by Robin Black
Tyler drove her to the hospital in his tin can car. His mother stayed with Cliff, and then with them both, for many days, seeming to enjoy Jean’s deception, giving Cliff and anyone else who called detailed, fictional accounts of her recovery from her bronchial woes.
The sticks suited Jean’s mood those first few weeks. Having planted roses, she was reaping thorns, the perfect bouquet for her solitary martyrdom. But then even they seemed to stop caring, caught up as they were in themselves, sprouting red nubs like potato eyes, spinning out into green stems, five-leaf clusters, buds in a hurry to exist, in a hurry to bloom, pink-tinged white, blushing at their own exposure, insistently, ludicrously beautiful. Five of them anyway, a single one remaining bare—which looked peculiar, but turned out not to be.
They could be temperamental, she read online. It wasn’t a sure thing they would wake from dormancy on command. What looked dead might actually be. After all, nature didn’t make promises. On the other hand, mail-order plants were guaranteed. Shipping season was over for the year, the Texan supplier told her, but Jean’s name would go on a list. First thing next spring, they would send her a new Winchester. Though the bushes did sometimes wake up, the woman said, even after taking twice as long as the others. “They’re jest funny things. They have their moods. Jest like all the rest of us. Sometimes, they’re jest playing dead.”
And sure enough, right after Brooke left for town, a full seven weeks after Jean had planted them, she saw a tiny reddish bump, the unmistakable beginning of what would become unfurling leaves and bursting blooms—as though the last of her commiserating friends were moving on.
When Brooke returned just before dinner, she was as unruffled as her bedroom had been. All but her hair, which was a mess. She disappeared upstairs for a few minutes, returning with the whole auburn mass twisted into an elegant knot, for whose benefit Jean couldn’t imagine.
As they sat again around the table, neither she nor Brooke spoke very much, leaving Cliff, always happier speaking than trying to catch others’ words, to recount the many transformations he had witnessed that day.
The noises didn’t wake her; she was awake when she heard Brooke’s door open, then Brooke on the stairs, the front door, the distant hum of a car growing louder, the front door again, the stairs, the click of Brooke’s door.
Distinctly irritated, she rolled onto her side.
When the children were teenagers, she had dealt with their sexual activities, those known to her at the time, by pretending ignorance. Some of it was her disinclination to have that conversation with them, and some of it was her sense that they were of reasonable ages, that if she wasn’t going to object on principle, then she wasn’t going to send them out of the house—or have Cliff send them, which is how it would have gone. No thinking parent was in a rush for their child to park out in the darkness somewhere. People had been known to get shot that way. Once in a while, some sound would escape from behind a closed door, a gasp or moan, a bawdy laugh, but those were somehow sanitized and neutralized as they registered in Jean’s consciousness. Whatever sex her children were having was no more real sex to her than the stuff in their diapers had been real shit. Our children exist in some not quite human realm, she’d long before decided. They aren’t exactly people to us.
So it wasn’t parental squeamishness that made her turn the TV on now. And it wasn’t a disinclination to hear evidence, further evidence, of her daughter’s infidelity. Something else was producing this feeling, this pebble in her shoe, this grain of sand between her teeth. It was possibly, simply, the presence of sex in her home, when for several years she had tried to forget it existed at all. An absurd, impossible task, maybe. But what choice did she have? What choice but to pretend there was no such thing?
It hadn’t been until their second spring at the cottage that Jean had let herself understand, could no longer prevent herself from understanding, how thoroughly what felt to her like her first home felt to Clifford like his last. How each room, each wall, each patch of grass, tree, pebble, shaft of light was defined for them in these ways. How this sensation of not having to move twisted and shifted in Cliff into the sensation of not being able to move, so what gave her joy hollowed him. These pleasures of hers, she knew, were indebted to his age, to the strength of his frailty, to the cessation of his restlessness. Finally, simply, to the proximity of his death.
They were in bed when she realized this or realized that she had known it all along. They were in bed together, with the television on, lying side by side, in a bedroom in which they had never made love, a bedroom in which, she had just admitted to herself, they never would.
If the idea that there would be an acknowledged final move had surprised her, the fact that there had been an unacknowledged last time making love was stunning. Some kind of bargain had been struck, somewhere, somehow. She had given things up to have other things. But she hadn’t been consulted. She hadn’t really bargained at all; life had preemptively done it for her, drawn up this deal.
So what choice did she have but to unbraid the different strands of love and learn devotion without desire again? Desire without devotion? Manage the business of sex as she had when a girl, by herself. Forget that she knew any other way. What choice but to accept this cottage’s chaste enchantment as being—as Cliff himself would say—part of the deal?
As she lay there, once again rehearsing all of this, a chord of two voices arced out into the air, over Cliff’s regular, raspy breaths, over the late-night banter of a television host and his guest, through the wall Jean had built, was continually rebuilding, between her desires and her life as it must be lived.
In the morning, agitated, resolute, Jean left Clifford sleeping on his side and frowned her way through the familiar rituals. Teeth, face, toilet, clothes, performing any number of two-handed tasks with one hand, only just remembering to slip the sling on as she headed for the stairs.
She found her daughter in the garden, vibrant in a dark purple dress, brassy hair blowing, staring out toward an ancient, long-abandoned row of apple trees. As they stood side by side, the splash of color cradling Jean’s arm looked as though it belonged to the other woman, as though some piece of Brooke had spilled onto Jean. They exchanged a few words about how beautiful the setting was. Much more so than anywhere they had ever lived as a family, Brooke said; and Jean responded that the bar hadn’t been set very high, but yes, it was beautiful. For a moment, her mind drifted toward thoughts of a connection between Cliff’s lifelong restlessness and Brooke’s restless romance, affair, whatever it was. It could be a causal link: they had moved around so frequently, Brooke had never learned to stay with something. Maybe a genetic one: she was her father’s daughter, after all; his restlessness might have taken this sexual turn in her. But none of it much mattered, Jean thought, spooling her musings back in. By and large, she had outlived her own interest in why things had happened the way they had, in cause, with its eternal backward glance. She put her right hand on her daughter’s shoulder. She had decided she would use the word company. She would say, Brooke, I know you’ve been having company. But before she did, Brooke herself said, “We have company coming for dinner tonight. I hope that’s okay. I’ll cook, of course. A friend of mine turns out to be up here too, so I asked him over,” and Jean, who had been knocked off script, found herself saying, “No. Of course. That’s fine. Of course that’s fine.” And retreating to the house.
“You have to stand up to them,” Cliff used to tell her. “Children need to know who’s in charge.”
But she had learned early on that she could not. She was incapable of battle, so if a child chose to fight, that child would win. Little things. Making them eat unfamiliar foods. Forcing them into clothes they had rejected. Ben had spat every ounce of medicine he was ever given across the room, if not directly into Jean’s face. And Brooke would run away with both hands on her head, hiding in the empty cedar closet under the eaves when Jean tried to brush her hair. When Jean dangled bright metal butterflies
and ladybugs, attached to elastics, and cooed about how pretty they were, how pretty they would look affixed to Brooke’s curls, Brooke arranged her face into an expression of such haughty disbelief that Jean told Cliff that their five-year-old daughter looked like an old Frenchman. The one time she took her to have the curls sheared into some manageable form—like a topiary creature, she couldn’t help thinking—Brooke threw the kind of tantrum Jean had only heard about from friends, her body seeming both stiff and capable of moving in ways the presence of bones and ligaments would argue against, her screams so piercing that Jean found herself glancing toward the large mirrors, as though to catch the moment of shattering. And needless to say, they had driven home, mop of hair still intact.
Looking down from her bedroom window, Jean can see that hair from behind, loose and windblown, the artificial hue without Brooke’s face to testify to its worth, unsettling against the garden’s greens and grays.
His name was Aaron. He was a great huge man a bit older than Brooke, maybe fifty, bald, and—Jean thought—remarkably ugly, dressed in blue jeans and a pale yellow shirt that looked recently ironed. His handshake was firm. His arms were enormous. His eyes were obscured by an unending squint. His lower lip hung just to the left of his upper, as though he were perpetually reeling from a punch. The sheer physicality of him took her aback, the size of him and the specificity of his oddness. He banged his head on the dining room doorway, the cottage itself making some none too subtle point.
Brooke had cooked all afternoon—ruthlessly, Jean had thought, walking into the kitchen at one point. Now, she shuttled dish after dish to the table, refusing help from both her mother and her, what? lover, it seemed. Her enormous, homely lover. No dish had fewer than five ingredients, or fewer than three layers. Chicken, plums, almonds, in pastry. White, purple, and yellow potatoes, sliced thin, stacked into little striped towers, sprinkled with cream, dusted with nutmeg.
He was an engineer, a structural engineer. He talked about the bridges he had built, about span and tension. He talked about what had failed in the ones across the country that had recently fallen down. With Brooke’s encouragement, he also spoke about his three sons. Jean, who felt a bewildered form of curiosity, feigned genuine interest, while Cliff, who had been interested in the bridges, did not, but poked at the structures on his plate as though unsure of how to transform their architecture into food.
The oldest boy was an avid reader, he said, a real intellectual. He would be applying to college in the fall. The second, the middle one, was an athlete, he told Jean—as though between them the two boys might make one whole boy. How odd it was, she thought, that parents so often did that, handed out attributes to their children like sections of the same cherry pie.
“Aaron’s youngest son is in a wheelchair, Mom. He was in a diving accident, two years ago.”
“Oh,” Jean said. “How terrible. I’m sorry.” She thought she saw Aaron’s eyes flutter open for just a second. She thought she saw his cheeks grow redder.
“Well,” he said. “It’s been very difficult. It is. For him, I mean. He was just nine when it happened.”
“And for you,” Brooke said. She turned to her mother. “It was a quarry. Kids diving off the rocks. You can’t imagine what’s involved now.”
“It must be very hard for you,” Jean said. “He’s your child. I’m so sorry. It must almost be worse for you. In some ways.”
Aaron shook his head, the lower lip, askew, now jutting out. “I used to think that.” He picked up his fork and tapped it on the table, twice, then a third time. “I used to see children, like him, with something wrong. And I would always feel worse for the parents.” He shook his head again. “Because I think, I think what you’re really afraid of is how you’d feel. If it was your kid. But it isn’t like that,” he said. “Not really. You know—I know—it’s worse for him.”
Jean said nothing. Across the table, Cliff was wearing the face he had developed for times like this when he couldn’t quite hear a conversation and didn’t want to seem rude—a thoroughly noncommittal expression, poised to shift quickly should he suddenly catch some words. She hadn’t been so ready, so poised, hadn’t expected tragedy to join them at the table.
“He isn’t an unhappy boy,” Aaron said, as though reading her mind, banishing that word, probably practiced at doing so. “His mother has done an incredible job.”
“She used to work as a lawyer,” Brooke said. “But she stopped when the accident happened.”
“He doesn’t have a sad life,” Aaron said. “When I’m with him, I’m not…” He was looking across the table at Brooke. “It’s when we’re apart that I sag. He’s going to camp this summer,” he told Jean. “It’s a big deal for him. My wife did months of research to find this place. It’s amazing when you see what these kids do.”
“It must be,” Jean said. What more could she say? “I hope it works out well.”
“He’s a great kid. He’ll do great.”
Jean was out of conversation.
Cliff, at his end of the table, was staring off now, a vaguely worried expression on his face. Maybe just unused to company, Jean thought, or maybe disturbed by some unformed intuition that there was more going on here than he had been told.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that I bought traps, and Aaron has volunteered to set them,” Brooke said, suddenly bright—though looking at Jean diagnostically, as though trying to determine how much she had guessed. “The mice,” she said. “If you have peanut butter, we can use that. I’ll do the dishes and he’ll load the traps.”
“In the pantry. No, in the refrigerator.” Jean frowned. “It’s the all-natural kind, half oil. I don’t even know why we have it.”
“Probably Ben.” Brooke turned back to Aaron. “My brother’s a granola type, a tree hugger. I think I’ve told you that.”
“I thought your brother’s name was Glen.”
Brooke shot a look to her mother, tried a small, rueful smile.
“It’s Ben,” Jean said. “His name is Benjamin.”
“It’s just a family joke,” Brooke said. “I should have told you. Because of Cliff and Brooke. Cliff, Brooke, Glen.”
“We didn’t do it on purpose,” Jean said. “Brooke and Cliff, I mean. I wasn’t trying to be clever. Or cute.” That was what people had always said: How cute. It had embarrassed her then in a way it now seemed impossible to be embarrassed. The name Brooke had been a fancy of hers, a signal that the baby who had just emerged from her was special, a hope born of that moment’s euphoria that with so unusual a name—this was 1965—her daughter would have no choice but to step into the world more confidently than she herself ever had. She had cried when the link between Cliff and Brooke was pointed out to her. Two years later, Benjamin was named after Jean’s father, but also after her own retreat from flights of fancy. “I’ve always hated his being called Glen,” she said.
“My oldest boy is named Wright, a family name, on his mother’s side.” Aaron was turned toward her, his eyes so squinted she couldn’t see them. “So, his brother,” he said, “the middle one, is always called Wrong.” He frowned a bit. “I suppose that’s obvious,” he said. “He certainly hates it.”
“That one’s Edward,” Brooke said. “The middle boy.”
“He hates that too,” Aaron said. “Somewhere along the way, he turned into Teddy. Ted now that he’s a teenager, though we forget. I forget.”
“What’s your youngest named?” Jean asked.
“Jason.”
“I love that name,” Brooke said. “I think people grow into their names. Though I always loved mine.” This was said for Jean—with a larger smile thrown in, to make up for Glen.
“I told the boys they could change whatever they liked once they were eighteen. Or maybe I said once they were paying for their own food.”
“Funny,” Brooke said. “I’m constantly telling mine everything they can do when they grow up too.”
“Some days the list is pretty long.” Aar
on looked bleak.
“Yes,” Brooke said, “and then you grow up and discover how very short it really is.” Jean watched them droop in unison, for just a moment, then recover. “Actually, I like Teddy for a girl, too,” Brooke said. “Teddy and Sam. Alex.”
“I like Alex a lot.”
It had become an strange conversation, Jean thought. They sounded like a young couple broaching the subject of their future together. What to name the children? Except they didn’t look excited. They looked, if anything, tense. They looked sad; and for the first time, it occurred to Jean to wonder at how deep their feelings ran. What they had done together, here, in the cottage, what they were doing, had loomed so large, like Aaron himself, taking up too much space, banging its head on the doorways. For just a moment, instead, Jean was aware of all they hadn’t done, would never do.
Brooke stood; then Aaron did. “Let’s go find that peanut butter,” she said. “My brother only comes east twice a year, he and his lunatic wife, Cheryl. They smell of incense and leave the place full of food that no one else will eat.” As Brooke spoke, she and Aaron began gathering plates. “But then, young Glenjamin doesn’t worry a lot about other people,” she said. Her voice had lowered, softening, taking on the tones of a private conversation. “That isn’t his thing. Human beings, I mean.” As she stood beside Aaron, she was practically whispering. He murmured something back. Then she murmured in response and back and forth it went, this indistinct exchange, these gentle vibrations of sound. It was like overhearing two tuning forks, Jean thought. Two whales.