Page Utilities
Alix Kates Shulman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (page 3 of 6) Page 3 of 6
“Can you please tell me your address?”
Here is a problem. Our official post office address corresponds to a mailbox in front of Norm and Heather’s house at the end of the nearest road, a twenty-minute walk across the beach from here. Useless for guiding anyone to us. I try to explain the difficulty, but it’s futile. Why have I never prepared myself for this crucial question? Going back and forth with questions and answers, we waste precious moments, until I abandon the concept of address and tell the operator that we are on Long Island in Casco Bay, twenty minutes out beyond where the road to South Beach dead-ends, on a spit of land that juts out from the intersection of South Beach and Singing Sands Beach. The spit is called Andrews Nubble on the nautical charts. Assuming he’ll send a helicopter to land on the beach, I imagine more minutes lost while he locates a nautical chart. “We have two structures,” I warn, “the house and the studio. Three, if you count the small outhouse in between them. We’re now in the studio, the farthest structure from Singing Sands Beach. It’ll be the only one with lights on.” I warn him about the steep, rickety stairs up from the beach, the rail-less deck, the pitch-black night.
“What’s your husband’s name?”
“Scott York.”
“Age?”
“Seventy-five.”
“Okay. Now, don’t go away. I’m going to send out an emergency call. Whatever you do, don’t move your husband until someone arrives. It may take me a while, so just hold on there. Don’t hang up.”
For two decades of summers I came to this island by myself, in love with solitude, my only connection with the outside world weekly phone calls from the island’s single pay phone down near the dock or old-fashioned handwritten letters. The next miracle on that night of mistakes: the phone never once lost its signal, which is always chancy and quickly broken in this remote cabin. It’s even something of a miracle that I have a cell phone at all, having bought it only after I began to worry about
Scott alone in New York.
While I wait for rescue, I light the three downstairs gas lamps, then run back upstairs, grab my watch (it’s after two), and throw down a pillow and a sleeping bag to cover Scott with.
“Turn me on my back, please, it’s killing me.”
“I can’t,” I say, tucking the bag around him gingerly. “I’m not allowed to move you till a medic comes. You mustn’t move. I’m so sorry.” Over and over he pleads to be turned over. How can I go on refusing him? As I carefully slip the pillow beneath his head, I am seared by guilt for refusing to grant his wish — the first of many seemingly cruel refusals and tyrannical commands from me to him in the months to come.
Finally, the 911 operator comes back on the line to report that he’s sent out the highest, most serious alarm, a Number 10. I’m perplexed. Scott is talking okay, and I don’t see any blood. “Why a Number 10?”
“An elderly man falls nine or ten feet and loses consciousness? That’s a Number 10 if anything is.”
Elderly? The word takes me by surprise. It applies to one’s parents, not one’s husband. Whenever our children have shown that they consider us old, we’ve balked or laughed. Scott, whom I fell for when he was twenty and I seventeen, is timeless to me, not elderly. Maybe that’s why we fell in love a second time, after thirty-four years apart: in each other’s eyes, we were still the (by then mythical) youths we’d been in 1950, the summer of our first romance.
Science has firmly established that memory is unstable and unreliable, that whenever you summon up a recollection of the past you are liable to change it slightly until, with the passage of time, it may no longer represent what actually happened. Nevertheless, I can still see in my mind’s eye, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the twenty-year-old Scott York, blond, blue-eyed, and fabulous, sitting halfway up in the biology amphitheater as I stood at the bottom surveying the room on my first day of college. From that moment on, I set my sights on him. Seventeen and newly sprung from Cleveland Heights High School, I was no longer subject to the rule by which Jews and gentiles were forbidden to date — a restriction so rigorously enforced that even at my thirty-fifth high-school reunion, held at a country club where the ballroom was divided by the dance floor into two separate wings, Jews occupied the tables on one side, gentiles those on the other, as Scott and I alone noticed.
He had long figured in my fantasies. When I was a freshman at Heights, he was a graduating senior — captain of the basketball team, president of his (gentile) fraternity, school vice president. At the games where I went to cheer my own ( Jewish) boyfriend, it was Scott York I watched. At six feet, with thick blond hair, chiseled features, and muscular shoulders and thighs, he was a thing of beauty, despite the sweat staining his jersey or the occasional foul he inflicted with a well-placed elbow. His spectacular leaps to make the point, his perfect long shots from impossible distances, and his bone-risking dives to recover the ball made him the highest scorer, whose picture was often in the school paper and, during the championship play-offs, even in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He had the speed and grace of an antelope — not only on the court but also on the dance floor, where he and his girlfriend Nancy were among the slow-dancing and jitterbugging couples people formed circles around to watch.
Now here he was in summer school, three years after having graduated from Heights, taking the same botany class I was taking — and a long summer ahead of us. The class would be meeting from nine till noon every weekday for the next six weeks; much could happen in six weeks’ time. I had no illusion that he, who had left high school a semester after I entered, might remember me. Nevertheless, feeling predatory and bold, I walked up the steep steps and sat down beside him.
From To Love What Is by Alix Kates Shulman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Alix Kates Shulman. All rights reserved. To view or the book, go to www.amazon.com. For more information about author Alix Kates Shulman, go to www.alixkshulman.com.
