Thank You for the Music (22 page)

I stepped down off of my seat and began to walk toward her. I circled over to the next section, all the while looking at her. She had not moved. And she gave no sign that she wanted me to stop my circling, no sign that she would run if I tried to join her in the yellow seats above the third-base line. She gave no sign, but I knew all the same that I was to stop there in section E, near center field. She in turn stepped down and walked to the seats above what would have been home plate, until she was once again directly across from me. I suppose I began to understand that we were dancing.

Soon enough that understanding depressed me, and I sat down. I rubbed my eyes. I did not want to dance this dance. I did not want, anymore, this intrusion of absurdity. I watched a cloud of swallows move eastward above us. I closed my eyes.

“Will it rain!” she cried out, suddenly, as if sensing my approaching despair. Her voice was small and sturdy and echoed in the stadium's chamber. “Will it rain!” she cried again.

I could not bring myself to shout back. I stood and shook my head yes. Yes, it will rain.

“Will we talk!” she cried out now, louder than her first question. “Will we sit and talk!”

And this time I wanted to cry out, louder than I have ever shouted anything in my life, “Where?” But again, I could not bring myself to shout into that gray void. I tried to shake my head yes again, but I'm not sure that I even managed to accomplish that. The distance between us was overwhelming. It pressed against me. I somehow knew that any effort of mine to cross it would prove a mockery. Any words I managed to shout would blow back into my face like paper scraps. I expected that she would soon leave the stadium, mistaking my powerlessness as rejection of her. And I would leave too, and remember her every so often as the woman in the stadium.

She did not leave. This tenacity impressed me, then moved me. I stared across at her, then once again stood up on my chair like a child. More swallows in the sky, and a huge boom of some kind shook the city, the sort I hear every day, some sort of dynamite used for construction no doubt, but at that moment I imagined it was terrorism, war. Another huge explosion. Another. Then silence.

And so we, the children on chairs, went on staring. A sprinkle of rain joined us, then stopped.

I felt the wind in my hair, and saw the wind in the woman's hair. The sun slipped out from behind a cloud. And then the woman began to slip off her maroon dress, so that I saw her white shoulders in the gray light shining, and nodded my head. She wore a white slip that also had the quality of something that glowed. The slip came down to her knees. She looked very fine in that slip in those yellow seats. Imagine her as sunshine.

For a moment I forgot my perspective of distance, and saw her as five inches tall, someone I could slip into my pocket, someone I could make a bed for in my glove compartment, someone who could drive with me everywhere. This strange thought saddened me so that sudden tears stung my eyes.

My son died two years ago, when he was thirty, in a car wreck, when he was drunk one night, or perhaps on a drug. We had been estranged for several years before this happened. Perhaps this is one reason I remember him most as a boy, a boy who loved or tolerated his father, a boy who I carried in my arms at night in the alleys of that old city, when he was small, when I could never sleep, when I felt the solidity of his body in my arms as the one certainty on this earth. Looking at the woman in her slip I remembered his mother, the night after his funeral, when our house was empty of relatives again. She was not wearing a slip, yet she stood in our bedroom with the same vulnerability of a woman wearing a slip. The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of memories is to impede their initial entry. If you've noticed. One memory gives rise to the next. You remember your wife in your bedroom the night after you bury your son, and then you are bound to remember your own abominably judgmental heart, which sat in your chest with its own cold eyes.
Pull it together,
you were thinking then.
Pull it together, you've been crying all week and I'm sick of looking at you.
My wife looked up at me in pure shock, as if she'd heard my heart, as if finally realizing the depth of my lovelessness. It is a look that pleased me at the time. I felt anointed by her vision because I knew it was finally the truth she saw, that despite the good things I have said and done, it has always been the truth, that always the innermost eyes of my heart have been cold to the suffering of others. But no, I was not, as it turns out, loveless.

I took off my sweater, my pants, and my shirt. The sun was gone. The woman across from me was naked now. I had begun to weep. I undressed the rest of the way, and dropped each article of clothing on the seats beside me. The air was cool but I did not shiver. We stood there facing each other for what seemed a good while. I could tell you she had a long neck, and a long waist, and long, heavy legs, and that all of her seemed lit up somehow. Perhaps because the air against us was cold, she began to dress, and of course I did the same. But as we dressed, we looked at one another. Finally dressed I cried out the same question she had posed. “Will we talk!”

“Where!” she shouted back, and I smiled uncontrollably.

“On the field!” I shouted. “Down on the field!”

“On the field!” she shouted back.

“Yes!”

We sat under the green plastic covering, near home plate. It rained. We may have been campers. I was filled with a kind of astonishment, a kind of fierce gratitude to find myself in the presence of this woman. She was back in her blue winter coat. We both seemed to understand that neither of us wanted to smile at what had transpired between us, or even speak of the strangeness of it, though her eyes told me she felt the same astonishment that I felt.

“Are you a baseball fan?” was the first thing she said to me. She had green eyes. Her voice was low-pitched and clear. She held her head stiffly, her neck stretched forward. She may have been fifty years old or so. She had that rare quality of seriousness, or gravity, without the predictable contemporary persona that feels compelled to mock the gravity, that laughs and skates over the seriousness.

“I was a baseball fan. As a boy, I loved the game as much as anyone. And you?”

She lowered her eyes. Before she answered I felt compelled to give her an image of myself. I interrupted her as she began to speak. I said, “I lived in Brooklyn. On summer nights I lay awake listening to Dodgers games in the dark. The room was hot and my sister in the next bed asked too many questions.”

This was not the memory I meant to give her, but she looked at me as if she could see that old room, how frightened I was for reasons I couldn't name, how the windows looked out on tall buildings across the street, and sometimes a moon. She smiled.

“I slept in my underwear,” I added.

“Of course you did.”

We looked at each other.

“And you kept your baseball cards in shoe boxes under your bed,” she said.

“Yes, I did. Lots of them.”

“My husband played for the old Class D league.”

“And you watched his games faithfully?”

“He was my best friend,” she said. “Would you like an apple?”

She took an orange from her coat pocket.

“I mean an orange,” she said, and smiled.

“Thank you,” I said. She was staring at me now. Her eyes were the eyes I would've expected, cleansed with recent tears. It was strangely easy to hold her gaze.

“We could be arrested,” she said, handing me the orange, which seemed brilliantly orange under that green tent of ours. “I've been here before, and a security guard once gave me a warning.”

“If I get arrested, I get arrested,” I said.

She smiled and lowered her eyes, then looked up at me.

“We'll leave one at a time,” she said. “I'll go first. You enjoy the orange.”

She slipped out from under our covering. She left without another word, and I knew not to stop her. I stayed there with the rain pounding the plastic over my head for an hour or so, ate the orange on the Astroturf, and that was the world. My head hummed with a kind of light. I said the name of my son and the name of my wife. This became a kind of prayer. I can't explain it.

I finally got up and walked out of the stadium. I climbed the fence, and walked back to my car, and drove on, listening to the radio. And for a while after this, I allowed every word that every person said, every random face lost and alone in a crowd, to somehow penetrate my heart with stabs of light.

I
T WAS THE MONTH
A
ILEEN
'
S PARENTS SEPARATED
, when her mother said to her, “Just call me Roseen,” and her grandmother, who lived with them, said, “Then you might as well call me Belle.”

They said it in the car on the way to Jersey. They said it out of the blue, as they rounded the top of the Delaware Memorial Bridge at dusk, the sky a wild flame. It was early summertime, many years ago, and Carole King on the radio sang “So Far Away.” It broke Aileen's eleven-year-old heart every time she heard it.

“We got our whole lives in front of us,” Roseen said at the wheel.

“And this time we'll avoid the slithery and banal,” said Belle.

“The slithery and banal can kiss my ass,” Roseen joked back.

Aileen wished her mother wouldn't say “ass.”

When they got to Wildwood, Aileen was relieved to soon find other Catholic girls like herself, who wanted to dress up as nuns and have May processions (even in July) or mock funerals, or play Saints—a game where one girl stood against the wall getting pebbles thrown at her by the other girls—or Communion, where they broke Nilla Wafers and served up the hosts to each other's tongues, or Confession, where you got in a dark closet and told your fake sins, the more outrageous the better. These girls, Kathleen and Margaret and Deirdre and Marie, all claimed to have seen the Virgin come out of the sea one night. Aileen thought this was thrilling, and made the mistake of mentioning it to Roseen. “Honey, Mary wouldn't be caught dead in
Wildwood.
She goes to places like Lourdes over in Europe if she goes anywhere.”

By then Roseen and Belle were tired maids, cleaning out rented houses so the next group of tourists could move in. Belle would start to tell Aileen a story about what slobs people were, and Roseen would hush her, saying Aileen didn't need to know the grit. Roseen, instead, told Aileen how one of the realtors tipped her fifty bucks for having good legs.

After they cleaned, they'd come home for drinks. It was dusk, and the floor lamp was on in the corner of the cottage living room.

“Care for some wine?” Roseen said to Aileen one night.

“I'm only eleven!” Aileen protested.

“In some of the best foreign countries children drink all the time.”

Aileen crossed her arms. She was tired and sunburned. She'd run on the beach all day, eating peanut butter sandwiches filled with sand. “This isn't a foreign country,” she said.

Roseen poured Belle and herself some wine, and sighed. “If you don't watch out, Aileen, you'll end up like Ada the Fringer.”

Aileen refused to ask who Ada the Fringer was. It would be several years before she discovered Ada was an example of the wallflower in what had been Roseen's high school home-economics textbook. Ada the Fringer sat on the sidelines in drab clothing with bad posture, and never smiled.

“You need to loosen up a little, that's all,” Roseen persisted. Belle in a corner chair had her head back, her eyes closed.

“Leave her be,” she said. “Get the poor kid some Kool-Aid.”

“Yum yum,” Roseen said, but went and got Aileen a cup of Kool-Aid so she could join in on the evening toast.

Their ritual: first they toasted to something abstract like world peace or the future; then they toasted a person. You had to be quick and shout out a name all at once so they clashed in the air.

“To Betty Grable!”

“To Jackie O!”

“To Dred Scott!”

And the summer would soften into late August, the darkness falling earlier, a slight chill in the air, the tourists growing scarce and finally the town emptying so the real people could get on with their lives.

And they were real people now, when for years they'd been “shoe boxers,” coming down to the beach for a long day, using the public showers, or mere renters for a week in The Sands motel. Now they could say of the tourists, “I thought they'd never leave” and “They get louder and more demanding every year.”

Aileen attended a new school, Immaculate Heart by the Sea, and got a job all her own, sweeping the theater on the boardwalk every Sunday afternoon, the beautiful deserted boardwalk that ran parallel to the ocean, ghostly and abandoned in the wavering winter light, amusement rides closed down or hauled away, shooting galleries boarded up, and only a few bars, some fry joints, the bingo hall, and the Apollo movie theater left open for locals. Aileen loved her job. She dusted maroon velvet seats, swept up the crushed popcorn, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, cups, and once a mortifying beige bra she had to hide from the manager, Shillone, who was a magician and considered his theater job a measly hobby. While Aileen swept in the dingy light, Shillone worked in the high-ceilinged lobby counting money on the glass counter, half watching a church service on a black-and-white TV so he could ridicule it.