“Well,” he said, “we can handle that.”
“Thank you,” I said.
· · ·
I knew I should have felt grateful to Nandina for making that fridge trip. (Even though I had no doubt there’d been an investigative element to it.) Oh, whenever I took the trouble to notice, I could see that I was surrounded by people who were doing their best to look out for me. It wasn’t only Nandina. Charles brought me foil-wrapped loaves of his wife’s banana bread, heavy as bricks. Irene left fliers on my desk for life-threatening adventures designed to take my mind off myself — hang-gliding and rock-climbing and coral-reef-diving. My ex-neighbors called frequently with dinner invitations, and when I made excuses they said, “O-ka-ay …,” in this reluctant drawl that implied they were letting me off the hook this time, but not forever. And Luke had turned our supper at the restaurant into an almost-weekly event, while Nate had reinstated our racquetball games at the gym.
But I wasn’t all that good at gracious acceptance. Oh, especially not with Nandina. With Nandina I was constantly on the defensive, bristling at every intrusion and batting away her most well-meant remarks. Not that she didn’t deserve some of this. The things she came up with! Once, for instance, she said, “At least you’re not going to have to make any big domestic adjustments. I mean, seeing as how Dorothy never cooked your meals for you or anything.”
(“No,” was my rejoinder to that, “we had a very equitable marriage. We treated each other like two competent adults.”)
Or another time, when I undertook to do the laundry for the two of us: “No doubt Dorothy found it sufficient to split the wash into just whites and colors,” she told me in a forbearing tone, “but as a rule we divide the colors, then, into pales and darks.”
I didn’t let on that Dorothy would more likely have thrown all three categories into one washer load and let it go at that.
More and more often I could hear my sister thinking, It’s too bad his wife had to die, but was she really worth quite this much grief? Does he have to go on and on about it?
“You assume people won’t notice if you skip a day’s shaving or wear the same clothes all week,” she said, “but they do. Betsy Hardy told me she crossed the street the other day when she saw you coming, because she thought you wouldn’t want to be caught looking the way you did. I said, ‘Well, you were sweet to be so considerate, Betsy, but frankly, I don’t believe he’d even care.’ ”
“Betsy Hardy? I didn’t see her.”
“She saw you, is my point,” Nandina said. “I thought you were planning to fetch some better-looking clothes from your house.”
“Oh, Gil’s going to bring those over.”
“What: you mean you’d let him go through your belongings?”
“Well, yes.”
She gave me a narrow-eyed look. “When Jim Rust recommended Gil,” she said, “did he give you any clue to his background? Did he tell you what his history is? Where he’s from? Is he a Baltimore person?”
“He’s fine, Nandina. Take my word for it.”
“I was just curious, is all.”
“He never should have let you know that he was in AA.”
“I don’t have anything against AA.”
“It’s better than not being in AA if he ought to be,” I pointed out.
“Well, of course it is. You think AA is why I asked about his background? I’m completely sympathetic to his being in AA! Why, every time he comes over I offer him fruit juice or lemonade.”
“True,” I said.
But I knew that was only because she’d caught him once with a can of Coke. Nandina had a real thing about soft drinks. She didn’t just dislike them; she viewed them with moral outrage. If there were a twelve-step program for cola drinkers, I bet she would have sent them a hefty contribution.
Well, but listen to me. I had no business complaining about her. She had taken me in without hesitation when I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and she hadn’t shown the least annoyance at my upsetting her private routine. She was my closest living relative. We shared childhood memories that no one else had been part of.
Often, when we were by ourselves, one of us would start a sentence the way our father used to. “Needles to say …” we would begin — Dad’s habitual little joke, if you could call it that. And the other one would smile.
Or when I was sorting through the porcelain bowl after Gil brought it over — the bowl from my front hall, with its layers of junk mail and take-out menus and random chits of paper. I spread it all on the kitchen table one night while Nandina was fixing supper, and there was Bryan Brothers’ business card. I said, “Gilead!”
“What?”
“That’s Gil’s name: Gilead Bryan. I’d been assuming it was Gilbert.”
Nandina stopped stirring the soup and said, “Gilead. Like the song?”
“Like the song,” I said, and it was another “Needles to say” moment, because how many other people would come up with “There Is a Balm in Gilead”? It was our mother’s favorite hymn, the one she sang when she washed the dishes, only I always thought it was a bomb in Gilead, and when one of our cousins made fun of me for singing it that way, Nandina cracked him over the head with a Monopoly board.
Living in this house again was not half bad, really. In a way it was kind of cozy.
At Christmastime, the company always made a big production out of one of our past titles, The Beginner’s Book of Gifts. We arranged to have it displayed next to cash registers all over town, with a red satin bow tied around each copy. I myself felt the bow was illogical. After all, the book was about gifts; it was not a gift in itself. But Irene was very fond of the bow, which she had dreamed up several years back, and Charles claimed it went over well. Generally we deferred to Charles in matters of public taste. He was the only one of us who led what I thought of as a normal life — married to the same woman since forever, with triplet teenage daughters. He liked to tell little domestic-comedy, Brady Bunch-style anecdotes about the daughters, and the rest of us would hang around listening like a bunch of anthropologists studying foreign customs.
Nandina and I let Christmas pass almost unobserved. We had stopped exchanging gifts years ago, and apart from the balsam wreath that Nandina brought home from the supermarket we made no attempt to decorate. On Christmas Day we went to Aunt Selma’s for dinner, as we had done since our childhood. Even my marriage hadn’t changed that, although Dorothy and I had sworn every year that we would do something different the next time Christmas came around. The food was dismal, and the guest list had shrunk as various relatives died or moved away. This year there were just five at the table: Aunt Selma herself, Nandina and I, and Aunt Selma’s son Roger with his much younger third wife, Ann-Marie. We had not seen Roger and Ann-Marie since the previous Christmas, so there was the issue of Dorothy’s death to be waded through. Roger was one of those people in favor of pretending it hadn’t happened. He was clearly embarrassed that I had had the bad taste to show up, even. But Ann-Marie plunged right in. “I was so, so sorry,” she said, “to hear about Dorothy’s passing.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And last Christmas, she was looking so well!”
“Yes … she was well.”
“How are you doing, though?” she asked me.
“I’m okay.”
“I mean, really how.”
“I’m doing all right, all things considered.”