Evening News

by Marly Swick

  “What about Joe and Martha?”

  “They’ll understand,” she said. “I’ll tell Teddy we’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  She had to wave her arms and shout to get Teddy’s attention. She could feel people’s eyes on her, watching. There’s the woman whose son shot her little girl. Can you imagine? Finally Teddy waded over to the side of the pool. She knelt down and told him they’d be back for him in a little while. “Okay,” he said, eager to get back to the game. She had the feeling she could have told him they’d be back for him in ten years and it would have been okay with him. As she was opening the gate to leave, someone tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Giselle?” She flinched and turned around. It was the woman from Tulsa.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk,” the woman said. Her eyes managed to convey the fact that she knew. “I know this must be so hard for you.” She leaned over and kissed Giselle lightly on the cheek, catching her by surprise. Although she felt the tears welling up, Giselle also felt a flash of gratitude. She mumbled a thank-you and walked out front, where Dan was pacing up and down the driveway, waiting for her.

  Neither of them was familiar with Pasadena. They drove around until they found a funky little coffee shop called the Kozy Korner or the Comfy Cafe. It even had booths with jukeboxes, something she hadn’t seen in years, and they ordered slices of coconut cream pie, something she hadn’t tasted in years, and spent a surprisingly soothing hour playing music, eating pie, and drinking coffee. They were both so relieved to be away from the party, to be alone with each other, that they just sat there holding hands, not even bothering to talk. Then they drove back for Teddy. When Teddy whined about leaving, Dan told him to knock it off. Which Giselle took as a good sign, a sign that Dan was treating him like a regular kid again. Tired out from the sun and excitement, Teddy nodded off during the long ride. She felt calmer; the traffic didn’t bother her. Dan punched in a cassette and they listened to old Linda Ronstadt songs, humming along more or less on key, glad to be going home.

  ***

  Later that night they made love for the first time since the accident. Not because they’d had a good time, but because they’d had such a miserable time — together. She had been worried that she would suffer through the whole ordeal while Dan somehow managed to enjoy himself, and the whole outing would only serve to widen the gulf between them. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

  “Well, at least Teddy seemed to have a good time,” Dan said as they lay there holding each other in the dark.

  She stroked his hair. She kept meaning to buy a new lamp for the night table, but she always forgot when she was out. Her mind never seemed to focus anymore. Dan readjusted the pillows. “Comfortable?”

  She nodded.

  “I felt like a total alien,” he said. “Like we were from another planet, you know?”

  She nodded again and snuggled closer to him.

  “I know it’s unfair, it’s uncharitable to be so critical.” He blew out a long stream of air. “We can’t expect everyone to go around with a long face, talking philosophy, just because of our situation, but shit, I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.”

  “You don’t have to know,” she said softly. “It’s all right.” She was glad to hear him using the word we again.

  “That’s why I wanted you to go with me to this Compassionate Friends meeting. They’re people who know what it’s like. We wouldn’t have to feel like aliens.” He turned to face her in the dark. Her heart sank as she felt him waiting for her to say yes: Yes, now she understood. Yes, she’d go. She kept her eyes shut and tried pretending she was drifting off. “What are you thinking?” he prodded.

  “It’s just that, to me, it’s such a private and personal thing. Maybe they’ve lost a child, too, but they haven’t lost our child. We’re all different. I guess I’ve just never been much of a joiner.”

  “Oh, and I suppose I am?” His voice had an edge to it now. She’d offended him. “Whose the elitist now? You want to feel you’re unique, that no one in the history of the world has ever felt your pain. Not even me.” He rolled over with his back to her. “Well, fine with me.”

  She sighed, on the verge of tears. It was the first intimate time they had shared in so long, and now suddenly it had degenerated into this. “Okay.” She couldn’t stand it. “I’ll think about it. Maybe you’re right.”

  He groped for her hand, raised it to his lips, and planted a kiss in the center of her palm. It was something he used to do with Trina when she hurt herself. She would come running to him, palms extended, and say, “Bad booboo. Kiss better!” And he would. Maybe he was right. What did she know? He was the teacher, after all.

  “Martha told me about a house for rent over near Palms Park,” she said, anxious to change the subject. “She happened to be driving by and saw the for rent sign.”

  Now it was his turn to pretend to be drifting off. She could see his eyelids twitching. “She said it had a nice little yard with fruit trees.” She shook him lightly. “Hey!”

  “Ummm,” he murmured. “Ummhmm.”

  She lay there, tired but not sleepy, running her hands over her naked body, feeling his naked thigh pressed against her own. It had been a long time since they had slept naked. In the past few weeks they seemed to wear more and more clothes to bed, even as the temperature outside got warmer, with summer approaching. The clothes were like layers of protection, a shield against intimacy or the lack thereof. The sex per se had not been that good in the technical sense — passion still seemed a long way off — but she didn’t care, the intimacy was enough.

  After Trina was born, they were usually too tired for sex when they got into bed at night, but they had always tried to make time to snuggle and read together for a few minutes before turning out the light. Dan liked to read poetry aloud to her. He was a wonderful reader. In college he had majored in drama, thinking he would be an actor, before a favorite professor had influenced him to switch to literature. She remembered the afternoon they bought the Neruda book. Il Postino had just opened, and Dan was dying to see it. So they took the afternoon off — Dan played hooky from his office hours — and went to an early matinee in Westwood while Trina was still at day care. They had the theater practically to themselves. They held hands and ate popcorn, as if they were on a first date. And then they walked over to a bookstore and bought Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda. She remembered lying in bed smiling to herself as Dan read aloud “Ode to the Artichoke” — “Ode a la Alcachofa” in Spanish — and thinking how this was it: the life she had always wanted. Before she moved to California, she had never eaten an artichoke, let alone read Neruda.

  She got up slowly, careful not to rock the bed, and took the book from the night table, where it still lay. There was a particular poem she remembered, “Ode to a Couple.” She sat on the sofa and turned on the lamp, leafing through the pages until she found it, one stanza in particular:

  If snow falls

  upon two heads,

  the heart is sweet,

  the house is warm.

  If not,

  in the storm, the wind

  asks:

  where is the woman you loved?

  and nipping at your heels

  will press you to seek her.

  Half a woman is one woman

  and one man is half a man.

  Each lives in half a house,

  each sleeps in half a bed.

  The rest of the poem blurred on the page. She shut the book. The Beemers’ dog was barking halfheartedly, more, it seemed, to see if anyone was listening than to protect his territory.

  ***

  The next day she drove over and looked at the house. It was in a different school district. But now that school was about to let out for the summer, it occurred to her that changing schools in the fall would probably be the best thing for Teddy. It was a white stucco bungalow with a tile roof and had a tidy little yard with hibiscus bushes and lemon trees. She walked around and spie
d through the miniblinds on tiptoe. She couldn’t see everything, but what she saw looked nice. Bright and clean. She copied down the landlord’s phone number from the sign and stuck notes to both the front and back doors saying that she was definitely (desperately) interested in renting the house. She would have camped out in her car until someone showed up, but Teddy would be getting home from school in an hour.

  Even though she was anxious to move, she knew she would miss house hunting. It gave a focus to her otherwise aimless days, a mission. Dan had urged her to go back to school, but it still didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem right somehow to just pick up where she had left off. It seemed unseemly, like a widow remarrying too soon. It was different for Dan, who had returned to his teaching and research with a vengeance. She wasn’t sure how or why it was different, she just felt that it was.

  Heading back toward the freeway, she took a wrong turn and got lost in a maze of streets named after fruit — Orange Grove, Lemon Tree, Peach Blossom, Plum — pleasant stucco houses with well-tended yards. As she wended her way closer to the exit ramp, the houses seemed to shrink into concrete cubes and the lawns grew ragged. There were wrought-iron bars on the windows and doors. She made a mental note to avoid this route when she brought Dan. She had pinned all her hopes on moving. Even though she knew, rationally, that what ailed them couldn’t be left behind like an old chair or carpet. It would ride along in the U-Haul with them — their heaviest, most cumbersome possession. As she merged into the thickening sludge of traffic, the pre–rush hour rush, she thought how ironic it was that Dan’s father’s death had brought them together, while their daughter’s death had driven them apart. At least until last night. She hoped that maybe last night had closed the gap, the widening gulf, at least a little.

  As she neared her exit, she noticed suddenly that the generator light was on. She cursed under her breath. The last thing they needed was car trouble. She remembered a phone conversation with her cousin a few months after Ruth’s daughter had been killed by a car. “It’s the little things that set you off,” Ruth had told her. “If I break a glass washing the dishes or burn the toast or stub my toe on the bathroom door in the middle of the night, I might burst into tears and cry for an hour. You lose all sense of proportion.”

  When she heard about Trina, Ruth called her. A week or two after the funeral. And Giselle had felt a rush of relief when she heard Ruthie’s voice, thinking that maybe Ruth could tell her something to help them get through this. Something that no one else would know. But she hadn’t. They just cried together long distance for a couple of minutes, and then Ruth said she had to go — her older daughter was hollering for help in the kitchen, where she was baking cookies. After the phone call Giselle had felt even lower. It had seemed blindingly clear that there was nothing anybody could tell her. No secret words of wisdom to be passed from one survivor to the next, no underground network of comfort. No Compassionate Friends. She cringed as she remembered telling Dan that she would go to one of their meetings. She imagined it taking place in some drafty modern church with people sitting in rows of metal folding chairs, like an AA meeting. They would introduce themselves: “Hi, my name is ———, and I have lost a child.”

  It was just past two when she got home. The first thing she did was check the answering machine to see if anyone had left her a message about the house for rent. They hadn’t. There was only one message, and it was from Dan saying he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He was going to work on the book. She felt a twinge of disappointment. The three of them had been managing to coexist more or less peacefully, mostly by going about their separate business. The therapist said this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But Giselle had hoped that after yesterday, last night, they might start spending more time together. Well, maybe in the new house.

  She called his office number, but there was no answer. She left a message on his voice mail, “Hi, it’s me. Got your message. Call when you get a chance.” Then she lay down on the living room sofa to rest before Teddy got home and began moping around the house, complaining that he was bored. On occasion she had almost suggested he go over to Eric’s; they used to keep each other entertained from morning till night. But Dan had forbidden him to have anything to do with the Beemers. Sometimes, despite everything, she missed chatting with Lois in the backyard. Since the accident it was like having a vacant house next door, only worse. There was an even emptier feeling.

  “What do you do with your time?” her sister had asked her the last time she called. Giselle didn’t remember what her reply had been. But whatever it was, she could tell that Vonnie hadn’t been satisfied by it. “You should go back to school,” Vonnie had told her in her big-sister tone of voice.

  Apparently Vonnie’s grief had not taken the form of pure exhaustion. Even with the sleeping pills Greg had prescribed for them, it seemed as if neither she nor Dan ever really slept anymore. The exhaustion just accumulated; each sleepless night she felt as if she were gaining weight, another five pounds to drag around. This heaviness that was always with her, as if Trina’s dead body were inside of her, a two-year-old mummy in a snuggly, pressing against her lungs and heart. On her last visit to the pediatrician, just a week before the accident, Trina had tipped the scales at thirty-one pounds.

  Giselle reached over, picked up the remote, and clicked on CNN. TalkBack Live. Then she muted it and closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe they were still doing postmortems on the Simpson case. Her sigh stretched into a yawn. What do you do with your time? Before the accident it seemed as if she did, in fact, do things with her time. She organized her time. She made time for the various activities in her life, although it seemed there was never quite enough time to go around. But now time had the upper hand. She felt like a dog being dragged through time on a leash. She was straining with all her might to go backward while Time kept dragging her forward. She wanted to go back to the morning of the accident. Or barring that, maybe further, maybe back to the night of Trina’s conception. Instead of turning off the VCR halfway through Bullets Over Broadway and making love, they would watch it all the way through, then have an argument over whether it was a good movie, and go to bed miffed at each other. If you weren’t born, you couldn’t die. Life was full of trade-offs.

  She used to think nothing could be more exhausting than keeping up with a toddler — the terrible twos — until she didn’t have one to keep up with anymore. After Teddy was born, and then again after Trina was born, there was that fog of exhaustion that all new parents know so well. Getting up night after night to nurse the baby. Wearing a path in the carpet as you pace and croon the fussing infant back to sleep. Then waking up at the crack of dawn — who needs a rooster when they’ve got a baby? — to a full day of being at baby’s beck and call. Where did the energy come from? But that was nothing compared with this. That was child’s play compared with this. There were all those bright moments that lit up the fog. The baby’s smile. That look of wonder on her face as you dangled a new toy. The feel of her tiny fingers with those sharp little nails exploring your nose and eyes and mouth. The scent of her sweet belly as you bent over to kiss it after whisking away the dirty diaper. The taste of her pudgy thighs as you pretended to eat her up. And, last but not least, it was only temporary. When you collapsed into bed at nine o’clock, you knew that in less time than it takes for all the cells in your body to renew themselves, she would be walking and talking and pushing you away. It was only temporary. Whereas this, this was forever. From now on, she was always going to be dead. Trina was never ever going to grow out of being dead. No matter how much time passed.

  Giselle envied Dan his book, his ability to concentrate so deeply, to blot out everything else. She couldn’t really blame him or begrudge him this. She was relieved, actually, that he had found a way to cope. It was better than the two of them sitting around making halfhearted conversation. As the silences lengthened between them, she marveled, once again, at life’s little ironies. She had left her first marriage largely beca
use of the silence that descended upon Ed and her once the baby stopped crying or the TV was turned off. They had nothing to say to each other, it seemed. Or rather, she had things to say, but Ed never had anything to say back. Spending her days cooped up with a baby, she was ready for some adult conversation in the evenings, and when Ed failed to hold up his end of the conversation, her resentment and frustration grew. She began to see him as dense and thoughtless (as in “without thoughts”), whereas she’d seen him as strong and reserved before. She had fantasies of holding a gun to his temple and shouting, Talk! Talk, you dolt! Talk to me as if your life depended on it!

  So, naturally she had been attracted, even a bit dazzled, by Dan’s articulateness, his almost feminine (she’d thought) desire to communicate his ideas and feelings. Talking with him was like talking on the phone to a close girlfriend, only better. His conversation was more witty and stimulating. Maybe, as her old friend Laura had pointed out, he was a better talker than listener, but that was still a big leap forward from what she had been used to. And there were times, mostly when they were alone, when he did seek out her thoughts, when he did really listen to her. But lately it was becoming more and more obvious to her how much of the conversation between them had always relied upon Dan’s verbal energy and agility. Whenever he withdrew into silence, she felt as tongue-tied as poor Ed. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.

  And now there was Teddy with this Talkboy gizmo, driving her berserk. He refused to converse normally anymore. He had to record everything and then play it back to her at slow speed or fast speed so that he sounded like a zombie or a munchkin. It had become an obsession. She had tried taking it away and hiding it, but then he refused to speak, period. He even took it with him to the therapy sessions. The therapist admitted that it was a troublesome sign; however, she theorized that if they didn’t make too big a deal out of it, it would probably phase itself out. But ever since he’d got the damn thing, the only time he spoke normally was on the phone with his dad.