CHAPTER 38

Walking to CVS in the Rain

Soon after they got back from the trip Leda needed to run to CVS to buy paper plates because their dishwasher had broken. These are the kinds of things we do all the time, she thought, loosely associating the errand with every flat tire of her life, every lightbulb that went out without warning, as every lightbulb is wont to do. It was raining, but she took the opportunity to walk anyway. CVS was one of the few places close enough to her home that she could walk to now that she lived in the suburbs. Suburban life had proved to be relaxing and deafening all at once. She feared rape so much less, and yet the solitude seemed to prescribe a constant sense of imminent rape. Certainly she didn’t think this explicitly, but late at night as she was dead asleep or drifting into sleep she’d find herself all of a sudden having a sense that someone was standing beside the bed. John told her that she would often wake him in a panic, asking him if someone was there.

“Is that a man?” she’d say as she’d point to a pile of laundry.

“No, Leda. It’s not.”

“Are you sure? I think it’s a man.”

“You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep,” he’d say.

Leda never remembered these conversations. She’d only remember herself staring at something standing still, big and bulky, shadowed and beside her, so sure of what it was, so sure that somehow a man was there in their home, just watching her. How can you be so sure of what the laundry is in the night? she thought.

She stopped for a moment to tie her shoe. When she was a child, tying her shoes was one of the few things she’d taken forever to learn. It was shoe tying and bike riding that had held her up. When she’d first learned to ride a bike she was ten years old and determined not to be the only child anymore who didn’t have a bike. It was a taxing secret to keep from all her friends.

“I can’t ride a bike,” she’d have to confess in the cafeteria or standing in gym class, or wading through an aboveground pool. The children, especially those who had invested considerable pride in their bike-riding aptitude, never ceased to take the opportunity to make their dear friend feel worse about herself.

“What?! You can’t ride a bike?? I’ve been riding since I was four.”

“I just never learned. I don’t know why.”

“That’s so weird. I could do it since I was four!!”

“I know.”

“You’re weird.”

“I know.”

For her tenth birthday she asked her parents for a bike. Her dad helped her assemble it on the driveway after she’d opened the big box it came in. She helped turn screws and handed him handlebars and wheels one piece at a time until the mess of the bike scrambled over the driveway became a solid single thing, and she thought that she almost felt more exhilarated at its deconstruction than its construction.

It took her about forty-five minutes to learn how to ride. Pretty soon she was flying over the concrete sidewalks, no different from any other suburban kid. It surprised her how easy it was, how something that had plagued her so viciously was over and done with just like that. All those kids had made her feel so inferior for so long, and for what exactly?

And has it changed? Are we not all wishing we could ride bikes before everyone else? She thought of a girl she’d known in college who cried because she was still a virgin.

“It’s not all that great,” another girl said in consolation.

Leda remembered herself feeling a sense of urgency over losing her virginity too. It seemed like being a virgin was some great offense to adulthood, but then you had sex and it was like you never were a virgin. Nothing, no big deal. A life milestone you obsessed over for absolutely no reason.

Then there was Anne, who in the last few months had started to panic about being single and not finding “the one” yet. Leda felt sorry for her.

“It will happen!” she’d text. But she knew Anne didn’t want to hear it coming from her. Anne wanted to get married and have kids. She didn’t want her married friend with a kid to hand out any kind of courageous advice. How cruel it all is. Fertility and online dating, the living antithesis of each other.

Leda thought again of being on the plane and her epiphany about herself not wanting to write anymore. It made her upset so she shut her eyes tight for a moment and tried hard to think of something else, something far away, blissful. Nothing blissful came to mind, but she did remember that past September she and John had found a pigeon tipped upside down with its neck bent back. At first when she saw it she thought it was dead, but then she saw it blink at her. Its eye seemed to say something powerful and fluid and indistinguishable. Leda had watched a video online only the day before about what to do if you find a hurt bird. What had compelled her to watch it in the first place seemed virtually inextricable from this moment. It was as if something that existed in the stare between them had touched her, sent her to that video, and then on to this moment, this place, this salvation.

“Put on these gloves and turn it over,” she said to John.

She was nervous to touch the bird herself. John had once rescued a dove as a young boy, a story he often recalled whenever it was appropriate. “I rescued a dove once,” he’d say, and because of that she felt it was better he would be the one to move the bird. He already knew what lightness it bore; he wouldn’t spook at a sudden wing flap or the complicated nature of a talon. When they put the bird upright it walked a few steps but fell back over and landed once again with its neck upside down. Things looked grim, but Leda didn’t want to leave it like that. She started looking up phone numbers of bird rescues. In the meantime, people on the street passing by quickly assessed the situation and would throw their two cents in: “broken wing,” “rat poison,” “probably dying,” they’d say. Whenever they’d come to see that she and John were planning on helping the bird they’d become oddly combative.

“If it has a broken wing they’ll just put it down.”

“There’s nothing you can do for rat poison.”

“It’ll probably die either way.”

Why do these people care if we help the bird? Is it really too much for them to take that someone else is kinder than they are? What they should really be saying is, “Please let it die on the street so I can feel all right about my laziness,” she thought.

They found a rescue organization and drove the bird over. Leda held it on her lap in a paper box with a towel over the top.

“I think it’s a girl,” she said to John, and lifted the edge of the towel to be sure that the bird had enough air.

The rescue people took the pigeon and seemed to think that it would be okay. They nodded and smiled, and she and John made a donation of thirty dollars. Not enough to cover the bird’s care, most likely, but they still felt good about it.

A few days later Leda called to check up on the pigeon’s progress.

“I’m so sorry,” the lady on the phone said. “It didn’t make it.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” Leda tried to think of something consoling to say but nothing really worked. She finally settled on: “At least she died peacefully.”

“Yes,” the lady said. “Hopefully next time the outcome will be better.”

Next time? Leda thought.

Making her way into CVS, Leda noticed a man standing out front with his phone. As she walked past, she vaguely hoped he’d notice her. It was rare that she’d be walking around without either John or Annabelle, and these opportunities felt like the only few she’d have left for men to give her attention. Why she wanted their attention in this useless, fleeting, completely superficial way she wasn’t sure, but what she was sure about was that the older she was getting, the less men looked at her, and it bothered her more than she’d even admit to herself. What? You pass thirty and that’s it? It’s over? she’d think whenever a cute guy at a coffee shop handed her a latte with the same empty expression that he gave to anyone else. My power is going, going, gone. She thought momentarily of the witch from The Wizard of Oz: I’m melting, I’m melting.

At CVS she bought the paper plates and a bag of Skittles. The girl who rang her up smiled a lot and chatted about nothing in a fast, breathless way. For whatever reason the interaction emboldened her, and on her way out of the store she smiled at the guy who wouldn’t look at her. He still didn’t look at her and she thought, Pretty soon the only men who will notice me will be the imaginary men by my bedside. By now it had stopped raining. Birds bathed in nearby puddles and she thought maybe she’d make lasagna that night, an ambition that was meritless in the context of having a broken dishwasher. I hope there’s a heaven for that pigeon. Her mind drifted to herself on her bike as a child, whizzing over suburban sidewalks, feeling accomplished and anticlimactic all at once. These are the things you do, she thought, ride bikes, tell time, save birds, and fix dishwashers.

On her walk home she’d pick a daisy for Annabelle, and six years later she’d make a daisy chain for Annabelle to wear in her hair; many years after that, as an old grandmother lying in bed, she’d open a book to a daisy pressed between the pages and remember her mother, who cut a fresh bouquet each spring. How unaware she was of the little pieces of her life that fit together seamlessly and without touching. It was as spectacular as anything, really, as little as it was anything at all.