Epilogue (7 page)

I’m invited to swim in a friend’s pool. I don’t want to swim. I don’t know why. I am a good swimmer but now I

dislike the idea. Why move my arms and legs about just to get from one side of the pool to the other? Why bother?

I think of other summers I have had that were less than perfect. In August, when I was three, my brother was brought home from the hospital. August has never been my favorite month. Once in August in the time of my first marriage I was alone in the city with my young child. My first husband was gone for good and the slightest sound could make me jump. I had dreams of falling objects, closet doors that wouldn’t open, cliché and bathos followed me everywhere. My friends were away. There was a heat wave that could kill. I sat at an outdoor table in a nearby coffee shop, sweat dripping down my peasant blouse, and chain-smoked Camel cigarettes while my child rode her tricycle around in circles by my feet.

I have trouble reading. I am an escape artist who reads newspapers, books, cereal boxes. But now my concentration is cracked. Stray thoughts disturb my peace. The bird song on the nearby tree makes me close the covers of my book. This bird has an unlovely voice, his call is loud and grating but his mate appears from the other side of the garden and sits on the branch nearby. Evolution has programmed her to admire his voice. H.’s voice when he spoke to patients was gentle and soothing. You could lean on that voice, you could depend on that voice. It was a big voice although he was not a big man. Under the words lay a melody, a promising harmony.

People come from time to time to see the house, potential buyers. When they come I leave and go sit in my car in the parking lot near the beach. I inhale the salt smell. I watch the mothers carrying wet and sandy children in

their arms. I note their buckets and shovels and towels and f lip-flops and beach chairs. I see the teenagers f lirting with each other near the ice cream truck. I let my arm hang out the window and later I see that my elbow has turned red. The tip of my ear is also burned.

No one makes an offer. The market is bad, there are fourteen houses for sale within a four-block radius. I worry I won’t be able to sell the house. I worry I will be able to sell the house. I worry that I will lose my friends who live nearby. I will lose some of them. But I know from experience that with change other people will cross my path, other people with stories and bad habits and children who do or do not bring them pride.

The broker comes and goes and replaces his sign with a larger one. We are at the end of a dead-end street. No one sees his sign. The days are gold and the light is warm and silken. I should sit on the patio at my table where the umbrella with a print of roses going round will protect me from skin cancer while I watch the bees swarm and the black crows hang in the branches above. But I don’t go into the garden. Instead I sit on my bed. I wait until a decent hour to call my daughters. I also tell myself old stories. I embroider them with slight untruths. I wallow. This is unacceptable.

A friend asks me, “Are you used to your new status yet?” What does this mean? I would check the box that says widow if presented a form at a doctor’s office or the Department of Motor Vehicles. I no longer have a joint bank account. The joint is gone. I have changed our credit cards into my name. But status? Could it be true that a woman without a man is always at the edge of appearing

as a figure of fun, a disappointed person like a nun or the obese girl who stays home the night of the senior prom?

There are millions of women who live alone in America. Some of them are widows. Some of them are divorced and between connections, some of them are odd, loners who prefer to keep their habits undisturbed. They like the way they keep their cupboards, feed their dogs, stretch out on the couch, wash the ring off the tub, put the coffee cup in the dishwasher, always on the left, handle-side out. Never mind the howl of country music’s unrequited love, someone stamping around after midnight, lots of people are unmated and comfortable, feel no need to swoon into a microphone. Someone in a marriage must die first and many people live in single space peacefully.

But how do they do it?

I go to a luncheon. The guests stand on the lawn, glasses in hand, gazing down at three egrets who stand each poised on one leg at the water’s edge. I am introduced to a widow of some five years. “It’s horrid,” she says, “and it’s going to get worse. They don’t know, they with their husbands, they don’t know.” I nod. I know about some other horrid things too, that have nothing to do with losing a spouse, things that hover about the garden casting shadows here and there despite the high sun and the perfect weather.

• • •

A builder over the last two years has been constructing a huge house behind ours. Now it towers over my house. It looms above my red maple tree. The workers’ voices rise across the property line. I hear saws, hammers, small backhoes dipping their steel jaws into the dirt, trees falling

down, the radio with its loud unreal conversations, music you can’t dance to, on and on. The house they are building is grand. There is a giant pool and a little pool house that abuts my now-leaning fence. Four big brick chimneys rise to the sky. There is a deck but little grass. Where will the buyers put their garden? I hear from my neighbor on the other side that the builder has sold the house. I hear that the buyers are from Colorado and are in oil or gas and have business interests in Russia. I hear from the man who cuts my grass that the new owners have bought the house to the left of them and have put in a bid for the house to the right of them.

And then they come to see my house. I am out. They come twice and they bring an architect and I whisper into my cell phone: They’re here again. Will they notice all the windows that do not close and the stain on the kitchen tiles that I can’t scrub off and the drainpipe that is crooked and the broken screen that the cat has scratched, through which mosquitoes and spiders arrive and depart? I meet her. She is a young woman from Texas. “How did you ever get so many books?” she asks. “My husband liked the house because of the books.” “I’ll leave them for you,” I say. At last they make an offer. They will have a family compound. They will have a little estate. They will have closed a circle. Now they will have grass and a Japanese red maple tree that turns orange in August and all my blue hydrangea bushes. They are not, they say, going to tear down my house, just fix it up, a new kitchen and new bathrooms and new closets and new f loors and new wings and surveyors come and engineers come and I am ready to go back to the city and let the house go but I am aware

that this sale is an amputation, a necessary amputation. Another one.

Now I have another lawyer. He is a real estate lawyer who has drawn up the contracts for the sale of our house at the beach. I would like to keep it as a place for the family to gather at holidays. I would like to keep it because I love the small stone statue of a child that H. bought at a yard sale and the morning light transparent on the grass. I love the pink blossoms on the dogwood tree that come just as winter fades. Then there is fog and the sea and the clams at the clam bar and I love my friends who invite me to dinner and worry that I am too alone. I am too alone.

But I cannot keep this house at the beach. Sometimes here at the beach I fear that I might die in my sleep and lie undiscovered for days.

I cannot keep this house because I cannot afford it.

This lawsuit pursues me, I need to be careful with funds, to protect myself from becoming destitute in my frail old age. I am not overly concerned. I have no enormous desire, no secret plan to live long years in an expensive nursing home, requiring help to boil an egg, someone to bring me medicines to calm my raging mind. I suppose it is a moral failure, this lack of appetite for life on my part, life of any quality. I admire those who grab it all, want every moment, fight cancer with every tortuous new treat-ment imagined, travel to the far ends of the earth pushing their walkers, tasting all foods as they arrive at the table, demanding more and more. I am simply not like that. I am too much of a realist to battle against the odds. Or I am a quitter.

Today there are people wandering through the house.

They are picking up dishes and thumbing through our books and looking at the paintings. We are having a yard sale, my daughters and I are here, watching the strangers. The tables and chairs are being carried away and the can-ister I bought at a yard sale is being recycled to a plump man in a yellow shirt with golf balls on it. Someone wants my duvet and someone else wants the painted cabinet with roosters on the panels.

I am fond of my things, my accumulated things. The ceramic fish that rests on the table near the model ship, the wooden crane that has one blue eye and one black, the espresso cups from a trip we took to Portugal, the drawing of Jean Marais done by Jean Cocteau. But I am not so fond of them that I will not let them go. Like memories that are lost in the far recesses of the brain, like days that are swept away unremarked or unrecorded, I am willing to let objects leave with their new owners. This house must go and I will close the door on it with regret but without anguish.

What is the point of anguish? Certainly material things do not deserve a drama of their own. It is the unseen, still lingering, presence of the man who lived in this house with me that takes my breath away. My head swims. I need to sit down as someone takes the dollhouse we kept for our granddaughters and walks through the door.

If I were a cartoon character I would have stars circling my head and Xs for eyes. Actually I deserve a medal for bravery—or is my bravery foolishness or is foolishness the explanation of bravery? I find an old hairbrush behind a bureau—so that’s where it went.

H. loved his drawings and he loved his paintings and he

hung them on the walls with great care and he was always convinced he’d purchased a treasure, something of real value. He loved the seventeenth-century Italians and the sixteenth-century Dutch and he loved paintings of women with curves and drapery and enigmatic smiles. I loved his loving his drawings. I myself lack a collector’s will, a joy of possession. It is a f law of mine, not my only one. Standing outside the now nearly bare house, surrounded by my daughters and their daughters, and packing the car for our final departure, I look at the bare walls for the last time.

The drive back to the city takes forever because of the traffic. My daughter K. is with me. Her child sleeps in her car seat. Her head is tucked against the side. The child will not remember her grandfather although she will have photographs of him. There he is holding her a few hours after her birth. There he is with her mother and aunt and there he is holding a fish, a large fish, smiling with such pride you might think he had created the fish, not merely reeled it in. My friends have grandchildren. Sheepishly we show each other photos. It makes us feel like clichés to do this. We feel like characters in an old
New Yorker
cartoon, matrons with hats and wide hips who belong to garden clubs, not working women with titles of our own. Nevertheless we want to show each other our grandchildren. Is this the point after all? Will I live to see this child become a teenager? Will this child remember me when she has children of her own? H. would say that doesn’t matter. Don’t ask for more than you can get. Enjoy the sleeping child in her apple juice–stained shirt, clutching her precious blanket. Appreciate that she is not complaining about the length of the trip or the lack of amusements

in the car, or the fact that we have no more boxes of apple juice.

I do not dream about the house. Sometimes I think about the ocean, walking along the ocean’s edge. Sometimes I think of the dunes. I remember the jellyfish f loating in the waves. I remember the fishing boats with their huge nets rolled around the gears at the horizon’s edge. All this is permanent and returns summer after summer. The haze in the morning, the fog that rolls in from the North Atlantic sea, the driftwood blanched white, the abandoned balloons from a child’s birthday party, the bed of broken clam shells, the tiny stones with blue veins, the gulls with their grating caw, the half-buried red plastic pail, the ruins of a sand castle, return. I was the visitor, the one passing through. It’s time to go. H. would not complain that biology is biology, that beginnings have endings, that doors open and then they close.

• • •

I have lost weight. Enough so that my wedding band slips up and down on my finger. I play with it with my thumb. I turn it around and around. It is a simple gold band. I have worn it since we were married. I think I remember taking it off in the hospital when I gave birth to K. and B., or did the nurse put adhesive tape around it? You would think after all these years that it would have grown into my skin. It has not. I slip it off. I put it back on. I go out to dinner without it but rush home and put it back on.

The American Psychoanalytic Society always had its mid-winter meetings in New York, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The red carpets shone. The candelabra were golden,

the staircases marble, the mirrors ref lecting the tinsel-and-red ribbons of the Christmas season, and in the lobby psychoanalysts and their wives came and went, off to lectures, to symposia, to meetings on transference, transgen-der, techniques, termination,
etc.
In the hall outside the meeting rooms a long table sat lined with books written by the analysts in attendance or their colleagues long dead. Stacks of papers that were being delivered during the day were available for perusal. It seemed as if we were on a ship, Transatlantic, glittering in the air, sealed off from the traffic outside, from the concerns of others. Older famous analysts stopped to visit with their younger students and analysts remained students and supervisees for many years. It was a long apprenticeship to become an analyst, filled with ambivalent loves, secrets spoken, dissected, repeated, in rooms with volumes of Freud lining the walls, little statues of far-off civilizations sitting on desks, Oriental rugs on the f loor. Secrets that meant that the older analysts knew the darkest thoughts of the youngest and the youngest yearned for the attention of the oldest. Some, who believe that psychoanalysis is a dead profession, may think that the ship we were on was the
Titanic
but to me it seemed like the inner chamber of the heart, the essential organ.