by Susan Minot
Alongside the IV, she is emaciated and despite her coiffure does look very sick.
“I’m not gone yet.” This is apparently comic to her. “There’s been a mistake.”
“It’s okay,” I say. I’m saying what everyone always says. But this woman calls me on it.
“No, it’s not okay.” Her face is defiant. She jerks her head in the direction of her minders down the bar. One is laughing openmouthed at Mac. “You sound like them.”
She holds my gaze and I’m surprised to see her eyes clear as paperweights, with tiny angles of light in the blue. I would have expected rheumatic, sick eyes. Someone looks at you hard that way, it gives you agita, but in a good way.
“Well, it’s not forever,” I say, grasping at straws. She has unnerved me.
“Don’t you believe it,” she says. Her bony hand comes out and latches on to my arm.
We’re fused together for a moment and I feel oddly calm.
Out of nowhere a laughing paramedic appears behind her and takes her firmly at her shoulder. “Come on, Anita,” she says, steering her. “Come sit with us.”
The woman gets off the stool and goes where she is taken but looks over her shoulder at me. “You don’t belong here either,” she says.
People say things that have a physical effect. It must be particular to humans that words can do that. That woman’s words hit me and reverberate like a tolling bell through my body.
The paramedic has dragged her over to where they sit at the bar, but I see the woman’s mind is elsewhere, not listening to their banter. I start collecting the salt and pepper from the tables and the next time I look over all three of them are gone.
The smoking woman is still there, emptying her pipe. “Happy Obituary,” she cries to no one in particular. No one looks. That’s an old one. Minutes later she’s asleep on her arms.
At the station I refill the coffee which has dried into a syrup at the bottom of the beaker. I toss out the old grounds and get a premeasured packet and when I rip the metal paper the coffee grounds fly everywhere. Luckily we’re not busy so I don’t have to hurry to get the dust brush and sweep it up. Then I make another pot. As the water is gurgling down I am struck by something. In the past five minutes I have not thought of my beloved at all. It’s a sort of record. He’s usually there in my head, like a shadow in front of every thought. I feel guilty. Then I realize the reason I wasn’t thinking of him was because I was thinking of someone else for a change, of the woman in the nightgown. I was thinking about her saying I didn’t belong here. Maybe I don’t.
Now, thinking about my beloved again, I see his back. His back and shoulders are very characteristic parts of him. Suddenly I feel how absorbing it has been to think of him all the time, even when I chose it. The woman in the nightgown made me wonder for a change about what she was going through. She seemed to be doing the same about me. That’s a new open feeling. A patch of warmth spreads below my collarbones, surprising me. I didn’t know I had even been cold.
* * *
—
At the end of the night the last thing we do is make sure things are stocked or cleaned and ready for the next day. We fill the saltshakers, etc. I’ve noticed that when I’m doing things close-up with my hands, my mind reflects back to me, less distracted by what’s around it. I’m filling up a saltshaker and he, my beloved, appears. He’s usually there when I do something close-up. Only this time salt is pouring over his face and he wavers in and out of focus, as if being erased by snow in a blizzard. Then he disappears altogether.
The air becomes—how can I describe it?—softer. Sounds turn gentle and the people and the tables and the bar and the lights recede. I feel more of myself and yet don’t feel in place. Sharon passes me with an intent look. I notice Mac staring at a little section of mirror between the bottles. Everyone seems to be moving each in his or her own column. I see Maggie, concentrating at the cash register. She’s dug in now.
I see how everyone is enveloped in an individual daze. But I am cracked out of it. I feel clear. It’s as if they are all floating. But I’m not with them in the column. I’m unencased.
My arms feel weirdly strong, with that feeling of being outside in the summer, full of nature and invigorated, not worried about anything or even wanting anything. Though the feeling actually gives you a hunger. Your body is in fine working order. It feels restless and happy and would like to run or lift something up or swim underwater or dance or take up with another body, one with a pulse, one that can move and stay close and be warm and alive.
“Hel-lo,” Rita says, bunching forks and knives in the silverware tray. “Where are you?” She hovers near me, indistinct. “Have we lost you?”
Losing someone is the last thing I want to think about now.
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m here.”
But part of me has already left. I’m out the door.
• BOSTON COMMON AT TWILIGHT •
Much later, it was the trees he would think of.
They had been so tall and bare. He would have seen them when he’d first gone to the Boston Common when he was eight years old, but he didn’t remember then noticing the trees. Now, when he thought of that day in December, he would see the spaced-apart oaks with their spidery branches, reaching into the stark afternoon, leafless black skeletons, towering above him. But oddly he would picture them from above, looking down through their branches to his fifteen-year-old self, beside the melting snowbanks and the other people teetering around on the park paths.
* * *
•
Hockey practice had let out early that day at St. Peter’s when their coach’s wife finally went into labor. The boys were all laughing at how freaked Mr. D looked, forgetting to take the goals off the ice, and had given him shit when he had left for the hospital and had to go deal with it.
So Ned had taken a train earlier than usual out of the dinky train station in Concord. It was a quiet time of afternoon and no one else was boarding the squeaking car, except for an old lady in a light blue coat who was so curled over she could barely make it up the stairs. Watching her deliberate progress beside the conductor, Ned thought how bad that would be, to be so old you’d basically have to stare down the whole time.
It was Christmas vacation, but Ned hadn’t been able to go home yet; the hockey team still had a few days’ practice. The dorms were closed, and most of the other boarders on the team were staying with day students in Concord, but Ned was staying with his aunt Elsie, who lived in Cambridge near Harvard Square.
To get there he had to take the train to Boston and then the subway to Cambridge, but once he got to the big house on Craigie Street the food was tasty. His father was making him stay there because of everything going on at home. Normally they didn’t see Aunt Elsie, his father’s sister, because she was considered an oddball in the family. But now his dad needed her help. Aunt Elsie was actually pretty nice, Ned thought, and fed him giant meals and maybe appreciated having another person at the table since Uncle Rob hardly said a word, not that Ned did either, but at least she had another person to listen to her. She had a lot of opinions about Reagan winning and how bad it was for the country and about the hostage crisis. Ned had figured it was better than staying at Mike O’Conner’s house, where he’d been assigned. Word was the O’Conners had the TV ban. That night M*A*S*H would be on, and he had his own TV at Aunt Elsie’s. He could watch whatever he wanted. He even watched The Waltons, which he actually liked though he didn’t admit it to anyone. On The Waltons everybody actually cared about one another.
When he got off the train at North Station it was practically deserted. Where was everybody today? He walked out from the shaded tracks into the station with its polished ocher floor. Ned was tall for fifteen and thin, with brown corduroy pants slipping off his hips. He wore a plaid shirt and work boots with the laces undone. His navy-blue parka, unzipped, had an L-shaped patch of hockey
tape in the front from when Zeigler pushed him into the iron arrows on the chapel railing and ripped it.
Since he had extra time, instead of taking the subway to Cambridge as he had every other stupid day, he decided he’d go walk around. He vaguely knew the Boston Common was nearby.
He trudged up the hill toward downtown, past shops jammed with crap tied in ribbons and colored lights shaped like bullets and streetlights wound with fake ivy. It was weirdly warm. You could see your breath in the shade, but when you crossed the street, the sidewalk gutters were gushing with water and you could feel the sunshine. Sooty mounds of snow along the sidewalk were eroded into peaks. People went by holding square paper bags with red trim or briefcases or kids’ hands. His hands were in his pockets, hunkered down. He had his wallet in one. It was an old one that his dad had given him when he’d gotten a new one.
He got to the top of the hill where Government Center spread out as a brick-paved arena with levels and handrailings. He knew the Common was somewhere close and turned down a few streets narrow as canyons till he miraculously saw at the end of one crisscrossing tree branches and brown-and-white earth. Here, he’d heard, he could supposedly find someone to sell him pot.
It had been spring when he’d been there before seven years ago, with his mother and older brother, Matt. They’d come to go to the Swan Boats, and were dressed in their Boston clothes, gray flannel shorts with suspenders underneath their sweaters. Matt’s sweater was dark blue and Ned’s dark green; otherwise they were dressed exactly the same. Ned couldn’t believe they’d worn those things. Ned had never been into the city before just to walk around. The Baldwins used to drive through the city along the Charles River on their way to Brookline to visit their grandparents or, once, after the Ice Capades, they drove along the perimeter of the park to see the gold dome on the State House, and their mother pointed out the brick building where she’d first met their father at a party.
At the Swan Boats Ned remembered they’d gotten red-and-white cardboard boxes of popcorn and had thrown kernels to the swans and ducks while a man at the front of the boat pedaled what looked like steps. The boats weren’t really swans the way Ned had imagined them; they just had wooden cutouts on the sides in the shape of swan silhouettes with wing-tipped tails. Otherwise they were normal boats with red benches. Still, he’d felt it had been cool to be in Boston. The three of them went to Schrafft’s for lunch and had sundaes for dessert. His mom was dressed up, too, in a dark pink dress with a matching jacket, and her pearls. She was happy watching Matt eat his hot fudge and Ned his butterscotch and stole bites with her spoon. His mother liked treats, but was trying to keep her figure. That was one thing about their mother, she knew what it was like to be a kid. She didn’t try to make them into adults, the way Dad tried, correcting the way you talked, or telling you how you were doing something wrong. It was something he’d liked about his mom then, that she was more like a kid, but now, getting older, he sort of wished she were more like a grown-up.
It was weird being in the city alone. He stood under the amazingly tall trees near a trash can and unwrapped a Snickers. A woman loitered nearby. She had slicked hair parted in the middle and rounded into a ball at her neck. She wore a rust-colored leather jacket belted at the waist and narrow blue jeans with a flair. Her sunglasses were tinted brown, darker at the top. Each cheek was smudged with a brownish rouge. Sienna, he thought, knowing the color from his oil-painting art class.
The woman walked by Ned, not meeting his eye. “Pot?” she whispered, holding her lapel with crimson fingernails.
Ned looked around. There was a businessman in a suit moving briskly toward the subway. Three ladies, probably secretaries, walked beside one another in skirts and snow boots. An old woman had a net over her hair. No one was paying them the slightest bit of attention. “Okay,” he said.
The woman nodded, still not looking him in the eye. Ned couldn’t believe how easy this was.
It was definitely going to blow away Matt when he got home and they went down to the rocks after dinner and Ned brought out the pot. So far it was either Matt or their neighbor Barney who had supplied it. At school Ned had heard Sander Lawrence say there were guys selling it all over the Common. Sander had gotten his from a hippie at Thanksgiving, he said, passing a joint with both nonchalance and reverence to Ned and his best friend, Zeigler, huddled behind the maintenance shed as the white sunset shot through the pine trees during the two minutes they had before needing to be at the refectory for dinner.
The woman gestured with her head. She turned, and Ned followed her, looking down to the square heels of her boots. A car went by blasting music, Another one bites the dust…The woman’s shoulders went forward and back, forward and back, like someone exaggerating. Ned had seventeen dollars on him—he figured he could borrow more later from Aunt Elsie if he needed it, which he probably would for the train home tomorrow after the last practice. The subway to Cambridge was seventy-five cents. He would set that aside. If the pot were more, he’d just ask the lady for half. He would bargain, make a deal.
The woman headed into the subway entrance and started down the stairs. Ned kept a few feet behind her. Then she stopped in the echoing underpass and leaned against the blue-and-white-tile wall, facing away from him. Ned hesitated, expecting another signal. Should he go over there? The woman looked over her shoulder, pursing her lips.
He had that nervous feeling he got at the beginning of a game, or before seeing a teacher during office hours, that something uncertain was going to happen and he would be blamed for whatever it was, whether or not it was something he’d actually done. He thought of how Matt did things with natural assurance, as if it were obvious. Ned walked over and stood next to the woman, his hands in his pockets. She was tall, taller than he was.
“It’s at my place,” she said in a hoarse voice, matter-of-factly. She looked him up and down. “You’ll have to come there.”
Close-up Ned saw that her skin was covered with thick foundation and powder, which made it look bumpy. Around her neck was a thin green scarf. It was a thick neck. He felt something hot and terrible rush through him.
“Sorry,” he said. He dropped his head a little and frowned to show he wanted to, but really couldn’t. “I can’t. I have to get to—”
The woman grabbed his arm. She had a hard grip. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you can come with me.” Ned looked down and saw a small knife an inch from his dangling parka zipper. “It won’t take long, sugar. Just to Charlestown.”
Ned looked down at her hand gripping his arm. There were a lot of rings on the fingers. He saw some teal-green stones and black hairs sprouting below the knuckles. Out of the corner of his eye he felt figures walking by, but was too scared to look at them for help.
“Come on,” she said and locked her arm in his arm. “Let’s be nice.”
* * *
—
Ned dragged his feet, but she was strong and heaved him along. She paid for him at the ticket booth, keeping her arm tight against his. She’d put the knife in one of her wide pockets but kept it pointing in Ned’s direction.
She let him go through the turnstile before her. The platform had a lot of people on it; it was on the verge of rush hour. He thought, I could run. Should I run? Where would I go? This person is big. What if she caught me? She’d stab me. She’d only have to stab me a few times and I’d definitely die.
The subway car arrived with a screech and the woman kept her torso right up close to him as they stepped on, crowding in with everyone else. Ned looked around at the faces, on the low-key, searching for someone he could cry out to, who would protect him. But no one returned his gaze. He spotted a large black man hanging on to the bar, facing the opposite direction. That guy could nail this lady, he thought. When someone jostled him, the man turned his head and looked straight at Ned, but through him, with no interest whatsoever.
I
n his ear he heard, “Last thing I want to do is hurt you. So stop worrying. Everything will be fine.”
* * *
•
A woman holding a shopping bag on her lap glanced up at them, sizing them up as a couple with a disapproving face. Ned wanted desperately to explain and realized how crazy it was that he cared about what some stranger on the subway thought when he had a knife pointing at his stomach. It was an old train; it rattled and chugged. Then it stopped. Everyone sat silently in the tunnel. He couldn’t try to run here. He just had to wait. Then the train crept forward with a piercing screech at the turn. Ned covered an ear and stared at what little he could see through the window opaque with dirt. When the train came up from underground the sun was gone and the sky streaked with wisps of gray smog.
Forty miles north was his hometown, Marshport. It had a harbor and three different churches, the most prominent of which was a classic New England church right smack in the middle of the town green. Its steeple had been the focus of a recent fund-raising drive—wood rot was threatening its structure and safety required it be removed—and everywhere you went in town there were little clear plastic boxes with SAVE THE STEEPLE signs, stuffed with coins and dollar bills. His mother, who despite attending the Catholic church, where she dragged Ned and Matt for as long as she could before they were old enough simply to refuse to go, had taken up the cause. For some reason Ned thought of his hometown then and with longing of the steeple.
At the Charlestown stop, the doors opened and the woman, with a determined but calm face, urged him onto the platform. There were fewer people here as they walked up the stairs, and Ned was struck by how normal everyone around him seemed. They were all heading home or going to work or doing something that wasn’t full of fear or desperation. He wished with all his might that he were like them again.