The Whole World Over (36 page)

But Charlie's most interesting possessions were the smallest, laid out
evenly on a table against a third wall. The table—a peeling turquoise
door laid across a pair of filing cabinets—doubled as a desk and a natural
history display. Around a modest clearing that held a laptop computer
lay bones, pot shards, fossils, dried seed pods, mysterious tarnished
implements—and dozens of stones, each distinctive and striking. There
wasn't a mote of dust on anything.

"Come and get it," Charlie called from the kitchen. George emerged
with his own plate, on it two sandwiches shaped, as promised, like
Tyrannosaurus rexes. George looked up at his mother, grinned, and
made a loud snarling noise. This was the silliness she had missed.

"
Rrraaar
yourself!" she said. "Just wait till I get my stegos. They
know how to fight; you told me so."

"But not as good as T. rex. You cannot vanish T. rex." Carefully,
George transferred his plate to the dining table just outside the kitchen.

From Charlie, Greenie took a tray holding their sandwiches (Charlie
had chosen T. rex, too), a bowl of sliced pickles, and a dish of baby carrots.
Greenie's stegosauruses looked as if they were bleeding; beneath
the cheese, Charlie had tucked slices of tomato. She told him the sandwiches
smelled delicious.

"No disingenuous compliments from
you.
"

"I love grilled cheese," said Greenie. "My mother taught me how to
make it with horseradish and coleslaw."

"This is what they call one-upsmanship," Charlie said to George.
"Does she always show off like that?"

George was already eating. He looked up at Charlie and giggled.

Charlie asked George about his new school. Greenie learned more in
those fifteen minutes than she had managed to get from quizzing her son
for days on end. She learned that his teacher, Mrs. Rodrigo, was teaching
them a little Spanish; that she owned twenty-three finches, which
she kept in a cage that filled most of her living room; that her husband
operated a crane. (She had shown the class photos of the finches and of
her husband in his crane.) She learned that Mrs. Rodrigo had read them
a book called
Owl at Home,
which was really, according to George, "a
bunch of stories squished into one."

"I must say," said Greenie, "Mrs. Rodrigo seems to like birds. I
mean, finches . . . a story about an owl . . . and even that her husband
drives a
crane.
"

"Mom, not
that
kind of crane," George said impatiently.

Greenie glanced at Charlie, who listened with pleasure and amusement
to her son's assertions. She stacked their dishes on the tray and carried
it into the kitchen, a stunningly bright little alley of a room, almost
completely enclosed in glass. When Charlie joined her, she was taking in
the long terra-cotta planter filled with cactuses, the barometer (identical
to the one her father had kept in Maine), and the great wooden barrel
on the floor by the sink.

"No washing dishes. I do that."

"Oh please," said Greenie.

"No, really." He smiled apologetically. "I have my own eccentric
system."

She noticed that there was no dishwasher. The dish rack beside the
sink was rigged to drain through a slot in the lid of the barrel, along
with a hose that snaked down from a hole drilled in a window frame.
Charlie said, "It comes from the gutter. I get some of my rinse water that
way. Not much these days, but some."

She laughed. "That's how we got water in Maine."

He nodded. "And there you have more water than anyone here could
ever dream of. That is, if people here were realistic."

"What is
this
?" George called from the other room. Charlie left the
kitchen to join him, but Greenie lingered. Beyond the barrel and its
Rube Goldberg riggings, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Three yellowed
cookbooks were stacked on the only shelf, next to a framed photograph
of Charlie's parents in front of their house in Massachusetts.
On the counter stood an old-fashioned rotary telephone and a wooden
pepper mill. Greenie placed an index finger in the aperture framing the
zero on the phone. She pulled it around to feel that long-outmoded sensation,
of making a phone call back in high school.

"Hey!" Charlie shouted from the other room. "Stop snooping in
there!"

George stood at the large table, asking Charlie about his stones, lifting
them one by one. On the bottom of each stone, Charlie had inked in
white the place it had come from.
Champlain–Vt.
on a gray egglike
stone bisected by a protruding white vein.
Wading River,
long and
smooth and mauve, like a tongue. A lump of black pumice as light as
down,
Etna;
sage green with bits of glitter,
Trapalou–Ikaria;
a jagged
cube of granite,
Central Park.

"When were you in Central Park without looking me up?" said
Greenie.

"I didn't know you'd care to have me look you up."

"I like this one," said George. He was holding the biggest, in both
hands: a hunk of sparkling rose quartz. "Little Compton," he read
aloud from the underside. "Where is that?"

"Rhode Island," said Charlie. "Would you like to have it?"

"Yes!"

Greenie did not try to discourage this gift or even get George to say
please. She was through, for the day, with being the disciplinarian
mother. Idly, she picked up a sliver of blackish rock, thin as a piece of
cardboard. The perfect skipping stone, she thought, remembering contests
with cousins when the tide was low and the swimming cove was
placid. She turned the rock over:
Circe, Smith's Rock.
She put it back
quickly, but not before Charlie noticed.

"That one I'm not giving up. I'm not sure I could replace it."

Greenie laughed nervously. She lifted another rock. "Tierra del
Fuego," she read. "Where haven't you been?"

"Lots of places," said Charlie. "I'm one of those people who can't
stop searching my way around the world." Abruptly, he returned to the
kitchen.

George played with several of the rocks, lining them up, stacking
them, talking to himself about their qualities, while Greenie stood in the
kitchen with Charlie. He took a dipper and, with water from the barrel,
filled a plastic basin in the sink. He put their plates and cups in to soak.

"You wash dishes in that?" she said. "Water from your roof?"

"And from my salad spinner. I try to scrub them off without soap.
Then I rinse them with hot water from the tap. That's enough. I'm not
running a restaurant."

"And you take two-minute showers."

He smiled. "Three minutes. Every three days unless I go running."

Greenie laughed. "Charlie, you may be this big world traveler, but
you've grown into such an old lady!"

George, who was suddenly beside her, clutching his large pink rock,
said, "He is not an old lady, Mom. He is a guy. He is a man."

"That's right." Charlie did not take his eyes off Greenie. "I am
a man."

Greenie tried to meet his level, superficially pleasant gaze, but she
couldn't. George, who had not been so talkative in months, said, "Charlie,
can I change my mind? Can I keepen the one from the volcano
instead? The one with the little holes all over?"

"Absolutely," said Charlie, though Greenie was sure the pumice from
Sicily, like the skipping stone from Maine, was irreplaceable.

"Thank you. Thank you a whole, whole lot!" exclaimed her glowing
boy as he traded up, something large and shiny for something small and
cunningly dark.

CHARLIE BROUGHT ANOTHER ODD PRESENT
to Greenie a few nights
later, though this time he called before dropping by. George was fast
asleep.

Once again, she was fooled by the appearance of the gift, a small rectangular
box that suggested a bracelet or earrings.

"Don't get excited," said Charlie. "You know me by now."

The bar of soap Greenie took from the box was brown, oval, and
speckled like an egg. It smelled of almonds. "Nice," she said, embarrassed
by her disappointment. "Though I hope you don't mean to imply
that I'm not clean enough."

Charlie stood by her kitchen sink. He picked up the bottle of liquid
soap she kept there for washing hands. "No," he said, shaking his head
for emphasis.

Greenie laughed. "No what?"

"No antibacterial soaps." He went on to explain to Greenie how
these soaps, just like an improper dose of antibiotics in the human body,
flowed out into the streams and oceans, creating new and stronger bacteria,
supergerms.

"But then why does George's doctor have that very soap in his
office?"

"Two words:
free, samples.
" He smiled forlornly. "Charlie, the world
is full of shortsighted people."

By now, Greenie understood that to Charlie, an idealist almost by
instinct (could you be a knee-jerk idealist?), this human failing was a
monstrosity, a tragedy that made him chronically anxious. But she also
understood that he was telling her, whether he meant to or not, that she
could trust him with anything, because he was someone who, unlike
Greenie, thought things entirely through, saw the consequences of
actions and inactions both, their long trajectories through time. The
gifts he had given her were signs of his very self: that he was as solid and
square as the brick, as wholesome as the soap, as unassuming as those
wide-eyed daisies. But now all she said was "And that's why you do
what you do."

"I suppose so, yes, in a nutshell."

Greenie put the bar of soap where the quietly evil bottle had sat.

"What's that?" she heard Charlie say. He was pointing at a cake
stand.

"German chocolate," she said.

"I'll have a very big piece," he said. "Please."

As she watched him dig into her cake, she saw the earnest boy in the
man, and she understood something else, or two things at once: that she
wanted Charlie to make a pass at her and that he never would. If that
was how he wanted her—and did he?—he would leave it up to her,
because she was the one with so much at stake.

As soon as he was gone, Greenie called Walter. "Oh Walter, something
terrible is happening," she said when he answered. "I'm falling in
love."

"Good for you, baby," Walter said softly, instantly. "Falling in love is
never terrible, never."

Greenie said, "Walter, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard
you say."

"No," he said firmly. "It just depends on what you do with the love
into which you have fallen."

"That's too complicated for me," said Greenie. "I'm desperately in
need of simple. Simple, simple, simple." She heard summer thunder, all
the way from New York City. She thought of Alan:
We do it without any
sensible motive. It always involves pain.

"Darling,
simple
is the childish prayer on everyone's lips," said Walter.
"But here's what's crucial: does he love you back, this mystery man?"

"I'm afraid he might. Back to the time we were barely old enough to
drive."

"Oh my heavenly stars." Walter let out a laughing, wrenching sigh,
which was followed immediately by another, louder crack of thunder.
Then Greenie could actually hear the rain fall outside Walter's apartment,
pelting hard on the roof over Walter's head, the roof over Alan's
head, roof after roof in the city where Greenie finally knew that, whatever
else might happen, she would never make her home again.

"
WELL, EVERYBODY
, we have some big news. I'm pregnant."

They were eating the main course of Thanksgiving dinner—
Saga's turkey stuffed with corn bread, Pansy's mashed potatoes with
too much garlic, Frida's Asian yam salad and brussels sprouts in cider.
Pansy's new boyfriend had just asked if someone would pass the cranberry
relish (the one thing that wasn't homemade). That's when Denise
made her announcement.

Michael sat next to her, fully attentive; he hadn't been on the phone
once since arriving. He took his wife's right hand with his left, between
their plates. His thick wedding ring sparked in the light from the candles.

Pansy's face seemed to whiten. For an instant, she looked more anxious
than glad and stole a glance at her boyfriend, who smiled blandly,
the way one does at the good news of strangers. She laid
her
hand on the
tablecloth, perhaps hoping the boyfriend would take it. He didn't.

Frida was the first to speak. "Oh Denise, that is so wonderful.
Michael! Congratulations to you both." She raised her glass. "Here's to
you, new mom."

"She's going to be the best," said Michael.

Uncle Marsden's smile wasn't much more personal than that of
Pansy's newcomer boyfriend. His eyes were dry as he murmured, "You
bet she will."

"How far along?" said Pansy. She put her unclaimed hand back in
her lap.

"Oh, about a minute," said Denise. "We just found out yesterday. I
know it's soon to tell anyone, but since we're all together . . ." She
looked at Michael, who beamed at her.

To Pansy, he said, "No reason to think we'll have problems. First
checkup was totally normal."

"Oh no!" said Pansy. "I never meant to imply you would!"

In her head, Saga counted carefully, twice before she was nearly certain.
"August?" she said quietly. "Wow. A baby in August?"

The entire family looked at Saga: an unfamiliar sensation. Had she
said the wrong thing? But Denise was smiling wholeheartedly at her,
even gratefully. "August first, as a matter of fact. I can't imagine what
I'll look like in a bathing suit by then." Again, she and Michael
exchanged their starry look.

"August," said Uncle Marsden, "is when they're threatening to break
ground for those blasted condominia. Unless the bird people pull themselves
together. So don't get too smug about beach plans just yet."

Frida frowned at her father. "Dad, did you hear Denise? She just said
she's going to make you a grandfather."

There was a hint of annoyance in the smile Uncle Marsden directed at
Frida. His eyes were closed slightly—a little like a snake, thought Saga,
surprised by the treachery in this image. He said calmly, "I heard the
splendid news, my dear. I'm not a bit deaf." He turned to Michael and
Denise. "That
is
splendid news, in case I didn't shout it from the
rooftops. I shall have to dig up the cradle my father made. I think your
mother kept you girls in it; Michael, I seem to remember you did not
like the motion. You wanted your little bed on solid ground. That's you
all over, isn't it? Well, may your little one find his bit of solid ground as
well." He chuckled and raised his glass.

"Or
hers,
" said Frida as she joined the toast.

"And now I need more of Saga's fine stuffing. Pass it on over," said
Uncle Marsden. He set down his glass and made a summoning gesture
toward the dish, which sat at the far end of the table, near Pansy's
boyfriend.

Remarkable, thought Saga, how no one said another word about it
for the rest of the meal—well, herself included. But if your own sisters
and dad didn't want to talk about the first of a new generation—wonder
about names, things like that—wasn't something wrong? Or was it that
Denise wasn't their sister and daughter? Pansy was clearly envious.
Look at Michael, though: he did seem softer, happier. He seemed, for a
change, in the moment, not preoccupied by speculations, investments,
trades. Maybe a lot of his crankiness over the recent years had been
about this: worrying that they wouldn't have kids. Saga could understand
that. And she could understand the wash of joy when that worry
was behind you, like a wash of bright sunny blue watercolor brushed
across a pencil drawing. Or she could imagine it.

Dessert was pumpkin pie made from a can by Saga and pear-ginger
crumble made from scratch by Frida, served with Uncle Marsden's
favorite food in the world: hard sauce with brandy. They talked about
The Perfect Storm
; everyone had seen the movie except Uncle Marsden
and Saga. Pansy was upset that someone had exploited the tragedies of
real underprivileged people who would never see a penny of what those
actors and producers were getting. Denise said she thought the author
had set up some kind of scholarship fund.

"Well,
I
read that he opened a hipster bar in New York City with his
take of the loot," said Pansy.

"Maybe he did both," said Frida.

"The scholarship fund should be for the families of those rescue
divers from the Coast Guard," said Michael, "who sacrifice their lives
for spoiled, ignorant people on yachts. Did you read that part of the
book? It wasn't in the movie. About that rich imbecile who sued the
Coast Guard for forcing him off his boat? They should have left him to
drown."

"Aren't those spoiled, ignorant people with yachts some of your
biggest clients?" asked Pansy.

Michael gave her a brief hard glance, an "Oh
please
" sort of
expression.

"Frankly," said Uncle Marsden, "I am not interested in watching a
movie where you know from the start that you will see the main characters
drown. Unless they're murderers or former Gestapo, perhaps.
And big waves—we've seen plenty of those right here, no special effects
needed. What's the hoopla?" That brought the conversation to a halt.

Saga took orders for coffee; over her objections, Pansy's boyfriend
insisted on helping.

"You have a nice family. Mine can't get through a meal without a big
fight," he said as he measured coffee grounds and water. While they
waited through the coffeemaker's burblings, he gave her the dinner
plates one by one so she could rinse them. They had eaten off Uncle
Marsden's Yale plates because those could go in the dishwasher.

"That's too bad," said Saga as she rinsed off Harkness Tower, then
Woolsey Hall and the arch that led to the athletic fields. Funny how,
from washing their images on dishes, she knew these places by heart
when so many others, places she'd really been to, were hard to retain.
"We do okay here; we're pretty high on the scale of family niceness.
Most of the time." Had she just said "we"? Saga wondered if
maybe, tonight at last, she was feeling accepted by her cousins. And she
wondered what Pansy had told the boyfriend about her.

He said, as if reading her mind, "Pansy says you're looking for a job
in animal welfare."

Saga ran a sponge across the counter. "I do volunteer work. For now."

"I run a career counseling service in New Haven," he said. "Pansy
said maybe I could help you out. Nonprofit might be a good place for
you." He held out a business card. She put it in the pocket of her apron,
Aunt Liz's apron.

"Thanks."

He said, "I know you have . . ."

She looked straight at him. "Disabilities."

"That shouldn't discourage you. Obviously you—"

"Let's go have more of that yummy crumble," said Saga. "I'll call
you." She stared into the cupboards, hoping he would take the hint. For
a minute, she wasn't sure she would recognize the coffee cups, know
them from soup bowls or ramekins. I know all these words, she reassured
herself as she reached for the saucers.
Ramekin:
a sturdy cube of a
word, spinning in the air like a juggler's ball. Maroon.

She knew she was stacking the cups too loudly on the tray. Slow, she
told herself. Calm.

The boyfriend said, "Please, let me—"

"Oh yes," said Saga. She put the cream and sugar on the tray and
handed it to him. "Put this on the sideboard. We'll serve ourselves."

When he had left the kitchen, she walked through the mudroom onto
the side porch to feel the shock of cold air. She took a deep serrated
breath, almost a sob. The boyfriend was nice; it was Pansy who'd put
him up to that nasty little mission. Or was it thoughtful? Maybe Pansy
did care for Saga, about Saga's life.

The unseen waves were loud, almost as loud as thunder, slamming
the beach. A fine snow was falling, flakes as tiny as dust motes but sharp
and distinct when they hit your face. She leaned out from the overhang
and looked up. How thick were the clouds tonight? She walked down
the steps and away from the house. No,
there
was the moon, murky
yellow, half lit, a thick potato wedge. Hello. Hello, dear friend.

There was the falling snow, visible only in the light from the dining
room windows. There were Michael and Denise, perhaps the only ones
in the room now, kissing. There was the house.
House:
a word as
big and gray as a summer storm cloud, but flat, solid, quiet.
House.
Ramekin. Boyfriend
(china blue, Yale blue).
Baby
(white as the innards
of a milkweed pod). Four delicious words.

SHE HAD GROWN TO LOVE THE BOOKSTORE
, and it had become as
vivid a place in her mind, and in her memory, as her room at the top of
Uncle Marsden's house. The bird prince let Saga come and go as she
pleased, and he welcomed her modest help. She'd started with the garden
and moved her way in. After planting the window boxes, she'd put
pachysandra along the fence and a rugged moss between the flagstones.
She consulted Uncle Marsden's books, choosing things that were easy to
grow. She copied down their names, and Fenno bought them. In the
early fall, she planted daffodil and tulip bulbs in a patch of sun, hostas
among the pachysandra. She loosened the hard soil around the magnolia
tree and weeded, weeded, weeded. Sometimes the parrot kept Saga
company, watching with those strange black eyes, tilting her head every
which way as if she could never get a clear impression of Saga. Just who
are
you? she seemed to wonder. Will I know if I look at you this way?
This way? How about
this
?

In October, Fenno had asked Saga if she'd like to help him do a
reshelving project. He warned her that there would be a lot of carrying,
upstairs and down. Could she do that? He also told her that he would
not allow her to continue doing anything if she would not accept payment.
"Oneeka gets paid, you should get paid." Oneeka was his real
assistant, though she wasn't there all the time.

Saga now tried to go to the city a few times a week. Stan's frosty
behavior bothered her less and less. She brought him a litter of kittens
she found in a box when she went for a walk along the Hudson River,
putting up flyers asking for donations and volunteers. Fenno let her put
Stan's flyers right on the sales counter in the bookstore.

Sometimes, as she walked around the Village doing Stan's footwork,
she would pass the Italian restaurant, "her" little courtyard, and feel a
jolt of longing. On one of the last warm afternoons in October, she'd
taken a table there and ordered a piece of cake. These days, she spent all
her nights in her own bed, even if it meant taking a rush-hour train,
standing up for several stops, clinging to a pole as she struggled to keep
her hard-won balance. She did not want to show up for Fenno looking
anything but clean and neat.

She'd had a glimpse of Fenno's private life the first time she went
down into the basement of the bookstore. Half of the low space was
taken up by shelves—mysteries, science fiction, and horror stories—the
rest by stacks of boxes, a desk, a rocking chair, a dog kennel, a folded
baby stroller, and a bike. The bathroom was down here, too. It wasn't
much more than a cubbyhole with a toilet and tiny sink, but its walls
swarmed with information.

Next to the mirror over the sink hung a bulletin board. Tacked to it
were notices of readings around the neighborhood, a pamphlet claiming
to list the hundred best books of the twentieth century, a water-stained
handwritten sign that read
PLEASE: NO REFUSE IN TOILET
, and a photograph.
Here was Fenno, sandy hair blowing, eyes crinkled up in a
smile, standing in a field that stretched away like a green and stormy
sea. A moor, she thought.
Moor:
a long word, a purple word, a dark
satin ribbon of a word.

In the photo, Fenno knelt on the ground enfolding a child in each
arm: a boy and a girl, though you could tell this only from the way they
were dressed. Both had short, fine blond hair and wide pink cheeks. He
was a father! Saga felt unexpectedly strange at this discovery, excited yet
also unhappy.

Covering most of the opposite wall was a bird-watcher's map of the
world. It made the birds look like conquerors, their colorful shapes
crowding every continent like game pieces or markers on a battle plan.
Birds had such wonderful names, Saga thought as she let her eyes roam
the map. Way down in Australia, Rainbow Lorikeet, Satin Bowerbird,
Tawny Frogmouth; in Africa, the Green Wood-Hoopoe, the Sacred Ibis,
the Fulvous Whistling Duck. (Fulvous?! Was that an ordinary word
with an ordinary meaning? A word swollen, tender, and pink, like a
nursing breast . . .) In Europe, her favorites were the Chiffchaff, the
Fieldfare, the Stonechat, the Capercaillie; to the far north, Oldsquaw
and Parasitic Jaeger.

The birds' migration routes crisscrossed the map like a craze of telephone
wires, swooping gracefully from one coast to another. They
seemed almost to
secure
the world, all these well-traveled paths in the
sky, the way ribbon or twine secures a precious gift. And yet, it occurred
to Saga, all the creatures pictured here, though they might venture the
whole world over, returned in the end to their separate colonies. Could
you be a roving homebody?