by Sara Lewis
“Robins on her lunch break,” the guy said.
“Already?” I said. I looked at my watch again.
“She starts early.”
“True,” I said.
The song that was playing was “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver, which reminded me of pushing the radio buttons fast in an old VW bug that my parents bought me when I had completed all the requirements to graduate. I hadn’t wanted to learn to drive; I put up a fight. And I didn’t want anything that seemed like a present or a reward. My father said, “Tom, seeing you suffer isn’t going to help any of us feel any better about losing Jack. Do you understand?” I took the keys he handed to me. The car smelled like all the VW bugs I’d ever been in, and in reverse, it said, “Merrr?” the way they all did too.
“Alex, override on 8, please. Alex,” said one of the checkers over the PA, interrupting John Denver.
“Excuse me,” Alex said. He hustled down to checkout stand 8, handed over a card in a plastic case. The checker scanned the card and handed it back. Alex hurried back to his post at the customer service desk, where I was still waiting.
“When will she be back?” I wanted to know. Now I was listening to “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s, remembering the apartment I had before the one I had now, where people complained about my guitar playing. The closet was way too small there.
“About eleven-thirty,” Alex said.
I nodded. “Thanks.”
I’d have to kill some time. I went to a bookstore nearby and leafed through biographies of musicians until it was time for Robin to be back. Then I stayed another five minutes so it wouldn’t seem like I had been waiting for her.
I went to the customer service desk again. There was someone else there, Kelli, serving you since 1982, which was a hell of a long time, “I was wondering where I could find Robin?” I said.
“She’s stocking dairy. Just go to the big dairy case.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Alanis Morissette, “Ironic” was on, and I was back eating Thanksgiving dinner at Ellen’s. She had invited people from work without telling me, so I wasn’t speaking. This was the other me, the old Good, not the new Good.
Way in the back of this enormous store was an entire wall of every imaginable dairy product and some dairy-free products. I didn’t see Robin though. I looked around. No store employee in sight at all. I looked back at the dairy case. Milk cartons were moving. Someone was back there, stocking from behind the case. “Robin?” I said to a gallon of low-fat.
There was a pause, “Yeah?”
“Hi,” I said. “It’s me, Good.”
No answer.
“I was wondering if maybe, possibly, you could help me with something? Please?”
“What?” She didn’t sound like she wanted to know.
“Jeanette gave me her grocery list? And she said you know what she likes?”
There was a pause. “You’re shopping for Jeanette now?”
“Well, I was coming anyway, so I just thought I’d ask her if she needed anything.”
“Right,” she said. “What’s on the list?”
“Yogurt,” I said. I tried to see her in the small gap between two rows of half-and-half, but all I saw was the shoulder of a big black jacket. It must be awfully cold back there.
“OK, look to your right. She likes the Jerseymaid lemon, and they’re on sale, two for eighty-nine, so get six.”
“Oh. OK. Bread?”
“She likes Dutch dill. It’s the bottom shelf of the bread, next to the English muffins.”
“OK, could you show me? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”
“Sorry, we’re really swamped back here. If you can’t find it, get Angel.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess I could do that.”
“Was there anything else?”
Her voice came out from a different place. She had moved. Here I was talking to the Reddi-wip, and she was down by the egg substitutes. I moved a couple of steps to the left. “Raisin bran.”
“Kellogg’s.” It was the flavored coffee creamer talking to me now. I moved again.
“How do you know all this?” I was trying to stretch it out.
“I’ve been living in that house a few years now. So I’ve been doing Jeanette’s shopping for, well, all that time.”
“I see. Well, thanks for your help. I guess I’ll go get the stuff now.”
There was no answer from the dairy case, so I walked away.
I got the six yogurts. I walked to the bread and had to stare at it a long time until I found the Dutch dill. I went back to the dairy case. “Did you think at all about the other night?” I said to the hazelnut-flavored creamer. “Did you consider what I said?”
No answer.
“Because I meant it. I know you said you weren’t interested, but I’m going to do my best to change that. I’ll grow on you, I will. You’ll see.” The creamer didn’t say anything. I looked both ways and then I leaned closer. “You have to believe me,” I whispered urgently. “All I want is you!”
“Who are you talking to?” said a mans voice from behind the butter.
“Oh!” I said. “Sorry. I was talking to—I wasn’t—I was just— never mind. I’m leaving.”
“Good, idea!” said the voice.
thirty-two
Ellen was wrong. You couldn’t just change things starting now. If your life wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t going to work in a huge, sweeping way. Every little feeler that you sent out to get your new, better self to take root was going to hit a rock or a puddle of toxic waste or just shrivel up all by itself. Ever since I started this program to get a real life, everything I set my sights on as a goal ended up being out of my reach. I was stuck with myself.
I picked up a guitar, as usual, and I started to play. I played a song I’d written a long time ago. There were many problems with the song. It sounded childish, far too simple. Songwriting was another thing that I was bad at.
I just needed to put myself back on my program, that was all, push myself harder. I just needed to force myself forward out of this rut.
I was on my way to Ellen’s on the freeway in my car. There was a little slowdown as I got closer to Mission Valley. I hope there isn’t some game or concert at Qualcomm Stadium that I’ve forgotten about, I was thinking. Then traffic stopped completely, and I was sitting under that enormous bridge that connects the 8 to the 805. How much concrete did it take to build that thing? I was thinking. How long were they working on it? Were there people who had to work under it every single day for months at a time? Personally, I wouldn’t want to do it. In fact, I didn’t want to be sitting here at all. Now my heart started to beat faster, and my hands started to sweat. I looked at the car on my right in which a woman was talking on a phone. She laughed, nodding, and took a sip from a coffee cup. On my left, a gardener’s truck was overloaded with burlap sacks of yard clippings. Two men sat inside staring straight ahead, sipping from Big Gulps. I certainly didn’t want to eat at that moment, I can tell you. I just wanted the car in front of me, a gigantic bronze-colored SUV, to move forward. Even a couple of inches would make me feel better. I couldn’t see through the windows to find out what kind of people were in there. If I had those dark windows, I would feel so boxed in, I would just freak out. In fact, I was freaking out right now anyway, and my windows weren’t even dark. Sweat started to roll down my temples. What if I sat in this traffic so long that I ran out of gas? What would be the fastest way out of here on foot? Would there be any way to climb down off this thing, or would I have to walk a half mile to the exit? I turned around in my seat to look behind me: cars, lots and lots of cars just sitting there, spewing exhaust all over the place. How come the drivers all looked as though nothing was wrong? This was horrible! If you wanted to torture somebody, make them really suffer, this would be the place to put them, right here on the underside of this huge freeway, boxed in by about a million cars, with nowhere to go. If I were having a heart attack right now, c
ould an emergency vehicle come up this way? All the cars would move over just a tiny bit and open up a lane, but would it be enough room?
Now my heart was really thumping. My shirt and face were soaked. There were little puddles on the steering wheel when I released my hands. I can’t stand this,. I was thinking. I am not going to make it, I put my face against the steering wheel and continued to sweat. I took a deep breath. Then I said to myself, You won’t be here forever. Sooner or later, you will move. I lifted my head. The car in front of me had moved one foot. It was still rolling forward. I moved a little. Then we were up to 5 miles an hour with a pretty big space between us, then 10, and before long, I was going a full 23 miles per hour with room enough for a garbage truck between me and the next car.
When I got to Ellens, my shirt was soaked and my hair was stuck to my head.
“Tom?” she said. Her eyebrows dipped toward each other in concern.
“I’m stuck,” I said. “I mean, I was stuck. In traffic.”
thirty-three
I was coming in with groceries when I heard Robin calling me from the upstairs window. “Good!” she yelled urgently. “Good! Hurry! Jeanette fell! She can’t get up because of her arthritis. You have to help me pick her up!”
I put my bags down in the middle of the front yard and went bounding up the stairs, two at a time. Jeanette was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. She smiled up at me sheepishly.
“Well, its my knight in shining armor!” she said in that crackly voice. “It’s my own fault! I know better than to walk around in my hose with no shoes! Slipped on the darn linoleum! What was I thinking? If you each take one side, I’ll be off this floor in a Jiffy.” She put out her elbows.
“I heard this tiny voice,” Robin said, “and tapping, like knocking on a door, but it was coming from my ceiling. It’s good you tapped, Jeanette, or it might have taken a long time to figure out it was you!”
“Hold it, Jeanette,” I said. I squatted down on the floor. “Before we try to get you up, is anything hurting you?”
“No!” she said, as if it were a dumb question.
“Do you think you blacked out?”
“Blacked out! Well, for the love of Pete! No, of course not!” she said. I had hurt her feelings. “I slipped, that’s all. My dam feet are so bad today, I didn’t even want to put my slippers on. Then my hose slipped on the linoleum, and I couldn’t catch my balance. Blacked out? Good lord! My legs are stiff, is all. I’m just not limber enough to get up. I ought to take a yoga class down at adult ed. That’s how you get—”
“Do you think you hit your head anywhere?” I said.
“No!” she laughed at me, “Now, would you please get me off this floor?”
“OK, one more thing. Just squeeze my hands,” I said. I think I saw this in a movie or something. She had a strong grip on both sides. I looked at her face, which looked exactly the way it always did, like an old turtle, wearing a lot of lipstick. “I guess you’re all right.”
“I’m fine! Of course I am! May I please get up?”
“I’m just going to go behind you here and grab you around the middle. Robin, you don’t have to help, but can you get her walker? When I get you up, Jeanette, you can just grab the walker for balance, OK?” Robin scurried into the living room and pushed the walker in. I crouched behind Jeanette and hooked my arms under her arms. I was careful not to get anywhere near her saggy old chest. “Ready now? One. Two. Three!”
A teeny, tiny old lady is surprisingly heavy when you have to get her up off the floor. I pushed us both upright with my legs. For a split second I thought we were both going to go crashing right back down. Then I thought how complicated everything would get if Jeanette got injured. I’d have to bandage something. No! This had to work in one try. I pulled all my strength together for the last quarter of the way. I froze there, holding her tight for a second. Then I said, “Ta-da!” like Maddy winning the Parcheesi game.
Jeanette lunged for her walker, grabbed it, held it tight.
Robin clapped. “All right! You did it! Good job, guys!” These were the same words she said to her children all the time. I’d heard her say it a thousand times, but now that everything had changed, it made me ache.
Jeanette smiled. “Thank you, my dears. I’ll be just fine now.” Robin said, “Lets get you over on the couch. You can rest there. Did you eat anything?”
“I’m going to go,” I said at the door. “My groceries are—”
“Thank you, honey,” Jeanette said, slowly rolling her walker and shuffling her feet across the floor to the couch. “Maybe a piece of toast with—do I still have honey?”
“I’ll check. That’s it, sit right there, and here, put your feet up.”
Oh. They were finished with me. I went downstairs and picked up my slumping sack of groceries. My ice cream was going to be a mess.
thirty-four
Elise and Mike were finishing another music lesson outside. I had given them each three notes to play. My harmonica was around my neck in a holder, and my guitar was in my lap. I had demonstrated each of their parts several times. They had tried to do what I did, but so far made mistakes each time. Progress was slow. Now Elise was hunched over the guitar. I couldn’t see her face, but I would have been willing to bet that her tongue was sticking out, a habit of hers when she was working hard. Mike had his eyes squeezed with the effort of trying to remember the three holes I had told him to blow through in sequence. I was holding my breath.
Then they both played the correct notes in the correct sequence! “You did it!” I said.
Elise jumped, startled out of her concentrated trance.
Mike smiled.
“Can you do it again?”
They both took deep breaths and did it one more time.
“Brilliant!” I said. “Do you want to try it once more, or something else?”
“Something else,” they said together.
“OK,” I said, “let’s try three more notes.”
Behind them, I could see my sister’s car pulling up. What was she doing here? This almost never happened.
As my sister got out of her car, then locked it and walked toward us, I played three notes on the guitar and then on the harmonica.
When she saw me, saw what I was doing, her mouth dropped open. She didn’t call out to me but approached very quietly.
“OK, guys,” I said. “We have a visitor. This is my sister, Ellen.”
The kids turned around.
“Ellen, this is Elise on guitar and Mike on harmonica.”
“It’s nice to meet you both,” she said.
“Nice to meet you,” they muttered. They looked at each other and then at the ground, me, their door.
“Do you guys want to take a break now, while I talk to Ellen?”
They didn’t answer but got up and silently went into their house. It surprised me how dramatically their behavior changed with the addition of just one person.
“What was—are you giving them lessons?” Ellen wanted to know when they were gone.
“Well, yeah.” The way she looked at me made me embarrassed about it, as if I had done something weird like eat a flower off the bushes or something.
“That’s great,” she said, but she was still looking at me funny. “Yeah,” I said. “So what are you doing here?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, remembering. “I bought this sewing machine on eBay, and I wanted you to help me get it home and carry it into my apartment.”
“A sewing machine? Since when do you sew?”
“Well, it’s been quite a few years, but you know awhile back when we were talking?”
“You mean—”
“I was saying that, starting now, you should just start being the person you want to be. So I was thinking about it, and I wondered if there was anything that I wanted to do that I hadn’t been doing.”
“OK.”
“Back in college, I made a quilt. A small one, a really simple one. And it was kind of lo
usy. It had lumps, and the things that were supposed to be straight were crooked. Nothing lined up or came out anywhere near the right shape, but I’ve always wanted to make another one. Who knows why. I have all these books about quilts and quilt calendars and quilt note cards, and I’m always looking at quilts in stores. So I mean, why always want to do something like that? Why not just do it? What could be stopping me?”
“Uh… The fact that you don’t have a sewing machine?”
“Exactly, So I went on eBay, and I typed in the kind of sewing machine I was looking for—just a really simple one—and I restricted my search to the San Diego area. And guess what! I found one! And it’s in a table! It’s really old! And so I bid, and I won! It’s just the cutest thing! It looks brand-new, and it was made in 1949! All I have to do is get it home. So could you help me with that?”
“Sure,” I said. It was the least I could do. “When do you want to do that?”
“Now.”
“OK, sure,” I said. “I just have to finish the lesson with these guys first. Because we were right in the middle of—”
“Fine, yeah. Go ahead. I’ll just watch.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that this wouldn’t work. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but the kids wouldn’t play in front of her. I was shocked to realize that they felt comfortable with me, while they would be shy and silent around my sister. “No, you know, I think it would be better if you went inside my apartment and just kind of, like, waited, because they don’t know you and—”
“Oh! I’m sorry. God, what am I thinking? They don’t know me from a hole in the wall. I wouldn’t want them to feel uncomfortable! I’m a stranger, and they don’t—”
“Nothing personal, it’s just—”
“Got it!”
Ellen went inside my apartment, and I called the kids, “You guys! Lets finish our lesson, OK?”
Mike came to the door and looked both ways as if he were about to cross the street.
“Ellen’s going to wait for me inside my apartment. You ready? Where’s Elise?”