The Charpentier, blaring, brought her back to the present. To stanch her thoughts, she concentrated on Father Waters leading the prayers, asking God to protect and sustain his servant Lorraine in eternal life, a promise Emily needed to believe in and wished earnestly for Lorraine, and, by doing so, regained herself.
During the pensive, somber Bach, she decided it wasn’t Lorraine or Louise or the Buxtehude that had her so overwrought, but the tenuousness of everything. It had been a rough winter, with Arlene going into the hospital, and Sarah giving her her cold. It was no exaggeration to say the next funeral she attended could be her own. She expected the worst now, not out of self-pity (though heaven knew she wasn’t immune to it) but because at her age, realistically, that was what awaited her. Most of the time she distracted herself from that base knowledge by crafting her elaborate plans. Here, faced with the smallest chink in them, she panicked. Her death would not be special, and why should it? Her mother was right. They were all equal in the eyes of God.
The reception was in the refectory—a buffet ranked with chafing dishes and round tables set along the walls—but before the guests could sample a bite they had to run the gauntlet of the receiving line. Lorraine’s family was well represented, a husky, rosy-cheeked clan of Scandinavians. Neither she nor Arlene knew any of them. The hall was high-ceilinged, and with so many people talking, Emily couldn’t hear well. She followed Arlene, moving from person to person, offering her hand and leaning in to introduce herself and convey, over and over, the same condolences. “She was a dear, dear friend, always interested in everything.”
At the very end, the family had thoughtfully included Edie, who, rather than sobbing and stricken, was smiling, her face fixed in a beatific rictus, as if she were being congratulated. Beside the clan of pale giants, she seemed small and dark and fragile. For the first time Emily could recall, she embraced Arlene.
“I had no idea Lorraine had so many children,” Arlene said.
“They’ve been so wonderful,” Edie said. “Father Waters did such a nice job. And thank you both so much for the flowers.”
Edie opened her arms and Emily held her a moment, then let go, the smell of her powder lingering. She wanted to say she was sorry, that she knew it was a terrible loss, but Edie was beaming adamantly, and she deferred to her better judgment.
“It was lovely,” Emily said, nodding to reinforce her point. “The music was beautiful.”
THE DAMAGE
It wasn’t until several days later, unlocking the car after picking up her dry cleaning, that she saw the scratches on the door. Twin zigzagging gashes, as if someone had taken a barbecue fork to her paint job.
She stopped, arrested, her keys still in the lock, and made the same incredulous, disgusted face she made when she found a mouse stuck to a glue trap in the basement. She rubbed at the gouges with a gloved thumb, as if they might come away with the gray winter buildup of dried salt, but the clean smudge only made them more noticeable. They were deep, revealing a lighter color underneath—primer or bare metal. Possibly a body shop could buff them out, that would be the cheapest route. She wasn’t sure what her insurance covered, or what this might do to her premiums. In any case, it would be expensive and time-consuming.
Up until then she’d been having a productive afternoon. She didn’t let the discovery deflect her, continuing on to the post office and the library, yet even as she crossed off these errands, a feeling of pointlessness overtook her, all of her care and diligence squandered by a momentary lapse. Because her intuition had been correct. There was a good reason she hadn’t wanted to give up her keys, and now she scolded herself for not listening to her inner voice.
There was no way to prove it had happened at the funeral, and even if she could, who would take responsibility? Not the valets. No doubt the company protected itself with a clause on their claim checks saying she was entrusting the car to them at her own risk. And imagine—she’d tipped them.
“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Kenneth said, a notion she rejected yet could not logically refute. Bostonians, he and Lisa were accustomed to dings; it was part of driving in the city. They’d never think of fixing something as small as a scratch, but of course their battlewagon had two hundred thousand on it, where her car was brand-new. As always when she sought his advice, he brought forth his store of experience, making his case, and then, reflecting further, retreated to a perfect disinterest, as if the decision and its consequences were hers alone, which they were. What she wanted was for him to tell her what to do—as Henry would have, cars being his province—but Kenneth was unwilling to prescribe his opinions, and she hung up even more frustrated than before.
Margaret sympathized. The minivan’s transmission was slipping again. The estimate was more than the damn thing was worth, but she didn’t have the money to replace it, so for now Ron was letting her drive his BMW, an arrangement she wasn’t entirely comfortable with, given the uncertain state of their relationship, the particulars of which she didn’t feel like getting into. As interested as Emily was in Margaret’s love life, she recognized that Margaret had once again trumped her problems with her own, indirectly belittling them, and rather than try to refocus the conversation, she changed the subject.
Betty recommended a product she’d seen on TV. You squeezed a blob of this compound on the scratch, then let it sit for fifteen minutes. What happened was that the chemical broke down the paint so when you rubbed it around, you were covering the scratch with the original color. All you needed was a rag. Toni had used it on her Beretta and it looked like new. Betty still had the tube somewhere downstairs. “Before you use it,” she said, “you definitely want to test it on a part of the car you don’t see, like the edge of a door or something.”
Normally Betty was the voice of reason, but in this case one look at her rickety little Nissan disqualified her. Emily thanked her for her offer as if she might take her up on it later, but for now she was still making up her mind.
After transferring and putting her on hold twice, her insurance company said she was covered for the repair, but, naturally, only after she’d fulfilled her deductible, which was five hundred dollars. As to whether filing a claim would affect her premiums, the representative (Alicia, whose name Emily had jotted down to have some record of the conversation) couldn’t say. That would depend on a number of factors. Would she like to speak with an adjuster?
Once again she faced the classic dilemma: the onetime lump sum vs. the endless monthly payment. At her age, every financial decision she made had to take into account her life expectancy, as if she were betting against herself. The idea that someone besides her children should profit from her death, or her lack of clairvoyance in the matter, was insulting, yet so often that’s what it came down to.
“No, thank you,” she said, and, once off, marveled again at how the industry worked. Essentially they insured themselves against paying any claims. The only recourse, she thought, would be to go and burn down their headquarters, forcing them to submit a claim to their insurer. But then, of course, they’d both simply raise their rates—like the oil companies, passing their expenses but not their record profits along to the consumer.
The next day, unable to bear the unresolved issue any longer, she made an appointment at the dealership. The next Monday she drove out to McKnight Road in a spitting rain and waited two hours in a stifling room with a rotating cast of fellow Subaru owners while a TV blared idiotic talk shows.
The bill was just under five hundred dollars, so she’d made the right choice by not filing. This was no consolation. Neither, strangely, was the pristine finish of her driver’s-side door. When the car was new she often caught herself admiring her reflection in the deep azure clearcoat. Now each time she gazed upon its glossy surface, instead of the pleasure of perfection, she saw only the flaw of her lost four hundred and seventy-eight dollars, and vowed she would never be so careless again.
SPRING AHEAD
Saturday night, after putting
Rufus out one last time, she added an hour to the wall clock in the kitchen. She’d had a glass of wine by the fire, and poked hopefully at the controls of the stove and then the microwave, the blue digits racing past the correct time before she could stop them, and had to go around again.
The newscasters didn’t have to remind her. She’d been waiting all day. It was the only thing on her calendar.
God, she thought, if that isn’t a sad commentary.
She used the square-shanked key to do the grandfather clock, inserting it into the face painted with the heavens and twisting gently, letting the chimes play to the end before continuing, afraid she might damage the mechanism.
“Go on up,” she told Rufus, who was watching her from across the room. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
He went, leaving her to fine-tune the universe. Technically they were supposed to change their clocks at two in the morning, as if—Margaret had complained as if it were a personal affront—no one would notice. Unlike Margaret, Emily didn’t feel cheated out of an hour. She saw daylight savings as a fresh start, like punching a reset button. At this stage of the winter she’d do anything to hurry the season along. With every twist of the key, she was that much closer to Easter, and Kenneth’s visit.
Upstairs she fixed the banjo clock in the den, the old white-numbered clock radios in the children’s rooms, and finally the trusty one on her nightstand. She undid Henry’s Hamilton from around her wrist, pulled the stem out and rolled its ridged edge between her thumb and forefinger, then set the watch on her dresser.
She read for a while, some middling library mystery, her body not yet honoring the change. Downstairs, prematurely, the grandfather clock struck eleven. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d been up this late, and tried not to let the chimes intimidate her. Tomorrow would be here soon enough, her mother used to say, encouraging her to put away the Little Golden Book she was reading and sleep. Then, as now, she reluctantly marked her place and turned out the light.
Lying there with the false hour glowing over her shoulder, she reflected on the arbitrary, changeable nature of time, and how, at her age, she was almost free of it. The idea pleased her, as if she’d discovered something elemental. Springing ahead was an official admission that no clock could ever measure the rotation of the earth, or the earth around the sun, birth and death, the turning seasons, the thrust of new shoots. Though she couldn’t quite say why it was a comfort, floating in this unmapped, inbetween state, she appreciated time being imaginary and malleable, as if, knowing its secret, she might loosen its hold on her. But in the morning, when she woke, it was still dark out, and she was a full hour behind. She had to hurry to get ready for church and then was late picking up Arlene.
THE FLOWER SHOW
They came every year, like pilgrims. Women of a certain age, her mother called them, a polite way of saying old bags. For months they’d been saving the date, the invitation to members stuck to the fridge, pinned to the kitchen bulletin board. This was the real beginning of spring, the gathering of the tribe. Survivors, believers, they flocked from across the city, made the trek in to gritty Oakland from the tony suburbs, curling around the Gothic rocket ship of the Cathedral of Learning, back past the library and Flagstaff Hill to the edge of Schenley Park. There might be snow on the golf course, the trees bare, but inside the peaked glass palace of Phipps Conservatory, the world was in bloom.
Along the walkway leading to the new welcome center, before they even reached the front doors, Emily and Arlene had to stop and marvel at the beds of frilly, butter-colored daffodils open well ahead of schedule, as if they belonged to a different climate.
“You think the ground is heated?” Arlene asked, snooping about for a wire.
“I imagine they’re transplants. This mulch is new.”
The lobby of the welcome center was all light and curved white walls, a dozen conversations mingling, filling the atrium. From the domed ceiling hung a massive chandelier the color of marigolds, made from hundreds of tubes of blown glass like the balloons clowns twisted into animals for children. It was supposed to be modern and whimsical but was merely labored and ugly—at that scale, aggressively so.
“Oh my,” Emily said.
“I think I like it,” Arlene said.
“You’re not serious.”
“I am.”
They checked their coats but kept their pocketbooks. Rather than ask Arlene to attempt the sweeping, ramplike staircase, they took the elevator up the one flight with several brightly dressed garden club types, one of whom steered a gray-wheeled walker.
The door rolled open on lush jungle—towering palms and rubber trees, stands of bamboo, a profusion of orchids, but also overflowing baskets of hydrangeas, and along the low red-brick walls, orderly borders of white tulips. The air was moist and warm, the dripping humidity at once foreign and familiar, exhilarating. To Emily, the smell of wet, turned earth was a promise. In a few weeks she’d be on her hands and knees in the backyard, happily occupied, the long winter forgotten.
That was how time passed—waiting through everything else to do the thing you wanted. How little fell into that category now: Easter, her garden, Chautauqua. She thought there should be more to live for.
They escaped the busy crossroads of the Palm Court with its benches and piped-in Mozart and wound their way back through the rocky grottos. Underfoot, the concrete was wet in patches, as if a hidden stream had slipped its banks. A Girl Scout troop passed them coming the other way, snaking by single file. “It smelled like butterscotch,” one said, making Emily smile.
Like the aviary or Buhl Planetarium, the conservatory was a magical destination for young and old. Over the years she’d faithfully taken the children and grandchildren, and it was impossible to walk the meandering paths without seeing Margaret or Sam dashing ahead of them, then turning around to hurry them along to the next wonder. Kenneth loved to hide beneath the stone bridge in the Fern Room and menace them like a troll, his hands curled into claws. Half forest, half maze, the place was straight out of a fairy tale, though, like a fairy tale, once the children reached their teens, it no longer enchanted them. Now, as with so many things, with Louise gone, the only person she had to share it with was Arlene.
The day was overcast. With just the natural light filtering through the panes, Arlene couldn’t decipher the helpful labels on stakes. Emily craned in to read: Swiss-Cheese Plant (Monstera Deliciosa).
“Is it supposed to smell like Swiss cheese? It doesn’t look like it.”
They sniffed. They shrugged. It was a mystery.
In the Serpentine Room, among the fragrant hyacinths and delphiniums, they came upon another ridiculous glass sculpture, this one a cottoncandy starburst, utterly incongruous.
“Don’t tell me there’s one in every room.”
A large placard gave the artist’s name. She had to try it twice—Chihuly.
“I think he’s supposed to be famous,” Arlene said.
“Can’t he be famous somewhere else?”
They strolled on.
“Look at those,” Emily said.
“Aren’t they funny.”
“Are they jack-in-the-pulpits, maybe?”
“I don’t know what they are.”
“Do you like snapdragons?”
“I do like snapdragons.”
In the Fern Room, syrupy strings embellished a familiar melody Emily couldn’t quite place. “What is this awful music?”
“Sounds like ‘Moon River.’”
“Why on earth would they play that here?”
The humidity grew oppressive as they penetrated deeper into the rain forest. In the Orchid Room a drop of water splashed off her shoulder. The windows were steamed, weeping green streaks of algae. Fans blew, making the heavy fronds nod.
“Watch out for this,” Arlene said, pushing aside a strand of Spanish moss.
“Thank you.”
Arlene stopped by the goldfish pond—a homely touch in all the hothouse exotica, E
mily had always thought, though the children were fascinated with it, begging Henry to install one in the backyard, a bill she successfully tabled, knowing that, like the Millers’, it would quickly lose its novelty and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The fish hung suspended, undisturbed by their presence, lazily flicking their tails, bending the gridlike reflection of the ironwork ceiling.
Emily didn’t find them at all interesting, and instead watched Arlene cough long and hard into her fist, then lift her chin and clear her throat. Her scar was just a faint pink seam cutting through her deeply creased forehead. She hadn’t stopped smoking, as the doctor ordered. Besides being wobbly on her feet, and her eyesight going, even when she was at rest she wheezed emphysemically, like now, breathing with her mouth open, lipstick on her front teeth. She was three years older than Henry, and he’d been gone almost seven years. Emily knew how quickly a person’s health could turn, and wondered if the Eat ’n Park episode was isolated or the beginning of an inexorable slide.
Should she tell her she was worried about her?
She could hear Henry say yes, definitely, but now was not the time. She would have ample opportunity in the car, though this stirred memories of trying to reach Margaret as they drove home in their old station wagon from ballet class or riding lessons. Somehow Emily was never gentle, never politic enough. Thin-skinned herself, she had a talent for saying precisely the right thing to escalate the situation. “Do you think I should be happy you were suspended and not expelled?” Arlene might be offended, or hurt, or merely irritated. Knowing how hard quitting would be, she’d asked Emily not to think badly of her if she couldn’t, and Emily had agreed. That wasn’t what this was about. If she kept smoking, she wouldn’t be around for Emily to think badly of her. Was that what she wanted? The last thing Emily wanted to do was harangue her. That’s how it would sound. She’d have to bide her time and find the right moment to drop a calm observation free of judgment. You don’t sound well, she might say, instead of You sound awful. Or, That woman with the walker seems to get around nicely, instead of You’re going to fall and break something and then you’ll be in real trouble.
Emily, Alone Page 17
