It turned out that in the daytime our little house was Grand Central Station. Workmen came and went; power tools whizzed and hammers pounded. I was lost in all the confusion; nobody knew who I was. When I peered in through the screen at my new Butterscotch floor, a guy in a bandanna head-wrap asked if I had some business there. But once I identified myself, they were all over me. Would I like to take a tour? Would I care to see the sunporch? Gil was not around at the time, but clearly these men knew my story. They spoke to me in the respectful tones of funeral guests. They made me feel elderly, although we were all more or less the same age.
I didn’t really want a tour of the house, but I felt that I shouldn’t say no. (I was bearing in mind Nandina’s remark about how workmen needed to feel appreciated.) And after we got started, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. The guy in the head-wrap led the way, and the others, all five or six of them, dropped what they were doing to trail behind us. They were conspicuously silent at first, listening as the head-wrap guy explained what we were looking at. “Very nice,” I murmured, and, “Mmhmm. I see.” Then, bit by bit, they began to chime in, talking over each other, telling me how this particular molding had been the devil to find a match for, how they’d had to rip out that cornice three times before they got it right. “You guys are doing great,” I told them, and they went into an “Aw, shucks” routine and stuck their hands in their rear pockets and looked down at their shoes.
I felt ashamed of myself for waiting so long to do this. Now my refusal to visit seemed petulant, like a child kicking his bicycle after it’s tipped him over. What had happened wasn’t the house’s fault. And besides, these men had stripped away so much that it didn’t seem like the same place anymore. Even my bedroom, which they hadn’t touched, was unrecognizable, heaped as it was with a jumble of furniture shrouded in white canvas.
I felt all the more ashamed when Gil walked in. He looked so surprised to see me, and so pleased; he actually blushed, and then he had to take me around and show me everything I’d just seen.
So: a good visit, all in all. But what I learned from it was, no point going there during work hours if I hoped to catch sight of Dorothy again.
I took to stopping by in the evenings, therefore, or very early on Sunday mornings, when the neighbors weren’t out and about yet. At 6:30 or 7 a.m. I would park out front and just sit a while, staring through the windshield at the spot where I had seen Dorothy. I would relive every detail of that encounter, the way you’d relive a dream that you were trying to sink back into. Her square gray shirt, her black trousers, the tilt of her chin as she watched me approach, the steadiness of her gaze. My eyes worked so hard to summon her up that they were practically knitting her, but even so, she failed to appear.
Then I’d get out of my car and walk toward the house. Very slowly, though, just in case she wanted to intercept me at any point. I would pause after every few steps and look around me in an elaborately interested way, up at the shards of blue sky showing through the trees, down at the sidewalk with its imprint of old leaf stains like patterned fabric. But she didn’t appear, and so eventually I would unlock my front door, brace myself, and step inside.
The detritus of the workmen’s daily lives — their drink cups and crumpled drop cloths and jar lids full of cigarette stubs — made the house feel populated even though it was empty. I would have to stand still a moment, regaining my sense of solitude. After that I would move through the house from front to back, from hallway to kitchen.
No Dorothy. Smells of fresh-cut lumber, cigarette smoke, damp plaster, but no soap or isopropyl alcohol. In the kitchen I would stand waiting so long that the silence began to echo at me like the silence inside a seashell, but she never said, “Hello, Aaron.”
Had she said those words aloud? Or had they just been in my mind, the same way I’d told her my own thoughts? Had the whole scene been in my mind? Had I been so deranged by grief that I had concocted her from thin air?
I left the house. I walked back to the street. (But, again, very slowly.) I got in my car and drove away.
Where she showed up next was the farmers’ market.
Of all places, the farmers’ market! The one in Waverly. I’d gone there on a Saturday morning to buy salad greens for Nandina. I looked up from the butter lettuce to find Dorothy at the next stall, examining the beets.
She used to act politely bored at farmers’ markets. She would accompany me, but just tolerantly, forbearingly, and she would stand around swallowing her yawns while I chose our vegetables for the week.
Also: beets? Beets are so labor-intensive. And they require a certain amount of culinary know-how. Besides which, she didn’t much like them. She only agreed to eat them because of the beta-carotene.
But there she stood, lifting a rubber-banded cluster of beets from the heap and studying it seriously, turning it over several times as if trying to learn it before setting it back down and picking up another.
I moved toward her as cautiously as if she were some skittish woodland animal. My feet made no sound at all. And when I reached her, I didn’t speak. I turned toward the beets myself and selected a bunch of my own. We were standing side by side, so close that even a breath caused our sleeves to whisper together. I could feel the warmth that her skin gave off through the cotton. It warmed my very soul; I can’t describe the comfort I felt. I wanted to stand there forever. There was nothing more I could have asked for.
The woman tending the stall said, “Help you?”
I shook my head, almost imperceptibly.
“You’ll want to use the tops of these, too,” she said. “Notice how fresh and green they are. All you do is boil them up first in a little salted water, say five or so minutes, and then melt you a lump of butter in a …”
Hateful woman. Hateful, loud, prattling, cackle-voiced woman. I felt a coolness at my right side, and I knew without looking that Dorothy was gone.
Then she came to Spindle Street.
To the street where my office is.
I’d been to lunch with Peggy and Irene at the little café on the corner. Irene went shoe-shopping afterward, but Peggy and I headed back to work, strolling at a leisurely pace because it happened to be an especially nice day. It was sunny but not too hot, with a little bit of a breeze. And Peggy chose that moment, wouldn’t you know, to attempt a heart-to-heart conversation. She must have figured she should seize her chance, since for once we had no audience. She said, “So.” And then she said, “Aaron.” She said, “So, how has your life been going, Aaron?”
I said, “My life.”
“Would you say that you’ve moved past the very worst of your grief? Or is it still as bad as ever.”
“Oh,” I said, “well …”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking.”
“No,” I said.
Which was true, I found. At that particular moment, I honestly did want to tell somebody what I was feeling. (Share with somebody, I very nearly just said — not my usual language at all.)
“In a way,” I told Peggy, “it’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are … muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and — whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.”
She said, “Is there something the rest of us could be doing to make it easier? Should we talk more about it? Talk less?”