The Last First Day

by Carrie Brown

  You must alter the schema, Ruth, Dr. Wenning advised. Reject the sad ending. Concentrate on what is now, on the extra-or-dinary present!

  Afterward, they would go out for dinner at the Italian restaurant Dr. Wenning liked, where the owner kissed Dr. Wenning’s hand as if she were royalty and took her shabby old coat from her shoulders as if it were a full-length mink.

  Dr. Wenning spoke to him in rapid Italian; some of his relatives, too, had died in the war, she told Ruth.

  We have that in common, she said. Also the experience of national shame.

  Ruth and Dr. Wenning always ate the same thing on these occasions—eggplant Parmesan or spaghetti with vodka sauce—and shared a bottle of wine, and then Ruth would spend the night on the itchy little sofa in Dr. Wenning’s study at her house, driving back to Derry the next day feeling restored and more hopeful.

  I’m sorry, Ruth apologized to Dr. Wenning on one of these visits, after a long afternoon of complaining. All I do when I see you is woe-is-me. You just bring it out in me.

  You are not my patient, Ruth, Dr. Wenning said kindly. You are my friend. I want to listen to you. You listen to me as well, you know.

  Dr. Wenning was fond of quoting Whitman and Rilke, especially, and she gave Ruth many books over the years, mostly novels and poetry. Ruth also read lots of popular psychology books, though Dr. Wenning tried to discourage her from this.

  Enough Freud, Ruth! she would cry, springing up in frustration from behind her desk. What you need is novels. You need music, sex, food, dancing, wine, jokes …

  What do you call a cow, lying down? she said. Grrrrrround beef!

  On Dr. Wenning’s advice, Ruth played tennis with Peter as often as he could find time for it, and she walked three miles every day, learning the country roads and the paths around Derry. In her correspondence with friends, she tried to be entertaining, telling little stories about happenings at the school and describing the boys and the flora and the fauna. She looked up the names of the birds and the wild-flowers.

  She was a regular visitor at the school’s library, where she wandered self-consciously through the stacks. There were few women at Derry, and Ruth, with her red hair and height, felt herself especially noticeable. But she made her way through one or two novels a week, Dostoevsky and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Hardy. She toiled away at her novel and at her play, trying to have faith in herself and in the process, faith that all the creeping forward and crossing out and gusts of excitement and bleak periods of nothingness, when she couldn’t seem to imagine what came next, would end up finally in a complete story.

  On the night of that first horrible Christmas dinner with the bishop and the board of trustees, however, Ruth felt that all her weeks of determined effort—of self-improvement and patience, of taking care of Peter—had been a waste.

  She had made no progress in acquiring serenity or contentment. She was as full of wanting things—things she couldn’t exactly name—as ever. She was tired of housekeeping. She was tired of being just a wife. She was lonely.

  Beside her on the path, Peter took off his gloves and stuffed them in his coat pocket. He unbuttoned the top button of his overcoat and blew out a tired breath.

  Ruth watched these movements through narrowed eyes.

  As usual, she thought, Peter would not fight with her. He never fought with her.

  She was sorry that she’d spoken. It wasn’t Peter’s fault that those old men were rude. Why hadn’t she just tried harder to be nice to them that night? Why hadn’t she wanted to charm them? What was wrong with a little charm, anyway?

  At last Peter said, Well, you don’t have to mention those, um, darker aspects. He tried to take her arm.

  For gosh sake, Ruth, he said. Slow down.

  She thought but didn’t say: But if I don’t mention those darker aspects, then there’s no story.

  Instead, she said, No one ever asks what I’m interested in or what I studied or what I hope to do with my life. It’s as if they think that meeting you is the only thing of consequence ever to have happened to me.

  Peter didn’t say anything.

  She’d hurt his feelings, she knew, but despite her effort to be rational, she felt too wild to care.

  She wrenched her scarf from around her neck, where it felt like it was strangling her. Her stride could be longer than Peter’s, if she wanted, and all she wanted at that moment was to stalk away from him, to run through the snow.

  If I can’t ever tell anyone the true story, she burst out finally, then no one will ever know me.

  It had begun to rain, a fine icy sleet almost invisible except in the halos of light around the lampposts along the path.

  You can tell them, Peter said, trying again for her hand. You can.

  She snatched her hand away.

  She knew better than that, she thought. Some stories you simply could not let out into the open.

  That night when they got home, Peter hung up his coat and began to gather his books from the table.

  Ruth, still in her coat, watched him balance his grade book on top of the stack and tuck it under his arm. Where are you going? she said.

  I’m going upstairs, he said. I need to do a little work.

  Ruth said, The semester’s over, Peter.

  He didn’t look at her. I know, he said.

  Fine, Ruth said. Go ahead. Go do your important work.

  He didn’t say anything. She watched him leave the room, closing the door quietly behind him. She threw her gloves at it.

  She stood in the center of their room, listening, expecting to hear soon the sound of Peter’s old typewriter, but there was only silence from overhead.

  10

  The woods into which Ruth wanders early one lambent June morning nearly sixty year later, when she is eighty-five years old, are filled with ghost ferns and lady ferns and wild columbine and wild ginger, species of plants common to the part of the Adirondacks in which she and Peter made their home following Peter’s retirement from Derry. Ruth, always the student, always in search of knowledge, purchased dog-eared field guides to the area at the local library’s annual sale when they first arrived. She has struggled over the years to discern one fern from another.

  The Robust Male fern, she has fretted to Peter, looks inconveniently a lot like the Lady in Red fern.

  That’s us, Peter said. The Robust Male and the Lady in Red.

  Ruth rolls her eyes at him, but she laughs. He is so corny, she thinks.

  She sets off just after seven thirty, in the morning’s delicate light, along the fire road that runs past their house. It is a familiar path, a mowed blaze perhaps twenty feet wide, thick in midsummer with goldenrod and purple ironweed but now shorn low and easily traveled. The dog—an old, fat, sheepdog-beagle mix named Nanny, whom they’d agreed to adopt from a neighbor after his wife’s death and his subsequent move to an assisted-living facility near his son in Florida—comes with her.

  The dog worships Ruth and Peter equally and hates to have either of them out of her sight. She has powerful herder genes in her, as Peter has observed. She is tormented by Ruth’s habit of solitary walks, wanting equally to be with Ruth and to be with Peter, who more and more often stays behind these days, content to sit on the deck and read—or just look, Ruth thinks—while Ruth takes what Peter calls her constitutional.

  Ruth has done a lot of coaxing and cajoling, a lot of handing over of dog biscuits, to get Nanny to come with her this morning. For several hundred yards, for as long as the house remains within sight, the dog runs back and forth between Ruth, making her way slowly up the clearing, and Peter, sitting on the deck, leaning forward in his chair to shoo Nanny away when she returns to him, assuring her that she will be happier on a walk with Ruth.

  Ruth turns at one point to call Nanny again. From the deck, she sees Peter stand up to lift his hand to wave good-bye to her.

  She waves back.

  Finally, the fire road drops over the rise, and the house is out of sight at last, as is Peter with his
ravaged face, a consequence of the disease that has failed yet to kill him, though it has transformed his once handsome, gentle features into a rough wooden carving of a face, a face on a totem pole, Ruth thinks. She can still see in her husband the man he once was—she will always think him beautiful—but strangers often stop at the sight of him, nearly seven feet tall, hands like big spiders flapping at the ends of his frail wrists, heavy head balanced on his warped, elongated spine. His eyes are hooded and sleepy-looking. When he smiles, his jaw unhinges.

  Come on, Nanny, Ruth calls. Come with me.

  The woods on either side of the fire road are crossed with sunny ridges and deep, velvet glades, pierced by long columns of filtered sunlight and filled with the trickling sounds of water, where springs bubble forth here and there among the tumbled rocks, their arrangement the silent, motionless aftermath of once massive glacial upheaval. Ruth has read about the geologic history of the area, about plate tectonics and sedimentary structure. She knows that this place where she stands once rippled with the fluvial processes of the Susquehanna River. It feels so solid underfoot, she thinks; it is difficult to imagine these hills in motion. She feels small as she walks, aware of her footprints, the tiny, receding figure she must have seemed to Peter, standing on the deck and waving.

  The day is already warm, and Ruth moves out of the bright sunlight and into the dappled shade at the edge of the fire road. It will be hot by the time she returns, she knows. She has brought water, carried in a special flask with a comfortable padded shoulder strap, which Peter gave her last Christmas.

  The dog following closely at Ruth’s heels is panting, her barrel chest heaving. In the end, it is more troubling for Nanny to have Ruth straying far from home than it is to leave Peter behind safely at the house, and she has elected to follow Ruth, but Ruth knows that it was a painful choice.

  Poor old Nanny, Ruth says to the dog.

  She slows, to allow Nanny time to recover.

  You’re doing a fine job, she says, stopping finally to pat the dog and stroke her back.

  The dog, never good at making eye contact, averts her gaze but moves closer to Ruth’s leg as if to protect her from threat.

  I promise we won’t go far, Ruth says. Poor old Nanny, she says again. You’re such an old worrier.

  Sometimes Ruth is gone on one of her walks for a whole morning—she gets a second wind some days, and she feels as if she could walk forever—but it makes Peter worry if she is gone too long. She will not go far today, she thinks. She is tired.

  But how easy it is to be led deeper into the woods, which this morning, Ruth begins to notice, are filled with the strange spiral webs of orb weavers. Some of them are a foot or more in diameter, utterly fantastical things, and they hover in the woods as far as she can see in every direction. The finely spun rings of the webs are backlit by the rising sun, the empty bull’s-eyes of their centers surrounded by halos of filament suspended among the branches of the wild hydrangea and the elderberry.

  She marvels at the gleaming architecture strung all around her. She can see as many as a hundred of them—no, two hundred, she thinks, or three—gazing in astonishment.

  Look, Nanny, she says.

  She wants, for a moment, to return to the house and get Peter, to bring him here to see this extraordinary sight, but she knows, even as she thinks of it, that by the time she can return and rouse him, the light will have changed and the webs will have vanished. Or, not so much vanished but become invisible. It is only an accident of the light that she has happened upon this strange phenomenon, this wonderland.

  He can’t really make such a journey with her anymore, in any case.

  She bends to inspect a web nearby, sees a single fly netted in its center, wrapped in a sarcophagus of silk thread.

  Behind her, when she glances back, Ruth can still see the brighter light of the clearing on the fire road, but the ferns grow so thickly here that it is not difficult to drift into the woods and to move among the big old trees. Nanny comes behind her, trampling a heedless path.

  After a while, Ruth is thirsty. She unscrews the cap from her water bottle, drinks deeply. She looks down at Nanny, her mottled tongue hanging, and she pours some water into her cupped palm for the dog to drink.

  Nanny laps at Ruth’s palm, her tongue thick and surprisingly strong.

  As Ruth bends over, she feels her legs waver beneath her.

  Let’s sit, Ruth thinks. What’s the hurry?

  Come, Nanny. She puts her arm around the dog’s soft, heaving flank.

  Hours and hours of light, she thinks, lying back among the ferns and staring up into the cathedral space. Green days. Mineral nights, full of sparks.

  What could be more nicer than this? she says to Nanny.

  Silence.

  She opens her eyes. She wants to sit up.

  What could be nicer, she corrects herself, surprised. She knows better than that.

  High above her, the trees are rocking. Ruth feels, for an instant, a giant genuflection of the earth under her back, as if the mountains are boiling, swelling beneath the surface. Then all is still again. But she realizes that she cannot move her hands or her legs.

  Her eyes traverse the green swaying overhead.

  The dog’s breath on her face is, briefly, hot and foul. She turns aside to avert her mouth; she wants first to vomit and then to laugh. Nanny is gone.

  Come back, she thinks.

  A moment later she feels Nanny’s worried tongue on her neck, along her hairline, against her closed eyes, then a flickering of something—fingertips—against her cheekbones and across her chest and arms. A tickle. A plummeting descent—she feels her feet skitter against shale—toward sleep. She fights it, knowing.

  She does not want to leave Peter.

  Then she is awake. Once more she opens her eyes—it is so bright, though, she cannot open them for more than a moment—and it is Peter, looking down into her face.

  She smiles at him—beloved Peter—and at the green, glowing world beyond him.

  Shining day, she thinks. Perfect light. What a spectacle it all is. How happy she has been, after all.

  It is past noon by the time the dog finally abandons her position at Ruth’s side, having sat there through the morning, snapping at flies as they approached Ruth’s nose and open eyes and mouth. She hurries home, following her trail.

  In the flat light of midday, the host of spiral orbs, as Ruth predicted, is no longer visible in the woods.

  When the dog appears, weaving rapidly down the fire road toward the house, nose to the ground as if tracking prey, Peter is standing on the deck under the hot sun, both hands gripping the railing.

  Ruth? he calls when he sees Nanny. Ruth!

  But the dog, he sees finally, is alone. No one follows her down the clearing.

  11

  The night after that awful dinner at the headmaster’s house, Peter having retreated upstairs to the attic with his grade book and his papers under his arm, Ruth stared at the door through which he had disappeared.

  She wanted to throw something.

  She kicked the table leg, hard, hurting her foot, and then she looked around, her chest heaving. There were plates on the shelf, two glasses upturned in the dish drainer … but no, nothing breakable. She couldn’t bring herself to throw anything breakable.

  She went over to the dresser beside their bed, wrenched open the drawers and began emptying them, tumbling blouses and brassieres and socks and Peter’s sweaters to the floor. From the closet she snatched shirts from their hangers, hurling them behind her. She picked up a book and threw it as hard as she could onto the bed. Then she threw another, and another.

  She got down on her knees and heaved Peter’s shoes out of the closet into the room behind her.

  She paused. She felt sick, sweat on her forehead. What else? What else could she do?

  She tugged the bedclothes with their cargo of books to the floor. She beat a pillow savagely against the table, the sofa, the armchair she had la
boriously recovered in pretty orange fabric, hurting her fingers for days with the awful upholstery tacks.

  The pillow exploded. Feathers filled the air.

  She went to the bookshelf and grabbed the stack of pages that was the play she’d been writing, having long since given up on the novel. She paused for a minute; she would never be able to put it all back together … but, oh, what a pathetic thing it was anyway, her stupid play—and then she flung the pages onto the floor.

  They fanned out, sliding across the floorboards.

  Standing in the middle of the room, she looked around.

  There was nothing else she could touch without doing real damage, she realized. She had to get out of there.

  She listened. Upstairs there was silence, though Peter must have heard her, she thought.

  Had heard her and didn’t care.

  She ran, stumbling, down the steep staircase. At the bottom, she opened the door and then slammed it so hard behind her that it bounced back open and struck the wall, where it stood open. She heard the report of it hitting the wall behind her, but she was already running.

  • • •

  Later, when she got back home, she found Peter sitting on the floor.

  Clothes and feathers and shoes were everywhere around him, the contents of the bookcases in a heap.

  A bottle of Scotch stood on the table.

  He looked up when she came in the room.

  In his lap, he held a stack of papers, the pages of her play. He’d begun sorting the pages into little piles, she saw, trying to put them in order.

  There were feathers stuck to the back of his sweater and one in his hair.

  He looked away from her. You scared me, he said.

  I know, she said. I scared myself. I’m sorry.

  Peter took a drink from the glass on the floor beside him, and then he got to his feet. He walked over to the bed and heaped the covers back onto the mattress. Then he crossed the room and pulled Ruth roughly against him.