by Lisa Gornick
“And you didn’t know that I’m black.”
When Charlotte hears Margaret sit back down, she opens her eyes. Margaret has put the dark glasses on again. Her head is tilted in Charlotte’s direction.
“I’m afraid I’ve intruded upon you. I…” She doesn’t know the end of the sentence. “I’m afraid I don’t know myself why I came.”
Margaret nods slightly. In the center of the opaque lenses, where her eyes should be, two circles, reflections from the crystal lamp on the table between them, glow a buttery yellow.
“I know Eric’s out of the country. The principal at his school told me. That was in August, right after Eric’s father went back into the hospital.” She can’t not look at Margaret’s face, but when she looks, she’s distracted by not seeing her listener’s eyes. “He said he’d ask around if anyone knew Eric’s itinerary or how to reach him. I got a letter from him saying one of the teachers had given your name as someone who might know.”
The maid pushes open the French doors, her face flushed, a gray spot near the hem of her uniform suggesting a mishap in some distant room. Charlotte feels guilty, seeing something about Margaret’s maid that Margaret is unable to apprehend. The girl sets a round teak tray on the table between them: a carafe of pale wine, a green bottle of sparkling water, a glass bowl filled with large crescent cashews.
“Thank you, Janie,” Margaret says as the girl, ponytail flapping, hastens off.
“Eric’s traveling in Indonesia.” Margaret’s hands rest quietly on her lap. “I think you have about as much chance of locating him there as finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Wen, Eric’s father, passed away a few days after I spoke to the principal. I’d already buried him before I got the letter.”
A silence falls during which Charlotte feels relieved that Margaret doesn’t say any of the expected things like how sorry she is—why should Margaret be sorry?—that would require Charlotte to evade or explain. Instead, Margaret laces her fingers together and extends them upward, making a steeple with the tips. A moment passes during which Charlotte wonders if Margaret is silently intoning a prayer. Then Margaret leans forward. She wraps a hand around the carafe.
“Shall I?” Charlotte asks.
“I can do it. Wine, bottled water, or a spritzer?”
Wen stopped drinking after his heart began acting up, and Charlotte had stopped with him. At the reception after the funeral, she’d longed for a drink, but her sisters-in-law had served coffee and turkey and cheese sandwiches and pound cake they’d made themselves. “Wine,” she says.
With one hand on the wine glass and the other circling the carafe, Margaret rests the lip of the carafe on the rim of the glass and pours. She angles an ear toward the glass, pouring, it seems, by sound.
“He, Wen, Eric’s father, was sick for a long time,” Charlotte says, surprised by her own words, since Wen died four days after his second heart attack. They are, though, in a certain way, true: Wen had never really recovered from the back injury nearly two decades before.
“Eric sublet his apartment, but didn’t want to leave his electronic keyboard and his other instruments there. They’re in my guest room.”
Charlotte feels her heart pounding, knocking hard—her son’s things here, just a few rooms away.
Margaret hands Charlotte the glass of wine and then pours herself half a glass, topping it off with the bottled water. That must be a spritzer, Charlotte thinks, her hand tremulous as she moves her own glass to her lips. “How do you know Eric?”
Margaret swivels toward Charlotte, and for a moment Charlotte is overcome with the suspicion that Margaret is tricking her, that she really can see. Her face grows hot, the awful red splotches of embarrassment that have plagued her since childhood, when they’d streak her neck and burn across her cheekbones toward her ears, as she wonders if Margaret is Eric’s lover. With the glasses hiding her eyes, it is hard to tell how old Margaret might be—certainly past forty. But Eric will be twenty-five in the spring.
“He saved my life. Brought me back from the dead.”
Charlotte presses a damp palm over her heart. Perhaps, like her mother, she will quickly follow her husband to the grave. “What do you mean?”
“I was one angry son of a bitch after I lost my sight. It was six months or so later that I met Eric. I was supposed to be going through a rehabilitation program and I was giving them hell.” There’s a lilt to Margaret’s voice, as though she is talking about a naughty child. “I couldn’t imagine what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I’d spent eleven years training to become a surgeon—four years of medical school, four years of residency, a three-year fellowship in microvascular surgery—then two more years establishing my practice and boom, in an instant, it was gone.
“At this rehab place, they were trying to teach me what they called functional skills: how to navigate without sight, how to cut your food, how to fix your hair. There was an idiot psychiatrist there, blind himself—but from birth, that’s different—who kept talking about letting go of the false expectation that life is fair. One of the other patients, a kid who was never going to walk again after a motorcycle accident, told me that the nurses rolled their eyes whenever this idiot opened his mouth.”
Margaret reaches for a cashew, tracing the perimeter of the tray until she finds the bowl. The salt glistens on her lips. “One day, after I’d been there a good while, making no progress towards what they called my therapeutic goals, I had a temper tantrum over something and shoved my food tray across the cafeteria table. It flew off the table, landing with this enormous bang on the floor. The sound shocked me so badly I started to cry. I just sat there with my hands over the eye patches. This nurse peeled back my fingers—bloody around the nails, they’d told me, from chewing the cuticles. She held my hands in hers and said, Sugar, there’s got to be something you can do with these hands other than make trouble, and that’s how she came up with the idea of introducing me to Eric.”
Charlotte lets her own hand drop from her chest. Outside, light is draining from the sky and a shadow, sharp, like a parallelogram, grazes the piano—dusk, that chimerical rupture between day and night when tree branches and leaves and even the veins on the leaves appear for a fleeting instant more distinct, the edges no longer blurred by glare. It has always struck Charlotte as a pensive time, light and dark held in balance, and now she remembers those quiet dusks in the trailer at Priest Pond, before her parents died and they built the house on the money she inherited, her brother insisting she take his share since he was by then in his second year at his bond-trading job and expecting a bonus twice the size of the inheritance. In the trailer, Charlotte’s kitchen window had looked out over a field of emerald grass that stopped at a red mud cliff only fifty feet away, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence purple in the ebbing light, Wen seated on the banquette that served as a couch reading the paper, Eric at the fold-down kitchen table playing with pipe cleaners and humming so quietly that ten minutes passed before she recognized that he was humming Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat, a selection from an Arthur Rubinstein recording she’d brought home from the library and played that afternoon.
“This nurse’s son was in Eric’s class, a nine-year-old kid with a school chart three inches thick from smashing mirrors and stealing things and scratching obscenities on a teacher’s car. One of those kids who looks like he’s headed in a beeline for jail. It was Eric’s first year as the music teacher at the school, his first job out of college, and he’d taken the kid on, kept him after school trying him on the piano and the tuba and the cello and the saxophone until one day the kid sat down at a drum set and Eric saw a look in his eyes, and now this nurse’s son was doing great with the bad behavior behind him.”
Charlotte’s thoughts are breaking into fragments, darting every which way as she struggles to put this Eric—the nurse’s, Margaret’s, he’d taken the kid on—together with her own: a shy, dreamy boy with ankles that wobbled in the hockey skates Wen had bought him and lar
ge ears that the other children had teased him about.
“It was a humbling experience, letting your son teach me to play the piano. I wasn’t used to doing things without a guarantee that I could succeed. We weren’t poor when I’d grown up, there’d always been money for food and clothes, but there for damn sure hadn’t been money for piano lessons. In college, I’d been single-minded. Anything I wasn’t certain about, I avoided. It might lower my grade-point average. I was going to become a doctor and I was going to go to a top medical school. And it was easy. Not that it wasn’t a lot of work, just it was predictable. If I went to all my classes and labs and did all the problem sets and read and then reread all the assigned reading, I’d get an A in the course. Effort was, as they said in my biostat class, strongly correlated with outcome. I’d never tried to learn anything that didn’t work that way.”
Charlotte’s own music instruction had been limited to the recorder during grammar school and chorus once she’d reached high school, but she’d learned enough to know when she heard Eric humming that he could hear, that he’d heard every note of the Chopin polonaise.
“Of course, Eric didn’t tell me that he’d never taught a blind person before—or that he was just twenty-two. I guess I was lucky I couldn’t see how young I’ve heard people say that he looks. I was still living at the rehab center, and for the first lesson, we used this old clunker of a piano they had in the patient dayroom. Eric placed my right hand on middle C and said play. I banged. Banged like an angry four-year-old. Eric didn’t say a word. I must have banged for a good half hour, but eventually, maybe I was just getting tired, I let up, allowed myself to feel my fingers on the keys and listen to the sounds they made. I experimented with a little ditty. After a while, Eric started humming along. He leaned over me and began to answer my ditties and I answered back. And then he asked, When are you leaving here? and I said by the end of the month and he said, Good, when you get home, rent yourself a piano and we’ll start. So I did. Actually, I bought one. Not this one,” Margaret says, pointing over her shoulder, “this I bought last year, but a used upright.”
The day after Charlotte had recognized Eric humming the Chopin polonaise, she drove him the fifteen kilometers to the white-spired church in Naufrage. Sitting in the choir practice room, she placed his right hand with the thumb on middle C. Like Margaret, he banged until he was tired with the banging, and then slowly found his way to a melody. She sang her response and he answered with his fingers. There was no one on the east side of the island who could teach beyond the beginner level, so for ten years, until Eric was able to drive himself, every Saturday morning Charlotte drove Eric the hour and a half to Charlottetown for his lesson with old Mr. Fleitzig, a German Jew who’d left Bremen before the war and lived in a Victorian house by the harbor, the garden and exterior so overgrown and neglected the house appeared to be decomposing around him.
“So,” Margaret says, and then she comes to a full stop like the silence between movements in a piano sonata, and Charlotte realizes that this is partly why Margaret feels so intimidating, this bluntness exercised at will. “Why do you have to ask me where your son is?”
Dazed, by the wine, by the opulent room, by the scent, stronger now of gardenias (could it be Margaret’s perfume?), by Margaret, by Margaret’s Eric and the flood of her own memories, Charlotte fears that if she speaks, her wet eyes will overflow, a whimper escaping from her lips. But to her surprise, the next thing that happens is a yawn. A moaning yawn that pulls her eyes shut and casts her mouth wide. She raises her hand to cover her teeth. “Excuse me, I’m afraid I’m not accustomed to the wine.”
Margaret stands, briskly rubbing her palms together. Grains of salt float through the air. “You need a nap. All that driving, the body wasn’t made to be confined that way.”
“Oh, no. That’s not necessary. I’m fine, really.”
“No arguments. Not a word more until you’ve had a nap. Besides, I have some phone calls to make. You can stretch out on the couch. There should be a blanket resting on the arm.”
Again, Charlotte feels the heat rising up from her neck, and then, to her horror, she yawns again. Before she can think of what more to say, the French doors open and then close and there is the click-click of Margaret’s heels receding in the hall.
*
Of course Charlotte dreams of Wen. She knows she will. She has dreamt of him nearly every night since he died. In the dream, he is as he’d been when she met him: jumpy, boyish, rakish—a big grin as he took her elbow and led her back to the racetrack stables, along the bank of the Ohio River, where he knew the Canadian trainers who winked exaggeratedly at him for having a girl on his arm. Then the dream changes and he is as he’d been when Eric was a boy: grim, dour, because they never saw him until dusk, always with a shadow on his lip and jaw. He is standing at the bow of his boat, his back toward her and naked from head to toe: his forearms a leathery brown, the rest mushroom white. On his back, there is an ugly red gash, and even in the dream, Charlotte, the dreamer, knows this is wrong, that Wen’s injury is two disks compressed together, not anything she could see. Wen turns and there is a long gleaming knife in his hand like he might use to clean the hake in the silver pail by his feet, but then the scene shifts and Eric is crouched by the pail, his large ears pink and wiggling, his bony ankles flanking his hips. Charlotte rushes toward Wen but the dream grinds to a stop, Charlotte bolting out of sleep at the moment she reaches Wen, just a millisecond before the fish knife would have cut her palms.
She sits up. Outside, the streetlights have been turned on, casting white globes on the blackened windowpanes. In the wake of the dream, the light is painful, leaving her with a hollow, empty feeling. She pulls the mohair blanket over her lap and closes her eyes again, her thoughts drifting to the last day the three of them—Wen, Eric, and she—were together. Really together, since Eric made two more trips to the island but they were more pantomimes of visits than visits.
It was Eric’s second year at Oberlin, winter break, a Saturday, a few days before Christmas. Everything was frozen and bare, the trees, the roads, the fields all mud brown, waiting for the January snows. During the fall, Eric had veered from his piano studies, overtaken by what Charlotte had guiltily hoped (she’d always told herself that all that mattered was Eric do what he found interesting) would be a passing infatuation with musical anthropology. For his final paper, he’d programmed an electronic keyboard to reproduce a seven-note Javanese gamelan scale. He’d borrowed a portable keyboard from the music department and brought it home in a bulky black case to show them, though later Charlotte would wonder who he’d had in mind: his father and her, or Fleitzig?
Charlotte had placed a book of Renaissance Christmas carols she’d bought mail-order on the piano music stand, but Eric had set the keyboard up in his room and was occupied with only it. All morning, while she was baking Christmas cookies, strange music wafted through the ceiling. After lunch, Wen fell asleep in the recliner, exhausted from the roadwork he’d signed on for in November with the hope of logging in his twelve weeks on the province payroll so he’d qualify for unemployment in February and March, when it would be too blustery to either fish or repair roads. That year, the roadwork had taken its toll on Wen in a way Charlotte hadn’t seen before. She’d been frightened by his ashen pallor and by the way he had to soak his hands in a bowl of warm water before he could feel his teeth on his fingertips. Wen, angry, defensive—probably scared himself, Charlotte had thought—had insisted the gray cast to his skin was soot, the numbness in his fingers the consequence of gripping a shovel seven and a half hours a day.
Around three, Charlotte heard Wen stir and then get up to use the bathroom. The music stopped, and there was a loud thumping as Eric descended the stairs with the keyboard back in its case. He came into the kitchen, Wen following behind. Charlotte smiled at the two of them—Eric looking like the spindly, elongated forward-cast shadow of his compact, muscular father. She would make cocoa, bring it into the living room on a
tray with a plate of the cookies still soft and warm from the oven. Perhaps Eric would play the carols afterward.
But before she could heat the milk, Eric asked Wen to borrow the pickup; he wanted to show Fleitzig the electronic keyboard, to play him the gamelan simulation. Wen went outside with Eric to go over with him again where the safety brake release was on the floor and how to use the five gears, even though Eric had been home three days already and had already driven the new (really used, but new to them) pickup. Through the open kitchen door, Charlotte could hear Wen’s litany: “Remember, there are five gears, not four. The old truck had four. Not that you should go higher than third—fourth is where reverse was on the old truck.” Eric listened patiently, his head tilted slightly, but whether he was listening to the words or to the cadences of his father’s voice, Charlotte wasn’t sure.
That evening, Charlotte and Wen ate in silence, a familiar silence, not hostile but rather the silence of people who’ve run out of things to say to each other, not because life doesn’t provide an endless source of conversation but rather because the peace between them wouldn’t accommodate Charlotte’s ruminations: the memories set off by her mother’s Christmas cookie cutters (the fir tree, the Santa, the elf, the reindeer, the stocking, the wreath), would Eric go back to the piano, how would Fleitzig respond to the electronic keyboard.