Linda felt sure she could convince him. But in the following days, whenever she tried speaking to Hank of the secret joys of geology, his face transformed before her into something hard and foreign, like a new rock she had never seen before. “Please, stop, “he said, interrupting her. Soon his newly salvaged fossils began to appear about the house, on the couch, in the sink, their broken surfaces a solid reproach. About to shower one evening, Linda picked up from the tiled floor of the stall a crooked lump covered with tiny, twisted shells. Linda stared at the patterns until suddenly she was aware of Hank behind her.
“They’re dead things, understand?” he said, his voice so oddly unhappy. “They’ll never come alive.”
Linda crouched naked before Hank, afraid, yet she had to tell him how those spiraled shells were undulating in her hand.
Hank began to spend day and night in the study. Linda was anxious for her husband, surrounded inside by so much carefully preserved failure, and she kept watch outside the door. Afraid to imagine what terrible marks he might be making on his face with his pencil, instead she spoke to Hank through the closed door, telling him how the hallway floorboards around her, as if still part of a living tree, sprouted branches and leaves. Wouldn’t he like to come out and see them? She could hear him inside brushing away at his fossils with a destructive fury. So she continued, next recounting their son’s creation, feature by feature. “Go away!” he shouted from inside. But Linda tried again, describing how his face would change with age, how he would be a beautiful old man. Then there was a long silence, as if he were sitting still in his chair, barely breathing.
*
One afternoon while playing with her son in the living room, Linda watched William rock a wicker basket back and forth, back and forth, and she joined in his laughter, for the basket was unraveling and she could see the busy, invisible hands behind it all. Happy for another detail that might attract her husband, Linda walked to the study and was surprised to see the door slightly ajar. She hesitated, then looked inside, but he wasn’t at his desk. She entered slowly and saw Hank in the open closet, hanging in the air, the folds of skin on his neck horribly creased around a rope. Linda stared at his feet, inches above the carpeted floor.
Before she could scream, or cry, or even believe what she saw, Linda heard an unhappy shout of her son and his urgent, faltering steps down the hallway. She quickly ran outside and shut the door, standing before it just as William cried into her arms, his small hands on his forehead from some fall. Linda checked and found no bruise. She sank to her knees and hugged him, and his small grief seemed briefly to cancel her own, impending and terrible. She hoped he would never stop crying and held him until he had to break away impatiently. He toddled down the hallway, and she listened to his high laughter in the living room.
Her son gone, Linda leaned against the wall across from the study. She stared at the door and tried to imagine another possibility inside. She tried to reverse everything: the still, hanging body rising from the fall, the neck unsnapping, the hands that had tied the rope’s knot now untying it, the quiet steps to the closet now tracing themselves backward to the desk, returning until the first suicidal thought that began it all was not yet thought.
Linda finally entered the study again, and her husband’s contorted face stared past her. She rushed out to the living room. William had settled behind one of the upholstered chairs, and she listened to his quiet, self-involved chatter. Then she picked up the phone for an ambulance and started to cry into the humming receiver.
*
In the weeks following the funeral, Linda found her home had become a new landscape. Each stone of Hank’s collection, eloquent in its silence, gave her pain, and she was shaken by the thought that in all her life with him there had been this hidden future, this secret avalanche waiting to fall. But how could she put even one rock away? It would leave another empty space she wouldn’t know how to fill. No friends or family could comfort her, and when William woke at night, confused and crying from some bad dream, she ran to him as much to be held as to hold him.
Linda could have gone back to work, but she didn’t want to return to cleaning teeth that she knew would eventually decay and collapse in ancient mouths. Instead she stayed home, though everywhere she looked lacked her husband. The handle of Hank’s coffee cup had lost his fingers, the rim his lips. Then everything began to crumble. The label of the soup can on the kitchen counter faded and crinkled until its glue dried, the edges curled, and the can itself rusted. The blue wallpaper began to peel like broad, thin shreds of falling sky. The linoleum cracked, and grass grew up past the window sills. Linda sat in a chair and grew old, her fingernails extending until they snapped off, brittle from age. Exposed wooden beams warped and the walls around her sucked in and fell. Then she decayed. The tall grass swayed through her eye sockets and the spaces between her ribs. Metal fillings glinted in her scattered teeth. But then Linda slowly reassembled herself, the ligaments re-forming, the bone adhering to tissue, the veins rethreading themselves throughout her body.
When she was almost whole again she heard a series of crashes in the living room. She hurried to the open doorway and saw William among a pile of rocks, the shelves empty behind him. Linda scolded him and he ran away, laughing a wild laugh, happy to have her attention. She chased him to his room and he stood before her, suddenly about to cry. But then she saw him change into an awkward young man, pimpled and sullen, and suddenly she realized how frighteningly independent he would become. She could see William leaving home, could imagine his infrequent phone calls and large and small lies, imagine, finally, his denial of her in her old age. Crying herself, Linda held out her arms and William, small again, ran to hug her as she knelt down. But patting his back, squeezing his shoulders, she saw a vision of an older boy turning away, ashamed.
*
Linda grew frightened of her son, his small face a mask insisting itself into her imagination, always about to erupt into the person she feared he would grow to be. When she heard his footsteps now she wanted to run away and at the same time she wanted to run to him, to hide her son’s transforming face in her arms. But she was afraid his blonde hair would turn gray beneath the strokes of her hand.
Finally one day Linda found William sneaking up behind her. Strange tremors passed over his face. The curve of his jawline, so much like her own, altered. The furl of nostril that resembled hers erased, and Hank’s straight nose pushed forward. She simply vanished from her son’s face, while all of Hank’s features emerged and twisted themselves older. And then there was her husband, toddling toward her with his arms outstretched, but Linda was already running. She rushed out the front door to the car, ignoring his cries. Shaking in the front seat, she saw Hank in the rearview mirror hurrying down the driveway after her. She started the car, but he slapped at the door again and again, and she had to open it. Her husband stood unhappy before her. She let him in, even though she was fleeing from him.
Hank sniffled and tried to smile, wiping his teary eyes. When Linda leaned across and held his hand he seemed so content that she couldn’t imagine now what had ever gone wrong between them. She decided they would take a field trip in the country together and make a new start. Linda drove off, and the immediate sense of escape and the unfolding road were enough to calm her. She turned onto the highway, and with the white lines stretching ahead she felt sure they were both leaving everything terrible behind.
As Linda drove, she pointed, and Hank followed her finger. “Those fields were once a drainage channel, right?” she asked. But Hank played with the straps of his overalls, oddly disinterested. Linda tried again. “How long will it take to erode those hills over there?” Hank only squirmed on the seat beside her, kicking his feet together. Linda gazed off unhappily to the left and saw a runoff ravine in the distance. Though far away, she could make out the crooked trenches of erosion. This would surely interest Hank. She turned off at the first side road, so excited that she swerved sharply at the curve of the exit r
amp. Hank abruptly slid across the seat and cried out.
“Sorry, dear,” Linda said, slowing down. The new road she took was winding and so full of interesting geologic features that Linda soon lost her way. “Look, a sinkhole!” she called out to her indifferent Hank, who was standing up and about to crawl away from her to the backseat. “A bedding plane, a block fault!” she continued almost desperately.
Searching for topographical features to attract her husband, Linda was having difficulty paying attention to the road. An approaching car honked at her, but Linda saw it was actually an erratic, a huge boulder deposited by a retreating glacier. It passed them before she could point it out to Hank, who had plopped back down on the seat. Linda pressed on the accelerator, entranced by the transforming view of her windshield. Then a truck appeared, but Linda immediately realized it couldn’t be that at all. Instead, it was a road cut, and its sheer, towering slabs still frightened her, as they once had so long ago. “There, over there!” she shouted, pointing at the advancing cliff. Her hands tightened on the wheel, ready to turn away, and she fought a growing fascination with the exposed rock, the rippling patterns that seemed about to speak.
Lucky
I have a nice shop—men’s clothes, all of them classic. No young kids bother to come in for whatever’s latest because they know they won’t find it here. I don’t mind, I’ve known most of my regular customers for years—the second anyone walks through the door I can remember his collar size, sleeve length, you name it. I’ve always been the fellow who tucks everyone nicely into suits and pants and shirts, and I know more than measurements, I know what my customer doesn’t want to see in the three-way mirror: usually it’s the bald spot, the paunch or the neck wattle, so I divert attention to the shoulder pads, the cuffs, the snappy angle of a lapel.
Maybe I know my customers too well, because when old age settled in and they started dying I took it hard, right from the moment I heard the first bad news. I remember I was standing behind the register, enjoying the look of the long row of suits against the wall—I liked to think they were waiting patiently in line for something, maybe opening night at some big Broadway play, and they were all happy to have tickets. Joe Baxter walked in—the fellow who always goes through the tie racks three times before making up his mind. I was already thinking, Hat size: 7 3/4, when he said, “Hey Pete, guess what?”
He was holding back a nervous grin and I knew I was about to hear some awful surprise—that’s just the way he was. He’d done this to me before, once when Sadat was shot, another time when the space shuttle blew up. But Joe stopped smiling when he finally said, “Tiny Martin died—his heart. He just fell down on his way to breakfast.”
I leaned back against the counter and could only manage a weak, “No—Tiny? That’s terrible.” I liked Tiny and always felt sorry for him, beginning with his nickname—he was almost too big for the largest size in the shop. And the poor guy was afraid of the dressing room—he never tried on anything before buying. “No thanks,” he said to me the first time he ever stopped by, “I don’t need to go in there.” So I rearranged the cufflink display while he stood in front of the mirror and held shirts under his chin; after he picked out something, he told some little joke at the register, almost like he was thanking me for leaving him alone. Later, I heard talk that he’d seen real trouble back in the Korean War, squeezed inside some narrow prison cell.
Harriet and I went to his wake—a room full of flowers with nothing cheery about them—and poor Tiny looked awfully cramped in that coffin. The morticians had done a terrible job dressing him—the collar could barely contain his neck, and the knot of his tie was pulled off to one side, just like my brother Jamie’s tie at his own funeral so long ago. I hadn’t thought of it in years—I was nine, maybe ten, at the time—though I could clearly recall waiting in line for the viewing, nervous even though I knew there was barely a scratch on him—only internal injuries from his fall while chasing me up a tree. Jamie was dressed in a suit—something I’m sure he never wore when he was alive—with a thick blue tie knotted funny and twisted almost sideways. He looked so unlike himself that I leaned up close to his peaceful face, even though I was still afraid: sometimes at night he used to turn on the light by my bed and I’d wake to see his face inches from me, twisted up in some vile and gruesome way until I started crying.
Then there I was, standing beside Tiny’s coffin, tears pouring down, and Harriet whispered behind me, “C’mon, honey, people are waiting.”
I was so spooked that we left, too early to be polite. After that I avoided wakes and saved my respects for the funeral service, where Harriet and I sat in a pew in the back with the ushers and the less popular relatives. Because there were more funerals to go to—Jack Banes, a lover of cardigans, wasted away from cancer; and Paul Markowitz, a tie clip collector, died of kidney failure. Worse, more funerals were on the way. One afternoon I got a call from Gloria, Larry Johnson’s wife, and she said, “Pete, Larry needs a shirt for my niece’s wedding tomorrow, but he can’t, um, come by today. Could you pick something out for him and drop it by later?”
“Sure, I know his size, and you’re on my way home,” I said, a little surprised, but her tone of voice said, Don’t ask questions.
I brought along a nice selection, but Larry was in no condition to choose. He was sitting in the den beside a record player and listening to this scratchy Benny Goodman tune—when the clarinet hit its stride and went in loops around the beat, Larry’s face opened up like he was hearing it for the first time. Then he flipped the needle to the beginning so he could hear it for the first time again, and he gave that spinning record a silly grin. This was not at all the same man who rattled off baseball statistics while I chalked cuff lines on his pants. Gloria had a terrible look on her face, like she was a convict counting the minutes before parole, and I knew Larry’d been doing this all day, at least. God knows what was on my face, but she leaned in close to me and whispered fiercely. “You think he’s bad? Tom Peterson is some big fan of Sesame Street—he watches letters and numbers dance and sing all day long. Poor Ann.”
*
So one day I finished my lunch break sandwich, glanced over at the rows of suits, and they looked like they were all lined up to view the deceased. Next thing you know, I might start seeing ghosts poking through shelves of sweaters or avoiding the dressing room. What’s needed here is a change of scene, a walk to the park, I told myself, and I tucked the local paper under my arm and closed up shop for the rest of the hour.
I sat on a bench and watched the children playing their games in the sandbox for a while, then I opened up the paper and worked my way into the international news, all that faraway trouble. The national news followed—the usual sleazy dealings in Washington—and then I came to our town’s police blotter, the minor local fires, the major sales in the mall. Finally I turned a page and there were the obituaries.
I closed the paper and let it flap in the wind a little bit—after all, I’d come to the park to avoid this sort of thing. But what if someone I knew was in there—was I going to let Joe Baxter surprise me again with another awful grin?
All the names were unfamiliar. How could this upset me? So I read on. Everyone was survived by somebody: a wife or husband, brothers or sisters, kids grown up and scattered in different towns or states and their kids grown up and scattered. A job was listed too, just like another next-of-kin, and so was the time of death, down to the minute: 12:05 P.M. or 8:34 A.M. or whatever. I thought back to the day before and I tried to remember what I’d been doing at those times: maybe squeezing a tube of toothpaste, or finishing off a tuna sandwich.
That afternoon, when no one was in the shop, I stopped in the middle of arranging a shipment of socks in bins, checked my watch, whispered, “Good-bye and good luck,” and wondered if I’d just given a friendly send-off to someone I knew. The next day I read the obits to see how I’d done: no one there was even an acquaintance, and I hadn’t even come close to any time of death. But I kept u
p this little game for weeks, and I began to seem strange to myself.
I started thinking that when I retired—just a few years off, really—Harriet and I should move far, far away, where we didn’t know anybody, where the obits wouldn’t have one familiar name: I didn’t want to wait for Tom Peterson or Larry Johnson or anyone else to die.
*
Usually when Harriet made breakfast, I watched sleepily and thought about how lucky I was—she could have done a lot better than me, that’s for sure. But one morning I finally had to say, “Why don’t we move when I retire?”
She kept stirring those scrambled eggs and wouldn’t turn around, so I knew I had to speak carefully. Harriet was always the quiet one, and over the years I had learned to read her whole collection of quiets. I even had a favorite, her Out-of-the-Body quiet: I liked watching her knit, hands on automatic while her face took on this kind of faraway peace, like she could see something really wonderful that was miles off.
But the way she was slowly stirring those eggs I knew she was into her I-Wish-You-Hadn’t-Said-That quiet.
“Say we move south,” I said to the back of her head. Her hair was up in its usual bun, with a wisp loose here and there—I still loved it when she let it down. “Think of all that sun. And there’d be no snow. If we moved we could have a yard sale and sell the snow shovel and ice scraper, we could donate our boots and gloves and coats to the Salvation Army.” I hoped this might soften her up—Harriet could never get warm enough in the winter.
“What about the children?” she asked.
“I don’t know, what about them? They can learn to send their postcards to a new address, dial a different area code, I guess.”
Harriet was suddenly real busy dishing out the eggs and about to settle into her If-You’re-not-Going-to-Be-Serious-I’m-not- Going-to-Listen quiet, and she was right. We’d raised two fine kids—a girl and boy—and our worrying over each scraped knee, every chickenpox scar, and all the other marks the world made on them was not something to joke about. So I added, “Look, honey, if we lived in Florida we’d be closer to Elizabeth and the boys. And Jimmy can afford to travel a little farther.”
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