Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

“It happened two years ago,” she said.

From the fairy-tale rhythm of this sentence it was clear that her story would last a long time, and it did. But its gist was simple: Henry's hearing disappeared slowly, over a year, each day turning fainter and blurrier, like a repeated photocopy. She woke up in the middle of the night and found him sitting outside in the cold, looking at nothing, and when she spoke his name, he wouldn't answer. She thought he was distant, that maybe he didn't love her anymore.

“I considered therapy,” she said. Penny imagined these two sweaty, gnomish farmers sitting together on a therapist's couch, working through their issues. “I kept saying, ‘Henry, it's like you can't even hear what I'm saying.’ And it turned out to be true. Absolutely, literally, true.”

“I'm glad you got that sorted out,” Penny said.

For a moment, Irene just stared at her, as if she could tell Penny was trying not to laugh out loud, then she beamed again. “I am too, dear,” she said.

She stayed at the table for two hours and half a loaf of zucchini bread, telling anecdotes about the early years of her marriage, explaining how to scrub the delicate porcelain of the upstairs bathtub, urging Penny to call as early as possible to order heating oil for the winter. She was offering, in her shiny, organized way, a complete manual for life.

That night, when Tom came home, Penny told him about Irene: the tea, the countless slices of bread, the endless advice. “Two hours disappeared,” she said, “just like that.”

“Don't worry about it,” he said, leaning back in the same chair Irene had taken earlier in the day. Unlike Irene, he was gaunt and angular and very tall, and he could have reached across the table, without any strain at all, and touched her face with his long fingers, or her hair or her shoulder. “She's just making sure we're still the right people.”

Feeling guilty for complaining about this harmless, doughy woman, she asked Tom about the students. This was his first real teaching job — if he did well, he hoped the appointment would be extended beyond a year — and he was beside himself with the satisfaction of being a real professor, finally, his own office in the history department building. Yesterday he'd taken out his wallet and shown her, with real pride, his faculty ID card.

The moment Tom paused, she stood up and reached for his hand and led him upstairs to bed. She'd been doing this more and more lately, and was surprised by her own agenda. Things she'd never known she needed had recently crept up and shocked her with their force. She felt a sharp hunger for a certain kind of future. That is, she wanted Tom — as she always had — but she also wanted to own a home like this, with him, and for their kids to grow up in it, too. This need was mysterious and pure, like instinct or sex. It was as if someone had flicked on a light switch and suddenly she saw what was in the room with her, the room of her life, her heart.

In the morning she found herself alone again, unpacking, working through the many boxes of books upstairs, and it took her a bit longer to hear the car in the driveway. For someone living in the country, she was getting a lot of visitors. She came downstairs, expecting to see Irene again, but someone else stood at the door. He was around her age, thirty, and about her height, wearing a green T-shirt, jeans, and work boots. His short, curly hair was receding at the temples. She lingered behind the screen door.

“I'm the yard man,” he said.

Beyond him, parked behind her car, was an old pickup, faded to the same color as his shirt. The morning was very clear, and in the distance she could hear the faint rush of the brook. His face was lined, and he had the smoky, too-sweet smell of someone who spends a lot of time in bars.

“I didn't know there was a yard man,” she said.

“Well, there is.” He gestured vaguely at the grass in back of him. He was wearing a bulky, too-big metal watch, and it slid up and down with the gesture. “The service comes with the house. Didn't Irene tell you? I just need to get the mower out of the shed and I'll take care of the place for you.”

“Irene didn't tell me any of that.”

“The mower,” he said stubbornly, “is in the shed. Otherwise I'm going to have to break off each individual blade of grass by hand, and that's going to take a very long time.”

As an argument, it was less than convincing. Penny stepped outside into the cool shade of the porch. She did in fact have the key to the shed, although Irene had made it clear she was not to use it. The shed was storage space, for the daughter in Boston. The man shifted his weight back and forth, from one boot to the other. He needed a shave. In their tour of the house Irene, with Henry silently sweating by her side, had gone over the minutiae of the rental contract, including the watering schedule of the plants, the idiosyncrasies of the washing machine, the tendency of the third stair to inflict slivers on unsuspecting feet. These codicils took hours. There was no way she would've neglected to mention a yard man.

“You're not the yard man,” she said, and sat down on a plastic lawn chair on the porch.

The man shrugged, giving up without any struggle, and sat down on the other chair. He smiled resignedly. “You don't believe me,” he said, as though it happened to him often.

They sat for a minute in almost companionable silence. He had thick, stubby hands he folded carefully in his lap. Penny should have been afraid — a quarter-mile at least to the nearest house, and his car parked behind hers — but she wasn't.

“What do you want?” she finally said.

“I used to do some work around the house,” he said. “I'm guy.”

She didn't understand. “Excuse me?”

“My name is Guy,” he said, “although I'm also a guy. It's confusing, I know.” He held out his hand to shake, which she did; the large watch slid down his arm, toward his elbow, like a bracelet on a woman. “My friends used to call me Some,” he said. “As in, ‘There goes some guy.’ ‘Who was there last night?’ ‘Some guy.’ ”

Penny laughed, politely. “That's funny.”

“In a limited way,” Guy said.

She still wasn't sure what he wanted. “So you worked for Irene's daughter? The one who's in Boston?”

Guy snorted, then looked down at his feet. “Christine's not in Boston,” he said. “That old lady — Jesus. She's tough as nails, isn't she?”

“Where is she, then?” Penny said. “Christine.”

“She passed on,” Guy said, giving her a moment to register what this meant. “Car accident. A year ago now.”

“I'm sorry,” Penny said, conscious of the rote stupidity of the words.

Guy shrugged again, and stood up. The watch slid back down to his wrist. “You won't unlock the place,” he said.

“No.”

“All right, then,” he said. “Thank you for your time.” Once more he held out his hand.

She'd barely gotten back to the books when Irene came by again, this time bearing cranberry-walnut muffins and “a wedge,” she said, “of fine local cheese.” Penny sighed; the days were getting so crowded that she hardly had time to think. They sat in plastic chairs on the front porch, and the strips cut into the backs of Penny's thighs as Irene launched into an exhaustive anecdote about the amount of state taxes she and Henry had to pay that year. The story was complex, with figures and equations, and footnotes and appendices would not have been out of place.

“I see,” Penny said, nodding. She was pinching the back of her knee, hard, trying to stay awake, but drifting back and forth between boredom and pain. She wished Tom were here; he was good at making excuses, polite yet direct, whereas Penny could go on nodding and smiling until she exploded into an obvious yawn. She wanted to ask Irene about her daughter, why she'd lied that Christine was in Boston, but couldn't see how to bring it up, especially given Irene's barrage of storytelling.