“Oh, that’s good.”
“And all I have to do is grow wings and I can fly like an eagle. I have to go now, Linda. ’Bye.”
For the fifteen minutes following Olive’s call she sat in the little shop and thought about death. The hour from six to seven was always quiet. Most of the shops on the mall closed for dinner, so even if one stayed open, passersby were not likely to drop in. Olive normally devoted that hour to paper work and dusting. There was no paper work for Linda to do but there was always dusting. Instead she stayed seated and thought of death.
Clem would die. That seemed to be what Olive had been saying at the end. He had nothing to worry about if he stopped drinking for the rest of his life, but Olive would not grow wings like an eagle and Clement McIntyre would not stop drinking, and so he would die.
She thought back to the first time she had genuinely realized that she herself would someday die. It seemed incomprehensible in retrospect. She had known since childhood that everyone died sooner or later, but until not too many years ago this knowledge had held no personal meaning for her. Death was always something that happened to other people. Occasional family deaths — her grandparents, an uncle, a friend of her father’s — had left her untouched. And then one spring morning a donkey walked across her grave, and the shivers stayed with her for a full week.
She had been married then. Married to Alan, and although she could not recall the year she knew it must have been late in their brief marriage because they would not otherwise have bought the gerbils. Neither of them had quite voiced the thought, but they had bought the little rodents to hold their marriage together. It was starting to come unglued, starting to reveal itself as having been a gross error from the beginning, but had not yet reached the point where they could face the fact that there was nothing there worth saving. It had seemed a little extreme to have a child to save the marriage. Gerbils, allegedly silent and odorless and able to thrive on an occasional handful of sunflower seeds, seemed a more moderate and equally feasible solution.
They had purchased a male and female gerbil, and the gerbils had done what she and Alan had virtually ceased to do, and had done so without benefit of birth control. The female gerbil grew fatter than seemed possible ultimately producing a litter of five hairless and blind little creatures. The thrill of the birth had quite overwhelmed Linda, and for the next few days it seemed to her that she and Alan truly loved each other.
Then one day the mother gerbil died. They never learned how or why. The babies were about a week old; two had their eyes open already. They were a week old, and their mother was dead, and Alan ran around to veterinarians trying to get a formula for a gerbil milk substitute, then tried pet shops in the hope that a gerbil mother who had lost her young might be enlisted to wet-nurse the little things. In the end they warmed Similac to body temperature and tried to feed it to the babies with a tiny eyedropper from a child’s nurse kit. One by one the baby gerbils went cold and stiff. The first one died six hours after they found the mother dead. The fifth and last died around dawn the next day.
She and Alan had an apartment. There was no yard, so she took the little corpses to Central Park and buried them, digging tiny graves with a soup spoon. She wept over their graves as she had never wept in her life.
The next day Alan wanted to buy another female gerbil. “Oh, no,” she cried. “Never.”
“But Eddie will be lonely now,” Alan had said. They’d named the gerbils Eddie and Wallie, for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “The poor old guy can’t just sit alone for the rest of his life.”
And then it hit her — the realization that everything died, that everyone died, that she would die. It was a realization that had to come to everyone sooner or later, and that everyone got over, as she in time got over it herself. But from that moment on her marriage was finished. It would have been finished anyway, would have ended even if they had been up to their necks in thriving hopping odorless gerbils, but that was the point where she herself knew that she had to leave him. She did not do so at once. She waited for quite awhile, but waited with no hope whatsoever.
Eddie remained with Alan when she left. She wondered what had become of him. He had almost certainly died by now, she thought. Gerbils didn’t live very long.
She went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, picked up a magazine, and was back at the desk by seven. A few minutes before eight a voice spoke her name. She looked up from her magazine at Karen Markarian.
“I hope I’m not bugging you,” Karen said. “I was in town with nothing to do and I thought maybe you’d like company.”
“I’m glad you did.” She closed the magazine and put it aside. “There’s never anything to read in this anyway. I don’t know why I bought it. I was just looking at the ads.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“Of course I’m sure. Pull up a chair. There’s one over there.”
“It’s all right to move the chair?”
“Well, sure.”
Karen brought the chair over and sat down alongside the desk. “I went to your apartment first,” she said. “Then when you weren’t there I thought maybe you were finishing up over here. I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“There’s hardly any work to interrupt. Olive couldn’t come in this evening and I had no place better to go so I thought I’d stay open. Cigarette?”
“Thanks.” She inhaled deeply, blew out smoke. “Hugh’s working tonight. I didn’t feel like sitting around alone and I couldn’t think of anyone in town I wanted to see. And then I thought of you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“He’s really spending tons of time in front of that typewriter. Sometimes I’ll just stand outside his door and listen. He’ll go full blast for like fifteen minutes at a clip, just stopping to change pages, and then other times he’ll sit there without a sound for an hour at a time.”
“It must be very difficult.”
“I don’t know how he does it.”
“Neither do I.”
“I really mean it. When I grew up, you know, he was a writer, but a kid doesn’t think anything about that. He went into a room and made noises on a machine, you know, so big deal. I mean, I don’t know, when you’re a kid you don’t see anything special about it.”
“That’s interesting. I never thought of that.”
“What does your father do?”
“He’s in real estate.”
“In Ohio somewhere, I think you said?”
“Dayton.”
“Real estate. So at least as a kid you could understand what it was that he does. Showing houses to people and that sort of thing. He went certain places and he did certain things; it was the sort of thing that made sense to a kid.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“Are you very close to him?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“That’s sad,” Karen said. She thought for a moment. “But what I was saying. I used to take it for granted. He went in there and he wrote. But now I don’t know how he does it. As a matter of fact I don’t really know how anybody does anything. Not selling houses or like that, but I don’t know how a writer writes books or how a painter paints pictures. How you get the ideas and decide how to make them happen. Or a composer, that’s the most impossible thing of all to understand. Imagine sitting down to write a piece of classical music. Not just finding the tunes but fitting everything together so that it adds up to something. Figuring out what each instrument in the orchestra is going to do and how to put them all together to get the sound you have in mind. I wonder if it always works out right.”