If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (9 page)

She moves her hand up and down his back, feeling the knobs of his spine poking through the shirt, through the wool jacket. She presses her palms firmly onto his body. But she isn’t calming him at all. It isn’t her touch he needs, it seems.

What does he need?

“Shhhhh,” she says.

He had been calm, she remembers, while staring at her. Before she stepped away, hiding from him, leaving him alone. Perhaps it is now unbearable for him to be alone.

She shifts her hands to his face, tries to lift his head.

“Look at me,” she says. “Look at me.” It takes her a moment to remember his name. “Look at me, John. John. Look at me.”

He does, only inches from her eyes. He looks at her, and she is startled by the gaze that she has learned so well, startled to find a living man there, a feeling man. “I know,” she says. “I know.”

He stares at her, still, and it is hard not to read his sorrow as a wisdom of a kind, in this era of loss when knowledge and pain seem intrinsically linked. She thinks that maybe here is someone to whom she can speak all those thoughts, explain what she has been trying to do, what has upset her so, about her work, since George’s death. What stillness means. What time itself means, how it rules us, how it flows away, away. How unkind, how dispassionate it can be. How in the end, for all we are given, we are all robbed blind. Of everything. John Parker understands, she’s sure. He won’t think her sophomoric or pretentious. He’ll recognize her struggles. He’ll know that she, like he, is at war.

But his gaze belies her thoughts. He is too dulled already, too absent to hear her out. John Parker is as unreachable as George. But he is still alive, still needs the comfort he cannot give. His face is drenched with tears and snot, his lips quivering still. She pulls the cuff of her sleeve over her hand and rolls it into her fist as she used to when the children were small. She wipes him clean, careful not to drop her gaze from his for long. “I know,” she says again. “I know.”

Time, she thinks. Both foe and friend. It will destroy John Parker, but it will also soon relieve him of the knowledge that he is destroyed.

It isn’t long before she stands, reaches for his hand, gentles him up, and walks him out into the small sitting area, where they sit, still holding hands, silent, on the couch where he and his wife sat weeks before.

An hour or so later when Katherine Parker walks in carrying a few small shopping bags, Clara says only, “Your husband isn’t well,” and after a moment, the other woman nods.

“I know,” she says, and she too sits, in Clara’s usual chair. “I shouldn’t have done this.” She touches her forehead with one hand, her pale polished nails brushing against the fringe of short white hair. “I’ve upset him. It was too much. I should have known.”

“It can be difficult to know what’s right.”

“I wanted…” Her voice is now quivering, threatening to break.

“You wanted to immortalize him,” Clara says. “You told me that.”

The other woman looks over, blinks, and nods. “That’s right,” she says. “As a present, for myself.”

It can’t be done, you know. Not with any of us. It’s a false hope. A parlor trick. You’ll think you’ve done it, you’ll think you can hold on, but it’s always just a trick
. She doesn’t say it, though. “You’ve had him for fifty-one years.” She’s thinking of George, of course, of the twenty-one years they didn’t have, of the miracle of the five they found, of all the pictures of him she never drew, of her attempt to hold him entirely within herself, to preserve him that way, of how Harold proved that impossible, of the legacy of mystery every person leaves behind.

“I was seventeen when we met,” Katherine Parker says.

“It’s your whole life, then.”

It isn’t right, Clara knows, to tell her how lucky she has been, not at this moment, as her husband quivers beside Clara on the couch. It would be unsympathetic to call her blessed, to rush her through grief and insist on the silver lining. Clara won’t do it. But she does envy her. Despite it all, she envies her. It doesn’t matter about the many reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, that one might have stayed married for half a century. Right now, she can see only all the years.

“I should take him home.” Katherine Parker is sitting straighter now. Clara notices again that veil etched into her skin, over her eyelids, her lips. Beside her, John Parker sighs an almost musical tone.

“If you like,” she says, “I could try finishing it. Without him, I mean. I have enough sketches—I think. I could do it. Not the same way, but something.”

Katherine Parker frowns. “But it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” she asks. “It’s too late. Isn’t it?”

Clara thinks about the stark clarity with which she has been depicting John Parker’s decline. Is it too late? Yes. It is. Of course it is. But arguably, it is always too late.

“No,” she says. “It’s not too late.”

“Oh, it’s terrible. I feel like such a fool.”

“Time makes fools of us all,” Clara says. “Every single one of us. It’s possible we need to ignore that fact. And get on with our lives.”

It is another moment before Katherine Parker nods. “Yes,” she says. “I would like it, still. I would.”

“It will take a week, maybe two. I’m not sure how long.”

It won’t be the same picture, of course, not the one that so interested her. She’ll have to give up on the notion of depicting time itself—as a kindness. She’ll have to pick a point along the continuum of John Parker’s life and stop the clock there, search the evidence of her own observations and try to re-create him, as he was—as though that man were more real than the man he is now, as though there’s a moment in anyone’s life that is the truest one. As a kindness, she will pretend to this belief. A death mask? Perhaps. But also a token thrown to weigh in on the side of love.

Katherine rises, takes a few unhurried steps, then reaches for her husband’s hand, and Clara, who has forgotten that her fingers and his are still interlaced, misses a moment before she thinks to let it go. Then she watches their hands clasp together, loose skin, knobby knuckles. She sees him respond to the familiar, gentle tug, rising easily, as though sensing safety in the air around his wife. The couch cushion exhales; the dent from his weight disappears.

“Let’s go home, John. Let’s take you home.”

They begin to walk away. She will never see John Parker again, she knows.

When Katherine glances back, Clara gives her an encouraging look, a look that promises her the portrait she wants. Clara will do it. She will turn back the hands of time.

Katherine Parker smiles at her, seems almost to laugh, then turns away. The couple moves as one through the glass-paned door, their images visible only briefly, a bit distorted. Gone.

Harriet
Elliot

S
HE WAS THE NEW GIRL
in our fifth grade. Harriet Elliot. And when she told us that, she told it to us whole, the necessary pause between first and last name, that hard, repeated stop at the end of each, adding to the strangely adult air she carried with her, and signaling her separateness from us.

We were ten and eleven years old. Our parents, all of them friends, our fathers all professors, had started this school, an experiment in learning. We knew nothing of desks. Nothing of mimeographed sheets of paper with empty lines or boxes to be filled. We roamed the large classroom and Expressed Ourselves. We lounged, with books we chose, in beanbag chairs and on the shag rug, which smelled like the dog our teacher brought with her each day, and also like us. We played recorders and African drums. We learned our times tables with dried lima beans. We wore jeans or we wore blue-and-white-striped OshKosh overalls. Sometimes we wore Levi’s cords, though they always faded quickly at the knees, the ridges dissolving into translucent fabric, soft and grubby, like a loose second skin.

Harriet Elliot wore dresses, always clean, and white tights that reached an abrupt conclusion at the start of her black patent shoes. We wore shit-kicker boots and sneaks. When we took them off, our socks rarely matched. Some of us were tall—Freddy Steinberg, Peter Walker, Annabelle Grant. Harriet Elliot was taller. Our hair was shaggy, un-brushed, wild, long. Infrequently washed. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail so tight that, though it sprang from the elastic in a surprising mass of curls, it lined her head without a single ridge, smooth and shiny as a mirror.

We were supposed to know better than to tease. We were taught tolerance by our Quaker teacher at every chance. There was God in each of us—even in those of us, like me, who had been raised to believe there was no God. This puzzle, which puzzled me into contortions, never seemed to ruffle my parents, in their own jeans and overalls, flannel shirts and faded cords. My mother, a philosophy student, cooking our dinner of beans, brown rice, carrot soup, holding the phone head to shoulder, arguing in her quiet, even voice with the other end of the line in favor of Nothingness, an argument she seemed increasingly certain she had won. My father, an archaeologist, shaggily handsome, with a beard he kept well-trimmed, shoulder-length hair he continually touched, and the knack of being central to every situation he was in. Our home, half a brownstone, the division clumsily built, an illogical wall running through our front hall. Our shelves and our tabletops crowded with my father’s Mayan figures of squat, clay women with pendulous, thick-nippled breasts to which I, a ten-year-old girl, was supposed to be blind.

And of course we did tease. We were children, after all.

On the day Harriet Elliot joined our ranks, we set out, as if on the kind of formal assignment that we never were assigned, to make her defend her difference from us. Not in the large classroom, where we first mumbled our greetings as Teacher Margie encouraged us to do and then pretty much ignored her. But during morning break, our daily outing to Rittenhouse Square, where we would run up and down the pavement pathways cutting diagonals across the grass and climb the statuary and draw pink-chalk hopscotch boards on the cement.

Ben Granger began, asking her where she was from, as if the answer might be Oz. She told us that she was from New York. “Manhattan,” she said, hardening the
t
’s in that, as well. Harrie
t
Ellio
t
, from Manha
tt
an. She clicked when she spoke. And she wore a white, furry coat, though the rest of us wore only long-sleeved shirts.

“Philadelphia’s better,” Peter Walker said. “New York’s full of murderers.” We all nodded. We all believed the same things. Mary Hudson, a kind-natured child, said that maybe they dress different in New York. I looked at Harriet Elliot and thought maybe that was true. Maybe she would come back the next day in real clothes.

“This is probably just your first-day outfit,” Mary said, with a hopeful smile.

Harriet Elliot’s white coat hung longer than her dress. Her white tights stuck out beneath. I thought her black feet looked like hooves on a sheep.

“No. I always dress like this,” she said. “My father tells me I’m a princess.”

And that was that. Of course.

We whispered the word
princess
daily among ourselves, careful so Teacher Margie wouldn’t hear. We hissed it when we passed Harriet Elliot in the classroom and when we saw her alone in the small lav down the hall. We wrote it anonymously in the corners of her drawings, which were of castles, of unicorns. Which didn’t look like ours.

When our parents asked us how the new girl was fitting in, we shrugged, knowing better than to share our unanimous judgment. We said she seemed okay. We tried to make our faces look as though we had found a glimpse of God inside of her.

As there was God in each of us. Sometimes I would try to find him there. At night, in my room, my eyes closed, escaping the unmistakable tones of an unending parental argument forcing its way up the stairwell through my door, I would stare inside myself. Lying in the dark, in the nebulous shadow of my mother’s beloved Nothingness and in the quandary of my own curiosities, I would look until I slept for the God I had been told did not exist. Or sometimes at school I would peer at a classmate, at Freddy, who had an eye that always ran with yellow ooze, and who couldn’t keep his lima beans from falling on the floor. And I would search, without success, for signs of God.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of October came Self-Expression Day. Other schools called it show-and-tell. I only knew this from my sister, who had missed out on the co-op. At thirteen, she was old enough and at odds enough already with our parents to roll her mascara-fringed eyes at breakfast, wrinkle her freckled nose, and say
Self-Expression Day
with great contempt.

“Why can’t you morons just call it show-and-tell?”

My father, leaning against a kitchen counter, in his jeans and wool jacket, his black turtleneck, suggested I take one of his Mayan women to school. “How about the goddess Ixchel?” He ground a cigarette butt on a plate. “She would be perfect.”

My sister laughed out loud. “Oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Why don’t you do that?” she asked, her blond hair hanging like window curtains around her face.

I said I thought I’d rather bring the kimono my grandparents had bought me in Japan. I had already pulled it down from the back of my closet shelf.

“Are you sure?” my father asked. “I have a few minutes free. I could write a little something for you to read. What time are you doing it? I might even be able to come.”

“It’s
her
self-expression,” my mother said, standing up.
“Her
self-expression,” she repeated, the pronoun poking through like a thorn. “Not yours.”

For a moment no one moved; then my father muttered,
“Jesus Christ,”
stomped from the room, slammed out of the house. In the silence he left, I heard his car, its old engine rattling down the block. My mother began shifting the breakfast dishes around the kitchen with no obvious purpose and a grasp so tight I thought one would shatter in her hand. For just a second, my sister looked at me as though doing so might help, as though we might be aligned in this. But not for long.

“Thanks a lot,” she whispered across the table. “It’s all your fault, you know. For being born.”

T
he classroom that morning was cluttered with odd objects, many of them foreign like mine, many borrowed from our parents’ professions, as I had chosen not to do. Since we had no desks, we lined our treasures up against the wall under our coats, which hung in a primary-colored row, broken only by the puff of white Harriet Elliot wore each day. Nobody commented on what anyone else had brought. Nobody seemed interested in anything much, except the empty space beneath her coat, about which we whispered among ourselves with glee.

Late in the morning, Teacher Margie clapped her hands twice, the signal for us to stop what we were doing and ready ourselves for something new.

“Today, as you know, is Self-Expression Day. It looks to me as though we have a wonderful array of special things. Why don’t you each go get yours and come back to the circle, where we’ll share.”

I rose from my beanbag, took the folded kimono from the floor, and sat down on the shag rug next to Mary, who held a doll from Holland in her lap. Soon Ben, with a wooden zebra, joined us there, and before too long, the circle was formed.

First, we peered through Jenny Wilkerson’s microscope at something her father had prepared. Shapeless, wobbling forms and speckles shifted slightly in our view. We all said it looked
cool
, in flat, uncommitted voices that resisted the admission that we’d failed somehow to recognize a wonder we’d been shown. She waited until everyone had their turn before she told us what it was.

“It’s spit,” she said. “It’s my father’s spit.” And all of us said
ewww
in unison. “Your mouth is dirtier than a dog’s,” she told us. “It’s the dirtiest thing in the world.”

Then we stared without expression at the zebra Ben had brought.

“I think my uncle got it on safari,” he said. “Anyway, I know it’s real.”

And I was just old enough to wonder what
real
meant—about a wooden zebra brought to school. My kimono was met with silence, except from Teacher Margie, who said it was lovely and that maybe I could bring it back in the spring, when we’d be studying Japan. I said I would.

When Harriet Elliot’s turn rolled around, we all exchanged expectant looks. The Princess hadn’t brought anything. Once again, she’d gotten it wrong. She stood, her hands hanging by her sides. For a moment, she looked downward at our laps, filled with statues, silken fabrics, elaborate tools.

“I didn’t know we were supposed to bring in an object,” she clicked. “I thought we were supposed to tell something about ourselves.”

“That’s fine, Harriet. That’s perfectly fine.” As Teacher Margie spoke, we sucked in our cheeks, rolled our eyes to the ceiling, then looked down, barely hiding smiles on our lips. “Anything that expresses who you are. That’s what today is all about.”

Harriet Elliot nodded, slowly, before she spoke.

“Well, when I was three years old,” she began, “I was kidnapped by bandits. In Italy. My mother left my stroller outside a butcher shop, and when she came out, I was gone.”

We looked at one another now, deciding whether to laugh. Or make some other kind of noise.

“She said it was the worst moment of her life, because she knew I was the only child she could have. Because she’d been sick after me and there couldn’t be any more babies. Her inside parts were gone. And anyway, she loved me. And my father wasn’t there to help. Or to watch me. She was all by herself. Then an old Italian man saw her crying on the sidewalk…”

We looked at
her
now. All of us. Her blue eyes seemed to stare past our heads, as though she were speaking to herself.

“They called the police, who blocked the whole street with motorcycles and cars. And after a while they found my father, so at least my mother wasn’t alone. But nobody knew where I was.”

She stopped then. Ending there. And began to sit down, her hands tucking the skirt of her dress under her behind.

“But what happened?” Teacher Margie asked. “How did they get you back?”

“Oh.” She straightened up. “They didn’t. Not for a very long time. It took three weeks. It was almost a month. And then my parents got a phone call asking for money. In Italy, everything is in billions. They wanted billions and billions of Italian money for me. My father left it in an empty house, and the next day I was returned.”

There was silence.

“They never caught the bandits,” she said. “The men who took me. They’re still at large.”

This time when she stopped, she didn’t move. And after a moment, we all looked at each other, again. Because there was a decision we had to make. Ben’s face, close to mine, looked doubtful; but Mary, with her deep, habitual kindness, looked concerned. It was our teacher, though, who asked, “Is this true, Harriet? Or is this just some kind of story?”

“Oh no,” she said. “It’s really true.” And for the first time since we’d known her, she seemed upset. Even when we’d called her Princess to her face, she’d stayed implacable as a mannequin. Now her eyebrows drew together, her lips pulled into a thin line. Again she scanned the array of improbable objects tipping and folding in our laps. “I know it wasn’t what we were supposed to do. But it is true,” she said, looking out at Teacher Margie again. “I was taken. By bandits. I was. And they’ve never been found.” And then she sat down.

I
n the square we were subdued. There was no running up and through the crisscrossing paths. No hopscotch. Just the low murmur of our voices trying to decide what we thought.

“Who would want her?” Freddy asked, rubbing at the ooze around his eye. “Who would steal her, even if they could?” We all looked over to the bench where she sat, the bench that had become her daily place. “Who would pay billions and billions to get her back?”