by Molly Gloss
In San José she had been used to hushed voices and noise-dampening carpet, dim lights, leather couches, vaguely Asian instrumental music played barely louder than a whisper. At Bienestar, she was led to a paper-covered exam table shoved into a corner of what appeared to be a storage closet, where she could hear the high cries of children and scolding parents continuing from the clamorous, crowded waiting room, and through the wall in the next treatment room a man speaking Spanish, a fluent rush from which she gleaned a word here or there, his concern over missing work, and the terrible pain in his shoulder.
The acupuncturist was a big gray-haired woman named Raylene. Joyce told her that doctors in California had ruled out Parkinson’s and Essential Tremor. She gave Raylene a slight, embarrassed smile. “They think these tremors are just nervousness. I suppose they are; I’m a worrier, I guess. It’s not actual tremors, anyway, not that kind, it’s more a vibrating kind, on my insides, it’s like I’m ringing like a bell. Like I’m shaking, I guess, only nobody but me can feel it.” She had honed this description over the years, and by now most of it was fairly accurate, or felt accurate, although not unabridged. “Acupuncture helps me. It calms me, or maybe just distracts me,” she said, and this was a true statement. Over the years, after giving up on traditional medicine, and giving up on the numbing effects of wine and whiskey, she had tried every sort of homeopathic remedy and alternative treatment—reflexology, reiki, crystal light therapy, all of it. Acupuncture was the only thing that had done her any good, the only thing that helped her sleep through the “rumbles,” as Jimmy used to call her night tremors.
In the Bay Area, most of the alt-health practitioners Joyce had visited had practiced a quasi-religious Meditative Silence. Raylene was not a disciple. She kept up a steady stream of chatter as she tapped the fine needles into Joyce’s wrists and neck, her upper back, her ankles. How did she like the town, she must’ve been used to warm and dry down there in California, up here it would be nonstop rain October to June, but the price of houses must be a relief from California, which house had she bought, was it the blue one on Beech Street, small towns, honey, everybody knows what’s for sale. She asked about Joyce’s husband—Joyce was still wearing her wedding ring—and when she heard about Jimmy’s death she said, “How long ago was it, honey? Oh, Jesus, not even a year? No wonder you got tremors. I lost two husbands. Well, I divorced the first one, but it’s the same as. You lose them, either way. I always thought it was harder to lose a husband than anything else.”
Raylene had married again after the death of her second husband. This new one, Benny, was a farrier. Joyce didn’t know what that was. “He’s a horse shoer, honey, that’s what a farrier is. But Benny doesn’t do much shoeing anymore, he mostly sticks with clients who like a barefoot trim.” Joyce didn’t ask what a barefoot trim was.
Raylene and Benny used to have several horses but now they were down to just one old gelding, a “pasture ornament” too stove up to be ridden, and when he was gone they didn’t plan to have any more. Benny had the idea they might like to travel in their old age, which was coming up on both of them before long, and it would be hard to travel if they had animals to feed twice a day, and stalls to muck out.
Joyce had had a cat for a few years—well, it was her son’s cat—but she hadn’t wanted another animal after the cat died. She had always worried whether she’d be able to scoop up the jittery animal when a major quake hit, and she knew if he ran off she’d have to leave him behind to make her own escape through the collapse—an extra worry she didn’t need. She thought of asking Raylene how you’d ever move an animal as big as a horse out of harm’s way when an earthquake came, but Raylene went on talking, getting away from the topic of horses, and the moment passed.
Bienestar, it turned out, was a Portland-based outfit with satellites around the state. Raylene saw patients two days a week in Cornelius, three days a week over at the coast, in Tillamook. It was a long commute to Tillamook, more than an hour from where she and Benny lived, but Raylene didn’t mind the drive “except for the idiots on the road.” She didn’t trust all the driverless cars—those were the idiots she meant.
In Cornelius she treated mostly farm workers who came to her with repetitive injuries, “but I get a lot of meth addicts in Tillamook. I’ve had some luck with addiction, I get referrals from the courts, but honey, sometimes I think I’m bailing out a sinking ship with a teacup. There’s a reason people take up with meth, it’s poverty, you know, and no hope of anything different.”
In San José, Joyce had sometimes gone for acupuncture three or four times a week, but Raylene was the clinic’s lone acupuncturist and she was only in the Cornelius storefront on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that was the schedule they set up, twice a week appointments. Raylene wrote her phone number on the back of a Bienestar appointment card. “If twice doesn’t keep those tremors dampened down,” she said, “you just give me a call and I’ll take care of you.”
Tuesdays were always busy. Raylene would place all the needles but then leave Joyce alone in the treatment room—“your chi has got to have a little time to sort itself out, honey”—as she headed off to treat someone else. Joyce could often hear her big voice sounding through the wall, sometimes in Spanish, and she only paid attention when the conversation was in Spanish—a language lesson, not eavesdropping, was how she thought of it, although no one seemed to care very much about privacy here.
Thursdays were usually quieter. Raylene had time to sit in the treatment room chatting with Joyce while her chi was finding its path. She never gossiped about her patients, which was a relief to Joyce, but nothing in the woman’s own life seemed too private to bring up. None of her three children, she told Joyce, were Benny’s kids. “He was a prince to take us on, me with three teenagers, and the middle one, I admit it, fairly screwed up at the time, arrested already for DUI when he wasn’t but sixteen.” It had done the kids a lot of good to be with Benny’s horses, and by now the children were grown up and mostly doing well. But she always had a story about one of them, or one of the five grandchildren, something funny or a new worry, and always a story about a misbehaving horse or one of the “loony-tunes horse people” her husband dealt with in his work.
Joyce was guarded about her own life but Raylene pulled a few things out of her, neutral things, starting with the garden she had planted in the big front yard of the Beech Street house. She spoke softly, aware of the thin walls, listeners on the other side, and said nothing about her plan to feed herself from that garden in the event an earthquake cut off the town from the rest of the world.
When she told Raylene she had been trying to read Borges in his own language, Raylene slipped right into Spanish, a long rush that Joyce only half-understood, something about the weirdness, extraño, of Borges—or that’s what people had told her, she hadn’t ever read him herself, was not much of a reader—and then something about movies, she was a big fanatica of extraño in the movies, she loved movies about time travel, alternate universes, extraterrestrials—these last three terms all rendered in English.
Joyce, in truth, had a mild fear of being trapped in a dark theater during an earthquake, but this was not something she could say to Raylene. She fumbled for the Spanish to say she wasn’t much of a movie-goer. She said that she hadn’t been to a movie hall in years. She said she and Jimmy had both been big readers, and the little she knew about time travel and alternate universes was not from movies but from reading—was it Coetzee? She had read a Heinlein novel when she was young, it could have been from that.
These were not names Raylene had ever heard of. The last book she had read was a Harry Potter novel, because her youngest son had been fanatico about Harry. And she had read Fifty Shades of Grey. She laughed when she saw Joyce’s look. “Everybody was reading it, I had to see what all the mania was about.” Then, laughing again, lapsing into English, “Honey, I guess we are just from different planets. But you’ve got me thinking maybe I’ll give Borges a try. And I’m telling you,
you ought to get yourself on Netflix or Hulu, one of those things, find a way to see 12 Monkeys, then you’ll see what extraño is. You’ll be a movie fanatica like me.”
Gradually, the clinic became Joyce’s makeshift language school. Raylene made a habit of speaking Spanish, and Elena behind the reception desk took to greeting her in Spanish with a phrase that meant “one of our regulars.” Sometimes, while Joyce waited to be called for her appointments, she forced herself to say a few words to someone else who was waiting, someone she had overheard speaking Spanish—an older woman, if there was one—polite comments about the weather, praise for a well-behaved grandchild, a question about cooking with chayote. The women she met week after week were a rotating group, but over time she became acquainted with several. Reading Borges was an excruciatingly slow struggle—she wondered if Jimmy would have kept with it—but she began to look forward to her conversations with the women in the waiting room. She smiled a lot to cover the gaps in her understanding, and then sometimes the women would laugh and slow down their chatter, to help her follow what they were saying. Other people in the room who were not Mexican, not Spanish speaking, sometimes watched these conversations sidelong, which had a surprising way of making Joyce feel part of a group, the group of women who spoke Spanish.
She signed up for Netflix, worked out how to order 12 Monkeys, and afterward told Raylene that James Cole, going back in time over and over, failing over and over to change the future, but never giving up trying, made her think of something Raylene had said once about working with meth addicts, “bailing out a sinking ship with a teacup.” Raylene laughed, but then said, “Honey, that’s right. Me and Cole, just doing what we can. It’s all we can do.”
The weather was beautiful all through August and September, but by the middle of October had turned to rain and a leaden sky. Her friends in the waiting room, and Raylene too, told her this was only the beginning. “It will rain until the Fourth of July,” they said, and they might not have been joking. It went on raining for days on end.
Joyce had read everything there was to read about earthquakes. She knew where they were most prolific, she knew their causes, and where they do the most damage (dense populations, shoddily built places, places difficult of access). She knew about the religious nuts who believed earthquakes were a sign of Jesus’s return. She knew the several odd coincidences—Einstein leaving Pasadena one day before the quake that destroyed his hotel. And she knew that huge volumes of rain—rain dumped by tropical cyclones, for instance—were linked to earthquakes. There were theories that floodwaters lubricated the fault planes, or perhaps erosion from heavy rain reduced the weight on any fault below, and allowed it to move more easily.
If she had had the option, she’d have asked Elena to schedule a third weekly appointment with Raylene. Twice a week appointments were only barely keeping her insomnia at bay. She often woke at three or four in the morning, now, to the pounding of rain on the roof. Jimmy would have told her this wasn’t rational. He would have told her this wasn’t a tropical cyclone.
One Thursday in November Elena called just as Joyce was headed out the door. Raylene was sick, she said, all her appointments for the day were cancelled. Joyce undressed and went back to bed; she had had a sleepless night, the kind of night Jimmy always called her “rumbles.”
When Elena called again to cancel Tuesday’s appointments, Joyce wrapped herself in a blanket and turned on the television. She listened to a few minutes of mindless daytime programming and then looked up the Spanish phrase for “get well soon,” picked up the phone, and called the number Raylene had written down for her.
Raylene’s voice on the phone was hoarse and tired. She had come down with “a good and proper flu,” she said, was feeling better by now but many of her patients were in fragile health, she didn’t dare expose them to her virus. Joyce murmured a few sympathetic words and “que te mejores,” but then couldn’t stop herself from saying, “I could come out to you, I could bring some chicken soup, and if you feel up to it I wonder if I could please get a treatment, I’m not worried about flu, I just don’t want to miss another treatment.” Rushing the words like a crazy person. There had been an M 7.4 quake in Brazil that morning.
Raylene and Benny lived on twenty acres in the foothills of the Coast Range. Their long unpaved driveway after days of rain was a brown rushing stream. Joyce drove up the lane timidly, her old Honda lurching and sliding in the slippery mud. There was no yard at the front of the house, just a muddy expanse in front of the porch, no indication where she was meant to park, no place where she could walk to the house without splashing through a shallow lake. She imagined her car might just sink into the muck and be stuck there until the Fourth of July.
Raylene came onto the porch and called to her. “Sorry about the yard, sweetie. And the road. When it gets this muddy, we gotta just live with it. Cute boots!”
She had worn the ankle-high rain boots she’d bought at the Wilco Farm Store, red ladybugs printed on black rubber, which had seemed charming in the store but now seemed stupidly childish, insufficient for the muddy traverse from her car to the porch. She sheltered the cardboard carton of soup under her coat and hurried across. Raylene held the door wide for her. “Don’t worry about tracking in mud. Benny and the dog already brought it in a bunch of times.” She wore a frayed terrycloth bathrobe loosely cinched, and fleecy purple slippers. Her hair was an unwashed grey snarl.
In a wave of guilty distress, Joyce said, “I’m so sorry, Raylene, I shouldn’t have bothered you. I should have gone to someone in Portland, I’m so sorry.” She had never seen Raylene like this, bare-faced, her cheeks blotchy with rosacea, her eyelashes invisible without mascara.
Raylene flapped a hand. “It’s all good. I’m good. We’ll get you fixed up. You want some tea?” She headed off somewhere without waiting for an answer. Joyce didn’t know if she was expected to follow. She stood in the front hall, holding the soup, her coat and her hair quietly dripping. It was true, plenty of mud had already been tracked across the floor, but there were jumbled shoes and boots on a throw rug at the door, and wet coats hanging along the wall, so finally she pushed out of her ladybugs and set the soup down on the floor to get out of her coat. She hung it with other coats on a wall peg, picked up the soup again, and found her way cautiously, sock-footed, to a long, high-ceilinged kitchen. Raylene was pulling boxes of tea from a cupboard.
Joyce held out the carton of soup. “Should I put this in the refrigerator?”
“Oh, sweetie, thanks. Just stick it in there wherever you can find room. Water’s ready in a minute, pick out your tea. chamomile might be good for those shakes of yours.” Joyce had brought a soup from Mama Leona’s Mexican Deli, very spicy chicken tortilla soup. She always thought spicy food helped a bit with the flu or a bad cold. She had never found camomile or any other of the soothing herbals did anything at all for her “shakes.”
They took their tea with them back to the living room. It was a big room with an odd jumble of furniture—heavy Mexican arm chairs, an old cracked-leather recliner, a low-slung Danish sofa with blond wooden arms. The room was blessedly warm—a big wood-burning stove took up half of one wall.
Raylene sat on the sofa and waved Joyce toward the recliner. “Let’s take it easy for a minute, honey, just drink your tea, and then we’ll get some needles into you.”
Joyce wanted to say again, I’m so sorry. She wanted to put on her coat and boots and get back in the car and drive back down the muddy drive. But she held the mug in both hands, close to her face, and the surface of the tea shivered slightly with the shivering of the whole earth. Raylene, sipping her own tea, watched Joyce in uncharacteristic silence. Then she set her tea down. “Well, I can see you are a pretty mess, honey, so let’s not wait, let’s go ahead and get started.”
She came over and cranked the recliner back with a sudden thunk so that Joyce was almost fully recumbent, took a box of new needles from a book shelf, pushed up the sleeves of Joyce’s shirt and tapp
ed the first needles into her wrists. For no reason she could name, Joyce began quietly, helplessly, to cry. Raylene went on working without comment, folding the cuffs of Joyce’s pants to bare her ankles, opening the top buttons of her shirt to reach her collar bones, her neck, and then finding new placements as well, needles in Joyce’s earlobes and behind the ears, folding down the top of her pants to place them at her waist. Joyce kept her eyes closed and focused on breathing slowly from her belly as she’d been coached by a massage therapist years ago.
Raylene, as soon as she had finished tapping in the needles, came around behind the recliner and reached down to massage Joyce’s scalp with the tips of her fingers, which she had never done before. Her touch was light and warm, and Joyce’s skin, tingling, rose to her touch. Emotion welled in her chest again and filled her throat.
“It’s all right, sweetie, you cry if you need to,” Raylene said quietly, and went on stroking Joyce’s scalp, then moving her hands to Joyce’s temples and her face, pressing thumbs lightly around the eye sockets and down the cheek bones and along the curve of the chin.
“Oh!” she said after a few minutes, in some surprise. “Your tremor, I think I just felt it. Is that what I felt?”
Joyce was startled. She didn’t know what to answer.
Raylene began cupping her palms lightly around Joyce’s neck, then her ears, feeling for the tremor. She was cradling Joyce’s whole head between the palms of her hands when she said, “Oh! There! I do feel it, I can feel it. Oh, honey, not a tremor, kind of a humming, right? Like your whole body is a tuning fork. I feel it! What did you tell me, once, ringing like a bell? Jesus, ringing like a bell, you sure are!”
The quake in Brazil had rung through Joyce’s body like the banging of a huge gong. How could you not feel it? she almost said. She whispered, “There was a big quake in Brazil this morning.”
Raylene didn’t hear this, or didn’t note it. She made a slow, unfocused humming sound, mmmm-hmmm, and shifted her hands slightly. And then someone—Joyce thought it must be Benny—came suddenly stomping onto the porch and into the front hall. She couldn’t turn her head without disturbing Raylene’s hands, but she heard him noisily shucking his boots and rain clothes, heard a dog shaking water off its coat and the tick-tick of its toenails on the wood floor, and then Benny’s solemn announcement, “Here I is, your man returned from the hunt.” This may have been his customary joke—Raylene did not look up or trouble herself to respond. But she said, “Benny, come over here, see if you can feel this.” She was holding Joyce’s skull tenderly between her hands, fingers spread wide, as if she held a great, fragile egg.
