The Beginner's Goodbye Read online

  “Mom. Get over it,” I said.

  But she never did.

  She was a homemaker (as she termed it), from the last generation of women who married straight out of college. She graduated in June of 1958 and married in July. Then had to wait ten years for her first baby, poor woman, but even so she didn’t get a job. How did she fill that time, I wonder? Nandina and I were her entire occupation, once we came along. She built our science projects with us, and our dioramas. She ironed our underwear. She decorated our rooms in little-girl style and little-boy style—rosebuds for Nandina and sports banners for me. Never mind that Nandina was not the rosebud type, or that any time I took part in a sport my mother had apoplexy.

  I was a rough-and-ready kind of kid, despite my differences. I was clumsy but enthusiastic, eager to join whatever pickup game was happening on our block. Mom would literally wring her hands as she watched from the front window, but my father told her to let me do whatever I felt capable of. He wasn’t as much of a worrier. But of course he was off at the office all day, and middle-aged by then besides. He was never the kind of father I could toss a football with on weekends, or ask to coach my Little League team.

  So I mostly spent my childhood fending off the two women in my life—my mother and my sister, both of them lying in wait to cosset me to death. Even that young, I sensed the danger. You get sucked in. You turn soft. They have you where they want you then.

  Is it any wonder I found Dorothy a breath of fresh air?

  The first time she saw me, she said, “What’s wrong with your arm?” She was wearing her white coat and she asked in a brusque, clinical tone. When I explained, she just said, “Huh,” and went on to another subject.

  The first time she rode in my car, she didn’t so much as glance over, not even at the very start, to check how I was driving. She was too busy huffing on her glasses and polishing them with her sleeve.

  And the first time she heard me stammer (after I fell in love with her and grew flustery and awkward), she cocked her head and said, “What is that? The brain injury, or just nerves?”

  “Oh, just—just—nerves,” I said.

  “Really? I wonder,” she said. “When you’re dealing with the left hemisphere … Damn.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think I left my keys in my office,” she said.

  · · ·

  She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two.

  Then I looked down the street and saw her standing on the sidewalk.

  2

  Here is how she died.

  It was August. Early August of 2007, oppressively hot and muggy. I happened to have a cold. Summer is the very worst time for a cold, I always think. You can’t just pile on the blankets and sweat it out the way you would in winter. You’re already sweating, only not in any way that’s beneficial.

  I went in to work as usual, but the air conditioning made my teeth start chattering as soon as I got settled. I hunched over my desk shivering and shaking, sneezing and coughing and blowing my nose and heaping used tissues in my wastebasket, till Irene ordered me home. That was Irene for you. She claimed I was contaminating the office. The others—Nandina and the rest—had been urging me to leave for my own sake. “You look miserable, poor thing,” our secretary said. But Irene took a more self-centered approach. “I refuse to sacrifice my health to your misguided work ethic,” she told me.

  So I said, “Fine. I’ll go.” Since she put it that way.

  Nandina said, “Shall I drive you?” but I said, “I’m still able to function, thank you very much.” Then I gathered my things and stalked out, mad at all of them and madder still at myself, for falling ill in the first place. I hate to look like an invalid.

  Alone in the car, though, I allowed myself some moaning and groaning. I sneezed and gave a long-drawn-out “Aaah,” as if I were a good deal sicker than I was. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that my eyes were streaming with tears. My face was flushed and my hair had a damp and matted look.

  We lived just off Cold Spring Lane, in an unkempt, wooded area a few minutes’ drive from downtown. Our house was a little white bungalow. Not what you would call fancy, but, then, neither Dorothy nor I was the Better Homes and Gardens type. The place suited us just fine: all on one floor, with a light-filled sunporch tacked onto the living room where we could stash the computer and Dorothy’s medical journals.

  It was my intention to proceed directly to the sunporch and get some work done. I had brought a manuscript home with me for editing. Halfway through the living room, though, I found myself making a detour to the sofa. I sank onto it and groaned again, and then I let my papers drop to the floor and stretched out full-length.

  But you know how a cold reacts to a horizontal position. Immediately, I stopped being able to breathe. My head felt like a cannonball. I was hoping to sleep, but I seemed to be filled all at once with a brittle, edgy alertness. I found the normal clutter of our living room intensely irritating—the apple core browning on the coffee table, the unsorted laundry heaped in an armchair, the newspapers on the sofa interfering with the placement of my feet. One part of my mind grew suddenly ambitious, and I imagined springing up and whipping things into shape. Dragging out the vacuum cleaner, even. Doing something about that stain on the carpet in front of the fireplace. My body went on lying there, dull and achy, while my mind performed over and over the same frenetic chores. It was exhausting.

  Time must have passed somehow or other, though, because when the doorbell rang, I checked my watch and found that it was past noon. I got up with a sigh and went out to the front hall to open the door. Our secretary was standing there with a grocery bag on her hip. “Feeling any better?” she asked me.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, I’ve brought you some soup,” she said. “We all just knew you wouldn’t be fixing yourself any lunch.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not—”

  “Feed a cold, starve a fever!” she caroled. She nudged the door wider open with her elbow and stepped inside. “People always wonder which it is,” she said. “ ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever,’ or ‘Starve a cold and feed a fever.’ But what they don’t realize is, it’s an ‘If, then’ construction. So in that case either one will work, because if you feed a cold then you’ll be starving a fever, which you most certainly do want to do, and if you starve a cold then you’ll be feeding a nasty old fever.”

  By now, she was walking right past me down the hall—one of those women who feel sure they know what’s best for you in all situations. Not unlike my sister, in fact. Except where Nandina was long and gawky, Peggy was soft and dimpled—a pink-and-gold person with a cloud of airy blond curls and a fondness for thrift-store outfits involving too many bits of lace. I liked Peggy just fine (we’d gone through grade school together, which may have been what led my father to hire her), but the softness was misleading. She held our entire office together; she was way, way more than a secretary. Any time she took a day off, the rest of us fell apart—couldn’t even find the stapler. Now she headed unerringly toward the kitchen, pad-pad in her Chinese silk slippers, although as far as I could recall she had never been in our kitchen. I trailed after her, saying, “Really, I’m not hungry. I’m really not hungry. All I want to do is—”

  “Just a little soup?” she asked. “Cream of tomato? Chicken noodle?”

  “Neither.”

  “Deether,” it sounded like. I could have been in a nose-spray commercial.

  She said, “The cream of tomato was Nandina’s idea, but I thought chicken noodle for protein.”

  “Deether!” I told her.

  “Okay, then, just tea. My special magic tea for sore throats.”

  She set the grocery bag on the counter and pulled out a box of Constant Comment. “I brought decaf,” she said, “so it won’t interfere with your sleep. Because sleep, you know, is the very best cure-all.” Next came a le
mon and a bottle of honey. “You should get back on the couch.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “Don’t” was “dote.” Peggy heard, finally. She turned from the sink, where she’d started filling the kettle. “Listen to you!” she said. “Should I phone Dorothy?”

  “No!” Doe.

  “I could just leave a message with her office. I wouldn’t have to interrupt her.”

  “Doe.”

  “Well, suit yourself,” she said, and she set the kettle on the burner. Our stove was so old-fashioned that you had to light it by hand, which she somehow knew ahead of time, because she reached for the matchbox without even seeming to look for it. I sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. I watched her slice the lemon in half and squeeze it into a mug while she discussed the proven powers of fruit pectin in bolstering the immune system. “That’s why the Constant Comment,” she said, “on account of the orange peels in it,” and then she said that when she got a cold, which wasn’t all that often because somehow she just seemed to have this natural, inborn resistance to colds …

  Talk about Constant Comment.

  She poured a huge amount of honey on top of the lemon. I swear she poured a quarter of a cup. I didn’t see how there’d be any room for the water. Then she plopped in two teabags, draping the strings over the rim of the mug with her little finger prinked out in a lady-of-the-manor style that must have been meant as a joke, because next she said, in a fake English accent, “This will be veddy, veddy tasty, old chap.”

  I realized all at once that I had a really bad headache, and I was fairly certain that I hadn’t had it before she got there.

  While we waited for the tea to steep, she went off to fetch an afghan. We didn’t own an afghan, to the best of my knowledge, but I failed to tell her so because I welcomed the peace and quiet. Then she came back, still talking. She said when her father had had a cold he used to eat an onion. “Ate it raw,” she said, “like an apple.” She was carrying an afghan made of stitched-together hexagons. Possibly she had found it in the linen closet off our bedroom, and I knew we’d left the bedroom a mess. Well, that was what people had to expect when they barged in uninvited. She draped the afghan around my shoulders and tucked it under my chin as if I were a two-year-old, while I shrank inward as much as possible. “Once, when my mom had a cold, Daddy got her to eat an onion,” she said. “She instantly threw it up again, though.” My ears were a little clogged, and her voice had a muffled, distant sound like something you’d hear in a dream.

  But the tea, when it was ready, did soothe my throat. The vapors helped my breathing some, too. I drank it in slow sips, huddled under my afghan. Peggy said that, in her opinion, her father should have cooked the onion. “Maybe simmered it with honey,” she said, “because you know how honey has antibacterial properties.” She was wiping all the counters now. I didn’t try to stop her. What good would it have done? I polished off the last of the tea—the dregs tooth-achingly sweet—and then without a word I set down the mug and went back to the living room. The afghan trailed behind me with a ssh-ing sound, picking up stray bits of lint and crumbs along the way. I collapsed on the sofa. I curled up in a fetal position so as to avoid the newspapers, and I fell into a deep sleep.

  When I woke, the front door was opening. I figured Peggy was leaving. But then I heard the jingle of keys landing in the porcelain bowl in the hall. I called, “Dorothy?”

  “Hmm?”

  She came through the archway reading something, a postcard she must have found on the floor beneath the mail slot. When she glanced up, she said, “Oh. Are you sick?”

  “Just a little sniffly.” I struggled to a sitting position and looked at my watch. “It’s five o’clock!”

  She misunderstood; she said, “I had a cancellation.”

  “I’ve been asleep all afternoon!”

  “You didn’t go in to work?” she asked.

  “I did, but Irene sent me home.”

  Dorothy gave a snort of amusement. (She knew how Irene could be.)

  “And then Peggy stopped by with soup.”

  Another snort; she knew Peggy, too. She tossed the mail on the coffee table and removed her satchel from her shoulder. Dorothy didn’t hold with purses. She carried her satchel everywhere—a scuffed brown leather affair with the bellows stretched to the breaking point, the kind that belonged to spies in old black-and-white movies. Her doctor coat, which she was shrugging off now, had a dingy diagonal mark across the chest from the strap. People often mistook Dorothy for some sort of restaurant employee—and not the head chef, either. Sometimes I found that amusing, although other times I didn’t.

  When she went out to the kitchen, I knew she would be getting her Triscuits. That was what she had for her snack at the end of every workday: six Triscuits exactly, because six was the “serving size” listed on the box. She showed a slavish devotion to the concept of a recommended serving size, even when it was half a cupcake (which was more often the case than you might suppose).

  Except that the Triscuits were missing, that day. She called from the kitchen, “Have you seen the Triscuits?”

  “What? No,” I said. I had swung my feet to the floor and was folding the afghan.

  “I can’t find them. They’re not on the counter.”

  I said nothing, since I had no answer. A moment later, she appeared in the dining-room doorway. “Did you clean up out there?” she asked.

  “Who, me?”

  “There’s nothing on the counters at all. I can’t find anything.”

  I grimaced and said, “That would be Peggy’s doing, I guess.”

  “I wish she’d left well enough alone. Where could she have put the Triscuits?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I looked in the cupboards, I looked in the pantry …”

  “I’m sure they’ll show up by and by,” I said.

  “But what’ll I eat in the meantime?”

  “Wheat Thins?” I suggested.

  “I don’t like Wheat Thins,” Dorothy said. “I like Triscuits.”

  I tipped my head back against the sofa. I was getting a little tired of the subject, to be honest.

  Unfortunately, she noticed. “This may not be important to you,” she said, “but I haven’t had a thing to eat all day. All I’ve had is coffee! I’m famished.”

  “Well, whose fault is that?” I asked her. (We’d been through this discussion before.)

  “You know I’m too busy to eat.”

  “Dorothy,” I said. “From the time you wake up in the morning till the time you get home in the evening, you’re living on coffee and sugar and cream. Mostly sugar and cream. And you call yourself a doctor!”

  “I am a doctor,” she said. “A very hardworking doctor. I don’t have any free time.”

  “Neither does the rest of the world, but somehow they manage to fit in a meal now and then.”

  “Well, maybe the rest of the world is not so conscientious,” she said.

  She had her fists on her hips now. She looked a little bit like a bulldog. I’d never realized that before.

  Oh, why, why, why did I have to realize on that particular afternoon? Why could I not have said, “Look. Clearly you’re half starved, and it seems to be making you fractious. Let’s go out to the kitchen and find you something to eat”?

  I’ll tell you why: it’s because next she said, “But what would you know about it? You with your nursemaids rushing around brewing your homemade soup.”

  “It wasn’t homemade; it was canned,” I said. “And I didn’t ask for soup. I didn’t even eat it. I told Peggy I didn’t want it.”

  “How come she was in the kitchen, then?”

  “She was making me some tea.”

  “Tea!” Dorothy echoed. I might as well have said opium. “She made you tea?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You don’t even like tea!”

  “This was medicinal tea, for my throat.”

  “Oh, for your throat,” Do
rothy said, with exaggerated sympathy.

  “I had a sore throat, Dorothy.”

  “An ordinary sore throat, and everyone comes running. Why does that always happen? Throngs of devoted attendants falling all over themselves to take care of you.”

  “Well, some—some—somebody had to do it,” I said. “I don’t see you taking care of me.”

  Dorothy was quiet a moment. Then she dropped her fists from her hips and walked over to her satchel. She picked it up and went into the sunporch. I heard the leathery creak as she set her satchel on the desk, and then the squeak of the swivel chair.

  Stupid argument. We had them, now and then. What couple doesn’t? We weren’t living in a fairy tale. Still, this particular argument seemed unusually pointless. In actual fact I hated being taken care of, and had deliberately chosen a non-caretaker for my wife. And Dorothy wouldn’t mind at all if somebody made me tea. Most likely she’d be relieved. This was just one of those silly spats about something neither one of us gave a damn about, but now we were backed in our corners and didn’t know how to get out of them.

  I heaved myself from the sofa and crossed the hall to the bedroom. I closed the door soundlessly and sat down on the edge of the bed, where I took off my shoes and my brace. (I wear a polypropylene brace to correct a foot-drop.) The Velcro straps made a ripping sound as I undid them—batch! batch!—and I winced, because I didn’t want Dorothy guessing what I was up to. I wanted her to wonder, a little bit.

  I held still and listened for her, but all I heard was another creak. This would not have been her satchel, though. She was too far away for that. It was probably a hall floorboard, I decided.

  I stretched out on the rumpled sheets and stared at the ceiling. There wasn’t a chance on earth I could sleep. I realized that now. I had slept all afternoon. What I should do was go out to the kitchen and start cooking something good-smelling, something that would lure Dorothy from the sunporch. How about hamburgers? I knew we had a pound of—

  Creak! An even louder one. Or not a creak after all, but a crash, because the creak lasted too long and then it swelled into a slam! with smaller slams following it, and stray tinkles and crackles and thumps. My first thought (I know this was ludicrous) was that Dorothy must be much more miffed than I had supposed. But even as I was thinking it, I had to admit that she was not the type to throw tantrums. I sat straight up and my heart began hammering. I called, “Dorothy?” I stumbled off the bed. “Dorothy! What was that?”