Emily, Alone

by Stewart O'Nan

  “I know what that means.”

  “Have fun at the club, and please give our best to Arlene.”

  “I shall. Give my best to the Sanners.”

  After she’d gotten off, she put Rufus out and restarted the disc from the beginning. Rufus crunched his treat into pieces, took a sloshing drink of water and waddled back upstairs. Beneath the murky opening theme, church bells tolled, and she pictured the cathedral, the bare yews reaching over the chancel, the spire rising into the sky. Somewhere downstairs there were albums filled with Henry’s pictures of that day, and the next, when it had rained and the pub Louise had recommended was closed. As the horns and then the chorus entered, Emily looked up from her Lands’ End catalog, squinting, as if trying to remember something elusive, but the music was just music now, recorded voices and tympani booming from the stereo. There was nothing she wanted to buy. The models all seemed too pleased with themselves, as if they’d discovered an easier way of life. She flipped through the pages, wondering when Margaret would call, if at all.

  THE BELLE OF THE BALL

  Getting dressed for the club, Emily struggled with her jade necklace. She bent forward toward her vanity, chin tucked to her chest, arms curled behind her ducked head, blindly trying to pinch open the clasp and marry it to the tiny eyelet. With every miss she let out her held breath like a sigh. She’d get it eventually—she’d never failed yet. It was the contorted position as much as the clumsiness of her efforts that was humiliating. Over the years she and Henry had made a ceremony of the moment. There was no need to ask him. On formal occasions like tonight he would stand behind her like a valet, waiting for her to finish her makeup. She’d find him admiring her in the mirror, and while she discounted his adoration of her beauty—based, as it was, on a much younger woman—she also relied on it, and as time passed she was grateful for the restorative powers of his memory. No one else saw her the way he did. He knew the eighteenyear-old lifeguard she used to be, and the fashionable grad student, the coltish young mother. When he solved the clasp, he’d watch her regally settle the necklace on her chest, and then, with his hands on her shoulders, bend down and kiss the side of her neck, making her close her eyes.

  “Stop,” she’d say.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop what you’re doing.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “You’re making us late, that’s what you’re doing.”

  “I’m ready to go.”

  “I can tell.”

  Now when she finally succeeded and straightened up again, she nearly expected him to be there. She fixed the necklace so that it sat evenly, then, glancing upward, stopped and appraised her own face as if it were strange and captivating.

  The glow from the vanity was unforgiving. The hollows beneath her eyes had gone crepey, almost transparent, showing a bruiselike purple. Her mouth was deeply creased, her skin mottled with beige patches, the effect of too much sun. A downy fuzz fringed not just her upper lip but—in the glare of the bare bulbs—her cheeks and chin. She caught herself frowning out of reflex and looked away before clicking the light off.

  The image stuck with her as she gathered her lipstick and tissues for her clasp purse. Her hair was thin and stiff, kept presentable only by frequent visits to the salon. Her body—once her glory—had sagged and flattened long ago. Even her perfect posture was gone, her very bones and sinews unreliable. If nothing else, she could still dress well. Downstairs, she verified it in the front hall mirror, avoiding her face.

  “What do you think?” she asked Rufus. “Am I going to be the belle of the ball?”

  He looked up at her, worried. His eyes were rheumy, and she plucked a tissue and wiped the goo from the corners.

  “I know, it’s no fun getting old. At least you don’t have to go parade around in front of people.”

  She was still mulling the idea when Arlene picked her up. Even in the darkness of the car, Arlene’s lipstick seemed too stark, a stab at a glamour that Emily could not imagine was the fashion with anyone below the age of seventy—a vampirelike, Joan Crawford effect. Her perfume was fruity, and hurt Emily’s sinuses.

  “Don’t you look nice,” Arlene said.

  “So do you,” Emily said.

  Arlene had trouble enough seeing during the day, and the drive to Oakland, though less than a mile, took a good fifteen minutes. As they pulled into the club behind a familiar Cadillac, Emily was relieved to see a team of valets waiting for them beneath the porte cochère.

  Inside, under the glittering chandeliers, Arlene’s lipstick didn’t seem so noticeable, if only because Emily’s attention lit immediately on her forehead. The gash was still livid, the stitches visible. If Emily were her, she would have worn a scarf or a turban, as Louise had after her chemo, but Arlene was either brazen or blissfully unaware. She’d had her hair done, and was wearing her favorite diamond chips and the matching pendant from Henry’s mother. As they crossed the lobby to the grand staircase that swept upward along the far wall, they passed fellow members gathered in conversation, cocktails in hand. Emily’s instinct was to shield Arlene from them, but the sheer number rendered that impractical, and then Arlene was waving to Lorraine Havermeyer and Edie Buchanan as if she wanted to call attention to herself.

  Lorraine and Edie were best friends, spry, ninetyish widows who lived in the old Webster Hall apartments a few blocks up Fifth Avenue from the club. Shrunken and hunched, they were fixtures on the scene, inseparable, present for every lecture or opening at the Carnegie and the Scaife, every first night at the Benedum Center. Arlene made straight for them, dragging Emily in her wake. They all traded Happy Thanksgivings, asking after one another’s families.

  “We heard what happened,” Lorraine said, pointing at the gash.

  Rather than minimize it, Arlene dipped her head to give them a better look.

  They both craned forward, inspecting the doctor’s work like rival surgeons.

  “It must have been terrifying,” Edie said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Arlene said. “I was out like a light. Emily’s the one who had to deal with everything.”

  “It looks like it hurt,” Edie asked.

  “It did at first, but the doctor gave me these great painkillers. For a while I had no idea where I was, and I didn’t particularly care either.”

  “It could have been much worse,” Emily said.

  Oh, she’d been lucky, they agreed.

  The talk turned to falls, a favorite topic, and timely, with winter coming on, ice their mortal enemy. Jean Daly had slipped in her kitchen and broken her hip, and now her children were trying to move her to a home. The horror with which Lorraine delivered the story annoyed Emily. It was the ultimate cautionary tale, the moral being Don’t fall, as if they were made of glass. In a sense they were—their fragility was irrefutable, medically proven—and yet Emily detested the inevitable rundown of accidents and tragedies, the more fortunate clucking their tongues and counting their blessings, all the while knowing it was just a matter of time. She didn’t need to be reminded that she was a single misstep from disaster, especially here, without Henry, surrounded by the survivors of their earlier life.

  She was aware that it was just her frame of mind, that she’d had a bad day and was feeling sorry for herself. Usually the club was a comfort, unchanging, a bastion of middle-class civility and permanence, like the church. The Doric columns and flocked wallpaper, the potted rubber plants and wing chairs, the trophy cases and herringbone floors—they had all been here to greet her sixty years ago, the first time Henry ushered her into the Maxwells’ world. In Kersey she’d waited tables at the Clarion Hotel, but she was unprepared for the scale of the dining room, easily a hundred tables set with crystal goblets, gilt-edged china and heavy, monogrammed silver. By chance, that first night, one of their servers was a fellow student from her economics class. Dressed like a cadet in an immaculate white jacket with gold buttons, he silently poured their water and moved on, never betraying their secret. It
would be decades before Emily felt she belonged, as if she’d had to earn the right through long years of service. Now, by default (and the trustees’ rigid bylaws), the club had become hers, Henry’s membership passing to her so that Arlene was forever her guest, though she’d been coming here since she was born.

  If nothing else, the club gave them a place to go. These seasonal gatherings were tribal, a means of renewing one’s allegiance and catching up on the fortunes of one’s fellow members. As much as Emily might protest or wish otherwise, she was just as curious to hear the hottest gossip.

  “Did you hear about Bibi Urquhart?” Lorraine asked, already shocked.

  They hadn’t.

  “She’s moving—you’ll never guess where.”

  “Fort Lauderdale,” Emily said.

  “Try again.”

  “West Palm,” Arlene obliged.

  “Butler.”

  They both looked to Edie to see if it was a joke.

  She nodded, shrugging at the kookiness of the idea.

  “I don’t get it,” Arlene said. “She doesn’t have family there, does she?”

  “She wanted out of the city,” Edie said. “She found this cute little place by the country club, very reasonable. It has a pond and woods. It sounds idyllic.”

  “The taxes are cheaper,” Lorraine said.

  “They can’t be that much cheaper,” Arlene said.

  “I wouldn’t mind a place in the country,” Edie said. “As long as I didn’t have to live there.”

  “A summer place,” Arlene said, meaning their old cottage at Chautauqua, which Emily had had to sell after Henry died, and for which Arlene would never forgive her.

  “That gets expensive,” Emily said. “Especially if you’re only there a couple weeks a year.”

  “She’s serious,” Lorraine said. “She’s putting her house on the market.”

  “And it’s such a lovely house,” Arlene said, covering her mouth as if it had been leveled.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Edie said. “But for one person living alone …”

  “It’s just too much,” Lorraine finished.

  They speculated in low tones about the asking price, which led to a review of how Squirrel Hill was doing, and what other neighborhoods were losing value, and how the schools were failing and the tax base dwindling—an argument against leaving the city, Emily tried to mention, but quickly they were on to the elections, and the presidential race, and the larger issue of how the Republican Party they knew was gone, hijacked by the right, leaving them no one to vote for, a lament Emily had heard time and again, and which, like most of the world’s problems, would not be solved by any amount of small talk.

  Lorraine and Edie said they were going to take the elevator up to the dining room. Arlene said she and Emily would brave the stairs. They’d see them up there.

  They tarried to make sure they wouldn’t. Arlene took the opportunity to step outside for a smoke. As Emily waited, surveying the lobby, she thought that maybe Bibi was right, that solitude might be a more suitable life for a woman their age. And yet she couldn’t shake off the question of what one would do out there in the middle of nowhere, especially in the winter. She had no illusions about the country. It was where she’d come from. She knew the terrible boredom and insularity firsthand, the paralyzing sense of being stranded hundreds of miles from real life. Only a city person would see it as freeing.

  She hadn’t had much of a lunch, and was glad when Arlene returned. As Arlene navigated the room, skirting the many social circles, people glanced away from their conversations to follow her, gawking as if she had a knife sticking from her head. She kept on, beaming at Emily, looking pleased, as if she were carrying some gleeful secret.

  “I just saw Claude Penman outside, with Liz?” She laid a hand on Emily’s forearm and leaned in close to deliver her scoop, her eyes shining. “She’s in a wheelchair. You should see her. She looks awful.”

  THE DAY OF REST

  Sunday Emily drove the Olds to church. Both she and Arlene preferred the early service, and it was a pleasure to guide the long car through the gray, empty streets, knowing the Times would be waiting for her when she returned.

  The congregation was all regulars, mostly older, so small they took up just the first few rows. Calvary was grand, a mock-Gothic pile, and to save energy, only the lamps that hung directly above them shone, the wings and rear pews lost in the gloom. The night before had been freezing, and the stone held the cold, the space beneath the soaring vault too vast to heat. The Altar Guild had decorated the sanctuary with fresh pine boughs, scenting the chilly air. Emily kept her coat buttoned and watched the tapers waver and smoke. As a child she’d loved the pageantry of Advent, the delicious month of buildup to Christmas. Now, having outgrown most of her earthly desires, she thought she understood the longing for Christ’s arrival.

  O come, O come, Emmanuel,

  and ransom captive Israel.

  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” Father Lewis intoned, letting the meaning settle, when there was no need with this crowd, naturally drawn to last things. Emily saw the words as a promise. From beginning to end, her life was safely contained in Him, as was Henry’s, and the children’s. In this way she could believe in eternity, even as she imagined death as an endless darkness.

  Each week she came to be renewed by the music and the simple eloquence of the liturgy. With Arlene she processed to the rail and crossed one palm atop the other to receive the body and the blood, and afterward knelt at her seat, eyes closed, her forehead resting on her clasped hands, at peace. The recessional was boisterous, the organ triumphant, the bass vibrating the air. She shook Father Lewis’s hand and tugged her gloves on.

  Outside, the world was bright and cold, and as she drove Arlene home, the spell dissipated, and she was left with the day. She would start on the crossword. Margaret would call. She needed to take the chicken out of the freezer. It all seemed so meager that she thought, fleetingly, of dropping Arlene off and coming back for the eleven o’clock.

  At home she put on Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and brewed a pot of tea before going through the Post-Gazette. Rufus aligned himself with the radiator so he could keep an eye on her. She separated the glossy flyers from the news, making a neat pile at her feet, then slid out the classifieds and real estate sections. She clipped her coupons and set them safely aside before taking the pile into the kitchen and adding it to the recycling.

  Stripped of its advertising, the Post-Gazette was criminally thin. While she relied on their local coverage, and still loved the funnies, she was glad she had the Times to keep her company. The Arts section or Book Review alone could rescue an afternoon. Rationed correctly, the puzzle would last her all week. She and Louise used to compare their progress, or lack thereof, commiserating or crying foul when the editor asked too much of them. Even now, when she caught on to the pun that unlocked a puzzle, she wondered if Louise had gotten it, when of course Louise was beyond the reach of home delivery.

  The news was old. A bomb had gone off near a mosque in Baghdad. A teenager had been stabbed at a party in Garfield. Alcoa—which Henry and now she owned a fair amount of—was cutting jobs. The Steelers were playing Cleveland. It was supposed to snow tomorrow, just a dusting. She made her usual survey of the obituaries, and was relieved to find no one she knew. She noted those close to her age and younger, but refused to brood on them. She didn’t want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar. There was no need to hurry things. She would be among their number soon enough.

  She dispatched with the Post-Gazette and pressed on through the Times, pouring herself another cup of tea. Rufus lobbied her to go outside and then did nothing but stand there like a cow and sniff the air. She gave him a treat anyway. She let the CD repeat, and then, when she’d wrapped her legs in an afghan and taken up her lucky pen, let it repeat again.

  Starti
ng was always hard, but rewarding too, completing the easy clichés and catchphrases before decoding the coyer clues. She was pleased that she could still retrieve the names of poets and rivers and films, and was nimble enough to hold the competing possibilities of intersection in her mind until the right combination fit. “Nigeria’s neighbor” was GABON. “Steakhouse shunner” was VEGAN.

  “‘Capacious canine,’” she asked Rufus, “who does that sound like?”

  When the grandfather clock chimed one, she stopped for lunch—Lipton chicken noodle soup and a turkey sandwich. She put on Schütz’s Story of the Nativity and ate in the breakfast nook, looking out on the backyard. The weatherman was a day late. Wisps of snow floated down like ash. The birdfeeders were low, and when she’d had enough of her sandwich, she took her crusts outside and scattered them on the window ledge, then sat with a cup of coffee and some Nilla wafers and watched a pair of chickadees feast.

  That Margaret hadn’t called nagged at her—really, that she hadn’t bothered to call on Thanksgiving—but Emily resisted the urge to pick up the phone. All Margaret had to say was that she’d booked her flights. Was that too much to ask? Behold the handmaid of the Lord, the chorus rejoiced in the living room, but, as she sat there with the dregs of her cup, a napkin crumpled in one hand, a feeling of inertia took her. The day was half over and she’d gotten nothing done.

  Running the dishes didn’t count, or refilling the feeders, taking the single chicken breast from the freezer and baring it to the air. They were just ways of procrastinating, putting off the tedious job of writing her Christmas cards. She was using a picture Kenneth had taken of the grandchildren at Sam’s high school graduation, Sam in his gown, the other three smiling in their spring best. It was a tradition, each grandchild getting a chance to be the center of attention. He was the last, the baby of the group. Next year she’d have to find a different shot. Friday she’d made a special trip to the post office to buy holiday stamps, so there was no excuse, and still she roamed about the downstairs, distracted, as if she’d forgotten something.