Mistakes Happen All the Time, And Also Sometimes They Don’t

Every morning, at 9:30 sharp, Tania’s neighbor slips into his high school letterman’s jacket, straps on an old pair of roller skates, and spins around the street. Her neighbor is in his mid-60s. Or thereabouts. He is a short, compact man. Older than Tania, for sure, and with a face always slightly windburned-looking. He is older than Tania’s late husband, too, whose own skin had turned gray at the end with despair and medication. The older neighbor’s complexion, though, is not the subject of Tania’s fascination. It’s the letterman jacket. Or possibly the skates.

Years before Tania met her husband, she seriously dated a casual rollerblader. Or, rather, casually dated a serious rollerblader. He went to the city park every evening after work to practice his art. He dragged Tania along, sometimes, literally pulling her in his wake as she squealed down the busy walking paths, unevenly balanced upon those evil little wheels.

Tania already harbored more than your average amount of resentment toward skating as a sport. Thank a certain infamous scandal for that. In high school, when someone famous shares your name, you do one of two things. You cry about it, or you lean into it. Tania went as Tonya Harding for three Halloweens straight, though each time she did so, a little piece of her felt cheapened somehow, a gentle place rubbed raw, like a blister.

For a long time after Tania dated the rollerblade enthusiast, she couldn’t stand to even look at people on skates of any sort, the muscle memory too strong in her toes, which curled at the merest thought of wiping out. But now, Tania finds herself stationed in her living room at 9:30 sharp to watch her neighbor emerge mysterious from the garage like an Olympic hopeful wearing a jacket from the Carter administration.

Is this what a delayed mid-life crisis looks like, she wonders, peeking through the crack in the curtains. Some days the neighbor lingers in the driveway, warming up, doing neck rotations, all the while moving his lips as if counting off a stretch or saying a prayer. What age is too old to rediscover youthful hobbies, high school wardrobes? What age is too young for injury? Tania should probably know, though Ruben’s illness has distorted her sense of years, of time. Someday, God willing, she will be as old as the neighbor herself. Someday, she might even learn how to have a thought about the future without such stupid hedging. 

The last of Ruben’s milk substitute curdles in her coffee, but she drinks it anyway as her neighbor zooms down the street and back up again. He’s not graceful, but committed, determined, holding his paunch in, his knees bent for a lower center of gravity. He pants a little pornographically when he pushes off from the pavement and Tania finds that it gives her a thrill to hear his heavy breathing through the screen. A warmth tingles in her trunk, but she will not acknowledge it. 9:30 is too early to think of sex. Five weeks alone is too early, too. 

One day, when she is watching her neighbor, a UPS van pulls up in front of Tania’s house. The driver carries a brown rectangle up Tania’s walk, onto Tania’s porch, and deposits it in front of Tania’s door. Tania stays very still so that the UPS man, much like the neighbor, won’t notice her standing behind the curtains, her small breaths making the fabric sway. She is not afraid of the UPS man, but is afraid that he might comment upon the uptick of items sent lately, the bereavement packages, the fruit boxes, the cookie-grams, the well-meaning cards with casually cruel sentiments: It was his time. Everything for a reason. The Lord giveth. There are no mistakes.

The truck idles for a moment, then pulls away and after the coast is clear, Tania creeps out from behind the curtains that Ruben hung just before things got bad all over again. She had really been on his case about hanging the curtains during remission, and for a while, she secretly thought that maybe her complaining, his failure to hang them, kept them in some kind of wellness holding pattern. Until, that is, he had to go and do what she asked of him. To listen to her request. To hang the damn things. Two weeks later, she was staring at the curtains, harboring second thoughts about their weave, when the phone call came from the doctor. The beginning of the end.

At night in bed, all alone, Tania thinks not of Ruben but about the neighbor, and his wife. Does she know about the letterman jacket and the roller skating? Does she know that every day after she pulls out of the driveway, her husband waits twenty minutes before coming outside and gliding back into his youth? Does she know about the gentle way he stretches first, to preserve his body? Is this their own version of a holding pattern? Their own marital pas-de-deux? 

When Tania opens the front door, she looks down at the address on the package, which is not actually her address, but her neighbor’s. She considers walking into the street, flagging the man down to tell him so. She thinks that perhaps this package could be a reason to speak to him. To ask him about the skates, or the jacket. Why every day? Why, of all the things he could be doing with his time on earth, this? She wonders how difficult it might be to start such a conversation. Any conversation. She wonders how difficult it might be, too, to slip inside his home one morning after his laps, slip him out of his sweaty letterman jacket, and have no conversations at all. She is so flustered by this thought that the milk substitute gets caught in her throat. When the neighbor reappears in front of her house, she hesitates too long to make her move, and watches as he retreats again to the far end of the street. Too far to see the wrongly delivered package she grips. Much too far to read the writing on the side of the box: Derby Deluxe.

In the doorway, Tania uses one neatly trimmed fingernail to carefully slit the tape around the package. She reminds herself of what all the cards have been telling her, a reason for everything, there are no mistakes. Perhaps the universe had sent her, Tania, the skates by design. Or that, even better, the neighbor, having noticed her watching since Ruben, has arranged for this gift to be delivered. She imagines herself back on wheels again after all these years. A little ridiculous looking, but perhaps also a little more graceful, a latent balance emerging, an effortlessness that she hadn’t had back in her youth, before she learned that holding onto something, someone, only hastened the letting go. But Tania knows that the cards are merely platitudes. Mistakes happen all the time, and also sometimes they don’t. Either way, the package is hers now. UPS giveth, Tania taketh away. She holds up one of the skates to admire it, even as she knows she will never, ever slip it on. She spins and spins and spins one pristine little wheel with her fingertip. In front of her house, the neighbor executes an astonishingly perfect figure eight, a shape that, Tania knows, is only infinity flipped on its axis.