The New Yorker Stories

read a dirty magazine that had been lying around the house for some time. Then I took off all my clothes and looked in the hall mirror and decided to go on a diet, so I skipped dinner. I made a long-distance call to a friend in California who had just had a baby. We talked about the spidery little veins in her thighs, and I swore to her over and over again that they would go away. Then I took one of each kind of vitamin pill we have in the house.

The next week I had prepared for my spare time better. I had bought whole-wheat flour and clover honey, and I made four loaves of whole-wheat bread. I made a piecrust, putting dough in the sink and rolling it out there, which made a lot of sense but which I would never let anybody see me doing. Then I read Vogue. Later on I took out the yoga book I had bought that afternoon and put it in my plastic cookbook-holder and put that down on the floor and stared at it as I tried to get into the postures. I overcooked the piecrust and it burned. I got depressed and drank a Drambuie. The week after that, I ventured out. I went to a movie and bought myself a chocolate milkshake afterward. I sat at the drugstore counter and drank it. I was going to get my birth-control-pill prescription refilled while I was there, but I decided that would be depressing.

Joanna sleeps at her father’s apartment now on Tuesday nights. Since he considers her too old to be read a fairy tale before bed, Henry waltzes with her. She wears a long nightgown and a pair of high-heeled shoes that some woman left there. She says that he usually plays “The Blue Danube,” but sometimes he kids around and puts on “Idiot Wind” or “Forever Young” and they dip and twirl to it. She has hinted that she would like to take dancing lessons. Last week she danced through the living room at our house on her pogo stick. Dan had given it to her, saying that now she had a partner, and it would save him money not having to pay for dancing lessons. He told her that if she had any questions, she could ask him. He said she could call him “Mr. Daniel.” She was disgusted with him. If she were Dan’s child, I am sure he would still be reading her fairy tales.

Another Tuesday night I went out and bought plants. I used my American Express card and got seventy dollars’ worth of plants and some plant hangers. The woman in the store helped me carry the boxes out to the car. I went home and drove nails into the top of the window frames and hung the plants. They did not need to be watered yet, but I held the plastic plant waterer up to them, to see what it would be like to water them. I squeezed the plastic bottle and stared at the curved plastic tube coming out of it. Later I gave myself a facial with egg whites.

There is a mouse. I first saw it in the kitchen—a small gray mouse, moseying along, taking its time in getting from under the counter to the back of the stove. I had Dan seal off the little mouse hole in the back of the stove. Then I saw the mouse again, under the chest in the living room.

“It’s a mouse. It’s one little mouse,” Dan said. “Let it be.”

“Everybody knows that if there’s one mouse, there are more,” I said. “We’ve got to get rid of them.”

Dan, the humanist, was secretly glad the mouse had resurfaced—that he hadn’t done any damage in sealing off its home.

“It looked like the same mouse to me,” Henry said.

“They all look that way,” I said. “That doesn’t mean—”

“Poor thing,” Dan said.

“Are either of you going to set traps, or do I have to do it?”

“You have to do it,” Dan said. “I can’t stand it. I don’t want to kill a mouse.”

“I think there’s only one mouse,” Henry said.

Glaring at them, I went into the kitchen and took the mousetraps out of their cellophane packages. I stared at them with tears in my eyes. I did not know how to set them. Dan and Henry had made me seem like a cold- blooded killer.

“Maybe it will just leave,” Dan said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Dan,” I said. “If you aren’t going to help, at least don’t sit around snickering with Henry.”

“We’re not snickering,” Henry said.

“You two certainly are buddy-buddy.”

“What’s the matter now? You want us to hate each other?” Henry said.

“I don’t know how to set a mousetrap,” I said. “I can’t do it myself.”

“Poor Mommy,” Joanna said. She was in the hallway outside the living room, listening. I almost turned on her to tell her not to be sarcastic, when I realized that she was serious. She felt sorry for me. With someone on my side, I felt new courage about going back into the kitchen and tackling the problem of the traps.

Dianne called and said she had asked her husband if he would go out one night a week so she could go out with friends or stay home by herself. He said no, but agreed to take stained-glass lessons with her.

One Tuesday it rained. I stayed home and daydreamed, and remembered the past. I thought about the boy I dated my last year in high school who used to take me out to the country on weekends, to where some cousins of his lived. I wondered why he always went there, because we never got near the house. He would drive partway up their long driveway in the woods and then pull off onto a narrow little road that trucks sometimes used when they were logging the property. We parked on the little road and necked. Sometimes the boy would drive slowly along on the country roads looking for rabbits, and whenever he saw one, which was pretty often—sometimes even two or three rabbits at once—he floored it, trying to run the rabbit down. There was no radio in the car. He had a portable radio that got only two stations (soul music and classical) and I held it on my lap. He liked the volume turned up very loud.

Joanna comes to my bedroom and announces that Uncle Bobby is on the phone.

“I got a dog,” he says.

“What kind?”

“Aren’t you even surprised?”

“Yes. Where did you get the dog?”

“A guy I knew a little bit in college is going to jail, and he persuaded me to take the dog.”