Once, long ago, a lover took me with him while visiting his mother at one such Bide-a-Wee home-she was an alcoholic, in for her annual desiccation-and while he went to hold her hand I wandered around, identifying more closely with the ambulatory patients than I really wanted to, and ultimately finding my way into a shop where the patients’ O.T. work was offered for sale. Hundreds of little trivets ornamented with tiny ceramic tiles, thousands of those fucking potholders, no end of baskets and spoonholders and other triangular things which must have had some function-God knows they weren’t decorative-but which served no purpose I could fathom. I asked someone what they were for but couldn’t make out his answer and was too put off by his rolling eyes and slack mouth to ask him again.
But the point, if I’ve not lost it forever, is that no one would make that crap if there was anything else to do with his time. Worthwhile projects are those worth doing for themselves, not for their effect upon the psyche, not because they help pass the time, and my writing thus was in the same category as the potholders and the baskets and the trivets, of subjective therapeutic value only, and blessed little of that.
So I wrote things, and then tore them up, and put the typewriter away and went for a walk in the woods. Sooner or later, I knew, there would have to be something that I would discover and that would be right for me. But it did no good to keep trying things on until something fit.
Meanwhile, I began to play more of a role in the functioning of the house itself. I had to do this or feel like a sponge, a parasite, and it did pass time as well. I helped with the cleaning, I guided the power mower over those parts of the lawn that were level enough for that sort of thing. I appointed myself official morning coffee maker, and instant coffee ceased to play a role in our lives, to the relief of everybody but its manufacturer. I took over some of the cooking. I had never enjoyed cooking while I was married, and was none too good at it, with the result that we ate out most of the time. But now I was surprised to discover that I seemed to be capable of enjoying it after all, and that I could, when I took the time and trouble, produce a dish that everyone seemed to agree was quite edible. I was a very different sort of cook than Priss, who was rarely enormously inspired but who was able to prepare reasonably successful meals seven days a week without minding the routine or making an occasional mess out of an occasional meal. I, on the other hand, tended to get wildly creative, going in for some major production numbers and now and then ruining a meal completely. And I could only cook once in a while. If it had become a regular thing, I would have hated it.
I wonder how well I’ve conveyed the various changes we went through after the month of magic ran its course and left all three of us to find out just where we were going. There is one way of looking at things which I don’t seem to have mentioned, and that is simply this: When our orientation was planted firmly in present time, everything was great. As long as we lived as much as possible in the Now, there were no worries, no cares, no paranoia, no anxiety. It was only when we turned from Where are we now? to Where the hell are we going? that things became less than idyllic.
PRISS
We all found ways, didn’t we, to run away from us?
You in the woods, Rhoda, and you to New York, Harry. But more than that we ran off to our secret selves and shut the rest of the world out.
As well as we have come to know each other, I keep finding out things about both of you that I did not know until I read what you have written. And I’m sure the reverse is equally true, because I find myself revealing things here that I kept to myself until now. This typewriter is like an analyst’s couch, it really is.
I don’t know if I should tell you this.
Probably not.
But I guess I will, anyway. I suppose I could always tear up what I’ve written if I decide that it is something I would rather hold within myself a little longer.
I could do that.
And write some other chapter in this one’s place.
If things had gone together in any other way, if any of I don’t know how many variables had not been just so, then it never would have happened. But that’s always the way, isn’t it? Everything that occurs in life is an extraordinary coincidence, and life itself is such a flaunting of the odds that it’s a miracle any of us exist at all.
This one afternoon, you see, I was in the grip of my Priscilla’s-Just-In-The-Way delusion.
Well, see, it’s a particularly natural delusion. Almost inescapable when one sees how well Rhoda and Harry get along together, and how much more they seem to have in common than either one has with me. When I look at the subject sanely, however, I realize that one of the things they have in common is that they’re both in love with me, and I realize further that in a very special way we exist as a trio and would not exist ever so well any other way.
I honestly believe God meant for people to sleep in threes. If He didn’t, it’s just because He didn’t think things through logically. It wouldn’t absolutely have to be our sort of trio. It could be the other sort, two men and a girl, and that would be nice, although not as nice for me, I don’t think, as this. But nicer than sleeping with just one person. Definitely nicer than that.
More than three would not be good.
More than three…
There were other things wrong with that afternoon. It was the end of June, when our weather is usually particularly good, but for the past week we had been having chilly air and more rain than we had any use for, and at the moment we were having both. I might have just tried walking around in the garden to shake my mood but the garden was only fit for walking if you had webbed feet, and I didn’t. (It’s just my two heads that made me odd.) So I said something about going shopping, dashed for the car, navigated the length of the driveway, and then drove aimlessly along.
I didn’t plan on going to any particular supermarket, but that’s one of the comforting things about life in America. If you drive in any distance for a little while you will come to a supermarket, indistinguishable to all intents and purposes from any other supermarket, and then you can buy something and take it home with you, whether you need it or not. So I didn’t have to drive toward a supermarket, or rather there was no way I could drive that wasn’t toward at least one of them, so all I had to do was sit back and enjoy the ride. It would have been more enjoyable if the windshield wipers had worked better, or if I hadn’t kept crying like an idiot for no good reason at all.
I never pick up hitchhikers.
Never in my life. Not because I’ve been afraid-most of the time around here the kids who try to hitch rides are around twelve years old, and don’t particularly scare me. But because it just never occurred to me, it never seemed to me to be the sort of thing I would be inclined to do.
Then why did I stop for these kids?
God alone knows. I certainly don’t. There’s a certain temptation that makes me want to say that I had the final outcome in mind, somewhere in mind, when I first took my foot off the gas pedal and eased it onto the brake. But I’ve been over it in my mind a thousand times since then and I just can’t believe it was the case. I saw them out there at the roadside getting wet, and there was something youthful and appealing about them as a group, the way they stood, their casual attitudes.
Let’s make a scene out of it. I want to get my own mind out of the way and put it down the way it happened. That should be easier.