Joseph talked about how Gwendolyn always saved old bread to scatter for the birds. We sat on a bench in the shadiest spot we could find, the ground in front of us littered with soggy bread that the overfed, fat ducks were ignoring. I told him about the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and how as a child I had been taken there to see the ducks marching from their penthouse to the elevator and down and across the lobby to the pool. I told how I had looked around that lobby and marveled at the people staying there, this fine hotel with its rugs and chandeliers and fountains. I was with a church group, one in a busload of kids stopping here and there to sing for other congregations. It was supposed to be an honor (not to mention an educational experience) to get to go on that trip, but I spent the whole time reading Richie Rich comic books and wishing myself home. It was the summer before Martin Luther King was shot. It was when Elvis still walked the rooms of Graceland in the wee hours of the morning. It was when my sister was practicing to be a junior high cheerleader, and my grandmother was still walking the rows of her garden.
With the arrival of the swans (they had been staying across the street at the Ritz), Joseph cleared his throat and began reciting. Upon the brimming water among the stones are nine and fifty swans. He paused and laughed, added. “Or what about two swans?” But with Yeats’s “wild swans” he had once again opened his favorite topic, which led eventually, as the crowd began to thin—baby strollers pushed away, children led to visit the row of bronze ducklings, couples folding up their picnic blankets—to Eliot and one of his all time favorites, “Journey of the Magi,” which led him to “The Gift of the Magi” and then into his own Christmas story, one I’d heard on several other occasions. Christmas with Gwendolyn. The picture of Gwendolyn I always conjured up in my mind had the look of a Gibson Girl, even though I knew that she wore her straight gray hair cut close with bangs and that the waist of her dark wool coat hit high around her short, thick middle. He kept a photograph on top of his dresser: Joseph and Gwendolyn in 1945, standing on a busy sidewalk, each cradling a shopping bag, his face filled out in a way I’d never see.
“It was just the two of us,” he began as he often did, pausing with the unspoken question—one I never asked—about whether or not they had ever wanted a child. His close attention to my own growth, his comments on my coloring and my hair, seemed answer enough. He described their Christmas Eve, the rushing home from work in the mid-afternoon to find the other waiting on the stoop—her with a black wool scarf wrapped around her head and tied beneath her chin, him with a gray fedora he felt certain she was about to replace that very night. He said that when he looked back it seemed like it always snowed right on cue. Let there be snow. Inside, their windows fogged up with the cold, the lights they strung glowed as they pulled old boxes from the closets, tied red velvet around the cats’ necks. They waited until dark, and then they walked down to the waterfront, the freezing wind forcing them to walk huddled together like Siamese twins. They listened, ready to stop at the sound of carolers, church bells, paused and looked up into windows to see lights and children and greenery. The city was never more beautiful.
They ate in a small dark restaurant at a table by the window. First they ordered bourbons (hers with a lot of water), and then they spent the first hour just talking over the year behind them. Oh, there were those years when the plans went awry, when one or the other was upset about this or that, work or a sick family member; there was that year when, for reasons he didn’t feel it necessary to discuss, they were farther apart than they had ever been, complete strangers coming and going for a period of three months. They feared that they would lose each other. That there would be no forgiveness. He said this part quietly, nodded a slight nod as if to say you must understand what I’m saying. “That was the worst Christmas,” he said quietly. “Really the only bad Christmas.” He laughed then and looked at my abdomen, gestured to it as if speaking to the child. “Trust me. We were better people once it was all over. We made it.” We watched the swans circling, necks arched proudly as they didn’t even acknowledge the various breads and cracker crumbs tossed out onto the water. “In my mind the Christmas, the Christmas is the way I’ve described it. Our dinner, talking over us. Our life and our future.”
On all of those Christmas eves, it seemed they were the only people out. Others had rushed home to family gatherings but neither of them had relatives close by. They were alone with each other. The best part of it all was that they always got the very best tree left at the Faneuil Hall lot for just three dollars. (It had gotten up to ten by the time Gwendolyn died.) Then they dragged the tree home and decorated with common little items, things they already had. Paper chains cut from glossy magazine pages, tinfoil stars, spools of thread, her jewelry, his neckties, fishing gear, chess pieces tied off in twine. “We had a glorious time,” he said. “Brandy and poetry and her crazy ornaments until the sun, that cold winter light, came through the window.”
This Public Garden day, with the temperature at at least eighty as we made our way back down Charles Street, we once again argued over who was in worse shape, a thin old man with a prosthetic heart valve or a pregnant woman so far beyond her normal weight she thought she’d never again wear shoes other than the rubber clogs from Woolworth’s. A hard time we had of it, he said in short gasps as we began our climb up the dark stairs to our apartments.
I dreamed my husband and I went to a party. We were greeted at the door by the mother of an old friend of mine, a childhood friend I had not seen in years. In real life I knew that the mother had recently died of leukemia, and in the dream I knew this, too. And I knew that it was not my friend’s mother who greeted us but a three-dimensional image of her. Somewhere in this room there was a silent projector. My husband said how wonderful she was. He said, No wonder you love to be over at their house all the time. (I had not seen the house in twenty years.) I could not bring myself to tell him the truth, that we could pass our hands straight through her body; that there was absolutely nothing there.
The dream jumped the way dreams do, and the party was over; we were almost at the car when I remembered that I had left my coat behind. I raced back only to find an empty room (had the others there been projections as well?) and on the wall was her image, stilled. They were projecting an image I’d forgotten. It wasn’t the way she looked, racing up the gold-carpeted stairs of her house, demanding that we explain the cigarette burn in my friend’s brand new windbreaker, or the one she wore a year later when she handed me my first sanitary napkin and elastic belt, or the one she wore the day the moving van arrived to take them to California. Rather, the expression I saw, frozen there on the wall of the dream, was one more subtle and fleeting; it was the one she wore most of the time.
My friend and I are in the backseat of her Country Squire. We are taking turns inking the initials of the boys we love (high school boys we’ve never met) in cryptic fashion on each other’s Blue Horse notebooks. In the way back, her brother and his friend are bouncing up and down until her mother casts a quick glance in the rearview mirror. “Settle down, boys,” she yells, a forced furrow in her brow. They obey, at least while the light is red, and she goes back to her humming. And this is the moment: the second glance in the rearview mirror, the look after she yells, when her face relaxes into a half smile. On the radio is “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” and she sings along, her voice a little nasal, twangy with confidence. And that’s what I see on the wall, over and over, that look, and in that look, I see Indian summer, the fashionable ponchos my friend and I had shed balled up at our feet, the flat terrain of our hometown passing us by.
I had back labor. We took a taxi across town to the hospital, me stretched and riding as upright as I could manage, my face pressing into the soiled gray ceiling of the cab, smelling the traces of smoke that lingered in the upholstery. The cab was smoke-free, or so the driver said when my husband hailed him; at the time I was squatting in front of our building, my face against the concrete steps. Just the day before, Joseph had been in that
very spot waiting for the cab that took him to the very same hospital for a brief stay, a series of routine tests. In the hospital, we were still neighbors, though wings and floors apart, and I wanted to get a message to him but at the moment I felt discombobulated and all tied up. Would I like narcotics? Why yes, thank you very much. I said that I’d also appreciate a needle in my spine just as soon as they could round up an anesthesiologist. Epidural, please. The words rolled right off my tongue; I had forgotten everything I knew about breathing.
My friend and I were eleven years old and in love with Tommy James and the Shondelles. “Crystal Blue Persuasion” was playing on her little hi-fi on the floor when we heard her mother coming up the stairs.
“Where did you girls get cigarettes?” She flung open the door to my friend’s room and stood there, hands on her hips, frosted hair shagged short on top and long on the neck.
“Junior’s Texaco,” my friend whispered meekly. There was no need to paint the picture, the two of us riding double on her banana-seat bike, me pedaling furiously while she held on to my waist, her legs held stiffly out from the spokes. We were on the service road of the interstate. The glittering black asphalt was still steaming from a recent rain.
Labor went on forever. A monitor was strapped to my belly for contractions, another to the baby’s head for its pulse. I was telling jokes and calling my sister long distance by then. I was watching a contraction rise like an earthquake reading, the needle going wild to register my unfelt pain. I was ready to push when I realized that I’d been talking for hours and that the doctor had never left my side. Then I realized that all was not well, that my husband was too quiet. I had come this far—no cigarette had come close to my mouth—and yet, there was a problem. The baby’s heart rate dropped, a heart so small I couldn’t even imagine. It was a simple procedure, this C-section, but it had to be done quickly, now, this instant. They knew what to do; they had all of the right equipment to slice through the layers of skin and muscle, to pluck from my body a fully formed baby.
My friend’s mother reached into her bathroom cabinet and handed me a sanitary napkin and a little elastic belt. I had seen them before. I had practiced wearing one at home; I had envied those girls who had already turned the monumental corner. She said that she understood if I felt I needed to go home, but she really hoped that I’d stay the night as we had planned. I stood bare-footed on the cool tile floor of her bathroom, my eyes still red from chlorine, my hair bleached and like straw from the local pool. I watched the toilet paper and the fancy little embroidered guest towels sway with the blast of central air conditioning. She sat on the end of her bed, the first queen-size I ever saw, and talked while I nodded embarrassedly. Here was the moment I had been waiting for, the threshold, and I felt gawky and foolish and uncomfortable. But I stayed, and we went to Teen Night at the community pool, where we played Ping-Pong and sat on the hard wooden benches that lined the chain link fenced area. I felt like I was sitting on a garden hose but maintained my position for fear that the outline would be seen through my shorts. I kept thinking about my friend’s mother on the foot of that bed, ankles crossed, a flash of pale pink polish on her toenails. A million years later, when I heard about a girl several years older who faked sick to stay home from school and then slept with her boyfriend in her parents’ house, this was the bedroom I pictured, even though they had long since moved to California. I saw the bed, the chenille spread pulled up tight, pillows rolled and pressed against the scratched headboard. I saw the brown tiles of her bathroom floor, smelled the blast of central air and the lingering chlorine. My friend’s sixth-grade school picture was on the dresser in a heavy gold frame. At the height of first love, Saturday nights in parked cars or on the busted couch of somebody’s forsaken game room, the friction of adolescent passion driving me forward, I thought of that picture; the bed, the coolness, the distant glance, all insecurities and reservations temporarily brushed aside.
The day after my daughter was born, I woke to great relief, which was quickly followed by a fit of anger, a cold apprehension of what might have been or might not have been. Fifty years ago and maybe my child and I would have been the names with young ages on tombstones. Many times I had gone with my mother and grandmother to tend my grandfather’s grave; they weeded and planted, brushed the pine needles from his marble footmarker. My grandmother pushed a whirring handmower up and down the hill of his plot. I never knew him, her husband, my mother’s father, my grandfather, but I imagined him stretched out there beneath the dirt; I saw a young man in a World War One uniform even though I know he lived to be a very different man, a much older, frailer man, with wiry gray hair. On a nearby grave there was a tiny stone lamb and dates that equaled nothing, the baby born and died on the same day, the mother dead just one day later. The more I looked over the mossy slabs, the more I found. “Oh honey,” my grandmother said and squeezed my hand. “It is sad.” So many of them must have died for such simple, simple reasons.
I asked that the stitches in my abdomen be eternally blessed; I praised modern medicine, saluted and sang. I called everyone I knew or had heard about who had, in so many words, squatted out in the woods like an animal, gnawed tree bark and umbilical cord, stoically delivered in absolute isolation. “You idiot. You goddamned selfish idiot,” I raged and hung up before they knew who I was. In some places I am thought to have an accent.
Hurricane Andrew took the hotel in the Virgin Islands and all of the nearby time shares. I keep thinking of the place as if it still exists. I do the same with Joseph Sever. We moved a year after my daughter was born, and when we left, an August day much like the one of our arrival, he was out on the stoop wearing his panama hat and reading the Boston Globe.
The week before the move, we had finally done all of those things that visitors do: the bus tour, the battleship, the Old North Church. I spent a whole afternoon at the top of the Prudential building, my daughter tucked away in the little sack I wore strapped to my chest, as I fed quarter after quarter into the viewfinders. In a random glance toward Beacon Hill, I spotted the steeple of the church on our street, and from there it was easy to swing back and find our building, to travel up the red brick to the roofline. I found our bay window, the plant on the sill; I half expected to see myself enter the room, my abdomen round and hard and waiting. I had that same odd feeling that I get from time to time, the feeling that maybe I can pick up the phone and call my childhood friend or my grandmother at those memorized numbers long disconnected. That I can find a clean path into my childhood where I might race my bike, down the street and into the yard, the wheels spinning and clicking—a triangle cut from an aluminum pie pan clothes-pinned to a spoke. That I can run inside and find my parents, thirty years younger, younger than I am now, as they talk over some event that will soon be lost to that hour. I moved the lens just one hundredth of an inch, and there was Joseph’s living room, the outline of what might have been a cat.
We exchanged greetings over the next couple of years—Christmas cards, postcards. The last card to arrive was addressed to my daughter, an Easter card, one of those you open and confetti comes out. I hate those drop-what-you’re-doing-and-go-get-the-Dustbuster cards, and yet there I was, my daughter delighted by the sparkled shapes, while I imagined him there on Charles Street in one of the fancy card stores, thumbing through racks in search of the right one. The news that he died came from another neighbor in the building, and even then, seeing it all in print, it didn’t seem quite real. I couldn’t imagine the orphaned cats being given away or the years’ worth of warped books pulled from the kitchen cupboard, the dilapidated bedside lamp left on the curb in a heap of garbage bags along with The Heart of Darkness and all the makings of a thrown-together Christmas. Instead I saw, see, him out on the stoop or down at the corner grocery picking his fruit from a table out front, his breath visible and keeping time with the click of his heart.
My friend and I went to the cemetery to smoke cigarettes. She pedaled the bike that time. Her legs weren’
t as strong as mine, so we wobbled and nearly fell on the small dirt paths. It was a new cemetery, the kind where there are no raised stones, only flat slates of marble at the foot of each grave. The flowers, whether artificial or real, looked as if they had sprung up from the graves. People in our town liked the smooth new look and the serene white statue of Jesus in the center. But as I inhaled and exhaled, narrowed my eyes like I’d seen smokers do, I told my friend that I preferred the place my grandfather was buried. I liked the huge trees, perfect for tire swings and clubhouses, except they were in a cemetery. I liked the moss and the dates before I was born. Here, the people had started dying in the sixties, and it all seemed too close. I told my friend how my dad could palm a lit Camel nonfilter and hide it in his pants, how he had once done that in high school when the principal walked by. I had heard the story many times, and I had seen enough old photos to picture him there, his hair combed back high off his forehead—a pompadour—as he leaned, tall and thin, against the brick wall of the gymnasium. I turned my cigarette inward, heat near my hand, to demonstrate. My friend did the same, the fabric of her jacket singeing when she tried to slide her hand into her pocket. We smoked and smoked until our heads felt light, and then we each chewed three pieces of Teaberry gum and rubbed our hands in the yellow clay of a grave recently dug. Everywhere else there was perfect green grass, rolled out like a carpet, flowers sprouting up from the dead.
I think of that place every autumn when I kneel to plant bulbs, when I sprinkle a teaspoon of bonemeal into each hole, as my grandmother advised. And at Christmas I pull up Joseph’s scene, the walk to buy the tree, the brandy and makeshift adornments. I give Gwendolyn Gibson Girl hair and a rhinestone cigarette holder. I give her the face of my friend’s mother. “How old will you be when I’m one hundred?” my daughter asks, enunciating in a way I will never master, and I say, “One hundred and thirty one.” I catch myself looking at her in absolute amazement, that she is here and the time is now. A faster sperm and she wouldn’t be here; there would be another child or no child at all. No day beyond that moment would be exactly as I know it now. It might not be a bad life, just a different one. What we don’t know is enormous. “I want you to live forever,” she tells me. “I want a guinea pig and a Fantastic Flower kit. I want long wavy hair, and I want to be like Jesus and have people pray to the god of me forever.” I tell her that I would like nothing better, that it’s every young mother’s dream.
Final Vinyl Days Page 6