it is the eating dinner home alone that is getting to her. At first, because she had no furniture, she ate sandwiches over the kitchen sink, and in ways that was better than sitting down at her new dining-room table with a pretty place setting for one and a carefully prepared meal of asparagus and broiled chicken and pasta primavera. "I quickly exhaust my own charms," she writes in a letter to her friend Eleanor, who has begun to seem more imagined than real. "I compliment myself on the cooking, I ask myself where I got the recipe. At the end I offer, insincerely, to do the dishes. I then tell myself to just leave them, I'll do them later. I find myself, finally, quite dull."
"Things are going well," she writes to her father, who lives in a trailer and goes out on dates with women from his square dance club. "I think you would be proud."
There are children, beautiful, bilingual, academic children, who leave their mudpies on her porch, mud in Dixie cups with leaves and sticks splayed out at all angles. They do not know quite what to make of Benna, who steps out of the house and often onto one of their mudpies, and who merely smiles at them, as if she just wanted to please, as if they, mere children, had some say in her day's happiness.
Where she often goes is to the all-night supermarket, as if something she urgently needed were there. And in a kind of fluorescent hallucination, she wanders the aisles with a gimp-wheeled shopping cart, searching, almost panicked, for something, and settles instead for a box of glazed doughnuts or some on-sale fruit.
At home, before bed, she heats up milk in a saucepan, puts on a nightgown, looks over her lecture notes for the next day — the old familiar notes about the childless Mary Cassatt giving herself babies with paint; the expatriate Mary Cassatt, weary and traveling, dreaming homes for herself in her work; woman Mary Cassatt, who believed herself no woman at all.
Benna sifts through this, sipping the milk and half-waiting for the inevitable eleven o'clock phone call from an undergraduate who has been delinquent in some way and who wants very badly to explain. Tonight the phone rings at ten forty-five. She brings it into the bathroom, where the air is warmer, and gazes into the medicine cabinet mirror: This way at least she'll feel as if she's talking to an adult.
"Hello?" she says.
"Hi, Benna. This is Gerard. I want to apologize for this afternoon." His voice is careful, slow.
"Yes, well, I guess we got a little tense." She notices her face has started to do what her mother called bunch—age making pouches at her mouth and eyes: Are there such things as character bags? Benna opens the medicine cabinet mirror so she can look instead at the aspirin, the spearmint dental floss, the razor blades.
There is some noise on Gerard's end of the phone. It sounds like a whimpering child. "Excuse me," says Gerard. "My daughter's wiping something on my pant leg." He covers up the phone, but Benna can still hear him say in a patient, Dad voice: "Now, honey, go back to bed. I'm on the phone right now."
"Sorry about that," he says when he gets back on.
"You have a daughter?" Benna exclaims.
"Unfortunately, tonight I do," he says. "My wife's at the library, so it's my turn to stay home."
I didn't even know you were married, Benna almost says. A daughter? Perhaps he is imagining it. Perhaps he has only an imaginary daughter.
Her finger traces the edge of the cold water faucet.
"So… hello? Are you still there?" calls Gerard.
"Yeah," says Benna finally. She envies the spigot in her hand: solid, dry, clear as a life that has expected nothing else. "Sorry. I was just, uh, hemorrhaging."
She hears Gerard laugh, and she looks straight into the toothpasted drain and laughs too. It feels good to laugh. "Give to seizure what is seizure's," she adds, aiming for hilarity.
"You're crazy, Benna," Gerard says merrily.
"Of course," she says, "I'm here," though it sounds stale, like the hard rock of bread a timid child hurls into duck ponds, less to feed than to scratch at the black beads of the eyes.
STORIES FROM Self Help (1985)
How to Be an Other Woman
meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim's Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.
He emerges from nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of closing up again behind him. He asks you for a light and you jump a bit, startled, but you give him your "Lucky's Lounge — Where Leisure Is a Suit" matches. He has a nice chuckle, nice fingernails. He lights the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a starving man. He smiles as he exhales, returns you the matches, looks at your face, says: "Thanks."
He then stands not far from you, waiting. Perhaps for the same bus. The two of you glance furtively at each other, shifting feet. Pretend to contemplate the chemical snow. You are two spies glancing quickly at watches, necks disappearing in the hunch of your shoulders, collars upturned and slowly razoring the cab and store-lit fog like sharkfins. You begin to circle, gauging each other in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone.
A bus arrives. It is crowded, everyone looking laughlessly into one another's underarms. A blonde woman in barrettes steps off, holding her shoes in one hand.
You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book. A minute goes by and he asks what you're reading. It is Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket. Try to explain about binding warpage. He smiles, interested.
Return to your book. Emma is opening her window, thinking of Rouen.
"What weather," you hear him sigh, faintly British or uppercrust Delaware.
Glance up. Say: "It is fit for neither beast nor vegetable."
It sounds dumb. It makes no sense.
But it is how you meet.
at the movies he is tender, caressing your hand beneath the seat.
At concerts he is sweet and attentive, buying cocktails, locating the ladies' lounge when you can't find it.
At museums he is wise and loving, leading you slowly through the Etruscan cinerary urns with affectionate gestures and an art history minor from Columbia. He is kind; he laughs at your jokes.
After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music. He tells you his wife's name. It is Patricia. She is an intellectual property lawyer. He tells you he likes you a lot. You lie on your stomach, naked and still too warm. When he says, "How do you feel about that?" don't say "Ridiculous" or "Get the hell out of my apartment." Prop your head up with one hand and say: "It depends. What is intellectual property law?"
He grins. "Oh, you know. Where leisure is a suit."
Give him a tight, wiry little smile.
"I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says.
Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.