Duet for Three (19 page)

Instead, she met Herb Benson one evening in a restaurant, where she had stopped with friends after one of their bandage-rolling evenings. Herb Benson, whose limbs and organs were all present and accounted for; who, after all her letters and socks and scarves sent overseas, had never been there himself. Still, she was astonished and charmed by his attention, and thought that, after all, it was more than she could have hoped for.

THIRTEEN

People say, “I could have died,” when what they mean is, “I was surprised.” But now when Aggie's heart pounds too hard, or she is made aware, maybe through pee stains on sheets, that something is going badly wrong, “I could have died” is entirely literal.

How different might Neil have been, if he had understood that he would die? Or, how different would she be, if she could get it through her head and into her bones that she is dying now? Would she be tender? More gentle? Hard to tell, when she's so busy still surviving. Events get in the way. This business with June gets in the way. It would be foolish to be gentle in the midst of battle, even if the battle is only over where she will be when she dies.

June accuses her of thinking too much. Aggie is irritated by not being able to think enough: to think things through right to the end. Instead, at a certain point she gets dizzy. She has a ridiculous urge, which she suppresses, to say, “When you're my age, June, you'll see.”

Anyway, it's not as if Aggie's approach is so reasonable. Her own real death is still unreal to her; a fantasy in which everything but herself will not exist. This makes her subject to terrible fits of sentimentality, which make her cross. When June pulls off her nightgown in the morning, Aggie sometimes thinks, “I may not be putting that on again,” and when she goes downstairs, she thinks, “Maybe I won't be going up again.” “I may not have another meal,” she tells herself at lunch, or “This may be my last muffin.”

Well, it's all silly and amusing in a dreadful sort of way. Far better to be dying with flair and dash, with a flippant carelessness. She would like to picture herself dying with some wit, perhaps an epigram as her last words. Instead it's often just lonely and sloppy.

June, who asks, “How can you laugh about death?” obviously doesn't see the difference between laughing at something and making jokes about it. Joking is easy: Aggie has a line about dying in perfect health. Or she may say, “The trouble with death is there's no way of knowing. It's the uncertainty that's a killer.”

All the funerals, starting with Neil's, that she's been to: her mother, her father, both her sisters and one brother. Her last brother died two years ago, but she couldn't be there.

One way and another there were distances. She'd turned into a widow, running her own business, addicted to words, and how were they supposed to know? By then, she was two Aggies away from the one they were familiar with. Then June, too, didn't fit when they visited: hung back, wouldn't join her cousins racing through fields and leaping the creek. She was afraid of the big placid animals and also, apparently, of her big rough-handed uncles, and stuck out there like a thin, pale thumb.

Nevertheless. They all came from the same place — couldn't they have shown her where they all wound up?

Again and again, she sat through funerals in that church, and went to the small cemetery where they have all been buried. So many headstones, simple and chiselled with names and dates. (So many small graves, for little dead children; life must not, then, have been as secure and hearty there as she recalls.)

All those men who held barn-raisings, the women who cooked huge threshing meals, the boys who went on hayrides, all those people with whom she might have had an entirely different life, were now marked only by stones; she continued to be astonished that they had existed and now did not.

People may talk about the miracle of life, but what about the miracle of death? Or maybe just a magician's trick: a gesture, a word, and something greater than a rabbit or a dove appears and vanishes. She might say to June's God, “What is the meaning of this, then?” in an angry tone of voice.

She has, herself, been at times a splendid Aggie, a new woman rising to each occasion — what other Aggies might there have been in other circumstances? Now, however, she's afraid that the next Aggie to appear will be the dead one.

Was that a joke?

There are moments when something — a clean laundry smell, a flash of a certain color, a word or an expression — seems to remind her of something. The sound of her mother's voice, a dress she wore to church when she was little, the pattern on one of Neil's ties — impressions flickering for an instant and then sliding away when she tries to grab hold of them. It's one thing to have gained perspective, a sense of the sweep of events, but what are these memories that are only sensations? What mitigating circumstances may be lost in them? She may be on solid ground with what she does recall, but what about the rest?

What if the catastrophe of wet sheets is just a signal of disintegration? Think of other lapses: forgetting her address, or telephone number, or what Frances does for a living, or who June is, or her own name. What if she looks at a book and can't make out the sense of it, or watches television and can't connect a plot? What if she looks at a clock and can't tell the time, or at a measuring spoon and doesn't know what it's for?

This happens, she's seen it. That little Mrs. Ames from the grocery store was one: losing her mind, not violently or loudly, but quietly, in confusion, the identities of cans of peas and packages of ground beef slipping out of her grasp. Losing her mind like setting down a purse or a pair of glasses somewhere, and not recalling quite where.

What if that happens to Aggie? This great old body wouldn't be much at all, with nothing to interpret it. She shifts uneasily in her chair.

This is the same old chair in which she spent so much time after Neil died; here and in the kitchen. She sees, from that time, pictures: still lifes and landscapes. But faded, the life burned out of them by years, like the old photographs.

All those habits that no longer applied; it took some getting used to. She would find herself listening for his step, and then recall that there was no more step to listen for. She glanced at the clock and thought, “In two hours he'll be home,” before realizing that none of those old standards for judging time passing applied. At the butcher's, she might ask for three pork chops, or a roast big enough for three, and then have to revise down to just enough for two: June's small appetite and her own. Sometimes she set his place at the table and then had to clear it away quickly, before June could notice.

Poor little pale and hostile child. Aggie reached out to put an arm around her, or to touch her hair, and June glided away, out from under the embrace. There was no touching her.

So much silence. Outside because of snow, and indoors because of absence. It didn't seem to be only Neil who was gone.

In the front room, she continued to skirt the space in the centre where he had lain for the two days between his dying and the funeral. Upstairs, his room was closed and musty. Almost every day of their marriage, she had gone in and out of this room, cleaning and tidying and changing his barely rumpled sheets, and now she was looking around at its dark walls, wooden closet and cupboards, and narrow stripped bed, and wondering who the man was who had slept here. Just a wall between them, but such a wall!

“Get a grip on yourself,” she told herself, but felt as if she were slipping through her own fingers. Moving around the house, she found herself resting her hand on doorways, lamps, and walls, with an idea they might hold her down. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a full-fleshed woman with eyes that surely must be strange: like peering through a hole in a fence and seeing nothing but space on the other side.

Other people, though, couldn't have noticed. When she went out to shop, people stopped to talk. “You must let me know if there's anything at all I can do,” beamed the minister's wife. “Sad thing,” said the chairman of the school board. “We miss him. He was a fine man, an excellent teacher. Not an easy thing to find someone of his calibre. How are you managing?” So Aggie couldn't have seemed odd or invisible to them.

In books, people went on, leaving one thing for the next. In real life, it seemed one was launched willy-nilly into new circumstances without much decision or choice about it. Still, there was movement, however inadvertent. Was his death inadvertent? Or did she kill him with neglect, passivity, murder done simply by withholding something vital, like attention? Or perhaps just the force of her continuing ill-will had taken his breath away. Years ago would they have burned her as a witch?

Anyway, it was done. There was nothing she could do now about death. Also there was nothing she could do about being free.

What was she doing, sitting here? Surely she was not stupid. Where was the girl whose mother had once praised her wits, or the woman who had applied those wits to win small victories? Where was the woman who read books, and credited herself with a certain amount of information and worldliness and, as a result, some skepticism, if not yet wisdom? Apparently she did best with an opponent. He seemed to have been important to the sharpening process.

That was infuriating. She would not depend on him. Well, of course in these circumstances she could not. But she was damned if she needed him, or the memory of him, for some fired-up version of herself. He was gone, winter was going, the past was the past and nothing to be done about it. There were little rivers of melted snow rushing down the street. Sounds were no longer muffled, and smells were lighter in some way too. Things were moving on, and here she sat. It was ridiculous, and irritating to be out of step.

She could sit like a lump for the rest of her life, but what she was mourning — if it was mourning — was not the loss of him, or of love, but knowing that she had not known enough about him to miss him, and had made a mistake to begin with about love. She did not know if it made any sense at all to grieve for things that had never existed.

On the other hand, she could be pleased about certain other things that had existed and now did not. For instance, she no longer had a headache. Also, she was a little hungry. Some of the hunger might be a wish to soothe, but some of it seemed to be actually a little appetite on its own behalf.

She popped a chocolate cake in the oven and went out into the back yard. Soon, she could see, the grass would have to be mowed and the hedge trimmed. One of these weeks the garden would need to be turned over and planted. The white trim on the house was peeling and should be repainted. All these things would be up to her.

That stopped her, pinned her right to that spot on the grass where she stood: “It's up to me.” The idea gathered heat and grew into “It's mine now,” and “I can do anything I want.” She could plant flamboyant sunflowers and poppies to replace the genteel roses and refined little lilies-of-the-valley. She could cut down a tree or two for more light, and cut windows in the walls of the house. Anything.

Well, though, beyond ripping up the garden and the house, there were thirty, forty years. Inside again, she took the cake from the oven and made the obvious choice. It was exactly right, she thought: to make a living at what she was good at and enjoyed, and to do so in her own home. Which would be truly hers, because it required fundamental changes to suit her new purposes.

But good heavens, she thought the night before the bakery opened, what if it didn't work?

Her ovens were new, and she had a cash register on one counter. The cellar contained bags of flour and sugar and bran. Everything was clean, her new stoves shone, and in the front room there was finally enough light. And she had no money in the bank, and owed a little to the carpenter.

So it had to work.

So it did work. For whatever reasons — maybe, to begin with, out of pity or admiration — she had plenty of customers, but after that first rush, they returned for quality. Pity and admiration, she understood, would only go so far.

A peculiar sort of freedom, though, and it made her laugh, such hard work for so many hours every day.

It was still and black in the mornings when she swung her feet over the side of the bed and onto the old hooked rug. Slippering down the hallway to the bathroom, and then down the stairs to the kitchen, she felt like the only person in the world. The light flashing from her kitchen window was the only break in the darkness. That ought, she supposed, to make a person feel lonely, or maybe even frightened. What she liked was the calm and the stillness.

This was so even though there was a great deal to do: bread dough to knead and batter to mix, supplies to haul up from the cellar. First the lights, and then the oven, and finally the sun warmed the room, heat expanding through the house.

Her shoulders and her arms grew strong: pushing at the dough, whirling the batter in bowls by hand, bending over the oven, putting things into it in one state and lifting them out a little later as something else. It was like being a magician, this skill at transformations.

True, sometimes by the end of the day the strong muscles ached, and her back gave her twinges, and her eyes were dry and scratching from all the words she consumed in spare moments. There was June, too, but really she was so quiet and removed, a person might even forget she existed; especially a person already very busy calculating demand and multiplying recipes.

In the early days, she had to tell June so often that they couldn't afford things for her. “It's still a struggle. We'll make it, but we have to be careful.” So no new dresses. Also, there was a school trip somewhere, and even though it would only have cost a few dollars, Aggie had to tell her it wasn't possible. “Even if we had the money we used to, there's still a depression, you know.”