Nora wakens early in a strange narrow white bed in a strange narrow white room. Philip is not beside her. Oh. She leaps up, much the way she did yesterday morning, although without the scream. She has slept in her underwear. Now she puts on yesterday’s disreputable black clothes. This won’t do, not for the whole day, but it’ll have to for now.
Having slept and wakened and leaped, she is at a loss for where to turn next. She is, it appears, sadly inexperienced with events that cannot be controlled or undone. She has had a pretty smooth skate to this point—even death has previously come as a blessing as well as an occasion for sorrow, since when her mother finally took her last shallow breath, who could regret the end, any end, to her suffering? Who, also, could be surprised? This, though—this is a dive into the deep end of helplessness; or rather a merciless shove off a very high diving board.
Philip is dead!
Still, the quality of shock shifts on the second day after so unexpected and untimely a death. Brain cells zapped closed on the first day start popping open again, beginning the necessary, chaotic work of absorbing severe injury, adapting to fresh facts, seeking new alignments and compensating adjustments. In this hit-and-miss effort, survivors become more of what they already are. Extremes bubble up in silent or noisy lament. Lurking weirdnesses step out of the shrubbery.
Out in the upstairs hallway, going quietly into the bathroom (it’s so early the sun’s barely up, let the others sleep), then down the wide staircase, Nora can feel Philip everywhere. Not everywhere in the sense of expecting to find him in the bathroom, or in the kitchen brewing their first shared pot of coffee, or slamming cupboard doors or rooting through the fridge or wandering about in his socks asking where his workboots or waders have disappeared to; but as if he has spread out and dispersed, becoming a scattered, benign but still assessing presence in the universe.
His absence is also everywhere, and so she continues to be startled that he is not in the bathroom, or downstairs making their coffee. The kitchen is, in fact, deathly quiet. She sits at the table, mug in hand, looking around as if she’s never been here before. The oak counters and cupboards, the pine table and chairs, the blue tiles on the floor, all those shiny appliances, the toaster, the coffee-maker, the food processor, the kettle, where did they come from? It’s as if she has taken bold advantage of someone else’s home to step inside and brew up this coffee and sit at this table. Look at the dawn light, the smooth shapes and bright surfaces, the way the space has its own swooping rhythm from window to countertop, up to doorway, down to table, touching the floor and swinging upwards again. Can it be that she has been regularly going in and out of this room for years? Has touched, hundreds and thousands of times, each of these surfaces?
There is something hard inside her that bitter coffee does not dissolve. What do other widows do on the second day?
They go shopping for funeral outfits, or get their hair done, or sleep under sedation, or helplessly weep. Or they are responsible for comforting children. Nora has all the black clothes she needs, her hair is fine, she is not sleepy, she is beyond tears at the moment. She has no children to comfort, or anyone else. She doesn’t even have funeral arrangements to attend to. Sophie takes care of details. They hired her, thanks more to Philip’s income than Nora’s, to be keeper of the household, a resident practical person in a situation intended to be of mutual benefit. She was a cousin of friends in the city who described her, with sympathy and fascinated relish, as a woman rendered distraught and unstable by a mysteriously inflexible desire for virtue that had recently been overwhelmed by experience; a smart and competent person who needed a quiet place and clear, simple tasks of no moral weight whatsoever until she recovered.
Has Sophie recovered?
She was supposed to leave Philip and Nora free for what they supposed to be their more urgent and happy pursuits, and to do so unobtrusively, which for the most part she has; so quiet, at least in the earliest months, that they could be startled to come upon her padding about just when they might have forgotten her. To be sure, there are the shrieking nightmares occasionally startling them awake in the night, but basically she has been, and done, what she was supposed to be and do. Or as Philip kept saying, “Isn’t it great to be free just to work?” Of course. Nora nodded.
But now Philip has abandoned all his urgent and happy pursuits; leaving Nora with what? Sophie takes care of the details, and Nora’s own pursuits make no sense at the moment. It’s beyond her what material, which stitch, colour, shape, shade or texture could possibly depict the weight of being so much at a loss. It would have to be something extraordinary she has never yet seen in her palettes or threads or baskets of scraps.
Her fingers drum on the table, she stands to look out the window, she paces, she sits down at the table again. Something needs doing, but what?
Upstairs, Sophie is still in bed, but awake. She heard Nora go in and out of the bathroom, was alert to her quiet footsteps slipping downstairs. She’s damned if she’s going to worry about whether there’s enough coffee. She has wakened from her dreams with an idea. This is different, obviously, from waking up wondering if this is a day Phil will make a small gesture, or they’ll have one of those glances, or something will happen that unexpectedly leaves them alone together for an hour or so, but her intentions do nevertheless involve Phil’s skin, and his hands.
Has it been only a day?
Unlike Nora, Sophie does not feel him scattered and dispersed, either everywhere or nowhere. In her mind’s eye he is focused and precisely observing, her specifically. Never mind where he’s looking down from, which isn’t a place exactly, more like he’s a camera mounted above her, the way he himself could be mounted above her. Only the past couple of months, and not so often. There could have been a lot more times if he—they—hadn’t felt the need to be exceedingly careful. Beth, for instance, has to be clubbed like a seal before she notices most things, but if she did get a clue, she would either go running to Nora or more likely blurt something out accidentally. Phil said, “Watch out, she has too much time on her hands.” One of these days someone—Nora—would have had to tell Beth her time here was up.
Who’d have guessed Phil would be the first gone from the house?
Sophie doesn’t want him, mounted overhead, to see her behaving poorly. She also hopes he didn’t see her throwing up on the kitchen floor yesterday. She knows how offputting it can be, seeing someone throw up. He’s so close she could nearly reach up and touch him, she could nearly draw him down to her. The volume and flagrancy of her rolling, pale, freckled flesh is less evident and intrusive when she’s on her back like this. Gravity is useful. It was nice when he revelled in her, it was good, him diving in.
“I miss you,” she whispers upwards. She feels him pleased to know that, although miss isn’t quite right. “I’m doing my best,” she tells him, “I’m not letting you down”—how relieved he should be to know that even now she has little inclination towards havoc.
Interesting, though, the capacity for havoc. There’d be nothing he could do about it, no improving words or good lies he could say, no moves he could make to protect himself. She imagines reputation is important to the dead, although on second thought perhaps not, perhaps they don’t care a bit. In her experience people dying in awesome number are too busy perishing to indicate particular expectations—why would it be different for someone who dies in awesome semi-solitude?
It’s also her experience, though, that people may well want to leave messages. Martha Nkume, for one, thoroughly blasted by catastrophe, watching over her wrecked daughter, holding her dying son, that crumpled, pot-bellied child who might have been six months old or three years—Martha understood endings, and her bones clasped Sophie’s wrist. “My children, say them be care.” Sophie took this to mean, “Tell them to be careful,” or “Tell them to take care of each other,” but in any case neither message was deliverable: she had no idea where Martha Nkume’s other children might be, or whether they were in any state to hear messages from their mother or anyone else.
What if Martha and her Mary and her Matthew and all her other children, whoever and wherever they were, what if all the suffering multitudes are gathered around Phil, a great crowd of the tormented looking down on Sophie also? Reaching down?
Oh no. That gets her up wide-eyed on her feet.
She can be nothing to them. They have other people, in different places, to hover over and watch. More people than there are stars should be out there haunting and being haunted: slaughtering armies, kidnappers of children, torturers of men, rapists of women, bombers of villages, how do they sleep, how do they rest for the multitudes of the dead gazing down, touching their nightmares with cold muddy bones?
Nora begs ill-will and baits mobs with no notion of how easily cataclysms can be aroused, far beyond shit on the doorstep and awful words on the fence. Nora thinks she can do anything, she imagines she’s free, she presumes that her desires will have no terminal ends.
Well, she knows better now. Now she has something terminal on her hands.
Sophie’s own hands fly up—such vengefulness, such meanness, where does that come from? And with Phil watching.
With luck his capacities are confined to surfaces, not what lies beneath. Sophie stretches her naked body, she moves her hands to her breasts, raising them upwards towards him; she lets them fall, passes hands over her thighs, digs in her fingertips, hard. Was he handsome? Not really. His eyebrows were too thick, his nose a little broad, and his eyes were growing smaller within an increasing middle-aged fleshiness. What he had were energy and the kind of size that is beneficent and feels almost safe. And gifted hands. In her own hands her skin feels excessive. It is too rampant, it is soft. Not quite repulsive, but she has made more of herself than she ever intended.
However thoroughly and ravenously she set out to grow this plush armament, it never has fended off the terrible thinness of limbs, the luminous reproach of eyes in the night. Neither did it fend off Phil, who said, “I’m happy there’s so much of you, Sophie,” and touched her here and there; here, too.
The abrupt beginning of pleasure and the abrupt end of pleasure—can it really be true? People often exaggerate when somebody dies, making the dead person, or themselves, either too large or too small. Still, it is nearly the case that throughout this whole summer Sophie has been aware of Phil each waking moment, and some sleeping moments, causing her to step more quickly, watch more sharply. For weeks she has been thrillingly alive. Sophie moans, and the sound snaps her back. She knows better than to conjure hovering spirits. Anyway, she has plans. Reduced expectations. The best she can do.
Beth hears Sophie moving about overhead, and thinks she heard the coffee-maker cha-lunking in the kitchen a few minutes ago. So the others are up. But Beth, who yesterday was so light-hearted and hopeful, is severely and thuddingly earthbound this morning.
This occurred overnight, its cause a mystery except for the sofa being so uncomfortable it disrupted her sleep. Then too, dreams, even vanished dreams, have waking effects. Her body is stiff and she has aches that are unfamiliar. She is, oh God, nearly thirty. There are all sorts of pains and debilitations ahead, along with losses of skin tone and other aspects of beauty. What happens to someone like her as she gets older? Philip is dead. This can happen, it has happened to him. Without the most enormous care, there may come a time when Beth will not be widely admired or scrutinized or painted or praised—and then beyond that, she will still have to die?
Now, finally, and not before time, death comes shockingly home to her; now that it applies specifically and surprisingly to herself. Although if the time comes, still unimaginably off in the future, when she is not widely admired, scrutinized and praised, death may just be a blessing. Aging is terrible, involving shrinkages, crumplings, witherings, losses, invisibilities. Beth shivers. She neither cares nor envisions where Philip is at the moment, if anywhere. Time is short. Despite August, she is cold. She pushes herself upright as slowly as a creaky old woman.
The mirror over the sideboard tells her: it’s all right. Today she is still beautiful.
She finds Nora and Sophie both in the kitchen, Nora at the table in yesterday’s clothes, Sophie standing, wrapped in yesterday’s peacock robe under which, judging from thigh-glimpses and nipple-outlines, she is naked as usual. Nora looks up with, it seems to Beth, a welcoming face. “Beth!” she says. “Thank you. I feel bad you had to sleep on the sofa but I sure appreciated your bed. Did you sleep all right?”
“Perfectly. Thanks. I’m glad it helped.”
Beth might remember that Nora is years and years older than her, which is hopeful. Except Nora is rounder, and her skin is different, and since she has different purposes, she also probably won’t mourn too much when her more obvious appeals disappear. She doesn’t look all that great this morning, but over the long haul she will hold up better than someone who has experienced real beauty and all that it means.
Look at the empty chair at the table. Philip’s absence opens a huge space. There’s hope right there.
One person’s disaster is bound to be someone else’s triumph, that’s just how things are, isn’t it? Say you win a beauty pageant, or a modelling job, or release from a hospital: your victory depends on loss for some other people and there’s no way around it, so you might as well appreciate the success and build on the victory. Beth must put her best foot forward. Her mother used to say that, encouraging her to put your best foot forward on every occasion. Beth’s feet are narrow and long, their tendons prominent. As feet go, they look graceful. She extends her legs and regards her bare feet. She would be hard pressed to pick one as the best.
“What do we have to do today?” Nora asks. She is speaking, naturally, to Sophie, with that we she uses as if she had any intention of sharing the chores. Still, Sophie’s employment here, such as it is, must be coming undone, drifting loose, an attachment no more secure than a scarf tied in a bow with something pulling, none too gently, on one end.
“I have no idea. I suppose we’ll be hearing from the funeral home. The guy there said there’ll be forms to fill out, that sort of thing. If he doesn’t call by noon, I’ll drop in when I’m out shopping.”
“You’re going shopping?”
“Just to pick up a few things. Milk. Bread for sure. If there’s anything you want, just make a list.”
Because otherwise, it has occurred to Sophie, how to account for leaving the house? Which she has every intention of doing. One step at a time, that’s the trick to surviving practically everything. Partly because things not dealt with build up until they’re past any controllable point, and never mind wars, civil and otherwise—even in a household, and even in a tragic emergency, this applies.
Already some things are beyond doing: speaking proper last words, for one. That’s one terrible undone thing.
“How about you, Beth,” Nora asks, “do you have plans?”
Yes, but nothing to speak about yet, so she is relieved when the phone rings. Sophie answers, and says, “Yes,” and then, “Fine. I’m sure we can manage that. Of course. Thank you,” and when she hangs up, she tells Nora, “Everything’s going smoothly. That was the funeral home guy asking if we can get clothes to him in the next hour or so.”
“Smoothly?”
“You know—whatever they had to do to realize it was natural causes so things could get moving.”
“So they’ve decided for sure none of us caused Philip’s death.” Nora still cannot quite say die or dead out loud. Philip’s death is softer, and moreover makes it sound as if his death belongs only to him, and is therefore only his business, not anyone else’s, not even hers. “Too bad nobody was that interested in checking out whoever was leaving shit on the doorstep, but of course that was just cheery children’s idea of fun. Not like a coven casting spells on the man of the house.” Beth is surprised to see Sophie and Nora shoot bitter little grins at each other. Sometimes Beth can almost see jaggedy slices in the air between Nora and Sophie, then all of a sudden they’re grinning—how much does she miss just because of not happening to look at exactly the right moment? At least it’ll be easier without Philip’s signals, confusing and multi-directional; only two people to watch now. The hard part is figuring out what a word or a tone or an expression means. Which seems to keep changing anyway.
Nora, running a beat behind, frowns suddenly. “Wait a minute, clothes? For closed casket and cremation?” Yesterday morning Philip left the house inside a heavy black zippered bag, presumably still wearing the blue pyjama bottoms of which Nora had been wearing the top. So pathetic, so helpless—he would hate that.
No, Nora is not going to cry. Neither is Sophie, who shrugs. “It’s easier to do it than argue with the guy. Let’s just pick something.” Nora wants we? Sophie’ll give her we. Although not on the actual errand. “I can take them down to him, no problem.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know. He only had two suits and they’re years old, they probably don’t even fit any more.” Philip has been bulking up, Nora means. He has begun—had begun—the middle-aged thickening and settling process. He found this upsetting. “Shit,” he complained, standing naked, hands on hips, in front of the full-length bedroom mirrors, “I’m not putting on a whole lot of weight and I’m not doing anything different, so what’s going on?” His elegant shape, which once narrowed from broad chest to tight, slender hips, was turning blockish and solid.
“Gravity,” Nora had said from her perspective of bed. “Normal change.” What she found most interesting was that his penis seemed to be receding in the process; becoming something tender and fragile nestled in flesh, no longer a bold declaration. “One of these days I probably won’t have a waist any more. Same sort of thing.” She was only pointing out that they both had accommodations to make. She was suggesting that in making those accommodations, they were most safe, as well as most free, with each other. It was slightly disheartening, having to take the trouble to say this out loud. “We’ll be a pair,” she added, reinforcing the message and indeed, as best she could, spelling it out. In case he was in any danger of forgetting.
“I can pick something, if you’d like,” Sophie offers. “We need underwear, too, I gather, and socks. But no shoes.” No shoes. That’s entirely too vivid. That gives them all pause, even Beth.
“No!” That was loud. Nora is up on her feet. “I’ll do it.” Sophie invading Philip’s underwear drawer? Nora thinks not. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” and she is off, out of the room, up the stairs—to be halted by something like a hand raised against her at her own bedroom door.
She knows the room beyond this door like the back of her hand. Better. It’s their house, so she and Philip have naturally had the largest of the three bedrooms. Since the arrivals of first Sophie, then Beth, it’s also been the only room that contains no outside tastes, no bits and pieces contributed, or left lying about, by the others. Neither does it contain any of Nora’s work, which was both her choice and Philip’s, although for different reasons. She wanted sanctuary, one place where work needn’t exist, except theoretically and in her mind’s eye. He said, “I’d like a peaceful room, nothing jarring,” which ruled out her work and other bright things.
So they wound up with a bedroom of cool blues and pale greys and ivory whites and various old shiny grained woods. Philip made the wide, deep bed himself, from maple rubbed and stained dark and, after so many years, marked and scratched here and there from one jostling and another. They bought a broad oak bureau, four drawers for each of them, and the blanket box from an ancient neighbour auctioning household possessions. Philip refinished them both. “Texture,” he said. “Grain. Very sexy, textures and grains.”
The mirrors before which they examined themselves and each other were also the sliding doors to their wall-to-wall closet, reflecting the two original, rectangular farmhouse windows, more or less doubling the size of the room and the view, too, with the grey draperies opened. The draperies have been closed for a day now. It’ll be dark in there. To Nora, halted out in the hallway, the room feels forbidding. Or forbidden. Which is crazy. She slams her hand into the door and once through, takes a deep breath. The air is stale: from being closed in, or from some deathly residue?
There was yesterday morning, the view, the touch, from the next pillow on that Philip-built bed over there. There are also infinite, uncountable moments of flinging arms, tangled limbs, random or purposeful encounters of shoulders, calves, hips and hands—years of this, night after night after night. Words and silences both, in their two particular voices.
Never again? No. This cannot have happened.
In the equal knowledge that it is not only possible but true, a separate cool part of Nora opens Philip’s side of the closet and selects a pair of tan cotton pants, a slim brown leather belt. What he might have worn yesterday, if they’d driven off on the day they had planned. A crisp blue cotton shirt he might have worked in, did work in. No tie. A lightweight navy-blue sports coat. He would look, oh, full in these clothes. A large man leaning back in his chair at the end of a long restaurant lunch with Nora and Max, the three of them comfortable and familiar, stimulated and cheerful. She sees that restaurant scene as clearly as if it had been their real yesterday.
There is something to be said for touching his things. Perhaps that’s what Sophie really intended, suggesting they sort through his possessions: that this is as close as anyone can come any more. But throw out the contents of his closet and drawers, give them away, find them new homes and new bodies? Sophie goes too far there. With her arms around Philip’s empty tan pants and blue shirt, the clothes that will burn with him, Nora lets herself sag onto the bed. Jumps straight back up. This bed, no!
Philip’s boxers are piled and jumbled in the top bureau drawer. She picks a pale blue pair with a frivolous pattern of sailboats. “Climb aboard, matey,” Philip cried the first time he wore them, his thighs emerging like a couple of tree trunks, his hands on his hips as he stood at the foot of the bed, his head rolling back as he laughed; that joyous, absent roar.
Navy socks to match the sports jacket, she supposes, not black. And no shoes. Poor Philip, with nowhere to go; a tenderfoot, in only his socks. Tiptoeing through hell, his infinite punishment for sneaking off in the night.
She tastes something acidic as, embracing Philip’s last outfit, she leaves the bedroom, closing the door sharply behind her. At the bottom of the stairs Sophie waits, now in beige pants and pale yellow blouse, evidently not in mourning today, hair blazing red and arms outstretched: ready as ever to receive and accept Nora’s burdens.