by Unknown
“She was always doing things like that,” Sally said as she passed the lasagna to Lindy. (Who didn’t eat meat either, it turned out.) “Once when we were downtown she gave a dollar to a homeless person, except he wasn’t homeless after all; he was a tenured professor. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I’m a tenured professor,’ but Pauline waved a hand and said, ‘Oh, well, keep it anyhow,’ and I said, ‘Pauline . . . !’”
Lindy’s husband gave one of his furry, bearded heh-hehs.
And then the driving stories. The time Pauline got lost in her own alley and the time she confused the brake with the accelerator and the time she backed into a pedestrian, knocked him down, stuck her head out the window, called, “I’m sorry!” and pulled forward, put her car in reverse, backed up and knocked him down again. It was Sam who told this last tale but it was George who’d lived it, as a mortified fourteen-year-old, and even though it had happened more or less the way she said, somehow it sounded untrue. His mother had not been some fluffy-headed I Love Lucy dingbat; she’d been—at different times—scared and scary, angry, bitter, remorseful, unhappy, jealous, hurt, bewildered, at a loss. He said, “That’s not how it was!” but Sam caroled, “Oh, well, close enough,” and the others went on laughing.
Only Lindy met his eyes, for an instant. Only Lindy seemed to know what he meant. Lindy wasn’t laughing.
Okay, so: must get going, must do this again, must come to our place, blah, blah . . .
Was that the sum of it?
George stood at the edge of Anna’s front yard and pecked Lindy’s cheek and shook her husband’s hand. With the others, he stood watching as the Falcon bobbed off down the road, high-tailed and rakish and battered. The others were saying, “Wasn’t that nice?” and “Didn’t you think that went well?”
Blah, blah, blah.
What George should have asked, he saw now, was Why did you do it, Lindy? Was it worth it? How terrible could our family have been? What was so important that you had to rip our world apart like that? Doesn’t it ever bother you? Don’t you ever regret it? Did you give us any thought, all those years? Did you wonder about us? Miss us? Did you dream about us at night? Did you ever think you’d been wrong, or selfish, or cruel, or even . . . wicked?
Wasn’t I enough to keep you here?
Was I so easily forgotten?
How could you have left me, Lindy?
10. The Man Who Was a Dessert
Michael woke from a dream that had the landscape of a fairy tale—soft green hills and valleys, little thread of a road winding toward the horizon. The atmosphere of the dream colored his early morning. Showering, shaving, dressing, eating breakfast with Anna, he imagined wisps of fog clinging to his hair. Anna’s gentle voice traveled toward him across a great distance: She might be home late tonight. They ought to start making Christmas plans. She must remember to call Mollie Picciotto over the weekend.
At 8:45 he drove her to work—a routine that had developed after his retirement. It got him up and forced him out of the house, gave a little shape to his day. Then generally he ran a few errands. This morning he planned to buy window caulking. It was a more entertaining errand than some others. Hearing Anna remark last night upon the draft from the dining-room window, he had felt a quickening of enthusiasm. Now he reviewed the possibilities. Rope putty? Strips of felt? Or should he go for the more professional approach and buy an actual caulking gun? “I’m trusting I’ll find what I need at Schneider’s,” he told Anna. “I’d hate to have to drive to Home Depot.”
Anna said, “Pardon?” and then she said, “I don’t believe you’ve heard a word of what I’ve been saying.”
Hastily, Michael rewound his mental tape recorder. “Calvin,” she had mentioned. That would be her principal. “Problems at school,” he hazarded. “Old Cal acting up again.”
“From nine to three, we’re working nonstop. Even lunch is work, because we’re supposed to eat with the students. But then he expects us to sit through these endless after-school meetings! And this one’s on a Friday, when all any of us can think of is getting back home and collapsing.”
He flicked his turn signal on and took a left at the Maestro School driveway. “Anna,” he said, steering through bare, wanly sunlit woods, “There’s a simple solution. Quit. You are eighty years old. It’s absurd that you’re still teaching.”
“I don’t want to quit,” she told him.
“You and I could be traveling,” he said. He pulled into the packed-earth parking lot and faced her. “We could be spending more time with the grandchildren. You could see more of your daughter.”
Anna wore her can’t-budge-me expression. She was still a lovely woman, despite the gray hair and the netting of lines, but when she turned stubborn, something about the angle of her jaw reminded him of a nutcracker. She said, “Teaching is very important to me. I would never give it up willingly.”
“Well, listen to what you just told me,” he said. “Didn’t you say all you could think of was getting back home and collapsing? And I’m saying there is something you can do about it.”
“But I don’t want to do anything about it.”
“Okay,” he said. “I give up.”
“I’ll call if the meeting runs too late for me to walk home,” she said as she got out of the car. “Have a good day, dear.”
“You too,” he said. “Bye.”
But as he reversed and pulled out of the lot and started back down the driveway, he was turning their conversation over in his mind. If a person mentioned a problem, wasn’t it only natural for the other person to offer some helpful suggestion? Particularly when the other person was your spouse! Married couples supported each other. But not according to Anna. Anna needed no one. To her, Michael was merely a frill. A luxury. A dessert.
Well, maybe he should feel liberated. He was under no obligation; it was not up to him to fix things. What a relief, right?
He turned onto Falls Road and said, out loud, “She can be my dessert, too.”
This was not as satisfying as it sounded.
He and Anna would be married twenty-two years come next June. Amazing; it still felt so much like a second marriage. Peaceful though it was, it felt like an extra marriage, not quite the real thing—in fact, maybe just an extreme, extended reaction to one of his fights with Pauline. Although if he lived another eight years after that, he could say that he had actually been married longer to Anna. And the chances were that he would live eight years; it was entirely possible. His doctor had told him he had the heart of a man of sixty. At first, Michael had missed the point. “Sixty!” he’d said. “That’s ancient!” He didn’t see himself as old. He had a stoop to his back, a tremor to his hands, and his face was some stern old codger’s he didn’t recognize in the mirror; but internally he was still twenty, riding off to war while a girl in a red coat waved goodbye.
Today was Pearl Harbor Day, and they were making more of a to-do about it than usual because it was not just the sixtieth anniversary but the first one after the World Trade Center attack. Patriotic movies had been showing all week on TV. Veterans were being interviewed—creaky-voiced old fellows with eyes so hooded in wrinkles that you wondered how they could see. Now the car radio was replaying Roosevelt’s speech. Day of infamy, he said. Michael turned left onto Northern Parkway and found himself behind a rush-hour river of brake lights. Damn, he should have taken Harvest Road. He came to a stop and wriggled out of his wool jacket and laid it on the seat next to him.
It always surprised him that when he and Anna disagreed, the disagreement remained unconnected to the rest of their lives. Anna never linked it to other disagreements, never dredged up past issues or seemed to harbor any ill will afterward. Two minutes later she’d be going about her business again. And even when they out-and-out quarreled, she didn’t appear to imagine that this could mean the end of the marriage. Oh, once or twice in the early days he himself had brought up the possibility, out of a kind of reflex. “You can always get a divorce if you feel so strongly abo
ut it.” But Anna’s clear gaze had registered incomprehension. “Divorce?” she had said, wonderingly.
In that dream last night, he was walking through a misty valley trying to find his way home. Somebody was helping him, a beautiful golden-haired woman with a wand. Why, it was the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. Only now did he recognize her. She told him not to let anyone kiss him behind the left ear, and not to let the sun get behind his left shoulder, and not to listen to footsteps following behind him on the road. “In short,” she said in her buttery voice, “don’t ever look back, if you want to see your home again.” And then he had awakened.
At Schneider’s he decided rope putty was the answer—inexpensive, convenient, hard to mess up. (He was not so adept as he used to be.) After he had chosen a box, he took a look around the rest of the store, which was no bigger than some closets but managed to contain just about everything a person could need. He studied an array of adhesive-backed hooks. Hadn’t he wanted hooks for some purpose just a couple of days ago? He read the fine print on a sack of sidewalk de-icer. Trouble was, so many of these products damaged your grass and your grouting.
The only other customers were a little three-person family—a tall young father in glasses and a tiny, dark-haired mother about half the father’s height and a very small boy in a buzz cut. They were paying for a sled, the old-fashioned wooden kind with metal runners that Schneider’s displayed on the sidewalk out front, and the little boy was beside himself with excitement. Michael couldn’t help smiling at him. “You suppose you’ll actually get to use that?” he asked, and the child stopped his dance of joy just long enough to think the question over.
Nowadays Michael came in contact with so few small children that he had almost forgotten how to talk to them. George’s son and daughter were certainly old enough to have children of their own, but Jojo at thirty was still living the life of a teenager, touring with a rock band called Dark at the End of the Tunnel, and Samantha was single-mindedly pursuing her medical studies with no apparent thought of marriage. Neither one of them seemed likely to produce any little ones, at least not any time soon. As for Pagan’s two, they were way past the toddler stage—twelve and ten, more interesting to talk with now, surely, but no longer all chatter and giggles and unself-conscious glee. Bobby was bristling with braces that made his mouth look bunchy and misshapen. Polly had adopted a very unfortunate hairstyle: two fat, ball-shaped ponytails where a teddy bear’s ears would be, the resemblance magnified by scrunchies of brown fake fur.
Polly’s real name was Pauline.
Why had nobody thought to name a child after Michael?
Sometimes at family gatherings, when people started telling funny stories about Pauline, Michael felt a pinch of jealousy. Didn’t they remember how difficult Pauline used to be? How demanding? How irritating? (“I had to give my homeless person a five today because I didn’t have any ones,” she said on the very last occasion he had seen her, and just that word “my,” its cozy presumption, was enough to make him remember why they had divorced.)
He moved up to the counter and paid for his purchase, handing over exact change to the penny, declining a bag. Outside, he examined an array of snow shovels before proceeding reluctantly to his car. There was something so reassuring about hardware stores. We can help you deal with anything, was the message he drew from them. Drafty windows, icy sidewalks, mildew, moths, weeds . . . We’ve seen it all! You’ll be okay!
If he were closer to Lindy he might get to know those children—her granddaughters, or step-granddaughters, he supposed they would be: three-year-old twins and an infant. But his relationship with Lindy was little more than polite, an improvement over the old days but still nothing much to brag about. They saw each other just once or twice a year, usually at Pagan’s place when there was some family gathering. Their conversations tended to skate across the surface a while and then break through to dark water with a crash. Last summer, for instance, Lindy had announced that their family used to remind her of an animal caught in a trap. Out of the blue she had said that! With no provocation! They’d been discussing Bobby and Polly’s recent visit to the circus and Michael had asked, merely holding up his end of things, whether Lindy remembered her own circus trips as a child. “Lord, yes,” she’d said. “Good Lord above, those eternal family excursions! ‘Just us,’ Mom would say, ‘just the five of us,’ like that was something to be desired, and I’ll never forget how claustrophobic that made me feel. Just the five of us in this wretched, tangled knot, inward-turned, stunted, like a trapped fox chewing its own leg off.”
He was traveling east on Northern Parkway, driving aimlessly, facing pale, wintry sunlight with one finger on the steering wheel. The radio was playing “The White Cliffs of Dover.” Why couldn’t music today sound like that? He liked the way the singer kept her voice so plain and ordinary, too intent on expressing her sadness to concern herself with effect.
Not till he hit Rock Road did he realize he was heading toward the old store. Silly of him. It was true that a half-gallon of milk was on today’s mental to-do list, but there were plenty of groceries nearer to hand than Anton’s. Or World O’Food, rather. He hated that name. He hated the whole chain-supermarket concept, and felt miserable any time he set foot in the place, but somehow his car kept finding its way there. Now he relaxed and gave in to it, listening absently to an interview with a man who had served in France. He had lost both his brothers, three cousins, and his best friend in that war, the man said, speaking in a reflective voice, showing no sign of outrage. Imagine the youngsters nowadays accepting such a state of affairs! They would look for someone to sue, Michael thought. (Lindy certainly would.) Somewhere along the way, people in this country had developed the assumption that life should be unvaryingly logical and just. There was no recognition of random bad luck, no allowance for tragedies that couldn’t be prevented by folic acid or side air bags or FAA-approved safety seats.
He passed a strip mall that he could have sworn had not existed a month ago. He passed the dry cleaner where he used to take his clothes when he lived in his old apartment, except now it was a video shop. Then here came the grocery, expanded to engulf the businesses that had once stood on either side of it, repainted in World O’Food’s signature blue and green with the 0 a little globe. The gravel parking lot had been paved, admittedly an improvement. His tires rolled over the asphalt with unsettling smoothness. He parked between two SUVs and inched out from behind the wheel, favoring the one hip, and shrugged himself into his jacket. It was disheartening to see so many cars—far more cars than there had been when the place was his.
Inside, even the layout was different. They’d moved the florist department to the front. They’d replaced the registers with scanners and added a blond wood display case at the rear with a neon O’CUISINE in cursive lettering above it. Sushi rolls, pasta salads, chicken couscous, alfalfa-sprout wraps . . . What on earth? At the meat counter, a Middle Eastern—looking young woman in jeans and clunky-soled shoes that added several inches to her height was comparing jars of caviar while the young man with her—vividly blue-eyed, speaking in an Irish accent—asked whether imported could really be all that much better than domestic. A toddler in a full set of ski clothes begged her mother for tofu hot dogs.
Even the dairy case sported changes. Michael noticed a new line of milks and creams bottled nostalgically in glass, but he chose a carton of plain old Cloverland and headed for a checkout counter.
The clerk wore a nose ring and an eyebrow ring. It was hard for Michael to look at her.
Outside, the cold air was a relief. World O’Food had been overheated. After he’d put the milk in his trunk he stood a moment weighing his keys in one hand, postponing getting into the car again. Then it occurred to him that next on his schedule was his exercise walk. Why not stroll up Rock Road a ways instead of trudging his neighborhood streets the same as on every other day? He dropped his keys into his pocket and set off.
Thirty minutes each morning, the doct
or had advised. Michael checked his watch. He’d do fifteen minutes and turn back. He never went overtime, because walking wasn’t really something he enjoyed. It was too empty-headed and too slow, especially now that his limp had worsened with old age. The skewed rhythm of his gait always set up the same meaningless refrain in his mind: I THINK so but I don’t KNOW so, I THINK so but I don’t KNOW so, his good leg coming down hard on “think” and “know,” the bad leg sliding across the softer words in between.
His war wound, Pauline used to call it. He’d grown so accustomed to the phrase that he could almost imagine he had actually seen combat, although of course he hadn’t. Would he ever get over feeling guilty for that? In the old days he used to hold Pauline responsible. (If he hadn’t been so upset by her frivolous behavior, by her letters describing canteen dances and handsome jitterbug partners, he never would have started that crazy feud with his bunkmate.) Now, though, he thought it had been his own basic nature that was to blame. He was the kind who stood aloof while others waded in. He had no illusions whatsoever that he would have made a good soldier. In fact, he would most probably have been killed in his first real battle. So it wasn’t that he wished he’d gone to the front, but that he wished he’d been the type to go. He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
. . . THINK so but I don’t KNOW so, I THINK so but I don’t . . . and then a honking pickup truck blotted out the rest. He supposed he made drivers nervous—an old man limping unsteadily on the shoulder of the road. Old man! A shock all over again.
Lately he had noticed in himself a tendency to start a sentence and then let it run on automatically while he thought of other matters, often with bizarre results. Intending to tell Anna “This tastes delicious” at supper last night, he had heard himself say, “This tastes ridiculous.” And only a few minutes afterward: “Why don’t you sit and rest while I put the dishes in the computer?” He wondered if his mind was going—every old person’s nightmare. Or maybe it was just that he had said those identical sentences so many hundreds and thousands of times, his tongue had begun rebelling against the sheer monotony.