The Beginner's Goodbye (6 page)

I must remember to buy more stamps. I was using a good many, these days.

After I’d recorded each dish, I dumped it in the garbage. I hated to waste food, but my refrigerator was packed to the gills and I didn’t know what else to do. So the chicken salad, the ziti casserole, the tomatoes with pesto—dump, dump, dump. You could think of it as eliminating the middleman: straight from stoop to trash bin, without the intermediate pause on the kitchen table. Occasionally, abstractedly, I would intercept a drumstick or a sparerib and gnaw on it as I went about my work. While I rinsed out a Pyrex baking dish, I made my way through a cheesecake parked beside the sink, although I didn’t much like cheesecake and this one was getting slimier every time I reached for a chunk with my wet fingers. And then, all at once, I was stuffed and my teeth had that furred feel from eating too much sugar, even though I hadn’t sat down to an actual meal.

I dried the baking dish and set it out on the stoop with a Post-it attached:
MIMI
. Outside it was barely twilight, that transparent green kind of twilight you see at the end of a summer day, and I could hear children calling and a wisp of music from a passing car radio. I stepped back into the hall and closed the door.

Next, the mail, which shingled the hall floor and posed a
hazard to life and limb every time I stepped over it. I gathered it all up and took it back to the kitchen. The kitchen was my living room now. I’d done nothing about my plans to alter the guest room. I used the table as my desk, with my checkbook and my address book and various stationery supplies arranged in a row across one end. Oh, I was keeping up with my responsibilities admirably! I paid my bills the day they arrived, not waiting for the due-dates. I promptly filed catalogues and fliers in the recycling bin. I opened every sympathy note and read it with the utmost care, because there was always the chance that somebody would give me an unexpected glimpse of my wife. Somebody from her workplace, for instance:
Dr. Rosales was extremely qualified, and she will be missed at the Radiology Center
. Well, that was an added viewpoint that I very much appreciated. Or a former patient:
I was so sorry to read about
the death of your your loss
Dr. Rosales in the paper. She was very helpful to me after I had my
mastecto
surgery, answering all my questions and treating me
so normally so ordinarily
with dignity
. I suspected that this was a first draft mailed by mistake, but that just made it all the more meaningful, because it revealed the patient’s sincerest feelings. She had valued the same qualities in Dorothy that I had valued: her matter-of-fact attitude, her avoidance of condescension. That was the Dorothy I’d fallen in love with.

I answered each note immediately.

Dear Dr. Adams,

Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.

Sincerely,         
Aaron Woolcott

Dear Mrs. Andrews,

Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.

Sincerely,         
Aaron Woolcott

Then on to the food brigade:

Dear Mimi,

Thank you so much for the ziti casserole. It was delicious.

Sincerely,
Aaron      

Dear Ushers,

Thank you so much for the cheesecake. It was delicious.

Sincerely,
Aaron      

After that, the housework. Plenty to keep me busy there.

Sweeping the front hall, first. That was unending. Every morning when I woke up and every evening when I came home, a fresh layer of white dust and plaster chips covered the hall floor. At times there were also tufts of matted gray fuzz. What on earth? An outmoded type of insulation, I decided. I stopped sweeping and peered up into the rafters. It was a sight I looked quickly away from, like someone’s innards.

And then the laundry, exactly twice a week—once for whites and once for colors. The first white load made me feel sort of
lonely. It included two of Dorothy’s shirts and her sensible cotton underpants and her seersucker pajamas. I had to wash and dry and fold them and place them in the proper drawers and align the corners and pat them down and smooth them flat. But the loads after that were easier. This wasn’t an unfamiliar task, after all. It used to fall to whichever one of us felt the need of fresh clothing first, and that was most often me. Now I liked going down the stairs to the cool, dim basement, where there wasn’t the least little sign of the oak tree. Sometimes I hung around for a while after I’d transferred the wet laundry from the washer to the dryer, resting my palms on the dryer’s top and feeling it vibrate and grow warm.

Then a bit of picking up in the kitchen and the bedroom. Nothing major. Dorothy had been the clutterer in our family. By now I had retrieved several pieces of her clothing from around the room, and I’d returned her comb and her hay-fever pills to the medicine cabinet. I made no attempt to discard things. Not yet.

Over the course of an evening the phone would ring several times, but I always checked the caller ID before I picked up. If it was Nandina, I might as well answer. She would arrive at my door in person if I didn’t let her know I was still among the living. But the Millers, always after me to go to the symphony with them, or the eternal Mimi King … Fortunately, I’d had the good sense to deactivate the answering machine. For a while I’d left it on, and the guilty burden of unreturned calls almost did me in before I remembered the
Off
button.

“I’m fine,” I’d tell Nandina. “How are
you
since five o’clock, when I last saw you?”

“I can’t imagine how you’re coping there,” she would say. “Where do you sit, even? How do you occupy your evening?”

“I have several places to sit, and no shortage of occupations. In fact, at this very minute I—Oh-oh! Gotta go!”

I would hang up and look at my watch. Only eight o’clock?

I angled my wrist to make sure the second hand was still moving. It was.

Occasionally, the doorbell would ring. Oh, how I hated that doorbell. It was a golden-voiced, two-note chime:
ding
dong. Kind of churchy, kind of self-important. But I felt compelled to answer it, because my car was parked out front and it was obvious I was home. I would sigh and make my way to the hall. Most often it was Mary-Clyde Rust. Not Jim, so much. Jim seemed to be having trouble these days thinking what to say to me, but Mary-Clyde was not in the least at a loss. “Now, Aaron,” she would tell me, “I know you don’t feel like company, so I won’t intrude. But I need to see if you’re all right. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Okay, good. Glad to hear it.”

And she would nod smartly and spin on her heel and leave.

I preferred the neighbors who avoided me. The people who gazed suddenly elsewhere if they happened to be walking their dogs past when I stepped out of the house in the morning. The people who got into their cars with their backs kept squarely, tactfully turned in my direction as I got into my own car.

One evening when the doorbell rang it was a man I didn’t know, a keg-shaped man with a short brown beard and a mop of gray-streaked brown hair. “Gil Bryan,” he told me. “General contractor,” and he handed me a business card. The outside
light bulb made the sweaty skin beneath his eyes shine in a way I found trustworthy; that was the only reason I didn’t just shut the door again. He said, “I’m the guy who put the tarp on your roof.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I see you haven’t got it repaired yet.”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Well, that’s my card, if you ever want someone to do it.”

“Thanks.”

“I know it must be the last thing on your mind right now.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, and then I did shut the door, but slowly, so as not to give offense. I liked the way he’d worded that. Even so, I just tossed his card into the porcelain bowl, because I was purposely ignoring the roof the way I had ignored those doctors peeking into the waiting room. “Roof? What roof?” I should have asked Mr. Bryan. “I don’t see anything wrong with the roof.”

The earliest bedtime I allowed myself was 9 p.m. I told myself I would read a while before I turned out the light; I wouldn’t go to sleep immediately. I had a huge, thick biography of Harry Truman that I’d begun before the accident. But I couldn’t seem to make much headway in it. “Reading is the first to go,” my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and still I couldn’t have told you what it was about. My
eyelids would grow heavier, and all at once I’d be jerking awake as the book slid off the bed and crashed to the floor.

So I would reach for the remote control and turn on the TV that sat on the bureau. I would watch—or stare in a glazed way at—documentaries and panel discussions and commercials. I would listen to announcers rattling off the side effects of all the medications they were touting. “Oh, sure,” I would tell them. “I’ll run out and buy that tomorrow. Why let a little uncontrollable diarrhea put me off, or kidney failure, or cardiac arrest?”

Dorothy used to hate it when I talked back like that. “Do you mind?” she would ask. “I can’t hear a word they’re saying.”

This TV was just a little one, the little extra one that we sometimes watched the late news on when we were getting ready for bed. Our big TV was in the sunporch. It was an old Sony Trinitron. Jim Rust told me in the hospital that that was what had crushed Dorothy’s chest; the firemen said it had fallen off its bracket high in the corner. Sony Trinitrons are known for their unusual weight.

A while back, Dorothy and I had discussed buying one of those new-fangled flat-screen sets, but we’d decided we couldn’t afford it. If we had had a flat-screen TV, would Dorothy still be alive?

Or if her patient hadn’t canceled. Then she wouldn’t even have been home yet when the tree fell.

Or if she had stayed in the kitchen instead of heading for the sunporch.

If I’d said, “Let’s see if
I
can find those Triscuits,” and gone out to the kitchen to help her look, and then sat with her at the kitchen table while she ate them.

But no, no. I had to stomp off in a huff and sulk in the bedroom,
as if it had mattered in the least that she’d refused to settle for Wheat Thins.

Oh, all those annoying habits of hers that I used to chafe at—the trail of crumpled tissues and empty coffee mugs she left in her wake, her disregard for the finer points of domestic order and comfort. Big deal!

Her tendency to make a little too much of her medical degree when she was meeting new people. “I’m Dr. Rosales,” she would say, instead of “I’m Dorothy,” so you could almost see the white coat even when she wasn’t wearing one. (Not that she actually met new people all that often. She had never seen the purpose in socializing.)

And those orthopedic-type shoes she had favored: they had struck me, at times, as self-righteous. They had seemed a deliberate demonstration of her seriousness, her high-mindedness—a pointed reproach to the rest of us.

I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.

But somehow, it didn’t work that way.

I wished I could let her know that I’d kept vigil in the hospital. I hated to think she might have felt she was going through that alone.

And wouldn’t she have been amused by all these casseroles!

That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.

The TV infiltrated my sleep, if you could call this ragged semiconsciousness sleep. I dreamed the war in Iraq was escalating,
and Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the Democratic nomination. I rolled over on the remote control and someone all at once shouted, “… this stainless-steel, hollow-ground, chef-quality …,” by which time I was sitting bolt upright in my bed, my eyes popping and my heart pounding and my mouth as dry as gauze. I turned off the TV and lay flat again. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth:
Go to sleep, damn it
.

You would think I’d have dreamed about Dorothy, but I didn’t. The closest I came to it was the whiff of isopropyl alcohol that I hallucinated from time to time as I finally drifted off again. She had carried that scent home on her skin at the end of every workday. Early in our marriage I used to have vivid dreams about childhood doctor visits and vaccinations and the like, evoked by the alcohol scent as I lay sleeping next to her. Now the ghost of it brought me sharply awake, and once or twice I even spoke her name aloud: “Dorothy?”

But I never got an answer.

The casseroles started thinning out and the letters stopped. Could people move on that easily? Yes, well, of course. New tragedies happened daily. I had to acknowledge that.

It seemed heartless that I should think to go in for my semiannual dental checkup, but I did. And then I bought myself some new socks. Socks, of all things! So trivial! But all my old ones had holes in the toes.

One evening my friend Nate called—
WEISS N I
on my caller ID. Him I picked up for. Right off I said, “Nate! How’ve you been?” without waiting for him to announce himself. But that was evidently a mistake, because I caught a brief hesitation before
he said, “Hello, Aaron.” Very low-voiced, very lugubrious; not at all his usual style.