“I don’t want to track in snow,” Ms. Pines said.
“The maid’ll clean it up,” I said. A joke.
“Okay,” she said, in wonderment still. “I…”
“How long since you were here?” I said, still in the TV-silent living room. Ms. P., in the foyer, inched toward the foot of the stairs. The narrow hallway past the basement door and on to the kitchen lay ahead — the same house is on thousands of streets, Muncie to Minot.
Her gaze for a moment carried up the stairs, her lips a tiny bit left apart. “I’m sorry?” she said. She’d heard me but didn’t understand.
“Have you visited before? Since you lived here?”
“Oh. No,” Ms. Pines said, registering. “Never. I walked out of this house — this door…” She turned toward the glass storm door behind her. “… in nineteen sixty-nine, when I was almost seventeen. I was a junior. At Haddam High. I walked to school.”
“My kids went there,” I said.
“I’m sure.” She looked at me strangely then, as if my presence was a surprise. From the warmth of her red coat, enforced by the warmth of my house, Ms. Pines had begun exuding a sweet floral aroma. Old Rose. A fragrance someone older might’ve worn. Possibly her mother had sniftered it on upstairs in front of the medicine-cabinet mirror, before an evening out with her husband. Where, I wondered, did Negroes go for fun in Haddam, pre-1969? Trenton?
“You’re absolutely welcome to look around,” I said, extra-obligingly.
“Oh, that’s very kind, Mr. Bascombe. I’m feeling a little light-headed.” She re-righted her shoulders and took a firmer grip on her big patent-leather purse. Snow had puddled on the area rug inside the doorway. She was transfixed.
“Let me get you a glass of orange juice,” I said, stepping off past her and down the hall toward the kitchen, where it smelled of Sally’s morning bacon and the Krups cooking breakfast coffee to licorice. I hauled out the Minute Maid carton, found a plastic glass, gushed it full, and came back as fast as I could. Why OJ seemed the proper antidote to being transfixed is anybody’s guess.
“That’s very nice. Thank you so much,” Ms. Pines said. She hadn’t budged. I put the glass into her un-gloved hand. She took a dainty sip, swallowed, cleared her throat softly, and smiled, touching her glove to her lips, then handed me back the glass, which had decals of leaping green porpoises, from our years on The Shore — gone now except for the glasses. The old-rose fragrance was dense around Ms. Pines, mingling with a faint tang of intimate perspiration.
“Let me take your coat.”
“Oh, no,” Ms. Pines said. “I’m not going to impose anymore.”
From the basement, the heat pump came smoothly to life. A distant murmur.
“You should just look around,” I said. “I don’t have to go with you. I’ll sit in the kitchen and read the paper or refill the bird feeder for the squirrels. I’m retired. I’m just waiting to die, or for my wife to come back from Mantoloking — whichever’s first.”
“Well,” Ms. Pines said, smiling frailly, letting her eyes follow up the stairs. “That’s very generous. If you really don’t mind, I’ll just look upstairs at my old room. Or your room.” She blinked at the prospect, then looked at me.
“Great!” I said for the fourth time. “Take your good sweet time. You know where the kitchen is. You won’t find things much changed.”
“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “We’ll have to see.”
“That’s why you’re here,” I said and went off down the hall to leave her to it.
FOR A TIME, I HEARD MS. PINES — MOUNTING THE stairs, the risers squeezing, the floor joists muttering as she stepped room to room. She emitted no personal sounds I could hear via the registers or the stairwell. I’d already read the Times. So, I sat contentedly at the breakfast table, meager snowfall cluttering the back-yard air, caking on the rhododendrons and the Green Egg smoker. On a legal pad, I’d begun jotting down some entries for the monthly feature I write for the We Salute You magazine, which we hand out free of charge in airports to our troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or wherever our country’s waging secret wars and committing global wrongs in freedom’s name — Syria, New Zealand, France. We Salute You contains helpful stateside info and easy how-to’s — in case a vet’s memory’s been erased — along with phone numbers and addresses and contact data that the troopers, swabbies, airmen, and marines might need during their first critical hours back in the world.
My column’s called “WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?” It contains oddball items I glean out of “the media” that don’t really approximate fresh thought — that in fact often violate the concept of thought by being plug-obvious, asinine, or both — but that still come across our breakfast tables every morning or flashed through our smartphones (I don’t own one) disguised as news. Veterans often come back after a year of dodging bullets, seeing their pals’ limbs blown off, enduring unendurable heat, eating sand, and learning to trust no one — even the people they want to trust — with a fairly well-established sense that no one back home, the people they’re fighting, dying, and wasting their lives for, knows dick about anything that really matters, and might just as well go back to the third grade or be shot to death drive-by style (which is why so many of our troops are eager to re-up). My column tries to take a bit of the edge off by letting soldiers know we’re not all as dumbass as newts back home, and in fact some of the idiotic stuff in the news can be actually hilarious, so that suicide can be postponed to a later date.
One item I’m including for January is a study up at Harvard that found a direct correlation between chronic pain and loss of sleep. If you hurt twenty-four hours a day, sleep’s hard to come by — the Harvard scientists detected. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS? These things aren’t difficult to find.
In November, I included one from a top-notch sports medicine think tank in Fort Collins, where kinesiologists noticed that running slowly and not very far was much better for you, over a ten-year period, than running forty minutes or farther than eight miles — which, it turns out, increases the likelihood you’ll die sooner rather than later. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?
And one I’d seen just the day before, and was noting at the breakfast table, was out of the Lancet in the UK and represented a conclusion drawn at the Duchess of Kent Clinic in Shropshire (the same person who hands over the Wimbledon trophy, though she always seems like someone who couldn’t care less about tennis or even understand it). The doctors in Shropshire noticed that in cases of repetitive thought patterning leading to psychic decline, lengthy institutionalization, and eventually suicide, the most common cause-agent seemed to be not trying hard enough to think about something pleasant. WHAT MAKES THAT NEWS?
My pen name — it seemed appropriate — is “HLM.” The magazine often forwards me letters from vets who say that these squibs — which I include without comment — have brightened their first hours back and taken their minds off what most anybody’s mind would likely run to, if twenty-four hours before you’d been pinned down by enemy fire in Waziristan, but now find yourself in the Department of Motor Vehicles, trying to get your driver’s license renewed, and are being told by a non — English speaker that you don’t have the six pieces of ID necessary, plus a major credit card with your name spelled exactly like your passport.