Authors: Jane Smiley
She lay on the living room carpet, rolled in her blanket, watching Woody Woodpecker cartoons from the forties. I drank coffee. She was happy. Between cartoons, she would get up and walk over to me and begin to talk. Some of the words were understandable, the names Lizzie and Stephanie, the words “oatmeal” and “lollipop.” But more intelligible was the tone. She was trying to please and entertain me. She looked into my face for smiles. She gestured with her hands, shrugged, glanced away from me and back.
When Stephanie and Lizzie came down at seven, attracted by the opening theme from “Challenge of the Superfriends,” she retreated to the couch. When Dana got up and staggered down the stairs in her robe, looking only for a place to deposit her exhaustion, Leah shouted, “No! Go away! Don’t sit here! My couch!” She would take her oatmeal only from me. Only I was allowed to dress her. If Dana or Lizzie or Stephanie happened to glance at her, she would scowl at them and begin to cry. Dana, forgetting herself, happened to kiss her on the forehead, and she exclaimed, “Yuck! Ouch!” and wiped the kiss off. When I went to the bathroom and closed the door, she climbed the stairs behind me, saying, “I go get my daddy back.” We were embarrassed. By eight
forty-five, when I was ready to leave for the office, we had run out of little jokes.
It was not simply that she didn’t want Dana near her, for she would allow that most of the time, it was also that she had exacting requirements for me and was indignant if I deviated from them in the slightest. If she expected to climb the stairs and find me in my bedroom and I made the mistake of meeting her in the hallway, she would burst into tears and shout, “Go back in room! Go back in room!” I would have to go back into the bedroom and pretend to be ignoring her, and wait for her to come find me and announce herself.
I don’t think this ever happened to my father, who had a plumbing supply business and wore a white dress shirt to work every day. He referred to my brother and sisters and me as “the kids,” in a slightly disparaging, amused tone of voice that assumed alliance with the great world of adult men, the only audience he ever really addressed himself to. I don’t know anyone who calls his children “the kids.” It would be like calling his spouse “the wife,” not done these days. We call them “our children,” “our daughters,” very respectful. Would Leah thrive more certainly on a little neglect? Should we intentionally overlook her romantic obsession, as our parents might have done naturally?
At any rate, at dinner that night, there seemed no alternative to my serving her food, cutting her meat, sitting as close to her as possible. When I got up and went into the living room without taking her down from her high chair (Dana and Stephanie were still eating, Lizzie wanted me to adjust the television set), she allowed the others to leave the table without asking either of them to get her down. Dana
said, “I can get you down, honey. Let me untie your strap here.” Leah said, “No! No! Daddy do it.”
I stayed in the living room.
Dana said, “I’ll untie you and you can get yourself down. You’re big enough for that.”
“No! No!” said Leah. “Tie strap! Tie strap!” Dana tied it again. I stayed in the living room. Leah sat in front of her little bowl for ten minutes. Dana sent first Stephanie, then Lizzie as emissaries, first to ask if they could get her down, then if she, Dana, could get her down. Leah was adamant, with the two-year-old advantage that no one knew for sure if she knew what she was talking about, or what any of them were offering. This advantage enables her to be much more stubborn than the average speaker, whose eyes, at least, must register understanding.
After a minute or so, she began calling “Daddy! Daddy!” in a tone of voice that suggested I was far away but willing. Dana and I looked at each other. She looked hurt and resentful, then she shrugged. I got up and took Leah down from her chair. She did not greet me with the elation I expected, but after we went into the living room, she puttered around me, chattering mostly nonsense and looking to me for approval every so often. I said, “Let’s go along with her for a while. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
Dana lifted one eyebrow and went back to her book.
It was nearly impossible. At first I thought the worst thing was the grief at parting: “Oh, Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” hardly intelligible through the howls of betrayal. I was only going to the lumberyard or the Quiktrip, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside. Taking a child turns the errand into a forced march. “She’ll be good with you,” Dana would say, and she would, and the household would be relieved of screaming,
but at the price of constant engagement with equipment. A snap, two threadings, and two buckles into the car seat. The reverse for getting out of the car seat. Opening an extra door for the stroller. Unfolding the stroller, locking it into stroller-rictus, wheeling it around the car, a threading and a buckle into the stroller. Up curbs, through doors, down narrow aisles, all to find a package of wood screws or a six-pack of beer. Or I could carry her, thirty-four pounds. Doing an errand by myself came to seem a lot like flying—glorious, quick, and impossible.
But grief wasn’t restricted to my leaving the house. Leaving the room was enough to arouse panic, and the worst thing about it was that at first I was so unaware, and there was the labor of being trained to alert her that I was going outside or upstairs. Then there came the negotiations. One of the first things she learned to do was to tell me not to do what I had originally intended to do. After all, she had her own activities. “She loves you,” said Dana. “It won’t last.”
There were three more elements, too. I notice that there is a certain pleasure for a meditative person like myself in laying down one thread and picking up another, as if everything isn’t happening at once. One of these elements was that Dana’s choir group was practicing four days a week so that they might join the chorus of the opera
Nabucco
, which was being given in our town by a very good, very urban, touring company for one night. Dana’s choir director was a friend of the musical director of the company from
their
days in graduate school. The text of the chorus had to do with the Hebrews sitting themselves down by the waters of Babylon and weeping. Dana sang it every day, but in Italian. It doesn’t sound as depressing in Italian as it does in English.
The second element was our summer house, which we
had purchased the fall before, in a fit of response to autumnal color. It is in the mountains not far from where we live. Since buying it, we have also bought a well, a lot of plaster, a coat of exterior housepaint, a heavy-duty lawn mower, a set of house jacks, and a wild flower book. We have identified forty-two different species of wild flowers in the area around the house alone.
The third element was that Dana fell in love with one of her fellow singers, or maybe it was the musical director. She doesn’t know that I know that this was an element.
Not too long ago, the single performance of the opera
Nabucco
came and went. Leah stayed home, screaming, with the baby-sitter. Lizzie and Stephanie went along. I paid attention to the music most of the time, and the part that Dana sang about sitting down beside the waters of Babylon was very pretty, to say the least. I closed my eyes, and there were certain notes that should not have ended, that should be eternal sounds in the universe. Lizzie sat in the front seat and fell asleep on the way home. Stephanie leaned against Dana in the backseat, and also fell asleep.
In the midst of all this breathing, still dressed in her Old Testament costume and with her hair pinned up, Dana said, “I’ll never be happy again.” I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. She was looking out the window, and she meant it. I don’t know if she even realized that she had spoken aloud. I drove into the light of the headlights, and I didn’t make a sound. It seemed to me that I didn’t have a sound to make.
When we got home, Leah was still awake. She was thrilled to see me, and while Dana put the others to bed and changed her clothing, I sat next to Leah’s crib and held her hand while she talked to me. She talked about the moon,
and her books, and her Jemima Puddleduck doll, and something else unintelligible. She perused my face for signs of pleasure. Sometimes she made gestures of ironical acceptance, shrugs of her little baby shoulders. Sometimes she sighed, as if she didn’t quite understand how things work but was willing to talk about it. Are these imitations of our gestures? Or does the language itself carry this burden of mystery, so that any speaker must express it?
My eyes began to close, but Leah wasn’t finished for the night, and when I slid down the wall to a reclining position, she insisted that I sit up again. It was nearly one by this time. Saturday night. I had root-canaled two, and drilled and filled two, and cleaned two more a very long time before. One of them had insisted upon talking about her sister, who had cancer of the jaw. I had been arduously sympathetic, because, of course, you must. The room was dark and filled with toys. The baby was talking. The moon shone in the window. That was the last real peace I had.
Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth. Undiluted apple juice in a baby bottle, sourballs, the pH balance of drinking water, tetracycline, sand in your bread if you were in the Roman army, biting seal-gut thread if you are an Eskimo woman, playing the trumpet, pulling your own teeth with a pliers. In their hearts, most dentists are certain that their patients can’t be trusted with their teeth, but you can’t grieve for every tooth, every mouth. You can’t even grieve for the worst of them; you can only send the patient home with as many of the teeth he came in with as possible.
After a while, Leah’s eyes began to take on that stare that is preliminary to sleep, and her remarks became more desultory. She continued to hold my hand. I thought about the Hebrews sitting down beside the waters of Babylon, and I began to weep, too, although as quietly as possible. I didn’t see how I was going to support the total love of one woman, Leah, while simultaneously relinquishing that of another, Dana. I wasn’t curious. I said my prayer, which was, “Lord, don’t let her tell me about it,” and shortly after that I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was morning and I had a crick in my neck from sleeping by the window all night.
I crawled over to the half-open door and slithered through, so as not to awaken Leah. I expected to be alone, but I found Dana in her robe at the table. She was eating cold pizza. Her hair was standing up on one side, and she hadn’t managed to get all the makeup off from the night before, so there were smudges around her eyes and her lips were orange. I said, “What time is it? You look terrible.” She gave me a stricken look and said, “I can’t believe it’s over. It was so beautiful. I could sing it every night forever.”
“Well, you’ll sing other things.” I must have sounded irritable, when I meant to sound encouraging.
“I don’t want to sing other things.” She sounded petulant, when she must have meant to sound tragic. I have found that there is something in the marriage bond that deflates every communication, skews it toward the ironic middle, where man and wife are at their best, good-humored and matter-of-fact. But maybe there are others who can accommodate a greater range of exhilaration and despair. Tears came into her eyes and then began running down her cheeks.
I sighed, probably sounding long-suffering, and sat down beside her and put my arms around her. Sitting down, it was awkward. I cast around for something to say. What I hit on was this: “Mrs. Hilton needs to go to a gum specialist. I scaled her yesterday for an hour, and she is exposing bone around the second and third molars.”
“Have I worked on her?”
“Curly red hair, about thirty?”
“Eight-year-old X-rays of impacted wisdom teeth?”
“Won’t have them out till they hurt.”
“I had her. I didn’t think her gums were that bad. She could go to Jerry.”
“No dental insurance. Practically no money, I gather.”
Dana sighed. “Lots of kids, I bet.”
“Five. Sometimes she brings the eighteen-month-old and the three-year-old.”
“Yeah.” Now the tears really began to roll down her cheeks, and she closed her eyes tight to stop them. I had only meant to bring up a mouth, not a life. I held her tightly and repeated my prayer, and it was answered, because although she heaved a number of times, and held her breath as if about to say something, she never did.
Not long after, Lizzie and Stephanie appeared on the scene, the markers came out, the demands for paper, cereal, bananas, and milk went up, and the television went on. Lizzie and Stephanie go head to head on the drawings. Lately, Lizzie’s have a lot of writing on them. Wherever the sky would ordinarily be are Lizzie’s remarks, in blue, about what the figures are doing. Stephanie can’t write yet, but she pays attention. Her skies are full of yellow stars. Dana went into the kitchen and sang her song about the weeping of the
Hebrews while dishing up red bowls of Cheerios and bananas. Easter was coming up, and it occurred to me that the choir might go on to something less passionate, but I couldn’t imagine what it would be. They would certainly go on to fewer rehearsals every week—maybe only one.
Leah was still asleep. I remembered that I was still in my opera clothes, as formal as we get where I live, which was khaki pants, light blue shirt, sweater vest. Dana came through the dining room, and when I went up to the shower, she was already there, stepping out of her underpants with a sigh. Her breasts are wrinkled and flat from six years of nursing, but the rest of her is muscular and supple. I said, “May I join you?” Her eyes lifted to my face. It seems to me that they are very beautiful: pale, perfect blue, without a fleck of brown or green. Constant blue. Simultaneously deep-set and protuberant, with heavy, wrinkled lids. Her mother has the same eyes, only even older and therefore more beautiful. I don’t know what I expected her to say. She always says yes. Now she said, “Sure.” She smiled. She got out another towel. I turned on the water, got in first, and moved to the back of the tub. I reached out my hand and helped her in. We got wet, and soaped each other. She was businesslike about it, but friendly. I tried to be the same way. We talked about nitrous oxide, as I remember. We washed our hair, and she washed her face two or three times, asking each time whether the black was off her eyes.