Household Words Read online

  She was known for her control in the classroom, an effect she obtained the first day by announcing, “I never raise my voice,” in a low tone full of menace. Troublemakers she sent to the principal’s office, the unknown showdown designed to alarm and warn those left behind. She also cracked jokes, an allowance of pleasure in the classroom which amazed her students. It gave them a trust in her. This, coupled with her staunchness, induced even the wilder boys to join in on the little French songs she taught them at Christmastime.

  The work made her pleased with herself, striding through the halls in her suits, efficient and fresh. She avoided the other teachers, finding them weaklings, full of complaints and petty office politics. To her students she was encouraging; she dispensed praise to each like a vitamin. They told her she gave them more freedom than the other teachers; in certain other classes they were not allowed to leave to go to the bathroom, whereas she let them go one at a time.

  Already the students knew, as they always did, why she was leaving in January, and they’d grown harder to handle, as though her pregnancy were a scandal to them. They were fresh more often: she was like a déclassée aristocrat. Everyone knew she’d had sex.

  After November the children whose houses had no heating came to school early, and they were social and bothersome, standing by her desk. She had withstood the fatigue of her early months and taught quite capably, but now she was ready to leave. Sick of kids.

  One winter morning she walked into her second class and on the blackboard someone had written MRS. TABER HAS BUETIFUL BUNS. “C’est très intéressant,” she said. “J’ai un admirateur.” The class giggled softly. She said in English, “Alain, will you erase this for us? I might get conceited if I have to look at it all day.” Laughter broke out wildly among the students. They nodded and gasped and poked each other and twisted in their seats. They made a blurred unanimous sound, like barking dogs. “Assez!” she said. In her chair she swiveled slightly to watch the boy moving up and down as he wiped away the sentence. Not for all the tea in China would she have turned her back to them.

  Rhoda’s idea had been to keep her pregnancy as undramatic as possible. When Hinda suggested that she buy a special calendar to mark off the days, Rhoda laughed at her. “And afterwards I should frame the pages like a diploma?” Hinda seemed obsessed with the minutiae of expectation; she wanted Rhoda to weigh herself on progressive days, even to measure her girth. “Next you’ll be counting my varicose veins,” Rhoda told her.

  Leonard, on the other hand, tended to be airily expansive—mentally extravagant—in his view of the whole project. At night he lay in bed and wondered aloud when consciousness entered the body of a child, whether at conception or at birth, whether spirit meant “breath” as a physical fact or it was just a metaphor. Rhoda found these ruminations as tedious as Hinda’s suggestions—she could never participate in his enthusiasm for the intangible (although she was willing to admire him for it). Between the world of her friends and Leonard, she had wedged herself into a groove that seemed purely and comfortably hers—although she had no real attitude of her own about what was really of interest and value in life—so that without constant contact with these contraries, she might have fallen through the crack, in time.

  For years she had used her job as a counterweight against too much time spent with people; once she stopped working she found herself helplessly available to phone calls and spontaneous visits. Nor did she like the feeling of waiting for Leonard to get home. He worked till seven at the pharmacy, plus a half-day on Saturday, and three nights a week he worked late.

  Once, when the roast was overdone and tasted—as she herself said—like an old gray suède pocketbook, her voice got plaintive and exasperated: the money, the waste. “Baby,” he said, “what are you getting so excited about?”

  She hated the keyed-up significance now infused in dull things. It reminded her of the spinster who lived downstairs from her mother—she used to come rushing up the steps, wailing breathlessly, “She’s leaving him! So he’s out of work, so, that’s no reason.” Rhoda’s mother always fell for it—“who? what?”—offering her tea—“sit down and tell.” The truth would emerge: the woman was talking about the day’s installment of a soap opera on the radio.

  In penance for the ruined roast, the next evening Rhoda economized: macaroni and cheese, and a lovely salad. “There’s nothing to eat,” Leonard said. “A person could starve here.”

  “There’s plenty,” she said.

  “I like macaroni and cheese,” he said, “but with something else in it. Celery or something. Olives. I don’t know.”

  “You remind me of my brother Andy,” Rhoda said. “At least he was cheap to feed when there was no money around. His whole life he ate nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

  “Oh, come on now,” Leonard said. “Andy’s been here for supper. He inhaled half a chicken, as I remember. He outgrew all that when he got older.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “How old are you?”

  He nodded, as though he appreciated her retort, but she couldn’t shame him out of his discontent. With her job gone, she had lost practice in certain devices. Leonard at the supper table was always low-key and soft-spoken. Rhoda, who saved things from her day to tell him, found that unless she was very funny in the way she recounted something, her words lost importance as she spoke. She was now coming up against the fixed quality of his nature in a way she hadn’t since the early days of their dating. He hadn’t struck her then as the one she’d marry, but he seemed to go right past her to what he wanted, a higher interpretation of things. She admired him, a unique sensation that robbed her of her usual resources.

  They finished their meal calmly enough, and had tea together in the living room. Leonard sat in the maroon horse-hair plush chair that made everyone else itch, holding the saucer balanced on his knee and adjusting it without looking at it; he was quite graceful, in a cautious, masculine way. It reminded her of when she’d first seen him. She’d gone down the shore to Atlantic City for the weekend with a group of girlfriends and they had been promenading, for the third time that afternoon, along the boardwalk in the hot sun. Hinda had suddenly broken away and run up to a group of men walking towards them—she knew one of them—and she blocked traffic, exchanging introductions. A breeze had just come up, and the men’s wide trousers flared up like sails in the wind; one of them was nearly muzzled by the flaps on his collar. Only one of the men, Rhoda had noticed, didn’t seem to look disgraced by the rebellions of his clothing; he was squinting steadily into the wind and he bore the beating of his sleeves about his shoulders with an amused tolerance.

  She’d been quite impressed by his capacity to transcend this particular small indignity. When he opened his eyes more fully, she saw that one of them was green with a yellow cast and one of them was gray; the difference was quite subtle (she felt rather pleased with herself for having noticed it); it gave him the starry, unfocused, earnest look of dogs with the same genetic fluke. She had of course not known that the attention he called up in her would settle in her as something permanent. She had simply found him interesting (but not conclusively so: that had been his idea).

  Now he had put down his tea and taken up the newspaper. His face was remarkably motionless when he read; he didn’t move his lips and his eyes barely flickered. He looked intent and worried; he squinted into the news, bearing up under its obdurate nightly failure to improve.

  He was so patient; he read through all of it, the sports section, the obituaries. A methodical man: in the beginning she’d been sure he wasn’t her type or what she had in mind; she had just split up with someone she’d “almost” married and she’d expected to end up next with a perfected form of the same type—boyish, sharp, wisecracking—instead of this stocky, maturely genial person.

  Her initial judgments were usually reliable. In her circle of friends she’d been known as sensible to the point of being hard-hearted. Once a very handsome boy named Fritz Pearson
had given her a big rush, sending her a corsage of gardenias every morning. Their white, heavy petals stayed in the icebox, spotting brown at the edges and scenting the family’s butter. She hadn’t cared for Fritz, with his seedy eagerness and the way he had money when nobody else did. And she had been right; afterwards he had taken Hinda out and he had tried something—driven into a dark street, put his hand up her skirt or tried to bully her into sex—but in a grim way that had frightened Hinda. “But how did you know?” Hinda said. “He was always so well-behaved.” “You don’t have to roll in it,” Rhoda said, “to know it’s dreck.” This was a favorite saying of Rhoda’s mother.

  Leonard had put down his newspaper and was picking the dog hair off the cuffs of his pants in a somewhat irritating way. Rhoda said, by way of conversation, “I’m highly disappointed that I haven’t started craving strawberries and pickles these days.”

  Leonard, looking up from his shins, said, “We couldn’t get the strawberries at this time of year anyway. The pickles of course we could always get in the middle of the night from your mother.”

  Rhoda’s mother loved all pickled things. Cucumbers, sliced onions, and oversize green tomatoes: her craving for sour was like a child’s attraction to sweets—a wintry love for the chilled vegetables stored in glass containers; in their vinegar, yellowed with garlic, dill seeds bobbed like snow in a paperweight. In the afternoons, on Rhoda’s visits, she would be found reading at the table with her fork poised in a jar—a satisfaction almost painful, sharper than the pleasures of the newspaper.

  “I was there today,” Rhoda said. “At my mother’s.”

  “What does she have to say?”

  “Her radio’s broken and my father says it’s a noisemaker, he’ll throw it out the window if she brings home another one. He wouldn’t really do that.”

  “I guess it bothers him,” Leonard said. “That’s too bad.”

  Rhoda’s mother loved the radio; she was fond of classical music, and she also enjoyed talking back to the commercials. “Are you tired, nervous, rundown?” the announcer would ask. “None of your business,” she would tell him. Like many people, she would pick up pet phrases from the comedy shows. When Amos ’n’ Andy was popular, she went around saying, “I’se regusted.” This had a special comic effect due to the overlay of her own European accent. She could never lose the uvular hook of her r’s, but her grammar was notably classy, a source of envy to the neighbors, who agreed she spoke like a Yankee, unlike a certain person who made a fool of himself every time he opened his mouth.

  Rhoda’s father had never learned to speak English properly. This was not from any lack of intelligence, but from a willful disgust at the irrationality of the English language. “Suing machine,” he would say, referring to his wife’s Singer. “Come on, Pa,” Rhoda corrected him. “Everything it knows,” he would snarl. Her brothers were called upon to bear witness, but no amount of jeering convinced him. He was not given to extensive conversation in any language and he did not like noise of any sort around him.

  “My father,” Rhoda said, “is an old fart, if you really want to know.”

  Leonard said, “He’s just a man of few words, that’s all. All that tumult makes him uncomfortable. Some people are not outgoing.” He said this in a very low, even voice.

  At the moment she found Leonard’s steely mildness irking—that superior way he had of always speaking softly (a technique she had borrowed for the classroom). She said, “Why are you always mumbling in your beard like that? You make me feel like a fishwife. You do it on purpose.”

  “Kiddo,” he said softly.

  “Be quiet,” she yelled horribly. She was making herself ridiculous. She couldn’t stop. She liked Leonard—she always liked Leonard—but she saw no reason why he had to be so maturely patient about her father, on whom—she happened to know from personal experience—the exercise of virtue was wasted.

  Leonard said, “Rhoda, you’re not understanding me.” It was unbearable.

  “I told you to be quiet,” she said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  They stayed separate for the rest of the evening. He read in the den while she moved from room to room, performing tasks and looking at magazines. In the night they slept turned away from each other in their twin beds. But towards day her sleep was invaded by a vivid dream, a vision of real danger from the outside world. Her eyes weren’t open yet, she was struggling to be awake, and she had escaped what it was: there had been the face of a man in a movie they’d seen, Confessions of a Nazi Spy; he had teeth with gold fillings, and he was smiling maniacally. The room around her had the edge of strangeness, the excited light of early morning. “You told them everything,” she was saying. “You let them take me.”

  Her husband said, “It’s all right. I’m here.”

  She remembered something else. “I’m sorry I yelled at you so hard,” she said.

  “It can’t be helped,” he said. He was still mad, but quietly. Almost absently, he stroked her hair.

  In the morning she was full of little kisses and a sense of horror. All day she was good for nothing. At night she swarmed him, she was lively with little jokes and long stories to bring Lenny around. Her voice was high and sweet, almost lispy to make things funnier.

  He laughed as much as he could. He was a decent man who sincerely did not wish to fight, and if he kept grudges, he let them give way slowly inside, unnursed. He could not keep up the high pitch of fun she was now asking for, but he showed his amusement in slow smiles, resigned.

  Leonard brought her Empirin from the store, to take instead of regular aspirin, now that everything made her stomach lurch. She was ashamed that when she was nauseous she ate anyway, like a person with a cold who insists on smoking. The Empirins were small and hard as little pebbles. “They’re ‘sweet pills,’” Leonard joked. “To make you sweet.”

  Rhoda never took them; instead she found herself free of aches in the following weeks. The weather deepened into winter; her middle, under protective wraps, curved into a buoyant, simple shape. The trees along the suburban streets were stripped and bare (except for the evergreens), very dark against the white sky. Walking through the cold to Annie’s house on a Sunday, she watched the outline of the branches. She noticed the trees, now that they lived here: they were one of the things to like. There had been trees in Newark, if you wanted to look at them; some of the outlying wards had been, if never exactly verdant, almost rural in a scrubby way. Her sister-in-law remembered seeing a bunch of cows come down Irvington Avenue, but that must have been a sight even then.

  At Annie’s house Rhoda rang the doorbell four times, the rhythm of Beethoven’s Fifth—dit-dit-dit-dah—the Morse code for V. Everybody did it now. V for victory. They shall not flag or fail. Inside she could hear women’s voices.

  “Surprise, surprise!” they all shouted, a minute too late, as Rhoda stood at the door, arrested by their cries. She had her beaver coat on, half-open, showing a red silk blouse with a collar that tied like a scarf, centered and prim. Hard and lipsticky, she gave them an unaccustomed smile, a little off; she looked both crafty and sheepish. It was her party, and she had known before. “My! My!” she said, as though she were talking to her classes.

  They led her into the room, where crepe-paper streamers were twisted on the wall in great sweeping loops. On Annie’s rickety mahogany side table there was a bouquet of peach-colored carnations with torn edges, fashioned from Kleenex. They sat her down in the big wing chair, on whose twill surface someone had Scotch-taped the letters MOTHER cut from construction paper. Rhoda sat and picked at the letters, saying, “Look at this!” She faced them then, rubbing from her cheek the marks of lip-rouge. “Well,” she said, “what’s for lunch?”

  Hinda, standing behind Rhoda’s chair, put her hands on Rhoda’s cheeks and pivoted her face to the left so that she could see the pile of wrapped presents stacked on the carpet. “Open ’em so we can eat,” Annie Marantz called out.

  Rhoda’s father, who was give
n to mulish certainties, had predicted a girl, but no one else could be sure of the future baby’s sex, so many of the gifts were yellow: a yellow baby blanket, a crocheted yellow cardigan, a snuggly suit made of pale lemon terry cloth. “Just a little lighter than baby doody,” Rhoda said. “Easy to wash.” The women laughed, repeating what she had said to the ones in the back. From Hinda there was a white canvas satchel with brown bows and ribbons printed on it, lined with rubberized cloth like a beach-bag, for carrying diapers or bottles. “Gorgeous,” Rhoda said.

  For lunch Annie served creamed chicken dotted with pimientos, poured from a chafing dish into individual pastry shells. Rhoda sat with the plate on her lap, holding her knees together. Sybil Jawitz was the only one who couldn’t taste the chicken because she kept kosher. She ate her nude pastry shell with a fork. “Flaky,” she said. Annie offered her slices of American cheese, which she accepted with a bitter and patient smile.

  Rhoda’s mother came over to congratulate her daughter. “You have wonderful friends,” she said.

  Mrs. Leshko from down the block, who always wore a cotton housedress with a brooch pinned to the bodice and whose heavy powder gathered on her face like fur, leaned down to kiss the guest of honor. “Eat,” she said. “So skinny. But listen, who can tell, in a month you could be big as a house. Twins, maybe.”

  “Who asked her?” Rhoda’s mother said, as Mrs. Leshko backed off towards the buffet table.

  Rhoda had stopped eating. “Nobody believes me,” she said, “when I say I feel strong as a horse.”

  “You could run a race, I suppose? Win a little money for your old mother?”

  Rhoda held up her fists in sparring position and began dancing back and forth, jabbing the air as she hopped nearer to her mother’s face. “Wanna fight, Ma? Put up your dukes, there.”

  Her mother said, “You look like a mosquito.”