by Abby Frucht
Winter
One afternoon in early December, while Lydia was down in the basement printing T-shirts on a silk screen, snow fell. It was the first snow of the year and it didn’t last very long; by the time she’d wiped the ink off her hands and climbed the steps to the kitchen it had stopped falling. When the wind blew over the hills, a faint white dusting of snow rippled underneath it like a bed sheet. This was in the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia, in a house that had belonged to a relative who died. It was a tall brick farmhouse with a rotting foundation; if you climbed to the second floor and looked out from the back you wouldn’t see the city at all, just the layered blue hills and a thread of highway. Before this Lydia had been staying in Austin with a lover, and before that in Manhattan with a different lover, and before that in Philadelphia.
After a while a truck rolled up the drive and stopped in front of the house. A guy got out. Lydia thought at first he was looking for some wire to fix his muffler. The tail pipe was dragging. But then she recognized him as a man who played music in a couple of bars in town; he had blue eyes and a widow’s peak and one night he’d come over to her table to admire her T-shirt. He wanted one for himself. He wanted a dragon, red on green, extra large. It felt good to be doing some business.
That evening it rained and the rain froze. John, who had planned to drive home to his wife, stayed with Lydia instead.
“Maybe you should call her,” Lydia said.
They were lying on the mattress in her bedroom, flipping through sketch books. Ideas for T-shirts. John said not to worry, he didn’t have to call his wife because he didn’t care about her anymore because she didn’t care about him. Last week she’d thrown a juice bottle at his head and missed and broke a window. All this after he bought her a washing machine. The kitchen smelled like sour oranges and if you walked in certain places your feet stuck to the linoleum.
“Wait,” said Lydia. “Who stopped loving who first?”
“She never loved me in the first place,” said John. “I just caught on.”
There was a daughter, otherwise he’d move out for good. He wanted to go to New York City and get a band together and write songs and cut albums. For now he played bars and sold cocaine. He played a twelve-string with mother-of-pearl inlay, from a case lined with velvet scented like oil and wood. He was a huge man, fleshy and pale. Lydia liked the way the vial of cocaine looked, tiny in the palm of his hand.
After that it snowed five times in two and a half weeks and John was showing up every night. They’d walk out to the frozen water hole and skate around on their boot soles, or slide down the hill on a Hefty bag. Afterward they’d fill the tub with hot water and get in, one behind the other, and soap each other’s backs. Asleep, John snored like a bear.
But on the morning of December 22 there was a thaw. The hills turned brown and yellow. John’s tires got stuck in the mud, and finally Lydia had to take the wheel and rock the truck while he pushed from behind. Now she was standing alone in the kitchen, eating an apple for breakfast. An icicle fell past the window. “This is the first day of winter,” she said, and then the phone rang. It was a woman.
“My name’s Baby,” said the woman. “In case he hasn’t told you. I don’t know what he’s told you but it isn’t true.”
“Don’t tell him I called,” said Baby. “I just want you to stop loving him.”
“Say something,” said Baby. “I wanted to hear your voice.”
“Maybe we should meet,” said Lydia. She put the apple core on the windowsill and watched it. Maybe if she looked long enough it would turn brown.
“I don’t know if I could stand to look at you,” said Baby.
They met in the art museum. Baby had finally said yes, they could meet somewhere, as long as she could keep her eyes off Lydia and still have something to look at. She was wearing a sweat shirt with the name of a high school printed on it. She was taller than Lydia. She had large bones, a pale angular face, wide dark lips, and heavy eyelids. She looked like she wanted to shut her eyes.
“I was doing some laundry,” Baby was saying, “with my new washer and dryer he bought me so I would be happy. He thinks when he goes to spend the night with you I can sit in the basement and watch the clothes go round and feel better. That’s how I found your number, in the pocket of his jeans.”
“I’m sorry,” said Lydia.
They stopped walking, and stood before a large hanging screen titled “Mount Everest.” If you looked closely enough you could make out the shape of the mountain like something scratched onto the paper with the tip of a needle. Closer up you saw the tiny scratched shapes of spruce trees. For a while they talked about John. They talked about his music. Lydia said she admired a man with aspirations. Baby said he’d been playing the same songs for years, that he’d never get anywhere except maybe jail or dead.
“You’ve got bird bones,” said Baby. She had gone on to the next drawing. She still hadn’t looked Lydia in the eye. “I bet he suffocates you,” she said. “A man doesn’t know his strength.”
“We don’t do it with him on top,” said Lydia.
It was the wrong thing to say. Baby paled. She lifted her hands to her face. She had hair the color of copper that flashed about her shoulders. Lydia thought about touching her. She could put a hand on her shoulder, maybe push the hair from her face.
“Is that your real name?” she said finally, edging closer. “Baby?”
“Why don’t you fall in love with someone else?” said Lydia.
She was crouched behind him in the tub, soaping his neck with a cloth. His neck was as big around as her thigh. When he lowered himself into the tub, water splashed over the sides.
“What?” said John.
“Fall in love with someone old and rich,” said Lydia. “Then when they’re dead and you’re a millionaire, come back to me.”
She was thinking of Baby’s ring, a heavy band of cast silver with a jagged piece of turquoise set into it. John wore the same ring. Lydia hadn’t noticed it before. Probably they were wedding rings. Baby’s had a wad of masking tape wrapped around it, which meant she must have gotten thinner since the wedding day.
Now the soap was lost. They started feeling around, touching one another under the clouded water. If they wanted to get really clean they’d have to empty the tub and start over again. Lydia sniffed at the back of his neck and under his arms where the hair was still thick with lather. She liked how he smelled. He smelled like a clean animal.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
“Okay,” said John. “Don’t let go.”
Later that night he made a phone call and told Lydia he was driving up to Culpepper to visit Rick and Sue, friends of his. He said she could come if she wanted, so she made coffee and poured it into a thermos and climbed into the truck with him. The truck didn’t have any heat but it was a warm night, the kind of night in which crickets would sing if it were summer.
“We’re decorating,” said Sue when she met them at the door. She was holding one end of a string of Christmas bulbs. Rick, who had the other end, was trying to push his way between the couch and the wall so he could plug it in.
“Next year I said to Rick we’ll have to go on a diet so we have room for a tree,” said Sue. She laughed. Both of them were fat. You couldn’t guess their ages. On the mantelpiece was a photo of Sue when she wasn’t fat and in the photo she looked about sixteen.
Suddenly the lights in Sue’s hand blinked on, and she laughed. John played a couple of songs on his guitar, and after each one Sue laughed again, and clapped. Rick made some lines on a mirror and passed it around, and Lydia found herself telling Sue she liked her dress. It was a sleeveless dress with strawberries on it, the kind of dress you’d wear if you were fat and happy. The night went on; every so often the lights blinked. Lydia thought she could have known these people for years, she could be sitting here forever in this cozy room. To get to the bathroom you had to walk through a narrow hallway to the bedroom, where the bed was unmad
e. There was a dent in the middle of the mattress, which meant they rolled together as they slept, and on the sheets were roses, tiny hard clusters of them.
Back in the living room Rick handed her a chocolate cookie the size of a pancake and said, “Here, Baby.” At first Lydia thought he was being affectionate but then she realized he was calling her by Baby’s name, and that he and Sue thought she was Baby. There hadn’t been any introductions.
When they left it was nearly dawn. Sue filled the thermos with fresh coffee and said they should come back again, maybe eat dinner with the television on. At the doorway Rick gave John a package, and John gave Rick twelve hundred dollars.
By December 31 there had been two weeks of rain and sun and the earth was muddy. The air was fresh. Buds appeared on the trees. People said it was a freak year, winter come and gone already, spring on the way. Lydia drove into town and set her table up, on a sidewalk in front of some shops. Sunlight bounced off the shop windows, warming her back. In five hours she sold seven dragon T-shirts, four Mad Hatters, eight unicorns, and five Medusas. For summer, she was thinking, she’d do a winged horse, yellow on white. People would buy it, she was thinking, for the same reason they bought the dragons and the unicorns: they were unhappy with their lives. Someone tapped her on the arm. It was Baby, her hair flashing like a penny.
“You look good,” said Lydia. “But thin.”
Baby seemed puzzled. “I like those shirts,” she said. “I was wondering if you have one small enough for a kid five and a half years old.”
“I can give you the extra small,” said Lydia, “and you can wash it hot and stick it in the dryer.”
She felt bad, having mentioned the washer and dryer. It was like saying John’s name. But Baby didn’t seem to mind. She took an orange shirt with a red dragon on it.
“How much?” she said, digging around in the pockets of her jeans. You could see her hip bones pushing through the cloth.
“Take it,” said Lydia. “I wouldn’t sell you a shirt.”
“Is there something wrong with it?” said Baby, pulling at the seams with her fingernails.
Then she looked at Lydia hard and refolded the shirt and put it back on the table on top of the others and walked away. A few yards off she stopped.
“I didn’t know you had those crooked teeth,” she said. “I don’t see how he loves you.”
When she had gone Lydia loaded the shirts and the folding table and the money box into the back seat of her car, and then she slid into the front seat and lowered the visor and looked at her face in the mirror. It was true about the crooked teeth. They’d grown in like that. She liked them. She liked her imperfections. They made her feel human.
At home John was standing in the middle of her bedroom, unpacking a suitcase, hanging his shirts in the closet next to Lydia’s shirts.
“You moving in finally?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” he said.
For New Year’s Eve there was a bottle of sparkling wine from the supermarket. John was happy with himself for remembering it. They heated some up in a pot, with orange slices and pieces of apple and banana. In the wine, the fruit turned purple. John played songs. His face changed when he sang. In the candlelight the burnished face of the guitar had the texture of silk. Lydia got restless; she found a broom and a dustpan and swept the house, the kitchen first, the hallway, the steps. She swept in the dark. She was thinking how a year ago on New Year’s she and Bruce bought five six-packs at a 7-Eleven in Austin, and how a year before that she had dinner with Michael in a Trader Vic’s on Staten Island. She thought how the New Year always made you think back, never ahead. For a minute she was mixed up and saw Bruce on Staten Island, Michael in Texas, John somewhere else.
“I have to clear my head,” she said, and went out to the porch with a blanket, thinking that when she came back in they could turn the TV on and watch the ball dropping over Times Square, then all the old couples dancing.
“You tell him the landlord’s here, and it’s the first of the month, and I can’t pay the rent even for last month let alone this month, and Virginia’s got chicken pox, and he better tell me what it is I’m supposed to do,” said Baby.
“He’s in the shower,” Lydia said. He was singing in the shower. She pulled the telephone receiver away from her ear; Baby was screaming into it: “So I’m supposed to tell my landlord wait till my husband gets out of the shower at Lydia’s house and then maybe I can pay the rent?”
There was a pause, Baby sniffing at the other end.
“You could give your landlord the washing machine,” said Lydia.
“What?” said Baby.
“And then the dryer for next month,” said Lydia. In the silence that followed she heard the shower stop. She could have called John to the phone.
“Or I could write you a check,” she said.
Baby lived in a neighborhood on the opposite edge of town; to get there you had to take a road down into Charlottesville and then another road up a hill past the university. The house sat on top of a sloping yard reinforced with railroad ties, and since there didn’t seem to be a driveway Lydia parked on the street and climbed up. The house was pumpkin-colored, with an ornate porch and irregular glass in the windows. Baby lived in one half of the bottom floor. There were beer cans stacked in her window. She came to the door in a bathrobe, shaking a thermometer.
“Virginia’s got fever,” she said. “Look at that snow.”
Either the snow had just started or Lydia hadn’t noticed it on the drive over; it fell thickly and steadily past. Baby didn’t ask her to come inside. She stood in the doorway. She said the landlord had gone home for his lunch and would come back later for the check, which better have Lydia’s social security number and driver’s license number and telephone number printed on the back of it. Then she took the check and turned it over a couple of times, to make sure it wasn’t a fake.
“If I told John you were doing this I wouldn’t go home if I was you,” said Baby.
She was staring past Lydia at some roofs that were turning white, then she lifted a hand to her chest and pressed the flat part of her wrist against the hollow of her chest and held it there. Lydia understood this to be a gesture that Baby made often, a habit, her hand on her heart, her heart beating under it, for solace. She kept her own hands flat at her sides. There was nothing to do; she wished she hadn’t come. She turned away into the weather, where the fat neat flakes dropped silently under their own weight. How perfect they were in their last moment, in that brief cold moment before they hit the earth.
How to Live Alone
Steven’s ghost is breathing on her neck. His breath is salty and warm. It seems to come from far off. She knows it’s Steven; on the beach first thing that morning he began reading her book from over her shoulder and turning the pages just as Steven used to, impatiently flipping them as she was finishing the last line. There was that same tremor of agitation, his fingers drumming on the jacket of the book, It was uncanny how he’d always known exactly when to turn the pages, never a second too early or late. But it isn’t, so uncanny anymore. Nancy sits quietly in her beach chair till dusk, reading along with him, even after all the other bathers have packed their towels and gone home and there are shadows. The tide quits moving inches from her feet. The sand stays warm.
There have been other things. Hints. The first, last night just after she’d arrived, had been enough to let her know someone was there. She had left Lloyd Harbor later than she’d planned, having fallen asleep over dinner and then wakened embarrassed to find herself drooling, spit on her chin. She wrapped her plate in foil and set it in the refrigerator on top of last night’s dinner, then put her slippers on and walked out to the car, which was already packed. She had to unload the trunk and find shoes. Sneakers. You can’t drive in slippers—suppose you get a flat or run out of gas on the highway? She began to think about going to bed and waiting for morning. She could leave at five and beat the traffic. Instead she drove to the 7-Eleven for
coffee and drank it standing in the parking lot, watching some teenagers smoke cigarettes. When the coffee was gone she walked back into the 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Nows and lit one. She lit a second in the car and smoked through Lake Ronkonkoma, then tossed the pack under her seat where she couldn’t reach it. The drive was no fun—there was darkness and smog and finally turning onto West Hampton Beach she had to strain to see the railings of the bridge. In the rear-view mirror she saw her own pale face with the fog around it. It looked drained and gray, and it made her think of ghosts.
The apartment, which they’d bought six years ago for summer weekends, was on the bay side of Dune Road. Steven had wanted the bay side so he could take his sailfish out in the evenings while Nancy sat on the deck and watched. Time after time he’d strained against the bright triangle of sail toward the opposite shore, his hair glistening silver. He’d have a wet suit on. Coming back he’d be ruddy with cold and she’d unzip him. She went out to the deck the minute she arrived, and stood leaning with her hands flat against the railing in the fog that smelled salty and woody from the reeds. There were rabbits there with their eyes lit up. She could hear the tall dry stalks of the reeds breathing against one another, and the slow lapping of the water. In the stillness she felt the sounds advancing upon her.
Later, in her robe in the tiny kitchen, she thought she’d pour herself a glass of wine. It was jug wine. Why buy a good wine when there was only one of you? She wanted half a glass. She couldn’t remember the glasses ever being so large. But she was prevented from turning the bottle upright. The wine kept gushing out, a ribbon of pink that bubbled when it struck the glass. It was as if a hand had been lowered onto the neck of the bottle and was holding it down until finally the glass was filled and the bottle sprang back as if the hand had been pulled away from it.