T. Boyle - The Women

Very gradually, as spring deepened toward summer, she began to regain her strength. She felt it in her legs first, her calves hardening ever so perceptibly and the long muscles of her thighs and groin stretching to accommodate the pace of her nightly rambles. In the mornings, even before the sky began to shade to gray beyond the windows, she forced herself from bed and out into the garden, though she was weakest then, coughing with a persistency that alarmed her — and cold, cold all the way through, as if she’d never warm up again. But the garden needed tending, that was what she told herself. The peas and green beans were drowning in weeds, the tomato and pepper seedlings were delicate still and the sweet corn was at its most vulnerable, and while she slept a whole army of rabbits, gophers, beetles and caterpillars crept out to the feast. She didn’t eat, didn’t brew a pot of coffee or a cup of tea or even rinse her mouth with water from the pitcher on the stand beside the bed — she dressed in the dark in an old skirt and sweater and went straight out into the silent breath of the morning while the children were asleep still and there was nobody to see her.

Once the sun was up, she came in for breakfast, Frank already at work in his studio, Mrs. Taggertz feeding the children, the workmen hammering and measuring and sawing away at the perpetual revivification of Taliesin. She ate then — a soft-boiled egg, a slice of toast, coffee with cream and sugar — and afterward, if she had the energy, she sat with the baby and put Svetlana through her paces, an hour of dance, an hour at the piano, readings from the poets, drawing, painting, calligraphy. 55In the afternoons, she slept. And in the evenings, after Mrs. Taggertz had served dinner and the baby had been put to bed and she’d sat reading in the living room with Svetlana and Frank, she went back out to the garden, furtively, rising from her chair as if she were going to the kitchen or the bathroom and slipping out the door into the gathering dark. Moonlit nights were a blessing, the hoe an extension of her hands, her arms, her shoulders, one task leading to another until it was eleven, it was midnight, and still she was at it, the work consecrating her in routine. She spread the soil, paid out the hose, bent and clipped and dug, and the world of the reporters receded like a ship leaving the dock in a very dense fog.

By June, she’d begun to relax. The telephone rang still, rang continually, but she learned to ignore it. She put on weight — a pound or two, at any rate. Her complexion improved. Frank complimented her on her looks. She even began, tentatively, to sit out in the courtyard again without feeling as if she were being spied upon and twice she took Svetlana down to the lake to feed the ducks in broad daylight. And then one evening, as she played with the baby in the living room while Svetlana skipped rope outside the door with a rhythmic slap as regular as a heartbeat and the smell of fried ham and potatoes and onions rode a current of air from the kitchen, she happened to glance out the window to see a number of motorcars pulled up at the front gate. Absently, she rose to her feet and crossed the room to get a better look. There was a gleam of glass and metal, the roofs of the cars mirroring the sun in neat oblong sheets, movement there, people — men in hats — gathered in groups of two and three, as if they were looking for work.

Or a story. A newspaper story.

Her first reaction was to shrink back from the windows, though they couldn’t possibly see her at this distance, could they? She went to the bedroom next, not to hide herself like a scared child — she was angry suddenly, and she’d never hated any class of people in her life the way she hated these professional snoops and meddlers and why couldn’t they just leave them alone? — but to fetch the binoculars from the table beside the bed. She wanted to be sure. Wanted to know her enemy. And then she would call to Frank and Frank would send the men down to confront them and everything would go on as before.

She came back into the room in a crouch, gave a glance to the baby, who was preoccupied with a stuffed toy in the middle of the carpet, sensing nothing, knowing nothing, then went down on all fours and crawled to the window. The scene jumped at her in magnification, the lake a slap of color, the lawn crying out till every blade of grass came starkly visible, the gate trembling and then sliding into focus. She saw Billy Weston there, his back to her, and two of the other men with him. And then the newspapermen, their hats creased, ties askew in the heat. There was a shout, muffled by the distance and the interposition of the glass, the noise startling a flight of ducks up off the water to wheel over the house and throw a pulse of shadow across the room, and it was then that she saw there was someone else there too, a figure in motion — a woman — bending, rising in violent pantomime, bending again.

It was Miriam. It had to be. She was certain of it even as she shifted the binoculars to focus on the woman’s face, but then the figure ducked out of view, erased momentarily by the torsos of the converging men before coming up triumphant to fling something down in the dirt in a dull blur of color. Another shout. The men smirking. Easing forward. A photographer there, setting up his tripod, the sun exploding against the windows of the cars and the woman whirling away from them all to stamp furiously at that thing in the dirt as if she were killing it. Only then did she stand still long enough to reveal herself.

Olgivanna had seen Miriam in the flesh just once — in the corridor of the hospital — but she must have studied the photographs of her a hundred times, fixated on her, fascinated, every line of her rival’s face as familiar to her as her own, and now here she was, unmistakable, Miriam in all her belligerent glory, come to claim her own. She recognized the pug nose, the set of the jaw, the clamped insatiable mouth and the outsized hat slipped down over the eyebrows — and the eyes themselves, so startled and wide it was as if she’d been pricked with a pin every minute of her waking life. It gave Olgivanna a strange thrill to see her this way, reduced at the end of a long optical tunnel, flattened and derealized, but it was short-lived. Any minute now — she was sure of it — Billy Weston would stand back and Miriam would pass through the gates and sally up the drive with her horde of reporters, and what then? Would they have to run out into the fields and hide? Crawl under the beds? And where was Frank?

Svetlana’s rope beat and beat and beat again, echoing through the open door that gave onto the courtyard. There was a dull ringing from the direction of the kitchen, the cook rapping a spoon against the lip of a pot. And Olgivanna, absorbed in the spectacle of Miriam, forgot all about Pussy until something came crashing down behind her and she spun round to see the baby tangled up in the cord of one of Frank’s lamps, the glass shattered, the frame bent 56—Frank would be furious, that was her first thought — and Pussy expelling the first startled shriek of breath. Panic swept over her then — the electricity, the shards of glass — and she dropped the binoculars, sprang to her feet and snatched up her daughter and she didn’t care who was watching. In the next moment she was in the corridor, Pussy raggedly wailing — startled, but no blood, and the lamp hadn’t hit her, had it? — and calling for Frank in a voice that was a bitter distillate of rage and fear and impatience. “Frank! Frank! Where in God’s name are you?”

He was in his studio, drawing, always drawing, no matter what the crisis, and he looked up sharply when she burst in on him — the children, especially bawling, red-faced infants, were strictly interdicted from distracting him while he was working because how could she expect him to earn a living if he was to be forever interrupted every time Svetlana skinned her knee or the baby passed gas? 57“What is it now?” he demanded.