Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life

by Abigail Thomas

  He reminds me of Jean Gabin, she says.

  I don’t recall Jean Gabin in Lycra, I say. The man gets his coffee and we fall silent as he passes on his way out the door. We return to the subject at hand.

  Anyway, it’s not my muscle that’s sagging, I say. I don’t have muscle under my chin.

  Well, whatever it is. I saw it advertised somewhere. It’s called bo-tux or something.

  What is “bo” short for. “Botulism”? Ha-ha, I say.

  I don’t think they would inject you with botulism, she says. Anyway, whatever it is it’s dead.

  God, I don’t want anything dead injected into me.

  That’s what immunizations are, dummy, all that stuff’s dead! And then your body forms antibodies. God! She looks at me critically. I am familiar with this look. You’re so ignorant!

  I know. I need that Eyewitness Book about the body.

  Too advanced for you, she says, my little sister.

  Power

  She was sixteen and wearing a tight yellow sweater. It had shrunk, but she had to go to school and nothing else was clean. Her route was along Washington Mews, up University to Fourteenth Street, along Fourteenth to Third Avenue, then up Third to Fifteenth, then one more block east to school. It was a warm fall day. I believe she was also wearing a short plaid skirt, A-line, and probably loafers and no socks. She never could find socks. The men in New York City, where she had just moved, stared. Some of them put down their tools or else just held them slackly as she walked by. They murmured. My god, she realized. I have power. Like most power it was both utterly real and utterly illusory. But she spent the next forty years with her eye on who was looking back. This didn’t get in her way. It was her way. Her ambition was to be desired. Now it’s over and what a relief. Finally she can get some work done.

  Nothing Is Wasted

  She is a writer and she teaches writing. Well, not teaches writing because you can’t do that, but you can certainly locate the interesting, you can go over the page with sandpapered fingertips and say, Here, what is really going on here, and if you’re lucky the writer blushes and says, Oh I thought I could just skip over that part, which means you have discovered a gold mine, and you say, No, sorry, you’re going to have to write it. You can point out the promising. You can encourage and allow and permit and make possible. She gives assignments so nobody has to face the blank page alone with the whole blue sky to choose from. After all she knows how hard it is to make it up from whole cloth; everybody needs a shred of something to start with to cover their nakedness and so to this end she wanders around the city with her eyes and ears open. On the subway one afternoon she sees a man holding what appears to be a silver Buddha. Good lord, she wonders, what is he doing with that? Is he going to sell it? Is she going to buy it? Where did a silver Buddha come from? Then as she is watching he brings it toward his mouth and bites off the head. How completely baffling until she sees it is not a Buddha but something edible, some sort of wafer wrapped in silver paper. Perhaps chocolate. Nevertheless, she tells her class that night, Write two pages in which somebody is eating something unusual on the bus. Write two pages, she says, in which somebody can’t stop apologizing. Two pages in which somebody kills something with a shoe. Two pages containing a French horn, an ear infection, and a limp. Describe somebody by what they can’t take their eyes off. Two pages. Two pages in which someone is inappropriately dressed for the occasion. And so forth. Nothing goes to waste.

  What I Can’t Resist

  At this moment my grandson is asleep on the floor of my room; I can see his beautiful high forehead, his cowlick, and part of his left hand. The rest of him is under a patchwork quilt. He lies on the old egg-crate mattress doubled over. He likes it better than the stiff red couch. He comes visiting with his own soft pillow. This time there are no stuffed animals and he has forgotten his red nightshirt and toothbrush. Instead he has packed tiny little pewter armies, assembled and painted painstakingly with the finest of brushes. He has shown me the brush; it can’t be more than three or four hairs thick. With this he has painted eyebrows, eyes beneath the visors. I need a magnifying glass to see his work. He is eleven years old, his twelfth birthday coming soon. His favorite food is still mashed potatoes. He likes hamburgers with A-1 sauce. He hates tomatoes. He likes French toast. I would do anything for him.

  The blanket rises and falls with his breathing. It is lovely to watch. Today he’s going back home for his second saxophone lesson. “My teacher says I have a perfect mouth for the saxophone,” he says modestly but proudly in his gentle husky little-boy voice. I love his mouth. It reminds me of bubble gum just as the sugar is released. The sun is out this morning, and it will be a warm spring day. I love him, I love the world. I can sit on the floor and touch his broad forehead, his beautiful brow. He has the intent concentrated expression of a child taking in nourishment, sleep. If I stroke his hair he might wake up, but I can’t, finally, resist.

  Formidable

  Today my sister and I saw a cop yelling at somebody on the median at 102nd and Broadway. We could hear the commotion half a block away. What could this person have done, we wondered, to occasion so much anger. As we approached, it seemed that a man had been sleeping on the bench, and when the cop had told him to move, he had cursed. That was it. But the cop was beside himself. “Don’t you ever swear at me again. Do you hear? Look at me when I’m talking to you!” By now my sister and I, both middle-aged and of some stature, we felt, and some weight, were also on the median, drawn to it by an instinct to help, to defuse the situation by our presence, by our combined years, by our formidability. The man was hunched miserably on the bench, humiliated as the cop leaned closer, still yelling. My sister and I stood there, afraid it might get worse, afraid the man was going to open his mouth and say something, get beaten up and hauled away for talking back. I remembered being a child. I remembered being a parent. Finally the cop exhausted himself. The man was ordered to get going with threats of arrest should the cop ever find him sleeping on that bench again, orders to get rid of that piece-of-shit shopping cart and all the garbage in it, threats of going downtown next time; my sister and I began to cross the street and then waited on the far curb while the man pushed his cart across. “I’m so sorry,” one of us said as the man drew near. It was all we could think of. “Asshole!” he said angrily, gesturing at the cop’s back. He was younger than I’d thought. Then he shrugged his shoulders and, with his voice much gentler, “Thank you,” he said.

  What We Want

  Once in a while we have a misunderstanding, my sister and I. You are snapping at me, one of us might say. You never let me finish a sentence, the other replies. You are always criticizing me, both of us think. Recently, we hung up on each other. Then we called each other right back and found the lines busy. She’s taken her phone off the hook, we both thought angrily, but anger wasn’t where we wanted to wind up. Once upon a time anger was the final destination, but not now. Then my phone rang and it was my sister. Hello, we both said. I’m sorry, we both said. Then we talked about it a little. Do you still want to take a walk? she asked me. Yes, I said, and started to cry. We met at the entrance to Riverside Park at 108th, our faces blotchy and pink. This is kind of embarrassing, I said, and we both laughed. We took our walk and bought ice-cream cones and had a good time.

  Because we are older now, and we know what we want.

  Comfort

  Before they got married her husband-to-be asked her former husband out for a cup of coffee. “I want to reassure him,” he said, “that you aren’t marrying a lunatic. I want him to know that the household is stable. He might worry about his daughter when she is here.”

  “That’s a very nice idea,” she said.

  “How did we recognize each other?” her husband wonders now, ten years later. They are sitting at the kitchen table. “Maybe he said he would be wearing an orange hat,” he says, smiling. “We were both massively indifferent to fashion.” Her former husband had taken to wearing a bright orange wo
olen hat in cold weather. You could see him blocks away. He also had a Batman hat that one of his students had given him as a joke. And sometimes he had worn that. The orange hat kept his ears warm. Some kid had left it at his apartment. Suddenly she feels like crying. “I was probably dressed pretty much as I am now,” her husband says, looking down at his flannel shirt.

  “Yes,” she says, “it was probably the hat.”

  They are trying to reconstruct the day. “It was late morning, wasn’t it?” she says now.

  “No, I’m sure it was night,” her husband says. “I’m sure when we came out it was dark.”

  “I remember you didn’t have a meal.”

  “We had cappuccino. We sat at a little table for two by the window. We were there about an hour, an hour and a half maybe. Pertutti’s,” he says.

  “Before it moved,” they say simultaneously.

  “It was so nice of you,” she says now, looking at his face.

  “Well, it seemed the thing to do,” he says modestly. “After all we did get married very quickly. He might have thought we were insane.”

  “Yes,” she agrees. “He might have. What did you talk about?”

  “We talked about you,” he says. “Mostly we talked about you. And I remember thinking here we are two ordinary-looking men sitting in an ordinary restaurant having such an important conversation, just like that.”

  She smiles at him. “Yeah,” she says, “life is amazing.”

  “He wanted to tell me how fragile you are,” he says. “And I told him I would take good care of you.”

  “But I wasn’t so fragile. When you got home and told me I recall being peeved.” She laughs to herself.

  “Well,” her husband says, “you know we’re all pretty fragile, really.”

  He is sitting opposite her. His hair has gone gray in the last ten years, but it is still wavy and, in damp weather, curly. He reminds her sometimes of a photo from the twenties, some earnest member of a college rowing team, the face you pick out from the other faces for its shining innocence and honor.

  She remembers overhearing her former husband saying a year or so later that it was he who had initiated the first meeting, he who had called her husband-to-be and invited him out for coffee. She didn’t say anything. He’d seemed so pleased with himself. He was getting on in years; she wanted him to be happy. She had learned by then it wasn’t necessary to keep setting the record straight.

  Safekeeping

  My mother and father had been to Switzerland, traveling in the Engadine. When they got back, my mother told me this story. While walking in the mountains, they had come upon a small church, and a sign outside said it had been dedicated at the time of Charlemagne. She said it was the first time she’d realized there had actually been a Charlemagne, that he was not a creature of myth. It was late afternoon, getting toward dusk, and as they began to walk away, my mother said all of a sudden they could hear the disembodied voices of nuns coming through the windows of the church singing the same song they had sung at the same hour every day for the last five hundred years. “If safekeeping has a sound,” she said, “then surely this was it.”

  My Name

  You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

  A Present

  What is this, my sister asks again.

  It’s an explanation, I answer.

  An explanation?

  It’s an apology, I say.

  An apology?

  It’s a present, I say.

  Hugs

  They were strange and unfamiliar territory and she never knew what was expected of her inside one. What should she be feeling? What sort of look should she wear on her face? She was always relieved to be released from a hug so she could move around again and assess the situation. But now she understands. Maybe she learned from being a grandmother. She is amazed to find (after all these years) how simple it is. Nothing complicated is required of you. There are no special instructions. A hug is shelter, a dwelling place. It is dependable, durable, and easy to assemble with what you can find at the scene of the accident.

  Look

  I see the world as an extension of my mother’s hand. “Look,” she will say, as she has always said. And there will be a sight I might not have picked out myself, the way an old man stands at the corner, a child’s shoe lost in the street, a single swan in the pond near her house. “Swans mate for life,” she has probably told me a thousand times. There are things she has said I will never forget. “Look,” she said once, pointing to an old wooden church at the end of a cobbled street, “it is so simple the only ornament is its own shadow.”

  I can read her mood by the songs she sings. Since my father died they are all love songs. She calls me because I know the words and we sing together over the phone. She has always had a lovely voice. “Just give me something to remember you by,” she wanted to sing the other day. She had forgotten the chorus. “You mean after ‘when you are far away from me’?” I asked. “Yes, what’s that part,” she said. “ ‘Some little something that says love will not die,’ ” I half sing, although I know she knows these words. I can see her in my mind’s eye. She is sitting in the far-left-hand corner of the big living room, where my father always sat. When he died she moved from the loveseat to his chair. Perhaps she couldn’t stand to see it empty. “The Man I Love,” she called later to sing. “What’s the last verse?” But all I know of “The Man I Love” are the first four lines so I can’t help her. She is disappointed but sings the whole song to me, minus the last bit. “Great song,” I say when she is done.

  It is not that we haven’t had our differences. Much that I have cherished she has counted for nothing, and some of what she clings to I discount. There are times we have disappointed each other. But now she is shrinking the way old people do. She still wears stockings and shoes with little heels; I can see her in a black-and-white-print dress (too big for her now) with some sort of bow at the collar. She wears her coral necklace and her pearl necklace and a tiny round globe of a watch my father gave her that hasn’t worked for years. At night she has her rituals, a chocolate on the night table in case of insomnia. Whatever book she is reading. A pillow for her little dog placed at the foot of the bed. She takes her bathrobe off (lacy and silky and slippery and blue) and lays it just so over the back of the chair. Then she puts her handbag on another smaller chair and draws it close to the bed. She sleeps on her back with her arms straight at her sides. Once she is under the covers she is so small as to almost not be there at all.

  Look.

  Passion

  Even though she’s a grandmother now she loves to watch people kiss. She loves how their arms go around each other, how their eyes close, how their lips meet. She loves watching them make out at bus stops, entrances to subway stations. Sometimes one of them is crying and she feels sad and very interested and she makes up reasons why, one or another is going away, maybe, back to Ohio or into the army. Or they are breaking up. But she likes it best when they aren’t crying. Take today on the subway, for instance. She sat with a grandson on either side of her and right across was a couple eating candy out of two paper bags, feeding each other those soft pieces of yellow peanut-shaped candies and unable to keep their hands off each other. They were skinny and pale, their faces ravaged and sick, she was pretty sure they were junkies, but every time the boy leaned over to kiss the girl, the cords stood out in his neck. Oh, she thought, trembling. Such passion. Meanwhile the boys were reading a poem by a Chinese poet of the ninth century among the ads for jeans and liquor on the subway car. She smiled to herself and squeezed their warm hands because love comes and goes in so many forms and in this city passion is everywhere you look and all you have to do is breathe it in.

  Ephemera

  A woman and her daughter, estranged for months, come together over a box of photographs in a gallery. They look at the
pictures, heads bent, hair touching, and they get lost in the images, one after another, a man’s photographs of his wife and children, a backyard, domestic happiness. These are palladium prints, the color of the past, and all the more beautiful for that. They come upon the image of an enamel washbasin, in it a few cheap dishes and bowls and some debris floating in the water, silvery spoons among the dishes, as though hiding, as though about to disappear, the sun glinting off their long stems. “They look just like fish,” she and her daughter exclaim together, speaking of the spoons. And then they blush, realizing what they have done.

  The woman buys the photograph. It costs five hundred dollars. She knows these plates, bought for a dime, kept for a lifetime, she knows the debris in the water is berry hulls, that the children who picked the berries are just outside the kitchen door; she knows that a woman who has just dried her hands will drop the cloth on the back of a chair as a little breeze ruffles the air, and she will pause, feeling something stir inside she cannot name, and she will wait, struggling to bring it across the little bridge to consciousness, but it is already vanishing, like the red-gold spine of a fish as it dives away, she knows the woman will go outside now where her children are, supper still to come, dishes in the wash pan, a woman filled with the sensation she will one day decide to call happiness.

  What I Know

  It doesn’t take much—the glimpse of a bare-legged girl crouching on the second-story porch of a house with five mailboxes, and I know without looking any harder that she is feeding a baby. I can see through the slats of the railing, and it is all in the curve of her back, the position of her shoulder and arm, the posture of intent. I know she is feeding a baby and the baby sits in a small plastic chair on the floor of the porch. Maybe now and then she takes a spoonful herself, if it’s cereal with peaches or plum tapioca dessert in that little jar. Somewhere there are tiny shirts and crib sheets drying in the sun, and indoors a cat stretches on a beat-up chair. There is probably a sink full of dishes. Maybe she is thinking of the life she won’t have now, although she loves this tiny human creature she has made out of herself. I know for years she will listen to the radio and think of boys she might have had a different future with. What is this longing, she will want to ask. This troubling feeling of more to come. You can make something out of it, I want to tell her. But that’s what her life is for.