“It’s hard to listen to this song,” he said.
“It’s sad,” I agreed.
“My old boyfriend auctioned himself off to it at an AIDS benefit ‘Love Slave’ auction.”
“God, I wish mine had done that! And that was the last you saw of him?” I no longer could understand the world, and so I would only pretend to try.
“Sort of.”
“You broke up?”
“Well, he caught HIV that very night. And died — just last summer.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“I think Bonnie Raitt owes you a new song.”
“Somebody does,” he said.
Easter Monday and no classes, as if it were Canada. I buzzed up on my scooter. The lawns were greening brightly, though the sky remained a furry shade of pearl. Dogs barked next door. As a belated Easter present I had brought Mary-Emma two goldfish, in deli containers. I would find a clear glass bowl to put them in — Sarah seemed to have a hundred.
Inside the Thornwood-Brink house there was holiday detritus: a three-foot chocolate bunny, a Brio train set. There were actual eggs that Sarah had boiled in different colored teas to make an elaborate marbling. They were all piled together in a single flax basket.
“I see you put all your eggs in one basket,” I said, I thought wittily, but she didn’t hear me.
“Emmie’s asleep,” said Sarah. “Even that Suzuki of yours didn’t wake her.”
“Oops,” I said. “Sorry.” Possibly I was getting used to her oblique and random reprimands. I put the fish on the table.
“Those are cute,” Sarah said. “I promise not to entertain any thoughts about seasoning them.” She was at the kitchen counter, mashing the bulbs from the Christmas paperwhites into a bowl, forming a paste. “I thought I should tell you about something.” She stopped for a second from her work. “Something that is happening.” Even in her stillness she looked busy and tense. “But you know? Let’s have a glass of SB.” SB was sauvignon blanc. I knew that now. A month ago I would have thought she was referring to the Super Bowl, or an SB vintage Gibson guitar, or her very own initials. “I’ve got a bottle in the fridge. It’s been a good long time and so it’s chilled to the center of its little bones. Yum.”
She stopped the flower bulb mashing. “Let’s go sit in the living room.” She brought the wine, a Screwpull, and two wineglasses, and we sat on the pillow-ticking sofas, the same as we had when I’d first interviewed with her.
“We mustn’t tell Edward we drank white and not red,” she said. “Are you underage?” she asked.
“Under what?” I said, smiling and sipping, and Sarah just waved her hand through the air. “Well, if you drink more than one, don’t get back on that scooter.”
“One’s good. I’m good with one.”
She sipped from her glass and rolled the SB around on her front teeth. “I like a wine that’s oaky.”
“Oaky and … just a little dokey,” I said. I was learning nothing very serious about wines but after a single sip of one was clearly willing to say anything.
Too preoccupied to smile, she seemed on the brink of something. Not for nothing were people named what they were named.
“There are things that are happening and I feel you should know,” she said. Her face bore a look I’d seen before: it was one of bravado laced with doom, like fat in meat.
An uh-oh feeling overtook me. I gulped at my SB.
“But first you should know that there’s an unfortunate backstory. Which I’ll have to tell you. But you must understand: it was years ago and we were different people then.” She fell back in a sunken way against the cushions, while I leaned forward from mine.
“You and Edward?” I asked, swallowing more wine, which was grassy and cool. I never knew anymore whom people meant when they said “we.” College had done that to me. In Dellacrosse, I had always known whom people were referring to. I also didn’t really know what people meant when they said of themselves that they were “different people then.” It seemed a piece of emotional sci-fi that a small town would not have allowed. Whaddya mean, you were a different person? Don’t give me that hoodoo! I’ve known you since you were knee-high to a coot!
“Edward and I,” she said. “We were living out east, in Massachusetts. We were named Susan and John and we had a son.”
Was I shocked? I couldn’t even tell anymore. No one, it seemed, was who they said they were.
“Are you startled?” She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to say something.
“Are you serious?” is what I chose. It seemed one could just say Are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going.
“Susan and John.” She shook her head.
“Were those your middle names?”
She paused. “In a way.”
She was about to go on when we heard Noel at the back door, with his stabbing, fidgeting key in the lock and his clanking pails and mops.
“We may have to continue this some other time,” said Sarah, leaning forward and putting her wine down.
“OK,” I said, still sipping. Noel came into the living room, with his tie-dyed sneakers, bearing a bouquet of daffodils for Sarah. I knew they’d been cut from the previous client’s yard.
“Why, thank you!” she said. “Would you like some wine?”
“OK!” he said, smiling. “It’ll go with my Diet Coke,” he said, laughing nervously.
He seldom picked flowers from Sarah’s garden (for the client after her), though once he had snipped some hydrangea from her shrub and she had warned him to cut from the bottom next time; he’d cut a big blank hole in the bush. She felt poorer people were entitled to do things that rich people weren’t. It was in lieu of a revolution. And less bloody all around. I had heard her say this on one of her Wednesdays.
“We’ll talk later,” she said to me. And I brought my wineglass to the kitchen sink and just dumped it, then went upstairs to check on Mary-Emma.
She was lying there wide awake when I peeked in.
“How are you?”
“You got brown eyes,” she said. “I of brown eyes.”
“That’s right.”
“I want blue eyes like Daddy.”
“No, you don’t. Your eyes are perfect. They need to be brown like mine!”
“OK,” she said. She was at an age where she would awake from a nap and suddenly be an inch taller, or be speaking in whole sentences, or in the grip of bleak and disturbing ideas.
“Wanna go to the park?” I asked.
“YEAH!” she cried out happily.
“First I have to show you: I brought you two Easter fish.” We went downstairs and looked at them. They were still in their take-out containers, so I took a clear glass mixing bowl from the cupboard and poured them in. They swished around and bumped noses. “What should we name them?”
“Juicy!” Mary-Emma exclaimed.
“Juicy?”
“This one’s Juicy. And this one’s, this one’s … Steve!”
“Steve?”
“Yeah. They’re brothers.” She stared at them until she looked a little cross-eyed and bored.
At the park I pushed her on the swing, higher and higher, and when she got off she dashed over to the slide and I gulped anxiously, fearing its dangers, but let her go. It was a fast slide, and from our previous visits I knew that children typically shot out from the flattened scoop of its slippery, sun-heated metal and landed on their faces, their thighs burned. Mary-Emma was no exception, but none of it fazed her. She and another girl had started a little game together, and they giddily took turns on the slide and then tried to make each other laugh at the bottom by assuming outlandish poses. Sometimes one would pretend to be unconscious or dead while the other one forced her back to living, which was indicated by giggles and brought about by tickling or pouring sand onto bare bellies or into hair. Sometimes it seemed to me that children believed death occurred in different forms than adults did, in varying degrees, and that it intersected with life in all kinds of ways that were unofficial. It was adults who felt death exerted a lurid sameness over everyone. Why couldn’t it be as varied as life was? Or at least have its lurid sameness similarly gussied up and disguised?