A Gesture Life Read online

  But how near, indeed, all this presently ends. For there, inside the scratched and hand-smudged Plexiglas windows of the Kiddie Kare, is Sunny Hata, once daughter of mine, whom I have not seen in almost thirteen years, bending down to kiss a young boy on the crown of his head. She looks almost exactly the same, except her figure is fuller and her hair pulled neatly back with a band. She’s still quite beautiful, in her way, perhaps more so than ever as Officer Como had said, now that she is a woman. She must be thirty-two. I think the boy must be hers, bestowed as he is with her high, narrowing eyes and her black hair, though it’s tightly curled, near-Afro, and her warm, nut-colored skin (though I wonder why he isn’t darker). She cups his ear and his cheek and before leaving gives him a quick, tiny wave of goodbye with her finger, which he tries to dismiss with a diffident shrug. But he can’t, and runs to her, not with open arms, but with his head lowered and his shoulder dipped, throwing a slight, willful block into her side. She roughly runs her hand through his hair, then scoots him off.

  As she comes out of the Kiddie Kare she sees me, which happens almost by accident, for she drops her keys and turns on an oblique angle, back toward me, opposite her way to Lerner’s, and finds me where I’m standing stock-still in the middle of the mall. She stares, and for a moment we are transported back in time, as if we are caught up again in the long dry stare of her youth, that severe, bloodless regard she’d offer up from across the kitchen table, or the dark water of the pool, or from the sidewalk in front of the store, where she’d lean against the parking meter and smoke her spice-scented cigarettes. But now I see that more than anything else she is simply acknowledging me, her eyes half-angry and half-sad, and I wonder if in my threadbare red cardigan and bulky corrective shoes and loose-hanging slacks I am something of a horrendous sight for her eyes.

  “Don’t let him see us,” she says, slowly approaching and then passing me by. “We’ll talk at the food.”

  I realize what she means and start walking past the Kiddie Kare without glancing in, though now I wish to look upon him, once again take in his shape. Instead I loop around the large planter and head back toward the food hall smelling thickly of tacos and burgers and Chinese food warming in steam trays. Sunny is sitting at one of the tables on the inner “veranda” of the court, a plastic cup of iced coffee in her hands, and when I sit down she rises and asks if I want some tea. The consideration surprises me, and as she heads to the Java Hut I think we must both be glad for the momentary reprieve.

  Soon enough, though, she returns with a paper cup of steaming green tea.

  As there’s silence, I say, “I was grateful for the card.”

  She pauses, but it’s too late to act as if she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  “Sally Como told me. I bought it that day. I guess you know she works here. I wasn’t going to send it, but then one morning I put a stamp on the envelope and dropped it in the box. It was stupid to think you wouldn’t know who it was from.”

  “It wasn’t stupid at all,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t answer this, jiggling her iced coffee instead. “Well, now that’s done with, and you’re here. You look okay to me. But you lost some weight. I mean, over the years.”

  “I feel quite fine.”

  Sunny nods, not exactly smiling. “Did you really almost burn down the house?”

  “Not at all,” I say, taken by her sudden feeling and interest. “There was some minor damage from the smoke. Really nothing serious. I’ve had it all fixed, and the curtains and carpet in the family room have been replaced. There’s hardly an odor anymore. If you came by and saw it you might think nothing had ever happened—”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she breaks in, sounding busy all of a sudden. She checks her watch. “I have to be at work pretty soon.”

  “It is quite lively there,” I tell her. “It’s a very nice shop, you know, very efficient, very well run. It’s clear that there are good systems in place. You must have been managing the store for some time now, I suppose.”

  “No, not a long time,” she answers. She seems a bit nervous, even almost shy, but acting as an adult might in an awkward situation, forward and harried. “We moved here in the spring. I was doing the same job in Long Island, at a Lerner’s in Great Neck, but it was too expensive there for us to live and when this came up nobody else seemed to want it. So here I am.”

  “With your son.”

  “Yes,” she answers, taking a sip through the straw.

  “May I ask his name?”

  “It’s Thomas.”

  “What a good solid name for a boy. How old is he?”

  “Almost six.”

  “He looks sturdy, very strong.”

  “Well, I didn’t want him to see us together,” she says firmly, unapologetic. “He doesn’t know about you. And I would like it to stay that way. I don’t want him confused.”

  I have an impulse to ask about the boy’s father, if he is with them or at least somewhere around, and if it is Lincoln, in fact, but from Sunny’s tone I realize the question is one I should set aside. She’s here now with me, and willing enough. And from where I am sitting, I see how Sunny has aged as well. She’s still someone at whom you must stop what you are doing and take a moment to look, her rich color, her beautiful eyes. I was last this close to her nearly half her lifetime ago, in the bristling flush of her adolescence. But now, too, I see the first lines at the corners of her mouth, a strand (or two or three) of silvery hair, the barest perceptible sag to her cheek. If there’s anything one can say it’s that she’s a young woman of a lovely cast who has been worn down in the course of the years in the ways a woman of privilege or leisure would never have been.

  “I’ll let you say hello to him, if you want,” she says now, looking squarely at me, as if I have already asked her and she’s long been considering it. “But you can’t say anything like you’re his grandfather, or related to him in any way. I don’t want you to tell him there was a connection. I’m having trouble enough with all his questions about his father and me.”

  “I would be very pleased to meet him,” I say. “If he asks who I am, well, I can tell him you once worked at my store, when you were young.”

  “Fine,” she answers curtly. “But I don’t want him to have expectations. Because those would be impossible. You understand me, right? I want you to understand.”

  “Yes of course,” I reply, wishing certain expectations wouldn’t be so potentially hurtful or damaging, when all I might do is make myself available to him, in any possible way. “I’ll do exactly as you wish.”

  She acknowledges this and we sit in silence, sipping our drinks. And it’s striking to me—almost unacceptably so—how not awful it is to have passed all these years, with a host of all manner of difficult feelings, and have between us now such mild and mature accord. As if there had once been a hint of something more than just duty and responsibility: something like love. It’s what I hadn’t allowed myself to hope for as I drove to the mall, the ambient progression of such a meeting. At the same time, however, it grieves me a little now to see how Sunny has tempered herself, or worse, been thus tempered by her life, how my standing by and letting her leave at such a young age has led her, somehow, right back to this wan town and wan mall, to sit here with this innocently crouched old man who once tried to conduct himself like her father and not despise him to his death.

  But how this moment, too, surpasses me. And I say, “I’m not surprised to see how well you’re doing. For yourself and your boy, Thomas. I’ve had some worries, of course. I assumed I would find you in a good way, but like this, I must admit, as the manager of so wonderful a store with such attentive employees. And then to hold an obvious position of leadership here in the mall, which has some lack in this regard, well, it’s quite an accomplishment.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” she mutters, looking over at the teens and children milling around the frozen yogurt bar, the burger and fry place. “All I’ve done is be persistent
.”

  “Yes, of course,” I tell her, “that’s ninety-five percent of any success. You must know the secret. Sometimes I want to go into a shop on Church Street that isn’t doing so well and tell them just to hold on. People give up so easily these days. A few bad months and it’s time to sell everything off. The economy isn’t helping matters, but it doesn’t mean certain failure. It means having to provide better service, better goods. For a long time, you know, when you were in middle school, I was almost sure the store wouldn’t make it. I had to convince Mr. Finch at the bank to give me more time. I was behind several payments, and I had to beg him.”

  “Isn’t that when you were seeing Mrs. Burns?” Sunny asks, the mention surprising me. “I thought she helped you, because she’d known him.”

  “Mr. Finch?”

  “Yes. I remember her saying to you, at the house, that she’d have a word with him. Their families being close for a long time. I thought she sort of vouched for you.”

  “Well,” I reply, “I suppose you can say she did. Mr. Finch didn’t know me then as he does now. But it was nothing irregular.”

  “I’m not saying it was,” Sunny says, sighing a bit. “I just remembered her all of a sudden. What she looked like.”

  “She was quite dignified, you know. And kind.”

  “Yes,” Sunny answers, nodding a little, though perhaps more to herself than to me. And then, almost sadly, “She was the sort of person who was always kinder to people than they were to her.”

  I don’t have an answer to this, and after a moment Sunny makes some business of adjusting the cuffs of her suit jacket. I know what she’s going to say but she’s cut off by the sudden presence of Kari, the assistant manager, who’s holding an immense waffle cone of chocolate yogurt. A girlfriend, enjoying the same, is standing with her, grinning through her braced upper teeth.

  “Hey, you guys!” Kari beams. “Don’t worry, Sunny, I’ve got good old Sheila at the desk. I waited for you before taking my break, but then I figured you guys might be here, bonding and stuff.”

  “I’m coming right now,” Sunny tells her, just getting up.

  “Don’t sweat it, boss. Sheila is handling it. You guys take your time. Hey, is Tommy here today?”

  Sunny, now sitting, nods.

  “Well, let’s go see Tommy,” Kari announces. She and her friend bid us goodbye and march off to the Kiddie Kare.

  “I should go anyway,” Sunny then tells me. “It’s not really fair to Sheila.”

  “Yes, of course,” I say, though no part of me wants her to go just yet. For sitting right here, I think, is the daughter—considerate, fair, attentive—most anyone could be happy for. And I say, “You must return to your proud establishment.”

  “It’s not so proud for long.”

  “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “Business is terrible.”

  “What do you mean? What about all those customers, all the fine merchandise?”

  “It looks better than it is,” she says somberly. “It’s not at all good, really. The corporate office wants to close the store. I think they knew it when they hired me. It was a horrible summer. People in Ebbington don’t have much extra money to spend. No one else knows this yet, but we’ll be closing at the end of the month.”

  “This month? But that’s less than three weeks from now….”

  “I know.” She says softly, “On Monday I have to give everybody notice.”

  “But what about you?”

  “What about me. When there’s no store, there’s no manager. I’ve been looking around, but this whole town is in the dumps. Lerner’s doesn’t have openings anywhere else. I’ll have to be a salesclerk somewhere again. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get by. I always have.”

  “But there’s Thomas. Who will look after him? I know that day care can be very costly. You must look harder. You must find another management position. I can help you. I still know a number of businesspeople in Bedley Run—”

  “Please!” she says quite forcefully. “I’ve been fine all these years. Let’s not start. I didn’t send the card to you to start something like this. And you should know I won’t take one step in that town, and neither will Thomas. There’s no chance of that. So please don’t try to change my mind.”

  “But I can help you with Thomas,” I tell her. “I’ll pay for a sitter, or for day camp. Whatever else he needs, I’ll provide. Please let me do this, at least. Please, Sunny. It can’t hurt, to let me do this.”

  And yet, invariably, we all know how it does. In a few moments Sunny leaves to go back to the store, and I decide to walk about the mall with the last of my tea. We’ve made a plan to speak once again, sometime next week, after which I’ll go to their apartment in Ebbington to pick him up for a short visit; we’ll take a fun shopping trip, for some new sneakers or toys. And now, though I half-promised Sunny I wouldn’t, I go past the Kiddie Kare once more, slowing my pace by the window, to see what he’s up to inside. I can find him too easily amid the plastic barrels and chutes; he’s by far the oldest and biggest, towering a bit too much over the other boys and girls, and I think how it is that Sunny was able to send that card to me, unsigned as it was, a message and non-message for the sole sake of her boy. And the idea entreats me once more, to wonder if something like love is forever victorious, truly conquering all, or if there are those who, like me, remain somehow whole and sovereign, still live unvanquished.

  11

  HOW I AM STILL UP SO LATE and sleepless in this darkened, unwarm kitchen, after spending the entire afternoon with Sunny’s energetic boy, is an amazement to me. I must be rejuvenated, or at least somehow, for now, made over. Surely it is in good part Tommy’s presence happily lingering with me, the slightly dizzied, hyperactive romp of him, the constant, as if self-winding locomotion of his sturdy, pumping limbs. It seems to me I should be tucked away in my bed and dreaming of myself on younger legs, running after the boy with joyous, flowing ease, instead of sitting here at the table with shoots of a draft prickling my feet and a tepid cup of green tea cooling in my hands. I am certainly concerned that I might be rubbing Sunny the wrong way, encroaching too far and too fast into the wide territory she has set between us, which I have never thought ill of her for and have even looked upon with a certain measure of relief and gratitude; she has always been able to exercise her resolve, a trait that was difficult to handle when she was young but one I am beginning to appreciate more with each passing day. So I am starting to think that the real cause of my restlessness is something that I saw this afternoon, which was most ordinary and trivial.

  It was after I dropped Tommy off at the mall at the end of our appointed day together. He and I had thoroughly enjoyed a shopping spree along Route 3A, where we visited, in turn, the Toy Palace and the Sports Section and the old roller-skating rink, and then sat side by side on revolving stools at the ice cream counter of the Woolworth’s. It was a wonderful day for me, really, beginning at the toy shop where the stout little boy—whom I told people was my grandson—shed his initial shyness and healthy suspicion of me and suddenly bounded down the aisles touching and handling as many of the brightly packaged toys as he could. I told him he could pick out two things, though looking upon his desperate expression of trying to choose I weakened and said three, and soon enough I lost all resolve and it was five items he could have, then somehow seven. In the end he’d filled up the cart to the exact number, and I could tell he was fundamentally a well-raised boy because he picked out the smaller, modest things rather than some pedal-driven car or grandly boxed building set.

  Sunny was somewhat cross with me when we arrived at the store, me bearing the bulging bags of his things and Tommy, drooling and gregarious, methodically aiming his special noise-and-light-making pistol at the Lerner’s customers. But I could see that she was taken, too, by the lightness of his feet, his giddy, errant leaps and twirls, and maybe, as well, with the way he kept circling the racks of clothes and then returning to me, to shoot me square in the belly,
clicking away again and again. Sunny didn’t say much except to tell Tommy that he should thank “Mr. Hata,” and then nodded to me with a lukewarm smile and a wave of her hand. But she was not being unkind. She had given her employees the news of the store closing a few days earlier, and the mood on the floor and among the staff was decidedly somber, all the more distinguished from Tommy’s brusque, overpleased activity.

  And then, surprisingly, I was caught off guard by my own stirring, at least the sudden thrum-thrum in my chest as I shook his small hand goodbye, which was a sensation one might usually describe as both sweet and bitter but to me was also squarely, terribly rueful, as I realized how brief and few my times with him might be in future days. It seems curious, all these years alone and my rarely thinking twice of the larger questions, perhaps save certain reconsiderations in the last few weeks, but now the simple padding touch of his boy’s fingers seemed to have the force of a thousand pulling hands. It was everything I could do to heed his mother’s unspoken (though readily clear) wishes and keep a dignified face and uneventfully leave him until our next time together, which was as yet unarranged.