Every Day

by Elizabeth Richards

  “Are we back on Pam?”

  “Was it when you were researching the Southern belle film? I think it must have been because a few times you went off alone, and those were the only times before you left that I wasn’t with you. Was that when it happened?”

  He asks me, as before, why I am doing this.

  “Indulge me, please. I want information. You were my first love.”

  “I know that,” he says. “That’s why talking about this is so destructive.”

  “Is that when you saw her.”

  He says it was, but volunteers no more.

  “How did it end?”

  He says it was never enough of a thing to demand an end. “She was competing with you, don’t you see? She wanted to be smart and have the same things you had.”

  “So you gave them to her.”

  “I did not,” he says firmly. “I fell into bed with her, dead drunk, on a couple of evenings. I can’t remember much about them except that she was aggressive and I didn’t punish her for it, and now I don’t feel like being punished by talking about this for one more second.”

  I push a box of saltines toward Daisy and watch her try and open it. This frees me for more upset.

  “You were my first love,” I repeat.

  “And you were mine,” he says. “That can’t change, no matter what characters have danced on the periphery since. I wish I were with you on that blanket now. I just haven’t yet cottoned to the idea of people watching me crawl.”

  “I’m not people,” I say.

  “I want to see you so much,” he whispers.

  “I’ll be there soon,” I promise. “When you can bear it.”

  As dismissal time approaches, I move us to the shade of a tree closer to the building. Isaac and Jane are among the last out. I stand with Daisy in one arm and Isaac’s provisions dangling from the other. They see me right away, and Jane begins to pull him toward me, but he resists, staying on the flagstone path.

  “Come on,” she urges.

  Campers are passing on either side of us, staring and trying not to stare, and from the breezeway Garland gives me a sly wave, one that Isaac, from his statuesque position, doesn’t see.

  I walk straight up to him and put the bag at his feet.

  “Here,” I say. “Simon asked me to pack you some clean clothes.”

  “Thanks,” he says, in his public voice.

  “Do you want to spend some time before you go back to the city?”

  He rolls his eyes at my idiocy. “I’m not going back to the city, Mom. I’m staying with a friend.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” I plead, second biggest mistake of the century, “couldn’t we just try a few hours together? I miss you so much, and the girls want you home too. We could just have an early dinner, and then I’ll drop you wherever you like.”

  “NO!” he shouts. Then, much lower: “What do you want me to tell you, Mom? You fucked up. I can’t spend my life at Burger King and Toys “R” Us having you buy me things to make you feel better about what you did.”

  He turns from me, as if it’s for the last time.

  “JESUS!” I scream. “Where are you kids getting all this?”

  He turns back and rests his beautiful, disappointed eyes on me, nodding, as if I’ve just proven the point that his mother doesn’t deserve to live.

  “What do you want me to do?” I shriek.

  He comes toward me and takes my wrist in a crushing grip. “Put it all back where it was.”

  Then he lopes off, in a rush for his ride from whomever, so that he doesn’t hear me say, “I can’t do that.” He doesn’t see Jane plow into me with her fists or Daisy bury her face in my neck, moaning.

  Slowly, after I’ve shaken some temporary sense into Jane, have reminded her that hitting me won’t help, I gather up our things, our blanket and food, our toys and phone, the things that are meant to comfort us because they are ours.

  • • •

  “All I want to know,” I tell Kirsten by her pool later, “is why he was driving your car that afternoon.”

  “Who knows,” she says. “Who remembers.”

  “Try, Kirsten, because I think it would be helpful for me to know.”

  “How? How will it be helpful?”

  The girls, Adrienne and her patient, are hanging by their arms from the small diving board Ted just erected. Without much spring, it offers a steady perch for them. Daisy’s at the buckets and sand toys in the muddy wells by the blue walls of the pool. I’ve never seen her so dirty.

  “I’m trying to get things straight,” I say. “I want to know who comforts him, if anyone. I want to know how he’s coping. Has he said anything?”

  “Of course he’s said things,” she answers, amazed. “Who wouldn’t?”

  “What?”

  She takes her long legs off the picnic bench and sits forward. “I know what you want, Leigh. You want me to tell you he came to me a wreck and I pulled him into bed and made the whole Fowler thing bearable. You want me to tell you he was doing the same thing to you you were doing to him so you won’t have to feel guilty. You want ammunition.”

  “I just thought,” I say defensively, “particularly with Ted away and me gone down the road to ruin, that—”

  “It didn’t happen.”

  I register her genuine disappointment over this fact as she looks down at the tan flab of her legs, of which there isn’t much, admittedly, “just enough,” Simon once said.

  “I lent him the Jeep the morning you and Daisy took the train to your mother’s. It’s bigger than your wagon, and he offered to take all the kids over to camp. He called me because he thought you might be at this house.”

  “Kirsten?” I say, without much humor. “Hello?”

  “I’m not going to deny attraction,” she blurts out. “Who wouldn’t find a faithful, intelligent man attractive? And once, yes, I’ll admit, he did say something to me.”

  “Such as.”

  She directs a smile at the pool. “He said it was a good thing you were around all the time and didn’t travel, because it was too short a commute between our houses and he didn’t think he’d have the strength to resist should an opportunity arise. He said it almost just like that. So don’t sweat it. Here the opportunity arose, and he didn’t take it. He just drove my car.”

  “What a prince,” I finally say.

  “Oh, Leigh, really,” she says.

  “You’ll forgive me for not thanking you for your restraint.”

  She throws her Nordic head back, in despair, it seems.

  “Affairs don’t answer anything, Leigh. They just give you more to work out. I’d rather just think about them, actually. It’s always less esthetic when you actually have one. And yes, I’ve had affairs and Ted knows, and he’s had them, and I know. So we just handle it in a quiet way because it’s too embarrassing to talk about. Don’t think his business trips are filled with longing for this fjord!”

  “How can you not let it bother you?” I want to know. “Don’t you want to get rid of the trouble that makes you want other people?”

  She laughs out loud at me. “How would you suggest doing that? I don’t think of it as trouble. It’s just a fact. No one stays in love permanently, so you do other things: imagine, risk, go back, over and over. I don’t know any other way to be married. Let me know if you think of one.”

  I don’t know whether to admire or eschew this approach. It seems clever on the one hand, lazy on the other. But what better credo have I uncovered? At least Adrienne is still proud of her parents, untortured by them, posing as the solid one, the dispenser of eleven-year-old wisdom.

  Still, when the girls come to us for towels and snacks, it is with undeniable weariness that Kirsten reacts, bends down for the towels that are piled beside her, heaves her big bones up to standing and then crosses the patio to the sliding door and into the kitchen to fulfill the regular demands for iced tea, cinnamon toast, and popcorn.

  “Can I help?” I ask inside.

&
nbsp; “Sure,” she says. “You do the toast. I’ll get the tea. And you can stick the fatty in the pool. Ted’s cleaning it tonight.”

  I am not, hope never to be, this tired.

  • • •

  I read, much of that night. Liselotte’s letters betray her despair, her misery, her loneliness. All in the court and on its periphery have turned against her. It strikes me that sharing is at the crux of the problems that she and I, and all people, face. No one likes to share. I should take cues from my children, the smartest people I know. Even at out most altruistic, our most generous, we worry, suspect, and fear that the gift won’t be acknowledged, won’t be returned in kind.

  I am going to have to ignore those fears. I am just going to have to continue to take the enormous leaps my father studies, professes about, and privately deplores. I call Fowler at seven, unafraid to wake him, brimming with plans.

  “Can I see you today? I want to go watch boats from the South Street Seaport and eat five lunches. Daisy will be with me.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” he says. “You can carry me.”

  I tell him I feel invested with superhuman strength and that this happens to me when I lose sleep. I tell him Isaac refuses to live with me.

  “What about Jane?” he asks. “Can’t she come?”

  “She has camp.”

  He asks me to try and persuade her to join us. “Like you,” he says, “I’m feeling enormous. Like I have to do everything. It’s one of the advantages of terminal illness.”

  I promise that I’ll ask her, and I go to wake them. Through our open windows I note the enormity he was referring to, of this I-contain-multitudes morning, alive with possibility. On a day like this my marriage occurs to me a form of sleep that I’ve lulled myself into without much reference to the world outside it, and in my magnanimous mood I wish this sort of recognition on Simon, willing him some moments of well-being in his hotel room, some optimism he might share with Isaac. It has to do with sleep loss, this novel appreciation of what Daddy refers to as “it all.”

  “Babies?” I call happily at the top of the stairs.

  Groaning from Jane. Squeals from Daisy.

  “Let’s get up. We’re going on an adventure!”

  • • •

  Fowler’s standing on his stoop in white slacks and a blue blazer with matching baseball cap. He proceeds with great difficulty toward the curb, his left leg taut, the rest of him straining to compensate. I don’t know enough yet not to be alarmed by this obvious degeneration in his abilities, and I gasp and bring my hand to my mouth in horror.

  “God, Mom,” Jane says. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Ssssh,” I warn. “Wait.”

  Fowler leans into the car on my side and smiles at all of us.

  “Hi, Jane,” he says. “I’m Jim.”

  “Hi,” Jane says. She climbs over the emergency brake into the backseat and settles next to Daisy.

  “Daisy!” Daisy shouts.

  “Hi, Daisy,” he says. Then he pulls open the passenger door and backs into the seat, arranging his stubborn legs with studied grace. He looks over at me.

  “Come on, driver. Let’s go look at some water. I’ve got a wallet full of money, and I intend to spend it all.”

  In the mirror I see Jane’s wide eyes, her closed mouth. I see her waiting for a signal from me, some look that will tell her she’s right not to trust this man, that he’s full of shit, anything to prove him unworthy of anyone’s love.

  “Jane,” he says as we turn onto the Bowery and head south. “I’m honored that you skipped the day’s usual activities to come out with us.” His Southern gentry voice is at its most pronounced, its most mellifluous and sugary.

  “That’s okay,” she says.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” he says. And Jane, who has never to my knowledge uttered this word, says “Likewise.”

  I kiss him on the cheek, and he tells me to park in a garage.

  “Sky’s the limit,” he proclaims.

  The first thing I think of is the walking, how he’ll manage over to the Seaport from the garage, what challenges escalators will present. As we exit the car and assemble in the dungeon of a very pricey garage before emerging into the light of day, Jane says, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Well,” he says, hesitating as we hunt for an elevator without moving, “it doesn’t do the things I’d like to do.”

  “There’s one!” I bark, pointing to a double yellow door that’s opening for another family. I move ahead with Daisy in the stroller and let them handle the mystery together.

  “Why not?” she’s saying.

  “It’s a story,” he warns. “Do you really want to hear it? Do you know what cells are?”

  Traffic and water noise take over, but I can see it happening in just one backward glance, as Jane looks up at Fowler in profile, the way I used to. He’s mesmerizing her, weaving himself into her blood and bones.

  • • •

  We get them pizza, balloons, plastic facsimiles of the Disney characters in vogue. Then we do T-shirts and videos and stuffed dolphins. Jane has glued herself to Fowler, as, I believe, was his intention. He’s taught her about telescopes and distance, southwestern weather (I now gather that he lived for some years in Tucson) and cell death. In this way of providing casual education he is not unlike Simon, who takes every waking opportunity to converse with the children about the world at large, as it confronts them. It is possible, today, for me to consider Fowler a generous man.

  When he admits to the need to sit for a while, we find an umbrella’d table on a veranda, and he hands me more money to buy the obligatory coffee and some ice cream for the girls.

  “We’ll stay here, Mom,” Jane says, sitting by Fowler. “You don’t have to worry.”

  So I go alone to the line and stand behind an elderly couple who have been watching us assemble out here.

  “You have a beautiful family,” the man says.

  “And look at the little one, connehara,” the woman sighs. She touches my elbow. “Have more. I see all kinds of children, and some I don’t say this about. Have more. They’re beautiful. Don’t worry your husband’s tired. Mine was too! He’s fifteen years older, and we have three girls and a boy.”

  I thank her for the compliment.

  “He’s a good father, I can tell,” she continues, her eyes on Fowler as he pulls the girls’ chairs close by him, his arms behaving. “He pays attention.”

  Her husband pulls at her sleeve. “Sylvie, do you want cake?”

  “When do I not want cake?” she says, annoyed.

  I like them so much I want to invite them to join us, but I don’t for fear of disappointing Sylvie with the news that Fowler isn’t my husband or the girls’ father.

  “He’s a vet, your husband?” the man asks with concern after he orders coffee and layer cake.

  “Yes,” I answer automatically, because it’s true, and they don’t have to know who I’m talking about.

  “Bless him,” the man says.

  “Seymour,” the woman nudges. “The cake?”

  “You take care,” he says.

  I get us coffee and brownies with ice cream on top.

  “What have you learned?” I ask the girls brightly.

  Very blasé, Jane says, “That it’s more fun to sail than motor. That the doldrums are when there’s no wind, and that sailing is a gentle sport.”

  “A gentleman’s sport,” Fowler corrects, laughing. “I was just going to get into schooners and yawls and gaff rigging, but here you are.”

  I hear the noble fatigue in his tone, and I remember J.T. using it with Evelyn on a couple of occasions when he’d run out of love for her yammering: Tell about the time Jimmy sailed the Widget right up onto the beach! she urged, although that was the whole story right there, already told. Tell about the first time we put him out to sea on his own. Those were her most generous moments with me, trying to get J.T. to betray family secrets, so she wouldn’t have to, never u
sing my name, never thinking to tell me the story herself.

  “You look like Isaac,” Jane says to Fowler.

  “I do!” he cries, feigning surprise.

  “Yes,” she explains. “You have the same eyes and nose and mouth. You must have looked like him when you were younger.”

  He looks to me for verbal affirmation of this fact, but I can’t speak, my throat too full of this perfect day with them, my girls and this man they’ve taken in to make me happy. Instead, I open my arms to them.

  • • •

  In the car, Fowler apologizes. “I’m afraid I’m going to need an escort when we get back to my place. Any takers?”

  “No sweat,” Jane says, a phrase she’s taken from Isaac.

  “Friend for life,” I tell him.

  He looks spent, wan. It’s hard to come down off this day, for me too.

  “I’ve read a lot,” I say. “But we don’t have to talk about it.” My home schooling in neurodegenerative diseases, provided me via folder by Eliot, is something I don’t want to keep from him.

  “We will,” he says quietly. “Just not now.”

  “Will you just tell me when you found out?”

  “A couple of years ago. I couldn’t get my hotel door open. I mean, I couldn’t turn the key in the lock. Thank God they’ve invented those braille-like cards that you just insert! Should I ever need to be in a hotel room again.”

  This is the beginning: a key that won’t work. And the end? Suffocation. He’s right. It is too horrible to talk about.

  “This was a good day,” I say.

  “It was,” he says.

  I let him get himself out of the car and ease around with the cane and one hand on the hood. Then he puts his arm around me, and we walk slowly to the stoop and up the steps. To anyone else, it will look like we are tired lovers reluctant to part. It won’t look like most of his weight is on me, or that I’m bearing it well.

  “I’ll go in with you. I can see them through the glass,” I say at the door.

  “No. It’s all right.”

  “But the key! What if you can’t turn it in the lock?”

  “I left it open.”

  He sets the cane against the building wall and takes my face in both hands and kisses me with such force that I fall back, down one step. Then he picks up the cane and leans into the door to get himself through.