Household Words Page 3

  “Look,” Bev Davis said, passing them, “how light she is on her feet still.”

  At four o’clock the men arrived: Leonard and two of his friends in baggy flannels, their mufflers tied loosely under their overcoats, nodding slowly at the women from beneath the shadows of their tilted hat brims.

  Leonard kissed his wife and let himself be led to the table where the presents were piled. Rustling through the tissue paper he picked things up and put them down. “Nothing for me?” he said. “Now these booties, Rhode, a little small, but if you washed them and blocked them, I could use one as a nose-warmer.”

  And in fact his nose at that moment looked red and genial from the cold. “Is it true you’ve come to take me home?” Rhoda said.

  2

  SHE WENT WITH Hinda to pick out wallpaper for the baby’s room. What Rhoda liked was a paper of red-white-and-blue polka dots in a swirling pattern. Running her hand across the paper, Rhoda fingered the white dots printed on the white ground and wondered why a designer had bothered to put them there. Could an infant see them? Hinda said, “The first color a baby sees is red.” Rhoda found this information exciting. Facts were beginning to stir her more deeply, like coming attractions for a movie.

  Hinda’s mother thought it was bad luck to buy anything for the baby before it was born. Rhoda was disgusted at the backwardness of this superstition. “It’s very morbid of her,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Hinda said.

  “Imagine stopping yourself from arranging for things. There’s no reason. In general. In the Depression, I admit, you couldn’t plan. It wasn’t even such a good idea to look ahead.”

  “That’s done and over with,” Hinda said. She was somewhat distracted, still looking at the sample-book of wallpapers. “In those days you certainly couldn’t get patterns like these. I kind of love this one with the Little Bo-Peeps. I wish you knew already whether it was a boy or a girl.”

  “Some things,” Rhoda said, “you can’t plan.”

  Precisely on the morning of her due date, Rhoda was admitted to the hospital. Shortly after the later, close-spaced contractions began, it became apparent that the baby was too big for delivery without tearing her and she was put to sleep while they cut at her. Later she was told that, coming out of the anesthetic, she had answered, “Yes, I know, my father told me,” when the nurse said, “It’s a big, beautiful girl.”

  The baby was unusually well-developed and had a full head of hair, which the nurses, in a moment of leisured playfulness, tied in ribbons. These early signs of advancement pleased Rhoda. When, still dopey, she held the baby, she was aware of the damp, silky quality of its skin, which seemed too thin and soft to hold the nearly boneless mass within, and she wondered that there had been so much struggle to eject this puddle of a body. “You’re a little bowl of Jell-O,” she said, lifting the baby under its arms. “You can’t even stretch your legs.” Its bunched face seemed impersonal, the features an abstraction of a face. She felt for the soft spot on its skull, but she couldn’t distinguish a more delicate area; the head itself seemed only slightly tighter, less fatty, than the cheeks.

  Even the baby’s bowel movements, as she watched the nurse peel off its diaper like a Band-Aid, were soggy and clotted, like mashed squash. She wanted to ask if the baby would be more formed by the time they left the hospital together. Already it had corresponded to her expectations by its cheering normalcy. “Healthy,” she whispered to it. The baby had heard its first command. Pushing itself from the nurse’s pinning hands, it screamed—a loud, wet-faced bawl—it would not stop screaming. Rhoda, looking at the nurse, said, “That’s a healthy set of lungs there.”

  It was Leonard who first suggested to her gently, “You have to stop calling the baby ‘it.’ It’s ‘she’ or ‘her’ even before we have a name for her.” “You’re right, you’re right,” she said, in a hushed eager voice. “Well, now, there’s something I don’t hear very often,” he said.

  The second time she held the baby, her shape seemed dear and familiar. Cozy, and then the feeling rose. The sensation of yielding was almost shameful to her. But it was a private tenderness she could feel without speaking, like the aftermath of sex.

  They named the baby Suzanne Helen, after Leonard’s father Samuel (Shmuel, really) and a cousin Herschel on her mother’s side who’d been short of namesakes because no one remembered much about him. Leonard had wanted the name Sandra, but Rhoda knew that people would shorten it to Sandy, and she hated nicknames. She didn’t want her child made light of in that way. “And no calling her Sue or Suzy,” she said. To the baby she repeated softly, “Say: Je m’appelle Suzanne.”

  Suzanne was not colicky, but the ensuing months were the hot ones of early summer, and she was often fretful in the evenings. She cried when Rhoda tried to put her to sleep in her crib. “Shah,” Rhoda barked to her in Yiddish, and tiptoed out of the room. She sat with Leonard in the living room, gulping beer out of a green-tinted tumbler; the glass dripped with moisture and slid against her hand. The baby’s sobs ebbed and burst forth fresh in an alternating pattern of resignation and outrage. “She’ll stop,” Rhoda said, and just then the baby did stop, as though to prove her expertise. The night was hot; the beer smacked their tongues with its carbonation and in the sudden hush of relief from the infant’s crying and in the taking of adults’ refreshment, there was vague ease and calm.

  At quarter to four in the morning Rhoda awoke. She could hear the attic fan running with disturbing power above her, rattling the windows in their panes. She pulled the sheet and the light chenille spread from her body and walked to the baby’s room. Her bare, flat feet slapped the wood floor of the hallway and stuck slightly to the nursery linoleum. Suzanne was whimpering in her sleep.

  Rhoda went to the kitchen, where she took a bottle from the refrigerator and set it in a pan of water on the stove. Not yet inured to the new routine, she still liked the vague energies of this hour, the muted elation of night work. She padded back to the baby’s room and lifted her from under her fat, limp arms. The baby took the bottle happily, reaching for it and gripping it with specialized cleverness, her only deftness. “A little snack for you,” Rhoda said.

  Rhoda saw that the baby was opening her soft, toothless mouth too wide—she was gulping air. “Not like that,” she said. Helplessly she watched. Suzanne was plainly hungry; she drank her full portion, then, still captive at the bottle’s nipple, stopped sucking and began to cry. “You see,” Rhoda said, “I told you.” Curled in Rhoda’s lap the baby thrust out her legs and fists in a miniature tantrum. “Wah, wah, wah,” Rhoda said to her.

  Rhoda set the baby on her shoulder and patted the soft, cottony back. Firmly she sang (in a nonsense-Yiddish, dimly traditional): “Shooby shooby shooby shoe.” She sang loudly. From teaching school she had the habit of raising her voice when she sang, so that the students, having a line to follow, would join in. The baby’s room filled with noise, as the simple chanting bellied out with nasal undertones. She kept time, patting Suzanne’s back. Like an entertainer working to raise the troops’ morale, she felt her own willfulness battling Suzanne’s sadness. Her singing drowned out the crying. At first the baby wailed more loudly, but Rhoda’s chorus was solid, with a cantor’s sob or a torchsinger’s wail to the tune she was inventing. Subdued, held tightly, Suzanne hiccupped softly and was silent.

  The morning light hit them, lying in bed, with such moist, unwholesome heat that Rhoda felt real alarm when Leonard said, “It’s going to be a scorcher.”

  “A real stinker for a Sunday,” she said. She had planned to sit out in the backyard with Leonard and the baby, but even under the trees it would be stifling. Draped in a towel, back from washing, Leonard stood by the bed and touched her on the forehead. “We could go to the beach,” he said.

  She took the suggestion as an offering. “I can be ready in two shakes,” she said. Dressing, she called out to him, “We could ask Hinda and Stanley if they want to go.”

  “We could,” he sa
id, “but we won’t.” She said nothing. He wasn’t susceptible to persuasion and he couldn’t be jollied into something he chose not to do. He had a way of cutting her off that left her with no resource but to be ruefully impressed with him for it. At first she had railed against his rigidity, but once she took it as fact, she felt herself older, no longer a girl. Once she told her mother—boasting—“Boy, have I learned.”

  This morning she and Leonard were dropping the baby off at Rhoda’s mother’s apartment, and when her mother came to the downstairs door, she cried, “Ah, there you are,” and made a great fuss over rocking Leonard in a hug. In her mother’s hallway was the old-fashioned odor of boiled vegetables and spitting fats, the traces of ignorant people cooking away the vitamins. Rhoda’s mother had been proselytizing for years about the benefits of modern cookery, but to no avail; in her own apartment was the faint smell of paste wax, rising from the dark tables lit by little lamps.

  Rhoda’s father was in the kitchen having breakfast; he wore his suspenders over his undershirt and his neck was goatish before his shave. “You look like Pa Kettle,” Rhoda said.

  Her father said, “Who’s he?” What he really wanted was to hold the baby. He smiled when they let him take her in his bare, blue-veined arms—already he had the arms of an old man—and he made smacking, kissy noises; he shook his head closer to her and growled like a dog worrying a bone, in a way that he thought would amuse the child.

  “Everybody loves a baby,” Rhoda said.

  Her mother made them sit down and have coffee before they were up and away in such a hurry. She reminded Rhoda of how, when she was engaged, Leonard used to come to the house every morning to have his coffee before work. Rhoda remembered this well; she had once told him not to come every day for fear they would get tired of each other. She’d thought this was unusually sage of her until Leonard had pointed out that they were going to be seeing each other every day anyway once they were married. It embarrassed her a little to think how dim her maidenly foresight had been.

  Rhoda’s mother, who had liked Leonard from the first, was speaking very animatedly to him now; they were nodding at each other about something. They were talking (who could guess from looking at them?) about public sanitation. Newark was in the process of deciding whether or not to provide garbage collection at municipal expense (an advance not even contemplated yet in the suburbs). Rhoda’s mother—as a Social Democrat—naturally favored any small civic improvements as steps toward long-denied justice, whereas Leonard cared more about the white light of reason bringing enlightened hygiene; he went on about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the 1700s having her own children inoculated for smallpox to prove the serum was safe. They kept talking and nodding, deploring the narrow thinking that made people want to let their garbage fester; they were united in their fine passion to elevate the ordinary, until Rhoda began droning, as background music, a blues-parody she’d heard once in a revue—“Garbage…he treated me like…garbage.”

  ‘I think she’s getting restless,” Rhoda’s mother said to Leonard.

  “We’re really lucky to have them,” Leonard said, as they walked to the car.

  “That’s true,” Rhoda said. “Hinda’s mother won’t watch her kid for her because she reads all these stories in the paper—a grandmother was taking care of a little girl and the girl fell into a ditch and drowned. She’s got a million of them.”

  It always amazed Rhoda that someone as sour as Hinda’s mother—with her peasant shudders over natural disasters just around the bend—could have raised someone as placid and easy-natured as Hinda. The only thing Rhoda had ever heard Hinda distress herself over was expenses, which, considering how they’d all grown up, was only sane. They had once taken a poll in Rhoda’s high school—“What do you need most for future happiness?”—and 87 percent of the student body had laughed and written down “money.”

  Rhoda still basically felt that this was a sensible response to an obvious question. Not that she was insensitive to other (admittedly less immediate) things; the ongoing war in Europe was on her mind often now. Both her parents had family trapped in occupied Poland. Rhoda was the only one of the children who had ever seen any of them; on a trip to Europe with a girlfriend years ago she had met a great-uncle who lived in Cracow. He had been very old even then; she still remembered very vividly the clipped intonations of his elegant, citified Yiddish, and the sly, downy face of a younger cousin who was now in England.

  Today they were going to the beach and she kept thinking about the helpless English beaches, strafed after nightfall. (They must hate the dark now, ordinary people in those seaside towns.) Having an infant of her own had let certain images eat into her thoughts. Lately she had been haunted by visions of propaganda posters she must have seen in books (since she would have been too young to remember them from the last war), photographs of Hun soldiers with Belgian babies stuck on their bayonets.

  What bothered her most now was thinking about things that were left out of the news; scraps of information filtered through about Jews in occupied countries carried off to camps whose locations and conditions were left, as it were, to the imagination. Facts not spoken of were always the worst: wasn’t that the meaning of the word unspeakable?

  She’d read that Axis troops were planting on the Western Desert a new sort of land mine that blew straight up into fragments, so that soldiers who walked over them got blasted in the groin, and ever since, she’d been gripped by the notion that Leonard, if he went to war, would be sent as a foot soldier. She would have talked about it except that she felt her horrors were idle, compared to the burden on him, and he should have the right to speak of these things or not to speak, as he wanted to. She was also restrained by a parallel and actually somewhat stronger feeling that nothing this extreme and fantastical was likely to happen to either of them.

  They had hit heavy traffic and it was hot inside the car, with its chafing, straw-like upholstery. Leonard said, “Feel like a schoolgirl on holiday without the baby?” She was glad not to have Suzanne on her lap, stirring and squirming, but the question surprised her. There was nothing she wanted to be older or younger for. Already she had stopped understanding what people did with themselves when they didn’t have children. The smell of the ocean was coming through the car windows, disappearing, then returning, as the sighting of the shoreline along turns in the road began to excite their imaginations.

  They parked along the boardwalk and undressed in the car, writhing on the seats to remove their outer clothing, kicking like overturned crabs, and emerging suddenly from out of the car into the sunlight—she wore a white two-piece and he wore blue wool-knit trunks with a white belt and a white stripe down each side—they were peeled down to their brighter selves. Leonard, with his wide shoulders and short arms, looked strong and tidy and compact, she thought. They walked toward the water; the surf made swelling noises and the sand grew hotter under their feet. “Whoo, hah,” she said, doing a little dance.

  She suddenly frightened herself remembering that in Abyssinia Mussolini’s army had poured acid on the desert sands when they were being chased by the Ethiopian soldiers, who went barefoot. It was unbearable to be hopping around on the sand while remembering this, and she began running faster toward the water. Leonard came from behind and overtook her. They ran together for a moment and she felt happier; they both had their mouths open in smiling breathlessness like panting dogs. They stopped when they hit the water line. “Cold on the ankles,” Rhoda said. Leonard took her hand and led her out further, until the waves smacked their chests and they were drenched. Rhoda squealed as though she had just taken a turn on a roller coaster. She slipped, and he reached out quickly and held her up—his skin was nicely wet and cold—and she remembered how fast he always was to grab the baby before she fell or touched hot things. She liked the solid feel of him now, and she kissed his shoulder, which was salty. “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll,” he sang out. They stayed in the water, bouncing up each time a wave came,
until the surf got too rough.

  Later they lay with the dark plaid car-blanket spread out beneath them. The sand struck to the tanning oil on her legs and Rhoda said she felt, with her knees bent, like a chicken breaded for frying. Leonard was flat on his stomach. She reached out and touched his rear end, giving it a light tap with her fingertip. “It bounces back,” she said. “If you were a cake I’d say you were done.” He rolled over and smiled, dropping his mouth a little, playful like a dolphin. He was squinting his eyes shut now; he looked almost the way he did in certain stages of lovemaking. It startled her slightly to think of this while they were out on the beach. At first the discontinuity of sex had shocked her, the grasping, un-Leonard-like seizures in raw pursuit of a goal. But she had trusted him, and imitating him, she had been drawn into it. By now sex with Leonard—which she certainly enjoyed, and whose sustained continuance in their marriage made her secretly proud—was exempt from ordinary thought, since arousal took away judgment, just as it took away one’s breath.

  She was tracing with her finger the center line of hair on his chest, which thickened around his navel and above the belt of his suit. “Do you feel rumblings in my belly?” Leonard said. “This is because I’m hungry.” He wanted to go up to the boardwalk to bring back some food. “You stay.” He shook sand on her as he got up.

  Alone, Rhoda sat up and took a look around her at the other people on the beach, who had amassed into a considerable crowd by now. The waves were thick with them. Farther from the water, four or five boys about college age were practicing gymnastics. One of them stood with his arm outstretched while another boy sprang on his hands and flipped backwards over it. The others followed in sequence; the boy was raising his arm higher to make it harder. They had to stop in between to avoid kicking passersby. They had wonderful physiques, especially the long-waisted blond one. Rhoda was attracted, but in an amused way; it had never been in her nature to swoon, not even as a young girl. It always seemed a distortion to her—the languorous craving, the humorless sacrifice to a single idea. A healthy interest was one thing.