Fifty
By Nan Goldberg
It gets to the point sometimes when you can't not do it anymore, when you have to get started and get on with it or else shut up about it.
Wait a minute. Let me try that again.
You reach a point one morning where you open your eyes and you know, with perfect clarity, that your remaining time is less than infinite, infinitely less, in fact, and it's time to get started for real. I'm talking about the promises we make to ourselves and never keep. Time to get moving or quit. Shit or get off the pot. God no. The point is, at a certain point, you have to put up or shut up. Get on with getting on with it. That's enough now, I think. And this was more or less the situation with Lennie and her story.
Lennie was fifty. She lived in the New Jersey suburbs and drove to New York every day to be an editor. A long time ago, when she was very young, she had wanted to write novels, but somehow that never happened. Instead she got married, began a career, became pregnant, bought a house, moved out of Brooklyn. She gardened. She read a lot. She had two children, Wendy and Jay. Only two children - not as many as Tillie Olsen, okay, but her silences were equally deep.
Look, on second thought screw the details - happy families are all alike. And I don't really have to tell you, do I, that Lennie is me? I? I am she.
The important thing is it ate at her, this non-writing business, fortunate privileged middle-class American life notwithstanding. And then she turned fifty, and everybody knows what happens when you turn fifty. Well, maybe not. In literature there are hundreds of men, literally, armies of them complaining and obsessing and fucking their way toward fifty: Nathan Zuckerman, Will Barrett, Harry Towns, that Maple son of a bitch. Henderson. Rabbit. Bech. The Poet. The Sportswriter. Steven Rojak.
But women? Emma Bovary. Anna Karenina. Both dead. And they were barely thirty.
So one particular springish night around the time Lennie turned fifty, she was in the car waiting for Wendy, just sitting there attempting to jot down her thoughts under the streaky hallucinagenic white light that spilled out of the supermarket into the parking lot. Wendy was inside buying dinner. Lennie was trying to begin her story.
It was nighttime, after work. It was starting to rain again. Not too far away, the rare scream of a fire truck pressed itself hysterically against the solid suburban sky. Lennie sketched little flowers in the margins of her notebook and tried to aim her mind like an arrow, wooing combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation. Henry James said that; I didn't. I couldn't possibly.
She tried to squeeze her thoughts into some crisp green first sentence that she could then write down, but the only thought she could isolate was that tongue-twister of a James quotation, which circled around and around her brain, chasing itself into eternal meaninglessness. But that's often the problem with James. Then she thought of that story - ``Little Black Sambo''? - that she'd read to the kids when they were small, the one where the character chased itself around and around until it churned itself into butter. Now there was an image. Not her own, but anyway there it was, gleaming the way she'd hoped. Smiling, she glanced up carelessly into the supermarket's big windows and saw a person who was herself lining up groceries in front of the cashier.
The woman engaged her interest only randomly at first, only while Lennie's eyes, searching for Wendy on the line, flicked over the customers. Wendy wasn't on the line. But something about the woman caught her eye: her black hair was short and styled like Lennie's, especially around the ears, which peeked out whitely and were flat against her head. Lennie noticed that, then noticed the shape of the head itself, its familiarity.
She began to watch the woman.
She was short, like Lennie. She fidgeted in a familiar way. Suddenly she realized she'd forgotten something, like Lennie always did, and she began rapidly gesturing and talking to the cashier, then darted off.
Lennie slid down and back in her seat, so that when the woman returned she could see her from the waist up. The woman was wearing a denim jacket with some kind of a white furry collar, a strange collar for a denim jacket. Lennie thought, That's not my jacket. I don't have that jacket.
This woman was younger anyway.
Still, when the woman left the store, swiftly, with her cheerful walk, Lennie thought perhaps she should follow her home and see where she lived. What her kids looked like. Her husband. See if her dog was smarter, or if maybe she had a cat instead. Lennie's husband hated cats.
Wendy opened the car door and slid into the passenger seat, holding a shopping bag against her chest like a shield and looking confrontational. That was no surprise; Wendy was 14. Lennie suppressed a sigh, or perhaps didn't. She started the car. ``What did you get?'' she said, pulling up at the exit behind a blue Volvo station wagon that was exactly like her own blue Volvo station wagon except that it was a newer model. She realized the
woman who was herself was driving it. The woman had her right-hand turn signal on. Lennie switched on her left-hand signal and thought about ``Alice Through the Looking Glass.''
``Peanut butter and Fluff.''
``I sent you in to get something for dinner,'' Lennie said, annoyed.
``That is dinner. That's what I wanted,'' Wendy said, also annoyed.
``You were in there for 20 minutes and that's what you came out with?''
``I couldn't find anything I was in the mood to eat.''
``Okay, okay, fine,'' Lennie said, hoping she'd put up enough of a fight to satisfy Wendy's requirement that she act like a mother. The fact was, if she'd ever seriously cared what her children ate, she could barely remember it. It was another of those concerns she'd abandoned in the struggle to get through a day with some remnant left for herself. Not that it worked.
Wendy leaned over disgustedly and turned on one of her radio stations. Somebody was singing ``I'm an asshole. A-S-S-H-O-L-E.'' Lennie didn't know they could play that on the radio. She asked Wendy.
``Usually they don't,'' Wendy said. ``They beep it out. The whole song is beeps. It's hilarious.'' She started singing along, "I'm an asshole," and Lennie smiled. What was she supposed to do, cry?
They pulled into the driveway and Wendy banged out of the car and stomped up the walk. Lennie wasn't sure why. She followed slowly, examining the front of the house as if she were a stranger seeing it for the first time, wondering what sort of woman lived here. The front of the house couldn't tell her anything. She noticed her notebook was getting rained on and went inside.
In the foyer Lennie and her husband crossed paths for the first time that day. ``Hi,'' she said. ``Hello,'' Will said. ``Tough day. I rented a video. Will you watch with me?'' It was just the slightest bit plaintive, Lennie thought - not really plaintive, just maybe a little sad.
``Okay, sure,'' she said after a second's hesitation, and went into the kitchen, where Wendy was spreading Fluff on white bread. The original plan, which Will knew and had apparently forgotten, was for Lennie to spend the evening writing. But okay, she decided; sometimes the things that distract from the important thing are necessary, even if they're meaningless and stupid. Was that a rationalization? I don't know. Does it matter? ``Everything is significant, every small act changes the world,'' E.L. Doctorow once wrote. Then again John Barth tells us, ``Everything is significant, and nothing is finally important,'' a sentiment confirmed only yesterday, albeit primitively, by Wendy The Cynic, who'd written in her eighth-grade yearbook, ``Nothing means anything, and everything means something.'' Did it mean anything that each of them was under 25 when they wrote it? In adult real life, one simply Set Priorities, which took care of that.
Remnants of Will's and Jay's separate meals lay like still lifes along the counters, the table, the stove. Lennie pretended not to notice them. She went directly to the pantry closet, ignoring Wendy, who ignored her back, and stared into its recesses; closed the closet, opened the refrigerator, scanned it, and closed the refrigerator. She returned to the pantry and extracted six Oreo Double Stuff cookies from their package and left the kitchen to go upstairs.
``Oh, you're a great example!'' Wendy yelled after her.
Lennie stopped walking and reevaluated the peanut butter and Fluff. Was it imitation of Lennie's rotten eating habits? Or was it rebellion, as Wendy would prefer to have it? ``You're a great example!'' - was it A Cry for Help? She returned to the kitchen.
``I can make a salad,'' she offered. ``Would you like that? Or we could make it together …''
Wendy hooted. ``You're going to have salad with your Oreos?''
``If you want one I'd ...''
``Mom. I told you what I wanted. I want this. This is what I want. Are you going to stand there with your Oreos and tell me you have a problem with that?''
``No,'' Lennie said patiently. ``But I thought maybe if you wanted a salad too, we could make it ...''
``Other people's mothers just make the salad, you know. They don't have to ask about it. In fact, other's people's mothers make, like, a whole dinner for their family, without even being asked. Even working mothers do that. If you don't want to bother, though, that's fine. I'm perfectly happy with just this. Really. Just leave me alone,'' Wendy said.
Lennie's guilt swelled up under her chest with a whoosh and stayed there, slapping back and forth against her lungs like an ocean wave, suffocating and heavy. ``I'll make a salad,'' she said.
``I won't eat it.''
``I'll make it anyway.''
``Just leave me alone, okay?''
Lennie made the salad and left it at the center of the table, where Wendy, tearing viciously at her sandwich, made a point of not glancing at it. Lennie imagined the lettuce growing soft and brown around the edges, the cucumbers sour and slimy, the juice from the tomatoes leaking all over the carrots and turning them to mush. It was now 8:30, and Will would want to start the movie at 9.
In stories, people don't have these dilemmas, unless I've been reading the wrong ones. In the stories I read, people tend to worry about the moral consequences of their actions, that sort of thing. Their inner lives may be chaotic, but their outer ones are nicely linear, leading them from act to act to act, uninterrupted by salad-making or video-watching. Also there is cause and effect - not the random and resultless series of episodes that constitutes my life. What I always wonder is: Do the people who write stories not make salads or watch videos either? Or is it just that the people who people fiction aren't real?
Lennie went upstairs to spend half an hour thinking about her story. It didn't have a beginning yet, or even a middle for that matter, but as of that morning it had an ending. This is what it was about:
In a time around now, in a place like this, a woman about her own age is struggling to figure out where her life has gone. It isn't that her plans have failed; they haven't been tried. Her dreams, almost but never quite forgotten, remain unrealized; her potential lies coiled, unstretched. Her hopes, buried beneath layers of domestic and professional detail, she experiences as a niggling fear, mostly in the quiet moments before sleep, the way a cancer patient remembers death.
When this woman was fifteen and twenty-five and forty, she'd waited enthusiastically to be fifty, expecting to receive at any moment the gift of experience that would make her qualified to be a writer - somebody who knew important soul-shaking things that only she could tell, who could sit, concentrated, detached, and let newborn sentences flow smoothly through her fingertips to the keyboard like a pianist caressing his melody.
While she waited, nothing of importance happened. She'd got married and had babies, worked at a job, got used to things being the way they were. The children, who'd once seemed almost unbearably unique and full of special talents, had gradually grown into adolescents, indistinguishable from everybody else's kids.
Now she feels useless, superfluous, even her neuroses meaningless
.
She doesn't know anything worth telling.
No, not true, actually she knows an awful lot about a very few things, and almost nothing about anything else. And somehow she'd failed to learn what nobody else knew.
That was as far as Lennie had gotten, except for the ending, which was this: Driving to work one morning at rush hour, the woman sees a turtle about the size of a catcher's mitt, moving at its relaxed pace out of the path of her wheels toward the clump of trees that borders the highway. This had, in fact, actually happened that morning. Clearly it had come from the opposite side of the highway, where there was a lake, or pond, or something, Lennie wasn't sure. Lennie had nearly run over it, but hadn't, and neither had anyone else: the turtle had crossed the highway. The turtle had crossed the highway, Lennie had thought, and then she had thought, Miracles can happen. And then she had thought further. If a turtle can cross the highway, then it is possible for a fifty-year-old woman to start writing a goddamned story.
So that was where they were, Lennie and the unnamed woman in the story, in their progress toward writing a story. Now Lennie only needed to begin.
With a substantial amount of dread, she walked slowly into her ``office,'' the tiny extra bedroom she'd appropriated when they moved into the house and which she'd hardly ever entered. The Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf room, Will called it. The computer was in there; the kids used it a lot for homework. Lennie brushed crumbs off the chair and threw away an empty pretzel bag and a yogurt container. She put the spoon on the desk. Then she sat down and switched the computer on.
Will was watching TV; she could hear the theme of some cop show. Jay was in his room listening to R.E.M. The two soundtracks met and meshed in the office, producing noise. Lennie put her hands on the keyboard, which was comforting because it was a familiar action, something she did at work every day. But the screen was blank, which it usually wasn't. To rectify that, she typed, ``Once upon a time,'' and then stared at it, and then deleted it and typed, ``In a sense, I am Lenore Hunter,'' and then stared at that, fighting down a powerful surge of self-loathing, and deleted it.
``Mom!'' Jay shouted over his soundtrack. He opened the office door and leaned hugely into the little room, filling it right up. ``Ma!'' Directly into her ear. Jay in his 16-year-oldness treated Lennie mostly like a dorm-mate from down the hall, someone you borrow stuff from and hang out with on a slow Saturday night, but otherwise irrelevant. Lennie found it a relief, actually, compared with Wendy's hostility.
``I'm working, Jay,'' she said, keeping her eyes fixed on his and deliberately off the blank computer screen. ``Is this important?''
``Need a map of California,'' he said, ignoring her tone.
``California?''
``Yeah. The homework. `East of Eden.' We have to draw the terrain.'' He always talked like that, like a telegram.
``The terrain? That's not what the book's about,'' Lennie said, upset.
``That's what the homework's about,'' Jay said. ``Do we have a map?''
Lennie closed her eyes briefly and let the whole of ``East of Eden'' rush over her, to its epiphany, its very last heartbreaking lines. ``Timshel,'' she whispered.
``What?''
``Timshel. Thou mayest.'' She opened her eyes.
``Thou mayest what?'' he said.
``That's what the book's about. It's about redemption,'' Lennie said dreamily. ``It means you have a choice in things, that your life isn't predetermined. You can decide how you want to live.''
``Oh,'' Jay said, and thought about it. ``Mr. Springfield in Family Life says we have too many choices. Not enough rules. He says that's the whole problem, what's wrong with America.''
``Oh?'' Lennie said, confused. ``Maybe that's true too.”
``So do we have a map?''
``I think downstairs,'' she said. Abruptly, he backed out of the office, nearly banging into Will on the other side of the door. ``Ready for the movie?'' Will asked.
``Ten minutes,'' she told him. He went away.
Sighing, she returned to staring into the computer screen and in its blackness saw herself reflected: a tired, short, irritable, ordinary, not-even-pretty-anymore woman who had wanted, once upon a time, to be somebody else - John Steinbeck! - but had never made the effort; who had entertained a multitude of choices and casually, obliviously, closed them off; who had automatically expected happiness, as if it were something you picked up in the supermarket. Like that woman who was herself. Oh, right, that woman! She got up and rushed downstairs to the kitchen.
Hell, I forgot to describe Wendy. She was exceedingly thin, was Wendy, with the kind of body that dancers seem to inherit from nobody, from the karmic dancer gene pool. She could eat anything without consequences, unlike Lennie. Unlike Lennie, she wanted to be a dancer. She had distinct, smallish features in a sweet, heart-shaped face. She read prodigiously but without envy. Lennie sometimes thought she was an alien. Required by age and gender to obsess about her looks, Wendy chose to hate her hair, which was a nondescript not-blond not-brown color although it was otherwise lovely. Okay? Lennie said, ``When you were in the supermarket, Wendy, did you see anybody who looked familiar?''
``Everybody looked familiar, mom. That's our supermarket,'' Wendy said, turning the page of the book she was reading. Her sandwich plate was pushed away from her but remained on the table with her milky glass. The untouched lettuce was wilting already, Lennie couldn't help but note.
``Right. But I mean, anybody strangely familiar?''
``What?'' Wendy looked up from her book.
Lennie took a long breath and decided to go for it. ``Did you see anybody who looked like me, for instance? I thought I saw somebody in line in there who looked just like me.''
Completely vulnerable, she waited for Wendy to attack. Consequently when it came it seemed inadequate. ``Oh, mom, your evil twin!'' Wendy cackled, and went back to her book, incurious. Lennie thought, At least I'm not the evil one, though that was not what had hurt her. Only Wendy could hurt her by not trying to hurt her, by her indifference alone. She trudged back up the stairs into the office and exited the file she'd sort of started. FILENAME? the computer asked. STUPID. HOPELESS. IDIOT. MORON. No, nothing. No name yet; she wasn't ready. She hit exit again, hit the off switch, and went into the bedroom to watch the movie with Will.
By now you're probably thinking that it's unlikely this person, this would-be writer, will be able to tie all this together. I mean, a double? That's magical realism; Marquez does it brilliantly but a neophyte? Come on. And the turtle: contrived, you're thinking, though I will have to insist on it since it really happened. And what about the several points of view and this story-within-the-story that really is the story? Metafiction, John Gardner calls it, and he also says you're not supposed to mix your genres. So the prospects aren't good.
Well, I'm just doing my best here, writing what comes into my head. Just plodding along, putting one sentence in front of another, not having too good a time, frankly, yet. But like Ken Kesey said, some things are true even if they never happened, and I'm just going to sit here and keep on doing this until I prove it; it's my great notion. Sometimes it's necessary to suspend your disbelief, okay? - maybe to suspend your belief and your disbelief, suspend every goddamned thing, or you could never sit down to write a word. Isn't that so?
But I digress. The next thing that happened was, Lennie watched the movie - pick your own movie; I'm tired - with her husband, and it was good. And that was the end of that day.
Friday Lennie drove to work distractedly, the radio news station turned down to a soft staticky buzz, first words crowding her mind.
How to start. How. To. Start. Words had such particular value for Lennie, they wielded such specific power, that the commitment to one rather than any other one was more than daunting. It was depressing, actually.
Lennie knew that this, at least, was something unusual about herself. All day long, she worked with writers, tightening their prose, soothing and smoothing their transitions, enlivening their leads. Always, she was astounded at the ease with which they wrote out their stories, at their easy assumption that what they had to say mattered, that people needed or would want to read what they produced. Equally amazing was the careless way they passed their work over to her: to change, to trim, to question, to delete, to reject, to send back for more, finally to publish. They had no awe of the process, as she did. They saw something and wrote about it; the next day they saw something else and wrote about that - 30 inches or so of their own limited, idiosyncratic versions of the truth, all neatly sized to wrap around ads on page C-3. What they had written about two days ago was in the recycling bin by today. That didn't bother them either.
Her mind wandering, she steered the car onto the ramp that led to Route 80, a four-lane highway distinguished by its many potholes and its familiarity as a way to get everywhere she ever went. It was right here that she'd seen the turtle yesterday, so Lennie absently checked the pavement as she drove past, looking for another secret sign. Just to her right along the shoulder was the unmistakable corpse of the miracle turtle.
Jolted, she checked the rear-view mirror, and there it was again, a black lump among all the other mystery lumps along the roadside. Then it was gone, receding into the empty distance just like the ending to her story.
Wearily, angrily, for the remainder of the drive, Lennie rewrote her ending. She supposed the living turtle could be in the beginning of the story - why not? - and the dead turtle could be the end. This changed the nature of the story a bit, true, but it also worked nicely as a metaphor. What you'd have to get to is the sense that even though the turtle was finally squashed there on the highway, nevertheless a fifty-year-old woman could still write a story. Couldn't she? The turtle had crossed the road, after all, before dying.
At work somebody took hostages at a Newark mall after royally screwing up a robbery attempt, and it felt like Election Day in the newsroom: busy, busy, busy, everybody running around a little breathlessly with that self-important knowledgeable scoop glow on, but back where Lennie worked, in Features, all was exaggeratedly quiet. The whole staff back there looked sheepish, which is how they always looked when big news was breaking. Lennie skipped the news meeting in the afternoon, knowing nobody would care, and spent the day editing a longish story on medical breakthroughs in the treatment of menopause and thinking about the turtle and the woman who was herself in the supermarket. She wondered whether she'd hallucinated the woman, whether she was losing her mind. The thought was tantalizing, glamorous, encompassing as it did the possibility of being taken care of, for instance, and the hope of amnesia. Eventually she conquered menopause and went home.
``Hear about the hostages?'' Jay demanded as soon as she walked in the door. Lennie shot him a look; what did he think she did all day?
``That's all I heard about, and I don't want to hear about it anymore,'' she said, and was instantly sorry but continued scolding anyway. ``Look, if you want me to go to your game tomorrow, you're going to have to let me work upstairs for the rest of the night. Okay?''
``Sure, right, absolutely,'' Jay said, backing away very quickly. What was she yelling at him for? She walked into the kitchen and found Wendy and her friend Blake.
``She's sleeping over, okay?'' Wendy said without preamble.
Lennie smiled thinly, menopausally. ``On one condition,'' she said. ``I'm going into the office to work and I don't want to be disturbed. Not even for anything. And you'll have to keep the music down. Is that clear?''
Wendy and Blake exchanged Weird Mother glances and nodded. They'd ordered a pizza. Lennie ate a slice, standing up at the counter, then went upstairs with some Oreos.
She found Will in the walk-in closet in his underwear, hanging up his suit. She followed him in and put her arms around him. The air was thick and warm and muffled and slightly stale; the ghosts of their various roles, their costumes, hung all around them. ``What's up?'' he asked.
``Do you have any idea how horrible it is to work in Features when it's hostage day at the mall?'' she said. He laughed; he thought it was funny that her whole life was passing her by. No, scratch that, he just didn't make the same connections.
``I'll be in the office working, probably most of the night,'' she said. ``Can you do without me?''
``Sure, I'll have pizza,'' Will said, releasing her. He strode out of the closet, whistling, an older, somewhat smaller version of Jay, comprising at once more humor, less innate sweetness, and fewer pimples. She wished she could just stay there in the closet and eat Oreos. She wished she could be Will.
Instead, she returned to the office to resume yesterday's battle: where to start. Can you start before you know exactly where you're going? All the short-story-writing manuals say it's okay not to know what the ending is, even though it feels wrong to start out that way, unsure of your path, your footing. What is a beginning, anyway? It's a fake, a pretend: Every beginning is a middle of something, just an arbitrary place you decide to stop at and notice before continuing on. Unless you're talking about Genesis or something. Genesis put it well, as a matter of fact: “In the beginning was the Word.” No, maybe that wasn't Genesis. Was it? Anyway, what was the Word? In other words, what Word was it? Lennie's head was pounding. Several hours passed this way.
Around 11 o'clock Will stopped by to see how Lennie was doing. This is how she was doing: The computer screen was blank, and Lennie was slumped in front of it holding her head in her hands. ``How're you doing?'' he asked stupidly, and Lennie started to cry.
``I can't do it, I just can't do it,'' she sobbed. ``I just don't know how to start. I don't know what the first word should be, Will, it could be any of a million words and I can't seem to pick one.''
He was silent for a few moments, till Lennie lifted her head to look at him. She was worried she'd find him laughing at her or maybe angry at her foolishness, but he was just thinking.
``How about `The,''' he said finally.
The! My god, The! Lennie, still crying, started to laugh. Will was delighted.
``That's good?'' he asked. ``The?''
``No, well, maybe. I don't know,'' she said, but she felt better anyway, it was undeniable. ``Let's go to bed,'' she said.
``If you don't like it later, you know, you can go back and change it,'' Will added.
``Shut up now,'' she said. ``I'm fine.'' She wrote THE in big letters on a memo pad to stick on the refrigerator, and hit the exit button. FILENAME? STOPASKINGMETHAT, she typed. SAVING STOPASKI, it responded. She switched it off.
In the morning they left Wendy and Blake still sleeping and went to watch Jay's baseball game, where they saw the woman who was Lennie. Or was she Lennie? It was unclear which kid the woman was rooting for, or even which team. The woman sat alone on a far-off bleacher, still wearing that jacket, which is how Lennie spotted her.
``Look over there,'' she said to Will urgently, grabbing his face by the chin and pointing it. ``Do you see that woman?''
Will gazed off in his farsighted way and nodded.
``See anything familiar about her?''
``No. Why? Do we know her?''
``No, no. It's just - doesn't she look like me?''
Will looked for a moment, then shook his head. ``Nope. She has the same haircut, though,'' he said.
``Come on, you really don't think so? Doesn't she look like I used to look, then?''
Will turned to her and smiled. ``Sweetie, you look like you used to look. You're just the same,'' he said smoothly. Whether he meant it or not, she thought, he was still lying.
``I'm going over there and get a good look at her,'' she said, angry, but
just then Jay stroked a double to the right of the third baseman, the ball landing on the calk line and kicking up a rooster tail of white dust. It was a nice moment for Jay, but when she looked back at the bleachers, the woman was gone.
It was a long game, followed by a picnic. When they got home late that afternoon, their house had burned down.
What? Yes, yes, right, their house had burned down. Well, it hadn't entirely burned down; it was still burning when they arrived in front of it. The top of the house seemed to be vaporizing, replaced by sickly yellow licks of flame that towered upright inside the windows, melting the furniture and deconstructing the walls. As Lennie watched, the roof above Wendy's bedroom blew off. The noise was stupifying. Around her, the whole street was full of emergency, suffocated by fire trucks and police and black, smelly smoke and hoses and ambulances and gushing water; and there was a huge crowd gathered there, too, but no Wendy.
Will pushed Lennie through the crowd to the fire chief, leaving Jay behind staring up at the approximate spot in the inferno where his bedroom window used to be. His mouth was open. He was filthy, he needed a shower, Lennie thought as she glanced back at him, fixing his position in her mind. Will was explaining to the fire chief that This is our house, We live here, What happened here please? like a respectful citizen. Lennie scratched at his arm till he jumped. ``Wendy,'' she said to him.
``She's got to be here someplace; look around,'' he said.
She shook her head. ``She's not,'' she said. She pushed her consciousness out, hard, over the street, feeling into its depth, and felt a psychic flat wave; this crowd had no Wendy in it. ``WEN-D-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y!'' she called out anyway. ``WEN-D-Y-Y-Y-Y-Y!''
The middle of a suburban street is like a canyon, she discovered; there is an echo.
The fire chief turned and looked at her. ``Is somebody in there?'' he said.
Will had stopped talking.
Relax, though: I'm not going to kill off Wendy. It's not necessary, in my opinion. In fact I really hate it when other writers do that gratuitous kind of thing. This isn't, after all, a story about death, except for dead turtles. It's about fear of death, like all midlife crisis stories are.
Lennie moved off into the crowd of neighbors and strangers and uniformed strangers, stumbling on dummy legs, looking for Wendy. She peered deeply into faces. About the eighth face she came to was her own.
“Forget the turtle,'' the woman who was herself said to her. ``It is contrived. Sometimes things aren't true even if they did happen. And it doesn't matter where you start; you'll still end up ahead.''
Lennie grabbed the woman by her upper arms and squeezed till her thumbs hurt. “Where's Wendy?'' she said hoarsely, and watched the woman's face wrinkle into her own expression of disgust. ``It's only a story,'' she said peevishly, and then she pointed up the street to where Wendy, who'd been at Blake's since about noon, was just rounding the corner. Wendy began to run toward them, and Lennie ran too, zigzagging through the people like a running back. They collided, sharply, halfway down the block. ``It's not my fault, mom, I swear, it's not my fault,'' Wendy was sobbing. She could barely get the words out, she was so scared.
Lennie couldn't talk just then and stood holding Wendy tightly, stroking her hair. It occurred to her she hadn't been allowed to do this for the last few years, ever since Wendy began developing and became a teenager. She felt the warm, unfamiliar pressure of her daughter's small but indisputable breasts against her own breasts. She cried softly into Wendy's hair.
It turned out to be the third fire in as many days, according to the fire chief, and was assumed to be arson, pending investigation. There was a gang of boys in town, bad kids, pretty horrifying but the usual story; it wouldn't even make the paper she worked at, Lennie reflected later with some irony, especially since nobody had died.
They left the scene in two police cars, Lennie with Wendy, Will with Jay. Wendy had to answer questions; Will filled out forms. There was insurance. It was thought the house could be salvaged, although there was no upstairs; the bedrooms were gone. That evening, they were allowed in to survey the damage to the downstairs, and wandering through the barbequed kitchen Lennie found the word THE fastened by magnet to the refrigerator, where she'd placed it just that morning. The scrap of paper it was written on was grimy but uncharred. She put it in her pocket. The wasn't the right word, of course, but one had to start somewhere. Sometime? Sometimes?
“It gets to the point sometimes,'' she wrote later at her mother's house, by hand how strange on a yellow legal pad, ``when you can't not do it anymore, when you have to get started and get on with it or else shut up about it.''
There.
