Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  “We should do something more fun.”

  “This is … fun.”

  Finally, he turns from the window, an action plan in mind. He grins at her, shaking his head to disagree with her. “Girl, you have been cooped up too long. I need to remind you what fun is!”

  SO NOW, ON SUNDAYS, HE BRINGS a DVD for them to see. They make a pact that they will go through the American Film Institute’s one hundred best comedies. They like the silly movies best, the sillier the better, films he would never have seen on his own: Duck Soup, Blazing Saddles, There’s Something About Mary, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World—the title of which resonates particularly with both of them.

  They’re outrageous and crude and very funny. Celeste gets all the jokes, another positive sign, Dr. Banerjee says. Jamie has dubbed Sunday afternoons “Movie Matinee Day,” and it gives them something to look forward to. It’s when they can laugh together, Jamie always leading the way, getting the jokes a split second before she does. He assumes it’s her injured brain still having trouble processing quickly, but mostly it’s because Celeste’s attention is often focused on Jamie. Because she watches his face light up with laughter, hers comes second.

  And then, there is Celeste’s secret. Despite the relaxed happiness of Sunday afternoons, it’s Wednesdays that she looks forward to the most. Jamie arrives after teaching summer school, and there isn’t enough time for a movie then. They have to talk or sit quietly, and it’s those hours that get her through the long week of physical therapy and occupational therapy and cognitive therapy and speech therapy, the hardest one of all.

  She needs her speech therapy. She needs to be able to say all the words that are swimming around her brain, just out of reach of her tongue. She needs to tell Jamie that he has saved her life. That if she didn’t have his visits to look forward to she thinks she’d give up. She needs to make him see how good he is. She’s listened enough to understand that he feels he’s worth something only when he’s teaching, and she wants to tell him that this isn’t so. That the Jamie she knows from the hospital rooms she’s inhabited these many months, to her that Jamie is beautiful.

  But she can’t say anything any of those things yet, not with the complexity that might make him believe her.

  IN THE TIME BETWEEN THE END of summer school and the beginning of the fall semester, Jamie has several unscheduled weeks. In prior years he used those days to prepare for the coming school year. He meticulously made his lesson plans for all five classes. He reread the books or plays or essays that he would assign so that they were fresh in his mind, even though he had taught most of them for years. He would go to school and rearrange his classroom. But not this year. This summer none of that happens, because he finds himself making the drive north many times a week. He tries to convince himself that he is fulfilling the promise he made to Chet, that the trips north are altruistic, but he knows that’s not even half the story.

  One Tuesday afternoon when he arrives exactly at one thirty, as he said he would, he finds Celeste waiting at the elevator for him, standing up, holding on to a walker. When he steps out onto the floor, she turns without a word and takes four steps, unaided, before she collapses back into the waiting wheelchair Nadia holds for her.

  Jamie is astonished. “You’re walking.…”

  “I wanted … a surprise …” she manages to say, breathing hard from the exertion.

  “You pulled it off, didn’t you? Wow, you’re walking!”

  “A little …”

  “But a little leads to a lot, right, Nadia?”

  “We think so.”

  “I want …”—Celeste struggles for the word and then when she finds it, she grins at him—“a … reward.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “The ocean … I want … to see … the ocean.”

  Jamie looks at Nadia for permission. “Could I take her?”

  And before Nadia can answer, Celeste says, “I say yes!”

  THE REHAB FACILITY HAS BEAUTIFUL GROUNDS, carefully planted and landscaped with level walkways, fountains with benches around them, but Celeste isn’t interested. Only the ocean will do, and so Jamie has to push her chair past the manicured lawns and the curved flower beds bursting on this late summer’s day with cosmos and zinnias and salvia in shades of purple. They cross the main driveway and come out onto the winding road that brings visitors to the hospital and then continues on.

  Jamie pushes Celeste along the shoulder of the road, being careful to look for cars, conscious that her safety is in his hands, but she seems supremely unconcerned. She puts her head back and takes in the feel of the sun on her skin. Her eyes are closed and she is smiling.

  “I smell it,” she says to him. And so does he. The ocean.

  Carefully, afraid that he might be jostling her newly knit bones too much, he turns off the road and cuts across the yellowing late summer grass of an empty field. He knows that if he can get her to the edge of it, she will be able to overlook the ocean. She will be able to see for miles.

  She doesn’t open her eyes. She waits. He doesn’t talk, because he’s concentrating on the uneven surface of the dirt, attempting to pick out the least bumpy path. And then he stops the chair, sets the two hand brakes, and kneels down beside her so that he can see what she will be seeing. And yes, the view is perfect—Swami’s Beach is in front of them. The sun is on the water. The waves are shallow and rhythmic, running up the sand in frilly white ruffles. The horizon line goes on forever, blending with the bluest sky of the summer.

  “Here,” he says to her. And she opens her eyes. It’s all there. All in front of her. All that she has longed for these many arduous months.

  “Oh, Jamie,” she says, “thank you.”

  And she takes his hand and brings it to her and holds it with both of her hands. He lets her. He wants her to.

  “Now,” she says, “I can get well.”

  Tell Me One Thing

  ON A BRIGHT BLUE JULY MORNING, LUCIA opened her eyes with the thought already formed in her brain—Is this the day Maggie starts talking? She had awoken with this question every day for the past thirty-nine days. And every day the answer had been no, not today.

  What she hoped for, what the doctor told her not to expect, was that one day, suddenly, her daughter would start chattering again, word would tumble after word, a cascade of sounds and sentences and laughter where now there was only silence and mystery.

  Dr. Greenstein took Lucia aside one day and prepared her for whispers, maybe a word at a time, maybe then followed by more silence. “Be alert,” the doctor said, “for the occasional word spoken so softly you might miss it.” But Lucia didn’t want that, one word spoken occasionally. She wanted her child back, her spontaneous, silly, talkative dream of a child.

  It had started slowly. On the early Thursday morning, beginning of June, that Lucia began to pack whatever clothes she could fit into two duffel bags, she looked up to see Maggie in her pajamas, thumb in her mouth, black hair chaotic from the sleep that still clung to her like a mist, hugging the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Oh, sweetheart …” Lucia said and then stopped, fumbling for what to say next. She knew it had to be the absolute right thing, but she hadn’t expected Maggie to awaken so early and she wasn’t prepared.

  Maggie’s eyes scanned the chaos on the bed—heaps of clothing jumbled on top of each other, the open duffel bags.

  “Mommy, where are we going?”

  Lucia was desperate to believe that they were going on to something better, but she couldn’t have described exactly what that was, so, as she sat down on the bed and reached out for her daughter, Lucia was as literal as she could be. She hoped it would ground them both.

  “We’re going to go live by the beach,” Lucia said as her daughter climbed into her lap, “in a place called Ocean Park. We went there once in the summer, to the pier where they have rides and cotton candy. Do you remember?”

  Maggie took a minute to consider. She took all questions seriously.
Did she remember? “How old was I?”

  “Let me see, you were very little. Maybe not quite two.”

  “Oh, Mommy,” Maggie said, immediately relieved, “that’s too little to remember. No one could.”

  Lucia smiled. “Probably not.” She understood Maggie didn’t like to fail at anything, including remembering things.

  “You’re being silly,” Maggie said as she snuggled deeper into Lucia’s arms.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Did we have fun? Tell me about it. I want to remember.”

  And so Lucia described the merry-go-round and the white horse with jewels in his tangled mane that Maggie insisted on riding over and over, Richard at her side, holding her on, but Lucia left that part of the story out.

  While her mother talked, Maggie took an inventory of the clothing spread across the bed. She saw her shorts and T-shirts, her sandals and tennis shoes, her mother’s jeans and sweatshirt hoodies and her face clouded over. It was clear who was going and who wasn’t and she stopped her mother mid-sentence. “Why isn’t Daddy coming?”

  Lucia took a deep breath. “Because his work is here. He has to go to work.”

  “But when he comes home after work, nobody will be home.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But what about Sunday? Will he come pick me up?”

  Lucia wanted to say, Yes, eventually, I hope so, if he comes to some peace with this, but she knew she couldn’t say that to a five-year-old. “When things have settled down, Daddy will come on Sundays, but probably not right away.”

  “He’ll be sad.”

  “Yes,” Lucia admitted, “he’ll be sad.”

  “Does he want us to go?”

  “No.” And here Lucia sighed. “He doesn’t.”

  What Lucia hadn’t figured out how to explain was that she was escaping. That’s how it felt. Richard wouldn’t know until he got home that afternoon that they were gone. If you’re escaping, you don’t tell anyone in advance. If you’re escaping because you haven’t the words to explain your departure, it feels like flight.

  Richard would have demanded a logical explanation. He is a scientist, after all. And Lucia could have offered him nothing but deeply embedded feelings. There is the certainty now within her that this marriage is wrong and the belief that she would harden into someone she despised—cowardly, angry, and eventually bitter—if she stayed.

  This dread finally has propelled Lucia to her early morning escape. It’s not that she hasn’t tried over the eight years they have been together to speak up, to shift things between them even a little. Oh, maybe not at first. At first she was simply grateful. But gradually, over the years, and especially after she became pregnant with Maggie, Lucia began to question Richard’s version of things. She struggled to have him see the way the world looked to her. He would have none of it. It wasn’t even an argument. It was an outright dismissal. “No, Lucia, that’s not right.” “No, Lucia, we’re not doing that.” “No, Lucia, you haven’t thought that through clearly.” “Pay attention, Lucia, you’re all emotion, use some logic.”

  Here was a man whose life had proceeded easily from precocious child to adored son to honored student to responsible husband. Only now, as Richard struggles to finish his dissertation, as he competes with scientists more than his equal, as he finds that teaching undergraduates at the University of California at Riverside isn’t to his liking, as his life stalls around him, only now has Richard ever had to examine his circumstances. And he’s not doing a good job of it, introspection being a skill he never acquired.

  At the beginning, Lucia thought Richard would light the way. It was his rock-solid belief in his own competence that drew her to him. In those early days, she believed he knew how to get the better of life.

  “Most people don’t know how to set the right goals,” he told her in the midst of a noisy Oberlin party the night they met. “That’s their first problem.”

  Lucia’s immediate thought wasn’t that she didn’t have the right goals, but that she had none. She would graduate in June, and then what? The thought terrified her. Would she end up back at her parents’ house in Columbus, Ohio, sleeping in her childhood bedroom, eating Sunday dinner in her grandparents’ overstuffed dining room, walking the same neighborhood streets, seeing the same tired faces as she had every day of her life until she left for Oberlin? She saw no other alternative. She was studying music. How would that translate into a life that could sustain her? She had no idea, but she knew that if she didn’t come up with a plan soon, it would be as if her four years at college had never happened.

  Richard and Lucia stood in the tiny kitchen of a classmate’s apartment, the crowded party going on around them, empty beer bottles spilling out of black garbage bags and continuing on across every available surface—countertop, stovetop, kitchen sink. The floor was crunchy with broken pretzels and ground-up potato chips, the air thick with the aroma of pot, and the room sweltering from a late September heat wave. Not a lick of a breeze came through the open back door.

  Richard seemed to take no notice of any of it. A deep green bottle of Rolling Rock in hand, he leaned his lanky body against the old lumbering and wheezing fridge, his blue eyes intense with concentration as he spoke to Lucia. He made her feel as if they were alone and she was flattered, rapt. Richard Weiss was mesmerizing in his certainty.

  “And most people refuse to work hard, really hard. They don’t understand that’s what you have to do if you want something badly enough. You do all that …” And here he paused and shrugged, as if to say the rest was self-evident. His thin face, so somber till then, broke into an irresistible grin, and suddenly he was boyish and appealing. When he said, “My life is the perfect example,” it didn’t occur to Lucia to see it as bragging.

  Her own life had been a series of accidents and unexpected turns, so that Lucia never trusted the outcome of any enterprise and certainly didn’t trust her ability to make things happen.

  Named after her paternal grandmother, Lucia grew up the only child of grateful parents. Her father, Lino, had emigrated from Calabria, Italy, as a young man, lured by the stories of his relatives who had come before him, and settled in Columbus. Two uncles had opened a shoemaker’s shop. At first they did only the most commonplace repair—resoling shoes, replacing broken heels, stretching insteps for ladies who had bought a shoe several sizes too small. But gradually they began to design and make shoes. The uncles were friendly. Their customers spoke to them about their difficulty in finding a comfortable shoe. People with tricky feet were grateful to pay a little more for the luxury of walking pain free. Their business prospered.

  Because neither uncle had married, they gratefully taught their nephew the trade. Thirty-seven years later, as Lucia packed her duffel bags in Riverside, California, Lino continued to greet customers at the counter of Pascoli Brothers Shoes in Columbus, the uncles long dead, the shop now his.

  Never once can Lucia remember her father complaining. Did he like what he did for a living? The question, itself, was outside his range of inquiry. He was grateful to have had uncles to help him, grateful to have made enough money to provide for his wife and daughter, grateful he has work still.

  Lucia named her daughter after her own mother, Margaret, who married Lino Pascoli, this courtly Italian man, and never stopped loving him. Margaret’s Irish-Catholic parents weren’t pleased. But Lino was Catholic. They could all go to the same church. They believed in the same God. That’s all that mattered, Margaret told them, and, as the years went on, they agreed.

  Her hopeful, sweet mother, who saw only the best in people and would do anything not to make waves, taught Lucia to be thankful and good and to live without anyone noticing. She grew up feeling doted on and pretty much invisible outside her home. She was always the child who gave the nuns no trouble in school, who sat with her hands folded and her attention fixed on her teacher. She was the student whose grades were good and whose love of music, for her violin, gave her a pat
h to college. To Lucia’s astonishment, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music welcomed her with a scholarship. Her parents were equally flabbergasted. Yes, Lucia liked to play the violin. Yes, the music that poured out of it was sweet and often made her mother weep, but a scholarship? College, when neither of them had ever gone? This scholarship, this chance to go to college, it was a gift. And Lucia thought of it that way as well. Not as something she’d earned. Not as the logical conclusion to all the years of practice and praise. A gift, an unexpected turn in her life.

  And now far away from home, in California, if she doesn’t have the words to tell Richard why she’s leaving, she certainly can’t begin to explain this decision to her parents. In her family, you stayed married. In her family, you didn’t inform your husband that you were leaving with a note propped up on the kitchen table, a note that explained pretty much nothing and that explicitly didn’t give him any address where he could find you.

  AS LUCIA’S CAR SPEEDS WEST ON the 60 Freeway, away from hot, steamy Riverside, she concentrates on her driving. Even though Richard has no idea that they are leaving, it somehow seems urgent to get as far away from the campus as quickly as possible. When the 60 merges with the Santa Monica Freeway, the 10 West, around Boyle Heights, Lucia finally allows herself to draw a breath. This freeway will take them to the ocean. They are on their way. She glances over to see Maggie looking out the passenger-side window, humming quietly to herself.

  “Do you remember Bernadette?”

  Maggie nods. She remembers that Bernadette laughs a lot and moves around quickly and isn’t a restful kind of person. But she also remembers that when Bernadette would come for dinner, she would always bring a present for her. Once she brought Maggie a goldfish in a plump plastic bag tied with a striped ribbon. Another time it was a book about the animals that live at the North Pole. But the best present was a soft doll with long, black braids who was wearing a honey-colored dress embroidered with beads. She had tiny moccasins on her feet. Bernadette explained she was an Indian girl from the Lakota tribe. Later her mommy said that Bernadette taught anthropology classes where her daddy worked, sometimes about the Lakota, sometimes about other native people.