Of Time and Memory (20 page)

An ordered life. Could she sense that all this order is merely an illusion that we hold on to so we don't have to face the fact that we are barely clinging to this planet? Had she already learned that life can be thrown into disorder almost at any moment? Is this why she tried to make everything so neat in her little world?

It was a way of managing her fear.

She was afraid of the airplanes that crossed the skies while she hung out the laundry for her mother. So many more planes in the skies this late autumn of 1949. They were from the airfield at Willowgrove where fighter pilots were being trained for the next war, which is never far from her mind now. No matter how many times Dick tries to convince her that there won't be a war in Korea, she is unconvinced.

One Saturday morning when she was supposed to be waiting for him to pick her up to go shopping she went to the library instead, and left word with her mother to tell him to meet her there.

When he came through the library door he was smiling and wearing his new tennis sweater, the one she would always say she loved to see him in—off-white, with a red and a blue stripe along the V neck and around each cuff. She will show
him on the atlas where this country is. Korea. So small, it disappears beneath her thumb. But on the other side of the world.

He is dumbfounded.

How can you keep thinking about these things, Peggy?

What things?

All the things that make people sad.

There's no answer to this, and so she doesn't even try to explain. She is supposed to go look at the house on Broad Street in Lansdale this morning, but somehow she has forgotten this. How could she forget this? How could she forget that the way to overcome her terrible fears is to give herself up to the momentum of a normal life. To let herself be carried along by the currents of a real life.

It's a fine little house, a row house along a wide street with overhanging elm trees. There are stairs up from the sidewalk to a front porch. Each house has its own porch, sectioned off from the houses on both sides by a scrolled handrail. At the top of the stairs in the house next door, and in the one next to that, is a baby gate. There is a lot of life in these little houses, and she can hear it faintly if she listens. She will never be alone here. If she cares to, she can invite the young mothers over for coffee. She can set the table with the cups and saucers she has chosen for her wedding gifts. Desert Rose pattern.

It is exactly like the row house Dick lives in with his parents just a few blocks from here. Looking through the front windows into the living room she shows him where she wants to put the Christmas tree. He counts the rooms for her, and tells her there's an extra room.

And there, he says, turning to face the street. There's
the hospital right there. The Elm Terrace Hospital is just across the street. It's where his sister, Jean, had her baby boy last week.

In the backyard, a long rectangle leading to a tiny garage, a clothesline was already hung. It was raining that morning or she might have seen the wives who would become her neighbors hanging out their laundry up and down the street. A room for a baby. A backyard with a clothesline. If she brings a baby into this world, she brings with it the routines and duties that can fill her life and distract her from her distant worries. Her life will be reordered around the necessity that only a baby can provide. She will be far too busy to worry about the airplanes in the sky above her.

Dick has something to show her this morning. A small card that he has printed at Lauchman's.

Dick and Peggy Snyder
will be receiving guests
after December fourth at
623 North Broad Street
Lansdale, Pennsylvania.

He has already paid the first month's rent. In four weeks they will be living here together. The wedding already behind them. Christmas lights on the tree. And maybe a strand of lights across the railing of the front porch.

Holding the card in her hand, she begins to feel it is all becoming real to her.

S
he looks up just as she is leaving the church. There is her father with a box of rice raised above his head. And then the rice showers over her. She is wearing a white cloth coat over her wedding dress, holding up the long train with her left hand. Her right hand is on Dick's arm. It is a cold gray day. A shadowless day. Her mother looks very old, and there is a troubled expression on Peggy's face. No one can remember ever seeing a prettier bride. Maybe she is overwhelmed by everything, maybe this explains the faraway look in her eyes. She is there, but not really there, in the photograph. Her mind is on something else.

It is dark by the time they make their getaway from the reception. She and Dick dance a slow dance to “Peg o' My Heart,” the only couple on the dance floor, then they are off to New York City. One of their friends gives her a small package wrapped in gold-foil paper on her way out to the honeymoon car. In the excitement of the day, with everything she and Dick have to talk about during the four-hour drive to New York City, they forget all about the present until the night is over and Dick is asleep beside her for the first time and she cannot seem to close her eyes. She would always remember
the happy faces, and often recall them; more than anything else, she wanted people to have fun at her wedding, and it seems they all did. They were all smiling when she turned with Dick to walk down the aisle as man and wife. And now, on her wedding night, with her husband asleep next to her, the memory of this day is enough to reassure her of the promise of her life. All the people at the church had been drawn into the orbit of their fine
new
life. You could see it on their smiling faces.

She turns on the bedside light and opens the gift wrapped in gold-foil paper. A best-seller,
Cheaper by the Dozen
. The true story of a family with twelve red-haired children.

Life is a pair of glasses folded on the table by the bed, the morning's first light glancing off their gold rims. Life is someone's clothing draped over the arm of a chair with her own. The boy she loves lying beside her is the confirmation of life's order and holiness. A thin gold band on his finger that matches her own. His face on the pillow. We see who a person is in the world if we watch him waking. Those first seconds as they are returning from sleep, before they remember where they are in the universe. This is a boy who asks for nothing for himself except that she never leave him. A pledge she cannot imagine breaking. There are his polished black shoes on the floor by the door. Sometime in the night an ache she carried inside her since he first touched her, a longing that she learned to accommodate, finally disappeared, replaced by a marvelous lightness. Across the room a shelf slides out of the wall to make a desk. On a piece of stationery marked “Taft Hotel,” she writes him a note and places it next to his face on the pillow. Are you as happy as I am?

Here she is on the eleventh floor of a hotel in the world's largest city. It seems strange. And yet, because she is still young enough to look behind her and see clearly the path that led her here, life feels like it is in her control.

She has brought far too many clothes. Four suitcases full. And a hatbox. She packed like a movie star. One suitcase for each day. Like an actress who must change for every scene.

Maybe she would prefer if I didn't write about this, about how she cared about her beauty. Her nails and lipstick. Her complexion. She attended to her beauty. With dresses, she was partial to a bow or sash at the waist or collar, something extra to make the costume complete, so she could hide behind it. But here in New York City she is free to show her face, to stare at everyone who passes. It is the first time in her life that she is standing in a place where no one knows her and there is no one she has ever disappointed! She can be anyone here. It is enough to make her go skipping down the sidewalks.

For five days Dick can barely keep up with her. The deal is if he can catch her, she will kiss him before she runs off again. Kiss him at the Statue of Liberty, on top of the Empire State Building, in front of the department stores on Fifth Avenue, their great sidewalk windows decorated for Christmas. Opening her eyes while he is kissing her, and there she is reflected in the glass. Who is she? A girl with a pair of chopsticks in her purse. A girl who once dreamed of living in this city. A girl in the arms of a boy who loves her depthlessly. She can feel his love for her, a trembling that rises off his skin. The only thing she has to do in the world now is lean toward him, return his touch.

In the hotel lobby, a woman named Miss Allen sits at a desk and answers tourists' questions about New York City. She is famous, she tells them; there is no question she cannot answer. She wears her gray hair pulled back in a bun. The first time Peggy walked through the lobby Miss Allen stopped her and said, Honeymoon, right? I can tell. Each time she sees Peggy, she smiles knowingly at her. A woman's secret perhaps? Memories of her own honeymoon. It makes Peggy wonder how she looks to her. It makes her feel sorry for her and for everyone on earth who is no longer young and in love.

There is a drugstore in the hotel. Two dining rooms, two nightclubs, and a florist where Dick buys her a bouquet of roses. He is holding them behind his back when he steps off the elevator right into her arms. She pushes him back inside and when the doors close he leans her against the wood-paneled elevator wall. It is the first elevator she has ever been on. She kisses him all the way down. When the doors begin to open, she can feel him pulling away. But she isn't going to let him go. For some reason she wants everyone to see her in his arms.

I saw him just last week. Peggy's young man, my old father. I watched him sleeping in a chair, his soft white hair pushed to one side. His hands folded in his lap. We were talking about their honeymoon. He was telling me that they both chose the Taft Hotel because there had been a weekly radio broadcast from its rooftop dance club, big-band music which the two of them listened to every Saturday from the time they first met. The Vincent Lopez band. I was listening to my father and watching his expression; I could see something in his eyes, some spark of recognition. But then he bowed his head and
fell asleep. My little boy, Jack, came up to me and whispered in my ear, Does Granddad fall asleep all the time because of that thing in his head?

I wasn't really listening to Jack. I was watching Peggy's husband in his sleep and remembering that he always slept with a tormented expression on his face that is so unlike the look he showed to the world when he was awake. He never appears to be resting in his sleep. As a small boy I used to stand beside him as he slept in his gold-colored chair in the living room where he always fell asleep reading the newspaper after he came home from work. I watched him carefully as a child. For the longest time before he remarried, I thought he was my brother. I remember when he went out at night with his friends, I'd be at the front door crying for him to stay home and he would promise to bring something back for me. And no matter how late it was when he returned, I would be awake, waiting for him to keep his promise. He never let me down when I was a child. He always made me feel like I was special to him. He always took my part. He was always for his boys. I would like to tell Peggy this.

But when he was sleeping his face frightened me; he always looked like he was pulling against a powerful force. When I saw him the other day I realized that in the last forty-seven years, Peggy's death always inhabited his sleep. I don't think he survived her death. The boy who jitterbugged on the rooftop of the Taft Hotel vanished when she died.

O
n Peggy's first shift back at the telephone company, the other girls want to know all about her time in New York City. They gather around her at the end of the day while she tells them about the big fantastic world beyond the small boroughs of Pennsylvania. Even as she is answering their questions, she is aware of the unlikelihood that
she
, a small-town girl whose life up until now had been lived within two square miles, would ever be speaking of her travels to distant places. Looking into their faces, listening to the excitement in their voices, brings her a sudden contentment because her life seems finally to have found its proper course. For so long now she never felt a part of the world that everyone else occupied, and now at last she occupies a different world.

The girls have heard that she'll be working only half-day shifts now, and they want to know if this is true.

Yes, it's true.

Oh dear, bread and beer, if I was married, I wouldn't be here
, one of them sings with a great, jealous sigh.

Peggy's life has opened to her. Of course the world is full of married ladies, some of them even newly married like her. But all of them put together couldn't convince her that her life with Dick wasn't going to be extraordinary in some way. She can feel this deep in her bones.

She is going to work the noon-to-five shift from now on, so she invites them to come see her apartment at 623 North Broad Street on Saturday morning.

Six twenty-three Broad Street? One girl teases her about this. Peg, that's just across the street from the Elm Terrace maternity unit!

Married lady. Up early, standing at the gas stove burning bacon. Dick comes bounding into the kitchen; he thought the place was on fire.

No, it's just the bacon. It's the stove's fault. I'm used to an electric stove, but this damned stove with its gas flame keeps burning the frying pan.

Dick tries everything to make her laugh. He reminds her that it isn't even five o'clock in the morning, it'll be hours before any of the girls show up. He wants her to come back to bed with him.

She can't, not now. Not until she has figured out this ridiculous stove.

When the girls arrive, there are four pans soaking in water in the sink and all the windows are opened to clear the air. They tease her, and she smiles for them, pretends to laugh it off. But that night she is still angry about it and when Dick tries to console her, she won't speak to him about it. It is very late when she sits down at her sewing machine to try and calm herself. A new dress she's been working on is folded on the chair next to the machine. When she picks it up it smells like bacon grease. She buries her face in it; it's enough to make her want to weep. She will have to go through her life smelling like a short-order cook. Before she throws the dress away, she makes herself take out every stitch with a pair of scissors. One stitch at a time. It takes most of the night.