Marie and Daniel were both twenty eight, in the mid-seventies in San Francisco – a time and place, as Daniel would remember it, when almost everyone he knew seemed to be trying to find their place in the world. They had been going together for several months and had recently had an argument that circled around things they each wished the other knew about each other without saying what they were. And although the subject never came up directly, it might even have been about marriage. After a few days of uneasy silence passed, they decided to spend a weekend in Santa Rosa where Marie’s parents lived.
They arrived at her parents' house in the late afternoon, a small one story house with white siding that Daniel said reminded him of a Hopper painting. Daniel had been here before, when shortly after meeting Marie at a public library (she was a librarian), she invited him to have Thanksgiving dinner with her parents. Her parents had moved from Denver to Santa Rosa a few years after Marie had settled in San Francisco.
The front door opened and Marie’s father, Andy, pushed himself in his wheelchair out onto the porch. Andy had taken a liking to Daniel, perhaps because Daniel’s father, like Andy, had been in the Air Force during World War Two. He wore heavy black glasses and had a crew cut. He reminded Daniel of the manager of the supermarket where his mother worked as a cashier.
‘You’re just in time for dinner,’ Andy said. He and Daniel shook hands, though it was difficult for Andy because of polio which had weakened his arm. (‘He doesn't mind,’ Marie said later when Daniel mentioned it to her. ‘He doesn't want special treatment.’) Once inside, they were greeted by Marie's mother, Margaret, her arms folded and a sweater draped over her shoulders. She looked like an older version of Marie: heavier, her face more lined, but the same pouty rose-bud mouth, the same elongated wrinkles in her forehead (Marie's were only lightly traceable), the same long, brown, wavy hair, and the same twang in her speech.
‘We haven’t seen you in a while, Daniel,’ Margaret said. ‘What have you been up to?
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Still working and going to school at night.’
‘Good for you.’
‘So what'd you two do today?’ Andy asked. ‘Did you see the Burbank House?’
‘We saw it’ Marie said
‘Were the flowers in bloom?’ he asked.
‘Some,’ Daniel said.
‘There's always something in bloom, but never everything at once,’ Margaret said.
‘Burbank said this area had the perfect climate to grow just about anything,’ Andy said. ‘And he was pretty much right about that.’ All were silent for a moment until Margaret called out for them to take their seats in the dining room, which they did.
‘So what else did you do today?’ Andy asked once they were all seated.
What they did that day was tour around the area, with Marie the guide as if she were a native. She acted as if it was important that Daniel see the area through her eyes. ‘We have to see the Luther Burbank house,’ she said.
Tours of the Luther Burbank House were led by volunteers most of whom were women who were retired. Daniel and Marie's tour guide was a woman in her sixties in a flower print dress. She reminded Daniel of a cashier in the supermarket where his mother worked as one.
Daniel walked with his hands behind his back and looked at the little rooms – the chairs with rope across them so people couldn’t sit in them, the dresser made from a wood that was too difficult to work with, according to the tour guide. He heard about Burbank’s spineless cactus and grafts of various fruit trees.
Burbank was a genius who wanted to be rich, Daniel thought. Nevertheless, he could not help admiring him. He also admired Henry Ford and Thomas Edison with the same reservation. They were friends of Burbank whose photos hung on the walls of one of the rooms. He knew they were known to be racists and boors. Thomas Edison rarely bathed, and Henry Ford had a foul mouth. Common people who had struck it rich; their money could not hide their working class origins.
‘Here's a photo of Paderewski, the piano player,’ the woman said, pronouncing it ‘Paderooski’. ‘He would come by sometimes and play the piano.’ Her mispronunciation and whole demeanor struck him funny. He pictured Paderewski belting out a version of Tavern in the Town – Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Luther Burbank singing along. Loudly and out of tune.
Daniel and Marie looked at the garden on the grounds of the museum; the roses needed tending to, they both noticed. They looked at the aloe plant, at the needleless cactus, and then they left to drive along two lane roads in the area.
As Marie took him to some of the wineries, the day was developing a set of in-jokes that would carry through to their everyday lives. ‘Paderooski the piano player,’ Daniel kept saying and Marie would laugh. After a while, she would admonish him. ‘She's a retired woman filling in time. You expect too much from people.’ He would be quiet, but then something would remind him of it, and he would say it again, the joke carrying with it its own exaggeration so that by the middle of the afternoon it sounded like Paderooski the Pi-ana Player.
She knew of a winery in Sonoma that had picnic benches so they bought supplies: a bag of walnuts, dried apricots, dried salami, bread and cheese. Daniel made himself a large sandwich with the walnuts serving as a side-dish. Marie looked at him and smiled like he was her baby brother.
They drove around some more, and by the time they reached Healdsburg, it was the end of the afternoon and in another hour it would be dusk. ‘We better get over to my parents,’ Marie said. ‘They like to eat early.’ The light was unusual and they both looked up at the sky. The clouds looked like they were floating in a transparent liquid. ‘I’d love to paint that,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
On the way back to Santa Rosa Marie hummed a tune softly until it became inaudible, although Daniel could tell she was still humming. ‘They're looking forward to seeing you again,’ she said when they were almost there. ‘They really like you.’
At dinner, Margaret talked about a train trip she took when Marie and her sister were four and six. ‘Gad, Marie, you and your sister were a handful.’ Other things from the past surfaced. Marie talked about the time a boy at school had dared her to stick her tongue out on the frozen metal of the swing set on the school playground in winter; her tongue froze to the bar. ‘Don't you remember that, Mama?’
‘The teacher had to pour water on it to free you.’
‘Gad!’ Marie said.
‘I don’t know why you would do something so stupid.’
‘I don’t know,’ Marie said. ‘I was little.’
‘I guess,’ Margaret said. ‘I wonder what happened to him.’
‘Who knows?’ Marie said. ‘Everyone has gone their separate ways.’
After dinner, they all sat in the small living room. ‘How about making a fire for us, Daniel?’ Andy said.
‘Sure, OK,’ Daniel said, and set the logs on the grate while Andy watched. ‘Always leave spaces between the logs for the air to get through,’ Andy said.
The fire caught and did quite well. Marie and Daniel sat on the couch and held hands. Daniel felt awkward doing this, and watched for any expression of disdain on either Andy's or Margaret's face; they didn't seem to care.
Conversations droned on unmercifully about people they knew from Denver, people who married, people who had kids, and people who died. At a point when Daniel could no longer hold his attention and was dangerously close to falling asleep, Margaret talked about Andy's interest in ham radios. ‘A holdover from his time in the Air Force,’ she said.
‘You operated a radio in the Air Force?’ Daniel asked, suddenly more awake.
‘Yeah, I sure did,’ Andy said and looked at his fork as if it were a link to his past.
‘You were in too, I hear. Where'd you do your basic training?’ Andy asked.
‘Waco, Texas.’
‘You grow up pretty fast in basic, don't you?’
‘You definitely go through a change,’ Daniel said and they both laughed.
Andy looked at Daniel and smiled. ‘Best years of your life, weren't they?’ Daniel tried to think of a diplomatic answer but Andy beat him to it. ‘If they aren't, they will be. You'll see.’
Daniel had told Marie once that the only good things about his service were not getting sent to Viet Nam, and his education being paid for. After basic, he was stationed in the desert near Victorville, California, working in supplies. ‘Boring as hell,’ he told Marie. He made some good friends but mostly it was a bunch of guys making tiresome jokes about their lives and each other.
‘You still planning on going to law school?’ Andy asked.
‘I go back and forth. Lately, I've been thinking about it. The GI Bill would help pay for it.’
Andy nodded. ‘I think you ought to.’
‘You look exhausted, Daniel,’ Margaret said, coming by and patting him on the shoulder. ‘Do you want to help me set up the cot?’
His sleep that night was uneasy. The fold-out cot was uncomfortable, and creaked whenever he turned over. He was awakened whenever the heating system in the house came on. At two in the morning, Marie, looking ghostlike in her nightgown, came into the living room and woke Daniel up.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Nothing’s wrong. I thought you might want to sleep in the guest room. You’ll be more comfortable,’ she said. He nodded sleepily, and they switched places. When he woke up the next morning, he didn’t know where he was. The amnesia-like moment passed and he remembered the middle of the night switch, thinking that it was strange.
It was early afternoon by the time they left the next day. They had planned to leave Santa Rosa in the morning but Marie slept late, Andy wanted to show Daniel his ham radio set-up, and Marie had an extended conversation with Margaret. Daniel couldn’t hear what Marie and her mother were talking about, but he heard Marie’s voice raised.
When the time came for them to leave, Andy wheeled himself onto the front porch; Margaret stood next to him. Andy and Margaret waved from the porch as the two climbed into the small car. ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ Andy called out. In the car, Marie wiped away a tear, which Daniel pretended not to see.
On the drive back to San Francisco Daniel thought about the argument they had the week before. They sat on her bed in her room. A half-finished oil painting of Marie's rested on an easel in the center of the room – a head of cabbage that resembled a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Marie looked through a book of photographs and showed Daniel a picture of her mother. ‘My mother was really pretty; prettier than I am,’ she said. It wasn't the first time he had heard her brag about herself. She had too much wine again, he thought.
The argument started with Marie asking Daniel about his last girlfriend before her: Sofia – a woman from an upper middle-class family of Portuguese descent in her early thirties. After going together for a year, without any statement of break-up, she left to go to law school at New York University. ‘I knew all along she had applied there,’ he said.
‘Then why would you stay with her?’
‘I don’t know. Stupid, I guess,’ he said. More than stupid, he thought; not picking up the cues of her references to his parents being from Mexico.
‘Some people aren't right for each other,’ she had said. ‘One thinks they’re better than the other. It's like some couples where one person is a lot better looking than the other; it's an imbalance. Don't you think?’ she added with a bitter smile. Her sarcasm-veiled sadness might have come from her having had too much wine that night, or maybe because she had been married once – or both, he thought.
‘Meaning what?’ he said.
‘Meaning…’ she thought a moment. ‘Meaning, how serious are you about us? Do you love me?’
‘It’s too early to tell how serious we are about each other,’ he said, which he immediately regretted saying. His efforts to soften his statement did the opposite. ‘I don’t mean it like that,’ he said.
‘There’s only one way to mean it. It’s a yes or no question.’ She began crying.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Just leave,’ she said.
A few days of silence followed. Then a night out which felt like a first date, leading to a walking-on-eggshells type of truce. ‘I’m very confused right now; thinking about law school and this and that. Of course I love you,’ he said. She didn’t seem entirely convinced, but they decided to spend the weekend in Santa Rosa at her parents’ house. ‘To forget about things for a while,’ she had said.
Now, driving home they talked some more about the weekend. As they passed by the exits for San Rafael, Marie asked ‘What was your favorite part of the weekend?’
‘The picnic at the winery,’ he said.
‘Mine was seeing the clouds at the end of the day. I really want to paint that.’
Crossing over the Golden Gate Bridge, the discussion took a defensive downturn. ‘My parents don't have a lot of education,’ she said. ‘But they're not stupid.’
‘What makes you say that?’ he asked.
‘I don't know. You kept joking about that woman who talked about Paderewski. That's something my mother might have said. She even wanted to be one of those tour guides. If it had been my mother giving the tour, and you didn't know her, you'd be joking about her right now.’
‘I didn't mean any harm,’ he said.
‘You would have laughed.’
‘'Maybe; I don't know,' Daniel said. 'It just....; I don’t know. It just struck me funny, that's all. My mother might have said the same thing. My parents don’t have a lot of education. My mother is a cashier at a supermarket and my father works for the post office. They’re Mexican; people look at me and think I’m stupid.’
Neither said anything else of any importance for the rest of the ride to her apartment. He parked the car across the street from the apartment building where they sat, both waiting for the other to say something. At last she broke the silence. ‘I don’t want to go in just yet,’ she said. Knowing her as he did, he suspected she was still brooding about things.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.
‘A bunch of things.’
‘Such as?’
‘My parents, at the moment,’ she said. ‘Among other things.’
‘What about?’
‘About my dad. Sometimes I think it’s unfair that my dad had polio. He was fine until I was five. I remember the day my mother told me they were going to the hospital. I looked in the bedroom, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent over, tying his shoes. That was the last time I would ever see him tie his shoes by himself,’ she said.
‘My mother tried to get him benefits as a disabled vet. She thought the stress of being a fighter pilot could have caused it. That went nowhere. But he pretty much gave up on doing much with his life. He was a defeated man. Except spending time with his ham radio. And watching nature shows on TV. Sometimes I think of him as a failure. I know it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all. It’s cruel; I know. But that’s what I think. Sometimes.’
She said nothing more and she sat in her brooding silence once again.
‘You know when I woke you up last night?’ she said. ‘You must have known I wanted to have sex. I wanted you to come with me to the guest room.’
‘I didn’t know. I was half asleep. I barely knew what was going on.’
‘Well, I did. But then I thought it wouldn’t be a good idea.’
‘We could do that now,’ he said.
‘I suppose. But now I’m not in the mood.’
‘You brought it up.’
‘Yes. I did. But I don’t think it’s a good idea, actually. I don't know. I’m kind of confused right now. I like to make you happy, but I feel like you think I'm not good enough. Like Sofia was with you. You’ll go to law school and be some lawyer, and I’ll just be some librarian.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said.
‘I think it is,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell me we need to talk. I want to be by myself right now.’
He retrieved her small suitcase out of the trunk. ‘You don’t need to walk me to the door,’ she said, grabbing the suitcase and walking to the front door.
‘I’ll give you a call later,’ he said, but she was already inside.
He drove back to his apartment, thinking about what he could have said, and what he should do. Maybe he could stop by her apartment the next day – a surprise visit, and bring her flowers. Maybe things could work out, he thought, but he knew that they wouldn’t; something he probably knew for a while, as did Marie. He continued thinking; about the weekend, and Marie's parents. A tune went through his head which he recognized as Minuet in G, by Paderewski, a piece he had practiced when he took piano lessons years ago.
About the author
Barry Garelick has fiction published in Heimat, CafeLit and Fiction on the Web. His non-fiction pieces have been published in Atlantic, and Education Next. He lives in Morro Bay, California with his wife.
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