This Thursday, Helene had a bag of mussels I’d ordered and I bought a package of linguine, and a hunk of good grating cheese. The mussels were from Maine, picked off the rocks from the area around Blue Hill where we used to live. They were expensive, but it didn’t matter. Shep was getting in late from Albany, and I wanted him to come home to a good dinner. I also bought red peppers and a small amount of fresh string beans. When I got to the register, Helene brought the mussels up front. “I have Shep’s order. You could take that too, save a trip. Or maybe you have to come this way anyway.”
“I don’t know,” I said carefully. “Refresh my memory.”
“Let’s see.” She pulled a list out of a drawer and read two cupcakes, two ginger sodas, two apples, a package smoked salmon, smoked mozzarella, one box sesame crackers and a bag of spring lettuce. It’s all bagged up in the cooler. I’ll go get it.”
I stopped her. “That’s okay. He can come in the morning.”
“Let him pay for it too,” Helene added.
I recognized my husband in these choices. Trips, for him, were an opportunity to indulge in expensive snacks. I used to be a peanut butter sandwich, carrot stick sort of traveler, but Shep schooled me out of that. He’d pack a basket of goodies and then in the middle of the drive he’d pull off at a nice spot and make a picnic. I loved this about him.
“Where are you going?” Helene asked.
“New Hampshire,” I said, feeling my cheeks heat up because it is impossible for me to lie.
“Nice. Well, have a good time. Drive safe. I hope the snow stays away. And hey, enjoy the mussels tonight. Sounds like a little celebration. Good for you!”
When I got home, I went out to check on the goat. I could hear him butting against the walls, and as I opened the door, he pushed his nose in the crack, but I slipped in and hooked it closed before he could get out.
The stall had a warm animal smell, and the little bit of hay I had put down was urine-soaked and marked with piles of little black balls. I added fresh hay to the floor and stuffed more in the basket I was using as a temporary hayrack. I also unhooked the water bucket and maneuvered my way out the door without letting him escape. I scrubbed it out and filled it down at the hydrant. Carrying it back full, I made it in without getting any water down in my boots and locked it in place against the wall.
The goat was pulling tufts of hay out of the basket, eating some, but dropping more to the floor. I was surprised that on such a cold day the stall would feel as warm as it did and that his body would be even warmer. It felt so safe I didn’t want to leave. So I squatted in the fresh hay next to him and leaned my head into his warm goaty flank.
“You need a name,” I said. “What is your name?” He nuzzled against me, still chewing. “Dammit,” I said. “I know your name. Mischief, that’s what it is, isn’t it?”
Back in the kitchen, I started dinner. I enjoy cooking for the simple reason that I like to eat good food. I’m a good cook because I take the time to imagine the dish before I make it. That’s what I’d been doing up at the goat barn. I’d imagined the garlic-mussel sauce I was going to make for pasta. I’d pictured a bowl of spaghetti with a crown of opened mussels adorning it. Then I’d imagined a side dish of peppers, artichoke hearts, and string beans tossed with olive oil and vinegar.
First, I oiled the peppers and put them under the broiler. As they were heating, I cut up parsley, olives, garlic, and rinsed the beans. The counter was covered with colorful piles of chopped things. I set a pot of water on a high flame and put a fry pan on another burner. Soon things were sizzling and boiling and the kitchen windows were covered with steam.
Shep would be getting home soon, and I wanted to have everything ready. The flames leaped, the water jumped, the oil spat. I threw in the garlic and onions, grated pepper over them, and slammed on a lid. Then I poured the mussels into the steaming pot and slapped on another lid. Meanwhile, in the oven, the skin on the peppers was crisping. I placed them in a pot with a tight-fitting lid and let them sit for ten minutes. It’s a trick I read. The steam makes them juicy.
That was when I heard a car grind up the driveway. But I didn’t run to the window. Fifteen things were happening at one time, and though browned garlic is lovely, burnt garlic is trash. So I stirred and waited, and soon the back door popped open, and I could hear rustling in the mudroom as he removed his boots. The door to the kitchen opened, and I could hear him setting his briefcase on the floor, hanging his coat on the hook.
Usually, I say something, something welcoming as he comes through the hall, but this time I couldn’t speak.
“Smells great!” he called.
I looked up when he came into view, and that was when it hit me. I have never been able to hide my feelings, and when I caught the scent of cold he brought into the room and saw the splotch of weather on his cheeks, I understood, like it was a new fact, that this man moved in a world I knew nothing about. There I am, locked up with naked bodies, while he’s at a desk studying percentiles, regulations, budgets. I had always liked our differences. I couldn’t do what he did, and he the same with me. If I asked him to rub my back, he did it, but not effectively, not well, because he had no feeling in his hands and no desire to confront pain. Now, with cold streaming away from his skin, he came to the stove and bent, slightly, to kiss me.
“Don’t.” My voice was husky with tears. “What’s going on?” I whispered. “Why is Darla Oswald moving to New Hampshire?”
Shep has a wonderfully resonant voice, and when he laughs it is a spilling of notes that melts you. “What a strange question. I have no idea why or if she is. You seem to know. Is she? Boy, does it smell wonderful. What are you making?”
I should have known that a man who functions well in a political position is a man who knows how to keep secrets. Who knows how to work people. Not the way I do, but in the invisible, manipulative, behind-closed-doors bargaining that I’ve only seen in old movies where white-shirted men fill back rooms with smoke. “Who are you going to New Hampshire with?”
“Look,” he said. “I’ve been driving for five hours. Let me sit down. Let me get something to drink. You can’t imagine what this day has been like, and in two days I have to get in the car again.”
“I’m sure you’ll fortify yourself with delicious snacks. You and Darla.”
“Yes, she’s coming with me. She recommended me to the school, and she happened to be driving there this weekend, so it made sense. What is this? Are you accusing me of something?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I threw my hands up. Was I? The garlic was getting too brown. “I can’t talk. I’ll ruin this meal.”
“What can I do to help?”
Such a simple, Shep-like question. Maybe it was all my imagination. “Just sit. Just sit and relax. Or set the table. Then relax.” After all, he’d had a hard day; he’d been on the road. “Is it snowing?”
“Clear,” he said, “but still cold. Supposed to drop to twenty below. Let’s remember to keep the faucets dripping.”
When it’s cold like that, the kitchen is the only place in the house that feels cozy; the fire in the woodstove and the heat from cooking balances the assault of outside air. “Don’t talk,” I said. I was pulling the skin of the pepper away from the meat, and it was coming off in thin, wavery sheets. The mussels were done, and I threw the noodles into the fishy water and kept the flame high.
For some reason, he used our best china and silverware and lit a candle. It looked beautiful. The dishes on the counter, waiting for us, were beautiful too. But I felt as nervous as though it were a first date. I served the meal in shallow bowls and put a dish of grated cheese on the table.
The first forkful was so good. There was just the right amount of pepper and salt, and the mussels were fresh and sweet. But I had no appetite. “Is something going on?”
“Yes,” he said. He put down his fork. “I told you I’m interviewing for a job. It’s a job Darla put me in contact with because we work together on
school issues and she went to this school as a young girl and she knows it well and is very active there as an alum.”
“But are her parents really ill? She’s really going back there to take care of them?”
“You know each other?” he asked.
“We met at the feed store,” I said, remembering that I mustn’t reveal anything a client tells me in the treatment room.
“I don’t know her that way. We’re not friends.”
“But you’re taking her to New Hampshire, not me. And you’re considering moving there without consulting me. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Are you and I finished?” There. My worst fear.
He looked up in surprise.
Shep carries authority even when he’s sitting at the dinner table. Sometimes that authority makes me feel as though I were nothing but another one of his children, not only his two blood children, but his five hundred other children at the central school.
“Well, what am I supposed to think? I go into the grocery, and I find out you’ve ordered this romantic lunch for the road.”
“It’s food. I have to eat, don’t I?”
“What’s going on?” I said evenly.
“Look.” He finally made eye contact. “I want to make this decision alone. I want to check it out alone. I don’t want to have to consider all of your…”—he paused and finished more softly—“all of your stuff.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Your… requirements.”
“Such as?”
“Your massage work; your desire for animals; for a private, rural place with no neighbors in view. I want to look this over for myself first. And then…”
I didn’t let him finish. “So you’ll make a decision for yourself, and then, at last, you’ll ask my opinion. But by that time, it’ll be too late.”
“I’m tired. You know I have to leave this job. I have to go somewhere simple, where I’m not the enemy, where there’s no taxpayer and no state government. It’s killing me. I can’t keep it up.”
“You don’t have a thing for Darla?”
Shep smiled. “Darla is an extremely seductive woman.”
There it was.
But then his face broke open, and the man I remembered looked out. Oh yes, finally. Now why had he gone missing? It was the face I knew from our private moments, when the outside world disappeared and something boyish and grateful and entirely devoted took over. His eyes, the color of wet stones, glistened in the light. “But you have nothing to worry about, because you are, too.”
The goat had been locked in his stall for three days. As I walked out to the barn, the snow crunched under my boots. The morning was cold, but he had a heavy winter coat, and he would know where home was now. When I opened the door, he came up and nuzzled against me, breath curling from his nostrils. I stomped on the water bucket to crack up the ice, filled it with fresh, put new hay in the basket, and came and went with the door open. He stayed indoors. He didn’t even poke his head out to see the large fenced pasture where the chickens pecked even on that coldest day. When I finished my chores, I put a stone against the door so it would stay ajar and he could come and leave as he wished.
My requirements. Were they that difficult? The questions came and went as I rubbed and pressed into flesh. I couldn’t pay attention to them as I worked, but when I broke for lunch, they came at me hard. I sat by myself in the village restaurant and thought about the way his job, his skills, organized my life. Did my job, my skills, organize his? What I knew, what I knew without question, was that every time he drove up the driveway, whether it was from a trip to Albany or a day at school, I couldn’t wait to see him. I couldn’t wait to tell my news and hear his, to put my arms around his body. Remembering that got me through the afternoon.
There was still some light by the time I got home. Darkness was in process, but I could see my way to the barn, and when I looked into Mischief ’s stall, I knew at once that it was empty. The pasture was empty too. The snow was slick under my feet, because the day had warmed up and then turned colder. I followed his footprints. He hadn’t frolicked at all. There was only a single line. He’d come out of the barn and gone straight to the four-foot fence. He did it at a run, and on the first try, his body sailed over and he landed, hard, because the prints were deep, on the other side. Even in the low light, I could see his tracks crossing Darla’s hayfield, climbing to the hills.
I knew what not to do.
But when I opened the door to the house, it was Bruce’s voice I heard: contiguous. Of course. That’s what was going on. It wasn’t sex she was after—it was land. My Shep: principled, honorable, overwhelmed. He would be oblivious to her grand scheme. Shep needed a school without Albany; Darla needed contiguous land. If we were in New Hampshire, she could buy our acres.
I could imagine it all: truck traffic, well pads, containment pools. These hills and valleys: pools, pads, pollution. And then the word love added itself to the list. All the many possibilities. But where was the love in that vision? Shep would be in New Hampshire, educating the next kings of industry. And I would be where?
The moon rose over the tracks, glazing them with blue light, a chilly line stretching to somewhere else. That was not me. Oh no, that would not be me.
Three Rivers
Had Lana Leicester Smith been married a third time, she would have added that surname too. They were like degrees, each one providing a little extra gravitas, weighting her, connecting her, keeping her from lifting off on the next wind. Not that she was frail; it had to do with the perpetual flutterings of doubt and other havoc.
Having a husband had always helped, but now that she didn’t, fear so paralyzed her it was difficult to leave her apartment. Only doctor appointments and the once-a-week visit to her therapist could override what had become a self-decreed house arrest. And she was lucky, her many windows made her feel like a participant; she could look down on the tops of the trees, she could see the Delaware river behind the Hyatt Hotel, and sometimes even the silhouette of Camden.
On this day, Lana was sitting in her bedroom, watching the comings and goings of cars and pedestrians when the phone rang. She picked it up greedily, but it was only Willow, her second husband’s daughter. She knew the reason for the call. Tomorrow was the anniversary of her father’s death, a date Willow still honored but Lana ignored. First, Willow inquired about Lana’s health, but there wasn’t anything new. Same old, same old, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, so she told Willow, “Not getting any younger, but not getting any older either!” They laughed, but for Lana it was true. She was going to live forever; she believed it just as she believed that she had never been a Jewish girl from Brooklyn.
Willow was an expert in Asian culture and like others in academia, she considered everything in life a chance for instruction, so in far greater detail than Lana would ever have bored Willow with, she described her realization, one of many she had offered Lana over the years: “I have decided not to mark Daddy’s death this year because his spirit has passed on. I’ve meditated on it and consulted my teacher and what I’ve come to realize is that remembering his death, even lighting a candle, is to call his spirit back to the places and people it left long ago. That isn’t beneficial for him or for me because his spirit has moved onward. It’s selfish. I wanted to tell you,” she said, “because I know you still have his ashes. You might want to consider having a private ceremony and letting them go.”
Lana wondered why Willow kept track of who still had her father’s remains.
“Not that you have to,” Willow corrected. “That’s your decision, I just thought I’d let you know.”
Lana thanked her. She said she would think about it, told her to call the next time she came to Philadelphia. “Call in advance,” she said, “because sometimes I’m busy.” That was a lie, but she liked the illusion of a still well-connected older woman rushing from one obligation to another.
After hanging up the phone, Lana gave the top shelf in her be
droom a guilty glance. She pulled over the footstool and reached for the boxes she had put up there a long time ago. The better one was an antique of carved rosewood. It contained Leicester, her first husband. The lesser box was Smith, Willow’s father, paper-covered cardboard, pretty to look at, but worthless. She dusted them off and placed them on the bureau in her foyer. Didn’t a widow have the right to keep whatever she wanted, a woman alone, living on a finite income, having, as her financial advisor warned, to exercise care? Private ceremony! The truth was she had been planning to divorce Smith. But then he got sick.
Lana showered and chose her clothes carefully, a grey pants suit with a plum colored scarf that complimented her white hair and brown eyes. She put on sturdy walking shoes. She made sure she had enough twenties in her wallet and then, frightened of what she was about to do, called down to the front desk for a taxi. As she waited in the lobby, the two boxes in a canvas bag at her feet, she felt a wavering of courage. What if the driver took her to a lonely place, stole her purse, and drove away? It was too risky. But just as she stood to go back upstairs, a cab slipped into the slot at the front entrance. The driver, head wrapped in some kind of religious covering, looked into the lobby at Lana. Feeling marked by fate, she gripped her bag and walked towards him.
Of the two rivers in Philadelphia, the Schuykill, the river of Eakins, skull racing, and cherry blossoms, was the better one. She explained to the back of the driver’s head wrapping (was he unable to turn around because he had slept in the wrong position, like she sometimes did, and had a crick in the neck?) that he was to wait right there in the parking lot below the art museum, but he only nodded and in a soft, lilting accent mumbled, “yes, ma’am.” Praying he understood English, Lana set forth, watching for uneven footing, turning around as often as she dared to make sure the cab was still there. It was a beautiful day in April, just before the azaleas would flower, just before the park would explode into brilliant color.
The Exit Coach Page 9