Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Read online

  There were questions: Why would evil happen to children? How do we understand it and continue believing? Is there a way we can understand it? I asked the pastor these questions. I didn’t know how to tell her about the travelers. I found, in the way I would find with my therapist years later—as you often find with someone you love—a common world that felt manageable. I wanted to but didn’t ask: Do we get to go home? Why did it seem more likely for children, as if they were closer to the beginning when it came time to return? Maybe we had gone too far.

  She didn’t garden and I rarely saw her except when she was in front of the congregation on Sundays. She was never memorably eloquent. How does one get to be known as good at that job? What sense of herself or her profession did she have? I used to wonder about this. She told stories during her sermon; in one, she was in a grocery store, in the fruit aisle, faced with so many inexplicable choices. She must have tied this into faith, though I forget the moves she made. Richard disliked the church and found her interminable. I was riveted, but didn’t say it. She hates being in front of people, I thought. I also couldn’t understand being a true believer. It seemed the most fantastical thing, to be so full of belief in the mystical that you would go up front to teach others. Her face, the pinch of it, and her weary eyes made her seem too tired to actually be a believer.

  Her office was on the second floor of the building. She was, on the day I first went up, tucked into her desk. She looked up when I came to the door. I introduced myself. Yes, I’ve seen you on Sundays, she said. You live in back. With my husband, I said. Yes, and your little girl, she said. No, I said quickly. We don’t have a child. We would like to, but it will be some time … I paused and she didn’t speak, though it had been her mistake. She was waiting for me to explain myself. Perhaps those of faith are used to being told—if they sit still and wait—are used to being told everything. I don’t have a girl, you see, I said. Though I would like one. We’re young still, I said. Too young to take in a child, I thought, imagining them as souls in a hall, waiting for someone to open the door so they could pass through, and that parents were nothing more than that, not the thing itself, not the moment of their creation. I felt that the girl had returned to the hallway to wait again.

  The pastor grew up in a town in New Hampshire. Ellsworth, she said, then asked if I knew it. She took out a large green book. I waited for a theology lesson but in fact she was opening an atlas. She pointed to a dot in the middle of New Hampshire. Her mother had died and her father was an alcoholic, she said. The town had one church in the middle of a field. She never went as her father wasn’t religious. It held her more, she said, than had he had religion and she had gone every week. She hadn’t returned to Ellsworth in twenty years, she said, and still had never gone to the church. Though she called our time together her visiting hours and made clear it was part of her work as pastor—to attend to the spiritual needs of the community—she mostly talked about herself and her beliefs, and not in the sense that she was teaching me, but because she seemed to enjoy talking out loud. Perhaps she hadn’t been given such free range in a long time.

  I could see the New England in her. You could see her in a turtleneck with her face whitened with the cold. She had asked me about my childhood, and I talked about my parents. My mother was strict, I said. It was a stern upbringing, a New England upbringing. And she said, Yes, as was mine. She said her childhood would have been lonely if not for her faith, which she had from a young age. I asked her what faith felt like, what it felt like in your body, whether it had a physical sensation such as longing had. I wouldn’t know, she said.

  Once I felt the desire to have a baby it took me a year to realize what it was; something clinched me in a tight place in my chest and pulled me, but I didn’t know what the pulling was. It wasn’t what I would have guessed. That you feel the urge to have a baby and a worry that you won’t be able to have a baby. Instead it feels like you’ll expire; there’s a sense of time running out. An urgency as if you’ll die soon. I hadn’t imagined that about the desire, how physical it would be. She leaned back in her chair, as if to consider, and said, I haven’t felt those things. I don’t know.

  I was traveling once—where was I?—I was in Columbus, I think, and I came upon a historical street sign. One of those that describe a landmark. This one said Strangers Church and explained that there had been several churches that served the area hotels. I remembered it because, well, weren’t they all strangers’ churches? Hers had been. She was not fit for the work. The congregation didn’t warm to her. She left a year or two after we left. She had a poor memory and poor facial recognition in a job where you needed both. When I had once asked her, Why did you think I had a little girl that one time? she had said that with such a changing parish, it’s hard to remember most people. She usually didn’t do what she had done that day—give her lack of memory away—but she had forgotten herself for a moment. It was a good guess, so many children in the congregation. You know, she said, often parents come because they want their children to grow up around faith, not because they have faith themselves. Which is not the same, she said. Not the same at all.

  On the second service of the day, the deacon read to the children. The children came up and she would motion for them to sit around her. Then she would read a story that, in my memory, always involved lambs and the goodness of Jesus. She was jolly and happy and made the children comfortable. Where was the pastor during this time? Sitting back, watching.

  I tried my best with my therapist to remember what had taken place in the Church Apartments. Our living room that didn’t have any furniture. The services I went to sometimes, mostly alone, because neither of us had religion but I liked the quiet hall and the pews that were engraved with names of deceased relatives. My nocturnal habits. The long hallways. The room with the children, and the parents standing outside, waiting to take the children away. What did Richard do during this time? she asked, pointing out that when I told stories, he wasn’t there. You must have been lonely, she said. But he was at work; the silence and hard work no doubt helped him as the hallways helped me. We are all lost. Why blame him? It was silly to remember the stories of us not getting along. The melodrama of any couple breaking apart. My feelings for the man who stayed for a month in the neighboring apartment who made jewelry. He lay earrings on the bedspread and let me pick a pair. Feathers I picked and even wore. Mistaking the relief from loneliness that meeting another fragile soul can bring about, mistaking that for love, but who’s to say it wasn’t love, or what I felt for Richard, that it was love. Who’s to say.

  Before my husband and I left Portland, I went to say good-bye to the pastor. She was tired that day and struggling to write the sermon. She said that sometimes it came and she could feel the words inside her. But lately, she said, it had become harder for her. It felt as if words were not inside her. I wondered if that meant the faith was also not there, but didn’t ask. She had told me she never doubted her faith, that there could be no crisis of faith, that it would feel like not being alive. She sometimes thought that she wasn’t a good pastor. That the faith in her was a private thing and sometimes she didn’t want to talk about it, though sometimes she did.

  When I learned that she had left the church, left the faith, and gone back to New Hampshire, I imagined her at the grocery store. Examining the range of fruit in confusion—the watermelon, so alien to the climate, holding it and then having no one to tell about it later. To sit at home at her table by the window. Perhaps the most important thing is to have someone to tell things to. But no, she had faith, she would have felt herself in conversation all the time. Sometimes I thought that maybe I had faith and simply didn’t identify that when I talked in my mind—and I talked all the time—that I hadn’t identified who I was talking to, not allowed myself to feel the presence there. I had considered this one day when I was walking in the new city I had moved to. In this city there was an elevated train that I was always catching sight of in the distance. It was, sometimes,
when the light was right, a magical place. The elevated train, the distant Amtrak tracks, all the children, who, in my imagination, were also in elevated places, as if there were elevated playgrounds, too. I walked and thought, Maybe I should have a child. Or maybe all this, this is always a response, only I’m not hearing it properly.

  BOSTON

  There is one last story that I have been trying to tell: what happened to the man who ran away from his kids on the island. When I told my mother the story, she said that the way it was left led her to believe he had killed himself. My mother rarely lets on that she is curious about what is around her—curious about anything abstract, not immediately a part of her day—but sometimes she would show that she knew quite well what was around her. She would reveal it as matter-of-factly as she revealed anything else, such as what was going on at her friend’s or the neighbor’s.

  I tried to figure out the story about the man when I was lying in bed, tired from waitressing, but I drifted off and turned the television to a crime drama. In those dramas the lost person was always found or the crime solved. Occasionally a story wouldn’t be solved, but only because it was part of a larger narrative that would be solved later. The curious thing, though, was that the solving, while mandatory, was the least interesting part of the show. I watched an endless number of episodes and for years cut clippings from newspapers about lost people. The real life stories—those newspaper clippings—never let me down, whether they were solved or unsolved. The details were too beautiful. Too etched in. Each person had only that one time to be lost, while the writers of the dramas wrote a new episode each week.

  I left the story with the man from the island stealing a car. He drove to New Hampshire and stayed in abandoned houses. He wandered the houses and one day found a full closet and traded his coat for a warmer one. He also pocketed some old photographs. When the cold became unbearable, he drove to a shelter. Nothing after that, no more mention of him. He was simply in line for the shelter. Later a body was found in a lake with the warmer coat on and several photographs in a plastic bag. The owner of the coat and photographs was found alive. He couldn’t account for the body in the lake—he didn’t know anyone who was missing. Then he remembered his parents’ home, left empty, and drove there with the officer, where they found a strange coat and pieced together what happened. As if finding a coat were finding a person. Maybe by saying it here, I can stop with that story. So often stories don’t work.

  It’s quite a thing to think about, my mother said. She was visiting from the Cape. The subletter had left weeks earlier and my mother was staying in his room. He had moved out when I was away, leaving only a necklace pinned to the wall. It was a tiny room. My mother sat on the bed while I sat on the floor. She looked around and said it reminded her of when we had lived on the island. There was a place where we could pick grapes, she said. I was pregnant with you that summer, and I thought all the time about how you would be able to pick grapes.

  I talked about the restaurant, my worry that it wasn’t going to last the winter. That it had been my plan to save thirty thousand dollars to have a baby, but now there weren’t enough customers.

  Thirty thousand dollars wouldn’t have paid for a baby, she said.

  I know, I said.

  The next morning I put cream and sugar on the table while my mother started the percolator. I told her I had dreamed that night about returning to Berlin, and she asked if I remembered Poland. All that way, she said, and you didn’t leave the hotel. There’s no reason to believe things will always go that way, I said.

  We left the house for the Neue Galerie to meet up with a friend of hers. We looked at the work of an artist who painted the same lover over a period of twenty years. He had been married and never painted the wife. He was from Belgium, or a similar country, and to be in rooms with his large paintings was to be surrounded by the inner world of a man I didn’t know. My mother spoke little over lunch, so I talked with her friend Robin. She wore a broad scarf around her shoulders. I was glad that my mother had never resorted to scarves. We talked about art and travel while my mother drank coffee and picked at her cake. Afterward, after saying good-bye to the woman and getting on the train, I was exhausted.

  And the art, you liked it? my mother asked.

  I felt bad for the wife, I said.

  It’s not easy for anyone, is it? she said. You liked Robin, though, you got along well with her?

  You were quiet, I said.

  I don’t know why.

  The art?

  Sometimes I wonder if you would have been happier with someone like her.

  She didn’t mean it as a question. She said it to herself, looking out the window, and I didn’t respond. I was thinking of the man who had spent all those years painting the lover and never once the wife.

  That Saturday the man at the market had clams. There, my mother said, as she stepped forward and bought two dozen. At home, I scrubbed clams and put them on a towel, while she opened a bottle of chardonnay we had bought at the discount store. The wine tasted of pear juice. She was leaving the next morning. We sat at the table in the fading light and I tried to talk about Richard, put in mind of him, I think, by the clams, and the cold, and of having my mother there, and of having her about to go.

  When I had spent the winter in Provincetown—it was when my marriage was ending and a painting friend had offered her cottage cheaply—I used this friend’s license to clam every Sunday, going at first out of curiosity, and then because I loved it, and then after that, when the wind became bitter, the clams scarce, the ice on the jetty treacherous, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.

  Much of my money that winter went to the heating bill and food and beer at the Governor Bradford, which wasn’t cheap—nothing in Provincetown was cheap, though it seemed like there were only seven of us staying for the winter, and none of us had any money. Everything should have been given away. I didn’t bring my computer, but I did bring pens and my notebook, which more than leading to creating anything, mostly helped alleviate the panic that I wasn’t creating. The Stop & Shop was two miles away and I’d walk with my backpack and come home to cook lunch, and perhaps I’d write something or sketch with my friend’s supplies. Afternoons I’d walk until stopping to have a drink at the Governor Bradford. There weren’t happy hour specials in Provincetown, but being in New York had put me in the habit of drinking at dusk. Then at night I’d listen to the radio or read the Times or fiction from the library.

  I didn’t get along with the bartender at the Governor Bradford. She stiffened when I came in and was slow to greet me. At first she had been easy with me—probably thinking I was a tourist there for only a week—and told me stories about herself and the area. When she had learned that I researched stories she asked what they were about. I tried to think of something that would be easy to describe, and I talked about a girl who had gone missing from the pier in Portland. The bartender froze in place. She said, Several of my friends left here and walked off the pier. I thought of the pier, two dark blocks from the bar, how you could hear and feel the ocean and what it must have felt like.

  I went to the Governor Bradford most nights until Richard came to visit and then my habits changed. We were happy then—during those two weeks—and switched to a bar across the street where younger locals went, and day trippers, and professionals from neighboring towns. There was a raw bar and microbrews, and it was warm and nice to sit by the window and eat oysters.

  In the cottage, we fell in together as easily as if we were still married, when we used to stay out late and sleep until noon and play records from bed. He would lie there, one hand lifting records from the floor and putting them on the player, which was also on the floor and covered with dust, so all our record players—and we went through a lot of them back then—played too slowly. In Provincetown, he lay there while I sat and smoked and watched out the window, talking to him, telling him stories about my childhood. I touched his back tentatively, unsure of what I wanted. He
didn’t move, either toward me or away. We might have been drinking the night before. He was not a big drinker, but there were a few nights he was hungover and slower in the morning. I wondered if I was mistaking his slowness for intimacy.

  There was a window over the door, and another near the bed, covered with a gauze fabric that brought to mind cheese-cloth. I smoked with my feet under me and watched out the window. Maybe it is cheesecloth, I said. He lay with his head down and eyes closed. What else do you see? he said. I told him about the seagulls, the clouds, the different shades of gray that made up the landscape there.

  We went to the Old Colony the night they closed for the season. They turned off their fridges and put beer on the counter and you could buy anything for two dollars. They also turned their heat off, but space heaters blew air into the dark room. It was as if they had already closed, then opened to make fifty more dollars. He had loved that, sitting on a chair against the wall in his wool coat. That night he told me—we were sitting at the bar and he was holding a drink and he moved the bottle away from his mouth to say it—I’m going to take the bus out in the morning. Okay, I said. He got us both a shot of whiskey. Of Evan Williams. They didn’t have beer and shot specials in Provincetown like they did in New York; we had to buy everything separately.

  The P & B bus for Boston left at six thirty in the morning, in the dark, from the harbor. He stayed up all night, working in the living room, while I slept for a few hours. I got up at six and went to the kitchen to make coffee. You don’t need to be up now, he said. It’s fine, I said, walking past him. We walked to the harbor holding coffee in travel mugs, and he had his bag over one shoulder. I wore a long coat over my pajamas. The bus was already there, idling. We drank coffee standing near the door of the bus. The harbor like that, in the dark, felt like a wild animal. You heard it and felt it—the dark abyss of it. Sometimes it felt like the wildest place on earth. He lurched onto the bus in the way he had of moving, as if breaking something that was attaching him to where he was.