by Martha Ronk
They were oddly uncommunicative, not that they ever were very good at talking, but now they had given up even the small talk of the breakfast table. It was as if they were communicating by the mere passing of salt and pepper, by some sort of sign that passed between them. The doling out of the newspaper went on as usual but it was as if they had mastered something or refined it so that I found myself chattering on about, well, at that time, it was the local elections to my school board, but it was as if I were speaking to the air. He would nod or say yes, but it was as if the idea of whole sentences had dropped out of their universe. I’d always had to do most of the work, bringing anecdotes from the office to cheer them up, telling jokes I’d got off e-mail. I like stories now and again and finding out about the news. Maybe I am a bit used to talking down, working at the middle school and all, but I’ve got an eye and usually can bring anyone out. But this was downright peculiar.
When she alters my skirts, Marie says she likes my way of telling things the best of all her customers. I notice things, where the best sales are, who recently painted his house, the name on the mailbox next door, who’s put in the best new rose. But I can’t even get them to visit in the neighborhood, despite the news I bring back from my walks, and it’s not too bad, really, little houses in a row and the water there to look at. It’s a good site, I tell them, a good investment, values can only go up and you meet such nice people. I talked to the neighbor on the beach who has found two quarters already with his metal detector. I would have preferred the bayside myself, the water is warmer and there is nothing like a warm swim, I say, buoyed up and surrounded by salt water and the blue of the sky. I told them I would also have liked it better nearer the shops and I keep trying to get her out of the house to go shopping. It will do you good, I say, and besides it looks as if you left most of your clothes behind. Where is the red sweater I got you for the retirement party, I ask, a bit of a gathering I organized in spite of their protests. Well, it just isn’t right to ignore such important occasions. Though they said they didn’t want a fuss, I just knew they’d want to see old friends, have the usual toasts and best wishes and cut the cake: Happy Golden Years it said in red and gold frosting.
I pushed the hangers aside thinking something must be on the shelves behind, but they were as empty as the kitchen drawers. I hunted for things I had handled forever, it seems, through my childhood, but they had gone to charity, she said over her shoulder. That’s how she talked to me as if she could only project at an angle while moving into the next room as if she had something to do, but when she got there she wasn’t doing anything. I’d come in after her and find her standing as if she were listening to something. Got a seashell in your ear, I’d say, but she didn’t seem to hear or find it funny.
And she bought odd food, none of my favorites. I found a fish store in town and talked to the manager about how we liked halibut and he said we were on his ready list. But she went to the supermarket and bought a freezer full of Lean Cuisine and said she couldn’t be bothered. When you opened a drawer there was one thing in it, a fork or a bottle cap or a plastic bag, folded as if it had been washed and ironed.
She bought a bottle of soy sauce and stuck it at the top of a cupboard I couldn’t reach and no one likes Chinese food anyhow. I’ve never been fond of foreign cooking, could never take to it really. It seems such a lot of trouble and you’re always hungry right after anyhow or have a headache and besides I like hearty things—you are a hearty girl, she used to say to me—and Thanksgiving dinners especially. I loved coming home for dinner and even when mom asked if I didn’t sometimes want to visit friends or take a bit of my vacation in my free time from teaching, I preferred really to come home for mashed potatoes and where the heart is.
He was reading. It was a magazine I’d seen him with before, and it didn’t look as if he were really reading, but using it as a kind of prop. You know: someone who is reading needs a magazine. I tried to start up with him, but I just couldn’t get a response. Some people, and he is like that, just won’t answer when they’re sitting in a certain chair with a certain look no matter how one tries. I’m one for getting a giggle out of people and I’ve collected my share of witty remarks over the years, but nothing worked. I’ve always been one to try. Try, try again is my motto. That’s why I was so good a swimmer as a girl and was on the swim team in high school, the photo of it on my bedroom wall, a blue frame, you know, for water.
I started out trying to explain new recipes to mom, especially the new ones I’d just put in her file folder, but she just wouldn’t go over them. She was getting ready to do it she said, but then I just found her standing as if she couldn’t remember what to do next and not getting ready for anything. Everything stayed the same after those first few days. The stuff the Baxters had left just stayed; the boxes would have stayed in the hall if I hadn’t flattened them and bundled them for the collection.
The calendar stayed turned to July though it was August, and when I moved to change it, he just stared hard at me as if he knew something I didn’t. My hand lifted towards the page, but I couldn’t do it, as if I’d forgotten what I was about to do, well not exactly forgotten, but I didn’t tear the month from the wall. At home I rule off each day with a sharp pencil. I was willing, of course, to do anything they asked, but it was as if they had arrived at a place with rules already set and didn’t want to upset the given order of things, were studiously following a prescribed routine. The chairs were too far apart for conversation, but they didn’t want them moved. They could have been upside down for all they seemed to care.
Maybe, I thought, they’ve just been alone too long, maybe they’re just getting old. They weren’t depressed exactly though I do like a perky person to be around and I tried to bring some life into the house. I tried to get mom to join me in decorating the wastebaskets with pictures I cut from National Geographic. She didn’t say no, she just didn’t sit down at the card table with me. Something momentous seemed about to be revealed. Nonsense, I said to myself, thinking these sorts of thoughts is what makes people act the way they were acting. I decided on a brisk walk to the pier where I talked to people who naturally brightened at my company. I learned all of their names before they had to rush off to collect shells, they said, or would gladly have stayed. I have that way about me, I can bring out most anybody. You can find a common topic with anyone if you try and here there’s always the weather or the birds. Everyone wants to see the roseate spoonbill at the bird sanctuary, and you can always talk about that. I myself like to watch them feeding in the mud at low tide even though it means getting up ever so early.
When I came back they were sitting in the gravel in the two chairs looking at the sunset. It was a pretty one, but I just couldn’t bring myself to interrupt whatever it was they were doing, though of course as far as I could tell they weren’t and wouldn’t ever be doing anything. I went inside for a cool drink which I always have after a walk—to rehydrate after even mild exercise is important for one’s health I always say—and I saw the calendar again. When I went to tear off the month, though, I saw his face again as it was before, frozen and silent in front of me, and I felt suddenly too big for some reason and in the way, though there was nothing to be in the way of so far as I could tell. I don’t know, I just never got around to fixing the calendar then or later. It stayed with the red number marking the Fourth as if it were always going to be July.
The Flea Market
She tried to point out to him the tricky consequences of kindness, but he just didn’t get it. She, however, wanted to get this idea across, although if you’d asked her why, she couldn’t have explained. It had mostly to do with his ex-wife to whom he was, at least as far as she could tell, devoted, patient and very kind. She, the one doing the explaining, thought he should be respectful and polite, but did he have to go out of his way. After all, the divorce was final, they had no children, no pets, and no debts. It should have been over, she thought.
It turned out they did have, however,
a vast array of furniture, more couches and chairs and lamps and rugs and bureaus and plein-air paintings than she had ever seen. The ex-wife was a flea-market junkie. Every Sunday she set out with a wire basket on wheels to the Rose Bowl flea market and came home laden with art treasures. She was passionate about it and had thought early on in the marriage that eventually and with coaxing, he would become passionate too, that they would do this together and, she had imagined, would gaze in rapture at the tree which in the odd painting she’d picked up last week looked positively anthropomorphic, a cypress, curiously bent and dull green. It was more than beautiful, this throbbing thing. Something tore at her heart, lit up her skin, propelled her into the next week when she could do it again. And she had done this every Sunday of every month of every year they had been married until their house, now his house, was filled to the brim and overflowing into the garage, the storage shed, the basement.
She had left him because he had no taste and also, she proclaimed, no passion. What are you up to, what do you want, I mean, really want, she asked with fervor. You can’t just wander in the world hiking and liking only trees. It’s too vague; it isn’t enough. The one explaining the cruelty of being kind said that just liking trees was fine with her, and so he and she got on well in a mild but satisfying sort of way for the most part, except for his kindness and refusal to confront the issue of bag and baggage.
The ex-wife had moved out into a small apartment in Santa Monica. It’s for the air, she said and breathed with satisfaction the way people who live on the other side of the 405 freeway do. Soon she had filled up the small apartment with paintings of trees, the painted kind being, as she explained, far more real and valuable. She had, everyone had to admit, a quite splendid collection and she hung the walls with them and stuffed them under the couch and put them cheek by jowl and just everywhere until it was impossible to move except in the narrow passage between front door and kitchen. She invited him over for viewings and she kept on. Later, she called from the road. She had five large framed ones and the oak table had to be bought, had to be carted home, had to be lifted into the back of her SUV and he had to help and he, being kind, did.
Not only did she not give up her passion for collecting, she also refused to give up her passion to convey to him her passion for collecting and for the beauty of the painted trees, the artificial color of the foliage, the arrangements of shapes and vacancies, the ways in which they were, she explained carefully, superior to trees in general. Tears formed in her eyes. She called him to meet her for lunch. Over tomato sandwiches she went over the composition of the newest painting in great detail. She so wanted him to understand. Just try to see it, she said. Just try. Her eyes were bright. Like the gleam of paint in the corner, he thought, and wondered why he had had such a thought. He wondered why he had never seen it before and why it made him feel, as he rarely felt, unsettled.
The one doing the explaining about cruelty and kindness wanted to move in with the man with the ex-wife, but she wanted, she explained patiently, to move into a house they could make their own, not one laden with the paraphernalia of another, the mirrors of another, the draperies and rugs and tastes of another. She needs to get on with her life by herself, you know, she said. Couldn’t you, she asked, get her to clear out? But the man couldn’t explain why not. You don’t want to hurt her, is that it? I don’t, of course, he said, want to hurt her, although that wasn’t exactly it, he knew; he just didn’t know how to explain. It’s her passion and her life. It’s what keeps her going, I don’t know what she’d do without it, and well, I couldn’t take it away, now could I, he asked. He didn’t, he realized without knowing why, mention what he’d seen in the corner of the painting, the gleam that kept floating disconcertingly before his eyes.
You wouldn’t want me to, would you? I would, she wanted to say, but it was the wrong thing to say or at least the wrong time. So, instead, she tried to explain, as if explaining would straighten things out, that if he kept on being kind, his ex-wife would never strike out on her own, would always call on him at inopportune moments, would continue to dominate his life, our life, she slipped in, although it was a word neither had used before. Her usually mild voice moved in the direction of complaint. She said, You need to do something, and he said he would but he didn’t and she tried again to explain that his being kind was a kind of cruelty, and he said, You don’t understand, which she didn’t.
One Sunday she suggested they take a hike and look at trees in the nearby mountains and he would have liked to, he said, yes, he would have, and he said this in such a way as not to hurt her feelings, except he had promised to be on call in case his ex-wife couldn’t get the garden set she’d hoped to find at the flea market home without help. She’s been after it for quite some time, he told her. It’s what she says she really wants more than anything and the dealer promises it will be there today. There is no garden at her apartment, the explainer explained, and then she found herself caught in the folds of what she was saying. There is, she went on helplessly, only a garden at your house. And she finally understood, without its being explained, something more about the extraordinarily tricky nature of kindness.
Hands
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
Too grim is what we all thought about Sam, Samantha, too caught up in endeavors to be artistic, thrusting poems at friends and strangers alike, ignoring the everyday stuff of what can be gathered up, the babies and jam jars and peaches from the front tree and this year finally the figs. I want it all—the sideboard, the antique mantel, the optician’s equipment, the plein-air paintings, the tools, the copper pans, the hostas and cyclamen and agapanthus. Sonja says stop. She says stop cramming up the rooms, give some to the kids, but I can’t stop, can only stop the pounding in my chest when I stand for a moment before going out the door and count up the plants growing to the edge of the greenhouse, the rugs now piled thick on top of one another, the rare and the ragged, playing their geometric patterns off against one another.
What I can’t do, even after my now half days at the office and my regular tennis matches with Jay and even riding the bike around the pond, is sleep. No sleep for the wicked, Jay says. I wish more of them lived nearby. Instead they’ve taken on careers in other cities calling home to report on Chicago’s architecture, the movement of the film business to Canada, the cost of apartments in Manhattan. I’ve bought a new rug in acid green, horsemen buried in the edges, holding up spears and running around the periphery. The days are full in July. Sonja sits in the garden. But I can’t, can’t sit or read as I used to. Now only the news in brief, only the stories of refugees, moving from place to place, restless, unhoused. All they own left behind, one parcel, one bag. And I can’t sleep. The edges of the room are filled with hands gesturing to music, moving in the air. My heart pounds and ribbonlike shadows run along the floorboards.
In the side room at the museum, there are drawings of the bony and veined hands of men, lifting, falling. I turn on the light and look at my own hands, the veins prominent, age spotting the skin. Sonja sleeps early and late, falling asleep in front of the TV, sleeping past nine until she’s up to walk the dogs, gathering gossip from the neighbors, paying the gardener and napping under quilts piled at the foot of the bed. It’s not that I worry about anything in particular. It’s not that I have bad dreams.
I drove her to the wedding those many years ago. She, Sam, wearing gray and scribbling in a notebook as she was always scribbling things, taking notes, writing aperçus. What a waste, I thought, she could have a life and in the moment I thought that I could be it, but like all that happened to her then and later, I was, I realized, more imagined than real. Not that she lacked all affection, but it seemed the affair was imagined, the ways we sat together reading Anna Karenina aloud were imagined, something she couldn’t grasp but only pass through—a scene in a play, some occasion for which she invented lines, remembered, re
played. She’d make a garden, if she ever thought to make one, without color or flowers. Sonja comes into the room with flowers, with branches of pussy willow, with gifts wrapped in pale tissue, with another find. Look, she says, I just picked it up on my way home, and I look at the colors on the glass plate as she holds it up to the light—pink figures dancing around a maypole.
It is night. My calf muscles cramp. Too many games of tennis, I tell myself, wait until Wednesday to play again. My neighbor recommends bone meal. I want morning to come and the world to start up, hate the loss of what is collected on the table under the lamp, what would show up if I turned on all the lights and flooded the shadows, edged the particulars. I want to run my fingers on the velvet upholstery, to hold the ancient bowl and feel its underbelly of soot.
Why does one think of strangers one doesn’t really know. Samantha, Sam with her boyish head and niggardly ways, hands so frail as to seem useless. They fluttered about my shoulders those many years ago until I held them just to get them to lie down flat. They gestured, unsettled and ill at ease, reaching for something, picking up a pencil to scribble. Once Anna’s child wanted to go to the aviary at the zoo; birds and butterflies alighted on our shoulders and in our hair. I was twenty again and Sam’s hands fluttered in stripes of henna, yellow, the pollen from the iris running across the back of a cat. Why should I think of her, imagine colors on her frail hands, her silly ways, her sad and wasted life. Her handwriting was spindly, fine, peaked as her hair. I wanted to wrap her hands in turban cloth, to buy her something.
Why can’t I sleep, I ask myself at breakfast and vow to cut back on wine and red meat, to exercise more and get the gears fixed, to pick up those green glasses Sonja wants on my way home. The light comes in the window and the coffee comes up in the espresso pot and I burn my fingers lifting the scalding milk. Last week at dinner we all ordered the Merlot we had last night and toasted the now pregnant Cely and looked forward to another addition to the clan. Today I celebrate with a stack of new shirts from Filene’s basement and I remember the green glasses. But Sonja’s not home and the present seems heavy in my arms. The note reads: Gone to be with Cely. Will call tonight. Back tomorrow. Xxx. S.