by Sue Halpern
* * *
There was an old, old house renewed with paint . . .
—Robert Frost
The house needed a lot of work. In her old life Kit hadn’t been a homeowner, so this was all new. Daisy found her a contractor, an older man named Ray Wagonner who walked with a limp—“occupational hazard”—and who had grown up in one of the other run-down houses in the neighborhood before, he said, “the Americans moved out and all those strangers moved in.” Coolidge and the streets around it were where the government had been resettling refugees for the past few decades—“It’s like the United Nations over here” is how Daisy put it. “Almost no one speaks English,” which suited Kit just fine.
When she confessed to Ray that she was in over her head owning such a derelict property, he told her that there were only three things she needed to know: “Benjamins. Benjamins. Benjamins.” Money she had, thank God. For the first time ever, she had an overflowing bank account and nothing but this house to sop it up.
The old windows were replaced first, taking with them the draft that had sent her burrowing under three quilts most nights, and after that a new boiler, insulation, and radiators. Every other week Ray would hand her a bill and she would write a check, on the spot, without looking it over. For all she knew he was ripping her off, and for all she knew, he’d figured out she didn’t care. Three months in and Kit came home from work to a new bathroom; the original claw-footed tub had been refinished and now sat gleaming against a matte black slate floor. “This is too nice,” she complained to Ray, who took it as a compliment.
In December a pipe froze under the sink, swamping the new floor, which Ray said shouldn’t have happened, which was small consolation since it did. “Mice,” he said. “Mice ate through the insulation,” and since the pipes were on an outside wall, they didn’t stand a chance. An exterminator came, a large man wheeling a canister with a hazard sticker on it. creative pests, his shirt said. The exterminator told her that in addition to the mice there were flying squirrels in the attic and that he’d set some traps. He also mentioned carpenter ants, termites, spiders, and cluster flies and urged her to sign up for a monthly service that included unlimited follow-up visits and a free Creative Pests T-shirt, so she did. He also mentioned that she should probably be in the market for a new roof—he’d found a few places where the vermin had eaten through to the other side. It occurred to her that he was in cahoots with Ray and that each would get a kickback from the other, but she just couldn’t care. Ray liked her attitude but found it strange. Most of his clients were all over him to cut costs and speed things up. Kit was content to let things unfold. It wasn’t normal, but who was he to complain?
The new roof went up in May. It had been a rainy April, but the sun came out on the second and stayed there for most of the month, and by the third week rows of gray utilitarian asphalt shingles had replaced 1635’s weathered cedar shakes. Though Ray, especially, was sorry to see them go, he promised Kit that she now had herself a “fifty-year roof,” which was like saying she had a roof for life. “Till death or a category five hurricane do you part,” he said, handing her a bill.
* * *
Sunny/moving
“Wake up! Wake up!” This was Willow, whispering in my ear. I was seven and curled around my stuffed panda in a corner of my big kid’s bed, sleeping soundly. Willow’s hand was on my neck. It was cold, like she’d been outside. The shades were drawn, but when I cracked open my eyes I could see that it was still dark out.
“Are we getting a puppy?” I asked. Willow sometimes told me the story of how her parents woke her up in the middle of the night and dropped a little dog into her sleepy arms and said, “This is Joseph, he’s a Weimaraner.”
“What? No,” she said.
“Ten minutes,” Steve called from the other side of the apartment.
Willow pulled back the covers and lifted me out of bed and walked us into the living room. The bookshelves had been stripped bare, the futon was gone, and there were boxes on the floor. I burst out crying.
“We don’t have time for this, Willow,” Steve said. He was wearing an old army jacket and a black wool hat that, when it was pulled down, doubled as a face mask, the kind with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. Steve liked to wear it that way on Halloween, when kids came to the door.
“I know,” she said, then planted quiet, tickly raspberries on my neck till I giggled and squirmed to get down. I was fully awake now, and she handed me a granola bar and told me I didn’t have to change out of my pajamas and could go back to sleep on the drive. I didn’t ask where we were going, or why. It was like a dream. I just followed her down the stairs, then let her carry me the rest of the way to the station wagon, which was full of our stuff and attached to a trailer that Steve, who was right behind us on the stairs, was also loading. Willow tucked me and the stuffed panda into my car seat, covered us with a blanket, put the car radio on, said she’d be back soon, and disappeared into the house. Steve clomped down and up the stairs, down and up. I couldn’t see him, but I heard him and felt him, since every time he put something into the trailer, the whole car bounced. The music on the radio soon turned to news, just a lot of voices talking about things I didn’t understand until they mentioned the circus (I had just been to the circus), and I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew my parents were in the front seat, the motor was running, and we were driving away from home, and it was still completely dark out. I followed the path of the high beams down the street as we drove, but everything on either side had vanished, as if it wasn’t us who were leaving the neighborhood, but the neighborhood itself that had moved on.
“Don’t forget my bike,” I said to the backs of my parents’ heads. I loved my bike, a banged-up blue Trek I’d inherited from another homeschooled kid who probably got it from another homeschooler who probably got it from another homeschooler. It was my first two-wheeler. I am not sure they heard me, because neither turned around right away. Instead, Willow was looking at Steve, and Steve kept his eyes on the road.
“Right,” he said after a moment. “No worries,” and I was too young to know that this is what he says when, in fact, there are worries.
“Sunny,” Willow said suddenly, “can you count to one thousand?”
Willow knew I could. We’d been working on this. But I took it as a challenge and launched right in and Willow did, too: “Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. Fifty-one, fifty-two . . .” I heard Willow’s voice. And then I didn’t.
* * *
Silence is a gleaming sword.
—Robert William Service
“Can I ask you something . . . personal?” Sunny said when they were culling the periodicals, tossing old magazines and newspapers, holding some for the free bin that greeted patrons just inside the library door and putting the rest into recycling. It was an overcast, humid Thursday morning, threatening a thunderstorm that was edging ever closer, as towering cumulonimbus clouds drifted in from the south. Kit had an umbrella in her bag, but if it poured she was sure to get soaked on the five-block walk home. Riverton weather was unpredictable in the summer, but when it rained, the streets reliably flooded. Somewhere in the city’s decline, the decision had been made to pretend its infrastructure had been built to last indefinitely; as long as its sewers, bridges, and roads were still there, that was enough. Kit looked down at her feet and vowed to go barefoot rather than ruin another pair of shoes. These were just a beat-up pair of sandals, but broken in and comfortable, with an impression of her feet cast into the bottoms. Riverton was once the shoe manufacturing capital of the United States. Now it didn’t even have a shoe store. People shopped at the Walmart out on Route 5 or at the mall or online, or they picked up flip-flops and knockoff Crocs at the Dollar Tree across the town green from the library where, like many things, they cost more than a dollar. If she wrecked her sandals she’d have to get a new pair, which would mean a trip to the store, and she hated to shop, hated the whole ritual of it, hated the whole
trying to care if the blouse was blue or green and made her look busty, if the shoes showed off her calves, if cowl-necks were out or in. But what she hated most was seeing herself in the three-way mirror. Straight on, confronting her puffy eyes and the gray creeping through her hair, was bad enough, but catching sight of her unsprung rear end and the cellulite that had attached itself to her thighs like barnacles was more than she needed to know about herself. And then, invariably, that line from Milton, or what she thought she remembered was that line from Milton, would pop into her head: “I myself am hell.” Such were the joys of having studied literature once upon a time.
And then she looked up and noticed Sunny staring at her.
“Did you say something?” Kit said, still surprised to see that sometime between yesterday at five in the evening and this morning at nine, Sunny had dipped the ends of her bangs into some kind of vermillion dye or paint that made the hair covering her forehead look like matchsticks.
“I was just wondering . . .” Sunny began, then stopped, took a deep breath, and, as she exhaled, inflated then deflated her cheeks. “I was just wondering if I could ask you something kind of personal.” Sunny was focusing on her feet when she said this, but looked up long enough to see Kit recoil, her head bouncing slightly backward and her eyes narrowing, as her gaze shifted from distraction to high alert.
So this was it, Kit thought. This was the moment when Sunny tried to breach the barrier. This was it. Usually people didn’t ask for permission, they just barreled ahead: “Are you married?” “Don’t you wish you’d had children?” “Do you mind living alone?” She felt every muscle in her body contract, as if she were a turtle, tucking into its carapace, only there was no shell and she was going to be asked to account for herself, and by this peculiar girl with her severe opinions.
“What I was wondering is,” Sunny said in a rush, pretending that the temperature in the room hadn’t just dropped precipitously, “why do you do this? I mean not what we’re doing right now. I get why we have to recycle old magazines. I mean why did you become a librarian?”
The girl was wearing a dark green oversized T-shirt that said question authority, which, Kit decided, if you wanted to be literal about it, Sunny was doing now. Kit found herself smiling, despite herself.
“What’s so funny?” Sunny demanded. “Was that a stupid question?”
“No, no, not at all,” Kit said. She hadn’t thought of Sunny as fragile, but she could see it now: this was hard for her. “I guess, to answer your question, it’s because I’m a big fan of silence.”
Kit was turning back to sort a pile of National Geographics when she caught sight of the smallest trace of disappointment on Sunny’s face.
“No, I’m serious,” Kit said. “I like the silence. There aren’t many public places where you can get paid to tell people to be quiet.”
Sunny considered this for a moment. “Before I was born, my parents used to go on these ten-day silent meditation retreats where they had to sit all day and practice their breathing. They said it was cleansing.”
“I’d like the silent part, just not the sitting part,” Kit said. “I don’t think I could do that.”
“Me, either,” Sunny said. “Willow says that if you don’t have the right mind, mindfulness is impossible. She says it’s something you have to cultivate, and she’s sure I’ll get there someday.”
“Not me,” Kit said, smiling. “I’m cultivating mindlessness. And the way I’m doing it this morning is by separating out the old magazines from the new.”
She pushed a stack of Sports Illustrateds over to Sunny, and for the next twenty minutes or so they worked side by side easily, without saying anything.
“The other thing is,” Kit said, picking up the conversation later, “it’s a job, and jobs are hard to come by in this economy, especially for people who love books.”
She wasn’t actually looking at Sunny when she said this. She wasn’t looking anywhere except backward: the résumé writing, the job search, the need to be someone with a relevant and cherry-picked past. The last time she’d gone job-hunting no one was connecting through LinkedIn or searching through Monster.com. She wasn’t opposed—the system worked the way it was supposed to and she got a job halfway across the country with only a CV and the briefest Skype interview—she just thought that calling it social media made no sense.
“It’s doublespeak. It’s the opposite of social,” she told Dr. Bondi, who had been encouraging her to “go digital.”
“Is that a complaint or an endorsement?” he asked. Was he teasing her?
“Very funny,” Kit said.
“No,” he said, “I’m serious.”
“Right,” Kit said. “I forgot that every single thing I say in here can and will be used against me.”
“Well?” he said.
“Okay, yes, I like that it’s impersonal,” she said. “I don’t think it’s good for humanity, but I do think it’s good for me.”
Dr. Bondi wrote something on the pad he always had resting on his knee, on which he sometimes drew little pictures and diagrams to explain things to her, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief and also, for reasons she could no longer remember, how the catalytic converter in her car worked. He drew and she sat there thinking how nice it was he cared, and how expensive.
Kit hesitated, then asked, “What are you writing down?” She nodded in the direction of the legal pad.
“I’m making a note to tell my supervisor how difficult I sometimes find your humor. Not because it isn’t funny. It is. You are. But it’s a defense, and it’s challenging, and I probably shouldn’t be telling you I feel this way, but I want this space, and our relationship, to be one of transparency and truth.”
“Your supervisor?” Kit said.
“Yes,” he said. “The therapist who helps me process my work.”
“You see a shrink?” she said.
“I do,” Dr. Bondi said. “I find it very helpful. What about you?”
He had her there. “Nicely played, Doctor,” Kit said, and didn’t answer.
Dr. Bondi didn’t push her. Instead, he said nothing. Kit knew this was strategic. His silence was a squeeze. She felt it tightening around her torso, just under the ribs, a Heimlich maneuver to get her to dislodge her feelings—or at least answer the question.
“Yes,” she said finally, “I do find it helpful.”
“And why do you find it helpful?”
“Is this ‘make Dr. Bondi feel good about his work’ day?” she said.
“Would that be so bad?”
She ignored this.
“You know, Kit, you and I have spent a lot of time teasing out a lot of negative stuff. Maybe it would be helpful to flip it around and look for positives.”
Kit felt herself color and get instantly angry. “So I’m supposed to find something positive in the mess that’s been made of my life?”
She was incredulous, furious, full of venom for this clueless man who didn’t understand anything but his happy platitudes. Her life was in shambles, her husband was dead to her, her marriage might have been the greatest story ever told, and where was the plus side in all of that? But then, just as quickly as her anger had risen, it receded and she laughed. Her husband was dead to her and her life was in shambles. Kit laughed so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks.
“At least I don’t have to pretend to like sailing anymore,” she said.
“There you go,” Dr. Bondi said. “A positive. What you’ve got to believe, Kit, is that there are very few situations in life that are one hundred percent bad. Did you know that two years after becoming paralyzed, most paraplegics say that their life is better off than when they could walk? We are an adaptive species. Try to embrace that.”
Chapter Three
6.21.10–6.27.10
Remorse—is Memory—Awake . . .
—Emily Dickinson
This Monday, when Kit got to work, Evelyn was at the front desk countin
g the day’s petty cash as usual, but seeing Kit, she started waving her hands wildly, as if she were trying to stop traffic, or at least slow it down.
“Don’t say anything about it,” she hissed.
“Don’t say anything about what?” Kit didn’t bother to lower her voice. Evelyn was prone to inventing conspiracies and controversies, and Kit was not prone to humoring her.
Evelyn gestured toward Barbara’s shut door, which at that moment began to open, and before Evelyn could pretend to be separating nickels from quarters, and before Kit could turn to make her way toward the reference desk, the library director stepped over the transom and stood there, arms crossed, eyes frightened. Though they had worked together for years, Kit couldn’t really say they knew each other. To her, Barbara was a particular type of woman: sturdy, with angular features and a white pageboy, handsome, not pretty—a sensible shoes kind of woman with proper manners, manners proper enough to keep her from prying into the lives of the people she worked with or trading gossip, a woman who was standoffish by breeding, not intention. But here was that woman, just standing there—no, not even standing, leaning against the doorjamb, and this Barbara was stoop-shouldered and her hair was unwashed and lank and her face was swollen and bruised, especially around her nose, which had a length of white tape stretched cheekbone to cheekbone over the bridge.
“What happened?” Kit blurted out, keeping her gaze on Barbara since Evelyn, she knew, would be shooting full-bore dirty looks at her.
Barbara opened her mouth to speak, but instead of words, short high-pitched bleats came out, little stuttering burps of sound, as if she’d forgotten everything she knew about vowels and consonants and how they fit together. She took a step forward, or pitched forward, because before Kit knew it, Barbara’s head was on her shoulder, and Kit was holding her up.
