The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (16 page)

T
OMORROW WOULD BE WAR
. T
OMORROW, EVERY RADIO
would break into the Dodgers game and announce the Japanese attack, followed later by our own president’s declaration. War was hours away. And they did not know it.

Morning shouts, and morning newspapers, and Nathan’s sideways expression as he shaved, and my son so sleepy, wandering down the hall. Eggs and bacon and bright red jam. So many smiles. Send a salami to your boy in the army. Somehow I wanted to hold this moment before it broke apart forever. Mrs. Green’s nutmeg-scented arrival and Nathan’s peck-on-my-lips departure. A house to clean and toys to step on and put away, all with an arm in a cast. The last hours of a steady life.

“Good-bye, wife!” Nathan said in the doorway, tapping down his hat. “Have a good day!”

To be a wife with Nathan! How my old self growled at the idea. We had always rolled our eyes at marriage, knowing too well how it led to matching coffee cups, and matching children (“one for me, one for you”) and soon a white-collar prison outside the city where our cars would know our bodies better than our spouses. We felt we lived above it all; we would not marry, would not contract ourselves to each other like businesses. We would be messy, and unstable. And happy.

And yet—and yet!—here I had no choice but to be a wife. I will admit, it was a pleasant sensation, walking through the Village with my purse and hat and gold wedding band, to take each step with the pride of a married lady. I was a modern woman of the eighties, but it took very little time for me to get used to the strange underthings and hems and hose of that era and treat it like a costume of dignity—an academic gown, or a WAC uniform—with the thought that here I was, a married lady. Some days I held my son’s hand and took him to the park. Some days I did the shopping and searched in my purse for minuscule change. My hat was straw with roses, nothing garish. It felt so funny to be prim and proper. It felt outlandish. And to have policemen nod their heads, and men open doors, and children be pulled aside so I could pass, all for a rich doctor’s wife and her wide skirts—imagine! A crook of my finger and waiters would bring wine! A hand to my forehead and a seat would open on the subway! Ridiculous. Greta Wells, who had marched for ERA. Who had gone braless in Washington Square Park. I had become the kind of woman I used to hate. How I loved it.

Straightening the antimacassars on the armchairs. Licking my thumb to wipe a smudge from Fee’s protesting face. Watching him race two shoes across the carpet: his and mine. Touching this and that. How do you steady things before an earthquake? Nobody really knows. Even I did not know, for there was another earthquake coming I had not foreseen.

I
T WAS EVENING
, the day done, and Mrs. Green had prepared yet another chicken pot pie and was gathering her things to leave (she had knitted at least five sweaters since I’d first met her, all for the war effort, all in hideous green) when I got the call from Nathan that he would be late at the clinic again. “Oh, what a shame,” I said before hanging up the phone, and then, coiling the cord around my finger, I turned to Mrs. Green and asked if she could stay just another hour. I wanted to surprise Nathan and take him supper. The clinic was close, just around the corner, it would take no time at all and mean nothing to me. “If I may suggest, madam,” she began as always. “To let Mr. Michelson get his supper on his own.” I shook my head, believing her to have a tin ear for romance.

On my walk I studied the strange world I was becoming accustomed to, the world on the brink of a war. In an odd reverse of the world of 1918—where suddenly the fever had broken, the patient had risen, and death was banished forever—here were streets full of people who did not know that war was coming tomorrow. In the window of a bread shop, a hand-painted sign:
AN INDEPENDENT DESTINY FOR AMERICA!
And around the corner, at an appliance store:
WESTINGHOUSE HAS AN E FOR EXCELLENCE! SERVING THE NAVY, READY FOR ACTION!
It was as if two paths were being prepared: one for war and one for peace, and this world was trying to take both, like a bride preparing for two weddings at once, depending on who asked her. Only I knew who would ask her: Death would ask her. There were boys in uniform everywhere, and girls sat in soda-shop groups giggling and admiring them. I could see how quickly old sufferings had been forgotten; their own fathers or grandfathers had lost limbs to war, their mothers or grandmothers had wept over a son or brother. But there they were, sipping egg creams at the window, as girls in centuries past must have watched the legions pass them on some Roman road. Waving and giggling and sighing with pleasure. I had wondered earlier about the Cassandra who could prepare them. I was that Cassandra.

“He left an hour ago, as usual, Mrs. Michelson,” I was told by the male nurse at registration. “Didn’t he phone you?”

I stood examining a pot of paperwhites that sat just beside his plump left hand. The stiff green stems, the bright little petals already beginning to crisp at the edges. I leaned forward; scentless. I heard my name again and pulled my coat closer around me, then picked up the ceramic pot of dinner. Yes, I said, yes, he had phoned me; I was sorry to disturb him. I made my way out and threw the dinner in a trash can; my hands were shaking too hard to hold it.

“W
HERE IS HE
?” I demanded of Mrs. Green.

She stood in the kitchen, in her long, plain, rose-colored dress, arms crossed and lips pressed tight, as if to keep any flash of recognition from me. A teapot stood on a blue gas ring. My son was already put to bed, and her eyes went over and over to the shut door to his room. He was a light sleeper. Yet she said nothing at all as I shouted.

“You know exactly where he is. I know you do. You’re in cahoots.”

“Mrs. Michelson,” she said quietly. “If I may suggest, as a friend—”

“You’re not my friend! You’ve hidden things from me. To protect him.”

“No, madam,” she said. She gripped her hands before her like the clasp of a purse.

“You have!” I shouted.

Through the thin kitchen drapes, I saw a neighbor’s light go on. Mrs. Green must have seen it, too, but she did not move an inch, did not undo her hands, but stood there backlit by this new light, gazing at me as if she knew that what she was about to say would change us always. Not just change me, but change the two of us. Women must be careful what we say to one another. We are almost all we have.

Mrs. Green stood, carefully considering her words. “No, madam,” she said slowly, never removing her gaze. “To protect you.”

I heard the teapot begin to tremble on its ring, and saw her eyes go to it. “Tell me where.”

Her eyes came back to me. Her voice went quiet. “Don’t go,” she said. The teapot struggled against the heat. “You don’t remember anything from before, do you?”

Her eyes were crinkled now in curiosity. I said, “No, no, I—”

“We used to talk about it, you and I,” she told me, and at last her hand went to the stove, and saved the teapot from screaming. She placed it on a wooden block, where it shivered and hissed slightly before calming. She said, “I knew you’d have to find out all over again.”

“Tell me where.”

“Don’t go,” she said, looking up at me now. The neighbor’s light went out behind her. “Greta. Don’t go.” It was the first time she ever called me Greta.

I
AM REMINDED
of a cocktail party in 1985, a few months after Nathan had left me, where I met a charming woman all in white who was a decorator, and after a little conversation began to relate a recent job she’d had. “You won’t know the client, a Nathan somebody,” she told me, which was of course my Nathan somebody, in an apartment with his new girlfriend. Without revealing my identity, I asked her about the job: the furniture, the bedroom, the bathroom; I would not let her go until I knew everything. I did this, though each detail was a fresh jab in my heart. And why? What magnetic force draws us to scenes of pain, and words that wound us?
You have seen this
, I told myself as I marched along to that apartment.
You have seen this already, you’ve lived through this, spare yourself
. Yet on I went. Grief will go—it always does—but not before it forces us to do these absurd things, and hurt ourselves, and bring on suffering, because grief, that parasite, above all else does not want to die, and only in these terrible moments it creates can it feel itself thrashing back to life.

And this, this time, the dread was different. As I left Patchin Place, I pictured myself before the same apartment building, low and brick, stained with rain and soot, the fire escape in a zigzag smile, knowing that it was that window there, with the light on. There beside a coal fire, in their robes with glasses of whiskey or wine, her hair spread like an octopus on a pillow. His smile happier than I knew it. It was not the pain of being cheated on; I had already suffered that, and built a callus around it so that it could not hurt again. No, that pain was over. I could not resuffer it if I wanted to. This time, it was the pain of understanding that he was no different, this Nathan. I had thought the small shift of eras had changed him, as it had changed Felix, that without my neglect, our unmarried arrangement, he would be a better man. He was a better man, in many ways: kinder, more attentive, more loving. But it was not the details of our lives. How we lived or what we said or did. It was not that the time we lived in deformed our love, with freedoms that weren’t freedoms, and selfishness and modern noise or fear. It was the goddamn way of things. How could I have imagined it could change?

And yet, one difference: me. I had changed. What he had done: I had already done myself. I had felt the solitude of freedom, the pressures of war and marriage, and seized a warm embrace when it offered itself. Why not? I had thought to myself. What damage I had done, in that other world, I did not yet know. But I could gauge the damage here. I had lived through it from both sides. The mind, however, is just a figurehead above that hidden dictator: the heart. It did nothing to help the anger. Or the pain at feeling Nathan slipping away, perhaps, all over again.

I
RETURNED TO
my kitchen wet with rain, the paper flowers in my hat ruined, their colors bled together. I found Mrs. Green in the living room, looking out the window at the raindrops, each with a tiny streetlight tucked inside it. She turned her head to me.

“I didn’t go,” I said. “There was no need.”

She nodded. “What will you do, Greta?”

“Nothing,” I said. “That’s what I did before.”

“Yes it is,” she said gravely. I had meant in my home world, when I had let my Nathan’s affair run its course. But she meant in this world. I surprised myself by knowing something, all of a sudden.

“Was it the same woman?”

She did not say anything.

“The woman from the park? I’ve seen her, watching me and Fee. In a plaid coat.”

She pulled out a cigarette, lit it, empluming herself in smoke. “Yes, that’s her.”

He came home that night very quietly, and he looked startled when he saw me—and smiled, folding his umbrella, satin-shimmering from the rain. I was sitting in my nightgown, reading a Colette novel (of all things) in the hot glow of a lamp, and he kissed me and said, “Cigarettes,” so I offered him one and we sat and smoked together as the rain threw itself against the window like a naughty child. He said it was a long night, and the army was getting him prepared to stop his hours at the clinic and devote his time to inductees. A draft was all but assured. With Roosevelt in office, the talk of staying out of war had quieted a bit, but of course in army quarters there was always talk of war, never of peace. I saw no point in telling him what was coming, and I just nodded. Had Mrs. Green frightened me again? “No,” I said. “No, she’s become a friend.” He smiled and said that was good, everyone needs an ally. I said, “I thought you were my ally.” He smiled and said he was, and kissed me, then went off to get ready for bed. I stared for a long time at Mrs. Green’s darning basket, the red felt tomato stuck with pins.

Better somewhere. Perfect somewhere. I thought it would be here, in this world with Nathan. I had fooled myself into thinking that, as a planet with water implies some kind of life, a world in which husbands stayed implied some kind of loyalty. But a minor miracle is needed for life, even in the best circumstances, some errant spark. And it seemed there was no miracle here. Why would there be? When he did not love me in my world?

The next day, I broke down in tears as a radio play was interrupted with the words: “From the NBC Newsroom in New York. President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese . . .”

W
HO CAN GUESS
what war will bring? I had barely a rest of a few weeks, and it was war, again. With Germany, again. I thought I was more prepared than anyone.

Yet I was wrong. I assumed it would be all flags and terror, like last time, but that was not what took up even a fraction of the hours. War is so much smaller than you think. It is the mind that makes it small. We would scream with horror if we could not break it into pieces: polish his shoes, and match his socks, and practice cakes without sugar, or butter, or flour. Drill with rifles, drill with gas masks. Because tomorrow is impossible, you plan today. You plan the hour. You take your cup of poison one sip at a time.