Emily, Alone

by Stewart O'Nan

  “He may have strained a ligament, but I’m not finding anything that would make me think it’s more than that.”

  “Thank you so much,” she said, holding a hand to her breastbone. “The way he fell, I thought for certain he’d broken something.”

  “You’ll want to watch his output for a day or two, just in case. If you see any blood, either in his stool or his urine, I want you to bring him in right away.”

  “I will.”

  “I’d say he’s very lucky.”

  “Did you hear that?” Emily said, nose to nose with Rufus. “You need to be careful. You can’t go pushing in front of people whenever you feel like it.”

  The cost of the visit, as she would tell Arlene with pop-eyed astonishment, was highway robbery, but honestly, what choice did she have? She did not completely mean this. While logging the amount into her checkbook annoyed her, the doctor reassuring her that it was nothing serious was well worth it. She’d expected much worse.

  At the edge of the parking lot, Rufus gave her an opportunity to check his pee. The stream was clear, melting a yellow hole in the snow. At home, she watched him pick a spot in the backyard and squat, then tugged on her boots and her jacket and crunched her way to the pile—nothing unusual, just poo.

  “I think you’re fine,” she told him, as if he were faking, but that night after dinner she went out with a flashlight to make sure.

  The next morning his limp was gone. She made him sit before opening the bedroom door.

  “You wait,” she said, holding up one finger as she slowly backed toward the stairs. “Wait. Good boy.” She knelt down. “Okay, now you may proceed.”

  Her plan was to make him sit and wait there as well, but he’d waited enough, and scooted by her on the outside, clattering down the stairs and then spinning around at the bottom, looking up, his tail wagging, to see what was taking her so long.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Let’s try that again.”

  They began every day with this battle. At first she used treats to get his attention, which worked but which also made him drool all over the floor, and when she weaned him off them, he lost interest. He went two days, three, being good, then completely ignored her, turning at the bottom and racing for the kitchen as if he could get his own breakfast.

  She didn’t think he was too old to learn, he just didn’t want to listen. It was a matter of being consistent. If anyone could do that, she could.

  She stood at the top of the stairs, waiting for him to reappear.

  He finally did, looking up at her expectantly.

  “Let’s go,” she coaxed.

  She clapped her hands.

  “Come on.”

  He blinked at her vacantly, a blatant challenge.

  She sighed. It was like having a child. His stubbornness spurred her own, but there was no place for her anger, which was doubly frustrating. He had to learn his lesson, for his own good.

  “If that’s how you want it,” she said, “I can stand here all day.”

  EXPRESSIONS OF SYMPATHY

  Lorraine Havermeyer was dead. Arlene didn’t have all the details. She’d just gotten a call from Peggy Stevenson, who’d talked to Sukie Beach, who was friends with Roberta Joyner, who lived in the Webster Hall apartments. Apparently it was sudden, because she’d been at brunch on Sunday and seemed her usual bubbly self.

  “That’s awful,” Emily said.

  “I wonder how Edie’s doing.”

  “I know.”

  “She had to be upwards of ninety.”

  “Somewhere around there,” Emily said. “Still, you never thought of her that way.”

  “She always had a lot of energy.”

  “More than I ever had. Oh my. Lorraine.”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was Thursday, early morning, and piercingly sunny, which added to the shock of it. Betty had come the day before, and the news made a mockery of her clean house. She couldn’t picture Edie without Lorraine. Emily had considered them indestructible, a Greek chorus somehow immune to the follies and fates they reported. Like the death of anyone in their circle, it brought Emily closer to her own, as if they’d all moved up in line.

  “They haven’t set a date but I’d imagine it’s Saturday.”

  “They’re still at Ascension?”

  “So you know parking will be a headache. Remember Millie Bennett’s? What a debacle that was.”

  Emily had been thinking the exact same thing and was relieved that Arlene would say it out loud. Death made her feel petty and self-involved, her current life unworthy of deeper inspection.

  “We should send flowers,” Emily said. “What did we do for Gloria’s? That was nice.”

  “That was the lily wreath. I wasn’t wild about the stand.”

  “What if we do the lilies in a vase?”

  “It would be cheaper and nicer. Want me to order it?”

  “Please,” Emily said. “Just let me know what I owe you.”

  “Any preference, in terms of a vase?”

  “I trust your judgment. Something simple.”

  “Gotcha,” Arlene said.

  Normally a call this time of day was an intrusion. Now, stunned and rudderless, Emily didn’t want to get off, but finally let her go.

  Poor Edie. Emily knew from losing Louise the desert emptiness she was facing, and was uncomfortably aware that if not for Arlene she herself would be totally alone. Was that why she’d wanted to keep talking, to say she appreciated her company, despite all their squabbles, or was death making her sentimental? She hadn’t been that close to Lorraine.

  The Post-Gazette ran her obituary the next day, topped with a soft-focus shot from another era: a dimpled, dark-haired girl in her twenties wearing a peaked garrison cap. As a child during the war, Emily had envied the WACS and WAVES who scaled rope ladders and elbow-crawled under barbed wire and danced the Lindy with their fellow GIs shipboard. From her seat in the rear balcony of the Penn Royal, she sailed to exotic ports and stumbled into foggy intrigues like Ann Sheridan. With her photographic memory and love of cryptograms, she thought she would make a good spy, and planned on signing up when she was old enough, but of course that, like so many of her vicarious lives, never happened, and to discover, too late, that Lorraine had actually been what she’d idly dreamed of becoming was humbling. How could she have been ignorant of this?

  She parsed the long column and learned that Lorraine was only eightyeight and had been born in Albany. During the war she’d been stationed at the naval yard in Hampton Roads, Virginia. After her honorable discharge, she was an auditor and later worked in employee benefits at Dravo, where she met her husband Edgar, retiring in 1982 after thirty-five years of service. She enjoyed quilting, cross-stitch and other needlework, and donated many pieces to UPMC-Oakland’s neonatal ward. She was predeceased not only by Edgar, but by her five sisters.

  Emily had often heard of Edgar, and seen pictures of Lorraine’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but had no inkling of this other side of her—the quilting, for instance—and wondered if she’d known Lorraine at all. Emily herself had never fully divulged her history to anyone besides Henry and maybe Louise, but she’d never considered her past interesting. Like Kersey, it was something to shrug off. She went to elementary school, she went to high school, she went to college. She imagined friends from the club poring over her obituary. What about her life was surprising?

  “I think I knew that about her,” Arlene said. “She handed out uniforms or something. I can’t believe they used that picture. When I die, promise me you’ll get one that looks like me. Kenneth must have some.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I heard from Peggy that she went in her sleep.”

  “That’s the way to go.” Henry hadn’t, nor Louise, and she felt unaccountably jealous, as if this final mercy had been withheld. Louise had been dead—hard to believe—for nearly a year now. Emily could just call back her
voice, and how she perched sideways on the edge of her couch, ladylike, skirt smoothed, knees together, to stab an olive with a toothpick or pour them each another glass of wine. She should really visit her and Doug, but she hadn’t been to see Henry or her parents in ages. When the weather turned, she’d take a day and make the drive to Kersey. It might be the last time.

  Looking out the front window, she thought, as always, of visiting Kay Miller, though Kay would have no clue who she was. Emily knew the place, it was maybe ten minutes over the bridge. She really should. There was no excuse not to.

  She sulked the day away, dumping her cold cup of tea in the sink, sighing as she logged the usual troop of jays and nuthatches and titmice in her bird journal. She didn’t recall this black gloom descending when Millie Bennett or Gloria Albright died. She suspected the weather contributed to it, and her worries about Rufus. Louise had been waiting for spring. “If I can just hold on till then,” she said, “I know I’ll feel better. The days being longer makes such a difference.”

  Emily herself felt the same way now. The flower show was only three weeks away but seemed far off. She’d been cooped up in the house too long, at the mercy of her own claustrophobic thoughts. Kenneth was coming for Easter—Lisa too, but they would steer clear of each other—and then it would be spring and she’d be busy in the garden. In the summer she lived in the backyard, weeding and sunning with Henry’s transistor radio playing QED, enjoying leisurely meals on the porch, a glass of chilled Chablis with dinner. Late July, when the humidity grew oppressive, she’d close up the house, trusting Jim and Marcia to water her garden, and head for Chautauqua, where for a week the whole family would be reunited. More than anything, that was what she looked forward to, that week of renewal, at the end of which she would be desperate to get back to her solitude. It was all a cycle, this was just the hardest part. Logically, if she could make it through the dregs of last winter, the long, awful vigil by Louise’s bedside, she could make it through this. After Henry, she could make it through anything.

  In the morning, getting dressed, she discovered a dry-cleaning tag pinned to the cuff of her beaded jacket. The last time she’d worn it had been at Gloria’s funeral. She wondered if anyone would notice, and thought, of all people, Lorraine would.

  The service was scheduled for ten, meaning they needed to be there by nine-thirty at the very latest if they wanted a parking spot. Emily called ahead and Arlene was waiting for her at the bottom of her stairs. She’d had her hair done, the rich, artificial henna making her face seem pale.

  “Morning,” Emily said.

  “Morning.”

  For a while they rode in silence, like strangers carpooling to work. They crossed the Fern Hollow bridge and snowy Homewood Cemetery slid by on the right, the headstones and mausoleums dotting the gentle hills. Arlene flipped down the vanity mirror and freshened her lipstick, then snapped shut her clasp purse.

  “I expect it will be catered.”

  “I’d imagine so,” Emily said.

  “Remember Gene Hubbard’s?”

  “I doubt it will be that lavish.”

  “Whoever did his, that’s the kind of reception I want.”

  “The cannoli.”

  “The cannoli, the crab puffs, the little cheese-and-spinach thingies.”

  “Empanadas.”

  “And no sandwiches. I don’t want people to have to make their own sandwiches.”

  “It’s not a picnic,” Emily said, egging her on.

  “That’s right. And it’s not a pick-up dinner party. No eating off of your knees. Give people a table so they can eat properly.”

  Once, Emily would have thought this conversation the height of crassness, but as a regular guest at these all-too-frequent gatherings, she harbored the same complaints, and the same hope that her own reception would be a success. She’d begun planning her service directly after Henry’s, choosing the music and the readings, tinkering every so often with improvements, updating her ideas and filing them in a folder she kept with her most important papers. To impress upon the children that she was serious, she occasionally brought up the topic, but, as with her will, Kenneth and Margaret were uncomfortable discussing it. They probably thought her morbid or obsessed. Emily couldn’t explain: making her wishes plain, once and for all, was comforting. She trusted they would honor them. In case there was any confusion, each time she made changes she sent Gordon a copy for safekeeping. The Bach toccata, the Buxtehude prelude, the Libera Me from Duruflé’s Requiem. Just thinking of the sequence of pieces warmed her like a pleasant memory. The great shame was that she wouldn’t be there to hear it.

  They came down Forbes, through Carnegie-Mellon, the wide plazas and crisscrossed walks of the campus deserted after last night’s frat parties. In Oakland, the restaurants were closed. Crammed in nose-to-tail, students’ old Volvos and Camrys filled every available parking spot.

  Church of the Ascension was a squat armory of black stone tucked behind the more imposing St. Paul’s on Fifth Avenue, and only a few blocks from Webster Hall, convenient for members of their set who’d relocated from Squirrel Hill and Edgewood and Fox Chapel. Emily was familiar with the lot from a decade of dropping the children off to catch the bus to Calvary Camp. Land was too dear here, so close to the university. In the front there was barely enough room to angle the two charter buses so their noses infringed upon the sidewalk; the narrow alley that ran around the side was a fire lane; in back there were just three stunted rows—the one along the wall handicapped, the middle reserved for clergy and vestry, leaving parishioners to vie for the spaces against the fence or roam the streets. Even in the summer, with Pitt on vacation, Henry had to put his flashers on and double-park on crowded Ellsworth as the counselors pitched in to lug Kenneth and Margaret’s footlockers and sleeping bags to the open cargo hold.

  Today the church was offering valet parking. Near the stairs a pair of attendants in matching jackets and watch caps stood by a line of orange traffic cones.

  “That’s smart,” Arlene said.

  As glad as she was not to have to find a spot, Emily had never let anyone drive the Subaru, and relinquished her keys with some misgiving. She was also not sure if she had any ones to tip him with afterward, and on principle resented the pressure. This was exactly the kind of thing she hoped to spare her guests. No one would have to pay to see her off.

  The stairs were oversalted and treacherous, grains like shattered safety glass crunching underfoot. Arlene clung to the railing as if it were a lifeline, Emily steadying her elbow. An usher saw her struggling and opened the heavy door for them.

  As Emily stepped into the dim narthex, the bass drone of the organ and stuffy, tallow-scented air enveloped her, inducing a cleansing reverence. She liked the idea of shedding the world, and her worst self, if only temporarily. They were early, the pews nearly empty. On all sides, the vault amplified the low murmur of voices, a cough, the scuff of shoes on marble. She accepted a program from an usher, and together she and Arlene processed down the aisle, surveying the scattered mourners as they searched for a good seat. Myra Frost and Barbara Chase turned to them as they passed, and Emily dipped her head in greeting. Peggy Stevenson was there with Bev Howard, and two rows beyond them but still a respectful distance from the front, Rand and Graceann Beers, tan from their time-share in Delray Beach, their teeth unnaturally white.

  “I’m surprised none of the family’s here yet,” Arlene said once they’d gotten situated.

  “I’m sorry. I thought we’d have more trouble parking.”

  “I’m not complaining. Do you see our lilies anywhere?”

  “They’re just to the left there.”

  “I swear I’m going blind.”

  “On the steps.” Emily pointed. “I like the vase.”

  “I asked for the plainest one they had.”

  “They did a nice job. You’ll have to let me know what I owe you.”

  The crowd straggled in, stooped and doddering, propped up by the young like th
e walking wounded. Most they hadn’t seen since Christmas, some since Thanksgiving, and their presence was a relief—like that of Claude and Liz Penman, though she was still in a chair and appeared to have lost weight. As at any club function, a few would be conspicuously missing, their health speculated upon endlessly.

  While Arlene craned around, Emily appraised the program as if they were at a concert. She expected the selections to be interesting, given that Lorraine and Edie were what Doug Pickering called culture vultures, but she was startled to find, right at the top, her Buxtehude Prelude in G minor.

  Had she mentioned it to Lorraine? Because Donald Wilkins hadn’t played it in ages. The rest of the program was fairly standard, some florid Charpentier and the always safe Clarke, a couple of Bach warhorses. Besides the Buxtehude, it might have been thrown together on short notice by any musical director.

  This is mine, she wanted to protest to Arlene—she had the papers to prove it—and only held back out of shame. Was she really that selfish?

  No, because when the organist played it, with Lorraine’s family and Edie gathered in the two front pews, surrounded by a heartening show of old friends, Emily felt the same sense of peace that came over her at home. He rushed the limpid middle section, but on the whole she was pleased.

  Father Waters delivered the homily, on the use God had for each of them. Like Father Lewis at Calvary, George Waters was on the civilized side of the Anglican debate, which, from countless coffee hours, Emily understood as a power struggle rather than a referendum on gays, though, as usual, the right-wing types aimed their arguments at the most vulnerable minority, a tactic which seemed decidedly un-Christian to her. In the diocesan newsletter, Father Waters had written an open rebuke to the new bishop of Pittsburgh, who was threatening—as leverage, if nothing else—to seize the assets of several prominent congregations, among them Calvary, prompting talk of lawsuits. She was predisposed to listen to Father Waters, yet as he spoke of Lorraine’s many roles as daughter, wife, mother, grandmother and friend (nodding to Edie), though Emily knew she was wrong, instead of contemplating her own usefulness, her mind circled back to the impossible coincidence, trying to conjure an explanation. It bothered her that it bothered her. Did she think herself better than Lorraine, somehow more deserving or worthy of Buxtehude’s genius? She could just hear her mother dressing her down for thinking she was special. I don’t know where you got that idea, because that is not how I raised you.