Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (13 page)

He stands up, lays the special hammer on the cart.

Lugo in normal time. All the promises and warnings and slowing down and speeding up and this is when it becomes clear. This is when he has his comeback for Irene, when he knows the thing that only he can know. He is in trouble.

english made easy

T
onight the air is cooler but not yet cold, and the houses float together and separate like boats in a bay. Lena walks alone. She is not drunk. She's had several glasses of wine, but wine doesn't seem to affect her lately. Possibly her legs are drunk. Waiting to cross the street after talking to Bern from her support group, she repeats what she said to him and it sounds perfectly sensible, perfectly sober. She said: thank you.

On Boylston, she sees old Mrs. Appleman in a yellow sweatshirt, pulling weeds. She waves Lena over to ask her name, where she lives, what her husband does for a living. Mrs. Appleman has some type of exquisitely benign dementia. She asks Lena these questions several times a week, amazed anew by each answer. “Your husband's overseas, you say?”

“He spends winters in South America. Except it's not winter there, it's summer.”

“Everything's so big,” Mrs. Appleman says. “The world, my house.” She kneads her hands together. The backs are chafed and intricately mottled. “Which house are you again?”

Lena describes her house for Mrs. Appleman: gray with black trim, pair of jacaranda trees out front.

“I know that one,” Mrs. Appleman says. She always says this. “Didn't a woman's husband die? With a baby on the way?”

Lena listens to the hollow, bone-like tock of bamboo chimes nearby. It's a mournful, an awful sound to broadcast through a neighborhood. “I've heard that, too,” she says.

“Does your husband ever put his hand on your back when you walk through a doorway?” The old woman smiles and waits and, perhaps sensing Lena's unease, says, “You have such an amazed little expression. You look like you just found a lost race.”

Lena pauses at each house on her way down the street. Some houses are drowsy. Some are unconditionally awake. Some are asleep. A sleeping house keeps a light going in a side window, like the dreaming part of its brain. It holds its secrets until morning.

“Visit me again soon,” Mrs. Appleman said when Lena left. “Knock on my door if I'm not out here. Talk to me, fertilize me, make sure I'm still alive.”

Lena approaches her own house. From the sidewalk she watches the babysitter pace back and forth with Lyle asleep on her shoulder. She's wearing a telephone earpiece, which she speaks into like a gerbil lapping at a water pipe. Lena suspects the babysitter tries to breastfeed Lyle. It's not a heartfelt suspicion, but once, when Lena returned home early, the babysitter's shirt was inside out. The babysitter said she was worried that the baby would spit up on her while she rocked him to sleep. She pulled off her shirt right there and put it on correctly and Lena stared at the cross pendant nestled reverently in the babysitter's tidy cleavage. Jesus looked so snug there, hardly suffering at all.

After a few minutes, the babysitter sits down on the sofa, out of view, and Lena continues up her street, toward the bigger homes.

She's supposed to be at her group meeting, but she can't do it tonight. She tried. She stood in the lobby of the community center and hesitated at the directory: Alcoholics Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous. Lena's group was at the bottom. Seeing the name, Parents Without Partners, made her feel sick. So grave and frivolous. It brought to mind hopeless moms groping through the opening notes of a song for men to waltz with. Lena would've preferred to enlist with the alcoholics, the overeaters, anything but the partnerless parents. At her first meeting, the group sat in a circle and took turns introducing themselves.

“I'm Lena,” she said when it was her turn. “I have a seven-month-old boy. His father died, on his horse—he was an equestrian. Both were killed in an equestrian accident. The horse's name was Diamonds. It's nice to be here.”

This is how it goes for Lena. Start with a lie, tell more lies in service of the original lie, until she begins to resent herself, and those she lied to—especially those she lied to—for the lies. People, she's come to realize since Andrew died, ask too many questions, and they're never the right questions.

Earlier tonight, while sneaking away from the community center, she ran into Bern, whose wife was killed after kids dropped rocks from a highway overpass onto the windshield of her car. He called out to Lena, “Forget something?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just remembered I can't make it, unfortunately. I've been invited to a costume party.”

“Fun,” Bern said, catching up with her. Though he wore a tie, crisply knotted, Lena sensed he was unemployed. She sensed he hung around a park all day trying to get people to do things against their will. “Where's your costume?”

“It's at home,” Lena said. “Drying.”

“Drying,” he repeated, turning it over to show the absurdity of it. “I'd like to go to a party. I can't remember the last time I was at—”

“I'd invite you,” she interrupted, “but I'm just going for a few minutes. You know. In and out, that's me. Quickety-quick. Now you see me, now you don't.”

“Sounds like someone's been celebrating early.”

“Thank you,” she said. She didn't realize what he was alluding to until halfway down the block, looking in on her neighbor's houses. But she wasn't drunk. She was safely housed, immunized against sadness. “Thank you,” she repeated while waiting to cross the street.

Andrew never put his hand on her back when they walked through a doorway. He never called her anything but Lena. Sometimes they would hold hands on the armrest at the movies. It was a way of being simultaneously together and alone, the best way to be.

Houses at night are open books. She need only stand in a front yard for a minute to know what they are about. There are stories of love and marriage and severance, there are coming-of-age stories. Most are predictable, lackluster. Some foretell endings so forlorn—derelict sprinkler head, yawning garage door—that Lena has to hurry past to the next house and the next.

I
t's been almost a year. She doesn't keep track, she won't check her calendar, but she knows. Often Andrew's sister calls from St. Pete to tell Lena things. “He used to follow me and my friends all around,” she says. “He tried to hide, but I could see him over the bushes. I didn't care. When I picture him now he's on a couch with a candy cane, and there's marble tile and he's barefoot. He was a big fan of candy canes, Lena. Know that. He ate them year-round.”

Lena can hear an ice tray cracking and a glass being refilled. She's pretty sure the sister has written things down and is reading from a card.

“Lena's turn,” the sister says. “Tell me something I don't know.”

He died on a Friday. He collapsed while riding his bike to the post office to drop off a stack of misdelivered letters addressed to S. T. Valeric, the former owner of the house, who apparently was in some kind of club that involved young Asian women sending him letters. The letters, some of which she and Andrew opened and read, often contained specific physical measurements and a list of sexually tinged likes and dislikes. “I like animal of all kind,” one woman wrote. “Sometime I dream of riding me nude a Black Beauty.”

Fridays, Andrew would return the letters to the post office. He enjoyed making rituals out of tiny events like this.

He cut his cheek when he fell off his bike, after a rupture in his heart. By the time Lena made it to the hospital, he was dead. The first thing she noticed was the cut, and even after the doctor described exactly what had happened, pointing to his own chest to demonstrate, after a woman, a nurse not dressed as a nurse, asked if she'd like a sedative and Lena said, “I can't, I'm having a baby,” which made her cry and cry until she blacked out and woke up with an IV in her arm and there was Andrew's sister—she was still thinking about that cut on his cheek.

A houseful of people for the funeral and then an empty house and a freezer full of stews. Lena became adept at bundling up her unhappiness, sealing it, shipping it from sight. She focused on the thing inside her due in five months. She determined not to poison him with even the merest drop of sadness. The pregnancy would be a five-month ride for the baby in a car built for one. They'd sing songs. They'd head west, away from nightfall, ahead of the retreating sun. She went to the store and bought baby slippers, fleece blankets, a book called
What to Expect When You're Expecting
. He lived in a womb, she'd tuck herself into one, too.

He was born on a Monday, a quick delivery fogged by pain. The first few months, he slept next to her in bed and she woke up every twenty minutes to make sure he wasn't suffocating beneath covers, or choking on a screw that had come loose from, say, the ceiling fan and dropped down next to him on the bed.

She's ready now, ready to mourn. She wasn't fully successful at delaying it while pregnant. She broke down while reading cards from their friends, while cleaning out his desk, after waking from particularly convincing dreams. They're vicious, those dreams, sharper than any memory she can summon. Sharper than any photograph. The grief's still there, somewhere. Every so often she'll brush against its thorny surface and she knows it's waiting, existing separately from her, growing.

“I can't think of anything right now,” she says to Andrew's sister. “Let's talk about something else.”

“Something else? What's there else to talk about? Recipes? The government?”

“I don't know,” Lena says. “Anything.”

Andrew's sister sighs. Ice cubes clack against glass.

“Is the baby busy?” she says. “If you aren't gonna talk about anything at least put Lyle on the phone for a minute.”

Lyle rests on a nursing pillow in her lap. His eyes open and close, open and close. “He's almost asleep,” Lena says. “He's right here.”

“Just put the phone to his ear real quick. I won't be long.”

She should have said it the other way:
He's right here, he's almost asleep
. Andrew's sister breathes and waits. What the hell. Lena holds the phone to Lyle's ear and watches his face shudder and awaken as Andrew's sister tells him things.

L
ena, careful Lena, pushing Lyle, bundled in his stroller under a purple fleece, around the block. She stops to talk to her neighbors. They know about Andrew, but they won't mention him. Maybe they think she's forgotten and they're hesitant to remind her. Their sympathy has dissolved and reconstituted as intense interest in the baby. What a terrific head of hair! they say, kneeling to fully acknowledge him. What nice soft full healthy pleasing miraculous hair. And those eyes—wait, he's smiling! He's beautiful, a dead ringer for his mother, they say.

Lena knows they're being dishonest. She's become sallow-eyed, crow-like, cagey. A new girl at the salon cut her hair too short and now, hiding under a sweatshirt hood, she looks like a medieval lesbian. She sees only Andrew in the baby's unresolved contours. The baby looks like Andrew.

He's asleep now, she can tell without looking at him. She has to be outdoors. She has to keep walking. Past other people's houses and bird feeders made out of two-liter bottles and landscapers sterilizing their saws and sprinkling powdered fox urine around the bases of palms, to ward off moles.

She finds Mrs. Appleman push-brooming sweet-gum husks from the sidewalk in front of her house. Her face is red from exertion, her hair tied back with a gold ribbon in a perfectly uniform bow.

“A baby!” she says. “Nothing in the world's better than a baby.” She peeks into Lyle's stroller, reaches under the blanket. “What a beauty.” On the crown of his skull, a diamond-shaped soft spot pits and puffs with his heartbeat. “What a nice warm fortune cookie.”

Mrs. Appleman asks Lena her name, the baby's name, what her husband does for a living, where they live. “I know that house,” she says. “There was a woman who died there? Or had a baby who died?”

“They all died.” Lena studies the fallow grooves in Mrs. Appleman's face. Every expression she's ever had, every smile and glower and scowl, is intimated there. Conveying an expression now seems a matter of animating certain premade wrinkles. “We live there now,” she says.

Mrs. Appleman stands up, gives the sidewalk a stiff final sweep. “So unlucky.” She lets the broom fall into the grass. “You can tell the unlucky ones, you can always tell.”

She bends down again, over the baby. Lena wonders if there's even a glint of recognition in Mrs. Appleman, if she ever notices that she's reliving a continuous single day. How awful it is to be consigned to this, Lena thinks. And what a blessing not to notice it, and how awful.

“How can you tell?” Lena asks.

“How can you tell what, sweetheart?”

Lena feels a shiver like a thumbnail sketching letters up her back.

“If someone's unlucky.”

Mrs. Appleman makes faces at the baby, squinting and curling her bottom lip over her top lip. “How about you start talking right now?” she says to Lyle. “I'll put a dime in your mouth and you tell my future.” She grips his socked foot like a lever. “Babies are the nicest, especially real babies. But they're sad, too. But they're also nice. Nice and sad.”

Lyle has opened his eyes but he hasn't yet awoken. Mrs. Appleman leans into his stroller like the last swaying tentacle of a dream.

“I'm going to kiss him in case I don't see him again,” she says.

Lena pushes the stroller up Boylston, lifting the front wheels over oak roots that have ripped through the sidewalk, before realizing she's a half-block from the post office, near the spot where Andrew died. She doesn't turn around. The post office is a two-story whitewashed building, just a building. As she walks past, she notices a bike with side baskets and a laughing cow sticker on the crossbar, locked to a bike rack. She stops and stares at it. Chain, sprocket, and spokes are rusted, both tires are flat. She wonders who took the time to move it out of the road. The lock is a cheap combination lock, a chain sleeved in green plastic. The ambulance driver? Lena doesn't know what to do. She finds herself nearing the bike, patting her hand on the seat. Lifting the lock, turning the tumbler—the combination is 0525, Lena's birthday. She unhooks the chain and drops it into one of the bike's baskets.