19

Sarabeth began eating scrambled eggs: once a day, twice, even three times on one occasion, though she only picked at the third plate, vaguely disgusted. It was atavistic; it went back to the time right after her mother’s death. She had entered the Cowper Street kitchen one evening to find that the gifts of food that had seemed so endless had in fact ended. The refrigerator contained condiments and sour milk. The bread box held one last greenish banana muffin. Even the staples were nearly gone: all that remained in the soup cabinet was a single tin of lobster bisque that had been there for something like a decade.

Up until then she and her father had been scavenging among the donated food and the dwindling staples, sometimes together but more often alone; she had even found him early one morning eating cold beef stew straight from a Tupperware. She saw on this evening that it had to stop. They had to deal. Real cooking was for the moment beyond either of them, and so she bought and scrambled eggs: with milk or without, plain or with chopped tomatoes, with grated cheddar or a pad of cream cheese. She learned that her father liked his eggs very dry, and she discovered that if she got hers out of the pan early and put them on a prewarmed plate that she set over simmering water, they could both eat them as they liked.

That endless but fast-disappearing year when she was in eleventh grade, and her mother was dead, and he had not yet decided to move away: what a strange, impossible year it had been. Mostly they avoided each other, she upstairs and he down, she at school and he at work, but from time to time they went to a movie together, often an old Hitchcock movie being screened by one of the film societies at Stanford, and in the dark, staring up at the beautiful and troubled face of Joan Fontaine or Ingrid Bergman, they were joined in something vast and unspoken.

The transfer to Baltimore happened quickly, went from unlikely possibility to done deal in mere weeks. The therapist Sarabeth saw when she was in her twenties had remarked that it had been a kind of preemptive strike on her father’s part, to leave Sarabeth before she could leave him, and though Sarabeth argued that he’d wanted her to go with him, she supposed that in some way the therapist was right. It hadn’t felt like a strike, though. It had felt like mercy.

They packed the house in August, during a heat wave. Her mother’s clothing was already gone, and they emptied the kitchen cabinets into boxes, sorted through books, labeled furniture BALTIMORE or STORAGE or GOODWILL. It was into a carton marked STORAGE that the silver candlesticks had gone, along with a fancy Limoges vase that Sarabeth’s mother had bought for herself at Gump’s, in the city. The vase seemed to stir something in her father. He picked it up and rotated it, looking at it this way and that. He said, “This made her happy for almost a week,” and Sarabeth stood there hoping he wouldn’t say more, nearly holding her breath until he put the vase down again and began wrapping it in newspaper. That evening, she slid her bare feet into flip-flops and carried her belongings across the street to the Castleberrys’ house.

         

Thursday morning she watched for Jim’s car, thinking she had neither the energy to tour with him nor the courage to cancel. When he arrived, she kept her eyes focused straight ahead, away from the Heidts’ house, as she headed down the driveway to the car. Needlessly, since the Volvo wasn’t even there.

“How are you?” he said as she got in.

“Fine.”

When he’d called last night, she’d been in bed already, at seven-fifteen. Were you asleep? he’d said. Now he watched as she arranged herself in the seat, put her purse on the floor, buckled up.

“No offense,” he said, “but I don’t believe you.”

She wondered if she could tell him: about Lauren, about Liz; about how horrible she felt, how desperate to call Liz again, and how afraid. She looked at him, Jim in one of his trademark colorful sweaters, all swoops and jags of green and tan and brown, and while she had always been able to tell him anything, she was too ashamed.

She said, “It’s just Billy misery.”

“Honey, since when? I’m so sorry, what happened?”

“Nothing. I was in Rockridge at this one stop sign, and I just—”

“You had a relapse?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, honey.” He reached for her hand and held it. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Because it’s so boring. It’s pathetic.”

“It’s not, it’s the human condition.”

She was able to smile at this, and he gave her hand a little shake and let go to put the car in gear. He said, “Let’s go on tour, shall we? We’ll have ourselves a morning, all right?”

The sky was pale with cold, and pedestrians hurried along the leaf-strewn sidewalks in layers of sweaters and knit hats, the Berkeley version of winter wear. Jim told her about a harpsichord concert he and Donald had attended, about a friend of theirs who was giving up on the Bay Area and moving to Oregon. At a huge house in the hills, the group of realtors that often included Peter Something didn’t include Peter Something, and Jim said, “He broke his leg.”

Sarabeth tried to seem interested, but she couldn’t even remember Peter Something’s face. She had first noticed him during Billy: decided he was cute and moved on. Post-Billy, cute became more interesting. She found out that he was single. But she’d never even spoken to him.

“Rock climbing,” Jim added. “Do you get that?”

“I guess. The challenge?”

“Yeah, but the discomfort. The terror.”

“Some people are into that.”

They toured the house, got back in Jim’s car, drove to the next property. Jim’s niece in Southern California was about to have a baby, and he told Sarabeth about his sister’s near-daily phone calls to update him on the condition of her daughter’s cervix. “She will never live this down,” he said. “That’s a promise.”

After the last property, he excused himself to make a phone call, and Sarabeth leaned against the car and waited for him. She felt the chill of the air, looked at the thinning winter trees, and there was something so familiar about how she felt: it was as if she were hearing music she’d known long ago and forgotten. A song, maybe, but what were the words?

Jim came back. He said, “Do you have time to look at a new listing with me?”

It was an apartment in Adams Point, a third-floor condo with all the character of a Days Inn motel room. The owner had bought it after getting divorced, only to decide that she couldn’t live without a yard. Sarabeth didn’t understand how that could happen. How could you not know that about yourself?

Her name was Helen. She wore the kind of baggy black pants and tunic that Sarabeth thought of as no-clothes—the kinds of things you wore when you had given up. In a sad attempt at style, she’d tied a colorful batik scarf around her neck, but this highlighted rather than overturned the general impression of misery. Was Sarabeth, by chance, projecting? She was, of course.

“This is going to sell so fast,” Jim said as the three of them stood together in the entryway. “The only tricky thing is that there’s another unit coming on, but I don’t think it’s nearly this clean. Come on,” he said to Sarabeth, “wait’ll you see.”

Helen had owned the place for two years, but it looked like two months, two weeks. The furniture was all new and so bland as to defy the idea that an actual person had chosen it. The walls were worse: hung with framed reproductions of Impressionist paintings that were so familiar you didn’t even see them.

Sarabeth smiled at Helen. “It’s lovely.”

“Thank you.”

The kitchen was a galley with nothing on the counters but a folded red dishtowel. The bathroom could have been taken from a plumbing showroom, right down to the unused soap. It wasn’t until they got to the bedroom that Sarabeth saw anything interesting: a rather lovely antique rolltop desk. It made the room way too crowded, but it would work well in the living room—an improvement for both spaces.

“So where are you going?” Sarabeth asked at the door, and Helen retied her scarf before responding.

“I’m not sure—a little cottage, maybe.”

Sarabeth got a look from Jim. They said goodbye to Helen and descended the stairs in silence. In the car she turned to him. “What was that?”

“I’m exercising good boundaries. She wants to sell her condo, I’ll sell her condo.”

“And then she’ll be on the front page of the Chronicle, fished out of the bay under the bridge.”

“Sarabeth!”

She fastened her seat belt. Her own age, that’s what she was thinking. Helen was about her own age.

“Did you take me there to show me how much worse my life could be?”

“No!” he exclaimed. Then he looked over at her and sighed. “Well, maybe a little.”

She stifled a giggle. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“It could be.”

He started the car and headed back to north Berkeley, neither of them saying much as they drove. At one point his phone rang, and he silenced it without so much as a glance to see who was calling. When they arrived in front of the Heidts’ driveway, he put the car in park and pulled her close.

The Volvo was back. She said goodbye to Jim and stood eyeing the distance to her front door; then she took a deep breath and walked as naturally as she could past their house, past their back door, past their yard, and up onto her porch.

Inside, she went straight to her bedroom and lay down. Tonight was a Center night, and she opened Anna. Went back to what she’d read two weeks ago. Read ahead. She was ready. She saw herself as globally ready—Anna fully in mind, lampshade paper on order, a new listing to stage (barely). Globally ready and locally absolutely idle.

What if she called that Helen and said: Who are you, what was your life, what happened? She tossed Anna aside. Again, the idea of distant music, familiar and sad. A song without words.