Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

On the day of that party Milo was wearing his standard costume: flannel slacks, turtleneck sweater, tweed jacket. He was then almost fifty, a bit older than my parents and their friends. His hair, prematurely gray, rose high and thick from a narrow forehead. It swung at his nape like a soft broom. He was very tall and very thin.

Dr. Will Plunket gave me beef tartare in a hamburger bun. But the Plunket boys wouldn’t let me join their game of Dungeons and Dragons. So, munching my feral sandwich, I wandered in the fall garden still brightened by a glossy sun. On a chaise on the flagstone terrace sat a woman I didn’t know. She looked sulky and bored. Dr. Judah joined me for a while and wondered aloud if fairies nested under the chrysanthemums. I frowned at him, but when he went inside I knelt and peered under the mums. Nothing. After a while Milo found me. In his soft voice he talked about the greenery near the stone wall — basil was rumored to cure melancholy, marjoram headaches, ground ivy conjunctivitis. He bent, picked up a handful of the ivy, stood, and crushed a few leaves into my palm. “Not to be taken internally.” Then he, too, went in.

I drifted toward the terrace. “How lucky you are,” drawled the woman on the chaise, and she drank some of her cocktail.

“Yes. Why?”

“To have such an attentive aunt,” she said, and drank some more.

“My aunt lives in Michigan.”

“She’s here on a visit?”

“She’s in Europe this month.”

“I mean the aunt you were just talking to.”

“Milo?”

“Her name is Milo?”

I raced into the house. I found my mother standing with Dr. Margaret and Dr. Judah. “You’ll never believe it, that patient on the terrace, she thought Milo was my aunt!” My mother gave me a ferocious stare. “My aunt ,” I heedlessly repeated to Dr. Margaret, and then turned to Dr. Judah. “My—” but I couldn’t finish because my mother was yanking me out of the room.

“Stop talking, Susan, stop right now, do not say that again. It would hurt Milo’s feelings dreadfully.” She let go of me and folded her arms. “There’s dirt on your knees,” she said, though dirt was not usually denigrated in this circle. “Filth.”

“Garden soil,” I corrected.

My mother sighed. “The woman on the terrace is Dr. Will’s sister.”

“I wish Milo was my aunt.”

“Were.”

“Were? Why?”

“Condition contrary to fact.” As our conversation slid into the safe area of grammar, we returned to the party. Milo was now listening to Dr. Will. It didn’t seem to me that Milo’s longish hair was more feminine than Dr. Will’s black smock. But this once I would obey my mother — I would not again relate the error of the woman on the terrace. I hoped that Milo hadn’t heard my earlier exclamation. Not for the world would I hurt his feelings; or so I thought.

MILO CELEBRATED THANKSGIVING here, Passover there, Christmas twice in one day, first at the Collinses and then at the Shapiros. He smoked his after-dinner cigar in everybody’s backyard. He came to our annual New Year’s Day open house, which I was required to attend for fifteen minutes. I spent that quarter hour behind a lamp. My parents, shoulder to shoulder, greeted their guests. Sometimes my mother slipped her hand into my father’s pocket, like a horse nuzzling for sugar.

Milo went to piano recitals and bar mitzvahs and graduations. In August he visited four different families, one each week. He was an aunt, my aunt, aunt to many children born into our therapeutic set, if an aunt is someone always ready to talk on the telephone to worried parents — especially to mothers, who do most of the worrying. Those mothers of ours, full of understanding for their patients, were helpless when their own offspring gave them trouble. Then they became frantic kid sisters, reaching for the phone. Bad report cards, primitive behavior on the playground, sass, lying, staying out all night, playing hooky — for all such troubles Milo was ready with advice and consolation. He knew, also, when a child needed outside help — strangling the cat was a sure indication. Usually, though, it was the parent who required an interpretation and also a recommendation to back off. “No, a joint today is not a crack pipe tomorrow,” he memorably assured Dr. Lenore. Dr. Lenore’s daughter was, of course, listening on the extension. We were all masters of domestic wiretapping — slipping a forefinger between receiver and the button on which it rested, lifting the receiver to our ear, releasing the button with the caution of a surgeon until a connection was soundlessly established.

THE JULY I WAS TWELVE I ran away from overnight camp. The day after I arrived home, surly and triumphant, I eavesdropped on Milo and my mother. Milo was suggesting that my mother praise me for taking the bus rather than hitchhiking on the highway.

“She stole the bus money from her counselor,” my mother said.

“Borrowed, I think. Encourage her to return the money by mail.”

“Shouldn’t she be encouraged to return herself to camp?”

Milo said: “To the hated place?” There was a talcum pause as he drew on his cigar. “To the place she had the resourcefulness to escape from?”

“It’s difficult to have her home,” my mother said, with a little sob.

“Yes, Ann, I can imagine,” said Milo. And then: “It is her home, too.”

There was a silence — Milo’s the silence of someone who has delivered a truth and my mother’s the silence of someone who has received it. And a third silence, a silence within a silence: mine. “It is her home, too,” I heard. The gentle living room. The kitchen whose window looked out on birds and squirrels and sometimes a pheasant that had strayed from the more suburban part of Godolphin. The attached office where my mother saw patients during the day. The bedroom where in the evenings she received those patients’ panicky calls and where she herself called Milo. My brother’s room with his construction projects in various stages of completion — though a year younger than I, he was already an adept mechanic. My own room: posters, books, toys outgrown but not discarded, clothing pooled on the floor and draped on lamps. A long window led from my room onto a little balcony. My mother had once planted impatiens in boxes on the balcony but I let the flowers die. Without recrimination she had watched me neglect — desecrate, even — a generous space in the house. The house that was hers, too.

For the remainder of July I babysat for the kids next door, treating them with a pretend affection I ended up feeling. (“Hypocrisy is the first step toward sincerity,” Milo had written.) I made a small effort to straighten my room. (“A token is a cheap coin, but it is not counterfeit”—same source.) In August we went to Cape Cod.

Our determinedly modest bungalow faced the sea; there was no sandy beach, but we had become used to lying on our strip of shingle. The house had four small bedrooms. The walls were thin, providing perfect acoustics. There was a grille and an outdoor shower. Sometimes my father grilled fish; sometimes he and my mother prepared meals together in the inconvenient kitchen, where they bumped into each other and laughed.

As always Milo came for the third week. I could hear him, too, turning over in bed or splashing in the bathroom, just as I could hear my parents’ soft conversations, my brother’s indiscriminate farting. The small family — still too large a group for me. “I want to work in a private office,” I said one morning.

“You could be a psychiatrist,” said my unimaginative brother.

“Private! By myself! Nobody comes in.”

“Ah. You could be a bank president,” Milo said. “They are rarely interrupted.”