A Misunderstanding

I wake all night from dreams, delighted by three reprieves against the terrible morning. The waking must be to remind me: Don't forget the children or you shall go mad. Children simpl;y wander through the ordinary dreams. Sam then stirs, says nonsense and I argue back with him for fun. "That's nonsense, Sam," I tell him firmly. It isn't Samuel but Sami Hassan. I've married him because he is Indian and quite wretched, a good boy, whereas I am rotten; though, of course, it isn't true, none of that, I'm simply arch enough to snap, which is the reason for the dreams and they do their job, apparently, for if I'm not mad now, when should I be?

It's black as night when I draw the thin curtain an dso cold I want to die at once. Sometimes I've squeezed so tight to keep my warmth in at night that I wake aching in my joints. Twenty-three years old! Next, I must see Sam out of bed or he might stay in all morning and miss work. He promises every day I don't need to see him put his feet on the floor but if I take him at his word he doesn't get up till noon and we simply can't afford for him to lose another job or we never shall leave this disgusting city. I set a cup of coffee on the night table and beg Sam to jump out quickly. "Please get up right now."

He stares, rigid. He does not know who I am. I add formally, "This is London and I'm your wife. Get out of bed right now. Please," and I grip his shoulder till he starts to promise, but I haven't the time to listen through. "Please, Sam, please get up now, I haven't the time." Dazed, he swings his long starved legs to the cold floor and reaches for tobacco and papers, and I leave for school.

He never gets up first, never. He still promises every Friday to shop for me Saturday, but by now I tell him. "Never mind, Sam, you know you won't and I don't really mind as long as I'm not counting on you to do it." But he insists, so I warn him, "Now if you say you'll get up, get up, but don't ask me to wake you. If you can't wake yourself up, only tell me and I'll shop, myself, because I'd rather shop than wake you u7p, that's no holiday for me." But he does promise and of course he's not up by noon, and the shops close before one, and if we don't shop then, we'll have no food in for the weekend and we can't afford to eat out and would be spending next week's dinner money if we bought from the high-priced, late-closing shops down the road, so I get up and slip out by myself. He's still snoozing when I come back an hour later with a cut in the palm of each hand from my two shopping bags. I wake him neatly with the morning paper, right in the face, and he bounces up like a ball: "What is it? What is it?" he asks.

"What is what? I've just done the shopping."

"Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm sorry, love."

"Don't be sorry. Just don't promise you'll do what you have no intention of doing."

He comes out of bed scrawny and grey in his greying tag of a vest to hold me and say, crooningly, "All right, all right, love, it's all right."

"I know it's all right," I tell him, shaking him off to put the groceries away. "You can't help sleeping and I can't help being a bitch, but at least let's admit it."

"No, no," he insists. Elaborately contrite, like some shrewd servant in a comedy, he takes the frypan out of my hand, sits me down full of great spirits and gets breakfast, thinking he'll salvage a shred of my wretched little holiday, but he only spoils the eggs and bacon and crumpets I've been looking forward to all week. I tell him just that, too, I always do, but he goes right on with his little act, as if I were some stock-character virago and he the comic hero, and it's really not fair.

At half past seven I climb through fog to the bus. The sun rises, like blood on the fog, and I think: "The bloodied sky, the sun in its own filthy afterbirth," and that sort of sensationalistic imagery. France won't let us in her market; though we put ourselves on continental time and wake up in the middle of the night to match her busienss hours, she simply won't have us. Certain headmasters and headmistresses, so reports the Standard, are starting classes an hour late to spare their children from early deaths on the dark roads, and for one brilliant instant I'm filled with hope--I could sleep till eight!--but of course, these council-flat types live so close to school they hardly have to cross streets. Poverty excluded, their only real danger is the foul canal some one or two drown in every year; so we teach swimming even before reading as a service to our wretched little community, and I must say it's a pleasure. They warm the pool water and I hold their bare bodies in my bare arms, their hair slick and tight to their little skulls like newborn babies, and I remember all over again what babies they really are, what tiny throats their nasty mews issue from, what tiny bones poke at the fragile stretch of white skin on them, scarecely an armful of child.

I'm a wretched teacher, of course, an idealist, desperate. I mean well enough, but I just miss the point; I have all the philosophy down but none of the plans and no one learns a thing in my shabby class. Not so shabby as it was before I took Mrs. Singh's class, who became ill at half-term. One guesses what sort of ill: defeat. Everyone pitied her. No one pities me, which proves they don't shun me from racial prejudice--I married one, but she is one yet no one pities me. And it isn't that I wouldn't accept pity. God knows, I beg for it like pasty Glenda who turns my stomach tugging at my skirt all day, though I know she's not any more to blame for whining than Scott Philpott is for sparring on the classroom floor. Why do we forgive the gruff ones who don't need our love, and want to smack right off the face of the earth the ones who need it most?

For example, Gregory. I'd assumed my own experience would lend me special sensitivity to his problems as a colored child, but Gregory doesn't need to be drawn out, far from it: I spend my day reminding him that others, too, need attention or special privileges or toys, an dhe spends his in tears because he can't have just what he wants. He makes no special fanfare about it, just cries while he plays, or sits numbly in his beautiful white shirt buttoned right up to the collar, but I can't soften to him. His selfishness enrages me and his tears don't make me change my mind, though I shake with shame when his fat, melancholy mother asks me, "He still crying all day?"

"No, no," I say casually, smiling sympathetically at her. "He's doing fine." I rub Gregory's knotty hair and he does a little pleased hop, more fool he, and I'm torn with shame and remorse. "I liked her," I say, pleased, when Sybil's gone. Sam often accuses me of coming between him and his friends.

Sam doesn't answer at once, so I take a little break (gather wool) while he trembles attractively, doubtless preparing a fresh batch of his standard critique, white-English variant. But when he speaks at least it is to say, "How can I ever look at her again?"

That shocks me out of my dreams. Cautiously, still not at all sure I heard him properly, I ask, "What do you mean, love?"

"You know it as well as I what I mean."

It turns out well enough: he'd constructed a fantasy in which Sybil and I have invented a secret code on the spot, meaning Sam by Gregory. I can hardly believe he means this, but perhaps he really is that mad, textbook mad, which comes as something of a relief to learn, if it's true.

He hadn't suspected women before, jealous as he is. It was the men that tortured him, that handful Sam brought in from work or school that kept him grey with rage fo rdays after they sat with us for miserable dinners they were never asked to again, men so unappealing I had to wonder whether Sam hadn't put on an act of jealousy to torture me for real grievances: my insensitivity, inconsideration, selfishness, condescension. In fact, I'm delighted by these false accustaions, for they prove I'm not to blame for Sam's moods. "You thought I flirted with Peter?" I would laugh. "But I don't care for Peter. Peter's not my type."

But Sam would only brood. "What is it really, love?" I might go on, then lose patience. "Look, if something's on your mind, you tell it to me, otherwise I can't be bothered." When in doubt, Sam stretches his fingers toward the gasfire and stares at them; I pick up a book. Then I'm swept with pity for my husband, who is saying, tightly, "How can I meet this man again?" I must answer blandly, not to raise suspicion: "Very easily, I should think."

Quivering, he goes over old ground: "How can I look at this man's face?"

"Look," I snap, as there's no point conceding it's anything but rubbish, "if you can't look in his rotten face that's your problem. Don't go blaming your inhibitions on me. What shall I do? Go into purdah?" He stares at me intently,l then dulls his gaze and drops it to his fingers? Shall I have them cast in bronze?"

He starts up as if woken from sleep and, seeing his own outstretched fingers, clenches them and lays them on his knee. Of course I soften and go kiss his fingers and his eyes as well, saying, "I don't love anyone else. There's no one else but you. Do you believe me?"

He stares as if he has never seen my face before, then smiles briefly and says, "It's all right," though I wonder why he said that and not, "I know," or "I love you, too."

I dream that Sam and I live in my classroom, which has a dirt floor. Sam's been a soldier in the war and, far from the front, heard news of the armistice just after killing an enemy soldier. He killed the soldier thinking it was wartime but war being over he's legally guilty of murder. What shall he do with the corpse? We dig a hole in the dirt floor of the classroom and bury the corpse there but Gary Trower comes in with a pet cat on a leash who runs straight to the spot and starts to sniff and scratch crazily, and I freeze. When I force myself awake Sam is panting in his sleep. I wake him and say, "What is it? What is it?" His eyes are beady; he doesn't know me. He always forgets dreams but this time he remembers: "I dreamed two ferocious beasts were in there--" he points to the hulking wardrobe. "A lion, a tiger perhaps, trying to get out. And I was terrified, you see, terrified they would come out and hurt you."

Still shaken, I turn a light on. Then we hear a scream, not in our house but not far off, perhaps a few houses away. We look at each other. "What do you think?" I say.

Sam says, like a gool, "Perhaps it's nothing."

The woman screams again and I get out of bed, Sam crying, "Take care, love, take care!" I knew he would not go himself, he never gets up first, it's always me who starts the fire, gets the paper, keeps him when I can from losing his filthy job, and I'm as cold in the night and morning air as he is, just more disciplined, simply that; so to show what contempt I have for his pretense of concern for me, I part the thin ragged curtains.

It's a terrifying night, cold and black. The trees are in full bloom, still, and the moon's ice-cold and fiercely white; the flowering trees are lit with it. Across the yards I can see the row of neat alike houses, square, chimneypots quaint and black against the sky. There are no lights in any of the houses. There is no more screaming and I don't know what to do. "Can you see?" Sam asks. He's lit a cigarette.

"What do you think it was?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Perhaps a quarrel." I'm shivering and I put on my heavy coat. "Come to bed," he says.

"No," I say, "I don't want to dream again. You go to sleep.

"Don't be cold, love," he says.

"Don't worry about me," I say. I put on water to boil and find a match for the gas fire. I light the gas and listen to it hiss. I'm still frightened, shaken, chill, sick with the strangeness of the night. By now, it's April, though night and morning and even afternoons are raw and always grey, but it's a time of hope, a moist and growing time, I think. I read a French novel, huddled by the fire, and I get up to make cocoa with the boiled water so the caffeine from tea won't give me hairier dreams. Sam is sleeping, but I can't be bothered to worry about making noise; he'll always be able to drop off again. He cries urgently, waking, "What is it?" Are you all right?"

"Of course I am, what did you think?" I snap and then ask myself why I had to snap, why couldn't I just say, "Yes, love. I'm all right. Don't worry, my love."

"Don't catch cold," he murmurs, falling back to sleep.

Still not a sign of spring except the recklessness of flowers and certain modish secretaries in minis and blue knees. Odd to think it was just a year ago that, walking under the leafy trees up and down Holland Park and Notting Hill, I thought, "The streets were lightly sprinkled with sun," or "Up and down the broad quiet streets the dogs were seeing evening in." The raw damp goes directly to my bones if I even cast off my wool vest, but I make Sam take long walks with me on the weekend, all the way into town, where we see a film. In Oxford Circus, we meet Rick, a student we once knew until Sam took it into his head he was my lover. I keep my eyes on my shoes and try not to shake. Sam says to Rick, "You are looking very smart. Don't you think Rick is looking smart?" I smile, "I think he is a very smart man. Are you smart, Rick?" Rick must laugh; I don't look. "I hope you are smart," Sam says. "For your sake."

Rick says, willing to be cheerful still, "I don't think I understand what you mean."

"Oh, I think you do," Sam says, trembling and grey. I tug at his arm to leave. "A smart man like you understands," Sam says, and I tug at him.

"He didn't understand," I tell Sam when we've left.

Sam says, "Believe me, Maia, I know these men, they would sleep with my mother."

"He's a young boy," I say.

"I know these young boys," Sam says. "I was also one. Believe me."

He broods, and I grow delicate: I bring cups of tea and run out for cigarettes and even invite him, once or twice, to bed; then I fear my sweetness will feed his suspicions. In any case he doesn't answer. I ask, "What is it? What is it?" I say, "Please tell me. Love? Please, Sam. We'll never work it out if you don't tell me." He clenches his jaw from supper till bed, at times nodding abruptly to himself. I ask nastily, "Are you still obsessed with Rick?"

"Don't play with me, Maia," he flashes, and I feel ashamed and I protest, "I never slept with Rick. I never even wanted to."

"I warn you," he says at once, staring intensely at me. "I will not be played with," and I stop, because of coruse that's what I've done, answered the question he wasn't asking and left unanswered what he must really mean--though he can't really mean what I fear he does, or why would he stay? If he stays, he must know I love him, as I do, I'm simply a difficult person, irritable and hypercritical, a bully, but I do love Sam, no one's ever cared so much for me, which is why I can put up with his mistakes, which after all are only a matter of culture. How would I feel in his world, after all? It's just that I can't stop insulting him, and who could blame Sam for resenting that? But he must realize that I only dare show him this side of me because I do love him, and if I rarely tell him so it's only because I don't trust feelings like that to words, which candistort or even destroy the truest feelings. As soon as I've said, "I love you," I think, "Is that really true?" I only need to say a thing exists for it to disappear. Even at school, the words "my husband" seem to hang in the air after I've spoken them, as if we weren't married at all and these teachers were the landladies and shopkeepers and neighbors I lied to when the ring I wore cost three and six. In fact, I seemed to believe that lie more easily than I do this truth, which might prove that, if lies don't make you guilty, the truth will, later.

Yet, surely, if "my husband" hangs in the air it could as well be the teachers' small-minded prejudice as my odd guilt. I do forget that. They are so cold, these English, that one never can be quite sure what has really gone on, and that's how racism works on this dreadful island, perhaps, it simply drives the victims mad by never letting on that it does exist. Or do I only wish to blame others for what in my heart I know is my fault? If I were they, what would I think of myself, after all, with my disgusting apologies, my lumpiness, mystinking clothes that I can't afford to clean or even hem properly with no one to help, my annoying questions? "Don't you hate yourself when you have to punish them?" I absurdly ask. They glance uneasily over my shoulder an dsay, "Oh, well, you have to look out for yourself, don't you," and in fact I have begun to use their tricks, their petty jibes and rewards; but I haven't the skill or conviction to bring that off. I threaten, then forget, protect favorites and let others fend for themselves. Blood spurts, paint spills, books ar esmeared and puzzle pieces disappear forever. I ignore the meek until nothing's left for them but naughtiness, which I reward with interest; I forgive the bad.

For instance, one day Gary Trower, the wordless sadist whose father beats and mother pets him, gouges Maisie's forehead and I resolve to take some action at last: I drag him to Miss Lewcock's office. I have to pry his tiny fingers from every door on the way. His milk-blue eyes, bheind the thick circle of his glasses, are saucer-wide with terror. "I yood!" he bleats, or pipes, or squeaks. It's the first sound to pass from Gary Trower's lips all term and it makes me want to throw up. It sounds like an insect imitating a child. "I yood! I yood!" I consider how terrible his fear must be, to expose this secret voice, and, sickened ,bring him back to class instead. He's good.

At last I even turn to crisp Miss Lewcock, the headmistress, for advice. In her cozy office, she tells me, "Oh, it's a fight!" I pause to rephrase my question so that she can in no way believe I don't want real answers; but to explain my pause I murmur, "Yes, I suppose it is," as if the thought had never crossed my mind, and we go on like that for an hour. By then I shake so peculiarly that she, quivering herself, looks ringed in flame like Blake's angels, and I try to leave, but, as I try not to seem ungrateful, my goodbyes invariably turn into questions I don't want answers to. I walk right into rush hour, my bus crawls, the shops are closed, and I must trudge way up the hill to get kippers an dpeas at a price we won't be paying for all week; of course Sam's home and staring at the fire when I finally get in, and my excuses sound so lame I don't believe them myself, though Sam pretends he does.

Incomplete.

Paris Review, 1977