THE DAY OF REST
Sunday Emily drove the Olds to church. Both she and Arlene preferred the early service, and it was a pleasure to guide the long car through the gray, empty streets, knowing the Times would be waiting for her when she returned.
The congregation was all regulars, mostly older, so small they took up just the first few rows. Calvary was grand, a mock-Gothic pile, and to save energy, only the lamps that hung directly above them shone, the wings and rear pews lost in the gloom. The night before had been freezing, and the stone held the cold, the space beneath the soaring vault too vast to heat. The Altar Guild had decorated the sanctuary with fresh pine boughs, scenting the chilly air. Emily kept her coat buttoned and watched the tapers waver and smoke. As a child she’d loved the pageantry of Advent, the delicious month of buildup to Christmas. Now, having outgrown most of her earthly desires, she thought she understood the longing for Christ’s arrival.
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” Father Lewis intoned, letting the meaning settle, when there was no need with this crowd, naturally drawn to last things. Emily saw the words as a promise. From beginning to end, her life was safely contained in Him, as was Henry’s, and the children’s. In this way she could believe in eternity, even as she imagined death as an endless darkness.
Each week she came to be renewed by the music and the simple eloquence of the liturgy. With Arlene she processed to the rail and crossed one palm atop the other to receive the body and the blood, and afterward knelt at her seat, eyes closed, her forehead resting on her clasped hands, at peace. The recessional was boisterous, the organ triumphant, the bass vibrating the air. She shook Father Lewis’s hand and tugged her gloves on.
Outside, the world was bright and cold, and as she drove Arlene home, the spell dissipated, and she was left with the day. She would start on the crossword. Margaret would call. She needed to take the chicken out of the freezer. It all seemed so meager that she thought, fleetingly, of dropping Arlene off and coming back for the eleven o’clock.
At home she put on Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and brewed a pot of tea before going through the Post-Gazette. Rufus aligned himself with the radiator so he could keep an eye on her. She separated the glossy flyers from the news, making a neat pile at her feet, then slid out the classifieds and real estate sections. She clipped her coupons and set them safely aside before taking the pile into the kitchen and adding it to the recycling.
Stripped of its advertising, the Post-Gazette was criminally thin. While she relied on their local coverage, and still loved the funnies, she was glad she had the Times to keep her company. The Arts section or Book Review alone could rescue an afternoon. Rationed correctly, the puzzle would last her all week. She and Louise used to compare their progress, or lack thereof, commiserating or crying foul when the editor asked too much of them. Even now, when she caught on to the pun that unlocked a puzzle, she wondered if Louise had gotten it, when of course Louise was beyond the reach of home delivery.
The news was old. A bomb had gone off near a mosque in Baghdad. A teenager had been stabbed at a party in Garfield. Alcoa—which Henry and now she owned a fair amount of—was cutting jobs. The Steelers were playing Cleveland. It was supposed to snow tomorrow, just a dusting. She made her usual survey of the obituaries, and was relieved to find no one she knew. She noted those close to her age and younger, but refused to brood on them. She didn’t want to be one of those old ladies obsessed with death, hearing it in every tick of the clock and creak of the floorboards, as if it were prowling around the house like a burglar. There was no need to hurry things. She would be among their number soon enough.
She dispatched with the Post-Gazette and pressed on through the Times, pouring herself another cup of tea. Rufus lobbied her to go outside and then did nothing but stand there like a cow and sniff the air. She gave him a treat anyway. She let the CD repeat, and then, when she’d wrapped her legs in an afghan and taken up her lucky pen, let it repeat again.
Starting was always hard, but rewarding too, completing the easy clichés and catchphrases before decoding the coyer clues. She was pleased that she could still retrieve the names of poets and rivers and films, and was nimble enough to hold the competing possibilities of intersection in her mind until the right combination fit. “Nigeria’s neighbor” was GABON. “Steakhouse shunner” was VEGAN.
“‘Capacious canine,’” she asked Rufus, “who does that sound like?”
When the grandfather clock chimed one, she stopped for lunch—Lipton chicken noodle soup and a turkey sandwich. She put on Schütz’s Story of the Nativity and ate in the breakfast nook, looking out on the backyard. The weatherman was a day late. Wisps of snow floated down like ash. The birdfeeders were low, and when she’d had enough of her sandwich, she took her crusts outside and scattered them on the window ledge, then sat with a cup of coffee and some Nilla wafers and watched a pair of chickadees feast.
That Margaret hadn’t called nagged at her—really, that she hadn’t bothered to call on Thanksgiving—but Emily resisted the urge to pick up the phone. All Margaret had to say was that she’d booked her flights. Was that too much to ask? Behold the handmaid of the Lord, the chorus rejoiced in the living room, but, as she sat there with the dregs of her cup, a napkin crumpled in one hand, a feeling of inertia took her. The day was half over and she’d gotten nothing done.
Running the dishes didn’t count, or refilling the feeders, taking the single chicken breast from the freezer and baring it to the air. They were just ways of procrastinating, putting off the tedious job of writing her Christmas cards. She was using a picture Kenneth had taken of the grandchildren at Sam’s high school graduation, Sam in his gown, the other three smiling in their spring best. It was a tradition, each grandchild getting a chance to be the center of attention. He was the last, the baby of the group. Next year she’d have to find a different shot. Friday she’d made a special trip to the post office to buy holiday stamps, so there was no excuse, and still she roamed about the downstairs, distracted, as if she’d forgotten something.
Everything she needed was in her secretary. She gathered her address book and the stamps, the bag with the cards and a pair of permanent markers she’d bought strictly for this purpose, and established herself at the dining room table, setting out her materials left to right in an assembly line.
She did the grandchildren’s first, adding, All my love, Grandma, to the printed greeting, and was immediately dismayed by her handwriting. Since winning a plaster of Paris bust of Shakespeare for penmanship in the sixth grade, she’d prided herself on her cursive. In the last few years it had deteriorated, become shaky, her hand tremulous, as if she suffered from a nervous disease. It may have been the day, the exalted promise of the morning spoiled, but she saw her squiggly letters as more proof that she was bound to lose everything, at least in this world.
Her address book confirmed it, the pages inhabited equally by the living and the dead. Helen Alford had been gone ten years now, yet Emily could bring back the ratty Swarthmore sweatshirt Helen wore to play touch football with Bud and the children Sundays in the park. George and Doris Ballard, who used to carpool to the symphony with them. Conrad and Hilde Barr, who moved to Roanoke. Ida Blair. Judy Burke. Each name called up raucous dinner parties and gin-and-tonics on sunny patios, lazy Saturday afternoons at the swim club, station wagons filled with noisy boys in polyester baseball uniforms. The temptation was to mourn those days, when they were young and busy and alive. As much as Emily missed them, she understood the reason that era seemed so rich—partly, at least—was because it was past, memorialized, the task they’d set themselves of raising families accomplished. The thought of Margaret was enough to remind her that not all of their times had been happy, that, in truth, much of it had been a struggle, one that was far from over, if that was in fact possible. No, probably not. Even after she herself was dead, Margaret would still be battling her, just as, occasionally, Emily still fought with her own mother, both guiltily and, being eternally wronged, self-righteously. Though everything faded, nothing was ever done.
Based on last year’s tally, she’d ordered a hundred cards and envelopes. So far she’d completed twelve. In the living room, her puzzle waited, and the book review, the arts section. She could put on Bach’s Mass in B minor, pull the afghan over her and sink deep into Henry’s chair. Falling asleep while the sky outside colored and then dimmed appealed to her. It was Sunday, after all.
The notion, like the temptation to give in to nostalgia, was fleeting, and impractical. If she quit, the cards would just be waiting for her tomorrow, ruining two days instead of one. It was her job. No elves would magically sneak in overnight and do them for her. It would take her hours, and they’d probably look awful, but, honestly, what else did she have to do? She took an envelope from the stack, found the next living person in her address book and kept going, pressing down hard so the words would be legible.