by Dick Cluster
“Rubbish,” Meredith said as Alex’s hand played its exploratory tune. “If you don’t want us to live together, you wouldn’t be bringing it up. You’re afraid to take the plunge, that’s all.”
“And you’re not?”
“I’m afraid of not taking it.”
“I know,” Alex said. “You want to be able to invite the faculty to a housewarming while all my faculties are intact.” He squeezed her hand to show that any meanness in this bad but spontaneous joke was his. He knew that Meredith respected his effort. For all her skill with words, she did not play with them very well. “So. By this time next year. How about that?”
“Yes,” Meredith answered. A smile split her long, lightly freckled face and dimpled her otherwise sharp chin. “Isn’t that what you’ve had in mind all evening to say? I wonder what else you’ve already decided in the privacy of your head.”
“A piano. I’d like a piano in the parlor and a pool table in the conservatory. You can teach Maria to tinkle one kind of ivories and I’ll teach her to shoot the others.”
Since his marriage, Alex had been through a number of more or less serious relationships. None of them had involved giving up his and his daughter’s separate address. So he mocked the idea of living with Meredith, even as he admitted he was ready to give the nuclear family a second, if different, try. “Do you know anything about player pianos?” he added. “Terry asked me if I’d take a look at what’s wrong with his.”
Meredith shook her head but smiled. Alex squeezed her hand once more and then brought his up to rummage in his beard. “I told him maybe it was waiting. Motion in stillness, stillness in motion.” Alex’s tai chi teacher was the only authority figure, other than his doctor, whom he had admitted into his effort to survive a cancer and thus keep living longer than Schubert, longer than Che. Still, Alex found he could bear the master-student business with Sifu Terry Newcombe— and the solemnity of the Chinese ritual itself— only by cracking enough jokes to keep it at bay. “He said it would be worth a month’s tuition for me to open the thing up.”
“I remember one that worked,” Meredith said. “They’re… air-driven, aren’t they?”
Alex nodded. He imagined the small, pink, and very British Reverend Phillips delivering a lecture on air-driven machinery to his red-haired, green-eyed, watchful daughter. Meredith would have returned a level stare to her father, but she would have taken in the content and made it her own. Alex thought it would be nice to sit here with her and not talk much more, to hold hands and listen to the sounds the pianist’s skillful muscles made as they worked out on the keys. Although it would be nice, too, to go home before they were too tired to want to make love. They should want to— not have to— on the evening that celebrated the end of their first year. But Alex had no desire to go out and face the icy streets— and there was always the morning, and anyway by now there was more than one way of making love. He felt in his pocket for a dime so he could call the new sitter to make sure that a while past midnight would be okay. “Let’s stay longer,” he said hopefully. “I’ll call Suzanne.”
The phone was next to the smoking section, so as Alex dialed he waved the heavy cloud from his nose and eyes. Speaking of milestones, he thought, finding sitters would soon be behind him. Maria was more and more willing and able to take care of herself. It was a matter of coming up with just one or two more sitters, to get through one or two more years. Meredith’s student Suzanne Lutrello seemed like a perfect if expensive discovery. A sitter over twenty was justified in charging five dollars an hour, Alex thought. Shit, he charged twenty-five to take apart and put together inanimate objects, cars. But then, she shouldn’t be asleep in front of the tube like one of those thirteen-year-olds. Why was the phone ringing for such a long, disturbing time?
Maybe, despite instructions about bedtime, Suzanne and Maria were deep in conversation. He should feel flattered that a college student considered his daughter better entertainment than a book or TV. Or maybe Maria was long since in bed, and Suzanne was in the bathroom and would soon pick up the damn phone. Across the darkened lounge he could see Meredith unconcerned, watching the fingers of the man at the piano. Meanwhile, the phone continued to ring. Alex doubted that he could have misdialed his own number. But there was nothing to do but hang up and try again.
When the ringing stopped on number four this time, Alex discovered how long he had been holding his breath. The carbon dioxide whooshed out of his lungs. He inhaled carcinogenic tobacco vapors, but he was grateful for the sound of his daughter’s businesslike telephone voice.
“Checking out the midnight hour, kiddo?” he said. “Let me talk to Suzanne, okay?”
Maria didn’t answer, nor was there a sound of her clunking down the phone. Alex could feel that she was standing, thinking, running her tongue between her upper gum and upper lip. “Suzanne left,” Maria announced finally. Alex thought he heard an underlying quaver in counterpoint to the enforced calm. “She said not to answer the phone, but when it rang again I thought it might be you. She’s really sorry, it was an emergency. I’m watching TV. It’s okay.”
“She left?” Surprise and perhaps alcohol made Alex stupidly repeat his daughter’s words. “When?”
“Um, about ten. You didn’t give any number where she could call.”
“Yeah, but— okay, okay, listen, we’ll be right home. In the meantime, don’t answer the phone.”
“Okay. I did hear noises upstairs, too, so I think somebody’s home up there.”
“Well, that’s good. You can always call Anne or Frank in an emergency. Remember, their number is right on the list by phone, under Lafarge?”
“I know,” Maria said impatiently. “Um, Alex?”
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“She said it was an emergency,” Maria repeated, as if backtracking to get ready for a flying leap. The next sentence came out as a statement inflected like a question. Am I missing some grown-up code, the inflection meant, or am I supposed to take this the way it sounds? “She said the emergency was that somebody was dead.”
“Um, well, then I guess she really had to go. Listen, maybe, you know, it was like her grandmother or something. It was my fault not to leave a number. It’s not your fault, anyway. Watch the rest of your show. We’ll be right there.”
* * *
Three nights before, Wednesday night, Alex and Maria had watched eight inches of light, dry, swirling flakes fall on rooftops, on small lawns, on sidewalks and streets. Every time it did this it was new. The flakes left room for an easy kind of joy and wonder as they floated in the glow of the streetlights. “Snow day tomorrow!” Maria had called with a nine-year-old’s confident enthusiasm. In the morning she had hopped onto Alex’s bed and flashed a quiet told-you-so look as the radio announcer plodded through his long, alphabetical list of school closings. It had been a day of late breakfast, shoveling out, sledding over at Fresh Pond. Alex had let his message machine handle the nervous customers. From long experience, his home number was unlisted. Let them wait; he knew that, deep down, automobile owners were happy to have somebody else car-sit for them on a day like this.
Then the snow had been followed by a half-day of sun and a cold snap. Now Alex cursed both climate and baby-sitter as he and Meredith crab-walked their way along sidewalks where slush had frozen into ice. A crab was what Alex felt like much of the Boston winter— an inefficient, prehistoric, stiff-jointed creature, knees and shoulders and elbows locked, picking its way awkwardly over the slippery ridges and troughs of bootprints fossilized by cold. When he felt his body working against itself like that, he would wonder why he hadn’t stayed in California way back when. Especially these days, when his body needed to work for itself, not against. But tonight he thought mostly about getting through the four blocks to the car. He followed Meredith single file along the narrow paths. Once in the car, he repeated out loud the assurances he had been making to himself. “I know she’s all right,” he said. “I mean I just talked to her, and she sounded fine.
But whatever happened, I don’t see why Suzanne had to tell her something scary— that somebody died. It’s bad enough to run out, I mean, she better have a good explanation for that. But to scare the kid on top of it…”
“It might have been a lie,” Meredith said doubtfully. “It is the handiest excuse. American college students seem to have more deaths in the family than any other group I’ve met. Mine have lost seven relatives in a month. I’ve given up trying to guess which ones are true. If it were a lie, she might have been mostly conscious of its being untrue. She might have forgotten how real it would be to a child who wouldn’t expect her to lie.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” That could be, Alex thought. He noted this surprising woman’s surprising eye again. Meredith had some internal mechanism that spotted pretense as swiftly as… as a carpenter’s level, he had told her once, but he didn’t bother with analyzing what he admired in Meredith right now. He was concerned that what she had said clicked with a thought he’d come to by quite a different route.
“It’s not only that,” he said slowly, trying to slow down his own intuition, to put it into words. “She said dead, not dying. You might be in a hurry if somebody was dying. You’d want to rush for a last word, or a last look at them breathing. There’s not the same kind of hurry if they’re dead. Your last chance is gone then— no more consciousness, no more breath.”
Meredith brushed Alex’s cheek with her hand. Her touch was light, as if she were fearful of intruding. Yet it didn’t hesitate or flinch back. “That’s perhaps when people are in the biggest hurry,” she said. “When it’s too late to do anything, that’s often when they hurry the most.” Alex grunted as he turned sharply but skillfully onto the icy ruts of the small North Cambridge street where he, and half of the time his daughter, lived.
2. OBITS AT LUNCH
In the morning, Sunday morning, they did make love. Alex closed his eyes toward the end, but he thought that Meredith kept hers open. He was glad that ohhh-Alex was part of what came out of her mouth as well as the just plain ohs and the mmmmmMMMMM. After breakfast, Meredith went home to her word processor, which Alex joked was how she paid her devotions now that she no longer went to church. Maria’s friend Georgia came over to play. They played store, and then Georgia robbed the store, and Maria chased her shrieking through the apartment. “Stop, thief!” Maria cried.
Alex was surprised that this archaic phrase stayed in use among children generation after generation.
When that game wore out, he organized them to bake cookies. The baking kept them busy and it also warmed up the house. Meanwhile, he kept himself busy reading, doing laundry, and practicing the new positions he’d be showing Terry tomorrow. He also tried to call Suzanne Lutrello, seven times.
Always the same, no answer. When his own phone rang, he half expected the sitter to be calling him, anxious to apologize or explain. When somebody died, Alex thought, didn’t the survivors keep themselves busy with concrete tasks like a phone call to clean up yesterday’s social mess? After Georgia left, he went over again with Maria what Suzanne had said. He didn’t mind letting her know he was worried. If Maria was worried also, he wanted her to talk. But Maria simply repeated what she’d told him the night before. She added only that she and Suzanne had gotten along well and talked earlier on about “lots of things.”
“What kind of things?” Alex pressed, but Maria only said, “Lots of things. I don’t know.” Alex didn’t see what difference it made because on the circumstances of the sitter’s departure Maria was very clear: Suzanne had put her to bed but allowed her to stay up reading. Then she’d come into Maria’s room and explained that it was an emergency, that somebody was dead, that she was sorry but she had to leave. “She said I was very grown-up, I shouldn’t answer the door, and I could stay in bed or I could go in the living room and watch TV until you got home. When I got settled on the couch, she left.”
Alex asked whether Suzanne might have meant dead in the sense of “If you don’t do that, man, you’re dead.” Maria’s eyes opened wider, as if this was a daring and attractive idea. But she answered, truthfully, “I didn’t think about that.” She added, “I didn’t think it was the right thing for me to ask who died.”
Suzanne lived in Dorchester, across the river and on the other side of downtown Boston. When Alex had called her home number last week to set things up for Saturday, she’d answered the phone herself. He didn’t know— and neither did Meredith— whether she lived with parents, with roommates, with a boyfriend or girlfriend, or alone. She’d told Meredith that sitting in Cambridge would be okay, because she had friends nearby where she often stayed over. Maybe she was there now, but Alex didn’t know where “there” was.
After dinner, Meredith came back. Whatever else happened, she spent every other Sunday night with Alex. That way, on the weekends when Alex had Maria, he could still leave the house in time to make Terry’s Monday-morning class. At five minutes to seven he was crab-walking down a boot-stamped but unshoveled sidewalk, bitching to himself about the absentee owner of the long brick building where Terry’s tai chi studio was.
It was an old industrial building, near the train tracks that separated North Cambridge from the rest of town. It was the kind of building in which they had once cut nuts and bolts from dies, or built radios out of vacuum tubes, or printed catechisms on ancient letterpress machines. Now the place housed a few cabinetmakers, odds and ends of artists, the one-room offices of tiny mail-order firms. The owner sat in Florida collecting the rents, and wouldn’t give any thought to hiring a kid or a snowblower service to clean up the walk. Any day he’d sell to a developer who would make the place over into condos or software firms.
Alex turned the knob on one of the double doors and found that it was unlocked. Terry was already here; Alex wouldn’t have to stand around waiting in the cold. He was grateful the Sifu’s powers had helped his tires to root themselves firmly and propel the old rusting Rabbit out of any rut. Alex knew the Rabbit well, because he bartered repairs for lessons. Sifu was Chinese for “teacher.” SIFU TERRY NEWCOMBE was what it said, in copper-colored aluminum letters, on the studio door.
Inside, Alex joined three other students in their warmups, letting the stiffness in joints and muscles slip away. His morning tiredness began to evaporate like the steam that clanked in the pipes. He bent, straightened, arched, tried to remember to breathe. Each warmup posture stretched quadriceps and hamstrings and God knew what other inner components tightened by cold and age and improper use. Alex tried to smooth out the curve in his back, tried to relax the muscles that weren’t being used. He tried to let the chi begin to flow.
The seven-fifteen train whistle sounded, joined by the higher-pitched clickety-clack as the wheels clattered over the track. Commuter train, bound downtown. Alex told himself to let the noise and the mental image go by as inexorably as the train. Don’t shut it out, don’t hold onto it either. Would Meredith remember to ask Maria to remember her homework, her extra sneakers for the classroom, her lunch? Would he be able to get that 144 with the frozen fuel pump started, so he could drive it into the shop? These minor worries drifted by as another train passed the other way. Terry said, “Okay, Alex, let’s see Punch Under Elbow. Let’s see it from, uh, from the Slanting Single Whip.”
Alex smiled. He shuffled his long and angular body for one more loosening, then tried to square his hips, sink into his legs, and feel the connection between his feet and the floor. He watched himself in the full-length mirror— a black-bearded, curly-haired scarecrow, thin lips pulled back, eyes glittering, sharp nose parting the air before it. He assumed what he hoped was a presentable bow stance, feet spread, one forward of the other. Then, very slowly, he shifted his weight back onto the right foot, stepped forward with the left, extended his arms, stepped with the right, swiveled from the hips, and rotated one arm counterclockwise and the other clockwise as his hips swiveled back the other way.
Make yourself light, he told himself in Terry’s voice. Spread your wings
like a bird about to fly away. He tried to feel his arms and legs as porous, as collections of molecules moving insubstantially through a denser space. Through oil, through honey, through dry beach sand. He ended on his right foot, the left one emptied on the heel, the right hand punching under the left elbow. All movements ceasing together, motion becoming stillness before it would become motion again.
Alex smiled a second time. Punch Under Elbow had been impossible two weeks ago, but it wasn’t now. He checked himself in the mirror, relaxed his stretched lips and hunched shoulders, and moved into the Repulse Monkey. That meant walking slowly backward along invisible tracks while fending off an attacker with smooth, alternating extensions of the arms. On each step his working knee trembled as it took all his body’s weight. When he’d counted five steps he stopped, considering his bearded stork self in the mirror.
“Not bad,” Terry said, laughing. Terry’s dark brown face creased and his eyes stayed soft. “You’re all up here in your arms, though. Let the energy sink into your belly, into your legs. Do it again, with me. Slower.”
Alex did, and as he practiced the motions again and again he gradually forgot snow, ice, daughter, lunch, homework, girlfriend, future plans, job. Other concerns came and went— the injured foot of Celtics forward Kevin McHale, the balance in his own checkbook, the war in El Salvador grinding on and on— and by the time he was doing his warm-down stretches, only two puzzles presented themselves to his conscious mind. One was how best to phrase the question he wanted to put to his doctor later today. The other was what he would do if Meredith returned from school without seeing or hearing from Suzanne. At the end of class, after silent standing meditation, everyone sat crosslegged in a circle where questions and comments were in order. Alex asked about the label of his latest accomplishment.
