At Seth's feet lies the little corner of the lawn his mother ripped away a generation ago to form a vegetable garden. She tilled this fifteen square feet of soil relentlessly and made it yield remarkable things: leaf lettuce first, then tomatoes, peas, pole beans. A huge zucchini somehow sprang up in the adjoining privet and was mistaken by the entire family, when they spotted it, for a raccoon. He can recall his father, terrified, edging up like a fencer with a rake extended. Seth remembers many Sundays out here, hoeing, weeding, being the man his mother needed, doing her gentle bidding while he tried to keep up with the Trappers game on his transistor. Lucy has wonderful vegetable gardens and he's always adored her for them.
His mother's gardening equipment was housed in the narrow barnwood shed his father positioned in the rear corner of this lot. Bernhard feared thieves, of course. A heavy rusted padlock hangs there. Seth would love to look inside. What has my father left me? he thinks again. He heaves on the old wooden door, then recalls the key, still hidden under the same piece of loose walk. The interior is dark, smelling of rotted wood, of rancid fertilizers and loam. The old tools lie in disarray, the metal parts rough with rust. The spiders have choked each other in bleak, silky competition.
'Jeez-o Pete,' he says suddenly, 'what a horrible day this is.' Behind the open door, safe from the wind and prying eyes, actually alone with Lucy for the first instant in months, he wordlessly accepts her comfort. Here she is in the crook of his arm, this woman, this tiny female person whom he was with longer than he lived without her. Here she is.
Sonny
'You aren't leaving? I hoped we'd get a chance to talk,' Lucy says as Sonny, carrying her purse, approaches the front door. It's a few minutes past 4:30 and most of the afternoon visitors have departed. Attempting to sound casual, Sonny explains she has to pick up Nikki from day care, a few minutes away, and expects to return with her. Unmentioned is the fact that Seth performs this task many afternoons now.
'I'd love to get away for a second,' says Lucy. 'How about I come along?' As Lucy rushes off for her coat, Sonny indulges in an instant of stark assessment. Lucy is one of those women born in the right age. In the era of Botticelli and Rubens her looks would have been disregarded. Yet at the end of the twentieth century her slender waifishness is right. She has intense black eyes, a tangle of dark hair, a narrow, fragile face. Her size and apparent vulnerability always made Sonny feel like half a cow, even a quarter of a century ago, and watching her slip around the house, she's been unable to contain her amazement that any woman after two children can actually have a waist that small. Seth's side-of-the-mouth descriptions of Lucy have tended to portray her youthfulness as a failing, a sign of continuing childishness, but avoided mentioning that she's retained a lot of sensual pizzazz. Dating a twenty-six-year-old no longer seems pathological. Lucy's one of those women whom men - on the sidewalk, across a revolving door - still turn to watch in that idiot way, as if there's actually some hope you might commit a carnal act right here on the street. Is Sonny envious? Only slightly. There are other aspects of youth - bending from the waist without back pain, or the ability to remember seven-digit-number strings -she'd rather recover.
In the car, heading off, Lucy chatters. People remain so fundamentally themselves, so recognizable. Seth insists Lucy is brilliant, but hamstrung by self-doubt, something Sonny can hear in the urgent way she gushes about the fact that Sonny is a judge. How exciting! How difficult! Support and flattery, the rhetoric of women of our age, Sonny thinks, but she knows Lucy is sincere. She answers that her job is far less lofty than it sounds.
'But it's important in the lives of other people,' Lucy answers. 'And you did that. As a woman. I know what that means, how hard that was. When Michael told me you were a judge, I actually felt proud. Does that sound ridiculous? But I'm very proud of all of you, the women I knew who did all these things that their grandmothers or even their moms couldn't even dare to consider. When we started college, if you think about it, we were so vague. So many women were. I was. We didn't have any sense of what we could do. And what you did, you, all our women friends, they did for themselves. Together, I mean, hand in hand. I don't think Sarah can really understand the imagination that required.'
The reaching trees rush by in reflection on the windshield. Sonny tips her head.
‘I can't take credit,' she says. 'My mother gave me that.'
'Really?'
'It was very unusual for the time, but a wonderful gift. I owe her so much for that.' 'You are great,' Zora whispered. 'You are a treasure of the world.' Day in, day out, the message was repeated, with a passion that left no doubt it was true. At instants, that unrestrained praise of her abilities seemed more a burden than a benediction, but in the end, Sonny thinks, it's a lot to have, to reach back to.
They park at Drees, a small brick building, retooled three or four times for various municipal uses. Rush hour, sometimes madness on University Avenue, is light today and they are early. At Sonny's suggestion they walk down the block to a gourmet coffee shop, the Seattle franchise which has America mainlining caffeine. A native, Lucy knows all the code words. 'Grande, macchiato, double shot.' They sit on brushed-steel stools across a granite table. Shoppers, mostly female, pass on the street. A woman with a baguette from the French bakery across the way turns in the midst of conversation and nearly knocks Lucy from her seat. There is a brief scene, much laughter, and a flurry of apologies. When they are alone once more, Lucy hunches over her coffee cup and lets her tongue slide forth kittenishly to lick the foam.
'So, is it love?' she asks. Sonny, who had not contemplated such directness, feels her chest rock when she attempts to draw a breath.
‘I know Seth's in love with my daughter. I'm not as sure about me.'
'Oh, I think he's always been hung up on you. What's the term? With the torch? As a child it made me think of the Statue of Liberty. But it means love is never finished. Don't you think that's right? I think love is never finished.'
Sonny sees how this will be, one of those oblique, neurotic dialogues, saying one thing and, in some lost recess, meaning something else. If love does not quit, where does that leave Lucy and Seth? Registering Sonny's discontent Lucy apologizes. She didn't mean to pry, she says.
'It's hardly prying,' Sonny says. 'It's natural. You wonder about Seth and me, I wonder about you and Seth.'
In response, Lucy stirs her coffee, her eyes nowhere in the room. 'Life is messy,' she says suddenly. 'Isn't it? People have these messy little corners that you can't get to with one another.' Is it Seth and her she means? Or is she talking about the fact that even decades ago Sonny and she were not especially close?
‘I don't need explanations,' Sonny finally says, then, after an instant's reflection, murmurs Isaac's name. Lucy cannot contain a small, tense reflex.
'Naturally,' Lucy says. ‘I mean, that's the biggest piece of it. Isaac. Michael won't give it up. Resolve. Let go. God, I don't know the word. But he won't. The sadness won't leave him. And I empathize, I think I'm a sympathetic person -'
'Of course you are,' offers Sonny, realizing it's foolish to reassure someone she hasn't seen for twenty-five years, but still certain she's right.
'But it's me, too. He was my child, too. I can't live with this silent accusation that I've forgotten Isaac and he hasn't, that he suffers and I don't. I can't bear that.' She has started crying now. The liner goes at once, and settles on her cheek, a trail of greying sludge. Lucy stares at the traces on the paper napkin grabbed from the stainless dispenser and shakes her head. Why did she bother with makeup? she asks. She's been crying and redoing it all day.
Having touched this great pain so quickly leaves Sonny uneasy. It's like digging in a garden and inadvertently exposing the root of a plant, a white, awkward thing never meant for light. As she watches Lucy regather herself, the day presses in on her amid the hubbub of the store. The place is filling. Women and men, on the way home, with time to grant themselves a few minutes of relief, queue before the bright chrome-and-brass fittings a
t the counter. A few little ones grind against their mothers' thighs. The steam machines whir, spilling out sensational aromas, while the young clerks bustle about, enjoying the frenzy and performance of the rush hour. For a moment, it seems to Sonny that she can recover some recollected kinship to every person in this store: young and unknown to herself; at loose ends with spare moments; mom with babe in arms. She surmounted all that. Why can she see the arc backward so clearly, but nothing ahead?
'I mean, Isaac's not our whole thing,' Lucy says. 'We're like any other married couple. We've done some bad stuff to each other over the years.'
'I was married,' Sonny says.
'Right,' says Lucy, and smiles quickly, tentatively, not certain it's polite to agree. 'But for Michael, for me - you know, the issue is how much disappointment you can embrace before you say, "I have to start again." I mean,' Lucy says, 'it turns out there are some things you can't say. In a marriage? You can mess up a relationship in a sentence. You don't know it for sure until ten years later. But that's how it turns out.' Lucy, whose dark eyes are flighty, seldom loitering, now land directly on Sonny. 'He's never told you, has he?'
Trying to find the thread, Sonny does not answer. Lucy leans on the tiny hand she has brought to her forehead, the nails short but carefully trimmed in red.
'God, I need a cigarette,' she declares. Lucy takes her paper cup and moves to a table in the corner. She has lit up, wreathed in smoke, by the time Sonny arrives. And her mother died of emphysema. Sonny recalls Seth's stories of this woman, with a ruined face like Lillian Hellman's, smoking behind the oxygen mask, and her family screaming, begging her to consider the fire hazard, if nothing else.
'This, you know, period, whatever you call it,' Lucy says, 'this is like our second Big Crisis. We had a first Big Crisis. About ten years ago. Did you know that?'
'A little,' Sonny says.
'Michael's mother was dying. And he was having a hard time with that. Alzheimer's. They just disappear right in front of you, it eats the soul before the body. And he was becoming very successful at the same time. And he was having a hard time with that, too, you know, people were different with him now that he wasn't just some weird guy ventilating a lot of crazed private thoughts. It was like the commercials that were on then about "Everybody listens"? That was his life all of a sudden. The room would go silent. Everybody listened. And so he was pretty nuts with all of it, and he started sleeping with some girl around the paper. He was traveling with her and telling me nothing was going on. His assistant. But you could just about see sparks when they even said hello. And men never will get it, will they, that women know! And I put up with stuff, that's one of my problems, I always take way too much - but this? Finally, after a party, I threw a fit. I realized I was entitled. I was so hurt, savagely hurt. And he was kind of a skunk about it. He said all of the usual incredibly dumb things, but the one that got me was "You don't understand, this doesn't mean anything," and I said, "No, I do understand, and don't say it doesn't mean anything," and, I don't know, I just said, I said, "For Godsake, I was still sleeping with Hobie a year after we were married." So I'd said it.' She waits an instant, considering only the ember at the end of her cigarette.
'Even when that was going on,' Lucy says, ‘I didn't understand much of it, but I told myself, "If you do this, this is for yourself and only yourself and he can never know." And he hadn't. They were two completely different spheres, like sleeping and waking, or stoned and straight, it seemed completely implausible they could even touch. But they did. They had.
'I mean, the whole thing was like ancient history. It had been over years and years before, Hobie and I had both seen it was crazy and absurd. And one of the problems - I mean, now I was a mom, we had a home; we had, you know, our customs, our things, furniture and breakfast cereal, and honestly, one huge problem was I couldn't even understand it anymore myself. I looked back and it seemed like being with the Moonies. I mean, ho w can I even explain what I used to think when I was twenty-one? We forget what we used to be like, what everything was like. It seems like there weren't the same categories, you know? I mean, everything wasn't in this sort of place. Who understands what an adult commitment is when you're twenty-one? I thought I could sleep with Hobie and be Michael's wife. It sort of made sense, and then eventually it didn't. I mean, that's life, that's reality, I can't apologize for that.
'And you know, the shrinks, the counselors, they pointed out the right stuff, about how complicated it is between Michael and Hobie anyway, and why did Michael - Seth - why did he want to hook up with Hobie's girlfriend in the first place, and we all played a part. But it was still a major mess. Not that he ever wagged a finger, because he's done more than his share of shitty things and he knows it. But he couldn't even talk to Hobie for a couple of years. And I mean Hobie prostrated himself, he absolutely begged forgiveness, which I frankly didn't even think Hobie would know how to do. And you know, I forgave Michael and Michael forgave us. He's a forgiving person. Except for his father. I'd had trouble getting pregnant again, secondary infertility, and we did in vitro and we had Isaac. And we went on. But there's that term "sadder but wiser"? That's a terrible phrase, don't you think? When you really hear the words? And he was sadder but wiser after that. And our marriage was sadder but wiser. And with Isaac suddenly, maybe it was too sad and too wise. And what's the way out, you know? Is there one?'
Lucy, boiling in shame, closes her eyes and crushes out her cigarette. The store is emptying out. As the customers pass through the doorway, a touch of cooler air, swifter movement, the simpler smells of sundown and spring cross the cafe. Through her bleared eyes, Lucy dares to look again at Sonny. She says, 'So now you know.'
Seth
The day, like some lingering sweet lament, lolls toward a close. Seth and Nikki sit on the grey stairs of the back porch, facing the failing stockade fence his father years ago erected along the property line of the tiny city lot. The birds twitter urgently, and a block or two away a power mower thrums, as some citizen tries to liberate the weekend with an hour's labor after work, rushing through the first cutting of the year. In magnificent hue, the sky loses light about them. Lucy and Sonny have gone together to pick up takeout for dinner. Inside, Sarah, who just led a minyan in reciting the mourners' prayer, is whiling with the last of her friends. Nikki watched in awe as Sarah chanted and now has asked Seth to hold a conversation in a foreign language, albeit one of her own invention. They have gone on quacking and gargling at each other for some time.
'You know what I was saying?' the little girl asks. She is in jeans and a pilled turtleneck adorned with corny, small flowers and two smears of fingerpaint. ‘I was saying, "Yes, I want to go on a horse ride." '
'Oh, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying, "Thank you, Seth, for hanging out with me, you're such a swell fella." I could swear that was what you meant.'
'No-o-o!' she exclaims and in mock-reproof squeezes his cheeks, stopping to comb her fingers through his new beard, which all three of them - Seth, Sonny, and Nikki - privately refer to as 'Nikki's Whiskers.' Her laughter rollicks momentarily, then her dark eyes grow serious again, reverting to what was on her mind. 'Why was she talking Spanish, anyway?'
'Spanish? Who?'
Nikki waves a tiny hand desperately toward the living room. She cannot recall Sarah's name or otherwise describe her. He has told her a thousand times Sarah is his daughter, but Nikki seems to find it impossible that a daughter is not someone her age.
'You mean when Sarah was praying?' he asks. 'That was Hebrew. Span-ish,’ he mocks and grabs Nikki about the waist momentarily, jostling her in delight. She throws herself deep into his arms, and the compact feel of the little girl, with her mysteriously sweet aroma and innocent seductiveness, enters the core of him. Isaac was such a handful, so haunted and inconsolable, that Seth had half-forgotten the spectacular buoyant pleasures normally part of this age. Around Nikki he has often been called back with a throb to those times, when he was in his late twenties and Sarah w
as little. She'd been a surprise in every aspect, her conception first, and then, upon arrival, the way her needs dominated Lucy and him. Every meal, for instance, was a task. She was allergic to milk products and, worse, for years would only take her food disguised in baked beans. Each day was a thicket, planning for her, working, scheduling. Lucy was trying to finish college. He had been hired at a daily in Pawtucket, and one day one of his columns was picked up by a real syndicate, fifty papers, which kept asking for more. He'd write. Research. Do interviews. He'd keep endless notes on different ideas and work on them with no particular consistency, free-form, a renegade enemy of order in his writerly role. But with all the pulling and heaving, at home, in the office, he found suddenly there was no activity in the course of the day which did not feel imbued with deep purpose - Lucy, Sarah, what he wrote. And where it all was going, who knew, who knew, but he was laboring toward something, if only perhaps the creation of the self he was, after long wondering, seemingly meant to discover all along. Good years, he thinks now. Good times.
In this mood, he clings to Nikki. Her long dark hair, pigtailed today, spins around as he lolls her back and forth. He is always self-conscious about handling her. Welcome to our era. But a six-year-old needs to be hugged. When his children were little, he enjoyed nothing more than lying down with them for a nap, clinging to their small hands, losing track in sleep of where exactly their bodies and his began and ended. He finally lets her go so he can explain what Sarah was doing.
'Sometimes people feel that they have to try to talk to God. That's praying. And Sarah was praying about her grandfather. Remember that real, real old man? I showed you his picture? I used to go visit him? We're remembering him.'
'Did he get dead?' Seth knows Sonny has gone over this at length, but no doubt they'll be repeating it for days.
'He was more than ninety. He was almost ninety years older than you.' He was the century, this benighted, amazing century, Seth thinks. He has not cried yet, but he's been on the verge once or twice, and with this new thought, he stifles a sob. It would upset Nikki. If she was his kid, it would be all right if he upset her. He would just cry. He'd be willing to say this is life, too. No truckling before the altar of tiny vulnerabilities. But she's not his.