Authors: Francine Prose
Vera’s almost convinced herself when she walks down the subway steps and notices the wall behind the ticket booth covered with signs. Why hadn’t she noticed them before? Bright-colored enameled placards with pictographs aimed at illiterates and foreign tourists. The smoking cigarette behind the diagonal slash, the crossed-out radio. The schnauzer bisected by another diagonal line, and beside it the blind man with his Seeing Eye dog and no line. A dog, thinks Vera. A sign.
And finally, a joke. By tomorrow, some kid will have drawn a penis on the Seeing Eye dog, two balls on the cigarette; in six months, the Transit Authority will take down the signs. When she was in high school, the most common subway graffiti was LAMF. Who now knows it meant Latin American Motherfucker? People talk about archeologists excavating New York and wondering at the uses of things, but it won’t take that long for most things to lose their meanings.
We Jews often make tragic mistakes.
Vera knows hers is not realizing: when you’re looking for signs, you see them. But how to stop? Just trying reminds her of a story she heard about some alchemists who believed that the secret of making gold was going through the process without once thinking of the word
hippopotamus.
The train pulls in, and Vera sits down across from a fat kid with a giant hippopotamus grinning at her from his T-shirt. She thinks
HUNGRY HIPPO CHEWS CHICAGO CHILD,
then stops herself; such thinking is her version of waving a cross at Dracula.
Lowell was a great believer in synchronicity, a tireless collector of meaningful coincidence; he’d mention some cousin he hadn’t seen in years and the cousin would call up. His attitude toward it was not unlike Mavis’s: those little runs outside the laws of probability seemed to cheer him. Easy for him, Vera thought. His terrors went only as far back as the Baptists, while hers had had three thousand years in the desert to cook. It wasn’t that she feared synchronicity, but that she’d rather not be the beneficiary of all that unwanted attention from the beyond. Who knew but that those little casual clusters might at any moment turn out to be black holes? This too must be part of her DNA code. Why else should she feel this way? Until today she’s never seen anyone harmed by peculiar coincidence except perhaps Louise. And ultimately it’s hard to say
what
hurt Louise.
A few weeks before Rosie was born, Louise came to New York and asked Vera to meet her at the Museum of Natural History cafeteria, where, over lukewarm chili dogs and parched French fries, surrounded by school trips and artsy hooky-playing teens, Louise spun out her tale of woe. Coincidence, coincidence, and all of it frightful. First a boyfriend beat her up and then she met a guy who turned out to have known her old boyfriend in grade school, and he beat her up, too. A guy who’d hassled her all along Dwight Way showed up the next night beside her at an elegant dinner. She was typing a letter to her favorite uncle in Florida and her mother called to say the uncle was dead. Just as Vera was starting to fear that Louise’s story might be endless, Louise looked at her watch and said, “It’s time for the planetarium.”
Halfway through the planetarium show, Rosie awoke in Vera’s belly, and Vera guided Louise’s hand to the bumpy elbows and knees. The swimming baby, the high, starry vault, and even the swelling “Theme from
2001
” brought tears to Vera’s eyes, but finally it was Louise who cried. At the end, when the projector—like some alien creature itself—whirled the sky overhead, Louise turned to Vera and, with the spinning stars reflected on her face, said, “I feel like this
all the time
.”
It was just after this that Louise joined the Ananda Devi ashram. Vera’s thinking of how the turbans the Ananda Devis wore seemed to alter the shape of their faces when she notices something strange about the kid in the hippo T-shirt. It’s not how fat he is, but the pull of his flesh—almost horizontal. He’s retarded, and like certain retarded people, appears to obey a slightly different gravity.
The kid—he’s thirteen or fourteen—opens his mouth as if to speak, then rounds it. Magnified by thick glasses, his eyes bulge and quiver. He looks like an undersea creature, a sea cow. He blows a fair-sized spit bubble and doesn’t blink when it breaks.
Vera wants to ask him: Who buys your clothes? But she can’t imagine an answer that doesn’t make the hippo kid in his hippo T-shirt seem like somebody’s mean joke. And then she understands why she’s always seen those runs of coincidence as malevolent: because they are. Think hippopotamus and you’ll come as close as you can get to one on the subway. Ask for a sign and you’ll get the word made flesh of every mistake God ever made.
O
N VERA’S CORNER IS
a vacant lot. Before the skyscraper condos go up, it’s enjoying a brief life as some landlord’s tax-credit community garden. Its nametags, its tight adjacent plots, remind Vera of a vegetable apartment house. In the spring, everyone grows a few stunted tulips; in summer, Ping-Pong-ball-sized tomatoes. In every season, the earth looks starved and hard. But it’s better than a weedy lot, it’s something to look at. Last May, when someone scaled the chain link fence and lopped off the tulips’ heads, the whole neighborhood was demoralized.
Around that time, Vera stopped into Firbank Florists, her downstairs neighbor, just as a customer was teasing the owners, Kenny and Dick, about having beheaded the tulips to eliminate the competition. Dick turned to Vera and said, “Sweetie,
you’re
the one who writes about sickos cutting little things’ heads off.” Vera assured them she’d nipped a tulip-slasher story in the bud. Having seen the results, she didn’t want to give anyone the idea.
Kenny and Dick live below Vera and Rosie. They have terrible fights that escalate from housework to Kenny’s infidelities and last all night. Vera hears every word. Sometimes this makes her feel better about being single and sometimes it makes her feel worse. When she sees the wholesaler’s truck pull up on Montague Street and Kenny and Dick leaning close together over the first purple irises of the year, she feels better, then worse. At any rate, they’re good neighbors, conscientious about locking the outside door and not buzzing strangers in without checking. Today Vera’s especially grateful: she’s had enough unpleasant surprises without finding a human one on the stairs.
Kenny even brings her mail up and slips it under the door. Now, on the hall floor, directly under a giant, framed photo of Mount St. Helens erupting, Vera finds a phone bill and a letter from Louise. She remembers ordering the Mount St. Helens photo through the cryptobiologists during one of those times when Lowell was leaving and she was doing her best to prove she would still lead an interesting life without him. Now it seems mainly a sign of how quickly you can get to the point of walking past an exploding volcano and hardly noticing.
Louise’s letter is postmarked from the small town in Washington where she lives on a farm and supports herself by teaching at a community college. Vera wonders if Louise still writes poetry. She certainly has the same typewriter, its keys so mired in ink the b’s and o’s print solid. She also wonders why Lowell writes to her at the office, Louise at home. Among other reasons, it’s probably that Lowell wants to reach her first thing in the morning, while it’s more in Louise’s nature to know Vera needs a letter to keep her company while she’s mixing and drinking her cocktail-hour vodka tonic.
Dearest Vera,
This morning I was out picking raspberries. Everything was wet and the low warm sun hit the berries so the red in them glowed. I thought of Monet and Gerard Manley Hopkins and that this was the light they saw. Then I thought how much better it was to be seeing it than trying to teach it to Olympic Community College students who didn’t give two shits. And
then
I thought: if I’m seeing that kind of light, why do I still feel the need to justify what I’m doing? It all made me think how long it’s been since I wrote you. You would be the first to tell me: Light doesn’t necessarily translate. That lovely Victorian parsonage meadow and the gardens at Giverny are a long way from forty miles northeast of Seattle.I can’t remember when I last wrote you. Was it before or after my brief, stormy interlude in therapy? A few months ago my parents wrote offering to pay for therapy, and I thought: Well, why not? It’s like somebody offering you free dance lessons. I thought maybe it’d get me off the antipsychotic drugs which anyhow make me pee every fifteen seconds.
So I started going to this guy somebody recommended in Seattle. Fortyish and kind of cute. I said I was afraid that if I told him everything and he found out who I really was he’d reject me and he said, why did I think that? So I told him everything and he found out who I was and he fell in love with me and
then
he rejected me! He said nothing like this had ever happened in his whole professional career and what it most likely meant was that his own analysis wasn’t complete etc. etc. etc….So once again my heart’s broken.Rereading this, I think: No wonder! Here’s a woman who can experience rapture among the raspberries and then come home and use the words “think” and “thought” sixty times in two paragraphs! No matter what—acid, the Maha Deviants, lithium and Stelazine and God knows what—the right brain cells never seem to be destroyed. I mean right cells, not right brain. And nothing’s happening here, nothing to distract me, nothing in the mailbox…in other words, write immediately!
All my love and kisses to you and Rosalie,
Louise
Vera picks up the phone and dials Louise’s number. “Listen,” she’ll say. “Wait till you hear
this
.” She lets it ring long enough for Louise to come in from milking the cows or feeding the hogs or whatever she does on that farm, then hangs up.
Sipping her drink, Vera shuts her eyes and sees the kitchen drawer stuffed with old letters, phone numbers, bills, and, if the cockroaches haven’t smoked it, her emergency Camel, kept there the way a spy risking capture keeps the cyanide pellet. If only she could just inhale, exhale, smell the smoke, and not have to think about fountain-of-youth lemonade, let the nicotine hold her and rock her like Lowell used to rock Rosie, doing a slow, dippy dance to the
Soul Train
show on TV.
She used to think Camel smokers had a harder time quitting because of the beauty of the package. She’d quit a dozen times but never for more than a week that ended with her telling herself a week of not smoking was better than a week of smoking and she could always quit again. Then last spring she had a sore throat for a month. Smoking hurt too much, and when she got better she thought, Why not take it all the way? This time, breaking the habit was so easy, it made her think life really is a merry-go-round, and not-smoking is one of the rings you can grab when the right moment comes. She prefers thinking about merry-go-rounds to thinking about death, about fear—that long sore throat meant no more chances, too many warnings ignored—about the certainty of mortality that came like some mean joke-gift on her thirty-seventh birthday.
Now she can practically hear the vodka persuading her it’s the very nature of merry-go-rounds: miss the ring once, it will come round again. Meanwhile there’s that Camel, wedged in one corner of the crumpled, beautiful pack…
What saves her is the sound of the front-door key: Rosie’s home. Vera calls out but gets no reply; Rosie’s got her Walkman turned up. How often has Vera yelled at her, “You think the Dungeon Master sneaks through the Wizard’s cave with earplugs on?” As often as Vera’s pictured Rosie’s trip home as some kind of nightmare cartoon, her daughter ricocheting from danger to danger like a frail, childish Mr. Magoo. Vera’s read about some German who calculated the logarithmic probability that one’s premonitions of one’s own death will come true; her premonitions about Rosie are so numerous, she’s afraid the chances of accuracy must be way above the norm. Sometimes when Rosie’s about to go on a car trip with a friend’s parents or swimming with her summer program, Vera wakes in the night with visions of wrecks and drownings so vivid she’s sure they’ve already happened. She would do anything to protect Rosie and suspects that her fantasies are disguised attempts at protection: if she imagines something, it won’t happen. What undoes these efforts is her irrational fear—and it’s odd how her superstitiousness manifests itself almost exclusively around Rosie—that imagining something
makes
it happen, a theory that this business with the Greens would certainly seem to support.
Now as Rosie sails in and sees Vera, she stops short, so startled you’d think Vera was the lurking maniac of her own worst dreams. Vera wants to squeeze her, but they don’t even touch.
“How come you’re back early?” says Rosie.
“Long weekend,” says Vera. “Could be really long. Capital The, capital Long, capital Weekend.”
“Earth to spaceship Mom,” says Rosie into her fist. “Testing. Testing.” She likes to tease Vera about being spaced. Vera’s tempted to bring out rent receipts and paid utility bills as proof that she isn’t except she’s afraid of alarming her, of letting her see the thin thread on which it all hangs.
“Bad news,” she says. “I think I’m about to get fired.”
“For what?” Rosie asks, and when Vera tells her, she says, “Are you
serious
?” It’s not a question but a dismissal. The lawsuit part doesn’t interest her at all, and she considers the synchronicity element just long enough to dismiss that, too. “I’ll bet Solomon told you their names and you forgot. You forget things all the time. Otherwise it’s just impossible.”
Vera wants to ask how someone who spends half her life playing Dungeons and Dragons can take such a hard line about possibility. Often Vera’s eavesdropped on Rosie and her friend Kirsty time-traveling over monster-filled moats into caves with magic doors concealing saviors and villains governed by the forces of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil.
If they’d had Dungeons and Dragons when Vera was young, she’d have played it to excess while Dave and Norma lectured her about the condition of the serfs and scolded her for dwelling on mythical codes while so many real-life injustices were crying out to be righted. It’s not the best thing to be thinking of when Rosalie says, “I hate to tell you this, but we’re going to Dave and Norma’s for dinner.” Though Rosie loves her grandparents and calls them Gram and Gramp to their faces, she affects their first names and this put-upon attitude for Vera’s benefit.