Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (14 page)

“Go now,” she says. “Off with you.”

It seems unfair that people should leave behind so much noise. Not a single discernible sound but patches of cracking static to mark where they were.

If bikes were horses, Lena thinks, stealing one last look at it. She leaves the thought incomplete, lets it grow untended, like a deep-woods weed, as she pushes Lyle home.

S
he meets Andrew's sister at an outlet mall in Kissimmee. The mall is exactly midway between their houses, Andrew's sister has calculated. She brings her husband, Cal, who has a different job every time Lena sees him. Currently, he cold-calls people and tries to get them to buy water softeners.

“It's incredible,” the sister says. “He picks up the phone, dials a number, introduces himself, and pretty soon
he's
the one answering questions. Telling them about aquifers and sodium content and problem stains.”

“I've always been tuned to a certain longing in other people,” Cal says sadly. “I can touch it, I can massage it in place, but I can't do nothing else with it. I hate being a salesman.”

“He suffers from an excess of empathy,” Andrew's sister says. “And several other things.”

“You ever feel like you've mishandled your talents?” he asks Lena. He doesn't wait for an answer. “I do. I feel like mine got dumped out and put back in the wrong containers. Did Beth tell you that we're in counseling because she caught me making love to a puppet?”

Beth is Andrew's sister. “Wait,” Lena says, confused. “An actual puppet?”

“As actual as they get, I guess. It was just a little old hand puppet, an owl. Nothing perverted.”

“It was a gift for someone,” Beth says. Then, to Cal: “Why don't you go over to the toys and find something nice for Lyle.”

The three of them are walking the aisles of a store where all the items are slightly irregular or damaged. Windbreakers with slight tears along the sleeve, board games missing pieces. Some of the things you have to pick up and examine before you can tell what's wrong with them, and even then Lena isn't always sure. She and Andrew's sister never buy anything. They come to follow the blue tape line on the floor that marks off how far they've walked, around and around the store, until they've gone two miles.

“He wasn't making love,” Beth says after Cal's gone. “And that's not even one of the top five reasons we're in counseling.”

Lyle's at home with the sitter. He woke up five times last night. Lena finally gave up and brought him to bed with her so she could nurse him while she slept. On these sleepless nights, her waking-mind and her dream-mind merge and all of her days with Andrew contract to one day. Morning, noon, night: when she wakes up the next morning, he's gone.

“How go the meetings?” Andrew's sister asks her. “Are they helping?”

“Fine,” Lena says. They walk past a woman trying on a pair of brown terry shorts over her jeans. “Actually, not fine. I've missed the past few. They sort of make me want to unpack my brain when I get home, set it on a cutting board, and chop it in half like a roast chicken. It seemed like the men were there just to pick up women.”

“How pathetic. I bet most of them aren't even widowed. I can imagine them trying to work up the tears by thinking about childhood dogs. Tell me if they bother you, and I'll get Cal on the phone with them. He's protective of you, you know. Behind the scenes.”

Most of Lena's lies are fatigue lies, convincing details pinch-hitting for less convincing ones. She knew the bit about men at the meetings would explain everything to Andrew's sister.

“Let's go on a trip together,” Beth says. “Me and you.”

“That sounds nice,” Lena says without thinking.

“I don't mean
nice
. I'm not talking about sightseeing. I mean the desert, someplace with hostile plants and extreme weather and animals that want to kill us. The Southwest, Mexico. I've got guidebooks. Mexicans have a much more honest relationship with the dead than we do, Lena. We can learn from them. We can go to shrines. We don't need a vacation. We need the kind of a place that'll scour us raw.”

Lena's trying to concentrate on walking, the scissor of her arms, the listless momentum of her legs. If she fell down right now, she would not get up for a while. Her fellow shoppers would have to tend to her in front of the bin of mother-of-pearl picture frames, on the side of which is a handwritten sign:
MAKE MEMORIES AN OCCASION FOR CELEBRATION!

“I don't want another honeymoon,” she says.

Beth is glaring at her, Lena can tell without looking. She doesn't know why Beth keeps calling her and asking her to meet. They weren't friends when Andrew was alive. He almost never talked about his sister, actually, something Lena reminds herself whenever she feels her memory of him being overlaid by Beth's, clarified, stunted, retraced in crayon.

“Will you just talk to me?” Beth says after a while. “Sing, tell a joke, yell at me, punch me in the stomach. Shit. I'm dying here.”

“I've been gathering pictures and stories to make a book about him,” Lena says. “A scrapbook, for Lyle when he grows up.”

Beth sighs. Lena isn't sure if Beth's exasperated or relieved. “That is so perfect,” she says. “Listen, I want to help with this. I can do all the chapters before you guys met. The Early Years.”

“Sure,” Lena says. “There's no way I can do this alone.”

A scrapbook. Lena looks over her shoulder at the bins and shelves to figure out where the idea came from. Other people walking the blue-lined circuit approach and say, “On your left,” then walk past. Not all lies are lies, she thinks. Some lies are wishes, some are just-born plans.

As they leave the store, they find Cal sitting out front in an oversize wooden chair with rubber electrodes against his temples. Bulbs along the top of the chair light up every few seconds and Cal jerks and twitches around in the chair as if he's being electrocuted. Old Sparky, the chair's called. Three minutes for a quarter.

“What's it feel like?” a little girl asks him between jolts.

“Horrible,” Cal says. “I'm trying to commit to one last thought before I die, something lofty. But the chair won't let me. All I can think is, ‘My God, I am currently being executed.' ”

A plastic shopping bag rests near Cal's bound feet. Lena can see the box inside: Bedtime Zoo Mobile.

“Just picture the two of us in the desert,” Beth says to Lena. “Surviving. Realizing things.”

At home, Lena finds the babysitter asleep on the couch. Her telephone earpiece is askew and there are crinkle marks on her face and neck from the corduroy pillow. Lena imagines someone on the other end singing a lullaby.

Upstairs, Lyle is in his crib. Lena sits in the rocking chair and assembles the zoo-animal mobile. When she's done, she holds it above him, turns it on, and watches it rotate at approximately half speed. Its once-happy jingle has slowed to a glum dirge. The giraffes and elephants look confused, swiveling above Lyle. He sleeps on his back with his hands behind his head, aggressively at ease in the world. Lena switches off the mobile and kisses Lyle without kissing him.

On the edge of sleep, the threads of the day unravel in her mind and she stirs awake to retie them. She makes bows of the loose strands, admires the bows, and watches them unravel again.

S
he buys a blank book and rubber cement and sheets of hard-stock paper for descriptions and whatever else she might write. She buys photo corner tabs. She buys an exceptionally nice pen in a plastic casket. She realizes she's just indulging Andrew's sister and herself, but it doesn't bother her. In fact, the preparations are strangely consoling. It's as if she's assembling an alibi. When Andrew's sister calls, she knows exactly what to tell her.

Andrew's sister calls. Lena's napping on the couch with Lyle sprawled across the crook of her arm. She ignores the phone until the ringing dies, and then it awakens a few seconds later and rings again. Zombie rings, Lena thinks. Her shoulder and arm are asleep and moist with sweat.

“Listen to this,” Beth says. Lena listens to the angry cracking of ice cubes being freed from their tray. She waits for it to stop, waits for Lyle to start stirring on her lap. Then there's a click and Lena hears two children's voices, a boy and a girl. They're arguing about what to watch on TV and pretty soon the boy's yelling at the girl: “Watch what you want! Watch what you want!”

Another click and Beth comes on the line. “It's him, it's Andrew. I used to hide a tape recorder and then start an argument, and play it back afterward. He hated it.”

“What a terrible thing to do to somebody,” Lena says.

“That isn't the point of my story, Lena. I'm finding all kinds of loot like this in my attic. It'll be perfect for the book.” A sip and a colossal swallow. Lena's mouth is suddenly dry. She lays Lyle on the couch, sets her nursing pillow next to him so he doesn't fall off, and goes into the kitchen. She pours a glass of wine while Andrew's sister tells her about all the things she found in her attic: tapes, drawings, letters, photographs.

Lena, too, went through a box of her pictures the other day, after which she put them on the highest shelf in the house. So many pictures. It was as if she knew something bad was going to happen, overdocumenting their past together to augur her togetherless future. Look here, remember this. She wishes she were a druid, or an ancient Eskimo, someone with a past that's an unbroken slur of labor and meals and darkness and seasons and fires. None of the pictures are real. They don't capture anything as it happened or as she remembers it happening. They're just pictures of people having their pictures taken.

“Good or bad, he was always himself,” Beth says. “We need to make sure we show that in our book.”

“I'm writing it down right now,” Lena says, pouring another glass of wine. “He . . . was . . . always . . . himself.”

“All right then. I gotta go get Cal from the stupid chiropractor. Can I talk to Lyle real quick?”

Lena looks over at Lyle, still asleep on the couch. “Here he is,” she says. She covers the phone receiver with her hand. Andrew's sister begins humming softly, a little raspily. She doesn't speak. The ice chimes against the side of her glass. Lena can hear crying, as soft and melodic as the humming. Beth says, “What are people supposed to do all day?”

T
he community center, a converted mansion with terrazzo floors, smells like crushed gardenias. Lena peeks into rooms, nods to the alcoholics cradling Styrofoam cups and looking like hollow owls, nods to a group of women who are clapping. They clap until Lena is halfway up the stairs. They stop, but her thought, that maybe this is a support group for people who can't quit clapping, continues. She holds it with her until she is seated, filled with dread, waiting for her own meeting to begin.

The wine seems to have electrified the blood in her legs. Concentrating, she can feel the pressurized suck and surge of each artery and vein. She closes her eyes and
sees
it, lit up in blue and red like a transit map.

She doesn't recognize any of the dozen or so other partnerless parents—unsurprising, since she hasn't been to a meeting in more than a month. Tonight, a bald younger man stands up and begins: “Hello. My name is Todd.”

One by one, the others in the room repeat, “Hello. My name is,” and then fill in their names. Name tags and markers are passed around. Lena writes her name on the tag and sticks it on the breast pocket of her blouse.

Todd walks over to an older Asian woman clutching a rolled-up newspaper in her lap and says, “Good evening.” And the woman says, “Guh evening.” He says, “The evening. Is good.” And the woman says, “The evening, it's guh.” He repeats this with everyone else in the room, including Lena. He tells them that he is American and they tell him what they are: Chinese, Ecuadorian, Ghanaian, Chinese. Lena says Albanian. The teacher tells them what he ate for dinner and they tell him what they ate for dinner—almost everyone ate exactly what the teacher ate.

Lena nods whenever he looks her way. She should leave, but she doesn't want to appear rude. After she drinks several glasses of wine, the feelings of strangers seem like something she'll be called to account for. Plus she's starting to enjoy listening to her classmates earnestly tiptoe through the rudiments of conversation, and to partake in it herself. It's like praying. The hope of simple acquisition, the guarantee that she won't be asked any question she can't answer.

“I like my friends,” Todd says. “I like baseball. What do you like?”

One by one, they tell the teacher what they like. They like tea, ice cream, springer spaniel, church, bedroom, friends, English, sister, sailboat, Cadillac Seville, breakfast.

Lena is last. “What do
you
like?” he asks her.

“I like horses,” she says. “I like walking and most flowers. I like the feeling of somebody whispering really close to my ear.”

“Outstanding!” he says. “I
love
my wife and daughter. I
love
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. What do
you
love, Lena?”

His small, small eyes study her. He's trying to look warm and attentive but his eyes won't allow it. They're the eyes of a creature that needs to detect only if prey is moving toward him or away.

“I love everything I like,” she says. “Plus Twix bars. And puppies.”

“Okay,” he says less enthusiastically. He claps twice and just as he's about to move to the next person, he turns to Lena and says, “This is English Made Easy. It sounds like you should be in one of the advanced classes. Or one of the recovery groups.”

She looks at the rowdy array of faces: five other women, some young, some old, some smiling, some not, unpretty. A man next to her winks as he holds a plastic water bottle a few inches from his mouth and squeezes out a stream.