They May Not Mean To, But They Do(74)

Alone at last.

That was meant to refer to a couple, surely. Two lovers, alone at last.

Nevertheless.

She and Aaron had lived together for so long they had barely noticed each other, like two old dogs asleep before the fire. Without him, the room was empty, any room. Yet it was wearing to be around other people. That was something she realized more and more. People you love, they wear on you, too. Molly and Danny and Coco and the girls, she wanted them to be near every minute of every day—it was wearing, that was all. Lovely. And wearing.

She looked for the jam in the refrigerator, but then remembered Coco kept it in the cabinet. But she kept peanut butter in the fridge instead of the cabinet. It was aggravating, all this change. Coco and Danny put knives in the dishwasher, they left the bathroom door closed when no one was in it. There were so many things here, Upstate in her house, that were done differently now. The television remote was new and made no sense to her, but then, she was not allowed to watch television, anyway, she made it too loud and disturbed everyone. The toilet paper was the wrong brand, as were the paper towels and the dishwashing liquid. The towels were folded oddly and put in the wrong closet when they were clean or, when they had been used, hung wet and moldering on hooks she had never installed in the bathroom. The place had become almost foreign to her, as if she were a stranger, a stranger in the house her mother gave her, the house she had nurtured and protected for so many years.

She wondered what would happen if she agreed to live with Karl. It was possible he would turn out to be another comfortable old dog, just like Aaron, just like her, but it was more likely he would be wearing. New, unfamiliar, and wearing.

Of course she would bring him to Ruby’s bat mitzvah. Her children were behaving like children. They should be happy she had a new friend. She hadn’t mentioned Karl’s proposal that the two of them live together, but even that should make her children happy. Would they prefer she be sent off to a nursing home, by them? Like Freddie’s father? To fend off some senile old goat? Like Freddie’s father? Molly and Danny were probably worried about their inheritance, that’s what it was. She was doomed to rot on a urine-stained sofa like Mrs. Astor. Except there was no inheritance. Except the house. Which they wanted to sell. Where she no longer belonged.

She tried to shake off this feeling that she was an intruder, the sense that even this timeless place had moved on and left her behind. She went outside and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs. Such an unpleasant smell. The dog must have vomited. She moved to the porch swing and breathed in the wet summer air, so familiar, her summer air. But it felt all wrong, even the air was wrong, heavier than she remembered it, stickier. The fresh smell of grass and soil and the damp living smell of the stream evaded her. She had hoped, she’d been sure, that Upstate was where she would get her bearings again. She would walk along the road and pick wildflowers, wade in the stream to cool off from the summer heat, pick raspberries from the thorny hedges at the bottom of the hill.

But everything had gone awry. The weather had gone wrong first, hotter and rainier than any year Joy could remember, but that was just the beginning. There was the construction on the other side of the road, which got worse and worse, puffing out clouds of dust when it didn’t rain, oozing mud when it did. And that rain, forcing the field mice to take refuge in the house, the lightning knocking out the power every week. There was a coyote, too, which prowled the property and howled at night. She worried about Gatto, so small, so urban in his experience of the world. Bad enough he’d been attacked by a brute in Los Angeles. What if he wandered out one night and was attacked by a coyote? She wouldn’t be there to save him. She’d be inside, asleep. She had become attached to the dog. He was the only one who didn’t tell her what to do.

The swing creaked as she stood up. She could not wade in the stream this summer. It was rushing full speed ahead, carrying fallen branches, no time to wait for an old lady and her poor balance. She could not pick raspberries, either. The bulldozers had ripped the bushes out of the ground. And the wildflowers had been crushed beneath enormous tire treads.

She walked out onto the lawn and looked back at her house. Perhaps she should sell it, after all. It stood on the hill, dim and weather-beaten, her own house, a house she loved and had loved for almost as long as she could remember. But at that moment, in the gray morning heat, this wonderful place, this house that had given itself over to the happiness of so many generations of children, seemed to feel as out of place as Joy did.

The sky was suddenly dark, thunder grumbling in the distance. Poor Ben and Ruby. They’d get soaked. What if they went under a tree to get out of the rain? What if they touched a wire fence? They could be electrocuted. Joy felt herself tilting, listing to one side. The bottom of the earth shot away from her, from beneath her feet, then came back. Vertigo, a new plague, thank you very much. And her eyes, so unreliable. There had been several trips to the ophthalmologist in the city and an emergency repair of a cataract lens that was far from successful. She closed one eye, but the sky still threatened rain.

She wished Ruby was not going off to sleep-away camp. She wished Cora would not be going to day camp every weekday. She wished Danny didn’t have to go to the office. She wished Aaron were not dead.

It’s your fault, damn you, she thought. All your fault, Aaron.

What was the point of everyone being together if people went away?

If the black clouds above had not spelled certain death for Ruby and Ben, she would have welcomed the darkening sky and thought it beautiful, much more beautiful, certainly, than the dingy clouds of dust, the dun-colored fog, that was usually lurking in the sky from the building site. The digging had done something to the septic tank as well, something obstructive, and there had been overflowing toilets. The fireflies had given way to houseflies and bees and wasps and, with all the rain, a burgeoning crop of mosquitoes. Inside, the air conditioners labored noisily and the doors and windows were kept shut.