Harder to figure, though, was that she didn’t visit our own house—at least, not the interior. Wouldn’t you suppose she’d be interested? The closest she’d come was that time on the sidewalk. But then, one Sunday morning, I caught sight of her in the backyard, beside where the oak tree had been. It was one of the few occasions when she was already in place before I arrived. I glanced out our kitchen window and saw her standing there, looking down at the wood chips, with her hands jammed in the pockets of her doctor coat. I made it to her side in record time, even though I seemed to have left my cane somewhere in the house. I said—slightly short of breath—“You see they removed all the evidence. Ground the stump to bits, even.”
“Mmhmm,” she said.
“They asked if I wanted to replace it with something, a maple tree or something. Maples are very fast-growing, they said, but I said no. We’ve never had enough sun here, I said, and maybe now—”
I stopped. This wasn’t what I wanted to be talking about. During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I had saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event and it sort of levels out, so to speak—settles into the general landscape.
I cleared my throat. I said, “Dorothy.”
Silence.
“I can’t stand to think that you’re dead, Dorothy.”
She tore her gaze from the wood chips.
“Dead?” she asked. “Oh, I’m not … Well, maybe you would call it dead. Isn’t that odd.”
I waited.
She returned to her study of the wood chips.
“Are you happy?” I asked her. “Do you miss me? Do you miss being alive? Is this hard for you? What are you going through, Dorothy?”
She looked at me again. She said, “It’s too late to say what I’m going through.”
“What? Too late?”
“You should have asked me before.”
“Asked you before what?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
Then Mimi King called, “Yoo-hoo!” She popped out her back door, waving. She was all dressed up in her church clothes; she even had a hat on. I waved back halfheartedly, hoping this would be enough, but no, on she came, stepping toward us in a wincing manner that meant she must be wearing heels. I said, “Damn,” and turned back to Dorothy. But of course she wasn’t there anymore.
I knew it was because of Mimi. Why, even while Dorothy was alive she’d had a way of ducking out of a Mimi visit. But somehow I couldn’t help taking her disappearance as a reproach to me personally. “You should have asked me before,” she’d told me. “It’s too late,” she’d told me. Then she’d left.
This was all my fault, I couldn’t help feeling. Mimi was tripping through my euonymus bushes now, but I turned away with a weight in my chest and limped back into my house.
7
In September, we held a meeting at work to plan for Christmas. Most of us found it difficult to summon up any holiday spirit; temperatures were in the eighties, and the leaves hadn’t started turning yet. But we gathered in Nandina’s office, Irene and Peggy on the love seat, Charles and I in two desk chairs wheeled in from elsewhere. Predictably, Peggy had brought refreshments—homemade cookies and iced mint tea—which Nandina thanked her for although I knew she didn’t see the necessity. (“Sometimes I feel I’m back in grade school,” she had told me once, “and Peggy is Class Mother.”) I accepted a cookie for politeness’ sake, but I let it sit on its napkin on a corner of Nandina’s desk.
Irene was wearing her legendary pencil skirt today. It was so narrow that when she was seated she had to hike it above her knees, revealing her long, willowy legs, which she could cross twice over, so to speak, hooking the toe of her upper shoe behind her lower ankle. Peggy was in her usual ruffles, including a sweater with short frilly sleeves because she always claimed Woolcott Publishing was excessively air-conditioned. And Nandina held court behind her desk in one of her carriage-trade shirtwaists, with her palms pressed precisely together in front of her.
“For starters,” she said, “I need to know if any of you have come up with any bright ideas for our holiday marketing.”
She looked around the group. There was a silence. Then Charles swallowed a mouthful of cookie and raised his hand a few inches. “This is going to sound a little bit grandiose,” he said, “but I think I’ve found a way to sell people our whole entire Beginner’s series, all in one huge package.”
Nandina looked surprised.
“You’ve heard of helicopter parents,” he told the rest of us. “Those modern-day types who telephone their college kids every hour on the hour just to make sure their little darlings are surviving without them. Nothing Janie or I plan to do, believe me—assuming we can ever get the girls to leave home in the first place. But anyhow, this is exactly the kind of gift idea that would appeal to a helicopter parent: we would pack the complete series in a set of handsome walnut-veneer boxes with sliding lids. Open the boxes and you’ll find instructions for every conceivable eventuality. Not just the Beginner’s setting-up-house titles or the Beginner’s raising-a-family titles but Beginner’s start-to-finish, cradle-to-grave living! And the best part is, the walnut boxes act like modular bookshelf units. Kids would just stack them in their apartments with the tops facing frontwards, slide the lids off, and they’re in business. Time to move? They’d slide the lids back on and throw the boxes into the U-Haul. Not ready yet for the breastfeeding book, or the divorce book? Keep those in a box in the basement till they need them.”
“What: Beginner’s Retirement, too?” Irene asked him. “Beginner’s Funeral Planning?”
“Or toss them into their storage unit,” Charles said. “I hear all the kids have storage units now.”
Nandina said, “I’m having trouble believing that even helicopter parents would carry things that far, Charles.”
“Right,” Irene said. “Why not just give the parents themselves The Beginner’s Book of Letting Go and circumvent the whole issue?”
“Do we publish that?” Peggy wondered.
“No, Peggy. I was joking.”
“It’s a thought, though,” Charles said. “But only after we sell the other books, obviously. Make a note of it, Peggy.”
“Oh! If we’re talking about new titles,” Peggy said, perking up, “I have one: The Beginner’s Menopausal Wife.”
Nandina said, “Excuse me?”
“This man came to fix my stove last week? And he was telling me all about how his wife is driving him crazy going through menopause.”
“Honestly, Peggy,” Nandina said. “Where do you find these people?”
“It wasn’t me! My landlord found him.”
“You must do something to bring it on, though. Every time we turn around, someone seems to be dumping his life story on you.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
“For my own part,” Irene said, “I make a practice of keeping things on a purely professional footing. ‘Here’s the kitchen,’ I say, ‘here’s the stove. Let me know when it’s fixed.’ ”
I laughed, but the others nodded respectfully.
“I promise,” Peggy told us, “this was not my fault. The doorbell rang; I answered. This man walked in and said, ‘Wife.’ Said, ‘Menopause.’ ”
“We seem to be getting away from our subject here,” Nandina said. “Does anyone have a suggestion relating to Christmas?”
Charles half raised his hand again. “Well …” he said. He looked around at the rest of us. “Not to hog the floor …”
“Go ahead,” Nandina told him. “You seem to be the only one with any inspiration today.”
Charles reached beneath his chair to pick up a book. It was covered in rich brown leather profusely tooled in gold, with Gothic letters spelling out My Wonderful Life, By.
“By?” Nandina asked.
“By whomever wants to write it,” Charles
said.
“Whoever,” Irene corrected him.
“Oh, I beg your pardon. How gauche of me. See, this would be a gift for the old codger in the family. His children would contract with us to publish the guy’s memoirs—pay us up front for the printing, and receive this bound leather dummy with his name filled in. On Christmas morning they’d explain that all he has to do is write his recollections down inside it. After that it goes straight to press, easy-peasey.”
He held the book over his head and riffled the pages enticingly.
“What’s to stop the codger from just writing stuff on the pages and letting it rest at that?” I asked him.
“All the better for us,” Charles said. “Then we’ve been paid for a printing job we don’t have to follow through with. It’s strictly non-refundable, you understand.”
I refrained from making one of my Beginner’s Flimflam remarks, but Peggy said, “Oh! His poor children!”
“You pays your money and you takes your chances,” Charles told her.
“Maybe we could just offer the dummy by itself—no printing involved,” she suggested.
“Then how would that be any different from those Grandma Remembers books in the greeting-card stores?”
“It would be more deluxe?”
Charles sighed. “First of all,” he said, “people like to see their words printed out. That’s what half this company is built upon. And besides that, we’re trying to drum up the most expensive product possible.”
“But what if his life was not wonderful?” Irene asked.
“In that case, he’ll be longing to set the record straight. He can hardly wait to get started! He’ll be hunched under the Christmas tree already hard at work, scribbling his grievances and ignoring all his relatives.”
“Well, thank you, Charles,” Nandina said. “That does give us something to think about. The modular-bookshelf idea seems a bit … ambitious, but we should definitely consider the memoir plan. Now, anyone else?”
The rest of us took to studying the décor, like students hoping not to be called upon.
One odd effect of Dorothy’s visits was that, more and more, I’d begun seeing the world through her eyes. I sat through that meeting like a foreigner, marveling that these people could take such subjects so seriously. Just think: A set of instruction manuals whose stated goal was to skim the surface. A hodgepodge of war recollections and crackpot personal philosophies that no standard publishing house would have glanced at. This was the purpose of my existence?
I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I’d never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.
It was lunchtime when the meeting ended, but instead of going to the corner café with the others I retreated to my office. I had some work to catch up on, I told them. Once I was alone, though, I swiveled my desk chair toward the window and stared out blankly at the dingy brick landscape. It was a relief to stop looking animated, to drop my expression of lively engagement.
I thought back to the time when Dorothy had stood on Rumor Road gazing at our house. I thought of when she’d walked alongside me after lunch. It occurred to me that, in all probability, neither one of us had actually spoken aloud during our encounters. Our conversations had played out silently in my head—my words flowing smoothly, for once, without a single halt or stutter. Granted, that was how I tended to recall all my conversations. I might ask somebody, “C-c-could you give—give—address,” but in my mind it was an unhesitating “Could you give me your address, please?” Still, I never fooled myself. I knew how I really sounded. I sounded like a breaking-up cell-phone call.
With Dorothy’s visits, though, it had been different. I had glided through my sentences effortlessly, because I had spoken just in my thoughts. And she had understood my thoughts. It had all been so easy.
Except now I wanted the jolts and jogs of ordinary life. I wanted my consonants interrupting my vowels as I spoke, my feet stubbing hers as we hugged, my nose bumping hers as we kissed. I wanted realness, even if it was flawed and pockmarked.
I closed my eyes, and I willed her with all my heart just to come lay a hand on my shoulder. But she didn’t.
I heard the others returning from lunch—scraps of chatter and laughter. A chair scraped. A telephone rang. Several minutes later, someone tapped on my door.
I swiveled to face forward. “Who is it?” I said. (“Who?” is what I really said.)
The door opened a few inches and Peggy poked her head in. “Are you busy?” she asked.
“Well …”
She stepped inside and shut the door carefully behind her. (Oh-oh: another of her heart-to-hearts.) She was holding one hand out, palm up, displaying a cookie on a napkin. “You left this on Nandina’s desk,” she told me, and she placed it on my blotter. “I thought you might want it, since you didn’t go to lunch.”
“Thanks.”
Under her arm she carried her cookie tin, which was painted with pink and lavender hydrangeas. The edge of a paper lace doily peeked out from under the lid. She placed the tin on my blotter, too, but she made no mention of it, as if she were hoping to sneak it past me.
“It was Reuben day at the Gobble-Up,” she said. “We all ordered grilled Reubens.”
“Great. I’ll be the only one fit to work this afternoon.”
“Yes, I’ve already got a tummy ache.”
I waited for her to leave, but instead she pulled up the chair across from my desk. She perched on only the front few inches of it, though. I considered that a good sign. But then she removed her sweater, which was definitely a bad sign. She turned to drape it just so over the back of the chair, prinking out the short sleeves so that they flared like hollyhocks. Then she faced me again. She clasped her hands in her lap. “I guess they didn’t think too much of my idea,” she said.
“What idea was that?”
“My menopausal-wife idea. Don’t you even remember it?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
I tried to cast my mind back to the menopausal wife.
“Well,” I said after a pause, “maybe since we were focused on Christmas …”
“No, it’s always like that. Nandina’s always telling me, ‘You’re a full player on the team, Peggy; I don’t know where we’d be without you, Peggy,’ but then, when I speak up, I always get shot down. They didn’t spend one second’s thought on what I said this morning, except to laugh at me for having a conversation with my repairman. They didn’t discuss it, didn’t vote on it; then Nandina ups and tells Charles that he’s the only one with any inspiration. Did you not notice how she said that? But it was a good idea! They should have paid it more attention!”
“Well, I wonder …” I said. I was still trying to recollect what her idea had consisted of, exactly. “I wonder if maybe people thought it was a little too … specialized.”
“Specialized! Half the world’s population goes through menopause. It’s not what you would call a rare and exotic condition.”
“Yes, all right, but … Or maybe it’s just that the focus seems odd. Beginner’s Menopause I can see, but Beginner’s Menopausal Wife? That seems aimed at the wrong reader.”
“It is not aimed at the wrong reader,” Peggy said. She was sitting extremely straight-backed now, and her clasped hands were white at the fingertips. “It’s aimed at exactly the person who should have this information: the husband. He’s bewildered! He’s saying, ‘What’s going on with this woman? I don’t understand!’ And we would be explaining to him what she is experiencing. We’d tell him what she needs from him, how she’s feeling useless and outdated now, and how he should be taking extra care of her.”
Yes, that would be Peggy’s main thrust. I said, “Look, Peggy. I see your point, but some people hate being fussed over; have you considered that? If his wife is feeling useless, maybe she’d feel even more useless if her husband started babying her. Maybe she’d even resent it.”
“That i
s so, so like you,” Peggy said.
“What?”
“Only you would think of resenting someone’s doing you a kindness.”
“I just meant—”
“Normal people say, ‘Why, thank you, dear. This makes me feel much better, dear. It makes me feel loved and valued.’ ”
“Okay …”
“But you: oh, no. You act so sensitive, so prickly; we all just walk on eggshells around you in case we might say the wrong thing.”
I said, “How did we end up with me, all of a sudden?”
“It’s not fair, Aaron. You expect too much of us. We’re not mind-readers! We’re all just doing our best here; we don’t know; we’re just trying to get through life as best we can, like everybody else!”
Then she jumped up and tore out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
Goodness.
I was left gaping, completely at a loss. I had seldom been involved in a conversation so illogical. Point A had led not to Point B but to Point H. Points X, Y, Z, even!
I needed a book called The Beginner’s Demented Secretary.
Had the others overheard? They couldn’t have missed that epic door slam, at least. I listened for voices, but I didn’t hear any. In fact, it was way too quiet.
I picked up the cookie on my blotter and studied it. I felt sort of unsettled. I’d never seen Peggy lose her temper before.
The cookie was oatmeal-chocolate chip. It wasn’t a flat disk, like the kind you buy in stores; it was a big, humped hillock of a thing, lumpy with whole oats and studded with extra-large bits of chocolate, not chips so much as chunks. I took an experimental nibble. The chocolate lay coolly on my tongue a few seconds before it melted. The dough had been baked exactly the right length of time—some might say underbaked, but not I—and it was chewy inside but crisp outside, with some tiny sharp pieces of something that provided a textural contrast. Nuts, maybe? No, not nuts. Harder than nuts; more edgy than nuts. I really didn’t know. I seemed to have finished the cookie while I was deliberating, so I pried the lid off the tin and selected another. I needed to pin this thing down. I bit off a mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. The oats had their own distinct identity; I suspected they were the old-fashioned kind, rather than the quick-cooking. I would have liked a glass of cold milk but you can’t have everything. I finished that cookie and reached for another. Then another. I feel sort of silly saying this, but as I chewed I closed my eyes, in order to savor the different textures and to feel the oases of chocolate melting on my tongue. Then I swallowed and opened my eyes and took another bite.