The note said simply be back soon.
Minnie left it propped on the night table in case Max woke up before she returned. But he did not. And by the time she got back, a breeze through the partly open window had pushed it onto his chest. Now it looked like a sign he was wearing that gave his open-mouth snore a curious subtitle.
Minnie dropped her coat on the chair gingerly so as not to wake him. A sleeve flapped onto the seat pointing her towards the kitchen. There she hefted her grocery package onto the countertop. Collectible plates of all the Presidents peered at her from the shelves as she took out the cottage cheese, milk, bread and other items and put everything neatly in its place. The floor croaked underfoot as she shifted from one chubby leg to the other, sorting. Twice she hit the cabinet closed with her fist but it popped open for a third time. And she had to struggle to shut the utility drawer by shaking it up and down.
Yet none of this woke Max in the bedroom.
Without even thinking about it, she began to clean the tile on the counter. She was not exactly obsessed with cleaning but mightily enamored of it. Then a glint on the floor near the counter drew her attention. She bent down to retrieve what turned out to be a metal object which she held up to the light in amazement. It was her lost wedding ring. She had misplaced it months ago and even thought that it might have fallen off in the ocean during the visit to Rockaway. But here it was again. Amazing.
It was a world, after all, in which nothing was lost. Vidcams followed your every more, toilets ran biotests, and every purchase was logged into the Grid. Even the InSens in the apartment knew where everything was. It ran all the appliances, controlled the climate, and kept track of everyone by location, emotion, condition. This was the price of staying in touch, of being connected, of modern life.
But the wedding ring was a reminder that even in this pinpointed world, things could still go missing. Not people or purchases or prognostics, but small things, the knicks and knacks that were the building blocks of a life.
Holding her ring again, Minnie tried to imagine the detour it had taken, how it might have slipped through the system. In her mind’s eye she could see herself, months before, standing at the sink where her breasts rested perfectly on the rime of the basin. She envisioned herself slipping the ring off at that moment so that it would not get wet. Then setting it down on the tile near the soap dish. She would have made tight, squeaky circles around the dish edges and touched the surfaces to make sure they were smooth. And would have wanted so much to clean everything that was soiled, to make everything bright, to wash the gunk right down into the sucking drain.
Yes, that was what happened. And Max had been standing near her in the kitchen, stony silent as usual.
“Max why do you do this?” she had asked.
He was standing at the doorway as he often did, saying nothing. He was not a fan of chatter, distrusted it maybe, or thought it were too flimsy and he hated breakable things. How many times had she asked that question and gotten the same strained silence back?
“Why do you always do this to me?” she repeated.
“What do you want from my life,” he finally barked.
“Is it so much to ask? To be nice to my friends? For years like this.”
”Bah.”
“So you don’t love Myrna, so what? You don’t have to love Myrna. She likes you well enough. Just to get along for one lousy dinner, I mean.”
“No.”
“No. Always no with you. What does that mean…no?”
“She’s nothing to me,” he said and he flicked the phrase away like an irritating speck.
“Myrna has always been a good friend to me, Max. Especially during the bad time. I know she said some things to you, but she was protecting me. And she’s apologized. Can’t you understand that?”
There was no reply.
“Sometimes I think you hate me Max. Do you?”
But he was no longer standing there; the conversation had already ended, at least for him. Minnie still kept talking, hoping to resolve it in her own mind anyway.
“Maybe you do. So then I guess it really is too much for me to ask you to be civil to my friends. Is that it? Yes, I guess it is.”
She turned from the sink to dry her hands on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle. She felt a familiar sinking in her stomach and as always did not know what to do about it. And that was when she forgot to put the ring back on. Later on, Maddy would splash water in the sink which would pool on the tile and, when no one was looking, spill over the edge and carry the ring like a log in a river off the counter and down to the floor.
Yes, that must have been what happened, Minnie thought.
She pressed the ring back onto her finger but barely felt better about it.
The InSens screen in the kitchen was cycling between frames showing where Minnie and Max were in the apartment, what their biometric readings were, and suggestions for dinner based on what was in the fridge.
But Minnie suddenly felt like breaking free of the Grid and so she wandered into the living room searching for something to clean. She found it on the low table in front of the couch. A nice spot of grease. Paper towel in hand, she buffed the spot and then followed it to a smear on the couch, then to a smudge on the radiator, and that to some dirt on the windowsill. There on the sill she discovered a tiny piece of black plastic. She inspected it like a clue and finally figured out that it had fallen off the flatscreen that used to be in the living room.
Holding this up to the light like an amulet, she could vaguely recall – or was she inventing it right now? – the moment when it must have fallen off. That had to be when they moved the set into the bedroom months before.
The whole thing had been Max’s idea. He wanted to be able to watch TV while he was lying down in bed. Minnie’s friend Myrna, always poking her nose, warned her not to move it because she read somewhere that a television in the bedroom replaced sex.
“What can I do,” she asked her friend, “Max wants it there.”
“You can stand your ground is what.”
“You know how Max is,” Minnie said.
“Yes. And the fact that you put up with it all these years is…”
“Stop again already.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“I’m not as liberated as you, Myrna. I guess I’m just old-fashioned.”
“Well you’re gonna be a lot older-fashioned without sex,” Myrna warned.
It did not seem worth the argument and besides, Minnie thought, Myrna had never been married. She did not know how these things worked. Did not know what you had to give up, ignore, go without. Did not know that sex in the long run was far less reliable than television.
So there was Minnie, wearing that old blue housecoat, standing in the living room and watching her own reflection in the screen as the two servicemen prepared to move the set to the bedroom. Max was sitting on the couch but stiff and still like a totem.
“Dolly and Milt are moving to Canarsie in two weeks. In cartons up to their ears. You remember. I said it was worse for us because of Maddy. She asked us to help them unpack once they’re in.”
“Let them unpack.”
“Max, are you sure you want them to move this screen in the bedroom? There’s much more room in here.”
“I can’t see,” he barked, waving her away from his line of sight as he oversaw the maneuver.
Minnie moved to the side.
“It’s going to be tight in there. The bed, the dresser.”
“I want it in there.”
“Okay, okay. I guess we’ll live with it. I’ll tell Dolly to call us when they get in.”
“Let them unpack,” he said again.
The servicemen hoisted the screen onto a robocart and began to direct it into the bedroom in the back. But as they rounded the corner, the set scraped the wall and the plastic piece that held a wire in place fell off. No one noticed. Later in the week the housekeeper found it and put it on the windowsill where it remained unseen until Minnie’s cleaning.
They rarely had sex after that.
Back in the bedroom, softly, Minnie placed the piece of plastic on top of the dresser. Max was still on his back, snoring away as the InSens carefully logged in his breathing rate, heartbeat, infratemp data and decided that he was napping and not dead. The be back soon sign had now fallen to the floor and Minnie picked it up and moved on to the bathroom. There she adjusted the dangle of the toilet paper because only one square was supposed to show in the better homes. She cleaned stains from the rim of the bowl then noticed a crimped hairpin nestled into the green oval bathmat. Hand on the hamper for support, she clutched the pin in her fist and stood up. At the medicine cabinet she was about put it back into a small jar of hairpins, but she hesitated when she saw her own reflection in the mirror. She looked older than she expected to. More weary. Had that much time really passed since she last looked at herself? Probably so. She licked her finger and rubbed a small spot on the surface of the mirror as a means of ignoring the image behind it.
It occurred to her then that she must have used that hairpin to fix one of her curls before going out. Squinting at the memory, she could just barely squeeze out the image of herself pulling the pin out with her thumb and first finger. But hairpins were titanium now and had memory themselves, very springy, and it shot out of her hand, twanged against the tile wall, and disappeared into the mat. She probably looked down but could not see it. Then she had noticed Max at the bathroom door. She wondered if he was going to glance at her breasts, the unspoken signal that behind his cold mask the curves of her body were causing heat.
“Do I look okay? Am I wearing too much makeup?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You know, you could answer me.”
“No, I said,” he said.
“I mean it wouldn’t kill you to say something nice.”
“Fine. You look fine. Let’s go already.”
“I’m ready. I’m waiting for you. Zip me up?”
He stepped in closer and zipped. But there was no glance.
“I wish I could understand you Max.”
“What do you want from me Min? What?”
“To talk. That’s all.”
“About what for chrissakes?”
“Anything. So we’re not two strangers.”
“We’re not. Let’s go already.”
“About what you feel. What you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking let’s go already. I told you.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Just stop trying to get all your damn talk in me.”
Like blood from a stone, she thought for the millionth time. And also for the millionth…but it doesn’t mean anything. It was just his way of putting up with all the bullshit. He thought women talked too much, talked things to death, and muddled things with all their damn words. She knew that about him right from their very first date in fact. So why did it seem so rejecting now? In the beginning, she saw it as manly, as a kind of discipline. But now, after 30 years, it only made her feel fat. Fat, that is, with too much language.
Of course, she said none of this to him. She never said many of the things she thought, and by now there were too many of them to say. On the other hand, Max never said the things she wished he would say. Even though she desperately needed to know that he really meant them.
Water under the bridge, she thought and let the memory flow by. Minnie put the pin back into the bin and took another look at herself in the mirror. Perhaps it was just the light that made her seem so tired.
In the hallway on the way back to the kitchen to program dinner, Minnie closed the closet door, which was always slightly ajar from years of paint. That was when she noticed a scrap of paper wedged into the crack where the wall met the floor. It turned out to be a gum wrapper. Rolling it into a tiny ball in her fingers she suddenly recalled that time that Maddy had come for dinner.
Maddy was home from college for the weekend. They had not seen her for the entire semester. Max was cool about this, as about all things, but Minnie knew that he missed her too, missed them as a family. Because he could not say this, Minnie was trying, too hard maybe, for it to be nice. Which of course only made the whole evening more tense.
In one year Maddy had become a jiggle of cigarettes, gum, polished nails, hair in the face, and exploding pronouns. She was majoring in nanopsychology, which Max distrusted, and she needed new boots. She was dating someone new and telling them all about the hassles and hurtles. Max, legendary grouch, was actually smiling as she spoke.
“What is this Werner’s major?” he asked.
“Wendell Dad. It’s Wendell. I told you. It’s nanopsychology. Just like me.”
“Goddamn psychology majors. What the hell do you expect to do with that?”
“What do you want Dad? You want everyone to be a tax lawyer? Then you’d be happy?”
“Damn right. Do something useful.”
“Max stop,” Minnie implored, “let her alone. She’s home.”
“Are we eating or not?”
“In a few minutes.”
“What is it with you Dad? Why are you always like this?”
“More talk.”
“What exactly did your mother do to make you hate women so much?”
“What the hell! My mother? Shut your mouth.”
“Maddy!” her mother shouted.
“You yell at Mom, you yell at me. You gripe about everything. You never talk. It’s like you hate women.”
“Maddy please…”
“Like you’re trying to get back at your mother or something.”
“Goddamn it!” Max bellowed, the signal that all discourse was over.
Maddy, taking her cue, stormed out of the kitchen and down the hallway to her room. That was the moment that she dropped the gum wrapper that got wedged under the molding.
Later, Minnie knocked on the door to her room, but her daughter would not open up.
“Maddy please,” Minnie said, “you can’t talk to your husband that way.”
“Husband?” Maddy shouted through the door.
“What?”
“You said husband. That’s what used to be called a Freudian slip.”
“I said that you can’t talk to your father that way.”
“You said husband.”
“You’re just trying to hurt him with your psychology.”
“Hurt him? That’s a laugh. What about him being mean to me? Doesn’t that count?”
“You know he doesn’t mean it. That’s just his way.”
Dramatically, Maddy opened the door and looked directly at her mother, standing so perfectly at the door.
“Well it’s not my way,” she said. “And it’s not normal. And it shouldn’t be yours either.”
“You can’t say that about his mother.”
“Why? Because it’s true?”
“Everyone knows how devoted he was. All the brothers were.”
“Then how do you explain him?’
“You know, Maddy, his mother told me that he was moody before we ever got married. This frail old lady…and she warned me. But she said to pay no attention at all to that. She knew that he loved me even though he couldn’t express it himself. And so do I. And he loves you too.”
“How do you know? By guessing? People deserve more than that.”
“You can’t just go by what people say.”
“By what then?”
“Who they are inside.”
“So he gets to be himself and hurt you and hurt me and I have to assume it’s all because he loves me and never talk back.”
“You don’t have to put it that way.”
“No. You can put it any way you want but that still doesn’t make it right.”
And now, back in the future that had become this very moment, Minnie carefully opened the trash pail and dropped the gum wrapper inside where a laser instantly poufed it out of existence. And with it, the entire episode.
The InSens indicated that Max was sitting up in bed and that his biometrics were all within the acceptable range. Minnie’s too as she stood on flat feet in the kitchen. The news said that the government was using all this data to control everyone and that the corporations were using it to manipulate. Everyone known and placed and logged in, all bodies measured and all needs directed. A neat world, accounted and demographed.
But what about all those misplaced memories, Minnie wondered, where did they go? The decisions that were made or not made, the things that were said or not. Everything that happened and the tiny details and the lost objects, everything that cemented us into the gone past. Maybe the world was only made of two things, she decided, the lost and the not now lost. Rings and plastic parts and wrappers. But people too and maybe even entire lives hidden.
She closed her eyes and tried to press out these thoughts. They were confusing and indulgent. What was the point after all? You lived your life. Even Max himself, who could never be explained or poinpointed, but who was always there, always watching over her. Taking care of her, even if not tenderly, since she was a girl of seventeen and mistook it for an austere poetry.
She tapped some icons on the kitchen screen and instructed the system to prepare dinner.
Suddenly, there was Max standing in his spot at the door. Watching her moving, breathing.
“Oh, are you up?” she asked.
He did not answer.
But she knew, in the way that things that go missing are known to be somewhere, that if he could have, he would have said everything she wanted to hear.
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