Crash Diet (11 page)

“He will once he’s taken that test,” she told him. They had visited Wayne once during law school at Columbia, and he had spent the whole visit locked in his room “studying,” though they’d heard him make many phone calls. They had just gone ahead and ventured out as tourists, seeing everything you can possibly see in Manhattan in twenty-four hours. That night, after an early dinner, Wayne went back to his studying, and they sat nursing their sore feet and vowing how the next trip would last longer. They had made the same promise just the year before when she went with him to San Francisco. Walter had an early meeting but then they rented a car and headed out. They were determined to see everything from Alcatraz to Chinatown, Walter singing like Tony Bennett every time they saw a cable car. They had raced through downtown Seattle the year before that. They loved the West Coast and had always talked about taking another trip—a long relaxing childless trip—as soon as Wayne passed the bar. Son,
I’ve got to tell you
, Walter said the day they were leaving New York,
I’ve never been able to pass a bar
.

“I hope that test is all that’s bugging him,” Water said
that morning on the phone. “He’ll be home soon.” That’s when she looked at the clock and told him that she
had
to hurry, she was going to be late; somebody had to work.

“See you tonight, honey.”

She thinks now that Walter was onto Wayne. He always seemed to
know
things. On Ben’s first wedding day he said that he felt the marriage would never work; he just couldn’t put his finger on it but something was wrong.
Carol will never go back to school if she marries this Trey fellow
, he had said.
This Trey fellow wants a woman in the house. I can tell. It may take a dozen children and shackles but he’ll find a way
. Sometimes it makes her mad that he knew so damn much, was so perceptive about their children, could tell from her physical stance what mood she was in (uh-oh, the limp-wristed hand on the hip means depressed; straight wrist is mad as hell), but when it came time for him to know the most important moment, the danger that would rob him, her, all of them, he hadn’t had a clue.

The first year was the hardest. Each day was an anniversary. Each day was a countdown of events. Nothing could pull her away from the timetable leading up to or away from his death. Her children tried. They took turns dumping the events of their lives at her feet, but she wouldn’t be deflected. She got tired of listening to what was going
on in
their
lives. She wanted her own life. Real or not, she wanted to be a part of something that was of her own design. She had to get out, go places, watch people. In her mind, she wrote long letters to the woman at the beach.
How could you just stand there?
she asked.
How could you be at peace?

Now the third year is closing. Thanksgiving is around the corner. It’s time to decide what kind of stuffing or dressing to prepare. But nothing equals a mall or an airport during the holidays. Both are bustling with people, and emotions are soaring. On the days she doesn’t work, she alternates between the two. Carol says, “But
why
were you at the airport?” and Anna tells her that there are wonderful stores at the airport, that people shouldn’t ask so many questions so close to the holidays. That was Walter’s line. He had used it on the children from October 1st to December 25th, diverting their curiosities with hopes for a present. Her children want her to be the perfect widow, being led in and out of the house like the woman at the beach house. Anna imagines Mrs. Vanderbilt living out the rest of her life in silent composure as she yearns for those late afternoons with her husband (their dinners at Brady’s Seafood) so long and so hard that she is stripped of all that was ever a part of her.

Children are so selfish the way they want to lead you around and keep your mind occupied with latch hooks or Phil Donahue. Carol says,
Why don’t you get interested in a continuing program?
(Meaning a soap opera.) Trey disagrees
with Carol’s suggestion of
regular
programs. (He says he hopes she isn’t watching such trash when he’s out in the garage working!) He suggests Anna watch the Public Broadcasting System (
British
soap operas). Ben and Terri suggest she choose a craft (ivory-carving has done wonders for some people). Wayne says she’d be great at the soup kitchen, a breath of life for the down and out.
And who will give me a breath?
she asks.

Her children don’t want her to talk about Walter anymore. They don’t want her to talk about how he looked in the casket. She keeps saying, “He looked okay, but his mouth was wrong. Walter never held his mouth that way a day of his life.”

“Really, Mother,” Carol says and Anna wants to slap her, to shake her, to tell her
for godssakes get a divorce
. And Ben says, “Really, Mother,” and she wants to ask how they can be so sympathetic with an alcoholic who murdered his family and not with a woman who had a wonderful happy marriage (complete with wonderful sex and happy private jokes) to a wonderful man and who wants to talk about it? Wayne says, “Really, Mother,” and she wants to shake him, to ask how a son of hers and Walter’s went such a route, holes in his ears and men on his arm. She wants to say,
Don’t tell me what loneliness means. Don’t you even try
. Dear God. Some nights she can’t sleep because her mind flashes picture after picture, like slides. Walter. Wayne as an infant. Walter looking down at her,
sheets twisted around their legs. Wayne running towards them with his suitcase, happy to leave summer camp, never to go again. Walter’s eyes closing as he exhales, his heart beating rapidly, her hands on his back, pulling him toward her. Wayne in a shiny blue graduation gown. Walter’s eyes closed as his heart beats rapidly, the telephone cord beyond his grasp, and Wayne with a male lover, sheets twisted around their legs. She shudders and cries out, unable to bear either picture.

She is at the airport at a gate that is crowded. Sunlight is streaming through the big glass windows. There is a man with a bouquet of flowers. A young girl wearing fatigue pants and a tight black T-shirt is slouched in a chair with her tote bag on the seat beside her. She’s reading some kind of self-help book (
Making a Place for Yourself
) and will probably do so all the way to Dallas (it’s clear from the boarding pass she clutches that she is leaving). Somewhere in this world (somewhere in Dallas/Fort Worth maybe) this girl has a place and there is someone waiting for her, her name running through that person’s mind this very minute. The last time Anna was here she had witnessed a scene involving a lost child. The little girl’s description was given over the loudspeaker time after time as the airport employee hugged her close and tried to get her to stop crying.

While the child sobbed, Anna had watched and wondered
what Walter would have said when Wayne announced that he had a male lover? Alone, she had held her breath and counted long seconds, swallowed, focused. She said, “We,” and then faltered with the plural, “we want you to be happy, Wayne. Nothing more.” If Walter had been there, his large strong arm around her, she would not have been so understanding and sensitive. She would not have thought to remind herself how fragile it all is, fragile and precious. The lost child was red-faced. Her nose was running onto the stuffed toy she clutched. The airport employee looked at Anna and shook her head. “Can you believe this?” she asked. “Can you imagine a parent not keeping a better watch?”

“Oh God, there you are!” A woman rushed into the area, her face white and frantic, mascara ringing her eyes. “Oh, baby, baby.” She grabbed the child and then turned to the airport employee. “My husband thought I had her,” she was explaining, out of breath and needing to redeem herself. “I thought she was with him.” The husband was there within seconds, a trail of suitcases strewn behind him as he wrapped his arms around the two. “Thank God,” the man said.

Sometimes Anna imagines that she will turn in a crowded place and see him there, that they will reach each other with a babbling of how it was all a misunderstanding, that he didn’t really die. “Oh, thank God,” she sometimes wakes up saying, somehow confused that the dream where
he was checking the air in her car tires is reality and the empty bed is not.

“See you tonight, honey,” Walter says and hangs up the phone, turns to the simple moderately priced room. On the table by the window is his breakfast, orange juice and toast. He loves eggs and bacon but is watching his cholesterol. He quit smoking years ago. He walks at least a mile a day. He does everything just the way it’s supposed to be done. In the closet is his blue suit, white shirt, red paisley tie. He has been traveling for years. The insurance business has been good for him, good for
them
financially. Retirement is just around the corner.

I left my heart in San Francisco
. The third grade teacher thought it was an odd selection but couldn’t help but smile at the chorus. They drew pictures, hearts like valentines riding up to the stars. “You can’t leave your heart nowhere,” a boy, still pink-faced from recess, said and grinned. “You’d die.” He laughed, the whole class joining in. The teacher looked at Anna in a shocked worried way, which she brushed off with the wave of her hand. She thought of Mrs. Vanderbilt, her hands firm on the railing, her chin lifted as she stared out at the ocean.

“That’s true,” she said. “You would die without your heart.”

“Oh, no.” A girl at the front shook her head, her hand
up to her chest as if to check her own beating heart, while Anna attempted to explain
figurative
.

“What’s a cable car?” Another child asked.

Now, people are filing through the jetway door, spilling into the hall with waves and shrieks. The man who has stood so quietly with the bouquet is moving forward, arms reaching for a young woman in blue jeans, her hair cropped in a thick blunt cut. “I thought I’d never get here,” she says and kisses him full on the mouth, the flowers pressed between them. The girl in fatigues looks around as if annoyed by all the chatter and goes back to her book. Her flight can’t board until all of these people have gotten off and the plane is tidied.

Anna thinks of the couple reunited with their lost child as if she knows them, as if they are distant relatives or old acquaintances. She imagines them at home, their house recently painted, a yard recently mowed, a bed with sheets just washed, their dinner thawing in the kitchen. They have gotten over what happened at the airport last week and have stopped studying each other with the unspoken, unintended accusation; but they still wake with a sudden rush of horror with all the things that
could
have happened that day. “You have such a morbid mind, sweetheart,” Walter once said. The kids were at camp and she kept expecting a phone call: a broken arm, salmonella, stitches in the chin.

But
that
morning as she collected her construction paper and went to school, she had no such thoughts, no expectations of what was to come. She tries so hard to see it all. “See you tonight, honey,” he says, and he hangs up the receiver. She imagines a hotel bedspread with matching striped draperies, art deco prints in chrome frames. He would have the draperies opened with the sunlight coming through. He would stand in front of the window and watch people coming and going on the street below. Maybe someone was watching him across the way. Maybe someone from another window in another building saw him turn suddenly. He felt sick and he turned to put down his coffee, but he didn’t get there and he reached for the phone, their familiar number going through his mind like a secret message or song. Everywhere Anna looks, there is the message: life is fragile, so very very fragile. She watches the people exit, the crowd thinning temporarily before those departing make their way to the gate. Already the couple with the bouquet is at the end of the hallway, arms entwined as the flowers swing back and forth. Now the girl in the fatigues sits up straight, clutching her boarding pass.

“You going to Dallas?” the girl asks, and Anna is startled, turns quickly from the big glass window and shakes her head.

“Are you?”

“Yeah.” The girl’s voice is much higher than Anna would have expected, much younger. “Unfortunately.”

“Oh.” Anna waits for an explanation but the girl doesn’t give it.

“I guess your person missed the flight,” the girl says and points to the closed door.

“Yes.” Anna feels the need to move now. To push herself down the hall and outside into the fresh autumn air. “I hope you have a good trip.”

The girl smirks, runs a hand through her short stiff hair. “I won’t. It’s my dad. You know I
have
to go spend that weekend once every three months.” She waits for Anna to nod and then goes back to her book.

Anna begins walking. By her next visit here, she will have constructed a setting for this girl where she will be happily reunited with her father. The father and girl will ask in amazement why they didn’t see years ago how silly their problems were. They are parent and child—family. They will drive into Dallas and eat at a fine restaurant. Now Anna feels like a ghost, like someone haunting someone else’s life, and so she concentrates on turkey and stuffing and her own children and grandchildren and schoolchildren, and how she needs to construct or reconstruct her own scene. It’s been exactly three years; now the fourth begins. There are details she will forget and need to reinvent in a simpler, gentler way. It will be a smoother progression, the nerves worn down. She passes gate after gate, each one identical.

If she could pick a time, they would load the station wagon and drive to the coast, the kids crowded in the back
seat. It would be a long bright day—the children’s squeals muffled by the roar of the surf—followed by a cool shower and a nap. And in the late afternoon as the children sat in a circle playing cards, as Walter still napped, she would cross the street and go stand by Mrs. Vanderbilt on the deck. She would take notes on loneliness (is it really possible to live with it?) and then rush back to her own bed to find Walter there, her love reaffirmed with his every breath.