“OK, fine,” I said. “But why?”
“ ‘So if she does come back I’ll know it’s not just pity.’ ” He stared at me. “Get it?”
I didn’t answer.
“His expectations are zero, Carrie. Zero. But his hopes? This is a guy who has a lot to hope for, and you’re somewhere near the top of the list.”
C
HAPTER
35
I canceled my flight. I couldn’t go back yet, not after what Rooster had told me. Kilroy wasn’t happy, and his unhappiness made me unhappy, and when I told my mother that I was going to stay a while longer she searched my face hard, as if for an explanation.
“Do you really want to?” she said at last.
“Yes.”
She’d cleared that afternoon’s appointments and gone out to Wellhaven with Jamie. Mrs. Fletcher, she said, was in a private room overlooking a quiet terrace planted all along the edges with pink and white crocuses. When they arrived she was sitting motionless in an armchair near the window. My mother only stayed in the room for a few minutes, but Jamie told her afterward that eventually Mrs. Fletcher started talking, and what she talked about was some meat she’d defrosted. She told Jamie to look for it, a veal roast, and throw it away. She said she was worried she hadn’t taught Jamie and her sisters all they needed to know to run a kitchen. Three days for chicken, four for beef. Don’t let anyone cook that veal roast, she told Jamie. (“As if we would,” Jamie’d said to my mother. “As if we weren’t just nuking Stouffer’s most nights.”)
My mother told me this at the kitchen table over glasses of white wine. She said the conversation could be seen as a good sign, an indication that Mrs. Fletcher felt connected to her life.
“Does Jamie see it that way?”
My mother lifted her wineglass and took a sip. She set the glass down and twirled the stem back and forth between her thumb and forefinger. “Jamie can’t quite get past the hospital,” she said. “She thinks her mother being in the hospital spells out trouble, rather than that the hospital is addressing trouble that was already in her mother.”
I nodded. “That reminds me of what you said to me.”
She cocked her head. “When?”
“When I first called you from New York. I said leaving made me a bad person, and you said people aren’t defined by what they do so much as they define what they do. It’s like that.” I fiddled with the saltshaker. It was also like what Kilroy had said:
Forty doesn’t say what I am, I say what forty is
. I thought,
And I say it’s solitary
. Then I shook my head hard, wanting to fling the idea away.
My mother was watching me.
Observing
me: the word came to me all at once. She stood up. “You remember a lot,” she said. “You’ve always had a good memory.”
I thought of my early childhood, when I’d tried and tried to remember my father. Maybe I never wanted to forget anything again. “I guess so,” I said, and I watched her cross to the sink, where she poured the last bit of her wine out, then turned on the water and let it fill the empty glass.
I called Mike the next morning, and Mrs. Mayer answered. I said I guessed she’d heard I was back, and she said yes, she guessed she had. When Mike came on I told him I was going to be staying for a few more days and that I’d like to visit if I could.
They were all home when I got there—Mr. Mayer, Mrs. Mayer, John Junior. It was almost as if they’d hung around to get a glimpse of me, or it struck me that way about John, anyway, who wandered in and out of the kitchen four or five times for no good reason.
Mrs. Mayer was glacial. It was she who answered the door, and she held on tight, as if I might pry her away and try to force her into a hug. She looked older and dowdier, nearly a year into Mike’s tragedy: her hair badly permed, extra lines on her face. She wore a decade-old nylon sweatsuit in a bright jade green that cast a gray light on her skin. She didn’t bother trying to be nice.
I stayed for about an hour. Mike and I talked about Rooster: about how happy he was, what a goon he would be as a father—Mr. Camcorder, Mr. Spoiler. He told me about Harvey, who’d developed some motor
function in his left arm and was back in the hospital for more therapy. “He’s a great guy,” Mike said. “I learned a lot from him.”
“About?”
“Just life,” he said, and then he grinned broadly, the first really big smile I’d seen on him: it was familiar at the same time that it was strange, shadowed by the mustache. “Listen to me,” he said. “ ‘Just life.’ Yes, and he’s a really caring individual.” He rolled his eyes. “Never mind, you’ll just have to meet him someday, I think you’d like each other.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Mr. Mayer appeared, tall and broad-shouldered, his bald spot gleaming. From the doorway he looked at me, then he came in and circled the table to stand behind me, putting a hand on each of my shoulders. “Isn’t she a sight for sore eyes?” he said to Mike, and then he ruffled my hair and bent down to put the side of his face against mine.
The silk I liked best was a sage green jacquard, small shadow leaves spilling across it. It came in mauve, too, but the green was more interesting, smoky and soft. Maybe it wasn’t sage, maybe it was celadon. Or light olive. I loved the names of colors, the tiny distinctions between them. Cantaloupe, shrimp, salmon.
It was Monday morning and I was at Fabrications. I’d come just to look, half expecting to be disappointed after the place in New York, but the shop still had its old hold on me, the fabrics not just gorgeous but arranged to entice, exquisite pale earth tones mixed with whites and ivories to signal the coming of spring.
The bell over the door sounded, and a very tall woman came in carrying a Marshall Field’s bag. She said hi to me, and I was confused for a moment, wondering if I knew her. But no, it was just Madison again, Madison friendliness. I was still suffering from cognitive dissonance. I looked at my watch. Back in New York, my Patternmaking class would start soon, and I was missing it again. Twice now.
“Could you help me?” the customer said to the saleswoman, a soft-bodied blond in an obviously homemade blue twill jumper with a lot of top-stitching. “I bought this dress and I’m not sure what to do about the fit.”
The saleswoman showed her to the back room, and the woman came out a few minutes later wearing a red silk dress that just didn’t fit her, never mind what the color did to her face. As I watched, the two of them talked, trying to come up with a plan for altering it.
“I think you’d have to take the sleeves off,” the saleswoman said at one point. “Then you could take out the pleats and narrow it through here and get rid of that puffiness.”
“Or I could just return it,” the customer said.
“Or you could just return it.”
The customer sighed. She looked at herself in the mirror, the same full-length mirror that had sold me on the washed silk for my nightgown and robe last summer. “I don’t suppose you do any alterations,” she said.
“Sorry,” the saleswoman said, shaking her head. “I have a two-year-old at home.”
The customer gave her reflection a last look. She had a long face, and she wore her shoulder-length brown hair pushed off her forehead with a wide hairband. She was turning toward the back room when I stepped forward and surprised myself by saying that I’d overheard her and that as it happened I was in the business of doing alterations myself.
“Are you really?” she said. “I desperately need this for Friday and I don’t want to trust it to the tailor at the dry cleaner’s.”
The saleswoman said I could pin it right there, and we moved into a corner and got to work. I felt a little silly, but excited, too, because I knew just what to do.
The problem wasn’t just the sleeves. The woman had narrow shoulders and wide hips, and the dress bowed at the neck and pulled across the belly—drag lines, in Parsons language. Using pins from a box I bought on the spot, I took in the bodice, adjusted the sleeves so they were less puffy and droopy, and shortened the skirt by about an inch.
“Look,” I said, leading her back to the mirror. “Isn’t that better? If you can kind of ignore the pins and squint a little, you’ll get the idea. I can’t do anything about the hips, but the rest.”
“I don’t have to squint,” she said. “It’s great, you’re a miracle worker. And don’t feel bad about the hips—I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t do anything about them, either.”
The work was easy to complete by Friday, and the Kenmore held up for me, although there were a few bad moments when the bobbin thread got tangled and oily. I charged sixty dollars, and the woman and I were both happy. Heading back to her car after picking up the dress, she turned and said, “Hey, could you make me a dress from scratch sometime?”
Standing there on my mother’s front step, I knew the dress instantly—the neckline, the silhouette, the dusty blues and greens that
would bring out her eyes and set off her hair. Just like that, in front of me, a whole dress. It was thrilling, and I shook my head regretfully. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just here visiting.”
Kilroy cooled. He went from a certain somewhat unhappy state of understanding to a more irritable state of wanting to know why I had to resolve everything at once, during a spur-of-the-moment trip that had gone on longer than planned. “You’re getting sucked back in,” he said. “You’ve got to see that you’ve done what you could. It took Jamie a long time to reach this point, it’ll take her a long time to come back from it.” I said I knew, I knew. I didn’t mention that I’d stopped trying to see her. I didn’t mention Mike.
I visited him every day. Just for a little while, a half hour, forty-five minutes. He liked going for walks around the neighborhood on weekday afternoons when the sidewalks were empty. It was sixty degrees out, sixty-five, and the tulips were opening, great stands of yellow and red.
Mrs. Mayer barely tolerated me. She tossed me sidelong glares, her arms crossed over her chest. When I knocked on the door she opened it and then walked away, calling, “Mike, door.” It was a punishment, and just: enduring it was a form of mortification, as in mortifying the flesh to cleanse the soul, except that I was mortifying the soul to cleanse the soul. I survived it moment by moment.
On Saturday I showed up around one. Mr. and Mrs. Mayer were in golf clothes, moving around the front of the house with clubs and shoes and then going off to look for their gloves. She beckoned me to the side.
“How long do you think you’ll be staying today?”
“I don’t know, why?”
She smoothed her skirt, a robin’s-egg-blue A-line with a big ladybug appliquéd near the hem. “It’s just John Junior has a softball game and I hate to leave him home alone too long. It’s our first time out this spring—we only want to play nine holes.” She looked at me, our eyes truly meeting for the first time since my return. She gave me a faint, neutral smile: no pressure.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
She let out a heavy breath. “Oh, thanks. Thanks.”
I joined Mike in the kitchen. When they were gone I got us each some ice water and we went out to the deck. The yard was well planted for spring, possibly more so than it had been the previous year, even the grape hyacinths carefully controlled along one piece of fence. I thought
Mrs. Mayer must have spent many a fall day out here, punishing her knees while Mike labored through rehab.
“So you’re baby-sitting?”
“Mike.”
“Mom’s a little too protective. I can hardly get her to go to the grocery store.”
A power mower started up a few houses away. I could almost picture the mower, how some man Mr. Mayer’s age would have pushed it out of his garage and given it a once-over, filled the tank with gas, and then made a little wish before pulling the cord for the first time since fall.
“I guess you don’t hear too many of those in New York.”
I smiled at him. “Not too many.”
We sat together on the deck. A cardinal lit on the rail and we watched it peck, then fly away. “Mike?” I said after a while.
“Carrie?”
“Can we be friends?”
He bent toward the redwood table for a sip of water, then straightened up and gazed into the middle distance. “I can’t help loving you,” he said, and his face slowly filled with color. “God, isn’t that a line from some awful song?”
“I think so.”
“Love songs are so stupid. I was thinking about this just the other day—Mom had some godawful oldies station playing in the kitchen. I mean, when did anyone ever actually enjoy walking in the rain? It doesn’t feel so fine.”
We looked at one another. I remembered running with him through the rain, to the Student Union or to my dorm, his hand clasping mine as if he could actually make me go faster. How he looked with wet hair plastered to his head, strands stuck in clumps to his forehead as he searched for something to dry off with.
He motored away from the table, toward the rail, then turned to face me. “In answer to your question,” he said, “I really don’t know.”
“I want to be,” I said.
“You don’t even live here anymore, Carrie.”
I looked at my hands. How could I do both: live in New York and be Mike’s friend?
Mike was Mr. Congeniality, wasn’t he? A nice guy. That’s what I’ve always figured
. How strange it had been to learn Kilroy was jealous. What would he think if I started calling Mike, writing to him? What would he think if he found out I’d been calling him and writing him and had never said so?
Mike sat across the deck from me in his wheelchair, the big black machine that both freed and imprisoned him. He wore a zippered gray sweatshirt over navy-blue sweatpants, and the fabric lay on his body so that I could easily see the contours of his limbs, bony and spastic. There was pain, I’d learned, which seemed like a particularly cruel joke: no movement and no sensation, but the nerves were tricked out to keep on transmitting messages of hurt. There he was in his wheelchair. You could never take the chairness away from it.
C
HAPTER
36
Monday morning I sat at my mother’s long, polished-wood dining room table. I’d always liked the dining room, its white walls and dark china cabinet and thick blue rug. It was the room where I’d sewn as a teenager, spreading my work out down the length of the table. I always put my machine at the end, just in front of a window that got the morning light.