This morning the program is devoting a full hour to the music of Kiss Me Kate, and George and I, in the shower, act out parts from it, contriving gestures for all the words, something we call the Eensy-Weensy Spider School of Singing. On “I Hate Men” we soap each other’s shoulder blades and scowl. (“If they can send one man to the moon,” Eleanor’s always saying, “why can’t they send them all?”) On “Why Can’t You Behave” I shake my finger like a good, offended mother-slash-lover, and on “Too Darn Hot” Georgie giggles and stands behind the angle of the water and fiddles with the faucets and the temperature, which is when I say, “Yikes, this is where I get out,” push aside the curtain and drip out onto the bathmat. Georgie is in a giggle fit, like a little girl who hasn’t laughed for a long time. When she, too, finally steps out, she puts her hands on my hips and says, “You’re getting fat, Mom. You’re turning into a hippie!” and she giggles some more and I say, “Gee thanks,” and her eyes are wet with laughing, her skin pink from steam and heat, her tiny nipples like two thin slices of hot dog, and we powder each other’s backs with a blue-gingham powder mitt, which was on sale last week at Woolworth’s, wrap our heads and bodies in red, clean towels, and return to the shredded wheat downstairs in the kitchen, bring bowls out into the living room, turn on the TV, and watch cartoons.
At around noon the phone rings. It’s Darrel.
“Hi,” he says.
I tell him I’m watching Saturday morning cartoons, all space heroes and ray guns, and he’s clearly impressed. He wants to know if I’d like to have dinner tonight, and because I really want to spend tonight with Georgianne, I say no but can we make it for next Saturday? and he says all right how about seven o’clock and I say great.
I like Saturdays. Now that I’m a merry widow, they feel happy, aspiring. When I was married, my husband and I would always fight on Saturdays: That was when we had the most time. I remember one Saturday, after The Best of Broadway had done 1776, and after my husband had declared twice in a loud voice “I cannot abide this musical,” he asked me to get his glasses from the bedroom, since I was closer. I said no, and told him he was lazy and presumptuous and had no sense of moral outrage at anything, at which point he bolted up and said loudly, “You needling bitch, if you really believe I’m so despicable then you’re a masochistic scumbag in love with my prick.” Our marriage, I suddenly realized, wasn’t going well.
I hadn’t heard the word scumbag since I was a kid. Eddie across the road had yelled it at my brother Louis once and Louis had yelled it back. I stared at my husband. This was a man who could say subpoena duces tecum like it was soup. Scumbag? It terrified me. My heart did a fast crawl out and onto the hilly dirt road of aloneness and escape; it’s an image I have: a wide dirt road which undulates like a roller coaster. I think it’s somewhere in Lebanon.
Later we had an argument about his involvement with a woman at work, and I stormed into the dining room and took the plaster bust of George Eliot he’d given me for Christmas (George’s middle name was Eliot; this was his sense of humor) and broke it against the stereo he’d given me for my birthday. Two birds with one of the birds.
We were rotten and cruel. Especially on Saturdays. We’d say things like, “Blow it out your ass, Bingo-Boots,” though I’m not sure why.
The rest of the afternoon George and I clean the house. I wash the dishes and run the vacuum cleaner quickly through the living room. Georgie dusts: “These cobs sure do make webs,” she says. She thinks this is fun. Her friend Isabelle Shubby from next door is helping her dust, a volunteer from the neighborhood. The Shubbys’ house is separated from ours by two driveways and three trees. It’s a big turquoise split-level, the only one on a street of brick and stucco. Her parents have noisy parties, which they invite me to so that I won’t get annoyed and call the police. I’ve never gone, however, though someday I just might show up in lace and emeralds or something. Isabelle has brought her Labrador, Adams, and we put him in the bathroom with newspapers on the floor. I don’t like dogs, large bumping dogs. They have a crowd behavior like humans: They gang up and go straight for the genitals. Besides, Adams doesn’t like the vacuum cleaner, which I keep turning on and off and moving from room to room.
In the living room Mme. Charpentier and Her Daughters is crooked. It is dry-mounted and unframed and I have to balance it between push-pins. I turn off the vacuum, go to re-align it, and notice a small dark scribbling, as with a black felt pen, in the left corner. It looks like the sort of thing Georgie used to do to books and papers of mine when she was little.
“Georgianne,” I say. “Did you do this to the Renoir print?”
She comes closer. “Don’t yell at me,” she says. “How do you know it’s not Gerard? He coulda done it.” She looks at the black squiggle, then moves on, dusting the TV, her little arm making circular movements with the rag. Isabelle has stopped to look at a magazine.
“I’m not accusing you, I’m just asking you.” Neither of us says anything. After a minute I add, “What makes you think Gerard might have done it?”
“I dunno,” she shrugs. She’s still concentrating on her darkening dustcloth. “He was looking at it.” Isabelle glances at me fearfully. She says she’s wondering if Adams is okay.
“I’m sure he’s okay,” I say.
The dark line on the Renoir looks like a miniature of the crack on the side of the house, the seam of a jigsaw puzzle, a tear in the blue of a dress.
· · ·
The news tonight is about Congress and about polyps, both threatened by man. We watch, glued, frozen. We have ice cream for dessert. After the news George and I watch a sociologically minded talk show whose program tonight is on talented, autistic children. One of them, Donna, is in the studio audience, between her parents. She looks only twelve, but is seventeen. The host makes a mistake, tells the world she’s fourteen, then apologizes. Her black eyes dart around, and then she retreats into the sweatered hump of herself. Autistic or not, she knows this is a humiliation: to be called fourteen in front of millions of viewers, when you are really seventeen. Her mother next to her, I can see, in the corner of the screen, tries to console her by squeezing her hand. Donna has made something of a national reputation for herself drawing greeting cards. The silver-haired host bends down to compliment her, as if she’s a lobotomized dwarf, a midge, a worm; her features suddenly relax when the host says again, “Donna, you’re really very talented,” and her mouth and eyes fall into all the right places, and the voice that says “Thank you” is a low, strong, woman’s voice.
It’s as if I know the girl. She almost has my name, and I bet we know things about each other: slipping behind the hips and shoulders of our mother, squeezing her hand, we don’t want to talk to this silver-haired man, we see things clearly, we can sit here all day locked up yet seeing, our mouths unnecessary, though they may smile to be polite. I have been her: the darkness, the slump, the fat splotched cheeks, the frumpish skirts. People talk past us, we are invisible; when they say our name, if they really look at us, they don’t mean it, they only want us to say anything, anything stupid, but our dark woman’s voice, we know, would terrify.