Days of Awe (9 page)

Cal breezes into the kitchen with an armful of plates, sets them carefully on the counter. “Ladies,” he says, then goes back out for more.

My mother leans toward me and whispers urgently in my ear. “This whole evening makes a lot more sense now! He'd be lucky to have
you,
sweetheart. Not me.”

My mouth falls open, and the room suddenly feels a little tilted, which, now that I think about it, the real-estate agent might have mentioned. “Helene!” I whisper back, just as fervidly. “He's a hundred and six!”

“Pretty well preserved,” she says, rinsing a cup.

Cal comes back in with the last of the dinner plates, which he sets down gently. My mother's kitchen is warm and small. There is a threadbare pot holder hanging from a metal hook near the sink that says
I LOVE YOU, MOMMY. ISABEL APPLEBAUM, FIRST GRADE.

Cal steps away from us, backs up against the Formica-topped table, puts his hands on a chair. “I have to confess something.” He looks genuinely abashed. He's going to tell us he's married, still married, newly married, and all of my mother's sincere efforts will have been for nothing. Oh, God. What an ass. But how was he supposed to know this was a setup? How could he have known he was a pawn? For the second time this evening, my emotional compass spins and spins.

Helene turns off the water and looks at him expectantly. She's not wearing shoes—she likes to kick them off under the table—and her stockinged feet on the kitchen floor look bony and translucent, little foot skeletons.

“I brought dessert,” Cal says. “But I left it in the car.”

“Well, that's nice.” My mother cups her bad hand with her good one, the way she does.

“And it's ice cream.” Cal smiles, twinkly and embarrassed, and I think again how he might have made my mother laugh, and then I wonder about his lips, the way his skin might feel. What his warm hands could do.

And now I'm so confused and unsettled that I hear a strange little mewling chirp, which has come from my own mouth. “I'll go get that ice cream,” I say, “if you give me your keys? Maybe it's not completely melted.”

“I think it probably is.” Cal reaches for his coat, shrugs it on. “I'd like to go out and get more.”

“No need!” My mother opens the freezer and starts rooting around. “I think I might have some in here. Remember last Thanksgiving, when I served that low-fat butter brickle? I don't think I ever finished it….”

“I'll go with you,” I say to Cal, surprising myself.

“Well, all right. I'll tidy up in here,” my mother says, and as Cal holds the door for me, Helene stays behind, in the kitchen.

If I turn around, I know that I will see her grinning, pleased with herself. And if I look for more than a second, underneath the satisfied smirk I'll see all of the wide-open hope she holds for me, her bottomless desire for my happiness, the way her sorrow mirrors mine. And I am a lot of things, but I'm not a glutton for punishment. So I keep walking. Cal is right behind me; I can feel his footsteps. I don't turn around.

Meehan's Market at night is almost deserted. Its upscale clientele apparently has better things to do than shop for unusual gourmet items at 8:00 p.m.

In the car on the way over, Hannah sent me a text:
can I sleep here 2nite? Lucky is soooo cute i can't be away from him!!!! if U don't let me sleep at chloe's we will have 2 get a dog!!!!!!!!!

“This is it,” Cal says. He takes a pint from the freezer shelf and examines it. “Once you try this, you'll never be able to enjoy any other kind of ice cream.”

“Oh, good,” I say. “I'm always looking for opportunities to stop enjoying the things I once loved.”

Cal hands me the pint. “Hmm,” he says. “You are dark.”

My cheeks heat up. “I know. Chris hates that about me. I'm sorry. It's a…bad habit.” I feel like sticking my face into the ice-cream freezer to cool it off.

Cal takes the pint of ice cream from my hand and points to the label:
DEEP CHOCOLATE EXTREME.
“This one's phenomenal.” He reaches in and grabs another pint. “I like dark.” He closes the freezer door, and it fogs up.

I turn to look at Cal. We're next to each other, close, so that when I turn my face, he's near enough to examine, near enough to kiss. His eyebrows are wiry. The lines around his eyes that looked distinguished from across the dinner table are just wrinkles up close, worn tracks on his face. His eyes are greenish. On his lower lip there is a small dot, like a freckle, but blue. There is a tiny spot just under his chin that he missed with the razor, less than a centimeter, and the stubble growing there is gray.

He's taking my measure, too. I know it. And he sees the same signs of deterioration, I suppose, if he's inclined to look for them, but better disguised. My skin probably looks pretty good; it usually does. But I used to have thicker eyelashes. Fuller cheeks. An entirely different neck.

We're just marching toward the end: slow steps, fast steps, faster. Probably there is no point in trying to connect. It takes so much effort to let someone in. Maybe there was reason for it ten, twenty years ago; maybe then it made sense to try to drum up a partner for the long journey. But now? It will only end soon, and in heartbreak. It always has; it always does.

“My mother is trying to set us up,” I say.

“I'm flattered.”

“How old are you?”

“Fifty-nine.”

“Are you as nice as you seem?”

“It depends whom you ask.”

“Do you realize that this ice cream is seven dollars and fifty cents a pint?”

“Yes.” He drops the two pints into the green basket he's carrying. “I need bread. Do you mind if we make one quick detour before we check out?”

And no, I don't mind. The light above us flickers, bright and unforgiving. The freezer's fan gives a little
thump
and then hums into action. I'll stay here wandering the empty aisles of Meehan's Market with this kind man for a few more minutes.

Six months after Josie died, Mark decided to move out of his parents' house. He thought they would insist he hold on to his childhood home, but, Mark told me, Mr. and Mrs. Abrams immediately agreed that he should sell it.

“Of course you have to get rid of the house, sweetheart,” his father said to him over the phone from Florida.

“Of course you do,” his mother echoed. They were each on an extension, elderly Jews in stereo. Mark repeated the entire conversation for me, flawlessly imitating his sweet parents.

“Your good memories will go with you,” Mr. Abrams said.

“And the bad ones you can leave behind.” Mark's mother swallowed a gulp of her ever-present Fresca. “Remember Larry Bachman?” she said. Mark was about to tell her he had no idea who Larry Bachman was, but it turned out she was talking to his father anyway.

“Oh, sure. Larry.”

“He sold the condo after Janet died. He got less than he paid for it, remember? But it didn't matter. He had to get out of there. He's dating Marilyn Epstein
and
her sister June now!” Mr. Abrams laughed appreciatively. “Both of them!” Mrs. Abrams repeated.

They were ten years older than Helene, in their early eighties (Mark was their late-in-life miracle, as they frequently reminded him) and living in a retirement community in Boca. They had become experts in the field of loss.

I went to the house on a warm Friday afternoon to help Mark. The
FOR SALE
sign was poking out of the front lawn like an unusual species of tree.
LAKEVIEW REALTY,
it said.
EXCLUSIVE HOMES FOR FAMILIES. CALL TRINA COHEN-PUGH FOR SHOWINGS.
Trina Cohen-Pugh was the best real-estate agent in suburban Milwaukee. She'd gone to high school with Mark and me, a year ahead of us. She'd been editor of the school paper, the star of the cross-country team, and the president of the debating society; she'd graduated from Northwestern. In high school, everyone thought she'd be the first female president. But who knows, she might have ended up sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office thinking,
I wish I were pricing bungalows right now.
Anyway, if Trina Cohen-Pugh took you on, you'd be closing within the month.

Mark said once that the weirdest thing about living in your childhood home as an adult was sleeping in your parents' bedroom. You were your parents, he said; not that you felt like them, but that on some molecular level you actually were them, waking up on a Sunday morning in a king-sized bed with the sun coming through the white curtains at exactly the same angle as it did when you were five and would pad in from your bedroom early and quietly slip into the big, safe space in the middle.

Josie took a swig from her beer bottle and snorted. “That's so sweet.” She was slurring a little.
Thassosweet.
She put her hand on Mark's. “But no way. Noooo way. It's not the sleeping. Let me tell you.” I was looking at Josie, but I could sense Mark next to me, nervous. “The weirdest thing about living in your husband's childhood home as an adult is fucking in his parents' bedroom!” She let out a throaty laugh, and Mark pretended to be fascinated by the edge of his chair.

In the fading light of that Friday afternoon six months after she died, I walked through the front door I'd walked through a thousand times, and everything was familiar to me: the green slate tiles in the entryway. The big silver mirror in the living room. The worn Formica countertops in the bright yellow kitchen. The smell of the house, like coffee and toast and a pot of noodles overboiled in 1981. Layers of years accumulated, one on top of the other.

It was messy, though, disheveled and grimy in a way Josie never would have tolerated. Dishes were piled up in the sink, newspapers scattered on and around the kitchen table. The sofa in the living room was pulled out and made up for sleeping, white sheets and a light blue fleece blanket messily thrown over it. Mark had ended up on the couch the night after the funeral, he said, and he hadn't moved back into their bedroom. That couch was thirty years old at least. There was a deep depression in the middle of it, a canyon, and I could see the outline of bedsprings through an exposed corner of the mattress. It didn't look like a place to sleep. It looked like a punishment.

“Welcome to the House of Usher!” he boomed, throwing his arms wide, as if he'd rehearsed it, and then he hugged me and said, softly, “Thanks for coming, Iz.” I waved him away. “I mean it. There's no way I could have started this without you.” He handed me a beer.

“I know. I'm glad…I mean, you know I wouldn't have let you go through this alone.”

The truth is I had tried sending Chris in my place, but he'd refused. “You have to do it,” he said. “You have to get your head on straight.” He was fed up with me by then; I knew that: the way my sadness was a suit of armor. How securely I kept him out.

“Hey, Happy Yom Kippur,” Mark said. It was our joke, what the non-Jews of Milwaukee had been saying to us since we were kids.
Happy Yom Kippur! Have a good one!
It was late September, three days until the Day of Atonement, in fact. We were smack in the middle of the Days of Awe—ten days of introspection and repentance, and if you're lucky, and you've introspected and repented enough, at the end of it your name gets inscribed in the Book of Life. Although neither of us believes that.

“I'm feeling introspective as hell right now,” Mark said, clinking his beer bottle to mine.

“Me, too,” I said. “And I'm repentant as shit.”

We were blowing hot air. Nonbelievers are the worst. The window is slammed shut, but there's always a crack where the cold air gets in. Anyway, who was I kidding? Helene's history, my history—it's etched in my soul. I secretly suspect there might actually be a God, and if so, he's mean as a hornet.

We wandered around the house, Mark and I, like clumsy tourists, poking our heads into rooms and closets. We walked through the living room, with the crystal candlesticks Mark had given Josie for their fifth anniversary, the photographs on display of the two of them: in Paris, in front of a tent in northern Wisconsin, on the urban shore of Lake Michigan. I shook my head. “Not here.”

We traipsed up the stairs and past their big bedroom, and we paused at the door of his childhood room, which Josie had converted into her art studio. It was draped with canvas and still full of supplies and tools, buckets of clay and bottles of paint, as if she were just in the middle of an afternoon's work, as if she'd just gone downstairs for a cup of coffee. “Nope,” I said, and obediently he followed me down the hallway to the bathroom. “Here.”

Surely the bathroom was the place to start when you were faced with the task of dismantling your home. Here in this plain, utilitarian room—white tiles, a striped blue shower curtain, a sink, a toilet—what ghost could possibly haunt us here?

We got through four things: a half-empty (
half-full!
sure!) bottle of basil-apricot facial scrub. Two little, mostly used-up containers of Humidité, an antifrizz serum Josie swore by (although it did not work). A comb. A bottle of Zealexifor, a low-dose antidepressant Josie had begun taking a few years ago. She'd been on one before that called Ebulizor, and before that, briefly, one called Dynamizole, until Zealexifor seemed to do the trick. The names were so goofy and obvious. Their sheer absurdity could cheer you up.

We used to make up our own. We'd send e-mails to each other when we had prep time between classes:
Oh, I'm a little down today; I forgot to take my Gladiprene. I'm way too cheerful right now! I need to up my dose of Despairizeme! Despondizac! Hopelesse!

I stood close to Mark in their tiny bathroom and watched as he picked up that little orange pharmacy bottle, then set it back down gently on the shelf and placed his palms flat on the edges of the sink. The sound he made came up from a place inside him no one else was ever meant to know: a howl from his cracked heart. “Oh, my God, Iz. Oh, my God.”

I'd seen him cry before. But not like this. Sorrow contorted his face, pulled and twisted his features with raw force. Time had not mitigated his grief; six months had done nothing to relieve his pain.

I wished Chris were here. I wished he could see Mark's face, could understand how, if you loved Josie, you would never feel better. You wouldn't even want to. “Come on,” I said, putting my hand on my friend's forearm, gently pulling him away.

We ended up at one of our old haunts, a dark, overpriced, self-conscious English pub called the Pig's Knees. There was a statue of a Buckingham Palace guard in the doorway, and a huge television set over the bar that was always tuned to a soccer game. I led Mark to a little booth toward the back of the place. The bartender nodded to us. He'd seen us here in various formations over the years: in twos, threes, fours.

Mark shoved his hand through his hair and immediately began drumming his fingers on the nicked, dark brown table between us. “It's not always this bad,” he said. “You know I'm not always this wrecked.”

“I know.”

“Only ninety-four percent of the time.”

“That's good!” I said. “Six percent unwrecked!”

“Nobody understands,” he said, even though I did; I also understood, fleetingly, that Mark was flourishing in isolation, although negatively, like a poisonous mushroom or a blind cave fish. He swiped at his cheek and blew his nose in a napkin. His face was stubbly, the skin under his eyes dark. The handsomeness of his features was smudged, altered. “There's a schedule to this, apparently. Six months. I'm supposed to be healing by now.” He leaned in. “I am not…healing.”

He was distant from me, lost in the particular way each person goes his or her own kind of crazy: sleepless, obsessive, hungry, crushed.
I'm here, too!
I wanted to say.
I'm sad all the time.
But what good would it have done? I just nodded.

“I'm finding some solace in alcohol, though,” he said. “That's an unexpected benefit.”

“Keep up the good work with that,” I said.

His rubbed his eyes, looked down at his hands. “Maybe the worst part is how hard things had been between us,” he said, “before she died. We would have worked through it. I know that. But now it's just this open wound.”

I waved my hand in the air, shooing the whole idea away. I knew how hard it had been. I knew more than Mark. “Of course you would have worked through it,” I said. “Of course you would have.”

“Sometimes when I can't sleep I go to that place near the bowling alley,” he said.

I took a sip of my beer, a thick, brown English swill. It tasted like something dredged from a river. The only places near the bowling alley I could think of were sleazy, gentlemen-only establishments with blinking neon boobs in the windows.
“Mark.”

“No, God, Iz, I'm not that far gone. It's just a little Milwaukee dive. I can't sleep, and I get in my car, and I just drive for a while, and then I go there. And I just have one or two drinks. I don't have a death wish.” He winced. “I just go there some nights.”

“You could come over to our house,” I said. “Always. No matter how late it is. You know that, right?”

The Pig's Knees was pretty deserted, but it was never empty. A beefy man in a shiny green soccer shirt was sitting at the bar, watching the game, occasionally pounding his pink fist on the counter and shouting “Oi!” or “Yellow card! Yellow card!” Two women sat at a table a few feet away from us, sharing a greasy plate of something. They were using lots of napkins, pressing them on top of their food, sopping things up.

Mark looked at me for a moment that stretched out too long, like he had just lost his ability to calibrate social interactions. “I need to tell you something.”

A lightning bolt of awkwardness struck me on the top of my scalp and traveled right down my body. I felt my head tingling, my face flushing, my fingers becoming trembly. My body knew before the truth settled over my brain. It was a stage of grief, wasn't it? The inappropriate transfer of affection to your dead wife's married best friend?
Oh, no,
I thought.
No no no no no no.