The New Yorker Stories (13 page)

Patty leans across David. “There are so many animals here, even in the winter,” she says. “Don’t they hibernate anymore?”

She is making nervous, polite conversation. She wants to leave. Noel walks away from me to Patty’s side of the car, and tells her about the deer who come right up to the house. Beth is sitting on Noel’s shoulders. Not wanting to talk to David, I wave at her stupidly. She waves back.

David looks at me out the window. I must look as stiff as one of those wooden whistles, all carved out of one piece, in my old blue ski jacket and blue wool hat pulled down to my eyes and my baggy jeans.

“
Ciao
,” David says. “Thanks.”

“Yes,” Patty says. “It was nice of you to do this.” She holds up the bag.

It’s a steep driveway, and rocky. David backs down cautiously—the way someone pulls a zipper after it’s been caught. We wave, they disappear. That was easy.

Downhill

W
alking the dog at 7:30 a.m., I sit on the wet grass by the side of the road, directly across from the beaver pond and diagonally across from the graveyard. In back of me is a grapevine that I snitch from. The grapes are bitter. The dog lifts a leg on the gravestone, rolls in dead squirrel in the road, comes to my side finally—thank God none of the commuters ran over him—and licks my wrist. The wet wrist feels awful. I rub it along his back, passing it off as a stroke. I do it several times. “Please don’t leave me,” I say to the dog, who cocks his head and settles in the space between my legs on the grass.

My mother writes Jon this letter:

“Oh, John, we are so happy that September marks the beginning of your last year in law school. My husband said to me Saturday (we were at the Turkish restaurant we took you and Maria to when she was recuperating—the one you both liked so much) that now when he gets mad he can say, ‘I’ll sue!’ and mean it. It has been uphill for so long, and now it will be downhill.”

Curiously, that week an old friend of Jon’s sent us a toy—a small bent-kneed skier who, when placed at the top of a slanting board, would glide to the bottom. I tried to foul up the toy every which way. I even tried making it ski on sandpaper, and it still worked. I tacked the sandpaper to a board, and down it went. The friend had bought it in Switzerland, where he and his wife were vacationing. So said the note in the package that was addressed to Jon, which I tore open because of the unfamiliar handwriting, thinking it might be evidence.

Why do I think Jon is unfaithful? Because it would be logical for him to be unfaithful. Some days I don’t even comb my hair. He must leave the house and see women with their hair clean and brushed back from their faces, and he must desire them and then tell them. It is only logical that if he admires the beauty of all the women with neatly arranged hair, one of them will want him to mess it up. It is only logical that she will invite him home. That smile, that suggestion from a woman would lure him as surely as a spring rain makes the earthworms twist out of the ground. It is even hard to blame him; he has a lawyer’s logical mind. He remembers things. He would not forget to comb his hair. He would certainly not hack his hair off with manicuring scissors. If he cut his own hair, he would do it neatly, with the correct scissors.

“What have you done?” Jon whispered. Illogical, too, for me to have cut it in the living room—to leave the clumps of curls fallen on the rug. “What have you done?” His hands on my head, feeling my bones, the bones in my skull, looking into my eyes. “You’ve cut off your hair,” he said. He will be such a good lawyer. He understands everything.

The dog enjoys a fire. I cook beef bones for him, and when he is tired of pawing and chewing I light a fire, throwing in several gift pinecones that send off green and blue and orange sparks, and I brush him with Jon’s French hairbrush until his coat glows in the firelight. The first few nights I lit the fire and brushed him, I washed the brush afterward, so Jon wouldn’t find out. The doctors would tell me that was unreasonable: Jon said he would be gone a week. A logical woman, I no longer bother with washing the brush.

I have a scotch-and-milk before bed. The fire is still roaring, so I bring my pillow to the hearth and stretch out on the bricks. My eyelids get very warm and damp—the way they always did when I cried all the time, which I don’t do anymore. After all, this is the fifth night. As the doctors say, one must be adaptable. The dog tires of all the attention and chooses to sleep under the desk in the study. I have to call him twice—the second time firmly—before he comes back to settle in the living room. And when my eyes have been closed for five minutes he walks quietly away, back to the kneehole in the desk. At one time, Jon decided the desk was not big enough. He bought a door and two filing cabinets and made a new desk. The dog, a lover of small, cramped spaces, wandered unhappily from corner to corner, no longer able to settle anywhere. Jon brought the old desk back. A very kind man.

Like Columbus’s crew, I begin to panic. It has been so long since I’ve seen Jon. Without him to check on me, I could wander alone in the house and then disappear forever—just vanish while rounding a corner, or by slipping down, down into the bathwater or up into the draft the fire creates. Couldn’t that pull me with it—couldn’t I go, with the cold air, up the chimney, arms outstretched, with my cupped hands making a parasol? Or while sitting in Jon’s chair I might become smaller—become a speck, an ash. The dog would sniff and sniff, and then jump into the chair and settle down upon me and close his eyes.

To calm myself, I make tea. Earl Grey, an imported tea. Imported means coming to; exported means going away. I feel in my bones (my shinbones) that Jon will not come home. But perhaps I am just cold, since the fire is not yet lit. I sip the Earl Grey tea—results will be conclusive.

He said he was going to his brother’s house for a week. He said that after caring for me he, also, had to recuperate. I have no hold on him. Even our marriage is common-law—if four years and four months make it common-law. He said he was going to his brother’s. But how do I know where he’s calling from? And why has he written no letters? In his absence, I talk to the dog. I pretend that I am Jon, that I am logical and reassuring. I tell the dog that Jon needed this rest and will soon be back. The dog grows anxious, sniffs Jon’s clothes closet, and hangs close to the security of the kneehole. It
has
been a long time.

Celebrated my birthday in solitude. Took the phone off the hook so I wouldn’t have to “put Jon on” when my parents called. Does the dog know that today is a special day? No day is special without beef bones, but I have forgotten to buy them to create a celebration. I go to the kneehole and stroke his neck in sorrow.

It occurs to me that this is a story of a woman whose man went away. Billie Holiday could have done a lot with it.

I put on a blue dress and go out to a job interview. I order a half cord of wood; there will be money when the man delivers it on Saturday. I splurge on canned horsemeat for the dog. “You’ll never leave, will you?” I say as the dog eats, stabbing his mouth into the bowl of food. I think, giddily, that a dog is better than a hog. Hogs are only raised for slaughter; dogs are raised to love. Although I know this is true, I would be hesitant to voice this observation. The doctor (glasses sliding down nose, lower lip pressed to the upper) would say, “Might not
some
people love hogs?”

I dream that Jon has come back, that we do an exotic dance in the living room. Is it, perhaps, the tango? As he leads he tilts me back, and suddenly I can’t feel the weight of his arms anymore. My body is very heavy and my neck stretches farther and farther back until my body seems to stretch out of the room, passing painlessly through the floor into blackness.

Once when the electricity went off, Jon went to the kitchen to get candles, and I crawled under the bed, loving the darkness and wanting to stay in it. The dog came and curled beside me, at the side of the bed. Jon came back quickly, his hand cupped in front of the white candle. “Maria?” he said. “Maria?” When he left the room again, I slid forward a little to peek and saw him walking down the hallway. He walked so quickly that the candle blew out. He stopped to relight it and called my name louder—so loudly that he frightened me. I stayed there, shivering, thinking him as terrible as the Gestapo, praying that the lights wouldn’t come on so he wouldn’t find me. Even hiding and not answering was better than that. I put my hands together and blew into them, because I wanted to scream. When the lights came back on and he found me, he pulled me out by my hands, and the scream my hands had blocked came out.

After the hot grape jelly is poured equally into a dozen glasses, the fun begins. Melted wax is dropped in to seal them. As the white wax drips, I think, If there were anything down in there but jelly it would be smothered. I had laid in no cheesecloth, so I pulled a pair of lacy white underpants over a big yellow bowl, poured the jelly mixture through that.

In the morning Jon is back. He walks through the house to see if anything is amiss. Our clothes are still in the closets; all unnecessary lights have been turned off. He goes into the kitchen and then is annoyed because I have not gone grocery shopping. He has some toast with the grape jelly. He spoons more jelly from the glass to his mouth when the bread is gone.

“Talk to me, Maria. Don’t shut me out,” he says, licking the jelly from his upper lip. He is like a child, but one who orders me to do and feel things.

“Feel this arm,” he says. It is tight from his chopping wood at his brother’s camp.

I met his brother once. Jon and his brother are twins, but very dissimilar. His brother is always tan—wide and short, with broad shoulders. Asleep, he looks like the logs that he chops. When Jon and I were first dating we went to his brother’s camp, and the three of us slept in a tent because the house was not yet built. Jon’s brother snored all night. “I hate it here,” I whispered to Jon, shivering against him. He tried to soothe me, but he wouldn’t make love to me there. “I hate your brother,” I said, in a normal tone of voice, because his brother was snoring so loudly he’d never hear me. Jon put his hand over my mouth. “Sh-h-h,” he said. “Please.” Naturally, Jon did not invite me on this trip to see him. I explain all this to the dog now, and he is hypnotized. He closes his eyes and listens to the drone of my voice. He appreciates my hand stroking in tempo with my sentences. Jon pushes the jelly away and stares at me. “Stop talking about something that happened years ago,” he says, and stalks out of the room.

The wood arrives. The firewood man has a limp; he’s missing a toe. I asked, and he told me. He’s a good woodman—the toe was lost canoeing. Jon helps him stack the logs in the shed. I peek in and see that there was already a lot more wood than I thought.

Jon comes into the house when the man leaves. His face is heavy and ugly.

“Why did you order more wood?” Jon says.

“To keep warm. I have to keep warm.”

I fix a beef stew for dinner, but feed it to the dog. He is transfixed; the steam warns him it is too hot to eat, yet the smell is delicious. He laps tentatively at the rim of the bowl, like an epicure sucking in a single egg of caviar. Finally, he eats it all. And then there is the bone, which he carries quickly to his private place under the desk. Jon is furious; I have prepared something for the dog but not for us.

“This has got to stop,” he whispers in my face, his hand tight around my wrist.

The dog and I climb to the top of the hill and watch the commuters going to work in their cars. I sit on a little canvas stool—the kind fishermen use—instead of the muddy ground. It is September—mud everywhere. The sun is setting. Wide white clouds hang in the air, seem to cluster over this very hilltop. And then Jon’s face is glowing in the clouds—not a vision, the real Jon. He is on the hilltop, clouds rolling over his head, saying to me that we have reached the end. Mutiny on the Santa Maria! But I only sit and wait, staring straight ahead. How curious that this is the end. He sits in the mud, calls the dog to him. Did he really just say that to me? I repeat it: “We have reached the end.”

“I know,” he says.

The dog walks into the room. Jon is at the desk. The kneehole is occupied, so the dog curls in the corner. He did not always circle before lying down. Habits are acquired, however late. Like the furniture, the plants, the cats left to us by the dead, they take us in. We think we are taking them in, but they take us in, demand attention.

I demand attention from Jon, at his desk at work, his legs now up in the lotus position on his chair to offer the dog his fine resting place.

“Jon, Jon!” I say, and dance across the room. I posture and prance. What a good lawyer he will be; he shows polite interest.

“I’ll set us on fire,” I say.

That is going too far. He shakes his head to deny what I have said. He leads me by my wrist to bed, pulls the covers up tightly. If I were a foot lower down in the bed I would smother if he kept his hands on those covers. Like grape jelly.

“Will there be eggs and bacon, and grape jelly on toast, for breakfast?” I ask.