Claude never asks him questions beyond “Can you do this?” or “Did you exercise on your own this week?” But it makes sense to be impersonal when one’s job is so very personal. If he had to choose, Gerry would vote for Claude’s stoic silence over Aileen’s inane chatter, which seems designed to push his buttons. She chats, chats, chats about famous people as if they were known to her, repeatedly asks him about television shows he does not follow. And, oh God, her interest in the weather is exhausting. Or, more correctly, she never exhausts the topic of the weather and that exhausts him. He should get ready for an especially tedious day today.
Sure enough, Aileen arrives at seven, complaining of the roads, her commute, the slippery sidewalks of Locust Point. (She has to park on the street, as does Victoria, but only Aileen complains repeatedly about the lack of a space in the building’s garage for her.) She serves him his dinner, a can of low-sodium chicken soup, a salad, tea. Aileen’s salads are a thing of wonder, by which Gerry means they are so awful he can only wonder at the effort it requires. He has encouraged Victoria to buy those salad “kits,” yet somehow iceberg lettuce keeps showing up on his plate at night, soggy and sad, loaded down with bottled dressings. Even Gerry can make a simple vinaigrette. He has tried to dissuade Aileen from serving him these salads, but she makes a big deal of “sharing” her food with him, as if she is conveying a favor. Her nightly meal is usually this salad alongside a Dinty Moore stew or a microwaved entree. Food may not be important to Gerry, but he does prefer it to be edible.
He finishes his dinner, texts for Aileen to take his tray away. Strangely, she would prefer for him to shout for her, but he doesn’t like screaming. He grew up in a household where there was almost never any screaming, not even during the most vicious fights. His parents were hissers. Maybe it would have been healthier to scream every now and then, but he never got the knack of it, although if he had stayed with Margot much longer he might have been forced to master the art. His three wives were essentially passive women, as conflict-averse as he is. Margot, however, loves drama. She likes big fights followed by sex that feels like an extension of the fight, which can be at once exhilarating and a little frightening. On more than one occasion, she had dropped to her knees almost midsentence and begun clawing at his fly, yanking at him, as if to prove how much power she had over him. And she did have that particular power; when Margot got going, she was hard to beat on that score. She was, after all, a professional courtesan, a woman who had put in her ten thousand hours. It was the only reason, he supposed, so many men had put up with her, although none had ever married her. Margot told him she had never wanted to marry before she met him and maybe that was true, or maybe it was what she said to each man, hoping to make him feel special. Thank God he had gotten away from her.
He drifts off. Sleepiness is a side effect of oxycodone, but it could be boredom as well. He should be writing. Then again, what better reason not to write than recovery from a major accident? No one, not even Thiru, can blame him for not being productive right now. As a young man, he disliked sleep, tried to get by on five hours. There was so much to do, so much to write, to read. Maybe it’s all the television he’s watching now. As jumpy and jittery as the news is, it also seems designed to be soporific, the way it repeats itself over and over. The text running along the bottom of the screen, the anchors’ voices. The president today. The president today. It’s like a nursery rhyme. Which, come to think of it, was the source for the title of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Do people still read Kesey? Probably, because the book is sentimental. Will people read Dream Girl fifty years after its publication date? A good movie version could ensure its legacy, but, oh, how Gerry dislikes the irony of that.
The snowstorm, which has been gentle and pretty, begins to pick up steam. The winds are howling around the building. He remembers his mother screaming in the night. The only time she ever screamed, as far as he knows. But she moaned, during snowstorms such as this, knowing it would be on her, and later Gerry, to shovel the driveway and sidewalks, to try to get to work. Their street had a downhill slope and she learned how to park so she could roll carefully down to Bellona Avenue, which had a shot of being plowed early, whereas their side street was never cleared. It was a good sledding hill, too, he remembers—
The phone is ringing. Where is Aileen, why won’t she answer it? He picks up, assuming he will hear a warning from Baltimore Gas and Electric.
“Hi, Gerry. It’s Aubrey. I wanted to check on you, make sure you’re okay in this storm.”
“Who is this?”
“Aubrey, Gerry. Are you okay in the storm? Do you need anything?”
“I have your number on caller ID and I am going to report you. This is harassment. This is—”
She laughs and, damn, if the laugh doesn’t sound like Aubrey’s as he described it in the book, a laugh that was never laughed in ridicule or unkindness.
“Anyway, I’ll be coming to see you soon. So if you do need anything, let me know.”
“How could I—” But she has hung up.
He bellows for Aileen. She lumbers up the stairs, full of apologies. “I don’t know what happened, but my dinner hit me hard, I had to—”
“The caller ID,” he says. “Check the caller ID.”
She has yet to reach the kitchen phone when the power goes out.
1966
“IS IT SAFE?”
“Don’t be a scaredy-cat. Everyone else has done it.”
But everyone else has a sled. And sleds, even in this deep, hard-packed snow, didn’t go as quickly as Gerry’s toboggan. He wasn’t quite eight, one of the smallest kids out here, and his toboggan was taller than he was. Why did he have a toboggan anyway? Why were his parents so bad at even the smallest normal things?
It was the third day of a historic blizzard, the second day that school had been canceled. The children in Gerry’s neighborhood had set up sentries so they could sled down Berwick, which meant crossing what would normally be an unthinkably busy Bellona Avenue. But the world was still, quiet except for their shouts. No one was driving anywhere and if they were, they crept along so slowly that there was time to bail should a car approach. The adults, dull creatures, were inside, their enthusiasm for snow used up by the second day. Yesterday, a Monday, the fathers and even some of the mothers had joined the children. Not Gerry’s mother, because she was not that kind of a mother. And not Gerry’s father, because he was out of town for business. But he would have been out here if he hadn’t been stranded in Iowa. Gerry was sure of that. Pretty sure. His father was the one who had given him the toboggan, after all.
Resigned, Gerry dragged his toboggan about midway up Berwick. Some sidewalks had been cleared, but not his own, not with his father gone. A neighbor had offered, but his mother had refused. “Gerald will do it when he returns.” She had managed to shovel out a small path to the back door, so Gerry could come and go without tracking snow into the front rooms. Even in the early part of the storm, when the falling flakes had been so pretty and no one had a sense of how severe it would be, Gerry’s mother had wanted no part of it. She had shut herself up in her room, blinds drawn, as if her refusal to acknowledge the snow would cow it. But the silent treatment worked no better on the storm than it did on his father.
Gerry had to go to the bathroom, but no one would believe him. Even if they did, he would have to come back or suffer the consequences at school, assuming there was ever school again. Wallace Wright, on the noon news today, had suggested there would be no school at all this week. His mother had turned off the set and started to cry. But they had everything they needed as far as Gerry could tell. Food, toilet paper, coffee, the amber liquid his mother poured into her coffee at night. He didn’t give his mother any trouble. That was the phrase instilled in him by his father, who traveled so much. “Don’t give your mother any trouble.” When he was younger, a nursery school baby, he had imagined a box with a bow. But what, exactly, would be inside a box of trouble? He didn’t know and he didn’t want to find out. Gerry didn’t give his mother any trouble.