Sometimes his letting the land go seemed as if it could only have been an extraordinary act of kindness, that he assumed the months until the trial were going to be my last chance in a long while to be with the girls, that even Rafferty’s reason would not prevail and I would be proven guilty. Sometimes, it seemed another punishment for something we didn’t even know we’d done.
We were sitting on what he used to like to call “the davenport,” that first night, after the girls were in bed. He set his muscled arm around me. It didn’t seem to weigh much more than a stick on my back and shoulders. My head was thrumming, something it did when I was tired. I could tell he was nervous; I was going to ask him about the farm, he thought, or say something about the apartment or Rafferty. He was sitting with a terrible erectness and formality. We must have looked as if we’d been positioned, like mannequins, as we tried out various topics, all of them running aground before we touched on anything difficult or meaningful. “What about Nellie?” I finally asked.
“She’ll be back soon,” he said.
“She always knew you shouldn’t have married me,” I said lightly.
“I haven’t told her much. She’s pretty involved over there.”
“We still owe her quite a bit, don’t we?”
“Yep,” he said, “we owe her.”
We were quiet for a while. “Thank you, Howard,” I said. “Thank you—” He sprang up before I could finish.
“We tried to have a fire one night when it wasn’t so hot,” he said, looking at the fireplace, “to roast marshmallows. The girls wanted to,” he added, perhaps to make it plain that there wasn’t much he wanted anymore. “You can hardly get a log in the grating, it’s so small. What’d they make the thing for if you can’t use it?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“But what’d they make it for?”
I followed him up the stairs to the master bedroom. I wanted to lie down with him and cry or laugh or be sick, shivering under the covers,
partners in misery. He had put the futon on the orange-flecked carpet, the old lump we used to haul out for guests. Our clocks were there, the Big Ben and the Little Ben, ticking away as always, both of them keeping the wrong time. From storage Howard had pulled together a box of essential things for me, not unlike jail basics: underwear, socks, T-shirts. I was trying to think what to say beyond, “Thank you,” when he said, “I’m tired. Could you get the light when you’re done?”
I climbed in and he turned over and kissed my cheek, mumbling something about how much they had missed me. When I was sure he was asleep I crawled out, pushed open the sliding door, and stepped onto the rough planks of the small deck that faced the highway. The air smelled of fry from the bar and grill down the street. It wasn’t the chintzy carpet, the newness all around that made me feel that I’d just been born and had neither a past nor a sense of the future. It wasn’t the street lights shining in over the bed, or the fact that we didn’t have one speck of dirt for a tulip bulb; it wasn’t any of those things that made me feel as if I had cracked. I got back under the blanket and tried to pull close to Howard. He was asleep and his jaw was still clenched.
He found a job at the Motor Vehicle Registration Office that’s right next to Shopko on the outskirts of Racine. He had to take the Civil Service Test and the fact that he scored off the charts temporarily bolstered his spirits. He gave people eye exams, did the paper work on title transfers and registrations, and processed driver’s licenses. His starting salary was twenty-one thousand dollars with benefits. It was the most he had ever commanded thus far in his life. He stood at a booth like a bank teller, all day long, and was courteous and helpful. They told him that if he stayed a year he’d most certainly rise to the rank of Team Captain. I had become maudlin, sentimental, as temporarily bright as a new penny. One of those oppressed and hideously cheerful Victorian children heroines, Sara Crewe or Pollyanna, kept a running list of reasons to be thankful. Emma and I had a notebook where we wrote down the good things that had happened to us. Howard’s success on the job market was the first entry in our book.
It came as no surprise to us that Emma was reluctant to leave home in the mornings and go to school. At 8:20 every day Claire and I walked her to her kindergarten room in the old schoolhouse that had high ceilings
and tall windows and a musty charm. We left her in the hands of Miss Smucker, promising, crossing our hearts, hoping to die, that we’d be waiting by the door at 11:36 when the bell rang. I hated to promise on the off chance that I might get carted away. I had come to think, while I’d been in jail, that I deserved to be there, a normal reaction, Theresa later assured me. I couldn’t see a squad car go down the street without thinking that I’d better hurry and get my things.
After we dropped Emma at school, Claire and I used to walk to the playground. We’d swing, take the trip down the slide, and then head over to the A&W. We always split a sweet roll and had a glass of water each. She prattled on and on and I’d close my eyes and listen to the pure sound, the cadences of her three-year-old speech, trying, somehow, to etch the music into my brain.
Not long after my release Theresa called, saying that she was so anxious to get together. I remember thinking that it was both a curious and appropriate word choice: anxious. I had not yet felt ready to talk to her. I wasn’t ready to feel so vividly, as I would in a meeting, the void. Theresa may have begun somehow to adjust to Lizzy’s death, but my time in jail had not made me know more deeply that it was real. She suggested that we meet for breakfast on a day three weeks away. It seemed so agreeably distant, far enough in the future that it might never come to pass. But the morning arrived and Claire and I stood on the sidewalk outside the A&W, waiting, knowing from experience that she’d be late. When her blue van came along the block I wanted to run, and I had to breathe hard to get an adequate supply of oxygen, and I had to hold the metal outdoor menu post to keep myself from giving into that old habit of fleeing. As she turned into the driveway she stuck her head out the window and called, “It’s so great to see you!” She rolled up onto the curb and rocked back into the parking space. “God,” she cried, trying to untangle herself from her seat belt, “it’s so good to see you.”
She turned off the engine, and jumped to the pavement, talking as she hugged me and talking as she held me at arm’s length. “I like it! I like your hair. It’s so comfortable. It’s chic. Did your long hair get to be too much? You look younger—it makes you look like you’re about twenty, no honestly. Come on, Audrey, honey, come see Claire.” She stooped down. “Hi, Claire. Give me a hug. Ummm, I’ve missed you. Audrey, do you
have the little present you were going to give Claire? There you go. God, Alice,” she said, taking hold of my sleeve. She hadn’t really looked at me yet. She was buzzing and flapping, all movement and noise.
“It’s good to see you,” I managed.
We admired the children and expressed astonishment at their growth. Inside, the girls went directly to the play corner, where they had old-fashioned desks and a pot full of coloring books. Theresa settled herself into our booth, first smoothing her skirt over her rump and then sitting down. She leaned forward and said, in an undertone, “Can you believe what happened? Aren’t you still in shock? Sometimes I just can’t believe it. Sometimes I say to myself, No. I just have to say No!”
At first I thought that what was different about her was her new feverish pitch, her record-breaking speed. Other than that it seemed as if she was rattling on in her regular old way. She was working twenty hours a week, she said, and no more, because she meant to devote herself to Audrey. “You can’t get the time back,” she said, looking at her menu. She was going to have her tubal reversed at the beginning of November, with a doctor in Milwaukee who had a ninety-percent success rate. Dan was making an effort to be at home more and they’d been planning a lot of family activities. “I’ve got my hopes pinned on a baby,” she whispered. “Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do. We’ll heal faster with new life, I just know we will.”
I said how nice that would be.
I could see by the way she kept turning the pages of her menu without reading that she wanted to move away from the subject of Lizzy. Lizzy was near—we both felt it. As we talked of increasingly smaller and smaller things, the thick hovering form of the little girl became more oppressive. Theresa understandably would certainly have rather been at home; she wasn’t quite engaged, going through the motions of breakfast and friendship. When our food came and we had the business of eating to preoccupy us she casually asked, “Will the whole—deal take up your time now?”
“I think Rafferty’s trying to leave me alone for a while,” I said. “He was so angry at first. Howard didn’t tell him about the farm until after the closing. Rafferty always maintained that the property was our anchor, our greatest asset; it proved we were not going to turn tail and run. Howard
went over to the office the Monday morning after I got home, to break the news. I’ve gathered that Rafferty gave him a dressing-down. Paul and I talk details and stay away from the farm issue. I think he’s worried that Judge Peterson is going to be against us. He’s always very reassuring, but all the same I know he thinks that the judge might bar our key witnesses.”
“Oh God—”
“No,” I said. “I don’t worry much. I’ve always, from the start, felt that the thing just had to play itself out, that Howard and I are only two of the many powerless players.”
She sat across from me eating her bacon biscuit with the sort of intense concentration that’s required for taxes and higher math. She had her head bent over the plate and she chewed as if she was inspecting her food for something that might better have been observed under a microscope. “I’ve struggled a lot lately to keep from feeling helpless,” she finally said.
I nodded, knowing that it must require tremendous energy to keep up her unfailing good cheer. I nursed my coffee along staring out the window and she continued to work at eating. We had suddenly and unexpectedly fallen into a silence. We had run out of material, gone dry. We used to tell each other the kinds of private stories I had never planned to tell anyone. We didn’t know how to start up again; we didn’t know what to say. The silence had descended upon us like a hex.
“God,” she said, for filler, shaking her head.
I racked my brain, trying to think of something that didn’t point to Lizzy. Later I came up with numerous topics we could have spent hours belaboring, but at our booth I was sure we had lost our bearings, that we had somehow forgotten crucial information about each other. We both went at our breakfasts as if we were actually hungry. When we were finished Theresa cleared her throat, and wiped her mouth carefully, and I blew my nose. She picked up a sugar packet and read it, and I motioned Sharon, the waitress, for more coffee. “Those girls sure are busy,” Sharon said.
“Yes,” I nearly shouted. “Aren’t Claire and Audrey doing a good job?”
“Oh, they are,” Theresa cried. “They really are! They are so good.”
We turned to look at them over in their corner, sitting at the desks, scribbling in their books. Emma always used to play with Audrey; Claire was the one who had been Lizzy’s friend. “I was really impressed by how well the older girls included Claire when they were at our house,” she said. “Alice, oh Alice, was it awful in there, in the jail?”
We had come through. We had passed the doldrums, found wind for our sails. I shook my head first and then nodded. “I don’t know.” I laughed at my own confusion. “I read a lot. There’s a poem,
‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.’
The last line too especially spoke to me:
‘All life death does end and each day dies with sleep.’ ”
“That sounds good,” Theresa said faintly. “I’ll have to look it up.”
“One of the funny things I finally figured out,” I said, “was that the need for stories was so elemental—the jail girls could turn the smallest happening into something supernatural.”
“Oh God, Alice,” she groaned in her good old way.
“Any longer in there and one of us would have turned into a top-notch orator, a little Homer, a Homerette, reciting the long list of inmates as if they were ships going to battle.” I put the warm coffee cup to my cheek. “I’m still pretty disoriented. I’m mixed up about the whole experience.”
“Of course you are.”
“Take Sherry,” I said, “the one I told you about who was driving the get-away car. She was nineteen years old, had two or three children. At first I thought of all the girls as wayward kids, but by the end I realized that Sherry, in particular, had a dignity, a nobility, that I will never have, no matter if I live to be ninety. I don’t even know how to talk about it without making that nobility sound like some ridiculous racist stereotype, the Noble Savage idea. I don’t know how to talk about them. Maybe there isn’t any way to talk about them. Even Dyshett, the other girl I wrote you about, tried to bridge what seemed to me an infinitely wide, an unfathomably deep gap. When I was in my do-gooder phase several years ago I used to think I might volunteer at a prison, tutor someone toward their high-school equivalency test, but now I don’t see how I could teach those girls anything they don’t already know.”
“Can you imagine having to take them through something like the—
the Boston Tea Party?” she said, laughing. “All of that seems so irrelevant to street kids.”
I started to tell her that that wasn’t exactly what I meant.
“What they need is life skills, birth control, nutrition, that kind of thing,” she interrupted.
“I-I-I don’t know,” I faltered. “I think Dyshett would have understood, ‘No worst, there is none.’ ”
We ate some more. Everything had changed: I had been carted away, her daughter was still dead, we no longer lived close by, I might end up locked away for the next several years. I had been naïve to think a friendship could be maintained on a different plane from circumstance.
“I should visit them,” I said, “but I’m not sure I could face it. I’m working up to sending them something, a care package.”