Returning to Earth

by Jim Harrison

  Midway through Tuesday morning K called to say Rachel had disappeared when she was supposedly shoveling snow off the front walk. He had heard a car stop out front but thought nothing of it. There was a note in her bedroom under the pillow that said, “Dear Mom and K, Sorry. Love, Rachel.” Polly came over during her lunch hour at school and sobbed her heart out. She had called the state police, who weren’t interested in the problem. A twenty-two-year-old girl had freedom of movement since the heroin charge in New York City had been dropped. Vincent arrived for his tutorial and after meeting the distraught Polly said that he would leave, which was the last thing I wanted. I actually grabbed him by the elbow and said, “No.” I had been laying a trap for him since he’d left the day before. The cleaning lady had been out in Jesse’s old apartment all morning and I was wearing a modest low-cut sleeveless summer blouse and a fairly short blue skirt, not exactly a winter outfit. I pushed grief-stricken Polly out after inviting her for dinner. I had been upset in the morning when I’d studied myself in the mirror and realized that I had inadvertently lost too much weight since Donald’s passing. This worried me because Upper Peninsula men in general favor a riper figure perhaps due to the colder climate. Donald had once picked up Clare’s Vogue magazine and asked, “How come these women are all so skinny?”

  Before dipping into the hell of grammar study I led Vincent out to Jesse’s apartment. I was wearing flats and picked my way on the icy path and when I reached a pool of slush from the recent thaw at the bottom of the steps Vincent put his hands on my waist and lifted me over the slush to the bottom step. I felt a little wobbly on the way up the stairs and wondered if my butt was worth looking at. In the apartment we were standing next to each other and he looked around and said, “I can’t believe my luck” and gave me an impulsive hug. I didn’t let go and he looked at me oddly as if making sure of himself. The first one didn’t last long but we lolled around on the bed for a while doing everything and the second time around I properly lost my mind. On the way back to the house I said I had been lonely for a while and he said, “Me too.” We laughed quite a bit during our lessons.

  Clare came home while I was fixing dinner for Polly. She was in a good mood but then was concerned when she studied my face at the kitchen counter. “You have more color in your face today,” she said. Vincent’s pickup pulled into the alley and Clare watched him begin to unload his stuff. I explained why I was loaning out Jesse’s old apartment. Vincent waved at our faces in the kitchen window and she looked at me and laughed. “Everyone needs affection,” she said.

  Dinner with Polly and K wasn’t as grim as I might have expected. She and our stalwart K had evidently talked for a while and he had convinced her that she had done what she could. Clare piped up with the information that Rachel and her boyfriend had been wanting to go to L.A. to break into the music scene there. I said that maybe Herald could look for her but Polly said, “What would be the point?” Both Polly and K felt humiliated about the money I had spent and I said, “Don’t be silly. Jail would have made everything worse for her. I didn’t earn that money. Thank my dead parents. Of course they didn’t earn it either.”

  In the morning Clare went off to Ann Arbor with K, which pleased me because at least I didn’t have to worry about her freezing to death in a hut. I made love with Vincent every day for a week and admitted to myself I felt relieved when the university went on Christmas break and he went home to his deaf mother’s in Pickford. He said that her greatest insecurity was whether she had enough wood to burn for winter and he intended to cut and split an extra dozen cords. In addition to all of the pleasure he gave me he had begun using was and were in the right places.

  A few days after Vincent left I collapsed on the front walk while shoveling a foot of new-fallen snow. It was a still day and I could hear strains of Christmas music wafting up the hill from downtown. I had been coughing a lot but attributed it to the occasional cigarette I had smoked with Vincent. I also felt feverish and dizzy several times a day but ignored it. I had put away my García Márquez for a while because it had become unbearably poignant and then, absurdly enough, had begun rereading Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, but at breakfast the print had blurred and I thought my eyes might need a checkup. I had also been a bit dreamy and delusional not realizing it was because of the fluid building up in my lungs. It’s amazing how dumb we can be. So anyway I collapsed facedown in a snowbank and luckily a neighbor down the street was walking past and called an ambulance.

  I didn’t remember much for a couple of days but when I came semiawake in the hospital I was told I had severe double pneumonia! Clare was standing at the end of the bed and K and Polly were peeking in from the hall.

  In my two weeks in the hospital right through Christmas there was a nearly overwhelming feeling of embarrassment. I had expected Clare to end up in the hospital not me. In fact at age forty-four I had never been in one except to give birth and visit sick friends. Since childhood I’d rarely had a cold and growing up, when Mother and Father and David had the flu I didn’t get it. In the second grade I had this poor girlfriend whose family was religious and when Father was hungover and puking in the bathroom we stood outside and sang, “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so.” My friend cried when my father hollered, “Cut out that goddamned racket.”

  I never had any interest in my dreams except when they were amusing though I’d had sense enough to be upset when my friend Laurie had said that she never dreamt. I had the half-learned assumption that they helped resolve mental problems but when Coughlin and David talked about the theory and practice of dreaming I yawned. However, early in my hospital stay I was in a semicoma for three days from either a drug allergy or contraindicatory drugs and in this semicomatose state it was not so much dreaming as seeing the inside of my brain in lurid Technicolor as if it were a disjointed movie. I was too sick to be frightened but my mental movie was more vividly real then any waking reality I had ever known. It seemed that at the depths of my illness the idea of death wasn’t frightening. Like movies there was often accompanying music. Once on a family camping trip up near Crisp Point Donald and Clare were fishing the Big Two-Hearted River and Herald and I went off to some clearing we had seen near a logging trail to look for wildflowers. When you have your nose in a wildflower guidebook you can lose track of where you are. After a couple of hours it became warm and we were thirsty and the deerflies were driving us crazy and it occurred to us that were lost. Herald climbed a tree but could only see miles of trees. Every direction we walked was the wrong direction. We decided we’d best stay in one place so we sat in the middle of a clearing and Herald started a smudge fire to drive away the flies. Late in the afternoon we heard Donald calling and then suddenly Clare appeared in her fishing boots and practically screamed, “You assholes shouldn’t leave the campsite.” Luckily she had a canteen of water. Anyway in this fevered state I saw us all as a movie camera that hasn’t been invented yet. Bugs, beetles, spiders, a pink-eyed garter snake, the birds called cedar waxwings, the shadows of ferns, rotting logs, deer turds, Herald following me, or me following Herald. Grass tickling my butt when I peed, the smell of perspiration, a cloud that looked like an elephant, everything was seen more clearly than I had ever seen before. You could even see the emotion of being lost.

  This kind of thing seemed to go on forever though mostly in shorter segments: Laurie in the kitchen seeing my father’s swollen penis through his parted robe and giggling, the speed at which I fell down the bank of the Deadstream River, the fear of the book Wuthering Heights when I was twelve because some aspects of Heathcliff reminded me of my father, the nutty fat woman jumping up and down near the Coast Guard station, me frying up an egg sandwich for the paperboy who one winter afternoon wore only one sock. I asked him, Why? His pants were too short and frayed. He said, I couldn’t find my other sock. He wouldn’t come in the house. He ate the egg sandwich on the front porch and when he dropped a piece in the snow he picked up the hard egg yolk and ate it. My
brain couldn’t make Donald look right. Often he was too hairy near a campfire near Muskallonge Lake when we heard a baby bear crying. Once he was in our hotel room when I took the kids to New York City but he’d never gone to New York City. Several times he was a painted warrior like he was with his friends at a Halloween party near Eckerman and when they rushed into the party howling they scared the shit out of everyone and kids cried.

  When I came fully awake I was relieved that these visions never returned with close to the same strength. Clare was beside my bed and said, “You sure made some strange noises.” When I would wake from a sweaty sleep she would be reading a botany textbook and then help me change my nightie. Sometimes in the night K would be sitting in the corner under a dull lamp reading this Frenchman Foucault and I’d wake up and ask, “What’s that book about?” and he would say, “I’ll tell you when you feel better.” I said that I must look ugly and he said “Not to me.” Vincent came several times bringing profoundly stupid flower arrangements that I liked anyway. My two main doctors were only faces but Donald’s neurologist stopped by several times to say hello. He said that there had been questions by his colleagues about what happened to Donald but he had only said that Donald had moved to Canada.

  The last big vision was the best and happiest and centered on our trip west when the kids were in their teens. We had stopped on the way out to see my mother in Evanston and Donald had loathed Chicago traffic. He had no experience with heavy traffic so I’d usually drive with him slumped low in the seat muttering. It was even a problem for him in Yellowstone Park, where we’d stop and he’d walk off in the forest for a while. We went home by a northern route and he wanted to see the Custer Battlefield because we’d listened to a tape of Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star when we were driving west.

  The dream started when we left the Best Western in Buffalo, Wyoming, at dawn and drove north toward Crow Agency, in Montana. It was a peculiar clear cool dawn that came after a heat wave and there were puddles of water in the parking lot only in the dream the puddles weren’t dirty brown water but clear and pale blue. It had been the most enchanted day of the whole trip and the dream followed this course of enchantment. It was cool and windy and we wore jackets at the Custer Battlefield and we were so early few people were about. Donald was distressed to find an old drunk man sleeping in a ditch and covered him with a spare blanket from our car trunk. Donald laughed at the battlefield because he could hear shouts and small horses and in the dream I could too. Herald was our navigator with altogether too many maps so we continued on the side highway, Route 212, toward Belle Fourche, in South Dakota. Reality started to disappear in my version when we reached Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Donald was waiting outside the school with his green work clothes smeared with pungent pine pitch as if he were a logger and the kids were very young sitting out in a pickup reading comic books. I came out of the school with an armload of books and we went home to a gray weathered log cabin overlooking a gulley and cooked dinner. In reality Donald loved Lame Deer and had talked to a round woman in front of the post office who said, “You’re a big sonofabitch!” We went farther southeast and turned in Alzada so that Herald could see Devil’s Tower, which was used in his favorite movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Clare and I hadn’t liked the movie and we drove back north to 212 and farther through Belle Fourche to Bear Butte, north of Sturgis, where we saw the largest buffalo in creation in a pen.

  I awoke from this dream in an odd state of mind thinking of Donald’s story and how his great-grandfather had dreamed of this draft-horse farm where he eventually ended up happily working. Did this mean I should write to Lame Deer and see if they needed a teacher for the coming fall? Maybe. Why not? I lay there with Clare snoring softly in an easy chair next to the hospital bed wishing I had come to know that part of Donald that involved his religion but he was naturally reticent. I mean he wasn’t secretive but the inquiries were up to me. He seemed quite open with Clare but I was always too busy as a schoolteacher and Herald was strictly interested in the sciences.

  I was home by the day of New Year’s Eve feeling not bad but horribly spindly in the bathroom mirror. I was five-ten but had dropped from nearly one-forty to one-fifteen. At my request Clare made me a cheeseburger and I ate most of it. That evening from my bedroom I could hear Clare and K quarreling downstairs through the hot-air register. He intended to return to Ann Arbor when possible but she planned to enroll in botany and horticulture at Michigan State in East Lansing, seventy miles from Ann Arbor. They would visit weekends. They nagged at each other like pissed-off cousins. I fell back to sleep and woke at midnight and heard from the television downstairs the sound of New York City on New Year’s Eve and also the sound of Clare and K making love. She’s noisy.

  A few days later I made a decision and got in touch with Mrs. Plunkett, our old housekeeper and cook when our parents were up at the Club. She was now in her late eighties but managed to find a grandniece, a more recent emigrant from Italy, down in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was willing to come north and take care of me. I was pleased to tell Clare and K that they were free to resume their lives. They argued with me but I could see that their concealed hearts were in departure. They left the next day after picking up Benedetta at the airport. She was round but light-footed and graceful, quite merry really, and by dinner, when she served me a lasagna in a béchamel sauce, she asked me about the men in Marquette. I said she would have pretty good luck if she wasn’t too choosy. She said she wasn’t, then brought me a veal chop and spinach. She meant for me to eat my way back to health.

  Of course it was the strangest winter of my life. I was so impatient with my convalescent existence and the painfully slow increments of recovery. It reminded me of when Herald was a boy and would chart the progress of the Detroit Tigers on a bulletin board. We would all have to listen attentively when he explained how slowly the players improved their batting averages after midseason. A prolonged hot streak might only raise your batting average from .271 to .276.

  David came up from Jalapa stopping in Chicago to see Coughlin, who decided to come along after they concocted a plan to snowshoe the five miles from the plowed road into his cabin near Grand Marais. At dinner with both of them glancing surreptitiously at Benedetta’s butt at the kitchen stove they boyishly refined their adventure until I said that they were scarcely going to the North Pole, which they ignored. Their glances at Benedetta made me think of the silly filigree that surrounds our sexuality. The night before I had felt a slight pang of jealousy when I heard a noise and peeked out the bedroom window to see Vincent leading a woman up the garage-apartment stairs. Now David and Coughlin were huffing and puffing for Benedetta about the Great North and the five miles in to the cabin. I was tempted to mention how Donald and a game biologist had tracked wolves crossing from Canada to west of Paradise Point for twenty-five miles one cold February day. When he finally dropped his faux manliness during dessert (zabaglione) David admitted that Vera wanted to have a baby. I was stunned and Coughlin actually dropped his fork. At forty-one it was certainly possible for Vera and I tried to stop my mind from racing over certain aspects of what I had presumed was only their love affair. When they returned in two days they had to spend most of their time with Polly, who had become so depressed over her daughter she could barely speak. I invited her to come over anytime she wished but then I was still ill enough that I couldn’t stay awake all that long. Sometimes we sat on the sofa holding hands and watching a movie. For unclear reasons Polly liked westerns but when I said I was thinking of moving out west to Lame Deer in Montana she was appalled. “You can’t just go out there alone,” she said, and I said, “Yes, I can.”

  It had occurred to me as my illness began to subside and my strength gradually regathered that at age forty-four I wasn’t dead yet. It was hard to stop being a schoolteacher after twenty years so I would have to continue being a schoolteacher until my mind led me elsewhere. To me life without work would become meaningless despite
the fact that I didn’t have to work, but now I felt the vertigo of freedom, remembering painfully a beginner’s course in philosophy in college where the professor was obsessed with the French writer Albert Camus’s idea of terrible freedom. My vertigo came from examining a half-full cup of coffee and realizing I was free to come and go as I wished. I had been taking care of a husband then two children since I ran off and married Donald when I was sixteen. Now this life had nearly disappeared and it occurred to me that part of my obsession with Clare’s grief was that I didn’t want to let her go. Even the house no longer had abiding ghosts. I couldn’t imagine leaving Marquette forever but then I didn’t need to. I had enjoyed my sexual extravaganza with Vincent but at the moment I couldn’t imagine ever being tied closely to a man again.

  Clare came north only once before March but we talked several times a week on the phone. Flower came twice a week, driven to Marquette by an old boyfriend, Joe, who had been a commercial fisherman down in Naubinway. Joe would sit sleeping in his battered pickup and when I asked Flower why he wouldn’t come in the house she only said, “Joe’s favorite thing in life is sleeping.” She never came without bringing a dried-fruit pie. Benedetta was curious about the grand taste of these pies and Flower told her that you have to render the lard for the crust from young pork.

  I was attentive to the increase in the winter light. I clocked dawn and twilight in a journal in the manner of Herald tracking baseball averages. The low point had been on the day of the winter solstice, December 21, in the hospital right after I emerged from the coma. I had awakened at dawn and Clare had said, “Mom, from now on the light is going to be with us an extra minute every day.” But then I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until darkness fell, shortly after four. It was more than I could bear, this missing an entire day in my life.