Celestial Navigation (27 page)

When I first came here, I would have laughed aloud at the thought of loving him. Yet it is only now that I think to be surprised at myself. While it was coming about I hardly noticed. We have such an ability to adjust to change! We are like amoebas, encompassing and ingesting and adapting and moving on, until enormous events become barely perceptible jogs in our life histories. All I know is that bit by bit my world began to center on him, so that my first thought in the morning and my last at night was concern about his welfare. “Are you all right?” I used to wake and ask him out of nowhere. “Are you—is there anything you need?” I would move to his side of the bed and feel him seep away from me somehow, backing off from my everlasting questions and my face too close to his and my perfume, which—even if it was only the hand lotion I had put on after finishing the dishes—suddenly seemed too rich and full now that I was next to him. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I wanted to say. “I never meant to—I don’t want to
overpower
you in any way, believe me!” But then he would only have backed off further; saying that would have been overpowering in itself. There was no way I could win. Or I could win only by losing—by leaving bed,
reluctantly, to sit up with a sick child or a colicky baby, and then he would come stumbling through the dark house calling my name. “Mary? Where’d you go, Mary? I can’t find you.”

He changed. I changed. He gathered some kind of stubborn, hidden strength while I became more easily touched by anything small and vulnerable—changes that each of us caused in the other, but they were exactly the ones that have separated us and that will keep us separate. If he calls me back he will be admitting a weakness. If I return unasked I will be bearing down upon him and plowing him under. If I weren’t crying I would laugh.

One day in August Rachel started fussing at breakfast time, and she kept it up without a single pause. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. She was flushed and her breath had an ether smell that my children usually get with fever, but no one in the boatyard owned a thermometer and I was too hot myself to be able to gauge the temperature of her skin. By afternoon I had decided I would have to find a doctor. I was going to ask for a ride from Zack—the boat mechanic, a slimy man who whistled whenever he saw me, but still he did have a pickup truck—and then I saw Brian’s car pulling up in our backyard and out he stepped, looking very steady and reliable in his old jeans and a fresh-ironed shirt. “Brian!” I said. “Will you drive me to the doctor? Rachel’s sick.”

“Of course,” he said, and turned on one heel without a second’s pause and went back to the car. I felt better already. I grabbed up Rachel and my purse, called out instructions to Darcy, and slid into the front seat. “Her doctor is on St. Paul,” I said, “just a few blocks away from us. Away from Jeremy.”

“What’s the matter with her?” Brian asked.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Rachel was quieter now, maybe from the shock of being in a car, but she still whimpered a little. Brian said, “Could be a tooth.”

“Oh, no, she wouldn’t make this much fuss.”

“Are you sure? It’s my understanding that—”

“Will you please just
drive?”
I said.

He stopped talking. We sped down the gravel road I had nearly forgotten, between rows of neat little flower-decked houses and trailers. After a minute I said, “Sorry, Brian.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s just that I’m afraid he’ll close his office soon, you see, and then I wouldn’t know how to—”

“Sure, sure, I understand.”

We turned onto the main highway. It seemed to me that Brian was driving faster than I had ever gone before. Fields and factories and junkyards skimmed past, and then came the first gray buildings of the city and the long unbroken walls of rowhouses. Brian dodged in and out between slower cars, honking like an ambulance, scarcely ever putting on his brakes. I felt that I was in good hands.

In front of the doctor’s office, he double-parked and got out of the car. “Oh, don’t come with me,” I said. “You’ll get a ticket, Brian.” I was expecting him just to drop me off and then pick me up later. But he had already opened the door on my side and reached for the baby, and I let him take her. Freed of her weight, I felt light and cool. I floated behind him across the sidewalk, which seemed very crowded, through the revolving door of a surprisingly tall dark building. In the lobby I was hit by the cold smell of marble, which I had forgotten about. I had also forgotten the doctor’s office number. Imagine, after ten years of school checkups! It was as if I had been away for decades. My eyes had trouble focusing on the tiny white letters in the showcase. Even my hand, skimming
a straight line between his name and his number, looked like a stranger’s hand, brown and chapped, bigger-boned. “Four thirteen,” I told Brian.

“We won’t wait for the elevator.”

I followed him up the stairs. Rachel peered at me over his shoulder; all this speed had startled her into silence.

In the waiting room Brian told the nurse, “We don’t have an appointment, but it’s an emergency. This baby is very ill.”

The nurse looked at Rachel. Rachel grinned.

We were shown into a cubicle at the front of the building. Above the examining table was an enormous, sooty window overlooking the street. I could peer down and see cars threading their mysterious paths below us, stopping and starting magically. I felt I was observing them from another planet. “You can undress her now, I’ll send the doctor in immediately,” the nurse said. But all Rachel wore was a diaper, a damp one. I left it on her. I stayed at the window, remembering other, happier times when I had come here with three or four children for their shots. Then my only worries had been how to keep them out of the cotton swabs, and how to calm the one who was scared of tongue depressors, and what to fix Jeremy for supper that night.

The doctor came in with his white coattails billowing—a young man, dark-skinned. “Now! Mrs. Pauling,” he said. “What seems to be the problem here?”

“I think Rachel’s sick,” I said, “but I can’t tell what’s bothering her.”

He gave Brian a short nod and stretched the baby out on the table. She frowned at him. He prodded her stomach, felt her neck, looked into her nose and mouth and ears and listened to her chest. I held my breath. The skin on my scalp ached from waiting. Then, “Ear infection,” he said. “Both sides.”

“Oh! Are you sure that’s all?”

“It’s all I see. She been pulling at her ears lately?”

“No, she hasn’t.”

“Usually that’s a sign.”

“Well, I know that,” I said. Relief made me snappish. I felt he was accusing me of something. Did he think that after six children I wouldn’t notice a thing like ear-pulling?
All
my children have been susceptible to earaches. I wondered if he disapproved of Rachel’s single, grayish diaper. I became aware suddenly of what I must look like in my dirndl skirt and rubber flip-flops, one shoulder strap slipping out from the sleeveless blouse that I had fastened shut with a safety pin. My purse was patched with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. I turned it to its good side while he was bending to write out a prescription.

When we were back in the car, loaded down now with penicillin and decongestants and a brand-new thermometer, Brian turned east although it would have been simpler to continue due south. I suppose he thought it would disturb me to pass near my old neighborhood. “Wait,” I almost said. “Let’s go back, can’t we?” What I wanted to do was just confirm that the house existed; it wasn’t that I planned to walk inside or anything. But Brian looked straight ahead and chewed on his pipe, pretending that this route was a natural one, and I didn’t say anything after all.

His car was air-conditioned—something I hadn’t noticed when I was so upset. For the first time in weeks I could stop fighting the heat, and Rachel actually went to sleep in my lap. “Must be fast-acting medicine,” Brian said. (We had given her the first dose back in the drugstore.) When I told him I thought it was the coolness he frowned. He said, “Now will you believe that shack is no place for children?”

“Well, I don’t see how the
shack
comes into this,” I said.
“We’re perfectly comfortable there. The children get earaches any old place; it’s something to do with the twists in their ear tubes.”

“In summer, even?”

“Any time.”

“I don’t believe it,” Brian said. “And if they’re sick in summer, what will winter be like? The place is not insulated, you know. There’s no heat, and you will have to turn the water off every night, and I won’t always show up just in the nick of time this way.”

“No, I know that,” I said. Actually I had thought about winter several times lately, but then I put it out of my mind again. I said, “We’ll work it out when the times comes. I’m sure that everything will—”

“It’s August, Mary.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Could you tell me what’s going on with you and Jeremy?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” I said.

“Do you still love him?”

“Oh yes,” I said. Which was easier than describing the exact combination of love and hurt and anger that I had been feeling about Jeremy lately.

Brian looked over at me for a second, and then back at the road. “I don’t want to step on Jeremy’s toes,” he said, “but I wish that if you’ve really left him you would make it final and get a divorce. Are you considering that?”

I don’t know why my life always seems more confusing than other people’s. First Jeremy proposed marriage when I wasn’t divorced and now Brian was proposing a divorce when I wasn’t married. I said, “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to think about anything right now.”

“All right, then. I’m just letting you know that I’m here, Mary, and sooner or later you’re going to want
someone
to turn to.”

Did he suppose I hadn’t thought of that?

My poor, pathetic store of money, which once had seemed the answer to everything, had almost disappeared. I lay awake nights trying to think of people who might help. On the trip home now I dreamed up ludicrous solutions: I could take up with the slimy boat mechanic, I could suddenly reappear at Guy Tell’s front door. I pictured the string of children trailing me like ducklings, Guy’s startled face, his new wife peering out behind him. “I’ve come back to you, Guy!” “Uh, who are all these people with you, Mary?” I nearly laughed, but then I grew serious. I began to see how every move I had made in my life had required some man to provide my support—first Guy when I left my parents, then John Harris when I left Guy, and Jeremy when John Harris left. Now I couldn’t imagine any other way to do it. I had come here on my own, certainly, but it began to look as if I couldn’t keep it up. Underneath, Jeremy and I were more alike than anyone knew. Eventually I would give in and find someone, Brian or someone else, it all came to the same thing. I could see it ahead of me as clearly as if it had already happened. I couldn’t think of any way out. I felt drained and weak suddenly, as if I had shriveled.

I looked over at Brian, but he had dropped the subject when I told him to and now he was just driving along puffing quietly on his pipe.

In the evenings I tell fairytales, the same old fairytales over and over. The children curl against me, clean and warm in their fresh white underwear, smelling of milk. I close my eyes and take a deep breath of them. I could tell these stories in my sleep. “Another, now another,” the children say. Don’t they ever get tired?

I see myself on a sagging couch beneath a warped tin roof, braced on each side by my children for lack of firmer support.
I understand that from outside I seem to have been leading a fairly dramatic life, involving elopements and love children and men stretching in a nearly unbroken series behind me, but the fact is that when you proceed through these experiences day by day they are not really so earth-shaking. All events, except childbirth, can be reduced to a heap of trivia in the end. When I die I expect I will be noticing a water ring someone left on the coffee table, or a spiral of steam rising from a whistling teapot. I will be sure to miss the moment of my passing.

Rapunzel. The Princess and the Pea. Rumpelstiltskin. My voice grows croaky. My mind runs ahead of the words. I play silent games with the tired old plots, I like to ponder the endings beyond the endings. How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the prince stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband, being so quick to find the faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.

You know how I knew she had left him? I found him smoking a cigarette. I went up to his studio on Friday night to ask where the others were, it felt so weird downstairs. I knocked and stuck my head in, and there he sat on this purple velvet couch holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger and blowing out a long careful funnel of smoke. “Mr. Pauling?” I said. “Jeremy? Where’s everyone gone to?” But then I guessed for myself, right while I was asking. Something about the way he was holding the cigarette. I don’t know why. “Good Lord, she’s left you,” I said. He nodded. I wouldn’t say that he looked upset. Just stunned, sort of. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything, and then he switched the cigarette to a new position between his index and middle fingers and sat there staring at it, and I closed the door again.