The Beginner's Goodbye Read online

  And that is how it happened that I went to live with my sister.

  4

  Nandina lived in the house we’d grown up in, a brown-shingled foursquare north of Wyndhurst. Even in the rain, it was only a five-minute drive. I almost wished it were longer. When I got there I parked out front, but then I stayed in the car a minute, debating how I should word this. I didn’t want to confess the true state of my house, because Nandina had been nagging me for weeks now to get started on the repairs. But if I just showed up with no explanation and asked for my old room back, she would think I was having a nervous breakdown or something. She would turn all motherly and there-there. She would be thrilled.

  Well. As sometimes happens, she surprised me. She opened the front door when I rang and she sized up the situation—my slicked hair, damp clothes, the flecks of white plaster clinging to my trouser cuffs—and then she said, “Come in and stand on the mat while I fetch a towel.”

  “I’ve got—got a little water in my front hall,” I told her.

  She was heading toward the kitchen now, but she called back, “Take your shoes off and leave them there.”

  “I was thinking maybe, just for tonight—”

  But she had disappeared. I stood dripping on the mat, breathing in the smells of my childhood—Johnson’s paste wax and musty wallpaper. Even in the daytime the house was dark, with its small, oddly placed windows and heavy fabrics, and tonight it looked so dim that I kept feeling the need to blink to clear my vision.

  “Your shoes, Aaron. Take off your shoes,” Nandina said, returning. She had a faded dishtowel with her. She waited while I shucked my shoes off and removed my brace, and then she handed me the towel. It was one of those calendar towels our mother used to hang above the kitchen table. 1975, it said. I mopped my face and then my hair. Nandina said, “Where’s your cane?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you leave it in the car?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you bring any clothes with you?”

  “No.”

  She stepped a bit closer, although she knew better than to offer an arm, and we made our way into the living room. She smelled of shampoo. She was wearing a gingham housecoat. (My sister was one of the last remaining women in America who changed into a housecoat at the end of every workday.) She waited for me to get settled on the couch, and then she said, “I’m going to see if you have any slippers here.”

  I probably did. I had plenty of other stuff. Our mother had never cleared my room out after I left home.

  While Nandina was upstairs, I slumped back on the couch and gazed up at the ceiling. It was a really solid ceiling, the old-fashioned, cream plaster kind with a medallion in the center, not so much as a hairline crack anywhere in view.

  I thought about the car my college roommate used to drive, a rusty heap of a Chevy that kept sputtering out for no reason. One day it died altogether, and he got out and unscrewed the license plate and walked away from it; never looked back. I wished I could do that with my house. I wouldn’t miss a single thing about it. Let it vanish from the face of the earth. It wouldn’t bother me in the least.

  Nandina came back with a pair of corduroy moccasins that I’d completely forgotten. Then she brought me my brace, which I strapped on before I fitted my feet into the moccasins. “Now,” Nandina said. “Have you had supper?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Aaron,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tell the truth, now.”

  “I’ve had half a dozen raw oysters, a crab cake, garlic mashed potatoes, a Green Goddess salad, a seven-apple tart à la mode, and two glasses of wine.”

  “Goodness,” Nandina said.

  I tried not to look smug.

  “And what, exactly,” she asked, “is the current state of your house?”

  “Ah.” I considered. “Well, at the moment my hall ceiling seems to have taken on a bit of water.”

  “I see.”

  “It could happen to anyone,” I told her. “It rained all last night, remember, and all today.”

  Nandina said, “It seems to me—”

  “But we can t-t-talk about that to-tomorrow,” I told her. “Meanwhile, I am beat. Are there sheets on my old bed?”

  “Of course.”

  Yes, of course; why did I bother asking? I stood up and made a big show of yawning and stretching. “Guess I’ll toddle off, then,” I said. “Thanks for taking me in on such short notice. I promise I won’t be in your hair more than a night or two.”

  “Aaron! You can stay here forever. You don’t need to give me notice.”

  It shows how defeated I felt just then that the thought of staying forever seemed almost tempting.

  My room was upstairs, at the rear of the house, next to Nandina’s. (Which had been hers since childhood, although it would have made more sense if she’d taken over our parents’ larger, brighter room after they died.) It was exactly as I’d left it when I went away to college. My model airplanes still lined the shelves; my vinyl recordings of U2 and Tom Petty were still stacked beneath the stereo. I found a pair of old pajama bottoms in the bureau, and I changed into them and then checked the bookcase for something to read myself to sleep with. But there I had less luck. All I saw were tattered collections of math games and logic puzzles. As a child I’d been good at those, although occasionally, when I ran into a wall (which was almost literally what it felt like—a kind of head-butting), I could become quite violent, throwing things and breaking things. When I cast my mind back to those scenes, I saw myself from outside: my spiky, flailing figure, my hair sticking out in all directions, while my mother stood at arm’s length trying to calm me, trying to grab hold of me, murmuring ineffectual phrases. “Aaron, please. It’s only a pastime. Take a little break and come back to it, why don’t you?”

  Where had all that passion gone? I wasn’t like that now, thank heaven.

  I used to be obsessed with magic tricks. I practiced them for days on end and then I’d start badgering the grownups. “Pick a card. Any card. Don’t show me. Wait! You showed me what it was!”

  And I wanted to make my living as a stand-up comic. I memorized jokes from magazines and then tried them out on relatives. “So, this man is walking down the street to the clock-repair shop, all bent over, with this great big grandfather clock on his back. He’s taking it to be fixed, see. And he meets up with a friend, and the friend says—the friend says—”

  But I never could get past that part without totally cracking up. I swear, I thought it was the most hysterical joke I had heard in all my life. “The friend says, ‘Have you ever—have you ever—’ ”

  I’d be breathless with laughter, weeping with laughter. My cheeks would be streaming with tears and my stomach would ache, and whichever aunts and uncles were listening would be smiling at me quizzically.

  “ ‘Have you ever thought of buying a wristwatch?’ ”

  “A what?” they would ask, because by that point I was almost unintelligible. But even repeating it was a struggle, because I’d be rolling on the floor.

  That I saw from outside now, too: my gleeful, sputtery self, with my arms wrapped around my rib cage and my whole body screwed up in an agony of hilarity.

  It was no wonder I’d never had children. They would have made me too sad.

  When Dorothy and I were courting, we barely talked about children. I believe Dorothy mentioned once or twice that she wasn’t interested, but you couldn’t call that a real discussion. So now there would be no next generation, because I didn’t picture Nandina pairing off at this late date. The line would end with the two of us.

  It was probably just as well, I figured.

  “You didn’t realize anything had changed,” my mother told me. “You rode back from the hospital all happy and bouncy and glad to be going home, and you scrambled out of the backseat before either of us could reach for you—”

  “I don’t want to hear,” I said.

  “—and your leg just crum
pled under you and you sat down hard on the sidewalk, but you didn’t cry. You were trying to smile, but only one side of your mouth turned up, and you looked toward the two of us with this confused expression on your face but you were still trying to—”

  I said, “Mom! Stop! I don’t want to hear, I told you!”

  She could be sort of obtuse, our mother. I know she wanted only the best for me, but still, it seemed to me I spent my childhood trying to fend her off. It was “No!” and “Go away!” and “I can do it myself!” I never headed out the door without her calling after me, “Don’t forget your cane!”

  “I don’t need my cane.”

  “You do need your cane. Do you remember what happened last week at Memorial Stadium?”

  I would set my teeth and draw to a halt, facing the street, until she arrived behind me with my cane.

  She died in 1998, just six months after our father. Heart attacks, both of them. Now, when I looked back to all her fluttering and hovering, it didn’t seem so bad. It seemed touching. But I knew that if she were to appear at that moment and ask what I could be thinking, getting into bed in the T-shirt I’d worn all day, I would snap at her once again: “Back off, I tell you! I’m fine!”

  I fell asleep almost instantly, the first time I’d done that since Dorothy died. I dreamed that Jimmy Vantage still lived next door, although in fact he’d moved away at the end of seventh grade. We went to Stony Run to look for turtles. But Jimmy walked too fast for me, and I couldn’t keep up. At one point I was actually crawling on the sidewalk and shouting for him to slow down. Which was odd, because in my dreams I tend to be assertively able-bodied. I practically have wings. But in this particular dream I was twisted into knots, hampered and gasping for air, and when I woke up I thought for an instant that I could still feel the grit from the sidewalk on my palms.

  Nandina said she knew just whom to call: Top Hat Roofers. They’d been replacing the slates on our parents’ house for as long as she could remember, she said, and she was sure they would understand that this should be given priority. “I’m going to phone them today,” she told me. “And you, meanwhile, should call your insurance agent. Or have you already done that?”

  “Um …”

  She gave me an ultra-patient look, an “I know you, buster” look. I was not a fan of that look. We were seated at the kitchen table with tea and cornflakes—our family’s traditional breakfast, which I had exchanged years ago for coffee and toast—and she had a memo pad in front of her that she was making notes on. I was not a fan of her memo pads, either. I said, “Forget it. I’ve got everything under control.”

  “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

  “I mean the insurance agent, the roof … and it’s going to be way more than just the roof. Shows how much you know about it. I need a general contractor.”

  “And you have one?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  She looked unconvinced.

  I said, “His name is …” Then I started over again, like someone retracing his steps to take a long, running jump. “His name is … Gil Bryan.”

  It was the image of the shining skin beneath his eyes that brought it forth, finally. I said, “I’ll just give him a call today to let him know about the hall ceiling.”

  “Well,” Nandina said. “All right, I guess.”

  She seemed almost disappointed.

  We drove downtown in separate cars, at my insistence. I said, “Who knows? We might want to leave at different times.”

  “I don’t mind adjusting my schedule.”

  “But also,” I said, “I may run by the house after work for a few of my things.”

  “You want me to come with you?”

  “No.”

  In fact, I had no intention of going to my house. I had cased the bureau and the closet in my old room and found more than enough clothes to suit my purposes, provided I wasn’t too picky: stretched-out, kiddie-looking underpants, and jeans that fit fine although they seemed a bit high in the waist, and a button-down oxford shirt that I remembered from eighth grade. You would think oxford shirts would be timeless, but this one was kind of spindly in the collar. Well, never mind. For shaving, I’d made do with a disposable plastic razor I found among Nandina’s backup supplies in the bathroom. I use an electric shaver, as a rule. I made a mental note to buy a new one on my lunch break.

  That was the first time I admitted to myself that I couldn’t face the sight of my house: when I realized I was willing to spring for a new electric shaver rather than retrieve my old one from my medicine cabinet.

  So, as soon as I reached work, I shut myself in my office and started making phone calls. First I left a message on the answering machine at my insurance company—just the company in general, because I had no recollection as to who my personal agent was, never having had to use him. Then I searched the Internet for gil bryan contractor baltimore. No Gil to be found, but there was a Bryan Bros. General Contracting Co. I tried that number, and this time I reached an actual human being. “Hell-o,” a man said, too loudly.

  “Bryan Brothers?”

  “Yep.”

  “Gil Bryan?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you have a Gil Bryan.”

  “Yep.”

  “Could I speak to him, please?”

  “He’s out.”

  “Could I leave him a message?”

  “Let me give you his cell.”

  I wrote the number down, but I didn’t try it right away. The conversation with the first guy had worn me out.

  How about if I just sold my house? Put it on the market as a “fixer-upper.” (I’ll say!) Paid somebody to pack my belongings so I wouldn’t have to set foot in the place ever again. Surely there were people you could hire to do that. I would rent a little apartment, fully furnished. If anything happened to that one, I’d rent another.

  The birdwatching book had gone off to Irene, and I was working on one of our vanity titles: George S. Hogan, Sr.’s My War. In the office, we referred to it as War Thirteen. Why was it that so many men viewed their military service as the defining event of their lives? They could have lived ninety years or more, they could have had several marriages and half a dozen children and outstandingly successful careers, but still, if they chose one experience to sum them up, it would be Vietnam, or Korea, or the Normandy invasion. It was especially hard to fathom in the case of Mr. Hogan, because his own particular war sounded downright dull. My best buddy in the barracks was Cy Helm. He was a really fine fellow. You couldn’t ask for a finer fellow than old Helm I always tell folks.

  Apart from inserting a comma after old Helm, I left the text alone. That was our policy with the vanity manuscripts. (Some people didn’t even want the commas added.) I waded through another three pages, and then I rubbed my eyes and stretched and got up to fetch a cup of coffee.

  Charles was playing FreeCell on his computer. He was a stocky, rumpled man with a perennially red face, slightly older than the rest of us, and he had his own mysterious schedule that none of us interfered with. Irene seemed to be out of the office, and Peggy was refilling the cream pitcher. “Oh, poor Aaron,” she said when she saw me. “I heard about your ceiling.”

  I sent a malevolent glare toward Nandina’s office door.

  “Who are you hiring to fix it?” she asked.

  “Just this guy.”

  “Because I know a good—”

  “Never mind; it’s all seen to,” I said.

  Then I added, “Thanks anyhow,” because I might have sounded a little abrupt.

  Peggy didn’t seem to take offense. She passed me the cream pitcher, handle first, and asked, “How’s Mr. Hogan’s book coming along?”

  “He’s got this really fine buddy I’m reading about,” I told her. “Really fine. You know: just a really, really fine buddy.”

  Peggy smiled at me. She was one of those people without any sense of irony. (Well, unless you counted her Little Miss Muffet clothing style, which I sometimes
suspected you could count.) Still, it seemed I had to go on now that I was wound up. “It could be worse, I suppose,” I said. “It could be My Years with the City Council. That’s my gold standard.”

  Then Charles weighed in, from his desk across the room. “I’d vote for The Life of an Estate Lawyer, myself,” he called, without taking his gaze from the computer screen.

  “Oh, good point. How could I have overlooked that one?”

  “Remember The Beginner’s Book of Kitchen Remodeling?” Peggy asked me.

  “Ye-e-es,” I said. It hadn’t stuck in my mind, especially.

  “I was thinking you might find that helpful when you’re dealing with your house repairs.”

  “Whoa!” I said. “Actually consult one of our books?”

  She nodded, solemnly.

  “Good heavens,” I said. “Those books are not meant to be used.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Well, not in any serious way. They’re more like … gestures. Things you give to other people.”

  “But in Kitchen Remodeling they talk about what you should settle with the contractor first, before he starts work. I was thinking that would be good to know.”

  The “they” she referred to was me, as it happened—me and a retired kitchen designer from Anne Arundel County. So I just said, “Oh. True,” and took my coffee back to my office without the slightest thought of following her suggestion.

  “Remind him it’s a buyer’s market before you settle on the price,” Charles called after me. “Buyer’s? Seller’s? Whichever.”

  “Okay.”

  Mr. Hogan was describing field maneuvers. Smith and Donaldson were positioned on my left about fifty yards away and Merritt and Helm were holed up in the woods to my right but I didn’t have a visual on them because there was a considerable dip in the terrain running some two hundred yards north-northeast along the …

  My eyes wandered toward my bookcase. The Beginner’s series lined several shelves—a rainbow of narrow, shiny spines identical in size. I stood up and went to examine them more closely. They were arranged by publication date, earliest to the most recent. Kitchen Remodeling dated from several years back, and it was on the top shelf. I pulled it out.