by Rae Meadows
She decided she would indulge in a small glass of wine, and walk over to the beach as the sky turned colorful and dark, to mark her last night of solitude.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“I think your phone cut out for a second.”
“You better get back to work,” she said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“You need a cell phone.”
“I need a lot of things,” she said, and then added hurriedly, “I love you.”
The words came out more rushed than she would have liked, but they didn’t sound strained, and for that she was pleased.
“You too,” he said quietly. “Okay, then. Bye.”
Iris closed her eyes, and breathed in as deeply as her damaged lungs would allow.
* * *
Samantha had sent her a card for her birthday years ago, just after the divorce, with a reproduction of a painting on the front: The Bay by Helen Frankenthaler, 1963. The picture had moved something in Iris, opened her up. Those saturated blues and watery violets, a top-heavy stain on a flat earth of sage. And that small wedge of orange. What was it doing there? It was so strange and compelling, a splinter that seemed to hold the whole thing in place. She immediately went to the library to learn more about the painter. Frankenthaler was an abstract expressionist, more precisely, a field painter, married to—and overshadowed by—Robert Motherwell. But the most striking thing was that she was the same age as Iris. In 1963, while Iris was dropping Theo off at kindergarten, getting the carpets cleaned, dusting the chandelier, Helen Frankenthaler was living her bohemian life, diluting her oil paint with turpentine and creating the fluid other world of The Bay. She hadn’t been saddened by the comparison as much as impressed by the other woman’s self-possession, which had taken Iris a lifetime to cobble together.
This is my sky, Iris thought, as she sat hugging her knees on the edge of the small dunes, with the tide high, the waves calm and even. It reminded her of the painting, how the gray-purple clouds seemed to have more heft than the water beneath. She supposed the chardonnay-and-painkiller mix might have something to do with it, but she didn’t find it any less wondrous. It would be a relief to let go, she thought now. A handful of morphine pills. When the time was right.
The day’s beach crowd had mostly cleared. An older couple—probably her age, she thought, abashed by this recognition—walked by her holding hands, he carrying a camera, she swinging a bucket of shells. A little girl in a pink bathing suit, her hair a fountain on her head, made a break for the water but was quickly scooped up by her father, who carried her over his sunburned shoulder. Iris was glad for all of this, or maybe she was grateful.
She and Henry had come to this beach only once together. It had been dusk then, too, but winter, blustery, the sky gunmetal gray. The sand was cold against her feet. Other than the sandpipers and seagulls, they were alone. His hand was warm around hers. They talked about aging (“I still haven’t gotten used to the fact that I’m older than almost everyone in the world,” Henry said), about their kids pushing them to get e-mail (“What would I write that I couldn’t say to them over the phone?” Iris said), about how the invasive Brazilian pepper and Australian pine were degrading the wildlife habitat at the refuge.
Iris had felt good then, her health issues—osteoporosis, high cholesterol, a back that gave her trouble—were commonplace and unthreatening. She no longer cared about who she was supposed to be. With Henry, she was more comfortable than she’d been her whole life. They had walked until darkness took hold and they could hear the waves but no longer see them.
And then he’d said, “She knows, my dear.”
Iris filled her hand with the warm white sand and funneled it over her feet. She knew she should get up while she still could muster the strength, but she was lulled by the warm breeze on the now dark, empty beach. If she stayed very still, she could pretend she wasn’t sick, pretend she would be here for another spring, pretend she was fearless.
* * *
“Mother?”
“Yes, Iris.”
“Can you hear the bees?”
“Yes, Iris. I can hear them,” she’d said, sitting on the bed.
A crawling, humming mass of bees—all piled on the queen—had swathed a branch of the maple tree outside of Iris’s window.
“It’s almost as big as me,” she said, burrowing deeper into the bed and clutching her doll.
“They won’t stay for long,” her mother said, pulling the sheet up over Iris’s shoulders. “They’re visitors. The colony is migrating. Father says they’re getting ready to leave.”
“Where are they going?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why’d they leave their house in the first place?”
“Maybe their hive got too small. Or it got damaged in the hailstorm last week. Remember how it sounded like rocks were hitting the hog-pen roof?”
Iris nodded.
“Or maybe the bees just felt like a change.” Her mother shrugged and smiled. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it?”
“Will they come back?”
“I don’t think so.”
Iris wondered how they knew when to go, where to go, how they communicated, and how the ones in the middle could breathe, smothered by all those other bees, but she couldn’t keep her thoughts straight as she neared sleep.
“I can still hear them.”
“Close your eyes, Iris…”
At dawn, her mother swooshed into her room. “Wake up, sleepyhead. The bees are moving.”
Iris groggily clambered to the window, her mother behind her. The colony looked to be in a frenzy, crawling and shaking, the bodies shiny in the rising sun. Some of the bees were flying off and orbiting the cluster. And then all at once, as if some giant hand had bounced the branch, the swarm was airborne, a black buzzing cloud, swirling, up and up and then away, west over the farm until she could no longer see it.
“Oh,” her mother said, a small plaintive sound, and Iris looked up to see that her eyes were full of tears.
“Mother?”
“I will miss them,” she had said. “Isn’t that a funny thing?”
For days Iris had looked for the bees in the sky, hoping they would return for her mother. But they had gone for good.
* * *
Iris had read that fake smiling could make something more enjoyable, that facial movement could influence emotional experience. What if she could fake wellness? She could go through the motions as if it were any other day, and maybe it would make her feel better. So she passed on the peanut butter and jelly—sadly—and warmed up a bowl of carrot soup, and tossed a small salad of spinach, goat cheese, and walnuts. She even pulled a cloth napkin from the drawer and set out silverware, a glass of sparkling water.
But she kept thinking about the bees, and how she’d never seen anything like them for the rest of her life, the wild and magical beauty of them, and how her mother had cried, and how she thought she finally understood why her mother had cried when the bees had flown away.
Loud voices echoed on the landing, her neighbor Stephen and another man, in some kind of quarrel. Iris went to her door and strained to see through the peephole. Stephen was in a towel, his hair wet from a shower. The other man was barely more than a boy, skinny, his jeans low and tight. He stood with his arms crossed, his head cocked: petulant, Iris thought, hateful.
“I didn’t take it!” he yelled. “Like I’d want your shitty watch.”
“Give it back, and that will be that.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“I’ll call the cops,” Stephen said, one hand holding his towel.
The boy laughed, a mirthless ha-ha-ha.
Iris wondered if she should call the police, but something in Stephen’s weak posture, his furtive glances, told her not to.
“Go on, big boy, call them. I’ll be waiting right here.”
Stephen grabbed his arm, but the boy spun out of his grip and ran. Stephen slipped back into his apartment and s
lammed the door.
Poor Stephen, she thought. How unseemly, how embarrassing the encounter must have been for him. To be shamed so because someone sniffed out your weakness. Will he change? Does he want to? Maybe he doesn’t aspire to settle down, she thought, or he feels he isn’t worthy of someone who would choose him. Maybe the thrill of possibility each night brings gets him through the day of forced cheer at the hotel desk. Samantha had once accused her of imposing her feelings on others, and Iris decided she would try in the next three weeks to do less of that.
She sipped her soup, tasting the carrot and ginger and cream on her tongue, and felt nourished. She had made it through another day, and she felt satisfied by the very passing of day into night.
* * *
She’d still been single at twenty-eight, and Glenn had been the quiet new associate at the Chicago firm where she was a secretary. Eligible, all the girls said with hungry eyes. Iris decided that it was time. Her girlhood romanticism had gotten her nowhere, and it was time to pack it away. Glenn was not exciting to her, but he was a decent man—handsome, polite, and successful—who thought she was pretty and wanted her to be his wife. Waiting around for passion surely wouldn’t afford her a life on the North Shore. After the engagement was announced, she promptly quit her job, knowing she would never work again. In those newlywed days she used to greet him at the door in full makeup, dressed up in heels and wasp-waist dresses, dinner on the table. She’d have spent hours preparing some dish she’d seen in a magazine: beef Wellington, tomato aspic, baked Alaska. It was, she had thought, her end of the bargain, and Glenn had been ever appreciative.
How different her life might have looked from here had she married a saxophone player instead of Glenn, or if she’d become a teacher instead of a secretary, or if she’d turned left instead of right on any given day. It was a futile, wistful game with infinite variations and outcomes, an ideal pastime for someone with regrets and the long view.
But there had been one moment, one day, when Iris, at thirty-seven, had decided that she could bend her course off its rails, to begin again. She didn’t know what that change looked like, but she wanted to make herself available to it. There had been no big argument with Glenn. In fact, everything was fine. He’d just given her an Hermès scarf for their ninth wedding anniversary. Theo had started second grade. She had recently begun tennis lessons. She had a pork roast defrosting in the refrigerator.
After dropping Theo off at school, she returned to a clean and quiet house, put on her pale-rose wool suit from Bonwit’s, her most flattering and sophisticated outfit, the belt of the dress cinched tight around her slim waist above an A-line knife-pleated skirt. A cropped little jacket over it. White square-heeled pumps. She wore her hair in a modified flip, the ends curled up and set twice a month at the hairdresser’s, which she now brushed and smoothed. She didn’t know where she was going, but she got in the car and drove south. When she hit Chicago she drove along Lake Shore, the lake a wind-whipped blue, the sun’s reflection making it too bright to look at straight on. She felt both numb and exuberant, her freedom a secret no one yet knew, as she veered into the city at Michigan Avenue. And there it was, the Drake Hotel, just to the left on East Walton, and Iris felt as if it were what she had been looking for.
The Drake was where those with means stayed in Chicago. Iris had attended wedding receptions here, and she and Glenn had eaten at the Cape Cod Room many times, big nights out when they still lived in the city. She’d even taken her mother to the Drake to give her the full Chicago experience. Her mother had declared the hotel a little snooty and the tea weak, and she had not seemed awed by the grand scale and excitement of the city. Iris had been surprised, even a little hurt. She’d always had the silly inclination to impress her mother by the trappings of her life, as if she needed to show off why she’d left Minnesota.
As the valet took her car, Iris straightened her skirt, pressed her lips together to even her pale pink lipstick, wiggled off her engagement and wedding rings, and pretended she was someone else. The hotel bar, the Coq d’Or, had a dark, clubby feel, with butternut paneling, swanky lantern lamps that hung low from the ceiling over the tables, and a quilted turquoise leather banquette against the back wall. The bow-tied piano player, an older man with sparse gray hair slicked back from his forehead, smiled as she glanced over. The heavy bar was lined with red leather seats, a large crystal ashtray at each. It being midday, there were groups of suited men at a few tables, even a group of women laughing and smoking, but the bar itself was empty, save for an old man at the end nursing a watery scotch.
Iris perched on a seat at the bar, crossing her legs a little to the side, and pulled out a cigarette from a small silver case in her purse. She didn’t smoke a lot, but it calmed her nerves, and she thought it made her look alluring. The bartender was instantly in front of her with a lighter. She felt conspicuous—a woman drinking alone was uncouth—but in the role she was playing, she didn’t mind. She rubbed the absence of her rings with her thumb.
“Gin and tonic please,” she said to the bartender. “And a cucumber sandwich.”
The room’s sounds enveloped her in a warm cocoon: ice tinkling in thick bar glasses, martinis being shaken, the low tones of professional men’s conversations, the occasional roar of a man’s laugh, the magpie cackle of one of the women, and, in the lulls, the soothing piano to smooth over any moments of fearful silence. She sipped her cold and bitter drink, the green ribbon of lime peel clinging to the edge of the glass, and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. The bartender whisked away her ashtray and replaced it with a clean one. She crunched her dainty sandwich and dabbed at her mouth, careful not to wipe away her lipstick. The part up until now had been fun—she’d felt uncharacteristically nervy—but the reality of sitting here now started to feel desperate. What did she have to complain about, really? And Theo. As if she could ever leave her brown-eyed little boy who loved trains and still held her hand when they walked down the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” a man said, suddenly beside her. “Are you waiting for someone?”
She furrowed her brow a little to stifle the laugh she felt gurgle in her throat.
“No. Having lunch,” was all she could get out.
“May I join you?” He was younger than she was, confident. She guessed he was in advertising from his slim little black suit and flamboyant paisley tie.
“That would be fine,” she said.
“Richard.”
He held out his small hand and she shook it. It was damp, unappealing.
“Iris.” This does not feel exciting or romantic, she thought. She felt foolish.
“You are one pretty lady, Iris.”
She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
“What’re you drinking?” he asked, leaning in.
“Gin. And tonic.”
Richard held up two fingers to the bartender and pointed to Iris’s glass.
This is ridiculous, she thought. What was she going to do? Have an affair with this man in one of the upstairs rooms? She was not a movie heroine. She was Iris, wife and mother.
She caught the bartender’s eye. “My bill, please.”
“Oh, come on now.” Richard placed a proprietary hand on her wrist. “We were just getting acquainted. Stay for one more drink.”
Iris smiled and pulled her arm free. “It was nice to meet you, Richard.”
She retrieved more money than was necessary from her billfold and stacked it on her check.
Richard sighed loudly and lit a cigarette as she left. As she swung past the curve of the bar, she slipped a gold-rooster coaster in her purse.
She drove home. She didn’t feel embarrassed by what she’d done or disappointed that nothing came of it. In fact, the excursion had made her feel powerful, and she would think back on it on occasion, in the months and years that followed, to remind herself of how easy it had been, momentarily at least, to walk away. And somehow that had made it more palatable to stay.
* * *
Out on her balcony, swallowed up by the dark, soft air, Iris sat and sipped her water and listened to the sounds that had become a backdrop to her aloneness: the crickets, the frogs, faint calypso music from the bar near the beach, the thudding of Stephen jumping rope for the second time today, the mosquito zapper from the pink house encrusted with seashells, and always the seagulls. The wind carried with it the soft sticky sea with a tangy endnote from the orange and lemon trees below. Sanibel had been a good home for her. It had let her be and, most importantly, she had chosen it.
SAM
December 10, 1910
Dear Mrs. Olsen,
It was with great expectation that I read your letter. A flood of emotion overtook me when I realized who you were. Has it really been ten years already? Where does the time go? Here I am, an old woman, a grandmother many times over.
As for your request, I am afraid I came up sorely short. I inquired at the Aid Society of one Joseph Sewell, bookkeeper, but after an exhaustive examination, as he characterized it, he was unable to find anything that might assist you in your search. Adequate records, I’m afraid, have never been the Society’s strong suit. I took it upon myself to check the most recent Manhattan directory, but found no one by the name you provided.
You were my last group of children. I have fond memories of our journey together, though certainly there is sadness in remembering our farewell. I will always believe that the Lord’s hand steered us, and that He keeps watch over us all.
I am pleased to hear of your health, and hope soon you will be blessed with a child of your own.
Faithfully yours,
Mrs. Harriet Comstock
While the pound cake baked, Sam tried to tease out meaning from the letter to her grandmother. Where had she come from? Who was she looking for?
The buzzer sounded and she lifted the butter-glistening brick out of the oven. It landed with a thwunk as she overturned it on a wire cooling rack, a rich and delicious mess. She pulled out the aluminum foil, tearing off a sheet against the tiny metal teeth of the box, and encased the still-warm cake. Maybe her brother would know something.