Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  But this is irrelevant: Richard has told her about everyone he has slept with, and among the modest handful there are no quick affairs, ladies who might later call up with bad news. Alma recalls their first days as lovers (she was thirty-nine; Richard, forty-seven), the thrilling sense that even as middle-agers they could still be the principals in a love story: the long, housebound days on weekends the boys were with their mother, the rumpled sheets, the life stories they shared, the lights of the little town beyond the window, snow beginning to fall. “Okay,” Alma says finally, as if granting the woman some point. “Just tell me, when did you and Richard get together?”

  “Please don’t get mad at me, Mrs. Huebner.”

  “My name is not Mrs. Huebner,” Alma says, her voice rising again. “I’m Fulana de Tal.” Her professional name, necessary camouflage upon family request. “It sounds too much like a title,” Lavinia had objected, finally relenting when Alma explained that fulana de tal actually meant a nobody, a so-and-so.

  “What?”

  “Fulana de Tal,” Alma repeats. She doesn’t try to Americanize the pronunciation. This woman will probably assume that Richard found her during one of his third-world consultancy trips and brought her back to be the good wife it is now difficult to find in this country.

  “You don’t give a shit, do you? As long as you’re safe.” The woman’s voice has turned nasty. “I hope you get exactly what you deserve! Go to hell!”

  “Wait! Please!” Alma is the one pleading now. She wants the woman to take back her curse. But the woman has hung up her end.

  Alma is still at her post at the window. She looks out as if she might spot the woman racing across the back pasture toward Helen’s house. She thinks of the stranger she saw earlier. It’s as if in her gloominess she has mistakenly wandered into some twilight zone, among the bruised and broken with no way to defend herself from their intrusion or ill will. This woman’s curse is an infection she won’t be able to shake off.

  Only, Richard—loving him, being loved by him, if he hasn’t already betrayed her—might save her.

  SHE WANTS TO CALL Richard and hear him deny everything. But it’s Thursday afternoon, when HI holds its weekly company meeting, reports from the different project managers: What’s happening with the water-system project in the West Bank? Is the financing application for the Haitian reforest-a-mountain proposal finished? Did we get back the estimates and feasibility studies from the microloan coffee cooperative in Bolivia?

  Whenever Richard talks about these meetings, Alma imagines all the men in the company standing over a large table map, dividing up the world. Always it’s the men she imagines—though a few women do work as coordinators and project managers. And though Alma knows that Help International represents the good guys, many of them former Peace Corps volunteers, corporate Robin Hoods funneling funds from the rich and powerful in the first world to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor, their talk at these gatherings, at least as reported by Richard, sounds to her like four-star generals plotting in the back rooms of the Pentagon. Sometimes Alma wonders how much difference—besides content—there is between these types of men.

  “A world of difference,” Tera would say. Bossy and big-hearted, Alma’s best friend is a force of nature. Just who Alma needs to talk to right now. Any number of times in the past, Tera has been the emotional equivalent of God reaching down toward Adam’s lifted fore finger on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Tera has breathed grit into Alma.

  The phone rings and rings. Unlike everyone else Alma knows, Tera refuses to get an answering machine and buy into the impersonality of the first world. Dear Tera, everything is a political struggle. But Alma has learned to get beyond this first string of her friend’s defense. She has come to realize that this is Tera’s way of girding her loins, so to speak, making her poverty mean something. Tera actually survives on less than twenty grand a year and no health insurance, teaching as an adjunct at the local state college. She also conducts weekend journalwriting workshops in which a half-dozen or so women participants uncover horrible pasts and buried terrors. One time, as the guest writer, Alma sat through three hours of a sharing session. It was awful.

  “Hey!” Tera sounds breathless. She needs to lose some of that extra weight. How to approach the topic again and not have it turn into the evil forces of anorexia attacking the organic, expansive shape of the female body. “I was outside,” she explains. Tera is an incredible gardener—a passion she shares with Richard, although usually it takes the form of competition: who is still harvesting kale in November, who has the first tomatoes. “They’re predicting a big frost tonight. Paul, don’t bring that in here!” Tera’s companion, Paul Vendler, is a tall, docile Quaker, whom Tera has been living with for way longer than anyone they know has been married. Needless to say, Tera does not believe in marriage. “Just set it in the mudroom for now.”

  It always annoys Alma: Tera’s stereo conversations with her and Paul. Today especially, Alma wants her friend’s undivided attention. “Tera, I just had this upsetting phone call,” Alma blurts out.

  “What happened? Hold on,” she adds before Alma can even begin. “Shut the door, Paul. I can’t hear a damn thing.” It’s Tera’s own fault. She refuses to update the vintage rotary bolted to the wall of the kitchen, the receiver cord so short there is no way to migrate away from noise. Alma once tried to pass on her old portable (marriage with Richard doubled, and in some cases tripled, their cache of certain items: four alarm clocks; five assorted wine bottle openers; six phones, including two portables). But Tera refused the gift. “Ours works fine. But I’ll take it for the battered women’s shelter.” Alma has not told Tera about the cell phone—afraid Richard and she will be consigned to that corrupt circle of consumer hell Tera reserves for people who replace things that aren’t broken.

  “Tera? Are you still there?” There is an absent sound on the other end. Tera must have given up on Paul and gone off to shut the door herself.

  “Sorry,” Tera says coming back. “Go on.”

  Alma has already decided she won’t bring up her dark mood. She doesn’t want a reminder about how lucky they all are. Right now, what Alma wants is Band-Aid reassurance, someone reminding her that her fears and doubts are unfounded.

  “Have you talked to Richard?” Tera asks when Alma finishes her account.

  “He’s at a meeting. And I just couldn’t concentrate on anything. I had to talk to someone.” Someone doesn’t sound like an adequate category for her best friend. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I wish you weren’t so far away.” Tera sighs. When they lived in the same town, they met almost every day for a walk and talk. Presence is important to Tera. It’s one of her articles of faith: being there. Maybe that’s why she has let herself get so large. More of her bearing witness, marching on a picket line, being there.

  “Here’s what I would do,” Tera says in a voice so strong and sure, Alma feels as if her friend’s capacious arms are pouring out of the receiver and wrapping themselves around her. Although they are the same age, Alma often thinks of Tera as older, wiser. “First, you absolutely need to talk to Richard before you get worked up. It sounds to me like this poor, lonely woman got diagnosed with this horrible disease and got piss-poor medical information and counseling and went home and took out her old address book and started calling everyone she even shook hands with or lusted after in high school. Seriously, the health care in this country is just the pits—”

  “Like you say, it’s probably nothing,” Alma puts in, nipping Tera’s rant in the bud. If Tera gets started on the Big Issues of the World, Alma’s petty problems won’t stand a chance. “It’s just, oh, you know how down I’ve been, Tera. And this call just reminds me how everything can come tumbling down.”

  “You said it,” Tera agrees. But instead of pursuing any number of corroborating horrors, Tera stays with Alma. Perhaps she senses the des peration in Alma’s voice. “Hang in there. It’ll pass, really. And you got me
, babe, like the song says. Are you taking your Saint-John’s-wort?”

  Just the name makes Alma cringe. Unlike Tera, Alma doesn’t believe in all those expensive, alternative tins and jars at the co-op. But it’s more than that. She doesn’t want to take Saint-John’s-wort; she doesn’t want to be on antidepressants; she has stopped going to Dr. Payne. There has to be a place left in modern life for a crisis of the soul, a dark night that doesn’t have a chemical solution.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Tera offers. “I’m going to drive down and stay with you till Richard comes home. I’ll give you a back rub, make you some lemongrass tea, whatever you want. I just want you to know you’re not alone.”

  “Oh, Tera.” Alma feels a surge of guilty love toward her dear, generous friend, whom she so readily lets slip into caricature in her head. “I’m fine. Really.” Richard will be home soon enough. It’s probably best if Tera isn’t here. Richard and Tera, well, they have to work at being friends. Tera’s high-horse antiestablishment takes on everything offends Richard’s bottom-line, heartland faith in the United States of America, the Golden Rule, and not biting the hand that feeds you. But Alma suspects that it has less to do with conflicting ideologies than with the fact that they both want to boss her around, though both are succeeding less and less these days.

  “Richard doesn’t have to know. I’ll park on the back road. When we hear his pickup, I’ll go out the back way and hike across the pasture.”

  Just the thought of her baggy-panted friend hiking across the back pasture, bumping into her Paul Bunyan peeping Tom, makes Alma laugh. “Ay, Tera, what would I do without you? I’m okay, really. Just promise that if Richard and I break up …” She doesn’t know what to ask Tera to do or be in that eventuality. “You’ll marry me, okay?” They’ve played this way for years. Holding hands walking down streets. Long, passionate hugs when they part or meet. Wannabe lezzes, their gay-couple friends, Marion and Brier, call them. In fact, when Richard and Alma first starting going out and he met Tera, he assumed that at some time in the past they had been lovers.

  “I don’t believe in marriage, remember?” Tera reminds her. “And don’t talk horseshit. You and Richard are not going to break up.”

  “But if we do—”

  “If you do, you move in with us. We fix up the shed as your study. We take turns cooking meals from the garden. We carpool, save on gas. We’ll have a great life all together.”

  It’s scary the way it sounds so doable. This isn’t the reassurance she needs. “Well, like you said,” Alma reminds them both, “this woman was probably just calling everyone in the phone book. Oh, Tera. I don’t know why I’ve let this get to me. I mean I know Richard really loves me. We have a good life. I’m a lucky person.”

  There’s a worrisome pause. “Of course, Richard loves you,” Tera agrees. “I love you. Lots of people love you.” It sounds like Tera is conjugating a verb that has always given Alma trouble, in English and in Spanish.

  AFTER HANGING UP WITH Tera, Alma heads for her study. She’ll try to squeeze a few hours of work out of this wasted day. Will and discipline have gotten her out of old lives and bad habits before; that’s what she’ll try for. Keep at it, and one day she’ll look up and the dark wood will be a flourishing garden, kale in November, tomatoes in mid-January.

  All morning, she has taken notes, answered e-mails, called a catalog company, pretending to be her mother. The wrong size cotton briefs have been sent, and her mother has called Alma to correct the mistake. Poor Mamasita is no longer able to negotiate her way through the auto mated mazes of customer service, much less rectify mistakes when an impertinent, young voice finally answers at the other end. There went Alma’s morning. Then the intruder in the back pasture, followed by the woman’s weird phone call have thrown her off completely.

  It will make her feel good if she succeeds in getting herself back on track. A sign that at this mature stage of life, Alma can count on inner resources. Shouldn’t she have deep ones by now, on the eve of fifty? Oil fields of inner resources to tap?

  The file marked BALMIS is still on top of her desk, pages and pages of notes from the dull, dusty tome she borrowed from the university library, using Tera’s card. Francisco Xavier Balmis was no spring chicken when he embarked on his smallpox expedition from the Galician port city of La Coruña in 1803, Alma’s age exactly. He had already been to the New World four times, stints at a military hospital in Mexico City as a young man. But this time his plans were to continue around the world, from Mexico to the Philippines and on to China, with his boatload of orphans, and then round Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena and home—a trip that would take almost three years to complete. His poor wife! Josefa Mataseco, dates unavailable. Marriage, childless. All of this Alma has learned from her e-mail correspondence with the historian in Spain who tends the Web site. There is a Web site on Balmis! A Web site on everyone.

  Alma’s mind wanders. What would it be like to live without Richard? It’s not a new question. She has been bracing herself, ever since they lost both Richard’s parents within months of each other almost two years ago now. Her own have moved to Miami, close enough to “home” to be flown back to the island easily for their last days, as they have instructed. Mamasita and Papote—sweet, slightly buffoonish names, courtesy of the grandkids—are now tottering on the edge of their graves, reaching out for Alma’s hand. “I can’t see anymore from my left eye. No, it’s not a cataract. The doctor says there’s nothing to do about it. Eat spinach. Can you imagine, I’m paying this doctor una fortuna and he tells me to eat spinach! Papote? You know how he is: Today he asked me if he had children. Yesterday he was quoting Dante. In and out. His blood pressure is up. Of course, I’m worried about his diabetes. He hasn’t had a bowel movement in days. So, how are you?”

  The losses that lie ahead … Alma is not looking forward to this next stage of her life. “Don’t dwell on the inevitable,” Helen often counsels as she creeps around her drafty kitchen, preparing their tea, Alma’s visit the day’s event. But like the proverbial child told not to spill her glass of milk, that’s all Alma can think about. Maybe if she had had children, she’d throw her gaze over her shoulder, see the next generation coming up and feel heartened. Having stepsons doesn’t help, though she tries to pretend that it does. David and Ben and Sam are not her babies; she never pored over their little bodies, nuzzling and grooming them; and it’s that primal, animal comfort that is called for, the creature surrounded by what it has spawned. She is proud of them, her handsome, good-hearted stepsons, but she can’t get over their size, their big jaws, their flushed faces when she fusses over them too much in front of their fancy New York City girlfriends.

  “Nothing in the world like having children,” her mother, who never seemed to enjoy having her own, would lecture Alma over the phone during the early years of her marriage. But Alma was never swayed. Not much of her mother’s advice ever worked Stateside anyway. Besides, a new husband and three young stepsons were challenge enough. By then, Alma’s first novel had been published, and she was in the thick of a family fallout. The idea of generating more family was terrifying.

  Cosas de la vida, cosas de la vida … You look up one day, and the adults of your childhood are gone, and the big questions you still haven’t answered come flooding into your head at three o’clock in the morning. Who to turn to for answers? Alma wonders, remembering the lines in a poem she recently read and copied in her journal:

  How to live—someone asked me in a letter,

  someone I had wanted

  to ask the same thing.

  Her writing woes, though absorbing, are minor when compared with the winds of time blowing right in their faces as the windrow of parents goes down.

  Losing Richard is what she has been bracing herself for. A fatal heart attack; a car accident, the body she loves strewn across the pavement like so much roadkill. For a while, after the deaths of his parents, Alma readied herself. She bought a small, spiral notebook and tailed him for days,
writing down instructions on how to do all the things in the house that Richard always took care of, mysteries to her: hooking up the generator if the electricity failed, refilling the water softener, programming the thermostats. When she asked him to teach her how to plow the driveway, Richard said, “What on earth do you want to know all this for?”

  “So I can live without you,” Alma admitted grimly. Richard’s eyes filled. “Oh, Alma, have a little faith.” But he went ahead and taught her to plow the driveway, though her terror of driving through drifting snow convinced her that she would probably die of a heart attack if she tried to do this herself.

  After this afternoon’s phone call, Richard’s loss, which Alma has always imagined as tragic and terminal, is now transformed into something tawdry: betrayal and divorce. I’ll kill him! she thinks, smiling in spite of herself at the irony of causing the very loss she dreads. They have already had the infidelity conversation. “I’m not Hillary Clinton,” Alma has told him. “I’m too insecure. I wouldn’t like the person I’d become if I were married to a man I couldn’t trust.” Richard let out a deep, convincing sigh. “When are you going to get it through your head that I adore you?”

  It’s probably what Francisco Balmis told Josefa on the eve of his departure. Did she believe him? Did she look over the final registry of the members of the expedition—a list the Spanish historian sent Alma via e-mail—and ask, So what about this Isabel? Alma’s own eye was caught by this little detail. Accompanying Balmis were nine attendants, twenty-two boys, the ship’s crew, and—unheard of on an expedition of this sort—a woman, Isabel Sendales y Gómez—or López Gandalla or Sendalla y López. (“Of her surname we cannot be certain,” the Web historian noted.) Not only had the rectoress of the orphanage granted Don Francisco the little boys he asked for, but she had joined his mission herself! On the darkest days, when nothing else seems to interest her, Alma finds herself thinking about this crazed, visionary man, crossing the ocean with twenty-two little boys all under the age of nine, and the mysterious rectoress about whom nothing is known for certain but her first name.