The New Yorker Stories

Kate poured a glass of Perrier. “I haven’t told the story yet,” she said.

“Oh,” Will said.

“I thought everything between us was fine. When he stopped in the doorway, I put the magazine down and smiled. Then he said, ‘Kate—will you do something for me?’ ” Kate looked at Mrs. Camp, then dropped her eyes. “We were going to bed, you know,” she said. “I thought things would be better after a while.” Kate looked up. Mrs. Camp nodded and looked down. “Anyway,” Kate went on, “he looked so serious. He said, ‘Will you do something for me?’ and I said, ‘Sure. What?’ and he said, ‘I just don’t know. Can you think of something to cheer me up?’ ”

Will was sipping his drink, and he spilled a little when he started laughing. Kate frowned.

“You take everything so seriously,” Will said. “He was being funny.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Kate said softly.

“What did you do?” Mrs. Camp said.

“He came over to the bed and sat down, finally. I knew he felt awful about something. I thought he’d tell me what was the matter. When he didn’t say anything, I hugged him. Then I told him a story. I can’t imagine what possessed me. I told him about Daddy teaching me to drive. How he was afraid to be in the passenger seat with me at the wheel, so he pretended I needed practice getting into the garage. Remember how he stood in the driveway and made me pull in and pull out and pull in again? I never had any trouble getting into the garage in the first place.” She took another sip of Perrier. “I don’t know what made me tell him that,” she said.

“He was kidding. You said something funny, too, and that was that,” Will said.

Kate got up and put her glass in the sink. It was clear, when she spoke again, that she was talking only to Mrs. Camp. “Then I rubbed his shoulders,” she said. “Actually, I only rubbed them for a minute, and then I rubbed the top of his head. He likes to have his head rubbed, but he gets embarrassed if I start out there.”

Kate had gone upstairs to bed. Serpico was on television, and Mrs. Camp watched with Will for a while, then decided that it was time for her to go home. Here it was August 25th already, and if she started addressing Christmas cards tonight she would have a four-month jump on Christmas. She always bought cards the day after Christmas and put them away for the following year.

Mrs. Camp’s car was a 1977 Volvo station wagon. Mr. and Mrs. Wilde had given it to her in May, for her birthday. She loved it. It was the newest car she had ever driven. It was dark, shiny green—a color only velvet could be, the color she imagined Robin Hood’s jacket must have been. Mr. Wilde had told her that he was not leaving her anything when he died but that he wanted to be nice to her when he was above ground. A strange way to put it. Mrs. Wilde gave her a dozen pink Depression-glass wine goblets at the same time they gave her the car. There wasn’t one nick in any of the rims; the glasses were all as smooth as sea-washed stones.

As she drove, Mrs. Camp wondered if Will had been serious when he said to Kate that Frank was joking. She was sure that Will slept with girls. (Will was not there to rephrase her thoughts. He always referred to young girls as women.) He must have understood that general anxiety or dread Frank had been feeling, and he must also have known that having sex wouldn’t diminish it. It was also possible that Will was only trying to appear uninterested because Kate’s frank talk embarrassed him. “Frank talk” was a pun. Those children had taught her so much. She still felt a little sorry that they had always had to go to stuffy schools that gave them too much homework. She even felt sorry that they had missed the best days of television by being born too late: no Omnibus, no My Little Margie, no Our Miss Brooks. The reruns of I Love Lucy meant nothing to them. They thought Eddie Fisher’s loud tenor voice was funny, and shook their heads in disbelief when Lawrence Welk, looking away from the camera, told folks how nice the song was that had just been sung. Will and Kate had always found so many things absurd and funny. As children, they were as united in their giggling as they were now in their harsh dismissals of people they didn’t care for. But maybe this gave them an advantage over someone like her mother, who always held her tongue, because laughter allowed them to dismiss things; the things were forgotten by the time they ran out of breath.

In the living room, Mr. Camp was asleep in front of the television. Serpico was on. She didn’t remember the movie exactly, but she would be surprised if Al Pacino ever got out of his dilemma. She dropped her handbag in a chair and looked at her husband. It was the first time she had seen him in almost two weeks. Since his brother retired from the government and moved to a house on the Chesapeake, Mr. Camp hardly came home at all. Tonight, many cigarettes had been stubbed out in the ashtray on the table beside his chair. He had on blue Bermuda shorts and a lighter blue knit shirt, white socks, and tennis shoes. His feet were splayed on the footstool. When they were young, he had told her that the world was theirs, and, considering the world her mother envisioned for her—the convent—he’d been right. He had taught her, all in one summer, how to drive, smoke, and have sex. Later, he taught her how to crack crabs and how to dance a rumba.

It was eight o’clock, and outside the light was as blue-gray as fish scales. She went into the kitchen, tiptoeing. She went to the refrigerator and opened the door to the freezer. She knew what she would find, and of course it was there: bluefish, foil-wrapped, neatly stacked to within an inch of the top of the freezer. He had made room for all of them by removing the spaghetti sauce. She closed the door and pulled open the refrigerator door. There were the two containers. The next night, she would make up a big batch of spaghetti. The night after that, they would start eating the fish he’d caught. She opened the freezer door and looked again. The shining rectangles rose up like steep silver steps. The white air blowing off the ice, surrounding them and drifting out, made her squint. It might have been clouds, billowing through heaven. If she could shrink to a fraction of her size, she could walk into the cold, close the door, and start to climb.

She was tired. It was as simple as that. This life she loved so much had been lived, all along, with the greatest effort. She closed the door again. To hold herself still, she held her breath.

Times

It was almost Christmas, and Cammy and Peter were visiting her parents in Cambridge. Late in the afternoon on the second day of their visit, Cammy followed Peter upstairs when he went to take a shower. She wanted a break from trying to make conversation with her mother and father.

“Why is it that I always feel guilty when we’re not at my parents’ house at Christmas?” he said.

“Call them,” she said.

“That makes me feel worse,” he said.

He was looking in the mirror and rubbing his chin, though he had shaved just a few hours ago. Every afternoon, she knew, he felt for a trace of beard but didn’t shave again if he found it. “They probably don’t even notice we’re not there,” he said. “Who’d have time, with my sister and her au pair and her three kids and her cat and her dog and her rabbit.”