Secrets & Surprises (15 page)

Carlos made my aunt two marionettes: a bride and a groom, with pointed silk shoes on the bride and rabbit-fur slippers on the groom. They both wrote letters to thank him. They have never asked us, since I came here, to come to visit.

At dusk Nick comes, a bottle of beer in his hand, his gray knit stocking cap lowered over his eyebrows. I am always happy to see him. I never see him alone, and I have never properly thanked him for bringing me here. The last time he came, when he got a sliver of wood in his thumb from stroking an unfinished marionette and I tweezed it out, I wanted to hold his hand longer than necessary to tweeze; I thought that I’d close the bathroom door and say thank you, but he was eager to be back in the living room, embarrassed to have cried out.

From the front window I watch them go down the plank from door to field, and over to Nick’s car. The baby waves, and they wave back. The car starts and fishtails out of the snowy driveway. The baby looks to me for amusement. I settle us by the fire, baby on my lap, and do what she likes best: I seat her facing me and bend my head until my lips graze the top of her head, and softly sing songs into her hair.

He does not know what childhood diseases he has had. He thinks he remembers itching with the measles.

He has lost his passport, but has extra passport photographs in a jar that once was filled with Vaseline.

With Nick and Dominic he plays Go on Mondays.

He washes his own sweaters, and shapes them.

He can pare radishes into the shape of rosebuds.

The woman he lived with five years before, Marguerite, inspired him to begin making the marionettes because she carved and painted decoys. Once he got furious with her and pulled all her fennel out of the garden before it was grown, and she came at him screaming, punching him and trying to push him over with the palms of her hands.

I practice typing by typing these facts about him. He nods his head only—whether to acknowledge that these are facts (some told to me by Nick) or because my typing is improving, I don’t know. Sometimes I type lies, or what I think are lies, and that usually makes him laugh:

He secretly likes Monopoly better than Go.

He dreams of lactobacilli.

He wants a Ferrari.

I have typed a list for him that says I was born to parents named Toni and. Tony, and that they still live in Virginia, where I grew up. That I have no brothers or sisters who can console them for their wild child, who wanted to run away to New York at seventeen. When I was eighteen, they sent me to live with my aunt in Vermont, and I went through a year and a half of college at Bennington. I fell in love with a musician. We skied cross-country (I was more timid than my parents knew), and in the spring he taught me to drive a car. I learned to like Mexican food. I learned to make cheese, and to glaze windows. I ended the list here; I wanted him to ask if this man was the baby’s father, where he went, what my life was really like before I met that man, if I was happy or sad living in my aunt’s house. I have told him a lot about myself. Sometimes I’ve talked for so long that we are both left exhausted. He is so good to us that I want him to remember these facts: height and weight and age, and details of my childhood, color preferences, favorite foods. Sometimes, in his quiet way, he’ll ask a question, say he understands. Last week, after I had rambled on for hours, I stopped abruptly. He knew he had to give something. He was painting a unicorn white; it was suspended from the beam with fishline so he could paint it all at once and let it air-dry, steadying it only at the last beneath a hoof, then dabbing paint on the last spot of bare wood. He took a deep breath, sighed and began: Should he raise chickens? Do we want our own eggs, so we will not have to rely on Dime?

Tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day or night, we have to talk.

I have to know if we are to stay always, or for a long time, or a short time.

When he talked to me about eggs, I went along with his conversation. I said we should get another hive, make more honey.

We are thinking about the spring.

I pick up the baby’s Christmas present from Nick: an Octascope (a kaleidoscope without the colored glass), which she uses as a toy to roll across the floor. I hold it and feel as powerful raising it to my eye as a captain with his periscope. I aim it at the two toys suspended from the beams, a camel and a donkey, and watch them proliferate into a circular zoo. I put on my jacket and go to the door and open it. It closes behind me with a tap. I have never before lived where there is no lock on the door. I thought that a baby would make demands until I was driven crazy. When I step out, she is silent inside, dog curled beside her, waiting. I raise the Octascope to eye level, and in floods the picture: the fields, spread white with snow, the palest ripple of pink at the horizon—eight triangles of the same image, as still as a painted picture when my hand is steady on the Octascope.

Bat the Cat darts from under a juniper bush to crouch between my legs. It will rain, or snow. Pink blurs to pearly gray.

This is the dead of winter.

Weekend

O

n Saturday morning Lenore is up before the others. She carries her baby into the living room and puts him in George’s favorite chair, which tilts because its back legs are missing, and covers him with a blanket. Then she lights a fire in the fireplace, putting fresh logs on a few embers that are still glowing from the night before. She sits down on the floor beside the chair and checks the baby, who has already gone back to sleep—a good thing, because there are guests in the house. George, the man she lives with, is very hospitable and impetuous; he extends invitations whenever old friends call, urging them to come spend the weekend. Most of the callers are his former students—he used to be an English professor—and when they come it seems to make things much worse. It makes
him
much worse, because he falls into smoking too much and drinking and not eating, and then his ulcer bothers him. When the guests leave, when the weekend is over, she has to cook bland food: applesauce, oatmeal, puddings. And his drinking does not taper off easily anymore; in the past he would stop cold when the guests left, but lately he only tapers down from Scotch to wine, and drinks wine well into the week—a lot of wine, perhaps a whole bottle with his meal—until his stomach is much worse. He is hard to live with. Once when a former student, a woman named Ruth, visited them—a lover, she suspected—she overheard George talking to her in his study, where he had taken her to see a photograph of their house before he began repairing it. George had told Ruth that she, Lenore, stayed with him because she was simple. It hurt her badly, made her actually dizzy with surprise and shame, and since then, no matter who the guests are, she never feels quite at ease on the weekends. In the past she enjoyed some of the things she and George did with their guests, but since overhearing what he said to Ruth she feels that all their visitors have been secretly told the same thing about her. To her, though, George is usually kind. But she is sure that is the reason he has not married her, and when he recently remarked on their daughter’s intelligence (she is five years old, a girl named Maria) she found that she could no longer respond with simple pride; now she feels spite as well, feels that Maria exists as proof of her own good genes. She has begun to expect perfection of the child. She knows this is wrong, and she has tried hard not to communicate her anxiety to Maria, who is already, as her kindergarten teacher says, “untypical.”

At first Lenore loved George because he was untypical, although after she had moved in with him and lived with him for a while she began to see that he was not exceptional but a variation on a type. She is proud of observing that, and she harbors the discovery—her silent response to his low opinion of her. She does not know why he found her attractive—in the beginning he did—because she does not resemble the pretty, articulate young women he likes to invite, with their lovers or girl friends, to their house for the weekend. None of these young women have husbands; when they bring a man with them at all they bring a lover, and they seem happy not to be married. Lenore, too, is happy to be single—not out of conviction that marriage is wrong but because she knows that it would be wrong to be married to George if he thinks she is simple. She thought at first to confront him with what she had overheard, to demand an explanation. But he can weasel out of any corner. At best, she can mildly fluster him, and later he will only blame it on Scotch. Of course she might ask why he has all these women come to visit, why he devotes so little time to her or the children. To that he would say that it was the quality of the time they spent together that mattered, not the quantity. He has already said that, in fact, without being asked. He says things over and over so that she will accept them as truths. And eventually she does. She does not like to think long and hard, and when there is an answer—even his answer—it is usually easier to accept it and go on with things. She goes on with what she has always done: tending the house and the children and George, when he needs her. She likes to bake and she collects art postcards. She is proud of their house, which was bought cheaply and improved by George when he was still interested in that kind of work, and she is happy to have visitors come there, even if she does not admire them or even like them.

Except for teaching a night course in photography at a junior college once a week, George has not worked since he left the university two years ago, after he was denied tenure. She cannot really tell if he is unhappy working so little, because he keeps busy in other ways. He listens to classical music in the morning, slowly sipping herbal teas, and on fair afternoons he lies outdoors in the sun, no matter how cold the day. He takes photographs, and walks alone in the woods. He does errands for her if they need to be done. Sometimes at night he goes to the library or goes to visit friends; he tells her that these people often ask her to come too, but he says she would not like them. This is true—she would not like them. Recently he has done some late-night cooking. He has always kept a journal, and he is a great letter writer. An aunt left him most of her estate, ten thousand dollars, and said in her will that he was the only one who really cared, who took the time, again and again, to write. He had not seen his aunt for five years before she died, but he wrote regularly. Sometimes Lenore finds notes that he has left for her. Once, on the refrigerator, there was a long note suggesting clever Christmas presents for her family that he had thought of while she was out. Last week he scotch-taped a slip of paper to a casserole dish that contained leftover veal stew, saying: “This was delicious.” He does not compliment her verbally, but he likes to let her know that he is pleased.

A few nights ago—the same night they got a call from Julie and Sarah, saying they were coming for a visit—she told him that she wished he would talk more, that he would confide in her.

“Confide what?” he said.

“You always take that attitude,” she said. “You pretend that you have no thoughts. Why does there have to be so much silence?”