Dear Earl,
I haven’t written in so terribly long! It’s not that I’ve forgotten you, or forgotten our wonderful evening together last February. I have been working on translations of the poems you gave me when I can fit them in between teaching, commuting, and the dreary doldrums of domesticity and rural idiocy. I have had a lot on my mind, and I scarcely know . . .
She thought it improbable that Earl had made her pregnant. They hadn’t “gone all the way,” as her coed students would say. She hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy to him yet, and she hesitated now, undecided if she would. But those goddamn sperm were tough little bastards, as Arthur would say, and she was quite sure that some of them were present on that icy bench in Central Park last February. They’d met up at the ballet, then gone for a long late dinner at the Mandarin Chinese Restaurant on Broadway and Ninety-Eighth Street. They’d talked and talked, about poetry, about Russia and the Russian language. Earl was fluent. He had actually spent six months at the A. A. Zhdanov Leningrad University doing his doctoral research. They had talked about their favorite writers (Dostoevsky for her, Turgenev for him). Nothing at all had been said about their personal lives. She thought she’d glimpsed the obligatory wife-and-child photo in his wallet when he’d taken it out to pay for their moo shu pork and egg foo yong.
Her fortune cookie had read “You will receive an unusual offer.” But when they sat down on a bench in the Ramble section of the park, and he’d put his arms around her, she hadn’t been sure at first that she wanted him too. She’d just taken Edith to see Oklahoma the night before, and Ado Annie’s rueful “I’m Just a Gal Who Cain’t Say No” began playing in her mind.
I’m just a gal who cain’t say no
I’m in a terrible fix.
I always say “Come on let’s go”
Just when I oughta say “Nix.”
And so she hadn’t said no. Earl’s huffing and puffing and thrusting and rubbing had suddenly stopped with a low moan that she knew how to interpret. She hadn’t expected anything of the sort (though she had to wonder why she hadn’t), so she wasn’t protected. And they were fully dressed. in winter coats, no less, and, more or less, upright. She remembered heated but poorly informed discussions in her Smith dormitory about how you could get pregnant when you wouldn’t think that you could, and what things were safe to do with boys. She knew from experience that pulling out didn’t work: that had resulted in her first visit to the émigré Hungarian doctor in Pittsfield who made his living as an abortionist. If only she had called him this time, before things had gone this far, but now it was too late. She recalled Sartre’s protagonist in The Age of Reason—you couldn’t call him a hero—searching for an abortionist for his mistress and referring to the fetus he wanted to get rid of as a “strawberry.” But by now hers was more like one of the naked baby mice she’d found in her sock drawer that morning. She was too far along. She’d already told Arthur, and he was all excited again about his supposed virility and fertility. If it were up to him, she’d have as many babies by now as Grace DeMelo across the road.
And really, her brother-in-law Edwin was the most likely culprit. Much more likely than Earl, since they’d had sex at least a dozen times since that first time on Edith’s birthday in February. only days before her meeting with Earl. But Edwin, darling and clever though he was, deft though he was in bed, couldn’t hold a candle to Earl when it came to culture. Earl was even more sophisticated than Arthur, who at least had done his graduate work at Columbia in New York, while Edwin was just a country boy despite law school in Boston.
Sometimes Kitt wondered if she was a nymphomaniac. She seemed prone to lust over almost any male she met. The more inappropriate and dangerous the better; hence her current dalliance with her brother-in-law. It had been this way since she’d been a seventeen-year-old virgin freshman at Smith who craved (and attained) the caresses of her forty-five-year-old faculty adviser, Professor Panin. She’d been coaching him (at his request) in French pronunciation. Arshily Panin was a Russian, like her parents, and since she had lived in France until she was eight, French was practically her first language. He’d selected Les Liaisons Dangereuses as their text. He’d taken her to a rustic motel in the Berkshires for their one and only tyrst, and after skillfully deflowering her in the fake log cabin, he’d patted her on the arm in an avuncular fashion and said, “Now go find a boy your own age and I will go home to my Sofya.”
After him, it had been one boy after another until Teddy Brynn. Teddy and then, after he was killed, his brother Arthur had briefly sated her cravings enough for a few years of almost-fidelity. That lasted until Edith was born, when she learned that Arthur had been banging one of his students while she was in labor. Why isn’t there a word like nymphomaniacfor a man like Arthur, who goes through girls like Kleenex?she wondered.
She put down the pen with the blue ink and reopened the folder with her translations. Then she got up and pulled a record off the shelf—Schubert’s Winterreise— and put it on the phonograph to settle her nerves.
***
Uncle Edwin and Edith were playing checkers in front of the cold fireplace when they heard the Schubert begin. In the pictures Edith had seen of her father and uncle as little boys, her father had towered over her uncle. But now they were the same height. They had the same tightly curled glossy black hair, though Arthur had a small bald spot and Edwin did not. They shared the same blue eyes and fair skin and the whiskers that scratched her face except for the first five minutes after they shaved. Edwin liked to tease, and Arthur liked to teach: he was a professor, after all. But their voices were hard to tell apart. It was funny when they argued. The fights were usually about politics, because Edwin was not in the Party and Arthur lived for the Party, and when they quarreled, it sounded like someone fighting with himself. Like when Edith talked to her reflection in the toaster.
In the new kitchen Arthur vigorously mixed cream cheese, grated cheddar, green onions, and chopped walnuts with his big bare hands, making cheese balls to eat with the predinner drinks that they had started drinking right after lunch. He had learned to cook from his mother but, at least in his own eyes, had long since surpassed her. Making food and feeding people were things he deeply loved, so he did most of the cooking for his family. Kitt made a few exotic things like beefsteak tartarewhen the whim took her. Now that Edith was old enough to help him, Arthur had taught her how to slice carrots and dice potatoes and mince onions with the knives that he kept gleaming and sharp. A smoldering Chesterfield hung from his lip, and smoke swirled over his bowed head. He tossed another apricot-sized cheese ball into the stainless steel bowl and walked with it into the old kitchen, just in time to see one of Edith’s red checkers gleefully pounce catlike over one of Edwin’s black men.
“You sure that’s what you want to do?” her uncle asked.
Edith, carefully stacking her latest prey on top of the neat pile of her previous victims, nodded, jaw firmly set.
Bam! Bam! Bam!Her uncle executed a triple jump she hadn’t seen coming. Edwin swept her captive checkers into his palm.
Edith howled, “No fair!” flushing red as a wave of acid rose to her throat. Outrage flooded her in spite of her efforts to keep calm. She slammed the flat of her palm down on the checkerboard, and all the remaining checkers flew up and landed all over the board, the floor, and on Edwin’s lap.
Without a trace of compassion, her uncle sneered, maddeningly, “No fair that you weren’t paying attention? I’m not buying it. If you’re going to be a big baby, game over.” Edwin swept the few checkers still on the board into his big palm and tossed them into the box. Edith was sobbing now, great wet furious sobs. She knew she