SYLVIA WHO DREAMS OF DACTYLS by Janice Obuchowski
Sylvia wakes thinking of dactyls as if they’d been spilling out across her dreams. Washington, Dumbledore. She stretches, throws back her comforter, opens the curtains and lets ashen light bathe her. Some subterranean part of her head engaging in pattern assessment. Bothersome: yes. Trigonometry: no.
In the kitchen she drinks coffee from a mug glazed cobalt – dusted sunshine about her shoulders – and looks out to her back fields. In the distance a slim streak of lake is silver blue, and the mountains are August lush and serene. Gesturing, cluster fuck. This abstract clutter, this part of herself not making sense to herself – pursuing its own avenues of nonsense inquiry. A nighttime devoted to syllabic count.
Soon a late morning of tennis with her neighbor. Veritas, festering. She makes a light breakfast: toast with butter and marmalade. Marmalade. If it would work, she’d shake her head like a swimmer clearing droplets of water from her ears. Mucinex, Bessemer. Hexagon. There’s no languor in this kind of thinking.
Already it seems beyond her to lead a rational day. Joshua. She showers, steam and mist hotly fogging the room, and with various cleansers scents herself with orange blossom and sandalwood. Then to anoint herself with serum and slather herself with creams. Slavish, lavish these rituals of older middle age. Joshua. That must be it. Her head engaged in fractal logic, tiny shapes mimicking – at least in sonic apparition – the large one. The one that comes at her from these absurd, oblique angles.
Her wrist extended, racket out, she whacks the ball, a great return just over the net, but has to drop her racket because she’s hurt her wrist. John comes to her. She’s worried her mouth is open in a tiny o, a silly shape that does no justice to her pain.
“You’re OK?” Even-keeled, concerned neighbor. They play occasionally as the weather holds. He’s a veterinarian and she always wonders what his days are like, what mix of joy and heartbreak comes his way as he engages in new pets, sick pets, happy families, sad ones. If he feels all happy families are alike, etc. He touches the underside of her wrist – less assessment and more reminder of his presence. “Let’s get some ice on that,” he says and trots off to the Harbor Club’s dining room.
She walks off the court and sprawls in an Adirondack chair. He returns with a bag of frozen peas, which he foists upon her. “Maybe a sprain,” he says. “Ice now and certainly Advil later.” He sits in the chair beside hers and pats her knee – perhaps as he’d pat the head of a Golden Retriever. “You weren’t paying attention.”
“I was,” she huffs. She wasn’t. Dactyls, fractals, Joshua. Thoughts that cling as lint on a dress. Beyond them is the lake, with its little shivers, shimmers, its lack of placidness. The air is thick with moisture. Her wrist throbs and gives off heat despite the cold wet plastic bag of peas. Questioning, darkening. John is chatting about some volunteer work he’s doing tomorrow, registering crew teams for the Dragon Boat Festival. She knows of it vaguely. In Burlington, an annual event to raise money for cancer survivors. She presses the peas to her forehead just for the delectable thrill of coolness unmitigated by hurt. Poetry, escalate. She’d ice these dream remnants, dream logic, and turn them into snowflakes, which themselves contain fractals. It all makes sense. “Can I join you?” she asks.
“For lunch?” he spreads his arm to the club behind him. “I bet they can squeeze us in.” This is him being wry. The Harbor Club is lake-resort chic, and vacationers come from God knows where in their salmon pants and seer-sucker jackets, looking forward to meals on white linen tablecloths and the constant, buoyant tranquility that comes from lakeside fun. He’s a member. She used to be when she still had a family surrounding her, Susan and Jack climbing all over to dig into the beach bags for towels, for graham crackers, for bug spray. The house just a few miles south, and Rusty thought it was the civilized thing to do. Susan, when she was a toddler, splashing in the harbor shrieking with some unbridled joy. Her children inhabited this Eden, thinking it their own. They now live in New Haven and Westchester, respectively. They barely call.
“No, to the Dragon Boat Festival. Is Geoffrey joining you?”
“Geoffrey is giving a reading across the lake. So he’ll be busy letting women ply him with cheap rosé,” John says, a second stab at being wry. “Then they’ll sit around gossiping. He loves it.” John watches some vacationers take their place on the court, lithe and young, likely married. “I’d love it too. If you really want to come I’m going to leave at 7.”
“I’ll be ready.” Her wrist has gone numb, but beneath that numbness is a hum of pressure, pain wishing to come back if only she’d stop trying to dampen it. “I think it’d be great fun.” Fun is the wrong word – she ought not describe an event devoted to surviving cancer as fun. What will it be? She has no idea. She’s not actually sure why she wants to go.
The tock-thwack of the ball going back and forth between this young athletic couple. She wonders if this woman loves this man. The woman, her ponytail bouncing, her skin fresh, her lips rosy. A happiness of being generally well received and having to do very little to earn it. Sylvia understands. She’s spent the majority of her life getting by on her looks, too. It’s an unfair universe. As if high cheekbones and light eyes have anything to do with the her that’s really her. But with age she’s begun to match her insides. A kind of withering as she thinks of it.
“Would you like to go to lunch?” John stretches, perhaps restless for not getting to finish their game. “My treat.”
“I’m sorry about the game,” she says, by which she means she doesn’t wish to have lunch. She does wish she hadn’t spoiled something they were both looking forward to. She was not paying attention.
He nods and says he’ll be in her driveway tomorrow bright and early.
“Bright and early!” she chirps – fatly false chirp, night frog and not delicate bird. Genuine, she thinks. Escalate. Dactyls still everywhere, like light falling through the trees.
Her wrist is swollen, gives off heat, so she picks up Geoffrey’s book gently. She goes to the back patio – so much green tapering off to wheat and sunlit bands of gold in the distance, as if she lived in an impressionist’s painting. An hour to Burlington and an hour back is a long time with John, and to be caught out in white lies is never fun for anyone involved. Geoffrey, who’d insisted for years he had a novel in him. A decade of staying up late and going sleep-deprived to his day job as an accountant. And now the book has been embraced by the book-club lot. She bought it. It’s schlock. She read the first 10 pages and then set it on the coffee table in case the men stopped by. She read the reviews so she could offer vague praise.
In her white wicker chair, in the shade, she feels the rich buzz of summer is such she could drown in it. Again she attempts the opening pages: an accountant uncovering a crime. Chicory. Joshua. Geoffrey had had the timid audacity to knock at her door – two years ago now. And even though she saw in his features some mix of shame and need, she invited him in. She served him Earl Grey. As if his eyes bulged, but only bad novelists such as Geoffrey would describe it so.
“Sylvia, John just read over some of my most recent pages.” Geoffrey, the auteur, sporting his affectations. Pages. “And he pointed out to me the obvious: that one of my subplots bears resemblance to your life.” He studied his tea as if it might provide solace. “If you can believe it, I didn’t notice. I’ve spent so long working on the book – so long in my own head – I started borrowing from the lives I know.” He took a sip although it was still too hot and blanched. “Subconsciously, of course.”
“No,” she said.
He nodded, but a part of him had drifted out of her dining room and into his study, where he sat at his laptop reluctant to delete hours of work detailing her and Rusty’s failings. Hours spent rendering her life, or what he imagined of it, because of course he knew nothing.
“Geoffrey,” she said. “Look at me.” Pudgy man, a nervous cerebral quality to him. He married up, landing John. “If you make me a subplot I’ll never speak to you or John again.”
He babbled about knowing he was in the wrong, not knowing whatever possessed him to bring it up in the first place. All would be deleted immediately, forthwith, yesterday. He asked for forgiveness, and she pretended to offer it. It never came up again.
The conversation showed her she’d become part of the local mythos, a story to tell. Geoffrey was just more earnest in trying to write it down and then more clumsy in bringing it up.
She closes the book, cares more about the band of gold out there, the scent of late summer grass and goldenrod. Tomorrow she’ll just have to lie the color of snow, snowflakes. They already think she’s quite good at lying. Perhaps if she were more generous she’d consider that Geoffrey had written about her infidelity because he was trying to make sense of it, because it was alien to him. More than anything – because she no longer trusts what she perceives of couples – Geoffrey fictionalizing her life showed her he had no pain of his own to draw from. Which is to say: he is happy. Geoffrey and John are happily married.
Negligence, Chesterfield. Blunderbuss, edelweiss. Tragedy.
The afternoon is fat with somnolence, a whirr of crickets, the dip and rise of the red-winged blackbird in and out of the grass. Gray-blue clouds are settling over the mountains in the west. She decides to pick blueberries.
The bushes are in the backyard, near the shed. From the kitchen she gets a mixing bowl and carries it out crooked between elbow and hip. She kneels to get at the lower branches first, spilling the dark berries into the silver bowl. They look unevenly dusted, some matte, some with a bruised sheen. She tastes one and finds it agreeably sweet.
The trees beyond will soon yield fruit – one plum, one apricot, and, later in the fall, a small row of Black Oxford trees will produce apples. Bless Rusty’s strange great aunt, who either planted these varietals or kept them up. Heirloom fruit, purple-black and tannic, quintessential New England. Sylvia has learned they’re old: originally from Maine and thought to have existed since 1790, which means they predate the house by half a century. They make sense on this property, create a kind of unity of landscape. In the fall, bees swarm as the extra fruit drops and rots, a sweet ferment. The kids picked them into October and, when they thought she wasn’t looking, would see who could throw one the farthest. She’d watch from the kitchen window: low arcs against a gray sky. Such a discovery that first fall to find sensuous fruit just appearing on the land. Black hearts hanging low in the branches. The temptation of it – Eve made more sense to her then.
She lets more blueberries fall from her palm into the bowl. Deer, crows, robins have stolen away some of the more easily available berries, pecked or nibbled when she wasn’t around. Maybe their mutual love of this house and its land kept her and Rusty married for so long. That he handed it over, signed away in the divorce, and then hightailed it back to DC: the place signaled to him his pain, he’d told her – one of their final conversations. She wanted it? It was hers.
She thinks – but can never pinpoint when, where, how – a slide occurred from actual happiness to only the appearance thereof. Or it was never actual happiness – just happenstance and they were too young to know the difference. She’d come from upper-crust Delaware. But finding herself at a university reeking of genteel charm, she’d adapted quickly to blue grass and bourbon parties, to springtime horse races where you stood in fields wearing pastel dresses and mixing shakers of juleps. The rules felt clear: be pretty, be witty, and wear charm as if armor. Her only rebellion was not going steady with anyone. She didn’t care. She preferred being out in large groups to going out with dull boys who wanted to lecture or grope her. Forms of domination she’d not brook.
A sorority sister decided she needed someone older. They were young enough, then, to conflate older with worldliness and to think 25 was old. Enter Rusty, getting his masters in architecture. Their first date was at a low-lit bar with black-and-white floors, sipping gin and tonics. This preppy boy from DC with freckles and ears sticking out – a wonderful grin, a strong jaw – resembled a blend of Alfred E. Neuman and Kennedy. The lime fizzed acidic in her drink, and Rusty had an easy laugh along with a serious temperament. This was good. He listened when she talked. He understood she was more than her features, her figure.
In the spring they would go for nighttime walks on campus – the grounds, the university insisted on calling them – and she admired his understanding of construction and space, of buildings’ histories. Crabapple trees blossomed white and snowy. Everything was shadowed brick and white pillars and black branches against a dark-blue sky. Cicadas in the warm dark offered constant throaty calls.
Was it love? She preferred him because he was interesting. He knew how a spiral staircase was built. He understood its elegance. She could recite a bit of John Donne – “Busy old fool, unruly Sun” – and he found her interesting, too. They both loved beauty and patterned things. Magnolias were in bloom. The nights were scented with flowers. Was it love? Was it love, was it love.
She moves to the second bush, twisting the berries off at their stems, only taking them if they yield easily, attentive to those – shrouded in shade – still with white-green underbellies. The sun is a diffuse heat and over the mountains the clouds have darkened to slate. Maybe a storm will cross the lake, the patter of rainfall. The bowl is almost full and she brings the berries inside. Her wrist is again a thrumming heat even though she did all the picking with her left hand. Inside the kitchen is cool. The whir of the overhead fan is minor wind. She rinses the berries and gets some in a smaller bowl with yogurt. They are still sun-warm and seem rich. The yogurt is from a dairy farm nearby and its taste reminds her of the scent of clean hay.
Sometimes lately she thinks of herself as Eve alone in the garden. Everyone cast out except her. Except not being cast out is also – unequivocally – punishment.
She wearies of her own self-pity.
She returns to the back porch with a real book. She’s reading Wallace Stevens because Susan, as she begins preparing for her oral exams in American Modernism, is reading him. Surreal and cerebral, this poet who worked at an insurance company in Connecticut. Susan has, as professor, a man whose great aunt lived in the same Connecticut town and called her nephew when, years ago, Wallace Stevens passed away. “Did you know,” Susan says the old aunt asked her professor nephew, “that Wally Stevens was a poet?” There is something so entirely wonderful about a man who on the outside led a life of banality but on the inside was rich and inventive and strange.
She’d wished for more schooling, but then the summer after Rusty finished his degree they were married. And then his great aunt passed away – the bohemian one who lived by her lonesome up north in a stone cottage on the western edge of Vermont. And she bequeathed him this house. They came up to look and were gobsmacked by the surrounding loveliness. Was it not providential, the timing? He got a job at an architectural firm in the college town half an hour away. To pay for renovations they sold some of the adjacent acreage and thus ensured themselves neighbors: John and Geoffrey, so young then themselves. She became a first-rate gardener. She was pregnant with Jack before she could blink.
Happenstance, happenstance: her husband, her home. A sorority sister sets her up, a great aunt dies, and thus her life takes shape. Just: it seemed an adventure, it seemed good fun. She’d invested in none of it deep thought. She’d been a cavalier girl. She liked Rusty, she liked Lake Champlain, she liked dirt roads, she liked babies who smelled like stale milk, she liked hard frosty winters and learning to use the wood-burning stove. She liked that Vermonters were polite but remote, which meant she could be remote, too.
Susan and Jack – 28 and 30 – aren’t married. Jack has a new girlfriend, but he often has a new girlfriend, one every year or two, and likely won’t settle until he finds someone bright enough to captivate him. Susan just went through a hard breakup, someone from her PhD class, but on the phone Susan chokes down her bitterness and mumbles banalities about things just not working out and needing to move on. In conversation with her mother, she refuses to be vulnerable in any way.
It’s punishment. Jack does it too. The children will talk to her of their work, so she learns of venture capital and seed funding and business models. Or she learns of literary analysis. But neither will speak of love – nor sadness, nor happiness, nor anything in between. They think she betrayed them so many years ago when they were teenagers, so they’ll leave her with no more opportunities for betrayal. They’re very firm in their polite outrage with her. Meanwhile Joshua, when she hasn’t seen him in nearly a decade, still haunts her dreams.
Children, she wishes she could say. It’s more complicated than your mother being a harlot.
But she takes it. The fact is her life rolled on easily and well for such a long, long time. And led to her children, who are her life’s blood even if they hate her. And even now it’s as if her days are cloaked in richness and beauty – if a kind of fraught beauty, as if the whole landscape secretly wished it could undo itself.
Happenstance is not a dactyl but a cretic – that last syllable long. Bitterly, however, is.
The pink-navy sky, the evening star one white point: she dozed off. This is terrible. She’ll never get to bed at a decent hour now, and she’ll not be rested for whatever tomorrow’s Dragon Boat Festival will entail. She’s lapsing into old-lady habits. Twilight and the fields are abuzz with lament, cricket cry a shivery call. She goes in to get a glass of wine and returns with it to the wicker chair, sipping it slowly, liking the small warmth it gives to her limbs as the air cools. She raises her glass to the night, hoping tomorrow she’ll be more rational, less indulgent, in her thinking. She resumes her reading: Key West and tigers in red weather.
Buckling her seatbelt, she considers the early ethereal prettiness: transparent high clouds over silver water. The circumspect glimmer seems to reflect her mind. She isn’t rested, but likes the freshness, the unexpectedness of being out before she’s usually awake. John, whom she suspects is a virtuous early riser, has coffee for them both. “How’s your wrist?” he asks.
In the night it radiated wild heat – one of the reasons she slept badly – but Advil has since tamped that down. “Swollen,” she says, not wishing to go on. Another’s pain is so uninteresting. She offers him blueberries from a Tupperware dish, along with some scones, dense and portable. She wants to be a good travel companion, a good sport. Adventure and rationality: these are her hopes for the day. And that language not tumble about her head as if laundry in a drier.
“Keep it elevated.” John reaches for a scone. “As much as you can today.”
She wants to ask what the volunteer work entails but bets he explained it yesterday during her extended bout of not paying attention. She’ll figure it out. She sips her coffee, earthy and strong.
“Perhaps it’s the early hour,” John says, backing out of the driveway. “But I have a confession to make.” She laughs lightly and looks out the window to the fields. She wants no confessions. “It’s so much nicer to give advice to patients who understand you.”
“Feeling misunderstood by the tail-wagging set?”
“I spend more time thinking about it than I should,” he says.
“Like tending to sick infants, I’d imagine. Jack used to get these horrible ear infections and be up half the night screaming.”
“It’s the absence of cause and effect. When you’re shoving a pill down a pup’s throat, you can’t very well say, ‘it’s an antibiotic.’ ” John is in his late 60s. He could retire. What she hears is fatigue – wishing things were other than they were. It’s a fine tipping point over into the existential. He’s always struck her as heartier than this.
“You heal them,” she says. “Hopefully this mitigates your day-to‑day qualms.”
“We just had to put down an old girl – a lab I’ve been seeing since she was a puppy. The family cried and cried.” He fusses with the rear-view mirror and takes a long swallow of coffee. He’s trying to keep from crying. John, she thinks. Poor John.
“I admire you.” She wishes her words were less vague. She eats some berries, sweeter for being chilled. “Today I’ll be a topnotch patient. I’ll ice and elevate and not once, for my troubles, will I ask for a treat in return. But I won’t wag my tail. There are limits.”
It works. He laughs. Among the things he’s telling her – trying to communicate – is why he’s volunteering today. He knows a slow slouch toward crisis still eventually reaches that crisis. And when that occurs you’re no longer in control of your life. Altruism as means of self-rescue. Which makes it no less admirable.
“I was thinking we might listen to Geoffrey’s audiobook.” John presses some buttons on the radio console. “It’s just come out and he’s very anxious about it – if the actor did a good job, etc. Do you mind?”
“That’s a lovely idea.” He can be a good husband and she can look out the window and think her own thoughts without appearing rude. The conversation has left her flustered. Or maybe weary.
A fanfare of slightly ominous music. “The Accounting,” a man says, “by Geoffrey Benson.” And then the story begins, the actor doing his best to inject energy into the opening scene.
They’re traveling north along Route 7, driving through farm-centric Addison County toward the more suburban Chittenden County. There’s almost no traffic. Gardener, miscreant. Something of yesterday’s dactyl anxiety is reviving itself in her. She drinks more coffee to combat it. The accountant goes over the numbers again. Something does not add up.
She’s wondered about Geoffrey’s manuscript – what he initially wrote of her and Rusty. She guesses he went in for cliché. Rusty comes home (probably Geoffrey gave Rusty a briefcase) and opens the front door, calling hello and hearing a startled gasp from the upstairs bedroom. She’d be in expensive lingerie – or putting back on expensive lingerie? – her hair a bird’s nest. She’d come downstairs tightening the waist of her silk kimono, looking ashamed. Or perhaps she’d be defiant. She’d shout at Rusty agape in the foyer: Yes, she’d taken a lover! Their marriage was finis, kaput.
But even Geoffrey knows she’d not likely yell. Nor was Rusty ever stupid enough to stand around slack-jawed when confronted with things he did not approve of. Perhaps Geoffrey described the woman as petite and blonde, the man as a lanky, wholesome, graying redhead. She’d be a bit cold, Rusty a bit impatient.
He’d write of Joshua – the contractor who’d begun working with Rusty’s firm, who kept showing up as she and Rusty did renovations to the house – expanding the kitchen, adding the back porch. Perhaps when the schlock-Joshua showed up at the door the schlock-her, wearing a low-cut blouse, invited him in for a drink. In fact, during his breaks, they talked lightly over coffee in the dining room. He was a great reader. They eventually started a book club of two.
She drums her fingers along the coffee cup. She doesn’t even know where he lives now. A dinner in Middlebury – Rusty and his colleagues, their spouses – and he was new to the area, next to her, without a wife. He barely looked her way except to speak with the perfunctory low-level charm needed to maintain a group conversation. Her impression: both pretty and burly – dark hair cropped close, a full beard, black eyes with thick eyelashes, something soft about his lips. At one point he’d said, “You’re not from here,” and she told him she grew up in Delaware.
“I would’ve guessed the South.”
She glanced at Rusty, sipping a beer and talking shop with another partner. “We met at UVA. The joke – at least to the Delawareans – is that in the North you sound Southern, but in the South you sound Northern. The muddle of being from the middle.” All practiced. All nothing – light chatter. He told her he’d moved from upstate New York, from Ithaca. Then he joined Rusty in talking about the project du jour.
Banal, all of it. Because later that night, as she took off her earrings, she felt buoyant, borne aloft, and her instincts said it was him – just being near him. But this was ridiculous. She considered how boring their conversation had been, which helped her put aside her feelings as the vicissitudes of self. She kissed her husband, next to her in bed flipping through The Economist, and switched off her table lamp. Then she dreamt of waterfalls – a downpour and rush, water luminous and frothing and fast, and the air misted over in refracted light, her skin damp with coolness. She woke up ashamed, confused. She was 42.
She doesn’t know how most affairs work. Theirs felt quiet, ineluctable. Afternoons in his bed, sex and books, languid light from the eastern window falling onto the sheets. Two years later he said guilt consumed him and he’d decided this had to end, he had to move. She told him she loved him. She felt sure she did. He only shook his head, a gesture she’s never been able to parse. Only that she found – still finds – thinking of it so painful a pulse begins at her temples. These are thoughts that should remain buried. But her own mind fights her, offers up dactyls, tries to trick her into remembering.
John presses pause, asks her what she thinks. She has no idea. “The actor reads well,” she says.
“I’ve read years and years of drafts, and I still find myself surprised Geoffrey had this in him. It’s remarkable.”
She tells him the poet she’s reading worked as an insurance executive in Connecticut – a poet who’s considered one of the greats of the 20th century. “After he won the Pulitzer, Harvard offered him a faculty position, but he turned it down, not wanting to leave his company.”
“It’s fascinating what people contain.” She worried as she said it he might think she was making light of Geoffrey – who will certainly not go down as a major literary figure – but John is too proud to worry over the comparison. He’s right, too. What we contain is endlessly interesting, if also sometimes frightening. To her relief, he resumes playing the audiobook.
The accountant has returned to his computer screen to show someone the proof he’d found of malfeasance, but when he again goes through the very complicated algorithm, the evidence is gone. Poof! As if it had never existed! And such is the accountant’s confusion that he then questions its existence. Could he have dreamed the whole thing up?
They park a few blocks away from the waterfront and walk down to the park, where food vendors already line the walking path. Behind them – closer to the water – is a white tent, a registration sign above its entrance. The light clouds have dissipated. The mood is confident, the sky azure. Groups rove the park in matching t‑shirts – bright orange, raspberry – munching bagels, chatting. Some have large drums set out on the grass. Others are stretching, a mixture of toe-touching and tai chi. By the docks, red crew boats are at rest. Their bows rise into the faces of dragons with yellow horns and oversized green eyes. Magnificent, she thinks. Elegant monsters to begin the day.
As she and John walk into the tent, a woman with a puckered mouth smiles incandescently at them. John explains he’s here to help with community team check-in – which sounds very official – and asks if Sylvia can join him as an impromptu volunteer. Sylvia’s made some wrong decisions arriving in a summer dress, wearing mascara, and hopes not to be hated too much. The woman turns behind her to some large cardboard boxes and hands them each an orange t‑shirt – one large, one less large. Sylvia puts the t‑shirt over her dress, feeling silly. The woman points John toward a table, then tells Sylvia she’s putting her outside. She lightly squints. “Are you wearing sunblock?” Sylvia nods. “Follow the path to the docks. Once there, tell the race officials you’re assisting people in and out of boats. The first race is at 8:20, so scoot.”
She’d not imagined they’d be split up, but this woman is being accommodating. She’ll scoot. John, settling in at his table, raises his wrist – reiterating his advice – and then she’s out of the tent’s shadows and into the brilliant day. A troupe, all in hot-pink t‑shirts, Elvis wigs, and Mardi Gras beads, pass her in a swarm of chatter.
She wishes the children could see her amid this hubbub, that Rusty could too. He’d find all this energy agreeable. Actually Rusty would wish to be on a team. The boyish part of him would want to win. The financials would interest him too – how much money is being raised and what percentage goes to whom.
The habits of 22 years. To be understood by another is a tremendous thing, and she regrets – above all else – this loss.
She told Rusty of the affair only as it was ending. In the moment, she didn’t even feel guilt over it – she was too absorbed in her heartbreak. They were at a restaurant and he turned white beneath his freckles as if she’d poisoned him. He nodded quickly and returned to his menu and didn’t speak another word to her that night – not for days until he left a note for her on the bureau that said they’d have to agree on how to tell the children they were divorcing.
Memory is liquid. It washes away. She still can’t fathom her love for Joshua, her cruelness to Rusty, or what she really, in the end, felt for either of them. She doesn’t know if she changed as she grew older, or this was really her all along, or if everything that happened was just more happenstance – except not brilliant luck tossed her way but the possibility for loss she then stumbled into and heedlessly embraced. Beauty and pain: twining helix.
Like John, she tries to make sense of what will not make sense.
At the docks, she tells a man at a check‑in table she’s here to help people in and out of boats. He looks mildly surprised, and she wonders if that woman made up a job for her on the spot. He says to go down to the first dock, parallel to the boat, and as teams arrive she can offer them her hand for support. Delightful, she says. It’s the wrong thing to say, the last few days an epidemic of wrong-thing-saying. She marches down the wooden dock, feeling its soft sway almost as if she has to breathe differently to stay balanced. Sunshine dapples the water, quicksilver gleams over dark silk. Behind her are the Adirondacks, monolithic guardians. Jack told her that as a kid he believed they were there to keep the water from spilling out. She saw the immediate sense in it. Barriers, borders, distant containment. Parameters. She gets a gold medal in mind racing.
A horn sounds and she turns to two teams putting on life preservers, clapping their hands together, throwing fists in the air – all in sunglasses, all laughing. One set is in green t‑shirts with ladybugs printed on them, with some also wearing black-speckled red headbands. The other set is in red t‑shirts with black stripes at the sleeves. Two people carry drums. The horn blows again and they trot down the parallel docks. She has the ladybug team. The drummer is the coxswain. She offers her good hand as the woman steps into the boat. Another team member hands over the drum. It’s such a fluster of good cheer and jabbering, as if they were all gulls or small gods: she can’t decide which. She keeps offering her hand and the men tend not to take it while the women do. She’s not used to so much touch, so many warm palms. She’s not sure she’s of help. More that she’s at the center of a dance. She’s a maypole and about her they swirl with ribbons. The sun is warm on her neck, on her eyelids. She reaches out her hand again and again until they’ve all settled and have their paddles at the ready.
People are gathered along the waterfront, attentive. Everyone stills. A woman with a carnation in her ponytail smiles up at Sylvia. The horn sounds again and oars hitting the water rise and splash. The coxswains’ drums beat as they shout encouragement. The crowd erupts. It’s all sunlight and cheers. The boats pull away, strong arms in conjunction. Her heart is a rattle in her chest. She feels elation surge through her as if she were the one rowing, or if, perhaps, she were that dragon smoothly cutting through the lake.
The ladybug team wins and they’re back very quickly. They seem to accept her help in more sincere fashion as they rise to step onto the dock, more acquiescent to some steadying presence. Or they just recognize her now as part of the process. The men still resist, letting go as quickly as they can. Someone pats her on the back, perhaps a thank you.
Several more times this happens – these are qualifying heats to see who competes later in the day. One team she helps all wear light pink hats, with breast-cancer awareness ribbons pinned to their t‑shirts. Some must be survivors themselves – those who row – but she can’t discern those who’ve fallen ill and gotten better from those who haven’t. They all seem so radiant to her. Running through her, however, is fear manifesting as a dopey anxiety over logistics. No chaos can enter: no one must spill into the water, slip on the docks – which have gotten damp. No one can have a summer’s cough or sun poisoning. No one must need her help beyond the token gesture it actually is. They are all strong. She loves them for it.
There’s a mid-morning break and the race official says to return at 11 for the flower ceremony. She nods as if she knows what that is and, famished, goes to buy a coffee and bagel. The woman ahead of her in line takes an extraordinarily long time ordering – poppy seed or plain, cream cheese or butter. Finally it’s Sylvia’s turn and she quickly orders. The woman working the food cart says, “Thank you for your patience just now. You know how it can be – chemo freeze.”
Sylvia says yes, she knows, and walks away, her appetite diminished. She has led a life of brutally good luck not to have encountered that concept before.
She sits beneath the shade of a tree, dappled sunlight at her toes, and watches this brightly colored circus. The crowd is large, everywhere, wonderful. She smells of lake water, a lightly mineral smell, and the heat of sunburn spreads across her cheekbones. She needs more Advil, that throb and swell returning, but she also doesn’t care.
People begin to gather at the beach and at the docks. She realizes, too, some are getting back into the boats. They let the boats gently drift – not racing but arranging themselves so that the dragons – and those they carry – face the land. Monsters narrowly aligned. She rises from the shade, throwing out the remnants of her meal, and walks back to the dock, which is where she now feels she belongs, even if she sees quite clearly all these people managed without her palm to brace them.
In the water – some she recognizes from the morning races, some she doesn’t think have yet raced. They all have sunflowers on their laps. Someone taps her shoulder and hands her a sunflower, too. It has a thick stalk, yellow petals, and a heavy center. A sturdy flower, very much of late summer – she has some growing in the backyard. The flower ceremony.
A woman at a microphone begins to speak – is talking of those who did not make it, who have passed away from cancer. This is a memorial to them. In the water, they’ve gathered their boats close, have their arms draped about one another. Those leading the tribute are those who have survived. A light breeze comes in off the water, a rippling that goes through the crowd. Her wrist takes off in a kind of frenzy of pain. Someone puts an arm about her, and she clutches the sunflower with her bad hand so she can also put her good arm about another.
Mannequin, ruffian. Promising, fortitude. Shattering. God forgive her, she’s thinking of Joshua at her dining room table. She brought out a book she thought he’d like. She opened it and touched a page to show him a passage and he brought his chair closer to look – the windows behind them offering a flood of pale April sky. A linen tablecloth, a bowl of grapes, his chair close. He’d put his hand over hers, clasped it warm. It was as if she’d leapt into dimension, as if the whole world had leapt into dimension with her. She ruined her life for that moment.
She thinks of a line from Wallace Stevens about pungent oranges and bright green wings seeming like things in a procession for the dead. People about her in beads and wigs and bright t‑shirts: they cry for those they’ve lost, those they’ve loved, those who deserved much better. The dragon-boat survivors are throwing into the water their sunflowers, which drift, sodden and bright. Those close to the water kneel to let their flowers float away, too. Sylvia takes her arm from this stranger so she can go to the edge and let her sunflower fall from the dock. Her wrist hurts so much the edges of her vision blacken but all about her is vividness: cobalt-and-violet water, green-blue mountains, and this carnival of sunlit people, devastated and celebrating.
Janice Obuchowski’s stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Passages North, Slice, Grist Journal, and The Seattle Review.