Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

  “Of course not.” I sat up straighter.

  “How’s your father?” he asked.

  I told him his hip was still sore, but the doctor didn’t think anything was wrong.

  We ate quietly for a little while, then Leo said he was thinking about landscaping the promenade in the spring, maybe with a green border built somehow between the counter and the parking lot. He wanted to know what I thought.

  “With containers?” I asked.

  “Could be. I don’t have any definite ideas. I was hoping you might.”

  I looked out the window at the space. I said I had a few books on container gardening he could borrow.

  After a minute he said he’d also been thinking about putting some flowers around the garage.

  I set my silverware down, wiped my mouth, and told him annuals grow well in hanging baskets, but he should be careful about viruses, which are incurable, and overwatering, a common mistake. A lot of people get started with containers and have no idea. The plants get mildew or aphids or white spots and it’s all an eyesore before you know it.

  “Okay,” he said. He looked discouraged, but I was just being realistic.

  I told him my burrito was particularly good.

  He smiled. “I’m glad. I made it for you.”

  “You’re not working tonight.”

  “I made an exception for you.”

  “Oh.” This surprised me. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  * * *

  —

  HE’D MADE A DESSERT, too, but I didn’t stay. I needed to walk.

  My mother, a city girl who often despaired at the lack of anything to hang a walk on in Anneville, invented something she called the redeemable element game. On every street you try to find something redeemable, not in the sense of cashable, but in the sense of finding the one thing in your field of vision that either soothes or keeps you moving. I play it when I’m agitated.

  My mother and I had the pink Cadillac always parked in the same spot on the hill near the university; the mysterious corner where we always smelled cigarette smoke, though we never saw anyone smoking; the long garden where someone grew corn and zinnias in alternating rows; the patch of pink phlox under the railroad bridge by the Econo Lodge; and the wine bar downtown where, if you sat with your back to the door, you could pretend you were somewhere other than Anneville. It was a desperate game, I see that now, but it worked for her for a while.

  It was the wine bar—new ownership several times over but still a wine bar—I found myself standing outside after I left El Puerto. It had grown dark enough that the group of friends at the inside front table saw only their reflections in the window when they looked out, not me standing on the other side of the glass. They weren’t that much younger than me, maybe midthirties. There were eight of them, men and women, and they were celebrating something, because the waiter was pouring champagne. Four of the friends sat along a bench with their backs to me, two sat at the ends of the table, and two were on the far side facing me. Their phones were out, but while I watched not one was touched. The waiter seemed to know the group, or liked them, because he was smiling and talking to them. What was not to like? To a person they looked happy and comfortable, so comfortable, with one another. While I watched, several of them wrapped an arm around the person next to him or her in what looked like a spontaneous act of affection and friendship.

  It started to rain, but still I stood there. I watched them order their food. That took a long time, but the waiter never lost his patience. One of them got up from the table and I worried she might be coming outside to smoke so I scuttled to the side, but she walked toward the back of the restaurant. When she returned, she leaned over to sit back down on the bench, her face coming within inches of mine on the other side of the glass, but she didn’t notice me.

  For a little while, one of the women talked and the whole table listened. It must have been a sad or poignant story because two of the other women wiped their eyes. But there were smiles, too, and laughter at the end. Then the appetizers arrived and the whole table was talking again.

  After the appetizers I left abruptly, walking faster and faster in the rain. I thought about all I’d read. They say friendship alleviates physical health problems and increases our level of happiness. They say that spending time with friends can lower blood pressure, decrease depression and stress, and help relieve chronic pain. One study showed it has as large a positive effect on health as quitting smoking. In another, researchers took a group of students to the base of a steep hill and fitted them with heavy backpacks before sending them up the slope. Some walked next to friends, while others walked alone, and the students who walked with friends gave lower estimates of the weight of the pack. The longer the friends had known each other, the lighter they reported the backpack to be.

  Yet spending time with friends is the first thing we drop when life gets busy. This has been shown, too. Exercise is good for our health, and even the lazy might exercise a couple of times a year. Many people now eat kale. Who among us makes plans to visit friends regularly? We heed so much radical health advice, why not this?

  “Do you have somewhere you can go?” I heard someone ask a homeless woman as I walked.

  “Who is near?” Siri asked me when I fumbled with my phone.

  Grendel was alone, but Dante had Virgil and Odysseus had his men and gray-eyed Athena. A man on a quest always gets a crew or a guide.

  I passed the cemetery, where it had become popular to place little solar lights by the gravestones. There were probably two dozen soft blue lights glowing in the rain. I pressed something on my phone and ended up with Siri again, her words floating up from the dark.

  “What can I help you with?

  “Here are some of the things I can answer.

  “Who is near?”

  I turned the phone off. I wanted to answer that question myself. We document our lives for people near and far with status updates and photographs, but we rarely just show up.

  I decided to show up.

  “Poor May’s going on a trip,” I whispered, and vowed to buy a new suitcase in the morning.

  Crack Willow (Salix fragilis)

  The crack willow grows well along watersides and takes its name from a feature of its twigs. If you pull one back with a quick tug, it breaks away from the larger stem with an audible crack. Nobody is sure why the tree grows such brittle twigs (it is also sometimes called brittle willow), but the property aids its general propagation. When twigs are torn off by gusty winds, they are carried downstream and take root easily on damp banks. Crack willow is, in other respects, a typical member of the willow genus, Salix.

  This might have been my father’s attempt at a joke after his fall. The leaves are bright green and the catkins in early spring are lovely, but there is no obvious waterside on campus and the tree is highly susceptible to snow and ice damage.

  Or it was his way of asking me to stay home. He hadn’t cracked a bone when he fell, but he was worried about the next time.

  Crack willow (Salix fragilis)

  II.

  Baggage

  The day I bought Grendel there was a sparrow in the Walmart. I spent awhile choosing my suitcase, but I spent longer watching the sparrow’s small black beak tilting this way and that, questioning the high white ceiling full of fluorescent lights. The front doors had an air lock, which would have been hard for a bird to navigate, so I assumed he must have come in from the garden center, a dismal area adjacent to the parking lot with only the most average evergreen shrubs and seasonal chrysanthemums (genus Dendranthema) in three colors: too yellow, rusty orange, and bad purple. Mounds of forced hardy mums plunked along curbs and into garden beds this time of year are my least favorite tradition of the season. I’m not a fan of using annuals in landscaping in general, and to use a hardy mum, which is a perennial, as an annua
l is an affront. Chrysanthemums were first cultivated in China as far back as the fifteenth century, and, along with the plum blossom, the orchid, and bamboo, it was considered one of the Four Noble Plants. Now the mum is to flowers as the Red Delicious is to apples; a ubiquitous fraud. The mums outside Walmart were arranged in long, single-color lines on aluminum bleachers facing the parking lot, their fall from grace complete. The only thing worse might be the grocery store orchid.

  A young employee mistook my staring for interest. “Can I help you find something?” she asked. She was wearing gardening gloves and holding a trowel, but it wasn’t clear that she’d been planting. She was very clean.

  “Oh, no, thank you,” I said.

  “Hard to choose, isn’t it?” She looked at the mums with me. “They’re all so pretty. I did yellow and purple this year.”

  Back inside, the sparrow wasn’t hard to find. He was making quick trips from the air space above Pet Supplies to Bedding and back, which seemed like a sound plan. Anyone in Pet Supplies would be sympathetic to his plight, but when I walked over there the section was empty. I stood beneath him for a while. The archway to the garden center was large but low, and he didn’t seem to be aware of it. I stood next to the dog food projecting flight lines. It seemed possible for him to fly out that way, but he looked confused by the lights and perhaps the Christmas music.

  A woman about my age turned into the aisle and stood before the cat food. Her cart had several giant boxes of Goldfish, a dozen rolls of wrapping paper, and now the tins of cat food she was layering in.

  “There’s a sparrow,” I said, pointing at the ceiling.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “There’s a sparrow up there. I think he’s trapped.”

  She frowned and looked up. The little beak opened and we heard a few pitiful chirps.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “Did you tell someone?”

  “No. Should we?”

  “Oh,” she said, resuming her work with the cat food, “I’ve got to get home.”

  “Right. I mean I could.”

  She counted her tins, then looked back up at the sparrow. “I’m sure it happens all the time,” she said, beginning to push her cart out of the aisle.

  “But does that make it better?” I said.

  She laughed as if I’d made a joke and kept going.

  In the Home Goods section it took me nearly twenty-five minutes to settle on the American Tourister Meridian 360, which was advertised as “a functional travel companion for all your fun adventures.” The bag featured a multidirectional wheel system that promised to allow me to “push, pull or turn in any direction with effortless mobility.” Hardly the help of the gods, but it wouldn’t hurt. There were several black and navy blue models, but I decided on the slate gray before realizing there was only one left in that color and it was damaged. It had a black scuff mark like a sash across the front and one of the outside zippers was bent. “We take our friends as we find them, not as we would make them,” Samuel Johnson wrote. I took the banged-up suitcase—and hoped I might get a discount at the register.

  The sparrow was still chirping as I navigated back to the front of the store, but I didn’t look up.

  I wanted to ask someone if birds flew into the store frequently, but my cashier was the yellow-and-purple-mum girl from the garden center.

  “No mums?” she said, genuinely perplexed, when she saw me.

  “No,” I said. I knew I should follow this with some nicety, but I couldn’t think of anything. “Not today,” I offered as cheerfully as I could.

  She smiled and I decided to leave it at that. I didn’t ask for a discount.

  Invitations

  There’s a difference between showing up and showing up without an invitation. I was not willing to do the latter. And it was not as if I needed to make a list of friends I might visit and then narrow it down. I don’t have that many friends, and by that I mean I knew who I wanted to see.

  1. Lindy Ascoli. Hers was the house I spent the most time in growing up, her phone number still as familiar to me as my own. She has always been serious, yet smiles readily, and seems to genuinely enjoy being a stay-at-home parent to three girls.

  2. Vanessa Meyers. Lindy and I met Vanessa in eighth grade. She was taller than both of us and had beautiful dark hair and eyes and a sense of fun more daring than mine or Lindy’s. The three of us became a close trio, though eventually Lindy and Vanessa became closer than I was to either of them. Lindy went to Connecticut for college, married a few years later, and has been making a home there ever since. Vanessa has lived in six different places in three different countries, recently married a divorced man, and became a stepmother to twin boys. In all the pictures I’ve seen of her lately, she is leaning to touch her head against someone—a friend, one of the stepsons—as if anchoring herself.

  3. Neera Khadem is a college friend. My roommate was a disappointment, as I’m sure I was to her, and I was soon spending more time with Neera, whom I met in an introductory psychology class. A driven woman from the West Coast, she stayed up late and dated a lot. I did neither. Nevertheless, she’s my closest tie to a time in my life I remember fondly. I met her husband, Adam, before she did. I introduced them, so we have that bond, too.

  4. Rose Gregory chose me. She scanned the list of graduate student names and decided we should be friends, a May and a Rose in a Landscape Architecture program. She’s assertive like that. She’s a few years younger, having come straight to the program after college, and yet focused and calm. I’m not sure what I offered her, but even after I left the program and she finished and moved back to England, she stayed in touch with me.

  Lindy, Vanessa, Neera, and Rose. Through some mysterious combination of shared experience and common interest, they seem to feel something for me and I for them. There are other friends I found and lost, friends I had for a little while but couldn’t keep hold of. As a child I was, if anything, an overeager maker of friends. There is a picture of me at a swimming hole when I was nine, one arm tight around the shoulders of another girl, the other arm blurry because I am waving it up and down, joyous at having made a new friend. The word befriend is related to bind and I was clearly trying to bind her to me. That friendship didn’t stick, though. I can’t even remember her name.

  Lindy, Vanessa, Neera, and Rose. I have strong images associated with each, a combination of memories and social media posts, I suppose: Lindy walking confidently across the park, bouncing on her toes to appear taller. Vanessa writing from New York about the family she’s making. Neera in Seattle buying a pot of begonias for her desk before sitting down to work. Rose walking in Clapham Common, her navy pea coat buttoned up neat and trim to go grocery shopping. These images have meaning for me, they feel like clues toward something, and I try to keep them in mind.

  It’s usually not appropriate to invite yourself to anything. The one exception seems to be when you are in a town where a friend lives. You can say you’ll be in town and many times this leads to an invitation to stay. Some people will announce to a large group that they will be around on a certain date and will be at such and such a place on a given night and hope friends will join them. This scattershot approach feels foolhardy to me. Unless you are certain you are very popular, I’d rather apply the Kitty Genovese lesson to seeing friends and pinpoint one at a time.

  “I wanted to pay you a visit,” I said on the phone. Why do we “pay” visits and “receive” guests? It’s the language of accounting, of ledgers and balance sheets. But no one likes to admit keeping track, good manners forbid it.

  “You wanted to?”

  “I do. I still do.” I’m not good on the phone.

  “Really? I’d love that. When were you thinking?”

  “I’m flexible. I have a lot of time off work.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes. It’s sort of a reward.�
�

  “A reward? Like a vacation?”

  “Sort of. It’s complicated.”

  “Well, anytime, May. It would be great to see you.”

  I looked at my calendar. “What about in two weeks?”

  “Oh, soon. That’s great.”

  “It could be later.” I flipped calendar pages.

  “No, that’s fine. I’m just surprised. But we’re in town, it’s no problem. Are you thinking a weekend?”

  “Maybe four or five days?”

  “Okay. Are you sure everything’s all right, May? How’s your dad?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Can you leave him that long?”

  “He’s very independent.”

  “That’s good. Are you still living—”

  “Yes, still in the house.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to see you. It’s just sort of sudden and . . . not really like you.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “. . .”

  “So how much time are you taking off work?”

  “Four weeks. The university is giving me paid leave because someone won a lot of money for a poem about a tree I planted.”

  “That’s so cool! Congratulations, May.”

  “Thanks. But, please, don’t think you have to entertain me at all. That’s not why I’m coming.”

  “Great, we’ll just hang out and catch up. Thanks for reaching out.”

  Is that what I was doing? Reaching out? It sounded desperate. The phrase made me picture someone walking blindfolded. I’m certain Amber Dwight would have managed with more flair, but I did the best I could.