by Ilana Masad
“Darling, pennies are worthless and you know it. Make a man a better offer than that.”
The elevator door opened and there was Harold’s walker on the landing where he must have left it earlier. Iris knew it was his because his grandson, a fifteen-year-old whom Harold said was in his monosyllabic phase, had decorated the dull silver with skateboarding stickers, wrapping every surface but for where Harold gripped it with the black-outlined, neon-colorful graffiti fonts. It looked ridiculous, but Harold loved it. His grandson must be special, Iris had thought when she first saw it. How many teenagers would try to make their grandparents’ walkers look hip?
They got to his room fairly easily after that, Iris taking small paces beside Harold, but it was hard seeing him like this. She’d first met him over twenty years ago, and while he hadn’t been young then—he’d been only a bit younger than she was now, in fact—he had been vibrant and athletic, that late-fifties type of man who wore his middle-age like a bespoke suit. Now he was old, truly old, and she could tell he hated it. She thought he’d hate being dead more, though.
“All right, here we go,” he said, trying to turn his energy back on as he settled himself on one side of the couch that sat by the window. The curtain was pulled back and the sky was a magnificent indigo, not yet entirely dark. “A room with a view, some good wine, and an old flame—what could be better?” He’d already positioned the bottle, an opener, and two glasses on the coffee table and was now working on opening the wine while Iris settled beside him.
“Excuse me, who’re you calling an old flame?” she said, trying to be playful as he struggled with the cork. When it was out, he poured a generous glass for each of them so that the bottle was almost half-empty when he set it down.
“Iris, what are you still doing here?” Harold asked after taking a sip. His charm was dimmed, his eyes suddenly very tired, the pouches underneath making him look like a hound.
She considered his question, surprised he’d asked it. He was the one who’d reached out to her, after all. He’d tepidly googled her, found her email on LinkedIn, told her he was moving to this place near where he knew she used to live. Where she still lived. He’d never been to her house, didn’t know her address. She’d looked him up too some time back, had figured out where he was located, had written his address out on a white envelope. She kept forgetting she needed to change it. “I thought you wanted me here,” she finally said, turning her glass between her palms, watching the light bounce off it.
“Well, sure I do. But I’m old. And this place is depressing.”
“It wasn’t so depressing last time I was here,” she said softly. They’d made love then, the first time since they’d become reacquainted. Harold had needed to take a pill, which had somehow surprised her, though she knew it shouldn’t. His body was different, of course, his pubic hair sparse and white, his skin loose around his joints, his stomach and thighs heavier than she remembered them being. She’d been on top for most of it, but he’d flipped her over with more strength than she’d expected toward the end, and the weight of him had felt almost suffocating, heavy with nostalgia. She’d been weepy after, but he kissed her tears away and made her gasp with his fingers until she was moaning. He’d whispered in her ear, calling her beautiful, sexy, delighting in the feeling of her wet and warmth. When she’d orgasmed hard around his fingers, he’d shuddered alongside her, urging her on, breathing raggedly with her.
A shiver passed through her now, and she reached for him. “Harold,” she said softly. “Don’t we have the right to enjoy each other? Haven’t we earned that?”
He barked a laugh and looked away from her, though he leaned his cheek against her hand. “I don’t know about earn,” he said. “But yes, we have the right.” He nodded at the bedside table where the Viagra sat in the drawer. “Maybe we should get started before it gets too late.”
It was only eight, but visiting hours ended at nine thirty here, and she didn’t want to overstay her welcome. She got him the pill, a glass of water, and sat beside him, stroking his long fingers.
* * *
• • •
IT WASN’T THE same this time. Neither of them came. There was a feeling of futility and frustration in their actions, an attempt to recapture the magic they’d only just rekindled last week. Once he got tired, he pulled out and tried to make sure she, at least, was satisfied.
“It’s okay,” she said finally, as she reached a precipice she couldn’t get beyond for the third time. “I can’t. It happens.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, and Iris almost laughed. It was such a juvenile question, one she’d answered so many times. It was always her responsibility, somehow, to make every encounter with a man end up all right. She’d made her peace with it a long time ago, though a vestigial twinge of resentment lingered.
“I’m sure. Tell me something nice,” she said, wanting to revel in the intimacy between their damp unsatisfied bodies before she had to get dressed and go. She laid her head on the plumped pillow, with his outstretched arm under her neck, so that he could hold on to her without her weight hurting him.
“Like a story?”
“Sure.”
So he told her about his eldest son’s dramatic divorce from a health guru in Sacramento, how they’d split their community of yoga-class attendees and juice-bar regulars and how he’d gotten the rotten end of the friend deal, because, and Harold smiled as he relayed this reasoning, his son couldn’t put his foot behind his ear like the ex could. Harold made the story funny, though Iris imagined the whole thing had been quite painful, but that was Harold—he was a spectator of human behavior, his years working as a psychologist always with him. Iris felt herself drifting off into semi-sleep, and only when the soft chime announcing visiting hours coming to an end sounded from the hallway did she rouse herself.
“I can’t come next week, I’ll be packing for a trip, but can I come the week after?” she asked as she pulled her bra and panties on. Harold was on his side, watching her with his always damp-seeming blue eyes.
“Only if you promise me something,” he said. Iris looked up, trepidatious. “You need to tell me more about you. Your family. Your kids. I think your daughter was, what, two? When we first met? And you said you have a son. I want to know about them.”
“That wasn’t ever part of the deal before,” she said, turning her back on him as she finished getting dressed.
“We’re in a very different place than we were before, Iris,” he said, tone serious. “I don’t know how long I have to live, and I know, I know, I’m in great health for a man my age, but that doesn’t matter. Living here is a reminder that people can go at any time, sick or not. It just happens. Old age is a real thing, Iris, and you’re lucky that you’re not afflicted with it yet.”
“What?” she said, holding a hand to her ear, mocking herself. “I’m a little deaf, what did you say?”
“Har har. You heard me very well.” He lay back. “I don’t want to know just this one part of you. If you want to spend this time with me, you have to be willing to share more. Let me get to know more of you, not just this ephemeral sexy pixie-dust-throwing apparition.” He was laughing by the end of this descriptor, and so was Iris.
“I missed you, you know,” she whispered into his mouth when she kissed him. Something inside her felt loose, as if the hinges of the cage containing her other life when she was with Harold were rusting, but it didn’t frighten her. She thought it would be nice, actually, telling him about Ariel, about Maggie, about what they taught her. He would understand, she knew now, about the terror that was parenting, and the elation, and he would smile indulgently. She was, she realized, looking forward to it.
“I missed you too,” he said.
“Two weeks, okay?”
“See you then, darling.”
* * *
• • •
AND THEN. THEN the drive home, one ha
nd on the wheel and the other fiddling with her necklace, a little elated, a little melancholy, that space of in-between that she felt was becoming more and more a part of her life as she aged. She both wished for things to be as they once were, and accepted quicker than ever before how they were now. And then the dog, or maybe it was a coyote, she wasn’t sure, running across the street. Her senses just a tiny bit duller from the large glass of wine. Her hands gripping the steering wheel hard, her eyes wide open, swerving, swerving, until she crashed, the car crumpling in front of her, her head whipping back, seat belt tightening around her torso and the crack of breaking a rib as her body rocketed forward, and the airbag popping into her face and breaking her nose, and as she tasted blood, as the broken rib punctured a lung and she began to drown, she heard the cars still driving by in the opposite direction, and in the soothing tide of life going on as normal, she died.
AUGUST 21, 2017
Maggie collects her suitcase and walks out to the curb. Ariel said he’d pick her up, but she doesn’t know yet how a mother’s death changes responsibility, whether he’ll forget or oversleep or show up. She doesn’t know what home will be like, whether it will feel like it used to or like a nightmare reflection. The world is atilt. LA’s air smells faintly of tar. The sky is so blandly blue it could be a tarp, the kind set up to provide shade for the outdoor picnic tables at the park where Maggie’s classmates had birthday parties when they were all little kids and the most exciting rush was sneaking third and fourth slices of birthday cake when the adults weren’t watching. The distance Maggie still feels from the existence of her grief makes her intensely self-conscious, as if she’s acting in a movie about a woman who goes home when her mother dies rather than actually experiencing it. She runs her hands through her hair, styled in a curly top fade to accommodate both her thick waves and her workplace—she slicks everything straight back and flat for the office—and considers texting Lucia to tell her she’s arrived, but a car honks at her and she sees it’s Ariel in his 1994 Jeep Wrangler, a car older than Ariel himself, but which someone sold him in high school when he worked at an OfficeMax that has since closed.
“I can’t believe you’re still driving this thing,” she says when she opens the door and heaves her suitcase into the narrow space of the back seat. Ariel rolls his eyes, and again, the entire scene feels unreal, too normal. “Hey, are you okay?” she asks as he tears away from the curb. LAX is as bad as the St. Louis airport about letting people sit and wait. Everywhere is. This constant coming and going of humanity, Maggie thinks, makes it impossible to pause anywhere. We’re all just going-going-going until we’re gone.
“What do you think? Are you okay?” Ariel spits at her. He turns the radio up. It’s something she doesn’t know, a rapper tossing out lyrics and rhymes in Spanish. She recognizes the curl and curve of some words, but can’t grasp the overall meaning. Maggie wants to tell Ariel that yes, she’s okay, more or less.
Instead, she says, “Jeez, okay, just don’t take it out on me,” and wonders what she means by that. Who else is Ariel supposed to take things out on? It’s not like he has a girlfriend, as far as she knows, and then is disgusted with herself for assuming she’s supposed to take things out on Lucia. Although hasn’t she already? Just in the last sixteen hours or so? But it’s a good thing, really, she thinks, pulling absently at the yellow-brown foam poking out of the seat. It’s good because now that Lucia has seen how cold Maggie can get when something bad happens, she’ll know she should leave. And that’s good too, Maggie tries to convince herself as Ariel plucks the chunk of foam from between her worrying fingers and asks her sternly to stop. It’s good because this way Maggie will at least know that she didn’t cheat this time, that she didn’t fuck it all up half on purpose.
The drive is longer than it should be because of the traffic getting away from the airport, but eventually the 101 clears up enough for it to feel like they’re actually moving again, and Maggie watches the hills that always look dry, burned-out—some of them really are, the fires have been bad lately—with what greenery there is lying low, fighting for its life and the few drops of water it can get from the arid land.
“Remember when Mom took us sometimes when she had work in LA?” she asks, the words tumbling out of her mouth. Ariel’s hands tighten on the wheel and he nods. He pushes his fist under his thick black-rimmed glasses and rubs each eye with a tight twist, as if shutting off a faucet, as if this’ll keep him from crying. “That was so fun,” Maggie continues. “Well, for me it was. You were so little, you usually just watched whatever I was doing and then fell asleep.”
“Yeah, but you’d tickle me to try to wake me up. You know that’s why I’m not ticklish? I trained myself to ignore you because if I looked like I was asleep Mom would pick me up and bring me to the car. I mean, everyone fakes that, right? Like, do kids really stay asleep when grown-ups pick them up like that?”
“No idea. I also pretended,” Maggie says. They fall silent again, and she thinks about that feeling of being wrapped in the warmth of an adult, a person she could trust. She knows she’s an adult herself now, technically. Usually, she’s proud of this, that she’s made it, as if growing up is an achievement rather than a force of nature, but now, she wishes she could go back.
* * *
• • •
WHEN ARIEL PULLS up to their childhood home, Maggie sighs, relieved. It looks the same as it always does, the same as it always has, and though she grew up thinking it was ugly and old and was always jealous of the kids who lived in the newly built houses, she realizes now that she was lucky to live in a somewhat vintage place, even though it’s still ugly on the outside. Ariel parks in front, without opening the garage door, essentially blocking it, and on any other day Maggie would have told him off for this annoying habit, but at the moment, she feels a rush of fear. Ariel hasn’t mentioned their father once, and she’s been too scared to ask. She has to wait for Ariel to open their front door, which is littered with several wreaths of flowers delivered apparently in the past couple of hours.
“Who are these from?” she asks, and Ariel grunts something and bends down to pick one up and check, but she doesn’t wait. She walks straight through the foyer, doesn’t glance at the kitchen or living room or the backyard where her mother left out a birdfeeder that was usually used by the squirrels. She goes right to the door of her father’s office, which is ajar, and pushes it open.
“Dad?”
She drops her backpack. It thunks loudly, the metal water bottle at the bottom landing hard. Her father doesn’t look up. Ariel mutters from behind her, “He’s been this way since last night.”
Peter is sitting at his work desk, the place where Maggie and Ariel have seen him a thousand times before, but it’s all wrong. Rather than the busy, harried focus on paper or screen he usually had when they were kids—or the pacing that accompanied his bouts of creative frustration—he’s still. Peter isn’t a still man, or never used to be. The death of his wife appears, Maggie thinks, to have made the clockwork inside him run down.
Throughout their childhood, Peter was the one who cooked, who cleaned, who picked them up from after-school tutoring sessions or sleepovers on the weekends with friends. Peter was the one who made their house a home, always welcoming them when they arrived. He was a stay-at-home dad, a work-from-home dad, a dad like no other dad they knew. He was good with his hands but wasn’t handy, and he hired people to fix things when they broke—plumbers and electricians and car mechanics. They weren’t wealthy, but they were in that middle-class place where they could weigh time against money—Peter knew, for instance, that instead of trying to learn how to pull things out of toilet piping or attempting to figure out his car engine on his own, he could cook for his children or find a new client to work for. He was good that way, knowing when to extend himself and when to keep to the things he knew.
When Maggie first came out, there were those kids at school who asked her why s
he hated men. She didn’t answer them, because they didn’t deserve an answer, but she thought about the question. Did she hate men? No, she didn’t. She hated male dominance and the patriarchy, of course, but that was different. Men, on an individual level, she didn’t hate. How could she, when she joined in the boys’ games all the way until puberty, disliking the girly things she was supposed to like back then? She simply wasn’t attracted to masculinity, though she adopted some of it for herself. She wanted to tell those kids in high school that it was impossible to hate men as a category when she had a father who was distinctly male—in the essentialist way she would later reject as being true, because the binary was bullshit—a father who had been nothing but a gem to her. They had their share of fights about curfews and dating—both before and after she came out—and the way her mom could be a total bitch, but still. He was the best dad she’d heard of. He was there. He was paternal and maternal, making up for Iris’s long work hours and frequent business trips.
And he was talented too, though she didn’t really register this until much later. She was just used to seeing new lettering, logos, and designs hanging around his office, not quite thinking about the fact that Peter was creating them entirely from scratch for his clients. It wasn’t until she took a graphic design class in her first year of college and hated it—the software was so finicky, and doodling on notebooks was very different from creating consistent shapes—that she realized the extent of her father’s abilities. That he was, though he didn’t call himself that, an artist.
But now—now Maggie looks at her father sitting at his desk, still, his head lowered, reading something, not moving, not reacting to her voice.
“Daddy,” she tries again, and begins stepping toward him. He lifts his head, an expression of mild surprise on his face.
“Oh, hello.” He sighs and looks back down. “This isn’t very good. But I can see why Iris loved it so much.” Peter and Iris almost never used each other’s names when speaking to their kids, usually saying “your dad” or “your mom,” and it’s strange for Maggie to hear the way her father says her mother’s name, like she’s some woman Maggie’s never heard of.