Chapter 16
Alone
For the first week she did nothing, and was surprised how tiring it was.
She had expected to be sad. She was, in an odd, loose, sideways way, as if grief were a coat she had been handed and had not yet found the arms of. But what she had not expected was the quiet. The apartment had always been quiet, but it had been a waiting kind of quiet, a quiet with a phone in it. Now the phone lay on the counter, face up, with a screen that did not light, and the quiet that came out of it was larger and slower and very strange. She would stand in the kitchen at seven in the evening with a spoon in her hand and find that she did not know what came next.
Nobody was going to ring and ask where she was.
Nobody was going to ask what she was wearing, or who she had talked to, or why the tone of her voice had gone flat. Nobody was going to say good girl. She could eat what she liked. She ate a bowl of cereal at the sink, standing up, in the dark, and nobody minded. She wore the oatmeal sweater for three days running, and slept in it, and found on the third morning that she had a small foolish smile on her face which she had been wearing, unnoticed, since she woke.
She did not tell anybody that.
It seemed disloyal. It seemed, in some obscure way, like dancing at a wake. She had spent three years with a man who had sat on her couch and cried, and she had left him, and she had no right to feel, on a gray Tuesday in May, with the radio on, as if somebody had opened a window.
"It's not disloyal," said Tessa, over the phone. "It's just a window."
"It feels like it."
"You can be sorry for him and glad for you. There's room. They're not in the same drawer."
"What if it goes away?"
"The sorry? Good. The glad? I hope not."
"What if I'm just, what if I'm one of those people who only feels free for a month? And then I wake up, and I'm lonely, and I take it all back?"
"Then you'll be lonely," said Tessa, in her large, comfortable voice. "And you'll call me. And I'll bring a casserole. We'll see." There was a pause. "But I don't think that's what's going to happen."
"Why not?"
"Because you're singing."
Sarah stopped.
She was standing at the sink with the tap running over a cup. She had not known. She listened. She had been humming, under her breath, a slow, wandering, half-formed tune, unconsciously, and she knew it as she knew her own name. It was the opening of a song she had not heard in a month. It was a piano figure, a rolling, yearning, falling thing, with a woman's voice coming in underneath.
She turned off the tap.
So far away, she thought.
She stood in her kitchen with her wet hands held out in front of her and a half-remembered melody going round her head. She had not owned the record since her father died. It had been on the shelf in her mother's house. It was a mark of the way things were in that house that no one had touched it in two years.
She joined a pottery class in the second week of May.
It was Tessa's idea. It had been a suggestion made in passing, in a staff meeting, over a plate of cookies, and Sarah had said maybe, and then, to her own surprise, had gone home that evening and looked it up. There was a studio on Water Street, in an old brick warehouse, run by a woman named Ines who had huge forearms and a laugh like a bell. It met on Thursday nights. It cost sixty dollars for six weeks, and she went in on the first night with her sleeves pulled down and her hair in a tight knot, and sat at a wheel, and was very bad.
It was marvelous.
She had never been bad at anything on purpose. She had never, in her whole life, been allowed to make something that was ugly. She sat at the wheel with a lump of gray clay on a spinning disk and her hands cupped round it, and the thing rose, and wobbled, and collapsed, and slid over the side of the wheel in a long wet slump. She did it again. It leaned. It folded. It became, after twenty minutes, something between a flowerpot and a very sad hat.
"It's a bowl," said Ines, looking down at it.
"It's not a bowl."
"It's a bowl that's been through something." She took it in one big hand, and held it up, dripping, to the light. "It has character. It has a lean. I like a lean."
"It looks drunk."
"So will you, in a minute," said Ines, "if you drink the wine," and handed her a plastic cup of white from the cooler at the back, and Sarah, to her very great alarm, burst out laughing.
She laughed in a room of strangers. It was a long, loose, uncomfortable, unrestrained laugh, with her hands covered in clay to the wrist, and her hair coming down, and a man at the next wheel looked round, and a woman in an apron said oh, you've got the giggles. And she thought, clearly, as she wiped her eyes with a gray-streaked forearm: Nobody here knows what I'm like.
I can be anything.
She made four more bowls. Each was a little less unhappy than the last. At the end of six weeks she had a row of them on the kitchen shelf, in a line, glazed in a green so deep that it looked like river water. They were crooked. They would not sit flat. She ate her cereal out of the smallest one.
She tried to learn what she liked.
It was a slow, foolish business. She did it the way you might look for a pair of glasses you had put down and forgotten. She stood in a shop and thought, Do I like this? She had to hold the shirt up and ask herself. She would find that she had been looking, without knowing it, over her shoulder, for the nod. And then she would put the shirt back, and take a different one, and discover that she liked it a great deal, and had never worn anything like it in her life.
She liked yellow. That was a surprise. She liked big, soft, shapeless sweaters. She liked long walks, alone, in the evening, with her hands in her pockets, when the whole city went blue. She liked cheese. She liked the sound of the radiator. She did not like golf, or white wine, or the green dress. She gave the green dress to Goodwill, and walked out of the store with a feeling of such pure savage joy that she had to sit on a bench.
She baked bread.
It was a bad loaf. She followed the recipe. She kneaded it for ten minutes, with the heels of her hands, on the counter, in a cloud of flour. She let it rise. It did not. It sat in the bowl like a damp gray stone, and when she put it in the oven, it came out a little smaller and a great deal harder. She stood and looked at it, and began, slowly, to laugh.
It's a doorstop, she thought.
It's mine.
She ate a slice with butter. It was horrible. It tasted of flour and effort. She ate a second, standing at the counter, with her bare feet on the cold tile, and decided that she would make another on Sunday.
She went to see her mother on a Wednesday in June.
She had not planned a conversation. She had gone to bring the casserole dish back. It was a long bright evening, and the house on Maple Drive smelled of lilacs. Her mother was in the kitchen, in an apron, with the radio on, cutting up tomatoes for a salad. She did not turn round. She said, "Sit," and Sarah sat, at the old pine table, with the long scar in the wood where her father had once dropped a hot pan.
They did not talk for a while.
"I never liked him," said Linda.
She said it to the tomato.
"What?"
"Mark. I never did." She laid down the knife. She wiped her hands on the apron, slowly, finger by finger. "I didn't say. It wasn't my business. You were happy, or you seemed. And he was so good to us. After your father. I thought, who am I?" She turned round. Her face was pale and strong and lined, with a high color on the cheekbones, and her eyes, under the gray fringe, were very bright. "I thought, it's a mother's thing. No man's good enough. I told myself it was that."
"Mom."
"But I watched you. When he was in the room. I watched you stop. You'd come in the door, a girl in a, with a laugh, and then he'd walk in behind you and you'd go. Like a candle with a hand round it." She lifted her chin. "I should've said."
"I wouldn't have listened."
"No. But I'd have said."
"I'm not sure that I'd have wanted you to."
"No." Linda smiled. It was a rueful, crooked smile, so like Eli's that Sarah's throat tightened. "That's what I told myself. For three years. She's a grown woman. It's her life. It's very convenient, being polite."
"You're not polite."
"I'm very polite. I just do it loudly."
Sarah laughed. She could not help it. She put her hand over her mouth, and her mother came and sat across the table, with the dish towel in her fists, and they looked at each other.
"I want to ask you something," said Sarah.
"Go on."
"What was it like? With Dad?"
"With your father?"
"Did you, were you ever. How did you know?"
"That it was right?"
"That it was good."
Her mother looked at the window. The evening light lay on the sill, and on the rim of a blue bowl, and the edge of her cheek. She sat very still for a moment, with her fingers in the towel. When she spoke, it was slowly, and in a voice that Sarah had not heard her use before.
"We fought about the thermostat for thirty years," said Linda.
"What?"
"He liked it at sixty-eight. I liked it at seventy-two. We had a war. It was a cold war, he used to say, and think he was funny." She smiled. "He'd come in and turn it down. I'd go and turn it up. We never discussed it. It was the longest argument of our marriage. We had it every winter, for thirty years. Neither of us ever won."
"That's, that doesn't sound."
"It was wonderful." She said it fiercely. "It was the most wonderful thing in the world. Because I knew. When he turned it down, I knew exactly who he was. And when I turned it up, he knew me." Her voice shook. "I wasn't afraid of him, Sarah. Not for one minute. I could have thrown the pan, if I'd liked. I could have said anything. I said terrible things, sometimes. And he'd say, Lin, you're being unreasonable, and go and eat a sandwich. And in the morning it'd be, it was all, it was the same."
"Nothing broke."
"Nothing broke. That's what it is." She wiped her eyes with a corner of the towel. "I don't think it's the flowers. I don't think it's the flowers, or the, or the way he looks at you in a restaurant. I think it's that you can be wrong, and nobody's going to take it from you. You can be a mess. And he's still there in the morning."
She stopped.
"I'm not telling you anything," she said. "I'm only saying what I know."
"It's a lot."
"It's a thermostat."
"It's a lot, Mom."
"Well." Linda sniffed, and blew her nose, and stood up. "I've got a salad to make. You can stay for dinner. I'm doing a chicken. Eli's coming. He's bringing a girl."
"A girl?"
"Her name's Danielle. She's from the warehouse." She turned, with an odd little glint in her eye, and Sarah saw, just for a second, a woman of fifty-six in an old apron who had been, long ago, startling. "I like her. She doesn't say much. She laughs at the right places."
On the twentieth of June, she sent a message.
It was not a long one. She did it on a Saturday morning, in bed, with a cup of tea going cold on the table. She had been looking at the phone for twenty minutes. She had been looking at it, on and off, for eight weeks, and in all that time she had not once written a thing to him. She had read the one he sent, i'm around. no pressure at all. pickles says hi. She had read it every night. She had not answered.
It's been long enough, she thought.
No. It isn't. It's been what it had to be.
She held the phone above her face, in the pale light, and typed.
Gus said twenty minutes.
She sent it.
Her pulse was going so loudly that she could hear it in the pillow. She lay and watched the screen, and the white space under her message, and nothing happened. She counted to ten. She counted to thirty. A bird sang on the fire escape.
Three dots.
They came up and went away. They came up again. She lay there, very still, as she had lain in a cabin in the snow, with her whole body listening. The dots stayed for a long time.
he lied, wrote Daniel.
She pressed the phone against her mouth.
She was smiling. She could feel it. It had come up so quickly, and so wide, that her cheeks hurt. She lay there with her eyes shut and the phone against her lips, and a feeling in her chest like the first warm day after a long gray spring, when you go out without a coat and the whole world smells of grass.
Hi, she wrote.
hi.
I'm sorry it took so long.
it took exactly as long as it took. no apology. how are you?
She did not answer at once. She looked at the question.
It was so simple. How are you? It was the one that everybody asked, and nobody wanted answered, and she had given the same reply for twenty-seven years. I'm fine. Good, thanks. You? It was the phrase she had learned like a password. She looked at it on the screen, in its little gray bubble, and she saw, clearly, that he was waiting for the real one.
I made a bowl, she wrote.
a what?
A bowl. I took a pottery class. It looks like a hat that's been through something.
that's the best sentence i've read this year.
I'm eating cereal out of it.
i'd like to see it.
She hesitated. She breathed in.
I'm not ready for, I don't want you to think, she typed, and deleted it. She started again. I'd like to see you. As a friend. I'm not ready for anything else. I don't know when I will be. I might not be for a long time. I don't want to lead you on.
you're not.
I might never be.
then we'll be friends, wrote Daniel. i'm a very good one. i have references.
She laughed.
It was a startled, delighted peal, and she put her hand over her mouth. She lay back on the pillow with the phone on her chest. She was crying, a little, in a way that did not hurt. The window was open, and a warm wind was coming in, and the curtain stirred. Outside, in the street, somebody was calling a dog.
Tuesday? he wrote.
Tuesday.
ruth's. the corner. i'll be the one with the dog and the pencil.
I'll bring the chai, she wrote. I mean I'll buy my own.
i'll get it, wrote Daniel. i'm the one who knows how to order.
He was early.
He had been early every Tuesday for a year. He had sat at the corner table with a pen and a stack of papers, in the green dusk of a June evening, and watched the door. He had come at four. He had been there since four, with a lab report he had read six times, and a cup of tea that had gone cold, and a sensation in his stomach like a small bird flung against a window.
Nina had said, on the phone, "Don't wear the gray sweatshirt."
"What's wrong with the gray sweatshirt?"
"It's your I've given up sweatshirt."
"It's comfortable."
"It's a flag of surrender." She had been laughing. She had been feeding Owen, and he could hear the baby banging a spoon. "Wear the blue one. The one with the buttons. You look like a man who has an opinion."
"I don't have an opinion."
"You have about eleven. They just don't come out of your mouth." Her voice had softened. "Danny. It's going to be all right. Whatever it is. It'll be a good Tuesday."
He had worn the blue one.
At 5:19 he put down the pen. At 5:20, the bell on the door gave its cracked small ring. He did not look up. He kept his eyes on the lab report, and read the same sentence for the seventh time. The density of the sample was found to be. He heard the door shut. He heard a step on the boards. It was lighter than he remembered, and quicker, with a different cadence, like a person who has put down a heavy bag.
He raised his head.
She was standing at the table.
She had a gray cardigan, over a yellow dress, and her hair was down. It had grown. It hung in a soft brown wave over her shoulders. She had a faint tan, across the nose, and a smudge of green on her wrist that he thought must be glaze. She looked, he thought, like somebody who had slept for the first time in a year. She looked rested, and well, and a little shy.
She was holding two cups.
"Chai," said Sarah. "Oat milk. Extra hot. With honey, not sugar."
She put one in front of him.
He stared at it.
"It's for you," she said. "I thought you'd, I never got you a thing. In a year. I thought it was about time."
"I drink tea."
"I know. It's a, you'll hate it. It's a very sweet drink. I think it's got too much cinnamon." She sat down. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, her left one, and it was only a gesture, but it was slow and unhurried, and her hand, when she took it away, did not go to her sleeve. "But I wanted you to know what it was like."
"What?"
"To be handed one."
He picked it up.
It was hot. It smelled of cinnamon and clove and a faint dark sweetness. He took a sip, in front of her, and it was, as she had promised, a great deal too sweet, and he swallowed it, and a slow wave of heat went down his chest, and he did not trust himself to speak.
"It's good," he said, in a strange voice.
"It's terrible."
"It's the best thing I've ever tasted."
"You're a bad liar."
"I'm a very good liar," said Daniel. "It's just that I'm not lying."
She looked at him. She did not blush, or look away. She held his eyes, across the little round table, under the pressed-tin ceiling, with her cup in both hands. A long slow smile came up in her face, as the light comes up in a window at the end of a day, and it was a smile that he had never seen before. It was not for him. It was not for anyone. It was simply what she looked like when she was glad to be alive.
"Hi, Daniel," said Sarah.
"Hi," he said.
"I made a hat."
"I want to see it."
"I'll bring it," she said. "Next time."
She said it so calmly that he almost missed it. It went by, lightly, a small round pebble on the surface of the evening. Next time. It was nothing. It meant nothing but a bowl. He sat there with his hands round a cup of terrible chai, and the room swimming a little at the edges, and thought: I'm not going to say anything.
I'm going to sit here and be her friend.
And it's going to be the best Tuesday of my life.