Flings

by Justin Taylor

  We had six, nearly seven good years in Florida, despite the onset of what Gerald called “old folks’ disease”—his catchall for the host of complaints and small agonies that infringe with the gaining years. Our joints ached; we were advised to watch how we ate. We caught fewer colds in the warm weather, yes, but whatever we caught would linger. Gunked sinuses. Aspirin regimens. Prescription bottles in the medicine cabinet, on the nightstand, by the kitchen sink—chatting about side effects like the people on TV. We got good about sunscreen. We stood on the decks of cruise ships. Then Gerald got sick in his lungs and then he died.

  All our New York years I kept my hair short—very sensible and teacherly, and only ever dyed its own natural color. In Florida I found all the ladies wore their hair like this, permed or close-cropped or whatever it took to mask the thinning and recession, keep themselves regulars at the salon, give themselves somewhere to go. I had no intention of living like that, besides which my hair is still nearly as thick as when I was a girl, so as soon as we got here I stopped coloring it and grew myself a white braid that was all the talk of the clubhouse whenever I went in for a turn on the StairMaster or a dip in the pool.

  The night I left Gerald’s body at the hospital I came home and cut my braid off, coiled the limp thing up like a length of rope, stuck it in a jewelry box, and shut the lid. Now I’m one more short-haired widow after whom nobody whispers. Sometimes while I’m exercising I’ll wonder, What is the point of this? The hope is for health, of course, and that the sunlight and heat and exertion will prove exhausting, set the foundation for a good night’s well-earned rest. Sometimes it happens this way, but not often. It’s more like my body and mind are disconnected, my days and nights non sequitur to each other. Sometimes I feel like the hole in my life is even larger than my life ever was and that I live inside it, potted like a houseplant in the soil of my grief.

  Midmorning I make a pot of coffee and set it out on the counter to cool. I put the TV on but there’s nothing good to watch: soap operas on the networks, shouting anchors on the cable news, and either way you get more commercials for lawyers and drugs. I shut the TV off, put a load of laundry in, then go outside.

  By day my patio with its peach-colored tiles hardly seems to be the same place I pass my endless nights. I sit down at the table—tempered glass on a white metal frame; the chairs woven plastic, also white; and all of it lightly filmed in dirt—and am staring out through my fine-mesh black bug screens at the houses across the calm brown water when, with a kind of calm shock, I notice something so utterly unexpected it hardly occurs to me to be afraid. An alligator—gray-green, perhaps seven feet nose to tail, having apparently crawled out of the water and up the stumpy step of the low bank—has laid itself out in a sunny spot halfway up my grass and fallen asleep.

  Leaves rustle in the breeze. The sun is high.

  I know I ought to call someone, an authority, the authorities—police or animal control or 311. I can dial the gatehouse. Charles, or Guillermo or Rose, whoever is on duty, will know what to do. This development, this whole county, was swampland not so long ago. It’s not so crazy that a displaced creature would wander home again. This can’t be the first time it’s happened. There surely must be procedures in place. But he feels like my secret, even though he’s right out there in the open where anyone can see him and, for all I know, has. Perhaps some other, more prudent citizen has done the needful thing and made the call, is on the phone this very instant with a man in a county uniform who is saying, “Could y’all repeat that, please?” as though Mrs. Markowitz or whoever it chances to be were a crowd unto herself. But somehow I don’t think that’s happening. He is a beautiful animal and I think that he is mine.

  In the house the phone is ringing. Not without reluctance, I get up and go into the living room, to the end table next to the couch. I check the name on the caller ID and my heart sinks: Ed Roman. Ed is a neighborhood man whose memory is shot. His wife, my friend Marlene, talks incessantly of the need to put him in a home, how she can’t bear to do such a thing, and the peace she will know when it is finally done.

  “Hello,” I say, twisting and untwisting the curled phone cord as I squint across the living room, through the sliding glass door and past the patio, but the yard slopes in such a way that from where I’m standing the sleeping creature has fallen out of view.

  “Hello, Carol,” Ed says. “How are you? Everything’s well?”

  “Wonderful. I’m just finishing up the breakfast dishes. Would you like to talk to Gerald?”

  “If you please.”

  “Well, I’m afraid he’s out right now, Ed. A gator crawled out of the lake today and he chased it off with my broom. Foolhardy, I know, but that’s Gerald.”

  “My God.”

  “Then it was straight to the hardware store to price fencing.”

  “Oh boy,” Ed says. “Now that’s a job.”

  “What can I say, Ed? Gerald loves a project. I’ll tell him you called.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  I hang up the phone and rush back outside, knowing with perfect certainty that the animal will be gone and then seeing that he is gone without a trace, no ripples in the water, no flat spot in the grass. I go back inside and get a rag and the 409 and go back out and wipe down the table and the chairs. I go back in and check the coffee and, finding it room temperature, serve myself some over ice in a clear glass mug and pour cream into it and watch as the cream seeps and trickles around the ice cubes and against the glass, the dark drink blurring pale. I take it back outside and sit down at my now clean table to wait, but nothing comes. Well, not nothing. There are blue jays and dragonflies; a gardener across the lake prunes back a flowering bush whose branches have grown across a doorway. An escaped house cat stalks a squirrel he’ll never catch—there’s a small brass bell hung from his collar—passing through the very space where the alligator slept.

  The den is a beige room—they’re all beige rooms—with a big window and warm tiles because I never draw the shade. Gerald called the den the computer room because we keep our PC there. Keith set it up for us and whenever he’s over he’ll fuss with it—update programs, move folders around, whatever he does. Gerald used to pay close attention to these ministrations but he never seemed to understand what he saw. Me, I can check my email and otherwise prefer to ignore the computer altogether, but my sister, my God, she fills out these surveys. She finds these websites where you sign up and do them and then they send you coupons and gift cards. Elsie will fill out any survey if she wants what the reward is and if she doesn’t fit the criteria for respondents she lies. “If I didn’t I would never get to do any,” she says. “Nobody cares what an old woman thinks, but I make sure they know.”

  So the in-box: There’s a summary of my accumulated points on a certain credit card, and three forwards from my brother-in-law, who has become a one-man distribution center for hoary old brain teasers, animated pictures of animals, political op-eds falsely attributed to celebrities, and racist knock-knock jokes. I don’t know where in creation he comes by such stuff, much less why he passes it along to me and the dozen or so other people on his email list. He never asks me if I’ve read these things or what I thought of them. For him, the payoff seems to be in the act of forwarding itself. I believe it makes him feel like a player in the modern world.

  Marlene calls, beside herself: “You won’t believe what Ed said to me. I can’t even tell you, I shouldn’t, I’m sorry, but this is too much.”

  “Honey,” I say to her. “You just let it all out.” As I listen to her talking and crying, I keep doing this thing where I wrap the phone cord tight around my fingers until it hurts, then count to five and let the cord go. The pads of my fingers blanch white and then flush pink again; it’s like watching the tide.

  I have dinner with Keith and Heather. Their development is called Vista Trace. Tonight they’ve brought in takeout from a rotisserie chicken place that they call “the chicken place,” which is close enough to its real n
ame that I wonder why they don’t just say the right thing. My daughter-in-law stabs at her steamed broccoli with a fork that already holds a wet flag of chicken skin draped over a corkscrew of mac and cheese. I break up an oily cornbread biscuit with my fingers, steal a glance at the clock.

  In the old days I was never alone. When Elsie and I were girls we lived in Borough Park with lots of family nearby: cousins on every corner, or so it seemed. Our aunt Bessie had a candy store on Avenue J and Coney Island Avenue. That place! Like a dream now—only I’m not dreaming. I’m awake and wandering aimlessly in the old halls of my head. The candy store had a marble counter and a soda fountain and a big display of magazines and newspapers. We went there after school for a float or a sundae and for Bessie to watch us until Mom got off work. She worked in the office of a pocketbook factory and our father was a butcher. He’d been a garment salesman before the Depression, but when things got bad his father-in-law, my grandpa Izzy, said, “If you’re a butcher you’ll always eat, at least.” Izzy had been through hard times in Poland. So my father learned butchering and he was good right from the start but he hated it. He worked at a storefront on Union Street and after the War, when things turned around, he always talked about quitting but he never did. Maybe once he could have been something else, but the Depression had made him a butcher. We didn’t know all this as girls of course: who was struggling, what the reasons were, what they’d given up or lost. Everything seemed normal to us because it was all we knew, like Bessie’s husband, Morris, sitting in the back of the candy store, reading Torah—I used to know the Yiddish word for it, what they called the men who read Torah all day—and never helping with the store at all. She married him late and he worked her like a horse. Bessie did the books, she placed the orders, stood out front, everything, and probably the only reason she had taken him was to have kids—I mean it must have been—but either they couldn’t or he wouldn’t because they never did. Really Bessie was my great-aunt, Grandpa Izzy’s sister; they’d come over together in the 1890s, when she was about the same age as Elsie and I were when we used to go and sit at her shop. Such a strain on that woman! And on top of everything else being responsible for the two of us sitting at the marble counter, our school friends, too, swiveling our red stools so we spun in circles and crying if any soda should spill on our dresses. Bessie must have known by that time we were the closest she was going to get to girls of her own. After she died Morris sold the candy store, and so it passed out of our family and a few years after that it closed down. And to think that I’m older now than any of them were then—except maybe for Izzy, who left Poland not knowing his own birthday or exactly what year he’d been born. He always said, How can I worry about my age when I don’t even know it?

  I’m woken by the phone, on the couch, having fallen asleep—finally—during Good Morning America. I see on the caller ID that it’s Dennis, my younger son. I let the machine get it. He says, “Mira fell off the jungle gym at recess and broke her arm. Everything’s okay, we took both girls out of school, and we’re all at the hospital; she’s being a trouper and I thought you’d appreciate—anyhow we’ll send pictures of the cast after her friends all sign it.” The machine clicks off.

  I wait ten minutes before calling him back. I tell him I just got in from running some errands. He puts Mira on and I tell her to be a good girl and brave. Then Rebecca comes on and I tell her to be brave, too, and take good care of her sister. Then, since I’ve talked to everybody else, Dennis’s wife comes on to say hello. I ask her how she’s holding up. “Pretty good, all things considered.” A pause on her end, then, “How are you, Carol?”

  “I don’t sleep,” I say. “I don’t sleep and I hate this goddamned being alone.” Instantly I am abashed, thinking that perhaps the worst part of grief is how it inexorably pivots any and every thing back toward itself. It has made me pitiful and selfish and I hate it, and so on top of everything else it has made me hateful, too.

  I force myself to break the silence on the line. “Jessica, I’m sorry. This wasn’t the time and I didn’t mean—Everything is fine here. I’m well.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know. But listen, Carol, it’s important to me for you to know that you are not alone. We’re all right here with you.” I can picture her standing in a green hospital corridor, wearing a charcoal business suit and a thin gold necklace, my son’s cell phone in one hand and the other hand cupped over her other ear, her wedding ring flashing when it catches the light. It occurs to me that her well-meant words are both true and not true.

  At my checkup Dr. Greene asks after my sleep schedule. He suggests—not for the first time—that I let him prescribe a sleeping pill. I always refuse because they seem like a crutch, or like they could become one. “But the purpose of a crutch,” Dr. Greene says, “is to relieve pressure. So the thing that’s been broken can heal.” I don’t say anything to him. He smiles, puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “You’ll try it and you’ll see,” he says.

  The first night I take the pill sleep comes swift as rain and I am grateful despite turbulent dreams. The second night is even better: oblivion, pure and sweet. But the third night sleep will not come, even after I take a second dose, so I lie flat on my back in my bed while the pills murmur through me, amorphus shapes flickering rosy and golden in the deep of the bedroom sky.

  When the sun rises I put on a pot of coffee, toss the orange canister in the trash.

  Marlene comes over early for our outing: to the cemetery to see Gerald, to the nursing home to see Ed, and then an early dinner either at the TooJay’s next to the mall or the Cheesecake Factory in it. Normally when we go out together we fuss awhile first over who will drive—each of us insisting that the other need not trouble herself—but today I’m only too eager to seize on her lame excuse of having blocked me in.

  We don’t stay long at the cemetery. When Gerald first died I used to talk when I came here, bring him up to speed about our children and friends, the neighborhood—anything I could think of. But whatever this was supposed to make me feel, it didn’t, besides which I hated doing it. If Gerald is anywhere he can hear me, I figure, then he probably already knows what little news I have to bring. Another of our old friends kicks off, he’s bound to see them before I can get here to see him. And if he’s not anywhere, which is, after all, what we both always expected would be the case, then what am I doing recapping TV shows and mah-jongg winnings to a patch of earth? So I come and stand around for a few minutes with my head down, place a rock on the headstone; then Marlene and I go pay respects to a few other people we know who are buried here, but she has some trouble with her knees and in the sun it’s pushing ninety, so before we know it we’re back in her Cadillac. “My boat,” she says, grinning reflexively at her favorite of her own few jokes. “One of these days I’ll pick a name for it, get it painted on the trunk.”

  “Big white letters,” I say.

  “Fancy cursive script,” she adds.

  “But what do you call it?”

  “The Part D.”

  Laughing, we pull into the parking lot of the nursing home where Ed now lives. The building is painted the same peach color as my patio.

  Ed seems smaller, like some animal that fits itself to whatever shell it finds. He likes that they let him wear his pajama clothes all day long instead of making him get dressed, like Marlene always used to, even though they had nowhere to go.

  “How’s Gerald?” he asks me.

  “Ed, you know better,” Marlene says, exasperated, even as I say, “Oh, he says hello.”

  Marlene and I look at each other. I look away, down, at Ed, who says nothing, the paradox of our answers either somehow resolved or else unregistered in his mind. I excuse myself to the restroom and don’t come back. I take a seat in the lobby and then text Marlene that I will wait for her there. I pick up a magazine from a table and flip the pages without looking at them. It occurs to me I have no idea how long this visit is suppo
sed to last. Is the fact that Ed will probably forget we were ever here an argument for staying as long as possible, or does it excuse cutting things short? How much time is enough time?

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Marlene. We’re standing in the parking lot; she’s fishing in her purse for her keys. “I know I shouldn’t have done that, but it seemed . . . kinder.”

  “Pity isn’t kindness,” Marlene says, and I don’t say that Ed was hardly the one I was trying to be kind to. “It’s important to get him to focus—to retain things. Even if he can’t do it he must try. It’s the only way to, the only way to keep him here.” I walk around the car and hug Marlene, whose whole body is shuddering. Her skin feels like a piece of paper that has gone through the laundry folded up in a pocket. Gently, I pull her keys from her hand; she lets me have them. Her rings are so loose on her fingers it’s hard not to take them, too.

  Marlene says I should go to my house and she’s fine to get herself home from there, but I won’t have it. I drive her back to her house, cut the engine, and apologize again. She tells me to please just forget it, unbuckles her safety belt, opens the passenger door. I give her her keys back and she says we’ll make dinner up—later this week or next, some night there’s no mah-jongg, we’ll figure it out. We say our good-byes and I set out to walk across the development back to my house. I cross a street. I see a crow. It is evening, the sky orange-pink at its rim and blue as winter up above. A few jet trails and a pale scrim of moon. I walk past palms and bougainvillea, decorative grapefruit trees and spiky ferns. Lizards skitter across the sidewalk, its curve tracing the shape of the fake lake as it leads me home.