Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  He was thinking, patting his fingertips. He said, “I’ll tell you a few things about myself. The morning Matt died, by the time I arrived at the ICU and could locate Ruthie, my wife, she was standing with her face to a wall, clenching her diaphragm like she’d run a marathon and couldn’t breathe. So I tiptoed over and tapped her on the shoulder to show I was there. Only she didn’t feel it or was too distressed. At any rate, she didn’t acknowledge. I wasn’t sure. I just stayed there waiting. Until, when she finally did turn she looked straight through me. So, what I did? I gave her this huge tick-tock wave. Like, heidy-ho.”

  He smoothed his hair a few times. “How much have I thought about that! It was just a bad moment probably, a slip-up, but it might’ve paved the way for this second thing, a situation I found myself in.”

  He said, “My son was riding his Jet Ski, I don’t know what you heard about it.”

  Connie’s head moved, no.

  Buddy’s head nodded. “On the lake. He crashed into a fishing boat that had a couple of high-school boys. No one else was killed, but damn near. I found it hard. Hard to stop picturing. Then this urge came that if I could talk to someone I didn’t know very well. Have a plain conversation with no mention of my son. So, for some reason I chose a woman who’s the floor rep at Zack’s Print Shop. We’d exchanged a few words. I doubt if she remembered my name. I gave her some information, the first call. I told her their sign—for the rear parking whatchamajiggy—had fallen down. Then I started calling with everything you could name—a TV contest, or foreseeing a weather problem. Or call and make some joke about Zack. Ten, fifteen times a day. Sitting in a spindly chair there with the phone, not even comfortable. And my poor wife, having to overhear all of this, was just beside herself. As to why I kept harassing this woman. Who, finally, when it got too much, went downtown and filed a restraining order.”

  “Man!” Connie said.

  “She did indeed,” said Buddy.

  He got up. The cats were yowling and hopping at the glass door. “I have to stop for a second and give them dinner. I’ll be right back.”

  “Go,” Connie said, “go,” and signaled with a flick of her hand that she understood.

  •

  While he was filling the dish with Science Diet, he caught her figure in the shadows, descending the porch stairs.

  Buddy rocked on his shoes. Now a light switched on at the lawyers’ place next door.

  He watched as the cats chowed. He refreshed their water.

  He stood in the center of the kitchen and waited, without going to a window, for the effect of a taxicab’s headlights out on the lane.

  •

  It was quiet where Elise was. She almost had to whisper. “This is eerie. All the patients’ colored faces in the TV light? It’s despicable that I’m always canceling on you. It’s the worst thing I do. It’s what destroyed every relationship I’ve had.”

  “Oh God, let that be true,” Buddy said.

  He was flicking a stub of paper around on the countertop, to no end. “Are you ever nervous around me?” he asked Elise.

  “What?”

  “Nervous about me, I mean. Because of the way I bothered that woman.”

  “Don’t insult me,” Elise said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m a smart person. One of the smart ones. They insisted on textbooks where I went to school.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  There was a pause between them. Buddy paced up and back a step, holding the phone. The room was overly warm and the cats had taken to the cool of the floor tiles.

  “I should go,” Elise said. “I really have to pee. Plus they’re right now carrying Vincent in on a stretcher. Directed toward the Time Out Room is my guess. Will you be O.K.? Do you feel O.K.?”

  “Maybe I’ll just keep that to my own fucking self,” he said, and grinned. “It’s a joke you don’t know. I’m sorry. I’ll explain it to you some other time.”

  “They don’t need me that bad. I’m free to talk,” Elise said.

  “No, I feel fine. The joke isn’t even about me.” His index finger traced around and around one of the blue tiles set in the countertop.

  “Listen to me a second,” she said. “Are you there? This is the last thing I want to say before I have to hang up. Grief is very mysterious, Buddy. It’s very personal.

  “Bye for now,” she said, and Buddy stayed a moment after he’d hung up the phone, his hand on the receiver, his arm outstretched.

  •

  He stood on the side porch. The night was warm and a full white moon dawdled over Likely Lake.

  Across the lane at the Tishmans’ a car was adjusting behind a line of cars—latecomers for the bridge party Carl and Suzanne hosted every other week. One of them or somebody appeared in the entryway, there to welcome in the tardy guest.

  Buddy was thinking about other nights, when he and Elise had sat out here until late, telling each other stories and drinking rum. On his birthday, she had worn a sequined red dress. There were nights with his wife, their last sad year.

  How silly, he thought, that Connie’s confession had bothered him. He should have absorbed it. He should have taken her hand and held her hand, as a friend, or even clenched it, and said what a very long life it can seem.

  30

  Yours

  ALLISON STRUGGLED AWAY FROM her white Renault, limping with the weight of the last of the pumpkins. She found Clark in the twilight on the twig- and leaf-littered porch, behind the house. He wore a tan wool shawl. He was moving up and back in a cushioned glider, pushed by the ball of his slippered foot.

  Allison lowered a big pumpkin and let it rest on the porch floor.

  Clark was much older than she—seventy-eight to Allison’s thirty-five. They had been married for four months. They were both quite tall, with long hands, and their faces looked something alike. Allison wore a natural-hair wig. It was a thick blonde hood around her face. She was dressed in bright-dyed denims today. She wore durable clothes, usually, for she volunteered afternoons at a children’s day-care center.

  She put one of the smaller pumpkins on Clark’s long lap. “Now, nothing surreal,” she told him. “Carve just a regular face. These are for kids.”

  In the foyer, on the Hepplewhite desk, Allison found the maid’s chore list, with its cross-offs, which included Clark’s supper. Allison went quickly through the day’s mail: a garish coupon packet, a flyer advertising white wines at Jamestown Liquors, November’s pay-TV program guide, and—the worst thing, the funniest—an already opened, extremely unkind letter from Clark’s married daughter, up North. “You’re an old fool,” Allison read, and “You’re being cruelly deceived.” There was a gift check for twenty-five dollars, made out to Clark, enclosed—his birthday had just passed—but it was uncashable. It was signed “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Late, late into this night, Allison and Clark gutted and carved the pumpkins together, at an old table set out on the back porch. They worked over newspaper after soggy newspaper, using paring knives and spoons and a Swiss Army knife Clark liked for the exact shaping of teeth and eyes and nostrils. Clark had been a doctor—an internist—but he was also a Sunday watercolor painter. His four pumpkins were expressive and artful. Their carved features were suited to the sizes and shapes of the pumpkins. Two looked ferocious and jagged. One registered surprise. The last was serene and beaming.

  Allison’s four faces were less deftly drawn, with slits and areas of distortion. She had cut triangles for noses and eyes. The mouths she had made were all just wedges—two turned up and two turned down.

  By one A.M., they were finished. Clark, who had bent his long torso forward to work, moved over to the glider again and looked out sleepily at nothing. All the neighbors’ lights were out across the ravine. For the season and time, the Virginia night was warm. Most of the leaves had fallen and blown away already, and the trees stood unbothered. The moon was round, above them.

  Allison cleaned up the mess.

  “Your
jack-o’-lanterns are much much better than mine,” Clark said to her.

  “Like hell,” Allison said.

  “Look at me,” Clark said, and Allison did. She was holding a squishy bundle of newspapers. The papers reeked sweetly with the smell of pumpkin innards. “Yours are far better,” he said.

  “You’re wrong. You’ll see when they’re lit,” Allison said.

  She went inside, came back with yellow vigil candles. It took her a while to get each candle settled into a pool of its own melted wax inside the jack-o’-lanterns, which were lined up in a row on the porch railing. Allison went along and relit each candle and fixed the pumpkin lids over the little flames. “See?” she said. They sat together a moment and looked at the orange faces.

  “We’re exhausted. It’s good-night time,” Allison said. “Don’t blow out the candles. I’ll put in new ones tomorrow.”

  In her bedroom, a few weeks earlier in her life than had been predicted, she began to die. “Don’t look at me if my wig comes off,” she told Clark. “Please.” Her pulse cords were fluttering under his fingers. She raised her knees and kicked away the comforter. She said something to Clark about the garage being locked.

  At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

  Clark was speaking into the phone now. He watched the jack-o’-lanterns. The jack-o’-lanterns watched him.

  Author photograph by Pier Rodelon

  MARY ROBISON was born in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She is the author of four novels—Oh!, Subtraction, Why Did I Ever, and One D.O.A., One on the Way—and of three other story collections,—Days, An Amateur’s Guide to the Night, and Believe Them. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.