Lost and Wanted(37)
“We saw you!” Jack said.
“I just ran into a friend.”
“The lady from the funeral.”
Miles’s mother looked alarmed. Evelyn was at least five years younger than I was, carefully made up and dressed in the sort of stylish exercise clothing that is now worn outside the gym as well, her blond hair pulled into a neat ponytail. Somewhat unconventionally for our Cambridgeport public elementary school, she wore a large diamond cross around her neck.
“Jack and I went to the memorial of a friend of mine over the summer,” I explained. “That was her mother.”
“She was young, then.” Evelyn’s voice was sympathetic.
“My age—we were in college together.” I found that I wanted to talk about it, but that when I did there was a nagging uneasiness. Was I turning it into conversation—what Arty would call a “topic”?
The children were ignoring us, playing with the paper wrappers from their straws. They bunched them up and then dribbled water on the compressed tubes, watching them expand.
“She had children?”
I thought that Evelyn’s appearance—the wholesome prettiness coupled with the ostentatious display of faith hanging around her neck—belied the gentleness of her sympathy. It seemed real, without being at all intrusive.
“One.”
“It’s unbearable,” Evelyn said.
To my dismay, I started to cry. I’d hardly cried at all about Charlie and it seemed absurd, here among the people enjoying pesto and arugula sandwiches, with someone I hardly knew. It was maybe the fact that we didn’t know each other, and that she still bothered to go beyond ritualized sympathy, that moved me. Evelyn must’ve noticed that I was struggling to regain composure, because she looked away, wiping the face of the youngest child with a paper napkin.
“We have a group at church. Harper, be still. I joined after my mother passed. That was two years ago, and I’m still going.”
“Thank you—but I’m not religious.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s congregational, very relaxed. We welcome everyone.”
“Well, and Miles should come for a playdate at our house soon.” I was thinking that it would have made Charlie laugh, how her death was getting me multiple invitations to events that took place in churches.
“I like Miles’s house better,” Jack said. “There are so many kids.”
* * *
—
I found myself crying more. It was as if, once it had started, it could happen at any time. I decided one night to make shrimp for Jack and me; he had seen them at the fish counter and been curious. I cleaned them, then followed a recipe carefully—I didn’t want to waste them—and as I put them in the pan I remembered a phone call from Charlie. This was when Jack was about two. She’d said she was coming up from New York, where she had gone to take a meeting about a possible feature, and I had bought groceries to cook for us. When she called to cancel, I told her about the shrimp in a joking way, but she knew I was annoyed.
“Shrimp!” she said. “Now I feel twice as bad.”
Shrimp! I thought, and suddenly the pan and the stove and the window to the right of the stove blurred and my shoulders started to shake. Jack was drawing at the linoleum table, and he looked up, alarmed.
“I’m just sad,” I told him, but it took several minutes for me to stop.
“I don’t want shrimp,” he said. “Yuck.”
“We have to eat them!” I turned them angrily, one by one with a pair of tongs as the recipe dictated, suddenly frantic at the possibility of overcooking.
“Why?” Jack asked, his eyes wide and frightened.
Another day I was blow-drying my hair. I don’t do this very often; I don’t have the patience to do a good job, and I tend to get dizzy from holding my arms above my heart. This time I gave up, sat down on the side of the tub. I left the dryer on so that Jack wouldn’t hear me. Charlie had been the one to show me how to separate my hair into top and bottom layers, and to do the bottom first, starting with the ends.
“You have this easy hair, and you can’t even blow-dry it,” she’d said to me once, the first time she’d seen me doing it. I said something to the effect that I thought it looked okay, and she had sighed and taken the brush and the dryer out of my hands.
“Me fixing your hair is like Einstein fixing my toilet.”
“You’re the Einstein of hair?”
“I have certain God-given abilities,” Charlie said.
I thought that if I hadn’t blown my hair dry, or decided to make shrimp, I would never have remembered those conversations. Was it just chance, what I got to keep of her?
I tell my students that cosmic background radiation, which is now giving us so much information about the origins of the universe, will be gone in a trillion years. The photons that we can see now with the help of satellites like the WMAP are slowly lengthening, and will eventually stretch beyond the wavelength of visible light. If there are astronomers still looking then, they’ll have to rely on other sources of data—hypervelocity stars, for example.
The photo on my desk sometimes seems to be alive, and is sometimes very flat, as if there is a glare on the plastic frame.