This car we’re riding in smells of new paint. It’s electric. We boarded at Sixth and Clement. Ma hasn’t said a word since we sat down. She’s not watching where we’re going.
I know the way home.
We’ll ride west to Thirty-Third. Then we’ll jog left. The trolley pole will strain hard, and sparks will skid skyward. We’ll rumble along Point Lobos Avenue until Sutro Heights rises up. Behind lies be the ocean. We’ll smell sugar and beer and mildew. We’ll pass the penny gaming Ma never lets me play. We’ll smell the salt from the sea.
I sneak a glance Ma’s way. A fat man smoking a pipe across the aisle is watching her too. She looks unpresentable. She’s hatless, for one. Her hair isn’t pinned. And she has those lines at the corners of her eyes that show up when she’s tired.
She wouldn’t look so poorly if she hadn’t spent the morning fishing me out of that well. That makes this partly my doing. At least Mr. Stone helped take care of things. But he’s gone now too. She left him behind to pay our bill. And there are no men left in the Outside Lands except those whose names spell trouble.
That last line is what Ma told Pa the night of my birthday after they’d given me two sticks of licorice and one book and put me to bed. She was talking loud enough I could hear her.
Usually I don’t bother listening when they talk at night. They sit around the table and yammer on about the same things, paddle around the same subjects: Pa’s store, Ma’s taxidermy, Ma’s sense that something has gone wrong with her life. Whenever she talks about that last one, my stomach hurts. Pa doesn’t talk about what’s gone wrong with his life. He just listens.
This time I paid attention. I sat up in bed. Pa’s voice when he answered her dropped so low, it was hard to hear. I had to press my ear against the wall to catch what he was saying.
—I’m well aware, he said.—I’m well aware of the problems here.
And Ma replied: You’ve said that before, Henry.
—I meant it before, he said.—And I mean it now.
Ma coughed.—We have to make a change.
—And how do you propose to do that?
—Carefully.
—What would it look like?
—It would look like we talked about, she said.—We’d stop. We’d just stop, Henry.
—Let’s talk this through, he said.
—We have. We’ve talked it through a thousand times, and each time we wind up talking about parting instead of actually parting.
—I’m glad we haven’t been able to do it, he said.—I’m proud we haven’t been able to tear ourselves away from each other. I can’t imagine no longer seeing you. Or Blue. I can’t fathom the prospect.
My ears pricked up when he mentioned my name. No longer see me? He must not have been right in his upper story. Ma wouldn’t want that.
Ma stood up to pour a drink, which she does sometimes to help herself think, because next thing I knew, I heard a slip and a thud, followed by breaking glass and a groan—and Pa saying: Are you all right? And the joints in his knees cracked, which happens when he squats, and I heard Ma say: Blue’s Raggedy Ann doll. I didn’t see it. And she started giggling. Relief swelled in my chest. Whenever Ma laughs, I laugh. If she bangs her elbow, mine throbs. If she trips on Raggedy Ann, I hit the floor too.
—You’re my sympathetic nervous system, she once told me, with a half-proud, half-worried look.
This particular time, her chortling lasted so long I poked my head around the bedroom door and asked them to please keep it down, I was trying to rest.
—I can’t sleep, I said.—I need help falling asleep!
Why my voice sounded so cross, I could not have said. Crossness just sprang out of me. My throat and eyes felt angry.
Pa was crouched with his arms cradling Ma. She was pretty well settled on the tile where she’d slipped. Pretty well not moving. She looked happy to have his arms around her. She had leaned her head against his chest. She was in her stockings with no shoes on her feet.
—Now that I can do, Pa said, talking to me.—I might bear the mark of Cain for everything else these days, but I can still help my child fall asleep on her birthday. That much even I can’t bungle. Right, Blue?
He stood and left Ma’s side, pausing to collect pieces of glass near her feet. He set them on the table. Ma swiped at her eyes, suddenly quiet. She watched as he went and found the Little Soldier Boys ABC, the book he had brought for my birthday. I was glad for that book. I’d grown tired of hearing only Bible stories. Too many Abrahams finding rams in bushes. Too many Solomons waving their swords over babies, deciding which half of love goes where.
—Let’s read, Pa said to me.—I’ll read you to sleep from your new book.
And then, over his shoulder, to Ma, his voice cracking:
—Don’t you give up.
The streetcar clangs to a stop. I look out the window as the conductor climbs down and crosses over to a toolshed along the roadside. He’ll relieve himself behind that shed. We’ll have to wait for him. The rain comes steadier here. And harder.
Pa’s store lies a block south, down the street and past a vegetable garden. We won’t pass it directly. A turkey vulture waddles through the weeds near the toolshed. It stops to shrug rain off its feathers.
I’ve never been inside Pa’s store. The few times I’ve asked, Ma always says:
—We can’t go in there.
—Why not?
—He stays very busy, and he can’t be interrupted.
He’s so hard-working, she explained, he has to live in the office over the store.
—I don’t like that, I told her.
She gave me an odd look. I think the look said: I don’t either. But she didn’t say it in words.
I’m still staring out the window when I see, far away, an old mare trundling up to the front of his store. She’s a gray mare with white blotches on her nose and forehead. Blotches I’d like to pet. She pulls a black coach with the letters IOOF printed on the side.
A white-haired man sits on the driver’s box. He wears a hat wide as a sombrero. He lifts his eyes to the sky. He’s stewing over something. I look up also. Has he spied a hawk? A pelican? What am I missing?
Someone had rattled the cottage door partway through the Soldier Boys ABC. It might have been the wind. It might have been a groundskeeper. It might have been May or June, bringing a tin of coffee.
Pa shot to his feet at the sound. He whirled around like he expected a peck of trouble. The rattle came right after he read me the letter J for Judiciary, which he mispronounced as judicious and did not take the time to correct. I had to say the right word for him. He closed the book and pressed it into my hands, leaned down, kissed the top of my head, and whispered, I’m sorry. Then he threw open the bedroom door and left, pausing to touch Ma on one cheek before he went out the back.
Vamoosed. That word isn’t in the ABC book.
Ma watched him leaving. She didn’t say a word.
Afterward, she walked outside and sat on the front step and eyeballed the moon awhile. Whoever or whatever had banged on the door was gone.
I came out, and she patted the outside step, meaning for me to sit beside her. The moon turned her hair silver.
—Are you mad at me? I asked her.
She studied me. She looked at me for so long, I felt like someone else’s daughter.
—No, she finally said.—No, child. I’m not angry with you.
And then she added, softly: No more.
She stood up, picked me up, and carried me inside. I don’t need to be carried, but I didn’t remind her. For almost the whole night she stayed up trying to write a letter. I could hear her trying on words as she sat at the table and crumpled papers. I fell asleep before she finished. Either it was a very long letter or my mother is a very slow writer. Or both.
In the morning I walked with her to the main estate so we could post the letter together. She said it was important that I join her. Pa’s name was on the envelope, Henry, along with his last name, P
lageman, which I had never heard before.
—I thought his last name was ours, I said.
Ma stopped in the middle of the path. She placed her hands on my shoulders and said:
—I’ll explain everything to you. I promise. I will. Soon.
Since that night, since my birthday, Pa has called on us only twice in almost four months, and both times Ma has not been at home to receive him.
—It’s just you and me, half-pint, he said during his most recent visit.
He walked me around the estate three times without asking me if I wanted to walk that long. Then he bought us tickets to the baths and took me to the upstairs exhibits Ma had helped create.
—Curate, he said, correcting my word when I said the wrong one.
He was sad that day, or nervous. As worried as a cat in a roomful of rockers. To calm him down, I led him around and showed him the Bengal tigers under glass. I know the museum better than he does. We didn’t see Ma once.
Pa studied her creations. He watched those tigers for a long time, until my stomach started hurting again.
He hunched his shoulders into his coat, and we moved on.
The conductor boards after he finishes with his business. Our car lurches back into motion. I can still see that old gray mare over on California Street, so I wave goodbye to her.
Someone’s hotfooting it toward that mare. Someone tall, in a hurry, half hidden by leaves. He’s carrying trays of plants with petals shaped like pig ears. Calla lilies. Pa taught me those.
I can’t see any part of the moving figure except his legs. But I would know those legs anywhere. Even from this far.
—Ostrich! I call out.
Ma rouses herself from her nap.
—What is it? What’s wrong?
Across the aisle, the fat man stands up. He holds his pipe in one hand, and with the other, he reaches for the handgrip above Ma’s head. He’s standing too close. His legs part wide for balance. He moons down at her, waiting for the car’s next stop. He’s almost brushing her legs. He is brushing her legs.
I don’t have time for this smelly old goat. Not in the middle of a father sighting.
I reach out and kick the man in the kneecap, kick him with my shoe, so hard his leg buckles. The cuts on my own leg are stinging.
—Little cur, he snarls.
Ma instantly trains her eyes on him, instantly begins tracking his movements.
—What did you say? she says.
He’s roused the hawk. Or is she a falcon? Whichever’s meaner.
The man mumbles a foul reply, but he steps away. By the time I can get Ma’s full attention to show her what I saw, the car has traveled a good ways, and the store is out of sight. The store and my father.
Henry
—GET WHAT YOU NEED, Plageman. I’ll wait.
Kerr lights his pipe. He’s losing steam, and in this weather his lungs must be raw. The two of you have stopped outside the hardware store.
—I can take it from here, you say.—If you need a rest. I can borrow Bess and finish up on my own.
—Nonsense. We’ve come this far. We’re nearly there. Right, Bessie?
He pats the mare’s rump as his speech dissolves into a hacking cough.
—You all right?
He gestures you away.—Will be, he says, gasping.—Get on now.
The ramshackle structure on the northeast corner of Tenth and California houses your store. Stevens lives on the second floor, in a room next to the bookkeeping office. A vegetable garden, your own untended vegetable garden, occupies the vacant lot next door.
—I’ll tend it in my spare time, you told Marilyn a couple of months ago when introducing the idea of vegetables to her.
—What spare time? she said.
But you do indeed have time, now that you’ve stopped trekking every week to Sutro’s. You’re drowning in time, buried in it, second by second filled with these ticking nerves, this clock that won’t stop chiming.
The front door wears a sign you painted by hand: Plageman’s. All Orders Filled. Lucy used to tease you about that sign.
—Which orders are those? she would say.—Because I can think of a few you haven’t filled for me.
A sleigh bell jangles as you step inside and pass the potbellied stove and the wooden bench for customers. Floor-to-ceiling shelves line the walls behind the counters. Stevens uses a step stool to reach the higher shelves. You use your arms.
Your clerk is stationed at his post behind the counter, wire glasses perched on his nose, perusing the morning Call. He’s taken to calling your wife the Mathematician because of her deft handling of the ledgers. The two of them, Marilyn and Stevens, have grown fond of each other. In another life they would have been friends, or more.
He rests the paper on the counter. His glasses reflect the gleam of his small tabletop lamp. Beside him squats a new Smith Premier typewriter with a toothy metal carriage.
—You’re late, he announces.
He knows about May 22. He’s been around this block with you before.
You nod.—Wound up taking a little detour.
—I just read the news article. I can’t believe they sent you to the police station, Henry!
—That they did.
He straightens his string tie.—How can I help?
—I just need to gather the usual supplies.
—Most of it’s ready. I started to pull things together when I realized you were running behind.
—My thanks, you say as he trots off to help retrieve your gear.
And here are the bait-and-tackle shelves, the same corner where you and Lucy quarreled over your infected knee, where Lucy breathed: I just miss you. Fool.
—Pruning shears, right? Stevens calls.—I have them. And a jug of water?
—Yes. That’s right.
—And I dug up a shovel. Ha! I didn’t even think about that before I said it.
—Maybe not a shovel, you tell him.—Maybe just a trowel. A shovel could be excessive.
—Is it?
—Depends on the hardness of the soil.
—Take it just in case, he cheerfully advises, as if you’re packing for a lengthy expedition, an exploration of unknown territory.
Tomorrow things will return to normal, at least where Marilyn is concerned. You’ll travel past May 22; you’ll round the corner on the calendar. The rain will pass. Kerr’s cough will pretend to dry.
Tomorrow will not return to normal where you and Lucy are concerned.
Lilies are the last item on the list. And the most important. Calla lilies, as many as a man can carry. You order each year from a nursery south of Golden Gate Park and have them delivered in advance. You should have gone with some type of hellebore instead. Hellebores are mean plants in disguise. They sicken anything that tries to eat them; absolutely nothing fazes them. Perfect for a cemetery. But Marilyn distrusts native plants.
—Stevens, where’d you put the lilies?
—Around back. I was letting the sky water them. I’ll fetch them.
—I appreciate it.
He hands you the shovel before heading out the front door. You stand, restless, your arms and legs suddenly heavy. The Call lies on the counter. Its pages will contain a report on last night’s neighborhood meeting. This shovel is a lead weight. It takes more effort to accomplish the same task each year. Good thing you have Kerr and his hearse. You never thought you’d see the day when your closest friend was a seventy-year-old who drove coffins for a living.
But this is your life. Don’t knock it. Don’t trade it. You’d trade today, trade May 22, but not the rest of it.
Then again, today can’t be divorced from the rest of it. The good and the bad dwell together in the same house. Christ, you miss Luther.
—Why don’t you read him, then? Marilyn asked recently.—No one’s made you stop.
—I don’t have a reason to read him. I don’t write sermons anymore.
—And whose fault is that? she said, shaking her head.
&nbs
p; Stevens reappears bearing a wooden crate. Lilies peek through the slats.
—Goodness, he raves.—They’re lovely this year. And there are some more out back. Where do you want them all?
—In the hearse. Out front.
—A hearse! I hardly noticed, I was so focused on these blooming beauties.
Your clerk is an honorable man. Unmarried, a lifelong bachelor. You hope he’s having a good life. You hope his losses have followed the natural order.
What would Jack have been like at sixteen?
—Extraordinary color, Stevens says.—And in full bloom!
They’ll last a week.
Lucy could change her mind about showing up at the cemetery. Couldn’t she? It’s not likely. It’s bound to be too late. But anything’s possible.
And is it true that she saved you? Yes, though that’s an incomplete portrait. There’s Blue, for one. And Marilyn. All three are implicated in this business of Henry Plageman’s resuscitation.
Are you that much of a problem? Yes.
Stevens retrieves the remaining lilies while you walk outside to see how Kerr’s faring in the rain. The foreman reaches down to help you settle the first crate of plants at his feet in the driver’s box.
—Let’s get moving, Plageman, he says, shivering in the damp.
A long block to the south, the Sutro streetcar clangs and starts moving. You glance up at the sound. That car could take you straight to Sutro Heights, straight to Lucy and Blue. In theory, you could drop these lilies, make a run for it, board. In theory. You could chase after her. Do it once and for all.
Say it: Don’t leave me.
But if she’s the one who left, why hasn’t she gone anywhere?
Stevens returns bearing the second crate and lifts it into the driver’s box. The plants burst with heart-shaped leaves, each protecting a long white spathe.
—I’m grateful, you tell him.
—My pleasure. He beams.—Give my best to the Mathematician . . . to Mrs. Plageman.
—I will.
—You’ll be glad when today is over, won’t you?
You nod.
The Half Wives Page 18