Hal put down the mail. He opened his arms, waiting, with a patient, avuncular look, until Daisy stepped against him and let him hold her.
“You know, the feminists can say whatever they want, about women making money and men staying home,” Hal said into her hair. “But in my opinion, this is the way it’s supposed to work.”
“And what do you mean by ‘this,’ exactly?” Daisy’s voice was faint. Hal didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve got the job. You keep the house. You cook us wonderful meals. You take care of Beatrice.” He kissed the tip of her nose, then her forehead. “You make our house a home.”
“Yes, but…”
“And you’re happy, aren’t you?”
“I am, except…”
“Then good.” He put his lips against hers; a hard, dry kiss that made her feel more like a document being stamped than a woman being appreciated. “I just want my little birds to be happy in their nest.” Hal hooked his suit coat over his finger and went upstairs. Daisy sighed. She felt exhausted, utterly drained, but she still had to get dinner on the table. She went to the kitchen to pull steaks out of the refrigerator and snip a few stalks of rosemary from the pot. She was reaching for the cast-iron pan when she heard a voice.
“You know where that’s from, don’t you?”
Daisy gave a startled screech. When she looked up, Beatrice was hanging over the balcony, staring down.
“What?”
“Little bird.”
Daisy was surprised that her daughter had even noticed the endearment, given how determined she seemed to ignore everything about her parents in general and Daisy specifically. “I don’t know. That song? The Bob Marley one?”
“No,” said Beatrice. “You’re thinking of ‘Three Little Birds.’ ‘Little bird’ was what Torvald called Nora in A Doll’s House. ‘Little squirrel.’ ‘Little skylark.’ ‘My pretty little pet.’？” Beatrice smirked, then turned and went back to her bedroom. Daisy heard her door close, very gently.
“Well, I’ll bet I would have known it if I’d graduated from college!” Daisy yelled. There, she thought. A teachable moment.
She seared the steaks, and finished them with a sauce of rosemary and red wine, and served them with mashed potatoes and broccoli with lemon zest. She set the table, then cleared it, scraping the leftovers into the trash can. Then, leaving the rest of the dishes on the table and, unwashed, in the sink, Daisy went to the living room, where she sat on the edge of the fireplace, feeling the cold stone underneath her. She wasn’t unfamiliar with feeling inadequate or unlettered, in a world where all the men and almost all the women she’d met had finished college, and most of them had earned advanced degrees, but this was the first time she’d thought about Beatrice seeing her that way. She wondered if, someday, her daughter would treat her with that same faintly patronizing air she’d gotten used to in her years as Hal Shoemaker’s wife.
Daisy pulled her phone out of her pocket and started googling. The play begins at Christmastime as Nora Helmer enters her home carrying many packages. Torvald, her husband, playfully teases her for spending so much money, calling her his “little squirrel.”
Daisy grimaced and slipped her phone in her pocket. Upstairs, the door to the bedroom that she and Hal shared was half-open, and she could hear the sound of the television, the voices of the sportscasters on ESPN. Hal would be lying on the bed, shoes off, feet up, maybe scrolling through some documents on his iPad, half paying attention to what was on TV. Beatrice’s door was closed, but Daisy could hear music—Enya, she thought, or maybe Conan Lee Gray—coming from her daughter’s bedroom, and could picture Beatrice in her rocker, furiously needle-felting, her face red as she jabbed her needle into the wool. She stood for a moment, undecided, then turned and went to the guest bedroom, which was empty for most of the year. No matter how she pleaded with Danny and Jesse to come for a weekend, or even a night, they were always busy, or off to someplace better: Fire Island or Florence or San Francisco. She didn’t bother to turn on the light when she lay on top of the comforter. Lester followed her into the room and heaved himself up onto the bed on his second attempt. Daisy downloaded the entire play, scrolling through it, faster and faster, skimming, then reading closely when she neared the end.
“Then I passed over from father’s hands into yours,” Nora said. “You settled everything according to your taste; or I did only what you liked; I don’t exactly know. I think it was both ways, first one and then the other. When I look back on it now it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor man, only from hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and father have sinned greatly against me.”