Authors: Paul Harding
“Charlie. I feel like—a few people feel like, that maybe you might need a little bit of—” I put my hands up, like a soldier in a movie surrendering. I realized that Helen was frightened of me. Not because I had been a violent guy or had a bad reputation but because she thought I might be mentally ill, I might be deranged, even capable of harming someone.
“Ah, Helen, you got me; you’re right. It
has
been bad. Real bad, I guess. But I
promise
you, it’s better. Corners have been turned. Susan’s been gone, and it’s been real rough. But I think she’s coming back, and I’m coming back, you know, back
here
. And I know it looks bad—” I felt out of breath, and transparently full of shit. Helen had backed up toward her car. I lowered the volume of my voice, and lowered my hands,
and said more deliberately, “I know it looks bad, Helen, but, please. I just can’t.”
“Okay, Charlie. Well, I hope you enjoy the lasagna,” Helen said. She opened her car door and put one foot in. “We’re around. Call if we can help.”
I tried to smile and look upbeat, and said, “Will do!” and waved, but Helen was already looking over her shoulder, backing out of the driveway.
I
WOKE UP EARLY
one morning on the couch. I woke up every morning on the couch. It felt like the same morning all the time, or like an infinite series of nested dreams from which every day I imagined I awoke but I only ever really arose into another dream. When my mood was not pitch-black, I thought it would be interesting to come up with a Homeric formula for waking up on the couch, an invocation that would ennoble the act, make it more like poetry, less like a monotonous personal apocalypse.
The couch as a ship. The couch as a ship sailing to retrieve the lost daughter. Grieving Charles, Crosby Undaughtered, piloting the couch, sorrowdark and stitch-loosed, through all of Oceandeath, forever, until he spies golden Kate, shining and whole, hanging steadfast from the horn of a low moon
.
It was early spring or, I guess, very late winter—sometime in the second or third week of March. The sun had not yet risen but was about to. Light was beginning to flood earlier up the shores of the mornings and ebb away later in the evenings, accelerating as the planet pulled alongside the sun in equinox. Despite the gelatinous, nervy pain of the previous night’s drugs, I felt the necessity of watching the sun rise, as
if to roll over and tuck my head back into the corner of the couch and sleep through the dawn would be blasphemous even for a decrepit soul like me. There was still a thread, tenuous, strained, barely but still holding, connecting that drugged and bleary consciousness with the mornings when we were fishing in Maine and had to get up early in order not to miss breakfast in the dining hall and my grandfather, who had been up for an hour already, dressing in the cold, washing with cold water from the spring, singing, deliberately provoking me in my warm cocoon of sleep, would finally come to the foot of my bed and sing in his loudest buffo tenor,
Ringy dingy!
, just ahead of the actual ringing of the bronze bell in the dining hall belfry, and bang the bed’s metal foot rail with the poker from the woodstove and yank the blankets from me, leaving me uncovered in the frost-shot morning. His gusto during those freezing sunrises angered and delighted me. I cringed almost in pain at how sleepy and cold I was, hunched up into myself on the bed, the chilled air piercing me. Sometimes I growled at my grandfather, which amused him more and made me even grumpier. But I admired his heartiness, the spirit he seemed to imbibe from the clean cold tonic northern morning. Although I had always been gentler about it, I had done the same thing to Kate on cold school mornings in our home—bright autumn mornings, dark winter mornings, rainy spring mornings—when it was then me who had already been up for an hour, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading the morning paper in the quiet left behind by Susan after she’d gone to work. I’d enter Kate’s room and pull the shades up in the windows and sit on the edge of her bed and pet her back and kiss her head
and singsong,
Oh, Ka-ate; it’s time to get u-up!
She’d turn and groan and screw herself up more tightly in her blankets. I’d tickle her behind one of her ears and she’d unsheathe one of her arms from within the blanket and swat at me and growl for me to leave her alone and
Stop
, Dad. I know, my little Katie-cat, I’d say. You’re all curled up and cozy like a kitten in a den. I know just how you feel. But it’s a new day and life is good and get up and get dressed and we’ll get you some hot grub. This was a gentler version of my grandfather’s stagy, gruff rousings. And I felt such love for my kid in those moments, such a sense of how good it was that she was safe and warm and cared for and healthy, how charming it was that within such larger goodness she was a little cranky, a little feisty. I also felt in those moments how much my grandfather must have loved me when he got me up those mornings for fishing. And I wondered at how when his mother or father had gotten him up when he was a kid it might have been with a love that I and even less Kate hardly could have recognized, because getting up when he had been a kid often enough had been so that no one would actually freeze or starve to death.
I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and sat up and looked for the cigarettes on the coffee table. They were not there. I leaned over and looked under the table. The cigarettes were there and I fished them back with my big toe. I grabbed the pack, but it was empty. This irritated me as much and in the exact same way as before I’d lost Kate and slipped so far into decrepitude. I went to the kitchen to make coffee. There was no coffee. I considered running water through the old grounds, but the water had breached the filter and the
grounds spilled over into the filter well and the coffee would be full of grounds and, Shit, I thought. Shit,
shit
.
Most days, I never would have walked to the convenience store half a mile down the street to get cigarettes and a cup of the lousy coffee they served there. But for some reason, the familiarity of my irritation at being out of smokes and coffee gave me just the boost of spirit necessary to make the trip. There was a speck of reassurance feeling that small but persistent emotion from the terrible Before, even as I felt a corresponding plunge of deeper despair at the thought of Kate’s death being merely now a milestone of my life, because my life continued while hers had been canceled. It was just a matter of grammar on one level, I realized, but it still felt selfish and awful and disloyal.
I meant to splash cold water on my face and rake my wet hands through my hair and go. But the person I saw in the mirror looked ravaged and haunted and underfed. In the instant before I equated myself with the reflection, I thought, Look at how helpless that guy looks. I thought, That’s the look of real grief, and my face changed to a frown as it looked at itself.
I stared at my reflection and said, “You’re a wonder, Charlie Crosby; it’s a wonder you don’t fall apart.”
There was a lozenge of soap in the gritty bottom of the bathtub near the drain. I scraped it up and rubbed it between my palms under the running water in the sink until it lathered and scrubbed my face and rinsed it. My hair was filthy but I felt revulsion at the idea of taking a full shower, something I had not done, I realized, since before the New Year. The idea of immersing myself in hot water and cleaning myself
off made me feel as if I’d come out raw and vulnerable and exposed, like some animal that properly lives up to its eyes in mud for protection. I did strip off my four layers of shirts, though, all at once, and scrub myself with a wet washcloth and swab on some of Kate’s old deodorant because I smelled foul. Almost miraculously, there were a couple of clean old shirts in the bottom drawer of my bureau, articles I’d told Susan not long before Kate died that she could give to charity.
My worries about feeling like an animal coming out of its hiding place were confirmed when I stepped outside and the sunlight felt as if it were scalding my eyes. I wanted to turn and scurry back into the darkness of the house, but my cravings for tobacco and caffeine compelled me.
The convenience store was called Red Orchard. It was one of the last two or three dingy franchises left from what had once been a near monopoly around the North Shore. When I was a kid, there had been a Red Orchard about the same distance from my mother’s house as there was now from my own, and as I walked I thought about being sent there by my mother for a gallon of milk or by our neighbor Dolores—Dolly—for cigarettes when she and my mother got together on summer afternoons to gossip and play a dice game called Yahtzee. Most of the short walk, which couldn’t have been longer than a third of a mile but seemed much longer when I was young, took me past a stretch of Enon Swamp that had remained undeveloped even after World War II, a few dozen acres of lowland that flooded in the spring and gave way to skunk cabbage and smelly mud in the summer. For me the trip was always fraught with perils.
Milk used to come in glass bottles and I dropped a half gallon once on the sidewalk and the bottle shattered and I ran home, terrified. Since the road we lived on was fairly busy, dead animals regularly materialized spraddled out against the curb—a raccoon or gopher or someone’s cat. The bodies were usually intact except for some single, horrifying detail, like a green, vermiform length of intestine trailing out from under a woodchuck, or a tabby with its hind legs twisted backward, or maggots devouring a possum’s eyes. My mother and Dolly told me horror stories, too, in order to frighten me into being conscientious near the road, about the Litchfield boy who jumped into the street after the basketball he’d been dribbling and got run over by one of Keener’s oil trucks, or Kimmy Leach, who pirouetted right into Mrs. Abbot’s Nash Metropolitan, which the widow never drove faster than twenty miles an hour, but that just meant it took Kimmy three agonizing weeks in the hospital to finally die. In between the nerve-racking odysseys to and from, though, there was the store itself, stacked with soda and stuffed with candy and comic books. Comic books were an unthinkable luxury, but when I was sent for milk or bread or Dolly’s cigarettes, which were called Pall Malls and came in red packages and had no filters, and which I bought three packs at a time, Dolly’s daily ration, I was given fifteen cents to buy a candy bar or a bottle of store-brand soda. The soda was a source of great frustration because it came in dozens of flavors, all of different, bright, alluring colors. I wanted so much for the soda to taste like what I imagined the colors should, but it never did, and I ended up nearly in tears so many times over, for example, how lousy the beautiful, almost fluorescent
green soda, called Key Lime Rickey, tasted that my mother finally forbade me to buy any more.
When I reached where the sidewalk met the Red Orchard parking lot, I wanted to turn and flee again. Instead, I walked along the back perimeter of the lot. Half of the low, one-story building was a vacant storefront where over the years a succession of ill-planned businesses had come and gone: a store that sold nothing but soccer equipment, a haberdashery, a frumpy dress shop. When a barbershop had looked for a time as if it might thrive, the landlord had expanded the parking from its original half dozen spaces to twenty, where the men of Enon would park their cars every Saturday morning in order to get their weekly trims. The barbershop closed a year after the new lot had been completed (the owner, an ex-marine, only knew how to give flattops) and the space had been used since by the DPW trucks during snow-plowing breaks and the police for speed traps. I walked toward the back of the lot, along the border between the pavement and the weeds that were matted down and half buried in the road gravel that had melted out of the snowbanks over the winter, resisting the temptation to dive for cover beyond the verge, trying to appear as if I were studying some bit of botany. (I imagined seeing myself from a car pulling into the lot, a scarecrow of a man hunched over the twigs, scratching his chin and nodding expertly to himself about some soggy mirage of his own madness.) As it happened, I did see the pale tips of crocus buds rising from the mulch.
I walked along the side of the store and when I reached the front corner I peered around it. There was only one car in the lot, a big, expensive European sedan, empty and idling,
straddling two spaces. I waited until the car pulled away and walked across to the storefront, deliberately avoiding looking at my reflection in the glass, pushed the swinging door, and went inside.
The interior was much dingier than I remembered. The fluorescent lighting was dim and fluttery and buzzed, the floor worn and scuffed. An old card table with two folding chairs was set up in a corner, facing a television set screwed into brackets set high up on the wall. Sets of random numbers flashed on the television screen. A plastic stand with paper forms and half a dozen stubby pencils had been placed on the center of the table. A couple of bright green lottery scratch tickets had been left in front of one of the seats, next to an empty coffee cup. The racks around the store seemed half empty, and the boxes and cans all looked like they’d been there for years, like they were props used to stage the appearance of a convenience store rather than real goods someone might actually buy. The magazine rack and wire carousel for comic books were empty except for what looked like real estate brochures and menus from pizza places. The store smelled stale and papery, but it was clean. There was no dust anywhere and the worn floor was well swept. I figured the store must do most of its business selling lottery tickets and coffee and newspapers, which were piled up in front of the cashier’s island, and maybe still cigarettes, although no one seemed to smoke anymore. Six coffee carafe pumps were set on a counter perpendicular to the cashier’s island, along with stacks of different-sized cups and lids and bins of sugar and artificial sweeteners and plastic thimbles of cream and milk.
The man at the cash register looked like he might be
from India or Pakistan or somewhere on the subcontinent, as I thought of it. He was my age, I supposed, and had short, straight hair and a thick mustache. He wore old gray pants and a tan sweater vest over a plaid shirt. I smiled and nodded at him, and halfway said hi to him, but it sounded more like “Huh” or “Ha.” He didn’t smile back but nodded at me once, not unfriendly, just serious. I didn’t want to dither, because I knew I looked sketchy. I had never bought my coffee or my cigarettes here and although I was a native of Enon, to this man I was a stranger who could have been from anywhere. I figured I’d buy three or four of the largest coffees they had, black, and take them back to the house and keep them in the refrigerator and heat them up in a saucepan each morning. I looked at the cashier again and smiled.