Aloft

four

HE DAY THAT DAISY DIED was a lot like this one, early July, with the sun seeming stuck right at the top of the sky, T

casting the kind of light and heat that make all the neighborhood kids vault over themselves with pant and glee and then cows everyone else, moms and dads and us older folks and teenagers and the family pets. Daisy liked the heat, and though she didn't know how to swim she'd spend plenty of time in our backyard pool, tanning in her plaid one-piece in the floating lounger or else dog-paddling with an old-fashioned life ring looped under her arms. I tried to teach her how to swim a couple of times, but I'd end up cat-scratched about the neck and shoulders, and then half-drowned besides, Daisy lurching and pulling up on me whenever I let her go, yelling out if her face or scalp got wet. She wasn't so much dainty or persnickety but for some reason hated being submerged or drenched. She always showered with a cap and on alternate days shampooed her hair in the sink, the drain of which I'd have to unclog every couple weeks of the thick black strands, using a pair of chop-sticks.

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 always 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 barely hovering 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 our backyard pool, or else run

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 trying to fill-er-up). If it was the weekend I'd be out there for a good while, too, chuck the kids around in the water and play the monster or 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 snooze until one of the kids got hurt or fell or puked because they drank too much pool water, all of which in the heat and brightness and clamor made for a mighty decent time. This, of course, was dependent, too, 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 those days she would set up the patio table with all kinds of vittles, she'd have the soppressata and the sugar ham and the crock of port wine cheese and the Ritz and Triscuits and she'd have plenty of carrot and celery sticks and pimiento olives and then she'd have the electric fryer on the extension cords snaking back through the kitchen window, to fry up chicken wings or butterfly shrimp and french fries right there on the table, so it was hot and fresh. If my folks or other people were going to be over she made sure to put out her homemade egg rolls and some colorful seaweed and rice thing that we didn't yet know back then was sushi, which people couldn't believe she had made, and maybe some other Oriental-style dishes like spicy sweet ribs and a cold noodle dish she always told us the name of but that we could never remember but which everyone loved and always finished first. She had this way of arranging the food on the platters that made you think of formal gardens, with everything garnished by fans of sliced oranges or shrubs of kale or waterfowl she'd carve out of apples, giving them shiny red wings.

I was working a lot then, having just been made second-in-command at Battle Brothers by my father and uncles, and Daisy was like a lot of the young mothers around the neighborhood, meaning 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 somehow didn't, for the usual semi-acceptable reasons of men; but I will tell you 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, not only because she wasn't so long removed from the old country, but also because her nature (if you can speak of someone's nature, before she changed and went a little crazy and ended up another person entirely) preferred order over almost all 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 whenever you go into most people's houses, stuff like piles of folded laundry to be put away, some dishes in the sink, toys loose underfoot, everything finding its own strewn place, but for Daisy, when it began to happen, it meant there was maybe a quiet disaster occurring, a cave-in somewhere deep in the core. One time, a day just like this, kids frolicking about, our guests arrayed as usual around the backyard and the spread of piquant goodies on the patio table, Daisy sort of lost it. I don't know what happened exactly but maybe one of the kids bumped the other table where she was working the deep fryer, and the hot oil lipped over the edge and splashed the table and then spilled down onto her sandaled foot. I knew it 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 the handles and turned it over and sort of body-slammed it on the table, the oil and chicken wings gushing out sideways, luckily in nobody's direction. I ran up and quickly yanked the extension cords apart and asked her if she was all right and she had this sickened look on her face and she said it was an accident and that she was sorry. By this time our guests had descended and I'm sure no one saw what had really happened, as 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 about being more careful. She started crying and that pretty much 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 with the fryer was a surprise to me. From the moment I met her on the main floor at Gimbel's in the city, 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 Daisy was volatile, like the crazy girl who haunts every neighborhood, the one always climbing fences and trees and eating flower petals and terrorizing the boys with sudden kisses and crotch-grabs. At Gimbel's Daisy sprayed me before I consented and then sprayed me again, and I would have been really pissed except she was amazingly bright-eyed and pretty and she had these perfect little hands with which she smoothed down my coat collar. She had a heavy accent to her English but she wasn't a tentative talker like some who come to this country and seem just to linger in the scenery and either peep-peep or else have to bark to get your attention. Daisy just let it all spill out in her messy exuberant froth of semi-language, clueless and charming and quite sexy, at least in that me Tarzan you Jane mode I welcome, with its promise of most basic romance.

For I had no idea what real craziness meant. I thought people like my father and my mother and my brother Bobby were off-kilter and in need of professional help. I didn't know what it was to be DSM-certified, described in the literature, perhaps totally nuts. And it was a month or so after the deep fryer incident that the first genuine trouble reared itself, when Daisy went off to Bloomingdale's and charged $7000 for 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 practically spitting with hatred and I swear had she been wielding a knife I would be long in the grave.

I didn't know that the previous days in which she bought herself and the kids several new outfits and served us filet mignon and lobsters and repainted our bedroom a deep Persian crimson trimmed in gold leaf were indicative of a grandiose run-up to a truly alarming finale; in fact, I was pretty pleased, for Daisy seemed happy and even ecstatic for the first time in a long time. She was lively with the kids and once again we were making love nightly, and though she worried me a little with her insomnia and solo drinking and 2 A.M. neighborhood walks in her nightgown 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. I tell you if Daisy hadn't blitzkrieged our net worth at Bloomingdale's nothing much would have changed; probably I wouldn't have cared if she was only steadily depleting our bank account, a time-honored way in our civilized world. But this was 1975, when the economy was basically shitting the bed, and Jack and Theresa were seven and six and I was making $20,000 a year at Battle Brothers, which was a hell of a lot of money, actually, and much more than I deserved. But $7000 for anything was of course ruinous, so I had to beg the store manager to take everything back (with a 10 percent restocking fee, plus delivery), and then cut up her charge cards and take away her bank passbook and start giving her the minimum cash allowance for the week's groceries and sundries and gas.

As you can imagine, Daisy wasn't exactly pleased with the arrangement. It was a suggestion/directive from Pop, whom I hadn't consulted directly but who had overheard my mother telling Aunt Vicky what her daughter-in-law had done. The next day Pop barreled into the messy double 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 just stared up at him with my mouth half-crooked, indolently probing my upper mo-lars 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 the troubles.

I should mention that Pop 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 kiss and then twirl her in a little cha-cha move, all of which Daisy welcomed and totally played into like she was Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, 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'm making 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 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'd only have to deal with a certain displacement, you know what I mean? But with a sleek machine, you've got to tool a governer 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 string of pearls 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 very night when I got home Daisy was un-dertaking a complete overhaul of our house décor; she was going through a couple of hundred fabric swatches piled on the kitchen table, she had four or five different dining room chairs, some Persian rugs, several china and silver patterns, she had odd squares of linoleum and porcelain floor tile; she had even begun painting the dining and living room with sample swaths of paint, quart cans of which lay out still opened, used brushes left on the rims, dripping. For dinner she was heating up some leftover pasta on the stovetop. In the den the kids were watching TV, rolling popcorn in baloney slices for their predinner snack, and then spitting streams of Dr Pepper at each other through the gaps in their front teeth. When I asked her what the heck was going on Daisy simply looked up from her work and answered that she couldn't decide between a shiny or not-so-shiny silk for the living room curtains and what did I think?

She was grinning, though sort of painfully, like part of her could see and hear the miserable scene and understood that another part was taking over and probably winning. I couldn't holler right then the way I wanted to, and instead just grum-bled my usual "Whatever, dear" and went to the bedroom and stripped out of my dusty workclothes 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, take you out of a time line, 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 exploratory tugs but maybe I was still too pissed (which is usually plenty good reason), when Daisy opened the shower door and stepped inside, paint-splattered clothes and all.

"Jerry," she said, crying, I think, 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 Rs, and I hugged her, clutching her beneath the spray.

"So hot!" she gasped, recoiling, and I let go, but she grabbed back on 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, as she'd bitten her tongue trying to stand the hot water.

I pointed the shower head away from us and she took off her wet clothes and she 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 even born. I remember Daisy being five months pregnant and showing in a way I didn't expect to be so attractive (both our kids, by the way, were tiny when they born, barely six pounds full-term), the smooth, sheened bulge of her belly and her popped out belly-button and the changed size and color of her nipples, long like on baby bottles and the color of dark caramels. Daisy was not volup-tuous, which I liked, her long, lean torso and shortish Asian legs (perfectly hairless) and her breasts that weren't so full and rounded but shaped rather in the form of gently pitched dunes, those delicate pale hillocks. I realize I may be waxing pathetic here, your basic sorry white dude afflicted with what Theresa refers to as "Saigon syndrome" (Me so hor-ny, G.I. Joe!) and fetishizing once again, but I'm not 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, totally unlike the wide-hipped Italian or leggy Irish girls or the broad-bottomed Polish chicks from Our Lady of Wherever I was raised on since youth, who compared to Daisy seemed pretty dreadful contraptions.

Unfair, I know, unfair.

Though that evening in the shower eight years into our marriage I wasn't so enamored of Daisy as I was hopeful for any break in her strange mood and behaviors. 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. (Note: I've always suspected that it was this very scene that set Theresa on her lifelong disinclination for whatever I might say or do, and though she's never mentioned it and would reject the notion out of hand for being too reductionist/Freudian, I'm plain sorry for it and hate to think that knocking about somewhere in her memory is a grainy washed-out Polaroid of me starring as The Beast or The Rapist.) 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 primal sighting of me in my engorgement 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 I grabbed a towel to wrap myself with and ran down the long bedroom hall and then the next hall down to the kitchen, where Jack was tossing handfuls of water at the frying pan roaring up in flames.

The steam and smoke were pooling at the ceiling, and I quickly pulled Jack away into the dining room; he impressively fought me a little, trying to go back, to fight the good fight. He was always a commendable kid, earnest and vigorous, and for a long time (right up through high school) I really thought he might become a cop or a fireman as most young boys say they want to be at one point or another; I could always see him donning a uniform, strapping on that studly stuff charging hard with his mind unfettered into the maw of peril, "just doing his job."

Sometimes it still surprises me how damn entrepreneurial he is now, what a multitasking guy he's become, as the term goes, though I wonder if being a CEO really suits him, even if it is heading a fundamentally working-class outfit like ours.

"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 clown on his shoulders, "okay?"

"Okay. "

I rushed in and knelt below the range top 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 only flickered low for a second, then vengefully 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 thing, 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. Then Tack 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 practically hurled him into 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 exactly what Jack had already tried, splashing on water with my hands and then 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 deck was cedar and I didn't know what else to do but maybe toss it over the edge onto the back lawn. 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 barbe-cues but they never actually made it over. They were into tony, Manhattan-type gatherings, with candles and French wine and testy, clever conversations (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, all in tones that said they weren't. Though the sight of me clearly got their attention. Someone at their table said, "Look at that!" and with the skillet in one hand I kind of waved with the other, the Lipschers and their guests limply waving back, and for some reason it didn't seem neighborly to chuck the frying pan and so I just held it out in full flambe, 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 guests in all her foxy loveliness and gave them the finger. If I remember right, Theresa did the same, Jack and.1 grinning idiotically as we trailed our women inside 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 burnt 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, $20 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 stapies like milk and bread or underwear or school supplies. Back in those days I could actually titter such a thing, threaten someone like that, even a loved one, and I have to say that I regularly did. I naturally got into the habit at Battle Brothers, hollering at the fellas all day and lecturing my subcontractors and sometimes even talking tough to my customers, if they became 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 reliably I could get all sorts of people to move it or jump or shut the hell up. People say that Pm like Pop that way, that I'll get this expression on my face, this certain horrific look, like whatever you're saying or doing is the most sickening turn, this instant disease, and that for you not to desist seems purely con-temptible, a veritable crime against humanity. And then I'll say what I want to have happen, what I want done, as I did that day to Daisy. She could hardly look at me as she sat on the edge of the tub as I shaved, her straight hair screening her face like those beaded curtains we all used to have, her palms pressed down against the porcelain, her elbows locked. I repeated myself and left for work and didn't call all day and when I got back (a little early, for I had the horrible thought that the house might be burning down) the whole place was peerlessly clean and quiet and the kids were in the den playing (Jack) and reading (Theresa) and there was a tuna casserole bubbling away in the oven, four place settings sparkling and ready 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 into our bedroom to change, which was empty but trimmed out and neat, and when I walked into the bathroom, there Daisy was, still dressed in her pink robe with the baby blue piping, sitting on the edge of the tub 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 like I might to the guys, as though it was simply what I expected. It's always best, when you're trying to get things done, to utter the absolute minimum. You made it rain? Okay. You moved Heaven and Earth? Fine. This, too, was part of my general studies education a la Pop; he's the one who showed me how effective it can be to say grindingly little at the very moments you ought to say a lot, when you could easily be sappy and effusive and overgenerous 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 noggin, with a tough-guy grunt, which you'd think would be just what Daisy had had to deal with all her inscrutable Oriental/Asian life, and probably had, and was part of the reason she'd ended up with someone like me, some average American Guido she'd figure would have more than plenty to say, entreating every second with his hands and his hips and with his heart blithering on his sleeve.

Daisy didn't say anything and neither did I and for a moment our normally cramped en suite bath got very large in feeling, the only sound coming from the running toilet tank, this wasteful ever-wash I've always meant to fix but never actually have, 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 already eating their dinner, as usual furiously wolfing their food like a pair of street urchins who'd stolen into a cake shop. Daisy was making up my plate. As little kids, Jack and Theresa were forever hungry, a trait only parents must know to be peerlessly endearing, 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 wasn't eating.

After serving all of us seconds she took our plates and began cleaning up. The kids chattered back and forth but Daisy and I didn't say a word to each other. In the morning, breakfast was the same, and it was like that for the rest of that week and the next. Finally I got tired of the whole thing and when he asked I told Pop his method was fine save 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 Nonna would stop by on Saturday to run interference. I asked him to just come over and play with the kids, so I could patch things up with Daisy, maybe take a drive to Robert Moses and sit on the grassy dunes and tell/beg her that I wished for our life to be normal again, though in truth their visit would mean that Nonna would take the kids out to the playground or to a matinee 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, which he did anytime we spent more than an hour together.

When my folks arrived Daisy was still in the bedroom getting dressed. No matter 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 outfits and full evening makeup and jewelry and maybe she'd tie a little rolled silk scarf around her neck, which gave her a fetchingly game barmaid look. Pop of course lapped it up. He loved how she made silly mistakes with her English and always laughed at his jokes and patiently listened to all his stories and theories and opinions about the brutality of man and falsity of religion and the conspiring forces of a New World Order that would enslave all good men in a randy socialist vise-grip of eco-feminism and bisexuality and miscegenation (not withstanding my and Daisy's lovely offspring). Daisy, I really have to say, always kissed his ass, and I don't really know why, as there was never anyone else but Pop who could elicit that kind of humoring and attention from her, no one I'm sure except for Bobby Battle, M.I.A. (the best degree, for Immortality), whom she met a couple of times only but I know would have loved.

Daisy floated out in a new hot-pink-with-white-polka-dot silk mini-dress and matching scarf tied around her throat as mentioned, with a white hair band holding up her black-as-black tresses. As annoyed as you might be with her you couldn't help but think she looked good enough to eat. She kissed my mother, who was already unloading the fridge of everything that we might possibly eat for dinner, culling as she went for mold and wilt and freezer burn. My mother, God bless her soul, 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 else but keep house and feed everybody and try to make Pop's life run smoothly and comfortably, even as he was often a jerk to her and had several love affairs and was universally acknowledged to be a Hall of Fame jerk. She rarely read the newspaper and never read a book and wasn't even interested in movies or television, her main personal activity being shopping for clothes, not haute couture but sort of Queens Boulevard country club, bright bold colors and white patent leather bags and shoes and bugeye sunglasses. Every once in a while on no special occasion Pop would spring for a marble-sized 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; it wasn't because the gray matter didn't work well enough but that she preferred to keep her life as uncomplicated as possible, more thought and rumination leading only to misery and remorse and 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-to-handle-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?" Nonna said, holding up a frozen brown slab.

No one answered, as no one knew.

Nonna, accustomed to the nonreply, said, "I hope it's a beefsteak."

"The dress looks real good," I said to Daisy, feeling I should utter something, bring at least some bread to the table, if not wine. And then I was all set to offer even more, maybe 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 you with his eye for finish and detail, which somehow was more Park Avenue than Arthur Avenue.

"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 Mikimotos."

"It's not my birthday even," Daisy said, hushed by the glitter in her hands. "This is so nice. This is so pretty."

"Call it a reward, for all the hardship of the last couple of weeks. Ask Nonna over there. It's no picnic, putting up with us Battle men. We're stubborn and prideful 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 knew what real fun was. He was 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, practically vibrating with glee and gratitude. Nonna had already ceased paying further attention to the scene, 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, as usual, 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 drifted around the gleeful huddle and asked Nonna if she needed anything.

"I don't think so, honey," she said, never, ever ironical. She was scraping the freezer burn from the ice-hard meat, a little pile of root-beer-colored shavings collecting at the edge of her knife blade. "I think I have everything I need."

I N T H E W E E K S A F T E R Pop came bearing gifts, everything pretty much went to shit. It did, it really did, though not in the manner I thought it would. I figured I'd be the one generating the enmity, the one beaming out the negative vibes, the go-to-hell shine first thing in the morning and stay-on-your-side rays before clicking off the bedside lamp at night. 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 so I could figure out how to fix the problem without forever placing her under house arrest. But the fact was, Daisy was the one who took further umbrage. She wouldn't speak to me, not a word, her silence made that 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? Was it, in language Theresa might employ, an epochal turn? I really don't know about that. What's clear to me is that Daisy pretty much exploded with life, and our life, as it went, exploded right along with her. Up to then, my basic conception of crazy was still 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 be with You/It would be Life/and Life is over there /Behind the Shelf), my trousers clingy with fear and arousal.

With Daisy, I didn't know, nor did anyone else, for that matter, including Dr. Derricone, 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 fondness even, with wistful rue.

The first thing was, she would hardly sleep. If at all. After Pop venit and vidit and vincit that weekend and she stopped talking to me, Daisy's metabolism went into overdrive. We usually went to bed at 11 or so, after the news for me and maybe a bath for her, but she started getting up at 5 in the morning, and then 4 and 3 and 2, until it got to the point when she didn't even get ready for bed, not bothering to change into a nightgown or brush her teeth or even take a soak. A couple times in the middle of the night I awoke to the plash-plash of water, and I 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, 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 know exactly what I did, which was to just fall back into the pillow and scratch at myself half-mast and maybe dream in sentimental hues of gorgeous black swans, who must always swim alone.

After a couple weeks I didn't even notice that Daisy was never in bed. She probably slept a couple of hours while the kids were watching TV, but I can't be sure of that. As for sex, it wasn't happening, and not just because of the fact that she decided not to talk to me. Pure talk was never that important to us anyway, even at the beginning, when it was mostly joking and flirting, for though her English was more than passable it was just rudimentary enough for us to stay clear of in-depth and nu-anced 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 stand, because if she had any power over me it was certainly 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 that every last cell in my body was 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 pointed right at them, abject with confused misery and love.

And this really happened, mostly while I was slumbering. I don't know how many times she did it, but one night the doorbell rang and roused me from a deep sleep and I trudged tingling in the limbs to the door to find my wife wrapped in a big blue poly tarp with a burly young officer of the local law 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 just looked glum and down in the mouth, as if this whole thing was 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, like it was a goddamned date or something. Daisy disappeared inside.

The cop said, "Sir, if you could please tell your wife 1'11 have to cite her the next time."

"There's not going to be a goddamn next time!"

"I'm just saying. ."

"Good night," I said, and I slammed the door.

I found Daisy in the kitchen, making tuna-and-egg salad for a sandwich. She had the eggs going at furious boil in the stockpot, the bread in the toaster, she had the jars of mayonnaise and mus-tard and sweet pickle relish out on the counter, she had the celery and carrot and onion on the cutting board, and she had the ice blue German chef's knife in her hand, the one Pop had given her at Christmas. But the strange thing was that she did it all so casually, as if a nude woman in sneakers chopping vegetables at three in the morning after a neighborhood police sweep was 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 maybe it was 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 shill"

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 more ranting at him. No more threats. No more scenes with his receptionist."

"He's a complete fool," she said, with a perfect, and faintly English, accent, as though she'd heard some actress say the phrase in a TV movie or soap. Daisy was a talented mimic, when she got the feeling. "They are all complete and utterfools."

"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 made him promise, and though you treat him like dirt he's not giving up."

"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, in fact really screamed, and I thought about the kids for a second, how they'd wake up to their mother's distressed cry and probably think 1 was doing something horrible to her, like flicking a backhand at her or grabbing at her throat, which I never, ever did. But the whole truth be told, in those days I let myself think about such things every now and then, I too easily imagined picking her petite body up and flinging her onto the bed like you might a cat, mostly because you thought 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 really can't defend myself, except to say that Daisy was never a completely passive or feckless party in our troubles, she being ever 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 then that's when it happened.

She lunged at me, in her splendid nakedness, knife and all, her eyes dull with dark no-method, with the chill of empty space.

And I will tell you that 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; it was actually enough to make me say, I must depart, I must depart (perhaps this the seed of my eventual interest in flight), and not mind whatever the rest. And the significant detail (of the rest) is not that Daisy missed my throat with the chef's knife by a mere thumb's-width, jabbing the point into the door of the refrigerator a good two inches beneath the vinyl skin (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'd not flinched and hit her mark.

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 good Dr. Derricone appeared with his scuffed black visiting 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 psy-chiatrist or psychologist would diagnose as her particular state or behavior and duly prescribe; I wasn't even thinking of "the right thing to do," but was instead just needing to jam hard on the brakes, do whatever it took to stop the train, indeed, do just what Theresa would no doubt say was my only modality and like most lazy modern men compel the desired result with the most available and efficient measure on hand, which often, not surprisingly, takes the form of another lazy modern man but with better credentials. 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, and he was indeed a general practitioner of the grand old school, in that he believed in his skills across the disciplines, 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 for the twenty or so more years afterward, and I don't doubt that Daisy was but among 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, not in any scenario or space/time continuum or alternate universe I can come up with — I do naturally wonder what might have been, and can't ignore what the good doctor said to me at a party in honor of his retirement, that it probably wasn't the best thing to have kept Daisy on sedatives after she'd come down from her manic heights, in that period of trough. For who really imagined that there could be a state grayer than that for our mad, happy Daisy, lower than low, beneath the bottom, 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 preferred, drifted float-less into the pool, perhaps paddling a calm yard or two, before flying, like a seabird, straight down to the bottom.