“HELLO? THIS IS a message for Kathleen Levine? I got your name and number from Rabbi Hertz? My name is Brigid Gallagher-Steinberg, and Rabbi Hertz wanted me to contact you about the library at the temple?”
Kathleen stared out the window while she listened to the string of questions. Back from treatment, with the day ahead of her, she noticed that her tomato plants needed staking.
It was a nice day. But she didn’t feel like walking the beach alone. Joyce was back in the city now, getting Nina ready for camp. Kathleen sat at the kitchen table and glanced at the calendar.
It was almost July, which meant it was almost August.
Danny would have been twenty-six. He could have married by now, Kathleen thought. She folded her arms and put her forehead down. Of her three boys, he had been the most social. He was fascinated with little babies; he tried to swaddle his teddy bear like an infant. She would have been a grandmother. She lowered her cheek to the cool-hard Formica, but there were no tears.
“No!” she thought, sitting upright. She had no idea what Danny would have been like. He was a three-year-old who sucked his fingers and wanted Goodnight Moon five times a night. He thought his big brother walked on water. He never met Jack, never got to be a big brother himself. He was barely out of diapers on the day that car knocked him into the tree, headfirst.
The day before the accident, Kathleen had taken Danny to Muchnik’s Shoes downtown and bought him new sneakers. Red Keds. He wanted the red ones. Twenty-five years ago. The red sneakers against the white sheet on the stretcher. They could have looked like bloodstains, but they didn’t. They looked like roses.
Kathleen shuddered and started looking for her car keys. There was no rule against visiting the cemetery on days other than the anniversary, she thought. She would go by herself. Right now. Why not?
The phone rang.
“Mrs. Levine? This is Brigid Gallagher-Steinberg again? I couldn’t remember if I left my phone number or not? So I thought I’d call and leave it on your machine? But there you are.”
“Here I am,” Kathleen said abruptly.
“I’m sorry if this isn’t a good time,” Brigid said, her cadence flattened by Kathleen’s tone.
“No, it’s okay. I was going out. But there’s no rush.”
Brigid had been deputized to chair the library subcommittee for children’s books. “Rabbi Hertz picked me because I asked why there were no books for my little boy at the temple? You’ve got to be really, really careful what you say around her. My husband is running a committee to see about adding a handicapped-accessible bathroom because he told her about a case he’s doing on the Americans with Disabilities Act? He works for the attorney general’s office?”
“Yes,” said Kathleen, putting the keys into her purse.
“Rabbi Hertz says you’re a professional children’s librarian? So I wonder if I could bring over the books we already have and also a bunch of catalogs? Oh, and there’s a really good children’s collection at this temple down in Lexington? They have a full-time librarian. I talked to her, and she was really nice and said we could go down there for a visit?”
“I’m not sure I’m up to that.”
“I could drive.”
Annoyed that Brigid hadn’t taken the hint, Kathleen said, “I’m afraid that the radiation treatments are making me tired.”
“Radiation?” Brigid gasped. “I’m so sorry. Rabbi Hertz didn’t say anything about any, anything, any treatment. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t understand why she didn’t. Really, I am so sorry.”
Kathleen flushed, ashamed at the way she’d blindsided this poor woman. “Oh, it was probably meant as a gift, her not treating me like an invalid. I don’t really want to be treated like I’m sick.” Except I do, thought Kathleen. “I’m having radiation for breast cancer. My doctors tell me I’ll be fine.”
“No chemo?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s good. My friend, Nancy? She had radiation and chemo after her surgery? The chemo was awful.” There was a long pause.
“I’m not that bad off.” Kathleen made herself add, “I’m lucky.”
Brigid said she’d understand if Kathleen would prefer not to get involved. “You’ve got plenty on your plate.”
“Actually, I don’t. Besides, you’re right about the rabbi. I’m not sure I didn’t agree to do it. Why don’t you drop off the catalogs. But I think I’d rather wait and see about the field trip. I am pretty tired these days.” Kathleen wasn’t sure she wanted to spend hours in the car with Brigid of the Perpetual Question.
When she got off the phone, Kathleen went out to the deck and tended to the flower boxes. Slipping off her shoes, she walked barefoot over the warm paving stones to rescue her two drooping tomato plants, which is where Brigid found her.
“I knocked on the door and rang the bell?” she said as she rearranged the little boy straddling her hip. “This is Nathan.” She brushed thick red hair off his freckled forehead. “Can you say hello to Mrs. Levine?”
“Nathan?” asked Kathleen. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.” Nathan buried his head in his mother’s shoulder. “Hello, Nathan. Do you like teeny tiny toads?”
“No!” said Nathan, his voice muffled.
“Oh, too bad. Because there’s one right under this leaf. Are you sure you don’t want to see him?”
Brigid crouched down and Nathan peeked. “Oooh,” he said, catching sight of the thumbnail-sized creature as it hopped away.
Kathleen invited Brigid and Nathan in for cookies and milk, but they were on their way to a play date. Brigid — a slender redhead in denim shorts and a Rockport T-shirt — carried a shopping bag filled with catalogs to the deck. She put Nathan down while she fetched a box from her car.
“Are you two years old?” Kathleen asked.
Nathan nodded warily.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I won’t pinch your cheeks or kiss you. But I hope you’ll come back and find the teeny tiny toad with me. He lives in my garden in a teeny tiny house with an itsy-bitsy mouse and a squeaky beaky grouse.”
Nathan stuck his thumb in his mouth, but his eyes smiled.
Brigid returned with a cardboard box that held the entire contents of the temple’s juvenile collection. “There isn’t much here. The rabbi said to recycle anything — or everything. It’s up to you.”
Brigid lifted her son, kissed him on either cheek, and asked, “Um, Mrs. Levine? I gotta ask. With a name like Kathleen? Are you Catholic?”
“I converted to Judaism before I married my husband. What about you, Brigid?”
“That would kill my mother. But the kids are going to be Jewish? I mean, we’re raising them Jewish? Actually, I’m raising them Jewish. My husband isn’t all that into it? You know?”
“Yes, I do.”
Kathleen walked Brigid to her car.
“Will you come back sometime, Nathan?” Kathleen asked.
He looked at her for a moment and nodded.
“So you’ll call me when you’ve gotten a chance to look through this stuff?” Brigid asked.
“Yes.”
“Say bye-bye, Nathan.” But Nathan shook his head no.
“Bye-bye,” said Kathleen.
The house felt empty. She switched on the radio, but that only made the rooms seem even more desolate. The phone rang. “How ’bout a fish sandwich for lunch?” Buddy asked.
“Okay,” Kathleen said, thinking of the way Nathan nodded with his thumb in his mouth. Danny had sucked his two middle fingers.
Buddy showed up twenty minutes later with the sandwiches, french fries, and two chocolate milk shakes. Kathleen had dropped eight pounds since the surgery. Buddy had noticed; she saw it in his eyes every time she changed into her nightgown.
Marcy had noticed and asked about her appetite. But Kathleen liked being thinner. It made her feel younger. Besides, food didn’t appeal to her much these days.
Buddy coaxed her to finish his shake after she polished off
hers. “I guess I was hungry,” she said, spooning the last of Buddy’s coleslaw onto her plate.
“Good. Now, how about a nap? You were up again last night, weren’t you?” he said.
“Maybe I could sleep.” Kathleen shrugged. “Would you lie down with me for a moment?”
“Sure.”
He lowered the blinds and turned back the bedspread. Kathleen took off her gardening pants and stretched out. Buddy came out of the bathroom in his shorts. He lowered himself to his side, his eyes on her.
“What are you looking at?”
“My beautiful wife.”
Kathleen smiled. “Keep the glasses off, m’dear.”
“You are beautiful,” he whispered. “Even more than when we met.” She kissed him and ran her fingers over his kind, rugged face. He was still a good-looking man, but he had aged. His face was craggy, his chin was starting to slacken into jowls, and there were thick white hairs in his nose and ears. She could go for days on end forgetting how much she had changed, but Buddy’s face reminded her of the passing of time.
Of course, she never said that to him. There were lots of things she never said to Buddy. Kathleen believed it was the secret of their marital happiness.
She’d known a man, once, to whom she had said everything that popped into her head, but that was years ago. Stan might be dead, for all she knew.
It was good to have Joyce to talk to.
She smiled at her husband, whose eyes were still clear and tender. “I love you, too.”
He leaned in to kiss her. A real kiss, mouth to mouth. He drew her toward him. Kathleen was flattered on the occasions Buddy got aroused. He reached around, holding her backside in his big hands, a move that still made her feel like a girl. She pushed into his embrace, feeling his erection.
“One second,” she said, and turned to get the lubricant from the drawer.
Kathleen woke up an hour later and found a stem of Sweet William on the pillow beside her. She stared at the red-and-white stripe of the flower and ran a finger around its pinking-shear edge. Does anyone still own pinking shears? she wondered.
She was restless. She hadn’t climaxed with Buddy. She reached under the sheet and touched herself. She tried to remember what it was about Stan that had been so tempting, so compelling. She had risked everything for those afternoons, each one thrilling not just for the sex, but also for the talk. Stan was a great talker, and she had never made anyone laugh so much. Now she couldn’t even remember what he looked like.
She closed her eyes, and Dr. Singh’s face materialized. Kathleen giggled. She wondered whether all his patients fantasized about him.
She thought of his full, cupid-bow lips. She remembered his hands on her. The nut-colored skin. Hands with long, tapered fingers, long, oval nails. Oh, those hands.
JULY
JOYCE spent another whole week behind the wheel of her car, working her way through a long list of errands in advance of Nina’s departure for camp. And then there was her daughter’s urgent social calendar: she had to sleep at Sylvie’s house; Rachel’s sleepover was the last one until September; going to the movies with Jesse was the only thing she wanted to do.
“What if I sit on the other side of the theater?” Joyce asked as she drove the girls to the multiplex. “You won’t even know I’m there.”
“I would, too, know it,” Nina snapped.
Joyce opened her mouth to argue, thought better of it, and said nothing.
Nina finally agreed to spend a few hours with Joyce, shopping for camp clothes. They bought sneakers and shorts at the sporting goods store without incident. The underwear purchase went smoothly, but at Old Navy, Joyce said, “Honey, I’m not going to spend forty-nine dollars on a pair of pants that are going to get wrecked at camp.”
“I am not going to wreck them,” said Nina, her eyes instantly glazed with furious tears. “These are the only ones that fit me.” She slammed the dressing-room-cubicle door.
A woman outside another door caught Joyce’s eye and shrugged. “They’re all like that,” she whispered. “They get better.”
“Promise?” Joyce whispered back.
The well-dressed stranger nodded as her daughter — tall, chubby, and pouting — walked out of another cubicle carrying a stack of jeans. “Nothing,” she said, glumly handing the jeans to her mother in a messy heap.
“Do I look like the maid?” the woman asked in a strangled voice that Joyce recognized. The girl shot her mother the Teenage Death Ray look, grabbed the pants, and shoved them at another sullen teenager wearing a headset, whose miserable job was to fold rejected items.
“Nina,” Joyce said softly through the door, “let’s just buy those pants and go home.”
Nina opened the door and smiled. “Thank you, Mommy.”
Joyce and Frank drove two cars to see Nina off. Side by side, they watched as the buses pulled away. “Seven weeks,” Frank said. “I don’t know whether to cry or cheer.”
Joyce nodded.
Frank took her hand. He chewed the inside of his lip. “She’ll come back more mature.”
Joyce, fighting tears, didn’t respond.
“You’re a great mom.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” she said. “Want to grab a cup of coffee?”
“Sorry, Joyce, I’m already late for a meeting that I can’t miss.” He kissed her on the cheek. “See you later?”
“Are you going to come up to Gloucester?”
“Looks good. I’ll call this afternoon.”
Joyce watched Frank drive off. She sat in her car and promised herself that she would write every single day that Nina was gone. She would walk the beach with Kathleen every day. She would start Nina’s room this afternoon. And she wouldn’t wait for Frank to make the first move. She’d ask him what was going on. She’d do it tonight.
Or maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe he would show up at the house with flowers and they would make love every night for a week. Maybe things would be fine.
FRANK DIDN’T COME up that night. He called at four to say he’d just been informed of an evening teleconference with a new set of potential buyers. He called at eight-thirty the next morning to check in. “I should make up it there tonight.” But at four, when Joyce was at the supermarket, he left a sheepish message about a programming bug that might take all night to correct. In the morning he said he probably couldn’t come up that evening since they had a 7 A.M. meeting the following day and that it was possible he’d be stuck working through the weekend.
Joyce let that bit of news hang on the line between them.
“Joyce? I’m really sorry, but it’s crunch time here.”
“I know,” she snapped. “What about Sunday? Can’t you at least take off Sunday afternoon?”
“I’ll try. I’m sorry. Is it nice being up there?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said icily.
“Are you getting work done?”
“Yes.”
“You seeing Kathleen?”
“Yes.” Joyce wasn’t going to let him off the hook by making her life sound pleasant.
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Fine.” Joyce slammed the phone down. Son of a bitch, who needs him anyway? She was enjoying the physical labor of painting. She was sleeping ten hours a night. And her time at the beach with Kathleen was wonderful.
They seemed to have an endless supply of things to talk about. Headlines, bathing suits, books, and story by story, themselves. As soon as she caught sight of Kathleen at Good Harbor, Joyce became aware of the clenched tightness in her jaw and noticed how it eased as they walked together.
“I think I’m relieved Nina is gone,” Joyce said as they started across the beach. “In fact, I’m so relieved that I don’t even feel guilty.”
“It’s probably good for you to have a break from each other.”
When two women stopped Kathleen to ask about how her treatment was going, Joyce stared out at the horizon. By the time they reached the end of the beach
, she marveled at the change in her mood. “I can’t believe how much better I feel already. Why is that?”
“I think it’s the emptiness,” Kathleen said, rolling up her trousers. “Or that straight line between the sea and the sky. Or the size of it all. I don’t know, but it does put things in perspective.”
As the week progressed, Joyce and Kathleen permitted longer silences into their conversations, confident that the lulls would end in new territory. Like troughs between waves, Joyce thought.
After a few minutes of quiet, Joyce said, “You’ve told me a lot about your sister, but I don’t know anything about the rest of your family — your father, your mother . . .”
“My poor mother,” Kathleen said, shaking her head. “Pat, my mother, and I lived with my gran, my father’s mother, after he walked out on us. My grandmother decided it was my mother’s fault that he was a drunk, which was terribly unfair, but there was no challenging Gran.
“My mom worked for an insurance agency to support us all. Gran stayed home with Pat and me, and she was good to us — as good as she knew how to be. But she made my mother’s life miserable. My mother bore it in silence, as far as I know, and I suspect she did blame herself for my father’s desertion. I was fifteen when we heard he died.
“My mom and my gran died within a year of each other. Strokes, both of them. Neither one lived to see my boys.”
“I’m sorry,” said Joyce.
“Yes. And what about your mother, is she still alive?”
“My mother is alive and well on a golf course outside of Prescott.”
“Where is that?”
“Arizona. She and my dad got divorced when I was a freshman in college, and she remarried a couple of years later. Bob, the second husband, had four kids, and she raised the two younger ones. Her life revolves around his children and golf. And since I hate golf, our conversations are pretty brief.”
“I’m sorry,” Kathleen said.
“Yeah, me, too. But it’s been like that for twenty-two years, so I don’t expect anything else. Boy, was I ever determined to be totally different from her. To have a house full of kids, instead of an only child like I was. And to never ever let that kind of distance come between Nina and me. Of course, I’m learning how little control you actually have over what happens between you and your kids.”
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