Happiness

It Was Humdrum

It Was Humdrum She picks up the phone on the second ring. She is in the kitchen anyway. "Hello7" "Hi, babe." Juan's voice, frayed from too many cigarettes too late at night. "I'm sorry. You have the wrong number." Maude hangs up. It's their signal for when she can't talk; but he will hate it anyway. She had to do it: Roger and Mary Lynn are both in the living room, within earshot. Maude goes back to the sink, where she was scrubbing potatoes. She holds them in the slant of light from the window, not bothering to cut out the eyes. On the window frame above the sink she has tacked a postcard, a reproduction of a painting. A brightly colored 88 ship, flat as paper, on a dark-green sea; in one corner a red arrow points straight out of the painting. It is called "The Ship Ready for Departure." Roger comes into the kitchen to get some cat food for the turtles. He walks slowly with his fists clenched at his sides, the way Lynnie used to do to keep her balance when she was first learning to walk. He does not touch Maude--pat her or rub her shoulder as he usually does-<:ommunicating by this omission that he is annoyed with her. He crouches down and reaches around her without saying anything, pulls the sack out from under the sink, and goes. She hates it when they fight without her even knowing it. She tries to work out what the fight is about. She said something wrong at breakfast. What was it? Her hands move automatically over the roast, rubbing salt and pepper into it. It was the detective, that was it: the detective Roger hired to find his mother. Maude has always thought of her as the "Long Lost Mother," L.L.M. for short. She left when Roger was two. He hasn't seen or heard from her since, except once when he was ten or so, a card with no return address, only the Florida postmark. That was it: Maude should not have said, "When they find the L. L.M., we'll have her up for a visit." Roger wanted "L.L.M." explained. It must be terrible to lose your mother like that-or rather, to have her lose you, like an umbrella or a single glove. Even Maude's mother hung around. Maude tumbles everything, meat and potatoes, into the oven. She goes to the doorway. Roger's back is toward her. He throws pellets of cat food into the big tank and the turtles waver to the surface and snap at them. Before Maude and Mary Lynn moved in, they were nameless; now, courtesy of Lynnie, they are No Name and Buttercup. No Name is the size of Roger's hand; Buttercup is twice as big. They started out as ordinary dime-store turtles, no bigger than a silver dollar. Knowing and sinister , they have corrugated shells and skin wrinkled like hands that have been in water too long. Roger finishes, closes the bag deliberately, folding the top over and over. Roger is a systems analyst. He is a good man, a good father: her deliberate, methodical husband. That's why she chose him, after the years of crazy lovers, after Mary Lynn's crazy father. So why, now, is she betraying him (that would be his word) with crazy Juan? Maude thinks of the story about the duck and the scorpion. Needing It Was Humdrum 89 to cross the river, the scorpion asks the duck to carry her on his back. No, says the duck; you will sting me and kill me. Why would I do such a stupid thing, says the scorpion reasonably. Then I would drown. Persuaded, the duck agrees to ferry her across. Halfway out into the river, the scorpion stings him. As they both go down, he asks her, Why did you do it? She says: Because it is my nature. Who is she hurting, after all? Roger doesn't know; Juan doesn't care. The image of quicksilver Juan imposes itself across Roger's back. The two of them together add up to a whole person. On the drive into Philly the next afternoon the air is heavy and sultry. All day it's been about to rain. Maude likes South Street, the crowds, black faces, noise. Getting out of the car on Spring Garden Street, remembering to lock it (it must not get stolen: that would be very hard to explain), she breathes acrid city air, life, danger. Juan's apartment is on the second floor, three rooms opening one into the other railroad-fashion, full of stained-glass windows and wood paneling and gilt-framed mirrors that return uncertain images like questions. The wavery light gives the whole place an underwater quality. It is full of odd thrift-shop objects: as in an aquarium, you get the feeling everything is trying to look like something else. Maude lets herself in. The kitchen is empty. She edges around the grand piano in the middle room and finds Juan in the back room, in bed, already naked. She always comes at one, when Mary Lynn goes to afternoon daycamp. "Hi, babe." He is languorous, already most of the way through a joint. The little sudden lurches of the heart when she first sees him or hears his voice on the phone have largely abated by now. But there is still something: direct, visceral, as breathtaking as a hand on her genitals. She doesn't love him. She knows that, for an affair, it's better to choose someone you can't love; though even then it's tricky. Sex makes its own bond, one that can even sometimes (she believes this but has never experienced it) generate love. She undresses quickly-Lynnie will be home at four-and slides into bed beside him. Juan kisses her, running his hand over her belly, hands her the last of the joint. He gets up to get another one. She 90 It Was Humdrum watches him cross the room, his small tight buttocks round as apples. He is, simply, beautiful. In public, people tum and stare. Reflected in the huge mirror, his erection points stiffly in front of him, wavering from side to side like a divining rod. Maude thinks of marble genitals, throngs of them, museums in Rome, in Florence. She looks down the length of her own body, stretched out straight like a medieval knight on a tombstone: belly round and a little slack since Lynnie, wide thighs, feet long and slender. She is thirty to Juan's twenty-two, a fact which only seems to matter when she isn't with him. As he gets back into bed, lines from a poem come to mind. "I like my body / When it's with your body." She decides not to say it out loud. Juan isn't much interested in poetry, and certainly not at this moment. She fingers the small quick pulse at the base of his throat. He makes a thready noise like a wasp. Light coming in through the colored glass of the window over the bed stains their flesh deep velvety hues, like the behinds of baboons at the zoo. Afterwards, beached, they smoke another joint, passing it back and forth between them, faintly damp. Juan gets up and plays for her, sitting naked at the grand piano. "We're a musical people," he says when he catches her looking at him, and rolls his eyes. He keeps playing-not the things he plays in restaurants, but Gershwin, Rodgers , Kern, striding, drifting in and out of jazz. His eyes are deep brown and strong, with glistening whites. His mother was Puerto Rican; his father, quien sabe? The music makes her want to dance, but her body is too heavy after making love. It would be like trying to run underwater. Listening to the music, riding on it, Maude rests in the moment. With Juan she never has to come up with a plausible algorithm to explain, step by step, how she got from wherever she was to wherever she is. He never asks. Al-go-RITHM-is not-RHYTHM, she thinks, in time to the music. Here she has rhythm; at home, algorithm. She laughs out loud. When she leaves, Juan walks her to the door, bare-chested in jeans, his glossy hairless skin like polished leather. What if, she thinks, driving home, what if one day she just stayed there? Stayed with Juan. She could get a job, Mary Lynn could go to school in the city; she would never have to explain anything. It Was Humdrum 91 The traffic makes her late. When she pulls up outside the row house, Mary Lynn is sitting on the steps, trying to entice some sparrows with crusts she must have hidden in her pockets at lunch. "Mary Lynn, don't do that." But Mary Lynn's attention has already moved on. "Look, Ma." Lately she has taken to calling Maude that. "Look, Ma. That's nature." A black ant, shiny and fat, crawls slowly across the stoop, drugged by the heat. "Can I go under the sprinkler? It's so hot." Mary Lynn looks straight up at Maude, her forehead corrugating with the intensity of her desire. She has Maude's wild red hair, her father's brown eyes. "Yes. Run up and change, and I'll turn it on." Mary Lynn glitters under the fine spray, drops flashing off her arrow-straight body as she jumps and turns. At six, she is as straight up and down as a boy. "Come in," she cries and beckons with quick gestures. Maude laughs, shakes her head. It's more pleasurable just to look at Lynnie. She remembers the pure sensual joy of having a very small child, the feel and smell of Lynnie at one and two and three, a hundred small daily pleasures. How could the L.L.M. have relinquished that? When Mary Lynn has had enough, they go in. Mary Lynn takes off her bathing suit. Maude dries her small body and wraps it in a yellow towel. She puts on "Saturday Night Fever." They sit in the kitchen drinking Kool-Aid the same violent pink as Mary Lynn's bathing suit. "Let's dance," says Mary Lynn when they finish. They push the table and chairs into the corner and dance wildly, twirling and flinging each other around. Oh, oh, oh, oh: stayin' alive. Stayin' alive. When the song ends, they collapse together on the floor, breathless. Maude rewraps the naked Mary Lynn in her towel. "Okay, Bean-Bag. Go get dressed." She gives her a thump on her toweled behind. "Don't call me that. I'm too old." "Oh," Maude sighs. She buries her face in her daughter's damp hair. "What'll I do when you grow up and leave me?" "You and Roger have your chother." When Mary Lynn was smaller, she heard the phrase "each other" as "our chother"; she still thinks of a chother as some mysterious secretion that grows between 92 It Was Humdrum two people and cements them together. She adds craftily, "You could have another baby." "Nothing doing." The front door opens. Mary Lynn struggles free and runs to greet Roger. The record clicks off. The sudden silence is gummy and bland. There is so much silence in Maude's life with Roger. Whole happenings go on inside it, subterranean complications and resolutions that Maude never even knows about until they're over. Sometimes he tells her there was something wrong between them last week, or last month, but everything 's all right now. It's like finding half a worm in an apple. Roger comes into the kitchen. He turns his lips inside-out when he kisses her. She hopes she doesn't smell of marijuana. He always kisses her hello and goodbye: it's part of his algorithm. "How was your day7" she says. He tells her in detail while she gets out a beer for him. (She does not have to ask what he wants.) Maude feels as if she has been absorbed ; she feels contained, like a ship in a bottle, like Jonah in the belly of the whale. She thinks, He has swallowed me. "Have you heard anything about-If she catches herself in time, "your mother7" "No." He looks grim. She is sorry she asked. In a few minutes Roger sets down the half-finished beer and gets up and goes down the hall to their bedroom, where he will lie on top of the puffy dacron bedspread and stare out the window. They have run out of conversation anyway, all the routine inquiries ticked off. She thinks of Juanpassionately , volubly (erratically, untruthfully) communicative. Even in dreams, Roger doesn't speak. Maude does. At first she was afraid she would say Juan's name in her sleep; but as time goes by, and she apparendy doesn't, she relaxes. The thought occurs to her: perhaps she has said it, and Roger hasn't wanted to bring it up. Sometimes she thinks it's not that Roger doesn't understand her but that he understands her too well. (She imagines a traveling salesman trying to pick up a woman with the plea, "My wife understands me.") Now, lying beside Roger while he sleeps, Maude listens to the occasional thump of the turdes moving in the tank. Her thoughts spiIt Was Humdrum 93 ral out into the darkness. Often now, she feels unfaithful when she makes love with her husband. Sometimes she pretends he's Juan. She exchanges his crisp curly hair for Juan's silky stuff, his hairy chest for Juan's smoothness. But something always breaks the spell. She feels his beard; or her eyes open inadvertently. lhen she just hangs on and tries to remember the algorithm for making love. Afterwards, the kisses, small pats, the murmurs of endearment and sighs of success are hard to stay still through. She gets up and takes a shower. lhen she goes into the kitchen and makes a cup of tea and sits at the narrow counter with it. She looks at her reflection in the dark windows of the old rowhouse, the glass grainy with age like taffeta. Maybe if Roger weren't around so much. He's always there, wants to spend all their free time together, comes home early to be with her. Closing the bathroom door makes him uneasy: she can feel his heavy presence outside it, waiting. She feels as if she were pushing him through life in a shopping cart, pointing out this delight, wheeling him up to that-pleasure. His first wife left him for somebody else, just like that, no warning. He came home one day and she was gone. "She was young and restless," Roger said when he told Maude about it. He made it sound like a tautology, as if youth and restlessness were the same thing. Maude pictures her bounding, freckled, with bright hair in a single thick braid down her back. 1hinking about her makeS Maude feel old. Whereas Roger makes her feel young. "Listen, Mother," she said when she called to say she was getting married at last. "He isn't young, and he isn't pretty." By that time her mother's standards had fined down to minimal: a husband (any husband) for her daughter; a father for her granddaughter, who, miraculously, was not black. "Your father would be so glad. A steady man. A good steady job." Maude doesn't really remember her father, who died when she was five. Just an outline, like the line drawings you see painted on city sidewalks: burly, broad-shouldered, big hands. Roger is about the same size and shape. Really, Maude thinks now, Mother thought we would live in Fort Washington or somewhere and have a pair of golden retrievers with golden, stupid eyes. She puts her cup in the sink and turns out the light. She thinks of all the men, her lovers, a long chain stretching across the years of high school, college, dropping out, odd jobs. She lost count somewhere around thirty; jobs, sooner than that. All the 94 It Was Humdrum changing, the different selves; and at each juncture a man would appear who represented the next self, the next Maude. Lynnie's father was the last. Intense, passionate, unpredictable, sometimes he would hit Maude or choke her, then afterwards sprawl on the floor in an agony of contrition, seizing her ankles, while the baby watched with wide eyes. By the time he left, Maude had already met Roger. Maude goes back to bed. In the night she dreams of Juan's underwater cave of an aparnnent, of the two of them swimming strongly in the tangled sheets. They hear from the detective. They get a card from the 1.1.M. herself. It is a diffident, impersonal card with a prefabricated greeting, "Thinking of You." Inside are the time and day and flight number, with the handwritten message, "Dear Son, Am looking forward to seeing You again after so Many Years." Roger lies on the bed and looks out the window. He sleeps a lot, sleeping at Maude, who can't figure out what she's done. The phrase "1.1.M." hasn't crossed her lips since the detective's phone call. She has been careful how she refers to this woman who now looms in their lives, dwarfing everything else. Mary Lynn tries to work out what to call her. Harriet, since she's not a blood relation, just as she calls Roger Roger and not Daddy? Lately Mary Lynn has been interested in blood. On the other hand, she'd like another grandmother. Grandmothers buy you Barbie dolls and tell you you swim better than the boys. Mary Lynn makes Maude help her draw a family tree. Red for blood relationships: Maude, Maude's mother; green for "Steps": Roger, Harriet. Black, wonders Maude, for absent members? Her father; Lynnie's? A week before she's due to arrive in Philadelphia, the 1.1.M. sends a photograph. It shows a young woman of nineteen or twenty in a glamor pose, full length, one leg curving inward at the knee. She is wearing a bathing suit, draped and boned in the style of the forties, and her hair marches across her head in precisely crimped formation. Her full lips are very dark. Contemplating this Betty Grable image with Mary Lynn looking over her shoulder, Maude cannot reconcile it with that of the seventy-year-old woman living on the edge of poverty in a tiny Florida town. The detective has told Roger her story: It Was Humdrum 95 fourth (fourth? thinks Maude) husband dead, no insurance, no pePsion . When she was young, the L.L.M. was a singer. She sang with bands in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. In the days before she comes, the silence between Maude and Roger grows thick and sluggish as the late summer weather. It spreads and fills the comers of the house. Maude tries, as hard as Roger himself usually does, not to fight. Fighting with him, even a small fight over nothing, would be like opening a door onto an elevator shaft. She would end up telling him about Juan, thrusting at him the fact of her lover, in anger or in guilt, she's not sure which. If they start at all, she will find herself falling, falling. With relief she sees Roger drive off to the airport. The weather breaks at last, the heavy August sky cracks open and releases rain. When they get back, it is the tail end of the thunderstorm. For hours the rain has been beating city dirt into the pavement and hurling itself against the old windows of the row house. It is very late. The storm delayed the plane, made the drive back on the Schuylkill Expressway a nightmare. Maude barely has time to register how small she is, this woman who has dominated their lives for weekshow thin and small her outstretched hand. Harriet is very tired: they will talk tomorrow. When Maude comes downstairs in the morning, Harriet is already up, fully dressed, sitting in one of the straight-backed chairs in the living room. Her hands make fists on the chair arms. Maude can't think for a minute who she reminds her of; then she remembers how Roger walks. "Good morning," Maude says. "Did you sleep well?" "Yes, thank you. Very well." At a loss, they look at each other. Morning light washes the room, gold overlaid with green. What can they possibly say? Everything, words that touch the heart's core--or nothing. Choices made decades ago, before Maude existed, crowd into the gap between them. Then Harriet smiles. Her skin, pale as parchment, stretches precariously over the brittle armature of bone. She reminds Maude of a cryptic construction Lynnie brought home from art class in the spring, tissue paper over a framework of toothpicks. 96 It Was Humdrum Maude goes into the kitchen to start the coffee, comes back to ask, "How was the trip?" The flight was rough; the weather; the whole trip took longer than Harriet expected. She smokes as if she were knitting, transferring the cigarette from hand to hand, back and forth to her mouth, in an intricate semaphore. Otherwise she sits motionless . When she talks she makes no gestures, no waving to show how fast, no spreading of her hands to show how big. Maude thinks that she is, not relaxed, but contained: in one piece, all of a piece. When Mary Lynn comes down, Maude goes back into the kitchen. It's Saturday, so they'll have eggs and bacon and fruit. She is so hard, Maude thinks. Crack! She knocks an egg on the side of the blue mixing bowl and drops it in. Imagines a baby's skull. Crack! I can't stay with this husband. Crack! Not this one either. In her mind a picture forms of Harriet in Florida. Palm trees rise abruptly through the shimmering heat. Exotic birds make their exotic noises: parrots, macaws with glittering beaks. Harriet has friends, women alone like her; they play bridge on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. She goes to the A & P in elastic stockings, into the cold slap of air-conditioned air, coaxes the shining cart up and down the aisles. Maude looks down into the bowl. The yolks stare facelessly up at her. She counts them-ten eggs for four people? She sees the picture of Saint Lucy, virgin martyr, on the calendar of her childhood. When Lucy refused to yield (her body, not her soul), they put out her eyes. In the picture, she holds a platter with her upturned eyes on it like two fried eggs. From the dining room Maude hears Mary Lynn's thin tuneless whistle, her voice explaining Harriet to the turtles. They are feeding them grapes, which Roger has asked her not to do. Maude puts rice in the salt-shaker as Roger has taught her, so that the humidity doesn't keep the salt from flowing, picking up the fine grains carefully between her fingernails. She admires them in passing: long nails, smooth as ivory, smooth hands that would not make anyone think of parchment. At breakfast Harriet sits across from Mary Lynn, Maude across from Roger. Mary Lynn and Maude are still in their bathrobes. Harriet sits straight in her careful dark-red knit suit with a darned place over one elbow and her careful hair, protected last night by plastic pleated like an accordion. "What's that painting there?" she asks. "Who did it?" "Guy Anderson." Roger is pleased to be asked. He turns and looks It Was Humdrum 97 at the painting with satisfaction. When he bought it, the gallery registered him as the owner. He has papers on it, like a pedigreed animal. "Very nice." Harriet looks around, making a gesture with her eyes only, to include everything in the room. "You have a nice home." Maude looks at Roger, then at Harriet. She is his mother. It's a connection that you can't break, that you can always resume,like the Law of Return in Israel. Maude thinks of the word for it: inalienable. She wonders if Roger will ask the question. Maybe he's decided not to disturb things. The first maxim of computer programming, he has told her, is: If it works, don't fix it. As if he's read her thoughts, Roger says into a lull, "Mother." Harriet looks up. "Why did you leave-my father?" He doesn't say, me. She hesitates. Her hands make a sudden small motion. She says, "It was humdrum." Maude's stomach gives a throb like a bass fiddle. Roger turns to look at her as if he feels the vibration. His eyes move from her face to his mother's; they hold an emotion she cannot read. After breakfast Roger and Mary Lynn and Harriet leave for the zoo, Lynnie holding Harriet's hand. If they hurry, Lynnie tells her grandmother, they'll be in time to see the nocturnal mammals get their dish of blood. Alone, Maude stands in the quiet house. Harriet is whole. Like the scorpion, she has followed her nature. Whole-hearted; hard-hearted. Are the two things the same? And she, Maude-is she split in two, living her life on two parallel tracks that never meet, while Roger watches from his shell of silence, keeping her safe, waiting for her to leave? When the dishes are done, she leaves them gleaming in the rack and goes into the living room. She puts on "Saturday Night Fever" and turns the volume up high. Walls and floors and furniture vibrate faintly to the deepest rhythms. Slowly and deliberately she takes off her clothes and lays them across one end of the sofa. She runs her hands through her hair. She dances in the green-gold light. 98 It Was Humdrum ...