Household Gods

The owner of the voice, Nicole realized, was rather obviously pregnant. She didn’t seem to be blooming, but rather the Rosemary’s Baby type: wan and hollow-cheeked, but in this case irrepressibly cheerful. She held up a cup and said brightly, “Good morning, Umma! It’s been absolute days since I saw you. Here, look, I have an excuse. I’m out of oil and my dear woollyhead of a husband has gone off all day drumming up clients, and it’s such a long walk to the market.”

Nicole was no recent expert in cup-of-sugar diplomacy, but she’d seen plenty of it when she was growing up. If it wasn’t sugar, it was coffee, or maybe, in extremity, a cigarette: a transparent excuse to come by, camp in the kitchen, and chatter the morning away. Housewives did it to lighten the monotony, or to get out of washing the ceilings, or to drum up sympathy for this or that husbandly stunt.

In Carnuntum, apparently, the medium of exchange was olive oil. Nicole spared a half-instant to wonder if Umma actually gave away what she sold to regular customers, then shrugged and dipped the cupful. Her neighbor, as she’d expected, didn’t just thank her and leave, but perched on a stool near the counter where Nicole was working. It was a slow time of day, as she must have known and calculated. She looked as if she was a regular occupant of that same stool, easy and comfortable – surprisingly so for someone whose pregnancy didn’t seem to be treating her well.

“So,” she said. “How is everything, then? Do you believe what Valentia got up to with that traveling eye-doctor? Why, I hear her husband whipped her black and blue – then she made him feel so guilty he gave her a new necklace! Imagine that!”

Nicole hadn’t known she was tense till she felt the muscles of her back and shoulders relax. This was the easy kind of neighbor, then, the one who never let you get a word in edgewise. She didn’t appear to notice anything odd about Nicole, nor did she expect any answer to her rapid-fire questions – just rattled right on through them. There was something strangely soothing in the endless flow of her voice, names and events that were as alien to Nicole as the far side of the moon, but so many of them were familiar, too: this couple married, that one divorced (“And he tried to pretend her dowry was his own family money, can you believe that? Got slapped good and proper for that one, you can be sure!”), a third blessed with a son, “and about time, too, after six daughters – they had to expose the last four, they just couldn’t feed them.”

The woman sighed. Her face, for a moment, was almost somber. “Some people have children and don’t want them. Me, I want them and neither of my first two saw even one birthday.” Nicole heard her with grim astonishment. Things like that didn’t happen in California. No – they did, but rarely enough that they put you on the talk-show circuit with your anguish. Well, Nicole’s neighbor was on the talk-show circuit, too. She sighed and patted her belly. “This time, by Mother Isis, everything will be fine. It will.”

On and on it went. Somewhere in the middle, Julia came down from cleaning upstairs, greeting the visitor with a smile of honest pleasure and a delighted, “Fabia Ursa! How good to see you. You’re looking well.” Which gave Nicole a name and a respite, while they chattered at each other for a while – till Julia seemed to remember her status and excused herself to take the heap of soiled bedding and filthy clothes across the street to Titus Calidius Severus, who would trample them in a tub full of water and fuller’s earth. No washing machines or laundromats here. No Tide, either, worse luck.

Nicole realized as the morning went on that she liked Fabia Ursa. She also realized she couldn’t say that of anyone else she’d met in Carnuntum, even Lucius and Aurelia. It was odd, because back in the twentieth century she’d cordially despised the kaffeeklatsch queens, as she’d liked to call them. Fabia Ursa was a cheerful soul, happily married to a somewhat feckless but much beloved husband, whose foibles she was not shy about sharing. She had two slaves who did everything, as she professed, and had not much to do, it seemed, but trot about and discover who was doing what to whom. She did it with such relish, and with such a clear sense of vocation, that it was impossible to dislike, still less despise her.

Yes, Nicole liked Fabia Ursa. She was not so sure at all that she liked Titus Calidius Severus. Sometimes she did. Then he’d say something, or do something, to set her off again.

He waved to Nicole whenever they saw each other outside their front doors. She always answered politely, and she remembered to use his praenomen. Past calling him Titus, however, she gave him nothing he could take for encouragement.