by Amy Bloom
He takes my arm and he says, This is my privilege, Miss Hickok, and I say that I’m sorry that I’ve steered clear of his church. He laughs. He opens the car door and I heave myself in with the enormous jug of wildflowers I’ve put together, the kind you love, and there’s not a carnation or chrysanthemum among them. But I’m wearing clothes that would distress you and I have no small talk for this nice man, who said such good and lovely things over your grave. (I heard on the radio. He said the world had suffered an irreparable loss, which is so true, and he said that the entire world would become one family as we are orphaned by your passing, which is probably not true.)
He drives me right past the big house, which has a lamp lit in one window, and he parks not too far from the rose garden. I can see the big white marble slab, marking your place and Franklin’s. It’s as bright as the moon. He says that he’ll wait in the car for me, and I think he is so much your kind of person. He has probably noticed that I am half-blind and he has certainly noticed that I walk with a cane but he does nothing except hold the car door wide open for me.
I take small, slow steps, the way we have both come to these days, and it doesn’t save me. My cane slides through wet leaves and I fall, onto my knees, which surprises me and it’s so painful I cry out. The glass jug breaks on a rock. I put my hand over my mouth. Gordon Kidd comes by my side and helps me up. Be careful of the glass, he says. Please help me pick up the flowers, I say, and he does. I am a danger to myself in the dark. I don’t want to make this nice man responsible for my little journey.
“There’s a bench here, right around here,” I say, and he helps me up. “Mrs. Roosevelt and I used to sit right around here.”
We find the bench, which is cold, wet granite. I make a point of not complaining about my left knee, now pulsing so badly I feel the pounding from my hip to my hands.
“You go,” I say. “You take the flowers and please lay them at the foot of her side of the grave. If you don’t mind.”
“I should take the flowers?”
“Please take them, and if you don’t mind, just go back to the car.”
I know what a believer you are in doing the thing well and I am sorry that I can’t. The wildflowers are nothing to me now. I sit on our bench and talk to you. I am so sorry I couldn’t go with you, on your big trip around the big world, and be who you needed me to be. I’m even more sorry that I didn’t want to and that my plan for us seemed just as good to me as yours seemed to you. And now, all of those ups and downs, our separations and closed doors, those terrible fights and furies, our cruelties and our silences, seem like nothing, like losing a handbag or missing the morning train.
Reverend Kidd must have left the flowers with you already, because he passes by and says I should take my time.
* * *
—
The first thing I knew in this world was that I was alone and unseen. Then I knew I was not. You are not just my port in the storm, which is what middle-aged women are supposed to be looking for. You are the dark and sparkling sea and the salt, drying tight on my skin, under a bright, bleaching sun. You are the school of minnows we walk through. You are the small fishing boat, the prow so faded you can hardly tell it’s blue. You are the violet skies, rain spattering the sand until it’s almost mud, and you are the light to come. You are the small, stucco houses with blue and white and flashing tin roofs, near the piers, and the dusty chickens that run through the café. You are the patched sail, and the hopeful mast, and the frayed greenish ropes. You are the shells, the thin, pearly ones that almost crumble in your pocket and the wide blue ones that are like rough knives. You are the little girls, carrying water in their red buckets, and you are the ruined sandcastles at sunset, gaudy with seaweed and gull feathers. You are the dawn, rolling back the dark until the beach glitters and the girls return with their buckets, holding hands.
Author’s Note
To the best of my ability, I have worked from the particulars and facts of geography, chronology, customs, and books by actual historians. That said, this is a work of fiction, from beginning to end.
For my parents, Sydelle and Murray
Acknowledgments
To say that I am lucky in my editor, Kate Medina, is like saying that I am lucky to be alive. I sure am, and you don’t know the half of it.
My rare, unstoppable, and very dear agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, has helped me and my books at every turn, with excellent judgment, unflinching candor, and reliable, unstinting kindness.
I’ve had the opportunity to work on this book, at length, at the MacDowell Colony, which is as close to writers’ heaven as I ever need to be. I’ve continued to be a lucky visitor to the kitchen table of Jack O’Brien’s Imaginary Farms, where I often get my best ideas, and to the Provincetown desk of Michael Cunningham, where I have been able to write them down, tear them up, and try again.
Wesleyan University, my alma mater and employer, has a wonderful library and wonderful librarians. It is a welcoming place for readers and writers, for teachers and students, and I am happier to be there than I ever imagined. The days spent at the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, and in their Archives, were among the most exciting and productive of my writing life.
I want to acknowledge, praise, and bow down to Blanche Wiesen Cook, whose exceptional biography of Eleanor Roosevelt inspired this book, as the author’s commitment to truth, detail, and curiosity inspired me.
Three great writers, Bob Bledsoe, Tayari Jones, and Sarah Moon, read, criticized, consoled, and put out fires, right up until the last minute.
My children, Alexander, Caitlin, and Sarah, are my best and most demanding audience and my daily joy, enabling me to finish this book and keep sight of the rest of my life.
As she has for the last decade, my friend and assistant, Jennifer Ferri, talked me off a few ledges, stopped a few bullets with her golden bracelets, and, in every way, made my work possible.
I can never thank my husband, Brian, enough, although I try. He is my reader, my listener, and my deliverance.
BY AMY BLOOM
White Houses
Lucky Us
Where the God of Love Hangs Out
Away
Normal
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You
Love Invents Us
Come to Me
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMY BLOOM is the author of Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Love Invents Us; Normal; Away, a New York Times bestseller; Where the God of Love Hangs Out; and Lucky Us, a New York Times bestseller. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Short Stories, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and many other anthologies here and abroad. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, Slate, Tin House, and Salon, among other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. She is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.
amybloom.com
Facebook.com/AmyBloomBooks
Twitter: @AmyBloomBooks
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