Arthur falls asleep instantly, and he has a dream. He dreams that it is summer and he is out in the front yard deadheading the roses and he becomes aware of something behind him. When he turns around, there is Nola, standing on the sidewalk in front of their house. She is young again, and beautiful, and her face is flushed with pleasure the way it used to get.
“Nola?” he says, his heart in his throat.
She smiles.
He walks a few steps closer. “Are you…Can I touch you?”
She nods. He drops the clippers and moves slowly toward her. When he is right in front of her, he sees the dampness in her eyes, he hears the breath moving in and out of her, he smells her perfume and sees the gentle wind moving her hair and he cries out and embraces her. He says her name over and over, he tells her he misses her so much, he kisses her neck, her shoulder, and then he pulls back away to look into her eyes. She says nothing.
“Can you talk?” he asks, tears wet on his face.
She shakes her head no.
“That’s all right,” he says. And then, “Would you like to sit on the porch with me?”
She nods, and they hold hands and walk up the steps together like they did so many times, so many times—as young people, as middle-aged people, as old people. He sits on his chair and waits for her to sit on hers. But she doesn’t sit there, she sits on his lap, oh, he can feel warmth and her weight, she is real and she has come back to him. She smiles into his face and then leans over to slip off her shoes, she always did like to slip off her shoes in the warm weather. And then, even though she is so young and beautiful and he is an old man with patches of white whiskers he misses with the razor, with cloudy eyes and aching joints, with a turkey neck and a concave chest and a shuffling gait, she kisses him full on the mouth for a long, long time. Her hand rests lightly against the side of his face. Her breasts are pressing into him. He is about to lead her upstairs when he awakens.
The room is gray; dawn has come. “No,” Arthur says. “Go back to sleep.”
He closes his eyes, thinks of Nola’s clove-scented breath, her bare feet, the little white buttons down the front of her dress. Come back, come back! He has heard that people can wake up from dreams and then will themselves right back into them. But not him, apparently. She is gone. Again.
He turns over and shoves his face into his pillow and weeps, a horrible, hoarse, creaky-gate sound, an old-man sound. A man-utterly-alone sound.
He can’t go to the cemetery today. He can’t see her headstone, he can’t see the earth packed over her coffin. Her down there all alone in the darkness. He won’t go there. He will spend the whole day trying to dream her back to him. And anyway, he feels lousy. Sometime in the night, when he got up to pee, he brought up a bunch of crap from his lungs. His neck hurts. His legs. His arms. His heart. His soul. His bedroom and his clothes and the glasses in the kitchen cupboard, they hurt.
He goes downstairs to feed Gordon another hot dog and to empty his litter box. In another bowl he puts a big pile of dry cat food, which the cat disdains, he only likes it when it’s given in small amounts, but Arthur’s not sure he can make it downstairs again. Not today.
When he starts back up to his bedroom he hears Gordon meow. “No,” he says. “I can’t.”
—
Maddy waits at Nola’s grave for her entire lunch period. The old man doesn’t show.
When it’s time to go back to school, she goes back. A couple of weeks until graduation and done.
Her father brings home frozen enchiladas for her birthday dinner and they eat them on plates rather than out of the microwave containers. He also got two huge cupcakes from the bakery, and after the enchiladas he puts a candle in hers and she obligingly blows it out while he sings two lines of the Happy Birthday song. Then he hands her a card, a musical one, the Beatles singing, You say it’s your birthday! Inside are two brand-new one-hundred-dollar bills. She looks up at her father and he says, “Happy birthday.”
“It’s too much,” she says, and he says, again, “Happy birthday.”
Later, when she’s doing calculus homework in her bedroom, her father knocks at the door, tells her he’s going grocery shopping, does she need anything? She wants to leap up from her desk and scream, Do I NEED anything? Do I NEED ANYTHING? Are you fucking BLIND?
What she does say is “Frosted Mini-Wheats? Blueberry kind?”
“Okay,” her father says, entering it into his phone. “Anything else? Any…feminine things?” He keeps his eyes focused on the phone.
“Tampax, pearl, regular,” she says, and he dutifully enters it.
But she doesn’t need Tampax. And at this moment, she understands why. She understands why her boobs hurt, why she’s had weird episodes of nausea. And now she sits calmly before her father with her brain all pinbally and she doesn’t know what to do. What should she do? And then she thinks, I’ll call Anderson. This is no tragedy. This is a get-out-of-jail-free card.
“I’ll be back,” her father says.
“Okay.”
Maddy cleans up the kitchen, then goes back to her room and gets her phone, lies on her bed, and takes in a deep breath.
It could work. He really liked her at first. Really liked her. He may be a jerk at times, but he’s responsible, he is up for assistant manager. And he likes kids, he loves them, as does she; he told her that once, he said he wanted a lot of kids. She asked him how many and he said one hundred. All girls that look like you, he said.
A baby is so cute, how can you not love a baby? She won’t be sad around Anderson anymore. She won’t be weird. Everything will be solid, this will bring them together, they will be a family, she will have a family like other people have.
Maddy taps his name on her phone. He picks up, that’s the first good thing.
“Hey, Maddy.” His voice is warm. Second good thing.
“How are you?” he asks. Jackpot, he wants to talk.
“I’m good!” she says. “How about you?”
“All right,” he says. “I kind of miss you, kid.”
“I miss you, too.” She wants to cry but she knows better. Keep it light. He always likes to keep it light.
“Hey, I had a birthday!” she says.
“When?”
“It’s…today, actually.”
“Happy birthday! So you’re eighteen, right?”
“Right!”
“What’d you get?”
“You mean…? Oh, I got a card. And some money. From my dad.”
Anderson snorts. He doesn’t think much of her dad.
“It was nice, I can buy some clothes or something. Some books.”
“Yeah, you like your books, don’t you?”
She reaches down to hold tightly on to her ankle. “So…are you still with that woman you work with?”
“I don’t know. More or less.”
He’s bored with her, Maddy thinks. Already.
“Would you ever want to…get together?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer. She bites her lip, waits.
Finally, he laughs.
“I just meant—”
“What are you doing tonight?”
She sits up, triumphant. But then, “Well, it’s a school night,” she says. Her dad is an idiot about that stuff.
“You could sneak out again.”
She supposes she could. But wait, then she would tell him face-to-face. What if he got mad?
“Come on,” he says. “We’ll have a do-over. A do-over plus.”
She looks out the window, where the streetlights have just come on.
“Anderson, I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I seem to be pregnant.”
Silence. Then, “What are you talking about?”
“I haven’t done the test. But I’m late.” The word feels sideways in her mouth.
“Well, you can’t be pregnant. Not from me. I never even came in you.”
“No, but remember that time you came on me kind of
…low?”
“Fuck!”
She stops breathing, says nothing. Presses the phone closer to her ear.
“Listen, Maddy, you’re not going to pin this on me. You’re not going to trap me. I didn’t do anything. I don’t know why you’re even telling me this. What do you expect me to do about it?”
She closes her eyes, rocks back and forth. “I thought…”
“You thought what? Oh, Christ, you didn’t think I’d like marry you or some shit, did you?”
“No, no, not that, but maybe I could live with you. I could take care of you. We used to have a good time. You like kids; you’re good with kids, you told me you want to have a lot of kids.”
“You’re crazy, Maddy. You really are. I mean bona fide. You’re fucking crazy, okay? You need help. Get some help. And take that money your dad gave you and get yourself an abortion. I want nothing to do with this. It isn’t even mine. Don’t call me anymore. Get some help, Maddy, I’m not kidding.”
He hangs up.
She sits unmoving until she hears her father’s car pull up. And then she hears him calling her.
She goes out into the kitchen. “What.”
“Nice greeting!”
“Sorry.”
He takes the shredded wheat from a bag. “Here’s your cereal.”
“Thanks.”
“Put it away, will you?”
She puts it on the cereal shelf, then silently helps to put away the other groceries.
“So I’ve been thinking about graduation,” her father says. “We’d better make a reservation for dinner after the ceremony. Where would you like to go?”
“Nowhere,” she says, and her father says, “Nice.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” she says. “I just…I don’t like my school. You know that. I don’t like the kids there. I don’t fit in.”
“Oh, every teenager feels that way,” her father says. “I felt that way myself.”
“No, they’re mean to me, you know?” Her voice is shaky; she is close to tears.
“Why are they mean?” her father asks. “What do they do?”
She stands there. Then, “Never mind,” she says. She starts to walk away, and her father takes her arm. “Well, tell me. What do they do?”
She doesn’t answer, and her father sighs. “You’ve got to toughen up, Maddy. It’s a rough world out there.”
“Right.”
“Sometimes you just have to let things roll off your back.”
“Yeah. Like you do, Dad?”
He stares at her for a long time. Then he says, “That’s different. I hope someday you can understand.”
“I hope so, too. In the meantime, can I skip graduation?”
“You’re going to graduation. For God’s sake, Maddy, do you always have to be so melodramatic?”
“I’m not going,” she says. “We don’t have to go. And I’m not. I’m not going!” Her voice echoes in the room, she’s almost screaming.
Her father holds up his hands. “Fine!” he says. “Get a refund on the cap and gown. I suppose you don’t want to go out to a restaurant, either.”
“What would be the point, Dad?”
“To celebrate? I’m proud of you?”
She laughs.
“Maddy, I don’t know what to say to you. I have never known what to say to you. I just…I can’t…”
Is he going to cry? She looks into his face, touches his arm. “It’s okay,” she says.
He shakes his head. “Oh, Christ, Maddy. It’s your birthday.”
“Yeah. So I guess I’d like to take a walk, okay?”
He starts to put his jacket on.
“Alone,” she says. “No offense.”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
She walks to the drugstore a mile away. She buys a pregnancy test and goes into the bathroom to use it. When she comes out, she buys a sippy cup. A rattle. A yellow washcloth with a duck on it. And a little stuffed bear that is 60 percent off because his ribbon is stained.
She’s keeping this baby. It is hers. And in it, and through it, she will remake the world. She, too, will get born, into another kind of life.
—
On June 1, the first day of the month for weddings, Lucille closes the door behind her and Frank, then locks it. She turns around and says softly, “Well, Mr. Snow, here I am.”
Frank looks confused.
“Carousel?” Lucille says. “That song in the play Carousel?”
“Never saw it,” Frank says, embarrassed-looking, and Lucille thinks it’s the sweetest thing.
“Not even the movie?” she asks, and he says no.
“Well,” she says. “I’ll get it out of the library and we’ll watch it. And we’ll have a clambake after we watch it, there’s a clambake in there. Or, you know, we’ll go out to Red Lobster.”
“I like Red Lobster,” Frank says.
“Me, too.”
“I like the Create Your Own combination.”
“Me, too!”
Frank clears his throat and sticks his hands in his pockets. Then, “Are we stalling?”
Lucille nods. “I guess so.”
“Let’s go upstairs. Shall I carry you?”
“Very funny,” says Lucille, and Frank says, “It’s the thought that counts.”
When they reach her bedroom, Frank sits at the edge of her bed and Lucille pulls down the shades. Then she comes to stand before him.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says.
He pats the bed beside him. “Just come sit.”
She does, and they sit staring straight ahead. Then he reaches over to take her hand like it’s a Fabergé egg.
Lucille begins to cry, unexpectedly. It’s embarrassing to her; she wipes her eyes quickly, then laughs.
“It’s okay,” Frank says. “It’s been a long time.” He takes off his glasses and lays them carefully on the nightstand. Lucille takes off her glasses, too. And then she does something astonishing: she whips her wig off her head, exposing her thin, thin hair that you can see her scalp through, plain as day.
Frank stares at her.
“There!” Lucille says. “You might as well know!”
She kneads the wig she’s holding in her lap, then tosses it on top of their glasses.
“Lucille, I already knew,” Frank says softly.
“What?”
“I say I already knew. That you wear a wig.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s…you know, it’s a bit crooked, sweetheart.”
“It is?” But she’s been going around like this! Everywhere!
Well, at least he told her. Now she knows. At least he isn’t like Ben Stoltz, the man she ate with at the last church social, who smiled at her sort of funny the whole time and then when she got home there was a big piece of spinach stuck between her front teeth.
Lucille turns to face Frank fully. “I appreciate your honesty, Frank. I think we should always be honest with each other.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
He nods, staring into his lap. “Okay. Well, then I think I should tell you I had prostate cancer. I’m fine now, but…you know.”
“Oh, my. Were you scared when you got diagnosed?”
He looks over at her. “I guess so. I guess I was scared. But mostly, I just wanted to keep on living. I mean, after I turned fifty, I realized that things were going to start happening, you know? I lost a buddy to cancer when he was only thirty-seven. I was lucky I lived so long without anything happening to me. I was seventy-nine when I was diagnosed. And you know, I wasn’t even surprised. I thought, Huh. So this is what’s going to take me out. It didn’t, of course, all it did was wake me up a little. And remind me that other things are going to happen.”
Lucille nods. “Some of the things that happen when we get older are good, though.”
“Some of the things are very good. And surprisin
g. And some things are so…” He stops, turns to her, and she sees that his eyes are wet. “Lucille. I still love you. I never stopped.”
“Oh, Frank,” she says. “You’re my dream come true. Honestly.”
They lie down and kiss a little and then it’s as though they both run out of gas. But it’s nice, it’s very nice, they’re comfortably out of gas together.
“Would you like to stay here tonight?” Lucille asks.
“Well, I don’t have my things.”
“What do you need?”
“Oh, you know, pajamas, for starters.”
“You can wear one of my nighties,” Lucille says, and starts giggling.
“Wait a minute,” Frank says. “Is this one of those reality shows?”
And then they lie quietly and the night deepens around them. After a while, Lucille sits up at the side of the bed to take off her clothes, and on the other side of the bed, Frank does the same. Then they lie down and face each other, Lucille holding the sheet up high, to just beneath her chin. Frank tugs gently at the sheet and says, “You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh yes I do. And don’t you dare look.”
“At what?” he asks, smiling.
She clamps her lips tightly together and then says, “At my sacky old breasts. And my big fat belly, and my…Well, I don’t even know what they are. My brown spots.”
“Lucille, I hope you don’t mind my asking, but do you have anything really wrong with you that I should know about?”
“Oh, high cholesterol. High blood pressure. Treated with medication. A little skin cancer here and there, but who doesn’t have that? Even dogs get that. But otherwise, I never even had surgery. I still have my wisdom teeth. And my appendix. And my tonsils!”
“Ohhhhh,” says Frank. “I think I’m getting aroused.”
Lucille’s eyes widen.