The Whole World Over (49 page)

The waiter seemed to appear from nowhere. "Finished, sir?"

Michael looked at Saga, a question. She nodded to her lap.

"Yes, yes," he said.

"The soufflés will be ready in ten minutes. May I bring coffee or
tea?" Saga heard the waiter but did not look up.

"Maybe we'll just have the check," said Michael.

"No!" said Saga, but still she kept her face down. "I do want my
soufflé."

Michael sighed. "Good. Then coffee for me. Double espresso."

Again, she felt his hand on hers. "My life is good now. I want yours
to be the same. I don't know what else to say."

Saga pulled her hand away, though she knew it was childish. She
wiped her eyes and looked up at her healthy, successful cousin who
couldn't be content with what he had; no, he had to take what she had.
Or that was how it felt. "Well, you
could
say that you and Denise will
take the cute house."

Michael smiled at her, a Saint Bernard smile, mournful and guilty.

"Never mind," she said. "Let's have our soufflés, okay?"

"You're going to love this place," said Michael. "I promise you."

"Be careful what you promise, isn't that what they say?" said Saga.
Or was it be careful what you
wish
? And then it came, the small steaming
delicacy that looked like little more than a droopy brown hat. She
inhaled the steam; it smelled woefully similar to the cologne of the man
at the very next table. She ate it anyway: every bite and slowly. It was
food the texture of love, sweet and airy, warm and moist; the taste didn't
matter so much. She and Michael did not speak again until they stood
on the street and he embraced her.

"If it makes you feel any better," he said, "Frida and Pansy are pretty
pissed at me too these days. They think Dad's favoring me because I'm
giving him the grandchildren he never knew he wanted so much."

Saga tried to smile, to share his simple joke. "I guess you must be very
sure about what
you
want," she said.

"It's becoming a father. I feel like I have so much catching up to do."

"Oh, well," said Saga, "I could tell you a thing or two about that.
The catching-up part."

Michael gave her a searching look. They said good-bye; they would
meet again on the weekend, to see the cute house, the consolation prize.
That would make sense, wouldn't it? Just about all of Saga's life was a
consolation prize.

SHE WALKED UPTOWN
. She had an envelope of notices to post, this
time about meetings. As much as he did not like having too many people
in his life, Stan needed more volunteers. "We've been discovered," he
said. "Which is the good news and the bad. It means we're about to
become a dumping ground for half the abandoned creatures of Brooklyn
and Queens. Yesterday I got a call from a Dalmatian rescue league
on Staten Island. Katy bar the friggin' door."

The notice read:

Join the
TRUE PROTECTORS!
Make a real difference in the lives
of the city's
SMALLEST, MOST HELPLESS CITIZENS!
Be a part of
the
REVOLUTION
against malice, abandonment, so-called "mercy
killing," and overpopulation!! You will
SAVE LIVES.
Come see what a
MEANINGFUL MISSION
we are on, and meet your
FELLOW CRUSADERS.
The beer and coffee are on us. Drop by and check us out,
YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY!

At the bottom, it gave Stan's e-mail address and information about
how to get to the falafel place. Saga had suggested to Stan that he hold
the meeting in Manhattan, where more people were likely to show up,
but he had barked, "I want people who are serious! Committed! No
fuckin' dilettantes need apply. Subway scares 'em off, then screw 'em."

In his typically grumpy way, he'd muttered something about how it
was finally time to "get real," make it an organization with some kind
of official recognition. "By recognition, I mean cold hard cash," he said.
"I mean, like these taxi fares are busting my balls." They were in a cab,
taking the Airedale puppies to the vet. "But to get the cash, I need the
status. I need to knock the socks off those executioners in Midtown who
call themselves animal lovers. Yeah, like Hitler loved kids. Did you
know he gave medals to women who had lots of kids? The right kind!
Not the scruffy kind!" Stan laughed his creepy laugh, all the while petting
the puppies, soothing them with his pale bony hands.

Saga tried to imagine Stan raising money. This was difficult.

Perhaps people could grow into what they needed to be. Sometimes
they didn't even know what they wanted to be until it stared them in the
face. For example, it was true what Michael had said: after years of
claiming he couldn't care less, Uncle Marsden was in love with the idea
of being a grandfather. "Now I'll be a bona fide patriarch," he'd said
to Saga after Denise and Michael admired the cradle. "What do you say
to that, my dear?"

Patriarch.
Brown, she thought: a temple of a word, a shiny red brown,
like the surface of a chestnut. "You're a natural," she had assured him.

After that, he began to dig deep into the storage rooms on the third
floor, searching for further mementos of childhood: not just Michael's
but Pansy's, Frida's, and his own; even Aunt Liz's girlhood. He'd sanded
and repainted a wooden rocking giraffe just before Christmas, tied a
large bow around its neck to make it a gift for Denise. But when Pansy
showed up first on Christmas Eve, she saw it and cried out, "That's
mine! Where did you find that?"

"Well, if you have a child one day, I'm sure Michael will be happy to
hand it on to you," Uncle Marsden told her.

"Dad! Dad, it's mine, to save for my children first, not Michael's!"

Uncle Marsden had been unable to convince her that she should give
it up, even temporarily, and the grudging rift between them had made
Christmas tense. In the three months since then, Uncle Marsden had
given Saga the job of finding out which unearthed treasures belonged to
which cousin.

Two weeks ago he had declared, "Time to clean all this stuff out of
the attic, once and for all! And I will not be a party to any materialistic
feuds. If those girls are planning on families of their own, I'm all for it—
but they'd better get cracking. Time waits for no man, and Mother
Nature waits for no woman!"

Now it was clear that he was preparing not just for the arrival of his
grandchildren but for his own departure—and Saga's—from the house.
Perhaps she should have felt angry at him rather than at Michael, but
she couldn't.

Most of her cousins' belongings were in boxes they'd already labeled,
but Saga did have to bring down all the old books and lay them in piles
on the living room floor so that Pansy and Frida could divide them up
properly. This was comforting work, because it was so much like working
with Fenno.

Just this past weekend, Frida had come down from Boston and filled
her car with boxes. Afterward, she'd had lunch with Saga on the porch.
They'd carried out mugs of chicken noodle soup and pulled quilts across
their knees. It had been humid, almost warm for March; fog hovered
over roads and lawns.

"How are you, Saga? I mean, really?" asked Frida.

"Pretty good, I guess," Saga had answered.

"Do you feel like things are still improving, like you're . . ."

"Getting better?"

Frida laughed nervously. It took a lot to make Frida nervous. "I hate
to phrase it as if you're sick. Obviously, you're not sick."

If she needed to answer that, Saga didn't know how. So often she
had
felt sick, sick the way that maybe people with vertigo felt sick, like a
sickness of not knowing your place, the place you were supposed to
occupy in space. "The worst things don't seem to bother me much anymore,"
she told Frida. "I don't get the headaches, I haven't had seizures,
writing's no problem, or using . . . everyday things. Mostly."

She wondered if Uncle Marsden had told Frida about her checkup the
week before. Saga hadn't been to the neurologist in six months, and he
was pleased, saying that she had made unexpected progress. Though
Saga could have said no, she always allowed Uncle Marsden to sit with
her while she took the peculiar series of tests measuring eyesight, hearing,
coordination, and memory skills. He was the one to fill out her
medical history. Letting him take over made her feel more like a child,
but when she looked at the forms—the fine print, the numbered questions
and rows of boxes to check—she felt queasy. Uncle Marsden's certainty
was a relief. "I know it all by heart, my dear," he'd say as he
ticked off the boxes. "Easy as pie."

Frida nodded at Saga's good news. "I'm glad to hear it. And Dad says
you get away a lot." She said this with a smile revealing that her dad had
expressed his displeasure.

"I go to the city on the train."

"You've made friends there?"

Saga hesitated, but why should she keep friendships a secret? "I've
met a Scottish man who runs a bookstore and another man who's a
therapist."

"A psychotherapist? He's a friend?" Frida sipped her soup. "If this is
too nosy, just say, but are you seeing anyone? I mean, a therapist?"

"No. That stopped a little while after the PT stopped." Saga braced
herself for more advice. Why did people always think she wanted their
advice? But Frida just stared into the fog and drank her soup in rhythmic
little sips.

"Well," she said at last, "I've been seeing someone for more than a
year. I fought against it, but now I'm glad. I was lonelier and angrier
than I wanted to know."

"Angry?" Saga meant it more as an expression of surprise than a
question. But Frida seemed happy to answer.

"Mostly at Dad, because he seems so oblivious to me." She turned to
Saga and smiled. "And for a while I was angry at him because of you. As
if you'd taken our place—as if you were the one and only daughter now.
His Cordelia."

Saga's confusion over the name must have looked like fear, because
Frida leaned over and touched Saga's knee. "Don't worry. I'm past that.
Pansy can't stop being angry about it, but she's angry about everything
these days. You might not know this, but that nice guy she brought with
her for Thanksgiving and Christmas broke up with her last month."

"Oh," said Saga. "That's sad."

Frida nodded. "Sometimes I'm just as glad I never get asked out these
days. I seem to have reached the end of my shelf life. Maybe I've been
too passive, assuming my brains and my sense of humor would hook
some passing suitor." She peered into her mug. She spooned up noodles
from the bottom and ate them with a satisfied look.

Saga said, "You haven't given up, I hope."

Frida shrugged. "I have a crush on my therapist, and sometimes that
seems like enough. But Pansy's still out there fighting the good fight.
She's paid to join some fancy matchmaking service. I think she has a
date this week."

Saga nodded. She didn't want to talk about Pansy's love life. Pansy
was prettier than Frida by far, but if Saga had been a man, she'd have
gone for Frida over Pansy any day.

"What about you, Saga?"

"Me?" The quilt slipped from Saga's knees.

"Any guys in the city? How about the guy with the bookstore?"

"Oh no," she said. "Not like that." She couldn't help thinking of
Fenno, how she'd missed understanding that he was gay.

"Wouldn't you like to go out with somebody other than Dad?"

Saga laughed. "Maybe there's a fancy matchmaking service for halfwits."

"You're not a half-wit."

"I'm not a full-wit, that's for sure."

Frida looked as if she were measuring Saga with her eyes. Saga
looked away. The fog was clearing. She could see Commodore Perry's
front porch. The commodore was sleeping in his giant basket.

"Saga, do you think you hold on to the half-wit thing? Have you
made it a habit, a pair of comfy old shoes? I saw you in the kitchen just
now, making our lunch. You didn't consult your labels once."

Saga continued to watch the fog lift—or drift, really, as if retreating.
Fog didn't really lift; it backed away. Out of nowhere came an image of
Japanese girls bowing as they tiptoed backward.
So sorry, so sorry, so
sorry.

"Saga, did I offend you?"

She looked at Frida. "Michael didn't put you up to this talk, did he?"

Now Frida was the offended one. "Saga, everything around here isn't
about Michael, though it may seem like that right now, now that he's
flaunting his reproductive vigor, like some kind of sports car.
Vroom,
vroom,
twins!"

Saga laughed. "He's taking me out for lunch, you know."

Frida was quiet for a minute, then spoke cautiously. "Michael is a
good man, and I admire him, even though I don't like to think about
what he does for a living. Pansy would kill me if she knew I'd told you
this, but he cosigned the mortgage for her condo, and he's even tried to
fix her up with a couple of guys from his firm."

This was when Uncle Marsden came around the corner of the
house and sprang up the stairs, carrying a pair of shovels. "Girls!" he
exclaimed, smiling. He held out the shovels, one in each hand. "Girls, I
am putting you to work!" He had a replanting project. Though it was
barely spring, he'd become a sort of garden dervish that week. He
seemed bent on moving shrubs around, front to back, shade to sun,
from one corner of the porch to another.

That heart-to-heart with Frida was the first time Saga could recall,
since her coming to live there, when one of her cousins had really
wanted to talk to her and also to listen. It meant something. It was an
omen, not necessarily good—because now she could not remain outside
the circle.

That was when she'd known that no matter how much Frida cared
about her, or even Uncle Marsden, there would be trouble ahead.

Well, she thought after her lunch with Michael, after putting up her
last notice, here it is. The question was, could she face it?