The Gretchen Question Read online

  When Scout and I got back from the walk I poured some food into his bowl, then considered putting on the exercise video the surgeon’s nurse recommended after my surgery, to help me recover. I was compliant back then, and did it every day. But for the past few weeks—who am I kidding, for the past few months now—I haven’t been able to summon the energy, or the motivation. My heart’s felt too low in my chest. I decided I would just eat a little breakfast and then set out, first to my work meeting and then to perform my chore. There was no need, of course, for the trash and garbage receptacles to be replaced so soon after they had been emptied, but it is in my nature to avoid procrastinating; procrastinating makes me nervous.

  Besides, it made sense to carry out the errand at Grettie and Jack’s on the way to my appointment with the therapist, rather than the other way around. I had no way of knowing what I would feel like when I left the therapist’s office.

  I took a shower and tried on a couple of different outfits in front of the mirror. Finally I chose a tunic with bright colors, hoping the pattern and the loose fit would distract people from looking too closely at my arms or my face, which I guess have gotten too thin now for me to camouflage. Funny—I remember buying the blouse, a few years ago, in the hope that it would cover my extra pounds. Now I hoped it would cover the fact that I’ve lost more than I can afford. Not that I actually notice this myself, but Grettie’s mentioned it enough times, and if I’m honest, I have to say I’ve also seen it in the way other people look at me.

  I went to the kitchen to let my hair dry as I stood at the sink, eating a slice of leftover frozen pizza. I had long hair before, but it’s short now, and I love the convenience of not having to blow it dry.

  I used to fix myself a proper breakfast every day, and I still do, sometimes. Oatmeal, scrambled eggs, or fruit and toast. But sometimes, now, I either skip it or eat whatever’s closest at hand. If I’m tired and I want leftover pizza for breakfast, then that’s what I eat.

  My kitchen window looks out onto the yard my apartment building shares with three others. The townhouses are kind of like small dorms on the four corners of a rectangular quad. From my window I can look into the kitchen twenty or so yards across from me, and see Pascal. I used to try to catch her eye, but I don’t anymore, because at some point it became clear to me that she was trying not to notice me doing it. It made me sad, but it couldn’t be helped. There are times I want to call her up, or go over, and say Pascal, this is so silly. We live close enough to toss a package of spaghetti between our windows (we actually did that once, a long time ago, when her water was already boiling before she realized she had no pasta to put in it), and here we haven’t spoken about anything substantive, anything personal, in so many years.

  As I stood eating my cold pizza, I saw her washing dishes at her sink. A cloud passed fast over the quad, and we both looked up at the sudden sight of the sun. When our eyes met, I waved as I used to do all the time. She appeared to hesitate for a moment, then waved back. She didn’t return my smile, but she did raise a hand.

  The elation this created in me was far out of proportion to what the gesture warranted. Wasn’t it? Yet who was to say, really? If I was happy to have my old friend acknowledge me after so much time, wasn’t it my right to feel that way?

  Then she stepped away from the window, and the cloud blocked the sun again. I washed down the last bite of pizza with some flat Diet Coke, then set out for the drive twelve miles north to the hospital.

  But my car wouldn’t start. This happened every so often, but when I took it into the shop, the mechanics said they didn’t see anything that might account for it. I had them replace the battery last time, in case, and it seemed fine for a while, until now.

  Eight tries before the engine turned over. Another sort of person might have taken it as an omen about the trip she was embarking upon. But I am not that sort of person. I backed out carefully and drove down my street on the lookout for cats or other animals, which sometimes dart across without looking. Stupid. I hit a squirrel once, but never a cat. I’m afraid I will, though, so I always drive very slowly until I get to the end of the road.

  At the highway, it wasn’t until I was about to turn onto the ramp that I saw it was closed off by three orange traffic cones, and a sign instructing me to Seek Alternate Route. No indication as to why the sign was there—no men in hardhats, no trucks or emergency vehicles, nothing I could see that was blocking or contaminating the road—just the sign and the cones placed exactly so as to prevent me from proceeding where I wanted to go. I drove past the blockade, now headed in the wrong direction and feeling suddenly, absurdly, that I might cry.

  Knowing that I needed to put the address of the hospital into my phone’s GPS and find a back route, I pulled into the parking lot of Apex, the athletic club I’d belonged to for a few years when Grettie gave me a membership as a Christmas gift, before Will took tennis lessons there. Every Monday at lunchtime, I went to a yoga class taught by a middle-aged, bulky black woman who didn’t seem to mind teaching a gym filled with only white people. The class always left me in a good mood. I liked how she ended every class while we were lying in the corpse pose. “You stand in the center of your own inner peace,” she’d say in this calm kind of singsong, and I tried to believe this. Usually believing it only lasted as long as the class did, but that was better than not believing it at all.

  But then one day I threw my back out trying to achieve a pose, and didn’t return even after my back got better, afraid of repeating the injury. It turned out, I heard later, that the yoga teacher had been fired for not being a yoga teacher at all, but some imposter who enjoyed watching us smug middle-aged suburbanites twist ourselves into painful and unhealthy positions while she gave increasingly complex instructions from her mat at the front of the room. “Now thread your left arm under your right knee—balance on two toes of each foot—inhale to a count of sixteen and exhale to a count of thirty-two.” Turned out, she made all those “poses” up. No wonder my back hurt—what kind of person did something like that? And yet I had liked her. The gym’s manager told me, when I inquired, that Apex had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to things like what the “yoga teacher” had been fired for.

  That was a pretty good trick she’d played on us, I had to admit. I felt hurt, though, because I’d liked the teacher, and I’d felt vulnerable in her class, trying to make my body do all those things she’d convinced us were good for it.

  If some of the people in the class had not felt so embarrassed by how she had humiliated them, they might have started a petition requesting that she be given a second chance. It’s the kind of thing people who live around here do. But she had humiliated them, so they did not.

  It’s not really the reason I left that yoga class, because I threw my back out. No, the real reason is that one time when I was lying there at the end of the hour, listening to the “teacher” say those words about standing in the center of my own inner peace, I turned my head and happened to see the woman on the mat next to mine, lying the same way I was. The way we all were—like, well, corpses. I knew it was only a pose, but I’d never seen it from the outside before.

  The woman, who was only a little older than me, looked for all the world as if she were dead. I knew she was not dead, only relaxed, but knowing it didn’t make any difference—it freaked me out so much that I couldn’t go back, to that class or any other. By the time I even thought about trying it again, the imposter had been found out and ejected. There was some talk of pressing charges, but I never heard any follow-up.

  This morning, despite the fact that I felt an urgency to make up some time, I got out of my car in the gym’s parking lot and leaned against it, taking in some air. I felt a little faint—the sun was so hot—but I’ve developed strategies for when this happens, like closing my eyes for a few moments or putting water on my face. I didn’t have any water with me, but I tried closing my eyes. When I opened them I saw a
man coming out of Apex and looking my way, and before I could avoid his gaze, I realized that we knew each other. Though he was older and heavier now, I remembered him as the tennis pro who’d taught the lessons Will took with some other kids back when they were in middle school, after I’d quit the gym myself.

  The lessons had been Trudy Foote’s idea. She’d signed her son Derek up, and she wanted him to have a pal or two in the class. I couldn’t afford it, but Grettie paid for her own son and mine. Maybe one or both of them would take to it, she said, and end up getting a tennis scholarship someday. This was what persuaded me, along with the fact that I knew she wasn’t going to tell Jack that she was paying for Will’s lessons as well as Cam’s. I know I should be ashamed to admit it, but I loved our having a secret from Jack, even such a small one.

  “Hi!” the pro said, recognizing me. “It’s Roberta, right? Mrs. Chase?” I’d never told him it wasn’t Mrs.—what business was it of his? He took a step closer. “Hey, you okay? Should I go get somebody? Or call inside?”

  Shit! So much for hiding what I didn’t want anyone to see. But I would do my best to pretend I didn’t know why he was asking me these things. “No, thanks,” I told him. “I’m on my way to work, I’m just taking a little break.”

  He said “Okay” in a weird tone, but then I remembered that he’d always been weird. When he added, “So how’s our boy doing?” I knew he had forgotten my son’s name. Which was all right, because I’d forgotten his. I answered “Fine,” without giving him the satisfaction of reminding him it was Will. “What’s he up to now?” the pro asked, and I told him where Will went to college.

  “He’s studying psychology and biology,” I added. “He might do premed.” Will had not exactly told me this, it was just something I thought might happen.

  “Wow. Smart kid.” The tennis pro seemed uncomfortable, standing there having a conversation with me, but he kept up his end of the small talk. He asked if “our boy” had kept up with the game. I told him No, he didn’t play tennis anymore, he was pretty heavily into tai chi.

  The tennis pro didn’t seem to know what to say to that. He adjusted the load of his bag from one shoulder to the other and said, “Hey, would you be willing to write me a recommendation? Or a testimonial, I guess it would be called. For my website. I’m thinking about going totally private, this place is for the birds.” He jerked his thumb backward at the Apex sign behind him. The club’s logo was a jagged line aspiring toward the top of a graph. “They pay crap, and if I have to pretend I give a shit about whether one more middle-aged woman can add some pop to her serve, I might just collapse on the court and die.” He smiled as if of course I could understand his plight.

  I made a murmuring sound which, I knew, could have been taken to mean anything. I’ve been making the same sound all my life, on the many occasions upon which I feel expected to offer an opinion but do not feel prepared.

  Then I said, “Okay” to his testimonial question. I was confident I would not have to follow through, because he wouldn’t be able to track me down when I didn’t supply what he wanted.

  “You sure you’d be up to it?” he asked. “I don’t want to—”

  “Of course,” I interrupted him, irritated. “You have a card or something?”

  Once, Will told me that Derek Foote had puked on the court when this pro made them do suicide drills and refused to let Derek stop because he had a stitch in his side. “Are you an athlete or a pussy?” the pro had asked, and when Derek threw up, the pro turned away in disgust and said he guessed he had his answer.

  He dropped the tennis bag now and rummaged loudly through one of its compartments, then swore when the search did not yield the business card he was looking for. “Tell you what—you could just drop it off at the desk in there,” he told me. “In a sealed envelope, okay? I don’t trust any of those schmoes.”

  I told him Okay again and he said it was great to see me, and that I should take care, and I said You, too, before we parted. I am sure we both understood that I was not going to write the note he had asked for on his behalf. I hoped he did not also understand—or did I hope the opposite?—how much satisfaction this gave me.

  I got in my car, but had trouble starting it again. Six tries, this time, before I could pull out. The pro had parked on the far side of the lot, so we reached the exit simultaneously. Someone had to give. He smiled and waved me on, and I proceeded before him, but wait! Was it a smile and a wave? As I passed by, assuming that he was smiling and waving, it seemed that what I might actually be seeing was a sneer and the finger! Could he possibly have been giving me the finger? I gasped as I turned back onto the main road, and behind me he sounded his horn. Friendly good-bye tap, or a blast saying Fuck you, you bitch? The idea that it might have been this second thing struck me like a slap, even though I’d been the one with the intention of slighting him.

  I was still only a mile away from my own house. All I really wanted now was to return home, stretch out on the wicker chaise on the screened porch, and alternately doze and read. I’m enjoying, so much, my current book—I have not read Virginia Woolf before (as an English major, it shames me to admit), and though I find that I need to read certain sentences more than once, I end up every time being glad I did.

  Oh if she could have had her life over again! If I were a person who underlined, that sentence I would have lit up in yellow. The agony was so terrific. It’s after reading lines like these that I have to set the novel aside. Reading it takes longer than reading a simpler book, but how long it takes isn’t everything.

  I was tempted to call in sick to my meeting and return home to pick up the novel, but no. I would have my time, soon, to rest and read. Such moments of luxury have to be paid for, and first I would go to my work meeting, then move the bins. After that, my appointment with the therapist. Checking the clock in my car, I saw with some relief that I still had a good deal of time before the hour I’d designated to begin worrying.

  The chaise, though: it held onto my imagination. There was a time in my life when I was afraid to lie down, because it was while I was in this position—let’s face it, in the corpse pose—that I felt the full measure of my despair. In the years after I followed Grettie to Boston, before Will was born, I thought about killing myself. On my bathroom mirror I taped a yellow sticky note containing the final line of a poem I’d read once, and loved. “God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.” Even if I hadn’t been an English major I would have understood that evening meant death, and I left the line where I could see it when I needed to believe that ending it all was an option.

  My sister and I didn’t grow up going to church, but I’ve never had the usual trouble believing there’s a God. In fact, it seems kind of arrogant to me, the disdain people show for the idea. As if they’re afraid to acknowledge that there might be something more or better than what they know—or think they know—to exist on the hard dirt of earth. But why? My only struggle with it lies in trying to catch myself when the vision I conjure is that of a man with a beard and a white robe, looking down at us from the sky. I know this image comes from all the illustrations I’ve ever seen of Jesus. As an adult I’ve tried to let go of this conception, and put another in its place. God as a spirit, invisible but everywhere. God as perpetual witness. God as love.

  I don’t think God designs or manipulates things, like an architect or a puppeteer. When I imagined killing myself, I didn’t consider it an affront to destiny or to some master plan. No—my God would not lay blame or shame on my forehead in receiving me back to the fold. I know, He’d say, in whatever language He used to communicate (and is it possible to begin learning that language while we’re still alive?). I know. You tried. It’s not for everyone.

  One very cold night—amazing to think it was almost twenty years ago—I went so far as to go to the cemetery near my apartment at the edge of the city and lie down under a bush. I brushed some snow away and m
ade a space to lie in. In retrospect it doesn’t make sense for me to have brushed the snow—what difference would it have made, if I actually expected to die? I couldn’t have said if it was a real suicide attempt or just the wish not to feel what I felt. The police came before I could fall asleep. I never knew whether they’d just been patrolling the cemetery, or someone saw me and called them. The cops wouldn’t say, only made me get into the police car and drove me to the hospital, where I had to stay for three days because it’s the law in this state when you pose a danger to yourself.

  Only in the hospital did I realize that if I died, it would be Grettie who’d have to clean out my apartment. There was nobody else; my sister lives too far away, and it wasn’t the kind of thing she’d be good at handling.

  It would have been too much to ask of my best friend. And it would devastate her—wouldn’t it? The idea that it might not devastate her was one I couldn’t allow myself to consider.

  If nobody’s going to be devastated when you die, then what’s the point? Not of dying—of life.

  So I never told Grettie about that night, she never even knew I’d been in the hospital.

  After that, I did my best to get better. I saw the therapist, which helped, for a while. I had someone to talk to, I believed he cared about me. Then I had my son and I could take the poem down. I stopped thinking about dying. And now, here we are.

  The back route from my house to the hospital turned out to be easy, though it took longer than my usual one. As I approached the light near the entrance, a line of big-headed children in wheelchairs was being pushed across the street. It took them longer than the light lasted, and when the horns started up behind me, I was shocked to see a few tears fall onto my lap.