In Revere, In Those Days

by Roland Merullo

  Lydia sat in a lawn chair, reading the New York Times and sipping from a glass of grapefruit juice, but I could feel her watching me. I could feel a strange sort of tightness in the air. “You coming in, Mrs. C?” I said in what I hoped was a casual tone.

  When she put her eyeglasses on top of the paper, stood up, and walked to the diving board, I noticed, as if it were the first time I’d seen her, how small she was built. There was a scar running from the hem of her bathing suit bottom up to her navel, and I looked at it, then away. She dove and swam underwater the length of the pool. We made a couple of laps together a few feet apart, floated, hung to the rough cement edge at the deep end, keeping all but our heads and the tops of our shoulders in the warm water. She ran a hand up from her forehead, pushing the hair back, and glanced at the one other house we could see.

  “Nice to have you on the same level as me for once,” I said, but she glanced up again, over the lilac bushes that bordered her yard, then fixed me with a look that cut through any possibility of humor. She stared at me that way for what seemed like half a minute but was probably five seconds, then she took a breath and dropped down into the water.

  I felt her hands on the bones of my hips, and my bathing suit being tugged down, over my knees, past my ankles, and off into the pool. She surfaced very close to me. Her eyes searched my face as if she was waiting for me to stop her, but the last thing I would ever have done then was stop her. We were each holding on to the lip of the pool with one hand. She took my free hand and brought it to her bathing suit bottom, and I tugged down, and then went under the water as she had done and pulled it over her legs and let it go. I could see the scar on her belly, the hair between her legs—darkened by the water—the muscles of her thighs. She was making a very small kicking motion. I rose up through the water against her and she took hold of my shoulder and pulled herself up and onto me so that I felt as if my whole body had been enveloped by her, that she was a second, warmer flesh pulled down tight over the thumping blood in my legs and hands. She held on to the muscles of my upper arms and leaned back so that she was looking into my face. I was breathing very hard and shaking violently; I could barely keep my eyes on her eyes. “Let go,” she said. I thought she meant let go of the lip of the pool and I did, and we immediately sank and separated and found each other on the surface again. She was spluttering, then laughing quietly.

  “Not let go of the pool,” she said, coughing, treading water a few feet from me, the happiness in her face blending over into something else, something unprotected. I reached out—timid still, afraid she would stop me—curled my arm around the middle of her back and pulled her up and onto me again. She lifted her legs up over my hips and moved a few times against me, and I made a noise that echoed in the fenced backyard, and then she was squeezing me very tight with her arms and legs and sobbing into the side of my neck, pouring out all the pain I had not been able to see in her before that day.

  “I hurt you,” I said.

  She was sobbing as if death itself were visible over my shoulder. My arm grew tired from holding on to the lip of the pool, but I didn’t move. There were strands of her wet hair across the side of my face, and her ribs were against my other hand, moving back and forth in time with her quick breaths. I could see, beyond her shoulder, the yellow bottom of her bathing suit floating on the pale blue water.

  “Tell me if I hurt you.”

  But she was shaking her head and pressing it hard against the side of my throat, and could not speak. We stayed that way a long time. At last, she said, near my ear, “Come inside the house now.”

  I dove for my bathing suit. I could see the maroon square of cloth lying against the drain, and I felt, for the time it took me to retrieve it, that perfect clearness of mind I remembered from the river, as if all my life I had been wrapped in a tight suit of thoughts, wrapped in a false belief about who I was, and what God wanted from me, and what was wrong, and what wasn’t, and now I had burst through all that and was diving down into a bright, open adulthood that had no limits. When I surfaced, she was already in the house. I pulled my trunks on, climbed out and quickly dried myself with the white, dormitory-issue towel, and saw that the bottom of her bathing suit had been tossed carelessly over the back of a lawn chair. She was standing on the kitchen tiles, naked, young-seeming, with the top of the bathing suit in one hand. Her breasts were formed like the rest of her, small and muscular and yet somehow fragile-looking, with tiny nipples like a boy’s and a spray of freckles across them. In a certain way it was like coming upon her that first afternoon in the woods: she seemed not to have a particle of embarrassment about her, not to have the capacity for shame. More than anyone I have ever known, she treated sex as if it were a wonderful, almost holy event, and it made everything easy and natural for me, in spite of the frenzy of my body. My first instinct was toward guilt and regret, toward apology; she broke that apart for me without speaking.

  She took me by the wrist and led me to the small guest bedroom. She pulled the covers back and we slid under them, wet in places from the pool, our hair damp against the pillows. The shade was drawn in the room. The light was dim. Her skin was cool against my skin at first, and she shivered slightly. We lay there silently for a little while, and then she kissed me very tenderly and lovingly, and I took my cue from her and kissed her back the same way, as if I had done it a thousand times before. And when she turned and pulled me on top of her, I remembered my grandfather’s fingers against the wineglass, and I tried to hold her that way, my hands against the sides of her breasts, and she did nothing to make me feel awkward or clumsy. When we had made love, I lay on top of her for a long while. I remember her running a hand slowly up and down my shoulder blade, and I remember feeling surprised that it had all seemed so natural, as if being intimate with a woman was something I had done countless times before and somehow forgotten about. A moment later I drifted down into a sleep so deep and warm, it was like being covered from forehead to feet in the fur-covered bodies of small animals.

  When I awoke, it was dark in the room and I was alone in the bed. I turned onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. I could smell the clean cotton smell of the pillowcase. I rested both hands across my stomach with the tips of my fingers touching, and concentrated on the breath moving in and out of me. It was very quiet in the house. My life at Amen Hall was thousands of miles away. For a long time I did not seem to think anything at all, but coasted along in a single feeling, the deepest calm, as if I believed I would never have to strive again, or accomplish anything again, or prove anything to anyone ever again, as if there could not be any sadness again ever in my life.

  After a time the door opened. “Are you sleeping?” I heard her say. She stepped into the room, and I could see her head and shoulders, half-lit by the light from the hall, a faint line of reflection along the frames of her glasses. She sat on the bed and put one hand on my chest. “You’re awake?”

  “Drifting.”

  “It’s quarter to nine. What time do you have to be back?”

  “Ten.”

  She put her hand on the middle of my chest. “Get dressed, and we can eat something, alright? Are you hungry?”

  “Make me eleven sandwiches,” I said.

  She made me two. Grilled cheese on rye bread with thin slices of tomato. And she poured me a glass of white wine without asking. Instead of sitting at the table, we carried the plates and glasses onto her sun porch, and sat in the white wicker chairs with the food on our laps and only the light from the street on our faces.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “I told you I went away because my sister was ill. She is, and I did go to see her. But I went away because I wasn’t sure what would happen to you if we did this, what would happen to your last two months at school.”

  I studied her, studied the leaves of the plants on the table between us. “Where did you go?”

  “I went to see Anastasia, and then I went up
to where we have a cabin in the Allegheny Mountains, near where I grew up, and made a kind of solitary retreat.”

  “Why did you cry there in the pool?”

  She did not answer for so long I thought she was angry at me for asking. I could see a shadowy figure passing along the sidewalk at the front edge of the yard, a woman walking her dog. “That’s right,” the woman was saying very loudly. “That’s right now, that’s my boy, that’s my little sweetheart.”

  “My neighbor Helen,” Lydia said, nodding in the woman’s direction. “She’s a little bit deaf and half blind. Good thing for us.”

  “Why did you cry, Lydia?”

  Helen went on spewing endearments into the night. Two cars hummed down the quiet street, one after the other. Lydia didn’t answer.

  After a long while I asked, “Can I come back?”

  She was staring at me now, staring right through the adolescent wrapping, as if to measure the amount of affection I was capable of accepting from her, or giving in return. There was only one thing I was afraid of then, one word.

  “I want you to come back,” she said at last. “I just don’t want you to be thinking about coming back. Do you see?”

  “Almost. I think if I come back a few more times I will.”

  She laughed her lilting laugh then, sunlight in the room. I looked at her, smiled, felt that nothing stood between us—not our ages or histories or personalities, nothing superficial like that.

  She took my plate to the sink, gave me a mint to cover the wine on my breath, and kissed me once lightly on the mouth before I left.

  Three

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE NOT to think about her. I thought about her in my classes, in my bed at night with the rough wool blanket against the skin of my forearms and hands, and the sound of Joey stirring and muttering in his sleep on the other side of the room. I’d sketch her face in the margins of my textbooks. I’d leave my friends at our table in the dining hall and go up for a second helping of chicken à la king or a third brownie, or a fourth glass of milk, and my inner eye would be filled with visions of her: lying beneath me in the guest-room bed, looking at me in a way I had never been looked at, making soft humming sounds during the lovemaking—the language of another life; sitting in the wicker chair with the plate balanced on her thighs and held lightly in the fingers of both hands and telling me, “I don’t care what other people think, Anthony; I just don’t care about things like that anymore,” in a voice that sounded so certain and calm, it seemed she had never been afraid, that she could never be hurt.

  Everything in her world—from the jars of flour and cornmeal on her kitchen counter to the strands of her hair, wheat-colored with a few threads of gray, held back in the teeth of her barrette—seemed clean and ordered, immune to ordinary complications.

  It wasn’t true, of course. Her life was, in fact, ordered and calm, more so than most lives I knew before or have known since. Sitting quietly in meditation for two hours every day, as she did, is almost a guarantee of an ordered, calm life. But there were also deep layers of trouble and grief in that life. Her sister’s illness. The lingering, nagging sorrow—too small a word—caused by the death of her husband and, especially, of her son, Robert, who had celebrated his fifteenth birthday a week before the accident; the haunting memory that she had stayed home that day, instead of going with them, because she had wanted to finish one of her sculptures. There was, too, a particular brand of middle-aged loneliness that I could sense at certain moments, dimly, but would not, for another twenty-five years, even begin to understand.

  We made love nine times in all, and always afterward she wept. It was a quiet, restrained weeping that lasted only fifteen or twenty seconds, a kind of orgasm in reverse. She would pull my face down against her neck and turn away, and I could feel the pulse of sadness running up through her chest and throat. I would hold her and let the sorrow run its course, and then lie next to her on my back, feeling the warmth of her leg against my leg, and resting my left arm across my belly so that the ends of my fingers touched the scar that ran up toward her navel. That scar fascinated me. I know now what event it marked, what profound joy, but I did not know it then, and I ran my fingertips across it as if it were the mysterious key to her, which it was.

  Over the last two weeks of the term, I went to her house on Wednesday afternoons and Sunday evenings—the times I could get away from my friends and from the dormitory without attracting attention. On Sundays, we had more time together, and after the lovemaking, she would talk more than she had ever talked since I’d known her. I understood that she had made the decision to allow me into the secret room where she kept her old trophies of happiness, and I tried to be the perfect guest there, the perfect listener.

  Lying beneath the single sheet in the darkness with the sound of the drawn shade knocking against the window frame, I would listen especially carefully to her voice, as if the essence of her could be distilled from its sure, quiet notes. She liked to tell me stories about her travels: the canals and gilded onion domes in Leningrad, old kerchiefed women on the corners selling strawberries from cones of newspaper, their hands as gnarled and worn as if they’d been scratching out a living in the dirt for centuries; a plain poor village in the mountains near the Yugoslavian coast, where a man had been killed on the train tracks outside, while she drank beer and ate chocolate with friends in the depot bar; a road that led from a city called Domodossola in Italy, south and west into France, winding down out of the Alps past soft-looking cliffs with old French men fishing in the river that curled around the base of them. As a single woman, and later, with her husband and son, she had traveled widely—to Africa, to Argentina, to a Norwegian city called Narvik, a hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, where she and her husband had lived for two weeks in a cabin at the mouth of a fjord, and where they’d returned ten years later with Robert.

  “Traveling is the purest joy for me,” she said. “No house, no car, no things. It’s like the feeling you have sometimes when you’re running. You have no weight. And everything has a richness to it, a newness. When you’re finished with college, you should take off for a year or two and just see what there is to see.”

  “We could travel together,” I said. “I speak Italian. We could go to Italy, to the villages where my grandparents were born.”

  There were eighteen days until graduation, until I was supposed to leave Exeter. There were two weeks. I consoled myself by creating elaborate scenarios like that in my mind’s eye: we would travel to Europe together; we would find a house on the beach at Cape Cod, where I would get a job as a carpenter and she’d have all day to work on her sculptures; we would book passage on a freighter and sail to Hong Kong. Or, if I was in a less expansive mood, I would imagine borrowing my uncle’s car on Wednesday afternoons in the summer and driving up to Exeter to be with her—to make love, meditate, walk in the woods, drive to the seacoast for a cold swim.

  From time to time, in that shadowy warm room, one of those dreams would rise and break the surface, and she would let it make its fabulous splash there in the darkness, and then let it fall back and sink again, without comment. Instead of taking up the thread of my fantasies, she’d put my fingers on the pulse in her wrist, or she’d say, “Look at the way that band of light falls across the walls and the ceiling.” Anything to tow me back into the actual present.

  “That’s not light, that’s less-darkness,” I would say, or something like that, some seventeen-year-old’s clever quip, because her wordless resistance to my fantastical plans felt like rejection to me.

  Once, she brought me down into her cellar workshop and showed me a sculpture she was almost finished with. There were tools lying in one corner of the room—chisel, mallet, goggles, a power sander—and next to them, on a wooden pedestal, a piece of white marble about the size of a basketball, that she said she had gotten from a quarry in northern Vermont and carried in from the car herself on a dolly. She’d carved faces into the four sides of the globe, elongated faces wit
h noses, cheeks, and foreheads as smooth and speckled as a grapefruit skin. A woman weeping, a woman smiling, a woman who appeared to be in pain, a woman who might have been asleep, or in a state of deep relaxation, or in a state of bliss. “No one in particular,” she said when I asked who it was. “I’ve been working on it for two and a half years. There are some other versions out in the shed and up in my bedroom. I’ll show you sometime.” She led me back up the stairs and kissed me good-bye there, patiently, playfully, and slapped her hand lightly against the seat of my jeans when I turned to go out the door, so that I made the walk back to Amen Hall singing to myself.

  Twice she had me sit with her in the small “shrine room,” as she called it, and meditate cross-legged before her Buddhas and her beads. My meditations would be full of images of her body, or echoes of things we had said or done in the bedroom, nothing like the little empty stretches of peace I had sometimes experienced in the woods. When I confessed that to her, she told me, “Think of it as a thousand-year project.”

  In the other hours of the week, I went through the motions of my former life, crossing the campus with textbooks under one arm, sitting in the Grill and talking with friends about summer plans, going out onto the playing fields on the last Saturday afternoon of the sports season and watching Joey Barnard fly around the gravel track in his maroon shorts and maroon EXETER shirt and set the school record for the mile—four minutes, twelve and two-tenths seconds, a record that stands to this day. I would talk to my grandmother and Uncle Peter from the basement telephone, and wander alone in the woods before dinner, practicing not-thinking. One night, I had such a vivid dream about Rosalie that I sat bolt upright in bed and shouted her name, waking Joey out of a solid sleep. In the dream, she had borrowed Caesar’s car and driven up to Exeter in the middle of the night, and had been tossing pebbles against the screen of my room and calling my name, but by the time the sound woke me, and by the time I went to the window, she had somehow rigged up a rope to the windowsill and looped it around her neck and was dangling from it. Her feet were twitching, she was reaching up one hand to the rope, to me, but her body was too heavy to reel in, and there was such a space between us that I could not reach down and save her.