Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Page 13

  My mother and I talked on the phone several times a week. Sometimes we’d start in midconversation. There’s not much furniture in here, my mother said when I answered the phone one day, not long after she had visited. I’m sitting on the kitchen floor, she said.

  She was, it turned out, housesitting a cottage on a lake for the winter. She knew the owner from Puritans, the store where she worked. Ever since those years of living on the ocean, she had wanted to see water when she woke up. Ocean property had grown so expensive. Even a lake she couldn’t afford. You should come here for a time, she said. The previous tenants left boxes in the attic.

  Going through other people’s stuff?

  Part of the deal is that I clean the place out, she said. He said I could keep anything I wanted.

  Is there anything good?

  No, not really. But you should come. There might be something of the sort that you like. Or maybe she had said, Something up your alley.

  When I arrived—a week or two later, the restaurant had shut down and I wasn’t working anymore—she was wearing surprisingly fashionable clothes though she wouldn’t have known it, only recognizing them as clothes from years ago. She had on high-waisted jeans and a T-shirt and her hair was held back by a scarf.

  Those sorts of pants are in again, I said.

  With who? she asked.

  In the city, people have started to wear those.

  Not skinny jeans anymore?

  It’s transitioning.

  There we go then, she said. I found them in the boxes. And I may have found a mystery for you, she said. Something you might like.

  In the boxes?

  Yes, something in the boxes.

  She talked about the mystery after dinner. Her dinners were always tidy—baked chicken, salad in small bowls where most things, even the carrot shreds, came from bags and were slightly dried out, and then fluffy rolls, a bottle of ice-cold chardonnay that she had opened days ago. After we ate, she loaded the dishwasher, wiped and dried the table, then sat down. I asked if she minded if I taped her. You’re working again, then? she said.

  I’m not sure. Maybe.

  When I turned the recorder on, her voice became loud and dutiful. There are some people who are natural being recorded, but my mother wasn’t one of them. She said that she had found photographs of children standing in front of her house, sitting near the sliding door, standing before the lake. They were a boy and a girl—blond and happy. She thought they were childhood pictures of the teenagers next door. She had watched them before they left for the season. They were working at a camp and had its name on their hats and sweatshirts. The dad would grill, and then the children would leave for town in a jeep.

  My mother said that she had waited for the family to leave for the season before swimming in the lake. Sometimes the father came on the weekend to do projects. She took the pictures to him. He—Ian—was in front of his house, putting in a new mailbox. She told him that she had found the photographs and wondered if they were his kids. He didn’t hold the photographs as his hands were dirty, so she held them. Then he went inside to wash his hands. When he came back, he asked if he could keep them and she said yes, that was why she had brought them over.

  She got to know him as the fall went on. She would be out raking and he would be out raking. Or they would both get the mail. Those sorts of things. They would talk about the weather, or the town, or what getting older entailed. Once he said that if he had acted peculiar that day, when she had brought over the pictures, it was only because he wasn’t sure they were his kids. They looked like them, but not enough, for some reason, that he knew right away. He said, Isn’t that something you should know?

  One day, when we came back from shopping in town, Ian was in his yard. He had just arrived for the weekend. I hadn’t met him yet. The three of us stood on the lawn; she introduced me, I shook his hand, then my mother and I went into the house, carrying groceries. I sat at the table while she made lunch. Afterward she wiped and dried the table, then laid out photographs, having kept several of them. I studied them, then asked what she supposed. I don’t know, my mother said. I thought you would like them.

  I thought, She must be lonely. There was hardly any furniture and trees kept light out. It had the economy she wanted. She said to me at some point—maybe when she was hand-washing dishes because she only had two of everything and we had wanted to eat salad in bowls after eating soup—I’m sorry that I’m not something different. You think it wouldn’t pain me to keep four bowls.

  Looking at the pictures on the table, I talked about my interest in doubling—that reality could have been altered slightly, leaving traces of another. For instance, his children, at the time those pictures were taken, could have been somewhere else, but that didn’t mean those weren’t also his children.

  I thought about it later, on my mattress on the floor. I wasn’t trying to explain the pictures. I was trying to explain another world, one I had always wanted to find. One day, when we were in Provincetown, Richard and I had broken into a dune shack. I had stood inside, looking out the window at the ocean. I didn’t move, even as he tried to show me things he had found. He asked if I was okay. We lived in so many houses when I was a little girl, I said. What was I feeling? Desire, maybe. To want something that you couldn’t remember. It was a hard feeling to live with. After the divorce, I saw light everywhere. Some light—the light at the end of the day, the way it hit the pigeons that flew around the steeple, the way it hit the sides of buildings—that light felt like entrances to another world. Like the shack had felt when I was looking out the window. Sometimes it was better to be farther from this feeling. I felt it would split me if I let it.

  In the morning, when I woke, chilled, on the floor, I didn’t know where I was. I pulled the recollection from bits around me. I walked to the kitchen and from the window saw my mother talking to the man next door. She held a coffee mug and he, a rake. A leaf blew in her hair and he picked it out and she smiled. They stood still. He touched her hair again. She reached up and touched his hand. They stood holding hands, and then she turned to come inside, their grasp loosening as she pulled away.

  I asked if she had eaten breakfast. Some toast, she said, but I would have a little more with you.

  I was going to make a full thing, I said, at least if you have things to make French toast with.

  She found a skillet and a plastic spatula that had melted some and a plastic mixing bowl, then went into her room to change, coming out in a wool skirt and turtleneck sweater. We ate French toast and clementines. How is Ian? I asked.

  Fixing the drain, she said. He asked if I needed anything from Home Depot. Do we need anything? Besides mousetraps?

  I drove her to work at Puritans so that I could use her car and from there drove farther out, first to a thrift store to buy items she was missing—a can opener, a strainer—then to the swap shop at the dump to look at clothing, considering an oversized coat made in Yugoslavia, and then thought, Enough of coats. I read in the town library, then went to pick up my mother, stopping inside the store to watch her. She had the habit of looking as if she was studying the women around her for how to act. She straightened a stack of sweaters while the other two employees talked by the desk.

  Outside it had grown dark. We drove to a bar on Main Street with stained glass windows and plank walls. Inside felt snug and warm. We got stouts and she talked about work, of the coworker that was always complaining about her boyfriend and also about a neighbor who had been arrested for guns. Mom, I said, with Ian. Am I interrupting something by being here? Would it be better if I went?

  What do you mean? she said.

  I could leave tomorrow, or I’m grown now, you could just go over.

  He’s married.

  That kind of thing. It’s one of those things. It is what it is.

  We could go down Cape tomorrow, she said. There’s a show at PAAM of artists who painted the light in Provincetown.

  You’re always taking me to sho
ws.

  I always think you like them, she said.

  Do you?

  Sure. They’re fine.

  You noted, right, that I let it go?

  I noted it, my mother said.

  I dreamed that I had a baby—that it simply popped out; there was no terrible birth, no pain, even in the dream I was aware of the unlikeliness of what had happened—and when the baby wanted milk, I called for my mother because I didn’t know how to nurse.

  I didn’t tell my mother about the dream. What she would have said. Maybe I loved her best because she believed the things I said. She even took my dreams as fact. Well, she would have said, You just figure it out. It’s just something that happens.

  It’s impossible to see your mother as a middle-aged man might see her. To see her as a girl grown older. But I still tried to imagine it. At the beginning of fall, when the mornings were growing cold and the family next door had gone away—going back to their town outside Boston, leaving only the man to weatherproof the house—my mother had taken to swimming. She had an old red suit, the material softened by age. From a distance she probably looked like a flag. She would have worn a towel until she got near the water and then dropped it to wade in. The man next door would have noticed it one morning and then taken to making coffee by the window overlooking the lake. He had an estranged marriage—he was there, after all, at the summer cottage while his wife and kids were back home—and my mother would have been easy company. She was spare, self-sufficient. And she was such a small woman; she must have looked like a girl emerging from the water. He would have started with offers—to get her groceries, to help nail a shutter—and then would have offered his dock to dive off.

  What I missed most when I lost a man I loved was someone who held a record of my life from that time. It was the way we told each other things. Without them I went back to my quiet life, but with them there was a transcript of living. Transcript, of all words, as a way to describe love. But we all want, in some way, to be able to record our life, and for some reason lovers do that for each other. Of all things. Of all jobs for them to be given.

  My mother and I drove down Cape the next day, to the study-of-light exhibit, and when she saw that it hadn’t made me happy, that I hadn’t found the art good, had found it a small-town exhibit, she mentioned a theater show she heard was quite good in Chatham. I said, It’s okay, Mom, I’m just here to see you. Me, she said. Me of all things. We stopped at the lighthouse and kicked off our shoes and walked along the coastline, clutching our jackets and not talking because of the wind. When we got in the car she paused and said, They had been separated, but then were together over the summer with the kids, but they’re separated again, which is why he’s staying here.

  Will he be staying for a long time? I asked.

  I don’t know, my mother said.

  The clouds were going over the sun in the incredible way that happened there. The study of light, I pointed out, this is worth a thousand of those shows.

  I’d like to think she said something like, Maybe forever, maybe it will stay like this forever, but of course she wouldn’t have. She would had said something careful. Who’s to say how long any of this lasts, she might have said. It’s nice to have company. I’m going to enjoy it while I’m here. All lines I’ve said myself at one time or another, and no doubt I meant them, too, when I said them.

  The last story I have about my father I have from her, so it’s a story with little embellishment, even less emotion, and the kind of odd detail that seeks to compensate, as the person telling the story must linger on something after all. She said that after my father left us, she visited him a few times with me and my brother. He had gone to Boston where he got temporary jobs. She would take us there, and we would sit, and he would say, Well, you must be hungry, and she would say, No, not really, as we had eaten on the drive. She said that we were in the habit, when driving to Boston, of going to Friendly’s, as we liked the clown sundaes. Once we hadn’t stopped for food and she said that we would eat something if he made it, and he put mustard and American cheese on white bread and cut it into triangles. He served peach juice from Dixie cups.

  Then he moved and for fifteen years she didn’t hear from him, but one day he got in touch, and she drove to Boston to see him, not telling me, as she wanted to see him first. He had found work as a janitor. My mother had brought a picture of us, but later, when she got home, realized she hadn’t shown him. He had changed. He had gotten older and his health had grown bad. The apartment was cold, the building vacant. The building was to be torn down and the owners were allowing him to live there in the meantime. There were several pianos. She asked if he played and he said they weren’t tuned, but that when he came across one he couldn’t help himself. There were boxes everywhere. He asked after me. How is Anne? She realized she still hadn’t sat down, that she wasn’t comfortable, and, remembering a deli she had passed, suggested they get something to eat. Or she suggested an Irish bar she had seen around the corner. But he pointed to his feet and said he didn’t have shoes on. She was about to say that he could just put them on, but then stopped. She thought, Maybe he has the thing where you can’t go out. She had been alive long enough to have felt that, felt the terror of the world around you, some form of that, some form of most things.

  That afternoon they talked about easy matters. Friends he had, those who helped bring in the pianos and brought other things for him now that he had trouble working. And then about me. That I was away. And that when I came back we would come and visit. That I would want to see him. She said that if he wanted we could all go to a restaurant. He was mostly quiet. When I asked her, Would he have wanted to see me? She said, Of course. He just didn’t know how to say it. She wrote him a letter a month later, but it got returned, so she drove to Boston, only to find the house had been boarded up. She looked in one window, but the pianos were gone. She said, After a time, I thought maybe I had the wrong house, or maybe I hadn’t seen him at all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the teaching and support I received from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and the University of Massachusetts–Amherst Program for Poets and Writers. Thank you to friends and family who helped with this book, including Sam Leader, Brian Booker, Allison Devers, Katherine Hill, Anu Jindal, Emily Hunt, Dan Bevacqua, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Inpatient Press, and John Cochary. Special thanks to Brigid Hughes and Jonathan Lee, who made this book possible.

  SARA MAJKA’s stories have appeared in A Public Space, PEN America, the Gettysburg Review, and Guernica. A former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she lives in New York City.

  Cities I’ve Never Lived In was set in Adobe Caslon.

  Book design by Rachel Holscher.

  Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.