One afternoon she was working with the cross pictures and deciding which to send to TG when she heard a truck climbing the driveway, struggling against the slope. The dog let out a sharp gruff bark, and she moved from the table to sit on the couch, one hand knotted in the other. The truck stopped; she heard its door open, then close. When there was a knock at the door it was as though every thought she could possibly have scrambled through her mind in just an instant, like a squirrel through the leaves in the woods.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve delivered here,” said the UPS man. “Boy, it’s a slog.”
That was a bad day. That, and the day Tad drove up with the back of his car filled with a bouquet of pink balloons. The balloons crowded into the living room, bumping against the ceiling, mobbing the fireplace. When she looked at the card, it said, “Happy Valentine’s Day from Tad.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked, and with a bow Tad said, “That would be very nice.”
As they sat at the table she realized, by the way the bunch of balloons bounced from one end of the room to another, that she must have a leaky window or a break in the walls. The day before she had found a shingle on the ground. “I need a roofer,” she told the dog, with a harsh laugh that made his ears come down. She sent the owner of the cottage an email, but he did not respond.
(“What does she think, that for a thousand a month she’s getting the Taj Mahal?” he said to one of his friends on a sunny terrace in Bermuda, where he was overseeing an addition to a hotel.)
“I hope you won’t take it amiss if I say that you have been an inspiration to me,” Tad said. “Those”—he nodded at the balloons, which seemed to nod back—“are a small token.”
“That’s lovely, but unnecessary,” she replied.
“By example. You’ve inspired me by example. I have considered for a long time changing my life. Drastically, as it happens. Your example has told me that that is possible.”
“I haven’t made much of a change,” she said, bending her face to her teacup as the ribbons from the balloon bouquet passed overhead, touched her cheek, and moved away.
“Adaptation,” Tad said. “I required a model of adapting to new circumstances. I thank you for providing that.”
“Can you share your plans?” she asked, thinking, Oh, no, please don’t, don’t make me listen to one of those scenarios so clearly doomed to failure, the lovely home cook who decides to launch a line of cookies, the venture capitalist who has always wanted to own a country inn.
“They are in flux, but you will be the first to know,” Tad said, and again she thought, Oh no. Please don’t. Please.
“This is excellent tea,” he added.
“Lipton’s,” she said.
“My mother has always favored it.”
She’d told Ben the story of the snowstorm, leaving out the last few hours, of course, and he’d said, “Ah, man, Mom, no cell, no email? You can’t be that out of the communications loop.” The UPS man had brought a package from Ben, a little plastic divot she put into one side of her computer. She didn’t know how it worked, but it meant that, on a semiregular basis, she was able to get email at the house. This was less momentous than perhaps her son believed. She heard from Dorothea, who was on a yearlong teaching fellowship in Venice and who appeared to be having a good time, although Rebecca was skeptical of this because she knew the emails she sent in return had likely convinced Dorothea that she was having a good time, too.
There were photographs of houses she might use during the semester at Carnegie Mellon, small but pretty, with porches and pocket lawns. There was one that she thought she would choose, and each time she looked at it, and at the tentative schedule of lectures, seminars, graduate tutorials, she felt like an actor preparing for a role: for a term she would turn herself back into that strange familiar version of herself, the clothes in the closet in rotation again. She sent a message, took the house, confirmed the schedule. The artist formerly known as Rebecca Winter.
She checked her bank balance once a day, as though it might have magically changed overnight, and change it slowly did, but only for the worse. As for the rest: invitations, the occasional press inquiry, some requests for speeches at art schools and women’s clubs. One lunch invitation for the birthday of a friend.
It was funny, what friendship meant in Rebecca’s world. It mainly meant lunch, twice a year, and the occasional dinner party, except for Dorothea, who was an old school friend, a genuine friend. Rebecca had realized, ruefully, that she should have made more friends in school; they seemed to be the only ones women really talked to honestly because the shared history meant fewer lies were available to them. With the others shared meals had become a substitute for intimacy, but not the kind of substitute that allowed for dark nights of the soul, calls at 1:00 A.M., tears and drinking and despair in pajamas. How many times had she heard women in New York—maybe women everywhere, for all she knew—speak lyrically of how they wouldn’t see friends for months, perhaps even years, and then it was as though they had never been apart. “Picked up where we left off” was the common phrase. It was supposed to signal some magical communion, but if you looked it right in the eye, it came down to this: the kinds of people they considered friends they might not even actually see for a long long time.
It seemed so far away, all of it, although she knew that if she got into the car and drove for two hours she would be in the city, in Central Park or at the museums. The idea gave her vertigo. She went for days without speaking, unless she talked to the dog. When the ground was clear of snow, or clear enough, the two of them might hike for hours. When she pulled on her jeans one morning she noticed that her legs were as hard as firewood, that the muscles of her thighs made vertical lines reaching to the bend of her pelvis. There was a sharp suggestion of rib above her waist. Some nights when she couldn’t be bothered to cook venison she ate tuna right from the can, or a bowl of lukewarm black beans, while the dog stared up into her face, his tail a metronome. Please please please. She always shared.
One early morning the two of them struck out up the mountain until Rebecca realized that they were farther than she’d ever come before. Pushing through a stand of denuded brambles, their sharp nails reaching for her jacket, she came upon a long flat plain and saw railroad tracks disappearing into the distance. Sometimes at night she heard the lowing of a train whistle; this must be its source, the kind of ramshackle tracks that carried occasional freight through the outskirts of towns. She and the dog followed the tracks until what looked like the end of the world appeared at their juncture, and she saw that the earth fell away to a rocky chasm with a stream working its way across the bottom. The tracks continued over a trestle that threaded its way above nothing to the other side. Rebecca stopped at its edge to take a few photographs, and then she began to walk across it.
Lying in bed that night she would think about why. She was not afraid of heights but neither was she adventurous. She could ski intermediate slopes but didn’t care to, knew how to snorkel but had never learned to scuba dive, had never feared flying but didn’t care for small planes. When she had looked at the photographs after, it had seemed the thrust of the tracks disappearing into woods beyond the enormous opening in the land demanded exploration.
But the truth was that the sudden disappearance of the solid ground beneath her feet had felt like a laugh in her face, a declaration of war, a cosmic bet that she could not and would not and didn’t dare, as though it made visible where she had wound up and how she felt about that. She was shaking slightly as she began, and it was with anger. And, almost halfway across the long trestle, she looked down, and the shaking was adrenaline. She fell to her knees on the wooden crossbars, through which she could see the stream and the rocks and the drop to both, and she could feel herself tumbling in her own imagination. She climbed the trestle like a ladder back to where she had begun, hand over hand, until she threw herself onto the frozen solid ground where she had started. The dog licked her face. H
e had not budged.
Oh, the loneliness, the loneliness. It lived inside her now like an illness, like a flu that could be ignored and then would suddenly overtake and overwhelm her. If she’d fallen from the railroad trestle she wondered how long it would have been before anyone had even known, who would have cared, who would have mourned. She could almost see the story in the Times, with a photograph of her photograph, alongside, or perhaps in lieu of, a photograph of her face. “Rebecca Winter,” they would say in galleries and restaurants. “You didn’t hear? An accident, I guess. Or maybe … well, things were difficult.” Sometimes she felt as though she was disappearing, that she was being whittled down to just this terrible feeling, like a sudden aching that appeared all over, not in her body but in her soul. At night she woke: 1:23, 3:07, 4:22, blurry advertisements from the little digital clock. And when she could not go back to sleep: 1812 in the checking account, 740 for the car insurance, the 400 from the state that hadn’t yet cleared her account. It was funny, how her equations had come to rely on 200 here, 200 there, the 200 she would no longer have since she would not be sitting in a tree with Jim Bates if hell froze over, which, some days, it seemed likely to do. She was never very good at math; now she was haunted by numbers, filling the black hours after the sun went down.
On her next birthday, sixty-one.
As she hiked back to the cabin, the dog nudging along her thigh as though concerned, she remembered a night years ago when she had been lying in bed in her apartment in New York, reading, and through the wall had heard the sound of someone weeping and wailing. They were thick walls, in the old building, which meant that the sound at its starting point must be loud for her to hear it. She had pressed her ear to the plaster as the sound died, stuttered back into life, began again. Something in her had wanted to call 911, to whisper into the phone, someone’s heart is breaking in apartment 8C. What a silly thought. The police could never keep up with it, with all the breaking hearts behind the locked doors of New York City apartments. She imagined that the woman had lost her lover, or her job, or her best friend, or had just found herself broken by the weight of her own life. There were a thousand ways to imagine someone unhappy and so few ways to imagine someone contented.
The next day in the elevator she had seen the woman who lived in 8C. She was wearing a black suit with a big brooch on the shoulder, and carrying a lipstick-red bag that matched her shoes, and she gave Rebecca a toothy smile. Rebecca smiled back. So much smiling in the service of pretense. Alone in the cottage she needn’t smile, and didn’t.
Sometimes she realized that when she had been married, at the height of her success, her days had been filled with tasks: Ben to preschool, a meeting with a gallery owner, a dinner order at the fish store, a stop at the dry cleaner for the dress for the cocktail party. She had had time for thoughts only at night, as she lay in bed, Peter’s back a clamshell in striped cotton beside her. She had had a hard time sleeping in those days because of all her thoughts. Was Ben’s failure to achieve word recognition a sign of some learning disability? Did his biting phase mean he was unhappy? Was he unhappy because his father sniped at his mother? Did Peter snipe at her because they had not had decent sex for a month, or had they not had decent sex for a month because he sniped at her? What had he meant when he said he found her work derivative? Surely he’d only been in a mood. Surely it meant he didn’t love her. Surely it meant she was no good at her work.
No wonder she hadn’t been able to sleep. There had been bees in her brain, a whole hive, no honey. Now her thoughts were a daytime thing, and there were fewer specific questions and more general ones. What would happen next? How and where would she live? How could she make a living? She knew any reasonable person would say she should downsize, downgrade, sell her apartment, but that was if you thought of an apartment as real estate instead of a home. She didn’t want to sell her home. She thought of it as the last link to the self she had once been.
She felt foolish and yet somehow as though she had woken up to something that she should have known long ago. She remembered how Dorothea had told her, and only her, not to bring her a snow globe ever again. When Dorothea was in college someone had given her one, and she was charmed by it, and had started a collection. Soon everyone who knew her knew, that for a birthday or a holiday or simply a dinner party offering, they could bring her a snow globe. Except that Dorothea was no longer charmed by snow globes; they took up space, developed a milky patina of dust, and after a while all looked the same. But it was still the case that, with a certain sort of smile, someone would say to her, “I’ve found the perfect thing for your birthday.”
“Another goddamned snow globe,” Dorothea would mutter.
People froze you in place, Rebecca sometimes thought, trudging through the woods. More important, you froze yourself, often into a person in whom you truly had no interest. So you had a choice: you could continue a masquerade, or you could give up on it. No matter what Tad might think about her skill at adaptation, it was hard to know how to do that.
There were nights when she woke with a barbed-wire fence of minor but undeniable pain around her heart, and she rehearsed what she’d eaten that day—raisin bran, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, chicken and rice, the cuisine of a freshman at boarding school—and convinced herself that it was indigestion, then wondered if she was having the female version of a heart attack, which she had been told was often overlooked, which seemed right since her experience was that women overlooked most of what their hearts told them. In the morning she felt fine except for the fact that she had made her hands into little paws beneath her cheek and they had gone numb at the wrists. In recent years what she missed most about her youth was sleep, that ability to fall into a hole of unconsciousness and land, softly and without sensation, at the bottom, to awake ten hours later rested and with skin remarkably uncreased.
The night she’d tried to cross the railroad trestle she slept as deeply as she had for years. Just at dawn she woke to the sound of the train whistle, then went back to sleep and slept two hours more.
WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS THAT?
She finally bought a space heater. The furnace was a sad little thing, nearly fifty years old; when the plumber finally replaced it, the following year, he said, “That sucker wouldn’t heat a doghouse.” Even a good fire in the fireplace reached only to one end of the couch, leaving the small hallway and the kitchen frigid. The bedroom had newish windows, but even there Rebecca sometimes slept in a sweatshirt.
But it took her most of the winter to shake the feeling that a space heater represented an even more marked fall in the world than her thoughts about dipping into her retirement account. For some reason her parents had been obsessed, in a small way, with space heaters; she wondered now if both had childhood memories of visits to relatives with crowded walk-up apartments and a glowing death trap in one corner of the living room. She knew only that, from time to time, her mother would read the newspaper and say caustically to her father, as though he had lit the match, “Four people dead in a fire in the Bronx,” and her father would ask, every time, every single time, “Space heater?” Even if the paper said that there had been bad electrical wiring, or someone smoking in bed, or a child playing with matches, her parents were certain: put one of those things in your home, and sooner or later they’d be identifying you by your jewelry or your teeth. Luckily the heating system in their building was so enthusiastic that the windows had to be cracked between January and April so that they would not all suffocate. “Those people never learn,” her mother always said, as though the poor willfully chose apartments in buildings where the furnaces broke when the temperature fell.
As Rebecca browsed the aisles at Walmart she could imagine what her father would say if she mentioned buying a space heater. “Put on a sweater! Better to freeze! An accident waiting to happen!” Of course she could not tell him, since he still thought she was on West Seventy-Sixth Street. Everything about her living situation would appall him: “They shoot guns?
What’s with the dog? How can you eat that stuff?” She didn’t notice the two women pushing a cart toward her until she heard one say, “That’s her.” How was it possible that anyone in Walmart cared about Still Life with Bread Crumbs? One of the women pushed past her, bulky, somehow sullen, wearing the sorts of clothes she associated with nuns who had been forced to trade the habit for street wear. But the other planted herself in front of Rebecca and stared up at her. She was very short, and florid.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“Ah,” said Rebecca, as she had on so many other occasions.
“Stop giving my nephew ideas,” she hissed.
“Pardon me?” Rebecca said.
“You heard me,” the woman said, and followed the other down the aisle, toward small appliances.
“What in the world was that?” Rebecca said aloud, but she had no idea.
WHAT IN THE WORLD WAS THAT?
One morning a large SUV pulled up at her door. “I was lucky to find this place,” the driver said. Rebecca’s last name was on a placard in the back window, as though there would be a mob of people at the cottage, all clamoring to find their car and driver.
The Women’s Art League Presents an Afternoon with Rebecca Winter.
How long had it been since she had done something like this? The organizer had sent her a lovely letter a month before, ending ruefully with the fact that she knew it was short notice and that they could pay only a modest honorarium. Rebecca had almost laughed when she saw the number, only because it would cover the nursing home for a month. Of course she had accepted the invitation, although she knew the short notice meant that they had had another speaker who had canceled and that she was second string.
In her black dress and her dress boots, she felt like a rusty gate. In the car the driver tried to talk to her about this and that, but she was oiling her hinges, thinking of her work, the questions she was certain to be asked, the kind of audience she could expect, preparing to become that public self. She was out of practice.