Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  “If only there were an everything,” Sarabeth said now. “Or even an anything.”

  “There must be an anything.”

  “I made a new lampshade.”

  “What did I tell you?” Liz teased. She twirled the stem of her wineglass and said casually, “For MM?” She worried about Mark—but really, she didn’t need to.

  “The very same.”

  “Did he like it?”

  “He did. But not as much as he likes his new canoe.”

  “What?”

  “Mark got himself a new canoe. It was kind of strange, really, I was getting ready to leave, and he goes, ‘I want to show you something.’ And in his workroom he had this actually very beautiful new canoe.”

  “Only you,” Liz said, “would know someone who’d have a canoe at his workplace.”

  “Unless the workplace was a boat shop.”

  “Only you would know someone whose workplace was a boat shop!”

  Sarabeth shrugged; Liz had a thing about how unusual and interesting her life was. If only it were true.

  “So how was it strange?” Liz said.

  “I don’t know. Because a canoe is so phallic?” Sarabeth waited for Liz’s smile. “It was different is all. Mostly I’m in, I’m out, it’s all lamps. He made a point of asking if I had a second.”

  “Maybe it was that he showed you something he cared about. He put himself on the line. It would’ve been hard for him if you hadn’t admired it.”

  “Speaking of phallic,” Sarabeth said, and they both laughed.

  “Actually, I have something to show you,” Liz said, and she motioned Sarabeth to follow her to the garage.

  There, in the middle of the floor, in a space cleared of bicycles and skateboards and exercise equipment, stood an old wooden bench: two boards for the back, three for the seat, and a pair of sweet little armrests supported by standards of curved wrought iron. Liz had started doing decorative furniture painting recently, and Sarabeth figured this was her next project.

  “I love it,” she said. “What’s your plan, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Liz brought her arms close, folding them across her stomach. “That’s the hard part.”

  “It’s the fun part,” Sarabeth said. “You’ll think of something great.”

  “We’ll see. You’re the creative one.”

  “We aren’t ones,” Sarabeth said. “If I’m the anything one, or you are, then that means the other person automatically isn’t that thing.”

  Liz smiled.

  “What?”

  “I always knew you were the smart one.”

  They went back into the kitchen, and Liz stationed herself at the drainboard, where a pile of washed potatoes waited. She opened a drawer for a peeler, and in no time there were ribbons of potato skin flying into the sink. Sarabeth stood where she could watch.

  “So how is everyone?” Liz said. “How’s Jim? And Esther—you haven’t mentioned her in weeks.”

  Esther was an elderly woman Sarabeth had sort of adopted—or was it Esther who’d adopted Sarabeth? For five years now, Sarabeth had been reading aloud at the Berkeley Center for Integrated Living, a result of one of the fortuitous, strange stories that had supplied her with work, a short-term volunteer position reading to the blind becoming a paid—well, gig, actually. Once a week she carried a book of her own choosing to the Center, and people paid to listen to her read from it. Blind and sighted people. Esther was her favorite: at least eighty, thin as a pack of sticks, and possessed of a lovely, uncanny cheerfulness. Nearly every week she presented Sarabeth with a small gift, usually a few cookies in cellophane, sometimes a worn postcard of a painting she’d seen decades earlier at a museum in Europe. She baked the cookies herself: branny, raisiny cookies that Sarabeth never ate, though she took them home and kept them until she received the next bag.

  “She’s a delight,” Sarabeth said. “She’s so cute—last week she was wearing this red beret.”

  Liz grinned. “My mother got red pants.”

  “Red pants like preppy?”

  “More like hottie. Tight, low-cut velvet. She lost weight in Egypt so she’s buying all these clothes that’ll fit her for like a month.”

  “Now, now.”

  Liz had finished peeling the potatoes, and she set them on a board and cut them into chunks, then put them in a saucepan. She filled the pan with water, swirled it around, dumped it out, and filled it again. There was a reason for this, Sarabeth was sure, but she had no idea what it was.

  On the counter near her elbow there was a piece of binder paper with a drawing of a leaf on it—a marijuanaish-looking leaf, though surely it wasn’t. She held it up for Liz to see. “What’s this?”

  “Looks like something of Lauren’s.”

  That made sense: Lauren was the artist. She was a wonderful artist, in fact—had been since she was little. The leaf was beautifully drawn, the veins faint but exact.

  “Oh, my God!” Sarabeth said. “You know who I just thought of? Do you remember that guy Carl Drake?”

  “Oh, my God!” Liz cried. “I haven’t thought of him in decades!”

  They beamed at each other, Liz’s eyes wide with pleasure, Sarabeth feeling something close to an adrenaline rush. Moments like this with Liz, the retrieval of events buried so long they’d become comedy—who needed sex?

  “What on earth made you think of him?” Liz said.

  “Let me think.”

  What had? He’d been her just-after-college boyfriend—one of her just-after-college boyfriends—and she remembered being in bed with him, how full he was of dirty talk. Do you like my dick? Does that feel good on your pussy? What on earth had she been doing with him? Liking his dick, actually. Then one day she realized there was a difference, and she didn’t really like him.

  But why had she thought of him? She thought of his apartment, a tiny chunk of an old house near the Oakland border. His room, which smelled of cigarettes and greasy food. His bed. Then she realized.

  “Marijuana! He had a huge poster of a marijuana leaf over his bed.”

  “Ohhh-K,” Liz said. “And you thought of marijuana because…”

  Sarabeth held up Lauren’s drawing again. “It’s ten o’clock,” she intoned. “Do you know where your child is?”

  Liz laughed. “That’s a maple leaf! I wish it were pot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” Liz said, and she returned to the sink, clearly not wanting to say more. Should Sarabeth ask? When Liz was this emphatic she never quite knew.

  “All right,” Liz said, setting the pot of potatoes on the stove with a clank. “We are getting there.” She stood still for a moment, tapping her finger against her chin, then she went to the refrigerator and got out lettuce and a cucumber.

  Sarabeth put the drawing down. She said, “I believe the time has come.”

  “The Wandering?”

  “Exactly that.”

  She had her habits, and one was to spend a little time on each visit drifting through the Mackays’ house and garden—as if she were a nineteenth-century landowner who’d traveled to one of the more distant acreages of his holdings, partly to reacquaint himself with it and partly to determine if there had been any changes since his last visit. As if she were a Levin, come to think of it. She was reading Anna Karenina at the Center.

  Through the family room she drifted, past the huge flowered couch, the elaborate entertainment center, the family photos crowding the horizontal surfaces. At the French doors that let onto the patio, she stopped. She could see Liz reflected in the glass, her arm moving quickly as she sliced the cucumber.

  She opened the door and stepped outside. She breathed in the smell of the suburbs. Overhead, the sky was teal blue, starless. She stood still for a moment, then made her way to the wooden glider the kids had given Liz for her birthday one year. She sat down and pushed off with one foot, and the glider creaked as it began to move.

  Who cared about Carl D
rake? It was Billy who was on her mind. Endlessly. Or if not on her mind, then in it, readily available: the one channel always broadcasting on her mental TV. She saw him in close-up: his thick hair, always so clean smelling; the scar dividing his left eyebrow, where her fingernail fit perfectly; the shallow rise and fall of his upper lip. No other ex-boyfriend had had such a hold on her, not even Roger Orr, the one guy she’d actually lived with during her spotty romantic career. Was it because Billy had been married? Was married?

  The shame she’d felt throughout the affair—she’d hated herself, been unable to stop herself, hated herself; even now it overlay all her memories. Did it also make them more insistent?

  “Hi,” said a voice.

  Sarabeth startled, then looked around.

  “Up here.”

  She looked up and saw Lauren leaning out a window, her shape dark against the bright room. “Hi,” she called up. “Beautiful night, huh?”

  Lauren didn’t respond, and Sarabeth cupped her eyes to try to see better. “How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s new? I missed you last week.”

  Again Lauren didn’t respond, but she shifted, her silhouette moving to the left. A phone rang somewhere, inside the Mackays’ or close by.

  “Want some company?” Sarabeth said.

  “Sure.”

  “I just have to pee first.”

  Inside, Liz was at the stove, stirring something in a skillet while with one shoulder she pressed the phone to her ear. Sarabeth pointed at the ceiling and kept going. There was a powder room at the foot of the stairs, and she used the toilet, then paused in front of the mirror when she was finished. She had one eyebrow hair that liked to spring away from her brow and call attention to itself, and she wet a fingertip and leaned forward to dab it back into place. She peered into the mirror. She had lines fanning out from her eyes and etched from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, but what really bothered her were the small indentations beginning to appear in her chin. They were curled like little commas, or maybe parentheses: a full battalion of punctuation making inroads into her face. She straightened up, took a deep breath, and looked again. She was a small, elf-faced woman with wrinkles, but wearing an amusing scarf. It could have been worse, she supposed.

  Lauren’s room was right at the top of the stairs. The door was closed, and Sarabeth knocked softly, then turned the knob. Lauren was still at the window, and now Sarabeth saw that in order to lean out she’d had to kneel on her desk.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  Lauren looked over her shoulder, then quickly swiveled around and dropped to the floor. She wore jeans and a gray thermal henley, and her hair fell in unbrushed hunks past her shoulders. Not long ago she’d gone in for the slightly slutty junior movie-star look, three inches of below-the-button belly showing, heavy eyeliner and pale lip gloss, but evidently that was a thing of the past.

  “From the patio,” Sarabeth said, “you looked like Juliet, leaning out the window.”

  “Yeah, right,” Lauren said, rolling her eyes.

  They came together for a quick hug.

  “What are you doing up here? Plotting your escape?”

  Lauren smiled, or half smiled, anyway. She seemed spacey—much as she had the last time Sarabeth had seen her. Sarabeth wondered if Lauren had a boyfriend, a Romeo she was mooning over. But Liz would have mentioned that, wouldn’t she?

  “Don’t ask me how school is,” Lauren said.

  “OK, I won’t.”

  Lauren crossed the room and sat on her bed, which was covered by the bedspread she and several friends had made, or doctored, one summer evening when Sarabeth was over. This was two or three years ago: they were sitting around saying how bored they were, as only girls of thirteen could, until finally Sarabeth suggested they take Lauren’s existing bedcover, a plain blue coverlet, and decorate it with colored markers and glitter glue. “Lauren’s bod right here!” one girl had written. “Groovilicious Girl!” said another note. Sarabeth remembered Liz’s initial hesitation at the idea, her own worry that in making the suggestion she’d somehow overstepped.

  “So how is school?” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “Amanda?”

  “Fine.”

  “You?”

  “Fine,” Lauren said, smiling at last, though she also flushed a little, her cheeks turning pink.

  “Sorry,” Sarabeth said. “I’m being an asshole. Let’s see. What’ve you been reading?”

  Now Lauren brightened. Long ago, they’d bonded over books: Harriet the Spy, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. “Actually,” she said, “my mom said I should ask you for advice.”

  “Please ask me for advice. I love to be useful.”

  “I need a classic novel for an independent reading project. Something good and not too long. Or boring.”

  Sarabeth turned Lauren’s desk chair toward the bed and sat down. She said, “I think I should go into business advising teenagers on what to read. You’re going to pay me, right?”

  Lauren fought a smile, and Sarabeth was struck by how pretty she could be, how her smile had always—since babyhood—been beautiful. She had an almost perfect heart-shaped face, with a sweet wide V of a jawline.

  “I’m just kidding,” Sarabeth said. “Let’s see. You definitely can’t go wrong with Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice? Emma? Though if you’re anything like me you’ll end up in a funk, wishing you’d lived back then.”

  “No way.”

  “Way. They had it made. The big decisions were, you know, ‘Upon whom shall we call today?’ I mean, walking around the room counted as doing something.”

  “What?”

  “They’re always in the drawing room after dinner, going, ‘Shall we take a turn around the room?’ ‘Oh, no, I prefer to play the pianoforte.’ ‘I would do my needlework, but I must rest my eyes.’ I mean, think about it. They had it good.”

  “You’re weird,” Lauren said.

  “I know. But how about it?”

  Lauren shrugged. “Half the girls in the class are doing Jane Austen.”

  Sarabeth considered. She remembered struggling with Dickens at Lauren’s age, struggling with Hardy. Perhaps what she’d struggled with was struggle itself.

  “OK,” she said. “I can see this is going to call for deep thinking. What is ‘classic,’ anyway?”

  “Old.”

  “Probably ‘good.’ What did your teacher say?”

  Lauren sat still for a moment, then got off the bed and went to her backpack, on the floor in a corner of the room. She dug around in it and pulled out an orange binder. “It’s just supposed to be something ‘good for you,’” she said, making air quotes with her fingers.

  “A spinach book,” Sarabeth said, and Lauren gave her a mischievous look.

  “You mean broccoli.”

  “Brussels sprouts! Actually, you know what’s weird? This is more true of movies, maybe, but sometimes you’ll hear about some book, and it’ll be a total chocolate-cake book, and then you won’t read it for a long time, you’ll sort of put it off, and all of a sudden you’ll realize it’s become a broccoli book. Like, overnight.”

  Lauren smiled, but after a moment color rose up into her face, and she looked away.

  “What?” Sarabeth said.

  Lauren shook her head. She turned and stuffed the binder back in her backpack. “Excuse me,” she said, and she left the room, and a moment later Sarabeth heard the bathroom door close.

  What had just happened? Was she supposed to wait? She heard the water go on; she heard the muffled sounds of Brody’s game, coming from the little TV room at the end of the hall. She looked around the room. Next to Lauren’s door was a grid of wooden shelves holding CDs, and just above that, drawn directly on the wall by Lauren, was a colored-pencil picture of a big-eyed girl playing guitar. If there were a spectrum of girls’ bedrooms, this one would be at the opposite end of the one Sarabeth had had on Cowper Street. Her mother h
ad hired a decorator, for one thing, and she remembered being shown the finished room after school one day when she was about six: the violet-sprigged wallpaper, the fan-backed wicker chair, the silky purple curtains that she’d been told in advance she should try not to touch. She remembered knowing what her mother wanted, standing next to her in the doorway, and how she still somehow couldn’t manage to say it, that the room was pretty. “Do you love it?” her mother cried at last, and Sarabeth nodded quickly and said she did.

  She moved to Lauren’s door and made her way down the stairs. Liz had taken a huge, flame-colored casserole from the oven and was ladling beef and vegetables onto a serving platter.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a simple dinner.”

  Liz looked up and smiled. “There you are.” She wiped her forehead with the back of her arm. “I got inspired, what can I tell you?”

  Sarabeth reached for the cheese roll bag and held it up for Liz to see. “Hey, I went to the Cheese Board. Got some you-know-whats.”

  “Oh, that is so nice,” Liz said. “We’ll die.”

  Sarabeth set the bag down and found the aluminum foil. She tore off a piece and laid it on the counter, then removed the rolls from the bag, setting aside the one she’d been eating. Except…here was another she’d been eating. Now there were two rolls with gouges, which meant someone—she, of course—would have to have one with dinner. But then, no, there were three rolls with gouges—she’d ruined three of the rolls.

  “I’m such a jerk!” she exclaimed.

  “What?”

  She gestured at the rolls. “Ta da. What kind of guest snacks on her contribution to the meal before she presents it to you? Jesus.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  “It is!”

  Liz left the ladle in the casserole and came over. “Now, now.” She gathered the rolls onto the foil, turning the torn ones ripped-side down and wrapping the foil over them. “See?” She patted Sarabeth on the shoulder, then put an arm around her and pulled her close. “They’ll be perfect with the stew. OK? I’m so glad you’re here.”