Mending - Sallie Bingham

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for more milk. That was the only thing Mother ever said about me, and she said it more to criticize herself. She hadn’t had sense enough, she explained, to realize I was hungry and to give me more bottles. Instead she slapped me once or twice. That wasn’t enough to kill off much feeling, although it is true that if I were asked to draw a picture of myself, I would draw a great mouth.

      By then I was almost in despair about getting what I wanted from my doctor, even a kiss or a lap sit or holding his hand. I kept having faith in him, the kind he didn’t want, the kind that keeps you from eating and wakes you up at night. That faith woke the saints with visions of martyrdom and woke me with visions of lying in his arms. I kept believing that nature and its urges would triumph over the brittle standards of his profession; I kept believing that his calm attention was the marker for a hidden passion. I also believed that if he would take me, I would begin, magically, to feel. Or lacking that, light up like a torch: joy, like Aunt Janey with her pearls hanging straight down her back.

      But he would not.

      So for me it was a question of quitting—which of course I would not do, because at least during the sessions I saw him—or of going on with the work, keeping to the schedule, getting up in Greenwich in time to dress and catch the train. It was a question of opening my mind to the terrible thoughts that flashed through it like barracuda through muddy water. It was a question of making connections between one thing and another that did not come from the expression in his eyes—the looks I called waiting, eager, pleased—but from some deep, muddy layer of my own, where the old dreams had died and lay partially decayed.

      The result was that I lost what ability I had. The children went back to eating peanut butter out of the jar although I had gotten Aunt Janey to lay in a supply of bread. The little skirts and tops we had bought at Bloomingdale’s began to stink with sweat, and I stopped washing my hair. It did not seem possible to stand under the shower and come out feeling alive and new. It did not seem worthwhile even to try.

      I didn’t care anymore about getting better—that was a sailing planet—but I did care about the little fix of warmth I got from sitting next to my doctor. I cared about his words, which were for me and not for all the other women, and after a while I began to care about the things he said that hurt me and seemed at first unacceptable. There were, in the end, no answers. Yet he seemed to see me, clearly, remotely, as I had never seen myself, and he watered me with acceptance as regularly as he watered the sprouted avocado on his windowsill. Is it after all a kind of love? By January, I was back inside my own bleached mind; I knew it the day I went out and bought myself a bunch of flowers.

      Aunt Janey washed my hair for me and insisted on new clothes and a trip to Antigua; when I said I would go, she hugged me and kissed me and gave me a garnet ring. Uncle John told me I was looking like a million dollars, and the little girls, who had been scared off by my smell, began to bring their paper dolls again so that I could cut out the clothes. I was still, and always would be, one of the walking wounded; I was an internalized scab, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, I understood why people call naked need the ugliest thing in the world. I broke two appointments with my doctor and went to Antigua with Aunt Janey, and one night, I danced with an advertising man. I was no queen, but I was somebody, two legs, two arms, a body, and a head with a mouthful of choice words. I wouldn’t sleep with him because I knew that I wouldn’t feel a thing, but the next day we played some fine tennis.

      When I came back to New York, the pyramids on Fifth Avenue were no longer shining. The gutters were running with filth and melted snow, and the doctors’ names in the windows and on the plaques were only names, like lawyers’ and dentists’. My doctor was on the telephone when I walked in, and I looked at his free ear and knew he would never be mine. Never. Never. And that I would live.

       New Stories

       FOUND

      THE DINING ROOM HUNG SUSPENDED from the arches at its three tall windows, opening onto a wintry garden. The big table in the center of the room floated in spite of its weight of wine glasses—empty at lunch, but still Jean insisted on placing them at the top right corner of the coffee-colored lace mats. The table hung from the chandelier whose candle cups held electric light bulbs that glared in the middle of the January day.

      The children who were not really children but three lanky half-grown youths (the real children were closeted with their governess upstairs) lounged at their places, creaking their spidery gilt chairs. Saturdays revolved around lunch because both parents were briefly at home.

      The two tall brothers clinked their empty wine glasses with their spoons; they knew something about drinking. The sister sat primly.

      Jean thumped soup bowls down in front of them. The thin clear bouillon jumped.

      “A little more gently, please, Jean,” the mother said from the funnel collar of her plaid suit.

      Jean did not acknowledge her request, whisking away at once to the pantry, the swinging door sighing behind him. No one knew what language he spoke. He was supposed to be Corsican and had come with the house, which the Embassy had rented for the family, sight unseen. The mother had only stipulated the number of bedrooms.

      “Children, you should know our ambassador to Italy has been recalled,” the father said from his pale-blue silk breast pocket handkerchief. “You may be asked about it next week at school.” He might have known that his eldest son seldom went, sleeping until the maid came, insistently, to make his bed; that the younger had failed his midterms and was kept on only out of fear of embarrassment (it was an American school, after all, an outpost in foreign if not actively hostile territory); and that the girl, sitting so primly, spoke no French and could not have answered questions from the mob of Parisian girls at her convent school. She had been transferred to the convent after seeing two boys fighting with knives at the American School—anything, she’d told her mother, would be better than that: the mucous and blood and, even worse, the sobbing.

      “You are all citizens of the world, now,” their mother had announced from her pearl necklace when they had shambled onto the liner for France; nevertheless, everyone had been fearful of her going to the convent school, speaking no French, and having no religion.

      (“Do they really want to go?” some petty St. Louis neighbor had asked, exhaling disapproval with her cigarette smoke, a question that should not have been asked and so merited no answer.)

      Now the younger of the two brothers drawled out a question while plumbing his soup for something solid. “Why’d they recall her?”

      The girl remembered that they had been talking about an ambassador.

      Jean was bringing in the bread.

      “She was taken ill,” the father said from his narrowly striped tie in the voice he used to close a subject.

      “What was she taken ill of?” the eldest boy asked with a submerged sneer.

      Their mother answered promptly, “Arsenic poisoning, from the paint that chipped off her bedroom ceiling. Poor Claire.”

      Someone snorted, probably the eldest. Jean plumped the bread basket down in the center of the table where it was difficult to reach.

      “Butter,” the mother asked piteously, but they all knew from the way Jean turned away that he had no intention of complying.

      The girl was thinking of the name, Claire. She had read the name in a story about St. Francis. She wondered if this woman, this sick ambassador, had been some kind of helping saint.

      She knew the bedroom with the paint flaking off the ceiling. It would match her parents’ bedroom with perhaps a little yellow added by the Roman sun.

      She thought, Then we might be recalled, too, if somebody got really sick. But it did not seem likely. They were all, her mother said, healthy as horses.

      “Didn’t do her job before the elections,” the snorter said sideways so as not to provoke an answer. “Let the Commies get back in.”

      It

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