“I was thinking about nothing. It was very pleasant.”
“Over there.” Alma pointed at something behind her husband. He turned to see: off on the other side of the picnic area, a guy in jeans and a T-shirt was blowing soap bubbles, and a young woman, similarly clothed, was dancing around, popping the bubbles with her fingers and occasionally leaping up to pop them with her bare feet. She was remarkably agile, and her movements resembled those of a martial artist. A third person, seated at a nearby picnic table, oddly dressed in clothes too heavy for the weather, was observing them.
“Sweet as a couple of bunnies,” Alma said, removing her hand from her husband’s shoulder and nervously touching a brown spot on her forearm. “Too cute for words.”
Brettigan had always had a weakness for picnics, for summer and its long, drawn-out days, for laziness and the sweet languor that accompanied it. During the summer, time stretched out to accommodate whatever you needed to do, particularly when you didn’t need to do anything, and you were occupied watching the runner at second base, and the count was three-and-two, and the home team was losing, and no one, absolutely no one, really cared. You ate your salt-in-the-shell peanuts and waited for something to happen. Chewing his sandwich, he remembered the two years before he and Alma had had children, and they had paraded around the house naked and had gone on camping trips and had made love outdoors as if it were summer all year long. Their honeymoon lasted for quite a blissful period, and they had thought themselves very daring in those days, before they settled in to the hard labor of parenthood.
Having finished his sandwich, Brettigan bit into a carrot.
“You’re daydreaming,” Alma said. “You’re having one of those fantasies of yours.” No one could say that she didn’t know him. She’d always had a rather frightening ability to access his thoughts and say them aloud before he could. Did all longtime married couples share each other’s thoughts? She put her hand on his arm and gave his open palm a brief involuntary caress. “We were like that. You didn’t miss out on anything.”
Something about the two young people, especially the girl popping the soap bubbles, seemed familiar, but Brettigan couldn’t quite place them. Young people were beginning to look generic to him. What individuality they had didn’t matter anymore.
“They haven’t done anything we didn’t do,” Alma told him with a trace of pride in her voice. “We were once beautiful, too. Don’t forget that. I’m sorry I said you were harmless. That was unkind.”
“Do we know those two?” he asked.
“They look like anybody,” she said. “Finish your carrots, Harold. I want to walk somewhere.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head so that the sun bathed her face, as if she were taking a shower in it. Her expression radiated a transitory peacefulness.
After he put his paper napkin and the waxed paper wrapping back into the cooler, he took his wife’s hand with a slight upward pressure, encouraging her to stand. She smiled and nodded before rising. They were both expert at these little marital pantomimes and enjoyed occasions of semi-comical tenderness. She asked, “Should we leave all this here?” meaning the cooler and the tablecloth and the cups of wine, and he nodded and escorted her onto the sidewalk that angled in toward the pavilion. All at once he drew back. “No, wait,” he said.
“What is it?”
“I just thought of somebody I haven’t thought of for…I don’t know. Forty years. Longer. Decades.”
“Who?”
“Give me a minute.”
“Harry, what is it?”
Feeling himself caught and hooked in a memory, he returned to the picnic bench. His surroundings had rather suddenly become abstract: the park that had been painted by Seurat was now splattered by Jackson Pollock, and Brettigan felt himself pulled out to sea by a tidal wave of memory.
* * *
—
When he’d been a boy and the world had seemed impossibly large, his parents had hired a woman to clean the house, an affable German-American named Mrs. Schimmelpfennig from a nearby farm community. She cleaned other houses in town, singing German school songs as she dusted and swept. She walked around in an aromatic lemon cloud from the furniture polish she applied to the tables and chairs.
She’d owned an old two-story house with a wide front porch, and she did occasional babysitting and had taken care of Brettigan on a few occasions when his parents were out. She enjoyed teaching him songs in German. While she sang, he’d been fascinated by her watery blue eyes and uncombed fairy-tale brown hair. He could remember the German sounds but couldn’t quite remember what she had told him they meant.
Abends, will ich schlafen gehn,
vierzehn Engel um mich stehn:
zwei zu meinen Häupten,
zwei zu meinen Füssen,
zwei zu meiner Rechten,
zwei zu meiner Linken,
zweie, die mich decken,
zweie, die mich wecken,
zweie, die mich weisen
zu Himmels Paradeisen.
* * *
—
Now he remembered, and out of some resource of spontaneity he suddenly knew its meaning, the German words no longer a barrier but a portal to that moment when you went to bed and were about to go to sleep with the help of angels who would transport you to heaven. Its equivalent in English was “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I lie on.” Sitting in the park with Alma looking down at him, Brettigan felt the German words slide through him, accompanied by Mrs. Schimmelpfennig’s quavering voice in the summer air as a visitation.
“Zu Himmels Paradeisen,” he said now, glancing at Alma. She observed him warily.
“I worry when you lapse into German. Are you okay now?”
“I think so,” he told her. “I just had a memory of a babysitter I once had.”
“Oh, that one? The one who was murdered by a drifter?”
“Yes, that one. How’d you know?”
“I’m omniscient,” she said, sitting down next to him and massaging his back. “I’m the eye at the top of the pyramid. What haven’t you told me by now? Nothing. Everything you have to tell me, you’ve told.” She took his hand. She had the stern but encouraging expression of a grade school teacher. Brettigan noticed that she had a small purple stain on her blouse from the plum she had just eaten. “Let’s go for a walk,” she said, pointing in the direction of Minnehaha Falls and the creek that drained into the Mississippi.