Calamity and Other Stories

by Daphne Kalotay

  Lonny returned, clearing his throat. “Blind’s fixed. Everything should be fine now.”

  “Thanks again,” Rhea said, and stood up to accompany him to the door.

  Lonny walked there slowly. When they passed the fuse box in the entranceway, he looked at the smudged fingerprints left over from Mike’s fiddling and said, “Let me wipe this off for you.”

  “No, no, please don’t worry about it.” The afternoon had been fine, Rhea thought, but now it was time for him to go. And as if he sensed this, Lonny stepped out of the door, said good night, and was gone.

  Rhea closed the door and locked it. She turned back to witness the last moments of sunset through the bay windows of the living room. The sun had already dropped away, but the elongated clouds made red streaks in the sky. Though she had seen such spectacles before, Rhea stood and watched with amazement. She watched for seconds, then minutes, until she realized that the room had become dark. She went to the repaired socket to turn on the torchiere lamp, the one that had indicated the whole electrical problem in the first place. Pressing the switch, she braced herself for disappointment, but the lamp sent up its bright rays, and it seemed miraculous: the room lit up with halogen sun.

  Anyone out on Commonwealth Avenue could easily see in, Rhea realized, see the large woodblock prints on the walls, see Rhea standing with her hand still on the little switch of the white lamp. Lonny could see her, if he were waiting for the T; it stopped right in front of her building. Rhea walked over to the windows to begin shutting the Venetian blinds. She looked out, but the T must have just left. There was no one there.

  Tears welled in Rhea’s eyes. And yet it did not seem a bad thing that for a few hours that day—as Rhea now saw quite clearly—the man from Allston Electric had cared about her more than anyone else in the world.

  Anniversary

  It was ten years ago today that Eileen found herself leaning up against a building on Bowdoin Street, out of breath and barely able to stand. Though she had been smoking happily and basically nonstop for thirty-five years, the inability to breathe came as a shock.

  At the hospital, she was asked to blow into a balloon, to make a little arrow rise on a dial. When the dial refused to move, the nurse called in a small charge of doctors, and Eileen could see in their faces that they thought she was about to die. She was too weak to explain that she had decided not to. And so they scurried around in emergency fashion, preparing her deathbed, making the call to her son, wearing serious faces, and treating her with that fearful kindness people affect toward the dying.

  And yet here she is, skinny as ever, her bony fingers swollen at the joints, ankles so thin she once broke one just by stepping the wrong way. She is alive. It pleases her to think that she is a statistical improbability, a living refutation of scientific fact. Each morning, rain or shine, winter or spring, she pushes her long feet into orthopedic sneakers and rides her three-speed bicycle down back streets to the foundation in North Cambridge where she works. In the bike’s padded basket are the water bottle and thermal container of broth that she takes wherever she goes. She hasn’t smoked a cigarette since that day at the hospital.

  “You have to live,” her best friend, Annie, told her back then, “or else Mack will be an orphan.” It wasn’t a particularly helpful thing to say, and Eileen suspects that Annie, who never had children of her own, would have been more than happy to take over all parenting duties. But Eileen does feel a bit of guilt for putting Mack through such a scare. He was only a sophomore in college the day when they called him from the hospital, and pretty much everything else in his life had been easy. Even now he has that same relaxed, sheltered way about him, though he’s almost thirty and should have seen some sort of trouble by now. A week ago he proposed to the wrong woman, who told him yes. Eileen hasn’t informed him of his mistake; it’s his life, and she refuses to be made to feel responsible for it.

  “What happened to that other girl?” Annie asked when she heard the news.

  “Oh, she was too much for him.” That’s Eileen’s assessment, although she wishes he had dared to try to make it work. There was something just slightly off-kilter about Rhea, and Eileen liked the way that her occasional bracing comments revealed an unyielding, if submerged, fervor. But she was doomed to the sludgy life of a scholar, misunderstanding and defeat part of her daily grind. It was clear to Eileen that Rhea would always take the more difficult path—which is nothing Mack has ever had the patience for.

  Callie, meanwhile, works at a television station. She’s the type of dedicated worker—resourceful if not imaginative, smart if not intellectual, quick if not precise—who, Eileen is certain, can succeed at almost anything.

  “You know Mack. He’s not the type to step up to a challenge. He likes things easy.”

  He is the product of a great love affair, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. There’s something innocent and carefree about his very movements—sloppy like a puppy. Eileen sees the little boy in him even when he goes through periods of not shaving, even when she walked in on him and Callie that night when they were visiting last summer. He has Eileen’s long limbs and his father’s messy dark hair, and his usual expression is one of sleepy contentment. To Eileen he looks as if he needs to be nudged.

  His father had a puppy-dog quality, too, but more exuberant and purposeful, as if aware every minute that he had only this one shot at life. Eileen met him at a kibbutz a generation ago, back when she was thirty-three and Israel really did need more trees. It was Annie’s idea to go there; she had decided to leave her husband and declared that if she didn’t go far away she was going to go crazy.

  “I knew something was up,” Annie says now. They are at the Vietnamese restaurant where they have been dining weekly ever since Annie moved here twelve years ago. The menu has never changed, and the same faded sign hangs on the door: “Please Do Not Double Parking.”

  “The other day at the gym,” Annie tells Eileen, “I was riding the stationary bike, and I looked out the window onto the soccer field, and there was a bride in a gown with a veil and a long white train. Just gliding right across the field, with her dress and the veil billowing behind her.”

  “Sounds like a ghost.” Eileen coils noodles between her chopsticks. Her fingers are long, her nails blunt, the skin at her knuckles cracking slightly.

  “No, it was one of the students, a girl in some team uniform, lugging the goal to another part of the field. The net was flowing out behind her, all white and billowy. But for a split second she morphed into a bride.”

  Eileen nods at Annie’s insight. “Callie’s one of those athletic types.” Tall and rosy, with long legs, swimmer’s shoulders, healthful skin, and her hair full of highlights, Callie could be on the cover of a fitness magazine. She and Mack have broken up numerous times but always end up going back to each other.

  “It’s true I’m a bit psychic,” Annie admits, sipping her tea. “Just not in any particularly useful way.”

  She smooths the enormous, frilly collar of her blouse. Everything Annie wears looks like it has just come out of some attic trunk. She finds things at flea markets and thinks them bargains. Her blouse tonight has frills all the way down the front and billowing sleeves that are too short. Being a professor of philosophy, she can get away with this kind of thing.

  She teaches at a college just outside of Boston, which is why Eileen, who used to see her only on visits to New York, first proposed these weekly meetings. Their little table by the window has been the setting for some of their most heated debates. Eileen knows what the owners, a middle-aged couple from Hanoi, think: that she and Annie are aging lesbians, too in love to ever part despite their strong, sometimes loud, differences. One time Eileen brought a co-worker to dine here, and the owner’s wife kept giving disturbed looks, as if Eileen were doing something adulterous.

  “So—what’s she like, really?” Annie asks. “I mean, now that you know she’s going to be your daughter-in-law?”

  Eileen th
inks only a moment before saying, “Her crotch is always showing.”

  Annie lets out a cackle. “What, is she liberated?”

  “She always wears short skirts, and I swear every time I look there’s this view.” Eileen shakes her head at herself, because even though it’s true it’s not at all what she means.

  She tries again: “Last summer, when she and Mack were staying with me, we were going out to dinner and she’d put this tight little peach-colored dress on.” But how can she explain? Though she pictures Callie with her hair clipped back in a simple blond ponytail, glowing in her fitted peach dress, there is no way to put into words the way this girl moves, so unaware of her own body, of her physical power. They had reached the bottom of the stairwell when Callie said, “Wait, I need to fix my sandal.” But the dress was too tight for her to bend over; without hesitation, Callie hiked it up to her hips. Eileen still sees that peach tutu at her waist, while Callie fiddled with the strap on her sandal. Mack had already opened the door and stepped out onto the street. Anyone could have walked down the stairs right then, anyone on the street could have looked in, but what impressed Eileen was how un-self-consciously Callie had carried herself—and how Mack, waiting on the sidewalk, didn’t even notice.

  Another time, Callie came to breakfast in nothing but one of Mack’s T-shirts and her thong underwear. She went around like that all morning, reading the sports section, making herself more toast when she felt like it.

  But none of this explains what Eileen means. She says, “There’s this amazing lack of propriety about her.” Yes, that’s it. “We thought we were like that, Annie, didn’t we? Back in our twenties, in our thirties? We wanted to be. We thought we’d told the world to go screw itself, but we were always so aware of what we were doing. We were too conscious of ourselves, always making statements. With our lives!” She takes a gulp of tea and thinks of women she used to know, whose divorces were collective acts as much as personal decisions, whose clothes and affairs and careers and sexually transmitted diseases were badges of independence.

  She asks, “Are other girls like that now?”

  “It’s true the girls I teach wear skimpy clothes,” Annie says. “I would hate to be a teen nowadays. They think they have to look like something out of a music video.”

  But that’s not Eileen’s point, either. She says, “With Callie, it’s different, It’s nothing she’s trying to be, it’s just the way she is. It’s an amazing thing, actually. I find it inspiring.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  Eileen digs into her noodles. “With the two of them together, it’s just too . . .” She searches for the right word. “Comfortable. You know how Mack is. He needs someone to push his buttons, to get him going somewhere. There’s no edge to his life. There’s nothing to fight for. It’s all soft corners and cushy sofas.”

  Annie has formed a wicked smile. “I’m sure between the two of us we could find plenty of ways to push his buttons. He doesn’t necessarily need a wife to do that.” She gives a little snort. “I love to push buttons. I push them all time.”

  Eileen can’t help wondering what Annie’s students think of her, with her darting eyes and big, active nostrils, with her cackling laugh and her habit of sometimes talking to herself. “Careful, Annie,” she tells her. “You know how you sound when you talk like that. If you don’t watch out you’re going to end up like the old bat I saw in the drugstore today. She was returning a bottle of hand lotion that she must have had hanging around for at least ten years. The poor guy at the counter didn’t know what to do; they don’t even make that brand any more.”

  “I love it,” Annie says. “The nerve those old broads have.”

  With her face thinning out, her chin has somehow gotten longer, and Eileen thinks that in a certain light, from just the right angle, Annie is starting to look like a witch. This is a new, fascinating, development. When she turned sixty-three Annie vowed to no longer dye her hair, and so it is suddenly coarse, frizzy. Her nose is long and curved, and her pouting lower lip, which everyone used to say looked sexy, now just drags her jowls down. Her breasts, too, sag, amazingly so, into her belly when she hunches her shoulders. And yet Annie is still, at the same time, moment to moment, that fiery-cheeked college student who vowed never to wear anything as confining as a bra.

  With awe Eileen observes her friend’s mutations. She wonders at the way a person goes from being a buxom Bryn Mawr girl singing a cappella to this.

  Back in their twenties and thirties, Annie was always the attractive one, the big-breasted one, the one people set up on dates. No one ever set Eileen up. At the kibbutz Annie had a number of boyfriends and seemed to forget about her husband in no time. Eileen didn’t particularly like the other kibbutzniks, mostly Europeans and Scandinavians, all in their twenties, smoking too much dope and spending too much time checking each other out. The men didn’t even try to find a solution to the constant power outages, were unwilling even to do something about the stray cats that walked over everything, including the food and dishes and kitchen supplies. The women went around in short-shorts, halter tops, and Dr. Scholl’s and worked inefficiently.

  “We need more Dafnas,” Eileen used to joke, referring to the Israeli women living there. They at least got work done. Eileen could not bear to watch chores take so much longer than they should, could not even stand to watch the many idle flirtations that went nowhere. “Come on, Dafna,” she’d tease some Danish girl with her wooden sandals kicked off, drying her hair in the sun, and direct her toward a specific task. Someone had to take charge.

  “What this place really needs is passion,” she said one day as a young man fiddled with a circuit breaker in the main building. He turned his thick-lashed eyes toward her and seemed to think her brilliant.

  “You look like a ballerina.” It was the first time he had spoken to her, though she had seen him often enough before, usually helping himself to seconds at the canteen.

  “I said ‘passion,’ not ‘euphemism.’ ” Eileen lit a cigarette and looked at the boy’s round face, blue eyes, faint freckles, and messy hair. He was stocky in a robust, bow-legged way.

  “To me you’re a ballerina,” he said, and then walked over to shake her hand. He was from the Midwest and had been taught to do things right.

  Eileen wondered just how earnest a person could be. She drew a breath from her cigarette and said, “You must be dehydrated.”

  The boy laughed. “You can’t stand this place, can you?”

  “Other kibbutzim can’t possibly be like this. Can they?”

  “I have no idea. I’m only here because of my friend Louis. It was his idea.”

  “I’m here thanks to a friend, too.”

  Eileen told him about Annie’s impending divorce, and Len told her about living at home in Iowa with his mother. He was twenty-three years old.

  In the next few days, Len made sure to be wherever Eileen was, and Eileen felt a private thrill as the girls in their wooden sandals watched him following her around, lighting her cigarettes with his, whispering things in her ear. He made sure she ate enough; Eileen was the sort of person who, when involved in some other activity, could forget to eat. Len held her hand whenever he could. And yet it was a few days before he kissed her, and a few more before he pulled her into his bed. Everything he did was purposeful, in a clumsy, exuberant, way. In bed at night, every single night, before they closed their eyes in search of sleep, the final thing he did was to take her hand in his.

  When they returned to the States, his mother would call Eileen a cradle-robber. Part of the problem was that Eileen looked older than she was. Smoking, little sleep, and too much sun had aged her skin, and there would come a time, a few years later, when people sometimes thought Len was a younger brother or cousin, not her lover, certainly not her husband. But Eileen was used to being denied her sexuality. Her short-short hair, nonexistent breasts, and political activism had long caused people to assume she was a lesbian, an angry one—too skinny and
mean to experience love.

  Now that she has become—in everyone else’s view—old, she is simply seen as asexual, a bony, wrinkled creature with a cigarette-weakened voice and a brief helmet of gray hair, without physical passions. To Len, back when she was in her thirties, Eileen’s skinniness was youthful, her cropped hair radical, her smoker’s voice sexy. One day, toward the end of their time in the kibbutz, he said, “I’m going wherever you are.”

  And so Eileen is forever indebted to Annie for those months of planting trees and eating cucumbers and tomatoes and plain yogurt.

  “So—when’s the wedding?” Annie is asking.

  “Who knows? They haven’t decided if they want to do it in San Francisco or back here.”

  “Too bad old lady Rivlin kicked the bucket,” Annie says with a little cackle. “She would have finally gotten to see one of you folks tie the knot.” She pauses. “What do you think bothered her more: that you weren’t some sweet Midwestern girl, or that you were an unwed mother living in sin?”

  Eileen has to smile privately. “I was just so far from anything she had ever imagined for her son.”

  In his mother’s mind, everything had somehow become worse than it was; for years she had Len meeting Eileen at an ashram, a hippie commune, a cult.

  “And now,” Annie says, “here you are, about to become a mother-in-law.” She nods her head so that her eyes look wicked. “Isn’t life grand?”

  They were together three years before Mack was born. Len worked for a city planning department, while Eileen directed an after-school program in Arlington. Summer weekends they drove to the Catskills to stay in a cabin owned by the parents of Len’s friend Steven. There was a lake just small enough to swim across and still be able to make it back, and they spent hours swimming and floating on inflatable rafts that were always leaking. Eileen bought a little watertight plastic case that she clipped to her swimsuit and in which she kept her cigarettes and a lighter. She and Len would lie in privacy on the other side of the lake until they had had enough of a break from Steven’s parents, and then Eileen would smoke a cigarette to fortify her lungs for the swim back.