The Good Daughters (22 page)

Specks of Dust

J
UST BEFORE LABOR
Day, I made the drive to the university, to deliver samples of what I was calling the Plank Strawberry. This was the first step in the long process of pursuing a patent. I’d been told it would take a year or more, during which time my plants would undergo rigorous scrutiny over at least three generations before winning acceptance as an officially registered new breed of strawberry.

That fall, a few weeks before the new academic year, Clarice resigned from the art history department. I had found her at her desk one afternoon, in tears over a slide carousel she’d been trying to load with images for a lecture on the Flemish masters.

“I can’t get the slides in the slots,” she said.

“I’ll do it,” I told her. But that was only part of it. She no longer had strength in her leg to work the gas pedal of her car, and steering was now close to impossible. Even if she could get herself to work, walking was getting harder every day, and though I still understood everything she said, her speech had begun to slur. That, for her, was the worst. The worst so far, anyway.

“The good news is, now we can take a trip,” I told her.

The next day I went to town in our old Subaru and came home in a brand-new van, outfitted with a gas cookstove and a sink, and a bed in back, a lavatory, a stereo system and air-conditioning. The deluxe model. What were we saving our money for?

“Come with me to Wyoming,” I said.

WHEN I HAD FIRST BROUGHT
home the van, I’d thought we’d make our trip in the spring, when everything would be green, but in recent weeks the effects of the disease seemed to have accelerated with a terrifying speed. I wanted Clarice to make the trip when she could still get around a little and was no longer sure that would be so six months from now.

So I got the couple down the road to house-sit and cleaned up the strawberry patch in preparation for the winter, laying out the straw mulch to get them through the winter. I hired a helper to tend the goats, which wasn’t as big a job in the cold months when their milk dried up and the cheese-making operation ended until spring.

We set out on our great adventure. I drove, naturally, with Clarice perched in the custom-designed copilot’s seat beside me, looking out over the road. Our plan was to cover the first eighteen hundred miles as quickly as possible—the stretch from Maine to the Wyoming border—so we could conserve Clarice’s energy to spend the most time in the places she wanted most to see: the Bighorn Mountains, the Tetons, Yellowstone.

I had outfitted the van with a good sound system and made tapes of all the music she loved—classical, jazz, show tunes, folk, and though I hated it, country.

There was an album she loved, by an Irish folksinger, with a song that always made her cry, about a woman whose son leaves on a fishing boat and never comes home.

“Does this ever make you think of your brother?” she said. “I wish you two could reconnect.”

“He knows where I am,” I said, not adding that he wasn't my real brother after all. “Ray’s the one who chose to disappear. It would have been so easy to talk to me at Val’s service if he’d wanted, but he just left.”

“Someday,” she said, “maybe you’ll make your way back to each other. He may need you. You may need him, too, more than you think. Everyone should have family.”

We were on the Ohio turnpike, a long, flat stretch of highway that could have been anywhere, almost.

“You’re my family,” I said. “All I need.”

We found a great piece of pie at a truck stop in Indiana. Clarice was having trouble using a fork now, but I knew she didn’t like having me feed her in public.

“Just use your fingers,” I said. I did, too, so she wouldn’t be the only one.

“Who cares what people think, right?” she said. “That’s the least of our problems.”

After that we started eating practically all our food with our fingers. Pasta, chicken, salad. She drank soup with a straw now, so I did also.

Nights we’d pull over in some campground. I folded down the bed in the back of the van. First I helped her into the little toilet cubicle and brushed her teeth. Then, with the curtains drawn and a candle lit, I brushed her hair and undressed her.

For a few months after we’d got the diagnosis, we had continued to make love, but it had quickly become harder for Clarice. “Put my arms around you,” she said. “Lay me on your chest.”

But I knew the truth. She was long past lovemaking now. She was doing this for me. I was happy just holding her.

It was nearing the end of October when we reached the southern part of Wyoming. We had left the interstate now and were on a two-lane highway winding over the Bighorns. Great walls of rock rose up on either side of us, the layers of mineral as clearly delineated as a drawing in a geology textbook. Signs along the way named the particular era in which each rock formation had come into being. 250 billion years ago. 350 billion.

“It’s comforting, isn’t it?” she said. “Those numbers remind you how small a moment in time this one really is. What specks of dust we all are in the end.”

And the stars amazed us. I had thought I knew what the constellations looked like, from nights on our farm we’d lie on our backs in the yard looking up into the darkness, but that was nothing compared with the sky that blanketed us in Wyoming—how brightly stars shone in this place, how clear.

We passed waterfalls and strange, red rock outcroppings that rose alone, like totems, in the middle of a flat expanse of plains. We pulled into a junk shop where Clarice wanted to buy me a pair of spurs, and I bought her an angora skin rug to lie on.

“Do you think I only need invalid-type items now?” she asked, with a sudden sharpness. It was the one moment in ten days that her bitterness had shown itself.

So I bought her a mother-of-pearl penknife for removing the tops of strawberries. I bought her an ivory hair clip, and chaps.

Sitting in her copilot seat, with pillows and a strap under her chin to hold her neck up because she wasn’t strong enough to hold her head steady, she sported her chaps over the pajama bottoms that she wore all day now. It was just easier that way, she said. Her pajama bottoms were for comfort. The chaps were for style.

In a town called Buffalo, we found the Hotel Occidental, a place that looked like something straight out of an old western movie.

We pretended she was a rodeo rider, injured in a fall from a horse, and that was why I had to carry her. “You’ve heard of Calamity Jane?” I stage-whispered to the woman at the registration desk. “This is her great-great-granddaughter. She took a bad fall over in Cody, riding a bull.”

They seemed to believe us. We ordered room service and ate medallions of buffalo on the floor by the fireplace and finished off a bottle of wine.

“It doesn’t matter if I get drunk now,” she said. “I talk like I’m drunk anyway.”

“This room looks like a bordello,” I said, setting her on a big spool bed with a red velvet spread and slipping her shoes off.

“Let’s pretend we’re on the run from the sheriff,” she said. “We robbed the stagecoach.”

My turn again. “We shot a lawman and now the posse’s on our tail. We know they’re catching up to us. It’s our last night of freedom.” It was unlike me to make up stories like this—I, the scientist, believer in data. But with Clarice, and only Clarice, I possessed an imagination.

“We can do anything we want,” I told her.

Not that we could, really. Our horizons, even in a place as wild and open as this one, were narrowing, and we both knew it.

“I want a whole pint of chocolate ice cream,” she said. “I don’t care if it’s fattening.”

For three days, we drove around Yellowstone, pulling over by the side of the road sometimes to watch a moose or a herd of buffalo. We had a picnic on the shores of Yellowstone Lake, huddled under a blanket, watching the pelicans. At the geyser walk was a row of wheelchairs, available for physically challenged visitors.

“I think one of those would be a good idea for me,” she said, surprising me. Until now she’d avoided using a wheelchair.

We talked some about the past, and about the wildlife, the rock formations, the way the light fell on the plains, and how much our old dog, Katie, would have loved to run on them back in the old days, or simply be there in the van with us, her head out the window taking it all in.

We did not talk about the future—not her death, or all the stages yet to come between now and then. But one night as we were lying next to each other in our bed at the campground, she turned to me. Her words came out more measured now, and so soft I had to lean close to hear her sometimes, but she was speaking right into my ear.

“I don’t think I’ll be very good at that eye-blinking system,” she said. “I don’t have the patience for spelling words out one letter at a time. Going through the whole alphabet to get each letter. By the time I spelled one word I’d probably forget what I wanted to tell you.”

There was no point in my saying something cheerful or encouraging, like it wouldn’t really happen, or it wouldn’t be so bad. It would happen, and when it did, it would be worse than anything we could imagine.

“I need to ask you,” she said. “To make sure I don’t get to that point. I’ll need to end things before I’m so bad I can’t tell you anymore. I don’t think I can do it by myself. I don’t think that I’ll be able to do it by myself.”

Our campsite was near a deep crevasse. Earlier that day, in the sunlight, we had stood at the edge watching the Yellowstone River raging through and jagged rock rising along the sides, red, rose, orange, yellow. The water smashed down over the rocks with such force that even high above it as we were, we felt the spray on our faces. Now, in the black night, I could hear the roiling current.

We could hold hands and jump,
I thought. But I could never stand there watching her fall.

“Promise you’ll help when I ask you,” she said.

I told her yes.

A Wild and Beautiful Country

I
HAD NEVER
imagined us getting a divorce, but it happened now with stunning speed. Jim was out of the house by Christmas; papers were signed before the snow melted the next spring. He married again—a small wedding but unlike ours, a real one, with music and guests and the bride in a white gown, I gathered, from our daughter—in late summer.

I had no argument with his actions. Seeing him with his new wife (an insurance client, a widow with whom he had worked, following the death of her longtime husband) I felt no jealousy. I can’t go so far as to say I felt free of envy concerning the man with whom I’d spent the last two decades, but the envy I felt was unconnected to any desire to be with him.

I only envied the feeling of being in love. The memory of that was as distant now as what a war veteran amputee might feel remembering a pair of legs blown off in 1967.

By now I had lived half my life without Ray Dickerson, and it was not even Ray I missed. It was the young woman I had been when I loved him. She had disappeared. I missed the way the world had seemed to me then, the richness of
the possibilities, the hunger I had felt, the capacity for longing. I had inhabited a wild and beautiful country once, one that I could never find my way back to. I had spoken a language no longer known to me. Somewhere on the planet, music was playing that my ears could not hear.

I thought about Apollo wandering the earth without Daphne, Jackie Kennedy watching the flag-draped coffin of her husband being carried up the steps of the Capitol as Camelot crumbled. I wondered if Neil Armstrong had ever felt this sense of exile: that he had once walked on the face of the moon, and could never return there.

The Promise

T
HE WORLD WAS
closing in on Clarice now. The muscles of her body, one by one, were shutting down on her. One day we realized she could no longer walk. Next her right hand went. Then she was down to a couple of functioning fingers on her left, till those two locked. It was the opposite of a growing season, what we were living through now: a slow and relentless catalog of deaths.

She could still speak, though every syllable was labored. With what remained of her ability to communicate, she returned to the subject she had first raised that night in Yellowstone. As much as Clarice loved being alive, once she could not communicate, she would have no more taste for living.

“Not the blinking,” she said, again, in her new clipped way of speaking. “Can’t do that thing. With the alphabet.”

I said there were computer programs that could help her. I was looking into one that picked up the movements of a person’s irises to identify commonly used words and phrases on a board. She shook her head when I started to describe it.

“You made a promise,” she said.

MANY YEARS EARLIER, WHEN I
worked at the experimental cattle barns at the university, I learned how to use animal tranquilizers, and in recent years I’d applied my knowledge on occasion, mostly when a need arose to dehorn one of our male goats. There was a chart in my old textbook, identifying the quantities of each tranquilizer necessary to achieve the desired level of inactivity in warm-blooded mammals. There appeared to be no discernible variation in recommended dosages among differing species; the crucial determinants seemed to be simply the weight of the animal undergoing injection and the degree of tranquilization necessary to immobilize an animal without killing him.

An appendix to this text, printed in red, outlined the risks of incorrect dosage, from extended paralysis to coma to death. I learned from my textbook that this was painless.

Because I was a licensed animal breeder, I was able to buy these drugs. Still, I battled with Clarice over her choice, and with myself over my ability to do what she asked of me. For me, it would have been enough to know she was there in the room with me, there on the bed, breathing. But what would have been sufficient for me was for her unbearable.

And even if I wasn’t ready yet to act on her request—for what the literature referred to as “a terminal event”—I knew that if the day came when I did, it would be prudent to have an established pattern of making tranquilizer purchases.

So I began buying the drugs and injecting tiny doses of tranquilizer into Clarice’s bloodstream at night before she went to sleep.

IT WAS WINTER. FOR WEEKS,
I’d barely left the house. Taking Clarice out in the van was too difficult now—not so much because I couldn’t carry her as because she could no longer sit up on her own and needed to be strapped in place in her old copilot seat with a breathing tube to do the work her own lungs could no longer manage. She now spent her days on a hospital bed we had set up in the living room after it got too difficult caring for her in our old brass bed upstairs.

I’d put a television and VCR by the bed, with a stack of movies for her. Once a day, I massaged her body with scented oils—a small remaining pleasure.
I brought Clarice a kitten that I laid on her chest so she could feel the purring and the soft fur, and the kitten’s small pink tongue licking her skin.

Nights after we finished our third or fourth movie of the day, I’d read out loud to her. She loved Jane Austen novels and the poetry of Yeats, in particular, though one day when I’d made a rare foray to town, I brought home a copy of
Valley of the Dolls
by Jacqueline Susann, and started reading it to her, acting out the dialogue with exaggerated drama. In the old days this would have been the kind of thing Clarice did—never me—but now that she could no longer be that kind of person, I became one, or tried to. Nothing but my love for her could have inspired this.

I was on the chapter where the world-famous fashion model and pill addict breaks off with her millionaire boyfriend because she’s really in love with a dashing lawyer who, though he doesn’t know it, is the father of her unborn child.

Once this would have made Clarice laugh. Now she just lay there and sighed.

It was getting harder to find anything that provided any form of diversion for Clarice. She was weary of everything now—even the music she’d loved, even the writers, even the pages of her favorite art books. Bonnard’s women in their bathtubs, the erotic drawings of Egon Schiele. If it wasn’t for Clarice, I never would have known the names of these artists, but because she loved them, so did I.

It was while I held one such book open for her that I had seen her crying. No sounds came out of her, but tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Enough,” she said.

“OK,” I told her, shutting the book.

“Not what I mean,” she told me. “Enough of life. I’ve had. Enough. Of life.”

THAT NIGHT I BATHED HER.
I washed her hair with the good shampoo, the stuff she used to ration for herself, it was so expensive. Now I slathered handfuls on her scalp until the suds were piled on her head like a hairdo.

Then conditioner. Then body oil. Bath salts and pumice stone. A loofah on her back.

When every inch of her was scrubbed and patted dry, I carried her to the bed. I rubbed lotion on her. Then I did her nails. I held out six bottles of polish to choose from.

“Curls,” she said, after her toes were done.

“I’ll do my best,” I told her.

I propped her up on the bed. I dug out her round wooden brush and the blow-dryer she’d used to curl her hair with every morning, until she couldn’t hold it anymore, and a jar of clips and Velcro rollers.

“This had better be a good hair day,” she said with a crooked little smile. It was a long sentence for her now. I knew what that one cost her.

As little as I knew of hair, I knew less of makeup, but I dug out the small velvet bag in which she kept her favored beauty items. Clarice believed in expensive products: swore that a twenty-dollar lipstick possessed properties the drugstore variety did not. Whether or not this was true, the containers her stuff came in were all beautiful little buffed metal compacts with gold-flecked powders, eye-liner wands with long, elegantly tapered brushes, tubes of creamy lipstick that fit in a person’s hand like art pastels.

“The trick with makeup,” she had once told me, “is to make it look like nothing’s there, when plenty really is.”

I loved her face best as it was in its most natural state, but because I knew she wanted me to do this, and because I was in no rush—just the opposite; I did not want this night to end, ever—I applied color, then took it off, then put it on again, until it was perfect.

I dabbed perfume on her neck and wrists. Then came jewelry: moonstone earrings and the bracelet I’d given her with charms from all the places we’d visited, the last two depicting a buffalo head and the Old Faithful geyser.

I dressed her in her favorite outfit, an antique lace gown she had found at a vintage clothing store in Portsmouth one time. I put ballet slippers on her feet.

She wanted Joni Mitchell, the
Blue
album.

“I know it’s not. An original choice,” she said. “But there’s a reason. Why everybody. Loves that one.”

IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT
by the time we were finished. I had lit the candles.

“Get it,” she said.

The syringe. I thought about my old days at the Ag school barn with the goats. Janis Joplin in the Chelsea Hotel.

“Always remember,” she told me. “You made me happy.”

“I was the luckiest person on earth,” I told her. Only later did I remember who else had said that. Lou Gehrig.

After, I climbed onto the bed and lay down next to her. I put my arms around her, and my face against hers, so I could listen to her breath. Slower, slower, then gone.

I lay there a long time, almost until morning. Then I went outside and buried the syringe. If there was an autopsy, and suspiciously high traces of tranquilizers were found in her blood, I wasn’t sure I’d care. As it was, nobody demanded those tests. If whoever it was who examined her body had any questions, they never asked.