The Whole World Over (16 page)

"Know what?" said Alan after he'd listened for ten minutes or so.
"I'm going to check out the old locker room. Nice to meet you,
Stephanie."

"Do you have a card?" said Stephanie. "We're collecting everyone's
card. We're in the city, too, and we might do a post-reunion reunion
sometime. What do you think?"

Alan told her it was a great idea and fished his card from his wallet.
Without heading for the locker room even as a pretense, he crossed the
gym, straight toward the bleachers.

He sat beside her. "Maybe it's my turn to look after you," he said.

Marion looked skeptical. "When was it mine to look after you?"

"Well, you and Joy, the two of you . . ." Alan blushed.

Marion saved him. "I do remember the time we got you into that
R movie when you were so obviously a baby. When you were about to
be humiliated in front of that long line of older kids. What was it,
Taxi
Driver
?
Mean Streets
? Something with Robert De Niro. We had the
hugest crush on him, Joya and me." She squeezed his arm again. "I'm
not sure that constitutes 'looking after.' Maybe the opposite."

He glanced at the flyer she was holding. It was a "newsletter" from
her class. "Are you in that?" he said.

"Oh no. Coming to this thing is geeky enough. Sending in my snapshot
or listing my dubious achievements, no way."

"Why are you here?"

"Let's see . . . I'm a glutton for punishment?" She folded the newsletter
twice and set it beside her. "It so happens my parents are packing up
the house before they move south. They're joining the flamingo set.
Dad's wearing white shoes. Unbelievable. I think he thinks he's an elderly
Bing Crosby. So this is my last chance to go through the old Barbie
dolls and those gimp bracelets from Camp Watusi. Salvage my mementos.
Or not, as it's turning out. I won't lie: from where I sit now, my
childhood looks almost beautiful—or innocent, just the way it's supposed
to. But the remains look pretty grotesque. A mouse made a nest in
the shoebox where I kept all of Barbie's stewardess outfits and cocktail
dresses."

"And what about your . . . your dubious achievements?" Alan knew
that Joya and Marion had stayed in touch through college or longer,
that some Christmas a few years back he'd heard his mother ask about
Marion. Joya had said she was in Tanzania or Thailand, doing something
valiant and hopeful, like vaccinating babies or building thatched
schools or teaching first aid.

Marion did not answer right away. "Well, they're not a lot different
from yours, Alan. I mean, I help people. Fundamentally. Or try to." She
stopped there, as if she'd said too much already.

"Are you trying to avoid telling me you're a lawyer?"

"God no," she said. "Thanks a lot, little brother."

"Teacher."

"No. I don't have that kind of masochistic patience, I'm afraid."

"Wait. I didn't ask
you.
Are you married?"

"Oh no," she said. "I'm a member of the female generation that
somehow missed that bus. Pretty stupid, to tell you the truth. But I'm
fine about it now."

"What, you think it's too late?" Like his sister, who was still fervently
aiming herself toward marriage, Marion would soon be thirty-eight.

"For me at least. But like I said, I'm fine about it. At this point, I'd
make a horrific wife. I'm not too good at give-and-take."

Neither was Greenie, thought Alan, recalling how cool she'd been
that afternoon when he left for the train station. "Have a good time,"
she'd said, with the same tone and rhythm you'd use to utter, "Makes
no difference to me."

Marion looked around at the growing crowd—including, noticed
Alan, too many lone souls meandering about as if the gym were an art
gallery and the climbing bars and basketball hoops and scoreboards
were objects of aesthetic fascination. Joya had been wrong: this was
depressing.

"Listen," she said. "You want to go have dinner somewhere? That
road joint you guys used to take us to when you wanted to get laid? It's
still there, can you believe it? I passed it on the way over. I'd love to see if
they make the burgers as greasy as they used to. One last time."

Alan knew the place she meant, though he'd been there only two
or three times in the past and never (alas) for the purpose she'd stated.
He suspected that the only reason the place survived was its fame as one
of the bars where Bruce Springsteen had played before he was anyone
special.

They took Marion's car, and they didn't say much on the way. Marion
would point out landmarks: places where the relics of their youth
had survived, places where they had not. No one at the reunion had
noticed their desertion or tried to stop them, as Alan half-wished someone
would—and not because he wanted to stay.

When they got out in the dusty parking lot, they could hear the
thumping pulse of whatever godawful band was booked at the bar that
night. They looked at each other across the roof of the car, and Alan's
guilty hesitation was vaporized, gone in a flash too quick to overrule.
This was his past; he had the right—even the responsibility—to explore
it, to seize this strange, unexpected chance at looking backward so far
and so clearly.

"Shall we, little . . . Alan?" Marion held out her hand in a way that
suggested he should make a hoop of his arm and escort her formally in.
When her arm was tucked inside his (their identical fake-western shirts
from the Gap linked together, as if they were partners in a square
dance), Alan stole his first close look at her face in so many years and
saw there a kind of admirable clarity: no makeup, few creases, a plain
old-fashioned pallor. The earring he could see was a small cascade of silver
beads, like a sip of icy spring water.

A pink fringe of sky persisted still, the rim of a wide rosy ocean
beneath the ever-descending night. An evaporating ocean. A last chance,
a last glimpse of innocence, thought Alan as the present enclosed the
past like a long soft glove and the two of them stepped into the clamorous
dark. Marion pulled him toward the only empty booth, though
the table was strewn with someone else's dishes.

ALAN CARRIED THE LAST OF HIS
rice and prawns to the kitchen; he
would eat it for lunch the next day. When he switched on the light, the
plate and mug in the sink reminded him instantly of Saga's visit that
afternoon. In a peculiar way, this cheered him up. Her story (which he
had not managed to get, at least not through subtle methods) was surely
not a happy one, yet once she had come inside, out of the storm, she'd
exuded an air of confidence, almost contentment. He had said, as she
left, that he hoped he would see her again, and he'd made sure she had
his phone number, written clearly on a heavy piece of paper in permanent
ink. (His card, he thought, would scare her off for good.)

She told him she'd be in touch; she had to return the clothes he'd lent
her. She said she could not keep them, not without the explicit permission
of the woman to whom they belonged. But would she, a day later,
care about or possibly even remember Alan? Her appearance had implied
she might be homeless—and often people living at such extremes, no
matter how "normal" they seemed, were in such a psychic muddle that
each day wiped clean the day before. The inability to keep time continuous,
one day distinct from another, might be the very reason such people
had to live like feral cats.

But Saga had not seemed the least bit feral; a little simple, a little careless
about her appearance, but not wild, uncivilized, crazy. She had
wiped her feet vigorously on the mat inside Alan's door, and she had
asked for an old newspaper to set the box on, so as not to stain the floor.
(Later, she asked for a new box, and he found one—the one that had
been too small to hold George's Mousetrap game that morning.)

"Where are you going to take those puppies?" Alan had asked as he
led her to the bathroom.

"My place."

"Where do you live?"

"Oh"—she laughed, the laughter of private jokes—"downtown a bit.
Sometimes."

"If you need a place to live—"

"I just said I have one, didn't I?" She sounded testy, but then she
smiled. Her right eye, the narrow one, did not give in to the smile; nor
did that side of her mouth, as if the muscles there were contentious or
unwilling. The good eye, only by comparison with the other, looked as if
it were open extra wide, as if half of Saga were in a state of perpetual
astonishment.

She said, more gently, "This is very generous of you, taking us in. It's
not often strangers do things like that. But I do take care of myself." She
glanced at the puppies, sleeping off the trauma of their shots and the
storm. "And of my little friends. Till
they
get homes, and they will. One
way or another, I'll make sure of that." Alan's irrepressible judgment
must have shown on his face, because she added, "Do you think I'm a
little eccentric? Hey! Don't answer that."

He began to protest, but she interrupted. "Know what? I'm freezing."

So she had showered, while Alan made her tea and put out a plate of
crackers and cheese. When she came to the kitchen table, she was wearing
the sweatpants and T-shirt he'd taken from Greenie's bureau. The
T-shirt was red, stamped with the white silhouette of a lobster and the
name of the restaurant in Maine where he and Greenie had celebrated
their anniversary four years in a row. The restaurant had been a favorite
of Greenie's, on the coast looking out toward the island where she'd
spent a part of every childhood summer, in a tiny house on the rocks
with kerosene lamps and an outhouse. After her parents' death, Maine
had become too sad for her. That was two years ago; she and Alan had
not returned since. Nor had she worn this T-shirt, Alan suspected.

Saga stayed for only forty-five minutes (twenty of which she spent in
the shower). While they were seated at the table, she asked Alan about
George, whose face hung in every room.

"He's four. On a trip with his mother right now," said Alan. He asked
if Saga had children.

"Oh no." Her mouth was full, and she covered it with a napkin, as if
to hold back something else she might have said.

"Parents?"

He tried to sound casual, but she eyed him sharply, warning him she
wasn't so simple. "Long gone," she said.

Saga ate the entire plate of crackers and cheese, using a thumb to pick
up the last of the crumbs—just as George would have done. Alan
wished he had put out more food, but to put out more now might insult
her. She looked out the window often, and as soon as the rain seemed to
have let up for good, she said, "I should go now, but would you mind if
I made another phone call? It's local, I promise."

"Oh please," said Alan, and he took her back into the bedroom and
pointed to the phone. He closed the door to give her privacy. He carried
their plates from the table to the kitchen. He found a sponge and
worked at the gray crud around the faucets and the drain.

"Success!" Saga stood just outside the kitchen. "Thank you! You've
been the soul of kindness, Mr. Alan Glazier."

Alan was startled, not just by her sudden closeness. She smelled like
Greenie—like the shampoo Greenie had left behind. "I've done hardly
anything," he said.

"Perhaps you'll do more," Saga said brightly. Within a few minutes
she had collected her soggy, soiled clothing in a plastic bag, her box of
puppies, and Alan's number, which she stuffed in a pocket of Greenie's
sweatpants. After she put on her damp sneakers (Greenie's feet were
much smaller, Alan's too large), he saw her out the door. She refused his
offer to pay for a cab and set off toward Seventh Avenue. Alan watched
her cross every intersection—carefully—until she turned a corner.

When he wandered, idly, into the bedroom, he found her wet towel
folded neatly on the bedspread and the bar of soap from the shower on
his dresser, placed in the ceramic dish where he put his keys and coins
each night before he went to bed (it was in fact a soap dish, one he had
pilfered from a fancy hotel in Paris before he knew Greenie). On the
nightstand, beside the phone, Saga had left two quarters.

He checked the bathroom when he took the towel in to hang it up,
but he found nothing out of order there. Sheepishly, he opened the medicine
chest, and at first his heart foundered at the sight of all the empty
spaces where vials and miniature boxes had stood—but then he realized
that these were just the spaces so recently occupied by Greenie's benign
little remedies: Motrin, Q-tips, Chapstick, hand lotion, a tiny beaker of
colored barrettes, and a cylinder of powder (a scent called Rain, as if
you could begin to capture such an elemental smell). Against his will, he
felt the longing for her things, her presence, spread across his chest like a
burning rash. "Oh Greenie, what a mess," he said. He closed the cabinet,
which left him facing only himself. How well a mirror could say,
I told you so.

"
THREE DAYS IS MUCH TOO LONG
," said Uncle Marsden. "You
are going to worry me literally to death if you keep on disappearing
like this. And then you'll be in a pickle, won't you, my girl?"

Arriving on foot from the train station, Saga had found her uncle on
his knees in the garden, weeding the peony bed. His white hair, blown
loony by the wind, made him look like that god—Who was that god?
What was his name?—about to hurl a thunderclap.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't disappear. I left you a note. And yesterday
I left you a message. You were out." Or did she leave the message?
She remembered planning to leave the message.

"Oh thank you very much!" he scoffed. "A note and a message! As if
they assure me you're safe. I wish you would let me find a room for you
down there. I'm sure I know folks who'd put you up, maybe even let
you have a key. At least I'd know where you're sleeping, that you're
safe." He tossed his dirty gloves into the wheelbarrow and grasped her
shoulders, as if he might shake her, widened his eyes and uttered a long
growl. "Rrrraghhh!" Then he kissed her on the cheek.

As she followed him into the mudroom, it came to her. Zeus. The god
was Zeus. Uncle Marsden was nothing like Zeus, he was more like . . .
Hephaestus? Was that the blacksmith god? Saga had loved the Greek
myths when she was little, known all the gods and muses and famously
doomed mortals by heart. She'd like to know them again. She would
have to find that book. It had a yellow cover; that much she remembered,
but not where she had last seen it. Had it even survived the move
from her mother's house? It might be in one of the boxes on the third
floor. She would have to look—if she could remember to look. She took
out her notebook to write a reminder.

"Did you do what you needed to do with those creatures? Poor
things," said Uncle Marsden as he took off his rubber boots.

"Yes. But I have to go back in at the end of the week. They're with my
friend Stan, but I want to keep an eye on them. Until he finds them
homes."

"Is that where you stay? With this Stan fellow? Who in Constantinople
is
this Stan fellow?"

"I stay there sometimes," she lied. "But he's not a boyfriend, so
please, no lectures."

Oh,
Stan
might have liked that, no doubt about it. Stan wasn't really
even a "friend"—in terms of personality, he was a jerk—but there was
no reason to worry Uncle Marsden with the details of her history with
Stan. Stan was a big drinker, and basically, Saga had decided, he didn't
much care for people. Drunk or sober, however, he was devoted to the
animals he rescued.

Uncle Marsden growled again, but quietly. Gradually, he was giving
up the struggle of trying to reason with her or find out where she stayed
when she went into the city. She knew he suspected that he wouldn't like
the answer, and it was true: he wouldn't. Last year, when he'd told her
that her secrecy was dangerous, she'd told him it wasn't secrecy. It was
just that she needed some of her life to remain private, all her own. "If I
don't make a boundary or two," she had explained, "I'll have to keep
reminding you I'm thirty-three years old, I'm not a child." Poor Uncle
Marsden had to agree.

She hadn't had a seizure in two years, so he couldn't very well use this
caution, either, as an argument to keep her close to home. They had a
complicated alliance but one they both loved. At times—late nights, on
the front porch when it was warm, by the front fireplace when it was
not—she fancied that this must be a little bit like marriage.

She caught him eyeing the borrowed shirt she wore, but all he said
was "I'm going to assume you were
not
in Maine these past few days.
Though God knows that might be safer." He looked again and, this
time, pointed at the shirt. "Lobster, lobster . . . nice idea there. How
about lobster on Friday? Just for a change of pace."

"I'd love that," she said. Briefly, she wondered why she was clutching
her notebook. She put it back in her knapsack and hung the knapsack
on a hook. She dropped the plastic bag containing her wet clothes
beside the washing machine. For a moment, on the train, Saga had completely
forgotten what the bag contained. She had been surprised, when
she opened it, to see her yellow dress and her tweed jacket, the remains
of a suit she'd bought for job interviews in her previous life.

Inside the house, heat rose contentiously through the antique vents
like the mumblings of a hungry stomach. Saga walked carefully through
the kitchen and the rooms beyond, turning on lamps. Just to see where
you were going, you had to turn on half a dozen. Because of the outdated
wiring, Uncle Marsden insisted on weak bulbs, and most of the
shades had turned cloudy and yellow with age. "Can I make you a
drink?" she called out.

"You may, my dear!"

She went to the bar in the parlor and stood on the library stool to
reach the shelf with the bourbon and the cherries. "Shirley Temple for
me," she said when Uncle Marsden passed her on his way upstairs. Even
when he hadn't been in the garden, he changed his clothes for dinner.

He leaned across the banister. "And forty lashes. As if they'd do a bit
of good."

Saga looked out the front windows at the house across the street.
Standing at the door was the giant schnauzer who lived there. He never
barked or scratched, just showed up and waited. Saga didn't need to
look at a clock; this meant it was probably five to six. Every night, precisely
at six, the porch lights flanking the door winked on, and Commodore
Perry was admitted to his house. That was the kind of life Saga
kept thinking she longed for. Really, though, it was the kind of life she
could have right here, for the time being, if she chose—a life of perfect
safety, ample comfort, and easy kindness amid all these deep, lumpy
sofas and thick-limbed tables in rooms as grand as circus tents.

Uncle Marsden's house was so nice, so intensely, so magically
nice
—
not magazine nice but fairy-tale nice. Saga had loved it forever, all the
way back to when she was a little girl and came for summer visits with
her parents. Even then she had wished she could live here, and not just
because it would be wonderful to live near the beach. Uncle Marsden's
house had lots of funny forgotten stairways and cupboards and chutes,
just the way a person had blood vessels and organs (some of them essential,
some nearly obsolete) hidden beneath all that skin. It had a dumbwaiter
that still worked, though no one used it—or not since Saga and
her cousins had been children, pretending, when the adults weren't
around, that it was an elevator, a spaceship, a diving bell. In the old
smoking den, Uncle Marsden had installed blue lamps and a purring
humidifier. This was where he kept his personal plant collection; he
called this room the Salon of Mosses. It smelled exactly like a forest.

There were chandeliers that might have come from Cinderella
(though Cinderella would have kept them free of cobwebs), and halfway
up the front stairs, which changed direction twice, there was a deep windowseat,
as if you just might need to rest on your way to bed—which,
for a while, Saga did.

Everything was big and old: the tall imposing beds, the crooked
raftered ceilings, the Arabian rugs—worn from plush reds to dusty
pinks—and the front porch, which felt like the sheltered deck of a ship,
cluttered end to end with sagging wicker chairs and flocks of pillows
with sun-faded faces, their undersides peppered with mildew. It was the
kind of house people called stately, with rooms on the highest floor that
Uncle Marsden referred to as "maids' rooms" even though he'd never
had any maids, or any that Saga knew about. Three of these rooms were
filled with boxes and unused furniture, and when you opened their
doors, the smell of mothballs hit you hard and made you sneeze, but the
fourth room had a bed, a dresser, a cracked-leather armchair, and a
painting of a tulip field in Holland (complete with rickety windmill). In
one corner stood a tiny green sink, and out the one protruding window—
this was the best part—there was a view of the ocean and some tree-tufted
islands in the distance. This was the only room in the house
where you could really see, not just hear, the ocean, and Uncle Marsden
had given it to Saga.

That long-ago wish of Saga's—getting to live here—hadn't come true
in the best of ways, but she sometimes got a kick out of the fact that it
had
come true when so many others had not. She didn't like to think
about how long it would
stay
true, though unless Uncle Marsden lived
practically forever, she would almost certainly have to think about that.
Saga had moved in just over a year ago, when her mother died. Uncle
Marsden had sold his sister's house and furniture and put the money in a
bank account for Saga. "No question, my dear, you'll move in with
me," he had said right up front, before the funeral. Saga, too proud to
say that she could not live alone, had never felt such relief. Uncle Marsden
was, if not a god, a saint for sure.

On a good day, the only serious drawback to Saga's altered life was
Uncle Marsden's allergy to cats and dogs—which meant she couldn't
have so much as a single kitten in the house. Two years ago, for several
months, she had fed a group of feral cats behind the garage, cats abandoned
by the fickle kinds of people who came to stay in the summer
cabins a few miles down the beach and somehow thought that pets, like
bathing suits, were a seasonal thing. But Uncle Marsden's snooty neighbors
had put an end to that. It broke Saga's heart to have to catch
them—which wasn't hard, since most of them had come to trust her—
and drive them over to the shelter, a few at a time. She would rather
have driven them back to the overturned boat where they had gathered
and managed to survive before she became their caretaker (and then
their betrayer), but she knew that nothing would have stopped them
from returning to the garage, and she did not want to make trouble for
her uncle.

Uncle Marsden told people that Saga had wanted to be a vet and that
it was such a tragedy her accident had made this impossible. This wasn't
really true, or not completely. Saga had loved animals from the time she
was little, and when she was eight or ten, she told all the grown-ups
that's what she wanted to be, a vet, maybe a zoo vet. But by the time she
finished high school, she knew full well that she didn't have the kind of
brains it took to ace all those science courses. Because vet school, she'd
found out, was harder to get into than med school, and once you got
there, you had to learn how to be a doctor not just for one species, like
human doctors did, but for a whole bunch of species—pigs and horses
and cows, even if you knew from the start you just wanted to care for
dogs and cats (never mind zebras and camels and snakes!). As part of
your schooling, Saga had heard, you had to slice open ponies, just to
explore their insides, and cut the beaks off chickens the way they did on
factory farms. Well, that would have done Saga in. Learning science was
peanuts compared to
that.

When she was in college—nowhere like Yale, where Uncle Marsden
taught—she'd gone to a career workshop and decided that travel agent
would be a great job, so that's what she'd set her mind on, taking classes
in French and business and even a little modern history. So
that
was the
profession which now, because of the accident, she could no longer pursue.
There were just too many details you had to keep straight. In fact, it
was exactly the sort of job for which she was now
least
qualified. Sometimes
that seemed funny, too. Almost funny.

But Saga held back from correcting Uncle Marsden. She understood
that for him, a tenured professor at a fancy university, to say that his
beloved niece had been thwarted from a career as a
travel agent
by a
serious head injury would have been . . . well, it wasn't tragic enough.
And anyway, a lot of the time when she heard him tell his version, she
wasn't even in the same room. The very network of passageways and
hollow compartments that made the house seem so alive also made it a
place where conversations traveled unlikely distances—like straight up
the dumbwaiter shaft to the heating vent on the floor in Saga's room. So
if she was up there and people were talking just a little loud in the
kitchen, she'd hear most of it without trying, or wanting, to.

This was how she'd sometimes hear her cousins Pansy and Michael
and Frida discussing
her.
To her face, they all treated her as if they loved
and cared about her as much as their father did, but actually, when
Saga was absent, Frida was the only one who ever came to her defense.
They all worried, and you had to admit this was logical, about what
would happen when Uncle Marsden died. Would
they
have to look after
Saga? Absurd—especially since surely there was some kind of work she
could do to support herself; Uncle Marsden hadn't tried hard enough to
help her find it.

But Michael, she'd found out, made merciless fun of her.

One morning last summer, before she had gone down for breakfast,
she'd heard Michael's voice, like the voice of a pompous ghost, reverberate
through the floor: "Rubber bands, twisties—
twisties!—
tinfoil, wax
paper, and
stuff
. . . can openers, corkscrews,
et cetera.
. . . Oh, I like this
one: large utensils except wooden spoons,
wooden spoons go in jar
beside laundry door!"
Laughter—mostly his.

Michael was reading out loud, to his sisters, from the labels Saga had
placed around the kitchen to help her remember where to put things
away, and where to find them again. (The antique cupboards had glass
panes, so there she had only to look right through to see the dishes and
food inside.) She cooked and cleaned for Uncle Marsden, though at first
he told her she shouldn't feel obliged to do anything special; all he
needed was her charming company. But Saga liked organizing tasks in
ways that made her feel like anyone else and that might, despite what
some doctors said, sharpen her mind again. Uncle Marsden had also
nailed a big blackboard on the one blank wall, taking down a rooster
weather vane that had been there as long as Saga could remember.
(She'd been told that most of the long memories were just fine in her
head—but how could anybody know for sure? How could she, much
less anyone else, know what she'd once remembered and no longer did?)
On that board, Saga and Uncle Marsden wrote down telephone messages,
events for the week, and things to shop for, anything that might
slip their minds.