Between episodes Sara accused me of liking the color gray. Her evidence: my gray jeans, my pearl-gray scarf, and my steel-gray coat in the hall. I suspect she thought I’d deny the charge, but I didn’t, and she seemed to find this interesting. “My favorite color is pink,” she said.
“You may feel differently when you’re older,” I said.
“No, I won’t,” she said. “I’m not boring.”
Then the dancing mouse show started again.
I needed a break, so I left the family room and wandered through the kitchen and into the formal front room of the house. I don’t understand this kind of room. Houses have had best rooms or front parlors for centuries, but in modern times they seem to have become especially useless. Once reserved for special occasions or holidays or a death in the family, no one ever particularly wants to gather there now. In Lindy’s house, she’d told me, the dog had often pooped in the front room when he was a puppy. When I asked Neera about hers, she waved her hand dismissively. “I don’t have time to spend in there,” she said.
I sat down on Neera’s best couch. It was surprisingly comfortable. There were real curtains in here, ones you might call drapes, and two matching lamps and some expensive-looking candlesticks on a small mantel over a gas fireplace. It was very quiet. I couldn’t hear the television and the traffic outside was muffled. I couldn’t even hear a dog barking. I checked my phone to see if Neera had texted to say when she’d be back, and it felt like the loneliest activity in the world, sitting alone in a formal front room, checking your phone.
When the doorbell rang, Sara came barreling down the hall to answer it. I was right behind her, but she opened the door.
“Daddy!”
Adam didn’t look as miserable as I thought he might. He had a scruffy beard, which suited him, and the same kind eyes I remembered. The only sign of stress might have been that he’d gained some weight.
“May,” he said, as if we’d seen each other last week. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“I didn’t know you were nesting.”
“Neera didn’t tell you?”
“Not before I got here, no.”
“What’s nesting?” Sara asked.
I froze. Adam winced and rubbed his forehead. “Making a cozy home for you, sweet pea,” he said. “I love you.”
“Watch Angelina with me!” She began pulling him toward the back of the house and I stepped out of the way. I knew firsthand how strong she was.
Adam stumbled a few steps forward, then stopped. “I can’t, sweet pea. I just came by to pick up something I forgot. I can’t stay.”
“Why can’t you stay?” Sara asked.
“Neera’s out,” I offered.
“That’s not how this works,” Adam snapped, then looked so sad I tried to help.
“Because I’m taking you to the park!” I said to Sara.
She looked at me skeptically. “That’s not what Mommy said.”
Adam knelt down to her height. “I’m going to see you in a few days and we’re going to do lots of fun things, okay? But right now I have to go.”
“Okay,” she said, and took my hand. “You watch with me.” And so I did.
Adam found the jacket he’d left upstairs and blew a kiss to Sara before he left. He waved to me and I waved back, which felt a little like a betrayal of Neera, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I had a late-afternoon cup of coffee in the hope of staying awake through Sara’s bath and bedtime so Neera and I could talk, but Neera was so tired by the end of the day it felt kinder to let her go to bed than to keep her up with questions. I’m certain Penelope would have done the same, sensing another woman’s home in crisis.
* * *
—
THE LAST DAY of my visit we didn’t have a plan. The rain had stopped, but Sara didn’t want to go to the playground again. Neera and I were lingering over coffee when suddenly Neera jumped up and said, “I know!”
Before I could object, she’d booked three tickets for us to see the flower show in town. Under the circumstances, it seemed like a heroic act of friendship, so I refrained from telling her that a flower show in a convention center is like a ship in a bottle, strange and unnatural. The smells from food vendors often overpower the flowers, and the crowds can be shocking. A flower show is to gardening what the runway is to fashion: beyond the reach of mortals. People go to gawk.
I wasn’t optimistic, but touring a flower show with an eager four-year-old in a ballet skirt turned out to have some advantages. The lines around the gardens were long, but someone would notice Sara trying to see on tiptoe and wave us in. Was it the well-dressed ladies in hats and feathers who smiled at us and let Sara cut the line? Not at all. It was the men in jeans, the landscapers, the real-life installers, I guessed, of gardens like the ones we were looking at, who moved aside and said, “Go ahead. Absolutely. Let her see.” A few older women told Sara she looked as pretty as a flower in her pink dress. Sara mostly remained mute, which I admired.
Twice Neera and I were reminiscing about college when she thought she spotted the woman Adam was seeing in the crowd. Her face went white and she grabbed my arm. Both times she was wrong. “Same posture,” she said once, shaking her head. And, “She has that coat.” Both times we lost the thread of our conversation and couldn’t recover it.
After lunch, which was dominated by what Sara would and wouldn’t eat, we saw a few more gardens, then headed briefly to the window-box competition, where I would have lingered, but one look at Neera’s face told me we were done. I made an exception to my cut-flower rule and bought Neera and Sara each a posy of pink and yellow Ranunculus asiaticus before we left. Sara accepted hers with gratifying solemnity, quite taken with the tight folds of concentric petals. On the drive home, she fell asleep holding her flowers.
“Thank you,” I said to Neera. “That was a lovely afternoon. You didn’t have to do that for me.”
“I wanted to. And, really, it was something for Sara and me to do, too. I worry about not doing enough fun things with her. Somehow Adam is the fun parent.”
I knew that as soon as we got back to the house we’d begin the evening routine, so I whispered, “Neera, how are you doing?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that. But today is a good day.”
“What happens after nesting?” I asked. “Do you know what you’re waiting for?”
She glanced at Sara in the rearview mirror. “Things to get easier.”
“I understand that,” I said. “Me, too.” I thought she might ask me to explain, but she didn’t.
“Did you know people will underestimate the weight of a heavy backpack before climbing a steep hill if they’re standing next to a friend?”
“Aww,” Neera said. “That’s nice.”
I looked out my window. Every stripped tire looked like roadkill.
After a minute Neera said, “Actually, that really is something.”
“I thought so,” I said.
That night I packed up my things and so did Neera. She would be staying with local friends until her next turn nesting. In the morning, I left the guest room exactly as I’d found it. We dropped Sara at her preschool on the way to the airport; Adam would pick her up in the afternoon and for the next week and a half, Sara and the house were his.
When Neera hugged me good-bye, she said, “I’m here if you need me.”
“Me, too,” I said.
I knew we both meant it, but on the other hand, we would make each other ask.
March 14
Dear Neera,
Our notes must have crossed in the mail. I hope by now you’ve received mine and know what a lovely time I had. Please don’t worry: I proposed the visit on short notice and you were brave to take me up on it. You shared your home, which is never easy, no matter the circumstances, and were a grac
ious host. Thank you for a wonderful, memorable weekend. I only wish I could have helped you more.
Yours, May
P. S. Tell Sara I’m reconsidering pink. She’ll understand.
* * *
—
ALLEGEDLY WARMTH, cheeriness, friendliness, and strength are distinct from one another and your likability is largely determined by how much of each you project. The definition of warmth is how easily you convey you have something in common with another person. Rereading my note, I worried I was better at being warm in writing than in person.
The Steiff bumblebee I brought Sara had been mine as a child. Most of my Steiff collection is boxed up in the basement, but I keep a few of the bees nestled into the African violets on the windowsill behind my kitchen sink. They’re black and yellow, about two inches long, with two pieces of felt for wings and black yarn antennae. I have two left, and they sit there with the pink tape measure and now also a little stone bird paperweight. It did not occur to me until I was flying home that a stone bird from a place where a broken family is trying hard to make a nest is a little grim. But what’s grimmer than the bumblebee? Her stinger is barbed so it will stick under the skin after it has pierced you. When she attempts to fly off, her intestines are pulled out and she’ll die, unless you can find a way to dislodge the stinger gently.
Postcards
The postcard Neera had included was from Leo. My father told me he’d given him the address. The picture was a view of the university grounds showing my yew, though that wouldn’t mean anything to Leo, and the text in its entirety read “Signed up for an extension class at the university. Plant Identification. Starting in two weeks. Leo.”
I put it on the windowsill behind my sink.
I’d already been to El Puerto with my father since returning from Neera’s, but hadn’t mentioned the postcard because I hadn’t gotten it yet. I’d complimented him on the whiskey barrel planters he’d placed at the corners of the promenade. They were real wood ones, not the fake plastic kind, and I thought they were a good choice. I warned him not to fill them completely with soil, but to use empty plastic bottles in a layer along the bottom to improve drainage. He thanked me, and my father and I ate our dinner.
After Neera’s, I had some busy weeks at work. Blake had been asked to help create a university farm. He’d anticipated this—our administration was slower than most at recognizing the changing social landscape—and we’d been discussing plans for more than a year. Now we knew where it would be—one of the founder’s historic homes was ceding acreage from its extensive flower gardens. There was already a placard that read “Future site of the University Farm, which will enhance students’ overall educational experience as well as their understanding of the sustainability challenges that will affect their adult lives.”
Blake told me the university wanted an organic garden, a flock of laying hens, a number of beehives, and a small herd of goats.
“A tunnel greenhouse is also a possibility,” he said.
“Is there enough room for all that?” I asked.
“No,” Blake said. He rarely wasted words.
* * *
—
I WENT BACK OFTEN to the café where I’d seen the elderly friends who met there for coffee every day. I’d learned their names were Maris and Helen, and I liked to sit near them. They didn’t talk a lot, and when they did it was mostly about people they both knew, often illnesses related to those people. Maris, the small and thin one, liked to smoke a cigarette, for which they would both move outside and sit next to a pot of purple pansies. If it was cold, and we were having a chilly March, it took them awhile to get their coats on. Sometimes Maris read the daily horoscope out loud, her voice as low and gravelly as you’d imagine for a lifelong smoker. Helen, the tall and heavy one, listened to the brief horoscopes and together they discussed each one as if it were an important piece of news. Their mutual friends nearly covered the zodiac. If they hit a horoscope for which they couldn’t remember someone, they called out to the barista, “When were you born?” All the baristas knew them, the café owner knew them, other shopkeepers on the street knew them. They argued sometimes, but it never amounted to anything.
When little, friends play house in order to pretend to be family, which is ironic because the beauty of friends is that they are chosen, not given. Should siblings play friends? And do we make friends or find them? Emily Dickinson thought the best verb was enact.
One morning in late March, inspired by Leo, I decided to send my brother a postcard. He emailed once in a while with my father, but he and I hadn’t really been in touch for years. A postcard would travel publicly by U.S. postal service across three thousand miles, but the act of buying, writing, stamping, and sending it suddenly felt more intimate than anything else I could do. This was a broadcast to one, after all, not one and a crowd of follower-friends.
The Anneville diversity festival was in full swing. Anneville is very proud of this annual festival and the daffodils and tulips were in full bloom, so people were out in droves. I made my way through the crowds to the university gift shop, where I chose a postcard showing a photograph of the town square in winter. I found it in the seasonal discount pile: one red cardinal perched on a snow-laden evergreen branch, looking like a forgotten Christmas bauble. On the other side I wrote only, “Do they have Christmas in France?” which was a line from a movie that had made us laugh when we were kids.
That night I dreamed my brother and I were playing house. For some reason it involved a lot of cleaning. I was walking around barefoot and he was surprised. He looked down at my feet and said he couldn’t do that anymore because it hurt too much. I told him it hurt me, too, but that I’d practiced. I wiggled my toes.
Then suddenly, in that nonlinear way of dreams, we were walking in a pine forest. A guide appeared and took us to a dollhouse in the woods. He pointed out holes left by Revolutionary War–era musket fire, or so he said. My brother studied the bullet holes, while I marveled at all the beds. There was at least one in each room, all different colors. And that was the end of the dream.
House Bound
To me shelter is a word that leans more toward survival than luxury, and yet it’s the term for magazines with an editorial focus on interior design, architecture, home furnishings, and gardening. In other words, nice things not essential for survival. The term was first used this way in 1946 in reference to a magazine called Your Own Home, which was devoted to the very real problem of postwar low-cost housing. “Shelter magazine” grew into a misnomer over time.
Shelter magazines assume boundless energy, and often boundless wealth, but not always. Energy, though, is nonnegotiable. You have to want to work on your house. You have to ignore the fact that a house during most of mankind’s time on earth was a necessity, not a display case of prized personal possessions and decorating prowess. The spaces were crowded and multiuse. Beds were shared.
A house becomes a home when a person or a group of people has an emotional attachment to it. A house is a physical thing that is built with wood and bricks, furnished with furniture and carpets, while a home takes time and is built with memories. Shelter magazines, however, would like to convince you that the right colors and fabrics can help.
If instead the shelter magazines covered subjects such as tracing new worry paths across your floorboards, redecorating for the invalid, or area rugs to cover blood stains, I might be more interested. Housekeeping for the grief addled? Gardening for the undone? Then I’d consider a subscription.
But perhaps I’m bitter. My parents never had enough money to redecorate. I learned that you conform your life to the space you have, just like the earliest cave dwellers: This one will do! But now most people tear out perfectly serviceable kitchens and bathrooms simply to re-create them in a style they prefer. Now people are bent on designing a space to suit their lives.
Here’s a word: reside, from the Latin sidere,
“to sink or settle.” Can you change where you reside because someone died? It’s such a modern idea to even contemplate it. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort in the home was so unfamiliar, no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Prior to World War I, the drawing room was often referred to as the “death room” because it was where the bodies of loved ones were laid out. After the world wars, the shelter magazine known as Ladies’ Home Journal suggested it was high time for a “living room” and the term took hold.
As did my father and I, though he moved to the basement and I still walk through the rest of the house now and then burning sage.
* * *
—
MY MOTHER WAS DIFFERENT around other people. She never, that I can remember, had lunch with a friend. She never met someone in the evening for a drink or a movie. Even before she went upstairs, my mother liked rainy days because they seemed to reduce expectations; the rest of the world slowed to her pace. I was always at pains to express joy in sunlight, hoping this was the way forward, worried about the trajectory she was on.
And yet she is the one who gave me, Lindy, and Vanessa a framed picture of us together at our high school graduation. She made copies, bought frames, wrapped the boxes, and brought them to a graduation party Vanessa’s parents hosted. No one else gave us a present that celebrated our friendship like that. Why did I never ask her, But where are your friends?
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