here is Isaac, and here am I, his mother.”

Naturally, the happiness of those years had a converse side. Over the course of Isaac's first year she called the pediatrician's office at least twice a week. There was the incident at four months, when Isaac ate an ant. “A little extra protein,” said the pediatrician's famously patient nurse, but Ruth couldn't get the words “formic acid” out of her mind. There was the late-night trip to the emergency room when she was sure she'd discovered a lump in his armpit. And there were dozens of other panics, not all of which prompted her to call the doctor's office. Sometimes fear of seeming crazy stayed her hand.

And there were the fights with Ben, which had always been bad but got worse after Isaac was born. His first attack of night
terrors happened during one of their late-night kitchen shouting matches. That episode was followed by many others, most of them seemingly cued by raised voices. Ruth called the pediatrician's office and arranged a consultation. “What's the nature of the problem?” asked the nurse, an edge of asperity in her voice. Ruth told her she'd rather not say. “Are you
sure
this isn't something I can help you with?” asked the nurse. Ruth told her no, her voice quavering. She wanted to talk to Dr. Mead privately.

She arrived alone and was shown into a treatment room, where she wedged herself into a child-sized rocker and leafed through back issues of
Parents
magazine for forty minutes until Dr. Mead arrived. He was a buoyant, exhausted-looking man with a green pipe-cleaner puppet riding in the pocket of his lab coat. This was the first time she'd talked to him outside of Isaac's presence. “Mrs. Blau,” he said, “how can I help you this afternoon?” Ruth burst into tears and blurted out something about fights and night terrors. She hadn't brought it up in Isaac's twenty-four-month checkup, she confessed, because there'd been a medical student in the room. Dr. Mead went into listening mode, propping his back against the examining table, removing his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose, nodding steadily—”Got it,” each nod said. Ruth struggled to give a rounded picture of the situation, but her powers of articulation were squeezed by contrary pressures: it was important to acknowledge that the fights were very bad and getting worse and that on more than one occasion she and Ben had gone on screaming at each other for some time even after they'd heard the eerie mechanical cries coming from Isaac's room. But Dr. Mead should also understand that their marriage was stable and actually very close and that they'd been together for several
years before Isaac's birth and had gotten used to feeling free to air their differences …

At this point she saw that he was stealing a glance at his watch, a big one with visible internal workings that had always fascinated Isaac. She allowed her account to run aground. Dr. Mead paused to make a note in Isaac's chart and sat down on a swivel chair, his widely splayed knees bracketing hers. Leaning forward, looking her deliberately in the eye, and speaking slowly and clearly, he explained that the thinking on night terrors had changed. They were no longer understood to have their origin in trauma or in any psychological problem, but instead were seen as a kind of sleep disturbance, a purely neurological phenomenon. They were very scary for parents, but also quite common and really nothing to be alarmed about. And Isaac—here he consulted Isaac's chart—at twenty-eight months, was smack-dab in the center of the average age of onset.

The nurse knocked softly on the door. Dr. Mead was instantly on his feet and Ruth was on hers too, thanking him effusively. Dr. Mead gave her a tired smile and a no-thanks-necessary shrug as he edged past her. When he was gone Ruth sat down heavily in the rocking chair for a few seconds, then got up again and gathered her jacket and purse. She walked down the echoing back stairs to the hospital lobby, empty at this hour except for an elderly couple peering inquiringly into a popcorn cart, and came out blinking into a bright fall afternoon. She found her car and sat in it for a few minutes, resting her forehead against the steering wheel.

Her many-layered reaction put her in mind of wine reviews she'd read in glossy food and travel magazines. She felt a certain
relief—a light floral top note—at the news that she could not be held responsible for Isaac's night terrors, and also a certain resentment toward Dr. Mead, whom she'd always regarded with anxious deference and never quite trusted. Beneath all that was a prickly heat of shame: she was embarrassed more by the nakedness of her need to confess than she was by the content of her confession. And underlying that was a familiar substratum of dread, something that was always with her but whose presence she rarely sensed as strongly as she did now. For just a moment she was visited by the insight that her anxieties only represented a desire to propitiate that dread, which sat at the very center of her happiness.

Ruth obliterated this item with a heavy application of pencil lead. It was hot already, or would be soon, and there really wasn't time.

Ruth took a brief tour of inspection. The house was a bungalow built in the forties with a second-story half addition, furnished in the graduate-student style of thirty years ago. It was, in the words of a clipboard-carrying Realtor who'd nosed discreetly through the rooms over the summer, “dated,” “tired,” and in need of “sprucing up.” Ruth found it hard to accept the idea that their low-slung, clean-lined, functional chairs and futons and coffee
tables could age. They were modern, weren't they? That meant new, intrinsically youthful.

They'd consulted the Realtor when they were toying briefly with the idea of looking into the downtown loft condominiums into which many Lola faculty couples their age had been moving. “Sprucing up,” Ruth muttered under her breath for days after the Realtor's visit, and in a short-lived burst of zeal she called in a cleaning service and bought four watercolor prints and two small, good Turkish rugs. The effect was negligible; any sprucing up, she realized, would need to be a revolutionary undertaking. It would require an overturning of the established order. The stained, tufted carpeting would be ripped from the floor; the futons and the coffee table and the canvas-sling chairs would be dragged out to the curb on heavy-trash day. The peeling wallpaper would be steamed and prized off with a scraper. The frayed lampshades would join the rest of the pile of historical detritus at the curb, as would Ben's flat-tired bike, which had been parked in a corner of the living room ever since she could remember.

They would begin again, and then what? What regime would replace the long-extended graduate-student era? (Was this what people meant when they talked about the dilemma of postmodernism?) The furniture they owned was worthless but irreplaceable; its kind was no longer manufactured, or rather it was, but it was cheap and people consciously identified it with youth—with starting out, not starting over. Any new era could only be a turning back to a much older one—the era of their parents—and oddly enough, Ruth sometimes longed for just such a reversion. Sometimes it struck her as unseemly that they lived the way they did, so oblivious (especially Ben) to their material surroundings.
By now, they should have cultivated an appetite for comfort, for polished furniture and soft surfaces. People their age should wear slippers, not pad around barefoot, as they had done in their twenties and continued to do now. They should suffer from age-appropriate ailments. They should own a looming breakfront and heavily upholstered sofas with matching club chairs. Their house should smell of brisket. Were they too young to live like their parents? No. That couldn't be the objection. They weren't too young for anything anymore.

Walking into the half bath adjacent to her study, she was reminded of a series of disturbing photographs she'd once seen of toilets in the Soviet Union before the advent of abrasive cleansers. Now here was a situation in urgent need of remedy. Vacuuming was beside the point; the graduate students wouldn't notice dust. (Barbara Bachman would, and a few other wives, but that would be the least of what they'd notice.) She crossed out “Vacuum downstairs” and wrote in “Scrub bathrooms.” She paused for a moment, crossed out the final “s,” inserted a carat between “Scrub” and “bathroom,” and penciled in “downstairs.”

She'd assembled the ingredients for her chicken chili with white beans, though she'd had to substitute parsley for cilantro. She'd gathered two bags of tortilla chips, two bags of pretzels, two bags of potato chips, two jars of mixed nuts and one of salsa. Whatever Ben might say, she knew the graduate students could eat this and more, and if they didn't, any leftover food could be pressed on them as they went out the door. On impulse, she'd dropped a jar of wasabi peas into the cart; she'd eat them if nobody else did.

Now she was hesitating in the paper-products aisle. For a reason that remained obscure to her, she had consciously neglected to check whether they already had paper plates and cups and plastic forks on hand. Actually, she was sure they had plenty, left over from last year's potluck, and year before last's, and year before year before last's. Even so, she chose three cellophane-wrapped packs of shiny yellow paper plates and three packs of matching napkins and flung them defiantly into the cart. She did this every year, and every year Ben dragged the old paper plates and napkins she knew quite well were already there out of the cabinet above the sink and arranged them in a shaming row on the central island, like the bales of marijuana and blocks of hashish the DEA puts on display after a major bust.

On her way to the checkout, she remembered that she'd also intended to buy milk and cereal and a bottle of peroxide for Ben's periodontal routine, so she swung the cart around and picked these things up, snatching a bunch of purple tulips from the floral department while she was at it. This purchase would irritate Ben even more than the superfluous paper plates and napkins, but it would also soften him. At the counter she was careful to divide her purchases into two piles, the larger to be paid for by the Philosophy Department entertainment fund. “You fine arrythin’ awry?” asked the checker.

In what alternative universe must she have been living when she made this list? She crossed these entries out and wandered
into the kitchen where she turned to the more agreeable task of looking for a vase for the purple tulips and then out to the living room where she found a place for them on the mantel. She spent a few minutes choosing books to display on the coffee table—her own, of course, and one of Ben's and a few recent novels and the most recent Pushcart anthology. As she moved around the room, straightening and rearranging, she discovered that she was feeling something pleasant, a cool run of exhilaration along her veins. It took her a moment to recognize the sensation of anticipation, to realize that she was actually looking forward to the potluck dinner this evening. She hadn't felt this way about a party—certainly not one of her own—in many years. Apparently something in her still survived from a time when a glittering path of expectation lit up the days and hours before a party, when she rang a doorbell with the hope that the next three hours might change her life.

Ricia Spottiswoode and her husband would be coming. That, of course, was the explanation. She'd been maintaining a provisional skepticism about these two—especially about Ricia—but even so, she'd been dwelling on them continually, waiting for her chance to meet them. She imagined her house as she hoped it would look through their eyes—the house of a writer, who lived more in her imagination than in the world. In a back room in her mind where wishes were formed, she'd already invested them with the power to divine her languishing talent on sight, to restore her lost career. That was crazy of course. But even if Ricia was as affected and self-involved as Ruth had reason to believe she was, even if Charles Johns was the superannuated hipster Ben had described, they still promised to be more interesting than the blank young people she could usually expect to meet this time of year—the new graduate students and the newly hired epistemologists
and metaphysicians. Interesting to her, at least, because they were emissaries from the exciting world she'd blundered into and out of all those years ago, a world in which the phone rang with news and the knock of the FedEx delivery man could be heard at the door.