CHAPTER 2 #2
I shook my head. I didn’t fly. I had stopped flying when my father, Buddy Zabriskie, died, which was to say that Jonathan and I had never been on a plane together.
He knew my limitations when he married me, even though he would occasionally push on them to see if they held.
We had taken our honeymoon on Cape Cod, our vacations in Maine.
One of his daughters lived in Philadelphia and the other in Baltimore, and in both cases it was quicker to drive than it was to fly.
I understood the inconvenience I caused, but other people lived with great burdens.
There were wives who wouldn’t take the subway, wives who wouldn’t get on elevators.
There were wives who were afraid to drive over a bridge and wives who refused to take the tunnel that ran beneath the river.
We had taken the Queen Mary to Southampton and then taken the Chunnel to Paris for our tenth anniversary. It was splendid.
Jonathan once asked my sister over Thanksgiving dinner if she didn’t know someone who could fix me—hypnotism or EMDR—and to my great surprise my sister said yes, she could put me in touch with someone if I were willing to try.
I handed her a dish of roasted sweet potatoes and said I was not willing to try.
I said if she had had a similar experience on a flight, she might well have come to a similar conclusion, not to mention the fact that I believed it was healthy for Jonathan to spend time with his sister, in the same way I believed it was healthy for me to spend time with mine.
“I don’t want to leave you alone now,” he said. “I wish you’d come.”
“Why shouldn’t I be alone?”
“Well, clearly it rattled you, seeing him.”
“I was surprised, not rattled. I was happy to see Eddie. I loved seeing Eddie.”
“So, do you think you’ll call him?”
“Of course I’ll call him.” I looked at his profile. He kept his eyes on the road. “You liked Eddie, didn’t you?”
Jonathan nodded. “I did.”
I wondered if he’d gotten any packing done since he’d come home or if he’d just been taking apart the afternoon in his mind. “So what’s the problem?”
He stayed quiet a beat too long, then gave me a small smile that was meant to indicate bravery. “I want to be sure you’ll be here when I get back.”
“Seriously? You think I’m going to run off with Eddie Triplett?”
“I don’t,” he said. “But you have to admit, he seems to love you more than most of them do.”
“Jonathan, he’s my stepfather.”
That explanation provided no comfort at all.
I had been a young-looking thirty-one when we married, while Jonathan’s hair had gone gray around the time his wife died.
More than one waitress commented on how nice it was to see a father and daughter going out to dinner in those early days.
Neither one of us knew what to do with that one.
I remember a particular dress I loved, a navy blue pinafore that I wore over a white blouse, and one day Jonathan asked if I would please get rid of it.
“Give it to one of your tall students,” he said. “It makes you look like you’re twelve.”
These days no one looked at us twice because I was no longer his much younger wife. I was a woman safely past fifty, and Jonathan was newly seventy. We were at last a perfect match, and my husband wanted to make sure I didn’t mess it up while he was out of town.
I would tell this to Eddie someday. I would tell him that Jonathan was worried about what could happen, and then the two of us would laugh.
Jonathan and I ate our sushi in the backyard, sitting in Adirondack chairs.
We stayed there until the sun, tired of waiting for us to go back inside, called it a night.
We talked about his mother’s house and the work there was to do, how to dispose of a lifetime’s possessions.
One of Bea’s sons was planning to drive over from Madison to help for a couple of days, and Jonathan’s older daughter, Sydney, was going to fly in from Philadelphia.
Bea’s husband would be there, too. I still didn’t feel guilty.
If anything, I felt glad there were so many hands on deck.
“It would be nice to be able to travel,” Jonathan said.
“We travel,” I said, seeing how the conversation was about to circle back.
“You get to be a certain age and you realize that time isn’t stretching out forever.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?” I’d brought out a box of strawberries and we ate them for dessert, dropping their little green hats into the lawn.
“I worked for a long time,” he said.
“I know you did.”
“I thought when the time came to retire, I’d be able to see some things. I don’t need to go around the world, but I’d like to see some things.”
“Jonathan, we’ve known each other for more than twenty years.”
“It’s not just that you’re afraid to fly,” he said. “It’s that you can’t ever go places with me.”
“What are you talking about?” Was he anxious about the trip?
“We have plenty of money, but you want to keep working.”
“We both worked. We always worked. No one came to the school and offered me a buyout. I’m still working.”
He looked at me. “This is the time we have.”
“So you want me to quit my job and start flying again? Neither one of those things interests me.”
“Well, see, that’s the problem,” he said. “Right there.”
“I’m not saying you don’t interest me. For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been a non-flying schoolteacher.
I haven’t changed. We’ve rented the house in Wellfleet this summer.
We still go away.” Jonathan was a wonderful person, a wonderful husband, who had become a little destabilized by his newfound free time. He was adjusting. I held fast to that.
“I want to go to Fiji,” he said. “I want to see the Milford Sound.”
I didn’t say anything. I waited to see where this was going. We were both looking up at the stars.
“All of Candy’s dreams had to do with travel. We were going to go places when the girls got older, when we had some money put away.”
“Candy?”
“She never got to do any of it. She was forty years old when she died, and for the years before she died, she was too sick to travel. She’d been to Rome and Florence when she was in college and that was it.”
“And I’m sorry. It was a terrible thing, but I don’t see—”
“It’s that we die, and we should think about doing the things we want to do while we’re able to do them.”
It might have been the looming prospect of cleaning out his mother’s house that was bringing this up, or maybe, if he really did feel threatened by the arrival of Eddie, he was letting me know that he could go, too.
Maybe he was thinking about how gladly his first wife would have gone to Wisconsin to sort through the boxes of old report cards in the attic.
All I knew was that he was leaving in the morning and I didn’t want to fight.
“Maybe one of the girls would want to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. Fiji, the Milford Sound.”
He shook his head. “They’ve got their lives. They can’t walk out the door and travel with me.”
And clearly I could. “Ask Bea,” I said.
He sat with that one for a while.
“Bea never gets to go anywhere,” I said. “She’s been stuck taking care of your mother all these years. I bet she’d be thrilled to go.”
Jonathan ate another strawberry. “Maybe.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to talk about it.”
He waited. I could tell he was rolling the idea around, seeing if he could picture the two of them in Kyoto or Rome. “I’m sorry I said anything about Candy.”
“You know you can talk about Candy.”
He shook his head. “I still feel bad for her, that’s all. I think about all the things she missed, not only the travel but the weddings, the grandkids.”
I reached out across the wide arm of my chair and took his hand. The lightning bugs dotted the grass with brief yellow light. “You still have to pack.”
When we stood up, we held each other for a couple of minutes, and when we went inside, I took the suitcase off the bed and we made love, which was the best way I knew to reassure him. I was telling him he could go and come back and I would be here and it would all be fine.
In the morning I drove Jonathan to the airport, the second most reassuring thing I knew how to do.
I thought about calling my mother on the drive home and telling her I’d seen Eddie, but I kept getting stuck on that week after the car accident when I was nine.
Leda was still in the hospital on the second floor, unable to achieve peristalsis in her bowels, and Eddie was in the hospital on the fourth floor, having had surgery on his ankle.
In 1980 the insurance companies were fine with people staying in the hospital until they had recovered.
All I had was a brutal row of stitches down the left side of my face.
My mother had arranged for me to stay at the Cathcarts’ house down the street.
I would go to school with my best friend, Tavia.
There was plenty to worry about, but nothing was coming to an end.
I liked going to the hospital. I’d get Leda to write a note to Eddie: “Dear Eddie, I am sorry about your foot. Feel better soon. Love, Leda.” Leda confessed that she didn’t know how to spell “ankle.” Then I would take the stairs two flights up and deliver it, waiting for Eddie to write out his reply.
“Dear Leda,” he began on the back of the same piece of paper, “I am sorry to hear you are still in the hospital. I hope there is more fun on your floor than there is on my floor. The fourth floor is the dullest floor of all. The food is bad and I am lonely. I think they should put us together in a double room. I would give you my ice cream. Love, Eddie.”