Buona Sera

“I’m home!” Lydia cries out.

“Dov’è la biblioteca?” says Lyle. He’s at the stove, his back to her, tossing something into a pot. His voice is steady, reassuring, as seductive as the all-night jazz radio host who inhabits the parallel universe that of late has revealed itself to Lydia—a world populated with graveyard shift workers, or people like her, who have lost the innate ability to sleep.

“Dov’è la biblioteca?” he repeats, and this time Lydia sees the wires dangling from her husband’s ears, as if he were plugged into himself. Lyle, the multi-tasker, is practicing Italian while he cooks. Lydia is supposed to practice, too, but she resents the cheerful prattling of Flavia and her boyfriend, Gianni, who hold tedious conversations with Florentine waiters, museum guards and shop clerks. Now one of them appears to be in search of a library.

Lydia places a bag of Chinese takeout on the counter, before swooping in to hug Lyle. She comes up from behind, burrowing her face into his wooly sweater, which smells faintly of onion and soap. He sets down a wooden spoon, plucks the mini-speakers from his ears letting them drape around his neck, then turns to greet her. “Buon giorno, signora!” He smiles and pecks her cheek. “Or is it sera?”

Lyle, a high school English teacher, is one of the last sticklers for syntax and grammar. He teaches his students to parse sentences; he corrects their spelling, though the current orthodoxy dictates that such nit-picking stifles creativity. Lydia has tried assuring him that it will not matter if he wishes people a good evening before the appointed hour. What she hasn’t said is that she may not go, that she’s not ready, as he put it when he surprised her with the tickets to Rome, to “move on.”

“What’s in the pot?” she asks, her voice too bright. She’s banking reserves of goodwill, before confessing that she’s already seen to dinner, that on her way home from seeing Dr. Becker she stopped at Wing Yee’s.

“Chili,” he says, and as if to dispel any doubt, tosses some minced jalapeño into the cast iron pot.

“Smells good,” she lies. “Who’s the author?” Lydia doesn’t feel up to playing this game, but she’s still hoping to atone for the dinner mix-up. Every school year, Lyle takes on a new project, and this year has been no exception. What started as a joke, after he’d read an essay, “How to Cook a Wolf,” turned into his Moveable Feast project. Lyle will lure his students into the world of books through the pairing of readings with recipes. So far, he has prepared Mrs. Cratchit’s holiday pudding, and a vegetable noodle soup suggested by a passage in Middlemarch that details the annoying manner in which Mr. Casaubon scrapes his bowl with a spoon.

The other day, Lyle showed Lydia a recipe for Jim Harrison’s mesquite-roasted doves, which began: Find some wild doves. Shoot them. When they finally stopped laughing, the couple stood frozen, embarrassed by their mirth, which had seized them without warning. What to do with such unexpected—yes, unwelcome—pleasure? Lydia had been about to apologize, when Lyle pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, delivering them both from the discomfiting spell.

“Simon Ortiz,” Lyle replies, holding the spoon to Lydia’s mouth. She recoils, then with a rueful glance toward the Chinese takeout, accepts his offering, though she has little enthusiasm for food. It’s all the same to her, which is the reason she couldn’t understand why Lyle had stormed out of the house last week when she snatched the marmalade from his hand. After setting the jar back on the windowsill safely beside the others, she retrieved some strawberry preserves, but by the time she set it on the table Lyle had left the room, and soon she heard the front door click shut.

He’d issued his ultimatum later, after he returned home, sweat-drenched from a run. “It’s me or the jars, Lydia.” He paced the floor as he spoke, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, as if he were measuring the length of the room with his feet. He had on orange running shoes, the color of popsicles. She’d been about to ask if they were new, when he said, “A year is enough.”

When she asked if he’d leave because of some jam jars, he said, “You know it’s not that.”

She remembers looking up from her husband’s shoes to the jars perched on the sill above the sink, like amber frozen in time. “He’s right, Lydia,” they seemed to say. “A year is enough.”

Whether to the jars or to Lyle—she still can’t be sure—she heard herself say, “The man in the truck would understand.”

Lyle stopped pacing. “What man?”

Then she told him about the man who drives around with a coffin in the back of his pickup. When Lyle looked even more puzzled, she said, “His son was killed while on patrol in Najaf?” Only she spoke in that annoying interrogative lilt, that verbal tic that afflicts so many young people, turning every declarative sentence into a question. It was as if she couldn’t bring herself to assert what she knew was true.

She told Lyle that the coffin holds a few of the son’s belongings: a soccer ball, a pair of his favorite shoes, his boots, uniform, dog tags. The side panels of the father’s truck are plastered with poster-sized photos: the son in uniform; the son blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, a paper hat askew atop a mop of dark curls. “He was in all the papers. On the radio.” Again, that annoying, questioning lilt.

She didn’t say that she’d picked up the phone to tell the man that when her husband isn’t home she sets Sophie’s picture on the windowsill beside the jars. But another caller came on the air and accused the man of dishonoring his son’s memory, so she hung up and turned the radio off.

When Lydia said, “Surely, you’ve heard of him,” Lyle shrugged and shook his head and she hated him for his indifference. She couldn’t get the man’s voice out of her head. “My son’s off to Iraq. And there I was at home learning that there’s no weapons of mass destruction.” He was soft-spoken, his speech lightly accented, the way she imagined Gianni might sound if he spoke English. “I had two TVs going all day long, and the radio, trying to get news, to figure out what is happening over there. I see sandstorms, the Tigris River, tanks. I see the Marines move through dark alleyways. They kick in doors. All the time, I am afraid for my son, but I am helpless.”

Now Lyle is pressing a spoonful of the literary chili to Lydia’s mouth. Despite everything, he still needs her approval. She opens wide, feigning delight at his offering. “Mmm. Do I detect a hint of cinnamon?”
“Nice touch, isn’t it?” He beams.

She offers to set the table, and when he says the chili won’t be done for at least another hour, she says, again too brightly, “That’s alright. We can have it tomorrow.” With a nod toward the paper bag, she confesses that she’s already seen to dinner.

He turns sharply and the glasses he has started to wear for reading slip, so it appears that he’s peering down his nose at her. She braces for a fight, but his voice is as soothing as her favorite radio host when he says, “I told you I was cooking.” And she can tell by the slope of his shoulders, by the way his six-foot frame has collapsed in on itself, that he is too tired to argue.

Lyle returns to the chili and while Lydia sets out two dinner plates, she considers what, if anything, she can say to atone for the mix up. The truth is, she passed by Wing Yee’s on her way home from Dr. Becker’s, and bringing dinner in had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Lydia, who has no desire to share her innermost thoughts with a stranger, is seeing Dr. Becker at Lyle’s insistence. This afternoon, she told Dr. Becker: “Lyle wants the marmalade gone. That’s why I’m here.” She didn’t tell her how on sunny days the light filters through the jars, creating an incandescent glow. And she could never say, as the man in the truck did: “My world tumbled, and I felt my heart go down to my feet and rush back up through my throat.” She couldn’t even say, “Save me.” Instead, she described Lyle pacing while issuing his ultimatum.

Sophie had found the marmalade recipe in a dog-eared Sunset in the orthodontist’s waiting room. It was sandwiched between recipes for persimmon pudding and fig pie—desserts conceived for people with backyard trees bearing bumper crops. Their own yard, in Minneapolis, in a growing zone unable to sustain such exotics, yields nothing more than acorns. Lydia remembers thinking they’d have to buy the oranges, as well as the kettle and jars and tongs. Turning to Sophie, she’d said, “It’s a lot of work.” But when Sophie flashed that tinsel grin and said, “It will be fun,” Lydia believed her. Besides, once she got hold of an idea, there was no stopping Sophie. Nothing. Nobody. Not Lydia. Not Lyle. Not Lydia’s mother, who threatened a hunger strike if Sophie didn’t come to her senses. But that came later.

So they made marmalade as if they had their very own orange tree out back, instead of an old oak that shed prodigious amounts of inedible nuts. They danced to their favorite Paul Simon recording, while they scrubbed and chopped, boiled and stirred.

Now Lyle, who has been chopping green pepper, looks up from the cutting board, and in a voice suddenly tight with anger, accuses her of forgetting. “How could you?”

“I just did,” she says. Hoping to leave it at that she starts fussing with the alignment of the tarnished forks and spoons. Her mother had given the set to her after selling the house. Lydia had protested that it was too much, too soon. “Besides, what will I do with silver?” When Ida replied, “Some day you’ll pass it on to Sophie,” Lydia relaxed. The gift felt like insurance, a guarantee that everything happens in turn. Some day it would be Sophie’s. Now the dulled utensils feel like a rebuke, a symbol of Lydia’s failure to oversee and protect the natural order of things.

She picks up one of the dulled spoons, rubs it with the hem of her silk blouse, holds it up for inspection. Though the job clearly requires more than elbow grease, she continues buffing, as if she can erase the dull miasma, which, like acid rain or nuclear fallout, coats everything around her.

After returning the spoon to the right of a knife, she looks over at Lyle, who’s gone back to his chili. Now would be the time to tell him about the tree, to cut through the anger and resentment that chokes the room. Lydia has always derived immense satisfaction from the sort of quotidian exchanges that pertain to the upkeep of a home, that signify a shared existence—reminders about the plumbing, car repair, dry cleaning. She supposes that over time, such minutiae, and particularly the need to discuss it, might wear a couple down, but she has always found the exchange of such ordinary—some might say mind-numbing—detail, to be extraordinarily intimate. Who else besides Lyle needs to know, or for that matter, even cares, that the car needs a new muffler, or the leak in the living room ceiling is coming from the bathroom on the opposite side of the house, or the shirts won’t be ready until Friday?

Yet as soon as she says, “The tree is coming down first thing tomorrow morning,” she senses her blunder. It can only remind Lyle that she’d cancelled the previous appointment, which had taken six weeks to procure, as well as the one before that.

But he merely nods, which Lydia reads as permission to press on. “What’s ‘first thing?’” she says, straining for a light-hearted tone. “Is it seven o’clock? Or eight!” She pauses. “Yes. Perhaps eight o’clock is second thing.”

Once, this might have gotten a rise out of Lyle-the-Stickler, but now, as he tosses diced pepper into the pot, he accuses her of trying to change the subject. Yet his voice is eerily composed, as if he has just asked her to please pass the butter. Then he says, “I told you I was cooking dinner. How could you forget?”

 

“It seemed like a good idea.” She waits a moment, then says, “At the time, I mean. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Then she crosses the room to where she’d set the dinner, carries it to the table, flops down in front of one of the places she’d just set, unfolds the bag that Mr. Yee’s daughter had sealed with the swift, assured precision of an origami artist, pulls out a carton, picks up one of the tarnished spoons, and plunges it right into the heart of General Tso’s chicken.

“Lydia!” Lyle rushes toward her, still clutching the knife, hair falling over one eye, ear buds flapping, the Italian lesson pouring out of them. Briefly she wonders if he plans to use the knife on her, though Lyle has always been the gentlest of men.

Standing over her, he pleads with her to stop. But as she shoves the spoon into her mouth she realizes that she can’t, and then, when it’s empty she licks it clean, before plunging it back into the carton for more.

“Lydia, please! For God’s sake, stop. Please. Stop.” The very words, that he, (she, too), should have said to Sophie.

She digs in again, only this time he yanks the spoon out of her hand, sending a gob of chicken, red-hot chili peppers and congealed sauce sailing across the room, where it hits the window and oozes down the pane, landing on one of the pristine jars.

Lyle grabs a towel and starts mopping the mess that landed in Lydia’s lap, but she pushes him away and rushes to rescue the sullied jar, which nearly slips from her trembling hands as she tries to wipe it clean. If only she could speak, this would be the time to suggest that he see the shrink. Let him, the one who flew into a rage over a carton of Chinese chicken, sit in that stuffy office in an overstuffed chair, confronted by a box of man-sized tissues, cheap, leggy carnations, Dr. Reena Becker’s long, crossed legs, and her three-hundred-dollar stiletto heels. Everything about that place seems calculated to make Lydia feel small.

But she’s tired. Lyle is, too. She can see that now. Even the tan he has acquired from all that running can’t mask his pallor. She wonders if the strain in his face is a new development, or something else she’s neglected, like the tarnish, or the tree, which has been dying in stages. “Oak wilt,” the forester had said. And then, as if it were any consolation: “It’s wiped out half the trees in the city.”

Lydia resists the urge to cross the room and stroke her husband’s cheek, push his hair back. She remembers the night before the funeral, the way they’d comforted each other with their bodies. The clinging had felt so familiar that it was hard to believe that everything else in their life wasn’t also the same. It was their subsequent couplings that felt indecent, a betrayal of something, their better selves, perhaps.

She sets the jar back on the sill and says, “I’m sorry.”

That’s what she’d said to the men who stood on her front porch. They wore dress greens, their pant creases sharp as if Mr. Yee’s daughter had pressed them. The pink-cheeked man wasn’t much older than Sophie. At first Lydia wondered if he might be one of her daughter’s old boyfriends. Then he called her “ma’am,” and she wanted him to be one of those clean-cut proselytizers who sweep through the neighborhood now and then—a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness.

Through the screen door, the older man, identical to the first in nearly every way except for the color of his skin, asked to come in.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.”

She wanted to get back to the kitchen, where she’d been preparing marmalade as a surprise for Sophie, who was due home in sixteen days. It was a lot of work, as she’d predicted all those years ago, though it had never felt arduous when the two of them worked side by side. But without Sophie even Paul Simon sounded flat, so she’d turned it off. That’s when she heard the tap. It was the lightest tap on the door that she’d ever heard.

“Ma’am, we need to come in,” the young man insisted. He was fresh-faced, barely shaving.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

Then his partner asked to speak with Lyle, with “Mr. Martin.”

When Lydia said, “He isn’t home,” they offered to wait.

Lydia, who ordinarily supplies the men who work on her house with pitchers of lemonade in summer, mugs of hot coffee when it’s cold, closed the door, retreated to the kitchen and turned the recording back on to drown out the sound of the knocking. Then she wiped the cooling jars and moved them to the sill, thinking back to a time when she and Sophie had stood admiring their handiwork, pleased as if they’d just lifted delicate raku bowls from a kiln.

It was Lyle, still flush from his run, who let the men in. How could he know? He wasn’t like her, consumed by fear as she finished those jams without Sophie, fear that even gentle-sweet Paul Simon couldn’t assuage, fear set off by knowing, knowing, absolutely knowing why those men in starched greens were standing on her porch. How could Lyle, punch-drunk on endorphins, know? So he let them in.

Later, Lyle told her how she’d run to the piano for the picture of the three of them, then waved it in their faces, pointing to Sophie, who was being swung in the air by Lydia and Lyle, one moist, dimpled hand tucked inside each of theirs. “You’re wrong,” she’d shrieked. “Mistakes happen!” Hadn’t they heard of death-row prisoners? DNA? “You’ve come to the wrong house.”

Then she ran back for the picture of Sophie swinging a tennis racket, vintage Sophie with the crooked smile and the perfect teeth.

“My daughter is nineteen years old,” Lydia cried. “She was captain of the high school tennis team.” She jabbed a finger into the starched chest of one man and then the other. “Was it you?” she cried. “Did you come to campus and promise to teach her to fly? Or was it you?”

After Sophie had phoned home to announce her plans, Lydia had said: “Tell them you didn’t mean it.” Then she hung up and scrubbed the kitchen floor and ironed all the laundry, including Lyle’s boxer shorts and socks. Lyle, who had never done so before, put on a pair of old gym shoes and ran around the block three times. Lydia’s mother, Ida, called Sophie and said, “If it’s flying lessons you wanted, why didn’t you tell me?”

Then Lydia called Sophie back and reminded her of the picture on her grandmother’s living room mantel, the one taken minutes before Ida and her first husband, Harold, who was on a weekend pass, were married at City Hall. The newlyweds spent their brief honeymoon at the old Edgewater Beach Hotel, where Harold carried Ida over the threshold and into a room filled with orchids. As a child, Lydia never tired of listening to her mother tell that story, though she wished it didn’t have to end with Harold stepping on a land mine. She used to fantasize that, had he lived, Harold, King of the Romantics, would have been her father. Even after she was old enough to understand that, had he lived, she never would have been born, Lydia wanted the story to have a different ending.

Sophie was killed by an improvised explosive device. “An IED, ma’am,” said the baby-faced man.

“IED?”

“Sharp metal objects,” said his partner.

Back and forth they went.

“Remote detonators.”

“Garage-door opener.”

“Doorbell.”

“Easy to make.”

Together: “Nobody’s sure just how it went off.”

Lydia can’t shake the idea that IED is one letter off from IUD, the contraceptive device that had failed and given them Sophie. She’s never been able to share that particular thought with Lyle, who, after adjusting the burner to simmer, informs her that he’s going for a run now.

When she’s sure Lyle’s gone, Lydia retrieves the picture, the one she’s kept hidden in the pantry since the day Lyle the grammarian, the stickler for the precise turn of phrase, railed at her “fucking shrine.” When she tried explaining, when she told him about the pot-bellied Buddha and the plate of oranges and incense arranged on the floor near the cash register at Wing Yee’s, he rolled his eyes and she slipped the picture into a drawer.

Now she sets it on the sill beside the jars. There’s Sophie, in a straw hat and goofy sunglasses, laughing as Lydia and Lyle swing her off the ground. Lydia and Lyle are laughing, too. Lydia can’t recall shoving the photo in the officers’ faces, though she remembers that after they left she beat Lyle on the chest with her fists; she punched his stomach. She screamed: “You let them in!” Later, after all their friends had departed, leaving them alone with a refrigerator full of plastic-shrouded casseroles and cakes, she told Lyle, “I opened the door and when I saw the men in dress greens I knew. I knew. But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let them in, they couldn’t tell me. And then it—none of it would have happened. And then you let them in.”

Lydia is suddenly aware of voices and panics at the thought that Lyle may be right, that she really is crazy and it has come to this: auditory hallucinations. Then she sees the iPod, which he’d left on the table. She tries turning it off, gives up, and plugs the mini speakers into her ears. Flavia and Gianni are in a trattoria, where Flavia is dithering over whether to order carne or pesce. Lydia has had enough of Flavia and her unexamined life. She’s had enough of Flavia, to whom nothing untoward happens, unless you count the time her luggage was lost at the airport in Prague, where she and Gianni had gone on holiday. She doesn’t care whether Flavia orders meat or fish. She yanks the earbuds out and sets the device back on the table.

Their own dinner is in shambles. Chili à la Simon Ortiz? Or General Tso’s chicken? The chili is simmering, but she sees that the offending carton, as well as the rest of the takeout, is gone. Perhaps Lyle tossed it out when he left the house, though more likely he would have set the remains in the refrigerator. She hopes it’s the latter and is about to check when a shadow crosses the room. Looking up, she sees a squirrel, perched on the ledge, gnawing an acorn. They’ve blanketed the lawn this year, and she remembers the arborist explaining that it happens, that a dying tree can still produce acorns, even an abundant crop.

Tomorrow the tree comes down. Earlier, when she’d reminded Lyle of that, she’d wanted to thank him for his patience and understanding. Last month, when she confessed to canceling the tree cutter, she’d jokingly called it “a stay of execution.” But then she started to weep, and he said they could plant another. When she bristled at the suggestion, he admitted that a new tree wouldn’t be the same. Then she stopped whimpering and shared with him the first thing that came to mind: “We can try planting an orange tree.” Instead of replying, “You’re fucking nuts,” or more likely for Lyle, “You have gone round the bend, haven’t you?” he went for a run.

She loves that oak. It has served them well, gracing the yard with a canopy of leaves, providing shade on the sultriest of days. It provided fodder for squirrels; a blaze of fall color. Dormant, it stood silhouetted against the sky, a majestic reminder of seasons to come. Like the silver her mother had passed down, it stood as insurance against the vagaries of life, a symbol of consistency and order.

Lydia resists the notion that death is an inevitable part of that order. Sophie didn’t have to die. Not in that desert. Not in that trumped-up war. Not, she thinks, ever. No. That’s not true. The truth is: Sophie didn’t have to die now. Not in that way. Not while Lyle was running through the streets in his Day-Glo shoes and she was sorting laundry.

She taps on the window now and calls out, “Enjoy it while you can!” The squirrel drops the acorn, leaps off the sill and scurries toward the safety of the tree.

Lydia grabs Lyle’s plaid shirt off a hook near the back door and heads outside to rake the acorns. As she gathers them in piles, they resist the pull of the rake. Her arms burn from the effort; her hamstrings throb from all the bending to scoop them up. Tomorrow she will feel the effects of all this effort, but right now she feels a surge of energy, like lights that blaze before shorting out in a storm. This must be how Lyle feels when he runs—exuberantly exhausted.

As she scoops the last of the acorns into the bag, she wonders if a bumper crop portends a harsh winter—record snowfall, ice storms, extreme temperatures? At that, she turns the bag over and calls to the squirrel. But night has fallen, and if he’s still out there, she can’t tell.

She’s heading toward the house when a light goes on in the kitchen. Lyle is back from his run. Though he can’t see out in the dark, she ducks behind the tree and watches as he opens the refrigerator. Perhaps he’ll take out the Chinese, stand over the sink and eat it straight from the carton, as she’s caught him doing in the middle of the night, when he can’t sleep either. Instead, he stands with the door ajar, swigging orange juice from the carton. There was a time when she would have reminded him to close the door, drink from a glass, and he wouldn’t have objected.

He closes the door and looks around as if he’s forgotten the reason he came into the room. Under her breath she reminds him to check the chili, and he starts toward the stove, as if they hadn’t lost that eerie telepathic power that some close couples possess. He stirs the pot, brings the spoon to his mouth, but stops short, sets the spoon down and heads toward the window.

Lydia holds her breath as she sees him reaching for one of the jars. He wipes it with the hem of his T-shirt, carries it to the table where he sits at one of the places she’d set. As he taps the lid with one of the tarnished spoons, she knows she could never reach him in time to stop him. Her only recourse is to stand hiding behind a diseased tree while she spies on her husband, waiting for him to break the seal, which may be the very thing that is holding her together. The situation is beyond her control.

As Lyle wraps his hand around the lid, she feels light-headed and closes her eyes, leaning into the tree for support until the dizziness passes. By the time she opens her eyes, the lid is off and he is eating the marmalade, straight from the jar. She doesn’t falter. Even after he scrapes the jar with the spoon, she is steady on her feet. “That leaves four,” she whispers, knowing, just as she knows the tree is coming down in the morning, that at breakfast tomorrow she’ll open another jar and spread marmalade on a triangle of toast. She will give a jar to the mailman and perhaps one to the man who comes to cut down the tree, which she ducks behind again, just as Lyle looks out the window, scanning the yard, as if he knows she is out there.

“Buona sera!” she calls out. “Or is it notte?”

Though she knows he can’t hear her, he seems to shrug, as if to say that such distinctions are unimportant. Then he turns, and the last she sees of him, his hands are clasped behind his back, his head slightly bowed, as if he were taking a measure of the room.