The Year She Disappeared

by Ann Harleman

  Mel bent down and pried the torn half-slip from Nan’s clenched fingers. “You look totally weirded out. Should I go get your cigarettes?”

  Nan knew Mel wanted to follow Jane, to put her arms around her, reaching into the past to comfort little Mel. She thought tiredly, Jane doesn’t want me; let her at least have Mel. She said, “Actually, I’d like to be by myself for a while,” then surprised herself by adding, “Would you call Walker? His number’s on the fridge, 351-something.”

  Val declared that he himself would carry Walker in his taxi, and followed Mel out of the room.

  Alone, Nan sat in the wash of late-afternoon light from the tall windows. A bowl of water stood on the radiator beneath, to send moisture into the dry winter air, the way Dorothea had always done. The water’s stale smell, like ashes, made her think of her grandmother’s secondhand store. Closing her eyes, Nan saw not Dorothea’s face but her body, strong and certain, always in motion. Raising Nan at the cost of her own well-earned late-life freedom, she’d somehow managed to avoid becoming bitter. She had not encouraged Nan to feel resentment and call it virtue, had not taught her self-sacrifice. Courage—yes, she’d taught her that. But not compassion. She hadn’t been any better at comforting little girls than Nan was now.

  Outside the window a red winter sun was slipping down between snow-quilted roofs where the freeway poured out a thickening stream of lights. Its low, unceasing hum came to Nan through the glass. She heard herself sigh. She’d seen things—oh, she had. A young man bitten by a viper on a trip—one of the excursions discouraged by the State Department—to the ancient cliff towns of the Cinque Terre. He’d died before the makeshift litter in the Jeep’s backseat reached Genoa; in the heat, his hazel eyes, which no one thought to close, slowly turned opaque, like yellow soap. (Tod’s second posting; Nan’s first death. HOWDY had offered no helpful tips for watching people die.) On the road to Timisoara, a Rumanian girl no more than eight or nine, carrying a rust-stained bundle of clothing that turned out to be the body of her baby brother. Crossing the border from Poland into East Berlin, the morning after Reagan was elected, East German guards with dogs searching the train, pulling up seat cushions and grinning. How do you like your president now? they laughed. Later Nan had seen them dragging a man and a woman, in jackets too thin for November, along the platform, leg irons clanking in the clear morning air.

  Other people’s suffering—never my own.

  Mel appeared in the doorway. “Walker’s on his way,” she said. “Jane and Val are looking for Zipper. Mind if I sit with you?”

  Nan shook her head.

  They sat in a silence broken by Jane’s occasional grief-edged cry of “Zipper! Zipper-Kitty!” Mel took Nan’s hand and held it, resting it on one blue-jeaned leg. There was a ragged hole in the denim through which her pale knee gleamed.

  “You and Janey—you’re on the run, huh?” Mel said softly. “You’re in trouble?”

  Nan felt hot, then cold. Sweat sprang between their two palms.

  Mel regarded her in silence. Then she said, “C’mon—chill! I won’t say anything. I haven’t even told Val. He’s probably figured it out, though. He’s no bunbrain.”

  “It’s not what you think.” What does she think?

  “Hey! None of my business. Only—if you need anything. You and Janey. Val and I’d be really bummed if you didn’t let us know. That’d be bitter.”

  |

  Until she saw Walker’s face Nan had forgotten all about her recent transformation. Even then it took her a second to interpret the look that slid, quick as an arpeggio, from shock through amusement to acceptance. Those sure blue eyes. One could lean on this man.

  He located Jane’s cat in the twilight behind the refrigerator and coaxed it out with (Nan would never have dreamed of this) two raw hot dogs cut into mouse-sized lengths. He’d brought along a toy he’d bought the day before for Jane—a stuffed yellow creature with a pointed head and the stunted limbs of a thalidomide baby, dressed in what looked like a prison uniform. When you squeezed its fingerless yellow hand, it sang:

  Bananas in pajamas

  Are chasing teddybears,

  ’Cause on this day their stares

  Can catch them unawares

  A toy too young for a four-year-old, but neither Walker nor Jane seemed to notice this. Jane, holding fast to a wildly purring Zipper, smiled and smiled. The gap where her front tooth should have been, and her hair, pulled back into two tight looped braids, gave her the comical face of a rag doll. Must be Val’s work, Nan thought. She looked like a Russian schoolgirl.

  “I shot a mollie,” Jane said to Walker. “Val let me shoot.”

  For a second Nan was taken aback. Jane shot a meter maid? Then: Oh—the camera.

  Walker said to Nan, “How about a walk? You’ve got your coat on.”

  Nan looked at Jane, now happily ensconced on the sofa next to Mel, a headlock each on Zipper and Bananas.

  Mel, Val, Walker, Mikki—any of them can offer Jane more than I can, right now.

  “Okay,” she said; and Walker went to the door and held it open for her, bowing and doffing an imaginary hat.

  Rescue; rescue.

  On Elbow Street in the chilly dusk, they turned, without needing to consult each other, toward the river. Walker put his hand under Nan’s elbow, an old-fashioned gesture he hadn’t ventured before. Courtly (he took care to walk between her and the curb) and kind. Staid attributes, which, in a lover (the Last Lover, for instance), she would once have scorned. Despite the fog, thicker as they neared the river, she was glad to be outside. Glad that Walker had suggested it. The feeling of violation she’d had in the apartment—a tightness across her chest, as if the available air had been already breathed and expelled by someone else—began to ease, dispersing into the darkness.

  It was so cold—that austere New England cold that wrapped around your bones—that there were few pedestrians. The ones there were hurried along, heads down, unspeaking. Nan and Walker reached the river and turned south along the narrow wooden walkway where the construction began. Once or twice they bumped awkwardly, hip to hip. Walker whistled under his breath, an old Beatles song.

  If there’s anything that you want

  If there’s anything I can do

  Nan glanced sideways at him. Above the lumpy purple muffler (touchingly hand-knit: Christy?) his profile made her think of a pelican. His wattle, like a pelican’s expanding crop; his thin beak of a nose. The pelican, she remembered, was an ancient symbol for nurturing. For tending, as kind and courtly Walker tended Nan.

  “Sunset. Twilight. Dusk,” he said. “That’s the order they come in. Twilight—that means between light and darkness. Dusk is almost dark. But not quite.”

  “Walker, thank you.” Nan pressed his arm. “For everything. Jane felt better the minute you came through the door.”

  I felt better.

  He held out a hand to help her squeeze past the metal barrier with its dented, graffiti-sprayed KEEP OUT sign, and they walked slowly along the arched pedestrian bridge. Its surface was ice-coated rocks, not yet paved, and no railings stood between them and the water. Walker kept a grip on Nan’s arm so firm she could feel his fingers through her sleeve. Ice edged the river. Mist rising off it twirled slowly in a chill, damp breeze that smelled of fish. An east wind off the unseen ocean. Nan said as much, and Walker nodded. “Nor’easter’s on its way. Might blow out to sea before it gets here, though.” A watercolor landscape, wet on wet: bare black trees and the stark shapes of machinery dwindling into the mist, like the Chinese paintings that Tod had, in a small way, collected. The paintings that had supported her since his death—or rather, that had supported Nan Mulholland. This thought threw her into furious calculation: what was left in the bank account (not quite a thousand dollars); what bills were urgent (rent, food, Jane’s day care); how long until Alex’s next message (today was the first of March, so, six days). Adding and subtracting made her head ache.

  As if he’d read her mind, Wa
lker said cheerfully, “A fool and his mother are soon parted. Don’t look so glum! It’s only money. Thing is, you could’ve been there when he broke in. You and Jane. Good Christ! Some crazed druggie with a hammer, no telling what he might’ve done.”

  Once again Nan had the contradictory sense that Walker was both familiar and hidden. She was at ease with him in a way that continued to surprise her—that mysterious sense of being in tune with someone quite unlike you that the Italians called sintonia. More at ease than might be accounted for by his relationship to Deenie. Yet alongside this deep feeling of comfort—interwoven with it, even—was the sense that Walker was concealing something. Where did that feeling come from? The way he held himself, the way he looked at her? What was it HOWDY had said? The most ordinary-appearing person, often offering help of some kind, may present a security risk. But she didn’t feel, about Walker, that he was a danger in some way—not at all. The opposite, in fact.

  The hell with it— K chortu. Everyone our age has something to hide.

  And who was she, after all, to cast the first stone? She pulled the hood of Mel’s double-thick Champion sweatshirt closer around her newly bare neck.

  Walker said, “How about tomorrow morning, minute the stores open?”

  “What?”

  “For the dead bolt. And I think you ought to have a Yale lock, as well. The guy must’ve just slid your door open with a credit card. Any rate, Val agrees with me. Says he has the owner’s okay for that kind of thing.”

  “Oh. If Val agrees. Who am I, a mere woman, to say the two of you nay?”

  Walker didn’t laugh. He stopped dead in the middle of the bridge and turned to Nan. She thought, Why, he’s worried about me. Worried. It had been a very long time since a man had been that. Tod had been too sick, in those last years, had moved onto another plane entirely; and the Last Lover was never one to let the worry-light shine in his eyes.

  Walker put both hands on her shoulders, and she thought he was going to shake her—his face beneath the dark wool cap looked grim—but then it came too near for her to see his expression, and then he kissed her. His lips were cool, then warm. The taste of salt, the oceany mist from the river trapped between their two mouths. His clean smell, like pencil shavings. The faint grittiness of his chin. Surprised, she felt an answering tug, somewhere at the center of her.

  When she opened her eyes, the world seemed to have dissolved into fog. The two of them were all that was left, standing on the arch of the empty bridge. She blinked. Streetlamps at the far end of the bridge bled light onto the snow, like windows left uncurtained in the violet dusk. Her mouth buzzed lightly, as if the muzzle of a gun had pressed against it; her underpants (oh, blessed little blue estrogen pills!) clung to her crotch, damp with desire. Somewhere a dog barked with bell-like regularity, and there was the sound of buoys from the unseen ocean.

  Walker took the edges of her sweatshirt hood and tugged it gently over her bare head. His fingers smoothed the sprigs of hair at her temples.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “We’ll head on back.”

  |

  She wasn’t cold. Had never been cold, despite the myth that beautiful women are. Her lovers had often seemed surprised at her eagerness. If they’d believed the myth, why had they pursued her? Though, come to think of it, maybe that was why.

  Nan stood at the window of Nibbrig’s darkened living room watching the fog roll in and thinking of the past.

  How engrossing—what a lifework—it had been. Chasing the moment of escape from yourself. Different every time, old yet new, the way each orgasm was different from all others. Impossible to make any man understand this: theirs must be pretty uniform. Different colors, textures, shapes—different music—impossible, anyway, to find words for it. The pleasures of surprise, of not-yet-knowing, of discovery, beckoned at least as strongly as the predictable pleasure of the act itself. Which was never just itself anyway, but was taste and sound and smell and touch. Was the ring of the muezzin beyond the shutters, the fragrance of Siberian lilac floating through an open window, light reflected off snow, cool sheets, warm bodies … oh, bodies! The smell and taste and feel of them. Skin, simple skin. Pale, freckled, blue-black, olive; like apples, salt, bread; like silk and linen and coarse curly wool. Sex had always made Nan think of a hymn from her high school days:

  O everlasting streams

  And oceans of delight

  It had taken the proverbial seven years for Nan to discover adultery. She’d married up, as the saying goes. (Up and away, Pop had said, sorrowing.) On yet another scholarship, this one at Douglass College—the state of New Jersey’s women’s school, a pale imitation of the Seven Sisters—she’d met Tod Mulholland, who was finishing a master’s degree in political science at Princeton. Who was tall, shy, angular, awkward—and speedily smitten with Nan. She’d loved his loving her. Had tried, in gratitude, to be a good wife. Tod hadn’t understood how the lovely, buffered life of State Department wives (oddly like the life of nuns) could fail to be desirable. Could, in fact, drive a woman bonkers. After several years there was Alex. But The Nannies claimed her, as they claimed the house, the meals, the marketing. Studying the other Foreign Service wives showed Nan a narrow choice of remedies. Alcohol; Valium; cocaine; sex. Like the other drugs, adultery led to more adultery. Resistance became not merely difficult, but unthinkable; remorse, easier to endure than temptation. A quick study but a slow learner, Nan did not see that what served as an escape from her life also kept her from living it. She did not see—not until Tod began dying—the irreversible distance that adultery had imposed between her and Tod. Not scatterbrained—scatterhearted, he had called her once, in anger. Yet by ignoring her affairs he’d seemed almost to encourage them, as, in the first years of their marriage, he’d seemed to like the idea of her previous lovers (she had been a wild young girl), had liked her to murmur their names when they made love.

  They never talked about any of this. A diplomat, Tod used to say, is a person who thinks twice before saying nothing.

  All of it—the new, uncharted bodies, the florid meetings in hotel rooms, the yearning—stopped when Tod was diagnosed with lung cancer. Nan was fifty-two, arguably past the age for lovers, but in practice, not. She gave them up—she gave them up—in the simple, believing way a child gives up candy for Lent. For the duration, which turned out in Tod’s case to be nearly three years. A thousand mornings: waking, those first precious seconds of forgetting, then the need to decide, all over again, every single day, to stay. Looking back, Nan saw that time as a sleep-deprived blur of bodily fluids.

  Piss

  Shit

  Blood

  Spit

  Snot

  She matched this list with a list of her lovers. Jack (Genoa, 1968); Anton Waldfisch (Warsaw, 1972); Matthew Prout (Washington, 1976); Daniel Hess (Bucharest, 1980). The two lists made a litany she recited to herself when shoving sheets into the washer at three in the morning; or swilling Clorox around a plastic urinal (breathe it in, bless the rankness that cancels all other smells); or driving behind the ambulance before sunrise, eyes gritty with unslept sleep, thinking, This time he stays; I can’t keep on doing this. But of course she brought him home, he always came home, he died as he wanted to die, at home, with Nan asleep on the cot next to his high bed, one hand on the long cool worm of his oxygen tubing. Waking, she knew immediately that he was dead: she’d slept through the night for the first time in almost a year.

  Reparation. That was what, dry-eyed at the funeral (because her tears would have been not for Tod but for Nan), she called those years. Reparation: to repair. One of the conditions for forgiveness. Number of lovers; number of gallons of bodily fluids. Sleepless, Nan counted them instead of sheep, over and over, night after night. If only she knew the correct ratio! Did she need to suffer more, even now that he was dead, or could her grief be just grief? She got out her old Baltimore Catechism and read and reread it obsessively, until Alex took it away from her and threw it out.

  It
was Deenie who saved her. Deenie who persuaded her to come to Chicago, to stay on there for weeks. Deenie who made her laugh. (Why can’t Santa Claus have babies? Because he only comes once a year, and then it’s down the chimney.) Gradually, during that monthlong visit, Nan’s lunatic calculations ceased. In Deenie’s wide pearwood bed she slept and slept. The terrible weariness unwound itself from around her bones and slid away into the thin blue air over Lake Michigan.

  Why had she ever gone back to Seattle? The place Tod had chosen for their declining years: clean and new and complacent. The place where the major metropolitan newspaper would say, “In addiction to his wife, Mr. Mulholland is survived by a daughter.” The obituary next to Tod’s was “Victor Dorman, 80, Altered the Packaging of Cheese Slices”; below it ran the headline SCIENTISTS SUCCEED IN GIVING ALZHEIMER’S TO MICE.

  Alex had written an angry letter to the editor of the Pee-Eye protesting both her father’s obituary and the company it kept. To be near her dying father, she’d gotten herself transferred—she worked for the VA then—from Denver to Seattle. If Tod hadn’t chosen Seattle to retire in, if he hadn’t gotten cancer, Alex would never have met Gabriel. Jane would not have existed. Nan would not, at this very moment, be standing at a window looking out over foggy Providence, the new moon at midnight a silver suggestion above the State House dome.

  Such thinking made her dizzy—that tiresome butterfly beats its wings in Guatemala, and off the coast of Maine a hurricane strikes—and she turned away. She stumbled over something. Wearily, she bent to pick up a Barbie doll. The chill air seemed full of ghosts. She imagined the women—of course they would have been women—who’d once worked in this building, in this very room, their heads in hairnets bent over the creaking conveyor belts, their large-knuckled hands flying. Those women would have been the same generation as Dorothea. Would they have had her courage? Fear rose in Nan’s throat. What would she do now? With no money and no way to get any? No recourse, really, but to wait for Alex’s next message? The wooden floor burned with cold beneath her bare feet. She dropped Pet Doctor Barbie and left it where it fell. Planless, she went to bed.