Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

Truisms are often untrue, but that cruelty is a fact of human life is not one of them. We must go closer, so close that we smell the blood from their cuts and the frisson of secrecy and theatrical danger the girls found in the Coven. We must be so close that we feel the pleasure they took in hurting Alice and so close to Alice that we can see how in her vulnerability and her need to be so very, very good, she defanged herself, just as I had before her.

But, I told myself, you are no longer twelve. Your fangs may not be the sharpest, but they have grown back and now you can act. I made seven phone calls and explained to seven mothers that I wanted to take a week off, but that during that week each of the girls had to write her story of what happened in either poetry or prose. Two pages minimum. The rest of the class would be spent dealing with that material in one way or another. I was forceful. Although I heard some murmurs of concern about “going over all that again,” no one opposed me in the end, not even Mrs. Lorquat, who seemed genuinely shaken by the whole ungodly mess.

* * *

Dear Mom,

Dad has moved into a hotel. I’m not sure what’s going on exactly, but we’re going to have dinner on Thursday, and he has promised to talk to me, to be totally honest. I told him that he really should write to you, and he said he would, but I have to tell you he sounds awfully sad on the telephone, all slowed down. He’s no open book, Mom, but I will keep you posted. A week and a half and I’ll be in Bonden, my little Mammy dear, and will pop through your door and fling my arms around you!

Love from your own Daisy girl

* * *

A. Boris dumped the Pause.

B. The Pause dumped Boris.

C. The affair was still on, but the duo had decided the pausal quarters were too small, hence hotel.

D. The two parted by mutual agreement.

E. None of the above.

* * *

A was preferable to B, B to C. D was preferable to B. E was an unknown quantity, or X. Much inward churning and burning over A, B, C, D, and X. Considerable spinning of satisfying fantasies of prodigal spouse prostrate or kneeling in state of keen remorse. Other, less satisfying fantasies of spousal heart broken by Frenchwoman. Some introspective activity on the conflicted state of own worn and tattered heart. No crying.

* * *

And then, on Wednesday evening, around nine-thirty, while I was reading Thomas Traherne aloud to myself in a very low voice as I lay on the sofa, my face covered in a mud mask of a green hue, a concoction I had purchased because its makers promised it would soften and purify an older face like mine (they did not state this explicitly, but the euphemism “fine lines” on the label had made their intention clear), I heard him next door, the volatile Pete, howling two well-known expletives, an adjective for the sex act and a noun for female genitalia, over and over again, and with every verbal assault my body stiffened as if from a blow, and I walked to the glass doors that opened to the yard and stood looking out toward my neighbor’s low modest house, but the windows revealed no persons. It wasn’t entirely dark yet, and the sky’s deep blue was streaked with darker trails of graying clouds. I opened the doors and stepped onto the grass and into the hot summer air, and I heard Simon wail, then the front door slam. I saw a racing shadow that was Pete, heard the car door slam, the ignition, the revving motor, and the skid of tires as the Toyota Corolla vanished down the empty street and took a violent left, presumably into town. Then, framed in the window, I saw Lola walk into the living room with Simon, her head bent over him, bouncing the child in her arms as Flora trailed after them like a sleepwalker. They were all whole.

I didn’t move for a few minutes. I stood there with my bare feet in the warm grass and felt immeasurably sad. All at once, I felt sad for the whole lot of us human beings, as if I had suddenly been transported skyward and, like some omniscient narrator in a nineteenth-century novel, were looking down on the spectacle of flawed humanity and wishing things could be different, not wholly different, but different enough to spare some of us a little pain here and there. This was a modest wish, surely, not some utopian fantasy, but the wish of a sane narrator who shakes her red head with its slices of gray and mourns deeply, mourns because it is right to mourn the endless repetitions of meanness and violence and pettiness and hurt. And so I mourned until the door opened, and my three neighbors emerged from the house and came across the lawn, and I took them in.

There were four, really, because Flora had brought Moki. As she walked toward me over the grass dressed only in her Cinderella underpants, she spoke urgently to him, telling him it was okay, that he mustn’t worry, mustn’t cry, that it would be all right. The child patted the air beside her and kissed it once and when we were inside, she ran to the sofa, curled up in the fetal position, and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. I noticed she was not wearing her wig. I sat down beside Flora, beconed to Lola by pointing at a chair, and watched her lower herself into it as if she were an old woman with sore joints, her face oddly expressionless. She did not appear to have shed any tears — her cheeks were dry and the whites of her eyes were untouched by redness — but her chest rose and fell as she breathed deeply, like a person who had been running. I placed my hand gently on Flora’s back. She opened her visible eye, took me in, and said, “You’re green.”

My hand flew to my face as I remembered the beauty product, rushed off to remove it, returned to the room, and noticed that more than anything Lola looked exhausted. She was wearing a thin paisley bathrobe of some synthetic material that had fallen open at the neck so that it exposed much of her right breast. Her blond hair hung in disordered clumps over her eyes, but she made no effort to adjust the robe or push away the hair. She was limp, beyond effort. Simon whimpered as he pressed the crown of his head against his mother’s arm, but she didn’t move. I took the baby from her and began to pace, jiggling him as I walked back and forth across the floor. Without turning to look at me, she said in a voice hard with determination, “I will not go back there tonight. I do not want to be there when he comes home. Not tonight.” I offered them my bed, to which she said, “We can sleep there, all four. It’s a king, right?”

We did sleep there, all four or five of us, depending on how you counted. After giving Lola a couple of shots of whiskey from the Burdas’ stash of hard liquor, I rocked Simon to sleep and laid him on the bed, a fat ball of babyhood in blue pajamas with feet, who breathed loudly from his chest, tiny lips pursing and unpursing automatically. I dug out a small blanket I had hidden away and wrapped him up in it to protect him from the air-conditioning and then carried in the unconscious Flora, who snorted once when I pulled the blanket over her, but she quickly rolled over and settled into deep sleep. After I returned, Lola and I sat together for a while. She did not want to talk about Pete. I asked her about the row, but she said that their fights were stupid, that they were always about nothing, nothing that was important, that she was tired, tired of Pete, tired of herself, sometimes even tired of the children. I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, without a transition of any kind, she began to tell me that for three years after she had started school as a child, she had not uttered a word. “I talked at home, to my parents, to my brothers, but I never said anything in school, not to anybody. I don’t remember much about preschool, but I remember a little about kindergarten. I remember Mrs. Frodermeyer leaning over me. Her face was really big and close. And she asked me why I didn’t answer her. She said it wasn’t polite. I knew that. I wanted to tell her that she didn’t understand. I just couldn’t.” Lola looked at her hands. “My mom says that sometime in the first grade I started whispering in school. She was overjoyed. Her kid had whispered. And then, little by little, I guess I just got louder.”