Howard was leaning toward me, first describing Claire sitting in the hay chute holding two wild kittens by the neck, and then Emma hitching the dog up to the old goat cart, getting the ride of her life. He smiled as he
wiped the steam from the window with his hand. I was slightly drunk on one bottle of beer. I laughed out loud, burped, and got hiccups in swift succession. Our children were marvelous and not even Howard’s beef or my lukewarm salty Chicken Almond Ding with one or two almonds in a gray-green slurry could dampen our enthusiasm.
“I wonder if a kid like Robbie MacKessy thinks that pain is the only reality,” Howard had said after I opened my fortune and read, “Happiness is illusion. Pain is reality.”
I didn’t like the idea that Happiness was nothing more than a phantom. I looked through the circle that Howard had cleared on the window, and I saw, all the way back, to the time when my father took me to Bolyston, Ohio, to see the Gem of Egypt. It was a giant earth-moving machine, an absolutely colossal machine, used for surface coal mining. It stood fifteen stories high, with pulleys the size of Ferris wheels, and rigging and scaffolding as glorious as the Golden Gate Bridge. It had a claw that could move 150 cubic yards of dirt in one bite. In one or two passes the Gem of Egypt could wipe out an entire coal town. The company my father worked for had made the pulleys and the machine was his pride and joy. When I started to run toward it, my father yanked me back by the collar and shouted, “What’s the matter with you?” When I didn’t answer, he shook me. “I said, what’s the matter with you?”
I finally managed to say, “I want to climb on it—and wave to you.”
He took me under my arms and lifted me up. I was ten years old, much too old for that sort of thing. As far as I could remember he had never held me before. I started to scream and then stuffed my hands in my mouth. It was my father’s unspoken rule that I wasn’t to cry for any reason. He lifted me up and up, so I could see the Gem. “It’s bigger than the goddamn Parthenon,” my father used to say, as if the Parthenon was a standard unit of measurement. Being three feet taller didn’t appreciably change my perspective, and I couldn’t really concentrate on it anyway, because I was on his shoulders. They were sharp and I couldn’t help noticing that he had dandruff, huge pieces in his brown hair like pussy willows growing along a stalk. Still, I knew that I would never forget that moment—it, the happiness, was stronger than almost anything I could think of, like the terrible blinding glare of sun on fresh deep snow.
“What are you thinking about?” Howard had asked that night at the restaurant.
“What?” In my experience people didn’t ask such a question unless their love was brand-new. “I was just remembering more of my cow dream,” I lied. “It was such a stressful night’s work, dreaming that dream. I was being brought in from the pasture to the milking parlor and prodded into a stanchion. My name was there on the board, everything you needed to know:
GARDNER FRANCES KATHRYN GOODWIN ALICE
.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Gardner from my father, Frances from my mother, Kathryn from my aunt, who raised me, Goodwin from you, the sperm donor, Alice for myself. I was a fine milker, really. I would have been superb but it was impossible to chew the grain, locked in the stanchion because you were watching me—”
“You weren’t thinking that Alice, were you? You looked so peaceful just a minute ago—”
“You’re right, Howard,” I had said. “You’re right! Isn’t it awful”—I stabbed a piece of chicken with my chopstick—“that we know each other so well we can’t even have a little fantasy in private? I was thinking about our strange, lonesome wedding and the warty-headed whatever his name Justice was. Remember what he said about our deep knowledge of one another? We knew nothing about each other! Maybe, actually, we still don’t. Sometimes I think I know the bone-grinding routine of our life, that that’s all I know, up to milk cows, in for breakfast, out to the—”
“Alice,” he had said, shaking his head, “let’s just love each other. Did you ever think it’s as simple as that?”
It wasn’t nearly as simple as that—was it? Could it be? “I know, I know,” I said, leaning over to massage my calf. “I’m talking about—Christ, my leg is knotted up—”
“You’re making it worse,” he had said in his calm and mature sixty-head-of-cattle farmer voice. I was curled over, clutching my leg. “Try to sit up and relax.” The pain was turning the bend in my knee, traveling along my thigh, en route to my stomach. “Relax, Alice. You’re making it worse.”
We had had to go home early. I lay in the hot water in the bath that night absently stroking my irreproachably relaxed calf, thinking about
Emma, who had been the reason for our marriage. Emma had been no hardier than a peach
in utero
, but she had had the power to force us to become a family, to buy the farm at Prairie Junction. She would have been happy in a drawer or a box, and we had gone and got married, bought four hundred acres, a barn, several outbuildings, and a three-story house. She had forced us to go beyond knowing each other deeply, beyond loving each other: She had impelled us to make a life.
I had felt the charley horse coming on again, and I sank down into the tub. As I got older and older and then died somehow or other, I knew I would feel excruciating pain that was only a part of ordinary deterioration. There would be the chronic pain of aching joints, a broken hip, gallbladder surgery, the malignant lump in my breast—the sorts of trials that people endure day in and out. At thirty-two I had the occasional shadow of mistrust. I could imagine, as the years went on, my body becoming something outside of myself, something to cheer on, an old friend who is huffing up the hill on a bicycle. Still, I hoped that there would be no pain so great that it could blot out the time I sat on my father’s shoulders looking at the extraordinary, the magnificent, the gorgeous Gem of Egypt, dwarfing all of mankind.
Howard had come into the bathroom with a candle. He had turned off the light and undressed and climbed into the tub, displacing so much water it rose to my chin. It seemed, just then, like a summer to rejoice in the heat. It was so good of him to think that a rumpus in the bathtub would be fun, so good of him to walk straight in, with a candle, and without saying a word, put his hand on my head, stroke my hair. I moved up to make room for him. It had been a dry spell, as I had told Theresa recently, and who was to blame the hungry farmwife if one quiet night she had pulled a can of store-bought whipped cream out of her bathrobe pocket and squirted some froth on the dairy farmer’s privates? Theresa and I had howled out on the porch, trading the secrets of our marriage beds. I hadn’t taken into consideration how cold the whipped cream would feel, and so I had been surprised when Howard ran squealing like a pig into the hallway. He had tried to be good humored but he couldn’t stand the thought of my spending money on a dairy product when I could skim our own cream off the milk pail.
I had so often been in awe of the luck which had led me to him years
before in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That night in the tub I was thankful for Howard, thankful for the prospect of renewal. Although it was cramped in the deep but short bathtub on claws, although I was in danger of being impaled on the faucet at several points in the tumult, I was grateful, all the same.
I was sitting with my eyes shut, in the hospital lounge, remembering that night in the bathtub, when the elevator bell rang and Howard stepped out onto the newly washed floor. “How is she?” he asked, sitting down, putting his arm around me. I could hear his heart beating. I tried resting my cheek on the metal snap of his shirt pocket. Howard was the most potent man in Wisconsin. I had smelled him in my stupor from the lounge on the third floor when he was out in the parking lot, I was sure of it now.
“Her eyelids fluttered this afternoon,” I said. I had been alert then, coming up for air after a strenuous supplication. Dan had come from room 309 shouting for Theresa. It was possible, I thought, that Howard would make the miracle take place. The power of smell would bring Lizzy back into herself.
“What does it mean?” Howard asked.
I shook my head. I wanted to wake up to find Emma and Claire in the next room. I would scream at them for pulling each other’s hair, and we would resume our happy life. I would have recklessly given away anything to find that I had only slipped into another dimension, like Scrooge did every Christmas Eve. I was in a preview of the possible future and when I got back to earth and turned over several new leaves, all would be well. The fluttering eyelids might or might not be meaningless, according to the rumors that had circulated in the lounge.
I had admired Howard from the start because of his beauty and the way he stood back quietly, both observing and not judging, a remarkable combination, I had thought. He was everything my father wasn’t. He wept at movies, he loved auctions and thrift stores for their antiques, and he occasionally made a comment out of the blue that was killingly funny, well worth the wait. He knew about things: He knew how matches were made, what to do if a swarm of bees landed in a tree, how to bandage a wound, start a fire, make a candle, kill something for dinner. If he said he
did something twenty times or twice, or one thousand times, it was accurate. He didn’t ever stretch the truth or embellish. It was his code, to be scrupulously honest. I had thought there was no occasion to which he could not rise.
“Howard,” I whispered into his shirt snap. “What am I going to do?”
He rubbed his hand over his freshly shaven chin. “What happened?”
I tried to swallow but my tongue felt thick and bristly, like a Brillo pad. “I don’t—” I could hardly stand the feel of what was my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “I don’t know.”
He pulled me hard against his chest. That was comforting. Being held so firmly you couldn’t injure anything. I could imagine spending the rest of my numbered days on the hospital sofa. The second time I had crashed the car into the stone planter by the garage he had said in his owner-of-the-manor voice, “Alice, you’re going to have to tell me what happened.” He was waiting. It was his nature to move, to work, to produce. He was going to wait for me for a while. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said after a minute. “It happened so fast, while Emma was in the bathroom.” I realized, as the words came past my teeth, that I had edited out the time I had spent in the basement and upstairs. “Where are Emma and Claire?” I asked. “How are they?”
“I called Nellie,” Howard said.
His face was like a Cro-Magnon’s. He was all crags, and he had shaggy eyebrows, a looming forehead; he would have looked wonderful in a cave painting. He would have been a Cro-Magnon celebrity, on the cover of Cro-Magnon
People
, the most handsome, nearly modern man of the year. His eyes were set too close together. It made a person feel crosseyed just to look into them. Howard’s mother, Nellie, had come from St. Paul, Minnesota, eight hours away. She had come because it was a real emergency. I rested in the thought of how repulsive I found Reverend Joseph Nabor. I pictured him calling his mother when he got home and telling her what a job he had done helping the sick, the bereaved, and the criminal, when he himself could hardly breathe.
Howard was saying something about going to eat. I couldn’t make my way to the cafeteria, couldn’t sit down to eat banana cream pie while Lizzy battled to get well. I couldn’t, didn’t want to, and he was pulling me
up, hardly waiting while I slipped on my flip flops. When we passed the broad open doors of the intensive care unit I faltered, broke away from Howard, had to stand and look. This was not something in my imagination. It was not one of the dreadful things I worried about, not an Uzi stickup or the sun glaring through the great big ozone hole. There, surrounding Lizzy’s bed, were all of Theresa’s prodigious Catholic family: sisters, brothers, mother and father, grandmothers, aunts and uncles, great-uncles and cousins. There were so many of them they were spilling out into the hall—they were at the hospital instead of making coleslaw and potato salad for the family picnic tomorrow. They were encircling the bed, holding hands, praying together. They were saying every single prayer, from the first Hail Mary to the last novena. Five out of eight of Theresa’s siblings could certifiably be excommunicated from the Church—she had told me elaborate stories about each of their sins. They had fornicated, blasphemed, committed adultery. And what had Theresa said about the Uncle’s secret illegitimate daughter? She was probably the one with the short skirt and the dangerous-looking platform sandals.
I should go straight to the relatives, I knew, and let them see me in my abundant shame and misery. I was going to get pushed down the chute into the white flames of hell and I would tell them right out that I deserved to burn and burn. I didn’t ordinarily censor my thoughts, but I would, from now on, blot out what was bullheaded and extreme. They were gathered around the bed of the child, chanting and praying, believing for the moment, committing themselves, just as I had, to eternal belief and purity of heart and mind, if only the one, the most important error could be rectified. No one beckoned. No one broke away from the circle to invite us into the room. Dan looked up and did not seem to recognize us.
We sat in the lounge for two more nights and two more days. Howard left only to milk, to return with a fresh, piquant smell on his tennis shoes. We closed our eyes at night, leaning against each other, listening to the world moving up and down the hall on wheels. The laundry baskets were on wheels, the scales, the I.V. poles, the respirators, the meal trays, the beds, the chairs, the dressers, the bedside tables. Nothing was rooted to the floor. The nurses seemed weightless, like birds, flying down the hall,
their cushioned shoes barely touching the ground. They were as swift as they could be, considering the ringing bells and gravity and the time of night.
Other families came to wait out their calamities. We stood by as they formed their own communities within the space of the lounge. I sat at the end of the sofa watching Lizzy’s door. Periodically the obese woman rose up and asked for our attention. “Let us bow our heads,” she began.