Sand in My Eyes (24 page)

I CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT
I’m hearing,” Fedelina said, interrupting my reading.

“To this day, I can’t believe it either,” I told her. “I cringe as I read it. But I did the right thing, getting rid of all that junk of mine, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes, it’s meaningless,” she said. “I see clearly now how meaningless all the belongings in our lives are. When they moved me into this place, I had to decide what to take. The rest I gave to my children and told them to pick through, get rid of whatever they didn’t want. I felt like I had already passed, deciding who got what, boxing things up, storing it all. My first week here, I questioned why I had put the music box Oscar got me when we were newly married, or the glass platter belonging to my grandmother, into storage boxes. What was I storing for? That’s when it hit me, that we store and collect, and all of a sudden the process reverses and we have to start shedding it all.” Her eyes were starting to close.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I’m waiting. Do I dare ask what happened next—between my son and you?”

I continued to read from where I had left off.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

SO TELL ME,” I
said to the man sitting next to me. “Do you ever get lonely?”

“I’m not the type to get lonely,” Liam told me then. “I enjoy my own company. I’m content.”

“You’re one of those,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“A lone soul.”

“I’m no monk, don’t get me wrong.”

“No, I can’t see you as a monk,” I said, imagining women from around the world, including his own students, falling for him as I was, asking him a question after class, but, because he was easy to talk to, pouring out their innermost thoughts on life instead. “A good-looking professor like yourself, do you date your students?”

“I try to keep the scandals down at the university.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“I dated a student once. We didn’t go out until after the semester ended, and she was fifteen years older than I.”

I did the calculations in my mind. “Do you like older women?”

“It’s not about age,” he said. “I like women who are wise, not ignorant, nor innocent, but who have experience in life and have walked away from their experiences a better person, if you know what I mean. I’d do well,” he went on, “with a woman who lives more contemplatively, on a deeper
level, but for now, I’m not looking.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I don’t think I would make a good husband. I’m not saying I was rotten or unfaithful when I was married. I wasn’t. But I’m too much of a free spirit to belong to another person, to be another person’s absolute everything. And I learned too late the kind of woman I like, one who isn’t afraid to let her toes touch the ground, to get her feet dirty. But enough about me,” he said. “I’ve told you more than you wanted to know.”

“I wasn’t thinking that at all,” I said.

“Then what were you thinking?”

“Oh,” I said with a shameful smile, “I’m just curious, that’s all.”

“Curious about what?”

“Things I shouldn’t be curious about. I have no right.”

“If you really want to know,” he said. “If you’re going to keep asking, then let’s see, there’s a professor in the art department, and another who runs the overseas program and another in the academics department, who I sort of see when I’m in a midlife mood and need career counseling. But, mostly, I’m focusing on other things at this point in my life, and they know that. I’ve told them, so enough about me.”

“We haven’t talked that much about you,” I told him.

“We have!” he insisted, “And I’m boring myself.”

“What would you rather talk about?”

“I don’t know. How about we count shooting stars?”

“I don’t feel like counting shooting stars.”

“Then we can look for UFOs.”

“I don’t believe in UFOs,” I told him.

“Then let’s talk about you. I want to know more about you.”

“You keep saying that, but I don’t know,” I said, wanting to tell him more about myself, who I was, my variety, and all my particulars. But I wasn’t an orchid and it wasn’t that simple. “What do you want to know about me?”

“What makes you tick?”

I looked at my feet, which were filthy from having gone barefoot all day, and then I laughed good and hard, deciding that a woman drinking
with a man beneath the stars is able to answer whatever questions she wants about herself. “I’d like to focus more deeply on things that matter, but there are countless things demanding my attention and my energy daily—namely housework. It never gets done and, even after I spend a good four hours at it, five minutes after my children wake it’s an embarrassing mess again. There’s nothing I’d love more than to sit and read to them, or sing songs, or hold them in my arms all day long, but they have so many needs, crises, and emergencies that, one by one, make up my day.”

“So the overwhelmed woman you’re writing about—is it you?”

I took a big breath in, let it all out, and tried shifting gears. “So what’s your mother doing tonight?” I asked.

“She went to bed,” he said.

I looked at my wrist and remembered I had decided to sell my old watch, and that it was ticking away somewhere in the piles of stuff. “It’s early,” I said.

“She’s in bed by dusk. And coffee’s ready by four.”

“Oh,” I said, but suddenly, all I could think about was my children and what they were doing tonight. “It’s a good thing,” I told him then, “how all of a sudden a mother cares more about the choices her children will make in their lives than the ones she made in hers, and that if her own life doesn’t measure up to her expectations—the dreams she set for herself—then it’s okay as long as her children’s lives are good. But listen to me rambling. Why are you so easy to talk to? Do all your lady friends talk to you like this?”

“No,” he said, “They don’t, and I don’t think for an instant that it’s easy juggling what you do.”

“Well,” I said then. “I know they’ll grow up and go off, and when they do, I want at that stage in my life to be more than a woman going for weekly pedicures—not that there’s anything wrong with pedicures. I do like them, but I also want to be doing more, if you know what I mean. What exactly do I want, and who do I want to become? I don’t know,” I told him. By now the liquor in our glasses was gone. I could have gone on like we were, sitting close, as two people are forced to sit when sharing a
love seat, but it was getting late and nothing good comes from a woman telling a man everything there is to know about her in a single night, and so we said good night.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

BELVEDERE

WHEN I STOPPED READING
and looked up from the manuscript, I was ready to hear feedback from Fedelina, find out whether she liked the story I was reading, and if she minded all the parts about her son.

“I’m still in shock over the two of you,” was all she said. “I’d like to hear more, but I’m tired.”

“I read too much,” I told her, “too much for one day. I’ll be back in the morning.”

The next morning I knocked lightly on her door and went in. She was done eating her breakfast but, by the look and smell of the unidentifiable mush left on her plate, she couldn’t have enjoyed it. I waited for the girl to take it away and then handed her the fudge I had bought on the side of the road.

“It’s sugar-free,” I told her.

“Put it over there, on the counter, would you?”

“You don’t want some now?” I asked.

“It’s too early for fudge,” she said. “I usually wait until one-thirty for things like that. When you get to be my age, routines are everything, they keep you going—give you something to look forward to. By the way—I’m looking forward to hearing more of your story.”

“You are?” I asked as I sank into the armchair beside her bed.

“Waking up this morning wasn’t so hard. It’s your reading,” she said. “It’s given me something to look forward to. But tell me, after that night on the love seat, did anything else happen between you two?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I
STAYED AWAKE ALL
night, regretting my intimate talk with another man. I was aware that it’s a woman’s right to live and love, but those rights are altered when she must first consider the best interest of her children. And I felt their fingers at all hours, tugging at my heart, and their voices reached my soul and their curiosities raced through my mind. They never asked the simple stuff. It was always complex like, “Mommy, why did my balloon pop, and goldfish die, and Daddy leave on a trip again? And why aren’t bald eagles bald, and why don’t hummingbirds hum? And why do the ospreys return to the same nest year after year, and when will Daddy return?”

I got up from bed, turned my computer on, and spent the rest of the night and into the wee hours of the morning researching the answers to everything my children might want to know. By the time I turned it off again and slipped back into bed, I felt like I knew it all, why the big, yellow, fuzzy bees don’t sting and the other ones do. I had learned how to cut the top off of a pineapple, so when my children came home we could plant it in the dirt and grow our own. I had spent hours looking up the answers to things they’ve already asked, and those they might yet ask, and I found there are answers to everything, except, “Why are there starving children in the world when you can toss a seed into the dirt and produce a fruit-bearing plant?” I would look further into that when I wasn’t so tired, I decided as I turned out my light and pulled the blanket up to my chin.

I hardly felt like I had slept when there was a knock at my door. I could see through the peephole that it was Fedelina, and I feared she had come to tell me that a married woman has no right entertaining her son, like I did in my yard until way past midnight.

“Hi,” I declared when I opened the door. “Are you sick?” she asked.

“Why? Do I look sick?”

“Tired. You look tired.”

“Missing my children is all,” I said. “I was up all night. It’s been too long. I’m ready for them to come home. An afternoon would have been fine, a couple of hours to myself—a day at most—but it’s getting long, them being away like this.”