Flings (16 page)

Marlene calls, beside herself: “You won't believe what Ed said to me. I can't even tell you, I shouldn't, I'm sorry, but this is too much.”

“Honey,” I say to her. “You just let it all out.” As I listen to her talking and crying, I keep doing this thing where I wrap the phone cord tight around my fingers until it hurts, then count to five and let the cord go. The pads of my fingers blanch white and then flush pink again; it's like watching the tide.

I have dinner with Keith and Heather. Their development is called Vista Trace. Tonight they've brought in takeout from a rotisserie chicken place that they call “the chicken place,” which is close enough to its real name that I wonder why they don't just say the right thing. My daughter-in-law stabs at her steamed broccoli with a fork that already holds a wet flag of chicken skin draped over a corkscrew of mac and cheese. I break up an oily cornbread biscuit with my fingers, steal a glance at the clock.

In the old days I was never alone. When Elsie and I were girls we lived in Borough Park with lots of family nearby: cousins on every corner, or so it seemed. Our aunt Bessie had a candy store on Avenue J and Coney Island Avenue. That place! Like a dream now—only I'm not dreaming. I'm awake and wandering aimlessly in the old halls of my head. The candy store had a marble counter and a soda fountain and a big display of magazines and newspapers. We went there after school for a float or a sundae and for Bessie to watch us until Mom got off work. She worked in the office of a pocketbook factory and our father was a butcher. He'd been a garment salesman before the Depression, but when things got bad his father-in-law, my grandpa Izzy, said, “If you're a butcher you'll always eat, at least.” Izzy had been through hard times in Poland. So my father learned butchering and he was good right from the start but he hated it. He worked at a storefront on Union Street and after the War, when things turned around, he always talked about quitting but he never did. Maybe once he could have been something else, but the Depression had made him a butcher. We didn't know all this as girls of course: who was struggling, what the reasons were, what they'd given up or lost. Everything seemed normal to us because it was all we knew, like Bessie's husband, Morris, sitting in the back of the candy store, reading Torah—I used to know the Yiddish word for it, what they called the men who read Torah all day—and never helping with the store at all. She married him late and he worked her like a horse. Bessie did the books, she placed the orders, stood out front, everything, and probably the only reason she had taken him was to have kids—I mean it must have been—but either they couldn't or he wouldn't because they never did. Really Bessie was my great-aunt, Grandpa Izzy's sister; they'd come over together in the 1890s, when she was about the same age as Elsie and I were when we used to go and sit at her shop. Such a strain on that woman! And on top of everything else being responsible for the two of us sitting at the marble counter, our school friends, too, swiveling our red stools so we spun in circles and crying if any soda should spill on our dresses. Bessie must have known by that time we were the closest she was going to get to girls of her own. After she died Morris sold the candy store, and so it passed out of our family and a few years after that it closed down. And to think that I'm older now than any of them were then—except maybe for Izzy, who left Poland not knowing his own birthday or exactly what year he'd been born. He always said, How can I worry about my age when I don't even know it?

I'm woken by the phone, on the couch, having fallen asleep—finally—during
Good Morning America
. I see on the caller ID that it's Dennis, my younger son. I let the machine get it. He says, “Mira fell off the jungle gym at recess and broke her arm. Everything's okay, we took both girls out of school, and we're all at the hospital; she's being a trouper and I thought you'd appreciate—anyhow we'll send pictures of the cast after her friends all sign it.” The machine clicks off.

I wait ten minutes before calling him back. I tell him I just got in from running some errands. He puts Mira on and I tell her to be a good girl and brave. Then Rebecca comes on and I tell her to be brave, too, and take good care of her sister. Then, since I've talked to everybody else, Dennis's wife comes on to say hello. I ask her how she's holding up. “Pretty good, all things considered.” A pause on her end, then, “How are you, Carol?”

“I don't sleep,” I say. “I don't sleep and I hate this goddamned being alone.” Instantly I am abashed, thinking that perhaps the worst part of grief is how it inexorably pivots any and every thing back toward itself. It has made me pitiful and selfish and I hate it, and so on top of everything else it has made me hateful, too.

I force myself to break the silence on the line. “Jessica, I'm sorry. This wasn't the time and I didn't mean—Everything is fine here. I'm well.”

“It's okay,” she says. “I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know. But listen, Carol, it's important to me for you to know that you are not alone. We're all right here with you.” I can picture her standing in a green hospital corridor, wearing a charcoal business suit and a thin gold necklace, my son's cell phone in one hand and the other hand cupped over her other ear, her wedding ring flashing when it catches the light. It occurs to me that her well-meant words are both true and not true.

At my checkup Dr. Greene asks after my sleep schedule. He suggests—not for the first time—that I let him prescribe a sleeping pill. I always refuse because they seem like a crutch, or like they could become one. “But the purpose of a crutch,” Dr. Greene says, “is to relieve pressure. So the thing that's been broken can heal.” I don't say anything to him. He smiles, puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “You'll try it and you'll see,” he says.

The first night I take the pill sleep comes swift as rain and I am grateful despite turbulent dreams. The second night is even better: oblivion, pure and sweet. But the third night sleep will not come, even after I take a second dose, so I lie flat on my back in my bed while the pills murmur through me, amorphus shapes flickering rosy and golden in the deep of the bedroom sky.

When the sun rises I put on a pot of coffee, toss the orange canister in the trash.

Marlene comes over early for our outing: to the cemetery to see Gerald, to the nursing home to see Ed, and then an early dinner either at the TooJay's next to the mall or the Cheesecake Factory in it. Normally when we go out together we fuss awhile first over who will drive—each of us insisting that the other need not trouble herself—but today I'm only too eager to seize on her lame excuse of having blocked me in.

We don't stay long at the cemetery. When Gerald first died I used to talk when I came here, bring him up to speed about our children and friends, the neighborhood—anything I could think of. But whatever this was supposed to make me feel, it didn't, besides which I hated doing it. If Gerald is anywhere he can hear me, I figure, then he probably already knows what little news I have to bring. Another of our old friends kicks off, he's bound to see them before I can get here to see him. And if he's not anywhere, which is, after all, what we both always expected would be the case, then what am I doing recapping TV shows and mah-jongg winnings to a patch of earth? So I come and stand around for a few minutes with my head down, place a rock on the headstone; then Marlene and I go pay respects to a few other people we know who are buried here, but she has some trouble with her knees and in the sun it's pushing ninety, so before we know it we're back in her Cadillac. “My boat,” she says, grinning reflexively at her favorite of her own few jokes. “One of these days I'll pick a name for it, get it painted on the trunk.”

“Big white letters,” I say.

“Fancy cursive script,” she adds.

“But what do you call it?”

“
The Part D
.”

Laughing, we pull into the parking lot of the nursing home where Ed now lives. The building is painted the same peach color as my patio.

Ed seems smaller, like some animal that fits itself to whatever shell it finds. He likes that they let him wear his pajama clothes all day long instead of making him get dressed, like Marlene always used to, even though they had nowhere to go.

“How's Gerald?” he asks me.

“Ed, you know better,” Marlene says, exasperated, even as I say, “Oh, he says hello.”

Marlene and I look at each other. I look away, down, at Ed, who says nothing, the paradox of our answers either somehow resolved or else unregistered in his mind. I excuse myself to the restroom and don't come back. I take a seat in the lobby and then text Marlene that I will wait for her there. I pick up a magazine from a table and flip the pages without looking at them. It occurs to me I have no idea how long this visit is supposed to last. Is the fact that Ed will probably forget we were ever here an argument for staying as long as possible, or does it excuse cutting things short? How much time is enough time?

“I'm sorry,” I say to Marlene. We're standing in the parking lot; she's fishing in her purse for her keys. “I know I shouldn't have done that, but it seemed . . . kinder.”

“Pity isn't kindness,” Marlene says, and I don't say that Ed was hardly the one I was trying to be kind to. “It's important to get him to focus—to retain things. Even if he can't do it he must try. It's the only way to, the only way to keep him here.” I walk around the car and hug Marlene, whose whole body is shuddering. Her skin feels like a piece of paper that has gone through the laundry folded up in a pocket. Gently, I pull her keys from her hand; she lets me have them. Her rings are so loose on her fingers it's hard not to take them, too.

Marlene says I should go to my house and she's fine to get herself home from there, but I won't have it. I drive her back to her house, cut the engine, and apologize again. She tells me to please just forget it, unbuckles her safety belt, opens the passenger door. I give her her keys back and she says we'll make dinner up—later this week or next, some night there's no mah-jongg, we'll figure it out. We say our good-byes and I set out to walk across the development back to my house. I cross a street. I see a crow. It is evening, the sky orange-pink at its rim and blue as winter up above. A few jet trails and a pale scrim of moon. I walk past palms and bougainvillea, decorative grapefruit trees and spiky ferns. Lizards skitter across the sidewalk, its curve tracing the shape of the fake lake as it leads me home.

It's late when I hear the noise outside. I mute the TV, put my slippers on and pass through the dark house and slide the glass door open and step onto the patio. Through the bug screens the house lights on the far side of the water seem to twinkle like distant stars. I can see a shape among the shadows; something out there is alive.

I hit the perimeter lights. A couple of teenagers appear in my grass. The girl is on top of the boy, her hair in a tight braid past her shoulders, blue veins glowing beneath the pale skin of her chest. Her shirt in the grass beside them; his jeans are open but not pushed down. She jumps to her feet but then stands there, making no attempt to cover herself, squinting her eyes toward the patio as if she can't quite see me through the suddenly glaring light.

“This was very stupid,” I say, in my most imposing teacher voice, only slightly betrayed now by a quaver as I get louder. “Monumentally stupid. It's dangerous out here at night—you have no idea!”

“Lady, this is like the most boring place on earth,” the boy says, rising to his feet with the girl's shirt in his hand, positioning himself behind her as though he were the one half undressed. She reaches back for the shirt and takes it, brings it forward and holds it up in both hands, shakes a few blades of grass from the fabric and only then grudgingly puts it on before walking off without so much as a word. The boy follows close on her heels through the succession of unfenced yards. When I'm sure they're gone I shut the lights off and go back in.

In the fridge there are two boneless chicken breasts, a pound of lean ground beef I'd meant for meatballs, and a packet of deli-sliced turkey. I gather it all into my arms and carry it out to the patio, out the screen door, into the dark. I kneel in the warm grass and peel back wrappers—the first chicken breast bounces off a tree trunk; the second hits the water with a plop. I toss the slick deli rounds like Frisbees and they land like lily pads but sink after a few seconds. Cold beef squishes between my fingers and mucks up under my nails. I ignore the rising drone of flies that my work has drawn, focusing instead on a welcome wave of exhaustion coming over me, and what a blessing it would be to ride that wave—lie down in the grass by the calm black water, wake up next to my husband on a white beach in Macau.

W
e lived in a sludge-colored building with open-air hallways and stairs. My unit was on the second floor and faced the road. Terese and Mazie had a ground-floor unit that faced the back lot and a shuttered strip mall across the way. (You couldn't call them apartments, quite, but “rooms” seemed sad, somehow, so I went with units. The building itself I called the Hardluck Arms.) I was in my unit, watching a nature program about sharks. It said that because of how their gills work, sharks can never stop swimming or they drown. Now what would that be like, I wondered, to live your whole life in motion—to never even know what it meant to rest?

This was in Alabama in a small town I think it's fair to assume you've never heard of, halfway between Tuscaloosa and Mobile. The closest decent-size place is actually Meridian, but I was having a disinclination toward Mississippi around that time. My little brother, Benny, was a lawyer in Tallahassee, which was—in the other direction—far but not as far as it felt like; Florida can be that way. And he had a beach house on the panhandle in Carrabelle, which was even closer: six hours, about, and you could do it in less if you took 43 to 10 and didn't stop to eat. I hadn't had occasion—that is, invitation—to visit Benny in a while, but when I did go I preferred the smaller roads and the slower pace. If you were of a certain mind-set, say my ex-wife's, you might read quite a bit into that statement. But then if you were my ex-wife you might do all kinds of things, such as the things you did (or I thought you did) that made me do what I did—no reason to rehash particulars here—the upshot of all of which is her back with her mother in Oxford, and me disinclined toward Mississippi, established here at the Hardluck Arms.