The Age of Grief Read Free

past on the main thoroughfare nearby, andthey make plans to jog, to swim, to learn to cook Middle Eastern food. Florence talks about Bryan. Most of her remarks are open-ended, so that Frannie can simply fall into telling all about it if she wants to. She doesn’t, even when Florence says, “If you ever want to talk about what happened, you can trust me completely. You know that, don’t you?” Frannie always nods.
    Florence can hardly help speculating, especially at home, alone in her own kitchen, staring out at Philip’s stained-glass windows. The thumps and sawings that occasionally sound from his house seem to her not the mysteries of the moment, but those of the past autumn, when she was so often inside, but never saw what was going on.
    She picks at the burned kernels in the bottom of the popcorn bowl. “You know what one of the mothers said to me today? They’d done Lamaze, I guess, she and her husband, and she said that when the pains got bad, he climbed up onto the labor table and held her head in his arms. She looked me full in the face and asked, ‘How can my marriage not be perfect from now on? We were splendid together!’
    “Philip and I lost a baby.” Frannie tips the beer can back and catches the last drops with her tongue. Florence runs one of the kernels around and around the buttery bowl. This is the moment. What Florence wishes to know is the story of their mundaneness: what was said over breakfast, and in what tone, what looks were exchanged, what noises Frannie could not help listening to when she was tending her own affairs, who would be the first to break a silence. “I was prediabetic without knowing it. She went full term, but when we got to the hospital they said she had died in labor, then knocked me out.” Frannie speaks calmly, expecting Florence’s expertise to fill in the details, which, regrettably, it does.
    “They should have suspected.” She is professionally disapproving.
    “The doctor was an ass. It was a long time ago. Almost eight years.”
    Needless to say, it was tragic, devastating, but how so? Florence sips her beer and glances into Frannie’s face. No more on the subject is forthcoming.
    Bryan joins them twice, but though he likes Frannie, his pleasure in her company isn’t as exquisite as Florence expects it to be. That he might sometimes be on the verge of criticizing Frannie annoys her, because she is beginning to have so much fun with him that it can no longer be called “fun.” It encompasses many things other than, and opposite to, amusement.
    He tells lots of stories. His past begins to assume the proportions of an epic to Florence. She likes his self-confidence and his ready flow of conversation, his thick, curly hair, and his willingness to be teased. She listens to all his stories with interest, but when he talks about his ex-wife, she can’t keep her attention on what he is saying. Images of Frannie, Philip, their pale furniture and their pale floors invade her imagination. “Marriage is such a mystery to me,” she says idly.
    “Well, it’s a mystery to me, too, even though I sometimes think I can remember every minute of my own.”
    “And you’re going to describe them all, one by one?” She smiles.
    “Only if you ask.”
    “And besides, there’s so much else to cover.” She pokes him in the ribs.
    “You don’t want to hear it?”
    “Every word, every word.”
    “The past is always with you.”
    “God forbid.” But she doesn’t mean it. She will remember, for example, every moment of this talk—the fall of light through the hackberry bushes fixes his words and his tones permanently; his words and tones do the same for the light.
    At the hospital, she surprises herself by recalling things she did not know she had noticed—the color of his socks, the titles of the books piled on his dashboard, what he almost ordered for dinner but decided against. When she relates these details to Frannie, Frannie’s smile reminds her that she is