((This is a six part story...part six, the final part, is on the next page of the blog...this story does not end with "They are propping each other up in the cold."))


Silence


1.

Eight minutes after six in the morning, Claire Sanborn lies in bed and watches her husband sleep over the rippled folds of her pillow. The first intimations of daylight are filtering through the closed blinds of the Sanborn’s bedroom, illuminating the miniscule dust particles of their lives as they tumble and rise in their invisible currents of motion. Claire remembers a morning when she must have been six or seven, before her parents’ home had heating, when she and her sister dressed like gypsies and chased after dust with butterfly nets, pretending the particles of dirt were the
escaped souls of their dead grandparents.

David’s mouth is agape, his breath slow and smelling something like moist, moldy soil. His cheeks are heavy with skin she cannot remember, layers of finite wrinkles sloping his face downward to his pale, chapped lips. An uncomfortable grey stubble has grown in unevenly around his jaw and the loose skin that hangs over his neck. Beneath the cover of a down blanket, Claire can feel the heat of his body. Strangely, in his slow fade, she is aroused by him. She would like to rouse him and make love to him.

Instead, she listens to the eerie quiet of her house. It is mid-November, and although her youngest son has been away to school for over two months now, she has not been able to grasp the stillness of her house on weekend mornings. No fans whir in adjacent rooms; no teenage boys rumble up the basement stairs on their way to the bathroom, perhaps vomiting up alcohol from the night before; no water runs for a brief shower before raking leaves; the refrigerator door does not open and close with a thud. Her house - and it is hers, she has made every mortgage payment with her own money; David has no real stake to this place - is silent but for the creaks of the autumn wind against its windows, and the moans of its joints expanding and contracting.

The silence spurs her into movement. She opens her eyes, rolls over swiftly, and uncovers herself. She is naked and the room is frigidly cold with waking. Quickly, she crosses the hardwood floor lightly on her heels, barely breaking the quiet. She does not want to wake David anymore. She is grateful because this morning, her feet, which usually ache with age and the wilting of her body, do not hurt. This makes her feel unusually spry and vigorous. The momentary illusion of youth is propelling her mind, and she thinks of all the things she might do with her day. Perhaps she will go for a run, or drive to the city and walk along Kelly Drive. Lately she has been drawn back into Philadelphia, to the orchestra on nights with Erin, or for dinner with David at restaurants they used to frequent in the relatively early days of their marriage. She has long neglected the city, and is beginning to remedy this.

She slips David’s heavy robe over her body, its insides soft and cold against her nipples and the bones of her shoulders. Claire walks out into the hallway from her bedroom. The doors to Luke and Christina’s old rooms are closed. She opens them, one at a time. Christina’s room is neat with years of emptiness, the walls stripped but for a few old pictures of Christina with friends or old boyfriends in high school. The bed is made, its headboard dusty. Claire cannot remember now the last time she was in here. Maybe it has been two months? It smells, still, of her daughter, of old basketball shoes and sweet, smooth lotion.

Luke’s bedroom is still half messy with use. A few old button down shirts are scattered around the foot of his bed. A drawer of his dresser is half open, and there are empty beer cans crumpled inside. She closes it. The door to his closet is open, old books pouring out into the main room. Photographs - many in black and white of the Swarthmore woods, one bright colored panorama of the Ben Franklin parkway, one heavily shadowed profile of his ex-girlfriend - are plastered around the room. He has taken a few to school with him. She stops at a picture of a waterfall in winter, its torrent slowed by hanging icicles that dangled like stalactites from its lip. She still wishes Luke would reconsider photography as a career. There is almost nothing he can do with it to make money, barring an extremely fortuitous stroke of good luck. She blames David for introducing Luke to photography. He put all of his hapless artistic dreaming, which reawakened in him during his relatively whimsical forties after a trip to Morocco, into their youngest son. In fact, both of her sons had acquired their father’s occasionally maddening lack of practicality. Luke, though, definitely had it the worst. Matthew, much to his credit, had given up on being a writer halfway through college. Luke might do the same with photography, she hopes.

She closes the door to her youngest son‘s room with great care, hoping not to wake her husband. She deftly descends the narrow stairwell leading to their foyer. It is lined in old family portraits which she often stops to admire. They marvel her with how quickly they have all grown. But today, she is in no mood to face her own ascendant age. She feels remarkably young, which is exceedingly rare, and does not need to be reminded that this spryness, this sensation of being sharp and invigorated for the coming day, is likely to be temporary.

She walks the long way to the kitchen, through the dining room first, then the living room (which despite the death of their second golden retriever nearly a year before, still smells thickly of mud and creek and dog; a spot in the corner of their leather couch is permanently worn in the shape of a coiled canine). Perhaps it is time to get another dog, one that might retire into old age with her and David, that she could take for walks on mornings like this, and that could give David company while he grades papers in his office. A cat would be more practical, and easier to deal with down the road. She prefers the warmth of a dog, though. They are so eager to be loved.

The kitchen is colder than the rest of the house. David has left the large window, which is directly over the sink and looks into their backyard, cracked open. She begins to make coffee, and as she waits for it to brew, she puts a bagel into the toaster. Then, she finally muscles the window closed (it is nearly frozen in its tracks). As she is about to check back on the coffee, she notices the window is frosted over with intricate crystals of ice, and she spends a long while studying them, the seeming randomness of their patterns. She has begun to wonder, quite frequently, about the construction of such things, the incredible detail of such insignificant matter as frost on a window, or the furrowed bark of an oak tree. Increasingly, her own body has begun to mirror such finely tuned facades in its patterns and textures, her veins more apparent, her crevices deeper and more meaningful. She has been particularly fascinated with the growing confusion at the base of her hands, where it seems new hollows have formed, and each capillary is a tributary of its own. The most remarkable thing about her own aging has been how uniquely defined her body has become and how much more attuned to its frailties she is. And, on days like this, how grateful she is for it functioning rather normally (her stomach is still a bit sour, which seems to happen on nights she goes to bed later than ten). In the past two months, she has been more aware of her own functioning more so than she can ever remember. It is something for her to monitor in the long empty hours before and after work.

There is, of course, work that she should be doing today. The company she is presently representing, a non-profit group that helps put inner city children into suburban schools, is looking to expand in the Philadelphia suburbs. This requires buying new houses - all the kids live together, dormitory style - and finding families, usually couples that have been unable to conceive children themselves, to run and monitor the homes. The vetting process is intense, for both houses and families. Claire is presently working on the loan proposal that would allow them to buy two more homes. Increasingly, her legal role has been blurred with the budgetary concerns of the group, something she was not prepared for but is strangely enjoying. It has been far more rewarding and engaging than operating, more or less, on the fringes, and only when problems arise. She wonders at times if she should fully make the plunge and become a fully functioning member of the operating board for the company, which would likely mean forfeiting her law practice and license. Five years ago, she would have been appalled with the thought. Lately, it does not seem such a bad idea. She should be more philanthropic.

Her bagel springs out of the toaster. She has forgotten about the coffee, which is fully brewed. She pours a cup, and spreads a thin layer of butter on the bagel. She is not yet ready to venture outside for the morning paper, so instead she finds an old copy of Philadelphia Magazine to peruse. It is the best of the shore issue. She has considered buying a shore house. She wants something to pass down to her children, something that can bring them together after she and David have died (though she is quite certain David will go first). Families have a bad tendency to scatter, to lose touch. Claire has not seen her own sister in nearly half a decade. She is not even sure where her older brother lives anymore.

Again, she thinks of being a small child, sitting by the old iron stove in
their house, playing gypsy and other games with her sister. The months after the harvest, when snow blanketed all of northern Wisconsin and the stumps of corn stalks wilted in the fields, were always her favorite. The walk home from school turned into one tussle in the snow after another, and her father was home to cook venison stew or chili on the stove for dinner. She and Margaret would lie in bed together, they shared one until they were nearly teenagers, and pretend to be astronauts under the covers, or members of the Packers (even Claire, who despised football, wanted to be a Packer). On Sundays, Fred, their older brother, would listen to the Packers on the radio in the dining room.

Of course, it is easier now for her children to stay in touch. They have cell phones and email and plenty of other ways to ensure they don’t fall completely out of each other‘s lives. Besides, they’re all still relatively close by, and only Luke has insinuated he would like to be anywhere other than the east coast. Still, a house on the beach is not such a bad thing to have. When Matthew and Christina were young, her and David would rent a house in Cape May for a week every summer. David hated it - she has never understood his bizarre distaste for beaches - but the kids loved it, and would spend all day running in the surf. By the end of the week, they would be so sunburned that they couldn’t shower for days on end.

She finishes her bagel and closes the magazine. She opens the door to the back porch and steps out onto it, its weathered wooden planks frigid on the bottom of her feet. Leaves still litter the backyard, and they gleam with frost and early morning light. David never rakes. He’ll likely make Luke do it when he is home for Thanksgiving, which will put everyone in a bad mood. She wonders often how she married such an impractical man with absolutely no work ethic or sense of money.

She steps off the porch. The earth is solid, and the grass crunches beneath
her weight. This weather, the last vestiges of autumn before everything turns grey and sere with winter, makes her nostalgic. She always laments David’s propensity to linger on the past, but something about mornings like this causes her to look backward, too. She needs something to bring her forward today. There is still much ahead of her, she is certain of this. She is still young, or at least she feels this way on most days, even if her house is now quiet, and her body routinely nags with the kind of frailties she always thought she would avoid. She is not old enough to spend all of her days living in the past.