“It was all right.” I tried not to resent her identifying herself as part of a couple in front of me, who no longer was.
“I can’t believe you’re moving so soon!” Sheila said.
“I know. It’s hard to explain, but I think it’s the best thing to do.”
She stared into her lap and fidgeted with her watchband. “Betta, I have to tell you, I think it’s just too radical. Randy and I were talking, and—”
“It’s too late to change anything,” I said. “I appreciate your concern—I know how crazy this must seem to you, but it’s what I really want to do.” I recalled the time Sheila and I had run into each other at Copley Place and then gone to lunch at Legal Seafood. We’d talked about a woman who lived in the building next to us who had lost her husband in a drowning accident. He was thirty-eight. It had been almost seven months, and Sheila and I—it chilled me to remember it—had apparently decided that the time for mourning was up. No more grieving; Annie needed to get out there. “I mean, couldn’t she take a cooking class or something at the Cambridge Center?” I’d said. I saw it as though it were yesterday, the two of us having our sanctimonious lunch at Legal Seafood, the restaurant’s blinds pulled against the bright sun, a table full of businessmen next to us, exulting over their frutti di mare. “They have wonderful classes there,” I’d said, “and you get to eat the dinners. And it’s too early for her to date, I suppose, but she could make some new friends.” And Sheila had said, “Well, of course. Or go to a movie with a girlfriend, or shopping, or anything but continue to stare at your own bedroom walls.” “Exactly,” I’d said. “This is just too long to . . . well, I don’t know if wallow is the right word.” “I think it is,” Sheila had said, around her bite of lobster roll. How cruel we’d been, sitting there with our shopping bags full of new fall clothes, deciding how someone else should repair the rent in her own heart. I wondered whether I would be able to live up to my own ruthlessly dictated standards.
In a more conciliatory tone—Sheila was, after all, only trying to help—I told her, “I can always move back if it doesn’t work out.”
“But not here. Not to this house. This is a beautiful place. I thought about buying it myself.”
“Oh?” I looked at her, not quite sure how to respond, and we both laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Sheila said. “That must have sounded—”
“It’s okay,” I said. And then, “Well, so . . .”
“Right.” She slid her hands into her pants pockets. It was clear to both of us that there was nothing more to say. Again we smiled awkwardly at each other, and Sheila moved to the door. She started to open it, then turned suddenly to face me. “I just want to say . . . you know, I wish I could be more with you in all this. I wish we were closer. You’re kind of hard to get to know—not your fault, I don’t mean that, but you and John were sort of . . . well, you were complete unto yourselves. I guess that’s what I’d say. We wanted to invite you to more things—other people did, too—but—”
“I know. I know how insular we were. I thought of calling you sometimes, to actually plan something, you know—lunch, a matinee . . .”
“I would have liked that. I know neither you nor John have family. It just seems like it might help, now, for you to have some really close friends. I mean, you have no one, right? Randy and I—”
“John and I do have really close friends, actually. They just don’t live here.” Lie. But this kind of talk was only making me feel worse. I wanted to go to bed. Well, I wanted John.
“Oh! Well, I’m sorry! I guess I never saw anyone—”
“Mostly we visited them.” Again a function of writing fiction. In my mind’s eye, I began seeing these friends clearly: friendly-looking people, all with good teeth. Permanent residents of Martha’s Vineyard; we liked riding bikes with them there.
“I see. Well. I’d better go. Keep in touch.”
“I will.” Lie.
“Do you have a phone yet?”
“No, not yet. But I’ll call you when I get a number.” I doubted I’d even do that.
“Okay, so . . . good luck, Betta.”
“Thank you.” I closed the door behind Sheila and watched her walk home. There was nothing wrong with her. She was a perfectly nice woman. I had seen her carrying things into her house that I’d wanted to ask her about sometimes: a footstool I liked, a potted plant with beautiful feathery foliage that I’d wanted the name of. Once she came home with a ridiculous number of grocery bags, I didn’t know why, and I’d stood at the window watching her carry them in and had made no move to help her. I was shy, but this did not absolve me. Sheila was right; it would have been nice to have a really good friend now, someone I could be completely and utterly myself around. But I was out of the habit. I’d met John right after I finished school and moved back home, and I’d given myself over completely to him without regret. People deeply in love almost always do that at first—abandon the rest of their friends in favor of being with each other—but John and I just never really stopped. It was the downside of having such a good relationship; we were so compatible that we were lazy about starting and maintaining outside friendships. My housemates in college had been as close to me as I imagine sisters might have been—closer, probably—but I had lost touch with all three of them soon after we graduated. It was a pity I’d let that happen, but there was no sense brooding about it now.
I went over to the sofa, picked up the present, and opened it. Inside the cigar box were more slips of paper with mysterious phrases written on them. Eclipse, I read. Old CDs. It looked like there were hundreds of them. Mists. Split rail. What did these mean? Nothing. I began to grow angry—why would he have left these things for me without making it clear what I was meant to do with them? And then it occurred to me that he had not been lucid to the end after all, as I’d told so many people, as I’d told myself. His last gift to me had been only precious bits of nonsense.
I stashed the papers in a deep drawer of the Chinese chest we kept up against one end of the living room. It was the piece of furniture John and I had always loved best of anything we owned, for its elegance and mystery, for its beautifully painted birds and flowers. Sometimes we’d hidden things in there to be found later as surprises—either to ourselves or to each other. I’d found a polished amethyst once, and hadn’t remembered putting it there, nor had John. I’d put a tiny wren’s nest in one drawer that John hadn’t discovered for months, and a watch I’d meant for a Christmas gift that he’d found minutes after I’d hid it there. John had put in a jade necklace he’d bought for me, a poem he’d liked and torn out of The New Yorker, and once, tickets for us to go to a play, which he’d forgotten about and that I almost hadn’t found in time. I looked now for something new, but there was only a feather, tucked so far inside a drawer I figured it had been there when we first bought the chest.
I turned out all the lights but one and headed upstairs. I felt my aloneness like a coat. You think you get used to death in the dying. But after the dying is done, you see how the end is the beginning.
I bathed, listening to Mozart, and wept briefly, the bathtub being a convenient place for tears. I climbed into bed and tried to read for a while, though I found it difficult to concentrate. Finally, I turned out the light, folded my hands over my chest, drew in a deep breath, and exhaled. And it came to me.
One Sunday, when John and I were browsing in an antiques store, I’d found a small green bowl I liked very much. It was just the right size for making scrambled eggs, and I told John this as I held it up before him. “Buy it,” he said, and I said no. I had a great fondness for bowls, and I’d collected far too many already. Among those wrapped in newspaper in the attic were a tiny black-and-white-striped bowl, a butter-yellow antique mixing bowl, one that had been hand-painted with violets, and more than a few sets of nesting bowls. I put the green bowl back on the shelf, but I kept looking at it. “Buy it!” he said, but again I said no. He picked it up, ready to get it for me, but I told him no
t to. The next day, I decided I wanted it after all and went back to the store, but it was gone. It had cost two dollars.
So, what was his message to me, on that little slip of paper? Take the green bowl. Take all the green bowls; love what you love without apology. I went down to the chest and pulled out other slips of paper. Those that I had been unable to decipher, at least not then. But here was the glory: We were not done with each other yet.
Henckley Realtors was in a strip mall a few miles away, along with a pizza parlor, a pet store, an exercise club, a beauty shop, and a Laundromat. The place had the dispiriting air of all strip malls, but at least the businesses weren’t chain stores. I sat in the car for a couple of minutes. Was I sure? Sure enough, I decided.
When I came in the door, I saw Delores seated at the only desk, her jacket slung over the back of her chair. Philodendrons grew down the sides of a filing cabinet. There was a card table covered by an embroidered tablecloth, holding a Mr. Coffee and various-sized ceramic mugs. One said I WORKED MY ASS OFF, BUT IT CAME BACK AND FOUND ME. A round wooden table had three chairs grouped around it—the conference center, I presumed. Delores was on the phone, and her brow was furrowed. “Now, that’s not what I—” she said. “Well, if you want, I—” She listened for a long while, then said, “No, I should think that—” She listened again, then leaned forward in her chair and yelled, “LYDIA! Stop your yammering and let me get a word in! Now, the woman who’s interested is standing right in front of me. Do you want her to think that you’re—” She sighed. “Yes . . . all right, Lydia. Hold on and I’ll see.”
Delores put her hand over the mouthpiece and looked up at me. “This is the owner, Lydia Samuels, I’ve got here on the phone. Just in case you hadn’t figured that out. She wants to meet you. Won’t sell the house to anyone she hasn’t met. Would you be willing? She’s over at the Rose McNair Home, it’s pretty close by. Won’t take us more than ten, fifteen minutes to get there.”
“I guess that would be all right. But you haven’t even told me the price!”
“Well, I know that. You forgot to ask and I forgot to tell you. And I forgot to show you the pictures of the garden in bloom! We’re a hell of a team. The house is listed at three hundred and fifty thousand. We’ll get to all the financing options, and there are some other things I want to talk to you about, too. But first I had to call Lydia. I promised her that if I showed it, I’d let her know who to. And now she’s gone and—” She turned her attention back to the phone. “What? . . . All right, yes, I suppose I could do that. What kind do you want? . . . With or without nuts? . . . All right. So let’s say, five?” Delores looked up at me and I nodded. “Fine, Lydia, we’ll see you then.”
Shaking her head, Delores hung up the phone. “You know, she is something, that old woman. She’s ninety-five years old now, and she still scares the bejesus out of me.” She gestured to the chair in front of her desk. “Have a seat.”
I moved to the chair and picked up a small pile of newspaper clippings that were resting there. “Did you want these?”
“Oh, that.” She reached for the clippings and shoved them into a desk drawer. “Recipes. Clip them out every day and never make a single one. You do that?”
I nodded. “I used to.”
“You will again,” she said, and her words seemed so full of something beyond what she had said. I looked closely at her, both afraid and hoping she’d impart some particular wisdom, but she was busy reading a listing, I assumed for the house we’d just looked at.
But what she said when she looked up was, “Now, this is a condo, which I think might be much more appropriate for you. What do you say we have a look at it, before you make an offer on a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house that I know will not come down one cent.”
I shook my head no.
She raised her eyebrows—I saw that one was drawn in longer than the other. “Don’t like condos?”
“No, actually, I don’t. I’m interested in the house. The price is all right.”
“Well, let me just tell you about this one other little house I have. Just darling. I think you’d like it, too, and it’s not so big. Or so much money.”
I said nothing.
“You want to see it?” Delores reached for her jacket and began to put it on. “It has the cutest little kitchen—but fully equipped!”
“This will be a full-price offer,” I said. “And it will be a cash deal. And I am ready to write a check.”
Delores sat back in her chair, her jacket half on. She said nothing for a moment; we sat staring at each other. And then she finished slipping her jacket on and said, “You know, if I didn’t already like you, I might not like you.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I understand.”
“Everything will depend on what Lydia decides. I just have to tell you that. There’ll be nothing I can do to influence her, one way or the other. Are you ready to meet her?”
I said I was.
From the back room, I heard a meow, and an ancient, overweight tuxedo cat wandered out, yawning. Delores hesitated, her hand on her hip, and said, “Let me feed Boodles, and then we’ll go—as you can see, she’s wasting away. And don’t let me forget to stop at Mick’s to get Lydia her turtle sundae. We might want to get one ourselves. Might as well be fortified.”
Let the old lady be stubborn, I thought. I am, too.
We found Lydia Samuels in an otherwise deserted community room. It was a large multiwindowed space furnished with several big wooden tables and chairs and an ancient studio piano. The place smelled not unpleasantly of some sort of cleaning agent. Fake-flower arrangements sat on doilies at the center of each table, and glaringly amateurish artwork lined the walls: lighthouses, bowls of fruit, wicker chairs on front porches. A portrait of a girl with a potato-like nose.
Lydia sat slumped in a wheelchair near one of the windows, her back to the view. She was tiny; from a distance, she looked like a child impersonating an old lady. “Pleased to meet you!” she said loudly from halfway across the room. When we reached her, she squinted up at me and said, “There’s not a goddamn thing wrong with my hearing.”
“Good,” I said. Or with her voice—it was surprisingly low and strong. A man’s voice, almost.
“Just so you know and don’t start shouting at me like I’m some old fool.” She crossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. She wore a brightly patterned housedress, a tan cardigan sweater, and white sneakers with thick gray kneesocks—all of which looked long overdue for the laundry. The home was very clean, but I supposed it was a bit of a challenge to get Lydia Samuels to hand over her clothes—or anything else. Halfway down her nose was an ancient pair of cat-eye glasses, powder blue with rhinestone trim—they would work for stylish irony but for the grease stains on the lenses and the Band-Aid that had been wrapped around one stem for a quick repair. She smelled of baby food and, more distantly, of urine. Her hair, what little there was of it, had been pulled up into a ponytail with orange yarn. Crisscrossed bobby pins anchored the sides. She had several long white whiskers on her chin—they stood out in the strong light of the window.
“Here’s your sundae,” Delores said, and handed the rapidly melting dessert to Lydia, who ate it with astonishing speed. She handed the empty container to Delores to dispose of. Then, favoring the back of her hand over the napkin to wipe the chocolate off her chin, she told me, “Give me your hand.”
I offered her my right hand, and she shook her head impatiently. “No, the other one.”
I gave her my left, palm up, and she held it in her own hands, firmly but gently. Her skin was dry and papery but warm. She sniffed at my hand as a dog might, tentatively but knowledgeably, and Delores and I exchanged a quick glance. Then she took off her glasses and peered closely into my palm. “Long life. Given to dreaming. Oh, lucky in love, I see. And you . . .” She grew quiet, looking even more closely. She stayed so still I thought for a moment she had fallen asleep. But then she dropped my hand and sat back in her
chair. “Price of the house just went up,” she said, and cackled—there was no other word for it. She put her glasses back on carefully. Then she clasped her hands on her lap, and one thumb began rapidly tapping the other. A passerby might have thought, Parkinson’s. I saw it for what it was: I’m waaaaiting.
“Lydia,” Delores said. “You can’t do that!”
Lydia gripped the sides of her wheelchair and turned a fierce gaze onto Delores. Her eyes were beady and dark, her mouth turned dramatically downward. “I can. I’m the owner.”
“It went up to what?” I asked, and Lydia turned slowly to me, spider to the fly. She was sweet-faced now. “Went up to three hundred and sixty. Five.”
“Sold,” I said, though I could hear Delores’s silent objection.
“I meant, three hundred and seventy,” Lydia said, and I said no. And then she seemed to suddenly tire; she sighed and said, “All right. Take it, then. Three hundred and fifty.”
“You mean . . . sixty-five?” I said, and heard Delores inhale sharply. Later, we would have a conversation.
“Three hundred fifty!” Lydia said. “And that’s my last offer!”
I looked over at Delores, who shrugged.
“Deal,” I said, and offered Lydia my hand to seal the agreement. But she waved me away.
“Take me back to my room,” she said. “I want to watch the news.”
After Lydia was settled in front of her television, Delores and I said goodbye and started out of her room. But then, “You,” she said to me. “Come over here.”
I went to stand before her, bracing for another price increase. She looked up at me, her brown eyes watery and searching. “He will come,” she said finally. I felt a cold grip at the back of my neck.
“What do you mean?” I cleared my throat, smiled.
She leaned her head around me. “Don’t block the television. Get out of the way.” She sniffed, pulled a wadded-up tissue from her sleeve, dabbed at her nose, regarded with interest an ad for a sporty car. Then she yelled into the hall, “Thanks for the sundae, Dorothy! Bring me another one when you come with the papers for me to sign. Bring me two!”