On Keeping Women Read Free Page B

here now, at almost the same hour, calmly discussing my life—with my life…
    “Organize?” the cop says, addressing James as the most decently clothed. “Who’s organizing what?”
    “We are,” James says, pointing. “Her.”
    So that’s how, as soon as school is out that summer and next, I go to study to be a medical secretary. And never get to college at all. As Mother says, “James’ll be bringing plenty of interns home.”
    As Father says the day I marry one, “You women never look farther than your nose.”
    This is in reference to the foreign tour he’d briefly spirited me away on to persuade me otherwise, the minute I’d announced my intentions. He’d aimed for Canada, but the hired car had failed us—and perhaps the money too. “Will you just look at the world!” he’d said to me from a window of the Hotel Oswego in Cooperstown, New York. “Look. Look!”
    Let them fade now as parents do, into the ruins but still alive. Mother at sixty still repairing the city volunteer—all the way from the Gulf. Father leaving the city altogether—like people who so love cats, but desert them—to follow his nose into retirement with a richer wife—her nightgowns being especially luxe.
    James’s imagination, bachelor again after two tries, has proved most durable. Often after he’s been up the river for the weekend with us, and is off for the city again, he’ll whisper something to me, while brother-in-law Raymond kindly goes to extricate James’s car from those others which on Sunday afternoons are often pulled up on the various front lawns of the houses along the road here, like lines of shoats. James’s sibling eye is meanwhile casting a small judgment on me—a large woman—like those tiny, flat metal stampings of the Statue of Liberty the class used to be sent home with, after toiling up her inner staircase to look out at her spikes. His wicked diagnosis tickles my ear. “Honorable sister,” his voice says. “Float down the river to me any day suits you. Only, not as a corpse.” A city judgment.
    So here I am—as organized.
    When I married Raymond, the tallest, palest (with effort) and most careful of the interns James brought home, the “Dr.” had just been attached to him: two perfect initials which swing from him, and sound as he walks. And are never lost. Later on I gave him a matched tiepin and cufflinks of those same initials, which he wears proudly still. Doctors love simple jokes, the grim dears, and in return for the life they lead, a wife whose jokes are not the same may still cooperate. Sometimes when I lay with him, looking deeply into his chest hairs, a few of these would whorl themselves into those same initials, pair upon pair. And until the finalities that brought me here, there was a pattern of moles on his windpipe that my mind’s eye was working on.
    A blameless man; try as I may, no blame will ever attach to him. Or to his parents. The basement of their house as I first saw it remains the most finished basement in America. With outlines drawn on the floor—garden-shears to roto-cutters, to ladders and floor-sanders—in which all implements are placed. The ladders being alumi num without the added “i”; theirs is a household local to the very end. Which end may be those milkcans Ray’s mother paints black with bald eagles on them—which no longer hold milk. Around the cellar walls, trunks from another generation stand rigid with non-travel. “A hysterical basement,” I report to James, after the engagement visit. “Someday those empty trunks will explode.”
    And I add how “Since I’ll have to pick up my education piecemeal from now on,” I’ve already learned from my father-in-law-to-be that a veterinarian is a man who doesn’t kick dogs but doesn’t pat them either. Or allow them into the house.
    Ray and I’ve already chosen the shabby Victorian mansion from which he will practice. And in which I will live—needless to say—so I don’t.
    A lie.