the weight of two (fiction)

Posted on February 22, 2007
Filed Under writings |

Heather left the apartment well before dawn. The sun had yet to rise over the dumpster, the parked cars, the leaves and litter blowing in restless tumbles. She carried a small suitcase bulging with the woolens and scarves and outer wear she’d packed for the trip North.

Her old Honda started with a shudder. She could see her breath as she waited for the car to warm and decided to smoke the last cigarette in the pack on the dashboard. It would be a good ten hours before she arrived, enough time for the smell of cigarette smoke to dissipate. Her mother, reproachful, worried, had just sent her a copy of a study linking breast cancer and smoking. It wouldn’t due to have that conversation upon arrival with Heather’s own father dying the slow undignified death of advanced mestastic cancer.

As she made good time hurtling past Norcross and Duluth, she couldn’t settle on which loss to mourn. There was the effort to anticipate her father’s shrunken frame, his last days ahead of him, but just. And then there was the fact of Chad’s leaving. Nothing to show for their five year’s together but the embarrassment that was now her car with violent, sprawling expletives spray painted across the hood. ‘BITCH’ and ‘WHORE’ now companion sentiments to the old bumper stickers, peeling and faded: Keep Your Laws Off My Body, Clinton/Gore ’92, Good Planets Are Hard To Find.

Chad had been fiercely protective, admirably concerned when they had discovered the car. “Who would do this? We should call the police.” And Heather had confessed to the affair to save him the embarrassment. She had promised to quit her job, committed to counseling. She had scrambled and begged, trying to explain something she herself didn’t understand. The vandalism was the least of it, just the inevitable response of a scorned wife with a can of spray paint and a temper.

Initially the whole thing was quite beyond her and she had been shocked by her own capacity for betrayal. But, after the first few times, it was easy, such a separate diversion, this sleeping with her editor. Fifteen years older, dour and handsome and married, he had begun by asking her to long lunches at restaurants owned by celebrity chefs. She had thought he was going to promote her, offer her a position on the editing desk. Instead, closely shaved, exuding the stuff of mortgages and car payments and 401Ks, he had pursued her in a ways that were urgent and lascivious. He began leaving small notes that were dirty and directly sexual, “Pano and Paul’s -12:30 p.m. Wednesday. My place after. I’m going to fuck you all afternoon.” These little dribbles of correspondence tucked into her desk drawer grew frequent. She found herself at his antebellum home in Buckhead, with its antique coffee tables and 600 thread count sheets, at least twice a week. Because of their afternoon romps she would miss deadlines. He would substitute an article from the Associated Press as cover. It was too easy to hide, so simple a slip when involved with the boss. She kept meaning to cut it off, but he’d wooed her with Dvorak, Orff and Bach when all she was used to was Fat Buttercat and Big Head Todd. He gave her gifts; diamond earrings, hardcover books by Melville and Fitzgerald and Austen, an expensive watch, cashmere lined gloves. She decided to wear the earrings home one evening, as if daring Chad to see her… really, really see her. But Chad hadn’t noticed the sparkle and weight of them, the cold cut of betrayal in her ears.

Now it had been less than a week since the editor’s wife had followed her home from work and released her rage on Heather’s car; less than five days since Chad had left for Santa Monica, pulling out of the alley in his VW bus with a fire extinguisher wedged between his legs to douse periodic engine fires.

Chad had said very little when she’d admitted her affair. His silence had been unbearable. Say something, anything, she’d begged. Instead he had carefully packed his collection of framed vintage concert posters into the bus for the long drive West. Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, stacks of rock n’roll history in the back seat.

She had spent the few days since his leaving staring at the blank wall in their apartment where those posters had hung. She had decided to get an Impressionist print to fill the space. Something like Madame Monet and Her Son. Monet was so un-Chad, she expected it would soothe her.

She brought his Radio Head CD along on the car trip home. It was the only thing he had left in the apartment. Now she sang along with Thom Yorke, If I could be who you wanted, all the time…

In the few short days that he’d been gone, she had already begun to forget the noisy way he chewed, with his mouth wide open. She had begun to forgive him his inability to wring out the sponge, leaving it soaked in the bottom of the sink, cold and stinking. She had begun to shrug off the glasses and bowls and heaping ashtrays he would leave on counter tops and bedside tables. She couldn’t remember why these things had mattered to her at all.

Now she exited the freeway to get gas, to phone her mother, guessing that she would be awake now with the sun. Heather retrieved enough change from the passenger seat floor to make a call from the pay phone.

Hello, you have reached Marla and Don. We are not available to take your call. Please leave your name and your number at the beep and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Mom will have to change that message she thought. It’s been that very same recording for years, her mother speaking woodenly into the phone as if someone was holding a gun to her head, so strained and uncomfortable with technology. She wondered if her mother would soon leave a message saying, You’ve reached the Bensleys, the way divorced women, widows, people afraid of being robbed, left such messages on their answering machine suggesting there is still a man in the house.

She guessed her mother was already at the gym in one of her many workout ensembles selected for its flattering color and cut, her highlighted hair pulled back, face complete with smudge proof eye liner and her favorite shade of expensive lipstick- Pink To The Club. Heather straightened her old jeans, grown tight and faded, smoothed at her mussed hair that she had allowed to get shaggy, all split ends, mousy and neglected.

As she swiped her credit card at the pump she began to do the mental math. If I fill up three times today, that’s at least eighty five dollars. She felt ashamed to be doing calculations, as if it amounted to God damn it Dad! Why’d you have to get so sick? It’s costing me a fortune. She decided to spare two dollars for coffee, something to keep her perky and attentive to the journey she was making home. As she returned to the freeway, her hand shook, slopping coffee across her lap.

At each stop to use the bathroom, to refuel, to eat luke warm burgers from damp foil wrappers, she felt the swelling tickle to phone Chad. Instead, she arrived that way, tired and nostalgic, the mounting dark of evening and a persistent drizzle obscuring the familiar pitch and roll of a landscape that was childhood. She hesitated at the back door, by the garage, gathering strength, flexing gaiety. “Anybody home,” she called, hoping to be the cheerful breath that lifted the mood. There was a dull quiet throughout the house and she noticed a light on at the top of the staircase. Heather grabbed a blanket from a heap on the floor, draping it across her mother, collapsed across the bed. She lay like a fallen warrior, as if sleep had overcome her in the midst of action. Heather collected a week of clothes that had been strewn across the chair, atop the t.v., dribbled into the bathroom, and began a load of laundry in the basement. The house was disorderly, much too cold. The refrigerator was empty save for some condiments, curdled milk and row after row of Lean Cuisines stacked neatly in the freezer.

In the quiet of her homecoming, she called her brother from the kitchen phone, complete with cord and rotary dial, “I just got in and Mom’s asleep, she said, trolling for company. “You know it’s all still a little surreal for me. For the first time it feels lonely… coming home.” She picked at her frozen dinner with its carefully apportioned calories and parsimonious fats, a pasta medley that tasted of cardboard.

“I’ve been with Dad all day. I’m going to get some rest; help Theresa get Teddy down,” Gregg said, all business, unable to meet her anywhere sentimental or meaningful. Heather guessed that this was just work-a-day stuff for a doctor, the antiseptic handling of disease and injury, so comfortable with language like Do Not Resuscitate.

“I’ll see you at the hospital in the morning,” she said. “Mom’s grief has taken up residence at the gym. I’ve got a load of yoga pants and jogging bras in the wash right now. It’ll keep me busy.”

Heather set to work straightening her parents’ house. She began to sift through boxes that had accumulated in the upstairs hallway, rearranging, stacking, allowing access to the bedrooms and bathroom that hadn’t been used since her visit last Christmas.

She strained at a box that had drifted into the hallway outside the master bedroom. Jesus, she thought, this one’s full with rocks. When she tore open the packing tape, she found her father’s jars of pennies. Stacked neatly, a lifetime of small change.

“When did you get in? Sorry I fell asleep,” her mother appeared in the doorway, disheveled, raspy with fatigue.

“Don’t be sorry, Mom, it’s unproductive. You needed the rest.”

“Where’s Chad,” her mother asked. “Did you make that drive alone?”

Heather winced at the freighted way her mother said “alone,” judgment, clear and polished in darkness of the hallway.

“I’m a big girl. I can drive myself home. How was Dad today? Have they been able to give him anything that touches the pain?”

“He’s suffering less now, but frail and tired. Thank God for your brother. He’s been so great, a comfort really.”

“And the pennies” Heather asked.

“That’s your father’s collection from his dresser.”

“You’re boxing up 50 pound of coins? Ever heard of a penny roll?”

“He’s always claimed that there are valuable antique coins in there,” her mother said. Heather swallowed criticism, that familiar intolerance for her mother threatening to sour this moment together in the hallway amid boxes of fatherhood. She silently made plans to stop by the bank the following day.

“You know he’s had that collection going since he was a ten. He told me about it on our first date. I fell in love with him anyway, overlooking his affinity for coins.”

“I know, he made you ride the rollercoaster three times and you were sick all over the couple in the car behind you,” Heather said, having heard this quaint story of their courtship many times. “People don’t really go on dates like that anymore, Mom. There’s no revelatory moment about stamp collections and musical tastes. You just kind of take up with someone you already know.”

She remembered the moment when she and Chad were suddenly alone on the balcony of the Phi Delt house, free from the great drifts of pot smoke and the gurgle and pull of the bong. He had grabbed her hand and pushed his way through the French doors and out into the spring night that was chill and moist and clear, leaving ten or so people slouched in chairs, draped across couches, paranoid and diminished. The music was still loud through the closed door. The volume a thin veil for the festive evening that had fizzled. He kissed her there, for the first time, well past midnight.

Heather had come to think of this moment as dangerous, the balcony suffering disrepair, aggressive ivy shrouding the original architecture in dense greenery, diminishing the acceptable load with rot and moisture and aerial roots. They could have died there; plummeting to their deaths. The whole structure peeling away under the weight of two, kissing in April.

“But we’re friends, Chad. I mean really, really friends,” she said, stepping back a little to see him in the darkness.

“I can eat sunflower seeds and watch baseball with you. All day. Without your ever mentioning the fat content of a seed. It’s perfect. I love that,” he laughed, drawing her back into his chest. She felt his clavicle against her temple.

She reminded him of his allergies, his need to live someplace warm and dry, without pets. She reminded him she was from New Jersey where summer humidity was oppressive; that she had two dogs, Humphrey and Albert, who were great shedders, who slobbered with aplomb.

“So where does that leave me? Allergy free and alone?”

“Most women are psychotic. You’ve said that. Those are words from your mouth.”

“But you… you’re perfect… a beautiful girl who acts like a guy. We could have children together and name them all Cal for Cal Ripken.”

“I’m your best friend and I’m gonna be honest with you…You’re stoned,” she had said with firmness, a trumped up severity.

The next day he had asked her over for Milwaukee’s Best and bong hits. It was his attempt at an apology. And they’d laughed and resumed friendship and failed to notice that this was their version of courtship, this quiet folding into one another. Two months later she would tearfully place an ad in the paper, “Two lovable, well behaved dogs to a good home…” They would rent a canine-free yet dingy apartment on the alley where all their post-collegiate belongings would mingle and merge, CD collections sorted and shelved, sheets and towels in neutral tones purchased.

She decided that her mother didn’t need to hear how much these things had changed, that now two people must forgive each much greater trespasses than an interest in antique currency. She hoped that by parking her car on the far side of the garage her mother might miss the modern manifestation of relationship fallout.

“I’m going to turn in, now that I’ve cleared a path to my room. See you first thing in the morning,” Heather said.

* * * *

She tried for sleep in her twin bed, in the familiar darkness of her old room, with the faded floral wallpaper and the worn purple carpet with its great glossy stain, a murderous slick, where she had spilled nail polish during a sleep over back in middle school. There was a picture of her and Chad at graduation in its silver frame. He was holding her around the waist, swinging her high above his head as he shouted and cheered. His happiness so sharp a contrast to her face, striken and collapsed. She had just opened her diploma’s royal blue cover, official, stately, all golden calligraphy, to find a slip of paper asking her to see the Registrar. Turns out she hadn’t graduated at all, standing there stupid and defeated in a silly cap and gown. Her mother, father, older brother clapping enthusiastically from some where beyond the podium. She had failed Brain and Behavior, an elective, a choice, something she should have done differently. She laid the picture in the top drawer of her little girl dresser, closing it softly.

Heather had confided in her father shortly after the ceremony, covertly showing him the empty diploma case, no official university seal, no golden corners keeping valuable proof of purpose intact. “Please don’t tell Mom and Gregg. Not yet, not this weekend.”

Her father had placed his arm across her shoulders, reassuring, good at secrets. Quietly he had paid for her to retake the class that summer. No harm done due to his honest effort to save her the familial shame.

The crows began to scream and jeer just before sunrise. Heather went down to the kitchen to make coffee, search through the freezer among the packaged entrees for the remains of a pound of Starbucks. Her mother, just back from her Pilates class, was bent over at the kitchen counter scratching at a Sudoko puzzle. There was something sad and solitary in the effort. Heather remembered that her parents used to work the solution together, sharing the pencil, scratching out each others answers, close as newly weds.

“There’s not much to eat around here. Maybe we should get something on the way to see Dad?” her mother said, tapping her sculpted red nails on the counter, waiting for death had made her impatient. “I bought you a sweater. The hospital is so cold.”

“But I have sweaters. And when have you had time to shop?”

“This one’s so great. It’s cashmere, crew neck, your color.”

Gregg waited for them at St. John’s Hospice, a vision in scrubs, pacing the lobby done up in pastels with an assortment of landscape and seashore paintings.

“Where have you guys been? I’ve got to start my shift in 30 minutes,” he said, pointing across the street to the hospital ER.

“Mom took hours with her hair,” Heather whispered, receiving her mother’s pointed glance that said, Sorry that this was is so hard for you, the rest of us have been at this thing for months.

“Second floor, please,” Gregg told the woman in the elevator, closest to the number prompts. She was holding a cup of coffee, balancing a newspaper and a bundle of white lilies, expertly juggling, as if she had done this many times before. Heather wondered at the flowers. They seemed a prematurely funereal gesture until she saw her own father, slack and drawn. He was just barely propped up, slightly listing. She wished that she had thought to bring flowers, something to place beside the bed where her father was dying, so solitary an act but for this audience of three.

Heather held his hand tightly and squeezed, letting it fall limply back to the bed covers. She remembered her first time holding a bat, his hand, big and furry over hers, guiding the swing. This hand didn’t seem the same, shrunken into a gray and lifeless imposter open at his side.

“Can’t they give him some fluids,” Heather asked. “His lips are so chapped.” She pressed the button to call the nurse.

“We stopped all treatments the day before yesterday,” Greg said, authoritarian, familiar with the processes of death.

Her mother found an extra chair and drew it close to the bedside where she began reading aloud from the latest edition of Time magazine. There was none of the swirl and bustle of a regular hospitable room with nurses and technicians attending to blood pressure and bed pans and colostomy bags. There was mostly silence and defeat. So her mother began with the article she’d left off with yesterday, something about the urban slums of Rio de Janeiro. Heather thought it appropriate in a horribly poignant way, the squatter’s shacks her mother read about like tumors, afflictions on the body of Brazil.

They stayed like that, the two of them at the bedside, long after Gregg had gone to attend to strangers’ deep lacerations and myocardial infarctions. They were reluctant to leave, attuned to her father’s breathing grown slow and deliberate. His fingers now life-like, working at the thin blanket, clawing their way toward death.

* * * *

In the days to follow, the telephone just kept ringing. Arm loads of pies and casseroles and coffee cakes trotted through the door with upbeat, brightly supportive women Heather had never seen before, women from her mother’s tennis group, fitness friends in velour track suits and Nike sneakers. Heather greeted the suburban relief effort with perfect pitch. She guessed these women knew nothing of her father beyond what her mother had told them. Still she managed, “We’re holding up well. You’re kind to think of us.”

The phone rang again as she was settling another foil tray of lasagna into the basement fridge. It was Chad, faltering through the first conversation they’d had since his leaving, inquiring after her mother, her brother, sheepishly supportive, awkwardly available.

“We’re okay …Mom’s training for a triathlon, making plans to go to Nordstrom’s after the service. And I’m holding it together, sneaking cigarettes out in the back yard, smoking joints in my tree house.”

Chad laughed and Heather felt flickering satisfaction that she could still make him smile. The easy timber of their exchange made her consider telling him that her editor had been fired and that she had left the paper, too ashamed to face the newsroom after her lapse in judgment became popular water cooler discourse.

“It’s nice to hear your voice,” she said. “It’s been the longest day… all of us trying to pick out a container for the ashes. Gregg reminding us that Dad was specific- no expensive coffins. Turns out we’re burying my dad in the Economy Urn Vault. It’s plastic, costs $99.95. Mom thinks it’s what he’d want. I suggested a tennis ball can. He loved tennis. But that got vetoed.”

He was proud of you, you know,” Chad said.

“You mean proud of us. He didn’t believe in co-habitation without a purpose.”

“He thought you were happy… ”

“I just can’t settle in to happiness. It’s not a sensation I’m used to,” she said hoping he’d change the subject.

“I saw Planet Claire yesterday. Had to tolerate hours of her amazement that things had ended between you and me,” Chad said. Heather could hear the effort he expended trying to make her jealous.

“That’s nice of her…. I guess. Was she being nosy or sincere?”

“I can’t tell the difference. Not with Claire. She leaves for India later this week.”

“What a great place for Planet Claire… India,” she said, wistfully, envying her the freedom to take herself off on exotic adventures, trying not to imagine the sex between Chad and Claire. She couldn’t conjure the moment clearly, never having been to California. They were just two bodies tangled in space - intercourse without context.

“Does she seem the same as she was in college,…lovely, happy Claire?”

“Mostly. Except I think she’s trying too hard with the hippy thing.” Heather couldn’t know that it had been an awkward evening, with Claire showing up to a crowded, warm bar in Santa Monica without the courtesy of deodorant. She didn’t know that for him it had amounted to one bump and grind that didn’t do anything to dull this thing between them. He slept diagonal on his futon.

“I think I’m going to stay up here for awhile, help Mom sort through things. I could help Theresa and Gregg with my nephew. He’s two now, talking. It’s a great age. It would be nice to be around for that.”

She wondered if Chad had expected this for them… children, commitment, an antique house on a quiet street. They had been so close, it had seemed ordinary even.

Heather glanced down at the blue cable knit sweater she had finally agreed to wear, granting her mother this small triumph in her time of need.

“I’m just not good at this thing… this letting go,” she said and it stood out between them as the first true thing in months.

He began to hum his response, “You’re gonna have to leave me now I know. But I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grasses, in the ones I love. You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go .It’s Dylan. Blood on the Tracks. You gotta love that song. It’s so sweet and sad,” he said.

Up until that moment she had considered sharing with him the story of the penny jar, her parents’ first date, the tender way her mother remembered these coins as some symbol of their incompatibility that she’d been willing to overlook. But Heather knew that she couldn’t endure it if Chad broke into song again… Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes.