A Watershed Year (18 page)

“I have something to show you,” Yulia said. “This came in mail.”

The construction-paper card had a roughly drawn blue heart on the cover. Inside were squiggles that might have been water and a sun with green rays poking out. An adult hand had written a name in Russian letters in the lower right-hand corner. Yulia handed the card to Lucy.

“Mat made this himself?” Lucy said. “Can I keep it?”

“Of course,” Yulia said.

She realized Mat hadn’t made the card specifically for her, but it made him real in a way the picture, and even the video, did not. She
could imagine him sitting at a low table, coloring the heart, trying to stay inside the outline, and then the sun, choosing the crayons that weren’t already broken or small nubs. And then a caregiver—some adult who was paid to keep the children occupied—would have taken it from him. Written his name. Cleaned up the crayons. No more time for coloring. Lucy would let him color for hours if he wanted to.

Yulia spoke, bringing Lucy back to the present as their meals arrived.

“So, you have a boyfriend, Lucy?”

“The social worker already went over my love life during the home study.”

“I am asking as friend. And this, of course, will affect Mat as well.”

“Well, you have nothing to worry about. Someone very special to me died last year, though he was never my boyfriend. There might be someone new, but it’s very early, so I can’t really tell you where that’s going.”

Yulia stopped eating her
biryani
, a sign that she was exceptionally interested in the topic. She rested her broad chin on a closed fist.

“So this man you loved who was never boyfriend? He was married?”

“No, it wasn’t that. We just didn’t talk about how we felt. He was engaged when we met, and then he was diagnosed with cancer. I just didn’t think it was fair to tell him how I felt.”

“So nothing?”

“Nothing… Except for one night. But I’m not even sure that happened.”

Yulia put another fist under her chin, as if it needed two for proper support.

“Tell me.”

“It was just a kiss, or at least I think it was.”

“And you never talk about this?”

“Never. Maybe I dreamed it.”

“But this is not something you forget.”

Yulia was right, of course. A kiss, you don’t forget. Her confession had taken a third seat now, in front of the plate of naan. It was a source of embarrassing intimacy, binding them together like a pilfered diary.

“And now?” Yulia said. “Other man?”

“He’s a little younger than I am,” she said. “I can’t see him taking on the father role just yet, so I don’t see how it’ll work out.”

The smell of curry and the weight of the Indian food in her stomach made Lucy feel sluggish. She pulled out a twenty, said good-bye, and left Yulia to finish the naan. On the way out, she regretted running at the mouth about her love life. But as she walked down the sidewalk, slowing to let a woman with a stroller go by, she realized it had given her some clarity. She had loved Harlan in a way that never quite fit with the reality of their lives. But with Louis, the potential was there for substance, for more than just stories she told herself inside her head.

HARLAN IS RELATING someone else’s experience, Lucy’s sure of it. The doctor is confused. They’ll find out that the test results were swapped, meant for an elderly man from Tacoma Park who had emphysema anyway. They’ll call him tomorrow with the news, and his wife will cry.

On the off chance that Harlan’s diagnosis is accurate, she wants to mention a few saints he might consider studying for inspiration. His beliefs, she knows, are agnostic at best; he’s like most of her academic friends, too research bound to allow for the mystery of grace. But she tries anyway.

“Do you know why I’m so fascinated by the saints?” she asks.

“I can’t say that I do.”

“Because they take me out of my small frame of reference and force me to think about the scope of human history, not just whether my library books are overdue. If you want to know what the human spirit is capable of doing, read about the life of a saint.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Harlan says, which means he must be tired. He rarely passes up the chance for a good didactic argument.

“Let’s go outside,” she says. “I need some air.”

She pulls open the cheap sliding-glass door, and he follows her onto the small balcony, which she has furnished with an outlet-store lounge chair and a folding metal chair. She’s only on the third floor, so they don’t get much of a view, just a long line of anemic pine trees. No moon at all.

She gives him the lounge chair, which has cushions on it. She balances on the folding chair, bringing her knees up to her chin. She closes her eyes and feels as if she is in a play, waiting for the curtain to open, memorized lines at the ready. The dialogue is new, strange in her mouth, and has an air of unreality about it. But it’s Harlan’s turn to speak. She’s waiting for her cue.

The night air is still, as if it’s holding its breath, waiting for Harlan’s next words.

“When I was a kid in Tennessee,” Harlan says, “I used to imagine that someday I would have my own house, and it would have a special room just for playing cards, because my parents played cards all the time. I would invite my friends over, and we would play cards all night, and they would never refuse, because I had this special room. Just for cards.”

“Just for cards,” she says.

“It had a bar in it, too.”

“Of course.”

“And a soda machine.”

She nods, and they both look up, searching for the moon instinctively, though it’s nowhere to be seen.

“People don’t play cards anymore,” he says. “Not like they used to.”

“I’m a little cold,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

She slides the door open and finds a fleece pullover and a chenille blanket and brings them outside, sliding the door back into place. She hears an unexpected click and tries the door again.

“It’s locked,” she says. “Help me try it.”

Harlan gives the door a good tug, but it holds. He tries again but fails. They look around below the balcony, but there are no signs of movement. It’s dark, silent, and cool, a good night for sleeping.

LUCY ARRIVED a bit early for Mavis’s funeral Mass, knelt down in an empty pew, and prayed that her great-grandmother would find a new life beyond this one, one where she would be healthy and upright again. No more orthopedic shoes. No more arthritis. Rosalee and Bertie arrived, followed by Paul and Cokie and the kids. The rest of the mourners—mostly Rosalee and Bertie’s friends and neighbors—sat behind them.

The priest spoke movingly—dust to dust—and told a few anecdotes about Mavis’s life: about her arrival in New York City with nothing but a pocketful of seeds from her family’s vegetable garden in Sicily; about her years as a seamstress in Brooklyn, making ladies’ undergarments; about her successful efforts in the 1960s—something Lucy had never heard before—to prevent the government from taking her home in New Jersey by eminent domain for a highway.

Lucy left the funeral with an entirely new view of Nana Mavis, who had been so old throughout Lucy’s life that Lucy never imagined her having a youth.

At the cemetery, the soft April sunshine warmed her back as she placed a white rose on Mavis’s casket and saw another white stone Mary a few graves away. Harlan’s funeral came back to her with a vividness that wasn’t there on the day itself, and she was grateful for the friends who had spoken about him with so much wit and warmth, since she had been barely able to speak at all without sobbing. She wondered if the Mary near his grave was still off-kilter, the way she had left it.

On the way back to her parents’ house, Lucy stopped at the bakery to pick up the napoleons. By the time she arrived at the house, she had to walk an entire block past all the parked cars. She
balanced the white cardboard bakery box on one knee while trying to open the front door. To her right, she could see that the garden had been stripped of its large rhododendron, rototilled, and then replanted with bushes that weren’t doing well. They looked as if they hadn’t been watered in days, in the way that the exterior of a house sometimes must defer to what’s happening inside. And inside was a carnival.

Mavis, she found out, was something of a legend in the nursing home. She had been there only nine years—a short tenure compared to some—but had managed to charm and insult everyone connected with the place. And funerals, apparently, were big occasions for the residents. Rosalee’s house was teeming with the superannuated, lurching awkwardly across the carpeting in wheelchairs or being shuttled to the bathroom by nursing aides. The home must have bused them in. Add to that all of Rosalee and Bertie’s friends, and the friends of Rosalee’s deceased parents, and the result was an undulating sea of teased hair, in many bluish tones of gray, through which bobbed the occasional bald head.

Lucy suddenly felt young, flexible, brimming with health. It seemed as if she were back in school, walking among the relatives as she collected checks for her various passages of life: First Communion, confirmation, graduations, birthdays. She gently touched sloping shoulders—
may Saint Anthony of Padua protect you
—and inched toward the dining-room table, where three cakes on the sideboard spelled out 1-0-1, as if this were Mavis’s birthday.

Lucy stood in the dining room, remembering birthdays capped by Rosalee’s exceptionally dense homemade cake, as her childhood selves filed in. In their own way, each had a relationship with Mavis and had come to say good-bye. There was the four-year-old Lucy asking Mavis to braid her hair, make it red, and give her freckles; the seven-year-old Lucy crying on Mavis’s knee because she couldn’t do a cartwheel; the nine-year-old Lucy singing “Delta Dawn” into a fork for Mavis, who told her she was good enough for the radio; and the twelve-year-old Lucy, standing with her arms crossed in front
of her emerging breasts, not wanting to grow up and make Mavis feel even older. They all offered condolences to the thirty-eight-year-old Lucy, who wished she could give each of them a napoleon. Instead, she poured herself a glass of red wine and downed it on an empty stomach, because the food all around her looked too perfect to be eaten.

The dining-room table was invisible under Rosalee’s weekend efforts: antipasti glistening with red roasted peppers, artichoke hearts, and olives; vast bowls of couscous; piles of oranges and lemons; trays of cannoli; and an enormous tuna, with the head on, on a platter at the center of the table. On the sideboard, to the left of the cakes, sat Lucy’s plaster-of-paris model of Sicily’s Mount Etna. Rosalee or Bertie must have dug it out of the basement. Did she make that in third grade or fourth? Back then, she wouldn’t have known anything about Sicily’s Saint Agatha, wouldn’t have suspected that a human being was capable of surviving imprisonment and torture before dying on a bed of hot coals. But Mavis would have known about her, maybe even have seen Saint Agatha’s veil carried in processions to prevent the volcano from erupting. Lucy wished she had asked her more about Sicily when she was alive.

Inside the kitchen, clutches of women in shapeless black dresses stood arranging food on platters and sipping ginger ale, smiling with their too-perfect dentures. Rosalee towered above them with her dark puff of hair as Lucy reassessed her place in the world, as people do at funerals, and realized that the kaleidoscope had twisted—she was no longer a kid, and her mother fit in with the older crowd. Rosalee hesitated as she bit into a piece of celery, Lucy noticed with sadness, closing her lips around it as if her teeth weren’t strong enough to be trusted.

But there was someone else in the room who stood above the rest, someone bending an ear toward a cheese-plate organizer with a riot of bobby pins protruding from a wispy bun on the back of her head; someone whose youth pulsed even more than Lucy’s, but who nevertheless looked comfortable amid the deafness and the humped
backs and the inelastic skin all around him, drooping from necks and arms and earlobes. It was someone Lucy hadn’t anticipated seeing at her great-grandmother’s funeral.

ten

T
he shrine of the unintended consequence. This was where Lucy led Louis after discovering him in the kitchen. Her old bedroom was now a gallery for Rosalee’s inadvertent collection of vintage lunchboxes. It was the only room in the house with a lock on the door, besides the bathroom, which was being monopolized by dozens of people with bladder-control problems. The room had no furniture. Bertie had purchased white plastic cubes, two feet high, which were stacked in various configurations to display the lunchboxes. A low-pile Berber covered the floor, and track lights cast a fluorescent glow on the white cubes. The room had a reverential feel to it, as if the lunchboxes were just placeholders for the real art that was to come.