Saturday. Matthew’s gone off somewhere. On errands, he said. I stopped at Mrs. M.’s and walked off with a smelly armful of her clothes, to take to the cleaners. That stretch of Farmington Avenue always depressing–the buildings squat and run-down, the signs look like broken teeth. And worse today, with soggy leaves in little mounds against the buildings and along the curb.
I nodded into the window at Pat’s bookstore because my arms were full and I couldn’t wave.
Pat’s just one of my stories for Matthew, she only exists for him because I told him about her. How I met her that spring morning, coming home from errands, walking along, tossing my keys high and catching them as they fell, tossing higher, walking faster in an upward spiral of rhythm, step/toss, step/catch, step/toss the keys higher, closer to sunlight, straight and brightly and catching my foot on a tipped slab of pavement, stumbling down.
Landing hard, hands and knees on pavement as the keys fell to rest just inside a low white fringe of plastic pickets around a tiny grass apron protecting an old city house from the dust of the street. And kneeling just inside the pickets, setting geraniums into very red rows, was Pat.
Didn’t hurt yourself, did you?
Oh. No. No, just turned my ankle, a little. Are those my keys there? Could I
By all means. Such a lovely morning? You new to the neighborhood? Pat Oakes, I run the Shop of Good News, bookstore up on Farmington Ave? Christian books, proceeds to the Universal Word of the Faith Church down Wethersfield Ave–you know where that is? Stop by the store sometime, I’ll give you directions?
Pat now standing, small, looking as if she’d been scrubbed thin, her hair stunned by chemicals into blonde immobility, her eyes green and glittery with deep, snaky intelligence. But her hand, wriggled out from the gardening glove, was warm, her smile friendly.
Glad to know you, dear. What’s your name?
And so the questions began. l told Matthew how the square of grass had seemed much too small, forced us to stand too close. How I stepped back onto the grey civic safety of the sidewalk. How Pat had followed. How long it had taken for me to escape, the keys sinking jagged edges into my hand. Going amid sociable smiles and waves.
And then, after nodding into the window to Pat, I decided not to tell Matthew I saw her, I won’t come home with another story for him, offered up like a living thing on the altar of our closeness. Forget it. No more little stories about Oh, I saw Pat, or the man at the liquor store said the wine was almost too dry. Forget it.
What does he tell me? His day, he crumples up like junk mail. Nothing much, The usual, Hectic, Slow. One word, maybe two. And now there’s this thing in the crawl space and he’s walking the streets all night, where does he go, and doesn’t want to talk about any of it. At least to me.
So there I am on Farmington Ave, my knees almost buckled under the weight of wanting to curl myself down on the curb between two parked cars, and cry. But I stayed on my feet and kept blinking, forcing myself to notice the intensity of the colors that were coming through the screen of tears. Which I wasn’t about to let fall. After the cleaners I went into The Hive, plopped myself into a booth and ordered myself some cinnamon apple tea.
No, I won’t tell him anything about my morning. I’ve told him too many mornings. Lying in bed, walking down the street, almost anywhere. All my stories, the ones anyway I’m willing to tell. The ones about me and Beryl. Painting my hair with streaks of peroxide when we’re fifteen, or building a treehouse in Berry’s backyard when we’re nine, way back as far as we could so we couldn’t can’t hear the shrieking at her house from before her parents’ divorce . or my mother’s weepy silences that no one was ever brave enough to step in. I sat in the Hive, wiping my nose with paper napkins, sipping scalding tea and thinking maybe what he likes about these stories, about me and Berry, is that the passion of friendship is voluntary, like it is with lovers, like it can never entirely be with family.
On Cape Cod one weekend, in a cold drizzle walking Race Point beach, I held his hand and told him what it was like when I went off to college. How I worried about Beryl, stuck on the lumpy rock of home, with no fancy grades to ship herself off. How I’d sit talking on the phone to Berry, scrunched up in the closet of that barren little dorm room, so I could escape the wail of Clare’s country music, the endless tales of loss. But then one day I jumped up in excitement, dropping the phone into one of my boots and making half my clothes fall down because Berry told me she had a new job in a florist’s shop—window displays, flower arrangements, cash register, how she really loved working in this shop—and by the way, she’d quit school.
I told him all this, clutching his hand on that drizzly beach, telling him these stories, my throat aching with the remembering and with the effort of speaking over the noise of the ocean.
My throat aching from not crying in the Hive, today, swallowing tea and thinking how he’d listened so carefully, like he knew it wasn’t just me shutting out Clare’s stupid music, it was an intimate almost secret thing, giving him my l ife to imagine, my separateness before we met. And then, sitting there in the Hive this morning I pushed the empty teapot away from me and saw fully, for the first time, how empty is the other side of the scale, the side where his stories should sit.
My side’s weighed down with details not just of my life, but mine as it’s tied to others, like Berry. I told him that soggy afternoon at the beach how the following year at school, in another closet, I jumped to my feet and knocked down all the hangers and clothes again when Berry told me how the old lady who owned the flower shop wanted out, had offered to let Berry buy the store—and would finance the purchase. And Berry was terrified but she did it; before her twentieth birthday owned the business.
And then the old lady—meaning so well, only trying to help—called the local newspaper, and the next day a reporter called Berry, asked to do an interview: Park Street’s Youngest Merchant, that sort of thing, he said.
I told him all this at Race Point beach, it was deserted, I was squeezing his hand and the story came out in spurts.
The photographer who came along on the story was the reporter’s friend, up for the weekend from New York. Gerard. I told Matthew how suddenly all I heard in her phone calls was Gerard, his letters, his visits—Gandhi, Superman, and Washington combined couldn’t live up to this billing.
I sat on that cold horizonless beach and told him the whole thing. How I knew something was wrong about this guy, I tried to tell Berry, Go slow, you haven’t had that much experience with men. She hung up on me for three months.
By the time she’d speak to me again she’d sold her shop, she and Gerard were living in New York, married, expecting a child. I tried to explain to Matt, over the salt wet wind of the beach, how I kept telling myself this business of Berry and Gerard would be okay, then, knowing all the time that it wouldn’t be.
When I went down to New York to visit her, I stayed, just to be safe, with my aunt in Yonkers. I helped Berry decorate the nursery that the baby, Megan, saw only a few times between hospital stays, during her eight months of life.
Remembering all this, this morning, in the stupid cafe, I felt like crying, like I cried on the beach with Matthew, and I had no warm hand to hold onto this morning, like I’d had then. Telling him how I arrived the morning after Megan’s birth, was getting off a subway car with a bunch of postChristmas shoppers just about the time that Gerard walked into Berry’s hospital room, said, This is your fault, you little bitch, what the hell did you do? And grabbed her by her shoulder, It’s your fault this happened, how could you do this to me? And he started smacking her so hard across the face that she fell out of bed. By some miracle he didn’t break anything, though her face was horrible, her right eye swollen shut.
Gerard had this friend of his, Jeff, call me up in Yonkers that same night. Gerard’s left on assignment. In Vienna, he said. Jeff gave me his work number, but nothing else about Gerard—no address, no phone, no explanation. And I didn’t ask for any. I knew, Berry and everyone else knew, that Gerard wouldn’t see his daughter again. No one wanted him to.
In Berry’s hospital room the next morning, her mother kept turning her back and faking a cough so no one would see her crying; her father sat by the window like an unwatered plant. Here are the keys to the apartment, Berry told me, and her voice was thin and steady and terrible as a sharpened knife, Would you please pack up his things please and get his friend Jeff to take them away?
I slashed through every closet and drawer in the apartment, snatching up anything that looked un-Berry, stuffing it all into plastic trash bags, stopping only to call Jeff, tell him that if he’s not there in two hours to get it, I don’t care if you’re at work, I’ll throw it all down the trash chute, where your friend Gerard belongs. If you talk to him tell him his wife and baby will be staying there until Berry can find somewhere else to live, and she’s having the locks changed today.
Look, he said, l feel terrible about this, about Gerard, I don’t know—maybe he can’t—
Don’t you give me can’t, I hissed, Can’t is getting smashed to pieces by a bus as you’re running to the hospital to be with your wife and sick baby. Everything else is won’t.
Can’t was saving Megan. I watched the small feathers of her life fall and fall on Berry till I thought their weight would break her. I couldn’t stand the though of leaving Berry, I told Matt as we sat there huddled on that cold damp sand, So I decided to take a leave of absence from grad school. But Berry said No, the only way I couldn’t refuse: I know you’re here even when you’re not. Please don’t make me feel guilty about you, on top of this.
So I stayed in school, and that was when my Megan paintings began—Megan as baby, girl, and woman, sick, well, real, in dreamscapes—Megan, over and over. Those paintings Gardiner said were the first valid work I’d ever done. They convinced him I could paint, he thought they were odd, and some disgusting, but they got him excited about my work when I couldn’t have cared less. All I cared about was the paintings and getting through what was happening. Berry and Megan and the paintings, there wasn’t anything else, I told Matthew that day on the beach.
I left the Hive and headed home to get a little work in before I go to meet Matt, and as I walked I found myself thinking for the first time how Matthew and Gardiner and Mrs. M, my job, my work—one way or another Megan had brought them all to me. What does it mean, that my happiness comes from that? That she’s part of me now, like a nerve, connecting me to all the rest? But did I take that nerve from her, use it because l needed it, or was it somehow given? A gift, like the feel of her infant breath on my cheek.
When the last breath fell from Megan’s body, Beryl’s mother told me, all Berry said was, Call Sarah.
But then Berry disappeared. A few weeks after the funeral, just the day after she drove back to her mother’s house, outside Boston, she took her mother out to dinner, thanked her for all she’d done. When her mother woke up the next morning, Berry was gone.
She stayed gone for almost three years, calling one or the other of her parents or me after silences of weeks or months to say she was fine, was waiting tables in El Paso, cashiering in a natural foods store in Park City, clerking in a gift shop in Little Rock, a drug store in Baton Rouge, another in Cincinnati, not to worry, she had to go, goodbye. Then a call from a new place, a florist in Valley Forge. The florist I knew, was a good sign. And so was Valley Forge: Berry was edging closer.
By then I was teaching, I told Matt on the beach that day, with the drizzle turning to rain so we had to run back toward the car—I told him how I called every florist in and around Valley Forge until I found the one where she worked, then on the first day of spring break drove down. It was almost closing time when I got there.. I looked in the window and there she was, arranging anemones and irises and ferns and looking almost peaceful.
Three days later she was in her same old battered yellow MG, the one she’d driven out of her life in Hartford, and following me home. I thought, when I got her here, how everything seemed rounding toward completion—some reasonable, of course not perfect shape. Gardiner, a.k.a. Rubin Teitelbaum, would have laughed himself silly if he’d heard me say those words, completion and perfect. And of course I know completion isn’t possible. But still, Gardiner was more wrong that I was. His idea of completion didn’t have anything to do with love.
Just finished off old Io. When I took on these Metamorphoses illustrations I wasn’t much interested in the text: I took it for the money of course and then it was something to put in my portfolio. Also there was this little feeling about obliging Gardiner—which I would never admit to Matt—since Poundstone was sort of a friend of his. Was. But making these illustrations—each drawing seems to go into some dark terrain, you’ve got these powerful capricious gods and goddesses fiddling around in the lives of these poor foolish mortals and there’s all this mutability that’s so potent and dazzling and scary and seductive.
Anyway, I’m done with poor old doomed Io.
previous, 25 September, cont’d next, 27 September
The Nature of Things 