He says, “And you won’t use it as a coaster?”
She says, “Iswear. And listen, thanks for helping me carry the books.”
Charles smiles. “Anything for the jumble sale.”
Clemence says, “Well, obviously.” And oh, the tension between them, like a trap door that could spring open beneath her feet, and she knows she’d be falling, falling, falling. She sidesteps, away from him, and then a twirl, like a whirlwind, away.
Ten
There is news: her sister Prudence is pregnant again, though Clemence is not sure this constitutes news because Prudence has been pregnant throughout most of the last decade. What is different this time is that nobody knows, except Clemence. While previous announcements had arrived momentously at holiday dinners, or via cute videos sent by mass email (the recycled “I’m Going to Be a BigSisterBrother” T-shirt was a theme), this time Prudence breaks the news half-heartedly while stripping wallpaper, the occasion for which she’d invited Clemence to dinner. Prudence never invites anybody over without giving them a chore, something Clemence can’t stand, and she would have declined the invitation, as had been her habit since moving back home, except something in the way her sister had punctuated her texts had led Clemence to believe more was going on.
And so that weekend she’d taken a bus out of thecity toward the suburbs, not the northern ones where Charles lives, but this time west, leaning her head on the window and thinking about Charles while trying not to, the world beside the highway speeding by. She is patient when Sandro fails to be waiting upon her arrival, because Prudence’s family is always late. Prudence has them on a regimented system, but it runs about twenty minutes behind everybody else’s, and now here is Sandro, driving the small bus that constitutes their family vehicle. He doesn’t even put the car into park, taking off again before she’s got the door closed, let alone fastened her seat belt, slamming on the brakes as he arrives at an unexpected stop sign, flinging out his right arm to stop her from flying through the windshield and/or (is she imagining this now?) copping a feel of her left breast.
“Sandro is European,” is the Lathbury family’s explanation for everything unusual or inappropriate about their sole remaining son-in-law, plus he’s a professor, and so it’s impossible to tell if these are the factors in play or if he’s just weird. Sandro has always been flirtatious, the kisses he bestows as greetings a little too intimate, and he delivers compliments such as, “The way that blouse hugs your bosom is most appealing.”
It would have been sleazier if he’d taken pains to hide it, or if Prudence herself didn’t just roll her eyes when he behaved this way, as though it were a minor annoyance, a little quirk, and so Clemence tries the same approach. Recalling what her sister had said at the barbecue, that Sandro supposes that Clemence wants to sleep with him. She folds her arms over her chest just to be extra clearabout boundaries, and starts telling Sandro about her own professor and the book on Alvin Puddicombe, whom Sandro has never heard of. Sandro believes that nothing that isn’t Italian could possibly constitute literature anyway (his pronunciation of “literature” is “lit-tore-a-ture” and she doesn’t hate it) and he wants to make sure that Clemence is getting a fair wage for her work.
The work women do, Sandro reminds her, as if she doesn’t know, is rarely permitted its fair value—and this is what Clemence is thinking about now as she and her sister strip the wallpaper from the dining room, a hideous pink floral that had been hanging since they moved in. Sandro considers himself a feminist, and an attentive father, and he is—with this family, at least; things had been very different when he’d been married before. On feminist grounds, Sandro had objected to Prudence’s resistance to hormonal birth control, but he’d also been supportive when she insisted they employ a more natural method because it was her body, her choice. “The fertility awareness method,” Prudence explains. “But maybe we should have been more aware.”
And now she is six weeks pregnant. Again. “All the baby stuff,” she says. “Ithought it was over. It’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve rediscovered sleep.” She hasn’t told Sandro yet. “He’ll be fine either way, but he’ll also say ‘Itold you so.’ He never really believed in fertility awareness in the first place.”
Prudence is standing up on a ladder. The ceilings in here are so tall, the floor-to-ceiling windows revealing the backyard where Sandro is leading the kids in soccerdrills. The only reason Prudence can be so open with her disclosures is that she’s not making eye contact. She’s got her back to her sister, and it’s more like a monologue.
Clemence, up on another ladder, manages to loosen a corner, and peels back a strip in a satisfying release. Too bad it can’t all be like this. She knows to stay quiet, to let Prudence say what she needs to say. When Prudence desires feedback, she’ll will ask for it. Clemence continues to peel the paper and she waits, and tries to think about Toby instead of Charles, fixating on the one best suited to being her unsuitable attachment.
Of course, an abortion is an option, says Prudence. She’s still got some time to decide. Prudence had had an abortion when she was seventeen, in high school, which she’s still quite clear is the best decision she ever made, until she married Sandro. She’s not opposed in principle. “But it’s not quite in keeping with the spirit of all this, you know? So many kids—what difference is one more?”
“But you’re talking about a family, not a flash mob,” says Clemence. “And what you want matters, too. Alot.” She is thinking of what she was wanting when Charles leaned in to—she thought—kiss her. She is thinking that she apparently has absolutely no will, and can’t control herself, and Prudence is the living embodiment of what happens when a person lets those impulses take over.
“Before, Iwas never ambivalent.” Prudence steps down from her ladder and stands back to examine her work so far. “Ididn’t understand how anyone could be, if they’re not seventeen. Ambivalent about a baby? Ababy is ablessing!” She turns around to face her sister. “But this time it all just seems so overwhelming.”
This time? “Iguess you know what you’re getting into.”
“Ido, and it’s a lot. Pregnancy does a number on you. My hemorrhoids have hemorrhoids.”
“That’s good to know.” It wasn’t.
“It is,” insists Prudence. “Because nobody tells you these things. And Ilike being a mother. You know that. Iloveit. It’s my whole life, and I’m fine with that, and so it seems weird that Ican’t accept this with open arms. Like what kind of a mother am I, then, really?”
“One who acknowledges her limits?” Clemence and Prudence are now sitting on the bottom steps of their ladders. “There’s nothing wrong with that.” Limits are important. Clemence hasn’t felt this connected to her sister in years.
“Ineeded to tell you, to talk to somebody who wouldn’t judge,” says Prudence. “Imean, you’re not exactly pro-family values.”
“Hey, Ihave family values,” Clemence says. “I’m here, aren’t I? My sister needed me. With household tasks and other things. That’s family values.”
“Ijust mean you’re not Catholic,” says Prudence. “And you can see there’s more than one side of things, other possibilities. You know there’s never just one answer.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if there were?” says Clemence.
“But getting to decide is the point,” says Prudence. “No matter what the outcome is. It’s about the process, and what Ineeded today was to process this.”
“And to take down the wallpaper.”
“That, too. Listen, don’t mention anything.” They hear the sounds of the family coming in. And Clemence, naturally, promised that she wouldn’t say a word. Now engulfed in the noise and hubbub of her sister’s household, she can see what Prudence means—what difference would one more make? But also, when she visits her sister, Clemence usually needs two days to recover. Roberto walks into the dining room, and immediately kicks over the bucket of water by Clemence’s ladder, the deluge soaking her socks, and little Enzo has already scrambled around her, making his way to the top. Lila hiking up her shorts to show her mother the scrape on her thigh from falling down on the sprinkler, and Alessia is yelling at her smallest brother. One more child might be the point to tip the whole thing into chaos, although Clemence recalls thinking the same with each of her sister’s pregnancies. She is glad that this cacophonous family life exists, but she’s never desired it for herself. The things she wants are different, and she insists on that, the right of women to want different things, and this was why her sister had called her here, for this perspective. In addition to the manual labour.
Clemence leaves her phoneat home when she goes to the bookstore, because the hugeCellphones OFFsign by the door conveys the message that she should, and the only time Toby has gone out of his way to note her presence in the store was the time he told her off for checking her texts.
“Ithought the sign meant Ihad to turn myringeroff,” Clemence protested, but Toby said no, it meant she had to power down the whole thing altogether, which turned out to be fine because she couldn’t get a signal anyway, the three-plus layers of hardcovers lining the walls not permitting one to permeate the building. Otherwise she might have snuck around to the shadowy corner where foreign language erotica was, and checked her phone while hidden there.
