The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (23 page)

“He can’t sit still,” Sandra said. “It worries me.”

Norman shook his head once again over the plants and then turned back to us, shading his eyes from the sun. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” he asked me. “I’ve got to go down to the golf club for a quick game.”

“You see?” Sandra called gleefully. “Well, stay this side!”

“I’m going into town,” I said. “I don’t think it’s on your way.”

“Got to drive anyhow,” Norman said. “Just jump into the car, hippity-hop.”

That evening the party glimmered below me with candles and lanterns. My room was like part of the evening, and as the rich murmur rose up to me I watched Dolores and a boy, who were both dressed in white with local weavings over their clothes, as they circulated, carrying trays among the guests. When I shut the door behind me to go downstairs, I could feel my apartment swell with dreams poised to overtake me on my return.

I made a quick circle through the garden—naturally, Marcos and Elena were not there—and I noticed Simon Peter heading in my direction. I turned away just in time and found myself facing a snub-nosed woman in a ruffled dress, with sticky-looking yellow-brown rolls of hair like varnished wood shavings. “You don’t have a drink!” she said. “Well, I hope you can hold out for about an hour. The best thing to do is just to go in and pour yourself something, but it makes Norman so miserable if he sees. How long ago was it they moved from the big house? Nine years? Ten years? Still, I suppose it’s a difficult adjustment. Sandra looks quite well, though, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sometimes it’s worse when she’s just come out of the clinic,” the woman said. “It’s hard to remember, isn’t it, that she was the one who really ran the show all those years when Norman was such a souse. Oh, she was just as capable as anything! Of course, he was always just…
sweet
, wasn’t he? A
gentle
man, Bob always says.”

How dare she, I thought. How dare this stranger tell her friends’ secrets to me. But as I thought it I realized that Sandra and Norman had already offered me this information about themselves, and I looked down to avoid the reflection in this woman’s face of my own brutality and cowardice.

“Such a pity about this weather,” the woman said. “All this haze. Or smog, whatever it is. We never used to have this.” She patted her careful permanent. “Oh, I see that you’re admiring my sash,” she said. “Guatemalan. Old, the girl said, and she seemed honest. I think she was German.”

“I’m sure,” I said, looking around for Norman and Sandra. I would say good night and then leave.

“Excuse me?” the woman said.

“Pardon me?” I said. “Yes, it must be.”

“Well, at least I was told it was,” the woman said. “They still do marvelous things, of course, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Bob and I were horribly disappointed ourselves last year. We had a wonderful view of the lake, but otherwise it was impossible. And the meals! Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you that it really wasn’t food at all.”

“Perhaps I will go inside and get myself something,” I said, but at that moment the boy appeared with a tray of frothy drinks. He was very young, really a child, and he was absolutely radiant. He seemed delighted with his tray and his uniform.

“Uh-uh,” the woman said loudly as the boy started to move off. “Hold still there.” As the woman drained her glass and exchanged it for a full one, I realized that the boy looked exactly like Dolores—he must have been her son.

“Hello, hello,” Norman said. He was crossing past us on the lawn, and he held firmly by the elbow a woman who walked unsteadily in high-heeled sandals. “All set up, I see. Good.”

“Muriel,” said the woman with Norman. “No one
told
me you were here yet.”

“Just,” said the woman I was talking to. “Barely a week.”

“Marvelous,” the other woman called back over her shoulder as she and Norman continued on their way. “And how’s Bob?”

“Well, you know.” Muriel leaned across me to answer her retreating friend. “He’s been out on the course all day.” Both women laughed and waved. “Actually,” Muriel said to me, “he just can’t stand to come to their parties any longer. He was so close to Norman, after all, and since they lost the Fort Lauderdale place Bob has hardly had the heart to see them. But I feel we just have to come out for Gerald and Helen, don’t you? You know”—she paused and turned on me a look of blind radar—“I don’t remember you from Fort Lauderdale—”

“Isn’t this lovely,” said Sandra, arriving in a whirl of skirts. She put a bare, somewhat slack arm around Muriel. “Everyone all together.”

“Just a moment, dear,” Muriel said, reaching over with a piece of Kleenex to wipe a bit of lipstick off Sandra’s tooth. “There. I was just telling your young friend here about your beautiful, beautiful place in Fort Lauderdale.”

“We had such fun, didn’t we?” Sandra said.

“Where do you two know each other from?” Muriel said.

“Oh, she’s my darling,” Sandra said. “Isn’t she cute? But she’s so busy. Full of important things to do.” She crinkled her nose and put it against mine for a moment. “I hate you when you’re busy,” she said. She turned to Muriel. “Where’s Bob?” she said. “I haven’t seen Bob all evening.”

“He was miserable not to be able to make it,” Muriel said. “But he was simply exhausted. He spent the entire day on the course with Dr. Skip.”

I realized that I’d never seen Sandra’s face in repose before. She focused dispassionately on Muriel as Muriel carefully picked a fallen blossom off her dress, and when Muriel looked up again Sandra was still gazing at her. “He gets tired,” Muriel said, glancing at me to enlist my support. “He’s not as young as he used to be.” But I was looking at her in just the way that Sandra had looked at her, and Sandra herself turned and walked off.

“There!” Muriel said. “Well, I suppose I’ve done something now, but that’s just the kind of thing—” An expression of dull triumph spread across her face. “She blames us. She blames Norman. But what else can Norman do? He’s the only one with the authority to commit her.”

But over on the patio something was happening. Just as Norman reached down to take a drink from Dolores’s son, Sandra strode up. Norman seemed unable to move as he watched Sandra grip the child’s shoulder and with her free hand take a drink from the tray, lifting it high above her head. The child stared, his huge eyes gleaming with fear, and the glass seemed to hesitate where Sandra released it, twinkling lazily in the air, before it shattered on the slate. The sound seemed a signal for the party to resume, more noisily than before, and the entire event was swallowed in the cleft of silence that closed behind us while Sandra raised the glasses one by one from the boy’s tray and let them drop.

As I crossed the lawn, a pulpy hand grabbed mine. “You’re not going to be all upset now, are you?” a voice said. The voice and hand belonged to a large man in Bermuda shorts. “It’s over and done with,” he said. “Tomorrow no one will even remember.” I snatched my hand away and continued across the lawn.

I found Sandra in the living room leaning on Dolores, who comforted her as if she were a child. Her crying sounded like a small, intermittent cough. Norman stood several feet away, looking up at the moon. His face was wet with tears, I saw, and, like the face that looked back at him from the moon, it was indistinct, as if it were being slowly worn away. There was nothing I could do here.

Near the gate, Dolores’s son was kicking listlessly at the wall. We pretended not to notice each other as I went out.

By the time I got to the square it was nearly empty. Four men still stood at equidistant points around the band shell conjuring streams of bubbles from their bottles of colored liquid, but the other vendors and the crowds had disappeared, and the last remaining people must have assumed, as I sat down on a bench, that I was waiting for something.

Had Sandra and Norman ever been aware of the life they were making for themselves? Probably not. It seemed that one simply ate any fruit at hand, scattering the seeds about carelessly and then years later found oneself walled in by the growth. I cast my mind back into my own past, straining to see any crossroad, any telling choice, that would indicate the destination toward which I was moving, but there was only the gentle clacking of the broad leaves above me and a slight scent of roses eddying through the night air.

If only I could be lifted up and borne off to someplace further along in time, to where the hours would move forward in a benign, steady procession and I would spend the modest coinage of daily life among pleasant people. I closed my eyes wearily for a moment, and when I opened them, a piece of chiffon seemed to wind around me, a billowing thing that had belonged to my mother’s mother. I pored over it, studying the thrilling colors that were unfaded by previous exposure to memory. I held it up, filtering a cold afternoon light through its ravishing thinness. The patterns were larger, and the threads and the dark interstices between them, and then it was gone and the night was around me again. Yet I’d seen that forgotten scarf as perfectly as if some globe underfoot had rotated thirty years back, placing me right next to it.

And now there was another rotation, and I was crouching in the alley, where garbage cans clustered like mushrooms, and the brick apartment buildings rose up and up, casting a private weather around me. Most of the windows were dark and vacant, but in some, white shades were pulled halfway down. One cord and ring turned aimlessly, ominously, in a ghostly breath of air. I watched and watched until a tightening circle of darkness closed around it.

I sat shivering and miserable at the edge of a community pool where my mother sent me to swim on Saturdays. Lights, reflected from under the water, rippled on the dark walls and ceiling, and the tile room echoed with loose booming sounds. Chlorine stank, and burned in my nose and eyes.

During recess I leaned against the fence as classmates played tetherball—an awful game, dogged and pointless. Sharon, a bossy fat girl, came over and stood next to me. She had never talked to me before, but now she asked me to go skating after school. I looked at her uneasily. Had she felt sorry for me? As I stalled, I saw anxiety erode her self-assurance, and her purpose became clear—she thought I’d be easily acquired: “Sharon is making friends now,” her relieved parents would be able to say. Well, I did not have to be her life raft. “No, thank you,” I said. My strength had returned. “I have to get back to my mother.”

In the university library I talked with a man from one of my classes. I was stricken with a fear that he was going to ask me to have coffee, and while I waited, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, his face became less and less familiar. Suddenly he checked his watch and turned away, leaving me confused.

My friend Pamela and I sat in our favorite café after an early Sunday supper, studying our check. We opened our purses, and each of us carefully counted out what she owed. The headlights of the cars that drove past were sulfurous yellow in a cold autumn drizzle. Time to go—the office tomorrow.

Well. Yes. That had been only last month. I blinked at the shapes of the foliage becoming visible against the velvety night. What random, uneventful memories. In any case, it must be terribly late, and I ought to be asleep, but as I rose to go, there was the sudden rush of entering a tunnel, and I sat with my mother, holding one of her hands. I traced with my finger the huge, adult bones, the fascinating veins that crossed it like mysterious rivers; I fitted my attention exactly to the ridgings of her knuckles, the wedding ring, her pale, flat nails. “Your hand is so beautiful,” I said.

“My hand is hideous,” she said, withdrawing it. “I have hideous hands. They’re old.” Later, in private, I cried until I felt sore. How old had I been then? Not more than seven, I suppose, but how well I knew those hands when I saw them lying, truly old, as frail as paper on the hospital coverlet. The light from the window fell across them, and across my mother’s sleeping face, her skin soft, like a worn cloth, as I stood in the doorway wondering if I should make some small noise to see if she was ready to wake. But light was coming through the walls of the hospital room, and they faded, and my mother faded, into the sparkling dawn.

Heavens. Vanished. How quickly the long night had turned to morning. How little there was behind me. I got up from the hard bench, stamping slightly to bring the blood back into my feet. Colors began to pulse into the day, and a terror took hold of me at being out here in the open as, deeper and surer with every beat, colors filled up the leaves and the flowers and the steep walled streets and the circle of mountains all around me, and the sky, too, where a round yellow sun was rising.

People were appearing in the square, quietly preparing for business, and I saw that there was a row of women already sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, waiting for change. As I quickly distributed mine among them, one of the women said something to me. How thin she was, that woman—there was practically nothing left of her. At the correct moment she would need only to shrug off her ragged shawl in order to ascend from the sidewalk, weightless.