A Week as Andrea Benstock Read online

  Especially now, when she so much wanted to be close with her father. It would seem to her that there were things she had to tell him, questions she had to ask him. That he had answers for her if she could only give voice to her questions. That each of them had parts of self which had to be deliberately revealed.

  For there was only so much time available. He knew that he was not going to live forever, and now she knew it, too. Oh, he could live for a great many years. It was by no means impossible. He had made a good recovery, and men with a similar medical history often, lived to be very old men. But she sensed that he knew this would not be true in his case, and she for her part was convinced it would not. The heart attack had made him an old man and a sick man, and however much the doctors talked about the good recovery he had made, age and sickness showed themselves to her in his face. He was in his middle sixties, and she could not say that he looked older or younger than his years. But she could say, though it hurt to do so, that he looked like a man who did not have very much time.

  And of course there had to be things he knew that she ought to know. He was a wise man. She had always known that, had never in adolescence made the mistake of thinking her parents to be foolish people. She had thought frequently that they had made terrible compromises with life, that her father should have been able to be the doctor he’d wanted to be instead of settling for dentistry, that her mother should have had a chance to develop her own talents instead of settling, however willingly, into life as a housewife. But that, even when she had been most rebellious, had been as far as she ever went, and she had never begun to question her father’s essential wisdom.

  Sometimes these days she held elaborate conversations with him in her own mind. At night when she I couldn’t sleep, or during the day when Robin was taking her nap, she might find herself in a corner of her mind telling her father things she had never told him in actuality. She might talk about her marriage, or about the numbness she felt sometimes, as if the fingers and toes of her soul were losing their ability to feel.

  They were not really conversations, these fancied discussions she had with him. Because he never offered any response. She would talk and he would draw her out, but when it was time for him to comment the conversation would come to an end.

  And when they were alone together, not in her mind but in actual fact, they never did talk about any of the things that had seemed so vitally important. Instead they talked about nothing at all. It was pleasant, simply being with him, relaxing in easy conversation, but it was also frustrating that they were not saying what she somehow felt had to be said.

  At times she sensed that he too had things he wanted to tell her. At other times she thought she was merely projecting her own feelings onto him. But whatever that ultimate wise conversation might be, they had not yet had it. Would they ever? Should they?

  She was losing him. Just as she seemed to be losing all the other parts of her life. They grew cold. They burned themselves out. And she sat and watched, and couldn’t quite reach out to them.

  Her sister-in-law called a little after three. Happy birthday, and how’s everything in Buffalo, and everything’s fine out here, the kids are fine, Jeff’s fine, everything’s fine. And they would probably be coming back east between Christmas and New Year’s and how was Robin, and how was Mark, and how was her father, was he feeling better?

  “It was nice of you to call,” Andrea said at one point, and after hanging up she thought that it was nice of Linda to have called, that she was glad to have heard from her. And to have been told that everything was fine, fine, fine.

  Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Linda again, but Andrea hardly recognized her voice at first because it was so different. Pitched a little lower, and thoroughly limp, flaccid.

  “Well, hello again,” Andrea said.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s not often I get to talk to you twice in one day, Forget something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hello?”

  “I said yes. I forgot something.”

  “Linda? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well—”

  “Fine fine fine. Everything’s so goddamned fine.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was gonna talk about it with you and I called and I just did the whole usual number, I’m fine, he’s fine, they’re fine, the whole fucking world is fine, and I hung up and I just stood there saying Linda Gould, for God’s sake, what in the hell is the matter with you? Then I went to get a tranquilizer but I just took one. You play around with those things and before you know it it’s like eating peanuts. I just had to call you and tell you that everything isn’t fine.”

  “Is someone ill, Linda?”

  “Oh, God, no.” A laugh like a small dog barking. “No, nothing dramatic and real like that. Real things don’t happen out here. It doesn’t rain and it doesn’t snow and the air is clean and there are no slums and nothing happens. Nothing happens and I play tennis and work on my suntan and take the kids for swimming lessons and Jeff is, Jeff is—”

  “Linda?”

  There was a pause, and then when Linda spoke her voice was steady. “I shouldn’t be dropping all of this in your lap but I had to tell someone, Andrea. Jeff and I, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I really don’t. Almost ten years, three children, and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “Every couple has trouble, Linda.”

  “Oh, Christ. I know that. We had trouble from the day we were married. No, this is more than that. He’s … not living here. At home. He has someone else.”

  “Jeff’s living with someone else?”

  “I don’t know if he’s actually living with her or not. He has a place of his own. An apartment.”

  “When did this—”

  “Over a month. Almost two months. I knew he was seeing someone but this has happened before, he’s very attractive and his work brings him into contact with a lot of available women and I guess I learned to handle it. Or maybe I didn’t, I don’t know, but things came to a head and blew up in my face and the next thing I knew he had moved out. So I’m here with the kids, and he makes deposits to my checking account, and the kids think he’s out of town on business a lot, and then he’ll come on Sundays and visit, and, oh, I don’t know what to do, Andrea.”

  “I hadn’t heard a thing.”

  “Oh, Christ. That’s the whole thing. Nobody knows.”

  “You haven’t told your parents?”

  “Not my parents, not Jeff’s parents. Nobody. Oh, people in town know, but nobody here knows anybody in Buffalo. And I don’t have a single goddamned friend out here. This place is full of plastic people. Nobody was actually born here. They all come here from somewhere else and after a couple of years of sitting in the sun their brains melt into goo.”

  “Aren’t you friendly with anyone, Linda?”

  “There are people I play tennis with, and there are people whose kids play with my kids, and I had a bridge game for a while but one girl moved and we never managed to get a regular fourth and it gradually broke up. And Jeff and I have been less social in the past couple of years. I don’t know why. It just happened little by little. And since he moved out, I don’t know, I’ve just become like a hermit. I sit in front of the television set and watch soap operas. I don’t even have the excuse that I’m caught up in them. I couldn’t care less about them but it’s something to do.”

  “Is the separation—”

  “Permanent? I don’t know. I don’t know what he wants. God, I don’t know what I want. That’s the God’s honest truth. This thing of his, this affair, it probably would have blown over. I could have closed my eyes again and waited it out. But for some reason I just couldn’t make myself play the game again, you know what I mean? I found myself saying all the things I hadn’t said before, and it just blew, the whole thing blew, and I think it’s better this way, it has to be, but, oh, I don’t know. That’s it, that’s eve
rything right there. I don’t know anything.”

  She was on the phone with Linda for almost half an hour, and when she finally got off she was shaking. Linda and Jeff. She had taken it for granted that they had a good marriage, a secure marriage. But evidently you couldn’t take anything for granted, ever.

  She thought she had grown accustomed to seeing other people’s marriages fall apart. Her generation didn’t seem to be terribly good at staying married. The Alumnae Bulletin never failed to announce the failed marriages of a few more of her college classmates. Evidently they sent in announcements of divorce just as they proclaimed the other milestones in their lives.

  She thought of Linda’s last words. “This is a hell of a trip to lay on you on your birthday, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Andrea. Don’t let it ruin the occasion for you, huh?”

  Oh, certainly not. Perish the thought.

  The conversation with her sister-in-law lingered throughout the evening. The busy ritual of dinner at the club kept her from thinking too intently about anything. It was almost a relief to have essentially the same conversation a couple of dozen times with a couple of dozen people.

  They sat at a table for four in the club’s main dining room. Her mother sat across from her, with her father on her left and Mark on her right. From time to time Mark would take her hand or touch her leg with his.

  It meant so much to spend this birthday in this room. At this table, with these people. She thought of how she had examined her thirty-year-old face in her mirror. Without these people—the three at her table, the others at the other tables—she would lack definition. She would be unframed canvas, the perimeters of her world uncharted and hazy.

  Linda’s world was like that, and for the first time Andrea was able to appreciate the enormous difference between their two worlds. She and Linda both lived in cities about the same size, lived in new houses in the suburbs of their respective cities. They were both married to professional men who were doing well financially. They were both mothers. In short, they would occupy very much the same shelf in a sociologist’s cupboard, and yet their worlds were worlds apart, and the difference was very simple. She lived in the town she had been born in, while Linda lived thousands of miles away.

  And that made all the difference. She belonged to an entire community in a way that neither she nor the community could change. All of these people around her, all of these people whose lives touched hers in the smallest way, were there to prop her up and be propped up by her. All of the people who had irritated her with birthday phone calls were people who made it easier for her to stay married, to stay sane, to stay alive.

  Linda couldn’t expect to get that kind of support from her friends. Not when her friends were people I who had been a part of her life for a matter of months, people she knew next to nothing about, people who knew next to nothing about her. People who were her friends because friendship was convenient, but who would forget her readily and permanently when a whim—their own or an employer’s—led them away from that city, even as an earlier whim had led them there in the first place.

  How very different this country club was from the place where Linda swam and played tennis. Linda’s social circle had all the permanence and commitment of those hippie communes scattered throughout the same desert. Either way you could snap your fingers and leave. Of course Linda’s friends couldn’t throw their belongings in a knapsack. They were devoutly middle-class, their lives defined by artifacts. For them a long-haul moving van took the place of a knapsack. But the difference was only a matter of degree. Emotionally it was not much more difficult for them to take leave of their friends, or of each other.

  These thoughts came to her not all at once but in bits and pieces as she sat with her husband and her parents. They dropped into place like puzzle parts while she participated in conversations, ate her food, sipped her coffee.

  When she had a moment to herself in the ladies’ room, she was annoyed to find herself again studying her reflection—and in such an unflattering mirror, with the fluorescent lights overhead making her look all grayish-green.

  Thirty.

  And graced with the perception and philosophy of the mature woman, she told herself. Well, youth for wisdom wasn’t all that bad an exchange, was it?

  “You’re quiet.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’ve been quiet all night. Not withdrawn or anything, but a little subdued.”

  “It’s the sort of occasion that subdues a girl.”

  They were in the car, heading back toward their house. Her window was open and she liked the feel of the wind in her hair. The air was warm and heavy with moisture.

  “Rain coming,” she said.

  “Tomorrow, the paper said. It does feel like rain, doesn’t it?”

  “Could we just drive around for a while?”

  He glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road. “I guess so. It’s fine with me if it’s all right with the sitter.”

  “No problem.”

  “Fine. Do you want to go someplace for a private drink or do you just want to drive around?”

  “Let’s just drive.”

  “Sure.”

  She folded her hands over the buckle of her seat belt. Sometimes the belts annoyed her, though not enough to keep her from using them. Tonight, however, she felt secure, comfortably enclosed. And that seemed to be the evening’s motif, she thought—that she was comfortably enclosed, blanketed, cocooned. By this seat belt. By her husband and her parents, by her friends, by this city.

  After a few minutes she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it with the dashboard lighter. She smoked half of it and said, “Your sister called this afternoon.”

  “Your memory’s failing. I suppose it’s part of being thirty years old.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The arteries harden. Inescapable, I guess.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “You already told me she called, remember? When we were over at my folks’ place. She called and she’s fine and Jeff’s fine and the kids are fine and when are we coming out there for a visit. Don’t you remember? And my mother was saying—”

  “She called a second time.”

  “Oh?”

  She leaned forward to deposit ash in the ashtray, then sat back again. “I promised I wouldn’t tell you this. I spent dinner deciding whether to keep something from you or violate a confidence. That’s a part of why I’ve been so quiet.”

  “I see. What did you decide?”

  “To violate a confidence, obviously. Or I wouldn’t have brought this up in the first place. Although there’s no real point in telling you except that if I know about it I think you ought to know about it, too.”

  “Then go ahead and tell me.”

  “Jeff moved out almost two months ago.” She looked at him as she spoke, watching his face for a reaction. He had his eyes on the road so she saw his face in profile, and if he changed expression she couldn’t tell. She went on talking, giving him an abbreviated but essentially accurate version of Linda Gould’s conversation.

  When she stopped speaking he didn’t say anything for a few minutes and she thought he might be waiting for her to continue. Then he said, “Well, I’m glad you told me. I think you’re right, I think it’s the sort of thing either both of us should know or neither of us should know.”

  “That’s what I decided. What do you think?”

  “What is there to think, really? It’s their life; it’s their marriage. We’re not really close enough to know what’s going on and how much can you tell from one phone conversation with her? If he’s been fooling around for years maybe this is nothing serious or maybe it is. Maybe he’ll decide he’s had enough and want to come home and maybe she’ll want him to come home. Or maybe not. Evidently she doesn’t even know the answers to those questions, so it’s hardly possible for us to know.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Don’t you agree? You sound doubtful.”

  “W
ell, what I mean is how do you feel about it? I don’t mean what do you think will happen or what you want to happen, but how do you feel about the whole thing?”

  “Oh. I see.”

  She waited.

  “Sorry for them, I guess. In that I have a fundamental bias in favor of marriage.”

  “Do you really?”

  “Isn’t that pretty obvious? In addition to adoring you, isn’t it fairly clear that I specifically like being married to you?”

  She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t know you were pro-marriage as a general thing.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And antidivorce.”

  He nodded emphatically. “Yes again. I’m basically pretty conservative, you know. Not in politics necessarily but in other respects. I like the idea of order. Not what the word means when Nixon or Wallace use it. They use law and order so that it means keep the kids and niggers in their place and bust heads if they get out of line. But I like the idea of an ordered universe and an ordered society. That’s one of the things that attracted me to law as a profession, you know.”

  “I thought it was the logic of it.”

  “Definitely that, but also the order element. That’s the first object of law, you know. Not justice. Most people believe that the object of law is justice, but it’s not. It’s order. People will tolerate injustice but disorder drives them out of their minds.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway, the point is—”

  “That’s literally true, isn’t it? Order keeps people sane.”

  She thought about that and fitted it into what she had been thinking earlier about how the community of people she belonged to made for stability and security and, yes, sanity. She followed her thoughts for a moment and lost track of what he was saying, and then she tuned in again to hear him say, “—effect on the children, though I don’t know the answer to that. Is it better to have the kids grow up in a broken home or in one where the parents can’t stand each other? Hell, we’ve heard this one before. Every time someone we know goes through it.”