Or last December, when the McCarthys had invited her and Red to a Christmas concert along with a bunch of their other friends, and she had been so chatty and confiding with the man who happened to be seated next to her but then discovered, by and by, that he was a total stranger, had nothing to do with the McCarthys and no doubt thought she was a lunatic. Just a skip in the record, that was. You can see how it might happen.
“And time,” she would tell Dr. Wiss. “Well, you know about time. How slow it is when you’re little and how it speeds up faster and faster once you’re grown. Well, now it’s just a blur. I can’t keep track of it anymore! But it’s like time is sort of … balanced. We’re young for such a small fraction of our lives, and yet our youth seems to stretch on forever. Then we’re old for years and years, but time flies by fastest then. So it all comes out equal in the end, don’t you see.”
She heard Nora climbing the stairs. She heard her say, “No, silly-billy. Cookies are for dessert.” Her footsteps proceeded at a stately pace toward the boys’ room, followed by Sammy’s little sneakers.
Was there something wrong with Abby, that she didn’t fall all over herself to spend every waking minute with her grandchildren? She did love them, after all. She loved them so much that she felt a kind of hollowness on the inner surface of her arms whenever she looked at them—an ache of longing to pull them close and hold them tight against her. The three little boys were such a clumped-together tangle, always referred to as a single unit, but Abby knew how different each was from the next. Petey was the worrier, bossing his brothers around not out of meanness but from a protective, herding instinct; Tommy had his father’s sunny nature and his peacemaking skills; and Sammy was her baby, still smelling of orange juice and urine, still happy to cuddle up and let her read to him. And then the older ones: Susan so serious and dear and well-behaved—was she all right?—and Deb who was Abby herself at that age, a wiry knot of inquisitiveness, and poor clumsy, effortful Alexander who could wrench her heart, and finally Elise who was just so different from Abby, so completely other, that Abby felt privileged to be granted this close-up view of her.
But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.
The upstairs hall was quiet again. Abby turned her doorknob by degrees, opened the door a bare minimum, and slipped out. The dog shoved the door wider open with his nose and plodded after her, snuffling noisily and causing Abby to wince and glance toward the boys’ room.
Down the stairs to the front door she went, and out onto the porch. Then she stopped short, struck by an idea. She reached back into the house for the leash that hung on a hook just inside. Clarence made a glad moaning sound and shambled onto the porch behind her, while somewhere in the depths of the house Heidi gave a yelp of envy. Eat your heart out, Heidi. Abby was not a fan of overexcitable dogs.
She paused on the flagstone walk to clip the leash to Clarence’s collar. This was the old-fashioned, short kind of leash, not the permissive retractable kind that people nowadays favored. Strictly speaking, Clarence didn’t need a leash; he was so slow and stodgy and mindlessly obedient. But he did have a willful streak when it came to very small dogs. They seemed to bring out all the old feistiness of his puppy days. He never could resist pouncing on a toy terrier.
“We’re not going far,” Abby told him. “Don’t get your hopes up.” From the stiff-jointed way he moved, she suspected he wasn’t up to more than a block or two in any case.
They turned to the left when they reached the street—the opposite direction from Ree’s house. Not that Abby wouldn’t love to see Ree, but after Abby’s little lapse that time, Ree would have been distressed to find her walking alone. And Abby loved walking alone. Oh, it felt so good to set out like this, free as a bird, no “What’ll we do about Mom?” hanging unspoken over her head! She hoped she wouldn’t run into anybody she knew.
Sometimes on her walks it would strike her that of all her original family, she was the only one left. Who would ever have dreamed that she’d be traveling through the world without them? She thought again of the framed picture in her bedroom: the solitary child threading a path beneath giant, looming trees, the guardian angel following protectively behind. Except that Abby didn’t believe in angels, and hadn’t since she was seven. No, she was truly on her own.
She used to have at least one of her children with her everywhere she went. It was both comforting and wearing. “Hand? Hand?” she used to say before she crossed a street. It came to her so clearly now: the stiff-armed reach out to her side with her palm facing backward, the confident expectation of some trusting little hand grabbing hers.
Clarence eyed a squirrel but kept on heeling, not even tempted. “I agree,” Abby told him. “Squirrels are beneath you.” Then she gave a testing pat to the cushiony space above her breasts. Had she thought to hang the house key around her neck before she set out? No, but never mind; the lock was set to manual. And there was always Nora to let her back in if need be.
Another secret she knew, but this wasn’t something anyone had told her: it had occurred to her just recently that the song Stem remembered his father’s singing him to sleep with could very well have been “The Goat and the Train.” Burl Ives used to sing that on a children’s record she had owned when she was small. Should she suggest it to Stem? It could be a transporting moment for him, hearing that song again after all these years. But he might think she was tactlessly reminding him that he was not a Whitshank. Or maybe her reason for keeping silent was more selfish. Maybe she just wanted him to forget that she wasn’t his first and only mother.
He and Denny had treated each other with artificial politeness ever since their fight at the beach. You would think they were barely acquainted. “Denny, are you going to want that last piece of chicken?” Stem would ask, and Denny would say, “Be my guest.” They didn’t fool her for a minute. They could have been two strangers in a waiting room, and she was beginning to lose hope that that would ever change.
Oh, always lately it seemed that some crisis arose at the beach house. No wonder she dreaded vacations! Not that she ever let on.
“What’s gone wrong with us?” she’d asked Red on the ride home from this year’s trip. “We used to be such a happy family! Weren’t we?”
“Far as I can recall,” Red had answered.
“Remember that time we all got the giggles at the movies?”
“Well, now …”
“It was a Western, and the hero’s horse was staring straight at us, head-on, chewing oats, with these two little balls of muscle popping out at his jaws when he chomped down. He looked so silly! Remember that? We burst out laughing, all of us at once, and the rest of the audience turned toward us just mystified.”
“Was I there?” Red asked her.
“You were there. You were laughing too.”
Maybe the reason he’d forgotten was that he took their happiness for granted. He didn’t fret about it. Whereas Abby … oh, she fretted, all right. She couldn’t bear to think that their family was just another muddled, discontented, ordinary family.
“If you could have one single wish,” she had asked Red one night in bed when neither of them could sleep, “what would it be?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“I would wish wonderful lives for our children,” Abby said.
“Yeah, that’s good.”
“How about you?”
“Oh,” he said, “maybe that Harford Contractors would go bankrupt and quit underbidding me.”
“Red! Honestly!”
“What?”
“How can you not put your children’s welfare first?” Abby asked him.
“I do put it first. But you already took care of that with your wish.”
“Huh,” Abby said, and she had flounced over to her left side so she was lying with her back to him.
He was getting old, too. She wasn’t the only one! He wore reading glasses that slipped down his nose and m
ade him look like his father. And that “Eh?” of his when he hadn’t heard right: where had that come from? It was almost as if he were acting a part. He thought that was how a person was supposed to sound at his age. And sometimes what he said landed oddly off the mark—“scarlet teenager,” for instance, referring to a red bird he saw perched on their feeder. Which probably had to do with his hearing, again, but still, she couldn’t help worrying. She saw the way salesclerks treated him lately, how condescendingly, speaking to him too loudly and using words of fewer syllables. They took him for just another doddery old man. It made her chest ache when she saw that.
Didn’t anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven’s sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was “cool” (“I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger,” she had said), did she not realize that “cool” had been used in Abby’s time, too, not to mention long before?
She didn’t mind looking old. It wasn’t a real concern of hers. Her face had grown slightly puffy and her body had softened and slumped, but when she studied the family album she thought that her younger self seemed unappealingly puny by comparison—pinched and tight, almost starved-looking. And Red seemed downright frail in those photos, with his Adam’s apple poking forth too sharply from his too-long neck. He weighed no more now than he had then, but somehow he gave the impression of greater solidity.
Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.
“I bought a goat,” she sang as she walked. “His name was Jim.” Then she broke off, because she caught sight of someone approaching up ahead. But he turned left at the corner, so Abby resumed singing. “I bought him for …” Clarence trudged next to her in silence, every now and then accidentally or maybe deliberately bumping against her knee.
Wasn’t it interesting how song lyrics stayed in your memory so much longer than mere prose! Not just the songs of her teens—“Tom Dooley” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”—but ditties from her childhood, “White Coral Bells” and “Good Morning, Merry Sunshine” and “We’re Happy When We’re Hiking,” and her mother singing something that began “I’ll come down and let you in,” and even jump-rope chants—“Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea …” Anything that rhymed, it seemed. Rhyme imprinted things in your brain. Dental appointments should be put into rhyme, and important anniversaries. In fact, all of life’s more meaningful events! If you came across any gap, all you had to do was start singing as much as you could remember—embark on the first line, confidently—and the missing part would arrive in your head just in the nick of time.
Abby used to worry about becoming forgetful, because her maternal grandfather had ended up with dementia. But that wasn’t turning out to be her particular problem. She had a better memory than most of her friends, they all agreed. Why, just last week Carol Dunn had phoned, but when Abby answered she had heard only silence. “Hello?” she’d said again, and Carol had said, “I forget who I dialed.” “This is Abby,” Abby said, and Carol said, “Oh, hi, Abby! How are you? Gosh, I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t—but anyhow, you aren’t who I meant to call,” and she had hung up.
Or Ree, who kept losing the names of things. “Next summer I think I’ll plant some of those … Maryland flowers,” she said, and Abby said, “Black-eyed Susans?” “Yes, right.” It always seemed to be Abby who had to fill in the blanks. She should tell Dr. Wiss that.
“In some ways,” she should tell him, “my memory’s better now than it was when I was young. The most surprising details suddenly show up again! Tiny things, infinitesimal things. The other day I all at once recalled the exact turn of the wrist that I used to give the handle of the CorningWare saucepan I got for a wedding present. I got a whole set of CorningWare with one interchangeable handle that you twisted to lock into place. That was almost fifty years ago! I used those for only a little while; they kept scorching things on the bottom. Who else could remember that?”
She might suddenly smell again the bitter, harsh, soul-dampening fumes of the chopped onions and green peppers her mother fried up most evenings as the base for her skillet dinners, back when Abby was a toddler whining with hunger and tiredness and just general five p.m. blues. She might hear the long-ago humming in the wires that the number 29 streetcar made when it sped down Roland Avenue without having to stop. And out of nowhere she pictured her childhood dog, Binky, who used to sleep with both paws folded over his nose to keep himself warm on cold nights. It was exactly like a time trip. She was bobbing along in a time machine gazing out the window at one scene after another in no particular order. At one story after another. Oh, there’d been so many stories in her life! The Whitshanks claimed to have only two; she couldn’t imagine why. Why select just a certain few stories to define yourself? Abby had a wealth of them.
For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.
What street was this? She hadn’t been paying attention.
She stopped at the curb and gazed around her, and Clarence sat down on his haunches. To her left was the Hutchinsons’ house, with that beautiful huge magnolia tree that always seemed freshly enameled. She was surprised that she had walked this far; she’d thought Clarence would have protested by now. She made a clucking sound and he rose with a groan, the weight of the world on his shoulders, his head sagging so that it nearly touched the ground. “We’ll take you home,” she told him, “and you can have a nice long nap.”
Just then, though—how could this happen?—a little mosquito of a chihuahua minced past on the sidewalk across the street. No owner anywhere to be seen, and no leash and not even a collar. Clarence sprang up instantaneously, as if his weariness had all been for show, and with a startlingly loud roar he leapt forward, yanking the leash from Abby’s hand. Somehow she had time to see his entire life streaming by: his soft, pudgy belly and giant paws when he was a pup, his old fondness for playing fetch with tennis balls gone soppy with spit, his pure, delirious joy when the children used to come home from school. “Clarence!” she shrieked, but he paid no attention, so she tore after him into the street, while something she couldn’t quite place—something huge and sleek and metallic that she hadn’t been expecting—came speeding toward her.
“Oh!” she thought. “Why, this must be—”
And then no more.
7
WHITSHANKS DIDN’T DIE, was the family’s general belief. Of course they never said this aloud. It would have seemed presumptuous. Not to mention that some non-Whitshank would have been sure to point out that after all, Junior and Linnie had died. But that had been so long ago; Red was the only one left alive with any firsthand memory of it. (Nobody counted Merrick.) And Red was not himself right now. He was just a shell of himself. He walked around in his slippers, unshaven, with a vacant look in his eyes. For one whole day it appeared that he had lost his powers of speech, till it was discovered that he’d once again neglected to put his hearing aids in.
/>
Abby died on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday she was cremated as she had always said she wanted to be; but the funeral wouldn’t be held until the following Monday. This was so they could collect themselves and figure out what a funeral entailed, exactly. None of them had had any experience with such things except for Nora, and she came from such a different background that she really couldn’t be much help.
Putting the funeral off for so long might have been a mistake, though, because it meant they were all suspended in a kind of limbo. They hung around the house drinking coffee, answering the telephone, sighing, bickering, accepting covered dishes from the neighbors, trading comical Abby stories that somehow made them end up crying instead of laughing. Both of the Hughs were there, because their wives required support. Stem fielded the occasional work-related call on his cell phone, but Red didn’t even bother asking what the issue was. The grandchildren went to school as usual but gathered at the house in the afternoons, looking awed and stricken, while little Sammy, stuck at home all day with the grown-ups, seemed to be going slightly crazy. He gave up using his potty—an iffy business in the best of times—and started throwing spectacular tantrums. When Nora asked him, in a too-calm voice, what was troubling him, he said he wanted Clarence. This made everyone stir uneasily. “Brenda, you mean,” Nora told him. “Brenda has gone to be with Jesus.”
“I want him to come back from Jesus.”
“Her,” Nora said. “You want her to come back. But she’s happier where she is.”