Cost. Roxana Robinson

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      She drew another deep breath and laid out the slices of bread on the counter in rows, like bread solitaire. She spread the mayonnaise, smoothing it creamily out to the edges. The tangible world: she admired the rich surface of the mayonnaise. Opaque, succulent. How would you paint it, she wondered, and get both the glitter and opacity? Who used that heavy, creamy brushstroke? Chase? Sargent? It all looked like a painting already.

      Her father was eighty-eight, her mother eighty-six. Julia loved them, and they were getting old. She didn't think of them as actually old, but as getting old. They were nearing that country, their bodies were less present in the world, they were losing height and weight and bulk. Her parents were being diminished. She could feel them moving away, withdrawing, sweeping out like the tide toward the distant horizon.

      Her father appeared now in the doorway.

      How is it, she thought, that when we see someone, all the disembodied thoughts and emotions of that-person coalesce in that figure, that presence? How does the body carry that dense weight of being?

      Her father's body held him, his character within it. If the body was lost, all his thoughts and feelings, his opinions, his irascibility, his surgical skills would be lost, swept into deep space. He would be intact then only in memory—a system so flawed and arbitrary, so unreliable, so wanting. The thought made her panicky. She looked at her father and was struck by her deep knowledge of him, by the way their lives were wrapped around each other's, the many times she'd seen him walk into a room. How she'd longed, she supposed, for his approval.

      Her father was now shockingly small, nearly her own height. In her childhood, when she'd first learned him, her father had been immense, massive-chested, towering over her like a cliff. His head was in the upper regions of the air; she'd had to call up to his great height, her own voice tossed and tiny. Even when she'd grown up, her father had been tall. At her wedding, walking down the long aisle of the church, her father remote and distant beside her, in his dark suit, she'd felt his looming, powerful presence.

      But now her father's eyes were nearly level with hers, and his movements slow. Now his forehead rose to the top of his head, and fine white hair ringed his bare pate like a tonsure. His hair was too fine and weightless to lie down, and it stood up wildly, as though blown by a small personal wind. His nose had become bulbous; on his pouched yellowy cheeks were faint brown stains. His small piercing eyes were faded blue, and deep disapproving lines were etched from nose to mouth.

      He wore old khaki pants, ponderous white running shoes, and a stained blue windbreaker, zipped up to his chin. He wore the jacket every day, indoors and out, as though it were the only thing he owned. This was not the way he'd used to dress. Julia remembered him leaving for the hospital each morning wearing elegant suits, dull silk ties, soft leather shoes. Now he looked like a poor person, homeless. Which was what age did to you, it stripped you of what you'd had, of your presence in the world. The sight of him like this, shuffling, heavy-footed, in his stained windbreaker, made Julia feel helpless with tenderness.

      Her father frowned at her. “Do you have an atlas?” he demanded. “I want to look up where we are.”

      At once Julia forgot her tenderness, her anxiety. He had restored himself to despot. His manner—autocratic, imperious—never ceased to exasperate her.

      “We do have an atlas,” Julia said. “I'll get it for you.”

      She strode into the living room, bare heels thudding confidently on the floor. Crouching by the bottom shelf, where the big books lay flat, she ran her fingers briskly and uselessly down the spines: the atlas, she could see at once, was gone.

      She looked further, her gaze ranging back and forth across the shelves, lunch unfinished on the counter, her father standing ponderously behind her, judgment gathering in the silence. The atlas had its own place on the bottom shelf, everyone knew it. Why, right now, her father's frown embedding itself on his forehead, was the atlas elsewhere? More evidence of her inability to run a household. Where could it possibly be, that big ungainly volume?

      Julia sat back on her heels. “It's not here, Daddy. Sorry.” She made her voice brisk and offhand.

      “It's not there?”

      “Someone's taken it and not put it back.” She stood and headed for the kitchen, head high.

      “I wanted to see just where we are on the coast.” Her father shook his head. “You don't have an atlas.”

      “I do have an atlas,” Julia corrected him. “Someone's taken it.”

      There was a pause.

      Edward said, “I don't see how you can say you have an atlas if you don't have it.”

      “I do have an atlas,” Julia repeated. “I just can't find it right now.”

      Edward shook his head. “I'd call that not having one,” he said, almost to himself. “Do you have a map of the region? A local map? I want to see where we are on the coast.”

      “We're Down East,” Julia said. “That's what you say up here. You don't say north or south, you say Down East. Because of the schooners, and the prevailing winds.”

      “I know that,” Edward said. “I know about being Down East. What I want to know is where. I want to look at a map and see exactly where we are on the coast.”

      “There might be a map in the car,” Julia said, though right now she doubted it, “but I'm in the middle of making lunch. Can it wait until afterward?”

      What her father made her feel was incompetent: the missing atlas, the absent husband, the shabby house. Don't say anything more, she silently commanded.

      She peeled off a translucent slice of ham and laid it carefully onto the bread. Her father waited for a moment, but she did not look up.

      Frustrated, he turned away. She heard him heading slowly down the hall, the floor creaking beneath his steps.

      At once she was ashamed.

      Why did this happen? Why did she snap at her father like an adolescent? Why did he unsettle her? She was an adult. She had two wonderful sons, an ex-husband, and a possible new boyfriend; she taught at a distinguished university, she was a working artist, she showed her work regularly at a good gallery. She should be far beyond the reach of her father. But her father, though he himself was diminishing, still cast a long shadow over her life.

      Julia and Wendell had bought this house years ago, when the boys were small. It was supremely inconvenient—an eight-hour drive from Manhattan—but supremely cheap. Even so, the upkeep and taxes had always been a struggle, and many times they'd almost sold it. The house would never be worth much, though; it was not on a fashionable part of the coast: no presidents or Wyeths or Rockefellers lived in this small stretch of bays and coves and wild islands.

      The clapboard house stood at a little distance from the weathered barn. This was unusual here: during the old, bitter winters it had been too dangerous to venture outside. The old farmhouses were connected to their barns by a telescoping series of constructions. Bighouse, little-house, backhouse, barn, they were called. Julia liked the notion of continuous shelter, and she liked the rhythm of the phrase. Sometimes she said it silently to herself as she passed an old farmstead.

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