Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (5 page)

When his father was moved to Fourth West, Andrew drove home to help decorate the room and prop get-well cards on the end tables. “He isn't going to get better here,” Dora predicted. He returned to school and waited, and Dora and his mother waited at home. They celebrated Thanksgiving at Fourth West, behind the sliding blue-and-white curtain, Christmas. Another shift: his father began complaining about the waiting, implying that anything would be preferable, anything. There's been a mistake, he would say. He had waited too long, the whole family had. They waited and waited until waiting was a place they had gone for good.

A
bout a half hour later, after the pilot had twice announced, “Should be a few more minutes,” the plane was still parked at the gate. Andrew read every word of the in-flight magazine, including the letters to the editor. He was interested in the kind of person who'd write a letter to an in-flight magazine. It seemed a sincere and hopeful act. One of the letters began, “For years my wife and I have been enjoying the unlikely grandeur of Quito.” Below the letter-writer's name was his e-mail address, which Andrew jotted down on the flyleaf of Walter Benjamin. He thought that maybe he would write the man a letter about his letter.

He imagined his mother sitting by a phone, hand poised over the receiver, waiting. The correct, the only thing for him to do was to start making his way home. If he could just stand up, grab his bag, and get off the plane, he knew he could manage the rest of it. The preparations, the funeral, picking over the remains of the unmade summer with his mother and Dora. He just had to spark the right neurons to tell the right muscles what needed to be done. But the thought of asking the woman to unbuckle her seat belt and stand up so that he could stand up, and then standing up and fishing his bag out of the overhead compartment and walking down the aisle had begun to make him very, very tired.

As a kid, he read a book about an astronaut who orbits the earth for a few weeks and returns to find that eighty years have passed and everyone he loves is dead. It was a sad story made sadder by the astronaut going back into space and deciding not to come back. There was something sweet and fitting about the hopelessness of the astronaut, alone in his space capsule. Riding the bus home from school, Andrew would try to summon this feeling by pretending his family was gone and that he'd decided to live out his days on a bus. Sometimes, to complete the illusion, he waited until the final stop to get off the bus and would have to spend a half hour walking home. He remembered doing it several times, so it must have been worth it.

Tory from his Building Arts class stopped by Andrew's seat on his way to the bathroom. He was wearing a black T-shirt on which
MOORE IS LESS
was printed in white letters, a design joke. “We wondered where you were,” he said. “Why are you stranded way back here in steerage?”

Andrew told him he didn't know, that this was the seat that was printed on his boarding pass. “I'm happy back here,” he said.

“The woman next to me took some pills and went stiff about thirteen seconds later. Her mouth's wide-ass open. She looks dead.”

“What are you talking about?”

Tory looked at the man next to Andrew, then at the woman. “If she ever wakes up, you two could switch. It's gonna be a long flight.”

When Tory left, the woman asked who he was and Andrew told her. She said, “I bet he's not very popular, although everyone knows who he is.”

Andrew didn't agree or disagree, though she was right.

“I can tell,” she said. “The instant he opened his mouth, I said to myself, here is someone who's talked his way into being ignored.”

This, too, seemed an accurate observation. “You're probably right.”

“Watch out,” the man said. “My wife's a great authority on other people.”

“Instincts,” the woman said.

“When it comes to other people my wife could win contests.”

“Years ago when we were visiting Japan, a very old woman on the subway came up to me and handed me a sheet of paper with some Japanese written on it. The concierge at our hotel translated it. ‘You are a lamp in a world of lampshades.' Isn't that wonderful?”

“It was an advertisement for a new kind of shampoo,” the man whispered to Andrew. He could smell the dank spearmint of the gum they were all chewing. The man opened and closed the window shade on the view of the terminal. “Any thoughts on our friend here?” he asked his wife.

“We haven't even left the gate.”

“But you've formed an opinion. Nine seconds she says it takes,” he told Andrew.

Andrew looked at the woman, who nodded with her eyes closed as if she'd foreseen the question. A sharp line ran down her chin from each side of her mouth, like a ventriloquist's doll. She said, “Serious. Kindhearted. Has a bit of the lone wolf to him. A bit of the constant traveler. He's resilient, no,
resistant
. If he finds something he likes at a restaurant, he'll happily order it every time. He's practical. But he needs things a certain way.”

“His way,” the husband said. “That can be admirable.”

Stand up, and you'll never see these two again, Andrew was thinking. Stand up, and you'll be doing the correct, the only thing.

“We're making him uncomfortable, Reed.” The woman patted the armrest as if it were his leg. “The poor boy probably can't wait to go sit with his friends.”

“It's okay,” Andrew said.

“Even when she's not listening, she's listening,” the man said. “It's like living with a detective.”

The two said nothing else until the plane began backing out of the gate. Neither did Andrew, whose body was fixed rigid to the seat, a prop for the Walter Benjamin and the complimentary purple socks in his lap. He wasn't going anywhere. By staying still he could feel himself being pulled away, like how an ocean undercurrent tows you up the beach, easily, unnoticed, past hotel front after hotel front, until you've forgotten which one you were using to keep your place . . .

He thought about how his father called the screeching crows perched on his window ledge
buzzers
, which was what Dora called buzzards
.

How he'd begun wearing calfskin driving gloves in the hospital, and would mark pauses in conversation by fastening and unfastening the Velcro.

How, especially how, Andrew had walked into the wrong house the last time he returned home from school. His mother and sister still lived in the townhouse where he grew up, in a subdivision of two-story luxury townhouses around a man-made lake. The townhouses were built five to a building, with the three middle units exactly the same and the two end units mirror images of each other.

It was late and he hadn't slept much. He climbed stairs he'd climbed a thousand times, but instead of turning right he turned left. The door was unlocked and Andrew walked into the foyer and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkened house. He noticed an unfamiliar pale-oak bookshelf in the living room, which, since he hadn't been home in a while, didn't seem all that unusual. Only when he approached it to look at a framed photograph, which turned out to be of his neighbor, old Mr. Patterson, shaking hands with a man dressed up as Captain America, did he realize what had happened. But not before he thought,
What is this picture doing in our house?

Then, as now, he couldn't bring himself to move. He looked around and tried to figure out what was different between this townhouse and his. A white cat was sleeping on the back of a white couch, a coffee table, a mug with a straw in it. At eye level on the sliding glass door were pictures of pelicans, which Andrew remembered seeing from the other side, years ago. His father had explained that the pelicans were there so Mr. Patterson didn't accidentally slam into the sliding glass door while drunk. The carpet was white, like the cat; one of the walls was filled with black-and-white photographs. He felt pinned into place.

“Defamiliarize yourselves,” his instructors had said. “Don't overlook what you've seen before, or
think
you've seen before, because you've seen it before. See things again for the first time.”

There was Mr. Patterson yelling. There was Mr. Patterson holding a nightstick in the doorway. “Identify yourself!” he was yelling.

When Andrew did, and Mr. Patterson finally calmed himself down, he returned the nightstick to his umbrella stand and sat down on the couch. The cat hopped to the coffee table to a chair to the dining-room table, never touching the carpet. “What the hell were you doing just standing there? What were your plans?”

Andrew tried to explain. It was late, he hadn't slept much. Mr. Patterson, in a tank top and a pair of boxer shorts too small for him, smiled right through the explanation. Below the hem of his shorts peeked the stingy-looking cap of his penis. “You need to realize,” he said, still smiling, “that I would've had every right, every right in the world, to brain you.”

He sounded sort of disappointed that he hadn't.

Andrew apologized and Mr. Patterson said something complimentary about his father, talking about him in the past tense, and Andrew thanked him.

“I know your daddy's sick, but you can't go standing in other people's houses. You've got to keep your wits about you. When my wife died I moved here to Florida. Most people come to Florida to die, but I came here to live. That's what I say when somebody asks why I'm taking skydiving lessons. Death happens to the dead. We're here to live!”

Andrew knew that this was self-mythologizing nonsense (and who needed
lessons
to jump out of an airplane?) but he didn't say anything. He just wanted to explain what had happened so that Mr. Patterson would understand. It sounded sensible until the part where he realized he was in the wrong house. Mr. Patterson had watched him, Andrew, staring through his own face like a zombie, he said. I haven't been sleeping much, Andrew kept saying. We have the same floor plan. Haven't you ever woken up before your body?

Mr. Patterson smiled, his penis perched close to his leg like a pilot fish. Probably he was still marveling at how righteous it would've been to brain Andrew with that nightstick. Andrew might as well have been explaining how he was just trying to defamiliarize himself and see things again for the first time. It's an assignment, he could've told Mr. Patterson. For school.

This was the visit when his father wore the calfskin gloves. His face looked rummaged but the gloves were brand-new, toast-colored. Andrew sat on the pullout sofa and waited while his father pulled on the Velcro and stared out at the window ledge, which was fixed with metal spikes to deter birds. Snip, snip, snip. A trio of crows had worked their way around the spikes and huddled with their tail feathers against the window, screeching into the wind. “You might fool other birds,” his father said finally. “But you never can fool the buzzers. Buzzers won't pretend to pretend.”

Although he'd heard what his father said and knew what he meant, Andrew said, “What?” Maybe he wanted to see if he'd repeat it. He didn't. It was as if he'd been working over this idea for months and, once he said it, wasn't about to spoil it by saying it again.

He continued the routine with the gloves. Andrew continued waiting.

O
n the airplane, which was slowly backing out of the gate, his stomach tightened and he suddenly felt short of breath. His father was gone and he should've gotten off the plane. His father was gone and he'd failed to do the correct thing. He'd failed to do anything.

“At last,” the man next to him said as the plane inched closer to the runway. He opened the window shade and his wife leaned over Andrew and made a relieved sound. Andrew tucked the Walter Benjamin into the seat pocket, closed his eyes, and tried to breathe. He thought about why he was going to Vicenza, what his instructors expected him to look for: relationships, specific to the city, universal to human occupation. The open-endedness of this was comforting, the improbability of searching very long without discovering it.

“Sit back and enjoy the rest of your flight,” the flight attendant announced once the plane had reached cruising altitude. “May we suggest trying on your complimentary travel socks?”

Just as the husband and wife had done earlier, Andrew slipped off his shoes and socks and replaced them with the travel socks, which felt cheap and warm and new. He sat up and saw several other passengers doing the same thing. Travel socks, he'd never heard of such a thing, but he liked the sound of it.

There was a TV installed in the seat back facing him, and on it he watched famous people laughing. Something inconceivably funny was going on. He could still feel a tightening in his stomach and it occurred to him that, although he was traveling far from home, he'd soon be met with what had happened. No matter how far he went, it would find him there.

A little while later, the woman next to Andrew reached over and tapped her husband on the shoulder. He stirred awake and asked what she wanted. “Ever since I heard about Annie's cancer, my own tongue's felt too big for my mouth,” she told him, “like it has no business being in there at all.”

She stuck out her tongue and began moving it back and forth.

“You'll get used to it again,” her husband said, and went back to sleep.

in the pines

F
or the third time Alta was free. Free of obligation and free of men and free of her home of ten years, a palm-log cabin with two dining rooms. She was seventy-four years old but she still felt like a young woman. Long ago she'd foreseen the day when time's advance would collapse her into a dry heap, but that day hadn't come, not yet.

Her new apartment was small and had wall-to-wall carpet with a chaotic pattern, but the view was nice. Her back patio looked out onto a Civil War battlefield returned to its native state: treeless and shaggy with grass that on windy afternoons was wonderful to watch. Sections of grass zigzagged open as gusts of wind swept through. If she positioned herself just right, all she saw was the vast expanse of grass, ceaseless as the sea. No houses, no landscaping, nothing but drab, irregular movement. It reminded her of home.

She'd lived on the Florida coast for fifty years, until recently, when she, too, had been returned to her native state. Pennsylvania, pill-shaped hilly patch of zilch. Her great-niece and great-nephew lived somewhere nearby. When her third husband, George, died, they came to Florida and helped Alta move to In the Pines, not a nursing home, they insisted, a
retirement village
. Not a shelter for the suddenly senile and abruptly decrepit but a community of
active seniors
.

Wow! they said, following Alta down the hall and pointing out the exercise room, the computer room, the activity room. Hey now! Maybe
we
should think about living here! In her apartment, they asked where she wanted the dining-room table. “The dining room,” she told them, but there was no dining room. They helped unpack her clothes, programmed her VCR, cleaned the sliding glass door.

“What a view,” said her great-niece, a blithely confident girl named Brenna. She held back the curtains. “You'd think you were in the middle of the woods, Aunt Alta. Except that phone tower.”

Alta went to the patio door and looked out. Far beyond the battlefield, tethered vertical by just-visible cables, was the gunmetal tower, red beacon lights blinking. Alta cropped it out by centering her view on the middle of the battlefield. In Florida, she used to sit in a beach chair close to the ocean and let the tide run beneath her. She continued waiting, waiting . . . for what, she didn't remember, or never knew. Her husband, maybe, to come tell her it was time to go. To put his hand on her shoulder, tap his wedding band against her clavicle, and reset her to normal.

“It appears,” Alta said in her new apartment, “that I need a man.”

Her great-niece and great-nephew hesitated, and then, together, they laughed. Alta was their favorite aunt, the one who knew just how to defuse an awkward moment. While the mood was bright, they hung Alta's new apartment key on a metal hook marked
KEYS
, and then excused themselves.

S
he ate pancakes with five others at her table, two men and three women who stared at her like dogs at an empty food bowl while she spoke. For weeks she'd been trying to interest the two men, offering easy questions like
Anyone been outside today?
and
Anyone play cards?
One man belched wetly into his cloth napkin, while the other clutched a biscuit and crumpled his face into a deep sort of personal frown, as if straining his bowels. Alta, who'd been married, and widowed, three times, had always relied on men to measure her own well-being—and, in better days, to enlarge it—and this, this dim unanimous disregard, was not good.

“Wasn't our year,” one of the men said to the other.

“It never is,” the other said. “I hate to admit it, but we're a national joke.”

“This year we are. What's next year look like?”

“What do you think?”

“Same as this year.”

“Same as last year,” the second man said, “same as
every
year.”

Alta thought this the most dismal conversation she'd ever heard. “That's an awful way to talk,” she said to them.

A few moments later, though, she realized they were just complaining about a sports team. She excused herself and left the table, but the low feeling stayed with her, shadowing her as she walked the asphalt nature trail around the man-made lake, in the center of which fountains made daisies of water. She passed dozens of memorial trees and their scuffed little markers. The younger trees were tethered upright like the phone tower behind her apartment, and Alta's thoughts drifted as she looked over the names, former residents of In the Pines. What if the dead residents were actually buried inside the trees? She imagined beavers padding through at night and, unaware of the trees' ceremonial importance, chewing through their trunks, dragging them off, and heaping them all together into a mass grave, a great memorial dam.

Alta didn't want anything to grow in her name after she died. She wanted a hole to open up and swallow her, and maybe a nice-looking man or two. The pair assigned to her table were no good, but there were other men at In the Pines, who were handsome and seemed warmish and alert. She had a habit of making quick, stubborn judgments, and maybe her perception had slipped a little, because lately, whenever she made up her mind to talk to a man, he'd say something like “I miss my car,” or “Noodles are all I can stomach these days.”

Once she took pride in her perception. Now it was punishing her. Once she was confident of the effect she had on others. Now it was as if her fellow tenants were suffering her like a chill, waiting for her to go away.

A
lta first saw the soldier from her back patio, swatting at the high grass with his saber in the early afternoon. The field was shrill with sunlight. She watched and might have happily continued to watch as he walked on past, creeping far off into her view, briefly residing in it, then moving on. She might've noticed him without noting him, like the elapsing of a memory left untended. But when the soldier saw Alta sitting on her patio, he halted, smiled, and began swatting a path toward her.

He reached the edge of the field, took off his hat, and said, “Permission to come aboard.” Two more steps until Alta's patio. He was an older man, with orderly features and a waffled sunburned neck. His blue felt jacket was dark at the armpits.

“Are you lost?” Alta asked.

“I was,” he said. “My men are camped up on some ridge a ways back, singing beautiful songs about liberty and transformation. I set out to look for some berries and mushrooms and things. We're hurting for rations.”

She invited him to sit. He sheathed his saber and sighed before dropping himself into the plastic chair. He was in his late fifties, maybe, no watch, no wedding band. He scanned the fields slowly, stopping when his gaze reached the phone tower. “Sometimes you're watching the world,” he said, “and the world's watching right back.”

As he said this, Alta looked down at herself and saw that she was wearing her yellow bathrobe over her clothes, which she often did, to keep warm. She couldn't recall changing into the bathrobe, but there it was, indisputably on her. She practiced a few responses, then said, “And sometimes you fall asleep but don't realize it until you wake up with a man on your patio.”

The soldier smiled. “Well put,” he said, extending a hand to Alta. “Lieutenant Charles Thorn.” She shook his big, warm hand and introduced herself and together they watched the flat grass retreat and advance and retreat. Alta waited for him to explain the uniform, what he was actually doing in the field, anything. But she was neither uncomfortable nor overly curious about it. She could still feel his warmth on her hand.

The lieutenant let out a tidy, satisfied sigh. “You're brave,” he said finally. “Staying out here while the war rambles through.” He crossed and uncrossed his arms. “You probably have a husband or sons or some loved ones fighting?”

Alta started to say no but hesitated. The question wasn't a question, but an opening, an invitation. “Come to think of it,” she said, “I bet I do. Any news?”

“Sporadic. So far it's just some cavalry making raids on the fringes, rummaging, pillaging what they can.” The lieutenant turned around in his chair and looked through the patio door into Alta's apartment. “This place looks solidly fortified but you never know. Are there any other women in there?”

“Just us active seniors,” Alta said. “Maybe a few nurses, none too appealing.”

“You'd be shocked,” the lieutenant said, “at what appeals to them. We're talking about men who have amorous interactions with horses and dogs and livestock and each other and trees, even, whatever's softest and available.” He shook his head so vigorously his brass buttons rattled. “Sorry. I haven't talked to a woman in a few months. I've forgotten how.”

“You're doing fine,” Alta said. “Tell me about the war.”

And the lieutenant did. He told her about his battalion, a group of men from western Massachusetts, and about the little skirmishes and larger battles they'd seen so far. He was a deadpan storyteller, dotting his account with words like
contretemps
,
sanguinary
,
asunder
. He used his hands to shape what he described and paused after anything solemn: “At night in the encampments you can hear men crying in their sleep. Crying because no matter what they've done up until now, no matter how grand their aspirations, they've all been funneled to exactly the same god-awful place.”

Alta let herself settle into the cozy tragedy of it all. There was a kinship, because she, too, felt as if she'd been funneled to a place to join a company of people who neither cared about nor comforted her. Her routine had been permanently interrupted. Her past had been torn from her future and now here she was, subsisting on the bleak, ripped brim of the present. She didn't even have a dining room anymore.

Before the lieutenant left, he reached into his jacket and presented her with a dried-out seedpod he'd found while searching for food. “It's extremely valuable,” he said. “I'm giving it to you for safekeeping, and so I have a reason to come back.”

He put on his hat and ran his hand over the front of his jacket, which was adorned with—Alta counted them—seven long black bars. One for each day of the week. He took her hand, leaned down, and kissed it with his chapped lips. The saber's blade, Alta could see, was engraved with something, but it was too faint for her to decipher.

She followed his outline as it wended through the field, swatting the grass with the saber, then disappearing over a small hill.

The moment he was gone, she wondered when he would return. She imagined him lying wounded on the battlefield gripping his stomach in agony, waiting for someone to cart him off. The image remained while she went inside to get ready for dinner until, after a while, it yielded to another image: Vic, her first husband, crouching in the backyard, irately pulling weeds. He was most entertaining when angry, and yard work made him angry, so Alta sometimes watched him from the kitchen window. One afternoon, she looked out to see him straining near the little camphor tree, banging his fist against his chest. She first thought maybe he was mad at the tree, or at her, but he was actually dying of a heart attack, a
substantial
heart attack, the doctor would later tell her. He was trying to punch himself back to life.

After dinner, she returned to her apartment in a good mood, and found a blank notepad. She brought it to the dining-room table, opened it, and wrote on the first blank page:
Here's all I know about men.

She'd had the idea at dinner to make a list for herself, to use it to organize her mind. She thought,
Men are sometimes . . . tall. Men like certain . . . things.
But she was too tired to remember them, both the things and the men. She underlined the one sentence, to make it look more imperative for her to return to it, and put it away.

A
few days later, Alta sat on her patio after breakfast. Several times the high grass parted in such a way that she was sure someone would emerge, but the grass blew the other way and the horizon returned to ordinary. Alta ate a too-soft banana and flung the peel into the field when she was finished. “Damn this sundered country,” Alta said, and laughed. “Damn this Civil War.” She laughed until she made herself cough and then she stopped.

A blackbird circled and went call call call. The red beacon light atop the phone tower pulsed like a machine heart.

The lieutenant had better hurry: she wouldn't wait all day. She was alone, yes, but she wasn't
that
lonely. She could always walk over to her next-door neighbor's, a not-bad-looking ex-optician named Fenn, and knock on his sliding glass door. Tell him she was locked out of her apartment, or that she needed to borrow a hammer, needed him to turn down his television, comb his hair, and whisper something tender into her ear . . .

Fenn, though, was out of the running. He'd hung a flag on his patio that said
SPRING HAS SPRUNG
and which featured two bunnies chewing carrots, and he watched game shows at maximum volume all day long. Sometimes she'd hear his voice through the wall, and think he had a visitor, but it would turn out that it was just Fenn guessing along with the contestants. The viola! Marvin Hagler! Brussels!

There was no shame in waiting for the lieutenant. He would either arrive or he wouldn't. If he arrived, she would invite him in for a drink. (“If it isn't too much trouble,” he'd say. “Don't be silly,” she'd say. “You look like you need one.”) She came up with about a dozen different throwaway greetings: Come aboard; Hark; It's about time; You look thirsty; Hello again; How's the war; Don't hurt me, I'm unarmed . . .

She continued sitting on her patio, watching the overgrown grass flit and shimmy to reveal flashes of pale, scalp-like earth. No shame in watching the overgrown grass flit and shimmy.