Dive From Clausen's Pier

by Ann Packer

  “You could still live like that,” I said. “More or less. If you wanted to.”

  He shook his head dolefully. “No, it would be an affectation.”

  We headed up the East Side, stopping when we got to the United Nations to cross the wide, flag-lined plaza and stand looking at the East River, steel gray and rushing under the pale sky. My hair was wet from the new snow, Kilroy’s damp at the edges under the wool cap he wore. He put his arm around me and pulled me in. He kissed the side of my face, then burrowed his head close, his frozen nose coming to rest against the side of my neck. Standing there, I imagined the two of us in a snowbound cabin, a fire in the fireplace, windows cold to the touch. Outside, icicles hung from the eaves, while farther away, encircling us, white-topped pine trees soared into the sky, creaking a little in the wind.

  • • •

  When we got home it was early evening. Kilroy defrosted some homemade mushroom barley soup, and we ate it without talking, my feet in his lap under the table. After, he washed the dishes while I took the phone back into the bedroom to call my mother. She picked up on the first ring, then listened silently while I explained that I’d decided to stay, my voice faltering as she failed and failed to speak. I heard Kilroy stacking dishes, and I wished I could be more like him, just say what I had to say and be done with it.

  “Well,” she said when I was done.

  “What?”

  “ ‘What?’ ” she exclaimed. “You ask me what? Do you know how many times Mike’s called to find out what time you were arriving today? Three separate times. And it’s not easy for him to make a phone call!”

  “I know,” I said. “I just don’t feel ready.”

  “This isn’t about whether or not you’re ready,” she cried. “Are you heartless? This is about how Mike was waiting for you. This is about cruelty.”

  I began to cry, noisily, my eyes hot and drowning. I pressed the phone to my ear and it got wet, and my palms, and my wrists. My mother never talked to me like this, and I sobbed and sobbed, waiting for her to say something that would take it all back. She was usually so evenhanded. When we were little, Jamie always said she wanted to trade moms, have my calm one instead of her nervous one. Where Mrs. Fletcher worried and scolded, my mother said, How did that make you feel? Apparently there was behavior that was too dreadful for such an approach. An image of Mrs. Fletcher came to mind, a table knife in her soft, freckled hand as she spread icing on a cake, her pink lips pursed thoughtfully. For a time I’d wished Jamie and I could trade mothers, too, until I met Mike and it was his family I wanted—and his family I got. I imagined my mother in her clean, spare kitchen, the curtains I’d made last summer hanging cheerily over the black windows, and I wondered how she could have let me go. I sobbed again, my shoulders shaking.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s true,” I said. “It’s true.”

  “It’s a rough time for you,” she said. “I know that.”

  I shook my head again. I didn’t want to think about her alone in that kitchen, but I couldn’t help it. Maybe she’d cooked something for the two of us to eat. Maybe it was on the counter now, a lasagna she’d been planning to put in a low oven before she headed off for the airport. “Mom,” I said. “God. I didn’t even think about Christmas.”

  She was silent, and I imagined that she was thinking as I was, of the Christmas tradition we’d shared for as long as I could remember: breakfast by the fire while we opened our presents; the afternoon working together in the kitchen; and then, shortly after dark, the two of us in the dining room with a perfect rare roast beef resting on a silver platter, because we didn’t have Christmas dinner with the Mayers.

  “Mom,” I said again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, in a rush, “Oh, listen—that wasn’t on my mind before at all. I’ll be fine. I’ve got a big new book I’ve been wanting to read, I’ll just load up on firewood and lounge the day away.”

  Which meant that because of me she’d spend Christmas in the exact way I’d been envisioning for Kilroy: alone, reading. I could just see her, book in hand while Vivaldi played, and a small, pro forma Christmas tree sat in the corner, strung with tiny white lights.

  CHAPTER 26

  New York was full of men. Young men with pierced noses, old men with aluminum walkers. Black men, Latino men, Asian men. And middle-aged white men, thousands of middle-aged white men who might have been my father.

  Away from Madison, I felt more and more aware of him—of his absence from my life. On the street I studied men I wouldn’t have noticed a year earlier, looking not so much for my father as an idea of him: a facial expression, a span of shoulder. I wondered if he had other kids, maybe a string of them left around the country, half siblings joined to me by all we didn’t know.

  One cold day in early January I made my way up Fifth Avenue to the New York Public Library. The pre-Christmas snowfall had long since melted, but dirty water still filled the gutters, and I had to leap across great lakes of it. The library was warm and smelled of dust and sweat. I knew they’d have every phone book in the country, and I found them on microfiche and spent several seasick hours spinning through the little plastic cards. My father’s name was John Bell, and he lived everywhere, of course: in Chicago and Cheyenne; in Seattle, St. Louis, and Sioux Falls; in Houston, Austin, Arlington, Albuquerque, and Atlanta. Twelve of him lived in Manhattan alone.

  I left the microfiche reader and wandered dizzily through the famous library, into the great rooms and down the wide corridors. I was down to my last few hundred dollars. My mother had sent me a check for Christmas, but I could barely hang on for another month or two, especially with credit card payments to worry about. I thought of finding out how to put in an application to work here—I knew libraries, after all—but then I saw a lank-haired woman in her early thirties, standing with a cart of books, her hand resting on their spines while she stopped for a moment to read a notice pinned to a bulletin board, and I looked at her sallow face and thought No.

  Back at the brownstone I set myself to folding laundry I’d done earlier. Library or not, I should get a job, and soon. I’d even asked Kilroy about temping, but he’d responded with horror, said it was like considering a career in pulling the hairs out of my head one by one. “You do it,” I said, and he frowned and shook his head. “Trust me,” he responded. “You’d hate it.”

  Now, folding clothes, I thought instead of working in a store in SoHo. Being one of those women with perfect hair and perfect eyebrows, making sure the garments were spaced evenly on the rods they hung from. I’d get a discount on clothes, spend my lunch breaks walking around looking in the windows of rival stores. The only problem was I didn’t have the right stuff to get a job like that. The right clothes, though maybe I didn’t have “the right stuff,” either.

  I heard a step, and Simon appeared below me on the staircase, coming up from the second floor in a T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “What are you doing home?” I said. It wasn’t even four in the afternoon.

  “All-nighter at work last night,” he said, running a hand through his disheveled hair. “I got home at seven-thirty this morning. Just woke up.”

  “That sounds horrible.”

  “Actually, it’s not bad. I get double for last night and I still get paid for today even though I don’t have to go in.”

  I shook my head. “You are so lucky.”

  “High-paying drudgery has its charms.”

  “Could you get me a job there?”

  He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “You don’t want to work there.”

  I was holding a pair of socks, and I balled them together and tossed them onto my sock pile. “Everyone’s telling me where I don’t want to work. Where should I work?”

  He stepped onto the futon and then settled himself against the wall, sitting cross-legged. “Hmm.”

  I reached for a
T-shirt and folded it. “Yeah, nothing really leaps to mind, does it?”

  “You’re just about broke?”

  I nodded.

  “Great city, terrible prices.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, pulling a pair of jeans from the tangle and shaking them.

  “But things are good with the K-man?”

  I thought of last night, how Kilroy and I had roasted a chicken and eaten it with our bare hands, pulling the meat from the bones until our fingers and mouths gleamed with grease. When we were done he got up and brought back hot washcloths, then cleaned my fingers for me one by one.

  “They are,” I said.

  “He’s kind of an odd duck, but I think that’s good in a way.”

  I smiled. “I’m so glad you approve.”

  “Hey, I’m your sponsor here—I get an opinion.”

  “My sponsor? You make me sound like a foreign exchange student.”

  He studied me for a long moment. “Are you OK?”

  I nodded. I’d finished my folding, and now I stood up and began putting things into my cardboard dresser, underwear and socks in the top drawer, shirts and sweaters next. The dresser wasn’t holding up very well. I’d thought of trying to find a cheap wood one somewhere, but it hardly seemed worth it, given how depressing the alcove was. That morning, getting ready to go do laundry, I’d wrestled the sheets off the futon, and when it thumped back down clumps of dust darted across the floor like tiny mice.

  “You can’t use the bottom drawer, can you?”

  I turned and looked at him sitting against the wall, a concerned expression on his face. There were times, usually when other people were around, when I forgot how much I liked him. I said, “There’s not enough space for it to open.”

  He pressed his lips together thoughtfully. “I bet you could really use the extra room. There’s got to be a way.” He sat for another moment, then suddenly got to his feet and headed for the stairs. “Hang on, I’ll be right back,” he called over his shoulder as he hurried down. I heard his footsteps continue to the first floor, then move in the direction of the kitchen.

  I turned back to my clothes. Part of the problem was that the drawers were way too full. I wiggled open the third one and jammed my jeans in, on top of the pants and skirts that were already in there. I should get rid of some of this stuff: there were things I hadn’t worn since arriving in New York, things that were just too dowdy. If the people in the stores in SoHo knew I even had this stuff, they’d write me off in an instant.

  I thought of the green velvet dress, hanging in Kilroy’s front closet so I wouldn’t have to crumple it into the dresser. “When are you going to wear it?” he kept asking me, but now that I’d bailed on wearing it to the occasion that had inspired it, I didn’t have a clue. It wasn’t exactly the right thing for the Cuban-Chinese greasy spoon we’d tried a few nights back.

  Simon’s footsteps became audible again, and from the second-floor landing he called, “You’re going to be so happy.” I went out to the top of the stairs, and there he was, halfway up, two stacks of bricks held precariously against his body. He smiled a big smile. “They were in the backyard,” he said. “They’ll be perfect.”

  He reached the top of the stairs and carefully squatted, then set the bricks on the floor one by one. There were about a dozen of them, red and crumbling, a bit dirty in places. We brushed them off into the bathroom garbage and then rocked the dresser onto its side and slid three stacks of two underneath it. Simon got his fingers under the other side and lifted, and I wedged the remaining ones in, trying to separate them so the weight would be supported evenly. “You’re totally brilliant,” I said.

  “If I were totally brilliant I would have thought of this the first time I saw your little cardboard wonder.”

  He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, then came out, squatted in front of the dresser, and pulled open the bottom drawer. “Voilà,” he said, but then his expression changed, and he reached in and pulled out my silk nightgown and robe. “Whoa,” he said. “What are these?”

  My face was warm. “Nothing.”

  “They don’t look like nothing.” He took hold of the gown and straightened up, and it dropped open, a tumble of gold. He held it by the spaghetti straps and turned it this way and that, and the long drape of it caught the light. He laid it on the futon and picked up the robe, which he unfolded carefully. “Jeez, Carrie, where’d you get these?”

  “I made them.”

  He stared at me, his eyes wide. “As in sewed them? You better not be fucking with me.”

  I smiled. “I’m not.”

  He placed the robe next to the gown and then stood looking at the two pieces, a pool of silk waving a little over the wrinkles in the scratchy green blanket he’d lent me. “Jeez,” he said again. “And you don’t even wear them with lover-boy.”

  I stifled a smile. I couldn’t imagine showing them to Kilroy, let alone wearing them with him.

  “This is the answer, you know,” he said.

  For a moment I thought he meant the answer to my problems with Kilroy, and my heart pounded. But I didn’t have problems with Kilroy: I had Kilroy, who was a bit of a mystery sometimes, but not a problem.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Simon said. “You’re going to become a famous clothing designer.”

  I smiled. “Probably by tomorrow.”

  “Carrie, come on. I’ve noticed—you’re interested in clothes. In fashion. You are. And look at these things: you’re obviously talented.”

  “I can sew.”

  “So push it,” he said with exasperation. “Seriously. Take a class.”

  “I have no money.”

  He sighed and then got down on his knees and began folding the robe. He was careful with it, smoothing it as he went. He put it in the drawer, then did the same with the gown. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “And then you and I are going for a walk.”

  Where we went was Parsons School of Design, and what we got there was their course catalog, the one with continuing studies offerings. We took it to a coffee shop and looked through it together, the course names interesting to me and then thrilling, full of promise: Color and Design, Draping, Patternmaking. Fashion Trends, Design Sketching, Couture Sewing Techniques. Simon sat beside me bristling with pleasure. On a paper napkin he doodled a dress, then wrote “Carrie Bell, Designer” off to the side. “I’m so pleased with myself I can hardly stand it,” he said. The classes started in a few weeks, and they were $380 each. Which meant there was only one way I could make it work: by selling my car. It was suddenly that simple—give up the car I never used, and get something I could use. Of course I would sell my car! The fact that Mike had been a kind of guardian of it—that he’d helped me buy it, had packed a roadside emergency kit to keep in the trunk, had rescued me a couple times when it died—this no longer mattered. Or it mattered differently from how it had. Before, it had been a reason to keep the car, a nerve connecting me to a body of old habits. Now it was free, a small foreign body wedged inside me next to the ongoing ache of my failure to go home for Christmas.

  I got $2,500, from a thirtyish couple in Patagonia jackets who had a weekend place on Long Island and wanted an extra car to leave out there. I registered for Draping, Patternmaking, and a class called Process, new this spring, that was described as “a general and wide-ranging introduction to fashion.” Waiting for the term to start, I pondered my wardrobe, what to wear with what, how to give it verve. The January sales pulled me into store after store, and before long I’d succumbed to a black velvet shirt, then a pair of black ankle boots, and finally a bucket-shaped black leather bookbag with brushed nickel hardware.

  It was strange to go back to school. I felt all the excited jitter of school beginnings in Madison, of being a third-grader in a new dress, a high school senior wondering what a new year would mean to me and my boyfriend. My classes were held at Parsons’ Midtown campus, just a couple blocks from Times Square, and it was a rush of sti
mulation to leave the subway and enter the street with its chaos of honking cars and squealing buses, its towering buildings, its giant electronic signs, its hotdog smells and crowds and crowds of people. Once I was in the building the commotion subsided, or didn’t so much subside as change, into a commotion of looks: of hair dyed blacker than black; of high, high heels or enormous, bulbous-toed boots; of bold interplays of color and pattern. Downtown was full of this, but it was odd to find such a concentration in the middle of that other New York, the New York of tourists and huge commerce: an enclave of edge.

  Draping and Patternmaking introduced skills I saw right away I’d use forever, but it was the Process class I looked forward to. The teacher was a small, plump Italian named Piero Triolino, who wore a different-colored merino-wool mock turtleneck to each class, tucked into black jeans. In his accented English he told us again and again that inspiration was everywhere—in movies, through the viewfinders of microscopes and telescopes, in the daily lives of a hundred foreign cultures. He had us get large, hardbound books with unlined pages, and he told us to record our ideas in them—about color, silhouette, whatever. At first I felt frozen, thinking I had no ideas, but then a guy in class showed me several pages of fabric swatches he’d stapled into his book, and suddenly I got it. I taped in slips of paper from Chinese fortune cookies because I liked the grayed pastels; I bought colored pencils and markers and experimented with unexpected combinations, like cherry and pale yellow, or olive green and light blue. Remembering how I’d tried to draw dresses during the summer in Madison, I even tried sketching some ideas for clothes.

  A freakishly warm Saturday in February pulled me and Kilroy out onto the street, and before I knew it he was steering us to the Museum of Modern Art, where I’d never been. I wasn’t wild for museums, but it was the exact kind of thing Piero was always encouraging us to do, Go to new places, see with new eyes, so I was game. I had my sketchbook in my shoulder bag.