E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“It’s raining,” Phyllis said. So it was. Shattered raindrops appeared on the windshield. Daniel’s eyes focused on the surface of the windshield, trying to anticipate the small explosions of rain. This was too difficult, so he fixed on one drop and followed its career. The idea was that his attention made it different from the other drops. It arrived, head busted, with one water bead as a nucleus and six or seven clusters in a circle around it. It was like a melted snowflake. Each of the mini-drop clusters combined and became elongated and pulled away in the direction of its own weight. As he accelerated the car, so did they increase their rate of going away from the center.

“Shouldn’t you put on the wipers?” Phyllis said.

The sky was darkening rapidly. Headlights of oncoming traffic multiplied in the drops of water on the windshield. The tires hissed on the wet road.

Daniel groped for the wiper switch. The car veered for a moment, and a horn blew behind them. Then the wipers were thumping away. But Daniel had noticed in the moment of the car’s veering that Phyllis clutched the armrest of the door with her right hand and extended her left back over the seat to protect the baby.

She glanced at him to see if he had seen.

“I like the rain,” Daniel said.

“I love rain,” Phyllis said. “I especially love warm rain in the summer when there’s no lightning or thunder.”

“No, I mean now, in this car,” Daniel said. “The rain has the effect of a cocoon, it encapsulates us.”

“Yes,” she said looking ahead. She was unbraiding her hair. Her eyes were fixed on his father’s Chevrolet directly ahead of them with the silhouettes of three heads in the front seat.

“Oh, Daniel, I wish I could hold Susan and hug her and kiss her and be her friend.”

He nodded.

“Maybe when she’s better she should come and live with us for a while. We would really love her and make her happy. The baby would love her. Do you think she would?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe she was coming to see us. Do you think she was coming to New York?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she was coming to visit us?”

“No.”

“She’s so beautiful,” Phyllis said, and she sighed.

I met my wife at a Central Park Be-In. In the Sheep Meadow. She was there with two other girls from her neighborhood who weren’t cool. They gaped at the genuine hippies. They broke down and giggled like Brooklyn high school girls. She was embarrassed by them. She was very lovely. Someone had solemnly offered her a daffodil and solemnly she had accepted it. Solemnly with a spiritual smile, she walked with her flower, taking those too large, slightly awkward strides of hers. She was avid for spiritual experience. I took her home to 115th Street and put on some Bartok. She was amazed by the numbers of books. I suggested to her that fucking was a philosophical act of considerable importance. I knew that in deference to this possibility she would allow herself to be fucked.

Phyllis’s parents are young and recently into money. Not wealthy, well-off. Her father sells carpet at a discount. He is a partner with another man, a World War II buddy of his, and they have one store in Brooklyn and one in Queens. He is one of the Young Turks in the Brooklyn Reform Jewish Center. He takes Phyllis’s mother to Florida for two weeks every winter. In the afternoon they play golf and in the evening they go to one of the night clubs and listen to a comedian. In their apartment in a new high-rise in Brooklyn are porcelain lamps of nymphs. Over the stuffed, buttoned sofa in the living room is an original imitation Hudson River School painting in an elaborate gilt frame and with its own spotlight.

There is a younger child, a boy, twelve, Scott. He despises and hates and fears me only a little less than the mother and father do. They are appalled at Phyllis’s marriage, and we see them less and less frequently. They send gifts for the baby. When we were still talking, the father tried to bring himself to ask me about the bruises his wife saw on his daughter’s upper legs; he mumbled and cleared his throat, but I pretended not to understand, and he gave it up. I think they call her during the day.

This is no day to be in the library. It is too beautiful and warm and you can hear a bird or two. I will go back and take them to the park and well see if there are any boats on the river—

A few minutes later Phyllis unbuckled her seat belt and turned around to see to the baby, who was stirring fretfully. “I have only one diaper left,” she said. Clumsily she got to her knees and leaned over the back of the seat to change Paul. Her ass wiggled as she moved her arms. Her long hair hung down. The rain was coming down, rattling the roof and streaming over the windshield. Daniel checked his rear-view mirror and swung into the left lane. A moment later with Phyllis still occupied, he passed his father’s car, then another, then another.

“There,” Phyllis said. “You take a nap now. And soon well be at your grandma and grandpa’s house. All right now, close your eyes.” She turned, and tucking one leg under the other, she slid heavily into a sitting position. “Oh,” she said. “It makes me dizzy to do that.” She opened her window a crack. “It’s very close in here.”

Daniel said, “Will you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Take your bells off.”

She looked at him and laughed. Perhaps she was pleased that he could joke this way and come up from being so far down. Perhaps she was cheered by this expression of the Life Force on such a deadening day. “Very funny,” she said. But she was appreciative.

“I’m not being funny. I mean it.”

She studied his face.

“Come on, Phyllis. Right now.”

“Daniel—”

“Take them off.”

“I don’t think that’s right. I don’t want to do that.”

“But I want you to, Phyllis.”

She was looking for the lights of the Chevrolet, but the road immediately ahead was empty. She noticed that the car was going faster.

“Oh, Daniel, why are you doing this? It’s so foolish. It’s so unnecessary.”

“Move it, Phyllis.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“I want you to take your pants off.”

“And then what? You can’t do anything while you’re driving. All you’ll do is get us crashed,”

Daniel gently depressed the accelerator and said nothing.

“This is a kind of sick kidding around, Daniel. It frightens me. You have no right to freak out driving a car with your own baby in it.”

Daniel pressed down further on the accelerator. Phyllis was sitting straight in the seat now with both feet on the floor and her arms folded across her breasts. Daniel quietly explained to her the mechanical problems of the car: there was considerable play in the steering, the front wheels were unaligned, the brakes were worn and the tires slick. He glanced at the speedometer and informed Phyllis that they were doing eighty-five miles an hour.

“When we get to Brookline I’ll do whatever you want,” Phyllis said. “I know I bore you, Danny, I know your family thinks you married someone not as good as you. But you gotta gimme credit for trying, don’t you?”

Daniel said nothing.

“You’re all such big deals,” Phyllis said. “You’re all such big deals of suffering.”

Daniel was pleased with this formulation. She wouldn’t have been capable of it six months before. He thought of complimenting her. Instead he leaned forward and turned off the windshield wipers.

The rain poured down the windshield now in such torrents that the visibility, though slightly distorted, was good. Phyllis, not a driver, was hardly comforted. She was gazing at a light screen with white and red lights enlarging, shrinking, wavering, scattering, and pouring off her sight like water. Her impression was of not being able to see where the car was going. For the first time there was the sound of thunder rumbling over the sounds of the engine and the slick tires creaming the water. The thunder seemed to buffet the car, which swayed gently at the rear, left to right, right to left.