Dorothy still didn’t speak, but I could see that her expression was softening. She might even have been starting to smile, a little.
“The waitress would ask if we wanted bibs but we would say no, that was for tourists. And then we’d pick up our mallets and we’d be sitting there banging away like kindergarteners at Activity Hour, with bits of shell flying up and sticking to your dress and my tux, but we would just laugh; what would we care? We would just laugh and go on hammering.”
Dorothy was smiling for real now, and her face seemed to be shining. In fact she was shining all over, and growing shimmery and transparent. It was sort of like what you see when you swerve your eyes as far to the left as you can without turning your head, so you can glimpse your own profile. First your profile is there and then it’s half not there; it’s nothing but a thread of an outline. And then she was gone altogether.
9
I never saw Dorothy again after that. I did keep an eye out, at first, but underneath I think I knew that she had left for good. Nowadays, I step into the backyard without the slightest expectation that I’ll meet her. I hoist Maeve into her toddler seat and start her gently swinging, and all I have on my mind is what a beautiful Saturday morning it is. Even this early in the day, the sunshine feels like melting liquid on my skin.
“More, Daddy! More!” Maeve says. “More” is her favorite word, which tells you a lot about her. More hugs, more songs, more tickle-game, more of the world in general. She’s one of those children who seem overjoyed to find themselves on this planet — a sturdy little blond squiggle-head with a preference for denim overalls and high-top sneakers, the better for climbing, running, rolling down hills, getting into trouble.
I have become expert at grabbing the back of the swing seat in the very center, so that, even one-handed, I can send it off perfectly straight. When it returns I push it higher by pressing a palm against the puff of denim ballooning between the slats. (Underneath her overalls, Maeve still wears diapers. Although we’re working on that.) She bends double over the front bar and wriggles her legs ecstatically, skewing her trajectory, but I’m patient; when the swing approaches again, I grab the top slat to restart her. We have a couple of hours to fill before her mother gets home from her errands.
“Here goes,” I say, and Maeve says, “Whee!” I don’t know where she learned that. It’s a word I associate with comic strips, and she enunciates it just that precisely, so that I can almost see it printed inside a balloon above her head.
There was a time when the thought of remarriage seemed inconceivable to me. I could not wrap my mind around it. When Nandina once or twice referred to it as a possibility for my very distant future, I got a lead weight in my stomach. I felt like someone contemplating food right after a heavy meal. “Oh, that will change, by and by,” Nandina said in her all-knowing way. I just glared at her. She had no idea.
The Christmas after she and Gil got engaged, we went to Aunt Selma’s for Christmas dinner as usual, except that this year Gil came, too. And as I was driving the three of us over, Nandina just happened to drop the information that Roger and Ann-Marie would be bringing Ann-Marie’s girlfriend Louise. I cannot tell you how I dislike the word “girlfriend” when it’s used to mean the platonic female friend of a grown woman. Also, I knew perfectly well who this Louise would be. She was the famous Christmas Eve Widow, the one who could presumably have handled her husband’s death just fine if he hadn’t died just before a holiday. Ah, yes, I could see the machinery spinning here.
“This was supposed to be a family occasion,” I told Nandina.
“And so it is!” she said blithely.
“I would hardly call the unknown acquaintance of our first cousin’s third wife a member of the family.”
“Aaron, for mercy’s sake! It’s Christmas! It’s the time for taking in people who have no place else to go.”
“What: she’s a homeless person?”
“She’s, I don’t know. Maybe her family lives on the other side of the country. And the season has especially sad connotations for her, if you’ll recall.”
Notice the careful omission of such telltale phrases as “so much in common” or “getting you two together.” But I was no dummy. I knew.
When we arrived at Aunt Selma’s, Louise was already in place, installed at one end of the otherwise empty couch. Roger and Ann-Marie sat in armchairs, and Gil and Nandina took the love seat. So, naturally, I was settled next to Louise.
She was what I had expected, more or less: a thin, attractive young woman with a slant of short brown hair that swung artfully to one side when she tipped her head. She tipped her head often during our first few minutes together, fixing me with a bright-eyed gaze as we embarked on the usual small talk. It emerged that she was the type who prefaced even the most unexceptional statement with “Are you sitting down?”—a question I’ve always compared to laughing at your own jokes. When I asked what she did for a living, for instance: “Are you sitting down?” she said. “I’m an editor! Just like you! Only freelance.”
Her thinness was the kind that comes artificially, from dieting. You could tell somehow that she was not the weight that she was meant to be. Her knife blade of a dress had clearly been chosen with an eye to accentuating her prominent collarbones and the two jutting knobs of her hips. I don’t know why this annoyed me. I suppose that if we’d liked each other it wouldn’t have annoyed me, but by now we had both arrived at that despairing stage where you realize that the other person is simply too other to bother with. Louise had stopped prettily tipping her head, and her gaze started veering sideways to conversations elsewhere in the room. I felt a strong urge to excuse myself and go home.
At dinner, she was seated on my right. (We had place cards this year, to ensure there’d be no mistakes.) However, now that she’d given up on me she addressed the bulk of her remarks to Gil, across the table. She announced to him during the soup course that she had a “very unique” relationship with clocks. “Every time I look at one, just about, you know what the time is? Nine-twelve.”
Gil said, “Ah …,” and wrinkled his forehead.
“And nine-twelve is — Are you sitting down?”
He sent a bewildered glance toward his lap.
“Nine-twelve is the day I was born!”
“Huh?”
“September twelfth! Isn’t that just eerie? It happens way more often than you can explain scientifically. Why, on my very first trip to London, years and years ago, of course I went to see Big Ben, and can you guess what time it was when I got there?”
Gil looked panicked.
I said, “Twelve-oh-nine?”
“What? No, my birthday is—”
“Because you were in England, after all, where they say ‘twelfth September’ instead of ‘September twelfth.’ ”
“No … actually—”
“Aaron,” Nandina broke in, “tell Louise about Beginner’s Jet Lag.”
“I forget,” I said.
“Aaron.”
She thought I was being difficult, but I honestly did forget. I couldn’t think of anything but the endless number of hours before I could make my escape. Till then, we had so much food to plow through. Not just the soup (cream of flour, as near as I could make out), but baked ham in an overcoat of pineapple rings, olive-drab broccoli, and mashed sweet potatoes cobbled with miniature marshmallows, followed by fruitcake for dessert along with — oh, God — a second dessert, which Louise had brought: a platter of cookies shaped like stars and bells and wreaths. I sent Nandina a “See there?” look, because one thing Nandina hated was unexpected contributions to a dinner party, but she was too mad at me to respond. The cookies were dead-white and paper-thin, dusted on top with red and green sugar. I took one for politeness’ sake and bit into it, but it had no taste. Just flat, insipid sweetness. I set it down on my plate and started praying for coffee. Not that I planned to drink any at such an hour, but coffee would signal the end of this interminable meal. It was already late afternoon, and a dull gray twilight furred the corners of the dining room.