MY DAUGHTER’S NAME is Tabitha but sometimes I say Plumjam, Pebblesweet…even now; she’s a high school senior. “Where do you get that stuff?” shouted Christopher once. “Pebblesweet!” Christopher is a man I’ve loved for twenty years—when I’ve thought of him—but I don’t sleep with Christopher. My husband, Parker Stillman, has gone to bed with other women. (Yes, I knew. My anguish fastened on trivialities: Who heard Parker’s rare jokes?) Now Parker wouldn’t do what he couldn’t discuss with Tabitha. Their voices rise through the heating ducts in our mellow, woodworky old house, which Parker and I bought last year, recklessly, with all our money.
Something is wrong with Tabitha’s eyes. Our son, Brian, discovered it when he tested everybody’s visual perception for a psychology assignment. When Tabitha covered her left eye, straight lines swooped sideways no matter what Brian was demonstrating. “I have a warp in my right eye,” she said.
The doctor asked if she’d stared at eclipses. She hadn’t. She has macular degeneration. I thought only old people got that, but it turns out they get the “wet” kind and this is the “dry” kind. “The wet kind sounds sloppy,” said Tab. It may get worse; it won’t go away. Tabitha says reading is peculiar lately; light hurts. She has special glasses.
“What’s it like exactly?”
She looked up at me from the Times. “I shall look out the window,” she said. “I shall close my left eye and curve the telephone pole. Curve, telephone pole! I have curved the telephone pole.” She bowed.
I cannot curve the telephone pole. “But the street around it, Plumjam, that looks right?”
“Unless I look directly at something straight. I can curve the edge of that roof if you want me to.”
“I want to straighten the telephone pole!” I said. “Or at least I want to see it your way.”
“What a mother,” said Tabitha.
Perhaps you are picturing white people saying these things, but we are light-skinned black women, Tabitha and I. Parker is white. Brian has very light skin and describes himself as “Other.”
Eyes were the main topic here, besides college applications and financial aid forms, when Christopher (a big man, light brown skin, hair getting gray) came for the weekend in the middle of January, a wintry January. I had first met Christopher when he and Parker shared an apartment on Chapel Street. Chris was a graduate student in political science at Yale and Parker was in the school of architecture. Parker is a New Haven architect, but Christopher lives in San Francisco and writes for magazines—mostly, he says, The Pig Farmer’s Newsletter and Modern Sewage, but now and then I spot his name and read something cranky and interesting about politics or city life.
When Christopher came for the weekend, Tabitha was finishing applications to Oberlin and Vassar. Both had to be postmarked on the Saturday. Brian was thinking hockey, and Parker had promised to drive him and some teammates to a game on Saturday. Christopher came on Friday in time for dinner. “I’m writing two good stories,” he said. “‘Lying’ and ‘Dying.’” Parker had cooked Indian food. “Suicide,” Christopher said, and swallowed. “In India—”
“Lying down or telling falsehoods?” said Tab.
“Falsehoods. I’m here to interview a grand old liar at Yale.”
“There are a number of grand old liars at Yale,” said Parker.
“This is the prince of lies,” Christopher said. “Retired philosophy professor. Wrote a great book. I’m lucky to get him before he drops dead.”
“Then you could interview him for the other story,” Brian said.
The prince of lies was named Markowitz and he lived not far from our house, in a richer direction. The interview was Saturday afternoon, and Parker was taking our only car to the hockey game, but Christopher could walk to the professor’s house.
“It’s supposed to stay cold,” I said.
“The cold is interesting,” said Christopher.
The temperature had been close to zero or below for several days—unusual for us. I didn’t mind, but I was shy with this serious weather, conscious of when I went outside and who knew I was going. I told Chris I’d walked to work twice when it was zero.
When I said work, Christopher remembered what I’d been worried about at the office the last time he’d come. “Did you have to shoot anyone?” he said now.
“One.”
“What happened? Tell me the whole story.” I will love any man who says that, but now Tabitha asked about Christopher’s article on suicide. “Well, I read one of those dumb pieces about depression,” he said. “Send Grandma to a shrink if she’s sad because Grandpa has cancer. One of those pieces. I can’t leave them alone. The worst thing is checklists. If somebody prints a checklist, I have to test myself.”
We were all suckers for checklists. Brian went for his psychology textbook, full of checklists. Christopher kept talking. “So I read the symptoms of depression, and one of them is ‘suicidal thoughts.’ I mean, it’s a symptom of depression to think about committing suicide. Well, I don’t know about you, but every week I think about suicide. It didn’t say try it. It just said think of it.”
“You think about suicide every week?” I said. “You think about it as a topic or you think about doing it?”
“Doing it. I think, I wouldn’t have to write this if I were dead. How shall I kill myself? For example, I’d never jump out a window. Never.”
I was clearing the table but I stopped. “Every week?”
“Is this a story about putting a plastic bag over your head?” said Parker. “Dr. Kevorkian?”
“No, no, I’m not writing about committing suicide, just thinking of it.”
“I know what you mean,” said Tabitha.
“No, you don’t!” Parker said, and he almost shouted at her. “You’re the happiest little person I’ve ever heard of. You don’t have suicidal thoughts.”
“I think Chris is right,” said Tab. “I think everybody does.”
“If I were a science-fiction writer,” said Christopher, “I’d do this as fiction. A universe in which you could die just by deciding to. If you could lie down and cross your arms on your chest…” And Christopher lay down on our dining room floor, though it has no carpet. He closed his eyes.
“Watch out for splinters,” said Parker.
“Say if I could make up my mind and just die,” said Christopher from the floor. “Would the death rate go way up? Isn’t it because it’s trouble that most of us don’t do it?”
“No,” I said.
“Anyway,” Christopher said, sitting up and opening his eyes and looking at me, “I want to find out whether everyone thinks this, or just me,” but now Brian brought in his textbook and began showing Christopher checklists. They sat on the floor together. “This is how I diagnosed Tab,” said Brian, showing Chris a vision test he’d used.
“What’s wrong with Tabitha?” said Christopher.
“I’m a macular degenerate,” said Tabitha.
Parker explained.
“Is this some tragedy and you guys didn’t tell me?” Christopher said.
“It’s not a tragedy,” said Tabitha. “It’s not what makes me think of dying, if that’s what you mean.”
“What makes you think of dying, baby?” said Parker, and I stopped stacking plates and sat down next to him and touched his shoulder, watching my husband think the thought he was thinking.
THAT NIGHT I went to bed early and heard Parker and Christopher talking through the heating ducts. “The military,” Parker said.
“Of course the military,” said Christopher. “I have something so good—I have found someone who knew about the bombing of Cambodia.”
“Unless he’s lying.”
“Right, but that’s different, a different impulse. Lying to Sherry is creative—but bad. People who lie institutionally do not feel guilty. This is in the book. Markowitz’s book.”
“But if I tell Sherry a lie…”
I am Sherry.
“I think in some families everyone lies, and in others nobody ever does.”
“I think I do lie to her,” Parker said more quietly, “because when I had a reason to, it was easy.”
“When you were fooling around,” said Christopher, and I tried to stop listening. I had told Chris myself, but I didn’t know Parker had told him, too.
“Well,” said Parker.
“But what about the children?” Christopher was saying. “Would you lie to keep them from pain? Say you knew Tabitha’s eyes are worse than she knows—”
“How could I know that?”
“I don’t know. Doctor confides the result of some test. Would you tell her?”
“They’re her eyes,” Parker said.
“You mean you would?”
“I can’t imagine the scenario you’re inventing,” Parker said. “I can’t imagine knowing more than Tabitha about her own eyes.”
“I’d lie,” said Christopher.
“I don’t think lying is ever right,” said Parker.
“But you lie to Sherry. You don’t know what you think!” said Christopher with a laugh.
“Hush. I didn’t say that.”
“I remember you lying to Sherry,” said Christopher. “I remember the occasion. It had to do with apples.”
“Do you have to talk so loud?” Parker said.
IN THE MORNING Parker and Brian left before I got up. I had breakfast alone with Christopher, and I didn’t ask him about the conversation I’d overheard, though I wanted to. It’s always that way when he comes: emotion at breakfast. Maybe that’s what I love. “If Tab doesn’t wake up and write those applications,” I said, “we’ll be walking to Brewery Street in the dark.”
“The post office?” said Christopher. I explained that Tabitha had until four to mail the applications in the neighborhood. Downtown, the last pickup was at six. But she had until eight P.M. if we went to the main post office on Brewery Street.
“Won’t Parker be back with the car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can’t we fax them?”
“Oh, the whole world isn’t like you journalists,” I said. “Some of us still use those blue mailboxes.”
“Show me the rest of your new house,” he said, and touched my cheek. We stood at the window in Brian’s room, looking out, and Christopher touched my back and traced the line of my spine through my sweater, starting at my neck and stopping halfway down my back. Then my shoulders. “Here you are in Connecticut, owning your bones,” he said.
“What was that conversation you had with Parker last night?” I said.
“I’ll tell you sometime,” he said, patting my shoulder. It’s as far as we go.
Tabitha woke up about ten and panicked by eleven. Vassar wanted to know what books she’d read lately and what they’d meant to her. “A Guide to Low Vision,” she snapped. We tried to remember books. She’d read Wuthering Heights and Paule Marshall.
“Wuthering Heights…” said Christopher, coming unbidden into her room, where I was trying to help. He’d put on a tie for his interview. “Feel like walking me there, Sherry?”
I wore a woolen hat and tied a scarf over it. It was five below. Snow had fallen a week before and it lay in gray, apparently permanent heaps. In the cold air, we didn’t talk. We were so wrapped up, we could bump each other, and we did. Christopher stepped gingerly on the ice. He was nervous.
In front of the professor’s house I socked his arm and turned back. I had been cold but now I was warm. Whenever I passed a mailbox I checked for the last pickup, but most of them had no Saturday pickup at all. We could call a taxi….
“I don’t want to call a taxi,” said Tabitha, at home. “Don’t you sort of want to walk to Brewery Street in the cold with me?”
I sort of did. She and I could do anything. “Plumjam, just fill them out!” I said. “Isn’t the downtown post office far enough for you?”
“Sure,” she said. “I forgot about it.”
Before I’d taken off my boots, Christopher came back. “He wouldn’t see me,” he said. “The bastard wouldn’t see me.”
“Did you have an appointment?”
“Of course.” He sounded angry with me. “His wife died.”
“You mean, today? Oh my god.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know when.”
“Suicide!” said Tabitha brightly, from the stairs.
“I don’t think it was suicide,” he said coldly.
“I’m not making light of it!” she said.
“Maybe he was lying,” I said, worried that they’d fight—drawing his anger from my daughter to myself. “Maybe he never had a wife.” Christopher stared at me; then he did laugh.
TABITHA MISSED THE four o’clock deadline at the neighborhood mailbox. She was sure she’d be done for the six o’clock pickup downtown, but she wanted to send along a short story she’d written, and she had to print it out twice on her computer. Her printer is slow. I typed address labels on my typewriter while Tabitha and Christopher hovered over the printer, but we missed the six o’clock pickup anyway.
“I can’t think with him in the house,” she said when we met in the kitchen, looking for crackers. “Why did you let him come?”
“Of course we let him come.”
“Right.” She hurried from the room.
I lingered and Christopher came in. “It’s still below zero,” he said.
“If Parker comes after we leave,” I said, “send him to Brewery Street to rescue us.”
“But I’m going with you.”
“You are? Why?”
“To keep you company. And to help fend off criminals.”
“Outdoor crime drops when it’s zero,” I said.
Tab finished at six-fifteen and came down with her two fat manila envelopes. “My mother and I are walking to Brewery Street,” she said to Christopher from the staircase, “and I’d appreciate it if you could keep from telling us how crazy that is.”
“It’s not crazy,” said Christopher. “It’s picturesque. I didn’t know they still had post offices. I thought everything was faxes and e-mail.”
“Stop it,” said Tabitha.
“Do you mind if I come along?” he said. He’d been walking around in his big stocking feet and he was pulling on his boots again. I didn’t think Tabitha would let him come, but she did. We left a note for Parker.
We walked on ice like black iron. Setting out, I was frightened. The cold air might damage Tabitha’s eyes, I thought wildly, though it wouldn’t. She walked ahead of me in a parka with the hood up and a scarf over her mouth and big mittens, gripping the two manila envelopes, to which we’d affixed all the stamps in the house.
I walked second and Christopher came last. His voice sounded from behind me. “What’s the short story about?”
The air felt empty, not cold but roomy. Tabitha turned to look at Christopher and pulled the scarf around her mouth down a little. “My story?”
“Mmm.” He’d stripped the perforated edges off the sides of the computer paper.
“A girl who works in a frozen-yogurt store,” said Tabitha.
“I love frozen yogurt.”
“This high school girl works in a frozen-yogurt store,” said Tabitha, “and a man comes in, and he gives her money. First a quarter, and it’s like a tip, except this isn’t the sort of place where people leave tips?”
“Uh-huh,” said Christopher.
“And then ten dollars and twenty, and she realizes he wants her to sleep with him, in exchange for the money.”
“Does she?”
“She goes to his apartment. She wants to return the money, but she doesn’t have enough, and she sleeps with him and becomes a prostitute.”
Tabitha was silent and none of us spoke for a moment. “I worked in a store like that,” she said then. She turned to me. “Don’t worry, it’s not true.” She’d never shown me the story. “I didn’t let Pekko see it, though.”
“Who’s Pekko?” said Christopher.
“My boss.”
“I knew someone called Pekko when I lived here in the old days,” Christopher said.
“I’m afraid he might think it’s true,” Tabitha said. “He thinks I’m pretty innocent. I don’t want him imagining I was turning tricks out of his yogurt store.”
We had reached Olive Street. We had to cross the railroad bridge, where nobody had shoveled and we could hardly scramble over the snow.
“What does Pekko look like?” Christopher said.
“He’s big,” said Tabitha. “White. He has a long white beard.”
“I think he had a beard,” said Christopher.
“When did you know him?” I said.
“Maybe I better not tell you,” said Christopher.
“Now you have to tell me,” I said. But it was blocks and blocks before he did.
“At the end of my story,” said Tabitha, after a long silence, “the girl is planning to kill herself.”
“Heavy story,” said Christopher.
“Yes,” I said.
“The colleges won’t think it’s true, will they?” said Tab.
“Of course not,” I said.
“You mean it’s not true?” said Christopher, with mock incredulity.
“The store is real,” Tabitha said.
“How does the girl plan to kill herself?” said Christopher.
“She hasn’t decided.”
“Now, lying down in snow is a good way of committing suicide,” Christopher said. “If we all lie down right now, that will do it.”
“I think maybe the police will find us,” said Tabitha. “Or Dad. Dad will come and save us.”
And then Christopher told us the story.
Years and years ago, when Parker and Christopher shared the apartment over a store on Chapel Street and Parker and I were falling in love, Christopher got into a conversation in a coffee shop with a man called Pekko. Pekko had dropped out of graduate school or college. He’d been in Vietnam and had turned against the war. He had a car. “Want to pick apples?” he asked Chris.
Christopher was from the crowded part of Long Island and he had no idea you could pick apples. He thought all fruit was picked by oppressed migrant laborers, and people like him merely boycotted it, or marched outside supermarkets on picket lines. Pekko did plenty of marching, but he explained that he also liked to drive into the country on a nice fall day and pay to pick apples in an orchard. They went on a Saturday, and Parker went along.
They loved picking apples. They picked bushels—mostly McIntoshes, Christopher thought he remembered, some Jonathans, some Delicious. Pekko sang blues songs while picking and the two graduate students joined in. They paid for their apples and loaded them into the trunk, but now Pekko said he was tired, and tossed Parker the car keys. Pekko went to sleep in the back seat and Parker drove home.
Parker got lost, and became tense because he was confused. Suddenly thinking he knew where he was, he made a turn without signaling and caused an accident, banging into an old car driven by a middle-aged black man. Both cars were slightly damaged. Pekko woke up and Christopher told him what had happened. Parker paced nervously until the police came.
The white policeman gave the black driver a ticket and let Parker go, and Parker said nothing. (Neither did the black man.) Furious, Pekko called the cop a bigot and demanded that he give Parker the ticket, but the cop said he was crazy. “This is your buddy,” he said.
Parker paced for days, Christopher said. “How could I let the cop give the ticket to the black man?” he asked Christopher over and over again.
“What did you say to him?” I said now, as we walked on the ice and snow decades later.
“I said, ‘Next time you’ll know better.’”
“You decided to forgive him?”
“I don’t know what I decided,” said Christopher. “Here I am.”
“And here I am,” I said.
“Well, he didn’t tell you, of course,” Christopher said. “He lied to you. He kept saying to me, ‘If I tell her any of it, I’ll tell her all of it, and she’ll never speak to me again.’ He told you somebody gave us the apples. Don’t you remember?”
I remembered apples. I made applesauce and apple pie in their rudimentary kitchen. They didn’t have a vegetable peeler and I left the peel on, not knowing if that was all right. I loved Parker’s love of the apple pie.
Christopher finished the story and Tabitha and I were silent. We reached the bottom of Olive Street and turned onto Water Street, a dark, silent street made harmless by cold. No one was out but us. We carried Tabitha’s applications down Water Street, under the highway, and onto Brewery Street. In the light of a streetlamp, I looked over at Tabitha. She was looking at me and her eyes were dark and startled. I took her arm, and then I took Christopher’s arm. “You shouldn’t have told us,” said Tabitha.
I held on to both of them as we reached the post office. We stepped inside carefully, because the floor was wet, said, “Ta-da!” and approached the out-of-town slot. “Wait!” I almost said, but Tabitha was shrugging and mailing the applications, and she did a restrained dance step in her boots so we’d know she wasn’t scared of the adult life she was beginning—it seemed—at just that moment. Then she led the way outside. But I don’t know what she was thinking or seeing, looking down the icy street with her oddball eyes—where Parker’s car was just coming into view, coming to rescue us and drive us home.