Patricia Gaffney (8 page)

Maybe this isn’t so much a fantasy as a clothes fetish.

I’m riding in an elevator with those light-bronze reflective walls and that flattering light they give, in a tall, modern office building. I’m wearing my hair in a simple chignon. My expression is pleasant but serious. I’m a professional, consummately so. Professional what? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. People on the elevator, women as well as men, admire me—I see them watching me in the mirrored walls—but that’s not really the point of the fantasy.

The doors open and I stride out through an airy brass-and-glass lobby, through the revolving front door and out onto the wide white sidewalk, which is busy but not congested. It’s dusk. The streetlights are on, but the sky is still a soft, hazy indigo. Nothing glares, everything is muted; the city at its gentlest. I’m heading somewhere, perhaps a stylish bistro where I’m to meet an interesting man, perhaps just to the corner to flag a taxi and go home, but I’m very purposeful, swinging briskly along in my high but perfectly comfortable slingback heels.

That’s it.

Why is this little vignette so comforting and seductive? I think it’s because I’m alone, and I’m confident. Two things, and one’s no good without the other. Solitude is nothing if you’re frightened or lonesome or bored to tears or without a purpose. And confidence is easy for couples, relatively speaking; much more complicated and difficult for singles.

So the point of the fantasy is that I am both, the perfect Dash caught in a snapshot moment, and everything is possible. Instead of all the mundane knowns of my real life, I’m a walking (literally) manifestation of opportunity. Nothing ties me down. Freedom. Total freedom, and I’m not scared of it—I
thrive
on it. I stride out, chin up, heels clicking, toward my unknown but significant destination.

T
he Benders’ house is on Tolliver Pike, the road to Dolley. Right on the road, one of those old farmhouses it must’ve seemed like a good idea, eighty or ninety years ago, to build twenty-five feet from the sleepy lane the milk truck trundled down every day to pick up your product. Not that Tolliver Pike is much more than a sleepy little lane now, but at least it’s got two lanes instead of one, which means they widened it since the olden days, which means the Benders’ front porch is fifteen feet from the road and completely out of proportion, house to yard. The place isn’t even a dairy farm anymore. Various Bender forebears sold pieces off over the years, and now there’s just the old gray frame house set so close to the road you could almost reach out and skim your hand along the daylilies as you drive by.

I’ve always admired it, though, even before I knew our handyman lived there. It’s got the classic box shape with a steep gable front, very popular around these parts. Two aged, peeling sycamores shade the long porch on either side, and I just think that’s a miracle, that nothing has happened to at least one of those old beauties in all this time. There’s a spectacular flower garden in the backyard—too bad it’s not in the front, but the sycamores make too much shade. Plus there’s no room.

I park in the driveway, pick my way around winter-naked shrubbery to the front. I don’t recognize the man who answers the door. Then I do. Mr. Bender—without his hat! Why, he’s bald, there’s only a smoky fringe of hair in back from ear to ear. He looks younger—no, older. I can’t decide. I’m discombobulated.

“Hi, hello, I hope I’m not disturbing you—I wanted to ask after your wife, and give you this.” I hold out my foil-topped glass casserole. “You probably don’t need it, but I thought you could freeze it, and don’t worry about the container, I can get that any old time—”

“Who is it, Shevlin?” a woman’s voice calls from inside.

His black beetle brows come down. He looks as welcoming as an old, irritable rottweiler. He stands still, moves nothing but his head to call back: “Miz Bateman.”

“Who?”

He turns back, vindicated. “Wife’s not up to—”

“Oh, Bateman, from up the mountain? Well, let her in, don’t leave her standing out there on the stoop.”

I say, “That’s okay, really, I just wanted to—”

“Come on in,” Mr. Bender—
Shevlin
—says in a resigned but commanding tone, and opens the door wide.

“I won’t stay
two minutes
,” I promise, and step inside.

A grandfather clock in the hall takes that moment to chime the hour. I have a hasty impression of country decor and comfortable clutter before an upright, elderly woman in jeans bustles toward me from the low-ceilinged living room, pulling a white cardigan tighter around her and smiling with her whole face. “Mrs. Bateman,” she says, almost as if she’s been expecting me. We shake hands; her grip is calloused and firm. “How nice to meet you, I’ve heard all about you.”

What has she heard? “Dash,” I say, “call me Dash. I’m sorry—I thought—Mr. Bender said…” But now I don’t want to say what he said; if he was fibbing to get out of doing chores for me, how embarrassing for everybody. I stutter some more. Mrs. Bender looks puzzled.

Then her face, which is long and creased with laugh lines, and also pink as if from exertion, clears. She turns to her husband, who’s shifting protectively from foot to foot beside her. “Oh, did you tell her I’m an invalid? Shevlin, I swear.” She puts her hand on the back of his leathery neck and gives it a soft squeeze, the gentlest admonition, and Mr. Bender’s face undergoes a profound change. The black eyes unfocus; a foolish half grin uncovers straight, tobacco-stained teeth. He ducks his bald head and mumbles.

“I had a valve replaced, is all.” Mrs. Bender pats her chest lightly. “I’m not only good as new, I’m
better.
”

“And you’re already up and around,” I marvel. “Wow, that’s amazing.”

“They cut her open like a rabbit,” Mr. Bender says. “Had to stop her heart and then start it up again. She was in the intensive care for fifty-three hours.”

“All right, now.”

“She got this ball contraption in her chest, which they sawed right down the middle. Cracked ’er ribs—”

“Shevlin, she doesn’t want to hear that.”

Well, I do and I don’t.

“Why, look here, did you make us a casserole?” She gestures toward the bowl in her husband’s hands. “That was awfully nice, you surely didn’t have to do that.”

I begin again on how they can freeze it, they must have a refrigerator full of meals by now. Mr. Bender interrupts me.

“She can’t eat salt.”

“Oh. Uh-oh—”

“Oh, I can eat
some.
Let’s go in the kitchen, I bet you’d like a cup of coffee, Mrs. Bateman. Did you say
Dash
is your name? That’s unusual. Mine’s Cottie, my grandmother’s name. It’s not short for anything, it’s just Cottie.” With a hand on my back, she ushers me through an unused-looking formal dining room into the sunny kitchen. “Or would you rather have tea? Take a seat, sit right there—”

“She can’t drink coffee, either.” Mr. Bender has followed us in.

“Tea’s fine—anything,” I say, sitting down on a padded chair at a wooden spool table. It’s crowded with flower arrangements in baskets and jars and vases, some with the cards still in them.

“From the hospital,” Mrs. Bender explains, plopping down next to me. She’s taking deep breaths; the short walk winded her. “Silly, I should’ve left ’em there, but I can never resist flowers.”

“She had twice that many. Some died, some she left for other people. And cards like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Put the kettle on for us, would you, hon? And get down some of those cookies Gladys Lejeune brought.”

She wears her gray hair in a braid down her back. Her face is thick-skinned, not delicate, with heavy brows and a large nose and pale lips not yet thinning with age. She has a high voice, almost childish, but she tells me that’s because of the tube they put down her throat in the hospital. I guess her age at around seventy, but I still can’t decide about Mr. Bender, who never stops hovering while Cottie and I—she insists I call her that—talk about flowers and the pleasures of gardening, country life versus city life, and the fact that we both have one child, a daughter.

“Our Danielle’s in Richmond and she’s doing real well, working for a cosmetics company.”

Mr. Bender makes a sound like “Hmpf.”

“She’s got a little boy, Matthew, who we don’t see nearly enough. Seven years old, and so funny and smart—here’s his picture.” Framed, half-hidden among the flower arrangements on the table; a freckle-faced redhead in a shirt and tie, grinning for his school photo. “We’re old even for grandparents, because we had Danielle so late, me forty-one, Shevlin forty-six. We’d given up thinking we could have any, and then along comes Danielle.”

“I always wanted lots of children,” I say, drawn in by her candor, even though Mr. Bender is glaring as he sets cups of tea in front of us, put out by all this personal woman talk on such short acquaintance. “But after Chloe, we couldn’t have any more.”

“But you photograph children—maybe that’s a comfort.” She pats my wrist once with gentle diffidence; there’s a Band-Aid over the top of her hand, half covering a large purple bruise.

“Oh,” I say, “sometimes.”

“And your husband, Shevlin tells me he’s a teacher at a university. My, my.”

“History professor at Mason-Dixon College.”

“Isn’t that something. My goodness.” She shakes her head and smiles, so pleased with me and mine. Some of the locals in Dolley are suspicious of us Batemans because we’re outsiders; I can tell by the narrow way they eye us in the hardware store or at the gas station. Mr. Bender was the most suspicious of the lot, and now here is his kind-faced wife beaming at me, impressed with my life, my husband’s career. I feel accepted and embraced—it’s almost as if I’ve been forgiven for something. All of a sudden, I’m flooded with an intense longing for my mother.

“Does he just get down on weekends, or sometimes during the week, too? Depending on his schedule, I guess.”

“Andrew? No—he—we—” She was only making conversation, but she’s caught me flatfooted. I’m thinking too slowly to say something vague and change the subject; I stutter some more until, inevitably, understanding unclouds her face.

“Sweetheart, would you go get my pills for me?”

Mr. Bender squints at a cuckoo clock on the wall. “It’s not time yet, not for—”

“I know, but would you go get them anyway?”

I can tell by the look he gives her that he’s recognized a tone inaudible to me. He leaves the room without another word.

“I’m sorry—” she begins.

“No
, no.”

“—and I just wanted to tell you that by
myself
, so as not to make it even worse.”

“It’s absolutely nothing.”

“But I would never have asked anything personal if I had my wits about me. I’m not all here yet, the doctor said I wouldn’t be for a while. Why, this morning I tried to put Shevlin’s teeth in instead of mine.” We look at each other with straight faces for a long second. Then, thank God, a light glints in Cottie’s eyes, and we let out whoops at the same time. Her shoulders shake; she throws her head back, mouth open—I could swear she’s got her own teeth in there, not false ones.

“Wooh, that felt good for a change.” She puts her hand flat on her chest. “In the hospital, I had to keep telling Shevlin,
‘Don’t make me laugh
.’”

I have trouble imagining that. Mr. Bender, the cutup.

“Anyway.
I’m sorry for butting into your business.”

“You didn’t, and it’s not a secret, it’s just—new. Andrew and I are taking a little time off, that’s all. So he’s up there and I’m down here. I’m sure it’s temporary.” I’m not sure of that, but I feel like reassuring her, fitting myself into what I imagine is this woman’s stable, sensible, old-fashioned world. I wonder how old-fashioned it is, though. She’s a surprise, not the Mrs. Bender I was expecting. She has clear hazel eyes that look directly at me with a wry knowing.

“How long have you been married?” she asks.

“Almost twenty years.”

“Oh, yes. Well, that’s when it starts to get pretty serious, isn’t it?”

“How about you and Mr. Bender?”

“Forty years this January. You’re lucky to have a place to go to while you sort things out. Once Shevlin and I didn’t talk for three weeks. I don’t remember what started it. Something to do with Danielle, probably, since that’s mostly what we’ve fought about in our lives.”

“You didn’t talk for
three weeks
?”

“I kept holding out for a change in him. But I expect we wouldn’t be speaking to this day if I’d kept on that way. One thing I know, staying together doesn’t depend on feeling the same way about everything.”

“What does it depend on?”

She scrapes her fingernails over her chin, thinking. “Depends on letting a lot go. Not being so proud and sure of yourself.”

“But then, aren’t you the one who always compromises?”

“Well, somebody’s got to.” Her infectious laugh draws me in again. “If a woman marries a
difficult
man, she’s got her work cut out for her, that’s for sure. But if she knows it from the start, then she’s probably got a stronger kind of love to help her get through it with him.”

“Andrew’s not…well, I guess he is a difficult man. In some ways.” Let me count the ways. “But I’m no picnic at the beach,” I add in fairness. “Matter of fact, I drive him a little bit nuts.”