Dancing in the Dark (12 page)

No one came to my home with lights and television cameras to see how I lived. No writers came with pads and pens to ask me my principles, what my solutions were.

No, they all talked to those younger ones, who were so sure. Even at their age I had not been sure, and I watched them on television and read their words in magazines with amazement. They marched, those girls, young women, in demonstrations, and some were even wanted by the police. They were terrifying. Some of them were also beautiful.

Their words, the things they did—they were saying I did not exist. They threatened my life with their demands.

And my magazines were altering, and there were new ones besides, entirely foreign. My mother, now, she might have liked them.

Unsettling enough turning thirty, without the rules changing also.

It was odd not to be young. Not old, of course, but also no longer young. I woke up in the mornings sometimes assuming an enormous future, and realized it was not so enormous any more. My body still seemed young, grey hairs or no. It was trim and firm. But there I was, thirty, a contradiction. I must have assumed that body and mind and time and everything would move together, synchronized. It was a shock to find one leaping ahead of the others.

I found myself thinking, “So this is it.” But where did that thought come from? I had what I wanted. It was not as if I’d had dreams of anything so very different, or ambitions to be something else. I had never
considered seriously other possibilities. But it was still unsettling, disquieting, to think that now there would not be any.

Why did I think thirty was so old? Now it seems quite young.

I can still be surprised when I wake up some mornings wondering who I’ll be. Now, of course, it’s a fair question: who will I be?

I can’t apologize, although it seems one is expected to these days, for spending twenty years caring for my husband and my home. Could I explain that was just my way of caring for myself?

My cause was not as spectacular as the ones of those people on television parading for civil rights and against war, for equal rights and against killing seals. My cause did not make for parades in the streets.

But if a civil-rights marcher is assaulted by a black, if an animal-lover is bitten by a dog, or an equal-rights demonstrator attacked by a woman, what does that mean? That all those efforts, those fair feelings, have gone to waste? In the victim, is there a sense of betrayal, a resentment that one’s energy was stolen, one’s caring disregarded?

Whose fault is it? Some ultimate uncaring selfishness in the attacker, a blindness? Or a flaw in the giver, who gives not quite enough. Who fails to give quite everything. Whose fault are these breakdowns, anyway?

“Look,” I said to Harry, “if you want to work this weekend, go ahead. I’ll find things to do.” He’d spread out his papers on the glass-topped coffee table in the living room. I took him tea and sandwiches and opened his beer for him. He had to concentrate, so I read quietly in the kitchen, or did some baking. I wanted to let him be, when that was what he wanted.

But I never meant him to assume I wasn’t there. I didn’t mean to disappear.

My magazines, the ones I liked and was raised on, made it seem so clear. If one did this, that would result. Did I not follow the instructions carefully enough? I never could put things together. Harry bought kits for building things: a worktable or a set of shelves, and he could fit piece A into slot B with no difficulty at all, perceiving the logic of the thing. Me, I would have been left with a pile of unconnected pieces.

I thought—what did I think? That I had a home and Harry and so I was safe. I would be terrified without them.

I am terrified.

I didn’t lie. If I turned my efforts into making him important, that was true. What I demonstrated to him of devotion was a mere glimmer of the truth.

When did the lie begin? His lie. Certainly not from the beginning. Perhaps only quite lately, which means that for most of those years there was no lie, those years are genuine. Maybe he just got tired. Or bored. I knew how easily bored he was in other ways.

Oh, I want him here. I have so many questions and he’s the only one who knows. Why? I would say. What did I do wrong? What were you looking for? What more could I have done? When did it start?

Lunch is scalloped potatoes, thawed peas, a slice of ham, a dish of custard. Coffee, too, or tea. The potatoes are a little soggy, the peas wrinkled, the ham somewhat overcooked, the custard bland, the coffee bitter. It’s not an awful meal, just not a good one.

What I miss about it is not taste. What is lacking is a complete meal on my table. What I would like to see is a whole
dish of potatoes from which to scoop my own, an entire ham or turkey or roast sitting there waiting to be carved.

What we are served are individual plates of food, each as if it has come from nowhere, has no origins. A little inhuman, to have it presented this way. Food should be part of a whole, a ceremony of care.

I wonder what’s happened to all my recipes. All those clippings from magazines, pasted or copied so carefully onto file cards. And the recipe books that I used to read, thumbing through the pages and pictures, selecting, balancing, visualizing the combinations of possibilities on our plates.

I wonder what’s happened to all my things. The house? Can it just be sold, without my ever seeing it again? Because I don’t want to go back. I do not ever want to be inside that yellow kitchen with the white and yellow daisy clock. I do not want to see that living room with its wall of white gold-flecked paper, and I do not want to be upstairs. The pillows alone would break my heart.

Is someone looking after it? If not, will the pipes freeze this winter, or the furnace break down? By now dust must be gathered on the windowsills, and there will be bits of fluff and dirt settled in the carpets.

It seems it should be wrong, after a twenty-year investment of effort and work and attention, not to care. But I do not care. Let the place fall down.

I can think of only one thing about it that might give me pleasure now. I think that if I were out of here I might drive a bulldozer to that house and smash it into splinters. That, I think, might give me joy.

I see that for all this tidy writing, following so carefully the lines, the rage is still there, in the ink and in the movements of the tendons of my hands.

“T
alk to me, Edna,” he’d say. “What did you do today?” Well, I felt contented, and pleased with myself. But to tell him what I had done—I could do these things an infinite number of times, it seemed, but I could hardly describe them an infinite number of times.

The trick with housework is to make one’s labours invisible, so that the other person does not observe them, but would observe their absence.

We talked about vacation plans, food we liked, a new restaurant to try or a movie to see, articles in newspapers, and programs on TV. He said, “Okay to have the Baxters over Saturday? Could you maybe make those little quiches?”

“What about your day?” I asked. “How did it go?”

He was in the marketing department of a drug firm. He ended up head of it. Was he pleased with that? Might he have concluded he wasted his gifts on so small a stage?

A stage, yes. I can see him as an actor, someone striding and declaiming, or hunched and whispering to the farthest rows. Laughing, head thrown back, or weeping, face in hands.

This is no criticism, that he was alert to the effects of
alterations in tone of voice or sudden movements. It was a skill he had, a gift, an offshoot of the intensity with which he saw his life, himself, and of his wish to be in charge. If someone had said, “What a liar he is,” instead of “What a performer,” I would not have understood.

I’m sure that for him it felt quite different to act than to lie. One for his pleasure, the other for his preservation.

But the skill in lies must have been cultivated in the acting.

What if he had truly been an actor? Would that have satisfied his desire to play out roles? Would he have known the difference between the play and all the rest?

I see him furious; dismissive; amused; bored. He could be all those things in our living room, with our company. I could watch the people watching him and listen to the changes in their words and voices. He changed topics with just a sigh and a shifting of his weight.

I thought I could appreciate his performances and still see the husband Harry underneath.

I thought he spoke to me in different ways. For one thing, I never heard tenderness except with me. He could be gentle and kind with others, but not tender. To me he might say, “Edna, you’re perfect,” although that might be in connection with a special meal for guests or in a quiet moment in our bedroom.

We could spend evenings doing very little except reading or watching television. He stretched out on the couch. He didn’t need to speak unless he wanted to. It was a sign of trust, that he could relax so far with me. He trusted me, and therefore no performance.

With all the others he had to be on his toes.

But I, too, could be an actress. A silent, listening actress.

How many hours in twenty years did I spend listening? Nodding, asking questions (but that was part of listening). He spoke with such enthusiasm of his work and confided his manipulations. Another sign of his trust, that he could still talk freely of moves made with selfish, sometimes cruel, motives. I might listen with some pity for a man squeezed out, or injured in some Harry-feint. The effects didn’t seem real to him. His pleasure was in the game itself, it seemed, no meaning for him beyond that.

What he told me was not real to me, either. More like stories read in magazines or heard on radio. Not even as real as a television program.

“You know what you need in business, Edna?” he asked. “You need the right image. Of course you can’t make too many mistakes, either, but a lot of it is how people see you. You can get away with more mistakes for a longer time if they think you’re a winner, but if you’re not confident about yourself or let them think you’re not dead sure of what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter how many things you do right—they think you’re a loser. It’s a hell of a lot better to risk the odd mistake and make quick decisions and be definite about it than to hesitate. I’m good, you know. I’m really good at that.”

“I know.”

“You also have to make them notice you. You have to have a character in their minds. Not weird, of course, or eccentric, I don’t mean that. But you have to stand out.”

All that was somewhere else. In our two-person corporation, we didn’t have to worry about these things.

I had, however, a few betraying thoughts. (Were they the missed spots? Certainly a sign of imperfection.) Sometimes when he was very keyed up from a particular move and went over and over it aloud at home, crowing and analysing, I was
bored. And amazed at being bored, so unlikely for me, who could spend days and years in the same routines. And I might think, “He sounds so
young.”
I meant, I think, that he wanted so much praise.

(Did she praise him? She was so much closer to that part of him; did she say, “Great work, Mr. Cormick, you handled that so well”? When would the Mr. Cormick have changed to Harry? Did they talk business over wine and dinner? She, who was right there, must have had a special view. Maybe when she praised him, it meant more from her than from me, because she would really know.)

I understood, with some surprise, that I protected him and gave him balance. “He needs me here, too,” I thought.

I fed him that way and others. He fed me with his long arm around my shoulder when I woke up, my head in the dent where his shoulder met his chest when I fell asleep.

And too, there was his energy, the heat that flowed out of him and into me. I didn’t think I raised much heat on my own.

Sometimes, yes, I might have liked to say, “Let’s talk about something else for a while.” But what? He said, “Talk to me, Edna,” but what about?

I might have liked to say, “Harry, I don’t understand. I know you’re good, but I’m not there, I don’t see it. It wearies me to hear all this.”

That would have broken something. Everything, I suspect.

Did he only love my ears then? Surely there was more.

His beautiful smile, white teeth between narrow lips, the kind of lips to look at and remember how they feel; the creases of laughter by his mouth, the crinkles around his eyes.

We laughed, too. We enjoyed ourselves. In any magazine, this was a good marriage.

When I put on four or five pounds and told him I was going to start exercising and eating a little less, he looked at me, mock-solemn, like a doctor. “Stand up,” he said, “and turn around.” Then, “Come here, let me examine,” and he poked my ribs, my stomach, my thighs, my arms, said, “Fat are you? Where? Here? Is this where you’re fat? Or here?” and he pulled me down onto him, both of us laughing, on the couch.

Sometimes he was angry. But with Harry, anger wasn’t very serious. He did not like to keep things bottled up inside. He let them out and then forgot.

He said, on a hot day in summer, “For Christ’s sake, are we out of lemonade? You might know we’d need a lot in this weather. What the hell do you do all day, anyway?”

That sort of thing. Not often. But when he got tired. Sometimes just office irritations slipping into home. I could understand that.

“Jesus Christ, that goddam Baxter. Can’t piss without getting his zipper stuck. What an asshole. Why is my life full of assholes?”

Because, I think, he liked it that way. Because he wanted to be the best. Because I stroked his hair, the back of his neck, and listened to him, and made his drinks.

But surely I wasn’t lying, not really. Acting, on occasion, perhaps, but not lying.

God, to have ever said what was true.

This business of anger, it frightened me. Not Harry’s sort: that hurt me, but did not frighten.

And I was right. I was right to feel my own rage might lead anywhere.

How often did my father swallow fury as he opened the door to the porch to have his pipe out there in the cold and the wind? Or, for that matter, how many times did my tense
and, I think now, ambitious mother bite her tongue against complaints and urgings that he be better, bigger somehow. Because she didn’t press him that way; merely bullied him in small ways.