Raw Silk (9781480463318) (3 page)

“Hit her in the face, hit her in the face!” the girl shouted, and Frankie, both fists clenched but only one fist pounding, brought his knuckles down on Jill’s eyes and nose with the implacable rhythm of a machine. I watched him frozen for a second and then dashed outside. The girl caught sight of me and ran, but Frankie, wholly absorbed in his work, didn’t notice me until I caught his wrist on an upswing and jerked him to his feet. I used to think myself incapable of murder. I think now that if I wanted to find someone incapable of murder, I wouldn’t go looking among mothers. I felt huge with shaky strength. His wrist was as horny, small and brittle as a bird’s leg in my fingers. Oliver had come down by then, and I left Jill with him; I don’t think I looked back to see how badly she was hurt. I dragged Frankie the half mile home and I don’t remember it. I wasn’t even tired. I pulled him through the pig yard and whipped him round to his back door, which opened immediately on Mrs. Billingham.

“He …” I said, and the strength left me. Mrs. Billingham’s eyebrows were knotted and sweating. Behind her a pot of something gray was boiling over on the stove, and a baby in an undershirt was sitting in a pile of flour. I still had my mixing stick in one hand and I’d splashed a few drops of paint on Frankie’s face like turquoise freckles. I was aware of his thumping pulse in the circle of my fingers. His hand had gone cold.

“Well, he was … hitting my little girl,” I said, and Mrs. Billingham wrenched his arm away from me. He stood in her grip with his elbow cocked over his head.

“But it wasn’t his fault,” I said, and suddenly I realized that this was true. “An older girl, I don’t know who, she ran away … a girl made him.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Mrs. Billingham said with a nastiness meant for me as well as Frankie. “Thanks.”

“Don’t punish him!” I called, but the door slammed.

I panted back through the yard and supported myself on a stone wall. The pigs snorted lazily, and beyond them I could hear the impact of what must have been a belt, and Frankie’s shrieking. There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do. What I could do I’d done.

I stumbled back along the road and Oliver came to meet me, carrying Jill. The bruises were rising on her forehead and there was dry blood around her nose, but she was all right. She’d stopped crying.

“I hope you pulverized the little bastard,” Oliver said.

“It wasn’t his fault,” I cried, and let Oliver take my weight too, against him. I told him about the girl, and he was willing to see the point, but it only irritated him when I said the worst of it was my fault.

We came back to the subject of St. Margaret’s in the evening. Well, I guess Frankie took his medicine and I took mine. We began that evening the longest and bitterest in an impressive history of quarrels. Oliver said that we had to save Jill from the atmosphere of that school.

“This afternoon had nothing to do with the school,” I said. “It’s Frankie’s home. The school is probably a relief to him.”

“It’s not going to be a relief to Jill as long as Frankie’s in her class.”

“I know, but that’s my fault …”

“Don’t be dim. You’re never happy unless you’re guilty for something.”

“I’ll bring him around. He
likes
Jill …”

“Virginia, I don’t understand you. Your kid’s nose is nearly broken …”

“Oliver, don’t you see that Frankie
needs
Jill in his school.”

“So he can break her nose.”

“I’d rather have it broken than have it shoved permanently in the air by some snob-Gothic goon academy.”

And we were off. My position was that Oliver really wanted his daughter “finished” into an appropriate specimen of Young English Womanhood, and wanted at all costs to keep her out of the destructive atmosphere of pig farmers’ sons. Oliver’s position was that, whereas he was thinking about
Jill,
I was willing to sacrifice her to an image of myself as a benevolent liberal. There was plenty to be said for both arguments, and I truly think we said it all. Our fights have been developing their pattern through the years, and over Jill they achieved pure ritual. It used to be that we couldn’t stop without a physical blow or a fit of tears, followed by an aggressive-apologetic bout in bed. But there wasn’t the energy for that every day through a whole autumn. We got so either of us could call a truce with a particularly exhausted sigh, sleep on it and begin again refreshed at breakfast. Breakfasts were terrible, keeping the tone conversational for Jill’s sake, and ritualistically ripping the guts out of a poached egg. When Jill was gone—ironically, Frankie never threatened her again and she began to settle in at school—we had half an hour before Oliver had to leave for the office.

“This is Jill I’m talking about, Jill our daughter, whom you profess to love.”

“I understand that, Oliver. But I don’t see why it isn’t possible to think about Jill and a few other million kids at the same time.”

“Oh, I do admire your scope. A few million!”

“The fact is that education in this country is being …”

“The fact is that a little girl in this house is being turned into an angry, aggressive, destructive little bitch because she’s in an angry, aggressive, destructive little school. Is that the fact or isn’t it?”

“It is and it isn’t. It’s her age as well. According to Spock …”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Well, what does St. Margaret’s turn little girls into, can you tell me that? A place called
St. Margaret’s,
my dear. Who the hell was St. Margaret?”

“As a matter of fact there’s a state school in Eastley Village called St. Timoetheus, and they’ve got nothing but factory hands in that district.”

“Oh, well, thank God we don’t live there.”

Sometimes Oliver’s arguments hit home. He said, for instance, that the reason I was so indifferent to our money was not from any real sympathy for people who had none. Quite the opposite. It was a way of proving myself superior to everybody, my parents included, who had to think about money all the time. It’s a subtle argument, but the subtlety isn’t all Oliver’s. It’s true that money pervaded the atmosphere of my childhood like smog, though I didn’t know it. It’s only at this distance that I can see how Henry Ford had a place in my bedtime stories beside Ali Baba and Robin Hood; how the symbol that dominated religion was a neon thermometer flashing the progress of the church building fund; how my parents, who seemed to have no passion but economy, had in fact no pleasure but to spend. And yet it’s only in England that I’ve discovered my father was a member of the working class. There’s no working class in America. We were Baptists; we were Westerners; we were Law-Abiding; we had Ideas. If there was any class-consciousness in my consciousness then, I’d have to say we considered ourselves the elite: morally, because we drank no alcohol; physically, because we lived in seasonless sun; mentally, because my mother liked pictures and went on purpose to museums to look at them. I felt none of the gulf that I should have felt in England, as the daughter of a laborer, between myself and the great universities, the great careers. It was common enough to drive two hundred miles to a square dance. I saw no reason I shouldn’t travel at the same offhand speed over the social highways of America. I was ambitious, I suppose, but I didn’t know it was ambition. Ambition was as usual in our town as bread.

Half the reason, Oliver said, that I wouldn’t send my daughter to an expensive school, was that I could recognize it as an ambition my mother might have had. I lost that round.

In fact, I lost. The arguments wore me down; they tired me essentially; they aged me. When Oliver started to attack through Jill, tempting her with visions of St. Margaret’s horseback rides, I was scared. Oliver’s fairer than that. I saw that he wasn’t going to give in, and if I didn’t either, this quarrel was going to lurch right on through Jill’s adolescence. I considered the alternative, of taking Jill and leaving him. When I did that, I came up against the blunt probability that I love my husband. It came to me, after eleven years, as a nasty shock.

Like every child of the forties brought up on Barbara Stanwyck and Tyrone Power, my parents’ marriage had seemed a shabby affair to me. I could have sat out the bickering and the periods of pointless martyrdom, but when my mother smiled up seraphically out of that bramble patch and assured me that my father was the dearest thing on earth to her, I was choked with hot derision. I discovered now, her dead and me at thirty-two, that I owed her a profound apology. If I once wanted emotion as apocalypse, what I have is as gnarled and stunted as a tree in chalk, but it isn’t dead. I’m not suited to Oliver. I don’t agree with him and I don’t forgive him. He enters things, he takes them at the value they take themselves, and I pull against it, arrogant and didactic. He uses words like “finalize” that make me squirm in my chair, and I use words like “codswallop” that make him squirm in his. I’m clumsy too—cats leap on windowsills to avoid me—whereas Oliver can lounge convincingly in French Provincial. So we grate each other, our corners get rubbed off. But when he goes away for the weekend I go, at least once, to the medicine cabinet, to smell his shaving things.

It’s harassing, but it’s organic; it’s a peculiar place, it’s home. I discovered that for eleven years I’d been living as if it were temporary. I’m not so naïve that I haven’t noticed how much, like everybody else, we concern ourselves with things and taxes. I don’t run everywhere as I used to, and Oliver’s humor is not so fresh. But I thought that was age, and age doesn’t trouble me overmuch. I know that we’ve chosen compromises, but no choice has seemed to lead inevitably to another. I thought we could go this direction but keep our essential selves intact, and turn off any side road that took our fancy. There are two thousand people the work of whose hands depends on Oliver’s decisions, there are women in Stuttgart and Carmarthenshire out shopping in my cherry blossoms, we have textile stock and two cars and two careers and a daughter—we’ve even planted asparagus—and all this time I’ve believed we would some day slough the lot of it to discover ourselves in peace and passion. Doing what, I don’t know: weaving grass mats in the Caribbean. And now we stand facing each other and I see we
have
discovered ourselves. We’re right about each other. Oliver does want his daughter finished, and I do want to sneer at a life I can’t do without. We’re right about each other, and what do we gain by that? This is what we’ve got, take it or leave it. I couldn’t leave it.

I did some research to make sure I’d have nothing to regret. I visited Jill’s class and saw for myself the regimentation and the boredom. I checked out the nearby day schools, I asked the local council if she could be transferred. Then I told Oliver he’d won, and why, which he more or less understood. I knew the wrench wasn’t done for me. For one thing, Jill was by now outraged at the notion of leaving her school and home—and perhaps Frankie. But I knew that Oliver had been right about that part of it; she could take it. And I figured that once the thing was done, I could settle down myself to have a clearer look round the bramble patch.

A
ND THAT WAS PRETTY
much the way things stood, when Oliver came to bed last night with a batch of papers. I was sleeping uneasily, with the imminence of Jill’s departure. His scratching pen woke me—single sharp scratches of irritated underlining. When he finished and snapped off the light he rolled straight to me, began nuzzling my shoulder and bent a cold leg across my thighs. The lack of transition annoyed me, and I pretended sleep for longer then could have been credible. It didn’t matter how long I pretended. Once he’s decided to make love, Oliver has every confidence of bringing me round. I’ve heard him dilate with the same confidence on the settlement of strikes: patience and firmness, and always look more willing than the other fellow is. Virginia asked me once what I missed most about being single. Necking, I said. She was worried for me, but I read between the lines from Grosvenor Square that she sees what I mean. So I pretended to be sleepier than I was, and Oliver wrapped his legs around mine and rocked himself patiently and willingly against me until his firmness impressed itself on my thigh. My irritation partly paled; it’s a form of flattery, after all, and I thought: it’ll be good for me, I always enjoy it once I’m started. It occurred to me that it might help me face Miss Meridene in the morning, more relaxed. It occurred to me that Oliver was sorry about Jill’s going. Sorry that he hadn’t made his reasons mine, and that he still believed a father’s reasons had more weight. And I was sorry too, that I couldn’t suit him better, since I’d chosen to live his life. Then he got to my ear and said, “You rangy broad,” and I turned to him, as if waking, with a provocative uvular.

There’s no discovery left in this process; the frontiers have all been mapped. And—it’s part of coming to terms with us—I no longer see why there should be. Oliver knows exactly how many drinks I must have had before it’s worth his urging fellatio, I know exactly how to make use of my early horseback riding, and we both know—my body takes his angle as familiarly as the mattress—that whereas my right breast is rousable and willing, there’s no use arguing with the left at all. My left breast isn’t on strike, it’s just bone-idle.

So we plied and stroked each other without error, his tongue freewheeled along my collarbone, and I made moan, not uncontrollably, but for the equally good reason that he likes it. He bit too hard and I jettisoned him, then he won me back with a swift ring of licks around my concave belly button, which has been an object of some wonder to him since he discovered that it would hold twenty-six small southern-French beach pebbles. His shaving scent made me think, as it always does, of the lemon groves in Pasadena Valley, and when he rubbed the nerves at the base of my spine there followed, as there sometimes does, the halo of aspen behind Jay Mellon’s head and the scare of sap in everything. I wondered briefly about Jay, tried to picture him as old as he must be now, and couldn’t, and forgot that, because the muscles of Oliver’s back seemed animal and young. My own length turned supple and I took him in, and worked with him until his shuddering deep in me brought shuddering from deep in me. And what more, after eleven years in the same bed, do you expect?