About Grace Read online

  This was 1975. He was thirty-two years old, in Anchorage, Alaska. He had an apartment over a garage in Midtown, a 1970 Chrysler Newport, few friends, no family left. If there was anything to notice about him, it was his eyeglasses: thick, Coke-bottle lenses in plastic frames. Behind them his eyes appeared unsubstantial and slightly warped, as if he peered not through a half centimeter of curved glass but through ice, two frozen pools, his eyeballs floating just beneath.

  It was March again, early breakup, the sun not completely risen but a warmth in the air, blowing east, and with it the improbable smell of new leaves, as if spring was already happening to the west—in the Aleutian volcanoes or all the way across the strait in Siberia—the first compressed buds showing on whatever kinds of trees they had there, and bears blinking as they stumbled from their hibernal dens, whole festivals starting, nighttime songs and burgeoning romances and homages to the equinox and the first seeds being sown—Russian spring blowing across the Bering Sea and over the mountains and tumbling into Anchorage.

  Winkler dressed in one of his two brown corduroy suits and walked to the small brick National Weather Service office on Seventh Avenue where he worked as an analyst’s assistant. He spent the morning compiling snowpack forecasts at his little veneered desk. Every few minutes a slab of snow would slide off the roof and plunge into the hedge outside his window with a muffled whump.

  At noon he walked to the Snow Goose Market and ordered a salami and mustard on wheat and waited in a checkout lane to pay for it.

  Fifteen feet away a woman in tortoiseshell glasses and a tan polyester suit stopped in front of a revolving rack of magazines. Two boxes of cereal and a half gallon of milk stood primly in her basket. The light—angling through the front windows—fell across her waist and lit her shins below her skirt. He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.

  A cash register clanged. An automatic fan in the ceiling clicked on with a sigh. Suddenly he knew what would happen—he had dreamed it four or five nights before. The woman would drop a magazine; he would step over, pick it up, and give it back.

  The cashier handed a pair of teenagers their change and looked expectantly at Winkler. But he could not take his eyes from the woman browsing magazines. She spun the rack a quarter turn, her thumb and forefinger fell hesitantly upon an issue (Good Housekeeping, March 1975, Valerie Harper on the cover, beaming and tan in a green tank top), and she picked it up. The cover slipped; the magazine fell.

  His feet made for her as if of their own volition. He bent; she stooped. The tops of their heads nearly touched. He lifted the magazine, swiped dust off the cover, and handed it over.

  They straightened simultaneously. He realized his hand was shaking. His eyes did not meet hers but left their attention somewhere above her throat. “You dropped this,” he said. She didn’t take it. At the register a housewife had taken his place in line. A bagboy snapped open a bag and lowered a carton of eggs into it.

  “Miss?”

  She inhaled. Behind her lips were trim rows of shiny teeth, slightly off-axis. She closed her eyes and held them shut a moment before opening them, as if waiting out a spell of vertigo.

  “Did you want this?”

  “How—?”

  “Your magazine?”

  “I have to go,” she said abruptly. She set down her shopping basket and made for the exit, almost jogging, holding her coat around her, hurrying through the door into the parking lot. For a few seconds he could see her two legs scissoring up the street; then she was obscured by a banner taped over the window, and gone.

  He stood holding the magazine for a long time. The sounds of the store gradually returned. He picked up her basket, set his sandwich in it, and paid for it all—the milk, the cereal, the Good Housekeeping.

  Later, after midnight, he lay in his bed and could not sleep. Elements of her (three freckles on her left cheek, the groove between the knobs of her collarbone, a strand of hair tucked behind her ear) scrolled past his eyes. On the floor beside him the magazine lay open: an ad for dog biscuits, a recipe for blueberry upside-down cake.

  He got up, tore open one of the cereal boxes—both were Kellogg’s Apple Jacks—and ate handfuls of the little pale rings at his kitchen window, watching the streetlights shudder in the wind.

  A month passed. Rather than fade from his memory, the woman grew sharper, more insistent: two rows of teeth, dust floating between her ankles. At work he saw her face on the undersides of his eyelids, in a numerical model of groundwater data from Shemya Air Force Base. Almost every noon he found himself at the Snow Goose, scanning checkout lanes, lingering hopefully in the cereal aisle.

  He went through the first box of Apple Jacks in a week. The second box he ate more slowly, rationing himself a palmful a day, as if that box were the last in existence, as if when he looked into the bottom and found only sugary dust, he’d have consumed not only his memory of her, but any chance of seeing her again.

  He brought the Good Housekeeping to work and paged through it: twenty-three recipes for potatoes; coupons for Pillsbury Nut Bread; a profile of quintuplets. Were there clues to her here? When no one was looking he set Valerie Harper’s cover photo under a coworker’s Swift 2400 and examined her clavicle in the viewfinder. She consisted of melees of dots—yellows and magentas, ringed with blue—her breasts made of big, motionless halos.

  Winkler, who in his thirty-two years had hardly left the Anchorage Bowl, who still caught himself some clear days staring wistfully at the Alaska Range to the north, the brilliant white massifs, and the white spaces farther back, the way they floated on the horizon less like real mountains than the ghosts of them, now found his eyes drawn into the dream kitchens of advertisements: copper pots, shelf paper, folded napkins. Was her kitchen like one of these? Did she, too, use Brillo Supreme steel wool pads for her heavy-duty cleaning needs?

  He found her in June, at the same market. This time she wore a plaid skirt and tall boots. She stepped briskly through the aisles, looking different, more determined. A shaft of anxiety whirled in his chest. She bought a small bottle of grape juice and an apple, counting exact change out of a tiny purse with brass clasps. She was in and out in under two minutes.

  He followed.

  She walked quickly, making long strides, her gaze on the sidewalk ahead of her. Winkler had to half jog to keep up. The day was warm and damp and her hair, tied at the back of her neck, seemed to float along behind her head. At D Street she waited to cross and Winkler came up behind her, suddenly too close—if he leaned forward six inches, the top of her head would have been in his face. He stared at her calves disappearing into her boots and inhaled. What did she smell like? Clipped grass? The sleeve of a wool sweater? The mouth of the little brown bag that held her apple and juice crinkled in her fist.

  The light changed. She started off the curb. He followed her six blocks up Fifth Avenue, where she turned right and went into a branch of First Federal Savings and Loan. He paused outside, trying to calm his heart. A pair of gulls sailed past, calling to each other. Through the stenciling on the window, past a pair of desks (with bankers at them, penciling things onto big desk calendars), he watched her pull open a walnut half-door and slip behind the teller counter. There were customers waiting. She set down her little bag, slid aside a sign, and waved the first one forward.

  He hardly slept. A full moon, high over the city, dragged the tide up Knik Arm, then let it out again. He read from Watson, from Pauling, the familiar words disassembling in front of his eyes. He stood by the window with a legal pad and wrote: Inside me a trillion cells are humming, proteins stalking the strands of my DNA, winding and unwinding, making and remaking…

  He crossed it out. He wrote: Do we choose who we love?

  If only his first dream had carried him past what he already knew, past the magazine falling to the floor. He shut his eyes and tried to summon
an image of her, tried to keep her there as he drifted toward sleep.

  By nine A.M. he was on the same sidewalk watching her through the same window. In his knapsack he had what remained of the second box of Apple Jacks and the Good Housekeeping. She was standing at her teller’s station, looking down. He wiped his palms on his trousers and went in.

  There was no one in the queue, but her station had a sign up: PLEASE SEE THE NEXT TELLER. She was counting ten-dollar bills with the thin, pink hands he already thought of as familiar. A nameplate resting on the marble counter read, SANDY SHEELER.

  “Excuse me.”

  She held up a finger and continued counting without looking up.

  “I can help you down here,” another teller offered.

  “It’s okay,” Sandy said. She reached the end of her stack, made a notation on the corner of an envelope, and looked up. “Hello.”

  The lenses of her glasses reflected a light in the ceiling for a second and flooded the lenses of his own glasses with light. Panic started in his throat. She was a stranger, entirely unfamiliar; who was he to have guessed at her dissatisfactions, to have incorporated her into his dreams? He stammered: “I met you in the supermarket? A few months ago? We didn’t actually meet, but…”

  Her gaze swam. He reached into his knapsack and withdrew the cereal and the magazine. A teller to Sandy’s right glanced over the partition.

  “I thought maybe,” he said, “you wanted these? You left so quickly.”

  “Oh.” She did not touch the cereal or the Good Housekeeping but did not take her eyes from them. He could not tell but thought she leaned forward a fraction. He lifted the box of cereal and shook it. “I ate some.”

  She gave him a confused smile. “Keep it.”

  Her eyes tracked from the magazine to him and back. A critical moment was passing now, he knew it: he could feel the floor falling away beneath his feet. “Would you ever want to go to a movie? Anything like that?”

  Now her gaze veered past Winkler and over his shoulder, out into the bank. She shook her head. Winkler felt a small weight drop into his stomach. Already he began to back away. “Oh. I see. Well. I’m sorry.”

  She took the box of Apple Jacks and shook it and set it on the shelf beneath the counter. She whispered, “My husband,” and looked at Winkler for the first time, really looked at him, and Winkler felt her gaze go all the way through the back of his head.

  He heard himself say: “You don’t wear a ring.”

  “No.” She touched her ring finger. Her nails were clipped short. “It’s getting repaired.”

  He sensed he was out of time; the whole scene was slipping away, liquefying and sliding toward a drain. “Of course,” he mumbled. “I work at the Weather Service. I’m David. You could reach me there. In case you decide differently.” And then he was turning, his empty knapsack bunched in his fist, the bright glass of the bank’s facade reeling in front of him.

  Two months: rain on the windows, a pile of unopened meteorology texts on the table in his apartment that struck him for the first time in his life as trivial. He cooked noodles, wore one of the same two brown corduroy suits, checked the barometer three times a day and chaRted his readings halfheartedly on graph paper smuggled home from work.

  Mostly he remembered her ankles, and the particles of dust drifting between them, illuminated in a slash of sunlight. The three freckles on her cheek formed an isosceles triangle. He had been so certain; he had dreamed her. But who knew where assurance and belief came from? Somewhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.

  The days slid by, one after another: warm, cold, rainy, sunny. He felt, all the time, as if he had lost something vital: his wallet, his keys, a fundamental memory he couldn’t quite summon. The horizon looked the same as ever: the same grimy oil trucks groaned through the streets; the tide exposed the same mudflats twice a day. In the endless gray Weather Service teletypes, he saw the same thing every time: desire.

  Hadn’t there been a longing in her face, locked behind that bank-teller smile—a yearning in her, visible just for a second, as she dragged her eyes up? Hadn’t she seemed about to cry at the supermarket?

  The Good Housekeeping lay open on his kitchen counter, bulging with riddles: Do you know the secret of looking younger? How much style for your money do cotton separates offer? How many blonde colors found in nature are in Naturally Blonde Hair Treatment?

  He walked the streets; he watched the sky.

  6

  She called in September. A secretary patched her through. “He has a hockey game,” Sandy said, nearly whispering. “There’s a matinee at four-fifteen.”

  Winkler swallowed. “Okay. Yes. Four-fifteen.”

  She appeared in the lobby at four-thirty and hurried past him to the concessions counter where she bought a box of chocolate-covered raisins. Then, without looking at him, she entered the theater and sat in the dimness with the light from the screen flickering over her face. He took the seat beside her. She ate her raisins one after another, hardly stopping to breathe; she smelled, he thought, like mint, like chewing gum. All through the film he stole glances: her cheek, her elbow, stray hairs atop her head illuminated in the wavering light.

  Afterward she watched the credits drift up the screen as if the film still played behind them, as if there would be more to the story. Her eyelids blinked rapidly. The house lights came up. She said, “You’re a weatherman.”

  “Sort of. I’m a hydrologist.”

  “The ocean?”

  “Groundwater, mostly. And the atmosphere. My main interest lies in snow, in the formation and physics of snow crystals. But you can’t really get paid to study that. I type memos, recheck forecasts. I’m basically a secretary.”

  “I like snow,” Sandy said. Moviegoers were filing for the exits and her attention flitted over them. He fumbled for something to say.

  “You’re a bank teller?”

  She did not look at him. “That day in the market…It was like I knew you were going to be there. When I dropped the magazine, I knew you’d come over. It felt like I had already done it, already lived through it once before.” She glanced at him quickly, just for a moment, then gathered her coat, smoothed out the front of her skirt, and peered over her shoulder to where an usher was already sweeping the aisle. “You think that’s crazy.”

  “No,” he said.

  Her upper lip trembled. She did not look at him. “I’ll call next Wednesday.” Then she was moving down the row of seats, her coat tight around her shoulders.

  Why did she call him? Why did she come back to the theater, Wednesday after Wednesday? To slip the constraints of her life? Perhaps. But even then Winkler guessed it was because she had felt something that noon in the Snow Goose Market—had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place, the vertigo of future aligning with the present.

  They saw Jaws, and Benji, talking around the edges. Each week Sandy bought a box of chocolate-covered raisins and ate them with the same zeal, the indigo light of the screen flaring in the lenses of her glasses.

  “Sandy,” he’d whisper in the middle of a film, his heart climbing his throat. “How are you?”

  “Is that the uncle?” she’d whisper back, eyes on the screen. “I thought he was dead.”

  “How is work? What have you been up to?”

  She’d shrug, chew a raisin. Her fingers were thin and pink: magnificent.

  Afterward she’d stand, take a breath, and pull her coat around her. “I hate this part,” she said once, peeking toward the exits. “When the lights come on after a movie. It’s like waking up.” She smiled. “Now you have to go back to the living.”

  He’d remain in his seat for a few minutes after she’d left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater around him, the drone of the film rewinding up in the projection room, the hollow thunk of an usher’s dustpan as he swept the aisles
. Above Winkler the little bulbs screwed into the ceiling in the shape of the Big Dipper burned on and on.

  She was born in Anchorage, two years before him. She wore lipstick that smelled like soap. She got cold easily. Her socks were always too thin for the weather. During the earthquake of ’64 a Cadillac pitched through the front window of the bank, and she had been, she confessed, thrilled by it, by everything: the sudden smell of petroleum, the enormous car-swallowing graben that had yawned open in the middle of Fourth Avenue. She whispered: “We didn’t have to go back to work for a week.”

  The husband (goalie for his hockey team) was branch manager. They got married after her senior year at West High School. He had a fondness for garlic salt that, she said, “destroyed his breath,” so that she could hardly look at him after he ate it, could hardly stand to be in the same room.

  For the past nine years they had lived in a beige ranch house with brown shingles and a yellow garage door. A pair of lopsided pumpkins lolled on the front porch like severed heads. Winkler knew this because he looked up the address in the phone book and began driving past in the evenings.

  The husband didn’t like movies, was happy to dry the dishes, loved—more than anything, Sandy said—to play miniature golf. Even his name, Winkler thought, was cheerless: Herman. Herman Sheeler. Their phone number, although Winkler had never called it, was 542-7433. The last four digits spelled the first four letters of their last name, something Herman had, according to Sandy, announced at a Friday staff meeting as the most remarkable thing that had happened to him in a decade.