Her tone was relaxed and pleasant. She and Michael’s mother were cozy friends, and Michael was the outsider pressing his nose to the window glass. He sighed and offered Lindy a spoon. “Don’t you plan to dine with us?” he asked when she didn’t take it. As if he had convinced her, she reached out and grasped the spoon and pulled it from his hand with surprising strength. He lowered his face to the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her hair. Underneath the talcum he caught a hint of fresh sweat, which he found endearing and faintly comical.
Pauline ladled out the soup—cream of tomato. She sat down and unfolded her napkin. Michael wrested his spoon from Lindy’s fist and started eating, and his mother picked up her own spoon, but Pauline just sat there, staring into her bowl.
“Hon?” Michael said finally. “Can’t you manage even a little?”
“Not unless I want it all to come back up again,” she said.
“Mrs. Piazy says to try saltine crackers.”
There was a box of saltines on the table, but she didn’t reach for it. Instead she said, “Will you all please excuse me?” and she laid her napkin next to her bowl and stood up and left the kitchen.
Michael and his mother looked at each other. The bedroom door closed quietly.
“She’s going to waste away to nothing,” his mother said after a moment.
Perversely, Michael felt a pang of almost brotherly jealousy. Didn’t he deserve a little sympathy too? This wasn’t much fun for him!
When they had finished eating (the clinks of their spoons too loud, guiltily healthy-sounding, and their remarks to the baby too chirpy), Michael told his mother that he thought he’d go check on Pauline. “Yes, why don’t you do that,” she said. “I’ll see to the dishes.” He hoisted Lindy out of her high chair and took her with him.
Playing it extra safe, he knocked on the bedroom door first. Nobody said, “Come in,” but after a brief pause, he went in anyway.
Pauline was not lying in bed, as he had expected, but standing near the window at the foot of Lindy’s crib. She had lifted one lace panel to gaze out, and she didn’t look around when Michael entered. “Pauline,” he said.
“What.”
“I wish you’d try and eat a little something.”
She went on staring out the window, although the view was just the flat faces of the houses across the side street.
This room, which had once belonged to Michael’s parents, had developed a kind of dual personality since his marriage. His parents’ white iron bed and glass-knobbed mahogany nightstand kept company now with Pauline’s autograph quilt from her girlhood, and her senior-prom corsage all faded and hardened on the bureau, and snapshots of her high-school friends tucked in the frame of the mirror. Her decorating style was so personal. Even the few pieces of furniture that she’d introduced—a child’s rocker, a hope chest—had their intimate associations, their long-winded, confidential histories.
He went over to stand next to her. “See Mommy?” he asked Lindy. “
Poor
Mommy. She’s not feeling well.”
Sadly, Pauline said, “You don’t even know what’s wrong, do you.”
“Actually, I believe I do know,” Michael said. He kept his voice very even, so as not to upset her further. “Or I know what you
think
is wrong. You think I should have made more of a fuss about your birthday.”
Pauline started to say something, but he held up the flat of his free hand. “Now, I’m sorry that you feel that way,” he said. “I certainly never meant to disappoint you. But what I suspect is that you’re under a little strain these days. You’re pregnant, you’re morning sick, and you’re none too pleased anyhow—neither one of us is—about having a second baby so soon. That’s what’s really bothering you.”
“How do
you
know what’s bothering me?” Pauline asked, wheeling around.
Lindy whimpered, and Michael patted the small of her back. He said, “Now, Pauline. Now, hon. Calm yourself, hon.”
“Don’t you ‘hon’ me! Don’t you tell me to calm myself! So all-knowing and superior. I’m the only one who can say what bothers me and what doesn’t!”
Anyone could have heard her—his mother, for sure, and maybe even Eustace and whatever customers might be down in the store. Her voice had risen at least an octave and turned thin and wiry, nothing like her usual appealing croak. And she was so physical in her fury, putting her whole body into emphasizing each word, that her curls stood out from her head in an electric, exaggerated way. (Like a dandelion clock, Michael suddenly fancied.) When things reached this state, he felt helpless. He had no means of controlling her. However he tried to quiet her only made her louder. “Sweetheart,” he tried, and “Poll, hon,” and “Be reasonable, Pauline.” But she advanced, both fists clenched tight. She grabbed the baby, who was crying now, and she hugged her to her breast and shouted, “Go away! Just go! Just take your stuffy pompous boring self-righteous self away and leave us in peace!”
He turned without another word. Now was when he most hated limping, because instead of striding out he had to leave the room in a halting and victimlike manner. Still, he did his best. In the kitchen he passed his mother, who stared at him from the sink with a dish towel gripped in both hands.
“Guess I’ll get back to work,” he told her, and he smiled at her, or tried to smile, and lurched past her and out the door.
Was it possible to dislike your own wife?
Well, no, of course not. This was just one of those ups-and-downs that every couple experienced. He’d seen the topic referred to on the covers of those magazines that Pauline was always buying: “How to Stop Marital Fights Before They Start” and “Inside: ‘Why Do We Argue So Often?’”
But surely most other wives were not so baffling as Pauline. So changeable, so illogical.
He transferred three onions from the scale to a brown paper bag and set them on the counter for Mrs. Golka. She was considering a pound of sugar but she hated to use all her points up. The twins had a terrible sweet tooth, she said. Michael said, “Sweet tooth, yes . . .” and then fell to studying the scoop of the scale, which bore a dent from when Pauline had slung it down too hard during a quarrel.
Oh, there had been any number of quarrels. Quarrels about money: she spent money on what seemed to him unnecessary, household knickknacks and baby things and decorative objects of no earthly practical use, while Michael was more prudent. (Stingy, she called it.) Quarrels about the apartment: she swore that she was going mad, stuck in those airless, dark rooms cheek to jowl with his mother, and she wanted them to move to the county as soon as the war was over—someplace with yards and trees and
side
yards, too, not one of those row-house developments that were starting to sprout here and there. When Michael pointed out that they couldn’t afford the county, she said her father would help; he’d already offered. (Already offered! Michael had felt his face grow hot with shame.) When he said they would be too far from the store, she’d told him to move the store as well. “And what will St. Cassian people do for groceries, then?” he’d asked her, but she’d said, “St. Cassian people! Who cares? I’m tired to my bones of St. Cassian people! Everyone knowing everyone’s business from three generations back. It’s time we broadened our horizons!”
Even their sex life was grounds for dispute. Did he have to start out the same, exact way every single time? The same rote moves, the same one position? Michael had been dumbfounded. “Well, but, I mean, how else . . . ?” he had stammered, and she had said, “Oh, never mind. If I have to say it, forget it.” And then he
had
forgotten it, to all intents and purposes, for nowadays they didn’t have much of a sex life at all, though he supposed that was understandable in view of her condition.
But the worst quarrels, he reflected (fetching the sugar for Mrs. Golka, who had decided to go on and buy it) were the ones where he couldn’t pinpoint the cause. The ones that simply materialized, developing less from something they said than from who they were, by nature. By nature, Pauline tumbled through life helter-skelter while Michael proceeded deliberately. By nature, Pauline felt entitled to spill anything that came into her head while Michael measured out every word. She was brimming with energy—a floor pacer, a foot jiggler, a finger drummer—while he was slow and plodding and secretly somewhat lazy. Everything to her was all or nothing—every new friend her best friend, every minor disagreement an end to the friendship forever after—while to him the world was calibrated more incrementally and more fuzzily.
Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately. “What are you thinking about?” she liked to say, and “Tell me what you honestly feel.” She customarily opened his mail. She never failed to ask whom he’d been talking to on the phone. Even her eternal guess-whats (“Guess what, Michael . . . No, seriously, guess . . . Come on. Just take a guess . . . Wrong. Guess again . . . Come on!”) seemed to him a form of intrusion.
How could two people so unlike ever hope to interweave? Which only proved, Michael felt, that his view of marriage was the right one.
“Well, that’s Michael for you,” he imagined her saying. “Never been wrong in his life, if you ask
Michael.
”
He set the sugar carefully upright on the counter. “Anything else?” Mrs. Golka asked him.
He said, “Pardon?”
“‘Anything else I can get for you, Mrs. Golka?’”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”
She smiled, shaking her head, and handed him her ration book.
A grocery store’s business comes in waves: the early rush for staples depleted overnight; the late-morning rush for the children’s lunches before they walked home from school; the afternoon rush for supper supplies. By five o’clock, things had slowed to a trickle and only Wanda Bryk stood at the counter. Wanda Lipska, she was now. She had finished all her shopping but she lingered to gossip with Michael. Had he heard that Ernie Moskowicz had been drafted? “Ernie Moskowicz!” Michael said. “He’s just a kid!” And Nick the Greek’s café had caught fire, and Anna Grant had married a colonel and moved to Arizona. “You remember Anna, the girl who played the piano at your wedding,” Wanda said. Michael said, “Sure,” for of course he remembered Anna—her archless, level eyebrows and smooth brown turned-under hair. He was surprised by a twinge of wistfulness. Why couldn’t he have fallen for a woman like Anna Grant? he wondered. His life would have been so simple and serene!
Or Wanda, even. He used to find Wanda irritating, but here she stood, six months pregnant and rosily, bloomingly healthy, hugging her sack of groceries. Her tan cloth coat, which was slightly too short and didn’t quite meet across her stomach, had the well-worn, comfortable look of the clothes that his mother and her friends wore, and her broad Polish face shone with contentment.
“Tell Pauline I asked about her,” she said as she turned to leave. “Tell her I hope she’s feeling—oh, there you are! Hi!”
It was Pauline herself, toting Lindy, entering through the street door with a string shopping bag on one shoulder. She wore her red coat and the hat Michael called her Robin Hood hat—a matching red felt that she normally saved for Sundays, with a narrow, asymmetrical brim and a dashing black feather. He used to look for that shade of red on the street when they were first courting. A flash of it glimpsed in a crowd could make his heart race.
“Hello, Wanda! Hello, Michael!” she said. “I thought I’d come in this way and see if you’re closing up yet.”
“Is she a little sweetheart,” Wanda told Lindy. “Is she a little angel child,” and she made a series of kissing sounds. Lindy was all decked out as well, in a pink wool coat and bonnet. She studied Wanda soberly and then looked toward Michael as if to ask “What’s happening here?” He gazed back at her, not smiling.
“We went to the butcher’s,” Pauline was saying. “I thought I’d buy pork chops for Michael’s supper. Isn’t pork expensive these days! And seven points a pound. But Michael works so hard, I want to be sure he gets enough protein.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Wanda told her, “married to a grocer. I’d love to be in your shoes, with all the coffee and sugar I needed waiting just downstairs.”
Pauline gave her chuckly laugh. “Oh,” she said, “I’m lucky, all right!” and she cocked her head at Michael, waiting for him to laugh too.
He didn’t, though. He just stared at her stonily, till Wanda cleared her throat and announced she’d be running along.
Pauline must think words were like dust, or scuff marks, or spilled milk, easily wiped away and leaving no trace. She must think a mere apology—or not even that; just a change in her mood—could erase from a person’s mind the fact that she’d called him stuffy and pompous and boring and self-righteous. Watch how lightheartedly she moved around the kitchen table, humming “People Will Say We’re in Love” as she forked a pork chop onto each plate. She’d prepared the pork chops the way Michael liked them, a coating of nothing but flour, salt, and pepper and a quick, hard fry in bacon fat. (Ordinarily she had a weakness for experiment, mucking up good food with spices and runny sauces.) And the vegetable was his favorite, canned asparagus spears, and the potatoes were served plain with a pat of real butter. “Isn’t this nice?” his mother said happily, smoothing her napkin across her lap. Lindy crowed in her high chair and squeezed an asparagus spear until it oozed out either side of her fist. Michael said “Hmm” and reached for the salt.
During the course of the meal, Pauline reported all the news she had gathered while she was out shopping. Mr. Zynda’s daughter was visiting from Richmond. Henry Piazy had married an English girl, or maybe just gotten engaged to one. Little Tessie Dobek had been taken to the hospital last night with a burst appendix. “Oh, my land,” Michael’s mother said. “Poor Tom and Grace! First losing their only boy, and now this. They must be worried out of their minds.” Michael just went on eating. To hear Pauline talk, you would think she cared. You would think she actually felt some attachment to the neighborhood, instead of scorning it and maligning it and itching to leave it behind.