They May Not Mean To, But They Do

19

For Joy and Aaron, the months were long and cramped, though not without excitement. The apartment teemed with people in rubber gloves, and the atmosphere was pungent and gurgling with strange cuisines, sausages and beans, African pumpkin and foo-foo, fish heads floating in soup pots, chicken feet protruding from stews. Joy’s eyes burned from the spices in the air. She was afraid to look in the refrigerator.

She was still tired, more tired than she had ever imagined a person could be and still rise up and stand on two feet. Her hearing was going, too, she was sure of it. “I’m deef, Paw,” she said to Aaron, and he smiled because he knew he was expected to, not because he thought she was funny, she could tell. There were days when she was glad of losing her hearing, the babel of languages and the sounds of pain thereby muted and dulled. The cold and snow continued morning after morning, afternoons of snow dissolving into snowy nights. Joy and Aaron, trapped inside, migrated from one end of the apartment to the other and back. Aaron could no longer use a walker, and the one time they had tried to push his wheelchair in the snow, before the temperature really dropped, the wheelchair bucked and slid and crashed into a bank of snow.

The wind blew and iced branches fell. The sidewalks dwindled to slippery tracks. The days, short and dark, seemed endless. Joy wondered if Aaron suffered from choking claustrophobia, too. She couldn’t ask him. He no longer said more than a few stock phrases. For Joy, the way one indistinguishable hour ran into another was frightening. She came to cherish the arrivals and departures of Walter, Elvira, and Wanda. They were like the chimes of a clock, like church bells, dividing the day into its proper parts.

On one afternoon when the sun peeped out and the temperature rose to just below freezing, and Joy could stand the seclusion no more, she bundled Aaron up in a heavy sweater and the parka she’d gotten him on sale at McLaughlin’s, which looked so good on him.

“We have to get out of our cloister, Aaron. We are going to breathe some fresh air.”

She adjusted his cap, a tweed driving cap that did not cover his ears.

“Your big ears are going to freeze,” she said.

“Watch your language.” It was more than he had said in days, and Joy pulled off the hat and kissed his head.

“There.”

Sometimes she wanted to put her hands around his neck and squeeze the last lingering pretense of life out of him. More often, she wanted to bury not him but herself — bury herself in her down duvet and never show her face again. She missed him terribly.

She put on her warmest coat. Wanda pushed the wheelchair to the front door and Gregor made a fuss over them, shaking Aaron’s hand, then high-fiving him. Though the days of Aaron walking to the park with his little red wagon were gone, every cloud had its silver lining, that’s what they said, and Joy, unsteady and weak, took possession of the red walker herself for their outing.

“Won’t Coco be pleased, recycling and all,” she said to Aaron as she followed him out the door. She leaned down and whispered in his big ear, “I feel like the red caboose of the Old Jew train.” She turned to Gregor. “I’m the caboose,” she said.

“Good for you, Doctor,” Gregor said.

She often wondered if he thought she was a real doctor. He held the door and smiled and nodded encouragement.

The shock of the cold almost stopped her. The snow, banked up on the sidewalk, looked ponderous and old. But the sunlight and the sky, that blaze of blue sky, were miraculous after so many weeks of looking out the window at sky the color of an old nickel.

They turned into the park where Aaron had spent so many afternoons.

“Isn’t this nice?” Joy said. “Oh dear god, we’re free!”

Aaron, inside his heap of warm clothing, said nothing.

“Okay, Aaron.” She sighed, disappointed in spite of herself. “Have it your way.”

She sat on a bench blinking in the sunlight like a night creature.

“Koffee?” Wanda said.

Whenever Wanda said coffee, it seemed to Joy that the word began with a k.

“No,” she said. “Thank you, but I dare not.” Dare not. Where had that come from? A book she’d read? Her grandmother? Did all grandmothers use the same phrases no matter what era they lived in? “My digestion,” she added primly, as if Wanda did not know their digestive behavior, hers and Aaron’s, intimately.

“You go,” she said to Wanda. “Go get your koffee. I’ll watch Aaron.”

And that is what she did, gazing at him with the love of decades past and the angry exhaustion of a sleepless night and the terror of the days and nights to come.

I dare not think that way, she said to herself. I dare not.

The air smelled cold, but the sun gave the illusion of warmth. Snow that had piled on the bushes dripped, just a bit. It was almost like spring, which is just what the man approaching, pushing a familiar-looking red walker, said.

“It’s almost like spring!”

He was accompanied by a pink-cheeked woman who immediately began to speak in Polish to Wanda. This must be Aaron’s friend, Joy thought. She watched as the man settled himself on the neighboring bench. He adjusted his gloves and his hat and his scarf, then turned to her, obviously about to speak. Instead, he stared.

“Joy?” he said. “Joy?”

“Karl? Oh my god. Karl!”

They clambered to their feet and embraced.

“Sixty years? I think that’s how long it’s been, Karl. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you recognized me.”

“Sixty-six years,” he said. “I would know you anywhere.”

They sat down again, on the same bench this time. So this was Aaron’s park friend Karl. This was Karl, her Karl.

“Karl,” she said. “You really are Karl.”

He was better-looking, in a way, than he had been as a young man. Old age suited his angular face. His face had been awkward for a young man’s face. Now it was distinguished. He wore a beautiful overcoat, and his scarf was elegantly tied. He exuded prosperity and confidence. Even the red walker looked natty. It matched his luxurious silk scarf.

“I wondered if I’d ever see you again,” he said.

She had wondered, too. “The world is strange,” she said.

“Wondrous strange.”

“You have met my husband,” Joy said, putting a hand on Aaron’s sleeve. “Aaron, your friend Karl is a very old and dear friend of mine.”

Aaron nodded affably.

“I’ve heard about you from Aaron. But I had no idea you were you.”

Karl lived right down the block. He was a lawyer, or had been until he retired.

“I’m still working,” Joy said.

“It’s something you love,” Karl said with such assurance that Joy felt buoyed.

“Yes, I do.” Must remember that.

They talked until the clouds washed over the sun and the cold could no longer be ignored.

“Very much money,” Wanda said to Joy, when they were out of earshot, rolling her eyes toward Karl and his caretaker.

“He was poor as a church mouse when I knew him.”

But Wanda’s English did not include church mouse or the past tense. She said “Yes” emphatically, and they made their way home.