Songs Without Words

by Ann Packer

  The seat was set for him, way back and low. She pressed the memory button for her setting, and the seat moved forward and up, the mechanism making its familiar errrr sound.

  “See?” he said. “It remembers you.”

  She adjusted the mirrors, put the car in reverse, and slowly backed from the spot. She made her way to the parking lot exit and then to the stoplight at University. Across the freeway, she crept along in the line of cars heading for downtown Palo Alto, relieved when she could finally turn and drive more freely. The senior complex was on a street with towering pine trees, and by the time they got there she was liking the feel of driving, liking the way the car gave itself to her, followed her lead. She almost wished they had farther to go.

  “Very nice,” her dad said. “How’d it feel?”

  “Good.” She sat still for a moment. “I mean…it actually felt really good.”

  He smiled and cupped the back of her head with his hand. “That’s great.”

  The sidewalk was shady, and she shivered in her sweatshirt, then said yes when he offered her his jacket. Her grandparents had a ground-floor unit, and her dad knocked on their door, using his knuckles rather than the brass-monkey knocker they’d brought back from one of their trips. Her grandpa answered, and there was a look of deep confusion on his face for a moment before he recovered himself and said hello. “My favorite local granddaughter and my favorite son-in-law! Come in, come in.”

  Lauren hung back for a moment, then let her dad push her toward her grandpa for a hug. Up close, he had begun to have a kind of bad smell, and she held her breath until he let go.

  Her grandma came out of the master bedroom, hair tousled as if she’d been lying down.

  “You were expecting us, weren’t you?” Lauren’s dad said. “I hope you weren’t napping.”

  “Of course not,” her grandpa said. “Please come in.”

  Lauren felt her dad’s eyes on her, and she looked at him long enough to exchange a smile. Of course they’d been napping—but they’d never admit it.

  “Let’s have hot chocolate,” her grandma said, and she led the way to the tiny kitchen, where she opened a cabinet for a box of Swiss Miss.

  “Don’t give them that,” Lauren’s grandpa said.

  “It’s fine—no one can tell the difference.”

  “I can.”

  “That was just when I accidentally bought the diet.”

  She got out cups and filled her kettle at the sink. She had the kind of Swiss Miss that had miniature marshmallows in a separate paper envelope, and while the water heated she shook a handful of the tiny white pebbles into each cup.

  “Is that the new style?” Lauren’s grandpa asked her, tweaking the sleeve of her dad’s jacket, dangling way past her fingertips. “What’s it called, oversize?”

  “It’s Dad’s.”

  “In a catalog,” her grandma said, “I saw men’s underwear for women—with a fly and everything!”

  “Everything?” Lauren’s dad said, and her grandma flapped a hand at him.

  “Honestly, Brody,” she said, but she was smiling.

  A little later, they sat sipping hot chocolate in the living room. This was the darkest room in the condo, too dark for daytime. Lauren let herself go, let her mind wander to her grandparents’ old house, on a street with the biggest trees she’d ever seen. When she used to spend the night there, she slept in her mom’s old room, imagined she somehow was her mom—that someday she’d have her mom’s life.

  “Have you made plans for the summer, hon?” her grandma asked her.

  Lauren pulled herself back to the present. “Not really.”

  “Because I was wondering if you might want to travel. Your mom spent a summer in France during high school, and she had a wonderful time. She lived with a French family in Brittany, and she wrote letters back and forth with the daughter for years afterward.” She turned to Lauren’s grandpa. “Remember Marie-Sandrine?”

  “Of course,” Lauren’s grandpa said. “Of course I do.” He leaned forward and set his cup on the coffee table. “Funny when you think about it—she almost didn’t go.”

  “Who?” Lauren’s dad said. “Liz almost didn’t go? To France?”

  “Because of Sarabeth,” Lauren’s grandpa said. “That was the spring Lorelei died.”

  Lauren stared into her lap. If her dad was giving her grandparents a look, she didn’t want to see it. Not long ago, she had told Dr. Lewis about Sarabeth’s mom, and he’d said suicides often ran in families, which had made her feel very weird.

  “But she did go,” Lauren’s grandma said, “and she had a great time, and Sarabeth…let’s see…I think that was the summer she worked at the ice-cream parlor, wasn’t it, Rob? She’d bring us pints sometimes. The boys loved it.”

  “Butter pecan,” Lauren’s grandpa said. “I had a bowl or two myself.”

  There was a silence. “Listen,” Lauren’s dad said, scooting forward and setting his cup on the table, “we should get going. I didn’t realize how late it was getting.” He hesitated a moment and then got to his feet, and Lauren’s grandparents stood, too. Lauren took a final sip of the lukewarm chocolate and rose as well. Sarabeth at an ice-cream parlor: she couldn’t quite picture it. Was her mom still fighting with Sarabeth? She had no idea.

  “Dad,” she said, remembering suddenly. “The recipe?”

  He smiled. “I almost forgot!” He patted his pants pockets, then took out a folded piece of paper and handed it to Lauren’s grandma. “Spare ribs à la your daughter.”

  Lauren’s grandma unfolded the paper and pulled her glasses up onto her nose. “Soy sauce and ginger,” she said. “This is the one.”

  They all stood there. The recipe was at the center of their circle, a small piece of paper covered with Lauren’s mom’s handwriting, an excuse, Lauren understood, for her grandparents’ welfare to be evaluated. Just checking on you, she remembered her dad saying long ago, when she woke in the middle of the night to find him outlined in her doorway, the hallway bright behind him. Go back to sleep, he said, and she always did.

  Valentine’s Day fell on a Tuesday, and because it was their custom, Liz and Brody went out for dinner, to a little French place downtown that had been around for years. It was the kind of restaurant where the menu never changed, but the food was so good you didn’t care. Brody had escargots for an appetizer, and Liz thought of a day maybe ten years ago when he told the kids to find as many garden snails as they could, because that was what they were having for dinner. The shrieks that brought on. The laughter.

  She said, “Remember coming here when Lauren was a baby?”

  He had finished the snails and was mopping up the butter with a piece of bread. He said, “I remember coming here a long time ago—maybe when we first moved here?”

  “It was the first place we went after Lauren was born. The first place without her.”

  “Really?”

  “My parents babysat.”

  “Did we have fun?”

  “We did.”

  “My archivist,” he said. And then, “Try this.”

  He held out a piece of butter-soaked bread, and she took it from him and put it in her mouth. It was so garlicky and delicious she nearly groaned with pleasure.

  “Good, huh?”

  “I could live on it.”

  “No, you couldn’t. Not if you couldn’t also have your coffee.”

  The entrance door swung open, and a couple they knew came in, the parents of one of Joe’s soccer teammates: a former college basketball player and his tiny Japanese-born wife. Liz had spent long hours on the sidelines of games with Kiko, sometimes wrapped together in a single blanket if one of them had remembered and the other hadn’t.

  She said, “Look, it’s the Morrises.” She waved, and Brody turned and waved, and the Morrises hesitated for a moment and then smiled and waved…and kept following the maître d’ to their table.

  “Isn’t it funny?” she said. “If it hadn’t been Valentine’s Day
, I’ll bet they would have come over and said hello.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s an unwritten rule, no tableside hellos on Valentine’s Day.”

  “Thanks, Jerry.”

  She grinned; there’d been an era when one of their great pleasures was watching Seinfeld together. He was never home in time for the broadcast, or he’d have gone back to the office after dinner, so she generally taped it, and they watched late on Friday nights, when the kids were in bed.

  He lifted his glass. “Here’s to you.”

  “To us.” She touched her glass to his, and as she looked at him, a surprising, happy feeling spread through her. This was Brody: Brody. He liked red wine and lamb, smelled a certain way after tennis, whistled when he did yard work. When they were first dating he’d had the sweetest way of kissing her goodnight: he’d put his hand on her shoulder, but just one hand on one shoulder, as if he didn’t want to stake too large a claim.

  You knew you’d slept when you woke, would know you’d been dead only if you were reborn. Was it the same with marriage, its renewal telling you how bad things had gotten? Something had happened in the last couple of weeks, some shift in how they were. The day they saw Dr. Lewis and then sat together afterward in the van: it had started then. Making love that night, they’d taken more time than they had in ages, moved from position to position—it was making love in the sense of making it, from scratch, there and then. At one point she was sitting on top of him, slowly rising all the way off him and then lowering herself down again, and when she finally stopped he reached up with his thumbs and forefingers and twisted her nipples in a way that was both familiar and astonishing. At breakfast the next morning they kept laughing, over the tiniest things.

  After dinner they walked down the street, past the bank and the post office. She held his arm. She’d let him down, she felt; she wanted to do better.

  At city hall they turned into the rose garden. In spring it would be full of colorful blooms, floodlit at night and a popular destination for evening strollers; but tonight the bushes were bare, and the paths were empty except for the two of them. They walked the outer lanes, gravel crunching under their shoes.

  “Hey, I ran into Tom Shepard the other day,” he said, “at Ace Hardware.”

  “You’re kidding.” She hadn’t thought of Tom Shepard in years. Brody had worked with him at Xyno, the company he’d been at before Oiron. Tom had been single; she remembered because she’d tried to fix him up with Sarabeth. “How is he?”

  “Great. Married. His wife was with him, she’s from Cleveland.”

  “Oh, how funny. We should have them over.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  They had circled the garden, and now they left and headed back, passing the library and the fire station.

  “How’s Sarabeth?” Brody said. “You haven’t mentioned her in a while.”

  They were in front of the town diner now, and Liz looked through the window: dark, though on weekdays it was full of old-timers, on weekends families with toddlers or hordes of soccer-uniformed kids.

  She said, “Were you thinking of that time we did dinner with her and Tom?”

  “They didn’t exactly hit it off.”

  She let go of his arm and turned up the collar of her coat. “The thing is, I don’t actually know.”

  “What?”

  “How Sarabeth is.”

  He slowed and gave her a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

  “I think we’re finished.”

  Now he stopped altogether. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  “We aren’t talking.”

  “Liz,” he said. “My God, what happened?”

  She shrugged.

  “I can’t believe this. I knew she hadn’t been around, but—why didn’t you tell me?”

  She brought her gloved hands together and listened to the whisper as she rubbed them back and forth. She remembered a mom from the elementary school days, admonishing another woman: Don’t try to talk to your husband—that’s what your girlfriends are for. She thought of her parents’ marriage, the absolute division of realms. But look at them now! Playing bridge together, taking each other to the doctor.

  Her mother had made it all look so easy.

  She looked into Brody’s face, saw he was waiting for her. She said, “I don’t tell you everything.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes full of hurt.

  “Come on, let’s go home,” she said, and she took his arm and held it with both her hands, leaning into him as they walked. “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “It’s OK.”

  He stayed silent until they got to the car. He opened her door. “You can’t be finished with Sarabeth, can you?”

  “No,” she said. “Which is why I may have to be.”

  “What?”

  She got in and adjusted her coat underneath her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I meant by that. But really, don’t worry. It’s OK.”

  Kathy had foil-wrapped chocolate hearts on her desk the next day and a sign saying HELP YOURSELF. At first she affected an attitude of mystery, making Brody wonder if she had an admirer. Then she confessed she’d stopped at Walgreens on her way to work, for the half-off sale.

  “When these are gone I’ve got a package of red and pink M&M’s waiting.”

  He said, “You bring out M&M’s, I’ll rewrite your evaluation. I’ve gained enough weight this year already.” He grabbed another chocolate and waved as he headed into his office.

  In fact, he was softer at the middle than he’d ever been before; in bed last night Liz had rubbed her hand back and forth across his abdomen, and his belly had moved with it. He thought of that hand, its southward wanderings, its fingertips at his thighs—its perfect squeezing pressure. And then, at just the right moment, her mouth.

  His in-box was already jammed, the usual distribution list junk plus at least a dozen messages requiring real attention. And he had to call Boston, to iron out a few last points with the guys there. He imagined flying out again—just for one day, for the advantages of face-to-face contact. But there was no need.

  He made the call, wrote six or eight e-mails, went to a meeting with Russ and Dale Quigley, the CFO. Now there was a go-getter: three major promotions in two years. Brody, Dale always said when they ran into each other, good to see you, and he’d smile and offer Brody his hand even if they’d just seen each other the day before. (Watch the smilers, Brody’s dad used to say. Figure out a guy’s smiles, and you’ve figured out the guy.)

  When the meeting was over, Russ asked Brody to stay. They remained at the conference table, Brody watching Dale as he passed by the interior windows, glanced in at them, walked on.

  “He’s going places,” Russ said.

  Brody nodded, then said, “Wait, going places going places?” Like Dale or not, he was the best CFO the company’d had; Brody didn’t want to see him leave.

  “Maybe,” Russ said.

  “Really?”

  Almost imperceptibly Russ shook his head. “So you talked to Boston? We’re good?”

  Brody brought Russ up to speed, explaining what the CEO had told him. Russ asked some questions about another deal, and then they were finished.

  “So what about Dale?” Brody said as he pushed back his chair, but Russ just shrugged.

  “He’s a striver. He’s the only guy I see here after midnight.”

  “Jesus, Russ, what are you doing here after midnight?”

  “It’s when I get some of my best work done.”

  “You amaze me,” Brody said. Whatever was going on with Dale, Russ wasn’t in a confiding mood. Brody got to his feet and pushed his chair in. “Onward, then.”

  “Onward.” Russ stood, too, and his bare scalp caught the light from one of the spots in the ceiling. He looked tired, but down at the bone level; his skin was tanned from skiing, ruddy from the sun and wind. He tightened his fancy tie, clapped Brody on th
e shoulder.

  “I was thinking,” Brody said, but he’d been thinking of the early years, pre-IPO, when he’d worked insane hours himself. He and Russ and a couple other guys had found a Mexican restaurant in Mountain View that would keep its kitchen open late if they had some advance notice, fire up chicken quesadillas at midnight, 1:00 a.m., for the guys at Oiron. It had been fun, crazy, ridiculous. He kind of missed it.

  “You were thinking?” Russ said.

  “Never mind—better let it percolate a little more.” He saluted Russ and headed back to his office, grabbing a couple more chocolates as he passed Kathy’s desk. He had phone calls to return, but he went to Google instead, typed “Sarabeth Leoffler” and “Berkeley, CA.” Only seven hits, and none with any contact info. He tried People-Finder, but her number was unlisted, as he’d figured it would be.

  Not that he would have called. What’s up with you and Liz? Not in a million years. She was Liz’s project, in his view. Liz’s project. “I have this friend,” Liz had said, early on, “she’s sort of like a sister”—which had failed to convey the first thing about the reality of the matter. Five feet of chaos, that’s what Sarabeth was.

  Maybe this was better, actually. A little distance.

  But no, he didn’t really think that. He’d made his peace with Sarabeth long ago.

  At six he wrapped things up and headed to his car. Six o’clock, and the sun wasn’t all the way down yet. He liked the California dusk in late winter: pale sky reflected in the pale bay; hills green for the brief spring, little yellow and white flowers sprouting everywhere. And evenings like this: calm, cool, clear.

  He wanted last night back again. He wanted all of it: the sex, the rose garden walk, the dinner. He wished he’d made a better toast. To my beautiful wife or something. She was, in fact. Beautiful. They hadn’t had a weekend away in a long time. Why’d he punted his career, or at the very least plateaued, if he wasn’t going to take his wife away for the weekend? He was. Soon.

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