White Noise - Don Delillo [41]
“Your mother is not sure exactly who her husband is.”
“That’s not the basic problem. The basic problem is that she doesn’t know who she is. Malcolm is in the highlands living on tree bark and snake. That’s who Malcolm is. He needs heat and humidity. He’s got like how many degrees in foreign affairs and economics but all he wants to do is squat under a tree and watch tribal people pack mud all over their bodies. They’re fun to watch. What does Mother do for fun?”
Bee was small-featured except for her eyes, which seemed to contain two forms of life, the subject matter and its hidden implications. She talked about Babette’s effortless skills in making things work, the house, the kids, the flow of the routine universe, sounding a little like me, but there was a secondary sea-life moving deep in the iris of her eye. What did it mean, what was she really saying, why did she seem to expect me to respond in kind? She wanted to communicate in this secondary way, with optic fluids. She would have her suspicions confirmed, find out about me. But what suspicions did she harbor and what was there to find out? I began to worry. As the odor of burning toast filled the house, I tried to get her to talk about life in the seventh grade.
“Is the kitchen on fire?”
“That’s Steffie burning toast. A thing she does from time to time.”
“I could have prepared some kind of kimchi dish.”
“Something from your Korean period.”
“It’s cabbage pickled with red pepper and a bunch of other things. Fiery hot. But I don’t know about ingredients. They’re hard enough to find in Washington.”
“We’re probably having something besides toast,” I said.
The mild rebuke made her happy. She liked me best when I was dry, derisive and cutting, a natural talent she believed I’d forfeited through long association with children.
The TV said: “Now we will put the little feelers on the butterfly.”
In bed two nights later I heard voices, put on my robe and went down the hall to see what was going on. Denise stood outside the bathroom door.
“Steffie’s taking one of her baths.”
“It’s late,” I said.
“She’s just sitting in all that dirty water.”
“It’s my dirt,” Steffie said from the other side of the door.
“It’s still dirt.”
“Well it’s my dirt and I don’t care.”
“It’s dirt,” Denise said.
“It’s my dirt.”
“Dirt is dirt.”
“Not when it’s mine.”
Bee appeared at the end of the hall wearing a silver and red kimono. Just stood there, distant and pale. There was a moment in which our locus of pettiness and shame seemed palpably to expand, a cartoon of self-awareness. Denise muttered something violent to Steffie through the crack in the door, then went quietly to her room.
In the morning I drove Bee to the airport. Rides to airports make me quiet and glum. We listened to news updates on the radio, curiously excited reports about firemen removing a burning sofa from a tenement in Watertown, delivered in a background clamor of ticker-tape machines. I realized Bee was watching me carefully, importantly. She sat with her back against the door, her knees up, held tightly together, arms enfolding them. The look was one of solemn compassion. It was a look I did not necessarily trust, believing it had little to do with pity or love or sadness. I recognized it in fact as something else completely. The adolescent female’s tenderest form of condescension.
On the way back from the airport, I got off the expressway at the river road and parked the car at the edge of the woods. I walked up a steep path. There was an old picket fence with a sign.
THE OLD BURYING GROUND Blacksmith Village