Next to Love (27 page)

Millie hums beneath her breath as she arranges her cards.

“Please,” Grace snaps from the next table.

The humming stops.

“I’m sorry.” Grace’s fingers toy nervously with the top button of her shirtwaist dress, which is tight. She is putting on weight again.

“No,
I’m
sorry,” Millie says, and Babe wonders if she ever gets angry. She tries to imagine Millie howling at Al the way she does at Claude, but other people’s marital brawls are like other people’s lovemaking. You can’t imagine the real thing.

They have been her best friends since the first day of kindergarten. In those days, there was only one primary school in town. Grace cried that she wanted her mother; and Millie held her hand and said, my mother left too and I’m not crying; and Babe told her there was nothing to cry about, because the mothers would be back to get them in a few hours. And here they are all these years later. They love one another with an atavistic ferocity, though, it occurs to Babe sitting in the sunporch, these days perhaps they do not much like one another. But she is asking too much of them. Friendship, like marriage, is not all of a piece. Sometimes she thinks she would kill for them. Sometimes she wants to kill them. Perhaps parental love is the only exception to the fluctuating law of the social jungle, or maybe she thinks that only because she is not a parent. She has seen mothers smack their children, not for discipline but in blind savage fury. She knows grown children and parents who do not speak to one another. She speaks to her parents, but no warmth flows between them. Her father always resented her, and now her mother does too. She sees Babe’s life as an indictment of her own. Babe thinks of Claude. It always comes back to Claude. Love may endure a lifetime, but it is less reliable on a day-to-day basis.

She glances around the table, realizes they are waiting for her, and makes a bid. Sharon Dobson glares at her. Why does she come? She is no good at bridge.

She puts her cards on the table, a relieved dummy, and stands. From the other end of the house, she can hear the sound of cabinets opening and closing. Naomi is taking out the cups and saucers and cake plates. She feels an overwhelming desire for a drink and looks at her watch. It is only a little after three. She cannot start drinking in the middle of the afternoon. Nonetheless, she heads for the kitchen. She will not ask Naomi for a drink. She just wants to get away from the bridge party.

“Need help?” she asks.

Naomi looks up from the tray and shakes her head with a polite smile. No, not polite, forced. She does not want me here in the kitchen with her. Naomi is as uncomfortable with me as she is with them. The injustice of it stings. I am not like them. I will not let her call me Mrs. Huggins. I cheered when Frankie went to the pond. I’m on her side.

“I think it’s wonderful what Frankie did.”

Naomi does not answer.

“You must be so proud of him.”

She takes a cake plate down from the cabinet and puts a doily on it.

“It took a lot of courage.”

She slides the layer cake onto the doily.

“Think of it. He’s making history.”

She looks up from the cake. Her face is impassive, but her eyes are hard as granite. “Mrs. Huggins—”

“Babe.”

“Mrs. Huggins, I don’t want Frankie to make history. I want him to graduate high school. I want those boys on the track team to leave him alone so he can graduate high school in one piece. Then I want him to go to college. I want him to go to college like his daddy never could, even though that G.I. Bill said he was entitled. So, do me a favor, please. Say what you want to me. But don’t tell him how brave he is, and don’t tell him he’s making history, and, please, don’t offer him any more rides to anywhere.”

SHAME DOGS BABE’S
steps as she lets herself into her house. She is as bad as the rest of them. She insists Naomi call her Babe. Isn’t that broadminded of her? She goads Frankie to take risks. Isn’t that brave of her? She is a silly futile woman, who wastes her afternoons playing bridge and feeling superior to the women she is playing bridge with.

She looks around the den and feels even worse. Claude is alive and well, almost. They own a house. They have two cars in the garage, both used but still an astonishing number. If anyone had told her before the war that she would have all these possessions, she would not have believed it. Now she takes prosperity for granted. They all do. They are awash in houses, and cars, and washing machines, and television sets, and air conditioners, and dishwashers, and deep freezes, and pressure cookers, and extension telephones, and Polaroid cameras, and stereos, and long-playing records, and power tools, and every other convenience they never knew they needed. So why is she dissatisfied? What is wrong with her? Why, now that Claude is getting better, is she falling apart? She hates the thought. She does not want to believe that his illness held her together.

She hangs her coat in the closet, goes into the kitchen, and stands staring at the shelf of cookbooks. The sight of them makes her feel exhausted. How can she be tired? She has not done anything all day except play bridge. Lately she is always worn out. Claude wants her to go for a checkup, but she keeps putting it off, partly because she believes she is not sick, merely ungrateful, and partly because she will not go to Morris but feels disloyal to Grace going back to Dr. Flanner. A few weeks ago she tried to explain the problem to Grace. She cannot imagine taking off her clothes with Morris.

“He won’t even notice,” Grace said.

“Thanks a lot.”

Grace flushed. “I mean he’s a doctor.”

Babe looks at her watch. It is a little after four. A respectable hour for a drink, almost. She pries the ice out of the ice tray, puts it in a glass, and pours enough scotch to cover the cubes. Then she takes
The Cordon Bleu Cook Book
from the shelf and gets to work.

FROM WHERE HE IS
sitting in the dining room, Claude hears the oven door squeak open and closed.

“Damn.”

She is speaking to herself, but he calls inside to ask what’s wrong.

She comes in carrying a baking dish. “It’s a mess.”

“What’s a mess?”

“Poulet Creole One.” She puts the baking dish on a trivet. A spongy beige blob lies under several slices of chicken. “I should have made the Poulet Creole Two. In that one, you don’t have to form the stuff that goes under the chicken into the shape of a chicken.”

“You’re supposed to make the non-chicken part look like a chicken?”

“It’s called presentation.”

He takes the serving spoon, puts some on her plate, then his, and lifts a forkful to his mouth. “It’s good.”

She goes back into the kitchen to get the broccoli and her drink.

“I’m trying to think of what it tastes like,” he says when she returns.

She sits at right angles to him, her back to the low sideboard with his mother’s silver candlesticks, which she gave them for their last anniversary, his to the bay window that looks out over the backyard. She picks up her own fork and tastes it.

“It’s not awful. It just looks that way.”

He takes another bite and sits chewing for a moment. “I know. It reminds me of that chicken hash you used to make when they’d let you cook in the boardinghouses.”

“Poulet Creole tastes like chicken hash?”

“Poulet Creole is chicken hash.”

She puts down her fork, picks up her drink, and polishes off what’s left of it. “That chicken hash took twenty minutes. The landladies were always rushing us out of the kitchen. I spent two and a half hours whipping up this mess.”

“It’s good,” he says again.

“Not two and a half hours good.” She reaches for the wine he has poured her, takes a sip, and sits staring at her plate.

She cannot imagine how she did not see it before. It’s Dior’s New Look all over again. She still remembers the day Millie dragged her into a fitting room at Diamond’s to try on a New Look dress, Paris original $450, Diamond’s knockoff $19.99, with Al’s discount. Babe stood staring at her reflection in the mirror. The dress was as unflattering as the frilly pink homemade number that had turned her into a wad of cotton candy. It was also wildly, willfully impractical. The tight bodice constrained her arms like a straitjacket. The cinched waist over a boned undergarment made it difficult to bend. She could barely walk in the yards and yards of full skirt that reached almost to her ankles. The wartime trousers and short skirts encouraged striding and reaching. Dior’s New Look was designed for standing in place.

“The two and a half hours is the point, isn’t it?”

He looks up from the chicken, which he seems to be enjoying. “What do you mean?”

“The official line is that, after the war, women couldn’t wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn’t have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. ‘How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we’ve seen the world,’ ” she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. “Enter the women’s magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all those advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. ‘That’ll keep the gals out of trouble.’ ”

She waits for him to tell her she’s paranoid. What he usually means is she has had too much to drink.

He takes another bite of his chicken hash and says nothing.

A WEEK LATER
, she quits the bridge club. No one argues with her. Even Grace and Millie do not urge her to reconsider. She spends the bridge afternoon reading
East of Eden
and feels vaguely guilty about it. Shouldn’t she be doing something useful? Bridge is not useful, but it is sociable and therefore acceptable. To make matters worse, she finds herself looking up at the clock periodically, measuring the time until she can have a drink.

At five o’clock, she closes the book, goes into the kitchen, pours herself a scotch, and takes down the cookbook. It falls open to the marker she has left at Poulet Creole I.

The first swallow of scotch sizzles through her. She closes the book, goes to the refrigerator, takes out the chicken, and puts it in a roasting pan. Salt, pepper, paprika. Her hand halts halfway to the spice rack. To hell with paprika. She slides the chicken into the oven. She is thumbing her nose at someone, though she is not sure at whom.

FOURTEEN

Grace

AUGUST 1952

G
IVE MORRIS A CHANCE, BABE SAID. IT’S NOT HIS FAULT HE ISN’T
Charlie. He’s a good man. He’s crazy about you and Amy.

If only she knew. But Grace has promised herself she will tell no one. It is her failure, and she will live with it. She only wishes she had not let on to Amy that anything was wrong. She never would have if Amy hadn’t come dancing into the bedroom the night she and Morris came home from their wedding trip. He was still downstairs getting the luggage out of the car.

“You must be so happy,” Amy almost sang to the room that was now a normal parents’ bedroom, with two people living in it, like the parental bedrooms in all her friends’ houses, a bedroom where the door will be closed against her rather than left open to lure her in, a bedroom that she can close her own door against.

Grace did not even know the sob was there until it escaped from her. The sound was as contagious as the flu. They stood in the middle of the bedroom, hugging each other and crying, though Amy did not know what she was crying about. She knew only that her mother was unhappy, again. And that it was her job to cheer her up, again.

They let go of each other when they heard Morris on the stairs.

“It’s nothing,” Grace said. “Forget about it. Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone I came home from my honeymoon and cried.”

The words did not reassure. Amy’s eyes were still wide with fear, and something else—reproach. She wanted no part of her mother’s misery. She was fed up with it.

Grace felt a flash of anger at the realization. Get used to it, she almost snapped, because you’re going to grow up to be a woman too. Her fury frightened her. She did not mean that. She is not a bad mother. She did not confess. She broke down, but she did not come clean.

She did not tell Amy about how she felt that first night in her new nightgown, her pulse thumping like a drumbeat, her body prickly with fear. She had been frightened with Charlie, but that was because she did not know what to expect. She is scared now, because she can think of too many permutations of what to expect. She knows more about sex, but she knows nothing about this man, her sudden husband.

He comes out of the bathroom wearing a pair of pale blue cotton pajamas. The sharp creases are a giveaway. He bought something new to sleep in on their honeymoon too. The sweetness of the gesture undoes her fear.

He gets into bed next to her. She turns on her side toward him. He leans over, puts a hand on her shoulder, and kisses her. The kiss is chaste, a replica of the one he gave her in front of the handful of guests at the ceremony in her living room that afternoon. She wore a beige suit, carried a Bible with a single orchid, and managed not to cry. It was lucky her hat had a veil so no one could see her face.