Duet for Three (15 page)

ELEVEN

“Oh, for God's sake, June,” Aggie snaps, “I don't remember your damned birthday party. Why on earth would I? How can you still be harping about something fifty years ago?”

“How could you have forgotten?”

Actually, Aggie does have some recollection of making a taffeta dress, but not the occasion. In the depression, she made almost everything she and June wore, and some of the teacher's clothes as well. But June expects her to remember something about spilled cake and ice cream? Really, she's going to be a very silly old woman if she keeps this up; if she doesn't learn the importance of proper memory.

“It was the expression on your face.”

“What?”

“Hate.” Said flatly. “It looked like hate.”

“How ridiculous. You mean, as if I hated
you
?”

“Me. Everything.”

“Oh, June, how could you have imagined a thing like that? Of course I didn't hate you. Haven't I been trying to tell you how much I wanted you, it wasn't only your father who did?”

But did she love June? An obedient child, yes. When they went out together, people said, “She's so like your husband, isn't she? And such a good little girl.” Not at all what Aggie had had in mind, not a daughter who resembled him, or one who was good. This quiet obedience merely showed a lack of imagination, as far as Aggie could see.

“I know what I saw.” June pauses. “If it wasn't that, what was it?”

“Honestly, I can't remember. I simply don't remember anything about it. But I suppose I might have been angry. I might just have been fed up. I was so fed up, June, you can't imagine. It was nothing to do with you, though. I'm sure if I was angry, it was him, not you.”

Part lie, part truth. True that she couldn't have hated the child. Disapproved of her sometimes, or was disappointed. But not true that it had nothing to do with her. It made everything worse, how much he loved his daughter. She felt her own child had been stolen. And he never once returned to her room after June was born.

“I think,” she says, daring a great confession, “I might have been angry that you got along so well. Sometimes I didn't think either of you even noticed I was there, as long as the house was taken care of and your meals were on the table.” She might be drunk, dizzy with admission.

At least June's face has softened. At least she looks more curious now than resentful and accusing.

“But if you liked me, you didn't show it.”

“I did, you know. You just don't remember.”

Well, she did like the baby: danced with her when she cried, and sang to her and really did make an effort to alter images. It was something like what she had done before she married him: changing the vision to fit reality.

She, too, told June stories, reading little books to her and talking about the farm, her family. Her stories didn't seem to grip the child, though, not like his. Perhaps, unlike Aggie's family, who could be visited, his people were more alluring, being so far away.

Their voices, their speech, were so similar, his and June's. When they spoke, the sound went through her head like a drill. It was irritating to have to hold onto June when he was leaving for school and feel her excitement when the time was coming for him to be home. She was like a little animal, sensing his approach.

Aggie remembers a decade of being married, a muddy-colored recollection involving a sense of trudging. Determined, hard-working days, and a child who was turning out as unexpectedly as her marriage. Their failure, his and Aggie's, remained inexplicable; how they managed to disintegrate so forcibly and irrevocably, and so swiftly. Maybe it was a fault in her mind then that she couldn't work it out, or, having worked it out, resolve it. That's a theory. What she
felt
was that he was entirely wrong-headed, a disputatious bully, a frantic, feeble dictator who had mistaken her for someone else.

Looking at him sitting across from her at the supper table, she could think, “Well, to hell with you.” But there he was, not just in the flesh, in his brown suit and white shirt, but a presence in her life, like a headache. Even when she was angry, she was angry with him, so that in a way it was his anger. What would have happened if she'd said, “Listen, sit down, let's talk about what's wrong and what we can do to fix it”? That's the sort of thing Frances would do; Frances, who sometimes lapses unfortunately into the words of silly magazines, advocating “openness” and “honesty”.

Well, what would have happened? Probably, like the gingham dog and the calico cat, they'd have eaten each other up.

As it was, they only gnawed at each other's edges. He left her money for household spending under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table every Friday. She might say, “Well, we can't eat your position, can we?” Or she could regard his Sunday suit doubtfully as he was going out the door to church and say, “It's too bad, you know, it's gotten shiny at the back like that, when you can't afford a new one.”

They weren't poor, just had to be careful. But it was a way of digging at something important to him: his ability to make a living, and his status. Not much, after all, compared with the wounds he could inflict: that he did not find her tempting or appealing.

Either to try to find the key to all this, or to escape, she can't recall which, she began to read. She does remember thinking that she was damned if he'd have any advantage, including whatever he knew from those little packages of information on the front-room shelves. And that sometimes it was nice to hide in other lives. But damned if she could tell, wading through his books, just where he thought his advantage lay. These were for children, small moral tales. They were not power, and certainly not wisdom. They did help her learn words and gain confidence. She found it increasingly easy to hear words flowing into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into stories. It was like doing exercises, building strength. But to what point? To learn that it was bad to lie and steal, and manly to be brave? These were things you could learn by listening to sermons.

“Have you been dusting my books?” he asked irritably. “Some of them are out of order. I wish you'd put them back where you found them when you're cleaning.”

It occurred to her that she did not see him reading, except when he was preparing lessons. She'd had an impression of a learned man, but he seemed to have stopped at some point. What kind of teacher must he have been? Likely the sort of husband he was. Except that she thought he was a little afraid of her, whereas naturally he would not be afraid of his pupils. Perhaps he was also afraid of that glimpse of himself in the blow he had struck once, the marks of his fingers on her cheek. He probably hadn't known he could do a thing like that.

The blow she struck, answering him, was instant and instinctive, not a defence but a response. If he were ashamed of his moment of weakness, she was proud that, without thinking, she'd taken care of herself. That did not seem to her to be violence; more an assertion, a proper positioning of the two of them. A wordless setting out of the rules: do that and this will immediately occur.

Just standing up against him gave her an advantage, since he had not expected it. Like a fighter going into the ring assuming an opponent with shorter arms, he was bewildered to find himself facing someone of precisely the same reach. The one more surprised, dismayed, and affronted is the one who loses.

She discovered an atlas on the shelves of books. It contained not only maps of the earth, but sketches of the solar system. From Neptune, Mars, or Mercury, all the upheaval in this house was insignificant: rather like God's perspective, peering down from heaven. From high in one of the trees at the farm, her brothers had looked small, gaping up at her. You could cause quite a lot of unintended pain, throwing something from a height. She'd tossed an apple at her smallest brother once, and hit him in the chest and knocked him down. Maybe God didn't quite realize the effects down here on earth, in her front room, of the smallest of his finger flicks.

So many countries there were, and continents, signifying so many people of so many colours and customs. So many possibilities there must be, then. Finding out one thing led to another. There was, she found, an expanding progression in all this. She got quite frantic about it for a time; trembled in the desire for a further fact, the definition of an unknown word, some magic piece of knowledge that surely must be out there, if only she knew just where to look. She carted the dictionary with her through the day, replacing it on the proper shelf shortly before he was due home. She discovered the town library and hid books beneath her bed.

It was hard, choosing between fact and fiction. Both were vital, after all. Simple information: what crop is grown where, the location of deserts, the periods of kings and queens and the names of plants — all of it counted, all of it was useful. Just knowing was an edge, a gain. Oh, she cared for June as well, scrubbed the floors and cleaned out the ashes of the woodstove, continued to mend and darn. Most of all, cooked and baked and ate, her hand reaching out absently for another cookie as she read another chapter in another book, ending a day flushed with facts and food. Perhaps it was just as well, from that point of view, that June was such a good child.

Whatever hurt, like the sound of his pen scratching on paper in the dining room in the evenings, or his snores in the middle of the night, or June's periodic cries, or the sound of his briefcase being set down in the hall, the tap-tapping of his papers being knocked into line on the table, or his knees cracking when he bent to pick up an eraser he'd dropped — all that could be soothed, in the day, with food, and reduced by knowledge. How could a woman who knew the capital of Peru and the names of the explorers of America be hurt? What could damage a person who could recite the names of all the planets, and all the continents of the earth, and all the oceans? She was making herself a fortress of facts.

Novels had an interest of another sort. They told of men moving, leaping around the world from event to event, with great occurrences of significance and heroism, passion of various kinds. Revenge and honor and blood. Nothing to do with washing dishes and making meals and patching sheets and scrubbing floors and getting to the end of the day. It seemed reasonable to conclude that the lives of men offered the chance to shift scenery and conditions.

There were no changes in her life. There was instead his voice droning on in the front room, telling June his endless tales of England; and his whoops of joy when he came through the door and lifted up his eager daughter. There were his little lectures, his instructions and rebukes, about the condition of his books and her behavior in the presence of company. His punctuality: meals to be served at six-fifteen; his footsteps going past her door at ten-thirty at night; his feet hitting the floor promptly at seven in the morning. The rhythm of relief when he left the house, and the weight of knowing he would be back. The drudgery of all the small jobs involved in running the house, and having them all to do again the next day. Dishes washed were dirtied again, sheets laundered had to be washed again, shined floors got scuffed, and dust resettled on windowsills and furniture. June bathed had to be bathed again the next night; June weeping had to be comforted again and again. There did not seem to be an end. It seemed, most days, a matter of surviving from one moment to the next, of drawing the next breath and taking the next step. Of keeping running and keeping reading.

Keeping eating, too: the banana cakes, blueberry muffins, date squares, and oatmeal cookies. They soothed pains and avenged her. As if the food were flesh, she devoured it. Her slim belly became plump, then rolling. Her thighs began to ripple, her chin sagged and doubled. Her features, and her feet and hands, came to look tiny against the bulk of the rest of her. She became imposing. If he glanced in her direction, she must fill up his view. It wouldn't be so easy for him to pretend she wasn't there.

He grew small and insignificant beside her. When they had to go out, usually to school functions, she thought they must look fairly odd. Certainly she was no longer what he must have had in mind, as the appropriate wife of a teacher.

It is ridiculous, of course, and wicked, too, to compare her life then with the lives of prisoners, of people who are scooped off streets by secret police, taken to dark cellars, and tortured. Of course there were no electrodes attached to her body, and the soles of her feet were not beaten by switches. Her pain, unlike that of tortured prisoners, was dull, not sharp. But it was constant, lodged somewhere below the heart, just above the waist, and was accompanied by a tiny perpetual headache. She could no longer remember how it felt to be without those pains. Words and food soothed, but did not cure.

She prayed for freedom, although without a clear idea of exactly what God could do for her. She only asked for some miracle, and meanwhile she ate and worked and read. By the time she was thirty-one, she was fat, literate, furious, and disappointed.

(But every disappointment toughens. Frances once said to her, “Grandma, you're a tough old bird,” meaning it affectionately, as a compliment. But there are different kinds of toughness. Aggie's, she fears, has added scales. She is afraid she is dying with a crusted soul.)

How sad, how unfortunate, that he wound up with a fat woman out of whom he tried, once, to beat wilfulness. Naturally he would have preferred some slim meek woman who would deliver his small pale children without fuss. Just as she would have preferred a robust man whose children were adventurous. She might have felt pity for him.