“What happened when you were eighteen? Did a light go on?”
“I saw a body.”
“A body?”
“A dead person. An aunt of mine, stretched out in a coffin. She had on rouge and jewelry. She had a dressy black dress on and a string of pearls. One day she was alive and the next day she was lying there dead. I had this sudden notion that it didn’t make a pinch of difference if you were one or the other.”
“But of course it made a difference. To the people who loved her.”
“It made a ripple. That’s not a difference.”
“Some people make bigger ripples than others.”
“A ripple eventually subsides. What does it matter if it subsides next week or next year? That’s what I thought, looking at her. It was a bitter little thought, let me tell you. And chilling.”
“And were you shattered? About the revelation, not your aunt.”
“Just the opposite.” Onion’s voice went firm. “I was relieved. I felt the mystery go out of things, whoosh, it was gone, and everything seemed a whole lot more solid as a result. I was a bundle of protoplasm and so was everyone else.”
“And it never came back? The mystery?”
“There they go again, those damn bells. They’re as bad as those prayers they pipe into Strom’s room at the hospital. Morning and night he’s got to put up with that mumbo jumbo.”
“How is Strom?”
“No change.” She sipped, then sighed harshly. “Well, he’s a little worse. His hand, he can’t move it at all anymore.”
“Do you think he even hears those prayers?”
“Probably not.”
“What if he does, though? What if he finds them a comfort? Not the words maybe, but the repeating of them. Something to measure off time.”
“Hmmm,” Onion said, closing her eyes. She looked inexpressibly tired. “Seeing my aunt lying there that time, an odd phrase jumped into my head, and I’ve never forgotten it. I thought, there she is, all dressed up and nowhere to go. All alone there and no one to swank for. She’d been a great one for swanking, as we used to call it. People used to laugh at her behind her back. But there she lay, this singular being. This singular, insensible being. My uncle, a terribly pious old goat, came up to me and said, ‘I hope you said a prayer for Auntie.’”
“And what did you say?”
“I said yes. But my fingers were crossed. That’s the way I was. A person with crossed fingers. My identity, if you like – not that I have any patience with all this search-for-identity nonsense.”
Fay listened to Onion and found herself nodding. She, too, is uneasy with people perpetually searching for their identities. She’s sick of her identity; in fact, she’s afraid of it. She has all the identity she wants, all she can absorb. Daughter, sister, girlfriend, all her Fay-ness, and all of its tints and colors, her clothes, her bed sheets, her cups and saucers, her writing paper. This looks just like you, people tell her. This is your sort of book, your sort of movie, the kind of thing only you would say. Fay McLeod. Yammer, yammer, yammer. She’s sick of the woman. Throttle her, put her on the back shelf. (Only when she’s with Onion does the image retreat.)
She’s learned, too, how unstable identity can be, how it can quickly drain away when brought face to face with someone else’s identity. Talking to Hannah Webb, the placidly genteel Hannah, Fay feels herself coarsen; she wants to slap her knee, wave her arms boisterously, shift into an alien diction, say words like “fuck” and “lousy” and “bitched-up.” With Clyde or Bibbi she becomes the calm older sister, slightly ponderous, immensely charitable. With Iris Jaffe she grows a coat of acute girlishness; with Beverly Miles she’s a skeptic. With Peter Knightly she was intermittently outrageous and determined, as though she were locked into a desire to keep him off balance; she never knew why; probably she was feeding some strain of his identity, reflecting, deflecting, fading back, re-emerging. And with herself? A woman not even on speaking terms with her own loneliness.
Enough of this, enough.
It was exhausting, the battle to give yourself a shape. It was depressing, too, like an ugly oversized dress you had to go on wearing year after year after year.
“I SUPPOSE I SHOULD SAY bon voyage,” Peter said to Fay, running into her one morning in the staff cafeteria.
“Oh, but I don’t go for another ten days,” Fay told him. “A whole week, and a half.”
“Lucky you to get away from this heat. It’s been a pretty cool summer in Europe from all reports.”
“Except in Greece. It’s been terrible there, people collapsing on the streets.”
“Right, I read something about it. But in England, and in Paris – ”
“I’ll have to take a raincoat.”
“And an umbrella.”
“Yes,” Fay said, “there’ve been record rainfalls in the U.K.”
To herself she said: Here we are, this man, this former lover and I, standing on a strip of beige public carpeting in front of a soft-drink machine, talking about rain and cold. The most neutral of all subjects, the most harmless.
“Quite a lot of flooding on the Saône,” Peter went on. “And in the north of Italy, Tuscany. Devastating. We saw some clips on the news.”
We? Of course. Peter and Fritzi.
This is the man whose mouth has read the length and width of her body.
She knows his tongue and teeth. She’s acquainted with the fine tremors of his long thighs. His surprisingly silken pubic hairs. The reddened veins of his penis. And what else, what else? All those nights. She’s absorbed those strange moans of his that seemed to originate not in the throat but in some primary node of memory, nothing to do with his real voice, nothing to do with him.
Oh, the things he’s done to me, Fay thought, staring into the shaded knot of his tie. Maroon with blue flecks. Nubby. The things I’ve done to him, for him.
“Of course,” Peter was saying, “the wind off the North Sea.”
“Brutal.”
“Never really lets up.”
The death of intimacy, so this is what it means: Bodies dissolved in water. Bodies made of water. A trickle of memory left, thin as the mention of rain in a weather bulletin. The waste of it.
“How’s Fritzi getting along?” she asked Peter. Her confected social voice.
“Oh, God, this has been a tough time for Fritzi.”
“And the girls.”
“Terrible, terrible. Heather’s been having nightmares. And acting out, tantrums and so on. Fritzi’s worried about her. We both are.”
Both. The word hung in the air, small and subtly textured, like a tennis ball.
“I’m staying on for the moment,” Peter said, as though he felt an explanation were called for. “It’s not just the rent money, which does help out, God knows. It’s more the emotional support. Although I suppose it’s got the communal tongue wagging.” At this he peered questioningly at Fay, who could think of nothing to say.
“Well,” he said, moving away, “I won’t say good-bye just yet. I’m sure to see you before you head off.”
Familiar tucks appeared at the corners of his mouth, a retractable smile in a face composed of cartilage and muscle, of aqueous matter, social tissue, a long malleable humid face. A face that Fay has sometimes thought of as ecclesiastical.
How impervious and ongoing his life seemed at the moment: Fritzi, the girls, a household hanging together.
Protoplasm, she said to herself, and shivered with hurt.
FAY AND IRIS Jaffe had planned to go to an early movie on Tuesday night and then stop off somewhere for a pizza, but Iris phoned at the last minute to say her temperature was up and she and Mac were going to spend the evening in bed trying to make a baby.
Well, Fay thought, I’ll have a “singles” evening at home – and I’m going to enjoy it, too.
I will enjoy it!
She would make herself a salad, she decided, but when she opened the refrigerator and looked at the drawer full of lettuce, tomatoes, ra
dishes, and parsley, all those wet things, things that needed cutting up, she thought: Why bother.
She would boil an egg. And make some toast. And a pot of tea. An odd meal for a hot night, but less pitiable than chopping watery vegetables for a scrabby little salad she would consume in four minutes.
Boiling her egg reminded Fay of the story of the mermaid who was captured by Manx fishermen early in the eighteenth century. This creature, according to legend, had been held in a house for several days before being returned to the sea, and her only comment was that humans were so ignorant they threw away the water in which they boiled eggs. A ridiculous story. Pointless. Why was she thinking about it now?
Well, she had to think about something, didn’t she?
Her “ideas,” her “attitudes.” They roused her deepest suspicion. Yesterday she used the word “paradigm” twice in a single conversation, and her tongue had stumbled along, unsuccessfully, in an effort to retrieve it.
She arranged the table. Forcing herself. A place mat, an egg cup, a spoon and knife, a small plate, salt and pepper. A paper napkin? Did people eating alone bother with paper napkins? She handled these objects roughly and gritted her teeth with boredom. She supposed tea really could be made of egg water, but wouldn’t it taste of eggshell? Perhaps the water contained calcium. She would have to ask someone; someone would know, but who? And why bother with puzzles as pointless as this, as trivial.
She admitted it: her curiosity was at a low ebb. A dangerous sign for someone fueled by the need to know things.
She ate quickly. Cut, chew, sip. A phrase frolicked on her tongue: old-maid’s fare.
Stop it.
How did she end up at loose ends like this? She supposed if she sat here long enough the mysteries of self-knowledge would be revealed to her.
What did other women do on their own? They ate out of saucepans or straight out of cans. Yes, they did. They chugged wine straight from the bottle, stuck their finger into the yogurt carton and licked it off. There might be some pleasure in this kind of private vulgarity, giving vent to it, getting away with it.
What, she wondered, was the recently widowed Muriel Brewmaster doing at this precise moment? Knitting, probably. She was always knitting. Sitting in her green-and-white living room, that round posy face of hers, with her needles going. A silent room. Click, click, click. Maybe she should phone Muriel Brewmaster. They might, for the first time in their lives, have things to say to each other.
At one time she felt she understood other people’s lives, but now she doesn’t.
If only Onion weren’t tied to Strom’s hospital bed. Onion knew how to pump courage into her. Onion would squint into the hollow of her loneliness and judge her as roughly as she deserved to be judged.
She could do some ironing. Her blouses, her summer skirts. She could even get an early start on her packing.
No, that was idiotic. No one packed a whole week before going away, not unless they were insanely compulsive.
Nothing, nothing on TV. She might telephone someone. Or what about curling up with a good novel. One of the nineteenth-century novels she loved: predicament, resolution, a happy ending, always a happy ending.
Why not? She recalled how it used to irritate her when Peter interrupted her in the middle of reading. Well, there would be no interruptions tonight. It was only seven o’clock. If she went to bed at eleven, that would leave her four hours.
Four hours!
She would open a bottle of wine.
No. This wasn’t the sort of situation that floated. Well, what sort of situation is it, Ms. McLeod?
It was starting again, the tears that sprang from nowhere, the impulse to jar the room with a whimper of pain. She would have to get hold of herself. What if she became one of those people who talked to themselves or made up lists of pathetic tasks, dusting their suitcases, waxing their window sills, striking out alone for desperate walks?
There goes Fay McLeod. Such a sprightly stride on that woman. Such dignity. What a shame she never –
She knew what she wanted. She wanted to let the tears come, to let herself slide under the dangerous edge, giving way for once.
No, she said, trying for an astringent tone. Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later Fay was sitting on a lawn chair in her brother Clyde’s back yard, saying, “I hereby call this meeting to order.”
She and Clyde and Sonya and Bibbi had gathered for a final session of planning for their parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary celebration. The party was to take place at Clyde and Sonya’s house on the first Thursday in October, a month after Fay got back from Europe. Most of the details had been worked out weeks earlier, the menu planned, a few of the dishes divided among them and the rest ordered from a caterer. Bibbi was making the invitations and in a few weeks would mail them to a hundred old family friends. Fay had organized a program, arranged for music and speeches, for the presentation of gifts. There were only a few items to discuss tonight, and Fay, relishing her big-sister role, presided. She held a pen in her hand and a list on her lap. Who would pick up the wineglasses from the caterer? Also, who was going to keep track of the RSVPs? Should they have a punch bowl or not? What about flowers?
The four of them were drinking mugs of decaffeinated tea; this was the sort of abstemious household that lightly mocked its own austerity. Clyde refilled the cups and at the same time argued the merits of renting a tent – for some reason his stutter was particularly pronounced tonight. No matter how much furniture he and Sonya carried down to the basement, he said, it was still going to be crowded. A tent in the back garden would hold a hundred easily. Hmmm, Fay said, a tent might be cold. Bibbi was worried about the cost.
“We don’t need a tent,” Sonya said firmly. “You remember, Clyde, how we squeezed more than a hundred in for that open house we had last Christmas. People like to be crowded. Besides, tents feel too obviously festive.”
Fay agreed. “It’s probably folksier to huddle,” she said, going back to her list. “Now, who did we decide was going to make the fruit trifle?”
“Me,” Bibbi said.
“Do we really have to have fruit trifle?” Clyde asked. He hated shapeless food.
“Yes,” said Sonya and Fay together.
Sonya leaned back in her chair, knitting steadily, a sweater for one of the boys. Her love of domesticity shamed her at times, and earlier tonight, talking about her plans for improving the garden, she had waved an arm and referred to the yard disparagingly as a curtilage, giving it its ancient legal term, making light of the ground she cherished.
Now she brought up the subject of whether or not the party should be a surprise. Some people, she said, resented being taken by surprise. A surprise can be an act of aggression. A surprise singles out the guests of honor, makes them strangers at their own celebration.
She’d raised all these arguments before.
For a minute no one said anything. The growl of a lawn mower reached them from some distant point in the neighborhood. Crickets sang. Fay and Clyde and Bibbi exchanged glances.
Sonya came from a large quarreling angry family. She was used to heading off trouble.
“I think the folks can survive a surprise,” Clyde said quietly.
“They’ll love it,” Bibbi said.
Fay, who was sleepy, yawned and said, “If people can survive forty years of marriage, they can probably survive anything.”
“Okay, okay,” Sonya said. She threw up her hands. “I surrender.”
“You look tired, Fay,” Clyde said.
“Don’t tell a woman she looks tired,” Sonya scolded. “No one wants to hear that.”
“Well, it’s true,” Fay said. “I was up till two last night reading.”
“Something good?”
She looked at their faces, the three of them, and saw with surprise
that they really were waiting for an answer. “Not very,” she said at last. “Just something to pass the time.”
FAY’S BEEN SEEING Robin Cummerford for several weeks now.
Or, as her mother would say, and, in fact, has said, Fay’s been “dating” Robin Cummerford for several weeks.
Fay’s grandmothers, maternal and paternal, who died before she was born, might have said that she was “walking out” with Robin Cummerford, extracting from that scented phrase several overlapping images of nature, of delicacy, of a determinism dappled with sunlight and forthrightness.
And her grandfathers, one a judge, the other the founder of McLeod’s Dry Cleaning Establishment – and, like the grandmothers, long dead, too long dead to offer comment – might view the situation from a male perspective and say that Robin Cummerford was courting Fay McLeod.
“But are you fucking him?” Iris Jaffe wanted to know when she phoned Fay at her office on Thursday morning.
Fay and Iris have been friends for thirty years, and part of their code of friendship demands that Iris make shocking statements and that Fay feign shock. “Iris!” she said, or rather exclaimed.
“Well, are you or are you not?”
“Not.”
“For heaven’s sake, why not?”
“I’ve only know him for a few – ” She stopped herself. How many weeks had it been? She’d lost track.
“Christ, he’s not gay?”
“No. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Impotent? That’s all you need at your time of life, a man who can’t – ”
“My time of life!” Fay laid on an extra decibel of dramatic shock. “And what exactly do you mean by that phrase, ‘my time of life’?”
“So what’s the matter with him, then, your Cummerford guy?”
“Well – ”
“Well?”
“What can I say?”
“Exactly! What can you say.”
“He’s rather … formal. Quite formal.”
“How old did you say this guy was?”
“I haven’t asked him, but – ”
“You must know.”
“Well, from what I can piece together, from the information he’s dropped, when he graduated and so on – ”