A Little Hope(61)
Von was the strongest person she’d ever met. So unafraid of any circumstance. He never seemed nervous. He could laugh while being shot at if he were ever shot at; once, he said during the Cold War, “If any Russians come here, they better be ready to get kicked back a few continents.” She loved that toughness, she misses that toughness. She stares at the drum set and wants to break it into pieces.
A commercial for Drano is murmuring on the television now, and she stops for a minute to watch the cartoon dramatization of the liquid dissolving a clog in the drain. Then she walks over to the drum set and sees the drumsticks where Luke last left them. The sun comes through the high windows over in the corner, and it makes the cymbal disk glimmer. There is a music stand, and two guitars propped next to a speaker with a frayed cord. She wants to drag it all away but is surprised how connected the drum set is.
In a second, without really thinking, she picks up one of his drumsticks and hits the cymbal quickly, a noise like someone just told a joke on Johnny Carson. She puts the drumstick back with the other one and stares out the window.
The washing machine is droning, making that nice wet swishing sound, and she looks back at the long basement. What did they envision for finishing it? Maybe sectioning off the washer and dryer. Maybe adding some cabinets, a stove, and a fridge. She remembers thinking they could put a large table in front of the fireplace for holidays. No mess upstairs. And then Mary Jane could have that group of girls sleep down here during her slumber parties, and Luke and those Meddleson brothers he liked to skateboard with could watch their movies and play their video games, dropping popcorn and slurping that Kool-Aid she hated. She imagined opening the door and standing on the top step, listening to the pleasant noise of the young, the girls recounting who said and did what, and the boys giggling and telling each other to shut up.
She wonders now why they let the basement idea vanish.
It seems to her that Mary Jane and Luke were fourteen and ten at one point, and then in seconds, Mary Jane was graduating college. Luke was dating Ginger, and doing his concerts, but still living at home. Sometimes Ginger would come over for dinner, always helping Darcy clear the table, always telling her a good story about her college classes or something her parents had said. Luke had so much respect for Ginger, and Darcy hoped in a way that made her stomach knot that Luke could stay with her forever. Whatever his faults, Ginger softened them. And he made Ginger laugh, and oh, did she look at him like he was a prince. Almost as if Ginger saw something in Luke that Darcy forgot about.
Sometimes Darcy would look out the back window and see them walking around the yard, arm in arm, Luke a half foot taller, Ginger’s hair longer then, the weeping cherry tree and white azaleas behind them. Sometimes they’d bring Ginger’s dog over and they’d throw the ball to it again and again. Darcy wasn’t a dog person, and they never asked to bring it inside. Sometimes, after Ginger had left, Darcy and Von would wake to the sound of the drums or the nasally electric guitar beating through the floorboards. Von would grumble and put his slippers on and march down to the basement, and the noise would stop in seconds. He’d come back to bed and smile. “Noodle head,” he’d say. “He didn’t think it would wake us.” And then Von got sick, and Luke broke up with Ginger, and then Mary Jane was married and pregnant and then and then and then.
She wants this drum set out of here. She can’t look at it another day. Maybe she will call Wally. He could bring it to the thrift store. Two or three armfuls and it would be gone. She hears the washing machine draining now, and another talk show comes on with a host she remembers was an actress once, and Darcy perches tentatively on the sofa. Maybe she can just wait until the rugs are clean. She sits back, and her body remembers this sofa, remembers the way the cushions felt against her shoulders, its velvety texture. How many years since she has sat on it? It must be twenty. But she has vacuumed it every so often. She has folded laundry on it.
She sinks back into the couch and watches the woman on the talk show move through the audience surveying them about their end-of-summer bucket lists, sticking her small microphone in an eager participant’s face. Darcy hates that phrase, bucket list. She hates the thought of doing things only because you’ll die. Most of the time, you don’t know when you’ll die. And items on a list won’t save you either way. Why bother? she thinks. Why discuss it with strangers on a talk show? Darcy puts her feet up on the coffee table.
She looks around when she wakes up an hour later.
Upstairs is Ginger’s letter on the kitchen table. God, that letter makes her angry. She can’t say why. She doesn’t feel differently about Ginger. She is a dear, dear girl. One of the best people she knows. But she wants to burn the letter. She wants to knock on the door of Ginger’s new place and throw it at her, watching the pages scatter on the floor. She stretches and walks over to the built-in phone nook where the black rotary phone sits. “It’s like going downstairs to a time machine,” Luke used to say, pointing to their old furniture, the type of phone the world barely even used in his time. She picks up the phone. His time. Her son has lived and died already. How can that be? His time. How can she still be going through the everyday, looking at the lawn, washing her rugs, rinsing her dishes, when he has already lived and died?
She thinks of Ginger’s letter again, and her stomach flips: I don’t use words like “love of my life,” but Luke was something like that to me. Sure, Ginger, she thinks. Sure, sure. Go on and be free, she thinks. And then to invite her and Mary Jane to the wedding! The absolute, absolute nerve.