Five Tuesdays in Winter

by Lily King

anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a t...

He’d once wanted the store to be a homey place, the sort of place where you come in and hang up your coat and stay awhile, but it never had been. He’d never given any customer the impression that he wanted them to stay awhile.

Meeting his wife had brought him pleasure, or a sort of relief, the mystery of whom to spend his life with solved—or so he’d thought. But he’d actually been fairly content before he met her, talking on the phone with Aaron, eating tuna in his little room, reading from the stacks of books borrowed from the store he now owned. Mitchell wished his cup of soup would never end.

She seemed amused, entirely uninterested in changing him. He knew it was like that at first with anyone. He also knew it might mean that she didn’t care about him at all.

when a girl a few years older than Paula moved swiftly through the store to the picture of Thomas Pynchon that hung on the back wall and burst into tears. It was the only picture of Pynchon available then, and not many people had ever seen even that, a reproduction of his high school yearbook photo, teeth like a donkey’s. “The only person who should cry over that picture is his mother,” Mrs. White had said.

every time he rehearsed it in his head, it sounded like a boss’s question and not a friend’s.

It was only yesterday, the day of the mushroom soup, but it was already far away.

that night she told him she had play practice in the morning—she’d been cast as Rooster in Annie—

lamented the loss of the driveway as a primary source of entertainment

There was nothing outside—not above or below or in the trees beyond the mall—that wasn’t some shade of gray. The cold had eased and everything that had been solid was now a thick, filthy sludge.

“It’s an awful time of year to have a birthday.”

or anything by Henry James.

His wife had left because, she claimed, he was locked shut. She said the most emotion he’d ever shown her had been during a heated debate about her use of a comma in a note she’d left him about grocery shopping.

He marveled at how in books people looked back fondly to remembered selves as if they were lost acquaintances.

He’d read a great deal in the past twenty years but nothing that threatened his view of the world or his own minuscule place within it.

He actually already had “stuff” in his bathroom; he’d bought it for her years ago. “That’s good,” he said. Kate’s choices would be better.

Soon Paula would begin complaining that he didn’t understand her, didn’t appreciate her, didn’t love her enough, when in fact he loved her so much his heart often felt shredded by it. But people always wanted words for all that roiled inside you.

But I always knew the minute she turned her back I was out of her mind completely. She wasn’t like you. I knew you were thinking about me always.”

“You babbled? I thought you were the most reticent man in the world.” “Every forty-two years or so I babble.”

before I could remember them ever having lived there, their rooms still stuck in the seventies: the girls’ closet doors covered with McGovern-Muskie bumper stickers,

I was the martini baby,

Ed came from New England, a small town in northern Maine,

Ed spoke little about his family except in tight, funny vignettes, like his father buying his mother-in-law a cow for Christmas because whenever she came over to the house she complained the milk was off.

“School” sounded like scoal. It sounded Scottish or something.

“You enamored with anyone?” I was, of course. Hopelessly. But I shook my head no.

“What makes your heart sing?” “Chicken noodle casserole. The full moon and the really thin moon. Sunday mornings if the New York Times isn’t sold out. My nieces and nephews. My blue bicycle. Yeats. And Hermann Hesse sometimes.”

“What makes your heart sing, Ed?” I ventured. “The venerable state of Maine.”

“It’s Disneyland in the summer. Unrecognizable. Hollywood. Hate it.”

We could hear the sounds of a cocktail party down the street, the rumble of male conversation and a woman’s laughing voice cutting through, saying, “No, no, don’t tell them!” “No, no, don’t tell them,” Ed said in falsetto. “Don’t tell them, Harold, about our large animal fetish!”

Everything he said felt like the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

“It’s very civilized, being rich,” he said. “Very mellow.” I’d always been told we were middle class. Rich was something else. Yachts and private jets.

I had never been naked in front of anyone since I was a baby and even then I wasn’t sure. All my life my mother had been handing me things through a closed door, just her arm reaching in with a towel or soap or whatever I needed.

He was thirteen years older than I was, more like a friend of my parents’ who stopped in occasionally for a drink.

Because suddenly I found I resented my awe of them, my infatuation with them both,

I wanted somehow to even the scales a bit, to show them that I was worth something, too, that I had something to teach them, something for them to be in awe of.

and I knew Ed and Grant knew everything, and everything—everything—made me happy.

I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around.

Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.

Kindnesses like that could strip her naked and she scrambled to cover herself up.

Oda felt a racing in her body, an urgency that had no reason to exist now.

She wondered how

other people adjusted to vacations. It was such an unpleasant feeling, like gunning a car in neutral.

Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.

Also, there was no correlation between happiness and kindness.

I grew up with parents who never talked about the things that mattered, the things that pained them.” “The war?” “Yes, the war was one of those things.” “So Papi’s death is like the war and I’m like a Nazi who won’t talk about it?”

But for so long now when someone asked how she was they loaded it with pity and braced themselves for her reply, as if she had the power to hurt them with the truth.

“She gets drunk and we fight and she says, ‘Just because I haven’t read Ethan Frome.’”

I’d moved a lot but this time it was more like self-banishment. I didn’t have the same feeling I normally did, setting up my room that night,

That fresh start, clean slate, anything’s possible feeling. I didn’t have that. I knew I was going to write a lot of stupid things that made me cry before I wrote anything good on that table.

“Am I going to have to fight him?” “More likely you’ll have to listen to him sing ‘Norwegian Wood’ on the sitar under my window.” “Then I’ll really have to beat him up.” “Your neighbors will probably beat you to it.”