The Story of Arthur Truluv

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Aw, come here,” he says softly, and some force moves her closer to him. Where else can she go?

  “Hey. I got something for you.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small jewelry box.

  Oh, my god. This was a joke! The other girl, that was a joke! Because look, he’s going to propose! And she will say yes, she will say, Just take me to your apartment and we’ll start living together right now. She stares at the box, her heart galloping in her chest. To be out of her house, away from her father, who is like constant bad weather. To wake up excited for the day ahead! To feel seen and appreciated! Maddy feels she wears a mask behind which is a wondrous kaleidoscope. Look through here: she knows things; turn the wheel: she can do things. She can sing, she’s a good dancer, she can curl her tongue on demand, every dog and cat on the street comes up to her, she’s an amazingly fast reader. Now she can show someone everything: her heart, her humor, her loyalty!

  “Take it,” Anderson says, pushing the box toward her.

  She takes it, her hand shaking, and opens it to find a pearl solitaire necklace, identical to the one he gave her before.

  “A token of my appreciation,” he says, as though he were dressed in a tux and bowing before her. “Do you like it?”

  She reaches beneath the neckline of her T-shirt to pull out her necklace and shows it to him.

  “Oh,” he says. “Shit.”

  She starts to get out of the car and he grabs her arm. “What are you doing?”

  She says nothing, tries to wrestle her arm free, and he holds on tighter. It hurts. She turns toward him and slaps his face. It startles both of them, he lets go, and she gets out of the car, leaving the door open. Let him shut it. She starts running away.

  “Maddy!” he says. “What in the hell are you doing? Get in the car, I’ll give you a ride home. For Christ’s sake, get in the car!”

  She keeps running, faster.

  “Maddy! It’s not safe!”

  She hears him slam the passenger door and the car starts coming toward her. She runs into the woods.

  “Maddy!” she hears. And then she hears the car driving off.

  She comes out of the woods and there is no sign of him. She waits for a minute to see if he will come back, but he doesn’t.

  Maybe fifty feet away, just at the periphery of the woods, she notices a doe watching her, and she becomes flooded with an elemental sense of shame. She stares back at the animal, its wide and patient eyes, its stillness. For a long time, neither moves. Then, “Mom?” Maddy whispers.

  When she was little, Maddy used to watch Mister Rogers on TV. Her father would set her up on the sofa with animal crackers and juice and disappear into the bedroom or the basement, where he could be alone. Maddy would watch the little train and the puppets and the regular visitors to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She would listen to the soothing voice of a man she wished her father were like. One day Mister Rogers stared out from the screen as though he were talking right to her. “Look for the helpers,” he advised. “If you look for the helpers, you’ll know that there’s hope.” She’d started when she heard that, then held perfectly still. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Mister Rogers had reached out his hand through the screen. She has never forgotten that day, that feeling of being offered some sort of lifeline.

  Maddy feels her mother sometimes as a glow in her brain, as a knock at her heart, as a whisper she can’t quite hear. And then there are times when she thinks her mother takes on the form of something else, like this doe, appearing from out of the woods to stand by her, if only from a distance. Maddy sees this as wordless reassurance, as fulfillment of the promise that Mister Rogers made, and it does offer her hope, though that hope is not nearly as bright as it used to be. That hope has gotten tired.

  Maddy swallows, holds up a hand. “Bye,” she says, and starts walking.

  When she gets home, she climbs noiselessly through the window and, once inside, turns on her desk lamp. Her father is sitting on the edge of her bed. “Where have you been?” he asks.

  There is nothing left in her. She is not afraid.

  “I snuck out to meet a boy.”

  Her father nods. He stares at her standing there, her arms crossed, her heart shattered.

  Then, “Come here,” he says, and pats the bed beside him. Maddy moves to the place he’s indicated and sits staring straight ahead.

  Her father clears his throat. He puts his hand over Maddy’s, and Maddy’s stomach clenches. Her natural response to his rare attempts at affection is to stiffen or move away from him. Because these attempts are not felt as warm. Rather they are felt as foreign and intrusive, and as reminders of what was almost always missing and, at least at first, acutely longed for. Over the years, she has built a little fort against wanting any of that from him anymore. It is too late now. The fort is impenetrable. She is safe inside it.

  “Look,” her father says. “I know I’m not…I know it might not seem so, but I love you. Please don’t ever do that again. I was scared, you scared me. Will you promise me never to do that again? That’s not the way. Boys don’t respect girls who do that. Okay?”

  No shit. “Okay,” she says, and takes her hand away.

  “Don’t do it ever again.” He looks over at her, starts to speak again, then doesn’t. “Good night.” He rises, tiredly, it seems to her, tired beyond the lateness of the hour, and, at the threshold, turns around to face her. “Do you want to talk about anything?”

  She shakes her head no.

  “I’m going grocery shopping tomorrow. Do you need anything?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said no!”

  He hesitates, then again says, “Good night.”

  “Good night.” They are beautiful words, she thinks. Good. Night.

  She gets under her covers without undressing. She will not think of him. What did she expect? She will not think of him. She will think of good. And night.

  In the morning, she will take the bus to school and then she will not go to school but instead will walk over to the cemetery. To be with her people.

  —

  Before he heads to the bus stop, Arthur decides to stop over at Lucille’s. He will apologize. He will say that he had been indisposed, and had been embarrassed to say so. But he’s okay now, and maybe they can chat that evening. He hopes Lucille will agree, and maybe even say, “Wait just a minute, I’ll give you something for your lunch.” And then she might come out with a baggie of cookies for him. Orange blossom, he thinks she said last night. Butter orange blossom. They’ll be good, he bets. His mouth waters, just thinking of them. Lucille can bake! As she will tell you, but let the woman take credit where credit is due. Sometimes when she bakes her caramel cake he can smell it from his living room.

  He crosses over his yard and goes up the steps to her front door. Knocks the shave-and-a-haircut way. He hears her moving around inside and reaches toward the back of his head to smooth his hair down. Puts his hands behind his back, then in front of him. Rocks back on his heels, then forward. Knocks again. Silence this time. He rings the doorbell, but she doesn’t come. Is she all right? It’s a question that does occur at this age. He rings again, then cracks open the door to say, “Lucille?” and here she comes, rushing up quickly to meet him. Look at the pink in her face. Good.

  Only not, because what she says is “What are you doing, opening my door like that? What are you doing?”

  “I…Well, you didn’t answer, and I was afraid you had fallen or something and I—”

  “Fallen!”

  “Well, yes, Lucille, I was worried you might have fallen.”

  “I have never fallen in my life since I was a little girl.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  They stand there, and then she says, “I have to go.”

  “Okay. I guess I’ll see you, then.”

  She shuts the door.

  So. She’s angry. He could knock again and apologize, ask if she’d lik
e to talk. But you know what? He doesn’t want to. He does not want to. What he wants to do is go and have lunch with Nola. It is his greatest pleasure and he doesn’t care who knows it.

  Still, exiting the porch, he turns around one last time. Maybe he sees the curtain flutter, maybe he doesn’t.

  He rides the bus a bit subdued, but his heart lifts once he walks through the cemetery gates. It’s a beautiful day, puffy white clouds seeming to ride the blue sky. Blue is the right color for a sky, and white is the right color for clouds. His pace picks up. He’s brought peanut butter and grape jelly for lunch today, and one of those little fruit cups, and a thermos of milk on account of the peanut butter and jelly. When the day comes when he can no longer enjoy peanut butter and jelly, well, he will be ready to reside in heaven with Nola. He hopes there really is a heaven. He hopes there’s a way he can see her again. How he would love to see her again right now! If only he could, he wouldn’t tell anyone, it would be his and God’s little secret, but, oh, what he wouldn’t give to see that face alive again just for an instant, those eyes looking right into his. It would sustain him for the rest of his days.

  Ah well.

  He starts walking down a row.

  Annette McAllister. Dead at eighty. A long life, one might say, though if you asked Annette, she might disagree. Arthur bends slightly over her grave. Forget-me-nots, he gets. Must have been her favorite flower. A bad case of arthritis, knuckles all knobby. A knitter, nonetheless. Peanut brittle in a yellow bowl by her recliner. Irritated by small children.

  Arthur straightens. Irritated! Well, you always want to give the benefit of the doubt to those buried and gone, but Arthur cannot abide those who don’t like small children. Oh, maybe little kids are trouble, sometimes, but only for a good reason: They are tired. They are hungry. They are afraid. He supposes a great many ills of adults might be cured by a nap or a good meal or a bit of timely reassurance. But adults complicate everything. They are by nature complicators. They learned to make things harder than they need to be and they learned to talk way too much. Not that he isn’t guilty of his own sins, as an adult. His loss of enthusiasm for spontaneity, for one. Nola used to complain about that. “Let’s go for a drive!” she’d say, and he’d say, “When?” and she’d say, “Now!” “Where?” he’d ask, and she’d say, “Anywhere!” And he’d say, oh, he couldn’t right then. Finally, she stopped asking, because he always said he couldn’t do it right then. But he could have! He could have and should have. You ask kids if they want to go for a drive, what do they say? Yes! Want to catch minnows? Yes! Want to bury treasure? Yes! Want to spin around and get dizzy? Yes! The truth is that, apart from Nola, Arthur always has favored being with kids over adults.

  Arthur moves on toward Nola’s row. Passes Harold Lawton. Passes Henry Olson. Passes Heidi Mueller and pauses. Born March 14, 1922. Died December 25, 2011. Christmas Day. That must have been a hard one. He stands still, his fists clenched. War bride, he thinks. Came here with her soldier husband. War bride with blond curly hair and the bluest eyes. She stood and watched, from behind lace curtains, as an Army convoy rolled into her town at the end of World War II. The Nazis had told the women not to talk to the Americans, who would try to rape them, who would give them chocolate laced with poison. She talked to a soldier anyway. He had three new toothbrushes in his front pocket. She saw them and she wanted one, because luxury had come to this: a new toothbrush. He’d begged a kiss in exchange; she refused; he was smitten. He was from New York City, nearly undone by all he had witnessed in the war, and the sight of this woman was a rose in snow. He was fined for breaking the fraternization ban and talking to her. Never mind. Just one look, that’s all it took.

  Just one look, it happens more often than people think. Happened with him and Nola. He looked at her standing at the candy counter at the dime store and everything inside him took the express elevator down, then up, zip-a-dee-doo-dah. “Miss?” he’d said, around the lump in his throat. She’d turned toward him and smiled, and he’d said, “I’m going to marry you.” And she hadn’t run away. She’d said, “When?”

  Arthur looks up at the sky, which has suddenly darkened. Rain wasn’t forecast, but apparently the rain didn’t check the forecast. He’ll eat quickly, bless the resting spot of his wife, whose spirit glows in him and around him still and forever, and then he’ll head home. He’ll plant the tomato seeds he bought to start in little Dixie cups. It makes him feel like the Lord above when those things sprout. A man may not have a whole vegetable garden, but a man needs his fresh tomatoes in the summer.

  He sits down on his fold-up chair and is just about to start in on his lunch when he sees that girl again. She’s watching him, her back against a tree, her arms crossed. Her backpack is beside her. It’s one o’clock. Why isn’t she in school?

  Tentatively, he raises his hand and waves. She waves back, then stands and starts over toward him. Her gait is slow but purposeful, her expression unreadable.

  When she reaches him, he stands and says, “Well, hello there.”

  “You come here all the time,” she says.

  “And you almost as often.”

  She shrugs. Then, gesturing with her chin to Nola’s grave. “That your wife?”

  Arthur nods. “That’s Nola. She died six months ago. Nola Corrine, the Beauty Queen.”

  Silence, as they both regard the headstone, and then Arthur says, “I miss her an awful lot, and so I come out here to have lunch with her every day. Feels like I’m having lunch with her.”

  “Was she a beauty queen?”

  “To me, she was.”

  “You talk to her, right?” Maddy says. It is a child’s question, innocent and absent of judgment.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What do you talk to her about?”

  He straightens, offers a smile.

  “It’s private; okay, I get it,” Maddy says, and Arthur sees that she’s embarrassed, a little folded in on herself. She’s a fragile one, this one.

  “It’s not so private,” he says. “I talk out loud. Anyone nearby could hear me, if they wanted to. In fact, I guess you might have heard me at one time or another.”

  She shakes her head. “I never heard you. I saw your mouth moving, but I never heard you.”

  “Well, it’s nothing very much,” Arthur says. “I tell her what I’ve been up to. I tell her anything that comes into my head, really. The weather. Sometimes a story I read in the paper, something funny; she used to like the funny things or the human interest stories, she didn’t care for politics.” He looks into the girl’s face, sees the dark rings under her eyes. “Sometimes I tell her how much I miss her. Though that’s…Well, that’s like trying to put an elephant through the eye of a needle. If you know what I mean.”

  Maddy nods.

  “I’m Arthur Moses,” he says, and offers his hand. She looks at it, then shakes it, and Arthur isn’t sure that she’s ever shaken a hand before. He supposes it’s possible. It’s not something you see young people doing a lot. Seems like they mostly keep their hands in their pockets, something that used to be considered rude. That or they’re type-type-typing on their phones.

  “Maddy Harris,” the girl says.

  A crack of thunder, and then the rain starts suddenly. Fat drops land on Arthur’s neck, run down the back of his shirt. He hunches his shoulders, speaks loudly over the noise of the storm. “Looks like we got a monsoon here! Guess I’d better go!”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  He starts to walk away, and the rain intensifies; it’s the kind of rain that hits the headstones so hard it bounces up.

  “Hey!” he says, turning back to where the girl is standing. “There’s a bus coming in just a few minutes. Would you like to come over to my house and get out of the rain?”

  “Arthur!” Nola used to say, about such sudden impulses. Once they had just bought a loaf of cinnamon indulgence bread and he gave half of it away to a passerby who said it smelled good. And when Nola widened her eyes at him as he w
alked away with her, he said, “What. Last time we gave half the loaf to the birds.”

  “Yes, and the birds like it!” Nola said. “And I like to give it to them!”

  Arthur licked a little cinnamon sugar off his pointer finger. Then he offered it to Nola. She frowned ferociously but then laughed and had a lick herself. That was Nola for you, couldn’t hold a grudge if you paid her.

  Arthur tells Maddy, “We have to hurry if you want to come.”

  She doesn’t move. She stands looking at him and he sees in her eyes when she makes her decision. She hikes her backpack up onto her shoulder and says something he can’t hear.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, ‘Fine, I like riding the bus.’ ”

  They walk quickly through sudden mud toward the stop. Arthur hopes Lucille won’t see him bringing this girl into the house. Then he hopes she does see them. Maybe she’ll come over with cookies. Though Lucille very rarely comes over. Almost always, he goes to her house, and usually just as far as the porch, though he does help her put her star on top of her Christmas tree. Isn’t it funny. All the years they’ve lived next to each other and so rarely do they cross each other’s thresholds. He liked it better when he was a kid and he and his friends ran into and out of each other’s houses as though they lived in all of them.

  He and the girl reach the bus stop and Arthur is relieved; his heart feels odd, like it’s shimmying. He’s out of breath. He would like to sit down on his chair, but some old relic of masculinity makes him refuse. But then the girl takes the chair from him, opens it, and gestures for him to sit there. And he does. And then they wait in silence in the pouring rain for the bus.

  Arthur realizes that if he were alone, it would be a grim wait. With the girl, it is an adventure. That’s what being with another does. He remembers now with something like a full-body flush, he remembers what it means to share something with someone, the particular alchemy that can light things up.

  If Lucille doesn’t see them go into his house, he’ll go and get her. As long as he’s collecting women.

  “Here it comes,” Maddy says, and Arthur sees the bus approaching, headlights on, windshield wipers slapping at high speed. So much water has collected already in the gutters that the bus looks part boat.