We Have Everything Before Us Read online

  GIBSON HOUSE PRESS

  Flossmoor, Illinois 60422

  GibsonHousePress.com

  © 2020 Esther Yin-ling Spodek

  All rights reserved. Published 2020.

  ISBNs: 978-1-948721-08-0 (paper); 978-1-948721-09-7 (ebook)

  LCCN: 2019948033

  Book and cover design by Karen Sheets de Gracia.

  Text is set in the Corundum Book typeface.

  Printed in the United States of America

  24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper)

  To Brian, Ben, and Daniel

  “We had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”

  CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES

  1

  AMIDST THE SUN and floral blooms of a Chicago suburb in May, Eleanor cringes at the bird sounds she has tried to eliminate from her life. From her balcony she sees the expanse of patchy grass and dirt trails her dog, Annie, has created. Across the alley in a neighbor’s yard she sees the work of a real gardener, intricate arrangements of annuals and perennials, a gazebo at the center and, near their garage, a trellis with vines and tiny purple blooms.

  Eleanor can hear the nesting house sparrows.

  Once, pigeons occupied the eaves of Eleanor’s house, and huge, stinking piles of their droppings had laid below. The uninvited pigeons cooed deep, low razors of sound before dawn, and flapped at the windows as if to stake out their territory. Eleanor would wake just as they began to vocalize.

  They never woke Frank, her husband.

  Eleanor couldn’t understand the photographs of people in quaint European city settings tossing morsels of bread to attract these dirty, disease-carrying interlopers. She asked Frank to do something, explaining to him the problems of viruses and bacteria, worrying that little boys (especially her own little boys) would run through piles of pigeon shit then track it into the house. But Frank wasn’t helpful. He said it would wash away with the rain. It didn’t. Eleanor could smell the droppings from inside, through the screen door, a sharp ammonia.

  Then an egg fell from one of the nests and left a partially formed pigeon chick. Eleanor donned surgical gloves, tied a bandana over her nose and mouth, picked up the dead bird with a newspaper bag and brought it out to the garbage bin in the alley. “Call an animal control service,” she told Frank.

  The man from the animal control service came to their house on a day that she and Frank were home and suggested a pigeon sharpshooter. “They always come back,” he said of the pigeons. “They’re homing birds. You have to kill them.”

  “You mean with a gun?” Eleanor said.

  The man nodded.

  Frank thought the man knew what he was talking about. The sharpshooter was booked for several weeks and he required a five-hundred-dollar deposit. Eleanor felt she was being taken for a ride and she could not hire a man with a rifle when she had forbidden her sons from playing with fake guns of any kind.

  She told Frank to find someone else.

  He hired a second animal control company, who placed traps on the roof and over the porch. As the temperature climbed to an unusual high, the sun warmed the roofing material and baked the squirrels caught in the traps, while nearby the gloating pigeons cooed happily in the eaves.

  Finally, Eleanor called a roofer who suggested installing spikes to block the pigeons from nesting. “Same as under the train bridges,” he told her. Spikes installed, they were finally rid of the fat, dirty birds.

  Then the sparrows arrived. Eleanor could hear them even earlier than the pigeons. They were European imports, tiny bodied, possessing a puritan work ethic, and vigorously productive. They left tiny piles of sparrow excrement.

  Now, as she stands on her balcony, Eleanor leans to her right and looks up at the strands of fiberglass and cellophane that dangle, woven between the steel needles of the spikes, the beginnings of yet another nest. Holding her broom, she climbs on a chair and smacks at the nesting material. Below in the yard, these crumbs float to the ground to join with the leaves and cigarette butts from next door’s workmen, the puffs of dog undercoat extracted from the last brushing, and the sandwich wrappers, all prime European house sparrow building supplies.

  Earlier in the spring, Eleanor had looked up to realize that the sparrows had built not only a nest over the back door, but that their sparrow community extended upward into the eave above the attic window. The colony now comprised sparrow mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, maternal and paternal grandparents, cousins, second and third cousins, all not only flapping or sitting around, but dropping small threads of sparrow excrement, and an occasional egg (although not as traumatic as the pigeon fetus).

  Eleanor called another animal control company.

  Two burly men dressed in camouflage arrived carrying a tall, extendable ladder. They removed the nests and covered the eaves with wire mesh. But the sparrows returned through an opening and built once again. The two men came back and closed the opening but did not remove the nest. One lone sparrow returned, only to get stuck, impaling itself against the mesh as it tried to get back to the nest.

  This morning the small body is still attached, wings splayed, tail at an unnatural right angle. It has yet to decompose, and its feathers flutter lightly. Eleanor leans the broom against the outer wall of the house. The last pieces of the new nest float down from the eave, but the dead bird remains, as if to remind her that the war is not over.

  Downstairs the coffee pot is empty. Eleanor takes ground beans from the freezer and makes a new pot. She considers how Frank, who gets up first, never makes enough coffee for both of them, as if he doesn’t think that anyone else drinks it. From the other end of the kitchen she hears a tight animal groan and the light tap of small toenails on the wood planks of the floor. She reaches down to touch the white spot on Annie’s velvety black head, and Annie licks her on her knee in return. Annie always arrives when she smells coffee brewing, no matter who is making it.

  Once there was no Annie and no boys, just Eleanor and Frank and a small apartment near the Northwestern campus. There were cheap dinners in the rooms of fellow grad students, intellectual and social camaraderie, and sparrows and pigeons could nest without fear of Eleanor strong-arming them.

  At some later point, after her oldest son, Eugene, was born, intellectual camaraderie was displaced by more mundane concerns, raising babies, then raising toddlers, then preschool carpools and PTA volunteer work. Then came long, empty school days filled with menial jobs; phone calls for the Democratic party, gardening at the ecology center, numerous fundraisers for worthy causes, until Eleanor could barely reconstruct the reasons why she had gone to graduate school in the first place.

  It was not until Eugene was in middle school and was reading an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe that Eleanor was able to put her earlier life to use, telling him that this was arguably the very first novel ever published.

  Now Eleanor sits at the kitchen island of her remodeled one-hundred-year-old house, in one of the four chairs used for family meals. She doesn’t always enjoy remembering the past before kids, but it pops into her head almost daily. She sets her coffee mug next to her laptop and watches Annie retreat to her crate, circle on the padding, and settle at the back.

  Eleanor pushes aside the New York Times and browses Facebook for her upcoming thirtieth high school reunion. There are lots of people who look very different now, and others whose faces hold kernels of their youth and are much easier to identify. She finds Phil Anderson, who at forty-eight, in his matchbook-sized photograph at least, is much better looking than the other men. Spiked blonde hair frames a firm but moderately lined face. She is aston
ished at how good he looks. Thirty years ago, she’d shared a few classes with him, helped him with his homework, and watched as he dated prettier (though she is confident, not smarter) girls, and played on the football team. She had never been dateably pretty or socially outgoing.

  But from a distance she had always admired Phil’s looks and gregariousness. And now, well-educated and expensively styled, and at the very least an improvement over high school, Eleanor figures she might be worth noticing.

  So, she shoots Phil a message. She wants to see if, like her, he has settled down with a family. She writes:

  Are you the Phil Anderson from my trigonometry class? Where are you now and what are you up to? I am married and live in Evanston, a suburb north of Chicago, with my two teenage sons, husband, and border collie. Let me know how you are. —Eleanor

  She rereads what she has written, to make sure it is simple and noncommittal, in case he turns out to be odd. Then she presses send. She feels some excitement, which is something she has not experienced in a long time.

  2

  PHIL ANDERSON HAD stood watching his wife, Linda, from the curtained wing near the entry to the sanctuary of her new church, while the minister preached to a stadium of congregants. Her look said the same to him as when she had reached orgasm, tight-eyed, flushed. It had been some time since he had seen her in possession of that look. In the front row of the church, right below the stage, Linda Anderson stood very close to a man not quite young enough to be her son. The young man and Phil’s wife lifted their arms gently, fingers fluttering like long grass with the rest of the congregation, their faces rapt. In this postcoital expression, they both accepted Jesus Christ.

  Now, Phil can’t shake the image. It pops into his head as he begins his day.

  Each morning in his basement he runs three miles on the treadmill, lifts weights on a machine that allows for rotations of exercise, and works up a soaking sweat for ninety minutes. He eats a high-protein, high-fiber breakfast prescribed by his nutritionist, bran cereal with fat-free milk, fresh fruit. Then he showers, shaves, and dresses carefully for work.

  He thinks to himself that some might call this vanity, but his wife is leaving him presently. He will need to find someone new. He is forty-eight. He needs to overcome his age.

  Phil’s two daughters are both at school, one in college at Northwestern, and one still in high school. Linda has already left for work. Phoenix, a red-and-white border collie, jumps up to put her paws on his belly as he approaches the coffee maker. Simeon, the cat, is standing on one of the bar chairs at the kitchen island, his tail lifted, spraying the cushion. Simeon does this when Phil is around. Phil tries to grab the cushion but the cat is too fast. “Simeon!” Phil shouts. Phoenix barks twice, her ears raised and her tail out. The dog follows Phil to the washing machine in the hallway near the garage. I do not need this, Phil thinks.

  In his Alfa Romeo, Phil reaches back and puts the top down. Phoenix settles, curled up in the passenger footwell. They exit the long driveway at the side of the house and turn on to the gravel road. Phil likes to check out what is happening in the neighbor’s yards, and if anyone is outdoors. He makes a point of waving to prove that he is friendlier than his wife. The houses at this end of the subdivision are big, traditional, all similar, with carefully sculpted front and side yards. Phil had planted five weeping willows along the edge of his property and he likes to watch them sway in the light wind. He checks them each morning with a quick sideways glance, to reassure himself that outwardly his home portrays a sense of order.

  Phil drives fast. Driving a racecar is the next best thing to sex, he once told a friend. He listens to the Rolling Stones on the radio, tapping the dashboard with his right hand as he drives along the river. He is conscious that he is tapping, forcing himself to get into the music. But he doesn’t feel it inside.

  There are things Phil thinks about while he is driving. First, there is Sarayu, the registered nurse he used to meet in secret. She would periodically travel through the area, hired by a health-care company, to maintain a certain standard of excellence in small rural hospitals. He had found her on the internet. She came to him once at his house, one night on a weekend when his wife and daughters were out of town at the grandparents’. She was long-legged and dark-skinned, and he liked the way she smelled, earthy and exotic (he had asked her to wear patchouli). He liked her movements, her thick, dark, straight hair. He met Sarayu mostly in hotels where they had sex. He wondered where she was now. He’d had to give her up when Linda had discovered the emails.

  His office is quiet when he arrives. The phones are not ringing. The local economy is bad. Phil has time on his hands. People don’t want to upgrade their copy machines or contract to have them serviced. Phil and Linda own the business where they both work. The only other employees are plain, overweight women that Linda hired.

  Phil sits at his computer in the storefront office, composing new, lower bids for business. It is difficult to concentrate. Beyond the front window the sun is bouncing off car metal. Across the street the river looks cool and inviting.

  When she came to his house, he and Sarayu had walked along the streets of his neighborhood in the dark. At the edge of the river, she had removed her dress and waded into the water. Her skin had looked pale in the thinly lit darkness as she floated on her back, her dark hair glistening with the minimal moonlight against her head, her breasts floating above her body, evenly round and buoyant. She brought some of the pungent earthen smell of the river out of the water as she left it and kissed him, and tried to convince him to join her. He began to remove his shoes and socks, but better judgment took hold of him. They were still close to his neighborhood, and though it was very dark, he was afraid that a neighbor would see them. He was afraid he would lose the sense of exotic adventure.

  Phil finds it easy to think about other women when his wife doesn’t think about him. Even easier when the other women let you know how much they think about you. Sarayu was articulate in her emails, even poetic. She was younger, unmarried, and spent a lot of time on the road. She logged on to her computer every day. And she wrote to him. So, how could he not write back? And with summer almost here, and the possibility of her passing through town, how could he not think about her again? Would she pass through town? Would he run into her? Now that he was virtually free of his wife? He could go online and find her.

  Phoenix noses Phil’s hip through the side of his chair. She senses that the weather is good for going outside. Phil quickly gives in. “We are headed out for a walk,” he tells Jan, the office manager. “You can reach me on my cell.” Jan smiles and nods. Linda is out on service calls and Phil hopes that while he is out, his wife will check in and leave again and he won’t have to see her.

  Outside, Phoenix takes the Frisbee in her mouth. She looks up at Phil as they cross the street in front of his storefront to the park along the river. He throws the disc, underhand, toward the trees and the pathway, and she runs for it, diving into the grass to take it up in her mouth, running to bring it back. She props her torso up on her elbows in a low bow, and shakes the disc, then stops to look up at Phil. She noses him in the leg before dropping it at his feet. Her ears are pricked, her mouth is open, and she is panting eagerly. He throws it again in the same manner. He remembers tossing a Frisbee on the quadrangle in college, throwing it underhanded so that he looked like he knew what he was doing. Phoenix chases her disc again.

  The day is pleasant and he is in short sleeves and can feel the sun on his pale forearms. He moves under the shade of a broad tree to protect his fair skin—his face, his white-haired arms. It is cooler under the tree. His brain continues to work through the issue of finding a new woman. As Phoenix again runs for the disc, he throws it back, but he hardly pays attention to what he is doing.

  Later in the day, he drives home along the river with Phoenix in the passenger seat and the top down. It is a slower commute than usual because the spring and summer road repairs have begun in the last few days.
He stops at the supermarket, closes the top to his convertible, and leaves Phoenix to protect the car with an open window. He picks up hamburger meat, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and his favorite bottled beer, basic dinner supplies. Before unpacking them at home, he has opened his first beer. It isn’t his usual drink, he prefers red wine, but he is thirsty. Phoenix sits next to where he is standing, her white paw poking his calf.

  How can you spend years with someone and then decide—just like that—that it is over, that you must split your family and your belongings? He looks down at the dog. “How can you do that?” he says, without realizing he has spoken out loud.

  He had met Linda at a fraternity party in college. She was a tall, virginal girl with long, dirty blonde hair parted in the middle so that it fell evenly over her face and shoulders when she bent down. Her skin was a pale yellow more than pink. She put up a protest when he first tried to touch her. So, he campaigned to get her into bed, and for a while it was all that he could think about.

  After the birth of their first daughter, when he was in the marines and they were stationed in Southern California, he bought a large sailboat. As a family, they would put their daughter in a life jacket, slather her white Scandinavian skin with sunscreen, and set sail. Phil would guide the boat, and Linda would watch their child. This was when his wife was at her most beautiful. Not the night at the fraternity party, before he had realized what a challenge she would turn out to be. She had matured and the twenty-year-old baby fat had vanished from around her cheeks. She had colored her hair a truer blonde. Now she was an attractive woman, and they were an attractive couple. When he watched her touch the baby, putting sunscreen on her pink-white shoulders, dressing her in a sun hat and tiny pastel-pink sunglasses, this was when he was happiest.

  Phil thought his wife spent too much time with the children when they were young, planning and doing activities with them, playing with them and disregarding his needs—not that he had many needs, or that the children were not important. Because he knew that they were, as he knew that they should be the focus of her life, and his.