A Big Storm Knocked It Over (5 page)

His father's wife—he could not bring himself to say “stepmother”—was unlike Eleanor in every way. When Martine sat you could see the lace of her slips, and in the morning she came to breakfast wearing a bright quilted robe with bows. She and Teddy's father lived clear across the state, and it had been easy enough to ferry Teddy from one place to another. But as Martine produced her three daughters, Lisbeth, Moira, and Daphne, Teddy became less necessary, although he was still picked up from Eleanor's and brought home again. But the visits diminished. “With all those children, it's too much for Martine,” Eleanor said. And while Teddy had been relieved, he had also been hurt in his secret heart. How easy it must be for his father not to love him!

Jane Louise sighed. Eleanor had Thanksgiving with the Peerings. Edie and Mokie often catered for others, which was Edie's way of avoiding
her
family. This year Jane Louise had decided to protect herself and Teddy and do Thanksgiving on her own. After all, it was their first year of married life. She was going to ask Eleanor and the Peerings, and Edie and Mokie, and her mother and Charlie, who would say no. Teddy would ask his British colleague, and they would invite their landlady, Mrs. Berger, whose children lived in Israel.

She did not anticipate the outcry this decision would cause.

“Oh, dear,” Eleanor said. “The Peerings have been planning this for months.”

“Couldn't they come to us just this one year?” Jane Louise asked. “Beth could bring her pies, and Mrs. Peering could bring her sweet potatoes.”

“Well, I just don't know,” Eleanor said. “It would be so much easier if you came here. There are eight of us and only two of you.”

It was not much better with Jane Louise's mother.

“It's totally impossible,” Lilly said. “It's been planned for weeks. I have the guest cards and the menus, and Charlie's nice friends from Palm Springs are coming, and we were sure you and Teddy were coming, too. We were counting on it.”

“We thought if we did it ourselves we could have both mothers-in-law at the same time.”

“I've already written to Eleanor,” said Lilly, who was nothing if not correct. “I know she likes to stay up in the country, but we hoped this first year of your being married she'd come to us.”

“Supposing she wanted you to come to her?” Jane Louise said.

“There's only one of her,” Lilly said. “I'm afraid there are tons of us. It just won't work. But I'm counting on you and Teddy.”

“The problem is,” Jane Louise said, “Eleanor is counting on us, too.”

“Well, darling,” said Lilly. “You'll have to work it out the best way you can.”

Dita appeared in the office three days before Thanksgiving with her arm in a sling fashioned out of a large, expensive silk scarf. Jane Louise found her on the editorial floor just about to try to pour herself a cup of coffee from the communal coffeepot.

“This fucking arm,” Dita said.

Jane Louise poured Dita's coffee for her and carried it to her office.

“I sprained my wrist,” Dita said. “Sliding down some ridiculous glacier made of pebbles. I had to be taken to the doctor by canoe. Thank you for bringing my coffee in.”

Dita's hair shone under the lamp. She was wearing a black skirt, a white silk blouse, and a pair of suede shoes. Her cigarette box was open on her desk, and next to it was a little gold lighter and a big black fountain pen.

“You better scoot,” she said, as if to a child. “I've got Jacob Elitzer coming in with the copyedited manuscript of his translation. Do you know if Sven has anything back on that? It's called
End of the World: Three Latin American Poets.
”

“I'll just check it out,” Jane Louise said.

“And close the door behind you,” said Dita.

“Dita,” said Jane Louise. “What's going on with you?”

Dita looked up. She seemed for an instant like a cornered cat. Then she smoothed out her features—Jane Louise had seen her do this a thousand times after a crying jag or rant—and assumed the posture of a harried worker.

“Darling, I'm half crippled and I just got back!” she said. “I've got a pile of stuff on this desk that would choke a horse.”

“I don't mean now,” Jane Louise said. “I mean—”

“Kiddo,” said Dita. “Scoot out. I can't have this sort of conversation on my first day back. Nothing at all is wrong.”

Jane Louise felt a great number of things were wrong. They had once had a standing Tuesday lunch date: “First my analyst, then
you,
” Dita had said at the last one.

Those days were over now. Whatever had happened to Dita was not going to be shared with Jane Louise. Dita existed to prove that people were never knowable: It was a hard lesson—the hardest lesson in life.

Jane Louise counted on friendship with women. Without Edie she felt she could barely live, and she had considered Dita a very close friend. But then Dita did not have close friends, it seemed.

She was also slightly suspect at the office. For instance, Erna, who had been two years ahead of her at college, did not approve of her. Erna did not approve of divorce, or short skirts, or female editors having lunch with their male authors and then coming back at four in the afternoon looking haggard.

Erna did not approve of Dita's Nick, who had been her classmate. He was restless and easily bored. When bored he spoke in Russian or made rude noises. He was a dicey prospect at a party, since you never knew whom he might be awful to. Sven said he
was Dita's front man and running dog—the pit bull she set on the others she was far too mannerly to be snooty to.

To someone like Erna, Dita was an affront. Intellectuals ought not to read fashion magazines and have exotic hair treatments at lunchtime. While it was perfectly all right for a bluestocking to wear perfume and lacy slips, it was not all right to show any amount of thigh or laugh in a dirty way. Furthermore, delicate-looking ladies ought not, when they blew their noses, to sound like foghorns. Erna believed that most women had a mandate to stay home and take care of their children—they had a mandate to reproduce, she felt—but those with a Higher Calling ought to find maternal and loving child care and take a four-day week.

Around holiday time the office was invaded by little Hendershotts, who trooped in wearing school uniforms or pinafores: Simon, Eva, Ben, and Winnie, the baby, who, left to wander, wandered into Dita's office and came out smelling of Dita's perfume and bearing a large chocolate truffle in her hand. Dita's method with children veered from the cavalier to the seductive. She felt, she told Jane Louise, that children were fooling you. “Behind those child eyes, they know all,” she said. “If Erna's baby isn't allowed chocolate she should have told me. It's clear those children are totally deprived. Why, that poor child looked as if she'd never seen a truffle before.”

Jane Louise, who did not expect children to be wild, found the Hendershott children remarkably well behaved. She said as much to Sven.

“That's because they aren't
real
children,” Sven said. “They're props. She got them at that theatrical rental place around the corner. Also, their father is an android. Although that little Eva is going to be quite a honey in a few years.”

“For crying out loud, Sven!” said Jane Louise, who always
hoped that in Sven's case, children were exempt. She had seen him run a meandering gaze over his own beautiful daughter, Anik, but she also knew that Sven was much too interested in his sense of cool to contemplate anything as tacky as incest.

“I said ‘in a few years,'” said Sven. “I'm a democrat, little Janey. I like 'em young. I like 'em old. I like 'em in between. Remember Mrs. Leigh Bracken-Rodgers?”

Jane Louise remembered very well. A small, well-made woman with white hair and beautiful cheekbones who was a curator and had done a book on miniature chairs. She was close to seventy. This had not stood in Sven's way, although whether or not he had been successful in his pursuit was not known.

Jane Louise came downstairs to her office feeling bereft. Was it the looming holiday, which, after all, had a terrible underground effect on Teddy? Or was it because it was plain and clear that she had been dumped by Dita, who had so vigorously and ardently taken her up? In public Dita was as perfect as a new white shoe, whereas Jane Louise alone knew that Dita had been unable to resist a young playwright named Joe Ching, whose play,
Harvest of the Forlorn,
she was publishing as part of the New Theater Series. This person, half Chinese, half Irish, seemed eager to run away with Dita. Dita treated him as you might treat a small dog, although she said he was as silky as a seal without his clothes on.

She had described to Jane Louise her first marriage, not a success in any way. She told the long story of being carried out of her fancy apartment one afternoon by Nick and taken to his grungy flat, where the two of them had holed up for several days, causing her second husband to divorce her and her mother to be outraged. She had been on the verge of confessing something or other about Sven. This, Jane Louise imagined, was part of the reason that Dita no longer dialed her extension, dragged her out for lunch, had girls' dinners with her when Nick was away and
Teddy worked late. And then, not to acknowledge that anything had changed! Jane Louise looked into Dita's beautiful bony face for some acknowledgment of anything and found a beautiful bony face, as closed and unrevealing as a closed door. She knew in her heart of hearts that Dita never looked back. She had left her first husband without the slightest trace of remorse or regret: It had been a mistake on both parts, and the cleaner one cut one's losses, the better. This face said: I don't want to have any idea what you are talking about.

In her own office Jane Louise closed the door and realized that she was in a rage. She wanted to throw things against the wall. She wanted to take Dita by the shoulders and shake her until she said something, anything. Instead she called Edie.

“I hate her,” she said into the telephone.

“There, there,” Edie said. “She's not a normal person.”

“It's so unfair. It's so out-to-lunch.”

“It may be that people who get married a lot aren't very steady,” Edie said.

“What about people who have a lot of boyfriends?” said Jane Louise.

“That's different,” Edie said.

“How?”

“Boyfriends are part of the evolutionary process,” Edie said. “You and I don't trust people who marry their high school sweethearts, do we?”

“We envy but don't trust them,” Jane Louise said.

“The point is you didn't marry anyone except Teddy. You think marriage is serious. People who get married a lot don't, like Sven.”

“Sven is more faithful to his poker buddies. He says that Dita has three friends from childhood and the rest of us recent acquisitions don't matter.”

“You poor duck,” Edie said. “The problem with Dita is she's fast. I don't trust people who take other people up so quickly. As Mokie's mother used to say, ‘There'll be tears.'”

“I love Mokie's mother,” Jane Louise said. Mokie's mother was a black Scotswoman, a native of Glasgow who was quite a curiosity in South Carolina.

“I'm very angry,” Jane Louise said.

“Well, go
say
something to her,” Edie said.

“What am I supposed to say? ‘You dropped me! You did a kind of friendship seduction on me and then split!'? I know her. She'll give me that look and make me think I'm crazy.”

“Tell her to go fuck herself,” Edie said.

“I'll never be given the opportunity,” Jane Louise said.

It turned out that no one went anywhere for Thanksgiving. Eleanor stayed home and had dinner with the Peerings. Lilly stayed home and had dinner with Charlie and their innumerable friends. Teddy and Jane Louise stayed home and had Thanksgiving with Edie and Mokie and Mrs. Berger from downstairs. Mrs. Berger owned the building and lived on the first floor. Teddy and Jane Louise lived on the parlor floor. Above them were the young Calzones (the older Calzones lived down the street) and on top, Frank and Ross, a team of interior designers whose attic flat was done in green and white.

Jane Louise cooked a small turkey, sweet potatoes, chestnuts and onions, and a green salad. Mokie made a mince pie, and Edie baked a pumpkin cake in the shape of a pumpkin, glazed in orange icing with a chocolate stem and marzipan vine leaves.

Over dinner the subject of multiracial children reared its head. Mrs. Berger said that her late husband, Mr. Berger, had been very much against this sort of thing, but she, Vesna Berger, was not. She began, after dinner, on the subject of her late husband.

“You know,” she said, “I went to the bookstore the other day, and there was a whole shelf of widow books. Widow this, widow that.” She paused for a tiny bite of pie. “Now, my late husband, Mr. Berger, was a very charming man and very well organized. He bought this house so cheap! On the other hand, he was so very annoying. I looked in these widow books and there was not one word about a husband's being annoying. For example, I could never buy the Sunday paper on Saturday night because the sports page had to be the last possible edition. And then social life! He didn't like this one or he didn't like that one. He would never have rented to the boys in the attic because he disapproved of men living together.”

“What about lesbians?” said Mokie.

“It would have given him a heart attack,” said Mrs. Berger. “He came from another world, where those things are not supposed to exist. For instance, black people. Do you know, for all the years he lived on this block, and you know he had a factory—women's gloves, he made—no black person ever sat down at the table with him? I'm sorry to say this to you, Mokie, but there are such people. Such a shame! Not to be able to sit down with someone who makes such a nice mince pie.”

“I put up the mince myself,” Mokie said.

“I hope you don't take what I said the wrong way,” said Mrs. Berger.

“Well,
you're
sitting here, aren't you, honey?” Mokie said.

“I'm very happy,” Mrs. Berger said. “My alternative was to go to my sister in New Jersey, and I'm sorry, but every day I listen to her problems. On the holiday I like to have a little fun. I always ask myself why it seems to be so hard to have a good time with one's family.”

This was a question everyone at the table had asked many, many times.

“You know,” Mrs. Berger said, “my daughter lives in Tel Aviv, and my son is in Haifa. They want me to come and live with them. They say how lonely I must be. But I tell you, I mean I can be perfectly honest, I am extremely happy to be alone. I was a very nice wife and mother, and now I get a little chance to be myself. I could be sitting in New Jersey listening to my sister fight with her daughter, and instead I am here. Now, Edie. May I have another little tiny piece of that lovely cake?”

She took a nibble of frosting and sat back in her chair.

“I'm so happy,” she said. “Now you nice children tell me about where you were supposed to be.”

“Well,” Edie said. “I was supposed to be in the country with my parents and my brothers and my brothers' wives and my perfect little nephews, and my Uncle George and his wife. I was probably supposed to help with the cooking and chase the boys around and set the table and serve and do the cleaning up while they sat around the fire and drank their coffee because I am a girl and there is no reason to think I shouldn't be a drudge since I am a lowly pastry chef instead of a prosecutor or a judge.”

“That's nice,” said Mrs. Berger. “Next?”

“I am missing out on a huge family party in Charleston,” Mokie said. “Six thousand aunts and uncles. Fourteen cousins I can't stand. Too much food. Lots of religion. Of course, if I walked in with Edie they would all drop dead. My parents love her, but our relatives are kind of separatist.”

“It's too bad,” Jane Louise said. “What a heavenly wedding you'd have. Your huge, horrible family on one side, and Edie's huge, horrible family on the other. After dinner, mixed partners for dancing, like a checkerboard. You could have one of those cakes that comes out in little chocolate and vanilla squares.”

“Eventually we'll get pregnant and go down to City Hall,” Mokie said.

Jane Louise gazed at him. “Remember, Edie,” she said, “we're going to coordinate this.”

“Don't do anything without us,” Teddy added.

“We wouldn't dream of it,” said Edie.

A baby! Late in the evening Jane Louise was putting away the dishes while Teddy swatted the sofa pillows back into shape. A baby rounded everything out. Two more places at the table: her baby's and Edie's. A Thanksgiving with babies crawling on the floor or playing with blocks while the grown-ups ate. She saw herself floating through the living room, a pregnant woman, full of purpose, just like Erna, who had often reminded her of the woodcut of Dorothie,
Great with Manie Children.

And what, she wondered, was Erna Hendershott doing right this minute? Putting away her dishes—the family Wedgwood—or poking the fire while her happy guests—happy to be in her warm and happy orbit—finished their coffee. Her children would have been sent sleepily off to bed, the youngest with some adorable and worn bed toy, the older with an appropriately elevating and obscure English children's book. The remains of her turkey would be neatly tied up in cheesecloth and waxed paper. Erna made a point of cheesecloth and waxed paper. In fact, the insides of her fridge reminded Jane Louise—who had once been dispatched to the kitchen during a party to get another bottle of cold champagne—of a foreign country: the eggs in a French wire basket, juice in a Swedish pitcher, butter in an English butter box. The Indian lime pickle, the ricotta draining in a tub. When Jane Louise described this to Teddy, he said: “It isn't a fridge. It's the UN.”

Erna made her feel like a worm. Oh, the safety and surety of that huge dining room table, those pink-cheeked children, that wedding band, thin as a wire, that didn't ever need to call attention to itself.

Jane Louise found Teddy lying on the couch reading the morning paper.

“Did you have any fun?” she asked. He moved over and tried to make room for her, but there wasn't room so she wedged herself beside him with one foot on the floor.

“I had lots of fun,” Teddy said.

“But didn't you miss being in the country?”

“About as much as you missed being with your mother and Charlie,” Teddy said. “I think holidays should be abolished.”

“Maybe it's us,” Jane Louise said. “I mean me. Maybe I just can't stand to be around anyone I'm related to for any period of time.”

“Edie can't either,” Teddy pointed out.

“Yes, but her brothers are all over each other constantly,” Jane Louise said. “They play handball together. They meet for lunch. They live in the same neighborhood. Their children go to nursery school together.”

“No one else can stand them,” Teddy said. “As you know, they haven't any friends, and their wives look exactly alike.”

“I guess if you like your family you don't need friends,” Jane Louise said. “Maybe friends are a modern invention. Maybe they're just fluff that fills up some empty space where your extended family used to be.”

“Let's have a baby,” Teddy said.

“You mean, right now?” Jane Louise said.

“Let's practice,” Teddy said. “Get in shape for it.”

Jane Louise inwardly swooned. What an odd thing it was to have a husband. This person who was almost like a household object—a pillow or a lamp—who transformed you from a single entity into a unit, whose breathing at night was as reassuring as a clock, to whom you could, of an evening, pay almost no attention at all, and who in one minute, with one look, could turn into what a husband in actuality was: a sexual being.

Jane Louise's heart contracted. There was in this arrangement some frightening aspect, some scary way in which this connection went beyond connection and spilled into the larger world.

Teddy peered at her from his couch pillow. His hair was mussed. His glasses were fogged. She could feel his smooth hard chest under his shirt. She put her arms around him and kissed his sweet mouth.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Let's.”