Commuters (4 page)

“Yeah?” Guy on a stool looked up from a tiny computer he was balancing on one knee.

“How much for a haircut?”

The manager—if that was who he was—looked over Avery’s head. “First time here?”

Avery nodded.

“Forty,” the guy said, turning back to the screen.

“Any one of these?” Avery looked at the three empty chairs. Not one of the tattooed kids made a move. No sign of whether they worked there or were just hanging out.

“NONA,” the manager yelled. Nothing happened. The guy with the broom hoisted it and
whapp
ed the handle against a back door. A woman stuck her head out, angrily.

“I’m on the goddamn
phone
,” she said. “You take him, Trevor.”

“On break,” Trevor said, and brandished a pack of cigarettes for proof.

“Jesus fuck,” the woman said, and disappeared. Avery made himself comfortable in the chair closest to the window. The mirror he faced was scratched and cloudy, and covered on all sides with stickers, taped-up photos, and Magic Marker graffiti.

Then she was there, standing behind him. Nona. She finished tying on an apron and pushed at his head, this way and that, roughly.

“Maybe shorter on the sides and—” Avery began. The music changed to that song by the Killers that had been everywhere last summer.

“Yeah, I’ll take it from here,” Nona said, not meeting his eyes in the mirror. Avery grinned and shut up. He watched her razor up the back of his neck and scissor-snip the top into a wild, spiky tangle. She worked her mouth as she bent to check how even things were on the sides, and muttered something to herself, her warm breath puffing against his earlobe.

Avery checked her style—the beat-up, half-laced work boots, a cheap silver snake thing clamped around her upper arm—and recognized it, of course. She was one of his kind. But there was something else: Nona’s face, pale, and faint lines on her forehead. Purple skin under her eyes. Her hair, a mess of twisted black dreadlocks, had streaks of gray growing out from the roots. Why did that set his heart humming? Avery wondered. The way her strong bare arms did, and the heavy softness of her breasts under the apron front.

The whole cut took less than ten minutes. He thanked her, and she nodded, wiping her hands on a small towel after flicking it down his shoulders.

Avery paid the guy on the stool his forty bucks and checked his wallet for a tip. All he had was another twenty. “I don’t have any change,” the manager said, shrugging. He slipped an earpiece in, unconcerned.

Avery turned to Nona. “Just my luck,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“This you?” he asked, reaching over to touch a battered postcard stuck in one corner of her mirror. He’d been staring at it during the haircut, a grainy black-and-white image of a woman bent forward and howling into a microphone. He pulled it out. Dates and clubs were printed on the back.

Nona looked up into his face as he studied the card. “It’s my last one.”

He handed her the twenty. “I’ll take this as change.” One of the Mohawk dudes snorted, a hooting laugh that both Nona and Avery ignored. One half-turning-up of her mouth, that’s all Avery allowed himself to savor, standing there, one beat of perfection
passing between them. Then he pushed back out onto Thompson with the postcard stuck in his pocket, hands shaking in a powerful kind of jones, grinning at everyone and no one, just like your basic village idiot.

Enough of Hartfield, already. Somewhere in the dark tangle of streets in this little town was the train station that could get him back to Manhattan. But where exactly, and how would he get there? What time did the trains run? Avery had none of the answers, but he wasn’t too fazed. He’d figure it out. On his way to the door, though, he was stopped by a commotion in the country-club foyer.

A cluster of people, some kneeling, were gathered around an old woman lying on the floor.
Don’t move her,
the people were saying to themselves.
Give her some air.
Avery edged closer and saw a thin line of blood running from the woman’s nostril. Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing, hard, through her open mouth. He didn’t recognize her, although that didn’t mean anything. She must be a guest, maybe a friend of Grandad or his new wife, just one of the many old people in attendance. It was revolting to see an old lady lying like that, he thought, flat on her back on the hard carpet of the entranceway. Why didn’t someone cover her legs, at least? They shouldn’t be out in the open like that, all bony and ridged with veins. Avery stared at the shiny new sneakers on her feet, unable to look away. He owned the same brand, same style.

“Coming through,” someone said, and Avery allowed himself to be pushed aside by the EMS guys and their wheeled stretcher.

Not sure where to go, he wandered slowly outside. The soft suburban night air was filled with crickets or cicadas; a bat looped
underneath the awning over the door. A feeling he’d had earlier in the day, at the church, flashed back to him—a horrible feeling, like a nightmare…There was everything in place for a wedding: the altar, the minister, the flowers. The bride’s white dress, the groom in a suit, everything normal until you looked in the smiling faces of the marrying couple and saw how old they were, how gray and wrinkled and stooped. A warp-speed fast-forwarded life. Twilight Zone stuff.

Now suddenly all the parts of his grandfather’s big day curdled inside Avery. He pulled his tie over his head and stuffed it in a pocket. What was the point? Sure, it was great how the old man had found someone again, this close to the end of his life. Everyone was saying so. But now it hit Avery just how insubstantial it all was—love, marriage—compared to the hard physical reality of the world. The old lady on the floor in her neon sneakers; her bloody nose. This was coming soon for Grandad, whether he knew it or not. Wasn’t it ridiculous for everyone to get all dressed up and pretend otherwise?

Avery watched as one of the valet attendants tossed a pair of keys high into the dark air and then caught them behind his back, one-handed. Nice. Then he stepped off the porch and walked slowly into the lush night streets of Hartfield. He’d find his way to the train eventually.

How could it be after eleven? Jerry would be back from the clinic any minute, where he twice weekly submitted to the cheerful, horrible ministrations of a physical therapist named Becka. In her kitchen of twenty-two days—big enough to hold her old dining-room table and a desk and chair set, not to mention the two ovens and a gleaming stainless-steel refrigerator whose front door dispensed not only carbon-filtered water but either crushed ice or cubes—Winnie took out a small battered saucepan and set a wood spoon across it on the stove. Then she unpacked the brown paper bag with this morning’s shopping load: four different cans of soup. For lunch, soup; Jerry always had soup for lunch—he’d had soup for lunch for decades and wouldn’t be stopping soon, despite the month, despite the heat. He wasn’t a man you had to fuss over; he ate what she fixed and said little about it. So yesterday afternoon it had surprised her, when she’d caught him peering closely at the bowl, poking the little vegetables this way and that with a spoon.

“Is this the kind with the green label?”

“It’s minestrone, if that’s what you mean—why?”

“Tastes different.”

“Different bad? Let me go check. I can’t remember what brand it is.” Jerry had waved that away, and then he’d gone on to eat the rest. But before washing up Winnie had fished through the garbage, and then the recycling box, and held up the offending red-labeled can.

So, to the store. Or several, as it were: at the last minute, Winnie had turned into Fresh Market’s lot, where she had been buying groceries for at least twenty years, just to double-check, but she didn’t even need to walk all the way down the aisle to tell—no green-label soups there. With a fast wave to Donnie, behind the meat counter, she moved on. Winnie tried Associated next, the bigger store in town, and saw red labels, blue labels, large white boxes of chicken and beef stock, and some orange plastic bottles for children called Squeezy Soup. The stock boy was no help at all. Nor was the ditzy old gent at the register in the health-food place (used to be Red’s Cleaners, until last year). He seemed to think Winnie was interested in a cup of lentil made fresh that morning, and she didn’t care for the way he eyed her up and down. At last, in a Fast-Mart on Route 9, halfway to Mount Morris, she found what she was looking for, a dusty row of pea-colored cans on the bottom shelf. Tasty Harvest was the brand name, which Winnie severely doubted, but she bought one of each kind—minestrone, cream of mushroom, tomato noodle, and hearty beef. At checkout, she made sure to smile at the nervous teenage boy who gave her incorrect change; Winnie had a feeling she might become a regular customer at Fast-Mart.

Tomato noodle thudded into the saucepan in a brick-red congealed cylinder. Winnie filled the can with tap water and poured
that in. She mushed at it all with the spoon, lighting a burner underneath, until the soup turned into a bubbling liquid.

The phone rang, and she answered immediately, hoping—and dreading—that it would be Rachel. But it was Grass Is Greener, with estimates for the monthly lawn mowing, and so Winnie dutifully copied these down in their allotted space on a page in her now-bulging notebook, even though there was only one particular landscaping element she was waiting to hear about. She fended off the fellow’s sales pitch easily and said she would call back.

She had never been busier, which was a good thing. If it hadn’t been for the two different phone lines newly installed, Winnie couldn’t imagine how she might keep on top of everything. At times she even found herself actually using two separate phones at once: on hold with a wholesale outdoor furniture outfit in Hoboken, while simultaneously leaving a return message for Greg of LuxPool, Inc. Yes, she supposed it looked silly—a phone to each ear.

The pool project had taken hold of her as nothing had in recent years, other than helping Rachel in the year after Bob’s accident. But even that had been someone else’s cause, and this was hers alone, although it was the idea of Jerry’s pain—that bitten-down grimace, whenever he stood up or bent over—driving her forward.

“Water’s the only thing that really helps,” he’d admitted once, just after the wedding.

“So what about the pool at your gym? And there’s always Waugatuck, of course.”

“Too crowded,” Jerry had said. “Too many noisy kids.”

She’d scoffed lightly at that, until one afternoon when she saw for herself what it was like for him. It had taken all the efforts
of a lifeguard and Matty, his driver—who bent over at the side of the pool, still dressed in his black jacket and shiny shoes—to lower Jerry into the water. At one point, jostled by someone in a hurry, Jerry slipped on the sharp plastic ladder and nearly cracked his head on the cement. Winnie couldn’t bear any part of it—the shakiness in his arms, the gritted teeth as he tried to smile up at her, the sidelong glances from others.

Soon after, she got to work. Six days after moving in, Winnie followed the first of many pool men around the still-unfamiliar grounds of her new home. They looked in back first, but the short, steep downhill slope, covered in thick brush to where the neighbors’ property began, proved impossible. So it would have to be in front—not ideal, but no matter. There was plenty of room and nice, flat ground. She tried to keep up as the man paced off different lengths, kicking at errant twigs, and held up his arms to show where different sizes or shapes of pools could be sunk.

He had been the first to say it out loud, clipboard on hip and squinting up at the sky, though by now she had heard the same general opinion from at least three different pool companies, as well as one landscaping firm, plus a “tree man” that Rachel had personally recommended.

“It would have to come down,” the pool man had said, and at first Winnie couldn’t grasp what he meant. But she followed his gaze to the wide, sweeping branches and thick, peeling trunk of the sycamore tree in the exact center of the yard. “Kind of a shame. But there’s no other way to lay the foundation—not to mention…” Here he had gone on about set grades, building inspection rules, and air compressor lines, terms Winnie was now thoroughly acquainted with. The house itself was tucked behind a
cluster of conifers, and there was a stately row of maples along the low stone wall that bordered Greenham. Winnie had one linden tree just outside her kitchen window, and she guessed the huge, dark threesome over by Franklin Street were horse chestnuts. But this sycamore was the only one on the property. It was the tallest thing on the whole lot, a massive structure rising high above the house—later, Rachel’s tree man estimated it was at least a hundred years old.

“I know for a fact it’s the only one in town been around that long. They had one over at the school, but the storm in ninety-eight brought it down.”

“Is that so,” Winnie had said, politely enough. She’d paid his fee and thanked him for his time. But a tiny new determination bloomed inside her, like a drop of blood in a glass of water.

So far, while she did her pool research, she’d said nothing about the tree to anyone, but Winnie could just imagine what people in town might say.
But—but—you wouldn’t
really
cut down that beautiful tree? For a
pool,
of all things?

Yes, in fact, she would, Winnie would inwardly retort. Not for any old pool—for the one that would take away a measure of Jerry’s pain. Her
husband’s
pain. The custom-designed heated one that he could step down into, ramps and rails at hand, and float in all morning and all afternoon, if he liked. The absence of the grimace: that alone was worth ten sycamores.

But some of these fast-talking pool salesmen—well, they’d show up and take one look at the imposing size of 50 Greenham, and you could almost see the dollar signs lighting up in their eyes. The combination of her age and the lush, spreading lawns surrounding her new home probably gave most of these pool men
the heady sense that they were about to score the commission of a lifetime.

They’ve got another think coming,
Winnie vowed, stirring the tomato soup a little too vigorously. She hadn’t grown up the daughter of a railroad man for nothing. Along with a lifelong punctuality, often bothersome even to herself, what Winnie inherited from her father was a scrupulousness that extended itself to almost every area of her life, and usually, her children’s lives. She remembered the logbooks her father kept in a glass-front cabinet in their living room, where most folks would display a Collected Shakespeare or an encyclopedia set: their pebbly, dark-green faux leather covers, and the lined pages the color of buttermilk. Winnie used to run her fingers down the paper, across the rigid columns of dates and numbers entered in her father’s careful hand. She could feel, even now, the scratchy ridges and depressions of those old pen marks.

Jerry’s money had come into her life, there was no denying it. And such a pool was something most people would consider a luxury, she could admit that. Still, Winnie had no plans to become, at nearly eighty years, something she was not. She would spend no more than she had to. In fact, her general plan was to ignore the money, all of it, for as long as she could.

The phone rang again, this time in Jerry’s office. She turned the gas to low and went to stand in the foyer, listening. It was that same young lawyer again. Did he think his other two messages this morning hadn’t taken?

“—And since we just received another set of papers, I thought you should be aware that things look more serious. At this point, it looks like we’ll need to file a response by end-of-day tomorrow. So again, give me a call as soon as you—”

Winnie detoured back through the living room, trying to ignore a slight hum of alarm the call had set off inside her. From here, she’d be able to glimpse the big Oldsmobile pulling up around back, idling a few minutes, while Matty finished whatever story he had been telling. But there was nothing in the wide driveway with its blue and white basketball-court markings. (She’d once suggested painting over them, but in response Jerry had pretended to bounce and shoot an imaginary ball, all in such a lovely, boyish way that Winnie knew she wouldn’t mention it again.) Turning away, Winnie saw a doorway she’d never noticed before, in the short hallway leading to the sunroom—a closet? Stairwell?

Together, she and Jerry were exploring the house. Each night after dinner, and after a television program or two, they wandered into a different room and flipped the light switches on and off. They wondered at a strange water stain high up on a wall or tried to guess which child or grandchild might sleep there when visiting. On one of the first nights they did this, Jerry announced that he wanted to furnish the second-largest bedroom, the one that looked out onto the spreading branches of a blue Douglas fir, with twin beds in matching pink. Rachel’s girls should share a room, he’d said, because girls that age liked to stay up and talk. He stood in the doorway, Winnie in the middle of the room, both of them assessing the light, the space. After a moment, she noticed that Jerry had stopped talking, and saw how he was looking at her.

“Would you—” he began, and stopped. “Your blouse,” her new husband had said, lifting his chin. “Never mind,” he said almost as quickly, flashing a smile at what he’d revealed.

Winnie held still, in his gaze, in the empty room. Then in one motion she unhooked her skirt and let it drop. The blouse came off
just as easily, a simple pullover. She didn’t stop there; underthings soon joined the rest in a soft heap on the bare wood floor. And then Winnie closed her eyes, the better to feel the air cross her bare skin—the better to revel in the heat that built from being loved in this way. She could hear Jerry’s breathing. She could hear his footsteps as he walked a slow circle, all the way around her.

Yes, that was a lovely room. Rachel’s girls would have some fun picking out curtains, rugs.

“Presuming Rachel ever darkens the doorstep,” Winnie said now, reaching out to wipe a smudge on the glass with her cuff. She said it lightly, dramatically. That was the right tone. The rosebush behind the stone bench was wilted and drooping again already; after lunch she’d drag the hose across the lawn to perk it up. That she and her daughter were barely speaking—were talking only enough to continue a wearying, weeks-long argument about things that were none of Rachel’s business—chafed at Winnie, but what could she do? If it was the fact that she hadn’t consulted Rachel before buying the house, all right, fine, she’d apologized already. But if it was the fact of the house itself, this shadowy jewel-box, a beehive of rooms within rooms, boxes everywhere, the place where Jerry and she slept and woke and ate their meals—well, what then? There was no going back. Even Rachel didn’t seem to know what she was so angry about. When they did speak, her daughter toggled between the two—the not-telling; the house itself. The house itself; the not-telling. Back and forth, back and forth, in increasing agitation, until one of them would end the conversation, in fluster and dismay.

Just as she moved to shut off the heat under the soup, the back door opened, and there was Jerry, a brown-paper package under
an arm, his shirt collar cockeyed on one side. Winnie breathed in. She imagined that she could smell him before he was even fully in the room—that harsh yellow soap he liked, the metallic whiff of the car’s air conditioner, and the heat coming off his big body.

“I was just starting to worry,” Winnie said.

“Went over to the post office. Had to sign a few things, registered mail. Am I late?”

“No, no,” Winnie said, taking the package away. “Sit down, now.”

Jerry drained a full glass of water while she set up his lunch. “There’s something,” he said. “I didn’t want to get you all worked up, but…”

Winnie sat down at once.

“It’s all a lot of nonsense. Just a strategy to get some attention. All will get sorted out in the end.” Jerry pushed a half slice of bread in his mouth. He seemed embarrassed to be having this conversation.

“Is it Avery? Did he ever call back?”

Jerry, mouth full, shook his head.

Winnie had a new thought. “It’s not…the other thing, is it? That…other sort of trouble?”