The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [32]
Leanne gazes across the table in that way of hers, calm and considering. Finally she says, “Eric comes in for a lot of criticism around here. His style’s all wrong, for one thing. And he drives Harold the younger and Anna crazy. But I’ve noticed something about him. He never tries to get something for nothing. I admire that.”
Now Kirby looks around the room, at the plants on the windowsill, the hoarfrost on the windowpanes, the fluorescent light harsh on the stainless-steel sink, and it seems to him that all at once, now that he realizes it, his life and Mieko’s have taken their final form. She is nearly too old to marry, and by the end of her father’s cancer and his life she will be much too old. And himself. Himself. Leanne’s cool remark has revealed his permanent smallness. He looks at his hands, first his knuckles, then his palms. He says, “It seems so dramatic to say that I will never get over this.”
“Does it? To me it seems like saying that what people do is important.” And though he looks at her intently, seeking some sort of pardon, she says nothing more, only picks at her boot for a moment or two, and then gets up and puts their cups in the sink. He follows her out of the kitchen, through the living room. She turns out all the lights, so that the house is utterly dark. At the bottom of the stairs, unable to see anything, he stumbles and puts his hand on her arm. She takes it, in a grasp that is dry and cool, and guides it to the banister. Then, soft and fleeting, he feels a disembodied kiss on his cheek.
Dynamite
I used to not call my mother or my brother and sister because their phones were being tapped, but then I just got out of the habit. Those calls were all the same. For one thing, the phone had to ring six or eight times before my mother would answer it. “What are you doing?” I would ask.
“I hate to talk about all of that trivia,” she would say.
“What trivia?” This was a ploy.
“How people pass the hours, what they are cooking or eating, or have eaten.”
Better begin with the basics, I thought. “What are you wearing?”
“Some clothes.”
“That’s promising, Mom. Do you look like a bag lady today?”
But it was impossible to get a rise out of her. “I don’t know,” she would say. “I don’t think in those terms.”
And then, “How are you, Mom?”
“I’m fine.” We all said that. My sister, Miriam, was throwing herself away on Methedrine addicts; my brother, Avram, only left his room to take laundry to Mom’s place, my mother had no activities she would admit to. When they asked me, I was fine, too, but I had the excuse of making bombs, something, I told myself, they didn’t want to know. I didn’t miss calling them for a long time, but now I remember our tones, how glad we were to hear from one another. I have had the urge to call, but I am still out of the habit, and I wonder if their phones are still being tapped.
My mother was sixty-eight yesterday. She was born on July 20, 1919, at nine in the morning. Last night I was out with my friend Michael, and he didn’t know how old his mother was, or his father, even though he sees them every month or so. He does, however, know how they are. We were eating a pizza, and he said, “I don’t believe my mother. She went bicycling with my sisters, and she tried to ride no hands and fell down and broke her wrist.” He shook his head, and I nearly choked with envy, that he should be possessed of this little incident. He sent her a get-well card and a subscription to a magazine called New Woman.
I met Michael at work. We are shift engineers at a Farm Services fertilizer plant, glamourless jobs in the chemical engineering world. When the recruiter came to campus during the last semester