At the Sink

Enough was enough, she thought as she stared out her kitchen window at the falling snow covering her garden. Growing things now bored her to tears. It was a brutal and masochistic hobby in such a harsh climate. She’d have three mostly satisfying months, preceeded by two months of dirty work and followed immediately by eight weeks of rain, retrogression, and diminishing satisfaction and diminished spirits. Not to mention the five months of cold misery after that.

Increasingly in her retirement she passed the winters as an almost total shut-in, puttering about the house and re-reading books she’d read years before. She listened to public radio, but even those people got on her nerves anymore. They all sounded so drab, so earnest, and it irritated her no end how they were always pleading for more money. They talked too much about biological terrorism and sports stadiums, and they were constantly bringing that awful, spastic wrestler on to huff and puff and bully people. She could just see him jerking around.

What had the world come to? She’d occasionally venture out to go shopping, but it wasn’t really even shopping anymore; it was more like visiting the museum of a planet she no longer lived on. There were fewer and fewer things she recognized, let alone really needed or wanted. She’d go into an electronics store near her home whenever she wanted to feel truly obsolete and done for. It was oddly thrilling, like a bright and confusing dream.

Thank goodness, she always told herself, she still found people so interesting. She lived across the street from a city park which several nights a week hosted “Community Senior Classes.” She could see the old people through the windows, square dancing or sitting around tables making crafts. She thanked her lucky stars she hadn’t sunk to that level of desperation. It was terrible, but she had very little patience for old people and their frequent gripes and loneliness.

She’d gone on a bus tour with a bunch of senior citizens shortly after she retired—it had seemed like a bad idea even at the time, but a neighbor lady had talked her into it—and she’d never heard so much complaining in her life. Certainly she was sympathetic to their loneliness, but she’d lived alone for her entire adult life, and liked to think she had developed a certain toughness and self-reliance. She supposed it must be disappointing to raise a family only to have your grown children virtually abandon you in your old age, but how much worse her old neighbor friend Helen had it, widowed and stuck with a forty-year-old son who seemed to have absolutely no intention of ever moving out from under his poor mother’s roof.

This man still went about the neighborhood in camouflage pants, wore a ridiculous Australian-style desert hat, and raced a remote-control model car up and down the sidewalk. She knew that Helen regarded her only son—there were also two daughters of normal accomplishment and independence—with a degree of shame, but there was also something of that pathetic symbiotic coddling that starts young in such cases and eventually produces such unseemly dependence in both parties. Heaven knows, with her husband now dead, Helen would have been lost without her greasy and stunted boy.

She and Helen had been neighbors and friends for more than forty years. That was what was so sad to her about the boy; she could remember when he’d been born, and she’d watched him grow up (or not grow up, as it turned out). She could feel a measure of pity for him. She was sure he—Michael was his name—had been disappointed in life, and she was equally certain that he was depressed. Who wouldn’t be, given the circumstances? He’d settled into that disturbing indifference regarding hygiene and personal appearance that you saw so often in the chronically depressed. Once upon a time Michael had been a smart enough boy, and even reasonably attractive, but he was one of those children with an immodest imagination, completely ungrounded in the real world. She’d seen the type every year in her classrooms, those poor prisoners of science fiction. So far as she could tell, such books and films were a hazard to young boys; they eroded their social skills.

She was quite certain Michael didn’t have a job, and hadn’t had one for as long as she could remember. Several times a day she’d see him stalking off to the convenience store up the street, just like the high school students in the neighborhood, and just like them returning on each occasion with candy and snack chips and big plastic jugs of unreal-looking green soda. Weather permitting, he sat out in the backyard at a picnic table, staring blankly at a chessboard or reading one of his paperback Martian novels. He’d gotten less friendly and outgoing as he grew older; he seldom even acknowledged his old neighbor anymore, and if he had any friends they never seemed to come around his house. Sometimes he smoked a pipe, and looked preposterous doing so.

She couldn’t remember anymore what it was he had studied at college, but he had gone away to a good school, small and private and very expensive. The education of their three children had practically bankrupted Helen and her husband. The husband had worked for the city’s utility company, and had fallen over dead shortly after Michael had returned from college for the summer one year. The death of his father had effectively taken the boy off the hook so far as making any kind of a meaningful life for himself was concerned. The father would not have stood for the current arrangement, she knew that much.

All of these things passed through her head as she stood there at the sink watching the snow come down, the day she resolved that she would no longer bother herself with gardening. She even went so far as to haul every one of her houseplants out to the garbage, and felt confident they would be salvaged by her neighbor’s oafish son.

She’d recently taken an old classroom globe out to the trash, a globe that some cretinous former student had defaced with a black ink swastika once upon a time. Less than an hour later she had seen Michael plodding through the snow in his backyard with the globe clutched in his arms.

Why in the world, she wondered as she watched him disappear around the corner of the house, did she feel as if he were taking something from her, stealing something she suddenly imagined she could not live without?