The O'Briens by Peter Behrens Page A

matter how much she polished she could see swirls on each pane.
    When she ran out of rags, she went through her clothes until she found a dress, grey silk, made by the Chinese dressmaker on Fifth Street who made frocks and gowns for the matrons and daughters at the Pasadena Club. It was the dress Iseult had worn to her mother’s funeral. She began tearing it up and using the scraps of silk on her windows. She cleaned every piece of glass in the house, including the mirror above the bathroom sink. And still they weren’t clean — they were murkier than ever.
    Suddenly she was exhausted. She dumped the bucket into the kitchen sink and refilled it with cold water, then gathered the roses from the bathroom. Stepping over the dress lying in tatters on the floor, she felt ashamed of what she’d done. Without eating or undressing, she lay down on her blankets and almost immediately fell asleep.
    Awakening in darkness in what she knew must be the heart of the night, she could not get back to sleep. She had lost all her composure and clarity. Her mind was sore from exhaustion.
    She could hear coyotes yipping. In Pasadena there’d been coyotes; she was used to their hysterical noises. Dogs of death, her mother once called them, the only time she had heard her mother use that word.
    A house was just a house. He had a railroad, mountains. He was making something of himself. She was trying to but not getting very far. Sunlight, space, setting — they were aspects of existence but weren’t in themselves reasons for living. They were like the wind blowing across the land, not the land itself. She had to find her purpose; she needed her own ground.
    Alone was no good. Someday she would need children and a sense of life widening, not narrowing.
    Patrick Dubois on the stairs; her father in his upstairs library all alone; Joe struggling with his little book of manners — men might seem harder, more forceful, but really they were as unsure of themselves as women.
    Desire was the most interesting thing.
    She grew even more restless. Her legs thrashed and kicked under the blankets. She heard noises rising outside, rustlings and scrapings. Coyotes? She fought panic. Finally she went out to the living room, wearing a blanket around her shoulders. It was three o’clock by the Leavenworth clock. From her front window she could see hundreds, thousands of electric lights sparkling on Venice Pier. Was the Incubatorium closed; were the newborns asleep? Were the nurses? Perhaps they had visitors through the night. Perhaps she ought to dress and go out there, she thought; there was nowhere else she felt so alive.
    No.
    I have to get this under control , she told herself, or I am going to lose my mind .
    She dragged her nest of blankets into the living room. As she lay on the floor, the electric glow falling through the windows resembled moonlight. All the energy she had been using in the past few days to bolster her sense of self was spent. Wrapped in the old blankets, she felt drained and spiritless, but she lay awake for a long time before she could sleep.
    ~
    The morning fog was white and wet. She made herself take a bath before getting dressed. She measured and boiled coffee and buttered and ate a slice of bread, trying in each small sequence of actions to recover her poise. Lightness, joy, freedom seemed very far away. Everything tasted like nothing. These bare rooms were nothing, and so was she.
    She was afraid to leave her house; afraid that if she did, she’d never return to it.
    The fog had not cleared by noon. It seemed to curdle more thickly than ever.
    That was the afternoon Mr. J. O’Brien came to tea.
    ~
    The knock on the front door startled her. “Miss Wilkins? Are you at home?”
    She considered not answering the door, hiding in her bedroom. She wasn’t strong enough to entertain a visitor, especially him. But if she hid from him she’d despise herself even more. She was bathed and