Read More: A brief Q&A with Kevin Egan
Nora doesn’t remember the first request. It may never have arrived, or she may have tossed it out with the junk mail, or, like the first notice from a collection agency, it may never have existed. But she does open the second request, which she imagines looks exactly like the first: a pre-printed sheet with instructions at the top and college-ruled black lines running down to the bottom. The sheet is folded into thirds to fit inside the #10 envelope, and what identifies it as a second request is a neon orange sticky note with “Second Request” written in painfully curlicued script with a soft-tipped pen. Two exclamation marks follow.
Nora re-folds the sheet and forces it back into the envelope. Above her desk are cubbies for bills, for personal correspondence, and for things she will attend to only when she has absolutely nothing else to do. She shoves the Second Request into this last cubby. She never has absolutely nothing to do.
Nora sits down to her computer and picks up where she left off. After a minute, she forgets the Second Request. After another minute, she is entranced.
One week later, Nora is in a completely different head. Her work – she is a novelist – is not going well. Her daily page count has dwindled while her tweets to followers and posts on her fan blog site have soared. She also finds herself easily distracted. The ticking of a cardinal outside her window diverts her eyes from her computer screen. The sudden whine of a leaf blower two lawns over sends her pacing across her study. The squeak and clap of the mailbox lid draws her to the front porch. She stands there, her hair pinned up, her glasses low on her nose, and flips through the bills, the fan mail, and the flyers until she comes across an envelope with the nursing home’s return address. She opens this one to find the identical sheet folded into thirds and the identical orange sticky note with the identical curlicued script except for “Third Request” with three exclamation marks.
Nora marches to her study, plants herself at her desk, and snaps the sheet so that the folds will not close. She wedges the top edge under the keyboard and reads the instructions.
“As the closest relative/friend of your loved one, we ask that you take a few moments to write down a brief synopsis of your loved one’s life. We will post this Life Story in the memory box on the wall outside your loved one’s room, along with any souvenirs or artifacts you might furnish.”
Nora places her fingers on the keyboard, imagining the nameless social worker who justifies her salary by sending these institutionally vapid forms with tautological constructions like “brief synopsis” and trimmed with passive-aggressive sticky notes. Then, after peeking between her wrists to read the instructions one more time, she types furiously.
Nora mails off the life story and, because she blames the Second Request for breaking her concentration, expects to return to her normal creative flow. She doesn’t tweet, she doesn’t post, but instead of moving forward, she finds herself picking over her recent work like a child playing with the food on her plate. A week passes. She slashes entire pages down to a few bony sentences, then scraps the leftovers.
Another week passes. Nora sits at her desk, staring at a blank screen. The phone rings. A woman asks for Nora and, in the momentary silence before Nora can respond, identifies herself as the social worker at the nursing home.
“Thank you for sending your aunt’s life story.” The voice carries an affect that is the auditory equivalent of curlicued script. “But I’m afraid we can’t use it.”
“Why not?” says Nora.
“Because it’s not truly representative of her life.”
“And you know this, how?”
“It’s not what I know. It’s what I feel. And what you wrote feels like an attempt to mollify me without truly examining your aunt’s life. You write that she was born, educated in local schools, worked as a secretary, and never married or moved from the house she grew up in.”
“Do you want me to say that she lived in Provence and was a double agent during the Cold War?” says Nora.
“Only if she was.”
“She wasn’t,” says Nora. “There is nothing more to say.”
“I have been doing this for a long time,” says the social worker. “There is always more to say.”
Thirty seconds later, Nora is tweeting furiously. “Can’t believe it … the nerve … the gall …” Thirty seconds after that, her phone rings. For an instant Nora thinks it is the social worker calling to tell her that the life story actually is fine and is already displayed in her aunt’s memory box. But the caller is her brother. He is a lawyer and has been arranging for the sale of their aunt’s house via phone calls and e-mails from the West Coast. He asks if Nora can meet with a realtor.
“When?” says Nora.
Unspoken between them is Nora’s steadfast refusal to deviate from the tight structure of her days, her habit of allowing herself only small islands of free time.
“Tomorrow. Whatever time is good for you.”
Nora promises to arrange the appointment.
“How does Auntie stand money-wise?” she says. Her brother has been paying the carrying charges for several months while she her own contribution was to hire two college guys to clean out decades of detritus.
“She has enough savings for a year,” her brother says. “If the sale is delayed, the nursing home agrees to hold a lien on the proceeds. Why do you ask? You usually don’t care about crass financial matters.”
“One can never tell in my position.”
“Like your publisher is going to reject your next novel.”
“If I ever finish it,” says Nora. “And I was rejected just a few minutes ago.”
She explains the memory box, the life story, and the call from the social worker.
“What did you write?” says her brother.
Nora tells him.
“I’d swear to that in court.”
“Thanks.” Nora pauses, then says, “Do you think Auntie could have rubbed off on me? I spent so much time with her when I was very young.”
“How can you can’t equate yourself with Auntie when you’ve published what? Five novels?”
“Six.”
“See? I can’t even keep count. And remember when she took up knitting? All those squares around the house.”
“Crocheting, not knitting,” says Nora. “And I was away at college at the time.”
She had forgotten about the squares until coming across them during the clean-out. They were to coalesce into an afghan, perhaps, or a shawl, but instead, forever solitary, they became coasters, potholders, trivets.
“Maybe it’s not an equation,” she says. “Maybe it’s an analogy or a recapitulation. Generational history repeating itself as farce.”
“That’s the writer talking now,” says her brother, and, falling into his stout lawyer voice, tosses off three significant ways that Nora’s life differs from their aunt’s.
Nora listens because her brother’s lawyer voice brooks no disagreement. And, in truth, she can’t disagree with the facts. Yes, she attended a top college while her aunt barely managed secretarial school. Yes, she lived in a series of apartments in a succession of cities and now in her own charming suburban cottage while her aunt slept her entire adult life in her tiny girlhood bedroom, eventually inheriting the house when her parents and brothers passed. Yes, she had been married for a time and had been involved in several other serious relationships while her aunt never had even a casual boyfriend. Yes, yes, yes, all this was true. And she understands the human ability to organize random events into themes and random images into symbols.
Nora has fictionalized aspects of her own life in her books, which she refers to, though never aloud, as autobiographies of what might have been. It’s a standard conceit, she knows, to explore the roads not taken, to re-visit personal disasters, to re-examine childhood assumptions through the prism of adult wisdom. She has spun herself, her parents, her grandparents, and her two uncles into characters. But not Aunt Annie, never Aunt Annie. Why? She has dodged the question seemingly forever. But what she can cop to, though there is no one other than her brother to interrogate her, is that as a young girl Nora regarded her aunt as a prettier, wittier version of her mother. Something changed, though, in Nora’s early adolescence, and the suspicion that her aunt was a disappointment wrapped in a mystery solidified into an unexamined truth.
Nora swings onto the wide swath of blacktop that was the backyard of her grandparents’ house before her younger uncle’s demented obsession with ample parking. Despite the blacktop, she visualizes the yard as it had been, hedge-lined, grassy, furnished with rusted swings and a sun-bleached wooden play gym. She sees the impressions left by the sharp iron feet of the Dumpster, which took the two college guys four weekends to fill. She remembers standing on a footstool and winging the last eight crocheted squares one by one into the tangle of broken lamps, ancient garden tools, and splintered scrap wood the way her brother once flipped baseball cards.
A car pulls in beside her, and the realtor, a neat woman approximately Nora’s age, gets out. They walk completely around the house, then climb onto the porch. Inside, they tour the first floor and then the second.
“Is this a walk-up attic?” says the realtor and, before Nora can answer, opens the door to the steep, narrow stairs.
The attic had been a repository of junk going back decades and was so dusty that the two college guys literally became sick from emptying it out. It is clear now except for an ancient oak wardrobe standing proudly in the middle of the plywood floor and away from the sloping dormers.
“Is this here for any reason?” says the realtor.
“Too big to move,” says Nora.
“Empty?”
Nora shrugs.
The realtor opens one door, then quickly closes it.
“Well, I suppose a new owner wouldn’t object,” she says. “I’d empty it, though.”
They land back in the kitchen and sit at a small gate-leg table the perfect size for three adult siblings who never left home. The realtor turns expansive as she spreads out the listing agreement and pencils in a selling price. Nora thinks the price too high and mentions the dated fixtures, the small rooms, the overgrown shrubbery. But the realtor parries her every thrust. She says there is dated and there is charming and this house is charming. Nora relents on the price and, skimming for the few buzzwords her brother instructed her to find, signs her name.
After the realtor drives away, Nora wanders the house and tries to envision the charm the realtor described. Memories interfere. At the foot of the stairs, the tinny audio of her younger uncle’s black and white TV drifts down from his bedroom. In the living room, her older uncle nods in his chair, the book on his lap slowly slipping and then thudding to the floor. In the parlor, her grandmother stretches on the couch with TV images flickering on her glasses while her aunt is tucked like an acolyte in the narrow space against the armrest.
Nora finds a plastic garbage bag in the kitchen and climbs back to the attic. The wardrobe is not as chock-full as her quick glance with the realtor implied. There are magazines, mostly related to fashion, and there are three wire notebooks with dated entries in her aunt’s stunningly neat hand. She shoves the magazines into the bag and tucks the notebooks under her arm.
As her last official act, she steps onto the front porch. Her aunt’s mail is forwarded directly to her brother, but the mailbox is stuffed with third-class circulars. When she pulls them out, a small envelope falls to the floor. She picks it up, reads the name on the return address, then takes out her cell phone and stabs in her brother’s number.
“Does the name S. Tedesco mean anything to you?” she says.
“That would be Sonny. Don’t you remember Bobbie, Auntie’s good friend from secretarial school?”
Nora winces, physically trying to recall.
“Vaguely,” she says.
“He married Bobbie, who ended up dying at some ungodly young age, like forty-five. At her wake, Sonny propositioned Auntie.”
“Propositioned?”
“As in asked her to marry him.”
“Yikes!”
“Oh yes. Prim and proper Auntie was scandalized.”
“Why do I not know all this?”
“Probably because you were away at college at the time.”
Or more probably, thinks Nora, because she had stopped paying attention to her aunt’s life.
“I found a card from him in the mailbox,” she says. “Must have been there two months. Inside he wrote, ‘Please say yes.”’
Nora starts with the notebooks.
There are three of them with three different pastel covers and with 60 pages each. Her aunt has written on both sides of the pages, the press of her ballpoint pen thickening each leaf just slightly but collectively swelling the notebooks perceptibly.
On the very first page of the very first notebook, there is a three-by-three photograph with a scalloped white border. It shows two young women kneeling side by side on a beach. One woman is Auntie; the other, she assumes, is Bobbie. A young man crouches behind them, a hand on each of their shoulders. Like he owns them, Nora finds herself thinking. On the reverse side of the photo, a date is scribbled in blue pen. Her aunt was 23 at the time; Nora herself was not yet born.
The entries begin many years after the date of that photograph, coinciding with Nora’s college and grad school years and the years she lived in faraway cities, working at menial jobs while scribbling away during her spare time in her quest to become a writer.
The writing that thickens these notebook pages is twice beautiful: her aunt’s exquisite penmanship and the pellucid simplicity of her prose. The subjects are three people, designated simply as A, B, and S. Boiled down, the story is this: A and B, two childhood friends, attend secretarial school together and work at the same insurance company. Enter S, a college professor, who meets them at a dance hall. They became an instant threesome, spending days at the beach, nights at the dance hall, and weekends on road trips in S’s convertible. A loves B and she loves S and she also understands that loving S as she wants to love S is mutually exclusive with her friendship with B. S seems to love A and B equally and often implies that he can’t choose between the two women, that he would want to have both of them if he can.
These first two notebooks, if Nora were to lit-crit them, were her aunt’s attempt, years after the fact, to understand the shifting alliances among three people heavily invested in each other and to imagine a series of might-have-beens.
The third notebook, however, is a fast-moving contemporaneous diary. It begins with a visit to B and S. They are living upstate, where S has taken a post as a professor of geology. B has described her life as a professor’s wife in glowing letters: a charming village, an ivied campus, a beautiful cottage overlooking a lake, faculty cocktail parties, campus lectures that stimulate interesting hobbies like batik, birding, and sustainable gardening. A arrives to find none of the above, or at least no recent evidence of such. Instead she finds disconnection and malaise. B, who like A, is now in her forties, looks like someone in her mid-sixties — wrinkled, lusterless, deflated. S, for his part, seems distant, as if he has tried everything to please his wife and has resigned himself to observe her slow, inexorable deterioration. At one point, while washing the dishes together, S grasps A’s hand beneath the surface of the warm, soapy water and mutters, “I wish I had chosen better.” […]
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Kevin Egan is the author of eight novels, including Midnight, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013. Egan’s 40+ short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Mystery Magazine, Rosebud, and The Westchester Review.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Kevin Egan