“These are their souls,” I show Gerard later that night. I pull out the index cards and spread them across the coffee table. He looks at each one thoughtfully, sipping scotch. He finally swallows and looks up, a look of tremendous seriousness.
“And you’re going to go on and try to work with these kids?”
I shrug. “Only fourteen more weeks. They’re not all kids. I have an escaped housewife and a Vietnam vet. It’s better than all eighteen-year-olds.”
Gerard shakes his head. “Look at this one, Benna.” He reaches to his left and holds up one of the cards. I look and see a big blue-inked cube with wavy lines coming out of it, swastikas at the end of each squiggle. “You’re gonna try to teach poems to this guy?”
“Hell, it’s only community college, Gerard.”
“Sounds like one of the circles Dante forgot to put in the Inferno.” Gerard believes the other forgotten circles are Carpet Town and the Ramada Inn.
“Look, if all else fails, I can always sing almost any Emily Dickinson poem to ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’ ” I smile and flutter my eyelashes.
“You know so much about literature,” twinkles Gerard out of one eye. He grabs me for a fast tango about the room, the citrusy beard of him against my face. The tango isn’t quite right for “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” which I am now singing, country-western style, but we pretend not to notice.
“Yeah, I know,” I sigh. “Aren’t I devastating?”
Georgie’s first day of school is tomorrow. She needs cheering up so I drive us downtown to Children’s Clothes so that she can pick out a dress to wear. The store is small and the three saleswomen are all sisters, widows with different last names. The rods against the walls are loaded with dresses.
Mrs. Hazelstein knows Georgianne. “Well, Georgianne. Looking for something to wear to school tomorrow? I’ve got just the ticket. In fact, I’ve got many tickets.” Mrs. Hazelstein winks at me, and George follows her, silent, obedient, over to the size sixes, which, for some reason, are hanging from the highest, not the lowest, rod on the wall. Georgie looks up at the dresses, head dumped back, mouth hung flaccidly ajar like a kid in the first row of a movie theater.
Mrs. Hazelstein pushes clear the size eights and size fives and proceeds to glide each size six, one by one, slowly from left to right across the rod so that Georgie can view them.
“Oh, now here’s a nice one,” she says and lifts a very adult-looking purple knit dress down off the rack, holding it in front of George.
“Ya like that, George?” I ask dubiously.
George steps back, suddenly afraid of Mrs. Hazelstein. She hides behind my legs and slips a hand inside the rear pocket of my jeans. “I dunno,” she says softly.
Mrs. Hazelstein looks at me for advice. I have none. “Perhaps that’s a little warm for September, anyway. Tell me, Georgianne, if you see something you like.” Mrs. Hazelstein continues the slow sliding parade across the rod.
“That one,” whispers Georgie, finger in her mouth.
“Did she say something?” Mrs. Hazelstein asks me.
“Which one, honey?”
“That one,” she points. “The one with the babies.”
“This one?” Mrs. Hazelstein takes down a cotton dress printed all over with little peach-colored babies, their heads haloed in bonnets.
Georgie is entranced. She tries it on in the dressing room, comes out to get buttoned and tied, and swirls around shyly in front of the three-way mirror. It’s a hideous mud of pinks, blues, and yellows. Something’s crooked with the collar. George, however, is smiling, touching the little babies on her dress.
“Are you sure now? You’re the one that’s going to have to wear it.” My mother: That is what my mother always said to me.
“Yup.”
Mrs. Hazelstein shrugs.
We put it on my charge account there, and Georgie wears it home, her old shirt and jeans in a plastic Children’s Clothes bag that draws shut with a string. She fastens her seat belt carefully and continues staring at her dress.
When we get home she takes the dress off, lays it carefully on her bed, looks at it awhile, and then takes a Mr. Bubble bath. “Don’t forget your ears!” I call and then go into the kitchen to fry chops, boil potatoes, make a salad. Ten minutes later, however, there is a howling. “Georgie?” I call and dash to the bathroom, push open the door. Not since my husband left have we ever really latched it.
Georgie is sitting in the tub amidst quickly dissipating suds. She has lather on her face, her eyes squinted shut, and is blowing her nose into a washcloth, but stops and begins to wail as giant soap bubbles bloom forth from her nostrils. I grab a clean towel and wipe soap off her face. “What’s going on here? Didja get soap in your nose?”
Georgie nods. She holds up a little soap chunk she has broken off the bar. She is crying. “I put it up my nose,” she sobs. “I wanted to be all clean for tomorrow for school and now it won’t come out.”
“A friend of mine put soap bits up her nose last night,” the teacher told her ten o’clock class. “So I didn’t get a chance to memorize your names. I know some of you have these reversible jobs like James Russell or Jay Kim, so you’re going to have to help me out a bit here, okay?”
My husband was a lawyer. I met him at the firm I worked for in New York, right after I dropped out of grad school. I got married, not because I’d met Mr. Right, but simply because I felt like getting married. That was also back in the days when I would shave one leg and not the other, just to see what would happen. But I had, I thought, figured it out. People didn’t get married because they had found someone. It wasn’t a treasure hunt. It was more like musical chairs: Wherever you were when the music of being single stopped, that’s where you sat. I was twenty-six when the notes started winding down and going minor. A dark loneliness, in a raincoat and fedora, scuffed in instead. Or maybe I was just tired of saying I was twenty-six years old and having it sound like “I am a transsexual.” Also, two different people in the office had asked me if I was married. When I said no, they acted very surprised. To me it was a preposterous question, like grown-ups at a wedding, trying to be funny and asking the flower girl if her husband’s in town. But these people were serious. They asked me if I’d ever been married. I had, they said, some sort of married look. The thought burrowed in me like a fever tick: a married look. When I met my husband, the old musical-chair music had already begun to skitter to a halt. I clutched and sat. He was new at the firm and liked me because I typed his briefs faster than anyone. (“Yeah, I’ll bet you did,” says Eleanor, still.) After work he and I would head out for drinks. He knew a lot about food, fish, planets — he was an information fetishist, and I was impressed. He knew that a pound of a certain smoked fish in Iceland was the equivalent in benzopyrene to four thousand cigarettes. He was the first person I’d ever heard pronounce Reykjavik out loud. He knew that human beings never dream smells. Later, of course, I discovered the dust bunnies under the bed of his souclass="underline" He liked to do weird things with cameras; he could never say anything sweet or romantic; his heart was frozen as a winter pipe — it was no wonder he knew so much about Iceland. By the end of our marriage I was sitting in our house in outer suburbia, wondering, Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said Fuck it and given up. It doesn’t go anywhere special, it’s just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much. Three days after my husband walked out of the house, his rented Mazda veered off into a wall of blasted-out rock, on his way to the airport. He’d been planning a trip to the Caribbean somewhere. I got the house in outer suburbia and an imaginary ankle-biter. Actually, once I thought we’d brewed up a real ankle-biter and when I phoned my husband at work to tell him that it looked like the rabbit had died, he’d started cursing and shouting because he thought I meant our car, our VW with the RUST IN PEACE, the POETIC LICENSE, and THE MORAL MAJORITY IS NEITHER bumper stickers. Later he took me for a drink—“a drink with milk in it,” he insisted — and spent a lot of time joking around with the waitress. This is what happens to a marriage.