Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Once upon a time—when I was little—the food on our table (always in serving dishes, two cracked and crazed bowls of pale green) was precious, our portions were measured in hours of work. And my mother had been a good cook: Sunday dinners of chicken and mashed potatoes and cream gravy. (And David dozing contentedly in the big chair afterward.) She’d enjoyed cooking; she was proud of her skill. No more. Not now. Not for a long time past.

  I don’t think my mother ever thought about food anymore, or felt hunger. Now that she could afford it, now that the days of shortages were past, she seemed to have lost interest entirely. Alone, my mother might have starved in her affluence. But she wasn’t alone. David kept a list of restaurants and menus. He ordered from them, using one of his cabs for delivery. He seemed to be especially fond of Chinese.

  Over the sink a faucet dripped slowly, a solitary sound. I tightened it. Perfect silence now, except for the faint hum of the air-conditioning system.

  I was starting to feel the effects of last night’s alcohol. My teeth seemed coated with slime; there were sore spots on my tongue. My hands were puffed and stiff; my rings hurt my fingers. I sniffed the skin of my forearm, sour and metallic, champagne filtering through my pores like smoke. I took the bottle of apple juice from the refrigerator, drank it quickly, burped.

  What was it I needed now? Aspirin and a hot bath. Or was it a cold bath? No matter. I kicked off my shoes; they thudded against the crisp white vinyl floor. I pulled off my stockings and dropped them by the shoes.

  I went through the house methodically, as if I were looking for something. First the entrance hall, where I peered at the outside world through a peephole in the door. The street was empty except for a Siamese cat sitting on the curb, tail delicately wrapped around feet, unmoving. I walked through the dining room, then the living room. I considered them curiously, impartially, evaluating my work. The colors were soft and comforting; the carpets were thick; the dark furniture was good-quality English reproduction. Comfortable, discreet. And empty.

  I thought of the crowded white walls and the book-cluttered tables in Mr. Poole’s apartment. Here the walls were a soft empty blue expanse, the tabletops were bare. The smooth polished wood looked at me like dark smiling eyes, waiting expectantly.

  A year ago none of this belonged to us, not the house, not the land, not the sparse contents of the cupboards, not sheets nor blankets nor towels. Bring nothing, my mother had said. Nothing at all.

  Time started here.

  She would hang pictures on the walls—as she could afford them—and trinkets and photos would fill these dark-wood surfaces. There’d be silver on display in the dining room. David was talking about enlarging the family room for the pool table he planned to buy.

  She—and with her, David—had walked away from the past. Simply, easily, like pulling down a shade. Completely and finally, the way a cicada leaves its casing.

  But I hadn’t been able to do that. Almost, but not quite. Not yet.

  Sounds came back to me, uninvited: the sharp snapping of termite-ridden beams, like shots almost; the rumble of heavy trucks and the soft jelly-like shiver of the ground at their passing; the high-pitched whine of my mother’s sewing machine singing through the dark nights; police sirens; fire bells; the screams of mating cats.

  From my bedroom closet, from the far corner where I had hidden it, I took out my basket filled with toys, the talismen of my childhood.

  Against the pale peach silk bedcover, the basket seemed twisted and shrunken and tattered. From it came old remembered smells, long streamers unrolling in the cool filtered air of this bedroom. I could identify each and every one; they were as familiar to me as the shape of my hands: dust (pleasant and faintly sweet); mildew; damp from old boards; plaster from walls that were crumbling behind their paint; gasoline exhaust from the crowded streets; sweat from black bodies close together; a living pine smell from the tarred dead trees that were power poles; the smell of sun on concrete sidewalks (soft, like drying clothes); of asphalt bubbling from road joints in the summer heat; the scorching of my hair pressed into perfect straightness on my mother’s ironing board.

  All these floated from the basket. Old friends, surrounding me, wrapping me in their magic. Again I was an Indian princess manqué, nourished and protected by fantasies.

  The bedside phone rang. I ignored it. I packed my treasures carefully and hid the basket in my closet on a shelf behind my dresses. Lovely dresses, a dozen of them, all designed specially for me, designed to show off my height and my swift fluid motion. These were not clothes for a princess but for a modern young woman, clothes to fit my mother’s idea of me.

  The phone had stopped ringing by the time I closed the closet door. I showered, slowly and dreamily, then took a nap. I woke at noon—the sun had just reached the brick barbeque grill on the patio outside my window—dreaming that the phone had rung again.

  I took a long bubble bath, decided I disliked the scent, and took a shower. When I finally came back to the bedroom, I found Mike pacing up and down.

  “Where have you been?” Annoyance, even anger, in his voice.

  “How did you get in?”

  “I picked the lock, how else?”

  “I was afraid I’d left the door open.”

  “You didn’t. And tell your mother she needs to get better locks. Any child can open these.”

  “They came with the house, I think.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Where should I be?” He seemed such a long way off, the other side of the world.

  “I called you. I’ve been calling you all morning.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose I did hear the phone ring once.”

  “More than once. A lot more than once.”

  “I thought it was a dream.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  A pause. He still seemed so far away. Our words crackled like rumpling paper in the distance between us.

  “Mike, I want to get married. Do you want to marry me??

  He stopped pacing to look at me closely. “When you left my house, you drove straight here? That was all?” Crisp, quick.

  I shrugged my indifference.

  “Did you have an accident? Are you all right?”

  Again I didn’t answer. Just waited.

  “Why did you sneak out this morning?”

  “I didn’t sneak out. I walked out the front door.”

  “But why did you leave without saying anything? Didn’t you know I’d worry?”

  “I am a strange person.”

  “I know that and I know you’ve got a hell of a hangover, but there’s got to be something else. Something wrong.”

  “No, I’m fine. I’m just like I always am.…I have to dress now and go to work. And you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “So?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

  We were married a month later at the city clerk’s office.

  That was almost sixteen years ago.

  I finished college; I even got a Phi Beta Kappa key; I had it attached as a fob to a small antique watch on a long gold chain. I wear it sometimes across the vest of a tailored suit. The watch has never worked, but no matter. There are always plenty of clocks. Mike finished medical school and joined his father’s practice. They are quite successful. Some years ago, with a small group of partners, they even started their own hospital and satellite clinics.

  My mother and David are well, still living in the house with the brick barbeque pit. On a dare from his golfing friends, David ran for town alderman, was elected, and is now in his second term. He says that next he will try for district assessor or state representative; he hasn’t made up his mind. He is thinking of selling his cab company—it takes up too much time, he says—but he intends to keep the chain of lunch restaurants, six of them, in the downtown business district. He now plays golf twice a week. Occasionally Mike, who has taken up the game, plays with him. Mike prefers tennis.
He has joined a tennis and racquetball club, a shiny new facility with a magnificent view of the city twenty-five stories below. I meet him for lunch there every Wednesday: carrot juice and a salad, all organic. Mike is watching his weight.

  “Just look at my father and you’ll see what I mean.”

  I think of his father’s steadily thickening waist and his shiny smiling face. “Your father likes being tubby.”

  “Well, I don’t.” And he does not even finish his glass of carrot juice.

  I don’t play tennis, not anymore. I left my athletics with my music back in convent school. Still, I do enjoy having lunch with him; he is very handsome in his dazzling whites, and I admire, in my mind’s eye, our ever-so-proper appearance.

  My mother no longer runs the daily business of the shops; she appears only once or twice a week for a few hours. She still designs, and her clients are as faithful as ever. But now I oversee the transit of her thoughts from paper sketch to showroom mannequin. Now the daily business routine grinds against my skin, and she is young and free again.

  She has her garden, and she seems quite content to spend endless hours there. (Only the heaviest rains force her inside to shelter.) She does most of the work herself; she seems to love the feel of dirt. I’ve seen her rub light friable soil into dust between her palms and then toss it into the air, solemnly, like a priest dispensing incense. Five or six years ago she and David bought the sixty- by one-hundred-and-twenty-foot lot directly adjoining their house, enclosed it with a high wall of old pink brick, and turned it into a separate garden, entered through a locked iron gate. Inside the paths are so small and neat they look Japanese; dwarf crab apple and pear trees are espaliered along the side walls. The grass is zoysia, soft and fine and brilliant green, algae-like. There is a scuppernong arbor where my mother and David sometimes play cards. In the fall the heavy yellow grapes hang close around their heads, untouched. I don’t like the wild taste, my mother says. So the fruit falls to the ground or is taken by birds or shrivels into raisins on the vine. There is a foot-wide stream twisting through the entire area; its gentle flow is propelled by a pump hidden under a mound of clematis. There are no azaleas or camellias, or sasanquas, none of the winter flowering plants you’d expect to find in a garden here. Instead, in cool weather, there are masses of sweet peas, a pastel jumble of colors, shoulder high. Underneath, between the stakes of the trellis, are lines of lettuce and the spikey green of onions. The heavy blossoms of a slender medlar tree shiver and vibrate under the probing of a hundred bees. By summer the sweet peas are dead, and cosmos take their place, flat-faced flowers with feathery foliage. In the damp ground by the stream there are pitcher plants, small and green and question-mark shaped. Bedded side by side are crinum lilies and butterfly lilies, paper plants, and marigolds and petunias. There are rows of garlic and carrots and corn waving its tassels in the sun. On either side of the entrance gate are tall clumps of sugarcane, never harvested.

  There are other growing things I don’t recognize, things without names probably, the strays and waifs of the botanical world. My mother and David collect wild plants and seeds. They spend almost every weekend hunting for specimens, travelling from vacant slum lots to country fields and pastures. Their discoveries are usually leggy, brushy, sprawling things, quite ugly. There have been two exceptions: a wild iris, small and compact with flowers of clear deep yellow, and a small tree, very slender, with clusters of white flowers like tiny magnolias. The two seem to enjoy each other’s company; neither thrived or bloomed until my mother planted them together in the damp mud by her stream.

  Across the back of the garden, there is a wooden fence within the brick one, post and crossboard, six feet high. On it my mother has begun to paint a flower mural, working slowly and carefully. Only flowers. All sorts of them: roses and sweet peas and begonias, daylilies dripping pollen, convoluted orchids of bright red, and seven-petalled tulips of sky blue. She has worked on it for four years now, and she has finished exactly eight and a half feet.

  Mike and I have no children. By choice.

  “I don’t think I’d make a very good father,” Mike said. “I like things the way they are now.”

  “I’ve been a child and that’s enough.”

  Mike burst out laughing. “That settles it. We grow old together alone.”

  His parents were upset. (“I had to tell them, honey,” Mike said. “I can’t have them staring at your belly every month and wondering.”) But they got over it. I once heard his father describing us as the typical professional couple whose work comes first. Anyway, Mike’s sister provided plenty of grandchildren, three boys and four girls.

  Mike and I are happy in our marriage. More than lovers, we are companions and friends, unfailingly polite and always considerate, each careful never to disturb the other. We live in a rational orderly world, its edges padded by steadily increasing cushions of money.

  We are very busy at work; our free time is crowded with activity. (Just the sort of compartmented life I thought so very strange with Mike’s parents years ago.) We belong to a gourmet cooking group and meet four times a year to dazzle each other with our skills. Our drama group meets every other month; we read Shaw and Shakespeare, Molière and Albee. We are active members of the Little Theater; I do costume design for its six yearly productions. I am on the governing committee of the new City Museum of Art. We go to the opera and the symphony; Mike is on the board of trustees for both of them. We go to all tennis matches and golf tournaments. We have season tickets for professional football. Mike and his partners have a box. In the noisy echoing sports dome twenty-five of us sit in comfort high above the field, whiskey-and-sodas in hand. And yes, I have learned to drink, only single malt Scotch. I can distinguish the different brands; my preference is Laphroaig, with its strong smoky taste. I like to sit in the outermost row of seats and let the waves of sound roll over me—shouts, cheers, jeers, whistles, drums, the thudding of padded bodies on the playing field. To my right, in the crowd below, there are flickering points of light, tiny points of light like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, as ten thousand watch crystals on ten thousand moving arms catch and reflect the brilliant television lights. It is quite pretty, especially after a few drinks.

  We travel abroad twice a year—last spring to Rome and Athens, last fall London and Paris. Mike is a wonderful tourist, boyish in his enthusiasm, as if the whole world were created just for his amusement. Everything delights him. Everything.

  One rainy night in London as we walked back to our hotel (we were crossing Piccadilly Circus, I think), groups of men surged out of the Underground, shouting and fighting their way along the shiny black streets between the lines of cars.

  “What the hell is that all about?” Mike said. “Get in here, out of the way.” We stepped into the shelter of an arcade. The smell of caramelized sugar was heavy in the wet air. I peered through the lace-curtained front door: a tea shop.

  “Will you look at that.” Mike was watching the street, chuckling. “That’s got to be football fans.”

  I leaned against the shop door and pulled off one shoe. An expensive Ferragamo, now soaking wet and ruined. “They could be overthrowing the monarchy.”

  “That’s a good old-fashioned brawl, my love. In its purest, most delightful form.”

  There was something in his voice, a mixture of elation and amusement.…“Mike, you’re enjoying it.”

  “Of course I am. It’s not my teeth getting smashed.”

  In a very few minutes, from nowhere, the police appeared, formed a sort of line, and advanced across the pavement.

  Like a street sweeper, I thought. And laughed out loud.

  “You see, it is funny.” Mike nodded approval.

  The air filled with singsong sirens and more police appeared. Their lines stretched, circled, and pushed the fighters back down the steps into the Underground, leaving behind a scattering of injured.

  We opened our umbrella and walked on, arms linked tightly together. The rain fell harder on the sil
k curtain over our heads as we splashed and kicked through puddles, jumped up and down curbs, imitating Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain.

  Out of breath, Mike gasped, “Old girl, let’s us go back to the hotel and take a hot bath and get a bottle of champagne and have a celebration.”

  “And what, sir, would we be celebrating?” The street cobbles had bruised through the thin soles of my shoes. I rubbed one foot thoughtfully.

  “How the hell would I know? Because we’re here, because we’ve been married a long time, because we’re growing old. We’ll celebrate anything you like.”

  We folded our umbrella; the cold rain streamed down our necks as we ran down the slippery streets.

  Next winter we will go to Australia and New Zealand. My choice, my selection. Years ago, when I was one of a row of navy-and-white raisins perched at a line of desks in the parish school, I turned through the pages of an atlas and found Christchurch. A faraway place with a strange name. I copied it on the back pages of my notebooks, Christchurch. I spelled it in fancy curling script in the margins of my textbooks. And thought, I will go there someday.

  Now I hesitated. Now I wondered: Did I want to go. Did I want to change forever that magic spot on my childhood map. Did I want to convert it to indelible images of real houses and harbors and ships and ocean.

  “Stop dithering about it,” Mike said. “We go when we can, wherever we can. And we always have fun.”

  Yes, we do, my love.

  But something else is happening. One by one my dreams are coming true. My cloudy images, those longing visions of a child’s mind, are being turned into reality.

  I do not want reality. I am not at all sure I can live with it. Not at all sure.

  As he had in college, Mike disappeared occasionally. Without a word, unpredictably, he would not come home. He was never gone long; after all, he had a large practice to take care of. In a day or so he would reappear, looking and acting just as he had before, as if no time had passed.