the group. Solome decided to make a dessert. There were three couples, two unmarried sisters named Forman, and a man who came without his wife. The minister and his wife also sometimes attended.
The group was amazed at the Savard’s house. Solome could tell by the way they looked at the room. Didn’t they know she was the wife of a provost? She wished it were something she could hide. The man who came without his wife was the only one who didn’t seem impressed.
Mrs. Croft, the minister’s wife, thought Solome could do everything as she tasted her dessert. Flattery should have been her name.
The Bible study group was a fast-paced crowd, Stephen told her with irritation when they left.
“Do you want me to quit?” Solome asked.
“Do what you want.”
The minister’s wife had a drifty presence. She could be everything to nearly everyone. Solome admired her resistance to getting stuck in one place— Her wide berth.
Solome was who she was. But who was she? And why did she have the feeling she was on the swift current of a river moving toward a sea from which there was no return? Or sometimes she felt like she was on a river with a steep waterfall ahead. Would the river just stop, and she would find herself mid-air?
On Sunday morning at church, the group studied the travels of Paul in Acts. In the old class, the one Stephen and Solome had attended for years, the Fidelis class, they had speakers, and not much talk about the Bible.
Stephen Savard
“Brian and Soos need a small loan,” Solome told me at lunch on Sunday.
“Let them go to the bank,” I answered. I wanted to change the subject. I wanted to tell her I was embarrassed I had forgotten a colleague’s name as we left church. But Solome wanted to talk to me about their youngest daughter.
“Soos called yesterday— She has enough pressure in her marriage.”
“They weren’t in church,” I said. “They said they would be there.”
Solome looked at me. “Maybe the baby wasn’t well.”
“Maybe they spend too much money.”
“It takes a lot of money, Stephen. Susanna doesn’t work so she can take care of Susan. I don’t see why we can’t help them.”
“Because they’re dependent enough as it is.”
“No, they’re not,” Solome argued. “They handle their finances.”
“Then why are they asking for money?”
“The interest they have to pay on their Visa card— ”
“Tell them not to buy so much,” I offered.
“I think they buy what is necessary.”
“Solome— ”
I knew she could hear my impatience.
“ — that’s their problem.”
“But you give Mark what he wants— ” Solome protested.
“Didn’t we just help Brian and Soos?”
“That was Gretchen,” Solome said. “And when did you talk to Susanna— when did she say they’d be in church?”
I looked at her. “When she called.”
“I talked to her yesterday,” Solome said. “You weren’t here— ”
“She called later— ” I got up from the table. “You give them the money they’re asking for,” I said angrily, and left the dining room and went to my study.
Solome couldn’t let go of the fact that I wasn’t responsible for my forgetfulness. I knew she thought my forgetfulness was to spite her. Why would I do that?
Solome Savard
The radio station was full of static, fading in and out. Solome listened to it at night as she fell asleep, so Stephen’s snoring wouldn’t keep her awake. Solome remembered when she had returned with her parents Sunday nights from Crane Lake or after visiting her grandparents in Hastings, Minnesota, and they would hear a station in Mexico.
When she first had the children, Solome couldn’t handle the feedings, changings, spills, colic, erratic sleep patterns, the predictability of the messes. She worked all through the day and ended up at the same place each evening, exhausted, frayed, with another pile of laundry, another pile of toys scattered over the house. Stephen’s voice had pulled her through. He had called during the day, sometimes leaving between his history classes at Cobson College to eat lunch with them. Her mother helped too. But it was Stephen who talked her through the crises.
Jane Mead, her friend since high school, was always going through a crisis of her own making. Most of the time, it was Solome who listened to Jane.
In the years that followed, Solome often thought about how long it took to raise the children. Fifteen more years before they were grown. Ten more. Five more. She felt the long haul of cooking, cleaning, car-pooling. The school activities. But again, it was Stephen’s voice she heard. Now Solome was on a smooth course. Hadn’t she earned it with her responsible life? But what if Stephen’s signal was fading? NO!
She felt the thought of losing Stephen. It was a tremor in her bedrock. Was she like one of those animals who could foresee an earthquake? Whose erratic behavior gave a signal it was going to happen?
Sometimes Solome remembered the tumult of their family history. How children tore up expectations, went their own way, stretched the family into territories the parents wouldn’t have gone. But now it was Stephen who was slipping. He could remember fifty years ago, but where was yesterday? He was not yet 60 years old. How could this happen? It still seemed like they were just beginning. Was the end already here? Did it all pass that quickly?
Sometimes he stood in the kitchen while she fixed supper. Sometimes she looked at him. “Do you know where you are?” Solome asked.
“Of course, I’m in the kitchen.”
“What are you standing there for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit down. Look at the paper. I’ll have supper ready soon.”
Sometimes she could hear his childhood when he shared an old memory with her. Sometimes he struggled for the words he wanted. It was Stephen who first mentioned the word, “Alzheimer’s.” What would she do if their light went out? What would she do without marriage? What if their language together fractured and shut down?
Often, her husband stumbled over his words. Trickster language. Taking as it had once given. Full of fractured words broken off from other languages, making new words that then joined with others. Wasn’t it Noah Webster who imposed uniformity of spelling on words? Otherwise, her American language would be more like water, which it was. How often she thought of Crane Lake.
“We could move to a smaller house,” Stephen told her at supper. But where would the children stay when they came for a visit? Solome asked. Where would someone stay if she needed help with Stephen? When she needed help with Stephen, she thought.
What was she thinking? Maybe Stephen was just overworked. Yes. There were financial and political decisions at Cobson. A department to be eliminated. There was tension between faculty members. There was a starkness in academia, despite the festive caps and robes the professors wore during convocations and graduations and official events. Maybe that was the reason for the robes. There was student unrest and editorials protesting college policies in the student newspaper. Didn’t pressure cause forgetfulness? Yes, it did. Maybe Stephen needed to rest. Then he’d pull out of it.
Stephen Savard
I was in a meeting with the president and several faculty members who were protesting a change— opposing it— the elimination of their department. Arguing for their case. After the meeting,