“Mom is leaving for Rumania next week,” Howard said, in the soothing tone he used with a cow when it’s having trouble delivering. “It’s time to get up.”
“I can’t,” I said into the pillow, wittingly using the short sentence that had been forbidden in Howard’s formative years.
I spent the next two days sleeping. I told myself that I was resting from the rage of parenting, that I had been shattered by my squabbling children. I had been exhausted without realizing, and now I couldn’t move another inch. At night, wide awake, I prowled the house. The plangent strains of the clarinet drifted up from the front porch, where Howard was playing. I stood by Emma’s bed, wiping the sweat off her forehead and gently pulling the thumb out of her mouth, hoping to spare us the cost of the orthodontist. I adjusted the fan so it blew to the place she had moved. In Claire’s room I kneeled and looked through the slot of her bed rail, so that I could get a better look at her puffy face. Claire was going to be the beauty. Her lips were parted and a fine thread of drool seeped from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes weren’t shut all the way and I could see the white luster between her lids. I stuck my hand through the bar and felt her dimpled fingers.
When they were grown, our children would freely offer their objections about their upbringing. They would sit me down and tell me what I had done wrong, itemizing my character flaws. The time would come when they would outdistance me in every way; they would be far smarter than I, wiser, better adjusted, generous, all the good things from their father. They would know how to navigate through the world. I would have to listen and admit that they were right. They would never forget the time I had tried to beat the milk of human kindness into Emma, shouting, “Be nice to your sister,” as I spanked her bare bottom. I wondered if they would forgive me my inadequacies.
After I checked the girls I drew on pants and a sweatshirt against the mosquitoes that bred in the dew. I walked through the hay field. If a
person squinted, the lights up in the subdivision looked like the Dipper, Cassiopeia, the Swan. “You used to live there,” I said to Lizzy. “Lizzy Collins of Prairie Center, Wisconsin. At Christmas your house has the star on the roof—that’s how you’ll know it. Your neighborhood association has strict rules and they only allow white lights, and they can’t twinkle on or off. So your star will stand out both from the heavens and from the rest of the town’s garish displays.”
I saw the life that might have been Lizzy’s moving along the dark horizon. She was round and rosy, and her mother always did her best to dress her up. She might well have been in the pack of girls who in kindergarten start out with clapping games and jump-rope stunts and end up years later as cheerleaders and student-council members. She might have been just as we all dreamed to be. I could see her at sixteen in the tall grass behind the baseball diamond, willing the boy to kiss her, it being worth the jigger bites.
Maybe Dan and Theresa knew what they had learned from Lizzy, but I couldn’t think what lesson there was that might even begin to compensate for her loss. I stood watching the bedroom lights going out, one by one, until there was nothing but the halos from the yard lights, meant to frame the burglars as they tiptoed away with the VCRs. Surely there was a formula: If I do —, Lizzy will come back. The act of contrition was just beyond my grasp. If I stared at the pond, at the haze of insects fluttering over the surface, it might come to me. I will close my eyes, I thought, and wish hard. I will hear a noise, like a fish jumping, and when I look I’ll see Lizzy, coming to the surface, shaking off her pink scales, finding her new arms to do the breaststroke to shore.
Four days after the funeral Nellie announced over the lasagne she had made, Howie’s favorite, that tomorrow she would have to go. “I’m not sure I should leave you,” she said as she walked around the table, putting a hunk of garlic bread on each of our plates.
“We’ll be fine, Mom,” Howard said.
“I could call tonight and tell them—”
“We’ll miss you, but we’ll get along. They’re counting on you.”
At the end of the meal Emma was inching her hand toward Claire’s
place mat, and Claire, uncharacteristically, let out a gorgeous and savage scream.
“Girls!” Nellie breathed.
Howard reached for his J.I. Case cap on the counter and said in his usual terse way, “You two. We’re going for a ride.”
When the car started, the muffler sounding its call, Nellie cleared her throat and adjusted herself in her chair. She and Howard had planned this time for our little talk. I knew it, could see the pleasure of conspiracy in her big sincere face. “Alice, dear,” she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin, “I can’t help worrying about you. You’re going to hurt yourself, sweetheart. You’ve just got to be more positive. You’ve got to stop thinking such black thoughts.” I knew what she was going to say next. The words were going to barge out of her mouth: In a time like this, Alice dear, a woman still needs a mother, and if there’s anything you want to talk—
“I had my Aunt Kate,” I said, before she could speak. “She wasn’t mother but I adored her.” I pulled on my sandals, huaraches they were called, with soles made in Mexico from old tires. They looked like something a dog had gnawed and buried and dug up and gnawed again. “She bought me these sandals at a folk fair and they’re still good after fifteen years.”
It wasn’t nice to say to poor Nellie. She loved everyone to look their best, to be brushed and clean and polished and polite. I was curse to her, I knew, disheveled, beaten down, nothing that a good attitude couldn’t improve if only I would try.
“I’m going out,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders, wishing one gesture could make amends.
At the water’s edge the mosquitoes bit my forehead and flew up my nose. I closed my eyes and listened for the slightest ripple, for the break of water. We would someday swim in the pond again, but it was hard to imagine how we’d have the nerve to break the taboo for the first time—it was horrifying to think of putting our mouths to that particular water, letting it touch us. Theresa, I thought, probably wouldn’t ever be able to walk down the lane or maybe she wouldn’t want to come to the farm at all. When the gnats became intolerable I made my way around the pond
and into the woods. It was an old growth forest, the burr oaks, hickory, walnut, and red oaks towering to the sky, and underfoot the May apples, Dutchmen’s britches, wild ginger, poison ivy, shooting stars, and trillium. The canopy overhead protected the wildflowers from the sun, and the wavering golden light that came through was laced with swarming insects. I thought of the other deaths I’d lived through: There had been my mother, my father, my Aunt Kate, and a woman I’d known slightly in college. Grieving for those people had entailed also a general wonder and fear of death, for one’s own death, for the inevitable end as dust. Lizzy’s death, a child’s death, I considered, should be at remove from oneself, the grief more pure. I wished I could forget her for just a minute so that I could take a walk or be with the girls, or cook a meal, or wash my face, without feeling the weight bearing down on my shoulders, the leaden yoke around my neck, so heavy I felt I must stoop.
I came to the stand of sumac in what used to be a clearing. Beyond lay the orchard that had not been pruned or cared for in fifteen years. Howard had thought each spring that finally he would have time in the coming season to trim and spray and pick the existing apples, as well as plant new varieties. He was forever optimistic, forever deluded. The twenty trees seemed to lean toward me, their gnarled, bent forms like old men gathered together in the village square, whispering. They were judging me, I was sure they were. They frightened me, until I looked straight at them, at the flaking bark, at the denuded spots where deer had nibbled. There had been no discipline, no guiding hand in the trees’ rampant growth, each bough greedy for light and space, suckers spearing through to the heights, all a tangle, a glut of regeneration. I didn’t ever want to go back to the house, to Nellie and Howard. Better to stay in the orchard and be judged by the old trees who thought themselves stern but were ineffectual, temperamental as brats. I pulled myself up into the crotch of what I thought was a McIntosh, and then I climbed to a higher limb. I tried for the thousandth time to think where I could go to get better, where there might be someone or something to receive me if I ran away. I could at least sleep in a sling, hang it from a branch like an outlaw, and wait until the morning, when Nellie would be gone. There was a wood thrush in the distance, singing its love of beetles and berries, summer and twilight, and
there came the faintest breeze in my face. The apple tree felt hospitable, and for just a bit I didn’t feel quite so sick. I didn’t hear anything but the bird and the rustle of the wind, and there was peace because it was hours before I’d have to go home again. I didn’t hear the twigs breaking, didn’t hear the tread of feet over dry grass. The noise of the cry struck and rang out in whorls through the night. No word, but terror was in the center of it, and even as it rippled away the sense hung in the air. I slipped, caught myself for a second, before I saw Theresa, and when she came clear I actually fell, spreading my arms out and sliding, scraping my back to the ground.
She was about ten feet away in the next row. Her open mouth was twisted, but she had made her noise and the quiet was like the silence after a car accident, when there’s nothing but smoke coming from the wreck.
She’d scared the bejesus out of me with her scream but I wasn’t going to let on. I stood up, absently dusting myself off, my mind racing, trying to think what to say, something about running from the funeral, about Mrs. Glevitch, something about how I was always thinking of Theresa, always thinking of Lizzy. That was what I was doing, always thinking of them.
“I—” I began.
“You scared me,” she said with tears in her voice. She was walking around in circles, patting her chest, breathing so heavily I thought she might hyperventilate. “I’m not up to a fright like that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said meekly.
She dug in her shorts’ pocket and produced a pack of Camel Lights and a folder of matches. That Theresa carried cigarettes around was as unlikely as Reverend Nabor having cocaine on hand for his visits to the elderly. I couldn’t help jerking my head back, out of surprise.
“I know, I know,” she said, “just a few now and then, when I’m alone. It’s a habit from my bad girl days at St. Ben’s, sneaking a pull in the john. It’s helpful right now, like an old friend.” She put the cigarette to the corner of her sagging bottom lip, struck a match against a cardboard match paper, and managed, when the flame was almost to her thumb, to get it started. She leaned against the tree in the next row. I didn’t know what else to do but edge my raw back to a resting position against the
McIntosh. It was an odd thing, to be stuck with someone, as if we were in the confines of a stalled elevator, when we had four hundred acres, plenty of cover, any number of good hiding places.
“It’s hard for me to see you right now,” she said quietly. “It hurts so much. I sometimes come down to sit near the pond, but I mean not to disturb you. I called the other day and when the phone was ringing I realized that I couldn’t talk to you at all. It’s something I’m struggling with, along with everything else, this business of how to take up life, how to start out again. I’m praying half the day.”
I wanted to apologize, not only for Lizzy’s death, but for the disturbance at the funeral, and for scaring her just then, making her think there were ghosts in the orchard. “I’m sorry—”
She was exhaling and waving her hand back and forth. “There’s nothing to say—that’s one of the terrible things for both of us. I know you’re sorry, and like the good girl I was raised to be I’m even sorry you’re sorry. I haven’t been able to think too much about you, Alice, but I know I will, that the time will come when I’ll probably feel your pain too. Father Albert talked with me about you; he made me take note. I do know your pain is there, that it must be fierce. I hurt so much I can’t even think.”
“I know,” I whispered. I started to sidestep away because there was clearly nothing to be done. I had thought that I’d been as good as dismissed, that our unexpected meeting was over, that there would be no more visits for a long time. But I was held there, not only by her very real presence but also by the idea of her. I thought that we had sometimes seen ourselves in the other, that we were more alike than we acknowledged, that we started from much the same lump and might have turned into something quite like the other if we’d been switched at birth. I had been brought up to be off-balance and was; and she had been raised to hold all things in perfect equilibrium, something that was so unusual it too was beyond the norm. I yearned to keep myself straight and in order, but of course never could, and she longed, without any success whatsoever, to let herself go, to let everything occasionally fall to pieces. We were leagues apart on the outside and I think we were amused by the differences, the variation that had been wrought perhaps most of all by circumstance. We had understood one another, felt a sympathy, an affection, as well as been critical of the other’s idiosyncrasies. We were friends in a deep way, in a
way that involved obligation and trust, a solid faith in the other’s love. I had never had a friend like her and I felt her life moving alongside of mine in much the same way I felt my husband’s days and passages to be a complement to my own. Only with the prospect of her letting me go had I begun to realize how important she was.
She took another pull and choked. “Damn,” she said, between her hacks. “I’ve forgotten how.”
“You’ll remember,” I said, the first words of comfort I had offered her since Lizzy’s death. “You’ll remember,” I said again, coming out from the trunk.
She began to talk, apparently not realizing that I was trying to take my leave, that she had said I should go. “It’s awful,” she said, “losing my daughter, and feeling that I’ve lost you too. I don’t feel that you’re gone exactly, but that you’re—misplaced. I’ve never felt so alone. I keep thinking, I’ve got to tell Alice—and then I realize that I can’t call you, that there is this pain in my chest, like my breast is being cut clean through.” She put her head down to her knees and let out one thin wail that sounded like the far off call of a loon. “Isn’t it terrific,” she said, righting herself, “how much a person can cry?” She looked out at the woods, the tears running down her face. “Isn’t it phenomenal how long it goes, and then there’s this period of the strangest calm, grace, it must be, and then it comes on again, all that, sorrow, and you feel as if you’re not a big enough—vessel—to contain it?”