The doctor came in with his white coattails billowing — a young man, dark-skinned. “Now! Mrs. Pauling,” he said. “What seems to be the problem here?”
“I think Rachel’s sick,” I said, “but I can’t tell what’s bothering her.”
He gave Brian a short nod and stretched the baby out on the table. She frowned at him. He prodded her stomach, felt her neck, looked into her nose and mouth and ears and listened to her chest. I held my breath. The skin on my scalp ached from waiting. Then, “Ear infection,” he said. “Both sides.”
“Oh! Are you sure that’s all?”
“It’s all I see. She been pulling at her ears lately?”
“No, she hasn’t.”
“Usually that’s a sign.”
“Well, I know that,” I said. Relief made me snappish. I felt he was accusing me of something. Did he think that after six children I wouldn’t notice a thing like ear-pulling? All my children have been susceptible to earaches. I wondered if he disapproved of Rachel’s single, grayish diaper. I became aware suddenly of what I must look like in my dirndl skirt and rubber flip-flops, one shoulder strap slipping out from the sleeveless blouse that I had fastened shut with a safety pin. My purse was patched with a flesh-colored Band-Aid. I turned it to its good side while he was bending to write out a prescription.
When we were back in the car, loaded down now with penicillin and decongestants and a brand-new thermometer, Brian turned east although it would have been simpler to continue due south. I suppose he thought it would disturb me to pass near my old neighborhood. “Wait,” I almost said. “Let’s go back, can’t we?” What I wanted to do was just confirm that the house existed; it wasn’t that I planned to walk inside or anything. But Brian looked straight ahead and chewed on his pipe, pretending that this route was a natural one, and I didn’t say anything after all.
His car was air-conditioned — something I hadn’t noticed when I was so upset. For the first time in weeks I could stop fighting the heat, and Rachel actually went to sleep in my lap. “Must be fast-acting medicine,” Brian said. (We had given her the first dose back in the drugstore.) When I told him I thought it was the coolness he frowned. He said, “Now will you believe that shack is no place for children?”
“Well, I don’t see how the shack comes into this,” I said. “We’re perfectly comfortable there. The children get earaches any old place; it’s something to do with the twists in their ear tubes.”
“In summer, even?”
“Any time.”
“I don’t believe it,” Brian said. “And if they’re sick in summer, what will winter be like? The place is not insulated, you know. There’s no heat, and you will have to turn the water off every night, and I won’t always show up just in the nick of time this way.”
“No, I know that,” I said. Actually I had thought about winter several times lately, but then I put it out of my mind again. I said, “We’ll work it out when the times comes. I’m sure that everything will—”
“It’s August, Mary.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Could you tell me what’s going on with you and Jeremy?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” I said.
“Do you still love him?”
“Oh yes,” I said. Which was easier than describing the exact combination of love and hurt and anger that I had been feeling about Jeremy lately.
Brian looked over at me for a second, and then back at the road. “I don’t want to step on Jeremy’s toes,” he said, “but I wish that if you’ve really left him you would make it final and get a divorce. Are you considering that?”
I don’t know why my life always seems more confusing than other people’s. First Jeremy proposed marriage when I wasn’t divorced and now Brian was proposing a divorce when I wasn’t married. I said, “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to think about anything right now.”
“All right, then. I’m just letting you know that I’m here, Mary, and sooner or later you’re going to want someone to turn to.”
Did he suppose I hadn’t thought of that?
My poor, pathetic store of money, which once had seemed the answer to everything, had almost disappeared. I lay awake nights trying to think of people who might help. On the trip home now I dreamed up ludicrous solutions: I could take up with the slimy boat mechanic, I could suddenly reappear at Guy Tell’s front door. I pictured the string of children trailing me like ducklings, Guy’s startled face, his new wife peering out behind him. “I’ve come back to you, Guy!” “Uh, who are all these people with you, Mary?” I nearly laughed, but then I grew serious. I began to see how every move I had made in my life had required some man to provide my support — first Guy when I left my parents, then John Harris when I left Guy, and Jeremy when John Harris left. Now I couldn’t imagine any other way to do it. I had come here on my own, certainly, but it began to look as if I couldn’t keep it up. Underneath, Jeremy and I were more alike than anyone knew. Eventually I would give in and find someone, Brian or someone else, it all came to the same thing. I could see it ahead of me as clearly as if it had already happened. I couldn’t think of any way out. I felt drained and weak suddenly, as if I had shriveled.
I looked over at Brian, but he had dropped the subject when I told him to and now he was just driving along puffing quietly on his pipe.
In the evenings I tell fairytales, the same old fairytales over and over. The children curl against me, clean and warm in their fresh white underwear, smelling of milk. I close my eyes and take a deep breath of them. I could tell these stories in my sleep. “Another, now another,” the children say. Don’t they ever get tired?
I see myself on a sagging couch beneath a warped tin roof, braced on each side by my children for lack of firmer support. I understand that from outside I seem to have been leading a fairly dramatic life, involving elopements and love children and men stretching in a nearly unbroken series behind me, but the fact is that when you proceed through these experiences day by day they are not really so earth-shaking. All events, except childbirth, can be reduced to a heap of trivia in the end. When I die I expect I will be noticing a water ring someone left on the coffee table, or a spiral of steam rising from a whistling teapot. I will be sure to miss the moment of my passing.
Rapunzel. The Princess and the Pea. Rumpelstiltskin. My voice grows croaky. My mind runs ahead of the words. I play silent games with the tired old plots, I like to ponder the endings beyond the endings. How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the prince stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband, being so quick to find the faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.
8. Spring through Fall, 1971: Olivia
You know how I knew she had left him? I found him smoking a cigarette. I went up to his studio on Friday night to ask where the others were, it felt so weird downstairs. I knocked and stuck my head in, and there he sat on this purple velvet couch holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger and blowing out a long careful funnel of smoke. “Mr. Pauling?” I said. “Jeremy? Where’s everyone gone to?” But then I guessed for myself, right while I was asking. Something about the way he was holding the cigarette. I don’t know why. “Good Lord, she’s left you,” I said. He nodded. I wouldn’t say that he looked upset. Just stunned, sort of. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything, and then he switched the cigarette to a new position between his index and middle fingers and sat there staring at it, and I closed the door again.