Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

Suppressing a sigh of exasperation, she reached for a fresh diaper, and Rich gave her a toothless smile and aimed a warm yellow stream at her hands, just as Emma burst through the door, wailing over a missing button on her favorite frock, the one with pink lollipops. Suppressing another sigh, she wiped her hands dry, pacified Emma with a set of wooden blocks, and, casting a wistful glance out the window—the sun lay in bright yellow slabs on the flagstones of the winding garden paths—went to get her sewing kit. No sooner had she settled in the armchair with the dress than Rich began to cry in his crib, and George woke up and joined him a room away, and Emma began to bang her blocks on the floor, not to be ignored, and when the delivery man rang the doorbell downstairs, Squash started to bark.

“Oh, be quiet!” she shouted, and, after a calming intake of breath, shouted again, “Be quiet, Squash!”—for she did not want to be the kind of mother who shouted “Be quiet!” at crying babies and peeved little girls, as much as she felt like it at times. For in truth, her exhaustion was making her irritable, not to say angry. Mrs. Simmons came to lend a hand three days a week, and Dolores helped with the cleaning every Wednesday; but even with their capable assistance, taking care of four children, two dogs, Eugene’s fish, and a house stuffed full of things that needed constant dusting, washing, updating, and repairing took its toll. It was like a never-ending sentry duty—or, as it seemed in her grimmer moments, a prison sentence with no chance of parole. Apart from an occasional dinner outing with Paul—and these were becoming increasingly rare, subject to Paul’s demanding work schedule and Mrs. Simmons’s migraines—she never even left the house, and she was never, ever alone.

(She calmed Rich and George, called the doctor, dressed Emma, explained matters to the newly arrived Mrs. Simmons.) She thought of the kiss in the cellar, half a year ago now. Troubled as it had made her feel at the time, inconsequential as it had proved to be since—Adam was back in Paris, and they were not in touch—she found herself returning to it again and again. While knowing that this chapter of her life was finished, she felt nonetheless sustained by the secret fantasy of another, happier woman who had been released into being by a different answer—“Yes!”—at that dazzled instant in the cellar and who had walked out of the chilly gloom into a full, three-dimensional existence of moonlit romance, sunlit adventure, daring art, and, yes, guilt and regret; for unlike her, this imaginary woman, whose parallel existence ran like an intermittent ghostly thread through her mind, was an unnatural mother who had abandoned her children. (Mrs. Simmons called from the doctor’s waiting room; they would be seen next. She finished reading a book to Emma, folded the laundered clothes, and commenced scrubbing the changing table.)

Still, her confinement was only temporary, of course. First would come the driving: it was essential to be able to leave the house. She was hoping to start her lessons in another month, a month or two, as soon as Eugene had adjusted to his new school routine. (The doctor’s office called; Dr. Peck’s rumbling baritone came on the line, asking her if he had her authorization to perform a simple blood test, merely a precaution, he just wanted to be sure it was nothing. Of course, of course, she said, and, hanging up, changed George’s diaper and moved on to sweeping the detritus of broken toys from under the cribs.) Yes, first the driving, then a membership at the library, a reading club, perhaps, even some classes at a local college. Not right away, for she was still needed at home—but in only four years the twins would join their older siblings at school, and she would have a glorious window of freedom, from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon five days a week (minus the holidays and the summer vacation and the spring break and the winter break and the snow days and the sick days and the dental appointments and the plumbing repairs and the visits to the vet). She would still be young then, only thirty-eight, her whole life before her, or no less than three-fifths of it, or at any rate more than half. (She gave George and Emma their snacks; the dogs needed walking.) Then Eugene would leave the house altogether to go off to college, and Emma would follow three years later, and finally the twins—and thus in seventeen years, a decade and a half, really, she would be free at last to live her life to the full. Fifty-one was nothing in this day and age, at fifty-one anything was possible still. She would travel, she would meet fascinating people, and most important, she would—she would—

Mrs. Simmons entered, carrying Rich. She leapt up from the armchair in which she had just collapsed, and rushed to take him. His face was blotchy from recent tears, and a bandage with blue balloons bulged in the crook of his plump little arm; but his forehead was cool to the touch of her lips, and his eyes had lost their dull sheen of sickness.

“I’ll let the dogs back in,” Mrs. Simmons said from the doorway, “and give lunch to Emma and George. Rich will sleep now, I think. Dr. Peck asked you to call him when you have a minute.”

(Mrs. Simmons, who had left Hungary as an eight-year-old girl well over a century before—for Mrs. Simmons was much older than she looked—still kept to the old ways. At night, in the solitude of her small apartment, empty save for the tent she had set up in the middle of the floor, she read tea leaves and peered into crystal balls and chatted with the moon; she was no longer hoping to see a handsome dark stranger in her cards, but she had some modest investments on which she liked to keep her third eye. On occasion she would receive, unasked, glimpses of other futures, intimations of other lives. Poor dear, she thought as she walked to the kitchen. The things we deem important are so fleeting. I do hope she survives the birth pangs, for if she ever comes into her own, it will be something to see. Perhaps I will stay a bit longer, help her through the pain.)

She settled Rich in a nest of fresh blankets and, still unwinding the spool of a different, brighter life in her mind—her fantasy fifty-one-year-old self sipping absinthe at a sidewalk café in Prague, her pen poised in her hand, her companion, his face rather vague, playing with her foot under the table—dialed the doctor’s number. The doctor came quickly. Too quickly. There was nothing definitive yet, he hastened to reassure her, it was only a preliminary result; they would know more in an hour. As she listened, the sidewalk café dimmed and receded, became a ghost of a wisp of a thought—and the present sped toward her, until here it was, looming large and solid, threatening to crush her below its sudden weight.

“But you shouldn’t be alarmed,” the doctor said before ringing off.

She stood with the telephone clutched in her hand, then punched in Paul’s number. “I think you better come home,” she said.

“I have a client meeting at noon. Couldn’t you just talk to the doctor when he calls? Or… do you think it might be serious?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. There was just something in Dr. Peck’s voice—”

“I’ll come,” he said.

He arrived less than an hour later; he must have run a few red lights. She was sitting on the floor, her fingers white around the receiver, her face against the bars of Rich’s crib. She was watching him sleep.

“Have you heard anything yet?” he asked.

“No, not yet,” she said.

“You know it’s probably nothing,” he said, “they just have to—”

The telephone rang in her hand.

She looked at it.

“Well, answer it, answer it!” he cried.

“Hello,” she said, and her voice sounded all tinny to her ears.