“Yes, but I don’t want a car. I want to go back to Europe.”
Marta began to eat only things that crunched: carrots, celery, crackers, popcorn, apples. She did not move. I brought these things to her bed, closed my eyes, and listened to the sound of her jaw coming down on a stalk or a core. She did not speak. She was making sounds the only way she could. No more talk about Natalie’s death—no more talk at all, the crunching went on all day and long into the night.
As I lie alone in my bed in New York now, I hear her crunching again, though I have not seen Marta in such a long time. Now in the middle of this lonely December she hands me a perfect, red apple. “Eat this,” she tells me. “Eat this.” She passes me a carrot next, a cracker, not much, but all she has.
“I miss you, Marta,” I call out in the darkness where only the cat moves.
“I loved her so much,” I hear her say. “It was so hard to try to live without her, to try to live after her.”
She tries to help me now as a light snow begins to fall, and I realize that she has been helping me all along. The room, the candles, the photos, the—it was all part of the rehearsal. She gives me my marks on the stage now, telling me where to stand, my line cues. She hands me a ripe, red apple. “Eat this,” she says, “eat this.”
Before her eyes the highway opened up like a field and slowly filled with snow. She looked up at the white sky; it seemed the snow might never stop. As they neared home in the little red car, the snow fell harder, transforming the landscape.
It was one of those bright, impossibly clear spring days that had become less and less common in New York. Rain had become its weather, gray its color. Ahaze that would not entirely burn off seemed always to envelop the city. We had grown accustomed to it; it was how we lived. So on this day in Central Park the heightened clarity seemed strange, giving us all a sense of unreality-Things this clear did not seem true anymore.
I was unused to such a skyline. It was sharp, pointed. I felt I might pierce my hand on the Chrysler or the Empire State Building; they seemed that defined, that close. I could nearly see into them: the off-hour office scenarios: in one building a band of young lawyers working this Saturday on an antitrust case; in another building a boss taking his secretary onto his lap.
Such clarity provides information we do not know how to take in, how to integrate. Faces are more exposed, we are forced to see the hundred deaths in them. Words are more vulnerable, fragile, sounds are magnified. Everything is exaggerated. Even a piece of paper can have a wounding edge. But this was the day chosen months in advance to celebrate the earth, and on the thousand mouths of those who gathered, the words “perfect,” “beautiful,” “lovely,” “exceptional” rose as they looked to the blue-egg sky.
My mother looked to me, then away, then back again quickly as if she saw some small feature of mine that had been hidden from her for seventeen years. My father studied Fletcher who, chosen by the high school to make a speech this day, was just approaching the podium. It seemed as if Father was seeing Fletcher clearly for the first time, seeing him with new eyes, and with these eyes he glimpsed something he hadn’t been able to see before; something came clear in his own mysterious life. Staring straight ahead, he was not the man who adored my mother and lived in her shadow, he was not the father of two children whose jacket ends were tugged even in sleep. He was not the wayward son, the disappointment. Looking at his own son he was someone else, a man of nature with a destiny, a free will. It welled in his chest and filled him with a great feeling of power and momentum. For a few brief moments I saw my father this way: a free man, an immense, important figure in his own life.
But in less than a minute something happened. The wind changed direction or the public address system hissed and the spell broke. It is I who cannot sustain this vision.
Though my mother’s shoulder touched mine and my father’s shoulder touched my mother’s, I was aware that something was already beginning to divide us, separate us. Fletcher seemed to recede before me, my parents to fall away. “Don’t go,” I said, but no one heard me. I knew that I would have to start talking louder, concentrating harder. Blocks of lucite or some other modern, clear material seemed to be forcing us apart. I feared it would cloud over and distort my eyesight. I feared that soon I would not even be able to shout through it. I should have investigated its terrible proportions more that day, touched its thickness and its edges before it grew monstrous, untouchable, unbreakable, without boundaries. My father, a tall man, found his knees constricted by the invisible slab. They knocked against it. Through it he looked at my mother and, sensing her uneasiness, attempted to calm her with talk. The tiniest details of everyday life could sometimes relax her. They looked at the light fixtures, changed since their last visit to the park. They noted the tourists, guessing their nationalities. They watched the colorful garb of joggers, talked about shoes, followed the horse-drawn carriages as they made their way around the park.
“That horse is so poorly groomed,” my mother said, pointing to a shabby brown one. “An animal like that should be cherished, not made to pull overweight foreigners on concrete.
“Where do they keep the horses at night, Michael?” she asked, and her voice was as high and light as a child’s. Once my mother got hold of an idea, she did not easily let go of it. She moved back and forth slightly in her seat. I knew as my brother neared the podium that she was imagining those old brown horses shifting from one leg to another in their tiny stalls.
“It is no secret,” Fletcher said, and she jumped, looking at me with animal eyes that darted wildly as if there were fire and she was a horse. I took her hand.
“I love you, Mom,” I said, and the “m” sound hung in the air. It reminded her, I think, that she was a mother, that next to her was her daughter, in front of her son, and she smiled slightly, if only for my sake; and as I watched her smiling for my sake I knew for no particular reason that somehow this was the beginning of the end. How ridiculous, I said to myself as soon as the thought formed; I did not know what it meant, it was senseless, melodramatic, and still I believed it.
“We are each of us alone,” I thought.
My grandmother, dead two years, would think that on such a bright day such thoughts were inappropriate: my brother giving a public speech, the sky an impossible blue. But my grandmother could not see beyond primary colors, and this sky had too much white in it to be a true blue. I watched Fletcher against this backdrop.
He is a little boy fishing in the lake, catching trout, then throwing them back.
He is a little boy waking early to find his turtles, which he left outside overnight in a pail of water, eaten by birds, a tiny leg there, a piece of shell, a head bitten off and left.
He is a little older, up late, caught already in the excitement of primary politics, watching the young senator win California, then moments later fall mortally wounded.
He is older, sitting in the woods collecting moss and putting it in a basket.
He is older, looking at mushrooms under a microscope.
And there is my brother, sometime in the future, slumped over the edge of a stage, dejected, but I don’t know why.
He felt himself to be falling. He seemed to be struggling as he spoke to maintain his momentum, to keep up his energy. He was floundering in shallow water. He was doing all he could to stay afloat. Those who did not know him could not have realized that he was having trouble, but he was my brother and an intricate system of attachments bound us in a way not even we completely understood. He was having difficulty. My magnetic brother, the person who could convince anyone to follow him anywhere, my brother, whom hordes of people had followed wherever he asked them to go, now panicked. As he began I saw him take a deep breath and shake his head. Like an athlete he had prepared for this speech, done jumping jacks, run in place, but he was not feeling it. Something was wrong. It might all slip away as he spoke. He might wander off or his voice might falter. People would pull back. People would think him insincere or weak. This is what I detected in him. He worried through the speech that he was somehow not connecting, not getting through, holding back. Only the audience reaction, the donations of money, the number of volunteers proved otherwise. He had moved his listeners, illuminated the problems. In some new way they would see the situation. He had succeeded. He sighed. He felt such relief that tears fell from his eyes, and his arms and legs went limp.
As we neared him I could see that tiny lines had already begun forming in his face. The shadows cast in the bright sunlight were long and dramatic. Now that his speech was over, his thoughts turned inward, growing darker, and they kept him separate from his earthly vision, and his own pleasure at what he had accomplished that day was diminished. For a split second he knew it. What he had sensed somewhere in the beginning of his speech now was clear: what he hoped for with every cell of his body would not come true. He sat alone perched on the edge of the stage, a dark hawk (dark as the sky was light), inconsolable.
It is late afternoon. He is an old man. He stares at the bright orange wall of the house. His eyes burn. He looks down at his hands. His palm twitches. He knows this means he will soon strike someone or become angry.
Nothing moves—not the high grass, not the prairie dog, not the shriveled pods of yucca. All is the color of sand and dust. Rusted cans are strewn on the landscape.
Wood ages quickly here, worn by wind and rain. He looks out over the reservation and then further off at all he has lost. He sees a row of wooden boxes bleached gray. These tiny houses are like the coffins of white men: there’s no air. He sends a petition to the Great Spirit. “We can’t breathe in here. We lie down in here and die.”
It is the end. He walks into the kitchen, turns on the faucet: sound of metal, sound of dark water. He opens the refrigerator, closes it. “The young ones tell me I’ve got to forget the way it was,” and a smirk comes to his face. “When we forget, then surely we die. Once there were buffalo and elk and clear water. Once we roamed freely on the land.
“Give me back,” he rasps, “what you have taken.”
He walks into the other room. He turns on the television.
Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble flip brontosaurus burgers on the grill in Bedrock in brilliant technicolor and plot how to sneak away to the Water Buffalo meeting without the girls finding out.
Lucy and Ethel have just begun work at a chocolate factory. They stand in front of the conveyor belt. The foreman tells them if one candy passes them and gets down to the packing room unwrapped, they’re finished.
A game-show host in heavy makeup smiles madly. “What is behind that curtain?” he asks a squealing audience.
“Come on down,” he calls out. “Mrs. Betty Loomis from Nashville, Tennessee, come on down! Let’s make a deal.”
Switch to a commercial: a woman in a nurse’s uniform breathes her mouthwash breath on a young doctor.
A man offers a woman a cup of coffee by a fire. Demurely she refuses. “It’s the caffeine,” she says, wrinkling her brow with puppy-dog sincerity. “But it’s decaf,” he says. “No, it can’t be. This rich?” she says in amazement, in adoration.
His voice quivers. “Give me back,” he says into the false smiles, “give me back,” he says into the antiseptic grins, into all the lies, “give me back what you have taken.”
Now as the orange and yellow and lime-green walls start to close in on him and he is beginning to have difficulty breathing, he closes his eyes and calls up the sacred land of the grandfathers. Slowly the walls recede and disappear.
Tears fall; tears have fallen for hundreds of years. The sun drops; the clouds turn pink and purple. Once he could call rain from the sky. “You must never forget,” he says.
He looks out the tiny window and sees his grandchildren reaching for the red medicine ball.
Lucy and Ricky, roses in their mouths, do the tango for the PTA at Little Ricky’s school.
In this fragile light which seems to change even as he observes it, the figures of the children dissolving, as he holds them, into a dusty background—in this light he calls up Butte Mountain where he can still go whenever he has to, in his mind. He reaches for it now.
“I dream of you,” he smiles,
“I dream of you jumping.
Rabbit,
Jackrabbit,
Quail.”
“We are killing people. There is no other way to see this,” Fletcher said in sorrow, standing paralyzed in his realization. “We fill the earth with the bones of those who beg simply to live out an average life: seventy years and the chance to work, but for many even that is not possible. This must change,” Fletcher burned, looking at Bill whose lungs had filled with asbestos.
Timmy Skofield was filled with questions.
Clifford kept saying, “I quit. I quit for good.” The deal he and Fletcher had made now seemed stupid. He had made the promise earlier that week that he would not quit at all for ten days and Fletcher in turn would take him out alone to any movie he wanted and afterwards for ice cream. It was the fifth day but now he kept saying, “I quit, I quit,” over and over. Fletcher was leaving. What Clifford had always known was still true: there was no one who would take him seriously, no one who could be trusted, relied upon, though life in the house with the other residents and Fletcher had seemed different somehow.
Amanda began neighing like a horse the way she always did when she was upset.
And in the bathroom Debbie unrolled roll after roll of toilet paper and stuffed it into the toilet.
The whole house was in chaos, my brother having to leave the job, unexpectedly, without notice.
The first postcard came from Maine. On it a fisherman stands on a wharf holding up two lobsters. The sky is a brilliant blue, like his eyes, which shine out from a haggard face.
“Eli Lilly,” Fletcher scrawls on the back, “manufacturers of the drug DES. Wrongfully marketed for use in preventing miscarriage. No preliminary lab tests done on pregnant mice. Consequences: all plaintiff’s reproductive organs and more than half her vagina removed. 1953 prenatal exposure to DES, which was ingested by the mother while pregnant with plaintiff, is proximate cause of cancer that developed seventeen years after her birth.”