How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park clean-up. Mitsuko made filligree cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired. When their eldest was in my class, each gave a What-I-Do talk to the sixth grade. At my request they repeated it annually. Wearing a belt stuffed with tools, his mask in his hands, Keith spoke of welding’s origins in the forge. He mentioned weapons, tools, automobiles. He told us of the smartness of the wind, the sway of the scaffolding, the friendly heft of the torch. “An arc flames and then burns blue,” he said. “Steel bar fuses to steel bar.” Mitsuko in her appearances before the class also began with history. She described Babbage’s first calculating machine, whose innards nervously clacked. She recapitulated the invention of the Hollerith code (the punched card she showed the kids seemed as venerable as papyrus); the cathode tube; the microchip. Then she too turned personal. “My task is to achieve intimacy with the computer,” she said. “To follow the twists of its thought; to help it become all it can.” When leaving she turned at the doorway and gave us the hint of a bow.

  Many townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs—shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware. The kids bought magazines and notebooks at Dunton’s Tobacco. Every November Keith and his sons walked smiling into Roberta’s Linens and bought a new Belgian handkerchief for Mitsuko’s birthday. During the following year’s special occasions, its lace would foam from the pocket of the white silk blouse.

  But none of us knew them well. They didn’t become anyone’s intimates. And when they vanished, they vanished in a wink. One day we heard that the youngest was leaving to become a doctor; the next day, or so it seemed, the parents had decamped.

  I had seen Mitsuko the previous week. She was buying avocados at the greengrocer. She told me that she mixed them with cold milk and chocolate in the blender. “The drink is pale green, like a dragonfly,” she said. “Very refreshing.”

  Yes, the youngest was off to Medical School. The middle son was teaching carpentry in Oregon. The oldest, a journalist in Minnesota, was married and the father of twin girls.

  So she had granddaughters. She was close to fifty, but she still could have passed for a teenager. You had to peer closely, under the pretext of examining pineapples together, to see a faint crosshatching under the eyes. But there was no gray in the cropped hair, and the body in jeans and tee was that of a stripling.

  She chose a final avocado. “I am glad to have run into you,” she said with her usual courtesy. Even later I could not call this remark valedictory. The Maguires were always glad to run into any of us. They were probably glad to see our backs, too.

  “You are a maiden lady,” the school doctor reminded me some months later. We have grown old together; he says what he pleases. “Marriage is a private mystery. I’m told that parents feel vacant when their children have flown.”

  “Most couples just stay here and crumble together.”

  “Who knows?” he shrugged. “I’m a maiden lady myself.”

  The few people who saw Keith and Mitsuko waiting for the trolley that September morning assumed they were going off on a camping trip. Certainly they were properly outfitted, each wearing a hiker’s back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack.

  The most popular theory is that they have settled in some other part of the country. There they work—Keith with steel and flame, Mitsuko with the electronic will-o’-the-wisp; there they drink avocado shakes and read paperbacks.

  Some fanciful townspeople whisper a different opinion: that when the Maguires shook our dust from their hiking boots they shed their years, too. They have indeed started again elsewhere; but rejuvenated, restored. Mitsuko’s little breasts are already swelling in preparation for the expected baby.

  I reject both theories. Maiden lady that I am, I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference. Keith and Mitsuko took the trolley together, yes. But I think that downtown they enacted an affectionate though rather formal parting in some public place—the bus depot, probably. Keith then strode off.

  Mitsuko waited for her bus. When it came she boarded it deftly despite the aluminum and canvas equipment on her back. The sneakers—bright red, this time, as if they had ripened—swung like cherries from the frame.

  The Large Lady

  Whenever the Foxes give a party, people eagerly come. In the Foxes’ big, messy house people feel good. Marty Fox has a born-in-California ease; and Judy’s uncorrected Brooklyn accent, here in New England, seems as warm as pastrami. They are attentive hosts, just as they are attentive parents. (Their three sons nevertheless cause them some worry.)

  “People with gratifying children,” Marlene Winokaur observes on the Friday night of the Foxes’ party, “arouse the wrath of their friends.”

  “Mmm,” says her husband, Paul, radiologist and colleague of Marty Fox. And then: “Really?”

  In another part of town Frances Masmanian, Judy Fox’s coworker at the Social Service Clinic, is writing down their destination for the sitter.

  “Let me ask you a question,” says Bill Masmanian. “Why are the Foxes putting themselves to so much trouble?”

  “Is it trouble?”

  “I was hoping to stay home tonight and grade exams.”

  “You’ll do that tomorrow,” says Frances, turning on him the mild, slightly walleyed stare that he loves, or, at least, remembers having loved. So he does not remind her that tomorrow they are going to a Little League game and tomorrow night to a faculty cocktail party and Sunday to a neighborhood meeting. Life in the town of Godolphin, Massachusetts, is chockablock with activity, Bill thinks ungratefully; but how could it be otherwise in a place where so many interesting people choose to live?

  Meanwhile, the Foxes were searching their kitchen for stray coffee cups. That this was not an ordinary party—that it was more than social in purpose—had not altered their simple preparations. Marty had bought the wine on his way home from the hospital. He had set up a table for it in the den, where their two older sons would preside. Judy, who didn’t work Friday afternoons anyway, had taken on a number of tasks: picking up the platter of turkey and cheese from the deli, spreading a Guatemalan cloth on the big oak table, setting out plates and silverware on the buffet, supplying a McDonald’s supper for the boys, and making sure that the bathrooms looked respectable, or at least not repulsive. Today Judy had had the further assignment of pushing the living room chairs against the wall and then setting up twenty-five rented bridge chairs in close rows. All of this work she did unresentfully, her mind busy with one of her clients, a woman whose depression Judy would have liked to relieve. But the woman, mourning a wasted youth, was as yet inaccessible . . . Judy had unfolded chairs and swabbed toilets and answered the telephone and thought about her client; and she would have accomplished everything well ahead of time had she not encountered such terrible traffic on her way to and from the airport.

  And so, at six-thirty, she was feeling rushed. “All so unnecessary,” she complained to Marty. “Mrs. Fenton told me, while we were stuck in the airport tunnel, that she never expected to be picked up at all, that the Organization always pays for a cab. Why couldn’t she have said that on the telephone last night?”

  “She was too pickled,” said Marty. “Which reminds me . . .”

  “I bought three jars.”

  “Kosher spears?”

  “Yes. You wondered how I’d recognize the lady, remember? Wait till you see her; you’ll know why I didn’t have any trouble. She’s as big as a house—what crusader against famine wouldn’t be?—and as red as a beet. Gray hair scraped into a bun. Glasses, of course, like all the best people”—her own spectacles twinkled—“and an aroma of, uh, recent refreshment.”

  “Mouthwash
?”

  Judy nodded. “Preceded by bourbon. She seems eager and clumsy and . . . kind. She was kind to Ricky, who came with me. She and Ricky counted all the No Nukes bumper stickers.”

  “Did you bring up the movie screen from the basement?”

  “Yes, but not the slide projector. She’s wearing a navy blue suit. Big shoulders, shiny skirt. She looks like a visiting nurse.”

  “Are you kidding? Visiting nurses these days are snappy little shickses with advanced degrees.”

  Judy smiled, as she was meant to. “You make good use of your two Yiddish words.”

  Marty smiled back. “I’ll get the projector.”

  About the bourbon Judy was wrong. It was Scotch that Mrs. Fenton braced herself with. Not so very often. A quick one at lunch, another at around three o’clock, a few before dinner, and a good many at bedtime—but the nightcaps didn’t count. Neither did the cocktails. Neither did the noontime snort; she drank less at lunch than most businessmen she’d met. It was only the midafternoon pick-me-up that indicated the . . . incipient problem. But it was only incipient; it was incipient only; and if a bottle or two were part of the provisions that she brought to the Compound when it was time for her tour of duty—well, those bottles were just restoratives, rather like the volumes of Whitman that her closest friend dragged along everywhere, or like the Reverend’s needlework. Doilies, antimacassars, tablecloths . . . the man of God crocheted everything. His flying fingers, he claimed, enabled his body to keep still and his heart to refrain from . . . not from breaking, he said with a smile: to refrain from showing its heels. Terrible metaphor, carped the Whitman scholar. Walt would have thrown it out.

  Lying shoeless on the bed, Mrs. Fenton reviewed the situation. Her black dress, only slightly malodorous under the arms, hung in the closet. The case of slides was safe in one corner of the room. It had been lugged upstairs by young Ricky, who had then wanted to open it and play with its contents. When she had said no, he had given her a winsome, effeminate look. She had said no again, and he had scampered off, thoroughly boyish. Damn all kids, she’d groaned.

  She would not have anything to drink now. The good people downstairs would provide wine and a light supper after the presentation. She would not write to her daughter nor her grandchildren; that could wait until tomorrow. She would not itemize her expenditures from this fund-raising trip; that could wait until Monday, when the secretary at the New York headquarters might give her a hand. She would not read; she would not think; she would simply lie here peaceably, gazing with a sort of affection at her feet in their snagged stockings. Women in the Compound Hospital often lay like this. Down the lengths of wasted bodies they communed with their own toes.

  People started to arrive at seven. Judy and Marty soon regretted their decision not to serve cocktails. The guests moved awkwardly among the rows of bridge chairs. A few collected in the small space between the front row and the movie screen. One woman reached out and scratched the harsh white surface.

  “I can’t help thinking that movies are in the screen,” she confessed to a friend.

  “Me, too. And music is in the piano.”

  “French words are in the plume.”

  “Of your aunt. Murderous thoughts are in the couch of my analyst.”

  “You are very silly ladies,” said Bill Masmanian.

  “Women,” corrected one of them.

  “However,” Bill went on, “scholarly ideas really are in the typewriter. They reside there. Sometimes I have a devil of a time teasing them out. Is there anything like a drink around here?”

  Only Marlene Winokaur, sole smoker in the crowd, seemed relaxed. “Where’s the speaker?” she puffed at Marty.

  “I haven’t the fuckiest,” he told her. He found his wife in the front hall. “When is Mrs. Fenton coming down?”

  “I’m to call her when everyone is here,” Judy said.

  Marty greeted another couple. Then it was Judy’s turn. The Foxes didn’t confer again for another five minutes. By that time everyone had arrived except for the Satterthwaites, who were always late.

  Marty said, “You wake her up. I have to review my introduction.”

  Judy said, “Okay.”

  But Mrs. Fenton was already on her way down.

  It is the rare person who can descend a stairway with grace. Mrs. Fenton, Judy thought, was to be praised just for staying erect. She was wearing a black wool dress of the sort that, thirty years earlier, Judy’s mother had dragged out for second-rate luncheons. Flashing from its front was a diamond pin. Her outfit included a pair of scuffed brown sandals.

  “Forgive my shoes,” Mrs. Fenton said, one hand gripping the banister. “I forgot to pack my good ones.”

  Judy said brightly, “Heavens!”

  Mrs. Fenton’s other hand was grasping the handle of the case of slides. Now, trying to steady its weight against her thigh, she lost hold of her burden, and it dropped. The catch, which Ricky must have been fooling around with, flew apart, and the lid opened slightly, and some of the slides spilled down the stairs.

  “They’re numbered,” said Mrs. Fenton consolingly.

  Mrs. Fenton watched while the wife in the plain brown tunic retrieved the slides. The husband—now what on earth was the name of these people? Fitzmaurice? No, that had been the Chicago pair. The husband turned from whatever he’d been reading and moved forward to greet her as she reached the bottom stair. Fox? No, they were in Denver. “Good evening, Mrs. Fenton.” They shook hands. What had those busy fingers been up to recently, she wondered: which orifices did they confidently enter? Or perhaps this fellow was the pathologist. She had been lodged with so many doctors. Greenglass! she remembered with relief.

  “. . . and after my few words,” he was saying, “we’ll turn out the lights and let the presentation begin. Is that how you want it?”

  “Yes. The pledge cards . . .”

  “Their little table is on the way to the dining room. There are some others in a box near the wine. In vino caritas.”

  “I hope so.” Oh, she was thirsty. She took the slide case from the hands of her hostess and stepped into the living room. Fortunately the projector and her chair were near the entrance.

  “Do you want to see how the thing works?”

  She couldn’t design a cistern or speak much Somali, but she could handle any goddam projector anybody gave her. However, she allowed him to review the mechanism of his toy. Most of the Greenglasses’ guests were seated by now, facing the screen, their backs toward her. Some looked over their shoulders to smile a welcome. Then they faced forward again, for the doctor had made his way to the front of the room.

  Mrs. Fenton never listened to the introductory remarks. Since they were all derived from the same mimeographed sheet, they were pretty much alike. The excellent work of the Organization with its three Asian and seven African outposts. The continued need for more support, emotional as well as, of course, financial. The career of today’s representative, Alice-Mary Fenton, a former schoolteacher who, fifteen years ago, recently widowed, responded to a call for workers. Has served, in no particular order and sometimes simultaneously, as teacher, administrator, nurse, cook, gardener, teletype operator, jeep driver, labor arbitrator, and practitioner of minor surgery. Ripple of laughter. The members of the Organization staff spend some portion of every year back in this country, interviewing recruits and trying to raise money. Mrs. Fenton is on her stateside tour now. Mrs. Fenton. Mrs. Fenton?

  The dogsbody rose. Thank you, she said to her host. She looked around for her hostess, nervous brown tunic, mother of Ricky the Wicked. There she was, off to the side, curled up in one of the real chairs, knuckles against sweet cheek. Thank you, said Mrs. Fenton to Judy. A touch of hunger makes the whole world kin, she said. We’ll start with the slides, she said. The doctor turned out the lights.

  “Distended bellies,” began Mrs. Fenton, “reside on every coffee table.” Marlene Winokaur caught the allusion just as Mrs. Fenton, having swallowed, began her second sen
tence. “I speak of course of Life, the New York Times Magazine. Magazine Section,” she clarified. “And other periodicals, and television. The media, which should excite our sympathies, in fact benumb them. But here is Digo’s belly.” The voice was neutral, thought Marlene. No, not neutral: unforceful. A slight hoarseness... “Digo is six. It never fails to amaze me that not eating can make you fat. He came to the Compound the day before this picture was taken. Here is a slide of him some weeks later,” and sure enough, the child’s proportions had improved. “Not all of our stories have happy endings, but this one did.”

  “You have seen pictures like this before.” A mass of starving children. “They look pregnant, don’t they? But malnutrition comes in other forms.” The woman crouching on the straw mat was shapeless because of her wadded garments, but the infant in her arms was all bones. “Paolo could not be saved. Here is Luonne. About thirteen. Anorexic, but not from nerves. The people of Luonne’s tribe subsist on rice and bananas. During famines they try to eat roots and leaves. I have seen, in the operating room, a child whose esophagus had been perforated by the twigs she attempted to swallow, she was so desperate, so willing to die.”

  Mrs. Fenton paused. Why did she allow herself to relive that moment? Herself holding the retractor, ready to faint, and the nurse turning white above her mask. Later, cradling the little girl in her arms. Mrs. Fenton had wished that the child could have looked last upon a prettier face than her own. What sentiment: the eyes had been blind with dying.