“Obliquity,” he murmured. “Know the definition?”
Yet there was the time I’d have taken his hand, said, “Let me help you,” with invitation. Now there was only that lackadaisical
reach of hand to hip as one or the other of us tried to decide whether we felt sufficiently sexy to screw. There was no gauging
the sexual shifts from furtive and frantic, to tender and easy, to social joking about Halley’s comet frequency and getting
lucky. Now there was only Hal closing his book, cutting off the bedside lamp.
“Watch what you put the electric blanket on,” he said. “I got hot last night.” Now there was only bedtime appliance instructions.
It comes to this.
“Love you,” he said.
“Me too,” I said, automatic as the sex scene check. It’s no one’s fault. Of course I loved him, too. I loved his patience,
his serenity, his logic, his steadfastness. No, I
admired
them, as I admired much about him. But admiration is a distant cousin to love.
Love.
“I absolutely love your husband,” an Asheville Academy teacher had told me recently. “Don’t you?”
Love.
“Did you notice how Ed Jordan couldn’t keep his hands off his new wife?” I’d asked Hal after a party in Durham. “He didn’t
let her out of his sight. Talk about true love.”
“That’s infatuation,” Hal had returned noncommittally, “not love. Which would you rather have?”
Love.
“Mark loves Wendy,” Ellen had whispered to me through rubber-gloved fingers while we scrubbed terra-cotta pots with bleach
before winter storage. In the driveway the two teenagers were washing the car, and I looked up in time to see Mark flick a
soapy rat-tailed rag at Wendy in shameless, timeless flirtation. “Mark needs a Wendy fix,” Ellen said, and giggled.
“That’s not the same thing as a you fix,” I said as Wendy squealed obligingly and lunged for Mark, equally shameless.
Don’t be jealous. It’s her turn to be sexy.
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“A you fix is about love. That’s. . . ”
Ellen had stripped off the gloves, on to other matters. “My hands stink.”
Love.
“They get along well,” Mark had observed of a classmate’s parents as we drove away from their house. I knew what prompted
my son’s comment. As the couple chatted with us they’d stood with arms en-twined, hands in each other’s back pockets, smiling
at each other more than at us. There’d been a kind of wistful envy in Mark’s tone of voice. I reached across the seat and
patted his thigh, for which small affection I was rewarded with a scowl. I also knew that the pair was in marriage counseling.
That twining and touching and smiling was therapist-prescribed behavior. I knew the look of a couple making a concerted, demonstrative
effort at reloving. You had to be married to recognize it.
Hal’s leg jerked without warning, a nightly routine of twitching with slumber’s unwinding. I braced for the next nocturnal
jolt, his limbs bolting with inconsistent spasms. I’d tried speaking aloud to him, even laying my leg heavily over his. Nothing
worked. How did it happen, the slide into same-house separation?
“How do you know if you love someone enough to marry them?” I’d asked my father once, at Mark’s age, perhaps. Asked with all
the sincerity I’d once asked how he could sleep every night, wasn’t he afraid our house would burn down? I’d sat on the stoop
in the velvet dampness of a summer night, chin upon my nightgowned knees.
“When you can’t stand to be without someone for a single day, when it hurts your heart to be away from them even for an hour,
then you know,” my father had said, equally sincere. He hadn’t lived long enough for me to ask him how you kept it that way.
Unable to sleep, I rose, fumbled through the blackened house, and switched on the outside floods. Checking, scanning, hoping
for the first flake. Nothing. My old wives’ prediction for Ellen had come to nothing, like my attempts with Daintry. The spotlit
glare illuminated only the sad battered bird feeder lying on the ground where it had dropped unnoticed, as if finally yielding
to the invisible weight of neglect. The cedar shake roof had fallen off, the glass side panels shattered.
Hal’s corduroy pants were crumpled before the louvered doors of the washing machine. Apparently he couldn’t be bothered to
put them in the hamper like everyone else. The dull olive nap of the fabric was dotted with burrs and tiny seed pod triangles.
My husband was constructing his rock wall with the same thorough perfection he brought to any task. At the sight of the stubborn
hitchhikers I felt a sudden spasm myself, a lurch of love. Of course I loved Hal. Surely. Inadequate, inarticulate, mis- and
overused word with no definition, but the right word all the same.
“What do you tell them?” I’d asked Peter when he’d come to the woods after a marriage counseling session. He’d looked tired,
beaten. I couldn’t touch him, but I could talk to him. “ ’Don’t go to bed mad’?”
“That old shopworn dictum.” He laced his fingers. “There’s a scientific reason people in the throes of romance are dreamy,
think life is perfect. Our bodies literally release a chemical when we fall in love. The euphoria hormone. It only lasts six
months.”
I sat beside him, grubby hands tucked inside my folded knees. “But what do you tell them,” I asked again, “later? Afterward?”
Peter creased a leaf along its spine and folded it neatly as a letter. “They don’t want to hear what I say. That after a certain
time, loving is an act of will. It’s . . . work.” We were both silent a moment. “The truth is, people don’t need marital counseling
before
they’re married. They need it
when
they’re married.” He’d sailed the leaf away. “Do you suppose I could change that rule, too?” Since then we hadn’t spoken
of marriage, or of Daintry, or Hal.
I brushed at the clinging pods on Hal’s pants and thought of another pair, Peter’s. He’d wanted to help plant the bulbs.
“No,” I’d told him. “You’re not dressed right. It’s dirty work.”
“I won’t get dirty. No one will know.” The reference was innocent, but the words rang between us, fraught. “Because I’ll do
the shoveling,” he said quickly, stooping, moving with that restless energy, “and you’ll put in the bulbs.” But his trouser
cuffs had gotten soiled, and I’d worried over them, kneeling to scrub the stains with my shirttails as Peter stood above me.
Like other physical gestures—his hand at my waist or elbow, the touch of fingers when I gave him an apple, my palm over the
small welt of his bee-stung finger—it had felt an intimate act.
Had Daintry noticed the stains? “Did you get those bulbs planted?” she’d asked. Casually or pointedly? I tried to remember.
Love.
“She’s cool,” Ellen had said of Daintry. “I love her.”
Love.
“But it was different from you and Daintry,” Ceel had said. “I
loved
Geoff.”
Love.
“You’ve always loved those PKs,” she’d said.
Love.
“That’s not love,” I’d said to Ellen, “that’s. . . ”
One night years ago as I read to a five-year-old Mark, he’d pointed to a word and without fanfare simply uttered “ball.” I’d
gasped at the wonder of it, the absolute unexpectedness. At breakfast the page had been unintelligible squiggles of ink, by
nighttime it was
ball.
“Mark’s reading!” I’d exclaimed to his kindergarten teacher. “How did you do it? When did you start teaching them to read?”
She’d smiled at me, responded mildly. “No one knows how people learn to read. If we did, there’d never be anyone who was illiterate.”
Wasn’t it the same with love? If we knew what it was that attracted us to other people, there would never be any infidelities.
Or love. People speculate, “What does he see in her?” and vice versa. There’s no formula for attraction. Nothing as simple
as moons and suns, aortas and atriums. Sometimes it isn’t the way someone looks, that they’re funny, or prodding, or hopeful,
or intense.
I put my husband’s pants in the laundry hamper, as I’d done a thousand times.
“You’re so married,”
Daintry had said. Sometimes it’s as simple as this: He’s not what you already have.
From Hannah’s quote book:
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments picked apparently at random, shine?
—John Updike
I
t’s the gin,” Mother said.
“I used vodka,” Ceel said.
“Did you buy any extra ornament hooks?” Mother asked me, and secured the final word in the debate over which liquor, added
to tap water, produced the more rigid, topple-proof stems when forcing bulbs: “Gin works much better.”
I stepped into a familiar role of diplomat. “What does it matter as long as they’re standing?” Ceel’s narcissi were triumphs:
frothy white crowns on foot-high stalks springing from rocks and water. And gin. Or vodka. “Thanks for saving one bowl for
me.”
“I ran out of moss,” Ceel said. “But I figured you’d know where to find more.”
Hal grunted from behind the tree where he was attaching lights. “All done. Have at it while I have at vodka
and
gin. Ben?” he called to the kitchen. “Whatever you’re fixing, do it double.”
“Wait!” Ellen said. “We need music before we start hanging ornaments. And where’s the
White Christmas
video? Everything has to be just right.” Like a count-down to launching, Ellen had been crossing off the days to this Friday
night of vacation’s beginning. The night the tree was put up and the house decorated was on a par with Christmas Eve in Ellen’s
holiday scheduling. It wasn’t Christmas proper until the house was cozied with red and green clutter. She’d arrived home from
the half day of school giddy with freedom and festivity. But her smile sagged with disappointment when she saw the den, unchanged
since breakfast.
“Where are the boxes? I thought you’d have everything ready. You haven’t even brought out the ornaments and stockings?”
I understood expectations and their debilitating effects. The first Sunday in December Hal had expressed similar dismay at
supper. “You haven’t gotten an Advent wreath for the table?” It seemed less a question than a statement of my inadequacy.
So I’d fashioned a circlet of greenery from tree lot trimmings and scavenged the attic for the four leftover purple candles,
only to find them melted into a waxy clump.
Even Mark had directed a Christmas complaint in my direction. “You’re trimming the tree on a night I have to work?” He’d gotten
a vacation job in the kitchen of Honey Hams.
“But you told me it didn’t matter to you when we decorated, Mark.” It took an act of Congress to coordinate the evening around
holiday hubbub, selecting the tree, making certain Mother, Ceel, Ben, Ellen, and Hal were available and included. Mark had
shown no interest in participating. “You said to do it whenever we wanted.”
“I can’t believe you’d do it without me,” he’d insisted. “At least get some icicles. Everybody but me thinks icicles are tacky.”
“There’s a big blank spot on the right,” Mother said now. She walked over to examine the black hole. “Four bulbs are out.
You should have checked the strand before they went on the tree, Hannah, and bought extras.”
I sighed. It was hard to say what induced the greatest guilt: children, husbands, mothers, or Christmas itself. I thought
I was prepared—shopped and wrapped and packed and delivered and mailed—covering every base in that blitz of activity and readiness.
Making time to enjoy the short days beforehand.
“Did you put that soup on?” Mother was saying.
“Mark brought some ham from work and I thought we’d just have sandwiches.”
“No, we need something warm. It’s my homemade. It’ll be more filling.”
“Sounds good to me,” Hal agreed with her. I put down a fragile hand-blown globe and went into the kitchen. Obeying. Capitulating.
Again.
“Church is at ten,” Mother said.
I reached across the platter of eggs and bacon for Hal’s hand. It was early in our romance, and we were visiting Cullen. “Let’s
be lawless. Stay home together and read the paper, take a walk.” I sensed my mother’s frown and ignored it, silently challenging
her to interfere.
“I’d like to go to church,” Hal said. “Really.”
“We’ll need to leave right afterward to get back to school. Don’t you want to laze around here, the two of us?” Hal smiled,
indulging my wheedle.
But after breakfast Mother followed me to my room, closing the door for privacy. “Hal obviously wants to go to church with
us, Hannah. You ought to be glad about it. And if you can’t be glad, at least let him do what he wants to do.”
“He can go with you, then,” I said tersely, in the tight grip of defiance. “I’m staying home.”
Her double reflected in the full-length mirror, she stood at the door and delivered her parting shot: “Fine. That’s between
you and your God.”
And I had gone, of course. The good daughter. The good girlfriend. Dutiful. Faithful in several senses of the word.
“I want to do the angel at the top,” Ellen was saying. “Daddy says if he and Mom ever fight, the angels will cry.”
Ceel looked at me curiously, but Ellen pulled on her. “Did you hear me in the Academy show, Ceelie? I sang
aingells,
not
aingulls,
just like you taught us in choir.”
“I can’t believe Peter Whicker substituted a come-asyou-are afternoon service for the Christmas Eve pageant,” Hal said. “He’s
made more decrees than Caesar Augustus.”
I bit back a defense for Peter’s idea and teased Ellen, “Remember when you used to say, ‘Christ the sailor is born’?”
Ben shuffled CD cases. “What about carols instead of this?” A jazzy version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”—Ellen’s selection—was
blaring from the speakers.
“Hey,” I said, more diplomacy for the sake of Ellen’s ritual. “I need a tall man. Put this crystal snowflake somewhere safe
and high, will you?”
“Is that your favorite ornament, Mom? Everybody has to have a favorite,” Ellen said. The conversation fell to favorites, and
I relaxed as the tree filled with finery. I knelt at the ornament box and carefully extracted a crumpled construction paper
wreath whose unevenly scissored center held a photograph of a five-year-old Mark. Once the wreath had been adorned with macaroni
curls painted red. Attic mice had nibbled away the pasta, paper, and even the clotted glue, so that only a mangled paper circle
remained. But Mark’s beaming kindergarten grin was intact. “Oh, look. This needs a special place.”