Catch, Release

MADAME IDA Although Cloris and Hattie Finnerty, Ida’s young neighbors , can be depended upon to feed Ida’s cat and bring in the newspaper , they also like to riffle through her mail when she is away, culling out the magazines and catalogs they fancy and leaving the rest in a tidy throwaway stack in the milk bin inside the kitchen door. Bills and the rare letter are carelessly mixed within the pile, and are, as Ida has discovered from past experience, exceptionally easy to overlook. So, on returning from a visit to her sister Joanie, Ida combs patiently through the little girls’ rejects, and in this way she finds, slipped between the pages of a glossy four-page advertisement for a foreign language program, a flat, pale blue envelope with a sketched flower border addressed to her only child, Dave. The printed black letters are loopy and aggressive, a little alphabetical brass band, cymbals and horns blasting out her son’s name as if to accentuate a second message, a bright red sticker plastered crookedly along the bottom of the envelope: Urgent. Immediate attention, please! Over a year ago, Dave had given up on his six-year struggle for a PhD in physical science and shocked everyone by finagling a position at an all boys’ school in France. There he began teaching English and, in record time, also married the school secretary, a divorcée named Marie-Therese. The wedding party was too hastily assembled, apparently , to allow for Ida’s attendance. The couple sent her an attractive announcement—ecru edged in gold—which was Dave’s way of saying, once and for all, that he wasn’t coming home. Catch, Release Her son does not like Ida to forward his mail. He would like her to destroy the occasional piece with his name on it, ripping each envelope into tiny squares and scattering the pieces into the trash. But those other letters don’t smell faintly of lilac bath powder, nor do they bear the slight imprint of a teacup as this one does. On the back of those envelopes, no one has doodled a caricature of Dave himself, complete with his new tiny eyeglasses, the ones that make him look like an intelligent insect. The drawing portrays the cartoon Dave caught in a forest of slim birch-like trees, each bearing a semblance of his own face. One of the cartoon Dave’s hands is outstretched toward the envelope’s flower border. A delicate ink trumpet vine curves sensuously toward his open palm, barely missing contact. Ida is startled by how closely the drawing resembles her view of her son. It’s as if someone has rendered the heart of Dave as she sees it. The mystery deepens: the envelope lacks a return address, and even the stamp has been removed, leaving only the faint smudge of an unintelligible postmark. A careful slice with the letter opener reveals that it is, indeed, an empty envelope. No, this isn’t an ordinary solicitation , she decides, but an entire personality occupying her kitchen counter, caterwauling for attention. Her suitcase still squats on the back porch, and she hasn’t yet removed the blue blazer she wears for traveling, but Ida remains in reverie, the envelope still in hand, until a loud internal mewling stirs her and she puts the envelope aside to consider the subject of supper. Last night, Joanie had taken her to an East Indian restaurant that recently opened on the edge of her Indiana suburb. They’d driven twelve miles to the restaurant, which was situated in an old semi-abandoned mall next to a grocery store called Sub-Rite. Her sister dragged her into Sub-Rite, as well, to buy a carton of cigarettes. Apparently one of the charms of the East Indian restaurant was that they allowed smoking “everywhere.” Or so Joanie claimed, although Ida knew that [148.135.83.86] Project MUSE (2024-11-24 18:10 GMT) Madame Ida couldn’t be true. There were laws now about smoking sections. She, herself, would kick the habit if she could, and she often asked to sit in non-smoking sections to force herself to be good. Something was wrong with the supermarket’s lighting. The fluorescent bulbs not only flickered, they flashed from time to time as if an itinerant photographer was at work recording the shabbiness of the place. The carton of cigarettes Ida’s sister bought was crushed at one end...