The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (53 page)

“Must we discuss it?” Andrew said.

Dee Dee strained into the silence. “What?” Andrew said.

“Did you say something?”

Dee Dee could feel Carl sigh. “No,” he said.

“But
I
said, must we discuss it?” Andrew said.

Carl cleared his throat. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“What?” Andrew said. “You’re what?”

“Don’t,” Carl said. “Please.”

“Don’t
what
,” Andrew said. “Please
what.
Oh, God. Why are you
here
?”

“I don’t know,” Carl said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Andrew said. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

“I thought it would be—” Carl said. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” Andrew said. “Of course you know.”

“I wanted to be—I thought we’d be able—”

“You see,” Andrew said. “Oh, how idiotic. You see, this is what you say now. This is what you always say. But then it’s
you
who always—”

“I know,” Carl said. “I’m sorry. But not anymore.”

Darkness boiled up around Dee Dee. After a minute Andrew spoke again. “Then why are you here?” he said. His voice twisted like a wilting flower. “Why are you here?”

The next evening Dee Dee was waiting on the sofa when Carl returned.

“Where is everyone?” Carl said.

“Jane never came back,” Dee Dee said. “I guess. And Andrew wanted me to tell you he was going somewhere with Timothy.”

“Ah,” Carl said. “Hm. Well, in that case.” He looked around at the walls as though he were trying to remember something. “Takeaway all right?”

Dee Dee stretched out on the sofa, her empty plate balanced on her stomach. Carl sat in a high, straight-backed armchair; he appeared to be sitting in a bell jar of light. The boy who had hovered by her, always available in moments of extreme need, who had led her from one year to the next—had that boy become this man? “Carl—” Dee Dee said.

“I was thinking,” he said. “You know, it’s idiotic, your being here in Europe and just lying around the house.”

“It’s only Friday,” Dee Dee said. Where was
Carl
? “I only just got here yesterday.”

“I ought to take some time off,” Carl said. “Or arrange with my firm to go someplace.”

“Go someplace?” Dee Dee sat up. “I mean—”

“Someplace else,” Carl said. “After all, why should you stay in London? It’s so—well, and also it’s…”

Dee Dee ran her hand over the velvety covering of the sofa. It was only last night that Andrew had lain in this very spot.

“And you know,” Carl said. “It occurs to me. What did you think of Márta?”

Carefully, Dee Dee felt her way toward the answer. “I liked Márta,” she said. She looked at Carl gravely. “I felt very comfortable with her.”

“Because I was thinking,” Carl said. “Maybe Márta should come with us.”

The restaurant was emptying out. There were only a few remaining parties of ladies, and, at the next table, a hunted-looking man whose pinstriped shoulders carried a dusting of white. Márta’s little frown intensified, and Dee Dee’s heart began to beat rapidly; what had she done now? Oh, no—and what had happened to that bitten little cake on Márta’s plate? She had some impression that she herself had…

“So you say Carl is planning some sort of trip,” Márta said. She turned her teacup in her hands.

“Well,” Dee Dee said. Had Carl expected
her
to ask Márta? “I mean…”

“He really ought to let us know, don’t you think?” Márta said crossly. “That brother of yours really ought to let us know when he is sending us on trips.”

“Didn’t he call you today?” Dee Dee said timidly. “I’m sure he tried to call you today.”

Márta looked at her blankly. She seemed to be concentrating, as though she were identifying some faint piece of music.

“Márta?” Dee Dee said.

“Shh,” Márta said. She leaned toward Dee Dee, lowering her eyes. “Do you think that man is attractive?”

“What man?” Dee Dee said. The only man she could see was the one at the next table.

“Don’t look,” Márta said. “He is very aware of us.” Márta gazed in unearthly majesty at her teacup, and a hush consumed the room as a marmorial glow lit her face, her arms, her throat. But then she burst out laughing, causing a renewed murmur of conversations and teacups. “Oh, what a ridiculous country this is!” she said. “‘The cloakroom is closed for renovations—’” She imitated the hostess’s pruny expression. “The cloakroom! Closed for renovations!” She burst out laughing again and smiled over at Dee Dee with a merriment that seemed entirely unwarranted.

“I had a nice time today,” Dee Dee said that night to Carl. They were in a room on the second floor that held a great number of books. “With Márta.”

“Good,” Carl said. He peered at a horse print on the wall in front of him.

“Have you had a chance to—I mean, I’m glad you’re going to ask her to come on our trip,” Dee Dee said.

“You know,” Carl said, “I spent a lot of time in this room when I was your age.”

“Excuse me—” A boy a few years younger than Carl leaned around the door. “I can’t find a corkscrew.”

“There’s one in the drawer to the right of the sink,” Carl said.

“Oh,” the boy said. “Well, I couldn’t find it.”

Carl shrugged. “Sorry.”

“The thing is,” the boy said, “I can’t find Andrew, either.”

Carl sighed and pushed back his hair. “Andrew went out,” he said.

“Oh,” the boy said. “Well, when you see him, tell him Christopher and Angelica and I waited.”

Carl nodded.

“Thanks,” the boy said. He looked at Carl uncertainly and then withdrew. Carl put his head in his hands.

That miraculous hair of his—so like their mother’s. “Carl?” Dee Dee said after a moment. “Could we take a train?”

“A train?” Carl lifted his head. “If you like.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I’d better call Márta, hadn’t I, before it’s too late.”

“Carl?” Dee Dee said. “It isn’t too late…”

“Yes,” Carl said. “I mean, it’s already after ten.”

From high under the grimy glass, two pigeons swooped over Dee Dee as she hurried along. On their way—who could guess from where to where? The line where Carl and Márta stood arguing tensed and rippled as Dee Dee approached, like the tail of a nervous animal; the train would be boarding any minute.

“What is the matter?” Dee Dee heard Carl say. “Why are you angry?”

“Why ask me?” Márta said. “When you know very well.”

“Know what?” Carl said. “I don’t know. What have I done?”

“Done,” Márta said. “You haven’t ‘done’ anything.”

“Then why—”

“It’s what you
think.
”

“I see,” Carl said. “And now you know what I’m thinking.”

“I happen to,” Márta said.

“Very good,” Carl said. “But you could be wrong.”

“I happen to know,” Márta said. “And I happen also to be right.”

“Yes?” Carl said. “Good. So what is it that I’m thinking?”

“You know what you’re thinking,” Márta said. “Why should I tell you? You’re thinking that you don’t want to go.”

“I’m thinking that I don’t want to go!” Carl said. “On this trip? Of course I want to go. This trip was my idea—why wouldn’t I want to go?”

“I don’t
know
—” Márta said. “I don’t know why not. You tell
me
why not.”

For a moment the line paused in its progress, then continued around Carl and Márta into the open doors of the train. “Márta,” Carl said. “We have to get on the train now. Where’s Dee Dee? Oh, there you are.”

“You get on the train,” Márta said. “You get on the train since that’s
what you want.
But what am I going to do?” Her eyes shone, furious and teary, and a freezing little laugh hung in the air. “Now I’ve taken time off from my job, I have no money. You don’t care whether I live or die—”

“Oh, please,” Carl said. “Márta—Márta, please. We have to go now.”

“We?” Márta said. “Yes? Why should I go somewhere with you when you don’t know the difference between me and a…
suitcase.
I will stay here, where at least there are certain people who do want to see me.”

Carl looked at her. His face closed over. “Oh, what is the point?” he said. “Why should I say anything? No one ever believes me. I’m sorry, Dee Dee—” He put his hand on Dee Dee’s shoulder. “We’ll have to work this out before we—”

But Dee Dee slipped out from under his hand. Hugging her bag of magazines and candy bars against her chest, she mounted the steps of the train.

Carl’s and Márta’s shocked faces glowed as she fled along a corridor. The train breathed and shuddered. From the other side of its metal membrane Dee Dee could feel all the last sad leave-takings, torn away, fluttering idly upward in the station like slips of burning paper, floating as the dead words curled into the faint edge of flame, darkening into ash…

She opened the heavy door onto one of the compartments. She felt in her pocket for her ticket, and took a seat. She was alone. Would Carl and Márta be looking for her, pacing up and down beside the train? Or would they still be arguing, each trying to get the other to say what they needed to hear? But perhaps, in fact, Carl had already capitulated, and Márta, victorious, was already abandoned. In which case Carl—well, Carl could go on his way back to Andrew’s house.

The door of Dee Dee’s compartment opened; the train slid into motion. A stooped, elderly man appeared. He stood briefly, balancing, then took a seat across from her. In the gauzy dimness he looked to her impersonal, unformed—like a mound of clay on a sculptor’s table. Yes, she thought; that’s how she would look to him.

The carriage swayed, the train roared into a tunnel. How was she going to take care of herself, Dee Dee wondered. Still, how does anyone?
From far away Carl had accompanied her.
In darkness Dee Dee gazes out the dark window—faint lights bobbing in the silver frame. Any moment, she knows, day will pour in, extinguishing the lights, molding onto her face and the face of her traveling companion the masks of themselves: a man made ordinary by evasions and fears, a girl who won’t engage our sympathy or hopes. But just for the moment, aren’t they free? What rare, dear beings are hidden here now by these shadows?

For my brother, David
and our father, George
and in memory of our mother, Ruth

Jessica dangled a sock between her thumb and forefinger, studied it, and let it drop. “There are times,” she said, “one wearies of rooming with a pig.”

Pig.
Francie checked to see what page she was on and slammed
World History
shut. “Why not go over to the nice, clean library?” she said. “You could go to the nice, clean library, and you could think nice, clean thoughts. I’ll just root around here in the homework.” She pulled her blanket up and turned to the window, her eyes stinging.

Faint, constant crumblings and tricklings…Outside, spring was sneaking up under the cradle of snow in the valley, behind the lacy gray air that veiled everything except the girl, identifiable as hardly more than the red dot of her jacket, who was winding up the hill toward the dorm.

Jessica sighed noisily and dumped a stack of clothing into a drawer. “I will get to that stuff, please, Jessica,” Francie said, “if you’ll just kindly leave it.”

Jessica gazed sorrowfully at Francie’s ear, then bent down to retrieve a dust-festooned sweatshirt from beneath Francie’s bed.

“You know,” Francie said, “there are people in the world—not many, but a few—to whom the most important thing is not whether there happens to be a sock on the floor. There are people in the world who are not afraid to face reality, to face the fact that the floor is the natural place for a sock, that the floor is where a sock just naturally goes when it’s off. But do we fearless few have a voice? No. No, these are words which must never be spoken—true, Jessica? This is a thought which must never be thought.”

It was Cynthia in the red jacket, the secretary, Francie saw now—not one of the students. Cynthia wasn’t much older than the seniors, but she lived in town and never came to meals. “Right, Jessica?” Francie said.

There was some little oddness about seeing Cynthia outside the office—as if something were leaking somewhere.

“Jessica?” Francie said. “Oh, well.
‘But the poor, saintly girl had gone deaf as a post. The end.’
”

Jessica’s voice sliced between Francie and the window. “Look, Francie, I don’t want to trivialize your pain or anything, but I’m getting kind of bored over here. Besides which, I am not your personal maid.”

“Oink oink,” Francie said. “Grunt, grunt.
‘Actually, not the end, really, at all, because God performed a miracle, and the beautiful deaf girl could hear again, though everything from that moment on sounded to her as the gruntings of pigs.’
”

“
As
the gruntings of pigs?” Jessica demanded. “Sounded
as
gruntings?”

“Oink oink,” Francie said. She opened
World History
to page 359 again. “An Artist’s Conception of the Storming of the Bastille.” Well, and who were “Editors Clarke & Melton,” for that matter, to be in charge of what was going on? To decide which, out of all the things that went on, were
things that had happened
? Yeah, “World History: The Journey of Two Editors and Their Jobs.” Why not a picture of people trapped in their snooty boarding school with their snooty roommates? “Anyhow, guess what, next year we both get to pick new roommates.”

“If we’re both still here,” Jessica said. “Besides, that’s then—”

“What does
that
mean?” Francie said.

“You don’t have to shout at me all the time,” Jessica said. “Besides, as I was saying, that’s then and this is now. And if I were you, I’d stop calling Mr. Klemper ‘Sex Machine.’ Sooner or later someone’s going to—”

But just then the door opened, and the girl, Cynthia, was standing there in her red jacket. “Frances McIntyre?” Cynthia said. She stared at Francie and Jessica as though she had forgotten which one Francie was. And Francie and Jessica stared back as though they had forgotten, too. “Frances McIntyre, Mrs. Peck wants to see you in the Administration Building.”

Jessica watched, flushed and round-eyed, as Francie put on her motorcycle jacket and work boots. “You’re going to freeze like that, Francie,” Jessica said, and then Cynthia held the door open.

“Francie—” Jessica said. “Francie, do you want me to go with you?”

Francie had paused on the threshold. She didn’t turn around, and she couldn’t speak. She shook her head.

What had she done? What had been seen or heard or said? Had someone already told Mr. Klemper? Was it cutting lacrosse? Had she been reported smoking again in back of the Science Building? Because if she had she was out. Out. Out. End. The end of her fancy scholarship, the end of her education, the end of her freedom, the end of her future. No, the beginning of a new future, her real future, the one that had been lying in wait for her all along, whose snuffly breathing she could hear in the dark. She’d live out her days as a checkout girl, choking on the toxic vapors of household cleaners and rotting baked goods, trudging home in the cold to rot, herself, in the scornful silence of her bulky, furious mother. Her mother, who had slaved to give ungrateful Francie this squandered opportunity. Her mother, who wouldn’t tolerate a sock on the floor for as long as one instant.

Mrs. Peck’s bleached blue eyes stared at Francie as Francie stood in front of her, shivering, each second becoming more vividly aware that her jacket, her little, filmy dress, her boots, her new nose ring all trod on the boundaries of the dress code. “Do sit down, please, Frances,” Mrs. Peck said.

Mrs. Peck was wearing, of course, a well-made and proudly unflattering suit. On the walls around her were decorative, framed what-were-they-called, Francie thought—Wise Sayings. “I have something very, very sad, I’m afraid, to tell you, Frances,” Mrs. Peck began.

Out, she was
out.
Francie’s blood howled like a storm at sea; her heart pitched and tossed.

But Mrs. Peck’s voice—what Mrs. Peck’s voice seemed to be saying, was that Francie’s mother was dead.

“What?” Francie said. The howling stopped abruptly, as though a door had been shut.

“My mother’s in the hospital. My mother broke her hip.”

Mrs. Peck bowed her head slightly, over her folded hands. “
EVERYTHING MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, NOTHING TRAGICALLY
,” the wall announced over her shoulder. “
FORTUNE AND HUMOR GOVERN THE WORLD
.”

“My mother has a broken hip,” Francie insisted. “Nobody dies from a broken fucking
hip.
”

Mrs. Peck’s eyes closed for a moment. “There was an embolism,” she said. “Apparently, this is not unheard of. Patients who greatly exceed an ideal weight…That is, a Miss Healy called from the hospital. Do you remember Miss Healy? A student nurse, I believe. I understand you met each other when you went to visit your mother several weeks ago. Your mother must have tried to get up sometime during the night. And most probably—” Mrs. Peck frowned at a piece of paper and put on her glasses. “Yes. Most probably, according to Miss Healy, your mother wished to go to the toilet. Evidently, she would have fallen back against her pillow. The staff wouldn’t have discovered her death until morning.”

Bits of things were falling around Francie. “‘Wouldn’t have’?” she plucked from the air.

“This is, of course, a reconstruction,” Mrs. Peck said. “Miss Healy came on duty this afternoon. Your mother wasn’t there, and Miss Healy became concerned that perhaps no one had thought to notify you. A thoughtful young woman. I had the impression she was acting outside official channels, but…”

“But
all’s well that ends well
,” Francie said.

Mrs. Peck’s eyes rested distantly on Francie. “I wonder,” she said. “It might be possible, under the terms of your scholarship, to arrange for some therapy when you return.” Her gaze wandered up the chattering wall. “A hospital must be a terribly difficult thing to administer,” she remarked to it graciously. “I have absolutely no one to bring you to Albany, Frances, I’m afraid. I’ll have to call someone in your family to come for you.”

Francie gasped. “You can’t!” she said.

Mrs. Peck frowned. She appeared to be embarrassed. “Ah,” she said, no doubt picturing, Francie thought, some abyss of mortifying circumstances. “In that case…” she said. “Yes. I’ll have Mr. Klemper cancel French tomorrow, and he—”

“Why can’t I take the morning bus?” Francie said. “I’ve taken that bus a thousand times.” She was going red, she knew; one more second and she’d cry. “Don’t cancel French,” she said. “I always take that bus.
Please.
”

Mrs. Peck’s glance strayed up the wall again, and hesitated. “
HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE
,” Francie read.

Mrs. Peck took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Miss Healy,” she mused. “Such an unsuitable name for a nurse, isn’t it. People must often make foolish remarks.”

How could it be true? How could Francie be on the bus now, when she should be at school? The sky hadn’t changed since yesterday, the trees and fields out the window hadn’t changed; Francie could imagine her mother just as clearly as she’d ever been able to, so how could it be true?

And yet her mother would have been dead while she herself had been asleep, dreaming. Of what? Of what? Of Mr. Davis, probably. Not of her mother, not dreaming of a little wad of blood coalescing like a pearl in her mother’s body, preparing to wedge itself into her mother’s heart.

If you were to break, for example, your hip, there would be the pain, the proof, telling you all the time it was true:
that’s then and this is now.
But this thing—each second it had to be true all over again; she was getting hurled against each second.
Now.
And
now again—thwack!
Maybe one of these seconds she’d smash right through and find herself in the clear place where her mother was alive, scowling, criticizing…

Out the window, snow was draining away from the patched fields of the small farms, the small, failing farms. Rusted machinery glowed against the sky in fragile tangles. Her mother would have been dead while Francie got up and took her shower and worried about being late to breakfast and was late to breakfast and went to biology and then to German and then dozed through English and then ate lunch and then hid in the dorm instead of playing lacrosse and then quarreled with Jessica about a sock. At some moment in the night her mother had gone from being completely alive to being completely dead.

The passengers were scraggy and exhausted-looking, like a committee assigned to the bus aeons earlier to puzzle out just this sort of thing—part of a rotating team whose members were picked up and dropped off at stations looping the planet. How different they were from the team of sleek girls at school, who already knew everything they needed to know. Which team was Francie on? Ha-ha. She glanced at the man across the aisle, who nodded commiseratingly between bites of the vile-smelling food he lifted from a plastic-foam container on his lap.

All those hours during which her life (along with her mother) had gone from being one thing to being another, it had held its shape, like a car window Francie once saw hit by a rock. The rock hit, a web of tiny, glittering lines fanned out, and only a minute or so later had the window tinkled to the street in splinters.

The dazzling, razor-edged splinters had tinkled around Francie yesterday afternoon in Mrs. Peck’s voice. “Your family.” “Have someone in your family come for you.” Well, fine, but where on earth had Mrs. Peck got the idea there
was
anyone in Francie’s family?

From Francie’s mother, doubtless, the world’s leading expert in giving people ideas without having to say a single word. “A proud woman” was an observation people tended to make, vague and flustered after encountering her. But what did that mean, “proud”? Proud of her poverty. Proud of her poor education. Proud of her unfashionable size. Proud of bringing up her Difficult Daughter, Without an Iota of Help. So what was the difference, when you got right down to it, between pride and shame?

Francie had a memory, one of her few from early childhood, that never altered or dimmed, however often it sprang out: herself in the building stairwell with Mrs. Dougherty, making Mrs. Dougherty laugh. She could still feel her feet fly up as her mother grabbed her and pulled her inside, still hear the door slam. She could still see (and yet this was something she could never have seen, really) skinny Mrs. Dougherty cackling alone in the hall.
“How could you embarrass me like that?”
her mother said. The wave of shock and outrage and humiliation engulfed Francie again with each remembering; she felt her mother’s fierce grip on her arm. Francie was an embarrassment. What on earth could she have been doing in the hall? An
embarrassment.
Well,
so be it.

On the day she had brought Francie all the way from Albany to be interviewed at school, Francie’s mother—wearing gloves!—had a private conversation with Mrs. Peck. Francie sat in the outer office and waited. Cynthia had been typing demurely, and occasionally other girls would come through—perfect girls, beautiful and beautifully behaved and sly. Francie could just picture their mothers. When she eventually did see some—Jessica’s tall, chestnut-haired mother among them—it turned out that her imagination had not exaggerated.

Waiting in the outer office, Francie feared (Francie hoped) she was to be turned ignominiously away. Instead, she was confronted by Mrs. Peck’s withering smile of welcome; Mrs. Peck was gluttonous for Francie’s test scores. That Francie and her mother looked, each in her own way, so entirely
unsuitable
appeared to increase, rather than diminish, their desirability.

When her mother and Mrs. Peck emerged from the office together that afternoon, a blaze of triumph and contempt crackled behind the veneer of patently suspect humility on her mother’s face. Mrs. Peck, on the other hand, looked as if she’d been bonked on the head with a plank.