Three Women at the Water's Edge (24 page)

“Well,” Dale said, “I really can’t see how I can help you pack, but let me clean your house for you. Why don’t you go rest and I’ll watch the children and tidy up? I’d like to do it, I really would, Daisy; I
need
to do it, it will give me a chance to see what life would be like if I were married and had children.”

“Oh, Dale, I don’t want you to clean my house,” Daisy said halfheartedly. “But I am tired. I mean we stayed up so late. I usually fall asleep right after the children do.”

“Well, go up and lie down and rest,” Dale said. “This is your only chance; I’ve got to leave at three. Go on, please.”

So Daisy waddled up the stairs, pulling her robe up about her so she wouldn’t trip, and Dale sat down on the floor of the family room and played for a while with Danny and Jenny. They were such pretty children. They had fat cheeks, rosy and dimpled, and little white squares of teeth, like toy teeth; Dale loved to see the teeth when the children smiled. They were delighted by her interest and affection, and they brought out their favorite toys, and Jenny sat on her lap and cuddled while Dale played garage with Danny. Dale had never had much interest in little children; she preferred young adolescents, kids who could share jokes and knowledge, who could carry on a decent conversation. For that reason she had gone into secondary-school teaching instead of elementary. But now as she sat on the floor with her nephew and niece she became slowly aware of their charm, their real entrancing charm. First of all, of course, there was their size: They were so tiny, such miniature people, and as Dale held them or felt them topple against her, she grew amazed that such small creatures should contain all the necessary human parts: a heart, a spleen, lungs, a stomach, intestines, a brain, tiny veins and capillaries. She thought their organs must be like little trinkets, like baubles, that for them to be of such a frivolous size and yet to work such wonders—pu
mping blood, digesting food, bringing in air, keeping the small body alive—must be a real kind of miracle. So the two children were both delightful, like toys, and yet enormous in significance, showing how the force of life is not one only of brute power, but also of clever delicacy.

And then they did talk, they did try to carry on a conversation, and they were not jaded or brittle like the students Dale taught in Maine, who came slouching in reeking of the smoke of some kind of cigarette or other, who pretended to feel no excitement at any wonderful thing, not the workings of the human body nor the intricacies of a leaf. Everything was of vast interest to both Danny and Jenny, although Jenny’s attention span was not very long. Dale told the children that she taught French and biology, and she spoke a little French for them, and taught them a few words—how easily, with what willing readiness they learned—they were not constrained by fears of appearing foolish; and Dale realized that at their young age it was all the same to them, English or French, those were all new sounds they must learn to shape in their mouths, new sounds they must try to connect a meaning to. They were without embarrassment. That was the important thing.
“Bonjour, chérie,”
Jenny said sweetly, perfectly, as if she had been born French.
“Je m’appelle Danny,”
Danny said. For one weird moment Dale had a glimpse of what the world must be like to someone two or four, how vast and peculiar the world must seem, full of awesome and arbitrary bits of sounds and objects that must somehow be brought down, like chairs and broomsticks floating haphazardly through the air, into a sort of organized room so that one could walk and sit. It was eerie. And of course the only way to get by was not to be embarrassed; you had to reach out and snatch at a word or idea quickly, before it floated away, and by saying it you possessed it, you made it your own, brought it to earth, and kept it, though sometimes you must stomp on it a bit, to make sure it did not escape. Oh, it was eerie, frightening, wonderful, exciting. Everything was possible to children; so they believed in Santa Claus and goblins and shadows and light. But mostly they believed in adults, in the wisdom and goodness of adults, they believed in them without embarrassment, with total surrender, and with all their complete little lives at stake. Look how easily they believed that the sounds Dale was making
—”Je t’aime, ma petite”
—were real words which had some worth. Look how they trusted her with their minds. My God, they were marvelous, children were, Dale thought, they were so
brave
. It was their courage that impressed her most; it almost moved her to tears.

And then their persistence, and their innocence, their unusual way of seeing the world. Dale told the children that she also taught biology, and she tried to explain to them, on their level, what that meant. She said she taught about the way the body worked, and about animals, and about trees and leaves and grass and flowers.

“Oh, good!” Danny interrupted her, pushing at her, intense. “Then you can tell me why grass is green.”

Pleased by the question, Dale began to talk about chlorophyll, and the sun, and carbon dioxide, and water, and Danny sat listening to her patiently. “Do you see?” she finished.

And Danny said, “No. You’ve just told me
how
grass is green. I want to know
why
.”

And there was nothing she could do but to hug him with great affection, and to laugh, and to cop out: “Because God made it that way, I suppose,” she said. “What color would
you
make the grass?”

They would make it orange, they would make it pink, they would make it yellow; it was all the same to them. And they got so silly that Dale decided to take them out for a walk, to use up some of their energy. “Come show me your lake,” she said.

She dressed the children warmly—Daisy had told her about Jenny’s fall illness—and put on her own coat and a pair of Daisy’s rubber boots, and walked out with the children down the sloping backyard to the beach. It was a cold, windy day, but bright with sun and startling with the quick blots of clouds that the wind blew now over the sun, now away. The lake was dancing. Dale watched it, trying to capture its rhythm. Swells began far out and crested and broke, smaller whitecaps rose and fell, and birds swooped. Dale was surprised to see seagulls; she did not realize they lived inland. She walked with her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her coat for warmth, and watched Danny and Jenny as they scurried about on the sand. The far stretch of lake seemed not to interest them at all; several times she tried to call their attention to it—look at the streak of sun on the horizon, see how it glows?—and they would politely agree that it was nice, but then return to their own business, which was scrabbling about in the sand, looking for bright chips of glass or pebbles, or making circles with their fingers or a bit of driftwood in the sand. Why did they so obviously prefer circles and spheres? Dale wondered as she watched. Why was that shape so satisfying to children? For they made it over and over again. But she could not come to a conclusion, and soon they were off, running to try to catch a flock of sandpipers that pecked at the water’s edge.

The children’s noses began to grow red, and so did their cheeks and hands. It was cold; winter was very much nearby. Dale suggested that they return to the house, but first they begged to throw some stones in the water, and Dale acquiesced. She watched them, she threw rocks herself, and felt strangely pleased to see the concentric circles that spread out in the water each time a rock entered. The children did not seem to notice or care; it was the plop of sound they were interested in, and the drama of a splash; they shrieked with joy if a few drops of water sprang up onto their faces or clothes. It seemed that they were interested in the water only as much as it was close to them, that they were unimpressed by its vastness, or at least that they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, deal with it. But the water within their reach was exciting; Dale could feel how the children longed to walk right into it in spite of the cold, just for the pleasure of entering it, that fascinating, intriguing stuff that was somehow a solid thing like a box, and somehow something moving, like a bird, and somehow something spiritual, like a laugh. Danny and Jenny kept going closer and closer to the water, getting the toes of their boots and then all the boots wet, and then the cuffs of their jeans, and before she knew it they were wet up to their knees. She knew the water had to be very cold, but the children didn’t seem to care. They wanted to go more and more into the water, as if they were entranced. She took them each firmly by a hand and led them away. “You’d better wait until next summer to go swimming,” Dale said. “The water is too cold now. You’d get sick.” But they were reluctant to leave, they dragged their feet and looked back over their shoulders, and Jenny became whiny, and Dale felt irritated until she realized: oh, why, she’s tired and hungry! That’s why she’s acting this way.

So she got the children into the house and into dry clothes, feeling a sensual satisfaction as she dried their wet pale legs and put them into clean warm dry cotton clothes and sweaters. She put them in front of the TV, as Daisy would have, and brought them plates with peanut butter sandwiches and apples, and they were quite happy, and Dale felt immensely pleased, almost smug. It pleased her too that Daisy was still asleep upstairs, trusting her children and her house to her sister’s care.

Danny did not have school that day because it was Thanksgiving vacation, so Dale told the children they would have to rest in the TV room, and made them snuggle up at opposite ends of the sofa under blankets to watch a TV show. It was a
nice
TV show: two young women were in a flawless stage garden singing songs to their audience, trying to teach them songs. There was a puppet, too, and it all seemed quite pleasant. Dale left the children there and went into the kitchen. She made herself a cup of coffee and ate an apple, and then began to work. She cleaned the Play-Doh off the kitchen table and washed the counters, the outside of the refrigerator and stove, wiping away millions of fingerprints. She swept the kitchen floor and then hurriedly washed it with hot water and scented detergent. She became aware of what a bright, cheerful kitchen it was to work in, how agreeably the sun shone in the windows, how really attractively Daisy had painted and wallpapered the room. Then she went through the rest of the house as if seeing it for the first time, dusting and straightening what she could, realizing how lovely Daisy’s house was, how lovely Daisy had made the house. And she suddenly became certain that it was not right for Daisy to have to leave this house, not when it seemed to embrace Daisy and the children so perfectly, not when each room seemed to have such a perfect, salutary function. Daisy and her children fit the house; the house fit them. It was right. It was so right that the very walls were warm with it, so right that even the dust seemed cheerful.

Dale found the cat curled up in a living room window. She picked the creature up and held it in her arms, to give herself comfort. Then she sank down into a large wicker rocking chair and looked at the room around her. In this room the woodwork was eggshell white, all the woodwork—high ornate ceiling moldings, fireplace moldings scalloped and curved and ridged, doorframes, doors, and the beveled panels of wood and glass bookcases that rose on either side of the front bay window. And Daisy had scraped, and then primed, and then painted—tw
ice—all that complicated woodwork. It was so fine and smooth and clean-looking, the woodwork, and as Dale studied it she saw how it all had the look of a sculpture, of a piece of material that had been painstakingly, lovingly adorned with more than paint, with craft and care and love. The walls were a bright, almost daffodil yellow, and were hung with a wonderful variety of pictures: an enormous bright acrylic in bold fresh greens and pinks and yellows, a dark Chagall poster framed in chrome; blown-up photographs of Danny and Jenny and Daisy and Paul down at the water, with the wind blowing their hair, one with them snuggled all together in the same bed, with toes peeking out of the covers every which way and everyone laughing. (Who, Dale wondered, had taken
that
picture? For everyone in that photo looked naked.) There were books in the room, and large bright pieces of pottery—a large vase holding peacock feathers, a lamp base with plump naked nymphs floating about on what must have been clouds of marijuana or opium, so sly and silly were their smiles, a large flat bowl in the middle of the coffee table, bright with slashes of blue and pink and green. Of course the bowl held various strange things: a pink rubber pacifier, two safety pins, what appeared to be a plastic replica of the head of Captain Kirk of
Star Trek
(where was the body?), a fingernail file. And there were the cardboard boxes standing around half full of books and
things,
large brown cardboard boxes which seemed like mute and tasteless intruders, like nasty deaf secret police who had invaded the house and were standing about immobile, carrying out their duty to ruin everything, to make everyone miserable. It was wrong for the boxes to be here, Dale thought, and she actively hated the boxes. Here the house was, spreading itself about, harmoniously cluttered with children and toys and the paraphernalia of life, and all of it sheltered by these warm, lovely, loving walls. It was not
fair
that Daisy should have to leave, it simply was not fair at all. Daisy should not have to leave this house that was so truly
her
house, and she should not have to leave the access to the lake. Not now.