Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (54 page)

Yes, she missed the Greens. She wondered what they were doing this Monday morning … had they made friends in Washington? She still missed the Chapin twins, who must be almost in high school. She missed the three-year-old now back in California. But mooning over losses, regretting a child no longer in sight … that never got her anywhere. It was nine o’clock and she’d better hurry. She had an interview at ten.

The entire family was present at the interviewing—the parents and their two daughters and their son. Nine, seven, five. The father taught at the local university—a form of mathematics, he grudgingly revealed. “Topology.” He had a strawberry mark on his left cheek, no more disfiguring than a stripe on a shirt. The mother was petite, almost child-sized herself, with colorless messy hair and a long elfin nose. “I don’t work,” she said. “I don’t work yet,” she corrected. “I’m looking for a craft.” The children were quiet and appeared healthy, though the boy—the youngest—was too thin, and did not meet her eyes. “Your references,” Professor Duprey said tonelessly, “are impeccable.” Their shabby townhouse was located on the Boston end of Godolphin, a short walk from Val’s apartment.

But with the Dupreys it was a condition of employment that she live in.

How flexible her principles had become. This family had no gaiety and she guessed they hadn’t much small talk, either. Silence and solitude might still be hers. And Godolphin had become less safe at night, at least for a woman walking alone. A developer had recently bought her apartment house and might turn it into condominiums.

She followed Professor Duprey down a perilous staircase. The others trooped after them. They entered a group of rooms which resembled her own, even to the tiny high windows. Light would slot itself downward in the same impersonal way.

“Yes,” said Val. “But I have a lease,” she remembered.

“There’ll be a penalty for breaking it. We’ll pay,” said the professor. “You’ll have Thursdays and Sundays off, twenty-four hours each.”

A civilized form of servitude, then. But she had never indulged in much of a social life since leaving home—an occasional afternoon movie with one of her few friends.

“It isn’t that we go out much, Miss Gordon,” said the wife. First names would probably not be the rule here.

“They don’t go out at all,” said Win, the nine-year-old.

“But the household requires another adult,” said the professor.

“If God had wanted people to have three children—,” began Mrs. Duprey.

“—he would have created a third parent,” finished young Liam, and this time he did look at Val.

A
ND IF
V
AL HAD WANTED
to live in a houseful of adults and kids and bugs (the Dupreys’ screens needed patching) she might never have left her own noisy family in their ramshackle Toronto house, where no one had a room to herself; she could have watched the generations replace themselves; she could have made up Vallies for whatever children were around. What she wanted, she had discovered at twenty, was a life alone, with a family at fingertip distance. And she’d gotten that for a while, hadn’t she, with the Chapins and the Greens and that little girl this summer … She swatted a mosquito. Besides insects flying in through the screens, there were beetles making free with her kitchen as well as with the one above it—Theirs. First names were to be avoided, so she thought of her employers as pronouns. He, She, They. The pair of Them.

He was tall and ill-kempt. She was a child herself. She burned the meals or left them half cooked, sewed buttons on the wrong garments (“You’ll start a new style,” Val comforted Fay, the second daughter, who was dismayed at a cardigan adorned with toggles). And She started projects and then abandoned them, didn’t care that insects ruled the household. She was at ease only with the children and, gradually, with Val.

There was no heat between the pair of Them. No anger, no resentment, no merriment. They might have been brother and sister forced to live in reduced circumstances in order to bring up younger siblings. As for the three siblings, undemanding and obedient, they quickly attached themselves to Val, but shared her as scrupulously as if they’d made a compact.

The girls walked themselves to school. Val escorted Liam, who spent his mornings at a different school. She stood quietly when he stopped to stare at things. At an irregular stone wall held together not by mortar but by the stone layer’s skilled placement of rocks. At the buds, half-opened petals, full blooms, and spent ovals of a hibiscus. He remarked on the progress of one form to another day by day. He squatted to examine deposits of dogs. “This dog’s owner is not doing his share,” Val remarked. “He should follow his pet with a pooper-scooper.”

“Then we would not get to see the dog’s shit,” said the child, “and imagine the circumstances of his insides.” His utterances were few and precise. She supposed he was some sort of genius. They were all precocious—even the incompetent Mrs. Duprey seemed like an overbright twelve-year-old.

The nearby playground had whimsical sculpture. Liam often clumsily climbed a stone turtle and occupied himself in counting something, molecules of air, probably. Val sat on a bench, ignored by the usual collection of adults. They went there many times that fall. For lunch he ate a single carrot stick and half a cheese sandwich. She wondered how he’d take to caterpillars.

At home Val encouraged the children to make their beds in the morning; she encouraged Mrs. Duprey to straighten the marital bed and to dust and sweep once in a while. Val herself ran the vacuum cleaner over carpets whose pattern had been lost decades ago. And eventually it was Val who shopped for groceries, cooked the meals, called the exterminator, had the back stairs repaired, remembered to leave the money on the oversize dining table for the weekly cleaning woman (cash was kept loose in a kitchen drawer, available to everyone; Val paid herself out of it). That giant dining table had probably come with the house. The wicker living room furniture, no cushions matching—it had probably come from Goodwill.

One Saturday in December she suggested a trip to a large discount shop to buy new school clothes. Val drove the family car. She saw to it that the children were properly outfitted. Liam liked a shirt of madras plaid, and Val bought three of them, each a variation on the others. Mrs. Duprey wandered among the clothes for teens and found some navy blue dresses suitable for French orphans. Val bought her half a dozen.

It was a while before she resumed the Vallies. The children, talented readers all, still liked to be read aloud to at bedtime—at least the girls did, curled up on either side of Val on the wicker couch in the living room. On a footstool Liam would stare at the blackened fireplace. The children liked the unbowdlerized Brothers Grimm; they liked Robin McKinley’s fantasies, with their complicated psychologies.

Then one Wednesday night: “
Tell
us a story, please,” said Win. “You do tell stories; your résumé said so.”

“Well … mine aren’t exactly stories.”

“What, then?”

“Interactive dilemmas. Together we invent situations that require resolution. Then we invent some resolutions. Then we choose among them, or don’t.”

“Please,” said Win.

“Once upon a time,” said Val, “in a peaceful house in a peaceful village, a lodger came to the inn. He was a dark, quiet man: a woodworker. He carved beautiful spoons and ladles and spindles, and he charged fair prices. After a while he was able to buy his own cottage and build a studio next door—a big, open barnlike thing, only three sides to it. The children in the village gathered where a wall might have been, to watch him work.

“One day an official from the prince of the district stopped at the village to speak to the mayor about something financial, or maybe agricultural. On his way out of town he passed the woodworker’s cottage, slowly, for the house was pretty and the horse thought so, too. In the studio the woodworker was carving a puppet, and several children were watching. The official reined in his horse. The woodworker looked up. The men’s eyes met. The official turned his horse around and went back towards the mayor’s house at a leisurely trot.

“It turned out that the woodworker had spent time in the prince’s dungeon being punished for a crime. Not an ordinary crime, though. A crime against a child.” A figure crept close to the couch: She. “And the official’s dilemma was this: was he bound to tell the mayor that there was a person with such tendencies in their midst?

“He thought and thought. His horse drew to a halt. They both pondered.”

“He was bound to tell only if the tendencies hadn’t … hadn’t gone away,” said Fay.

“Such tendencies rarely go away entirely,” said Mrs. Duprey.

“The carver had done his penance,” said Win.

“What happens if the official tells the mayor?” said Fay.

“Then the dilemma flies off his shoulders onto the back of the mayor,” said Val. “Should the mayor let the woodworker’s past be known to the village?”

“The woodworker would be shunned,” said Win. “He’d leave.”

“Three walls—everyone can see what he does,” said Liam.

“Let him alone unless he builds a fourth wall,” said Win.

“Until,” corrected Mrs. Duprey.

That was that. There were no tuckings-in for this gang. The children just wandered off. Their little mother, too.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Thursday, was Val’s day off. She went to the movies with a friend. And Friday the Dupreys had one of their rare evenings of guests—another family and its children. Val cooked two meat loaves and let the kids mix the salad. Though she was invited to join the table—as she had been invited at the Chapins’, the Greens’—she declined as always. She stood at the kitchen window and looked through screens she’d installed at the transformed garden, now shades of gray under the winter moon: but she knew where the tulips she’d planted would come up, and the allium later.

Saturday night: “Please, another dilemma!” cried Fay. And Sunday, too, this time joined by Him as well as Her. He sat in a chair by the fireplace, stern as any mayor. And She on the floor beside the couch, and Liam on the footstool, and the girls next to Val, Fay stroking her arm.

They took these positions several nights a week while Val recycled the old Vallies, some of them inventions, some embellishments on real or half-real incidents. Finally she couldn’t remember any more. Well then, invent some more, embellish …

“There was a large town that climbed up the side of a mountain,” she began, “a bustling town, prosperous, most people happy, some miserable of course. People had big families in those days …”

“They expected to lose some children,” said Mrs. Duprey.

“They practiced redundancy,” said the professor.

“One household was particularly numerous—nine offspring, assorted uncles and aunts, a grandfather. They didn’t have much money, for none of them liked to work, but they were generous with what they had. There were three cows and some hens. Usually someone remembered to feed them. Mum did the cooking for the family and Dad did the repairs on the house.

“Right in the middle of the lively crowd were twin girls, not identical. One was spirited. She had light curly hair that went its own willful way. People couldn’t seem to help loving this tousled girl. The other one, who was pretty, too, hovered between a sense of duty and a wish for fun. She was organized; the family trusted her to manage their skimpy finances. Her hair was black and reliably straight, like licorice.

“Perhaps the lighthearted girl was also scatterbrained. At any rate, when she was nineteen, she found she was with child. The child’s father had scampered. This had happened to one or two of her sisters. Such an event was accepted, was even applauded. The new child, like the others, would be everyone’s. Everyone would care for it. There would be only an increase of the family’s easy happiness …

“But the child was born—”

“Defective,” said Mrs. Duprey.

Val swallowed. “Yes, the infant, a girl, was born deformed and also defective, the kind of child who cries all the time and is un-rewarding to care for. Her red ringlets”—Val’s hand fluttered to her own hair—“seemed like a curse. The town witches would have done away with her. The priests offered to take her to their House of Compassion on the far side of the mountain and bring her up with others of her kind. A magician wanted to transform her into an amphibian. But the family wouldn’t listen to those ideas. ‘Hope,’ they said—Hope was the poor infant’s misbegotten name—‘Hope will be brought up in our midst.’ ‘She will have the best life that can be given to her,’ said the oldest and laziest sister.

“There was only one silent voice—one person whose vision of the family had been darkened by the event, who inwardly damned its members as feckless and forgetful.”

“A twin sister,” said Liam.

“Who knew she’d do all the caring,” said Win.

“
She
would have accepted the magician’s offer. A nice frog,” said Fay.

“Or the priests’,” said Mrs. Duprey.

“Or even the witches’. Euthanasia,” said the professor.

“But she would not have been listened to,” said his wife. “Even though she was—”

“So what should she do?” Val quickly interrupted.

“Run away,” came all five voices at once.

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, on a rainy Sunday, Val was having a cup of tea near the movie theater, waiting to see a new Afghan film. A man dressed in clothes that had once been good sat down opposite her. His teeth, too, had deteriorated, but his smile remained charming nonetheless, and of course she recognized him.