Michael Thériault
A Day of Grace
Teddy was a block from the house, off to get coffee for himself and Joanna, when he realized he’d forgotten his cap. He always wore a cap outdoors. A dozen of them, baseball caps and trucker hats, assorted in age and discoloration, awaited on pegs by the front door. He became aware of the cap’s absence not from the morning cool on the scalp exposed by his thinning black hair, but from a sensation that something had touched the crown of his head ever so lightly and briefly. His hand, going up, found nothing but the hair, no object to account for a touch, and no cap.
He decided against returning for one. The shouting was too recent. Left alone, Joanna might stew and grow angrier or might calm down. Staying away a good half hour, Teddy figured, gave better odds of calm.
To his surprise, after the touch on the head he felt not driven along by the argument, as before, but as though his thoughts ran down the sidewalk ahead. Something in the day had changed. He paid little attention to birds ordinarily, except to know their names, but now he heard from the clotted foliage of a Victorian box above him the chatter of twenty-three, and not just as mass of sound, but each bird’s vocalizations distinct. He looked up. House sparrows moved along and between branches, behind leaves, back into view. He told himself they must be searching for food, but his perception exploded this plain thought into myriad small gestures in service of the search: Cocks of head, flutters and angles of wing, openings and closings and half-openings of beak.
The three blocks to the café all passed in this multiplication, extension, new distinction of perceptions, as though he walked through rain and every drop pelting him was at once like and unlike every other. A clump of weed, Judean pellitory, clung to a low garden wall of native graywacke. He was sure that he saw sap flowing in its thin red stems and that he heard its quivering leaves’ stomata breathe. A minute displacement between the sides of a sidewalk crack revealed itself part of the movement of the land one side of it and the land the other, a movement extending to the San Andreas a few miles distant. Aswirl on the air were scents not just of eucalyptus, the closest of which was blocks away, but of kelp washed ashore, and this with Ocean Beach almost as far as the fault. Two ravens alternated elaborate caws, and Teddy heard very nearly speech, and understood it with no notion of how to say what he understood.
Thrilled, frightened, fortified, overcome, he attained somehow the café counter and greeted the dark-haired, ponytailed woman at the cash register. In her smile as Teddy ordered his latte and Joanna’s mocha with dollop of whipped cream he saw – How did he see? Maybe by a volume in her lips slightly greater than usual, a darker tone of carmine, a faint throbbing– long kisses scant hours before.
He had longer to watch the woman at the espresso machine. When with short strong brown fingers she pushed back behind her ear a wavy strand of dark hair that had strayed from her snood, the gesture recounted to him young children with her in a sequence of morning bus rides starting under streetlights. Two names, a boy’s and a girl’s – Diego, Celia – came to him; he had just enough Spanish to recognize them as names. Are these things I know? – thought Teddy – How would I know them?
His fingers trembled as he took the paper cups.
He saw ripples of heat traverse the cardboard.
The rain of perception sometimes harder, sometimes softer, he found his way home. Inside the front gate even the three cans for the City’s garbage and recycling service shone with a brilliance that their very ordinary colors – black for trash, blue for recycling, green for compostables –seemed hardly to accommodate. He saw now for the first time the graffiti inked down the side of the composting can. One in black clearly said “Lords.” He tried to decipher whether another, highly stylized, in rose, said “Boost” or “Beast” or “Best,” but suddenly he understood that it was all these at once, and the rose had the glow of fresh petals through which sunlight passed, and within “Lords” the black swirled as would, he thought, squid’s ink in green water.
He had to tell Joanna, to bring her to see, despite the morning’s argument, despite the curtain between them dark and heavy with so many arguments now decades into their marriage that he had begun to despair of opening it.
He gave her the mocha. “Thanks,” she said, not looking at him, the word hardly audible.
He knew no better way to say it; he said simply, “Come outside, please.”
She turned and narrowed her hazel eyes to examine him.
“Please,” he said again, and gestured toward the stair and front door.
In silence, she and her mocha followed him out.
He raised an arm toward the three cans and the graffiti. “What do you see?” he said.
She looked at them. Eyes again narrowed, she looked Teddy up and down. “I see,” she said, “all three need washing, and you’ll have to find something to remove what somebody scribbled there.”
To his astonishment, her failure or refusal to see what was so clear angered him not at all. He felt instead an ache for her senses to know what his now did, and this not from pity, but from a tenderness, an affection so complete that he wondered if it was even possible that he had ever felt it before.
“Is that it?” she said.
His lips moved without words. He had none. He nodded.
Sipping mocha, she returned inside.
They had shopping to do. This had occasioned the earlier argument. The supermarket was five blocks away. He didn’t consider the shopping list long. She disagreed. He’d said they should walk, for load-bearing exercise, good for aging bones, all that. By the time he was back with coffee and they’d finished it the sun would be higher, the morning more comfortable. She complained often about the spread of her hips, said she should do something about it. He’d known better than to address this directly. “It’ll do us both good,” he’d said, “and I’ll carry the heavy stuff home.”
But, no, this was what the car was for, to carry things; she insisted on driving.
After their coffee he started the car with her beside him and pulled it out across the sidewalk and past the Chinese elm with its thousands of leaves vibrating in desire for the sunlight, which was thickening into a kind of syrup. He drove slowly and with arduous attention to the task, because the world swarmed.
The supermarket had lately become a succession of disagreements culminating in angry silence in the checkout line: Low-fat or nonfat? Thin- or thick-sliced? Sweetened, unsweetened? Today he walked the aisles beside her and saw the touch of human hands in everything on the shelves, to the point of hearing – did he in fact hear it? – pulse through wrists, and no dispute entered his thought. The sensation peaked in the produce section, where the touch seemed less mediated by production and packing machines and the sound was unquestionable. Joanna held up in her left hand an artichoke as though expecting he’d dispute her choice of it, want one rounder or with milder spines. He saw also two leather-gloved hands, a knife, a field near Castroville, and heard the iambs of blood. He smiled
Then he noted the hand now holding the artichoke wore no wedding band.
His silence in the checkout line this time came not from the typical surfeit of anger, but from a mix of wonder at the chaotic variation of creases at the seams of the Mylar celebration balloons floating for sale nearby and of despair at what seemed a message of finality for his marriage of thirty-eight years. Joanna, too, was silent here as usual, but twice she turned to him as though an uncontentious trip through the aisles had left her with unfinished business, only now both times to see him and turn away, to appearance puzzled.
He drove them home safely despite the dance of a white plastic bag up the street before him on eddying breezes, to a music he could hear but not quite, in a choreography beyond human, for a thing not simply a thing.
She had laundry waiting to be done once groceries were put away. Awaiting him was painting the front fence. The work accorded perfectly with what the day had given him. The flow from each brush stroke into the rough, weathered surfaces of the redwood planks invited another brush stroke, and this another, flow succeeding flow, the surface over which each spread and into which it penetrated varying at once subtly and spectacularly from adjacent surfaces. Tiny moths and flies attached themselves by instances to the wet paint. He heard their cries. He understood their doom. He apologized to each as he plucked it from paint and gave it a merciful end against the dropcloth at the fence’s base.
In this way he reached lunchtime.
Joanna had prepared her lunch but not his.
From the refrigerator he brought sliced ham, jack cheese, two lettuce leaves, and a mustard jar to the kitchen counter.
The mustard jar was almost empty.
“The mustard jar is almost empty,” he said to no one, really, although Joanna was still at the kitchen table.
“I told you I was making a list this morning,” she said.
She had indeed told him, when she drank her mocha and he his latte and the brilliance of City waste cans and of urban calligraphy dazzled him. The hands in the supermarket aisles had amplified the dazzling.
“You see, that’s a thing I’ve been talking about,” she said. “Even in piddling little things we’ve stopped communicating. In big things….” She filled the ellipsis with opposing side-to-side waves of upturned palms.
He held too much to communicate just then.
“We’ve had thirty-eight years to figure this out,” she said. “We haven’t figured it out.”
He had never felt the mix of despair and exaltation he felt now. What was it they hadn’t figured out? It mattered completely; it mattered not at all. All the yeast that had given itself to the sponge of his slices of bread, the massed final breaths of innumerable organisms fixed in its pores! The quiet pleasure of the cows in the mechanical tugging of their teats and in the ruminant sounds of the herd up and down the milking shed! The triumphant power of the lettuce leaves – so frail in appearance and between teeth – as gales galloped from Monterey Bay up the Salinas Valley and over them! The hog that, trotting with others to the smothering chamber, squealed an ode to death!
“I’m making a sandwich,” he said. He meant this not to avoid response, but to state overwhelming fact.
Joanna, however, seemed to hear avoidance. She brought her plate and glass to the sink but did not wash them. Her back to him, she flung a dismissive hand up and left the kitchen.
He did not return to painting. Wind had come up and street grit and dead leaves of the Chinese elm flew and threatened to affix themselves to fresh paint. He went to the back garden instead.
He met the great mass of grays and dusky green of the neighbor’s Monterey pine, all windflung gesture, broad at scale of trunk and limb, tremulous and delicate at that of needle.
He stared long at it.
He pulled himself away at last to shovel compost from its bin into a bucket and spread it on beds and fork it into the sandy soil, but not the red wrigglings of earthworms nor the globular desperations of pill bugs kept him from stopping again and again to stare at the pine.
He escaped the pine’s grasp only when darkness in the crevices of its bark spread and thickened. It was time to make dinner.
He brought in sorrel and arugula to add to the refrigerator’s lettuce for the salad he would prepare. Joanna began a spaghetti alla carbonara. The intricate dance of two in a small kitchen, halts and pivots, pauses of knife blades, turn-taking at cabinet and refrigerator, at pot rack and sink and table was one they had perfected in the thirty-eight years, so that, despite its many possibilities for conflict, it was a time of day in which they never argued. He managed his part in the dance well enough this evening, despite the draw – powerful at moments – on his attention of the wildly disparate paths of the leaves’ tearing at his hands.
This truce had ended lately when they sat for dinner. Tonight, before she had twirled the first forkful of pasta, in fact with fork poised above bowl, she looked across the table into his eyes and opened her mouth as though to speak.
Not at all because of his expectation of argument, her hazel eyes made him ache.
Something in his must have stilled her. She lowered her gaze. She worked her fork.
Dinner passed with no sound but fork against bowl or plate and the infrequent slurp of a stray end of noodle. Teddy’s head was too aswarm for speech. Twice more Joanna did look up and open her mouth not as destination for food – once before reaching for oil and vinegar, once after a sip of wine – but both times her eyes met Teddy’s, again to quieting effect.
Together mute, they brought the empty dishes to the sink. He reached for a towel to dry, but instead of washing she caught his hand and led him back to the table. She sat and indicated the chair, not across the table, but next to hers. He took it. She took both his hands.
“You’ve been…,” she said, and paused.; “I don’t know what, today. Sweet, maybe. Or scared, or lost. You’d think I’d know, after so many years, but today you’re … different.”
Her voice was like the wind through the pine that afternoon.
“I’ve wanted to be angry,” she said, “maybe because that would make this easier. But I’m not angry. You’ve taken that out of me. It may be hard, but I can’t be anything but straight up. It’s only fair to you.”
“Your voice is like the wind through the pine,” Teddy found himself saying.
She sat back suddenly but did not release his hands, and he did not lean forward to the tug, so that their arms, joined and stretched, were taut almost as stays on a mast, guys on a tower. “What does that…,” she said, looking flustered. “You…,” she said. Then her face regained its usual firm cast. She again leaned forward. “The pine…. The pine is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. I was in the yard a few weeks ago, looking across the fence at it, and the morning sun was beautiful in it. It was full of birds. It came to me, ‘I have no desire to share this with Teddy.’”
She squeezed his hands.
“I was fine with being alone,” she said. “And I realized, not just then, there, fine with being alone. Always, being alone.”
Teddy didn’t know what to say. Now it was her words that made him ache. He did not want her hands to release his. For a moment he detested everything about himself and despised this day, which seemed to have crippled him, deprived of him of any response; how could anyone live amid such unrelenting beauty?
Somehow the moment passed.
Still not knowing what to say, he said, with no intention of saying it, “The juncos, they were up and down, pine to the ground, back up, and every move, their tails flashed white each side and said something, signaled something, something specific, but I saw it was private, not for me, theirs. The chickadees stayed up above, hanging from twigs, and I saw upside-down, and same time right-side up, like them. A house finch up top was singing, red-faced, its voice was too big for it, it was a flute, a wild flute, the tree danced to it. But the tree didn’t dance to the trumpets, two of them, stubby-tailed, climbing in spirals up the trunk, nuthatches, you call them, nuthatches but they were Gabriels, announcing, I understood them: Something was being born, or reborn. There was one small bird, yellow stripe above and below its eye, yellow on its chest, some warbler, I think, and it moved so quick through the branches, and I tried to see why, and I saw it stitch together the world.”
Her eyes went up and down his face, back and forth, to his eyes, away, to them. He was sure he had confused her.
It came to him that he could happily live out his days with this in her, this sweet confusion, and in himself.
Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, half a dozen stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by numerous publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Overheard, and Sky Island Journal. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.
