Putting away the groceries, she did what she always did, which was imagine the boys talking about her someday — out of the blue, no reason of any kind, she must have gone crazy, or, alternatively, good riddance, we never liked her anyway, never understood why he married her in the first place, females are only good for two things and I forget what the second one is. Her hands were still trembling as she smoothed butter over the skin of the chicken and set it in the roasting pan.
But then Paul gave her a wonderful gift. She had just scrubbed the potatoes and was peeling the first one. Brad had the refrigerator door open, and Gray had brought his book into the kitchen. He was saying, “What does this word mean?” and pointing, when the back door flew open and slammed against the wall. Everyone jumped. Paul stormed into the kitchen, yelling, “I ran over a bicycle! Brad, your bicycle was lying right in the driveway, and I ran right over it, and now the—”
Brad jumped away from the refrigerator and closed the door. His mouth had dropped open. Gray moved back toward the doorway to the dining room, ready to flee. Paul yelled, “God damn it!”
Claire said, “Are you still on top of the bicycle?”
“No, I am not, for God’s sake! I backed off it.”
“Then no harm done.” She glanced at Brad. “Except to the bike.”
“It’s dark! I don’t know if there’s no harm done. There could be oil or gas dripping out of the underside of the car. And the car damaged, too, for Chrissakes. It could be quite a dangerous situation. Not to mention—”
She said, “Why don’t you not mention it?”
Brad started for the dining room, and Paul said, “Come back here, young man!” Claire dropped the peeler and the potato and stepped between Paul and Brad, who made it through the door. Paul’s voice sharpened. “Did you hear me?”
“How could he not hear you? You sound like an air-raid siren.”
And then he gave it to her — he popped her right on the chin and knocked her down.
She was lucky she didn’t whack the back of her head on the edge of the table; that was the first thing she thought. She landed sitting. Her neck hurt. Paul stood above her, and she saw his face, which was red with rage, become gradually infused with disbelief. And it was true that he had never hit her before. For Claire, though, there was nothing unbelievable about it. She knew that he had wanted to — that the kicking of a door or the smack of a fist on the table was only a substitute. It could be said, though she would never say it, that her change of tone — a bit of sarcasm for the first time in their lives — had startled him and undone his last mote of self-control. She turned her head. The boys were frozen in the doorway. She said nothing. Paul said, “Your mother fell down.”
“You liar,” said Claire. It was possible that Gray and Brad had never seen an argument, because it was possible that Claire had never talked back. Claire shook her head, leaned forward, and helped herself up with the chair. Not even the desperate look on Paul’s face aroused her pity, and that was how she knew that whatever love she had once felt for him had left no trace.
Finally, Paul said, “I’m s—”
Claire stood right in front of him and said, “I don’t care.” Then, “Dinner will be ready in an hour.” She went back to peeling potatoes.
She served at six-thirty; the chicken was a little dry, the mashed potatoes were good, and cleanup was easy. At eight, they watched Barney Miller, and at nine, they watched Soap. Brad came in and out with questions about his homework, and at nine-thirty, he was told to go to bed. Gray was, Claire suspected, hiding out in his room. At ten, they watched the news, and then Paul stood up from his easy chair and said, “Well, I’m going to bed. I—” But she must have had a look on her face, so he stopped, and headed up the stairs. She turned off the TV. In the late-night quiet, she glanced around and decided that she hated every piece of furniture, and she was not going to take a single one with her to the apartment. What was that furniture called that those Perronis had in California? Oh, right, Mission style, of course. She would start there. Paul appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She looked at him. His first utterance would be a final test.
He said, irritably, “It’s late. I have to be at the hospital by—”
How many times had he said that over the years? He was a very prompt man. But he had failed to pass the test. He had gone on with his life, with their lives, out of habit, not daring to recognize that all was changed.
She said, “I’m getting a divorce.”
He said, “I won’t allow that.”
And then she simply laughed. She saw his fists clench, and she saw him notice and unclench them. She said, “I’ll sleep on the couch tonight.”
“What will you tell the boys?” Now his lips twisted, and he looked as undecided as Claire had ever seen him, torn between remorse and rage.
“I’ll tell them I slept on the couch.”
He stared at her, then turned away.
Little had she known what a pleasure it would turn out to be, telling the truth at last.
1980
WHEN JOE GOT the flu after Christmas, he was in bed for a week, throwing up, lost in a fever of 103 or more, and waking at odd times from dreams about snow. And there was plenty of snow — Lois and Minnie let D’Ory and D’Onut in the house. After his fever was gone, he slept for another week, and when he finally woke up, on January 7, he had lost ten pounds and was as hungry as a hog. Lois thought this was funny, and made his favorite dishes for a few days; all in all, Joe was glad that he’d gotten sick in the middle of winter and that no one else came down with it. Apparently, Annie, who was home for a few days, oversaw the quarantine and would not under any circumstances let Lois go to the doctor and get some antibiotics, not even to be safe, because flu was a virus and that was that. She even called a couple of times after she went back to her job at a hospital in Milwaukee, to make sure that Lois wasn’t “going for the cefaclor behind her back.”
“So bossy,” exclaimed Lois, but they all knew she was right.
When he managed to get himself into the Volkswagen and go into town for lunch, he was the only person in the Denby Café who wasn’t up in arms about Carter’s grain embargo. Marsh Whitehead had a paper with him, not The Des Moines Register or The Usherton Post, but The Christian Science Monitor, which had an article by two men from over in Kansas about why the embargo would fail. Joe read it over while he was drinking his coffee and listening to all the other farmers bitching about it. Here they’d thought Carter — well, peanuts, what kind of a crop was that? But hadn’t his sister ridden a tractor back in December of ’77, two years ago, when those farmers protested? And Russ Pinckard said, “Well, I didn’t see anyone from around here down there at Terrace Hill, driving their John Deeres over the lawn, did I?”
According to the article, you could tell by the thickness of tree rings how much rain there was in the course of a year, which Joe knew, and, furthermore, these rings went in a twelve-year cycle: for six years, the rings were fatter, which meant more rain, and then for the next six years, thinner rings, less rain. Those years when the Russkies needed more grain because of less rain were over, so there was no reason to think they needed to import much this year. In addition, indications were that they had plenty on hand, left over from ’78, which they were hiding in brand-new and very enormous grain-storage facilities.