Fruit of the Month (11 page)

When she had gone Lydia loaded the shirts and the folding table and the money box into the back seat of her car, and then she slid into the front seat and lowered the visor and looked at her face in the mirror. It was true about the crooked teeth. They'd grown in like that. She liked them. She liked her imperfections. They made her feel human.

At home John was standing in the middle of her bedroom, unpacking a suitcase, hanging his shirts in the closet next to Lydia's shirts.

“You moving in finally?” she asked.

“Looks like it,” he said.

For New Year's Eve there was a bottle of sparkling wine from the supermarket. John was happy with himself for remembering it. They heated some up in a pot, with orange slices and pieces of apple and banana. In the wine, the fruit turned purple. John played songs. His face changed when he sang. In the candlelight the burnished face of the guitar had the texture of silk. Lydia got restless; she found a broom and a dustpan and swept the house, the kitchen first, the hallway, the steps. She swept in the dark. She was thinking how a year ago on New Year's she and Bruce bought five six-packs at a 7-Eleven in Austin, and how a year before that she had dinner with Michael in a Trader Vic's on Staten Island. She thought how the New Year always made you think back, never ahead. For a minute she was mixed up and saw Bruce on Staten Island, Michael in Texas, John somewhere else.

“I have to clear my head,” she said, and went out to the porch with a blanket, thinking that when she came back in they could turn the TV on and watch the ball dropping over Times Square, then all the old couples dancing.

“You tell him the landlord's here, and it's the first of the month, and I can't pay the rent even for last month let alone this month, and Virginia's got chicken pox, and he better tell me what it is I'm supposed to do,” said Baby.

“He's in the shower,” Lydia said. He was singing in the shower. She pulled the telephone receiver away from her ear; Baby was screaming into it: “So I'm supposed to tell my landlord wait till my husband gets out of the shower at Lydia's house and then maybe I can pay the rent?”

There was a pause, Baby sniffing at the other end.

“You could give your landlord the washing machine,” said Lydia.

“What?” said Baby.

“And then the dryer for next month,” said Lydia. In the silence that followed she heard the shower stop. She could have called John to the phone.

“Or I could write you a check,” she said.

Baby lived in a neighborhood on the opposite edge of town; to get there you had to take a road down into Charlottesville and then another road up a hill past the university. The house sat on top of a sloping yard reinforced with railroad ties, and since there didn't seem to be a driveway Lydia parked on the street and climbed up. The house was pumpkin-colored, with an ornate porch and irregular glass in the windows. Baby lived in one half of the bottom floor. There were beer cans stacked in her window. She came to the door in a bathrobe, shaking a thermometer.

“Virginia's got fever,” she said. “Look at that snow.”

Either the snow had just started or Lydia hadn't noticed it on the drive over; it fell thickly and steadily past. Baby didn't ask her to come inside. She stood in the doorway. She said the landlord had gone home for his lunch and would come back later for the check, which better have Lydia's social security number and driver's license number and telephone number printed on the back of it. Then she took the check and turned it over a couple of times, to make sure it wasn't a fake.

“If I told John you were doing this I wouldn't go home if I was you,” said Baby.

She was staring past Lydia at some roofs that were turning white, then she lifted a hand to her chest and pressed the flat part of her wrist against the hollow of her chest and held it there. Lydia understood this to be a gesture that Baby made often, a habit, her hand on her heart, her heart beating under it, for solace. She kept her own hands flat at her sides. There was nothing to do; she wished she hadn't come. She turned away into the weather, where the fat neat flakes dropped silently under their own weight. How perfect they were in their last moment, in that brief cold moment before they hit the earth.

How to Live Alone

Steven's ghost is breathing on her neck. His breath is salty and warm. It seems to come from far off. She knows it's Steven; on the beach first thing that morning he began reading her book from over her shoulder and turning the pages just as Steven used to, impatiently flipping them as she was finishing the last line. There was that same tremor of agitation, his fingers drumming on the jacket of the book, It was uncanny how he'd always known exactly when to turn the pages, never a second too early or late. But it isn't, so uncanny anymore. Nancy sits quietly in her beach chair till dusk, reading along with him, even after all the other bathers have packed their towels and gone home and there are shadows. The tide quits moving inches from her feet. The sand stays warm.

There have been other things. Hints. The first, last night just after she'd arrived, had been enough to let her know someone was there. She had left Lloyd Harbor later than she'd planned, having fallen asleep over dinner and then wakened embarrassed to find herself drooling, spit on her chin. She wrapped her plate in foil and set it in the refrigerator on top of last night's dinner, then put her slippers on and walked out to the car, which was already packed. She had to unload the trunk and find shoes. Sneakers. You can't drive in slippers—suppose you get a flat or run out of gas on the highway? She began to think about going to bed and waiting for morning. She could leave at five and beat the traffic. Instead she drove to the 7-Eleven for coffee and drank it standing in the parking lot, watching some teenagers smoke cigarettes. When the coffee was gone she walked back into the 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Nows and lit one. She lit a second in the car and smoked through Lake Ronkonkoma, then tossed the pack under her seat where she couldn't reach it. The drive was no fun—there was darkness and smog and finally turning onto West Hampton Beach she had to strain to see the railings of the bridge. In the rear-view mirror she saw her own pale face with the fog around it. It looked drained and gray, and it made her think of ghosts.

The apartment, which they'd bought six years ago for summer weekends, was on the bay side of Dune Road. Steven had wanted the bay side so he could take his sailfish out in the evenings while Nancy sat on the deck and watched. Time after time he'd strained against the bright triangle of sail toward the opposite shore, his hair glistening silver. He'd have a wet suit on. Coming back he'd be ruddy with cold and she'd unzip him. She went out to the deck the minute she arrived, and stood leaning with her hands flat against the railing in the fog that smelled salty and woody from the reeds. There were rabbits there with their eyes lit up. She could hear the tall dry stalks of the reeds breathing against one another, and the slow lapping of the water. In the stillness she felt the sounds advancing upon her.

Later, in her robe in the tiny kitchen, she thought she'd pour herself a glass of wine. It was jug wine. Why buy a good wine when there was only one of you? She wanted half a glass. She couldn't remember the glasses ever being so large. But she was prevented from turning the bottle upright. The wine kept gushing out, a ribbon of pink that bubbled when it struck the glass. It was as if a hand had been lowered onto the neck of the bottle and was holding it down until finally the glass was filled and the bottle sprang back as if the hand had been pulled away from it.

Later she recalled Steven's insistence that she take more wine than she wanted on the nights he intended to make love to her.

And a door had opened by itself. Had it been an ordinary door she would have thought nothing of it; there were plenty of breezes near the water and doors were always being blown open. But this was a sliding door made of glass. It led from the bedroom onto a tiny slatted porch overlooking the parking lot. It had been closed. Then it was open. She was climbing into bed when she noticed it, the curtains billowing. So she stepped out for a minute in her nightgown to look around. You couldn't see the ocean from there but you could hear it. There was nothing else. Only she found herself peering at the flower boxes, which were still papery with dead geraniums from a year ago. They'd been infested. Steven had cared for them. At night in his underwear he'd pinched the gluey white eggs from the joints of the stems, shining a pocket flashlight up under the leaves while he crouched below them.

Nancy is fifty-one years old. She has always been thin but now she is thinner. She has brought with her to the apartment on West Hampton Beach six books including four cheap novels, a guide to the shorebirds that Steven had taken along every summer and never opened, and a dictionary with a broken spine. In the months since Steven's death she has discovered in herself a certain poverty of words; she does not have the words to make her truest feelings understandable even to herself. It seems wasteful to her, that a woman should spend hours picking through her emotions in search of the one she can name. Her plan for the summer consists simply of circling in the dictionary those words whose definitions seem to apply to herself. Later, in the fall, she'll type them up, weed some out, reread the list each day and pare it like a fruit until she has to stop, until there remains only a hardened core of words that she might swallow and expel. So far she's circled just two. “Age” is the first, and that doesn't help. When you're fifty-one you know how old you are. Just the same, a spot on her cheek below the left eye has recently started to twitch. Of course. You get old. If it takes the death of your husband to bring it on, who's to say you weren't lucky having lasted that long? They'd found a bunch of roses in his car. They'd handed them to her along with the news. Imagine opening the door to some cop breathing roses, tears in his eyes.

The second word, “afflux,” the act of traveling toward a point, she'd circled without really knowing why. She used a red pen; the circle gave the word a misspelled look. If she was traveling toward a point, would she know when she was there? Maybe not. The vanishing point. She'd set the roses in a soup can she'd emptied for supper. She forgot to put water in.

After the funeral she drove six hours to Stamford, Connecticut, where Steven's younger sister lived in a high-rise. Jolene was fat and had swollen arteries and couldn't make it to Long Island by herself. Years ago she'd switched her name from Jody, hoping the change would make her less fat. Still, people called her Jody by mistake. She blamed them for her inability to shed weight. Nancy and Steven had called her Jolene; for this they were mammothly loved. Jolene, finding Nancy at the door, cried out and swaddled her in pounds of milky flesh. She had been weeping, more than usual. The front of her blouse was transparent with tears. She grabbed hold of Nancy's suitcase. Nancy wondered if she'd brought enough to last.

“Tell me how it happened,” wept Jolene. “They told me he was bringing you flowers.”

“Yes,” Nancy said. “But who says the flowers were meant for me?”

Jolene dried her eyes and stared hard.

“He wasn't in the habit of bringing me flowers,” Nancy went on. “When there wasn't an occasion.”

“Do I hear what you're saying?” yelled Jolene. She had taken Nancy's hand in hers. For a fat woman Jolene had lovely hands, sharp and delicate.

“It's just a thought,” Nancy said. “He was driving through Great Neck when he died. As far as I know there was absolutely no reason on earth Steven would be in Great Neck.”

“There must be some way to find out!” said Jolene. “You have a right to know!” Her hard little blue eyes blinked.

“I don't care to,” said Nancy.

That night there was a tremendous thump and Nancy got up to check on things. She was sleeping in Jolene's room, under the white and sky-blue comforter that gave her bed the plump appearance of a cloud. Jolene had insisted on spending the night in the living room. It wasn't the type of couch that folded out into a bed and it was far too narrow for Jolene. She had tipped too far in the wrong direction and rolled off. There she lay on the floor, her body quivering beneath the gauze of a nightgown. She had not woken up. She was dreaming. She was dreaming of love, her perfect hands searching the air above her. Nancy stood in the doorway a minute and looked at her and wondered what to do. Wake her up? Let her sleep? Maybe this was the kind of thing you should expect in a woman who lived by herself, that she wake up each day in a heap on the floor not knowing how she got there, when she fell, when the crash occurred. Jolene was moaning. Her mouth was wide open and you could see the moonlight inside of it.

The visit was otherwise uneventful. Jolene showed Nancy photographs of her and Steven growing up. She cried, Nancy comforted. Jolene still wore her high school ring, gold plate with a dull blue stone.

Nancy left Stamford two days early and drove back through Manhattan on a Friday. It was early May, the sun on the sidewalks glaring like snow. She meant to buy herself some tinted glasses, the kind whose lenses darkened when you stepped outside. Instead she chose a pair in an aviator style whose lenses didn't change but gave the world, inside and out, a smoky look. The sidewalks glistened not like snow but like water, like a place where water has been once and slipped back. Then in Saks she moved among the dresses restfully, touching the fabrics and letting them brush against her. She craved summer. The dresses were smooth and cool and airy. At last she bought a blouse, silk, in a dusky salmon color.

At home in Lloyd Harbor, later that evening with her sunglasses off, Nancy found that her blouse wasn't salmon at all but hot pink. She started to cry. She hadn't cried a bit since Steven's death; instead her eyes stayed dry and numb. She cried for a long time and walked aimlessly through the huge house. She turned the television on and watched the end of the sports news, then listened to the weather announcer's jokes. Sobbing seemed shocking and dangerous, as if she'd swallowed some poor animal that was trying to get out. But her eyes were soothed. At the end she blew her nose into the blouse and balled it up and stuffed it in the garbage and dumped some coffee grounds on top of it. Then she walked three blocks to Walter Sneider's house. He was the family doctor, a divorcé of fifteen years, balding, with large ears you could trace the veins in. For ages Nancy had chosen his carpets and drapes and upholsteries, and had supervised their installation, always keeping in mind what Greta, his absent wife, would have chosen herself. Florals mostly, prolific and unmatched like some dense fruity jungle, sachets in the closets, strawberry soaps. Walter himself was a sudden cool comfort, like waking between new sheets. He made her a rum punch, he smelled of lime, he was solicitous as always and gave her the softest chair to sit in and then ran a bath without her knowing, in the black-tiled bathroom.