“Grammie gave me a new bracelet.” She had half risen up, was resting her head on her fists, elbows bent, staring at me.
“That’s nice,” I whispered.
“It’s rhinestones,” she said, “what princesses wear.”
I had never cried so hard in my life, and Emma didn’t want to notice. It was as if that was how I greeted her every morning, crying. Crying because I didn’t feel I had a right to be in her room anymore, crying because I had inadvertently fouled our own nest.
The visitation and funeral took place two days after Lizzy’s death, in the evening, at the Presbyterian Church in Prairie Center. Dan loved the small town church where every Sunday he put on his black robe, came through the minister’s door to the pulpit, and took his place at the organ. He only knew how to use eight pedals but he got by. He had donated a life-size cow from the Dairy Shrine for the crèche that went on the lawn at Christmastime, which he kindly stored in his garage during the off-season.
We were eating at 4:45 when Nellie asked Howard what he was going to wear to the funeral.
He had just taken a bite of muffin, and when he said, “My navy blue sport coat,” crumbs went flying in all directions.
“Look at Daddy!” Claire squealed.
It took a full minute for Nellie to mentally roam through Howard’s wardrobe and come to the worn corduroy sport coat she had purchased for him when he was sixteen.
“You don’t mean the one you had in high school,” she said, tittering at the absurdity of the suggestion.
“Yep,” Howard said.
When she managed to close her mouth, she cleared her throat, braced both hands on the table, threw her head back, stuck her pointed chin out, and from that great height looked down upon him. “Honey,” she declared, “you cannot wear corduroy when it is one hundred degrees.” She straightened up, and with all the vigor of a sergeant strode to her room. She was back again before we could guess her order. “Go buy yourself a suit,” she said, slapping a blank check down on the table. “You ought to own one—and then you’ll have it for occasions like this.”
Were there going to be more occasions just like this? And could an exceptionally tall and slim person purchase a suit on short notice?
“Do you know what I could do with the—hundred or so dollars it’s going to cost?” Howard said with no trace of irritation in his voice. “I could get a better—”
“Don’t be silly. You’ll want a suit when Emma graduates from high school, from college, and gets married.”
She had no idea what moved her son. He was always silly, wasn’t he? First of all, he was under the impression that he could buy a suit for one hundred dollars, and second, he got up at 4:30 every morning because he longed to get out to the barn and milk animals the size of the Parthenon. Nellie was sure that Howard would soon outgrow his fantasy about the dairy farm, that that dream life of his wasn’t too much different than a boy spending hours moving a tractor around in the sandbox, making his own engine noises. A person could get by without depriving a cow of what was rightfully hers; we could all drink calcium-fortified orange juice and soy milk. My ears burned, my cheeks felt hot when I thought too much about her. I couldn’t forgive her for the way she treated Howard—as if she thought he was begging for candy.
Okay, sweetheart, here’s one hundred thousand dollars for your farm. Don’t eat it in one sitting or you’ll get a tummyache
. She had the wicked habit of generously giving and then chiding us for not using the money wisely. Sometimes she literally threw cash at us, and other times we felt we would have to get down on our knees and beg to get a nickel out of her. I should have been grateful, inwardly and outwardly, for her occasional spontaneous showers. No matter how much I prepared myself, how well I thought I had steeled myself against her, against my own irritation, I was always amazed, as if for the first time, by her little speeches, her slights, her apparently careless generosity that later implied a condition or two.
Howard was adept at concealing his exasperation, but I knew him well enough to understand that the steady gaze he now turned on me was his way of pleading for help. I shrugged my shoulders and pushed my plate back. She wanted him to look nice. Her son was going to smell of manure and have a dirty face at church; he wasn’t going to put his best foot forward and no one would know what a good, smart boy he was. I could see the worry in her puckered face. Her son’s wife was a disgrace,
and he wasn’t going to look as if he was separate from her. Nellie was tired, and she was growing old. To her credit she had said very little about Lizzy’s death, and giving her the benefit of the doubt, the suit business was probably her way of trying to make it all right for us. I did feel a little bit sorry for her. He had already jeopardized the cows’ productivity and comfort by milking two hours earlier, so why not oblige her? “I’ll drive,” I said to Howard. And to Nellie I murmured, “We’ll find him something presentable.”
On the way to town I couldn’t keep from saying my usual line: “Someday we have to stop taking her money.”
“I know.” It was characteristic of him to speak in monosyllables when there might be an argument.
At the men’s store in Blackwell, Hutchin’s, conveniently open late on Fridays, Howard tried on three suits, all of which were big around the middle and too short in the sleeves. Although he is color blind he picked out a respectable gray-and-green ensemble. “This isn’t pink, is it?” he whispered. The saleswoman reminded him that he needed shoes and a tie, a shirt and socks. She winked at me as if to say, We are on the same side. We have a mutual interest in dressing the senseless mannequin. When it dawned on her that something was wrong with me, that I was feebleminded or deaf, she turned her back and addressed Howard as if she had only just recognized his genius for matching socks to ties.
We sat for fifteen minutes scratching our legs and thumbing through the
Reader’s Digests
while the suit was being altered. The seamstress lived right around the corner and was called from her supper for the emergency. For all our bad luck there was a speck of good fortune. I found a fashion magazine with a scratch-and-sniff perfume ad and applied the strip vigorously to my wrists. After a while Howard began playing his front tooth with his fingernail and tapping his foot on the hardwood floor. Finally he got up and burst into the back room where the woman sat doubled over, her nose in the hem of the pants. From his pocket he took the needle he had used to sew up the back end of the cow with the prolapsed uterus that afternoon. “I can fix it with a neat slip stitch,” he said. “No need to worry. I took an upholstery class in college.”
The startled seamstress had a forehead the size of Mount Rushmore. It was astonishing that a person could have such little eyes, an acorn of a
mouth, hardly any hair, and yet so much forehead. I couldn’t help staring, thinking how you’d have to be careful coming around the corners with a forehead like that, how easy it would be to wham into the icebox or the kitchen cupboard.
“We’re short on time,” Howard was explaining. “Should have been there a half hour ago.”
At 6:15 the suit was finished. He paid a terrific sum, carefully writing the figures on Nellie’s check, and then he went into the dressing room to put on his finery. He emerged, silent, looking down, as if he couldn’t believe that anything below his neck was still his own body. I stood back marveling at him, at the handyman, who didn’t care how he looked, who had little use for daily personal hygiene, and there he was ravishing in his suit. It was only June and his face was tanned to a deep brown. His teeth were blindingly white, dangerous to look at, like an eclipse. It was impossible not to admire him, hard not to want to do something to contain that kind of beauty—drink him, ingest him, sneak into his shirt and hide for the rest of one’s natural life. After six years of marriage he had the power to occasionally render me weak in the knees.
“Did you see the forehead on that seamstress?” I cried, outside on the pavement. “I’ve never seen such a cranium—”
He grabbed my arm and we both stopped. “Alice,” he said, “why do you always notice the strangest things? Why can’t you ever pick out one good quality about someone?”
It wasn’t his habit to criticize openly, and his judgments always rattled me. I saw the good in people, I was sure I did. Didn’t I? I opened my mouth to defend myself, but he said, “Just don’t talk about it.” He went around to his side of the car, muttering to himself as he opened the door. I heard him say, “I’d like this to be over and done.”
The suit escapade had temporarily distracted me from the purpose of the evening, it was true, and now I remembered, with what felt like the force of a lead pipe coming straight down on my skull. He was right. How could I be so much of this world, to think of someone’s forehead when we had a hurdle before us that was going to require our best social skills, our firmest fortitude.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”
There was a line halfway around the church when we pulled over to
the side of the road. The lot was overflowing and the somber deacons were directing the cars to double park. It was seven o’clock in the evening and the sun bore down with the intensity of noon. I remember how frightened I was, seeing all of the bright cars, the hot metal and glass catching the light like water. No one in the line had the strength to fan themselves or flick the gnats away. Everything was blistering, stale, as if we were being held inside a balloon. Most of the women near us were wearing nylon stockings and their dresses were sticking to their legs. I felt faint, just being next to them, and I whispered to Howard, “These people are going to have heatstrokes.”
“Don’t say anything,” Howard snapped. “Just don’t talk.”
I looked down the hill into the straight rows of knee-high corn, corn that had been irrigated every day for the last month. I’m fine, I said to myself. I would think about the deep well, the aquifer below, the elements that would nourish the corn. I would imagine the green fronds of corn being as high as an elephant’s eye. Howard and I hadn’t spoken very much in the last few days. Together we had told Emma and Claire about Lizzy. For as much as ten minutes they asked us about her whereabouts, and did it hurt, and why didn’t she try to swim out? They couldn’t grasp the fact that we would never see her again, but they tried, for a moment, chewing on their fingers, looking up at the ceiling. “Will it ever happen to us?” they wondered. “No,” we assured them. “Not until you’re very old.” Lizzy, for them, was suddenly a different sort of creature, not like them in any way. Before she died she had been invulnerable, just as they were. Something had changed, something had turned her into this—other. When they understood that they were all right, that they could not be harmed, they went merrily on their way.
Howard and I had moved around each other with exaggerated care, unsure of what lay beyond politeness. He went out in the morning, and that’s when I put my head in my pillow and stared into the blank white cotton. In the last two days, when he had come in from chores, he had found me sputtering apologies. He had told me to please be quiet more than once. There was no arguing, no shouting in indignation, because he’d told me to stop talking. He knew what was proper: It was stupid to invoke the spirit of the dead lamb, Buster we had called him, which Nellie had served for dinner in the form of chops. It was cowardly to suggest
that we dry up the cows and go somewhere for a few weeks, until the worst was over. “Please, Alice,” he had said, “let’s just keep quiet and get through this.”
I hadn’t realized at first, in line, that Howard’s lower lip was trembling, that he was fighting to compose himself. As he turned away from me I understood that none of the last week had been real for him until now. He wiped his nose on his new sleeve. I felt as if I could see through his suit, to his hairless chest that despite his supernatural strength, had always reminded me, not of hard manly strength but of china, smooth white china that would shatter if you weren’t careful. I remembered how at the hospital Howard had said that he felt we were outside of time and circumstance, and then after it was over, back at home, he had had his blissful routine, hours in which work was rest. He had done the chores alone, thankful, I’m sure, for the numbing tasks. His rusted irrigation rig was leaking and the cow had prolapsed. He hadn’t wanted to call the vet and spend at least a hundred dollars just to see him show up, so he had pushed the uterus back in, and sewed her with a shoelace and a darning needle, and given her a shot of penicillin. It was probably unheard of for a dairy farmer to take that kind of risk with such an expensive animal. If she died from infection he would be so sorry he meddled, and if she got through it he would be a champion farmer.
The last few days for Howard had been made up of action. It stood to reason then that for him the church service was the time to feel. Maybe he was remembering how we had seen Lizzy in the hospital nursery when she was four hours old. There was one photo album and the video of the second birthday party. Her face was covered with white frosting, a balloon popped, and she cried. Dan and Theresa had probably spent their time since her death talking together, about what a fine baby she had been, how she crawled and stood and walked, irrepressible she was, all in the same month. They would shake their heads and wonder at how extraordinary she’d been. They’d go over and over their little stockpile of stories until there was no point in repeating them. They swore they would keep her memory alive, swore it, and swore it. But she slipped away even as they spoke. Maybe they’d have other children and move to a different state. When Audrey was a teenager she would occasionally remember that
there’d been a sister who had drowned in the neighbor’s pond, the baby who was frozen in the photograph in the den.
I remember feeling as if I was at quite a distance from the gathering, that I was much more composed than I should have been. Theresa, who knew from her practice as a family therapist, had told me once that feelings are never wrong. Emotions in varying degrees exist, of course, and have to be acknowledged, but they, in and of themselves, she said, do not have moral weight and should never be judged. That was more latitude than I could ever give myself, and I knew full well that my composure, the unreasonable calm, was wrong.