“How many kids you got?” Dyshett asked, turning around to face our group, looking straight at me.
“Why is everyone asking me that question?” I whined into my hamburger bun. I wished to continue thinking about the tuber that was going to be genetically engineered to grow vinyl tablecloths with or without flower patterns. I didn’t want her to know that I had been diminished by our fight, such as it was. The others thought I had come out ahead, but they were mistaken. I didn’t want her to know that there were days I couldn’t see straight. And I didn’t want her to know that I loved Howard in a way that I was sure she would never love anyone. I had a life full of marvels and she wasn’t going to get so much as a glimpse of it. He and I had mapped a course in which work and love were to go together. She wouldn’t be able to conceive of such a commitment. We had invested our lives in our children and the gifts we were giving them were for their heads and their hearts. Emma and Claire were not merely showcases for expensive jewelry.
“I don’t want to talk about them,” I said.
“Esc
u
se me,” she said, bending her arms so that her hands, palms up, came to her shoulders.
“So, like stores had his name on their lists,” Carla was saying, in her lesson on fraud, “you know, how they do for people who write bad checks?”
I felt a violent shudder in my abdomen again, and I swallowed my hamburger as fast as I could in hopes that the bun would stanch the sobs.
“What’s their names?” Dyshett said. “You can tell me that.” She was blurry across the table from me. “A boy, you got, or what, a girl?”
“No,” I said, the awful sharpness and heft of the thing in my stomach lurching up, falling back, lurching up again. “NO,” I said. I left the table and went to my cell and I sat on the bed, doing breathing exercises meant
for giving birth. I tried to focus on a speck on the wall, to feel as if I was pouring what was inside myself into the black dot on the cinder block, filling the infinite space behind that smallest of portals, until I was empty.
It was as I tried again, and then again to focus on the speck, that I recalled the day and the time. Howard was going to come soon for his weekly visit. He too would see my pink bandanna and wonder why it fit so snugly over my head. I would try to distract him by saying, Remember the night we swam together in the pond, Howard? Remember how we moved so effortlessly through the water, holding each other as if we were one body? That was the beginning, wasn’t it?
When I went down to see him that afternoon, and when I came to my station and reached for the phone, I saw in that instant behind him, Emma and Claire looking into the communications room. Without thinking I tried to get through the window, as if I thought the girls being there meant the glass would dissolve. They were so beautiful. They were wearing new sundresses and their clean hair was shining. I hadn’t, for a month and a half, been able to count on the fact that they were real, and now there they were, wonderful and alive, curious about the operators, as if the outing was a trip to a museum. I was so glad and I felt a rush of gratitude toward Howard, for knowing, despite my command, that I needed to see them. He was standing up, shouting into the phone, trying, it seemed just then, to keep me from seeing. I couldn’t think why he was blocking the view. He was wearing a blue shirt, looking like a dark shadow in the window, like some ominous figure coming down the street in a cartoon. I was going to say so, into the phone, and then I was going to shout how glad I was to see the girls. I needed to look beyond him, if he would only get out of the way, and I needed to say the lines I had been working on: Remember the pond that night, Howard? Is it love that connects us, is that what it is? I never knew that the feeling I have is regular old love because it’s so—intricate. Perhaps there is another name for it, one we don’t yet know. I used to think that love was simple and noticeable, like rain falling, so that just as you’d look at your skin and say Water, you would also wake in the morning and say Love. But it has been underneath, this new and old thing I feel, subterranean, silent and steady, like blood, rushing along and along without often making itself known.
When I looked at him he was jabbing his finger at the window, as if
he meant to poke me. His face was red, bilious. I had never seen him with such an expression, his frown running all the way into his neck. “I love you, Howard,” I tried to say into the window, but he was spitting and frothing, erupting into what looked very much like anger. The room began to lean and spin, slowly, like a merry-go-round just heating up, going at a drowsy pace so that you could still jump aboard if you had your ticket. I wasn’t sure then that the girls were really there, that they weren’t some kind of mirage. I had to get out before I tipped over. The guard tried to make me go back to my station, but he finally let me out when I said, “There is no one here I know.”
Chapter Nineteen
——
I
NEVER DREAMED THAT
Howard would actually sell the farm, that he could part with the barn, and his cows, upon which he lavished what seemed a maternal care. I remember a day long ago when I looked out to see him shining the four-paned windows that are set into each side of the barn near the roof. Our house was falling to pieces and was unclean from top to bottom, and he was polishing the windows up in the haymow, where the dust was thick, like haze.
It was not clear to me that Howard meant to sell the farm, but near the end of the summer his letters became infrequent, short and full of gloom, and, to make matters worse, Theresa stopped writing altogether. There was no balance, no yin for the yang. I was mystified: One day she was telling me how delightful the girls were, how much they meant to her, how stoic I was, and the next day there was nothing. A postcard trickled in a week later, saying that they’d been sick, they were busy: I could practically hear her making the feeble excuses, and yet I couldn’t think what she was trying to hide. I was writing to her several times a week, first of all because I was so thankful she was caring for Emma and Claire, and second, because I thought that as well as nourishing Howard she might be able to keep his spirits up. Theresa’s letters were unusual
because she wrote just as she spoke, bubbling along about her mother, the girls, the flower borders, an epiphany, a recipe for shortbread. I appreciated her trying to keep me in touch with ordinary life, a place where one fretted over shoddy merchandise and strained relationships. After her communications stopped I knew that something had happened, and that she, even with her considerable talents, did not know how to tell me.
When the call came through that I could go, everyone stopped what they were doing. They gathered in the day room to watch me pack. Sherry asked me what I was going to wear home and I described, as best I remembered, the khaki shorts and the gray T-shirt that I’d worn the day I was taken.
“You jus’ as well keep the orange shit on,” Sherry said. “That sound bland as mud.”
“You are so lucky,” Debbie whimpered. “I wish someone could get me out of here.”
“You try to keep the faith,” I said.
“You going back to the farm?” Sherry asked. When I didn’t answer she said, “I couldn’t stand to live out there in all that dark empty space. I’d feel like somebody was lookin’ at me all the tahm.”
A woman who was new called from across the room, “Like there ain’t nobody lookin’ at us right now?”
“Let’s not have long faces!” Sherry shouted. “You know we’ll be back here someday. You know we was meant to be one happy family.”
Dyshett stood just outside of her cell and watched. I gathered my books in the grocery bag and went quickly for the door without any personal good-byes. It was possible we would meet again, that we might spend the prime of our lives together, if we were convicted of our various crimes. As the door buzzed and the guard came through to get me I turned and waved. “Be good,” I said.
“Keep in touch,” Sherry yelled.
I could see them soundlessly repeating both jokes as I was led along the hall and out a series of doors to the elevator.
I felt as I’m sure that dog must have felt, the dog we came upon in our woods one day, wrapped around a tree by its own leash. It was barking and barking. And after Howard carefully unwrapped the leash and it was
free to go, it still stood there, barking and barking. Even when it took one step, and another, it couldn’t believe that it was no longer bound. It barked at us, at the tree, at itself. It barked as it ran off, astonished all the way through the woods.
Before we went to our new town we stopped at a county park to walk along the nature trails. We didn’t talk much, except to point out a turtle, a kestrel, a great blue heron. There had been a short spate of rain and the trees dripped their water on us. I had missed a season, one dry summer; I had gone in when it seemed the heat would never abate, and come out to find a wet, cool September day. It had rained in my absence. Howard had told me about the first storm in July, and then the few showers that came after. I hadn’t heard the thunder inside our pod. The rain hadn’t been enough or come in time, and many of the farmers in the southern part of the state had lost their crops. One summer wasn’t much to lose over a lifetime, a season blotted out. There might be others to follow in some new place, lush wild summers, with cicadas, fireflies, mosquitoes, fish jumping, sunsets, and northern lights. There was no telling where we might go. I felt weightless walking along the trail, as if I might drift up to the sky like a helium balloon if I once let go of Howard’s hand.
I was standing in the brush looking over the cattail marsh when he told me that school was starting on Monday. There had been a teacher’s strike for nearly a month. The girls had seemed so far away while I was holed up, and I had somehow not been able to absorb the fact that Emma was going to be a schoolgirl. She was looking at a nest that Howard had found along the path. I wondered if he’d thought to enroll her at Spring Grove Elementary. We’d have to write down our names and addresses on a registration card, as well as our occupations, our home and work phone numbers, someone to contact in case of an emergency. We wouldn’t have much information to give. We had nothing permanent except our tarnished name for that card. I wondered if we had money to buy Emma crayons, a paint smock, a pencil case, a folder, new shoes. I went and knelt down by her, pretending to look at the nest. I won’t let her go, I thought. I’ll hide her away, or pretend that she’s sickly.
Howard set the nest back in the thicket. I remembered how lovely he used to look with a small wet lamb in his large splayed hands. He looked tired and unhappy, and I kept glancing at him to see if I was only
imagining that he looked so tired and unhappy. It was nice of him to bring me to the park, and I said so. He smiled a lame smile. The girls ran alongside of him, by habit now. I was like a guest.
I had decided, once I knew about the farm; I had resolved that I was not going to be ungrateful about my freedom. We left the park after we’d had some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on doughy white bread, the cheapest brand there is, the same kind they served at the jail. Howard occasionally used to make bread with our cow’s milk and with flour which he ground from the wheat he’d grown. I used to tell the girls that it was the best bread in the world and they called it that, “The-best-bread-in-the-world-bread.” We stood up and ate because the picnic tables and benches were wet. We were like acquaintances, standing and eating, not quite knowing what to say. Even the girls were subdued, staring up at my bandanna.
When we were finished we made our way to Spring Grove. We drove into the garage that was attached both to our apartment and to the next apartment in the Pheasant Glade development. Howard unlocked the white door and ushered me into the small vestibule. Never, not in our strangest dreams, would we have seen ourselves in a place so new, a place that smelled as if air freshener were somehow built into the very walls. Howard’s jaw was clenched, his eyes narrowed as he moved quickly to open the sliding doors off the kitchen. He had warned me that the place was only temporary and that it was not something we would have chosen under normal circumstances. He and the girls had picked goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, and chicory from the side of a road somewhere, and put them in jars in the living room and kitchen. I sat down in the sagging wing chair we’d had on the farm and took the girls on my lap. I began to talk with them about the time my Aunt Kate moved in with me when I was a little girl, about the day she came to the door with her suitcase, how she led me right out into the yard and began planting tulip bulbs. “We’ll ask if we can plant some tulips in the back,” I said.
“There isn’t a back,” Emma said.
“The front then.”
“That’s the driveway.”
“A window box. We’ll make a window box.”
“I don’t think you should put bulbs in a window box. There’s not enough dirt in a window box.”
She was right. “We could color tulips,” I ventured, “and tape them to the walls in a border, and then we’ll have them all year around?”
“If you want to,” she said, slipping off my lap, defeat in her knock-kneed walk, resistance in her hunched shoulders. She was choosing isolation; it was all hers as she made her way up to her room and closed the door.
“What’s under your hat?” Claire asked.
I untied the bandanna and showed her my very short, soft hair.
“You’re not so pretty anymore,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’ll pet you.” She nestled into my chest and I read her
Blueberries for Sal
. When I was finished she said, “Can we go visit Theresa soon?”
“We’ll have to call her one of these days.”
“When?”
“One of these days we’ll give her a call.”
“This house is sticky,” she said. “I think it smells bad.”
I wouldn’t let myself think that “the unit,” as Howard called it, with no space to breathe, was the price we were all paying and paying for my release. That first night Howard sat me down at the kitchen table in the breakfast nook and showed me his accounts. He was going to be able to pay off his debt to the bank if he could get a job. He had paid my bond, money which we would get back when I showed up for my trial. There was enough to pay Rafferty for the time being, a meager amount for food, insurance, rent, taxes. Nellie would have to wait for her portion. I think Howard was trying to show me that the reason for everything was in the account book. “I see,” I said, although the numbers ran together into one big blot of ink at the edge of the page. I am sure I will never understand what moved Howard. He said that our life in Prairie Center was tainted. It was a defensible excuse, and yet I had always felt, as he did, that the place was ours in a way that went beyond ownership. When Howard farmed he looked as if he didn’t have to do anything much more than pick up a shovel and start digging to be a part of the landscape. I don’t mean in a pictorial way, but actually a part of it, part of the dirt, the sky, the growing things. Away from home I had realized that the farm was not as dear to me as flesh, but nearly so, that the ground was something that I
could very easily have knelt down on and kissed, tried to embrace. Perhaps it was Lizzy’s death that had given new meaning to the word “ground.” It, the ground, the shabby buildings, the shoots in spring, the pond, the garden, began just where our bodies ended.