World Without You

by Joshua Henkin

  She goes through his desk drawers. She recalls the mounds of condolence letters, many of them unanswered, unopened, dozens upon dozens of friends to write back. And then, amidst everything else, were the people who, unaccountably, hadn’t heard what had happened, and so she was forced to deliver the news all over again. A year after his death, they continue to get mail addressed to Leo: subscription offers, pledge requests, statements from a bank account with $1.22 left in it that they haven’t managed to close down. Leo still gets summoned for jury duty, though he hasn’t lived at their address for fifteen years; apparently, he’s still registered to vote there. When Marilyn told him this, he said, “I should have given them a few addresses for me in Florida. Perpetrated a little election fraud of my own.” One time, she handed him his jury summons and said, “Here, you deal with it,” and Leo, in his idea of a joke, returned it with the word DECEASED across the envelope. But it didn’t work then any more than it works now. His Reader’s Digest still arrives faithfully every month. When he was born, Gretchen gave him a lifetime subscription, but no one seemed to understand what lifetime meant; they’ll just have to wait for Reader’s Digest to close down. Now the smell of mothballs wafts through the room, and something else, sweet and sickly, like rubbing oil and lemon, something she can’t name. “I can’t remember what they dressed him in for the funeral.”

  “I can’t, either,” David says.

  She recalls a discussion: did the dead get buried naked or in clothes? What, she wondered, was the tradition? And what tradition, besides? The Jewish one? It was her tradition in a way, but she felt so removed from it she was loath to rely on its edicts and consolations. Thank goodness for Noelle, whose tradition it now was; maybe she would have an answer. Though even as Marilyn considered it, she found it foolish to bury Leo in clothes; it was too reminiscent of the Egyptian pharaohs. There was talk of having him buried in a jacket and tie, which was ridiculous, she thought, because when he was alive he never wore a jacket and tie. She recalls a disagreement she had with Thisbe (there were so many of them—she’s always regretted that) about what clothes to bury him in, and it was decided that someone should buy him new clothes so he wouldn’t have to be buried in the ones he had lived in. Though even of that she isn’t sure. Everyone shielded her and David from these things, left them up to Thisbe and the girls, to the funeral people themselves, the diggers and embalmers. “I remember what Thisbe was wearing that day.”

  “I do, too,” says David. “She had on a black pants suit.”

  “And a pale yellow shirt.” This has stuck with her, she doesn’t know why. She looks up at David. “Did you talk to her?”

  He nods.

  “And?”

  “She’s moving on, but we knew that already.”

  “Are they getting married?”

  “At least not yet.”

  “But eventually …”

  “I presume.”

  “And if not to him, then to someone else.” She’s standing at the window, looking out at the elms swaying in the breeze. A sparrow has landed on the bird feeder. “Maybe she’ll do us a favor and not invite us to the wedding.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Retaliation for when we didn’t invite her to our party.”

  “Oh, Marilyn, that was years ago.”

  “We can hope she bears a grudge.” She presses her face to the window. The sparrow seems to be looking at her, but then it flies away. “You knew about him,” she says, “didn’t you? You knew Thisbe had a boyfriend.”

  David nods. It was a few months ago, and he called California to speak to Calder. A man answered the phone, and he figured it out. “It’s another thing you can hold against me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could threaten to leave me, but then you’ve already played that card.”

  “David,” she says, “we don’t have to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “I could cancel the moving trucks. I’d lose my deposit, but I don’t care.”

  “And come home with me?”

  “We could at least try.”

  They’re standing in their son’s bedroom, gathering what possessions remain. Marilyn sits down on the bed; David installs himself next to her. He’s sitting up straight, the back of his head pressed to the wall; Marilyn is looking at him. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “What would you like me to say?” He walks across the room to Leo’s dresser. He opens drawer after drawer, all of which are empty, until he reaches the last one, where he finds Leo’s San Diego Chargers pennant. “Didn’t you give this to Thisbe?”

  “I thought I did.”

  “She must have forgotten it.”

  “Or declined my offer.”

  He places the pennant back inside the drawer. “I don’t get it,” he says. “Was it my mother?”

  “Was what your mother?”

  “All it took was Gretchen coming up here to rebuke you? If I had known, I’d have driven her up here myself.”

  “Oh, David. It wasn’t Gretchen.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “I don’t know.” She’s still sitting on their son’s stripped bed, looking up at David, “So you’re not going to give me another chance? If I don’t leave you, then you’ll leave me instead?”

  “We’ll go back to the city,” he says. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

  She steps outside to catch her breath. She replenishes the bird feeder, and pulls a few weeds from the garden. The pear tree is in bloom, and she plucks a fruit off the branch. She takes a bite of it, then leaves the rest of it on the garden table.

  She goes into the garage, where she’s looking for some gloves and garden shears. But she can’t find them, and what she unearths instead behind the rake and the hoe and the bucket of tennis balls is one of the girls’ old bicycles. Dry mud is caked across the frame, but once she wipes it off and wheels the bicycle outside, she finds it’s in good shape. The tires are a little low but still inflated. Even the bell works. And in the basket is a dandelion, desiccated but intact.

  She gets on the bicycle and circles around the stone path behind the garden, then pedals out to the driveway, where David is attending to something beneath the hood of the car. “Look at me!”

  “Jesus,” he says. “I haven’t seen that thing in years.”

  She does another circle around the car, and when she loops back she parks in front of him. “Here,” she says. “You have a go.”

  “You want me to ride a girl’s bicycle?”

  She laughs. “You think it will compromise your masculinity?”

  “It very well might.”

  But then she remembers. The kind of bicycle is just an excuse, because David doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle at all. “Wasn’t I going to teach you how to ride?”

  “That’s what you kept threatening.”

  “Well, come on,” she says. “Now’s your chance.”

  He’s still hidden beneath the hood of their car, attending to the oil or the antifreeze or the carburetor fluid, some liquid or another. “Are you going to humiliate me, Marilyn? After everything?”

  “I’m not going to humiliate you. I’m going to teach you how to ride.”

  She has him on the seat now, and she’s standing behind him, grabbing hold, first of his shoulders, and now, as the bicycle moves forward with him atop, just of the handle bars, which he’s grasping as well. She lets go for a moment and he wobbles. He takes his feet off the pedals and rests them on the ground.

  “Let’s go down to the path,” she says. “There’s a clearing there. And if you fall, you fall on grass.”

  “Oh, Marilyn. I don’t know.”

  “It’s just like riding a bike.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You have to keep pedaling,” she says. “If you come to an obstacle you just steer out of the way.”

  He’s on the seat again, pedaling as she has told him to. She lets go for a second.

&
nbsp; “Marilyn!”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t let you fall.”

  He lists this way and that, like a canoe.

  “Pedal, David, pedal!”

  “I am!”

  “Don’t go out onto the road! There’s traffic there!”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You steer!”

  She lets go now, and he’s circling the path, making tight revolutions, teetering but staying aloft. She counts the seconds—ten, fifteen, twenty—until, finally, he keels over, toppling onto the lawn.

  “Bravo!” she says. “You did it.”

  “Did what?” he says. “I fell.” He looks up at her from beneath the bicycle. He has grass stains on his rear and on the legs of his pants.

  “You fall, you get up.”

  He brushes off his pants, and now she’s brushing them off, too. She slaps dirt off the knees and the cuffs at his ankles.

  “I’m hungry,” he says. “I’ve worked up an appetite. I’m going inside to eat your omelet.”

  “Okay,” she says, though she hopes he’ll save at least a little for her. She’s worked up an appetite herself.

  On the garden table, she finds the pear where she left it. She dispenses with it in a few bites and takes another pear and dispenses with it too, then deposits both cores in the compost heap. She gets down on her knees and removes more weeds from the garden, and now her pants are stained, just like David’s. Only his are torn. There’s a small hole in each leg; she can see the pale glint of his kneecaps, like two matching eggshells.

  She walks around to the front of the house, where the hood of their car is still open. The mail has arrived early, and she goes to retrieve it. She has weeds in one hand, the mail in the other, and it’s only now, walking back to the house with her pile of letters, that she sees the return address on the top envelope. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House. Someone must have placed her on the wrong mailing list. She opens the envelope. It’s a letter from President Bush. He’s sending her and David his condolences on the anniversary of Leo’s death. Could it be a peace offering?

  It’s July fifth, she thinks. A day late and a dollar short. And an image comes to her from five years ago, she and Lily down in Florida for the recount, a Tuesday in December, waiting for the Supreme Court decision to come down. Florida, she thinks. A state that will forever in her mind be the state of shame: dimpled chads and butterfly ballots, Katherine Harris’s noxious mug splattered across the TV. How different the world would be were it not for Florida. How different her own life would be, the life of her whole family. Standing in Florida with Lily, waiting for the decision to come down, then learning of it, the deflating conclusiveness of it all, she started to sob. “It’s all over,” she said. She was right, and she didn’t even know it yet.

  She can hear Lily’s voice. You should use that letter as a dartboard. She would, she thinks, if only she had darts. And she’s overcome by the strangest feeling, that she needs to go inside and tell Leo about this.

  Guess who wrote me. President Bush.

  You mean he’s still president?

  For another three years.

  And here I was thinking it was just a dream.

  And here she was thinking it too. She’ll think it again two years from now, out in Santa Cruz, on the Pacific Coast. She’ll have flown there for Thisbe and Wyeth’s wedding; David will have convinced her to go. The whole family will be there, except for Gretchen, who will have died the previous spring. A beach wedding, and she’ll sit with Calder at a table in back, and Calder will say, “My daddy’s dead,” and she’ll say, “Yes, he is,” but it will be as if she hasn’t heard him. Because from behind the bride and groom, a seal will have poked its head out of the water, and what Marilyn will be thinking about is Thisbe’s first wedding, the one when she married her son.

  “It was at the aquarium,” she tells Calder.

  “What was?”

  But she doesn’t answer him. She’s thinking of the walrus pressing his nose to the glass, making his walrus noises.

  “Will you take me swimming?”

  “Sure,” she says, and now he’s leading her to the water. He’s wearing a tuxedo and he has his pants legs rolled up, and she’s holding the hem of her dress. They have their feet in the water, facing the wedding party up on the bluff, and now everything has blurred, and they’re all just figures on a hill. Her dress is getting wet, she’s taking her grandson for a swim, and then a wave is coming, and another, and another.

  Now, in Lenox, she walks up the driveway with the mail in her hand. She moves purposefully along the path, holding the bills and flyers and subscription notices, the president’s letter on top. She can hear David’s footsteps upstairs. For a moment they stop, and she’s alone. Then he’s there, her husband, coming down the stairs, his shoes making their syncopated beat, and she’s looking up at him, anticipating his voice, waiting to see what comes next.

  Acknowledgments

  [TK-allow one page]