Their sleep, Barker Flett likes to think, is made up of softer denser stuff than other people’s sleep. There’s something clean about it like scrubbed fleece. Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else — and this is what he more and more believes — just a word trying to remember another word.
He dreams of weeds tangled at the edge of a lake, of the breasts of a young girl, their hard tips, of an immense shaggy-flanked animal chasing him through the streets of an unknown town.
Alice Alice’s mother has explained to her the secrets of procreation.
This is terrible news, shocking in all its parts, a man’s peter poking inside a woman’s peepee place. The explanation, meted out during a long, tense kitchen-table session, is more sickening in its way than the story Alice got from Billy Raabe who lives on the next block, for according to Billy the man goes pee inside the lady.
“No,” Alice’s mother says firmly, this — she pauses — this business has nothing to do with urine. The fluid in question contains seeds which are necessary if the mother is going to grow a baby inside her.
The mechanics of the exchange seem impossible to Alice.
“The mother and father lie on a bed,” her mother tells her, sighing it out, “with their arms around each other.”
“When?” Alice asks. Her own voice feels harsh to her ears.
Mrs. Flett’s expression turns cross at this question, those three little lines between her eyes shooting up like a fan, but she clears her throat and says, “Well, usually at night.”
“At night? Right here? In our house?”
“Really, Alice.” Now her mother is staring down at her cuticles.
The little teapot clock over the stove says half-past three. A coconut chiffon cake, freshly iced, sits on a pink glass plate.
“Well?” Alice is waiting for an answer. She will not let the issue drop.
“I don’t know what to say, Alice. And I don’t like the way you’re speaking, your attitude, that scowl on your face.”
This is becoming worse and worse. But Alice can’t stop herself.
“It’s so icky. Why does anyone have to do such an icky thing?”
“Really, Alice.”
“It’s so awful.”
“No, it’s not awful. It’s a beautiful thing between a man and woman.”
“It makes me sick at my stomach.”
“Well, you’ll just have to believe me, it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.”
Alice can feel her insides whimpering but she manages to keep the sound confined. The cloudless summer day is spoiled. Nothing will ever be the same. The house is defiled, especially her parents’ upstairs bedroom with its stale powdery mysterious smell and the big hard-mattressed bed with its tufted headboard. Men and women are unclean, it was all grotesque, her mother who dresses herself each morning in her closet, the door left open a crack to let in the light, pulling on her underpants and girdle with her back turned, and hooking up her nylon stockings. Her mother actually opens her body at night to that dark hairy part of her father — Alice has glimpsed this darkness from time to time — and she allows this unspeakable thing to happen. It’s like a dirty joke, the dirtiest joke she’s ever heard.
Beautiful, her mother calls it, but then she’d gone on and on about the naked statues in the art gallery, saying they were beautiful too.
And other people must do it — Mrs. Raabe, Mrs. Hassel, her teacher Mrs. Strong. What about Esther Williams or Deborah Kerr or the king and queen of England? Maybe even Grandma Goodwill in Indiana. She and Grandpa.
“Do ladies,” she asks her mother carefully, “still do it even when they don’t want to have any more babies?”
“Well”—there was a swelling pause—”well, some do and some don’t.”
Alice feels a shift in the balance of the room. She and her mother have sat down at the table with willingness between them; they were going to get to the bottom of what Billy Raabe was spreading around the neighborhood. But now the discussion seems to be drawing to a close. Her mother is picking at her thumbnail, pulling a sliver of loose skin away, then glancing up at the window where the curtains are blowing inward. Alice senses that only one more question will be permitted.
“And do you — and Daddy — still do it?”
“Well—”
Alice holds her breath and waits.
“Well, yes,” she hears, and then her mother adds a brave, tight addendum that seems pulled together like the drawstring of a bag, “Sometimes.”
Alice is going to throw up the cream of asparagus soup she had for lunch, she knows it. She wonders if she should go stand by the kitchen sink so as not to make a mess.
“But, Alice, you must promise not to say anything to Warren and Joanie about what we’ve been discussing. Not until they’re old enough to understand.”
Warren and Joan are playing kings and queens in the backyard.
Alice can hear Warren through the screen door yelling at Joan to bring him his crown and she hears Joan shouting, “Yes, your royal highness, here it is, your royal highness.”
It is Alice’s day to be queen, but she doesn’t feel like going outside this afternoon. Let them play what they want to play.
Oh, she loves them, her brother and sister, she’s never understood before how much she loves them. They are healthy, beautiful, perfect, and unbruised by this terrible knowledge. They will be able to go on looking into the faces of their mother and father, look right into their faces and smile and talk and carry on as if nothing has happened.
Warren “How old are you?” Warren asks his mother.
She is folding sheets and pillowcases and kitchen towels on the dining room table. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Well, what year were you born in?”
She considers, then says, “1905.”
“And now it’s 1947.”
“Yes.”
He thinks about this for a while. “What year was I born in?”
He’s asked this question before, often, but is always forgetting the answer.
“You were born in 1940. In the early days of the war.”
Now he remembers why he keeps pestering his mother with the same question. So he can hear that shivery phrase — in the early days of the war. The image of a rising sun swims before his eyes, blood-red in color like the Japanese flag Billy Raabe’s got tacked up on his bedroom wall. He, imagines, too, a tense startled night silence broken by the high pitched rat-a-tat-tat of bullets, and all this fragmented noise is backed by a deeper, thunderous growling of guns. The War. The Second World War.
“Was that when Pearl Harbor was?” He loves the words Pearl Harbor. He loves himself for remembering them, for getting them right.
“This was before Pearl Harbor, a whole year before.”
“Why was I born then?” he asks.
“Because you were.”
“Alice was born before the war.”
“Yes.”
“And Joan, what about Joan?”
His mother’s head is shrunk tight today by rows of pincurls.
The bobby pins catch winks of light from the bay window. She is counting pillowcases. He can see her tongue ticking off the numbers at the same time her thumb travels down the neat stack — one, two, three, four, five. “Joan?” she says absentmindedly, “Joan was born in the middle of the war.”
The war is like a wide brown tepid river the world’s been swimming along in, only now, ever since Victory, there’s nothing. Peace doesn’t feel all that different to Warren. His body is the same body he’s always had, his scraped shins and knees and bony feet, and his face in the hall mirror has the same round look of surprise. But sometimes at night he wakes up with a stomach ache and calls out to his mother, who gives him a glass of something fizzy to drink and tells him he’s suffering from indigestion, that he’d be fine if only he didn’t wolf down his food so fast. But he knows it’s the war that gives him a stomach ache, the fact that the war is over and there’s nothing to hold him up and keep him buoyant.