Common sense, someone else might say. Simple common sense should have told Erin and me that we were heading out awfully far over a surface that was awfully thin. But what did common sense ever have to do with the situation at Mr. Challait’s? Conclusions, decisions, all brands of being sensible here meant nothing beside the slack-bellied wreck whose groanings made us doubt our very names. Here the only rule which could be counted on was behind the bedroom’s lock. By the onset of fall weather, I could no longer bring myself to wonder for any length of time about Robbie and how he was made. My curiosity had instead been transferred to the journal Erin continued to write in night after night. She’d ordered me never to look.
So I looked, on the first night that was truly cold. Erin was standing beside the kitchen stove as if she’d never leave it, bending away from me over the heat to study her face in the chrome panel where the dials were. I went out to set the table and wound up in the bedroom alone. Her journal, one of those 1940’s black-and-white composition books, sat on the lower shelf of her nightstand under a magazine. It was the magazine, I think, that hardened me enough to look. I knew she’d written in the journal since she’d last read the magazine; I knew precisely what the routine had been last time we were in here. But she’d slipped the journal underneath because of some leftover schoolgirl impulse. I lay across the bed with one leg cocked. I hadn’t turned five pages before I got even angrier. The entries seemed to be, without exception, about Robbie. I shifted my legs and ran a finger down the pages, skimming lines to find my name. Not there. Not there. But Erin could go on under three separate date headings about Robbie’s bee-in-a-tree song:
Human beings see the whole tree, the
whole leafy outer surface, but to see
the tree from the inside, the way a
bee does, to see the bark change color
and to see the aphids crawling over
the knots, to circle and circle and
still
not see the whole tree in the
human way, this requires a drastic
change in point of view.
I lay there stunned. So much thought. So much exploratory digging. In fact, I had to do some internal explorations myself, had to poke around considerably before I discovered the pebble I felt under my heart and identified it as betrayal. I lay there feeling betrayed. Therefore — and because the chill had made the house quieter, the wood in the stairs less responsive to the pressure of steps — I didn’t notice Erin’s coming until she was in the room.
“Tommy!”
If in my life there has ever been the kind of shouting and argument to make me think that my experience was going from bad to worse, that the next explosion would be the last straw, that in fact left me looking forward to the tragic breakdowns now sure to come, looking forward because at least the end would decide, would decide — if in my life there’s been one brush with the apocalypse, it came that evening as the dinner grew cold on the table downstairs. Erin lost control. The knob on my wrist ached for days from protecting myself against the lamp she threw. I knew I’d done wrong but I’d never expected such bile, such unpredictable whines and shouts. “It’s private!” was her main point. “It’s like, like how I can’t be positive with a diaphragm because I’m sort of between sizes down there, that’s how private this is!” More than once I saw not Erin but Erin’s mother, thrusting her boozy, drawn face at me. Meantime, after the throwing of the lamp, Erin kept taking up other items but then setting them down, dress shoes and those woven-wood jewelry boxes and the clock-radio. As she moved, reflected in the dark windows, for a moment I saw her differently: a slight-shouldered teenager throwing a tantrum over some little thing she’d believed was the whole world. But Erin began to move faster. With locked knees she went stutter-step through the dreck of our bedroom, touching and touching as if to fix her location. Somewhere along the way her insults expanded into anxiety. “One place where I can say anything, one place where I can let go and trust things—” this I’d stolen from her. With each chew of her lower lip her tone changed again. Yes and the change always seemed hooked, I‘ll admit, to some muscle in my own face. I may have baited Erin. I lay across the bed with one leg cocked and downplayed the whole scene, never mind that it was the first real argument of my life. The careless looks I’d mastered at school were set in place, defenses I would have thought were as hopeless against Erin as studded bronze shields against nerve gas. Yet it worked. These rundown old bogeymen left Erin backed against the vanity table. And when I at last got a complete sentence of my own in, the table’s mirror started to rattle.
I pointed out only that the entries I’d seen were all about Robbie. What was so private there? The vanity mirror rattled so loud I thought it would break. Then Erin’s tears started to come.
“I feel guilty about him — can’t you understand I feel guilty about him?” She was bent forward slightly over her hands, looking out the opposite window and crying. “I know I shouldn’t have said what I did, I know I talked like he was a piece of the furniture, I know that. But there’s nothing I can do, he just gets scarier and it always feels worse—”
I understood what was expected of me. I should clap my arms round her, take her face against my neck, whitewash the entire scene.
“I’m so sure something terrible’s going to happen,” Erin said.
I didn’t move from the bed. When Robbie started to howl, downstairs, I slipped out and left her standing alone.
Then, our worst surprise. For weeks grinding on into months, nothing happened.
Erin’s and my escapes to the bedroom did slowly intensify, and Robbie’s smashing likewise picked up steam. Maybe we just weren’t used to the waiting, the way irrationality must permeate the spine vertebra by vertebra. But I recall September and October differently. They felt blocked. Each afternoon following lunch, Erin would plod through her repertoire at the piano, five fugues by Bach. Five pieces of music that fell back on themselves every time they inched forward. Each Sunday about eleven my mother would call, and I’d do my best to wriggle away from her hints about having a baby. “Come on, Tommy,” she’d say, “this isn’t all happening in the mind.” I would chuckle gamely. And as I looked past the sweating phone, looked down between my own unathletic knees, I’d see my old house as it must be for Mom. A scarred welk-shell in which at every turn of the tunnel stood another bleary ghost. Come November it was only a year since my father had died. And as Mom went on teasing, as all her bright lines were eroded and the naked plea beneath revealed, I understood also why my mother hadn’t warned me about the dangers of a marriage so young. But…young? Erin and I were young? We lived like two fogies on a pension. Even our meals were mushy as if we wore dentures, since no knives were allowed in the house. Scutwork, newspapers, and the mail. The living-room flower vase, the one in Robbie’s only remaining photo of us, was so large you could waste an afternoon making sure it stood precisely in the middle of its table. The Girls In Apartment 3-G could take all morning. Plus there were the letters from Sylvia, Torsten, Cynthia, Nick, and Kimberly; there were the letters to Torsten, Nick, and Susan.