“Marauding duck,” the man said, not even glancing at Lynnette, having a radar, she realized mid-stride, for her age and her thick waist. He sped up, and shifted away from her on the path.
“I’m not after you, dude,” she called, speeding up herself and leaving his pumping calves behind with ease.
The next thing she did, to her mild embarrassment, was trip on a branch on the path. She didn’t fall; she caught herself and veered off in front of him to the ladies’ room. She never had to pee when she ran, but she stood in the unlit cement alcove for a minute or two. After that she ran the long uphill curve. The line of trees at the top, where the bench was, took shape in the fog. She wasn’t feeling right; she broke the rhythm of her run a second time and flopped down on the bench to get her breath.
The fog was unusually thick but now there was just enough sun coming up, working behind it, to put color into it here and there, a shell pink, a faint, downy yellow.
“There was something about it. I thought, I’ll kick myself if I don’t just sit down for one minute and look.” So she did; she leaned back on the bench and closed her eyes.
When she opened them a boy was standing over her, holding a red kayak on his head. “Hey,” he said, “sorry to bother you.” He shrugged a backpack down his arm onto the bench. “I’m going out in it. The fog. It’s something, isn’t it? Mind if I leave this here?”
“Go ahead, I’ll be here. Guess I look like I’m down for the count,” she said, pushing back her hair. Then, lest he think her too friendly, she said abruptly, “Sure, leave it.”
“You don’t have to watch it. This early in the morning I just leave my stuff,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I’m resting.”
He smiled at her. Well, he must be from somewhere far away, she thought, to smile like that. He lowered the kayak into the water and got in, and prodded the bank with his oar. Lynnette said oar but it would have been a paddle.
Suddenly she got an unpleasant idea. “How will you see to get back, if you go out on the lake?” she called. Lynnette was not accustomed to worries of this kind, but he was young. He was a boy. She thought of us, she said, of Cyrus and me, because of our son.
“I’ll stay out until it burns off. It’ll burn off in an hour. Hey, don’t worry. There’s nothing in the pack, no drugs or anything,” he added with a grin, twirling the paddle over his head. “No bomb.” It was the year the bomb went off in the basement of the Trade Center. “It’s bread. For the ducks.”
“I thought of telling him about how bread-paste in the craw starves a duck,” she told me. “I almost told him about the duck murdering the other duck. I didn’t though, I caught myself. I thought, Lately I’m so full of this creepy information. Why? Why am I? It’s getting into my work. And he’s young. He doesn’t need to hear it. Is that how mothers feel?”
When he had vanished onto the lake she leaned back again, and stayed so quiet that after a while a squirrel crept up onto the bench with her and began to poke at the boy’s pack. It spun itself this way and that on the zipped pocket, from which it must have been getting the smell of bread. It got a claw into the zipper at one point, and hopped and pulled to get free, working the zipper down a tantalizing half inch as it did so. All the while its tail, not fluffy as the tails of squirrels looked from a distance, but spiked with thin hair with a little shoelace of skin inside it, switched ardently. It did not seem to know Lynnette was there.
As a girl in her father’s store, sitting on the floor behind the counter hearing the chugs of the adding machine and nails being swept into bags, Lynnette said, she had gone in and out of a pleasant, canceled-out feeling like the one she had now. Finally the squirrel gave up and crouched on the pack, an expression so fixed and thwarted in its black eyes that pity for it swept over her, an intimation of its hurrying, single-minded life, a life that suddenly seemed to her such an ordeal that she was thankful the squirrel had no clear notion of it, connected as it was to whatever necessity among the gliding ducks had led one of them to murder another. She thought of Travis and his squirrel hunting. No necessity there. How he, a man who wouldn’t hurt a flea, had gotten up on cold mornings like this one when he lived here and driven into the river valley to shoot squirrels. How this had made him feel at home somehow. Home. Now the squirrel was digging furiously again at the pack, while she sat so still in her absorption that it never looked her way. She might have been a coat dropped on the bench, until the blast of a foghorn startled the animal and it raced off.
The long blast did not come from the little lake, of course; it came from the downtown waterfront, several miles away. Twice it sounded, rolling out over the city in a deep bellow. Lynnette waited; she had heard the foghorn a hundred times before but she could not remember if there were a prescribed number of blasts. She could make out the squirrel’s tiny savage scratches all over the nylon of the pack. This, she said to herself. This . . . what? I’m tired of the city, she thought, without any particular antagonism. I’m tired of people. I want . . .
For a long time no one ran by, and she gave in to a deep lassitude. Her eyes grew so heavy she came close to falling asleep in the quiet.
Then she came to and had a kind of hallucination. She saw, she said, the direction her art would take. She saw it in some detail.
She had been gazing at the colors in the fog, columns of them, deeper than the hints of sun. They were peeling off the bank or out of the water right in front of where she was sitting. They had the tense wavering of snakes charmed out of a basket, though it might have been only the fog that was moving.
She sat looking at them in a state of concentration. Her mind was exceptionally alive. The squirrel, not thwarted at all, had come back and resumed its assault on the backpack. She turned her eyes to it and when she looked back that was the end of it, the colors, some prism effect in the water-laden air, were gone, there was not even a hint of them where the fog was curling off the reeds.
She didn’t care, she had seen them, and seeing them she had made more than one decision. She didn’t care any longer about the runner who had not given her a glance, or about anything she had been worrying about or planning.
She stretched. Streetlights across the lake were beginning to show amber in the fog. Standing up she put her arms out and sucked in deep breaths of chilly air. She still didn’t feel like running but she thought lightheartedly, I’ll walk the rest of the way.
THAT NIGHT LYNNETTE dreamed the phone rang. This is the part she didn’t tell me. It stopped after a couple of rings but a while later, in the slow registration of dreams, she decided to get up and answer it. She went and stood looking into her closet, with the feeling—something required of her that was beyond her, some untappable energy—that we agreed viewing our clothes on hangers often provoked in us, when something stronger came over her, some cold foreboding.
She took hold of the folding door to rest her head against it. When she reopened her eyes she saw someone lying on the floor of the closet. She looked for a long time—her dreaming mind reset itself several times—before she saw that it was Travis.
He was curled on his side among the shoes. He had on an old sweater of her mother’s with the neck-tag showing. His back was to her, and the soles of his feet in socks with worn heels.
“Travis,” she whispered without moving. “Nobody told me you died.”
She put her hand out and touched the thigh, which she was able to do somehow without bending over. She would not have been able to bend over, hindered by that bulk of unease that was in her chest.
She ran her cold palm slantwise across the wale of the corduroy to a three-cornered tear she had repaired with iron-on tape on the inside of the pants.
Out of the ridges of the corduroy a grief came up into her such as she had never known in her waking life. At the same time the blunt edge of something heavy sank into place against her chest. The next minute, against her wishes and to her shock, whatever had hold of the heavy thing had levered it i
nto her by some means without breaking the skin, and jammed it steadily forward. A sweat of trying to heave it out drenched her as it paused and sawed a little way back.
“I think I can hold it right where it is,” she said to Travis, but she was cold, she couldn’t keep warm and hold it at the same time, or breathe and hold it.
IT WAS THE mailman who noticed the mail and the newspapers piling up. He had a thick envelope from a travel agency and he didn’t want to leave it. He started to go on down the sidewalk but something stopped him. Lynnette’s car was parked in front of the duplex. He knocked on the other door and a woman opened it. She worked at home; usually if Lynnette was going away this woman would take in the mail and water the plants for her. So she had been wondering. No noises from next door. She tried to make a phone call to Lynnette for the mailman, and then she called the police.
A patrol car arrived; a policewoman got out and knocked and tried the door, and without any to-do lifted up her leg and kicked it in, just as they do on TV. After a while she came back out onto the porch and told the mailman and the neighbor, who were waiting together. “No sign she ever woke up. You can tell when it’s quick.” The neighbor began calling the names in Lynnette’s address book.
Why should I tell Kate this? She heard the outlines of it from me anyway at the time. Heart attack in youth. Comparative youth. Misfortune of a stranger. I’m the only link between them.
AND HOW WOULD anyone know what was dreamed?
And if there is a dream, why not a deep dream of peace, like the one Abou Ben Adhem awoke from?
If Lynnette had ever brought her novel to a conclusion, which Cy always said she’d have to before she could throw it away—though he was wrong, she threw it away anyway—probably it would have ended with a tearful reunion or a marriage. Remembering Travis always comforted her. But if this is nothing like what happened to her on her last night on Earth, it doesn’t matter to me. It comforts me. Truth is not necessarily what we’re after.
It was in the early afternoon of the day Lynnette died that she called me. She was at school but couldn’t work. Finally she slammed the door of the art room on her students and shut herself in the teachers’ lounge to call me. “Were you up in time to see the beautiful fog? Oh, it’s set me off. I’m on the move!” She told me about the tree in the shape of an h, and the boy with the kayak, and the duck. She told me about the resolve that had flooded her, when she stood up with a series of paintings firmly in her mind.
Not only that, she was about to make her first trip home in thirty years. She had gone out at lunchtime and made a plane reservation, and bought paints and brushes. Because there were colors, dark burned yellows, maple reds, thin poplar greens, colors present to her since that morning—“Don’t laugh, it was the most heavenly thing”—in the very words West Virginia.
And she was going to look people up. Teachers, if they were still alive, and the sponsor of the cheerleaders, and the clerk in her father’s store who had let her doodle up and down the adding machine tape. She was going to pay her respects to people she had never written to and barely thought of in thirty years, who had never written to her either or even sent a Christmas card, and probably wouldn’t have any notion of who it was saying hello. A few her age might recall Travis Miller the quarterback. On the other hand Travis might be living right there in their midst, in Classic. Why not? Of course she would ask for news of him, there and in the next town where they had lived above the Rexall.
Much would be changed. A huge outlet mall had gone in. She was going to see what it had left of the Methodist church at the edge of town and the steep ground behind it where the cemetery was. Her mother’s grave was there.
She was going to paint. These new paintings would not proceed from anything she had been doing in her prints. They would be static, all their energy held in reserve. It was not that she repudiated the work she had done. But she was finished with fabric, with collage, with making plates, with printing altogether, with playing. She had seen. “I think they have to be landscapes.”
It was the most heavenly thing.
DON’T GET HUNG up on something-or-other. I forget what the warning was.
This is four or five years earlier. We were sitting in Lynnette’s car while she finished her cigarette and the tail end of one of her tapes, before we got out to start to walk and she reasoned with me, as she always did, illogically, comfortingly, telling me a dream of hers in which Cy had figured, laying out the signs that pointed to reconciliation.
Don’t get hung up on . . . The writer on the tape, to judge by her voice, was a young woman hardly older than my daughters. When I said that, Lynnette replied with dignity, “This woman has written several novels.”
We were going to walk around the lake to talk about a desperate situation involving Cy. I had to decide. In a book he was reading I had found a snapshot of a tall, beautiful, unstable friend of our daughters’. There was no doubt about this delicate, hungry face; the picture was inscribed to him on the back. The shocking words of love were not written in cursive but heavily printed, as if with malice. You could tell the person who wrote them was not in good control of herself. The letters, in the slant-tip pen she must have used for musical notation, had run a little where they had been touched.
I had burned up this picture, along with some of our own photographs, albums of them, in the fireplace. The fire got out of hand and oily smoke rolled out and blackened the fireplace wall and the ceiling. They were vinyl albums and they had those self-sealing plastic sheets over the pictures, which made it necessary for me and our son Ben to move to Kate and Joe’s for a few days while the chemicals that broke down were fanned out the open windows and the room was repainted. Cy went to a hotel. All day and all night Ben, who was fourteen, was lying in Kate and Joe’s messy living room on the floor behind the couch, with his earphones in and his hands pressed between his knees. He would not go to school. Sometimes at night I heard sounds, floors creaking, books falling off the stack at the foot of the stairs, and I knew from the uneven beat of one voice coming up through the floor of their daughter’s room where I was staying that Joe had gotten out of bed and gone down to see about Ben.
Cy called in the daytime but I didn’t go to the phone. Kate’s voice, floating in to me, went on for a long time in the kitchen. It’s too late, this time. Almost. It’s almost too late. He can’t come back to us as he was, not this time. That’s what Kate had to argue.
When Kate went to give her lecture I sat out on the deck under the tree.
Days went by like this, and on one of them I looked up to see the beautiful next-door neighbor. She was climbing over the railing of her own deck. She pushed through the hedge and slid on her heels and her rump down through the ivy on the bank. She walked over to me, brushing off her long thighs in their ironed jeans.
“I’m making some tea,” she said in a high, whispery voice, oddly old-fashioned, like a voice I ought to have known. I do remember: Jackie Kennedy doing the White House tour. “It’s ‘Evening in Missoula’ tea,” she said. “I thought I would bring it over. I came to tell you so you’d open the front door, because I can’t bring it down the bank. I heard you.”
I did not know anyone would be home during the day. I should have, though; I should have known this particular woman would not leave the house, she would be in there holding the wand over whatever room was being changed into something else.
I was just sitting there under the tree with my head in my arms on the picnic table but I might have been making noise. I had stopped my monotonous crying for the time being because I had given myself a sinus headache. Maybe I had been banging my head.
“My name is Kristen,” she said when I let her in the front door with her painted tray and her beautiful Italian mugs.
“I’m Sheila. This is my son Ben,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
Ben didn’t take off his earphones, but from the floor his half-closed eyes followed Kristen. Yes, beauty strikes the little c
old flint of life, there is no denying that.
The last thing most people would do is interfere in someone’s private grief. And here was a person dedicated to the exactly right thing, a person none of us had said more than hello to after the day the moving van pulled up and Kate went over with coffee and sat on a box marked GOURMET MAGAZINE.
Kristen Riley did not apologize. “I’ve seen you on this deck so many times,” she said by way of explanation. “Drink some tea. You’ll feel better. It’s a man, isn’t it. Your husband. I’ve seen him.”
“He’s seen you too,” I said through my hiccups.
We went out the back door onto the deck and she poured the tea into the Italian mugs, which had pomegranates and long-tailed, fanciful, tufted birds on them. She had slices of lemon and a little crock of sparkling Demerara sugar, with a ceramic spoon.
We talked all afternoon. I told her the story of my life and she told me the story of hers. We began with that day and worked back.
We got all the way back to our home towns and our parents and our sisters and brothers and the people they had married. We dwelt for a long time on our high school boyfriends, and on what it meant that we had chosen those particular ones. Her husband could not be exposed to the story of any boyfriend prior to himself, so many of these stories had lain dormant in her for years. Once married, she was not a person who made new friends. Talk had its ramifications.
Roy Riley did not like talk between women. He grilled her when she came back from shopping for clothes, in case she had stood there in her underwear with her bruises showing and confessed to some salesgirl, “My husband almost tore my arm out of the socket.”
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