Forty Rooms (30 page)

She became aware of the silence spreading wider and wider between them.

“Of course I did,” she said, speaking with something much like desperation—and, just like that, the wasps fell silent, and she knew it to be the absolute truth. “Of course I did. I still do. It’s almost as if—you know how you don’t choose your parents or your children? Well, after twenty-three years of marriage you don’t choose your spouse either.”

“Such passion,” he said, but he was smiling now, and as he put his hand over hers, she thought: And this too was easy, and it’s not too late, nothing is too late—and for another minute they sat, no longer drinking, in companionable silence, until she brushed his cheek, quickly, almost shyly, and said: “I’m going back upstairs. Join me soon, before I fall asleep.”

In the shadowy mirror above the bar, among the splintered reflections of tumblers and decanters, the dimly glimpsed middle-aged couple were having a conversation of their own. They talked about Rich’s difficult adolescence—they suspected him of dabbling in drugs, there was trouble at school. He was in favor of harsh disciplinary measures, but she wondered whether they shouldn’t take a family trip instead. They had never done it; of course, for years money had been tight, the house had sucked away everything, but they could try to do it now, could they not? Granted, his inheritance was not quite what he had expected, but wouldn’t it be worth a one-time splurge, it might bring them all closer together. He did not think much of the idea; how quick she was to spend his parents’ money, he said, what little there was of it. Hurriedly, before things veered off in an unpleasant direction, she mentioned Emma’s being less communicative of late,
not returning her phone calls with the usual promptness, which she found a bit worrisome. Must she always be so oppressive, he said—the girl was entitled to cut loose in her college years. So they moved on to Eugene’s girlfriend; things were clearly serious between the two. She thought Adriana lovely, but he said that he doubted she’d make their son happy; she might be nothing but an Eastern European gold digger, he said. Conversation lapsed briefly after that, until she thought to mention her mother’s fragile health. She was hoping, she said, that they could persuade her to leave Russia and move in with them at last. He did not reply. She nursed her one drink. He was drinking steadily. His eyes were becoming bloodshot. After a while, he started to talk, staring directly ahead, past the bar, past the bottles, at whatever he saw in the mirror, beyond the mirror. Much of what he said made little sense to her, but he seemed to imply that her life had been easy, that he wished he too could stay home all day long drifting from room to room, playing peekaboo with babies, overseeing the domestics. She could not begin to imagine the stress of providing for a wife and six children, he said, she took things for granted, she took him for granted, she never asked about his work, did she even know what he did, she found him boring, he supposed—but she should take a long, hard look at herself instead. She held on to her silence with the tenacity of a drowning woman clinging to a log, until she could stand it no longer, until she found herself crying out that he—that he should drink less.

He turned to consider her, his reddened eyes bulging.

“When did you stop dyeing your hair?” he asked, his tongue slow in his mouth. “You are showing your age.”

She stood up and walked away, leaving him hunched over the
bar—the man who had made her feel safe, the man whom she loved. In the doorway, she paused to look at him. His back was toward her, the broad back of an aging athlete, obscuring the martini glass she knew to be trapped between his hands. He was, she realized, still wearing his suit and tie. They will be wrinkled tomorrow, she thought, I’ll need to drop them off at the dry cleaner’s in the morning, I must remember to defrost the chicken too, I know I should try harder, but everything will be fine in the end, we just need to work on some things.

As she trudged up the stairs, she wondered which of the two conversations had been real—or had it been both, or had it been neither? She found she could not decide; though she had her suspicions, of course.

36. Garage

A Taxonomy of Neglected Possessions

1. Things that will be used someday soon (if, that is, one doesn’t forget they are there): spare batteries, extra lightbulbs, extension cords, a shriveled-up pair of gardening gloves, a second hose, a box of candles, a tower of plastic cups. One tends to think of them as reserves maintained against the gray forces of entropy—if something breaks or runs out or gets lost in the house, there is a replacement waiting in the wings; yet as time passes and the batteries and cords turn dusty and drab, becoming an ingrown part of the garage shelves and corners, they may end up contributing to the encroachment of entropy rather than holding it at bay. But not if they get used first, of course.
   
2. Things that don’t appear to be of much use in the foreseeable future but may come in handy next year, or at some point thereafter: three and a half cans of Paris Rain paint (in case they repainted the since repainted guest bedroom in the old color), converter plugs (in case they decided to take that trip overseas after all), portable heaters (in case the furnace malfunctioned) and fans (in case the air-conditioning broke down), a guide to the restaurants of Venice (see above), a giant fish tank, a yoga mat, a ski mask, a pair of hiking boots, a set of golf clubs, and on, and on. True, they do take up space, but one can’t just throw perfectly good things away. And one never knows.
   
3. Things that are broken but may be fixed someday: an old vacuum cleaner, four or five expired computers, two maimed bicycles, a box full of cameras and phones, a microscope, a flashlight, a nineteenth-century porcelain cup with its handle knocked off and preserved in two separate pieces.
   
4. Things that are ontological mysteries: nuts that fit unknown bolts, keys that open no doors, an unlabeled homemade videotape that gets stuck every time one tries to play it. Throwing them away would be tantamount to admitting that one no longer expects anything unexpected to happen in life. Though that may be a good thing.
   
5. Things that will be discarded in due time, but not just yet: a baby monitor, a toddler’s bib, a child’s bike helmet, a child’s pair of goggles, a child’s telescope, a hedgehog that looks like a bear, its nose spilling plush of a muddy brown color, once beloved by a boy who got married last March; a saltshaker in the shape of the Taj Mahal; an empty plastic case that once housed magnetic poetry tiles. On second thought, the last item is best tossed out without further delay. Even clutter has its limits.
   
6. Things that are the only remains of one’s childhood home (sold last year, gone decades before that), brought over by one’s mother, not yet sorted: a shoebox filled with papers, and a duffel bag containing a handful of pipes wrapped in a thick gray-and-white sweater. These are, for the moment, relegated to the darkest corner of the garage, behind a battalion of cleaning supplies. There is no need to rush, there will be time enough to decide where to put them later—once one is able to look at them properly, without breaking into tears at the sight of the familiar handwriting, at the ghostly smell of tobacco, reaching one from another country, another century, another life.
   

37. Deck

Forty

There were sixteen large flowerpots on the covered deck, positioned at regular intervals along the wall, and a separate tray with cooking herbs on the table. They had been her mother’s pet project: upon moving in with them two years before, she had declared their house too much like a museum, no greenery anywhere, and had set out to remedy the situation by assiduous gardening. Unwilling to brave the steep stairs down to the yard, she had spent most of her days on the deck, pruning and clipping and talking to herself.

Nearly three full weeks after her mother’s death, she remembered that she had neglected to water the plants, and came out to look at them. Most were, indeed, beginning to turn brown, especially the ones at the deck’s western edge, inundated as they were for hours with the afternoon sun. The farthest on the right was the only one that appeared to be healthy; it had even sprouted
a disturbingly glossy, plastic-like red growth—could it be a flower?—amidst the swollen protuberances of its leaves. But the third from the left seemed dead, all black and brittle, and a few others fared almost as poorly. She stared at them for a long blank minute, then dragged the hose over and flooded each pot with water. She had no idea what any of them were, or how much moisture they needed.

When she returned to check on them some hours later, evening had already fallen. Here and there water was still standing in the pots, glistening with the pink of the sunset. The plants looked worse than before—dead with a final kind of deadness. She dropped into the nearest chair and began to cry.

“There, there,” said her mother’s voice. She lifted her eyes to see her mother bending over the pots at the far edge of the deck, hazily outlined by the setting sun.

She stopped crying, squinted against the light.

“Mama?” Oddly, she wasn’t surprised. “Is that really you?”

Her mother was wearing her bright green gardening gloves. She did not look up, busy poking the crumbling plants with a rubber finger.

“Forty days,” she said matter-of-factly.

“What?”

“Have you forgotten all of your people’s traditions? Spirits loiter in places of their past for forty days, to say good-bye to all the things they loved before finally moving on. Or at least that’s the idea. I suppose if one’s spirit has nowhere better to go, it may hover about forever, or at least until it figures things out. But not me. I’ve always hated good-byes. Forty days—and I’m off.”

Dimly she remembered the subdued gathering held on the fortieth day after her grandmother’s passing; she had been ten at the time. “Yes, I knew that,” she muttered, shielding her eyes; the brightness was spreading across the sky. Her mother was wielding a large pair of shears now, snipping in silence; it was difficult to see her expression clearly in the sunset’s shimmering glow, but she seemed peaceful, smiling a little to herself, perhaps even happy—happier than she had looked in years.

Mama has come to say good-bye to her plants but not to me, she thought; after all, it’s merely by accident that I happen to be here. But then, it shouldn’t seem so very out of character—hadn’t she spent more time with her pots than with her own daughter while she was alive? Or—was it perhaps my own failure to pay more attention to her, to let her reminisce about the past as she tried to once or twice, when I had no time to sit and listen—when I had a roast burning in the oven or Paul’s shirts to iron or Maggie’s homework to check? Oh God, she talked to the flowers, she must have been lonely . . . And because her eyes were beginning to brim over again and she was suddenly afraid that she might fall apart, or worse, speak harshly, she asked the first irrelevant thing that came into her mind: “So . . . why forty? Why forty days?”

“It’s always forty,” her mother replied, snipping, smiling. “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean—Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses’ forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be
a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, forty years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “I see.”

They were silent for a minute. Her mother would not stop her puttering, her back bent, her hands always moving, strands of white hair falling over her face, so she could never see her clearly, could never meet her eyes directly. In the evening stillness, the gardening shears went on making sharp little sounds, unpleasant like the clicking of teeth, the scraping of claws. Bits of greenery rained onto the floorboards.

“You’ve made a terrible mess of my little garden,” her mother said at last, not altogether kindly, as she stepped back to survey the plants. “You are at an age where it would do you good to learn some particulars about the world. Making things grow is a kind of immortality too. But that’s the trouble with people who prize words above all else—you don’t know anything practical, anything useful. Your father is just like that too. Philosophy this and truth that, but I don’t believe he could ever tell a cactus from a begonia. The world becomes obscure and remote when you look at it through a mesh of words, you know. Like those semi-transparent sheets of paper they used to put over illustrations in old books, to protect them—it just ended up turning the picture all hazy so you could barely make out what it was supposed to be in the first place.”

And this was just like her mother too—she had never seemed to comprehend the urge to create things that had no tangibility to them, things that were not flowers or feasts or offspring.

“Words don’t make things hazy,” she said, feeling defensive. “They clarify.”

“Well,” her mother said tranquilly, “I suppose that depends on the words. The words that clarify don’t seem to be your kinds of words. Too small for you, aren’t they? What is this plant called, for instance?”

She looked at the spiky monstrosity in the pot, almost hoping that its name might pop into her head of its own accord, as if the name was its perfect essence, the summation of its nature, to be revealed to those who studied it closely. Hadn’t Adam and Eve guessed at the right, God-given names of all the creatures and plants in the Garden through mere contemplation?

“I don’t know,” she admitted at last.

“You see my point,” said her mother triumphantly. “Not everything is
soul
and
love
and
art
and
happiness
. In fact, very often, the bigger the word, the smaller the kernel of substance within it—it’s been rubbed flat, worn-out by all the use. Maybe that’s why it’s harder to be a great poet than a great novelist. A novel can be full of little words, as fresh and particular and unlike one another as a meadow of forget-me-nots.”