“Right.”
He took another bite and shut his eyes. “You can taste more with your eyes closed. Try it.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and chewed. “You’re absolutely right,” I told him.
“People should always eat like this. But they just don’t listen.”
“Don’t you think it would be hard to have a conversation when you were eating with someone if your eyes were closed all the time?”
“No, because you know why? You hear better with your eyes closed, too!” He cocked his head to the side, his eyes still squeezed shut and listening intently, as if proving his point to himself. But then he opened his eyes to ask, “Where do you work?”
“I don’t have a job right now.” Funny how, in saying this to him, I seemed to realize it for the first time myself.
He stared at me blankly. I suppose that these days, for a woman not to work doesn’t compute. And so I said, “I used to write children’s books.”
His eyes lit up. “Like Harry Potter?”
“I wish!” I said. “But no. I wrote picture books, for younger children.”
“What ones?”
I actually hated this question. The person on the airplane, on finding out what I did: “Well, have you published anything that I would know?” And then they never did know anything, and then would come the embarrassed silence, the returning to our respective reading matter. But I answered Benny. “Well, my favorite one was called Grandma Sylvia’s Pocketbook.”
“What’s it about?”
I took a second muffin. They were made from a mix, I was pretty sure, but they were very good. “It’s about a grandmother who babysits every Friday night for her grandson, who really loves to look through her pocketbook.”
“Why?”
“Because the things in there become other things. Like, one night, her compact becomes a little flying saucer.”
“A real flying saucer?”
“A real one.”
“Huh. What else did you write?”
“Oh, lots of books. The only one you might know is called The People Who Lived Here Before Me. That one sold a whole lot of copies.”
He sat up straighter in his chair, astonished. “I have that book!” Now he was regarding me in a different way—with affectionate suspicion.
I smiled. “Do you?”
“Yeah! Where the kid lives in this real old house and he finds a marble in his closet and wonders who used to own it? And he finds out all this cool stuff about all the kids who ever lived there?”
I nodded. “That’s the one.”
He began to laugh, quietly at first but then in a high-pitched giggle, all but holding on to his stomach. “Remember about the underpants?”
“I do.”
“I’m going to show my teacher that book and tell her you wrote it.”
I felt embarrassed, suddenly, to be in my robe. I had an image of Benny’s teacher, dressed in a clean white blouse and woolen skirt, looking down at me with eyebrows raised.
“Did your husband write books, too?”
“No, he was a child psychiatrist.”
Benny nodded. “Stan Maken? This kid at my school? He goes to one of them. He’s weird. We’re not supposed to know, but everybody knows, because Stan told us. Wait! What time is it?”
I told him it must be almost eleven, and he said, “I gotta go!” He went into the hall where he’d dropped his coat. “I could come by tomorrow if you want, and help you unpack.”
“That would be fine,” I said. “Anytime.”
He held up a finger. “One thing: Do I call you Mrs. Nolan or Betta?”
“Betta.”
“I thought so,” he said, and flew out the door.
I watched him from the window as he ran down the block, waving to another boy about his age who pedaled determinedly down the middle of the street, intent on business of his own. I remembered how, as a child, I used to dress every morning with great urgency, eager to meet the new day and all that it might present: a half-built house, a school of minnows, mastery over a one-handed cartwheel, money under chair cushions, even a sick thrill like the one I’d once had when I saw a naked baby doll shoved into the branches of a bush and covered with catsup to look like blood. I remember joining a circle of other children who were examining that doll, the way their faces were impassive, absent of horror. There is a natural quality of acceptance in young children, a blurring of distinction between bad and good; it is part of their great vulnerability. But it is also part of their great wisdom. A dog I once owned died with his eyes on the sky, panting and happy until the end. A friend once described the blackest parts of man’s history as also beautiful, if only we could know true perspective.
Perhaps I didn’t need another yoga class. Perhaps all around me were masters, both visible and unseen. Perhaps my “job” now was to learn what I needed to learn. John and I had often talked about how focused our culture was on distraction, about how ill suited we were to staying with things, following them through in a respectful and thorough way. There was a great discomfort with quiet, with stillness, at the same time that there was acknowledgment of how valuable these things could be. I once read an essay about a woman who spent an entire day simply looking at what she had, really seeing all the things she’d put in her house. I was as guilty as anyone else of buying books I never read, of rushing through days without ever looking up, of taking for granted things for which I should give thanks every day. Who appreciated their good health until they lost it? Who said grace? Who read to their children before bed without one eye on the clock, despairing of all they had to do before they themselves could sleep? Who engaged cashiers in grocery stores in conversations? Everyone seemed in a blind hurry, and there was no relief in sight. Technology rushed us ever forward, and simple civility—a certain kindness and care—got sacrificed. I was lucky not to have to take the first job that came along, lucky to be able to enter into a kind of purposeful inaction in order to refocus. I looked forward to it, in a sad kind of way. The price didn’t seem worth the purchase.
I woke up the next morning full of a cheerfulness I was afraid to trust. I ate breakfast and felt as though I were really tasting food for the first time in a long time. I put on some Duke Ellington to shower and dress by, and tried to ignore the guilt simmering inside. To be feeling so fine when my husband had so recently died! To become aware of the relief I felt, frankly, that it was finally all over!
On my walk to the center of town to go grocery shopping, I passed a group of young girls dancing on their lawn—they were the sisters I’d seen on the day I first looked at the house, who’d been playing with the biting puppy. They held their arms out, threw back their heads, stood on tiptoe, and took mincing steps around and around in a circle. I wanted to watch, but I didn’t want to make them self-conscious; I smiled and kept going. John and I used to like to go to concerts and to the theater, but even more than that we liked going to amateur productions. A high school’s version of Oklahoma! A Christmas concert at an elementary school, where all of the participants might march in with a lighted candle, their eyes wide and focused on their hands where the flames flickered—such danger! Such responsibility! One snowy evening we went to a dance recital at an all-girl school. One of the soloists was a fat girl whose girth strained piteously against her purple sequined outfit. She was flushed and untidy, her blond hair falling down from a bun decorated with plastic flowers, her eye makeup smeared so badly you could see it from the tenth row, where John and I sat. I was tense with hope that her dancing would be extraordinary—such things did happen—but it was not. Her style could most accurately be described as clomping. Perspiring, unsmiling, she soldiered grimly through something she’d obviously been forced to do. Most of the audience members regarded her with careful impassivity, but there were some whose smiles held back laughter and a few who’d exchanged glances full of a sanctioned kind of hostility—and these were not young people but adults. In the middle of the next number—tap dancing by an accomplished y
oung woman whose father stood at the side of the front row to videotape her, and who received an enthusiastic round of applause easily lasting a full minute—John excused himself. He was gone for some time; I was sure someone had paged him for an emergency and he was out in the hall having a desperate conference. But when he came back in, he was carrying a bouquet wrapped in paper from the nearby florist. Six yellow roses, tied with a wide yellow ribbon. I knew who they were for.
After the program, when he presented them to the girl, he said, “These are to express my admiration.” She was embarrassed and looked down to say thank you, and for a second I thought giving her flowers had been a terrible mistake, one of those things that, rather than correcting a bad situation, compounds it. But the girl held the flowers close to herself, and John had the good sense not to go on and on—rather he made a quick and elegant departure, and I saw that the girl smiled and raised her chin after we turned to leave. I took his hand and he said quietly, “Do you think we can adopt her?”
We had decided against adoption after trying for years to get pregnant; John had a low sperm count. By then, we’d grown used to our way of living. But John would have loved the presence of so many children in this neighborhood, just as I did.
It was a very nice shopping area that I could walk to: The town had a lot going for it, despite its small size. Among other things, there was a bookstore that felt like a bookstore and not a warehouse, and they had a wonderful selection of poetry. There was a movie theater where they popped their own corn. There was a clothing store for women, a few restaurants, a bakery, a stationery store, an antiques shop, a florist, two beauty parlors. Only one store was empty, a good sign for the town’s prosperity. I stood before it for a while, imagining how it would look if it were mine. There were two display windows; I’d put a big armoire in one and fill it with beautiful and unusual things, and in the other I’d put a claw-foot bathtub surrounded by sumptuous products, a red cashmere robe draped over the edge. I grew excited, thinking about this, and started to write down the number to find out how much the rent would be. But then I noticed a small note saying the store rental included a two-bedroom apartment upstairs, no separate rental available. No wonder it was still vacant.
There was a train station at the corner, and I saw a double-decker commuter train. If I wanted to go to Chicago, I wouldn’t have to drive; I could read or lean against a window and watch the scenery flash by, strobelike.
John would have liked it here so much. He would have appreciated having the antiques store especially; he had a wonderful eye. “Do you want a coffee?” he would have asked, outside the place I was now passing—he could almost never pass a coffee shop without going in. In honor of him, I decided, I’d go into Cuppa Java and have something sweet to bolster myself before I bought groceries and then went home to unpack both them and more boxes.
I ordered a coffee of the day and a lemon bar, then sat at a tiny table next to the window. Along with the smell of coffee in the air was the smell of newspaper, and the buttery aroma of things baking. I wanted to sit and watch people, to learn about who lived here, but it was difficult to concentrate on anything but the table next to me, where a young man and woman were having a quiet argument. “Why should it mean anything?” she said. “You fall in love with everyone!”
“No, I don’t,” he answered, his head down. He was shredding his napkin into long strips. Both he and the woman were wearing blue jeans and colored T-shirts with flannel shirts over them. Her long blond hair was twisted up and clipped carelessly to the top of her head, and the effect was lovely. Backpacks lay at their feet like dogs who’d been chastised for begging but refused to relinquish their posts entirely.
“You do!” she said. “And your loving someone doesn’t mean anything! It doesn’t mean anything about the person you supposedly love! I mean, tell me one reason why you love me!”
He looked up at her, his face full of longing. He was remarkably good-looking: soft brown hair, huge blue eyes, a dimple in his chin. Cheekbones a woman would kill for. “Because . . . you’re you,” he said. “You know?” He smiled, reached out to touch her hand.
She pulled it away impatiently. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” she said, her voice rising. “What does that mean? What does it say about me as an individual?”
It was all I could do not to lean over and say, “Sweetheart? Maybe this isn’t the time or the place. Also, maybe if you’d stop being such a bitch he could tell you why you’re so very special.”
“I don’t understand,” the man told her, and she sighed loudly and looked away from him, directly at me. I turned quickly toward the window. There was a flyer for used furniture taped to the glass, an ad for a massage therapist, and one for someone looking for a roommate. Sunny back bedroom, the ad said. Nonsmoker. Three hundred dollars a month. None of the tabs with phone numbers had been torn off yet, but I saw from the date that it had just been posted today. What was it like when young people lived together these days? Did they write their names on their cartons of milk? Did they sit at kitchen tables and talk as my roommates and I did, or were they all hunkered down in front of their computers, lost in link land? It seemed to me that you couldn’t look at one thing on a computer without enduring a barrage of suggestions for related topics, or pop-up advertising. For me, computers were like the kids in the classroom with their hands always raised, saying, Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! On more than one occasion I had been known to have words with my computer for its infuriating interruptions. Once, as I sat in my chair deleting things and yelling, “No! No! No!” John walked into my office, saying, “Who are you talking to?”
Still, computers were good for some things. Perhaps my computer would help me find my roommates, those old soul mates. For so many years now, the conversations I’d had with women had been halting and false; I’d often snuck looks at my watch when we talked about the mostly superficial things we focused on. I knew it was my fault—I didn’t make the effort to go deeper, to do what was required to achieve a true closeness. With my roommates, intimacy came by way of propinquity, and from the brutal honesty of youth. Now I longed to have that kind of friendship again. I needed to diligently pursue something I never should have abandoned in the first place.
“Fuck it!” the young woman said. She stood and slung her backpack over her shoulder. “I knew there was no point in trying to talk about this. What’s the point? It’s too late—I mean, I am gone. I told you, but you . . . Good luck, whatever. And don’t call me!” She walked out of the coffee shop and moved quickly down the sidewalk.
I looked over at the young man and smiled sympathetically. Embarrassed, he smiled back. “Sorry,” he said. “She’s just . . . anyway. Sorry.”
“No problem.”
He took in a huge breath, raised his eyebrows. “Not my day, I guess.” He grabbed his backpack and walked out, heading quickly down the block in the opposite direction. I felt bad for him; I wished I could have come up with something soothing to say. I watched him go, watched the wind lift his jacket and rush up underneath, wondered if he felt it. “This will be nothing in a few months,” I wished I’d said. But he would not have believed me. I knew something about others predicting how long pain would last. Pebbles flung against a mountainside, that’s what that was. Little bits of speculation thrown against an overwhelming fact.
In the grocery store I walked down the baking aisle, thinking I’d get some chocolate chips. It was Benny I was thinking of, but I was not opposed to having a bit of the dough myself—I preferred it to the cookies. I reached for flour, saw out of the corner of my eye a bottle of molasses, and it came to me what John meant by gingerbread. One night for dessert, I’d made gingerbread, complete with my mother’s famous warm lemon sauce. When we’d eaten it, I’d told John that I wished I could have it for breakfast. “Have it, then,” he’d said, and I’d offered reasons galore for not doing so—I was a big believer in sensible breakfasts. “Don’t let your habits become handcuffs,” he’d said, and I’d asked
him if he’d gotten that out of some dumb self-help book. “No,” he’d said. “It’s my own dumb idea.” Now I reached for the bottle of molasses and reminded myself to buy lemons, too.
It had gotten colder when I came back outside: dark clouds hung heavy in the sky. December had arrived without my quite knowing it. One reason was that the weather had been so mild, but the other reason was, I still wasn’t really paying attention to what day it was. I walked home quickly, and my arms were aching by the time I climbed the front porch steps. My street was deserted now; no children outside—I saw no signs of activity at all, in fact. It came to me that serious winter weather would soon arrive, and with it temperatures so extreme a deserted street would be the norm and not the exception.
I carried the groceries into the kitchen, put away the items needing refrigeration, and left the rest. I needed to lie down. A sudden despair was rising up within me, and I wanted sleep’s defense. “After it’s all over,” John had advised me, shortly after his diagnosis, “I want you to take really good care of yourself. Don’t get too hungry, too tired, or too sad.”
“Is that advice for widows?” I’d asked.
“For drunks, actually,” he’d said. “They use it in AA. But it’s good for widows, too.” We’d laughed—laughed!—and I had felt proud of us, that laughter was still in us. And I had felt afraid, knowing that it was because nothing had made itself real yet.
I turned on a light, lay on the sofa, and closed my eyes. I felt a deep despair, a vague longing to go to sleep and not wake up. I knew it was self-indulgent and phony, really; if death appeared and said, “Ready?” I’d gasp and plead. What a change this was from my cheerful start to the day. But it was not surprising, really—so much of grieving was holding things at bay, resisting a great force bearing down. Every now and then it broke through. Nowhere to go then, but to tears or the nether land of sleep.
I slept briefly, and when I awakened I went into the kitchen and began putting groceries away with an intense focus that was close to rage. There! A small jar of peanut butter on the top shelf of the cupboard. There! Tinfoil in one of the long drawers. A loaf of bread . . . where would it go? I had yet to unearth the basket in which I kept bread. I turned around and around in a circle, saying out loud with mounting hysteria, “Where is it? Where is it? Where?”