Rooms(21)

On the other hand, and especially at night, there are certain times of drift. There are moments when the house, the body, has gone still, when we are full of empty air, when nothing needs our attention. Then, sometimes, ideas converge: memory and present, wish and desire, silhouette shadows of people we have been or have known. This is the closest we come to dreaming.

What is now the study was once the sitting room, which became the living room, as times and fashions changed. There was a yellow-and-white loveseat that Ed hated. He traded it, later on, for a couch in green plaid we covered in plastic, so the upholstery wouldn’t fade. There was a wireless set we eventually moved into the cellar, to make room for our television, and a faded rug we replaced, when Ed retired, with nubby gray wall-to-wall carpeting: the newest thing. I used to walk it in my bare feet when he wasn’t at home, pacing all the way to the corners, kneading my toes against the fabric, marveling at the look of it.

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

That’s what I return to again and again, no matter how many times I think about it: how naive we were, how we believed in the promise, how we believed the past could be kept down. No. More than that—how we believed in a future that was distinct from the past.

We had bookshelves. Ed liked books, although he didn’t read them. He was sensitive about his background, and careful, in public, never to betray the fact that he hadn’t finished high school. He liked to collect things that made up for his childhood, as though the weight of his possessions would somehow hurtle him forward into a new life.

Maybe that’s why he was obsessed with the railroad. Ed liked to talk in front of company about the architecture of our country, and the way it was written in railroads and highways: pistons moving forward, spokes and wheels rolling over a landscape of natural obstacles, chugging headfirst into the future. That was what Ed did his whole life: push, and push, and push.

Ed kept a slim volume of nineteenth-century railway maps, which he had bought for ten cents at an old flea market in Buffalo, displayed proudly on the top shelf. He insisted it not be moved, touched, or even dusted.

This was one of the first secrets I kept from him: when he was gone, I would move the little footstool, climb up to reach the top shelf, take down the book, and read it.

At first it was simply rebellion. But it quickly became more than that. There was something sad about the illustrations, the tracks stitching the land, like a body that had been sewn up after a terrible accident: it was the very attempt to connect that made it ugly.

Thomas and I liked to look at maps together. Even now, when I see the large-bundled volumes on Richard Walker’s shelf, or the cardboard map that leans against the bookshelf, I can’t help but think of Thomas, and the way we used to trace our fingers over the contours of the pages, following suggested routes, and feeling in our fingertips the possibility of escape.

I suppose, in some sense, wills are like maps: they are the imprint we leave, the places our affections have been entrenched; the work we have done; the money we have burrowed away; the furrows and the paths that lead back to spaces we have gone, and marked, and loved.

I left everything I had—which wasn’t very much—to Maggie. In the end, my map was a dry place, a single road tethering me to my only child. In the end, my map was lonely.

I know that that’s how it seemed to others. I know what I looked like: a devoted wife, despite everything, and then a cautious, solitary widow; a mother, perhaps too strict, perhaps too careful in her loving. A dry, dusty, throwaway woman, like many others: a woman made to fade, and dry out, and die shaking in her hollow skin.

This is the map I left. I know this. I knew it even before I became old.

And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn’t express it, couldn’t speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption—even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn’t want even a ripple.

There were times when, exhausted, I held Maggie, in the dark, to my breast, and her tiny hands clutched at the air, and nobody in the world might have been awake but us. And then the small rosebud mouth, so needy, would find its object, and every mistake and blemish in my life was absolved: there was only giving, there was only the rhythm of life restored: the small pull against my breast, regular and ingrained, like a second heartbeat.

There were times with Ed—in between the storms, in between the distance—when for a miraculous moment, we seemed to wash up on a shore together, and for that moment (an hour, a day, a week), everything that had happened seemed like the long, littered road on the way to happiness. There was a picnic in Saratoga; there was the Fourth of July in Maine, when he surprised me with the ice cream cone.

There was watching Maggie waddle across the kitchen; there was the box turtle she found, and named, and insisted on attempting to keep in a cardboard box filled with long grass and nubby pebbles. Norman. She named it Norman.

There was the Christmas when Ed filled the house with tiny, winking lights and insisted I come downstairs with my eyes covered; there was snow piled deep and quiet in the woods, and sun turning slender cones of ice to diamond.

These are my secrets: roads branching, endlessly branching, each turn leading to a hundred others. When Sandra first came, I was tempted to share, to explain. But now I know: certain stories must remain mine, so that there is a me to remain.