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Authors: Elizabeth Berg
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come over.” I told him I had no car. He said to take Lorraine’s. I reminded him that I also had no driver’s license. “Drive real slow,” he said. I did take Lorraine’s car, which was a ’65 Mustang convertible, burgundy with a white interior—what I wouldn’t give to have that car now! Its windows were coated with ice, and I had no idea how to work the defroster, so I put the top down and drove the mile and a half to Ron’s house half sitting, half standing so that I could peer over the top of the windshield. I remember I had the radio up loud and was singing along. It was one of those moments you hold forever in your internal scrapbook.
It had been fun living there, yes, but mostly it had been comfortable, not so much physically as psychically. Lorraine had called it
safe,
meaning, I think,
accepting.
You could station yourself at the kitchen table and someone would show up to talk to you with unflinching honesty about anything.
I wanted suddenly—intensely—to know where those women were. We could truly talk, I thought; they would still be able to hear both what I said and what I meant. It was Kierkegaard who’d said that if a friendship is true, it doesn’t matter how much time has gone by, you just pick up where you left off. But how would I ever find them? Probably they had married and changed their names—we came before the time of casually keeping one’s own; surely they were spread out in different cities, perhaps they were not even in this country. And I knew only too well of another disturbing possibility: One of them—or more—might have died. I leaned forward and back, forward and back, rocking myself in the ancient rhythm.
I took one more look at the sky, then stood to go back inside. Something in my knee hurt, doing this. Arthritis, already? So soon? Who would I tell my old-lady fears to now? Who would tell me I had lipstick on my teeth, or that the story I was telling, I’d already told? Who would, sotto voce, suggest a mint and not have it embarrass me?
There was an old lady who lived on our block in Boston. She didn’t come out except to get the mail, which she always retrieved as soon as it was delivered. Then she stood on the sidewalk and examined with great care everything she received, mostly junk mail and flyers, it seemed. “I’ll bet she actually talks to phone solicitors,” John said. He used to say hello to her, but she would only scurry back inside. I’d always thought of that woman’s life as being so different from my own, alien, almost. Now it did not seem so strange what loneliness might do.
I went back into the house, folded the quilt, and lay it over the arm of the sofa. I looked around the living room, chaotic with unpacked boxes, but settled somehow, anyway, the rug in place, the furniture, too. John would have loved this house. “You,” I whispered.
“John.”
The specificity, as though it might help. As though it might bring him here in whatever form he chose: A step on the staircase. The wash of moonlight against the back of a chair. A touchless touch, a scent. I waited. I thought of Lydia Samuels and her eerie pronouncement:
He will come.
But he did not.
I turned out the lights and locked the front door. Then, as I was turning to go upstairs, I saw a small figure on the porch bend down and then run away. I opened the door again, mildly frightened, and saw a note on the top step, anchored by a rock. I brought it inside. In labored print, it read:
My name is Benny. In case you didn’t know, I live next door. Welcome to our neighborhood! If you need any help done, you can hire me. It is only fifty cents (or more if you think I did a really good job). You can call me, and here is my number, get ready it is 555-0098. Or if you don’t want to do that I can be found on the block after school and on weekends. When I am done, believe me you will say Wow, Everything is perfect!!!!
I’d seen a boy sitting on the porch of the house next door, earlier in the
It had been fun living there, yes, but mostly it had been comfortable, not so much physically as psychically. Lorraine had called it
safe,
meaning, I think,
accepting.
You could station yourself at the kitchen table and someone would show up to talk to you with unflinching honesty about anything.
I wanted suddenly—intensely—to know where those women were. We could truly talk, I thought; they would still be able to hear both what I said and what I meant. It was Kierkegaard who’d said that if a friendship is true, it doesn’t matter how much time has gone by, you just pick up where you left off. But how would I ever find them? Probably they had married and changed their names—we came before the time of casually keeping one’s own; surely they were spread out in different cities, perhaps they were not even in this country. And I knew only too well of another disturbing possibility: One of them—or more—might have died. I leaned forward and back, forward and back, rocking myself in the ancient rhythm.
I took one more look at the sky, then stood to go back inside. Something in my knee hurt, doing this. Arthritis, already? So soon? Who would I tell my old-lady fears to now? Who would tell me I had lipstick on my teeth, or that the story I was telling, I’d already told? Who would, sotto voce, suggest a mint and not have it embarrass me?
There was an old lady who lived on our block in Boston. She didn’t come out except to get the mail, which she always retrieved as soon as it was delivered. Then she stood on the sidewalk and examined with great care everything she received, mostly junk mail and flyers, it seemed. “I’ll bet she actually talks to phone solicitors,” John said. He used to say hello to her, but she would only scurry back inside. I’d always thought of that woman’s life as being so different from my own, alien, almost. Now it did not seem so strange what loneliness might do.
I went back into the house, folded the quilt, and lay it over the arm of the sofa. I looked around the living room, chaotic with unpacked boxes, but settled somehow, anyway, the rug in place, the furniture, too. John would have loved this house. “You,” I whispered.
“John.”
The specificity, as though it might help. As though it might bring him here in whatever form he chose: A step on the staircase. The wash of moonlight against the back of a chair. A touchless touch, a scent. I waited. I thought of Lydia Samuels and her eerie pronouncement:
He will come.
But he did not.
I turned out the lights and locked the front door. Then, as I was turning to go upstairs, I saw a small figure on the porch bend down and then run away. I opened the door again, mildly frightened, and saw a note on the top step, anchored by a rock. I brought it inside. In labored print, it read:
My name is Benny. In case you didn’t know, I live next door. Welcome to our neighborhood! If you need any help done, you can hire me. It is only fifty cents (or more if you think I did a really good job). You can call me, and here is my number, get ready it is 555-0098. Or if you don’t want to do that I can be found on the block after school and on weekends. When I am done, believe me you will say Wow, Everything is perfect!!!!
I’d seen a boy sitting on the porch of the house next door, earlier in the
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