The Beginner's Goodbye Read online

  Peggy’s cookie tin sat on my desk, another thing to savor, somehow nourishing to my vision. For each season, she had an appropriate tin: a shiny red one at Christmas with a Santa Claus on the lid, a pale-green one at Easter featuring a rabbit in a bonnet, and these hydrangeas till fall arrived, when out came her acorn tin. I started on a new cookie. Chewing steadily, I transferred my gaze to the sweater she’d left hanging on the back of the chair. It wasn’t clear to me how a short-sleeved sweater could provide much warmth, but she seemed very fond of this one, which was white and sort of gathered at the shoulders, so that it swung out like a cape. The sleeves were hemmed with narrow knit ruffles (wouldn’t you know), and two more ruffles ran down the straight part where the buttons were. Why, I would bet that even Peggy’s underwear was ruffled. I spent a pleasurable moment picturing that: a bra trimmed with eyelet lace like the cookie tin’s paper doily, stretched flat where it bridged the soft dip between her breasts. I reached inside the tin for another cookie, but it seemed I’d finished them. All I found were crumbs. I pressed a fingertip to the crumbs and licked them off, every last one of them. Then I gave a long, contented sigh and leaned back in my chair and swiveled toward the window again.

  This was a rear window, ground-floor level, and filmed with dust, facing the back of a shabby brick building hung with peeling wooden porches. Beneath the porches was a row of trash cans and empty milk crates, and in front of those, so motionless that it took me a second to realize, stood Dorothy.

  She was some twenty feet distant from me, on the far side of the alley, and I couldn’t tell if she saw me. She was looking toward my window, though. Her arms hung empty at her sides, and she wasn’t wearing her satchel. This gave her the air of someone who didn’t know what to do with herself. She seemed lost, almost. She seemed uncertain where to go next.

  I scrambled to my feet, but before I could get the window open she turned and wandered away.

  8

  One night I woke up and heard low murmurs from Nandina’s bedroom. And one morning a few days later, when I was shaving in the bathroom, I chanced to look out the window and see Gil Bryan walking from the house toward the street, climbing into his pickup and starting it and quietly rolling away.

  Oh, I was cramping their style, all right. It was time I moved back home.

  Work was still going on there, as both Nandina and Gil pointed out when I mentioned my plans that evening. But really I could have returned several weeks ago, if I didn’t mind having the men overlap me a bit in the mornings. When I said as much to Nandina and Gil, they said, “Oh. Well …,” and, “If you’re sure, then …,” and both of them looked relieved. I started packing right after supper. I moved the next afternoon, a Friday, taking off early from the office.

  The main part of my house was bare and shiny and echoing, as pristine as an empty dollhouse. But stray furniture and packed cartons filled every inch of my bedroom, so I settled in the guest room, which was small enough to have escaped being used for storage. I was glad to have an excuse not to return to my own bed. I think I was afraid it would bring back too many memories—not from the days of my marriage but from those weeks after the oak tree fell, when I’d lain there alone night after night wondering how to go on.

  It wasn’t only for Gil and Nandina’s sake that I moved back when I did. Let’s be honest. The other reason, the main reason, was that I was hoping I would see Dorothy there. In the two weeks since her appearance outside my office window, there had been no sign of her, not a glimmer. I had looked for her in vain on the sidewalks and in crowds and wherever anonymous strangers waited in line. I had spun around without warning as I stood at intersections, hoping to surprise her behind me. I had settled conspicuously on public benches and strained to feel her sleeve brushing my sleeve. Nothing. She was avoiding me.

  At home, I focused on the places where she had shown up before: the street and the backyard. On Saturday I got up when it was barely light out, and after a makeshift breakfast—two granola bars from a carton of foodstuffs in the bedroom—I took a stroll around the block, pegging my cane against the sidewalk almost soundlessly so as not to wake the neighbors. All I saw was one black cat, an insultingly paranoid type who shrank off as I drew near. The solitude made me feel too tall. I was glad to get back to the house.

  Once the sun was fully up, I dragged a wrought-iron chair from the front yard to the rear. I set it on the back stoop and sat down, facing outward. My God, the lawn was a wreck. We’d had a dry summer, and the grass was more like straw. The azaleas looked stunted and wizened, and the wood-chip circle where the oak tree once stood had sunk in a good foot or more.

  I was probably out of my mind to imagine that Dorothy would come here. The backyard was so bald. It lacked camouflage. There weren’t enough dapplings of shadow to break up the flat glare of the sun.

  I rose, eventually, and went into the house for my keys and drove to the grocery store, where I gathered a large amount of provisions. You’d have thought I was shopping for a family of ten. (I think I had it in mind to hole up, to wait it out in my cave until Dorothy chose to show herself, however long it might take.) Back home I dug a few kitchen utensils out of the bedroom cartons and I fixed myself a conscientiously balanced lunch—protein, starch, green vegetable—after which I went out and sat in the wrought-iron chair again, for lack of anything better to do. A few minutes of this and I rose to uncoil the garden hose. The grass made a bristly sound under my feet. I placed the sprinkler near the azaleas and turned the faucet on full-blast and sat back down. And that was how I discovered the pleasures of watching a lawn being watered.

  I swear that I could feel the grass’s gratitude. The birds seemed grateful, too. A little crowd of them came out of nowhere, as if word had gotten around somehow, and they twittered and chirped and fluttered in the droplets. My chair was too right-angled, forcing me to sit unnaturally erect, and its scrolls and curlicues dug into the knobs of my spine, but even so I felt the most pervasive sense of peace. I tilted my face up and squinted against the sunlight to follow the arc of the spray, which sashayed left, sashayed right, like a young girl swishing her skirts as she walked.

  I practically drowned that yard.

  Not till early evening, when the gnats started biting, did I turn off the hose. Then I went inside to fix dinner, and after that I tried to read a while in the impractical little slipper chair in one corner of the guest room. But I was so unaccountably, irresistibly sleepy that I laid aside my book fairly soon and went to bed. I slept without so much as a twitch, I believe, until nearly nine the next morning.

  The early part of Sunday I spent dragging various cartons from the bedroom to the kitchen, replacing pots and dishes and foods in the cabinets that smelled of fresh paint. I enjoyed establishing just the right locations for things. I never could have done that in the old days—at least not with any hope that they would stay there, not with Dorothy around.

  When I caught myself thinking this, I averted my head sharply, as if I could shake the thought away.

  Once I’d unpacked what I could, I went out back again, like some kind of sports fan desperate to return to his game. The grass was still a yellowish white, although it no longer crunched. I moved the sprinkler over by the euonymus alongside the alley, sinking into the sodden earth with every step, and I turned the water on and settled back into my chair.

  I had learned by now that when the sunlight hit the spray in a certain way I could occasionally, almost, see things. I mean things that weren’t really there. Not Dorothy, unfortunately. But one time I saw this sort of column, an ornate Corinthian column rising up and sprouting apart at the top and then dissolving into particles, and another time a woman in a long beige dress with a bustle. And yet another time—this was the weirdest—I saw an entire swing set, and a man in shirtsleeves was pushing a small child in one of those chair-like swings intended for infants and toddlers. I also saw a good many rainbows, needless to say, and numerous sheets of changeable taffeta unfurling and spreading th
emselves across the lawn.

  But never Dorothy.

  I saw a woman with an umbrella but—hey!—she was real. She was Mimi King, hovering by the euonymus bushes and shifting from foot to foot like a girl preparing to enter the arc of a jump rope, until finally she plunged into the spray and emerged on the other side of it, shaking out her umbrella before she collapsed it. “Well, hi there, Aaron!” she called, and she squished toward me in her Sunday heels, no doubt digging little tent-peg holes as she came. When she reached me, I stood up and said, “Good morning, Mimi.”

  “At this rate,” she said, “you’ll be growing yourself a rain forest!”

  “Got to do my bit for the planet,” I told her.

  She placed the tip of her umbrella between her feet and rested both hands on the handle. “Have you moved back in?” she asked.

  “I figured it was time.”

  “We were all afraid you might be gone for good.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, as if I hadn’t had the same thought myself once.

  “I was asking Mary-Clyde just last week; I said, ‘Shouldn’t somebody let him know that that lawn service of his is mowing grass that’s not even there anymore?’ But Mary-Clyde said, ‘Oh, I’m sure he must be aware; he’s got those construction men around; I’m sure they would have told him.’ ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel construction men are very sensitive to lawns.’ ”

  “Would you care to sit down, Mimi?” I asked. I felt bad about her shoes, which were plastered with a good half-inch of mud and damp yellow grass blades.

  But she was pursuing her own line of thought. “This is just providential,” she said, “because I’ve been thinking I would like to have you over for dinner some night.”

  “Oh, well, I’m not—I’m not—”

  “I would like for you to meet my niece. She’s had a hard time of it since she lost her husband, and I’m thinking it would do her good to talk to you.”

  “I’m not all that social,” I told her.

  “Of course you’re not! Don’t you think I realize that? But this is different. Louise lost her husband last Christmas Eve morning, can you imagine? Poor thing has been just devastated.”

  “Christmas Eve?” I said. “Haven’t I heard about this person?”

  “Oh, well, you know, then! She’d accepted that he had a terminal illness, but it never entered her mind that he would pass on Christmas Eve.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I guess she won’t celebrate Christmas ever again without remembering that.”

  I was just trying to sound sympathetic, but it seemed I’d succeeded too well, because Mimi gave me a look of surprise and said, “That’s exactly right! See? You would have so much to say to her!”

  “No, no!” I hurried to say. “No, believe me, it’s not as if I could offer her any … household hints or anything.”

  “Household hints?”

  “Besides, for the next little bit I’m going to be busy setting things straight. My golly, the place is a mess! I’ve got everything stuffed in one room: furniture, books, bric-a-brac, lamps, curtains, rugs.…”

  I drove her away with words, finally. She gave me a wilted little wave and started back toward the alley, raising her umbrella again as she approached the sprinkler, although I’d gallantly shut the faucet off the instant she turned to leave. Anyhow, I had to admit the lawn was pretty well watered by now.

  Having reminded myself of the mess in the bedroom, I went to tackle it after lunch. There wasn’t much point in putting things back in place yet, since they would only hamper the workmen, but I figured I could probably discard some stuff ahead of time. Dorothy’s medical books, for instance, and maybe a few of those decorative doodads that tended to accumulate for no useful purpose.

  It turned out that a good many of the books had gotten damp—not just Dorothy’s but mine as well. They had dried in the months since, more or less, but their covers had buckled and they had a moldy, mousy smell. Carton after carton I would open, dig through dispiritedly, and then drag to the front hall for Gil’s men to carry out to the alley. I did try to save a few of my favorite biographies, though, and the family photo albums. I’d appropriated the albums after our mother died, and I felt guilty about the state they were in. I took them to the kitchen and spread them across the table and all available counters, where I pried the faded black pages apart in hopes that they would air out.

  With the doodads, I was more callous. What did I care about my bronzed baby shoes? (A pair of tiny Nikes; how witty.) Or the little china clock that always ran slow, or the tulip-shaped vase someone had given us when we got married?

  I ate supper standing up, since the table was covered with albums. I cruised around the kitchen studying sepia-colored photos as I munched on my taco. Men in high collars, women in leg-of-mutton sleeves, solemn-faced children whose clothes looked stiff as sandwich boards. Nobody was identified. I guess the album-keeper had thought they didn’t need to be identified; everybody knew who everybody was in those days, in that smaller world. But then the sepia changed to black-and-white, and then to garish Kodacolor, and none of those photos bore any labels, either—not my parents getting married, or Nandina in her christening gown, or the two of us attending a children’s birthday party. Nor did the single snapshot from my own wedding: Dorothy and I standing side by side on the front steps of my parents’ church, looking uncomfortable and uncertain. We were both of us badly dressed—I in a brown suit that left my wrist bones exposed, Dorothy in a bright-blue knit stretched too tightly across the mound of her stomach. Fifty years from now, strangers discovering this album at some parking-lot flea market would glance at us and flip the page, not even interested enough to wonder who we’d been.

  Gil’s men and I barely crossed paths, since we had such different schedules. They arrived each weekday morning just as I was finishing breakfast. They brought paper cups of coffee that steamed in the early coolness, and they scuffed their soles heavily on the hall mat to let me know they were here. After we’d exchanged a few weather remarks I would leave for work, and by the time I returned they were already gone, no sign of them remaining but their little nest of belongings on a scrunched-up drop cloth in one corner of the living room. Something hung on in the atmosphere, though—something more than the scent of their cigarette smoke. I felt I’d interrupted a conversation about richer, fuller lives than mine, and when I drifted through the bare rooms it wasn’t only to reclaim my house; it was also, just a little bit, in the hope that some of that richness might have been left behind for me.

  On Friday, however, two of the men were still there when I got home. One was just completing the varnishing of the sunporch floor while the other walked around collecting paint cans, brushes, and rollers in an empty cardboard carton. “We were figuring we’d be gone by now,” the one with the carton told me, “but then Gary here bought the wrong color varnish and set us back some.”

  “It wasn’t my fault, bro!” Gary said. “It was Gil the one wrote the wrong number down.”

  “Whatever,” the other man said. “Anyways, we’re finished,” he told me. “Hope you like how it all turned out.”

  “You mean you’re finished finished?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Nothing more needs doing?”

  “Not unless you say so.”

  I looked around me. The place was spotless—the living-room walls a gleaming white, the new bookshelves in the sunporch just waiting to be filled. Somebody had swept up the last traces of sawdust, and the paper cups and the jar-lid ashtrays had disappeared, which made me feel oddly forlorn.

  “No,” I said, “I can’t think of a thing.”

  Gary straightened and laid his brush across the top of his can. “Now, don’t go walking on this, you hear?” he said. “Not for twenty-four hours. And then, the next few days or so, keep your shoes on. You wouldn’t believe how many folks think they’re doing a floor a favor to take their shoes off and walk in their stocking feet. But that’s
the worst thing.”

  “Worst thing in the world,” the other man agreed.

  “Heat of your body …” Gary said.

  “Linty old socks …”

  “Bottoms of your feet mashing flat against the wood …”

  They were still moaning and shaking their heads when Gil opened the front door. I knew it was Gil because he always knocked before he let himself in. “Hey there, guys,” he said, appearing in the living-room archway. He wore his after-hours outfit: khakis and a clean shirt. “Hey, Aaron.”

  “Hi, Gil.”

  “How we coming along?”

  “Just finishing up, boss,” the man with the carton said.

  Gil walked over to inspect the sunporch floor. “Looks good,” he said. “Now, give it twenty-four hours before you step on it,” he told me, “and then for a few days after that—”

  “I know: not in my stocking feet,” I said.

  “Worst thing in the world,” he said.

  He saw the men out to the hall, then, clapping Gary on the shoulder, reminding them both they were due at Mrs. McCoy’s early Monday morning. (I felt a little twinge of sibling rivalry.) Then he returned to the living room.