Freezing in Secret

5560 wds                            

"You get older, you freeze in secret.” From “Ice” by Marianne Baruch

As a young couple their most anticipated first of the month ritual was trimming toe nails. Showered and fresh, she sat on the edge of the bed as he clipped her dangling toes over newspaper spread on the floor. Next, lingering even though he fiercely wanted to go up and give her a blast, he rubbed lotion into her feet, stretching the toes, flexing the ankles. Signaling now enough by mumbling and stroking his hair, he rose to make love to her from the ankles up. Later clipping for him.

This monthly ritual, with modifications appropriate to age, continued through the children and middle age and held steady for a few years. The lovemaking slowed to an actual trickle and into memory, but the toenail clipping endured. The last time he massaged her feet, in the days when she was barely conscious, he thought, ‘Everything about her is old except her feet.’ As he stretched her toes she caressed his remaining tuft of hair. 

On a Tuesday morning four days later the woman died. 

Her husband was not an educated man. The ability to make and fix things was most important to him. The world goes around by making machinery function well, he thought. Pencil pushers, speech makers, the lazy rich smirking on their money, poor people sucking money from taxpayers, armies destroying cities and killing people, all those who make a living sitting on swivel chairs; all useless. Making things work is all. Who built the house you live in, who brings the water to your sink and toilet so you don’t have to crap in a bucket and carry it outside to dump in a hole and who digs the holes? Who paves the roads your car rolls on and who made the car? Besides this, working to make things is not just indispensible, it’s interesting, it’s real.

   His wife said, “You’re right about that.” 

“Except for a hospital, the most valuable place on earth is a hardware store, you know, for the public.”

“That’s smart,” she said. “I didn’t know you were that smart.”

“Well, i’m not really, i’m just the most valuable guy on the planet ~ and there’s plenty of us.”

This philosophical notion was as far from school and as close to a book as he ever got.

Instead of people in books, government or the news, he measured himself against neighbors, a few men and women co-workers, the church faces or the bar rats he played pool with; to these he looked for opinion, information and companionship. The judgments of these rated highest; he valued himself by matching their talents and skills. 

They watched the rest of the world with a mixture of awe and indifference. Retired and pensioned, they felt safe from the craziness of the new world brought into the living room television. Watching together, they didn’t believe most of it and when the screen went blank, forgot about it. 

Her husband was physical, involved in the physical world. Her illness was a part of the physical world he could not fix.

 At the funeral others saw him standing by the long box, saw him bend low over her and many thought in his grief he might losing control, but he straightened and walked away, his face dry, cold and grim. This was like him; all the family nice, they said, was buried with his wife. 

Most of the people at the funeral were her friends or co-workers. He had a vague feeling most of them thought he should be in the long box instead of her. Only one friend from the pool hall was there, also alone because he had no wife and family. How much could he know about losing a wife? Therefore this man, very tall so he stood a face above the rest, had plenty of time for a funeral, her husband thought, and nothing better to do. 

They had a drink and he got tough, “I guess i should feel lucky it was her instead of me.”

“Lucky she went first?”

“That’s it.”

“Maybe, of maybe not such great luck when you think about it.”

This man played pool exceptionally well in a bar near their home. He was the best, “the teacher in the house,”, so as a master of billiards he would consider angles.

Four days after the funeral her husband walked into the kitchen, windows bright with morning sun and wondered why he didn’t smell coffee. From a cabinet he took out two bowls. Centering the bowls on placemats before two chairs, he stood by the table and looked at them.   

They met in school. For years they saw each other in classrooms and hallways without speaking. Only after being together for years did he feel they were a good fit. 

It started then when something made him angry. One of his teachers was friendly until he taught the guy a lesson. A popular Civic Affairs teacher passionate about everything relevant,’ as he called it, a handsome young man with straight, white teeth, he brought political and world issues to the classroom. He used current political phrases and slang and there was always a gaggle of future pencil pushers hopping around him adoring him with ten books under each arm. Her husband hated this teacher. 

One day, bending low to unlock his bike, he took pleasure in jabbing the sharp end of his math compass into a neighboring tire. Mounting up, he then rode away, triumphant. A few days later he punctured another tire. It felt good, like a power none of these fools knew about. A few days later he struck again and continued until someone noticed and demanded something be done. 

It was that lively, pesky Civic Affairs teacher who met the challenge, collected a group of volunteers and thoroughly inspected and cleaned up the bicycle parking area. Whatever was puncturing those tires, he declared, was swept together, scooped up and thrown away, problem solved. 

This annoyed exceedingly. Deprived of his right to puncture tires, he paused to consider the next move. He was increasingly annoyed each time he saw the teacher’s face aglow with success or whatever made that creep happy.

At a football game a friend asked him to come behind the spectator stands. From a dark place he brought forth a bottle of brandy taken from an unlocked car. Above them in the stands the crowd chortled and roared, spectator feet and butts above a dizzying tumult of light and color that grew dizzier as they chugged the booze. 

He felt big, but didn’t remember much of what happened. The following day, his head dazed and spinning, the Civic Affairs teacher confronted him, demanding to know why he did it.

Danger, the fog of a hangover clearing, he said, “Yeah, whatever, muck off.”

“You know what i’m talking about. Three people saw you do it.” 

Oh sure, he thought, this lying horse’s ass is being clever, trying to pin something on me. 

Since he was drunk at the time he sincerely didn’t know what the teacher was talking about. But then there was a crowd, all eyes on him.

“What happened?”

“Get off it. You know what you did; during the game you went through the bicycle rack and punched holes in about fifty tires (in fact only ten). You left a heck of a lot of people stranded. People saw you do it.” 

Oh, he thought, that is why my math compass was in my coat pocket this morning. Then he remembered, yes, someone shouted, he ran. 

He truly hated that teacher, so fresh and devoted and his hatred never faded. The bastard would never die of cancer. He would live so long someone would have to kill him. 

The incident cast him out, his fellow students avoided him or abused him, shoved him aside in the hall. Some threatened him with bodily harm; he was constantly alert to avoid being backed into a corner and assaulted. It became a trend in the school, “That’s the guy you push around.” Some demanded money. After someone punctured his bike tires he locked up his bike at the library rack two blocks away and walked from there. The only upside resulting from his punishment; he acquired skill patching bike tire tubes. 

Of the thousands of students only one still kindly regarded him. Sometimes, he thought, she smiled at him. 

Over the months and years following his criminal act he often noted that she was near him; in the hall, outside school, in the gym, his eyes would meet her’s and he would look away, unsure. 

Later, when they were intimate, she didn’t turn away from him when he was angry. He had a habit of turning on people who befriended him. Often the anger surged up so fast, so strong and fast he instantly lashed out. The startled face of the buddy a moment before, he assaulted with sarcasm and insults. He didn’t know where this flashing shift into hate came from, or why he felt good before he calmed and felt bad about striking out. The one and only time he attacked her she stared at him and did not stop looking at him. 

“Why did you say that?” she said. 

“I don’t know.”

He read in her eyes a silent demand and never so willfully abused her again. Why did she not reject him? Did he lash out at everyone who cared for him? No doubt it is a bad habit; you can’t be a jerk to everyone; some people are necessary and worth the burden of being kind. Moreover, she did not make him angry; anger lived in him from an undiscovered source and he must push it down and away.  

Those were the events, that was the beginning and all the rest grew out of it. 

Leaving the other, empty bowl on the table, he sat down to breakfast. He considered speaking to the bowl as if his wife still sat behind it and stopped himself. If their daughter and son found out he spoke to a bowl there would be consequences. 

“I’m sorry,” he said to the bowl, “I can’t talk to you. I think i better put you back in the cabinet.”

He left the bowl on the table. 

He thought she would die short; not young, but not old ~ she smoked when young, avoided exercise and, most debilitating, she worried. Some nights she lay awake looking at the ceiling. From time to time she grew tense and when he asked why told him she feared having said something stupid and what do people think of me? He said, “People think it’s easy to make you worry about what they think, which is nothing.”

Seeing her fret over what might happen (before it never happens), he prepared to speak (she knew well) the same words so many times she said she wasn’t borrowing anything before he could say, “You borrow trouble.”

As for what people think he said, “If you ask them they lie. Nobody says what they really think.”

The result; she worried about who would lie to her when, where and why. 

The disease, like fear, took her slowly from the inside, cell by cell, receding and returning, advancing and retiring; each wave wasting away or revealing more. The illness became routine, his duty was to care for and comfort her. At first a burden, he grew to enjoy caring for her, listening to her, washing her. As she turned “gray about the gills,”as he told others between games of pool. He listened now instead of saying what he had said before, and what she told him was often new. As he was compelled to silence she recalled events, people and ideas he had forgotten or never thought about. The sum of her talk made him feel like he had been sleeping through parts of their life together.   

When her hair started clumping out she said, “Cut it off, cut it all off, bald is the style these days; let’s get this jalopy down the pike.” 

Jalopy down the pike?

This is no tired old wife. Accepting the challenge, here was pain and progress; she was gaining, a hidden woman emerged afire, purpose revived, engaged in the fight.

Thrilled by her boldness, yes, my woman, he kissed her forehead, gazing on her bald dome feeling a rush of lust rapidly thinning away. 

And the next day, both sunk in speechless gloom, the future forsaken. He sat by her, he held her hand, they wept together.

For all their years together dying was something that would happen someday, not now. 

Now each time he left the house something was changed; an old building demolished, a tree cut down, different cars on the street, new faces pass by. These changes sent her farther from him; this was how the world forgot her. 

It’s a new world, the old gone, he thought, what do i have? Thank God for my daughter and, most of the time, my son. 

The telephone rang. 

“Daddy, did you get some rest this afternoon?”

“Oh sure, rested all day, didn’t do anything.”

“I’ll be over soon with some enchiladas. Darnell (a boyfriend for long enough to be a husband) is in Smythe (nearby small town) and i want to check out mom’s garden.”

“That’s okay.”

“Daddy, i’m sorry, we have to do something about mom’s stuff.”

“I know.”

“It’s just that, we have to say goodbye.”

“So soon?”

“I’m sorry, daddy. I miss her so much, i always will, change is hard, i know.”

That is why, after her closet was empty, her clothing, jewelry, shoes under the bed gone, his toothbrush alone by the bathroom sink, he looked for signs of her still in the house. He found none, their daughter having done a very thorough removal job. His children wanted him to go play pool again. He held back; it could be a refuge, or now it could be completely different. The church, by the way, that was her thing.

Having breakfast with an empty bowl was gloomy so he turned on the radio. She liked radio talk and often commented; “That guy made no sense,” and he would say, “Yeah, head’s up his ass.” 

Or “That guy had his head on straight, I wonder who he was,” to which he would reply, “Yeah, sounds good.”

Or, “How did that dummy get to be president?” and his reply, “He lied his way to the top. You know how it is; they get so inflated they plop up to the surface, pop up, a gas bag. It’s all about the money, honey.” 

He dismissed the news; why bother with strangers, they have nothing to do with us. In her absence he grew to like radio talk; he listened, wondered what she would think of particular voices. There were wives and husbands together, kids and old people blown up in their beds, babies drowning at sea; what happened to respect in the world? Breakfasting in homes or cafes, people drink coffee and talk while he eats his breakfast alone and thinks of people he knew, people he thought he knew. He didn’t hear any of them, people he knew, on the radio. Generally he inclined to distrust everyone while he didn’t like being alone.

She was too close to see; alive, he didn’t need to think about her. Now the parts he had missed added up to a different person. After she was gone he saw her better. He had been very lucky. Gone and each new day going into the past, there is no remedy for it. Or maybe, stop and think, just think of her. That’s a fine place to be.

Machinery works according to make and function, machinery follows the rules. People are like that but not always. People shift like the weather, bring rain and snow or sun.

Eventually, he had to return to the pool table, to the world. 

Returning home with a few drinks in him, walking onto the porch, sliding his key into the lock, he expected the front window curtain to edge aside, her eye beyond it. He expected her to be sitting in the kitchen or bedroom or hear the toilet flush or the shower gushing. Was she kneeling at the garden edge when he looked out the back door window? She wouldn‘t go someplace without telling him. Seeing no one, hearing nothing, he must be in the wrong house. 

The house was now merely a structure of brick, wood and plaster covered with shingles and he had no reason to be there.

Slowly the mist cleared; she will never return. At such moments he slumped into an immovable gloom. There was nothing to do. 

If he was at work she could be home busy or also at her job. At the end of the day they might meet on the porch ~ it often happened, and what a relief to be home. An effort to make this memory present, to believe she walked and talked, was in the other room; the desire held him and then like smoke or rain or a distant siren brushed over and out of his mind and again he was alone.

People who annoyed with their sympathy reminded him that she was dead. 

They were gentle, speaking softly, consoling. Grief put him into a story other people told. How little they knew and he could not tell them how they were healthy and strong now and it will end. Small comfort that it would end for them, too. 

He didn’t want sympathy, he wanted his routine; getting attention was good, but not if you have to lose your wife to get it.   

The future was going alone into dark and debilitating age. The world stopped treating him like a regular guy, like a buddy. He wanted them to treat him like someone to whom nothing had happened. Only strangers did this and he told them, “I have to get home to the wife.” The best were those who listened and said little.   

At last he had to accept an empty house. After a second or third drink, something his wife never allowed at home, he talked to the television. There he found an endless world, wives, friends and family. No one on screen (large and clear now compared to the small box he grew up watching) paid attention to him; he could relax, drift away and sleep. He didn’t know any of those people. Asleep in his recliner, he might wake thinking he heard her calling from the bedroom. He sat up, ready to help, to listen, to put his hands on her shoulders, her feet. 

She wants me to take care of myself, that was her plan for me, she wants me to come to bed instead of passing out with a whisky bottle in my lap.

With time to sit and think, his life folded back on him. So much was gone. The old school where they met had been torn down and a new school built on the site. The kids lived elsewhere with strangers, he lived on a pension from work he no longer did with people he saw again, but rarely.  

His daughter came to work in the garden, brought food and trifling conversation. These visits reminded him that his wife was dead and their life replaced by so much ~ mostly unimportant people. 

Extremely annoying was their son trying to “Hook up dad.” Hook is the perfect word, he thought, with his tongue pushing at the corners of his mouth.

“I was never good at romance,” he said. 

“C’mon dad, you oughta try. You’ll see how much fun it is!”

“Fun? To try and score some strange?”

“Well, no dad, my approach was more mature. Let’s not think about it like that.”

“Nobody was ever as fun as your mom.”

“I know, dad, that’s right. But don’t you think you need someone?”

“Yeah, sure, and i bet you know the perfect someone.”

The woman targeted for hooking up worked at his son’s office, a skinny wench with a small beak of a nose and round glasses. She looked like an owl and it appeared not only her teeth but her lips were tight enough to bite. 

“Thanks for trying, son, but i don’t go for no chicken lips.”

In addition to this disastrous encounter, his son thought it salubrious (yes, he used that word) for his lonely, bereaved father (which he was but couldn’t fix it) to reconnect with his first family; his two still living brothers. His son was a counselor, a social worker and now, as never before, he regretted spending all that money sending his son to college.  

Between him and his brothers there was animosity; they were bad memories put away and left behind. All his life, from their earliest days, he felt they abused him, so as the family split up their relationships moldered into silence. For decades he avoided talking to them. Both older; one was a manipulator, the other a bully. To survive their influence he moved as far away from them as possible. To banish their memory he determined to think of them as strangers, like empty face on the street. There are billions of scheming, cruel brothers alive and dead, he thought, faceless, buried in the crowd. Putting them out of his thoughts long enough, they would vanish. They didn’t vanish. His son sent the notification and raised them from the dead.  

Neither brother came to the funeral; he didn’t expect them to. The oldest, the manipulator, left a sorry, too busy voice mail message. Sorry? For being a horse’s ass? Busy? Yes, busy taking up space better filled. The other, bully brother never responded. 

He missed his wife most at bedtime; they often lay talking in the dark before sleep. Memories of her family were different. She still loved and missed her parents like his own, now long dead. And she still, until the end, enjoyed the company of her brothers and sisters.

His father was alcoholic, mother stern and cold. As the youngest, they all had authority over him. All he had, all he achieved could be taken from him by a word, instantly, and his confidence and self-respect withered. Someone said, “You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else.” It sounded selfish and slowly grew into a goal. After years of determined rejection of his family influence it faded, yet like pop-ups on a screen returned unexpectedly. They never truly become the strangers he wanted them to be; he could not scrub them from his dreams.    

Now sitting in his empty house, he thought he had supported her, but she also delivered a paycheck. It is important, but just as important; she gave him a reason to be home.   

Throughout their life he thought he knew what was going on. Her death raised a question; why was their life together all about him and not her? Now gone, what had she really thought of him and why did she love him? 

He never asked her to help him, never felt required to thank her. He would have to visit her grave and thank her.  Once she was gone none of it mattered; the house, their daughter and son, the garden, the world. 

He told his daughter, “I will go to her grave once or twice a week ~ or when i need to talk to someone and there i will find her again. So many things i thought i believed in, now they’re like nothing.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” his daughter said, “I mean, that would be nice, daddy,” 

“You don’t need to do that, dad,” his son said. “She’s really not there; she’s in our hearts now always. But it’s okay, it’s good to go.”

He guessed she would die first ~ her constitution was weaker. As for his own inevitable end, he might have to do it himself. Helpless in urine and feces and withering into a husk was no good. He believed from his youth that a man faced with it might as well finish it. In the strength of his youth he believed he could do it if he had to. Did he have the courage now? Would it not be better to go now in strength instead of growing too weak to lift the pistol or the razor? 

Now that suicide was real he was afraid.

   Months passed before he felt comfortable at the pool table. Feeling out of place, he had his two happy hour drinks and quickly left. They greeted him warmly, and paused; yes, he lost his wife, he must be drinking a lot. Unknown faces lacked hints of this knowledge and he was glad of it. 

Although diminished by poor eyesight, he was still a good pool player capable of a clean stroke. The stroke may be clean, that is from habit, but the ball too often didn’t sink. 

His close friend there, the tall man, “the teacher in the house” expressed sympathy and, “now you’re back,” and he started to gain. After a few drinks all sorrows eased.

Thus a social habit resumed.  

This pool table friend was indisputably better at billiards. So tall he rarely used the bridge to make a shot, unmarried and a strict student of the game, rarely a drinker, he had taught, in a casual, informal way, many of the bar’s regular customers. He was a regular, friendly, yet with some untouched, unaffected detachment in his manner. His reserve inspired confidence. As he was known as the teacher there was great pleasure in beating him, a rare event. A victory in one out of five games was average. If the teacher lost he would laugh and say, “I’ll get you next time.” Because he bore this attitude and point of view he never lost. 

The first drink was not a problem, with the second he became emotional. Confusion and recent losses collected and there was no one to whom he could express his feelings in a casual, spontaneous way. His son and daughter visited with their easy answers; “try to be cheerful, music helps.”

At billiards, emotion clouds the mind and inclines a shooter to believe a ball will fall despite an inaccurate calculation. A ball cannot be sunk by desire alone, only by calculation. 

All went well until he started to lose. At first he didn’t care, adopting the ‘i’ll get you next time’ attitude of the teacher. He remained balanced and enjoyed the game for a few months. 

On his last night there he started a game well, sinking four of his balls on his first turn. His opponent, a young man new to the place, then matched him by sinking four of his own, but scratched (accidentally sunk the cue ball) and he returned to the table. As they played BCA (Billiard Conference of America) rules this “scratch” allowed him to place the cue ball and shoot anywhere on the felt. Called having “ball in hand,” the shooter usually sinks the target ball. 

But he didn’t sink the target ball. Someone from the nearby tables hooted, someone else laughed. It cut him. 

He tried to shrug it off, he remained tense. The opponent won that game, other people on the list of challengers stepped up to play. He waited. A few drinks later he had another chance to play. 

This game was worse than the one before, a fast, flat out defeat. Moments before his opponent (the same smirking redhead with a neatly trimmed beard) lined up to sink the eight ball, the last ball and victory, he cried, “To hell with this,” broke his stick over his knee and threw the pieces on the table. From the stunned crowd someone shouted, “Hey man, chill out!” 

“Sick of this shit, sick of it!” he shouted.

“Sore loser,” someone said. 

He turned to the people at the nearby table from which the voice had come. He picked up the butt end of his broken stick and demanded to know who said it. Someone told him to fuck off. 

Cussing them, he advanced with the broken pool stick. These new faces, young faces he didn’t know, shouted at him. 

“Oh no you don’t,” a voice behind him said and hands gripped his elbows. “You’re coming outside with me,” the teacher said. 

He dropped the stick, his friend dragged him out.   

“Sit down.” The teacher thrust him into a chair. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. 

His friend stood over him, said, “Maybe if you got your ass kicked it would make you feel better.” Saying nothing, the loser stared at the sidewalk.

“But i know, it’s been what, how long? It doesn’t go away. You‘ve been feeling lousy, that’s pretty clear.” 

“I should be able to sink some goddam balls anyway.”

“Look, you’re drunk; nobody shoots good pool when drunk, don’t worry about it, sleep it off and come back another day. It will take time to get back.”

“I’ve got no time.”

“Nobody does. I’m sorry for what happened, but it’s only a game.” He paused. “I liked your wife, a real sweet lady, and listen, none of those people in there give a shit. They don’t know enough to give a shit.” 

“Yeah i know.”

“You oughta go home, you’ll be better tomorrow, better next week. You need a ride?  

“No, i’ll walk, i can use a walk.”

His friend waited. “Go on then, can you make it?”

He stood up and said, “Thanks, i’m good, thanks for saving my ass, i’ll get you back for it.”

“I know you will.”

Then he slumped onto the chair again. He said, “The problem is, i didn’t kiss her goodbye.”

“Your wife? Why not?”

“I told myself to do it. My dad did it, bent down and kissed mom goodbye. He did it; he was drunk as usual, as always, drunk. But i couldn’t do it, i bent down and the stink hit me, the chemical stink, and her eyes were glued shut, and her mouth was, her lips were gone.” The teacher stared, silent. “Her forehead had this powder on it. I almost threw up.” 

“That’s rough,” his friend said. “I wouldn’t do that either.” After a pause he said, “That’s a Russian or Polish thing to do, right, kiss the loved one goodbye?” 

“Yeah, a tradition some people do. Maybe not so much anymore.”

“So it really doesn’t matter. The thing they bury, it’s a thing, it’s a shell; the person it used to be isn’t there anymore.”  

The crack of a rack of billiard balls broke the silence. 

“You gotta say goodbye to dead people. You have to live for living people, for yourself.”

As he did not respond, his friend took his upper arm, pulled him up and said, “C’mon, i’ll walk you home, come on.”

Halfway there in silence, they stopped and he said, “Hey, you’re the teacher, go back and play. They need you.”

“You sure you’ll be all right?” 

“What can i do but sleep?”

“I mean, do something stupid to yourself when you get home?”

“Oh hell no, i did enough that’s stupid, i woulda done that a long time ago if i had the balls.”

“All right, walk straight, they mug drunks you know,” the teacher said.

  “No, no problem, i’ll walk like i own the place.”

“There you go.”

They parted, the teacher watching him until he reached the end o tf the block and turned out of sight. 

It was his last pool game; ashamed, he never went back.

His daughter and son grew slack as they continued helping him. He grew slow. 

He lost track of the days, no longer measured his time because now, as nothing happened to him, clocks and calendars were meaningless; only the sun and returning darkness informed him. At times he did some cleaning or work around the house, mostly when he thought his wife would think he should do it. 

He grew stout and had difficulty bending to clip his toe nails or tie his shoes and at times wondered for several hours why his wife was not home; it was the first of the month. He eventually remembered. 

He began to wonder if his wife really was who he remembered her to be. The young man and woman who came to see him spoke of her and he wondered if they were getting people mixed up. He thought he heard them on the radio.

A few weeks before he went to the hospital his daughter came to fetch him, this time, she said, for an urgent appointment. She was there beside him and when he looked up at her he thought, she’s a pretty woman. I wonder who she is.

“Daddy, we have to go,” she said. 

“Where?”

“Please daddy, don’t do this to me, you know where.”

“I’m ready,” he said, “I just got to sit up, get the shoes on. Hey, where’s my wife?”

Not hearing him clearly, his daughter said, “What was that daddy? Your life?” The strain on his face as he bent to pull on his shoes alarmed her. She said, “What do you mean, daddy, your life? Your life is right here.”

End of “Freezing in Secret.”