Traditional Gravity

by Stephen Armstrong

Chapter Twelve

  Saturday morning brought a gray sky and soaking rain. I awoke in a corresponding cloud of confusion, feeling like a deadline loomed over me. I got dressed, and then entered the living room, where Jordan lay on the couch watching 'Sportscenter'.

  "Want to go into town, grab some donuts or something?" he asked, the moment he saw me.

  "I guess so."

  We headed into town and stopped at a store renowned for its donuts. After buying some coffee and donuts, we sat down in one of the corner booths. People leisurely enjoying their coffee and newspapers filled the little store.

  "You seem preoccupied," observed Jordan, watching me closely. "What's on your mind?"

  I shrugged. "Just life if general I guess. I sort of feel like I'm at a crossroads, and I need to make a decision."

  "You mean like job stuff? Or where you live?" asked Jordan.

  "Yes," I answered.

  "Yes to which one?"

  "Both, I guess."

  Jordan took a bite of his donut and a sip of his coffee and then sat back in his chair. "If you're thinking about making some kind of life change, why don't you look for a job in the New York metro area? You could even live with me for a while."

  Apparently, Jordan assumed I wouldn't like this idea, because he quickly added, "I know you don't necessarily love where I live, but there are more job opportunities down there. Besides, you can meet more people your own age and there's a ton of different things you could get involved in."

  Both of these claims were probably true. Although I initially bristled at the notion of rooming with Jordan, given the different ways we approached life, it was actually a decent idea. A change of scenery might do me good. But it failed to grab me as much as the other paths I considered, because no specific girl was attached to it.

  "Thanks," I replied. "I'll keep it in mind."

  We finished up our donuts, and departed for home.

  Back at my parent's house, I received a surprise call from Will.

  "You wanna play catch? You know, get warmed up for softball season?"

  "Uh sure, I guess so." I didn't have anything else to do but think, and would happily forgo that for a while.

  Will and I met at the high school field a half hour after he called. We walked to the first base side of the field and began our tossing session. As our arms warmed up, we moved further and further away. Will told me about his softball team and about their prospects for the coming year. None of it was more than marginally interesting. Eventually, I found my way to left field. Will stayed in right field and we played long toss until our arms grew tired.

  "Beer?" offered Will, fishing it out of the truck after we walked back to the parking lot.

  "Sure." I took the beer and followed Will to the metal bleachers, which were wet and way too cold to sit down on, though we did anyway.

  "You still seeing that Samantha girl?"

  "Up until yesterday I was."

  "What happened?"

  I didn't feel like telling the entire story again. "I guess she wasn't really looking for a relationship."

  Will just nodded. Just then, a figure caught our gaze - a woman running on the track. The track served as a boundary in right field until it curved its way around the football field. We couldn't see the mysterious figure clearly, but her general form piqued Will's interest. Young and lean, long blond hair, reasonably endowed - she certainly seemed attractive.

  "If I were you I'd be going for a run right now," Will said.

  I chuckled. "Is that because I'm the one who's not married or I'm the only one here who could catch her?"

  "Laugh all you want, but you should at least take a closer look - she looks really hot."

  "I'd probably pull a muscle." The woman seemed like an athlete and moved at a good clip. As she drew nearer, I speculated that she might have been a college student, or a little out of college. Will finished his beer and put the can down next to him. The runner arced away from us.

  "Becca's pregnant."

  I turned and looked at him. This wasn't shocking news - they had been married for almost five years. Nevertheless, they were the first contemporary couple of mine that I knew who were having a child - besides the few girls who been knocked up in high school.

  "Congratulations." I tried to sound enthusiastic, but not over the top.

  "Thanks."

  "Is this something you guys wanted for a while?"

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  I drank more of my beer. The runner progressed to the other side of the track. Will still followed her movements.

  "I guess your life is about to change."

  He nodded. The runner completed another circle and reached the closest point of her orbit again.

  "Yeah, I would be running after her if I was you."

  I shook my head. "Seems I prefer redheads."

  As Will continued to monitor the runner, I tried to put myself in his shoes. Would I have been staring longingly at the girl on the track if Samantha or Wendy was carrying my child? To answer the question, I imagined each scenario. Wendy voiced her desire for children on more than one occasion. I pictured her with a pregnant belly, beautiful and terrifying as we picked out baby items at some mind numbingly large department store. An image of a pregnant Samantha proved harder to formulate in my mind. Would she view her next pregnancy with a sense of redemption, or under Aidan's shadow?

  After simulating my own child coming, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something universal in Will's ambivalence toward fatherhood. Still, one of the major arcs of Will's story was being written, whether he welcomed it or not.

  We watched the runner finish another lap before she vanished at the far end of the track, down the hill to the school below before we went our separate ways.

  Once home, I resumed the painful process of deciding how I could move toward the meaning. Jordan found me in the living room, looking at no identifiable object.

  "You want to visit Grandma?"

  "Grandma?"

  "Yes, Grandma - you know, our mom's mom? Lives in Hadenburg? We call her Grandma?"

  "I know who she is - it's just that we've never visited her without Mom before."

  "You might be right," he conceded. "First time for everything though, right?"

  I possessed no objection against visiting Grandma. She would probably welcome the company after the busyness of observing my grandpa's death had passed, and nothing else remained to be done, except to absorb the loss. Anyway, I possessed no objective criteria on how I should move toward the meaning, and would welcome another diversion.

  "All right, let's go."

  We made the thirty minute trip, finally winding down a narrow country road flanked by doublewides and other rural dwellings, until we reached my grandparents' turn of the century farmhouse. Though currently yellow, my strongest memories painted the house green. Grandma spent the last seventy years in that place, and if she had it her way, she would live there until she died. Of course people didn't always get what they wanted.

  We walked the six concrete steps to the front porch and knocked on the door. "Come on in," a voice announced from the inside.

  I turned the unlocked handle and pushed the door open. My grandmother occupied the living room to the left and slowly rose out of her chair to greet us.

  "Sorry, it's kinda hard for me to get up too fast these days."

  She did manage to stand and put her arms out to hug Jordan and me. After the warm embrace, we sat on the couch across the room from her chair. Floral wall paper and homemade cross stitchings of Thomas Kinkade paintings adorned the wall and screamed country living. Various photographs of her children and grandchildren filled every end table and shelf. On the other side of the end table sat my grandpa's empty chair.

  "Well, this is a surprise," she said. "After so many days filled with people, this one felt a little lonely - so I'm glad you're here." She smiled kindly at us, her default expression to her grandchildren.

  "Glad we could keep you co
mpany," Jordan replied. Since we didn't typically talk privately with Grandma, I hoped Jordan would take the lead.

  "It was a good service Thursday. Grandpa would have been happy with it, I think," said Jordan.

  She nodded. "Yes, I think he would have liked it. It was simple, but he was a simple man." She chuckled softly.

  "That he was," Jordan agreed.

  "That was sure a pretty little thing you brought to the funeral yesterday Evan, and so sweet too."

  "Thank you." I opted not to tell her that the "pretty little thing" had discharged me from her life the day before. I didn't want pity, or to give Grandma any bad news. She had dealt with enough grief in the last few days to trouble her with mine.

  "Where did you say you knew her from? Was it high school?"

  "Yeah, she went to high school with me. She was two years younger than me though."

  "Well, your grandpa and I met in high school too. And he was two years older than I was." She smiled again. "Of course we ended up in the same grade though - I got promoted one and he got demoted one. I guess you could say we met in the middle."

  I had heard that detail before. The rest of their courtship remained mostly unknown to me, except for the fact that they married soon out of high school.

  "Your father and mother met in high school too," she added, throwing out another milepost for Samantha and me to follow.

  "Would you like some pie or cookies, or something?" she asked, after Jordan and I declined to say anything further about Samantha.

  "No thanks. It's a little early for pie," responded Jordan. We were taught as children to say no whenever anyone offered us anything, so as to not be a burden.

  She started walking to the kitchen anyway. "Nonsense! You're going to have to help me eat all of this food that people have been bringing me. Besides, it's never too early for pie." Jordan and I followed her through the dining room into the kitchen. A plethora of food lay on the table, stacked up on dishes and ornamental baskets.

  "It's nice of people to think of me, but I'm only one person and I'm not supposed to eat any of this anyway." She found an apple pie on the other side of the table, and held up it so we could see. "I didn't make it - but Mary Anne Palmer did and she usually makes good pies."

  My grandmother took three plates down from one of her cabinets, and retrieved some forks from the silverware drawer. While she did that, I surveyed the contents of a hutch in the dining room that housed dozens more pictures. I had seen all of these photos before. There were wedding pictures of my mom and dad, and uncles and aunts, plus an assortment of baby pictures. I searched each one anew, as if they would tell me a different story, or fill in details that I hadn't known or connected before. Perhaps the resulting information would give me a new vantage point to understand Grandpa's life. But the smiles in the photographs were the same.

  "Guess I might have a piece too, just to be social," Grandma announced wryly.

  She cut the pie for us and we took our plates to the dining room table - the same table I ate every Christmas dinner in my life at. Usually everyone in my mom's family was there too. I felt a little empty with just the three of us around the table.

  A large book in the center of the table caught my eye. It was the size of a scrap book or maybe a photo album, with a black and white picture of a young man and woman standing next to one another on the cover. The woman smiled generously, while the man wore only a small grin.

  "That was your grandfather and me, pretty soon after we were married," she told me, noticing that I was staring at the book. "You can look through it if you want. We took it out when we were looking for pictures for the wake."

  I pulled the book closer to me, careful to keep it a safe distance away from my pie. Jordan peered at the album over my shoulder.

  "He was a handsome man," I observed.

  "Yeah, I suppose he was. Except for that pointy nose of his. But even that grew on me. Of course I didn't want to tell him too much, because I didn't want him to get too big of a head."

  "You were a lovely bride." In that photo her now gray hair was dark, and her wrinkled skin smooth. The shape of the face and the smile in the picture were still hers - time hadn't altered those.

  She chuckled. "Haven't looked like that woman for a long time."

  Grandma hadn't changed much in my eyes. Her gray, curly hair was still cut to the same length. She complained about the extra pounds she gained, though I didn't notice. "When were you and Grandpa married?" asked Jordan.

  "Nineteen forty. Just two years before he was sent off to the war." She sighed. "Lord, where did all of the years go to?"

  That seemed to be a question meant for her to ponder, but I contemplated its answer too. The simple answer was that all of the years had been spent raising children, working, and moving on to retirement. Still, I saw something mystical in the passing of time, in the movement of youth to old age, that defied my understanding.

  I opened the book to the first page to find a picture of my grandfather holding a baby next to my grandma and two pictures of him in uniform, arm in arm with his wife.

  "The first picture of him in the uniform is him before he went to the war, and the other one is when he came home."

  I nodded. "Is that my mother?"

  She didn't even have to look. "Yes, that's her when she was three months old."

  "You know, I thought back then it was silly to spend so much on a camera. My brother had a camera, and he took pictures some for us, but we had a falling out. I just figured I would always remember the important times. But now all these years later, there's so much more I wish I caught on photograph."

  "Like what Grandma?" I asked.

  "Well, if I could remember, I wouldn't need the pictures," she smiled. "But I know a lot's been lost after all these years."

  A picture of my grandpa and grandma standing next to a sparkling convertible caught my eye. They were older - a little more wrinkled, a little thicker at the waists - but it was still well before I was born. I would've guessed they were in their late thirties, maybe early forties.

  "When was this one taken?" asked Jordan.

  "That one?" She peered across the table to see what Jordan was referring to. "I don't remember quite when. It was a little before your mom went to college. That was us with one of his new cars. We didn't have much money, but somehow we always had enough for Eugene to trade in our old car for something new." She shook her head, but gazed at the photo affectionately. "There were so many times I wanted to wring that man's neck! But now that he's gone, I kind of miss the old buzzard."

  We raised our eyes to his usual spot at the end of the table. Who could tell how many years passed through her mind in that moment? If a mere four years of history paralyzed me as I perused the halls of my high school, what kind of force did seventy years pack for her?

  While we scrolled through the album, I imagined it was my life captured in a photograph album like this one. Instead of my grandma narrating, it was Wendy or Samantha, sharing her life with our grandchildren.

  "This is your grandfather and me after we got back together again. Did you know he broke up with me? Fortunately, he came to his senses," Wendy might've said. "We had a good life together. A lot of memories."

  Or it could've been Samantha giving the photo tour. "Your grandfather never gave up on me. I tried to get rid of him, but I couldn't. And I'm glad he stayed around. Best decision I ever made." Then again, maybe the photos of us, and the things we shared over the years would never compensate for the photos that weren't there - of her and Aidan.

  We sifted through the rest of the book and talked some more. In another thirty minutes or so, Jordan and I decided we should go. We both stood up from the table and I walked our plates into the kitchen.

  "Why don't you take the rest home for your family? Lord knows I don't need it."

  We graciously took the pie off of my grandma's hands, plus a platter of homemade cookies. We hugged each other, she thanked us for our company, and saw us off to the
door.

  Driving away from the old farmhouse that would one day pass into the hands of others, I once again searched for any overarching purpose in my grandparents' seventy years of marriage. All I saw was a quiet, almost involuntary love, that weathered many years, trials and aggravations. Was this the grand reason for our existence, to find that kind of love? My parents exhibited a similar love, where affection was expressed more in occasional irritation than the reckless passion of youth. I doubted I could ever be content with such a relationship. Yet after watching Grandma at her dining room table, I couldn't question the weightiness that bond possessed now.

  Perhaps the meaning I anxiously searched for was mostly imperceptible, manifesting itself only in brief moments of transcendence - wedding days, family celebrations, the birth of children - before it faded into the background of the ordinary. When life came to an end, or we looked back at different moments from our past, then we could sense the meaning that had been present all along.

  I would have preferred for life's meaning be much more palpable than that. Ultimately, I concluded that this was further evidence that I should live my life like there was meaning, even if I couldn't pinpoint it at any one moment.