Nandina looked surprised.
“You’ve heard of helicopter parents,” he told the rest of us. “Those modern-day types who telephone their college kids every hour on the hour just to make sure their little darlings are surviving without them. Nothing Janie or I plan to do, believe me — assuming we can ever get the girls to leave home in the first place. But anyhow, this is exactly the kind of gift idea that would appeal to a helicopter parent: we would pack the complete series in a set of handsome walnut-veneer boxes with sliding lids. Open the boxes and you’ll find instructions for every conceivable eventuality. Not just the Beginner’s setting-up-house titles or the Beginner’s raising-a-family titles but Beginner’s start-to-finish, cradle-to-grave living! And the best part is, the walnut boxes act like modular bookshelf units. Kids would just stack them in their apartments with the tops facing frontwards, slide the lids off, and they’re in business. Time to move? They’d slide the lids back on and throw the boxes into the U-Haul. Not ready yet for the breastfeeding book, or the divorce book? Keep those in a box in the basement till they need them.”
“What: Beginner’s Retirement, too?” Irene asked him. “Beginner’s Funeral Planning?”
“Or toss them into their storage unit,” Charles said. “I hear all the kids have storage units now.”
Nandina said, “I’m having trouble believing that even helicopter parents would carry things that far, Charles.”
“Right,” Irene said. “Why not just give the parents themselves The Beginner’s Book of Letting Go and circumvent the whole issue?”
“Do we publish that?” Peggy wondered.
“No, Peggy. I was joking.”
“It’s a thought, though,” Charles said. “But only after we sell the other books, obviously. Make a note of it, Peggy.”
“Oh! If we’re talking about new titles,” Peggy said, perking up, “I have one: The Beginner’s Menopausal Wife.”
Nandina said, “Excuse me?”
“This man came to fix my stove last week? And he was telling me all about how his wife is driving him crazy going through menopause.”
“Honestly, Peggy,” Nandina said. “Where do you find these people?”
“It wasn’t me! My landlord found him.”
“You must do something to bring it on, though. Every time we turn around, someone seems to be dumping his life story on you.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
“For my own part,” Irene said, “I make a practice of keeping things on a purely professional footing. ‘Here’s the kitchen,’ I say, ‘here’s the stove. Let me know when it’s fixed.’ ”
I laughed, but the others nodded respectfully.
“I promise,” Peggy told us, “this was not my fault. The doorbell rang; I answered. This man walked in and said, ‘Wife.’ Said, ‘Menopause.’ ”
“We seem to be getting away from our subject here,” Nandina said. “Does anyone have a suggestion relating to Christmas?”
Charles half raised his hand again. “Well …” he said. He looked around at the rest of us. “Not to hog the floor …”
“Go ahead,” Nandina told him. “You seem to be the only one with any inspiration today.”
Charles reached beneath his chair to pick up a book. It was covered in rich brown leather profusely tooled in gold, with Gothic letters spelling out My Wonderful Life, By.
“By?” Nandina asked.
“By whomever wants to write it,” Charles said.
“Whoever,” Irene corrected him.
“Oh, I beg your pardon. How gauche of me. See, this would be a gift for the old codger in the family. His children would contract with us to publish the guy’s memoirs — pay us up front for the printing, and receive this bound leather dummy with his name filled in. On Christmas morning they’d explain that all he has to do is write his recollections down inside it. After that it goes straight to press, easy-peasey.”
He held the book over his head and riffled the pages enticingly.
“What’s to stop the codger from just writing stuff on the pages and letting it rest at that?” I asked him.
“All the better for us,” Charles said. “Then we’ve been paid for a printing job we don’t have to follow through with. It’s strictly non-refundable, you understand.”
I refrained from making one of my Beginner’s Flimflam remarks, but Peggy said, “Oh! His poor children!”
“You pays your money and you takes your chances,” Charles told her.
“Maybe we could just offer the dummy by itself — no printing involved,” she suggested.
“Then how would that be any different from those Grandma Remembers books in the greeting-card stores?”
“It would be more deluxe?”
Charles sighed. “First of all,” he said, “people like to see their words printed out. That’s what half this company is built upon. And besides that, we’re trying to drum up the most expensive product possible.”
“But what if his life was not wonderful?” Irene asked.
“In that case, he’ll be longing to set the record straight. He can hardly wait to get started! He’ll be hunched under the Christmas tree already hard at work, scribbling his grievances and ignoring all his relatives.”
“Well, thank you, Charles,” Nandina said. “That does give us something to think about. The modular-bookshelf idea seems a bit … ambitious, but we should definitely consider the memoir plan. Now, anyone else?”
The rest of us took to studying the décor, like students hoping not to be called upon.
One odd effect of Dorothy’s visits was that, more and more, I’d begun seeing the world through her eyes. I sat through that meeting like a foreigner, marveling that these people could take such subjects so seriously. Just think: A set of instruction manuals whose stated goal was to skim the surface. A hodgepodge of war recollections and crackpot personal philosophies that no standard publishing house would have glanced at. This was the purpose of my existence?
I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I’d never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.
It was lunchtime when the meeting ended, but instead of going to the corner café with the others I retreated to my office. I had some work to catch up on, I told them. Once I was alone, though, I swiveled my desk chair toward the window and stared out blankly at the dingy brick landscape. It was a relief to stop looking animated, to drop my expression of lively engagement.
I thought back to the time when Dorothy had stood on Rumor Road gazing at our house. I thought of when she’d walked alongside me after lunch. It occurred to me that, in all probability, neither one of us had actually spoken aloud during our encounters. Our conversations had played out silently in my head — my words flowing smoothly, for once, without a single halt or stutter. Granted, that was how I tended to recall all my conversations. I might ask somebody, “C-c-could you give — give — address,” but in my mind it was an unhesitating “Could you give me your address, please?” Still, I never fooled myself. I knew how I really sounded. I sounded like a breaking-up cell-phone call.
With Dorothy’s visits, though, it had been different. I had glided through my sentences effortlessly, because I had spoken just in my thoughts. And she had understood my thoughts. It had all been so easy.