by Bret Lott
“But what about your hair?” the wife said.
“What about burning leaves?” the husband said.
“I think,” Scott said, “I’d rather watch TV than lean on a rake.” He paused, seemed to smile to himself a moment. He said, “Must have been somebody else, some other neighborhood kid you burned leaves with.”
“Having a pixie,” Jennifer said, “was great. I never had to bother with barrettes and combs and stuff.” Now she started doing lunges, her right leg back, the left out in front of her, her body leaning forward as far as she could. Feel that quadriceps burn! the peppy woman said. “Stack perm’s even better,” Jennifer said. “Just pick it out, and I’m done.”
“Now,” Scott said, “if you’d just put us back where you found us, we could all get on with our lives.” With his free hand he made a vague wave back toward the shed.
“Sounds like a plan,” Jennifer said, and switched legs, leaned forward now over her right leg. She was looking at the television again.
Slowly the wife stood. Then the husband stood from where he’d knelt next to the cooler.
They looked at each other.
“Well,” the wife finally said, “you found them. You’re the one who knows where they go.”
He looked at her a long moment. He said, “But don’t you think we ought to—”
“Top shelf, between the lantern and the paint can,” Jennifer said.
“And if you close the handle I can catch the last couple minutes of Headline News,” Scott said, then, quieter, but just loud enough for everyone to hear, “provided this aerobics crap doesn’t drown out the news of the world.”
“Just because you sit on your butt all day long doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to,” Jennifer said. She was working her arms now, pumping them up and down while still dancing. “Just because—”
“Just knock it off, the both of you,” the father said.
“Close the lid!” Jennifer and Scott shouted together.
“Fine,” the father said. “Fine with me,” he said, and quickly knelt, slapped closed the lid. He picked up the cooler without looking at his wife, walked back into the shed, lifted the cooler, and slid it into place between the Coleman lantern and the paint can.
He took a step back, dusted off his hands. He listened for a moment, something small and sharp twisting in his heart while he did so. But he heard nothing, not even the small dark pounding he’d heard when he’d come in here a few minutes before. Suddenly it seemed that the dark inside this shed might swallow him whole, and he quickly turned from the shelves, headed for the light outside.
She stood holding her hands, watching the shed, and here he came, her husband, moving fast from inside that darkened door into the sharp light out here. She saw his face, saw the lines beside his eyes and across his forehead, signs he was aging in just those moments he was heading toward her.
She said, “Well?” though she wasn’t sure what she meant by the word, wasn’t sure what sort of answer she expected to elicit from him.
“Well what?” he said back to her, the only sensible thing he could think of to say.
He didn’t stop when he reached her, only glanced up at her, saw she was squinting at him for the sun. But in just that glance he believed he saw fear in her eyes, dark and opaque.
Then he was at the window, walked on into the living room. She was right behind him, and as he headed to the kitchen, he heard the window hiss through its track, his wife pulling the window closed.
He went to the sink, looked out the window to the swimming pool, the tarp pulled halfway off. He could see, too, out past the pool, huddled inside the trees back there, the shed.
Now his wife stood beside him, and he saw out the corner of his eye her hands on the edge of the sink, holding on.
They stood side by side. Something had happened here, they both knew. Something huge. And they knew, too, without a word between them, that what had happened was already over, had come and gone.
He said, “What were we fighting about, anyway?”
She said nothing, only shrugged.
Then she said, “Listen, honey.” She paused, said, “Listen, Bill, we have to talk.” Still she looked out the window, saw more leaves gathering across the surface of the pool, all those withered and empty leaves caught on the water.
He turned to her. He blinked, looked at his wife. He said, “My name’s not Bill.”
She turned to him, looked at her husband.
He said, “It’s Linda, right?”
She blinked. Slowly she shook her head, and he saw her chin start to quiver. “Nope,” she said.
They looked at each other a long moment, then turned back to the window. Now there would be this issue to resolve, they both knew, and the ensuing fight over who was who here.
But for now they were silent.
She touched at her hair, felt the softness of it, mixed in with it a certain coarseness. Old age, she knew, and now she started braiding it as best she could, her eyes never leaving the shed out there.
He watched the shed, too, while more leaves fell, the pool surface nearly covered now. He watched, and thought of the work skimming off all those leaves would be; thought, too, of how huge a bonfire all those leaves would make once he’d gotten them heaped out on the curb.
LATER, SHE PILED EVERYTHING UP IN THE CORNER OF THE ROOM. The armoire she’d had to leave in its place, the huge piece of furniture centered against the far wall of the bedroom. But she’d managed to move their bed across the room, inching it one end at a time across the hardwood floor until it was nestled in the corner, her side of the bed and the headboard touching the walls. She picked up the small table she used as a writing desk, set it upside down on the bed, pushed it to the wall, then set the cane-seat chair on the bed, too.
Next came the dresser drawers, each pulled out and set one on top of another next to the table on the bed, four drawers filled with her clothes stacked on the bedspread. Then she pulled the empty dresser itself across the floor, the dresser top littered with barrettes, bracelets, bottles of perfume on her side; on his side a comb, an ashtray, three AA batteries, and a small red rock from somewhere she could not recall. She pushed the dresser up along the footboard until it, too, touched the wall.
Finally there were only the odd items left on the floor: the clock radio from on top of the desk, still plugged in, 9:42 blinking in red; the black three-legged nightstand, more a stool than anything else, and the lamp that sat on it; the assortment of clothes she’d intended to drop off at the dry cleaners someday: two rayon skirts, a silk blouse, three sweaters that’d been ready to go since October. There were some of his things mixed in, too: a blue cardigan, a pair of gray wool slacks, a sweater-vest.
She gathered up the clothes, made her way across the room to the bed, her footsteps on the floor strange and loud now that the room seemed empty, everything in the corner.
Except the armoire, centered there at the far wall, inside it all of his things, and now, suddenly, it seemed fine that she hadn’t been able to move it. Nothing in it was hers. Only his.
This was when he came into the room, stopped just inside the threshold. Already she could smell him, felt on the air in the room the cold he’d brought with him from outside.
She smiled at him, let the clothes drop to the bed.
He said, “What are you doing?” and his words, like her footsteps across the room, were strange and loud to her. He still had his jacket on, still had on the muffler and his gloves. And he smelled of the eight or ten cigarettes she knew he must have smoked out in the car, where she’d left him before coming up here to move furniture.
It came to her, the answer to his question. She’d known for the last half hour, ever since she’d slammed the car door shut in the garage, then slammed behind her the door into the laundry room, that at some point he’d pose the question he had: What are you doing? Until that moment she’d had no answer ready, no reason she could see for doing what she’d done. She was simply m
oving furniture, what seemed to her the only logical thing to do after what he’d told her on the way home.
Or what he’d tried to tell her: the difference between women and men.
She looked at him, and it occurred to her that this man, her husband of twenty-seven years, was a strange and loud man, stranger and louder than any man she’d ever known.
Moving furniture is what I’m doing, she thought to tell him, but the words came out: “You are a strange and loud man.”
“What?” he said, and left his mouth open. He took a step closer to her, then stopped. “What did you say?”
“I said,” she said, “I’m moving furniture.”
She went to the clock radio, unplugged it, carried it to the bed while wrapping the cord around it. She said, “What did you think I said?” She set the clock radio on top of the clothes in the top dresser drawer.
He took another step into the room. “I—” he began, and stopped. From the corner of her eye she could see him working off first one glove, then the other. “I’m—” he began again.
“No need,” she said. “Apologies not accepted,” and she reached inside the lampshade, twisted off the black knob. The room was dark then, the only light that from the hall, what fell through the open door behind her husband. He was only a silhouette now, big and vague.
She stooped, unplugged the lamp, brought it to the bed. Fifteen cigarettes, she thought then, smelling him in the darkness, that smell growing louder and stranger, his silhouette growing bigger and more vague the longer he was in here with her. He’d smoked a whole pack out there, she thought, and set the lamp on the cane seat of the chair.
“I believe I’d rather we discuss the matter,” he said, and she heard the rustle of the muffler as he pulled it from around his neck, heard the first buttons on the jacket unsnap. “As your husband—”
“You are a big and vague, loud and strange man,” she heard her own voice give out, words she’d had no idea were leaving her.
The buttons stopped unsnapping, and she saw his silhouette, frozen against the light from the hall.
She picked up the nightstand, carried it to the bed, laid it atop the clothes for the dry cleaners.
He said, “What did you say?”
“I said,” she said, “I believe I’d rather move furniture.”
But now she was done. In the light from the hall she could see that she’d piled everything up in the corner of the room, that everything she could move had been moved. Except his armoire.
She looked from the armoire to him, put her hands on her hips. What words would come from her now? she wondered.
She said, “Please move the armoire.” They were words she’d planned herself, words she’d made on her own.
He turned from her, looked to the armoire. She could see his profile in silhouette now, and he seemed to grow even more vague, even bigger.
He looked at her. He said, “But my back.” He paused. “You know my back. My back.”
She watched him reach a hand behind him, touch his back.
“Move the armoire,” she said, her own words again.
“But—” he said, and he took a step toward the light from the hall, toward the open door behind him.
She walked across the room to the armoire then, her steps suddenly quiet and sensible, him so big and vague and strange and loud. He’d smoked a carton of cigarettes out there, she knew.
Then she knelt next to one end of the armoire, centered there against the far wall.
She looked back to his silhouette one last time, saw him stopped in the doorway.
Her arms holding tight to the huge piece of furniture, she then lifted the armoire with a miraculous ease, lifted it and lifted it, the armoire no heavier than a blue cardigan, a rayon skirt. All his things, just like that.
The top of the armoire bumped the ceiling, made a quiet and sensible sound in the darkness. She let the piece of furniture down a bit, then brought it up to bump the ceiling again.
She looked at him. He was out in the hall now, and she could see his face in the light out there, his mouth still open. The gloves were on the floor next to him, his muffler hanging loose in one hand, the jacket still half unbuttoned.
“A quiet and sensible sound,” she said, and they were still her own words. She bumped the armoire against the ceiling again. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
He said nothing.
She said, “Where would you like this?” and started toward him with the armoire containing all his things, then lowered it so as not to scrape the top of the doorway on her way out of the bedroom.
She would sort out the dry cleaning things later, she knew, then clear off his side of the dresser. But right now there was this business of the armoire, and where to put it.
MY BROTHER PHONED FROM CALIFORNIA. WHEN I HEARD HIS voice, I thought of the wide, clean streets, the homes bright and airy, the yards green. I’d spent the day hanging out the second-story windows of my home, knocking icicles from my gutters. I’d shoveled the porch, driveway, and sidewalk, then spread salt over ice my shovel could not break. In California it was two on Saturday afternoon, and sunny. Here it was five at night, and dark. Snow fell.
My brother: Tim the salesman. The boy who couldn’t wait to get out of western Massachusetts, couldn’t wait to give up this place to go—for no better reason than that he wanted to go—to California, and find what his life would give him.
He calls me, and we talk, and there’s never anything between us that keeps us from our hearts. That sounds cheesy, I know. But it’s what’s kept us alive as brothers all these years, me here and as sure of why I stayed as he was sure his life was to be lived a continent away. Our parents are dead, killed in the kind of lucky turn of tragedy some people only hope for: Once we two boys’d been married off—Tim to Judy, a girl he met out in California; me to Susan, who I met at UMass—and after we’d found our means, and before any grandkids were born to miss them, they died one summer evening in a car accident driving home from a weekend away at a bed-and-breakfast off the Mohawk Trail. They both had been asleep, the coroner told us, when the car left the roadway.
Now and always, it seemed, here we were: brothers.
We had a bad connection, most everything repeated somewhere along the line, so that his voice sounded as if he were speaking through cellophane. I asked him how the weather was. There was the pause at his end as he took it in. “Sunny, sunny,” he said. “In the eighties.”
He was quiet again, and I pictured him inside his home, sitting in his black recliner. He looked out the picture window behind the television set at his close-cropped backyard, rosebushes neatly trimmed, sycamore filled with green leaves.
“I called to tell you something,” he said. “Lew’s wife died. Betty. This morning.”
I paused then, too, and took in his words: Lew’s wife died. This morning.
Lew, my brother’s next-door neighbor. He was tall, about six-two, and thin, his white hair slicked back on the top and sides. His eyes were gray, and he was in his seventies. I thought of his bad teeth, and how I didn’t mind them at all because of the easiness of his smile. I knew Lew. I’d met him a few times, every time we went back to visit.
And I thought of Betty, and found it difficult to picture her. She had had a stroke, I remembered, some three years ago.
“Massive brain hemorrhage,” he went on. “She’d been in the hospital three weeks. She had it at three in the morning, the hemorrhage. Police, fire trucks, the works came out for it. Judy and I watched the whole thing from the bedroom. We thought they’d had a fire or something.” The word something echoed twice on the line, this bad connection.
I was sitting on the bed in the bedroom upstairs and watched, through the window, flakes fall past the light post outside, the snow illuminated for a few seconds, then slipping out of sight. I imagined I could hear flakes landing, a soft static sound, but realized it was static on the line.
“He called her his bride,” my brother said, “every time h
e introduced her to anyone. ‘This is my bride of forty years,’ he’d say.”
He was quiet. I heard my wife moving around downstairs, doing something. I heard my two children laugh somewhere in the house.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” he said, too quickly. “Oh yeah.”
I said, “Go on.”
“I was mowing the yard,” he said. He hadn’t hesitated a moment. “This morning, about seven, when Lew pulls up. He sat there in the car a minute after the motor’s off, and I knew she was gone. I could just tell. He didn’t even have to get out of the car before I could tell. I cut the mower right then, turned it off. We used to mow our lawns together, I was thinking right then. We used to get up every Saturday morning and do our lawns, match each other stroke for stroke up and back. We both had Bermuda in the front, and we’d have our own contests to see who could cut his lawn closest without losing the green. I was thinking about that.”
And I was thinking about how my brother tried to make it as a gardener once, how he had mowed lawns, landscaped, planted sod, torn out sod, rototilled for the first two years of his marriage, until Judy took him into the kitchen of their apartment one evening, laid the checkbook out in front of him, and showed him there was no money. He’d had a pickup and an old trailer back then, and a front-throw reel mower for close-cut grasses, a rear-bag mulching mower for thicker. A gas edger, a Weed Eater, a lawn roller, a drop spreader: as many different garden tools as he could afford.
“Azaleas,” he said then, the word out of the silence and static and snow falling here and sunshine where he was. “Azaleas everywhere. In the flower beds in the front yard, along the sidewalk, next to the mailbox. Flower boxes under the front window. He had them in the backyard, too, against the back fence. Bordering the patio. In boxes back there, too. Azaleas.”
I tried to picture azaleas, but could not. And it seemed in that moment, my brother giving to me his heart from three thousand miles away, a betrayal. Azaleas. What did azaleas look like?