Homeland and Other Stories (7 page)

Anaphylactic shock is an impossible thing to expect from a human body: a defense mechanism gone terribly wrong. Normally the blood swells around a foreign protein to flush it away, but when that happens in every cell of the body at once it looks from the outside like a horror movie.

I looked around for Melinda. She had reached the edge of the clearing and stopped, looking back at us with fearful expectation. “Get her,” I shouted at Ursula, “and get some help, as fast as you can. If you need a car, take ours.” I thrust the keys at her. Ursula knew as well as I did the urgency of the situation, but being the one with the most to lose, I suppose I needed to take command. Ursula scooped a hand under each of Melinda's armpits and ran for the house. I knelt beside Lena. Her face and throat were swollen, but she was breathing.

“In my purse,” Lena said quietly, and then she said nothing more, and I was afraid she was going to die. That those would be
her last words: “In my purse.” But then she said, with her eyes still closed, “That purple cloisonné case. Get that.”

I did so, having no idea why. I fiddled frantically with the clasp and then nearly dropped it at the sight of what lay inside. There was a cool, hateful-looking needle and a glass bubble of clear liquid.

Lena told me, in a businesslike way except for occasional long pauses, how to attach the bubble to the needle, turn it once, and jab it into her arm. When I couldn't get her sleeve rolled up, she said to shoot through the shirt. My hands were shaking. It was mostly out of an aversion for operations like this that I went into the study of plants, leaving flesh and blood to others.

Almost immediately she started to breathe more deeply. She lay still without opening her eyes, and I would have thought she was sleeping except for the tightness of her grip on my hand.

“Have you always carried that?” I asked.

She nodded.

In three years of intimacy I had never seen these secret instruments. I thought the case contained some feminine thing that wasn't my business. Face powder, maybe, or tampons.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“I've lived all my life with this thing,” she said, and I tried to understand this. That some pains are our own. She said, “I didn't want you constantly worrying about it.”

I squeezed her hand to bring some strength into mine. I thought of the previous afternoon, of watching her, beautiful and permanent, against the continual loss of the Eel River. The things we will allow ourselves to believe.

 

In the hospital, Lena's friend Dr. Cavanaugh warned me that although Lena was out of the woods she was even more visibly swollen than when I had seen her last, and would remain so for
a while. It takes the body days, he said, to reabsorb the fluids it releases in such haste.

Before I pushed open the door to her room I put in my mind the image of Lena swollen, but still I was startled. She didn't actually look like my wife, but like some moonfaced relative of Lena's.

She smiled, turning the moon to a sun.

“Does that hurt?” I asked, sitting cautiously beside her thigh under the sheet.

“Does what hurt?”

“I don't know, your face. It looks…stretched.”

“Gee, thanks,” she said, laughing. She took my wrist and laid her fingers lightly across my veins. Her hands were still Lena's hands, slender and gracefully curved. In bygone days they would have been the fingers of a movie star, curled around a cigarette.

“Where's Melinda?” she asked suddenly, almost sitting up but restrained by the sheet that was drawn across her chest and tucked into the bed.

“Ursula has her. They're getting along like knaves.”

“You know what I think? Immortality is the wrong reason,” she said, and suddenly there were two streams of tears on her shiny cheeks. “Having a child wouldn't make you immortal. It would make you twice as mortal. It's just one more life you could possibly lose, besides your own. Two more eyes to be put out, and ten more toes to get caught under the mower.”

Lena's Grandfather Butler had lost some toes under a lawn mower once. And, of course, there was her lost sister.

“You're just scared right now. In a few weeks life will seem secure again,” I said.

“Maybe it will. But that won't change the fact that it isn't.” She looked at me, and I knew she was right, and I knew that for the first time she felt sure she would not bear children. I felt a mixture of relief and confusion. This was the opposite of the
reaction I'd expected—I thought brushes with death made people want children desperately. My younger brother and his wife were involved in a near-disaster on a ski lift in northern Wisconsin, and within forty-eight hours they'd conceived their first son.

“You're full of drugs,” I said. “Cortisone and Benadryl and who knows what else. And that stuff I shot into your arm.”

“Epinephrine,” she said. “You did a good job. Did Cavanaugh tell you? That's what saved me.” She stroked my hand and turned it over, palm down. The wedding band stood out against the white hospital sheets like an advertisement for jewelry and true love and all that is coveted in the world.

“What I'm saying is,” I said, “this isn't the time to be making important decisions. Your head isn't clear. A lot of things have happened.”

“Why do people always say that? My head
is
clear.
Because
of what's happened.” She laid her head back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling. The white forelock still bloomed above her forehead, but her beauty had gone underground. Dark depressions hung like hammocks under her eyes. I realized that now I had the answer to a ridiculous question that had haunted me for years, concerning whether or not I would still love Lena if she weren't beautiful.

“Just being married, just loving one other person with all your heart, is risky enough,” she said. This I knew. I lay down carefully on the bed, not with her, but beside her, with my head against the white sheet that on some other day might be drawn up to cover a face.

 

By Sunday evening Lena was discharged on the promise that she would take it easy. She knew about the complex medications
she needed to take, there was no problem there. She spent her days explaining antidotes.

Once we'd gotten settled, Ursula brought Melinda over. It was several hours before the MacElroys were due to arrive, but I told Ursula I'd manage, and I did. Melinda's energy seemed spent, and perhaps the slight pall over the house made her feel as though she had done something wrong. She sat by the hearth in the living room driving a Barbie Doll over the bricks in a dump truck. I was reading Darwin. Occasionally I read short passages aloud to Melinda, and she seemed to appreciate this.

“Nature red in tooth and claw,” I told her, “is only one way to look at it.”

The principal difference between children and adults, I believe, is that children accomplish their greatest feats with little or no fanfare. Melinda looked at me strangely, then stood up and took five careful steps, and then sat down with a bump.

I called out to Lena, “She walked!”

“What?” Lena appeared at the door in her white robe.

“Melinda walked. She took five steps, from there to here.”

A doubtful look crossed Lena's face, which was slowly regaining its original shape and becoming easier for me to read. “Are you positive?” she asked.

Melinda looked gravely back and forth between us, apparently fearing she'd made another unknown mistake.

“Oh, honey, we're proud of you,” Lena said, crossing the room to pick her up. Melinda's knees spread automatically to straddle Lena's hip, and as she kissed the top of the baby's head my throat grew tight, seeing how right this looked. Lena was a mother waiting to happen.

Both Lena and Melinda were asleep by the time the MacElroys arrived, which was probably just as well. Melinda might have been expected to give a repeat performance, and
Lena's face would have given away the nature of our catastrophic weekend. I didn't tell them the whole story, only that Lena wasn't feeling well. There would be time later to go into it. For now, I didn't want to dampen the thrill of Melinda's having walked. They did not doubt my word for a minute, nor did they seem disappointed that they weren't there to witness it. They were unconditionally elated. So was Melinda. She collapsed groggily into her mother's arms, a warrior weary from battle.

I fell into bed beside Lena with similar relief. Our house was our own again. We were ourselves.

“What I
really
think,” Lena said suddenly, long after I'd turned out the light, “is that having children is the most normal thing in the world. But not for us, because we're not in a normal situation. I haven't been facing up to it, but really, I could go at any time, and it wouldn't be fair to saddle you with that kind of responsibility.”

“Don't think about what's fair to me,” I said. “Think of what you want.”

“I am,” she said. “This is what I want.” She turned over and faced me in the darkness. “You are.”

The light from the window behind Lena outlined the curve of her cheek with a silver line, like a new moon. I felt a strangeness in my chest, as though the muscles of my heart had suffered a thousand tiny lacerations and were leaking out pain.

“You're sure?” I asked.

“I'm sure.”

I pulled Lena into my arms and held her tightly, thinking of strange things: of diatomaceous earth and insects and the choices we make, and of eggplants, purple and bright in the sun.

M
IRIAM'S ONE AND ONLY DAUGHTER
, Rennie, wants to go to Ice Cream Heaven. This is not some vision of the afterlife but a retail establishment here on earth, right in Barrimore Plaza, where they have to drive past it every day on the way to Rennie's day-care center. In Miriam's opinion, this opportunistic placement is an example of the free-enterprise system at its worst.

“Rennie, honey, we can't today. There just isn't time,” Miriam says. She is long past trying to come up with fresh angles on this argument. This is the bland, simple truth, the issue is time, not cavities or nutrition. Rennie doesn't want ice cream. She wants an angel sticker for the Pearly Gates Game, for which one only has to walk through the door, no purchase necessary. When you've collected enough stickers you get a free banana split. Miriam has told Rennie over and over again that she will buy her a banana split, some Saturday when they have time to make an outing of it, but Rennie acts as if this has nothing to do with the matter at hand, as though she has asked for a Cabbage Patch doll and Miriam is offering to buy her shoes.

“I could just run in and run out,” Rennie says after a while. “You could wait for me in the car.” But she knows she has lost; the proposition is half-hearted.

“We don't even have time for that, Rennie. We're on a schedule today.”

Rennie is quiet. The windshield wipers beat a deliberate, ingratiating rhythm, sounding as if they feel put-upon to be doing this job. All of southern California seems dysfunctional in the rain: cars stall, drivers go vaguely brain-dead. Miriam watches Rennie look out at the drab scenery, and wonders if for her sake they ought to live someplace with ordinary seasons—piles of raked leaves in autumn, winters with frozen streams and carrot-nosed snowmen. Someday Rennie will read about those things in books, and think they're exotic.

They pass by a brand-new auto mall, still under construction, though some of the lots are already open and ready to get down to brass tacks with anyone who'll brave all that yellow machinery and mud. The front of the mall sports a long row of tall palm trees, newly transplanted, looking frankly mortified by their surroundings. The trees depress Miriam. They were probably yanked out of some beautiful South Sea island and set down here in front of all these Plymouths and Subarus. Life is full of bum deals.

Miriam can see that Rennie is not pouting, just thoughtful. She is an extremely obliging child, considering that she's just barely five. She understands what it means when Miriam says they are “on a schedule.” Today they really don't have two minutes to spare. Their dance card, so to speak, is filled. When people remark to Miriam about how well-organized she is, she laughs and declares that organization is the religion of the single parent.

It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Miriam is faithful about the business of getting each thing done in its turn, and could no more abandon her orderly plan than a priest could swig down the transubstantiated wine and toss out wafers like Frisbees over the heads of those waiting to be blessed. Miriam's motto is that life is way too complicated to leave to chance.

But in her heart she knows what a thin veil of comfort it is that she's wrapped around herself and her child to cloak them from chaos. It all hangs on the presumption that everything has been accounted for. Most days, Miriam is a believer. The road ahead will present no serious potholes, no detour signs looming sudden and orange in the headlights, no burning barricades thrown together as reminders that the world's anguish doesn't remain mute—like the tree falling in the forest—just because no one is standing around waiting to hear it.

Miriam is preoccupied along this line of thought as she kisses Rennie goodbye and turns the steering wheel, arm over elbow, guiding her middle-aged Chevy out of the TenderCare parking lot and back onto the slick street. Her faith has been shaken by coincidence.

On Saturday, her sister Janice called to ask if she would be the guardian of Janice and Paul's three children, if the two of them should die. “We're redoing the wills,” Janice reported cheerfully over the din, while in the background Miriam could hear plainly the words “Give me that Rainbow Brite right now, dumb face.”

“Just give it some thought,” Janice had said calmly, but Miriam hadn't needed to think. “Will you help out with my memoirs if I'm someday the President?” her sister might as well have asked, or “What are your plans in the event of a nuclear war?” The question seemed to Miriam more mythical than practical. Janice was a careful person, not given to adventure, and in any case tended to stick to those kids like some kind of maternal adhesive. Any act of God that could pick off Janice without taking the lot would be a work of outstanding marksmanship.

Late on Sunday night, while Miriam was hemming a dress of Rennie's that had fallen into favor, she'd had a phone call from her ex-husband Lute. His first cousin and her boyfriend had just been killed on a San Diego freeway by a Purolator van. Over the
phone, Lute seemed obsessed with getting the logistics of the accident right, as though the way the cars all obeyed the laws of physics could make this thing reasonable. The car that had the blowout was a Chrysler; the cousin and boyfriend were in her Saab; the van slammed into them from behind. “They never had a chance,” Lute said, and the words chilled Miriam. Long after she went to bed she kept hearing him say “never had a chance,” and imagining the pair as children. As if even in infancy their lives were already earmarked: these two will perish together in their thirties, in a Saab, wearing evening clothes, on their way to hear a friend play in the symphony orchestra. All that careful mothering and liberal-arts education gone to waste.

Lute's cousin had been a freelance cellist, often going on the road with the likes of Barry Manilow and Tony Bennett and, once, Madonna. It was probably all much tamer than it sounded. Miriam is surprised to find she has opinions about this woman, and a clear memory of her face. She only met her once, at her own wedding, when all of Lute's family had come crowding around like fog. But now this particular cousin has gained special prominence, her vague features crystallized in death, like a face on a postage stamp. Important. Someone you just can't picture doing the humdrum, silly things that life is made of—clipping her toenails or lying on the bed with her boyfriend watching
Dallas
—if you hold it clearly in your mind that she is gone.

Lute is probably crushed; he idolized her. His goal in life is to be his own boss. Freelance husbanding is just one of the things that hasn't worked out for Lute. Freelance fathering he can manage.

Miriam is thinking of Rennie while she waits through a yellow light she normally might have run. Rennie last week insisting on wearing only dresses to nursery school, and her pale, straight hair just so, with a ribbon; they'd seen
Snow White
. Rennie as a toddler standing in her crib, holding the rails, her mouth open
wide with the simplest expectation you could imagine: a cookie, a game, or nothing at all, just that they would both go on being there together. Lute was already out of the picture by that time; he wouldn't have been part of Rennie's hopes. It is only lately, since she's learned to count, that Lute's absence matters to Rennie. On the Disney Channel parents come in even numbers.

The light changes and there is a honking of horns; someone has done something wrong, or too slowly, or in the wrong lane. Miriam missed it altogether, whatever it was. She remembers suddenly a conversation she had with her sister years ago when she was unexpectedly pregnant with Rennie, and Janice was already a wise old mother of two. Miriam was frantic—she'd wanted a baby but didn't feel ready yet. “I haven't really worked out what it is I want to pass on to a child,” she'd said to Janice, who laughed. According to Janice, parenting was three percent conscious effort and ninety-seven percent automatic pilot. “It doesn't matter what you think you're going to tell them. What matters is they're right there watching you every minute, while you let the lady with just two items go ahead of you in line, or when you lay on the horn and swear at the guy that cuts you off in traffic. There's no sense kidding yourself, what you see is what you get.”

Miriam had argued that people could consciously change themselves if they tried, though in truth she'd been thinking more of Lute than herself. She remembers saying a great many things about choices and value systems and so forth, a lot of first-pregnancy high-mindedness it seems to her now. Now she understands. Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.

 

Miriam's job claims her time for very irregular hours at the downtown branch of the public library. She is grateful that the
people at Rennie's day care don't seem to have opinions about what kind of mother would work mornings one day, evenings the next. When she was first promoted to this position Miriam had a spate of irrational fears: she imagined Miss Joyce at TenderCare giving her a lecture on homemade soup and the importance of routine in the formative years. But Miss Joyce, it seems, understands modern arrangements. “The important thing is quality time,” she said once to Miriam, in a way that suggested bedtime stories read with a yogic purity of concentration, a mind temporarily wiped clean of things like brake shoes and Master-Charge bills.

Miriam does try especially hard to schedule time for the two of them around Rennie's bedtime, but it often seems pointless. Rennie is likely to be absorbed in her own games, organizing animated campaigns on her bed with her stuffed animals, and finally dropping off in the middle of them, limbs askew, as though felled by a sniper.

Today is one of Miriam's afternoon-shift days. After leaving Rennie she has forty minutes in which she must do several errands before going to work. One of them is eat lunch. This is an item Miriam would actually put on a list: water African violets; dry cleaner's; eat lunch. She turns in at the Burger Boy and looks at her watch, surprised to see that she has just enough time to go in and sit down. Sometimes she takes the drive-through option and wolfs down a fish sandwich in the parking lot, taking large bites, rattling the ice in her Coke, unmindful of appearances. It's efficient, although it puts Miriam in mind of eating disorders.

Once she is settled inside with her lunch, her ears stray for company to other tables, picking up scraps of other people's private talk. “More than four hundred years old,” she hears, and “It was a little bit tight over the instep,” and “They had to call the police to get him out of there.” She thinks of her friend Bob,
who is a relentless eavesdropper, though because he's a playwright he calls it having an ear for dialogue.

Gradually she realizes that at the table behind her a woman is explaining to her daughter that she and Daddy are getting a divorce. It comes to Miriam like a slow shock, building up in her nerve endings until her skin hurts. This conversation will only happen once in that little girl's life, and I have to overhear it, Miriam is thinking. It has to be
here
. The surroundings seem banal, so cheery and hygienic, so many wiped-clean plastic surfaces. But then Miriam doesn't know what setting would be better. Certainly not some unclean place, and not an expensive restaurant either—that would be worse. To be expecting a treat, only to be socked with this news.

Miriam wants badly to turn around and look at the little girl. In her mind's eye she sees Rennie in her place: small and pale, sunk back into the puffy pink of her goosedown jacket like a loaf of risen dough that's been punched down.

The little girl keeps saying, “Okay,” no matter what her mother tells her.

“Daddy will live in an apartment, and you can visit him. There's a swimming pool.”

“Okay.”

“Everything else will stay the same. We'll still keep Peppy with us. And you'll still go to your same school.”

“Okay.”

“Daddy does still love you, you know.”

“Okay.”

Miriam is thinking that ordinarily this word would work; it has finality. When you say it, it closes the subject.

 

It's already dark by the time Miriam picks up Rennie at TenderCare after work. The headlights blaze accusingly against
the glass doors as if it were very late, midnight even. But it's only six-thirty, and Miriam tries to cheer herself by thinking that if this were summer it would still be light. It's a trick of the seasons, not entirely her fault, that Rennie has been abandoned for the daylight hours.

She always feels more surely on course when her daughter comes back to her. Rennie bounces into the car with a sheaf of papers clutched in one fist. The paper they use at TenderCare is fibrous and slightly brown, and seems wholesome to Miriam. Like turbinado sugar, rather than refined.

“Hi, sweetie. I missed you today.” Miriam leans over to kiss Rennie and buckle her in before pulling out of the parking lot. All day she has been shaky about driving, and now she dreads the trip home. All that steel and momentum. It doesn't seem possible that soft human flesh could travel through it and come out intact. Throughout the day Miriam's mind has filled spontaneously with images of vulnerable things—baby mice, sunburned eyelids, sea creatures without their shells.

“What did you draw?” she asks Rennie, trying to anchor herself.

“This one is you and me and Lute,” Rennie explains. Miriam is frowning into the river of moving headlights, waiting for a break in the traffic, and feels overcome by sadness. There are so many things to pay attention to at once, and all of them so important.

“You and me and Lute,” Miriam repeats.

“Uh-huh. And a dog, Pickles, and Leslie Copley and his mom. We're all going out for a walk.”

A sports car slows down, letting Miriam into the street. She waves her thanks. “Would you like to go for a walk with Leslie Copley and his mom sometime?”