Chapter 5

One hour later the stressful driving is over and they’re on a straightaway two-lane blacktop, with the occasional dazzle of crocuses, Jersey milk cows in a field, suddenly pastoral. He’s almost forgotten where they’re going. That Uncle Mort, his mother’s brother, bequeathed them his twenty organic acres.

Joe says, “Haven’t we been a good example to the girls? As a couple?”

“I think so.” She gives him her best smile and a bright-eyed glance. “Look. It’s like that David Hockney painting – you know – the patchwork fields and the road.”

“It’s spring over here.” She thinks so. Goddamn lukewarm answer if there ever was one. But the irritation of the morning is gone and Joe anticipates complicity with the realtor, a chipper woman he’s spoken with by phone several times, and he anticipates a hearty lunch – maybe they can find one of those Italian places where the two of them can eat for sixteen dollars and someone in the family makes the sauce from scratch – and then the trip back. The sun might come out. They cross a creek and pass blueberry farms, the blueberry shrubs not yet in leaf.

 “Go right,” Emma says, a good navigator, lover of maps.

They turn down a road more serpentine than the last, and tucked here and there among the hills and dales are new, big, expensive homes in various stages of completion, raw plywood still visible, the yards tumbled with soil, not yet landscaped.  

Joe muses, “Mort would’ve been only three or four when they left the old country. After he grew up, he worked at a catsup factory in Marion. When they laid him off he moved up here. City life – he didn’t have much use for it.”

He slows to a crawl, watching for a landmark, a clue. The last time he visited Uncle Mort was nearly fifty years ago.

“How much do you think these lots are going for?”

“Plenty,” Joe says, then, “This is it. See those hemlocks –“ 

He creeps into a driveway with a grassy hump down the middle and chipped gravel, pulverized, in the tire tracks. Emma has to crane her neck to see the tops of the hemlocks. They have in common the love of names, specifics. It’s one thing that will carry them through on their summer trip. More hemlocks, with their drooping crowns, line the driveway plunging deep into the property, a long narrow trapezoid according to their copy of the appraisal. The figure on the appraisal astounds her. A small barn, once red, now gray, kneels into the ground, with its splintered Dutch doors flung open and moss growing on the north slant of roof. A dead rooster lies in the chicken yard, inside a sagging wire fence.

 Emma says, “This might be hard. But it won’t take long. I hope.”

The house is white clapboard, two-story, with tall windows and a frosted glass front door. A wide veranda fronts the house. Joe parks and squints up. “Black squirrels,” Joe says. “That’s a new one on me.” He peers out the windshield. “Let’s take a look around.”

“But my shoes.” Why didn’t she wear her hiking boots? She’s wearing Munros, black leather slippers. She didn’t prepare for the country. For mud and gravel. Dead chickens. Emma checks her watch. “What time is she coming?”

“Noon.”

“It’s noon now.”

“She’ll be here any minute.” Then: “You love the great outdoors.”

“I love walks. Not farms.”

“I want to get out and look around. I was here two or three times. I came here once for a week. I’d forgotten that. Come on, sweets – get out with me.”

She already has her beret on again; curiosity won’t let her sit in the car. She’ll have an adventure for her students on Monday. Joe goes around and opens Emma’s door. She delicately places her shoes on chosen dry spots and he takes her elbow and tips her up and out of the Skylark. Emma smells his minty smell, and she leans into him, kisses his cheek.

“That’s nice,” Joe says.

He holds her hand – she likes the feel of that – and navigates the muddy yard, around to the first gardens. The gardens go on acres beyond. Emma is not a good judge of acres. They enter one plot demarcated by stones and a wire fence. The quiet of the country is its own noise. Joe kneels and carefully tears away damp straw, down to the soil, and he smiles up at her and says, “Look – a strawberry patch. There’s new growth already.”

“I need a bathroom, Joe.”

“Let’s check out the inside.”

The back screen door hangs from one hinge. It’s too much, the trash barrels on the screened back porch, filled with batches of beer brewing, the yeasty odor, the empty brown bottles, the rusty chest freezer, a bathtub, the slippery pile of damp, yellowing magazines and newspapers – Soviet Life from 1957 is the one on top. Spiders inhabit the empty canning jars. The walls are plastered with calendars – seed calendars and girlie motorcycle calendars from thirty years ago.

“How did he get away with living like this?”

“He’s off the main road.”

She pries open the next door. In the kitchen, linoleum peels from the floor. It seems as if a mouse or mole scratches underfoot, a gray muscular flutter, but it’s gone.  Joe is right behind and she reaches for his hand.

He opens the door to a closet-size bathroom with an avocado green commode and basin, an aluminum box shower. The tie-dyed psychedelic shower curtain is streaked with mold.  “Please. Joe. Shut the door for me, would you?”

She goes, avoiding the rim. A photo of Fidel Castro in his prime is tacked on the wall directly in front of the toilet. It’s the land they’ll want, she figures. In the summer this house will be razed and the refuse taken away in a big Dumpster. Some poor soul will have the imagination for it. The trees are a selling point. And the certified organic gardens. By that time, or a little after, she and Joe will be wandering through the Matisse Museum and waiting in line for tickets to the jazz festival. It does her good to think of their travel plans, of Nice – French food and art and music – while she’s rinsing her fingers under the filthy tap and wiping them daintily on the hem of her slacks.

You can’t blame a man or woman for having dreams; and if we can believe the latest scientific evidence, our dreams and desires are one more biological imperative. People normally differ in the degree to which they seek stimulation. But the most enduring couples, it turns out, are those whose natural levels of sensation-seeking, whether high, low, or in-between, are very closely aligned. High sensation-seekers chase novelty and their dopamine levels increase and they get an all-around rush they associate with their partners. Hence Emma’s dream of traveling in Europe with Joe. Of resuscitating who they were when they fell in love. If only her novelty were his.

She finds Joe back in the strawberry patch, on his knees, mud wicking into the denim of his jeans. Sunshine cuts through the clouds and lights on him.

 “My mother and I visited Uncle Mort for that week.”

“I thought they weren’t close.”

“Not usually. There was that one visit. I must’ve been around ten years old. Right after the war. He gardened out here without a stitch on and my mother didn’t seem to mind. They had something in common – politics. They were political like Uncle Leo. Mucking about, subversively. I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I didn’t want to.”

“What about your brother?”

“I don’t know why he didn’t come.”

Joe sits down on a wooden stool, a milking stool, Emma realizes. The diamond in his wedding band catches light. His knuckles are a little misshapen, his hands spotted with age. “What I liked about being here,” Joe goes on, “was seeing so much growing. You can’t imagine what it’s like in summer. He’s got fruit trees in a field a little farther back. Apricots were coming in. Not much bigger than his thumb – the sugar was concentrated.”

“You have good memories, Joe.”

“Do you like it here?”

“I’m a townie, you know me,” she says. “I’m going back to the car.”

“Suit your self.” He lifts a moldy bundle of straw, sets it aside.

Emma picks her way around the house. Stepping stones overgrown with grass lead to the veranda. With the sun coming out she decides to wait there, and impulsively she telephones Liz. She and her girls are connected perpetually. That’s how she wants it. She doesn’t want to think about those years when Liz didn’t call. Liz picks right up where they left off this morning.

“Ems. Tommy’s only thirteen and he’s got these pictures up in his room. You know the kind.”

“Are you ready for that?”

Liz’s voice skids into a higher register as if she might spin out of control. “Tommy’s the reason I’m still here. Do you think that’s pathetic?”

“You’re a good person.”

“I want a home, that’s all. I want to feel at home.”

“And do you?”

“I told you: Neil isn’t here much.”

What happened to the Liz who subscribed to Bitch? Who chose to wear, at the age of nine, the woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle T-shirt? Who has a savings account begun as a girl and need not depend on anyone? Emma says nothing, for fear she’ll say the wrong thing.

“I know you think I’m in a hurry, Ems. You do.”

Almost whispering, Emma questions, “It’s hormonal, don’t you think?”  She feels a pinprick – wee pinprick – of envy. Liz and Sophie have what she still wants. Unseemly as it is, she’s bewitched at the thought of one last whirl with what they take for granted.

“Whatever,” Liz says. And then, “How does it feel to be your age?”

Emma says, “Have you heard of wabi-sabi?”

“Wabi-what?”

“It’s part of Japanese aesthetics. An appreciation for impermanence and imperfection. The beauty of things worn with age, according to Tiff. When I look in the mirror, I think, Got that wabi-sabi thing going.”

Her laugh is vintage Liz: all out, throaty.

Emma wants to say, “You’re beautiful. You’re smart. Leave Neil now. Don’t get married. I got married too young.” The stories of hardship are on the tip of her tongue. Her parents divorcing, that mess. Does she practice what she preaches? Or is she Hera, whose psychological well-being depends on being coupled? That thought gets plowed under.

On the comet tail of her agenda, a familiar refrain, Liz says, “My life doesn’t look feminist.”

 “Lizzie – honey – what’s your intuition tell you?”

“There’s no 800 number for intuition. Don’t tell Sophie.”

“I won’t.”

Liz sighs and says, “Aren’t you ever scared?”

Liz has five thousand dollars in cash tucked inside a CD case; she has a pantry full of canned goods and bottled water. Joe and she discuss emergency plans; they feed each other bits of paranoia.

“I try not to dwell on it.”

“That’s your theory?”

“In a nutshell.” Then: “How long will United allow you medical leave? Maybe it’d do you good to go back.”

“I’m not ready.”

Once the call ends, Emma thinks, Neil isn’t The One. Assistant professor of Computer Science. Developer of computer games he hopes will catapult him into a higher tax bracket. Emma struggles to see what Liz sees in him. Or why she wanted to be a flight attendant. If home is what she wants.

Liz fell for Neil on a turbulent flight from Atlanta to Chicago. “Chemistry, it was major chemistry,” she overheard her telling Sophie.

There are vague glosses over facts, questions Joe will bring up right before sleep – Was Neil still married when they met? Where is Tommy’s mother now? And why can’t she ask those questions – what’s wrong with a smidge of parental prying? 

A barn cat slinks up the steps. Its fur matted; its lemon-yellow eyes rheumy.

Emma shakes the front door knob until it gives and goes back to the kitchen and the fridge, a mess – Uncle Mort had definitely lost touch with his fridge – but there’s a soup-size can of mackerel covered in tin foil.

Cautiously, she removes the foil and sniffs.

The soft cooked rings of mackerel bones are dusky blue. Fishy, but not spoiled. On the front porch, amid the clutter, Emma spoons mackerel onto a clay saucer and watches, satisfied, while the cat eats. 

“Basie would love it here, don’t you think?” Joe stands there with soiled hands, smiling: it seems he expects her to agree.

 “We’re selling this place.”

“I thought you wanted to move.”

“Not here.”

Joe droops down pensively on the top step. Perhaps this is the moment she’s fretted about, The Talk. He pulls a cigar from his shirt pocket and holds it under his nose.

She wants the city. The Art Institute and the little galleries. The jazz fest. And even though she has her doubts about it, in this moment she wants her job. Tiff calls the city the behavioral sink, referring to an experiment with female rats; the rats raised their baby rats in the corners of a maze but went down into the open area in the center of the maze to misbehave.

The can of mackerel and the spoon feel grimy, infectious, on her hands. The cat swirls its tail against her calf.

 “Come here, sweets.”

“I don’t want to come there. Tell me.”

Joe rises, tucks his hands in the pockets of his jeans. In a conciliatory whisper, he says, “Damn it, Emma. I don’t want to sell yet. I just. Don’t.”

The realtor’s white Toyota pickup grinds down the driveway, her metal FOR SALE signs rattling in the bed, some easy listening love song squirting out her rolled down window. Emma slams the foul mackerel at the veranda wall, an improvisation, a desperate moment, free of deliberation, or so it seems. Later she’ll tell Tiff, “I just wasn’t on my best behavior.”

 

 Chapter 6

Janet Burroway tells us that when it comes to fiction, “Only trouble is interesting.” Where once the March family lived like angels on the head of a pin, upstairs from Home Plate, now they spin away from home.

Once more from the top. Where did this story begin?

Trust me now, I am telling you the truth: this story wanted to start in Manhattan. I feel at home in Manhattan. Husband #1 proposed to me there, second time around, not far from St. Pat’s Cathedral. (If I say yes to him, this will be my 4th marriage – I’m on a roll.) I was a finalist for a literary award at the Millennium Marriott. And I met my twin sister there, after having been separated from her at birth during the Easter tornado of 1957. Just kidding, inventing.  I don’t have a twin sister. But the literary award really happened.

After that walk on the beach with my philandering friend, I wrote in my moleskin notebook (the same type notebook, boasts the manufacturer, used by Hemingway and Paul Theroux): “How to continue in a marriage when both partners want radically different things?” That’s akin to a question Charlie Baxter ventured at a party not long ago: “In a marriage – a long, long marriage – what would you consider unforgivable?” MFA students lurked nearby, starry-eyed drunk on shots of Cuervo Gold. I had to think about it. I finally answered, “Physical violence.” And Charlie said, “It’s hard to say, isn’t it?”

The territory I’d explore seemed clear. But where to set it?

In January 2002 I met another friend, Gaye, in Manhattan to research the possibilities. A tax-deductible weekend. We stayed at the Washington Square Hotel. Where Bob Dylan stayed when he first arrived in New York, we told ourselves. Gaye is a jazz pianist by night, Human Resources Specialist by day, a woman with whom I went to Catholic boarding school. We had been known to build fires in the dorm halls, dance with Coke bottles inside our jeans to be like boys, with perpetual boners: mad girls, wanting sex the powers that be conspired to keep from us. In January 2002 our idea of a wild time was the early set at Smalls on 10^th Street. A now defunct jazz club, in a narrow basement made to quiver by the subway trains, the floor uneven murky terrain. Against a blue velvet drape hung a photo of grinning Louis Armstrong, in tweed knickers and a newsboy cap. BYOB. Gaye had a stash of flavored vodka in her purse. We felt like Bohemians – the Eastern European variety – shivering in our skimpy coats and boiled wool hats, swigging vodka while we waited to get in. I told her the story of my Bohemian family coming to the new world. Somehow those people wanted to hop in the story. We would have to visit Ellis Island where they landed in 1907. The bass fiddler at Smalls – in his early twenties, red-headed, athletic – came over between sets and chatted. He treated us like real people, even though we were old enough to be his mother. He breathed hard, sensually, as he bent to his task.

He reminds me of Damon Ray Dillon, whom you’ll met a little farther down the road.  You see how these things evolve. How the onion grows. 

We did Greenwich Village. We did the Lower East Side. Friendly New Yorkers told us great stories. Our fingers frosty, unable to speak, we solemnly circumnavigated Ground Zero. We consumed astonishing quantities of Indian and Italian food. The shiny white walls of the Italian place were made of tiles stolen by immigrant workers who built the first subway. We stomped through the snow. Got cold and wet. Flagged down a lunging Yellow Cab. Drank Irish coffees at Caffé Sha-Sha, where the wood fire crackled above the marble hearth and lit up an antique copper espresso machine. Every little thing seemed new and wondrous. Yes, this is where the new book would be set. I’d go live in Manhattan for a while; I’d always wanted to, since grad school in Baltimore. If my niece from Ohio (a nanny for a television producer) had done it, so would I. What I would write would be homage to New York City. I would see it in its quirky glory, perhaps as only a true outsider could. In spite of having lived a mostly pastoral life, thinking of myself like Dylan Thomas, “famous among the barns,” I love cities and have written about Saigon and London, New Orleans and Mexico City, Vancouver and Baltimore. 

The Monday morning I was set to fly home to the austere Midwest, I had breakfast (ostensible breakfast, I didn’t eat) with my (then) editor. His news was bad and what he said stands out to this day; while it may be true that much is forgivable in marriage, there is much that is not in the lit biz. He said:

1) No green market exists near Abingdon Square. (In my book proposal, I had placed Joe March at that very green market, selling vegetables he had grown in one of the miniature garden plots you find around the Lower East Side.)

2) People don’t want to read about people in their fifties.

3) Don’t set this book in New York.

He pretty much vacuumed up all the wind in my mousy sail.

I may or may not have said, “I bought an apple at that green market yesterday morning. A guy from New Jersey like a carnival barker in a white chef’s hat was giving away grilled samples of turkey burger from his turkey farm.”

I may or may not have said, “There are 80 million Boomers in the United States. Over half of them are women and those women are responsible for 80% of household purchases. Surely some of those purchases are books. And surely, if they are guilty of even a smidge of narcissism as pop psychologists accuse, they want to read about themselves! Boomer women are the greatest marketing opportunity today.  They revel in what Margaret Mead called ‘post-menopausal zest.’ And that’s what Emma wants! Craves! She is a character in longing!”

Whatever.

I skedaddled back to the Midwest. Rather than butt heads with New Yorkers who think that only they can know the nooks and crannies of their city, on the flight home I decided I would set the new book in Chicago. My brother Benny introduced me to Joe and Emma March and their two daughters, Sophie and Liz. I would follow their lives like a trailing camera-woman for one solid year. Poet Marianne Boruch says, “You take what’s in your beggar’s bowl.”

My brother Benny is one of Joe’s former students. A vestige of Joe’s former life, before he quit teaching. He and Joe watch DVDs on a super-size Sony, and like the bobble-heads in Mystery Science Theater, they comment freely.

Benny graduated from DePaul in 1975 and through a series of chance encounters decided to take up permanent residence in Chicago. Benny is a sculptor, with a cavernous drafty studio in Pilsen East where he fashions quilts from metal junk he picks up on his walks through the city. Or any city. Take Benny on a nice four-day jaunt to New Orleans or San Francisco and he spends his days walking with his head down, watching for trash. Benny is an anomaly in our family, with entrepreneurial urges – he buys and sells businesses and real estate. Over the years he has owned and liquidated – without much profit – an auto repair shop, a rat-infested movie theater, a hole-in-the-wall tamale place, and a gallery near Damon and Milwaukee. He can install toilets, hang drywall, spackle, paint, expose brick walls, lay tile, and wire new lamp fixtures without electrocuting himself.

He is also depressed, a quality of life he shares with Joe. Benny’s depressions are triggered by international politics, emotional anniversaries, and the lonely, unalterable realization that he hasn’t done everything he’d hoped to do. For several years, Benny took medications for depression. Lexapro. Wellbutrin. But the side effects laid him lower still. Finally he decided to self-medicate. Now whenever Benny feels a down coming on, he takes a Paxil. And one the next day. It is a sort of clear speed, Benny says. Doctors don’t like to think this short-term on-demand treatment helps, but Benny swears by it. He says that the doctors are bamboozled by the pharmaceutical companies. He says, “Did you ever take black beauties in the old days? Paxil’s like that without the freaky edge. It bumps me up a notch.”

On those days, if I can get away, I drive to Chicago and we walk. We steer clear of the zoo since Benny has Zoo-Melancholy, an ailment among vegetarians that if allowed to infiltrate a day can turn on a dime to Zoo-Rage, a sub-category of your basic Misanthropy. Close by the lake, we find its immensity, its navy-blueness, somehow soothing. We talk about how small we humans are. How our neurological firings ignite our troubles. Like a little Asian garden we rake the sands of nearly clichéd wisdom. How our thoughts create our suffering and so on. We admit that we love each other, we count on each other, and that sibling love makes life larger than it might otherwise feel when we own the unnerving sensation of being like feverish ants on the planet. (We sort of miss our parents, but they have deserted us to live on one of the lesser-known Florida Keys; they wear baggy shorts every day, fish, and think of themselves as the original parrot heads, with “Cheeseburger in Paradise” threatening to blast their boom box to smithereens.) When Benny’s down passes, he forgets about the Paxil.  His depression is like a country I don’t have a visa for. 

Otherwise I live in Dowdyville, the college town where I teach and live out my romantic and work-related tribulations. A place that time has nearly forgot. 

When Benny introduced me to Joe and Emma, I turned my writer’s lens on Chicago. I bought a down coat that looks like a mummy sleeping bag (good to -20 degrees), and embraced the Windy City.

The first time Benny took me to Home Plate he had called earlier in the day and said, “Trix-honey. It’s a Paxil on Parade Day.” I had been on my way to a faculty meeting and decided to skip out. It was February, but the roads were clear and dry and I made it to Chicago in two hours: record time. Benny’s significant other of twelve years – the fiery Italian comedic actress – had set him free. Times like that – with no commitments – we wander the city, maybe hanging out at a mega-bookstore or going to the gym, where I spot Benny as he bench-presses his own body weight.  Or we go to his Korean yoga studio where they slap their bellies and count in Korean. And afterward in a comradely circle, they drink tea that tastes like dirt.  I do whatever he wants. 

That night we’d been to the Music Box on the north side to see a silent movie. It was early evening, mordaciously cold. We got off the El near 18^th and Ashland Avenue. He wanted to go to Mass at San Pio before we saw Joe. We sat near the back of the church and Benny laid his trash like an offering on the pew. A pitted copper faucet with a swan’s head for a handle. A silver hoop earring. A few rusty nails. Benny loves Mass. He’s one of your intellectual Catholics the new pope wants to banish, who, nevertheless, loves the candlelight and occasional Latin, the odor of incense, return to childhood safety. He says it gives him peace.

After Mass we knocked on Joe March’s shop door and watched “Ground Hog Day,” for it was Ground Hog Day and Joe March said, “It’s my favorite holiday.” The best part was this: Benny laughed. He laughed every time Sonny and Cher started singing “I got you, babe.” The sound of my brother’s laughter when he’s getting over a down is like the first human laugh. Someone somewhere had to laugh first. What a surprise it must have been. A morsel of joy. Like sun at your back when you’re going home.

Benny’s sorrow dictated my interest in Joe. I hated to see my brother suffer and I wanted to understand it.

 

Chapter 7

Bundled in a down coat and blue beret, her fingers exposed and a little raw, Emma smokes her nightly cigarette on the landing, above the frozen courtyard and alley. Winter wind a bitter message from Lake Michigan. Sirens squall on Ashland Avenue. Her Miles Davis is muted, shut up in the kitchen where she left a stack of worksheets on the table. The dishes tucked into the dishwasher. A half-glass of merlot already poured to expedite the schoolwork. It’s after nine.

A shadow crosses over the light at the kitchen window. Joe is at the sink, drawing a glass of tap water. Right before she stepped out, Joe sat down at the table with a sheaf of mail. Mail he examines with painstaking, maddening diligence before slipping it into the recycling bin. “Boomer mail,” he said. “Your kind of mail. I’m a Depression baby. Not even a War baby.”

But – without exactly meaning to – after the trip to Saugatuck Emma stopped laughing at his humor. She has heard it all before: how different they are. Developmental differences might be with them to the grave. If she would laugh, they might eventually fall into bed together. Hundreds of weekly chances might lead them to bed down together; and in bed, whatever they do there might send those rubber duckies of oxytocin and vasopressin bobbing through their veins. The glue of attachment, according to Rutgers professor, Helen Fisher, whose scholarly turf is the chem lab of love. (See Outtakes for more info.)

But no. Emma’s ears feel frosty. She nurses a perverse, grand solitariness. For the duration of that cigarette, she imagines herself alone.

A cat cries from down below. Not a cat in heat, a cat in pain.

Emma stubs out her cigarette in a geranium pot. She raps on the window and Joe glances up from Sports Illustrated. A practiced courtesy on his ruddy, handsome face. A look of affection, no denying that. 

With stiff fingers, Emma beckons him outside. He is warm indoors, content. His shrug seems to question: Why in God’s name does she want him outside?

Emma joins her hands, miming: Please?

He takes the time to button on an insulated work shirt. He snaps a watch cap down over his ears. Kind of Blue pours forth when he opens the door.

“What’s up, sweets?” Gloves flop from his chest pocket. 

“Listen,” Emma says.

They go down. Past the back gate, the smell of refuse – rotting mutation of diapers and household effluvia – assails them. Joe says, “It’s coming from the Dumpster.”

“Shit, shit, shit.” Emma grimaces.

“Kitty, kitty, kitty –“

Emma says, “Can you give me a boost?”

Joe pulls on his gloves, squats with his legs wide, and his fingers dovetail into a step that he calls bombproof. Emma climbs up into Joe’s hands, wobbling, bracing between the rusty Dumpster rim and his shoulder. “Am I heavy?”

 “You’re a wisp of a girl,” Joe says.

He’s glad, now, to be there. Why would she ever think those intrusive thoughts about being alone? She says, “Hey.”

Joe glances up, questioningly.

 “I like you.”

“’Like you, too, Ems. I do.”

 The cat nests on a white plastic garbage bag. Not far from a hunk of two-by-four studded with bent nails. A tiger-stripe, with lactating teats exposed, her belly fur is reddish, long.

 “She looks like Cincinnati.” Deceased beloved queen mum, Cincinnati reigned in the shop for nearly two decades.

 Forlornly, Joe says, “Oh.”

 Emma grunts, “I can’t – quite – reach her.” She rests her weight against the Dumpster rim. Rejoicing: We’re doing something together. 

 “You’ll ruin your coat,” Joe says.

 “That can’t be helped.” Emma urges, “Kitty, kitty, kitty –“

 The cat’s eyes appear hooded, sooty. Still keening, she creeps close to Emma’s outstretched hand. She sniffs. Emma whispers, “We’re cat lovers. Trust us.” And to Joe: “She’s given birth recently.”

 “Do you see the babies?”

“No.”

“That’s sad.”

“I know.”

Easefully, so as not to alarm the cat, Emma manages to twist into a sitting position on the rolled metal edge of the Dumpster. She has dominion, sovereignty. The night shines out. Track lights gleam in the third floor studio – Sophie’s lair. In the gaps between the buildings, brake lights of cars on Paulina Street blink and disappear and blink. The Blue line El train zig-zags a block away. Her breath effloresces in the March cold.

 Joe offers, “She must be injured.”

 Emma says, “I think I can scoop her up. And pass her down. You’ll have to get a good grip. She’s scared.”

 “What about you?”

 “I’ll manage.”

 The cat rises, her haunches shaky. Emma flips up her hood and lies back in the frozen garbage, as if to carve a snow angel. A move she never thought she’d make. It’s somehow liberating to know she is capable of lying on garbage to rescue a cat. In her treasured down coat. The snot-nosed cat within reach. Emma slips a palm under her belly and pulls her near. She hands the trembling cat down to Joe. His top three buttons undone, he deposits her inside his quilted shirt and holds her snug. “She’s purring already,” Joe says.

Just then, apex of one of life’s small victories, a glass bottle smashes against a safety lamp at the end of the alley on the next block.  Someone whoops drunkenly. Joe sighs. “Let’s get inside. I don’t want any trouble.”

Sure in her own skin, her own muscles, Emma leaps down from the Dumpster. She’s concocting a rescue story, an adventure, to share with her third-graders. Starring Ms. March.

 Inside, they feed the cat half-and-half. Joe wraps her in a beach towel and cleans the cut on her rump with Bactine. She favors her right foreleg; a joint might be dislocated. Basie has retreated to the bedroom in a huff. Emma grades her worksheets, the merlot a steady warm seam in her body. Sitting on a rag rug, Joe murmurs to the cat and strokes her ears, checking for fleas.

“She’s fairly clean.” His face is pink with cold, his hair flattened, white as sugar.

Such moments of tenderness – toward babies or small animals – are a kind of currency in marriage.  Emma just loves him then.

She ventures, “Do you know anyone who wants a cat? I’ll bet she’s a mouser, if she’s lived outdoors.”

Joe frowns.

“You like her.” Unspoken is the agreement they made when Cincinnati died: they would acquire no more animal companions; when Basie goes – God forbid it happens anytime soon – they would enjoy the freedom of walking out the door whenever they pleased for as long as they pleased, no kids at home, no animals.

“I want to keep her,” Joe says.

 Reluctantly, Emma shifts gears. Maybe this is what he needs. What we need. She says, “What’s wrong with her eyes?”

 “They look damaged.”

 “She’s sort of glamorous. The way she squints. Sort of film noir.”

 “I’ll take her to the vet tomorrow.”

 “Are you sure you’re ready?” By that she means, Are you finished grieving over Cincinnati?

Joe says, “How can I know that?”

 She has the impulse to blurt: You just know. Patience is a virtue, GG used to say, possessed by few women and no men. But at home Joe has more patience than she does; she depletes her supply of patience at school. She musters up fake kindness. As if. “What’ll you name her?”

 “Peggy Lee. She’s Peggy Lee.”

Later, in bed, Joe says, “This is the best – cat island.”

Basie – miffed – perches on Emma’s side and Peggy Lee curls next to Joe. The house is quiet, save for the tick, tick, ticking of air in the radiator. Outside, Pilsen is never quiet. With its car alarms bleating, its church bells. Around midnight Sophie and Chanti will come in giggling, theatrically shushing each other. They’ll count their tips at the kitchen table. If they make their young athletic love upstairs, they’ll turn on tango at low volume to blanket the sexy noise.

They have each other.

Joe has Peggy Lee. 

That rush Emma felt on the edge of the Dumpster has dissipated; so, too, the homely pleasure of doing something with Joe, something out of the ordinary. He murmurs sweet nothings to Peggy Lee. Like an heirloom, Emma lifts a phrase from memory her mother and GG might have whispered: loveless marriage. What she frets they’re becoming. 

That was late winter.

Not the best of times.