WHAT A LIFETIME IS by Linda McCullough Moore
I fell in love with Andrew Owens the day that Annie Shenkle died, when we were in third grade at Thompson Avenue. Our teacher, Mrs. Dormley, made the whole class crowd into the cloak room, with our dripping boots and rubbers, saturated woolen coats, finger-itching, ice-wet mittens, faces hot in that frost-heated way, and she told us Annie Shenkle had died early that morning, of diphtheria.
“She let herself get wet and cold, and still she stayed outside and played till almost dark, and when her mother took her temperature: 105. The brain goes haywire at 105.3.” The Dormley woman scribbled on our brains, grafting myth to thinking apparatus: What you do in life affects what happens to you. That myth.
“So if you want to break your parents’ heart, you know what to do,” she said. “Now take your seats.”
As it would turn out, Mrs. Dormley got a nasty case of Alzheimer’s disease when she was only sixty. Even earlier than that, my mother said she showed up in church in some peculiar get‑ups. She meant no harm that cloakroom day, or not a great deal. She just wanted us to know the things that happen to a person. She was only trying to keep us from dying, before we absolutely had to, to keep our brains from going completely haywire, any sooner than they needed to.
The warning duly noted, we went into the classroom and slid onto seats connected to our desks by wrought iron tethers, as though parts of the furniture might disengage from any frailer bonds and try to get away. No worry. Nothing, no one ever, escaped from Mrs. Dormley. I see the children that we were: hunched shoulders, stringy hair, pilled sweaters, India-inked fingers hardly pristine even prior to Peterson penmanship at 10 a.m. We put the stoppers in ink bottles, never carefully enough – witness the black ink stains on wide oak floorboards in the school that burned down to the ground a half a century ago – and Andrew Owens walked into the room and asked Mrs. Dormley, out loud, not troubling to whisper, if she had any extra chalk Mrs. Hendricks might borrow, which she promised to return, though how she might send Andrew Owens back at three o’clock with powdered words – apostrophe, parentheses, Yugoslavia, nesting habits – that Mrs. Dormley might compact and use next week to write different words entirely, nobody said. Mrs. Dormley handed Andrew chalk – one stick, not even whole – and Andrew moved into my mind where he has been these sixty years.
In junior high school Marnie Kaufman and I would leave for school ten minutes early to stand at 7:30 on the coldest corner in western Pennsylvania, hoping to catch a glimpse of Andrew Owens and his buddies walking by on the way to school. Was Andrew aware? Did he see us standing there? How could he not have?
Marnie didn’t find someone to hope to catch a daily glimpse of until the seventh grade: Bert Haller. He was tall even then and quiet, fearful quiet, the kind of quiet that says please, please don’t speak to me. Marnie loved him or she made him her preoccupation, which over the years I have begun to think might not be exactly the same thing. Marnie loved Bert, but she would not let him be. “May I touch your trombone?” she would say to him, when all he wanted was to become invisible as soon as band practice was over. We used to walk by Andrew’s house, then Bert’s house, after school. We’d take Marnie’s squatty dachshund, who hated so to walk that we often had to take turns carrying him home. We found a toy gun in a tree in front of Bert’s house once when we were in junior high school. Nine years later on the Sunday night we heard that Bert had killed his mother and then taken his own life in a field nearby – both deaths by gunshot wounds – Marnie called me and asked did I remember that toy gun stuck in the tree outside of Bert’s house. I did. I still do. I make up stories, stretch the truth, elastic as you please, but that story is true.
My younger, meaner sister taunted my devotion, chanting truth out loud: “Margaret loves Andrew! He doesn’t love her back!” and writing in my zipper Bible, in turquoise ink, on the family records page right between the Books of Malachi and Matthew: “Margaret and Andrew were united in holy matrimony at the CMA Church, in the year of our Lord __________, writing her name in just-learned script, as witness.
I live today in the house that Andrew lived in as a boy. I moved here after Mother died. The house is three apartments now, which means I’m making oatmeal in his kitchen, keeping a distracted eye on the TV in his front parlor, sleeping in his dining room – on not one single night convinced entirely that the antique bolt that holds the tiny chandelier will not give way. Mud cakes and cracks on my old boots, ice melts and puddles out in the entryway where once his mother tripped on Andrew’s skates and taught three children words they have no doubt found use for down across the years.
I remember Andrew’s mother from one summer at Vacation Bible School, in the old house beside the brown brick church, the house where we had Sunday School: a one-time living room, a kitchen, all the bedrooms, full up with church-clothed children, King James Bibles, long-cured dust. That summer must have been a chilly one, or had a chilly day, when Andrew’s mother wore a coat, bold-checked in black and white, a coat she hung directly on a light bulb, its gray, round nose protruding from the wall with neither light fixture nor shade. I came into the bathroom sometime later, hit the light switch on the wall, peed, checked my hair, my face, my lips, my sweater, and walked out again. Mrs. Owens smelled the smolder, ran in, crying out, “My coat, my coat is burned. It’s ruined. The light bulb burned clear through.” The crime always down to the one who hits the light switch, never to the one who hangs a coat so stupidly. “Who did it?” the cry went up. I cowered, as I had been schooled to do.
It was not until weeks later I called up Andrew’s mother at nine o’clock one Sunday night. “It was me. I did it,” I said. “I will pay for it.” Velma Owens told me there was no need. She’d had it fixed. It didn’t cost that much. (Who would ever think to mend the thing today?) Some nights when I can’t sleep, I lie and wonder how does one repair a big burnt, brown hole in a coat, how make it good as new? My red and blue, boiled wool cape hangs today on an old gas lamp hook in what was once the pantry, though I need fear no skinny, brown-haired girl will ever come to set my coat aflame.
That was not the only Sunday night I called that phone number – 2199 R – to confess, to ask forgiveness for my sins. The preacher Sunday nights had much to say in favor of repentance, particularly if a person didn’t want to go to hell. Confess your sins, which he explained to be: Tell your Christian brother you have sinned against him in the privacy of your heart.
“Hello, Andrew, this is Margaret. I want to ask you to forgive me. I had bad thoughts about you in my heart. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
I’ve put a tall, wooden bookcase for my mystery novels in the alcove there where Andrew must have stood to take my calls of penitence those Sunday nights, so long ago, so far away, in that shared fire and brimstone childhood.
We went to the same church: Sunday morning, three hours, Sunday night, three more, Wednesday night, three more. We sat on the front pew with Donnie Wisheart and played our trumpets with the hymns: The Old Rugged Cross, All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name. Andrew was first chair, first section in the high school band. I was fourth chair, third section. Donnie didn’t take band. His father was the preacher; band may well have been a sin. We sat together and transposed to play each note higher than was printed in the hymnal. I bought gum and hard candy during the week which I would slip to Andrew during the sermon and the prayers. He never spoke to me; he just held out his hand. You play your trumpet, hand a person penny candy, every Sunday night forever, and then you blink and fidget in your seat, and it’s another century.
It seems now that the years were filled with the dying of my father, then my mother, one day suddenly my sister – I never saw that coming, that segment of myself that disappeared when I lost her. And then, it took so long to recollect and reconstruct and give a name and find a proper place for all the losing in my dreams and my rememberings.
I draw the curtains on the darkness just beyond the windowpane tonight and look around the living room. We had a lot of church youth fellowships in this house, which was the biggest and the nicest. The Owenses weren’t rich – I know that now – but they were richer than most families in the church. Earl Owens managed the Sykesville Dairy. He talked to us the day my Girl Scout troop came there for a tour – what passed for education and adventure in the day. Earl Owens told us they added Vitamin D to the milk. I raised my hand – unusual for me, then, or now – and said, “How do they know?” He frowned. It was the best that I could do to frame my confusion. I imagined vitamins as essence, occurring naturally in food, or in the case of vitamin D, in sunshine. So how could they know they had extrapolated this ephemeral and put some in each bottle, delivered to our door so very early in the morning, with cream that knew to separate and rest on top of thin white milk? I could not comprehend the mystery of nutrients that day, nor find apt words to package my perplexity.
There is only one other memory of Andrew’s dad, although as Sunday School superintendent he was everywhere at all times. My Uncle Frank, a sinner of the first water, had a stroke at the age of forty and sat in a chair forever after, till he died. About ten years in, he woke up one morning and said to my Aunt Flo, in the slurring way that only she could understand, “Call up Earl Owens. Tell him to come up to the house. I want to get saved.” Flo called, Earl came, my uncle signed up for salvation.
And who will you telephone the day that you decide on mercy?
We called those gatherings here youth fellowship – a word I hate today, a word I hated then. (It’s always struck me as a code word for a gathering of misfits munching on stale crackers in the basement of a church.) We would meet on Saturday nights – presumably the night sin was most readily available elsewhere – here in the parlor of this house where I eat supper most days now on a TV tray and watch the news on all four channels in the same half hour. There’s a small notch, there on the banister, which Bobby Smyers chipped out with a tiny pocket knife one night while we were singing There is Power in the Blood. My finger finds it every time I climb those stairs, which only lead now to a sheetrock barricade. No matter. I store things on those stairs where on those Saturday nights we lined up to sing, two, sometimes three, to a stair step. We would read Bible verses and play (aptly) parlor games, sing hymns, drink punch, and go home. We weren’t friends at school. I don’t know why we came Saturday nights, once a month, or ever. The God who made the world and sprinkled it with grace and mercy to redeem it was condensed to a tincture of boredom, a tiny plastic vial they agitated by browbeating and embarrassment. (I do allow for aspects of ardor, of genuine contrition, apprehension of the holy, but coursing through that holiness was always the question, Would Andrew be there?)
Andrew Owens was popular at school, handsome, even with a slightly flattened section in the middle of his nose, an athlete, cheeky, mocking even, smart. I had pimples, fearfulness and indigestion, shyness, fewer friends, and then as now, my thin hair never had my best interest at heart. We were no one’s notion of a pair. I sometimes think: not even mine. For him to have been with me would have been to so reduce him. He dated Margi Kohler, cheerleader, homecoming queen, and Joannie Winnick, popular and born-again, Joannie, who, it turns out, never married. She always comes to our high school reunions and after a glass of wine says that she should have taken her teenage dating with more seriousness. I never do know what she means, or just exactly how one might have done that.
It happens on a rainy morning in the cold part of November – you wonder for a lifetime if a certain thing might ever one day come to pass, and then you wake up on a random Tuesday, let the cat out, fill the kettle, and your life knocks on the door. I open the door and there on the front stoop stands Andrew. I try to take a breath, but there’s no air. I close my eyes, but when I open them again, he is still standing there, not quite as tall as I remember, not young certainly – almost ordinary looking in some way I never would have reckoned.
“I’m sorry to intrude, but I used to live in this house,” Andrew says. “I grew up here. I haven’t been back home in decades.”
I do the math. Fifty-two years, to be exact.
I smile and nod.
Good grief. He doesn’t know me. It’s crystal clear he doesn’t have a clue. He looks at me the way that he might look at anyone. And so, has this one short lifetime so disguised me then, years fashioning a mask that has me hidden here behind a face Andrew Owens will not pretend to recognize – a face sometimes, truth told, I do not recognize myself. I wonder would my own father, dead now thirty years, know me if he passed me on the street?
“Would you like to come in?” I speak in a voice that sounds like human speech. He walks in spryly, but stops to hang his coat and hat on the hook that’s just inside the door. And did he hang his coat here as a boy? His book bag? His letter sweater? Here where he must have stood to take my Sunday evening calls. Would he remember if I mentioned them now? Did he recall them the next day?
“That was our table.” He points and nods as though identifying a body in a morgue. “That was our table.”
And have I waited now a half a century for this?
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Over time, the drink I have imagined offering has been tea, chai, sparkling water, one hot summer: lemonade.
“I’d be grateful for a glass of water.” His tone is almost humble, so different from his arrogance at seventeen, he the bold, high scorer in the game. He’s hesitant. “I wonder if I could see the kitchen.”
I’ve played this out both ways in my mind. Sometimes I say, I’m sorry. Sometimes, Why not? Once or twice I’ve thought to change the wall paper, but I never could bring myself to do it. It’s faded, but the sepia color has reached rich tones that look intentional. The red, now well-marooned, looks fine and meant-to‑be, especially in wintertime, day nearly done, in lamplight, dull-cloaked darkness moving in.
“The kitchen looks different some way.” Andrew’s voice is wistful.
“It’s the curtains,” I say. “There used to be patterned ones, with little swans.”
Why couldn’t we have talked like this in high school? It would have cost so little.
“You knew the house back then?” He seems confused. Knew the house? I memorized the patterns of the bricks on the front walkway, I counted the bathroom tiles. Archivist of the museum of his life.
“So.” I hand Andrew a glass of water in a tumbler of a pattern like the ones his mother used to serve us Kool-Aid and Hawaiian Punch. “So,” I say, “tell me. How did your life go then?”
“Excuse me?”
Oh dear. He’s showed up in this conversation with no context, no shared history to undergird the questions I might ask, questions manufactured out of contrasts in the daily lives we’ve lived down through the years.
“Your life,” I say. “Since you moved away from here.” I see I’ll have to keep our conversation tethered to this real estate.
“Oh,” he says.
I like to think him more of a sparkler, back in the day. I can bring back one exchange – unique, anomalous – that surely sparkled more than this. It was one of our Saturday evenings, on which for some unremembered reason, our youth group met at my house. It was getting late, most of the youth gone home, Andrew and I sitting side-by-side on the sofa in the front room, a once-in‑a-lifetime seating arrangement, I am certain. And we were talking sex. I had my first boyfriend by then, Jerry Caldwell, so it must have been the spring before we were to graduate.
“Do you lie down or do you stay sitting when you and Jerry are kissing?” Andrew said. I’m fairly certain of that phrasing, but I can recall no answer, certainly no description of kisses so hard, so long, that in the bathroom mirror – once Jerry had kissed me for a final time and said good night – my lips were blue, cousins certainly of purple, but an artificial, if authentic, bruised and swollen blue.
“So kissing, do you sit or lie?” Andrew had asked that night. And I would’ve answered or not answered, and then said other things, until finally I would hear myself, cryptic, off-hand, conversational, saying the words: “What’s a blow job?”
“You are friends with Louie Nayman, aren’t you?” Andrew said. “Ask him to tell you.”
Louie Nayman was a handsome Jewish boy who for some reason was my friend. I asked him Monday morning in geometry.
“You know what masturbating is,” Louie said, every answer presuming some premise. “Well, a blow job is when you do masturbating not to yourself but to somebody else.”
An answer I would puzzle over for a long, long time.
“I’ve lived for many years in Switzerland,” Andrew says. “I was a doctor there.” He’s going to have to try harder than that if he wants to tell me something new. I went down to the public library not long ago. I Googled him. I don’t know why I never had before. Under his doctor listings they had patient reviews, just the same as here. One lady wrote: “Dr. Owens has been my doctor for twenty years. He is very caring and he takes time with me.” Another read: “Dr. Owens treated me for a urinary tract infection. Turns out what I had was double pneumonia.”
“I’ve lived in Switzerland,” Andrew says again. “I had a family there.” I give my head a shake. I do seem to recall some talk of a sick child, a car accident, or an unusual illness. A child who couldn’t travel, parents who couldn’t leave him. Andrew’s mother died of a slow, mean cancer during those years.
“Actually,” I say. I take in a deep breath. “I took care of your mom for a while. I was doing some home nursing.”
“I’ve always felt so bad she was on her own then,” Andrew says. “When I was little, I told her I’d take care of her when I got to be big. I loved her best.”
“You mean you loved her more than anybody else did, or you loved her more than anybody?”
“Both,” Andrew says.
“She spoke of you a lot. She told me one day that you had been the love of her life. She said that from the moment you were born, it changed her life. She was never the same.”
“We used to sit there on the sofa in the afternoon and she would read books to me. I have so many memories in this house.”
I guess we won’t be talking much of Switzerland today.
“We had our church groups here,” Andrew says. “I’ve thought of some of those kids down through the years. I wondered whatever happened to a few of them.”
Them? Us? Me?
“What were their names?” I say. He frowns. “I mean, I might have known them.”
“Gee, their names are gone. You don’t remember individual people after all these years.”
“Some people do,” I say. He winces. Were my words as sharp as that?
“There was this one girl I somehow never quite forgot.” He pauses long enough for me to catch my breath. “Through the years sometimes I’d think of her, remember things she used to say. And you know, today, I can’t recall her name. Now isn’t that a pip?”
“It is,” I say. A pip.
“I never expected when I knocked on the door of this house this morning that the person living here would ever have known my mother.”
I nod, knowing any words I tried to speak would stick in my throat. They’d come out all croaky.
Andrew asks if he might use the gents – he says the word our fathers used. Back then we did have different words for things. Crush was the word Velma used to tell me that she’s always known I loved her son. “I know about your crush,” she said to me one time. “Your crush on Andrew.” A crush, a sort of weight, heavy, perhaps oppressive, not light anyway, not airy, the weight, of course, born by the owner of the thing.
“I remember that pedestal sink,” Andrew says, as he walks back into the living room.
“The landlord put that sink in last summer.” Well, he did.
“I really couldn’t come to see my mother. We lost our son the year she died.”
Oh, the little boy, the one they said was so sick for so long. “I’m so sorry,” I say.
“Oh, he’s fine now. He’s a lawyer. Lives in Dallas, Texas.” Like there are two Dallases. Like there are two lifetimes to be fine in. My face must show my confusion.
“He got in with the wrong crowd. Drugs, petty crimes. It was a nightmare. No way we could fly back to the states with what we were going through with him.”
“Humm,” I say, the way my mother used to do.
“I am as old today as my mother was when she died.”
I heard that toward the end, they found Andrew’s mother wandering in her nightie down Knarr Street, looking for a trolley car.
“I should go.” He speaks as though I had been urging him to stay. “I can’t explain it, but somehow coming here today has made me wonder if I should have kept closer, not have stayed so long away.” He stands stiffly and pulls his jacket on. I almost reach out to help him. He looks like an old man. Any old man. Not Andrew Owens. Just some male person who has lived a long time on the earth. ” I missed something that was important. Something real.”
“Not much is ever all that real,” I say.
Andrew looks puzzled, but he lets it go.
“Well, I guess that’s it. I won’t be coming back here,” he says, in place of good-bye, in place of See you later, in place of Thank you for keeping faith with me for my whole life.
I close the door and turn away. I don’t watch Andrew down the walkway, into his car, driving away. I’m tired. It’s eleven in the morning, but I am bone weary. I sit down on the sofa by the truth.
I am afraid I have to say I have made up certain portions of the story I told Andrew.
As it happens, I never cared for his mother. She changed churches after Andrew’s dad died – a bold rebellion, prompted by whim, ardor, or old spite, she never said. One Sunday morning her corner of the seventh pew was vacant, then Sunday night and Wednesday prayer meeting the same, and my aunt called up to see if she was dead, Aunt Flo’s first surmise at any variation in routine. Her defection meant that I saw Velma only once or twice in passing during the final decade of her life. My mother would tell me she had run into Velma Owens in the supermarket, and report the news that Andrew was doing fine with his pretty wife and lovely life in Switzerland. My mother had a cruel streak she did not always look to curb. Andrew’s mother never wandered down the middle of Knarr Street dressed only in her nightie, or if she did, nobody ever knew. (So very much of what we do in life goes unremarked.) There are all different kinds of truth that people tell. Andrew did go off and leave someone who loved him.
I did love Andrew, but I never lived in the house where he used to live. I did walk by one time. It was divided up into apartments, pretty trashy, with a rickety fire escape and a rotting wooden ramp. I still live today in the house where I grew up, where I will likely die, as did my father and my mother and my sister. And Andrew Owens never came back home to knock one Tuesday morning on his, or my, or any other door. Andrew never came. Nor will he ever now.
I saw the notice of his death this morning in the paper. It is what has him on my mind. Famous Surgeon, Local Son, the heading read. Died peacefully, surrounded by his loving family . . . attended local schools. . . predeceased by his wife, Anne, by his son, Paul.
Andrew never walked in spryly, never sat, listening to my stories of his mother – truth a minor player even in the conversations I invent, prevarication living large in stories that I tell myself. I never lived where Andrew never came to sit and talk with me, unrecognized, even in my fantasy. He doesn’t know me, even in my dreams. In made‑up memory, he never loves me back.
This is not a tragedy; tragedy is an entirely different thing. Andrew lost his son, not to drugs or Dallas, Texas, but to God. To God, I have lost all my family. The little girl in Mrs. Dormley’s class, Annie Shenkle, she did die. Some parts of every history are true. Andrew did come in that third-grade day and borrow chalk, although Mrs. Dormley gave him not one dusty piece, but four large sticks that looked like long, menthol, tipless candy cigarettes. Andrew did come in to borrow chalk he never did return. I can see his blue plaid shirt, belt tight around his high-waist trousers, slicked-down, knife-parted light brown hair. And I did decide that day to love him, and I’ve loved him for a long, long time.
But, many of the things that we remember never happened. The line between what happens in a lifetime and what never does is pencil thin. Andrew did not come to visit me today, but I did burn a hole in Velma Owens’ black and white checked church coat. Bert Haller did play trombone in the high school band, he did shoot and kill his mother, and I did on the occasional Sunday night, when I got home from church, call Andrew Owens on the telephone to confess my sins.
He said it was okay.
I think that, even then, I was not in the story he would tell about his life.
Linda McCullough Moore is the author of the short story collection This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon (Levellers Press, 2011). Her short stories have appeared in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, and The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses.