The Amateur Marriage Page 6

  “Well, that’s Michael for you,” he imagined her saying. “Never been wrong in his life, if you ask Michael.”

  He set the sugar carefully upright on the counter. “Anything else?” Mrs. Golka asked him.

  He said, “Pardon?”

  “‘Anything else I can get for you, Mrs. Golka?’”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  She smiled, shaking her head, and handed him her ration book.

  A grocery store’s business comes in waves: the early rush for staples depleted overnight; the late-morning rush for the children’s lunches before they walked home from school; the afternoon rush for supper supplies. By five o’clock, things had slowed to a trickle and only Wanda Bryk stood at the counter. Wanda Lipska, she was now. She had finished all her shopping but she lingered to gossip with Michael. Had he heard that Ernie Moskowicz had been drafted? “Ernie Moskowicz!” Michael said. “He’s just a kid!” And Nick the Greek’s café had caught fire, and Anna Grant had married a colonel and moved to Arizona. “You remember Anna, the girl who played the piano at your wedding,” Wanda said. Michael said, “Sure,” for of course he remembered Anna—her archless, level eyebrows and smooth brown turned-under hair. He was surprised by a twinge of wistfulness. Why couldn’t he have fallen for a woman like Anna Grant? he wondered. His life would have been so simple and serene!

  Or Wanda, even. He used to find Wanda irritating, but here she stood, six months pregnant and rosily, bloomingly healthy, hugging her sack of groceries. Her tan cloth coat, which was slightly too short and didn’t quite meet across her stomach, had the well-worn, comfortable look of the clothes that his mother and her friends wore, and her broad Polish face shone with contentment.

  “Tell Pauline I asked about her,” she said as she turned to leave. “Tell her I hope she’s feeling—oh, there you are! Hi!”

  It was Pauline herself, toting Lindy, entering through the street door with a string shopping bag on one shoulder. She wore her red coat and the hat Michael called her Robin Hood hat—a matching red felt that she normally saved for Sundays, with a narrow, asymmetrical brim and a dashing black feather. He used to look for that shade of red on the street when they were first courting. A flash of it glimpsed in a crowd could make his heart race.

  “Hello, Wanda! Hello, Michael!” she said. “I thought I’d come in this way and see if you’re closing up yet.”

  “Is she a little sweetheart,” Wanda told Lindy. “Is she a little angel child,” and she made a series of kissing sounds. Lindy was all decked out as well, in a pink wool coat and bonnet. She studied Wanda soberly and then looked toward Michael as if to ask “What’s happening here?” He gazed back at her, not smiling.

  “We went to the butcher’s,” Pauline was saying. “I thought I’d buy pork chops for Michael’s supper. Isn’t pork expensive these days! And seven points a pound. But Michael works so hard, I want to be sure he gets enough protein.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Wanda told her, “married to a grocer. I’d love to be in your shoes, with all the coffee and sugar I needed waiting just downstairs.”

  Pauline gave her chuckly laugh. “Oh,” she said, “I’m lucky, all right!” and she cocked her head at Michael, waiting for him to laugh too.

  He didn’t, though. He just stared at her stonily, till Wanda cleared her throat and announced she’d be running along.

  Pauline must think words were like dust, or scuff marks, or spilled milk, easily wiped away and leaving no trace. She must think a mere apology—or not even that; just a change in her mood—could erase from a person’s mind the fact that she’d called him stuffy and pompous and boring and self-righteous. Watch how lightheartedly she moved around the kitchen table, humming “People Will Say We’re in Love” as she forked a pork chop onto each plate. She’d prepared the pork chops the way Michael liked them, a coating of nothing but flour, salt, and pepper and a quick, hard fry in bacon fat. (Ordinarily she had a weakness for experiment, mucking up good food with spices and runny sauces.) And the vegetable was his favorite, canned asparagus spears, and the potatoes were served plain with a pat of real butter. “Isn’t this nice?” his mother said happily, smoothing her napkin across her lap. Lindy crowed in her high chair and squeezed an asparagus spear until it oozed out either side of her fist. Michael said “Hmm” and reached for the salt.

  During the course of the meal, Pauline reported all the news she had gathered while she was out shopping. Mr. Zynda’s daughter was visiting from Richmond. Henry Piazy had married an English girl, or maybe just gotten engaged to one. Little Tessie Dobek had been taken to the hospital last night with a burst appendix. “Oh, my land,” Michael’s mother said. “Poor Tom and Grace! First losing their only boy, and now this. They must be worried out of their minds.” Michael just went on eating. To hear Pauline talk, you would think she cared. You would think she actually felt some attachment to the neighborhood, instead of scorning it and maligning it and itching to leave it behind.

  His mother said, “How old would Tessie be now, I’m wondering. Twelve? Thirteen? Michael, you must know”—trying to rope him into the conversation.

  But Michael just said “Nope” and helped himself to another slice of bread.

  “His hip has been acting up,” Pauline explained to his mother. “I’ll bet it’s going to snow. Did you notice how he’s been walking today? And he couldn’t finish his exercises this morning.” As if he weren’t in the room; as if his mother didn’t know the real cause of his behavior.

  And his mother went along with it. “Oh,” she said, “I can feel the snow! Every joint in my body is giving me fits.”

  “Did you take your pills?” Pauline asked her.

  “I forgot! Thanks for reminding me.”

  “I’ll fetch them. You sit still.”

  “No, no! Stay where you are!”

  Like partners in some elaborate dance, both women half-stood and appeared to curtsy to each other. Then Pauline sat back down and Michael’s mother rose all the way and shuffled out of the kitchen.

  “I should have thought to remind her earlier,” Pauline told Michael. “It’s a whole lot easier to stave off pain than to cure it once it’s set in.”

  Michael said nothing. He tore a bite-size piece from his slice of bread and set it on Lindy’s high-chair tray.

  “But of course, you’d know that better than I would,” Pauline said. “Accustomed as you are to living with your hip.”

  He was silent.

  “Michael?”

  “Try some bread, Lindy. It’s delicious,” Michael said.

  “Michael, aren’t you going to talk to me?”

  “Yum, bread. Can you say, ‘Bread’?”

  Lindy grinned at him, showing two tiny bottom teeth coated green with mashed asparagus.

  “Please don’t be this way, Michael. Can’t we make up?”

  “Bread,” he told Lindy distinctly.

  “I didn’t mean what I said, honest! It’s just I was feeling so under the weather. Michael, I can’t bear it when you’re mad at me!”

  “I’m not mad at you,” he said. He was still facing the high chair; he seemed to be addressing the baby.

  Pauline said, “You’re not?”

  “I’m just fed up with you. I’m disgusted. I’m sick to death of you and your nasty disposition. I never should have married you.”

  This time the silence was sharper—a sort of hole in the air of the kitchen.

  Then his mother’s footsteps came fumbling out of her bedroom. “Found them!” she called in a loud, carrying voice.

  She entered the kitchen holding aloft a blue cardboard pillbox from Sweda’s. Michael said, “Well, good,” and Pauline sat up straighter and asked, “You want something to take those with, Mother Anton?”

  “No, thank you, dear, I still have my water,” Michael’s mother said, and she lowered herself into her chair.

  Michael picked up his fork and resumed eating, but Pauline went on sitting motionless with he
r hands at either side of her plate.

  When the meal was finished, Michael’s mother said she would do the dishes. “You two just clear out of here and go relax together,” she told them. But Lindy was fussing by then, which meant she was nearing her bedtime; so Michael said, “I’ll make up her bottle.”

  “Oh, I can do that, dear. You two run along.”

  As if she hadn’t spoken, he went over to the rack of sterilized bottles on the counter. His mother offered no further argument.

  Pauline carried Lindy off to the bedroom to change her while Michael filled a bottle with milk and set it to heat in a pan of water on the stove. He stood with his arms folded and his feet planted wide apart and watched the water start to simmer. Behind him, his mother scraped plates and collected glasses. “Don’t let that get too hot,” she told him after a while, and he said, “Hmm? Oh,” and hastily plucked the bottle from the pan, burning his fingers. “Damn,” he said. For once, his mother didn’t comment on his language. He held the bottle under the sink tap while she stood back, and then he went off to the bedroom, shaking the bottle vigorously.

  Nobody was there.

  Lindy’s crib was empty. Her blanket hung crumpled over the railing. The rubber sheet that Pauline always spread on their bed before changing her was still folded on the bureau.

  He crossed the hall to the bathroom. Nobody there either. He even poked his head into his mother’s little room, but of course they wouldn’t be there.

  They must have used the outdoor stairs. Not the safe, sheltered indoor stairs at the rear but the rickety metal fire escape that ran down the Porter Street side of the building. Pauline must have climbed through the bedroom window onto the landing, which was an open grid, and carried a wet, hungry, sleepy six-month-old baby down the slick steps and into the cold winter night with a north wind blowing up and a promise of snow before morning.

  He went back into the kitchen and set the bottle on the drain board. His mother, swishing a handful of cutlery through the rinse water, sent him a questioning look.

  “I guess they’re taking a walk,” he said.

  She stopped swishing the cutlery.

  “Having a little stroll around the neighborhood before bedtime,” he said.

  She said, “Ah.”

  She placed the cutlery in the dish rack. Michael picked up a towel and began to dry the spoons, thoroughly polishing the bowl of each one before putting it away. When he got to the forks, he started humming under his breath in a jaunty, carefree manner. Then he noticed what the tune was: “People Will Say We’re in Love.” But it was too late to change it.

  Oh, and her inconsistency; had he included that fault on his list? Her fickle, irresponsible unpredictability. How would Lindy learn what a proper bedtime was, if she was carted off into the night whenever Pauline took the notion? By now it was almost nine o’clock; they’d been gone for more than two hours. Children needed schedules. They needed routines.

  Wandering back to the crib on one of his restless journeys, he took Lindy’s blanket from the railing and shook it straight and folded it. They needed neatness, too. You couldn’t raise a child in chaos and then expect her to view the world as a stable, secure place. They needed the edges matched and the corners squared. They needed to feel certain that things were where they belonged.

  He heard his mother emerge from the bathroom, hesitate in the hall, and then proceed to her own room—her slow, vague footsteps in heavy shoes. He should go back out to wish her good night, but it required too much effort. He heard her door latch shut in a way that seemed to him reproachful and resigned.

  Lindy’s blanket was one Pauline had sewn when she was pregnant, binding a length of pale-yellow wool with yellow satin on all four sides because, she said, babies loved to run their fingers across something smooth and slippery when they were trying to go to sleep. She somehow knew things like that. She knew that very young babies worried they’d fall apart; they liked to be wrapped into cylinders like stuffed cabbage leaves. She knew the level of voice they preferred—higher-pitched but not shrill—and she knew that while a swaying motion could be soothing, an up-and-down motion would cause a baby to stiffen every muscle.

  Michael had no idea where she had learned all this. He suspected that she hadn’t learned it—that it came from a natural, inborn fund of empathy.

  He laid the folded blanket at the foot of the crib. He adjusted the green cloth frog that sat at the head. It was Pauline’s frog, from her childhood. It had a faded, floppy, rubbed-bald look; you could tell it had been well loved. A gap at one corner of the stitched-on mouth turned its smile into a lopsided grin. The right arm had been reat-tached with brighter-green thread.

  She was a rememberer and a saver and a compulsive souvenir keeper. She still had the red tin cricket from the box of Cracker Jack that he’d bought her on their first date. She had a cone-shaped paper cup, flattened now into a pie wedge, from the train they’d ridden on their honeymoon trip to Washington, D.C.

  He circled the room, gathering further evidence of what kind of person she was. The laughing, affectionate faces of her friends in the snapshots tucked in the mirror. The fountain of maidenhair fern burgeoning on the windowsill. (She could grow anything, anywhere. Her victory garden in the backyard—a yard the size of a scatter rug! packed as hard as a pavement!—had produced so many vegetables last summer that they had had extras to sell in the store. Although half the time, she had spontaneously given them to the neighbors before Michael could collect them.)

  In the evenings, often, she and his mother put their heads together over one of her magazines and they would get the giggles. Anything might set them off—an extreme fashion photo or a ludicrous household hint. “‘Saving your silk stockings to donate for the war effort?’” Pauline would quote. “‘Crochet this lovely drawstring sack embroidered in a botanical theme to store them attractively out of sight!’” His mother would double over and make little snuffling sounds, shyly covering her mouth with one hand, her eyes two merry slits. Michael couldn’t remember seeing his mother giggle before, not even when his father and his brother were alive. Only Pauline called up that sense of mirth in her.

  He heard the tin alarm clock ticking away on the nightstand—every hollow, slow tick. Other than that, the room was silent. It was a silence that seemed directed toward him personally. “See there?” it asked. “See how little you would have, if you didn’t have Pauline?”

  He took his jacket from the closet, and he opened the bedroom door and walked out.

  Yes, it was surely going to snow. He could tell by the color of the sky—a pinkish tinge underlying the gray, like the pink in a hand-tinted photograph. There was a flinty smell to the air. The few pedestrians hurried past in a bunched and huddled manner. Each time Michael pegged the sidewalk with his cane a metallic sound rang out, as if the cane’s rubber tip might have frozen solid.

  He experienced Pauline’s absence as a torn feeling deep inside him. It would not have been a great shock to discover he was bleeding.

  When he was away in boot camp, he used to keep the scarf she’d knitted him folded beneath his pillow. He would pull it forth at night and press it to his face and inhale. At first, it had smelled of Pauline, or he had imagined it had—her almond lotion, her spearmint breath, and even the applesauce scent of her mother’s kitchen. But by the time he shipped out to California, those smells had faded, and the only one left was the yeasty smell of wool. He began to associate the smell of wool with Pauline. It got so any wool—Army blankets, a bunkmate’s watch cap, the mittens some misguided ladies’ club sent to his unit in June—called up in him an ache of almost pleasurable melancholy. He wrote her “I’m making myself sick over you” and “I really don’t think I could live without you”—lines that sounded extreme, he knew, but every word was painfully, absolutely true.

  And Pauline wrote back “Miss you!” and “Love you!” and “Wish you could have been here last night when all of us went bowling!” Then her letters grew farther apa
rt and even those few personal remarks, unsatisfying as they were, dwindled to almost nothing. She talked more and more about the canteen where she served coffee and doughnuts to soldiers. She spoke of these soldiers as buddies, “nicest guy from Nebraska” and “the redheaded fellow named Dave, I think I told you about him”; but even so, he couldn’t help worrying when she not only went bowling with them but roller-skating and dancing. “Have to do my patriotic duty!” she said about the dancing. “If jitterbugging’s what it takes, then jitterbug I will!” He read her letters with a narrow squint, struggling to see behind her words. He wrote, “You’re not starting to forget me, I hope,” and she wrote, “I would never forget you! But I can’t just sit at home nights, I’m 21 years old, what do you expect?” In fact, he thought that sitting at home sounded like a fine idea, but he kept that observation to himself.

  It didn’t help that he hated the Army. The outdoor life made him miserable, and the lack of privacy drove him to distraction, and nearly all of the time he was afraid. He feared not only combat but the exercises meant to prepare him for it: crawling through scratchy underbrush, twanging between strands of barbed wire, lunging with his bayonet while too close on either side his fellow trainees, grunting hideously, lunged also. In boot camp his secret prayer had been assignment to someplace stateside and safe—to a service battalion, say, in charge of foodstuffs. Wouldn’t that make sense for a grocer’s boy? But he could tell from what they taught him in California (all having to do with explosives) that the Army had other ideas. Special training was just more of the same; in fact he still, ironically, had to bunk beside Private Connor from Virginia with his everlasting cough.

  Pauline, meanwhile, was dancing with soldiers and whispering secrets to her girlfriends and fluffing up her hair in front of mirrors. The image of her snug, lacy world filled Michael with longing, though at times it crossed his mind that it was her fault he had enlisted. Well, not her fault, maybe, but her influence—the influence of her admiring and expectant gaze. No, cancel that. A man had to take responsibility for his own decisions.