Domestic Affairs Read online

  A neighbor introduced us, and Ursula invited me into her kitchen for tea and a slice of pie (blueberry) that day. In all my years of visits, all the hours I’ve spent in that kitchen, sipping tea and talking to Ursula, there was seldom a time when one kind of pie or another wasn’t just coming out of the oven. I’m not sure what we spoke about then: her garden (from which she gave me cuttings), the birds she fed daily, who flitted around her garden in such numbers that it could have been an Audubon sanctuary. Sewing maybe—she did that, too. I do know she took me on a tour of her wonderful old house: the basement filled with canned goods, and Andy’s enormous, hundred-year-old printing presses; her sunny sewing room, with fabric scraps all around, and boxes containing the pieces from every pattern she’d ever sewn; the collection of rocks and minerals she and Andy had gathered on their expeditions around New England, Ursula’s blue and white china, her wallful of cookbooks, and every issue of Family Circle and Woman’s Day from the last twenty years, filed for recipes; the big old upright piano in her living room, painted salmon pink. The garden, filled not just with the usual perennials, but with wildflowers Ursula had dug up and transplanted, including a jack-in-the-pulpit whose single annual bloom she’d call me every year to announce.

  I guess a person could call it woman’s talk, all this discussion of pressure cookers and pie crust and flowers, crochet stitches and scarlet tanagers. But the truth is, we were always talking about more than those things, Ursula and I (or any of the dozens of mostly young people who passed through her kitchen constantly), over the years I visited there. What it came down to, really, was a way of looking at the world, a set of values, which acknowledged not just the importance of using old-fashioned cake yeast for making bread or of never cutting thread with your teeth, but also fairness and generosity and—always—a respect for the natural world.

  A short woman (especially beside her tall, rangy husband), Ursula always despaired of her weight, and dressed mostly in loose homemade blouses and pants a little like pajama bottoms. My children always loved her embrace, in part, I’m sure, for the roundness and softness of her. Even for me, a grown-up, it felt good to get a hug from Ursula, and more than once, over the years, I turned up on her doorstep in need of one.

  Even when I first met him, Andy wasn’t entirely well. He was an infinitely gentle, slow-moving, vague sort of man, and a few years after I met him we learned he’d been diagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease. He must’ve had it for years, but because he’d always been a little fuzzy, a little slow-moving, nobody noticed that much. I remember a visit Andy and Ursula made (to our kitchen, this time) just after the birth of Audrey: Audrey in Ursula’s arms, wrapped in a patchwork blanket Ursula had just finished making for her, all of us eating slices of a pie Ursula had brought. Andy sat, by the woodstove, in a rocking chair, silently munching on his pie, and then, slowly, he spoke up. “Isn’t it something,” he said, “that a man actually walked on the moon.”

  Partly because of his completely unhurried, quietly thoughtful ways, he was a wonderful, natural companion to young children. When Audrey was little, I used to bring her to Andy and Ursula’s house whenever I’d try to sew a dress or to do a little canning. Ursula and I would be bustling about in the kitchen and there would be Audrey and Andy, in the living room, sitting together in Andy’s La-Z-Boy rocker, watching Sesame Street. “Are you sure Andy doesn’t mind?” I’d ask—as the hours went by. “Oh no,” said Ursula. “He likes watching that show anyway, but I don’t usually let him.”

  The summer Audrey was three Andy began saying, quietly, that his heart was giving him trouble. Several times Andy and Ursula’s daughter, Alison (who came to visit every summer), rushed him to the emergency room at a hospital thirty miles away. Every time, some doctor or other would take Ursula and Alison aside and tell them there was nothing really wrong and offer lectures on hypochondria. The Parkinson’s was just affecting his mind, that was all.

  All that summer, though, Andy was depressed. He stopped taking his afternoon swims down the road at Gleason Falls. He was too tired to take Ursula blueberry picking and looking for rocks. He told her she should learn how to drive. He sold his old horse, Duke, who had been living in the barn for years even though nobody could ride him.

  Then one morning, very early, I got a call from Ursula, who was practically screaming. Andy had collapsed on the kitchen floor. The rescue squad was on its way. Come over, come over right away.

  He was dead by the time they reached the hospital. Alison came; when she had to leave, Audrey and I drove back over with our suitcase and spent the night in an upstairs bedroom so Ursula wouldn’t be alone. We woke early, but of course Ursula, who in the best of times was always up by five, had been up for hours. With breakfast ready.

  Ursula lived alone in the big house four more years. We came by more often after Andy’s death, but still she complained that there was no one to cook for anymore. Pies went bad, cookies went stale. The house was cold in winter. The garden was too much to keep up with. Ursula took in boarders a few times, as much for the company as for the money, but there was always a problem. They would turn out to be vegetarians, or they’d be on a diet, or they didn’t believe in white sugar. Or they simply didn’t stop enough, at the kitchen table, for tea and conversation.

  So finally, last fall, Ursula packed up and moved to an apartment in Massachusetts, near her sisters and the family farm. She put her house on the market; and all winter, driving by (explaining to Charlie, for the hundredth time, why we weren’t stopping at Ursula’s for pie), I’d fantasize about buying it.

  But somebody else bought the house, and the closing is today. Hearing that Ursula planned simply to abandon Andy’s big old printing press in the basement, Steve and some friends spent all last weekend dismantling the press and hauling it to a neighbor’s barn. I noticed, as I watched them carry the last pieces out to the truck, that (though she had left her irises and lilies in the garden, and the special late-blooming lilac Andy had planted for her), Ursula had dug up and moved her jack-in-the-pulpit. As for the pink piano, it’s in our living room now, and I am working away at scales nightly. As Ursula says, no home should be without a piano, and no piano without a home.

  My friend Jessica is, like me, a married woman, mother of three children, living in rural New Hampshire. She wears old clothes a lot and cleans out sheep stalls and buys groceries at Cricenti’s. She’s also a former Miss North Carolina, a fact which amuses her but isn’t central to her existence these days. But because Jessica and her husband are innkeepers, she frequently comes in contact with a pretty unlikely sort of person for these parts—the kind who flies in to New Hampshire for the weekend with his girlfriend, who brings with her three suitcases, none of which contain mud boots. Some of these visitors are kind and considerate people—friends—and some are virtual strangers who stop in for a quick dose of the country and a few sets of tennis and the novelty of a venison steak before heading back to the airport.

  Now the truth is, Jessica is a beautiful woman—with the kind of natural glamour that doesn’t require klieg lights or makeup. She’s an artist by training, but for the last twenty years it’s been her children and her home to which she’s mostly turned her talent. Now her youngest son has his driver’s license and there are no more rooms left to redecorate, and she’s finally able to get back to her studio. But that twenty years’ interruption (as much as she chose it and, mostly, loved it) has had its cost. “Back in North Carolina,” she recently told one of these weekend visitors from the city, “a young woman was either talented or pretty, but never both.”

  “Oh,” said the visitor (an actress, an ingénue). “And which one did you used to be?”

  Well, one day when I was over at Jessica’s I asked her for a phone number I needed, and she handed me her address book to copy it down. And there on the same page with bug sprayer and bike repairs was the phone number of Marlon Brando.

  Naturally I had to get to the bottom of this. It turned out that Jessica didn
’t really know Marlon Brando. But one of these weekend visitors had the number in her book, which she kept leaving around open, next to Jessica’s kitchen phone (from which this weekend visitor was making frequent long-distance phone calls to “the coast”). And somewhere near the end of the weekend, after about the fourteenth of these phone calls—emptying out this woman’s ashtray again—Jessica found herself copying down Marlon Brando’s number. Also Jackie Onassis’s number, and Ryan O’Neal’s and Warren Beatty’s, and a few others besides. Not that she ever intended to call these people up. She just liked flipping through her address book and seeing their names now and then.

  It was her own private joke, having Omar Sharif in there with her veterinarian. Then, too, every now and then someone like me would spot one of those names, and sometimes, like me, they would comment; but frequently they would simply be silent, and forever after they’d be wondering, every time they called Jessica and got a busy signal, whether maybe she was on the phone with Marlon.

  I was getting so much enjoyment out of the idea that Jessica asked me if I’d like to put a few of those numbers in my address book. What woman couldn’t use the odd movie star in her life? So I said sure, and for the last couple of years now I’ve had Marlon Brando in there, right above “bus station,” and below “barbershop.” I never flaunt it, but every six months or so someone will notice the name there, at which point I either explain or (depending on the circumstances) simply act mysterious. The whole thing has worked so well I have come to feel that everyone ought to put a famous name or two into his or her address book, beside whatever number she chooses to make up. (The area code for Los Angeles, incidentally, is 213.) Not to put the neighbors in their place, or so the babysitter will see. Just as a reminder: There are all kinds of beautiful people.

  Because this is such a small town, the newspaper comes out only once a week here, and when it does the news is likely to be who won a milking contest and whose aunt has been visiting from Maine. For controversy we consider questions like whether or not to rename Dump Road after a beloved and recently deceased town fireman. Photographs on the front page feature unusually large trout, high-school athletes, and good-looking woodpiles. Then a month or so back, on the top of page one, came the headline “Two in Family Have Cancer,” accompanied by a large photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Norton and their three children, all of them stiffly facing the camera and looking understandably grim.

  The story below the picture went on to tell the Nortons’ story, based on the reporter’s visit to their home and the afternoon he spent there. Eighteen months ago, the family’s middle son, Billy, was diagnosed as suffering from leukemia and put on a program of chemotherapy. Then, a couple of months back, on the very day Billy was found to be in remission, his father was discovered to be suffering from another form of cancer. The paper didn’t say it outright, but for the father, especially, things don’t sound too hopeful.

  He can’t work now, of course, the paper informed us, and neither can his wife, because she’s so busy driving back and forth to the city, bringing her husband and son for treatments. The family has no medical insurance, no relatives in the area, no savings. Already they have had to give away their beloved family dogs. They don’t know what they’ll have to do next.

  Reading news like this, of course, leaves a person reeling. (Also, filled with the knowledge of his own relative good fortune: Thank God it’s not me.) I kept looking back at the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Norton (just a few years older than Steve and I, I figured). Mr. Norton very gaunt now, of course, but bearing the look of a man who used to be well built and muscular. Mrs. Norton, a good-looking woman, with dark circles under her eyes, her mouth forming a perfectly straight line. The little boy with cancer, his hair just beginning to grow back in tufts, like a baby’s. Almost saddest of all were the older brother and younger sister, who don’t have cancer. I wonder if they ever feel guilty about their good health.

  At the end of the story about the Nortons there was a plea for contributions. “We’re proud people,” said Mrs. Norton. “We hate asking for help. We just don’t know where else to turn.”

  Well, this is, as I said, a small town, and people here believe in taking care of their own. Even though the Nortons hadn’t lived here all that long—didn’t work in town, or belong to a church, or appear to have a lot of friends here—people began organizing the minute that story came out. Audrey came home from school a day or so later to report that every classroom was decorating a coffee can for local businesses to put out for contributions to the Norton Fund. Then the third grade announced a car wash. The school nurse approached me about donating the proceeds from a school play I was directing. There were posters for a dance on behalf of the fund, and then a concert.

  It’s come to the point where now you can’t buy a cup of coffee or pick up a newspaper in this town without seeing one of those Norton Fund coffee cans and that photograph of the family taped to the cash register. A couple of days ago Audrey came home from school with a letter from the principal, informing us that the elementary school would be putting together a bunch of food baskets for the Nortons, to be delivered on the last day of school, and asking that every child in the school (about five hundred) bring a canned food item for the Norton family. When I forgot to send in a can, that first day, Audrey delivered an impassioned retelling of the Nortons’ plight for me, and then marched off to survey our pantry shelves for good items. “I think one is enough,” I said, as she reached for a whole stack of tuna cans. “Mom,” she said sternly, “they’re desperate. Everybody has to give as much as they possibly can.”

  Well, I have become increasingly uneasy about all of this and about why I haven’t opened my heart to the Nortons. All the more so because the family’s situation is so unequivocally terrible. (Cancer. It’s the nightmare that haunts us all. Multiplied by two.) Why don’t I feel better about the way our community has rallied for these people—by doing precisely what my husband and I try to teach our kids? Namely, to always lend a hand.

  It’s just that I’m picking up these troubling undercurrents—hidden strings attached to all of our community’s love and charity. It is almost as if, with the contents of our coffee cans, we have purchased the right to scrutinize every aspect of the Nortons’ lives, and not surprisingly, they come up short in a few departments. There’s the story told me by a friend about a mutual acquaintance of ours who lives near the Nortons. One of the gentlest, most sweet-natured women I know, she showed up on my friend’s doorstep in tears, a couple of years back. Mrs. Norton had just chased after her, screaming, because—backing her car out of her own driveway—she had almost hit one of the Nortons’ fifteen tied-up dogs.

  Then there is another woman in our town, who tells my friend she drove past the Nortons’ house the other day (drove out there specifically to check things out, actually), and what she saw were half a dozen dogs, still tied to trees, three ten-speed bikes, a new addition, and a moped.

  “Why doesn’t Mrs. Norton get a job?” I have begun hearing some people ask. Someone else will point out, then, that she has to drive her husband and son to treatments. “What about nights?” they ask then. “And what about the sixteen-year-old son? He could get work after school. He could help out.”

  We have all of us become experts on the Norton case. Our quarters and our canned tuna entitle us to speculate, debate, and finally, to judge. It’s possible that Mrs. Norton isn’t a very nice woman, I think to myself. But is her trouble any less real, for the way she screams at her neighbor? Do we only help people who don’t tie up their dogs? Is what we want to see—driving past the houses of people we help out—signs of unabated misery? Does a person holding his hand out forfeit the right to a ten-speed bicycle? How about a five-speed, then? How about a one-speed?

  Last night as we were clearing the table after dinner, I made a few remarks to Steve about some things I’d been hearing around town concerning the Nortons, and Audrey overheard. “How would you feel if you were them?” she pointed out.
“You wouldn’t act so nice either.” And of course she’s right.

  So I sent a can of tuna in to school today, along with a can of baked beans, and some cream of mushroom soup that nobody in our family ever seems to want. I pictured what dinners at the Nortons’ will be like this summer, as they make their way through five hundred cans of baked beans, sardines, and maybe the odd Spam. I thought again of the haunted face of that father—who is suffering (all of us here now know) from cancer of the left testicle. And the boy, reading in the paper that his chances for survival are “pretty good.” And the healthy brother and sister—maybe stopping in Weber’s News now and then for a pack of gum. Standing at the cash register, studying that construction-paper-covered coffee can with their family’s name on it and knowing it’s headed their way.

  In September of the year Audrey turned six, a meeting of concerned parents who might like to raise money for an elementary-school field trip was called at her school. That seemed like a good idea. I had been a parent of a child in this school system exactly two weeks at this point, and hadn’t burnt out yet. Audrey’s new purple sneakers were still purple and not, as they would be come November, gray. She still had the top to her thermos. Life seemed filled with possibilities. So I went to this meeting, along with seven other mothers, six of them, like me, the parents of first graders.

  We started talking about ways to earn money, and all the usual suggestions came up. A bake sale, a yard sale, a raffle. Then I said, “Why don’t we put on a play?”