by Ann Packer
Memory is strange—part movie, part dream. You can never know if what you remember is the essential thing or something else entirely, a grace note. Of my father, here’s what I have: it’s late at night, and from a darkened hallway I see a man in a plaid bathrobe yelling at my mother, who’s standing before him in a long, pink nightgown, her hands clasped in front of her chest. I watch for a long time, but they don’t see me, and though the man is yelling, the memory is soundless. Next I’m at a frost-edged window while the same man hammers fence posts into the frozen ground, each strike ringing out to the snowy world beyond our yard, to the high, frozen branches of black trees and to the endless sky. “To keep out that goddamned bitch hound,” he says later, or maybe earlier, but not to me, although no one else is around. Finally, very early one morning, he’s raising the shade in my bedroom, a manila panel that he snaps up with a thread-wrapped ring, letting pale light flood in. He’s dressed in a suit, come in to say goodbye. On my bed, down past my feet, he leaves—“of all things,” my mother will say again and again—a monogrammed pencil sharpener from his desk, as a souvenir.
And that’s it, that’s all I remember. What I don’t know is nearly infinite: his smell, the tenor of his voice, whether or not he ever touched me. A whole book of things, an entire encyclopedia—a volume that I tried and tried to fill at the Mayers’.
I don’t have the pencil sharpener anymore. When I was in fourth grade, six years after his departure, I took it to school one morning and at recess snuck out the back gate and heaved it into the Dumpster behind the cafeteria.
Mike didn’t wake up. Fifteen days, sixteen, seventeen. Late one night, unable to sleep, I left my apartment and crossed Gorham Street to sit in James Madison Park, a grassy stretch alongside Lake Mendota. Already the summer was a contender for the hottest on record, and though it was after midnight I could still feel the air on my skin, an unpleasant thing that pressed against my bare arms and legs, filled my hair and made it heavy. A nearly full moon had risen, and the light from it glinted across the surface of the water. I picked out Picnic Point opposite, a darkness between lake and sky. I thought of Stu’s story, of him and Mike and Rooster walking across the ice, and I thought: good for Mike that he didn’t tell me.
I took off my shoes and started walking, letting the damp grass prick at the bottoms of my feet. At the base of a tree something round caught my eye and I stooped to look at it. A tennis ball. I picked it up. It was rough, as if it had been in and out of a dog’s mouth so often that the fuzziness had rubbed away. It had split open along one seam, and when I tossed it into the air it fell back into my palm with a hollow, off-balance thock.
I remembered a summer when Mike and I had played tennis almost every day; by August our games had taken on an anti-competitive feeling, with points and sets observed more for form’s sake than because we really cared. Playing became a form of conversation, a kind of physical talking. I suggested this to him one day, and he laughed it off at first, said, “Yeah, we’re saying ‘Take that,’ ‘Take that.’ ” But a few days later he brought it up again, and I had a feeling he’d been mulling it over. “I know what you meant,” he said, and then, “You’re a thoughtful person,” and I knew he was interested in understanding just who I was.
I didn’t want to think about it now. I carried the ruined tennis ball down to the water and threw it in, then headed home. The first-floor apartment was dark and silent, so I tiptoed across the porch and made my way up to my place as quietly as I could.
Mike was a few miles away, sleeping. The doctors had said it was wrong to think of it that way—he wasn’t sleeping—but I let myself anyway: I pictured him lying on his back with his eyes closed. I blocked out the tongs on his head, the tubes, the sound of the ventilator. I undressed and got into bed, and once I was lying down I thought of his face in sleep, his face beside me in sleep, just there on the other pillow.
I closed my eyes and waited. I might rest my hand on his chest, nestle closer—let the darkness take me, too. Or if it was morning I might kiss his shoulder. He might awaken but pretend to sleep longer. Then speak suddenly from complete alertness. “I’ve been thinking hard about something, and I’ve decided that I really ought to tell you about it.”
“What?”
He turns toward me, his eyes open now, soft gray fringed faintly by pale lashes. He looks into my eyes. “I’ve been thinking really seriously about waffles.”
And we both laugh, the day begun.
I opened my eyes into the dark of my bedroom. Lying there alone, I let myself think again, reluctantly, of that afternoon on the tennis court with him, four or five years ago. “You’re a thoughtful person.” We were done playing—done with that day’s physical conversation. We stood at the fence zipping our cases onto our rackets. It was ninety-five degrees out, and we left the court and sat on the grass under a shade tree. He unscrewed the top from the bottle of water he’d brought, then handed it to me. The ice had melted but the water was still cold. I drank deeply, then gave it back. Grinning, he splashed some onto his forehead before having a drink himself. He recapped the bottle and set it aside, then used the back of his arm to wipe his wet hair from his eyes. He reached for my hand and traced a line down my forefinger. “This is talking, too,” he said.
I smiled up at him. “What would the words be?”
He hesitated. “The usual three. That I’m always saying whether I’m saying them or not, because I’m always thinking them.” He looked away for a second, and when he looked back again his eyes were a little teary. “Always,” he said.
A feeling of pleasure, almost physical, flowed through me, and I reached for his hand. I moved my thigh against his and thought of how different our two legs were, mine smooth and small, his covered with hair and thick, strong. How different and how complementary.
He pulled his hand free and drew me close. “I’m still sweating like crazy here,” he said after a while.
“Me, too.”
He chuckled. “My mom would say, ‘Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow.’ ”
“OK, I’m glowing.”
“No, it’s OK, you can sweat. We don’t want to have—what do they call it?”
“A double standard?”
“No double standards,” he said. “We’re a single standard couple.”
“Sounds settled.”
“It is.”
We sat close, our dampness combining. “The thing is,” he said, “I actually kind of like to sweat. That’s what’s great about hockey, you can sweat all you want but the rink’s so cold you never feel too gross. But even sweating on a totally hot day is pretty nice. Your body, like, working.” He nudged me. “I’m speaking for myself here, aren’t I? I’ll bet you’re wishing you could step into a cool shower right this minute, right?”
It was true, but not entirely: I also wanted to be there with him.
“I’m sitting here talking about the joy of sweat, and you’re all, Gosh, I guess I can stand it for one more minute if it means so much to him.”
We exchanged an amused smile. He eased his arm off me and got to his feet, then held out his hand.
“What?” I said. “I’m good for a while longer.”
He shook his head. “Let’s go.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in the spirit of ‘Always leave a party at its peak.’ ”
“Who’s that, Dear Abby?”
“My aunt Peg.”
“Same difference,” we said in unison. His aunt Peg had advice for every occasion: one Easter she’d even pulled me aside and told me she didn’t want to butt in, but she was afraid I might not know how good an idea it was to make your man work a bit for your affections. “Keep him on his toes,” she whispered. “Word to the wise.” We had a good laugh about that later, Mike and I, and for a while afterward he’d walk on tiptoes every time he saw her, though she never caught on.
I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. “But isn’t the party us?” I said.
“We’ll take it with us,” he said. “That’s the idea, right?”
“Right,” I said, and we walked to our bicycles with our hands linked, swinging them between us, happy. This was what I loved, this certainty, this plan. It was what I’d always loved, how we’d somehow found this thing together, made this thing together: a party that would go on and on. Though it wasn’t so much a party that would go on and on as something else that would, something not temporal but spatial, like a huge house. I’d thought this before, that what we’d done was build ourselves a house so big there were rooms we hadn’t even discovered yet, rooms we could still find and inhabit together. I saw an enormous house on a cliff, beautiful in every light. And as I lay in my dark bedroom so many years later—and Mike lay not asleep but comatose across town, with a machine doing his breathing for him, doing his body’s work—I felt I was in a place where that grand old house, invisible for so long now, was suddenly in plain view again. His love. My love. The words to talk about it, the desire to. It could open up again, it could all open up. A tearful feeling approached me, moving quickly, and I tensed up, but it was no use—it was coming, getting closer every moment: huge, invincible. I was going to be swept up. Yet just as I was making myself ready for it—longing, even, for the relief of being overtaken—the feeling ebbed back, and then the house was gone, too, and I was simply in my bed again, alone, somewhere between anxious and numb.
CHAPTER 3
The next day was Saturday, and after my shower I made my way up to the Farmers’ Market. The huge square surrounding the high-domed State Capitol was lined with vendors’ stalls, and there were pickup trucks everywhere, their beds still full of lettuces, beans, basil, eggplants, Zucchinis—of crates of clover honey and flats of marigolds. I walked and looked. The same farmers came summer after summer, and I saw kids who’d hung back last year making change while their parents worked behind them, unloading vegetables or resting for a minute under the shade of a big vinyl umbrella. I passed a smoked trout stand, a stand selling nothing but deep green broccoli. Then I came to a stand of sour cherries, carton upon carton jammed together on a folding table, and I stopped in my tracks.
Mike loved cherry pie, but it was Rooster who had a thing about it—the pinnacle of pie, he always said. Sour cherries had a short season, but at least once a summer a vanload from Michigan showed up at the Farmers’ Market, and I bought enough for a couple pies. A small group of us would skip dinner that night and gather for dessert on my second-story porch instead, sweet vanilla ice cream turning the cooked cherries the exact pink of bubble gum. “Perfect,” Rooster would sigh, and for a while the only sound would be of forks scraping plates.
Then last summer: “Make three,” Rooster said. “Or four. Couldn’t you freeze one?” Mike and I had run into him at Coffee Connection, and he’d come up to the Farmers’ Market with us and spotted the cherry stand right off. I said I’d make an extra for him to take home, and I bought a huge number of cherries, quarts of them, then headed for my apartment while he and Mike went to help Mike’s father with some painting. When they showed up a few hours later I was still pitting—slicing open cherry after cherry and pulling the stone out with the tip of my finger, my hands crimson—and Rooster: Rooster was horrified. It had somehow never occurred to him that removing the pits was work. He couldn’t believe how long it had taken. “I had no idea,” he kept saying, and that evening, eating slabs of pie with me and Mike and Jamie, he kept pausing to thank me. I was touched, and completely unprepared for what happened next: about a month later he came over by himself one evening and handed me a little paper bag, a sheepish grin on his face as he said, “I got you a present. Well, us. For next year.” And inside the bag was a small metal thing that looked a little like a nutcracker: a cherry pitter he’d ordered from a catalog. “Don’t thank me,” he said. “Thank you.”
Now it was next year. A line had formed already, at least half a dozen people waiting to buy cherries. I looked at the fruit, round and red and gleaming in the sun, and I wondered: Would Rooster happen by today and wonder if I’d seen them, too? Would he think of the unused cherry pitter in my kitchen drawer? Would he wonder if I’d ever use it now? I’d seen him at the hospital yesterday, both of us awkward after the evening on the terrace with Stu, and for a moment I thought of joining the line and buying just enough for one small pie.
I continued around the plaza, stopping for some lettuce, then went home for my car and drove to my mother’s. She came to the door in her weekend uniform: a chambray shirt tucked into khakis, lace-up moccasins on her feet. Behind her the house was shadowy, the living room with its north-facing windows, the narrow staircase up to the second floor. “Honey,” she said. “Hi, I didn’t expect you.”
I’d stopped at a bakery, and I held up the bag. “I brought muffins. But if you’ve already eaten …”
“No, not really.”
I knew she had: her reading glasses hung from a chain around her neck, a sure sign that she’d already finished breakfast and started on her weekend paperwork. It had been five years since I’d lived there, but after the accident I’d spent several nights, so I even knew what she’d had for breakfast: bran flakes with skim milk, and coffee made three-quarters decaf. In the pantry there’d been half a dozen identical boxes of cereal, several bags of pasta, a stack of canned tuna at least a foot high. She was a creature of habit.
She took a step backward, opening the door wider. It’s your house, too, she always said, but I couldn’t help knocking, couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t. I stepped in and followed her to the kitchen. I’d seen her at the hospital a few days ago, but she’d had her hair cut since then and it looked bristly from the back, spiked with more gray than I’d have thought. She worked long hours as a therapist at Student Health; on weekends she holed up in a little room off her bedroom and translated jotted-down notes into fuller accounts of each session.
From the kitchen table I watched as she filled her coffeemaker with cold water, then opened the freezer and reached for the coffee bag that contained her special mix.
“Mom, I need the real thing this morning.”
She smiled over her shoulder. “OK, but it’ll be on your conscience if I end up with the shakes all day.” She got a different bag and started the coffee, then sat opposite me. I pushed the muffins toward her. “These look sinful,” she said. “What kind are they?”
“Carrot. But don’t worry, I got the ones that were only half butter.”
“Well, in that case …”
I broke off a piece of mine and put it in my mouth, the crunchy top edge that Mike loved. In my apartment there was often a little white bag containing two or three muffin carcasses, just the bottoms in their pleated paper skins.
“No news?” she said.
I shook my head. No news, no hope, nothing.
She reached across the table and patted my hand.
I looked away, and my glance fell on the curtains over the sink, made of tired, off-white muslin. I said, “I have to tell you something.”
A furrow appeared on the bridge of her nose, and she looked at me quizzically. I was sure she thought it was something to do with Mike.
“You need new curtains,” I said. “In here, in the upstairs bathroom, and in your office. Have you looked at your curtains lately? They’re dingy.”
Her face relaxed into a smile, but I could see she didn’t have a clue where I was headed. “And?” she said.
“And I was thinking I’d make new ones for you. If you’re not too busy we could go get fabric right now.”
She lifted her coffee and took a sip, then set the cup down deliberately. “That’s a nice offer,” she said, “but don’t you think you’ve got enough on your mind already?”
I didn’t want to think about what I had on my mind, and I looked away. In my peripheral vision I saw her lift her cup for another sip, then set it down again.
“New curtains would be nice,” she said.
I turned back. “Really?”
&nbs
p; “I accept.”
We finished our muffins and coffee and measured the windows, then got into her car and drove out to one of the big fabric houses on the far side of town. It was a place I hadn’t been with her since I’d gotten my driver’s license, and seeing it through someone else’s eyes made me overly aware of the unpleasant aspects: the bright lights, the vastness, the smell of sizing. There were aisles and aisles of fabric, bolts and bolts of it: cottons and rayons and wools, shiny acetates for lining. Near the entrance a display of Fourth of July fabrics occupied a prominent position, with over a dozen different combinations of stars and stripes. I’d never understood seasonal fabrics, the urge to make yourself a shirt strewn with candy corn for Halloween, a set of leprechaun-print napkins for a St. Patrick’s Day party. When I made something I thought of longevity, how the hours I put into it would yield me an exponential number of wearing hours. Never mind the question of taste.
We made our way to the back wall, where the home-furnishing fabrics hung on giant rolls. Right away she picked a stripe for her office and a tiny flower print for the upstairs bathroom, but she was less sure about the kitchen. “Maybe this one with the fruit,” she said. “Do you like it?”
“Sure.”
“I went by the Mayers’ last night,” she added casually.
I’d been fingering a flowered chintz, but now I let it go. I felt stricken, hating the idea of her discussing me with Mrs. Mayer. “You did?”