The Widow’s Husband Page 13

  In silent agreement, we turn around and follow our own footprints back toward the car. Suddenly I turn to Amy. “Say, I just remembered.”

  “What?”

  “That first date with your dad. What brought it back was that I was thinking the surf sounded like freeway traffic.” She grimaces, but I go on, “This is important to me, Amy, hear me out. Well, that first date, I thought we’d go downtown, see a movie, then have a soda or a cup of coffee at Ernie’s, which is what kids did then—”

  “Still do, the young ones.”

  “Instead, he turned right to get on the freeway, not left on Main. So, I asked where we were going. Your dad says to Vallejo, to a club he knew about where they were playing Dixieland, this real hot music, or was it cool? I can’t remember, but since we both liked the same stuff, we’d get a kick out of this group. Whoever they were. This guy played a banjo with real soul, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, my heart sank.”

  “Because you really didn’t like that kind of music?”

  “Mainly because I knew I couldn’t get in that place. See, I’d let on that I was twenty-one, but I was just nineteen.”

  “You shoulda just told him, why didn’t you tell him?”

  “Well, I had this fake ID, all the kids had them, we got them in Oakland, in a place that did passports. They took your picture, laminated it onto a thing that looked, at first glance, like a driver’s license, and if you flashed it real quick when they carded you, it worked.”

  “Hokey.”

  “It was the best I could do. So, we went to Vallejo, all the time I’m worrying, wondering if I should tell him, or what. But your dad was full of talk, I could hardly get a word in edgewise. There was just no place in the conversation to tell him. And,” I mumble, “I didn’t want to lose him.”

  “All the way to Vallejo—”

  “It’s not that far,” I say, nettled.

  “So, you flashed this fake thing, and no dice.”

  “Exactly. Turned down flat. So embarrassing in front of all those people. Should have known. There was a line to get in, it snaked clear down the block … we could hear the noise all the way back to where he’d parked. This tuba thing, blatting away. Tuba music, imagine!”

  “Better than accordion.”

  I laugh. “This oom pa, oom pa, oom pa. So … one-dimensional, mindless. As creative as a piston, up and down, up and down.”

  “Like a German making love.”

  I laugh again, turn self-conscious. “Hey, I resent that.” I am abashed; we never discuss sex. “Remember, I used to be a Schneider.”

  “Okay, a Schneider who didn’t like Dixieland. I can just see it, I bet I know how Dad reacted.”

  “He went silent. Totally mute, with that expression around his mouth. We trudged back to his car—he’d parked way out, under a streetlight, and I was wearing some foolish sandals I could hardly walk in. I filled up the air with nervous chatter, chirping away about nothing, my heart pumping ice water, I remember it so clearly now. How could I have forgotten?”

  “Because you didn’t want to remember.”

  I shoot her a look. Amy is right, I didn’t want to remember. Just talking about that horrible evening makes nerves twitch on the backs of my hands. “He unlocked my door, went around to his side, slid in, and I went on talking, talking. All the way back to town. He turned up the radio, I suppose to drown me out, so I raised my volume, went on with my noise, all the while absolutely sick to my stomach.”

  “Poor Mom. He was acting weird.”

  “Well, not really,” I say quickly. “I should have leveled with him, about my age.”

  “An innocent mistake. He was being a jerk.”

  “Do you think so? Well, anyway, it got worse. While he was pouting, we passed a theater showing The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen, and I said why don’t we go see it. Kind of an old movie, but your dad hadn’t seen it.”

  I stop, sit on a piece of driftwood in a pretext of emptying and retying my shoes, but really to put energy into my story. “I should have known, yeah, I should have known.”

  “What?” Amy sits down next to me, brushes sand from her feet, and prepares to slip on her sandals—she’d been walking barefooted.

  “How it would affect him. In the theater, in the dark, he sank down in his seat, got lower and lower, while up on the screen that Navy gunboat swarmed with little yellow people on that big yellow river. I don’t know what happened in Vietnam, he never talked about it, but that movie brought it all back. It haunted him, the jungle, the muddy river, the Mekong Delta. His job had been to shuffle men and matériel from one swampy outpost to another, for no reason that he could imagine, except that he saw guys he knew getting blown up, or destroyed by drugs. The futility of the loss, the lack of purpose.”

  “I always thought that was why he didn’t write you interesting letters. You know how you said his letters were boring? Well, life and death, the mortal combat. How could he polish his prose in the middle of that? Plus, maybe he was censored—”

  “I never thought of that! Of course! The wonder was that he wrote anything at all, now that I think of it.”

  “And him not literary, anyway.”

  “Amy, people were horrible to those vets when they came back. Spit on them, mocked them. Your dad never volunteered that he’d been in Vietnam, if he could help it.”

  “You have to admit that some of those vets were really screwed up.”

  “Maybe through no fault of their own, either. Anyway, after the movie, he went silent again, didn’t say six words on the way home. Later I told grandma that that was the last of him, he wouldn’t call back.”

  “I bet she said good. Grandma was lukewarm about Dad.”

  “She thought … well, I don’t know what she thought. Tell you one thing, she didn’t like the way I hung there by the phone, pining for him to call. She thought I was trusting someone not … trustworthy. He didn’t call for a month. Well, at least a couple of weeks. I just knew I’d ruined it.”

  Amy rubs her cold bare legs. “Still, I can’t see that any of this was your fault, or Dad’s, either.”

  “That first evening just didn’t work out, although I wanted it to in the worst way.” I sigh. “Then finally, finally,” I interpose a rueful laugh, to show my grown-up sense of proportion, “he called—I think it was a last-minute thing, someone else had stood him up—and we took it from there.”

  “Lived happily ever after,” Amy says in a crisp, dismissive voice, wrapping things up tidily. She stands, swings her arms, seeking warmth. “It turned out fine, no regrets, huh, Mom?”

  Now is when I should tell her. But I look into her round blue eyes, so like Emmett’s, and I can’t. She would label him a shit, and me a sap. Emmett cheated her, too, and she will be furious. I am not ready for her venting. “Regrets? Just the usual.”

  I get up, too, and walk back to the car with Amy, the daughter that Emmett had quit trying to understand, in a place he’d never wanted to visit—he’d disliked the north coast, had demanded seawater warm enough to swim in.

  The truth of the matter: whatever had been bothering Emmett, perhaps triggering the sudden fatal heart attack, had little to do with me. It’s hard to admit that I’d been an affectless element in his life.

  Another of his poems intrudes, but one that had touched me, causing me to study it to a point of saturation:

  He scrubs at the sink, half-numb, there he stands,

  His hair brushed with paint, and paint on his hands.

  His heart hears de Kooning, Picasso, and Klee;

  His body betrays with an old trick knee.

  His friends are a ladder, roller, a brush,

  His orders are one coat pale gray, rush, rush.

  My old man, broke when he died, not one thin dime—

  My age exactly, do I still have time?

  Emmett had been ashamed of his parents, his mother, the cafeteria drudge, his father, the laborer. Perhaps some sense of their failure had caused him to create his
own competitive, even combative, nature. On top of that—his ills pile up like a clumsy stack of firewood—on top of that had been his Vietnam experience, his boring yet stressful job, his midlife crisis. But what could I have done about any of it?

  We reach the car and get in; Amy points it toward Bodega Bay and the bowl of chowder. As we drive off, I feel almost lightheaded, as if I’m leaving a part of myself on the beach, a part I no longer have a use for.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Okay, we’re ready.” I stumble around a cardboard box of kitchen junk labeled FREE, Tupperwares, metal ice cube trays, parts for this and that. “Almost 8:30—few more minutes, I’ll open the door and we’ll spread camping on the grass, tools and hardware on the driveway.”

  That was Mr. Purdy’s idea. A way, he said, to draw men into our garage sale. According to him, women nickel and dime you; they spend an hour haggling over a quarter’s worth of goods, wear you out with their nit-picking.

  Nit-picking. I’d smiled politely, hoped he wouldn’t go on in that vein. It’s exactly the kind of mean and belittling thing men say about women that drives me wild. What a shame to ruin our incipient friendship, nip it in the bud. It could happen: I could trigger it myself. Lately I’m irritable; I bubble with a snappy comeback to even the most innocent remarks. An outbreak of rudeness threatens to engulf me, like a case of the flu. My skin is a thin membrane stretched tight and bright, an over-inflated balloon within which I struggle for control. I am ready to snap, to rip, to attack at the drop of a hat. Attack at the drop of a hat—I like that, I could write some poetry of my own. But then again, I’m tired, not sleeping well, and I’m worn out prepping for this garage sale. I’ll get over it. I have to because I’m about to go job-hunting, for a real job. No more play-acting with the temp stuff.

  Now men, Mr. Purdy went on, men are a different story. Put your hardware out where a man driving by can see it, and he’ll screech to a halt and buy big-ticket items, and pay with real folding money. No quibbling over prices, either. Display your hardware, he said, your driveway bait, your yard jewelry, and draw in the big bucks.

  To get me started, he brought over some of his own stored treasures, among which was a camper shell. I had to help him with it, the two of us staggering along, a pair of ants transporting a fiberglass sugar cube. He added other odds and ends of car equipment—snow tires, air compressor, battery charger, timing light, a crawler with torn plastic padding, gas cans. He brought over a tow bar, a metal yoke contraption rattling with pieces of chain. I stared at this junk, puzzled. “Nobody’s going to buy that,” I hissed to Amy. Emmett wouldn’t have; but then Emmett hadn’t been interested in automotive stuff. But Mr. Purdy was, or had been, a car buff. And thank goodness: he’d tuned up the Bronco, changed its oil, and what with the AAA guy’s tender loving care, it’s running … not well, but better. For this I’m grateful, willing to overlook his crusty ways.

  “Wow!” I’m peering through the garage window. “You should see them lined up at the curb, the street’s packed. Are we ready?”

  I’m talking to both Mr. Purdy and Amy, who are helping. To prepare for this Saturday extravaganza, we have spent a hot dirty week cleaning, sorting, pricing a garage full of junk. Mostly Emmett’s stuff—tools and clothes.

  In order to be here, Amy took some vacation days. “Oh, no, honey, not your vacation!” I said.

  “Why not? You need me and nobody else does.” Amy is suffering a letdown. Jake, her new guy, fizzled. I compounded the injury by spouting clichés about shipboard romances, cross-country love affairs, etc. I pointed out that Jake’s life is too complicated for a long-distance connection, which by itself takes up a lot of time and energy. Not to mention the court battle over his kids, which is draining his finances. The fact remains: Amy is depressed without a man. She has painted her nails a startling chartreuse.

  Feeling bad about my “negativity” (the label Amy pinned on me), I’ve taken her to lunch this week, to the Soup Kettle, Roy’s Barbecue Pit, the Jade Garden, Antonio’s Cocina.

  Because I owe Amy, big time. That last night in the cabin, after Amy left with Jake, I’d felt bereft, abandoned, had settled in with my paperback—a self-help book about widowhood, The Final Cycle, which sounded like a tract about doing the wash—when Amy reappeared. Like a mirage, like a miracle, Amy sat down on the snack bar’s redwood bench next to me. “I can’t run off and leave you, Mom,” she said. “I told Jake to go without me. Because you shouldn’t be by yourself.” So we ate together, not just mother and daughter, but two women alone in a time without men. I was overwhelmed with love and gratitude, because my world has become a slippery, dangerous and lonely place. So, at the moment, Amy can do no wrong. It’s the rest of them I’m mad at. Well, not Mr. Purdy, of course. No, I’m not mad at him. Even Amy has warmed up to him, isn’t near as rude to him these days.

  What triggered this garage sale, for one thing, was getting home from the trip and finally understanding that Emmett is gone. He’s not coming back from the plant at five o’clock, or six, or seven. Psychically I’d rejected the final acceptance of his death until Amy pulled into the drive, dropped me off, and Emmett wasn’t here. Never would be here again—except in my dreams, which are still full of him.

  Another thing urging me on: telephone calls from realtors wanting to list the house. They’ve probably gotten wind of my new status through the obituary, which finally appeared in the paper. If I have to sell, now’s the time to lighten up.

  Another bit of catastrophic news, one that gags me with nausea: I’ll have to pay capital gains on the stock Emmett sold to support his mistress. However, the man I checked this out with said that due to the circumstances, I can work out a payment plan with the IRS. How nice of them! I rage, what a good bunch they are! How good of Emmett, too! Temporarily I considered burning down the damn house, and Emmett’s stuff in it. Then I thought why not sell it for a nickel on the dollar? Beats nothing.

  Then in the mail, a double whammy. One, a letter from a removal firm. On rich ivory paper, these people (vultures) promised a speedy and discreet removal of, as they put it, the deceased’s effects. For this privilege, they’d pay a worthy lump sum, depending on what they could cull.

  Whammy number two: a call from Mr. Hawley at Freeway Furniture to tell me that the beneficiary on Emmett’s insurance is the plant, not me. I get nothing, while they collect. How can that be? Mr. Hawley explained, in embarrassed and halting language, that this is standard practice. Freeway Furniture paid the premiums. Therefore, it or they should collect the benefits. Emmett understood that. Why didn’t I? I didn’t know. I was aghast.

  Too stunned to ask how they could do that, cut a worker’s family out from the worker’s insurance benefits, I stood there like a hammered sheep. Mr. Hawley saw his chance and took it (I thought), hanging up before I could collect my wits and become abrasive. I wandered around the house, dazed. Emmett’s work gone up in smoke, gone to enrich the company. Had Emmett understood where this would leave me? He was smart; of course he’d known. The fault is mine. I should have been curious enough to get these details straight before he died. Nevertheless, I was furious. At Emmett, at Freeway Furniture, at myself, too.

  I convinced myself that his plunge into an office romance with Maggie Quinn sapped his attention and his judgement. Became so convinced of it that I plunged into a purge of his things, his “effects”. I’ll show him, I’ll extract revenge, retribution—at least enough to pay for that silver dress and the matching pinecone earrings.

  “Quarter of nine, let’s get this going.” In the clutter, Amy trips over Emmett’s fishing tackle. “I’ll be glad to get rid of that,” she mutters, rubbing her shin.

  “Honey, don’t hurt yourself. Yeah, fishing rods, reels, all that goes out on a tarp on the driveway. This stuff, too.” I gesture at what I’d begun to think of as Emmett’s boat shit: his all-weather waterproof clothing, which he’d needed for crewing on the River Rat, plus his duffel bags, and his sailor’s technology—gauges, charts,
compasses, whatever.

  “Let’s open for business,” says Mr. Purdy. “Give ’em a thrill.”

  I hit the remote, the door whirs up and sunlight floods in. Mr. Purdy dashes out with Frieda’s contributions: an old gas barbecue, a wheelbarrow minus its wheel, a collection of ceramic pots, gardening junk.

  Earlier, when I got huffy over what I viewed as Frieda’s piling on, Mr. Purdy smoothed me over, said it was okay, the more, the merrier. Garage sale etiquette allows neighbors to join in. A proper garage sale is a cleansing experience to be shared with the whole community, like a Baptist dunking down at the river. Nevertheless, I said—this time to Amy—“Nobody’s going to buy that junk. The nerve, foisting it on us. Like throwing trash in an unguarded Dumpster.” That’s a capital crime in my neighborhood. A few cheapskates aren’t above doing that to avoid expensive city dump fees. The real dump’s miles out in the hinterland.

  Dumpster: it reminds me of one of Emmett’s capers. When he remodeled the kitchen, he rented a Dumpster for the debris, parked it out at the bottom of the driveway. It started filling up with alien trash, so Emmett dove in, sifted for clues. Finally found an envelope with an address of a neighbor a block over. Emmett boxed up as much of his rubbish as he could find, drove it over, left it on the guy’s porch. I always wondered what he thought when he opened the door and found his trash returned to him.

  That Emmett—he’d been one of a kind … but then my warm flare of pride in him is extinguished under a wave of anger. How dared that man do what he did! Take up with Maggie Quinn! Leave me with this mess!

  However, now’s not the time to waste energy in recrimination, because people are surging up the driveway and into the garage while Mr. Purdy arranges, according to his garage sale specs, the camping gear, sporting goods, the automotive. Amy takes her position at the card table near the front of the garage—she’s cashier—and Mr. Purdy hovers around his big-ticket driveway jewelry. I wander around wringing my hands, smiling. In spite of my mood, I make myself smile; I smile, my face aches with forced smiling while I reshuffle piles of this and that, and answer questions. “Yes, size 12,” I say of my jeans. “Oh, sure, it’s washable,” about a cotton sweater. Of some linen, “Queen bed size, with both pillowcases.” I smile while a woman with orange hair, in a hot-pink stretch velour running suit, offers me a quarter for a vase priced at a dollar. I smile at a man who pays five dollars for the MALONE beer stein; at a woman who buys Emmett’s whole collection of suspenders. I smile, pretending I haven’t overheard Mr. Purdy, “… can’t ever have too many rods and reels, or too big a pole, if you get my drift.”