What Was Mine

IMAGINE A DAY AT THE END OF YOUR LIFE

Sometimes I do feel subsumed by them. My wife, Harriet, only wanted two children in the first place. With the third and fourth, I was naturally pressing for a son. The fifth, Michael, was an accident. Allison was third and Denise was number four. Number one, Carolyn, was always the most intelligent and the most troublesome; Joan was always the one whose talent I thought would pan out, but there’s no arguing with what she says: dancers are obsessive, vain people, and many of them have problems with drugs and drink, and it’s no fun to watch people disfigure their bodies in the name of art. Allison was rather plain. She developed a good sense of humor, probably as compensation for not being as attractive or as talented as the older ones. The fourth, Denise, was almost as talented at painting as Joan was at dance, but she married young and gave it up, except for creating her family’s Christmas card. Michael is a ski instructor in Aspen — sends those tourists down the slopes with a smile. I think he likes the notion of keeping people at a distance. He has felt overwhelmed all his life.

My wife’s idea of real happiness is to have all the family lined up on the porch in their finery, with their spouses and all the children, being photographed like the Royal Family. She’s always bustled with energy. She gave the rocking chair to Goodwill last spring because, she said, it encouraged lethargy.

Harriet is a very domestic woman, but come late afternoon she’s at the Remington, conjuring up bodies buried in haystacks and mass murderers at masked balls — some of the weirdest stuff you can imagine. She’s done quite well financially writing these mysteries, and every couple of years we hire a driver and set off across the United States, stopping to see friends and family. At night, in the motel room, she puts the typewriter on the bureau, piles pillows on one of the chairs, and starts typing. Nothing interferes with her concentration. At home, she might run off after lunch to examine an animal in the zoo, or even march onto a construction site with her tape recorder to ask questions about ditch digging. She has a lot of anecdotes, and that keeps things lively. We get more than our share of invitations to parties. People would have us to breakfast if we’d go.

Harriet says that I’m spoiled by how much fun we have and that it’s going to be hard to settle for the way life will be when we’re old. At the end of every year we’ve got a dozen new friends. Policemen who’ve taken a liking to her, or whoever’s new at the local library. Last year a man who imported jumping beans lived with us for a month, when he was down on his luck. Those boxes, out in the hallway, sounded like the popcorn machine at the movies.

Some people undervalue what Harriet does, or don’t have sympathy with my having resigned my position on the route, but how many more years are dairies going to deliver, anyway? I got to feeling like a dinosaur, passing the time until the great disaster. I felt like a vanishing breed, is what I mean. And how many people would go on doing what they’ve been doing if they had the means to do otherwise?

The girls are good-natured about their mother, and I think that Allison and Denise, in particular, quite admire her. Things didn’t ever really come together and take shape for those two, but that’s understandable, because no matter how much you try, every parent does have favorites. I was quite taken aback by Carolyn because she was so attractive and intelligent. Maybe instead of saying that she was a real favorite, I should say that she was a real shock. She walked at eight months! Never took time to crawl. One day, outside the playpen, she pulled herself up and took off across the rug. There she went. She married a fool, but she seems happy with his foolishness. Joan is remarried to a very nice man who owns a bank — flat out owns it! — in Michigan. She’s recovered well from her bad first marriage, which isn’t surprising, considering that she’s in her first year of law school and has inherited two daughters. There are three dalmatians, too. Dogs that eat her out of house and home. Allison works as a buyer for a big department store, and she’s pretty close to her younger sister, Denise. All year, Allison thinks about sweaters, contracts with people to knit sweaters, goes to look at the plants where sweaters are manufactured. That’s what we get as gifts: sweaters. She and Denise go on sweater-shopping expeditions in the spring. Harriet and I get postcards telling us what the towns look like, what they ate for dinner, and sometimes anecdotes about how the two of them located some interesting sweater.

Michael, lately, is the problem. That’s the way it is: you hope and hope for a particular child and that’s the one who’s always eluding you. He’ll plan a trip home and cancel it at the last minute, send pictures that are too blurry to see his face. Occasionally I get mad and tell him that he neglects his mother and me, but those comments just roll off his back. He says that he doesn’t cause us any trouble and that he doesn’t ask for anything, which isn’t the issue at all. He keeps bringing up that he offered to teach me to ski and that I turned him down. I’m not athletically inclined. He takes that personally. It’s so often the way that the position you’re in as a parent gets reversed, so that one day you’re the one who lags behind. You’re the one who won’t try anything new. Michael’s always been a rather argumentative boy, but I’ve never believed in fighting fire with fire. Harriet says he’s the apple of my eye, but as I said to her: “What does that mean? That when Michael’s here, I see red?” With the last three, I think, both she and I slacked off.

Live in the present, Harriet’s always telling me. As a joke, she’s named the man who runs the morgue in her mysteries, who’s a worrywart, after me. But I never did hold with the notion that you should have children and then cast them to the wind. They’re interesting people. Between them, they know seven foreign languages. If I want advice about what stock to buy, I can call one son-in-law, and if I want to criticize the president, I can call another. Naturally, my children don’t see eye-to-eye about how to live, and sometimes they don’t even speak to one another, or they write letters I’m sure they later regret. Still, I sense great loyalty between them.

The last time the whole family was here was for our fortieth wedding anniversary. The TV ran night and day, and no one could keep on top of the chaos in the kitchen. Allison and Joan had even given friends the phone number, as if they were going into exile instead of visiting their parents for the weekend. The phone rang off the hook. Allison brought her dog and Joan brought her favorite dalmatian, and the two got into such an awful fight that Allison’s had to spend the night in the backseat of her car. All night long, inside the house, the other dog paced, wanting to get at it. At the end of the visit, when the last car pulled away, Harriet admitted to me that it had been too much for her. She’d gone into the kitchen and stood a broom upside down in the corner and opened the scissors facing the bristles. She’d interviewed a woman who practiced voodoo, and the woman had told her that that was a surefire way to get rid of guests. Harriet felt a little guilty that it had worked: initially, Denise had said that she was going to leave early Monday morning, but by Sunday noon she was gone — and the last to leave.

I have in my possession cassettes of music the children thought their mother and I should be aware of, photocopies of grandchildren’s report cards, California wine with a label saying that it was bottled especially for Joan, and an ingenious key chain you can always find because when you whistle, it beeps. My anniversary present from Allison was a photo album, in a very nice, compact size, called a “brag book.” She has filled it with pictures of the grandchildren and the husbands and cats and dogs, and with some cartoons that she thought were amusing. And then there was another brag book that was empty, with a note inside saying that I could brag about whatever I wanted.

For a long while the albums just stayed on the coffee table, buried under magazines or Harriet’s fan mail. Then one day when I was coming up the front walk, I looked down and saw a ginkgo leaf. It was as bright as a jewel. I was amazed, even though the neighbor had had that tree, and the leaves had blown over our property, for years. I put the leaf on the coffee table, and then it occurred to me that I could put it in the brag book — press it between the plastic pages — maybe even add some other leaves.

The next day, I put the leaf underneath the plastic, and then I went out and started to look for other leaves. By the end of the week, the book was filled up. I have no memory of doing anything like that as a child. I did collect stamps for a while, but the leaves were a different thing entirely.

To be truthful, there are a few pages in the book right in the middle that aren’t filled, but it’s getting cold and the leaves are losing their color fast. It may be next year before it’s filled. I worked on the front of the book because I had some sense of how I wanted it to begin, and then I filled the back of the book, because I found the perfect leaf to end with, but I wasn’t sure about the rest. I thought there might be some particularly unusual leaves, if I went far enough afield.

So yesterday I drove out to the woods in Batesville, to look. If I’d been looking for birds, there were certainly enough of them. It was the sort of day — with all that blue sky and with the tree bark almost jumping out at you in the strong light — that makes you think: Why don’t I do this every day? Why isn’t everybody out walking? That’s the mystery to me — not that there are so many duplicitous people and so many schemes and crimes, but that out there, in the real world, people are so rarely where they should be. I don’t usually think about mortality, but the albums were a present commemorating forty years of marriage, which would put anyone in mind of what had happened, as well as what was inevitable. That day in the woods, I thought: Don’t run away from the thought of death. Imagine a day at the end of your life. I wasn’t thinking of people who were hospitalized or who saw disaster coming at them on the highway. I was thinking of a day that was calm, that seemed much like other days, when suddenly things speeded up — or maybe slowed down — and everything seemed to be happening with immediacy. The world is going on, and you know it. You’re not decrepit, you’re not in pain, nothing dramatic is happening. A sparrow flies overhead, breeze rustles leaves. You’re going along and suddenly your feet feel the ground. I don’t mean that your shoes are comfortable. Or even that the ground is solid and that you have a moment when you realize that you are a temporary person, passing. I mean that it seems possible to feel the ground, solid below you, while at the same time the air reminds you that there’s a lightness, and then you soak that in, let it sink down, so that suddenly you know that the next wind might blow you over, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. You might squint in the sunlight, look at a leaf spiraling down, genuinely surprised that you were there to see it. A breeze comes again, rippling the surface of a pond. A bird! A leaf! Clouds elongate and stretch thinly across a silvery sky. Flowers, in the distance. Or, in early evening, a sliver of moon. Then imagine that you aren’t there any longer, but at a place where you can touch those things that were always too dazzlingly high or too far in the distance — light-years would have been required to get to them — and suddenly you can pluck the stars from the sky, gather all fallen leaves at once.