The Birthdays

by Heidi Pitlor

  Joe continued driving, weaving in and out of the lane. “We should stop,” she said again.

  “I suppose we should.” He didn’t have a care in the world. He slowed the car and pulled into a gas station. Across the small lot, a pudgy boy dressed in stained shorts and a T-shirt stood beside a pickup truck full of corn.

  Joe walked inside the small building to pay and Ellen exchanged eye contact with the boy. Behind him a man appeared, carrying a box of something. He wore no shoes, and a cigarette hung from his lips. Ellen turned away and pressed her fingers into the middle of her forehead—a headache was coming and her legs began to cramp. Suddenly the boy stood right on the other side of her window, smiling dumbly. He might have been something—mentally retarded? “Christ,” she said, and rolled down the window. “Yes?”

  “You got any money?”

  Was he robbing her? He had no gun, no knife that she could see.

  “Ma’am, you got any money?”

  She fished around for her purse in the back seat. He stood there watching her, obviously with no good sense of what he was doing. She wanted to ask him why, what did he want with her money, did he even know? But she was afraid of saying something that might agitate or confuse him. Reaching inside her wallet, she handed him three dollars, all she had, and he took it and shrugged.

  Joe was now walking back toward the car. “Hey!” he yelled, and rushed forward, stumbling and almost falling over something.

  The boy padded off and Joe followed him but seemed to suddenly change his mind and headed back to the car. “What was that?” he asked, leaning his head in her direction as he went to the gas tank.

  “I don’t know. I gave him a couple dollars.”

  “For what? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I don’t know what he wanted,” she said.

  When Joe finished, he got back in the car, turned on the ignition and said, “We were going the right way.” He shifted the car into reverse. “Did he threaten you?”

  “No, no. Don’t we need to be on a smaller highway?”

  “This used to be one,” Joe said. “Did he demand your wallet?”

  “I don’t know what he wanted. He just wasn’t right upstairs,” she said. She held her hands together on her lap. “All the different ways that people can be, that children can be. It’s awful, if you really stop to consider it.”

  “Of course it is. So don’t, then.”

  They drove past motels and hotels, convenience stores. “I don’t recognize a damned thing,” Ellen said.

  Joe began to drift toward the lane markers and then the guardrails. Ellen’s nerves were shot. They’re just shot, she said to herself, and she imagined an enormous gust of wind blowing into her and causing something to burst from her like an explosion of water. “I’m shot,” she mumbled to Joe.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said. She pressed her fingertips into her forehead again, closed her eyes and made herself think once more of her family. Daniel would be a decent father, though he was so consumed with his illustrating. (Was it art? Was it really art if it was made only to sell products or services?) He had the tendency to be a little aloof like Joe, but he too was a fundamentally good person. She couldn’t even begin to imagine being a parent in a wheelchair. Every week or so Daniel and Brenda came to dinner and it killed her to see her son like this. The squeak of the chair, the sound of the wheels in the next room. When Daniel got stuck going around a corner or the wheels jammed, she had to remind herself to breathe and move on, look away, do something else. She’d tried to explain it to Joe and he’d nodded vacantly—Of course it’s difficult to see your son in pain—and said Daniel would be fine, he’d still live a good life, the outcome could’ve been worse. Bland comments that left her miffed and wanting more. They were supposed to be grateful that he’d survived and could still work and live a relatively normal life. But it’s more than difficult, she’d say now if it came up. Joe would look at her, confused, and she’d say, Sometimes just seeing him wrings me dry, it absolutely kills me, and he’d gaze at her through narrowed eyes as if she were being dramatic, and she would want to smack him for the dismissiveness, the ability to reside within these bland clichés. Somewhere he undoubtedly felt pain about their son, but he stifled it. As he had to, as she should have tried to and did sometimes, but the sting inevitably came raging back. She grew tired just thinking about the whole thing.

  Thanks to Jake’s job shuffling stocks around (she could never understand exactly what it was that he did), he had more money than the rest of them combined—more money than anyone she knew, really. His family would never want for anything. Of the three, though, he was the most sensitive and therefore the least content. He always felt a little left out—and he always was, she supposed, given his overly aggressive attempts at making people like him, as well as his strict values and expectations of others. Even when they were younger, he worried endlessly about Hilary and her bad behavior and her motley group of friends. (They smoked, Ellen now acknowledged. They drank and probably tried drugs. She’d never wanted to admit it back then.) Jake had lectured his sister, leaving nothing more for Ellen to say: the friends you make, the choices you make now, that sort of thing. He was a person guided by rules and morals, and felt good and bad in the depths of his bones. Running a stoplight, jaywalking: these were evils to him. And the goods were holy: family, love, work. It was surprising he wasn’t religious, the way he ordered his life. But the rule of man, the rule of law—Ellen supposed these were his religions.

  She’d mentioned it to MacNeil recently, and then they’d discussed what they considered to be the goods of life. “Intelligence, art, beauty. Love,” he’d said.

  “Food,” she’d added, and handed him a plate of vine-ripened tomatoes and mozzarella. She sat down across from him and they ate quietly, and she tried to think of something clever to say.

  “You had your hair done,” he said.

  “I did. Yesterday.”

  “I like it,” he said. “I can see more of your eyes now.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “It’s definitely a good thing. One of the big goods.” He kept his gaze on his plate. She wanted to ask him to keep going—did he mean her eyes specifically, or eyes in general, a woman’s eyes, what? Was she one of life’s big goods for him? But she grew nervous about where such a question might lead. What if he laughed at her and said of course he’d been talking about eyes in general, what had she been thinking? Now that she thought of it, maybe she should have just come out and set the cards on the table, asked him if he too noticed that the air between them had changed.

  Joe slid his hands around the steering wheel. She looked out at the houses along the street, at two young kids playing soccer in their yard. “Do you think that poor boy back at the gas station had a home?” she asked.

  “He had his grandpa with him. I’m sure they live somewhere.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I’ve got it, Ell. Don’t worry.”

  And only a few moments later she recognized everything: the town hall, the colossal flag in front, the neon ICE CREAM sign missing the R, the small parking lot and the ferry slip. She was amazed they’d made it, and in even less time than they’d planned.

  Joe pulled their car under the shade of a thick oak. He opened his door, hurried to pull the bags from the back of the car and rushed away as if completely forgetting he had a wife. He shoved past a small group of people stepping out of the next car and plowed his way out of Ellen’s field of vision. She decided to stay where she was and let him realize she was not beside him.

  She turned to Babe in the back seat, now asleep in his shell. Did Joe assume she’d follow him, carrying Babe’s enormous cage and the remaining bag as well as her purse and jacket? The turtle’s clay-colored head and arms and legs pulled beneath him, he resembled a rock. The animal was oblivious to her or anything else, for that matter. But perhaps he wasn’t. What if Babe in fact understood everything? He’d
been in the room when she spoke on the phone with MacNeil. Babe had watched her with his unblinking eyes, the black pits unmoving beneath thick, hooded lids. He was an ugly creature, really, an animal of no color or fur, no purring or singing. Joe liked to point out the ringed pattern on his shell—Like a face, see? The eyes, the nose, the mouth—and the calmness, the gentleness of a creature that moved so slowly. What’s the rush? Joe would say when Babe inched his way across their kitchen floor. What, when it comes down to it, is really the rush? Babe had seen everything. He was aware of her feelings for MacNeil. The turtle was not going anywhere. He was sitting there, unmoving, unblinking, communicating that she could drift anywhere she wanted. She could fall in love at this late age, she could leave her life as she’d known it, go anywhere, but I, Babe, am not leaving Joe. I am not running off anywhere. Like a rock.

  “Ell,” Joe was saying. “Ellen.” He was standing just outside her door. “We’re all set. Come on now.” She hoisted herself from her seat, followed him around the back and said, “Take it slowly. One thing at a time.” He gently lifted Babe’s cage into the air.

  They had twenty minutes until the boat would leave, and they found an empty bench in the corner of the parking lot. Joe stopped for a moment, clearly considering whether to place Babe’s cage on the bench or offer it to her. He paused and then carefully lowered the cage onto the ground. At once grateful and annoyed, she dropped the suitcase she was carrying. “I’m shot,” she said again, who cared if he knew what she meant, and he nodded absently. They sat and watched a line begin to form at the ticket counter. Joe set his hand on her leg. It felt solid and sturdy, almost separate from him, as if right then it was the only thing holding her against the earth.

  —

  Liz had napped while Jake unpacked the groceries, made the beds, opened the windows and set up the plywood ramp over the front step. Now he looked down at her on the couch, her head against her chest, her lips slightly parted, and he draped a thin blanket over her legs, careful not to wake her. He decided to go for a walk on the beach behind the house. He grabbed his sunglasses off the coffee table and headed out.

  By the water, he found a yellow pacifier and turned it over in his hands. It was encased in wet sand, and he brushed it off. Jake kept a wooden box of odd things he’d found, things that for some reason seemed wrong to throw away: an old copy of the Bible he’d found in a parking lot, a dog collar outside his office, a tiny mitten, a photograph of an elderly couple. He tried to remember to bring the box wherever he went, as he was constantly finding items that belonged in it. He imagined each had a story, a rightful owner and maybe even a reason for being left behind, and collecting them made him feel good, like the one savior of all these forgotten things. Liz didn’t know about his collection—she’d have thought it sentimental. She hated unnecessary clutter, things kept only because a person felt guilty getting rid of them. Such things, she’d say, kept one needlessly bound to the past. But Jake shoved the pacifier in his pocket, glad he’d remembered to bring the box this weekend. He often forgot it, and tended to find the most heartbreaking things when he was without it.

  He crouched before the tide, dipped his fingers in the icy water and recoiled. Maine water was invariably frigid, but it never failed to surprise him. He turned to walk back to the house, noting the faint smell of fir trees. He could hardly wait for his family’s arrival and to hear what they thought of his house, which none of them had seen. He looked forward to handing them each a drink and guiding them to the back porch, watching them gaze out at his little patch of ocean under the sunset. What a change this was from the house where he’d grown up. That small, crowded Cape with the stained carpets, the practically antique appliances, the rotting roof. Last year he’d offered his father some money to fix the roof or buy some new appliances or, better yet, both, but Joe had adamantly refused. Jake remembered back in high school joining forces with his mother as she tried to convince Joe to tear up the carpet in the living room and put in hardwood floors. Joe’d received an unexpectedly large bonus at the car lot, but he’d wanted to replace a cracked toilet with the money. Daniel and Hilary didn’t much care about the matter, but Ellen and Jake pleaded for the new floor. Jake’s classmate Henry lived in a large house that had only hardwoods and Jake thought it made the place seem even bigger and somehow cleaner and more elegant. In the end, though, the new toilet won out and that matted beige carpet stayed. Jake stopped for a second just before the path that led to his back porch. Now he had two houses of his own filled with hardwood floors. He gazed ahead at the newly patched roof, the freshly stained clapboards, and reminded himself that he’d tried to help his parents. He’d done what he could.

  Liz was up now and slicing mushrooms. She’d turned on the radio and he could hear the low buzz of someone talking when he stepped into the kitchen. A shred of something—a carrot, he soon saw—hung from her hair by her ear, and for some reason it saddened him. Jake reached over to remove it, and she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

  “They’re saying rain.”

  “No,” he said. “It looks all right out there. Just a little overcast.”

  “A storm moving in later, I guess, and then rain all weekend.”

  “Tell me you’re kidding,” he said. A few days ago the forecast had been for only sun. He’d planned to take his family out in a fishing boat he’d chartered on Saturday and to go to the beach on Sunday. “I didn’t hear anything about a storm.”

  “I’m kidding,” she said flatly, and popped a slice of mushroom in his mouth. “It’s okay. We’ll play games or cards. Maybe it won’t rain the whole weekend.” She turned and set the knife on the counter.

  “Mom hates games. She says they’re just a substitute for conversation.”

  “We could watch movies. We’ll figure something out.” Liz was only this flexible when he was not. If he’d been the one shrugging off the weather right now, she’d be the one pacing the kitchen, trying to come up with alternate plans.

  The Adirondack chairs sat stacked in the corner of the porch, and he went to set them out beneath the overhang so no one would get wet if it rained. He placed each about a foot apart, and noted there weren’t enough for the seven of them, so he went to the basement to look for the folding chairs they’d bought last year. Down here were remnants of past summers—a beach umbrella leaning against the wall, rusty cans of bug spray, a basketball he’d had since he was a kid. He used to play one-on-one with his brother, who always beat him handily and would then proceed to taunt him. Once Daniel fired the basketball at Jake’s head and gave him a swollen, painful bruise that lasted weeks. (What made Daniel do such things? Jake vaguely remembered having said something desperate like, “So you’re good at basketball? I get much better grades than you.”) They would likely never play basketball again. Jake would never lose to him again. Thank God, Jake said aloud, and then blanched at his words. It was a strange concept still, Daniel in a wheelchair, and as much as the thought saddened Jake, and it did, profoundly some days, it also remained plainly incomprehensible. Jake could still remember his brother wrestling him to the ground whenever they fought over whatever it was that used to rile them. Just after the accident, Jake tried to communicate his mixed feelings about everything (“After all, you used to beat the life out of me, which isn’t to say I’m glad that you’re in this state, but it’s just so strange to see you this way, you, of all people. You’ve always been such a physical person, you know? This must be devastating for you”), and Daniel, not surprisingly, told him that he wasn’t exactly helping. Jake tried to clarify and expand upon what he meant—that he’d always been a little scared of his big brother, that throughout his childhood Jake had only wanted his approval and friendship, really, but Daniel just sat there, nearly expressionless, and soon Jake gave up. This clearly wasn’t the time. After all, Daniel had his own aftershock to handle—he didn’t need to deal with his brother’s issues too.

  Jake set the basketball inside a box and looked around the bas
ement. On top of a stack of books, he found a copy of the Kama Sutra. He’d bought it a few years ago as a sort of joke, when sex had become tedium, nothing more than the means to an elusive end. He’d stocked up on porn magazines, but he kept these to himself—Liz had never been particularly adventuresome or curious in the bedroom. Even before they’d begun trying to get pregnant, their sex life had been fairly sparse. He now remembered he’d hidden a few magazines here—in his underwear drawer, was it? At any rate, buying the Kama Sutra was his first try at expressing his desire for better, or at least more varied, sex to Liz. He’d found an old copy of the book at a used bookstore, something that made it even more perfectly ridiculous and thus somehow less overtly demanding. He’d wrapped it in leopard-skin-patterned paper and had planned to give it to her that night after work. He’d gotten home in a good mood, having devised a way to save far more than expected on the firm’s quarterly taxes and then later been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Liz was sitting on their bed drinking a glass of wine and doodling furiously on a sketch pad, wrecked by the news that another of her friends had just conceived. Not once since then had the opportunity arisen for him to give Liz the book. Eventually he set it aside to be taken to the island, thinking the moment might arise here. Now he brought it upstairs and found her sitting on the porch. He sneaked up behind her. “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “What?” She looked back at him, her face upside down.

  “Close them,” he said, and she did. He placed the book in her hands, and when she glanced down, she smiled at the wrapping paper and tore it off. When she saw the title, she scowled. “The Kama Sutra?”

  “I bought it for you a while back as a joke. When sex was becoming, you know, kind of redundant.”

  “Good Lord,” she snorted as she peeled off the wrapping paper. “Some joke.”