Chapter One #4
Scrambling for an answer that wasn’t comic books, which, at that time, still comprised most of his reading, Cal said, “Encyclopedias.”
Becky laughed at that. He asked what was so funny. “There aren’t that many encyclopedias,” she said. She looked at his hair and seemed amused by it too. “You have a cowlick.”
“Every day. My mom gave up trying to flatten it when I was little. She said the cow kept coming back. Not that we had a cow.”
“You’re also a little dirty.”
“Am I?”
“Right here.” Becky lifted her hand and touched a fingertip to the side of his neck.
Cal felt a spark somewhere below his ribs. “That’s from work. Concrete plant.”
“I work at Dixon’s Stationery on Eleventh Street,” she said. “I’m very good at helping people choose which stationery to buy. Have you received some bad news lately?”
Did his 4-F status show on his face? Cal sucked again on the straw.
“Tell the truth,” she said.
He already liked her—she had a soothing, grassy voice, and she held her eyes open in a way that showed her entire irises, which were so dark brown that it was hard to see her pupils.
For all her quirkiness, she had a reassuring presence.
But he wasn’t going to tell her the truth.
He didn’t want to talk about how let down he felt, how frustrated, how inept.
Mary Lisnik scratched the side of her jaw with the hand holding the cigarette and said, “Now they’re rounding up everyone who’s Japanese in California. Even the American ones.”
The sack-headed man balled up his napkin. “If they’re Japanese, they’re not American,” he said. “And they’ve been rounding them up for a while. You sure that’s not last week’s paper, sweet knees?”
When Mary Lisnik looked over the top of the Toledo Blade, pure hatred reigned in her eyes. Then she noticed his empty plate. “How about a slice of Paratroop Pie?”
Becky leaned in closer to Cal. “If it’s bad news, it won’t stay that way forever,” she said.
—
Five weeks and as many dates later, they were standing in line on a snowy sidewalk in front of the Bonhomie Bijou, about to see Valley of the Sun, when she presented him with a small sealed envelope.
It contained, she said, a letter to herself she’d written when she was eight years old—a letter in which was a description of a vision she’d had then of her future self.
Would Cal promise to keep the letter and present it back to her on her sixtieth birthday?
It was the strangest thing anyone had ever asked him to do.
He wasn’t tall but was taller than her by a few inches and had become used to looking slightly down into her dark eyes, had become used to seeing her smile up at him.
He’d become used to nearly everything about her, yet she was still capable of surprising him. “Why on your sixtieth?”
“Because by then I’ll have forgotten what I wrote. And I want you to keep it to make sure I don’t peek at it until enough time has passed.”
“But why write it down if you want to forget it?”
“That’s the whole point,” Becky said. “Is the future knowable? Will our older selves be anything like our younger selves thought we would be? We can only find out by writing it down and then putting it out of our minds and letting life take its course. The unraveling of time should be mysterious, don’t you think? ”
Cal had never thought about the unraveling of time before. He said, “I guess.”
“So you promise to hold on to the letter for me?”
He nodded, she handed him the envelope, and he slipped it into his coat pocket. Then she asked him if he’d ever written a letter to himself, and he was so worried that the other people in line for the movie would overhear this “future” talk that he kissed her to get her to stop.
This was their first real kiss, and while it was interesting, neither of them really knew how to do it. Their lips fidgeted against one another. Their tongues touched for just an instant, then retreated. Someone behind them in line said, “Let’s keep it moving, folks.”
At the end of the night, sitting in his car in front of her parents’ house on London Hill—which wasn’t really a hill but was one of the more affluent neighborhoods in town—Becky brought up the subject again.
“About that letter,” she said. Cal wondered if he’d done something wrong on their date and she was about to ask for it back.
But she wanted him to know that if he did ever write his own letter—which she’d deduced he hadn’t—he could give it to her for safekeeping.
It was snowing again. The flakes were fat and stuck like little doilies to the windshield. Cal could think of nothing to say but “Thank you.” She smiled and kissed him. It was a little less clumsy and even more interesting. They kept it moving.
—
They didn’t have a lot of common ground in terms of interests, but as spring gave way to summer, they were savvy enough to realize that their common ground was them.
Their desire for each other’s company. Cal’s shifts at the concrete plant started and let out earlier than Becky’s at the stationery store, and he was often waiting for her when she got off work.
“I have an idea,” he said one Saturday afternoon that spring, while they were sitting in the backyard of the boarding house, on a bench among the roses.
“Why don’t we sneak past Mrs. Gautier and slip into my room?
You know, cuddle up.” Cuddle up was the term they used for everything they were doing that didn’t involve taking off their clothes or having actual sex (both virgins, wanting to wait).
She gave him a wry smile she was still testing out. Up they went.
“I have an idea,” she said one early summer evening when they were walking the path around Lake Meyer and he was explaining why cops-and-robbers stories weren’t the best fodder for comic books.
“Why don’t we stop talking and cuddle up under one of these trees?
” He stopped talking, and they cuddled up.
Becky was the first thing he thought about when he opened his eyes in the morning.
Seeing her, hearing her grassy voice, kissing her.
For Becky’s part, Cal was the sweetest, most considerate young man she’d ever known.
(She’d dated several others before him—no one for very long.) When he doted on her, his boyish face became etched with concern that he was doting the right way.
At some point that summer, she stopped worrying that he was going to lose interest in her.
She started thinking he was someone whose faults she could overlook, when they surfaced.
For he was bound to have them; she certainly did.
In fact, he already had one she was overlooking: when he ate, sometimes, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand—or on his shirt sleeve.
And she hadn’t said a word about that (yet) because she liked him. She so much more than liked him.
One evening they were sitting across from each other in the Blue Top Diner and she was telling him about a séance she’d recently held with her childhood friend Janice to try to contact the ghost of Joan of Arc, when Cal interrupted to ask what had gotten her interested in séances.
She told him about poor, dead Mr. Shefflin whispering inside her head.
Cal remembered hearing about the Model A with the dead man in it that had been dragged out of the Laurie River.
Then she told him about how the ghost of a Seneca tribeswoman had appeared beside her bed a few years later, when she was twelve.
Becky had been sick with the mumps, and the tribeswoman had rubbed some crushed herbs onto her chest, causing her throat to stop hurting.
She was gone before Becky could thank her—she evaporated, along with the herbs—so Becky went to the library and began looking up ways the dead communicated with the living.
Somehow the vanishing woman struck Cal as more outlandish than the whispering drowned man. “Well,” he said, salting his hamburger, “you did have a fever.”
“I did. A terrible fever.”
“That’s what it was, don’t you think? Isn’t there usually a scientific explanation for that sort of thing?”
“Does there have to be?”
“Not when you’re a kid, I guess.”
“That,” she said, leaning back in the booth, “coming from the grown man who still reads comic books.”
He hadn’t meant to irk her. Now he thought she was trying to make him feel stupid. “Some are based on novels.”
“Which ones?”
He had to think. “Tarzan.”
“They’re comic books. They’re the funny papers, stapled together.”
“It’s a hobby,” he said. “Like your hobby.”
“You think mine’s on par with reading a picture book about men wearing tights and fighting bad guys?”
“No,” he said. “Forget I said anything.”
“I know what happened to me.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
Was this their first fight? Were they fighting? He held up his hands in surrender.
They said little as they finished eating.
While he paid the bill, she walked out of the diner.
Just to stand on the sidewalk and wait for him, he thought, but as he got his change he began to worry that she wasn’t going to be there when he got outside.
That she’d decided he wasn’t worth her time and had walked off. Gone home. Vanished from his life.
It was dusk, late summer. The Blue Top was on Fleming, a wide street that ran between two mostly residential neighborhoods and was lined on either side with lilac trees.
People were out with their children, out walking their dogs.
Men in uniform, home from basic training, strolled with their arms around their girlfriends, their wives.
On a bench, an elderly couple sat, sizing up everyone who walked by.
But there was no Becky. Cal felt heat rise into his face.
He looked up and down the street, his stomach twisting in panic—then spotted her some twenty feet away, with her back to him.
She was looking off into the distance. When he stepped up beside her, she glanced at him, took his hand, and offered him a little smile that conveyed either forgiveness or just the desire to move on.
She returned her eyes to the darkening sky over the peaked roof of the Craftsman across the street. “Gibbous moon,” she said.
—
They were married in September of 1942, in the First Episcopal Church.
Other than the minister, the organist, the bride and groom, the maid of honor (Becky’s friend Janice), and the best man (Everett, who wore an ill-fitting, oily-looking suit and hummed under his breath like a bee for most of the ceremony), there were less than a dozen people in attendance, including Becky’s parents, Janice’s parents, the principal of the high school they’d both attended, and an elderly woman who lived in a house down the street and went to every wedding and funeral the church had to offer.
Becky cried and cried—first through Cal’s vows, then through hers.
She cried as they were walking back up the aisle to “Ode to Joy,” and she cried outside the church as rice rained down on them.
When Cal, smiling, asked why she was crying so much, she told him it was because she loved him and was just so happy they’d found each other. Cal was happy too.
The fall air was crisp against their faces, cooling the wetness. No one had tied anything to the Nash’s bumper because all the cans had been spoken for, but in exuberant swirls Janice had tempera-painted Hitched! on the back window.