Elizabeth Wagner

With Cedar

My stomach gets tight every time I drive to pick up Cedar. My heart beats too fast. At every stoplight I tell myself I’ll turn around, I’ll go back to my apartment. But then I see Cedar rolling his walker down the front walk of his house, and I’m smiling, not thinking about my stomach, only sometimes about my heart.

I wait to get out and help him until he’s close to my car.  The first time I came, I got out right away, when he was not even half way down the walk, and his sister opened the front door and shouted, “No!” as though I were a disobedient pet.  She must have noticed the way that I jumped, not used to being spoken to that way, not used to being spoken to at all, really. “He can do it on his own,” she added, in a voice that was encouraging, more to me than to Cedar.

Cedar seemed more interested in helping me understand.  His face brightened, his eyes opened wide like they were speaking.  And they were speaking, I realized, as I widened my eyes to answer him. I felt a click between us, like he knew I understood, and he immediately became animated, taking one hand off his walker and motioning me closer with a jerky flutter.  “Hey,” he said, because he hadn’t yet learned to pronounce my name, and then he started to say a lot of things I couldn’t understand, pointing down the road repeatedly and then bending his tentative knees a little deeper, to get something from the walker’s basket.  “Come and see,” he said, and I did. I stood beside him and watched as he took out a spiral notebook. He dropped the book on the ground, its pages splayed open on the pavement, and then he produced and discarded a sweatshirt, a flashlight, a portable radio.  The radio broke open and the batteries rolled down the walk toward my car.  “Oh no,” he said, his voice despondent and certain, but soon enough he laughed: one of the batteries picked up speed over a dip in the concrete and was launched into the gutter. 

I laughed, too, and ran down the walk to pick up the batteries.  I was happy on my hands and knees, trying to make sure I found them all. But when I turned to show Cedar that I had them, I saw that he was on the ground also.  His sister was running down the walk to help him up. 

“Do you want him to end up in the hospital?” she hissed to me, when I was squatting beside them. I tried to catch Cedar’s attention with my eyes, widening them like he had done, but his eyes weren’t speaking to me now.  I put my hand on the back of his neck, very gently, felt the cool skin of another person. His sister and I tried to get our bodies under his arms, so that he could push himself up.  He grimaced and bit his tongue and I held his rough hand over my shoulder, trying to stay calm, trying to hold back the tears that hovered around the rims of my eyes.  Eventually Cedar was standing.  “Whew,” I heard him say, almost sarcastically, as I picked up his sweatshirt and his flashlight. I picked up his notebook and saw many pages covered with shaky lines drawn in different colored ink, like light refracted through a prism.

“What are you looking for?” Cedar’s sister asked him, straightening the collar of his polo shirt. I put the notebook in his basket and watched beads of sweat glimmer on the sides of his face. 

“My wallet,” he said, very clearly. 

“It’s in your pocket,” his sister said, tapping the side of his leg.  “Remember?”

“You,” he said, in an accusing tone.

“He wants to go shopping,” his sister said to me and turned back to Cedar.  “You can shop after work,” she said, signing something.

Over the previous few weeks, I had taught myself the ASL alphabet from a little card someone had handed me once in the subway, in the city where I used to live; I saw now how inadequate that would be, how inadequate I was.  His sister signed full words, rattling them off in a complete sentence, and Cedar read them just as quickly, though he couldn’t always make his hands respond. 

“No,” he said to her and then something else that I couldn’t understand, something that sounded a lot like, “Back at ‘cha, bitch.” 

It made his sister laugh.  “Same to you and many more,” she said and he let go of the walker with one hand again, to wave her way. I stepped toward him, understanding, finally, the importance of holding on with both hands. He only muttered something and moved past me. His sister started to turn away, but she must have had a second thought because she stopped and put her hand on my back, a gesture that I initially mistook as friendly. “This better be the worst thing that happens to him today,” she said, the hiss much quieter this time. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d added, “Or else,” and slashed her hand across her throat.

Now Cedar and I have a better system.  I open the passenger door for him and when he has a good grasp of it, I take his walker and fold it up, put it into the trunk next to my tripods, all four of them, which I can’t bring myself to sell or give away.  I get into the driver’s seat and shut my door, wait for Cedar to close his own door and put on his seatbelt.  Sometimes Cedar does this rather quickly, but, other times, not so much. “Hot dog?” he asks me, looking up from his wallet, which he is suddenly reorganizing. 

“Sure,” I say, “For lunch.  First we have to fold the towels.”

“Okay,” he says as, hands shaking, he straightens a small stack of wrinkled coupons he’s cut from the Sunday newspaper, the ones he keeps mixed in with his cash. 

“They need your help,” I say. “They’re waiting for you.  First you have to shut your door and put on your seatbelt.”

Cedar points to the radio.

I start the engine. “We have to go,” I say and watch his face as I press down on the accelerator. The engine revs and he gives me a wry look, like I’m funny but not as funny as I think. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” I say, now that I have his attention, not knowing where this energy is coming from. I think I might be excited, ready to turn up the music, to feel the car gliding away from the curb, to turn out of the subdivision and across the highway onto the beach road.  I put my hand on Cedar’s hand and lean toward him, so that my forehead is against his and I’m looking down at what he is looking down at, 50 cents off Cheez-Its.  “I like those, too,” I say and can’t help breathing in the smell of him. He smells warm and yeasty, like a baby, but he’s also wearing nice cologne, an incensey musk.

“You,” Cedar says, teasing me, and he holds the coupon up, starts giving me directions. “Over there,” he says.

“Let’s go,” I say, and rev the engine again.

“Yeah,” he says, happy now, and then he puts his hand on my arm. “I’ll do it,” he says, though it costs him substantial effort to lean forward and pull the car door shut.

“Nice work,” I say and rev the engine a final time.  I am beginning to understand why young men soup up their cars so that they scream and sputter away from stoplights. 

“Hey,” Cedar says, making his voice enthusiastic like mine. I feel flattered.  He puts his hand on my arm again and says, “Watch.”

I watch as he puts on his seatbelt, his face tight with concentration until the buckle clicks, at which point he smiles at me and mimics the starting judge at a race, “On your mark, get set...”

“Go,” I shout and barely remember to shift out of park before we’re off.  I feel like I’m piloting a very important plane, the silence of the majestic sky spreading out before us. I could drive around in this quiet all day, but Cedar has other ideas. He immediately gets to work choosing a CD from the book his sister gave me, music he likes to listen to in the car.  Nine times out of ten he will choose the Bob Marley album produced by Scratch Perry, and this is fine by me. His head bobs to the music, and, as we get closer to the ocean, he rolls his window down and sticks his hand out.  Even from the driver’s seat, I can feel the air changing. 

“Stop, stop,” Cedar tells me, when we pass a grocery store. 

It’s taken me five months not to slam on the breaks when he does that. “You have to go to work,” I say, and I’ve known him long enough to know that he understands that.  As we get closer to the hotel, it starts to become his joke. “Stop, stop,” he says when we pass a strip mall with a grocery store and a Walgreens, both proud purveyors of Cheez-Its.  He holds his hand up like a traffic cop. “Stop, stop, stop, stop.”

At the hotel, we sit at a long folding table in a dingy room outside the laundry, which constantly steams and shakes. There’s a giant stack of warm towels at one end of the table and piles of folded ones at the other. They’re cheap towels, rough from too much bleach. I take one from the pile and spread it out flat in front of me. I fold it in half long ways and slide it down to Cedar who folds it once more the other way and adds it to the lowest pile.  When I do my fold I say “one.” When Cedar does his he says, “two.” 

“One.”

“Two.”

“One.”

“Two.”

If we go on long enough, Cedar will eventually say three instead of two, as a joke.  I wait for him to do this today, but we keep getting interrupted.  Maria comes in, the manager of housekeeping, Cedar’s boss.  She is beautiful, with long, dark hair that flips up at the end of her shiny ponytail. It’s clear that Cedar has a soft spot for beautiful brunettes. She comes up beside him without saying anything, puts her arm around his shoulder, and kisses the top of his head.  Cedar smiles and says, “Hi,” in a voice that sounds rather bashful. “How are you?”

He says it softly but Maria hears him, even over the sound of the driers. “I don’t even know,” she says, “How are you?”

“Fine,” Cedar says, which is what he always says, and goes on folding.

Later, the weekday security guard walks past the room. A tall man with a red face who may have once dreamed of being a traffic cop. “What’s up, buddy?” he says without looking at Cedar or pausing to give him time to respond, but Cedar is used to this sort of bullshit: he doesn’t bother looking up.  On the next towel, he says, “three,” and I laugh for a long time.

After work we buy Cheez-Its from the Seven Eleven and hot dogs from Fat Boyz, take them across the street to the fishing pier that juts out farther into the ocean than anything else in town. It’s a risk to do this:  the pier is fairly busy and it’s a long way for Cedar to walk without taking a break.  It’s happened before that we couldn’t find a free bench and had to go right back to the car.  His legs were shaking by the time we got back and I had to lift them, one at a time, into the car seat, help him turn his body.  “I’m sorry,” I said, kneeling at the open door, my head resting against his elbow. He patted my head.

“Do you want to go there?” I ask him now, pointing to the pier. 

“Yeah,” Cedar says.

“Are you sure?’

“Yeah,” he says again, and this time his eyes say it, too.

I bring Cedar’s pens and his notebook and sling my smallest camera around my neck. As we walk, we ignore the tourists and the fishermen who turn to watch us. Look at the fucking pelicans, I want to tell them, but, the thing is, it doesn’t bother Cedar. He’s a people-watcher himself.  We pick a bench that faces the foot traffic on the pier, and Cedar takes note of each person who goes by, his eyes narrowing like he’s trying to figure them out.  About half of the time he makes a mark in his notebook with a pen, and sometimes he’s inspired to choose a different color.  At other times, he puts his hand on my arm, looks at me with his eyes wide, and I take a picture of whoever’s going by.  “Cheese,” he sometimes calls to the subject, so that they look over at us just as I’m opening the shutter. These pictures on the pier are more or less the first I’ve taken since last year, when I finally stopped calling myself a photographer, even in my thoughts. My entire life I’ve dreamed of magazine spreads and gallery openings, but I’ve come to understand that this dream is no more real than the dreams I have when I’m sleeping.  The visions I see when I take the photographs, the ones that compel me to act, are never present in the developed film. I never capture anything. 

It’s different, though, when I’m with Cedar.

Today we see a tidy, silent family who seem to be keeping their distance from one another, each staring out at the ocean alone as they eat ice cream.  Cedar studies them closely, especially the smallest boy who often glances at his parents.  Cedar stares so much that I begin to feel self-conscious. His mouth is hanging open. “Cedar,” I whisper, “close your mouth.”  He shakes his head then, like he’s trying to wake up. We see sun-weathered men in T-shirts cut off at the shoulders, in jeans cut off at the knees, their fishing poles sticking out of orange buckets from Home Depot. We see a toddler in a faded pink bathing suit, seemingly unaccompanied, pinballing from one side of the pier to another.  I’m afraid that she’ll wander too close, fall between the railings and slam against the shallow bottom of the water lapping at the piles, but Cedar just laughs.  He turns to me and says, “A baby,” in a cooing voice.  He shouts “Cheese, baby,” when I take her picture. Then a woman in a long flowered dress bounds after the toddler, yelling at her. Cedar doesn’t like that. “Stop,” he shouts, and everyone on the pier turns in our direction. “Hi,” Cedar says when he has their attention. He waves with a broad gesture. “How are you?”

Some of the people smile, but nobody answers his question.

“They’re fine,” I say, after a moment, but Cedar’s already watching a woman with cut-off shorts slung low on her hips, exposing the strings of her bikini and a significant portion of her dimpled behind.  Cedar turns to me with a pinched look on his face, like he either can’t understand it or he doesn’t want to. I’m not sure which until I hold up the camera, and Cedar shakes his head.

“So judgmental,” I say, but he only shrugs, turns his attention to a chocolate lab, dripping wet and smelling even more of the ocean than everything else does.  Cedar pats his hand against his thigh and the dog comes bounding over, springs his front legs into Cedar’s lap.  Cedar’s laughing, but he’s also saying, “Stop, stop.”  When the dog starts licking his face, his laughter becomes more and more helpless.

“Stop, stop,” I finally say, looking around for the owner of this stinky dog.

*

When I take Cedar home for the evening, his sister’s unhappy about the paw prints on his khaki pants.  I try to explain, but she takes a quick step toward me like she might need to defend herself. “Where were you when this was going on?” she asks.

“Sitting next to him,” I say.

Cedar’s sister looks at me like there’s no point in continuing the conversation.

My boss told me that Cedar had a terrible experience with a support person from another agency.  “He can’t always articulate what’s happening to him,” she said, staring at me over the stacks of folders that covered her desk like a miniature skyscraper city. She started to say something else, but I said, “Please, no,” without even meaning to.  “Nightmares,” I said.  I hadn’t meant to say that either.

“Tell me about it,” she said. Now she was pinching the side of one hand with the thumb and first finger of her other one, like she was trying to stop the bleeding.  I started to ask her if she was okay, but she seemed to anticipate this, intercepted it by looking down at the resume I’d given her when I came in. “You’ve never done anything like this before,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if it was a question.  Just in case, I shook my head.

As I drive back to the beach road, I try not to think about somebody hurting Cedar.  “Stop, stop,” I can hear him say. Every evening I park at the Epstein Street beach access, the one my family came to when I was a kid.  It might be the reason that I moved here.  It might be the only place in the world where very little has changed, the sand perpetually creeping toward the edges of the parking lot, the day’s abandoned buckets and broken beach chairs piled near the little bathhouse that smells like bleach.

I take the towel from my back seat, but I never bring a camera because I know I’ll just want to use it. I’ll use it and the pictures won’t do anything justice, a futile attempt to hold something that’s beautiful because it can’t be held. I climb the steps to the boardwalk over the dunes and feel a familiar sense of suspense.  There’s a moment when you can’t see anything, only dunes and grass, odd little weeds and flowers, the kind that might grow in the desert or on the moon. But one more step and there’s the Atlantic Ocean stretched out like the rest of your life, like the lives of everybody after you.  It’s the sort of thing I wish I could share with Cedar, but that’s not possible: you can’t drive a walker over a sand dune.

I spread out my towel where the tide will eventually be and pull up the hood of my sweatshirt. The sun is still warm, but you only feel it between gusts of wind, which are occasionally strong, enough to blow sand over the beach like low clouds casting shadows. “Cold,” Cedar might say, smiling, pretending to shiver. I imagine wrapping a blanket around him, pulling it snug around his chin and tucking the edges around his legs. He would appreciate the chaos of these waves, the crabs skittering, the frantic birds dashing in and out of the water.  A kite enters my field of vision now, far above me in the sky, a red and green dragon with a tongue of orange flames. The wind ruffles it, so that it dances like a costume filled with people.  I glance over my shoulder and see a man walking with the kite strings held down at his side.  He is walking the kite like you might walk a dog, or a pet dragon. I wave to the man, because I’m still pretending I’m with Cedar. The man doesn’t wave back. Soon the kite is gone and the wind settles down. I start to feel like what I really am: alone with the world as it actually is, ravenous and indifferent.

“Can you take our picture?” someone asks me after a while.  A man.  He cranes his neck so he can see my eyes under the hood of my sweatshirt. For another moment I try to pretend like he isn’t there, like this is a private place and it’s impossible that he’s intruding.  But the man’s eyes cloud over like he’s starting to feel rejected, and I feel sorry for him.  He’s dressed like an extra in a Hollywood movie about the beach, white linen shirt and khaki shorts. On his face, a day or two of stubble. “Sure,” I say and feel embarrassed that I sound angry. 

There are four people, total.  Two men, two women.  All dressed the same. The other three are already posed, and when they see me coming they smile like the picture’s already being taken.  The man who spoke to me hands me the camera and falls in line next to one of the women.  She has blonde hair and a sunburn that’s turning into a tan. 

“Let me see how this works,” I say, making my voice as friendly as possible.

“You push the button,” the blonde woman says. 

I hold the camera away from my face and try to pretend like I don’t know which button she’s talking about.

“This is their tenth anniversary,” the other woman says.  She points her finger down over the blonde woman’s head like a flashing neon arrow.  “You’re helping them relive their wedding.”

“Congratulations,” I say, but the couple doesn’t say thank you. “Cheese,” I say, but they still don’t speak.  Maybe they can’t hear me over the wind. More likely they already regret picking me for their photographer.  This is why I don’t do weddings, I want to tell someone, as if I haven’t said it a thousand times already.  If Cedar were here, he could get them to say ‘cheese.’ “Are you ready?” I shout, but they just keep smiling.  At least they don’t say they were born ready.

I try so hard to seem like I don’t know what I’m doing that the first pictures come out awful. Four small people, defenseless against the vast and darkening abyss. It’s understandable that they want to be in front of the ocean, but the light would be better if they’d turn the other way.  I move a bit closer and take a few more shots, but the people are getting squirmy, and I start to feel like a creep, like I’m showing disproportionate concern.

When I hand the camera back to the man, he frowns at the little screen, then holds the camera out for the blonde woman, his wife of ten years.  “Should we get closer?”

“It’s fine,” she says and takes a step away, ready, clearly, to get out of here. Maybe somewhere there’s a margarita with her name on it.

The man keeps scrolling through my shots.

“Let me take them again.  The light would be better if you turned.” I point down the beach, where the blue sky is fading into a remarkable shade of lilac. “I actually used to be a photographer.” It sounds like a lie.

“Oh, it’s fine,” the woman says, waving me off, “Thanks so much.”  The couples walk away, hand in hand, into the light that emanates from somewhere behind us, from the past itself.

*

When I get back to my apartment that night, I google wheelchairs designed for sand.  They all have wide tires, but some models also have beach umbrellas that clip into their frames. These are expensive pieces of equipment, but if anyone should have one, it’s Cedar. His sister does not agree with me. She actually laughs when I mention it the next week. “I can’t think of anyone who hates the beach more than Cedar.”

“It’s great people watching. He wouldn’t hate it if he didn’t have to walk.”  I look at Cedar like he might back me up, but he’s busy making himself a cup of coffee, bracing against the counter with one elbow and using his other hand to do everything else. When Cedar notices that I am looking at him, he smiles.  “See you tomorrow, thank you, goodbye,” he says, everything strung together.

I say all of the same words back to him and smile even though my heart feels broken. 

On the beach the sky is gradually hidden by dense clouds that roll toward me, a swarm of something still too distant to make out, too far away to threaten. I hold my hands up, making a frame with my fingers, and look at the water and the sky in smaller, more manageable pieces.  Each piece is worth looking at.  Just before it starts to rain, a woman jogs in front of me at the edge of the water.  A plastic bottle falls out of the weird belt she wears around her hips, but she doesn’t notice.  For a moment, the waves work at sweeping it up, taking it with them, but I intercede.  I take the bottle to the recycling bin in my apartment, where I watch reruns of cooking competition shows until a man stabs a giant knife into a cutting board and screams about how the judges are jealous of his talent. I unplug the TV because it feels more decisive that way, and go to bed, try to fall asleep. The air away from the beach is stagnant.  Nothing outside my window moves, not a branch or a blade of grass coming up through a crack in the concrete of the parking lot.  Eventually I hear the roaring of a souped up engine out on the highway. I imagine the people in that car, windows down, making their own wind.

In the middle of the night, I wake up and realize I’ve dreamt about Cedar.  We are on the high bridge over Oregon Inlet. The narrow fingers of land look fragile and lacey against the sparkling blue water, like something seen from a descending plane.  We’re in a convertible and we have the top down, and Cedar is shouting “Whoa, whoa,” happily, as I continue to increase the car’s speed. He’s laughing with his head thrown back, and I’m not afraid of how far there is to fall, were the steering wheel to slip under my fingers, were the front of this strange car to crash through the bridge’s useless rails.  I’m not afraid until I see the blue lights behind us, a whole cavalcade of flashing cars.  I know they’ll take me away and I think, what will happen to Cedar?

*

The next day it’s still raining, so after work Cedar and I go to Walgreens to get some of our film developed. Since I’m not a photographer, I try not to feel bad about not printing the pictures myself. While we wait, we walk down the grocery aisle.  One at a time, I point to things on the shelf and Cedar tells me whether or not he likes that thing.  Sometimes it’s an immediate yes or no (crackers of all varieties, yes, fruit cocktail, no), but other times he has to think about it (Fig Newtons). I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what beef jerky is. “It’s meat,” I say and he looks at me and then away, like I’ve made an embarrassing joke. He points to a box of Cheerios. “I’ll get it,” he says and shifts his weight to hold onto his walker with one hand while he reaches in his pocket for his wallet.  He hands the wallet to me, and, when I look inside, I find a coupon for Cheerios, a dollar off any box 8.9 ounces or larger.  We bring a box with us when we go back to the counter to pay for the pictures.

At Cedar’s house, I make him a bowl of Cheerios with milk and when I put it in front of him, he starts trying to tell me something very complicated, pointing to the kitchen counter. “Do you want some coffee?” I ask and he shakes his head. “Some sugar?” People put sugar on cereal sometimes, right?  I ask Cedar this question and he says no, his voice low, like it’s sad but definitely true.  I get out the communication book and ask him to point for me.  He points to the bananas.  “Ah ha,” I say, and Cedar laughs, throwing his head back. I laugh with him as I slice a banana into his bowl. “It’s nice to be understood,” I say to Cedar and he says, “Yeah,” offhandedly, just before he takes a bite.  As he chews he points to his bowl. “It’s good,” he says and then he points to me.  “No thanks,” I say because I’m afraid of how much I want that.  If I were eating Cheerios with Cedar, I could pretend that we live here together, that this is my home, too. 

We spend the rest of our time looking through the pictures and gluing the best ones into Cedar’s notebook. He knows exactly on which page each picture belongs. The page, I guess, with the corresponding pen drawings for that person.  The little boy eating ice cream has a tight cluster of black lines, but the toddler gets some purpley pinks and a long yellow streak like a bolt of lightning. The effect of the lines and pictures together is moving. In each face we’ve captured a glimmer of communication, miraculous and tiny, private and universal, and the lines frame this somehow, make it stand out. 

“Do you want to show her what you made?” I ask Cedar when his sister comes home. 

“See,” Cedar says, holding up the notebook, and his sister comes and stands behind his chair at the table.  She rests her chin on his shoulder.  “That’s so beautiful,” she says, and Cedar leans the side of his face against her head. “Pretty,” he says, because beautiful has too many syllables.

That day, Cedar’s sister walks me to the front door when I’m leaving and puts her hand on my arm.  I jump, because, like the last time she touched me, I know it can’t be good.  “Cedar’s going to be working with someone else from the agency.  Someone with a lot of training, who’s fluent in ASL.”

I look at the front door.  It’s heavy and solid, with a pattern of long rectangular indentations: decoration, I suppose.

“Cedar really likes you,” the sister says. “But you can understand, we need…”

I interrupt her. I want to ask her how she’s sure that this new person is a good person, but how is she sure I am? How am I sure I am? Instead I say, “Can I still come and see him?”

His sister’s eyes are close to mine, and narrow, like she’s taking an exact measure of how dangerous I am, but then she sees that I’m crying.  I can tell that I am by the change in her face.  “Well,” she says, “I guess we can ask him.”

I wipe the tears, which have run all the way down to my jaw bone, and follow her into the kitchen.  She sits close to Cedar and looks him carefully in the eye.  Then she takes my hand and pulls me closer.  “Do you want to be friends?” his sister asks him, pointing to me.  She makes a sign with her index fingers, hooking them together like two links in a chain.

“Yeah,” Cedar says and holds out his hand to shake mine, as though things for us are just beginning.

For Matt Wagner