Page 14 of The Things We Never Say

Artie eventually said, “Do you like to sail?” And Rachel just shrugged and looked at Rob.

“No,” Rob said. “Sorry about that, but she’s like Mom, she doesn’t like boats.”

“Okay.” Artie held up both his hands. “That’s fine.”

As she and Rob were leaving, Rachel paused by one of the small tables in the living room and picked up a pillbox—it was tiny, and something that Artie had never really thought about; there were many such small old boxes on the table. But he said now, “That’s a pillbox. Belonged to some relative of Evie’s,” and Rachel put it back down on the table and said, “It’s really sweet.”

—

After they left, and Artie and Evie were back in the living room, Evie said, “She’s a kleptomaniac.” Artie laughed. “I mean it,” Evie said. She gestured toward the round table behind Artie. “She took that pillbox of my grandmother’s.”

Artie rose and walked to the table and found the pillbox he thought Rachel had noticed, and he said, “It’s right here,” and Evie squinted at it and said, “No, Artie, she took a different one.” At the time he thought only that this young (at least she seemed young) girl had threatened his wife in some way, but then when Evie began talking about what the girl had been wearing, Artie said—with honesty—“Oh Evie, if you saw what I see these days. I’ve told you this, people have no sense of dress, everyone is competing to look the coolest and no one can ever win that contest.” He sat down heavily in his chair again.

And Evie said, “I do see this, for God’s sake, Artie, what do you think the young women I work with are dressed like?”

But Artie only reiterated what he had said.

He meant this, because things had changed so drastically since he’d started teaching more than thirty years earlier. For years now girls had been wearing things that exposed their bare stomachs, and no matter how big their stomachs might be they showed them off. He had been glad that, as they now said, “fat bashing” was not allowed, except he saw—from some of the other girls in his classes—that it often was totally acceptable to “fat bash” a large young woman—privately, among friends. But he had watched this with interest. He and Evie had gone to a musical show in Boston a year ago, and in the chorus was a very large girl who moved and danced and shook her body in a way that Artie thought was amazing, just amazing, and he had (stupidly) breathed (almost) a sigh of relief to see this. The world was changing.

Except that it was not.

—

Because on Monday morning he passed Rhonda Lazarre in the hallway, and two young women—whom Artie had in different classes—raised their hands to their faces as they walked by her, and he felt (or thought he felt) their disdain for their fellow student. At the last minute, he turned and called out, “Hello, Rhonda!” She turned around, and he also saw the two young women turn and glance at him as well, and he asked Rhonda, who had stopped walking, how she was, and Rhonda said, “I’m good, Mr. Dam, how are you?”

Artie said that he was just fine, and smiled and gave her a wave and kept walking.

That Mr. Dam had turned and asked her how she was that day as she moved down the hallway was—Rhonda Lazarre would always believe this—when she decided she would become a minister, even if she had not fully understood it at that moment. But as these things happen, she carried with her that memory and connected it to the future, and it was a good future for her; she understood more and more as she got older that she had helped people, people like she had been, awkward, scared, lonely, and people also like the other girls in her class had been, popular and pretty and suffering—as she found out through her career—from terrible pains and fears of their own.

God bless Mr. Dam.

—

So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have, as Artie did with Rhonda Lazarre that day. But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.

—

And so: What about Evie and the shadows she was moving through at this point? Evie had been having troubles that Artie did not know of, and she was vaguely aware—in a way that made her feel a quiet self-loathing—that she compartmentalized, meaning that she put different emotions into different places in her mind, and the reason she realized this was because of various clients she had in whom she recognized this trait. And she was often a tiny bit uncharitable to them, knowing that she should not be, then overcompensating the next time she saw them. She should have returned to the therapist she had seen briefly before she went to social work school, but she did not care to do so, and she did not.

She had been privately (so privately that she almost did not know it) grieving, or at least feeling deep pockets of an abrupt sadness at times; this had been going on for many months. This had affected her feelings toward Artie; she was aware, as she always had been, that there was something soft about Artie; through her work she had come to realize that this (sometimes) happened with people who had not gotten enough love from their mothers when they were young: They ended up wanting to please, to be good. And this especially irritated her these days about Artie. She did not believe that he had precognition, she thought that he had dreamed about falling into the water and then it had fulfilled itself because he unconsciously thought it would. But had she known—because who could say if what she was going through with her deep and sudden pockets of grief might have had something to do with Artie wanting to kill himself?—had she known such an effect of her sorrow on her husband, she would have felt terrible. Much worse is what she would have felt.

—

Danny Marino was a mess; his mother had moved out, and then returned three days later. A seesaw Danny was on. Up and down went his hopes, his feelings. His father wept, which frightened Danny the most. At night, unable to fall asleep, Danny thought: I hate everyone.

—

Anne Merrill was still in a kind of state of shock that Artie Dam had almost died that day. Privately, her reaction stunned her; she loved him that much. The idea of coming into school each day and not finding Artie in the teachers room frightened her, and she kept saying to herself: Well, it did not happen. And after many days her fear receded, she became more balanced once again in her life.

—

Rob looked at his beloved Rachel in the tiniest bit of a different way after introducing her to his parents. He could barely admit this to himself, but she seemed to change before his eyes into an adolescent girl at a school dance, and this embarrassed him, his reaction. Francesca was back in the country now, and she had been very kind to him. They held each other in bed one night. He was to start looking for an apartment soon, Francesca said that she would help him, but he demurred. She was to be on her way again for another European tour, ending up in Paris this time, and he said that he wanted to wait until she got back to move out. She said that she understood.

“Dad, wear your sneakers, please don’t wear those fucking rubber boots.” Rob said this to him that Saturday—two weeks after Artie had almost drowned—as Artie got ready to take a sail. He was excited about the sail, and he had spoken to Rob on the phone about it. Rob sounded uncertain. “Can’t you take Mom?”

And in fact, Evie had offered to go. On a boat she hated she had offered to go, and he said No no no, he would be fine, and he told her that Rob was right, he would wear his sneakers (which he put on over his white socks). And so Evie came down to the wharf and watched him as he rowed a (new) dinghy out to the boat and tied it up; he waved to her when he was in the boat; she waved back with both arms. And off he went.

—