Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  After dinner, Wen returned to his recliner to watch television. Slowly, staring out the window into the murky night, Charlotte washed the dishes. She lined two Christmas tins with wax paper, packing each with an assortment of the cookies. Twice, she heard Wen get up from the recliner, once to use the bathroom, the other time to open the front door and step outside, listening, it seemed, for the pickup. Around ten, he called out that he was going to bed. Charlotte placed the filled tins on the kitchen table, one for each of Wen’s sisters whom she’d see in the morning at church. Then she curled up in her armchair to read. But she too had been distracted, listening for the pickup. At eleven, she checked the wood-burning stove, pushing the remaining charred log to the side, turning the knob for the flue so the air would dwindle, and went upstairs to bed as well.

  It was after one when Charlotte heard the kitchen door open and Eric’s footsteps, loud and heedless of whether he was waking them, on the stairs. Then Eric was knocking on their bedroom door.

  “Come in,” she called out. Eric stopped at the foot of the bed. She turned on the reading light. A small cut, covered with dried blood, crossed his chin. The piece of graphite in his forehead glowed blue.

  Charlotte propped herself up on an elbow. “Eric, honey, what happened?”

  “I had an accident. A raccoon ran out into the road and I swerved not to hit it. There was a patch of ice and I skidded.” Eric’s lip quivered. “I hit a tree.”

  Charlotte moved over so her hip was pushed against Wen, asleep on his side with his back to her. She smoothed the blanket and curled her fingers in and out toward her chest, motioning for Eric to come sit beside her.

  His hands were icy cold. She rubbed them between her own. “Are you hurt? Did you get hurt?”

  “No.”

  Charlotte touched Eric’s chin. Wen rolled over so he was lying on his back.

  “That’s from a branch of the tree when I was trying to see what happened to the pickup.”

  Wen opened his eyes. “What did you do?”

  Eric looked down at the blanket. Wen sat up. “It’s pretty bad,” Eric said.

  Charlotte reached out for Wen’s arm. “He hit a patch of ice.”

  Wen jerked his arm away. He lowered his feet onto the floor, his torso slightly bent, his hand pressed over his lower spine.

  “Don’t be foolish. This can wait until the morning.”

  Wen reached for his pants. Eric covered his eyes.

  “It’s dark out. You won’t even be able to see.” Her voice sounded thin—weak.

  Wen leaned against the bureau and stepped into his pants. Eric followed him downstairs. Charlotte heard the squeak of the kitchen door opening and then the bang as it shut. She drew back the edge of the curtain from the window over the bed. All she could make out were the bare branches of their pear tree. It was a pointless gesture, this peering out into the inky night; even if Wen had grabbed a flashlight or turned on the pickup headlights, the driveway was on the other side of the house. A useless compromise between the old impulse to chase after them, to intercede, and the idea (where had it come from—magazines, radio talk shows?) that she should let them work it out alone.

  Charlotte sank back under the sheets. She hated the women’s magazines with their awful catchphrases—empty nest syndrome, midlife crises—their assumptions, never questioned, that life rolls neatly through its stages, that difficulties can always be overcome, that feminine beauty and marital passion and maternal perspective can with sufficient effort be preserved, but she was unable to resist flipping through them when they arrived at the library. Was she fostering Eric’s childishness? Yesterday, after she’d twice run out to the driveway, once to hand Eric a hastily arranged plate of the Christmas cookies for Fleitzig, the second to call out to remember to go slowly on the stretch of road near Cable Head, the fog nestling between the gulf and St. Peter’s Bay can catch a driver unaware, Wen had looked up at her with an expression that wed hatred and disgust.

  A door slammed. Charlotte pulled her knees up under her flannel nightgown and listened for voices, but all she could hear was the wind rounding the corner of the house.

  In the morning, Eric was gone. He’d taken the electronic keyboard, leaving a suitcase of clothes with a note taped to the side: MAIL TO and then his address. Wen was in the driveway, rubbing a rust repellent into the smashed panel behind the passenger’s door of the truck.

  Charlotte rushed out the kitchen door. “What?” Air wheezed through her nose, making a hissing sound. “What did you say to him?”

  Wen didn’t answer. He lowered himself onto his back so he could see beneath the truck bed. Under his breath, she heard him muttering something that sounded like, Raccoon, wouldn’t kill a fucking raccoon.

  Charlotte felt herself coming to a boil, her muscles clenching—jaw, fists, gut—to hold back the rising steam. Only once, years before, when Eric was a toddler and he and Wen had come in from the beach with Eric dangling under Wen’s arm and screaming, loud piercing cries that had led Charlotte to jump out from the shower, certain that the child was hurt, had she raised her voice at Wen. Then, Wen had dumped Eric on the floor and grabbed her by the upper arms and shaken her, shaken her so hard the towel she’d wrapped around her had fallen to the floor so she stood naked before her husband and son. His words—“Don’t you ever holler at me. You got something to say, you say it”—had echoed in her neck and spine for days.

  That morning after Eric left, Charlotte frantically called Eric’s aunts, Fleitzig, his two closest friends from high school, and then, for the rest of the day, every hour, his dorm room, knowing all along it didn’t make sense, the dorms were closed for the winter break. She and Wen tiptoed around each other, barely speaking. On Christmas Eve, she went alone to church. Head bowed, her tears dropped onto the coat folded in her lap as she prayed: prayed that Eric was safe, prayed to be released from the anger at Wen. In the morning, she woke feeling calm. When Wen turned toward her in his sleep, she reached out a hand to run down his side and he stretched out an arm to pull her close. At noon, Eric called from the off-campus apartment of friends. Charlotte picked up the phone, and although she’d grown used over the prior year and a half to talking with Eric long-distance, it was the first time he felt far away, the first time there were awkward gaps between their words. Cautiously, they wished each other Merry Christmas, the caution even more painful than Eric’s absence but now, after another five years, so familiar that her former ease with Eric—the way she’d scooped him into her lap as a baby, jostled him awake every school morning with her singsong Rise and shine, run out laughing to the driveway that last Saturday with the plate of cookies for Fleitzig, whispering, Remember to take back the plate—seems now like the memory of a dream.

  *

  Charlotte sits for several minutes with her eyes closed, fingering the mohair blanket, the images from the dream and memory mingling together: Wen’s bleeding back, the dented pickup, Eric crouched by the silver pail. Leaning over, she retrieves her shoes, two ugly frogs, from under the glass coffee table. Gently, she opens the French doors. She finds the powder room, runs warm water, and washes her face. Turning off the water, she hears piano music, the notes so clear and clean it sounds like the speakers must be in the next room. She pats her face dry with a fringed hand towel, following the melody in her mind. It is Mozart’s Sonata in F, a piece she recognizes from Eric’s lessons with Fleitzig but played slower and with more feeling than Charlotte recalls.

  When she returns to the living room, Margaret is seated at the piano bench, and it takes Charlotte a moment to comprehend that it is Margaret playing the sonata.

  Quietly, she lowers herself onto the sofa where she dreamt of Wen. Margaret plays with her chin jutted forward, hearing, it seems, with her throat as much as her ears. The voile curtains have been drawn and a tall torchiere lit, casting a halo onto the ceiling and trembling shadows over the ivory keys. Through the curtains, Charlotte can see the lights from the buildings across the park.


  At the end of the piece, Margaret holds her hands for a moment suspended in the air. The spell broken, she sighs and with a clunk lowers the piano lid. When Margaret turns, Charlotte realizes that she’s changed her clothes: the houndstooth suit replaced by loose black pants and a long lavender silk blouse.

  “That was beautiful. I remember when Eric first learned that piece.”

  “I’ve been working on it as a welcome-home gift for him.”

  Margaret cocks her ear toward Charlotte, as though listening to her unspoken question. “Early December. But you know Eric. He doesn’t believe in timetables. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s two days before he’s due back at work.”

  Charlotte thinks about saying, no, she doesn’t know, but it seems too jarring an idea to introduce into this exquisite room.

  “Did you sleep?”

  “Better than I have since my husband died.” She is surprised to hear herself, usually so reticent, offering this information. Perhaps it is because Margaret hasn’t said any of the inane platitudes favored by Charlotte’s neighbors, with their casseroles and wreaths and hushed comments, and Wen’s sisters, with their pat-pat to Charlotte’s hand or shoulder and even once to her head as though her bereavement has reduced her to a pet, and even her own brother with his repetition of their father’s refrain about how God chooses his time.

  “It’s not from missing my husband that I’ve been sleeping badly.” Her fingers fly to her mouth, as if to stop the rebellious lips. She lowers her hand and holds it tightly in the other. “I know that must sound terrible—just he’d been gone so long I can hardly remember when he was here. Wen was like a turtle. He kept retracting further and further into his shell. These last couple of years, he’d come home so worn out from the roadwork, having to ask permission for bathroom breaks like a grade school child, all he could do was take a shower, get his dinner down, and then sit in that recliner watching the stupid TV.”

  With stupid TV, Charlotte’s voice breaks, and her eyes fill again. Margaret reaches an arm toward a gilded Kleenex box. She hands it to Charlotte, who blows her nose twice and wipes her eyes, only then realizing that Margaret can’t see the tears, that she has responded to the break in Charlotte’s voice.

  “Eric told me, about his father. About wrecking the truck. How he didn’t come home for another year after that.”

  “Seventeen months.” When Eric finally came home, he’d seemed altered. Taller, more filled out. More aloof. During his visit, there was a string of perfect days: the sky a cloudless periwinkle, the water warm enough to swim with comfort, the fields a riot of wildflowers, the bay so glutted with lobsters and mussels they feasted every night. But afterward, after Eric returned to school, she felt empty, as though she’d been entertaining a stranger. Except for the greeting and parting kisses, they’d never touched. Never exchanged looks of bemusement about certain things Wen said or did as they once had.

  “I remember the day Eric told me about his father. It was at the beginning, when I was still banging the keys, refusing to let Eric teach me or to let myself feel the music. We were here, in this room, before I had this piano,” Margaret says, running her fingers across the top of the music stand.

  “He was trying to explain to me about flats and sharps and how they relate to scale intervals, but I was so filled with rage that I might as well have been deaf too for all I could take in of what he was saying. I’d hear the words but they’d bounce right off me. I’d sit on the piano bench with my hands clenched like baseballs, and I must have been doing it then because Eric just stopped what he was saying, literally, midsentence.”

  Margaret turns her head slightly—except for the glasses, Charlotte thinks, a profile like a schoolbook Cleopatra.

  “He touched my fist, and Lordy, it was like a cloudburst. I cried so hard I soaked the front of my blouse. I don’t know how he got me off the bench and over to the couch.”

  She points to the couch where Charlotte is sitting. “I just sat there, sobbing and heaving and then sniveling, with Eric holding my hand and not saying anything. After a while, a long while, he asked me if I wanted to tell him what had happened, how I’d lost my sight, and I realized I did.”

  Margaret gets up from the piano bench. Charlotte imagines Eric leading her over to the couch, his thin arm around her waist. Margaret lowers herself into the leather chair where she sat earlier, slipping off her ballet flats and crossing her stockinged long-toed feet on the matching ottoman. “So I told him. Of course, I’d told people before, the police, my lawyers, the staff at the rehab center, but never because I wanted to.”

  The lower half of Margaret’s face loosens into a half smile; the top hidden behind the dark glasses—eerier, now, with the daylight gone. She reaches toward the table, where the maid has brought clean glasses, a fresh carafe of wine, and another bottle of sparkling water. “Let me,” Charlotte says. Margaret nods.

  “The first thing you learn is how little people want to hear. It scares them, scares them that it could happen to them too.”

  Charlotte hands Margaret a glass, half wine, half sparkling water, and then makes the same for herself.

  So Eric sat on this couch.

  “Eric took me on. I still remember his words. Look, Margaret, he said. That Look, Margaret, was a balm. I hadn’t heard anyone say that to me since I was a girl. Look, Margaret, he said, there are two ways of living. One way you try to control everything. That’s how you’ve done it up to now. You studied hard in high school and got a scholarship to college and then you studied hard in college and got into a good medical school and then you worked hard in medical school and got a good residency and then you impressed everyone there and were able to start your own surgery practice and make a lot of money and move into this apartment. But then someone, a crazy, jealous, racist kook—I think that’s how Eric put it, a crazy, jealous, racist kook—someone whose life didn’t work that way and who’s decided that the reason he didn’t get into medical school and you did is because you’re black and a woman, throws acid in your eyes and it’s all over.”

  Charlotte gasps. Margaret turns toward her and for the first time Charlotte notices the sliver of raw skin—thin, stretched, like the membrane between the shell and white of an egg—at the edge of her glasses.

  “I forget,” Margaret says softly. “I forget how shocking it must sound.” She reaches for her glass and sips, the wine tipping golden toward her crimson lips. “That was when Eric told me about his father. How he hurt his back and had to give up playing hockey but was never able to accept it, to take it as an opportunity.”

  Charlotte’s head is throbbing and she doesn’t know if it is because of what Margaret is telling her or because it is as if Eric, but an Eric she’s never known, is here in the room, or because it is true, so starkly true about Wen that it amazes her that she hasn’t thought about it before. Never had she seen any signs that Wen felt any pleasure in the fishing, never had she seen any elation or contentment on his face, not on those cold March mornings when the sea would turn lazurite, the sky whitewashed from winter, not when he’d come in on June afternoons and the sun, still high in the sky, would dart off the metal pails and glisten on the silvery fish skins, not at dusk when he’d sit on the patio cleaning the hake and mackerel and little herrings, the cliffs looming in the violet sky, the smell of onions barbecuing in tinfoil, his cuts so deft that the only blood would be a thin crimson line down the belly of the fish. No wonder Eric never wanted to go with him. No wonder Eric retreated into a world of sound, at first the Old World sounds Fleitzig had brought with his leather-bound music books from Bremen—Bach preludes, Strauss waltzes, Mozart sonatas—and then, later, after he went to Oberlin, sounds so unrecognizable to Charlotte, she didn’t know to what in the seemingly random jangle she should attend.

  “I remember Eric once saying something about his father that astonished me. That really the ice hockey had been as much dictated by circumstances as the fishing—only with the hockey his father had had the illusion o
f choice, the feeling that his life was under his control.”

  Margaret raises her hand to her breastbone. An opal ring, the stone fat and cloudy, rests on her middle finger. “It occurred to me that the same was true for me with medicine. I’d felt like I’d chosen to be a doctor, but it had been more reaction than anything else. Math and science had seemed less intimidating than the humanities, where my Wellesley classmates were leagues ahead of me. With differential equations, it’s irrelevant if you’ve ever seen the Joffrey or spent a summer in Avignon.”

  Margaret spins the ring around on her finger, and then presses it to her lips. “I was so agitated by the thought, I got up and started pacing. Back and forth across the room. Eric paced with me, holding my elbow to keep me from bumping into things. Talking all the while: that he didn’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna, that he wasn’t telling me to look for the silver lining, but that it had happened, my losing my sight, and I could rail and scream and make life miserable for myself and everyone around me and still I wouldn’t be able to see.”

  Charlotte can feel herself straining forward—as though she might miss one of Eric’s words. As though she has never heard her son speak before. And really, when she thinks about it, what she’s always listened for in Eric is the sound from his fingers. There had been very few words, very few words from any of them, so that it seems all the more wondrous to learn that Eric has grown to be a man of so many.

  “I’m not saying I was out of the woods after that day. There was plenty of hell still to come. I’m talking hatred. A hatred at white people like I’d never felt before.” Margaret pauses. “I don’t know why I didn’t take that out on Eric. Maybe because I’d never seen him, maybe because he’s so young. He felt to me like the Buddha in a body without color.”