The Beginner's Goodbye

  She said, “Is there something the rest of us could be doing to make it easier? Should we talk more about it? Talk less?”

  “Oh, no, you’ve all been—”

  Then I sensed a person walking on the curb side of me. She was several feet distant, but she was keeping pace with us. I sensed her roundness, her darkness, her silence, her intense alertness. I didn’t dare look over at her, though. I came to a stop. Peggy stopped, too. So did the other person.

  I told Peggy, “You go ahead.”

  “What?”

  “Go!”

  “Oh!” she said, and one hand flew to the satin bow at her neckline. “Yes, of course!” she said. “I’m so sorry! I’m—Forgive me!”

  And she spun away and rushed off.

  I would have felt bad about it, except that I couldn’t be bothered just then. I waited until she had run up the steps to our building and disappeared inside. Then I turned to Dorothy.

  She stood watching me soberly, assessingly. She seemed as real as the NO PARKING sign beside her. Today she wore her black knit top, the one she’d worn the night we first kissed, but it was scrunched beneath the slant of her satchel strap as if she had just come from work.

  She said, “I would have asked more questions.”

  “Pardon?”

  “We could have talked all along. But you always pushed me away.”

  “I pushed you away?”

  Somebody passed so close that his shoe nicked the tip of my cane, and I turned toward him for one split second, and when I turned back she was gone.

  I said, “Dorothy?”

  Pedestrians were parting around me like water around a stone, sending me curious glances. Dorothy was nowhere to be seen.

  Weeks passed, and all I thought about was how to make her come back.

  Was there some theme here? Was there some unifying factor that triggered her visits? The first time, I had been reflecting on our life together; but the second time, I’d been perusing the butter lettuce, for Lord’s sake. And the third time, I had been deep in conversation with Peggy. As far as I could determine, each set of circumstances was completely different.

  “Nandina,” I said one evening, “have you ever … Did Mom and Dad ever … like, appear to you after they died?”

  “Mom and Dad?”

  “Or anybody! Grandma Barb, or Aunt Esther … You were always close to Aunt Esther, as I recall.”

  Nandina stopped slicing peaches. (She was making one of her juice drinks for Gil.) She looked at me, and I saw that her eyes were glowing with pity. “Oh, Aaron,” she said.

  “What.”

  “Oh, sweetie, I wish there were something I could say.”

  “What? No, really, I’m fine,” I said. “I was just wondering if—”

  “I know you must feel as though you’re never going to get over this, but, believe me, one day you’ll … Oh, I don’t mean get over it—you’ll never really get over it—but one day you’re going to wake up and see that you still have your whole life to live.”

  “I already see that,” I said. “What I’m asking—”

  “You’re only thirty-six! Lots of men haven’t even begun their lives at thirty-six. You’re attractive, and smart. Some really nice woman is going to come along and snap you up one day. You probably can’t imagine that, but mark my words. And I want to say right here and now, Aaron, that I would wholeheartedly welcome her. I would welcome anyone you brought home to me, I promise.”

  “You mean like last time?” I asked.

  “You’re going to look back and say, ‘I can’t believe now that I ever thought my life was finished.’ ”

  I could have told her that I worried more about my life stretching on and on. But I didn’t want her going all compassionate again.

  One late afternoon when I’d stopped by our house, still with no sign of Dorothy, I went around back to where the oak tree used to stand. The tree itself had been carted away at some point, and even the stump had been removed and the hole filled in with wood chips. Gil had arranged for that. I remembered paying the bill, which was considerable.

  I was thinking, Come see this, Dorothy. Come see what changed our world. But the person who came was old Mimi King, from across the alley. I saw her picking her way through my euonymus bushes. For once she carried no casserole, although she did have a bib apron on. Her gray hair was rolled into little pink curlers that bobbed all over her head. “Why, Aaron!” she said. “How nice to find you at home! I looked out my kitchen window and all at once there you were.”

  “Hi, Mimi,” I said.

  She arrived next to me, breathless, and gazed down at where the tree had stood. “If that is not the sorriest sight,” she told me.

  “Yes, well, it had a good long life, I guess.”

  “Nasty old thing,” she said.

  “Mimi,” I said, “how long is it since your husband died?”

  “Oh, it’s been thirty-three years now. Thirty-four. Can you imagine? I’ve been a widow longer than I’ve been a wife.”

  “And did you ever, for instance … feel his presence after he died?”

  “No,” she said, but she didn’t seem surprised by the question. “I hoped to, though. I surely hoped to. Sometimes I even spoke out loud to him, in the early years, begging him to show himself. Do you do that with Dr. Rosales?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I took a deep breath.

  I said, “And every now and then, I almost think she does show herself.”

  I sent Mimi a quick sideways glance. I couldn’t gauge her reaction.

  “I realize that must sound crazy,” I said. “But maybe she just hates to see me so sad, is how I explain it. She sees that I can’t bear losing her and so she steps in for a moment.”

  “Well, that’s just absurd,” Mimi said.

  “Oh.”

  “You think I wasn’t sad when Dennis died?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You think I could bear losing him? But I had to, didn’t I. I had to carry on like always, with three half-grown children depending on me for every little thing. Nobody offered me any special consideration.”

  “Oh, or me, either!” I said.

  But she had already turned to go. She flapped one withered arm dismissively behind her as she stalked back toward the alley.

  I asked at work. We were sitting around with a birthday cake—Charles’s—and paper cups of champagne, and Nandina had just stepped into her office to answer her phone, and I was feeling, I suppose, a little emboldened by the champagne. I said, “Let me just ask you all this. Has anyone here ever felt that a loved one was watching over them?”

  Peggy looked up from the candles she was plucking out of the cake, and her eyebrows went all tent-shaped with concern. I had expected that, but I’d figured it was worth a bit of Oh-poor-Aaron, because she was just the kind of person who would think her loved ones were watching over her. She didn’t speak, though. Irene said, “You mean a loved one who has died?”

  “Right.”

  “This is going to sound weird,” Charles said, “but I don’t have any loved ones who have died.”

  “Lucky you,” Peggy told him.

  “All four of my grandparents passed on long before I was born, and my parents are healthy as horses, knock on wood.”

  Ho-hum, was all I could think. People who hadn’t suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

  Irene said, “My father died in a car wreck back when I was ten. I remember I used to worry that now he might be all-seeing, and he’d see that I liked to shoplift.”

  “Ooh, Irene,” Charles said. “You shoplifted?”

  “I stole lipsticks from Read’s Drug Store.”

  It interested me that Irene imagined the dead might be all-seeing. More than once, since the oak tree fell, I had been visited by the irrational notion that maybe Dorothy knew everything about me now—including some past fantasies having to do with Irene.

  “The funny part is,” Irene was sayi
ng, “back in those days I didn’t even wear lipstick. And anyhow, I could perfectly well have paid for it. I did get an allowance. I can’t explain what came over me.”

  “But did he find out?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did your father find out you shoplifted?”

  “No, Aaron. How could he do that?”

  “Oh. No, of course not,” I said.

  “Sorry!” Nandina caroled, and out she popped from her office. “That was Hastings Burns, Esquire. Remember Hastings Burns, Esquire? The Beginner’s Legal Reference?”

  “Beginner’s Nitpicking,” Irene said.

  “Beginner’s Pain in the Butt,” Charles put in.

  I was just glad to have the subject switched before Nandina learned what we were talking about.

  · · ·

  Then I was walking toward the post office on Deepdene Road and Dorothy was walking beside me. She didn’t “pop up” or anything. She didn’t “materialize.” She’d just been with me all along, somehow, the way in dreams you’ll find yourself with a companion who didn’t arrive but is simply there—no explanation given and none needed.

  I avoided looking over at her, because I worried I would scare her off. I did slow my pace, though. If anyone had been watching, they’d have thought I was walking a tightrope, I proceeded so carefully.

  In front of the post office, I came to a stop. I didn’t want to go inside, where there would be other people. I turned to face her. Oh, she looked so … Dorothy-like! So normal and clumsy and ordinary, her eyes meeting mine directly, a faint sheen of sweat on her upper lip, her stocky forearms crossing her stomach to hug her satchel close to her body.

  I said, “Dorothy, I didn’t push you away. How can you say such a thing? Or I certainly didn’t mean to. Is that what you think I was doing?”

  She said, “Oh, well,” and looked off to one side.

  “Answer me, Dorothy. Talk to me. Let’s talk about this, can’t we?”

  She drew in a breath to speak, I thought, but then it seemed her attention was snagged by something at her feet. It was her shoe; her left shoe was untied. She squatted and began tying it, hunched over in a mounded shape so I couldn’t see her face. I lost patience. “You say I’m pushing you away?” I asked. “You’re the one doing that, damn it!”

  She heaved herself up and turned and trudged off, hugging her satchel again. Her orthopedic-looking soles were worn down at the outside edges, and her trouser cuffs were frayed at the bottoms, where she had trod on them. She headed back up Deepdene to Roland Avenue and turned right and I lost sight of her.

  You’ll wonder why I didn’t run after her. I didn’t run after her because I was mad at her. Her behavior had been totally unjustified. It had been infuriating.

  I kept on standing there long after she had vanished. I no longer had the heart to see to my business at the post office.

  Once, we had an author at work who’d written a book of advice for young couples getting married. Mixed Company, it was called. He ended up not signing with us—decided we were too expensive and chose an Internet firm instead—but I’ve never forgotten that title. Mixed Company. I’ll say. It summed up everything that was wrong with the institution of marriage.

  “Here’s a question,” I said to Nate. We were seated at our usual table, waiting for Luke to finish dealing with the salad chef’s nervous breakdown. “Have you ever had a visit from anyone who’s died?”

  “Not a visit in person,” Nate said, reaching for the bread basket.

  “You’ve had some other kind of visit?”

  “No, but my uncle Daniel—actually my great-uncle—I came across his picture once in the paper.”

  It seemed to me that Nate might have misunderstood my question, but I didn’t interrupt him. He broke open a biscuit. He said, “They had a photo of these government officials in South America. Argentina? Brazil? They’d been arrested for corruption. And there he was, along with a row of other guys. But in full uniform, this time, with a chestload of medals.”

  “Um …”

  “It was strange, because I’d definitely seen him in his casket several years before.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “You couldn’t mistake him, though. Same bent shape to his nose, same hooded look to his eyes. ‘So that’s what you’ve been up to!’ I said.”

  Then he set his palms on the table and looked around the room. “Any butter in this place?”

  I didn’t pursue the subject further.

  Gil was the only person whose answer made some sense to me.

  And I didn’t even ask him! I’d have had to be insane—right?—to walk up to my contractor and ask if he’d ever communed with the dead.

  All I said was—I was looking at the new bookshelves in the sunporch and I said—“I’m just sorry Dorothy can’t see these.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” Gil said. He was squatting to adjust the time on the clock radio on the floor. His men had a habit of plugging it in wherever they were working and just letting the numbers flash 9999 all day, which seemed to irk him.

  “She always did want more space for her medical journals,” I said.

  “Well, these should have made her happy, then,” he told me. He stood up, with a grunt. “Damn. I’m getting old. Did I ever tell you how my dad liked to come back from the dead and check on my work?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “He passed away when I was in high school, but after I went into the building trade I’d catch a glimpse of him from time to time. Just here and there, you know? Kind of shambling around a project, looking to see what was what. He’d grab hold of a corner stud and shake it, testing it out. He’d bend down and pick up a nail that had dropped. Couple of times I got to work in the morning and found this little bunch of nails laid in a row on a sill. God, he did hate waste.”

  I tried to make out Gil’s expression—was he joking?—but he was tipped back on his heels now, squinting up at the frame above one window.

  “Must have been a couple of months or so he did that,” he went on after a moment. “He never said anything. Me, neither. I’d just stand there watching him, wondering what he was after. See, the two of us had not been close. No, sir, not at all. Not since I was a little fellow. He’d disapproved of my riotous manner of living. So I wondered what he was after. Anyhow, he moved on by and by, I can’t say exactly when. He just stopped coming around anymore, and eventually I realized. Know what I think now?”

  “What,” I said.

  Gil turned and looked at me. His expression was perfectly serious. “I think I was his unfinished business,” he said. “He was sorry he’d given up on me while I was sowing my wild oats, and he came back to make sure I’d turned out okay.”

  “And so … do you figure he accomplished what he wanted?” I asked. “Was he satisfied, in the end?”

  “Was he satisfied. Well. Sure, I guess so.”

  Then he wrote something on the Post-it pad he carried in his shirt pocket, and he tore off the top sheet and slapped it onto the window frame.

  I was sitting on a bench in the mall while Nandina was in the Apple Store. I hate malls. I wouldn’t have gone with her except her errand was business-related. But the Apple Store was packed, and I started getting restless, so she ordered me out. I sat there all itchy and grumpy and annoyed, but gradually I calmed down. And then I began to understand that Dorothy was sitting next to me.

  I didn’t speak. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t speak, either. It seemed we’d agreed to start back at Square One: just be together, at first. Just sit. Don’t talk; don’t ruin things. Just sit there side by side and watch the world go by.

  Picture two statues in some Egyptian pyramid: seated man, seated woman, facing forward, receptive.

  We watched three old ladies in flowered dresses and huge white spongy jogging shoes, taking their exercise walk. We watched a teenage couple strolling by so entwined and interlaced that you had to wonder how they kept from falling on their faces. We watched
a mother scolding a little boy about nine or ten years old. “I just want you to know,” she was saying, “that I’m going to have to apologize to your wife every single day of your marriage, for raising such a selfish and inconsiderate person.” We sat a long, long time together, absolutely still.

  She didn’t leave, exactly. It’s just that, after a while, I was sitting alone again.

  Now that I’d learned to see her, she began showing up more often. It wasn’t so much that she arrived as that I would slowly develop an awareness of her presence. She would be the warmth behind me in the checkout line; she’d be the outline on my right as I was crossing the parking lot.

  Think of when you’re threading your way through a crowd with a friend—how, even if you don’t look over, you somehow know your friend is keeping pace with you. That’s what it was like with Dorothy. It’s the best I can describe it.

  Let me say right here and now that I wasn’t crazy. Or, to word it a little differently: I was fully aware that seeing a dead person was crazy. I didn’t honestly believe that the dead came back to earth (came back from where?), and I never, even as a child, thought there were such things as ghosts.

  But put yourself in my place. Call to mind a person you’ve lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. You see your long-dead father sauntering ahead with his hands in his pockets. Or you hear your mother behind you calling, “Honey?” Or your little brother who fell through the ice the winter he was six, let’s say, passes by with his smell of menthol cough drops and damp mittens. You wouldn’t question your sanity, because you couldn’t bear to think this wasn’t real. And you certainly wouldn’t demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you’d been feeling that one touch was worth giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.

  I discovered that she seemed more comfortable outdoors than indoors. (Which was the opposite of how she had been before she died.) And she stayed away from Nandina’s, and she never came to my office. Understandable in both cases, I guess. She and Nandina had always had an edgy relationship, and I think she’d felt like an outsider at my workplace. Not that anyone there had been unfriendly, but you know that office clubbiness, the cozy gossip from desk to desk and the long-standing jokes and the specialized vocabulary.