He became aware, at his back, of splashing sounds. There was a pool in the center of the quadrangle of condos, and Leila’s sliding doors were open to admit its sounds, along with those of shuffleboard discs sliding on concrete, cars revving up, palm trees rustling in their antediluvian trance, glasses and ice cubes clinking on a tray somewhere in another screened-in room looking out on the wide shared space. A memory of Leila’s little lake, her white body knifing into the cold water, brought him to recognize, as she swayed on her ungainly footgear ahead of him toward her dining area, that she had stayed lithe, though the years had redistributed her weight toward the middle and loosened the flesh of her brown arms. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut short in this climate and fitted close around her tidy skull, on its supple swimmer’s neck. The old beast lived, and sluggishly stirred within him, chafing his stomach; in an abrupt collapse of all the rest of their lives he felt at home with this woman, their two bodies moving phantasmally among the rush-seated chairs, the glass tabletops, the faintly musty furniture of a perpetual summer. “I always did,” Leila said. Forgive him. For what? For fucking her? For leaving afterwards, in his own car, spinning dust down the woodsy road in a semi-panic?
Over the chicken salad and white wine, and iced tea and Key-lime pie, they caught up with enough of their decades apart. Her husbands, his spousal tragedy, their scattered children, the expectable aches, the predictable self-denials with which they tried to stay in shape and preserve the sensations of well-being as long as they could. They shared a vanity, it occurred to him, in regard to their physical health.
“Why did you tell Pete, and come south?” he asked at last. “Was it to escape me? Was there no other way?”
It was as if she had forgotten, and had to strain to see such a distant moment. “Oh… we’d often talked about Florida, and then the right job for him came up. I had to clean house. You were dirt under the bed. Dear Henry, don’t look so sad. It was time.” As she turned her head, he remembered her mother’s profile; Leila’s was now identical.
Leila had, he saw as he watched her talk and gesture, become vulgar, in the way of a woman with not enough to do but think about her body and her means. Yet a vulgar greed for life was part of what he had loved. Her desires had been direct and simple. In two hours they had said enough; they had never been ones for long confidences or complicated confessions. Their situations had been obvious, each to the other, and their time together had been too intense, too rare, too scandalously stolen, for much besides wonderment and possession. Now, as the shadows deepened in her touching condo, with its metal furniture and mall-bought watercolors, and the westering sun reached across the rattan mats toward the room where Leila and her guest sat still at the glass table, having returned to white wine, an invisible uneasiness seized him; he was not used to being alone with her this long, this late into the afternoon. Fuck and run had been his style.
She stood up, firmly on her bare feet. She had eased out of the awkward sandals; the straps had left red welts on her bony blue-veined insteps. They had been blue-veined and tendony thirty years ago. “How about a swim?” she asked.
“So late in the day?”
“It’s the best part of the afternoon,” Leila said. “The air’s still warm, the kids have gone in, hydrotherapy for the cripples is over.” She touched her shoulder, as if to begin undressing.
“I don’t have a suit.”
“You can use one of Jim’s. He left three or four.” She laughed. “You can let out the waist string. He was just a kid. He used to strum his knuckles on his abs and expect me to be thrilled.”
Henry stood, pleased to be standing, once again, and without hurry, next to Leila—her serious small mouth, its upper lip weathered to a comb of small creases, and her lovely eyes, gleaming like jewels in crumpled paper, bright-hazel remembrances of his mother’s desire to have him live, to be a man, on her own behalf. He panicked at the invitation. “I—”
He, too, had been unfaithful, as she had with Jim’s abs, with Jim’s predecessor’s money, with Pete and his uses of her. For two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence. Toward the end, in the intervals when the haze of painkillers lifted, she spoke to him as she never had, lightly, as to another child whom she did not know well but with whom she had been fated to spend a long afternoon. “I think they might have been just kidding us,” she confided one time. “Suppose you don’t get to take a trip up to Heaven?” Or again, “I knew I was boring to you, but I didn’t know how else to be.” In her puzzlement at his tears she would touch his hair, not quite daring to touch his face.
“I’d better get back,” he announced.
“Back to what?” Leila asked.
To that inn Irene had loved, with its stuffed fish and nameless saved shells, its bare comforts. To the repose he found in imagining her still with him. Since her death she was wrapped around him like a shroud of gold and silver thread.
“You were always getting back,” Leila said. Her tone wasn’t rancorous, merely reflective, her tidy head tilted perkily as if to emphasize what she was: a little old lady still game to take her chances, to play her hand. “But you’re free now.”
Back in her front room, Henry already saw himself out the door, under a circumscribed sky that was rectangular this time. It would be a long drive, against setting sunlight, through the great South Florida swamp. “Well, what is free?” he asked. “I guess it’s always been a state of mind. Looking back at us—maybe that was as free as things get.”
The Walk with Elizanne
THEIR CLASS had graduated from Olinger High School in 1950, a few years before its name was regionalized out of existence. Though the year 2000 inevitably figured in year-book predictions and jokes, nobody had really believed that a year so futuristic would ever become the present. They were seventeen and eighteen; their fiftieth class reunion was impossibly remote. Now it was here, here in the function room of Fiorvante’s, a restaurant in West Alton, a half-mile from the stately city hospital where many of them had been born and now one of them lay critically ill.
David Kern and his second wife, Andrea, long enough his wife to be no stranger to his high-school reunions, went to visit the sick class member, Mamie Kauffman, in the hospital room where she had lain for six weeks, her bones too riddled with cancer for her to walk. She had been living alone in a house that she and a long-decamped husband had bought forty years ago, and where three children had been raised on a second-grade teacher’s salary. Get-well cards and artwork from generations of her pupils filled the room’s sills and walls. Mamie was, as she had always been, bubbly and warm, though she could not rise into even a sitting position.
“What an outpouring of love this has brought on,” she told the couple. “I was feeling sorry for myself and, I guess you’d have to say, not enough loved, until this happened.” She described getting out of bed and feeling her hip snap, feeling herself tossed into a corner like a rag doll, and reaching for the telephone, which luckily was on the floor, with her cane. She had used one for some time for what she had been told was rheumatoid arthritis. At first she meant to call her daughter, Dorothy, two towns away. “I was so mad at myself, I couldn’t think of Dot’s phone number, though I dial it every other day, and then I told myself, ‘Mamie, it’s two-thirty in the morning, you don’t want Dot’s number, what you want is nine-one-one. What you want is an ambulance.’ They came in ten minutes and couldn’t have been nicer. One of the paramedics, it turned out, had been one of my second-graders twenty years ago.”
Andrea smiled and said, “That’s lovely.” In this overdecorated sickroom Andrea looked young, vigorous, efficient, gracious; David was proud of her. She was a captive from another tribe, from a state other than Pennsylvania.
Mamie tried to tell them about her suffering. “At times I’ve felt a little impatient wi
th the Lord, but then I’m ashamed of myself. He doesn’t give you more than He gives you strength to bear.”
In theistic Pennsylvania, David realized, people developed philosophies. Where he lived now, an unresisted atheism left people to suffer with the mute, recessive stoicism of animals. The more intelligent they were, the less they had to say in extremis.
Mamie went on, “I’ve been rereading Shirley MacLaine, where she says that life is like a book, and your job is to figure out what chapter you’re in. If this is my last chapter, I have to read it that way, but, you know, I’ve had a lot of time to think lying here and—” In her broad, kind face, nearly as pale as her pillow, Mamie’s watery blue eyes faltered, becoming quick and dry. “I don’t think it is,” she finished bravely. Even flat on her back, she was a teacher, knowing more than her audience and out of lifelong habit wanting to impart the lesson. “I’m not afraid of death,” she told the visiting couple, smartly dressed in their reunion finery. “It’s locked into my heart that—that—”
Yes, what? David thought, anxious to hear, though aware of the time ticking away. He came to this area so rarely now, he sometimes got lost on the new roads, even travelling only a mile. The reunion wouldn’t wait.
“That I’ll be all right,” Mamie concluded. She sensed the anticlimax, the disappointment even, and made an exasperated circular motion of her hand, with its flesh-colored hospital bracelet and IV shunt. “That when it comes, I’ll still be there. Here. You know what I’m saying?”
The visiting couple nodded in eager unison.
“It’s the getting there,” Mamie admitted, “I don’t look forward to.”
“No,” Andrea agreed, smiling her bright healthy smile. She was dressed in a gray wool suit whose broad lapels made her look more buxom than usual.
David searched himself for something to say, but his tongue was numbed by memories of Mamie from kindergarten on: the round-faced little girl being led to the asphalt playground by her round-faced mother, although the other mothers had ceased such escorting; the eager student, knowing all the answers but never pushing them on others or on the teacher, never demanding attention but ready to shine when the spotlight fell on her; the cheerleader and class secretary; the guileless pep girl. Like David, she had been an only child, a fruit of the Depression’s scant crop. Like him, she had acquired an only child’s self-entertaining skills—drawing, reading, keeping scrapbooks. In their class plays and assembly programs, she always played the part of the impish little sister, while David, for some reason, played that of the father, with talcum powder in his hair. There was no need for talcum powder now; he had turned gray and then white early, like his own mother.
Mamie was saying, “So I say to myself, ‘Mamie, you stop complaining. You’ve had a wonderful life, and three wonderful children, and it isn’t over yet.’ Dot offered to have me come live with them but I wouldn’t do it to her, not in the shape I’m in. Jake offered, too, out there in Arizona. He thinks the dryness would be good for me, but what would I do looking out the window at the desert, unable to open a window because of the air-conditioning? The funny thing is—this will amuse you, David, you were always into irony—the rehab I’ll be moving to is the same one with my mother already there. She won’t be in my unit, but isn’t that ironical? I lived two blocks from her most of my life, and now I’ll be on the floor just under her.”
The yearbook had not predicted that any of their parents would be alive in 2000. “My goodness—your mother must be ninety,” David said.
“And then some. Who would have thought it, the way she smoked? And she wasn’t averse to a drink now and then either.”
“She was always very nice to me,” he recalled. “Even without you being there, I could hang out in your house, waiting for my father to get done at school with his extracurricular stuff. Your mother and I’d play gin rummy.”
“She always said, ‘David will go places.’ ”
In memory he saw her mother at the kitchen table like a tenement solitary glimpsed from a passing train—smoke unfurling from a Chesterfield in a glass ashtray, a fanned set of cards in her hand, a glass of some tinted liquid beside her other elbow. She had pasty, deeply dimpled elbows, and she and her daughter shared curly brown hair, and full, talkative lips, curved up at the corners. For all the bubbly welcome with which the two females of the house had received David’s visits, there had been a melancholy nap to the furniture, a curtained gloom. It was a semi-detached house with no windows on one side and those on the other staring at a neighbor’s windows not six feet away. The man of the house, a small, almost rudely untalkative lathe operator, was slow, in the evenings, to come home from work. Mamie’s sunny manner, her busy happiness in high school—the long shiny halls, the organized activities, the tides of young life regulated by bells—partook of the relief of escape. Like David’s father, who taught there, Mamie had made a home of the broad, chaste communal setting. David’s fondness for her had never crossed the border into the mildest sexual exchange.
“Speaking of going places,” David said.
“Yes,” Mamie said quickly, recovering her briskness, “you must be off. It kills me not to be there; I swore I’d show up even if it had to be in a wheelchair. But my doctors said it wasn’t to be. You two have a wonderful time. David, be sure to say something nice to Sarah Beth about the decorations and favors. She slaved to find all those things in the class colors.”
. . .
Sarah Beth, a shy, skinny girl who had become a stringy, aggressive old woman, had indeed slaved. The effect was dazzling—swags of maroon and canary yellow, floral centerpieces to match at every table, the walls thronged with enlarged photographs taken more than fifty years ago of schoolchildren in pigtails and knickers, and then of teenagers in saddle shoes and pleated skirts, corduroy shirts and leather jackets. The boys looked mildly menacing, with their greased pompadours and ducktails and flagrantly displayed cigarettes, a pack squaring their shirt pockets and an unfiltered singleton tucked behind one ear. The girls, too, with their thickly laid-on lipstick and induced blond streaks, had a touch of killer—of determination to get their share of the life to come.
Now, although that life was mostly over, the function room was full of human noise, gleeful greetings and old-fashioned kidding: “God, ugly as ever! Who’s your friend, or is that a stomach?” Sarah Beth, who without Mamie here was thrown into the chief managerial role, came and seized David above the elbow and turned him away from studying the photographs on the wall to face a smartly dressed woman with button-black eyes and hair to match, cut short and tastefully frosted.
“Do you know who this is?” Sarah Beth asked. Her tone was so aggressive his mind seized up. The mystery woman’s features, in her smooth plump face, had an owlish sharpness, and her jet-black, decisively shaped eyebrows gave her a frowning look, though she was smiling hopefully, trying silently to sing her identity to David across the decades. He was reminded of walking to elementary school, when Barbara Moyer and Linda Rickenbacker would steal his cap and his rubber-lined book satchel and nimbly keep these possessions out of his reach until tears stung his eyes and he ran the other way in a tantrum; then the girls would chase him, to give him back what they had grabbed.
Now, again, he was being ganged up on by girls. The seconds stretched. Plump women of sixty-seven or -eight have a family resemblance. He stammered—an old problem, long outgrown—when he began to mouth the name of a girl, Loretta Haldeman, who, he realized in mid-stammer, this could not be, for Loretta had attended a reunion five years ago wearing steel-rimmed spectacles with one opaque lens; an eye had given out. This woman with her bright stern stare was being presented as a treat, a delicacy, a rarity. Sarah Beth offered a hint: “This is the first reunion she’s come to.” He tried to remember who, among the popular girls, always annoyed the class organizers by never coming, by not coming for fifty years, and thus through the powers of deduction rather than of recognition he named her: “Elizanne!” It was a name like none other, pr
onounced, they learned as children, to begin with an “ay” sound, like the mysterious “et” in “Chevrolet.” It bespoke an ambitious, willful mother, to brand a daughter with such a name, in so conservative a county.
Elizanne stepped forward to be kissed; David aimed at her cheek, though from the way she puckered she would have taken him on her mouth. “How lovely to have you here,” he said, a bit blankly. She had not been one of the showier girls in the class, though she had aged better than most. Her dress was teal silk and understated, expensive and suburban; her husband, that ultimate accessory, was tall and genial, with a trace of Southern accent—a man of business, retired or all but. The two of them were together embarked, David imagined, upon a well-earned sunset career of determined foreign travel, of grandchild-sitting and health-club attendance, of hard-working American leisure modelled on the handsome aging couples in commercials for Viagra and iron supplements. Elizanne had, he sensed, gone places. Her face displayed, along with that demure quick smile he could now remember—a smile that darted in and out—a good sense of herself, an established social identity momentarily set aside, for this occasion, like a man’s jacket folded into an airplane’s overhead bin. Though he was happy enough to see her, he had little to say to her, and less than that to the tan and drawling husband, to whom they must all seem, David imagined, Pennsylvania Dutch hicks. This man’s indulgent witness was inhibiting, and David, anxious to join in his class’s old-fashioned fun, soon drifted away.
Only toward the end of the evening, with their spouses lost in the crowd, did Elizanne come up to him. There had been the bumbling monologue by the unofficial class clown, the e-mailed greeting from the unable-to-attend class president in Florida, and the touching message from Mamie that Sarah Beth read aloud. The microphone amplified the catch in her throat. “We had the best of it,” Mamie had written. “No drugs, no gangs, no school shootings, respect for our teachers, and faith in America.” Then the Frankhauser twins, now stooped and heavy of step, performed a soft-shoe routine last presented in senior assembly. Sarah Beth methodically thanked all the committee members and warned that a hat would be passed for the outstanding Fiorvante’s wait-staff. Butch Fogel announced how to find tomorrow’s picnic, at Shumacher’s Grove, though the TV weathermen were predicting rain. The hired entertainment, a female keyboard player with a bassist, sang old songs freighted with nostalgic content for somebody, no doubt, but not quite for them. Their songs had been overlookable oddities tucked into the late Forties and early Fifties, just before Presley and doowop and rock rendered obsolete everything before them—the swing bands, the crooners, the iron-coiffed female vocalists, the novelty numbers and moony heart-wringers, to which one did a sluggish box step, as if sleepwalking. There was a little dance floor at Fiorvante’s, and five years ago, one couple dared venture onto it with their version of the jitterbug, and others followed. Now—nobody. The Olinger High School Class of 1950 had given up on dancing.