A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

met. I did learn several facts about her that I was surprised I hadn’t found out before. For example, she was a summa cum laude graduate of Mount Holyoke College, and served as a WAVE during the Second World War. There was a picture with the notice, but one taken from her early middle-age, which I supposed was how her children best wished to remember her, in the high glow and prime of her life.
    We first met on our street, right in front of my house. I had lived there a number of years, but as it mostly is in towns like Bedley Run, and particularly on streets like ours, being neighbors meanssharing the most limited kinds of intimacies, such as sewer lines and property boundaries and annual property tax valuations. Anything that falls into a more personal realm is only tentatively welcomed. I know certain families have enjoyed relationships because of their children, had carpools and holiday barbecues, and perhaps a shared weekend at a country house upstate or on the Long Island shore, but on the whole an unwritten covenant of conduct governs us, a signet of cordiality and decorum, in whose ethic, if it can be called such a thing, the worst wrong is to be drawn forth and disturbed.
    From the time I moved here, I was very fortunate to understand the nature of these relations. Even when I received welcome cards and sweets baskets from my immediate neighbors, I judged the exact scale of what an appropriate response should be, that to reply with anything but the quiet simplicity of a gracious note would be to ruin the delicate and fragile balance. And so this is exactly what I did, in the form of expensive, heavy-stock cards, each of which I took great care to write in my best hand. Each brief thank-you was different, though saying the same thing, and I know that this helped me gain quick acceptance from my Mountview neighbors, especially given my being a foreigner and a Japanese. And as I’ve already intimated, they all seemed particularly surprised and pleased that I hadn’t run over to their houses with wrapped presents and invitations and hopeful, clinging embraces; in fact, I must have given them the reassuring thought of how safe they actually were, how shielded, that an interloper might immediately recognize and so heed the rules of their houses.
    But Mary Burns, somehow, decided to breach that peace with me. I was planting pachysandra in fresh beds beside the driveway, when I heard someone say, “Do you always work so hard?”
    I turned around and saw a woman in faded red slacks and a sleeveless white blouse, a white velvety band holding back her sliver-streaked flaxen hair. She stood where the drive met the street. She wore delicate suede loafers and no socks, and I recall noting the differences in skin tone between her arms and shoulders and neck, and the narrow white shock of her ankles.
    “You’ve been working all weekend, I know,” she said, her hands locked behind her in an almost girlish pose. “And last weekend, too. Never anybody to help.”
    I stood up and brushed the moist sod from my knees. For the last few weekends, I’d been digging up the grass along the driveway, turning it over, breaking it down, and was only now planting. I recognized her face, but of course I didn’t know who she was, and when she introduced herself by saying we were neighbors, I was immediately ashamed. I fumbled with my work gloves to shake her hand.
    “Will you allow me to learn your name?” she asked with mirth.
    “I’m very sorry,” I said, feeling completely disheveled. “I am Franklin Hata.”
    “You’re the doctor,” she said knowingly, releasing her firm handshake.
    “No, I’m not,” I told her. “People call me Doc, but I’m not a physician. I own the medical supply store in the village. Many years ago some customers and other merchants got to calling me that, and somehow it stuck. I wish sometimes it wasn’t so, but nobody seems to want to call me Franklin. I don’t mind, but I would never wish to