He closed his eyes again and willed her, willed her. He summoned up her most concrete details: her long spongy earlobes, the sparrow's-egg speckles on the backs of her hands, the slight croakiness of her voice that always made her sound so appealingly unselfconscious and lacking in vanity. Do you remember what it was like to have a date on a spring evening? she asked. It wasn't Dave she was talking to; it was someone on the phone. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a trowel in her lap; evidently the call had interrupted her gardening. Every year when spring comes, I find myself thinking of that. The boys would come up the front walk in their short-sleeved shirts that still smelled of their mothers' ironing, and we girls would be wearing flowered dresses and ballet slippers and no stockings and there was something so fresh and so… free about the first bare legs of the season. .
Dave was in the living room with his two sons and someone else. Who? Some neighbor woman, a friend of Connie's who had stopped by for a visit. Connie's on the phone, Dave told her, but she ought to be off any second. He cocked his head to listen for a winding-up note in Connie's voice, but she wasn't speaking just then and he realized now that she had been silent for several minutes. Then he understood that the silence was real the silence in the actual bedroom and that Connie wouldn't be speaking ever again.
The oldest photo album showed women in rigid dresses and complicated hairdos, men in collars so high that their chins were buried, and stern-faced babies smothered in white lace. These people might have interested him if he had known who they were, but he didn't. The captions inked on the back were frustratingly evasive. Sunday, September 10, 1893, just before a delicious meal treat, one read. Or, With the beautiful amaryllis Mother gave us at Christmas. It seemed no one had imagined that the day would come when these people would be strangers.
The later albums were more clearly labeled, but even if they had not been he would have recognized his paternal grandparents, sitting on a wide lawn with their firstborn, who grew up to be his Aunt Louise. Poor Aunt Louise: she had lost her only love to TB and died mindless in a nursing home at eighty-eight, but in the photo she was toddling triumphantly toward the camera with both little arms outstretched, and her parents were watching her progress with the proudest, happiest smiles.
In the forties people looked surprisingly glamorous, even his mother in her house dress with the slantwise stripes. In the fifties they took on color, mostly jarring pinks and blues, but they were dowdy now and rumpled and the men's haircuts were too short. Had Connie really consented to be seen in a shiny rose-colored sheath that narrowed at mid-calf so you wondered how she could walk?
After that, life must have grown more rushed, because the later photos weren't mounted. Dave opened each manila envelope to peer inside: Bitsy in her bucktoothed stage, before braces; Abe with a terrier puppy who'd been run over soon after they got him; Abe again, at his college graduation. In the bottom-most, thinnest envelope Jin-Ho and Susan were blowing soap bubbles at each other, but even they seemed long ago, their faces rounder than nowadays and less definite, less specific.
Oh, what was the point, what was the point, what was the point?
He wiped out the corner cupboard (three separate dust rags, that took) and placed the albums and the envelopes on the lowest shelf. He put the tax returns in the desk drawer where the sickroom supplies had been kept. From the basement he brought up his boxed set of miniature tools, his compartmented chest of screws and nails and his repair manuals and his tin of adhesives, and he arranged them on the upper shelves of the cupboard along with the crochet hooks and Connie's sewing basket. He lugged the trash out to the alley, the Goodwill bags to his car trunk. He dusted the desk and the lamp tables. He stuffed his cleaning rags into the hamper. He vacuumed the floor and the sofa, which was littered with specks of paper.
He felt too tired to fix himself supper. Instead he drank two glasses of Scotch and went to bed. His sleep was a drugged sleep, cottony, like a cloth laid over his face. He dreamed he was out in the country, walking through a vast field that he understood to be a furniture graveyard. Abandoned pieces of furniture were grouped by category an acre of beds, an acre of bureaus, an acre of dining-room tables. Dozens of armchairs sat beneath a mulberry tree, their seats empty except for the weeds growing up through their cushions, and the fact that they were facing each other made them seem all the lonelier. How can they stand this? he asked, and somebody off in the distance, some man in faded clothes, caroled, Ooh, how can they stand this? in a mocking, cruel voice. He stopped in his tracks, stricken. Then he felt a hand slipping into his, and he turned to see Maryam Yazdan calmly surveying the chairs. They are thinking of all they have lived through, she told him. They like to remember that. He found this consoling, for some reason, and so when she said, Shall we go? he tightened his hand around hers and followed her out of the field.
He woke up and lay for a long while staring into the dark.
By the time Maryam heard about Sami and Ziba's new house, they had already made a down payment and arranged a settlement date. She said, A new house? I didn't know you were looking!
Oh, we hardly knew it ourselves, Sami said, and Ziba said, We weren't sure we would find what we wanted; so why tell anyone?
Maryam was not just anyone, though, and it puzzled her that they had been so secretive. They must have pored over real-estate listings, taken numerous tours, debated the merits of one place compared with another. And yet they'd never breathed a word to her!
But she said, Well, this is wonderful. Congratulations. And she patted Susan on the knee. They were sitting in Maryam's living room, Susan on the sofa beside her with a picture book in her lap. Are you excited? Maryam asked her. Have you seen your new room?
It's got a window seat, Susan told her.
A window seat! Really!
You lift up the cushion part and there's space underneath for my toys. Me and Jin-Ho climbed all the way inside it, even.
Jin-Ho had been to the house?
They'd already told the Donaldsons?
Sami cleared his throat and said, We mentioned this place to Brad and Bitsy because it's in their neighborhood.
Ah. In Mount Washington, she said.
I hope you aren't disappointed we're not moving nearer you, Mom. We did think about Roland Park, but the general atmosphere of Mount Washington seemed more, I don't know…
The general atmosphere of Mount Washington seemed more Donaldsonian, Maryam thought. Better not say it, though. Well, still you'll be very close, she said. Five or ten minutes away! I'm delighted.
Then Sami and Ziba leaned forward at the same moment to pick up their teacups, as if they felt suddenly unburdened. And Maryam picked up her own teacup and smiled at them.
She thought she knew now why they hadn't told her. They were embarrassed to be observed copying the Donaldsons yet again. Oh, those Donaldsons, with their blithe assumption that their way was the only way! Feed your daughter this and not that; let her watch these programs and not those; live here and not there. So American, they were.