He put the paper down and
thought that life is unfair. He remembered that she closed the door
tightly and locked it but she did not want to go. She adored her
home. She paused to wonder what it would be like to wake up and have
no breasts. She pushed that thought out of her mind and remembered
that the doctor said he wanted to talk to her. There were other
developments, he said. She told him that she would see him after the
operation. It was just too much to deal with. She knew,
anyway.
She looked out into the day
and it was beautiful. It smelled cold. The sun was
bursting brilliantly in the deep blue sky. The New England snow
slowed things, and in the early morning hours, when the snow was untouched and
pristine, it blanketed the Valley with a pleasant sense of peace and
calm. Beautiful winter days like this were a part of the reason she
loved this place and why she had never left.
She held the thin black iron
rail and stepped carefully down the slate and cement steps. Watching
her, he said across the freshly fallen snow, “Ice is gone. I got it.” And
he had. In fact, it was gone before the sun had risen over his
Valley’s hills. He took shoveling seriously.
She went over the mental
list of food she had left prepared for him. There was Golabki,
stuffed cabbage and Chlopski Posilek, bacon and cabbage, Rosoz kurczaka and
golden chicken consommé with noodles. There was Placki kartoflane,
potato pancakes, and Klopsiki, meatloaf stuffed with eggs. There was
Kotlet schabowy and breaded pork cutlet. She left Faworki, pastry
twists, and Makowiec, sweet poppy cake for dessert.
“I left you a few
things inside the frig-er-rater,” she said and went over the working of the
mysterious microwave with him, again, although they both knew its intricacies
would elude him anyway and he would nuke the food so long that smoke would
billow out of its every crevice.
He let the engine idle and
turned on the heater to warm the protective vinyl coverings on the
seat. A slight steam of blue grey smoke from the exhaust floated ghost
like over the open trunk where he had carefully placed her white Naugahyde
covered luggage over an old quilt in the unlikely event that there was dirt on
the trunk floor. She had packed only the clothes she knew she would
need, her nightgowns, slippers, her best dress, shoes, and her good jewelry.
He smelled the cold too and
he liked it. He liked the way it felt on his cheeks and on the tip
of his nose. He liked outside because you were alone
outside. Years ago, he had worked inside the shop for a few months
but he didn’t like it. He did not like the way some of the guys
talked dirty talk about girls. Some of them even had dirty magazines
with naked pictures of girls jammed inside their lockers. They would
show him and he would say, “I go to mass, you know,” and they stopped doing
that. That was why he took the driver’s job, hauling loads from
Ansonia up to Springfield and back again.
Twenty-four years behind the
wheel of a big rig had left him with enormous flat hands, thick wrists and a flabby
rear end that was distinctly disproportionate to the rest of his wide muscular
body. Decades of handmade kielbasa, and potato cheese pierogis
topped with bacon, and fried onions had left him with an enormous
belly. And those were the only things about him that were memorable
or unique except that he was a kind man, a benign gentle man. She
always said that the crew cut on his still blonde but thinning hair made him
look like a Polish prison guard and men who didn’t know him stepped out of his
way. But children liked him instantly and he had that aura of men
who would rather listen than speak.
He did not speak about this
hospital situation. He didn’t understand it and sitting there on the
edge of his thoughts was how he would take care of himself after she was
gone. He worried about the laundry the most. Those
machines were a mystery to him. When she was in the hospital that
time with the baby, he had fought it out with the laundry machine and the
laundry machine won by shrinking everything to half its size. He
wondered if she would feel pain. There were a lot of times over
these past few weeks that he closed his eyes and talked to the Virgin
Mary. He said to her that if there had to be pain involved, let him
feel it instead of her, because he could take it and he was not sure she
could. She was a small woman he thought, and God must have made him
this big for a reason.
He did not want to think
about any of that now. In a half hour, he would be alone and then he
would have no choice but to think about it, because there would be no one else
to talk too. He turned his attention to the slate wall and noted
that roots had pushed their way into the tiny porous holes in the cement and
pushed apart and severed the gravel that kept the wall together.
She slowly made her way over
to him and stared at the crumbling wall as well.
“It’s gotta come down,” he
said, “before it falls down on its own. You don’t want that.”
“I remember you and the boys
built that.” She pointed to the patch of wood in back of the house.
“Took the rocks from the back. Remember? We took the
Easter pictures here with yous in your red suit coats.”
The memory brought a
wonderful smile to his face.
“Yous were so handsome,” she
said with pride that lifted her chin. “Oh honest to God though.”
He pulled a large rock from
the top of the wall and placed in on the lawn. “Well, it’s gotta come down now
while we can still save it.”
He turned to see her eyes
had welled up. “Hell, woman, it’s just a damn wall,” he said trying
his best to sound gruff but coming nowhere close to the effect he
wanted. She locked her short soft arm into his and he turned and
embraced his bride for a long moment because he loved her and because he missed
her already and because hospitals upset him and he held her to keep out the
world, if only for another moment.
They walked silently
to the car, arm in arm. The snow was tapering off into rain, a rain
that unlike the snow, seemed to come as an assault, an attack that would
somehow, alter things forever. He opened the door. She
slid in. He shut her door, and he drove his bride to the hospital.
He ate alone these
days. He arrived to the Diner at six every evening and sat at the
same place at the counter and thought of her often while he waited to see her
again.