Household Words Read online

  HOUSEHOLD WORDS

  ALSO BY JOAN SILBER

  Ideas of Heaven

  Lucky Us

  In My Other Life

  In the City

  HOUSEHOLD WORDS

  A NOVEL

  Joan Silber

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK • LONDON

  Copyright © 1976, 1980 by Joan Silber

  All rights reserved

  From “The Night Will Never Stay” from Eleanor Farjeon’s Poems for Children by Eleanor Farjeon. Copyright 1951 by Eleanor Farjeon. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  Portions of this work appeared in slightly different form in Mulch (September 1976).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Silber, Joan.

  Household words.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.S571Ho [PS3569.1414] 813'.5'4 79–14742

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07071-2

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  FOR

  DAVID GLOTZER AND

  MARK BREGMAN

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  INTRODUCTION

  BY MONA SIMPSON

  I read Household Words for the first time at a writers’ colony. It was the summer of 1983, so the PEN/ Hemingway prize-winning novel must have been three years old. I began reading it and then gave up everything else—work, meals, walks—until I was finished and I emerged into the sunlight, dazed.

  During that day and a half, I succumbed to the interiority of the book, obeying its tightly managed point of view. I entered the hard, self-contained, smart and smart-alecky consciousness of Rhoda. In fact, I experienced the book almost entirely as Rhoda. This was odd, since I was twenty-four years old at the time, and Rhoda’s two daughters were in every way closer to my own experience.

  The book spans a generation, opening with Rhoda’s unsentimental pregnancy (she eschews ruffled maternity clothes and is frankly condescending when her two best friends talk about children) and closing when the child of that pregnancy is eighteen.

  Rhoda is upper middle class, with progressive leanings, close to her immigrant Jewish parents, house-proud. Yet there’s seemingly no authorial spin on her conventionality. She’s rendered intimately, unlike, say, Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, where we’re always sharply aware of the narrator’s ironic distance.

  Rhoda is a woman who “did not, like some of her friends, make the mistake of expecting life to be too much like the movies. Ginger Rogers was not Jewish.” What she did expect was “a certain zippiness of speech.”

  The reader is faintly aware of Rhoda’s husband, Leonard, an intellectually questing pharmacist, and later, of her daughters, banging on the outside of her, begging for more melt, more connection.

  Well into the book, it feels as if this may be the arc: the enlargement of this person’s hard, limited consciousness. “She had no real attitude of her own about what was really of interest and value in life,” we’re told early on. However, the expansion of her sensibility does not turn out to be Rhoda’s story. Illness lies in wait at the heart of this novel, and the narrative chronicles its subtle, insidious nature.

  Meanwhile, the two girls are growing up. In the simplest way, the central thrust of the book is the story of an ordinary woman’s life dwindling with frightening rapidity. It is a profoundly sad, heartbreaking book, asking the question of the song: “Is that all there is?”

  In my most recent reading, I was acutely aware of the daughters’ lives, as minimally as they are etched, as much as they are kept from us. There are great spaces between the strands of the novel. One feels the pressure of life pushing up into the stark, open fiction, the way one does in the work of Silber’s mentor, Grace Paley.

  I read Household Words this time for the character of the younger daughter, and I can imagine future readings for Leonard, and for the older daughter, and even for the lover presented late in the novel, as a rough, breathtaking last chance. With each, there is just enough to evoke and intimate the great swatches of hope and exuberance in the author’s later work, culminating in Ideas of Heaven, a 2004 finalist for the National Book Award. Yet this book, more stringently focused, and without the later joyful play of complex romance and sexuality, contains its own stark, lasting beauty.

  HOUSEHOLD WORDS

  1

  RHODA WAS PREGNANT in 1940. From her mother, a woman with progressive leanings, she got books about birth. Also suggestions for names, bids on behalf of dead uncles. The feminine form for Harold would be Helen. Be active. Drink a pint of milk a day. A quart even. Eat a little meat. But cooked well—no germs. “Talk to your husband,” she said to Rhoda.

  This last bit of advice, although unnecessary, affected Rhoda pleasurably. Leonard had a way of calling her “kiddo” which was not at all the way actors said it in the movies, where it was a tough word. Rhoda did not, like some of her friends, make the mistake of expecting life to be too much like the movies. Ginger Rogers was not Jewish. Clark Gable had probably never even met a Jew before he went to Hollywood. What she did expect from ordinary occasions was a certain zippiness of speech. “That’s a hot one,” she used to say when anyone said anything funny. Lenny liked to say, “Let’s get this show on the road.” They mispronounced words on purpose. “Have some vegetaybles,” she would say over dinner. “I don’t mind if I diddle-do,” he’d say.

  She read the books her mother gave her. It was all very matter-of-fact; your baby passed through a series of diagrams like the outlines on a Parcheesi board. The section on congenital heart defects was unnerving, as was the mention of nephritis, hereditary blood disease, mongolism, and miscarriage. On one page she felt smug (for Christ’s sake, everyone knew that), on the next page she felt stranded, a visitor in a foreign country where, watching her p’s and q’s at every turn, she could unwittingly lapse into a deep and awesome crime. It occurred to Rhoda that she didn’t know how to be pregnant. Everyone makes mistakes. A ruin as awful as the girl who bled to death under Fatty Arbuckle’s soda bottle. A spoilage you could never make up. The fat funny-man gone into hiding, producing films under the name “Will B. Good.”

  None of her friends would believe she was pregnant. This was largely because she hadn’t told anyone, until the start of the fourth month, when she no longer felt, as she said, “weak on her pins.” A secondary symptom persisted in the form of clogged sinuses. Having her nose run all the time made her feel oddly loose and wet as though she were crying. Any sad news was sadder, as the water gummed up in her eyes and she wiped her nose with a handkerchief. It was like a corny movie touching you unawares.

  Her friends were a bit put out that she hadn’t told them, hadn’t come to them to complain. “I can’t believe it,” they said, suspicious. “A skinny malink like you.” “Rhoda,” they said, “you’re such a kidder. Come on.”

  The three women were drinking coffee in her friend Hinda’s dinette at a square table covered with yellow oilcloth. They were sturdy young women with bodies tucked solidly into their blouses. Hinda, sitting next to Rhoda, stroked the flat lap of Rhoda’s brown crepe skirt. Rhoda gave her a tight, fishy look, and she withdrew her hand.

  “No stomach,” Hinda said. “But you’re wearing a girdle. Rhody, please, are you kidding?”

  “Yuk, yuk,” Rhoda said.

  “You really are
a character,” Annie Marantz said. Annie was a wiry woman, barely five feet tall; at thirty, she was only four years older than Rhoda, but she was sinewy all over; she looked as though someone had chewed on her like an orange. “Ah,” she said, “you’ll be a swell mother. Don’t get all nervous.” Rhoda did not consider herself the nervous type. “Listen, let me tell you from experience,” Annie said, “don’t have one too soon after the first.”

  “You’re rushing her,” Hinda said, laughing.

  Hinda was especially hurt that Rhoda hadn’t told her, Rhoda could tell. Hinda had been Rhoda’s friend when they were five. Rhoda even as a child had had a startling hardness; she was athletic and boisterous and powerfully light, and she used to pick on Hinda. Hinda, round-faced as a plum, had always forgiven easily enough because she couldn’t bear to live without Rhoda’s favor.

  “Plus,” Annie was saying, “I’ve really got three babies. I mean, Philip makes a third.” Philip was Annie’s husband.

  “Oh, but Leonard’s not like that,” Hinda volunteered. The women murmured and sighed. Leonard was a great favorite with them. “There’s a fineness to him,” Hinda said. “Never coarse. A real person. Rare.”

  “I bet he’ll never hit the kid,” Annie said. “You wait—you’ll have to do it all.”

  Rhoda felt that the women were speaking in a way that made them sound less intelligent and simpler than their true natures; her news had spurred them on to it. Now Hinda was talking about their childhoods, about something Rhoda had done in the first grade. A boy had come up from behind and pulled her sash and she had given him a bloody nose. Rhoda did not remember any of this; she thought Hinda must be talking about someone else. She did remember that, coming from a home where her mother couldn’t stand dawdlers, at school she had been amazed by the slow dreaminess of the other children. The boys kicked at the chairs in front of them and gazed sulkily at their shoes; the girls squirmed in their starched dresses and said their names in tiny piping voices. Rhoda had come back from the first day of school disgusted.

  “Hah,” Annie said, “wait till you have one like yourself.”

  “At least the house is plenty big enough,” Hinda said. Rhoda’s house was actually slightly bigger than either Hinda’s or Annie’s. All three of them had moved to the area within the past few years, to the small, rather old township, in the vanguard of a population shift out of Newark.

  Rhoda was now looking around at Hinda’s kitchen, which was green. That is, everything that could be painted—the window frames and the wainscoting—was swabbed with a light mint green, a color born to fade. On the upper walls in the breakfast nook was a wallpaper with pictures of teapots, their spouts tilted in mad gaiety; dashing beneath them was the repeating caption, “Tip me over…Pour me out…”

  Hinda’s cat—an ordinary cat, a striped chesty animal that did not move around much—circled Rhoda, stretching its chin over her ankles. Rhoda stamped her foot, and the cat flinched. “It’s overfed,” Rhoda said, looking at the cat’s bulging side, which it was sliding against her skirt. Rhoda hated all fat things. She would chide loose-fleshed old ladies: you just let yourself go. Of chubby schoolchildren she asked: what does your mother feed you?

  “Not a genius among cats,” Rhoda said. “Get it away from me.”

  Hinda picked up the animal and carried it against her bosom out to the porch; the cat, who did not like to be picked up, stiffened his legs in protest. “Ouch,” Hinda said.

  “Gads,” Rhoda said, when Hinda returned to the kitchen. “You’ve got a red mark on your neck—it’s like a welt.”

  Annie said, “Rhoda, enough with the animal already. Have a heart.”

  “He’s not really a bad cat,” Hinda said.

  “Well, let’s not discuss it.” Rhoda smiled, the peacemaker.

  That evening, when Leonard saw her nod and stare over her dessert, he said, “Feeling tired, kiddo?” He was waiting for her to wince, smile wanly. She was watching the fuzzed outlines of her dish of canned peaches, willing them to come back into focus. They were still more or less unappetizing, with their frayed edges where the pit had been removed. They would go down soft and floppy; their color was like the yolk of an egg. For spite she ate one. “Eat your peaches,” she said, chewing. “You like them.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

  The dog, a patient, sighing cocker spaniel, came over and sniffed at their knees, which he was not supposed to do near the table. Leonard gave him a piece of cookie.

  “Hinda wants to bring over a batch of her old maternity clothes for me to go through,” Rhoda said.

  “That’s nice of her. She’s broader than you though—isn’t she?—in the shoulders and all.”

  “Also, you know what she wears. She wears those moronic ruffles.”

  Rhoda had not worn ruffles for twenty years; she had not worn ruffles even for her own wedding. She had dressed in a plum-colored traveling outfit and Leonard had worn a business suit; they had opted for street clothes, exactly as though they were going on with the business of their life. She still had the hat somewhere—a triumph of smartness, worn tilted to one side, and trimmed with a small bird, its feathers dyed deep wine and rose. Her brother Andy had told her she looked like Francis of Assisi in it, but he always thought anything fashionable was foolish. Rhoda had never felt less foolish than when she had stood before the hallway mirror (with her mother holding a hand mirror behind her) and set the hat in place with a pin. She remembered—happily—that the tilt of the hat had looked almost military, like the uniform of some exotic foreign army.

  Leonard still looked much the way he had looked then. She had never seen him without his mustache. He didn’t, like vainer men, touch or stroke his mustache. His only habit of that sort was to smooth the back of his hair where it was thinning, but he did this often when he was thinking before speaking, so it had the look of someone taking his own phrenological reading. He was doing it now.

  “It’s too bad we can’t use Pluto for a middle name if it’s a boy,” he said.

  “Pluto?” Rhoda said. “Pluto is a dog’s name.” Their own dog, on hearing his generic title, lifted his head, expectant. “Not you, Timmy,” Rhoda said.

  “Walt Disney ruined the name already, I know,” Leonard said. “He made a joke out of it. But it was such a tremendous thing when they discovered the planet. I think the newspapers I saved from then are still at my mother’s.”

  Leonard was the most serious of spectators at planetariums; he was interested in all unmapped possibilities—the dark side of the moon, that sort of thing—and he used to quote some raffish professor’s poem, “O moon, when will mankind/Ever see thy glorious behind?”

  “I’m for normal human names,” Rhoda said.

  “I guess I am too, actually.”

  Sometimes in the nights they lay in bed and amused themselves thinking of silly names—Ada Maida Taber or Thrushbottom Snazzlewit Taber—but under all of it they rested secure in the pleasantly prolonged expectation that between them they would choose judiciously. They were competent people, companionable in their adequacy. Rhoda nibbled at the piece of lemon from her tea, and then she took up the lemon from Leonard’s cup and chewed that too.

  Tonight Leonard cleared the dishes so Rhoda would stop hopping up and down like a rabbit. He was short and tightly built, and when he rolled up his sleeves his forearms looked raw and muscled. Like most men he was awkward at dishwashing, and the sight of him—normally so measured and decisive with his hands—poking at the inside of a glass with a sponge was quite endearing.

  During the week Leonard worked full-time as a pharmacist, so that he and Rhoda, who taught school five days a week, were both away from the house a good deal. It always surprised Rhoda that the house did not stay cleaner. Where did it come from, the dirt? Airborne dust motes, afloat in the light of the rooms, descended on their own schedules and settled on all the surfaces by the time Rhoda got home in the late afternoons.

  In spring and summer, when the sofa and
wing chairs were covered with slipcovers (a giant print of lilacs on a brown ground) and the Venetian blinds let the sun come in in stripes, a little glisten of dust was not so bad. Winter solids were harder to keep up, but also, Rhoda thought, more restful to the eye. She preferred the house then, when it was all beige and brown and maroon—the upholstered shapes, worsted and plush, sitting in their neutral peaceableness on the rug, which was a taupe color, like stockings. The furniture all had Chippendale ball-and-claw feet—an oddly fierce touch, even Rhoda sometimes noticed, for her living room. Leonard liked to ask if the coffee table were going to spring at him. But even the carved feet had, when taken in the proper spirit, a stiff stillness, which was the presiding tone of the house—with its snake plants in their shallow ceramic holders on the Pembroke tables, and on either side of the mantel, figurines and vases in shelves at the windows.

  It was an unremarkable house, but as the home of a couple who were only just past “starting out,” it was notably filled and complete, and Rhoda always left it in the mornings a bit sadly, as she locked the back door and put the washed milk bottles in their box on the porch. She walked out through the driveway toward the bus stop, and the dog on his run barked his daily outrage at her leaving.

  For two years before her marriage and in the four years since coming back from her honeymoon, Rhoda had taught French I to ninth-graders. Her personality altered when she spoke a foreign language. She became crisply jovial, like an older woman who has a grip on her world, or a wise aunt uttering oracular phrases from a severe and mysterious knowledge. “Jean, soyez gentil,” she would say to the red-haired kid who laughed too loudly at a girl who kept making mistakes in the récitation.