Charles Baxter: Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Suddenly Mrs. Schultz stared at Burrage. “You said there wouldn’t be any episodes,” she said, pointing her finger at him. “God damn it, you said nothing would happen to us! And look at what’s happening!” She was shouting. “Look at all the smoke and the fire!” Her finger, still pointing, pointed now at Burrage, Magda, and Gregory.

“Mrs. Schultz,” Burrage begged, “please don’t swear. There are children here.”

“It’s a fire,” she repeated. And then she turned around in the boat, bent down, and cupped her hands in the water. Raising her arms, she doused her head. The water streamed into her gray hair and washed the handkerchief off, so that it dropped onto the gunwales of the rowboat. Again she reached down into the lake and again she scooped a small quantity of water over her head. As the children and Burrage watched, handful by handful the old woman soaked her hair, her skin, and her clothes, as if she were making a formal gesture toward the accidents of life, which in their monotonous regularity had brought her to her present condition.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER she had put her husband, all memory gone, into the home, she herself woke one morning with an unfamiliar sun shining through a window she hadn’t remembered was there. A new window! Pranksters were playing a shabby joke on her. She rose heavily from the bed, a groan bursting by accident out of her throat, and shuffled to the new window they had installed during the night. Through the dusty glass she saw the apartment’s ragged backyard of cement and weeds. A puddle had formed in the alley, and a brown bird was flapping in it, making muddy waves as it bathed. Then she looked more closely and saw that the bird was lying on its side.

“I remember this view,” she said to herself. “It’s not a new window. I just forgot to pull down the shade.” She did so now, blocking the sun, which seemed to her more grayish-blue than it had for years. She coughed rhythmically with every other step to the bathroom.

It was Tuesday, and their anniversary. He would forget, as usual. Now, in his vacancy, he had stopped using shaving cream and razor blades. He tore photographs out of their expensive frames, folded them into baskets, and used them as ashtrays. He took cigarette lighters to pieces to see how they worked and left their tiny wet parts scattered all over his nightstand. He refused to read, claiming that what she brought him was dull trash, but she had suspected for a long time that he had forgotten both the meaning of the words and how to read them from left to right across the page. She didn’t want to buy him cigarettes (in his dotage, he had secretly and then quite openly taken up smoking again). He lost clothes or put them on backward or declared universal birthdays so he could give everything he owned to strangers. The previous Wednesday, she had asked him what he would want for their upcoming anniversary, their fifty-second. “Lightbulbs,” he said, giving her an unpleasantly sly look.

She glanced at his lamp and saw that the shade was pleated oddly. “They give you plenty of bulbs here,” she said. “Ask them.”

He shook his head for thirty seconds before he replied. “Wrong bulbs,” he said. “It’s the special ones I need, with the flames.”

“Lightbulbs don’t have flames,” she said. “It’s filaments now.”

“Don’t argue with me. I know what I want. Lightbulbs.”

She was at the breakfast table reading the paper when she remembered that she had dropped an egg into the frypan, where, even at this moment, it must still be frying: hard, angry, and dry. She forgave herself, because she had been thinking about how to get to the First Christian Residence before lunch, and which purple bus she should take. She walked to the little four-burner stove with its cracked oven window, closed her eyes against the smoke, picked up the frypan using a worn potholder with a picture of a cow on it, and dropped her last egg into the wastebasket’s brown paper bag. Now she had nothing to eat but toast. She was trying to remember what she had done with the bread when she heard the phone ring and she saw from the kitchen clock that it was ten thirty, two hours later than she had thought.

She picked the receiver angrily off the wall. “Yes,” she said. She no longer said “Hello”; she was tired of that.

“Hello?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes, who is it?”

“It’s me,” the voice said. “Happy anniversary.”

Very familiar, this woman’s voice. “Thank you,” Margaret said. “It’s our fifty-second.”

“I know,” the voice told her. “I just wish I could be there.”

“So do I,” Margaret said, a thin electrical charge of panic spreading over her. “I wish you could be here to keep me company. How are you?”

“Just fine. Jerry’s out of town, but of course David’s with me, and last night we roasted marshmallows and made a big bowl of popcorn.”

David. Oh, yes: her grandchild. This must be David’s mother. “Penny,” she said.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say your name.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Margaret said carelessly. “Because I just thought of it.”

“Mother, are you all right?”

“Just fine, dear. I’m going to take the bus to see your father in half an hour’s time. I’m going to wish him a happy anniversary. I doubt he’ll notice. He won’t remember it’s our anniversary, I don’t think. Maybe he won’t remember me. You can never tell.” She laughed. “As he says, the moving men just come and take it all away. You can’t tell about anything. For example, I thought they put a new window in my room last night, but I’d only forgotten to pull down the window shade.” She noticed a list on the refrigerator, a list of things she must do today. It was getting late. “Good-bye, Penny,” she said, before hanging up. She took the list off the refrigerator and put it in her pocket. Then she stood in the middle of the room, her mind whirling and utterly blank, while she stared at the faucet on the right-hand side of the sink and, above it, attached to the cabinet, a faded color photograph of a brown-haired girl, looking away from the camera toward a tree. It was probably Penny, when young.

Once Margaret was on the bus, she was sure that everything would be fine. The sun was out, and several children were playing their peculiar games on the sidewalk, smacking each other and rolling over to play dead. Why weren’t they in school? She knew better than to ask children to explain their reasons for being in any one spot. If you asked such questions, they always had that look ready.

The bus was practically empty. All the passengers, thank God, seemed to be respectable taxpayers: a gentleman with several strands of attractive gray hair sat two rows in front of her, comforting her with his presence. The sun, now yellow, was shining fiercely on Margaret’s side of the bus, its ferocity tempered by tinted glass.

Margaret felt the sun on her face and said, “Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.” This, her one and only phrase to express joy, she had picked up from a newspaper article that had tried to make fun of Gertrude Stein. The article had quoted one of her poems, and Margaret had remembered its first line ever since. “Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea,” she said again, gazing out the window at obscurely sinister trees, with far too many leaves, all of them the wrong shape.

Horace, before he had been deposited in the First Christian Residence, had been a great one for trees: after they had bought a house, he had planted them in the backyard, trimmed them, fed them, watered them when droughts dusted their leaves. “Trees,” he liked to say, “give back more than they take. Fruit, oxygen, and shade. And for this they expect no gratitude.” He would have been happy working in a nursery or a greenhouse. As it was, he worked in a bank, and never talked about exactly what he did there. “It’s boring,” he would say. “You don’t want to hear about it.” Margaret agreed; she didn’t. Only toward the end had he raged against the nature of his work. But he didn’t shout at Margaret; he told the trees. He told them how money had gobbled up his life. He talked about waste and cash, and he wept into his hands. Margaret watched him from the kitchen window. She watched him as he lost his memory and began to give names to the trees: Esther, Jonas, Ezekiel, Isaiah. He told Margaret that trees should have serious, adult names. For eighteen months now, he had confused the names of his trees with the names of his children. He wanted his trees to come visit him in the home. “Bring in Esther,” he would say. “I want to see her.”