Daisy floated out in a new hot-pink-with-white-polka-dot silk mini-dress and matching scarf tied around her throat as mentioned, with a white hair band holding up her black-as-black tresses. As annoyed as you might be with her you couldn't help but think she looked good enough to eat. She kissed my mother, who was already unloading the fridge of everything that we might possibly eat for dinner, culling as she went for mold and wilt and freezer burn. My mother, God bless her soul, was nothing if not dependable. It's a terrible thing to admit, but I used to think she wasn't the swiftest doe in the forest, because she rarely did anything else but keep house and feed everybody and try to make Pop's life run smoothly and comfortably, even as he was often a jerk to her and had several love affairs and was universally acknowledged to be a Hall of Fame jerk. She rarely read the newspaper and never read a book and wasn't even interested in movies or television, her main personal activity being shopping for clothes, not haute couture but sort of Queens Boulevard country club, bright bold colors and white patent leather bags and shoes and bugeye sunglasses. Every once in a while on no special occasion Pop would spring for a marble-sized diamond ring or a string of fat pearls, and I suspect it was my mother exacting tribute for his latest exposed dalliance.
Lately I've been thinking that her lack was more emotional than intellectual; it wasn't because the gray matter didn't work well enough but that she preferred to keep her life as uncomplicated as possible, more thought and rumination leading only to misery and remorse and the realization that she could never leave him, that she could never really start over again.
Daisy twirled for my father and said, "What you think, Pop?"
"Gorgeous, doll, gorgeous." Pop used doll whenever they were together, Your old lady or Your wife when speaking about her to me.
"I got it at Macy's," she said, hardly glancing over. "It wasn't on sale price, but I couldn't wait."
"On you, it's a bargain at twice the price."
"You super guy, Pop."
"But I'm speechless at this moment," he said, smiling his Here's-how-to-handle-a-woman smile. "As Santayana once said, 'Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.'
"You too much, Pop!"
"Is this a liver or a beefsteak?" Nonna said, holding up a frozen brown slab.
No one answered, as no one knew.
Nonna, accustomed to the nonreply, said, "I hope it's a beefsteak."
"The dress looks real good," I said to Daisy, feeling I should utter something, bring at least some bread to the table, if not wine. And then I was all set to offer even more, maybe I was going to suggest running her right out to the department store and buying a bauble to go with the pretty dress, some earrings maybe, when Pop pulled a long dark blue velveteen jewelry case from his pocket and presented it to Daisy.
"For me?"
"Of course it's for you, doll. Open it."
She cracked the lid. It was a string of freshwater pearls, the beads small but delicate and dazzling in their iridescence. It was amazingly tasteful, even for Pop, who always surprised you with his eye for finish and detail, which somehow was more Park Avenue than Arthur Avenue.
"Look, Jerry, look what Pop got!" Daisy said.
"A customer of mine imports these from Japan, and he gave me a nice rate on them. They're just as good as Mikimotos."
"It's not my birthday even," Daisy said, hushed by the glitter in her hands. "This is so nice. This is so pretty."
"Call it a reward, for all the hardship of the last couple of weeks. Ask Nonna over there. It's no picnic, putting up with us Battle men. We're stubborn and prideful and we ask no less than the world of our women. The world. Your husband Jerome here is no different. We all know he can be sullen, but that's because he's always been too serious. Not like Bobby, who knew what real fun was. He was just like you. So you better learn patience, with this one."
Pop tousled my hair, and I let him, because incredulity freezes you, because I was like that back then, because Pop was Pop and I wasn't. Daisy was the one who stopped him, if only because she was hugging him, kissing him on the forehead and cheek, hooting a little, practically vibrating with glee and gratitude. Nonna had already ceased paying further attention to the scene, gone back to the daily calculus of how to make a meal from what was at hand. The kids ran in from outside and Pop had a handful of hard candies for them, as usual, toffees and sours and butterscotches. This was the minor parade my father always finessed for himself, wherever he went: my wife and kids, joyous with the old man. I drifted around the gleeful huddle and asked Nonna if she needed anything.
"I don't think so, honey," she said, never, ever ironical. She was scraping the freezer burn from the ice-hard meat, a little pile of root-beer-colored shavings collecting at the edge of her knife blade. "I think I have everything I need."
I N T H E W E E K S A F T E R Pop came bearing gifts, everything pretty much went to shit. It did, it really did, though not in the manner I thought it would. I figured I'd be the one generating the enmity, the one beaming out the negative vibes, the go-to-hell shine first thing in the morning and stay-on-your-side rays before clicking off the bedside lamp at night. I thought Pop's stunt (which I should have been ready for) and Daisy's giddy celebrations would lend me the pissy high ground, at least for a few days, long enough to keep Daisy on the defensive and not out there spending our future, long enough so I could figure out how to fix the problem without forever placing her under house arrest. But the fact was, Daisy was the one who took further umbrage. She wouldn't speak to me, not a word, her silence made that much more unpleasant by the fact that she seemed livelier and brighter in her dealings with everyone else.
Did the time mark a strange kind of renaissance for her? Was it, in language Theresa might employ, an epochal turn? I really don't know about that. What's clear to me is that Daisy pretty much exploded with life, and our life, as it went, exploded right along with her. Up to then, my basic conception of crazy was still the one I'd held since youth, the picture of a raven-haired Irish girl named Clara who climbed the trees in her pleated Catholic-school skirt not wearing underwear and lobbed Emily Dickinson down to me in a wraithlike voice (I cannot be with You/It would be Life/and Life is over there /Behind the Shelf), my trousers clingy with fear and arousal.
With Daisy, I didn't know, nor did anyone else, for that matter, including Dr. Derricone, the extent of her troubles, the ornate reach and complication. Those initial shopping sprees would in the end seem like the smallest indiscretions, filched candy from the drugstore, a lingering ass pat at a neighborhood cocktail party, nothing you couldn't slough off with a laugh, nothing you couldn't later recall with some fondness even, with wistful rue.
The first thing was, she would hardly sleep. If at all. After Pop venit and vidit and vincit that weekend and she stopped talking to me, Daisy's metabolism went into overdrive. We usually went to bed at 11 or so, after the news for me and maybe a bath for her, but she started getting up at 5 in the morning, and then 4 and 3 and 2, until it got to the point when she didn't even get ready for bed, not bothering to change into a nightgown or brush her teeth or even take a soak. A couple times in the middle of the night I awoke to the plash-plash of water, and I peered through the curtains to see, in lovely silhouette, Daisy paddling around in the pool with the inner tube hooped beneath her arms. She was naked, just going back and forth, back and forth, and I had the thought that I should go out there and keep her company. But I desperately needed my sleep back then(these days it's a different story, as I lie in wait for the muted thwap of the morning paper on the driveway) and rather than get up I know exactly what I did, which was to just fall back into the pillow and scratch at myself half-mast and maybe dream in sentimental hues of gorgeous black swans, who must always swim alone.