“No, and I don’t care!” Pauline cried. “His real-estate transactions are the least of my worries!”
“Oh. Right. I’m sorry, Pauline; I was being insensitive. I just thought . . . You know, this is bound to be something temporary. It’s not as if this is the first time you two have . . . Well, George is out running errands, but shall I come over and sit with you?”
“No, that’s all right. Thanks anyway,” Pauline said. She didn’t want to be seen right now, all snotty-nosed and puffy-eyed, and especially not by her impeccably groomed daughter-in-law.
“I could bring little Jojo! Little Jojo would love to cheer up his granny!”
“Maybe later,” Pauline said, and she got off the phone in a hurry.
All new parents thought their children were the only children in the universe, she reflected. They thought no others had ever been born; thought the world had been holding its breath all these centuries just for theirs.
Then Sally must have phoned Karen, who phoned Pauline five minutes later. Pauline had put off telling Karen because she figured Karen might take Michael’s side in this, not that there really were any sides. Karen started right in with “Sally says you and Dad have had another of your fights.”
“Not just another one, Karen. We’ve separated. The marriage is over.”
Stating it so flatly made Pauline’s tears start flowing again, although she had wanted to seem unperturbed. She made a snuffling noise, and Karen sighed and said, “Okay, Mom, have it your way,” and then, with typical heartlessness, changed the subject. Went on to request Pauline’s recipe for Crab Imperial. Pauline got the feeling that Karen was trying to impress some young man. “I’m scaling it down to serve two” was how she put it. She might have had the tact to avoid referring to romance in light of the current situation.
“Has your father not mentioned this himself?” Pauline asked. “Is he leaving you kids completely in the dark?”
“He hasn’t mentioned it to me,” Karen said. “He phoned about an hour ago wanting to know if I’d like to go to a movie with him and Pagan, but I assumed he was calling from home. So anyhow, if I don’t have those special shells to bake this in, can I use a CorningWare casserole dish?”
Sherry phoned—Pauline’s youngest sister, the baby of the family, who was unalterably convinced, therefore, that she was always left out of things. Her first words now were “I heard. I had to hear it from Megan. You told Donna; you told Megan; where was I in this?”
“Your line was busy,” Pauline said, taking a chance.
“Oh. Okay. You know what the problem is,” Sherry said. “None of us had brothers. We don’t have any hope of understanding what men are up to. We never got an inside view of them.”
“We had Daddy,” Pauline pointed out.
Mentioning their father gave her a twinge of anxiety. She dreaded breaking the news to him. He had always preferred Michael to any of his other sons-in-law.
“But Daddy was off at work all day,” Sherry said. “We didn’t get a close-up look the way we would have with brothers.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Pauline said. “I don’t understand men in the least. I might not even like them. Can you tell me why Michael did this? And why now? Why not years and years ago, if he was so dissatisfied? Back when I was young and pretty and could have found someone else!”
“Also we had the handicap of our parents’ happy marriage,” Sherry said. “They made it look too easy. That wasn’t doing us any favors, believe me! They gave us no preparation for how difficult marriage would be.”
“Oh, Sherry, is your marriage difficult, too?”
“It’s impossible! It’s torture!”
“Come to think of it,” Pauline said, “I’m amazed that I stuck it out even as long as I did.”
“And now you don’t have to anymore. You’re lucky.”
“I’m lucky,” Pauline said, and she started laughing through her tears.
So when George phoned and said, “What’s this I hear?” she had no trouble making light of it. “I’ll be fine. Really,” she told him. “I guess I must have sounded upset when I was talking to Sally, but I’m beginning to adjust now. It may be it’s all for the best.”
“You two are not serious, Mom. This is just one of your spats.”
“It is not a spat. Your father has rented an apartment and opened his own bank account and he wants weekend custody of Pagan.”
“Well, of all the absurd . . . I believe I’ll have a word with him,” George said.
“Oh, George, would you? Do you suppose you could do that? I know he thinks I told him to leave—well, I did tell him to leave, but it was only in the heat of the moment.”
“One would expect him to realize as much, after thirty years of this,” George said, in the heavy, elderly tone that always made her want to giggle.
It wasn’t till after they’d said goodbye that she remembered Michael had realized. George wouldn’t change Michael’s mind in the least. And Michael would hate it that she had told everybody their troubles.
Now she thought she’d been wrong to picture their marriage as a tree. What it felt like, instead, was something spilled—something torn and bleeding and spilling out of its borders, like a sloppily fried egg.
On Sunday, she placed not a single phone call. She went to church, where Michael wouldn’t ordinarily have accompanied her anyhow. She came home and had a tuna salad for lunch. Then she changed into slacks and worked in the yard a while, spreading mulch around the azaleas. Her next-door neighbor, Marnie Smith, waved as she got into her car and called, “How’s it going?”
“Going fine,” Pauline called back in a sprightly voice.
Next she made a clean sweep of the house. She filled a cardboard carton with all that Michael had failed to take with him—the clothes that had been in the laundry when he left, dribs and drabs from various closets, his sweatshirt, his snow boots, the slips of paper he had piled on his bureau that night. WHILE YOU WERE OUT . . ., these slips read, and Admiral Poultry and Eggs, and lemons, peanut butter, ham steak . . . His coins in the saucer she pocketed, feeling smug and gleeful as if she were getting away with something.
It wasn’t a very big carton. Men’s lives were more easily contained than women’s lives, she was learning. Imagine what she’d have had to pack if she’d been the one to move out! She felt a pang of envy as she pictured Michael’s apartment, with its “rudimentary” furnishings and a wardrobe that could be carried off in a single trip to the car.
Well. Enough of this.
She reminded herself of his failings. Of how, when she raised some perfectly reasonable objection—when he arrived home from work a full hour later than promised, for instance—he would say something patronizing like “You’re just feeling irritable because you’re on a diet; this is not about me.” Of his tendency to nudge her along when they were dressing to go out but then disappear, off to the bathroom or some such, when finally she was ready. And the way he grew ostentatiously tranquil during fights—etherized, some might say—as if to point out her own “excitability,” her “emotionalism,” her need to “simmer down,” all those terms he was so attached to.
The telephone rang and she raced to pick it up, but it was only Sarah Vine wanting to rearrange the schedule for the Shut-Ins’ Shuttle. Pauline said, “Sure, I’m flexible.” Later, though, after she’d said goodbye, she started wondering if she would have to forfeit her volunteer work now and find a paying job. What, exactly, was her financial situation? Would Michael still support her? Would he send her . . . oh, Lord, alimony? The word had a brittle, sophisticated sound that seemed completely unrelated to her life.
While she was gazing out the picture window she saw her father drive up. His shiny black Buick slid alongside the front curb and then turned into her driveway inch by inch, like a gigantic, unwieldy barge. He parked and got out and stood patting his suit pockets a minute before he fumbled the car door shut and started trudging up her walk. For some years now he’d been movin
g at this pace (he was over eighty, stooped and shrunken and arthritic), but she couldn’t help imagining that she herself was the cause—that he was bowed down by disappointment at what she had let happen to her marriage. He must have heard the news from one of her sisters. He would never just drop in unannounced for no good reason.
But all he said when she opened the door was “Why, hello, hon,” as if it were she who’d surprised him. He plodded past her, hands loose at his sides, heading toward the living room.
“What brings you here, Daddy?” she asked as she followed him. Might as well get this over with.
He settled himself in an armchair and adjusted the crease in his trousers. Then he looked up at her with his mild, blue, guileless eyes and said, “Oh, just thought I’d pay a call on my next-to-youngest daughter. Isn’t that okay?”
“Of course,” she said. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thanks. Lately I’ve been trying to cut back. Seems I haven’t been sleeping well.”
This she took as a reproach. She pretended not to catch his meaning. “Juice, then,” she said. “Or a soft drink.”
“I don’t believe I care for anything just now.”
Resigned, she sat down opposite him and waited for him to begin.
“Where’s Pagan?” he said.
“He went to a movie with Michael.”
“Oh? What are they seeing?”
“You know, I didn’t think to ask,” she told him.
Darned if she would be the first to broach the subject.
“I bet I didn’t sleep two hours last night,” her father told her.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“The night before, maybe three. I can get to sleep all right but then I wake up again.”
“Well, it’s not as if I’m sleeping much,” she snapped. A more understanding father, she reflected, would have offered support and sympathy.
“What do you do?” he asked her. “Do you get up or do you just lie there?”
“Well . . . I lie there.”
“Me too. I lie there and then I start thinking.”
“Oh, yes. Thinking,” Pauline said with some bitterness.
“Thinking is the worst,” he said.
She set her jaw. Here it came.
“I think of every little cross word I ever said to your mother. Every time I got aggravated when she would repeat herself or act confused.”
“It is stupid to believe that people can make it through a whole marriage without any cross words,” Pauline said too loudly.
He looked taken aback.
“What,” she said, “you expect I’d be some kind of saint? There are other sides to these things, you know. People don’t get mad if they haven’t been provoked.”
“Yes, but she couldn’t help herself. It was the illness.”
Pauline hesitated. “The illness,” she said.
“You know: she would wander off like she did and I’d be so worried about her. The neighbors would bring her back and I’d say, ‘Doris! Where have you been? What on earth possessed you?’ and then I’d see her expression. She would be looking so ashamed, like a little child who’d been scolded, and her eyes would fill with tears and she’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and I would feel just awful. It wasn’t her fault. Or when I acted extra-patient. She’d ask me the same question fifteen times in a row and finally I would say, in this extra-patient voice, ‘As I already told you, dear . . .’ But of course that’s not really patience; it’s ‘See how I’m holding my temper.’ It’s ‘See how well I’m behaving.’ I knew I was making her feel bad.”
“You did the best you could,” Pauline told him.
“Last night I was remembering once when she knocked over her milk,” he said. “It had been a trying day and then I burned our supper and I had to fix it again from scratch. I got it all on the table, settled her in her chair, sat down myself, reached for my fork . . . and she knocked over her milk glass. Milk everywhere, on our plates and the table and her lap and the floor, and I clamped my mouth shut and went out to the kitchen for a rag and came back, heaving these sighs, and while I was sponging her skirt she reached out and touched my hair and said, ‘You are such a honey.’”
He stopped speaking. He looked away, toward the window, and swallowed.
Pauline said, “Oh, Daddy.”
“I worry I’ll go to hell when I die,” he said, almost too low to be heard.
“You would never go to hell!”
She sat forward in her seat, planning to rise and give him a hug, but some slight motion he made warned her off. He was still looking toward the window. He said, “I worry I’ll get to heaven and your mother will say, ‘You! What are you doing here, after you were so hard on me?’”
“That is never going to happen,” Pauline said. “Never. I can promise. You know how it’s going to go?”
“How?” he asked, but distantly, as if he were not much interested.
She said, “There you are, climbing the stairs to heaven, and you look up and you’re surprised to see that the gates are already open and Mom is standing just inside waiting to greet you. She’s not old and sick; she’s the girl you first knew, and she’ll be all excited. She’ll be laughing and saying, ‘You’re here! You got here! Hurry up and come in!’ You’ll say, ‘Don’t I have to clear this with someone? Pass some kind of test?’ and she’ll say, ‘Oh, my, no.’ She’ll say, ‘You’ve already passed the hardest test there is,’ and she’ll take you by the hand and lead you through the gates. I promise.”
Her father was looking at her directly now. He said, “You’re a good woman, Pauline.”
For that moment, she believed him.
She fixed him a Sunday supper of raisin oatmeal—a Barclay family tradition—and after they had eaten he left, still apparently unaware that anything in her household was amiss. She walked him out to his car and stood waving as he backed almost imperceptibly into the street. Then she returned to the house.
The carton containing Michael’s belongings sat on the cobbler’s bench in the foyer. Now it seemed inhospitable to have it so close to the door, implying that he should just grab it and go. She moved it into the living room. Then she went out to the kitchen and cleaned up, humming as she worked. She was doing all right, she realized. She watered the plants on the windowsill. She draped the dishcloth over the faucet and turned off the kitchen light.
When the doorbell rang, she was just starting toward the living room. Was there anyone as pigheaded as Michael? He had a perfectly good key in his pocket. He was merely making a point. She took her time crossing the foyer and opening the door.
But only Pagan stood there, hugging his duffle bag. “Guess what!” he said. “Grandpa’s got a swimming pool!”
As he stepped inside, Pauline looked beyond him. Michael’s car was already gliding away, no more than a colorless hulk in the dusk.
“You climb up these extra stairs to the roof and there is this full-sized pool with a diving board and everything,” Pagan was saying. “If the weather’s still warm next weekend, I’m going to bring my swimsuit.”
She closed the door behind him.
“And there’s a TV in my bedroom. Grandpa let me watch one program after I went to bed.”
“That’s nice,” she said faintly.
“Have we got any ice cream?”
“Grandpa didn’t give you a gallon all your own at his place?”
“Huh?”
“Sure, we have ice cream,” she told him. “Don’t make a mess, though, hear?”
He dropped his duffle bag on the floor and set off for the kitchen, but instead of going with him, Pauline went into the living room. She didn’t turn on any lamps. She sat on the couch in the dark and pressed both hands to her cheeks and stared straight ahead.
Pictures passed through her mind, tiny but uncannily distinct. She saw Michael tugging on his plaid jacket the afternoon they met. She saw him shaving in the hotel bathroom the first morning of their marriage—that
method he had of grabbing the tip of his nose and moving it aside while he was shaving the skin below it, which had made her laugh out loud. She saw him walking into her hospital room with flowers after Lindy was born, more flowers than she had ever seen and surely more than they could afford, a whole mountain of flowers that almost hid his shy, young, thin, eager face.
In her memory all these pictures were brightly sunlit, and they broke her heart. She didn’t cry, though. For once, the tears wouldn’t come. She saw that Michael might have been right. It really could be too cold to snow.
7. The World Won’t End
Originally, the plan had been for Pagan to go to sleep-away camp. He was plenty old enough, after all—thirteen and a half, an eighth-grader come September. He enjoyed most sports and could very well have attended, say, the soccer camp in Virginia where the boy next door always went. But no, he suddenly announced that he wanted to learn guitar instead. And since there was no sleep-away guitar camp—or none that anybody in the neighborhood had heard of—it was decided that he should sign up for the summer music program at the Maestro School for the Arts on Falls Road.
This was where Michael came in. The summer program started at ten o’clock every morning, but Pauline had to be in the office at nine. (She worked part-time as a receptionist for a group of cardiologists.) She telephoned Michael and asked if he could help with transportation. “I can pick him up afternoons,” she said, “but I’d need you to drive him there in the mornings. I would drop him off at your apartment on my way to work every day.”
“Or the store, would be better,” Michael told her. “I head over to the store around eight o’clock, generally.”
“Okay, the store. Thanks,” she said briskly. Then she got off the line.
Conversations with Pauline were like business dealings nowadays, very starchy and efficient. This was preferable to how it used to be, of course (the tears and recriminations, the clatter of slammed-down receiver), but it always left Michael feeling oddly rebuffed. He hung up himself but then stood there a moment, one hand still on the phone.