Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

  Hello, she said.

  Hello, the young man replied, smashing more chips into his mouth.

  Might you have any information about the municipal council election and who’s running this year?

  Same bunch as always, I think. He yawned. Here’s the list. He held out a sheet to Olga and she asked him about the single female name, at the bottom.

  Her? Oh, her husband died and she started coming to the meetings instead.

  Is she the only one? Olga asked.

  Only what? The young man crumpled his now empty bag of chips and tossed it in the trash can beside his desk.

  The only woman on the council?

  He shrugged, eyeing Olga a bit sideways, as most men in the valley did when they spoke to her, as if her close-cut hair made them uneasy, or the width of her shoulders, her unusual height for a woman on the island.

  As she had gotten used to doing, she pretended this sideway staring was not happening and asked him what the process was to get a name added to the ballot.

  With a tug at his goatee, he told her there was probably a form for that somewhere in the building. But he didn’t pick up the phone on his desk. He didn’t open a drawer. Waiting in front of him, Olga ran her tongue over the back of her teeth. The Akhmatova poems she’d been reading that morning crackled inside her like kindling. As if they brutally knocked her flat. But also, from “Elegy for N.N.”: . . . the heart which does not die when one thinks it should.

  Is there someone in the building, she asked, who would know where the form might be?

  On the opposite side of the desk, the young man shrugged again. He wiped some bits of chips off the edge of the desk and then wiped that same hand over his mouth. Watching him, it occurred to Olga there was really nothing this island could possibly kill in her that it hadn’t killed in her already. If people in the valley were offended by the sight of some newcomer on the ballot, then they would be offended. If they found out her mother’s religion and didn’t like it, so what? She wasn’t going to win regardless. She could just add her name as a symbolic civic act of provocation, to spark a few questions with the mere sight of an Olga on the ballot, some woman with the nerve to think she might have an idea or two worth sharing with her district.

  If she had to explain her motivation, she could stick to things people here would be most willing to hear from a retired bookseller—the lack of a single library in the entire valley, the problem of people dumping their bottles and other garbage at night in the Maria. She could try and keep it benign enough to avoid creating any potential turmoil for Cosmo or Lena. She could avoid bringing up the abysmal state of the municipal schools.

  On the other side of the desk, the young man yawned again. I can ask about the form, he said, but the candidate will have to fill it out.

  That’s no problem, Olga told him. I’m the candidate.

  Dear S, reporting to you from the gravel lot of the tiniest of town halls in the interior. My need to speak to you was so great I am resorting to a page from Cosmo’s cookie-shaped notebook in the backseat. I added an Olga to the list of candidates for you, S, and I want you to know I am, and will always remain, your widow. Even if there is no chance of my being widowed into this two-bit council of old men, or into any entity at all in this fascist-hearted country of ours.

  To put oneself out there just to lose, and publicly, should not make a widow giddy, S, but I am. I haven’t smoked since lunch but am chuckling over this cookie-shaped missive to you anyway. I just am.

  * * *

  Victor swigged to cut the wet bite of the night wind on his face.

  No one was supposed to be on the docks at this hour.

  But he was keeping to the vast shadows of the largest ships.

  They were all foreign, these beasts with the widest, deepest shadows.

  Somebody on this island had to piss on their locked entry gates.

  Swig swig.

  It was Victor.

  He pissed on the gate of a foreign ship.

  Then he slipped on his own drips.

  Or it was the slick dock that brought him down.

  The uncaring ocean that was to blame.

  Or his own urine on the planks.

  Difficult to know when lying on a wet dock at this dim an hour.

  Victor tried to resituate his legs, made it as far as his side.

  The fall had been harder than he expected.

  Eyes shut, he told himself he’d still run for mayor next year.

  He’d run for the Green Party.

  He couldn’t let his ex-wife’s father determine his life.

  He’d rise again to where he belonged.

  People loved a good resurrection.

  * * *

  Oscar made an endive salad to please his wife. He poached a wild salmon for her and lit the verbena candle she liked. He sprinkled rosemary over the heirloom potatoes he had slow-roasted in the oven while preparing himself for his declaration. The day the photo of Cosmo arrived, he’d shared it with his wife. When she insisted that they keep what she called “this situation” between them, and tell no one, not even his parents, he had agreed. His wife had dictated the response she wanted him to send to Lena and he had sent it:

  This is a tremendous shock, Lena. I need to discuss this matter with my wife. We’ll respond next week.

  For the next week, he had kept his discomfort with this initial response to himself, had quietly endured his wife’s furious expressions across the table over the head of their daughter. In bed together, he had accepted her careful avoidance of eye or bodily contact as if he were a suspect stranger in the adjacent seat of an airplane. When his wife asked repeatedly if he realized what a horrible, impossible situation he had created for them and for their daughter, he told her the enormity of it never left him.

  That morning, as his wife stuffed her keys and water bottle into her public radio tote bag, she had looked across the kitchen counter at where he was washing their breakfast dishes and said she had a feeling this woman was going to start demanding money. There must be a reason, his wife had insisted, why this Lena never mentioned to you what her family did. It must be something shady. Have you ever seen any article about that island that didn’t mention corruption? Did you look up that link I sent you about the savage robberies there, the carjackings? It’s a brutal place, Oscar. This woman might resort to physical threats to our family. You don’t know anything about her.

  To all of this, Oscar had penitently lowered his head and scrubbed harder at the inner walls of his daughter’s plastic sippy cup. The cup was dishwasher safe but he and his wife agreed it was better to wash it by hand, given the risk of extreme heat in the dishwasher causing chemicals in the cup to leach into their daughter’s water. When it came to plastics and children, they fervently agreed a parent could never be careful enough.

  It wasn’t until his wife left for work and he’d collapsed on the rug next to his daughter and her wooden animal figurines that he began to feel increasingly numb, the truth flowing through him like anesthetic, cutting off his ability to feel the figurines between his fingers, his tongue dull and heavy in his mouth. For the truth was he could not have a child he did not know. He would die inside if he didn’t return to the island to meet his son.

  And so the endive tonight. The wild salmon and overpriced heirloom potatoes. He had decided the best way to convey this truth to his wife would be bluntly. But only after they’d tucked in their daughter and he’d served the salmon. Only after his wife had recounted in detail her third meeting with the potential new donor for the arts center where she oversaw fund-raising.

  I need to meet him, Oscar said as his wife punctured a potato with her fork.

  Meet who? She drove her fork in deeper, her blond hair falling over her forehead.

  You know who I mean, he said. Cosmo. They call him Tourist Face. He has no fa
ther and he doesn’t look like anyone around him.

  Oh Jesus, Oscar. Don’t you dare try and cast yourself as the noble savior in this. Don’t even try. His wife shoved her plate hard enough to send her fork clanging to the floor. It’s just so enraging. She crossed her arms. I mean, to force a connection now—

  Force a connection? He’s my son! How can you not understand this, as a mother? He gripped the edge of the table and saw the skin around his wife’s mouth quiver for a second before she shot up from her chair. Without a word, she bolted from the table toward the long windows at the end of their living room.

  I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Oscar rose and started across the carpet but his wife warned him not to come any closer. In the middle of their nubby wool living-room rug, he stopped and stared at her bony back through the thin fabric of her gray wrap dress, her clenched hands at her sides. She had come to a halt so close to the window she was nearly touching the glass with her nose.

  You already wrote to her about this, didn’t you? his wife asked.

  Yes, he said, feeling all that had been solid between them beginning to liquefy, the edges of their marriage melting as if it had consisted of no more than a block of ice.

  This child exists, and he’s mine, he said, and waited for his wife to reply. Beyond her, the city glittered to itself, glowing in every direction from the lit windows in the new high-rise across the street and in the even larger high-rise next to that in their ever denser, more gentrified neighborhood, which they agreed had lost its spirit but also concurred it would be foolish to leave, with the new playground opening just down the block.

  I’m sorry to complicate our family this way. He ventured a step closer. But I need to at least meet him online. For now, he added, and felt the drip, drip between them quickening.

  * * *

  Lena set down her laptop amid the Legos on the red play table. She flipped up the screen and angled it to minimize the glare from the lamp. After Oscar’s business-like first message, his second message asking to meet Cosmo over Skype had surprised her. Lena wished she knew what kind of negotiating had occurred with his wife between the messages.

  Cosmo had said yes right away to the idea, but it had been a child’s yes, with no knowledge of how certain fraught decisions could operate in one’s life like a virus, spreading through the nervous system—how profoundly this choice might change how he saw himself and spoke, how much he might come to mistrust his own instincts.

  Okay, you ready? she asked. You don’t have to do this.

  I’m fine, just click on it! Cosmo urged her. See if he’s there.

  Lena typed in her password, clicked, and saw Oscar was already logged in. With another click, Oscar’s pale, freckled face filled the screen. He was grinning, but it was a forced smile, fragile and anxious. Jowl lines had deepened around his mouth and his hairline had receded. A network of lines now surrounded his eyes. Wow, Cosmo, look at you, Oscar said with his heavy accent, though Lena had assured him Cosmo spoke easily in both languages after his two years in northerner preschools.

  Is that your room? Oscar leaned forward, his upturned nose magnified as if he were about to emerge from the screen, and it struck Lena how differently his pale, freckled face registered to her now that it also belonged to her son. To categorically feel a remove from such a face was no longer possible.

  You have the same dots on your nose, Cosmo said, and Lena began her retreat, to give them space. As she backed out of view, she saw a flicker of Oscar’s wife behind him in a green dress, retreating at the same instant. A pained laugh rose in Lena’s throat but she forced herself to swallow it. Of all the women to find herself moving in fleeting synchronicity with—Oscar’s smug wife, whose patronizing comments Lena had replayed often in her mind, using them to recharge her sense of righteousness and purpose.

  Really? You have a book of poetry you bought from Olga? Cosmo asked, and after a nod, Oscar ducked and reappeared on the screen holding up the yellowed anthology. Half the cover was torn off, the pages uneven from all the corners he’d folded over. Lena, moved at the sight of the book, and at Oscar’s thoughtfulness to plan this display of connection, drew closer.

  It has one of my favorite poems in it, he said.

  About growing old without finding the holy city, Lena said. I remember.

  * * *

  After lowering the screen, Oscar rose from the edge of the bed where he had been sitting during the call. He placed his hands on his wife’s shoulders, careful not to rest too much of his weight there, and thanked her. I thought that would be harder, he said and waited for his wife to agree. But she didn’t. She didn’t pull away either and he thought of all the drifting he had done to get away from his warring parents, all the dropping out and starting again to avoid living with a tension that felt irresolvable, but the irresolvable had found him anyway in the form of a little boy with his face.

  You’re going to be thinking about this child now, his wife said, when you’re with our child.

  Nothing will change for our family, he assured her. I won’t allow anything to change—I promise. Although already a room had formed in his mind with Cosmo in it, kneeling in front of the red Lego table where the laptop had been resting, positioning the little plastic trees around his half-finished mobile home set, waiting for his father to call again.

  * * *

  They brainstormed for the campaign until after midnight. Fueled on popcorn and supermarket wine, they sat out on the porch until they decided “a new advocate” had the right ring to it. People like the word “new,” Sara said from the broken porch swing. It makes them think of shiny new cars and appliances, but it still acknowledges you’re an outsider.

  Here comes my new appliance. Olga moved in front of the porch table and stuck out her broad backside in her gray sweatpants. How’s that shine?

  I need my sunglasses. Lena covered her face. The shine is blinding me.

  I think we’ve got it. Sara held up a piece of Cosmo’s construction paper with the slogan scribbled across it: A New Advocate for Literacy in District 26. Who could resist the shine of that?

  I’m b-b-blinking all the way out here, Simon called from where he was peeing against one of the trees by the driveway. He’d driven out with Sara for what they’d named in the car Operation Olga for the Universe.

  Olga rolled back her shoulders to ham it up for them a little more. She’d pulled something in her left shoulder last week and rolling it sent a pain pulsing up into her neck. She hadn’t wanted to go all out this way, with an official slogan and radio requests. All she’d wanted was to put down her name after the other widow. But Sara and Simon had insisted that if she was going to run, she had to show she meant it, and she had admitted they were right. If she didn’t take this seriously, she would make it that much easier to dismiss any other woman brave enough to add her name. But she couldn’t see herself getting on the radio and making any of the stilted statements Sara had come up with, referring to herself as a small-business owner, or a literacy advocate.

  I’m going to get this out to FM 90 first thing tomorrow, Sara said, tapping away on her laptop, and somewhere we need to work in Lena’s statistic about schools getting more money for soccer equipment than library books. It’s so outrageous. Sara shook her head exactly as her namesake had done and Olga savored the ache of it. They were making far too much effort for a campaign that would go nowhere. But for this evening alone, brainstorming in the dark with her favorite living beings, the awkward disappointment to come—when nobody but a few parents from Cosmo’s class voted for her—she could bear it.

  And you have to b-b-bring up the Harvest Chemicals report, Simon urged. You have to read at least some of the list on the air.

  If I even get on the air, Olga said. Simon had sent her a report a few days ago listing all the toxins in the runoff from Harvest Chemicals being discharged into the valley’s groundwater. But Sim
on had also mentioned a journalist in the capital who’d written about the report. The day his story ran, the journalist came out of his apartment building and found his front tires slashed.

  All day, anticipating this gathering, Olga’s thoughts had clacked like the keys of a typewriter. The rhythm of the clacking had only gotten faster as the hour of Sara and Simon’s arrival approached. At breakfast, she’d asked if Lena was okay with the possible backlash that reading the toxin report on the radio might create. It’s possible, Olga had added, that no more than a handful of old people in their cars will be listening anyway. But it only takes one old crazy bastard to find our address and break a window.

  Well, I ordered windows for this house once already, Lena had replied as they sipped their coffee. They’re all standard-size. They only took a week to arrive.

  On the veranda now, from under the lopsided porch swing, Lena was extracting a bag of what looked like lumps of cotton balls soaked in various colors of paint, blue and green and bright yellow.

  What the h-h-hell are those? Simon asked.

  Rainbow beards for the campaign, Lena said, only for covert use, of course. For our morale, here on the porch.

  You’re something else, Olga snorted, and before selecting a beard, she bent for the last of the burnt kernels in the popcorn bowl. Living together, she and Lena had discovered they both liked to bite down on the hard, resistant kernels at the bottom of the bowl, to brace for the one that might break their teeth.