Return Trips Read Free Page B

I wasn’t sure whom, and I didn’t like to complain. Mrs. Nelson, our neighbor, sighs whenever she comes over from across the street to look at the furniture, which is as often as I don’t see her first and hide in bed. “Such lovely pieces,” she sighs. “We’ve got to find a really good workman to repair them.” If I told her that we couldn’t afford a really good workman, she would not believe me. People with lovely furniture also have money, Mrs. Nelson believes.
    So many of the people in my life seem to be over-sized. Mrs. Nelson is one of them. An enormous pale woman, large pale-blue eyes and a tight white mouth, she stands in the doorway, filling it, with her heavy arms hanging across her chest, nothing about her moving but her eyes; her gaze moves ponderously all over the room, from one broken leg to another, all over the dust, and settles at last on me. The weight of her eyes is suffocating. I become hotter and thinner and messier than I am.
    “A really good workman,” she says. “You can’t just let nice things fall apart.”
    I can’t?
    At another time when she was manic, my mother sent me a lot of clothes, and they are what I wear, worn-out C. Klein shirts and jeans, old sweaters and skirts (A. Klein, B. Blass). My yellow hair tight in a bun. Skinny and tense, with huge, needful eyes. A group of artists lives in a big old shabbyhouse down the block. Artists are what I believe they are. Mrs. Nelson says, sniffingly, “Gays,” but to her that might mean the same. “Gay artists” surely has an attractive sound to me. In any case, they all wear beautiful bright loose clothes. I am in love, in a way, with all of them; I would like to move over there and be friends. I want to say to them, “Look, these clothes aren’t really me. I ruined my only Levis in too much Clorox. I will loosen my hair and become plump and peaceful. You’ll see, if you let me move in.”
    When Carl is at home he is often asleep; he falls asleep anywhere, easily and deeply asleep. His mouth goes slack; sometimes saliva seeps out, slowly, down his blond stubbled chin. Once I watched a tiny ant march heroically across Carl’s face, over the wide pale planes, the thick bridge of his nose, and Carl never blinked. We have a lot of ants, especially when I leave the dishes in the sink for a couple of days, which I have recently begun to do. (Why? Am I fond of ants?) Ants crawl all over the greasy, encrusted Haviland and Spode, and the milk-fogged glasses that Mrs. Nelson refers to as my “crystal.” At least that stuff sometimes breaks, whereas the furniture will surely outlast me.
    I could break it?
    Awake, Carl talks a lot, in his high, tight voice. And he does not say the things that you would expect of a sleepy fat blond man. He sounds like one of the other things that he is: a graduate student in psychology, with a strong side-interest in computers. He believes that he is parodying the person that he is. When I give too many clothes (all my old Norells) to the Goodwill, he says, “If only you were an anal retentive like me,” thinking he is making a joke.
    Carl complains, as I do, about the bulkiness of our furniture, the space it takes up, but I notice that he always mentionsit, somehow, to friends who have failed to remark on it. “A ridiculous piece of ostentation, isn’t it?” he will say, not hearing the pride in his own voice. “Helen’s mother shipped it out from St. Louis, in one of her manic phases. She’s quite immune to Lithium, poor lady.”
    But one Saturday he spent the whole day waxing and polishing all the surfaces of wood. He is incredibly thorough: for hours his fingers probed and massaged the planes and high ornamental carvings.
    How could I have married a man who looks like my mother? How not have noticed? Although my mother’s family was all of English stock, as she puts it (thank God for my Welsh father, although he died so young that I barely knew him), and Carl’s people are all German.