What the Family Needed

by Steven Amsterdam

  Peter was unsure what was expected here.

  “Look, I need to get home anyway so I can straighten out work tomorrow, but I’ll be back for the weekend. Don’t try to do too much. And don’t snap at company if you need company. Call me whenever, any hour. And I guess you could freeze the ham. Or I’ll come back and make pea soup. It’ll be getting colder soon.”

  Peter signed off and put the phone back on the kitchen counter as if it were a strange instrument handed to him in a dream.

  The sink was gleaming clean, untouched since the scrubbing he had given it at five a.m.

  All of those people he’d sent away.

  Come back.

  Suddenly, the voices were there in the next room again.

  Peter pushed the kitchen door open and walked out into the watchful love of family and friends. They all turned his way. The few tufts of snowy hair on his head, the thick, white eyebrows sprawling across his forehead in bewilderment. They would mistake it for simple mourning. Each in their own way was beckoning him over so they could console him for his loss.

  He stood in the middle, trying to absorb it all. Ruth, laughing at something in spite of herself, streaks of tears on her cheeks. Her resemblance alone was hard to bear. Ivan’s presence made it possible. He was interviewing Giordana and Jonah about life in Cairo. Youth in all its eagerness. Barely through his first semester and already drinking wine like such a sophisticate. Not a clue as to what else might come. Ben and Janelle were having heated negotiations with each other in the corner. The kid was nearly out of their house. What kind of conflict could be left to dissect?

  Linda from across the street reflexively tidied up. A damp glass that had been left on a shelf was put onto a napkin. After being insistently helpful with all of the arrangements over the last two days, she pounced on him before any of the others could.

  In the year or two after her husband had died, Peter had volunteered his services for any of her household repairs that didn’t require a ladder. But she kept asking for favors long after, as if the offer had been a permanent arrangement—not a simple gesture of condolence. Peter took longer and longer to respond to her requests, until she got the hint. Since Tuesday, though, the story had changed again. She seemed to expect him to come to her aid, even now, as she pressed her hand against his wrist.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He moved away.

  He was glad the people had returned. A gathering of friends, family, and neighbors—what, maybe twenty, twenty-five people? A few crowded rooms and half a ham. It didn’t seem like much for the end of a life, but it was enough.

  And Alek, out there somewhere. The news would get to him eventually.

  Sasha passed by, heading into the kitchen with another empty plate. Peter stopped him to say, “I’m sorry about the phone call.”

  Sasha looked confused. “What phone call?”

  Awkward for a moment, Peter glanced at the white plate. It was worth a try. Let’s have some more vegetables?

  Instantly, the plate was loaded with celery, carrots, cherry tomatoes, and radishes cut into roses. Sasha looked down, not bothered at all by the sudden apparition. He said, “You want me to pass these around?”

  Sasha hadn’t even reacted.

  Peter took his son’s head between his hands, pleased, as he always was when he noticed Natalie’s curls on his head. Even these, he saw, had a few strands of gray lurking in their midst, which comforted Peter with the only thing he was sure of: He was getting old.

  An hour later, he stood in the driveway, accepting all the good-byes given with the extra urgency that comes after death. Holding Sasha again, he asked him not to come back until the next weekend, reassuring him that a daily phone call would suffice.

  Before the sun had set, he tried to clean up from the gathering by asking for it. He was methodical, picturing how the house should look. As he formed the idea, he was sure to include the fact that the plates had been used by his visitors. He didn’t want to accidentally disappear the afternoon from history. The house instantly cleaned itself, with the paper and plastic even appearing in the green bin by the back door. This was all extremely convenient.

  The evening cool came on. Peter paused to look out from the screened veranda to the neighbors’ houses, with their meaningless front lights and trimmed gardens. The house he was standing in looked the same as it did the week before. This was plain wrong. A flag or something should be at half-mast in front of the house from now on. He stood there, looking at the old floral sofa Natalie had found at the Salvation Army. It was deemed clean enough and cushiony enough. She helped him angle it in through the doorway. It would be an idyllic place for them to sit and read in their dotage. It would also keep burglars from thinking there was much of value inside. That was how she sold it to him.

  The two of them rarely did read together, at least not as often as she had suggested. Peter always had other projects—sanding a table, planning a trip—that kept him elsewhere. He wondered about the quiet hours they could have enjoyed had he found the time. When he was younger, he actually worried that they would be bored with all the years they had in front of them. As comfortable as the sofa looked, with its cushions mashed down by an afternoon of loved ones, he didn’t see the point of sitting there alone.

  Without even thinking concretely, he wished for Natalie to be sitting next to him.

  She didn’t materialize. Perhaps he wasn’t being exact enough.

  He wanted to trace her chin once with his forefinger, the way she used to do to him when she was trying to emphasize her side of an argument. He wished he could give her a lifesaving massage: he would smooth the bubble of blood away, a fraction above her right ear, where her silver frizz had grown thin. Again, he focused on his goal, on the steady pulse of her body that was always somewhere in the house. Nothing. He didn’t have to look around to know it hadn’t worked. He tried again, this time less greedy, not trying to get rid of the aneurysm itself—accepting its existence as fated—but wishing that they had gone to the emergency room at the first twinge of a headache, that whatever treatment they had for her there had worked, that he might be holding her hand through months of rehabilitation. They would get through it. He looked around for even a shift in the air.

  Nothing. All of it—the disappearing people, the reappearing ham—was merely his madness in grief.

  He looked at his shoes. To prove he had been weaving reality with make-believe, he said to his laces, Untie. They did. Tie. He watched the transformation as they tied themselves up again, not slipping under and over each other into a knot, but suddenly pinching up like clay from a small tangle lying across his shoes into an upright and tidy bow. He thought he heard a sound and glanced back into the living room, looking for her, but all he saw was the freesias falling sparsely in their vase, with the card dangling down like a hanged man.

  If he could will people to leave the house—to have left—it was reasonable that he could bring Natalie to the hospital in time. Nevertheless, as many ways as he phrased it in his mind, she did not appear. The more times he attempted it and failed, the more tired he became until he gave up. Rubbing his face to forget it all, he went to sleep on the sofa, cuddling up to a lavender-colored quilt Natalie had made when the boys were small.

  Peter accepted that this situation might be present for a while. It was probably an unspoken, unstudied condition that all widowers developed. He would keep their secret. After all, if he mentioned it to anyone, he would end up medicated. These were bearable delusions—as long as he didn’t request the pleasure of his wife’s company. It would be another thing to make peace with.

  The new abilities enabled him to do the types of things she would have done if she were still there. He willed the books on the living room shelves to categorize and then alphabetize themselves within distinct categories. She had been talking about that one for years. A rip in the screen of the big kitchen window repaired itself in a blink. He thought of the foods that she
had always wanted him to eat and they dutifully filed into the refrigerator and cupboards. Just as dutifully, he ate them. Natalie, who never understood his impatience with daily chores, would have enjoyed seeing him devote his gifts to getting the housework done. He could have considered grander wishes—say, a new car or money in the bank—but for what? For whom?

  What he did do himself was make sure that he trotted the circuit around the reservoir in the early afternoon, while it was still light. For several days in a row, he made two complete loops, one hour and fifty minutes. Coming home through the streets, he forced himself to smile and say hello to everyone he passed. If Natalie had been there when he came home from these walks—she’d be reading on the veranda and vaguely waiting, forever fingering the next page of her book—she would have seen the blankness in his eyes and would have asked if he had enough time on his walk to worry about everything under the sun and still see that it was shining.

  The evening before Sasha was supposed to visit, Peter invoked her roast pumpkin mash, which appeared fully seasoned, with thyme from the garden scattered across the plate as if by her own fingertips. As he sat down to eat it, he tried to hear her playing the piano, but the sounds never progressed from his mind to the living room. When he stumbled upon limits like this, it all felt random, sadistic. It made him long for this part of the mourning to be done. The pianoless silence made him lose his appetite and he made the meal disappear. He vowed not to think about any of her dishes again.

  The visit from Sasha went well. He was certain that Sasha and Ruth were already in league, speculating about his ability to manage on his own. The order of the house provided conspicuous evidence of coping.

  Sasha volunteered to make an initial sorting of Natalie’s clothes. Peter stayed downstairs for most of this. When he did come up and saw her belongings being methodically transferred from the wardrobe into folded piles, and making their way into shopping bags, he had to sit down.

  “Coming up the stairs must have made me light-headed,” Peter said, fooling nobody. He stared at the stacks Sasha had made. How could Sasha even stand to touch her clothes as if they didn’t even matter?

  When his own father had died, when Peter was fourteen, their dog was shattered. There was no explaining death to Lila. She left food in her bowl and never settled. She barely seemed to sleep. Leaving the house for an errand or a proper walk was out of the question. She was up all the time, sniffing the corners of every room, looking around with a constant question on her face. It was a boiling hot summer and Peter’s mother, who wasn’t doing so well herself, needed relief from the pacing. She took his father’s tan pajamas and hung them out on the clothesline for Lila to smell, thinking it would get her outdoors at least. The top and the bottom were on two different hangers, but from the back step, you could almost make out his body in them. Lila stood right underneath them and just howled.

  She went at it for more than an hour. Neighbors looked over the fence, but when they saw what was happening, they pulled their heads back and kept walking. They knew. It was so bad that Peter’s mother walked him into town to get an ice cream sandwich. The quiet was a relief. Years later, he still felt he shouldn’t have enjoyed the ice cream as much as he did, but it was the first pleasure he’d had in a week. When they came home, Lila was still under the clothesline, but she was cried out, asleep, curled up like she was at her master’s feet. They got some peace after that. Less sniffing, less fretting. They thought it was out of her system. A few months later she dropped dead anyway, right on the pavement in front of the house.

  Everyone knew your life in those days. The old vet told them that Lila died because Peter and his mother had to keep living. So they did. The pajamas went into the right corner of the bottom of his mother’s chest of drawers, hiding her few pieces of jewelry. The pajamas stayed there until she died thirty years later and they had to empty out the house to sell it. Even after all that time, Peter couldn’t touch them. Natalie could. Everything was going to the dump.

  “What else are you going to do with your father’s pajamas?” she had asked.

  The few times Sasha brought up Natalie’s memory that weekend, he did so as if he were prying open a locked door on a cabinet. Peter and his son hadn’t spoken much in recent years, so he recognized this for what it was and did his best to appreciate it. He indulged Sasha with murmured agreement about how happy his mother had been during those last months, how engaged she had been with her friends, and—subtlety was never the boy’s strongest suit—how full a life she’d had. Peter permitted the talk, to a point, but he was concerned that some inopportune wish would intrude on their afternoon and something would happen. Natalie’s long-imagined new kitchen would appear. Peter didn’t want to be seen to be startled or unsteady.

  Late Sunday, as Sasha drove away, Peter felt fondly toward the effort he had made. He willed his son to meet someone, someone he could relax and settle down with. He understood that even if his wish worked that night, he wouldn’t hear about it for months, unless Sasha told Ruth, and she, in turn, told Peter.

  In small ways, Sasha seemed to cherish his selfishness as if it were a strength to be nurtured. He made jokes about it. Lord only knew how his housemate Damon got along with him for these past years. It was an enigma. But Peter was as bad, if not worse, when he first met Natalie. Her influence was the necessary spark that kept it from settling in.

  During their first weekend away together, they camped on his grandfather’s property. They would go boating at the pond. Peter had been talking about it for several weeks with his friends, as if none of them had ever taken a girl rowing. He would pack meals and show her the coves of his childhood. If it was warm enough, they would swim together and see what else transpired.

  Instead, it rained. His disappointment made him cranky and untalkative all weekend. Everything he did, he did grudgingly. They drove back in silence. That Tuesday, he called and told her they weren’t suited. He was sorry, but that was the way it was.

  A few days later, he received a letter from her telling him he was wrong. She wrote that she couldn’t have stopped the rain. It wasn’t polite of him to rob her of happiness because of it. Moreover, she summarized, she had no backup plan if the letter failed in its mission. This meant that in order to get on with their life together, he would simply have to become the man she already knew him to be.

  Peter had kept the letter in a folder on its own in his filing cabinet, as if it would one day be worth more than the others he’d kept—as if they wouldn’t all end up going to the dump. When he first received her letter, he read it and dismissed it. The next day, he was reading the newspaper and looked up at the tree shedding its bark outside of his window and decided—the way you do when you’re in your twenties and everything becomes blindingly obvious—that she was the one.

  Peter found her note. Years had made the paper see-through and although he had remembered her words as having her usual certainty, this time he read in them a girlish heart, nearly broken and taking an enormous gamble. They had come close to not going any further. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He wished he had been smart enough to survive his doubts after that weekend nearly half a century ago. He wanted to spare her whatever pain he had caused for those days. He waited for the page to disappear from his hands into nothingness.

  It was still there.

  All he wanted was to undo one weak deed, but even this was not allowed. He went upstairs to bed.

  If, as Natalie used to say, cleaning brought its own satisfactions, he did not find them. He let his sleeping self or the elves or whoever it was do the dusting, but otherwise he called on his power less and less. This way he wouldn’t be so reliant on it when it went away. The shopping gave him a reason to see people, and cooking passed the time. What was he expected to do, sit still for the remaining years?

  Invitations from neighbors offering temporary distractions were dutifully accepted. He resolved to embrace them while they were sincere. He pretended to be affable. He list
ened to what other people had to say and, when asked, said, “It’s hard, but I’m getting there.”

  Linda came over one night and roasted a chicken. It seemed like a friendly enough gesture when she offered. Besides, he was tired of sitting at the table by himself. Then she was there, opening drawers to find wooden spoons, yammering about the logic of kitchens. She was trying it all on.

  They didn’t talk about her dead husband and they didn’t talk about his dead wife. What was there to say? She tried to engage him in discussion about the house going up on the corner and what an eyesore it would be. Peter had talked to the workmen and told her that the next step, the rendering, would improve it. That was one topic. She started another. An all-drum orchestra would be performing at the arts center the next month. (“They were amazing. We saw them when they came through here last time.” No comment was made about that “We.”) Linda was going to buy tickets, if he was interested. He told her he might be. That was another topic.

  He washed and she dried. Fighting it was useless. If she hadn’t invited herself over, they would have been pushed together in some other way. In the alchemy of the neighborhood, a level of attraction between two half-empty homes like theirs was a given.

  Peter hurried the cleanup along so the evening would be over. With nothing left to do and no offer of a nightcap, Linda left before nine, waving her hand from over her shoulder as she went down the front steps, leaving no chance for even an uneasy pause. Glad to have the house back to himself, Peter admitted he had needed the company.

  The deepest solace was the garden, which he kept in a permanent red and orange of late-summer blooms, Natalie’s favorite. He didn’t have the nerve to go and sit there alone, but he enjoyed watching it from the kitchen. Knowing it was out there.

  Sasha called daily. They had already settled into their new dialogue, which consisted of a steady, haphazard discussion of national news, chores related to Natalie’s death, and finances. Surface, Peter thought, but he couldn’t see a way to get underneath it, the way that the rest of them did. That’s what Natalie was for. Every pause and sigh and “I wonder—” that she pressed into their conversations slowed things down to a reflective pace that after seventy-three years still eluded him.