She Was Like That

by Kate Walbert

  “Wine, I think,” Tom says. “Wine and good food.” He seems entirely pleased. He has put on a jacket and a pressed shirt, buttoning the cuffs. His beard looks planned, cultivated, no longer the result of days unattended. His glasses are bright and clean. At times she finds herself staring at him as if he is entirely unfamiliar to her, a blind date or somebody’s cousin she has agreed to meet. “What are you thinking?” he says.

  “Marion,” she says. “I was thinking of how she always spoke of coming to Paris and now here I am.” Rebecca looks around her; on the brick wall is a framed print she recognizes: still life with fruit.

  “I’m trying to imagine her in Paris, actually, and for some reason I can’t get a kelly green coat out of my mind. I think she would have worn a kelly green coat, whatever that is, and some sort of smart hat, and I think she would have come to the city in warm weather, and would have sat in the cafés and watched the people and met some dashing Frenchman named Monsieur something who wouldn’t have minded her at all.”

  Tom gestures to the waitress for the check, his pinkie extended as he signs his name in the air. Rebecca looks away, down at her brown wool pants.

  “Sounds like Audrey Hepburn in Gigi,” he says. “Marion would have hated the food.”

  * * *

  In the middle of the night Rebecca wakes to screaming, or wailing, really, something wounded, in pain. Descendants of a revolution she has never completely understood, though she knows that it lasted forever and continues, that there has been some terrible violence.

  Tom snores, a washcloth over his eyes to keep the light from the street out; she has insisted on leaving the shutters open, the window open. Tom is out like a light in the City of Light, she thinks. Tom, my husband. My husband, Tom. His father, Tom. Her father, Tom. That’s the boy’s father, Tom. His grandmother, Marion, is dead.

  She sits up, gets out of bed and walks to the window to see; outside, the cobblestones glisten with rainwater; it is the time of night impossible to know: she may have been sleeping an hour, it may be almost dawn.

  She will tell him tomorrow. What, she isn’t sure, but something, surely. I am bored, she will say, or I love you, madly. Let’s divorce. Let’s not. Let’s go on. Let’s stop.

  Across the street, the black-haired woman sits in a circle of light, fresh tulips in a vase beside her; she wears pajamas that look like men’s pajamas, pants and a tunic; she has crossed her legs and Rebecca can see one thin ankle, milk white, hanging just below the hem.

  Rebecca looks away. There is something too perfect about it, the scene. It is what they all wanted, isn’t it? Marion. Rebecca. Sophie. The something someone else had; the life seen through a frame: to be a black-haired woman, to eat a ripe pear.

  Beneath the window the cobblestones shine wet. She might hear horse hooves, the quiet clopping of a team on their way to the Place des Vosges. She tries to see but the street is empty, shops shuttered and dark, water pooled in places, a cat. Into this she imagines the carriage, a woman behind its shuttered windows on her way somewhere else, her hand gloved in white velvet, her body swathed in stiff silk: a princess, a saint, a mother, a daughter, a goddess borne out of this place to another: a palace, an attic. There are babies there and devils, too; they are all of them hovering there waiting to descend, waiting to be asked, waiting to choose, waiting for their chance to be born.

  A MOTHER IS SOMEONE WHO TELLS JOKES

  Helen walks late into the salon, Lucy on another client: what looks like a low light. Lucy pauses, her hands in blue surgeon’s gloves. “Did you see? Did you come Twenty-third?” she asks, waiting.

  The other client waits, too, framed in Lucy’s baronial mirror or, at the very least, Baroque: the vanity, not the other client; the other client is decidedly Modern, Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Kahn, glass and steel, angular, with perfect acoustics and a smart bag. “It was incredible,” she says, a smudge of black dye on her forehead, hair foiled and epic. “Amazing.”

  “What?” Helen says. “What are we talking about?”

  “No one knows,” Lucy says. She secures the last tinfoil fold then peels off her gloves. “They were in the sky.”

  “On Twenty-third,” the other client says. “Twenty-third and Eighth,” she says, her neck an alabaster column up from a black robe, her head a severed Medusa.

  * * *

  Big has been dreaming of a cataclysmic event and Helen is on her last nerve. Who wouldn’t be? He wakes odd hours to report what’s to come next and who’s involved, sometimes teachers from Park Lane, his old school, and sometimes children with whom he has long lost touch—the grown boy from 5F they see buzzing in or hurrying out. In Big’s dreams, Helen and Max escort survivors onto boats or pieces of driftwood, sweep broken glass into dustbins. Helen rips their good sheets for tourniquets. It’s nice to know I’m handy in an emergency, Helen says, smoothing Big’s hair as she tries to balance next to him on his narrow twin bed, too small for Big but still he insists, preferring to scrunch tight against the plastic guardrail as he sleeps or doesn’t sleep.

  “You’d think I would faint,” she says. “I mean, ripping my good sheets?”

  “It’s an emergency,” Big says.

  “That would take an emergency,” Helen says.

  “Shut up, Helen,” Big says, kicking at his cowboy comforter, agitated, although usually he will laugh at her jokes: this is what Mrs. MacIntyre had said. Keep your sense of humor! Mrs. MacIntyre had said. Mrs. MacIntyre always their favorite, Big’s nursery school teacher all those years back, of the MacIntyre and Farrell fame, she would say, raised in a circus in Narragansett-by-the-Sea, her first friend a chimpanzee—true story—named Charlie Darwin. It had all rhymed.

  Big adored her. All the children adored her. How could they not adore her? She wore hats with plastic flowers. She owned kitten heels. “Here, kitty, kitty,” she would say, slipping them on to walk the children down the stairs and down the street to one of the playgrounds in Riverside Park. She had promised if they were well behaved and kept quiet voices and still hands she would bring in the photo of Charlie Darwin from the highly regarded newspaper known as The Boston Globe. She had promised she would read to them from the article entitled “Inseparable” featuring a certain teacher they might recognize at a certain age close to their own. In the photograph, this certain teacher wore white cotillion gloves and satin shoes handed down to her by one of the Freaks whose feet had been bound in a place far away known as China, she said, where these things once happened and where life is very different from our own.

  Is any of it true? Big wanted to know.

  In the corner of her classroom, Mrs. MacIntyre kept a box turtle named Francis Galton and a bowl with Useless Information she read aloud before Nap. Francis Galton, the real Charles Darwin’s cousin, Shakespeare born the year Michelangelo died. Tidbits that might come in handy, she told them, when carrying on a conversation. She had projects to construct, ideas to execute: before Mother’s Day she asked the children to fill in the blank: A mother is someone who… She would write their words, she said, and they could illustrate. Together they would make a book.

  Lily P. drew a set of stairs heading up to a bed, a circle on the bed with slashes for eyes and a crooked mouth. Beneath this Mrs. MacIntyre wrote: “A Mother Is Someone Who Takes Naps.” Sebastian drew a circle with lines shooting out of it, like the sun. “A Mother Is Someone Who Crosses the Street,” it read in Mrs. MacIntyre’s neat cursive. That was interesting, Helen had told Big, reading, but Big’s was best: “A Mother Is Someone Who Tells Jokes.” Big’s drawing a circle that took up the entire page, its center blank.

  * * *

  Helen strokes the stubble on Big’s cheek. He needs to shave.

  “A mother is someone who tells jokes,” she says, willing Big to look at her and smile.

  But Big isn’t looking. He’s staring off where he stares. “You don’t faint, Helen,” he says, his eyes wide in the half-dark, his cowboy quilt—too warm for this weather—at the footboard she fou
nd at Goodwill and painted all those years ago with scenes from Winnie-the-Pooh. “You get us out of trees.”

  “We’re in the trees?”

  “Treetops.”

  “In New York?”

  “There are treetops, Helen. There are lots of treetops in New York.”

  “We’re in a park?” she says. “That’s nice.” She pulls the quilt up to cover him. He is all arms and legs and hairy kneecaps.

  “Helen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you like cats or dogs?”

  Down the hall Max snores, oblivious. For many years Big was in their bed, and then, when Max insisted, Helen moved Big back to Big’s room, although most nights here she is with him, sitting on the floor or leaning against the plastic guardrail. She had explained to Max that Big needed to know she was there when he closed his eyes and Big needed to know she was there when he opened his eyes. It is what it is, she said to him, her husband, a man who now moves through the apartment like a quiet boarder, someone from the nineteenth century with a whispered past and stockinged feet, unassuming, baffled by life’s circumstances.

  “Both,” she says. “I like both,” she says.

  “I like cats. Slinky was our cat.”

  “Slinky was our cat.”

  “There were cats in the treetops but Slinky wasn’t there.”

  “Wasn’t he?” Helen says: Slinky the Cat, adopted from Bide-awee, a gray kitten, wide-eyed, terrified, its stubby, shaky legs, as if always a giraffe just up from a pose. Big had carried Slinky to the window to look out.

  “Slinky was a funny cat,” Big says.

  “Yes,” Helen says. “Slinky was a very funny cat.”

  * * *

  She saw nothing on Twenty-third, Helen tells Lucy and the other client, who now broils in the corner beneath the red heat lamp, a woman’s magazine in her lap. Lucy has fastened a black robe around Helen’s neck and raised the chair so Helen sits squarely in the view of the baronial mirror, her face reflected in its fissured, antique glass as if a spectral vision, a ghost from history, a canvas you might dream of and then wake unsettled. Lucy has decorated the elaborate chandelier overhead as fits Lucy’s cheerful character: white doves and sparkly fake snow, loops of low-hanging dime store pearls—careful, Lucy says, as Helen settles in. Wonderful, love, Lucy says, mixing Helen’s formula. Helen watches as Lucy begins to paint the dye on the white line of her part, starker in the chandelier light than in her bathroom mirror at home, though in truth she rarely looks in that mirror: it’s a good day if she gets to shower.

  She had actually crossed Twenty-second, and been delayed, she tells them, by a small gathering around Starbucks commemorating Edith Wharton, who had lived there—not the Starbucks, of course, though, hah! think of that—Edith Wharton and Henry James ordering a grande macchiato with extra foam—no, the gathering had been to place a plaque on what had apparently once been Edith Wharton’s home, or work space, or something, the gathering including an impromptu reading from Wharton’s New York stories Helen had not recognized but felt she should.

  Helen waits for Lucy or the other client to comment, but Lucy seems so absorbed in painting Helen’s part that she may not have heard a word. She methodically dips the paintbrush into the little plastic bowl in her hand then lifts and coats a swath of hair, the cold dye burning Helen’s scalp, the threads of thick cotton around her ears already itchy. The other client, God knows; Helen can no longer see her: she might be sizzled to a crisp. Broiled to nothing.

  “I saw the Pride and Prejudice with whatshisname as Darcy,” the other client suddenly says or, rather, yells: difficult to be heard within the helmet of heat.

  “Colin Firth,” Lucy says, tucking the cotton into the collar of Helen’s robe; a trickle of dye wet on Helen’s neck.

  “Don’t even,” the other customer yells. “Colin Firth. Young Colin Firth.”

  “That’s Austen,” Helen yells back, a little pissed for reasons she can’t name. “Jane Austen.”

  “I know,” the other client yells. “That’s what I said.”

  * * *

  It was Mrs. MacIntyre who first used the word spectrum, a word that still brings to Helen’s mind an arch of good-luck colors, a rainbow, Big sliding down like the goddess Iris to deliver an indecipherable message from Mount Olympus, his beautiful pale face scrunched with concentration. What you will learn, Mrs. MacIntyre had said, is that although here is not where you imagined you would be, there is beauty here nonetheless. You might have imagined you were taking a trip to Italy and had all sorts of ideas of what Italy would be, what you would do there, where you would go, the meals, the art, the warm people, and so forth, Mrs. MacIntyre had said.

  Helen and Max sat across from her in tiny seats at a tiny table, Mrs. MacIntyre’s voice naturally amplified as if the oracle at Delphi. Surrounding them were the many plush stuffed animals Mrs. MacIntyre refused to get rid of even after the lice epidemic, each stuffed animal named and adopted by one of the children, a special buddy they would find before morning meeting and hold in their laps as they sat in a circle on the circular carpet outlined with the alphabet.

  “And then the door opens and, without warning, Antarctica!” Mrs. MacIntyre continued. “Not a place you ever imagined you would be, not even a place you wanted to visit. All you know of Antarctica is ice and cold.”

  “And penguins,” Helen had said, because she could not stand it: she could not stand the way Mrs. MacIntyre was speaking to them, as if they, too, were sitting on the circular alphabet carpet, name tags pinned to their chests. First-day jitters. How did Mrs. MacIntyre know a goddamn thing? The woman was raised in a circus!

  “I blame the city,” Helen’s sister-in-law later said. “Get out. Living there in those tiny spaces? It’s like raising veal,” she said, the two of them staring at her high-achieving suburban boys, pale as the moon, waxing, or possibly waning, poured like beams onto the couch in their basement rec room, deep into their video games.

  But still, Antarctica. In the end it wasn’t a bad way of describing everything, she supposed. Think of ice, she found herself saying to Big, trying to explain to him the fact of him after all the various experts and diagnoses, after he started asking questions. For example, she said, imagine if ice were denser than water, which you would think it would be, right? But if ice were denser than water, then a lake would freeze from the bottom up and life, what we know as the entire chemistry of life, would cease to exist.

  “This is the point,” she told him. “Everything is a mystery.”

  * * *

  What did she even remember of Edith Wharton? The ones she had loved were the Romantics, and Wharton was unlike any of those women, the women among the Romantics, women who seemed to, at a moment’s notice, drop their lives to sail to the continent with dying lovers, or tempestuous lovers, or lesbian lovers, towing their children behind or leaving their children behind or never having children at all. They changed their names and dressed like boys. They lived on nothing more than water and what they caught with their hands from the sea. Wharton, as she remembered, had been wealthy, a woman of society, or at least of means.

  Not like Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy, galumphing next to her brother as he walked through daffodils, or so Helen imagined, Dorothy calling to him from the lakeshore as he rowed one way and then another, as he watched the shadows, the play of light, reveling in his spots of time. Or maybe Dorothy hadn’t called to him from the lakeshore at all, maybe she had steered the boat. So many of the women did. Unnoticed. Quiet. Allowing the geniuses to concentrate and scribble. Scribblers, Smith called them; Smith himself, he let on, guilty of penning a sonnet or two. But alas his other tasks, namely education of overachieving midwesterners who couldn’t give a damn, got in his way. She had adored him: greasy-haired, shy, the fifth Beatle or the reincarnation of one of her hero poets, a graduate student charged with this discussion group, their TA. Then she had dried her hair straight and kept endless index cards with sentences written in her studied, l
oopy hand. Pens bought at the co-op for their colors, their promised clarity: green, purple, pink. Smith barely audible, mumbling and still—it was a terrible crush.

  Plus, he smoked! His cigarette balanced in a glass ashtray he took out of his mailbag, stuffed with their papers he graded in his cramped hand, ellipses, she remembers, as if everything he wrote actually meant something more, something too overwhelming to articulate, too profound. First, always, he placed the ashtray on the wooden desk at the front of the room—those days when chairs still faced forward—and then slowly he took his rolling papers and bag of tobacco from his corduroy jacket, an olive green that nicely clashed with his khaki pants and tennis sneakers. He took a while, rolling the cigarette he would smoke as he recited his Wordsworth, his Byron, his Coleridge, his Shelley, at times pausing to pick tobacco from his tongue, or lip, the cigarette, almost gone, balanced against the sullied picture of Margaret Thatcher in the glass ashtray’s well. He would eventually stub the butt on her face in rebellion. His teeth were predictably long and yellow, yet his eyes, as she remembers, were a glorious, stormy gray.

  Lately, to keep awake, she recites “Tintern Abbey,” her favorite, from the bookshelf in Big’s room that still holds those textbooks, Norton Anthology’s index to the Romantics. She had forgotten. The Romantics were her favorites; the Romantics were always her favorites.

  “Who were they?” Big asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “People. They had amazing lives though short, too. They were always sailing to new places, beautiful places like Greece and Spain, but by the time they got there they had compromised lungs, things to worry about. It can happen. They also drowned a lot or, I mean, a bunch of them drowned.”