The Summer Without Men

Who would deny us the mere pantomime of frenzy? We, the actors who pace back and forth on a stage no one watches, our guts heaving and our fists flying? Your friend was one of us, the never anointed, the unchosen, misshapen by life, by sex, cursed by fate but still industrious under the covers where only the happy few venture, sewing apace for years, sewing her heartbreak and her spite and spleen and why not? Why? Why not? Why? Why not?
    In all his bleakness, he made me feel better, strangely better. Why? Although for the first time I wondered if Mr. Nobody couldn’t just as well be Mrs. Nobody. Who knew? I wasn’t so sure he was Leonard anymore. But I realized I didn’t care. He or she was my voice from Neverland, from neverness, from Why, not Where, and I liked it that way.
If I ever do anything really stupid again, nail me to the wall.
     
      Your Boris
    *   *   *
     
    Daisy was standing behind me when I read this message on the screen, and I felt her hands on my shoulders. “What’re you going to say, Mom? Tell me, Mom.”
    “I’ll have my staple gun ready.”
    “Oh, Mom,” she groaned. “He’s trying, caand you see? He feels bad.”
    My daughter rolled back the desk chair I was sitting in, jumped into my lap, and began cajoling and wheedling me to say something encouraging back to dear old Pa. She pulled at my earlobes and pinched my nose and used various accents—Korean, Irish, Russian, and French—to plead with me. She leapt off my lap and soft-shoed and shuffle-ball-changed and waved her arms and wished loudly for the reunion of the aging couple, one Mommy and one Daddy, Sun and Moon or Moon and Sun, the double orbs in her childhood sky.

    *   *   *
     
    On the day of Abigail’s funeral, it rained, and I thought it was right that it should rain. The rain came down on the mown grass, and I remembered the words she had stitched in needlepoint: O remember that my life is wind . Rolling Meadows was heavily represented in the pews that afternoon, which meant there were a lot of women, since women were the ones who lived there, mostly, anyway, although the lecherous Busley showed up on his Mobility Scooter, which he parked in the aisle, toward the back. I saw the niece, who looked old, but then she was probably in her seventies. My mother had been asked to speak. She clasped her speech tightly in her lap, and I sensed she was nervous. She had tried on several black outfits before we left, worrying about collars and pressing and what may or may not have been a spot on a skirt, and she finally decided on a tailored cotton jacket and pants with a blue blouse that Abigail had always admired. The minister, a man with little hair and a suitably grave demeanor, could not have known our mutual friend very well because he uttered falsehoods that made my mother stiffen beside me: “A loyal member of our congregation with a generous and gentle spirit.”
    My small, elegant mother took the steps to the pulpit carefully but without difficulty, and once she had adjusted her feet and reading glasses, she leaned toward her listeners. “Abigail was many things,” she said, her voice quavering, hoarse, emphatic. “But she was not a generous and gentle spirit. She was funny, outspoken, smart, and if the truth be told, angry and irritable a lot of the time.” I heard a couple of women laugh behind me. My mother went on and with each sentence I could feel her warming to her subject. They had met in the book club the day Abigail shocked her fellow members by denouncing a novel they were reading that had won the PULITZER Prize as “a complete load of stinking crap,” a verdict my mother had not opposed but would have worded differently, and she went on to praise Abigail’s creative ability and the many works of art she had produced over the years. She called what Abigail had made art, and she called Abigail an artist, and Daisy and I were proud to have such a grandmother and such a mother. I knew Mama wouldn’t weep for Abigail. I don’t think she wept for Father. She was a true stoic; if there’s nothing to be done about it, away with it. The Swans were dying, one by one. We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can’t wash it off. There is nothing we can do about it except perhaps burst into song.
    We must leave us for a while, leave me and Daisy and the brght Peg, too, sitting beside Daisy, leave my mother as she stands there giving testimony to her friend. We are