had us cutting up quilt squares on the kitchen table. She would have the sewing machine going at eighty miles an hour while a fragrant concoction with a ham hock simmered on the stove. So that I wouldn’t cry I blurted, “The crazy dentist! I could call the crazy dentist from our folk-dancing days. He had hair like Bozo, honest to God, red tufts that stuck out on each side of his head, and he always wore these horribly greasy checked pants, and the zipper was perpetually half mast, and he never opened his—”
“Alice,” Howard said, “we have to get on with things.”
Things? I wasn’t the least bit interested in things. It’s you I want to talk to, Howard, I might have said, if I hadn’t been so weary, so dispirited. I had disgraced myself so thoroughly that there was not much chance of redemption. Couldn’t he see that I was alone, utterly solitary in that disgrace, as singular as the first village leper? I had been in error for half my life, wrecking whatever came my way. I wasn’t patient and wise with my own children, or the children at school. Our house was sinking into the ground, and I stood watching it crumble around us, without the energy to take caulk and scraper and paintbrush in hand.
“Theresa called a while ago,” Howard said.
That news startled me and I sat up. I couldn’t imagine going to Theresa’s, you-hooing and putting the copper kettle on, sitting down at the oiled butcher-block table, and waiting for her to come down the stairs with her only daughter trailing after her. In all the years we’d lived inPrairie Center I’d managed to make only one real friend. I didn’t have any reserves for lean times. How would we be neighbors now? I wondered if we’d avoid each other in the grocery aisles, going the long way home so we wouldn’t pass on the road.
“Mom is leaving for Rumania next week,” Howard said, in the soothing tone he used with a cow when it’s having trouble delivering. “It’s time to get up.”
“I can’t,” I said into the pillow, wittingly using the short sentence that had been forbidden in Howard’s formative years.
I spent the next two days sleeping. I told myself that I was resting from the rage of parenting, that I had been shattered by my squabbling children. I had been exhausted without realizing, and now I couldn’t move another inch. At night, wide awake, I prowled the house. The plangent strains of the clarinet drifted up from the front porch, where Howard was playing. I stood by Emma’s bed, wiping the sweat off her forehead and gently pulling the thumb out of her mouth, hoping to spare us the cost of the orthodontist. I adjusted the fan so it blew to the place she had moved. In Claire’s room I kneeled and looked through the slot of her bed rail, so that I could get a better look at her puffy face. Claire was going to be the beauty. Her lips were parted and a fine thread of drool seeped from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes weren’t shut all the way and I could see the white luster between her lids. I stuck my hand through the bar and felt her dimpled fingers.
When they were grown, our children would freely offer their objections about their upbringing. They would sit me down and tell me what I had done wrong, itemizing my character flaws. The time would come when they would outdistance me in every way; they would be far smarter than I, wiser, better adjusted, generous, all the good things from their father. They would know how to navigate through the world. I would have to listen and admit that they were right. They would never forget the time I had tried to beat the milk of human kindness into Emma, shouting, “Be nice to your sister,” as I spanked her bare bottom. I wondered if they would forgive me my inadequacies.
After I checked the girls I drew on pants and a sweatshirt against the mosquitoes that bred in the dew. I walked through the hay field. If aperson squinted, the lights up in the subdivision looked like the Dipper,
“Alice,” Howard said, “we have to get on with things.”
Things? I wasn’t the least bit interested in things. It’s you I want to talk to, Howard, I might have said, if I hadn’t been so weary, so dispirited. I had disgraced myself so thoroughly that there was not much chance of redemption. Couldn’t he see that I was alone, utterly solitary in that disgrace, as singular as the first village leper? I had been in error for half my life, wrecking whatever came my way. I wasn’t patient and wise with my own children, or the children at school. Our house was sinking into the ground, and I stood watching it crumble around us, without the energy to take caulk and scraper and paintbrush in hand.
“Theresa called a while ago,” Howard said.
That news startled me and I sat up. I couldn’t imagine going to Theresa’s, you-hooing and putting the copper kettle on, sitting down at the oiled butcher-block table, and waiting for her to come down the stairs with her only daughter trailing after her. In all the years we’d lived inPrairie Center I’d managed to make only one real friend. I didn’t have any reserves for lean times. How would we be neighbors now? I wondered if we’d avoid each other in the grocery aisles, going the long way home so we wouldn’t pass on the road.
“Mom is leaving for Rumania next week,” Howard said, in the soothing tone he used with a cow when it’s having trouble delivering. “It’s time to get up.”
“I can’t,” I said into the pillow, wittingly using the short sentence that had been forbidden in Howard’s formative years.
I spent the next two days sleeping. I told myself that I was resting from the rage of parenting, that I had been shattered by my squabbling children. I had been exhausted without realizing, and now I couldn’t move another inch. At night, wide awake, I prowled the house. The plangent strains of the clarinet drifted up from the front porch, where Howard was playing. I stood by Emma’s bed, wiping the sweat off her forehead and gently pulling the thumb out of her mouth, hoping to spare us the cost of the orthodontist. I adjusted the fan so it blew to the place she had moved. In Claire’s room I kneeled and looked through the slot of her bed rail, so that I could get a better look at her puffy face. Claire was going to be the beauty. Her lips were parted and a fine thread of drool seeped from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes weren’t shut all the way and I could see the white luster between her lids. I stuck my hand through the bar and felt her dimpled fingers.
When they were grown, our children would freely offer their objections about their upbringing. They would sit me down and tell me what I had done wrong, itemizing my character flaws. The time would come when they would outdistance me in every way; they would be far smarter than I, wiser, better adjusted, generous, all the good things from their father. They would know how to navigate through the world. I would have to listen and admit that they were right. They would never forget the time I had tried to beat the milk of human kindness into Emma, shouting, “Be nice to your sister,” as I spanked her bare bottom. I wondered if they would forgive me my inadequacies.
After I checked the girls I drew on pants and a sweatshirt against the mosquitoes that bred in the dew. I walked through the hay field. If aperson squinted, the lights up in the subdivision looked like the Dipper,
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