How to Fall (6 page)

The procedure ended. The ecstasy faded. Her eyes were now permanently beautiful, or would be, once the slight swelling had gone down. She could get the eyebrows done too, the tattooist informed her. Lips were an entirely other matter—that was real surgery, the Paris mouth they called it, Hollywood hopefuls all wanted to look like Michelle Pfeiffer, it cost them a fortune, and they still had to wear lipstick anyway. Ever think of having those ears pinned back? You could mention my name on your show, I hear you have a show, never have caught it myself—cable's my game.

A week later Franny got an infection of the eyelashes.

“Palpebritis,” she informed the camera, the audience, the
Russian, herself, grinning crookedly, her right eye gorgeous behind its contact lens, her left one squinting under the outraged lid.

She stopped the tape. PAUSE said the letters; the numbers were still. The infected lid looked warm. It
was
warm; a crockpot for bacteria. The asymmetrical mouth looked wretched. The moussed hair surrounding the besieged face could have passed for barbed wire.

PLAY. The homuncula—femincula?—oh, who cared?—continued with the news.

 

Things happened fast this time, too. Franny's right sclera developed sympathetic conjunctivitis. Now she looked as if a rival had been scratching her eyes out.

There were drops for the pain and drops for the inflammation and drops to correct the blurring. “Your eyes will heal,” said the ophthalmologist. “But, my dear, tattooing . . . Really, I wish you had consulted me first. Of course you can't wear your lenses.”

Eyeglasses quenched Franny's new face. She tried the standard frames she'd worn when she worked for the newspaper. Perhaps she looked no plainer now than earlier; but she had become accustomed to distinctiveness. She tried grannies and goggles and harlequins. Nothing helped.

She couldn't manage the lopsided smile.

She became too uneasy to run her hand through her hair.

The nervous wit pried itself loose from her tongue and ran off.

She felt her charm draining away, like life. And everybody at
Quidnunc
was so noticeably kind, to her face, and so patently engaged in sabotage, behind her back.

When Ramsay told her that the contract wouldn't be renewed;
that her predecessor, driven crazy by the kids, wanted the old job back, Franny shrugged inside a brown sweater. “I was not cut out to be an anchor,” she said at last.

“No? What were you cut out for, then?” shuffling some papers.

An anchorite . . . But she wouldn't waste the pun on him.

 

She is good at free-lance editing, but the pay is skimpy. Her eyes have recovered. She walks up Godolphin Hill most nights. She thinks about the bag lady a lot, she told her boss at their most recent lunch. “Maybe I should study social work,” she mused. “Or become a cop.” He didn't reply. Suddenly animated, she said, “I'll take up stemming. I'll wear shades and a cardboard sign. Seduced and Abandoned!” and for a forgetful moment, she lifted one corner of her mouth.

K
eith and Mitsuko Maguire drifted into town like hoboes, though the rails they rode were only the trolley tracks from Boston, and they paid their fares like everyone else. But they seemed as easy as vagabonds, without even a suitcase between them, and only one hat, a canvas cap. They took turns putting it on. Each wore a hiker's back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack. Two lime green sneakers hung from Mitsuko's pack.

That afternoon they were seen sharing a loaf and a couple of beers on a bench in Logowitz Park. Afterwards they relaxed under a beech tree with their paperbacks. They looked as if they meant to camp there. But sleeping outside was as illegal twenty-five years ago as it is today; and these newcomers, it turned out, honored the law. In fact they spent their first night in the Godolphin Inn, like ordinary travelers. They spent their second night in the apartment they had just rented at the top of a three-decker on Lewis Street, around the corner from the house I have lived in since I was a girl.

And there they stayed for a quarter of a century, maintaining cordial relations with the downstairs landlord and with the succession of families who occupied the middle flat.

Every fall they planted tulips in front. In the spring Keith mowed the side lawn. Summers they raised vegetables in the back; all three apartments shared the bounty.

Anyone else in their position would have bought a single-family house or a condo, maybe after the first child, certainly after the second. Keith, a welder, made good money; and Mitsuko, working part time as a computer programmer, supplemented their income. But the Maguires kept on paying rent as if there were no such thing as equity. They owned no television; and their blender had only three speeds. But although the net curtains at their windows seemed a thing of the moment, like a bridal veil, their plain oak furniture had a responsible thickness. On hooks in the back hall hung the kids' rain gear, and Keith's hard hat, and Mitsuko's sneakers. The sneakers' green color darkened with wear; eventually she bought a pair of pink ones.

 

I taught all three of the boys. By the time the oldest entered sixth grade he was a passionate soccer player. The second, the bookish one, wore glasses. The third, a cutup, was undersized. In each son the mother's Eastern eyes looked out of the father's Celtic face; a simple, comely, repeated visage; a glyph meaning ‘child.'

Mitsuko herself was not much bigger than a child. When the youngest began high school even he had outstripped his mother. Her little face contained a soft beige mouth, a nose of no consequence, and those mild eyes. Her short hair was clipped every month by Keith. (In return Mitsuko trimmed Keith's
receding curls and rusty beard.) She wore tees and jeans and sneakers except for public occasions; then she wore a plum-colored skirt and a white silk blouse. I think it was always the same skirt and blouse. The school doctor once referred to her as generic; but when I asked him to identify the genus he sighed his fat sigh. “Female parent? All I mean is that she's stripped down.” I agreed. It was as if nature had given her only the essentials: flat little ears; binocular vision; teeth strong enough for buffalo steak, though they were required to deal with nothing more fibrous than apples and raw celery (Mitsuko's cuisine was vegetarian). Her breasts swelled to the size of teacups when she was nursing, then receded. The school doctor's breasts, sometimes visible under a summer shirt, were slightly bigger than Mitsuko's.

The Maguires attended no church. They registered Independent. They belonged to no club. But every year they helped organize the spring block party and the fall park clean-up. Mitsuko made filligree cookies for school bake sales and Keith served on the search committee when the principal retired. When their eldest was in my class, each gave a What-I-Do talk to the sixth grade. At my request they repeated it annually. Wearing a belt stuffed with tools, his mask in his hands, Keith spoke of welding's origins in the forge. He mentioned weapons, tools, automobiles. He told us of the smartness of the wind, the sway of the scaffolding, the friendly heft of the torch. “An arc flames and then burns blue,” he said. “Steel bar fuses to steel bar.” Mitsuko in her appearances before the class also began with history. She described Babbage's first calculating machine, whose innards nervously clacked. She recapitulated the invention of the Hollerith code (the punched card she showed the kids seemed as venerable as papyrus); the
cathode tube; the microchip. Then she too turned personal. “My task is to achieve intimacy with the computer,” she said. “To follow the twists of its thought; to help it become all it can.” When leaving she turned at the doorway and gave us the hint of a bow.

Many townspeople knew the Maguires. How could they not, with the boys going to school and making friends and playing sports? Their household had the usual needs—shots and checkups, medications, vegetables, hardware. The kids bought magazines and notebooks at Dunton's Tobacco. Every November Keith and his sons walked smiling into Roberta's Linens and bought a new Belgian handkerchief for Mitsuko's birthday. During the following year's special occasions, its lace would foam from the pocket of the white silk blouse.

But none of us knew them well. They didn't become anyone's intimates. And when they vanished, they vanished in a wink. One day we heard that the youngest was leaving to become a doctor; the next day, or so it seemed, the parents had decamped.

I had seen Mitsuko the previous week. She was buying avocados at the greengrocer. She told me that she mixed them with cold milk and chocolate in the blender. “The drink is pale green, like a dragonfly,” she said. “Very refreshing.”

Yes, the youngest was off to Medical School. The middle son was teaching carpentry in Oregon. The oldest, a journalist in Minnesota, was married and the father of twin girls.

So she had granddaughters. She was close to fifty, but she still could have passed for a teenager. You had to peer closely, under the pretext of examining pineapples together, to see a faint crosshatching under the eyes. But there was no gray in the cropped hair, and the body in jeans and tee was that of a stripling.

She chose a final avocado. “I am glad to have run into you,” she said with her usual courtesy. Even later I could not call this remark valedictory. The Maguires were always glad to run into any of us. They were probably glad to see our backs, too.

“You are a maiden lady,” the school doctor reminded me some months later. We have grown old together; he says what he pleases. “Marriage is a private mystery. I'm told that parents feel vacant when their children have flown.”

“Most couples just stay here and crumble together.”

“Who knows?” he shrugged. “I'm a maiden lady myself.”

The few people who saw Keith and Mitsuko waiting for the trolley that September morning assumed they were going off on a camping trip. Certainly they were properly outfitted, each wearing a hiker's back frame fitted with a sleeping bag and a knapsack.

The most popular theory is that they have settled in some other part of the country. There they work—Keith with steel and flame, Mitsuko with the electronic will-o'-the-wisp; there they drink avocado shakes and read paperbacks.

Some fanciful townspeople whisper a different opinion: that when the Maguires shook our dust from their hiking boots they shed their years, too. They have indeed started again elsewhere; but rejuvenated, restored. Mitsuko's little breasts are already swelling in preparation for the expected baby.

I reject both theories. Maiden lady that I am, I believe solitude to be not only the unavoidable human condition but also the sensible human preference. Keith and Mitsuko took the trolley together, yes. But I think that downtown they enacted an affectionate though rather formal parting in some public place—the bus depot, probably. Keith then strode off.

Mitsuko waited for her bus. When it came she boarded it deftly despite the aluminum and canvas equipment on her back. The sneakers—bright red, this time, as if they had ripened—swung like cherries from the frame.

W
henever the Foxes give a party, people eagerly come. In the Foxes' big, messy house people feel good. Marty Fox has a born-in-California ease; and Judy's uncorrected Brooklyn accent, here in New England, seems as warm as pastrami. They are attentive hosts, just as they are attentive parents. (Their three sons nevertheless cause them some worry.)

“People with gratifying children,” Marlene Winokaur observes on the Friday night of the Foxes' party, “arouse the wrath of their friends.”

“Mmm,” says her husband, Paul, radiologist and colleague of Marty Fox. And then: “Really?”

In another part of town Frances Masmanian, Judy Fox's coworker at the Social Service Clinic, is writing down their destination for the sitter.

“Let me ask you a question,” says Bill Masmanian. “Why are the Foxes putting themselves to so much trouble?”

“Is it trouble?”

“I was hoping to stay home tonight and grade exams.”

“You'll do that tomorrow,” says Frances, turning on him the mild, slightly walleyed stare that he loves, or, at least, remembers having loved. So he does not remind her that tomorrow they are going to a Little League game and tomorrow night to a faculty cocktail party and Sunday to a neighborhood meeting. Life in the town of Godolphin, Massachusetts, is chockablock with activity, Bill thinks ungratefully; but how could it be otherwise in a place where so many interesting people choose to live?

 

Meanwhile, the Foxes were searching their kitchen for stray coffee cups. That this was not an ordinary party—that it was more than social in purpose—had not altered their simple preparations. Marty had bought the wine on his way home from the hospital. He had set up a table for it in the den, where their two older sons would preside. Judy, who didn't work Friday afternoons anyway, had taken on a number of tasks: picking up the platter of turkey and cheese from the deli, spreading a Guatemalan cloth on the big oak table, setting out plates and silverware on the buffet, supplying a McDonald's supper for the boys, and making sure that the bathrooms looked respectable, or at least not repulsive. Today Judy had had the further assignment of pushing the living room chairs against the wall and then setting up twenty-five rented bridge chairs in close rows. All of this work she did unresentfully, her mind busy with one of her clients, a woman whose depression Judy would have liked to relieve. But the woman, mourning a wasted youth, was as yet inaccessible . . . Judy had unfolded chairs and swabbed toilets and answered the telephone and thought about her client; and she
would have accomplished everything well ahead of time had she not encountered such terrible traffic on her way to and from the airport.