Interior Design (20 page)

“Sorry, dear,” Linda said, slowing down. The new road she took was winding and so full of interesting geologic features that Linda soon lost her way. “Look, a sinkhole!” she called out to her indifferent Hank, who was standing up and about to crawl away from her to the backseat. “A bedding plane, a block fault!” she continued almost desperately.

Searching for topographical features to attract her husband, Linda was having difficulty paying attention to the road. An approaching car honked at her, but Linda saw it was actually an erratic, a huge boulder deposited by a retreating glacier. It passed them before she could point it out to Hank, who had plopped back down on the seat. Linda pressed on the accelerator, entranced by the transforming view of her windshield. Then a truck appeared, but Linda immediately realized it couldn't be that at all. Instead, it was a road cut, and its sheer, towering slabs still frightened her, as they once had so long ago. “There, over there!” she shouted, pointing at the advancing cliff. Her hands tightened on the wheel, ready to turn away, and she fought a growing fascination with the exposed rock, the rippling patterns that seemed about to speak.

Lucky

I have a nice shop—men's clothes, all of them classic. No young kids bother to come in for whatever's latest because they know they won't find it here. I don't mind, I've known most of my regular customers for years—the second anyone walks through the door I can remember his collar size, sleeve length, you name it. I've always been the fellow who tucks everyone nicely into suits and pants and shirts, and I know more than measurements, I know what my customer doesn't want to see in the three-way mirror: usually it's the bald spot, the paunch or the neck wattle, so I divert attention to the shoulder pads, the cuffs, the snappy angle of a lapel.

Maybe I know my customers too well, because when old age settled in and they started dying I took it hard, right from the moment I heard the first bad news. I remember I was standing behind the register, enjoying the look of the long row of suits against the wall—I liked to think they were waiting patiently in line for something, maybe opening night at some big Broadway play, and they were all happy to have tickets. Joe Baxter walked in—the fellow who always goes through the tie racks three times before making up his mind. I was already thinking, Hat size: 7
^3/4
, when he said, “Hey Pete, guess what?”

He was holding back a nervous grin and I knew I was about to hear some awful surprise—that's just the way he was. He'd done this to me before, once when Sadat was shot, another time when the space shuttle blew up. But Joe stopped smiling when he finally said, “Tiny Martin died—his heart. He just fell down on his way to breakfast.”

I leaned back against the counter and could only manage a weak, “No—Tiny? That's terrible.” I liked Tiny and always felt sorry for him, beginning with his nickname—he was almost too big for the largest size in the shop. And the poor guy was afraid of the dressing room—he never tried on anything before buying. “No thanks,” he said to me the first time he ever stopped by, “I don't need to go in there.” So I rearranged the cufflink display while he stood in front of the mirror and held shirts under his chin; after he picked out something, he told some little joke at the register, almost like he was thanking me for leaving him alone. Later, I heard talk that he'd seen real trouble back in the Korean War, squeezed inside some narrow prison cell.

Harriet and I went to his wake—a room full of flowers with nothing cheery about them—and poor Tiny looked awfully cramped in that coffin. The morticians had done a terrible job dressing him—the collar could barely contain his neck, and the knot of his tie was pulled off to one side, just like my brother Jamie's tie at his own funeral so long ago. I hadn't thought of it in years—I was nine, maybe ten, at the time—though I could clearly recall waiting in line for the viewing, nervous even though I knew there was barely a scratch on him—only internal injuries from his fall while chasing me up a tree. Jamie was dressed in a suit—something I'm sure he never wore when he was alive—with a thick blue tie knotted funny and twisted almost sideways. He looked so unlike himself that I leaned up close to his peaceful face, even though I was still afraid: sometimes at night he used to turn on the light by my bed and I'd wake to see his face inches from me, twisted up in some vile and gruesome way until I started crying.

Then there I was, standing beside Tiny's coffin, tears pouring down, and Harriet whispered behind me, “C'mon, honey, people are waiting.”

I was so spooked that we left, too early to be polite. After that I avoided wakes and saved my respects for the funeral service, where Harriet and I sat in a pew in the back with the ushers and the less popular relatives. Because there
were
more funerals to go to—Jack Banes, a lover of cardigans, wasted away from cancer; and Paul Markowitz, a tie clip collector, died of kidney failure. Worse, more funerals were on the way. One afternoon I got a call from Gloria, Larry Johnson's wife, and she said, “Pete, Larry needs a shirt for my niece's wedding tomorrow, but he can't, um, come by today. Could you pick something out for him and drop it by later?”

“Sure, I know his size, and you're on my way home,” I said, a little surprised, but her tone of voice said, Don't ask questions.

I brought along a nice selection, but Larry was in no condition to choose. He was sitting in the den beside a record player and listening to this scratchy Benny Goodman tune—when the clarinet hit its stride and went in loops around the beat, Larry's face opened up like he was hearing it for the first time. Then he flipped the needle to the beginning so he could hear it for the first time again, and he gave that spinning record a silly grin. This was not at all the same man who rattled off baseball statistics while I chalked cuff lines on his pants. Gloria had a terrible look on her face, like she was a convict counting the minutes before parole, and I knew Larry'd been doing this all day, at least. God knows what was on
my
face, but she leaned in close to me and whispered fiercely. “You think
he's
bad? Tom Peterson is some big fan of
Sesame Street
—he watches letters and numbers dance and sing all day long. Poor Ann.”

*

So one day I finished my lunch break sandwich, glanced over at the rows of suits, and they looked like they were all lined up to view the deceased. Next thing you know, I might start seeing ghosts poking through shelves of sweaters or avoiding the dressing room. What's needed here is a change of scene, a walk to the park, I told myself, and I tucked the local paper under my arm and closed up shop for the rest of the hour.

I sat on a bench and watched the children playing their games in the sandbox for a while, then I opened up the paper and worked my way into the international news, all that faraway trouble. The national news followed—the usual sleazy dealings in Washington—and then I came to our town's police blotter, the minor local fires, the major sales in the mall. Finally I turned a page and there were the obituaries.

I closed the paper and let it flap in the wind a little bit—after all, I'd come to the park to avoid this sort of thing. But what if someone I knew was in there—was I going to let Joe Baxter surprise me again with another awful grin?

All the names were unfamiliar. How could this upset me? So I read on. Everyone was survived by
somebody:
a wife or husband, brothers or sisters, kids grown up and scattered in different towns or states and
their
kids grown up and scattered. A job was listed too, just like another next-of-kin, and so was the time of death, down to the minute: 12:05
P.M
. or 8:34
A.M
. or whatever. I thought back to the day before and I tried to remember what I'd been doing at those times: maybe squeezing a tube of toothpaste, or finishing off a tuna sandwich.

That afternoon, when no one was in the shop, I stopped in the middle of arranging a shipment of socks in bins, checked my watch, whispered, “Good-bye and good luck,” and wondered if I'd just given a friendly send-off to someone I knew. The next day I read the obits to see how I'd done: no one there was even an acquaintance, and I hadn't even come close to any time of death. But I kept up this little game for weeks, and I began to seem strange to myself.

I started thinking that when I retired—just a few years off, really—Harriet and I should move far, far away, where we didn't know anybody, where the obits wouldn't have one familiar name: I didn't want to wait for Tom Peterson or Larry Johnson or anyone else to die.

*

Usually when Harriet made breakfast, I watched sleepily and thought about how lucky I was—she could have done a lot better than me, that's for sure. But one morning I finally had to say, “Why don't we move when I retire?”

She kept stirring those scrambled eggs and wouldn't turn around, so I knew I had to speak carefully. Harriet was always the quiet one, and over the years I had learned to read her whole collection of quiets. I even had a favorite, her Out-of-the-Body quiet: I liked watching her knit, hands on automatic while her face took on this kind of faraway peace, like she could see something really wonderful that was miles off.

But the way she was slowly stirring those eggs I knew she was into her I-Wish-You-Hadn't-Said-That quiet.

“Say we move south,” I said to the back of her head. Her hair was up in its usual bun, with a wisp loose here and there—I still loved it when she let it down. “Think of all that sun. And there'd be no snow. If we moved we could have a yard sale and sell the snow shovel and ice scraper, we could donate our boots and gloves and coats to the Salvation Army.” I hoped this might soften her up—Harriet could never get warm enough in the winter.

“What about the children?” she asked.

“I don't know, what about them? They can learn to send their postcards to a new address, dial a different area code, I guess.”

Harriet was suddenly real busy dishing out the eggs and about to settle into her If-You're-not-Going-to-Be-Serious-I'm-not- Going-to-Listen quiet, and she was right. We'd raised two fine kids—a girl and boy—and our worrying over each scraped knee, every chickenpox scar, and all the other marks the world made on them was not something to joke about. So I added, “Look, honey, if we lived in Florida we'd be closer to Elizabeth and the boys. And Jimmy can afford to travel a little farther.”

“What about my bingo?” she said.

Harriet was quite the popular bingo caller, in demand at the Legion and the Moose Lodge, Am Vets, Elks, and even the Catholic church, but I can't say I much approved of her hobby. In those days even a lottery ticket was too much of the gambling world for me. So I said, though gently, “What, you think this is the only town where people play bingo? You can do that anywhere.”

By then Harriet was looking out the window, filled with her I'll- Consider-It quiet, so I let the subject drop and considered myself lucky: I knew if I had to tell Harriet my secret reason for leaving she'd laugh, might even talk me out of it. But I didn't want to be laughed at, and I didn't want to be talked out of anything.

*

Maybe the thought of moving made Harriet want to settle in more and take hold of the house as she never had before, because the next Saturday morning she started listening to this crazy radio program about how to express yourself everywhere in the home, the host's slick voice just slipping along: “Why settle for the ugliness of commercial packaging in your home? Pour the milk you buy out of its carton and into your own brightly colored plastic containers. Think how much nicer Cheerios look in mason jars. Ladies, get rid of all that advertising, take control. After all, it's your home and no one else's.”

Harriet took notes at the kitchen table. I left the room, depressed that I was driving my wife to such silly behavior. But no matter where I wandered in the house I could still hear the murmur of that cheery voice, so I went out for a long stroll. I walked through the falling leaves, kicking past little piles here and there, and I headed for the used bookstore to see if I could find some light reading.

Usually there'd be a tempting book in the window display, but that morning, when I glanced at the plain black cover of
Strategic Solitaire
, I decided I wasn't really interested in learning how to outwit a pack of cards. Next to this was a book of photographs about steam engines—I wouldn't have minded a train taking me far away, but not one that didn't exist any more. Then I looked at a book on hunting decoys, a beautiful wooden duck on the cover, and I thought about all the time and cunning it took to carve such a thing.

Finally, I turned to an anatomy book. Its cover was a drawing of a man's head arched back a bit, eyes closed and face so peaceful, but he was dead, a cadaver. The skin of his neck was sliced open and pulled back to show a tangle of veins, muscles, and nerves, packed together like wires in a telephone cable. I couldn't take my eyes off that cover. Behind me I heard the purr and rattle of a few cars passing by, a bicycle with baseball cards clicking the spokes, and a couple of running, rowdy kids, as if the world were saying, Keep walking,
move on
.

But I did go inside, though at first I picked up a book on the solar system and found myself staring at those fantastic
Voyager
pictures from Neptune: that dark storm spot and its clouds, the ice volcanoes on one of the big moons, the thin, wobbly rings. All the while I scratched an itch on my neck and imagined the veins inside.

I decided I might as well give the damned anatomy book a peek if I was going to keep thinking about it. Soon I was seriously staring at those drawings: the heart a collection of bloody caves, red and blue veins winding their way everywhere, nerves branching crazily all through the face, and pale intestines bunched up like thick clouds. There were even glands under the eyelids that looked like ferns, and I blinked, teary eyed, amazed that this was all just beneath my skin—even the edge of the solar system didn't seem as strange.