“I guess so.” She hadn’t really thought about it before, that dancing was something you could be good at. “I’m a good dancer too,” she asserts, even though she isn’t sure anymore what qualifies one to be good at anything.
“Is that right.” He screws the lid back on the pickle jar. “That’s the way with lawyers, I’ve heard. They all wanted to be dancers.”
“I’m a lawyer and a dancer.”
“Well, that’s very American of you.”
She looks at Orson, his long hair, his funny, asymmetrical smile. She feels the urge to hug him, to curl up into his lap, but it would be strange, wouldn’t it? She doesn’t know him at all, really. But he’s the first grown-up today to speak to her like a person, a real person instead of a sad child. She’s tired of everyone expecting her to be useless.
“Viola, would you do me a quick favor?”
Anything.
“Can you smell my breath and make sure it doesn’t smell like pickles?”
His nose brushes her nose, her face, his face, his cold skin, his breath, steaming in the frozen air, sour but not unpleasant, his eyes, her little eyes. “Smells okay to me,” she says.
“You’re a star. Come on, I’ve always wanted to dance with a professional.”
He stands up and reaches for her hand. Headlights bob slowly up the driveway and catch on the porch beams, on the white, cold backs of their hands, on the forgotten, empty pickle jar, everything touched becoming more important by the touching, becoming extraordinary.
Al sits with the engine on, staring through the fogging windshield at the house that he bought almost ten years ago (before the kids, before the cancer) with romantic notions of restoration and a return to simpler times. In hindsight, it was an overzealous expenditure of the little that had been left to him in his father’s will. 168 Argilla is one of the First Homes of Aldwych and a small round plaque by the door reads 1720. It is built in the New England colonial style, which is to say that the nine windows on the timber facade are straightforward and shutterless, its roof tilts at a sharp forty-five degrees, and every aspect of its bearing promises simplicity.
He had romanticized it. The idea of owning a bit of history, the challenge of constantly renewing the past into the present, the collapsing sense of time, the trace elements of prior inhabitants. Not that he believes in ghosts, just the impressions people make on a place.
Of course, it was all for Susan. She was the kind of woman who deserved somewhere special. No chain-link fences, no neighbors to hear if you shouted. She had taken to the project; sewing new curtains for the kids’ room, picking out paint colors. Putting her stamp on things. It is strange to think of her now, just another individual who used to live here, a name that appears on one census and not the next. He itemizes the work that needs doing: dredging the gutters, sealing the leak in the roof that appeared last month. He wonders whether he can handle it alone.
Sue. Suze. Susie-Q. Susannah in the Morning. Mom. How many thousand ways she was with him, in different moods, in different moments. How many dictionaries of their private language had been lost to time. He’s not entirely sure how he found himself sitting here burning gas, but it was the only place he could go. Perhaps he thought he’d find her out here, that his version of her might be less suffocated by theirs.
Was it love at first sight?People call it coming home, talk about itwith nostalgia. But all he can remember is seeing (for the first time) not his past but his future. The man he might have been with a woman like her, a woman who feared nothing, certainly not the rules, and certainly not him. When he was with her, none of it mattered; all of the academic jargon stuffed in his brain gave way to laughter, to easy feeling, desire. At least it was that way at the start. For some reason, now, the start is clearer than the end. She loved him too, immediately, he is sure of that—or he was sure, at the time. Now the certainty is eroding under his inability to confirm that love was the reason she got into his car that first time, the reason she kissed him. Why else, if not for love, would she have done such a thing?Did you know even then, Susie, that there was only one way for us? Or were you just in a mood?Desolate questions. What he would give to know what she was thinking. His mind seeks absolutes and absolution, definitive confirmation that it all meant something.
On reflection, he never truly became the man he hoped to be with her: bold and uninhibited. Everything soft and safety-seeking won out, didn’t it?If I had more of her time, he thinks. He sighs heavily, mourning, also, himself.
Through the low glow of the windows, the bodies of strangers are passing, congregating in heavy flocks. Exchanging Susans that never belonged to him. That never will. In the trunk of his car, Sadie’s tapes sit, meticulously labeled with air dates and episode numbers, a record of the woman his wife was without him. The scale is hard to ignore.
They agreed the show wasn’t suitable for the children. Now, without the counterbalance of her, it might never be. It might only disrupt their certainty of who she was, her love for them. Oh, why has it fallen to him to explain this part of her he could not understand himself?
You can’t dwell on the bad times, his mother said yesterday. He had been staring at bags of superfluous medical supplies when she came patting his back. Both of them were thinking about his father, who fell away piece by piece, who forgot first their birthdays then their names. He wasn’t himself at the end, though it was hard to say definitively when he lost himself.
I suppose not, he said, and his mother had taken the bags down to the basement, where he would never need to look at them.
Only later he wondered whether she had been thinking of the other bad times, the shouting matches and his sister’s departure. She ran off to the Catskills twenty years ago, married a ranger, became a recluse. Maybe she didn’t mean the dying, but all the living you didn’t want to carry; the fights and wrong decisions, the pain of loving someone who would not choose you. Was that how his mother got by? Scrubbing the record clean?
In a bright moment, it dawns on him: beyond the tapes, there is no evidence of Susan’s other life. No box sets or billboards, no plane tickets or memorabilia. All the ghosts will disappear after tonight. The children will hardly remember it, the pain of lost time. And who in good conscience would remind them?
Could it be that simple to unwrite all their mistakes?
He’s allowed, isn’t he, to toy with the idea. After all, he’s been through a lot.
Al blasts warm air onto the windshield, wipes off the dusty layer of snow, throws the car into reverse, and slips into town.
Aldwych, Massachusetts, is named for London’s oldest port, from which ancestral Blisses set sail to exchange tea for beaver pelts. Out the window, you can see the slow-moving panorama of muddy-banked streets. Proctor, Masconomo, Agawam names crossing Puritans on every corner. Flashes of cold marsh threaten to submerge the town, and older buildings hang precipitously over wooden docks, crying out for fortification. On Market Street, a cavalcade of antique stores spew out old rocking chairs and lawn ornaments, the figurehead of an old boat. The children cannot yet judge the value of these things and are mystified by them—worthless or priceless objects, created for purposes that no longer seem necessary. It’s up to him to show them what matters. To preserve what is beautiful.
He drives toward the beach, then thinks better of it and veers up Ingram Hill. The sky is deep and close and bare branches ache towardit, and he climbs until he reaches the dark, vacant summit. When he steps out of the car, cold air shreds his lungs. From the trunk, he lifts the heavy box of tapes, shifts it over his hip.
They had come up here two years ago with the kids, sheathed in snowsuits which they have already outgrown, the new snow hip-deep. Sue kept picking them up and swinging them forward to help them progress, while he dragged the two bright plastic sleds that skittered along the thin crust on top of the snow, bumping into each other and dashing apart.
“We should get a toboggan,” he had said. He had the most wonderful toboggan when he was a kid. Beautiful. A Flexible Flyer. Curved mahogany, steel runners. It took real tactics to steer through powder.
