Ordinary Love and Good Will (19 page)

Lydia laughs, “Oh, Nathan! He doesn’t care. He says paint everything white enamel and hose it down. He did the wiring, though, before we moved in. He’s very mechanical, for a mathematician.”

Tom and Annabel are back in school. I clear my throat and wait, trying to find a comfortable way to stand: the floor is not level, I can sense it if I’m not distracted by work, and it makes me edgy. There are other things about the house that make me uneasy. The air moves a lot, so that I can feel it rolling around my neck and shoulders. On the
second floor, paint is peeling off the chimney wall, showing that water vapor and maybe fumes are leaking through the chimney tiles. The mullioned windows have no storms, and are frosted on the inside. There is plenty of work here, but I don’t want to do it. I plan to mention these things sometime, after I have lost my identity as a handy sort of person.

“Let’s do this,” she says. “Let’s paint the wall below the molding a silvery green, which will bleach out both the floor and the rest of the woodwork. Then, above the moldings, I’ll paper with something rosy, which will draw the eye upward. So go ahead, leave it pale. It’s just too unusual to cover up. The table doesn’t matter. I’ll get a new table.”

I begin brushing on tung oil, and after a while she joins me. Like Liz, she is the sort of woman who works steadily without saying much, and she is orderly and neat. I forget she is here until she says, “I’ve thought a lot about those beautiful pieces you have at your place. The dark walnut chest is one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen. What did you stain it with?”

“I soaked crushed walnut husks in alcohol.”

“Would you sell it?”

“It belongs to my wife.”

Silence; then, “I envy you your talents.”

“I envy you your colors.”

“Pardon me?”

“The colors. The way you imagine colors together. When you were talking about how you were going to paint the room, it pleased me just to hear about it. I was impressed, too, at how quickly you saw the whole, and how you didn’t just solve the problem, but made something out of it. Liz and I love our life, but it’s funny how we miss color.”

Stroke. Stroke. I like the way work relieves conversation of duty, supplies it with time to ponder what has been said. I expect Lydia to ask me about our life, but instead I ask about hers: “What sort of math do you teach?”

“Right now, just freshman calculus and some algebra, but my field is combinatorics.”

“What’s that?”

“Counting.”

“You mean like one, two, three?”

“I mean like, if you have eight identical-looking billiard balls, and you know one weighs slightly less than the others, how can you find the one in not more than two weighings? Or if six people want seven different ingredients on their pizza, what’s the fewest pizzas you would have to order to give everyone what they wanted and no one what someone else wanted?”

“It sounds like trying to figure out how to do two things at once.”

“It has that pleasure.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“Really?”

I look at her, and she smiles skeptically.

“It’s not something I’m going to think about after I leave here, I admit.”

She laughs.

“I like the idea of something abstract and removed to contemplate, though. That’s something I probably never do.”

Stroke. Stroke. Now it is her turn to break the silence: “I’m the only black woman mathematician I know of teaching at a college in this country.”

“Why is that?”

“Poor judgment on my part, no doubt. Combined with bullheadedness.”

“I mean, why aren’t there any others?”

“You want the racist, sexist, establishment theory or the embittered failed-socialization theory or the tribal suspicion theory?”

“What’s your theory?”

“Practically, it’s this. Mathematicians aren’t very socially adept, but their field demands social interaction. They take the shortest route, through who you know, to who you are, then to what you know. With women and blacks the stretch past who you are is too difficult, slows people down. I’ve been lucky to be able to use a lot of who you know to jump over who you are. They also cherish the idea of innate genius. That idea, applied socially, always engenders prejudice. I’m thirty-six, and this is my first real job. Three of my colleagues have come up to me at parties and asked if I was in the music department.” She smiles. “I envy your independence.”

“Then you should get to know us better and find out whether it’s really enviable or not.”

“I would like that.”

I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination. A mystery is present, the solution is unusually important, and my most pressing urge is to question and probe. Liz and I look for the Harris house every morning—seeing it is our gauge of weather and visibility. Last night, after Tom went to bed, we sat by the fire and I recounted every detail of the day—the layout of the house, the decoration of the rooms, what was in the oven, what Lydia was wearing. It was thick and satisfying, gossip like five pounds of chocolate caramels, and afterward, in the dark of our bedroom, Liz said, “I feel guilty, as if we were conspiring against her.” I reassured her—I had done nothing remotely nosy, not even gazed too long at any single object—but I, too, felt guilty for soaking up so many observations, for the unwilled alertness of my antennae. Guilty and racist for responding to Lydia as if she were a phenomenon.

But she is a phenomenon. She just told me so herself.

And maybe she sat up last night, unseeing among all the glittering lights and colors, and speculated about Liz and me. Mutual fascination is as possible as mutual friendship or a mutually satisfactory business arrangement, isn’t it?

When I invite her to bring Annabel and go skating sometime, she jumps at the chance.

After I am finished, I choose to ski home over the fields rather than take a ride. The snow is deep and crusty, and all day long I have been promising myself these cool monochromes. On the way through town, I pass a number of good friends, people whose company, rooms, dinner tables, and conversation have given me great pleasure, but I make excuses to hurry. The fact is, more talk with Lydia Harris keeps unrolling in my head. There is nothing I don’t want to know about her, nothing I don’t want her to know about me. It feels like lust, agitating and restless, but it is not that. It is more like some judgment that I seek, on the worth of my very nature.

As I work for Lydia, so Tom works for me, to reimburse my labor of paying for the lavender coat. Plan A was to have him in her house, helping me under the very eyes of Annabel Harris, but they didn’t want the place torn up during the holidays, and of course Tom must go to school. Plan B involves twenty hours of extra effort at three dollars an hour. Tom goes about his work without complaining, about an hour a day. He is on hour seven. He must keep a record of the hours and of his tasks, so that he can know what the coat cost him. Supervising this work, I am sober and demanding. When the work ends, I always relax and provide some treat. I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist.

Today he is washing windows—only the insides, since the weather is cold—and I sit with him while he does it. I try to meet his chatter with cool silence. He says, “Daddy, do you think Sparkle is going to get to fourteen hands?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Don’t count on it.”

“Fourteen hands is big for a pony. Over fourteen hands, it’s a little horse.”

“Don’t forget that corner.”

“Don’t you like Sparkle’s white feet? Her white socks. They don’t go above the pastern joint, so they aren’t stockings. That’s my favorite part about her.”

“Why don’t you rinse out your rag now? It’s getting a little dirty.”

“I think Sparkle is a very pretty pony. She has a good head, better than Henrietta’s. Do you think Mr. Halloran would let us breed to his stallion again? He’s a good stud. We could raise lots of ponies and train them and sell them, and give Mr. Halloran half the money.”

“I want you to go right along the putty there, and get that dust off. That’s from the woodstove, and it could eat into the woodwork eventually.”

“I love Sparkle. She’s really smart, Daddy. I had this carrot for her, and I was keeping it in my pocket, and she found it right away and put her nose into my pocket, but she was really careful and didn’t tear the pocket or anything.”

“Sparkle is a good pony.”

“I’m glad she’s a filly, because then, when she grows up, she can have foals, too. Can we build a cart and teach Sparkle to pull it? I bet, if we let her run around, she would stay close to the house, and then she could come to my window and put her head in and wake me up in the morning.”

“Son, she’s not a dog.”

“But she’s really smart, Daddy. She knows me, and she likes me, because I know just where to scratch her and stuff.”

“How was school?”

“Okay. I wish we could go skating.”

School is not something he talks about, but he didn’t talk about it last year, either. When he finishes the windows, I
see that he has done a good job, not only careful. I don’t compliment him or thank him, but get up deliberately and go out to milk the goats without inviting him along. After dinner, though, apropos of nothing, I suggest that we go skating in the moonlight, all together.

The pond is hidden from the house by trees, another scenic mistake I would have avoided had I sited the house properly. It is a biggish pond, though, almost an acre, fed by a little stream. It was dammed a hundred years ago at least, and they did such a good job that all I have had to do is replace a few stones from time to time. The night is moonless and starry, cold and still. There has been no snow since we last skated, so the ice is clear, fluorescent. Impatient, Tom skates away from us, backward, awkward but determined. This is something he has just learned this year. I watch Liz put on her white figure skates. She pulls the strings tight, ties them carefully, businesslike, but then she leans back and points her toes, as if the skates were ballet slippers, and admires them. She is the skater of us all, having taken lessons as a child. Our skates are good ones, have lasted since our marriage. Her mother was going to give us china and linens. We asked for skates as if we were taking a political position, so she gave us custom-made Canadian skates. Her revenge was that we had to go to the sports store for three separate fittings.

On skates, Liz is not immediately transformed. Her flat-footed personality clings at first—her overalls are baggy, her old down coat makes her thick and matter-of-fact, she keeps her hands in her pockets. She cuts across the pond four times, picking up twigs and other trash. She tempts me to stop watching her, but I don’t. I might miss the moment when her arms spread, her head turns, and she suddenly slips into a big backward circle, lazy but sharp, her body as silver and definite as a trout’s. Then she is moving backward on one leg, the other leg straight behind
her, toe pointed. Her head is flat, turned, her arms flung beyond her head. An invisible thread looped through her outstretched skate seems to be towing her across the ice. She finishes with a spin, and her hat flies off. Tom retrieves it and returns it to her. They embrace, and she takes his hand and twirls him around. He stumbles but keeps his feet, laughing.

Now it is my turn. I haven’t mastered much, but I can go fast, and the acre of the pond is hardly big enough to contain me when I am really in the mood. I begin by drifting around the edge, getting the feel of the ice, of my skates, of my legs and lower back, stroking, gliding, crossing into a turn. It is soothing and stimulating at the same time, so easy that I am tempted, as always, to go off into my own arabesque and triple jump. There is no reason why not. The body is willing, tingles with anticipation. Except that the readiness is an illusion, and all I have ever done is to go forward, fast, and backward, slowly. I make myself settle down. In the middle of the pond, Tommy is practicing, staring at his feet. I skate a circle around him.

“What are you trying to do, son?”

“There’s a way you can turn your skates to stop so that they shoot some snow into the air. Mommy can do it.”

“Don’t you have to be going pretty fast?”

“I’m going fast.”

I skate away in a big loop and return, orbit him, and skate away again. Across the pond, Liz is cutting figure eights, trying to track the same circles over and over again. Tommy continues to flail through a few big strides, slide, and then stop. He never falls, but he never looks like he is skating, either, more like he is leaping though shallow surf. I skate another ring around him, and then the phrase comes to me, “running rings around him.” I wonder if it’s possible, especially if he had some direction across the pond and no reason to limit his speed. I loop him again, this time orbiting
like a planet instead of a comet, Mars, say. Earth. Venus. “Hey, watch out,” he shouts. Back to Mars. Out to Jupiter, so that he doesn’t get self-conscious. It is a strange and exhilarating feeling, circling him like this, sort of stroboscopic. The pleasure is watching his intensity revealed sequentially—in his face, his taut left arm, the arc of his shoulders, his right hip, his back again. I can even trick myself into thinking I am stationary and he is doing a slow, impossible spin here in the glinting blue darkness. I am a camera. I am a fence, a palisade, a moat, enclosing him. Now he looks up and sighs, glances at me, and begins to skate away. The real test. I turn and skate after him, one loop: I make a silly face, he laughs. Around his back, then another loop—they have to be tight, which slows me down, makes them harder. I throw my arms out, stick out my tongue. He laughs again, then speeds up. Now I am almost chasing him, the hare after the tortoise. He heads for his mother. The distance between them begins to close up. I put on speed, flatten my ring, go straight at them. “Hey, Mom,” he calls. Her arm goes out, oblivious. Between them is a doorway, a window, the eye of a needle. I shoot through it, brushing both of them lightly with the flapping tails of my coat. “Hey!” says Liz. I imagine them falling into one another’s arms.