Disturbances in the Field

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  He coughed and rested the TV against the doorframe. He was breathing hard. Victor had carried it with no trouble. Maybe this kid had a rheumatic heart, or a slight murmur like Vivian’s but not innocent. I pointed to the elevator and he pressed the button and waited, his forehead dripping, his shirt not quite so fresh. Only the greased-down hair still lay unperturbed. He tried to avoid my gaze but I wasn’t ready to release him yet. I noticed his blue Adidas sneakers. Good Lord, every kid around had them! Why did I have to tell him to wait till the snow melted?

  “What do you do with it now, take it to a fence?” Safe in the hall, he sneered at the crazy lady. “Tell him it’ll work fine anywhere but in this neighborhood. Around here it needs to be hooked up to the cable.” With his face screwed up and his body curved under the weight of the TV, he was a squirrel hugging an enormous nut. “Get away fast and don’t come back, because the next burglary on this block, I’ll go straight to the police and tell them exactly what you look like, sneakers and all. You get it? Tell your friends too. And try some other line of work!” I called as he struggled to open the elevator door. “You don’t want to get yourself killed!”

  For Phil and Althea I would have to invent something: a new student who was glad to take it off our hands. For Victor? It would be a long time before he noticed, if ever. Elsewhere, what a story this could make! How I could regale cocktail parties! But unfortunately it is a story that cannot be told, at least by me. I am so tired of curious oblique looks, solicitude, sorrowful head-shaking, friends being “supportive.” It embarrasses me. They make me feel that by losing my children I have done something shameful, profoundly antisocial, but never mind, I will be magnanimously forgiven. Meanwhile I am on probation; my behavior is watched closely for deviance.

  Come to think of it, there is someone I might safely tell: my coiffured sister-in-law Lily in Westchester, who has always judged me slightly wacky anyway, who lives and thinks like the Russian landed aristocracy in a Chekhov play. Linked together by cozy mutual disapproval, we have always gotten along rather well. Our dialogue might go something like this:

  Oh Lily, remember that old TV you gave us for Vivian and Alan to use? You’ll never guess what happened to it.

  I hope it didn’t break down or anything. It was a good little set, if you’re not too spoiled for black-and-white.

  It never worked in our apartment. We get terrible reception because we’re due north of the twin towers. We need the cable to get anything halfway decent. A boy broke in one morning so I gave it to him. Ha ha ha.

  Lily turns ashen beneath her make-up, and slams down her vodka martini, which nearly sloshes over the rim of the glass. What do you mean, gave it to him? Broke in when? What are you talking about?

  It’s nothing personal, Lily. It’s just that frankly, it was a lousy set to begin with, and with almost everyone gone—you know Althea will be away at college soon too—there was really no point. … I mean, to each according to his needs (I throw this in to irritate her), and Phil and I are not big watchers. So I figured, here is this desperate kid, here is this TV taking up space—they’re made for each other.

  You’re not serious!

  I’m perfectly serious. Why would I lie to you?

  But are you okay? Did he do anything to you?

  Not a thing. Didn’t even say thank you.

  This city is more like a jungle every day! She shakes her head and makes clicking noises with her tongue. And you! To each according to his needs! You’re too much. It’s a miracle you’re still alive.

  Yes, that’s what I’m thinking too. Not about the boy, though. I mean that when the things you thought you possessed, what you thought were necessities, the things that made you who you were, even your goddamn phone number, start to go and yet you remain—it’s kind of a riddle, Lily. Don’t you see? There you stand stripped, the same person, more or less. But what are you now? What is left? Something does abide but it’s only a certain feeling of continuity … I don’t know what.

  Lily sighs. Everyone knows all that, Lydia. (Do they really?) She lights a cigarette with some discomfort at my speaking the unspeakably banal. Listen, sweetie—her hoarse, smoky voice sincerely attempting to be kind—it’s natural to be confused. But remember, people have lost a lot more—she pauses for a sense of the sweep of history, of which my losses are clearly not a part—and they all go on. And on.

  Oh Lily, don’t tell me about the ones who clawed their way through the forests of Poland, our distant relations. I know about them. It’s a miracle they’re still alive. Please believe that I’m not trying to compete, only to clear a path also.

  And to be satisfied to possess simply this voice in my head which speaks and remembers back to when, the same voice that spoke then and dreamed ahead to now. And the child who dashed in the waves on the beach, whom they cannot take until they take me with her. She is the only child I will ever keep.

  Reunion

  GRIEF, ARISTOTLE WROTE IN his chapter on friendship, “is lightened when friends sorrow with us”—I looked it up before Esther arrived. He ponders, then, why this should be so: do they help shoulder our burden, or does the pleasure of their company simply lessen it? Well, this is too academic a point even for Aristotle; he quickly moves on to undercut the reassurance he first offered: “People of a manly nature guard against making their friends grieve with them … but women and womanly men enjoy sympathizers in their grief, and love them as friends and companions in sorrow. But in all things one obviously ought to imitate the better type of person.”

  Smooth, soft, and colorful, settled on a large pillow on the floor with her peasant skirt spread around her, Esther suggested a floral arrangement. A large bouquet just past its prime, at the edge of blowsiness. She was munching from a handful of cherries and blowing the pits into her palm. Every so often her voice wavered—she had been telling sad tales of mistreatment at the hands of men—and from living so long in Washington among black Southerners she had the tinge of a drawl.

  “Enough masochism,” Nina said. “Two hours is enough. I have discovered just the thing in the personals column. It’s for me and Lydie, though. You’re too earnest. And Gaby, well, you of course …” Nina was flat on her back on my couch, all in black—black pants, black sweatshirt, black beads—and pale from a recent bout with the flu. With time she had grown farsighted: the New York Review of Books wafted high above her head.

  “Oh, those. They’re awful. Althea used to read them aloud to me and Victor every week.”

  “This one has class. ‘Wanted: Two ladies who would like a summer jaunt in a VW convertible. Must be sweet, loving, able to read a racing form and drink their fair share.’ There’s a New York phone number, then it says, ‘Ask for Steve or Cal at any hour.’ What do you think, Lydia?”

  “It’s a gem, all right. Except are we sweet and loving?”

  “We could be, given the right conditions. Do you want Steve or Cal?”

  “Hm. Steve, I think, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Fine. I wanted Cal anyway.” Nina sat up nimbly, tossed aside the review, and withdrew behind her New York Times, folding the pages vertically, half over half, with the skill of a business executive on a crowded subway. All afternoon she had slipped in and out of attendance. I sensed a vague halo of anticipation, and was willing to bet that posed Indian fashion behind the stock exchange listings, she was off in some fantasy. Not with Steve or Cal. With Sam, the civil rights lawyer. Scattered evenings and weekends over the years, lifted out of his quotidian regularity of wife, kids, and job, enhanced by infrequency. I thought Nina deserved better, but it was what she had chosen, or been chosen by.

  “I knew a Cal. I bumped into him on the bus one afternoon a few months ago, a friend of Clyde’s,” said Esther, undaunted. “He wasn’t one of those SAVE types; he did something with computers. I never knew him well—he used to come over to play chess with Clyde. I couldn’t figure out how such a straight guy came to be a friend of Clyde’s.”

  “Clyd
e played chess?” Nina lowered the paper momentarily.

  “Yes. He wasn’t stupid. Misguided, maybe, but far from stupid. Anyway, I hadn’t seen this Cal in almost four years, since we were divorced. We said hello, how do you come to be in Washington, and all that. I swear I did not say a thing that might be construed as encouragement, but the next thing you know he’s telling me about his wife’s various uterine problems and asking if I might care to stop in the Holiday Inn for an hour or so. I mean, really!”

  “So what did you say?”

  She jerked her head towards me. “I said no and got off the bus, Lydia. What’d you think I would say?” She turned to Gabrielle, who was active in several women’s protest groups, for support, but Gabrielle just sipped her wine and continued to tear the edges of a paper napkin, making a neat half-inch fringe along the perimeter.

  Gaby was withholding herself out of righteous anger. “‘A friend is another self,’” she had quoted weeks ago, looking wise, her glossy hair streaked with gray. “You wrote it on the philosophy final, Lydia. Don’t you remember we drank to it and then danced up Broadway together? So why can’t she manage to get herself up to see you for one weekend?”

  “You can’t hold people to things they felt twenty-five years ago. That’s silly.” I was not offended. Esther was working in a ghetto with clients she insisted on calling old, not senior citizens, and her weekends, she wrote in voluminous letters, were claimed by crisis: Mr. Green’s food stamps mistakenly discontinued, Mrs. Brown’s apartment cleaned out by junkies (fortunately she was not home at the time), Mrs. Gomez’s grandson needing fast help with English to pass his driver’s test and take that hospital aide job in Virginia. It appeared she had reverted to the school of William James, trusting her good actions would elicit the universe’s better latent meanings. Her letters had postscripts: “‘Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.’” And in one that complained of my silence: “‘The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.’” I didn’t have to look them up; I recognized the equivocal voice of Ecclesiastes.

  Besides, I had had ample companionship in sorrow. Nina and Gabrielle were no Job’s comforters, either. No rationalizing or justifying or holding any hypersensitive power accountable. No dissecting my virtues and vices, my pride or humility, nor exhorting me to mend my ways. All they told me, at the beginning, was to get up, wash, dress, and see that Victor did the same. Gabrielle brought roasted chickens and vegetable casseroles and commanded that we eat. After our first week of utter sloth, she phoned every morning to make sure the children were going to school. When she appeared one day after work with a shopping bag from some East Side gourmet shop I felt the old suspicion conceived at her wedding stir again: friends with me, she was slumming, an impostor. Now a rich doctor’s wife as well. “Gaby, pate! For heaven’s sake!” Long silver earrings danced along her jaw as she flicked her head up from unpacking the bag. “Would you prefer ashes?” Gaby was so rarely sarcastic that Victor and I blanched with surprise and dutifully ate the pate. Nina came every few days and went about serenely emptying ashtrays and sorting laundry. She took off rings and jangly bracelets and dipped her lacquer-tipped fingers into steamy suds. Evenings she sat on the floor with Althea and Phil, going over the chemistry and physics they had missed. And the two of them nagged at me till I brought my puffy ankle to Don’s office to be X-rayed. After two and a half weeks I told them to stop, we could manage now. The house had never been so orderly.

  “Another time I was on a bus,” Esther went on, “and got to talking to this young guy next to me. It started over something trivial—my library books dropped, he helped pick them up and said they felt like heavy reading.”

  The young man was polite and soulful, Esther said, and when they got off at the same stop he invited her for a cup of coffee. In the coffee shop a faraway look came into his eyes. He declared she was his fantasy woman come true, what he had been dreaming of for months. Maybe years—she couldn’t recall his exact words. But for that very reason they could never meet again—he wanted his fantasy to remain intact and unsullied by the inevitable disappointments of reality. Esther didn’t know how to respond. She drank her creamy cappuccino while he sipped a muddy espresso. He mentioned Proust and Stendhal and the psychology of love; she wondered if he might have taken CC at Columbia. Then he had to leave, but would remember her forever. She found herself sitting alone at the wobbly wrought-iron table. He paid the check on his way out, she had to grant him that much, but she left the tip.

  “I dreamed about him for a couple of nights. I couldn’t help it. You can’t control what you dream. He wasn’t my fantasy but he seemed rather nice, at first anyway. I might have risked a little reality with him.”

  “Maybe your problem is spending too much time on buses,” I said. “Why don’t you try driving?”

  “I haven’t driven since that accident when I had my teeth knocked out and almost my eye. I observe the world through the windows of buses.”

  Gabrielle frowned. “Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic?”

  “What do you know about it?” Patches of color studded Esther’s cheeks. “You’ve never been mortified or treated like some kind of less than human.”

  “Esther, do you think there’s any one of us who doesn’t know what it’s like”—Gaby paused as if she were sorry she had begun—“what it’s like to lie awake half the night wanting someone? Do you? That is not politics.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it’s too rough for me. I must have a way of picking them. I think I’ll try women and see if they’re any better. I’ll come out of the closet.”

  “But, Esther, you’ve never been in the closet,” I reminded her.

  She spit a pit into her hand. “I’ll go in, so I can come out. I’m glad to see you’re all so amused at my expense. Well, it’s better than silence. Silence makes me anxious.”

  “Still?” I asked.

  “In school there was hardly ever silence,” she said. “We had so many thoughts and theories about everything.”

  “Yes, we were so determined to understand.” Nina’s hair tumbled down her back and she swiftly coiled it up again, pins between her teeth. “We really expected that what was in all those books would have some bearing on how to live.”

  Nina rose and went to stare out the window, fingering the leaf of a plant. She still walked and looked like a lady, even in her sweatshirt. Through the radicalism of the sixties, the flaccid confusion of the seventies, she had moved and spoken like a lady. Like a lady she had marched, like a lady lectured at teachins on the effects of chemical warfare, and perhaps even made love like a lady, if that is possible. Now that gracious ladyhood was back in fashion she was not caught unprepared, like some. She had kept pace yet relinquished nothing. For all her escapades, her glittering jewelry and despairing eyes, there was a virginal, noli me tangere quality about her. Not girlish. More like a mature nun. She turned round and smiled. “We’re not so bent on understanding the world any more, are we?”

  “No,” Gabrielle agreed. “Now we’re content just to live in it, without understanding.”

  “Well, I understand plenty and I am not content.” Esther scrambled up and pushed frizzed curls off her forehead. She announced, “I’ve got to be off. I’ll just go wash my face and pee,” at which Gabrielle winced.

  “You’ve barely arrived. At least stay and have dinner. I thought you’d spend the night—there’s room.”

  “I wish I could, Lyd. But I’ve got to get back tonight. I promised to be in church early in the morning.”

  “Church?”

  “One of my clients is the lead singer in the choir in a Baptist church. She’s been asking me to come hear her for weeks now. I promised. I’ve always wanted to go to one of those rousing black churches where everyone gets all excited, but you can’t go as a spectator—it wouldn’t feel right. I finally got an invitation. Maybe I’ll have a religious experience, y
ou never know.” She flounced off to the bathroom and returned with the scrubbed look of a child. Still pink-and-white-skinned, in her light ruffled clothes she might have been an illustration in a toddler’s book of nursery rhymes; she lacked only the broad straw hat with streamers. But the page was a trifle faded, a trifle smudged from being left out in damp weather. She had not combed her hair, either. Maybe her hairdo was the kind that couldn’t be combed: wild floppy curls. Maybe she just toweled it dry every morning and let it settle at random. For all its breeziness, it did not strike me as hair that would easily ignite. She twisted her skirt around till the zipper returned to the left side, then said her good-byes. Kisses and hugs. “If any of you are ever down in Washington …”

  At the door with me, alone, her face relaxed. “You don’t look so bad, Lydia, considering. How is Victor? I’m sorry I missed him.”

  “He’s all right. Look, I’m sorry too, that this didn’t work out. I thought it would be a good idea, but I see I should have arranged for us to be alone. We still can, if you want to stay. Victor is—he’ll be out late.”

  “I can’t. It’s true, about church and Mrs. Barker. Lydia, did I ever really thank you for the time you and Victor rescued me from Ralph and I slept on that mattress with all the baby toys around?”

  “That was so long ago. You must have. What does it matter now?”

  “I didn’t. I was so wrapped up in myself. Anyhow, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Forget it.”

  “Why are you limping?”

  “I tripped over a skateboard and sprained my ankle.”

  Esther clicked her tongue. “How’d you manage that?”

  “When the police came to tell me, I fell. There was a skateboard in the hall.”

  “Ah.” She nodded, as if this were an everyday occurrence.

  “Yes. Well, thanks for all your letters.”

  “You didn’t mind those little … ?”

  “No, I’ve always liked them.”

  “Well, Lydia.” She sighed and hoisted her small overnight bag onto her shoulder. “Things happen. What’re you going to do?”