In the Gloaming, page 18
“Are you paying attention, Mother? Remember, you’ll turn left at the picture of the parrots and keep going until you get to the elevator.”
Lil made the turn and continued on. Suddenly there was a window. It opened onto a courtyard, and a little room full of plants.
“Look,” Charlotte said, “a greenhouse. You’ll probably want to spend some time in here.”
“It’s very nice,” Lil said. There was no one in the greenhouse, no one anywhere. “Is this where we were going when we left the shore this morning?” she asked.
Charlotte had reached another elevator bank, pushed another button. “Yes.”
“I thought we were going home.”
Charlotte looked at Jack.
“This is going to be your home now, Ma, remember? We all decided it would be best.”
Who decided? Lil wondered. She didn’t remember anything about it, but she kept the lapse to herself. The elevator door closed and she stood quietly, obediently, in the fluorescent box, whirring downward, toward Gordon.
* * *
The Peppers owned two houses, and a condo in Florida, all bought for a song decades earlier. It was September, when they always moved back to Wynnemoor from their shore house. That was what they had been doing today, or so she thought. It was definitely that time of year. She would have known it just as well without the calendar; the signs were as familiar and her interpretation of them as automatic as her own pulse.
The mass exodus took place right after Labor Day. All that long weekend there were good-byes in the air, graceful, lighthearted fare-thee-wells that eddied among the shingled summer cottages. The breezes that carried everyone’s good wishes along were less vigorous than they had been in the middle of the summer, when they were liable to slam doors—always when the children were napping, of course—and rattle the thin old windowpanes.
The windows whistle and chatter like fancy-free men riding the rails.
She’d written that sentence once in the margin of a book. It was a spontaneous thought that both embarrassed and pleased her. She never knew quite what to make of such thoughts. They gave her an odd feeling, as if she were suddenly rushing headlong into the world, connected to everything. (She shuddered now to think of anyone finding that book and seeing the jotting. A horse’s ass, indeed.)
On that last weekend of the summer, everyone arrived at the beach a few minutes earlier and stayed a bit longer. For once, the children were allowed to have a Coca-Cola before lunch, a privilege usually reserved for the afternoon, so that it would seem like a treat rather than a weary accommodation to the long days of instruction and discipline and attempts to rein in the children’s wild energy which, unchecked, might have carried them straight out to sea. The women sat in low, wooden beach chairs and talked, their hands busy with knitting and needlepoint. They spoke more openly on the final weekend of the summer and paid less attention to their roles of mother or grandmother, often letting their charges stay in the water for so long that the children emerged of their own accord and voluntarily approached the adults’ circle of chairs, where they stood shivering and blue-lipped, wrapping their towels around their nut-brown shoulders, the expression in their eyes becoming more and more confused when they didn’t inspire the usual concern that they dry off before they caught cold.
Finally the women put their work down and went into the ocean all at the same time, laughing at the way they must have looked in their similar, flowered-cotton bathing suits. “Who says women don’t wear uniforms?” someone was bound to remark. They may have felt sentimental, but they behaved like giddy girls as they jumped the waves or rode them in. Somewhere along the way they recaptured the old, long-gone feeling they’d had before they were married, when they didn’t yet know how they would end up. They were reckless with hope as they faced the broad horizon, with nothing lying between them and Africa. After a time a new mood came over them—it was hard to say what caused the shift, a lull in the cacophony behind them, perhaps, or a flat, unpromising stretch of sea, or a sense that the amount of time allotted to them for letting themselves go was running out—and they collectively walked back toward the lifeguard stand, their steps heavy with water and their limbs stinging with salt.
The children were waiting for them, strung along the water’s edge like a line of police, their stern, disapproving faces causing a flutter of nervous laughter among the women, who for a moment saw themselves two ways at once: as the tough, brave, jaunty types who had run into the water and as the wives and mothers who intuitively knew when it was time to come to their senses, to go home and pack. They exchanged glances and waved casual good-byes, not saying much at the end. Good-bye, see you next year! Cool as soldiers, but carrying their camaraderie with them wherever they went.
The men, too, had their end-of-season rituals. At cocktail parties they could be overheard discussing the same old things, but they lingered a bit longer in each conversation and laughed more appreciatively at each other’s jokes. They stood on the wide covered porches in their pale linen jackets, and in subtle, barely discernible ways they touched one another, arm brushing against arm, elbow bumping elbow, as they raised their drinks. On the ride home from the last party, Gordon always said, “Well, that’s over with.” Lil never replied, knowing he didn’t want to talk further about it. She knew he knew she knew what he really meant.
Finally the car would be packed. She put their clothes in garbage bags rather than suitcases, because they were lighter and easier to fit around the other objects in the trunk. Gordon did the arranging in the car, but there was always a moment at the very end when he told her to find a place for one last item while he went back into the house and checked each window, each drawer, each closet for the umpteenth time. On a quiet day, she could hear his footsteps going all the way up to the third floor. Sometimes she spotted his face at the window and, not wanting to intrude on his private moment, she turned away, knowing he was gazing out at the ocean, making one last inventory of the boats.
When she heard him coming back downstairs she got behind the wheel and waited as he gave May, the cleaning woman, last-minute instructions for locking the house. He gave May a bonus, too—Lil never asked how much—then walked out to the garage where he rattled the rusty doorknob. Oddly, this was the image that often came to her when she pictured him: his profile, silhouetted against the unruly growth of trumpet vine and wild rose that ran for two miles between the back of their property and the bay. It was him at his most solitary and exposed. When he joined her again, she always pretended she’d been straightening the glove box and hadn’t seen a thing.
In recent years, most of their old friends no longer made the trek to the shore; many were dead. There were fewer parties, and then no parties. The days had a different rhythm. They didn’t do as much, eventually even stopped going to the beach, but the time sped by. After Gordon retired, there was no reason to return to “town” so early, and they stayed well into September, when they had their end of the cape virtually to themselves. The light was a rich, buttery yellow and spread across their whole porch at once, a phenomenon they’d never known about before. The golden days, Gordon called them. He sat in a wicker chair with his binoculars, but he couldn’t see much. He wondered why no one went fishing anymore, why these days no one was interested in the sea. She never told him that the horizon was dotted with boats, swarming with boats. She brought him a glass of ginger ale and a small bowl of pretzels and kept many of the things she saw, with her perfect eyesight, to herself.
She did not want to ruin it for him. He was the one who really loved the shore, and he had worked hard enough all his life—harder than she could imagine—that she believed he should have what he loved. If she had had her choice, she might rather have gone to other places occasionally. They’d gone to Europe for their honeymoon, an eight-week journey that took them through England, France, Germany, and Switzerland. Gordon had taken her out in a rowboat on Lake Como. In the middle of the lake he stripped, dove in, and swam around naked, smiling and waving up at her, very pleased with himself. She was only nineteen, yet she understood that he was not trying to embarrass her or to show off, but harmlessly demonstrating his exuberance—for their marriage, for life.
She blushed anyway—he was the only man she’d ever seen naked, and the experience was still crushingly new—but she did her best to hide it, feeling that she was at that moment, as she forced herself to gaze at him rolling around in the water like a seal, becoming a wife. She was both growing bigger than she’d thought possible and at the same time growing old. She had been raised to do whatever others wanted her to do and to value how well she could master putting the needs of others before her own. She didn’t see anything wrong in this and was taken aback when Charlotte accused her of not “modeling independence.”
“You try to be both independent and married to a man like your father,” Lil said.
“I would never marry a man like my father,” Charlotte replied. And she hadn’t. Jack was mild, conciliatory, thoughtful. Occasionally Lil wondered what it would be like to live with a considerate man; but the thought made her feel disloyal and she never dwelled on it for long.
After the ambitious honeymoon trip she assumed that they would continue to travel; but Gordon was content to go back and forward between their houses and, later, spend the winter in Florida, and she hadn’t pressed. She supposed that was an area where she could have been more independent. Many of her friends went without their husbands on the semiluxurious, semieducational trips sponsored by various museums, and afterward at the bridge table they laughed about their adventures as if they were wayward college girls. Lil liked hearing their stories, which were all the more enjoyable for knowing she would never have those experiences and would therefore never have heard of such things in any other way.
Would Gordon have let her go? She didn’t know—it had never come up. He’d certainly hated it when their children went abroad. Lil had never seen him more bereft than the day they took Charlotte to catch the boat in New York. She was sailing to England but her eventual destination was Eastern Europe. “Why?” he asked over and over as they drove back to Wynnemoor. “Why would she want to go there when she could have anything she wants right here?” He said this with no sense of irony, no awareness that he sounded like one of those love-it-or-leave-it types whom he always found slightly spine-tingling in their blind allegiance to the flag. No; Gordon was serious. He distrusted any passions based on ideas, such as nationalism, but he distrusted other countries more.
“She wants to go there because it’s not here,” Lil finally said in exasperation. It made about as much sense as what he was saying, but it stopped him. Not that he understood. She could still feel his anxiety wafting through the house whenever he picked up one of the thin blue envelopes covered with strange stamps that Lil had left out for him on the front table. He had simply learned not to discuss it aloud. But if Lil had decided to go off on a tour of Siena or Machu Picchu or Yorkshire with the museum group, she imagined he would have broken his silence on the subject. As it was, she heard all his objections anyway. His voice was in her. She had married him at nineteen, when her own voice was just a whisper and his a sure, long note that held her as confidently as he held her in his arms when he told her that she was everything he wanted. That, more than anything else, was what kept her home.
* * *
Gordon was sitting up eating off a tray when they joined him in his room. Jack pulled a chair next to him for Lil, then perched himself on the bed next to Charlotte. Gordon had always eaten slowly, bending forward over the plate as if he didn’t trust himself not to spill down his front or onto his lap. Lil saw him as she’d seen him thousands of times lift the spoon to his lips and tip the soup into his mouth at the same time as he inhaled it with a small hiss. For the amusement of the children, and later the grandchildren, he’d exaggerated the hiss when teaching them their table manners.
“Be sure to make as much noise as possible,” he would say, “so your hostess will know you’re enjoying the meal.”
Then he’d pull his napkin taut between his hands and saw it back and forth across his entire lower face, which sent his young audiences into gales. Lil had fallen quite naturally into the role of straight man. “Oh, Gordon.” Clucking her tongue in disgust.
They brought in a tray of food for her, too, and she ate, although she didn’t have much of an appetite. She tried to talk to Gordon about going home, but just as she had his full attention—he’d pushed his tray away and he was leaning forward toward her—a horrible thing happened. The nurse appeared. She was the youngest of the crew from the summer, the one who she’d heard Gordon say had a “good posterior.”
That remark had shaken Lil to the core.
“Dad, Sheila has to leave now. She’s come to say good-bye to you,” Charlotte said.
The nurse advanced.
“Well, my dear,” Gordon said, taking her hand.
“I’ve really enjoyed working for you, Mr. Pepper.” The girl’s eyes filled as she looked at him.
“Yes, yes,” he said.
The girl wiped her cheek. “I better go.” She leaned forward, gave him a hug and a kiss, and broke away with an audible sob. She took a few wobbly steps toward the door, then suddenly she was back again. Her white leather purse plummeted to the floor as her arms flung out to her sides. Gordon was engulfed. The girl’s jacket rode up in the back exposing a strip of skin above her pants. A gurgling rose from the pairing, a low laugh. The girl came up smiling. “I’ll come see you sometime,” she said. Jack handed her her purse and Charlotte walked her back to the door. Lil stared at Gordon.
“What?” he asked.
“I can’t believe it,” she said.
“Lil.” He reached out his hands to her, but she wouldn’t take them. “Lil.”
“In front of your daughter.”
Gordon looked helplessly at Charlotte. Shameless, shameless, Lil thought.
“Mother, don’t be silly,” Charlotte said. “Sheila was with you all summer. She was just saying good-bye.”
Gordon took the Liberty handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her. Automatically she went to take it, but drew away at the last moment. It fluttered to the floor.
“Oh stop it. Stop it,” Lil said.
“I think we should go back upstairs for a little while,” Charlotte said to Gordon. “You can come up later to see Mother’s room.”
“All right,” Gordon said meekly. He looked up and gave Lil a bashful smile. “Don’t be mad at me, my bride.”
“Did you know we were coming here?” Lil asked.
She saw Gordon look uneasily at Charlotte.
“Don’t do that,” Lil said.
“Lil, Lil, Lil,” Gordon said.
“I am still a person. You could look at me. You could look at me.”
Lil walked to the door and stopped next to the bathroom to collect herself. She rarely cried in front of anyone—Gordon was more apt to cry than she—and the tears scalded. She leaned her eyes against her sleeve and heard them talking in hushed tones behind her.
“What did I do?” Gordon asked.
“Nothing,” Charlotte said. “Mother’s tired, that’s all.”
“I couldn’t care less about Sheila. She’s a little girl. Lil knows me better than that.”
“Of course she does. Ma isn’t always herself anymore.”
“I know, I know. But I can’t get used to it.”
The bathroom had a pungent, sour smell. Instinctively, Lil backed away from it and huddled in the doorway until Charlotte led her back into the fluorescent-lit hall, saying she thought Lil could use a nap. They passed a lounge where a group of young black women in uniforms was smoking and swaying to the barely audible music coming out of a table radio. Lil pitied them for a moment, for their rotten jobs, and then realized that Gordon would be a part of that for them, one of many, forgotten as soon as they walked out his door.
“Pay attention, Ma. You’ll have to do this yourself.”
The halls all looked the same to Lil. She waited passively as Jack turned the key in the lock, but when she saw the little room again, smelled the thick cloud of air freshener that couldn’t mask the underlying scent of disinfectant that likewise couldn’t cover the sweet, seeping odor of old age and death, she knew that living here would kill her. Her senses rebelled at the bright decor, aquas and pinks, the colors she and her friends had turned to for amusement when they went to Florida but had never viewed with anything but irony and a shared wink at how they were temporarily escaping from the good taste that was expected of them. But we started this, and it was meant to be a joke, she thought, as she looked at the decorative “touches” here and there, the most searing example of which was a series of five Mexican dolls sitting on Plexiglas shelves on the wall. No, she could not live here. She could neither abide this room nor survive its cheerful meanness.
“Charlotte,” she said. “Jack. Children. Please.”
There was a pause. Then Charlotte stood up.
“I’m sorry, Ma. I should have realized you needed to say good-bye to the house.”
Finally they got some sense into their heads and took her home.
* * *
As always, everything was exactly the same. Lil thought of the remark Gordon habitually made when they pulled into their driveway at the end of the summer: “God’s other country.” Charlotte lifted the latch on the heavy garage doors and found the key in its hiding place under a flower pot. She jiggled the back door and banged her shoulder against it.
“Pull the door to you,” Lil said.
Charlotte gave it a tug and it swung open.
The house was dark and cool as a chapel, the air thickened with a wet, metallic scent that seeped in continuously from the Pennsylvania fieldstone walls. They all stood in the kitchen while their vision adjusted to the dim light, then pushed through the swinging doors in the pantry—Lil did an inventory at a glance of the hanging cabinets that held her china and glass—and entered the main part of the house.
