I had forgotten that I was going to be naked. I looked at my feet first, and then at my breasts and my stomach and thighs and knees. I was a ghostly color, gray, as if I’d been stored in formaldehyde. I thought of the leg of lamb that we’d eaten a few days earlier. Nellie had put on my soiled canvas apron and gouged the bone from the meat, made gashes all over and stuffed them with slivered garlic, and then put the bleeding slab over hot coals. Sheep were animals who knew weariness and rest, hunger and thirst, the pleasure of a rotten melon. They had the instinct to care for their young, an instinct which looked exactly like love. And then I thought for an instant of Lizzy in her coffin in the ground. How strange to put someone in the ground! I couldn’t put Emma or Claire in a box and bury either one without losing my mind. I would still think of that body as the person, as the child who would be terrified and alone and smothered under all that dirt. I saw out the window Lizzy’s bones lying under her party dress, her short toe bones inside the patent leather shoes. No, I said to myself. Not that. I had to quickly shake my head as if I might possibly work like an Etch A Sketch, the contents of my mind forever erased with one or two jerks.
“Did I tell you?” Howard said, leaning over to find a clean undershirt in his drawer, “that a traveling salesman appeared out of nowhere after the funeral, trying to sell coffin insurance to Dan and Theresa?”
“Coffin insurance?” I said. “Well, you never know. You can’t be too careful.”
“What?” Howard asked.
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
“What?” I asked. I sat down. I was naked except for my socks. I had forgotten the order of things. I was a mother, and mothers were supposed to rise to the occasion because they had children to care for; they were to
cook the stew in a crisis because there was no alternative to nourishment other than death. We were not to die until the youngest child graduated from college. Howard, how can I cook the stew when I don’t know what clothes to put on next? I wanted to ask. Maybe it was better if the children died first, because then a person could relax, stop worrying, and just take up grief.
“What are you doing, Alice?”
He occasionally said my name as if he were a viper, drawing out the
S
sound. There was a plastic tub on the dresser, underneath one of Howard’s dirty shirts. I had nothing on but my socks. That was butter, now soft and rancid, in the tub. I hadn’t remembered coming in the bedroom on the day Lizzy drowned, but I must have.
“Your children need you, Alice.” He hissed under his breath, right into my face, “Alicccce.” I could see that he was trying to bully me back to health. I might have done the same if he lay dying. Emma was watching television and calling for us, and Claire was banging a cereal bowl on the kitchen table.
I took a breath. I was going to open my mouth and bellow across the mountains, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.” The echo would come back, Knowwhattodo, whattodo, whattodoooo. Instead a noise came up from my throat, as if a rope had been made tight around my neck. I didn’t have the strength to dress and go down to the kitchen, and the bed looked so beautiful, stripped of the top sheet, like a clean white raft. I sank back down wanting to chart a course, to have it take me someplace.
“Shit,” Howard whispered. He rarely swore and therefore his curses always carried a punch. “What’s going on? Bear up, Alice. Go get breakfast. Keep in motion, for the sake of Emma and Claire. Keep in motion. Say that to yourself.”
He forced open our sticky drawers and pulled out my underwear, a brassiere, a gray T-shirt, and a pair of shorts. Then he yanked me up and began dressing me. He lifted my feet and put them through the underpants holes. It was important, I considered, to wake Emma and Claire every morning and feed them, and make them rest in the afternoon, so that they could grow up and have children, and make them get up and feed them, and tell them to rest, so that they could grow up and have children. That was called motion, and it was good. I drew the underpants
from my ankles to my waist. I remembered long ago lying with my head on my hands on mercifully hot cement, watching the women and Aunt Kate swimming laps at rest time at the public pool. The women all looked the same in their tight bathing caps that mashed their foreheads into their eyes. The back of their legs were mottled like cottage cheese. They swam languorously, their dimpled arms coming over their heads in the crawl. When they got to the other end they turned on their backs and came kicking home. I had eaten my breakfast and gone to bed, perhaps had a brief teenage moment of absolute beauty, and woken up into one of the middle-age swimmers.
“I have a floral bathing suit with a skirt and padded cups,” I said.
“I’m not going to let you do this.” He was talking to me calmly while he put the shirt over my head. “No one blames you. You understand that.” He took hold of my hands and stuck them through the armholes. “You’re making yourself feel responsible for an accident that could have happened to anyone. Did you call Theresa? You do the shorts. I’ll get Claire. Emma needs you. She doesn’t know what is going on. She needs you, Alice.”
He was speaking just the way my father would have if he’d ever really talked to me.
“And brush your hair. Please,” he called from down the hall. “Dave and Phil are coming out this morning.”
I puzzled over that information. Dave and Phil. When he reappeared with Claire in his arms I was still trying to think.
“What, Alice?”
Just as he was asking in his kind, kind voice I remembered Dave, the soil scientist from the University of Wisconsin, and Phil, his graduate student. They were monitoring our farm for foxglove and earthworms, phosphorous and nitrogen.
“I did talk to Theresa,” I said.
“Great. That’s great.”
She had said at first that she couldn’t pass the time of day with me, and then she had spilled over with news as if she hadn’t talked with anyone for weeks. If I’d been Theresa I would have turned the love she felt for me into hate; I would have quite easily and naturally fed the
festering thing. Is it possible, I would have liked to ask Howard, if I’d had the courage—do you think it’s possible that she’ll forgive me?
I went through the motions of breakfast. Milk on the table, spoons at each place mat, Life, Grape-Nuts, Cheerios, and cornflakes in a line, to suit everyone’s fancy. After we ate I held Claire in my lap, Emma at my side, and we read from our illustrated book of fairy tales. Next I sat on the floor and dressed and undressed the baby dolls. Their miniature white plastic shoes said on the bottom: “Made in China.” Wrinkled, bent Chinese women were sitting in an airless factory in Hong Kong stitching up dolls’ shoes so our Wisconsin girl children could role play. I closed my eyes, longing for some place like the primeval forest, a smell of bees and honey and first growth, a place where animals live together serenely because they are afraid of their own strength. When Emma and Claire started to tug at the same doll dress and shout at each other, I put my hands to my ears, my head to my knees, and splatted out a car-horn noise.
“When I was your mom,” Claire said, coming to me and putting a clammy hand on my arm, “and you were a baby, I beed sweet and nice.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, reaching out to touch her shiny dark little cap of hair.
“I was never mad when I was your mom.”
Maybe Claire knew best. Maybe she was the reincarnation of my mother, Barbara Gardner, who had died so early in life of lung cancer. Maybe my mother died willingly because she knew full well that she was going to return to earth as my second child. My mother had decided that it was better to be an infant again than to be married to my father, and finally, then, she planted herself in my womb.
Emma piped, “When you were a baby we put a pacifier in your mouth to keep you quiet.”
Maybe Lizzy was already planning her return, sitting in a waiting room with magazines and soft music and potted lemon trees growing up to the ceiling. I thought of Theresa and Father Albert walking out into the empty parking lot after drinking their cherry sodas, the two of them embracing under the three-pronged fluorescent light, Theresa feeling the blaze within her at once, what seemed to her to be the love of God.
At lunch, “dinner,” Howard called it without much affectation, he and the children and I sat at the table and ate. Most of us had whole-wheat bread with Cheddar cheese, warmed in the microwave, and milk, and slices of store-bought honeydew melon and a few limp leaves of lettuce from the garden. Bad Emma had white bread and butter, no cheese at all, and no melon either, because once, two years before, she’d been served a piece with a beetle crawling along the rind. Claire ate everything as is. We were the last dairy family eating Dinner, Prairie Center, Circa 1990. Although Howard hadn’t told me, I knew that the cow with the prolapsed uterus had died because I’d seen her trussed up with chains behind the tractor. They would come and get her, take her away to a plant for glue. He was glowering at me for something I must have said. I was staring out of the window thinking about how I had never planned to live this long, how in my child’s mind I was sure I was never going to reach the age of eighteen.
After lunch the team from the university came. There were several of them, bright, responsible people wearing their co-op grocery-store T-shirts, bringing along snacks that had been purchased in bulk. The women looked like I would have if I’d stayed in Ann Arbor. They wore their hairy legs and underarms as a badge signifying their higher power of reasoning and their disinterest in conventional standards of beauty. The women of Prairie Center, as a demographic entity, shaved or waxed all the way up to their bikini line. It was later that afternoon when Emma and Claire and I were standing out by the mailbox at the roadside that we saw the Collinses go past. Dan was driving, Theresa was in front next to him, and Audrey was in the back seat. They were going to climb and climb, trying to find awe within themselves. Theresa had said she was afraid to go and that she couldn’t tell Dan about her fears, but Dan was probably struggling too, over the same appalling thought: She isn’t dead, because she can’t be, and she’ll come home to a deserted house. I lifted my hand to wave. He saw me and drove on. Theresa was bent over her map. Audrey pressed her nose to the glass and opened and shut her fist.
I left the girls playing in the sandbox in the yard, and went upstairs to lie down by the fan for just a minute. Next I knew Howard was shaking me, saying, “Wake up. Go downstairs and make supper. Please.”
We each had our own clocks on either side of the bed. They were old
wind-up clocks from our Ann Arbor days. His was a Big Ben and mine a Little Ben. Naturally the Big Ben’s ticking was lower than mine, and louder, the father of the clock family. Mine was staccato, shrill, as if it was panicked by the passage of time. They didn’t tick in sync, and Howard’s was always set fast. I remember waking up and thinking the clocks were sparring, that they would battle over their precious minutes and the way to tick until they exhausted themselves and wound down and just quit.
I went to bed at 7:40 his time, 7:30 my time, listening to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” on the clarinet in the next room. Emma and Claire were floating down the hall in their summer nighties. Howard was proving his mettle as a father, make no mistake. He was so much better at handling their spats, and wrestling, and telling stories. It probably made sense for me to plow and cultivate and plant and repair, and for him to manage the children. I closed my eyes until it was the next day, and he was shaking me again, putting my own clothes in my hands, guiding me with unending patience, telling me what arm to put in which hole.
“I know you, Alice,” he said, setting my tennis shoes next to the bed. “Someday you’ll turn this into a story. You’ll tell a group of dinner guests about the time you were so depressed I had to talk you through dressing. You’ll say something about how I had to dust your feet off to put your socks on.”
I squinted at him, trying to think what he was saying about this time turning into a joke at a later date. If I’d felt slightly better I might have punched him in the mouth. The only dinner guests we ever had were Dan and Theresa. There was yellow lint stuck between every single one of my toes. I lay down again and closed my eyes.
“Alice—Alice.” He hunched down, and I imagined that he was going to beg and plead, use Russian diminutives to lure me out of bed, sing to me, offer money, a vacation, a diamond. “Alice,” he said, “we can’t change what happened.” He was leaning over me, brushing the hair out of my face.
I was just about to rise up a little, hold him around the waist, press my cheek against his stomach, tell him that everyone seemed monstrous to me, ready to devour me in one bite. Howard, I’m trembling—can’t you feel it?
“I don’t know exactly how people get through this kind of thing,” he
was saying, “but I know we have to carry on. It might be a good idea to see someone, a professional. I don’t know much about what’s available for help. You can’t get out of bed, you haven’t talked to anyone. Aren’t you supposed to go to the school board meeting tonight? Weren’t they going to discuss your contract? If you could see yourself you’d realize how frustrating it—” He turned and called into the hall. “What, Emma?”
“They’ll lynch me in the inner sanctum,” I murmured.
“What?” Howard said.
“Could you please come here for one short minute?” Emma shouted.
“What did you say, Alice?”
“No,” I said, “nothing.” When he was out of the room I eased back down on the bed.
That night I put on a light blue skirt and one of Howard’s new white T-shirts that had yet to go yellow in the wash, and a small straw hat that was unraveling. I drove with great caution along the back roads to the grade-school cafeteria in Blackwell. I didn’t want to exceed twenty miles per hour because my feet seemed to be unattached to the rest of my body. The principal had sent me a letter a few weeks before explaining that there were parents who wanted to volunteer in various capacities in the following school year. The administration and the PTA had noted that there were seasons when my office was a bottleneck and that it might be helpful to have a parent dispensing over the counter medication. Blackwell Elementary was a titanic K-through-Eight school, the last in the state, with nearly seven hundred students. It was true that my office was sometimes chaotic. They had told me that it was important to be present at the meeting so that the board could discuss those prospects and also go through my contract.