Final Vinyl Days Read online

  There were times in those early weeks when I couldn’t help but smoke. How bad could one cigarette really be? How bad could one little paper tube be, compared with nervous energy and honest-to-God craving? I walked blocks to a strange, distant neighborhood with a drugstore where no one would recognize me, to buy a carton, and then I hid them in the apartment, here a pack, there a pack, so it seemed like they weren’t even really there at all. Early mornings, I stood in my nightgown and watched from our fifth-floor window until my husband disappeared around the corner. I climbed out on the fire escape with matches and an ashtray. The knowledge that I was going to smoke allowed me to slow down, take my time, angle myself so that I had a good view, red-brick buildings and sidewalks rising up Beacon Hill. Then I puffed furiously, the late November wind making me shiver as people down below scurried past in their down coats and scarves and hats. I watched our neighbor walking toward Charles Street, his steps slow, as methodical as the metallic click of his prosthetic heart valve.

  Our neighbor. As we were moving in, we had been told by the single woman below us—the one who wore faux-zebra spandex minis and catered to at least five Persians I could see lounging in her bay—to avoid the old man at all costs, to look the other way. He’ll talk your head off, she whispered, and then rushed off to her job at a small gallery on Newbury Street. She never once asked what I did, somehow having gotten stuck in the groove of my husband’s job (he’s an actuary). Like many people who aren’t sure what one is, she simply stopped talking and left.

  I met our old man neighbor that same day while the mover was still bringing our things. It was only late August, but already it felt and looked like what I knew as the beginning of autumn in the South; there was a breeze off the Charles River and with it the sharp, water smell that I grew to appreciate, even to welcome, as home. The light seemed sharper, whiter, the shadows longer. It was a surprise to find that I loved this city, the street, the building. I thought about all of this sitting on those old concrete front steps, smoking one cigarette right after another—right out in public—and watching our belongings come off the truck.

  It was while I was watching my Great-aunt Patricia’s pie crust table angled and turned through the door that Joseph Sever stopped to introduce himself and then (as the other neighbor had predicted) proceeded to talk. He told me how he used to smoke, how he smoked Lucky Strikes, started during the war, liked them so much he kept right on. He said if he hadn’t had such a good reason—his life—to quit, that he’d still be smoking three packs a day and enjoying every puff. But of course that was before his wife of forty years, Gwendolyn, died, before the heart valve, before his temples atrophied. He had been an accountant right there in the downtown area, and he described those April evenings when he worked so late, lighting cigarettes without even thinking, sometimes finding two lit and burning in the ashtray, as if he had an invisible partner.

  He asked (it was clear he’d give consideration to any possible answer) how I spent my time. When he stopped speaking and there was a lull in the hoisting and heaving of the movers, I could hear his valve, a metallic click as it swung closed to prevent his blood from rushing back to its source. I told him that I worked as a copy editor for one of the publishers in town, and with that entry, he started in talking about books, his favorites from as long as he could remember: Look Homeward Angel as a young man new to the city, and then Anna Karenina and For Whom the Bell Tolls, all of Hardy and Conrad, a little Jack London. “I’m a bit of a literary dabbler,” he said. “I have written some perfectly horrible poetry myself.” He liked T. S. Eliot and he liked Yeats. He liked to pause and quote a line or two with some drama, always stopping, it seemed, just as his breath gave out, at which point he tipped his latest L. L. Bean hat and bowed.

  I came to learn that he purchased a new hat each season: the panama in the summer, the wool huntsman cap in the winter. I imagined a closet filled with hats, stacks and stacks like in that book Caps for Sale, a favorite book read in my memory in the voice of Captain Kangaroo. It turned out that at the end of each season, he continued to do what his wife had called purging. He gathered up everything he could live without and took it the Salvation Army bin down on Cambridge Street. “Everything except books,” he qualified, “and of course the cats.” He and Gwendolyn had always had cats, sometimes one, usually two. During his fifty years in the building, he had had fifteen different cats and could name them in one fluid motion, their names rhyming and rolling as each received an epithet: the friskiest of them all, the one with a terrible urinary problem, the one Gwendolyn never got over, the one who ate a rubber ball. He said that I should come visit his apartment and see what fifty years of books will look like. “This will be your future,” he said as he slowly mounted the stairs. “There are rows behind rows of books, in closets and in one very special kitchen cabinet. Gwenny always used Heart of Darkness to balance the lamp that wobbles by our bed.” He paused on the landing before taking his flight to the second floor, the big brass-plated door propped open by the movers. “I keep it there. The lamp is a hellish thing, old and shorted out, but I keep it there.”

  I kept dreaming I was having a kitten. I looked at the faceless doctor and said, “Oh, thank God she didn’t have her claws out.” I told him that yes she was really cute, but that I was kind of disappointed. I really wanted a baby. At which point he laughed, just slapped his knee and laughed in a way that marked the absurdity of it all. Imagine wanting a child. Then I dreamed that I couldn’t have a child, there was no child, and I went to a special clinic seeking help. I rode the T, changing trains twice; I took a boat and a bus and a taxi. The building was no bigger than the little drugstore around the corner and women of all ages and sizes and shapes were pressing up to the counter, behind which stood a woman in white guarding the shelves of test tubes. “Ah, yes, Mrs. Porter,” she said and nodded when it was my turn. “We have your child.” Suddenly all the other women were gone and I was being carefully handed a small glass tube. I held it up to the light and inside it I saw a beautiful little girl no bigger than Thumbelina, whom I remembered from my childhood fairy-tale book. She had dark brown hair that waved onto her shoulders and big blue eyes that I was absolutely certain I saw wink and blink in affection.

  “Freeze-dried,” the woman said. “Same process as coffee. Just go home and add a little water, you’ll see.” The woman looked like someone I knew, a former teacher, the mother of a classmate, I couldn’t quite place the face. “Be very careful with her, now,” she added and handed me a special cardboard tube, much like what you’d use to mail a stool speciman or a radon test. Carefully, I kissed the precious glass tube and slipped her into the sturdy container and then into the special zippered section of my purse. I put that into a brightly colored duffel and looped the strap over my head for extra security. In the dream I had dreadlocks and a joint hidden in my bra.

  “Oh, by the way.” I was almost out the door when I remembered the important questions I had planned to ask, all of the things that my husband and I had discussed before my long journey to this place. “Her medical history.” The room was buzzing with grappling, grabbing women again, and I was being shoved out of the way. “Please. I really have to know all that you know about her.” The woman seized my arm and pulled me behind the counter and back behind the heavily rowed shelves. She leaned close and whispered. Now I knew that I had never seen her before in my life. I would have remembered, the shiny broad forehead, the missing teeth. “You must never reveal what I’m about to say. If you do, people will want your baby. They will never let her alone.” She leaned closer, her mouth covering and warming my ear as I strained to hear. “Her mama was Marilyn Monroe” she said. “And her daddy,” she paused, looked around nervously. “JFK.” I felt stunned, disheartened. Why couldn’t my baby just be the product of Flo Taylor and Ed Smith from Podunk, Wisconsin? I didn’t think to ask why they were giving me such a burden. Is it all random, or have I been singled out, especially chosen? My worries turned to mental health issue
s, sustance abuse genes, square jawlines, and prominent teeth. But then, because I was wondering about the rich and famous, I found myself thinking about good looks and talent and Southern roots. I dreamt I said, “Do you have one from Elvis?”

  At three months, that magical time when you supposedly cross the threshold from morning sickness to a sudden burst of energy, the uterus slightly larger than an orange, we decided to take a vacation. The reason was clear. It was freezing in Boston, not to mention the fact that everywhere we turned people were saying to us, Your life is about to change, it will never ever be the same. Like birthdays, weddings, funerals, it seemed important to mark this transition, to remind ourselves continuously that something was in fact happening. We chose the Virgin Islands as a way of feeling we had gone very far and yet not left the country. I just didn’t feel I could be pregnant and in another country.

  The first day of our trip was like a perfect dream. I lazed in the sun, calypso music playing down the beach, the warm clear water as blue as the sky. I listened to the birds and the steel drums while I ran through lists of names in my mind—names of relatives long deceased. The voice of the man who was trying to interest my husband in a time share wove in and out of my thoughts. He’d sat himself down in his shorts and Hawaiian shirt, canvas shoes with laces untied, smelling like Hawaiian Tropic and some kind of musky aftershave, and asked my husband if teenage girls were better looking than ever before these days or was it just him? I heard him tell my husband that he preferred younger women, always had. “Like that one, mmmmmmm, mmmmmmmm,” he said, his words oozing in such a way I half expected to see them like black oily leeches crawling off his tongue. I opened one eye to his gleaming white teeth just in time to follow his look to a string bikini, oiled brown thighs too young for cellulite. I wanted to sit up and tell him that of course he liked ’em young, that any grown-up woman with any sense whatsoever wouldn’t touch him. But the warmth of the sun and the distant drums, the hunch that even the very young woman who had just passed would not give this two-bit Peter Pan salesman the time of day seemed satisfaction enough. That and the fact that I had lifted his almost empty pack of Marlboros and hidden them deep in my beach bag. I listened to him pat his pockets and look all around. Let him have a little nicotine fit, get a grip on the libido. I devised a plan: I would get up in the middle of the night and tiptoe out onto our balcony. I would huddle off to one side and blow my smoke with the wind just as I had done through screened windows of a locked bathroom as a teenager. A little mouthwash, deodorant, hairspray, cologne. If no one saw me, if I didn’t confess, it’d be like it never happened.

  The next morning I woke to the sensation of wetness, startled out of sleep by recognition as I hurried to switch on the fluorescent light in the bathroom. It was real; I was bleeding. Slowly, carefully, I called out to my husband and lay on the cool tile floor. I felt detached, as if I were in someone else’s room, on someone else’s vacation. I imagined a honeymoon couple, whirling and dancing, drunk and giddy, collapsing on the bed while the stark sunlight and still blue sea lay beyond the sliding-glass doors. Same place, same room, same toilet, different life. I lay there and questioned everything. Why did I buy the crib so early? Why did I smoke that Marlboro Man cigarette? I lay there wishing that we were home. I wanted the cracked broken black tiles of our own bathroom; I wanted our neighbor sitting with me on the front stoop, the smell of the Charles River, our pots without handles and the rickety three-legged couch I complained about every time I sat on it; I wanted normalcy. I said, Let’s make a deal. Let me win this round and I will never ever again smoke. I will go on great missions and try not to gossip. But more than anything I solemnly swear to never again smoke.

  It seemed to take forever, phone calls, a slow walk, the idle chatter and words of sympathy and well wishes from the time-share man, his gaze taking in the freshly raked beach. There was a boat ride, and then an ambulance that really was a station wagon with a light on top. There was an emergency room and then a closed door, a hall where pregnant women perched like hood ornaments on cheap aluminum stretchers, some crying out in labor, their wings spread in pain. They had no ultrasound; they had no answers. I was thinking about the used car lot that was across the street from my grandmother’s house when I was growing up. I thought about the little plastic flags strung across that lot and the way they whipped in the wind. It’s a Good Deal the sign said, and whenever anyone commented on it, my grandmother simply leveled her eyes at the person with a solemn stare, as if to say, you better work hard to make it a good deal. I rolled past woman after woman. They looked lifeless; used and worn and tired.

  I spent a week sitting in bed or on a chaise on the balcony, the room littered with room service trays; the hotel had limited choices: conch chowder, conch fritters, conch omelet, conch conch. I could hear my husband down below, in my absence forced to hear more time-share news, to have young, supple bodies pointed out for his perusal, while I clicked a channel changer round and round hoping that all of a sudden I would find more than one station. Over and over they advertised a parade that had taken place the week before, people in bird suits, feathers and bells, marching. I lay in the bed and watched little yellow sugar birds fly up to suck the jelly packets I placed outside, the breakfast tray discarded on the dresser. The Kings Day Parade. The Kings Day Parade. It was a bad Twilight Zone. It was like the world had stopped suddenly and thrown everything askew.

  Everyone has a story. Perfect strangers came up and told me the most horrible story they’d ever heard about pregnancy and childbirth. They would say, “I shouldn’t be telling this to you,” and then proceed without ever pausing to draw a breath. I heard about the woman who miscarried after the three-month mark and about the woman who knew at seven months that her baby was dead but was asked to carry it into labor all the same. “Oh, sure,” people said. “It’s common to bleed like that. Happens all the time. No real explanation.” Que será será. A miscarriage is just one that was never meant to be, you know, a genetic mistake. If you lose this one you can always have another. But look at it this way, you haven’t lost it yet! It ain’t over till it’s over. The fat lady ain’t done singing.

  The river is within us, the sea is all about us. Joseph Sever’s voice quavered out the line as he leaned closer to me, all the while looking at my abdomen, now two months beyond the Twilight Zone scare. He insisted that I read aloud, anything I was reading, anything my husband was reading. We should be reading aloud all the time now. He had read an article about it, the words, the sounds traveling through the layers of clothes and skin, thick hard muscle to those miniature ears, lanugo-coated limbs gently swishing and bathing. “Who knows what’s for real,” Joseph said as he tipped his hat and once again reached for my grocery bag piled high with cigarette substitutes like licorice whips and Chunky Monkey ice cream, greasy Slim-Jim sausage sticks, the taste for which I thought I’d outgrown. “We know nothing of this world, this great universe,” he paused, hazel eyes squinting in thought as he waited for me to nod. “Take God, for example,” he said and laughed softly, “and which came first, knowledge or man’s need for knowledge?” I motioned him on with his errand, his own marketing trip. It was our daily struggle, trying to help each other on the icy brick sidewalks. We argued who was more in need: an old man with a bad heart or a pregnant woman who would not believe that everything was really okay until she gave birth to, saw, held, heard a healthy infant.

  I dreamed of my grandmother. She was naked and alone in a rubble of upturned graves. I squatted and cradled her in my arms, so happy to find her alive after all, forget the damp orange clay and what seemed like miniature ancient ruins. Forget the pale, shrouded family members wandering aimlessly in search of loved ones. (Was this Judgment Day?) And then I dreamed myself sleeping, my husband on his side, his face a comfort. My own head was inclined toward him. I wore the very gown I wore in reality, and within the dream I woke to a chill, a cool draft that filled the room and I sat, startled, and turned on the lamp by the bed where, s
tuck to its base, was a little yellow Post-it note with the words, I came to see if you believe, written in a small deliberate hand. Yes, yes, I believe. I believe. I woke myself with this affirmation. I woke to discover that my husband was already up and in the shower, and that I wasn’t entirely sure to what or to whom I had given this great affirmation of faith. I woke to the tiny buzzsaw, vibrating uterus, a pressed bladder, the dim gray light of day.

  Early that summer—week twenty-eight, the time designated for a baby to be “legally viable”—Joseph and I went to see the swans being brought to the Public Garden pond. It was warm and we walked slowly, taking our time to point out to each other lovely panes of amethyst glass, the little catty-corner building that looks just like the drawing in Make Way for Ducklings, the bar that was the model for Cheers, crowds of people waiting in line to get inside and buy T-shirts.