A Week as Andrea Benstock

For there was only so much time available. He knew that he was not going to live forever, and now she knew it, too. Oh, he could live for a great many years. It was by no means impossible. He had made a good recovery, and men with a similar medical history often, lived to be very old men. But she sensed that he knew this would not be true in his case, and she for her part was convinced it would not. The heart attack had made him an old man and a sick man, and however much the doctors talked about the good recovery he had made, age and sickness showed themselves to her in his face. He was in his middle sixties, and she could not say that he looked older or younger than his years. But she could say, though it hurt to do so, that he looked like a man who did not have very much time.

And of course there had to be things he knew that she ought to know. He was a wise man. She had always known that, had never in adolescence made the mistake of thinking her parents to be foolish people. She had thought frequently that they had made terrible compromises with life, that her father should have been able to be the doctor he’d wanted to be instead of settling for dentistry, that her mother should have had a chance to develop her own talents instead of settling, however willingly, into life as a housewife. But that, even when she had been most rebellious, had been as far as she ever went, and she had never begun to question her father’s essential wisdom.

Sometimes these days she held elaborate conversations with him in her own mind. At night when she I couldn’t sleep, or during the day when Robin was taking her nap, she might find herself in a corner of her mind telling her father things she had never told him in actuality. She might talk about her marriage, or about the numbness she felt sometimes, as if the fingers and toes of her soul were losing their ability to feel.

They were not really conversations, these fancied discussions she had with him. Because he never offered any response. She would talk and he would draw her out, but when it was time for him to comment the conversation would come to an end.

And when they were alone together, not in her mind but in actual fact, they never did talk about any of the things that had seemed so vitally important. Instead they talked about nothing at all. It was pleasant, simply being with him, relaxing in easy conversation, but it was also frustrating that they were not saying what she somehow felt had to be said.

At times she sensed that he too had things he wanted to tell her. At other times she thought she was merely projecting her own feelings onto him. But whatever that ultimate wise conversation might be, they had not yet had it. Would they ever? Should they?

She was losing him. Just as she seemed to be losing all the other parts of her life. They grew cold. They burned themselves out. And she sat and watched, and couldn’t quite reach out to them.