The Beginner's Goodbye (3 page)

“Just a little soup?” she asked. “Cream of tomato? Chicken noodle?”

“Neither.”

“Deether,” it sounded like. I could have been in a nose-spray commercial.

She said, “The cream of tomato was Nandina’s idea, but I thought chicken noodle for protein.”

“Deether!” I told her.

“Okay, then, just tea. My special magic tea for sore throats.”

She set the grocery bag on the counter and pulled out a box of Constant Comment. “I brought decaf,” she said, “so it won’t interfere with your sleep. Because sleep, you know, is the very best cure-all.” Next came a lemon and a bottle of honey. “You should get back on the couch.”

“But I don’t—”

“Don’t” was “dote.” Peggy heard, finally. She turned from the sink, where she’d started filling the kettle. “
Listen
to you!” she said. “Should I phone Dorothy?”

“No!” Doe.

“I could just leave a message with her office. I wouldn’t have to interrupt her.”

“Doe.”

“Well, suit yourself,” she said, and she set the kettle on the
burner. Our stove was so old-fashioned that you had to light it by hand, which she somehow knew ahead of time, because she reached for the matchbox without even seeming to look for it. I sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. I watched her slice the lemon in half and squeeze it into a mug while she discussed the proven powers of fruit pectin in bolstering the immune system. “That’s why the Constant Comment,” she said, “on account of the orange peels in it,” and then she said that when
she
got a cold, which wasn’t all that often because somehow she just seemed to have this natural, inborn resistance to colds …

Talk about Constant Comment.

She poured a huge amount of honey on top of the lemon. I swear she poured a quarter of a cup. I didn’t see how there’d be any room for the water. Then she plopped in two teabags, draping the strings over the rim of the mug with her little finger prinked out in a lady-of-the-manor style that must have been meant as a joke, because next she said, in a fake English accent, “This will be veddy, veddy tasty, old chap.”

I realized all at once that I had a really bad headache, and I was fairly certain that I hadn’t had it before she got there.

While we waited for the tea to steep, she went off to fetch an afghan. We didn’t own an afghan, to the best of my knowledge, but I failed to tell her so because I welcomed the peace and quiet. Then she came back, still talking. She said when her father had had a cold he used to eat an onion. “Ate it raw,” she said, “like an apple.” She was carrying an afghan made of stitched-together hexagons. Possibly she had found it in the linen closet off our bedroom, and I knew we’d left the bedroom a mess. Well, that was what people had to expect when they barged in uninvited. She draped the afghan around my shoulders and tucked it under
my chin as if I were a two-year-old, while I shrank inward as much as possible. “Once, when my mom had a cold, Daddy got
her
to eat an onion,” she said. “She instantly threw it up again, though.” My ears were a little clogged, and her voice had a muffled, distant sound like something you’d hear in a dream.

But the tea, when it was ready, did soothe my throat. The vapors helped my breathing some, too. I drank it in slow sips, huddled under my afghan. Peggy said that, in her opinion, her father should have cooked the onion. “Maybe simmered it with honey,” she said, “because you know how honey has antibacterial properties.” She was wiping all the counters now. I didn’t try to stop her. What good would it have done? I polished off the last of the tea—the dregs tooth-achingly sweet—and then without a word I set down the mug and went back to the living room. The afghan trailed behind me with a ssh-ing sound, picking up stray bits of lint and crumbs along the way. I collapsed on the sofa. I curled up in a fetal position so as to avoid the newspapers, and I fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke, the front door was opening. I figured Peggy was leaving. But then I heard the jingle of keys landing in the porcelain bowl in the hall. I called, “Dorothy?”

“Hmm?”

She came through the archway reading something, a postcard she must have found on the floor beneath the mail slot. When she glanced up, she said, “Oh. Are you sick?”

“Just a little sniffly.” I struggled to a sitting position and looked at my watch. “It’s five o’clock!”

She misunderstood; she said, “I had a cancellation.”

“I’ve been asleep all afternoon!”

“You didn’t go in to work?” she asked.

“I did, but Irene sent me home.”

Dorothy gave a snort of amusement. (She knew how Irene could be.)

“And then Peggy stopped by with soup.”

Another snort; she knew Peggy, too. She tossed the mail on the coffee table and removed her satchel from her shoulder. Dorothy didn’t hold with purses. She carried her satchel everywhere—a scuffed brown leather affair with the bellows stretched to the breaking point, the kind that belonged to spies in old black-and-white movies. Her doctor coat, which she was shrugging off now, had a dingy diagonal mark across the chest from the strap. People often mistook Dorothy for some sort of restaurant employee—and not the head chef, either. Sometimes I found that amusing, although other times I didn’t.

When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the “serving size” listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size, even when it was half a cupcake (which was more often the case than you might suppose).

Except that the Triscuits were missing, that day. She called from the kitchen, “Have you seen the Triscuits?”

“What? No,” I said. I had swung my feet to the floor and was folding the afghan.

“I can’t find them. They’re not on the counter.”

I said nothing, since I had no answer. A moment later, she
appeared in the dining-room doorway. “Did you clean up out there?” she asked.

“Who, me?”

“There’s nothing on the counters at all. I can’t find anything.”

I grimaced and said, “That would be Peggy’s doing, I guess.”

“I wish she’d left well enough alone. Where could she have put the Triscuits?”

“I have no idea.”

“I looked in the cupboards, I looked in the pantry …”

“I’m sure they’ll show up by and by,” I said.

“But what’ll I eat in the meantime?”

“Wheat Thins?” I suggested.

“I don’t like Wheat Thins,” Dorothy said. “I like Triscuits.”

I tipped my head back against the sofa. I was getting a little tired of the subject, to be honest.

Unfortunately, she noticed. “This may not be important to
you
,” she said, “but I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. All I’ve had is coffee! I’m famished.”

“Well, whose fault is that?” I asked her. (We’d been through this discussion before.)

“You know I’m too busy to eat.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “From the time you wake up in the morning till the time you get home in the evening, you’re living on coffee and sugar and cream. Mostly sugar and cream. And you call yourself a doctor!”

“I
am
a doctor,” she said. “A very hardworking doctor. I don’t have any free time.”

“Neither does the rest of the world, but somehow they manage to fit in a meal now and then.”

“Well, maybe the rest of the world is not so conscientious,” she said.

She had her fists on her hips now. She looked a little bit like a bulldog. I’d never realized that before.

Oh, why, why, why did I have to realize on that particular afternoon? Why could I not have said, “Look. Clearly you’re half starved, and it seems to be making you fractious. Let’s go out to the kitchen and find you something to eat”?

I’ll tell you why: it’s because next she said, “But what would
you
know about it? You with your nursemaids rushing around brewing your homemade soup.”

“It wasn’t homemade; it was canned,” I said. “And I didn’t
ask
for soup. I didn’t even eat it. I told Peggy I didn’t want it.”

“How come she was in the kitchen, then?”

“She was making me some tea.”

“Tea!” Dorothy echoed. I might as well have said opium. “She made you
tea
?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You don’t even like tea!”

“This was medicinal tea, for my throat.”

“Oh, for your
throat
,” Dorothy said, with exaggerated sympathy.

“I had a sore throat, Dorothy.”

“An ordinary sore throat, and everyone comes running. Why does that always happen? Throngs of devoted attendants falling all over themselves to take care of you.”

“Well, some—some—somebody had to do it,” I said. “I don’t see
you
taking care of me.”

Dorothy was quiet a moment. Then she dropped her fists
from her hips and walked over to her satchel. She picked it up and went into the sunporch. I heard the leathery creak as she set her satchel on the desk, and then the squeak of the swivel chair.

Stupid argument. We had them, now and then. What couple doesn’t? We weren’t living in a fairy tale. Still, this particular argument seemed unusually pointless. In actual fact I hated being taken care of, and had deliberately chosen a non-caretaker for my wife. And Dorothy wouldn’t mind at all if somebody made me tea. Most likely she’d be relieved. This was just one of those silly spats about something neither one of us gave a damn about, but now we were backed in our corners and didn’t know how to get out of them.

I heaved myself from the sofa and crossed the hall to the bedroom. I closed the door soundlessly and sat down on the edge of the bed, where I took off my shoes and my brace. (I wear a polypropylene brace to correct a foot-drop.) The Velcro straps made a ripping sound as I undid them—
batch! batch!
—and I winced, because I didn’t want Dorothy guessing what I was up to. I wanted her to wonder, a little bit.

I held still and listened for her, but all I heard was another creak. This would not have been her satchel, though. She was too far away for that. It was probably a hall floorboard, I decided.

I stretched out on the rumpled sheets and stared at the ceiling. There wasn’t a chance on earth I could sleep. I realized that now. I had slept all afternoon. What I should do was go out to the kitchen and start cooking something good-smelling, something that would lure Dorothy from the sunporch. How about hamburgers? I knew we had a pound of—

Creak!
An even louder one. Or not a creak after all, but a crash,
because the creak lasted too long and then it swelled into a
slam!
with smaller slams following it, and stray tinkles and crackles and thumps. My first thought (I know this was ludicrous) was that Dorothy must be much more miffed than I had supposed. But even as I was thinking it, I had to admit that she was not the type to throw tantrums. I sat straight up and my heart began hammering. I called, “Dorothy?” I stumbled off the bed. “Dorothy! What was that?”

I made it to the door in my stocking feet, and then I remembered my brace. I could walk without it, in a fashion, but it would be slow going. Turn back and strap it on? No; no time for that. And where had I put my cane? That was anybody’s guess. I flung open the bedroom door.

It seemed I was on the edge of a forest.

The hall was a mass of twigs and leaves and bits of bark. Even the air was filled with bark—dry bark chips floating in a dusty haze, and a small bird or a very large insect suddenly whizzing up out of nowhere. Isolated pings! and ticks! and pops! rang out as different objects settled—a pane of glass falling from a window, something wooden landing on the wooden floor. I grabbed on to a broken-off branch and used it for support as I worked my way around it. It wasn’t clear to me yet what had happened. I was in a daze, maybe even in shock, and there was a lag in my comprehension. All I knew was that this forest was thicker in the living room, and that Dorothy was beyond that, in the sunporch, where I could see nothing but leaves, leaves, leaves, and branches as thick as my torso.

“Dorothy!”

No answer.

I was standing near the coffee table. I could make out one corner of it, the egg-and-dart molding around the rim, and wasn’t it interesting that the phrase “egg-and-dart” should come to me so handily. I looked toward the sunporch again and saw that I could never fight my way through that jungle, so I turned back, planning to go out the front door and around to the side of the house, to the outside entrance of the sunporch. On my way toward the hall, though, I passed the lamp table next to the sofa (the sofa invisible now), where the cordless telephone lay, littered with more bits of bark. I picked it up and pressed
Talk
. Miraculously, I heard a dial tone. I tried to punch in 911, but my hand was shaking so that I kept hitting the pound sign by accident. I had to redial twice before I finally connected. I put the phone to my ear.

A woman said, “Please file an ambulance.”

“What?”

“Please file an ambulance.”

“What?”

“Police?” she said in a weary tone. “Fire? Or ambulance.”

“Oh, pol—pol—or—I don’t know! Fire! No, ambulance! Ambulance!”

“What is the problem, sir,” she said.

“A t-t-t-tree fell!” I said, and that was the first moment when I seemed to understand what had happened. “A tree fell on my house!”

She took down my information so slowly that her slowness seemed meant to be instructive, an example of how to behave. But I had things to do! I couldn’t stand here all day! I had read that 911 operators could detect a caller’s address with special equipment, and I failed to see why she was asking me all these
questions she must already know the answers to. I said, “I have to go! I have to go!” which reminded me, absurdly, of a child needing to pee, and all at once it seemed to me that I did need to pee, and I wondered how long it would be before I could attend again to such a mundane task.

I heard a siren from far away. I still don’t know if it was my phone call that brought it. In any case, I dropped the phone without saying goodbye and staggered toward the hall.