But homework, as if I never existed to discuss it myself with my daughter twelve short hours ago. In front of another sink, a steel kitchen sink where I divided our shares (among dinner plates slipperily layered in the detergent dark, and three smaller cake plates that could have served for salad dressed and undressed, if we in our household when at home together served salad separately, now tonight whisked before washing, having been pressured by the frictional, sugar-spun essence of pound cake and quick-crumbed at supper’s end, plates so little smudged they could have been dry-wiped instead of wiped-dry) — so now I have divided and turned our attention between my soap-sponging and hot-rinsing, and urging (her) my glowing-haired (as advertised) daughter not to dry anything but the glasses while I question her on her current math — topology, topology. Only then twelve hours later to hear her mother’s homework question at another sink, while ten feet behind I look her mom in the eye in the mirror as Liz also looks her doubting mom in the eye in the bathroom mirror in order to shout (not unhappily), “Then why did you bother to have me!”
“We didn’t,” observes my wife, examining her face in the mirror with a glance my way. I am a madman with a pair of shapes at bay, snug contours of female approaching each other so I can’t see my ancient relations straight — the waists, the shoulders, the spines I’ve touched. And so I stop feeling her my wife over my reflected shoulder who’s in front of the mirror and me; and if my somewhat retired brain had hands or sharpened elbows, I’d type onto a keyboard a right-brain projection of a shot of this bedroom sunbeam in whose flow I approach with my eyes the mirror that is not denied me above the sacred basin that is — and above which echoes Mom’s dry “We didn’t bother.”
“Well here I am,” Liz says, as her mother starts to say, “I mean we didn’t go to any—” and shakes her head and falls apart out of the mirror, hugs Liz, who shouts, “I asked you a question,” and giggles, being virtually tickled. The collective style is Family Throwaway.
Well, one spring night when I heard, against a far verse of Stephen Foster sung three miles away by Lucille dockside, the language of the low-splaying copters reach toward the receptors on our high-rising apartment house and the language of all the dogs in the street below hounding some being in their midst, and I could hear the silence of a known displaced owl-hawk walking our terrace walls and parapets eyeing the city and eyeing the tiles for long-ago-eaten pet rodents while hardly twitching in response to the crying, through the horizon of the twilight time and through glass and brick, of a large-ish jungle cat belonging to our neighbor who is a one-handed actor who’s been enjoying a long run at the other edge of the continent (and has farmed out his flat rent-free in the meantime to an electronically oriented shadow of a college girl who’s seldom in), I found the opportunity upon me going by instinct from strength to strength to capitalize on a blinding point of energy that came between my wife and me as we, from above, watched our daughter on the carpet watch television and were substantially ignored by her.
Wasn’t there a strength in her, separating her from me?
Lengths of light brown hair grew to cascades in the light from the screen. America comes into your living room, your TV room, what have you.
You have Indians. I remember Indians. Real ones, because on the screen it wasn’t a western but a commercial. A serious, corporate progress-report commercial for a firm that makes digging machines. The biggest in the world and in the history of the world. Monumental earth-moving engines bright-painted and fine, that dig, lift, let go, tilt, turn, all in one curving act, and are, I was set up to think at a glance, run by Indians. Indians represented by the unknown personable one in a red shirt with sun-ray design like false eyelashes on the upper part of the sleeve, and the unknown personable one was right here concentrated in the screen with a grin of white teeth and strong wrinkles carved by heritage and fed by all the plump bloods of youth — a heritage of lines.
I’m really pretty sick of Indians, my wife murmured, or did I just know this was what she felt?
And this Indian’s hands, enriched by centuries of sun and of knowing who he was, gripped the controls of the giant earth-mover, and he spoke to us of this and other machines as if the firm that created them employed him to run them. Or sold them to itself.
How did we get here? I think I said.
You were moving away from me, while I was talking to you, my wife said; why don’t you sit down to watch TV since you’re here, instead of standing and making everyone else nervous?
What? said Liz, our child, as if she had heard someone say something important to her, facing the screen’s distance so her voice seemed distant, if there at all.
I wasn’t moving away from you yourself; I was just moving.
Wrong, said my wife, you didn’t want to hear about the wife of that black philosopher Chuck.
What? said Liz faintly.
I heard what you had to say, I said; I remember the party at the health club, the forty-third floor sunset, the banana daiquiri that spilt itself into the pool or was it an old-fashioned sea-breeze with true grapefruit juice, or vodka on the rocks that turned into a chlorine dawn? And I remember her leaving her drink on the brink of the pool while she swam some laps and it was gone when she reached for it again and she called Chuck but he was staring into the sun above the New Jersey cliffs and I remember him saying that the sun was exactly at the level of the pool, forty-third floor, and, come to think of it, he said something reassuring.
Listen, said my wife, in my brain—
What? said Liz from afar—
I was saying when you walked away that Chuck’s wife — she’s a scientist — was telling me in the sauna before we ate—
Until, I said, that other woman in the sauna started spitting on the floor, and then you left.
You remember all the bad things.
Nothing bad about spitting in the sauna: the heat brings out all that mucus.
The point, my wife said, as the commercial gave way to the news and Liz turned the set off and remained sitting cross-legged, seeming to look at the screen in a way she has when she, I believe, is thinking what to do next — the point was, this woman—
— Charlotte, I said.
Right. Charlotte. She’s a very interesting woman, you know.
And not just her career, I said.
You’re right all over the place, my wife said — she has two, three kids, and she’s a biochemist in a laboratory and somebody in her lab won the Nobel Prize, and she has the most beautiful hair, it’s like Liz’s when it’s all dry and brushed, only lighter, and when you walked away I was saying—
I didn’t walk away, I said so softly I seemed to emphasize what my wife knew anyway.
— that her husband’s a stay-at-home, that’s what she said, and she finally gave up on him and didn’t mention it but started, you know, seeing people on her own, nothing much.
Friends, I said.
Why not, said my wife.
How did we reach this point of agreement? I think I said.
You wouldn’t sit down.
The TV’s off, I said.
A real scientist, this Charlotte, said my wife, no lab technician, no lab assistant.
No guinea pig, I said.
Daddy! said Liz, that’s gross.
I moved around her.
And when she came home—
You know that any job you want to get—
What?
You know I rather like having a working wife to show off although it’s so old hat I hardly want to speak of it, it’s not just the money.
I was saying, my wife said, that when she came home, Chuck would not say a word.