The Hypothetical Girl (9 page)

She had a lot to do taking care of her father. Doctor’s appointments, outings for fresh air, cleaning-up activities. She was busy. Not a lot of free time for boating. Or dating. Or dating on a boat. Or boating on a date. However you wanted to look at it.

“Mmm,” said her father as she tipped his glass of Ensure to his mouth.

“Yes, mmm, Daddy, drink up.”

He spat.

It was one of those unglamorous moments that characterized her life. The sort that make you want to hide from rather than meet people. So she continued her flirtation in the abstract: land woman, wiping old man up, and boat man, sailing the high seas.

Suddenly a car drove up.
Is it him?
she wondered. She was gardening again, her father parked in the shade. Out emerged a man in a brown uniform. “Truck broke
down,” he said. It was not the boat man but the UPS guy. He handed her a clipboard to sign. Then he handed her a box.

They had begun to send frequent packages, almost every other day, with photographs. She sent him a compass; he sent her groceries. She sent him a pair of warm socks. He sent more groceries. Chocolate-covered raisins. Mango jam. Whole-wheat pita bread. Macadamia nuts. She sent him a nice fountain pen. He sent pumpkin seeds. Rice cakes. Protein powder.

She took the package inside and went out to get her father. He watched her open the box. She fed him a small piece of chocolate and he smiled. “Mphgatagata-ahwaah,” he said.

“Exactly my thoughts,” she replied.

“Does he think I am poor?” she asked her friend Elin, on the phone that night.

“He thinks you are hungry,” she replied.

“Maybe he is fattening you up,” said Noa, the visiting nurse who helped her with her father once a week, taking his blood pressure. Checking his weight. Cleaning him up nicely.

“Like the witch was fattening Hansel?” asked Allison.

“Or like the crazy guy in
Silence of the Lambs
.”

“Thanks for that image,” Allison said.

“You started it,” she laughed.

They sent each other more pictures they took with their cell phones. Allison sent him one of her kayak.
Chuck sent a picture of his left eye. She sent a picture of her oars; he sent a picture of his jaw. She sent pictures of her rock sculptures. He sent an ear. She began putting together the puzzle of him. But the jaw picture was too big for the eye picture and the ear was much, much too big. When she had assembled most of his face, he looked like a monster. Or a piece of art by David Hockney. Neither was particularly romantic. But taken apart the pictures were very appealing. It was a nice jaw. And a nice left eye, she thought. The ear was a perfectly acceptable-looking ear.

Around this time her father became ill and had to go into the hospital. His lungs, said the doctor, were “filling up.”

“Filling up?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the doctor.

“Is that bad?”

“Well, it isn’t good.”

“I mean is it normal?”

“It isn’t abnormal.”

In this way they spoke in circles. She noticed that most of her conversations with the doctor were like that, never getting anywhere in particular, just round and round.

But her conversations with Chuck were like arrows; they pierced to the heart of things. “I balanced a big rock on a bigger rock today, and the way it worked out there was a little window at the bottom you could peer through.”

“And see the sun on the water,” said Chuck.

“Yes.”

“And the shore and houses,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You could frame things with the little window in the rocks.”

“Exactly,” she said.

When she told him her father was sick, that his lungs were filling up, Chuck said simply: “That is the way many old people die.”

“It is?” she asked. It felt like he had stuck a vacuum hose down her throat and stopped her own lungs. She felt choked.

“Yes,” he said.

The honesty sucked all the air out of her, but somehow it was also refreshing. It was a physical oxymoron. She called the doctor. “I hear this is how many old people die, their lungs filling up. Is that so?”

“It isn’t a fiction,” the doctor said.

“And when were you planning on telling me this?”

“I wasn’t hiding anything.”

Then the doctor was silent. His silence annoyed her but it also seemed to be indicative of something. He was not going to tell her things that might be uncomfortable. Or he would tell her just enough to not be lying. That night she called Chuck. “My dad is on a ventilator,” she said.

“He is dying,” said Chuck.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“It is very likely,” he said.

She swooned, actually felt her knees weaken. But she also felt her heart puff up, with something she thought might be love, for Chuck, the man on the boat, the only honest person in her life.

She sat next to her father the entire following week in the hospital. She held his hand and sang to him. She sang “New York, New York” and “Sunrise, Sunset” from
Fiddler on the Roof
, a song that had once made him tear up. She sang to him:

She had a beautiful voice. When she sang
Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time …
she felt it. Her father squeezed her hand. “Daddy,” she said, and she leaned over to kiss his cheek. He smiled.

By morning he was gone.

Allison took a break from Chuck for a few weeks. She was sitting shiva in her house. She had to write to everyone they knew, take care of the business that comes when a person who has lived a long time dies. “Closing up shop,” her aunt Simcha called it.

Allison dropped off the wheelchair, the plastic device that made the toilet higher, the rails for the bed, at
Goodwill. When she drove back home there was a truck in front of her house. She thought it might be the UPS man again. “Is the UPS truck still broke down?” she asked the man sitting in the truck.

“What?” said the man.

“Your truck.”

“Yes, it’s mine. Wait—what do you mean?”

She recognized the voice. It was him. Chuck. The man on the boat. “Chuck?” she asked.

The man who was Chuck hopped out of the vehicle. He did not look like the boat man that she had had in her imagination. He did not look like the photographs from the cell phone. But if she looked at each part of him she recognized them. The eye, the jaw, the ear. But he was very, very small. Allison tried not to gape. He was … what was the word? Not a dwarf, because they had those largish heads and that particular shape to their faces. What was the word?

She remembered the time when she was about five and there had been a very small woman in the grocery store, in front of them in the line. “Look, Mama, an elf!” she had whispered.

Her mother had smiled. “There are no such things as elves,” she said. “She is …”

“Allison?”

“Chuck!” she said.

Midget
. That was the word. Or, in the politically correct vernacular of the moment,
little person
. He was
very, very small and yet his nose was big, with veins on it,
from the alcohol
, she thought.
The bar by his sloop, the
Tequila.

“Well, come on in,” she said, opening her front door. Inside were more boxes, her father’s clothes; she was giving them all away. And boxes and boxes of Ensure. She had arranged to drive it to a nursing home one town over.

Chuck looked at the boxes of Ensure. “Terrible stuff,” he said. “Poison, really.”

“Yes, my father hated it.”

“I brought you some …”

“Let me guess … groceries?” she asked, smiling.

“Yes,” he said.

In the back of his truck were bags and bags of food. Boxes of bottled water. Exotic juices. Cheese from far, far away. Distant Nordic countries famed for their cheese. Wine from Brazil.
Who ever heard of Brazilian wine?
she thought. Seeds, nuts, dried fruit. Dried apple rings made into chips.
Apple chips! Who ever heard of apple chips?
It was more than she could eat in a year. A lifetime maybe.

And flowers. At least twenty huge sunflowers, with long, thick, fuzzy green stalks with fuzzy leaves.
The tallest flowers
, she thought as Chuck carried them inside, and that seemed to her like something that mattered.

“Thank you, Chuck,” she said. Allison looked at him and he looked back, with the big sad eyes of the cell phone
pictures. He glanced across the pond to the place where her rock sculptures hugged the shore. Where she might look out and frame anything she wanted through the crack between the smaller and bigger rock. He glanced at Allison again. Alas, she wasn’t his type after all.

“Namaste,” he said.

T
his is the part where he appears. It is simple. An
x
. He has “favorited” you. Then he “winks” at you, and finally he writes to you.

“You’re so pretty,” he types. You read that and look at his picture. There he is. It is like a small but tidy lightning bolt has hit you in the temple. Ka-zing. You have been struck. It was neatly done. You “wink” and “favorite” him back.

I
magine. That simple. Hit by lightning and yet left so whole and alive. And maybe, you are thinking, if it is possible, even improved upon. It is a healing lightning bolt. You go to sleep thinking that someone somewhere thinks you are pretty. And this someone, he is beautiful. You think that his face is like a country you visited long ago and were happy in. Maybe it was in another lifetime. You go to sleep smiling and in the
middle of the night you have a dream that your body has developed the ability to hum.

T
his is the part where he comes to your door. You have avoided this for weeks. Partly because you are not sure you are as pretty in person as you are in your picture. But partly because you love that humming thing your body has learned how to do in your sleep; it is like you have developed your own personal motel magic fingers. You are afraid if you meet him that it will be lost.

“H
ey,” he says.

“Hey,” you say back. His voice is like a beautiful, ragged engine. It has lived a long time in his throat—it turns out he is almost exactly your age—and it makes a sort of hoarse sound. It is a lived-in, been-there, done-that voice.

H
e has come to walk your dog with you. So you do. You get the leash and go outside to walk your dog. Your dog is very old and he notices this. The way he sort of stumbles on the curbs. The man notices that the dog’s collar is very loose and that the dog could slip out of it any time, and almost does.

“Yeah,” you say, “it is just an act we do, this
walking the dog
thing. We do it for the neighbors. They like us better this way.”

The man laughs. It is a good and real laugh, a down-home meat-and-potatoes laugh, and you love it. The dog sniffs for a long time at a certain tree trunk. You stand there with this man, waiting, while the dog sniffs and pees and sniffs some more. You want to look at the man and see if he is the same him of the favoriting. The same him as the one who makes your body hum. You snatch a glance, small as a second. Small as a baby pea. And wonder of wonders: He is. The very same. Man.

T
his is the part where you make a plan. You will go out for a drink. You and the man. You are nervous. You are nervous because you like this man so much. He is a stranger but somehow not a stranger. He is, you think, the person you have been waiting to meet all your life. How could that be? That is ridiculous. You know that it is. But still. He is. He is waiting in the parking lot of the bar and you go in together. It is a slow night. You order beers and go to sit at a quiet corner table. Immediately you begin to talk and so does he. He tells you his life story, in an abbreviated fashion, of course. Wives, children, land, music. You tell him yours back. Job, dog, child, house. All the cards are laid out, face up, and you both look at them and somehow in the middle of this you have taken his hand and you are holding it. He is holding yours back and his is a hand you have been waiting to hold all
your life. How could this be? It is ridiculous. But there it is. That same hand.

R
evelation: Meeting the man does not stop your body from humming at night. In fact, your body is now a harmonica. You are trying out a few tunes with it. And you find it can improvise. It is a wise old magic-fingers harmonica, your body. What a thing. You would like to tell the man he has turned your body into a musical instrument but you are too shy, and besides, he might not entirely understand. But deep inside you suspect it; his body is humming too at night, when you are not there. The harmonica of him is playing the same songs, perhaps, and wouldn’t that be crazy?

T
his is the part where you spend the night with the man. There is not a lot of discussion about this or planning. You just do and it is the most natural thing, so easy. All night long you kiss and touch and it is like you have been waiting for just this body to meet with yours, to consume and be consumed by you. It is just like that.

“Are you noticing it?” you finally ask. You do not say what it is, but it doesn’t matter, because he nods and you think he might be crying a little. “I am noticing it,” he says.

S
ome days you go to his house and you just sit there, side by side. If you touch it is like little lightning bolts
all over now. And this is something, because you are over fifty years old and way beyond the lightning bolt stage of love, you think. When he kisses you and you kiss back it is like you are home. Home being the man himself. This is ridiculous, you think, as you hardly know this man. But there it is: home.

T
he man now knows a few real things about you. That not only do you have an old dog but you also have five cats. That you do not always clean your car. That you have a husband somewhere that you never see. That you have a child who does ballet. That you do not always wash your dishes immediately after you eat. The man says he must notice these things because he is trying to figure out if this thing of you, this reality of you, fits with the reality of him. He must look at you this way because he is practical, he says. “I am a logical guy,” he chants. And while love is sweet, reality is very important. You take a look back at the reality of him. You notice he has the most beautiful hands. And at that exact moment he says: “You have the most beautiful hands.”