She Was Like That

by Kate Walbert

  “Me, too,” Miranda says. “Thank you,” she says, scooting out after Fred Vegas, the baby and the Fairway bag like twin barnacles, clinging as she slams the door hard with her free hand and disappears into the soggy crowd. And now the back seat feels like an empty room off a hallway lined with cardboard boxes, one marked SWEATERS, another, KNICKKNACKS. Goodwill called to schedule the pickup from that same doorman in the lobby, always their favorite after the Casey debacle, still guarding, still vigilant for what might come next.

  “Professor Peterson?” Ginny says.

  “I’m sorry,” Sharon says. “Drifting,” she says. “A liability of age,” she says. The sound the metronome blink of the hazards and farther still an ambulance, the rain returned, the reprieve into which Fred Vegas and Miranda just escaped that: a reprieve.

  She had almost forgotten her other passenger.

  “What happened next?” the woman asks as Sharon tries to recall her name—Jane? Tina? Something predictable: as bland as a sock.

  “Right,” Sharon says. “Skulls up and down her arms, the young girl at the counter. I couldn’t take my eyes off. Some wrapped in snakes and then on her chest a skeleton with saddlebags and spurs. She shows me this greasy book, like a diner menu. Chinese characters. Hundreds.”

  “Not like the Phoenicians,” the woman interrupts. “I always think about that: twenty-six characters. Shakespeare and everything.”

  “Anyway,” Sharon continues. “This girl says she’ll ask in back. She doesn’t know any meanings, she says. Isn’t that funny?—but she’ll ask in back and so she goes in back and then returns and says her boss thinks this one’s adoration and this one, and she points, he’s pretty sure is wisdom.”

  “So wisdom but no forgiveness.”

  Sharon stares out the rainy window to where the wipers, briefly, sporadically, in rhythm, swish clear a view before the water again blinds.

  “Nope,” she says. “No forgiveness.”

  * * *

  Religion has never really been her thing, Sharon tells Patience Remington, picked up after Ginny—that was it—took advantage of another pause to unfurl her broken umbrella and sprint across the street, leaving Sharon to idle near the Cathedral of Jesus Christ, a pretty stone church on the next corner, red geraniums in window boxes and a red-painted door. She had been considering continuing to Duke Ellington Boulevard given the jazzy radio station and in honor of Fred Vegas’s parents when she spied Patience Remington, a large woman in a bright yellow suit, hurrying down the church steps to flag the M11, which clearly had no intention of noticing.

  “Church on Sundays with a father who sang in the choir, and a mother who refused everything on principle and took Sunday mornings to fish,” Sharon says. “Catch and release, of course. Mom wasn’t a hunter.”

  “Is that right?” Patience Remington says. She sits in the front seat, the wet newspaper she used as an umbrella folded in her wide lap.

  She’d love a ride north to 153rd or thereabouts, she had said to Sharon’s offer. Just close enough to skip the bus. No hurry at all, she had said to Sharon’s suggestion that they might first pass by Duke Ellington Boulevard given the general direction.

  “That’s fine,” Patience Remington had said.

  “This is Ohio. Have you been to Ohio?” Sharon asks, Patience Remington offering up she had relatives in Sandusky, which had always felt to her like a better name for a soda than a town. Bee-bop, Sandusky Pop!

  “Agreed!” Sharon says, brightening. Duke Ellington Boulevard a disappointment, just another city pocket, an intersection of gray brick and filthy limestone apartment buildings bordering an adjacent small park. Straus Park, Sharon happens to know, named after the famous Strauses who went down on the Titanic. Also, she says, every anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic a small band of New Yorkers march around the park with homemade instruments. She saw it once: grown-ups like preschoolers, shaking rice in oatmeal cans and whacking drum sticks on garbage lids. “With my own eyes,” she says.

  “Is that right,” Patience Remington says.

  “Apparently they were very well known at the time,” Sharon says.

  “The Strauses,” she adds.

  Patience Remington refolds the newspaper.

  “So, religion,” Sharon says, turning back onto Broadway. She’ll take the highway to save time, left on 125th—“the odds go to New Jersey”—and merge from there onto the Henry Hudson.

  “We’d join Mom after services,” she continues. “She would row back to the shore and pick us up and we would get in and she would row us out to the middle of the lake, me in my Sunday dress, Dad in his suit. Mom wore suspenders. She was like that. She had these braids she twisted on the top of her head; you rarely see that style anymore. A Scotsman or two in the bloodline—she’d dive for a penny if she ever saw one on the street and she had to have her tea on the boil. Always. Fishing, I don’t know. I guess it was something to do.”

  “Amen to that,” says Patience Remington. She looks out toward the granite ledge that lines the highway.

  “Plus, on my first communion,” Sharon says, “Stephanie Blake got a star sapphire necklace and I got nothing.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Patience Remington says.

  * * *

  Later still, after the rain stops for good and the sun sets, again, Sharon Peterson lands outside the city limits in one of those towns along the river whose names sound vaguely historical or poetic, as if only yesterday horses trotted along their dirt paths or were tied, in pairs, to the split-rail fence of the post office: Sleepy Hollow, Dobbs Ferry.

  Harry, she believes the man said by way of introduction, or, possibly, Henry, his eyes tiny pinpricks of light, tunneling to the smallest denominator, refusing to budge. His line of work involves air compressors, he told her. She does not know a thing about that, she says.

  He says, no, she wouldn’t.

  She says, her line of work is specific to Virginia Woolf and does he know Woolf?

  He’s heard of her, he said.

  She teaches college girls, she says. Then, college women, she says.

  I have daughters, he says.

  Words and more words—she does not say. Layers, depth, she does not say. Confluence, she does not say, although at other times she has found herself quoting one of her own well-honed lectures, wondering if what she had to say about any of it might still be of interest. She swishes her watery drink and thinks of Woolf. Day after day, week and then month, the drink and the rain eddying around her as if she were a boulder in a river, or a pebble in a sink. And she had only been in search of a pencil.

  Or forgiveness.

  Or perhaps a tug of something: something tangible from the deep, something like a hello from somewhere, from one of the other creatures of the sea.

  SLOW THE HEART

  Maggie suggests they play the game the Obamas used to play in the White House at dinner. (She read it!) Roses and Thorns, she explains to Peter and Grace; the good things of the day the roses and the bad things of the day the thorns.

  They’re in the kitchen, at the white Formica table, the light overhead flickering and too blue—“But let’s cut the thorns,” Maggie says to the two of them, no longer little-little though still children, certainly, still capable of games. “I mean seriously, why thorns? Aren’t there enough thorns now in everyday everything? I say we change the rules for our dinner table.”

  “Jesus, Mom,” Grace says. She’s been arranging her lo mein into lopsided circles on her plate. “Lighten up.”

  “Exactly,” Maggie says. She looks from Grace back to Peter back to Grace. “See, this is my point. Let’s lighten up. No more news. No more thorns: at this table, we will be genetically modified. Thorn-less: A genetically modified, thorn-less family.”

  “Crikey!” says Peter, who since Will left has claimed to be an Australian orphan named Captain Flick.

  “I’ll start,” Maggie says. “Peter’s smile is my rose. He is my rose tonight. Tonight there is nothing better than Peter’
s smile.”

  “I’m Flick,” Peter says.

  “That’s dopey. Peter can’t be your rose,” Grace says, pushing the noodles to the edge of her plate. “A rose isn’t a smile. You said it’s a thing. It’s supposed to be a thing. A smile isn’t a thing.”

  “Yes, it is,” Maggie says. “A smile can be a thing.”

  “A stupid thing,” Grace mutters. She stares out the kitchen window at the westward expanse: water tanks and ladders climbing water tanks, glassy high-rises, roiling sunset clouds, cirrus, Maggie thinks, so not exactly roiling, more fragile than roiling, composed entirely, she happens to know, of ice, cirrus clouds breaking across our Mary Poppins view, as Will used to say, or, rather, sing, when the children were little-little—Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim cher-ee. Grace slowly exhales, expanding her tiny rib cage with no doubt intention and peace, directing her breath to slow the heart. This is how Grace explained it in Group. Important to slow the heart, she said. The Buddhist monks do, she said. Mrs. Palowski says at Harvard Medical School they have a whole course in the slowness of Buddhist monks’ hearts. (Mrs. Palowski! Always Mrs. Palowski!) Also, at Harvard Medical School, they found marijuana cream cures cancer.

  The monks? Maggie had said from her place just beyond the circle, although no one had laughed, not even Will, who sat across from her.

  Now Grace looks back at Maggie and sets her eyes in that expression she sometimes gets, the dead-end look. “I’m not playing” is what she says.

  Maggie might scream. She might beat her fists against the kitchen table and scream. Not playing? Remember, Yahtzee? Remember, Clue? Remember, Monotony? You always play, Maggie might scream. Play!

  But she doesn’t scream. Instead, she smiles the mother smile that fools no one, looking out toward the Mary Poppins view and thinking gratitude and peace, exhaling her own breath, willing her own heart to slow. “It will be fun,” she says.

  The Obamas thought it was fun—(she read it)—and it could be—she and Grace and Peter playing Roses and Thorns, the children regaling one another with fun stories from school, adventures in plaid and gray, thick maroon sweaters rolled past those beautiful, blue-veined wrists. Fun stories told here in their apartment kitchen with its stuttering light, the array of Chinese takeout on the white Formica table she and Will, then fun newlyweds, lugged up from the sidewalk, cluttered with open take-out containers and small plastic cups of mysterious, glutinous sauces. They have ordered in again, Maggie late at work. Back by 7:00, she had texted. Requests? Peter wanting his favorite: garlic string beans he feeds to the cat. Grace agreeing to lo mein, though of course she has eaten none. Maggie watched as she pushed most of her portion into the paper napkin in her lap.

  “No can do,” Grace says, Peter looking from his sister to his mother to his sister as if trying to spin a web, something sticky and long lasting that will permanently bind them, something with a sprinkle of fairy dust and rainbows to forever guide their tricky crossings.

  * * *

  Will did not seem particularly bothered by Captain Flick. This yesterday, when he dropped off the children from the weekend and said, uncharacteristically, yes to her offer of tea. They sat in the kitchen, the day darker, clouds a mottled, heavy white. Maggie asked Will if he were bothered by their son’s new accent, the fictitious autobiography, the ridiculous Australian name. Had he noticed all this strangeness? she said as she poured out the tea. Had he even noticed?

  “Of course I noticed,” Will said.

  Captain Flick was orphaned at a young age and grew up with goats on a hillside somewhere outside of Sydney, like Heidi, Peter had explained. (“No goats in Australia,” Grace said. “Only sheep.”) The goats, however, were nothing compared to the tragic deaths of Captain Flick’s parents. All very Roald Dahl: a snorkeling mishap, a white shark, blood in the water, bits of flesh, and a torn life preserver. (“You let him watch too much YouTube,” Grace said.)

  Will sipped his tea and listened, his eyes shadowy as if he hadn’t had the sleep he needed or maybe he had been having a lot of sex. Have you been having a lot of sex? Maggie wanted to ask, but she stuck to Captain Flick as Will listened, sifting a packet of Sweet’n Low into his tea.

  “You remember my mother’s famous story” is what he said, stirring. And she did, of course. She remembered his mother’s famous story, how his mother sat in the corner at school and blinked all day, the entire day, blink, blink, blink, refusing to budge, refusing to do anything but blink. She remembered that, she could tell him. She remembered that as she remembered a lot of things, although sex, if they’re on the subject, now only dimly. She’s on leave, she told Cate in Portland, who said a woman in her department bought an orgasm every morning before work. It’s a chain, Cate said. Like Staples. It opens at 6:00 A.M. Entirely anonymous. You just walk in, she said, Maggie listening and trying to picture it, although all she could picture was her gynecologist’s examining room, his collection of Maine landscapes on the walls, the sound of his metal stool as he rolled up to the steel table where she waited, her discarded Vogue somewhere beside her, knees up, paper gown already ripped at the plastic tie.

  So, yes, she remembered Will’s mother’s famous story like she remembered a lot of things: how, for instance, Will now lived with his college roommate’s sister in Baltimore, where his college roommate’s sister ran a yoga practice and Will had moved his law practice, the two of them practicing their practices all day. She remembered also how she would love to scratch his eyes out but, then again, she remembered that she still loved him, or so she told the children, who had wanted to know if she still loved him in that nice, old wife kind of we’re-still-family way.

  And yes, and yes, there are still good guys—great guys. Wonderful guys! She sees them on the city streets in the morning waiting with their children for the school bus or walking their dogs, golden retrievers and Labradors in pleasing autumnal colors. Good guys in Central Park tossing footballs and softballs and Frisbees and in restaurants on West Fourth holding wine lists in their good-guy hands. Some have shaved heads; others have gone bald; a few have full heads of hair, lion manes. Life suddenly, in this recalling, a Dr. Seuss story with good guys in all shapes and sizes and colors, great guys existing in spades across the city, across the globe, the globe practically teaming with great guys—like Obama, take Obama!—that wonderful great guy who made it his business, even as the president of the United States, not only to have dinner with his wife and children every evening at six o’clock but to play a game called Roses and Thorns—and were they still living under the same roof, were Will still the great guy she remembers, kind and attentive and curious, she would ask him about that thorn part, if he got what she meant about cutting out that thorn part, especially now, especially now. But Will is not the great guy she remembers. Will is a shit, she does not tell the children. A sonofabitch, she does not say.

  “Just ignore,” Will said.

  “What?” Maggie said.

  “Captain Flick. You asked me what I thought. Ignore it,” he said. “That’s what I do. He’s more resilient than you think.”

  “All right,” she said. She sat across from him. “Okay,” she said.

  Will held the lumpy cup their friend Jennifer had spun on her wheel and given them as a wedding present, a set of six, and sipped his tea.

  “You think too much,” he said.

  There were originally six, in six colors, but someone broke the red along the way and then the brown although the brown was on purpose, Will one night—it was funny, actually—knocking the brown one from the narrow arm of the living room chair. Poor little cup, he said, laughing; poor little ugly cup.

  “I guess I do,” she says.

  “He’s a Cancer,” he says. “A crab. He’s just building his shell. Maybe this is his fantasy life.”

  “Australia?” she says, and Will laughs—she knew he would—and then he puts down the bumpy cup on the white Formica table the two of them lugged up from the sidewalk all those fun years ago and tell
s Maggie what else: that he and yoga Caroline have decided to make it official, the date in June or maybe July so the children can spend the week. They are thinking at a resort in Colorado known for horses and mountains and really quite spectacular. Maggie listens to Will’s description of the spectacular resort and then she does not: then she’s remembering that time in college Will jumped the chain-link fence of those famous, manicured gardens near her parents’ home, running in the twilight to the maze, an elaborate puzzle of shorn arborvitae monumental as Stonehenge.

  It was cold, this near the holidays, everyone else wandering the grounds to see the festive trees, spruce and magnolia and beech lined with white and red and blue and yellow sparkling lights, the paths near the gargantuan glass conservatory jammed with dressed-up visitors and old people negotiating electric carts, knees blanket-covered.

  “And Grace?” Maggie says when Will finally quits talking. “Should we ignore her too?”

  * * *

  “Let’s start over,” Maggie says.

  “If I hadn’t made the express at Fourteenth, I wouldn’t have gotten to Forty-second when I did to switch to the local, and if I hadn’t switched to the local, I wouldn’t have run into Mimi Rocker—I know, her name.” (Peter’s giggles!) “Neither of you will remember but Mimi Rocker babysat a thousand years ago. She was someone’s nanny’s friend and she arrived with a parrot on her shoulder—”

  “I remember,” Grace says.

  Maggie has turned off the flickering light for Peter’s headache—“MSG,” Grace said—the only light now in the kitchen from the hallway, a pool just beyond them; the day fast disappearing. Peter slips overboard into Maggie’s lap, too tired for his chair, he says, his head flopped against her shoulder as he used to do as a toddler after the park playground, feet filthy from sand. She can feel his heat as she strokes his hair, rests her chin on his big hard skull. He is too big for her lap.