(this short story appeared in Solidago Journal, Spring 2018, Issue Four)
Dear Arnie. There’s no reason for me to go on without you, so either come back or take me with you.
The pen stopped moving. She massaged the joints of her arthritic hands and looked out the dining room window, zeroing in on the upside-down lizard hanging on the trunk of the red hibiscus. In a world that made sense, Nancy shouldn’t have to write this letter. The lizard scurried down the hibiscus and disappeared, signaling his agreement – the letter was too hard to write. But she wouldn’t scurry away from it like the lizard. She would just pace herself.
She stood and arched her back to stretch. Then she went to the kitchen. Tonight was Wednesday, meat loaf night. Arnie loved meat loaf. She took ground beef from the fridge and put it on the counter, leaving it in the plastic wrap. She reached an onion out of the bag in the pantry and plopped it down beside the cutting board. She opened a drawer for a paring knife, then paused.
The house was too quiet. She listened to the pendulum clock ticking in the dining room. How long had the rhythms of their house been punctuated by the sounds of that clock? Back when they were still relatively young, they’d been in a store downtown and Arnie had noticed her coveting that clock. Later, he’d returned to the store, bought the clock, and then gave it to her that evening for no reason except she was his wife.
As if on cue, the clock chimed. One, two, three. Not time to start dinner, time to watch Ellen, with the sound turned down so it wouldn’t wake Arnie from his nap on the couch. But now she could turn the sound up loud if she wanted. She wouldn’t have to worry about missing some clever remark by one of Ellen’s guests because of Arnie’s snoring.
She put down the paring knife beside the cutting board and returned to the dining room. She picked up the pen. I miss your snoring. I would give anything to hear you saw logs again and know you are right there beside me and will wake up, a smile on your thick lips, those bushy silver eyebrows sitting above your eyes like a Cossack’s hat.
She put the pen down. Why was she writing this letter? Where would she send it, anyway? It’s not like she had an address for him. She looked out the window again at the hibiscus, hoping the lizard would return.
The pendulum clock chimed again. One, two, three, four . . . five. Had she been staring out the window for two hours? She’d missed Dr. Phil. Maybe she should write Dr. Phil. He could solve any problem. And Dr. Phil had an address.
Nancy went to the living room and sat in her chair, catty-corner to Arnie’s chair. She picked up the remote and switched on the Delray Beach news. There was a Golden Alert, another senior walking around lost and frightened like a dog that escaped when the gate was left open. She didn’t recognize the man’s name. She looked over at Arnie’s chair to ask whether he knew this man but his chair was empty. The chair still had Arnie’s smell. Indentations in the seat cushion still had the mold of Arnie’s body. But no Arnie. It was Catch-22. She didn’t have Arnie and she couldn’t let him go. It was upside-down Candide, the worst of all possible worlds. She turned back to the TV screen. They were giving details of when the missing senior had last been seen. Then, finally, a picture. It wasn’t a picture of Arnie.
Now they’d gone on to the weather. The weather people got younger each year, like the kids working as tellers in the bank. They were children! Were they even old enough to count money? Did they drive themselves to work or did their mothers drop them off?
She and Arnie hadn’t had children. It just hadn’t happened, notwithstanding pressure from their families because children were the whole point of marriage, were they not? It didn’t matter. They had each other. No, they were each other, melded together, two sides of the same face, the face of Arnie-Nancy, like the Hollywood couples that sometimes got nicknamed that way.
The clock chimed the half-hour. It was 5:30 on meat-loaf Wednesday. There had been a time, back when hormones governed their libidos, that the smell of meat loaf had been an aphrodisiac to Arnie. Fix meat loaf and mashed potatoes for dinner and that evening Arnie would be an animal in bed. In recent years, the savor of food had been replaced by the intimacy of the two of them eating together. The bedroom had become the same. How could you couple if you already were one person?
She stood. Now it was time to make dinner. She’d fix meat loaf for two, then save the leftovers, because she didn’t remember how to cook meat loaf for one.
#
She woke up in a start and looked beside her in the bed for Arnie. That happened every morning, though by now you’d think it wouldn’t.
She got up, put on her robe, walked downstairs, and started a pot of coffee. Then she walked outside in her bare feet and collected the newspaper from the driveway (she and the other old people in the neighborhood still had paper delivery). When the coffee was ready, she poured a cup and then, like every morning except during colder months, she took the paper and coffee to the patio. Since Arnie’s retirement from the practice of law, he usually drank coffee with her, reading the newspaper and, when he finished that he’d read some magazine like The Economist. Nancy, on the other hand, had stopped taking the news seriously years ago. It was all just blah-blah, except news about Delray Beach.
She sat at a table in the shade and sorted the paper – sports and business for Arnie, lifestyle for her, the news section in the middle so they could take turns. She drank coffee and worked on the crossword. She reached the point in the crossword where she usually asked Arnie for help, when he would put his paper down, study the crossword like it was a law book, and scribble in the name of some famous General or baseball player, drawing from knowledge he’d collected over the years. She’d collected different kinds of knowledge. Between the two of them, they’d always completed the crossword because, together, they knew everything that anyone needed to know. Now, she had to look up the answers Arnie would have given her on her phone.
Crossword done, it was time for tennis at the Club. The ladies played at nine, before the Florida heat kicked in. While she put on her tennis dress, she imagined Arnie beside her, dressing for golf, holding his stomach in while he fastened his shorts so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge that they’d gotten too small. They dressed together, but she always left first, sticking a cinnamon roll in the oven for him, always worrying that he would forget to turn the oven off. Now, she fixed a cinnamon roll for herself, but she heated it in the microwave because heating it in the oven was for Arnie.
When Nancy arrived at the Club, her buddies were already out on the court, hitting the ball back and forth. Nancy pulled her racket out of its cover and joined Sally on the west side of the court, completing the foursome. She pulled the bill of her tennis visor down to block the morning sun.
“Sorry I’m late,” Nancy said. “I don’t need to warm up.”
They hit a few balls with her anyway. Then, they began to play. The routine was two sets, three if they were up to it, switching partners after each set. The three of them had been playing together so long that they knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, like a marriage.
Arnie had played tennis, but not as much as Nancy because he preferred golf. She remembered the mixed-doubles tournaments they’d played here at the Club. Arnie’s forehand was good, his backhand was terrible, but his serve was powerful. She remembered being on this very court, in the semi-finals, with her up at the net and him behind her. He would slam serves that set up weak returns and she would put them away. If the rules had allowed Arnie to serve every game, they would have won the tournament.
Suddenly, she felt a stinging blow on her chest, just above her heart.
“Nancy? Are you alright?”
She’d just been hit by the tennis ball. She hadn’t even raised her racket.
“I’m so sorry,” Joan said. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
“I’m fine,” Nancy said, rubbing her chest. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Joan looked overly concerned. They often looked at her that way, since Arnie left.
#
Back home, she stripped and deposited her sweaty tennis clothes in the washer. She’d tried to train Arnie to do the same with his golf clothes, and especially his smelly socks – Arnie seemed to excrete all of his bodily waste through his feet, as if he didn’t have bowels and kidneys. But Arnie always forgot, and put his dirty socks in the clothes hamper.
“It’s a dirty clothes hamper, right?” he’d say.
“But it makes all the other clothes dirty,” she’d say. He never did get it.
She showered, changed into shorts and a blouse, and went to the dining room where the letter was still on the table. She sat down and began to write.
I miss your stinky socks.
Not very romantic. You wouldn’t see that on a Hallmark card. The Hallmark cards emphasize roses, kisses, candlelight dinners – all the good stuff. Only at the end do you realize it’s all good stuff.
She put the pen down and went to the kitchen. She peeled a tomato, cut a slice and put it on a plate, then crowned it with a dollop of cottage cheese. She took her plate to the living room, sat in her chair, catty-corner to Arnie’s chair, and switched on the TV. The noon news was on. There was another Golden Alert. It must be Bastille Day at the Old Folks Home, she thought. Gerald Schwimmer, last seen on Atlantic Avenue near the railroad tracks. And there was a picture, but it wasn’t a picture of Arnie.
#
None of her friends had ever mentioned going to a psychic and she wasn’t going to ask if anybody had because, under the circumstances, they would think she was nuts. They wouldn’t say it to her face, but that’s what they’d say when she wasn’t around to hear. So she searched for a psychic, like most things people shop for these days, by googling on the Internet.
There was a map with little dots marking the location of psychics within driving distance of her Delray Beach address. All of the psychics were women. She threw out of consideration the pet psychics and psychics without photos. She studied the faces of the others and read how each described her services. She read reviews, mostly glowing with the occasional fraud allegation, and checked out their Facebook pages.
She decided on Elaine, who styled herself “South Florida’s Premier Medium.” Even though Nancy was uncomfortable with how openly Elaine promoted herself – it seemed gauche to toot your own horn like a personal injury lawyer – Elaine’s reviews were uniformly high and there were lots of them. Something else Nancy saw in the reviews made an impression. People said that Elaine didn’t ask questions when she did a reading. She just read, as if there was an invisible library from which Elaine could take a volume, open the book, and turn to a page. Nancy didn’t want somebody who just made stuff up or guessed, extrapolating from clues they picked up in answers to questions.
The other thing Nancy liked about Elaine was her picture. Some of the psychics were pretty young women with long hair and spooky eyes, giving Nancy the distinct impression that their psychic vocation was partly an accessory to enhance their sexual allure, like a teenaged girl with a Ouija board. Elaine, on the other hand, was middle-aged, a little overweight, but not unhealthily so, and looked … normal. It helped Nancy reach the tipping point on this psychic thing if paranormal could be normal.
#
Elaine’s little pink wooden house was under the canopy of a huge gumbo limbo tree with twisty branches and peeling red bark. Nancy rang the doorbell and after a few moments the door opened. Elaine’s face radiate warmth like someone holding your hand.
“Hi, come in,” she said.
The house smelled faintly of juniper or cedar. Nancy followed Elaine to a small room in the rear of the house. The room was dark, but had a high window with wooden venetian blinds partly open let in light. Elaine sat on a love seat and Nancy sat across from her on a small couch.
They took care of the money first – ninety dollars for an hour – “but it often ends up lasting longer than that,” Elaine said, “so there’s no extra charge. We’ll just go with whatever Spirit is giving us.”
Nancy nodded, not sure what the protocol was with Spirit.
“How do we begin?”
“Just tell me what’s on your mind,” Elaine said, looking down and closing her eyes.
Even though silence was normally something people had to fill with words, Nancy didn’t feel any pressure to speak. As they sat there in silence, Nancy felt a calm descend into the room, as if they were quietly listening for something. She found her attention was turned inward to a place that was unfamiliar. She began to speak.
“I don’t know where my husband is. We’ve been married nearly fifty years. We never went on separate vacations. We never did separate anything.”
Elaine’s face raised, but her eyes remained closed.
“He smokes cigars,” Elaine said. “But only when he plays golf because you don’t like the smell.”
Nancy was stunned. That was true. She wondered if she’d ever mentioned that on social media and whether this Elaine had checked her out online before the session.
“He says he appreciates the letter and you should take a poetry class.”
She hadn’t mentioned that she’d been writing Arnie a letter and she definitely hadn’t put iton social media. There was no way Elaine could have known. Nancy stopped talking, sensing that Elaine had found the book about Arnie and Nancy in the psychic library.
“He says you’re not separated and you know where he is.”
Nancy wracked her brain. How could she know where he was and not know? He had family in New York. Maybe he went to visit and she forgot? But how was that possible? And he would have called.
“I know where he is?”
“Yes, he says you know where he is.”
Arnie sometimes went on golfing trips to California with the boys. She recalled the names of courses he’d mentioned – Cypress Point, Pebble Beach, Torrey Pines. But, again, he would have called. Was her phone out of order? Maybe she was able to call out but unable to receive calls?
“He says it’s warm, but not too hot. He’s laughing, like this is a joke you should get.”
She didn’t get it, and was feeling incredible anxiety, but Elaine, eyes still closed, was smiling.
“He says if you miss the snoring, just play the tape recording.”
The tape recording. Once, when he’d claimed she exaggerated his snoring, she’d recorded it while he slept. The next morning, she’d played it back to him, winning the argument and making him laugh. Nobody else knew about that. This was Arnie.
“Where is he?!”
“Woodlawn Cemetery,” Elaine said.
Nancy felt like she’d been slapped. Of course she knew that Arnie had died of a heart attack and she’d buried him at Woodlawn, but she also felt, more strongly than anything, that it wasn’t true. In fact, she was sure it wasn’t true – she felt Arnie’s presence everywhere – but obviously she couldn’t say so. What’s visible trumps what’s invisible. Her friends would have said she was crazy, maybe even petitioned the court to have someone put in charge of her affairs. So she’d come to Elaine for an explanation. But now, Arniehimself was telling her she was wrong.
“He says that’s where his body is, but his soul is everywhere. He says that’s how it really is, and you’ll find out when it’s your time.”
Arnie wasn’t saying she was wrong. He was mansplaining it to her. Ghost-splaining.
“But I want to be with you,” she said, speaking directly to Arnie, now.
You are, Babe, you are.
They were Arnie’s words, but inside her head. Nancy felt something ease out of her, rising up like a great blue heron lifting off from the beach.
#
After the session, Elaine suggested that Nancy spend the day by herself doing things that didn’t require a lot of left-brain linear thinking.
“And drink lots of water,” Elaine said. “Your body has to process all this, too.”
On her way to the car, Nancy noticed a stone bench under the gumbo limbo tree in front of Elaine’s house and felt called to sit there. The stone was cool against her bottom, but even though she was sitting on rock, it seemed soft.
She leaned back against the trunk of the tree. It felt like the shoulder of a friend. She tilted her head and looked up through the lattice of tree limbs and leaves at the blue sky. She felt a glow in her chest. My soul is everywhere. You’ll find out when it’s your time. The anxiety she’d carried around all her life like an overweight handbag was missing. She didn’t even have a clutch purse of anxiety. She wished Arnie were here to share the moment with her. Then she smiled.
You are Babe, you are.
