Dive From Clausen's Pier (45 page)

I was home from the copy shop, exhausted and sad, too jumpy to sit still. I found a knife and cut open the box, curious at what I’d left behind. When I saw, my heart sank. What had I been expecting? A leather jacket I wouldn’t recognize? A baby-rib pointelle cardigan? These were the things I
hadn’t
packed, and I didn’t want to be the person who’d bought them, let alone the person who still owned them. A Badgers sweatshirt, pleated wide-wale cords, a stack of cotton turtlenecks. I was dismayed. I closed the box and shoved it back into the closet, next to my old Kenmore sewing machine, the machine my Bernina had replaced. Sewing on the Kenmore—that was how I’d learned. Switching to the Bernina had been like getting out of a twenty-year-old pickup and sliding behind the wheel of a BMW.

The Kenmore outweighed the Bernina by a good ten pounds. I lugged it to my desk and set it down with a heavy clunk. My mother was on the other side of the wall, in her office doing paperwork, and in a moment she appeared, a curious look on her face. She saw the machine and broke into a smile. “Look at that old jalopy.”

“Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”

“Why’d we ever hang on to it?”

“Low blood sugar,” I said. It was a Kilroy expression, his explanation for anything left undone, and I looked away, flushing a little.

“Are you OK?”

“Just tired.”

“Jamie’s pretty angry?”

I nodded.

She’d been standing in the doorway, and now she came in and looked over my shoulder at the machine. She wore a string of off-white beads over her work shirt, and I thought that must be the thing that separated her from other people living alone, that she would put on a necklace for a day when she probably wouldn’t leave the house.

She said, “Does it help to know that she’s probably putting a lot of her anger on you because it’s too hard to put it on Lynn or her mother?”

I smiled halfheartedly. “Not really.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and patted it. “I guess it wouldn’t.”

I faced the desk and rested my forehead on my hand. I heard her shift behind me, and I looked up and said, “I feel like if I could just think of the right thing to say we could get past it, and then I could go back to New York.”

She cocked her head. “That’s what you really want to do, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She had some new khakis she’d been meaning to get hemmed, and a little later I pinned them for her, then somehow managed to get the sewing machine working, finding an old needle in a basket in my closet, along with some thread and an empty bobbin. When I asked, it turned out she had some other alterations she needed done, so I sewed for a couple hours more, taking in the waist on a skirt, mending the torn lining of a blazer. It got dark, and I turned on my desk lamp and in the pool of light it threw worked until there was nothing more for me to do.

Sunday morning I walked over to the Fletchers’. Mrs. Fletcher was being transferred to a place called Wellhaven that day, a psychiatric hospital halfway to Janesville, and I stared at the empty house, wondering how she’d be moved: strapped to a gurney or vacant-eyed in the back of Mr. Fletcher’s Lincoln Continental.

Maple trees with their smooth trunks. Sycamores with patchy bark, many-armed oak trees reaching for the sky. If New York was a city of
noise, Madison was a city of trees. It was so early in spring that they were still leafless, but there was a feeling of new green about them, a feeling that in a week or so you’d start to see it, the tiniest pale hints.

I walked down the driveway to the backyard. Looking up at the beige house, I thought of a night when Jamie and I were fourteen and she snuck down and met me on the lawn, where I waited with a pair of contraband beers. Ten years later, I remembered it vividly: the feel of the damp grass as we sat leaning against the back fence; the way the house looked, outlined against the dark night. And how bold we felt, how reckless.

Back out front, I stood thinking for a moment, then set off again, covering another four or five blocks. I stopped in front of a brick house with a for-sale sign on the lawn. Next door was the house I’d always thought of as the baby house, although the baby was probably in third grade by now, and beyond that was the Mayers’.

From where I stood I could see the house’s profile, plus the tail end of an unfamiliar white van in the driveway. It was nearly noon, and I tried to imagine what was going on inside. There was church, but Mr. and Mrs. Mayer didn’t go every week, and the kids rarely went at all. Mrs. Mayer in the kitchen, that was easy. Mr. Mayer off playing golf, or maybe out in the garage fixing something. Julie away at Swarthmore. John Junior—well, he was probably still asleep. And Mike …

Where in the house would Mike be? What would he be doing? What did he do all day? All week? The president of the bank where he used to work had been a good visitor at the hospital, especially once Mike was in rehab. He made a big thing of assuring Mike that there’d be a job waiting for him when he was ready. Had Mike become ready? Had he gone back to the bank? I didn’t think so, didn’t see how he could have started working again without my knowing it. Wouldn’t someone have told me, my mother? Then again, maybe not.

I stood in front of the brick house for a long time, a very long time for standing still on a square of residential sidewalk in Madison, Wisconsin. A well-groomed older man in a red windbreaker came out of the house across the street. He carried a spade, and after a curious look at me he set to turning the beds that ran alongside his lawn. The Colonel, that’s what Mike used to call him. He’d always had a military look about him. Still did.

I turned and headed back. The air was damp and cool, but people had begun to come out for walks, stout and unfashionable people in their church clothes, young couples with babies in strollers. “Morning,” they said as they passed me.

At my mother’s I sat in the kitchen and drank a cup of coffee. After a while I went upstairs for my sketchbook from Piero’s class. The things I’d stapled in there, the things I’d drawn: I couldn’t quite retrieve my initial impulses. I got my colored pencils and tried to sketch something, but I couldn’t find a way to start.

I went to the phone and dialed Kilroy’s number. When he answered I told him about seeing Jamie at the copy shop yesterday, how she’d ordered me away. “At this point,” I said, “I don’t know why I’m even still here.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re you.”

His voice sounded strained, and I felt alarmed. “What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it obvious? You can’t leave because you’re the person you are, and I can’t want you to because that would be wanting you to be someone else when I want you to be you.”

I want you to be you
. I closed my eyes and imagined him into the room with me—his face, his stocking feet on my lap. I wanted his feet on my lap or my feet on his, his hand stroking the skin between the top of my sock and the hem of my jeans, his fingers sliding up my shin until the denim stopped them.

“Tell me about Madison,” he said. “What does it look like, what’s it like to be back there?”

“Dull,” I said. “Dead.”

“Is that what it’s like or how you feel?”

“Both.” I thought of my walk home from the Mayers’ street. Without saying where I’d been, I told him about it, how friendly everyone was, good morning, good morning.

“Sounds surreal after New York,” he said. “It’s like you haven’t been debriefed so you’re having all this cognitive dissonance. You need to go through a decontamination process.”

We talked a little about what I might do next, write a long letter to Jamie, go back to Cobra Copy. “I love you,” I said just before we hung up, and there was a pause before he responded.

“As do I. Or I mean, As do I you.” He paused again. “How’s that for contorted?”

The next morning I drove my mother to work so I could use her car, then drove home again, wondering what to use it for. I wandered around
the house, sitting for brief periods in the different rooms. I didn’t want to go shopping, go back to State Street, go anywhere. I didn’t want to stay where I was. I needed to reach Jamie, but how? I went out and got into the car, and I turned the engine on and then off and then on again before driving the familiar streets to Mike’s house.

There were no cars out front, and I rang the doorbell nervously, wondering what I’d do if no one answered—if I’d come back again or not. How much did I want to see him, how much catch myself in the act of doing the right thing? I waited what felt like a long time, and then I heard a faint humming and a voice repeating the same two words over and over, though I couldn’t make them out. Finally I opened the door, and there he was.

Sitting in his wheelchair, his knees angular inside loose khakis, his arms on the arms of the chair. His face was slightly pink, and suddenly I understood that he’d been yelling “Come in, come in” because he couldn’t open the front door himself. His face was thinner than before, very pale and bristly at the upper lip with an unfamiliar mustache.

At the sight of me his eyes widened and then narrowed, and his lips pressed into a sidelong crimp. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. A deep flush climbed from his neck to his forehead, and at last he said, “I guess this is what’s called being speechless.”

I took a step inside and hesitated awkwardly, then bent to kiss his cheek, not quite missing the edge of the mustache. “I could have called, but—” I broke off. “Is this too weird?”

He stared at me. “It’s just that I’ve imagined this so many times …” He shook his head. “Never mind, that was stupid. Look, come in or something, let’s not just stand here at the front door.” He gave me a half smile. “Or sit, either.”

He moved a lever that operated the wheelchair. It was motorized, unlike the one he’d had in rehab, at least the one I’d seen. He rolled backward and I closed the door, then followed him through the living room, where the furniture had been rearranged to open a pathway.

In the kitchen he stopped. “You caught me during my mid-morning lull. Breakfast has been accomplished, my eleven o’clock tepid tea break is yet to come, and I’m not on the computer at all today.” He moved forward a last foot or two and came to rest at the table, which looked as it always had except that there were four chairs around it instead of five.

I pulled out a chair opposite him and sat down. “The computer?”

“I’m hooked up to the system at my dad’s office. The exciting world of insurance. We’ve got a nice little racket going where I bang around on
the computer here for ten or twelve hours a week, and they pay me fifteen dollars an hour, all so I won’t feel completely useless.”

“Mike.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve already said that.”

My face burned. The refrigerator began to hum, and I was relieved by just that tiny alteration in the way the room felt.

“Forget it,” he said. “That was uncalled for. How are you—what brings you to Madison, the Athens of the Midwest?”

“I thought it was the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

“We fell from the running when some guy in Ann Arbor started walking around naked.”

We both laughed, harder than was really called for.

“I’d offer you something to drink,” he said, “but you’d have to get it yourself.”

“I don’t mind that,” I said. “Can I get you something?”

He directed me to a special glass with a built-in straw and said he’d have some water. I got myself some, too, and sat down again.

“So?” he said.

“Why am I here?”

He smiled. “Let’s stick with why you’re in Madison.”

I took a deep breath. “Jamie. Lynn got hurt and I came home because of that.”

“Hurt?”

I licked my lips. “Assaulted.”

He’d been leaning over the glass, his mouth around the straw, and now he lifted his head again. “Lynn Fletcher was assaulted?”

I nodded.

“Is she OK?”

“As OK as can be expected.”

“God, that’s terrible.” His arms slid forward a little, and I tried not to look at them—the boniness, the paddlelike flatness of his hands. “When did this happen?”

“Last week—Mrs. Fletcher’s pretty shaken up.”

“I can imagine.” He bent for another sip of water. “So how long are you here for?”

“I’m not really sure.”

He licked his lips, and I didn’t know what to do, where to look. After a moment I stood and went to the window. A squirrel had paused halfway
up the trunk of the tree outside, and I watched until it scrabbled upward again. I turned back. “Are you hungry at all? I’m starving, I never really ate breakfast.”

“I’m fine,” he said, “but help yourself. Mom’s at the grocery store right now, but there should be a crumb or two in the usual places.”

I wondered how long Mrs. Mayer had been gone, when she’d be back. I got an apple from the fridge and then went over to the pantry closet. Inside were row upon row of canned foods, packages of noodles and rice, economy-size boxes of dry cereal. Down at the bottom, several bags of chips were held closed by giant plastic clips. I bit into the apple and reached for some Fritos. “Corn chips?” I said.

“Salt’s bad for me.”

I ate a couple and put the bag back. The last time I’d been here, Julie had been smoking away, asking me whether I was still going to marry Mike.
Do you want to?

I looked at him and found him watching me, less sharply than before but also less opaquely. His face had taken on the contours of emotion, the curve of his cheeks and the set of his chin speaking of loss. All at once I was very afraid.

He saw me looking and tightened up. “Come on,” he said after a moment. “I’ll show you my room.”

I finished the apple and tossed the core, then followed him back through the living room. The fear abated, replaced by a sick relief that we were moving.

We came to the den. What had once been a small, dark room with plaid wallpaper was now light and airy and somehow seemed bigger, the walls white and decorated with framed pictures: a big photograph of sailboats on Lake Mendota; a poster of a painting I thought I should recognize but didn’t, a blocky landscape with a mountain in the background.