by Abby Frucht
“It’s all because you refuse to understand that we need a new car,” I say to Daniel when I get home. “No one short of Italy has the axle we need. We could be stuck in this town forever eating Stilton and Carr’s Water Biscuits.”
“What’s wrong with this town?” says Daniel, pulling the butter out of the bag. “Besides, these aren’t sailboats. They’re sailing vessels.”
He’s right: they’re majestic as Mayflowers, each different from the next but with a uniform, easterly wind stamped into their billowing sails. I touch the crest of a wave with my finger, hold the fingertip of butter to Stevie’s tongue as Daniel sets the other groceries on the countertop. Our dinner. Six croissants, a tin of goose liver paté and a squat jar of strawberry jam from England.
“We’ll have the pie, too,” I say worriedly, already cutting the butter and flour. “And maybe Nikki will trade a zucchini for a croissant. Set the table, please?”
“Okay,” says Daniel, but as soon as he starts, he’s doubtful. How does one eat a fancy meal like this, he wants to know. Cloth napkins, or the usual Kim-Wipes pulled from their dispenser near his microscope? And do we need good silver?
“We don’t own any silver,” I remind him.
“Let’s just eat on the porch swing, again,” he says, then holds up the tin of paté and stares at it disbelievingly. “Do you think this is real goose paté?” he asks. “Or imitation?”
“I’ve never heard of imitation goose paté.”
“Do you know how they make this stuff?”
“Yes.”
“They take the goose, and they –”
“I know, I said.”
“and they force feed it mush till it –”
“Daniel. I know.”
“practically keels over, but it’s penned up, or tied, and they–”
“Okay, Daniel,” I say, and take the small, oval tin from his hand and drop it into the trash. It’s the only thing in there. It thunks when it strikes the bottom.
“Is that better?” I ask.
“You mean, will the goose feel better if we don’t eat it?” says Daniel. “Wow.”
“It’s already dead, Daniel. It doesn’t have feelings. Forget it, Daniel.”
“What are you talking about?” ask Ben, who is standing at our screen door, looking in at us through his hand-held zoom. Since Leah disappeared, he brings it with him everywhere he goes, as if it might help him find her.
“A goose,” says Daniel.
“You’re going to slaughter a goose?”
“It’s already slaughtered,” says Daniel.
“A goose liver,” I tell him.
“That stuff’s wicked. You know what they do to–”
“Yes,” says Daniel.
“We threw it in the trash,” I say.
“You threw out a goose liver paté?” says Ben. He opens the door, bends over our trash, peers in at the tin while twisting the focusing knob of the zoom. “Maybe it’s that vegetarian goose liver paté,” he says doubtfully, and reaches in to get it.
“Have a beer,” I say. “And stay for dinner, please. We have croissants, jam, and a big raspberry pie, if I ever get to put it together, and I’ll invite Nikki over with tomatoes and zucchini from her garden. But sit on the porch and drink your beer, please, while I make my pie. Where’s Simon?”
“SIMON!” yells Ben, and he and Daniel are out the door, beers in hand. Both children are out there too, in the sandbox banging on the pie plates. Being alone feels strange and sad, because Leah is not in the kitchen with me although the men are on the porch swing as usual. My invitation to Ben was a kind of white lie; he’s come for dinner every night since Leah disappeared, but I don’t want him to know that I know this. Now he flips through the notebook he keeps in his T-shirt pocket, filled with the names of the people who have said they’d get back to him. Long distance friends, relatives, missing persons bureaus, police. Also in the pocket, two pens, in case one runs out of ink the very second he gets the news he’s been waiting for. He won’t, I think, and set to work on our dinner. I dust the desk top with flour, all ready to roll out the dough. From here I can look right into the pine where a blue jay is scolding the air.
“Be quiet,” I say, and dust the rolling pin as well, but the blue jay keeps scolding, chattering, hopping from branch to branch. When I tap the window with the rolling pin, flour explodes from it onto the telephone. At that moment, the telephone rings. Expecting Danka, I pick it up and say, “Not now, I’m taking a bath,” but after that there is only silence, and I listen to it breathlessly as if absorbing it, three seconds of silence, of absolute peace. Four seconds, maybe even five. It’s like holding your ear to a conch shell. Even the blue jay cocks its head, closes its beak and is quiet. A car rolls down the street, parks on the drive between our house and Nikki’s, behind our Fiat. A tall black man climbs out, carrying a trombone case.
“Shit,” says a voice on the telephone. “He brought his damn horn.”
“Is that you, Nikki?”
Silence.
“Nikki? You all right?”
“I guess.”
“Good. Come to dinner?” I ask, and noticing flour on the telephone receiver, blow on it hard, to clean it. Next door, Nikki drops her telephone; I hear the clatter and thump as it hits her floor. This same thing has happened before. I was on the phone with Nikki, I sneezed, and she dropped her receiver.
“Liz?” she asks.
“Yes, Nikki.”
“No dinner tonight, but I was hoping maybe you could use up some of my garden. You can come back there and take as much as you want, okay, honey? I can’t eat so much. I got to go now.”
“Thanks, Nikki. That’s just what we needed. Our car broke its–”
But she’s no longer on the line. Already she’s out of her house, her arm linked through the arm of the tall black man. They’re taking Nikki’s little yellow sportscar. For a moment it looks like the horn won’t fit through the door, and when that slides in finally, I wonder about the man. He has to fold himself up like a pocketknife, then slowly resume his original shape. He sits with his knees pressed into the dashboard, his long fingers delicately at rest on top of them. He is Nikki’s younger brother, but when she told me that I didn’t believe it. He looks reverential, adoring, insistent as a lover. When he comes to get her, she tells me, usually they’re on their way to meet some of his friends in a club. Nikki always comes back alone, and wakes us with her late night music, not a bad way to be wakened at all. It’s like waking to a breeze, listening a minute, then losing track of the sound as it blends with the rhythms of dreams. Nikki doesn’t dream, she claims. Nor does she seem to have lovers. She likes being alone, and what puzzles me most is who does her hair, in cornrows, the dangling braids heavy with beads. Could she possibly do it herself? And she always looks romantic. Tonight she’s wearing a sarong. She’s barefoot, with a wide brass bangle around one ankle. When they’ve driven off, the blue jay starts scolding again.
Nikki’s carrots taste like onions, but her onions are sweet, and with the pie on the table it looks like a feast. The pie is beautiful, really; the very edge of each ribbon of lattice is golden, and the sweetened juices bubble furiously among them. I set it still boiling at the center of our table amid the wedges of tomato, the croissants, the paté. We pop open the tin and eat, a little of this, a lot of that, a wedge of tomato, some sautéed zucchini and onion. Ben is distracted, of course. Every once in a while he stands up suddenly, then either sits back down or makes his way to the window with the hand-held zoom. Daniel and I keep the conversation moving. The talk is familiar, about July Fourth approaching, and will there or will there not be fireworks this year, and will there or will there not be a band to play along with the fireworks.
“More pie!” yells Simon, reaching across.
Ben grunts and mimics. “Muppy,” he says, “What the hell is this kid trying to tell us?”
I cut a narrow slice of pie for Simon, a wider one for Ben, and lay them side by side
on a single plate. Stevie wants some too, although he’ll only suck the fruit before spitting the seeds back into his hand.
“Here, Pebbles,” I say, handing Stevie his spoonful of steaming berries.
Daniel looks quizzical. “Pebbles?” he asks.
“Pebbles,” I repeat, and smile happily at Ben, who looks sadder than before, so that I wonder if he knows what we all are doing: going on with our lives, the way you have to when somebody dies.
When he doesn’t eat his pie, I decide to talk about it.
“You know,” I begin, glancing at Daniel, “we’ve been avoiding the issue. We’re so very sorry. We wish we could help. We just don’t know what to say.”
“What issue?” asks Ben.
Daniel is silent.
“What issue?” Ben repeats. “There’s no issue. She’s not an issue. I’m not making an issue out of it. I’m not making a big deal out of it. It’s not like I’m losing my mind. It’s not like I want to kill myself, or anything. I’m just keeping things moving.” He taps a spoon on the rim of one of my pie plates and then on the seat of the empty chair.
“Come with me,” I tell him, and with a little more prodding he follows me outside to Nikki’s, both sneakers untied, laces flapping. Her door is kept unlocked, like mine, like Ben’s. I knock, just to be sure, and when no one answers I turn the knob and slip in, motioning Ben to wait in the front hallway along with several bongo drums and potted avocado trees. Last year I bought Nikki one of Leah’s covered bowls that with the lid in place resembles the planet Jupiter.
“See this?” I ask Ben in the hallway. “I bought this for Nikki on her birthday, when she turned thirty-six.”
Ben’s face turns red when I’ve set the familiar object in his hand. He has cumbersome fingers; nestled there the bowl looks as fragile as a bubble. Like all of Leah’s pots, it’s so thin-walled it’s luminous, the glaze a wash of burgundies, purples, and grays. It is the size of a grapefruit. To raise the lid, which has no knob or indentation, Ben must flip it gently onto the palm of his other hand, then hold the two halves as he’d hold open a book. Everyone does this with Leah’s bowls, but simply for the feel of it, not to see what’s inside.
But at the sight of what’s in it, Ben jumps and drops the bottom of the bowl, which lands upside down, unbroken on the skin of a bongo drum. The contents are spilled with a noisy clatter, and on our hands and knees we search the hallway floor among the bases of the drums, then feel in the soil around each avocado tree, then crawl into Nikki’s living room and search in there as well.
“I don’t know if they’re Nikki’s,” I say after a minute. “They might be her grandmother’s. No. Her grandmother’s dead. I can’t imagine she’d keep…. They must be Nikki’s. This is too awful. This is horrible. I’m going to laugh.”
“Not me,” says Ben, so sharply I feel I’ve been slapped. He lifts the edge of a beanbag chair and slides his hand underneath it to feel. I toss another three teeth into the bowl, where they skid grittily across the glaze like pebbles on glass. That makes seventeen. They’re like fragments of a mummy left behind in a cave. Together we gaze at the worn-down shapes, so for a minute I imagine we are doing what I intended for us to do – staring hard at Leah’s absence as if it were a thing that could be handled and understood – but then I know that we’re not; we’re not staring at Leah’s absence, but at Nikki’s pulled teeth, at the stain of dried blood and clinging nerve. It’s impossible to look at what’s not there. Besides, the whole town is adept at not-looking, at not-wondering, even. After a while, you take things in stride. Stores close, and the newspaper shrinks down to practically nothing. No news. No births, no deaths. There was an editor who talked about listing the names of the people who had moved, week by week, but all the hangers-on objected, and then the editor herself moved, too, to Las Vegas, people say, although nobody knows for sure.
I set the domed lid in place on its ludicrous cargo and carry it back to its table. Leah’s bowl has no base; it’s a perfect sphere. It wobbles a little, then balances exquisitely.
LATE THAT NIGHT, perched on the edge of the bed undressing, I find one of Nikki’s molars lodged in the toe of my sneaker. Not wanting Daniel to see, I slide it under my pillow and, still later, fall asleep with my hand cupped over its rotted peaks. I dream of an abandoned quarry we sometimes visited: Daniel and I, and Leah and Ben, the two children strapped into packs on our backs. In the shade of the woods are huge boulders slick with moss. No matter what time of year we went, the quarry was always murky and damp, and once there we always wondered why we’d come at all. Then we’d find some wild ginger growing among the detritus, exclaim over its heart-shaped leaves and go home, all four of us feeling romantic.
We do this in the dream as well, and when I wake in the morning, the tooth is gone.
ORDINARILY in summer the college opens its swimming pool for several hours a day and again at evening, so that the faculty hangers-on, as well as members of the public who’ve joined the athletic club, can bring their families to swim and cool off. It’s an indoor pool, but the doors to the outside-two sets of wide, double doors-are propped open, so a fragrance of mown grass and pendulous honeysuckle makes its way into the space where it mingles with the smell of chlorine. There is no kiddie pool, but there are life jackets, kickboards, and bleachers for restless children. The youngest of these dress in the women’s locker room and gaze interestedly at our bodies as we pamper, shave, and comb. How unconsciously familiar we become in that room, unclothed, the old with the young, the fat, the thin, the plain, the lovely, our pubic hairs beaded with moisture, our imperfections awash in a bluish light that seems to bless us equally. Every summer in the locker room I make some new friends, to replace those who are moving away. At some time each day the hot water runs out so the showers turn warm, then lukewarm, then cold, then icy, and we complain or holler jokingly in the spirit of our communal nakedness, swapping shampoos, cream rinses and lotions, borrowing razors, tampons, and deodorants, losing towels, hair clips, beach thongs and caps, but keeping track of each other’s slippery children, each other’s names, each other’s telephone numbers.
But this summer the recreation center is closed; the college, we are informed by its apologetic mailing, is experiencing “a season of sacrifice” owing to the cost of liability insurance.
Nor will the library be open, nor the snack bar, nor even the credit union office. The summer conference season as well has been canceled, a situation that, like the recent closing of the local movie theater, leaves us dazed and bewildered; pausing to examine the coming attractions we found ourselves staring instead into our own eyes reflected by the black glass facade. Although the conferences themselves were closed to the public, their very presence in our town changed the pace of our affairs; our parking lots were filled, our streets and stores crowded, our newspaper vending machines emptied early in the day as did the bakery of doughnuts, fresh breads and half-pints of orange juice. Every week brought streams of new faces—whole sidewalks of young socialists, squadrons of practicing cheerleaders, bagpipers parading in kilts, the monotonous whines of their instruments invading even the insides of our houses. Our favorites were always the Quaker Friends with their monkish smiles, their leather sandals worn with coarsely knitted socks, and their aura of pastoral benevolence that made us feel, in contrast, frenetically cosmopolitan.
Now that the college lawns are empty, we go swimming in the west reservoir, which is larger than the one close to home and set on a balding rise from where the distant golf course is visible on the far side of some open fields. At the base of one steep incline are several targets for archery practice, so ancient and worn that the sawdust stuffing, long exposed, has all blown away. In past summers, teenagers hung out on the ridge, partying, so that now, broken beer bottles litter the reservoir’s bottom amid sharp rocks and hunks of concrete, making swimming risky. A few days ago, Daniel cut his foot. A lot of people do. Nobody seems to care; we are as hardy and inured as soldiers in a war, carrying
in our picnic baskets rolls of bandages and bottles of Mercurochrome. As the summer progresses, more and more of us will be seen limping along the sidewalks in town, and limping while crossing the streets, and limping while strolling lopsidedly arm-in-arm at dusk, like the summer several years ago when it became popular to strew tacks along the roads leading into town so half the cars had flat tires.
Therefore it’s not surprising that my own limp should go unnoticed even though I didn’t get it at the reservoir. No one offers a hand or asks how it happened. Not even Daniel asks, when I’ve limped demonstratively home from an early morning route. I have to say, “Look at me, I’ve been crying,” before he notices that anything-everything-is amiss: the leather strap of my mailbag snapped, one leg of my pants split down to the ankle, my face tear-smudged, my hands still trembling.
“Guess what’s missing?” I say, when Daniel embraces me and asks me what happened. “Guess what’s gone,” I say, sniffling, suddenly more upset than I thought I was. “What do I not have that I had before?”
Nervous, Daniel lifts my hands, counts my fingers, then bids me sit down and unties my shoes. My toes are all there, my limbs whole and in place. Still kneeling, Daniel touches each leg, reads them with his fingertips, taps my knee for the reflex, and says he can’t guess. Soon he rises, checks each ear and examines my head from above.