15
Natalie was on the phone to Mira before nine on the Monday morning after the party, but Mira could not get away before the afternoon. Natalie was humming in the kitchen when Mira walked through her back door. She looked different: her eyes were bright and her whole face seemed firmer.
‘How about a drink? No? I’ll make you some instant, okay?’ She fished a stained plastic cup out of the dish-washer that Mira envied every time she looked at it. ‘Boy, I really laid a load on Saturday night. I ruined my dress, tore it all down the side when I fell, ruined the shoes I had dyed to match it, everything’s shot! And I paid ninety dollars for that dress, and seventeen for the shoes.’
Mira gasped. She bought one or two dresses a year and paid ten or fifteen dollars for them. ‘Oh, Natalie! Can’t you salvage them?’
Nat shrugged. ‘No, I threw them out.’
‘Poor Nat,’ Mira said with real feeling.
‘Oh, it was worth it,’ she answered jauntily.
‘Why? I thought you weren’t having a very good time.’
‘I was having a lousy time at the party!’ Natalie laughed and smirked at her suggestively.
Mira just looked at her. She had no idea what Nat was talking about.
Nat rubbed Mira’s face affectionately. ‘You are such an innocent. You’re so cute.’ She sat down across the table from Mira. ‘You didn’t notice that Paul left the party?’
‘Yes. That was kind of him. I was a little concerned myself, and I was glad he’d done that. It surprised me, I never thought him that sensitive …’
‘Oh, he’s very sensitive!’ Natalie was laughing.
Mira stopped. ‘Are you saying …?’
‘Of course! What did you think?’
‘I like to think men and women can be friends without it always being sexual,’ Mira said disapprovingly. ‘I thought he was being a friend.’
‘Friend, schmend, screw that. I don’t need a friend, I’ve got lots of those! Oh, God, it was so romantic! I was stark naked, my dress was on the floor and my underwear on top of it. I’d left the front door open for him. And suddenly he was standing there, right in the doorway: I hadn’t heard him come up. All I had was a sheet over me and I sat up and gasped. I really
was
surprised. To see him there so suddenly, you know. I hadn’t been sure he’d come. And he just comes toward me, walking slowly with his eyes on me the whole time, like Marlon Brando or something, and he sits down on the bed beside me and pushes me hard back against the headboard and kisses me, oh, God! It was fantastic! Pressing his body against my breasts and then he slid his arm around my waist and held me so hard I could hardly breathe and kept kissing me. Oh, it was great!’ Her voice had risen and her face was ecstatic.
Mira sat stony.
Suddenly Natalie’s face changed. Nasty lines came into it, her voice grew sharp and hard. ‘And that son of a bitch Hamp can just go straight to hell, he can kiss my ass, he can go fuck himself. He doesn’t want to fuck me, I’ll find someone who does, and he can go fuck himself.’
‘He doesn’t sleep with you?’ Mira inquired timidly, some life coming back into her face. If there was a reason, of course, that was different. She had read it often and often: spouses don’t roam unless there is something wrong with the marriage. And if it was Hamp’s fault, why then it was all explainable and with time and patience and discussion, solvable.
‘The son of a bitch hasn’t slept with me in two years. I’ve been going out of my mind. But he can go fuck himself.’
‘Why doesn’t he sleep with you?’
Natalie shrugged and looked away. ‘How should I know? Maybe he can’t. He can’t do anything else, God knows. I asked him to help me paint Deena’s room Sunday and all he did was manage to spill a whole can of paint on the rug. Not only that but he leaves me to clean it up:
he retreats back to his chair and the TV set. He’s a child!’ she said scornfully.
Mira pondered.
Nat kept going. ‘He doesn’t even take the garbage out. Probably afraid he’ll fall in the pail and the garbagemen won’t be able to tell him from the rest of the swill. He sits in that chair every night, night after night. He doesn’t talk to the kids, he doesn’t even talk to me. He sits there, drinking himself into oblivion and watching TV. He falls asleep there. One night he almost burned the house down – his cigarette burned a big hole in the cushion, that’s why I have it slipcovered, but I smelled something burning and came down. Look at the rug, look at it! There are cigarette burns all around his chair.’
She made Mira get up and look.
She was into it now, and she kept it up. She had all Hamp’s sins written in blood on her memory. Mira was speechless. Not at Natalie’s revelations: they were familiar enough complaints. Natalie had joked about such behavior before, and all of the women had similar complaints about their husbands. It was that Nat was serious. Mira felt that she was entering a new realm. The women always lamented or complained with humor and lightness. Their personal relations with their husbands had remained private. They were all simply parts of the ongoing American saga of uncontrollable children, inadequate husbands, and brave women wryly admitting failure even as they piled one more sandbag on the dike. But Natalie was making it real, she was moving it from the realm of myth (about which one can do nothing) to the realm of actuality (about which, if one were American, one must do something). The women could joke about marriage and children the way Italians joke about the Church, because it is there, solid, unmovable, unopposable, undefeatable.
‘Maybe I will have a drink.’
As Natalie poured it, Mira said, ‘Why don’t you leave him? If you’re that unhappy with him.’
‘Goddamn bastard, I should leave him. That would really serve him right.’
‘Why don’t you then?’
Natalie gulped down her drink and rose to pour another. Her voice was getting thick. ‘Goddamn bastard, I should.’
‘Your father would give you money. You don’t have to stay with him for that.’
‘Damn straight I don’t! That stupid ass, all he does is dictate form
letters all day. If I had to live on what he earned … We’d all starve. Bastard! That would really serve him right, because if I divorced him, my father would fire him on the spot. All he does is dictate form letters all day. My father told me. That’s all he does. Stupid ass.’
Mira was inexorable now. ‘From what you say, the kids aren’t much attached to him.’
‘Of course not! Damned brats. He has nothing to do with them. Once a month he yells “Shut up!” and that’s it. They just walk around him, stepping over that fat slob slumped in that chair. That’s all he is, a fat body. Fat lot of good that fat body does me.’
‘So they probably wouldn’t miss him. They don’t need him, you don’t need him. So why stay?’
Natalie suddenly burst into tears. ‘You know I hate those kids? I hate them! I can’t stand them!’
Mira stiffened with disapproval, not at Natalie’s feelings but her words. She had long noticed Natalie’s behavior with her children. It was not that she abused them physically, but she always disparaged them in speech: they were ‘the brats.’ And she was always trying to get rid of them, to send them outdoors or upstairs, away, away. Anything to be rid of them. Natalie took care of the children’s physical needs: she cooked for them as well as she could, she cleaned their rooms and did their laundry and bought them new underwear when they needed it. She just never wanted to be with them. But to some degree all the women were like that. Still Mira felt it was one thing to feel that way and another to say it. Saying it somehow made it hard and fast. In some dim place in her mind, Mira really believed that if you didn’t say you hated your kids, they would not know it.
‘Why did you have them?’ she asked tightly.
‘Good Christ, the way everybody has them! Accidents, my three little accidents. Christ. What a life.’ She stood up and poured another drink. ‘Actually, I liked them when they were babies. I love babies. You can carry them around and coo at them and they’re warm and helpless and they love you so much. But when they grow up! My mother is the same way. I can’t stand it when they start to talk back, be fresh, all that shit. My mother is the same way.’
‘I certainly don’t feel that way. I like my children better as they get older. They’re more interesting,’ Mira said primly.
Natalie shrugged. ‘Good. Good for you. I don’t happen to feel that way.’
Mira’s mouth began to purse nervously. ‘Well, what do they have to do with not leaving Hamp?’
The tears spilled over onto Natalie’s large cheeks. ‘Oh, God, Mira, what would he do if I left him? He’s helpless; do you know I have to tell him to change his underwear, I have to draw his bathwater? He’s so smart, God, he’s smart – you ought to know, Mira, you’ve talked to him a lot at the parties he really has a good mind, and does he do anything with it? He sits in that damned chair and watches TV. If I left him, he wouldn’t have a job, he wouldn’t have anything.’
Mira was silent.
‘He wouldn’t know when to blow his nose!’ Nat burst out again.
‘You love him,’ Mira said.
‘Love, love,’ Natalie mocked. ‘What is it? Years ago, before the kids were born, we were happy.’ Her voice changed: it went higher and thinner, it sounded like a child’s voice. ‘We used to play. He’d come home and find some dust on something, and he’d spank me. Not hard, you know. He’d pull down my pants and put me over his knee and spank me, real hard, it would hurt. And I’d yell and cry.’ She was smiling. Mira’s face was horrified. ‘He was my daddy and I had to do what he wanted. I was so happy then, so excited all the time. I’d run around all day doing things to please him. I loved doing them. I’d buy all the things he liked to eat and records he liked to hear and I’d buy these real sexy nightgowns, and I’d always have a pitcher of orange blossoms waiting – unless I wanted a spanking.’ She giggled. Her voice and face were entirely given over to the child. She had the dreamy sweet look of a child telling you the story of a book she had just read. ‘And, oh! would he spank me. I’d cry and cling to him.’ She stopped and sipped her drink. ‘I don’t know when it changed. When Lena was born, I guess. I had to grow up then,’ she said bitterly. ‘I had the shitty diapers to clean up. I couldn’t run around buying things, I couldn’t play games so much. And now look. For God’s sake I’m not just the mommy but the daddy too around here. He does nothing.’
‘You grew up.’
Her voice rose. ‘I had to grow up! I had no choice!’
‘He either had to be a tin god or nothing. Sometimes,’ and Mira heard bitterness in her own voice now, and wondered where it came from, ‘sometimes I think that’s all men are. Tin gods. They have to be all or they are nothing.’
‘Nothing, nothing! Right. That’s what that bastard is!’ Natalie had
recovered. She wiped her face and stood up and poured herself another drink.
16
Late that night, Mira told Norm the whole story. She was very upset; many things were working in her, but she was unaware of most of them. What dominated her account was shock at Natalie’s adultery. Norm listened impatiently, with a look of disgust on his face. He said Natalie was stupid and a drunken slut. She didn’t matter; she was not to be taken into consideration. Mira should just forget the whole thing; it was unimportant. Natalie was a whore and Paul was a bastard: that was that.
He went to bed. Mira said she would be up soon, but she felt restless; she paced around the downstairs rooms, gazing out at the night, at the moon over the rooftops, at the ominously rustling shrubs. She saw motion, furtive and frightening, everywhere. To calm herself, she poured a little of Norm’s brandy in a juice glass and took it into the living room. She sat there sipping, smoking, meditating. It was the first time she ever did that, and the beginning of a new pattern.
She wanted very much to talk to someone about the whole thing, especially to discover why it was bothering her so much. She considered: Was she jealous? Did she wish it had been she Paul came charging in on? But if Paul had come to her like Marlon Brando, she would have laughed. Was the resentment she had heard in her own voice reflective of her feelings about her own marriage? Was she urging Nat to leave Hamp because she wanted to leave Norm? She didn’t know and couldn’t seem to work it through.
She decided, however, not to tell anyone what Nat had told her. Nat had not enjoined her to silence, but it seemed a point of honor not to talk about it. That meant, though, that she could not discuss with anyone the things about the situation that bothered her. She decided to do some reading in psychology.
Time passed, winter melted into a rainy spring. Theresa bent over her swollen belly to plant a vegetable garden; Don got a job mending roofs. The Foxes finished the extension on their house and threw a party. Adele’s pregnancy was beginning to show. Nat finished redecorating her bathroom and was thinking of finishing the attic. Mira had finished the Jones biography of Freud, and several Freud
monographs and was reading various other psychologists. She wanted to read Wilhelm Reich, but the library did not have his books, and when she asked Norm to get one for her at the medical library of the university, he sternly forbade her to read Reich.
It was a slow drippy spring, and everyone was restless. The outside world, with Berlin and Cuba and a faded Joseph McCarthy, seemed far away. Bill got a raise and Bliss was elated: it meant she could hire a babysitter once in a while, so she could go out at night when he was out of town. She enrolled in a bridge course.
Late in May, the sun came out. Nat came down one afternoon for coffee. In the months that had passed, Mira had never referred again to the business with Paul, and neither had Nat. But their relationship had changed: Natalie now told Mira in detail about her daily irritations with Hamp. She would rave against him for three-quarters of an hour, and then go cheerfully on to something else. Mira was bored and irritated; she began to avoid Natalie. And Natalie felt that and was hurt and angry. She stopped just dropping in, but would call once in a while. Mira was usually busy. Natalie failed to understand how reading some books when you weren’t even in school could take precedence over her company. So she stopped calling. But one afternoon in late May, she strolled into Mira’s back door.