Tell Me a Riddle (10 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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Page 37
ing, he would find her so, and stimulated and ardent, sniffing her skin, coax: ''I'll put the baby to bed, and youput the book away, don't read, don't read."
That had been the most beguiling of all the "don't read, put your book away" her life had been. Chekhov indeed!
"Money?" She shrugged him off. "Could we get poorer than once we were? And in America, who starves?"
But as still he pressed:
"Let me alone about money. Was there ever enough? Seven little onesfor every penny I had to askand sometimes, remember, there was nothing. But always
I
had to manage. Now
you
manage. Rub your nose in it good."
But from those years she had had to manage, old humiliations and terrors rose up, lived again, and forced her to relive them. The children's needings; that grocer's face or this merchant's wife she had had to beg credit from when credit was a disgrace; the scenery of the long blocks walked around when she could not pay; school coming, and the desperate going over the old to see what could yet be remade; the soups of meat bones begged "for-the-dog" one winter....
Enough. Now they had no children. Let
him
wrack his head for how they would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything.
Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.
For in this solitude she had won to a reconciled peace.
Tranquillity from having the empty house no longer an enemy, for it stayed cleannot as in the days when it was her family, the life in it, that had seemed
 
Page 38
the enemy: tracking, smudging, littering, dirtying, engaging her in endless defeating battleand on whom her endless defeat had been spewed.
The few old books, memorized from rereading; the pictures to ponder (the magnifying glass superimposed on her heavy eyeglasses). Or if she wishes, when he is gone, the phonograph, that if she turns up very loud and strains, she can hear: the ordered sounds and the struggling.
Out in the garden, growing things to nurture. Birds to be kept out of the pear tree, and when the pears are heavy and ripe, the old fury of work, for all must be canned, nothing wasted.
And her once social duty (for she will not go to luncheons or meetings) the boxes of old clothes left with her, as with a life-practised eye for finding what is still wearable within the worn (again the magnifying glass superimposed on the heavy glasses) she scans and sortsthis for rag or rummage, that for mending and cleaning, and this for sending away.
Being able at last to live within, and not move to the rhythms of others,
as life had forced her to: denying; removing; isolating; taking the children one by one; then deafening, half-blindingand at last, presenting her solitude.
And in it she had won to a reconciled peace.
Now he was violating it with his constant campaigning:
Sell the house and move to the Haven.
(You sit, you sitthere too you could sit like a stone.) He was making of her a battleground where old grievances tore. (Turn on your ear buttonI am talking.) And stubbornly she resistedso that from wheedling, reasoning, manipulation, it was bitterness he now started with.
 
Page 39
And it came to where every happening lashed up a quarrel.
''I will sell the house anyway," he flung at her one night. "I am putting it up for sale. There will be a way to make you sign."
The television blared, as always it did on the evenings he stayed home, and as always it reached her only as noise. She did not know if the tumult was in her or outside. Snap! she turned the sound off. "Shadows," she whispered to him, pointing to the screen, "look, it is only shadows." And in a scream: "Did you say that you will sell the house? Look at me, not at that. I am no shadow. You cannot sell without me."
"Leave on the television. I am watching."
"Like Paulie, like Jenny, a four-year-old. Staring at shadows.
You cannot sell the house."
"I will. We are going to the Haven. There you would not hear the television when you do not want it. I could sit in the social room and watch. You could lock yourself up to smell your unpleasantness in a room by yourselffor who would want to come near you?"
"No, no selling." A whisper now.
"The television is shadows. Mrs. Enlightened! Mrs. Cultured! A world comes into your houseand it is shadows. People you would never meet in a thousand lifetimes. Wonders. When you were four years old, yes, like Paulie, like Jenny, did you know of Indian dances, alligators, how they use bamboo in Malaya? No, you scratched in your dirt with the chickens and thought Olshana
*
was the world. Yes, Mrs. Unpleasant, I will
* Olsen's invented name for a typical village of tsarist Russia.
 
Page 40
sell the house, for there better can we be rid of each other than here.''
She did not know if the tumult was outside, or in her. Always a ravening inside, a pull to the bed, to lie down, to succumb.
"Have you thought maybe Ma should let a doctor have a look at her?" asked their son Paul after Sunday dinner, regarding his mother crumpled on the couch, instead of, as was her custom, busying herself in Nancy's kitchen.
"Why not the President too?"
"Seriously, Dad. This is the third Sunday she's lain down like that after dinner. Is she that way at home?"
"A regular love affair with the bed. Every time I start to talk to her."
Good protective reaction, observed Nancy to herself. The workings of hos-til-ity.
"Nancy could take her. I just don't like how she looks. Let's have Nancy arrange an appointment."
"You think she'll go?" regarding his wife gloomily. "All right, we have to have doctor bills, we have to have doctor bills." Loudly: "Something hurts you?"
She startled, looked to his lips. He repeated: "Mrs. Take It Easy, something hurts?"
"Nothing. . . . Only you."
"A woman of honey. That's why you're lying down?"
"Soon I'll get up to do the dishes, Nancy."
"Leave them, Mother, I like it better this way."
"Mrs. Take It Easy, Paul says you should start ballet. You should go to see a doctor and ask: how soon can you start ballet?"
 
Page 41
''A doctor?" she begged. "Ballet?"
"We were talking, Ma," explained Paul, "you don't seem any too well. It would be a good idea for you to see a doctor for a checkup."
"I get up now to do the kitchen. Doctors are bills and foolishness, my son. I need no doctors."
"At the Haven," he could not resist pointing out, "a doctor is
not
bills. He lives beside you. You start to sneeze, he is there before you open up a Kleenex. You can be sick there for free, all you want."
"Diarrhea of the mouth, is there a doctor to make you dumb?"
"Ma. Promise me you'll go. Nancy will arrange it."
"It's all of a piece when you think of it," said Nancy, "the way she attacks my kitchen, scrubbing under every cup hook, doing the inside of the oven so I can't enjoy Sunday dinner, knowing that half-blind or not, she's going to find every speck of dirt. ... ."
"Don't, Nancy, I've told youit's the only way she knows to be useful. What did the
doctor
say?"
"A real fatherly lecture. Sixty-nine is young these days. Go out, enjoy life, find interests. Get a new hearing aid, this one is antiquated. Old age is sickness only if one makes it so. Geriatrics, Inc."
"So there was nothing physical."
"Of course there was. How can you live to yourself like she does without there being? Evidence of a kidney disorder, and her blood count is low. He gave her a diet, and she's to come back for follow-up and lab work. . . . But he was clear enough: Number One prescriptionstart living like a human being
. . . . When I think of your dad, who could really play the invalid with
 
Page 42
that arthritis of his, as active as a teenager, and twice as much fun. . . .''
"You didn't tell me the doctor says your sickness is in you, how you live." He pushed his advantage. "Life and enjoyments you need better than medicine. And this diet, how can you keep it? To weigh each morsel and scrape away each bit of fat, to make this soup, that pudding. There, at the Haven, they have a dietician, they would do it for you."
She is silent.
"You would feel better there, I know it," he says gently. "There there is life and enjoyments all around."
"What is the matter, Mr. Importantbusy, you have no card game or meeting you can go to?"turning her face to the pillow.
For a while he cut his meetings and going out, fussed over her diet, tried to wheedle her into leaving the house, brought in visitors:
"I should come to a fashion tea. I should sit and look at pretty babies in clothes I cannot buy. This is pleasure?"
"Always you are better than everyone else. The doctor said you should go out. Mrs. Brem comes to you with goodness and you turn her away."
"Because
you
asked her to, she asked me."
"They won't come back. People you need, the doctor said. Your own cousins I asked; they were willing to come and make peace as if nothing had happened... ."
"No more crushers of people, pushers, hypocrites,

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