by Robin Black
The move to the cottage, four years earlier, had come with old age—Cliff’s, not Jean’s. The fifteen years between them had opened up as if blossoming, fifteen full-petal roses, expanding beyond what she had ever imagined possible, so that she and he were no longer in anything like the same stage of life. “Your father turned eighty and became an old man,” she told her children, “while I turned sixty-five and became a full-time caregiver.”
It was Cliff who had wanted to move to the country. He announced this—as was his habit, to announce, pronounce, proclaim—on a particularly nasty January day, in Rochester. “I want to die somewhere beautiful,” he told her by way of explanation, which was startling, if only because he had always seemed to be oblivious to his surroundings, at times enviably oblivious, given the places they had lived.
He didn’t push her. Cliff Kurek was capable of pushing, but their history was such that he had every reason to count on her acquiescence before it came to that. And this time there was no doubt. Jean had lived in small cities all her life, third-tier cities like Wilmington, Delaware, and Richmond, Virginia, Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was not third-tier at all but aspired to be. She had spent more than four decades accompanying—she dismissed the word following, when it popped into her thoughts—this restless but oddly unambitious man while he jumped from job to job, lateral jumps, long rather than high, because it turned out that an itch could be as powerful a motivator as a lofty aspiration.
“Running toward or running away?” her own mother had asked when they were still young.
“Toward,” Jean had answered without pause. And then, with an uncharacteristic snap, “Don’t be ridiculous.” But she couldn’t imagine what she’d have said if instead of just looking skeptical, her mother had asked, “Toward what?”
It had never occurred to Jean that there would be a final move, not one acknowledged as such before the fact. For all the time Cliff spent planning, there never appeared to be an actual plan. The endgame had always seemed likely to be one of musical chairs. When the music stops, you are where you are, wherever you happen to be.
The notion of a country cottage settled in her thoughts as a watercolor, red bricks, climbing roses, the house the most intelligent of the three little pigs built, but with some age on it now; and the place they found in western Massachusetts wasn’t far off, solid enough to withstand huffs and puffs, small enough to feel manageable, large enough to hold visiting grandchildren, old enough to inspire optimism about what might, improbably, endure. They made an offer on the spot. Practiced at folding their tents, they moved with little trouble in just over a month, and country life soon began to seep into Jean’s bones. She started going for long walks. She stopped wearing what little makeup she had worn. She took up gardening, literally put down roots. Her life became both more practical and more poetic. “Our cottage is nestled in the crook of three hills,” she wrote on the change-of-address cards she sent, aware as she did of using words she had never used before. Though really, any description of this home seemed paltry. What was required was an explanation, the cottage having slipped in Jean’s understanding from being a beautiful place to being something more like a mystical event; just as all the old cities blurred together into one cold, rainy day spent waiting for a bus running late.
She found the scarf in the closet of the large guest room where their daughter, Brooke, was to stay that night. Bright turquoise, covered in an extravagant pattern of pink feathers, it was one of those objects that no one in the family had ever claimed but that seemed unshakable, following them from place to place, never mind that Jean was certain she had given it to Goodwill at least three times. Five feet long, maybe a foot wide, it was the perfect shape. Though the puzzle, the paradox, was how to construct a sling with only one hand. There had been quite a bit of improvement since the stroke—Any more signs of life? her doctor would cheerfully ask—but she wasn’t up to tying knots. She laid the scarf out on the bed, doubled it over, then stared at it for a bit, until she decided she could put it on the floor and use her knees to hold the fabric taut while she tied the ends together.
It took a few tries, and she felt ridiculous, as though she were playing Twister by herself, as though she were a bit demented, but eventually she managed to secure the ends together and wriggle her way into it, her left arm loosely cradled in a tropical neon blaze. It was a masterpiece of misdirection, she thought as she stood before the mirror and admired the effect.
Cliff laughed at the sight of her in the sling, great crags appearing on his droopy face. He hadn’t always been so easily tickled, but in old age was prone to chuckles, as though he had finally gotten the joke.
She stood between him and the blaring television set, and turned all the way around, just once, a slow twirl made of many small steps. “Feast your eyes,” she said. “The new me.” She walked to the chair beside his. “I’m an awfully clumsy woman,” she said, as she sat. “I’ll be lucky if I don’t break a hip next.”
“Don’t even think it,” he said. “Goddesses don’t break their hips.”
A lung infection, she had told him seven weeks earlier, to explain her overnight hospital stay. A cold gone bad. The decision to lie had barely registered as a decision, just fallen in line with the deaths of friends he would never see again anyway and various other bits of unhappy, unnecessary news. His world had been winnowed down to conform to his dwindling capacities; if it couldn’t be expanded to experience joy, she surely wasn’t expanding it in order to worry him. And any trace of doubt she might have felt was dispelled by his failure to notice the arm drooping by her side. In the old days, in their young days, there was nothing about her body she could have hidden from him, not the smallest bump or bruise, much less an entire limb gone useless.
“Goddesses don’t trip over trees,” she said.
Brooke’s early-morning email had read, in its entirety, I’m going to be there around four, very much as though it were the second email, the one after the one in which the visit was proposed and she explained whether she was coming alone or with Ian and the kids. It read like a second email, but it was not. It was the first and only mention of her plan, the whole thing feeling distinctly hasty, as Brooke’s actions often did. Her mother thought of her as ramshackle by nature, seeming to move through life in great loops of forward and backward progress, trailing loose ends behind her like maypole ribbons.
It was close to six when she materialized in the living room.
“I knocked and knocked,” she said, reaching for the remote control by Cliff’s side, pressing Mute. “My knuckles are raw from knocking. How can you stand it?” She frowned toward Jean’s sling, her head tilted in a question.
“I tripped,” Jean said. “That’s all. I tripped on a tree root this morning and stupidly broke my fall with my wrist. It’s just a sprain, if even that.” Brooke nodded, a single nod, a sympathetic grimace appearing but quickly gone, leaving Jean feeling a little stung. It was a bit painful having her lie so easily accepted.
She had been going to tell her children the truth—originally—but then she had felt this disinclination to have anyone, to have them in particular, interfere. That was what she told herself, the word meddle springing to mind. She didn’t want them to meddle. There was this problem with the children, that they tended to waltz in and try to take over—briefly, for only as long as they chose to stay. They tended to give advice that sounded less like suggestions than demands on how Jean should manage the house, how she and Cliff should eat, what books on the aging body they should read—or, better yet, listen to on the devices they should buy. And then they went home. Initially, the lie had been to ward that off—or so Jean told herself. If there was also at work an intuition that the sympathies of others might somehow limit how sorry she could feel for herself, it was not a conscious one.
“You should fence off whatever trips you up,” Brooke said. “Maybe you should have lights out there.” Jean gave a noncommittal nod.
She thought her daughter loo
ked well. At forty-three, Brooke kept her hair a brassy auburn that Jean hated when she thought about it, hated on principle, but admired face-to-face. It brightened her skin, nudged her eyes from hazel to green. Her body, no longer thin, no longer seemed striving to be thin and had acquired a relaxed, logical quality, as though the wide hips and general sense of plenty were the obvious right choice. She had an appealing aura of overflow to her. She was—a word Jean hadn’t thought of in years—a bit blowsy, and it suited her.
“Did you see?” Cliff asked, chuckling again. “It’s that same damned scarf. Good thing we never threw it out.”
“Though truly, I did throw it out. Several times.” Jean kissed her leaning daughter’s cheek.
“Well, you look very exotic. I wish the kids could see their flamboyant grandmother. You look like you got tangled up in someone else’s dance costume. Hello, Dad. How are you?” Brooke leaned into the pose of a hug, then quickly straightened. Jean recognized the tone, the question not really asked, the embrace not quite given, the legacy of a father so often preoccupied with planning his next move. Brooke turned back to her and smiled widely. “It’s like Isadora Duncan’s infamous scarf! Just be careful in the car.”
“My secret life. You’ve found me out.”
“It’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?”
Brooke was still standing between Cliff and the TV, and though it had barely been a minute, Jean could see him growing, if not consciously impatient, physically twitchy. It was difficult for anyone else to understand how immersed he was in that world, to appreciate the degree to which caring about those flickers of color and light kept him from brooding on himself. It was one of the many features of their life that defined even the children as outsiders now. She was relieved when Brooke said it had been a hell of a drive, that she needed a shower, maybe even a nap if there was time.
“There’s plenty of time,” Jean said. “We can eat whenever you’re ready.”
Brooke pressed the Mute button again, and the TV blared on. “Is that better?” she boomed, much more loudly than necessary.
“We’ll still be here,” Cliff said, chortling a bit. “Until a better offer comes along.”
The two of them resettled, one of Cliff’s home shows on the TV. A family of five jumped up and down, squealing at the sight of their new family room. In the next half hour, a condo in South Beach went from sleek to unimaginably sleek. Cliff turned out to like design. He liked to talk about materials. He kept track of trends—stainless appliances, mission-style everything, bathroom vanities with double sinks. Granite counters. He could ballpark costs of renovations, costs of the homes themselves. He knew the names and little quirks of all the hosts, developed what Jean could only think of as relationships with them.
“I’m thinking we should put in… granite counters,” said the beautiful young decorator—Lani De Rosso—as though it were a novel idea. “What do you think of that?” she asked the owners.
“I think it’s obvious, Lani,” Cliff said. “I think it’s what you always say. I think you should consider something new.”
They ate at the maple kitchen table, Cliff at one end, his wife and daughter on either side. Dinner was roasted chicken pieces, cooked and delivered by Nancy Lewis, a neighbor from down the road. She had long pitched in now and then, but had become a regular and a confidante since the stroke. Jean added a last-second can of baby peas, snatched from the back of the pantry. Brooke opened it. By themselves, they rarely ate side dishes, but that was one more expediency of old age best kept from the children.
Brooke cut Jean’s chicken for her. “As long as I’m here, you might as well let me.”
She gave no explanation for her sudden appearance. It wasn’t Jean’s way to push, and Cliff was long past knowing if her visit was sudden or if he’d just forgotten it was coming up. In a sense, everything was sudden for him.
They talked a little about Ian and the children, just details from the morning, email making it unnecessary to catch up on any real news. Hannah had been agitating to drive herself to school. Connor dreading the frog dissection on his schedule. Poor, sniffly Ian thinking he might be allergic to the cat—if one could develop allergies at forty-four. Brooke told a story about the pharmaceutical company where she worked, a ridiculous ad campaign scrapped, a proposed slogan that would have made them a laughingstock. Cliff talked about his shows.
“The new thing is to paint every wall brown. Jeanie, did we ever, in forty-plus years, paint a wall brown?” She shook her head. “Turns out, we were supposed to.” He frowned, shook his head. “You never do know.”
“You weren’t supposed to then,” Jean said, as though then covered their entire married life. “Brown was still ugly then.”
As they spoke, Brooke picked at her nail polish, an old habit, though Jean hadn’t seen her do it in years. As a girl, she used to leave little piles of tiny pink and red bits around the house, like fancy-dress pencil shavings.
When Brooke volunteered to do the dishes—“As long as I’m here, you might as well let me,” she said again—Jean mentioned the mice.
“I know it’s odd that they’re inside in June,” she said, almost as though apologizing. “It’s possible I haven’t been as tidy since…” She caught herself. “It’s possible I’m slipping in my old age. Anyway, be sure to clean any crumbs.”
“I will clean all crumbs,” Brooke said. She brushed the pile of red polish shards into her palm. “They’ll never know we were here.”
The squeal and groan of the stairs woke Jean during the night, but the low gurgle of her daughter’s laugh pinned her to her bed. Five hours later, bleaching the kitchen counters once again, she would wonder why she had been so certain there was another person there. It could have been a phone call, a middle-of-the-night exchange of anecdotes with Ian, one of the children doing something amusing, or even Brooke laughing at her parents and their tiny world of Mute buttons and home makeover reveals. But lying in the dark Jean had no doubt, no doubt that there was another person there, no doubt that this person and her daughter were lovers, no doubt at all—like glancing at the back cover of a book and inadvertently, irretrievably knowing too much.
Brooke appeared in the kitchen just before ten, wearing a light green sundress and shiny, strappy sandals, her hair still wet from the shower, her nails repolished smooth, and announced—when had she too become an announcer?—that she was walking the mile into town. She might see if there was a movie playing. She hadn’t gone to a movie in months. They shouldn’t keep lunch for her. They wouldn’t, Jean said, then told her daughter that the movie always started at one o’clock. “Around here,” she said, “people like that kind of thing. A regular schedule, I mean.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” From the living room, the television blared. “I really don’t know how you stand that,” Brooke said, and in the moments after she left, Jean wondered exactly what choice her daughter thought she had.
In the old days, of course, she would have told Cliff. Parenting is a conspiracy. But these were other days, so she left him to his shows.
The wooden staircase, with its steep treads and its audible objections and the slight curve toward the top, had lain in wait for some years now, a sleeping serpent stretched in their home, ready to snap. It had been something like love, something like the myopia of romance that had blinded them to the inevitable collusion between a staircase and time. It was a miracle Cliff could still manage it.
One unexpected revelation of old age was the degree to which death solved certain logistical problems—a feeble justification for its heartlessness, but a notion oddly present in one’s thoughts. Short of death, the plan was to convert the living room into a bedroom. “When my knees go,” Cliff had said, speaking in euphemism, the language of the unthinkable.
Upstairs, the guest bedroom door was closed, and for a moment Jean paused as though she might knock, but then she turned the small brass doorknob.
She felt ridiculous the moment she did. For the secon
d day running, she was doing something absurd in this room. The bed was slept in, of course, though tidied. At its foot, a white nightgown draped over the milky-blue wooden chest. A red glass bottle, maybe perfume, sat on the windowsill. A battered pair of sneakers poked their toes out from under the dresser.
After only a very few moments, she closed the door, irritated with herself. What had she been planning to do in there? Sniff the sheets? She scurried downstairs, quickly, and then outside.
Late June, the garden was still more beautiful than demanding. By August, the weeds would win out. Heat and weeks of battling them would have beaten Jean. But now they were still almost courteous in their arrival, a weed here, a weed there. She could manage most of it on her feet, leaning over to yank one every couple of steps. In three weeks, she knew, she would be on her knees.
Jean had always been convinced that the price of the cottage had been for the structure itself, with the six acres of old farmland thrown in. It was Cliff’s view that they were paying for the acreage, and the cottage had been more or less free. Either way, every year, Jean’s cultivated garden encroached a tiny bit more on land long ago reclaimed by its own untended tendencies. Each April she hired a local boy to dig a new plot—as though the house were a tossed pebble and these long, curved beds the ripples that it caused. This spring it was roses, bare roots shipped up from Texas, tangled all together in a cardboard box.
She planted them at the end of April, six all the same variety, Winchester roses, white, double petals. It had seemed unimaginable that these thorn-speckled sticks might somehow—how?—explode into rosebushes. They would have to turn themselves inside out—a magician’s trick.
April 27. The afternoon of her stroke. She’d been standing there with the boy, Nancy’s son, Tyler Lewis from down the road, questioning him on whether the bushes seemed evenly spaced, and he’d been saying you couldn’t really call them bushes, could you, when they looked so much like kindling. She was rubbing her left hand as they spoke, not thinking it through, just sensing that it had gone asleep while she’d been patting the topsoil over the roots. She was trying to get the blood flowing, waiting for the pins and needles to begin, when gradually her thoughts turned from the bushes to that heavy, numb sensation. She wanted to lift the hand, just to look at it, but realized she could not. It hung there limp, covered in dirt, as though it were already dead and had been dug from the ground.