Summerlong: A Novel Part 20

Charlie says, "Dude, come over. The parade's gonna mow you down."

Dude?

Don keeps staring at his family, unable to speak or move. In front of the approaching fire engines, the parade marshall, Olympic speed skater Leslie Hammer, is waving to the crowd. She wears red, white, and blue shorts; sneakers; and a white warm-up top. She is ten yards away. The candy flies from the fire engine. Her smile meets Don's eyes and then her smile fades and Claire says, "Don! Move!"

It is a police officer who finally moves into the road, and escorts Don to the side, away from his family, and when the slow fire trucks pa.s.s between them, Don Lowry disappears.

JULY 5,.

95 DEGREES.

The heat would not break and even the sun at the city pool could grow unbearable after ten minutes, and so, because it is Don's day to take the kids, his first outing as the noncustodial parent, he drives them to an indoor waterpark outside Des Moines; Claire has found him a deal on Groupon, a cost-saving move she's taken to since the separation, and he is grateful for the idea.

Back home, in the sultry late afternoon, Charlie takes an ice bucket of six beers out to the deck by the still-empty pool. On his fourth beer, he reads another cache of his father's letters; these he finds in a ma.n.u.script box in a bursting file cabinet in the closet. Letters in front of him, both from the admirers and to the admired-fervent declarations to Melinda and Sidney and Jamaica spilling out in front of him, all of them carefully photocopied and dated and saved in manila folders. His father had been serious about saving these, and he wonders, if early-onset dementia comes for him someday, would there be something shameful like this that he too will leave behind?

Do we all have secrets and do we all leave evidence behind of such secrets when our end comes without notice? What would Charlie want burned if he were to become incapacitated someday? Maybe that is the sign of a good, ethical life? The idea that there is nothing you need to burn before you die.

He watches Claire walking through the backyard toward the pool. She is wearing a pair of paint-spattered white overalls over a white ribbed tank top. She has been eager to earn her keep around the place, and has taken to painting the mildewed walls of the laundry room and the downstairs bath. She tells Charlie it will help him sell the place quickly when he's ready to do so. She'd said so yesterday as she recaulked the upstairs bathtub where Wendy would soak for almost an hour nearly every night.

"Don called," Claire says to Charlie now. "They're having so much fun that he is using that coupon to stay at the hotel tonight. The kids seem happy about it."

"Oh," Charlie says, barely looking up. He is reading a letter about a woman wanting to go back to a riverfront hotel in Davenport with his father and he reads it aloud to Claire: "'Gill, can't believe you got me to go to a gentlemen's club! That was kind of naughty. I was drunk!'"

"Jesus," Claire says.

"Right?" Charlie says. "Crazy, right?"

"He wrote a lot of letters. But why torture yourself?"

"Some to you? Maybe?" Charlie says. "There were some to ABC and some to a woman named Claire."

"I am sure we wrote notes. I took like four cla.s.ses with him. And then I was his colleague for two years. All of this before e-mail. So we wrote notes. Not like that one though."

"At any given moment," Charlie says, "it seems like my father was in love with a hundred women."

"I think you shouldn't read these," Claire says. "We could burn everything without reading them and set you free."

"But there's a book somewhere in these piles. His life's work, Claire."

"He won't know the difference. And if there was a book, why would-" she says, and then stops herself, reframing her statement. "Wouldn't he have published it if he had wanted it published?"

"He was a perfectionist," Charlie says. "He would have been afraid to, I think. Afraid of rejection, maybe?"

"I understand that. One bad review in the Times is enough."

"Your book got a bad review?"

"The worst!"

Claire stands near him for a long time, not speaking. She is glad to see him. Her whole body sways, as if she might fall on him without meaning to, and she plunges her hands into her pockets and feels the warmth there.

"Why didn't you ever write another book?" Charlie says.

"I didn't want to," she says.

"Is that the truth?"

"Something happened to me," Claire says. "I don't know what. I stopped wanting things."

"And now?" he says.

"Now," she says, "I just want."

JULY 6,.

97 DEGREES.

The house is filthy, at least by Ruth's standards, and had, in her able-bodied days, been impeccable. ABC knows she has not been as good a live-in aide as she had first set out to be when she arrived in Grinnell. She loves Ruth. She genuinely wants to do a good job, and she knows she has left Ruth home alone for stretches that are too long, spending her time with Charlie, sorting through his father's papers, or with Don, smoking, hoping to take a nap beside him and dream of Philly again. She knows she has not made the meals as nutritious as they should have been-frozen pizzas and grilled burgers. She knows the house is not as clean as it could be. But it is an odd situation, incredibly informal. In exchange for room and board (ABC has a monthly grocery store allowance to spend on Ruth's behalf) and a small monthly stipend, Ruth hasn't asked for much: an eye on her, keep her company, help her with whatever she needs help doing.

Mainly, ABC has helped the old woman stay high.

So that morning, ABC apologizes to Ruth for any recent oversights and inadequacies.

"I'm afraid I am not taking very good care of you," ABC says.

Ruth says, "Oh, phooey, honey. Who cares? I'm dying, and hopefully soon. You have a life to live. Anyway, there's only one thing I can't do for myself. I can't drive to Newton and buy my gra.s.s."

"The house is dirty. I will clean all day. It'll look better," ABC says.

"G.o.d, the hours of my life I spent cleaning," Ruth says. "Some of the only hours I regret. I was a housewife. They used to call us that. And I cleaned so much, as if it was the only way to demonstrate my value to the world."

"Well, this is no way to live," ABC says. "You deserve better."

"I'm done living," Ruth says. "And I am not trying to be dramatic here."

"I understand," ABC says. "We went to see my friend's dad at the Mayflower. He's gotten a kind of dementia that comes and goes. He's a lot younger than you. It doesn't seem like a dignified way to go. I wouldn't want to go that way."

"Gill," Ruth says.

"You know him?"

"They don't let people go in a dignified way anymore," Ruth says. "You promise me, if you find me on death's door one morning, you won't call 911? You give me some weed, maybe some painkillers-or whiskey if that's all you have-and don't call a soul until you are sure I am gone."

"I got it."

"This is the one major kindness the young can do for the old, yet they are all afraid to let it happen. They call 911, and you get six months of medical care and a month of hospice instead of an easy way out."

ABC looks at Ruth, whose eyes have taken on a dark sheen, the pupils overwhelming the deeply blue, almost purple, irises.

"Okay," ABC says, although she isn't sure she could do what has just been asked of her.

"You see?" Ruth says. "This is why I like you more than anybody else. When I give you the straight dope, you don't reel off some optimistic bulls.h.i.+t."

"I understand wanting out," ABC says.

Ruth pats ABC's hand.

"I've lived a full life," Ruth says. "A very full life indeed," she says.

Anytime Ruth says "a very full life" in a dreamy whisper, ABC will stop whatever she's doing and sit down and listen to the story at hand. On this particular morning, Ruth talks not of a trip to Europe with her husband, or something she'd studied in college, when she was the first woman from her small town in Minnesota to ever go away to college, but of something that happened later in life.

Often, Ruth begins her story by asking ABC a question. "Your friend Philly. Was she your first lover?"

"It was something new to us. It had just happened. We'd been friends first."

Ruth nods slowly. ABC is afraid Ruth will fall asleep. She wants to talk more, wants desperately for Ruth to remember this conversation, to bring her some insight and meaning, two things she feels are perhaps no longer existent in the world. Certainly none of the events of the last year indicated that insight is a real possibility, or that meaning is something one could discover.

"We grieve for lovers differently than we grieve for friends or parents," Ruth says. "The physical separation-it can be unbearable."

ABC feels as if she can hardly move, or as if something inside her body will turn to water, will liquify and turn to nothing. And she'll cease to exist. She feels-there was no other way to say it-suddenly unsolid.

"The way that you carry your grief," Ruth says, "it's the look of pa.s.sion, taken away before it had run its course."

"Yes," ABC says. "We'd just begun."

"Do you only like girls?" Ruth says. It is funny, the way she says it, laced with bluntness and naivete all at once. If some frat boy had phrased it that way, ABC would be offended and angry. But she understands that to Ruth it is a real question, a desire to know her better; girls was a generational term. To Ruth, ABC is so young. A girl.

"I don't know," ABC says. "I loved her. I wanted her to be my lover. I have not loved a woman like that before."

"Or anybody?" Ruth says.

"No."

"Do you love Don?" Ruth says.

"When I am near him, if I fall asleep near him, I still have those dreams of Philly, you know, emerging from that body of water. Only if he is here, only after we smoke pot and lie down together, do I dream of Philly. Those are the only times I get her in a dream."

Ruth stares off into the dark corner of the room, as if she can see something there, and then her face lights with recognition. Ruth says, "Oh, I see. He's a vessel."

Ruth has gone pale and her voice is almost inaudibly hoa.r.s.e. And then, just as swiftly, she perks up and resumes talking in her usual way.

"Ruth, are you okay?"

"Your generation, all of this shame!" Ruth says. "My generation-our parents didn't think about us much. And if they did, they whacked us when we were in trouble. But ever since your generation's parents gave up spanking? They've shamed their children into submission. Even the very good people in your generation, especially the very good people, just have so much shame. Everything you do makes you feel guilty."

"True," ABC says.

"I was over fifty," Ruth says. "Can you believe it?"

ABC smiles, but she doesn't follow.

"When I took my first lover, other than my husband. When I finally had a second lover, I was practically an old lady."

"Wow."

"How many lovers have you had?" Ruth says.

"There was only one who mattered."

"Hmm," Ruth says. "I think that is a good thing, sweetie. I loved my husband, loved him since we met the summer I turned twenty, wanted to have a family with him, wanted to feel him next to me each night. We had a good life, but, well, when the kids left, there was some distance, and I was, I was too old to consider the dangers of it. I'd always wanted a lover, deep down; somehow I knew I would take one if an opportunity arose. I wasn't looking for it though, and a.s.sumed it would happen only if something happened to John."

She gets teary for a moment, dabs at her eyes with a tissue. "And he had his. I am sure Mr. Manetti had his. Back then, it was different. In the seventies, professors did that sort of thing. With students. He traveled with one girl and I could see the sadness in his face when the trip was over. A conference in England. He said he had gone alone."

ABC, suddenly exhausted, shrugs. "I'm sorry." What else can she say? She stands up and thinks she might put some soup on the stove for lunch. Ruth is tired. She'll nap soon and probably forget the entire conversation.

"I was slender, still, and walked every morning, and I did my weights and exercises, my hair was still dark, not as black as it had been, but with the exercise, which back then, was not a very common thing to do, and the hair, and my figure-my hips had always attracted men. I was so sad when I broke one a few years ago. I had always considered my hips my best attribute. I used to wear the dresses and blue jeans that flattered them. I was somewhat vain! It's hard to believe, right, with this afghan on my lap, my hair a whitened bird's nest."

ABC finds a brush in the junk drawer. "Should I brush it?"

"Sure," Ruth says and ABC stands behind Ruth, behind her chair, and brushes as gently as she can. The old woman feels as if her neck is easily breakable, as if brus.h.i.+ng might take out her remaining hair.

"It was a summer morning, and I was walking, briskly," she says, "dumbbells in hand, out on the path that goes behind the observatory, and I met a young man, a new professor, das.h.i.+ng-that's the only way to describe him.

"I would see him out there every morning and our nods and h.e.l.los soon became friendly exchanges. It was summer. He'd just arrived, hadn't taught his first cla.s.s yet, and one day, I just . . ."