Disturbances in the Field Read online

  After I hung up I handed my mother a slip of paper. “I’m going to take a nap. Could you do me a favor, please? Call this number and ask for Mrs. Rodriguez and tell her I can’t come in next week and … I can’t come in at all any more.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “Look, would you just call, please?”

  “No, I won’t just call when I don’t know who I’m talking to and what I’m talking about. I don’t want to sound like an idiot.”

  I sighed. “All right. It’s the Golden Age Club at a community center uptown. I go there one day a week. They have a chorus that I conduct. There’s a group that learns sight singing. A couple of them take piano lessons. This and that. I said I’d be back next week but I can’t.”

  “Lydie.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Ma,” I wailed. “I can’t sit. My crotch is killing me. I can’t play. I can’t do anything.”

  “For heaven’s sake, you have a mild infection. It’ll be gone in a few days. With all your education, didn’t you ever learn that things can change? You’re not always going to feel the way you do right this minute. In two weeks you’ll feel like a different person.”

  “I already feel like a different person. Will you call for me, please? I’m too tired.” And you never told me it would be like this.

  From the bedroom I could hear her deliver my message, not quite as I had given it. I would be out for a couple of weeks. Yes, the baby was adorable, and doing fine. “She’ll be in touch with you just as soon as she feels better. … Thank you. I’ll be sure to tell her.” I shook my head in the dim room with the shades drawn. I would be in touch with nobody, nothing. I was too tired to persevere in my being. I thought of Esther’s mother, and for the first time I had an inkling of why she might have chosen to spend her life lying alone in a dim bedroom, seeing no one, doing nothing. As I was falling asleep the phone rang.

  “Someone called Rosalie,” my mother reported. “Is she the one I heard you with that time at City College?”

  Oh, Greg had worked fast. “Yes. Can’t you tell her I’m sleeping?”

  “No. She said it’s important. Get up and talk to her. By the way, Mrs. Rodriguez says the senior citizens send their love and miss you. Mrs. Kirchner learned the Brahms waltzes for four hands and is waiting for you to do them with her.”

  “Thanks.” I slogged over to the phone.

  “Lydia? What’s this I hear? It doesn’t sound like you at all. You can’t leave us in the lurch.” I moved the receiver a couple of inches away. When Rosalie got excited that deep vibrant voice seemed to be delivering the recitative between arias, on the verge of breaking into passionate song. “You have a responsibility, you know. We weren’t just fooling around till you became a mother.”

  “I’m sorry, Rosalie. I’m no good any more.”

  “Nonsense. The whole world has children. It doesn’t mean you have to retire from life. Sit on a pillow and practice. Take codeine, it works wonders. For every day you wait it will take three to get back. I’m speaking from experience, Lydia.”

  “Henrietta Frye is really good.”

  “I’ve played with her. I know she’s good. That’s not the point. I thought you were serious. Is this how fast you give up?”

  “Rosalie … If I stayed on the phone any longer I would cry, and I was so sick of those tears, beyond all control. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain. I have to hang up now.”

  The next day, as I was changing Althea’s diaper in the tiny room we had made bright and colorful the week before her birth, I noticed a thin red ribbon tied low around a leg of the bassinet that had been my sister-in-law Lily’s, and later Victor’s. My mother came in from washing the lunch dishes to view the baby.

  “What’s that?” I pointed to the ribbon.

  “Oh my!” She looked startled, then gave an uneasy laugh. “That’s an old Jewish custom, to ward off the evil eye.”

  “Mother, really.”

  “Don’t look at me!” she exclaimed, looking me straight in the eye. “Since when do I go in for such things?” She nodded with significance; her lips shaped art ironic smile. “Edith must have done it.”

  “Edith!” I never thought of Victor’s mother as being Jewish. She was one of those gracious East Side ladies who seem unmarked by any history, unrooted, adrift in a self-styled bubble of charm. For her to have married Paul Rowe, son of an Episcopalian minister, was a bold and undiplomatic act in 1932. The horror of her Russian-born parents was intense, but luckily brief. Her boldness spent, Edith had been docile ever since, attending Christmas dinners and Passover Seders with equal grace and lack of interest. Or so I had thought. Suddenly she became a romantic, haunted figure, her Lord & Taylor disguise concealing a dark tangle of atavistic loyalties, a female Daniel Deronda.

  Later, after my mother left to meet a friend at a matinee, Edith arrived, glowing from shopping and hairdresser. She was newly frosted, with a pale Chanel suit to match. It wasn’t a look I wanted, and yet it made me feel somehow undone in jeans and sweatshirt. She found me changing Althea’s diaper in the little room.

  “I brought you a sweater, darling,” she said, setting down her parcels. “I couldn’t resist, it was so perfect for you. Deep blue, with a scoop neck. Finish up and I’ll show you.”

  “Thanks. I think I’ve forgotten how to get dressed, though.”

  “No one forgets that. The sun is shining. I’ll stay with her while you go out and get some color in your cheeks. Why don’t you call a friend?”

  “What is that, Edith?” I pointed to the red ribbon on the bassinet leg.

  She turned, following, my finger. “Oh, my goodness!” And she smiled innocently. “Look at that! That must be to ward off the evil spirits. My grandmother once told me, ages ago. But I’ve never seen it done before. Isn’t that sweet! Where did it come from?” I shrugged my ignorance.

  Edith beamed. “Your mother must have done it.” She shook her head in mellow amusement, tickled Althea’s foot, and began making cooing, grandmotherly sounds at her. “My mother?”

  “Of course. Who else?”

  In the evening Victor came home and found me in the little room, changing Althea’s diaper. He was still working in the bar in the East Thirties, but from noon to seven now. He would get up at dawn to paint all morning, then walk the twelve blocks uptown. Before I left my job at Schirmer’s a month ago, three or four days a week of bartending had been enough to keep us. Now it was five or six days. He fell into bed early and hung on to me all night like the survivor of a shipwreck with a floating plank. He still had his stubborn will to make it on his own. We both had it, I should say. There was a ferocity about our independence and our austere refusals, and until the baby there had been a certain zing of glamor in watching the week’s money run out, counting pennies and planning cheap treats. Once or twice we had gone to bed slightly hungry, and there was even a sporting glamor in that. Not too hungry to make love. We knew they would never let us starve.

  He kissed me and Althea, then fidgeted about the baby things with a bemused gaze that would take months to fade, touching the mobile, the piles of clean diapers, the rag doll his mother had brought.

  “What’s this?” He squatted down at his former bassinet to get a closer look.

  “That’s to ward off the evil eye, I’m told. It’s an old Jewish custom.”

  He rose, came over, and embraced me from behind as I was pinning on the new diaper. “You’re funny,” he whispered, nuzzling against my hair. “You are funny.”

  “Me! I didn’t do it! It’s one of our mothers.”

  “Oh, come on. They’re not the type. It’s okay, I’m not laughing at you. I think it’s very nice.” He moved his hands around on my ribs, moved them up to my breasts. It was irksome, while I was trying to get Althea’s feet back into the terry-cloth stretch suit. I felt like shaking him off like a hovering fly, but I didn’t. I reminded myself that all this was happening because we loved each other. “Hey, bab
y,” he murmured, “when do you think you’ll be back in business?”

  Remember, I told myself, you love him. He hasn’t had a baby, his crotch is not stinging, he has no cause to wish that nothing will happen in that region ever again, no traffic or convulsion of any sort.

  “Soon. A week or so. Victor, I really didn’t do it. You can take it off if you want. I don’t care.”

  “I have no desire to take it off.” He let go of me and laughed. “You take it off if you feel like it.”

  “It doesn’t seem right to take it off. Somebody cared enough to put it there.”

  “Somebody, yes.” Victor grinned, taking the powdered, sweet-smelling baby from me. “Somebody, somebody, somebody,” he cooed moronically, rubbing his forehead against hers.

  Within about five months Althea could gurgle, laugh, and roll over; she attained a size and specific gravity that made her stop seeming prey to the least passing breeze. I finally took the ribbon off and threw it away. When Phil was born, less than two years later, Edith was in the hospital undergoing tests for mysterious symptoms (not for some time would they be diagnosed as bone cancer), and my mother was in Switzerland with Evelyn, who had had a difficult miscarriage. When Alan was born, nearly four years after that, my mother had a broken arm from falling off a ladder, trying to hang kitchen curtains—she couldn’t have tied a ribbon even if she had wanted to—and Paul had taken Edith on a trip around the world lest she suspect that she had cancer. And by the time Vivian was born, two years later, my father was dead of a sudden heart attack. My mother was spending a year in Arizona with her sister, to recuperate from the shock and grief. Edith was in the hospital. Out of all these mutations there came no more red ribbons. Althea was the only one of the four who had the evil eye warded off. At odd moments I would remember that—after exhilarating rehearsals, when I played the way I did in my dreams, or listening to a student of rare gifts do the Bach Preludes and Fugues (for I did regain my sanity and resume my life; they had all been right, Greg, Rosalie, my mother)—and I would worry for the other three. But never very long or very seriously—it was so silly.

  The Philosophy Study Group

  “BODY OF LAND.”

  Esther chose continent. “Asia, in particular. It sprawls and the boundaries aren’t clear.”

  “Peninsula,” I said.

  “Prairie. No, I guess that’s not … Forest?” said Gabrielle. “Anything landlocked. Nina?”

  “Island.”

  “Island?” That bothered Gaby. “Well, let it go. Pick a gem.”

  “Emerald,” said Nina.

  “Why emerald?”

  “Because it’s cool on the outside and hot on the inside.”

  Laughter.

  “Ruby,” said Esther. “Hot on the outside and hot on the inside.”

  On the outside, December snow is falling on the playground, etching swings and seesaws in the dark, making the sandbox into a snow-box, and softening the lines of tall slivers of buildings. Inside we are folded in warmth, our toes digging into the shag rug. No longer girls playing games in a college dormitory, but women edging towards thirty in a world spinning towards 1967, and still playing games. We are in Nina’s apartment in a Greenwich Village high-rise near New York University, where she is an assistant professor of chemistry. Nina’s apartment is sensuous; it suggests the harem. The dominant color is purple. (But in our game she said she was black. Gabrielle: “Rust.” Esther: “Green.”) Purple and gold. Gold in the lush, mosaic-like Gustav Klimt prints on the walls, of lovers, flora, and rainbows. Gold threads in the purple curtains. Gold, or really mustardy, pillows on the purple couch and on the floor. In the bathroom, purple towels, and in the kitchen, purple ceramic dishes, purple mugs, with the rest austerely white, smooth and glistening like her mind. Like a laboratory, I sometimes think, but are laboratories in fact so pristine? Near the refrigerator hangs a bulletin board with notices of meetings, phone numbers, events she plans to attend, the edges of every little rectangle of paper parallel to the edges of the bulletin board. A five-by-eight card, printed in Nina’s narrow, swift block letters, contains a quotation from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, which she says she sometimes reads to put her to sleep: “Everything has two handles, one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your brother sin against you, lay not hold of it by the handle of his injustice, for by that it may not be borne; but rather by this, that he is your brother, the comrade of your youth; and thus you will lay hold on it so that it may be borne.” The long wall in the living room, where we gather, is lined with bookshelves. The center, most accessible, shelves hold her thick science books. Below, books of philosophy, politics, sociology. Above, novels (Nina is an insomniac; Epictetus doesn’t always work) and poetry: Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams—she enjoys the sanctification of the ordinary. And on the top shelf, barely reachable, the books she used in college.

  By day Nina appears still ladylike, and fashionable; on her tall, understated body, clothes seem modeled; her oval face, with dark hair tethered by pins or combs, is assertive yet reserved about what it asserts; she has a model’s look of unlimited possibilities held in check. At home she transforms. She releases the hair, longer and thicker than it seems when drawn back, and strides through the apartment in harem clothes—filmy, rustling shirts, rope belts with bells and tassels, gold slippers. Once in a while she pulls on a pair of jeans and a mannish shirt to dash to the corner in the middle of the night for cigarettes or orange juice, when sleep eludes her, or to drive to Rockaway in her white Triumph convertible, to walk along the boardwalk and look at the ocean, which she did not see till she was over twenty. To an outsider Nina and her apartment with its velvet-covered pillows and Tiffany lamps would appear exotic. To me they are an image chosen deliberately out of a range of possible self-images, not an organic growth but like an adopted child no less genuine, no less lovable, and in time, fitting and necessary.

  The Philosophy Study Group was Nina’s idea, conceived when she returned to New York after five years of acquiring advanced degrees at Princeton. Her engagement to the fellow student was over; he left to work in Colorado, where she did not wish to follow him. She said she missed us. When she visited we were strained and distracted by husbands and babies. The best times we ever had together, she reminded us, were those late nights in her room the year we studied philosophy and took it seriously—before we abandoned the search for truth as sophomoric. Everything had turned around in the few short years since our college days. Hadn’t we noticed? Or had we been too busy perpetuating the life cycle? The country was heaving with war, drugs, sex, revolt, throwing up a lava that muddied the mind. Everything they had taught us was in question. What did we intend to do about it? Our plans? “Physical survival,” I replied. I had two babies but difficulty believing I was a mother. For Nina survival was not enough. She wanted to uncover the nerves that connected daily life to the metaphysical. She had a theory that the flower-bearing middle-class rebels taking over the public parks were descendants of the Greek Sophists, those slippery relativists, betes noires of Plato, who spent dozens of glittering pages mocking their claim that man is the measure of all things. She was drawn to that easeful vision too, but suspicious. She went to all the antiwar protests, mingling, signing, getting high, and accepting the handouts of every special interest group, but she couldn’t stand their ragged clothes and their hair. A scientist, as well as a sexual rebel herself, she was withholding judgment till all the evidence was in. Meanwhile she wanted to give them the dignity of a history they themselves scorned.

  The unexamined life was not worth living. We must come to her apartment, where there were no husbands and babies. I agreed for nostalgia’s sake; my prolonged postpartum anomie, boring as a pornographic home movie, had just peaked and seemed to be relinquishing its hold; Nina’s exigence would help. She suggested books of philosophy we should read (William James, another Sophist, American-style), but as it turned out, the Philosophy Study Group did not always, or o
ften, discuss philosophy. No. The name was a bit of a joke. Our lives did not encourage abstract thought. Phil was almost two, Althea almost four. What will and stamina I had, I saved for practicing, recovering the lost ground with scales and arpeggios, Beethoven and Bach in slow motion. Like a child who avoids the homework but brings in something cute for show and tell, I came to Nina’s purple apartment with tales of Thales, or talies of Thales, as Esther put it, to make it rhyme. I had found them while browsing in the library, with Althea at Story Hour and Phil slung on my back.

  “Okay, I’m sure you all remember how Thales measured the height of the pyramid. Well, he also figured out how to measure the distance of ships at sea. He built a tower right at the shore and projected a line drawn from the top of the tower to a far-off ship. He measured the angle formed by the line and the tower, and then, keeping that same angle, rotated the line around the axis of the tower so that it extended in the other direction, inland. The point where the line hits the ground, to the tower, is the distance. How do you like that?”

  Applause. Refilling of glasses. Encore!

  “One night, as his servant was leading him across the fields so he could observe the stars, Thales stumbled into a ditch. The woman asked him how he could ever hope to know the heavens if he didn’t know what was right under his feet.”

  “I was like that.”

  “You were very good on your feet, Gaby, as I recall.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We were all like that.” Esther laced her fingers in curious designs, like a cat’s cradle. She had stopped smoking.

  “When asked why he had no children of his own, Thales said it was because he loved children.”

  Nina said, “I love children too. But I would like to have them anyway.”

  “I don’t, in general,” said Esther. “But I would like to too.”

  “When his mother pestered him to get married, Thales said the right time had not yet come. Years later, when she brought it up again, he said the right time had passed.”