The Story of Arthur Truluv

by Elizabeth Berg

  She hears Arthur and Lucille come in. She goes downstairs to meet them.

  “There she is!” Lucille says, as though they’ve been out looking for her. But where they have been, Maddy sees, is to Willigan’s for ice cream: Arthur is holding the polka-dot bag.

  “Thank you for that picture of my mom,” Maddy says, and she minds very much the fact that her throat tightens. Maddy supposes it will never go away, the wrenching feeling that comes to her when she thinks about her mother.

  “It was Lucille’s idea,” Arthur says.

  “No, it was my idea to get a big picture made of Frank,” Lucille says. “Which I did. I cut one of him out of the yearbook to get made into an eight-by-ten. He’s wearing his letter sweater and he looks so handsome. What a dish he was. Then Arthur said why didn’t we do the same thing with that terrible, beat-up photo of your mom?”

  “Well,” Maddy says. “Thank you both.”

  “Are you hungry?” Lucille asks. Her favorite thing is asking that and having you say yes. And then after you say yes, she recites what the menu will be. And then when she serves it to you, she recites it again. She lays the meat on your plate and says, “Now. There’s a nice piece of chicken.”

  “I am hungry,” Maddy says.

  “Well, you two go and wash up and I’ll have everything on the table before you get back. We’re having baked chicken stuffed with dressing made with fresh rosemary, sage, and thyme; and twice-baked potatoes with butter and sour cream; and a Caesar salad, but I’ll coddle the egg on account of the baby. And Martha Washington’s cherry pie with Willigan’s French vanilla ice cream.”

  —

  One afternoon in September when Arthur is off at the cemetery, Maddy takes a break from cleaning and goes up into her room. She is sitting at her desk with her candy box when Lucille barges in.

  “Cranberry nut bars!” she says, holding out a plate with several treats arranged on one of her paper doilies. “I made up a kind of orange glaze to put on them, and it is the most delicious thing!” Then, seeing that Maddy has her hand over the box, she says, “Oh. Am I disturbing you?”

  “I guess I think people should knock,” Maddy says. “Before entering someone’s private space.”

  Lucille’s exuberance drains from her face.

  “It’s okay,” Maddy says, pushing the box off to the side. “But maybe in the future…”

  “Oh, I hear you,” Lucille says. “Loud and clear. You want your privacy.”

  She gestures with the plate toward the candy box. “What’s that?”

  Maddy has to laugh. “Well, Lucille, what that is, is private.”

  Lucille stands there, then asks, “So, would you like me to leave you the bars?”

  “Yeah, all right,” Maddy says.

  “And how about if I bring you some milk? You need your milk.”

  “I’ll get it later,” Maddy says.

  “You might as well have it now. Eating these will make you thirsty.” Lucille puts the plate down on Maddy’s desk and peers into the candy box.

  “Is that dollhouse furniture in there?”

  Maddy sighs. Then she attempts a glare at Lucille that turns to tears filling her eyes. When people talk about pregnancy making you emotional, they’re not kidding.

  “Yes. That’s not all that’s in there. But there is some dollhouse furniture.”

  And then, when Lucille’s face softens and she falls silent, Maddy pushes the box toward her. Let her know about the pearl ring, the faded length of blue ribbon. Things she has scavenged.

  “Ohhhh,” Lucille says softly. “I had dollhouse furniture like that. Can I see it?”

  Maddy takes out the bed, the sofa, the armchair.

  “Look at that,” Lucille says, her hands clasped beneath her chin. “Did you used to play with that, when you were little?”

  Maddy shrugs. “It was my mom’s. I guess there used to be more. But this was all I ever found.”

  “I played with my dollhouse all the time,” Lucille says. “Oh, I just loved it! I thought, this is exactly how I’m going to live. I’m going to have a house full of sunshine and every room will be beautiful!

  “I would arrange things in the house just so. I made lace curtains for all the windows, and I cut out squares of fabric to be bedspreads. I made little tiny pillows; my mother was a wonderful seamstress and she helped me. And do you know, every time I knelt before that house and peered into it, it was as though I was living there already, it was like everything I wanted had come true in the future and life was just waiting for me to catch up to it. I thought that house the happiest place, the most complete, and…Well. It was just pretend, wasn’t it? It was a child’s dream. And I was a foolish child and I guess I turned into a foolish old woman.”

  Her head falls, her hands, and a great quiet descends in the room.

  Then Maddy says, “Sometimes when I take out the furniture, I can almost feel her there. My mother. And I can feel what she must have been like. I…Well, I arrange things, too; I know it’s only three things, but I arrange what I’ve got and then I imagine the rest. I used to make houses everywhere when I was a little girl: outside under the bushes, in shoe boxes that I kept hidden in my closet. I used my mom’s dollhouse furniture and then I would cut things out of magazines. Furniture, rugs, even things for outside the house: trees, flowers, bushes. Birds. I would make these little houses and I would pretend I lived there with my mother. And we were so happy.”

  Lucille hesitates, then reaches over to put her hand on top of Maddy’s head.

  “You know what?” she says.

  “What.”

  “Some things come true. They might come true in ways different than we might have predicted, but some things do come true.”

  Maddy looks up, directly into those pale blue eyes, sad and joyful, joyful and sad. “Lucille?”

  “Yes?”

  “How about we go down to the kitchen and have those bars?”

  Lucille puffs herself up. “Well, I thought you’d never ask.”

  —

  After dinner, they are sitting on the porch coming up with suggestions for names for the baby. But this is an exhausting enterprise, and soon the conversation drifts to whether or not Lucille should sell her house. The real estate agent, having said she didn’t want to pressure her, is pressuring her. There is a call almost every other day, now coming to Arthur’s house, and Arthur often has a pleasant little chat with Rhonda before he calls Lucille to the phone. Lucille told Maddy that she thinks he and the realtor have gotten a bit too cozy. “She’s a brash one, that Rhonda,” Lucille said. “A real hussy. Those big-bosomed women have such a sense of entitlement; I have always said that. I hate to cooperate with her, but she is the top-rated realtor, she’ll get me the best price. I might as well sell before the winter sets in. I guess she’s right.”

  But, “You don’t have to sell, Lucille,” Arthur says now. “Don’t let Rhonda make you do something you’re not ready for.”

  Maddy thinks she can see Lucille bristle at Arthur using Rhonda’s name. It’s her opinion that Lucille is jealous; Rhonda, whom she has met, is actually a very nice person, and Arthur will have a pleasant chat with anyone who calls, even a wrong number.

  “But that’s just it,” Lucille says. “I might be ready.”

  “You can take a little time,” Arthur says, and Lucille falls abruptly silent.

  Then, “If you prefer, Arthur,” she says. “I can move into some apartment.”

  “You’re fine here,” Arthur says. “Everything is working out.”

  “But I’ve only been here for a few weeks. Who knows how you’ll feel after…”

  “Everything is fine!” Arthur says. “You’re happy here, aren’t you? And we’re happy to have you, aren’t we, Maddy?”

  “Totally!” Maddy says.

  “Well, all right then,” Lucille says. “All right.”

  They sit for a while, thinking their separate thoughts, watching the evening come. The clouds pinken and t
he roosting birds grow quiet; lights go on in houses. And then Lucille says, “You know, I just had a realization about that. About happiness, I mean. Today, when you people were out, I came out to sit on the porch, and I looked over at my porch. My old porch. And the old porch made me sad, because it was all about my life over there, which was mostly awful. Oh, I pretended it was all right—even to myself, I pretended—but it was mostly awful. And here, I’ve been so much happier. So I was sitting here and thinking that, and I had the funniest thought, which was that happiness was sitting with me.” She points to the chair Maddy is in. “It was sitting right there, like it was a person or something. I swear I could feel its presence, like when you don’t look at another person, but you’re seeing them anyway. Do you know what I mean?”

  “ ’Course I do,” Arthur says. “I do it every day in the cemetery.”

  Maddy says nothing, but she’s thinking, I do it with my mom.

  “Well, anyway,” Lucille says, “I felt like some embodiment of happiness was sitting there, and I was afraid to look over at it. I was afraid it would go away. And then it talked. The happiness, it talked, it said, ‘Look at me.’ So I looked over. And happiness said, ‘You’re not looking at me. You’re looking at you.’ ”

  “What does that mean?” Arthur asks.

  “Well, just that it’s all up to us, isn’t it?”

  Arthur says, “You know, I think teaching has been good for you, Lucille.”

  “And you really don’t mind having the students come here?”

  “At this point,” Arthur says, “you might as well bring in the Russian Army.”

  “But…you mean that in the good way, right?” Lucille says.

  “I mean that in the best way,” says Arthur.

  Lucille turns to Maddy. “I wonder something. And I’m just going to say it. Would you ever consider naming the baby Emma Jean?”

  “If it’s a girl?”

  “Oh, it’s a girl. I know it is. You ask them to tell you, you’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Maddy says. “I want to be surprised.”

  “I just don’t understand that,” Lucille says. “I would want to know!”

  “And I want to be surprised.”

  “Well, it’s no surprise anyway, because I know it’s a girl. I’m doing the whole layette in pink.”

  “Great!” Maddy says. “Boys can wear pink.”

  Lucille says nothing, and Arthur scratches his head.

  “It’s a whole new world,” Maddy says, smiling.

  A squirrel races across the lawn in front of them, cheeks fat with bounty.

  Lucille shudders. “Rodents!” she says. “Rodents with bushy tails.”

  They watch the squirrel dig down to its elbows, a hole so deep its head disappears. Then it takes the nut from its mouth, uses its nose to nudge it into the hole, and quickly covers it back up.

  Lucille laughs. “They’re kind of fun to watch, aren’t they? Do you know, I have never taken the time.”

  “Sometimes you see them swinging through the trees like acrobats,” Arthur says. “I always like to watch that.”

  “Their tails help them balance,” Maddy says.

  Arthur smiles over at her. “That’s right!”

  “How do they ever find where they buried those things?” Lucille asks. “The walnuts. I suppose they just steal from each other.”

  “Acorns, I think you mean,” Arthur says. “Red-oak acorns, mostly; they like those better than white-oak acorns. And they lick them before they bury them, and that’s how they find them later, by their own scent; they can smell it even under snow.”

  “What if all you could eat is one food?” Lucille asks. “Wouldn’t that be awful?”

  “They eat more than nuts,” Arthur says. “They eat leaves and seeds and insect eggs, even birds’ eggs, I’m sorry to say. Worse than that, they eat spring flowers!”

  “They chew on bones, too,” Maddy says. “For the calcium. And they lick the salt on the roads in wintertime.”

  “Well, aren’t you two just the Nature Channel,” Lucille says.

  As they watch, the squirrel runs into the street and is narrowly missed by an oncoming car. Maddy breathes out a sigh of relief; she can’t stand to see anything killed. Beyond her tenderheartedness toward animals, there is something else that happens whenever she sees that. Some sense of futility about life comes over her, some dark memory gets stirred.

  A car pulls up next to the curb, and a man gets out. In the dim light, it’s hard to see who it might be. But then Maddy jumps to her feet. “No!” she says.

  Arthur, confused, stands up. “What is it?” he asks.

  Maddy ignores him. Instead, she leans over the railing of the porch to shout, “Don’t come up here! Go away!”

  “Who is that?” Lucille asks Arthur.

  “Beats me,” Arthur says.

  Maddy goes down the steps and halfway down the walk. “Go home, Anderson. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  “You wouldn’t have told me that old man’s name unless you wanted me to come,” he says. “You probably want me to rescue you or some romantic shit. Well, here I am.”

  “I don’t want you to rescue me. I don’t need rescuing. And I told you, I don’t want to see you anymore.”

  “Bullshit.”

  From the porch, Arthur calls, “Who is that? Are you all right, Maddy?” He and Lucille are standing at the railing, peering out.

  Anderson looks over at the house. “Jesus Christ. This is who you’re living with?”

  Maddy lowers her voice. “Please leave, Anderson. I don’t want you here. I’ll call you later. We can talk about this. I don’t want you here.”

  She tries to take his arm and pull him toward the car, but he yanks away roughly, knocking her off balance, and she nearly falls.

  “Maddy!” Arthur calls.

  She takes Anderson’s arm again. “If you don’t go, I’m going to call the cops.”

  “Fuck you, Maddy, the cops won’t do anything. I’m not doing anything!”

  “Young man?” she hears from the porch. It’s Arthur, standing at the top of the stairs with a baseball bat.

  Anderson’s expression changes. “Really?” he asks, grinning.

  “Really,” Arthur says, and starts walking slowly toward him.

  Anderson’s hands curl into fists. “Better take it easy, old man.”

  Now Arthur picks up the pace while Maddy stands terrified on the lawn.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m going, okay?” Anderson says, but apparently he isn’t moving fast enough for Arthur, who has increased his own speed.

  Anderson jumps in the car and screeches away from the curb. And Arthur starts to run after him. He runs! He may be an old man, but look at him go.

  Suddenly, then, Arthur stops. He bends over, his hands on his knees. Maddy catches up to him. “Are you okay? Arthur?”

  Arthur’s breathing is rapid, but he is jubilant. “Are you okay?” he asks, and she nods.

  “What is going on?” Lucille yells from the porch. Maddy sees that a few other people are looking out their windows.

  “Everything’s fine,” Arthur yells. “It’s all over, folks.” And then, to Maddy, “Whew! I believe I’ll have another piece of pie. How about you?”

  —

  Before she goes to bed, Maddy knocks on Arthur’s bedroom door. He stays up for quite a while after he goes to bed, just thinking, he’s told Maddy. An old habit, to run the day he’s had past himself for review. “Come in!” he says, and she comes to stand by the bedside to show Arthur the book about trees that she bought for the baby.

  Arthur takes it from her and pages through it carefully. “Well, it’s a very nice book,” he says, handing it back. “Not quite as inclusive as I’d like to see. But a very nice little book. It’ll get him started.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘her’?”

  “I’m never wrong about a baby’s sex,” Arthur says in a high voice. He’s imitating Lucille,
whom they can hear snoring from her room down the hall. “Or about anything else.” Then, shrugging, he says, “You gotta love her.”

  “It must be wonderful to be so confident,” Maddy says.

  “I suppose it is.” He looks up at her, his brown eyes huge behind his glasses. She’d never say this to him in case it would hurt his dignity, but he’s so cute.

  “Good night, Arthur,” Maddy says.

  She goes to her room and sits in the little pink chair with her photography book. She studies each image carefully, rocking, with her hand on her stomach. There’s so much she can’t wait for.

  —

  The roses are gone, and September has passed. It was a lovely month, all of them sitting on the porch in the afternoons while it was still warm enough to watch the schoolchildren being disgorged from buses, then running toward home in zigzag patterns, smacking each other with backpacks, or strolling dreamily along.

  Now it is a war of days: on Monday, you might need a jacket; on Tuesday, it might get warm enough for you to lie in the grass in shirtsleeves. Assuming you can still lie in the grass, which, alas, Arthur can no longer do. Nola was one for that: in Indian summer, she might abandon peeling potatoes to go out and lie in the grass to watch the clouds pass by. In her apron. He came home from work one day and there she was in the backyard, still holding the peeler, and when she saw Arthur, she pointed to the sky and said, “Look! Do you see the elephant?” And he sure enough did, and he told her so. The one to tell. The one to be told by. For him, that was marriage.

  One day when Arthur and Maddy are out on the porch alone, he watches Maddy studying the children with a particular intensity. After a while, she turns to him and, with a kind of sadness, says, “I don’t see how you can ever learn not to make mistakes with children.”