The Stationery Shop(62)
“Honey.”
She hated it when he called her honey. He only called her that when he was being patronizing. Roya Joon was what he called her when he was actually affectionate, but honey meant I know better Honey meant you’re not thinking clearly, of course we’ll have another child Honey meant that he had no idea that the only reason she hadn’t quit it all was out of obligation to him.
“I can’t. No,” she said.
He got up, and she thought that he was going to the bathroom. Maybe he was even leaving the restaurant. He had every right to get away from her. She had been impossible since Marigold’s death: selfish and quiet and withdrawn. Maybe he would go to the restroom and gather his wits in his very Walter-ish way and come back with a fa?ade of good cheer—as much as he could muster in public—and they would go on eating their beef stroganoff amidst the clatter of the restaurant. They would pretend to be like any other couple there.
But he didn’t leave. He came to her side of the table. He knelt down and gently took her face in both his hands. His blue eyes were filled with a sadness that was theirs alone.
“She will always be right here,” Walter said. And he touched his chest just like he had during the first time Roya had cooked for him in Mrs. Kishpaugh’s kitchen all those years ago. Then he rested his forehead against hers.
The waiters came and went. The other diners clanged their utensils and chatted and guffawed every once in a while. Roya and Walter stayed that way—foreheads touching. Of his love she had never been more sure. For every ounce of grief that she had, Walter had the same. He had labored with her in this grief, felt his way through the darkness and the depth of it, and all the time as the world carried on, he was there by her side. Walter was always there. Reliable. Trustworthy. Steady. The love that she and Walter shared was a lifeline she did not want to do without.
At the end of the Christmas holidays, after Marigold had been gone for almost a year, she dragged the rocking chair down the stairs and to the curb. She knew Mrs. Michael was watching from her window across the street as she did it. In the town where America had begun, Roya deposited the rocking chair on the curb and left it there for someone new to pick up, take home, rock on.
Part Five
Chapter Twenty-Three
2013
* * *
Virtual Friends
If there was one thing Claire would ban, it was TV commercials. And if there was one thing she couldn’t stop watching, it was these commercials. Her friends on Facebook told her to record her shows and just fast-forward through the advertisements or to download them from a streaming site, but Claire couldn’t help but watch each program in real time with all the ads—almost in a masochistic way. Like dwelling on a wound, like itching a scab and feeling it sting.
Every night after she came home to her small apartment in Watertown, Claire made herself a dinner of pita bread with turkey and tomato or Top Ramen noodles or microwaved packaged rice and a fried egg. She turned on the TV and prepared to feel the sting. She didn’t watch the shows her friends on Facebook watched—the dramas on cable that won all the awards: sexy, well-written, edgy shows that warranted social media status updates and spoiler alerts and virtual water-cooler conversations. She watched instead—almost with horror—reality shows featuring plastic-surgeried housewives fighting in expensive restaurants or families with twenty happy children going through scripted mayhem. During the commercials, Claire would lie under her beige blanket as buddies ate fast food together, parents and children found bliss with mobile phone apps, cute toddlers ran around in diapers, fathers tearfully watched their daughters grow up in a montage from baby-in-a-car-seat to teenager-behind-the-steering-wheel. Claire scoffed at the sentimentality and rejected it, but longed for it all the same. Years ago, she had been a long-legged undergrad at college majoring in English literature, convinced she’d end up as a successful and content university professor. But then her mother had called in tears saying, “It’s positive.” The tiny lump in her mother’s breast ended up, even after removal, continuing its evil journey throughout her body, so that by the time Claire was twenty-four, her mother was in a graveyard in Bedford, Massachusetts, just a mile from the local Whole Foods, and Claire was tented in chronic grief. Her father had died in a car accident when she was just a toddler in those diapers constantly featured in the commercials she watched at nights alone now. Claire had felt, at a very young age, the stunning reality of being alone. Boyfriends came and went. None of them stuck, even though she had been convinced that she was in love once. Maybe twice.
Now, at age thirty, her friends from school were either married or in serious relationships. They were scattered all over the country and even the world. Her link to them was through social media, not through phone calls or that ancient ritual of actually seeing one another. She followed their colorful, happy, but oh-so-careful-to-be-self-deprecating lives online. She read status updates of “Yes, it’s true, we have a bun in the oven!” and pressed “like” even though she sometimes felt empty and jealous. She saw the photos of her pregnant friends on beaches with their husbands’ arms around them and pressed “like.” She opened her laptop to see the babies born—small, scrunched-up newborns in hats—and read all the comments: “So happy for you, Jenna!” “OMG—he is GORGEOUS!” and pressed “like” and added her own “Congrats!” She scrolled through selfies of her former classmates vacationing in Costa Rica and Hawaii with their kids and was mired in a strange stew of envy and happiness for them. Then she turned on the TV and watched families drink hot chocolate and have fights and make up and fathers give car keys to their newly licensed daughters. And all she could think was just how much she missed her mom.