Ordinary Life (2 page)

“Hey, Mavis,” Al says now, banging on the door. “Jonathan wants to talk to you. He’s on the phone. You’d better come out here.”

Mavis walks to the door, straightens her skirt, speaks loudly into the crack. “Listen to me, Al. I just told you I want to have a week to myself. I’m not coming out to talk on the telephone to Jonathan or any of the other children. I wish you’d stop running off and just let me
tell
you about this. No need to take offense or to think I’m crazy. For heaven’s sake.”

“Jonathan is on the phone, long distance,” Al says.

Mavis rolls her eyes. “Well, I guess I know it’s long distance, Al. If he lives in California and we live in Minnesota, then obviously it’s long distance.”

“So what am I supposed to say? That his mother can’t be bothered talking to him?”

Mavis sighs, thinks for a moment. Jonathan in the Bathinette, his baby fists waving, his palm-sized chest rising up and down excitedly. “Water,” Mavis is saying. “Yes, it’s
wa
ter, darling.” A kerchief is around her head. She is wearing red lipstick and open-toed shoes.

Quietly, Mavis says, “Go and tell Jonathan that I’m fine, Al, that I’ll call him in a week. And don’t you say anything else. I can hear you, you know!”

She can’t, of course, the phone is too far away, but Al doesn’t know that. His hearing is starting to go, hers has thus far remained the same, so as far as Al is concerned, Mavis’s hearing is suddenly extraordinarily acute.

“And come back after that,” Mavis says. “I want to talk to you.”

“The hell I will,” Al says. “I’m going out.”

“Where to?”

“The straitjacket store, that’s where.”

Big Boy, Mavis thinks. Well, good. When he comes back he’ll be in a better mood. He’ll get beef because she’s not around to tell him not to, probably a cream pie for dessert, too. Fine. Then she’ll be able to talk to him. Maybe he’ll feel a little guilty about what he ate. That will work entirely to her benefit as well.

She slips off her shoes, climbs into the bathtub, lies back against the pillows. It’s really not bad. For once in her life, she is happy she’s so short. She wiggles her toes inside her nylons. She should have dressed more casually. She undoes the button on her skirt, then unzips it slightly. There is a tan-colored stain on her blouse between the second and third button. Coffee? She wets her finger, rubs at it. Well, she’ll soak it later. It’s convenient being in here. She closes her eyes. She’s really very comfortable, could probably take a nap right now. But then it will be hard to sleep later on tonight.

She arranges the pillows to act as a backrest and climbs out of the tub to get a magazine. She feels the mean pull of arthritis in her knees. She selects a
Good Housekeeping
, climbs back in the tub, starts flipping through the pages, and realizes she’s already looked at this one—there’s the place where she tore out the recipe for low-fat lemon chicken.

Mavis used to give all her old magazines to her sister, Eileen, but her sister died last year. Breast cancer. She closes her eyes, lets herself hurt for a moment. The pain has not yet dulled, nor does she expect it to or even want it to.

Mavis and Eileen slept in the same bed as children, until she was eight, Mavis’s preamble to sleep was to wrap Eileen’s long hair
around her fingers, then suck her thumb dreamily while drifting off. She had to make sure Eileen was sleeping first; Eileen got mad if she caught Mavis messing with her hair. Mavis had once tried wrapping her fingers in the folds of a satin doll dress her mother had given her for her birthday, but it wouldn’t do—she needed the weighty, coarse silkiness of Eileen’s hair. She liked the heat from Eileen’s scalp at one end, reminding her of the thrilling fact of life, and the cool and bristly bluntness at the other end was wonderful to twitch your fingers over rapidly. It was worth getting caught every now and then for all that pleasure. The worst that ever happened was the night Mavis didn’t wait long enough, and Eileen reared up like a ghost in her white nightgown and socked Mavis three times in the stomach. Otherwise any attack was a sleepy and halfhearted thing that barely hurt, a dull nudge in the rib, a smack on her leg that was off the mark and carried no more weight than a falling towel. And of course, she usually didn’t get caught at all.

Mavis had gotten married first, and when Eileen asked her for certain essential details, Mavis had said, “Now, you might want to cry out. But don’t.” Oh, she missed her. Missed her. The conversations at the kitchen table, their elbows on the embroidered tablecloth, the steam from their coffee cups rising up. They would talk far into the night when they got together every week for dinner, and Al and Big Jim would get so impatient. They were all right as long as the fights were on, or some other sports event, but then the minute that was over, they wanted to go, one or the other of them, back home. When they were at Eileen’s house, Al would come to stand at Mavis’s shoulder, and she ignored him as long as she was able to. When they were at Mavis’s, Big Jim would eventually sit down heavily at the table with them, simultaneously
irritated and interested in what could possibly keep them here for so long, what could be so important that they hadn’t even taken their aprons off from doing dishes before they sat down. They had just talked yesterday, hadn’t they? Hell, they talked every day, didn’t they?

On one memorable occasion, Al and Big Jim had both gone to sleep in the living room, both of them on the sofa with their heads back and their mouths open, and the women finally had the chance to completely exhaust themselves. They woke their husbands up at 2
A.M
. after they’d taken a picture.

It was a week ago, when Mavis was cleaning out the bedroom closet, that she came across that photo again. It had fallen out of the album, its corner holders still in place but the glue on back dried to a fine dust. Mavis sat down on the bed with the photo, smiling at it. It had zigzag edges, looked to have been cut out with pinking shears. There was a bright spot off to one side of the photo, evidence of the imperfect flash of that time. The men’s heads were inclined fraternally toward each other, their mouths open in ways so identical it almost seemed the whole scene was staged. But if you looked a little closer you could tell it wasn’t, something about the defenseless posturing of the rest of their bodies, the heartbreaking vulnerability of real sleep: the open hand, the foot off at an odd angle, the sock drooping below the pants leg. The men’s faces were so young and unlined Mavis nearly gasped, looking at them. Their shirts were short-sleeved, boxy looking, tucked into the pleated pants the men wore with thin belts. Mavis remembered ironing the shirt Al was wearing, standing in the kitchen with the radio on, potatoes boiling gently on top of the stove. She’d sprinkle the ironing first, using a soda bottle with a special top, then store it in a plastic bag in the refrigerator
until she was ready. She used to iron everything, even Al’s underwear. She can’t remember exactly when she stopped.

Even more than the men in the photo, Mavis found she was interested in the surroundings: There was the sofa they used to have, the nubby floral one, so comfortable—what had happened to that? There, on a table they used to have in the corner, the porcelain figure that had belonged to her mother, that Mavis had later dropped and broken when she was dusting, then sat and wept over when neither she nor Al could repair it. She hadn’t really liked it, but it was her mother’s. And her mother was gone.

Mavis had sighed, put down her dust rag. She had lain back on the bed and closed her eyes, the photo facedown on her stomach, her hand over it. She’d wished she had more pictures of everything she used to have—all her furniture, even her old refrigerator, and what was in it, too: the big, square blocks of butter in the ribbed glass container, the old flowered mixing bowls she used to have holding leftovers, covered with waxed paper and anchored with rubber bands. How could she have known that ordinary life would have such allure later on?

What plants used to be in their house? she wondered. What stamps were on the envelopes that came in the mail? How exactly did the wringer washer look, the newspaper, the bathroom scale she used to weigh herself on? Their bedroom wallpaper, didn’t it use to be flowered, those big cabbage roses? Where was the pink girdle she used to have? It had a matching brassiere with wide satin straps.

Mavis had opened her eyes and looked out the bedroom window, sighing, watching the breeze lift the leaves on the trees outside. It came to her that she wasn’t quite sure where in her life she was. Near the end, she supposed. Certainly more near the end
than the beginning. Most of what a life is for, she had done: Her children were grown and had children of their own, she was retired from the job she’d taken after the youngest left home. She had traveled with Al to the extent that they were able, she had taken adult education courses, contributed as generously as she could to causes she believed in. What now? Really,
what
, now?

“Enough!” she’d said then, out loud, and she’d gotten up to go back to the closet and look for the album where the photo belonged. She found the album, even the right place for the photo. On the black page, in white ink, she had written in a careful, dainty script, “The boys, mesmerized. June 8, 1946.” Well, no more “girls” looking at the “boys,” asleep or awake. No more girls.

Big Jim had dropped by frequently right after Eileen died, sat stunned-looking at the kitchen table, his hands folded, watching Mavis make dinner and then eating with them. But lately he hadn’t come around. Able, finally, to stay home, Mavis decided. Or visiting others, perhaps. She and Eileen were so close it preempted other friendships, they both admitted that. Maybe now that Eileen was dead, Big Jim had made new friends. She hoped so. She knew her resemblance to Eileen was hard for Jim to bear. Hard for her, too.

Mavis starts awake, knocking her head slightly against the side of the tub. Outside the door, Al is calling her name. “One minute,” she calls, and the absurd thought comes to her that she should put on a robe. Then she shakes her head, clearing it, and goes to the door. “Hi, honey,” she says, into the crack. “How are you? Did you eat?”

“Mavis, you get the hell out of that bathroom, right now.”

“Al—”

“I’m not going to listen to any of your bull crap about a retreat,
Mavis. Now, so far I haven’t done anything about it. But this is your last chance before I do.”

“Yes, you did do something about it. You called Jonathan.”

“I pre
tend
ed to call Jonathan.”

“Well!” she says. And then, because she cannot help it, she says again, “Well!”

“You come out of there right now. Or I will … do something.”

She waits, and then he says, “What the hell would you do if
I
did this, Mavis? What would you think?”

“I would help you, Al,” she says.

“What? Speak up, I can’t hear you.”

“I say, I would
help
you!” She means to be tender, but it is difficult when you’re yelling.

Behind the door, Al grunts.

“I would try to understand,” she says. “I wouldn’t think it was so crazy, needing to get away from the world for a while. I would just let you do it, and I would talk to you when you wanted to talk, and when you needed things I would bring them to you, and I would not try to make you feel bad and guilty.”

Silence. And in it, his recognition that she is absolutely right.

She hears him shuffling about, changing his position, and then there is the long and heavy sound of him sliding down against the door and onto the floor. And then nothing. Is he all right? Oh, this is a terrible trick. Shame on him.

If it’s a trick.

She knocks rapidly at the door. “Al?
Al
?”

“What.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah!”

“Well—what are you doing?”

“I don’t know, Mavis. Did you say you wanted to talk to me?”

She sits down on the floor, too, opposite him, as far as she can tell. “You know, honey,” she says, “I’m kind of tired now. I think I’d like to go to sleep.”

“How can you sleep in there, Mavis?”

“Oh, it’s fine. I lined the tub with all kinds of blankets. It’s cozy!”

“Do you have a nightgown?”

Oh, God. What else has she forgotten? “I don’t need one.”

She hears him walk away down the hall, and then he is back again, knocking. “Mavis? I’ve got your pink one, here. Is that all right?”

She smiles, opens the door, and takes the nightgown. His face is so full of something, she kisses him quickly, even if it’s cheating. Then she closes the door softly, says through it,“ ’Night, honey.”

“Good night.”

“Take your pills.”

“I know. Mavis?”

“Yes?”

“We’ve never spent a night apart.”

“I know.”

She turns out the light, feels her way back to the bathtub, and climbs in. This day passed so quickly. And has really been so interesting. Perhaps she should have said she’d be in here longer than a week.

“Mavis?”

She opens her eyes. A thin light. Early morning. She stretches, turns toward the door, speaks loudly. “Yes?”

“Are you coming out today?”

“Now, what did I tell you yesterday?”

“I know, but… I thought maybe you just had a bad day.”

“No, I had a good day.”

“But Mavis … Jesus. Don’t you think this is a bit odd?”

“Yes, I do, but I also think it’s serving a purpose, Al.”

“Well, I don’t get it. I really don’t. If you want to be on re
treat
, Mavis, you don’t have to stay in the
bath
room all day. I go to the hospital six hours a day, you have the whole place to yourself. I’ll tell you what. I’ll call you before I come home. Then you can run right back in there before you see me.”

She can’t tell if he’s angry or amused.

“Mavis?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, but I need to stay in here, Al.”

“Well, then I’ll be back after I eat dinner. I assume you’re not making dinner again.” A hopeful silence. She knows Al is leaning his better ear toward the door.