I looked around and realized I had spent most of my life searching for this island and yet trying to avoid it. As a child, I had overheard my parents’ furtive discussions about my mother’s older brothers, and I had conflated their illness with a name I kept hearing on the news. Valentine’s Korea was a dangerous place, I thought. My uncles were soldiers who had been sent there and died. Although what this fighting had to do with love I couldn’t say. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see my uncles here now, in this strange and isolated world where nothing seemed familiar yet everything did. I imagined Max and Jake lurching along the main thoroughfare of Spinsters Island. My mother, I thought, might be waiting around the next curve.
Six shabby houses stood farther up the hill, their yards strewn with mangled bikes, toilet seats, and clothes wringers. How could anyone live in such a place? Laurel had said she didn’t care what she left behind as long as she lived widely while she had the chance. But that seemed impossible here. How could anyone live widely on an island that measured five miles across?
Sumner stooped to disentangle a cradle from a wreath of rusted bedsprings.
“Would you leave that be!” Miriam snapped, and Sumner looked around, puzzled, as if he only now understood that the island was inhabited. Since coming ashore, we had seen only that staggering mute and frozen woman. But I sensed the others watching, like natives who suspect that the invaders bearing gifts have plans to subdue them. Even the deer seemed suspicious, lifting their heads from the geraniums as we passed. (The deer were the size of dogs. Paul Minot had told me that wealthy sportsmen from New York had imported game to Spinsters Island in the late 1800s. With no predators, the deer had overrun the place. They didn’t get much food, but even the smallest could survive.)
People here made do with what they had. In Eveline Barter’s yard we saw a red Texaco gas pump with a yellow Shell head. We saw the chassis of a thirties Buick with the powder blue hood of what must have been a Cadillac. In the back of a Chevy pickup with a crude wooden bed sat three sacks of groceries. A deer stood on its hind legs, licking a bag of Cheetos.
“Scat!” A woman in pink curlers burst from the house and chased the deer. She wore overalls with nothing underneath. The tops of her breasts were crisscrossed with stretch marks. Her skin was flushed and shining, as if she had just stepped from the bath, but her palms were stained with grease.
“Go on. Scat. Get out of here!” The deer casually stepped down, licking Cheetos dust from its muzzle, then wandered toward Willie and sniffed his duffel bag.
The woman hoisted all three sacks of groceries. “You two,” she inclined her head toward Miriam and Sumner, “you can put your stuff in the back room. One bed, one sofa, you figure out between yourselves who gets which. Hell, you can climb in together for all I care. You young ones,” her eyes darted from Willie to me, then back to Willie, “you’re welcome to the porch. All of you, help yourselves to whatever’s in the icebox.”
Eve Barter led us to her kitchen, but she didn’t set down the sacks. The icebox truly was an icebox. A sampler hung above the stove: THIS IS MY KITCHEN AND I’LL DO WHATEVER I DAMN WELL PLEASE. On the oilcloth-covered table sat three baking tins of blueberry muffins. “Those are strictly off-limits. Made them for the party.” She smiled up at Willie, who, I could see, was trying not to look down at her breasts. “Long drink of water, aren’t you. None of the pip-squeaks on this island are tall enough to get the decorations stuck to the ceiling of that schoolhouse. You come along and help me get up those balloons and whatnot.” She led us back outside, the three sacks of groceries still pinned across her chest. She started up the hill. “Bring the booze!” she called back. “If we get the alcohol set up, the word’ll go out. Some of those bloodhounds probably could sniff the stuff clear across to South Point.” She walked back a few paces. “You did bring the booze, didn’t you?”
“We did,” I assured her, then I remembered we had left the crates on Stacks’s boat.
“I’ll get it,” Willie said. He trotted toward the dock, grateful, I thought, to delay his visit to the schoolhouse. I wondered if I ought to leave him with all that beer, but even with his confession that he used to be an alcoholic, I couldn’t imagine him drunk.
“I’m going in to lie down.” Miriam scowled at Sumner, daring him to say the bed would be his, then stomped into Eve’s house. I started to invent my own excuse to slip away, but Eve had taken the groceries to the schoolhouse, and Sumner had returned to examining the junk pile in which he had found the cradle. I walked quickly up the hill, toward the island’s center. At one point, I passed through a field of withered corn. I thought of my mother and how much time she had spent tending her garden. A shriveled cob lay beside my boot. I picked it up and squeezed it until the sockets pricked my palm. I felt like sitting in that cornfield and refusing to go on until my mother came and found me. We had never discussed her diagnosis. All she had ever said was, “Your father told you, didn’t he.” And when I admitted he had, she had gone out to her garden and pulled weeds for the rest of the afternoon. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that she had retreated so deeply into her illness to spare herself the agony of watching her daughters watch her die.
The path cut across a meadow. The blueberry bushes blazed a brilliant red. I found a claw-footed tub mired in the dirt like the skeleton of some beast that had gotten stuck there and starved. Fifty yards farther, I came upon a short, spiked fence. The tombstones inside bore blunt English surnames: Small, Rich, Dodd, Long. There were three Fews, two Smiths, and half a dozen Martingales. Carved atop the stone for Bea and Hiram Martingale were a pair of clasped hands. Several of the dates marked lives that had lasted nine decades; others, far briefer. Loving mother of Althea, Obadiah, Bathsheeba, Jericho, and Luke read the stone for Lucy Few, who had died at twenty-four.
I had little idea where my own ancestors lay buried. My mother’s father had lived a few miles from Mule’s Neck, but he died before I was born and my mother rarely mentioned him. We never visited his grave. I had been five when my uncle Max died—his Valentine’s had struck him young and progressed at such a rate that he was dead before forty—and ten when my uncle Jake had followed him. They had always struck me as old, no doubt because they twitched and seemed peculiar. When my parents thought I wasn’t listening, they discussed the checks my father sent my aunts and whether the amounts were large enough, especially for Jake’s widow, Yvette, who had been left with three kids. Apparently, to protect my mother and increase her chances of getting married, her parents had lied to her and said that Valentine’s struck only men. Who knows if she believed them. Certainly, it seemed to strike the men in my mother’s family in ways that seemed even crueler than it might have struck a woman. My uncles had finished years of training for their professions—Uncle Max had been a podiatrist, and Uncle Jake had studied pharmacy—only to find that their hands shook too badly to cut a patient’s corns or funnel pills in a jar. A woman could bear children in her twenties and raise them to adolescence. Her death was sad but not wasteful. Her survivors wouldn’t starve.
Someone must have been buried earlier that week. I kicked the mound of fresh earth, then watched in terror as the dirt bubbled and heaved. It was only a mole. My heart stilled. The fright passed. Death was what it was. People who were born here must have feared that the larger world held fates more frightening even than Valentine’s. If you stayed, you belonged to a sort of aristocracy, like royal Europeans who intermarried despite the risk of bearing heirs with weak chins or weak minds. Within the boundaries of this island, no names could have been more famous than Smith, Martingale, or Few. The names on the tombstones reminded me of the romances my sister used to read, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Pride and Prejudice, novels whose concerns seemed too limited to hold my attention, all those artificial barriers of breeding and wealth. Now it seemed to me those authors had gotten everything right, except that it wasn’t bad blood but bad genes that kept lovers apart.
As it turned out, everyone gave blo
od, even those islanders who weren’t at risk. They seemed to find it reasonable that the price of an evening of pleasure be pain. By five, they had lined up beside the schoolhouse, the men in stiff white shirts, the women in flowered dresses with wide cardboard belts. The children kept peeking in to see if balloons truly did hang from the ceiling and a bowl of punch and a case of beer really were sitting on the teacher’s desk beneath the letters of the alphabet and the time line that stretched from prehistoric times to the 1950s. Miriam dragged a table beside the threshold and jabbed each person’s arm as he or she came in. One old man was pushed to the dance in a homemade cart. Another man made the trek from the east point of the island for the first time in years. “Yow!” he said when Miriam jammed him with her needle. “I’d a-known you was a-going to break my arm, I’d a-thought twice about coming.”
After the guests gave blood and let Sumner examine them, they were allowed to dance and drink. The band was set up beneath a yellowed map of Asia. Eve Barter, on a stool, wore shiny white boots, her beefy legs bare to the hem of her short red skirt. Her sausage curls wobbled as she pumped a spangled blue accordion. “Listen up!” she ordered the musicians. “I don’t think we were all playing the same song that time. Ned, I know we been doing a lot of funerals lately, but our audience here is trying to dance.” She addressed this to a teenage boy with a pompadour; the mouthpiece of a sax dangled from his lips like a cigarette. Beside him sat a whey-faced guitarist who had been a bishop on the mainland before he lost his church, I never found out why. The pianist wore white gloves and pumped the pedals with such vigor she seemed to be marching, hour after hour, without reaching the end of whatever parade she was in.
Willie had been persuaded to take a turn on someone’s guitar. But he was clearly out of practice and couldn’t keep up. A string popped. I saw him mouth shit. Like me, he rarely cursed. Someday, I would like to take a poll of how many people whose parents died of Valentine’s try their very best not to swear.
When the band took a break, Eve offered Willie a beer. He shook his head. She tried again. He paused, then put the bottle to his mouth and drank.
I stepped forward to stop him. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might become as unglued by this crazy island as I was. Midway across the room, I was stopped by a man with wind-burned skin and splintery teeth. “Want to dance?” he asked me angrily. The band resumed playing, and my partner pulled me across the floor. I had never danced a polka. I stumbled, but my partner yanked me back up. “You may be smart,” he said, “but you’re not much of a dancer, are you.”
The polka seemed frantic, the way a seizure might be. I thought of primitive tribes who mimed the deaths they feared—to ward them off, to boast: We are the tribe who lives with such predators baying outside our huts. At last the song ended. I looked around, but Willie wasn’t there. I thought of going to find him, but I needed to help Miriam pack the blood. It was after one thirty. The youngest children dozed on the heaps of coats. A few spun in tired circles. For the first time, I noticed that about a quarter of the children had a dense mask of freckles. Were the freckles linked to Valentine’s? If only, I thought, then realized that I had condemned those freckled children to death.
I carried the Styrofoam racks to Eve’s kitchen and put them in her icebox, then sat on the stoop listening to the smack of riggings against the masts and trying to imagine what Willie would be like after drinking all those beers. I stood and took a step beyond the ring of light from Eve’s porch, and he materialized before me, as if he had been standing there all along, waiting until I took that first step.
“I’ve been a jerk about this whole thing,” he said. He took a long swallow from his bottle. “I wanted to come here with you, and I didn’t think you would let me, so I gave your dad that check. I shouldn’t have done that. But I’m just not sure how I feel about . . . I’m not about to take this test of yours. But you’ve got all these people out here, living like this. And I do have my son to think about.”
He took an even longer swallow. “What I mean to say is, I was hoping you would just sort of walk around with me awhile. Because all of this has me shaken up. Those kids back there? And that young guy who plays the sax? I didn’t catch on at first, but then I started looking at how bad his hands shook. And Ted? My son, Ted? I kept thinking about what happens if he has it. I’m in love with you. There’s that, too. So maybe you could come?” He took a last swig of beer and sent the bottle flying. An enormous shape flapped furiously above the trees. “If you don’t come with me, I’m going to go back to that schoolhouse and finish off every last beer in the joint.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll go with you.” He didn’t seem drunk as much as he seemed unmoored. I grabbed his hand, and suddenly I felt as if everything had been planned—by whom or what I couldn’t say. Willie and I were supposed to end up on this island. He wasn’t my worst choice. He was my only choice, really. Who else could understand everything I had been through? With whom else could I strike an equal bargain—I’ll risk caring for you, if you’ll take the same risk for me?
We set off along the cliffs. Willie had borrowed the headlight from someone’s bike, and he used it to light the path. Waves smacked the rocks below us. I didn’t care where we went or what happened when we got there. Here, on this island, a marriage between two people with Valentine’s chorea wasn’t absurd. Here, it made sense.
Something speared my leg. I cried out. Willie swung his light and caught the gleam of antlers. The deer was dead, its mouth set in a rubbery grimace. He knelt and touched its head, gently, like a man stroking his wife’s brow to keep her mind off her labor. He seemed sober by then.
We walked another mile. The path turned to stone. A wave exploded beneath our feet. We stood there like that. He put his hands around my waist. I leaned against his chest.
“I thought I had it beat,” he said. I assumed he meant his drinking, but then he said, “I just wasn’t exposed to any of this before. Not so much of it. All at once. When I’m by myself, I can convince myself . . . I guess this is how you’ve felt all along. And here I was, going on and on about how I wasn’t afraid of dying.”
“I’m not afraid of dying,” I said. “I mean, not the pain. I just can’t give it all up. Being alive. Everything. How I feel . . . here, now, with you.”
He slid his hands along my ribs. I held my breath, waiting for those hands to move higher.
“But when you die, it’s not as if you know you’re dead. It’s not as if half of you stays behind and hears the other half crying in the dark, crying that you’re lost.”
If only he would stop talking! If only he would lift his hand another inch!
“Don’t you want to give up that other half, the half that keeps watching?”
“I think I would miss it,” I said.
“That’s only because it’s been with you for so long. You’re used to driving yourself crazy.”
I told him I would stop driving myself crazy if I knew I didn’t have it.
Nah, he said, that wasn’t true. “Everybody’s like that. Everybody except a few Buddhists who’ve attained satori.”
I told him that despite what he might think, I wasn’t the type of person who was going to spend her whole life sitting around trying to become perfect. I had too much to get done.
He pulled away. “You think I’m trying to lead the perfect life? You don’t see me planning who I’m going to fall in love with according to a bunch of statistical formulas and graphs on a place mat. You don’t see me spending my life trying to make sure I have this perfect kid.”
“He doesn’t need to be perfect.”
“Yeah? Tell me you wouldn’t marry me right now if I could guarantee that I don’t have that damn gene. That you don’t have it. That we could have ourselves a one hundred percent grade-A certified healthy kid.” He pressed his hands against my head. “You know what nirvana is? I’ll tell you what nirvana is. It’s watching your kid eat Cheerios. You ever seen a kid eat a bowl of Cheerios? The way he di
ps the spoon in the bowl? The way he brings it up to his mouth and makes sure he gets everything in? The way he chews? He’s not thinking about anything except those Cheerios. That’s nirvana. And making love is nirvana. Here, on this ledge, on the darkest night you’ve ever seen, and not thinking about anything else but making love.”
He unbuckled my watch. Then he burrowed in my trouser pockets and took out my radiation badge and a calculator marked, though there wasn’t enough light to read it, BELONGS TO S. BATE. He made a pile beside the cliff, like a cairn. Don’t think, I kept thinking. It occurred to me that neither of us had brought a condom. Don’t think, I thought again. Put your hand around his neck. Lie back. Don’t say no.
My foot hit a can; it clattered down the cliff. Willie started kissing me, and I couldn’t think of anything except how lucky I was, because in the midst of so much nothing I had been allowed to exist, to think everything I had ever thought, learn everything I had ever learned, feel everything I had ever felt. I had seen chicks in their shells. I had seen burning bushes and rotting deer. And I had been allowed to fall in love with someone as completely as I now loved this man.
14
The morning I got home from Spinsters Island, I discovered a Seal-a-Meal bag on my lab bench with a mouse corpse inside. Lew had managed to keep alive a runty mouse we thought might be homozygous for the Valentine’s gene, and I had put Maureen in charge of watching him. A note in her meticulous hand was inscribed on the label: “So sorry! Things with Paul got pretty intense. I tried to preserve the remains for dissection.” I found myself weeping. It wasn’t only that the organs would have deteriorated too badly for an autopsy, or even that the mouse hadn’t lived long enough to reproduce. I composed myself enough to slice open the bag. The corpse was oddly mummified. I touched the skin. “Maureen!” I yelled. “Get over here!”
“Just a sec-ond,” she sang. I heard the wheelchair whir.
A Perfect Life Page 16
