The Story of Arthur Truluv

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Oh, wait, I don’t have any money,” Maddy says. “Will you lend me some?”

  “I’ll pay,” he says. “I’ve got a monthly pass.”

  When they board the bus, the driver won’t let Maddy ride on Arthur’s card. “Are you kidding?” Arthur says.

  “She doesn’t qualify,” the driver says. He’s a mean old bird, squinty eyes, no sense of humor or compassion.

  “I’ll pay, then,” Arthur says, and digs in his pocket for the fare. Luckily, he’s a man who believes in carrying change around.

  “Thank you,” Maddy says, her head bowed.

  They sit in the handicap seat, just behind the driver, since he’s not going to wait for them to find any other seat.

  “How far are we going?” Maddy asks.

  “Seventeen blocks,” Arthur says. “We’ll be at my house in ten minutes. Do you like soup?”

  “What kind?”

  “Bean and bacon?”

  She wrinkles her nose.

  “Tomato?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” She turns to stare out the window, and Arthur sneaks a look at her reflection. Such a sad face.

  When they arrive at Arthur’s stop, the rain has let up. They make the short walk to his house, and it is only as they are heading up the steps to go in that the girl hesitates.

  It occurs to Arthur to ask if she would like to just sit on the porch, but here comes the sound of Gordon meowing on the other side of the door.

  “Do you have a cat?” Maddy asks.

  Arthur nods. “Gordon. He gets mad if I leave him. Though of course he’ll walk away when I come in.”

  He puts the key to the lock and opens the door. Gordon looks up at him, sees the girl, and freezes.

  “This is Maddy,” Arthur says, and, to her, “Come on in.”

  She steps through the door and Arthur closes it behind her. She takes off her muddy boots, reminding Arthur to take off his shoes as well. Maddy’s socks have skulls on them; Arthur’s have holes in both toes. He wasn’t expecting company.

  The girl starts to shrug out of her jacket and Arthur goes behind her to help her.

  “What are you doing?” Maddy says, spinning around.

  “I was going to help you with your jacket.”

  “I can get my own jacket off.”

  “Sorry. I’m just used to doing that. Gentlemen used to do that, help a lady with her coat. Open doors for them. You know. You’ve seen it in movies, haven’t you?”

  “It smells like onions in here,” Maddy says.

  “Well,” Arthur says.

  “I like onions.” She stoops down and Gordon walks right up to her. He sticks his big head under her hand and closes his eyes when she scratches him.

  “I guess you’ve got a friend,” Arthur says.

  “Well, that makes one.”

  “Two,” Arthur says.

  She looks up at him quickly. And then she collapses onto the floor and puts her hands over her face.

  “Uh-oh,” Arthur says. “Maddy? Are you…?”

  Well, he can’t get down there with her, he’ll never get up again.

  “Maddy?”

  She pulls her hands down and looks at him. “I got dumped last night.”

  Arthur nods. Then, “Huh,” he says. “Me, too.”

  She frowns. “Really?”

  “I think so. Let’s have lunch, and you tell me what you think. And then I’ll tell you what I think. About your story. About what happened to you. If you’ll tell me.”

  Maddy pushes herself up off the floor, wiping at her nose. Arthur winces, imagining how it must tug at the ring. “I’ll tell you some,” she says.

  “Good enough.” Arthur goes into the kitchen and sneaks a glance over into Lucille’s house. Nothing. Dark. She must be out. He hopes she brought an umbrella.

  Arthur pulls out a chair for Maddy at the table. “I’ll just get this ready,” he says. He hopes he has enough milk for the soup. He hopes he has two matching bowls. He hopes they’re clean. When you live alone, you become a lot more tolerant of certain things.

  “Is there a drawer in this table?” Maddy asks.

  “Yup. That’s the way they used to do it. And they would keep silverware in there. Convenient! Nola and I used to keep our Green Stamps in it. ’Course they don’t have them anymore.”

  “What are green stamps?”

  “Oh, you’d collect them at the grocery store or gas stations and then you could trade them in for things. Dishes. Toys. Save enough and you could even get some real nice furniture. Little kids used to love pasting the stamps into the books.”

  “Did your kids?”

  “I don’t…We couldn’t have any kids, Nola and I.”

  “You’re better off,” Maddy says, low.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said, ‘You’re better off’!”

  Arthur pulls his head out of the refrigerator to stare at her. “Now why in the world would you say that?”

  She shrugs.

  “Don’t you like kids?”

  “I do. But a lot of other people don’t. A lot of people have no idea what to do with kids. Seems like they think they’re just in the way.”

  Arthur finds the milk and shakes the carton. There’s enough for the soup. He opens the can and dumps the contents into the pan. Then he adds the milk, his hand shaking a little bit. “I wish I’d had kids for lots of reasons, but especially now I wish I had them.”

  Silence, and then, “How old are you?” Maddy asks, and Arthur tells her eighty-five. Then he asks her how old she is.

  “Eighteen,” she says. “Almost.”

  Eighteen. The word is a poem. “You don’t look eighteen,” he tells her.

  “I know. When I was born, I looked young for my age.”

  He hesitates, then laughs. And she smiles. Good Lord, he’s never seen such a smile. It’s like the sun came out in her face. Such a pretty girl, if she’d just take that thing out of her nose.

  “Do you have any bread?” Maddy asks.

  “Sure. Half a loaf.”

  “Do you have any cheese?”

  “I got some American slices.”

  “Want me to make us some toasted cheese croutons for the soup?”

  He frowns. “How do you make those?”

  “I never made them, but I saw in a restaurant they had tomato soup with toasted cheese croutons. I guess you just make a toasted cheese sandwich and cut it up.”

  “Okay with me,” Arthur says. “Get yourself a frying pan.” He gestures with his foot toward the bottom cupboard.

  She gets out a little cast-iron pan. “Do you have any butter?”

  “If you won’t tell my doctor, I do.”

  —

  It’s eleven-thirty by the time Lucille lets herself into her house. Eleven-thirty! Practically midnight! She hasn’t been up this late in years!

  But oh.

  She prepares for bed as two people. Here is the Lucille that she is now, creaming off her face, but also here is the Lucille she was then, her cheeks full and pink, her skin dewy, her shoulder-length hair chestnut-colored and so thick she could barely get a brush through it. Not only does she see her face—oh! she was pretty!—but she feels her young body as well. It’s true, she can feel herself as she was then! Her chin lifts, her legs straighten, and she feels a rush of vitality running from the top of her head to the bottom of her feet as startling as if someone had dumped a bucket of water on her. Or like that time she stuck a fork in the toaster before it popped up.

  She presses her lips together, puts her fingers to her mouth, and squeezes her eyes shut. Feels something between a laugh and a cry come out of her. She shuts off the bathroom light and makes her way to her bed. Walking on clouds, she really understands what that means now.

  She lies down, turns out the bedside lamp, and sees his face in the darkness. His two faces, his young one, from when she was with him, and his old face, the man he has become. Guess which face is bigger. Guess which face hangs in the air before
her like a big fat moon.

  Frank Pearson.

  Frank Pearson!

  “I thought you were dead,” she told him. And he said, “I thought you were, too,” and his eyes were full of wonder. You can say all you want about chocolate and flowers. Never mind all that. To be alive when you were thought gone! To be alive and well! Well enough, anyway.

  Lucille sighs. She’s exhausted, but she’s not sure she’ll be able to sleep. She clasps her hands over her abdomen, tries to slow her breathing. Then her eyes pop open.

  She’s going on a diet. She’s contemplated doing it before, for health reasons, because every time she visits the doctor, he looks at her weight on the chart and then up at her and Lucille says, “I know very well what you’re going to say. I will lose the weight.” That’s what she says every time she sees Dr. Fink. Every time. But losing weight for health reasons is a very dull prospect, doomed at the outset. Losing weight for romance, that’s altogether different.

  Tomorrow she was going to stuff pieces of Kraft caramels into chocolate chip cookie bars. She guesses she won’t do that now, although she was very curious about how that would taste. Maybe she’ll make them anyway and give them all to Arthur. That man is so skinny he disappears if you look at him sideways. Yes, she’ll give everything she bakes to him, he’ll be thrilled. She’s not mad at Arthur anymore, because of Frank. Smile, and the world smiles with you. All the world loves a lover.

  She lies there and tries to shut off her mind, but it’s no use; she can’t sleep. She turns the light back on, slides into her slippers, and goes downstairs to get the letter she received just the other day. And they say nobody gets letters anymore. Well, she got a letter and it was something else. What if it had gotten lost? What if it had blown out of her hand? What if despite the handwritten address she had thought it was junk mail, as most of her mail is, and had thrown it out? What if she’d looked at the return address and said, Oh no you don’t, it’s way too late for you and me! Which it is. But it’s not.

  She brings the envelope back to bed with her and unfolds the single page. She’d had a hard time reading his penmanship at first, but she can read it now lickety-split. The truth is, she has memorized the letter, but it’s better to read it, to examine again the way the g’s hang open, the way the t’s are crossed with emphatic slanted lines. The way he underlined hope, that’s her favorite.

  She reads the letter again and then tucks it under her pillow. She doesn’t think he’s happy he dumped her all those many years ago for Sue Benson. Who died a year ago. Died! From leukemia! In just three months! But anyway, she doesn’t think he was ever happy he married her. He’d had to, that’s all. He’d had a fling with Sue after he went to a party without Lucille. Sue was all over him, he gave in to her, and presto, a bun in the oven. And then so many years later, here he comes a-calling.

  Oh, she remembers something now. He used to do this thing where he turned her hand over and very, very gently kissed her palm, then her wrist, then her lips.

  They make a lip plumper that you can get right at the drugstore, anyone can buy it, she saw it the other day when she was getting her prescriptions filled. And she’d thought, What foolishness, and she’d loosened her dress from where it had gotten stuck to her thighs a little, which happens all the time; she has to be mindful.

  She needs to find her half-slips, which she never threw away as far as she can recall; they must be around here somewhere. She once had a full slip that was a mint green, and it had tea-colored lace in abundance at the bodice and all along the bottom, beautiful lace, it practically made your mouth water, and she had bought it for her hope chest and then never used it, of course, but she bets that slip is around here, too.

  Naturally it won’t fit now, but she is going on a diet. Not that Frank said anything about her being so much heavier than when he knew her. He wasn’t exactly a GQ model himself. But now it’s not just vanity; now she really does want to live longer, because she has been reminded that you never know. You just never know.

  It seems to be in vogue for gerontologists to ask their patients if they want to live to be a hundred. She’s been asked that a few times. Always, she says, “Well, of course!” because she thinks that’s the right answer. You can’t tell these people the truth. When her ninety-year-old friend Franny Miller told her doctor, “No, I certainly do not want to live to be a hundred; I don’t even want to live to be ninety-one!” she got a mental health referral. For heaven’s sake, Lucille used to think, whenever she was asked that question, why in the world would I want to live to a hundred? Now, because of this one thing that has happened, which is kind of a miracle, it really is, she does want to live that long! People are living much longer in relatively good health. She saw a man in Denny’s the other day who might have been more than a hundred, and he was putting down pancakes like it was a competition sport. And he walked out with nary so much as a cane. Bent over, okay, moving slowly, okay, but walking completely independently. She herself is only eighty-three, only four years out of her seventies; think of all she can do!

  She gets out of bed and goes downstairs to pack up all the orange blossom cookies for Arthur. She has those cute Chinese take-out containers, only they’re for cookies. Her grandniece sent them to her, probably hoping Lucille would use them to send baked goods to her. But Lucille fits all the cookies into three boxes for Arthur. All except for two of them, which she pops into her mouth, both at once, get it over with. They won’t hurt. Just two. My goodness, they are good. My goodness! She slips her hand under the flap of one of the boxes to get one more. If she doesn’t open the box all the way, it doesn’t count.

  Across the way, she sees the light on in Arthur’s kitchen. He’s probably eating packaged cookies. She sneaks closer to the window and peers over. Yup. She doesn’t think his wife ever baked cookies, that Nola. She was a nice enough woman, but she seemed to find all she needed in her husband. But now he’s adrift, isn’t he, just sitting over there eating Double Stuf Oreos that they never should have double-stuffed, what were they thinking? She bets Arthur misses her cookies like crazy. Just like a man, doesn’t know how much he needs you until he sees how much he needs you.

  —

  Cherise Baumgartner. Born March 19, 1943. Died August 9, 2016. Oh, this one. This one was a librarian, the prettiest thing you ever saw in spectacles. A mole perched at the angle of her jaw. Flame red hair and sea green eyes. Favored the color pink. Wore her hair up in a bun that always immediately started falling down in a most attractive way. Had no time for the fact that she was so pretty, didn’t like that she was so pretty, told her mother at ten years old that she wished people would stop saying she was so pretty. When she read, she liked to be barefoot and she liked to lace her fingers through her toes. Never married. Too busy reading, she used to tell people who harped on that.

  Opal Erickson, beloved daughter, sister, aunt. And then—oddly, Arthur thinks, for these words are etched toward the bottom of the stone in a different font—there is this: Friend / Cherished in life / Loved beyond death.

  He stands with his sack lunch in one hand, his fold-up chair in the other, thinking. What could it mean? Friend, he doesn’t think he’s ever seen that before. Was she gay? He checks the dates on the headstone. Born 1905, died 1980. He supposes she could have been. He closes his eyes, and inclines his head closer to the grave. Nothing. Opal’s not talking, at least not to him.

  He walks on, and a few graves down he feels what is almost a tug at his sleeve:

  Cal Bierman. Born June 1, 1900. Died July 4, 1990. A trout fisherman, a man made philosopher by the sound of rushing water. Parted his hair right smack down the middle, fashionable or not. A reddened, bulbous nose but a temperate drinker. Never liked to talk about it, but he fainted on his wedding day right at the altar in front of everyone. Favored basset hounds. His favorite holiday was the Fourth of July and he and his immediate and then extended family had a big picnic every year in honor of it. Even in old age, he and his wife would load up the
car with blankets and lawn chairs and go out to reserve a place in the park while the sky was still a smoky red and the birds had not yet begun to sing. How fitting then, the day that he died.

  Well. Time’s a-wasting. He brought tuna fish today, and it’s warm out. Better eat it. Tuna fish and a couple of tangerines and orange blossom cookies, and he might just eat them first. He meant to bring four cookies, but another one slid in. Lucille outdid herself with these. He’s glad she’s not mad at him anymore. She’s not as friendly as she was, but she’s not mad.

  A few days ago, he was pruning the Juneberry tree in the side yard when he saw her on her porch getting her mail. “Hello!” he called out.

  She held her hand up in a kind of lackluster way, the equivalent of saying, Yeah, so?

  “Are you free for dinner tonight?” he asked, and was aware of a peculiar nervousness. It had been a long time since he’d asked a woman on a date.

  “What did you say?” she asked, kind of irritably, he thought, and he repeated the question.

  “Why are you asking?” she said.

  He put his hand on his hip, cocked his head. “Why am I asking?”

  “Yes, why are you asking me? Since I’m such a bore to you.”

  “Lucille, I apologize about that, about the other night.”

  “What?”

  He sighed, walked over to stand beneath her porch railing. “I said I apologize about the other night. I was…feeling indisposed.”

  “Then why did you come over in the first place?”

  He looked away, then back. “It came on suddenly, Lucille. Okay? Came on real suddenly and I had to get home fast.”

  The light dawned in her face. “Oh. Well, you should have said so.”

  “I’m saying so now and I’m also asking you to go out with me tonight and have dinner.”

  “Where?”

  “I thought maybe the Olive Garden? The bus stops right in front.”

  “I have a car, Arthur.”

  “I thought you don’t like to drive at night.”