by Thea Lim
“Why?”
“I always sat with my back to Marta’s point of view.”
The boatman drove fast and the horizon kept changing, the flat sea giving way to spiky coastline. She tried to call up what she had seen yesterday over his shoulder as he cried. There was no drop from the shore to the shallows. Just water, without the ceremony of a cliff. The coast on their left zigged and zagged, and then made a sharp right turn into the Gulf.
“Almost there,” she said. “Almost, almost . . .”
While the rowboat had floated on the whim of the waves with only the rope to rely on, she had seen what Marta meant about it being the end. That right turn of coast cut off the rest of the country so completely that, even though she lived on the beach on the other side, if someone said there was nothing but outer space beyond, she could have believed them. You’d think the end of America would be some forlorn place, but it was wide-open and beautiful. It was otherworldly and reaching, like the sand was stretching out its arms to touch somebody.
Then the motorboat lined up just right with the land, and Polly put her hand on Norberto’s arm and said, “Here. Right here.”
They stood single file and watched as the end of the world came into view. It stayed for only a second, and then the seascape shape-shifted, and what Marta had seen disappeared.
APRIL 1980
* * *
Frank has always liked to collect things. Baseball cards, stamps, coins. Once, when he was a substitute history teacher, he gave every student a penny, and asked them to look at the date on their coin and relate the most important thing that happened in their life that year. What was their personal history?
None of them could come up with much. They said a lot of “I dunno, I was four.” He tried to prompt them. “Was that the year you learned to read? Maybe your parents got divorced?” The students settled into a sullen silence. At the end of class, they all carefully returned their pennies. “No, no, keep them,” Frank said, but they wouldn’t.
Frank says that collecting is a kind of journaling, a way of keeping track of time. Polly and Frank play a game: Polly takes an album of Frank’s baseball cards and picks any card on any random page and says, “Where did you get this one?” No matter how many times Polly tries, Frank has a story for every one.
“I traded Johnny for this one.”
“This one is from the first time my dad took me to a sports memorabilia store. I was in heaven.”
“This one, the Rollie Fingers rookie card? We bought it together, don’t you remember? At that Cheektowaga flea market? You were wearing a huge barrette in your hair.”
Frank collects other, curious things. He still has the bottle cap from the first beer he ever drank, with Carlo. One night they are having dinner at a pizza place and Frank leaves his wallet open on the red-checked tablecloth, and a ticket stub slides out of a rip in the lining. Before Frank can return it to its hiding place, Polly picks it up.
“Is this from when we went to see Superman?”
“Yes,” he says, sheepishly drawing out the vowel.
“This is a two-year-old ticket stub. Why do you have this?”
“Not even eighteen months! Not two years. It was the first movie we ever saw together.”
“You’re nuts.”
Later, as they are walking down the almost-springtime street, arm in arm, Polly says, “How did you know you should keep the ticket stub?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you know that the first movie we ever saw together wouldn’t be the last movie? You keep things before you know they’re worth keeping. We could have broken up the next week.”
“Then I would have thrown out the ticket stub.”
“But say we break up tomorrow. Think of all the things you’ll have to throw away. You’ll have to go through every pocket of every jacket you own, looking for important ticket stubs and pencils and bits of my hair. You’re making things so much worse for yourself.” She ends in a laugh, to show him she is only joking around, but her knuckles are nestled into his ribs and she feels his torso stiffen.
“Are we going to break up tomorrow?”
“Of course not, silly.” She should drop it, but she can’t help herself. She truly wants to know. “But how do you know something bad won’t happen, something to make nice memories into bad ones?”
They haven’t told anyone about their plans to marry. She wanted to keep it a secret until she graduated next year. She thought that would be more romantic. Only recently has she realized her choice might have had the opposite effect. Another time, he might have answered her question with something like I’ll always have love for you, even if it doesn’t work out. But since Polly moved, their easy way with each other has strained.
“With your lousy attitude, I guess I don’t know. You know, some girls might actually find it sweet I keep things.”
“Maybe you just stay with me because you’re trapped now. It would take too long to purge your life of me.” She means this to be teasing, flirtatious. But Frank pulls his arm away.
“Must be nice, to know someone loves you so securely.”
She tries to salvage their evening after that, believing she can still turn back the night to before they left the restaurant. But when they get into bed and she slips her fingers under his waistband, he pushes her hand away. It will be another two weeks before the next visit, and it is unbearable that the time to mend this new rift before it sets has come and gone. Her distress comes across as disinterest in his departure.
“I think we have different ways of expressing love?” Polly tells Donna over the phone, when Donna asks what the problem is.
“What does that mean? So why don’t you just go ahead and ‘express love’ the way he does?”
Polly wishes they had a real, concrete problem, instead of this amorphous, teenage disparity.
“I want to be myself with him.”
“Don’t nitpick,” Donna says. “You’ll drive him away, and don’t you know love is hard to come by?”
Polly and Frank decide to take a long weekend trip together. It is the end of winter but not yet spring, and Polly wants to go to Florida. But Frank says they should go to see the cherry trees in bloom in DC. Florida is nice anytime, but the cherry trees blossom only once a year. He used to go there with his grandma when he was a kid; Polly will love it. She doesn’t know why he thinks this.
Everything about the planning process is fraught. Polly wants to come back early to see Donna on Easter Monday; Frank complains about cutting their time short.
“But we’re going to take lots of other holidays together,” Polly says.
“Are we?” Frank asks in a maudlin tone that Polly can’t dignify.
“You have to coddle men,” Donna says. “They’re weak.”
* * *
“Let’s stop for dinner in some lost spot,” Polly says.
“We don’t have time to get lost or we’ll get to the hotel too late,” Frank says.
“Let’s lie in bed together all morning,” Polly says.
“But I made us a schedule so we can make the most of our time,” Frank says.
On Saturday morning they sit with their feet wrapped in the hotel covers, drinking coffee and watching Mighty Mouse, and for the first time, Polly feels Frank release. “This is nice,” he says, and Polly says, “Hm.” She doesn’t look at him or make a big deal, in case it breaks the spell. But then there is a commercial break and Frank takes their mugs into the bathroom and puts on his shoes.
“What are you doing?” Polly asks.
“We have to go: I booked us on a nine-thirty bus tour. I told you, did you forget?”
“Can’t we stay awhile?”
“You don’t really want to waste our whole trip sitting in the hotel.”
Polly can see Frank regrets these words the moment they hit air, as clear as if he’s said it out loud. She goes for the throat.
“What’s the rush? Why are you making out as if it’s our last day on
earth? Am I missing something? Does one of us have a terminal illness and you forgot to tell me?”
“Why are you so sarcastic? You live six hours away! I supported your decision to move, and now I’m the bad guy because I want to spend the little time we have together doing something, instead of piddling it away?”
“I can’t live in this state of heightened emotion, as if it’s always our last day together.”
They talk at the same time.
“It is always our last day together. We don’t get to see each other every day!”
“It is never our last day together! This is just the beginning.”
“We have limited time together. What’s so wrong with admitting that?”
“Fine. Soon you and me will be over. The world will fade away. Everyone will die. Are you happy now?”
The phone on the bedside table rings, a sudden, shocking clang.
“Hello,” Polly says.
“This is a friendly reminder that the tour bus boards from the lobby in five minutes.”
“For God’s sake.” Polly hangs up the phone. “What are you so afraid of?”
Frank sits down. There is a luggage bench waiting to catch him, but he is going down, whether or not there’s anything there. He looks about to cry, and her irritation turns to shame.
She knows the phrase she needs, the thing to say to comfort him, but she can’t figure out fast enough how to explain its meaning.
When Polly’s mother died, a parade of adults told her that her mother would live on, always, in her heart. Every day she would cut school and go to the woods. She would lie flat on her back, the wide weave of her jacket collecting all the leaves on the forest floor, the sky mercilessly close, and it was an overwhelming responsibility to be the single safeguard of another’s continued existence on earth. Frank resurrects this time in her life. His meticulous archiving, as if otherwise everything will disappear, a phobia of forgetting.
After weeks of coming home with twigs in her hair, Donna said to her, “If you’re having sex with boys in the woods and you get pregnant, so help me God.” Polly started crying, which was regular, and Donna ignored her, setting the table and aggressively stirring, but when the crying continued until Polly’s bowl of hamburger soup was cold, finally Donna said, “What is it? What is it?”
Donna had so little patience for anything foolish. But Polly told her anyway: “If I forget my mom, she’ll be gone.”
To Polly’s surprise, Donna took her hand and spoke in the low, threatening voice she used when emotional. She said, “Once something’s been done, it can’t be undone. Your mother had a life, and that’s not up to you.”
It was an idea that brought Polly the deepest solace. No matter what happens, the past has a permanence. The past is safe.
Polly wants to say to Frank, Once something’s been done, it can’t be undone. But he might not hear it the right way. Maybe to him it would sound bleak.
Outside their window, the tour bus is honking its horn.
Their faces are still red when they get on the bus, and they sit like strangers, overcome by embarrassment and sadness. They pass the Washington Monument, the White House, the National Mall, and the Lincoln Memorial without speaking. As they pass over the Potomac River, she puts her arm around him, consoling him in the face of the dissolution that threatens them. When they go under a bridge, just before Arlington Cemetery, Frank lifts the camera and takes a photo of the glass in the moment that it holds their reflection, as they pass through the dark.
They hurry off the bus at the cemetery, because they only have a few minutes before the tour resumes, and Frank promised his mother a photo of the two of them out front, to send to Grandpa. The camera is out of film, and while Frank rummages through their bag for a fresh canister, Polly pops the back of the camera open. Then she yelps and slams it shut again and looks at Frank with wet eyes.
“What’s wrong? You forgot to rewind the film?”
She nods.
“It’s okay.” He pats her arm. “Only the last few shots will be ruined. The rest of the roll will survive.”
But that photo of them on the bus was the last on the roll, and now it’s gone forever. For the first time, she takes proper notice of all the little white headstones in the winter-hardened ground, so unbearably sad in their uniformity.
Frank is standing on a mound with the camera.
“There’s no point, really,” he says after a few snaps. “You can’t capture it.” He squints at her. “It’s okay. We won’t forget how the photo would have looked.”
She can’t ask which photo he means, in case he doesn’t mean the one from under the bridge. So instead she takes his hand, and there is that painful rush of hot and cold at the same time, the one she used to feel when they first met.
He gets one of the mothers milling about to take the photo for Grandpa, and the photographer is a perfectionist.
“Let’s do another shot, just in case,” she says more than once as her children look on. Polly and Frank smile until their cheeks tingle. Polly decides she can just do everything the way that Frank wants to. Why not?
“No, no,” the mother calls. “Don’t look at him, look at me!”
They get on the bus and Polly feels a weight lift. It is so simple—just be nice! Why did it seem so complicated?
“I’m having a nice time,” she says to Frank, and his face lights up.
* * *
In the afternoon the clouds clear and they go down to see the cherry blossoms. The air is pink-tinted by the invasion of blooms. They are carried along by the crowd, their elbows pinned into their sides by the other long-weekend tourists, nobody able to stop the wash of bodies. A teenager leaps into the air and grabs at a branch. There are gasps of horror as he falls to the ground in a shower of petals.
“Thug!” someone says. “Don’t you have parents?”
“It didn’t used to be this crowded,” Frank says. “Aren’t the trees amazing?”
“Yes,” Polly says. “It looks like pink popcorn.”
“I’ve never heard flowers described that way before.”
Eventually they get hemmed in against a fence between the path and the grass, and they can’t see any of the monuments across the water. Frank keeps beaming, apparently oblivious to the discomfort of sharing the sidewalk with three hundred other people. When the crowd forces them to hop the fence and retreat towards the parking lot, Polly says, “Well, what’s next?”
“You want to leave? So soon?” Frank says.
“Of course we should stay. Let’s sit down.”
There isn’t anywhere to sit, so they sit on the grass. They try to find an out-of-the-way patch under a tree, but the moment they crouch down, an extended family comes to pose for a portrait. They crowd under the tree to fit everyone in the frame, and the backs of their knees are against Polly and Frank’s noses. Then someone runs over Polly’s hand with a stroller.
“Okay,” she says, and heads off towards the parking lot.
“You don’t like the cherry blossoms.” Franks follows behind.
“Doesn’t the crowd bother you too?”
“Why don’t you like the flowers? All girls like flowers.”
“That’s insulting.”
“What? Why is that insulting?”
“I thought you wanted to bring me here, not any girl.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Fine. I don’t get it.”
“You don’t get what?”
“The flowers. I like them. The first second you see them, you say, ‘Wow.’ But that car there has a Montana plate. People travel hundreds of miles. Why? The trees don’t even smell good.”
“Because they don’t last! It’s special!”
“But no flowers last. It would be more special if they did.” She is winding up to further defend her point, eyeing his trajectory so she knows just where to strike, when he moves away.
“Okay,” he says.
“Wait.” Her thoughts stumble, c
onfused by the sudden shift.
“I’m going to the car.”
“Don’t be dramatic!” she shouts, though nothing about him is dramatic. She is behind the change of the curve, still gunked in rage, while he’s left for somewhere else. The anger has completely gone out of him, and in its absence his shoulders slope. She watches him go, in shock. This has never happened before. He’s given up.
He crosses the parking lot, getting smaller and smaller, until he finds his car and gets in. She is afraid that he is going to start the car and she will be left here with the giddy throngs of tourists, but the car doesn’t move.
She keeps still on the knoll, blocking the school groups, tour groups, and couples trying to pass. At the edge of the lot, a cart sells souvenirs: cherry-blossom soap, T-shirts, mugs. He can’t give up. She’s not ready. Panic seizes her. She wants to tell him that the past is safe, no matter what. But she knows, with a stinging pang, that it is the future he is concerned with.
She takes her time walking to the car, so that maybe, when she gets there, he’ll be glad to see her. She loops back and circles the same column of cars twice, in case he needs more time.
When she climbs into the car, he is just sitting there, staring numbly out the windshield.
“Listen,” she says. “I know what you mean about us having limited time. I’m not stupid. I know because of . . .” She struggles. “Because of family stuff.” She can’t bring herself to say, Because of my mother, not even to him, not even after all this time.
His denim jacket makes a rasping sound as he drops his hand from his mouth.
“Then why don’t you act like it?”
She’s never realized until now how like Donna she has become, how she has to say anything true in an angry voice.
“It ruins things. It ruins the only moment.” She reaches between her knees. “I brought you something.”
“Did you steal flowers? You’re not supposed to touch.”
“No, this is better, see?” She brings a bouquet of blossoms out from under the car seat. “They’re plastic. They last. Special.” She puts them in his lap.