The Beginner's Goodbye

  “I mean, of course I’ll stop in at some point.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Meantime, I’ll just keep on coming by here. It’s no trouble.”

  Whom did he remind me of then? Oh, of course: Peggy. Peggy with Mr. Hogan, so let-me-help-you and tactful. He and Peggy would make a good couple, in fact. I had to grin at the picture of it: Peggy in her china-shepherdess crinoline, hand in hand with grizzly-bear Gil.

  “Hey,” I said. “Gil. Do you have a wife?”

  He said, “Aw, no,” in the bashful, head-ducking manner of someone deflecting a compliment.

  “You’ve never been married?”

  “Nope.” He rubbed his beard. “I had a kind of misspent youth,” he allowed after a moment. “Dropped out of college, got in with the wrong crowd … I guess I missed the window for getting married.”

  “Well, you certainly seem to have straightened yourself out.”

  “Believe me,” he said, “if it wasn’t for my cousin, I’d still be falling off of some barstool. My cousin Abner; he took me into his business. Saved my life, really.”

  “How about your brother?” I asked.

  “What brother?”

  “Isn’t it Bryan Brothers General Contracting?”

  “Well, yeah. But that’s only because ‘Bryan Cousins’ wouldn’t work.”

  “It wouldn’t?”

  “Think about it. Everybody’d call up on the phone: ‘Could I speak to Mr. Cousins, please?’ ”

  I laughed.

  “No, I don’t have any brothers,” he said. “Just a bunch of sisters, always on my tail.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Sisters.”

  “Say,” he said, as if seizing his chance. “Pardon me for mentioning this, but I’ve been wondering if you’d want to do something about your things.”

  “My things,” I said.

  “Your papers and such and your personal things that you left behind in your house. Your mail, even. Any time I walk in, there’s mail all over your front-hall floor. It’s no bother to me, bringing it over, but did you know you could just get online and notify the Post Office to start delivering here?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  “And then your kitchen items. Your dishes in the cupboards. Once we start to work inside, you’ll want to box all that up and move it to the bedroom or someplace.”

  “I’ll see to it,” I told him.

  “Your sister took the stuff from the fridge already, but there’s other things, cereals and canned goods and things.”

  “My sister’s been there?”

  “Just to get the stuff from the fridge.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “I guess she didn’t want to bother you with it.”

  I looked down at the sheet of expenses I was holding. I said, “I realize I must seem sort of unreasonable about going back to the house. It’s just that I think I’d feel, maybe, overwhelmed or something.”

  He said, “Well. I get that.”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t know if I’ll ever want to go there.”

  “Oh, wait till you see how we fix it up,” he told me. “I was thinking we might put a lighter shade of floorboard in the front hall. I mean, assuming you approved it.”

  “But even so,” I said. “Even with lighter floorboards.”

  He waited, patiently, with his eyes fixed on mine.

  “Hey!” I said. “You wouldn’t want to buy the place, would you? Buy it for, like, an investment? Once you get it fixed up you could make a tidy profit, I bet.”

  Then I gave a sort of laugh, in case he laughed himself. But he didn’t. He said, “I don’t have the money.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look,” he said. “Don’t worry about your stuff. I’ll just have my guys box it up, as long as you don’t mind them messing with it.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” I told him. “I probably wouldn’t miss it if they took it all to the dump.”

  “Oh, they won’t do that. Then, anything we find that we think you might need here, I’ll just bring it over in the truck the next time I come.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said.

  I cleared my throat.

  I said, “One other thing …”

  He waited.

  I said, “Do you think you could bring me some clothes?”

  “Clothes.”

  “Just whatever’s in my closet, and the bureau across from my bed?”

  “Huh,” he said.

  I gestured toward what I was wearing. So far I had been making do with the clothes I’d found in my old room, but there was no denying that I was dressed a bit too youthfully. “You could just throw it all in your truck bed,” I said. “I’m not asking you to pack it up or anything.”

  “Well,” he said, “we can handle that.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  · · ·

  I knew I should have felt grateful to Nandina for making that fridge trip. (Even though I had no doubt there’d been an investigative element to it.) Oh, whenever I took the trouble to notice, I could see that I was surrounded by people who were doing their best to look out for me. It wasn’t only Nandina. Charles brought me foil-wrapped loaves of his wife’s banana bread, heavy as bricks. Irene left fliers on my desk for life-threatening adventures designed to take my mind off myself—hang-gliding and rock-climbing and coral-reef-diving. My ex-neighbors called frequently with dinner invitations, and when I made excuses they said, “O-ka-ay …,” in this reluctant drawl that implied they were letting me off the hook this time, but not forever. And Luke had turned our supper at the restaurant into an almost-weekly event, while Nate had reinstated our racquetball games at the gym.

  But I wasn’t all that good at gracious acceptance. Oh, especially not with Nandina. With Nandina I was constantly on the defensive, bristling at every intrusion and batting away her most well-meant remarks. Not that she didn’t deserve some of this. The things she came up with! Once, for instance, she said, “At least you’re not going to have to make any big domestic adjustments. I mean, seeing as how Dorothy never cooked your meals for you or anything.”

  (“No,” was my rejoinder to that, “we had a very equitable marriage. We treated each other like two competent adults.”)

  Or another time, when I undertook to do the laundry for the two of us: “No doubt Dorothy found it sufficient to split the wash into just whites and colors,” she told me in a forbearing tone, “but as a rule we divide the colors, then, into pales and darks.”

  I didn’t let on that Dorothy would more likely have thrown all three categories into one washer load and let it go at that.

  More and more often I could hear my sister thinking, It’s too bad his wife had to die, but was she really worth quite this much grief? Does he have to go on and on about it?

  “You assume people won’t notice if you skip a day’s shaving or wear the same clothes all week,” she said, “but they do. Betsy Hardy told me she crossed the street the other day when she saw you coming, because she thought you wouldn’t want to be caught looking the way you did. I said, ‘Well, you were sweet to be so considerate, Betsy, but frankly, I don’t believe he’d even care.’ ”

  “Betsy Hardy? I didn’t see her.”

  “She saw you, is my point,” Nandina said. “I thought you were planning to fetch some better-looking clothes from your house.”

  “Oh, Gil’s going to bring those over.”

  “What: you mean you’d let him go through your belongings?”

  “Well, yes.”

  She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “When Jim Rust recommended Gil,” she said, “did he give you any clue to his background? Did he tell you what his history is? Where he’s from? Is he a Baltimore person?”

  “He’s fine, Nandina. Take my word for it.”

  “I was just curious, is all.”

  “He never should have let you know that he was in AA.”

  “I don’t have anything against AA.?
??

  “It’s better than not being in AA if he ought to be,” I pointed out.

  “Well, of course it is. You think AA is why I asked about his background? I’m completely sympathetic to his being in AA! Why, every time he comes over I offer him fruit juice or lemonade.”

  “True,” I said.

  But I knew that was only because she’d caught him once with a can of Coke. Nandina had a real thing about soft drinks. She didn’t just dislike them; she viewed them with moral outrage. If there were a twelve-step program for cola drinkers, I bet she would have sent them a hefty contribution.

  Well, but listen to me. I had no business complaining about her. She had taken me in without hesitation when I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she hadn’t shown the least annoyance at my upsetting her private routine. She was my closest living relative. We shared childhood memories that no one else had been part of.

  Often, when we were by ourselves, one of us would start a sentence the way our father used to. “Needles to say …” we would begin—Dad’s habitual little joke, if you could call it that. And the other one would smile.

  Or when I was sorting through the porcelain bowl after Gil brought it over—the bowl from my front hall, with its layers of junk mail and take-out menus and random chits of paper. I spread it all on the kitchen table one night while Nandina was fixing supper, and there was Bryan Brothers’ business card. I said, “Gilead!”

  “What?”

  “That’s Gil’s name: Gilead Bryan. I’d been assuming it was Gilbert.”

  Nandina stopped stirring the soup and said, “Gilead. Like the song?”

  “Like the song,” I said, and it was another “Needles to say” moment, because how many other people would come up with “There Is a Balm in Gilead”? It was our mother’s favorite hymn, the one she sang when she washed the dishes, only I always thought it was a bomb in Gilead, and when one of our cousins made fun of me for singing it that way, Nandina cracked him over the head with a Monopoly board.

  Living in this house again was not half bad, really. In a way it was kind of cozy.

  At Christmastime, the company always made a big production out of one of our past titles, The Beginner’s Book of Gifts. We arranged to have it displayed next to cash registers all over town, with a red satin bow tied around each copy. I myself felt the bow was illogical. After all, the book was about gifts; it was not a gift in itself. But Irene was very fond of the bow, which she had dreamed up several years back, and Charles claimed it went over well. Generally we deferred to Charles in matters of public taste. He was the only one of us who led what I thought of as a normal life—married to the same woman since forever, with triplet teenage daughters. He liked to tell little domestic-comedy, Brady Bunch-style anecdotes about the daughters, and the rest of us would hang around listening like a bunch of anthropologists studying foreign customs.

  Nandina and I let Christmas pass almost unobserved. We had stopped exchanging gifts years ago, and apart from the balsam wreath that Nandina brought home from the supermarket we made no attempt to decorate. On Christmas Day we went to Aunt Selma’s for dinner, as we had done since our childhood. Even my marriage hadn’t changed that, although Dorothy and I had sworn every year that we would do something different the next time Christmas came around. The food was dismal, and the guest list had shrunk as various relatives died or moved away. This year there were just five at the table: Aunt Selma herself, Nandina and I, and Aunt Selma’s son Roger with his much younger third wife, Ann-Marie. We had not seen Roger and Ann-Marie since the previous Christmas, so there was the issue of Dorothy’s death to be waded through. Roger was one of those people in favor of pretending it hadn’t happened. He was clearly embarrassed that I had had the bad taste to show up, even. But Ann-Marie plunged right in. “I was so, so sorry,” she said, “to hear about Dorothy’s passing.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “And last Christmas, she was looking so well!”

  “Yes … she was well.”

  “How are you doing, though?” she asked me.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I mean, really how.”

  “I’m doing all right, all things considered.”

  “I ask because my girlfriend?—Louise?—she just lost her husband.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He passed away yesterday morning. Leukemia.”

  “Yesterday!” Aunt Selma said. “Christmas Eve day?”

  “Yes, and you just know she’ll never celebrate a Christmas again that she won’t be reminded of Barry.”

  “Also, it must make scheduling the funeral so awkward,” Aunt Selma said.

  “But, Aaron?” Ann-Marie asked. “Do you have any words of wisdom I might pass on to her?”

  “Words of wisdom,” I said.

  “Like, how to handle the grieving process?”

  “I wish I did,” I said. “Afraid I can’t be much help.”

  “Oh, well. I’ll just tell her you seem to have survived it,” she said.

  Roger said, “Honestly, Ann-Marie!” as if surviving a loved one’s death were somehow reprehensible. But the odd thing was, right at that moment I realized that I had survived it. I pictured Ann-Marie’s friend waking up this morning, the first full day of her life without her husband, and I thanked heaven that I was past that stage myself. Even though I still felt a constant ache, I seemed unknowingly to have traveled a little distance away from that first unbearable pain.

  I sat up straighter and drew a deep breath, and it was then that I began to believe that I really might make my way through this.

  And yet, just two nights later, I had one of those dreamlike thoughts that drift past as you’re falling asleep. Why! I thought. Dorothy hasn’t phoned me lately!

  She used to phone from her office during the early days of our marriage, just to say hello and see how my work was going. So the honeymoon was over, it seemed. I felt a little tug of regret, even though I knew it was only to be expected.

  But then I came fully awake and I thought, Oh. She’s dead.

  And it wasn’t any easier than it had been at the very beginning. I can’t do this, I thought. I don’t know how. They don’t offer any courses in this; I haven’t had any practice.

  Really, I had made no progress whatsoever.

  True winter arrived in mid-January. There was a snowfall of several inches, and then some weeks of bitter cold. But by that time the exterior work on my house was mostly finished and Gil’s men had moved indoors. He told me they were replastering the ceilings now. “Oh, good,” I said. I didn’t go see for myself. Nandina did, though. She reported it to me afterward; said she had felt that somebody ought to make up for my rudeness. I said, “Rudeness? Who was I rude to?”

  “The plasterers, of course,” she said. “Workmen need to know that their work is appreciated. They did an excellent job on those ceilings. Not a flaw to be seen.”

  “Well, good.”

  “Next you need to choose your hall flooring.”

  “Yes, Nandina. Gil showed me the samples. I voted for Maple Syrup.”

  “You voted for Warm Honey. But how will you know what Warm Honey looks like in your actual hall, when you’re sitting on the couch in my living room?”

  “Okay, you go,” I told her, “since you seem to feel so strongly about it.”

  She went. She came back to announce that Warm Honey was all right, she supposed, but in her opinion Butterscotch would work better.

  I said, “Fine. Butterscotch it is.”

  I expected that to settle things, but somehow she didn’t look satisfied.

  In the middle of the slack period between Christmas and Easter, Charles proposed a new marketing ploy. “Gift season’s coming up,” he said. “Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation, June weddings … What do you say we offer a collection of Beginner’s books, slipcased together according to theme. For instance, wedding couples could get The Beginner’s Kitchen Equipment, The Beginner’s Menu P
lan, and The Beginner’s Dinner Party. No new publications involved; just existing ones, repackaged in a single color. I see high-gloss white for the wedding couples. Pink for Mother’s Day, maybe. Are you all with me here?”

  Nandina said, “Could you not have brought this up in this morning’s meeting, Charles?” It was late afternoon, and we were all in the outer office. Nandina was leaving early again. She had her coat draped over one arm. But Charles tipped comfortably back in his chair and said, “This morning I hadn’t thought of it yet. I thought of it over lunch. That always happens to me when I have a martini at lunch. I really ought to drink more.”

  Nandina rolled her eyes, and Irene laughed without looking up from the catalogue she was studying. But I said, “I see your point.”

  “It can’t be just any martini, though,” he told me. “I favor the ones at Montague’s. They seem to have special powers.”

  “I mean about the boxed sets,” I said. It had been a slow day, and I’d killed some time rearranging the Beginner’s series by title rather than date. All the subjects were fresh in my mind. I said, “For the college graduates, say, we could have Job Application, House Hunt, and Monthly Budget. Maybe Kitchen Equipment in that set as well.”

  “Exactly,” Charles said. “And we could easily update any of the older titles that needed it.”

  Peggy said, “But a slipcase is so limiting! Someone graduating from college might not be ready to buy a house yet. Or a bride might have bought Monthly Budget back when she first left home.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” Charles told her. “People like complete sets. It fulfills some kind of collector’s instinct. They’ll buy a book all over again if it’s changed color to match the others in a unit. Or they’ll say, ‘I’m sure eventually I’ll be needing to house-hunt.’ ”

  “You’re right,” Irene said. She set her catalogue down, one long scarlet fingernail marking her place. She said, “I just bought a brand-new boxed set of Anne of Green Gables, even though I already own most of it in various editions.”

  “You read Anne of Green Gables?” I asked her.

  Peggy said, “Oh! That’s true! I did the exact same thing with the Winnie-the-Pooh books.”