A Patchwork Planet

8

BY THE END of April I’d saved eight hundred and sixteen dollars. I had hoped to be farther along, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to meet my goal of a hundred extra per week. Well, at least it was a start. I got myself a savings account and a little cardboard booklet to record all further deposits.

For most of May I had this very lucrative short-term client — a young guy who’d broken his leg in four places while mountain biking. He lived alone in a two-story house, and I had to be there first thing every morning to help him down the stairs and drive him to his law office. Then I’d pick him up at quitting time, come back again at bedtime … Not to mention the groceries he needed bought, the shirts he needed taken to the cleaner’s, and so on. When his cast was shortened to shin length and he could get around on his own, he gave me a goodbye gift of a hundred dollars. Rent-a-Back employees are not supposed to accept tips ever, under any conditions, and I told him that, but he said I had no choice. He said, “It’s take it now or have it come to you in the mail, which would cost me the price of a stamp.” So I took it. I confess. It would let me hit eighty-seven hundred that much sooner.

Sophia knew I was in debt. She even knew the amount, but not the reason. (Why get into the particulars? The Chinese carving and all that.) She was very understanding about it. She never expected me to buy her presents or take her anywhere fancy. Instead she ferried her Crock-Pot meals to my place after work. (We’d given up on her place, now that we needed more privacy.) First we’d go to bed and then we’d have our supper, tangled in a welter of sheets, leaning against the propped pillows that bridged the gap between my mattress and the back of the couch. I’d be in my jeans again, but she would stay naked, like that painting I have never understood where the men are picnicking fully dressed but the woman doesn’t have a stitch on. Me, I tend to feel kind of undefended without my clothes, but Sophia seemed astoundingly at ease. She’d drape a napkin across her stomach and nibble on a stewed pork chop, then wipe her fingers on the napkin and toss back the loose coils of hair streaming over one shoulder. And meanwhile, I would be asking her questions. There was so much I needed to know about her. No piece of information was too small: her favorite color, favorite crab house, favorite television show … I guess really I was asking, What does it feel like, being you?

And maybe she was asking the same. She was interested in my parents. She was curious about my brother. She wondered if he and I were anything alike. (“Not a whit,” I told her.) And especially, she wanted to know about my marriage. Where had it gone wrong? Why had Natalie and I split up?

“Why’d we get together in the first place, is more to the point,” I said. “A weirder combination you can’t imagine. Natalie with her good-girl forehead and me fresh out of reform school.”

“Oh, now,” Sophia chided me. “It wasn’t a reform school.” But she was wearing her thrilled look, as if she hoped to be contradicted.

“Well, it was a rich-guy variation on the theme, at least,” I said. “Certainly my neighbors thought as much. They pretended not to know me that whole summer after I graduated — everyone but Natalie. Natalie’s family had moved in across the street while I was gone, and one afternoon I’m mowing the lawn and Natalie comes over with a pitcher and two glasses set just so on a tray. Says, ‘Could I interest you in some lemonade?’ Could I interest you: such a quaint way to put it. ‘Why not,’ I tell her, and I swig down a glass, and that might have been the end of it, except then my mother pokes her head out the door and invites us in for iced tea. As if Natalie weren’t already operating her own refreshment service in the middle of our yard! Well, poor Mom; I guess the sight of a respectable girl was a little too much excitement for her. I tell Natalie, ‘Cripes, let’s get out of here,’ and I leave the mower where it is and we walk off, just like that. So everything that happened after was my mother’s fault, you might say.”

“Your mother did approve of her, then,” Sophia said.

“Oh, sure. Both my parents approved. It was Natalie’s who objected. They’d heard stories about me, of course. Also, I was wearing my hair about halfway down my back that summer. Natalie’s father called me Jesus. ‘Will you and Jesus be going to the movies tonight?’ This was when they were still allowing her to see me. Later, we had to sneak. I’d hired on at Rent-a-Back by then, and she would ride along on my jobs — spend the day with me while her parents thought she was swimming at their club.”

“Oh, forbidden fruit! No wonder you two were attracted,” Sophia said.

I was about to go on, but then a sort of hallucination stopped me in mid-breath. I swear I saw Natalie’s arm, just her arm, resting on the window ledge of my car. She was waiting in the passenger seat while I was with a client. And I was stepping out the client’s front door, walking down a flagstone path, heading through brilliant sunlight toward Natalie’s bare, tanned arm.

Sophia said, “What happened next?”

“Oh …,” I said. “We got married.”

“That seems awfully sudden,” Sophia said.

“Well, she was about to go off to college, see. She was leaving in September.”

Sophia hesitated. Then she asked, “Did you have to?”

“Have to? Oh. Have to get married. No,” I said, “we didn’t have to. I’m sure all the neighbors thought we did, though. To the neighbors, I was the bad guy. Natalie was ‘that lovely sweet innocent Bassett girl.’ It must have disappointed the hell out of them when Opal didn’t come along till fourteen months after the wedding.”

Sophia said, “So why …?”

“But anyway!” I said. “You can imagine her parents’ reaction. Mine took it more in stride. I think they hoped marriage would settle me down some. They got together with Natalie’s parents and worked out all the arrangements — agreed we’d live over the Bassetts’ garage and both of us would attend Tow-son State, and I’d keep on at Rent-a-Back in order to look like the breadwinner. Not that I really was. Our parents bankrolled just about everything. Our two mothers got into this decorating war, and pretty soon we barely had room to slither between all the furniture. And after Opal was born! They went wild. Cradles, strollers, changing tables … I don’t know where I was in this. I mean, there are huge chunks of time I honestly don’t remember. All at once I was standing at our front window one day, looking down at the driveway, and Natalie was buckling the baby into the car. This was a Volvo wagon her parents had given us when Opal was born. And I watched her shut the passenger door and walk around to the driver’s side, and I said to myself, ‘Why, great God in heaven! I seem to have married one of those station wagon mommies!’ So we got divorced.”

Sophia paused in the middle of licking her fingers. “Just like that?” she asked me.

“Well, no. Not instantaneously. First there was a lot of messy stuff. I admit I wasn’t a model husband. Finally she took Opal and left. Didn’t even warn me. Didn’t even offer me a second chance. Well, you’ve seen Natalie. You’ve seen how she kind of floats along in this sealed-off, stubborn, exasperating way Or maybe you didn’t get a close enough look at her.”

“No, not that close,” Sophia said. “She did seem very … poised.”

“To put it mildly,” I told her. Then I said, “But why are we wasting our time on all this? Don’t we have something better to do?” And I picked up our two plates and set them on the floor, and then I lifted her napkin.

Every word I had told her was true, but there was a lot I’d left out. Why we’d gotten married, for instance. I didn’t tell her that I was the one who had pressed for it — that I was dying to marry, wouldn’t take no for an answer, wouldn’t agree to wait. I didn’t tell her that at first I felt as if I’d finally come home. Hard to believe, I know; hard for even me to believe. “Did all that really take place?” I wanted to ask somebody. “Could that really have been me? How did I appear from outside? Would you say I seemed aware of my surroundings?”

The only thing I knew was, one morning I looked out the front window and thought, Great God in heaven! I felt as if I’d awakened from a long, drugged sleep, and the last thing I clearly remembered was Natalie bringing me lemonade. “Could I interest you?” she had asked. And I had taken a single sip and all at once found myself married to a station wagon mommy.

Sophia started catching a morning train back from Philly on Sundays so that we could see more of each other. (The roommate spent Sundays with her family in Carroll County, and we knew we’d have the house to ourselves.) I would meet the train and drive her to her place, and we’d fix a big lunch that was really a breakfast — bacon, eggs, waffles, the works. Then we would climb the stairs to her bed, which was not a four-poster, after all. It was a spool bed — same general idea. And there was a curlicued nightstand with a silk-shaded lamp on top, and a bureau with cut-glass knobs. The drawers were packed with neat, flat layers of clothing; tiny flowered sachets were tucked in all the corners. I know because I checked when she was in the bathroom. I smoothed everything down again just the way I’d found it, though. She didn’t suspect a thing.

Later in the afternoon we might watch a videotape or take a walk, but we separated earlier than other days because she had her Sunday routines to follow — her stockings to rinse out, hair to shampoo, blouses to iron for the coming week. “Go, go,” she would say, and I would go, grinning, and spend the evening picturing her in her quilted bathrobe, her shower rod strung with damp nylons. Even her most mundane rituals seemed dear to me, and touching.

She had two sets of friends who were married couples. All the others were single women, and I knew them only by hearsay — their latest diets or trips or boyfriend problems. The couples she introduced me to personally. She took me to the Schmidts’ for supper, and the Partons were invited as well. They were okay. Nice enough, I guess. I borrowed a khaki sports coat from Joe Hardesty, because I couldn’t wear my tweed anymore now that it was summer. We talked mostly about the Orioles. I think one of the husbands had had something to do with building the new stadium.

She asked me, what about my friends? Couldn’t we double date with someone? Oh, women get so social, sooner or later. She asked about my brother and his wife. I said, “Lord God, Sofe, you don’t want to spend a whole evening looking at baby pictures.” She said she wouldn’t mind a bit. Well, I did want to do things right this time. I said, “I know what! I’ll talk to Len Parrish. Maybe we could go out with him and one of his girlfriends.”

Because I couldn’t think of anyone else — any of my coworkers, for instance. Martine and Everett seemed to have broken up, or so I gathered from the fact that Martine never had the truck nowadays. Not that either one of them would have been Sophia’s type. Ray Oakley’s wife didn’t like me; she claimed I was a bad influence. My only hope was Len. Which goes to show how desperate I was.

And he knew it too. “Well, gee, pal,” he said, “I’m not sure. I’m awfully busy.” In the end, though, he agreed to meet for drinks. He named a bar I’d never heard of that he had discovered downtown.

This was on a Sunday night, the only night he had free, which meant that I was at Sophia’s while she was choosing what to wear. She must have tried on half a dozen outfits. Each one, I said, “That looks fine,” and she’d say, “No …,” and shuck it off again.

“It’s only Len,” I said, trying to reassure her. “I don’t even like the guy! He’s more my mom’s idea of my friend.”

“Then why are we bothering to do this?” she asked, in a voice with a teary edge to it.

“Beats me,” I told her.

By the time we left, her bedroom floor was a solid mass of cast-off clothes. She had settled finally on brown slacks and some kind of long white blouse — not much different from any of the earlier get-ups, as far as I could tell.

We took her car because mine was in the shop again. I drove, and she watched for street numbers. The bar turned out to be very easy to spot: a sheet of glass for the front, with DOUGALL’S slashed carelessly across as if the sign painter had barely found the energy for the job. We heard the music even before we climbed out of the car. I started feeling old; I’d fallen behind on the music scene a long time back. And no doubt Sophia felt even older. She paused in the doorway, patting her hair. Then we braced ourselves and walked in.

Of course Len was late. Of course we had to sit alone for half an hour — me nursing a beer, she toying with the stem of her wineglass, the two of us shouting above the din about made-up topics. (“Isn’t that an unusual picture over the bar!” “Oh! My. Yes.”) Finally Len breezed in with this six-foot-tall girl so blond that I thought at first she was bald; not a sign of an eyebrow on her; all languorous slouch and pouting pale lips. They were both in black turtlenecks, although it was a warm June night. “Barn!” Len said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You two been waiting long? I looked for your car out front; figured you weren’t here yet.”

“We came in Sophia’s car,” I said. “Sophia, this is Len Parrish. Sophia Maynard. And …” I looked toward the blonde.

“Kirsten,” Len said offhandedly. “Barnaby has this incredible car that’s totally wasted on him,” he told Kirsten as he pulled out a chair for her.

“Yes, you mentioned that,” she said. She draped herself on the chair and reached idly for the drinks list that stood in the middle of the table. Her nails were cut in U-shapes, dipping in the middle and sharp at the corners. They made me want to curl my own fingers into fists.

“So, you and Gaitlin been going out long?” Len asked Sophia, but meanwhile he was gesturing for a waiter. She said, “Oh, five months,” and he looked at her blankly. Then he asked Kirsten, “What are you having?”

“A mineral water,” she told him, although she was still studying the drinks list.

He ordered two, along with a snack called Wrappin’s, which he swore we were going to love. Then he turned back to Sophia. “This guy’s a nut; I hope you know that. Complete and utter nut,” he said. “Did he tell you about his life of crime?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling.

“Barnaby here is the Paul Pry Burglar,” Len told Kirsten.

Kirsten merely raised her nonexistent eyebrows and turned to the other side of the drinks list, but Sophia said, “The what?”

“That’s the name the newspaper gave him,” Len said. “People would come home and find their silver still in place, stereo still in place; but all their mail had been opened and their photo albums rifled.”

I said, “Len, she doesn’t want to hear this.”

Sophia’s lips were slightly parted.

“Guy was insane!” Len told her. “Love letters missing from closet shelves, locks jimmied on diaries—”

I wanted to strangle him. “Who are you to talk?” I asked him. “You were with me! It’s just pure luck you weren’t arrested too!”

“I always tracked down the liquor cabinet,” Len told Sophia smugly.

I don’t know why liquor should have sounded any more honorable, but right away her smile returned. I said, “Goddammit, Parrish—”

“Oh, tut-tut, Barnaby; language,” he said. He told Sophia, “They sent him to a special-ed school to straighten out his evil ways and teach him not to curse.”

“It wasn’t special ed, for God’s sake!”

“No, right, I guess it wasn’t,” he said. “They did make you repeat tenth grade. They must have had some kind of standards.”

Sophia looked at me. I said, “I had played hooky the entire year before that, see.”

I just wanted to dispel any suspicion that I might be mentally deficient, but Sophia read more into it. She got a softness around her eyes, and she said, “Oh, Barnaby. Had something gone wrong in your home life?”

“No, no. I don’t know why I did it,” I said irritably. By now I’d developed more of an appreciation for Kirsten. She was so plainly bored with all this, letting her gaze roam over the crowd that stood at the bar. “Thanks heaps,” I told Len. “I just love digging up ancient history.”

Len said, “Hmm?” and leaned back so the waiter could set his drink in front of him. Next came the Wrappin’s, which turned out to be a sort of roll-your-own arrangement — miniature flour tortillas with an assortment of different fillings. Ordinarily I’m allergic to dishes with dropped g’s in their names, but at least these gave us something to focus on besides my unsavory character. We all sat up straighter and reached for the baby corncobs and the salsa verde. It was kind of like the activities table in kindergarten. The women fell into a separate conversation (“How long have you known Len?” I heard Sophia ask, and Kirsten said, “Um, three days? No, four.”), while Len and I experimented with various fillings. The two of us got to flipping crudités off the backs of our spoons, aiming for the sauce cups. We developed an actual game with complicated rules. “No fair!” we were telling each other. “You hung on to your broccoli floret way past the legal limit; I saw you!” I enjoyed myself, in fact. You miss that kind of thing when you’re not around other guys a lot. Yes, I’d say the evening ended better than it began.

Sophia thought so too, evidently. When we said good night to them, out on the sidewalk, she told Kirsten, “We should do this again.” (It showed how little she knew Len Parrish. If we did do it again, it would probably be with a different girl.) And in the car, she asked, “Do you think Len liked me?”

“I’m sure he did,” I told her.

Actually, I doubt he more than registered her presence. He had summed her up with a look and then dismissed her. But who cared? At that particular moment, driving up Charles with the windows down and Sophia sitting next to me, I felt completely happy.

Toward the end of July, Opal came for a week’s visit to Baltimore. It was the first time she’d been allowed to do this, and judging by all the precautions taken, you would have thought she was being handed over to a serial killer or something. For starters, on the morning she was arriving I had to telephone Natalie as soon as I got out of bed, just to let her know I was really and truly awake. (The train was a super-early one, 7:52 a.m.) Then I had to phone again from Penn Station, not even waiting till we reached home, to say I’d met the train okay and Opal was safely accounted for. (“Let me speak to her,” Natalie ordered, and Opal took the receiver and said, “Yes,” and, “Uh-huh,” and, “I guess so,” all the time eyeing me narrowly, as if she were reporting on my general fitness as a father.) Also, she was required to stay at my parents’ house. This was only reasonable, since I’d have had to sleep on the floor if she had stayed with me; but still I put up a fuss. “What,” I had said to my mother, “you all think I live in a slum, is that it?”

“Now, Barnaby. You know you’re more than welcome to move back into your old room while she’s here,” Mom told me. But of course, the very thought gave me the willies.

Opal seemed a lot older, suddenly. Maybe it had to do with being away from her mother. She was letting her hair grow out — it nearly reached her shoulders — and she wore a straight, dark dress, not so little-girlish as her usual clothes. I said, “Hey, Ope, you’re getting to be a young lady!” She grimaced, clamping her mouth in a way that turned her dimples into parentheses, and I saw for the first time how much she resembled Natalie. Funny: Natalie was a beauty, but now I realized that she must have started out with Opal’s plain, smooth face — unsettling in a child but attractive in a grown woman. Well, attractive in a child too. In fact, this Opal was … pretty, actually. I cleared my throat and said, “So!” Then I picked up her suitcase — molded blue Samsonite, an old person’s suitcase — and we headed out to the car.

First I drove her to my parents’ house. Big to-do: toast and home-squeezed orange juice, new doll propped against the pillows in the guest room. (Mom was really into this grandma business.) Then I took her to my place, because she’d never seen it before. I had cleaned it up spick-and-span and borrowed a few board games from Martine’s nephews — Monopoly and Life and such — and alerted both the Hardesty kids, who were hanging out on the patio in this artificial way when we arrived. Joey was lying on a chaise longue with his ankles crossed, and Joy was jumping rope. Both of them were younger than Opal — I’d say six and eight or so; two tow-headed, stick-thin kids in shorts and T-shirts — but somehow they seemed the ones in charge. Joey started shrilling questions at her (“Did you come on the train? Did you ride in the engine?”), and Joy flung aside her jump rope and executed a set of brisk, efficient cartwheels across the flagstones. Opal, meanwhile, shrank closer to my side and grew very quiet.

“I’ll just take her in and show her where I live,” I told the Hardestys. “Then maybe you could all have Kool-Aid here on the patio.” I’d mixed up a jug already and put it in my fridge — Sophia’s suggestion. Sophia had been very helpful with the preparations for this visit. The board games were her idea. She had said we needed activities, something that would let us get to know each other better. That evening she was having us to dinner, and she had canceled her weekly trip to Philly.

Every day, it seemed, I saw something new to appreciate about Sophia.

Opal didn’t comment on my living quarters. I showed her all around, but she said nothing. I worried she was storing up criticisms to pass on to her mother. “I know it’s not fancy,” I told her, “but it’s affordable. And the Hardestys are super-nice landlords.”

“Where’s your bathtub?” was all she said.

“Um, I use the shower upstairs.”

“Do you have to knock on the door before you go up?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “I just walk on in. I mean, it’s only their kitchen. Then I go down the hall to the bathroom. It’s no big deal.”

She didn’t say anything more.

I brought the Kool-Aid and three paper cups to the patio, with Opal trailing behind me, but then she said she wasn’t having any. She waited till I’d filled all three cups before she told me this. I felt a little put out, but I didn’t show it. I said, “Okay. What would you like instead?” She said she wasn’t thirsty. Both Hardesty kids sipped their Kool-Aid, watching Opal with round, sky-blue eyes over the rims of their cups.

After that, I took Opal to work with me. We went first to Mrs. Alford’s, because today was the day her nephew was coming and I had promised to help him load his truck. He was hauling her husband’s tools to his cabin in West Virginia. Mrs. Alford immediately gathered Opal under her wing. “Come see the quilt of Planet Earth that I’ve been working on,” she said. “Come see the teeny tea set my granddaughters like to play with when they visit.” Opal went willingly — too willingly, I thought — not giving me a backward glance. It seemed to me she felt more comfortable with women.

Ernie, the nephew, was a beefy, muscular guy, and we made short work of the loading. He told me most of the stuff would probably have to go elsewhere. “I live in a place the size of Aunt Jessie’s kitchen,” he said. “No way can I fit all this in! But she’s my favorite relative. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

After Mrs. Alford’s, we stopped by the Rent-a-Back office, and I introduced Opal to Mrs. Dibble and a couple of the workers who happened to be there — Ray Oakley and Celeste. Mrs. Dibble invited Opal to stay and play with the copy machine while I went on my next job, but I said, “Maybe another time”—plucking a house key from the pegboard. “We’re off to visit Maud May after I pick up her mail,” I said. “I figure Opal will get a kick out of her.”

“Well, you come by later, then,” Mrs. Dibble told Opal, and Celeste gave her a stick of sugar-free gum.

But things didn’t go as well with Maud May as I had expected. First off, the nursing home had all these folks in wheelchairs lining the hall. I was used to them; I hadn’t thought about how they might affect Opal. She drew so close to me that her feet stumbled into mine, and she kept one finger hooked through a belt loop on my jeans. And then Maud May was in a fractious mood. Pain, I guess. She was sitting in a chair by her bed with her shiny new walker parked alongside, and, “Who’s this?” she barked when we entered the room.

“This is my daughter, Opal. Opal, this is Ms. May.”

“You never told me you had a daughter.”

“I told you lots of times,” I said. In fact, maybe I hadn’t, but I didn’t want Opal to know that.

“You absolutely did not,” Maud May said. “I haven’t turned senile quite yet, you know. What have you brought me?”

“Mostly junk, it looks like. Bunch of catalogs and stuff. Somebody left a plant on your stoop; so I took it inside and watered it. Here’s the card that came with it.”

“What kind of plant?” she demanded. She accepted the card, but she didn’t open it.

“Something with white flowers. I don’t know. I put it in the sunporch with the others.”

“Did you go in my house?” Maud May asked Opal.

Opal nodded, still hanging on to my belt loop.

“Did you touch anything?”

“No, she didn’t touch anything. Who do you think she is?” I said. “Why would you make such an accusation?”

“Good Gawd, Barnaby, simmer down,” Maud May told me. “It wasn’t an accusation. I was merely inquiring.”

But I was mad as hell. I tossed her mail on the nightstand and said, “So anyhow. We’re leaving. What am I supposed to bring next time?”

“More cigarettes?” she asked. She was using a meeker tone of voice now. “And that plant, besides, to brighten my room?”

“Fine,” I said, and I walked out, with an arm around Opal’s shoulders.

In the car, I said, “Next stop is Mr. Shank. You’re going to like Mr. Shank. He’s lonely and he loves to see kids.” My voice had a loud, fake ring to it that I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

“Maybe I could just go back to Grandma’s,” Opal said.

“Go back now?”

“I could watch TV or something.”

“Well,” I said. “All right.”

It was almost noon, anyhow. I figured we could have lunch there and she’d get her second wind.

At my parents’ house, I phoned Mr. Shank to push his morning appointment up to early afternoon. Then I went out to the kitchen, where Mom and Opal were mixing tuna salad. “Barnaby Gaitlin,” my mother said, “what could you have been thinking of?”

“Huh?”

“Taking a nine-year-old child to a nursing home!”

“So?” I said. “You have a problem with that?”

“She says there were people in wheelchairs everywhere she looked. Old people! A woman with a tube in her nose!”

“Geez, Mom,” I said: “What’s the big deal? We’re keeping it a secret there’s such a thing as old age?”

Yes, we were, evidently, because my mother threw a meaningful glance toward Opal, who kept her eyes downcast as she stirred the salad. “We’ll just let Opal stay with me the rest of the day,” Mom said. “I’ll take her to see Gram and Pop-Pop.”

“Well, I don’t know whit you’re so het up about,” I told her. But I didn’t argue.

I noticed a hollow feel in my car, though, for the rest of the afternoon. It seemed that just that quickly, I’d grown accustomed to Opal’s company When I was at Mr. Shank’s, I thought how she could have looked through his coin collection. And I knew she would have liked playing with Mrs. Glynn’s little dog.

In the last days of my marriage, Opal was just reaching the stage where she recognized my face. I’d approach her crib, and she’d crow, “Ah!” and start wiggling all over and holding out her arms to be picked up. Then they left me. When I walked into the apartment after that, there wasn’t just an absence of sound; there seemed to be an antisound — a kind of, like, hole in the air.

It had been years since I had thought about that “Ah!” of hers.

Mom was miffed when I told her we’d have dinner at a friend’s house. “Friend?” she asked. “What kind of friend? Male or female? You might have told me earlier. Is this a person who knows how to cook? Who’ll give her fresh vegetables, and not just a Big Mac or whatnot?”

“It’s someone who’ll serve all the major food groups,” I assured her.

“Well, I want you to know that I’ll hold you to blame if Opal gets a tummyache,” Mom said.

Sooner or later, I supposed, Sophia and my parents would have to meet. But I planned to put it off as long as possible.

Opal took to Sophia right away. I knew she would. Not only had Sophia gone to some trouble over the menu (Crock-Pot Chicken Drumettes and mashed potatoes, hot fudge sundaes for dessert), but she treated Opal like company: dressed up for her, in pearls and a shiny blue dress, and offered her a special fruit drink with about a dozen maraschino cherries lined up on a swizzle stick, and asked her these courteous, hostess-type questions throughout the meal. Who had Opal’s favorite teacher been, so far? What kind of movies did Opal like to watch? What kind of books did she read? Opal answered gravely, sitting very straight in her chair.

As we were leaving, I told Sophia, “Thanks,” and secretly squeezed her fingers. I could see the shadow where her breasts began, above her low, scooped neckline. “You coming by later?” I whispered, and she nodded and squeezed my fingers back.

I asked Opal in the car whether she’d had a good time. “Yes,” she said. “That lady was nice.”

“Sophia, her name is.”

“She had a nice dress on.”

“She liked you too,” I said.

I wondered if Opal would report all this to Natalie. You never knew what a kid that age would consider worthwhile mentioning.

We fell into a pattern. Mornings, I drove over to my parents’ house for breakfast, but I let Opal stay with Mom while I went out on my jobs. Then I’d stop by the house again and have lunch. This was the most I’d seen of my ancestral home in years. It wasn’t so difficult, though. I guess having Opal there sort of watered the experience down some.

After lunch, I’d take Opal to my place. She never did warm to the Hardesty kids, but she would watch TV with me or play a board game. The one called Life was her favorite. I found I couldn’t abide it myself. “There’s no logic to it,” I complained. “Look at this: the more kids you have, the more money you collect. It should work just the opposite! Children make you poorer, not richer.”

Then I worried she would take that personally; she would guess I’d been less than ecstatic when Natalie learned she was pregnant. But all she said was, “I like the little plastic people.” And she set her mouth in that obstinate way she had and leaned forward to spin the arrow.

I tried to keep my afternoon jobs to a minimum, so that I wouldn’t burden Mom with too much baby-sitting. Not that she complained. In fact, she put up a fight when I took Opal away with me in the evenings. I took her to Sophia’s for supper, and then the three of us went on an outing of some kind — down to the harbor, or one time to an Orioles game. Things like that.

On Tuesday, Martine invited Opal and me to a birthday supper for one of her nephews. (She didn’t mention Sophia, who said that she could use a little catch-up time, anyhow.) We grilled hot dogs out in the yard; Martine rented the top floor of this rickety old house with a deep backyard. The nephews were all in jeans, but Opal, not knowing, had put on a party dress — one of her Dick and Jane things, with a long, flouncy sash that tied in a bow. That was okay, though, because Martine wore a party dress too. It made her look kind of bizarre. I had never seen her in anything but overalls, till now. This dress was pink, and too big for her or something, too wide at the shoulders and long in the hem. Her hair was pulled straight back off her forehead by a child’s blue plastic barrette in the shape of a Scottie dog, and she was wearing lipstick the same garish pink as the dress, all wrong on that ferocious little yellow face of hers. I said, “Whoa! You look great.” Which was an out-and-out lie, but her appearance was so startling that I thought it would be noticed if I didn’t make some comment. Martine just said, “Thanks.” I guess she thought she did look great.

The only other grownups were her brother and his wife, who seemed at least ten months pregnant, and Mrs. Rufus, the landlady. We all sat on folding chairs, and the kids sat in the grass. Mrs. Rufus did most of the talking, telling a string of bloodcurdling tales about childbirth. If you listened to her awhile, you marveled that the human race hadn’t long ago died out. “But aren’t you the cool one!” she said to the sister-in-law. “You don’t even look nervous!”

“Thanks,” Martine piped up. Apparently she thought Mrs. Rufus was talking to her. “I expected to be nervous, but actually I’m having a very good time.”

Huh? Everybody stared at her a moment, and then Mrs. Rufus told how her fingers had swelled up like sausages when she was eight months along with her youngest. “We had to call in a plumber,” she said, “to saw my wedding ring off with a hacksaw.”

The sister-in-law said, “Ho-hum,” and swallowed a yawn.

The brother had brought two six-packs of beer. Although he and I were the only ones who drank any, it somehow had a sort of rowdy effect on everyone else — a phenomenon I’ve observed more than once. Pretty soon Martine and the kids were playing Prisoner’s Base, and Statues, and Simon Says, and a bunch of other games that I’d forgotten all about. Even Opal got involved. She loved it. By the time we left, she was as rumpled and sweaty as the nephews. Which made my mother throw a fit, of course, when I delivered her to the house. “How will I ever get those grass stains out?” she wailed. She should have seen Martine, if she thought Opal was dirty.

When I reached home I phoned Sophia, and she came over. “You smell like a new-mown lawn,” she told me. I had this pleasantly tired, loose-jointed feeling. I let myself imagine how it would be if I lived this way permanently — watching my kid play with other kids in the yard, lying in bed later with a warm, sweet, generous woman.

After I’d walked Sophia to her car and turned off all the lights, I caught the sky doing its color-change trick, which is possible at night but exceedingly rare. And I hadn’t even been trying! Maybe that was the secret, I thought. Let things come to you when they will, of their own accord. I went back to bed and slept like a baby.

Opal was due to leave on Friday morning. Thursday evening, therefore, we planned to have a farewell dinner. First it was going to be at my parents’, but then it was switched to my brother’s. (Recently, Jeff had developed some kind of fixation about hosting all family parties.) This irked my mother no end, because Wicky wasn’t much of a cook. She wasn’t anything of a cook, if you ask me. It must have been her Wasp background. Food was just a biological necessity, and a boring one, at that.

And then to make things worse, Mom took it into her head that we ought to invite Sophia. She didn’t actually refer to Sophia by name. She called her “that friend that you and Opal have been seeing so much of.” But she gave herself away when I said it was too short notice. “It’s already Wednesday,” I said, and Mom said, “Oh, I very much doubt Sophia will hold that against us.”

I sent Opal a glare. Tattletale. She just gazed blandly back at me. “Shall I invite her, or will you?” Mom asked. “Which?”

I considered saying, “Neither.” If I knew Mom, though, she would find a way of tracking down Sophia’s number; and nothing could be worse than Mom on the phone unsupervised. I said, “I will.” I wouldn’t, of course. I’d say Sophia had turned out to have a previous engagement.

But I’d reckoned without Opal, who popped the question over supper that night. “Grandma wants you to come to my farewell dinner,” she told Sophia.

Sophia turned from the stove, a pleased look lighting her face. “Really?” she asked me.

I shrugged.

“It’s going to be at my uncle’s, and Gram and Pop-Pop Kazmerow are coming too,” Opal said.

“Your mother issued the invitation?” Sophia asked me.

“Well, she knows it’s probably too short notice,” I said.

“I’d love to come!”

I sighed.

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

“These family things are such a drag, is all,” I told her.

“You wouldn’t think so if you were an only child,” she said.

I could see there was no hope she would decline the invitation.

We went in her car, because we were the ones bringing Opal. (Mom had gone early, to try and wrestle some semblance of a meal out of Wicky’s kitchen. Dad was coming directly from work.) For two days now, I’d been grousing about this whole idea, but as we were driving over I suddenly got in the spirit of things. Here we were, the three of us, traveling through a warm July night, with the fireflies flickering in the woods of Roland Park and faint, old-timey jazz playing on the radio. Sophia smelled of roses. Opal swung her heels in the back seat. And we were headed toward what was almost (if you didn’t look too closely) a genuine family reunion, complete with parents and grandparents, aunt and uncle, cousins. Well, only two cousins. This was kind of a miniature reunion. But even so. When we drew up in front of Jeff’s house, we found a huge tumble of silver balloons tied to the lamppost. Wicky’s doing, clearly. Wicky was not half bad, I decided all at once.

Opal wanted to untie the balloons and bring them in with her. She seemed so impressed by them, you’d think she had never seen a balloon before. So our entrance was fairly crowded. The balloons filled the whole foyer, with the humans having to fit themselves in between them, and then Dad and Jeff arrived on our heels, and a telephone started ringing, and Pop-Pop was asking where my car was. It took several minutes before we got sorted out and seated in the living room, and by that time Sophia had somehow been introduced. I certainly hadn’t introduced her. I was already in the doghouse for getting J.P.’s name wrong. “What’s new, P.J.?” I said when he toddled over, and both Mom and Wicky said, “Who?” Like a fool, I went on with it. “P.J., old buddy! Yes, sir; it’s the Peej,” I babbled, till I felt the disapproval streaming toward me from across the room, and I realized I had messed up yet again.

Jeff and Wicky lived in a very nice house, old-fashioned but modernly decorated, with a long white couch that fit together in an S-curve and Japanesey low tables and such. Still, I always felt it needed something. Maybe books, or pictures. It had this sort of blank feel. I knew my mother had given them a few paintings early in their marriage, but they had never hung them, and my dad absolutely forbade her to ask what had become of them. She said, “But it’s such a waste! Especially the Rankleston, with the barbed wire and the Brillo pads. I could take it back and hang it in your study, if for some reason they don’t like it.” Dad didn’t say what he thought of that idea, but you could guess from his expression.

It helped, at least, that there were so many of us. All the women wore their party clothes — even Gram, decked out in a bag-shaped shift with a rhinestone horseshoe pinned to the front. Pop-Pop had his shirt buttoned up to the collar, which was as dressy as he got, and Dad and Jeff and J.P. were in suits, and I had on my birthday necktie. A fairly festive-looking group, I’d say. The billow of balloons bobbing above Opal’s head didn’t hurt any, either.

And right from the start, Sophia was a hit. Big hit. Of course Gram and Pop-Pop already knew her. They showed off about that a little. “How’s the bank?” Gram asked. “How’s your roommate!” and then Pop-Pop said, “Stell brought the recipe for those nachos you liked so much.” This made my mother go all alert and suspicious. She started edging closer to Sophia on the couch. “Oh?” she said. “You’ve had Mother’s nachos? You’ve been to their house? Barnaby took you to visit?”—firing questions one-two-three, leaving her no room for answers. Meanwhile, Jeff was offering her a choice between white wine, Scotch, and ginger ale, and J.P. was lurching against her knees and trying to reach her pearls.

Not till we were settled around the table did Sophia manage to get a word in. Then she did a wonderful job. She made a little story of our trip to Camden Yards, and everyone came out well in it. (Opal had caught on to baseball so quickly; I’d been so patient in explaining the rules.) I kept saying, “Oh, it was nothing,” and, “Just a routine game, all in all”—rolling my eyes at the other men and looking sheepish. Jeff asked me how Ripken had done. Dad asked if I had noticed any slacking off in attendance after the strike. I felt like some kind of impostor.

When I was a teenager, I would be eating dinner and all at once I’d imagine grabbing hold of the soup tureen and turning it upside down over my parents’ heads. Noodles would snake down Dad’s temples, and carrot disks would stud Mom’s French twist. The image always set me to laughing, and then I couldn’t stop. I’d be laughing so hard I was choking, spewing bits of chewed food, while the two of them sat staring at me grimly.

I don’t know why that memory came back to me just at that moment.

Pop-Pop told Sophia I used to go to ball games with him as a little kid. “Him and Jeff; they’d take turns,” he said. “Barnaby loved that bugle call! Loved it. Always used to say to me, ‘Pop-Pop,’ he used to say, ‘aren’t you glad we don’t have organ music, like those poor other ball teams have?’ ”

It seemed everybody assumed that Sophia would be riveted by the most inconsequential mention of my name. And she did look entertained. She was smiling and nodding, forgetting to eat her canned pineapple ring.

“Just how did you two meet?” Mom asked, and my grandma, showing off again, burst in with, “They met on a train.”

“On a train!”

The phrase gave me a vision of Sophia riding that train: her golden bun, her feather coat, her calm, pale hands accepting the stapled packet. My personal angel at last, I had fancied, but now that seemed an outdated concept. It was like when you’re introduced to someone who reminds you of, say, an old classmate, but then later, when you know him well, you forget about the classmate altogether. Sophia was just Sophia, by this time — so familiar to me, so much a part of my life, that I couldn’t imagine how she appeared to the people sitting around this table.

Except it was obvious they must like her. She was telling them in some detail now about our train ride. “He spilled coffee all over me,” she told them, and they laughed and tossed me appreciative glances, as if I’d done something witty. She said, “First I was annoyed, but when I saw how nice he was, and how well-mannered—”

“Barnaby, well-mannered?” my mother said.

“Oh, he apologized endlessly and helped me clean myself up. And so then we got to talking, and he told me about his work—”

A few resigned expressions here and there, but I don’t think she noticed.

“—and he described his clients so considerately, you know … And the clincher was that in Philly, I got a glimpse of Opal.”

This was exceptionally kind of her. Just by mentioning Opal’s name, sending her a wink across the table, she reminded the others that tonight was really Opal’s night. I watched them all remember that. Gram, who was sitting on Opal’s left, patted her hand and told her, “So you met Sophia before any of the rest of us, you smart little old thing!”

Opal smiled down at her plate.

“And then Barnaby asked for your phone number …,” Wicky suggested to Sophia.

“No, no. It was all left to me. I was the one who phoned, asking for him to come work for my aunt.”

They laughed again, and Pop-Pop slapped his knee.

“Well, yes,” Sophia said, laughing too. “I admit it was sort of trumped up. But Aunt Grace did need assistance, and so I didn’t feel guilty about it.”

“Of course not!” Gram said soothingly.

“He’s been an enormous help to her — put her whole house in order again. You must be very proud to have raised such a caretaking person.”

“Why, thank you, Sophia,” my mother told her. “That’s sweet of you to say.” She glanced down the table to Dad. “It’s not as if he hasn’t caused us some worry, in times past.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” Sophia said. “But look at how he turned out!”

Everybody looked. I gave them a little wave that was something like a windshield wiper stopping in mid-arc.

In those photo albums I used to rifle, people were so consistent. They tended to assume the same poses for every shot, the same expressions. You’d see a guy on page one, some young father at the beach, standing next to his wife and baby with his arms folded across his chest and his head at a slight angle; and then on the last page, twenty years later, there he still was with his arms still folded, hair a bit thinner but head still cocked, wife still on his left, although the baby had grown taller than the father and was settled into some favorite stance of his own by now. Even the beach was the same, often. I would turn page after page, ignoring my friends. (“Gaitlin! What’s keeping you, man? Look what we found upstairs!”) I would set my sights on, say, one little boy and follow him through infancy, kindergarten, college. I’d see him slicing his wedding cake, and darned if he wasn’t still wearing the same knotted-up scowl, or shamefaced smirk, or joyful smile.

What I’d wanted to know was, couldn’t people change? Did they have to settle for just being who they were forever, from cradle to grave?

Seated at that table, the night of Opal’s dinner, I felt I had changed. I waved a hand at my family as if I’d left them far in the distance — as if I’d become a whole other person, now that I loved Sophia.