“Deal,” I said. And then, “Would you . . . are you hungry?”
He looked off into space for a moment, his hand to his stomach. “Yeah. I guess I didn’t eat dinner.”
“Come on,” I said, heading downstairs. “I’ve got leftovers. Do you like chicken sandwiches?”
“Sure.”
“Milanos?”
“Of course!”
“Would you like a salad, too?”
“Okay.”
In the kitchen I flipped on the overhead light. “Would you say that you’re pretty easy to please?”
He sat at the table, tipping his chair back on two legs. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess.”
I made up a half sandwich for myself, so that he wouldn’t feel odd, eating alone. But it tasted so good, I made another half. Then I ate one Milano, two Milanos, three; and licked with pleasure the small smears of chocolate from the ends of my fingers. John used to say that it was uncivilized to eat alone. I always thought that was pressing the point, exaggerating unnecessarily the minor discomfort one feels in such a situation. But in this as in many other things, he was right. I now had intimate knowledge of how the deterioration could progress. First: Why sit down at a table? Then: Why use a plate? Why bother with silverware? Finally: Why eat at all?
Matthew ate the last potato chip, then said, “I hope this isn’t rude, but—”
“Would you like another sandwich?”
He smiled.
By the time I drove Matthew home, the storm had suddenly worsened; my windshield wipers could barely keep up, and I was careful to leave plenty of space between me and other drivers after one car ahead of me fishtailed wildly. By the time we reached his house, visibility had been reduced to almost nothing—I turned in to his driveway only because he said, “It should be about here.” Then I turned off the ignition and sat still for a moment, collecting myself.
“I don’t think you should drive home,” Matthew said.
“I think I can make it,” I said.
“It’s pretty bad. You could stay here. I mean, you saw the room. You could stay if you want.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be fine.”
He shrugged. “Okay. So go look at some samples and tell me what color blue to buy—I’ll get the paint from this place that gives me a discount. I’ll have your room done by the end of next week.” He opened the car door, then immediately shut it—the angle of furiously falling snow was such that it blew in forcefully. “You sure you want to drive home?”
No. “Yes, uh-huh.”
“I feel like I ought to say, ‘Well, you can’t,’ but . . .”
“You’re too little?” I said, laughing.
“Well, no. I mean, I just thought it would be disrespectful or something.” He pulled his jacket tighter about himself, shivered. “Maybe you could . . . I don’t know, maybe you could call me when you get home?”
I stared at him, smiling.
“I mean, you don’t . . . if anything happened to you, there’d be nobody . . .”
I stopped smiling, looked down. Right.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry. I only meant—”
“It’s all right. I’ll call if you want. It was nice of you to suggest it.”
“Okay. So, you know the number. Be careful!” He climbed out of the car, slammed the door, and waved. I waved back, then put both hands tightly on the wheel and started pulling out of the driveway. It was hard to see anything but a white mass. Well, probably no one else would be idiotic enough to be out on the road; there’d be no one to hit. Of course, there would be other things to hit—lampposts, for instance. And what if someone was walking in the street and I didn’t see them in time to stop? I sat thinking for a moment, then turned on the radio and heard the tail end of the announcer saying that again, unless it’s absolutely mandatory, stay off the roads. I turned off the radio, backed up a few more feet, then put the car into park. I looked up at Matthew’s house. Why take a chance? What was I trying to prove?
I pulled forward again, turned off the engine with great relief, and ran up to his door. It opened before I knocked. “Good,” he said. “Want a beer?”
In the morning, there was a Dutch Master quality to the light coming through the window. The wooden table and chairs glowed golden; the blue in the wallpaper was deeper, more vibrant. I heard the muffled sounds of children playing outside, then the reassuring scrape of a snowplow. I looked at my watch—nine-thirty! For the first time since John’s death, I’d slept all night. I sat up at the side of the bed, stretched. I’d slept in my shirt, and it was thoroughly wrinkled, but no matter, my sweater would cover it. Matthew had offered to let me use some pajamas, and then Jovani, not to be outdone, offered his own—silk! From Milan!—but I’d declined both offers, reassuring them that I’d be fine. I’d seen them exchange looks and had wondered what they were thinking. She’s not going to sleep nude, is she? Eew.
We’d stayed up late, watching movies and taking turns going to the window to announce that the snow was still falling. Matthew had the Godfather trilogy, and we’d watched two of the movies and ate nachos courtesy of Matthew, who apparently had an extraordinary love of jalapeños. “Why you are always put it so many?” Jovani had asked, and Matthew had said, “Aw, here we go again. Just pick them off!”
“And then what?” Jovani had said. “An ugly little pile, make me sick. What I don’t eat, I don’t want to see it.”
“Deal with it,” Matthew had said.
In between films, Jovani had bemoaned his difficulties finding a job—he’d arrived in this country from Brazil early in the spring and still had done nothing but low-paying temp work. Matthew had suggested one of his problems was that he wore sneakers to interviews. “I keep telling you, you have to dress up a little,” he’d said. “You can’t wear sneakers to a job interview!”
“Listen, Matthew,” Jovani had said. “I have twenty-nine years. I know exactly how to put on my feet.”
I’d smiled at this, and when Jovani noticed, I’d pointed with a nacho to the television screen, where Diane Keaton was screaming after bullets were fired into Al Pacino’s and her bedroom. “What?” Jovani had said. “You think to see this is funny? This is not funny.”
“I know,” I’d said.
“One thing in Americans is always violent,” he’d said, sniffing. “I am tired in my mind of it.”
I got up and went to the bedroom window to look outside. The sky was a cloudless blue, and the sun was out; the road was for the most part clear. But the driveway was blocked by what the plow had pushed aside—a good couple of feet of snow.
I heard a knock at the door and then Matthew said, “Coffee’s ready.”
“Thank you!” I quickly dressed and went to the door to listen—I was embarrassed to be seen before washing up. I heard no sounds, so I cracked the door, peered down the hallway, and went into the bathroom. It looked worse in the daytime: towels flung everywhere, the uncapped toothpaste, the water glass splattered with white, and the toilet seat emphatically up and not exactly ready for a starring role in a Ty D Bol commercial. I spread toothpaste onto my finger and brushed as well as I could, then splashed water on my face and dried it with my shirt. I combed my hair with my fingers and wiped at the dark smudges of leftover eyeliner beneath my eyes, then stood back to have a look. It seemed to me that every woman past a certain age who looked closely at herself in a mirror had the same reaction: Oh, well.
In a grocery store, I’d once heard a woman who looked to be in her eighties say to her companion, “Every day I think I’m back in my thirties, and then every morning I get up and look in the mirror.” Her companion, a woman at least as old as she, leaned over to grab her friend’s wrist and confide with a Parkinsonian tremble, “You know, I always say this; I still feel like a girl inside.” I’d looked at their bowed backs, their tight perms, the single-sized cans of baked beans in their carts, thinking, Me too. It seemed impossible that I was so far away from standing sleepily before my dresser drawer, pulling out whi
te cotton underpants and a T-shirt, then dressing quickly and racing out the door without so much as a key to weigh me down.
I went back to the bedroom, folded my blankets, placed them neatly at the foot of the bed, then went downstairs to the kitchen. Matthew sat at the small metal table in sweatpants and a flannel shirt, reading from one of his textbooks. His feet were bare, his hair uncombed, a shadow of a beard on his face.
There were three lawn chairs around the table, the folding, woven-plastic-strip variety, missing a fair number of strips. On one counter were a coffeemaker and a toaster oven; otherwise, it was bare. A threadbare rug whose design featured a sleeping cat was in front of the sink. But the sun shone through the windows, and the room held a stubborn cheerfulness.
“Thanks so much for letting me stay here last night,” I said.
“No problem. It was fun, actually.” He clasped his hands behind his head and smiled.
“Do you have class today?”
“Way later. Have a seat. It’s my turn to give you a meal.”
I sat gingerly on one of the chairs. Once, a man who worked with John came to dinner at our house. He sat on one of the kitchen chairs—they were beautiful antiques—and it broke, spilling him onto the floor. He rose up quickly, embarrassed, and began to weep. “I’m so sorry,” he said, at the same time that I was asking if he was all right. Then he began to laugh, saying, “Obviously, I’ve got some things going on in my life.” I always liked that man, because I saw him as someone like John, someone unafraid to tell the truth about what he was feeling. Perhaps it was the incident of the broken chair that forced him into a kind of intimacy he might not otherwise have shown. I saw it as a happy accident, if that were the case. But I didn’t want to fall out of this lawn chair, and so I sat very still and tried to support some of my weight on my legs.
Matthew went to the cupboard, pulled down a mug featuring the fading head of an Irish setter, filled it with coffee, and put it before me.
“Do you like setters?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
I pointed to the dog on the mug.
“Oh. No.”
“Would you have any cream?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Sorry. And we don’t have sugar, either. Do you take sugar?”
“No, I don’t. But . . . how about milk, would you have a little milk?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Powdered milk?”
He scratched at his neck, frowning.
“Never mind,” I said. “This is fine.” I took a sip.
“I hope you like strong coffee.” Matthew poured himself another cup.
“Yes, I do,” I said, although this tasted not so much like strong coffee as like dirt.
“So, um . . . would you like your Pop-Tart now?”
“Oh! A Pop-Tart.”
“That’s all we’ve got. Unless . . . I could make you nachos.”
“A Pop-Tart would be fine. Thank you.”
He pulled a box from the otherwise nearly empty cupboard, then looked inside. “Uh-oh. Empty. Aw, man, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’m not hungry anyway. So! Have you heard anything about the weather for today?”
“Yeah.” He sat across from me. “The snow should all melt; the temperature’s going way up.”
“Where’s Jovani?”
“He went to fill out an application somewhere. In sneakers, of course.”
I took another sip of the coffee, then looked at my watch. “Oh, look at that, I’ve got to get going!” I dumped the coffee discreetly into the sink, then added the mug to a high pile of dirty dishes. When I was in college, one of the boys who lived next door with four other guys once came to get me. “It’s my turn to do dishes,” he’d said, “and I don’t know how. Will you help me?”
“You know how to do dishes!” I’d said, and he’d widened his eyes and held up his hand—I swear.
“Oh, all right, I’ll help you,” I’d said, envisioning some scene from a romantic comedy. Bubbles on the end of the girl’s nose; the guy wipes them off and gives her a little kiss. Not that I wanted a kiss from Jerry Kessler, whose idea of high culture was a belching contest where one took turns.
Jerry’s kitchen sink was overflowing with dishes caked with what looked like take-out food—pizza, mostly—and the counter was covered, too. Mold grew everywhere. If it hadn’t been so nauseating, it would have been fascinating.
“No way,” I’d said, and turned to leave.
“I’ll fix Lorraine’s car,” he’d said, desperation thinning his voice. “The timing is way off.” I’d turned back and said icily, “Well, isn’t that nice. Get Lorraine to help you then.”
“Like she would!” he’d said. “Come on, I’ll give you a doobie and Sgt. Pepper. I just bought it—I haven’t even played it yet, I swear.”
“Where’s your stupid dish soap?” I’d asked, rolling up my sleeves.
“I don’t know,” he’d said. “Where would it be?”
Now Matthew stood and pushed his lawn chair up to the rickety table. Something about the misplaced elegance made me smile—he might have had a white linen towel draped over one arm. “Let me get some boots on and I’ll shovel you out,” he said.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “You’ve done enough.”
“What have I done? Really. I mean, all I did is let you sleep here. Big deal. It’s like coffee, you know, when people have dinner at somebody’s house and the host says, ‘Anyone want coffee?’ and the guests all say, ‘I’ll have a cup, but only if you’re making it anyway.’ Like it’s a big deal to make coffee.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s true.”
“Did it used to be a big deal to make coffee?”
“You mean . . . like in the olden days? When I roamed among the dinosaurs?”
“No. I just meant . . . you know.”
“We’ve had coffeemakers since I can remember,” I said. “I mean, they used to be percolators, but—”
“Sorry I said that.”
“It’s okay. We just . . . have had coffeemakers since I can remember. I guess it used to be a big deal. You had to grind the beans, let the water boil . . .Well. Anytime you’re ready. I’ve got to go home and take my Geritol.”
He looked at me, puzzled.
“Never mind,” I said.
Outside, the sun reflected hard off the new snow. I dug in my purse for sunglasses, then stood watching Matthew work. At one point, I insisted on a turn, but he shook his head. “I’ll have you right out of here,” he said.
When he finished, he opened the car door with a flourish and waved me in. I started the engine and looked up at him. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You’re such a nice kid. Who taught you your wonderful manners?”
“My mom. Though she never liked the way I ate.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Too fast. She liked you to sit up straight and take your time. She—” He looked away for a long moment, then back at me. “She died when I was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I really miss her. Especially sometimes.”
“Yes. I know.” I fastened my seat belt, adjusted my rearview.
“This friend of mine said that when his mom died, he felt like he’d been dropped onto a mirror planet. Like everything was still familiar, only kind of backwards. He said he felt completely disoriented.”
“I understand that, too.”
“For me, it didn’t feel like I was in a different place. It was the same place. Just way lonelier. Like a big chunk had been cut out of the best part.”
“Right.”
Matthew looked at me, deliberating. Then he said, “Hey, Betta? What are you going to do tonight?”
I pointed to myself, an old habit I would apparently never break. “Me?”
“Yeah.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.”
“Want me to take you to a real
ly cool restaurant that nobody knows about?”
I laughed.
“No, I need something to do. And I’m not ready to go back to . . . I don’t know, dating.” He put his hands in his pockets, shrugged.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’ll go. But only if you let me pay.”
“No deal. Dutch treat.”
“All right. How’s seven o’clock?”
“Good. I’ll come and get you.”
“What about your piece-of-junk car?”
“I’ll have it running by then. I’ll fix it this afternoon.”
“Is there anything you can’t fix?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
I started backing out of the driveway and saw his mouth moving. I rolled down my window.
“Don’t forget to pick out your paint color,” he said. “And find brushes and a couple of good rollers that you like; I might let you help.”
“Okay, Tom.”
He stared at me blankly.
“Tom Sawyer?”
He looked worried. “No, it’s . . . Matthew O’Connor.”
“I meant Tom Sawyer like the character in the book.”
“The book.”
“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”
“Yeah, but what’s the name of the book?”
There was a message on the machine when I got home. Lorraine, saying, Hey, Betta. I was thinking about some things you could do. To feel better. You’ve got the time and the resources, right? I mean, you really do have time and resources. I was thinking, there must be fifty ways to grieve your lover, ha ha. You know that song, right?
Wait. Is that funny? It was meant to be funny. But I’ll bet it’s not.
Okay, I hate when I do this. Disregard this message. It was meant to be funny. I hate that I said that. It’s . . . you know when someone’s in the hospital with something really serious and you think, Well, all those other people are weeping and moaning and being all serious and sensitive, I’ll just offer some comic relief? Did you ever feel that way?