Interminable Longing

Part One: Having a Taste of Freedom and Liking It 

The Divide

Rusty Keep went fishing Sunday morning with his eight-year-old son Avery in Lake Harney, part of Florida’s sprawling St. John’s River. He cast his line toward the grass. His reel clicked, the boat rocked, and he heard a splash. Fish and game officers had split open every large gator they could find within a three mile radius until they saw Avery’s sneakered foot next to a nine-footer basking by its mound in the late noonday sun.

Alice read about the alligator incident as a chorus of cicadas rose with the sun through the cedars and live oaks. A car door slammed, and she got up from her chair and ran toward the gate.   

“Bye Mom!” David called from the driveway.  

“Do you have everything, your lunch money?” She said, wanting to touch him.  

“Yes, Mom!”

“Be careful!” She called after him as he backed the car out of the driveway. And that was it. He was gone. Gone the years driving him to soccer, basketball, and baseball games where she’d sit in the bleachers with other parents, all chatting and watching their kids.

This was a day of “firsts.” His first day of senior year, his first day driving himself to school, her first day watching him go. In her mind’s eye she saw him on his first day of kindergarten, huddled around his new teacher, wearing his new, blue shorts, clutching his lunchbox, forgetting her, standing in the doorway, watching him. Her head full of tears, she opened a sliding glass door from the patio and walked past Eddie who was sitting on the porch watching Vox News. If he had seen she’d been crying, Eddie pretended not to. Eddie was a proper southern man, taught the social graces by his mother and to keep his feelings in check by his father. Her emotional episodes, more frequent of late, made him uncomfortable. Eddie made sure he was out of bed before she left for work and up from his nap before she came home.

She showered, chose a grey skirt, white blouse and grey jacket, put on a little bit of make up and kissed her husband perfunctorily on the cheek. “Would you please take that hamburger out of the freezer? We’ll have spaghetti with meat sauce tonight,” she said on her way out the door.

Alice drove from the house, through two miles of dense oak canopy, out to the main road, and past the Spoonbill Golf Course where the retirees were jettisoning around in their golf carts. Crossing over the Intracoastal Waterway, she looked out over vast acres of mangrove estuary and felt the empty silence of the car. When she walked into her office, Jacques was sitting at his desk, paring his finger nails. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.” She set her purse and day calendar down on her desk, fixed herself a cup of coffee and told him about the alligator incident she’d read about in the newspaper that morning. “The boy probably leaned over the side of the boat, maybe put his hand in the water, and when his father turned around, he was gone!”

“That’s horrible,” he grimaced. 

“Yes, and David drove himself to school today!” She began to cry, remembering his first day of kindergarten and senior transposed into a single, painful moment.

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

“No, he didn’t even kiss me goodbye!” She pulled a tissue from the box on her desk and blew her nose.

Jacques took his book of Twentieth Century French poets from the hutch over his desk and thumbed through its pages.

“Ah, here it is.”

 He read, “‘Viens mon fils, dira-t-il de ses dents froides, dans le sein dont tu es digne.’ Come my son, it will say with its cold teeth, into the bosom you are worthy of…’ that’s Frenaud, a French poet.”  

 ”Thanks, Jacques, how apropos.” She gazed at the triptych of bright watercolors he had brought back from a trip to Africa. There were four women; one woman carrying something on her head, another pouring grain, and in the middle painting, two women picked up a large basket. Their primary colors and simple activities often had helped her to put things in perspective. Her gaze wandered to the photographs on her hutch: the tennis team at Inlet Breakers, a school picture of David. Her eyes rested on the picture of her and Eddie, standing in front of a bee stand in North Carolina, his narrow waist pressed against hers, his arm around her shoulder. She picked it up and realized how fat she’d become, as if she had strapped a twenty pound sack of flour inside her shirt and jeans.

 Just then, a short-haired woman wearing gym clothes strode quickly past their plate glass windows, presumably headed for her morning workout at the fitness center a few doors down. Pointing at her, Jacques jumped out of his chair, grabbed his crotch, and cried, “Ouch, Mama!” In no mood for his feminist jokes that morning, Alice said nothing. Then he pointed to an overweight couple lumbering toward the doughnut shop and moaned, “How do they do it?” Meaning how do they have sex, of course. Weary of his café jokes, she ignored him and opened her appointment book. That day passed like many others in the ten years they had worked together, only quieter. If she were a spinning top, exchanging momentum with the world around her, then this was the morning she bobbled.

At dinner that evening, she felt as if David had been away for much longer than the day.  

“How are your classes?” She asked, wishing she could hold him and run her fingers through his hair.

“Pretty good.” He shoveled a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth and looked toward the television set where the talking heads were discussing Donald Rumsfeld’s discovery that the Pentagon had lost track of two point three trillion dollars.

“That’s a lot of money!” Eddie exclaimed.

“How are your teachers, David?” Alice asked, wanting to see inside his head like she used to.

“Fine,” he said, and looked toward his father for sympathy.

“Did you see your friends today?”  

“Yes, Mother,” he said pointedly, directing his gaze back to the television set.

No one spoke for the rest of the meal. Finally, David said, “Thanks, Mom-that was good,” and got up from the table.

“You’re welcome,” she said, returning to the silence she’d been in all day.

He rinsed off his dinner things, put them in the dishwasher, and went to his room. Eddie silently followed and went out on the porch to smoke.

Alice washed the pots and pans, wiped down the stove and counters, took a hot shower, put on her pajamas, and picked up The Stone Diaries from her bedside table and read.

A splinter of time passes, too small and quiet to register in the brain; she blinks back her disbelief, and then hears a bang, a crashing sound like a melon splitting.

Then she turned out the light. Closing her eyes, she felt dizzy, as if she were teetering on a precipitous ledge, and then fell into sleep so quickly and soundly she didn’t hear Eddie when he came to bed after Letterman. Sometime in the morning hours, she bolted upright and screamed, her Faye Wray vibrato a long, shrill siren in the night. Eddie had leaped from bed. 

“Dammit Alice! You’re going to give me a heart attack!”  He gasped in the darkness.

Panting, shaking, and drenched in sweat, for the first time, she did not apologize for her night terror. Instead, she sat up on her elbows lowered her head and tried to make his figure out in the darkness. A flood light through the blinds drew stripes across his torso and his arms were wrapped around his chest.    

“Has it never occurred to you that I’m the one having the nightmare?” She said.

Eddie stumbled around the darkened room, found his bathrobe, and while shrugging it on howled, “Ow!” as he wrenched a muscle in his neck.

 The next morning, he was cranky and in no mood to be conciliatory, she barely spoke. David drove himself to school, she went to work, and she greeted Jacques as usual, but the centrifugal force she had maintained for seventeen years had lessened and Alice began to feel slightly out of kilter.

She was sitting at her desk, gazing out of the plate glass windows, watching the palm fronds sway in the wind when the telephone phone rang.

“Dunes Beach Properties, Alice Jones, may I help you?” She said.

“Hi Alice, my name is K. Ward,” chortled a voice in her ear. “The league director said you needed players for your new tennis team.”

They were playing their first match that week and Alice still didn’t have a full roster, so Alice had let the tennis league office know she was still looking for players.

“Good timing, as a matter of fact I am,” Alice said.

K. said she had played tennis in high school but hadn’t played much since becoming a professional golfer.

“That’s okay, if you can play golf at that level, then you can probably play tennis at ours,” Alice said, persuading her to play a match that week by letting her know if she didn’t, they’d have to forfeit the position.

“Who was that?” Jacques said from behind his Williams-Sonoma catalogue after she hung up the phone.

“Oh, that was K., a tennis player, no, a golfer,” Alice said brightly, cheered by scoring a professional athlete for the new evening team she had started. 

 The night of the match, she paired K. up with Dolly, a shrewd and consistent player in her mid-forties whose red lipstick, red nail polish, and revealing tennis outfits often caused her opponents to underestimate her ability to play. Alice watched from a bench beside the court as K., a tall and slender athlete in her thirties, became stronger and more consistent as the match progressed. They won easily in two sets. 

“Nice match,” Alice said, standing up as they approached her bench.

“A little slow to start, but she’s a nice player,” Dolly grinned.

“Thanks, I’d be better if I practiced.” K. flashed a bright, even-toothed, smile and pushed back her short cropped, blonde hair to reveal rock-candy sized diamond earrings.

“I’ll hit with you!” Alice said, embarrassed by the eagerness in her voice. They arranged to meet Tuesday mornings at the public courts not too far from where they lived.

As the weeks went by, Alice looked forward to Tuesdays. K.’s athleticism and calm self-assurance was a refreshing change from the mid-life upheavals of her peers:  either distressed over the behavior of their teenagers, the infidelities and neglect of their husbands, or the physical breakdowns of middle age. For the one hour a week they practiced, she felt young and unencumbered, free from the burdens of dependencies and middle age.