Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

She flushed with an indeterminate feeling—anger mixed with startling bitterness, and something else underneath, something very different. Jerking open the nearest drawer, she shoved the box with the insidious little words deep, deep into the sideboard’s prosperous recesses agleam with an earlier crop of useless treasures, and swung around to face her mother.

I don’t ever intend to have children, she wanted to say, fiercely. I will not live a life of platitudes, I will not sink into the plush swamp of a comfortable marriage. I will always walk the harder path. Mine will be a life free of the commonplace and drudgery, full of travel and thought, unstinted in feeling and experience—an artist’s life, do you hear me? But there was a look disturbingly like supplication in her mother’s eyes, so instead she said, her voice taut with suppressed emotion, “Mama, I’m twenty-six years old. We got back from our honeymoon three days ago. There is plenty of time for that later.”

Paul appeared on the kitchen threshold.

“Almost ready,” he announced. “Maybe you should wake the professor. And we should eat properly this time, at the dining table, don’t you think? Although… uh…”

He looked at the absurdly cluttered table.

“It’s all right,” she said, picking up the pheasants. Anger still had not loosened its hold on her throat, and she would not look at either Paul or her mother. “It won’t take too long to clear this off.” Paul nodded and vanished into the aromatic cloud that hung over the kitchen. “Mama, why don’t you go and wake him up while I pack everything away—”

“Let’s use it,” her mother said.

“What?”

“All these things. The dessert china. The tea set. The champagne flutes. The deer and the peacocks. Let’s use them.”

“Pheasants,” she corrected mechanically. “Why would we do that?”

“Did I ever tell you about my collection of old postcards? They were my grandmother’s. My father gave them to me after her death. I was eight or nine. My grandmother had kept them stored in a striped pink-and-white hatbox, and there were theater programs and dried flowers in there as well.”

As she talked, she began to push the many-colored glasses of sundry shapes and sizes and the plates, no three alike, into incongruously mismatched islands amidst the cornucopia of gilded fruit, arranging them on embroidered placemats and silver chargers.

“When I opened the hatbox for the first time and saw what was inside, I was enchanted. There were postcards of castles and moonlit lakes and girls in elegant dresses. The pictures themselves were black-and-white, but the girls’ lips, cheeks, and parasols were rouged red by hand. I had never seen anything like it, and it just took my breath away. But I was a secret hoarder. I didn’t want to squander my enjoyment on just any ordinary day, so I didn’t allow myself to look at anything properly, I just piled it all back into the hatbox, shut the lid, and hid it under my bed. For weeks afterward I went about, pretending nothing was there, all swollen with my secret. And every single day I was just dying to get the box out and pore over my treasure, to look at the beautiful girls, but I didn’t let myself. I thought I had plenty of time, so I would choose a perfect moment, make it a special occasion. My birthday, perhaps, or maybe New Year’s.”

She watched her mother in silence, without stopping her, without helping her. A chill was starting to creep up her spine. Her mother’s face had hardened into an unfamiliar expression of grim determination, and her movements as she darted about the table, sorting, shifting, rearranging, grew faster and faster.

“Then one day, when I was at school, my father’s new wife cleaned my room. She found a pile of old junk under the bed, and she threw it all out. So you see, I didn’t have any time, as it turned out. When you put something off to do later, it just doesn’t get done, not in the same way. Because there never is any time, there never is any later… There, all finished. Where do you keep your matches? I want to light these now.”

She stared from her mother to the table, groaning under its mad glittering, gleaming, sparkling weight, and back to her mother.

Her heart was beating slow and hard.

“Mama,” she said. “Has something happened?”

“Five minutes!” Paul trumpeted from the kitchen.

“We really should wake him up now,” her mother said.

Together they looked at the closed door of the bedroom. The candle flames bent left, bent right in an invisible breeze. The certainty of an imminent disaster hollowed out her insides. She said, “Something is wrong.”

“Yes.” Her mother stood still, her hands hanging loose by her sides, as though depleted all at once of her frenzied energy. “Don’t tell him I told you, not yet, I want tonight to be… to be like before. I promised him I wouldn’t tell you at all, and I didn’t, not before the wedding anyway, I didn’t want to ruin it for you. But it’s time now, I think. Papa is sick. Really sick. It’s cancer, and not the kind they can… That is, they don’t know how long… Well. All I wanted to tell you is, if you want Papa to see your children, you should start having them now.”

“And dinner is served!” Paul announced, carrying in a steaming tureen. “Wow, look at all that, it’s like the cave of Ali Baba!… Hey, shouldn’t you wake your dad now?”

“I’m awake, I’ve been awake,” her father said, entering the room. “I’ve just been resting a little.”

She heard him shuffling as he walked, but that was only because of Paul’s slippers, of course: they were much too big for him, weren’t they, and his own had been packed away already. She could not bring herself to look into his face at first. When she did, she saw what had escaped her in the fuss of the preceding days. He seemed much older than his sixty-eight years, and his skin had a grayish cast, and his eyelids were shadowed by exhaustion, and his mouth was thin and hard. Sorrow washed over her because she knew that she would never again be able to recall his face from before, the way it had been, that he was somehow already lost to her—and then he noticed the outrageous, clashing abundance of the table and laughed, laughed in just that contagious way in which he used to laugh when she was a child, slapping his knee with his hand, his face starting into life with a myriad of wrinkles, his eyes dark with a disarming, childish mirth; and she went all quiet inside.

The four of them sat in the festive light of a dozen candles, amidst the pewter Thanksgiving pheasants and the bronze Christmas deer and the porcelain Easter rabbits and the glass grapes, and lifted mismatched champagne flutes in a toast to the new couple’s happiness. The bubbles fizzed on her tongue, tasting of innocence and loss.

“Please, may you pass salt,” said her mother to Paul, exhausting her English.

“Don’t offend now, but this Taj Mahal thing? Is ugly,” said her father, laughing again.

Why, she thought, why hadn’t they told her before the wedding? She would not have gone through with it but would have returned home instead, would have added no more days to the careless tally of years she had already missed in her father’s life. But it was too late now, and there was only one way left to hold at bay the numbing grief that was spreading through her like a slow, viscous spill.

Gods, my gods, sometimes the harder path is the opposite of what it seems.

“Are you asleep?”

“No. Well, maybe. I guess I am. Is something wrong?”

“I just can’t sleep. I’ve been lying here thinking.”