Five Tuesdays in Winter

by Lily King

heard the horn again, very loud, even at this distance. And nothing like a regular car horn. More like the signal at halftime of a football game. No wonder it had blown me off the road.

The woman told me her name was Margaret and that she would be downstairs in the kitchen whenever I needed her.

“She only wore black, huge long dresses down to her ankles. She was the last Victorian. And the only ghoul I ever met.”

“They’re not weird. They’re happy, Stevie. Will you promise me you’ll remember that?” “‘Member what?” “Your mom and dad laughing. Will you promise? Even when you’re old as Grammy you’ll remember?”

upstairs. “Laughing is weird. Why do we laugh?” “Probably so we don’t blubber like babies.”

“Happy.” He said it like it was a filthy word. “Is your husband happy? Every day? Some days? What is happy? What is being happy in a relationship? Are you happy? Such a stupid word. What the fuck is happy?” “It’s not that complicated. You either like living with someone or you don’t. You either like the commitment part or you don’t. Maybe you don’t like the commitment part any more than she does, but she was the first one to say it out loud and now you are acting all indignant, but it’s really what you want, too.”

And: At the pool he lies on his back on the concrete with his arms spread like Christ on the cross and I want to ravish him.

You can be my own pet wolf shark.” “A wolf shark? That sounds scary.” “They don’t have to be.”

Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them or lead them to very clearly marked sections—if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?—while they complained that nothing was arranged by title.

She had thin, sometimes dry lips that she picked at when she was thinking deeply and that he would have liked to kiss.

They were good books, without writing or highlighting on any page, but the bottom edge of nearly every one had a pen-and-ink drawing of a hairy testicle. “That’s my icon, in my frat,” the student said.

He was often tempted to tease her, tell her that just because she sold used books she didn’t have to wear used clothes, but he thought she might snap back with a crack about the pittance he paid her, so he refrained.

She was the type who could not take a compliment. If he told her she looked nice, she’d give the reason instead of saying thank you. But he was the type who could not give a compliment, so he just said hello and let her in.

“They’re over. With some guy she met at the store.” “My store?” “She just said ‘tienda,’ but I think so.” “She told you this in Spanish?” “That’s why she’s here, isn’t it?” “Sí,” Mitchell ventured uneasily.

A few days ago, a woman had come in with swatches of fabric and asked him to find her books only in those colors. Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.

Customers, as always, were irritating and disruptive. They were worse in this kind of weather. There was a focus that went out of people’s eyes. They often forgot what they were looking for and stalled motionless in the aisles.

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.

She wasn’t like you. I knew you were thinking about me always.”

“Why do you think,” he asked her, “that man said we had the same eyes?” “Maybe he saw something similar in them.” “Like what?” “Fear.” She looked away. He’d forgotten how disappointing these conversations could be. “Desire,” she added quietly.

Grant might have murmured something consoling as they disappeared around the corner, about how they’d be back before I knew it. And then, after a respectful pause, they let loose.

Nothing made my heart sing. Even Becca Salinero didn’t make my heart sing. She made it hurt.

“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.”

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. One time when I was eight or nine I slipped getting out of the tub and she had to call my father to come get me. I remember how rough his wool jacket felt against my wet skin.

“It’s not here anymore,” he said. “What?” “What happened.” “Then where is it?” “It’s gone. It’s over. You can’t find it, stroke it, coo over it. Time has stolen it away like it fucking steals everything. In rare instances, like yours, that can be a good thing.”

I can look back on that time now as if rereading a book I was too young for the first time around. I see now how in love Grant was with Ed, how Ed knew it and needed it even if he couldn’t return it, how Ed was nursing a badly broken heart, and how well they understood what had gone on in my house before they arrived.

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.

“I sleep well by the sea.” Or was it at the sea? She could never keep the British and American prepositions straight, and who knew what the Australians did.

“You just like her because she’s a girl. All girls everywhere are like that. They hate boys.”

“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.”

that they let each other be exactly who they were at any given minute. He always said that, any given minute, as if after sixty seconds you became someone else, wanted something different. I wished that were true. I only kept wanting him.

He liked to quote Ralph Ellison: “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

My abortion made him sad, but he didn’t argue and paid half.

“I thought you grew up under a rock, man. I thought you grew up out of the earth like a mushroom.”

On the way back to Vermont I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.

“Mhmm.” He kissed me again. “Party.” And again. “Bonfire.” He was young. He didn’t care who saw all the desire and energy he had.

Socially we balanced each other out. He was the guy who came into the room and everyone was relieved. I made people deeply uneasy, myself most of all.

When you die, she thought now, you can no longer give love. You can’t give love anymore.

Once she had thought there would be a certain amount of grace and mystery in being a parent and that what went unsaid about her experiences would be respected and what was revealed would be absorbed without contradiction, occasionally sanctified.

her expression in even the most spontaneous childhood photographs resembling, as her father once said, the portrait of a disgruntled cabinet minister.

She checks the lock and feels for a moment what he feels: that delicious surrender to sleep in the passenger seat of a car.

She looked at his face for the first time. He was a familiar stranger, someone you know you haven’t met but could have, perhaps should have.

She’d never noticed, as a child, the tenderness between a drinker and his drink. He didn’t grab the bottle by the neck as she remembered, but lifted it with two gentle hands, one at the base and one at the belly. His hands moved delicately from ice to glass, bottle to glass, each gesture a signal of love.

“This is not my work!” Oh, why had she shouted? The baby jerked awake, shot her a pissed-off glare, and began to scream.

No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they’re writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It’s when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.”

They were always so excited about a fresh drink, but all the alcohol seemed to do to either of her parents was uncover how little they liked life or anything in it.

“And without a weapon. It’s priceless,” he cackled. “A weapon is necessary to the triad. Don’t you even know that? The killer, the body, the weapon. They interact. They interchange. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for Christ’s sake. After a murder, the murderer is really the murdered, killed by his own lack of humanity. It’s his death that is significant. The weapon stands as the judge and jury, the object that casts him out of the dream back into reality. Without it, you simply don’t have murder.”

stroking her, putting a hand up the back of her shirt and clucking with pity, declaring that no one ever recovers from being an only child. Look at Richard Nixon, she’d snorted before turning away.

You are meant to feel at the end of a book that what has gone on is completely unimaginable and yet inevitable.

“I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What’s the point? You’ll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable. You’ve got your little scenes, your pretty images, but that desperate exhilaration of blowing past all the fixed boundaries of art, of life—that will forever elude you.”

His feet bounced carefree down the steps. He was light and fell into the hole gracefully, like a piece of cloth, so she didn’t have to get in there and rearrange him. There was no mound when she’d finished; every scoop of dirt had fit perfectly back in.