The New Yorker Stories Part 44

Eyes wide, Ned turned first to me, then to Richard, playing to a full house. "While he was ranting, I had time to think. I said, 'Wait a minute, Sander. You mean they didn't get anything? You mean I left my wallet at the hotel?' " Ned sank into his chair. "Can you believe it? I'd actually left my f.u.c.kin' wallet in our room, so all I had to do was pretend to Sander that I'd gotten mugged-sons of b.i.t.c.hes made me strip and ran off with my pants. Then I told him that the guy at the hotel gave me the kimono to put on." He clicked his fingers. "That's what they're called: 'kimonos.' "

"He didn't ask why a kimono?" Richard said wearily. He ran his hand over the stubble of his beard. His feet were tucked beside him on the sofa.

"Sure. And I tell him it's because there's a j.a.panese restaurant in the hotel, and if you want to wear kimonos and sit on the floor j.a.panese style, they let you. And the bellboy thought they'd never miss a kimono."

"He believed you?" Richard said.

"Sander? He grew up in L.A. and spent the rest of his life in New York. He knew you had to believe everything. He drives me back to the hotel saying how great it is that the sc.u.m that jumped me didn't get any money. The sun's coming up, and we're riding along in the rental car, and he's holding my hand." Ned locked his thumbs together. "Sander and I are like that that again." again."

In the silence, the room seemed to shrink around us. Sander died in 1985.

"I'm starting to feel cold," Richard said. "It comes up my body like somebody's rubbing ice up my spine."

I got up and sat beside him, half hugging him, half ma.s.saging his back.

"There's that d.a.m.n baby again," Richard said. "If that's their first baby, I'll bet they never have another one."

Ned and I exchanged looks. The only sound, except for an intermittent hiss of steam from the radiator, was the humming of the refrigerator.

"What happened to your paws, Rac?" Richard said to me.

I looked at my hands, thumbs pressing into the muscles below his shoulders. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I'd forgotten to put on the lotion and the gloves before going to sleep. I was also reflexively doing something I'd trained myself not to do years ago. My insurance contract said I couldn't use my hands that way: no cutting with a knife, no washing dishes, no making the bed, no polishing the furniture. But I kept pressing my thumbs in Richard's back, rubbing them back and forth. Even after Ned dropped the heavy blanket over Richard's trembling shoulders, I kept pressing some resistance to his hopeless dilemma deep into the bony ladder of Richard's spine.

"It's crazy to hate a baby for crying," Richard said, "but I really hate that baby."

Ned spread a blanket over Richard's lap, then tucked it around his legs. He sat on the floor and bent one arm around Richard's blanketed shins. "Richard," he said quietly, "there's no baby. We've gone through the building floor by floor, to humor you. That noise you get in your ears when your blood pressure starts to drop must sound to you like a baby crying."

"Okay," Richard said, shivering harder. "There's no baby. Thank you for telling me. You promised you'd always tell me the truth."

Ned looked up. "Truth? From the guy who just told the Puerto Rico story?"

"Or maybe you're hearing something in the pipes, Richard," I said. "Sometimes the radiators make noise."

Richard nodded hard, in agreement. But he didn't quite hear me. That was what Ned and I had found out about people who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.

Two days later, Richard was admitted to the hospital with a high fever, and went into a coma from which he never awoke. His brother flew to Boston that night, to be with him. His G.o.dson, Jerry, came, too, getting there in time to go with us in the cab. The experimental treatment hadn't worked. Of course, we still had no way of knowing-we'll never know-whether Richard had been given the polysyllabic medicine we'd come to call "the real stuff," or whether he'd been part of the control group. We didn't know whether the priest from Hartford was getting the real stuff, either, though it was rumored among us that his flushed face was a good sign. And what about the young veterinarian who always had something optimistic to say when we ran into each other in the transfusion room? Like Clark Kent, with his secret "S" beneath his shirt, the vet wore a T-shirt with a photograph reproduced on the front, a snapshot of him hugging his Border collie on the day the dog took a blue ribbon. He told me he wore it every Friday for good luck, as he sat in oncology getting the I.V. drip that sometimes gave him the strength to go to a restaurant with a friend that night.

Ned and I, exhausted from another all-nighter, took the presence of Richard's brother and G.o.dson as an excuse to leave the hospital and go get a cup of coffee. I felt light-headed, though, and asked Ned to wait for me in the lobby while I went to the bathroom. I thought some cold water on my face might revive me.

There were two teenage girls in the bathroom. As they talked, it turned out they were sisters and had just visited their mother, who was in the oncology ward down the hall. Their boyfriends were coming to pick them up, and there was a sense of excitement in the air as one sister teased her hair into a sort of plume, and the other took off her torn stockings and threw them away, then rolled her knee-length skirt up to make it a micromini. "Come on, Mare," her sister, standing at the mirror, said, though she was taking her time fixing her own hair. Mare reached into her cosmetic bag and took out a little box. She opened it and began to quickly streak a brush over the rectangle of color inside. Then, to my amazement, she began to swirl the brush over both knees, to make them blush. As I washed and dried my face, a fog of hair spray filtered down. The girl at the mirror fanned the air, put the hair spray back in her purse, then picked up a tube of lipstick, opened it, and parted her lips. As Mare straightened up after one last swipe at her knees, she knocked her sister's arm, so that the lipstick shot slightly above her top lip.

"Jesus! You feeb!" the girl said shrilly. "Look what you made me do do."

"Meet you at the car," her sister said, grabbing the lipstick and tossing it into her makeup bag. She dropped the bag in her purse and almost skipped out, calling back, "Soap and water's good for that!"

"What a b.i.t.c.h," I said, more to myself than to the girl who remained.

"Our mother's dying, and she doesn't care," the girl said. Tears began to well up in her eyes.

"Let me help you get it off," I said, feeling more light-headed than I had when I'd come in. I felt as if I were sleepwalking.

The girl faced me, mascara smudged in half-moons beneath her eyes, her nose bright red, one side of her lip more pointed than the other. From the look in her eyes, I was just a person who happened to be in the room. The way I had happened to be in the room in New York the day Richard came out of the bathroom, one shirtsleeve rolled up, frowning, saying, "What do you think this rash is on my arm?"

"I'm all right," the girl said, wiping her eyes. "It's not your problem."

"I'd say she does care," I said. "People get very anxious in hospitals. I came in to throw some water on my face because I was feeling a little faint."

"Do you feel better now?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"We're not the ones who are dying," she said.

It was a disembodied voice that came from some faraway, perplexing place, and it disturbed me so deeply that I needed to hold her for a moment-which I did, tapping my forehead lightly against hers and slipping my fingers through hers to give her a squeeze before I walked out the door.

Ned had gone outside and was leaning against a lamppost. He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette to the right, asking silently if I wanted to go to the coffee shop down the block. I nodded, and we fell into step.

"I don't think this is a walk we're going to be taking too many more times," he said. "The doctor stopped to talk, on his way out. He's run out of anything optimistic to say. He also took a cigarette out of my fingers and crushed it under his heel, told me I shouldn't smoke. I'm not crazy about doctors, but there's still something about that one that I like. Hard to imagine I'd ever warm up to a guy with ta.s.sels on his shoes."

It was freezing cold. At the coffee shop, hot air from the electric heater over the door smacked us in the face as we headed for our familiar seats at the counter. Just the fact that it wasn't the hospital made it somehow pleasant, though it was only a block and a half away. Some of the doctors and nurses went there, and of course people like us-patients' friends and relatives. Ned nodded when the waitress asked if we both wanted coffee.

"Winter in Boston," Ned said. "Never knew there was anything worse than winter where I grew up, but I think this is worse."

"Where did you grow up?"

"Kearney, Nebraska. Right down Route Eighty, about halfway between Lincoln and the Wyoming border."

"What was it like, growing up in Nebraska?"

"I screwed boys," he said.

It was either the first thing that popped into his head, or he was trying to make me laugh.

"You know what the first thing f.a.gs always ask each other is, don't you?" he said.

I shook my head no, braced for a joke.

"It's gotten so the second thing is 'Have you been tested?' But the first thing is still always 'When did you know?' "

"Okay," I said. "Second question."

"No," he said, looking straight at me. "It can't happen to me."

"Be serious," I said. "That's not a serious answer."

He cupped his hand over mine. "How the h.e.l.l do you think I got out of Kearney, Nebraska?" he said. "Yeah, I had a football scholarship, but I had to hitchhike to California-never been to another state but Wyoming-hitched with whatever I had in a laundry bag. And if a truck driver put a hand on my knee, you don't think I knew that was a small price to pay for a ride? Because luck was with me. I always knew that. Just the way luck shaped those pretty hands of yours. Luck's always been with me, and luck's with you. It's as good as anything else we have to hang on to."

He lifted his hand from mine, and yes, there it was: the perfect hand, with smooth skin, tapered fingers, and nails curved and shining under the gloss of a French manicure. There was a small, dark smudge across one knuckle. I licked the middle finger of the other hand to see if I could gently rub it away, that smudge of mascara that must have pa.s.sed from the hand of the girl in the bathroom to my hand when our fingers interwove as we awkwardly embraced. The girl I had been watching, all the time Ned and I sat talking. She was there in the coffee shop with us-I'd seen them come in, the two sisters and their boyfriends-her hair neatly combed, her eyes sparkling, her makeup perfectly stroked on. Though her sister tried to get their attention, both boys hung on her every word.

Zalla

Recently, I had reason to think about Thomas Kurbell-Little Thomas, as the family always called him. Little Thomas fooled the older members of the family for a while because he was so polite as a child-almost obsequious-and because his father, Thomas Sr., had been a genuinely nice man. Ours was an urban family, based in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and Little Thomas's father's death reinforced every bit of paranoia everyone had about life in the country. No matter that he actually died of complications of pneumonia, which he had contracted in the hospital as he was lying in traction, recovering from a broken leg, shattered ankle, and patched-together pelvis, suffered after falling from a hay wagon. Legend had it that he'd died instantly from the fall, and this was always invoked as a cautionary warning to any youngster in the family who took an interest in skiing or sailing or even hiking. For the sake of storytelling, Thomas Sr.'s death often dovetailed into the long-ago death of his cousin Pete, who had been struck by lightning when he got out to investigate a backup on the Brooklyn Bridge: wham! With Thomas still sliding out of the hay wagon, there was a sudden bolt of electricity, and Pete, moved to New York City, was struck dead, lit up for such a quick second it seemed somebody was just taking a picture with a flash. I suppose it's true in many families that some things get to be lumped together for effect, and others to obscure some issue. I was thirty years old before I got the chronology of the two deaths correct. It's just the way people in our family tell stories: it wasn't done to mislead Little Thomas.

Little Thomas was a sneaky child. He'd sneak around for no good reason, padding through the house in his socks, sometimes scaring his mother and his sister Lilly when they turned a corner and found him standing there like a statue. His mother always said Little Thomas had no radar. No instinct for avoiding people and things. His going around in his socks made things worse, because if you were frightened and yelped he would become frightened, too, and burst into tears or topple something from a table in his fright. But he wouldn't wear shoes in the house-to get even with his mother, he said, for making him wear boots to school on days when it wasn't even raining, only damp-and no amount of pleading or punishment could make him change his ways. As he got older, he deliberately frightened his sister from time to time, because he loved to see her jump, but most of the scares with his mother were unintentional, he later maintained.

Little Thomas's mother was named Etta Sue. She was five years older than my mother, Alice Dawn Rose. There was a brother in between, who had died of rheumatic fever. Though Etta Sue married a man named Thomas Kurbell, she maintained that Little Thomas was named not for him but for her dead brother, Thomas Wyatt. Little Thomas's middle name was Nathaniel. "She put that name in because she wanted to include everybody, even the milkman," Thomas Sr. used to say. Apparently, the milkman was a subject of fond kidding between them: she really did like the milkman, and he became a family friend. He'd push open the back door, come in, and wipe off the milk bottles before putting them on the top shelf of the refrigerator, and then pour himself some tea and sit and talk to whoever happened to be in the kitchen-Thomas Sr.; my mother, on a visit; me. He was Nat the Milkman. One time when I wasn't there, Little Thomas jumped out of the broom closet and startled Nat the Milkman, and Nat grabbed him and flipped him over, holding him upside down by his ankles for a good long while. This was the reason Little Thomas hated him.

As well as slipping around in his stocking feet, Little Thomas was quiet and rarely could be coaxed into a conversation. He was quiet and troubled-that much the family would finally allow, though they refused to admit that there were any real real problems. It was said he was troubled because he'd had to wear gla.s.ses as a child. Or because his father was so personable that he'd presented his son with a hard act to follow. Later, Little Thomas's asthma was blamed, and then his guilt over the fact that Punkin Puppy, the family's russet-colored mutt, had to be given away because of Little Thomas's allergies. Growing up, I heard these things over and over. The reasons were like a mantra, or like the stages of grief being explained-the steps from denial to acceptance. By the time he was a teenager, it was no longer a question just of his being troubled but of his actively troubling others. Garden hoses were turned on in the neighbors' gardens late at night, washing their flowers away in great landslides of mud; brown bags filled with dog excrement were set burning on some neighbor's porch, so whoever opened the door would be ankle deep in dog s.h.i.t when he stomped out the flames. Things got worse, and then Little Thomas was sent away to a special school. problems. It was said he was troubled because he'd had to wear gla.s.ses as a child. Or because his father was so personable that he'd presented his son with a hard act to follow. Later, Little Thomas's asthma was blamed, and then his guilt over the fact that Punkin Puppy, the family's russet-colored mutt, had to be given away because of Little Thomas's allergies. Growing up, I heard these things over and over. The reasons were like a mantra, or like the stages of grief being explained-the steps from denial to acceptance. By the time he was a teenager, it was no longer a question just of his being troubled but of his actively troubling others. Garden hoses were turned on in the neighbors' gardens late at night, washing their flowers away in great landslides of mud; brown bags filled with dog excrement were set burning on some neighbor's porch, so whoever opened the door would be ankle deep in dog s.h.i.t when he stomped out the flames. Things got worse, and then Little Thomas was sent away to a special school.

Yesterday I visited my mother in her new apartment in Alexandria. She was afraid of crime in downtown Washington and thought she should relocate. Her nurse-companion came with her, a kindhearted woman named Zalla, who attended the school of nursing at American University two nights a week and every summer. When she got her nursing degree, Zalla intended to return to her home, Belize, where she was going to work in a hospital. The hospital was still under construction. Building had to be stopped when the architect was accused of embezzling; then the hurricane struck. But Zalla had faith that the hospital would be completed, that she would eventually graduate from nursing school, and that-though this went unsaid-she would not be with my mother forever. My mother has emphysema and diabetes, and needs someone with her. Zalla cooks and washes and does any number of things no one expects her to do, and during the day she's never off her feet. At night she watches James Bond movies over and over on my mother's VCR. My mother sits in the TV room with her, rereading d.i.c.kens. She says the James Bond movies provide wonderful soundtracks for the stories: Carly Simon singing "n.o.body Does It Better" in The Spy Who Loved Me The Spy Who Loved Me as my mother's reading about Mr. Pickwick. as my mother's reading about Mr. Pickwick.

Anyway, what happened was in no way Zalla's fault, but she was tortured by guilt. Days after the incident I'm going to tell about, which I heard of when I visited, Zalla was still upset.

That Monday, my mother had checked into Sibley Hospital for a day of tests. In the afternoon, there was a knock on the door and Zalla looked out of the peephole and saw Little Thomas. She'd met him several times through the years, so of course she let him in. He said he was there to return some dishes my mother had let him borrow when he was setting up housekeeping. He also wanted to say goodbye, because he was moving out of the apartment he'd been sharing with other people in Landover, Maryland, and was headed down to the Florida Keys to tend bar. Then he worked the conversation around to asking Zalla for a loan: fifty dollars, which he'd send back as soon as he got to Key West and opened a bank account and deposited some checks. She had thirty-some dollars and gave him everything she had, minus the bus fare she needed to get to Sibley Hospital that evening. He asked for a sheet of paper so he could write a goodbye note to my mother, and Zalla found him a notepad. He sat at the kitchen table, writing. It didn't occur to her to stand over him. She unpacked the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher, and then tidied up in the TV room. He wrote and wrote. He was writing my mother a nasty note, telling her that through therapy he had come to realize that the family perpetuated harmful myths, and that no one had ever chosen to "come clean" about his father's death, because his father had actually died of pneumonia, not from the fall off a wagon. He told her how horrifying it had been to see his father slipping away in the hospital, and he blamed her and Etta Sue for always discussing Cousin Pete's last moments when they talked about his father's death. "Fact is, lightning impressed you more than simple pneumonia," he wrote. He also thought they should have talked more to him about his father's accomplishments. He thought they should have told about his father's love for him. He made no mention of his sister Lilly, from whom he was estranged. He folded the note and put it under the saltshaker, and then he mixed himself a cup of instant cocoa and left, taking the mug he was drinking from.

Zalla was nervous. She thought he might have been drinking, though his breath didn't smell of alcohol. He'd gone to the bathroom while he was there, so Zalla went into the bathroom to make sure everything was all right. It was, but she still had an uneasy feeling. It wasn't until that evening, when she left for the hospital to escort my mother home, that she saw the black felt-pen graffiti on the wall in the downstairs hallway: stick people with corkscrew hair like Martians' antennae, and a quickly scrawled SCREW YOU BLOWING THIS JOINT SCREW YOU BLOWING THIS JOINT. She was horrified, and at first she thought she'd keep quiet about Little Thomas's visit-just pretend it was all a mystery-but she knew that was wrong and she'd have to make a full disclosure.

By the time I heard the story, Zalla and my mother had agreed he was probably drunk-or, worse, on drugs-and that he was a coward to pretend to confront my mother, when all he did was write a note. He also hadn't had the nerve to face his own mother, who was still living on Twentieth Street, and tell her that he was moving away. Zalla kept quiet about the thirty dollars, but the next morning she confessed that, too. In with the dishes he'd brought back were several strange, gold-bordered plates my mother had not given him; neither she nor Zalla knew exactly what to make of that. Both feared, irrationally, that someone would now come for the plates. They seemed to understand, though, that Little Thomas was gone and wouldn't be heard from for some time, if ever. Zalla remained afraid of him, in the abstract. She said he'd crept around like a burglar. That gave my mother and me a good laugh, because he'd been sneaky all his life. Good that he spared Mother's bathroom wall, I joked: bad enough that they'd had to call the management to apologize and to arrange to have the hallway repainted.

While Zalla watched Goldfinger Goldfinger, my mother led me into her bedroom and told me one of the Dark Secrets she'd never before revealed. It turned out she had always feared Little Thomas would do something really awful, because he had done something very bad as a child. My mother had been furious, but she had never told on him, because she was embarra.s.sed at her own fury, and also because she felt that Little Thomas's demons tortured him enough.

She asked whether I remembered the silhouettes. I did remember them, vaguely, though I had to be reminded that they'd once hung on a satin ribbon in Etta Sue's living room. I remembered them from later on, when they'd hung below the light above the bed in my mother's bedroom, attached to the same ribbon. There had also been one of Lilly, as a baby, and another of Punkin Puppy, in separate frames. The three framed silhouettes on the ribbon had been of Thomas Sr., Etta Sue, and the man who, Etta Sue told my mother, had cut the silhouettes. Etta Sue explained this somewhat humorous fact by saying that the silhouette cutter was going to throw his self-portrait away-he probably did it the way secretaries practice their typing, or something-and that she had rescued it from the trash. Little Thomas had destroyed his his silhouette before it got into the frame, and though Etta Sue always meant to have another one cut, Little Thomas wouldn't sit still a second time. My mother shook her head. She said that she supposed the silhouette cutter's self-portrait was sort of like Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's including himself in his own films, though that wasn't a good comparison, because Etta Sue had hung it up, not the man himself. silhouette before it got into the frame, and though Etta Sue always meant to have another one cut, Little Thomas wouldn't sit still a second time. My mother shook her head. She said that she supposed the silhouette cutter's self-portrait was sort of like Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's including himself in his own films, though that wasn't a good comparison, because Etta Sue had hung it up, not the man himself.

When Etta Sue was forced to move out of her house and into the Twentieth Street apartment after Thomas Sr.'s death, she had to discard many things. The furniture my mother could understand, but parting with so many personal possessions had seemed to her a mistake. When the ribbon with the framed silhouettes went into the trash, my mother grabbed it out and said she would keep it for Etta Sue until she felt better. And Etta Sue had given her the strangest look. First shocked, then sad, my mother thought. And in all the years my mother had the silhouettes hung in her bedroom, Etta Sue never mentioned them, although she did eventually ask for Thomas Sr.'s shaving mug back, and for the framed picture of herself and her husband taken at a Chinese restaurant on their first anniversary.

But the point of the story, my mother said, was this: One weekend a few months after Thomas Sr.'s death, she was taking care of Little Thomas and Lilly, and Little Thomas had gone into the bedroom while all the rest of us were in the backyard and he had taken the silhouettes out of the frames and cut the noses off. Then he slipped them all back into their frames and rehung them. It was days before my mother noticed-everyone with his or her nose chopped off, plus Punkin Puppy, earless.

She hurried right over to Little Thomas's school and waited for him to get out. He walked home, but that day he didn't go anywhere before she confronted him. By her own account, she grabbed the tip of his nose and squeezed it, asking him how he thought he'd like being without his nose. Then she grabbed his ears and asked him if he thought he might like to spend the rest of his life not hearing, too. She crouched and made him look her in the eye and tell her why he'd done it. It was amazing that someone didn't notice her making such a scene and come over, she said. Little Thomas gasped when she pulled him around and shook him by his shoulders, but he never cried.

He had done it, he told her, because the faces in the frames were miniature black ghosts, there to haunt people. He disfigured them because they were ghost monsters with special powers of sneaking inside people. If he got rid of the black ghosts, cut them up a little, they would become white ghosts, with no special power.

My mother was so horrified she couldn't stand. He had given a quite specific, terribly upsetting answer, and she had no idea what response to make, because if he really thought those things he was mad. That would make it the first incidence of real madness in the family. She was 90 percent sure he was telling her what he really believed, but she also thought there was some small chance he might be having her on. She stayed there quite a while, weak in the knees, staring into his face, looking for more information.

"You think I'd care if I didn't have a nose?" he said. "I wouldn't care if I didn't have a nose or a mouth or eyes. I wish the sperm had never gone into the egg. I wouldn't mind if there was no me, and you wouldn't either." wouldn't care if I didn't have a nose or a mouth or eyes. I wish the sperm had never gone into the egg. I wouldn't mind if there was no me, and you wouldn't either."

My mother remembered being surprised that he knew about s.e.x-that he knew such words as "sperm" and "egg." She didn't remember what she said to him next, but it had something to do with how she understood that he was very upset that his father was dead and had disappeared, but that he mustn't confuse that with thinking his father didn't love him.

Little Thomas broke away from her. "You stupid fool," he said. She remembered that distinctly: "You stupid fool."

After Little Thomas's father's death, my mother now suddenly reminded me, someone courted Etta Sue for a bit, but eventually faded away. In retrospect, my mother said, she thought it might quite possibly have been ("Now, don't laugh," she said) the milkman. Because, come to think of it, why else-unless she was a little embarra.s.sed-would Etta Sue refuse to let anyone in the family know whom she was seeing? Also, Nat the Milkman had been a Sunday painter, so perhaps he had also cut silhouettes.

"Say nothing of this to Zalla," my mother said. It was something she had begun to say increasingly, as an afterthought, in recent years-or perhaps as an end to each of her stories, not as an afterthought, really.

I kissed her cheek and gave her hand a squeeze, turning off her bedside lamp with my free hand. It was early evening and dark. We were in autumn, the season when Thomas Sr. had slipped from high atop the mounded hay-slipped in slow motion, compared to the way his cousin Pete had been struck by lightning.

That was the past. I imagined the future: the graffiti figures that had already disappeared in the downstairs hallway, whited out by a paint roller. Then I thought about the hospital in Belize, to which for all intents and purposes that paint roller could travel like a comet, to whiten the drywall that had at long last been installed in the corridors of the new hospital. Zalla would be standing there, her starched white nurse's uniform contrasting with her dark skin, and in a blink my mother would be dead, quite unexpectedly-gone from her white-sheeted bed to the darkness, as Zalla paused in her busy day to remember us, a nice American family.

The Women of This World

The dinner was going to be good. Dale had pureed leeks and salsify to add to the pumpkin in the food processor-a tablespoon or so of sweet vermouth might give it a little zing-and as baby-girl pink streaked through the gray-blue sky over the field, she dropped a CD into the player and listened matter-of-factly to Lou Reed singing matter-of-factly, "I'm just a gift to the women of this world."

By now her husband, Nelson, would be on his way back from Logan, bringing his stepfather, Jerome, and Jerome's girlfriend, Brenda-who had taken the shuttle from New York, after much debate about plane versus train versus driving-for the annual (did three years in a row make something annual?) pre-Thanksgiving dinner. They could have come on Thanksgiving, but Didi, Jerome's ex (and Nelson's mother), was coming that day, and there was no love lost between them. Brenda didn't like big gatherings, anyway. Brenda was much younger than Jerome. She used to nap half the afternoon-because she was shy, Jerome said-but lately her occupation had become glamorous and she had quit teaching gym at the middle school to work as a personal trainer, and suddenly she was communicative, energized, radiant-if that wasn't a cliche for women in love.

Dale turned on the food processor and felt relieved as the ingredients liquified. It wasn't that the food processor hadn't always worked-when she placed the blade in the bottom correctly, that is-but that she feared it wouldn't work. She always ran through a scenario in which she'd have to scoop everything out and dump it in the old Waring blender that had come with the rented house in Maine and that didn't always work. With blenders so cheap, she amazed herself by not simply buying a new one.

Nelson was forever indebted to Jerome for appearing on the scene when he was five years old, and staying until he was sixteen. Jerome had seen to it that Nelson was spared going to Groton, and had taught him to play every known sport-at least every ordinary sport. But would Nelson have wanted to learn, say, archery?

Nelson wanted to learn everything, though he didn't want to do everything. He was happy to have quit teaching and wanted to do very little. He liked to know about things, though. That way, he could talk about them. Her cruel nickname for him was No-Firsthand-Knowledge Nelson. It got tedious sometimes: people writing down the names of books from which Nelson had gotten his often esoteric information. People calling after the party was over, having looked up some strange a.s.sertion of Nelson's in their kid's Encyclopedia Britannica Encyclopedia Britannica and discovered that he was essentially right, but not entirely. They often left these quibbles and refutations on the answering machine: "d.i.c.k here. Listen, you weren't exactly right about Mercury. It's because Hermes means 'mediator' in Greek, so there and discovered that he was essentially right, but not entirely. They often left these quibbles and refutations on the answering machine: "d.i.c.k here. Listen, you weren't exactly right about Mercury. It's because Hermes means 'mediator' in Greek, so there is is an element of logic to his taking the souls of the dead to the underworld"; "Nelson? This is Pauline. Listen, Rushdie did write the introduction to that Glen Baxter book. I can bring it next time and show you. He really does write introductions all the time. Well, thanks to you both for a great evening. My sister really appreciated Dale's copying that recipe for her-though no one can make b.u.t.terflied lamb like Dale, I told her. Anyway. Okay. Bye. Thanks again." an element of logic to his taking the souls of the dead to the underworld"; "Nelson? This is Pauline. Listen, Rushdie did write the introduction to that Glen Baxter book. I can bring it next time and show you. He really does write introductions all the time. Well, thanks to you both for a great evening. My sister really appreciated Dale's copying that recipe for her-though no one can make b.u.t.terflied lamb like Dale, I told her. Anyway. Okay. Bye. Thanks again."

Jerome and Brenda would be twenty or thirty minutes away, a.s.suming the plane landed on time, which you could never a.s.sume if you knew anything about Logan. Still: Dale could manage a quick shower, if not a bath, and she should probably change into a dress because it seemed a little oblivious to have people over when you were wearing sweats, even if you did have a cashmere sweater pulled over them. Maybe a bra under the sweater. A pair of corduroys, instead of the supercomfortable sweats. And shoes... definitely some sort of shoes.

Nelson called from the cell phone. "Need anything?" he said. She could hear Terry Gross's well-modulated, entirely reasonable voice on the radio. Only Nelson and Terry and her guest were talking in the car: the pa.s.sengers were silent, in case Dale had forgotten some necessary ingredient. Yes, pink peppercorns. Try finding them on 95 North. And, of course, they weren't really peppercorns; they were only called peppercorns because they looked like black peppercorns. Or: purple oregano. An entirely different flavor from green.

"Not a thing," she said. She had changed into black corduroy pants and a white shirt. Keeping it clean would preoccupy her, give her some way to stay a little detached from everyone. She was shy, too. Though she wore bad-girl black boots.

"Brenda wants to see the Wedding Cake House. I thought we'd swing by. Would that mess up your timing?"

"I didn't cook anything," Dale said.

Silence, then. Unkind of her, to set his mind scrambling for alternatives.

"Kidding," she said.

She had toured the Wedding Cake House soon after they moved to the area. It was in Kennebunkport, a huge yellow-and-white creation, with Gothic spires like pointed phalluses. Legend had it that it had been built by a sea captain for his bride, to remind her of their wedding night when he left for sea.

"We'll be back around four."

Someone else was talking to Terry Gross in a deep, earnest voice.

"See you soon," Nelson said. "Hon?" he said.

"Bye," Dale said. She picked up two bottles of red wine from the wine rack near the phone. A little too close to the heat grate, so no wine was kept on the last four shelves. Not a problem in summer, but a minor inconvenience come cold weather. She remembered that Brenda had been delighted with a Fume Blanc she'd served last time, and bought the same bottle for her again. Jerome, of course, because of his years in Paris, would have the Saint-emilion. Nelson had taken to sipping Jameson's lately. Still, she'd chilled several bottles of white, because he was unpredictable. On the top rack lay the bottle of Opus One an appreciative student from the photography workshop she'd taught had given her. Two nights later, she planned to serve it to the doctor who had diagnosed both her hypoglycemia and her Meniere's disease, which meant, ironically, that she could no longer drink. If she did, she'd risk more attacks of the sickening vertigo that had plagued her and gone misdiagnosed for years, leaving her sweaty and trembling and so weak she'd often have to stay in bed the day after the attack. "Like taking acid and getting swept up in a tidal wave," she had said to the otolaryngologist. The woman had looked at her with surprise, as if she'd been gathering strawberries and suddenly come upon a watermelon. "Quite a vivid description," the doctor had said. "My husband is a writer. He sometimes stops me dead in my tracks the same way."

"Is he Brian McCambry?" Dale had asked.

"Yes," the doctor said. Again, she seemed surprised.

Nelson had been the one who speculated that Dr. Anna McCambry might be the wife of Brian McCambry. Dale, herself, had read only a few pieces by McCambry, though Nelson-as she told the doctor-had read her many others.

"I'll pa.s.s on the compliment," the doctor said. "Now back to the real world."