Days of Awe (13 page)

Cal drops my hand in front of apartment 447 and knocks, more of an alert than a question, since he has his key in the lock before his mother has a chance to say
Come in
or
Don't.
He turns to me, raises his eyebrows, and smiles in a way that reminds me of the look on Hannah's face at last year's spelling bee, right before she started to spell “psychology” with a
c.

Vivian Abbott is sitting in her small, warm living room in a blue armchair, her back to us, staring out the window, as if she had been sent from central casting: Old Woman, Waiting. There is an intermittent clicking noise that I at first attribute to the heating system. As it turns out, she's staring not at the scenery but at her computer screen, typing.

“Goddammit,” she says, turning to us. “I was in the middle of a sentence.” She holds up a hand and waves to us. “Cal, what are you doing here?”

“Hi, Mom.” He walks over to her, leans down, and kisses her on the cheek. “You sounded a little funny when we spoke this morning. I wanted to come check on you.”

“You're a good boy,” she says. “And you always have been.” She sets her computer down on the table next to the chair, then stands and pulls her lavender cardigan around herself. Even here, aged and frail in the independent-living unit of Lutheran Manor, Vivian Abbott is a beauty. Her eyes are bright blue and clearly appraising as she looks me up and down. Her skin is pale and delicately lined, softening her fine, sharp features. I wouldn't have guessed how old she is. She looks slightly younger than Cal.

“Hello, darling,” she says to me. Then, to Cal, “Is she Michael's friend?”

“No,” Cal says. “Isabel is my friend.”

“My goodness,” Vivian says.

I walk over to her, and she takes my hand in hers. Her palm is dry and papery. With her left hand, she pats my upper arm. I want to hug her. How can Cal say she's hateful? I guess we just cling to our old misunderstandings, those early injuries.

“You have very unusual features,” Vivian says, squeezing my hand. “Such thick hair and dark eyes. Are you a Turk?”

“Mom. Isabel is not a Turk.”

“Are you sure?” she asks me. “I'm sorry, but I don't trust Turks. I had a cleaning lady who was Turkish. I don't need to tell you what happened there. Well, I don't trust Spaniards, either, for that matter, so I can't be a bigot, even though Cal says I am.” She smiles sweetly. “I'm just happy to hear you're not a Turk.”

“Oh, Mom,” Cal says. “And I'm just happy you're feeling okay.”

“I certainly am.” She winks at me, and I wink back. “You are darling. I can see why Michael likes you.”

“We brought you some cookies,” Cal says, handing her a bag I hadn't noticed he'd been carrying.

“Pecan Sandies. My favorite! How is Michael?” she asks me.

“He's fine, Mom. He's in San Francisco, remember?”

“Of course I remember! He's out there working for that Internet security company. We Skyped last week. He looked so handsome. I'm just wondering if you've spoken to him
since
then.” She waves her hand dismissively at Cal and clucks her tongue. “Elizabeth,” she says to me, “my son brought you all the way out here just to show you that I'm not in full possession of my faculties. Well, I am.”

“Mom,” Cal says. “That's not why…”

She waves him away again and will now make eye contact only with me. “We'll enjoy these cookies. Pecan Sandies, my favorite. Would you be so kind as to go into the kitchen and get me my sterling-silver serving platter? It's in the cupboard over the sink. I would do it myself, but I might get lost on my way back from the kitchen.” She puts her hands on her hips and juts out her chin imperiously, like a much-younger woman, then, exhausted by all the effort, eases herself back down into her armchair.

In the cupboard over the sink there are three plastic cups, a butter knife, and a bottle of antacid. I'm searching the rest of the spotless kitchen, quietly, for the serving plate, when I overhear Mrs. Abbott say, “If not a Turk, then what? Sicilian?”

“No, Mom, she's Irish,” Cal says loudly, for my benefit.
“Black Irish.”

This is the weirdest situation I've ever been in, including the time a squirrel tried to climb up my leg in the park.

“Oh, I know black Irish,” Vivian says, “and she's not that. She's has lovely skin, though.”

I feel a little puff of pride. I do have lovely skin! This is why you go on a date with a man who is almost twenty years older than you are: so that his elderly mother will compliment you behind your back.

“She's a little heavy in the hips, though. Pretty enough, but not
too
pretty,” she continues. “That's important. Catherine, you'll forgive me for saying, was too pretty. Too pretty for you, too pretty for her own good.”

“Mom, please, shush.”

“What? A plain Jane will treat you better!” She's practically shouting now. “It's common knowledge, Calvin.”

“I don't think I've ever had a Pecan Sandy before,” I announce, carrying out a large green plastic plate shaped like a Christmas tree. “This was all I could find. Sorry.” In fact, I did find the silver platter she was looking for. But it was too pretty! Ha!

Cal looks at me like we're both disappointed fans of the losing team. I wink at him.

I sit down and bite into a cookie. “They are well named.”

“Is it the taste, or the grainy texture?” Cal says.

I make a face at him, try to make it look like I'm eating sand and also that I forgive him.

“Well, as long as you're here, I'll tell you,” Vivian says with a sigh as she reaches for a Sandy. “Marie over in four fifteen had a stroke, and they moved her down to the first floor. She's a young one, too. Seventy-nine.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Is she a friend of yours?”

“That's not the point, is it?” Vivian snaps. “And no.”

It goes on like this for a while; hours, possibly, although according to the clock only twenty-three minutes. Addie Warner in 445 took a fall the other day and did not report it to the nurses, can you imagine? Was it really a Mennonite holiday last week, or were Mr. and Mrs. Messerschmitt across the hall angling for special treatment from the staff?

Finally Cal stands up. “Mom, thanks for the visit, and I'm glad you're okay,” he says. “I will see you on Saturday. I have to go now.” For an awful moment I think he's leaving me here. Then, for the second time today, he reaches for my hand, pulls me up. “Isabel and I have something arranged for this afternoon.”

Mrs. Abbott looks up at her son. Her face is as open and vulnerable as a baby's, her pale lips slightly open, her eyes bereft.
Don't leave me,
don't leave me.
She might as well be saying it out loud; her gaze is so naked and pleading that I have to look away. All I want right now is to leave this too-warm apartment, this old woman who has nothing to do with me, her sour, calcified, aching need. My hand is in Cal's as if it belongs there. I am the opposite magnet pulling him away, going, going.

“I'll be back on Saturday,” Cal says again.

Vivian Abbott's expression hardens. Still sitting in her blue armchair, she runs a bony hand down her pants, swooshes off cookie crumbs, pats down her hair. “Well. Fine. Knock before you come in,” she says. “And next time wait for an answer.”

I didn't think of them as babies. They weren't. They were pieces of me, though: secrets, sweet hazy dreams, the thrumming anticipation of surprises. I guarded them tenderly, selfishly, and so when they were gone I grieved them like amputations, silent deaths, down, down, deep at the center of me.

After two of them, we got Hannah, warm and fat and loud, throbbing with life, oblivious to its alternative, but then, a couple years later, another one lost, and then another one almost two years ago, and by the end of it, for sure, a part of me was broken, just shattered, gone.

When I called my mother after the last one, she said, “I always hoped that maybe, after everything that happened, we would be spared.”

“Ridiculous,” I said, sobbing. “Say something useful. Make me feel better.”

“I wish I could,” she said.

Chris held me and said, “We can try again…if you want to,” and that was sort of helpful, but I felt almost as sorry for him as I did for myself, at least partly because procreational sex with an anxious, grieving woman is a pretty dismal affair. There are frequently, for example, tears, and I don't know for sure, but I don't think you can mistake those little half-suppressed sobs for moans of pleasure no matter how badly you want to.

Mark said, “Oh, man. Oh, wow. I'm so sorry, Iz. I'm really sorry.” There was a long pause, and then, “Here, let me go get Josie. Here, here she is. Here's Jose.” And that was helpful, because he got Josie.

Josie said, “I'll get you drunk,” and that was the most helpful of all.

We met at Heinrich von Raaschke's. It was Oktoberfest. For some reason we thought this would be a good idea. It was unseasonably warm, and you could sit outside in the Bierhaus's biergarten, which was cozy and strung with lights and smelled like apple cider.

“I love the way everything's a
garten
in German,” I said, pulling my chair out and sitting down. “Biergarten, kindergarten.”

“I think the two should be combined,” Josie said, “into a kindergarten where beer is served.”

“Or a beer garden where children are served.”

“You mean like children are served alcohol,” Josie said, “or children are served as food?”

“Food.”

“Yes.” She unfolded her napkin and glanced around for the waitress. “Everyone knows five-year-olds make the tenderest cuts of meat.”

“Their little thighs and their butts,” I said, thinking of Hannah, who was already in fifth grade. And then, without warning, I started to tear up.

“Oh,” Josie said. “Oh, Izzy.”

I squared my shoulders and waved away her sympathy. “It's all right,” I said. “I'm just crying because when you eat a five-year-old, the portions are so small.”

Josie nodded. “And it's like, do you order two, or do you just order one ten-year-old?”

I blew my nose in my napkin. Noises rose up from the people around us—boisterous laughter, glasses clinking, silverware scraping. “I'm so sad,” I said.

“I know.”

This was the thing about Josie and me, how we understood each other: goofy jokes skating on the surface and the truth of what lay underneath, the complicated architecture of it all. It was how we loved each other.

“Goddamn,” she said. “Where is Katie?” She was our favorite waitress. And we had been coming here for so long that we not only knew the servers, we knew which sections of the restaurant they worked. When the biergarten was open, Katie had the back half, Leni the front.

“Here I am, ladies!” Katie waddled up to our table. It had been a while since our last visit: she was hugely pregnant.

“Oh, my God,” Josie said.

Katie laughed and crossed her arms over her chest. “I guess I haven't seen you two in a few months. But don't worry, I won't go into labor until after I bring you your drinks.” She paused for dramatic effect, then leaned down conspiratorially. “I'm actually only six months along. It's twins!”

“Congratulations,” I said, and smiled like my face was being pulled apart. I'd been through this before. After my first miscarriage, I saw a pregnant woman sitting on a bench eating a sandwich, and I burst into tears. After that, except for work, I didn't leave my house for a week. But you can't live that way. So I taught myself how to fake it—smile, smile, smile—and it turned out not to be that hard. Practice makes perfect.

“Don't you already
have
two kids?” Josie asked, aghast, and I loved her.

“Yep, sure do.” Katie rolled her eyes. “Fertile Myrtle, that's me.”

I swiped at my face with my napkin and looked away.

Josie stood up then and swooped around to my side of the table so fast the silverware rattled. “Oh, my God, I'm so sorry! I just realized I forgot something at home. I forgot my, um, my stuff…that I need. We have to leave! Is that okay with you, Iz? Do you mind? Can we go? I'm sorry, Katie.” I nodded and stood, ready to bolt.

Katie was already calmly clearing our water glasses. “Oh, gosh, don't worry about it,” she said, a little distracted, holding the glasses with plump, swollen fingers, efficiently moving on to her next table, because this was her job, and no matter how much she liked us, paying customers were the ones who tipped. “Come back soon!” she called. She blew a stray hair away from her face. “Come back before these darn babies are born!”

I walked quickly, ahead of Josie, through the biergarten and around the building to the parking lot, where our cars were parked next to each other. The early October evening was humid, almost tropical; in a couple of weeks, the autumn cold would move in, icy and dank, and these last warm gasps would be a memory.

Josie steadied me with both hands on my shoulders and stared at my face like a lover. “Crap on a cracker,” she said.

“It's fine,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“That pregnant bitch,” she whispered.

“I know! So rude, how she flaunts it.”

“Let's go for a drive,” she said. “My car.”

Josie was always good at navigating, compensating for my innate directional inability. She drove everywhere, unless we didn't care if we got lost. The compromise, though, was that she got to make the rules. “Where should we go?” she asked, and turned left out of the parking lot without waiting for me to answer.

“Why don't we go to the maternity ward at St. Luke's and admire some newborns,” I said. “Or let's see what's going on at the Mommy and Me class at Gymboree.”

“Hmmm,” Josie said, pretending to consider my suggestions. “No. Let's do something illegal!” She slapped her palm on the steering wheel.

I turned to her. My whole life, anytime anyone suggested doing something even slightly dangerous—going for a ride on the back of a motorcycle, swimming in a lake with no lifeguard on duty, taking a particularly large bite of something—I would hear my mother's voice:
You're my life.
Helene staked her claim against the risk takers, the gamblers, the brave.
We don't do that,
she would say.
Please never do that.

And then came Hannah, and I understood. I was so risk averse when she was a baby that some days just crossing the street with her in my arms seemed fraught with peril. “Jose, you know I don't—”

“I'm kidding, I'm kidding,” Josie said. “I know you don't. And I know where I'm taking you.”

She drove through downtown, veering east along mostly deserted streets that were familiar but nevertheless confounding to me. I relaxed against the back of the seat and let her drive. An empty plastic cup rolled around on the floor at my feet. Josie's car was the manifestation of her id: a familiar mix of candy-bar wrappers and packs of spearmint gum and empty Diet Pepsi cans and napkins, a few stray student papers, and a medium-sized purple stuffed mouse and a small stack of art magazines in the backseat. It smelled like her, coconut shampoo and vanilla oil, sugary, a little burned. I had been with her when she bought this car, years earlier, almost new. The end of it was just a few months away.

We drove for about twenty minutes in relative silence, the kind of peaceful quiet you don't really note as unusual until it's pointed out to you—how rare and peculiar it is to feel comfortably alone without being alone. I thought about Hannah, home with Chris. It was nine o'clock. She was almost eleven years old, but she still liked to fall asleep in our bed, and then, hours later, one of us would carry her to her own bed. Sometimes she would wake up just enough to mutter something—
Mom
or
Thirsty
or
Where's Clucky?
—but mostly she would just stay asleep, slumped over and heavy on Chris's shoulder or mine.

By the time I focused on where we were going, we were there.

She had taken me through the city and out of it, into the dark heart of the suburbs. We were coasting down one of the beachfront lanes in Porcupine Bluff, a wealthy enclave. This was a private road;
NO TRESPASSING
signs were posted all the way down the dark hill toward the lake. We
were
doing something illegal! She parked on a little promontory overlooking the water, sandwiched between another
NO TRESPASSING
sign and a
NO PARKING
one.

“Jose!” I said.

“Come on, you love it here.”

I did. We'd been coming here for years, although less often recently. Technically, you could get ticketed just for being here, but the suburban police force was an inconsistent entity. Some nights they would be out in force, lights flashing, sirens blipping, power mad and bored, with nothing better to do than order a couple of giggling women off the rocks. Other nights you could roam the wild, dark, deserted beach and feel like you were somewhere else completely—the rocky coast of Maine, or Mars.

We got out of the car and scrambled down the gradual slope to the sand. Once we were underneath the rocky outcrop, there was a little stretch of sand where we were invisible to anyone walking or driving by on the road above. Other people must have known about this spot, and the
NO TRESPASSING
signs seemed like they would be catnip to teenagers. But this beach was rare and untouched, the sand blown smooth and perfect. We'd never seen anyone down here besides the occasional jogger or dog walker.

Josie stood a few feet from me, staring out at the calm water. “How can this be private property?” she said. “How can twenty or thirty suburban homeowners claim this beach? Is Lake Michigan theirs, too?” She spread her skinny arms out wide as if she were reclaiming the land for all of humanity.

I shrugged. The moon was tiny and dim behind hazy clouds. The night sky, muted by those clouds, was a dirty shade of pewter. The waves thwapped against the shore, water and earth perennially fading into each other.

“We should take the kids on a field trip here,” Josie went on, riling herself up. “Oh, my God, Iz. How about that? An illegal field trip!”

It was hard to know when she was kidding about a thing like this. The Claire Whitley incident at Lake Kass was long past. Josie never wanted to talk about it—not once—and so, eventually, I had stopped trying. But it had peeled away a fine layer of her, and what was underneath was a little strange and raw. Three or four of my students had come to me just since the start of the school year with reports of Josie's off-the-wall comments. “Don't listen to every single thing your parents tell you,” she had said a few times, and, “Learn it for the test, you guys, and then go ahead and forget it. You will never need to know the history of the cotton gin.”

“I think that's a fine idea,” I said. “Maybe we could take them to a bar after, and buy them cigarettes and condoms.”

She laughed, an appreciative little
heh,
and shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans.

I slipped off my shoes and walked to the edge of the lake. Josie followed. The freezing water lapped up onto our feet. Josie yelped and jumped back, but I liked the shock of it, the icy pain and then the bone ache, the way it pinned your focus. I moved back only when I couldn't stand it anymore. And then we stood there, just quiet again in the soft darkness, for a few minutes.