“She wasn’t moanin’,” Rita called.
“Shut your face! I was right there with my ear in her mouth.”
In Hilda’s version Dyshett came at me, we wrestled, I was brought to the floor, and badly beaten. The others for the most part did not try to hide their confusion about what had taken place. I had ended up in the hospital, in surgery, because a blood vessel had ruptured in the crash and was leaking blood into my brain cavity. That, at least, is how I understood the problem. I had been unconscious and apparently the doctor tried to call Howard, only to leave messages, he said, with a young girl. The jail authorities did not knock themselves out to inform either Howard or
Rafferty. I knew nothing about the specifics for a few days because no one told me anything. I was shackled to my bed and there was a guard outside, one of the larger men, just what you’d expect, hairy, with unclad women tattooed up and down his arms. I knew my head hurt, and that in all probability I would live to go back to the airless vault from which I’d come. On the last day, an Iranian doctor explained in the Queen’s English just how they had put a burr into my skull to drain the fluid. He comforted me with the fact that it had been a serious procedure and that I would mend. I did feel, as Hilda later remarked, that I hadn’t really been present for much of the trauma.
When I finally saw myself in the bathroom mirror at the hospital it wasn’t the bruise on my forehead that startled me as much as my cropped hair. I had always had thick, long hair. I had been vain about my braids, but I also believed that it, the hair itself, was somehow the truest, the best part of me; I liked to think it was the feature which described me.
“Too bad they had to go so close,” the nurse said from behind, as I stared at myself. “It’s a shock, isn’t it? I’ve got a scarf you can have, if they’ll let you, an extra pink thing to cover all that up when the bandage comes off.” By “all that” she meant my head. She didn’t seem to notice my manacles and she made conversation as if I was an ordinary person who’d had an accident.
I was in the hospital a short time, but in that brief interim I tried to fill up on air and light, silence and darkness. Lizzy’s death seemed close again in the hospital setting, and I found myself welcoming the familiar oppressive images only to then fully remember their content. I sat up when I could manage and watched the sky. Despite the constraints I felt free as a bird, being able to look out a window. The blow seemed to have shifted the contents of my brain, so that the heavy portion was up front, the fluff in the back. The dull continuous ache left me dizzy. If I didn’t consciously hold my head straight I had the feeling it would fall forward to my chest. In addition to the work of balancing the new weight, I couldn’t keep from thinking about Howard. I was sure that he would have been notified, and that at any moment he would walk through the door. I kept waiting. I wanted very much to see him without the barrier of the Plexiglas. I wanted to lay my hands on him; I thought that with touch, only with my fingers on his skin, would I know clearly what I felt.
During my time in jail I wasn’t always sure that Howard and I would weather the storm, and I often tried to think what it was, a single thing, that went deep enough to hold us. I knew that what had brought us together in Ann Arbor was the mysterious chemical bonding that is not rational, eyeball to eyeball, so that we both went to our respective apartments and dreamed each other up, yearning, never straining against the force that drew us right against each other. Emma had been conceived shortly after we met, we had bought the farm, and then Claire came along. There were children and real estate to bind the ties. His parents, Nellie and Walt, had had a strong union, and Howard believed, with a kind of fervor that seemed nearly Christian, that there was a sanctity in marriage to uphold, that the husband and wife were to make their way through the world, shoulder to shoulder. I hadn’t known anything to speak of about marriage when we met, but I had found his aspirations impossible to resist. Lying in the hospital bed I thought to myself that my passion for Howard had soon been replaced by something that was stronger than respect, or habit, or maybe even need. It wasn’t a simple connection like affinity, because there had been periods when I felt as if I was living with a stranger, that I didn’t know or particularly like the man asleep beside me, the man who always got up so early. There were dozens of feelings that came to me in varying strengths as I lay still. I recalled my affection for Howard, my admiration, the attraction I felt to him, and the way he could take me by surprise and amuse me. Those feelings were on the side of what I called love. On the other side there was rage, irritation, disappointment, boredom. Somewhere in the middle was endurance, stolid and essential as air. I wasn’t certain the group of feelings wouldn’t cancel each other out, if any of them could possibly be powerful enough to carry me along by his side, shoulder to shoulder.
Because I couldn’t make out the blur of the next week, or month, I tried to see through to the end. I would die, and if I was still married to Howard I would be buried next to him. Where would we rest our useless bodies? We might not be allowed a plot in the Prairie Center Cemetery, but it would be of little matter, save for our hurt feelings, because Howard would want to be buried with his relatives in Minnesota. Imagine lying down near Nellie, having, even in death, even as a pile of bones, to feel her disapproval. Howard would want to be laid between the two of us, for old
time’s sake. “Look on the positive side, sweetheart,” Nellie might say over Howard’s bleached carcass to me, “the worms need to eat too.” I would never feel at home in the Goodwin plot outside of Hastings, Minnesota. In the end maybe what marriage offered was the determination of one’s burial site. We would be laid to rest and little children would come along in the fall and kick leaves around and jump off the stones while their parents reprimanded them. Emma and Claire would grow up and die and go off and be buried with their husbands—oh, it was too lonely, too desolate to think about.
I sat in my bed while my head pounded and the guard sat outside chewing his gum. I thought of a time right after we’d moved to Prairie Junction. Emma was a baby. We had put her in her crib in the otherwise empty nursery. When she was sleeping soundly we went out, locking the swollen door behind us. Howard assured me it would be all right. We would be gone for just a minute. It was so hot and she was asleep. We had run down the lane in the dark and yanked off our clothes, dropped them in the sand. Howard carried me in the good, cool water, kissing my neck and my breasts. He had let me go and we had swum side by side, going under, opening our eyes to the darkness. And I wondered, as I came up into the air, if my mother and father had ever done anything of the kind, swum naked together on a sweltering night, stroke after stroke, going down together into the darkness. I had hoped so hard my teeth began to chatter, and then I hoped, most certainly in vain, for my mother’s mother, and her mother before her. I had stood in the water, catching my breath, throwing my head back, hoping beyond all the other hopes, that my daughter would someday know that particular joy.
Lying between the cool hospital sheets I tried to remember, to feel, the black water on my skin. I remembered being afraid that night at the pond, that Howard, the Howard who was so sure of animal husbandry, auto mechanics, and history—his beautiful face, his hair wet and slicked back, his marmoreal torso—I remember fearing that he was bound to go up in flames with no notice. That night I had wanted to swim to him and yet I wanted to think of him always there on the dock, safe and waiting for me. I had fluttered my hands and kicked my feet trying to stay in place, out of my depth.
Always my thoughts of the water, of Howard, led me to the farm
itself and the worry I had that he might try to sell it. It was irrational, I knew. Rafferty had explained to me that the farm was what we had in our favor, the thing that rooted us to Prairie Center. Howard wasn’t prone to impetuous behavior and he would be able to keep the faith, I always told myself, keep the faith that we could outlive everyone in Prairie Center, closed up in our house, secure in the woods. I was sure we could outlast everyone, until all the faces pressing against the glass were nothing more than a mild, unpleasant dream. It was impossible to imagine Howard without the farm. I couldn’t think what would fill his days and his nights. What would replace the map that was securely lodged in his brain, a weather map complete with every weather possibility? Clouds: cirrocumulus undulatis, stratus uniformis, a plain old cold front floated before his eyes even as he looked at the night sky. In my worst moments I pictured Howard coaxing the shy postmistress down at the Prairie Center P.O. out of her cage with a pail of fresh warm milk only because he knew that if he merged their stamp collections they would make a fortune. Helen, that was her name, and Howard! They belonged together. Emma and Claire would have brothers and be blended.
I had learned as a child that it is foolish to take anything for granted, and so I knew that it was possible that in my short absence Howard could fall blindly in love with Postmistress Helen. He would do well with someone who liked to weigh concrete objects and count out change and deliver goods. Mrs. Glevitch would say that it served me right, that that’s what happened when you let a decent man out of your hands. I tried to imagine taking up with Luther Tritz, the band director, once I was sprung, living a life of exile like the Duchess and Duke of Windsor, quarreling in between our games of blackjack, and all on Luke’s meager allowance. A fly had somehow made its way up the stairs in the hospital and was buzzing near my tray. I gave it a second look, one of God’s creatures, a dirty insect that we took for granted and treated with contempt. How charming he was, washing himself with his feet, how dapper the gray stripes were, running down his body. I might take him back to the jail girls as a token from my trip abroad.
While nothing was impossible, nothing, not life imprisonment, not death, or the keeping of a fly in a shrine, I wondered if it was remotely possible that something, a shred, to be sure, of the old life, could be
salvaged. The old life: Howard, arms bronzed up to his T-shirt, cultivating the corn, thinking about his cows, the storm systems, the farmers who’d come before him, the Blackhawk War, the wonder of growing vegetable matter from a place as unlikely as the ground. And I, upstairs on the porch, with the shades drawn, dancing by myself. All the while our girls would grow up, making their lives out of the pieces we’d given them. Ordinary life was laced with miracles, I knew that, had read enough poetry to understand that we are elevated with the knowing, and yet it was difficult to notice and be grateful when one was continually fatigued and irritated. I suppose that unquenchable sense of wonder is what separates us dolts from the saints and the poets. This was the lesson, perhaps, that I was sent to learn: The old life was worth having at any expense. Had Theresa been imprisoned, she would have guessed the moral after five minutes. I would know, wouldn’t I, when I got out, what things were worthy of complaint? Maybe there was value in going to jail to weigh the feelings I had for Howard, to determine if the scale would tip one way or the other. I thought so often last summer of the pond all those years ago, when Howard and I swam back and forth that first night in Prairie Junction. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the last year, but I could remember and find sense in that single evening in the past. At face value it had been a dip on a hot night. But it was something else too, I could see that now, something on the order of a baptism, a kind of blessing. It had been impossible to see at the time, to understand what was taking place right under our noses. Without minister and feast and candlelight and absolution, our swim had marked a beginning.
When I returned to the pod after the incident an unexpected change had taken place. I came through the door, and just as happened on my first entrance, the girls stopped their talk. They stared unabashedly as I made my way to the cell with my white bandage wrapped around my head like a squashed turban. I looked beaten, my hair was gone, but I did my best to stand up straight. I moved slowly across the floor without looking to the left or to the right. They watched me walk. I had lived, presumably still capable of telling the story, whatever it was, while Dyshett and Janet scratched at the walls of their cells across the corridor.
It was Sherry who came to my side just as I got into bed, who gave
me a hand. She may have known that I had doctor’s orders to rest and as much Demerol as I wanted. “She don’t know what hit her,” Sherry whispered.
“Who?” I said.
“Dyshett,” she answered. “You took it, like a sponge or somethin’, you jus’ soak all a her—” She wasn’t sure what to call Dyshett’s fury. “She screamin’ at you somethin’ fierce after you knock over—she screamin’ at Janet to kick at you. Big dumb Janet was like, ‘Huh?’ But you, you was somethin’ all raggy on the floor but we knowed you got strength inside a you. You wasn’t using it except you was too using it. We been tryin’ to figure that out ever since.”
She held my stiff back as I eased down into the mat. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.” She squinted at me as if my halo was hurting her eyes. “I don’t have any idea what happened,” I mumbled.
“Some of them, Natasha, Hilda, Rita, they say Dyshett and Janet beat on you. But the way it happens—and I seen it, I seen every move—Dyshett jus’ about ready to get you and you do it for her, you take all a her and dump over wid it. I tell myself, don’t get involved with this scene because there ain’t nobody goin’ to see it the same way. I tell myself, the Almighty’s takin’ over this picture. I seen you, with the grin on your face like you at heaven’s gate. And then you bump over, slam, head goes on the table, and then you fall to the floor, smack, head goes on the cement. The way I see it the whole story is one big trap, only I can’t figure out who got caught.”
“Dyshett didn’t hurt me?” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Let’s put Debbie’s pillow under here too,” she said, lifting my head and sliding the flat pillow under me. “She don’t need it with all her padding. No, it make Dyshett lose her mind a little. She not used to people jus’ takin’ her, right in the face. She been fighting her whole life and people been fighting back. You sat like you some dead sponge, soakin’ her up. Maybe you got so full a her you can’t take it no more, you jus’ drop over with all that shit she give off. When the guard ax what happen, she look at him like she a poor little lost lamb who accidentally kill her best schoolteacher. She don’t even know if she did it. She don’t even know if she didn’t do it. Dyshett, she never been in that spot before. I love seeing that girl all confuse. That the most beautiful sight, that girl mixed up so
she don’t know if she going or coming.” She spread my blanket over me. “You got to get comfortable and rest. No more talkin’ right now. You need somethin’, you call.”