Household Words Read online

  She was thinking now of all the boys she’d gone out with, in high school and in college and when she’d worked and lived at home. She’d been popular for her liveliness, and there had been quite a stream of them, with their slicked-back hair and self-conscious smiles. “So when is Mr. Right coming?” her father used to say. Rhoda had assumed she would pick one of them, but she had waited. She could bide her time, she was content where she was, all things considered. Florence Pinskow, who had worked with her part-time in Woolworth’s when they were both in school, used to wail dramatically, “Lyons Avenue is not the world.” “What world?” Rhoda used to say. It had seemed to her the height of willful innocence that a girl whose parents, in Europe and here, had had their bellyful of “experience,” would ache for a taste of it.

  Leonard was walking toward her, veering as he passed the boys, who were on to cartwheels now. He knelt on the blanket; he had brought back hot dogs and a doughnut to share. The doughnut was a little old and musty. “It tastes like a wet dog smells,” Rhoda said, but she finished her portion.

  They were cautious about going into the water right after eating. Neither of them really liked to lie in the sun. They had forgotten to bring books to read; Rhoda noticed that it was hard to think of things to say in the heat. She wasn’t comfortable not talking; in fact she often wasn’t comfortable with Leonard. It was an odd thing and he would catch her at it sometimes, flashing him a delayed smile or wandering in her speech as she tried to construct, without confidence, a conversation.

  Rhoda wanted to walk along the boardwalk a little. She liked the thin knocking sound the crowd’s feet made on the diagonal gray boards. Leonard took her arm. They wore their shirts over their suits and felt the shaking motion of their thighs, exposed but legitimate here.

  “Well, for goodness’ sake!” a man in front of them was saying, and Rhoda saw that walking toward them were Liz and Herb Hofferberg. They were a couple on the fringes of Rhoda’s and Leonard’s acquaintance. Liz was small and darkly pretty, thirteen years younger than her husband. Rhoda had gotten the idea that she was from a family with no money at all and Herb, with a medical practice already established, had been considered a good catch; Rhoda wasn’t crazy about Herb.

  The summer before, Rhoda and Leonard had spent a weekend at a lake resort with three other couples, including the Hofferbergs. Herb was always making jokes like, “An old husband and a young honey—and who gets tired first?” or “You’re as young as you feel—and I’m getting younger, the more I get to feel.” The Hofferbergs’ room was directly above Rhoda’s and Leonard’s, and before breakfast they heard the rhythm of the bedsprings squeaking and they smiled at each other uneasily. One evening, as Leonard waited in the hall and Rhoda stood at the mirror putting on her lipstick before going down to dinner, she heard above her the thud of a body hitting the mattress and then Liz giggling. Rhoda was startled and alert, as though to danger—she felt dismayed for Liz’s sake, but then who knew? She was ill at ease with the mingling of annoyance and her own slightly shamed arousal. She would have preferred to mind her own business.

  Five minutes later, sitting down to supper, she saw the Hofferbergs come into the dining room followed by Bev Davis, who had the room next to theirs. They were all laughing and Bev kept gasping, “Oh, Herb,” as though that were the joke. “You won’t believe it,” Beverly said, between laughs. “This joker.” Beverly had been trying to tiptoe discreetly past the Hofferbergs’ room, so as not to disturb them since they were obviously busy inside, but then what did she see but their door wide open and Herb Hofferberg, fully clothed, bouncing up and down on the bed, while Liz leaned up against the wardrobe and tittered. The friends at the table screamed with amusement. “Is it my fault,” Herb said, cocking his head toward Beverly, “if you people just have dirty minds?”

  The Hofferbergs seemed genuinely glad to see them; Liz was grinning and saying, “What a surprise!” in her deep, pleasant voice, and Herb rubbed her shoulder and said, “How’re you doing, Rhody?” which was not what she liked to be called.

  The Hofferbergs were on their way to have their pictures taken with their heads stuck through a piece of cardboard that had cartoon bodies drawn below. Leonard, in a burst of group spirit, wanted to go with them. “That man is a horse’s ass,” Rhoda whispered, but Leonard turned his head away and steered her by the elbow to walk with the others. It especially annoyed her because when she had been single she used to feel that she had to put up with unsuitable, irritating groups for the sake of an ongoing social life—and now, married, she wasn’t exempted from it either. She wanted Leonard to protect her from time spent with the Hofferbergs, just as she wanted him to protect her from thinking about the war.

  She found it strange that Leonard, who was so dignified, found anything to like in Herb, but men were odd in their enthusiasms for each other. Actually, Leonard was more of a snob in private. All his personal possessions were heavy with conservative quality. He had beautiful brushes—silver, monogrammed—and a shaving set from Belgium with badger-hair bristles. He would not let her buy him clothing at sales. But his sense of fun in public was unhampered by taste; he was happy to wear silly hats at parties, ready to contort himself playing charades.

  Herb knew the place; half a block down the boardwalk a man in shirtsleeves and a maroon bow tie nodded at them in nervous pleasure. “I think he sells glass fruit-knives on the side,” Leonard murmured, and Rhoda laughed. She continued laughing uncontrollably as they poked their faces through the garden scene they had chosen—she and Leonard were daisies, Liz was a rose, and Herb, standing on a stool, was a sly bumblebee. Pilloried, they twisted their necks to look at each other. Leonard’s bobbing profile was unspeakably amusing to Rhoda. When the man said, “Hold it!” she was pained, like a child, to stop her wriggling.

  The men paid, wrote their addresses to have the prints mailed, and the two couples parted from one another again. Her shoulders began to feel heated through and crisp, and she was worried for Leonard, who was fairer than she. The sky was still dizzyingly white as they made their way back to the car.

  They were jostled on the boardwalk by a bum whose shirt was buttoned staidly at the collar but flapped open below, showing the hairs on his chest and belly. He walked with his arms out straight in front, waving them to part a way through the crowd. His face was small and boyish, except for the smudged growth of beard. He whimpered as he passed them. “He’s gone,” Rhoda said, meaning in the head.

  She couldn’t help feeling contempt when she saw people who would choose misery, carrying it with them like an unattractive feature they made no attempt to conceal. Her upbringing had been in a different direction, toward staunchness and against dramatizing. Leonard gave the man some change.

  On the ride home, Rhoda felt richly exhausted, dazed from the heat, and she let the rocking motion of the car put her to sleep. When she woke, twilight had fallen and Leonard had put the radio on. She crooned a loud comic yawn to let him know she was awake, but he shushed her—he wanted to hear the news. Churchill and Roosevelt had met secretly on a ship somewhere off Newfoundland and issued a high-minded declaration; all nations were going to act nobly in such-and-such ways “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.” “It means Roosevelt’s going to get off his behind soon, doesn’t it?” Rhoda said. “Everybody knows it’s only a matter of time, but he’s so slow. First we call Hitler names, then we have to get in the war finally.”

  Leonard shrugged. The weather report came on (more temperatures in the nineties) and then the music again, and they drove ahead in silence. “Will you go, do you think?” she said. “Into the service, I mean.” She had been trying to think how to phrase this delicately, so as not to let him think that she expected anything cowardly or shrinking from him, or, on the other hand, that she was in any way eager to see him go. He had occasionally evinced pacifist sentiments, but she wasn’t sure how serious they were or whether the current situation overrode them. He was over thirty and a father and he probab
ly wouldn’t have to go right away unless he wanted to. She wanted to know if he wanted to.

  He wasn’t answering, and she wondered if she’d annoyed him (he sometimes accused her of asking obvious questions and being dense on purpose). “I’m thinking,” he said, catching her looking at him. Perhaps it was wise to prepare: she couldn’t quite bring herself to the point of expecting this to happen. I would manage, she thought, I wouldn’t sit home and brood. In his absence, she would, for instance, have gone down the shore today with Hinda and Stanley, as she’d wanted to in the first place, yukked it up with Hinda on the beach, kept Leonard’s name out of the conversation so that no one would feel sorry for her, and avoided more than a polite hello to the Hofferbergs.

  This is a little crazy of me, Rhoda thought, it’s not true that I want him to go. It was juvenile to be fooling around mentally with notions of her own fortitude. She had been having, she realized, a fantasy—frivolous and inaccurate—about how offhandedly brave she was going to be. Her sunburn hurt her slightly, and reminded her how little interest she had in ennobling herself with more tragic emotions.

  “I think I don’t know what I’d do,” Leonard said. He drew his brows together and titled his head at her and then he smiled weakly in a way that she found somehow beautifully modest and responsible. “I’d figure it out when the time came. I’d have to go, maybe.” Rhoda’s mind cleared suddenly—he was so sensible, and he saw into the heart of things. At once she was bitter at the thought that anything might take him away from her. It was no time to speak of the risks of combat; she wanted him to think that she was feeling the right thing. All the ride home she bore her panic silently; in this restraint she felt her strength.

  They arrived home stiff and sticky with salt, wanting to shower and eat quickly in peace before going to pick up Suzanne. The house looked shaded and cool, as they drove up to it, with its deep lawn and the brick steps leading to the porch; the flagstone walk was in shadow from the chestnut tree. Leonard made sandwiches while Rhoda took off her suit to rinse it in the kitchen sink. “Look at your strap-marks,” he said. “Look at your shoulder. Your skin always looks so smooth. Healthy and smooth.”

  He heard her singing in the bathroom, she knew. She had forgotten about the war, and her voice copied the tune as she had heard it on the radio—her voice was extra brassy, as though she sang from a microphone to a large audience, and the words had a stagey accent from another part of the country, further west or further south. She was pleasing herself.

  3

  IN DECEMBER, WHEN America finally entered the war, Rhoda kept telling friends that it was a relief; it meant, at least, that something was happening to stop more Jews from being killed. At home, her own uneasy opinion was that Leonard, as an overage father, shouldn’t go unless he had to. Still, when Hinda’s Stanley left, Rhoda was shy to mention Leonard’s name in front of her friend, as though his continuing presence were a guilty secret. Listening to the news one evening, Leonard announced, with the sober phrasing of an expert giving disturbing testimony, that the Navy was the most intelligently run branch of the service, and the next day he went down for the physical exam, never guessing the outcome: rheumatic fever in childhood disqualified him. When Rhoda heard the news, she was overcome with a deep and bride-like flush at the wonder of his maleness, the span of his chest and the hairs on his arm: the luck of having a man to live with. They did not celebrate but sat quiet over dinner, softly and companionably dismayed in their plenty, like tourists who feel themselves fat in a land of beggars.

  The war did not change their lives so very much. Though among her friends she made weary references to “these grim days,” Rhoda’s own part was limited to the tasks of budgeting ration coupons and helping in scrap drives. Leonard did volunteer work for the Red Cross, measuring and labeling medicines.

  He was very, very busy, working extra hours in the pharmacy now that the store was short-handed. The store, in which he had a sort of junior partnership, was doing well; the steadiest customers, the old and the sick, had been left behind, with the women who bought cosmetics. Kids with mothers at work came to hang out at the soda fountain, swilling down Morale Builder Malteds and Paratroops Sundaes (They Go Down Easy). By the winter of 1943 business had actually doubled from what it was before the war.

  The stream of customers elated him. Rhoda had seen this. He liked the momentum of tasks done rapidly on demand. It was on such a day of capable exercise—sweat stains mottled his blue shirt and showed like highlights through his white coat—that Mrs. Leshko found him at her service across the glass counter, while Rhoda sat on a stool at the fountain. Mrs. Leshko had waited a good ten minutes while Leonard had helped a ten-year-old select a bottle of cologne for his mother and had prepared cough syrup for a woman who worked in a clothing factory and complained of fibres in her lungs. After her wait, the sudden beam of his attention turned on Mrs. Leshko caused her to melt and gush plaintive confession. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I’m an old lady, the walk isn’t so good for me.”

  “It just shows you can’t keep a good woman down,” Leonard said. He had learned a little from Rhoda about how to handle people. “I’m very flattered that you came all this way to see me. A pretty face on a busy day, it cheers me up.”

  Mrs. Leshko wheezed her breathy little fat-woman’s laugh. She had walked extra, she said, because she didn’t trust the other druggist in town. Last time she had counted the arthritis pills he’d given her, and they were four short. “I can measure them out right in front of you if it’ll make you feel better,” Leonard offered.

  “You,” Mrs. Leshko snorted. “You I wouldn’t question. If the whole world was like you, there would be no wars.”

  Mrs. Leshko continued talking to him as he went behind the partition to fill her prescription. “I need some candy also. My nephew on a ship—it must be very boring, he writes to his old aunt even—he wants me to send him some sourballs. Five pounds.”

  Leonard walked to the candy counter and scooped out the little hard candies, dusty with their own sugar, into a paper bag and weighed them. “For you and the Navy, that’s fifty cents. And two dollars for your medicine.”

  Mrs. Leshko was suddenly at a loss. The difficulty of getting this flimsy wrinkled bag into the mail and overseas hit her as an unexpected and bitter disappointment. She wanted a box, she needed some twine—“It’s not so easy to tie a knot when you’ve got arthritis”—and she began to whimper.

  “Mrs. Leshko,” Leonard said, “if you give me the address, I’ll pack it for you. It’s all right.”

  The old woman was actually crying, thin short sniffs and gasps; tears leaked from her rheumy eyes. Leonard seemed appalled; he could not have been more uncomfortable if she had suddenly lifted her dress and revealed her grayed and withered private parts—for wasn’t she, in flaunting her suffering, displaying all the quivering intensity of the most private part of all, the soul? Leonard was an agnostic, but he believed in the soul.

  He offered Mrs. Leshko his handkerchief, and she gripped his hand. “When he was little, his mother used to leave him with me when she went to work; he was such a sweet little boy. He called me Aunt Beffie, he couldn’t say Bessie. You know how they are when they’re learning to talk.”

  “I know,” Leonard said.

  “Oh, God,” Mrs. Leshko wailed. “You have one of your own, I forgot. Be glad she’s a girl. How old is she now?”

  “Two and a half,” Leonard said.

  “They grow up so fast. What is she doing—walking, talking? What does she say?”

  “Well, not much, actually. Mostly she just says ‘dish’ and ‘dat’ and points to what she wants. A woman of few words.” Rhoda saw he was trying to be very concrete, by way of shifting the subject.

  “You’re kidding. When Arthur was that age, he knew a whole nursery rhyme by heart. Even my Marion, not a genius, could say a full sentence.” Mrs. Leshko was feeling better, braced by a glimpse of superiority, a vision as sustaining as any philosophy.
“It’s nothing to worry about. They all learn some time. When my Marion took so long to get toilet-trained, my husband used to say, Well, you never saw a bride under the chupa with a load in her pants.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Leonard said, and in the genuine pleasantness with which he said this, he showed himself to be, after all, truly different from Rhoda.

  “She’s just keeping things to herself,” Leonard would reassure Rhoda. “In her mind she’s composing War and Peace.” Suzanne’s failure to advance into speech was not troubling to Leonard. She seemed to understand everything that was said to her, and in the quiet with which she absorbed the words of adults was a sort of composure which Leonard found appealing. She was a robust child, big for her age, with a square face and curly hair. She was slightly cross-eyed, which contributed to her brooding look; often she seemed to be watching something just over his shoulder when he spoke to her. She was not hard to satisfy, tolerating substitutions when a thing had to be taken from her, and when she played with her toys she chuckled to herself.

  She had actually been noisier as an infant, when her crying had seemed to penetrate the walls of the house. For a while she had jammered in high shrieking chirps, so that Leonard had called her “our canary.” Rhoda had expected her to talk early, so she was especially piqued at having been made a fool of. Recently, Rhoda had come upon her rolling from side to side in her crib, as though rocking herself to sleep, and the sounds she was murmuring, by way of lullaby, which Rhoda at first took hopefully for words, were simply made-up noises, secret and clearly satisfying without her sharing them.