Be Mine

  Garrett smiled and nodded as if he were already planning on it, and I remembered that his mother didn't cook. The few times Chad spent an evening at Garrett's house he'd say they'd had Pop-Tarts for dinner. Sometimes he didn't remember eating anything at all. "I'll tell Chad to call you," I said. "Maybe Thursday?"

  "Thursday sounds great," Garrett said.

  I watched him walk away down the hallway.

  Poor little boy, I'd always thought—even before his father died. There was something so tenderly simple about Garrett—a credulousness about the world that Chad had gotten over early. Chad, ironic, already, at four, watching a fat Uncle Sam dance on stilts at a Fourth of July parade, had said, "That's pathetic." It was, I thought now—this fat Uncle Sam—the kind of thing a four-year-old Garrett would have liked.

  Little Garrett.

  I was surprised how happy I was to have seen him in the hallway. It had seemed to me since Chad left for college, I realized, that the whole part of my life that had really been Chad's life—his high school, his friends, his extracurricular activities—had been scissored out of the world. For the most part, his friends had left, too, in the fall. Pete to the University of Iowa. Joe and Kevin to Michigan State. Mike to Colby. Tyler to Northwestern. And the girls he'd known had scattered all over the country, too. Now, when I drove by the high school it was as if a ghostly fence had been erected around it.

  No.

  Now it was as if I, myself, had become the ghost—a ghost with eighteen years' worth of skills (Band-Aids, bike helmets, fund-raisers, cookies) passing through a world that had learned to get along quite well without me, which had never even noticed my departure, did not now note my absence in it at all.

  But I'd forgotten that there were these others, like Garrett, who would stay behind. Towns like ours have kids like this—kids, who, like their parents, grew up here and will stay here. There are those of us who moved here because we liked the idea of a small town—the cornfields around it, the brick buildings downtown. We moved in from other places, crowded the place, brought our expensive coffee shops with us, pretended we were small-town people ourselves, raised our kids here, and then, having no roots, dispersed when those years were over.

  But there was another part of the town that would always be here, and if Jon and I didn't buy that condo in the city, eventually I'd start seeing them at the grocery store, in the checkout lines, pushing their babies in strollers through the drugstore. Eventually they'd be the men changing my oil at the Standard station, the women who'll answer the phone at the dentist's office.

  They'll ask about Chad.

  They'll remember that I was his mother.

  OUTSIDE, a half-frozen rain ticks against the windows. Inside, Mozart on the stereo, a glass of wine, a book about Virginia Woolf I already know I'll never finish reading. The words move around on the page when I try to focus. I've read two chapters already and remember nothing of them. Jon's nearly done with his shower. I can hear him rinse the soap off his back. It's a sound you wouldn't think could be so different from the sound of a man scrubbing his armpits, but after twenty years of listening, you can tell the difference. I can hear, too, the rain outside harden. The minute difference in the ratio of ice to water on the windowpanes changes the music completely if you listen closely.

  Have I even spoken to Jon tonight? If I did, what did I say, and how did he respond? Dinner, we ate separately. I made chicken breasts and rice, ate mine at the kitchen table right after cooking it, then put his on a plate with plastic over it so he could microwave it when he got home—late from a meeting after I'd already gone to the gym. Without Chad to organize our days around, there's less to say. How was your day? Did you like your chicken? Do you suppose this rain will freeze on the roads? Do you remember what it was like before we had a child, when it was only the two of us? What did we say to one another then? Do you recognize me? Yourself? Your life? This house in which we live?

  Is it us?

  Is it here?

  Is it this?

  ANOTHER note:

  Sherry, Valentine's Day is over, I know, but I wanted you to know I'm still thinking of you. You are so beautiful that my thoughts of you melt even this frozen month for me...

  I called Sue at home and read it to her. She said, "Sherry, you sound excited."

  I said, "I'm not excited,"

  She wanted to know who I thought it was. Robert Z? A janitor? The dean? A textbook salesman? One of the security guys? A computer tech? A student?

  But, I told her, I have no idea. I work with hundreds of men—and which one of them has ever paid any more attention to me than any other? Friendly, some of them. Some more than others. A few are a little flirtatious maybe. There was that brief interlude with Patrick, for a while, after Ferris left and we both missed him. We were both young parents then, and we talked about children, had lunch now and then. But they moved his office across campus when they built the new computer lab, and now I only see the back of his head (hair thinning) during all-faculty meetings twice a year. I've taught here for nearly two decades. Who else? Why now?

  Am I excited?

  Well, if I am it isn't something I wanted Sue to notice. Saying it, Sherry, you sound excited, seemed somehow intrusive.

  But how could Sue, my best friend for two decades, the person on this earth who knows me best—and knows everything, because I've told her everything (how many hours on the phone, how many cups of coffee, how many long whispered conversations in the hallway, in the women's room, at the mall, in the car?)—intrude? If my secrets had been hoarded somewhere in a vault, I would have long ago handed Sue the key. If there had been some easier way to share all of my longings and desires and shame with her (a computer chip, say, on which I could have stored it all and given it over), I'd have already done it. I'd only parceled it out in words over these two decades because there was no quicker way to do it.

  And what a joy, to have someone all these years with whom it could all be shared! What a relief! Sometimes I'm not even sure I've felt what I've felt, or seen what I've seen, until I've described it to Sue.

  "It's okay, you know," she said. "You can be excited. I would be excited. I've never had a secret admirer."

  Still, I refused to tell her I was excited.

  If I am, is it something I can even admit to myself?

  Should I be excited?

  Or should I be offended? Annoyed? Afraid?

  How many stalkings, how many harassments, begin with a series of notes like this?

  All day there's been a bright blue sky, and the snow's begun to melt in shiny patches on the lawns, a few luminous rivulets running freely along the shoulders of the roads, the military spangles and insignia of winter starting to wash away. Walking from the car to the Liberal Arts Building, I could smell mud, and there were some crows in a puddle in the parking lot. When I walked by, they flustered and flew off, and a drop of water landed at the center of my forehead—some bit of melted snow falling from the wing of a crow as it flew over, and I felt as if I'd been baptized by a priest of spring.

  A CALL at the office this morning from Summerbrook:

  Dad's had another "little stroke."

  Tomorrow I'll drive to Silver Springs to see him and try to be back Sunday morning in time to pick Chad up from the airport with Jon.

  Jon says, "Sherry, we can't drive across the state every time he has some little thing. They only call you for liability purposes, not because there's anything that can be done."

  Fine, I said. Easy for you to say. He's not your father. And who asked you to go? I'm the one going. I can't bear it, I should have told him. My father. If all I can do is touch his hand here in these last years of his sad life, I will not miss an opportunity to touch his hand.

  Jon, who didn't have a father, has no idea....

  And without Chad here, I realized suddenly, I don't need anyone's permission to go anywhere anymore. In the paper last night I saw an ad for cheap tickets to San Antonio, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and I tho
ught, I could buy a ticket. I could just go. After eighteen years spent planning lunches, dinners, rides to soccer practice, who besides Jon would notice if I canceled classes for a few days and disappeared? Why not go to Silver Springs, whether or not anything can be done? What do Jon and I do on the weekends that can't be missed anyway?

  I go to the gym. He putters around in the basement or naps on the couch, shoots a sandbag with a .22 in the backyard. I pay bills, go to the grocery store. Last Saturday we rented a DVD about a woman who killed her children. All day Sunday I tried to shake the feeling of dread and despair that the movie had settled on me, the aftermath of that horror. All day I felt as if I'd killed my children, or known someone who had, as if there were blood on my hands—the kind of grief and guilt I used to wake up with, then carry around with me all day, the year after Robbie died. I'd open my eyes after some dream, look at the ceiling and inhale, feeling it somewhere around my solar plexus, the feeling that I had killed my brother, strangled him, suffocated him, injected his veins with air.

  Who needs entertainment like that?

  So, I'll go to Silver Springs tomorrow morning, stay at the Holiday Inn overnight, just long enough to feed Dad his dinner and lay a cool hand on his, and all I'll miss here is a disturbing DVD, a workout at the gym.

  No notes in my mailbox today, but word has gotten around (Beth, our secretary), and everyone's been teasing me about my secret admirer. What if it turns out to be Mr. Connery, they've said, our librarian of the strange small hats? Or the wild-haired grill guy in the cafeteria? Or the new Chippendale security guard—he of the five o'clock shadow and (we're guessing here, no one's seen him with his shirt off) the abs of steel?

  Maybe it's a joke, I said.

  Maybe someone feels sorry for me. Lonely old English teacher...

  Robert Z piped up fast.

  "Hey, don't sell yourself short, Sherry. There are a lot of us around here who'd be writing you love notes if we thought it would do any good."

  (It can't be him, can it? He wouldn't say such a thing in front of everyone if it were.)

  Beth said, "What's Jon got to say about this?" and I realized I hadn't told him, yet, about the last note.

  "Amused," I said. "Jon's just amused."

  "Yeah," Robert Z said with what I thought sounded ever-so-slightly like contempt. "Jon strikes me as a very secure guy."

  THE DRIVE to Silver Springs was pure winter again. Gray. Low sky. The hawks must be hungry, with everything frozen solid or hibernating. I saw two of them swoop down at one time on something in the median. I was driving too fast to see what it was they were after, or if a fight over it ensued, but the swooping from opposite ends of the road seemed choreographed—smooth and fast and feathered.

  I tried to listen to the radio, but never found a station I could tolerate. Even a few years ago I knew the names of the bands on the rock stations. Chad would tell me about them, his opinions on them, which were usually negative, since he was always one for the rustic poets—Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty. Still, he kept me up to date.

  Today, it depressed me. The angry din, or the synthetic vapid pop-star stuff. Like a fussy old lady I wanted to complain to someone that it just isn't music.

  And, at the same time, it seems, truly, like only a year or two ago that I was eighteen in the front row of a Ted Nugent concert, stuffing Kleenex into my ears when the band started up with the sound of a plane landing on my head.

  I did not stuff that Kleenex into my ears because I didn't like the music, only because I'd promised my mother that I would—so that I wouldn't weaken my hearing as she insisted my brother had at a Who concert.

  Ted was beautiful.

  His hair was long and wild and uncombed. He wore leather pants, a belt with a huge silver star for a buckle. Shirtless, glistening with sweat, and insane-seeming, to me he was the perfect man. And the music—serious, industrial, midwestern music. He spit into the audience, and a cool spray of it feathered lightly over my chest. My boyfriend recoiled as I rubbed it into my skin with the palm of my hand, but at the moment, having Ted Nugent's spit on my chest seemed like the most sexual and glorious experience of my life.

  But there do not, any longer, seem to be any radio stations that play Ted Nugent. Or Bob Seger. Or the Who.

  Or, if they do, those bands have changed so much I don't recognize the music.

  After a while, I turned it off and listened to the hum of my tires and the sound of wind blowing around me.

  It was, I thought, like the music you'd hear if you were that mouse or vole or sparrow in the median when those hawks swooped down from both sides of the road at once.

  AT SUMMERBROOK, as always, the smell of sauerkraut and sausage hit me first, and then the antiseptics and bacterial soaps beneath it. Dad was in his chair when I stepped into his room, watching golf on television. Seeing me, he looked sheepish, like a child who was worried he might be in trouble for having had another little stroke. The tears welled up so fast in my eyes when I saw him there, I could barely make my way to his side through the blurred scrim of my love for him.

  I kissed his left cheek, and it felt, indeed, a little slacker than it had the last time I'd kissed him.

  But he looked the same. Ruddy-faced. Blue eyes a little bloodshot. Like the mailman he'd been, walking twenty miles a day through wind and rain and snow, he looked like something sturdy that had been weathered. He used to step into the back door after work, after I'd just gotten home from school (a mail carrier's day starts at 4:30 A.M. and ends at 2:30 P.M.), and he would smell, I thought, like the world. Sky in the stiff blue fabric of his uniform. Grass, car exhaust, breeze on his neck. Birds' nest. Snow. Sun. Leaves.

  I would press my face into his chest and breathe it in as he stood at the counter near the stove and poured himself a shot of Jim Beam in a glass, swallowed it in one gulp.

  We walked around the halls of Summerbrook for half an hour, and I wondered if I had just not noticed or had forgotten it from my last few visits, or if his shuffle had changed. Now, it was all on the balls of his feet—a kind of graceful tiptoe along the carpeted hallways, holding on to the rail along the wall as the nurses and aides called out to him in their nursery-school voices, "Look at you, Mr. Milofski. Going for a walk with your daughter!"

  Only ten years before, I know, this would have infuriated him. The tone. The overfriendliness of strangers. He'd have made faces, grumbled under his breath, or, at the very least, ignored them.

  But ten years ago he was not yet a child.

  Now, he seems flattered by their attention. He smiled back at them and nodded. It reminded me of Chad in his miniature seat behind a miniature table at preschool, having managed to raggedly cut out a construction-paper triangle with his blunt scissors, and the way his fat teacher had lit up, looking at it, praising the triangle—and Chad, clasping his pudgy hands together, looked up at her as if trying to be sure that this praise was really for him, and very much hoping that it was.

  We went back, after the walk, to my father's room and sat together with the television off.

  After a while, we ran out of small talk, and just sat.

  The room was pleasantly overwarm. The sound of a furnace deep under the nursing home somewhere hummed evenly, and eventually it began to feel as if that hum were a part of my body.

  We sat as if we were waiting for someone. (Chad?)

  Or something. (A bus?)

  And it crossed my mind to say to my father, "You know, Dad, now it's just us."

  But it isn't, of course. I still have a job, a husband, a home on the other side of the state. And he lives here, in this waiting room, having small strokes in his sleep, waking every day a little changed. I've begged him to let me move him closer to us, so I can see him every day. "You can move me anywhere you please when I'm dead," is all he'll say in response. It's the town he was born in. He'll die in this town. Now, that's perfectly clear. It's just a matter, now, of when.

  I watched him in his chair, the slow shutting down of him.
The eyes blinking closed, his mouth falling open, and then the regular breathing that meant he was deeply asleep. I remembered being carried up the stairs, like that, in his arms, having completely let go of the world, my head on his shoulder. The swaying of that. The solidity. After an hour or so a nurse came in and said, "Will you be staying for dinner, Miss Milofski?"

  It surprised me.

  Had I also been asleep?

  I looked up.

  Miss Milofski? Who? It took me more than a few seconds to understand that this nurse was speaking to me, that I was Miss Milofski.

  No.

  It had been years since I'd been her—that girl who was a combination of her unmarried status and her father's name—but, still, in a brilliant flash I saw her again, Miss Milofski, sitting behind the receptionist desk of the dentist's office where I worked in the summers during high school. She was dressed too provocatively for her job, for her office full of matrons, for the conservative town she lived in. Skirts too short, blouses too sheer, sundresses without straps. Eventually some middle-aged dental hygienist would pull her aside and tell her that the dentist had mentioned it, and didn't like it. I looked up at the nurse. I said, "No. I won't be staying for dinner."

  I was, I realized, flushed.

  Funny, how just remembering that ("You need to dress less..."—she'd never been able to say it...) had made me blush.

  I could feel the hot splash of humiliation on my chest—still, or again.

  I pulled the sweater closed around my collarbone.

  The nurse left as quietly as she'd come.

  My father was still deeply asleep. I looked around his room. It was almost entirely empty. He'd never liked any of the framed prints I'd brought, or even the calendars, and had finally said, "Nothing on the walls, please."