The Age of Grief (12 page)

The man said, “Truck’s here.”

“Is this the place, you think?”

“No telling. Want to look around?”

“Ought not, I don’t think.”

Nothing was recognizable about this couple. There was no one in my family who could have been transformed by any amount of time into either of them. Of the license plate, I could only see that it was out of state, white. The woman stood on the porch, her back to the door. She sighed, clicked the clasp of her purse. He said, “Come on, then.” I didn’t want to look at them any more, and so I lay down among the vines and listened for the departing crunch of their wheels. It came soon enough.

At ten o’clock I staggered into bed, exhausted at last. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon, disoriented and with the sound of the television in my ears, which frightened me. The sense of someone else in the house when I am waking up always frightens me. I always imagine that it is the FBI, making themselves at home, looking at my stuff, eating my food. I know that they don’t do this, that in fact it was my fellow leftists who always did this back in the old days, but it is not rational, of course. Scott used to wake up shouting
if one of the cats got under the covers. He thought it was a rat, and that he was in Khe Sanh again. Sometimes if thunderstorms began while we were sleeping, he would wake himself all the way up and listen to make sure that no whistles preceded the booms. War wounds. Now I realized that Michael was watching the baseball game in the living room, and I relaxed in bed and looked out the window.

If I had broken up with Scott and he had moved away, I would now be able to call him on the phone from time to time and ask him how he is. This is literally my only conscious wish. He would be smoking a cigarette, and he would inhale audibly, and I would imagine him taking his mustache between his lip and his lower teeth, biting it a little. Then he would say, “Sandy.” We would be uncomfortable, too ready to prove, by talking fast, that we were both fine, happy, and productive, that we didn’t miss each other. He might have a wife to show me up with, and kids. I would be exactly as I am now, turning over in this very bed, reaching for this very telephone. No molecule of the scene I am looking at now would be different, except that Scott would exist somewhere. The more that Michael comes around, the more I have this wish, the more I let myself indulge the fantasy of it, of saying, “Did we love each other? Did I love you?”

It is the third inning, and Michael is pounding the couch as I come into the room. An error at second, the Cardinals. Herr makes it, dropping the ball right out of his glove. “Shit!” yells Michael. “Did you see that dumb fucker?” His eyes follow me across the room. He says, “Do you mind that I’m here?”

“I told you you could come over, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

“It’s okay.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

He doesn’t say anything to this, turns his eyes back to the game. He is hurt by my manner. He says, “When I saw you were sleeping, I knew I should just go home.”

“Don’t, Michael. It’s my fault. I was up at dawn, and now I feel really terrible,”

“Why were you up at dawn?”

“Don’t quiz me.”

“I’m not quizzing you. I’m just asking.” He stands up and goes over and turns off the television.

“Are we having a fight? You know I hate fighting.”

He says, “I don’t think we’re having anything as promising as a fight.” He goes toward the screen door and opens it. I am distracted by the color of the grass as the late afternoon sun falls across it, a hot, stark summer green, the way it gets only here, mid-continent. I turn my eyes to his face consciously, and he says, “You were so relaxed last night.”

“I wasn’t relaxed.” He waits for me to say what I was, but I can’t go on. And those are the last words we speak. He goes out to his car, gets in, and drives out of the driveway, pulling a tail of fine dust, and I go into the silent house. I sit on the couch where he was sitting.

My grandfather watched the Yankees on television every Saturday. My grandmother was under five feet, my grandfather not much over. My grandmother would be knitting an intricate and brightly colored outfit for one of those plastic dolls they had before Barbie dolls. This was for me. I hated dolls, and I would be pretending not to notice. Ringing
through the apartment was the sound, not of the Yankees’ announcer, but of
Rigoletto
, because part of watching the Yankees was turning the sound off and listening to the Texaco opera broadcast. My grandfather called himself a “Yankee,” Yiddish pronunciation, “Yahnkih.” The afternoons were long, and I was thinking, always, about something else, half bored, looking at the dust motes in the sunbeams, running my eyes across the titles in the bookcase and making objects of the long words. An opera is actually just about as long as a baseball game. I close my eyes now, and I look at my grandfather in his chair. He has thick hair, mink-brown, and his ears jut out of it like sails. His foot is up on a cushion, because he has gout in his big toe. He glances from the game to my grandmother and smiles. She is not looking at him. A socialist, an American, a Yahnkih, a man happy in his self-contradiction. I open my eyes, and I am in Missouri, and everything is collecting in my head, light and heavy, animate and motionless, bright and dark. Of my life it could truly be said that all is lost, except these things.

I remember when I first had the idea of making bombs. That is, I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember the feeling. I remember putting my hands out, palms curved and facing each other, about eight inches apart, as if a bomb, a hard small object, as I thought before I had seen any dynamite, could appear between them, if the force of desire alone could have that effect. Making a bomb was the most extreme thing I could think of to do, and once I had thought of it, I could not settle for anything less. All through the research, all through the dropping of hints, all through the wooing of Maury Nassiter, I was lusty and restless, the way I feel now.
It is the itch to do the most unthought-of thing, the itch to destroy what is made—the firm shape of my life, whether unhappy, as it was, or happy, as it is now.

But if I turn the imagined object and look at the other side, my motives are trivial, unimportant. My grandfather would say that what is true was what compelled me to act. He used to say, “When these bosses make you go faster until you can’t keep up and they fire you to hire a younger man for less, you think this is by mistake?” He would say, “Of course they shoot me if I throw a stone through the window. You think that a pane of glass is not worth more than I am worth? Did the pane of glass cost more than the bullet? That’s what they say to themselves.” And every time he devalued himself, I got angry. It is an explosive pressure in my chest and shoulders that pulsates, I realize now, in time to my quickened breathing. It only takes a second to feel it again, to know again what my grandfather knew. I push myself out of the couch and walk to the front door. It is locked, and I open it and step out onto the porch, still panting. Since no one ever comes here, and Michael and I always park in the back, I know that this matted grass is from the morning, from the old couple. I stand looking at the tracks. Who could they be, that couple, other than the representatives of blame? I am struck, in retrospect, by their half-defeated air, the way the man stayed behind the car door, and the woman held her handbag in front of herself like a shield. Although it is certain they have nothing to do with me, my anger passes suddenly into remorse, the way the blossom of an explosion turns from yellow to orange, even as its shape billows outward. And the blast wave, though slower, is more punishing: the conviction that I might have understood more, acted less ruthlessly.

• • •

“I can’t believe you ate it,” says Avie.

“I ate it. What was wrong with it? I didn’t want it to go to waste.”

“Mom, it was rancid. You can’t keep dressed salad in the refrigerator for a week and then eat it.”

“Did it hurt me? Am I still standing here? Did I like it?”

“I can’t believe you liked it.”

“I don’t like to waste things, that’s what I don’t like. It hurts me to waste things. Look at your socks.”

Avie looks down at his socks, perplexed.

“Are there shoes on your feet?”

Avie sighs. “No.”

“I can see those socks getting threadbare as I stand here.”

“Mom, you have to think more of yourself. You have to value your own mouth, your own taste buds.”

“You have to think more of your socks.” She turns and walks out of the room.

He shouts after her, “Why are you this way?” But she doesn’t bother to answer. Miriam goes over and puts her arm around his thin waist. We tease our mother, we question her, we watch her, but every time, she defeats us. There is no way in. Now she is in the other room. What is she doing? There are noises, a thump, a rustle. But when I go to look, she has gone into the bathroom and shut the door. I am filled with longing and curiosity.

Now I open my eyes again upon the Sunday summer afternoon, and I stand up from the couch and stretch. I move around the room, straightening, and into the bedroom, where I open the drawers and take out some underwear. I go to the closet and take out a bag and begin throwing things into it.
It is about three thirty. I have no plan. I will take each stage as it comes—south to I-70, north somewhere in Ohio to I-80. I will drive across the George Washington Bridge stealthily, press myself into the city as into jungle: not, as people think, to avoid capture, but rather to ambush my mother in some act, any act, to see her as she has never been seen before.

D
ana was the only woman in our freshman dental class, one of two that year in the whole dental school. The next year things changed, and a fifth of them were women, so maybe Professor Perl, who taught freshman biochemistry, didn’t persist in his habit of turning to the only woman in the class and saying, “Miss McManus, did you understand that?” assuming that if Dana got it, so had everyone else (male). In fact, Dana majored in biochemistry, and so her predictable nod of understanding was a betrayal to us all, and our class got the reputation among the faculty of being especially poor in biochemistry, a statistical anomaly, guys flunking out who would have passed any other year. Of course, Perl never blamed himself.

Dentists’ offices are very neat, and dentists are always washing their hands, and so their hands are cool and white and right under the nose, to be smelled. People would be offended if dentists weren’t as clean as possible, but they hold it against us. On television they always make us out to be prissy and compulsive. If a murder has been committed and a dentist is in the show, he will certainly have done it, and
he will probably have lived with his mother well into his thirties, to boot. Actors who play dentists blink a lot.

Dentists on television never have people coming in like the man who came to me today. His teeth were hurting him over the weekend, and so he went out to his toolbox and found a pliers and began to pull them all out, with only some whiskey to kill the pain. Pulling teeth takes a lot of strength and a certain finesse, one of which the man had and the other of which he lacked. What drove him into my office today, after fifteen years away from the dentist, was twenty-four broken teeth, some in fragments below the gum line, some merely smashed around the crown. Teeth are important. Eskimo cultures used to abandon their old folks in the snow when their teeth went, no matter how good their health was otherwise. People in our culture have a lot of privileges. One of them is having no teeth.

Dana was terrifically enthusiastic about dental school, or maybe the word is “defiant.” When she came into the lecture hall every day she would pause and look around the room, at all the guys, daring them to dismiss her, daring them, in fact, to have any thoughts about her at all. To me, dental school seemed more like a very large meal that I had to eat all by myself. The dishes were arrayed before me, and so I took my spoon and went at it as deliberately as possible, chewing up biochemistry and physiology, then fixed prosthodontics and operative dentistry, then periodontics and anesthesia and pain control.

I was happy during lab, when we were let loose on the patients. They would file in and sit down in the rows of chairs; then they would lie back, and we would stretch these wire-and-rubber frameworks over their mouths. They were called rubber dams. You lodged the wires in the patient’s
mouth and then pulled the affected tooth through a tight hole in the rubber sheet. Our professors said that they made the tooth easier to see and get at. Really, I think, they were meant to keep the students from dropping something, a tooth or even an instrument, down that open throat. They also kept the patients quiet. That little barrier let them know that they didn’t have to talk. Patients feel as if they ought to make conversation. Anyway, that huge hall would hush, and you would simply concentrate on that white tooth against that dark rubber, and the time would fly. That was the last time that I felt I could really meditate over my work. For a dentist, the social nature of the situation is the hardest thing.

I did well in dental school, but it seemed to me that I deserved more drama in my life, especially after I quit the building crew I had worked on every summer since I was sixteen. I quit the crew because I was making $4 an hour and one day I nearly crushed my left hand trying to lift a bunch of loose two-by-fours. It hurt, but before I even felt the pain (your neurons, if you’re tall, take a while) I remembered the exact cost of my first year of dental school, which was $8,792.38. A lot of hours at $4 an hour.

I took on Dana. I felt about her the way she felt about dental school. I dared her to dismiss me, and I was determined to scare the pants off her. I took the front basket off my bike, and then I would make her sit on the handlebars at midnight while we coasted down the longest, steepest street in town. We did it over and over, eight nights in a row once. I figured the more likely outcome, death, was cheaper in the end than just wrecking my hands. Besides, it was like falling in love with Dana. I couldn’t stop doing it and I was afraid she could.