The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [79]
“We had a nice day.”
“How do you feel?”
“Back to normal.”
“How normal?”
“I’m making fried chicken.”
“Mashed potatoes?”
“Cream gravy, green beans with browned almonds, romaine lettuce.”
“The Joe McManus blue-plate special.”
“I set a place for him at the table, just like Elijah.”
The ironic middle. We were married again, and grinning. We’ve always made a lot of good jokes together. I heaved myself off the couch and went to the shower. Not so long ago, Lizzie came home and said. “You know when you let the bathwater out and there’s a lot of little gray stuff in it?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She said, “That’s your skin.”
I stood in the shower for about twenty minutes.
And then it was Friday, everyone in school, day care, work, all support services functioning, the routine as smooth as stainless steel. I was thirty-five, which is young these days, resilient, vital, glad to be in the office, glad to see Laura and Dave, glad to drill and fill and hold X-rays up to the light. In our week away, the spring had advanced, and the trees outside my examination room window were budded out.
As soon as the embryo can hear, what it hears is the music of the mother’s body—the lub-dup of her heart, the riffle of blood surging in her arteries, the slosh of amniotic fluids. What sound, so close up, does the stomach make, the esophagus? Do the disks of the spine creak? Do the lungs sound like a bellows or a conch shell? Toward the end of pregnancy, when the pelvis loosens, is there a groan of protest from the bony plates? Maybe it is such sounds that I am recalling when I sit on my chair with the door to my office half closed and feel that rush of pleasure hearing the conversation in the hall, or in Dana’s office. Delilah’s voice swells: “And then they—” It fades. Dave: “But if you—” Dana: “Tomorrow we had better—” The simplest words, words without content, the body of the office surging and creaking. Dana’s heels, click click, the hydraulic hum of her dental chair rising. In my office, I am that embryo for a second, eyes bulging, mouth open, little hand raised, little fingers spread. I have been so reduced by the danger of the last few weeks that the light shines through me. Does the embryo feel embryonic doubt and then, like me, feel himself nestling into those sounds, that giant heart, carrying him beat by confident beat into the future—waltz, fox-trot, march, jig, largo, adagio, allegro? I don’t sing, as Dana does, but I listen. Jennifer Lyons, age fourteen, pushes open the door, peeps in. “Hi,” I say, “have a seat.” And I am myself again, and the workday continues.
And continued. And continued. She made lasagna for dinner. Saturday she got a baby-sitter and we went to the movies. Afterward we stopped at the restaurant next to the office and had a drink. She put her arm through mine. I watched her face. Now I could speak, but what would I say? If there was not this subject between us, I could have talked about the news, our friends, the office, our daughters, but now I could say nothing. We sat close, she put her hand on my knee. I drank the odor of her body into the core of my brain, where it imprinted.
On Sunday there was laundry and old food in the refrigerator. We mopped the floors, and Dana was seized with the compulsion to straighten drawers. I raked mulch off the flower beds and got out the lawn mower and climbed the ladder to clear leaves out of the eaves troughs. Lizzie and Stephanie spent the weekend obsessively exploring the neighborhood, like dogs reestablishing their territory. Leah took this opportunity to play, by herself, with every one of their toys that she had been forbidden over the winter. I liked her touch. She didn’t want to damage, she only wanted to appraise. I thought of my temptation to speak on Saturday night with horror. Each of these normal weekend hours seemed like a disaster averted.
Monday at noon Dana and Delilah were late, did not appear. Dave was surprised at my surprise. Man to man. He didn’t look at me. He said, looking at the floor, “Didn’t you know that she