In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  Kate sat propped up on three pillows against the headboard, which was carved with flowers and pomegranates. “Did anyone come in today with anything interesting wrong with them?”

  “No one ever has anything interesting wrong with them. I thought medicine was going to be exciting, but mostly it’s amazingly dull. Cuts, infections, broken legs. Alcoholism.”

  “I broke my leg once. Jumping out of a tree.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I was trying to see if I could fly. I was six.”

  Dr. Sonnenfeld slid a section of orange into her mouth. Outside, the crickets were calling loudly in the bushes, and once in a while a firefly (Lampyridae) flitted by, its greenish light leaving an afterimage in the dark. “I used to dream about flying. Across the meadow and out over the lake. What lovely dreams!”

  “It looked easy when the birds did it. I was shocked when I went down so hard.” She had almost forgotten this, but it came back to her now: the chilly, cloudy autumn day. The smell of pine needles and the rough texture of the bark under her hands. The dipping flight of a goldfinch, yellow against the white sky—her father had taught her to identify finches by the way they flew—the moment before she launched herself out of the tree.

  How fast the ground had risen up.

  “My mother was so angry. She had to stop what she was doing and rush out and see what I was bawling about.”

  “It must have hurt a lot.”

  “I don’t remember that. Just being furious that it didn’t work.” Wildly flapping her arms, and still her body plunged like a stone! She had shrieked in frustration when her mother ran toward her calling out, “What in the name of heaven is it now, Kathleen?” How her father’s face had floated into her field of vision at last. “I remember my father talking to me as he set the bone. He asked me how it had happened, and I told him, and he didn’t laugh or get mad. He told me about giant air balloons that carried baskets you could ride in. He said, if I promised not to try to fly again, he would take me up in one someday.” She could picture her father so clearly in his dark suit and hat, his neat sideburns. The grave expression on his kind calm face.

  “And did he?” Dr. Sonnenfeld asked.

  It had been a promise between them: that was what Kate had always thought. A promise he had died before getting a chance to keep. But maybe it was just what you said to a child to make them behave? To take their mind off their pain? Because it was true that there must have been pain, even if she couldn’t remember it now.

  “Did he?” the doctor asked again. She leaned forward, her white throat gleaming in the lamplight, the smell of oranges drifting out from her hands. “Kate?”

  Her name in the doctor’s mouth, like a chime being struck, echoed through all the chambers of her body.

  Kate graduated to scrambled eggs and boiled chicken. Mrs. Sonnenfeld said she was doing so well that she could come downstairs and have her lunch in the kitchen. Upstairs, in her room, the sheets and walls were white, the furniture honey brown. Down here, colors glared and shimmered: orange lilies in a vase, a red bowl of purple plums, bright yellow curtains fluttering at the windows. She was confronted with tongue in caper sauce, pink and green on the china platter. The dogs galloped in, tails waving, nudging their narrow skulls under Kate’s hands. “Aus! Aus!” Mrs. Sonnenfeld cried.

  Kate stroked the silken heads. “I don’t mind.”

  But Mrs. Sonnenfeld flapped her apron, shooing them away, and the dogs, sighing, crept back into the hall. Kate put a morsel of meat into her mouth. Mrs. Sonnenfeld sat down across the table and watched her. “You like tongue, I hope?”

  Kate nodded, though the fatty stuff felt odd in her mouth. “You’re not eating?”

  The older woman patted her stout waist. “I can live off my stored belly fat. Sarah says I should do reducing exercises, but it just happens with age, this expanding. She’ll see.” She pointed her double chin at Kate. “You, too. Such a skinny chicken now, but when you are an old lady, and your children are all grown, it will be a different story.”

  Kate looked up into the soft-cheeked face with its fierce expression. It seemed nothing you could say would bother Mrs. Sonnenfeld much, or change her opinion. “I’m not going to have children,” she said.

  Mrs. Sonnenfeld snorted. She reached for the platter of tongue, pulled off a soft piece, and popped it into her mouth. “I, too, did not meet my husband for a long time,” she said, chewing. “These things are hard to imagine before they happen. But then, in a breath, everything changes.”

  The dogs had crept forward into the doorway. They lay three abreast, their long noses quivering on the threshold, their tails sweeping the hall floor.

  “When did Mr. Sonnenfeld die?”

  “Oh, many years ago now. Well, he was older. It was natural that it happened that way. It was part of the bargain.” Her plump fingers reached for the platter.

  “Not everyone gets married,” Kate said after a pause. “Your daughter, for instance.”

  “Sarah!” Mrs. Sonnenfeld scoffed, flapping her hand. “Sarah has always been impossible. Ever since she was a little girl, she has done exactly as she liked. I always told her, men don’t like women who act so smart!”

  “Some men do,” Kate said, thinking of Thatch.

  “It was her father’s fault, anyhow. He spoiled her.”

  “Spoiled?”

  “He was always for her buying. China dolls, silk frocks—too fancy for a small child. He used to travel a lot for his business, and he always brought her something back. Something expensive.” Mrs. Sonnenfeld made a face, her lips glistening from the fatty meat. “When she was nine, he got for her a doll’s house like you never saw. A doll’s mansion! Furniture, miniature plates and cups and bottles of milk. Oh, she loved it, though. She would play with it for hours. She loved her dolls. She loved tea parties and dressing up in my hats. Such a waste!” The older woman’s eyes were damp. She pushed her chair back and got up, filling the kettle, pulling her handkerchief from her apron pocket, keeping her back to Kate.

  Kate looked at the dogs, still lying with their noses in the doorway. Quietly she slipped her unfinished portion of tongue to the floor. Two of the dogs stayed obediently where they were, their eyes fixed longingly on the meat, but the third—slightly smaller than the others, with the brightest, blackest eyes—leapt forward and gobbled it down. By the time Mrs. Sonnenfeld returned to the table with a plate and a knife and fork of her own, having decided to have a little lunch after all, the dog was back in its place.

  “Not that I’m not proud of my Sarah,” Mrs. Sonnenfeld said, heaping her plate.

  Thatch had to stoop to get his head under the doorjamb. “Look at you up here, like a bird in its aerie,” he said. “You’re feeling better?” He and Cynthia were leaving for New York in a few days, and he had come to say goodbye.

  “Yes.”

  “You scared me in the hospital. You were barely a wisp.” Kate thought he looked wisp-like himself. Thinner, his face drawn. Had his cheekbones always stuck out like that? “You’ll be going back to work soon, then,” he said.

  Kate looked up at the slanted ceiling where the shadows of leaves moved over the surface. A freight of sand seemed to be sluicing back and forth through her skull. When she thought about setting up a microscope, she was sure her fingers would fumble. If she tried reading a paper, her mind would shut down like a lens aperture closing. She could feel it starting to shut down now. “I keep thinking about the field,” she said. “The way it looked in all that rain.” Darkness, the drowned plants tugged by the current, their roots clinging hopelessly to the dissolving ground.

  “There are still a few plants left.”

  She looked at him furiously. “And what good does that do me? I can’t tend to them! I can’t shoot-bag them! They’re useless.”

  “You’ll replant,” Thatch said. “In the spring. Everyone
will be replanting.”

  “Not you,” Kate said, more sharply than she’d intended. “You’re moving on.”

  “I lost a year’s data, too,” he said.

  She took a breath, trying to hold back her anger as she had tried to keep the water back in the doomed field. “How’s Cynthia?”

  Thatch looked out the window where the leaves of a tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) waved gently in the hot afternoon. “I worry about her,” he said. His fingers drummed on his bony knees. “She’s so thin. As thin as you.” He smiled unhappily, his gaze flitting to Kate’s face and then away again. “Just looking at food seems to make her feel ill.”

  “Well, it’s natural,” Kate said impatiently. “For someone in her condition.”

  The room went still. “What do you mean?”

  Kate stared at him. It had been weeks since Cynthia had confided in her! “It didn’t cross your mind that the signs you just described have an obvious implication?”

  Thatch stood up and went to the window. His hands gripped the frame. “How do you know?”

  From the back, he still looked like the boy she’d first known, scrawny and tall and loose-limbed, his sandy hair untidy. “Thatch,” she said. “She wanted to protect you. That’s all. She was worried something bad would happen. She wanted to wait till she was sure everything would be okay.”

  Thatch’s chest expanded and contracted mechanically inside his wrinkled blue shirt.

  “It’s good news, Thatch,” Kate said. “A new little F1.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Kate was awakened by the racket of the dogs rushing down the stairs that meant Dr. Sonnenfeld had come home. The night lay all around her, deep and still, the face of the clock on the bureau bathed in darkness. After a minute, the dogs quieted. Kate strained to hear a footstep, or a cabinet opening, or a door shutting. Maybe it had been nothing, just the dogs hearing a noise out on the street. She turned over.

  What was it she had been dreaming of? An ocean? Floating in black water under a starry sky … She shivered in the breeze from the open window, turned on her other side, drew her knees together under the covers. Pressed them tight. Her mind felt dreamy, yet stimulated and alert, as though little lights inside it were blinking on and off. Her thoughts jumped restlessly. To calm herself she began reciting the botanical phyla and classes: Thallophyta, Bryophyta, Pteridophyta …

  It was odd to have been away from plants for so long, to think of her lab sitting empty all this time.

  Gymnospermae, Angiospermae.

  There must have been footsteps in the hall, but Kate hadn’t heard them. Now, suddenly, the door sprang open. Dr. Sonnenfeld stood in the doorway, a tall shadow. No tumbler of whiskey, no cigarette, her hands dangling at her sides.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate said, sitting up.

  “I’m sorry. It’s horribly late. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I was awake already.” As her eyes adjusted, she saw how stricken the other woman looked. “Is your mother all right?” Kate said.

  “She’s fine! No. It was something at the hospital. I just… ” She leaned against the doorway, her eyes glittering.

  Kate was on her feet without knowing she was going to stand. She crossed the room and took Dr. Sonnenfeld by the arm and led her to the bed and sat her down. “It’s all right,” she said, sitting down beside her. “Can I get you a glass of water?” Under the surface softness of Dr. Sonnenfeld’s arm she could feel the hardness of muscle and bone.

  “These things don’t usually…” The doctor stopped, then began again. “Usually I can—”

  But whatever it was she could usually do, she couldn’t do it now. Instead, she leaned toward Kate, just the smallest shift of weight. It was an intensification of heat Kate felt, a prickling of her skin. Dr. Sonnenfeld’s white blouse, her swan’s neck, her long pale earlobes looked ghostly, as though Kate could pass a hand right through her. “What happened?”

  “I should get something to eat. I think I never had any dinner.”

  “Tell me,” Kate said. Anyone could see the words pushing up right there in her mouth behind her closed lips. “Sarah,” Kate said.

  The dark head lifted.

  “Sarah. Tell me.”

  They were sitting so close together that the white face was just inches from Kate’s own—close enough to feel her breath, to be startled by the minnow twitch of a muscle jumping in her cheek.

  “Whatever happened,” Kate said sternly, “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.” Inside her nightgown, inside her skin, inside the sturdy cage of her ribs, her heart thumped. Slowly, Kate reached toward her and touched the narrow back. Dr. Sonnenfeld—Sarah—turned. Her mouth grazed the side of Kate’s mouth. Kate drew back half an inch in case there had been a mistake. For a moment they were like two hummingbirds, each beating its wings fifty times a second in order to stay perfectly still. Then, almost imperceptibly, a head inclined, and the other, like a mirror, followed it. Lips touched—the barest brushing, like a moth grazing a leaf—yet the whole room seemed to rise up whirling.

  It was still dark, but out the window some bird in the leafy arms of a tree had begun to sing.

  “Mutti will be getting up soon,” Sarah said.

  Kate lay stretched out on the sheets, naked, her skin flushed and warm. “Kiss me,” she said.

  Obediently, Sarah turned her head. Lips, tongue, teeth. Hands caressing, seeking out the tenderest places, the hollow above the collarbone, the damp crease at the back of a knee. The lowest vertebrae, like the place a stalk met the ground.

  The bird sang louder. The sky was perhaps not completely black.

  Sarah pulled away. “Listen,” she said, sitting up against the headboard with its carved pomegranates.

  Kate reached for her silken thigh, burrowed into her lap. Sarah didn’t have to warn her. She was good at secrets.

  “Listen,” Sarah said again.

  “Shh.”

  “I need to tell you about what happened at the hospital.”

  Kate stopped nuzzling. She rolled over on the rucked sheets and looked up at Sarah. The outlines of her strong face and her sharp clean collarbones, her wide shoulders and her pomegranate-shaped breasts were growing more distinct. Any moment Mrs. Sonnenfeld would get up and lumber down the stairs to let out the dogs.

  “The person who came in last night: it was your friend. The one married to that man you work with.”

  “Cynthia?” Kate said, though she was sure it couldn’t be.

  “She lost her baby. She lost a lot of blood, too. She waited a long time to come in.”

  Kate sat up and pulled the sheet up around her.

  All the time she and Sarah had been together in this bed, Thatch would have been sitting in a hard chair in the hospital beside another kind of bed entirely, in which his wife lay. A bare field washed with blood. “Will she be all right?”

  The sky was visibly changing now, charcoal gray lightening to lead gray, slate gray, oyster, ash. When she spoke, Sarah’s voice was clean and hard and precise as a medical instrument. “Miscarriage happens to a lot of women. Usually it means there was something wrong with the fetus. That it wasn’t viable, that there was some sort of major defect.”

  “Will she be all right?” Kate asked again.

  Sarah turned her face toward Kate, and her expression, too, was hard, shining. Blazing with something. Fury maybe, or compassion, or failure. “She was so unhappy. Stricken. Deranged by grief!”

  “Will she be able to have a child?”

  But Sarah was saying something quite different. “And then, somehow—when everyone was out of the room—she cut herself. Her wrists.”

  The olive skin, the bones jutting as she turned the diamond ring on her finger in Kate’s office; as she and Thatch pressed the knife down through the wedding cake. The skin slit, the blood in the bluish veins spurt
ing out. “Is she dead?”

  “No! No. The nurse found her.”

  Kate got up and began to look around for her clothes. She had worn nothing but nightgowns and robes and slippers for weeks.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah said.

  “I need to go and see them.” Him, she meant.

  “Get back in bed,” Sarah said. “You’re still weak. It’s the middle of the night.”

  But it wasn’t the middle of the night, not any longer. And she wasn’t so weak anymore. She tried the drawers of the bureau: linens. She tried the closet: a man’s gabardine trousers folded over a hanger. She turned back to Sarah. “I need something to wear,” she said.

  From down below, now, came the sound of a door opening, the pattering of canine toenails, the phlegmy noise of Mrs. Sonnenfeld clearing her throat as she crossed the landing to the second-floor lavatory. Kate’s head began to feel odd. There was a ringing coming from somewhere. She put out her hand and braced it against the wall.

  Sarah jumped up and grasped Kate by her bare thin arm.

  Kate pulled away. “I’ve been inside too long, that’s all.” But her head was spinning, and she had to sit down on the floor.

  Sarah fetched Kate’s nightgown and slipped it over her head. She lifted Kate’s arms and threaded them through the armholes as if Kate were a doll. Kate remembered what Mrs. Sonnenfeld had said about how Sarah had loved dolls, how she had loved the dollhouse her father had given her with its miniature chairs and tables and bottles of milk. So different from what Kate had loved: walks in the fields and baseball games in the street with the neighborhood boys. What made them so different? Had they been born that way? If you could go back in time and switch them, place them in the other’s household … From downstairs came the sounds of pans clanging, water running, Mrs. Sonnenfeld speaking German to the dogs.