While I Was Gone (3 page)

“Plus, of course”—he smiled back quickly—“I do like to talk. Talking is life.

Right?”

“For you, yes.”

“So what was this feeling? Today. Talk Talk to me.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was silly.” I leaned back.

“No.

Here’s what it was. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and I saw myself, and I don’t know how I got this way.” I made a dramatic gesture down my body.

wanted to amuse him. He had amused me.

He looked me up and down.

“What way?”

“Older. Not young. Not what I once was.”

“Ah, but which of us is?” He grinned, a flash of dry pleasure.

“Of course. It’s silly. But just, from time to time, don’t you kind of get swept by it? By the sense of separation between the parts of life.

Don’t you? Doesn’t the part that was crazy and doing drugs and having random sex in the sixties sometimes sit up and wonder what you’re doing here? Look at that,” I said. I pointed to the counter.

“There’s a Cuisinart there. There’s a dishwasher. That’s indefensible.”

He laughed. And then he said, “People change, my Jo.

That’s all you’re saying.”

“No it isn’t. I don’t think it is. What I’m saying is I don’t like this business of whole lives being taken from me.”

“Who’s taking? Who’s taking anything from you? Whole lives.”

He made a face.

“Too melodramatic. It’s just life.”

For a few moments we ate, we talked about the food, I poured myself more wine. Daniel wasn’t drinking, because he thought he might be going out later.

Then, abruptly, he pointed at me with his fork.

“I

mean, Jo, look at my parents. Born on farms, raised on farms, both of them. Farming, raising their kids on a farm. And lo and behold, the kids don’t want to farm, so they sell it. They move to town, they grow old looking out at the parking lot by Meadow Glen Acres. That’s disjunctive as hell.

But that’s the way life goes.”

“See, I don’t think it has to. I think it can feel more connected. I bet it used to. I bet this has something to do with goddamned modernity.”

“Could be,” he said.

I sighed. I drank more of my wine.

“It’s life, Jo,” he said after a few moments of silence.

“It isn’t,” I said.

We both laughed, small, rueful laughs.

“Ready to clean up?” he asked.

After dinner, Mortie called back. Daniel turned his back to me while he talked. His voice was grave, a series of quick, short responses.

Okay, okay. Yes. Okay.

When he hung up, I said, “She’s dying.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know.” He went to change, and I moved more slowly now around the kitchen. The windows had gone black, they were steamy with our life. I was thinking of Amy, his parishioner. I’d met her only a few times. She’d been pregnant the last time I’d seen her, singing in the choir. Her hands, holding the music, had rested on the shelf formed by her big belly in the maroon robe.

When he came back, he said, “I’m not sure how late I’ll be.” His face was stricken, frightened-looking, and I thought about how difficult his job was.

“I know,” I said.

“Don’t wait up.”

“I want to,” I said.

He nodded, and gripped my arm for a second, and left.

A WHILE AFTER HE’D GONE, SADIE CALLED, AND HER SMALL,

light voice made me see her and yearn for her. She was the youngest of my daughters, the easiest, and my love for her was the least complicated.

The twins had always been much more difficult. Unplanned, they’d come at the wrong time in our marriage, just when I was starting out as a vet, needing to put in long hours of scutwork as the junior partner in a practice. Daniel had their care more than I did, and sometimes felt shut out from their life together. And from the two of them, too, their mysterious dark twinniness. They cared most about each other.

And then suddenly, when they were two or so, they began to fight.

Within seconds they could move from a wild mutual joy to murderous violence. They left the tracks of their tiny fingernails on each other’s faces, the beautiful, even, red circlet of their teeth marks in each other’s soft flesh. They pulled out clutches of each other’s wispy black hair. They pushed and scratched and grabbed and would not let go, and woe unto him who tried to separate them. We rarely got through a meal without one of them attacking the other, without wails and shrieks and inconsolable sorrow..

Intermittently they’d be best friends again for a while.

Oh, maybe it’s over, we’d tell each other. Oh, thank God. But at the slightest offense, the mildest difference, they’d start again.

“Why must we live like this? ” Daniel and I would ask each other. I sometimes wept, it was so different from what I’d hoped for or imagined when they were born, these two perfect, helpless creatures nested bonelessly side by side.

And then, when they were five, along came Sadie. Planned for, adored by us all, pliable, sweet, she sat like a small Caucasian Buddha in our midst. I was able to take a maternity leave of three months this time, and I lay in bed long mornings, nursing her and sleeping, while the twins were off at kindergarten and then their after-school program. When they came home, they swarmed her. They carried her everywhere with them. She was their doll, their toy, their beloved.

She walked and talked late because they were so eager to serve her, to anticipate her every need.

They vied for her affection, and Nora, finally, was the winner, the one Sadie began to gravitate toward most often. I think that for Nora, Sadie may have offered a way of escaping from the demands of her bond to Cass—from the wild love, the maddened jealousy. At woe she became a kind of second mother to Sadie, and as Sadie w older, she often turned to her before me or Daniel for help and inion nation

Cass was angtj she felt left out. She wanted to go on fighting And

—.

that’s what she did, really—with herself, with us, with the world.

Dukes up, she charged at everyone and everything. She became the outsider, the tough one, the one we worried about. Even now. Here was Nora, living in New York with a young man we genuinely liked, going to film school. Sadie had just started college in western Massachusetts, still loving, still easy, voluntarily in touch all the time. And Cass, Well, Cass played guitar in a band. The last time I’d seen her, her hair was dyed a plummy black that rose around her head in a wildly teased tangle, and she was wearing lipstick so dark it seemed the color of violence itself—it put you in mind of bruises, of dried blood.

the band made no money to speak of. Who knows what they ate? A lot of the time they all slept together in their van in parking lots along the highway, on derelict empty streets in faraway cities. Sometimes we didn’t know where she was for two or three months at a time. Then one of us would pick up the phone in the middle of the night and I it would be Cass, collect, from a pay phone in Louisiana, or North Dakota, saying she could talk only a minute, they were about to go on, there’s more snow here than I’ve ever seen in my fucking life, I dyed my hair blond, the van broke down, I broke up with Tod, now I’m with Raimondo, oops, they’re calling me, love ya, gotta go.

Not Sadie. Sadie called and lazily talked and talked.

What’s new?

she’d ask. What have you guys been doing? Though all she wanted to hear was that everything was the same.

“Hi, Mom, it’s Sade,” is what she said tonight in her little voice. (If it isn t Betty Boop, Cass used to tease.) “Oh!” I cried in pleasure.

“Sadie, Sadie, my shady lady.”

There was a second of silence. Then she said, “God, isn’t it bad enough to give me the name?”

“It’s a beautiful name.” It was Daniel’s mother’s name. She’d wept when we told her, though she warned us, too, that it was a hard one to live with.

Sadie snorted now.

“What’s up” I asked. I could hear background noises—music, a muted conversation. She had a roommate, she had a boyfriend, she had a whole life, only fifty or so miles away.

“Yeah, well. I had this kind of, like, favor to ask.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’ll try anyway.”

“I’ve got this professor in my poli sci class? You know, I told you about her—Jean Bennett? She’s just so brilliant. And it turns out she lives in Adams Mills! I mean, she’s new. She just moved there.”

“Hey,” I said.

“So after I made that connection, I was mentioning you guys to her. Like if she ever needed religion, she could call Dad, and if she ever needed a vet, she could call you. Which I assume was fine.”

“Of course.”

“Though actually, you know, it was really just, like, being polite or something. The way you do. But today. After class? She mentioned to me that her dog is having some kind of trouble. She actually told me, but I forget what she said it was. Anyway. She wanted your name, and I gave it to her.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Which means, I assume, that she’s going to call you. So . I wanted you to know.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“Mom, she is so amazing. She is just so extraordinary.”

“Well, I’ll try not to embarrass you, dear.”

“You think I’m exaggerating, but it’s true, Mom. It’s true. You will love her.”

“And what is her name again? This paragon.”

“Jean Bennett. Jean. That’s one of the cool things, that we call her by her first name.”

“But you’ve always called everyone by their first name, haven’t you? I mean, grown-ups.”

“Not around here, Mom. Not professors. Everyone is Dr.

This or Professor That.”

“I see. Well, I’ll look forward to meeting her,” I said.

“Jean Bennett, right?” She made a noise of assent.

“And what’s new with you, sweetheart?” I asked.

Suddenly a deep sigh.

“That’s my problem, I bet,” she said.

“There’s absolutely nothing new.”

“But every little thing you do is new to us.”

“Mother ” “I mean it, honI allowed a beat of silence.

“And then, of course, I don’t.”

She laughed. And then she sighed again, less dramatically.

“Well, if you must know, I’m really stressed. I’ve got papers, I’ve got this dance thing”—a recital she was in. Daniel and I were planning to attend.

We’d have a fancy dinner at an inn we knew on the way, and then get to see Sadie in motion.

“I’ve got tons of reading I’m so behind on.

And I’ve been having those dreams, you know, where you’re taking some test you’re not ready for.”

“Ugh,” I said.

She began to tell me how unfair her humanities teacher was, not to grant her an extension.

As I listened and commiserated, I could hear the dogs stirring at some noise in the living room. Sadie’s voice, her own sweet voice combined with all the standardized cadences and phrasing of adolescence, rattled on in her world. The dishwasher sloshed in the kitchen.

Daniel’s clothes hung touching mine on the rows of hooks. I was alive, I was in all these worlds at once. A finger in every pie, I thought.

This, this is what we grow old for.

Sadie asked me our news, and I reported it as blandly as I could. No need to mention Amy, no point in trying to describe my odd feeling of the afternoon. It was gone now anyway.

Finally she said she had to get off.

“Oh! But, Mom…

just, when Jean comes, if she comes, don’t talk about me, okay?”

“Never in a million years.”

“And don’t dare tell her how enthralled I am. Swoon, swoon.”

“Well, now, that would be talking about you, Sade.”

“Right, Mom.” Her voice had dried.

“Good night, sweetie.”

“Night.”

WHEN DANIEL WASN’t BACK BY ELEVEN, I TOOK THE DOGS out for their walk. The air was cool, and I pulled my jacket tight.

Light fell from the windows behind me into the yard, and the world disappeared beyond its touch. I stepped forward, into it.

Often Daniel and I had done the dogs’ walk together when the girls were still home, happy just to be alone with each other at the end of the long day, to escape from them and the phone and the duties of the house. We’d stumble through the dark, reviewing our separate days for one another, ignoring the dogs, who ran ahead or trailed behind.

We’d walk past the stores, the fancy houses, looking in at other people’s lives like strolling gods, commenting. We’d wander into the unlighted streets off the common that turned gradually into knotted paths, into fields. We’d walk slower and slower as we wound down, bumping into each other more, unmoored and dizzy in the dark. And then finally Daniel would say, “Well, we better head home and see if anyone’s still alive.” Reluctantly, yet eagerly now, we’d whistle for the dogs in the soft night air and turn to start back.

That’s what I was thinking of that Monday night before everything changed, before my other life caught up with me. I’d pushed aside that moment in the boat, I was thinking only of Daniel trying to offer comfort in the face of death, of Sadie turning back to her world, and Cass and Nora moving around in theirs, even of the dogs, running after each other through the dark village to sounds and smells I couldn’t guess at. And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same.

WHEN I ARRIVED AT WORK THE NEXT DAY, BEAT TIE

was already behind the counter, with three dogs moving excitedly around her feet. We let the good-natured boarders loose for company for each other during the day, so there were almost always three or four of them nosing about officiously or sleeping under Beattie’s desk.

“The supervisors” she called them.

the barkers, the fighters, we kept in the runs in the back, and the cats had their own room, so they wouldn’t be in perpetual panic at the dogs’ noise.

Beattie was on the phone, making reassuring, motherly sounds to someone. She would be on the phone fairly steadily through the morning. Tuesday was my day to catch up with all the bad things that had happened to my people’s pets while I had my two days off. My partner, Mary Ellen, handled the worst of it on Mondays, the real emergencies left over from the weekend, fights, traumas, difficult births, the sudden onset of skin problems, unexplained loss of appetite or other gastrointestinal issues.