The Story of a Marriage (5 page)

Buzz added: “There was a screwup, and we were roommates.”

“It was a screwup for sure. I never had a worse roommate,” Holland said.

“I was very neat. And didn’t taunt the nurses, like some.”

“Not me!”

I took up the spatula and gave them each another slice, noticing that Sonny had only managed to mangle his. I sat back down. After a moment of silence I said, “But I don’t understand.”

“What, honey?” Holland asked.

“Why would a CO be in a military hospital?”

A pea rolled past the salt and off the table. My son said, “Uh-oh.”

Holland was about to answer when Buzz put down his fork and said, “COs were under military control. We were put in a military camp, up north.” As he said “up north,” he gestured out beyond the house. “And I was sent to that hospital because I was Section Eight.”

“Section Eight?”

“Yes,” he said. “I went a little crazy.”

I looked over at Holland; his eyes avoided mine. It seemed impossible to be discussing all of this so casually.

“Bo Peep Pie!” Sonny shouted, smashing the peas on his plate, ignoring all this talk of war.

I sat quietly, helping Sonny eat his meal. I hadn’t ever asked my husband what he had been treated for, or what ward he had been placed in; I knew his ship had gone down and I pictured him recovering from the oil fire and the salt water. But Section Eight was a mental deferral, and those two men were in the same room, the same ward. What had that ocean done to him? I couldn’t bring myself to ask any more; the war was something everybody wanted to forget, and the loving nurse in me wanted to protect Holland and his story; wanted to pack it all in cotton wool so we could have peace. So instead I passed around the beer.

That was how we spent those nights: at dinner, with beer and old stories that cleared up nothing. I got the idea to bake a cake for the boys and Buzz exclaimed over it so much that it became a tradition, and we all laughed at the ridiculousness of it. The three of us who had grown up in the Depression with no cakes, and got through a war with no butter, and here we were: a cake every night. And playing fetch with Lyle, Sonny screaming with delight. It was a time of harmless fun, and we were still young enough to enjoy it.

On Saturdays, when Holland worked overtime, Buzz sometimes came early. I didn’t mind. He looked after Sonny while I did my chores; it was good to have someone other than the aunts to entertain my son. But there was also something uncomfortable about those times. Buzz would be in the middle of telling me a story, the most banal kind of story, in his bumblebee accent, when he would pause and I’d just know somehow, even with my back turned, that he was staring at me. I swore to myself I would not turn around. It was almost a game.

I wonder what the neighbors thought. I really do. It amused me to imagine they might whisper about Pearlie Cook and her affair with this new visitor.

We were out back on an unusually bright, hot Saturday, pinning clothes to the line and he was handing the damp, bleach-smelling things to me as I fought to hold them firm against the wind. The white sheets cracked in the breeze with the sound of a great fire. That was when Buzz asked if I had a sleeping problem.

“No, it’s Holland,” I said.

“Poor man.”

Holland and I kept two bedrooms, connected by a little hallway. Lyle slept in my room on a sheepskin. Holland slept alone. My husband was a delicate sleeper, as he was delicate in all things, and it had long ago been decided that he’d have his own room. I was the one who insisted on it. To keep his heart safe.

“Had it ever since the war, he can’t fall asleep if there’s any sound at all. Dogs in the yard at night, that’s the worst. And anybody else in the room. Even so, he doesn’t sleep most nights.”

Buzz kept wringing out clothes and holding them for me to pin.

“I suppose he slept in the hospital,” I said.

“We all had different pills to take,” he said, smiling.

“And you started up your business.”

“Well, took over my father’s company,” Buzz answered. “Holland was my right-hand man. Then I traveled. Quite a bit, in fact. You have to stockpile a few beautiful vistas in your memory, Pearlie. In case we’re rationed again.” He glanced at me meaningfully.

I put two of the wooden pins in my mouth, and talking through them, I asked: “Did y’all have a falling out?”

He said nothing for a while. Finally, he said, “Well, I got this nose.”

I nodded. “It’s a beauty.”

“Thank you.”

“How did you get it?”

“Holland.”

The sun flashed across the billowing sheets. I blinked, turned toward Buzz, and saw him raising a hand to his face just as the sunlight stained him white all along his arm.

“Holland hit you?”

Buzz just cocked his head and watched me. Holland never raised his voice except at the radio, never hit a thing except the couch pillows before he sat down, grinning, with his cigarette. But once, of course, he’d been a different man, a man trained to shoot other men during the war, who drank, who sang with soldiers and hit a friend across the nose.

At last I asked, “Was it over a woman?”

He handed me a pair of trousers. “Yes.”

I pulled out the trouser dryer and began to stretch the pants onto it. “Tell me.”

“Pearlie,” he said. “We were born at a bad time.”

“I don’t know what you mean. It’s a fine time.”

I didn’t know what he meant by “we.” I couldn’t imagine what might bind me together with a man like Buzz, as likable as he was. I couldn’t draw any kind of line around the two of us.

“You’re proud of your house. You have a nice touch.”

“It belongs to Holland’s family.”

“It can’t be cheap,” he said to me. “I mean Sonny being sick and all.”

“Holland’s aunts help out. With the bills, the braces, it is a lot. It keeps me inside a good deal, I tell you, taking care of him,” I said without thinking. “Of course it’s no trouble,” I added hastily.

“Now what would you do if you had all the money you needed?”

I had no answer to that. It was a thoughtless question to ask a poor woman with a sick son, something only a rich man would ask. Like wondering aloud to a freshly brokenhearted girl: “What if it turns out he loved you after all?” It was something I had never allowed myself to think about. What would I have done? I’d have moved my family away from a house like that, with glaring neighbors, and stains on the basement walls from the ocean creeping in, with crickets sifting in under the doorsills with the sand… to Egypt, to Mali, to some fantasy destination I only knew from books. My God, I’d have flown to Mars with Holland and Sonny and never come back. That was the only answer I could think of. A woman like me, I couldn’t afford to name my real desires. I couldn’t even afford to know them.

All I said was, “I’ve
got
everything I need. I’m happy.”

“I know, but just imagine … where would you live?”

“This house is better than anything my parents had.”

“But just say … an apartment high above a city? A cliff over an ocean, with a view from your bed? Five hundred acres with a fence all around?”

“What would I do with five hundred acres?” I said without thinking.

Then he looked right at me, not a shy man at all, and I think for a moment I understood.

I stood there, staring at him, with the metal dryer contraption in my hand and the damp trousers over my arm. The sun came in full and lit the world from top to bottom; you could almost hear the jasmine reaching up for it. Then we heard the sound of Holland’s car returning and Buzz turned away.

In a moment, Holland shouted “Hey there!” from the house. I heard a bicycle bell, and Sonny heading down the hall in pursuit of love.

And Buzz said nothing else, touching his nose as if touching the memory of pain. He was half to the sun, and the shadow of his ruined hand fell across his long face in the form of another, younger hand cradling his cheek. The wind burrowed into his hair like a living creature. I didn’t say a word to him as he went inside, just continued stretching the trousers in the sun to dry. And down I went—into the green deep, flecked with gold and draped with waving plants, endless, bottomless—and forgot what I had glimpsed. I was a careful woman, a good gardener, and I pruned away the doubt.

But you know the heart: every night, it grows a thorn.

It happened when Holland left town. He was a traveling inspector for a fittings company, his area covering all of Northern California, and sometimes he had to stay the night in Redding or Yreka, by the misty sea or the misty mountains, in hotels named the Thunderbird or the Wigwam (like miniature Americas: garishly neon outside, prim and puritan inside). Of course he didn’t call; long distance in those days was only used when someone had died, or when you decided to tell someone, too late, that you loved them after all. My neighbor Edith Furstenberg had come to visit before supper, wearing her new aqua seven-way blouse from Macy’s—“Only three ways, really, if you think about it”; she wanted to gossip about the Sheng family who had been excluded from Southwood by community vote and how ashamed she was of our town, how ashamed after all the Chinese had suffered.

“It’s hard for the colored, too,” I said.

“But not here in San Francisco. Not here in the Sunset, thank God.”

We tried out her blouse in all seven ways, none of them appealing. “Don’t ever change!” she shouted at me, in that fashionable phrase, from some television show I’d never seen. I washed some delicates in something she’d loaned me called Re-Clean (“so safe you can smoke while using it”). Then Sonny and I were left alone with
Sky King
on the radio, and for half an hour my son stared into the carved-wood lyre of its mouth, surely understanding nothing but that he loved it. He fell asleep in my lap and I put him to bed.

It had been an unseasonably hot day, followed by a humid night. Just before sunset, it had briefly rained, and the last of the warm sun turned the air to steam that shimmered down to the ocean. The German and Irish families were out grilling, walking the streets, standing at corners and laughing as the men threw cans of beer to one another and the children wrestled in the still-wet grass. It was so delightfully warm that I opened the drapes and windows, but, unsettled by the idea of neighbors peering in, I turned out all the lights and sat in the kitchen, satisfied: water in the kettle, Lyle at my feet.

The singing kettle filled the air with noise for some time before I reached it. The stove’s red eye was all that lit the room. I took the kettle off the flame, and as it calmed and fell to silence, I heard the knocking that must have begun while the kettle was sounding its alarm. A tapping at the windowpane. I turned and I was reminded of an image that always haunted me: after the war, I’d heard that Berliners replaced their blown-out window glass with doctors’ X-rays—before my eyes adjusted, all I saw was a broad white hand spread on a black windowpane.

“Buzz,” I said, unlatching the door.

His eyes looked around the dim kitchen. “When no one answered the front door, I thought you might be having an affair.” He laughed. He was in a dark suit and a dark, shiny tie, and when he stepped over the doorsill he removed his hat, as always. And then he said, “Pearlie, what are you doing alone in the dark—”

“Don’t,” I said quickly, because his hand was reaching for the switch. I found that I’d put my hand on his; it was as smooth as touching a glove. He didn’t ask why. He merely stood there, handsome Buzz, with a hat in his hand. He looked like he wanted to sell me something. I laughed, which caused a baffled smile to flicker on his face.

“Is Holland around?”

“He’s out of town, and Sonny’s sleeping—”

“Oh, of course,” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot he’s traveling, how stupid of me. And selfish.”

“No, no.”

“He’s up in Yreka, right? So I’m wrecking your night alone.” A wry smile.

“Not at all,” I said.

“Yreka Bakery,” he murmured to himself, smiling.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s a silly joke. It’s a mirror name, you can read it backward and forward. I wonder if there really is a bakery there. If there isn’t, we should start one.”

I laughed. “I never heard of that! I have to tell Holland.”

“Too hot to hoot,” he said. “That’s another.”

I said that was a good one.

“Oh, it’s foolishness from my childhood.”

Once again, we were alone in my silent house.

“You came all this way,” I said at last. “Want some tea? Or no, maybe a whiskey. I feel like a whiskey, don’t you?”

“I could hardly turn one down,” he said with a kind of relief. I poured out two glasses and we both downed them in a second; that was how you did it in those days. I poured us another round and went to the freezer to get the ice. Lyle jumped around beneath me, hoping to get a piece; for some unknown reason, his silence came with a love of chewing ice.

“What a strange, warm night,” I said.

“Ain’t it?”

“Too hot to hoot!”

I opened the freezer (a lion’s roar) and pulled out the ice trays, sliding the little metal levers and releasing the ice into a bucket. I threw one into the air and Lyle caught it like a dolphin. Loudly, he began to crack the cold little thing with delight.