When We Argued All Night

by Alice Mattison

  The washing machine shuddered to a stop, and she moved her clothes to a dryer. It was hard to be patient, to keep putting in coins until everything dried thoroughly, but if she brought her laundry home damp, she’d live for days with clothing draped on furniture. She wished for a cigarette, but she’d quit smoking—for good, she hoped—when she found out she was pregnant. Next to the dryer was a newspaper she hadn’t noticed, the Concord Monitor. Because of Watergate, there was always something new, but this paper was a few days old. I’m not a crook, Nixon had said. She knew about that.

  She scanned the comics, the horoscope, the classified ads. The dryer stopped and she removed bras, a T-shirt, and three socks, then inserted more coins.

  Ted didn’t know and would not be interested. She would manage. She leaned on the table where people folded laundry, turning pages. A small item announced a talk to be given in a local church: “When Your Child Tells You He’s Gay.” Some of us are girls, Brenda said out loud. Wait a minute.

  She put the paper down, walked to the front of the empty laundry, looked out at the wind-scoured street and a street lamp. She had heard herself speak, and she knew what she meant: the title of the talk should say He or She Is Gay, not just He. But she had said us. If someone had asked her whether she was gay or straight, right until this moment, Brenda would have said she was straight, not consciously lying. She looked at the street lamp. A scrap of paper blew sideways along the sidewalk, then, for some reason, stopped. Brenda ran her hands slowly up her sides, past her hips, up her overall bib and her breasts, over her cheeks. She would have been lying. She had always loved women. She walked back to the dryers, asking herself when she had known this. She was crying. Before Ted. She’d been lying to herself for a while. Well, I wanted a baby, she said.

  —I’m a lesbian, she said tentatively to the rattling, shaking dryers, which looked as if they might fly open in astonishment, but they always looked that way. She wondered if the people at work would be astonished: a middle-aged owner, his son, and a woman older than Brenda who’d worked there for years. Probably not. They made wooden playground equipment, and Brenda had learned to use power tools on the lovely maple and oak, to shape the posts that held swing sets and climbing structures, to finish them so they were smooth and golden. Here she got dirty but in a different way. She had ideas about the equipment they built. She was thinking about an arrangement of uprights they had not tried, with crisscrossing pieces to give children another way to climb.

  She looked around. Everything was different—everything was different—having said that she loved women, though here doing laundry there was no woman to love. All these years, into her thirties, she had poked her thoughts into the alignment they should have, constructing shapes more complicated than the clever climbing structures they made at Mountainside Playgrounds—she and Gene, his son (also Gene), Lydia—along with Ted, for a few weeks. Her ideas about herself had climbed up, down again, across, negotiated a little twist and then leaped over a barrier, all to avoid the knowledge she had just come to.

  Her secular parents—her unconventional father—had not brought her up to think homosexuality was sinful or sick, but her parents and friends, and she herself, had believed, until recently, that it was not a good idea: inconvenient, frightening because illegal, not quite the real thing. She’d gradually learned that it was a good idea, as large and as real a thing as loving men. She’d understood this since gay liberation—the public declaration that it was all right to be gay, after the Stonewall uprising—made everyone who thought like Brenda acknowledge abruptly, with relief, that homosexuals didn’t lead lesser lives or need to be fixed. It was fine to be gay, she had reasoned, but she had slept with so many men. Yet often, all these years, there had been a woman, some woman she wanted, whom she explained away. Just now it was a neighbor, a woman who’d come over with a basket of apples when she had extra, who had stood in the doorway, talking, after Brenda took the basket. She might or might not try to seduce her neighbor—the woman seemed to have a boyfriend—but how much better even to know it was possible. Brenda was not religious, but what she felt at this moment was gratitude. Her laundry was dry and electrified, and she gathered it in her arms—overalls with flopping straps and hot buckles, flannel nightgown, pullovers, plaid flannel shirts, cotton underpants—transferred it to the table, smoothed and folded it, and stacked it in her laundry basket. Then she went out to her car to see if she felt the same way after the drive home or in the morning.

  2

  Wind blew March rain sideways and made Harold’s umbrella a useless encumbrance. He needed one hand to hold the campaign literature, which he should have put into a plastic bag, and the other to press doorbells and insert brochures into mail slots and mailboxes. He also had a chart on a clipboard, on which he was supposed to note down a number for each person he talked to: 1 meant definitely voting for Senator Kennedy in the Democratic presidential primary that was now three days off, 2 meant leaning toward Kennedy, 3 was undecided, 4 was leaning toward President Carter, and 5 was definitely for Carter. It was a neighborhood of brownstones, shabby blocks in Chelsea, and his legs hurt from walking up and down stone steps. Why had he agreed to do this? A friend had asked. He was seventy and still a fool. Well, he had agreed to do it, as he had agreed to give any help asked of him in these last eight months, because Nelson was dead and had not asked for help before he took the pills.

  A quiet death, Harold had said to himself more than once, and more than once he’d admitted that after all these years, despite his wild grief, there was some relief in knowing he no longer had Nelson’s death to expect and fear. Nelson had left notes for Harold, for Myra, and for Paul. He had never learned to live, but after many tries he’d learned to die compassionately. And what was the benefit in that, Harold had asked Naomi, over and over, these months. Were they better off because Nelson had been kind in his death? He had left his notes, along with a list of telephone numbers of family members, in a sealed envelope in his apartment, and on the outside he had written the name of a friend, a coworker at the bookstore where he had a job. He had given this friend a key to his apartment and asked him to come at a certain day and time.

  —Didn’t you know? Naomi had asked the friend, who had phoned when he found Nelson dead and then delivered the notes. She barely kept back her fury. Didn’t you know you had to go for help? Couldn’t you have done that much for him? They were at the door of Harold’s apartment. They had not asked the man in—he was a sad, shy man, a little older than Nelson, pained but resolute.

  —He picked me because he knew I wouldn’t, the man said. If he thought I’d have done that, he’d have asked someone else. Isn’t this better than having the police break in and find his body, after none of you heard from him for weeks?

  —It would be better if he was in a hospital, Naomi said.

  —He knew the inside of too many hospitals, the man said, and Harold knew that was true. Even Naomi quieted.

  He and Naomi had thanked the friend, eight months ago, and had gone inside. He had read the note, which was loving. Naomi sat opposite, her thin arms stretched on a chair that made her look even smaller than she was. She was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, and her hair was gone. She had put on her wig to receive Nelson’s friend, but it was uncomfortable, and now she took it off. Harold put down the note and studied Naomi’s cherished bald head in the diminishing evening light. Its paleness seemed to draw what light was in the room.

  —We should marry, she said at last. I’ve pretended too long that I’m not your wife.

  There was and would be no comfort, but alongside the weight that made it hard to breathe, alongside this new, permanent pain, came something light and cool, lovely.

  —You don’t want to rush into something like that, he had said, smiling.

  Some people didn’t know there was a primary; some didn’t know that as Democrats—nearly everyone in this neighborhood was a Democrat—they could vote; and a few didn’t know who was running ag
ainst Jimmy Carter. When he said it was Senator Kennedy—Teddy Kennedy—they had seen that on the news, they now recalled, but one woman said, holding up her hand to block the offered brochure, I wouldn’t vote for that scum. What he did to that girl!

  —He isn’t perfect, Harold conceded. None of us is perfect. He’s strong on gun control. He’ll deal with the economy. Get the hostages out of Iran—

  Harold tried to keep the brochures from flying away as he walked down her steps and farther along the block. The next man was voting for Kennedy because Carter was bad for the Jews. Harold didn’t think Carter was bad for the Jews, even though the United States had voted against Israel on the issue of Israeli settlement in occupied Arab lands, but he agreed because he was glad to mark down a 1. Nobody answered at the next three houses, and then a woman said she was voting for Carter because everyone knew Reagan would get the Republican nomination, and Carter was more likely to defeat Reagan. She quoted a poll Harold didn’t know about. Carter would beat Reagan 63 percent to 32 percent. Kennedy would beat him too, Harold noted.

  —But not as definitively, she said. The main thing is, Reagan has to lose.

  —You don’t think Ronald Reagan is a serious threat, do you? Harold said. She was a rumpled, brainy-looking woman, maybe in her fifties.

  —Of course he is, she said. The only thing that matters is to defeat Reagan. He’s an idiot. Did you hear about that joke?

  Harold had heard about the joke. On the campaign bus, Reagan had told an ethnic joke: How do you tell the Polish one at a cockfight? He’s the one with the duck. How do you tell the Italian? He bets on the duck. How do you know the Mafia is there? The duck wins. Edwin Meese, his political adviser, had said, There goes Connecticut.

  —People will see through Reagan, Harold said.

  —No, they won’t. Kennedy won’t ever be president because of Chappaquiddick. Who wants to win now so we can lose in November?

  —But if you could just choose your favorite, Harold said, it would be Kennedy?

  —Yeah, she said. It would be Kennedy. She took a brochure and closed the door. He put her down as a 3. Next came a man who said, I hate Kennedy, but I’m voting for him because I hate Carter more. Harold looked at his watch. He had promised to meet Naomi at her old apartment. She had moved out, but there were little things to do. Real estate was getting so expensive they had despaired of finding an apartment where they could live together comfortably, but at last they had found a co-op apartment they could afford. Harold had now lived there for a month and Naomi for a week. He could hardly believe that something in his life, at this late date, could be new and yet good—a gain, not a loss. They were to be married the next day: Sunday, March 23, 1980—two days, as it would turn out, before Kennedy won the New York primary—and at first Naomi had said he had no business volunteering for the primary the day before his wedding. Then she relented because the wedding would be so simple. Really, there was nothing to do.

  He quit early, tired, and took a cab to her old place. She was cleaning the kitchen. The furniture was gone, and he didn’t know how to help but couldn’t sit down. He stood and watched her. Her hair had grown back, dark gray, spiky, charming. I should help, he said.

  —I’ll tell you when I think of something.

  He was tired and leaned on the counter. I should have brought coffee.

  —I’d love coffee. He went into the rain again, leaving behind his clipboard and brochures, and found an open coffee shop. He brought back two containers, with two muffins in a bag in his raincoat pocket. Walking in the rain—again the umbrella was useless, and now he needed both hands for the coffee containers, but they were warm—he looked forward to the next day.

  There was always a next day and a next, and each took him further from Nelson’s life, each was a day that Nelson would not live, and each took Harold closer to his own death. But each took him further from the day of Nelson’s death, and that was worth it, further from the moment of finding out. They would be a small, quiet group at the wedding tomorrow. He was being married by a rabbi—would wonders never cease? As he walked carefully with the hot containers, head down against the rain, it seemed that if he concentrated enough, it would already be that next day, which was predicted to be sunny. He would be unmarried and then, as if he went over a bump, married. Naomi had wanted a rabbi, and Artie had produced one: Carol’s husband, Lenny, in midlife had gone to rabbinical school. Not too much God, Harold said to Artie.

  —Are you kidding? With me for a father-in-law? He doesn’t dare. Harold knew Lenny wasn’t afraid of anyone, but so what? They’d be married at Paul’s substantial home near Poughkeepsie—he taught history at Vassar—and Paul and his wife, Martha, were having lunch catered. The only guests would be Artie and Evelyn, Brenda and her little boy, David—who was six or seven—and her latest girlfriend (I try not to like them too much, Evelyn had told Harold, because they just don’t last). Carol and Lenny had two children, but Harold had no idea how old they were or whether they were coming. His own grandchildren would certainly be there: Paul and Martha had two boys and a girl, Amanda, who at three somehow knew about weddings and had insisted that she would be the flower girl in Grandpa Harold and Grandma Naomi’s wedding. So there would be no fuss—except that Amanda would carry a basket of petals and, if she could be persuaded to give them up, would strew them on the ground. Like Harold, Naomi was an only child, but two of her friends were coming to the wedding.

  After Nelson died, Artie and Evelyn had sat silently with Harold for hours, then returned day after day. They sat near him, bent forward as if their chairs had no backs, as if they sat on stools, as Jews are supposed to in mourning, though they were not on stools.

  Did you pick up your dress from the cleaners? he said, when he’d brought the coffee back and was leaning again on the sink.

  —What do you think? Huh? Do you think I picked up my dress? Or do you think I just left it there? She finished cleaning the stove, drank more coffee, elbowed him away from the sink and shook some cleanser into it. I’ve lived in this apartment all these years, she said, scrubbing. Decades. Decades, not just years. That stain in the sink. I clean it every week. It never changes. Oh my life, she said. What did I do with my life?

  3

  These days there were more homeless people in Grand Central Station than people taking trains. This was not true, Artie acknowledged to himself, but the homeless took up more room and were more noticeable than the people hurrying to or from the tracks, or even the people like him, waiting at the clock. A person who might be a man or a woman—in a woolen hat pulled down over the ears—sprawled against a wall, surrounded by battered suitcases. Artie’s bum knee was bothering him, and he walked repeatedly around the information kiosk in the center of the station because walking was easier than standing. He had arrived twenty minutes early for David’s train. Only eleven, the kid was coming by himself from New Haven, where Brenda had driven from New Hampshire to visit her girlfriend. The two of them would be alone for the weekend, while he and Evelyn got to keep David, which was good. But he didn’t see why she couldn’t have driven David into New York. Maybe the kid liked trains. He could remember being eleven, and he would have wanted to come alone, to come on the train alone. In a way, Artie was still eleven.

  Or Artie could have taken the train to New Haven, said hello to the girlfriend, Jess, whom he liked, and picked up David. Well, Brenda thought the way Brenda thought, and there was no point in arguing.

  Seventeen minutes until the train was due. Maybe Brenda thought taking the train back and forth would wear Artie out—that he was too old. She’d given him a funny look the last time they were together, as if she was shocked at how old he was, all of a sudden.

  Or maybe the kid insisted. Probably that was it. He enlarged his walk. No point in circling the information booth for seventeen minutes, giving himself the same circular explanations. He toured the station, studied the stupid Kodak ad, studied the homeless. The indeterminate person was a woman. Fourteen minute
s. If you often showed up early to meet trains, life would not seem short.

  Retired, he had too much thinking time. At the moment he was not worrying about the goddamn country four years after Reagan was elected or about Brenda’s love life—Jess had lasted for a while; maybe she was permanent—but, more immediately, about whether David would get safely off the train and into his arms and whether Evelyn would be standing inside the entrance of Macy’s closest to Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street when he and David arrived. What would Evelyn say if he couldn’t find David? What would David say if he couldn’t find Evelyn? Evelyn might get mixed up and go to the wrong place. He should have thought of something simpler. Macy’s had a million entrances. Thirteen minutes. Did he have time to go to the men’s room and get back before the train? He should have thought of that before. The impulse had been unexpected. Instead of wasting time deciding, he hurried down the stairs. He could still run. All that tennis. If everyone played tennis, the world would be a healthier place.

  He got back with two minutes to spare. Now he circled the information kiosk again, but when the train came in, he couldn’t help it, he went to the gate where David would come out. Then he thought that was a mistake, they’d miss each other, and he started back. Grandpa! called David, and Artie turned and opened his arms wide for a skinny boy and a fat, dilapidated backpack. David was wearing a Red Sox jacket.

  —You come to New York like that?