Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

“What?”

  “Rooster and Joan live next door—they’re renting the Nilssons’ house. The Nilssons moved to Arizona.”

  I turned and looked at the Nilssons’ kitchen window, but whoever she’d waved at was gone. “Rooster Rooster? My Rooster?”

  “The very same.”

  We went inside but I was antsy, couldn’t sit for pacing, avoided the windows that faced the Nilssons’ and then spent long moments in front of them, peering out. Finally I got my coat back on and went over, feeling strange about everything: being back in Madison and not having called Mike; the prospect of seeing Rooster; the notion that he was married in there, married.

  He opened the door and his look told me he hadn’t seen me when he’d waved at my mother. He was astonished. I thought of the telegram I’d sent in December—CAN’T MAKE IT AFTER ALL STOP SORRY STOP CONGRATULATIONS STOP—and I felt sick with remorse.

  His red hair caught the hall light and shone like bright copper. He said, “This is weird in so many ways I can’t even count them.”

  “I don’t have enough fingers.”

  From the doorstep I looked past him into the living room. In the Nilssons’ time it had been decked out in full Scandinavian regalia: lots of bleached pine furniture covered with heart and snowflake stencils, painted clogs displayed on the mantel. Now it was Laura Ashley: flowered couch, flowered armchair, flowered tablecloth covering a round table that held a flowered lamp with a flowered lampshade.

  He followed my glance. “Joan’s stuff,” he said with a grin. “Remember my armchair?”

  His armchair had been a blue-and-tan plaid La-Z-Boy that shook when you opened it.

  “Didn’t make the cut?” I said.

  “Not even close. You have no idea.”

  He took a step back and I followed him into the kitchen, all bright and cheery, white with a lot of red accents. I noticed with amusement that there was a framed Matisse poster over the table. But was it “hard”?

  There was an open can of diet cola on the counter, and he took a sip, then went to the refrigerator and got me one. “Cheers.”

  I hadn’t had a diet cola since I’d left. I popped the top and took a drink, the taste dark and sweet and almost forgotten. “You look different somehow,” I said, and it was true: he was trimmer for one thing, but it was more than that, there was something in the very way he stood and watched me. It was as if I’d stumbled upon his double, man where the Rooster I’d known was still boy, self-contained where my Rooster—and I’d never thought of this before—self-contained where my Rooster leaned over you, shadowed you somehow with his grievances and opinions.

  He smiled and nodded, but didn’t respond. “So you’re back,” he said after a while.

  “Just for a few days.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  I hesitated. Would he know? Was it OK to tell him? I said, “Jamie’s family is having problems.”

  “Is Jamie OK?”

  “I haven’t really talked to her.”

  “Oh, you just got back this minute?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, actually.”

  “O-kay,” he drawled. He moved past me to sit at the table, setting his can down with a sharp tap. He wore a Polarfleece henley over cutoff sweatpants, and as he settled into the chair I was struck by his knees—by the matted red hair, the freckles, the bony definition.

  He gave me a flat look. “Mike doesn’t know.”

  I shook my head, but he was telling me, not asking. He looked away, took a sip of his cola.

  “How is he?” I said after a while.

  “Holding steady.”

  “Steady?”

  “Good days and bad—you can imagine. I took him out for lunch today and he seemed pretty cheerful.”

  “You took him out for lunch?” For some reason it seemed odd to me, as if Rooster’d said they’d gone on a date. But of course Mike couldn’t drive. “Where’d you go?”

  “Brenda’s. We go every Friday.”

  I was still standing, and I felt awkward suddenly, too exposed. I moved around the butcher-block island so it was between me and Rooster. On the counter by the sink there was a deep white bowl full of Delicious apples, obviously decorative.

  Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t that we were waiting each other out, but it got to feeling like that after a while.

  “So where’s Joan?” I said at last.

  “Working.”

  “And how is she?”

  “Great.”

  “Good,” I said. I had a vision of Joan in her nurse’s whites, standing over Mike’s bed, turning to give me an encouraging look. It was hard to move her out of the hospital, to unpin her hair and put her into jeans, into this kitchen, where she’d wash a bag of apples, then buff each one before arranging them all in a bowl.

  I cocked my head. “So marriage is good, huh?”

  Rooster gave me a big smile, the kind of wide grin you try to control but can’t. He slid his can from one hand to the other. “I can’t speak for the whole institution, but I certainly like mine.”

  “I’m glad for you,” I said. I really meant it. I wanted him to know that, almost said I really mean it. But why wouldn’t I?

  “Let’s not talk about Mike,” he said then. “OK? Were you wanting to do that? Because I really don’t want to.”

  “OK,” I said. “Fine. Agreed.”

  We chatted for five or ten minutes and then I left. My mother’s house was silent. I went into the kitchen and found a piece of paper in a drawer, then set about writing to Jamie. I said I was sorry again, and that I’d missed her, and that I just wanted a chance to talk face-to-face. I found a spare key to my mother’s car and drove through the late-night streets to the Fletchers’ house. It was nearly midnight but the lights were all on, upstairs and down, and I wondered if any two of them were together or if each sister was upstairs in her own room while Mr. Fletcher was by himself in the den. My mother had told me that Mrs. Fletcher would be moved to a psychiatric hospital in the next day or two.

  I knocked at the front door. After a moment Mr. Fletcher came and opened it, his hair a little grayer than when I’d last seen him, a little sparser. He wore a nubby brown cardigan over his white dress shirt.

  “Carrie,” he said. “What a surprise.”

  He had always been something of a cipher to me, and I couldn’t tell if he was being cool or just himself. We stood looking at one another for a long moment, he in the entryway and I on the doorstep, until, almost simultaneously, we moved together for a stiff hug.

  “Is Jamie here?”

  “Well, she … she, uh—” He put his hand in his pocket, then took it out again. “I think she went to bed,” he said. “She’s kind of tired. We all are.”

  I ducked my head, sorry I’d made him lie. “I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He nodded.

  I held out the note, folded in half with Jamie’s name on it. “Could you give her this?”

  “Sure,” he said, taking it from me. He brightened a little, happy to have a task. “Consider it done.”

  Jamie’s shift started at noon the next day. I waited until one, then borrowed my mother’s car and drove over, parking where I’d always parked for work. I wondered if Viktor still worked at the library, how he and Ania were doing. It was extraordinary that they’d actually met Kilroy, that anyone in Madison had. Dinner at their house that night, when Kilroy and I’d met: it seemed expendable now, it was no longer part of us.

  I locked my mother’s car and headed to State Street, the morning’s conversation with Kilroy on my mind. He’d been impatient, said he didn’t understand my staying if Jamie wouldn’t see me. When I said that I couldn’t give up so easily, he got curt, said he had something on the stove, which I knew wasn’t true.

  The copy shop was quiet, not too busy on a Saturday afternoon halfway between midterm and the end of the semester. Jamie was behind the counter talking to one of the machine operators, a tall, gangly guy who’d worked there for years. H
er face barely changed when she saw me. I waited until they were done talking, but before I could speak she turned and walked into the storeroom. From where I stood I saw her pick up the wall phone and punch in a number. I thought I could be patient, wait until she was done with the phone, until business brought her back out to the main room, but there was something in the way she stood—right hand at her waist, all her weight on one leg while the other was bent dancerlike at the knee—that collapsed my composure. It was so familiar, that stance, so Jamie. Affection and regret overcame me like a sudden fever, and I reached around to open the half-door that separated the employee area from the front of the store, then made my way to where she stood.

  Her back was to me, but it took her only a moment to turn around. She was still on the phone, and she scowled and turned sideways, then just as quickly turned back—as if she’d realized she should keep an eye on me.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded when she’d hung up the phone.

  “Nothing. I wanted to see you. I—Did you get my note?”

  She stamped her foot. “Yes. And I don’t care. This is my place of work—get out of here or I’ll call security.”

  “Jamie,” I said. “My God.”

  She brushed past me and left the storeroom. Out front, she spoke to the tall guy, glancing back at me while she talked. After a moment he came and stood in the doorway. “Listen,” he said.

  I shook my head, unable to speak for the tears all over my face. I made my way past him and then past Jamie, who looked the other way. Out on the street I leaned against a notice-studded kiosk and sobbed—hard, racking sobs that shook my shoulders and caused me to gulp and choke. People stared at me, whispering. Finally I got control of myself. I found some Kleenex in my purse and blew my nose, then swabbed at my face. Before I left I took a last look into the copy shop, and there she was, staring blankly out the window at me.

  CHAPTER 33

  My bedroom closet smelled of cardboard. Boxes of my mother’s papers, boxes of mine. Some newer cartons contained the things I’d asked my mother to clear out of my apartment before subletting it. By their weight I could tell which ones held books, and I pushed them aside and found the one full of clothes, then pulled it into the room.

  I was home from the copy shop, exhausted and sad, too jumpy to sit still. I found a knife and cut open the box, curious at what I’d left behind. When I saw, my heart sank. What had I been expecting? A leather jacket I wouldn’t recognize? A baby-rib pointelle cardigan? These were the things I hadn’t packed, and I didn’t want to be the person who’d bought them, let alone the person who still owned them. A Badgers sweatshirt, pleated wide-wale cords, a stack of cotton turtlenecks. I was dismayed. I closed the box and shoved it back into the closet, next to my old Kenmore sewing machine, the machine my Bernina had replaced. Sewing on the Kenmore—that was how I’d learned. Switching to the Bernina had been like getting out of a twenty-year-old pickup and sliding behind the wheel of a BMW.

  The Kenmore outweighed the Bernina by a good ten pounds. I lugged it to my desk and set it down with a heavy clunk. My mother was on the other side of the wall, in her office doing paperwork, and in a moment she appeared, a curious look on her face. She saw the machine and broke into a smile. “Look at that old jalopy.”

  “Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”

  “Why’d we ever hang on to it?”

  “Low blood sugar,” I said. It was a Kilroy expression, his explanation for anything left undone, and I looked away, flushing a little.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Just tired.”

  “Jamie’s pretty angry?”

  I nodded.

  She’d been standing in the doorway, and now she came in and looked over my shoulder at the machine. She wore a string of off-white beads over her work shirt, and I thought that must be the thing that separated her from other people living alone, that she would put on a necklace for a day when she probably wouldn’t leave the house.

  She said, “Does it help to know that she’s probably putting a lot of her anger on you because it’s too hard to put it on Lynn or her mother?”

  I smiled halfheartedly. “Not really.”

  She put her hand on my shoulder and patted it. “I guess it wouldn’t.”

  I faced the desk and rested my forehead on my hand. I heard her shift behind me, and I looked up and said, “I feel like if I could just think of the right thing to say we could get past it, and then I could go back to New York.”

  She cocked her head. “That’s what you really want to do, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  She had some new khakis she’d been meaning to get hemmed, and a little later I pinned them for her, then somehow managed to get the sewing machine working, finding an old needle in a basket in my closet, along with some thread and an empty bobbin. When I asked, it turned out she had some other alterations she needed done, so I sewed for a couple hours more, taking in the waist on a skirt, mending the torn lining of a blazer. It got dark, and I turned on my desk lamp and in the pool of light it threw worked until there was nothing more for me to do.

  Sunday morning I walked over to the Fletchers’. Mrs. Fletcher was being transferred to a place called Wellhaven that day, a psychiatric hospital halfway to Janesville, and I stared at the empty house, wondering how she’d be moved: strapped to a gurney or vacant-eyed in the back of Mr. Fletcher’s Lincoln Continental.

  Maple trees with their smooth trunks. Sycamores with patchy bark, many-armed oak trees reaching for the sky. If New York was a city of noise, Madison was a city of trees. It was so early in spring that they were still leafless, but there was a feeling of new green about them, a feeling that in a week or so you’d start to see it, the tiniest pale hints.

  I walked down the driveway to the backyard. Looking up at the beige house, I thought of a night when Jamie and I were fourteen and she snuck down and met me on the lawn, where I waited with a pair of contraband beers. Ten years later, I remembered it vividly: the feel of the damp grass as we sat leaning against the back fence; the way the house looked, outlined against the dark night. And how bold we felt, how reckless.

  Back out front, I stood thinking for a moment, then set off again, covering another four or five blocks. I stopped in front of a brick house with a for-sale sign on the lawn. Next door was the house I’d always thought of as the baby house, although the baby was probably in third grade by now, and beyond that was the Mayers’.

  From where I stood I could see the house’s profile, plus the tail end of an unfamiliar white van in the driveway. It was nearly noon, and I tried to imagine what was going on inside. There was church, but Mr. and Mrs. Mayer didn’t go every week, and the kids rarely went at all. Mrs. Mayer in the kitchen, that was easy. Mr. Mayer off playing golf, or maybe out in the garage fixing something. Julie away at Swarthmore. John Junior—well, he was probably still asleep. And Mike …

  Where in the house would Mike be? What would he be doing? What did he do all day? All week? The president of the bank where he used to work had been a good visitor at the hospital, especially once Mike was in rehab. He made a big thing of assuring Mike that there’d be a job waiting for him when he was ready. Had Mike become ready? Had he gone back to the bank? I didn’t think so, didn’t see how he could have started working again without my knowing it. Wouldn’t someone have told me, my mother? Then again, maybe not.

  I stood in front of the brick house for a long time, a very long time for standing still on a square of residential sidewalk in Madison, Wisconsin. A well-groomed older man in a red windbreaker came out of the house across the street. He carried a spade, and after a curious look at me he set to turning the beds that ran alongside his lawn. The Colonel, that’s what Mike used to call him. He’d always had a military look about him. Still did.

  I turned and headed back. The air was damp and cool, but people had begun to come out for walks, stout and unfashionable people in their church clothes, young couples with babies in strollers. “Morning,”
they said as they passed me.

  At my mother’s I sat in the kitchen and drank a cup of coffee. After a while I went upstairs for my sketchbook from Piero’s class. The things I’d stapled in there, the things I’d drawn: I couldn’t quite retrieve my initial impulses. I got my colored pencils and tried to sketch something, but I couldn’t find a way to start.

  I went to the phone and dialed Kilroy’s number. When he answered I told him about seeing Jamie at the copy shop yesterday, how she’d ordered me away. “At this point,” I said, “I don’t know why I’m even still here.”

  “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re you.”

  His voice sounded strained, and I felt alarmed. “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You can’t leave because you’re the person you are, and I can’t want you to because that would be wanting you to be someone else when I want you to be you.”

  I want you to be you. I closed my eyes and imagined him into the room with me—his face, his stocking feet on my lap. I wanted his feet on my lap or my feet on his, his hand stroking the skin between the top of my sock and the hem of my jeans, his fingers sliding up my shin until the denim stopped them.

  “Tell me about Madison,” he said. “What does it look like, what’s it like to be back there?”

  “Dull,” I said. “Dead.”

  “Is that what it’s like or how you feel?”

  “Both.” I thought of my walk home from the Mayers’ street. Without saying where I’d been, I told him about it, how friendly everyone was, good morning, good morning.

  “Sounds surreal after New York,” he said. “It’s like you haven’t been debriefed so you’re having all this cognitive dissonance. You need to go through a decontamination process.”

  We talked a little about what I might do next, write a long letter to Jamie, go back to Cobra Copy. “I love you,” I said just before we hung up, and there was a pause before he responded.

  “As do I. Or I mean, As do I you.” He paused again. “How’s that for contorted?”

  The next morning I drove my mother to work so I could use her car, then drove home again, wondering what to use it for. I wandered around the house, sitting for brief periods in the different rooms. I didn’t want to go shopping, go back to State Street, go anywhere. I didn’t want to stay where I was. I needed to reach Jamie, but how? I went out and got into the car, and I turned the engine on and then off and then on again before driving the familiar streets to Mike’s house.