by Abby Frucht
Later she recalled Steven’s insistence that she take more wine than she wanted on the nights he intended to make love to her.
And a door had opened by itself. Had it been an ordinary door she would have thought nothing of it; there were plenty of breezes near the water and doors were always being blown open. But this was a sliding door made of glass. It led from the bedroom onto a tiny slatted porch overlooking the parking lot. It had been closed. Then it was open. She was climbing into bed when she noticed it, the curtains billowing. So she stepped out for a minute in her nightgown to look around. You couldn’t see the ocean from there but you could hear it. There was nothing else. Only she found herself peering at the flower boxes, which were still papery with dead geraniums from a year ago. They’d been infested. Steven had cared for them. At night in his underwear he’d pinched the gluey white eggs from the joints of the stems, shining a pocket flashlight up under the leaves while he crouched below them.
Nancy is fifty-one years old. She has always been thin but now she is thinner. She has brought with her to the apartment on West Hampton Beach six books including four cheap novels, a guide to the shorebirds that Steven had taken along every summer and never opened, and a dictionary with a broken spine. In the months since Steven’s death she has discovered in herself a certain poverty of words; she does not have the words to make her truest feelings understandable even to herself. It seems wasteful to her, that a woman should spend hours picking through her emotions in search of the one she can name. Her plan for the summer consists simply of circling in the dictionary those words whose definitions seem to apply to herself. Later, in the fall, she’ll type them up, weed some out, reread the list each day and pare it like a fruit until she has to stop, until there remains only a hardened core of words that she might swallow and expel. So far she’s circled just two. “Age” is the first, and that doesn’t help. When you’re fifty-one you know how old you are. Just the same, a spot on her cheek below the left eye has recently started to twitch. Of course. You get old. If it takes the death of your husband to bring it on, who’s to say you weren’t lucky having lasted that long? They’d found a bunch of roses in his car. They’d handed them to her along with the news. Imagine opening the door to some cop breathing roses, tears in his eyes.
The second word, “afflux,” the act of traveling toward a point, she’d circled without really knowing why. She used a red pen; the circle gave the word a misspelled look. If she was traveling toward a point, would she know when she was there? Maybe not. The vanishing point. She’d set the roses in a soup can she’d emptied for supper. She forgot to put water in.
After the funeral she drove six hours to Stamford, Connecticut, where Steven’s younger sister lived in a high-rise. Jolene was fat and had swollen arteries and couldn’t make it to Long Island by herself. Years ago she’d switched her name from Jody, hoping the change would make her less fat. Still, people called her Jody by mistake. She blamed them for her inability to shed weight. Nancy and Steven had called her Jolene; for this they were mammothly loved. Jolene, finding Nancy at the door, cried out and swaddled her in pounds of milky flesh. She had been weeping, more than usual. The front of her blouse was transparent with tears. She grabbed hold of Nancy’s suitcase. Nancy wondered if she’d brought enough to last.
“Tell me how it happened,” wept Jolene. “They told me he was bringing you flowers.”
“Yes,” Nancy said. “But who says the flowers were meant for me?”
Jolene dried her eyes and stared hard.
“He wasn’t in the habit of bringing me flowers,” Nancy went on. “When there wasn’t an occasion.”
“Do I hear what you’re saying?” yelled Jolene. She had taken Nancy’s hand in hers. For a fat woman Jolene had lovely hands, sharp and delicate.
“It’s just a thought,” Nancy said. “He was driving through Great Neck when he died. As far as I know there was absolutely no reason on earth Steven would be in Great Neck.”
“There must be some way to find out!” said Jolene. “You have a right to know!” Her hard little blue eyes blinked.
“I don’t care to,” said Nancy.
That night there was a tremendous thump and Nancy got up to check on things. She was sleeping in Jolene’s room, under the white and sky-blue comforter that gave her bed the plump appearance of a cloud. Jolene had insisted on spending the night in the living room. It wasn’t the type of couch that folded out into a bed and it was far too narrow for Jolene. She had tipped too far in the wrong direction and rolled off. There she lay on the floor, her body quivering beneath the gauze of a nightgown. She had not woken up. She was dreaming. She was dreaming of love, her perfect hands searching the air above her. Nancy stood in the doorway a minute and looked at her and wondered what to do. Wake her up? Let her sleep? Maybe this was the kind of thing you should expect in a woman who lived by herself, that she wake up each day in a heap on the floor not knowing how she got there, when she fell, when the crash occurred. Jolene was moaning. Her mouth was wide open and you could see the moonlight inside of it.
The visit was otherwise uneventful. Jolene showed Nancy photographs of her and Steven growing up. She cried, Nancy comforted. Jolene still wore her high school ring, gold plate with a dull blue stone.
Nancy left Stamford two days early and drove back through Manhattan on a Friday. It was early May, the sun on the sidewalks glaring like snow. She meant to buy herself some tinted glasses, the kind whose lenses darkened when you stepped outside. Instead she chose a pair in an aviator style whose lenses didn’t change but gave the world, inside and out, a smoky look. The sidewalks glistened not like snow but like water, like a place where water has been once and slipped back. Then in Saks she moved among the dresses restfully, touching the fabrics and letting them brush against her. She craved summer. The dresses were smooth and cool and airy. At last she bought a blouse, silk, in a dusky salmon color.
At home in Lloyd Harbor, later that evening with her sunglasses off, Nancy found that her blouse wasn’t salmon at all but hot pink. She started to cry. She hadn’t cried a bit since Steven’s death; instead her eyes stayed dry and numb. She cried for a long time and walked aimlessly through the huge house. She turned the television on and watched the end of the sports news, then listened to the weather announcer’s jokes. Sobbing seemed shocking and dangerous, as if she’d swallowed some poor animal that was trying to get out. But her eyes were soothed. At the end she blew her nose into the blouse and balled it up and stuffed it in the garbage and dumped some coffee grounds on top of it. Then she walked three blocks to Walter Sneider’s house. He was the family doctor, a divorcé of fifteen years, balding, with large ears you could trace the veins in. For ages Nancy had chosen his carpets and drapes and upholsteries, and had supervised their installation, always keeping in mind what Greta, his absent wife, would have chosen herself. Florals mostly, prolific and unmatched like some dense fruity jungle, sachets in the closets, strawberry soaps. Walter himself was a sudden cool comfort, like waking between new sheets. He made her a rum punch, he smelled of lime, he was solicitous as always and gave her the softest chair to sit in and then ran a bath without her knowing, in the black-tiled bathroom.
Then he toweled her dry and stood her on the scale and weighed her.
“You’ve lost weight,” he scolded. “Look at these ribs. You need a rest, Nancy. You’re in shock. You need some time alone.”
Three nights later he brought it up again. They had gone to a movie and were sitting in his car. The parking lot was jammed with cars and people pushing to get past. The movie was Breaker Morant, and Nancy couldn’t speak. She saw the two men tied to their chairs on a high rocky plain in South Africa, waiting to be shot, and then the credits floating past, and Walter’s smooth pink brow as he turned to her and led her from the theater. It was hot in Walter’s car but his words stirred her.
“You still have that place out east,” he said. “In the Hamptons. Go there and I’ll join you in a week or two. Don’t
worry if you find you want to sleep in the middle of the day. Drink plenty of cold water. Collect shells.”
His voice and touch were soothing and familiar. Waking with him close to her each morning, staring at his wide and freckled body, Nancy longed for West Hampton Beach.
Steven has no interest in the dictionary game. Nancy feels him wander off toward the water. She strains, shades her eyes, and sees a wave part and come together where his ankles would have been. He leaves neither shadow nor footprint; she senses his presence the way a blind person senses a door, by some shift in the intensity of light and air. When he comes near, the hairs on Nancy’s arm stand up and hold the sunlight close to her.
She circles “Ally.” “Alongside.” The word “Alone,” uncircled, between them on the page, looks blank and mute and forceful. This morning at breakfast (a hard roll with butter and marmalade, a pot of coffee small enough to brew a single cup, a dish of raspberries in milk), Nancy felt his hunger yawning near her, as bottomless and needy as a black hole in space. She felt helpless in the face of it. She wanted to feed him. She broke the roll in two and spread the jam on thick and placed it on the table in front of him. Then she turned toward the bay and watched a man rowing out in a clam boat, hoping that when she turned back to look for it the roll would have vanished. But it was there. She broke it into pieces and tossed them into the reeds where the birds would eat them.
The barn swallows, which nested every year beneath the high cedar deck, kept darting in and out in their swift, silent way. Their wings flashed blues and purples. To Nancy their perpetual swooping had the exact quality of those stabs of pain you read about in books, a sudden plunging sadness like an arrow in the heart. Grief, she thought, would pierce the air like this, like birds feeding over the saw grass, hovering and diving, vanishing and reappearing.
But Nancy wasn’t feeling any grief. She felt remote and cool sitting there, her breakfast untouched, a radio playing behind her. The swallows were merely a lesson in sadness, one of those trade books, Coping with Widowhood, you read reviews about dry-eyed. It was all right; here was Steven in the deck chair next to hers, keeping her coffee warm. That had been one of his habits, placing a hand palm down on her coffee cup to keep it hot for her.
Now Nancy puts the dictionary down and joins him at the water. The tide is out, the surface of the ocean calm and bright. Gulls chatter on the wet sand and in the air above. Nancy is wearing a straw beach hat, her black swimsuit, and her wading pants, a pair of army fatigues cut off at the knees. Steven has a pair as well. The two of them walk west, past the crazy beach houses and rows of umbrellas, under the high noon sun in silence. They have always walked this way, Nancy on the outside stopping every now and then for shells, Steven on the inside. He likes the chill of the water, the sting. There was always this companionable silence. On the jetty though, climbing the wet black ribbon of rock, Nancy worries. What if he slips, falls, hurts himself? How would she know or help? Who’s to say a man can’t die a second time, leaving his ghost on the rocks like an echo?
At home, dizzy and smarting from the sun, Nancy fumbles with the key. The telephone is ringing, insistently, as if it’s been at it all day. Walter, thinks Nancy. Probably he’s ready to come out. What can she tell him? Don’t come. Steven will be hurt.
It isn’t Walter but his wife, Greta Sneider, who for fifteen years has run a dancing school for little girls in Great Neck, in a tired old house as leafy and gracious as a stranded yacht. Nancy imagines rows of leotarded girls in tap shoes, Greta keeping time with a gardenia. She and Walter communicate only on birthdays; Greta sends him bolts of cloth, vanilla beans, tiny corked bottles of orange blossom water, things he doesn’t know what to do with.
“Nancy,” she says. “Are you holding up?”
“Thank you, yes,” says Nancy. “How did you know I was here?”
“I knew. I don’t know.”
“You must have tried the house.”
“No. I would have tried there next. How’s your back?”
“My back?” says Nancy.
“I thought it was troubling you.”
“No,” says Nancy. Although she had bruised her back a little several months ago, playing squash with Steven. “But thank you.”
“Of course. Don’t ask me how I’m doing. I’m up to my neck in tutus. It’s absolutely loony. But call me if you need me,” says Greta. “If you need someone to talk to.”
“Thank you,” says Nancy, and she hangs up, feeling foolish. When at a loss for words she always says thank you, over and over. This makes her feel empty-handed, like someone waiting for a gift that doesn’t come.
Absently, Nancy lifts the spice rack from the wall near the telephone and runs her hand along the bottom of the shelf. It had been Steven’s idea to hide it there, the Glad Bag of marijuana he’d shocked her with last summer. He said he wanted to know what the fuss was about. So they’d smoked some. But it wasn’t much, after all. It merely caused her to examine the most ordinary things with great care and attention to detail, the way you’d study an expensive piece of clothing you were thinking of buying. So the flaws in her life became suddenly clearer and manageable; she remembers plucking her eyebrows, writing an overdue letter, calling a friend who had borrowed a favorite book and not returned it. When she had tired of all this, she slept, dreamlessly.
“Christ,” Nancy says. It’s impossible to get the thing rolled. She knows you’re supposed to clean the marijuana before rolling it but she doesn’t know which part to get rid of. So everything keeps slipping from between her fingers or sticking out at odd angles, tearing the flimsy rectangle of paper.
“I really don’t see why you can’t roll this thing,” Nancy says to the ghost. “You always wanted to do it.”
“Please,” she says, after a silence.
“At least,” she says, “show me how.”
She thinks if a ghost talked it would be in a whisper, a sound as deep and cryptic as a heartbeat. She listens very hard. There is nothing to hear, but all at once she finds she’s picked up the cigarette and rolled it. It is there in her hand, a perfect tapered cylinder.
She lights it and smokes, with her head thrown back and her feet on the table, thinking vaguely of Greta and Steven. Were they lovers? But what really seems to matter is the smoke itself, keeping it inside, trapping the coughing spells. Steven had put it that way. “You have to trap those coughs before they can escape,” he’d say, “like farting in company.”
Nothing happens, except that she gets up from the couch and goes into the bathroom, where she removes her wading pants, her swimsuit, even her watch. For a while she stands in front of the mirror, not looking at herself. She turns the fan on so the room can breathe. From the medicine cabinet she pulls the wide blue bottle of Nivea cream. She squeezes it, and two worms of white lotion drop from it onto her legs. Then her belly and arms, her neck, feet, breasts, all of her. She watches as the cream disappears beneath her hands, into her skin, which has a reptilian look from the salt and sun. She feels graceful and self-absorbed and private, the way she used to feel when, preparing to go out, she’d barred Steven from the bathroom and readied herself in the close, steamy place.
In the living room again, wrapped in nothing but a towel, Nancy notices the painting hanging on the wall above the couch. It is one of her own, a seascape she did years ago in a night class at C. W. Post. The sun on the rocks looks like yellow paint someone spilled on them. And the painting is hanging at an angle, something Steven never would allow. He can’t stand the sight of a crooked painting, he would have straightened it—even in museums he had embarrassed her by reaching out and tapping on the corners of the frames.
Then, looking at the beige carpet and the ivory couch and the cream walls and the dusky view of the bay through the glass, Nancy knows how empty the room has become, how quiet and still and pale, like a tide pool the water has seeped out of.
She calls Walter. He sounds breathless and pleased.
“I’m on my way,” he say
s. “You caught me checking the oil. I’m a grease ball.”
“Don’t come,” Nancy says.
“Excuse me?” says Walter.
“Don’t come,” she repeats. “I need more time. I’m sorry.”
After a minute Walter says, “I’ll come on Saturday instead. I’ve got these lobsters. Should I cook them or freeze them till then?”
“Eat them,” Nancy says.
It is late August, the deck in orange sunlight. Swans feed in the water at the lip of the bay where the reeds thin out. Beyond them that clam boat floats, shallow and rocking, that man wading round it with his rake and sack. Nancy has begun to feel edgy. She reminds herself periodically of the money she’d collect were she to put this place up for rent, or better still, sell the house in Lloyd Harbor. She’s heard stories of widows who sell their estates and move into carriage houses on the edges of horse farms. She thinks of doing something like that, but not quite like that. She thinks of Manhattan, of the bustle and excitement, how she ought to find herself a home in the middle of things. And then a job in a shop. She could buy her own shop or start a business; she has that knack for interior design. Truthfully, she has been musing about this for days; she sees herself strolling through the entranceways of other people’s houses bearing armloads of paint samples and fabrics, floorings, wallpapers, and carpets. She would alter people’s lives. They’d call her, she’d come. For the moment, though, it’s dinner time. Nancy snips the thorns from the leaves of an artichoke. She’ll eat it with butter and garlic and allow herself the pleasure of a book while she eats. One of the mysteries.
In October Nancy rents a room in a luxury hotel in Manhattan. On her first evening she takes a ride in one of those horse-drawn carriages; leaves are falling in the park, and the lights are blinking on in the buildings surrounding it. There’s a man with a bouquet of pinwheels, and a group of young women carrying musical instruments, and another woman holding an umbrella, although it isn’t raining. Later, in her room, Nancy drinks a small amount of brandy and falls asleep feeling warm and impatient but a little lonely.