by Julia Glass
It was the same shirt, the exact same shirt—oddly, covering a chest far less enticing than the one he remembered from the upstairs hallway, the breasts he could just make out through her nightgown whenever she’d spent the night in Joya’s room. And now Alan was the taller of the two—though he still felt small beside her, small yet happy. (God, he had forgotten all about gin.)
Her hair. In high school, Marion had forced her bushy, obstinate hair into a braid that fell below her waist. Now, it struck Alan, her hair looked almost identical to his: short, curly, and dark, brindled with gray, standing up fiercely away from her head. She looked…militant, Alan decided. Was she gay? How odd that would seem. Alan might not remember the faces of classmates he’d passed in the halls for four years, but how minutely he could remember trying to listen, often successfully, to the conversations between his sister and Marion on the other side of his bedroom wall. He could remember trying to use a terra-cotta flowerpot as an amplifier, placing its wide mouth against the wall, pressing his ear to the drainage hole. How many boys had he heard the two girls dissecting like frogs in science class? How many nights had he gone to bed just a hand’s width from Marion’s body, only inches of wall between them, bringing his agony and fascination to a hard, thrilling crescendo just before sleep?
“So, little brother—not-so-little brother—are you married?” She glanced around and behind him suggestively.
“I am. But my wife couldn’t make it. And please stop calling me that.”
“Children? Pull out the pictures.”
“No. Not yet anyway.”
“Watch out there. We are not as perpetually youthful as so many of us seem to be assuming.”
Marion did not appear to be drinking anything, but she did seem charged up with mischievous elation. Someone had made the studious decision to put not just people’s names and classes on their paper badges but their professions as well—or, apparently, whatever they had filled in on that line of the reunion questionnaire. Marion’s name tag identified her, in some cheerleader’s round, girlish script, as LIFE STUDENT, AD INFINITUM. (Alan felt doltishly envious; his read PSYCHOTHERAPIST/COUPLES COUNSELOR, the last word squashed below the other two, as if cowed into the corner of a room.)
“I like your chosen career,” he said.
“I didn’t really choose mine, but I do like yours,” she said. “What’s your score on the couples?”
Alan rattled the ice in his plastic cup. He laughed nervously. “Score?”
“How many’ve stayed, how many split?”
“I don’t keep track,” he said. “Maybe I should.”
“People don’t ask when they come to see you? Like, who’d hire a broker without asking how many good investments he’d made?”
“No,” he said. “Kind of funny, I guess, now that you make that analogy. But in theory, I’m not a fixer. I’m a…sounding board, a safe zone, a giver of permission to say whatever you need to say without…” He faltered as he tried to read her expression. Was it mocking?
“Without being tossed in the wood chipper? That’s hard work. I’m serious.” She looked at his hands, at the rattling ice. “Let’s fix you up there.”
They walked to the bar, where Alan poured himself another metallic-tasting cocktail and Marion poured herself cranberry juice. Had she quit her hellion ways? Because she had always been the wild one, so if she was now on the wagon, he had to admire her bravery in coming to one of these sloshfests.
At the drinks table, Alan was accosted by a classmate he barely remembered, a guy who claimed they’d been in Boy Scouts and swimming lessons together. Jim and his wife, Stephanie, ran a small company that sold prostheses. Alan fought the childish urge to guffaw at their earnest description of how they’d fallen into this line of work (she’d been a physical therapist, he an M.B.A. with entrepreneurial yearnings). Alan examined their limbs as surreptitiously as he could, but all eight appeared to be quite real. Over their shoulders, he kept an eye on Marion, who had wandered across the gym and seated herself on the bleachers. She was reading something.
“Know what?” said Alan after he’d listened for ten minutes or so. “I’m going to check out the old locker room. Nice to meet you, Stephanie.”
“Do you have a card?” said Stephanie. “We’re collecting everyone’s card. We’re in the city, too, and we might do a post-reunion reunion sometime. What do you think?”
Alan told her it was a great idea and fished his card from his wallet. Without heading for the locker room even as a pretense, he crossed the gym, straight toward the bleachers.
He sat beside her. “Maybe it’s my turn to look after you,” he said.
Marion looked skeptical. “When was it mine to look after you?”
“Well, you and Joy, the two of you…” Alan blushed.
Marion saved him. “I do remember the time we got you into that R movie when you were so obviously a baby. When you were about to be humiliated in front of that long line of older kids. What was it, Taxi Driver? Mean Streets? Something with Robert De Niro. We had the hugest crush on him, Joya and me.” She squeezed his arm again. “I’m not sure that constitutes ‘looking after.’ Maybe the opposite.”
He glanced at the flyer she was holding. It was a “newsletter” from her class. “Are you in that?” he said.
“Oh no. Coming to this thing is geeky enough. Sending in my snapshot or listing my dubious achievements, no way.”
“Why are you here?”
“Let’s see…I’m a glutton for punishment?” She folded the newsletter twice and set it beside her. “It so happens my parents are packing up the house before they move south. They’re joining the flamingo set. Dad’s wearing white shoes. Unbelievable. I think he thinks he’s an elderly Bing Crosby. So this is my last chance to go through the old Barbie dolls and those gimp bracelets from Camp Watusi. Salvage my mementos. Or not, as it’s turning out. I won’t lie: from where I sit now, my childhood looks almost beautiful—or innocent, just the way it’s supposed to. But the remains look pretty grotesque. A mouse made a nest in the shoebox where I kept all of Barbie’s stewardess outfits and cocktail dresses.”
“And what about your…your dubious achievements?” Alan knew that Joya and Marion had stayed in touch through college or longer, that some Christmas a few years back he’d heard his mother ask about Marion. Joya had said she was in Tanzania or Thailand, doing something valiant and hopeful, like vaccinating babies or building thatched schools or teaching first aid.
Marion did not answer right away. “Well, they’re not a lot different from yours, Alan. I mean, I help people. Fundamentally. Or try to.” She stopped there, as if she’d said too much already.
“Are you trying to avoid telling me you’re a lawyer?”
“God no,” she said. “Thanks a lot, little brother.”
“Teacher.”
“No. I don’t have that kind of masochistic patience, I’m afraid.”
“Wait. I didn’t ask you. Are you married?”
“Oh no,” she said. “I’m a member of the female generation that somehow missed that bus. Pretty stupid, to tell you the truth. But I’m fine about it now.”
“What, you think it’s too late?” Like his sister, who was still fervently aiming herself toward marriage, Marion would soon be thirty-eight.
“For me at least. But like I said, I’m fine about it. At this point, I’d make a horrific wife. I’m not too good at give-and-take.”
Neither was Greenie, thought Alan, recalling how cool she’d been that afternoon when he left for the train station. “Have a good time,” she’d said, with the same tone and rhythm you’d use to utter, “Makes no difference to me.”
Marion looked around at the growing crowd—including, noticed Alan, too many lone souls meandering about as if the gym were an art gallery and the climbing bars and basketball hoops and scoreboards were objects of aesthetic fascination. Joya had been wrong: this was depressing.
“Listen,” she said. “You want to go have dinne
r somewhere? That road joint you guys used to take us to when you wanted to get laid? It’s still there, can you believe it? I passed it on the way over. I’d love to see if they make the burgers as greasy as they used to. One last time.”
Alan knew the place she meant, though he’d been there only two or three times in the past and never (alas) for the purpose she’d stated. He suspected that the only reason the place survived was its fame as one of the bars where Bruce Springsteen had played before he was anyone special.
They took Marion’s car, and they didn’t say much on the way. Marion would point out landmarks: places where the relics of their youth had survived, places where they had not. No one at the reunion had noticed their desertion or tried to stop them, as Alan half-wished someone would—and not because he wanted to stay.
When they got out in the dusty parking lot, they could hear the thumping pulse of whatever godawful band was booked at the bar that night. They looked at each other across the roof of the car, and Alan’s guilty hesitation was vaporized, gone in a flash too quick to overrule. This was his past; he had the right—even the responsibility—to explore it, to seize this strange, unexpected chance at looking backward so far and so clearly.
“Shall we, little…Alan?” Marion held out her hand in a way that suggested he should make a hoop of his arm and escort her formally in. When her arm was tucked inside his (their identical fake-western shirts from the Gap linked together, as if they were partners in a square dance), Alan stole his first close look at her face in so many years and saw there a kind of admirable clarity: no makeup, few creases, a plain old-fashioned pallor. The earring he could see was a small cascade of silver beads, like a sip of icy spring water.
A pink fringe of sky persisted still, the rim of a wide rosy ocean beneath the ever-descending night. An evaporating ocean. A last chance, a last glimpse of innocence, thought Alan as the present enclosed the past like a long soft glove and the two of them stepped into the clamorous dark. Marion pulled him toward the only empty booth, though the table was strewn with someone else’s dishes.
ALAN CARRIED THE LAST OF HIS rice and prawns to the kitchen; he would eat it for lunch the next day. When he switched on the light, the plate and mug in the sink reminded him instantly of Saga’s visit that afternoon. In a peculiar way, this cheered him up. Her story (which he had not managed to get, at least not through subtle methods) was surely not a happy one, yet once she had come inside, out of the storm, she’d exuded an air of confidence, almost contentment. He had said, as she left, that he hoped he would see her again, and he’d made sure she had his phone number, written clearly on a heavy piece of paper in permanent ink. (His card, he thought, would scare her off for good.)
She told him she’d be in touch; she had to return the clothes he’d lent her. She said she could not keep them, not without the explicit permission of the woman to whom they belonged. But would she, a day later, care about or possibly even remember Alan? Her appearance had implied she might be homeless—and often people living at such extremes, no matter how “normal” they seemed, were in such a psychic muddle that each day wiped clean the day before. The inability to keep time continuous, one day distinct from another, might be the very reason such people had to live like feral cats.
But Saga had not seemed the least bit feral; a little simple, a little careless about her appearance, but not wild, uncivilized, crazy. She had wiped her feet vigorously on the mat inside Alan’s door, and she had asked for an old newspaper to set the box on, so as not to stain the floor. (Later, she asked for a new box, and he found one—the one that had been too small to hold George’s Mousetrap game that morning.)
“Where are you going to take those puppies?” Alan had asked as he led her to the bathroom.
“My place.”
“Where do you live?”
“Oh”—she laughed, the laughter of private jokes—“downtown a bit. Sometimes.”
“If you need a place to live—”
“I just said I have one, didn’t I?” She sounded testy, but then she smiled. Her right eye, the narrow one, did not give in to the smile; nor did that side of her mouth, as if the muscles there were contentious or unwilling. The good eye, only by comparison with the other, looked as if it were open extra wide, as if half of Saga were in a state of perpetual astonishment.
She said, more gently, “This is very generous of you, taking us in. It’s not often strangers do things like that. But I do take care of myself.” She glanced at the puppies, sleeping off the trauma of their shots and the storm. “And of my little friends. Till they get homes, and they will. One way or another, I’ll make sure of that.” Alan’s irrepressible judgment must have shown on his face, because she added, “Do you think I’m a little eccentric? Hey! Don’t answer that.”
He began to protest, but she interrupted. “Know what? I’m freezing.”
So she had showered, while Alan made her tea and put out a plate of crackers and cheese. When she came to the kitchen table, she was wearing the sweatpants and T-shirt he’d taken from Greenie’s bureau. The T-shirt was red, stamped with the white silhouette of a lobster and the name of the restaurant in Maine where he and Greenie had celebrated their anniversary four years in a row. The restaurant had been a favorite of Greenie’s, on the coast looking out toward the island where she’d spent a part of every childhood summer, in a tiny house on the rocks with kerosene lamps and an outhouse. After her parents’ death, Maine had become too sad for her. That was two years ago; she and Alan had not returned since. Nor had she worn this T-shirt, Alan suspected.
Saga stayed for only forty-five minutes (twenty of which she spent in the shower). While they were seated at the table, she asked Alan about George, whose face hung in every room.
“He’s four. On a trip with his mother right now,” said Alan. He asked if Saga had children.
“Oh no.” Her mouth was full, and she covered it with a napkin, as if to hold back something else she might have said.
“Parents?”
He tried to sound casual, but she eyed him sharply, warning him she wasn’t so simple. “Long gone,” she said.
Saga ate the entire plate of crackers and cheese, using a thumb to pick up the last of the crumbs—just as George would have done. Alan wished he had put out more food, but to put out more now might insult her. She looked out the window often, and as soon as the rain seemed to have let up for good, she said, “I should go now, but would you mind if I made another phone call? It’s local, I promise.”
“Oh please,” said Alan, and he took her back into the bedroom and pointed to the phone. He closed the door to give her privacy. He carried their plates from the table to the kitchen. He found a sponge and worked at the gray crud around the faucets and the drain.
“Success!” Saga stood just outside the kitchen. “Thank you! You’ve been the soul of kindness, Mr. Alan Glazier.”
Alan was startled, not just by her sudden closeness. She smelled like Greenie—like the shampoo Greenie had left behind. “I’ve done hardly anything,” he said.
“Perhaps you’ll do more,” Saga said brightly. Within a few minutes she had collected her soggy, soiled clothing in a plastic bag, her box of puppies, and Alan’s number, which she stuffed in a pocket of Greenie’s sweatpants. After she put on her damp sneakers (Greenie’s feet were much smaller, Alan’s too large), he saw her out the door. She refused his offer to pay for a cab and set off toward Seventh Avenue. Alan watched her cross every intersection—carefully—until she turned a corner.
When he wandered, idly, into the bedroom, he found her wet towel folded neatly on the bedspread and the bar of soap from the shower on his dresser, placed in the ceramic dish where he put his keys and coins each night before he went to bed (it was in fact a soap dish, one he had pilfered from a fancy hotel in Paris before he knew Greenie). On the nightstand, beside the phone, Saga had left two quarters.
He checked the bathroom when he took the towel in to hang it up, but he found nothing out of order
there. Sheepishly, he opened the medicine chest, and at first his heart foundered at the sight of all the empty spaces where vials and miniature boxes had stood—but then he realized that these were just the spaces so recently occupied by Greenie’s benign little remedies: Motrin, Q-tips, Chapstick, hand lotion, a tiny beaker of colored barrettes, and a cylinder of powder (a scent called Rain, as if you could begin to capture such an elemental smell). Against his will, he felt the longing for her things, her presence, spread across his chest like a burning rash. “Oh Greenie, what a mess,” he said. He closed the cabinet, which left him facing only himself. How well a mirror could say, I told you so.
FIVE
“THREE DAYS IS MUCH TOO LONG,” said Uncle Marsden. “You are going to worry me literally to death if you keep on disappearing like this. And then you’ll be in a pickle, won’t you, my girl?”
Arriving on foot from the train station, Saga had found her uncle on his knees in the garden, weeding the peony bed. His white hair, blown loony by the wind, made him look like that god—Who was that god? What was his name?—about to hurl a thunderclap.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t disappear. I left you a note. And yesterday I left you a message. You were out.” Or did she leave the message? She remembered planning to leave the message.
“Oh thank you very much!” he scoffed. “A note and a message! As if they assure me you’re safe. I wish you would let me find a room for you down there. I’m sure I know folks who’d put you up, maybe even let you have a key. At least I’d know where you’re sleeping, that you’re safe.” He tossed his dirty gloves into the wheelbarrow and grasped her shoulders, as if he might shake her, widened his eyes and uttered a long growl. “Rrrraghhh!” Then he kissed her on the cheek.
As she followed him into the mudroom, it came to her. Zeus. The god was Zeus. Uncle Marsden was nothing like Zeus, he was more like…Hephaestus? Was that the blacksmith god? Saga had loved the Greek myths when she was little, known all the gods and muses and famously doomed mortals by heart. She’d like to know them again. She would have to find that book. It had a yellow cover; that much she remembered, but not where she had last seen it. Had it even survived the move from her mother’s house? It might be in one of the boxes on the third floor. She would have to look—if she could remember to look. She took out her notebook to write a reminder.