3
The sun felt a lot warmer now. The rows of houses became rows of shops intermingled with smaller houses, and then the houses turned into podiatry offices or one-man insurance agencies, and then we took a right onto Ashton Street and I saw Mayella’s Produce and the lake trout joint and beyond that, my school. Which reminded me: “I was thinking,”
I said (a bit breathlessly, on account of the hill we’d just climbed), “maybe I should send Marilee an email wishing her well with her procedure.”
“What procedure is that?”
Max asked.
“She’s having a cardio-something tomorrow to change the rate of her heartbeat.”
“That sounds serious,” Max said.
“Cardio…gram? Graph? Cardiolysis? I didn’t have a chance to wish her well on Friday because she was so busy questioning my people skills, but I can see where I might have sounded a bit, maybe, uncaring.”
“If you want to prove your people skills you should telephone her, not email.”
“Oh, that would be false advertising,”
I said, only half joking. “I don’t have that many people skills. Besides, what’s wrong with emailing? We might even say it shows respect. Respecting her private time with her husband the day before her…cardioxy?”
“Phone calls convey a more immediate concern,”
Max said. “Like, ‘Forgive me for intruding, but I’ve been sitting here feeling so worried about you that I just had to pick up the phone and ask you what I can do.’?”
I said, “Ha! She would wonder what had gotten into me.”
The Ashton School was closed and silent, I saw, with all the classroom shades pulled down to exactly the same level just as our custodian liked them; no bothersome teachers or students interfering with his preferences. Once we’d walked past it, we made a U-turn and started back the way we had come. I said, “I hate forgetting words. Hunting through my memory for them; it’s like asking the Magic 8 Ball, you know? ‘Will I be rich when I’m grown?’ ‘Will I travel?’ And then waiting for the answer to float up slowly, slowly in the glass.”
“?‘It is not yet clear,’?”
Max intoned in a solemn voice. “?‘Ask again later.’?”
“But at least it did float up, when I was young. Now that I’m old, it sometimes doesn’t. I’ll say, ‘It will come to me by and by,’ but it doesn’t.”
“Yeah, welcome to the club,”
Max said lightly.
“I hate it,”
I told him.
He looked over at me.
I said, “It makes me feel…vulnerable.”
“Oh,”
he said. “Sweetheart.”
“But you’re right: welcome to the club!”
I said. “Gosh, is that a red-winged blackbird?”
And we both turned to watch it fly up from a mulberry bush, black as ink with its epaulettes of startling scarlet.
“You and I were going to grow old side by side, once upon a time,” Max said.
I don’t know where he expected that remark to go. I didn’t answer, and we walked the rest of the way in silence.
* * *
Even though I hadn’t let on at the time, I thought seriously about his advice to wish Marilee well by phone. He might have a point, I thought. So after we came home, while I was upstairs changing out of my walking clothes, I sat down on the edge of my bed to give her a call. I had to look up her number in my little bedside phonebook; that’s how seldom I phoned her. “Gail!”
she said when she picked up.
“Hi, Marilee.”
“I’m glad you got back to me.”
“Right,”
I said. I’d forgotten all about her answering machine message. “Well, I just wanted to say I’m hoping things will go well tomorrow.”
“Why, thank you,”
she said. “That’s very thoughtful of you. Now. What I’d called about. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I happened to remember that before you hired on as my assistant, you were teaching math at Millwood High.”
“Yes…”
“Teaching remedial math.”
“Right.”
“So on Friday after you left I phoned Emmy Lawton,” she said.
Emmy was head of the mathematics department at our school—not terribly bright, but I liked her.
“I asked if she had any interest in acquiring a specialist in remedial math,”
she said, “and she said absolutely she did. Ever since Covid times set our students so far back, she said…But, so, I don’t want you to feel insulted by this suggestion; I realize you’ve long since moved up in the world…”
Count on Marilee to imagine that administration was a move up in the world.
“Still, would you ever consider the possibility of going back to teaching?”
she asked.
“You mean at the Ashton School,” I said.
“At least mull it over?”
“Huh. It’s a thought,”
I told her. And it was—but kind of a complicated thought. I set it aside, for the time being. I said, “So, maybe your husband could give me a call tomorrow to tell me how things went with you.”
“Thank you. I’ll let him know,” she said.
It would have sounded more personal if I’d remembered her husband’s first name. I didn’t, though.
After I’d hung up I crossed the hall to the guest room, where Max was packing. “I did it,”
I told him.
“Did what?” he asked.
“I phoned Marilee to wish her well.”
“Excellent,” he said.
“And she happened to mention that the Ashton School could use a remedial math teacher.”
“Oh,”
he said. “I see.”
To myself I said, “Darn. I should have asked her what that cardio procedure’s called.”
“Now, promise you won’t get mad at this,” Max said.
I looked over at him. I braced myself.
“But I did just now phone Sam Levy,”
he said. “I asked if by any chance we needed a remedial math teacher at our school. And he said, ‘Are you kidding? I would kill for a remedial math teacher.’?”
“Who would he kill?” I asked.
“Whom,”
Max said. And then, “Are you mad?”
“No,”
I said. “You were nice to go to the trouble.”
“It’s only that I was thinking change is sometimes a good thing, don’t you find?”
“Right,”
I said. “Except, you know. Here I am in Baltimore.”
“Yes,”
he said. “I know.”
“Hey!”
I said. “I have an idea. Are you leaving right away? Because if you don’t mind sticking around awhile, I could invite you out to lunch before you go.”
“I’d be happy to stick around.”
“Lunch at the Cultured Crab, maybe, since you get such a kick out of the place. How does that sound?”
“That would be very nice,” he said.
After that I ran out of things to say, so I went on downstairs.
I was reading the Sunday Sun on the couch next to the cat when Max came down himself. “Care for some of the paper?”
I asked him, and he said, “Thanks,”
and accepted the front section and took it over to the rocker. “Do I really want to know this?” he asked the top headline as he sat down.
I went back to reading the “Ask Amy”
column. I’d always liked how Amy doesn’t put up with any nonsense. “Darn right!”
I said aloud at one point. “The nerve of some people!” and the cat sent me an uneasy glance and edged a few inches away.
“The pay would not be that great, I grant you,”
Max said. He seemed to be speaking again to the newspaper headlines. “But you should bear in mind that the cost of living is much lower there.”
“You mean…on the Eastern Shore?”
I asked him.
He looked over at me, finally. “You could pick up a really nice house for practically nothing,”
he told me.
“Well, sure; it’s a depressed area,” I said.
He said, “As if Baltimore isn’t depressed!”
And then, “Just think, though: once Debbie and Kenneth have kids they can bring them for summer vacations. I suggest you bear that in mind when you’re considering how many rooms you’ll need.”
“You’re talking as if it would be a beach house,”
I said, “but the cost of living at the beach is astronomical.”
“No, I’m talking about my neck of the woods,”
he said, “Cornboro. They could stay with you in Cornboro and then drive to the nearest beach every day in not much more than an hour.”
“Oh, you’re right,”
I said. “And the drive would be so undemanding that Kenny Junior can take the wheel as soon as he gets his learner’s permit.”
Max looked confused, but only for a second. “True enough,”
he agreed.
“Max,”
I said. “I appreciate the thought. But the fact is that I believe I have only one span of life allotted to me. I don’t feel I have the option of just…trying out various random ideas and giving up if they don’t work out.”
“Yes, well,”
Max said with a sigh.
He himself, apparently, assumed he had an infinite number of lives.
Someday I’d like to be given credit for all the times I have not said something that I could have said.
* * *
For our lunch outing we took my car, since I needed to gas up before heading to work on Monday. (I was beginning to acknowledge that I might not be quitting quite yet.) The car’s interior still smelled faintly of hair product, I noticed. I rolled down my window before we took off. “Let’s do the gas on the way back,”
I told Max. “I’m starving, all at once.”
“Me too,” he said.
The Cultured Crab was in Lutherville, near where he had grown up. It had been his parents’ chosen restaurant for important family occasions. Now that they were long gone you would think it would make him sad to go back, but it didn’t seem to. He gazed out his window contentedly as we traveled up the York Road corridor, with its mishmash of car dealers and barbecue joints and strip malls and discount tire warehouses. “When Deb told me she and Kenneth were getting married,”
he said, “I took the two of them to the Cultured Crab for a celebration dinner. Did she happen to mention that?”
“No. What did Kenneth think of it?”
“He loved it.”
“Although, what else was he going to say?”
“No, seriously, I think he really did. He said it was one of a kind.”
“Well, that I can believe,” I said.
“But I should warn you,”
Max said. “Since Covid times, the place has undergone a bit of a conversion.”
“Oh!”
I said suddenly. “Cardioversion!”
“What?”
“Marilee’s procedure. It’s called a cardioversion.”
“Ah.”
“This jolt to her heart to make it start beating right.”
“Modern medicine,”
he marveled. “Okay, so, what they did was set up a lot of outdoor tables à la French sidewalk café, and they still haven’t taken them away. You see what I’m talking about.”
Because by now we were nearing the restaurant. The fa?ade was unchanged—a white clapboard cube with a neon crab in a chef’s toque dancing on the roof—but the space out front had become a jumble of tables and chairs and collapsed umbrellas, all bordered by the trash bins and newspaper boxes lined up as usual along the edge of the curb.
“Paris, France,”
he said with a wave.
“I see,” I said.
“Just don’t tell them you’re too fool.”
“Right.”
That’s something you forget when you’ve been on your own awhile: those married-couple conversations that continue intermittently for weeks, sometimes, branching out and doubling back and looping into earlier strands like a piece of crochet work.
I found a parking space a short distance up ahead, and we got out of the car and threaded our way between the outdoor tables.
None of them were occupied, and when we stepped inside the café we found most of those tables empty as well.
A young woman seated near the window was nursing a cocktail, while two older men across the room studied their menus with their foreheads knotted in frowns.
I was fairly sure I know why they were frowning.
They had probably wandered in assuming this was your average Baltimore seafood joint.
The idea behind the Cultured Crab, though, was that it was more upscale.
Ordinary steamed crabs weren’t even on the menu—too messy, too much work for the diners.
The crabcakes, so-called, were thumb-size croquettes studded with charred shishito pepper bits.
Crab parfait layered with wasabi-spiked crème fra?che.
Crab salad with marcona almonds under a yuzu glaze.
Max’s parents had taken this food seriously, but Max himself found it hilarious.
As we walked in he was actually rubbing his hands together, and the minute we had been seated by the hostess (a thirteen-year-old, from the looks of her), he had to read the tablecloth.
Each tablecloth was different—an Irish linen facsimile of a newspaper page, meant to duplicate the actual newspapers where other crabhouses dumped their vats of steamed whole crabs.
Our particular page included reports of a city council oyster roast and a squeegee-kid party where the mayor himself had handed out hot crab heroes.
That one Max read aloud. I said, “Notice they don’t say which mayor.”
“It’s like a time warp,”
Max said. He was gazing now at a corner table across the room. “Remember when we were all sitting over there and my sister announced she was pregnant?”
“Oh, Lord,”
I said, because his sister had not been married back then.
“And Dad stood up so suddenly that he knocked against the table edge and our candlestick fell over and set Mom’s menu on fire.”
“Happy days,” I said.
“Would you guys care to start with a drink?”
our waitress asked us. She seemed to be another teenager. Evidently all the “hon”-type waitresses in their sixties had taken early retirement during the pandemic. “Just water, please,”
I told her, and Max said, “I’ll have the iced tea.” The Cultured Crab’s iced tea was famous; it was seasoned with cumin or turmeric or some such that turned people’s teeth yellow.
“And now that baby is a grown woman who just attended our daughter’s wedding,”
Max said once we were alone again. Evidently he was back on the subject of his sister’s pregnancy.
“She’s getting a few gray hairs, even,”
I said. “I noticed while we were talking together after the ceremony.”
I was scanning my menu as I spoke, trying to find the least bizarre combination. I’ve never been a fan of foods I didn’t eat in my childhood.
The tin-can taste of mango, the bad-breath taste of cilantro—I might have been fine with them if I’d met them as a three-year-old. Max, of course, went in the opposite direction. Now he said, “What do you guess asafoetida is?”
“I hate to even imagine,”
I said. Then I said, “You know what ‘cardioversion’ makes me think of?”
“What,” he said.
“Remember in the old days, when people used to tap their watches?”
“They still do, if they’re smartwatches,”
he told me.
“Those are not watches; they’re computers on wristbands. But a normal watch like mine,”
I said, “why would I need to tap it, these days? It runs for years on one battery.”
“Why would you tap it even back then?”
he asked me. “Though come to think of it,”
he added, “my grandfather used to tap his watch when he wanted to point out how late we were.”
“Yes, so did my dad,”
I said. “But I guess it could also mean the opposite. Like, ‘Is this thing dead? Because I could swear I’ve been at this party for hours, but my watch says it’s only eight thirty.’?”
“Or also, ‘Stop right here, watch. Stop exactly where you are now.’?”
“Well, I’ve never seen that one,”
I said. “And let’s hope not in Marilee’s case. We’re talking about a heart, remember.”
“Or ‘Go backward, watch,’?” Max said.
“Backward!”
Our waitress set down our glasses and asked, “Have you guys decided yet?”
“I’ll have the crab-and-rhubarb strata,”
Max told her.
“If that’s your decision,” she said.
I said, “I’ll have the rockfish, minus the honey-sumac sauce.”
“You got it.”
She took our menus from us and left. No sign of pen and paper, but I guess at her age she felt she could trust her memory.
Max said, “Haven’t these past three days felt like going backward in time together?”
“Like Groundhog Day,” I agreed.
“Groundhog Day?”
He looked puzzled. “Scared of our shadows?”
“Groundhog Day the movie,”
I told him. Count on Max; he wasn’t much of a moviegoer. “Where people live through the same one day over and over until they get it right.”
“Exactly,”
Max said. “We’ve been given another chance to get it right.”
“And yet, did we?”
I asked. “You show up uninvited, just the same as when you moved in with me and my roommates after Polly got married. You bring an unannounced pet, just the same as when you brought your dog.”
“It’s true,”
Max said happily. “And, hey! We even had Jared Johnson hanging around again!”
“Yes, come to think of it.”
“We even had your losing-your-job issue.”
“Right.”
“So, how many times did it take them?” he asked.
“Take whom?”
“The people in Groundhog Day. How many times till they got it right?”
“Lots,”
I said. “I lost count, in fact.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?”
he asked me. “If the world really worked that way?”
I’d been about to say that it had taken them so many times that I had very nearly walked out of the movie in the middle, but instead I said, “Well, yes, it would, I guess.”
Then our waitress came back to tell us, “I forgot to mention our special appetizer: raw shrimp in tequila with salmon roe.”
“No!”
we said—even Max—and she went away again.