The day that Daisy died was a lot like this one, early August, with the sun seemingly stuck right at the top of the sky, casting light and heat that made all the neighborhood kids vault over each other with glee and subdued everyone else, moms and dads and older folks and even the family pets. Daisy liked the heat, and though she didn’t know how to swim, she’d spend plenty of time in our back-yard pool, tanning in her plaid one-piece in the floating lounger or else dog-paddling with an old-fashioned life preserver looped under her arms. I tried to teach her how to swim a couple of times, but I’d end up all scratched around the neck and shoulders, Daisy lurching and pulling on me whenever I let her go, yelling if her face or scalp got wet. She wasn’t dainty or persnickety but for some reason she hated being submerged. She always showered with a cap and on alternate days shampooed her hair in the kitchen sink, the drain of which I’d have to unclog every couple of weeks, pulling out the thick black strands with a pair of chopsticks.
And I swear—I swear, I swear—that I never imagined for a second that the pool was dangerous, at least for her. Sure, I jumped in a half-dozen times to pluck out one of my kids or their mangy booger-streaked friends thrashing fitfully in the deep end, but Daisy was always careful and tentative; even after she started to change and began seeing our family doctor for meds, she entered the water as if it were as hot as soup, then pushed off from the steps with her float tube and kicked, her taut chin just above the surface.
“Hey, honey,” she’d say to me, the ends of her hair slicked to pencil points. “I’m a mermaid.”
“Sexier than that,” I’d say, through the Sunday paper, through the summer haze.
It was nice like that, a lot of the time. I remember how Theresa and Jack would spend pretty much every second between breakfast and dinner in the pool, or running about on the concrete surround and the lawn spraying each other and whatever friends were around with water pistols filled with Hi-C punch, or sometimes even pee. (I caught them once in the rickety little cabana I’d built, giggling and pissing all over their hands.) If it was the weekend, I’d be out there for a good while, too. I’d chuck the kids around in the water and play the monster or the buffoon and do a belly flop or two for a finale, then dry off and wrap a towel around my waist and drag a chaise and a beer beneath the maples and doze until one of the kids got hurt or fell or puked after drinking too much pool water, all of which in the heat and brightness and clamor made for a mighty decent time. This was dependent, of course, on what mood Daisy was in, but in those early days she was pretty solid, she was pretty much herself, she was just like the girl I fell in love with.
In the afternoon, she would set up the patio table with all kinds of vittles—she’d have soppressata and sugar ham and a crock of port-wine cheese and Ritz and Triscuits, and she’d have plenty of carrot and celery sticks and pimiento olives—and then she’d bring out an electric fryer, a long contractor’s extension cord snaking back through the kitchen window, to fry chicken wings or butterflied shrimp or French fries right there on the table, so the food was hot and fresh. If my folks or other people were going to be over, she’d put out her homemade eggrolls and some colorful seaweed-and-rice thing that we didn’t yet know, back in 1975, was sushi, and which people in our part of Long Island couldn’t believe she had made, along with spicy sweet ribs and a cold noodle dish whose Korean name she always told us but we could never remember, although everyone loved it and always finished it first. She had this way of arranging the food that made you think of formal gardens: everything was garnished with fans of sliced oranges or shrubs of kale or waterfowl she’d carved out of apples, giving them shiny red wings.
I was working a lot then, having just been made second-in-command at Battle Brothers Brick & Mortar, a masonry company started by my grandfather during the Depression which my father and uncles had transformed into a successful landscaping firm, and which I have maintained with much hard work, if little passion. I never had any love for brick and mortar, or for mulch and shrubs, and in those days I was mostly waiting around for my brother Bobby to return from Vietnam and take my place, which he never did.
Daisy was like a lot of the young mothers in the neighborhood, which meant that she took care of the house and the kids and the cooking and the bills and whatever else came up that I could have dealt with but didn’t, for the usual semi-acceptable reasons of men; but Daisy didn’t mind, that was never a problem between us, because when you got right down to it she was an old-fashioned girl in matters of family, and also because her nature (before she changed and ended up another person entirely) preferred order to everything else, and certainly didn’t want any lame hand Jerry Battle could provide.
In fact, the first real signs of her troubles were the kinds of things you see in most people’s houses—stuff like piles of folded laundry waiting to be put away, some dishes in the sink, toys loose underfoot—but for Daisy, when this began to happen, it meant there was a quiet disaster occurring, a cave-in somewhere deep in the core. One time, on a day just like this, kids frolicking about, our guests arrayed around the back yard and the spread of goodies on the patio table, Daisy suddenly unravelled. I don’t know what happened exactly but one of the kids must have bumped the table where she was using the deep fryer, and hot oil lipped over the edge and splashed onto the table and then spilled down onto her sandalled foot. I knew something had happened because I saw her jump a little and leap back, and it occurred to me only later that she didn’t shout or scream or make any sound at all. I went over to see if she was burned, but before I could get there Daisy did the oddest thing: she picked up the fryer by its handles, turned it over, and slammed it on the table, the oil and chicken wings spurting out sideways, luckily in nobody’s direction. I yanked the extension cord off and asked her if she was all right, and she had a sickened look on her face and she said that it was an accident and she was sorry. By this time our guests had crowded around. I’m sure no one saw what had really happened, since everyone was appropriately concerned, but I knew and I got angry (if only because I was confused and a little scared) and yelled at her to be more careful. She started crying and that brought an end to the afternoon, most of our guests deciding to leave, among them some neighbors, who never called us again.
Of course, somewhere not so deep down, none of what happened that afternoon was a surprise to me. From the moment I met Daisy, on the main floor of Gimbels in New York, where she was offering sample sprays of men’s cologne (I think it was Pierre Cardin, a huge phallic bottle of which I bought that day and may still have in the bottom of the bathroom vanity), I knew she was volatile. At Gimbels, Daisy sprayed me before I consented and then sprayed me again, and I would have been really annoyed except that she was amazingly bright-eyed and pretty and she had these perfect little hands, with which she smoothed down my coat collar. She’d been in the country for only a few months, attending Hunter College to study art history. She had a heavy accent to her English, but she wasn’t a tentative talker. She let her talk spill out in a messy exuberant froth, the effect instantly inundating and certainly charming and not at all unsexy. I asked her if she would take a walk with me and she left her post without a word to anyone and we ended up lunching at the H. & H. automat, where I had an egg-salad sandwich and she got the Salisbury-steak meal with mashed potatoes and gravy, plus side dishes of cut corn and green beans and for dessert a slice of both German chocolate cake and cherry pie. She bolted all of it down as if she were some war refugee, but she was perfectly neat and systematic in doing so—every square of steak was larded with mashed potato, every forkful of cake or pie topped with whipped cream, the gravy finally cleaned up with white bread and the syrupy cherry filling with her index finger, the last dredge of which she offered up and let me lick. I probably thought then that she was loony, but—surprise, surprise—I didn’t care.
I had no idea what real craziness was. I thought people like my father and my little brother Bobby were off kilter and ego-active and maybe in need of professional help, but I didn’t know what it meant to be D.S.M.-certified, described in the literature, perhaps totally nuts. Just before he went to Vietnam on his first and last tour, Bobby threw Ma and Pop a surprise wedding-anniversary party—their twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh, definitely not one of the big ones—spending every last dime he had made playing a couple of summers of minor-league baseball on a fifty-guest dinner in the city at a famous French restaurant with murals on the walls. Pop was so pleased when he arrived that he told the sommelier to bring out his best wine (which he’d always do at the Chianti Corner in Islip when entertaining a Battle Brothers customer), but a couple of cases of Château Incroyable later the bill had tripled. Bobby couldn’t cover it. Luckily I was still carrying the day’s receipts, and with a few last secreted bills from Ma we avoided any embarrassment, and all the while Pop and Bobby were toasting each other’s good taste and fealty and love. For years Pop would say that Bobby should have met and married Daisy, that he would have been a better match for her than I. He was probably right, though I’m sure that, had Bobby ever returned from the war, Pop would have steered him to a reliable domestic model, some quiet local girl who wouldn’t fire up the afterburners when she didn’t need to.
A month or so after the deep-fryer incident, the first genuine trouble revealed itself. Daisy went off to Bloomingdale’s and charged up seven thousand dollars on a leather living-room set and a full-length chinchilla coat. We had a terrific fight, me rabid with disbelief and Daisy defiant and bitter, talking about how she “knew class people” and mocking me for “working in dirt” like some peasant or field hand. Her eyes were wild and she was almost spitting with hatred.
In the previous days, she had bought herself and the kids several new outfits and served us filet mignon and lobsters and repainted our bedroom a deep Persian crimson. I didn’t know then that these actions were indicative of a grandiose run-up to a truly alarming finale; in fact, I was pretty pleased, because Daisy seemed happy for the first time in a long time. She was lively with the kids and we were making love every night. I figured I was still way ahead of a lot of other guys with young families I knew, who were already playing the field and spending most of their free time away from the house. If Daisy hadn’t blitzkrieged our net worth at Bloomingdale’s nothing much would have changed; it’s likely I wouldn’t have cared if she were only steadily depleting our bank account, a time-honored activity in our civilized world. This was 1975, though, when the economy was basically shitting itself, and Jack and Theresa were seven and six and I was making twenty thousand dollars a year at Battle Brothers, which was a hell of a lot of money, actually, and much more than I deserved. But seven thousand dollars for anything was ruinous, so I had to beg the store manager to take everything back (with a ten-per-cent restocking fee, plus delivery), and then I cut up her charge cards and took away her bankbook and started giving her the minimum cash allowance for the week’s groceries and gas.
As you can imagine, Daisy wasn’t exactly pleased with the arrangement. It was a suggestion from Pop, whom I hadn’t consulted directly but who had overheard my mother telling her sister what Daisy had done. The next day, Pop barrelled in to the messy office we shared at the shop and plunked his backside onto my desk blotter and asked me what the hell I was doing. I had no clue what he was talking about, and as usual in those days I stared up at him with my mouth half crooked, absently probing my upper molars with my tongue.
“I’m talking about Daisy,” he growled, as if he were the one who had married her, as if he were the one having trouble. I should mention that Pop had always adored Daisy. From the second he met her it was clear—he could never stop talking about how gorgeous she was and how sexy, and whenever they met he’d corral her with a big hug and a kiss and then he’d twirl her in a little cha-cha move, all of which Daisy welcomed and played into as if she were Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday,” which was just the kind of humoring and ass-kissing that my father has always lived for and measured everyone by.
“I hear she went on a spree at the department store and damn near bankrupted you.”
“Not near,” I said. “It was seven grand.”
“Holy Jesus.”
“But it’s fixed now. I made it go away.”
“Damn it, Jerome, it’s just going to happen again! Don’t you know how to handle your wife yet?”
“I think I’ve learned something in these last eight years, yes.”
“Bullshit. Listen to me. Are you listening, Jerome? This is what I’m telling you. You have to squash her every once in a while—I mean, completely flatten her. Otherwise a beautiful woman like Daisy gets big ideas, and those ideas get bigger every year. If she were a plain sedan like your mother you wouldn’t have to worry, you’ve only got to deal with a certain displacement, you know what I mean? But with a sleek machine you’ve got to tool a governor onto the sucker, do something to cut her fuel.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Pop.”
“What I’m saying is you’ve got to be a little brutal. Not always, just every once in a while. Now is a good time. All this women’s libbing and bra burning is confusing everybody. Treat her badly, don’t give her any money or attention or even a chance to bitch or argue. Don’t let her leave the house for a week. Then when she’s really down in the dumps bring her some diamond earrings or a tennis bracelet and take her out to a lobster dinner. After, screw her brains out, or whatever you can manage. Then everything will go back to normal, you’ll see.”
“And how do you know any of this works, if Ma isn’t that kind of woman?”
“Trust your pop, Jerome. I have wide experience. And if that doesn’t do it, call Dr. Derricone.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I must have said, to get him off my desk and case. But that night when I got home Daisy was undertaking an overhaul of our house; she was going through a couple of hundred fabric swatches that were piled on the kitchen table, along with several china and silver patterns, and some odd squares of linoleum and porcelain floor tile; she had even begun painting the dining and living rooms with sample swaths of paint, quart cans of which sat out opened, used brushes lying across the rims. For dinner she was heating up some leftover pasta on the stove. In the den the kids were watching TV, rolling popcorn in bologna slices as a pre-dinner snack, and then spitting streams of Dr Pepper at each other through the gaps in their front teeth. When I asked Daisy what the heck was going on, she looked up and answered that she couldn’t decide between a shiny or a not-so-shiny silk for the living-room curtains and what did I think?
She was grinning, though painfully, as if part of her could see and hear the miserable scene and could understand that another part was taking over. I couldn’t holler right then as I wanted to, and instead just grumbled, “Whatever, dear,” and went to the bedroom and stripped out of my dusty work clothes and turned on the water in the shower as hot as I could bear, because there’s nothing like a good near-scald to set you right again, to take you out of a time line and set you momentarily free. And suddenly I was even feeling a little chubby down there with the hot trickles in my crack and so gave myself a couple of exploratory tugs, when Daisy opened the shower door and stepped inside, paint-splattered clothes and all.
“Jerry,” she said, crying, through the billowing steam. “Jerry, I’m sorry.”
I didn’t answer and she said it again, said my name again, with her rolling, singsong, messed-up “R”s, and I hugged her, clutching her beneath the spray.
“So hot!” she gasped, recoiling, and I let go, but she grabbed back and held me tight, tighter and tighter, until she got used to the temperature. Then she kissed me, and kissed me again, and when I kissed her back I thought I was tasting something mineral, like thinner or paint, but when we broke for air I could see the faded wash of pink on her chin, on her mouth: she’d bitten her tongue trying to stand the hot water.
I pointed the showerhead away from us and she took off her wet clothes and said, “Make love to me,” and we started to screw on the built-in bench of the shower stall, something we hadn’t done since we first bought the house, before Jack was born. I remember Daisy being five months pregnant and showing in a way I hadn’t expected would be so attractive, the smooth, sheened bulge of her belly and her popped-out belly button and the changed size and color of her nipples, long like the nipples on baby bottles and the color of dark caramels. Daisy was not voluptuous, which I liked, with her long, lean torso and shortish Asian legs (perfectly hairless) and her breasts that were shaped in the form of gently pitched dunes, these delicate pale hillocks. I realize I may be waxing pathetic here, your basic sorry white dude afflicted with what Theresa nowadays refers to as “Saigon syndrome” (“Me so hor-ny, G.I. Joe!”), but I’m not really sorry, because the fact is I found her desirable precisely because she was put together differently from what I was used to, as it were; she was totally unlike the wide-hipped Italian or leggy Irish girls or the broad-bottomed Polish chicks from Our Lady of Wherever I had been raised on since youth and who, compared with Daisy, seemed pretty dreadful contraptions.
Unfair, I know, unfair.
Though that evening in the shower, eight years into our marriage, I wasn’t so much enamored of Daisy as I was hopeful for any break in her strange mood. I thought (or so I thought later) that some good coarse sex might disturb the disturbance, shunt aside the offending system, and it might have worked had our little Theresa not opened the shower door and stood watching for God knows how long as I was engaging her mother in the doggie-style stance we tended to employ when things between us weren’t perfectly fine. Daisy must have peered around and seen Theresa standing there sucking on her thumb and shoved me off so hard I slipped and fell onto my back, providing a second sighting of me that made Theresa actually step back. I covered myself and asked her what she wanted and she couldn’t answer and then Daisy yelled at her to tell us.
Theresa said, “The macaroni is on fire, and Jack can’t put it out.”
“Take care of her!” I said to Daisy, and then grabbed a towel to wrap myself with and ran down to the kitchen, where Jack was tossing handfuls of water at the frying pan as it roared up in flames. The steam and smoke were pooling at the ceiling, and, as I pulled Jack away into the dining room, he fought me a little, trying to go back.
“Dad, it’s burning the metal,” he said, pointing to the steel hood above the stove, its painted surface blackening.
“Stay right here,” I told him, tamping down on his shoulders. “O.K.?”
I rushed in and opened the bottom drawer of the stove, where Daisy kept the pot lids, searching for one large enough to cover the big skillet. I found one and tossed it on, but it was about an inch shy all around and the flames flickered low only for a second, then leaped up again. Daisy always used a lot of butter or oil, and so I took off my bath towel and folded it and tried to smother the whole pan, the fire licking up where I wasn’t pressing hard enough, singeing my forearm and chest hairs and making me instantly consider all things from the narrow, terrified view of my fast-shrinking privates, and then Jack ran forward and tried to help by tugging down the edge of the towel. I picked him up and carried him to the living room and hurled him onto one of the as yet unreturned sofas, shouting “Stay put!” and also warning him not to soil the upholstery, if he valued his life. But by then the towel had caught fire and instinctively I did what Jack had already tried, splashing on water with my hands and then with a coffee mug, which did no good at all. So I finally took the skillet by the handle and opened the sliding door to the deck and stepped out. The firelight caught the attention of our back neighbors, the Lipschers, who were throwing a small dinner party on their patio. I’d spoken to the husband maybe once or twice, the wife three or four times; we’d invited them over a couple of times for barbecues but they’d never made it. They were into tony Manhattan-type gatherings, with candles and French wine and testy, clever conversation (you could hear every word from our deck) about Broadway plays or Israel or their favorite Caribbean islands, everyone constantly interrupting everyone else in their bid to impress one another, all in tones that said they weren’t. But the sight of me clearly got their attention. Someone at the table said “Look at that!” and with the skillet in one hand I waved with the other, the Lipschers and their guests limply waving back. For some reason it didn’t seem neighborly to chuck the frying pan, so I held it out in full flambé, Daisy now stepping out in her towel with the kids in tow, all of us waiting for the fire to die out. It took a while. When it finally did, Barry Lipscher said, “Hey there, Battle, you want to end the show now? We’re still eating here, if you don’t mind.”
To this Daisy unhooked her bath sheet and wrapped it around my waist, then turned to the Lipschers and their guests in all her foxy loveliness and gave them the finger. If I remember right, Theresa did the same, Jack and I grinning idiotically as we trailed our women into the house.
But in truth, I’m afraid, it didn’t quite end up as nicely as all that—young family Battle triumphant in solidarity, chuckling over the charred cabinetry and the toasty scent of burned pasta.
“Clean this up,” I said to Daisy, my voice nothing but a cold instrument. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
The next day, I instituted what Pop had suggested, basically placing Daisy under house arrest for the week (no car keys, no credit cards, twenty dollars cash), and promising her that I’d never speak to her again unless she sent back all the samples and swatches and kept the house in an acceptable state and made proper meals for the kids and checked with me from that point on before she bought anything—I mean anything—other than staples like milk and bread or underwear or school supplies.
In those days I could threaten someone like that. I had got into the habit at Battle Brothers, hollering at the fellas all day and lecturing my subcontractors and even talking tough to my customers, if they got to be too clingy or whiny or just plain pains in the ass, which at some point in every job they all did. But maybe it wasn’t so much the habit itself as it was its effectiveness that I kept returning to—how I could reliably get all sorts of people to move it or jump or shut the hell up. People say that I’m like Pop that way, that I’ll get this expression on my face, as if whatever you’re saying or doing is this crime, and that for you not to desist would be the most contemptible of acts.
And then I’ll say what I want to have happen, what I want done, as I did that morning to Daisy. She could hardly look at me as she sat on the toilet while I shaved, her straight hair screening her face like those beaded curtains we all used to have. I repeated myself, then left for work and didn’t call home all day. I wanted to call but I held firm, even as I imagined a disaster like a flood in the basement or an electrical fire. But it was one of those times as a husband when you have to decline the counsel of sound judgment and valor and gut-piercing panics and yield instead to the matchless attraction of simply making your damn point. To Daisy, the point was this: I’m leaving it to you, babe, and you alone.
Daisy’s sense of fearless self-reliance was partly, I suppose, why I was so taken with her to begin with. She’d come to the States by herself, just twenty years old, going to school and living not in a dormitory or in one of those single- women’s residences but in an apartment in a needle-littered Harlem tenement with some post-Marxist black-chick Ph.D. with a last name like Weiss, the cultural compaction of which really blew my mind. I couldn’t imagine what Daisy’s parents thought about any of this, and I never found out. They were seminarians, I guess, but for one reason or another she rarely talked about them, and during our years together I didn’t prod her to say much more about them or the rest of her family in Korea. She never seemed to mind. All I knew was that of four or five children she probably wasn’t the favorite, and that the only person from her family to show up for our wedding was an older brother with a pinched-up face who didn’t smile or say a word during the rehearsal dinner and hotly scolded her afterward in the parking lot, I’m sure for marrying a white guy. He was also tugging on her arm in a way that I didn’t like, and I ended up having to push him a bit too hard against his taxi to get him to release her. He cursed me and cursed Daisy and then they cursed each other for what seemed like five minutes, all this spiky language hurtling back and forth, until finally she laid into him with some choice American swear words and he relented, muffling his ears as he got into the taxi. He wasn’t at the ceremony the next day, and I don’t think Daisy even noticed.
When I got home from work, the place wasn’t on fire and there were no ambulances parked on the lawn. I rolled my pickup inside the garage and went in. The house was peerlessly clean and quiet and the kids were in the den playing and there was a tuna casserole bubbling away in the oven, four place settings sparkling on the kitchen table. The only thing missing was Daisy. I asked the kids where she was and they didn’t know. I looked out back and in the street. Then I went to our bedroom, which was empty but neat, and when I walked into the bathroom there Daisy was, still dressed in her pink robe with baby-blue piping, sitting on the edge of the toilet exactly as she had been eight hours earlier, as if she’d been cast right into the cool porcelain.
“I fixed the house,” she said, her voice husky, dried out.
“Yeah,” I said, just as I might to the guys, as though it were no more than I’d expected. It’s always best, when you’re trying to get things done, to utter the absolute minimum. You made it rain? O.K. You moved heaven and earth? Fine. Pop was the one who showed me how effective it can be to say grindingly little at the very moments when you ought to say a lot, when you could easily be generous with praise or forgiveness, when you could tender all you had and no one would ask for anything extra in return.
I know. I know about this. I do.
So when Daisy went on to say, “The other stuff, too. I got rid of it all. I did what you want, Jerry,” what did I say back but simply, “Right,” with a slight tip of the head, and a tough-guy grunt, which you’d think would be just what Daisy had had to deal with all her inscrutable Oriental life, and probably had, and was likely part of the reason she’d ended up with someone like me, some average American Guido she figured would have more than plenty to say, entreating her every second with his hands and his hips and with his heart bleeding all over.
Daisy didn’t say anything and neither did I, and for a moment our normally cramped bathroom felt very large, the only sound coming from the running toilet tank, with its wasteful ever-wash that I’ve always meant to fix but never actually have fixed, even to this day. Daisy got up then and brushed past me and I could hear her walk out of our bedroom and down the hallway to the kitchen. I showered and changed and when I got to the table the kids were eating their dinner, as usual furiously wolfing down their food like a pair of street urchins who’d broken into a cake shop. Daisy was preparing my plate. Jack and Theresa were forever hungry, and the only time I can remember them not eating was after Daisy was buried and we had a gathering at the house, the two of them sitting glumly on the sofa, a plate of cold shrimp and capicola balanced between them on their legs.
Daisy set down my dinner, and she sat, too, but she wasn’t eating. After serving all of us seconds, she took our plates and began cleaning up. The kids chattered but Daisy and I didn’t say a word to each other. Breakfast the next morning was the same, and it was like that for the rest of that week and the week after that. Finally, I got tired of the whole thing, and when Pop asked I told him that his method was fine except for the rageful misery and silences. He told me to keep it in my pants a bit longer, that I’d break her and also break myself of “the need to please her all the time,” and that he and Ma would stop by on Saturday to run interference. I asked him to come over and play with the kids, so I could patch things up with Daisy, perhaps take a drive to Robert Moses and sit on the grassy dunes and tell her that I wished for our life to be normal again, though in truth the visit would mean that Ma would take the kids out to the playground or to a matinée and then somehow cobble together a gut-busting dinner of meatballs and sausages and pasta and a roast, with Pop haranguing me about the state of our business and then inevitably bringing up Bobby.
When my parents arrived, Daisy was still in the bedroom getting dressed. No matter what her state of mind or what was going on, she always pulled herself together for them, and particularly for Pop. She’d wear her newest outfit and full makeup, and Pop, of course, lapped it up. He loved how she made silly mistakes in English and always laughed at his jokes and listened to his autodidact’s crank theories and opinions about the brutality of man and the falsity of religion and the conspiring forces of a new world order that would enslave all good men in a socialist vise-grip of eco-feminism and bisexuality and miscegenation (notwithstanding my and Daisy’s lovely offspring). No one but Pop could elicit that kind of humoring and attention from her, no one I’m sure except for Bobby Battle, M.I.A., whom she had never met but I know she would have loved.
Daisy floated out in a new hot-pink-with-white-polka-dot silk minidress and a matching scarf tied around her throat, with a white hair band holding up her black hair. She kissed my mother, who was already unloading from the fridge everything that we might possibly eat for dinner, culling as she went for mold and wilt and freezer burn. My mother was nothing if not dependable. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but I used to think she wasn’t the swiftest doe in the forest, because she rarely did anything but keep house and feed everybody and try to make Pop’s life run smoothly and comfortably, even when he had several affairs and was universally acknowledged to be a Hall of Fame pain in the ass. She rarely read the newspaper and never read a book and wasn’t even interested in movies or television; her main personal activity was shopping for clothes, always in a combination of Queens Boulevard and country-club styles, bright bold colors and white patent-leather bags and shoes and bug-eye sunglasses. Every once in a while, on no special occasion, Pop would spring for a marble-size diamond ring or a string of fat pearls, and I suspect it was my mother exacting tribute for his latest exposed dalliance. Lately I’ve been thinking that her lack was more emotional than intellectual; she preferred to keep her life as uncomplicated as possible, and understood that more thought would lead only to misery, to the realization that she could never leave him, that she could never really start over again.
Daisy twirled for my father and said, “What you think, Pop?”
“Gorgeous, doll, gorgeous.” Pop used “doll” whenever they were together, “your old lady” or “your wife” when speaking about her to me.
“I got it at Macy’s,” she said, hardly glancing over. “It wasn’t on sale price, but I couldn’t wait.”
“On you, it’s a bargain at twice the price.”
“You super guy, Pop.”
“But I’m speechless at this moment,” he said, smiling his here’s-how-tohandle-a-woman smile. “As Santayana once said, ‘Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.’ ”
“You too much, Pop!”
“Is this a liver or a beefsteak?” Ma said, holding up a frozen brown slab.
No one answered, since no one knew.
Ma, accustomed to the non-reply, said, “I hope it’s a beefsteak.”
“The dress looks real good,” I said to Daisy, feeling I should say something. And then I was all set to offer more. I was going to suggest running her right out to the department store and buying a bauble to go with the pretty dress, some earrings maybe, when Pop pulled a long dark-blue velveteen jewelry case from his pocket and presented it to Daisy.
“For me?”
“Of course it’s for you, doll. Open it.”
She cracked the lid. It was a string of freshwater pearls, the beads small but delicate and dazzling in their iridescence. It was amazingly tasteful, even for Pop, who always surprised me with his eye for finish and detail.
“Look, Jerry, look what Pop got!” Daisy said.
“A customer of mine imports these from Japan, and he gave me a nice rate on them. They’re just as good as Mikimoto.”
“It’s not my birthday even,” Daisy said, hushed by the glitter in her hands. “This is so nice.”
“Call it a reward, for all the hardship of the last couple of weeks. Ask Ma over there. It’s no picnic, putting up with us Battle men. We’re stubborn and proud and we ask no less than the world of our women. The world. Your husband Jerome here is no different. We all know he can be sullen, but that’s because he’s always been too serious. Not like Bobby, who knows what real fun is. He’s just like you. So you better learn patience, with this one.”
Pop tousled my hair, and I let him, because incredulity freezes you, because I was like that back then, because Pop was Pop and I wasn’t. Daisy was the one who stopped him, if only because she was hugging him, kissing him on the forehead and cheek, hooting a little, almost vibrating with glee and gratitude. Ma had already ceased paying further attention to the scene, and had gone back to the daily calculus of how to make a meal from what was at hand. The kids ran in from outside and Pop had a handful of hard candies for them, toffees and sours and butterscotches. This was the minor parade my father always finessed for himself, wherever he went: my wife and kids joyous with the old man. I asked Ma if she needed anything.
“I don’t think so, honey,” she said. She was scraping the brown rime from the frozen meat, a little pile of root-beer-colored shavings collecting at the edge of her knife blade. “I think I have everything I need.”
In the weeks after Pop came bearing gifts, everything pretty much went to shit. It did, it really did, though not in the manner I’d thought it would. I figured I’d be the one generating the enmity. I thought Pop’s stunt (which I should have been ready for) and Daisy’s giddy celebrations would lend me the pissy high ground, at least for a few days, long enough to keep Daisy on the defensive and not out there spending our future, long enough to allow me to figure out how to fix the problem without forever placing her under house arrest. But Daisy was the one who took umbrage. She wouldn’t speak to me, her silence made much more unpleasant by the fact that she seemed livelier and brighter in her dealings with everyone else.
Did the time mark a strange kind of renaissance for her? I really don’t know. What’s clear to me is that Daisy pretty much exploded with life, and our life exploded right along with her. Up to then, my basic conception of crazy was the one I’d held since youth: the picture of a raven-haired Irish girl named Clara who climbed the trees in her pleated Catholic-school skirt not wearing underwear and lobbed Emily Dickinson down to me in a wraithlike voice (“I cannot live with You— It would be Life—and Life is over there—Behind the Shelf”), my trousers clingy with fear and arousal.
With Daisy, neither I nor anyone else, not even Dr. Derricone, knew the extent of her troubles, the ornate reach and complication. Those initial shopping sprees would in the end seem like the smallest indiscretions—filched candy from the drugstore, a lingering ass pat at a neighborhood cocktail party—nothing you couldn’t slough off with a laugh, nothing you couldn’t later recall with some wistful fondness.
After that weekend when she stopped talking to me, Daisy’s metabolism went into overdrive. We usually went to bed at eleven or so, but she started getting up at five in the morning, and then four and three and two, until it got to the point where she didn’t even get ready for bed, not bothering to change into a nightgown or brush her teeth. A couple of times in the middle of the night I awoke to the plash-plash of water, and peered through the curtains to see, in lovely silhouette, Daisy paddling around in the pool with the inner tube hooped beneath her arms. She was naked, just going back and forth, and I had the thought that I should go out there and keep her company. But I desperately needed my sleep back then (these days it’s a different story, as I lie in wait for the muted thwap of the morning paper on the driveway) and, rather than get up, I would fall back into the pillow and scratch at myself half-mast and maybe dream in sentimental hues of gorgeous black swans who always swim alone.
After a couple of weeks, I didn’t even notice that Daisy was never in bed. She probably slept a few hours while the kids were in school, but I can’t be sure of that. As for sex, it wasn’t happening, and not only because she wasn’t talking to me. Pure talk was never that important to us anyway, even at the beginning, when we were mostly joking and flirting, for though her English was more than passable it was rudimentary enough for us to stay clear of nuanced discussions, which suited me fine. The truth was that while I was hungering for her I had an equally keen desire to hold out as long as I could, because if she had any power over me it was sexual power, which, most other things being equal, is what all women should easily have over all men. Daisy could always, please forgive me, float my boat, top my prop; she could always crank up the generators at any moment and make me feel as if every last cell in my body were overjuiced and soon to be derelict if not immediately launched toward something warm and soft. In her own way she was a performer, as they say actors can be when they enter a room; something in them switches on and suddenly everybody is abject with confused misery and love.
One night the doorbell rang and roused me from a deep sleep and I opened the door to find my wife wrapped in a big blue poly tarp with a burly young police officer standing behind her, waving a long flashlight.
“Are you the head of this household, sir?” he asked, momentarily blinding me with the beam, and fully waking me up.
“You wanna kill the light, chief?”
“Sorry, sir,” he said, slipping the flashlight into his belt. “Are you the head of household?”
“If you mean am I the owner, then yes.”
“Is this your wife?”
I looked at Daisy, who looked glum, as though this were yet another chore of her unglamorous life.
“Yes. She’s my wife.”
“She was at the elementary school, in the playground there. There was a complaint.”
“What? Is it illegal, to be over there?”
“I believe there’s a school-grounds curfew, sir, but that wasn’t the whole problem.”
“Oh, yeah?”
Daisy then said, “Just cut it out, Jerry. Good night, officer. Thanks for the ride home.” She tippy-toed and pecked him on the cheek, and then stepped inside. “Oh, this is yours.”
She peeled the tarp from herself and handed it to him. She was wearing only sneakers, white Keds with the blue pencil stripe on the rubber. The young cop thanked her and said good night, as if it were a goddam date or something. Daisy disappeared inside.
The cop said, “Sir, if you could please tell your wife I’ll have to cite her the next time.”
“There’s not going to be a goddam next time!”
“I’m just saying—”
“Good night,” I said, and slammed the door.
I found Daisy in the kitchen, making egg salad for a sandwich. She had the eggs going at a furious boil in the stockpot, and the bread in the toaster; she had jars of mayonnaise and mustard and sweet-pickle relish out on the counter, celery and carrot and onion on the cutting board, and she had the ice-blue German chef’s knife in her hand, the one that Pop had given her for Christmas. But the strange thing was that it was all so casual, as if a nude woman in sneakers chopping vegetables at three in the morning after a neighborhood police sweep were de rigueur around here, our customary midsummer night’s dream.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m hungry. You want to eat, too?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You have trouble sleeping?”
“What do you think, Daisy?”
She didn’t answer, engrossed as she was in the julienned stalks of carrot and celery. She was working carefully but fast, making perfect dices as she went, the crisp chock-chock-chock of the blade on the cutting board undoubtedly keeping time with her ever-quickening synaptic pulses. I didn’t want to disturb her; I was going to wait until she was done, but perhaps it was because of my state of angry half sleep or the searingly bright fluorescent kitchen lights or the notion of my supple-bodied immigrant wife tooling around in a squad car with a wide-eyed cop that I had to holler, “This is total shit!”
She looked around with unfeigned gravity and said, “Go back to sleep, Jerry.”
“This is going to stop,” I said. “You’re going to see Dr. Derricone tomorrow. I’ll go with you.”
“Go to sleep, Jerry.”
“You’re going to see him about this, and I mean it this time. No ranting at him. No threats. No scenes with his receptionist.”
“He’s a complete fool,” she said, with a perfect, faintly English accent, as if she’d heard some actress say the phrase in a TV movie or on a soap. Daisy was a talented mimic, when she wanted to be. “They are all complete and utter fools.”
“I don’t care if you think he’s the King of Siam. Dr. Derricone has been around a long time and you’ll show him respect. He’s seen it all and he’s going to help you.”
“I don’t want help from him, or nobody!” she cried, confusingly, though of course I knew what she meant.
“That’s it, now, Daisy! I mean it. I’ve had enough!”
“Me, too!” she shouted, and I thought about the kids for a second, how they’d wake up to their mother’s distressed cry and probably think I was doing something horrible to her, which I never ever did. Although in those days I let myself think about such things every now and then. I imagined picking up her petite body and flinging her onto the bed as you might a cat, mostly because I thought that she could handle it, and that the ugly pleasurable surge would somehow satisfy the moment and make everything good and right. Spoken like a veritable wife beater, I realize, and I can’t defend myself, except to say that Daisy was never a completely passive party in our troubles. She was ready to say or do whatever it took to make me feel the afflictions settled so insolvently within her.
“Quiet down,” I told her. “You’ll wake up the kids.”
“I don’t care!” she cried, and that’s when it happened. She lunged at me, in her splendid nakedness, knife and all, her eyes dull with the chill of empty space. And I froze, not so much with fear (of which there was plenty) as with a kind of abstention, for the horror of what was happening was too realistic to even begin to consider fright. And the significant detail is not that Daisy missed my throat with the chef’s knife by a mere thumb’s width, jabbing the point a good two inches into the door of the refrigerator (the perfect slit is still there, rusty around the pushed-in edges), but that when we both fully returned to the moment, our faces almost touching, we each saw in the other the same amazing wish that she hadn’t flinched.
Not that I didn’t want to live.
I did want to live, just not that way.
Daisy, suddenly scared out of her craziness, broke down and collapsed in a naked heap on the linoleum floor, crying her eyes out.
So with the first light Dr. Derricone appeared with his scuffed black bag and before the kids were even awake he gave Daisy a sample bottle of Valium with instructions to keep taking them as long as she felt, as he put it, “too frisky.” I don’t know what a trained specialist would have said, what a psychiatrist or psychologist would have diagnosed as her particular state or behavior; I wasn’t even thinking of “the right thing to do.” I just needed to jam hard on the brakes, to do whatever it took to stop the train. Frank Derricone was Ma and Pop’s doctor; he’d delivered me and Bobby and dozens of my cousins and nephews and then Jack and Theresa. He was indeed a general practitioner of the grand old school, in that he believed that good doctoring, as in most professions, was a matter of common sense, empirically applied. This salty view had no doubt served him well for the thirty years up to that point, and continued to do so for the twenty-five or so more years afterward, and I don’t doubt that Daisy was among only a handful of his patients who didn’t end up healthy and long-lived. And while I don’t blame Frank Derricone in the least—I’m not the one who can, at least not in any scenario or space-time continuum or alternative universe I can come up with—I do wonder what might have been, and I can’t ignore what the doctor said to me at a party in honor of his retirement this past spring, when he mentioned that it probably wasn’t the best thing to have kept Daisy on sedatives after she’d come down from her manic heights. For who really imagined that there could be a state grayer than gray for our mad happy Daisy, lower than low, when suddenly it was all she could do to lift herself out of the bed in the morning and drag a brush through her tangled, unwashed hair? Who knew that while I was at work and the kids were at day camp she’d steadily medicate herself on the back patio with Valiums and a case of beer, and on one stifling summer afternoon in August go so far as to induce herself into a dream of buoyancy, such that she, unclothed as she preferred, drifted floatless into the pool, perhaps paddling a calm yard or two, before flying, like a seabird, straight down to the bottom. ♦
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