Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.
Sincerely,
Aaron Woolcott
Dear Mrs. Andrews,
Thank you so much for your letter. You were very kind to write.
Sincerely,
Aaron Woolcott
Then on to the food brigade:
Dear Mimi,
Thank you so much for the ziti casserole. It was delicious.
Sincerely,
Aaron
Dear Ushers,
Thank you so much for the cheesecake. It was delicious.
Sincerely,
Aaron
After that, the housework. Plenty to keep me busy there.
Sweeping the front hall, first. That was unending. Every morning when I woke up and every evening when I came home, a fresh layer of white dust and plaster chips covered the hall floor. At times there were also tufts of matted gray fuzz. What on earth? An outmoded type of insulation, I decided. I stopped sweeping and peered up into the rafters. It was a sight I looked quickly away from, like someone’s innards.
And then the laundry, exactly twice a week — once for whites and once for colors. The first white load made me feel sort of lonely. It included two of Dorothy’s shirts and her sensible cotton underpants and her seersucker pajamas. I had to wash and dry and fold them and place them in the proper drawers and align the corners and pat them down and smooth them flat. But the loads after that were easier. This wasn’t an unfamiliar task, after all. It used to fall to whichever one of us felt the need of fresh clothing first, and that was most often me. Now I liked going down the stairs to the cool, dim basement, where there wasn’t the least little sign of the oak tree. Sometimes I hung around for a while after I’d transferred the wet laundry from the washer to the dryer, resting my palms on the dryer’s top and feeling it vibrate and grow warm.
Then a bit of picking up in the kitchen and the bedroom. Nothing major. Dorothy had been the clutterer in our family. By now I had retrieved several pieces of her clothing from around the room, and I’d returned her comb and her hay-fever pills to the medicine cabinet. I made no attempt to discard things. Not yet.
Over the course of an evening the phone would ring several times, but I always checked the caller ID before I picked up. If it was Nandina, I might as well answer. She would arrive at my door in person if I didn’t let her know I was still among the living. But the Millers, always after me to go to the symphony with them, or the eternal Mimi King … Fortunately, I’d had the good sense to deactivate the answering machine. For a while I’d left it on, and the guilty burden of unreturned calls almost did me in before I remembered the Off button.
“I’m fine,” I’d tell Nandina. “How are you since five o’clock, when I last saw you?”
“I can’t imagine how you’re coping there,” she would say. “Where do you sit, even? How do you occupy your evening?”
“I have several places to sit, and no shortage of occupations. In fact, at this very minute I — Oh-oh! Gotta go!”
I would hang up and look at my watch. Only eight o’clock?
I angled my wrist to make sure the second hand was still moving. It was.
Occasionally, the doorbell would ring. Oh, how I hated that doorbell. It was a golden-voiced, two-note chime: ding dong. Kind of churchy, kind of self-important. But I felt compelled to answer it, because my car was parked out front and it was obvious I was home. I would sigh and make my way to the hall. Most often it was Mary-Clyde Rust. Not Jim, so much. Jim seemed to be having trouble these days thinking what to say to me, but Mary-Clyde was not in the least at a loss. “Now, Aaron,” she would tell me, “I know you don’t feel like company, so I won’t intrude. But I need to see if you’re all right. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Okay, good. Glad to hear it.”
And she would nod smartly and spin on her heel and leave.
I preferred the neighbors who avoided me. The people who gazed suddenly elsewhere if they happened to be walking their dogs past when I stepped out of the house in the morning. The people who got into their cars with their backs kept squarely, tactfully turned in my direction as I got into my own car.
One evening when the doorbell rang it was a man I didn’t know, a keg-shaped man with a short brown beard and a mop of gray-streaked brown hair. “Gil Bryan,” he told me. “General contractor,” and he handed me a business card. The outside light bulb made the sweaty skin beneath his eyes shine in a way I found trustworthy; that was the only reason I didn’t just shut the door again. He said, “I’m the guy who put the tarp on your roof.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I see you haven’t got it repaired yet.”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Well, that’s my card, if you ever want someone to do it.”
“Thanks.”
“I know it must be the last thing on your mind right now.”
“Well, thanks,” I said, and then I did shut the door, but slowly, so as not to give offense. I liked the way he’d worded that. Even so, I just tossed his card into the porcelain bowl, because I was purposely ignoring the roof the way I had ignored those doctors peeking into the waiting room. “Roof? What roof?” I should have asked Mr. Bryan. “I don’t see anything wrong with the roof.”
The earliest bedtime I allowed myself was 9 p.m. I told myself I would read a while before I turned out the light; I wouldn’t go to sleep immediately. I had a huge, thick biography of Harry Truman that I’d begun before the accident. But I couldn’t seem to make much headway in it. “Reading is the first to go,” my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and still I couldn’t have told you what it was about. My eyelids would grow heavier, and all at once I’d be jerking awake as the book slid off the bed and crashed to the floor.
So I would reach for the remote control and turn on the TV that sat on the bureau. I would watch — or stare in a glazed way at — documentaries and panel discussions and commercials. I would listen to announcers rattling off the side effects of all the medications they were touting. “Oh, sure,” I would tell them. “I’ll run out and buy that tomorrow. Why let a little uncontrollable diarrhea put me off, or kidney failure, or cardiac arrest?”
Dorothy used to hate it when I talked back like that. “Do you mind?” she would ask. “I can’t hear a word they’re saying.”
This TV was just a little one, the little extra one that we sometimes watched the late news on when we were getting ready for bed. Our big TV was in the sunporch. It was an old Sony Trinitron. Jim Rust told me in the hospital that that was what had crushed Dorothy’s chest; the firemen said it had fallen off its bracket high in the corner. Sony Trinitrons are known for their unusual weight.
A while back, Dorothy and I had discussed buying one of those new-fangled flat-screen sets, but we’d decided we couldn’t afford it. If we had had a flat-screen TV, would Dorothy still be alive?
Or if her patient hadn’t canceled. Then she wouldn’t even have been home yet when the tree fell.
Or if she had stayed in the kitchen instead of heading for the sunporch.
If I’d said, “Let’s see if I can find those Triscuits,” and gone out to the kitchen to help her look, and then sat with her at the kitchen table while she ate them.
But no, no. I had to stomp off in a huff and sulk in the bedroom, as if it had mattered in the least that she’d refused to settle for Wheat Thins.