He has no sense of humor but I never understood why that should be important. He has always been either too much removed from us (shut away in body and in spirit, cutting burlap) or too much with us (smack underfoot from dawn to dark, when other men are busy in some office). And I won’t try to convince anyone that he is handsome. Nor that he has what they call “personality”—watch some visiting neighbor woman stammer when he fixes her with his worktime gaze, as if he were wondering why she doesn’t leave when in fact he is not even aware that she is there. On top of that we are separated by years and years, although with Jeremy that never mattered as much as it might have with someone else. He is not really a product of his time. When I was a toddler, for instance, other men his age were fighting World War II, but Jeremy wasn’t. I don’t have any proof he even knew about the war — not that one, or the one we are going through now. Nothing outside touches him. Sometimes he seems younger than I am, as if events are what age people. I remember when his sisters came to meet me. We were having tea in the parlor and they were discussing dead friends and relatives. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so old! They had that reverence for the past — forever returning to skate back around its edges, peering down, fascinated by its cold and pallid face beneath two feet of water. Repeating all they said in that doddery, old-lady way. (Jeremy did that too but I had never noticed before.) I looked from one to another. I felt like a very small girl at a tea party with three ancient relatives. I began to be shy and tongue-tied. What was I doing here? How could I have anything to do with this elderly man? But when they left he stood hugging himself at the door with his face all forlorn and I felt he was a two-year-old in need of comfort. “There now,” I told him, “won’t you come back in? Have another cup of tea.” And I laid my hand on his soft limp home-clipped hair and pressed my cheek against his, and felt far older than he would ever be.
When I first came here, I would have laughed aloud at the thought of loving him. Yet it is only now that I think to be surprised at myself. While it was coming about I hardly noticed. We have such an ability to adjust to change! We are like amoebas, encompassing and ingesting and adapting and moving on, until enormous events become barely perceptible jogs in our life histories. All I know is that bit by bit my world began to center on him, so that my first thought in the morning and my last at night was concern about his welfare. “Are you all right?” I used to wake and ask him out of nowhere. “Are you — is there anything you need?” I would move to his side of the bed and feel him seep away from me somehow, backing off from my everlasting questions and my face too close to his and my perfume, which — even if it was only the hand lotion I had put on after finishing the dishes — suddenly seemed too rich and full now that I was next to him. “Oh, I’m sorry!” I wanted to say. “I never meant to — I don’t want to overpower you in any way, believe me!” But then he would only have backed off further; saying that would have been overpowering in itself. There was no way I could win. Or I could win only by losing — by leaving bed, reluctantly, to sit up with a sick child or a colicky baby, and then he would come stumbling through the dark house calling my name. “Mary? Where’d you go, Mary? I can’t find you.”
He changed. I changed. He gathered some kind of stubborn, hidden strength while I became more easily touched by anything small and vulnerable — changes that each of us caused in the other, but they were exactly the ones that have separated us and that will keep us separate. If he calls me back he will be admitting a weakness. If I return unasked I will be bearing down upon him and plowing him under. If I weren’t crying I would laugh.
One day in August Rachel started fussing at breakfast time, and she kept it up without a single pause. She wouldn’t eat or sleep. She was flushed and her breath had an ether smell that my children usually get with fever, but no one in the boatyard owned a thermometer and I was too hot myself to be able to gauge the temperature of her skin. By afternoon I had decided I would have to find a doctor. I was going to ask for a ride from Zack — the boat mechanic, a slimy man who whistled whenever he saw me, but still he did have a pickup truck — and then I saw Brian’s car pulling up in our backyard and out he stepped, looking very steady and reliable in his old jeans and a fresh-ironed shirt. “Brian!” I said. “Will you drive me to the doctor? Rachel’s sick.”
“Of course,” he said, and turned on one heel without a second’s pause and went back to the car. I felt better already. I grabbed up Rachel and my purse, called out instructions to Darcy, and slid into the front seat. “Her doctor is on St. Paul,” I said, “just a few blocks away from us. Away from Jeremy.”
“What’s the matter with her?” Brian asked.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Rachel was quieter now, maybe from the shock of being in a car, but she still whimpered a little. Brian said, “Could be a tooth.”
“Oh, no, she wouldn’t make this much fuss.”
“Are you sure? It’s my understanding that—”
“Will you please just drive?” I said.
He stopped talking. We sped down the gravel road I had nearly forgotten, between rows of neat little flower-decked houses and trailers. After a minute I said, “Sorry, Brian.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s just that I’m afraid he’ll close his office soon, you see, and then I wouldn’t know how to—”
“Sure, sure, I understand.”
We turned onto the main highway. It seemed to me that Brian was driving faster than I had ever gone before. Fields and factories and junkyards skimmed past, and then came the first gray buildings of the city and the long unbroken walls of rowhouses. Brian dodged in and out between slower cars, honking like an ambulance, scarcely ever putting on his brakes. I felt that I was in good hands.
In front of the doctor’s office, he double-parked and got out of the car. “Oh, don’t come with me,” I said. “You’ll get a ticket, Brian.” I was expecting him just to drop me off and then pick me up later. But he had already opened the door on my side and reached for the baby, and I let him take her. Freed of her weight, I felt light and cool. I floated behind him across the sidewalk, which seemed very crowded, through the revolving door of a surprisingly tall dark building. In the lobby I was hit by the cold smell of marble, which I had forgotten about. I had also forgotten the doctor’s office number. Imagine, after ten years of school checkups! It was as if I had been away for decades. My eyes had trouble focusing on the tiny white letters in the showcase. Even my hand, skimming a straight line between his name and his number, looked like a stranger’s hand, brown and chapped, bigger-boned. “Four thirteen,” I told Brian.
“We won’t wait for the elevator.”
I followed him up the stairs. Rachel peered at me over his shoulder; all this speed had startled her into silence.
In the waiting room Brian told the nurse, “We don’t have an appointment, but it’s an emergency. This baby is very ill.”
The nurse looked at Rachel. Rachel grinned.
We were shown into a cubicle at the front of the building. Above the examining table was an enormous, sooty window overlooking the street. I could peer down and see cars threading their mysterious paths below us, stopping and starting magically. I felt I was observing them from another planet. “You can undress her now, I’ll send the doctor in immediately,” the nurse said. But all Rachel wore was a diaper, a damp one. I left it on her. I stayed at the window, remembering other, happier times when I had come here with three or four children for their shots. Then my only worries had been how to keep them out of the cotton swabs, and how to calm the one who was scared of tongue depressors, and what to fix Jeremy for supper that night.