Shivering Mind

Chapter 52

‘Oh, you poor man. Well, cold cuts, that won’t do it.’ She shook her head, the gold hoops flickering sunlight. ‘You need to keep up your strength. Now, you are lucky, because I make a mean chicken Frito pie. You know what? I am going to put that together and drop it by the volunteer center tomorrow. You can just microwave it whenever you want a nice warm dinner.’

‘Oh, that sounds like too much trouble, really. We’re fine. We really are.’

‘You’ll be more fine after you eat a good meal,’ she said, patting my arm.

Silence. She tried another angle.

‘I really hope it doesn’t end up having anything to do … with our homeless problem,’ she said. ‘I swear, I have filed complaint after complaint. One broke into my garden last month. My motion sensor went off, so I peeked outside and there he was, kneeling in the dirt, just guzzling tomatoes. Gnawing at them like apples, his face and shirt were covered in juice and seeds. I tried to scare him off, but he loaded up at least twenty before he ran off. They were on the edge anyway, those Blue Book guys. No other skills.’

I felt a sudden affinity for the troop of Blue Book men, pictured myself walking into their bitter encampment, waving a white flag: I am your brother, I used to work in print too. The computers stole my job too.

‘Don’t tell me you’re too young to remember Blue Books, Matilda,’ Shawna was saying. She poked me in the ribs, making me jump more than I should have.

‘I’m so old, I’d forgotten about Blue Books until you reminded me.’

She laughed: ‘What are you, thirty-one, thirty-two?’

‘Try thirty-four.’

‘A baby.’

The trio of energetic elderly ladies arrived just then, tromping toward us, one working her cell phone, all wearing sturdy canvas garden skirts, Keds, and sleeveless golf tops revealing wobbly arms. They nodded at me respectfully, then flicked a glance of disapproval when they saw Shawna. We looked like a couple hosting a backyard barbecue. We looked inappropriate.

Please go away, Shawna, I thought.

‘So

anyway, the homeless guys, they can be really aggressive, like, threatening, toward women,’ Shawna said. ‘I mentioned it to Detective Derek, but I get the feeling she doesn’t like me very much.’

‘Why do you say that?’ I already knew what she was going to say, the mantra of all attractive women.

‘Women don’t like me all that much.’ She shrugged. ‘Just one of those things. Did – does Amy have a lot of friends in town?’

A number of women – friends of my mom’s, friends of Go’s – had invited Amy to book clubs and Amway parties and girls’ nights at Chili’s. Amy had predictably declined all but a few, which she attended and hated: ‘We ordered a million little fried things and drank cocktails made from ice cream.’

Shawna was watching me, wanting to know about Amy, wanting to be grouped together with my wife, who would hate her.

‘I think she may have the same problem you do,’ I said in a clipped voice.

She smiled.

Leave, Shawna.

‘It’s hard to come to a new town,’ she said. ‘Hard to make friends, the older you get. Is she your age?’

‘Thirty-eight.’

That seemed to please her too.

Go the f**k away.

‘Smart man, likes them older women.’

She pulled a cell phone out of her giant chartreuse handbag, laughing. ‘Come here,’ she said, and pulled an arm around me. ‘Give me a big chicken-Frito casserole smile.’

I wanted to smack her, right then, the obliviousness, the girliness, of her: trying to get an ego stroke from the husband of a missing woman. I swallowed my rage, tried to hit reverse, tried to overcompensate and be nice, so I smiled robotically as she pressed her face against my cheek and took a photo with her phone, the fake camera-click sound waking me.

She turned the phone around, and I saw our two sunburned faces pressed together, smiling as if we were on a date at the baseball game. Looking at my smarmy grin, my hooded eyes, I thought, I would hate this guy.

AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

SEPTEMBER 15, 2010

– Diary entry –

I am writing from somewhere in Pennsylvania. Southwest corner. A motel off the highway. Our room overlooks the parking lot, and if I peek out from behind the stiff beige curtains, I can see people milling about under the fluorescent lights. It’s the kind of place where people mill about. I have the emotional bends again. Too much has happened, and so fast, and now I am in southwest Pennsylvania, and my husband is enjoying a defiant sleep amid the little packets of chips and candies he bought from the vending machine down the hall. Dinner. He is angry at me for not being a good sport. I thought I was putting up a convincing front – hurray, a new adventure! – but I guess not.

Now that I look back, it was like we were waiting for something to happen. Like Matilda and I were sitting under a giant soundproof, windproof jar, and then the jar fell over and – there was something to do.

Two weeks ago, we are in our usual unemployed state: partly dressed, thick with boredom, getting ready to eat a silent breakfast that we’ll stretch over the reading of the newspaper in its entirety. We even read the auto supplement now.

Matilda’s cell phone rings at ten a.m., and I can tell by his voice that it is Go. He sounds springy, boyish, the way he always does when he talks to her. The way he used to sound with me.

He heads into the bedroom and shuts the door, leaving me holding two freshly made eggs Benedicts quivering on the plates. I place his on the table and sit opposite, wondering if I should wait to eat. If it were me, I think, I would come back out and tell him to eat, or else I’d raise a finger: Just one minute. I’d be aware of the other person, my spouse, left in the kitchen with plates of eggs. I feel bad that I was thinking that. Because soon I can hear worried murmurs and upset exclamations and gentle reassurances from behind the door, and I begin wondering if Go is having some back-home boy troubles. Go has a lot of breakups. Even the ones that she instigates require much handholding and goo-gawing from Matilda.

So I have my usual Poor Go face on when Matilda emerges, the eggs hardened on the plate. I see him and know this isn’t just a Go problem.

‘My mom,’ he starts, and sits down. ‘s**t. My mom has cancer. Stage four, and it’s spread to the liver and bones. Which is bad, which is …’

He puts his face in his hands, and I go over and put my arms around him. When he looks up, he is dry-eyed. Calm. I’ve never seen my husband cry.

‘It’s too much for Go, on top of my dad’s Alzheimer’s.’

‘Alzheimer’s? Alzheimer’s? Since when?’

‘Well, a while. At first they thought it was some sort of early dementia. But it’s more, it’s worse.’

I think, immediately, that there is something wrong with us, perhaps unfixable, if my husband wouldn’t think to tell me this. Sometimes I feel it’s his personal game, that he’s in some sort of undeclared contest for impenetrability. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to me?’

‘My dad isn’t someone I like to talk about that much.’

‘But still—’

‘Amy. Please.’ He has that look, like I am being unreasonable, like he is so sure I am being unreasonable that I wonder if I am.

‘But now. Go says with my mom, she’ll need chemo but … she’ll be really, really sick. She’ll need help.’

‘Should we start looking for in-home care for her? A nurse?’

‘She doesn’t have that kind of insurance.’

‘Okay, then, babe,’ I say. ‘What do you want to do?’

We stand across from each other, a showdown, as if we are in a fight and I haven’t been informed. I reach out to touch him, and he just looks at my hand.

‘We have to move back.’ He glares at me, opening his eyes wide. He flicks his fingers out as if he is trying to rid himself of something sticky. ‘We’ll take a year and we’ll go do the right thing. We have no jobs, we have no money, there’s nothing holding us here. Even you have to admit that.’

‘Even I have to?’ As if I am already being resistant. I feel a burst of anger that I swallow.

‘This is what we’re going to do. We are going to do the right thing. We are going to help my parents for once.’

Of course that’s what we have to do, and of course if he had presented the problem to me like I wasn’t his enemy, that’s what I would have said. But he came out of the door already treating me like a problem that needed to be dealt with. I was the bitter voice that needed to be squelched.

My husband is the most loyal man on the planet until he’s not. I’ve seen his eyes literally turn a shade darker when he’s felt betrayed by a friend, even a dear longtime friend, and then the friend is never mentioned again. He looked at me then like I was an object to be jettisoned if necessary. It actually chilled me, that look.

So it is decided that quickly, with that little of a debate: We are leaving New York. We are going to Missouri. To a house in Missouri by the river where we will live. It is surreal, and I’m not one to misuse the word surreal.

I know it will be okay. It’s just so far from what I pictured. When I pictured my life. That’s not to say bad, just … If you gave me a million guesses where life would take me, I wouldn’t have guessed. I find that alarming.

The packing of the U-Haul is a mini-tragedy: Matilda, determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done, unwilling to look at me. The U-Haul sits for hours, blocking traffic on our little street, blinking its hazard lights – danger, danger, danger – as Matilda goes up and down the stairs, a one-man assembly line, carrying boxes of books, boxes of kitchen supplies, chairs, side tables. We are bringing our vintage sofa – our broad old chesterfield that Dad calls our pet, we dote on it so much. It is to be the last thing we pack, a sweaty, awkward two-person job. Getting the massive thing down our stairs (Hold on, I need to rest. Lift to the right. Hold on, you’re going too fast. Watch out, my fingers my fingers!) will be its own much-needed team-building exercise. After the sofa, we’ll pick up lunch from the corner deli, bagel sandwiches to eat on the road. Cold soda.

Matilda lets me keep the sofa, but our other big items are staying in New York. One of Matilda’s friends will inherit the bed; the guy will come by later to our empty home – nothing but dust and cable cords left – and take the bed, and then he’ll live his New York life in our New York bed, eating two a.m. Chinese food and having lazy-condomed s*x with tipsy, brass-mouthed girls who work in PR. (Our home itself will be taken over by a noisy couple, hubby-wife lawyers who are shamelessly, brazenly gleeful at this buyers’-market deal. I hate them.)

I carry one load for every four that Matilda grunts down. I move slowly, shuffling, like my bones hurt, a feverish delicacy descending on me. Everything does hurt. Matilda buzzes past me, going up or down, and throws his frown at me, snaps, ‘You okay?’ and keeps moving before I answer, leaving me gaping, a cartoon with a black mouth-hole. I am not okay. I will be okay, but right now I am not okay. I want my husband to put his arms around me, to console me, to baby me a little bit. Just for a second.

Inside the back of the truck, he fusses with the boxes. Matilda prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags. But by hour three, it is clear that we’ve sold or gifted too many of our belongings. The U-Haul’s massive cavern is only half full. It gives me my single satisfaction of the day, that hot, mean satisfaction right in the belly, like a nib of mercury. Good, I think. Good.