The Year of Pleasures

  “It’s Delores.”

  “Oh, what’s the difference? You know who I’m talking to!”

  Delores turned wearily toward me. “What do you say we go and get some dinner? And a drink.”

  I nodded, then turned to Lydia. “Goodbye,” I said. “I’m glad to have met you. I love your house, and I want you to know I’ll—”

  “Enough,” she said.

  Delores and I sat in an overly dark booth at the Chuck Wagon Round Up, chosen in part because it was right next door to a moderately priced motel where Delores had suggested I’d be comfortable staying. She pulled a tiny flashlight out of her suitcase-sized purse so that we could read the menu.

  “That’s handy,” I said.

  “You have no idea how often I use it,” she said. “I’ve got a little bitty fan in here, too, and the most adorable tool kit.” We placed identical orders for dinner: barbecue ribs, baked potatoes, salads with peppercorn dressing, and Bacardi cocktails.

  “I have to apologize for Lydia,” Delores said. “At the very least, I should have prepared you better. Still learning how to sell houses, I guess.” She pulled off her clip-on earrings and threw them in her purse, then leaned in closer to tell me, “My shoes are off, too. And my girdle’s not far behind.”

  “How long have you been in real estate?” I asked her.

  “Oh, hell, it’s just a hobby. Like macramé. I got into it a few years ago, after my husband died. I’m not very active, as I’m sure you’ve deduced. Don’t have more than four or five clients at a time. Lydia will be my biggest sale. I got her house because nobody else would work with her.”

  “Was she ever married?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Guy by the name of Lucifer Beelzebub.”

  I laughed, then said, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but what did your husband die of?”

  “Heart attack. Out mowing the lawn one hot day, and that was that. I’d just gone in to make him some lemonade, and when I came back out, there he was. And do you know, I started laughing at him lying there, facedown? Thought he was goofing around.” She shook her head, remembering. “First thing I thought when I turned him over was, Damn it, I told him he was getting too old for a push mower! I was so mad at him! I tried CPR, but it was too late. I was crying and pushing on his chest and yelling at him, saying, ‘You stop this! Now come on, come on!’ Oh, it was awful. I ran in the house and called 911 and then ran back out to keep trying until they came—that was the longest wait of my life. Only good thing was that he died instantly—never knew what hit him. How about you?”

  “Cancer,” I said, and felt inside a curious puckering, a drawing inward and upward. I was grateful for the waitress coming to the table to deliver our drinks. She was a young and very pretty blond woman, an engagement ring sparkling on her hand. “Here you go,” she said. And then, “Hey, Delores. A hundred sixty-eight and a half more hours.”

  “Good for you, sweetheart,” Delores said. “Still time to change your mind.”

  “Oh, I’m not changing my mind,” the woman said. She walked away toward the kitchen, the lightness of new love in her step.

  “You know,” Delores said, “her fiancé put her ring in a Kentucky Fried Chicken biscuit—that’s how he proposed. I thought that was pretty dangerous—she could have swallowed it, for Pete’s sake! But Cindy said he was watching her real carefully. In fact, she said she was worried he was going to break up with her—he kept staring at her in this really odd way.”

  I nodded, looking down into my drink. My own proposal had come at the end of a glorious Saturday. John and I had gone out to breakfast, then for a walk along the Charles, then to look in antiques stores out in the western suburbs, then to a funky restaurant in Cambridge for dinner. Just as we were getting ready to leave, John asked quietly, “Do I have anything in my teeth?” He raised his lips, chimplike.

  “No, “ I said, giggling. “Do I?” I showed him my own teeth.

  “No,” he said. And then his face changed and he rose quickly from his chair. I remember thinking that he’d gotten suddenly ill and was rushing off to the bathroom. But what happened was, he came to kneel beside me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “John?”

  “Shhhhhh!” he said. “I’m about to propose!” And he pulled the black velvet ring box from his pocket.

  “Yes,” I said, and he said, “I didn’t ask yet.” And I said he didn’t have to, and then I kissed him and the people sitting around us began to clap and I thought I might die of happiness on the floor of an Ethiopian restaurant.

  “You okay?” Delores asked.

  I sighed. “Yeah. It’s just . . . I resent the time of John’s dying. If I’d been older, I think I would feel more resigned—I’d hope to just enjoy what was left of my life. And if I’d been younger, I might have remarried and had children—John and I couldn’t. As it is . . .”

  “I don’t imagine it’s ever easy,” Delores said. “For me, the hardest thing was not to turn bitter. At first, there’s all this attention, casseroles and pies and cards and phone calls. But then it’s just you, and it starts to sink in, all that you’ve lost. Funny, for the longest time it seemed like I was surprised that it didn’t all go away, that Carson didn’t come walking back in the door saying, ‘Well, sweetheart, that was a real good job you did on my funeral, now what’s for dinner?’ But they don’t come back and they don’t come back and it takes a toll. You can get mad. And then you can take it out on the whole world. I’ve seen that happen often enough. But the alternative is . . . well, you can speak the truth and shame the devil. You can tell people you need a little help and then let yourself take what people offer—even though it’s hard to do! It is hard to do! And you can let yourself be gentle, which takes a lot of strength. But look, honey, it seems to me that you are very strong—look at what you’re doing!”

  “Well, mostly I’m honoring a request my husband made, trying to fulfill a dream we had. That and . . . you know, John used to say, ‘Never underestimate the power of denial.’ I suppose that’s what this is, in a way. Denial.” I finished my drink, shrugged. “If nothing else, I’ll sell the house and move back. You can be my Realtor again.”

  “That,” Delores said, “would be a very pleasant change from Miss Lydia Samuels.” She leaned back to make room for the large platter being put before her. “Oh my!” she said. “Doesn’t that look good.”

  Outside of my elementary school Dick and Jane reader, I didn’t think I’d ever heard anyone say “Oh my!” without being sarcastic. I liked that she said it with such clasped-hands sincerity.

  After we finished dinner and were ready to leave, Delores said, “Now, listen. Why do you need a motel room? Why don’t you just come and stay with me?”

  I looked at her, considering, then smiled and said no.

  “Why not?” she asked. Her voice was loud; she had ordered a second drink.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “Well . . . okay,” Delores said. “But you come over to my office first thing in the morning and we’ll get everything settled. Call your movers—I’ll have you in that house in less than two weeks.”

  In fact, it was a bit over one week. Lydia agreed to rent her house to me for fifty dollars a day until I owned it. And I was lucky again with timing—the moving company was able to bring my things out four days after I called.

  So it was that at ten o’clock on a Friday night, I wrapped a quilt around myself and sat on the top step of my new front porch. A few hours earlier I had watched the moving truck drive away, had watched the taillights grow smaller and smaller until they disappeared. It was as though Boston and John and all the life I’d lived thus far was contained in those glowing red circles. I thought of how the movers might go out and grab some burgers and coffee, how they might then jump up into the cab of the truck, turn on the radio, and start the long and bouncy drive back east. It was all I could do not to run after the truck. It had been one thing to be on a journey that was stimula
ting and full of promise—and distraction. But now here I was. Now what? Should I really try to open a store?

  I thought of the boxes of things I’d kept in Boston and now had downstairs in the basement—the candelabra with birds and twisting branches that I’d found in New Orleans, the glass pens and bottles of sepia-colored inks I’d gotten in Florence, the calligraphy sets once given to John by a grateful patient, beautiful samples of lapis lazuli that I’d meant to have made into a bracelet. I had antique birdcages, lengths of kimono fabric, a small bench with ornate ironwork at the ends, the seat covered in apricot-and-cream wide-striped silk. I had yards and yards of many kinds of fancy ribbons. One box held only dried bittersweet and silver dollars; another box once used for wine now had a bird’s nest in each divided compartment. I had charms and beads, vintage aprons, leopard-skin lamp shades, ornate doorknobs, small stained-glass windows. I had a Hopalong Cassidy child’s dinner plate and matching silverware, old black dial telephones, framed pictures of women from long ago, their hair in Gibson girl upsweeps, a variety of funky kitchen cannisters. John used to ask, early in our marriage, what I was going to do with all the random things I bought. But after he heard “I don’t know, I just like them” so many times, he stopped asking.

  I looked up at the sky, gaudy with stars in a way I hadn’t seen for a long time. It looked fake, like a backdrop for a stage play created by exuberant elementary-school students who might still believe stars were small, five-pointed objects that glittered in your hand, that you could take home and keep in a shoe box under your bed. In the first weeks after John’s death, I felt closer to him whenever I looked at the sky. Now I felt no ethereal connection; rather, I felt my aloneness. I pulled the quilt closer around me, breathed in deeply. I could smell dampness in the air. Mid-November was still early for snow, but that morning I’d stood out in the backyard before the movers arrived and watched a few flakes swirl around as though scouting out the territory, then melt on the blackening stalks in the garden.

  Delores had finally given me pictures of the garden in bloom. Come spring and summer, my senses would be pleasantly assaulted by roses and lilies and lilacs, by foxglove and peonies, by delphinium and phlox and zinnias and dahlias, and, best of all, by hydrangea in the glowing blue color I loved best. I envisioned a white pitcher in the center of my kitchen table, full of a bountiful mix. It made for a bittersweet rush of pleasure—John would have loved such a garden. He was often the one who would gather bouquets of wildflowers when we took walks through the countryside.

  That afternoon, while the movers carried in box after box, chatting in Spanish and laughing at things I couldn’t understand, I’d abandoned trying to keep up with them and instead went outside. The trees lining the block were mostly skeletal now, but there were still a few leaves in glorious reds and yellows lying on the lawn and sidewalk. I picked a few of the brighter ones and lined them up on my kitchen windowsill. I knew that the next day they would be dried out and curled at the edges, but I couldn’t let them just lie there, they were too beautiful. It was a tradition for me to do this; from the time I was a little girl, I had decorated kitchen windowsills with gifts of the season. John joined in this tradition. He used to carve fearsome little faces in the miniature pumpkins every Halloween, for example, and we would light them with votive candles. In December we had branches of holly berries and mistletoe; in spring, forsythia in small, colored bottles; and in summer we would line up the three sand dollars John and I had found on our second date when we walked along the ocean holding hands, both of us taut with the knowledge that we had found The One—though neither of us admitted that until much later. It was the same beach where I scattered his ashes. It is good we don’t know our own futures.

  A small gust of wind rushed up under the blanket, and I shivered; but I wasn’t quite ready to go back inside. I looked around at the houses up and down the block. A few porch lights were on, but otherwise it was all dark. I supposed people went to bed early here. I used to like doing that myself, though I was long out of the habit. The last few months of John’s life, we’d both slept in fits and starts.

  I rested my chin on my knees, huddled in closer to myself. I wished, suddenly, that I smoked—never mind the danger, what wasn’t dangerous, anymore? I wished I could take in a long drag and then watch the exhalation dissipate into nothingness. I believed there must be a comfort in it.

  In the late sixties, the three women I lived with when I was in college—those ones who’d been my last close friends—had all smoked. Almost every night, we sat in the kitchen and talked until very late, and the air would be thick and colored blue, the big orange ashtray we kept in the center of the table filled to overflowing. Sometimes I’d tried to smoke, too, but it never worked. If I inhaled, I’d have a fit of coughing. If I smoked without inhaling, I’d feel like an idiot. So I’d watched them, watched the lift of their chins and the whiteness of their throats as they blew straight up toward the ceiling, their long earrings dangling.

  Also I’d helped drink the cheap bottles of Boone’s Farm wine we bought and I’d helped change the records on the turntable so that we would never be without music. Odetta, we’d listened to. Dylan. Marvin Gaye. Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi and Janis. Also Lou Rawls’s elevated version of “September Song” and Morgana King’s “How Insensitive.” Music had been more important then. We’d put on a record when we got up in the morning; we’d put on another to send us off to sleep. We played music to articulate our own wants and needs, to amplify our burgeoning political convictions. Musicians posed questions we didn’t know we had until we heard them asked. It was understood that if certain songs came on, everyone stopped talking, no hard feelings.

  Maddy, Lorraine, and Susanna, those were their names. Maddy was Italian, beautifully complected (it was the olive oil, she insisted), and she was always doing something for you, though she would never let you do anything for her. She was an exquisite cook, even at twenty; she embroidered with great skill, and she was a serious mountain climber—she kept the scary equipment she used in pillowcases at the back of her closet. Susanna wanted to be an actress and was very dramatic about everything—“Oh my God, I’ve got a run!!!”—and she had a kind of charisma that makes me think she probably did make it in theater. And then there was the beautiful, black-haired Lorraine, who, despite her inherent snobbishness and her dark moods, was the one I liked best. Lorraine once poured a drink down the front of a woman’s dress, long before it had been done on film. She told the men she dated that her mother was a Hungarian Gypsy who had castrated her husband. This, strangely enough, seemed to attract them. Lorraine and I once gave our little Christmas tree a Viking funeral: On a railroad bridge, we set it on fire, all its ornaments still on it, and then we cast it into the Mississippi River. The idea, I think, was that a thing of such beauty should not suffer the indignity of being undone; let it go out in glory. I remember when Lorraine had proposed the idea, I’d said, “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” and she’d said, “Of course.”

  We lived in a house full of the smells of shampoo and White Castle and patchouli oil. Necklaces hung from window latches and doorknobs and closet pulls, rings were cast off onto saucers. No one had anything so practical as a jewelry box. Books and record albums and clothes were piled everywhere, and the phone rang all the time, often in the middle of the night. Once, a boy named Dan had called at 4 A.M. to tell me I was his Suzanne, and then he sang the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s new song to me. I was honored. Dan’s roommate, Ron, had called me when their phone was first installed—neither of them had ever had his own phone, and they wanted me to call their number to make sure it worked. When I did, the phone rang thirteen times. Just as I was ready to hang up, Ron answered with a stoned “Hello?” “Why didn’t you answer?” I said, and he said, “We were listening.”

  It was also Ron who once called me on a cold January night a little after midnight. I had just fallen asleep. “Come over,” he said. “Dan and I were just talki
ng about you, and we want to see you.” I told him I had just gone to bed and I was tired; also, I had an eight o’clock class the next day. “Aw, come on,” he said. “What we were saying about you is that you are real people. If you’re real people, you’ll come over.” I told him I had no car. He said to take Lorraine’s. I reminded him that I also had no driver’s license. “Drive real slow,” he said. I did take Lorraine’s car, which was a ’65 Mustang convertible, burgundy with a white interior—what I wouldn’t give to have that car now! Its windows were coated with ice, and I had no idea how to work the defroster, so I put the top down and drove the mile and a half to Ron’s house half sitting, half standing so that I could peer over the top of the windshield. I remember I had the radio up loud and was singing along. It was one of those moments you hold forever in your internal scrapbook.

  It had been fun living there, yes, but mostly it had been comfortable, not so much physically as psychically. Lorraine had called it safe, meaning, I think, accepting. You could station yourself at the kitchen table and someone would show up to talk to you with unflinching honesty about anything.

  I wanted suddenly—intensely—to know where those women were. We could truly talk, I thought; they would still be able to hear both what I said and what I meant. It was Kierkegaard who’d said that if a friendship is true, it doesn’t matter how much time has gone by, you just pick up where you left off. But how would I ever find them? Probably they had married and changed their names—we came before the time of casually keeping one’s own; surely they were spread out in different cities, perhaps they were not even in this country. And I knew only too well of another disturbing possibility: One of them—or more—might have died. I leaned forward and back, forward and back, rocking myself in the ancient rhythm.