“Have you been bonding?” I asked Joe.
He glanced at Ma. “Better ask your mother.”
“We’re working on it,” Ma said. “But there’re a few more things we need to get settled.”
“Wait,” I said. But of course she paid no attention.
“What does ‘romantically linked’ mean?” she asked Joe.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You couldn’t have gotten this over with while I was unconscious?” My jaw was feeling a little looser. Broccoli, the wonder drug.
“Don’t make a federal case, Anna,” Ma said. “It’s a simple question.”
“Maybe not so simple,” I suggested.
“Romantically linked?” Joe asked. He was clueless, poor lamb. Well, it was still slaughter time, and at least it took my mind off my unborn babies.
“The
Grain’s
article,” I explained. “It said you were romantically linked with someone.” As if I didn’t know who.
“Oh, Lola Falcon,” Joe said. “I told her publicity people they could do that. She’d just come out with a new cookbook and they wanted to get her name around.” He stood up. “I’ll be right back. I need some more of those scallops.”
“Bring me some applesauce,” Ma said. “In the fridge, the quart container. Just stick some in a bowl.”
“Flee for your life,” I told him. While he was in the kitchen, I whispered to Ma, “Leave him alone.”
“He’s tough enough,” she said, spooning more soup into me.
“Promise,” I said.
But when Joe came back with the applesauce, I could see by the way her eyes flickered to him that she was winding up for the kill.
“You still involved with her?” Ma asked.
He shook his head. “I haven’t seen her for weeks.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean shit,” Ma said.
The scent of the Northern Spies in Ma’s homemade applesauce was too much for me. I opened my mouth for a spoonful. What the hell, Joe was a big boy, and if he was going to hang around with me, he’d better figure out how to manage Ma. Also, to be totally honest, I was pretty much dying to hear what he had to say.
“You’re right,” Joe said. “But I don’t think about her either.”
Ma nodded, but there was more. “What kind of a woman is this Lola?”
I could answer that one: accomplished, athletic, blond, and gorgeous. You’d really like her.
“Suppose you tell me what it is you want to know, Mrs. Bolles,” Joe said. Respectful but firm. He’d had enough of the game. Every now and then, I’d get this glimpse of the executive.
“Fair enough,” Ma said. “Does she have a disability?”
“Hey,” I protested.
“It’s a reasonable question,” Joe said. “Your mother wants to know if I have a thing for disabled women. And no, Lola’s perfectly normal. Very athletic, actually. She wins the Glens Falls triathlon every year.”
Bully for her. I opened my mouth for another spoonful. I figure you should take your gratification where you can get it.
“Nice country,” Ma said. This was a peace offering. I could see she was mollified.
“You’ve been there?” Joe asked.
Ma nodded. “Only in the winter.”
“You have?” I asked.
“One November. There was a hell of a blizzard. Took us two days to dig out and the drifts were up to our asses.”
“When was this?” I asked. I thought I knew Ma’s itinerary from the day she was born.
“Oh …” She trailed off. “I can’t remember exactly.” Now, I know my mother almost better than I know myself. She’s a painfully truthful person. But she was lying now. Not only that—she was offering me an empty spoon.
“That’s okay. I’m done,” I said. She set the spoon down. “So was this before you and Dad were married?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “After the divorce.”
I shot Joe a whadaya-know look. Ma had gotten up and was headed for the kitchen, but not before I noticed the flush on her face. I figured she was eager enough to torture Joe, why should she get off so easily?
“So who’d you go up there with?” I called after her.
I could hear her banging pots around. She pretended not to hear me.
“Will it hurt if I kiss you?” Joe let his finger rest lightly on my lips.
“It’ll hurt if you don’t.”
He leaned over and rested his mouth against mine. It felt as though a butterfly had landed there. The sensation coursed along an electrical circuit straight to my crotch. “You win,” I murmured against his mouth. He raised his eyebrows. “In the war with pain,” I explained. “Now go home. Don’t forget your trick-or-treat. You’ve been such a good boy.”
Another brush of the lips, then, “I think I love your mother.”
“Why?” I asked. He hadn’t said as much about me, but I wasn’t about to quibble over that.
“She’s a warrior.”
“Torquemada of Eighty-first Street.”
“I’ll call from Akron.”
“Thank you, Joe.” I didn’t know where to start, the list was so long.
He got up. I heard him say something to Ma in the kitchen, but I was asleep before he got out the door.
It must have been adrenaline that had kept me even partly conscious that Halloween night. Several days afterward I crawled out of bed, but only to collapse on the couch in front of the TV. I worried about my absence from Cameron and imagined Leonard Chubb expressing his profound concern to Duncan Reese. “Isn’t it a pity about Anna?” he’d say. “Happens more and more often, but then, I suppose that’s the course of her tragic disease.” And all the while dabbing at his ulcerated mouth with the strawberry Chapstick he stores in his breast pocket.
I slept for almost eighteen hours, a record. Of course, there were wakeful moments of pounding insistence from my wound, but Ma made certain that I had a continual flow of acetaminophen in my system. My frequent dreams were like rocks in a creek. I leapt precariously from one to the other, goaded on by the need to reach the far bank. My memory of their content was as murky as the dark water, but when I woke I had the feeling that my dream river had a name: Regret. Provoked, perhaps, by thoughts of Mr. Gross and his neglected mail, I was apparently doomed over those hours to negotiate the slippery torrents of a lifetime’s supply of remorse. The last dream, the grand finale, woke me for good.
I was in a sandbox with Patsy somewhere in the country. We were naked, and although I don’t recall any actual physical contact between us, there was an atmosphere of sexual exploration. It was very exciting, very pleasurable. But then I noticed that Patsy’s body, which unaccountably morphed back and forth from a child’s into a grown woman’s, was covered with sores. Repelled yet fascinated, I touched the welts one by one, even those hidden in the tangle of her pubic hair. “You’ll be sorry, Anna,” Patsy said sadly. And then I was alone and filled with a sense of profound loss.
After I anchored myself back in my own room and in the present tense, I realized that I had been remembering in my sleep. Shortly before my father left, I’d contracted chicken pox from Patsy Waterman. I had a particularly disfiguring case of it, and my mother had her hands full convincing me that my father didn’t abandon us out of repulsion for my ugly welts. The other element was new, that perhaps Patsy and I had been indulging in some childhood sex games. It added another dimension to the great event of my father’s disappearance. It was clear that my deepest regrets, which had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Gross’s mail, flowed across a rock bed of guilt.
I lay in bed for a long time fighting off another bugaboo—that if my father had stayed, I would never have contracted MS. No matter how adult I tried to be, I could never quite shake the progression which still made sense in the primitive part of me that showed up in my dreams. I was bad, Daddy left, his absence made me literally sick.
“Oh, shut up and act your age,” I told myself, and pulled the pillow over my head as if that could protect me from the nightmares.
After a few days, I started to improve dramatically. The throbbing turned to a maddening itch, and instead of resembling a pelican with a pouchful of mullet, my face started to suggest the outline of a human being. The first thing I did was lie in wait for Ma when she came home from work so I could interrogate her about Joe.
“What did you talk about?” I asked her, vaguely remembering exchanges that had to do with me.
“Feeling better, are we?” Ma unpacked the groceries. I’d tasted a vast array of liquefied food over the past few days and noticed with alarm that frozen kidneys had appeared on the counter.
“I saw you yakking away over your wine glasses,” I said.
“We got along all right.”
“Don’t tease me. You were talking about my MS, weren’t you?”
She glanced up, her face serious. “He’s totally fucked, babe. You better be careful.”
“How about explaining that.”
“Don’t go messing with his head, is all. If you want him and can stick with it, okay. Otherwise, find some way to let him down easy and do it goddamn yesterday.”
It had never occurred to me until this moment to consider what Joe might be feeling. In my own movie, I was the heroine, flawed or otherwise, and up to now what had counted was Joe’s effect on me. “I think I just sort of assumed it wouldn’t last,” I said finally. “What did he say to you anyway?”
“I can tell you he’s in it for the long haul,” she said.
“Joe hasn’t the faintest idea what that means with somebody like me.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Ma said. “Just because he’s not a blabbermouth like we are doesn’t mean he hasn’t done a lot of soul-searching.” She stashed the last of the groceries and slammed the refrigerator door. “You two better get yourselves on the same wavelength or somebody’s gonna get mangled.” She started toward the door with the kidneys.
“Where are you going?”
“Mrs. Gladstone’s got a migraine and couldn’t shop.”
I was relieved that it was the Weimaraner who’d get the dreaded organs and not me. But Ma had succeeded in shaking me up. Over the past five years, I had obviously learned to stuff fantasies about the future in some dark closet of my brain, lock the door and throw away the key. Acceptable enough when operating solo, but now there was someone else to consider. When Ma came back from Mrs. Gladstone’s, I could barely look at her. She was supposed to be on my side, after all, and here she was using truth like a saber to slash away at my self-indulgent joy.
I took a careful shower after dinner and sat at my desk to check my e-mail. Cameron was renowned for its technological sophistication, and although the faculty was still more likely to seek one another out for face-to-face conversations, most of the students tended to communicate via computer.
First, there was a query from Rudy asking me to approve his term paper topic. He ended on a plaintive note:
When are you coming back, Ms. Bolles? We’re scared of the substitute.
I responded that his topic was fine, that I’d be back next week and that I hoped the class was at least a little afraid of me, too.
Then the following:
Anna: Disturbed to find you’ve included Morrison’s Beloved in Amer. Lit. curriculum for spring semester. The work is overwrought and overrated, and under no circumstances will I teach it in my section. I thought we’d resolved this issue in last departmental meeting, or did you forget? Please discuss with me asap. Hope you’re feeling better. Leonard.
I felt my face grow hot. Last year when Leonard pronounced that
Shipping News
was gimmicky claptrap, I almost resorted to violence. And that little dig about my memory. I was poised to fire off an eloquent response when Ma poked her head in. I could hear the Nature Channel droning from the living room, always the same disembodied male voice that’s the perfect antidote to insomnia:
“The hyenas bide their time, waiting for the lion to make a successful kill…”
“Check your e-mail,” Ma said.
“I am.”
“Joe just phoned from Dayton. He says he wrote you a letter.” I started to get up. “No,” she said. “He said he’d call you tomorrow.”
“He hung
up?”
But she was gone. I forgot all about Chubb and his lamentable lack of literary judgment and clicked on my mailbox where I found the following:
November 5th
Dearest Anna,
Prepare yourself. I’m making an uncharacteristic attempt to bare my soul and it’s bound to be strange. I just figured I’d do it better in writing. Hereafter the unexpurgated Joe:
Finding you has shifted me into another place. It’s both wonderful and baffling, so have patience as I try to tell you what I’m feeling. Keep in mind that for me the word “feel” has been reserved for contexts like “I feel we need a more comprehensive study of the spread sheets.” I’m way out of my depth.
I haven’t thought about much else since I met you at the photography center. To watch you responding to those images—well, it was the best movie I ever saw. Your remark about my bridge photo was like a physical blow. It changed everything. You changed everything. In French I think they call it a coup de coeur. A year ago I would have sworn such a thing was absolute horseshit. Shows you how much I know.
The reason you didn’t hear from me until September was because I was working out how I felt about the MS. I didn’t want to drop out on you. But there are couples who live with this kind of challenge. I decided that I’m strong enough. The question remained, are you? And more to the point, was I laboring under some colossal self-delusion about your feelings? By the time the leaves started to change color, I couldn’t wait another week to find out.
I’m moved by everything about you. When you describe your job, it’s like a great adventure, circling the globe in a hot-air balloon or exploring the moon. I’m touched by your relationship with your mother. I feel as though the two of you inhabit some interesting book while I’ve been living in a garage. Dickens is at work in your world—Popular Mechanics in mine.
And the other thing—that dimension I won’t entrust to these electronic scratches. I can only tell you that the way you move your hands, the shift of your shoulders when you settle against the back of a chair, the way your eyes capture me and won’t let me go. Jesus, Anna, I want you all the time. I can’t concentrate on anything else.
I’ve never been much of a believer: not in God, mysticism, love, any of that. I’ve been pretty comfortable skimming the surface. But you’ve taken a jackhammer to everything. I’m all chopped up. Along with being scared, I’m awed. It’s not that I’ve suddenly got religion, but I have become a believer. I believe in you.
Anyhow, I’ve had a glass of bourbon out here in the heartland where Miss Sue-Ann, the cocktail pianist, sings a medley that winds up with “God Bless America.” I’d better say good night before I get hopelessly maudlin. I would tell you that I love you, but it seems such a pitiful offering to describe what I feel.
Your,
Joe
I read it over and over again until I could recite it by heart—which I did while lying in bed and staring sleeplessly at the shadow network on my wall. I kept asking myself: How could this be? How could I have possibly engendered this extraordinary response? Talk about ambivalence. On the one hand, I was pretty much delirious. On the other, I heard Ma with her dreaded
long haul.
It was a particularly apt phrase. I imagined Joe dragging me through our lives leaving a trail of crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs in our wake. I would think about it. I would, but first, if I could just wallow in the delicious halting poetry of his letter.
The next day, I went to have my stitches removed. I was in such a fog, I didn’t even inquire about music for the pain. When the doctor asked me how I’d injured myself, I told him I’d taken this spectacular hike up the side of a cliff upstate. I knew I was gushing, but I couldn’t help myself. It just seemed as if everything that had ever happened to me, good or bad, had contributed to the way Joe felt about me. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk omitting any of it, not my father’s leaving home, not acquiring MS, not falling on my face. It was obviously witchcraft, and you just don’t tamper with the slightest detail.
I went back to Cameron after school that Friday to attend a departmental meeting I was particularly loath to miss, given Leonard Chubb’s communication. Fortunately, it wasn’t scheduled until four o’clock, so I had a little time to track down the other American Lit teachers and line them up on the side of righteousness and Toni Morrison. Jerry LaRosa was easy, but with Myra Zak, a testy veteran of twenty years, I had to buy
Beloved
by trading Sylvia Plath for Adrienne Rich.
When Chubb showed up, he took one look at Jerry and Myra and knew he was beaten. “Any student who graduates from this school without reading
The Last of the Mohicans
is intellectually and historically impoverished,” he said, and turned to me. “Welcome back, Anna. Glad you’re feeling better.” His expression said
I’m gonna get you, bitch.
Then he cited an appointment and left.
On my way out I stopped at the bulletin board in the lobby. There’s a certain climate about the notices: sometimes they’re all about protest—last month it was gender discrimination; sometimes there’s a hedonistic let’s-party atmosphere. Today, amidst a festoon of New Age self-improvement advertisements, there was a crumpled scrap of notebook paper, smoothed out and suspended by one tack. It said:
“G, You’ll never guess who sweats Michelle Cross. The Cootie! Is that grotesque or what? See you after practice. S.”
In teenspeak, sweating somebody means being attracted to them. Not a bad turn of phrase, given the overactive hormones of the adolescent. Nevertheless, I snatched off the news bulletin and ripped it into shreds. Hopeless love is grim enough.
Then I remembered that Joe was flying in. I glanced at my watch and bounced out the door on little springs. He was probably already in a taxi. No doubt about it, I sweat Joe in a big way.
I cabbed to his apartment at seven o’clock. This time there was no loitering at the door. I could have blown it down with one puff, waved a finger to pulverize it into dust, or merely teleported myself through it. Inside, I looked at Joe’s face and felt an overpowering sense of privilege, of gratitude. I circled his waist with my arms and laid my head against his chest. I listened to his heartbeat and realized that I was embracing the reply to questions I had thought were unanswerable. I knew that Joe Malone was exactly the man I had wanted and had believed did not exist. He was the end of a road I had not known I was traveling. I already hated death because one day it would separate me from him.
I stood that way for a long time, just holding him, feeling his breath against my hair and listening to that steady timpani that was the evidence of his being alive. Finally, I was too full of words and I had to look up at him and say, “Joe, I love you. Joe. I do.”
He took my hand and drew me into his bedroom, and that’s where we stayed until he had to fly away again.
Ma didn’t say anything at all when I got home very late Sunday night, but I could tell by her face that there was one big question on her mind. I didn’t want to think about it. I couldn’t think about it. So what I did was sit at the edge of my bed in the dark and make a solemn pledge that soon I would open that forbidden door labeled
Future.
I knew it was time, but I just couldn’t do it tonight.