My husband and I live in a tin can. He calls it the streamline model, the top of the line, the cream of the crop when it comes to moveable homes. Ambulatory and proud of it. That’s Frank’s motto and I guess it makes sense in a way, since he is the only one of six siblings who’s still alive and walking, not to even mention that he spent his whole adult life setting things in concrete—house foundations and driveways, sidewalks that will remain until the New England winters crack them once too often and that new cement outfit that just opened comes in to redo the job.
We’re in Florida now and the only concrete we own are the cinder blocks that keep our wheels from turning. “Can’t we at least put our tin can up on a foundation like everybody else’s?” I asked our first day here. “You know, pretend it’s a real building rather than a souped-up vehicle?” He was in what he called his retirement clothes, pastel golfwear, though he has never touched a club. He was surveying the flat, swampy, treeless land as if this was the Exodus. Even that day, our belongings not even unpacked, I was thinking that if this was the Promised Land, Moses for sure dealt me a bad hand.
“I like knowing we can move at a moment’s notice.” He turned to me then, eyes wide. There was an exuberance about him that I found as foreign as the landscape. He didn’t even look like my husband to me. He looked so small in those lightweight Easter-egg clothes. Where was the concrete dried gray on his knees? The bandanna in his back pocket? The heavy brogans I had decreed must always stay outside of our apartment door? “After all these years, Alice,” he said and took my prize possession from my hands, my mother’s silver tea service that I had carried on my lap all the way from Somerville, Massachusetts, “we’re free to do anything we please.” He kissed me quickly and then ceremoniously carried the silver service inside the tin can. I stood and watched this frail pastel imitation of my husband walk away with my only piece of inheritance and willed myself to wake up. I had never seen such an expansively bright sky, never felt such intense heat. I felt lightheaded, as if my whole world were encapsulated in some kind of vaporous bubble that could pop any given second. I closed my eyes tightly and waited.
“Alice!” Frank called. “Come see!” I opened my eyes, only to find the tin can in place, blinding me, and a swarm of sticky flies clinging to my pale arms. The Promised Land, Armageddon—who knew they’d be one and the same? “We’ve got a view of the driving range,” Frank called in a voice so enthusiastic you might think he was Columbus and I was on board the Pinta. “I’ve for sure got to get some clubs, now.”
There is no one in this neighborhood with naturally dark hair. The woman next door, her skin prunelike from what she refers to as her southern upbringing and what I (when alone with Frank) refer to as her melodramatic melanoma-begging life, has jet black hair that stains the fine teeth of the rattail comb that she uses to part and pincurl her hair. “I can’t imagine living up there where you were,” the woman says every time I see her. Her neck skin is like an accordion. I can’t imagine having hookworm, I think but bite the words quickly. Frank claims every day that he has never been happier, and it makes me feel helplessly sad. It makes me question everything I’ve ever believed in.
“This is the life,” he says after a round of golf lessons and a couple of martinis with the accordion’s malnourished spouse. “You’ve got to give it a chance, Alice,” he pleads. “The change is good for us.” I want to tell him that I don’t like change and never have and that he, the person who has bought me White Shoulders cologne every Christmas for years, should know that better than anyone. But instead, I tell him that I am giving it all a chance, that I am enjoying all this reading time that I never had before. Just this week I read an article about these very bugs that are driving me out of my mind, the ones that cling and stick to your skin whenever you walk outside. The article said that these bugs have created a boom in the market for car-headlight nets.
I’m not sure where the bugs started out, maybe in Canada, maybe on some cool lake in Maine, the White Mountains or the Green Mountains, or around the Cape. The article didn’t discuss their origin, only that they are slowly migrating through Florida; their destination is always south of wherever they are. It’s a very slow migration because their life story is so brief: hatch, have intercourse, produce, and die. It sounds like a normal enough life, except that these bugs only get one turn each at steps two and three. And since they’re chronically on the move, no two steps happen in the same place; there’s no time in their short, migrant lives for settling down.
When Carl was born, Frank stood outside the hospital nursery window for hours on end. Mothers were treated differently in those days; having a baby was like being sick, like having something removed surgically. We took a taxi, Frank’s face turning stark white each time I gripped the front seat and bit my lip. “It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay,” he kept saying, his hands and hair damp as we bumped along the icy streets. I passed out while staring into the pale gray eyes of a nurse and woke with a terrible headache, my whole world disoriented until I remembered where I was and what must have happened. Within minutes Frank was there just like in a scene from a movie, flowers and candy and a fuzzy stuffed bear. Suddenly there was a new picture, a new life, new plans of some day.
Imagine if Frank and I, like the bugs, had dropped dead at that moment. We would have missed everything that we have come to know as our life. Or maybe there wouldn’t have even been a Carl because it took years for us to have him. The article didn’t say what happened to the unsuccessful, the infertile bugs, if there is such an error of nature. You wonder. Do they get to try again or do they just go ahead and die under the false assumption that they were successful?
“Mom, are you okay?” Carl asked when I called to say we were where we were going, only bound by cinder blocks and a doormat that said welcome to the tin can. I could hear his wife, Anne, in the background. “Say hi to Nana and Pop,” she was saying, and each time she spoke, we’d hear the small echo of Joseph, eighteen months old and miles and miles away. They live where Frank and I used to talk about living some day, in Brookline. It was something I never expected to really come about, just as I never really thought we’d end up here. There’s a park across the street from their building with a rose garden and swings for the children. Just a little over a month ago we were sitting there, Frank going on and on about here, this place and how the weather would be so much better, so much healthier for both of us. I was already homesick just listening to him.
“Have you been home?” I asked Carl. “You know, by our building?” I felt like I needed to yell into the receiver. “I’m wondering if they ever fixed that broken windowpane in the front door?”
“Well, I haven’t gotten out . . .”
“What do you mean, our building?” Frank asked. “Give me that phone.” He laughed and took the receiver, Carl’s voice trailing on about how it wasn’t always convenient to just hop in the car or on the train and go. “Your mother is fine,” he said and patted my arm. “Sure. Sure. She’s going to love it once she gives it a chance.” I caught a glimpse of us in the storm door, only to be alarmed by what I saw—a couple of dried-up sardines stuffed in a tin can.
I have to take a broom and sweep those sticky bugs off of our screens at least once a day. I read in the paper that they have been nicknamed the “love bugs” because that’s all they get to do. It’s a real mess since they’re all just looking for a place to either procreate or die or possibly both. I can’t help but think if the bugs knew what was going to happen, they’d choose a celibate life and potential longevity. Don’t they have enough sense to look around and see what’s happening, to witness the great fate? I sweep them to our cinder-block stoop and then into the hibiscus, a lush bush with flowers so fiery red I keep expecting it to speak to me. I feel disgust and I feel pity as I sweep the carnage, some of the carcasses still joined at the thorax. The article theorized that they are heading for Cuba. I can’t imagine why they’d choose Cuba. I’m sure that when they arrive it’ll be nothing like what they expected. Millions and zillions of bugs to have died in vain. If I were a love bug I’d have to stop midflight and ask just whose idea was this anyway?
We had rented our apartment in Somerville for forty years, and the rent was frozen for us, safe and stable. For years I watched others move in and then out; with each tenant exchange and new coat of paint the rent increased. I knew all the neighbors, smooth-faced college students or young families replacing people like ourselves who had either died or one day just packed up and left. I had strolled Carl up and down that street, waved to all the neighbors on porches and at windows. “You don’t even know that many people anymore,” Frank said just six months ago, and I explained that, no, I didn’t know them like I had known various relatives and people who had been friends for forty years. But I recognized people; there were young people who looked up at my window and waved, a young woman next door who was always asking me what smelled so good in my kitchen. I knew that if we left, we could never afford to come back; the rent would skyrocket and what I had called home for forty years would be as unattainable as the moon.
The landlord already had the painters there in the hallway when I went in to look around one last time. There were clean white patches where Carl’s picture had hung over the television set in our bedroom; there were bits of dried concrete in the corner of our closet where Frank threw his work clothes. There was an old ball of yarn that had belonged to our cat years before and had somehow fallen into a small space at the back of Carl’s closet. Fitting, since it was in his closet that he had hidden the cat after sneaking it into the apartment. That was when he was only seven years old, and the cat slept in that same closet until Carl was a senior in high school. Finally the old cat went into the closet one Sunday afternoon and refused to come out. Carl was out at the movies with a girl in his class. Frank asked me to go down to the market and get him some bicarbonate, and while I was gone, he took the cat away so none of us would have to see it die.
I felt panic rise in my throat as I surveyed the apartment, pacing room to room and back. There was a mark on the living room ceiling made by a rocketing champagne cork on the day Carl and Anne got married. There were smudges on the kitchen doorframe where all of us held on while leaning into the living room to hear the conversation, or to announce dinner was almost ready. There was masking tape around one window pane in the bedroom, Frank’s solution to the winter wind he had likened to a dog whistle. The painters were waiting. They would lay on a fresh coat of paint that would hide all traces of us. I excused myself a moment and then opened the window over the bathtub and leaned out onto the small flat section of roof where I had deserted a dying geranium. In the distance I could see the train, hear the familiar rumble as it made its way into the city, where it would spill all the people and scoop up some more. I thought of all those times I’d complained, my arms filled with shopping bags, while I stood and waited for the rush of wind that announced an approaching train. I wanted another chance; just one more trip into the city and I would return stoically, no complaint uttered.
My young neighbor, pregnant and cheerful, was watering her patio tomatoes. “We will miss you,” she said, I assume speaking for her husband and unborn child, maybe for the whole building. I mouthed a thank-you and turned quickly, sat on the edge of the empty bathtub, my hand gripping the faucet. I grieved that I had never counted the baths taken there, never made little marks on the inside of the door with each passing day. I was sorry that I had not taken longer baths, that I had not simply lain back in my world and stared at the full green weeping willow which hid the building next door.
“Alice.” Frank was there in the bathroom door, a young wild-haired painter behind him. “I was getting worried.” He turned then to the young man and said something about women things.
“You know that we can never come back,” I told him, and he shook his head, hugged me close. “If we leave, we can’t ever afford to come back.”
“Sure we can, honey,” he whispered. “But we won’t want to. Wait and see.”
Frank and I were both born right near where we lived all those years; we figure we walked the same streets, shopped in the same stores, saw all the same movies at the same time, but we never met until we were in our twenties. He had just come back from World War II and I was taking some business courses in night school. I went to a party at my cousin’s house and there he was. He was already in the same concrete business where his father worked for years before him, and he was spending his day off setting my cousin’s children’s swingset in concrete. He was kneeling there, his big hands pouring cement, face flushed with the brisk March wind, his thick hair a deep auburn in the late afternoon light. “Once it dries, that swing is set for eternity,” he told my cousin when he was all finished. “Won’t budge an inch.”
I tell Frank about the love bugs and he gets a good laugh, says that if I’m going to waste my time thinking about such, I might as well go ahead and join Ida, the accordion-necked woman, at the bridge table. I do and by the end of the afternoon, I have heard about every stage of her daughter Catherine’s life and everything about Catherine’s children and Catherine’s Christmas Shoppe up in Georgia. “You can buy yourself an ornament at any month of the year,” Ida says. “Walk inside of Catherine’s shoppe, that’s shoppe with two ps and an e, mind you—sophisticated, huh?—anyway, walk in there and you get a shiver like it might be December and you’re in a snowstorm, carols playing, bells ringing.” I stare at Ida’s face, at her mouth moving in a slow drawling way, her lipstick caked like clay on her dry lips, and I long for winter, the hiss and whine of a radiator, the rattling of ancient glass windows, windows made long before anyone had heard the word thermal. I wish it were Christmas in our apartment, and Frank had just tiptoed in and slipped that bottle of White Shoulders under the tree, leaned in the kitchen to say, You’ll never guess what I just got for you. I wish I were standing in our neighborhood drugstore the first time I ever smelled that fragrance. It was a drizzly autumn day, four-thirty and already dark. I sprayed my wrists and then stepped out onto the busy sidewalk, my umbrella raised as I walked home, nothing on my mind other than the chicken I was going to cook for dinner and the calculated minutes until Frank got home. Carl was just an unnamed abstraction that we had talked about for ten years; he was the child we had finally accepted we’d never have.
Ida is still talking, her voice like a buzz, while I see myself up on a chair, reaching to throw old wool blankets over the curtain rods to close out the whistling air, while Carl at ten months holds onto the coffee table and pulls himself up in a wobbly stance. I want to feel the sting of cold; to pull a wool hat down close around my face; to huddle into a seat on the train, Carl pulled close on my lap while we draw in warmth from the strangers collected there, alive to the flashing lights and popcorn smells, the surfacing to daylight and the cold gray sky, the river frozen like a sheet of glass, lights thrown in crazy patterns onto the trees in the Boston Common.
“Then you walk out and it’s ninety-odd degrees, what do you think?” Ida asks. She is staring and I nod at her, returned suddenly to a much older body, a much quieter life, weather so eternally hot and humid that I feel like I might fly out and fling myself into the grille of a car. If I am going to sweat like a pig, then let me do it in Fenway Park or Filene’s Basement. Let me have a purpose and a little dignity. “I said if there’s something you want and can’t find, Catherine could send it to you.” Ida pauses and takes a sip of her fruity drink, some concoction I have refused. (It is always happy hour in the ambulatory senior citizens’ park.)
“I like birds on my tree,” Ida says. “Every year Catherine sends me a few new birds. You can’t wait until December to get your ornaments. Any time of year is good. I want some woodpeckers, you know sort of a comical bird, for the grandbabies.” I watch her neck, imagining strains of “Lady of Spain.” All of a sudden I feel the hideous speckled nausea that comes just before fainting. I have to wipe my face with a tissue I dip in my ice water. I have to breathe deeply.
“My son and his family will be here,” I finally tell her, though this is something we haven’t decided for sure. Frank says we will not be making the long trip home, so we are hoping they’ll come. Still, I know that if I were Anne and settled there in Brookline, her parents and siblings close by in New Hampshire, I would not drive to Hades to see anybody. “I have a simple tree, a biodegradable tree, popcorn, cranberries. I don’t buy ornaments.”
“Well.” Ida is speechless for a fraction of a second. “Did I tell you about our son Harvey, the artist?”
“I still can’t get over those bugs,” I tell Frank late one night. Our bedroom is the width of the bed, and its ceiling curves with air vents. “I mean, what are they doing? Why don’t they just stay put?” I know that he knows what I am insinuating but he just squeezes my hand.
“I know what’s got you worried,” he says, referring once again to what has him worried, hurricane season and what Carl calls The Mobile Home Tornado Theory. “First sign of a storm and we’ll just move our cinder blocks aside and drive inland. There’s nothing holding us down.”
“Sounds easy enough,” I say, knowing that he’s describing what we’ve already done. Frank wasn’t running to this new place as much as he was running away from our old one. First sign of a storm (or old age—legs that can’t make the apartment stair climb, bones too brittle to risk icy sidewalks) and we’ll just move. It makes me ache to picture our home at night, the familiar shapes and shadows of our belongings. Maybe Frank had a similar vision at one time, a picture of one of us sitting there alone, nothing to break the silence but the distant hum of a passing train. Maybe he felt the unknown survivor should begin letting go by degrees, throwing off old treasured relics that would only become burdens when the other one was gone. He knew, for example, that I would never stare out at this golf course and see any bits of our past. He would never look at the cheap flip-down table and be reminded of my elaborate holiday dinners. He didn’t take time to see that the memories would be there all the same, that they might even be heightened by the strangeness of an unfamiliar place. I suppose he thought when one of us died the other could simply move away from the grief. His plan of action was as simple as taking a dying house cat from its home. Or maybe he didn’t see any of these things; maybe an instinct to run had come to him out of nature without realization or explanation.
“As for the bugs,” he says, “what’s foolish is that they don’t stop and stay right here for a while, in the lap of luxury.” He says the word luxury with a slight shake of his head, as if in awe, this impossible dream that he has convinced himself just came true.
“They have a terribly short life,” I say.
“Yeah, and the men bugs have really got it bad.” He rolls into me, his hand on my hip. In the faint glow from the streetlight in front of Ida’s double-wide, he almost looks the way I remember from the first time we met; it was the same day he poured concrete around the legs of the swingset in my cousin’s yard, a cluster of children watching. “The men bugs only have three stages of life. At least the women get that extra one.”
“Birth? That’s the bonus?” I ask. “You’re saying you’d like to give birth.”
“Well, can’t be much to laying a little egg.”
“Try a seven-pound-and-ten-ounce egg, try that,” I say, and then he pulls me close and I try to imagine us in our bedroom with the full-size window and lace panel curtains; the window overlooks a sidewalk that Frank’s daddy poured not long before the market on the corner opened. The market has fresh fruits and vegetables that the clerks arrange on tables out on the sidewalk; even in the rain, you can stand under the bright green awnings and fill your bag. Carl is a baby napping in a crib; he is a teenager sprawled in front of the TV set with that cat stretched out on his chest. I close my eyes when I feel like crying but Frank doesn’t notice; he jiggles me and laughs, pulls me closer, and I imagine Carl in his small apartment, Anne beside him. I imagine them halfway listening to each other, halfway listening for the baby’s cry, and, once again, the bathtub drained, another night unnumbered. Maybe they are too tired to hold each other, too tired to tell about the day, to say our neighbor said this to me or you’ll never believe who I bumped into when I went into the city or when I was on the train. They tell themselves that some day they won’t be so tired.
When I returned home from getting Frank his bicarbonate that Sunday afternoon, he was staring out the window, the cat nowhere in sight. I went to the kitchen to put away the things I had bought, noticing immediately that the cat food was gone, the bowls, the rubber mouse. There was a quietness as we sat and waited to hear Carl coming up the stairs. “I just didn’t think it was right,” Frank finally said when the three of us were sitting there. “House cats are deprived of nature.” Carl shrugged, lowered his head to hide any response. “It’s just a cat,” he finally said and left the room.
Frank is snoring quietly now, his warm arm draped over my stomach. I want to wake him, to tell him that there’s no such thing as paradise; there is no Promised Land. At journey’s end, it is all a mirage, a picture of the journey itself and all we left behind. Wherever we are, here or inland or a hundred miles south, that’s all that there is. There is nothing that can make the end easier for whoever is left behind. That’s what I want to tell him but I don’t. He is sleeping so peacefully, so satisfied with the accomplishments of his life; yet, even as he sleeps, he is preparing for some day when at a moment’s notice one of us must take flight.