Part II/ 4

 

After the funeral, Emma gathers up all the socks that need darning. She piles them in a basket – there must be over a dozen pair. Sophie and she have a tendency to wear out the toes; Joe wears out the heels. She builds an encampment, island of refuge in the living room: clean sheets every other night for Sophie, Chanti’s books, candles to burn. The socks give her something to do with her hands, instead of smoking. Sometimes she feels like merely a witness. She is quiet if Sophie is quiet; she listens if Sophie wants to talk or read aloud from Chanti’s books. What Emma bestows on Sophie comes from a deep well – motherhood, what she has practice in. Who she is, what she might want, disappear. In bed late at night she wishes she could turn to Joe, but they lie locked, mute.  

The kitchen counters and refrigerator shelves are laden with food brought by neighbors. By Rosita and the bicycle repairman.  By the cook at the Dominican priory. Enchiladas and casseroles. Peanut butter cookies and donuts. Sophie does not eat for three days; finally she craves chocolate. Emma sends Joe out for chocolate ice cream, chocolate bars. Joe lays in a supply of Benadryl; Sophie will not leave home to go to the doctor to ask for a prescription to help her sleep.

When Emma couldn’t find her darning egg, she substituted an egg-shaped paperweight of hand blown glass swirled with pink, given to Sophie on her wedding day, replica of an egg used by brides in the 19^th century to cool their hands and keep them calm. She slips it into the toe or heel of each sock and stitches evenly, with precise care.

 “Where did you learn to darn?” Sophie says. She speaks as if every word is a brick she has to carry to build a sentence. As if she has to learn to speak all over again.

 “GG taught me.”

“Didn’t Nana Jane darn?”

“She must’ve known how at one time. But she rebelled.” Almost light-heartedly, Emma says, “You come from a line of rebellious women.”

 Sophie stands at the window, in a T-shirt and stretchy workout pants, pilly with bits of white cotton like a rash. Her complexion blotchy, eyes puffy. Her lips cracked. Her hair gathered into a haphazard mop with an elastic band. The window is open to the street. Down below, people have brought flowers and homemade crosses, messages to Chanti, novena candles: a shrine lit by sunlight. It feels like an early summer day, the temperature in the low seventies. A half-block away, a woman lets go with a melodious curse in Spanish. The Blue Line rattles the windows in their frames. Once it passes, Sophie turns to Emma and whispers, “When I was a little girl, after we started the commute to Friends School, I wondered why we lived here.”

Sophie’s body seems infused with anger. She speaks carefully, willfully. As if she has labored over what to say, to find the least offensive strategy. Emma says, “Did you now.”

“Why did you agree to it?”

“Your father . . . he wanted it. It’s his home. And . . .”

 “What?”

 “It made our lives affordable. Once he quit.” Emma doesn’t want to blame Joe: she has always cleaved to the discipline of not blaming Joe for anything when talking to Sophie and Liz. She has presented a united front. Tiff hears the truth. The women in Goddess Group hear the truth. Her truth. Emma says, “That’s not all. I needed something. Something to make me feel I hadn’t completely capitulated.”

 “To what?”

“When you grow up in New Orleans . . .  it’s hard to live without . . . liveliness. Without surprise. So it felt all right. And – it felt temporary. I didn’t think about the future.”

 “Now we’re there, aren’t we? This is the future you didn’t think about.” Sophie unfurls a sky blue yoga mat and sits down upon it. Her legs in a V, she leans into a stretch, her chin nearly resting on one kneecap.

“I thought it might make him happy,” Emma protests meekly.  “I wasn’t very good at choosing what to go along with and what to fight.”

“Why not, Ems?”

Emma does not want to get into all that. She cannot tell Sophie the hard-won truth: Hera has dominated me. I wanted my marriage above all else and would not cross your father when we were young. When I was young. And now I am a widow, too. I am in the winter of a metaphorical widowhood.

Sophie says, “It’s been the best and worst for me.” Basie sniffs the edges of the yoga mat; he rubs up against Sophie’s thigh, his purr like a motor. Sophie shoves him away, spitting, “Piss off.”

With deliberate care, Emma sets aside her darning. She goes into the kitchen, weeping silently, and she takes a can of cat food from the cupboard. The metallic rip of the can opening brings eager and always hungry Basie into the kitchen. Emma wishes she could retreat to the bedroom with him and sleep for a week. Miles Davis on the CD player. Petals from her birthday bouquet falling on the dresser, marking time. She doesn’t want to have what inadvertent harm she has done be laid upon the table. And shame creeps over her flesh. For protecting herself. Now.

When she returns to the living room, Sophie offers her the chocolate bar, the tinfoil peeled back. “I think you weren’t ready to be a grandmother. Am I right?”

Emma inhales sharply. “Sophie.”

“Am I right?”

Emma blinks back tears. “I didn’t think of it that way at all.”

“Think of it now. Now that it’s only theoretical.”

Emma opens her arms, but Sophie shakes her head no. As if to say, I won’t cry in your arms. I won’t be that close to you.

When you have children, life’s not about you anymore. You think you know it when they’re small and sick, feverish, up all night.  But that was nothing. It’s coming home to Emma again – how much they need you, how much is impossible. You can’t manage their suffering, but their suffering requires your presence.

They inhabit the encampment every day. The cats nap in opposite corners of the room, Basie on his fleece cat bed, Peggy Lee on the corduroy arm of the recliner. Joe comes and goes, tends to their needs. 

On the fifth day, softened, tentatively, Sophie says, “Next month, when you go on your trip, maybe Uncle Leo will come and stay with me.”

Emma says, “We’re not going. Not now.”

“But you have to.”

“I thought that,” Emma says. “I thought I had to go.”

“What’s the big deal? Tell me true.” Tell me true: almost a dare.

Emma says, without rancor, “Summers – my father taught me – were for travel, for reading big fat novels. Teaching takes so much out of you. You need . . . replenishment.”

“You blame Dad. Because he quit.”

Emma stops mid-stitch. The sock in her hand is Sophie’s, black angora, and she fingers the cuff; she averts her eyes. Her impulse is to lash out. But she can’t lash out at Sophie. She can’t say, “No one knows a marriage like the people in it.” Not now. Carefully, she says, “It’s not about him. I feel like I’ve postponed things.”

“Like?”

“I’m not even sure. I want to find out.”

“I think you should go, Ems.”

Emma murmurs, “We’ll see about that.”

Later Sophie says, “Please don’t go up to our room anymore. That’s our room.”

Emma kneels beside the sofa and gathers Sophie in. “I’m sorry, Sophie,” she whispers. But Sophie is stiff in her arms. Self-contained.

“Why did you?”

Emma hesitates. Sophie’s flesh, her scent – part chocolate, part shampoo – are so alive; Emma wants to embrace her the way she did when Sophie was small. To feel like Sophie is hers. “I wanted to see your work. That’s all.”

“Don’t go up there anymore. That’s private. You always said we have to respect each other’s privacy. But you didn’t.”

At odd times – in the shower, smoking on the landing late at night – she hears Sophie’s voice. You always said. But you didn’t. You weren’t ready to be a grandmother. You blame him. This is the future you didn’t want to think about.

 

 

Part II/5

The following Friday Joe and Emma cooperate sufficiently to deliver Peggy Lee to the vet hospital. She is scheduled for eye surgery and Joe sold a signed Barry Bonds bat to pay for it. Joe thinks that it’s one of those small commitments that keep life going, keep you taking care. There’s no reason to cancel. They left Sophie alone at home for the first time. Emma holds Peggy Lee in a beach towel, wrapped up like a burrito, and Joe drives, with a talk show on the radio to drown their silence.

At the hospital, amid the dogs – a Cocker with a bandaged foreleg, Lab puppies in a cardboard box, a German Shepard with his belly shaved – they wait for a vet tech. Joe canoodles with Peggy Lee. “It’s all right. You’ll be all right.” He leans in close to Emma who cradles the cat like a babe in arms. Once he glances up and says, “Thanks.”

And Emma says, “What for?”

“For being tender-hearted.”

“I can’t be grateful for anything right now.”

The vet tech is a short, perky blond woman with an asymmetrical haircut, cat-like herself, sleek and compact. She takes Peggy Lee from Emma and promises to be the one to care for her throughout the ordeal. She will telephone later tonight and after the surgery tomorrow. She coos to Peggy Lee and Emma lets her go. The vet tech is a cat lover and trustworthy. There’s an unmistakable vibe, an affectionate velvety pitch to her voice.

 Outside, in the sun-tinged gloaming, in a flat neutral voice Joe says, “She was nice.”  The trip to the vet clinic cannot quite divert his attention from what Franny Ryan said when he called. “Son of a bitch – whoever it was – fired twice at fairly close range. .38 special hollow-point bullets. One exited through his aorta. The other lodged in his spleen. The weapon used had been fired before, so we’ll check that out.” Franny sucked in his breath. “He probably lost consciousness almost immediately. He probably did not suffer. If that helps. If that helps you decide what to say.” Joe folded all of that into silence. It’s his secret, for now: an impossible coincidence: that empty ammo box. He doesn’t know for a fact that his father’s gun had never been fired, but he believes that to be true. He tells himself so. He clings to that. His father’s Diamondback revolver is probably in the sewer or a trash can. He pictures it in a stranger’s car, at a gas station a long way from here. He pictures it elsewhere.           

Emma finally says, “She was nice. I trust her.”

They stroll to the Skylark a block away, and the possibility hovers between them to link arms, to hold hands. For a moment he thinks that they might burrow back toward each other. But they don’t.      

 

 

Part II/6

Later, Emma lays her pocket folders out on the kitchen table. They’re labeled Dublin, Switzerland, France. The house is quiet. Basie bathes nearby. Sophie has gone out for the first time since the funeral: she tucked a note under the sugar bowl: I’m at the Jumping Bean with Dulcy. The house feels almost ordinary for the first time in ten days. Almost as if Chanti and Sophie are teaching tango or waiting tables. As if they’ll return laughing at midnight to count their tips.

If Sophie comes home soon, Emma will offer to make warm chocolate pudding, a treat Sophie has loved since she was small. Maybe they’ll talk again. Really talk.

Emma glances now and again out the second-floor kitchen window into the courtyard where Joe putters in the near-dark, lit only by the security lamp. In their tree-poor neighborhood the courtyard truly feels like an expanse, luxurious – with its own dwarf apple tree and redbud and maple, all leafless still. The apple tree was planted by Joe’s father in the seventies, the maple by his mother in 1947, to celebrate the end of the war. Its red leaves astonish Emma every October; when they begin to fall she lays the best ones on the kitchen windowsill. Astonishment, delight – at anything – seems impossible, prohibited. 

Could we ever leave these trees, she wonders.  For the unknown?  Are we too old for the unknown?

Joe is a shadow, squatting by his garden plot, shoring up the bricks that dam his long-accrued soil. The soil comes from a lake in southern Wisconsin, rich with decomposing fish guts and bones. Hence, his perfect tomatoes every summer.

The folders with her best laid travel plans almost mock her. How hard she worked to persuade Joe to commit to a long-ish walk, weather-permitting, south of Dublin, what was to be their first stop. One brief time in their lives she and Joe tramped in the Alps at every spare moment. Mountains and falling hard into love: these are a double exposure in her memory bank, inseparable.

Promises had been made. When the girls are on their own. When the girls are grown. We’ll go back. Of course, we’ll go back to Zermatt. Back to the Matterhorn. Remember the herd of goats in the rain? The silly sign in the post office: Good Feelings Make You Happy? Remember the climb to the beer-garden you could only reach on foot? The thin sweet air, the pastries? The turks-cap and monks-hood? How strong we were? Joe would say, “You were strong, Emma. You’re still strong.” She thinks of Zermatt, years ago, arriving there in June before the season began to wait for Joe.

She had finished her first year teaching at a Swiss boarding school near the Italian border. Joe had taught there for years. He had made a prior arrangement to visit a friend passing through Geneva, but Emma had gone on to Zermatt. She watched the fair Swiss women kneel and plant their pansies along the stone walkways. 1973. She wanted Joe so badly she could think of little else; at night she had thrashed half-asleep for months; the memory of his smell – the waxy crayons, the charcoal sticks, and beneath that, a slightly ripe grainy odor, he was a health nut then, not an aficionado of donuts – that memory would beset her as soon as she lay down to sleep on the iron bed in her room on the third floor of the girls’ dormitory, where she had been stationed to be a good role model. Virtuous, studious, thrifty, and kind. She would caress her own stomach, her downy thighs, thinking of him in the art studio beneath the dining hall, willing him to wash the porcelain slip from his hands and come to her window. He would ping the glass with gravel and she would open the window and they would speak in stage whispers and in code. The students might be eavesdropping. Later, the liquid moon seeped in; what hormones rushed along inside her, spree of desire. 

Some memories disperse like smoke; some she will never forget.

The kettle steams and whistles; Emma decides against tea and turns off the burner. Restless and frustrated, she slips a CD into the player: Puccini’s “Chrysanthemums.” Come on, Sophie. It’s getting late.

She pulls on her sweater with the deep pockets, checks for cigarettes, opens the door to the landing, and slips into the cool night. At the wooden thwop of the screen door, Joe glances up. They wave. He rises from the garden and brushes off his jeans. Every brittle move he makes looks as if it costs him; that hurts Emma’s heart. She thinks: This is the way your life will be. This is it.

The maple tree is wound around with a string of lights: tin stars. A white lap dog dashes across the littered vacant lot next door; Latino music trickles from the open rear of a van parked in the alley beside the vacant lot, its red turn signal left flashing. A woman in jeans emerges from the back of the van, awkwardly toting a baby car seat wrapped in cellophane and bows.

Emma perches on a stool and strikes a wooden match, cupping it, and lights her cigarette. Last year’s geraniums in white pots have winter-wrinkled stems and leaves like old maps, curled at the edges. They should have brought them in last fall, but the fall of 2001 was crazy, a tunnel of worry, akin to grief. She understands that now. 

A voice musical and male reaches her; she would know it anywhere: Dom Silva. 

“So, Joe. Como esta?”

Joe says, “Dominic.”

Balding, garrulous Dom Silva peeks covetously over the back gate and talks to Brandy – whose nametags jingle as she strains against her leash. He often catches up with them on walks to say, in effect, “Sell now, Joe.” But he finds more seductive ways to express it. He speaks of buildings on nearby blocks – just shells, Joe, still with the original pull-chains on the overhead bulbs, for Chrissakes, no trees, total re-habs – that are going for over 350 K.

Tonight he stands at the gate in nearly mute sympathy with Joe.

“No rent, no mortgage,” Joe said twenty-seven years ago when his father died, and at the time, she could not argue with that. She knows what Dom envisions: sandblasted brick, teak furniture in the courtyard, well-heeled UIC students and professors lounging about. Joe’s humble vegetable garden supplanted by trendy useless shrubs.

Now they will have to sell. There’s no satisfaction in it now.

Her cigarette is down to the filter; she stubs it out in the geranium soil. She gathers her sweater tight, her arms crossed. The Blue Line motors south, a block away. Dom Silva walks on, whistling, a man for whom life will work out. A man of means. An empire-builder, gentrifier. Chicago Magazine will feature him some day, his success like a scent the magazine is able to process and print. If he survives his walk down the alley – for Emma imagines there are people who wouldn’t mind seeing Dom Silva incapacitated. People who wonder where they will live when the victors swoop in and the rents rise. Across the vacant lot, in a second-floor window, someone has taped hand-lettered cardboard: WORK NOT WAR. Thirty-odd years ago it would have been MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR.

Joe looks directly up at Emma; his face takes on an expression she has come to recognize: bewildered and mulish. He casts his voice toward her. “Did the vet tech call?”

 “Not yet,” Emma says.

His curly hair shines in the tin star light. She can see his breath.

In the kitchen, she slips out of her shoes and scoots in stocking-feet through the cat-disturbed hallway, its throw rugs furled up, toy balls scattered. There is a light on upstairs. The photographs on the wall beside the stairs are staggered, a gallery of the girls at each stage, in Easter dresses and formals and graduation gowns. The photos have that saturated surreal color, a grainy surface. Odd that these are the moments we save, when, in memory, other times are more indelible. The photographs do not come close to the intensity of surreptitiously studying Sophie at the Art Institute, all those Saturdays, standing mute before Cezanne’s basket of apples. And Liz, dear unhappy Liz, at ball games with Joe, her round face turned to him. Or Liz with Basie, how she would hold him in her arms.

The last time she went secretly upstairs she admired “The Pizza Maker,” a 4 x 3 canvas of a man sliding a pizza into an oven, his arms muscular, the fire like the light of a brass foundry, something burnished, work with dignity, as Sophie sees it. The studio smelled of linseed oil and paint, garlic and marijuana, shampoo and something else, bouquet of them.

But she’s been forbidden. She blushes with shame.

The telephone rings and Joe answers in the kitchen. Emma eavesdrops from the stairway. Joe says, “That’s good to hear. Thanks for taking care of her.”

When Emma arrives in the kitchen, he says, “Kitty’s fine. She was a good girl for the blood work. She ate dinner and now she’s sleeping.”  He has Sports Illustrated in hand.

“I’m glad for that, Joe.”

Would she go to bed before he does? And later, would they lie awake beside each other, under the Amish quilt, unable to mend the darkened breach with a word or touch? 

With Emma counting questions like sheep?