The Last Day

by Kim Magowan

Sanath Kumar

Our son’s Quaker school marks the end of every school year by insisting all students and faculty walk from the school building to Lindley Meadow in Golden Gate Park. The tradition is either famous or notorious, depending on audience. When Henry was five, my sister Eileen maintained it was shocking that kindergarteners were expected to walk three and a half miles. Prone to hyperbole, Eileen used the phrase “borderline child abuse.”

Personally, I love it. When we first heard about this last-day-of-school tradition on the tour for prospective kindergarten parents, I knew immediately that this was the right school. I love that my fourteen-year-old son, sucked into the vortex of his phone, is forced to spend an hour and a half looking at our gritty, gleaming city. Especially once Henry enters the park — seeing the green unfurl in front of him, all the gnarled and lacy trees.

To get there today, I take my own long walk through the park. My husband Luke is a born-and-bred New Yorker. Since our first date, eighteen years ago, we’ve debated whether Central Park or Golden Gate Park is superior. To me, the contest feels so clear, more evidence that New Yorkers are delusional about their city.

I walk up JFK Drive, detouring to visit the dahlia garden outside the Conservatory of Flowers. June is too early for most dahlias to bloom, but a few have. I’m transfixed by a red, frowsy one that looks like a loofah. According to its plastic placard, the name of this dahlia is High Voltage. I pull out my phone and take a picture. My photo has the white dome of the Conservatory of Flowers in the background. So I take more pictures from a different angle: behind the dahlia I see only green plants.

On the last day of school, parents start gathering at noon in the meadow. The kids won’t arrive until 12:30 at the earliest, but the parents committed to front-row seats have already rolled out their picnic blankets and unfolded camp chairs. I choose the hill overlooking the meadow. I spread out our beach towel and check my phone. It’s 12:15. There’s a text from Luke: leaving office now, there in 20.

I send Luke a thumb’s up and attach a photo of the crazy-looking red dahlia.

Luke texts back a GIF of the red, spiky Muppet with his arms akimbo, holding drumsticks.

Separated at birth, he texts.

I send back a smiley face. The dahlia’s name is High Voltage.

Luke sends another GIF, a man with his finger in a socket, hair sticking straight up in Heat Miser-spike.

Marisa Waxman, down the hill, waves at me. I wave back.

“Another year!” Marisa sings. She’s wearing a white sundress festooned with bunches of cherries, white-rimmed sunglasses. Her brown, stretched-out legs are as smooth and shiny as bannisters. “Soon they’ll be leaving us forever!” she says. Marisa’s youngest child is five, so this future is far enough away that her pout is mock-sad.

Why does perfectly friendly Marisa annoy me so? I suspect she has a thing for Luke. The way she touches his arm at fundraisers.

Years ago, on a late-night talk show, I saw the host ask a beautiful movie star to verify a rumor that she and her boyfriend, another beautiful movie star, had broken up. She smiled her famous smile and said, “I have good news for the women of the world! Benjamin is available!” Everyone in the audience clapped. Instead of seeming heartbroken, the actress was cheerful. Now, I realize how much effort went into her enactment of unfazed good will.

How shitty it will be, once people find out Luke is “free.”

I picture the news rippling through the school moms, in particular the divorced ones. I picture Marisa Waxman’s reaction. Probably our marriage has always perplexed her. So many people are baffled when a handsome man partners with a plain woman. Though the reverse only registers if the disparity is truly extraordinary, a gorgeous woman with a toad-like man. A couple like my sister Eileen and her fiancé Barry, with his always wet lips.

Eileen’s mad because I objected to the poem she wants me to read at her wedding in July. I tried to explain last night on the phone. “I’d be honored to read a poem! Just not that one.” People always misread Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” I told Eileen, “‘Love is not love/ that alters when it alteration finds’ is patently false! All love alters. Shakespeare knew that. That isn’t me being jaded. Think about marriage vows. ‘For better, for worse. For richer, for poor. In sickness, in health.’ Marriage vows take it as a given, not just that things alter, but that things get bad. ‘For worse, in sickness,’ are presented as inevitable, not potential.”

On the phone, Eileen inhaled audibly to signify displeasure. I pictured that bubble “SIGH” in a comic book. “Maggie, I know you’re going through a lot,” Eileen said. “But I need you to buck up! I’m getting married.”

I wasn’t trying to piss all over weddings. I find marriage vows, with their clear-eyed anticipation of trouble, unbearably moving. Marriage is hard; that’s okay, I tried to tell Eileen. But I might as well be speaking Danish (Luke and I have been watching a great Danish political drama, and the one word I’ve managed to learn is “Tak,” for thank you). Eileen said she had a loaf of bread in the oven and hung up.

I smooth the towel under me, pull out my phone, and send Eileen a link to an Adrienne Rich poem. “I choose to love this time for once/ With all my intelligence” I text her. That’s perfect for you and Barry! But of course, I’ll read whatever you want me to read. It’s your wedding.

I see the wavering three dots, someone’s typing a message. Eileen sends me a red heart. I don’t know if the heart means she loves the Rich poem, or that she forgives me. I type a question mark, erase it, and put away my phone. I have enough on my plate today.

As if cued by that thought, there’s a hand on my shoulder. “Hey! Sorry I’m late.” Luke plops down beside me on the beach towel.

“No worries. The kids haven’t shown up yet,” I say. I look at his left hand, next to my leg, his fingers starfished.

Marisa Waxman looks over her shoulder and says “Hey Luke!” He waves back. I try not to evaluate the level of enthusiasm in his wave. It’s not my concern anymore.

“Thanks for the flower photo,” Luke says. “Dahlias always remind me of you.”

I was careful to send him one of the photos with no Conservatory of Flowers in the background. The Conservatory is where, almost sixteen years ago, we got married. I didn’t want to seem pathetic or clingy. I didn’t want my message to appear to be sending a message. That thought sounds so ridiculous that I smile.

“What’s funny?” Luke says.

I shake my head.

“I always had a theory about why dahlias were your favorites,” he says. “They had the most range. In color, shape, and most of all, in their scale between ridiculous and elegant. I mean, that High Voltage one looks like a Truffula tree.”

I can’t help smiling. Though I note too Luke’s weird past tense, as if dahlias are no longer my favorite flower. As if my fundamental tastes are subject to alteration.

Another parent, Naomi Piers, shouts, “Here they come!” In the distance, the first kids emerge on the dirt path like scouter ants. Parents clap and cheer.

An hour from now, we will all hush for the traditional Quaker thirty minutes of silence. This is uncanny to watch: over 500 people in Lindley Meadow, silent for half an hour. I’ve seen joggers stop and bikers brake in confusion, say “What the heck’s going on here?” The lone voice will carry, so voluminously, in that open-air silence.

Today, we celebrate Henry’s last day of school. We’ll watch the eighth graders awkwardly recite poems. Afterwards there will be that thirty minutes of silence, and then, the part that is bound to make me cry: all the graduating eighth graders, as they do every year, will dance with their assigned kindergartner partners. Henry’s partner is a little boy named Mickey, whom Henry describes as entertaining and rascally. “Like you!” I said, and Henry laughed, conceding.

I worry sometimes about Henry’s capacity to handle problems, his limited tolerance for dealing with anything hard. Last week, I saw on his desk a perfectly solved Rubik’s Cube. I held it up; the grid of blue squares reflected back my blurry shadow. “I can’t believe you figured it out!” I said, and Henry, lying on his bed, laughed. He’d watched some hack on YouTube, he said, about how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. It’s hard to explain why that unsettled me so. Henry, seeing my expression, reminded me how I’d watched and re-watched a YouTube video about how to fix our garbage disposal. But isn’t that different? The whole purpose of a Rubik’s Cube is to present a puzzle to solve.

The strangest thought occurs to me: if there were a hack to figuring out my life, would I take it? Or would that be cheating?

Eight years ago I sat on this hill holding hands with Luke, watching then-kindergartener Henry dance with his partner, a tall girl with jump-rope braids.

Time is viscous today. Dawdling, the kids fill in the clearing with their bodies and backpacks and water bottles. Near-sighted Luke looks for Henry.

I see it all: the poems, the announcements, the thirty minutes silence, the traditional dance, my tears, the fruit popsicles, the final releasing of us all into the foggy San Francisco summer. I see the restaurant where Luke and I will take Henry later this evening, where we’ll order pot stickers and soup dumplings, his favorites: our last family outing before we tell Henry tomorrow, as planned, our bad news.

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Kim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the English Department of Mills College at Northeastern University. She is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, Craft Literary, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com