I like to imagine this woman’s whole life in this house: the line of hair escaping to blow across her face as she stood on the steps calling the kids in to dinner, the smell of her roast in the oven, potatoes browning and carrots curling in the blue-and-white-speckled Dutch oven. She wore long white nightgowns to bed; I won’t have it any other way. She wrote out her grocery list with a stubby yellow pencil her husband brought home from the insurance company where he worked. Ovaltine, she wrote, in school-correct script. Butter. “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” came from the yellowish-white radio on top of the refrigerator. At ten-thirty in the morning, her phone would ring, the black and clunky phone sitting on the hall table on a doily, a fat phone book on the helpful shelf below. “Hello?” she would say, and then she’d listen to an invitation to have coffee with a neighbor. “That’d be swell,” she’d say, and she’d take off her cleaning kerchief and walk across the street. She would sit at her neighbor’s kitchen table with her legs crossed, talking, talking, hearing the pleasant china sound of her cup nesting into the saucer.
The women were home. They got to talk. I’m not sure it wasn’t better. Think of it, the luxury of talking to another woman and feeling your three-year-old idly pressing his head into your stomach, instead of being fined for picking him up late at day care—again.
I don’t know. I keep these things mostly to myself. I keep the ghost woman for myself. Oh, I’ve told Jay how I think it might have been better before. I’ve told him that. I’ve said sometimes I long so hard for older times. He always understands. He likes applesauce with pork chops. He likes this house for its old-fashionedness as much as I; he didn’t mind keeping the wringer-washer.
I’ve told Jay just about everything, from the day I met him. He is the way I determine where to put everything on the scale: Is this crazy? Is this right? Isn’t this funny?
When we were younger, in our twenties, we lived together before we got married. Before we went to sleep at night, we used to hold hands and sing little made-up songs to each other about what we did that day. “First I got up, and I looked out the window, and I saw a little bird …” I would sing. And then he sang about what he did. His melody was not as good as mine—he’s no singer, Jay—but he would sing about what he saw on the way to work and what he did there and what he ate for lunch and what happened on the way home and it was all very silly but it was surprising, too, what the songs told us. I suppose they were a kind of shy testimony to the love we had for each other and for the life we were living. “Telling Songs,” we called them.
We did it for a long time, until I ruined it. We had vowed never to tell anyone about it, imagine the embarrassment. Then one night I secretly tape-recorded Jay singing to me. I played it back to him and we both laughed. But then he made me tape over it, right away. His song got covered up with the sounds of us breathing, talking a little, an ambulance siren got on there—and after that we just stopped singing to each other. I don’t know if I really ruined it by taping him. I think I might have sensed that our singing was coming to an end soon, and I wanted to preserve some little bit of it. But I couldn’t tape him without telling him I’d done it and then he was just too embarrassed to let me keep it around. I wish now, of course, that I had at least kept that recording of us doing nothing, of us trying to conceal our tender secrets. I do sleep with a shirt of his that I had the good sense not to launder. Sometimes you know before you know.
I have a good neighbor, in every sense of the word. Alice, her name is. She lives with her husband, Ed. He’s a distant man, cool in a way that is perhaps unintentional. It’s not that he doesn’t smile; it’s that if his smile were something you drew, you’d erase it, thinking, Wrong. They have a seven-year-old son named Timothy, never called Timmy or Tim; a little, scrawny guy who wears thick glasses already, and who tucks his striped T-shirts into his pants with the aplomb of a silver-templed CEO. I like him very much. I think he’s going to be a great Something in science. He knows the word cache, he could read at three. I think he’s a genius, actually. “Nah,” Alice says, meaning, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Alice is the most unattractive woman I have ever seen. She has a complexion that went on a rampage in her teens and never settled down. Her hair is forever frizzed; nobody can do anything about it and everyone has tried. She has too-big lips, which I know are all the rage now, but not on Alice; and she has muddy brown eyes that are too small. She’s not overweight, but there are no cheekbones in sight on her face, no bones at all. One thing that’s nice are her ears, which are shell-like, really very pleasant to look at. But of course that’s not enough.
Still, there is something about her. She’s the hardest person to explain. If you saw her, the first thing you’d do is think, my God, she’s so ugly, and you’d feel sort of guilty, feel sorry for her. But then you’d look again. And all that feeling sorry for her would be gone, because of what is in her that is so strong, and clear, and finished. You would want to talk to her. You would want her to know you, and to approve of you. You would believe that in her hands, things were safe. And brushing at the back of your shamed brain would be some new knowledge about our usual concept of beauty, namely, the extreme wrongness of it.
Alice is sitting out on the wide front steps of our duplex now, smoking, and she watches me get out of the car and come toward her. I see that the sun is low in the sky; it must be nearly six o’clock. I’m late. I step over the weeds that are just beginning to poke out of the cracks of the sidewalk. They’re kind of pretty at first, and welcome, the way all green things are in early spring. In a few weeks, we’ll be paying the kids a penny apiece to pull them out. Well, we’ll pay Timothy and Amy. Sarah won’t do it anymore unless we pay her a dollar apiece. Which we won’t do. It occurs to me that there was ice on the sidewalk the last time I heard Jay’s voice, and the thought is like the pinch of skin in zipper.
Alice doesn’t smoke inside my house and only rarely in her own. She smokes on the porch, even in the winter. I’ll see her sitting out there in the morning, a parka over her nightgown, galoshes over her wild-colored knee socks. She drinks her coffee quickly so it doesn’t freeze, then smokes her cigarette even faster, so she doesn’t. Before coming in, she does five quick jumping jacks. This is so she can tell her doctor that yes indeed, she exercises daily. She counts her numbers out loud, as though you could lose track counting up to five. Her tone is serious. She is her own drill sergeant.
She watches me carefully; then, when I am closer, smiles and juts her chin out at me, a greeting. She puts her cigarette out in the clay ashtray Timothy made. It’s orange and lumpy, the kind of thing any parent loves.
I sit down beside her, offer her a bouquet of tulips. They are a beautiful silky red color, with show-off streaks of yellow running up the center of each petal. She grabs them out of my hand, then frowns at me. “Why do you do this?” she says. “You’re starting to piss me off.” And then, “Thank you.”
Well, she does so much, I want to bring her little presents now and then. She’s been taking care of my kids every day since January 17th; now it’s April 21st. She says she doesn’t mind, she says what the hell’s the difference, she lives right here, the kids go to the same school, she’s not doing anything. But of course she is. Even when you like other people’s kids, they’re still other people’s kids. You have to be a little more alert, a little nicer, it makes for a strain. I’d like to give her more than tulips. She deserves a piece of the glowing moon, captured in a jar.
“Don’t be pissed off,” I tell her now. “Just put them by your bed. When you wake up and see them, you’ll feel happy.” From out back, I hear the chatter of the kids. I lean forward, turn my head so that I can hear them better.
“They’re building a spaceship,” Alice says. “They have to finish before bedtime, so you can imagine how busy they are. I wonder how they’ll protect the cardboard when they get close to the sun. Incidentally, we had tuna noodle casserole for dinner, don’t sue me.”
“I like tun
a noodle casserole. So do they. Thank you. I didn’t know what the hell to feed them tonight. Last night we had spaghetti with butter, and cucumber slices.”
“Your kids are fine,” Alice says, though of course she knows they are not, not really, not mine. Mine are having a few little problems. Amy has begun wetting her bed; Sarah is hostile to me, and she seems to have forgotten every bit of math she ever learned, including addition. “I wouldn’t worry about it just now,” her teacher told me, her lipstick precisely within the lines of her mouth, her blouse ironed. I looked at her normality as if it were a museum exhibit.
“So how’s Jay?” Alice asks. I notice she is wearing mascara, a first. I want to talk about that. I want to say, Why, Alice! You’re wearing makeup! Do you like it? Yes, I want to talk about makeup, tell Alice how the cheap mascara is always the best and I hope she didn’t go to some department-store dowager and pay twenty dollars for it. I want to talk about what movies are playing, what kind of marinade is best for salmon, what was on the front page of the newspaper. Instead, I look down at my feet and say, “They’re going to move him to a nursing home tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“Well, you know. They said they can’t keep him past a certain number of days when he’s making no progress.” I look at her. “He’s making no progress. He’s flunking out.”
“Well. He’s still alive. They don’t know everything. He could come back at any moment. People do.”
“Yeah, I know.” I pull the tie off my ponytail, shake out my hair. It’s dirty. I wonder when I washed it last.
“So where are they taking him?”
“Ridgeview,” I say. “Over on Grand Street. It’s what I can afford. It’s probably a pit. Oh, God, this is awful. I hate this. He’s got to hurry up and get better, now. I can’t keep this up forever.”
Alice wraps her arms around herself, rocks back and forth slightly. How we speak when we don’t speak. I watch her moving shoulder, note with a kind of pleasure the small rip in the sleeve of her purple cardigan.
“They changed his feeding tube today,” I say, in a voice that I might use to mention a sale on London broil at Buy Rite.
“Oh yeah? That’s good.”
“Jesus, Alice,” I say then, and the lightness I attempted with my voice feels snatched from me, as though I’d been caught stealing it. “I just …” I say. And then, “Well, you know, I …” And then I stop talking, put my hands over my face. They smell like dirt and metal.
She reaches over to put her arm around me. “Right,” she says softly. “I know.” I start to cry and then I stop; and then I get up to go around back to see what the kids are doing.
On my side, they’re rolling me onto my side. A ship, lolling in the waves. Green fronds, the mouths of fish, the pull of the moon. I see you in your yellow dress, Lainey, the rip at the shoulder and how your tanned summer fingers felt along the line of it, as if to repair by touch. Dizzy. The spinning beginning. Low sound, thunder? I see the red blood cells passing, platelike disks, the opening and closing of the minute blossoms in my lungs. I am trying, but I am wrapped in so many layers. Here, a flash and a click. Light. An electric buzz. “So what’s going on after work?” I hear. I hear! What effort it is to breathe. Am I breathing?
“It’s to save us from the end of the world, when it blows up,” Sarah says, looking at me and shielding her eyes from the last bit of the lowering sun. She has laid a long branch carefully on top of another. She turns back, busy with the tasks at hand, bored with me already, me standing there with no good news, it’s plain to see.
She’s a very pretty little girl, Sarah, with her black eyebrows and light hair and perfect face. Her last birthday brought a new air of confidence that makes me a little uncomfortable with her lately. I see her as beginning to develop into the kind of girl whose yearbook picture every parent points to, saying, “And who’s that?” Jay and I agreed that we didn’t exactly know where Sarah came from, though he watched this change with a kind of prideful delight rather than with my wariness.
Amy comes to lean against my leg and watch the others work. Here’s the little girl I can still relate to, the one with the stick-out ears and cowlicks and love of garlic bread and dandelions. She puts her thumb in her mouth, reaches skillfully with the same hand for a bit of her hair. I lift her up, smell the sweet wrinkle in her neck, stop myself from saying, “Help me, I’m so tired.”
“Where’s Daddy?” she says. She always asks, as if it’s a surprise that he hasn’t stepped out of the car along with me.
“He’s still in the hospital, honey. But tomorrow he gets to move to a new place.”
She pulls away to look at my face. “Where?”
“It’s a place called Ridgeview. It’s a nursing home. And maybe he’ll wake up there, and then we can bring him home.”
“Why?”
“Why would we bring him home? Because he’ll be better then.”
“No. Why will he wake up there?”
“Well, I don’t know if he will. But maybe he will because it’s just a different place. Maybe it will stimulate him.”
She lays her head back down, thinks about this. As do I. Maybe he will wake up there! Maybe so! Sometimes I think this is why we have kids, to create hope for ourselves.
“Mom!” Sarah calls. “Can I use some Saran Wrap?”
“Sure,” I say. How easy some things are. What a relief it is to come home, to be able to do something about something.
“Sarah?”
She looks up. “What?”
“Never mind,” I say. “I’ll bring it out to you.” I just wanted to see her respond when I called her name, is the truth. “Can I help build?” I ask.
“Yeah, you can do the floor,” Timothy says. “It has to be really sturdy.” He pushes his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose, scratches absentmindedly at his wrist. I can see him thirty years from now, white-coated, staring into a microscope, too intent on his genius to eat his paper-bag lunch. Inside Alice’s kitchen, I hear her and Ed talking, the sound floats out over us. I feel a stab of jealousy.
“No, you can’t help!” Sarah tells me. And then, to Timothy, “She can’t.”
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because she can’t.” She stares fiercely at him.
He shrugs in the huge way of children. “Well, I don’t care.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I need to make some phone calls anyway. I’ll bring you the Saran Wrap, but then finish up for today. You can only stay out for another few minutes.”
I hike Amy up higher on my hip, go into the kitchen and notice the smell of my own house, which I’d forgotten. Something like toast. And Pledge, I actually cleaned a little yesterday. I know why Sarah doesn’t want me to help. She thinks I’ll mess up. This is my reputation lately. Courtesy of an accident that happened to someone else.
I get the Saran Wrap, ask Amy to take it outside. I want to change clothes. “When you come back in, you can have a bubble bath,” I tell her.
“And two stories, you said last night I could have two.”
“And that’s exactly what you’ll get,” I said. “I promised, I know. I’ll do what I promised, don’t worry about it.”
Alice and Ed have a little dog named Maggie. She looks like an animal dressed up like a dog, like a hedgehog or a weasel wearing a Tina Turner wig. I keep a bowl out for her; she visits. Lately, I’ve been holding her in my lap in the rocker, moving back and forth, feeling the little shakes her panting makes. I pet her whole body with long, slow strokes. She’s awful, really, her pop-out eyes, her rough fur, her awesomely bad breath. I can’t imagine what kind of dogs produced her. I can’t imagine why I love to rock her so. Last night, I put her over my shoulder like a newborn—she’s about the same size—and watched the half-moon out the window while we creaked back and forth in the rhythm that all women know from secrets whispered to their genes at the time of their conception. I was thinking, I am a female person with freckles scattered across the back of my han
ds, living under a sky that changes at random. I can only look up. Everything stops there, with my trusting that the asking is going somewhere. I felt a rush of longing flood through me as though water were rising on my insides to the top of my brain. And then Maggie all of a sudden jumped over my shoulder like Superdog and ran to the back door, shaking herself as though she’d just been bathed. As though she was trying to get rid of some sorrow she’d caught from me.
I don’t see Maggie around tonight. I’ve got nobody. The kids are asleep, half-washed. What are you doing, Jay? Where are you?
What are you doing, Lainey? Where are you?
Jay rode to the nursing home in an ambulance. Two hospital orderlies loaded him onto the gurney, a nice, shiny one, capable of tricks like rising up and down at the flick of a finger. They covered him with hospital blankets, then pushed him down the hall, his few personal things in a plastic bag that, at first, they had resting on his chest as though he were a hall table. “Please,” I said, and moved the bag to his side, as it would be if he were really carrying it.
The orderlies looked at each other. One of them had gum, and he’d stopped chewing it out of respect for me. But then, because I’d embarrassed him, he started chewing again. He blew a bubble in my direction. I wanted to slap his ignorant face. Instead I said nothing until I saw the ambulance attendants coming up to take over, and then I asked them to wait, to let me follow them. I wanted to be right behind.
And so here we are, driving down the highway, past the ruined beauty of downtown. Even in Minnesota, this has happened. I’m scared to go into the city at night. Even when I was with Jay that was true. I like to take a cab, get dropped off right in front of where we’re going. It’s only recent, this fear. I used to take the kids to the city with me all the time, to look in the big department stores, to sit on bus-stop benches and watch the people. Jay’s mother is from New York and she says things are so different there, and in such a short length of time. She said she used to get dressed up to ride the subway. We don’t go to New York very often, but when we do and we ride the subway, I’m afraid. Jay said it was because I’m getting old. I say it’s because the world has changed irrevocably. If the boom boxes were quiet at the subway stations, I would still hear that kind of music there.