The Birthdays (3 page)

“He needs to stretch.”

“He’s a turtle, he doesn’t have muscles that need stretching. He has a shell. He has turtle flesh.”

“Come here, Babe,” Joe murmured, snapping his fingers near the floor.

“It’s just not sanitary, letting him have the run of the kitchen.”

“He’s the cleanest turtle you’ll ever find.”

“Because it’s almost your birthday, I’ll give you this,” she said as she handed him the sugar bowl and sat. She wished she didn’t have the desire to fling the turtle out the window. As a boy, Joe hadn’t been allowed pets or toys or anything, really. The only child of a poor Russian couple, he had grown up in a small, bleak apartment in Buffalo. Constantly afraid some tragedy would befall him in this new country, his parents rarely let him play outside with the neighborhood children. It wasn’t a surprise that Joe now treasured the things that filled their small house with life.

Babe stared up at her, and she sighed. MacNeil did not have pets or a house filled with the clutter of old newspapers or piles of clothes heaped on chairs. He did not have leaking ceilings and a prehistoric boiler and stained, threadbare carpets. His house was clean and spare and spacious, the house of a man who lived alone and kept only that which fed his soul—soul! A word MacNeil used with regularity, a word that previously Ellen had never thought to use in daily conversation. In his living room were original paintings, photographs, rare books—he could afford the finest. Ellen lifted the tea bag from her cup and wrung it against the spoon. She supposed Babe filled a small hole in Joe’s spirit, one made in his childhood, but in the end it just seemed so ignoble, his obsession with his pet, his rock with four legs.

“Happy almost-birthday to me,” Joe said suddenly, and stood. He moved behind her and lightly kissed the top of her head. “Come here.”

“What is it?”

“Let’s dance,” he said, and clumsily pulled her from her seat.

“Joe.” He was acting like someone else. Her husband Joe wasn’t the sort of man who just up and danced with his wife. He was a car salesman, a bargain shopper, a man who organized his receipts. Everything about him was practical (everything except Babe, of course).

“Come on,” he said, and led her into the living room, where the morning light cut across the furniture in hard triangles. He gently slid his arm behind her back and guided her around the coffee table, and she practically tripped. It’d been years since she’d danced. He swept her back and forth as if in time to a waltz, and she noticed a flurry of dust winking like snowflakes in the sunlight.

“Joe, what music are you hearing?” she asked, but he only grinned in reply.

Pleasant. Silly. Pointless. Inane—
words filled her mind.

Ellen met Vera and MacNeil at an exhibit of young photographers at the DeCordova Museum thirty years ago. Ellen had dragged Joe and the kids out to Lincoln on a sunny Saturday afternoon, though they’d had other ideas of how they wanted to spend the day. The five drove the hacking station wagon fifteen miles westward on the skinny highway through larger and larger towns. They turned onto the road that led them up and down hills and through maples, elderberries, pines, oaks, past big old wooden houses with large porches and long
driveways. Ellen had once dreamed of living in Lincoln in a sprawling antique farmhouse on acres of land, but she and Joe never could have afforded it, and in the end she’d accepted their small but sufficient Cape.

At DeCordova, two outgoing and seemingly parentless children tagged along with their bored three, and eventually an attractive couple appeared and apologized vacantly for their kids’ rambunctiousness. Dressed in a loose black tunic and slacks, Vera was petite, with a long ballerina’s neck, curtains of silky brown hair, and MacNeil was twice Vera’s height but thin, broad in the forehead and square in the chin. Attractive. “Have you seen the Gartsons?” Vera asked Ellen after introducing herself and her husband. “We met the man a few years back at an opening downtown. A real genius, though he was out of his mind drunk at the time. Come on, come look at them. They’re unbelievably gorgeous,” and tugged her into the next room to show her the wall-sized color photographs of entwined nudes. The children followed and Ellen felt a blush fill her face as she watched her children giggle at the enormous breasts and legs and even the hulking shadow of a penis. Joe followed far behind, stopping to glance at each photograph, his hands held in a knot behind his back.

Later, he said he’d thought the couple was pretentious about art and completely careless with their children, but Ellen told him that she’d found them refreshingly exuberant, so obviously smitten with the world and each other. “You can just tell they squeeze every ounce they can out of this life.” Joe looked at her straight on and said, “Just make sure her pretense doesn’t rub off on you.” She pivoted, rushed out of the room and secretly vowed to befriend Vera.

The next week, on her day off, Ellen found herself sitting
on Vera’s large front porch in Lincoln, listening to the history of the two massive apple trees in her front yard—they’d been planted as symbols of hope by MacNeil’s Scottish ancestors—and sipping fresh-squeezed limeade that tasted like candy. And every Wednesday that followed, Ellen traveled to Lincoln and experienced a different life. Vera took her on long, hilly walks and identified the many different birds in the trees above. The two cooked risotto with truffles or prosciutto or goat cheese for lunch, and on rainy days they sat beneath Vera’s eiderdown comforter on her sofa and watched French and Italian films about young lovers, films that seemed to Ellen at once frivolous and profound. Occasionally Vera asked if they should meet at Ellen’s house, but Ellen always found an excuse for them not to.
After all,
she almost said once,
we don’t have a VCR or leather furniture or a view of the trees or anything, really, that you’d want to see.
The months and years passed, and Vera and MacNeil came to dinner a couple of times, but not once did Vera come alone, and not once did Ellen invite her.

At Vera’s funeral decades later, MacNeil looked like a stripped leaf—blanched, tired, finished. When they arrived, Ellen said to him, “It doesn’t get worse than this”—as if she knew, she now thought—and he said, “I hope not.” He’d had no time to prepare for Vera’s death, a massive heart attack that struck her one morning when she was yanking up weeds in her flower garden. He’d only just retired as dean of the university.

Two weeks later, Ellen bumped into him at a gourmet grocery store where she liked to shop once in a while for produce. He stood perplexed before a wall of milk. “I’ve never noticed what sort of milk I’ve been drinking all these years,”
he said to her. It was their first time alone. “Vera took care of all these things and I let her. I am a terrible person.”

“You are no such thing.” Ellen knew Vera preferred whole but pulled out a carton of skim. “You want something low in fat,” she said in her wife-and-mother voice. She remembered Vera mentioning his high cholesterol a few months back, and that she’d been plying him with red wine every night, but Ellen couldn’t imagine all that alcohol would do him any good. She led him through the store, filling his cart with oats and organic vegetables and eggs, deli meat and freshly baked bread—there was no need to bargain-shop for him—and in the health aisle, she picked out several bottles of vitamins and aspirin. One should never go, she always said, without aspirin.

“Let me thank you with tea,” MacNeil said in the parking lot as they filled the trunk of his car. She stood beside him, carrying a large plastic bag with a couple of Vidalias inside.

“I should probably be getting home.”

MacNeil nodded.

But Joe wasn’t at home. He was out with his friend Bill Dooley pricing new air conditioners, not that either would ever buy one. Joe loved to price things. New houses for them and the kids, kitchen sinks, new cages for Babe. “You know, why not? I’ll come for one cup of tea. I’ll follow you.”

He drove badly—slowly, drifting toward the lines on the road—and Ellen thought it was sweet. She drove at a distance behind him, careful not to crowd him. A few of his bags in her hands, she followed him inside his house at a distance too. The place was eerily quiet and immaculate, the floors shiny and smelling of ammonia. He must have hired a cleaning person. Vera’d always been a mess. She’d been far more concerned
with her gardens outside than cleanliness within her house, and her kitchen had always surprised Ellen, the dishes piled in the sink like old books, the empty food boxes strewn across the counter. “Life’s too short to worry about dishes,” Vera once said.

Ellen began to set the groceries on the counter as MacNeil filled the kettle and set out cups and saucers. Before long, the kettle shrieked and he served them. “You’re the first guest I’ve had in days,” he said. “Except a Moonie trying to sell me books.”

“Maybe it’s good for you to have people here,” Ellen said.

“Good, bad, I’m sure there’s some way you’re supposed to go about this, some way the doctors prescribe.”

Ellen tried to smile and took a seat at the table. She wondered if it had been where Vera used to sit.

MacNeil began talking about the approaching presidential election and the two men running for office, one a child, the other a ghost. As she lifted the tea bag from her cup, Ellen thought she and Joe never had conversations about such weighty subjects as politics. They planned, they talked about their days and their children and neighbors, but rarely, anymore, did they discuss anything else.

Joe had left the room now and Ellen looked down at the sofa, its green fabric worn but its cushions still firm. The sofa had lasted thirty years—a minor miracle. She went to the bedroom for the yellow Samsonite, which she’d packed last night, and lifted it, careful to use her knees. Soft blankets of clouds kept the heat away today, and she felt a chill as she carried the suitcase outside to the car and hefted it into the trunk. For one of
Joe’s birthdays, before Hilary was born, they brought the boys to Maine—was it Great Salt Island? Her memories were so specific, too specific. She could never recall the basics—the wheres (was it this island?), the whens (which birthday was it?), and it made her want to pull off her head right now. How could she not remember where they went? At any rate, she did remember that they found their way to the motel with the huge clam-shaped sign, and she did remember feeling somehow significant with two sons and a husband, a house outside the city.
I am very much an adult now,
she thought as she unpacked their bags and unfolded the cots for the boys. She and Jake played their game—
What would you do with a million dollars?—
and later that afternoon, when the boys were kicking a ball around outside the room, she and Joe made love quickly and feverishly, careful not to let them hear. Afterward, she curled up beside him and he said, “I’m happy. I really think this is happiness.” She nodded drowsily, gratefully, knowing Joe’s one dream in life had been to start a family.

Now she wondered what her one dream in life had been. To start a family? She’d certainly wanted one, and she was certainly grateful for hers, but she supposed she’d just always assumed she’d have one. To win a million dollars, as she and Jake used to fantasize? This seemed to approximate a small part of the dream, but it had been more than just this. Perhaps she’d wanted the side effects of money, the deep comfort and pride and sense of fulfillment of a person endowed in some way. With money, yes, or perhaps talent or brilliance or luck. Not just money. Maybe not even money. She looked up at the bleached sky. She couldn’t remember really having one unified dream, just the sensation of moving forward and following Joe’s lead. Trying in some aimless
manner, when she thought of it, to achieve the buzz of happiness.

In some respects, she was more adult then than now, she thought as she pushed the suitcase to the side of the trunk. She had gotten the responsibility of raising children out of the way, and now she was preoccupied with indulgences like Mac-Neil and museums, especially the Gardner, where Vera had taken her just before she died, and MacNeil a few times since then. It was one of his favorite places. Just a couple of weeks ago, the two stood under one of the stone archways that framed the courtyard and admired the new orchids. The sunlight filtered in from the skylights above and gave the place an almost holy glow. It was breathtaking, the beauty there. The flowers in the courtyard were changed seasonally: in the spring were nasturtium, freesia, jasmine and azaleas; lilies and cineraria at Easter; chrysanthemums in the autumn; and of course poinsettias at Christmas. MacNeil said this courtyard could have been what Eden looked like, and though at first the sentiment struck Ellen as too much, she chided herself for her reaction. She was not used to a man expressing such feeling, and so poetically. She was used to men keeping such things to themselves, experiencing happiness (with books, gadgets, cars, all the predictable tangibles) in the privacy of their own minds. The light above softened, then strengthened, and she let her own emotions take hold and form words in her mind.
It would be all right to pass away here.
She pictured her whole body falling in a sigh onto this stone floor. Perhaps in a moment of profound empathy MacNeil would fold too, and one of the guards would find them, two spent bodies lying flat, their eyes open to the heavens.
But what about Joe? He would die alone.
She pushed the thought
from her mind. The guard would page another guard, and the two would carry her and MacNeil into the Blue Room, the closest room, where paintings of Henry James and Madame Auguste Manet and friendly letters from Henry Adams and T. S. Eliot and Oliver Wendell Holmes would welcome them into their own long-sleeping world.

How noble Isabella Gardner was to have left so much to the public—her house, her art, her most personal letters. MacNeil had read all about the woman, and had given Ellen a biography. At the elementary school where Ellen was a librarian, she often tried to interest the children in the anecdotes she’d been reading. Her favorite was the one about Isabella bringing home a lion from a nearby zoo. Passersby gaped as this regal woman, pearls in triple strands around her neck, strode toward them down Beacon Street—
one of the richest streets in all of Boston
, Ellen explained—her hand resting on the plush yellow mane of the ferocious beast.
Some said she even tried to ride him
. The children sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her, their eyes bright.
She was not a particularly friendly woman,
she said,
but rarely are the most influential people. And anyway, she had something more valuable than a sunny disposition. She had character and good taste.