When We Argued All Night

by Alice Mattison

—Like what? He smelled fresh and familiar, pressing his face into Artie’s chest—eager, cool, aromatic—as if he’d been outdoors, not cooped up in a train. Don’t you know better than to come to New York in a Red Sox jacket? Some Yankee fan will knock your block off. Don’t worry, I’ll protect you. I’ll turn you into a Mets fan. Dwight Gooden. You know who that is?

  The kid was trembling. Maybe he’d been frightened after all, alone in the train. Artie held his skinny shoulders. You want me to carry your pack?

  He shook his head. I’m okay.

  —What’s the matter?

  —Nothing.

  —You know, Artie said, when I was eleven, I didn’t have a grandfather. I never had one. They stayed back in Russia. Horrible, what happened. So I have no experience with how you talk to a grandfather.

  David shook his head. I’m okay.

  —We’ll go find Grandma, Artie said. He’d taught children David’s age for years and years, but he’d rarely thought about them one at a time. If there were thirty, he’d know what to do. But this was true for kids too: they liked being with adults if there were plenty of kids around. He remembered being eleven, being with adults at eleven—embarrassment, bafflement. He said, Do you have to go to the bathroom?

  —No, David said. Yes.

  Back to the men’s room. David went into a stall. Artie stood watch. A homeless man washed clothes in a basin. Did you see that? David said as they left. They crossed the main concourse.

  —You want something to eat? Can you wait for lunch? He could buy him a knockwurst. A place in the station had great knockwurst. We’re having lunch soon—can you wait? I don’t want to spoil your appetite.

  —I can wait. David had straight, dark hair, like Artie’s own before it turned white.

  —I’ll tell you what. We’ll get one knockwurst and share it.

  —Okay, David said. He seemed excited. Artie gave him most of the knockwurst. They walked to Broadway—Times Square—and down Broadway. Did you see that? David said again, after a silence.

  —See what?

  —A man in the men’s room was washing clothes in the basin.

  —Homeless, Artie said. Reagan’s homeless. It’s 1984 and we’ve got 1932 all over again. People with no place to live. Now they’re throwing them out of the station. Soon that guy will be out in the street with dirty clothes. A woman got thrown out in the cold a couple of months ago and she died. You know what your friendly president says? He says they’re homeless by choice. Homeless by choice.

  —He’s not my friendly president.

  —Good boy. He’s disgusting. And, you’ll see, he’ll be reelected in November.

  —My mom’s not voting for him.

  —I should hope not! Artie said. How’s your mom, anyway?

  —She’s good.

  —So this Jess—is she going to last? Is she better than the others?

  —I liked some of the others, David said. I liked Karen. Karen had been Brenda’s partner for two years.

  —Everybody liked Karen, Artie said. A block later, he said, Hey David, you like limericks? Listen to this:

  A woman in females delighted,

  And by many of them was excited,

  But they’d shout or they’d pout.

  They didn’t work out.

  Would her troth ever be plighted?

  David was silent.

  —You don’t like it? Artie said.

  —I don’t know, he said. They walked, and Artie looked for something else to talk about. The weather was warm, and he opened his jacket. You want to take your jacket off? Is that thing heavy?

  —It’s not funny, David said.

  —What isn’t? Oh, I know what. Artie didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, I know, kiddo. You’re right. It’s not funny. They didn’t speak for a couple of blocks. He should have skipped the goddamned limerick.

  When they were almost at Thirty-fourth Street, David said, Grandpa?

  —We’re almost there. Let’s see if we can find your grandma.

  —I was scared I wouldn’t find you, David said, and burst into tears. He was almost a teenager, Artie saw, looking at him before he put his arms around him, skinny and short but with the beginnings of a man’s face, a jaggedness. His cheeks no longer stuck out—that was the difference. David had had round little cheeks Artie liked to pinch. Now he had a bony face. He sobbed and trembled.

  —She shouldn’t have sent you alone! Artie said. I don’t know why the hell she sent you alone!

  —I wanted to, David said. But then I was afraid I’d be lost in New York.

  —You’re not a New Yorker, Artie said. He had almost never known anyone well who was not a New Yorker. A grandson growing up in Concord, New Hampshire! That’s okay. I’ll teach you to be a New Yorker. I’ll teach you what to do. First thing, I gotta take you to a Mets game. I think they’re playing tonight—I should have thought. Now Evelyn will want to make a big dinner, the whole bit. Well, we’ll watch it on television. But I don’t think Gooden is pitching.

  If he could find Evelyn. The kid wasn’t the only one who worried. Evelyn got mixed up these days. She’d worked at the nursing home for so long, and then one day, before she’d thought about retiring, they told her they were having a big party, a dinner to honor her years of service. I get the message, she said to Artie.

  Holding David’s hand though the boy protested, Artie went into Macy’s and stopped just to the side of the entrance closest to Thirty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. He looked at his watch. They were ten minutes late. He didn’t see Evelyn. He would count to a hundred and not say anything. He would count to three hundred. Five hundred. There she was, dressed up in a spring coat but with flat shoes. Evelyn had finally stopped wearing heels. A broken ankle I don’t need, she said. She was getting shorter. She and David were the same height. I’m late, she said, after she hugged him. Don’t say anything, Artie, I know I’m late. I bought you some shirts, David, and there was a line to pay. Wait till you see—very nice shirts.

  4

  Finding their way in an unfamiliar store, they forgot soup when they were in the soup aisle, so Jess went back. Brenda pushed the cart across the front of the store toward cookies but stopped when she found piles of newspapers. Here in the Adirondacks, they carried the New York Times but not the Boston Globe, which they read at home in New Hampshire. The Soviets were withdrawing from Afghanistan. What she wanted to know was how the Red Sox—in second place—had done yesterday, but New York papers neglected the Sox. Jess had grown up in New York and Connecticut. She rooted for the Mets, though now she’d lived in New Hampshire for four years. She’d moved in with Brenda in Concord when—weeping and hugging, arguing, teasing each other for their nervousness—they made up their minds after months of discussion to live together, even if David didn’t seem to like Jess much—these days David didn’t like anybody much—and even if Jess was a Mets fan. Brenda (who’d been away from New York for years and years, whose son had become a Sox fan the minute she let him out the door) liked the Red Sox.

  Two years ago, in 1986, their relationship had survived Bill Buckner’s error and the Mets’ defeat of the Red Sox in the World Series. If we can handle that, we can handle anything, Jess had said. Now the Mets were in first place in the National League East, the Sox in second place in the American League East. Would they meet again? Could Brenda and Jess still handle it? When nobody was looking, Brenda leafed through the Sports section. Oh shit. Roger Clemens had screwed up early in the game and the Sox had lost.

  They had lost in 103-degree heat in Fenway Park, and the paper said it was hot in New York, but here in the mountains it was raining. After weeks of heat and humidity, they’d packed for a hot weather camping trip, and it was cold. Now Brenda was restless. She’d have walked up a mountain, but Jess hated hiking in the rain. Brenda wore the only sweatshirt she’d brought, now grubby. But here came tall Jess down the coffee aisle, grasping the top of a can of Progresso soup with each long-fingered hand, her thin arms bare,
her high round breasts discernible under her dark green T-shirt. Looking capable, looking happy. Nobody else in the store carried two cans of soup, one in each hand, and if they did, they would not look as if carrying soup was original and slightly scary. If the arm swung wide, a can of soup could become a weapon. But Jess was gentle. You are my sunshine, Brenda said.

  —And it’s all the sunshine you’re getting, said Jess. What now?

  —Cookies, bananas, bread.

  —I mean when we’re done.

  —Let’s go for a ride.

  —Where?

  Brenda said, The map’s in the car. They found cookies, bananas, bread. They bought wine. She knew where she wanted to go, the reason she’d proposed the Adirondacks in the first place.

  —At least we don’t have David to amuse, she said as she carried their groceries to the car. David had a summer job this year, busing tables, and was spending the week back home in Concord with a friend.

  —And to tell us our misdeeds, Jess said.

  —I can’t help it, I miss him, Brenda said, lowering the bag into the trunk, then stretching her arms and fingers. But I’m glad he’s not here. This long-necked, complicated but essentially lighthearted woman lived with her and loved her. It was still astonishing, and Brenda was never sure Jess wouldn’t change her mind. Jess was driving. She got back on the road. Look, Brenda said, pointing at the map Jess couldn’t see, pretending she’d just thought this up. Here’s where I used to go when I was a kid. The cabin. Let’s look for it.

  —You know where it is?

  —I think so. I loved being there. My parents would quiet down and forget I existed. I could think.

  —I love these roads in the rain, Jess said, but she sounded resistant. The dark green hills curved around them, two minutes away from the store. I don’t care if it’s raining. Here we are, not at work. We are not at work.

  They drove. For miles, nothing but evergreens or clearings where wildflowers drooped in the rain. Then, abruptly, there would be a lake ringed with cottages, lonely with rain, a general store with a gas station outside. Or a break in the woods and a view of mountains, barely visible in mist. They both liked their work, but vacation was exquisite. Jess was a divorce lawyer. Brenda—with Gene Stearns, whose late father had started the company—supervised ten workers who built wooden playground equipment. Mostly they sold it in sections, to schools and community groups. They held workdays to put it together, and Brenda traveled with the equipment and taught people who’d never built anything how to make a playground. She’d been as far south as Maryland, all over New England and parts of New York State. Best and hardest were playgrounds in the backyards of women’s shelters and residences for battered women. Those customers got a discount. She’d spend a week working with the women, showing them how to use tools, how to use their bodies, sleeping in an unoccupied room and eating with them, pretending to get their jokes. She might have lived in a place like that, she reminded herself. It could have happened.

  Jess had always known she loved women. Hearing about Brenda’s past troubled her. How could you? she had said.

  —I didn’t know who I was.

  —I don’t know what that means.

  In Schroon Lake village, only a few miles from the cabin, they stopped for coffee, which always made Jess happy. There was decent blueberry pie. Then Brenda said, Let’s walk down to the public beach. The village of Schroon Lake was the way villages ought to be: the stores were a block from the beach, and in between was the library, where Brenda had read as a child while her mother did the shopping. The little street, with shops crowded together—filled with tourists buying postcards and souvenirs, impatient with the rain—was unchanged. There was the Grand Union, the liquor store whose owner had given Brenda a ride to the cabin in 1969—incredibly, nineteen years ago. Nelson was dead, but it was as if she’d find him there, as if he might have escaped everywhere else to be at the cabin. They walked down the curved street and stood above a lawn and the beach, staring out at the big lake. Swimming was possible at the cabin, but Evelyn had preferred this beach with its clean sand, friendly women to chat with, and lifeguards, and Brenda had spent many hours here. Now the lake’s surface was gray-green, rough with wind and rain. No lifeguards in the big chairs on the beach. They descended the lawn and walked in the sand to the edge of the lake. The smell of this country . . . what was the smell? The sounds and smells were not like anywhere, not like southern New Hampshire—what was the difference? Without knowing what she meant, she said, The sky has a different shape at home and here.

  —No it doesn’t.

  —It circles differently. She’d lived in New Hampshire for something like sixteen years. The sky there curved back to David’s long, difficult babyhood and a list of women: Roz; Karen, whom she’d loved too hard; scary Jean; Annie; and then the first hard year with Jess, when she couldn’t believe she’d found, at last, the person with whom she’d grow old and kept trying to spoil things just to make sure. But the sky here in the Adirondacks made a larger curve, all the way back to her mother under a big hat calling to her and Carol, brushing sand off their backsides and pulling the fabric of their ruffled cotton bathing suits from where it was caught in the cheeks of their buttocks, telling them to stay out of the water because they’d just eaten ice cream. Evelyn was younger then than Brenda was now. How had she caught up to and passed her mother? A fragile, imaginary Evelyn, having seated her girls on the sand where she could see them when she turned her head to breathe, yanked her own rust-colored nylon suit down, tucked her hair into a white rubber cap with a strap under the chin, glanced at the sky—imaginary Evelyn saw sun, not rain—walked purposefully into the lake and swam back and forth parallel to the beach.

  Jess looked bored, her arms crossed, and Brenda put her arm around her shoulders to turn her back toward the car. Okay if we look for the house?

  —We have enough gas, Jess said.

  Brenda made one mistake, then backtracked and had Jess turn down the right road. Nothing much had changed since she’d been there last. At last, came the long driveway. Jess turned down it, but said, What are we going to tell the people here?

  —Maybe there won’t be anybody, and we can walk down to the lake. It was a small lake, lost in the hills. She went on, Or we can say we’re lost. Or we can tell the truth.

  Nobody was there. The house looked much as it had when she’d been there with Nelson. The grass was high, and the windows were boarded up. A faded FOR SALE sign leaned on its pole near the driveway.

  —Does it still belong to Harold’s first wife? Jess said.

  —I heard she sold it years ago.

  Jess parked the Toyota and slapped the edge of Brenda’s seat. Let’s go, she said. Anybody asks, we’ll say we might buy it.

  They walked around the edge of the house. The rain had stopped, but the sky was low and dark above the lake. Brenda walked down to the edge of the water—the familiar round shape, a few houses close together on the opposite shore—then turned to look at Jess coming too. She put an arm around her and Jess leaned into her. She stroked the back of Brenda’s neck and ran her forefinger down Brenda’s back to just below her waist. It was good to be away from people, where they could touch.

  —I’m cold, Jess said.

  —At last, Brenda said. Let’s go back into town and buy you a sweatshirt.

  —Dark green, Jess said. Also—could we get a dog?

  —Today?

  —When we get home.

  —What made you think of it now? Okay.

  —I have a past too, Jess said. Brenda turned and took Jess’s face in her hands, thrust her tongue into Jess’s mouth. They both laughed but they prolonged the kiss.

  Brenda wondered if the key was still in the Band-Aid box in the place near the door where it had always been. Probably not. The exterior had been painted since her time, though it was in need of paint now. Anyway, she didn’t want to go in. Inside was Nelson’s ghost. She touched Jess’s arm. You still put up with me, she said.


  —I like the way your head sits on your shoulders, Jess said.

  —Unlike the heads of your old girlfriends, which stuck out of their asses.

  —That’s right.

  —Maybe I’ll call Harold, tell him the place is for sale, Brenda said.

  —How old is Harold? Jess said.

  —Same as my father. Seventy-eight. Not too old to answer the phone.

  5

  Harold—on a bright, cool Sunday morning in September 1995, after an insufferably hot, dry summer—discovered yet again, at eighty-five, that he was a pretentious idiot. When he’d retired from teaching, he had told Naomi, who was already retired, that he was going to write, that he’d write every day in the spare room of their apartment, which he’d made into a study, that he’d write even on weekends.

  —A couple of hours on weekend mornings, that’s all, he said. Otherwise, I’ll stop believing I’m worth anything.

  Naomi, as emotionally complete as ever—she was a tidy zippered case equipped with every tool—had readily agreed to leave him alone in the mornings, and she accomplished that all too well. On weekdays she took classes, taught illiterates to read, and went to a gym. On weekends she walked with a friend even older than Harold. Today, after that, she was going on to lunch with another friend. Harold usually wrote. Sometimes he couldn’t. Since he’d retired, he’d published a study of Delmore Schwartz he’d worked on for many years and had written some reviews and articles. Nothing he wrote changed anyone. Walking with Naomi would have been appealing, but he had not yet said to her, I’m not going to write on Saturdays and Sundays anymore. I’m going to be with you. She’d probably prefer walking with her friend. Her friend was ninety-one. How long could she walk?

  And he—he was about to start another book, though only a fool would start a book at his age. Well, he would be a fool, then. He had bought a computer a few weeks earlier, and mostly, this morning, he had been wasting time, stomping back and forth to the toilet, glancing at the paper (Bosnia, as usual). But he had also learned how to insert page numbers. The real job of the day was continuing to copy notes he’d been making for the last eight months, a plan for this book. Typing the notes on the computer was different from typing them with a typewriter because he was a messy typist, but the computer made everything look good. He disliked the finished look of what he’d typed: his plan, plainly set down as if an office full of assistants would carry it out, made him feel even more like a pretentious idiot. The book—for God’s sake!—the book was an autobiography. A memoir. A memoir of doing things wrong.