Five Tuesdays in Winter(16)

“How do you feel?” he ventured.

“All right. Kinda weird.”

“Your mother used to get terrible cramps,” he said into the crack in the door. He waited for the clutch that came with talking about her, like someone had grabbed him by the chest hair. “She got headaches sometimes, too. She took extra iron. We probably still have some. They’re green, in a white bottle.” He waited, but the clutching feeling never came. “And she had a bullet birth when you were born, you know. Thirty-five minutes, I think. We barely made it to the hospital. Not that you want to be thinking of that right now.” Sweat prickled his scalp. Shut up, he told himself. “One time she was wearing these white pants and—”

“Do you miss her, Dad?”

“No.” He was astonished by the truth of it.

“I don’t either anymore. I feel like I should miss her. All I really remember is her walking me to school and holding my hand and giving me big hugs at the door. But I always knew the minute she turned her back I was out of her mind completely. She wasn’t like you. I knew you were thinking about me always.”

She was revising now, creating new memories out of what she was left with, but his eyes stung anyway.

When Kate came back from the pharmacy, he retreated to the kitchen. He could hear her coaching Paula, first in the bathroom and then through the door. At times her voice was serious and precise; other times they were both laughing. After a long while, she came into the kitchen. She caught him standing there in the middle of the room, doing nothing. She touched the quilt in his arms. “If I run cold water on it now, it won’t stain.”

“I’ll do it.” He went down the narrow back hallway to the laundry room with the big basin, and she followed. He never expected her to follow.

He turned on the faucet. She held the quilt up and fed the stained parts to him slowly. They had to wash it bit by bit, wringing out one part before starting on another. He wished, as in a fairy tale, a magic spell had been placed on the cloth so it would never end, and they could spend the rest of their lives right here, washing and wringing.

“You may have to undo some stuff I told her while you were gone. I babbled on about iron supplements and pregnancy and probably scared the lights out of her.”

“You babbled? I thought you were the most reticent man in the world.”

“Every forty-two years or so I babble.”

She still had her coat on. It must have started snowing again. Melted flakes glinted like stars all over her.

He heard the timer buzz, then the oven door squeak open.

They hung the quilt on the fishing line he’d strung up across the room years ago. When they were done he could do nothing but look at her. She looked carefully back. Paula called them to dinner but they made no move toward the kitchen.

“Why do you think,” he asked her, “that man said we had the same eyes?”

“Maybe he saw something similar in them.”

“Like what?”

“Fear.” She looked away. He’d forgotten how disappointing these conversations could be.

“Desire,” she added quietly.

Love, he thought. It would come out soon enough. Words and feelings were all churned up together inside him, finding each other like lost parts of an atom. He didn’t try to push them apart or away. He let them float in the new fullness in his chest.

She brought her hand to his face. It wasn’t the face other women had touched. The skin wasn’t the same. His nerve endings had multiplied. He could feel each one of her fingers, their different sizes and temperatures. His stomach made a long slow twist in anticipation of all that his lips would feel.

He pulled her close, but Paula came around the corner then, and they jumped back. His daughter, however, was grinning. She took them each by the arm and led them to dinner. She’d lit a candle and poured apple juice into wineglasses. She’d put the heart of chocolates by his place. Lasagna sizzled in the center of the small table and Kate was smiling and Mitchell felt, if only for this moment in his kitchen, if only for this one winter evening, that he might not need a never-ending spell after all.





WHEN IN THE DORDOGNE





The summer of 1986, the summer before I entered high school, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks. My father had been sick, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery. Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country. As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too.

We lived at the end of a short street in a quiet neighborhood. Our house was big and gray, exceptionally large for three people, though I didn’t realize that until Ed and Grant arrived in a maroon Pontiac that first afternoon. The two boys stood responsibly beside me as we waved my parents off. Grant might have murmured something consoling as they disappeared around the corner, about how they’d be back before I knew it. And then, after a respectful pause, they let loose.

Ed ran into the house and circled the rooms like a dog just let off its leash, climbed up the front staircase and came down the tight back stairs and then went back up the front set again, whooping and whooping again, all the way to the third-floor balcony where he called down to Grant and me still standing in the front hall. Just as we looked up, he released a pale-green globule that landed right on Grant’s cheek. Grant barely flinched, wiped it off with the bottom of his T-shirt, and tore up the stairs. I could hear them on one floor and then another, down across the back hallway to my father’s study—I didn’t tell them not to go in, though I was screaming it in my head—and around to my sisters’ old rooms, my brother’s old room, all of them having left before I could remember them ever having lived there, their rooms still stuck in the seventies: the girls’ closet doors covered with McGovern-Muskie bumper stickers, my brother’s with Nixon-Agnew and Ford-Rockefeller. I stood there frozen in the downstairs hallway, not with fear but with amazement, with revelation. I had only seen people behave one way in this house, prudently, laconically, in codes I could not understand but had learned to imitate. And now here was another way.