“Muriel,” said the woman with Norman. “No one told me you were here yet.”
“Just,” said the woman I was talking to. “Barely a week.”
“Marvelous,” the other woman called back over her shoulder as she and Norman continued on their way. “And how’s Bob?”
“Well, you know.” Muriel leaned across me to answer her retreating friend. “He’s been out on the course all day.” Both women laughed and waved. “Actually,” Muriel said to me, “he just can’t stand to come to their parties any longer. He was so close to Norman, after all, and since they lost the Fort Lauderdale place Bob has hardly had the heart to see them. But I feel we just have to come out for Gerald and Helen, don’t you? You know”—she paused and turned on me a look of blind radar—“I don’t remember you from Fort Lauderdale—”
“Isn’t this lovely,” said Sandra, arriving in a whirl of skirts. She put a bare, somewhat slack arm around Muriel. “Everyone all together.”
“Just a moment, dear,” Muriel said, reaching over with a piece of Kleenex to wipe a bit of lipstick off Sandra’s tooth. “There. I was just telling your young friend here about your beautiful, beautiful place in Fort Lauderdale.”
“We had such fun, didn’t we?” Sandra said.
“Where do you two know each other from?” Muriel said.
“Oh, she’s my darling,” Sandra said. “Isn’t she cute? But she’s so busy. Full of important things to do.” She crinkled her nose and put it against mine for a moment. “I hate you when you’re busy,” she said. She turned to Muriel. “Where’s Bob?” she said. “I haven’t seen Bob all evening.”
“He was miserable not to be able to make it,” Muriel said. “But he was simply exhausted. He spent the entire day on the course with Dr. Skip.”
I realized that I’d never seen Sandra’s face in repose before. She focused dispassionately on Muriel as Muriel carefully picked a fallen blossom off her dress, and when Muriel looked up again Sandra was still gazing at her. “He gets tired,” Muriel said, glancing at me to enlist my support. “He’s not as young as he used to be.” But I was looking at her in just the way that Sandra had looked at her, and Sandra herself turned and walked off.
“There!” Muriel said. “Well, I suppose I’ve done something now, but that’s just the kind of thing—” An expression of dull triumph spread across her face. “She blames us. She blames Norman. But what else can Norman do? He’s the only one with the authority to commit her.”
But over on the patio something was happening. Just as Norman reached down to take a drink from Dolores’s son, Sandra strode up. Norman seemed unable to move as he watched Sandra grip the child’s shoulder and with her free hand take a drink from the tray, lifting it high above her head. The child stared, his huge eyes gleaming with fear, and the glass seemed to hesitate where Sandra released it, twinkling lazily in the air, before it shattered on the slate. The sound seemed a signal for the party to resume, more noisily than before, and the entire event was swallowed in the cleft of silence that closed behind us while Sandra raised the glasses one by one from the boy’s tray and let them drop.
As I crossed the lawn, a pulpy hand grabbed mine. “You’re not going to be all upset now, are you?” a voice said. The voice and hand belonged to a large man in Bermuda shorts. “It’s over and done with,” he said. “Tomorrow no one will even remember.” I snatched my hand away and continued across the lawn.
I found Sandra in the living room leaning on Dolores, who comforted her as if she were a child. Her crying sounded like a small, intermittent cough. Norman stood several feet away, looking up at the moon. His face was wet with tears, I saw, and, like the face that looked back at him from the moon, it was indistinct, as if it were being slowly worn away. There was nothing I could do here.
Near the gate, Dolores’s son was kicking listlessly at the wall. We pretended not to notice each other as I went out.
By the time I got to the square it was nearly empty. Four men still stood at equidistant points around the band shell conjuring streams of bubbles from their bottles of colored liquid, but the other vendors and the crowds had disappeared, and the last remaining people must have assumed, as I sat down on a bench, that I was waiting for something.
Had Sandra and Norman ever been aware of the life they were making for themselves? Probably not. It seemed that one simply ate any fruit at hand, scattering the seeds about carelessly and then years later found oneself walled in by the growth. I cast my mind back into my own past, straining to see any crossroad, any telling choice, that would indicate the destination toward which I was moving, but there was only the gentle clacking of the broad leaves above me and a slight scent of roses eddying through the night air.
If only I could be lifted up and borne off to someplace further along in time, to where the hours would move forward in a benign, steady procession and I would spend the modest coinage of daily life among pleasant people. I closed my eyes wearily for a moment, and when I opened them, a piece of chiffon seemed to wind around me, a billowing thing that had belonged to my mother’s mother. I pored over it, studying the thrilling colors that were unfaded by previous exposure to memory. I held it up, filtering a cold afternoon light through its ravishing thinness. The patterns were larger, and the threads and the dark interstices between them, and then it was gone and the night was around me again. Yet I’d seen that forgotten scarf as perfectly as if some globe underfoot had rotated thirty years back, placing me right next to it.
And now there was another rotation, and I was crouching in the alley, where garbage cans clustered like mushrooms, and the brick apartment buildings rose up and up, casting a private weather around me. Most of the windows were dark and vacant, but in some, white shades were pulled halfway down. One cord and ring turned aimlessly, ominously, in a ghostly breath of air. I watched and watched until a tightening circle of darkness closed around it.
I sat shivering and miserable at the edge of a community pool where my mother sent me to swim on Saturdays. Lights, reflected from under the water, rippled on the dark walls and ceiling, and the tile room echoed with loose booming sounds. Chlorine stank, and burned in my nose and eyes.
During recess I leaned against the fence as classmates played tetherball—an awful game, dogged and pointless. Sharon, a bossy fat girl, came over and stood next to me. She had never talked to me before, but now she asked me to go skating after school. I looked at her uneasily. Had she felt sorry for me? As I stalled, I saw anxiety erode her self-assurance, and her purpose became clear—she thought I’d be easily acquired: “Sharon is making friends now,” her relieved parents would be able to say. Well, I did not have to be her life raft. “No, thank you,” I said. My strength had returned. “I have to get back to my mother.”
In the university library I talked with a man from one of my classes. I was stricken with a fear that he was going to ask me to have coffee, and while I waited, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, his face became less and less familiar. Suddenly he checked his watch and turned away, leaving me confused.
My friend Pamela and I sat in our favorite café after an early Sunday supper, studying our check. We opened our purses, and each of us carefully counted out what she owed. The headlights of the cars that drove past were sulfurous yellow in a cold autumn drizzle. Time to go—the office tomorrow.
Well. Yes. That had been only last month. I blinked at the shapes of the foliage becoming visible against the velvety night. What random, uneventful memories. In any case, it must be terribly late, and I ought to be asleep, but as I rose to go, there was the sudden rush of entering a tunnel, and I sat with my mother, holding one of her hands. I traced with my finger the huge, adult bones, the fascinating veins that crossed it like mysterious rivers; I fitted my attention exactly to the ridgings of her knuckles, the wedding ring, her pale, flat nails. “Your hand is so beautiful,” I said.
“My hand is hideous,” she said, withdrawing it. “I have hideous hands. They’re old.” Later, in
private, I cried until I felt sore. How old had I been then? Not more than seven, I suppose, but how well I knew those hands when I saw them lying, truly old, as frail as paper on the hospital coverlet. The light from the window fell across them, and across my mother’s sleeping face, her skin soft, like a worn cloth, as I stood in the doorway wondering if I should make some small noise to see if she was ready to wake. But light was coming through the walls of the hospital room, and they faded, and my mother faded, into the sparkling dawn.
Heavens. Vanished. How quickly the long night had turned to morning. How little there was behind me. I got up from the hard bench, stamping slightly to bring the blood back into my feet. Colors began to pulse into the day, and a terror took hold of me at being out here in the open as, deeper and surer with every beat, colors filled up the leaves and the flowers and the steep walled streets and the circle of mountains all around me, and the sky, too, where a round yellow sun was rising.
People were appearing in the square, quietly preparing for business, and I saw that there was a row of women already sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, waiting for change. As I quickly distributed mine among them, one of the women said something to me. How thin she was, that woman—there was practically nothing left of her. At the correct moment she would need only to shrug off her ragged shawl in order to ascend from the sidewalk, weightless.
When I passed the news kiosk, only the little boy was there. My terror intensified; where was the boy’s brother? I wanted badly to ask, but of course I was not able to, and as the child waved to me I caught a sudden glimpse of what those gods of Marcos’s would see if they were to look down now at their former venue: a dying beggar; a little boy beginning his working life in earnest; a community of refugees from failure, ravaged by their pursuit of some deadly specter of pleasure; a lonely woman moving into middle age. We would be a pretty sight, I thought, rocketing along our separate courses—tiny shooting stars burning out in space. But they were not going to look down, those gods. They had been released, and now they were free behind the screen of smog and pollution that protected them from the clamor of their new, unskilled petitioners, and as the day carried the people around me toward whichever of the positions they were to assume that night in the square, I would have to search unaided through my raucous sleep for the dream in which my mother would take my hand and step into the moving current.
All around me the tin shutters were rolling up, and the streets grew crowded and noisy with traffic, and people with bundles of goods poured down into town like cataracts of melting streams, and in what seemed to be no time I’d been flung upon this tide back at the gate, breathless and disheveled. But as I headed for the refuge of my apartment, a gleaming from among the stale litter of ashtrays and dishes drew me over to the patio. Oh, so many of the beautiful glasses—a little heap, I thought, of something over and done with. How sorry Sandra was going to be when she woke up!
I bent over the flashing splinters, and when I raised my eyes again I saw to my surprise that the living-room curtains were open and that Norman and Sandra were already awake. I peered cautiously into the dim interior, and I watched, shading my eyes, as they moved slowly about, making an ineffectual attempt to neaten up after the party. When they came to the door to answer my knock, I was shocked to see how old they were in this morning light, and seedy in their worn robes, like people just come from a hospital. They looked at me bewildered, as if they couldn’t quite place me—and, goodness knows, I had never come to them before—but I wasn’t able to explain myself or to speak at all. And as we stood and stared at each other, I saw on their faces the record, which was changing right in front of me, of countless challenges met and usually lost, and then, understanding what they must do, they composed themselves and invited me in.
Under the 82nd Airborne
For Wall, of course
A Cautionary Tale
“Stop that, Stuart,” Patty said as Stuart struggled with the suitcases, which were way too heavy for him, she thought. (Almost everything was way too heavy for Stuart.) “Just put those down. Besides,” Patty said, “where will you go? You don’t have anyplace to go.” But Stuart took her hand and held it for a moment against his closed eyes, and despite the many occasions when Patty had wanted him to go, and the several occasions when she had tried to make him go, despite the fact that he was at his most enragingly pathetic, for once she could think of nothing, nothing at all that he could be trying to shame her into or shame her out of, and so it occurred to her that this time he really would leave—that he was simply saying goodbye. All along, Patty had been unaware that time is as adhesive as love, and that the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as “friendship,” as if that were the end of the matter, when the truth is that even if “your friend” does something annoying, or if you and “your friend” decide that you hate each other, or if “your friend” moves away and you lose each other’s address, you still have a friendship, and although it can change shape, look different in different lights, become an embarrassment or an encumbrance or a sorrow, it can’t simply cease to have existed, no matter how far into the past it sinks, so attempts to disavow or destroy it will not merely constitute betrayals of friendship but, more practically, are bound to be fruitless, causing damage only to the humans involved rather than to that gummy jungle (friendship) in which those humans have entrapped themselves, so if sometime in the future you’re not going to want to have been a particular person’s friend, or if you’re not going to want to have had the particular friendship you and that person can make with one another, then don’t be friends with that person at all, don’t talk to that person, don’t go anywhere near that person, because as soon as you start to see something from that person’s point of view (which, inevitably, will be as soon as you stand next to that person) common ground is sure to slide under your feet.
Poor Patty! It hadn’t even been inclination or natural circumstances that led her to Stuart—it was Marcia. And perhaps if it hadn’t been for Marcia, Patty and Stuart never would have carried their association further than their first encounter, which took place almost exactly a year before the sweltering night when Stuart packed his things and left.
Patty had been in Manhattan for several weeks, living in the ground-floor apartment that Marcia had sublet to her, but Patty had been too shy to go down the hall, as Marcia had instructed her, and knock on Stuart’s door, so she didn’t meet Stuart until one evening when, on her way out for an ice-cream cone, she found two men chatting above an immense body stretched out across the hall floor. Bodies! she thought. Chatting! Marcia had not prepared her for this.
“Relax,” said one of the men, calling Patty’s attention to the thunder that reverberated around them. “She’s snoring. It’s a vital sign. I’m Stuart, by the way, and this is Mr. Martinez, our superintendent, and that’s Mrs. Jorgenson down there. I bet you’re Marcia’s friend.”
“Nice to meet you,” Patty said. “Should we call an ambulance?”
“Marty and I used to,” Stuart said. “But it just makes her mad.”
“She get so mad,” Mr. Martinez said. “The mens come, they put Mrs. Jorgenson on hammock, she bounce up like Muhammad Ali.”
“Maybe we should try to get her to her apartment,” Patty said.
“You can try,” Stuart said. “But she lives on Three, and she’s even bigger when not all of her is on the floor.”
“Is nice girl!” Mr. Martinez announced happily, pointing at Patty.
In fact, Patty had been ready to abandon Mrs. Jorgenson and go about her business, but Mr. Martinez’s praise revitalized her concern. “There must be something we could do,” she said.
“Not really,” Stuart said. “She just does this for a while, and then she goes back upstairs. But she could probably use a blanket.” So Patty went back into Marcia’s apartment and got her Hudson Bay blanket, which the two men gently tucked a
round Mrs. Jorgenson.
“Nice young girl come to make home,” Mr. Martinez declaimed accusingly to the hallway, “but what she see? Is Mrs. Jorgenson and floor.” He turned grieving eyes to Patty and made a tiny gallant bow. “You need something, miss, you come to Marty.”
“Well,” Stuart said. He moved slightly, buffering Patty against the dismal spectacle of Mrs. Jorgenson. “I was just looking for a girl to make cookies with anyhow.”
“So Marcia was right,” Stuart said as he set the cookie ingredients out on his counter. “She told me you were nice. ‘Caring,’ actually, is the word she used, which I have to say is a word that makes me fundamentally throw up. You know, I watched you dragging in all those cartons, and I figured you had to be you. I’ve been waiting for you to come say hello. I thought maybe you were avoiding me.”
Patty was puzzled by Stuart’s probing pause. “Of course not,” she said.
“Well, here we are, anyway. Yeah, Marcia talked and talked about you. Patty this, Patty that.”
“Really?” Patty said. Certainly Marcia could talk and talk, she thought, but it wasn’t usually by way of praise for her female friends. “Marcia and I used to be in the same dormitory. She was a few years ahead of me.”
“I know,” Stuart said. “You’d be surprised the things I know about Marcia. We’re very tight. In fact, there was serious consideration put into my going out to Austin with her while she set up her practice.”
“Oh?” Patty said. She wasn’t sure why she’d expected Stuart to be glamorous, although, now that she thought about it, Marcia’s descriptions of him had been studded with words like “artistic” and “unpredictable.” Well, he might be artistic and unpredictable, but he didn’t seem glamorous enough even for Marcia, whose tolerance had been widely remarked upon at school. But perhaps Marcia and Stuart’s relationship had professional roots. “Are you involved in therapy, too?” Patty asked.
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg Page 21
