I had a puzzle book as a kid. One puzzle had two drawings, apparently the same, and the task was to list twenty things that were different between them. I used to stare at the drawings, and at first I couldn’t see a darned thing that was different. Then I spotted one thing, then another, till I had fourteen or fifteen of the twenty. As I noticed each one, the difference – previously unapparent to me – became glaring. How could I not have noticed that the four bars on the gate had become five, that the little girl’s shoelace had come undone?
That’s what it was like last summer, the first and last summer of Arlene, with its gradual revelations. Mostly, I feel that I’ve run like quicksilver through my years, but for those few months it was different. For a time, life was subtle, willing to share its innuendos with me. The longer I live, the more it seems that I’ve forgotten how to be subtle. We’re not living in a subtle age, I suppose. We deal in bright sunlight or abject darkness. There’s no shade, no shadow, no ambiguity. Everything is what it appears to be. It isn’t, as we know.
It was past the midpoint of August. Next door, Franky was building his dream, or rebuilding someone else’s. I watched from the sitting-room window as Marcie picked the flowers. The weather was grey and still, as it always seems to be on this day, even when it isn’t. We don’t have much of a garden and too little time to tend what we do have. Some flowers blossom, and other flowers, wild flowers, grow in the patch of land that separates us from Mr Hammond’s property. That day, I could see flax there, and black-eyed Susans. There were more than enough flowers for two small bouquets.
Marcie selected them with care. Each bloom would have a considered place in its vase. What had been so carelessly lost would be carefully recalled. The harvest took twenty minutes, and they were small bouquets. No flower was discarded, once picked. Each flower was precious. Sometimes it took a minute or two for Marcie to select the next one. Once or twice she looked toward the window where I was watching behind lace curtains. She couldn’t see me, but she knew I was there, because I was always there on this day.
When the flowers had been assembled, Marcie returned to the house, to the kitchen. She trimmed them with a paring knife and arranged them in two vases that had been a wedding present from my Great-uncle Alvin, and which had now acquired this purpose and no other. I watched this process too. When it was complete, when each stalk occupied its proper place, Marcie placed the vases on the sideboard. Then she went to the cupboard and took out the photograph, the one that was present on this day and on no other, and placed that on the sideboard also. She stood in contemplation and I stood beside her, my arm around her.
We did not speak. There was nothing to say. There never had been anything to say. All words were inadequate. We who talked freely, without premeditation, at other times, did not talk at this time. Once, perhaps, one or other of us might have inclined our head, the trace element of an ill-remembered ritual. We no longer did that. The ritual was hollow and what it symbolized no longer existed for us. Many things did not exist.
Sometime in the next few weeks, I would say that I felt like a break and I’d go fishing for a while. Before that, Marcie would go to Colorado for a few days. That would be announced in a few days’ time. The departures were assumed and would not be discussed. She would go, and I would go, separately and at separate times, and then it would be the fall, the leaves would turn to gold, and life would resume.
It was in Colorado that it happened. At summer camp in Colorado, fifteen years ago. They weren’t meant to go to there; we had other plans for that vacation. Those plans fell through, and Roseanne and Bobby had friends who were going to the camp, and they begged to go too, and there were a couple of vacancies, so we said yes. What parent wouldn’t say yes? It was an accident. No one was to blame. No one was ever to blame in those days. Now, fingers would be pointing everywhere. Yes, the staff could have been more vigilant. Yes, the driver was going too fast. We all drove too fast. We decided then that we weren’t going to steep our souls in vinegar. We accepted then that it was one of those things.
Still, I don’t like August. It isn’t the sun so much, or the warmth. Those are things I like, on their own, shorn of their trappings. Nor is it the dappled sunlight in the garden, or the gold in the grain, or the dark green velvet of the leaves on the trees. These also are things I like, on their own, shorn of their trappings.
I do not like any part of summer: the season that recreates our innocence before destroying it. The season that is the repository of each false promise made to mankind, the worm within the apple, the darkness at the heart of the candle’s flame. I do not like summer anywhere, even in places that are made for summer. I do not like beaches and parasols and cotton candy. I do not like summer camps.
I do not like the roads in summer, or the fast cars that bestride them. I do not like the conspiracy between the car and the road. I do not like the promise they make: to take you somewhere, to lead you somewhere. The promise of a perfection that hauls you forward, mile by mile, tempting you toward a beacon that does not exist, a mirage in a miasma, tempting you toward non-existence. May the gods preserve us from the idea of perfection.
I am a placid man. Everybody says that. And Marcie is a placid woman, as far as a woman can ever be placid. We wallow in our placidity. We are admired for it. But beneath the flat metal of our road, there is a rage. A rage that simmers and bubbles and boils in the crust of our world. A rage that rails against the deceits of summer and its trail of broken dreams. Our road is strewn with dreams discarded. Sometimes one of us suggests making a change to our lives. The other always finds a reason not to make the change, and the one who made the suggestion is always relieved. We go through the motions of life.
So give me the winter instead. Give me the still days of November, settled in mists and remembrances. Give me the chill days of February. Give me branches bare of leaves, and birds emptied of song. Give me roads without their siren calls of immortality. Give me life as it is, not life as it is sold as being. Life is November, and it is February, and it is the times between. Life is the unassuming months.
There’s a time to be born and a time to die, the good book says. I can’t remember when the last time was for borning, a while ago now, but August last year seemed, once again, to be the time for dying, although it was the height of summer and the leaves were a goodly green on the trees.
Mr Maflin down at the hardware store dropped dead one Saturday night after putting bolts on the door, like he’d done many thousand times before, and did now for the last time. Mrs George, who’d been my teacher in kindergarten, slipped away soon after. I’d thought she was eighty when she taught me. Turned out she was eighty-one when she died. She lived a long time in that year.
Then there was Great-uncle Alvin, and he was a hundred. My mom and dad were dead. My grandma, Alvin’s oldest sister, was long dead. Alvin went on and on. He had lived in a home, a little way out of town, for fifteen years or more. He was a small man, wiry and strong. As he’d got older, he’d gotten smaller and wirier still, so that by the end he was like a double-concentrate version of himself. A stock cube of Alvin.
I would visit him once a month or so. His body was a sack of bones by the end; he couldn’t see and he couldn’t hear, but his mind was clear. At least it was clear on most things. One or two sectors had gone awry, such as believing that Marcie was called Roseanne. He’d started calling her by that name a few years earlier. To begin with, we’d correct him, then we stopped. The corrections caused us more heartache than an acceptance of the error. We’d known just the one Roseanne. He started calling me by the wrong name too, but it wasn’t Bobby. He called me Dexter. We didn’t know anyone called Dexter, and nor did he, so far as we knew. Roseanne and Dexter. That’s what we became.
As it happened, I’d seen Alvin the evening before he died. He was his same old self, wanting to know the baseball scores. Because of his hearing, he had a special alarm clock to wake him in the mornings. Last thing before I left, I asked him what time he wanted it set for, like I always did.
‘Don’t bother, Dexter,’ he said. ‘Won’t be needing it tomorrow.’ He died that night.
We’re here for three score years and ten and rising. You’d think that would be enough to work out what most of it’s about. I’ve got some years to go yet, I hope. I don’t know what any of it’s about. I don’t know if Alvin decided to die that night, or if an instinct told him he was going to die, or if he felt like having a lie-in the next morning. Can’t ask him now. Neither can I ask him why he chose to die in August, and whether he delayed it a few days out of consideration for us, or whether these things were coincidences.
Marcie wasn’t around when Alvin died. She was in Colorado. She rang me from there on the day it happened. I withheld the news from her. The time belonged to Bobby and Roseanne, and Alvin would have been a gatecrasher. If that sounds mean, I don’t deny that he deserved a time of his own, but he’d need to wait for it. He could have a different time of his own choosing.
Alvin’s funeral fell on the anniversary of the other one, sixteen years earlier. It was the first time I’d been to a funeral on that day since then. Although I suppose you could say there’s been a funeral every year. This year it was a shared funeral. My thoughts were on the one I was missing, that I always missed.
I mind that it happened in summer. I’ve always minded that. When branches are bare, when twigs snap in two on tombstone streets and frozen leaves shatter beneath the footfall, death belongs. You can’t complain when it comes calling, when it comes to claim its own. Golden days, with crops ripening in the field, and berries there for the picking: these things are the properties of life. They should have been ours, and theirs. We had the pawn ticket in our pocket. We were going to redeem the promise made of dreamland, with hallelujahs and hosannas. Illusion, illusion, it was all illusion. The dream was snatched, and every leafy summer road led nowhere. One step back. Two steps back. I’ve lost count.
What it did, I think, was to neuter us, Marcie and me. Something holds us back all the time. We crouch behind cut-outs of ourselves. We don’t lay our feelings on the line. We take care. We are too aware of how quickly, how unexpectedly, life can unravel. We watch what has happened to others. We see roads that are dyed red with the blood and entrails of elk that have mistimed their leaps between the juggernauts, and we do not leap. We respect the juggernauts of this world. If required, we will worship them.
When we buried Roseanne and Bobby, we buried pieces of ourselves. It’s the other reason Marcie goes to Colorado, in my opinion. She goes to mourn lost pieces of herself. And of me. Human tissue and body parts, scattered on roads I now fear to travel.
When Alvin was buried, I stayed on a while in the cemetery. There was a wake back at his granddaughter’s place, but I held my own wake there. In a corner of the graveyard, a young boy was picking wild flowers. He’d been there throughout the ceremony, keeping a respectful distance. Now he approached, flax and black-eyed Susans in hand.
‘Was that Mr Ballard you were burying?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Did you know him?’
‘No. I heard my pa talking about him.’
‘Pretty flowers,’ I said.
‘My pa tends the graveyard. I always pick flowers when there’s a burial.’
‘To put on the grave?’
‘Yeah,’ said the boy. ‘I like to do that. Sometimes there’s no one here except the minister. It’s not right.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Dexter,’ said the boy.
‘Well, Dexter, why don’t we go put those flowers on Mr Ballard’s grave.’