—
Rosie once told her, without any embarrassment, that she and Tim made love at least once a day. Grace, who immediately felt poorer than Rosie, wondered if that was why her friend always had on a bathrobe. To be ready. One evening, when Grace and Gene were sitting on the porch, she heard a wail from next door that was distinctly sexual. She knew Gene heard it, too, though neither of them said a word. Within a minute, Gene left the porch.
—
Grace’s house is a testament to containerization. A playpen with toys in it sits in a corner of the alcove attached to the living room. The Bathinette can be wheeled to the sink. The bassinet stays in the dining room in a corner. The toddler bed with railings is in the children’s room upstairs, as is Tom’s crib. The old wooden high chair that Grace’s mother used sits just to the right of Gene’s chair in the dining room. The small amount of counter space in the kitchen is free of any flour or utensils. She washes clothes at the basement sink and uses a washboard.
Perhaps because of this, she hates to leave Rosie’s house, with its cereal spilled on the kitchen table, the heap of clothes by the cellar door that the dog sniffs at in search of underwear. The couch is a toss of blankets and pillows and magazines and sometimes a surprise: On previous visits, Grace found a hairbrush and a screwdriver. On the coffee table, cups have made rings, and glasses come off as if stuck. But when she’s in Rosie’s house, she experiences an intensely pleasurable “let-down” sensation in her womb and in her shoulders, not dissimilar to the letting-down of her milk when she briefly nursed Claire. She’d have done a better job of it, she thinks, if she’d lived with Rosie.
In her own house, over the fireplace mantel, Gene has hung an elevation he did of their own property. It’s framed in simple black, and below that hangs a rifle that doesn’t work. She isn’t sure why Gene has put it there, except that it seems to be a common decoration in New England. Around the fireplace stand an old brass bed warmer and a set of fireplace tools. In the winter, she doesn’t feel truly warm until the fire is lit at night and on Sundays. Together she and Gene picked out the wallpaper in the living room, poring through sample books until the patterns began to blur. She made the slipcovers herself to match the green of the toile walls, and she fashioned the cream drapes at the windows. She learned to sew in high school, but she taught herself the more advanced skills. Sometimes Gene had to help because she had trouble thinking three-dimensionally.
Rosie is different three-dimensionally than Grace. Grace is softer, though each woman has a slim waist despite two children. As dark as Grace’s features are, Rosie’s are pale orange. She has no visible eyebrows or eyelashes, and her hair, stick straight and thin, needs the boost of pin curls. Rosie dresses herself and the children, when she rouses them all to go out, in navy or dark green. Anything else, and they would appear to float away.
Grace would spend all day with Rosie if she could, but when she checks her thin gold-colored Timex, she sees that she’s already late for her visit to her mother’s.
When Grace walks into her mother’s home, she has a sensation of great warmth and safety. This doesn’t occur in her own house despite the fact that at night and on Sundays, there’s a man to protect her. Her mother, Marjorie, doesn’t have a man to protect her and has learned how not to have one. Even in the vestibule and before she has gotten the children out of the carriage, the familiar scent—from the walls, the rugs, the coats hanging on hooks—transports Grace to a universe before she met Gene, before life became uncertain and even a little frightening.
“Saving the starving of Europe,” Grace says as she hoists aloft the apple pie she made in the morning. She skimped on the height and decoration of the crust edges to allow for enough pastry to make two crosspieces over the fruit. The crust browned up nicely, she thinks. She likes the fact that her mother doesn’t say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have” or “Aren’t you a dear?” Merely “Thank you” does for her mother.
Some have taken Marjorie’s taciturn manner for a lack of graciousness, but it isn’t, and her good friends know this. There are two, Evelyn and Gladys, women who stayed close to her mother long after the refreshments at the church hall had been eaten and her father lowered into the earth.
Grace’s father died before the war, his foot catching in a line, the rope hauling him off his lobster boat in forty-degree water in January. Death would have been instantaneous, Dr. Franklin told her mother, which was little solace. The ocean is so cold that most lobstermen don’t even learn how to swim. It took until the war was over and Grace married before her mother’s crippling mourning came to an end. At forty-six, she has said that she will never wed again, and Grace believes her. So apparently do the men of Hunts Beach, for Grace has never heard of one trying to court her. It is as if her husband’s death dragged her mother’s beauty into the ground with him.
They eat at the old kitchen table, the pie as good as Grace hoped. Better still, the coffee that her mother percolates with a broken egg to catch the grounds. With Claire in her lap, Grace feeds the girl bits of apple and crust, which seems to ratchet up her appetite to an extent she hasn’t seen before. She gives Claire her dish of pie and a child’s spoon. Her daughter falls into a frenzy of lust.
“Sweet tooth, that one,” her mother says as she croons to Tom. She has her housecoat buttoned up over her gray winter dress. When Tom begins pushing his face into the fabric, she says, “Why don’t you put on a pan of water? You know where the bottles and nipples are. I’ve got fresh milk in the fridge.”
Claire, finally sated, sits benumbed in the midst of her blocks on the floor. Grace’s mother gets by with monthly donations from the League of Lobstermen, who give part of their paychecks to women who have been left widowed because of the sea. That and the payments from her husband’s death benefits tide her over, the policy a result of a life insurance salesman who knew how to talk to a fisherman.
Rosebud cups on hooks. Colonial stenciling near the ceiling. A braided rug under the wooden table. The extra sink where her father washed up to get the fish stink off him before he went to his family. The rubber doorstop. The kitchen cupboard with the drawers that stick. The place where the blue and white linoleum has always been cracked. The six-over-six kitchen window at the sink that her mother has always resisted adorning. The cupboard where the cereal is kept. The mica in the oven door. Grace wonders if Tom and Claire will one day visit her and have a similar sensation of home. Each house has its own signature, unknown to all except the grown children who go back to visit.
Grace would like to talk about what happens in her marriage bed, but no sexual word has ever passed between mother and daughter, a handicap when Grace was twelve and got her period and had no idea what was going on. Eventually she guessed because of the source of the bleeding. She found, in the bathroom cabinet, hidden behind the towels on the first shelf, a package of Kotex and what looked to be a circular piece of sewing elastic with clips hanging from it. She had no choice but to fasten the pad as best she could. The next morning before school, her mother put her hand on Grace’s shoulder as Grace sat at the kitchen table eating Rice Krispies. The hand lingered, freezing Grace, but signaling to the daughter that the mother knew. Grace was surprised and yet not. The day before, she’d spent an hour and a half in the bathroom.