Arthur is whittling a little bird for the ever-coming baby. He doesn’t look up to answer. “I don’t see how, either. Everybody makes mistakes, sometimes even before we get up in the morning. We can’t help but make mistakes. The important thing is to keep trying. And to apologize when you need to.”
Maddy tries to tuck her feet beneath her, but it’s gotten too hard to do. Soon she won’t be able to see her feet. She’ll need help tying her shoes.
She watches Arthur whittle; there’s a meditative comfort in it. He’s talented at a lot of things he never talks about, and he’s so generous, overly generous, Maddy thinks. You have to be careful about saying what you like around him; it will show up in your room the next day. When school started, Maddy said she had always loved pencil boxes, and the next day, one he had made from a cigar box was on her desk, full of sparkly pencils and a pink eraser. Not only that, he had made a little tiny pencil box for the baby, and in it was a pacifier (blue).
—
Halloween is almost upon them. On his way to bed one night, Arthur sees light coming from under Maddy’s door. She’s always rather quiet, but today she barely said a word. He supposes she might be worn out from making Halloween treats for the kids with Lucille. They made taffy apples, at least fifty of them, because Lucille would not accept the fact that parents wouldn’t allow such treats any longer. Finally, by way of compromise, she attached a note to each apple, saying, THESE ARE NOT POISON. THEY WERE MADE BY LUCILLE HOWARD, MASTER BAKER. CALL 555-9986 IF ANY DOUBTS.
Lucille also asked Maddy to help her wrap Tootsie Pops in Kleenex to look like ghosts. The Kleenex was tied on with orange or black ribbon, and Maddy gave all the little ghosts ghoulish black eyes. Arthur helped for a while, but the repetitiveness got to him. He excused himself for the bathroom, then never came back. The women found him in the living room, snoring, Gordon asleep in his lap.
Now Arthur knocks on Maddy’s door.
“Who is it?”
“Gordon,” he says, and it’s true; the cat is lying outside her door.
“Come in.”
He opens the door and sees her sitting on her bed, back against the wall, a quilt Lucille made for her wrapped around her. She’s holding something that she covers with the quilt as he approaches. Her big eyes are bigger than usual; she looks nervous. He wonders if that awful Anderson has been after her.
“Just wanted to see how you are today. Are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Anything I can do for you?”
“No.” She swallows.
Gordon jumps up and lies next to her. He’s on high alert, muscles tensed, his tail up and moving through the air in lazy S’s. He’s ready to pounce.
Arthur shifts on the chair. “I don’t want to pry, Maddy, but has that boy been bothering you? That Anderson?”
“No.” Her voice is so small.
“Is it…?”
She bursts into tears. Arthur leaps to his feet, alarmed, and rushes to sit beside her. Gordon leaps off the bed and takes up another strategic position on Maddy’s desk.
“Does anything hurt? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she says. “I’m just…” She looks over at the door. “Can we get a lock put on that door, do you think?”
“Of course. Is that it? Are you afraid of intruders?”
“No.”
She picks at the quilt.
“Maddy?”
She looks up at him. “I don’t want Lucille coming in here all the time. I like her, I really do, but I just need…She told me all about what will happen when I deliver and now I’m just so scared!”
“What did she say?”
Maddy begins to wail. “She said it would feel like my body was being torn in half!”
She wipes off her face, reddened now, and asks quietly, “Where is she? Do you think she can hear us?”
“She’s asleep, I heard her sawing logs when I went past her room. Lord, that woman could be her own percussion section in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.”
Maddy laughs, in spite of herself.
“I’m not sure how much Lucille knows about childbirth,” Arthur says. “She’s never had a baby.”
“I know, but she’s talked to a lot of people who have.”
“So have I!”
“Really?”
“Well, I’ve talked to a few. Mostly the women…you know…Mostly that’s women’s conversation. But I’ll tell you one thing. This one woman I knew, friend of Nola’s, she had her baby in half an hour. Came out of her like a greased cannonball.”
“That wasn’t her first.”
“No. But how did you know that?”
Maddy pulls the book she’s been hiding out from under the quilt.
It’s a battered tome called You and Your Delivery, and Beyond. “It says in here that the first delivery lasts the longest. That’s what everything I googled said, too. And there’s all this stuff about if you want medicine or if you don’t and why you should do this and why you shouldn’t do that and the stages of labor and how you’re supposed to breathe and I don’t get it! I don’t want to hurt the baby but I don’t know what they’re talking about, I tried it and I don’t know if it’s right, I don’t know anything and I just want…” Now she begins to cry again. “I just want my mother.” She covers her face and weeps, rocking back and forth, back and forth.
Arthur nods, his throat tight.
“Well, you did sign up for those classes, right? The Amaze classes?”
She sniffs. “Lamaze.”
“Lamaze, that’s it!” He pooches his lips out. “Lamaze. What does that mean?”
Maddy shrugs. “I don’t know. But I don’t start that for another few weeks and I don’t even have anyone to go with me. Everyone else will have their husbands and I have to go alone like a loser.”
“No, you don’t,” Arthur says.
She looks at him.
“I’ll go with you.”
“You don’t have to do that. No, Truluv. I can do it. I’m just…”
“Well, just saying. If you don’t want to go alone, I’ll go, too. Might be kind of interesting!”
“That’s so nice of you. But see, you have to get on the floor.”
“I have to get on the floor? Why do I have to get on the floor?”
“Because the helper? He—or she—gets behind the pregnant woman and helps her. I don’t know. I’ve only seen pictures.”
“Well, I could bring my fold-up chair and maybe do it from there?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right. I’ll tell you what. I’ll just go with you to the first class. I’ll say I’m your grandfather. Okay? We’ll just go together and see what’s what. Then you can decide if you want me to come anymore. My schedule is wide open. Except at noon. So I’ll come any other time you want.”
“Okay. The classes are in the evening. But we won’t say you’re my grandfather. We’ll say you’re my friend.”
“Even better.” He stands up to relieve some pressure on his back. He points to the book. “Where’d you get that?”
“Goodwill.”
“Looks kind of old.”
“I guess. I go to the library and google stuff, too, but I like the books. I like to take my time and I like the old pictures. All the moms look so pretty, seems like they all have these beautiful ribbons in their hair. I have a lot more books.”
Arthur looks around the room. “Where?”
Maddy climbs out of bed and goes to the closet, opens it. There are stacks and stacks of books in there. He moves closer to inspect them: books on labor and delivery. Books on pregnancy, week by week. On top of one stack is a book about what your baby would ask for if he or she could talk. That looks interesting. Arthur picks it up. “Have you read this one?”
She nods.
“Any good?”
“I guess. Did you know that the baby can hear music when he’s inside?”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Arthur lowers his voice to a whisper. “Can he hear us talking right now?”
“That’s what they say. And he can suck his thumb. And after they’re born, when they start to reach for things, they try to catch light. They close their fist around it, and they think they have it in their hands. Isn’t that cool? They like to be talked to and sung to. And sometimes they want to be cuddled—you wrap them like a papoose, and I did learn how to do that—but other times they want to be alone, like they just want to think their own thoughts. That’s what I read somewhere.”
“Huh.” Arthur walks over to the window and looks out. The moon is full, some of the trees look silver-tipped. He turns and regards Maddy, who seems to him at this moment like nothing more than a wee thing in a nest. “I would like to ask a favor, Maddy.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t participate in this like your mother would. But here’s what I can do. I can listen. I can learn with you. I can go to the doctor with you, if you’d like. I’ll wait in the lobby on the day he’s born and I’ll be the second to welcome him wholeheartedly into the world.”
“Maybe the third,” Maddy says ruefully. “Lucille already made her reservation.”
“Well,” Arthur says. “This is one time when she will not be in charge. Okay? You’re in charge.”
She looks up at him.
Arthur points to her. “You’re the one!”
“Okay!”
“You all right now?” Arthur asks. “Think you can sleep?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Arthur flips through the book on what babies would ask. “There’s a lot of nice pictures in here of the little fellows.”
“And girls,” Maddy says.
“Of course. Would you mind if I borrow this? I finished my Western, I’m plumb out of something good to read.”
“Sure, take it.”
“I might have some questions for you after I look at it.”
“Okay.”
She lies down, pulls the blanket up. “Would you turn out the light, Truluv?”
He does so, then makes his way to his room. He prepares for bed quickly so he can get under the covers and see what she’s been seeing, and then talk to her about it. He’ll also talk to Lucille.
To learn that someone living in the same house with you has been feeling so alone and you didn’t even know!
—
The leaves turn and because there is so little rain, they are on the trees even in November. It’s glorious, Arthur thinks. It’s so beautiful that every time he looks outside, it hurts in his chest. Some leaves are a bright yellow, some a deep red, some coral-colored, and some are little stained-glass windows of many colors all on one leaf. Lucille ironed some leaves between wax paper and hung them in the kitchen window. It was something she used to do with her fourth graders. “Kids probably only look at leaves online now,” she grumbled, while she ironed them.
She’s begun to make all kinds of crafty things, place mats and napkins and pillowcases and lots of things for the baby. Things to sleep in, things to lie on, things to lie under. Mostly in pink. Arthur did feel a pang the first time he heard the sewing machine running, but he likes it now, that sound of domestic industry. He likes domestics, period. As a spectator sport. He likes to watch the women fold towels in front of Dancing with the Stars. He likes the pile of freshly laundered and folded T-shirts and shorts and socks that gets left at the foot of his bed once a week, and the way his shirts and pants are taken out of the dryer damp and immediately put on hangers, so there’s not a single wrinkle in them. He likes the scent of the lemon oil Maddy uses on the wood, he likes how the bathroom sparkles. Lucille has outlawed all the cleaning products that he used to use (not that he used them all that much, but he had them, that has to count for something!). It’s all organic now, or nontoxic or gluten-free or manna from heaven or whatever, Arthur isn’t sure what those two go off and buy or where they buy it. But it doesn’t matter. The house practically purrs. And wonder of wonders, both Maddy and Lucille leave the toilet seat up most of the time.
Lucille has been making nourishing soups and stews, and yesterday she made caramel rolls that smelled so good Arthur complained that she was going to put him into heart failure with just the smell alone. “They’re not for you, they’re the demo for my class,” she told him, but that’s what she always tells him when she makes things for her classes, and then she always saves some for him and for Maddy. And for herself. Always. Every morning after she’s taught a class, there’s some treat left on her special blue platter in the middle of the kitchen table. “I’m getting fat,” Maddy frequently complains, and both Arthur and Lucille always respond in unison: “You’re supposed to!”
This morning, while Lucille busily (and noisily!) sets up for teaching her class how to make a braided poppy seed egg bread, Arthur goes to the cemetery for an early lunch with Nola. It’s a bit chilly out, but the sun is warm; it’s the kind of weather that makes for a simultaneous feeling of gratitude and wariness, what with winter not far away, big puffy overcoats crowding the racks in the stores.
He heads, as if being directed, to a row of graves far from Nola’s and goes to the last plot, the one by the fence, close to the sounds of traffic. The cheap seats, he supposes. He always feels a little sorry for people buried in such places, as though they’re aware. Maybe they are aware. But if they are, he thinks they’ve moved beyond status or comparison or bitterness. If they are aware, they just…Well, they just are, and they are filled with their areness. Is how he thinks of it.
The grave at the end has a stone with an angel carved into it. She’s meant to be a kind of guardian angel, Arthur thinks, wings at rest, hands clasped, her gaze focused downward. He moves closer and squints at the name: James Linten. Born February 17, 1970. Died January 3, 2003.
Well. Another youngster. Cancer? he wonders. But no, here it comes: A car wreck; he slid on black ice. Last thing he did was try to change the radio station. And as soon as the car began to slide, he knew. Right into the path of a truck. He knew that he would die and in the remarkable way that these things happen, he got ready. He was ready.
Arthur stands with his hat in one hand, his chair in the other. And then, though he has never done this before, he opens his chair and sits beside the grave of someone other than Nola. He was ready.
Arthur has had friends die, he has visited them in hospitals near the end, and always he saw something when people were ready: a gentle turning-away-from. And what he always hoped was that in turning away, they were also turning toward. For everything there truly is a season; if his life’s work has not taught him that, it has taught him nothing. The birth of spring, the fullness of summer, the push of glory in the fall, the quiet of winter.
James Linten. Thirty-two years old. Father of twins.
Arthur stands and folds up his chair. He’d rather not think of those twins, whom he thinks must have embraced their father’s legs when he came in the door. James may have been ready; he doubts those twins were. And then he has to laugh at himself, at the realness of his imagination. Still, he looks over his shoulder as he walks away, and there is something.
He wanders a bit more. There’s the stone dog lying at the base of Benjamin Spencer’s headstone that he’s seen many times, muzzle on its paws. There’s a drawing of a turkey on Frieda Loney’s grave, the kind children make from their hands. There’s a carved weeping woman draped over Beth Ann King’s black granite marker that he does not like to look at.
He walks past Susan James: Died on vacation in a water-skiing accident, the clouds in a blue summer sky the last thing she saw. Here is Henry Wilcox, Lived 101 years out of pure stubbornness. Would never take his pocket watch off except when he bathed, and even then the watch was left on the closed lid of the toilet so he could keep an eye on it. No one ever knew why it was so important to him. “That’s my business,” he always said. Died in a car crash that was not his fault; he’d been on the way to get a proper shave. Bruce Hudso
n: Died at forty-five from a concussion, after a fistfight that began when a joke wasn’t so funny.
“Nola,” Arthur says when, out of breath, he reaches her grave at last. He settles down in his chair. “A nice day, but winter’s sticking its nose out the door.” And then he says nothing, just sits and enjoys the sun and the sky and the mild scent of the damp earth.
In winter, Nola had to have flowers. She bought inexpensive bouquets at the florist’s every week or so. Once she had one at the center of the kitchen table and the blossoms from the flowers had begun to fall, there was a ring of petals at the foot of the vase. At breakfast one day, Arthur cleaned them up and rearranged the stems. Nola sat watching him. Then she said, “What are you doing?”
“What?” he said. “They’re dying.”
“They’re still beautiful,” she said, “the petals, loose like that. Please don’t clean them up. The falling…it’s just part of it. I bring buds home, the blossoms open up, the petals fall, and I like all of it.”
At one o’clock, Arthur is going with Maddy to her obstetrician’s office. She told him it might be fun for him to hear the baby’s heartbeat, but Arthur suspects she has an ulterior motive. She and Lucille both have been badgering him to go to a doctor for his waning appetite, his declining strength, for the pains he’s been having in his stomach, and for the way he seems to need so much more sleep lately. The women can’t count on him to chime in on anything they watch on television anymore; they tell him they look over at him to tell him something and he’s gone, his head tilted oddly, his mouth agape. The only one who doesn’t bother him about this is Gordon, although, come to think of it, the cat does his own kind of surveillance: he rarely leaves Arthur’s side and he sleeps on his bed all night, every night.
Maddy probably figures that if her OB meets Arthur, he will, based on his appearance alone, advise Arthur to go and get a checkup. “The baby’s doing well!” he imagines Dr. Hunter saying. “But you, Arthur, you don’t look so good. When’s the last time you had some lab work done?”
The Story of Arthur Truluv Page 15