The children climbed in one by one and fell silent, and stood in a huddle together shivering.
Part of it was the cold, of course. There is nothing so cold as air that has been trapped beneath tin all winter. Then there was the dirt. When Brian bought his ketch the shack came with it, automatically. The previous owner had stayed here whenever he was working on the boat or preparing for an early morning sail. Brian couldn’t have cared less about the shack itself. He let the grit form a film on the table and the mildew grow on the swaybacked couch and the rust trickle down from the faucets in the kitchen sink. Boys broke windows, birds flew in and died after battering themselves against the walls. Why, I could have shoveled the dirt out! I pictured myself with a great garden spade, laboring over the cracked beige linoleum. Then I saw how I would rip down those tatty plastic curtains and scour the sink white again and cover the couch with some nice bright throw, and all my muscles grew springy the way they had the night before when I was planning the packing, and I knew that we would stay.
“You’re not serious about this,” Brian told me.
“Could you bring in our things, do you suppose?”
I set Rachel on my hip and took a tour of the house. Not that there was much to tour. There was a living room with a couch and an armchair, and the kitchen merely took up one end of it — a sink and hotplate, a table and three chairs. The bedroom held a concave double bed and an army cot and a highboy with one drawer missing. In a little cubicle off the bedroom was a toilet with a split wooden seat, its tiny pool of water a coppery color, set squarely beneath the biggest window in the house. Something about that window — the fact that it was curtainless, or the white scum on its panes — made the light passing through it seem cold and eerie. I stood staring out of it for minutes on end, although I knew I should be helping Brian. I watched the children carry things from the car, all of them ghostly behind that cloudy glass. They tottered beneath blurred objects that I could not identify, and in their midst walked Brian, stepping precisely in his narrow Italian shoes, carrying the potty chair and something pink. When they entered the house, they seemed to have just that moment become real. Like people stepping off a television screen into your living room. I heard their voices, warm and high-pitched and louder than I had expected, and then Edward started crying over a scraped shin and I went out to comfort him. I was very glad to see their faces. Their noses were pink from the fresh air and they were sniffing and puffing. “Where shall I put this?” they kept asking. “What do you want me to do with this? Where will we sleep? What will we eat?” I bent to roll Edward’s jean leg up, tilting Rachel on my hip, but Rachel was used to that and she just took a clutch of my blouse and went on smiling in her sideways position, as adaptable as any of them.
When I went out to say goodbye to Brian I could tell that he was still worried. “Well, so long!” I said. “And thanks again, Brian”—singing it out, hoping to cheer him up. But he didn’t seem to hear. “Mary. Look,” he said.
“We’re enjoying this, Brian.”
“Look. Why don’t you tell me the whole story?”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.
He sighed and climbed into the car. He rolled down the window to give me last-minute instructions—“There’s a phone up at the store … you can turn on the water out back beside the … call me if you …”—and I nodded and waved and smiled.
Then his car disappeared down the road, and I turned back to see my children watching me anxiously from the doorway. They were clustered at all heights, smudged from the things they had been carrying, framed by rotting wood with a great hollow blackness behind them. I have seen happier pictures in those ads appealing for aid to underprivileged children. I never thought that any children belonging to me would look that way.
From the little store up at the boatyard we bought cleaning supplies and groceries, and we all cleaned until dark but it hardly showed. Lunch was sandwiches and supper was canned spaghetti, and after supper we fell into bed. Bed: that was a problem. I put the three older ones in the double bed and Edward and Hannah at opposite ends of the couch. Rachel and I used the army cot. We didn’t even have sheets — just the blankets I had brought and one musty old quilt we found in the highboy. The children were tired enough to sleep anywhere, but I lay awake for a long time wondering what I thought I was doing. I tried to call up a picture of Jeremy. Had he missed us yet? I imagined him sitting in front of the TV in the darkened dining room, keeping silent company with the boarders. Whenever he had something to think over he would stare at the television for hours on end. Maybe he was weighing us in his mind that very minute, stacking us up, listing our faults and our virtues. Or mine, at least. Surely he didn’t need to think twice about the children. They might get on his nerves sometimes but at least they were mostly his own flesh and blood. I was the interrupter, the overwhelmer; nobody has to tell me that. I saw how he had to tear his eyes from his work when I climbed the stairs to ask him could he babysit while I went to a kindergarten conference? Would he feed Hannah while I took Edward to the doctor? did he happen to have change for the diaper man? I knew those things weren’t as important as his sculptures, but what did he expect me to do? This is what comes with having children. You don’t just tie off their little navel cords and toss them on their way like balloons. You have to start thinking about adenoids and zinc ointment and the proper schooling, you worry about nutrition and germs, money begins to matter suddenly. Oh, hear how shrill my voice gets. Imagine what it would be like to be interrupted by such a voice just as you were conceiving your finest statue. As for my overwhelming him! Did he think I didn’t know? I never spoke to him without a sense of holding myself in check, trying to keep the reins in. I didn’t want to dominate. When I talked to him with big, wide gestures, with power and energy flooding out of me, I saw how he quailed and then made himself stand firm. He was wishing that I would shrink a little. He never guessed that I already had shrunk, that this was as small as I could get.
I sent him messages through the dark: Come and get us. Call Brian, call the boatyard. Make up some excuse for missing your wedding, anything at all, I’ll believe it: you suffered a stroke or amnesia, you were mugged in the studio, you would never have simply decided that you didn’t want to marry me. I thought up ways that he might get in touch with us. I pictured the storekeeper banging on our door—“Lady? Man up there on the telephone, says it’s urgent, life or death.” Or he might come in person. No. Never. But couldn’t he, just this once? He wouldn’t bang. His knock would be so soft I would wonder if I had imagined it. I would open the door and find him waiting, hidden in the dark, recognizable only by the dear, sad hopefulness in his stance and that hesitant breath he always took before moving toward me. For that moment I would give up anything, half the years of my life even, anything but the children. I made a hundred silent promises, but the night just went trailing on and on and the only sound I heard was the murmuring of the baby in the crook of my arm.