Frieda nibbles the last of her apple. “Well, I’m off,” she says, standing. “I have shopping to do. Penney’s is having a sale. I want a new coat for winter.”
I nod. “I wish I could come. Have fun.”
She hugs me. “You, too, sister.”
After Frieda leaves, I’m frenzied in my work, and by midafternoon the place is spotless. I look around, a satisfied smile on my face. I’ve done a good job. They will be pleased.
I think about that rambling house on Springfield Street. I wonder how my other self keeps it clean, even with the faithful Alma to help out. And then I laugh a little.
It’s easy to keep an imaginary house clean, isn’t it?
Despite my intentions not to dwell on the dream life, I am drawn to Southern Hills again.
I tell myself it’s just something to do, a way to pass an evening that’s chilly but not yet wintry. I bike home from my parents’ place and, too weary for much more exercise, take the bus, getting off at Yale and walking south and then east.
Slowly I meander through the neighborhood streets. I imagine the people who live in each of the houses. I think about their lives, their families, their children. That house there, the red-brick one with the juniper bushes by the driveway, they must have teenagers. There’s a basketball hoop hung above the garage door and a pile of bicycles, all of them too big for young children, lying on the lawn by the front porch. The family in the house with the brown shutters—I think their car must be brand-new. It’s red with a white top, and it gleams with a just-off-the-showroom-floor sparkle. The man of the house stands next to the car, stroking its side panel affectionately, the way one might the cheek of a newborn.
These people have names, although I don’t know what they are. They have histories. They were probably raised in old-time neighborhoods like Myrtle Hill, where I grew up. They went to high school, perhaps to college. They met their husbands and wives; they had children. They decided this neighborhood of newly built houses would be a comfortable, homey, secure place in which to raise their families.
Lars and I, in the imaginary world, must have decided the same thing.
If that imaginary world were real, these would be my friends and neighbors. I walk by the Nelsons’ house, irrationally grateful that I know at least one family’s name, though in this life they do not know me. George is in the yard, raking leaves. Mrs. Nelson—I still don’t know her first name—is just coming out the front door, handbag over her wrist, car keys jangling. Their little spaniel runs up to me and barks.
“Buster,” George calls, and the dog runs back to his master’s side. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” George says.
Both George and his wife give me little half waves as I walk by. Their waves are the type you give a stranger. Not the type you give your neighbors.
I shake my head as I approach the bare lot where my own house would be. And then I quicken my pace.
I have got to get out of this silliness, I tell myself.
I am so glad my parents are coming home. Clearly I need the distraction.
Chapter 21
And then I’m standing on the street, right where I was standing in real life, in the exact same spot. But it’s not real life anymore. Now the house is in front of me, and I’m looking at it, and my family is with me. It’s a warmish day, but it still must be winter; there is no snow on the road, but it is melting into slushy puddles on the lawn. From the angle of the shadows on the snow, I can tell it’s probably midafternoon.
But how did I get into the dream this time? I don’t remember taking the bus back to my own neighborhood. I have no memory of making dinner, of reading or watching television or tutoring Greg, the things I usually do in the evening at home. I don’t remember turning off the front porch light, feeding Aslan, getting dressed for bed. I don’t recall closing my eyes, and I certainly don’t remember falling asleep. But I must have done those things.
Or I did something. Something.
Mitch and Missy are wobbling on bicycles—two-wheelers, his green and hers pink. Lars is walking beside the two of them, working with one and then the other to teach them how to ride. I think the training wheels must have recently been taken off the bikes, because both children are falling. A lot.
Missy goes down and lands on her elbow. “Ow!”
Before I have time to react, Lars reaches down to help her rise. Gently, he bends her arm back and forth a few times to make sure the elbow is functioning normally. “Don’t give up,” he tells her, righting the bike and helping her back onto it. “It takes a lot of practice.”
Lars catches my eye and smiles. Then he turns sideways and swings his arm, as if he’s batting a tennis ball. Automatically I do the same thing, also turned sideways. Lars is a lefty and I’m right-handed, so our positions pose us as partners, as if we were playing doubles against imaginary rivals. This pantomime, I suddenly understand, is one that Lars and I frequently perform. It’s our silent way of communicating to each other that we are on the same team—not just in tennis, but in everything. I nod at him, and he turns his attention back to Mitch and Missy.
It’s then that I realize Michael is not riding. He’s sitting in the driveway, staring down at the fabric of his bunched-up pants. A blue boy’s bike stands in the drive next to him; this one still has its training wheels on it.
I pause for a moment, and then I walk over and sit next to Michael.
Hesitantly, I ask, “Michael? Don’t you want to ride?”
He shakes his head, not looking up.
“You can try, you know,” I tell him gently. Because I believe this. There are a lot of things that, perhaps, he can’t do. But he can learn to ride a bike. I am sure of it.
He shakes his head again, and won’t answer and won’t meet my eye.
I inspect his bike. It’s beautiful and looks brand-new—still gleaming, with nary a scratch on it. I recall that the triplets’ birthday is in November; perhaps these bikes were birthday presents when they turned six.
I glance back at the garage, which is standing open, the large double door raised. “I’ll be right back,” I say to Michael, standing and dusting off my skirt.
I go into the garage and look around. The station wagon is parked in here; the Cadillac, too. It’s a big garage, with room for a lawn mower, sleds, and bikes in addition to vehicles.
I find my bike easily. It’s the same battered red Schwinn that I have in real life. I suspect that at some point during our marriage Lars would have proposed purchasing a new bicycle for me. But I would have resisted that notion. He may be able to buy me a car and fine clothes and a diamond ring, but this is my bike. We’ve been together for a long time, my Schwinn and me; I bought it myself during the early days of my teaching career, so I could bicycle to school. I would not have abandoned it heedlessly.
I wheel it out and climb on, gliding down the driveway. I stop in front of Michael, pressing the brakes gently with my feet. “Mama will ride with you,” I coax.
Michael doesn’t respond.
I know I ought to let it go, but I simply cannot. It seems terribly important—for reasons that I cannot fathom—that I make this connection with him.
That he rides with me. That biking becomes “our thing.” Something we share.
I reach out for him, try to pull him up by his arm.
Oh, I should know better, shouldn’t I? By now, I should know better.
The howl that comes out of him makes me step back, drop my bike, put my hands over my own mouth, as if by doing so I can silence his. Missy and Mitch stop riding and stare at us wordlessly. Lars strides over, glaring at me.
“I was hoping . . . I thought I could convince him to . . .” I trail off.
Lars bends down, does the shoulder-hold, and begins to hum. After a moment, Michael stops screaming and hums with Lars, until they are both in a little singsong trance. No one else in the world except the two of them.
Biting my lip, I turn away.
I pick up my Schwinn and wheel it over to
Missy and Mitch. “Daddy will manage Michael,” I tell them, climbing on my bicycle. “Now, you two show me what you can do.”
Chapter 22
On Wednesday afternoon, I have a hair appointment with Linnea.
I wonder, as I walk toward Linnea’s beauty parlor, how I got from Monday to Wednesday. Again—as was the case a few days ago, when I didn’t remember getting from the middle of last week to the beginning of this week—I don’t remember a lot of details. I can’t recall transitioning from my last dream, from bicycling with the children, back to the safety of my own bed. I don’t remember waking up on Tuesday morning. Indeed, I must have arisen and made breakfast and fed Aslan. I must have gone to the shop and worked. There would have been customers; there would have been book orders and shelf arrangements and conversations with Frieda. What did we discuss? I don’t remember. I think there was more conversation about the vacant space in the shopping center. I think we went over the financial aspects, trying to figure out how we could make it work moneywise. Did we decide to make an appointment with the bank to talk about an extension to our loan? Perhaps we did, but I can’t recall any particulars about the discussion.
Waiting for the light to change so I can cross the street, I pull my coat collar tightly around my throat, protecting myself from the windy, overcast day. I know this absence of memories ought to concern me, but when I give it more thought, I realize how very few actual moments—whether yesterday, last week, a month ago, last year—I can truly recall in detail. We remember so little of our lives, really, insofar as the finer points go.
Living, I think as I cross Jewell Avenue at Broadway, is not made up of details, but rather of highlights. Can I remember what I had for lunch last Thursday? Can I recall every word of my latest tutoring session with Greg? Do I know what the weather was like three weeks ago on Sunday? Certainly not. It all just flies by, the big and the small, and some of it stays in our minds, but much of it disappears the moment after it occurs.
I open the door to Beauty on Broadway and walk inside.
At her station, Linnea greets me with a smile. “It’s nice to see you again, Kitty. I’m sorry I haven’t made it to your bookstore yet. I really do want to see it.” She touches my hair gently, frowning at me in the mirror. “Goodness, you ought to come here to see me more often, though. If you don’t mind my saying so.”
I grin. “I don’t mind at all. You’re right; I ought to.”
After my shampoo, she settles into her work with the rollers. I lean back and relax. It’s Halloween today, and Linnea has her station decorated with a little paper black cat taped to the mirror and a bowl of tiny pink-and-white boxes of Good & Plenty candy on the vanity.
In the mirror I watch Linnea’s hands, those lovely hands that remind me of Lars’s. I want to reach out to them, and I have to press my own hands together, as if in prayer, to control myself.
I’m glad she’s touching me, however. It feels wonderful to have Linnea touch me.
“You made the right move, going into a line of work where you use your hands.” It sounds silly the moment I say it, and I close my mouth, embarrassed.
Linnea smiles. “Oh, I’ve got strong peasant hands,” she says. “They’ve done plenty of tough work over the years. My brother Lars and I, when we first moved to Colorado . . . we were kids, we had nothing, we took any job we could get. Dishwashers, potato diggers, bakers. He was a bricklayer for a while, and then he got a job as a streetcar repairman. Put himself through college doing that job.” Her brow furrows. “He was the real worker, Lars. He could fix anything, build anything. Loved to work with his hands.”
I nod. Though I have not witnessed this directly, I can imagine it. I can imagine how, given the time and capacity, he would build things, fix things.
And then something comes to me. A memory, or a thought, or something I made up. I have no idea where it comes from, but when I know it, I know it.
Naturally, Lars designed our house’s distinctive layout. Certainly, given his line of work and his enthusiasm for custom residential design, he would have done that. But he also personally constructed all the cabinetry in our house. Those slanted bathroom cabinets, and the slick-faced ones in the kitchen—Lars built all of those by hand.
I do not know how I know this, but I do. I close my eyes, letting reflections and memories from my made-up life envelop my mind.
When we first married, I gave up my duplex, Lars gave up his small studio apartment, and we moved together into a two-bedroom apartment on Lincoln Avenue. I could walk to the shop from our new place, and Lars took the Broadway line to the office he’d rented downtown for his fledgling architectural firm. The apartment was temporary, he assured me, just until his business showed a profit. “Then I’ll build you a house,” he’d said, looking around at the apartment’s bright but small living room. “I’ll build you a wonderful house, Katharyn.”
The apartment on Lincoln was where I spent my bed rest. It was the home to which we brought our babies when they were ready to leave the hospital.
After the surprise of triplets instead of twins, Lars had hastily switched the bedrooms, moving our double bed and bulky dresser into the smaller bedroom—which, months earlier, we had painstakingly set up as a nursery for a boy and a girl. I remember the pale yellow walls, the nursery-rhyme mural that I hired an artist friend of my mother’s to paint on the wall over the area where we placed the changing table. It was a lovely nursery, and adequate for two babies, but it was too small for three cribs and everything else that three would need. Lars selected another crib at Guys and Dolls, the children’s furniture store where we had purchased the other two cribs. He set up the three cribs, the changing table, and the rocking chair in what had once been our bedroom. I had been told that he’d made these changes, yet I remember my dismay, seeing the arrangement when the babies and I were finally discharged from the hospital. There had been no time for repainting; our bedroom walls were a sophisticated mauve that had gone wonderfully with my bedspread, but was not at all suitable for three babies. Although the children’s furniture fit in the room, it was a tight squeeze, and we had to shuffle sideways to fetch Mitch from his crib.
The setup was equally awkward in Lars’s and my “new” bedroom. The nursery-themed mural, of course, made no sense in a master bedroom. The way our furniture had to be arranged in the small room, the mural was directly over my head when I lay in bed—the cow jumping over the moon was the last thing my worn-out eyes saw before they closed at night. But we were too exhausted and overwhelmed to do anything about it. All we were trying to do was get through one day and one night at a time.
Within months we were overrun with baby things everywhere in the apartment. It wasn’t long before we needed three high chairs and three walkers. We kept the pram—enormous, large enough for two babies side by side and one more at their feet—in the living room, where it would be handier than if we kept it in our storage unit out back. Long ago, in the naive days when we thought we were having only one baby, Lars had constructed a beautiful, highly polished wooden cradle. That, too, we kept in the living room, and it made a handy spot to place one baby when my arms were full with two more.
Poor Aslan hid anywhere he could to stay out of the fray. Sometimes I forgot to feed him, and he would meow loudly in my ear at night, just when I’d finally fallen asleep. It would have been better for Aslan if I’d shipped him off to some nice unmarried woman like I used to be, allowing him to resume the quiet life he’d once had. But Frieda was allergic to cats, and I didn’t know anyone else who would take him. So we kept him, and I hoped he wouldn’t get so angry with me that he’d run away.
“We need that house,” I’d said when the babies were three months old. “We need that house, Lars, and we need it soon.”
We were feeding the babies their bedtime bottles. I was holding Missy; Lars had Michael. His turn already finished, Mitch was curled up and snoozing beside us in the cradle in the crowded living room.
Lars nodded. “I’
ve been thinking the same thing.”
“I know we wanted to wait awhile, but I just don’t see how we can,” I went on. “If we can’t afford to build right now, we ought just to buy some other house and build in a few years.”
Lars shook his head firmly. “Nothing doing,” he said. “We only need to find the right plot of land.” His look was pensive. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
He looked so dreamy, his blue eyes lost in imagination. “But can we afford it?” My words were hesitant; I didn’t want to break him out of his reverie.
He shrugged. “If we do it right, we can. The house doesn’t have to be enormous. Just big enough to comfortably raise these three little folks.”
“Still, a custom-built house . . .”
“And some things I could do myself,” he interrupted, looking over at Mitch. “I built that cradle, didn’t I?”
I didn’t want to be discouraging, but a cradle is hardly a house.
“I helped my father build, back in Sweden,” Lars went on. “And I did construction here, too, in those early years.” He looked thoughtful. “I’ve let them go, those skills. But I don’t think they go away forever. It’s like riding a bicycle.”
This made me shake my head wistfully. Only several months past giving birth to triplets, I had not been on my bicycle in close to a year. But it was still in the storage unit of our apartment building. I could never give it up.
“And your heart?” I questioned. “What of that? I don’t think you ought to be doing heavy construction, Lars.”
“I’ll leave the heavy work to others,” he assured me. “I’ll just do the inside things, the finish work.” He shifted Michael gently to his shoulder for a burp. “Just the fun parts, I promise.” He smiled at me. “I’ll build you that green bathroom you said you wanted, when we were in Paris.”
I smiled, too, remembering that. It had not even been a year and a half since our honeymoon, but already it seemed like a long time ago.
The Bookseller Page 19
