A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

WINTERREISE

USED TO BE EVEN in the rain we walked hooded in water-repellent bicolor suits that swished and sounded as if we were fat when we were thin, both of us, Margaret and I, and only walking for the routine and the way it felt, hands free, holding nothing. Children, leashes — my first husband — we left even the dogs sleeping to meet each other at the entrance to the park marked by the great elm, that folktale tree with its house-wide trunk sprung green. We meet there still although not as often — and no more in the rain.

No more in the morning either, but in the afternoon when we are certain of the weather and the light, then we walk. We take the bridle path where the low, gnarled cherries cut the cutting wind off the reservoir. In spring the wind undoes the blossoms, and they snow on us; but in winter the stripped cherries are all black trunk and hugely tumored. Last winter Margaret asked that we avoid them, and we did. We took the road and went south beneath the sycamores. The sycamore, or plane tree, as my husband calls it, is a true city tree and seems always in autumnal leaf somehow, not yet exhausted, not yet stripped. Nothing, I think, not even the scarlet oak, Thoreau's favorite, can exceed the sycamore’s assertive seriousness and grace, but my husband prefers the ginkgoes.

Margaret does not have a husband anymore to poll for his favorites — if he ever had favorites, trees that is, which I doubt. “A man,” Thoreau says, “sees only what concerns him,” and Margaret’s husband has always been concerned with just himself. He does not write to or see his children. Not even when his grandson was born did the man think to call his daughter. His absence in the lives of his son and daughter has worried Margaret on our walks. She says, “I wish he would see them.”

I start to say, but Margaret says, “I know what you’re going to say — and thank you, really, I mean it.”

We are in October, one of the great man’s months, March being the other, and because I aspire to see as purely as Thoreau did, I read the essays at night and bring him with me on our walks. I like to think it cheers Margaret, and she says it does, although she says a lot of things, I think, to make me happy. Today, for example, when we meet at the elm, I see she stands unsteady in a wind that is quite gentle; yet when I ask her if she would rather not walk, she says, “No, no, no, I’m hoping to see something red. I’m ready.”

There is little of red on our walks; the city mostly yellows. The ginkgoes are especially good at this. The fans that are their leaves never brown but turn, at the same instant, a like yellow. The trees look like matches, evenly planted, erect, and alight down the street. My husband admires them and is saddened, as am I, when the late rains thrash them from their branches.

But the ginkgoes have just begun to turn; we are not so far in the season, and Margaret and I have time, have weeks, I hope, to seek the reds, the sumac and the serviceberry, the flush of burning bush against the blue water when the water is blue and hard to look at in the afternoon angles of the sun. Near to the tennis courts and the north water station and the bridge this happens: the bridle path widens and rubbles and is hard to walk, so we turn onto the grassy swell and lean against the peeled trunk of a sycamore. We stop walking so that Margaret can catch her breath, and then it is we squint west, southwest across the water.

The reservoir wholly bright hurts memory enough to make a viewer weep, but Margaret — amazing woman that she is — doesn’t. She looks at the water while I cry, not loudly, of course, not even a lot of sniffle, just the eyes wet but distorting and coloring the white water so that I don’t see water but rather our collective past, Margaret’s and mine; I see the afternoons we have spent together. Those days we shoved onto the rocky paths with our children strapped in strollers that sometimes stopped short with our cargo nearly thrown against the stones we would drive over. We bumped over curbs, too, recklessly, the way young wives do with their health so casually assumed, wagging bags of it shouldered loosely. In our neighborhood, Margaret’s and mine, the bills fly for the simplest meals, although as young wives we made elaborate dinners, by the book, especially planned, costly. Parties these were, dinner parties for our young husbands and the other young husbands and wives from whom we hoped to gain — what?

So many of them now have left the city or moved to other parts of the city, met perhaps with their own disasters. I see few of the old gang anymore; only Margaret, really, from those times persists, lives, albeit alone, in the same prewar six in the Nineties off Fifth. If I press my cheek against her bedroom window, I can see the park.

Now when I visit her or when we walk, Margaret will remember someone we knew, and we will speculate about him and him and her. The couples — so many — what has become of? The little girls in French organza on the holidays — remember? The fabulous couple who sold apartments one after the other must have made a killing! Surely they are living grandly wherever it is in Connecticut. Margaret says, “I am not so sad they are gone.”

“Me, too,” I say, and we agree the quiet life now is what we wanted all along. We are glad the dinner parties are over, the silver wrapped and on the high shelf, the linens packed in tissues. No more the tedious procedures for making pies and peeling chestnuts; we have only to walk. Dinner will take care of itself; no one comes home hungry.

Margaret, especially, finds it hard to eat at night. Our walks are meant to help her appetite, but even the cannabis her son secrets her in hollowed books does not ease the way she has felt since — since when? I am not sure when. Margaret asked me to keep it a secret, and I did until a hot, dark night my husband came home and found me listening to Schubert’s Winterreise and the last, most melancholy songs. He asked, “Is it so cold already?”

The Winterreise is music I save for January, which Thoreau found, as I do, the hardest month to get through. Winter, and the bridle path is impassable and even the road walked south is balked with ice and banked snow. When we walk in winter, we must walk slowly, although we walk very slowly all the time now.

The speed suits our purpose, although I must remind Margaret of this fact whenever she falls into a fit of apologizing, as she does often, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so slow.” Then I remind her of what we are about on our walks. We are attending to nature. What business have I in the woods, Thoreau asks, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? So Margaret and I sit on the bench near the playground and look up at the honey locust’s acid green. The underside of the tree is darkly branched, veined as a body is, a green heart. Everywhere, I find, the landscape gives us back ourselves, and when the etched bark of the suffering elm reminds me of my suffering friend who would keep, above all, her dignity, I weep. I weep, and I am out of the woods again!

Margaret says, “Don’t you apologize now.”

To live each day as well as we can was Thoreau's goal, and I want it to be mine — but to see my friend scarved like a pirate! Margaret's hair was once…it was once old yellows, greens, and blues. Schoolgirl thick, braided, bound, fantastically clipped in enormous clips, her hair was a feature untouched by her husbands leaving or the upset with her boy, his expensive confusions, his noisy failures. These disappointments had never disclosed themselves in Margaret’s hair, although much of the rest of her contracted. Her brow was a scowl even sleeping. I knew. I had come upon her sleeping once and seen it: the arguments she must have had in sleep! This was when we drove to see her son at his college and slept in the last bed to be had in leaf season.

The leaves, I remember, and the colors on the toy-scale hills. Once we were beyond the broken and abandoned about the city — cones, netting, dividers, the many cautionary signs — the road widened and smoothed, and it seemed then we were alone and pioneering into the riotous crayoned woods of a time when teachers had said, “Color something special for Thanksgiving.” Red, red, red, orange we admired all the way to the white and shuttered towns, the needle steeples of the churches and incorporated signs reading seventeen something, seventeen something, earlier and earlier all the way to Margaret’s son, found lolling on a green once crossed by minutemen. “Imagine!” we had extolled, though nothing impressed him.

The boy had said, “I’m not getting anything out of school, Mom. I want to take a year off instead. I want to travel.”

Margaret said, “Peter”—his name—“Peter, will you use your head!”

The boy stayed on another year writing lackluster papers on the history of art, then groaning home for holidays — another Christmas, another Easter. He blued the apartment with French cigarettes until his weary mother said, “So travel, if this is what you want.” The boy worked his way across — across oceans, continents, misogynistic countries — forgetting what he looked like in the dirt-poor towns, the kind he was after. He wrote, “I’ve had enough of comfort,” so that who would have guessed his unexpected self-discovery? Cabinetmaking! Which he practices with mixed results near what was once his college.

Margaret, on our walks, sometimes speaks of him, of Peter, she begins, “If I had—”

Thoreau would have us live with nature in the present, above time.

But it is hard to live above time. The church bell sounds the hours and the neighborhood streets are trafficked with our pasts, backpacked students in a jangle of keys, fretful mothers. Weekday mornings, afternoons, the coffee shops clog while kids pool change. Must be three-thirty, school out, nearing four, I guess, until the ambulance’s wail or the pushy must of fire trucks, the clamor of it all, insists it is ongoing and anytime; this is a city.

This is a city, but we are in the park. We are straining to be in the park, Margaret and I, and out of reach of time and memory and sickness, which yet wash back beneath the trees. Nothing withstands sensation; the tremulous body will not hold still or still enough in the present to catch, by hand, small fish. But Thoreau, Thoreau could hold himself so stilly that rodents burrowed in his pocket, snakes slithered at his feet. He stood, as any tree might, ready, alert, large; the scrambling world would nest in him, he was in such ways constant and outstretched.

I am not so generous.

Once invited to hold her in bed, I took up Margaret’s hand instead and petted it, and when the nurse came in with her cruel means to relief — sharp objects, colorless drugs — I said, “I’ll just step out for a bit.”

The soldierly Thoreau drums past me; I am not brave. The slick at Margaret’s neck I know for sweat I will not touch for fear of catching what she has, and this is stupid, I know. I am ashamed of these feelings and of much else that I imagine when we are walking: the sea’s disgorged of shipwreck on Cohasset’s rocky shore. I see what Thoreau saw of the brig on Grampus Rock. The matted, livid, swollen, and mangled, his adjectives, piled easily as salvage, yet he would look at the dead as at a gown or scarf or tossed-up bonnet. Such losses in indifferent winds are sung, yet he would look, Thoreau, he had his pencil, surely, his diary.

Margaret has said, “I would like you to help me pick out a dress. I want pearls around my neck for the viewing.

“I want to look at the Great Thing boldly,” she says.

I want to look at trees and not at losses past or those to come; yet the boles in the trees, those trees struck half dead, the startled quality of the exposed and leafless, the dusty feather-duster grasses waving in the shallows their piteous good-byes — oh, the undulant lot of it moves with meaning! Nothing is only what it is, but we must — I must — insist on its underside, its theme, when what I have on my arm is just my friend.

My friend is fifty-six years old; the female parts of her have been scraped out. Her face is plucked, sketched. The enormous forehead is an oiled stone; the balled lids are lashless. Whatever came before and marked her has been sanded away.

The husband who left her on the side of the road — gone.

Gone the restless son, the sometimes sickly daughter.

Betrayals, losses, the inane nights alone slip like shawls from off her shoulders, lightly, and the late light turns her gold.

She says, “The clarity of it all”; she says, “My heart.” She is elusive, of course; she is dying. Thoreau, on the morning of his death and being read to, is said to have said, “Now comes good sailing.” Quotable to the very end, he is a hard, clean object, a white stone in dark water, woods, greens, needles underfoot. He is a walker; he walks a distance, as we would, from here to here.