The Beginner's Goodbye (16 page)

She heaved herself up and turned and trudged off, hugging her satchel again. Her orthopedic-looking soles were worn down at the outside edges, and her trouser cuffs were frayed at the bottoms, where she had trod on them. She headed back up Deepdene to Roland Avenue and turned right and I lost sight of her.

You’ll wonder why I didn’t run after her. I didn’t run after her because I was mad at her. Her behavior had been totally unjustified. It had been infuriating.

I kept on standing there long after she had vanished. I no longer had the heart to see to my business at the post office.

Once, we had an author at work who’d written a book of advice for young couples getting married.
Mixed Company
, it was called. He ended up not signing with us—decided we were too expensive and chose an Internet firm instead—but I’ve never forgotten that title.
Mixed Company
. I’ll say. It summed up everything that was wrong with the institution of marriage.

“
Here’s
a question,” I said to Nate. We were seated at our usual table, waiting for Luke to finish dealing with the salad chef’s nervous breakdown. “Have you ever had a visit from anyone who’s died?”

“Not a visit in person,” Nate said, reaching for the bread basket.

“You’ve had some other kind of visit?”

“No, but my uncle Daniel—actually my great-uncle—I came across his picture once in the paper.”

It seemed to me that Nate might have misunderstood my question, but I didn’t interrupt him. He broke open a biscuit. He
said, “They had a photo of these government officials in South America. Argentina? Brazil? They’d been arrested for corruption. And there he was, along with a row of other guys. But in full uniform, this time, with a chestload of medals.”

“Um …”

“It was strange, because I’d definitely seen him in his casket several years before.”

“Really,” I said.

“You couldn’t mistake him, though. Same bent shape to his nose, same hooded look to his eyes. ‘So
that’s
what you’ve been up to!’ I said.”

Then he set his palms on the table and looked around the room. “Any butter in this place?”

I didn’t pursue the subject further.

Gil was the only person whose answer made some sense to me.

And I didn’t even ask him! I’d have had to be insane—right?—to walk up to my contractor and ask if he’d ever communed with the dead.

All I said was—I was looking at the new bookshelves in the sunporch and I said—“I’m just sorry Dorothy can’t see these.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Gil said. He was squatting to adjust the time on the clock radio on the floor. His men had a habit of plugging it in wherever they were working and just letting the numbers flash 9999 all day, which seemed to irk him.

“She always did want more space for her medical journals,” I said.

“Well, these should have made her happy, then,” he told me.
He stood up, with a grunt. “Damn. I’m getting old. Did I ever tell you how my dad liked to come back from the dead and check on my work?”

“Uh, no.”

“He passed away when I was in high school, but after I went into the building trade I’d catch a glimpse of him from time to time. Just here and there, you know? Kind of shambling around a project, looking to see what was what. He’d grab hold of a corner stud and shake it, testing it out. He’d bend down and pick up a nail that had dropped. Couple of times I got to work in the morning and found this little bunch of nails laid in a row on a sill. God, he did hate waste.”

I tried to make out Gil’s expression—was he joking?—but he was tipped back on his heels now, squinting up at the frame above one window.

“Must have been a couple of months or so he did that,” he went on after a moment. “He never
said
anything. Me, neither. I’d just stand there watching him, wondering what he was after. See, the two of us had not been close. No, sir, not at all. Not since I was a little fellow. He’d disapproved of my riotous manner of living. So I wondered what he was after. Anyhow, he moved on by and by, I can’t say exactly when. He just stopped coming around anymore, and eventually I realized. Know what I think now?”

“What,” I said.

Gil turned and looked at me. His expression was perfectly serious. “I think I was his unfinished business,” he said. “He was sorry he’d given up on me while I was sowing my wild oats, and he came back to make sure I’d turned out okay.”

“And so … do you figure he accomplished what he wanted?” I asked. “Was he satisfied, in the end?”

“Was he satisfied. Well. Sure, I guess so.”

Then he wrote something on the Post-it pad he carried in his shirt pocket, and he tore off the top sheet and slapped it onto the window frame.

I was sitting on a bench in the mall while Nandina was in the Apple Store. I hate malls. I wouldn’t have gone with her except her errand was business-related. But the Apple Store was packed, and I started getting restless, so she ordered me out. I sat there all itchy and grumpy and annoyed, but gradually I calmed down. And then I began to understand that Dorothy was sitting next to me.

I didn’t speak. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t speak, either. It seemed we’d agreed to start back at Square One: just
be
together, at first. Just sit. Don’t talk; don’t ruin things. Just sit there side by side and watch the world go by.

Picture two statues in some Egyptian pyramid: seated man, seated woman, facing forward, receptive.

We watched three old ladies in flowered dresses and huge white spongy jogging shoes, taking their exercise walk. We watched a teenage couple strolling by so entwined and interlaced that you had to wonder how they kept from falling on their faces. We watched a mother scolding a little boy about nine or ten years old. “I just want you to know,” she was saying, “that I’m going to have to apologize to your wife every single day of your marriage, for raising such a selfish and inconsiderate person.” We sat a long, long time together, absolutely still.

She didn’t leave, exactly. It’s just that, after a while, I was sitting alone again.

Now that I’d learned to see her, she began showing up more often. It wasn’t so much that she arrived as that I would slowly develop an awareness of her presence. She would be the warmth behind me in the checkout line; she’d be the outline on my right as I was crossing the parking lot.

Think of when you’re threading your way through a crowd with a friend—how, even if you don’t look over, you somehow know your friend is keeping pace with you. That’s what it was like with Dorothy. It’s the best I can describe it.

Let me say right here and now that I wasn’t crazy. Or, to word it a little differently: I was fully aware that seeing a dead person
was
crazy. I didn’t honestly believe that the dead came back to earth (came back from where?), and I never, even as a child, thought there were such things as ghosts.

But put yourself in my place. Call to mind a person you’ve lost that you will miss to the end of your days, and then imagine happening upon that person out in public. You see your long-dead father sauntering ahead with his hands in his pockets. Or you hear your mother behind you calling, “Honey?” Or your little brother who fell through the ice the winter he was six, let’s say, passes by with his smell of menthol cough drops and damp mittens. You wouldn’t question your sanity, because you couldn’t bear to think this wasn’t real. And you certainly wouldn’t demand explanations, or alert anybody nearby, or reach out to touch this person, not even if you’d been feeling that one touch was worth
giving up everything for. You would hold your breath. You would keep as still as possible. You would will your loved one not to go away again.

I discovered that she seemed more comfortable outdoors than indoors. (Which was the opposite of how she had been before she died.) And she stayed away from Nandina’s, and she never came to my office. Understandable in both cases, I guess. She and Nandina had always had an edgy relationship, and I think she’d felt like an outsider at my workplace. Not that anyone there had been unfriendly, but you know that office clubbiness, the cozy gossip from desk to desk and the long-standing jokes and the specialized vocabulary.

Harder to figure, though, was that she didn’t visit our own house—at least, not the interior. Wouldn’t you suppose she’d be interested? The closest she’d come was that time on the sidewalk. But then, one Sunday morning, I caught sight of her in the backyard, beside where the oak tree had been. It was one of the few occasions when she was already in place before I arrived. I glanced out our kitchen window and saw her standing there, looking down at the wood chips, with her hands jammed in the pockets of her doctor coat. I made it to her side in record time, even though I seemed to have left my cane somewhere in the house. I said—slightly short of breath—“You see they removed all the evidence. Ground the stump to bits, even.”

“Mmhmm,” she said.

“They asked if I wanted to replace it with something, a maple tree or something. Maples are very fast-growing, they said, but I said no. We’ve never had enough sun here, I said, and maybe now—”

I stopped. This wasn’t what I wanted to be talking about. During all the months when she had been absent, there were so many things I had saved up to tell her, so many bits of news about the house and the neighborhood and friends and work and family, but now they seemed inconsequential. Puny. Move far enough away from an event and it sort of levels out, so to speak—settles into the general landscape.

I cleared my throat. I said, “Dorothy.”

Silence.

“I can’t stand to think that you’re dead, Dorothy.”

She tore her gaze from the wood chips.

“Dead?” she asked. “Oh, I’m not … Well, maybe you
would
call it dead. Isn’t that odd.”

I waited.

She returned to her study of the wood chips.

“Are you happy?” I asked her. “Do you miss me? Do you miss being alive? Is this hard for you? What are you
going through
, Dorothy?”

She looked at me again. She said, “It’s too late to say what I’m going through.”

“What? Too late?”

“You should have asked me before.”

“Asked you before
what
?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

Then Mimi King called, “Yoo-hoo!” She popped out her back door, waving. She was all dressed up in her church clothes; she even had a hat on. I waved back halfheartedly, hoping this would be enough, but no, on she came, stepping toward us in a wincing manner that meant she must be wearing heels. I said, “Damn,” and turned back to Dorothy. But of course she wasn’t there anymore.

I knew it was because of Mimi. Why, even while Dorothy was alive she’d had a way of ducking out of a Mimi visit. But somehow I couldn’t help taking her disappearance as a reproach to me personally. “You should have asked me before,” she’d told me. “It’s too late,” she’d told me. Then she’d left.

This was all my fault, I couldn’t help feeling. Mimi was tripping through my euonymus bushes now, but I turned away with a weight in my chest and limped back into my house.

7

I
n September, we held a meeting at work to plan for Christmas. Most of us found it difficult to summon up any holiday spirit; temperatures were in the eighties, and the leaves hadn’t started turning yet. But we gathered in Nandina’s office, Irene and Peggy on the love seat, Charles and I in two desk chairs wheeled in from elsewhere. Predictably, Peggy had brought refreshments—homemade cookies and iced mint tea—which Nandina thanked her for although I knew she didn’t see the necessity. (“Sometimes I feel I’m back in grade school,” she had told me once, “and Peggy is Class Mother.”) I accepted a cookie for politeness’ sake, but I let it sit on its napkin on a corner of Nandina’s desk.

Irene was wearing her legendary pencil skirt today. It was so narrow that when she was seated she had to hike it above her knees, revealing her long, willowy legs, which she could cross twice over, so to speak, hooking the toe of her upper shoe behind her lower ankle. Peggy was in her usual ruffles, including a sweater with short frilly sleeves because she always claimed Woolcott
Publishing was excessively air-conditioned. And Nandina held court behind her desk in one of her carriage-trade shirtwaists, with her palms pressed precisely together in front of her.

“For starters,” she said, “I need to know if any of you have come up with any bright ideas for our holiday marketing.”

She looked around the group. There was a silence. Then Charles swallowed a mouthful of cookie and raised his hand a few inches. “This is going to sound a little bit grandiose,” he said, “but I think I’ve found a way to sell people our whole entire
Beginner’s
series, all in one huge package.”

Nandina looked surprised.

“You’ve heard of helicopter parents,” he told the rest of us. “Those modern-day types who telephone their college kids every hour on the hour just to make sure their little darlings are surviving without them. Nothing
Janie
or I plan to do, believe me—assuming we can ever get the girls to leave home in the first place. But anyhow, this is exactly the kind of gift idea that would appeal to a helicopter parent: we would pack the complete series in a set of handsome walnut-veneer boxes with sliding lids. Open the boxes and you’ll find instructions for every conceivable eventuality. Not just the
Beginner’s
setting-up-house titles or the
Beginner’s
raising-a-family titles but
Beginner’s
start-to-finish, cradle-to-grave
living!
And the best part is, the walnut boxes act like modular bookshelf units. Kids would just stack them in their apartments with the tops facing frontwards, slide the lids off, and they’re in business. Time to move? They’d slide the lids back on and throw the boxes into the U-Haul. Not ready yet for the breastfeeding book, or the divorce book? Keep those in a box in the basement till they need them.”

“What:
Beginner’s Retirement
, too?” Irene asked him. “
Beginner’s Funeral Planning
?”