“Takes one to know one,” I said, because wasn’t Tamar also a tough nut? But she just looked at me. No comeback.
What was she thinking? What was going through her mind back in those days? She loved Asa Chamberlain, that much was clear. “That boy has the voice of an angel,” I once heard Annabelle Lee say to Tamar. “And the looks of one too, in a lumberjack kind of way.” Tamar didn’t say anything back—maybe she nodded, but I was eavesdropping from the living room so I didn’t know for sure—but the choir director was right on both counts. Once he knew how much my mother loved Leonard Cohen, Asa used to serenade her with his songs. “Hallelujah,” especially, because it was her favorite. I could still hear his voice in the kitchen of the house that used to belong to my mother and me, singing about those chords and that baffled king composer. She used to have this look on her face when he sang, a look I couldn’t read.
Now I wondered: Was that look happiness? Did Asa make her happy in a way that I didn’t?
His father, Eli, was not a tough nut. He might have given the impression of tough-nut-ness, but he was anything but. He was a tall, rough-looking, rough-speaking man, but you should have seen the way he used to pick up his dog, Miss Faraday, named after his kindergarten teacher, and smooth her already-smooth fur. Eli had found Miss Faraday in a ditch outside Watertown when she was a puppy, some kind of nameless pit-husky-boxer mix, as far as we could tell, and driven home with her on his lap.
He was the same way with his son.
“Clara, do you and Asa talk about what will happen after high school?” my mother once asked me. She had that look on her face, that same unreadable look.
“Sure. I’ll go to MVCC, he’ll drive for Byrne Dairy and everything will be the same.”
“You’ve decided all that together?”
“Not in so many words. But yes.”
I had already mentally rejected all the SUNY schools on a too-far-from-Asa basis. Oneonta, Cornell, Geneseo, Plattsburgh, Binghamton, New Paltz, Albany, all within three hours but still too far. I couldn’t stand the thought of being farther than half an hour away from Asa, who was happy exactly where he was. Happy with me, with his job, with Sterns.
And I was happy with him.
* * *
“Why did Asa enlist?” Sunshine said, still with the z sound instead of the s. “You’ve never really talked about that.”
“Asa. Not Aza. Get it straight. And I couldn’t talk about it.”
“But why not?”
I wanted to swat away the sound of her voice, the confusion in it. Calm down, Clara. Focus. It was a long time ago.
“Because it was right after he left me,” I said. “It all happened so fast. It’s still a jumble in my head. We broke up, and he enlisted, and I went away, and then he died. He’s dead.”
“Tell us more about Asa, then,” Sunshine said, after a long pause. “About that time.”
She was still saying it wrong. Could she never get it right? Could she not hear? Was there a problem with her ears? S instead of z, Sunshine. S for sweet, not z for razor. Sunshine was a word person but not enough of one, it seemed, to know the profound difference between s and z.
“Everything changed after the night I came home and they were talking,” I said. “He broke up with me the next day. Then he enlisted. He was an army mechanic. And then she made me go away. And if he hadn’t enlisted, then??—”
“Maybe he would be alive?”
I nodded. My heart fluttered in my chest, on the verge of a stampede. Too thin too dehydrated too stressed. The three toos, any two of which would bring on episodes. A long-ago cardiologist’s voice echoed in my mind, lecturing me on the specifics of my condition. Shhh, Clara. Shhh.
“Is that why you don’t talk about him?”
Yes. That was why I didn’t talk about him. Why I tried not to think about him. All these years. Fifteen of them, now, since we broke up. And Asa gone from the earth the last seven of them. Maybe I thought there would be time to put it back together. If not me and Asa as a couple, then the puzzle of what was broken. Understand how that time and those decisions—to do as my mother said, to leave my home and venture into a new world, to go forth without Asa—changed my life. Set pattern to it in ways that I could not have known back then.
Would we have broken up anyway? Would time have worked its sorcery on us, pulled us apart? Probably, the thirty-two-year-old me whispered to the seventeen-year-old former me. Admit it. You might have made it a semester, or a year even, and then you would both have known you were headed down different paths. But that ending would have been better than what actually happened, because it would have been natural. Sorrowful, but natural.
Even after he left me, I felt in my body that there was a force between the two of us, and I imagined that one day when I was home visiting my mother and out for a walk, he would drive by and pull off to the side of the road and turn off the ignition. Get out of the car.
We would talk.
I would tell him how sorry and sad I still felt about losing him, and he would nod and hold out his hand.
We would figure it out together. That happened in life, sometimes. The long-divorced parents of my friends growing up, who loathed each other, who hated being around each other at holidays and graduations and funerals, were suddenly glimpsed in their children’s wedding photos, dancing and laughing and clinking glasses. How it happened was time, maybe. Time melting away the edges. Time making you forget the awfulness.
Asa was my only boyfriend.
When he ended things with me, on that day he kept shaking his head and saying he was sorry, something broke. Something fundamental, so that the air itself broke around us, so that ever since the air I breathed came from a different country, a country I was still trying to figure out.
* * *
“I think about it,” I said. “I think about it more than you know. Because the world, it would be a better place if Asa were still in it.”
Sunshine and Brown kept their eyes straight on me, wanting more. The width of the wide table separated us and I was the field mouse and they were the hawks, listening with their eyes, ready to plummet from a mile high with claws at the ready if I stopped talking.
“And he’s not,” I said. “And my mother, she’s going now too. And what if I had stayed in Sterns? What if I had been close by her all along?”
“Would things be different now?” Brown said.