The Beginner's Goodbye

1

The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how other people reacted.

We were strolling through Belvedere Square, for instance, on an early-spring afternoon when we met our old next-door neighbor, Jim Rust. “Well, what do you know,” he said to me. “Aaron!” Then he noticed Dorothy beside me. She stood peering up at him with one hand shielding her forehead from the sun. His eyes widened and he turned to me again.

I said, “How’s it going, Jim?”

Visibly, he pulled himself together. “Oh … great,” he said. “I mean … or, rather … but of course we miss you. Neighborhood is not the same without you!”

He was focusing on me alone — specifically, on my mouth, as if I were the one who was talking. He wouldn’t look at Dorothy. He had pivoted a few inches so as to exclude her from his line of vision.

I took pity on him. I said, “Well, tell everybody hello,” and we walked on. Beside me, Dorothy gave one of her dry chuckles.

Other people pretended not to recognize either one of us. They would catch sight of us from a distance, and this sort of jolt would alter their expressions and they would all at once dart down a side street, busy-busy, much to accomplish, very important concerns on their minds. I didn’t hold it against them. I knew this was a lot to adjust to. In their position, I might have behaved the same way. I like to think I wouldn’t, but I might have.

The ones who made me laugh aloud were the ones who had forgotten she’d died. Granted, there were only two or three of those — people who barely knew us. In line at the bank once we were spotted by Mr. von Sant, who had handled our mortgage application several years before. He was crossing the lobby and he paused to ask, “You two still enjoying the house?”

“Oh, yes,” I told him.

Just to keep things simple.

I pictured how the realization would hit him a few minutes later. Wait! he would say to himself, as he was sitting back down at his desk. Didn’t I hear something about …?

Unless he never gave us another thought. Or hadn’t heard the news in the first place. He’d go on forever assuming that the house was still intact, and Dorothy still alive, and the two of us still happily, unremarkably married.

I had moved in by then with my sister, who lived in our parents’ old place in north Baltimore. Was that why Dorothy came back when she did? She hadn’t much cared for Nandina. She thought she was too bossy. Well, she was too bossy. Is. She’s especially bossy with me, because I have a couple of handicaps. I may not have mentioned that. I have a crippled right arm and leg. Nothing that gets in my way, but you know how older sisters can be.

Oh, and also a kind of speech hesitation, but only intermittently. I seldom even hear it, myself.

In fact, I have often wondered what made Dorothy select the moment she did to come back. It wasn’t immediately after she died, which is when you might expect. It was months and months later. Almost a year. Of course I could have just asked her, but somehow, I don’t know, the question seemed impolite. I can’t explain exactly why.

One time we ran into Irene Lance, from my office. She’s the design person there. Dorothy and I were returning from lunch. Or I had had lunch, at least, and Dorothy had fallen into step beside me as I was walking back. And suddenly we noticed Irene approaching from St. Paul. Irene was hard to miss. She was always the most elegant woman on the street, not that that was much of a challenge in Baltimore. But she would have seemed elegant anywhere. She was tall and ice-blonde, wearing a long, flowing coat that day with the collar turned up around her throat and the hemline swirling about her shins in the brisk spring breeze. I was curious. How would a person like Irene handle this type of thing? So I slowed my pace, which caused Dorothy to slow hers, and by the time Irene caught sight of us we were almost at a standstill, both of us waiting to see what Irene would do.

Two or three feet away from us, she stopped short. “Oh … my … God,” she said.

We smiled.

“UPS,” she said.

I said, “What?”

“I phoned UPS for a pickup and there’s nobody in the office.”

“Well, never mind. We’re heading back there right now,” I told her.

I used the word “we” on purpose, although Dorothy would most likely depart before I entered the building.

But all Irene said was, “Thanks, Aaron. I must be getting Alzheimer’s.”

And off she went, without another word.

She would really have worried about Alzheimer’s if she had known what she’d just overlooked.

I glanced over at Dorothy, expecting her to share the joke, but she was pursuing her own line of thought. “Wild Strawberries,” she said, in a reflective tone of voice.

“Pardon?”

“That’s who Irene reminds me of. The woman in the old Bergman movie — the daughter-in-law, with the skinned-back bun. Remember her?”

“Ingrid Thulin,” I said.

Dorothy raised her eyebrows slightly, to show she was impressed, but it wasn’t so very difficult to dredge that name up. I had been enamored with Ingrid Thulin since college. I liked her cool, collected air.

“How long do you suppose it will be before Irene does a double take?” I asked Dorothy.

Dorothy merely shrugged.

She seemed to view our situation much more matter-of-factly than I did.

Maybe the reason I didn’t ask Dorothy why she had come back when she did was that I worried it would make her ask herself the same question. If she had just sort of wandered back, absent-mindedly, the way you would return to an old address out of habit, then once I’d brought it up she might say, “Oh! My goodness! I should be going!”

Or maybe she would imagine I was asking what she was doing here. Why she had come back at all, in other words. Like when you ask a houseguest how long he’s planning to stay and he suspects you’re asking, “When can I hope to be rid of you?” Maybe that was why I felt it wouldn’t be polite.

It would kill me if she left. I had already gone through that once. I didn’t think I could do it all over again.

She was short and plump and serious-looking. She had a broad, olive-skinned face, appealingly flat-planed, and calm black eyes that were noticeably level, with that perfect symmetry that makes the viewer feel rested. Her hair, which she cut herself in a heedless, blunt, square style, was deeply, absolutely black, and all of a piece. (Her family had come from Mexico two generations before.) And yet I don’t think other people recognized how attractive she was, because she hid it. Or, no, not even that; she was too unaware of it to hide it. She wore owlish, round-lensed glasses that mocked the shape of her face. Her clothes made her figure seem squat — wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soled shoes of a type that waitresses favored in diners. Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her wrists and her neck. Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells.

My sister said Dorothy was too old for me, but that was just because I had foolishly told the truth when I was asked. Even though she was eight years my senior — forty-three when she died — she seemed younger, because of that good strong Hispanic skin. Plus, she had enough padding to fill out any lines. You wouldn’t really think about age at all, with Dorothy.

My sister also said she was too short for me, and it is undeniable that when Dorothy and I hugged, all the wrong parts of us met. I am six-feet-four. Dorothy was not quite five-one. If you saw us walking down the street together, my sister said, you would take us for a father and child heading off to grammar school.

And too professional, my sister said. Ha! There’s a novel objection. Dorothy was a doctor. I work as an editor in my family’s publishing firm. Not all that great a disparity, right? What Nandina meant was, too intent upon her profession. Too work-obsessed. She left for her office early, stayed late, didn’t greet me with my slippers in the evening, barely knew how to boil an egg. Fine with me.

But not with Nandina, evidently.

Maybe it was just a long, long way to travel, and that’s why it took Dorothy all those months to come back.

Or maybe she had first tried to do without me, the way I had first tried to do without her — to “get over” my loss, “find closure,” “move on,” all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable. But eventually, she had faced the fact that we simply missed each other too much. She had given in and returned.

That’s what I liked to believe.

• • •

I’ve made my sister out to be a tyrant, but she really wasn’t. She just wanted the best for me, is why she was so critical. She saw the best in me. When a neighbor kid called me Frankenstein, after I got so tall, Nandina told me I resembled Abraham Lincoln. (I pretended to take heart from this, although Abraham Lincoln was not the look I’d been aiming for.) When I admitted to a case of nerves before inviting Tiffy Preveau to the freshman prom, Nandina rehearsed with me for hours, throwing herself into the role of Tiffy so convincingly that I all but lost my tongue around her. “Could — could — could—” I stammered.

“Start with an H word,” Nandina advised, slipping out of character for a moment.

“How — how would you like — to go to the prom with me?” I asked.

“Why, I’d love to, Aaron!” she said in a burbly, false voice. “But tell me: are you able to dance?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Because I really do love to dance, you know. And I’m talking fast-dance. I like to go crazy!”

“I can fast-dance,” I said.

And I could. Nandina had taught me. Nandina was not exactly a teen success story herself (she stood nearly six feet tall even after shucking off her long banana shoes, and had reached her senior year without attending a single one of her own proms), but she steered me through a series of passable-looking moves. She showed me how to bite my lower lip as if transported by the beat of “Pump Up the Volume,” and she positioned my right arm so it seemed less like a broken wing and more like a banner, raised triumphantly as high as she could force it. It worked in my favor that nobody was dancing in that walking-embrace style anymore. I wouldn’t need to clasp my partner two-handed or anything like that.

And I should learn to do without all those C words, Nandina said. It seemed to her I was piling them on deliberately—“can” and “could,” every chance I got.

“That might not be entirely coincidental,” I told her. (I spoke almost without a hitch, since she was merely my sister again.)

“See what I mean? You could just as well have used ‘accidental’ there,” she said.

Tiffy turned down my invitation, as it happened. She said she’d already made plans. But still, it was kind of Nandina to offer her help.

I was wrong to use the word “handicaps” earlier. “Differences” would have been more accurate. Really I’m not handicapped in the least.

I may be different from other people but I’m no unluckier. I believe that. Or I’m unluckier but no unhappier. That is probably closer to the truth.

Sometimes I think I am unluckier than other people but much, much happier.

But there I suppose I’m fooling myself, because probably everyone thinks he has some unique claim on happiness.

The weird thing is that, although I have been this way for as long as I can remember, I feel myself to be exactly like everyone else. Staring out through the windows of my eyes, I imagine my back to be straight, my neck upright, and my arms of a matching diameter. In actuality, though, since my right foot and calf are pretty much deadweight I have to drag my right leg behind me, and I lean away from that side to counterbalance it, which throws my spine askew. When I’m seated, you might not guess, but then I stand up and I’m listing.

I own a cane, but I keep leaving it places.

And although I have trained myself to let my right arm hang as loosely as possible, it insists on reverting to a tucked position with the hand bent inward, folded sharply at the wrist as if I were a stroke victim. Maybe I am a stroke victim; I don’t know. I was a perfectly normal two-year-old; then I came down with the flu. After that I wasn’t normal anymore.

But I’ll bet I would have been left-handed in any case, because I have excellent penmanship and I didn’t need to struggle for it. So in that respect I am not so unlucky, wouldn’t you agree? And I play a wicked game of racquetball, and I can swim well enough to stay afloat, at least, and I drive a car much better than most if I do say so myself. My car has modified foot pedals. For steering and shifting, though, I get along fine with the standard hand controls. New passengers tend to look anxious at first; then, after we’ve gone a few miles, they forget all about it.

I daydream of switching to standard pedals, but the Motor Vehicle people have these absurd regulations.

It occurred to me at the beginning that Dorothy might have come back on some special assignment. She’d been permitted to return just long enough to tell me something, perhaps, after which she would be on her way. (I have to say right now that who had permitted her was not something I cared to dwell on. I am an atheist. Having her here in the first place had already shaken up more preconceptions than I could easily absorb.)

You would think that I would be eager to know what this assignment was. But remember the corollary: once she’d completed it, she would leave. And I didn’t think I could bear that.

So I adopted a sort of Zen approach. I lived in the moment. Dorothy appeared; I was at peace. I didn’t ask questions, didn’t probe, didn’t study the whys and wherefores; I just took comfort in being with her. If she had started to say something that sounded, oh, message-like, I would have tried my best to deflect her; but she didn’t. It seemed that she was living in the moment also. Then she would vanish again, but she wasn’t really gone for good. I somehow knew that. I would wait, still as a pond, until she reappeared.

Once, she asked me, “How are things at Nandina’s? Does she fret over you, and tut-tut?”

“Yes, well, you remember what she’s like,” I said.

I was silent a moment. Then I said, “You needed to ask? Somehow, I figured you would just know.”

“Oh, no. I don’t know anything at all,” Dorothy said.

It seemed to me that there was a sadness in her voice, but then she smiled at me, so I supposed I’d just imagined it.

My mother felt, to the end of her days, that my differences were her fault. She should have called the pediatrician earlier in my illness. She should have rushed me to the emergency room; forget the pediatrician. “They would only have sent us home again,” I told her. “They’d have said that some virus was going around; just give me fluids and bed rest.”

“I would have sat smack down on the floor and told them we weren’t leaving,” she said.

“Oh, why make such a big deal about it? I manage perfectly well.”

“Manage. Yes, I suppose you do,” she said. “And I wouldn’t give it another thought if you had been lame from birth. But you weren’t. You’re not the way you started out. You’re not who you were meant to be.”

“Maybe this is exactly who I was meant to be,” I said.

She just sighed. I was never going to understand.

“Anyhow,” I said, “you did call the pediatrician. You told me. You called as soon as my fever went up.”

“That man was an imbecile,” she said, off on another tack. “He claimed fevers were nature’s cure-all. He claimed they didn’t do half as much harm as all those hysterical mothers dunking their children in ice water.”

“Mom. Get over it,” I said.

But she never did.

She was a homemaker (as she termed it), from the last generation of women who married straight out of college. She graduated in June of 1958 and married in July. Then had to wait ten years for her first baby, poor woman, but even so she didn’t get a job. How did she fill that time, I wonder? Nandina and I were her entire occupation, once we came along. She built our science projects with us, and our dioramas. She ironed our underwear. She decorated our rooms in little-girl style and little-boy style — rosebuds for Nandina and sports banners for me. Never mind that Nandina was not the rosebud type, or that any time I took part in a sport my mother had apoplexy.

I was a rough-and-ready kind of kid, despite my differences. I was clumsy but enthusiastic, eager to join whatever pickup game was happening on our block. Mom would literally wring her hands as she watched from the front window, but my father told her to let me do whatever I felt capable of. He wasn’t as much of a worrier. But of course he was off at the office all day, and middle-aged by then besides. He was never the kind of father I could toss a football with on weekends, or ask to coach my Little League team.

So I mostly spent my childhood fending off the two women in my life — my mother and my sister, both of them lying in wait to cosset me to death. Even that young, I sensed the danger. You get sucked in. You turn soft. They have you where they want you then.

Is it any wonder I found Dorothy a breath of fresh air?

The first time she saw me, she said, “What’s wrong with your arm?” She was wearing her white coat and she asked in a brusque, clinical tone. When I explained, she just said, “Huh,” and went on to another subject.

The first time she rode in my car, she didn’t so much as glance over, not even at the very start, to check how I was driving. She was too busy huffing on her glasses and polishing them with her sleeve.

And the first time she heard me stammer (after I fell in love with her and grew flustery and awkward), she cocked her head and said, “What is that? The brain injury, or just nerves?”

“Oh, just — just — nerves,” I said.

“Really? I wonder,” she said. “When you’re dealing with the left hemisphere … Damn.”

“Excuse me?”

“I think I left my keys in my office,” she said.

· · ·

She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two.

Then I looked down the street and saw her standing on the sidewalk.