The Wait

As old Jules waited for Reva’s arrival, he attempted to acknowledge, however impossible it may have been to do so successfully, his brain’s own deterioration. Jules imagined sleeping on his side, and a marble falling slowly out of his own ear, one each night, dropping to the floor and rolling under the bed, to hide with the gathering dust.

He was on his living room couch, feet up, reading The New Yorker. He checked his phone. No texts yet. Reva’s plane was due to arrive soon and she’d text him when she landed in LA. It’d be another two hours before her rental car arrived on Maple Avenue. He began to doze.

The daydream took Jules to August, 1980. Whatever had held Jules and Lisa in that domestic dance of marriage and mortgage and emotionally-charged coupledom, whatever rope they’d knotted together, sharing their love and their lives was fraying. Lisa was sleep-deprived. Reva had just turned eight, heading into third grade. Lisa was folding the laundry, while Jules was finishing up at the sink, with the dishes. As Lisa was putting Reva to bed, Jules was putting the folded laundry back in the dressers.

He held t-shirts, putting them in piles, noticing some of his shirts were inside-out. The necks displayed the seams, as if to highlight the fact that these shirts were simply pieces of cloth, sewn together. Jules considered how so many seams were hidden from view. How so much of life was delicately stitched together. The seams were always unraveling. The word “unraveled” floated through Jules’ mind. Where did “ravel” come from?

Jules went over to his office and sat down at his desk. He looked it up in the dictionary. To “ravel” meant both to tangle and to untangle. The word ravel meant the same as unravel. To see things tangling or untangling. Jules thought of the hose he used to water the garden. How strange, all of life’s raveling.

Upon seeing the inside-out shirts, Jules looked up at the ceiling, above which little Reva lay in bed listening to Lisa’s voice, reading Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. Jules wondered if Lisa was okay, but it’d be another six years before Lisa ejected herself, or chose to ravel or unravel. Jules turned the inside-out t-shirts back. The inside was now inside and the outside was outside.

Jules went for a walk around the neighborhood, pondering the state of the world. There was the eruption of Mount St. Helens, 100 miles east of Seattle. The hostage crisis in Iran lingered like a black cloud over the country. Inflation was impacting everyone and devastating the middle class. The Summer Olympics weren’t televised due to the U.S. boycott of Russia, after the invasion of Afghanistan. Why had the Olympic committee even chosen Moscow as the site to begin with? Then there was the upcoming presidential election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In every aspect of life, Jules could sense a kind of unraveling.

As he strolled the leafy suburban blocks of his neighborhood, Jules was grateful for his own job security, but Lisa’s community-based art classes had lost students each year for the last three years and it wasn’t clear if she’d have work in September.

Reva was growing so fast. Her long legs had grown past the edge of the bed months earlier. Jules had put her new big-girl bed together in June. Jules and Lisa bought Reva a little desk, and put it in the corner of her room, moving the dollhouse. She was a student now. Jules became emotional for a second, considering his little girl wasn’t little anymore.

Life seemed to blur. Only the grade number provided a reference point. Coming soon: third grade. As he walked, Jules shuddered to think of Reva hitting puberty at 12 or 13.

Lisa had stopped discussing her fears with Jules years ago. Her swings of emotion took her deeper into her abstract oils, her late-night joints and her weekend trips to see her sister. Jules knew she needed to teach her art class. Needed the stability of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in a collaborative environment to get her out of her own head. As Jules and Lisa drifted apart, they continued to hold Reva at the center. But what would happen as Reva retreated into her room, wanting more independence?

Sleepy Jules awoke with pins and needles in his leg. He needed to pee. He lowered his feet and slapped at his dead leg. Slowly, he rose and shuffled over to the bathroom. How strange the mind was, traveling back 40 years without warning. His wonderful Reva would be living with him again. No longer an eight-year-old. As he peed, Jules thought of Lisa flying on that plane to Barcelona. How he’d always narrated the pivotal moments of his life story to others, how his life had swerved off course then. But maybe it was 1980. Losing the art class. The volcano. The hostage crisis impacting Lisa’s sense of the world, safety. The inside-out shirts.

Maybe all the moments mattered.