I did cry. I didn’t think I’d really turned into a bitch. I thought he was in love with someone else. And the Merthiolate took three days of hot baths to come off. Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.
Georgie and I go to Woolworth’s to buy barrettes. We walk almost aimlessly up and down the aisles, Georgie singing a song she thinks she’s heard on The Best of Broadway: “ ‘When you walk through a store hold your head up high …’ ”
In the housewares aisle she teaches me songs she has learned at school. Most of them have trees and flowers and animals in them. I think at peace talks and arms negotiations all those magisterial, overweight men should be forced to sing such rounds of “White Coral Bells” and “Lady Bug, Lady Bug.” It might save us. How afterward could those same men lumber gruffly off to go press buttons, lily of the valley decking their garden walks, checking their misfired testosterone.
I have fantasies. Such plans, such hopes. Walk on, walk on with holes in your heart.
George pulls a damp Band-Aid from her pinky and shows me the crinkled fish skin beneath. “Little white fish pinky,” she sings and dances it in the air, her finger sticking upright like a startled periscope.
At Hank’s I ask Gerard if he scribbled on my Mme. Charpentier. He looks at me and his mouth drops; a small cave opens up in his beard. He is clearly appalled. “Why the hell would I do something like that?”
I’m sorry I’ve asked him. I don’t dare tell him that George suggested it. She, of course, is the logical suspect.
“Sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t really thinking, I just thought I’d ask, I wasn’t really serious.” I try to change the subject. “How’s the singing going?”
Gerard beams widely and I’m relieved. “Just the news I was going to break. I’ve landed a part with the Free Verdi Company. I’m Don José in Carmen.”
“But that’s not Verdi.”
“That’s not the point. Jesus, Benna. You’re supposed to say congratulations. I get to kill the soprano.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “You’re going to be great at it. I can feel it in my bones.” I lean over the table, my sleeve dragging in some coffee, and give him a kiss.
Thursday I take George to Dr. Nintz, the eye doctor. George has grown suddenly frightened. She doesn’t understand how she’s supposed to look into the eye machine. Dr. Nintz smiles and shows her. “Tell me what’s in the top row,” he says.
“A, F, T …” Her voice is a whisper, a speck. For someone just beginning to read, the wordless arrangement of the letters must be scary, jumbled together like a foreign language, like the names of Indian tribes.
“You’ll have to speak louder than that, dear,” says the doctor.
Afterward we go to the optician’s with Dr. Nintz’s prescription and pick out frames. She tries on five different kinds and looks in the mirror as if she’s not really seeing. Perhaps she’s perplexed at her own reflection. She doesn’t seem to care what frames she gets.
“Which do you like best, kiddo?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. Mom, you choose.”
“I like these.” I point to a pair of clear whitish frames with silver hinges.
“Okay,” she says.
I remember having to get glasses when I was young, though my mother always took me to an eye clinic for examinations. I had to stand in line with about a dozen other children, and then we were raced through the eye charts, holding, in turn, one hand over each of our eyes. We had to indicate which way the E was going by indicating up, down, left, right with the hand that wasn’t covering up the eye. I always thought that the E stood for “eye” and its different positions were the four different ways your eyes could be impaired. (That was also back in the days when I thought the ice cream man lived in his truck.) My mother had once worked at the clinic; she thought it a fine place. I hated it. Later, as an adult, I tried to justify my hatred philosophically if not economically: a clinic was an unfortunate symbol of our entire society, a stark, fluorescent hieroglyph; every experience and institution was a virtual clinic, always looking over its shoulder, saying “Next?” and diminishing us all; whether it was love or art or graduate school or genetics or history or Auschwitz, there were always too many forms, too many people both ahead of and behind you in line, so close you could hear their gurgling and breathing and the impatient shifting of their weight from foot to foot. If George had been scared at Dr. Nintz’s office, I certainly wasn’t ever going to take her to an eye clinic.
Five days later we pick up the actual glasses. She wears them out of the optician’s office, unsure and clutching my arm. “They feel funny, but I can see better, Mom. Wow.” And she begins itemizing things, the rags of leaves on trees, on sidewalks, the headlights of cars.
“You look very pretty,” I tell her.
· · ·
From the backyard I am taking in the evening: The trees on the horizon release the moon, upward, the electric egg of the moon in a slow ovulation across the sky, lone as a diamond, as one bad eye roaming.
The ants are my friends. They’re blowing in the wind.
When Darrel stays over, we don’t talk about our ex-spouses or the war or anything. We compare Donald Duck imitations.
“Yours is good,” I say, lying next to him, naked and goose-fleshed. Duck-bumped.
“Here,” says Darrel. “I’ll teach you how to do Donald Duck when he’s mad,” and he lets loose with a blustery duck noise that vibrates the whole bed. “Try it,” he says.
“What do you do?”
“You just do the same voice, only you shake your head back and forth real fast.”
I try, but it comes out with a lot of spit, and Darrel laughs at me. “Oh, well,” he says.
“Sorry. This is the sort of thing I’m usually quite good at. I must be having an off day.” And then I do my imitation of Julie Andrews at the automat — which Darrel finds quite astounding in its way.
I am walking to my last class of the day, my Darrel class. The October air is breezy and clear, like a day at the beach. The trees have shed a large crunchy tea all around campus and a few students are lying out on it, faces closed and aimed at the sun. The dogs love this kind of weather. They are out, also, frolicking around, nibbling at each other. I’m afraid of them and hope they stay where they are and don’t romp too close to the sidewalk. You can’t trust dogs. They always look like they’re smiling. They spot each other from blocks away and dash to put their noses in each other’s groin. They know things about you that no one else does, things you haven’t told them but that they sense — that you are menstruating, that you are scared — and they take advantage.
In class the teacher distributed a student poem which began: “The autumn of adulthood turneth brown.” These kids thought they were writing the Bible. It madeth her ill. It madeth her lie down in green pastures, it madeth her that ill.
In the back Darrel said something to Melanie Masters and they both laughed. She was young, dainty, pretty as a Seventeen magazine. She needed practice in the art of missing belt loops. The teacher felt herself flush, her heart pound, and she looked away, at someone else, at someone else who had his hand raised and was about to say that when talking about getting older you don’t need to say both autumn and brown, one implies the other.
How had this happened? One Kafkaesque day she’d woken up and discovered she was a teacher at a community college, the perpetrator of a public fraud. The faces all about her seemed suddenly to alter and flicker in the light like mother-of-pearl. She had nothing to say to them. She had nothing to say and ended the class early.