The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  Her therapist, a slightly judgmental woman with permed hair and big beaded necklaces, prescribed her antidepressants and regular therapy sessions. “It’s not unusual for people to feel anxious when they suddenly find themselves alone,” she said. “This happens all the time with grieving spouses and single parents whose kids move out of the house.”

  “My husband isn’t dead,” she said.

  The therapist gave her a long look as if to say he might as well be.

  She went to her therapy sessions regularly, but she stopped taking walks and going for runs. The moving traffic and constant sunshine were too much. She took a leave of absence from work. Then she stopped going grocery shopping during the day, instead preferring to slip in and out of the store in the dead of night like some sort of fresh-produce vampire. She ordered her craft supplies online and pretended to be upstairs or dead when the mailman came to the door. She collected all boxes around dinnertime when she was sure her many neighbors would be too distracted to see her open the door and gather her goods.

  “Agoraphobia,” her therapist said as if she had just termed something new and exciting. “The antidepressants should be helping.”

  She shrugged. She didn’t believe in mind-altering medication. Never had an antidepressant passed her lips.

  “We’ll just have to increase the dosage,” the therapist said. “See if that helps.”

  “You have to keep taking your antidepressants,” her husband said during his one nightly phone call. “Although I do think a lot of it is in your head. You just need to calm down. Do you try doing breathing exercises?”

  She held on to the sound of his voice, those waves of sound and reassurance traveling to her from so far away. “Yes,” she said. “I breathe.”

  “Just concentrate on that.”

  She was quiet. Words hung in her mouth, aching to be released. Could words ache? Could her own lonely ache be the cause of all this drama?

  She didn’t think so.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t come home now.” As if he knew exactly what she wanted to say.

  She began skipping her therapy sessions and shutting the blinds during the day, but that only made her feel grim and claustrophobic, and so she took to the internet, browsing home improvement sites and gardening catalogs.

  The pieces of her future fence arrived on a Thursday.

  Her shrubs, still small, still waiting to be nourished, arrived on a Monday.

  And on the days that followed: seeds of every imaginable variety. Sunflowers to stand guard. Petunias to hang from windows and doors. Vines to climb the sides of the house. Dahlias. Marigolds. Cucumbers and zucchini and beans and tomatoes. The more food she grew, she reasoned, the less reason she had to leave the house.

  She ordered a vegetarian cookbook.

  She built the fence in stages, erecting pieces of it by day in the safety of her garage and then actually building it in the silence of night. If her neighbors wondered about this strange process, they didn’t let on. They didn’t actually seem to notice her at all. Cars and pedestrians meandered past the house. People went to work and came home. It was, she noticed, unusual for anyone to spend much time outside at all.

  Once the fence was done, she felt safe coming out into the shining heat of the day. She planted her shrubs as a kind of second border beside the fence and chose small areas for flower gardens and other areas for vegetable gardens. Day after day she worked, planting more seeds, nurturing the bits of green that arose, the flowers and vegetables that eventually took shape.

  Over the course of the summer, her front yard acquired a leafy sort of density, a forbidden-forest kind of feel that only left her feeling safer. She began to wonder why more people didn’t garden, if only to escape the world for a little bit.

  She soon found she was able to concentrate on just one task at a time. Sound disappeared and there was only sight. The purple petals of her petunias, striped by a bit of white. The pink unfolding head of a climbing rose. Its neighbor, the blue rose, standing by like a kind of lackluster shadow. And when she focused on the sounds of the wind or the call of the birds—crows especially seemed to gather around her house and gossip with each other all day long—the sights of her garden faded from her mind and there was only the sensation of sound moving through her.

  She cooked dinner at night and no longer heard the news, which she usually turned on in the background. The pleasure of slicing a squash or simmering a pasta sauce supplanted everything else in her mind. And when smells rose from each pot to greet her, her vision darkened at its edges, as if one sense organ was shrinking back to make way for the other.

  The darkness began to infringe on other moments during the day. She would be holding a half-ripened tomato in her palm and realize, vaguely, that she couldn’t see the maple that stood on the edge of the yard, or the shrubs, or the fence. Her vision collapsed to a small oval that included her hand, the tomato, and the plant directly in front of her.

  She didn’t worry about it too much. Vision problems had always run in her family, and she wasn’t about to go to the doctor.

  Her husband continued to call once a night, but if she wasn’t listening for the phone she missed it. “You seem distracted,” he said to her when they finally did talk. “And I feel like more and more you don’t answer at all. Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is fine.” She focused on the sound of his voice, the delivery of each word, flung like a rock into a pond where it created ripples. She could see those ripples, moving farther and farther in all directions. They brought to mind galaxies minus the rotation, minus the magnificent spirals.

  “Are you listening to me?” her husband said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “No. My mind wandered for a moment.”

  Their conversation held all the tension of the usual unspoken questions: Was she having an affair? Second doubts about their marriage? Were there side effects to all the drugs she was taking? On some level she knew she should try to address these concerns, but she couldn’t seem to hold all the thoughts together in her mind. When her mind conjured the word affair she clearly saw fishnet pantyhose and illicit afternoons in the bedroom or bathroom or kitchen, but none of it had anything to do with her, and explaining this to her husband would take too many words. The sentences would spread out, but then darken before they could be finished.

  “I love you,” he said, his voice hopeful.

  “I love you, too,” she said, and that was something she could hold on to.

  In her garden, she began harvesting zucchini and eggplant. The oval shrank to a smaller oval and then to a circle of light. Mini binoculars, she thought. Mini binoculars that allow you to see close up. She had to concentrate when she moved the zucchini and eggplant she was picking to the basket by her side. The landscape of her yard moved inch by tiny inch, and it was easy to get confused. She didn’t mind, though. Her movements acquired a kind of slowness, as if by compensation. She felt more attuned to the leaves of her plants, the blades of grass, the individual slats of her basket than she ever had before.

  When she looked in her bathroom mirror at night, she was confronted with a single brown eye, a stretch of skin specked with pores, two nostrils. Features of a foreign body. She viewed them as if from a distance, turning them over in her mind, wondering about the person who lurked beneath their surface before brushing her teeth, carefully, one glistening white pearl at a time.

  The tiny details of her house held more and more interest for her, and whole days would go by before she even went outside. Instead, she would sit on her couch or at the kitchen table and look at one spot on the wall, a bit of paint with a slightly ridged texture, or at her coffee mug. Her vision dimmed and she would listen to a passing car. The car would grow silent and she thought: there’s so much that person is missing.

  At night, the phone rang in the background and she did not rise to get it. She appreciated the way it broke the silence, the music of its summons.

  Then she woke one morni
ng and the circle was gone. She floated on a field of black that was like consciousness, but was also something more subdued. The peacefulness of existence without thought. The calm of an eternal meditation. She was aware of her thoughts whirring away, attempting to make sense of this new way of being. Then her thoughts blurred to make way for the calling of a crow outside her window. Then the slow rise and fall of her eyelid, the swish of an eyelash. A muscle twitch. A heartbeat. Another. And another.

  Mailman Fantasies

  This is where obsession begins: a bag of letters and a mail truck. A man who wears long shorts and sunglasses, who is tan. Tan from the sun. She passes him on the stairs leading up to her apartment, and he speaks in a voice that is authority. “Aren’t you going to keep me company?”

  She pauses on the steps. She is wearing a red sundress and patchouli musk perfume. Her scent is strong on the air, and he is breathing slowly, making it his. “I can,” she says. “How have you been?”

  She addresses him as a friend even though this is the first time they’ve ever spoken. This pleases him, and he smiles slightly as he looks her over through his sunglasses. She knows he is doing this even though she can’t see his eyes. “I’ve been fine,” he says. “Do you go to school here?”

  “No,” she says. “I graduated a while ago. Now I work at the library.”

  “You’re a librarian?”

  “A librarian.”

  He turns this over and his voice is careless, disinterested. “I don’t read much,” he says. “I suppose I’ll be seeing you around.”

  It is a big world, and the mailman is everywhere. She sees him during her late afternoon walks as she makes her way down the block and around the corner, stretching her legs, thinking. He calls to her when he spots her, leaning away from whatever doorway he is at, locking eyes with her. “Where have you been?”

  “Hiding,” she says. Always hiding. There is no other way to answer this question. Someday he will want to know where she hides. He will want to see her lair, but not now. These sorts of things take time. They are a slow progression.

  She feels his eyes on her as she walks even though he is nowhere in sight.

  She runs errands some afternoons. When her car is idling at a corner stop sign, he comes right up to her driver’s side window. The summer heat is dizzying, and she leans away from him, farther into the cool of the air conditioner.

  “Aren’t you going to take a walk with me?” he asks.

  “Not today,” she says. “Someday.”

  “I’ll hold you to it,” he says as the traffic clears and she pulls away, his words in her ears, her face in his sunglasses. How long will he hold the image of her there? she wonders. Will the heat burn it in or melt it away?

  During a brief afternoon rain, he pulls his mail truck into the parking lot of her apartment complex. He gets out and stands before her window, staring up at her, the rain pouring off his uniform, drenched and blue.

  She leans against the window, a queen, but more modest. The curtains blow past her, and she catches one absently, presses it to her cheek. Neither of them speaks. Slowly, he removes his sunglasses, a promise, a plea. She sees his eyes are like hers: dark and wanting.

  On the days when she works, she stands between rows of books, shelving, rearranging books that have somehow gotten out of order. She is neatly dressed in a pencil skirt and pink blouse. She is no one to look at, but men still turn. Her scent follows her throughout buildings, around aisles, past tables, and up the stairs to the second floor where windows overlook the bay.

  Her scent follows her and the mailman follows her. She feels his eyes everywhere. She is still stopped by the sound of his voice even though it is only a memory.

  The bay is blue, blue and the boats speed past, but all that color is too cool for the vibrating fever within her. She turns away and imagines the pavement, the feet that tread it, and the slow heat that rises in shimmers.

  In her dreams, he is selling her towels. “Come here,” he says, a pink towel in hand. “I want to wrap you in it.”

  She lets him, standing completely still as he slips it around her shoulders, pulls it snug in front. “How does that feel?” he asks. “Does it feel the way a towel should?”

  She doesn’t know how a towel should feel. Her mind is hazy and dark, the way it often is in dreams, and the words won’t come. The towel is soft against her skin, and she’s aware of creeping warmth, the flush of her face.

  “They’re on sale,” he whispers. “Let me get you a cart full.”

  She doesn’t need that many towels, but she’s awake and the towel feels real although she is covered only with her own skin and the thin cotton of her nightgown as it twists around her body. A breeze blows in through the open window, but it is still hot, too hot to keep sleeping.

  The night sky seeps through the window, spilled ink speckled with stars, and she thinks, The mailman is out there somewhere.

  When she is away from the circulation desk, moving up and down the aisles, shelving books, she feels like she is in a dream. Sound stops. Time stops. Only the water moves, waves rippling from left to right, ceaselessly, past the library. In the afternoon the sun beats down on the water, turning it cerulean.

  She longs to fall into that water, not to swim but to feel submerged. She imagines her body floating downward, her hair spilling out like a cloud, her eyes slowly adjusting to the water. The sun would reach her with muted rays, illuminating fish and seaweed and her fingers and arms and legs.

  Would the mailman find her in that water? Would he even know where to look?

  It seems like some sort of telepathy should bring him to her. If he knows her, then he should know about the water, the way it relieves her from the heaviness of each day. She didn’t even know how weighty time could be until she came to this town, this library, far away from her friends and family.

  She imagines him swimming toward her, still dressed in his uniform. With or without the sunglasses? She can picture him clearly either way. He takes one hand and then the other, but he doesn’t pull her to the surface. “Listen,” he whispers. “The fish are dancing.” And she doesn’t see them, but she can hear them, the pitter-patter of a thousand tiny fins flipping through the water, a beautiful synchronized motion.

  He is at her apartment now. He is holding a letter, and his sunglasses are firmly over his eyes. “Am I too late for lunch?” he asks.

  Her apartment is heavy with heat, and the clock ticks by slowly in the still air. Her body is both dense and light, a woman underwater, and she pulls the door open farther. “No,” she says. “You’re right on time.”

  It is an ordinary day. The neighbors are at work or washing their dishes or watching afternoon soaps, but here is the mailman, pressing her to the carpet, his sunglasses folded on her coffee table.

  The tree outside her window appears to shimmer in the afternoon light, each leaf burning into the next until it seems the whole tree is afire, simmering beneath a spectacular sun.

  She walks with the mailman, behind him, before him as he delivers the mail. He is a planet she is orbiting, a whole terrain of hills and foreign tongues waiting to be explored. People drive past in cars, walk by on foot. Crisped people. She marvels at the way the sun is drying them, the way the heat shimmers off their bodies. There is so much potential for fire. They are walking flames, and they don’t even know it.

  At her apartment, she presents him with a freezer pop. Blue, which coats his tongue and lips. She longs to bury herself in his blue—tongue, lips, the broad expanse of his shirt—but there is still mail in his bag, and the day is short. Later she asks herself this: How many women are seduced by their mailman? How many of them are overtaken first by the idea of him, then later by his form?

  It is an impossible question to answer. Somewhere in the neighborhood, the mailman is moving, slipping from door to door, down alleys, then out into the light, his shoulder heavy with unopened messages.

  When she closes her eyes, she can’t picture him clearly. In
stead, she opens her closet where she keeps her scarves. She runs her fingers across them, drapes the cool fabric around her neck, her skin sensitive to every touch.

  The bay is taking on a crystalline quality, like glass. She stands by the window and stares at it, imagining what would happen if the surface cracked and broke apart. Would there be a whole separate reality beneath it? Would it be better or worse than this one?

  The mailman is standing to her right. “Look at that,” he whispers. “That’s a good ice skating surface.”

  An elderly man is standing to her left. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks. “I just asked you a question.”

  She turns to him. “And what was that?”

  “Mystery novels. I wanted to know if you have any new mystery novels in. My wife asked me to pick up a couple.”

  She wants to tell him to look outside. There are more pressing matters than mystery novels, especially since the bay has turned to glass and he is smoldering. She can see the smoke rising off the shoulders of his T-shirt.

  “All right,” she says. “I can show you where the new books are, but you have to promise to be careful.” And she leads him through the silence, the labyrinth, her dream, her prison, leaving the mailman far behind.

  He is seated on the edge of her bathtub, the mailman. The shower is running and he pulls her foot to his uniformed knee. “When was the last time,” he asks, “you had a shave this close?” And he reaches for her razor.

  “Yesterday,” she says. “Never.” Time is insignificant now. There are only strokes up and down, white foam giving way to bare skin.

  She walks through the library. She walks through her neighborhood. Evening sets in and the air dampens and cools, but still she is buzzing, buzzing. She passes open windows and talking TVs and talking people. Dogs bark in the distance and boys hoot, and everything is ordinary, but also not ordinary. She is ordinary and not ordinary, too. She is two legs and two feet and two arms and one head, and she is on fire. Only the cool evening air makes the heat bearable.