by Toni Graham
Slater had not realized that Beth shopped at the Dollar Thrift-O. Well, who can guess about someone else’s life, even their spouse’s? He cuts to the chase: “Was she alone?”
SueAnn confirms that Beth was by herself.
“What did she buy?” he asks.
Poor SueAnn actually stutters her answer and seems extremely discomfited; her face again turns a deep red. “I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who rang her up,” she says. “But she’s a real pretty lady, very nice looking.”
“I cheated on her in L.A.,” he announces.
SueAnn’s and Holly’s faces register shock, and Holly even covers the bottom half of her face with her hands. But this much he knows for sure: they are not even half as surprised as he is. Until the very moment the confession spilled from his mouth, he would have sworn on Poppy’s grave he was not going to tell anyone about his misconduct.
“But …” SueAnne says, not finishing her thought. She and Holly both wear the bug-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of actors miming surprise on a TV sitcom.
Slater touches the arm of a waiter passing by the table. “I’ll have a Rusty Nail, please.”
Slater and the women sit in silence. The pressure belt sears his waist like a branding iron.
As he walks from Sancho’s to his car, even though his heels are now bandaged, Slater still feels the pain of each step forward and has to suffer the indignity of walking with a stuttering gait like some old gaffer. But in this instant, out of nowhere, the stabbing sensation in his feet calls forth something. Slater is a kid, maybe four or five, and he is limping along with Poppy, the bottoms of his feet radiating pain. He is wearing his brand-new summer sandals, which his mother, with what Slater years later realized was Depression-era mentality, has insisted on buying a size too large in order for him to “grow into them”—a phrase that actually means the shoes will be too large for several months and will then begin to fit properly just as the weather becomes too cold for sandals. The friction of the sandals slipping and sliding and rubbing against his feet has raised hellish blisters.
It’s just Davey and Poppy, and they are walking from the green DeSoto across a parking lot that is paved with hot asphalt. They are in Queens, at Rockaway Beach. Where was Mom that day? He cannot now guess why he and his father went to Rockaway on their own. But he does remember the smells, the smell of sand and salt water and sweet taffy and popcorn and Sea and Ski sunscreen—still called “suntan lotion” in those days. God, the sensory montage intoxicates him even in this moment. He begged his father to take him directly to Playland, saving the beach for later, but his father, always mesmerized by the ocean, tugged at his hand. In those days Rockaway was still known as the Irish Riviera, and the surfing culture had not yet sprung up. But Rockaway’s Playland was amusement-park heaven to the boy, even more than Coney Island. One of the most calamitous events of Slater’s adult life was Playland being torn down in ‘87 and replaced by houses.
On this particular day at Rockaway, Davey Slater had been able to think only of the carousel and a bag of salted peanuts in a striped paper sack. He envisioned himself astride a huge wooden steed, goading the painted horse with the leather strap and galloping along on the carousel, munching peanuts at the same time. His mouth now waters. But another sensation set in for Davey Slater at that point: he and his father stepped onto the sandy beach, and as he trudged forward, sand bunched in his sandals and settled in lumps that rubbed against the watery blisters on the bottom of his feet. Tears burned his eyes, but he did not want his father to see him crying.
“Never mind, buddy,” Poppy told him. “We’ll do the beach later—let’s schlep over to the rides.” His father picked him up and hoisted him to his broad shoulders, rescuing his son’s stinging feet from the hot sand. Poppy wore a white cotton T-shirt, smooth and soft under Slater’s bare legs. One of Poppy’s cartoonishly large forearms bore a garish tattoo featuring a large anchor and the words U.S. Navy—this in the days before tattoos were within the purview of young hipsters but were still somewhat louche emblems of working-class men and GIs. From the T-shirt rose the new-mown-fragrant scent of the Tide detergent in which Mom washed the family’s clothing. Being astride his strong father’s powerful longshoreman’s shoulders was even more thrilling than riding a carousel horse, and Slater was infused with a nearly beatific joy.
Two smells of that instant now enter Slater’s nose again, not remembered but actually present—the primary scents of everyone’s father in the fifties, Prell shampoo and Old Spice.
He slogs forward, his feet and midsection blowtorching his body, heading toward his car, which will take him to his house, where he will have to talk with Beth. Another of the slogans Poppy sometimes repeated was that people never lie so much as after a hunt or before a war.
Slater has tried for more than a year to tamp down thoughts of his father. He knows that memory is the ultimate gill net, ready to snare you and yank you away from your source of air. But lately he has been slipping down, sinking into that opal-dark pool. He does not seem to be able to remember himself in a very good light. What floats up is the recollection of the time he called his father an asshole, or the time when he was fifteen and took money out of his mother’s pocketbook.
Limping, Slater makes his way toward his Solstice, which is parked in the front of the Sancho’s lot. The neon sign on the front of the seafood restaurant across the street from Siesta Sancho’s looks as if it hovers near the roof of his car. The blue neon fish swimming across the facade of Cap’n Cabral’s seems to swim along Slater’s car, the illusion simply a matter of perspective. In the days when David and his father used to fish at Breezy Point, Poppy had explained to him that when fish are taken out of water, they suffocate not because they cannot breathe the oxygen available in the air but because their gill arches collapse and there is not enough surface area for diffusion to take place; the breaking down is a fundamental principle of engineering. The luminous fish swims out of Slater’s sight.
DROP ZONE
When cold, we gather ‘round the blazing fire;
When hot, we sit on the bank of the mountain stream in the bamboo grove
The Zenrin Kushu
Only the ugly survive. As she waters the silvery-purple coleus in the living room, Holly mentally kisses the plant goodbye. Though it looks fine now, it cannot possibly live. The plants that thrive are the unsightly ones, spindly viny plants or those with thick and rubbery leaves.
Food can fake you out, too: attractive food tastes bad and ugly food tastes good, as if the universe has a droll sense of humor. When she was first married, she brought home some produce from the supermarket, telling her husband, “Look at this gorgeous head of lettuce!” Theo laughingly informed her that the lettuce was actually cabbage.
Holly has read that Marilyn Monroe chose food for its appearance, too. When Monroe was still Norma Jean and newly married, she had served her husband a dinner of nothing but carrots and peas on a plate. When he stared at the plate and then at her, she told him she thought the orange and green looked pretty together.
The palmlike plant Holly paid big bucks for has lost all its bottom leaves, and the top fronds are curled and brownish. She dumps the dying plant into the garbage and takes the empty pot to the storage cabinet in the laundry room. When she opens the cabinet door, she sees it: a smaller pot, hand-thrown, with a green cactus painted on the front. Reed threw the pot in a ceramics class he took when they were still living in La Jolla. How odd that she has not looked inside this cabinet in an entire year. Oh, merde, her knees are actually jellying. She learned long before that most of the grief clichés are entirely true. Yeah, you go through the denial, the rage, the watered-down acceptance—you wear the dead person’s sweaters or robe, blah blah—it’s all true. But weird stuff happens, too, things you never dreamed of. Just when the year-mark has passed and you think you have begun to recover, think you might be ready to move on, you see him in the supermarket weighing cantaloupe: Reed, not a dead man’s ashes in an
engraved urn in the Calabasas cemetery chosen by his parents, but a vibrant, young, alive man buying produce at the grocery. Then, when he turns his head, of course he is not Reed after all.
She does not wish to think about the other thing—the thing she had forgotten about until one Sunday afternoon when she watched a video about the singer Leonard Cohen. Cohen lost his father when he was nine years old and subsequently created his own private grief ritual that he performed in secret. Cohen reported that he took one of his deceased father’s bow ties, which still smelled of his father’s after-shave, and slit open a portion of the fabric. He wrote a note to his dead father, telling him everything he wished he had said before his father died, folded up the note, and stuffed it into the bow tie. The young Cohen then slipped outside and buried the tie and the note in the garden, his own secret monument. Holly had cried out when she heard Cohen share this story, scaring Teddy, who came running into the room where she was watching the video. Poor Teddy—he had been through enough, losing his quasi-stepfather and having a mother half crazy with grief. She told her son she had simply had a sneezing fit.
But what she had remembered in that instant was that she had done something. Something that might have been touching if a child had done it, but in an adult was creepy and unwell. She had written a note to the dead Reed, begging him to come back to her and saying she would wait for him. She slipped the note inside Rumi’s Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, a volume given to her by Reed, with an inscription in Reed’s own hand. She is well enough now, more than a year later, not to allow herself to take the book from the bottom drawer of the night table and look at her note to Reed. And Reed has not come back, has he?
Instead there is the man on the online dating site, Reed’s doppelgänger, originally calling himself Waiting4U. The first time she saw the man’s photo, she was certain he was actually Reed, still alive after all. After a few brief e-mail exchanges, he has revealed his actual name is Jeremiah.
While for the most part Jeremiah can spell, and though he has never written in his e-mails anything vulgar, overtly stupid, or untoward, what is also true is that he is not exactly within her usual dating pool. Dating pool—who is she kidding even to think in such terms? She has never dated much; she met Reed only weeks after leaving her husband, and she had been with Reed five years at the time he shot himself. What she really means is that in the amorphous, primarily imagined world of men she might be willing to kiss, none of these are men with less education than she has or who are less urbane than Reed. The Internet look-alike works as a tree surgeon, which does call forth a few semi-sexy images. And also in Jeremiah’s favor, he has not asked to telephone or meet her for coffee yet. He seems astute enough to sense she wants nothing beyond e-mail, at least for now. Or maybe that’s all he wants, too.
This morning Holly drove Teddy to a school pal’s house across town for a play date, and her bookstore is closed on Sundays. Maybe before she immerses herself in e-Luv, she ought to have a light lunch and a glass of Shiraz. She was never one to drink wine with lunch, or even beer before five p.m., but lots of things have changed since Reed’s death. If she is honest with herself, she has become a lousy mother and an occasional tippler, as well as being chronically depressed. Were it not for Teddy, the image of herself in the gutter would not be difficult to conjure.
She finds a can of sardines in the kitchen cupboard, stacks some Wasa crackers on a plate, and uncorks what is left of last night’s bottle of wine. She lowers the can of sardines into the sink so she can drain off the oil. She carefully rolls back the key on the can, then lifts it to pull away from the tin. You would think they could have developed a more user-friendly way to open a can by now.
She sees the wound before she feels it: a bright stream of blood flows from her wrist where the lid has snapped sharply backward and cut her. Even before a glass of wine—this is hilarious—she has inadvertently slashed her wrist with a sardine can and is bleeding profusely.
She binds up her wrist with a dish towel, but when the towel is nearly completely red, she succumbs to panic. What if the tin hit an artery and she bleeds out right here on the less-than-immaculate kitchen floor, next to some unwashed dishes and a can full of oil and fish? What a dingy way to die. But she comes to her senses and applies firmer pressure to the wrist.
Holly has worn a long-sleeved blouse to the weekly meeting of the suicide survivors, although the room in the church hall is chronically overly warm. Her left wrist beneath her sleeve is wrapped several times over with gauze and tape, the definitive dressing for her slash wound. In her kitchen on Sunday, she had to apply pressure to the wound for some minutes before the bleeding let up, and she has bandaged and re-bandaged her wrist daily as the blood resumed seeping. She has always been a bleeder, her skin as thin as a promise.
Dave has been talking about some problems with one of his students, but suddenly he sits stock still and says, “What’s that?” He points with an alarmed expression to her sleeve.
When she looks down, she sees dots of blood speckling the cuff of her white blouse. “It’s nothing,” she assures the group. “I accidentally cut my wrist when I was opening some sardines.” She laughs nervously, the only sound in the room for some moments.
Finally Dave says, “Are you sure the suicide spell isn’t kicking in, hon?”
Holly, feeling she is being accused, tells him not to be silly, it was just a simple kitchen accident.
Dr. Jane says, “Someone once said there are no accidents.” She winks.
Holly observes that everyone in the circle is looking sorrowfully at her. Clearly they all think she has made an attempt, or at least a dramatic gesture that could be a cry for help. Well, screw it. Dr. Jane is liable to go Freudian on her no matter what Holly might say, and as for Dave and SueAnn, she can clear things up with them when they have their customary margaritas at Siesta Sancho’s after group tonight.
While SueAnn tells the group about the latest dustup between her and her husband—her dead child’s father—Holly wonders if she should tell the group about the new book she just ordered for the self-help section of her bookstore. Fall Out of Love: Lose That Baggage seems guaranteed to garner a few buyers, so Holly ordered three copies and is waiting to see how the book sells. Being in love with a dead man is something Dr. Jane has repeatedly pointed out is supremely unhealthy as well as technically not possible, so it follows that Holly should have no reason to read such a book.
But she can be in love with a dead man, is the problem.
Holly takes Teddy to school, then goes back home to spend some alone time reading Fall Out of Love: Lose That Baggage. The first thing she encounters in chapter 1 is a list of “candidates for healing.” Among these candidates are the woman who is obsessed with a married man, the woman madly in love with someone who does not return her feelings, the woman in love with a man young enough to be her son, the woman in love with a man who is “draining” her emotionally and financially. Maybe the last one might have been Holly when Reed was alive.
The author, a psychologist, suggests that every time the reader begins to think of the object of desire, she is to replace the incoming thought about the loved one with an extremely negative image.
“Envisioning the object of desire in such a negative manner can be scary at first,” claims the author. Holly dislikes the word “scary,” a babyish term of which the therapeutic community these days, including Dr. Jane, seems inordinately fond. She urges herself to read on, nonetheless. The author shares with her readers some of the negative images her clients have conjured to ban any romantic thoughts of their loved ones: envisioning him picking his nose; imagining him with missing teeth and shriveled genitals, walking down the street nude, mumbling to himself; seeing him with greenish pig vomit smeared all over him.
Oh, darling Reed, beautiful Reed, I can’t do that to you, Holly thinks. I might be willing to fall out of love with you, but I can’t defile your memory.
She closes the book. The back cover fea
tures a blurb that claims the book is a “masterpiece of clarity, a simple, logical process for breaking the bonds of memories that maim.” She hears the soft, mellow ringing of the fake wind chimes she keeps on the bedroom bureau top. She and Reed were shopping once in Target and kept hearing the mellifluous and soothing tinkling of what sounded like wind chimes. Arm in arm, they had followed the sound, zigzagging the aisles, tracking the source as if it were the Holy Grail. And suddenly there it was, perched on top of a display tower at the end of one aisle in the housewares section: an indoor wind chime, its melodious knelling occurring at regular intervals.
“It’s oddly relaxing,” Reed said.
They watched as every few seconds a timed puff of air rose from the battery-operated base and ruffled the tubular bells, initiating a soft, air-blown ringing sound. “Gotta love it,” Reed said, and picked up one of the boxed devices and placed it atop the other items he carried in one of the store’s small red baskets.
The chimes ended up in their bedroom, and now she cannot hear the tinkly jingle-jangle without having vivid flashbacks to love scenes between her and Reed. Scientists have documented the fact that memory and taste are linked in the brain, and that by stimulating a memory-storing segment of the brain, a person will potently smell something that is not actually present in the room. But for her, the tinkling sound is the source of those Proustian moments. She is aroused now, simmering beneath her clothing, and rushes to the bedroom, ashamed, to press the button that switches off the chimes.
Her laptop rests on the kitchen table, and she has been scrolling through the e-Luv messages while Teddy stands at the stove. Jeremiah wants to meet her.
“Some man wants to take me on a date,” she tells Teddy.