The Stars Are Fire
Anita Shreve
To my husband, with gratitude and love
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Wet
A spring of no spring. Grace pins Gene’s khakis to a line that stretches diagonally over the yellow linoleum of the kitchen. Only heat from the stove will dry the cotton. She holds off on the towels, hoping for a good day tomorrow or the next. On the last beautiful afternoon, over two weeks ago, there was wash on the line in every front porch and backyard. With white sheets, undershirts, and rags flapping in the wind, it looked as though an entire town of women had surrendered.
—
Grace glances at her two children as they nap together in the carriage, the one with the big rubber wheels, the dark navy enameled chassis, and the white leather interior and trim. It is her prized possession, a gift from her mother when Claire was born. It takes up half the kitchen and blocks the hallway when not in use. Claire at twenty months is a hot sleeper and has soaked the collar of her playsuit. Tom, only five months old, is an easy baby. Grace sterilizes the glass bottles and rubber nipples in a saucepan on the stove. Her milk was fitful when she had Claire; she didn’t even try with Tom.
—
When she sleeps with Gene in their marriage bed at night, Grace wears a nightgown, thin cotton in the summer, flannel in the winter. Gene is always naked. Though she would prefer to lie on her back, Gene almost always manages to turn her onto her stomach. She is not built for relations this way. How could she be, never having experienced the god-awful joy that Rosie, her next-door neighbor, once spoke of? On the other hand, the position must be good for making babies.
—
Apart from this unpleasantness, which doesn’t seem important and which, in any event, is over fast, Grace thinks Gene a good husband. He is a tall man with thin hair the color of damp sand. He has midnight blue eyes and a short ropy scar on his chin that stays white no matter what color his face: an angry red, a blushing pink, a January pale, an August tan. He works six days a week as a surveyor, five of them on the Maine Turnpike project, a job that sometimes takes him away for three or four days at a stretch. She imagines his head full of mathematics and physics, measurements and geometry, and yet, when he returns home, he seems enthralled with his children. He is talkative at supper, and Grace knows she is lucky in this since so many of the wives complain about dull silences at home. While she holds Tom in her arms, Gene chats with Claire in her wooden high chair. Grace smiles. These are her happiest moments, with her family in harmony. In many ways, she thinks, her family is perfect. Two beautiful children, a boy and a girl; a husband who works hard at his job and doesn’t resist chores at home. Every night, Gene washes the dishes, seldom complaining about the heavy line of garments that separates the sink from the dish drainer. They live in a shingled bungalow two blocks inland from the ocean. Good investment, Gene always says.
—
Before she goes to bed that night, Grace turns on a burner on the stove, correcting the flame to an inch high. She bends down, holding her hair so that she won’t set it on fire, and lights the last cigarette of the day. The khakis must be dry by morning, and tomorrow she’ll wash the pair Gene wore over the weekend. As she stands by the window, she can’t see the pear tree, but she can hear the rain on its leaves, relentless, never-ending.
Please bring a dry day.
She turns on all the burners and adjusts the flames an inch high, knowing that nothing will catch fire in this wet. She weaves her way through T-shirts and underwear and climbs the stairs.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the stars either.
—
Grace pauses at the landing, takes a breath, and then walks into the bedroom. She slips into her white flannel nightgown. The temperature, she reads on the thermometer just outside the bedroom window, is forty-two.
“More rain tomorrow,” Gene says.
“How long?”
“Maybe the rest of the week.”
Grace groans. “The house will get waterlogged and fall down.”
“Never.”
“Everything is damp. The pages of the books curl.”
“I promise you they’ll dry. Come to bed, Dove.”
She has never been Gracie. Only Grace. And then Dove, with Gene. Grace doesn’t feel like a dove, and she’s sure she doesn’t look anything like a dove, but she knows there’s a sweetness in the nickname. She wonders if it means something that she doesn’t have a fond or funny name for her husband.
—
In the morning, she wakes before Gene so that she can section the grapefruit and prepare his coffee, the grapefruit a rarity that will surprise him. Breakfast will be eggs and toast today, no bacon. Three eggs then. The meal has to last him until his bucket lunch. Ned Gardiner at the grocery store told her yesterday that bakers will now be making smaller bread loaves and one-crust pies as part of the Save Food for Europe campaign. Imagine. An entire continent, starving.
—
Gene never talks about his personal war as an engineer on B-17s, the one during which he got his ropy scar. The other husbands don’t either.
—
She can hear Gene giving himself a sponge bath in the tiny washroom they have squeezed between the two bedrooms upstairs. They bathe once a week in the tin tub Gene keeps on the screened-in porch and drags into the kitchen. He uses her bathwater because it’s too much of an effort to drag the tub out again and empty it onto the ground. Grace has thick brown hair that she cut short right after Tom was born. Gene wasn’t fond of the cut, but her mother thought the new look highlighted her cheekbones and large blue eyes. It was the only time Grace can remember that her mother called her beautiful, an exclamation that escaped her like a bee sting. Gene, when he first met Grace, described her as pretty, which she understood as a description less than beautiful.
Grace, at the moment, doesn’t mind what others think, because living with short hair, if not fashionable, is easier than dealing with pin curls or a set. She tucks it behind her ears. She looks good in a hat. Whenever she goes out she wears clip earrings.
Slightly above average in height, she is tall in heels. She lost the pregnancy weight fast after Tom: Two children under the age of two kept her running most days. She pictures her husband now, bare chested, wetting and soaping a washcloth, getting his face first, then his neck, and finally his underarms. Often he will scrub his wrists. She can hear him tap his razor against the sink. Is he whistling?
Grace wears no makeup except lipstick, a well-blotted mauve. It makes her lips look fuller, Gene says. When she talks to him, he stares at her mouth as if he might be hard of hearing.
She scratches a match against the box it came in and lights a cigarette, inhaling deeply. First of the morning.
—
“What section today?” she asks, savoring the wifely pleasure of watching Gene tear into his grapefruit.