The Dazzle of Day

by Molly Gloss

  She was fifty now, her menses had been erratic and skimpy for more than a year. Maybe she would be finished with that part of her life entirely, before long. How was it possible that she still remembered exactly the way her body felt, the hugeness, the intimacy, of harboring a child inside? And the absence afterward, the unexpected pang of becoming solitary again—she never had forgotten that. She was struck all at once by a flurry of precise physical remembrance, bare of nostalgia, the body’s memory: the salt-burn of her milk letting down, the briny-sweet taste of her son Ĉejo’s toes, the smell of his feces, Vilef’s narrow, membranous breastbone—the palm of her hand cupped to the heated pulse there.

  She stood up suddenly from the tub, sighing. In the close, humid heat of the bathhouse she combed her damp hair, smoothed her chapped hands, heels, knees with coconut oil, put on her shirt and sandals, tied up the strings of her trousers, while Filisa sat on in the water. “I think sometimes, when you set your mind to work at understanding your life, that’s when you lose sight of it,” Filisa said thoughtfully. She was looking into the ceiling, her tongue exploring her teeth. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be advice for Juko.

  Juko gathered up her towel and unclean clothes and went out, padding in flat bare feet along the narrow poles of the pasado to the door of her own apartment. People were waiting inside—Ĝan Sorensen, Svalo Smit, Dagmar Lopez, the three of them sitting with Kristina, talking quietly together while they waited. Bjoro was waiting with them, sitting in a half-lotus as if he might be meditating, his palms resting across his knees. When he saw her, he flushed slowly. She stood at the threshold, her bones taking on weight. “Oh hell,” she said, from a kind of tired helplessness.

  The three Clearness Committee people looked up at her, laughing, understanding. Dagmar said, teasing her, “Don’t cry, Juko. Hey, we started without you, but it’s a long work to find a clear way out of troubles. There’s enough to do—you won’t be left without.” Ĝan, grinning, said, “She looks happy to see us, eh? She’s got a good attitude. She wants to try to find a way through, doesn’t want to do any dodging.”

  Juko didn’t think any of this was funny. She gave Kristina a look. The old woman was sewing, her eyes fixed on her hands, but she knew Juko’s eyes were on her. She made a small, flatulent sound with her lips and tongue. “Should I have let your marriage go on being sick to death, then?” she murmured.

  The Clearness Committee people looked from one of them to the other. Dagmar said, not yet becoming entirely serious, “Are you blaming Kristina for bringing us into this? Did you think your troubles were a secret?” She gestured loosely, the swinging of her hand taking in Bjoro where he went on sitting as if none of this concerned him, his face turned from people, a mask of disinterest. “A husband and a wife can’t stop sleeping in the same bed—hell, the same house!—without neighbors seeing it, you know. Anyway, people heard your shouting. Some people think they know what’s the matter between you and Bjoro, and they asked us to help you find a clear way through. Maybe you should thank them, eh? for bearing witness. Maybe you shouldn’t be looking around for someone to blame.” Her voice was low, good-humored.

  Juko always had liked Dagmar Lopez, a woman her own age whose sense of humor was on the sour side, whose laugh was a pleasure to listen to, low and chuckling. But now she said bitterly to Dagmar, the words spilling out from a jumble of shame and anger, “Maybe you should look around for someone else to counsel. I don’t need help finding a place to put the blame in my marriage.” From the edge of her eye she saw Bjoro drop his head and then lift it, seeming to search the ceiling. Don’t look up there for it, she thought angrily, irrationally.

  People on Clearness Committees were respected for their patience, and for a certain kind of graceful common sense, a considered or instinctive wisdom. All three of them looked at her quietly, Dagmar’s face becoming serious but not taking on any offense. Svalo Smit said in a flat, reasonable way, “Where do you put it? This blame?”

  She meant to look deliberately at Bjoro, to deliberately name him, but in a moment she let her armload of dirty laundry heavily down to the floor and sat down with it, her eyes fixed upon Kristina’s hands, the bird-like clench, fingers stiff as pin feathers as they pulled a needle through the cloth, in and through, in and through relentlessly. Juko’s mouth when she finally opened it said sorrowfully, “If there’s a way not to blame my husband, you’ll have to help me look for it.”

  Ĝan Sorensen nodded. He turned his head toward Bjoro before turning it toward Juko again. “I don’t know if there’s a way not to blame Bjoro. But there’s always a way out of troubles, eh? and we’ll all of us look for it.” He didn’t say, Sometimes the way out of disease is death. Sometimes the way out of a troubled marriage is divorce.

  They let a fairly long silence clear the path a little. Then Dagmar said quietly that people had begun to know there was trouble in Bjoro and Juko’s marriage on the night of the Ruby’s homecoming. She said that people knew there was trouble in their marriage when Bjoro butt-fucked his wife as if this were an entitlement rather than a matter for mutual consent. She said, looking from one of them to the other, this was something everybody knew, or supposed to be true, and if it wasn’t, then Bjoro or Juko ought to say so now.

  Juko’s body filled with heat; there was a dim ringing in the bones of her skull. She had fixed her eyes on a point in the wall behind Svalo Smit’s shoulder but was blind to it, her seeing turned inward following a shifting confusion of memory, the fine pale hairs along the curve of Bjoro’s knee lifting to straddle her, the hollow below the hinge of his jaw clenching and then loosening, the involute plaiting of the rug pressed beneath her eye—an incomprehensible landscape, dim and vast.

  “Some people think Bjoro is ashamed of his behavior and hates his wife for this shame,” Dagmar said in a little while. “Some people think Juko hates her husband for his behavior and is ashamed of herself for this hatred. Anyway, everybody knows that Juko and Bjoro have given up having sexual relations with one another since the night of the Ruby’s homecoming. And that the person who came home inside Bjoro’s body is not the same person who went away in it but somebody else, somebody who can’t see a clear way through. And that the person inside Juko’s body has lately become solitary—she thinks she’s living alone, eh? anyone can see this.” Dagmar looked at Juko and at Bjoro without seeming to expect either of them to reply. “So people have asked us to help Bjoro find a clear way, and take Juko by the hand so she can stand up with the rest of us and stop this crouching down.”

  There was a longer silence while people waited for an inner stillness. Juko’s head kept up a clatter of noise, meaningless and distracting. She did not look at Bjoro but began to be conscious of the precise placement of his body in the close air of the room, the weight and balance of his head carried at the top of his spine. She didn’t know what she was feeling except a buzzing, unfocused anxiety. The Clearness Committee allowed the silence to stand and stand until it began to seem solid, a support, and finally it became possible for her to bring a few words out: “I don’t want to be known as the woman who was twice divorced.”

  She was surprised by the pitch of her voice, low, a murmur of piety and self-disgust.

  “I wonder,” Svalo Smit said, “who would you want to be known as?”

  She went on being surprised, separate from her mouth, from the words that finally came out, dismally sentimental: “The woman who was married so long that she and her husband would finish each other’s sentences.” Fragments of dialogue, pointless and unidentifiable, unwound themselves in her brain, the voices of old people overlapping one another in an amiable, winding braid of storytelling.

  Without seeing it, she felt Bjoro’s head turning. The turning of her own head brought the frame of reference around, a disconcerting sideward slip, a coriolis effect, and then he said, looking at her, “Do you want me to be that husband? the one who finishes your sentences?” with something in it that was anguish, and something else, a wildness, a char
ge. He may not have been asking her anything. Maybe he was angry with her for disclosing a maudlin side; their history together had been agreeably bristly, unimpassioned.

  “Yes! You!” She was angry too, and wild, and the surprising thing was that she began suddenly to cry, a choking cough of grief or denial. Maybe Bjoro cried too; he put his face down in his hands. She didn’t know what she wanted from him, but not weeping, and she hated him for it suddenly, remembering that she had thought this was something left behind in her other marriage, with that other husband. Swiftly she was finished with tears herself. She stared bitterly across the casement of the pasado wall, up the narrow slope of the tube to the houses and fields of the Bonveno ŝiro.

  Svalo Smit said mildly, “As far as that goes, I wonder if you want to be that husband—eh, Bjoro?”

  Bjoro reared his head, exactly as opossum sometimes will do, a kind of blind searching, and when he found Juko he twisted the heels of his fists against his eyes harshly. “I want to go on being married,” he said. His voice was rough, hopeless. In his long homely face there was something unfamiliar to her, a desperation that transcended loneliness. In that look, it was impossible to separate the gentle from the terrible, the suffering from the harm—what should Juko understand from that look? She turned from it in a confusion of anguish, as if he had deliberately peeled back a bandage to show her an ugly wound.

  “My wife never did finish my sentences, but she retold everything I said,” Svalo said after a while, uncomplainingly. “She said I never could get it right, eh?” He was an old man eighty or more, and had been divorced from his wife after their children were grown.

  The Clearness Committee might have gone on talking in this vein, a mild bantering—they may have thought this was a bridge to something—but Kristina said suddenly, bitterly, “I don’t know what all this talking about unfinished sentences has to do with my son covering his wife’s back.” Then unexpectedly she gave Bjoro a furious look, her lips twisting, “What were you thinking? What were you thinking?” she said to him, and went on glaring at him a moment—his burning face. Then she pulled her head down again, going on with sewing. Her lips were drawn up in a tight gather as if she had just now sewn her own mouth shut. They all could hear the slight hush of thread drawing through the cloth, and the stick of the needle.

  “What do you want me to say, panja?” Bjoro said to her, spreading his hands. “I was crazy. I told Juko that. I went crazy! I don’t know what I was doing, why I was doing it. Shall I go on apologizing for that until you make up your mind how much penance is enough?” He looked around at all of them. “I don’t know what I should do, after I apologize to my wife,” he said angrily. “After I tell her I want to go on being married. What’s the next thing I should do? I want to have sex with my wife again, but she never comes into my bed. What is the next thing I should do?”

  Ĝan said, in the habitual way of Clearness Committees everywhere, “Oh, well, I don’t think any of us know the answer to that; it’s not our business to tell you what you should do, after all.”

  Bjoro made a sound, a low hissing of unhappiness, of frustration, and looked off from everyone.

  “You say your wife never comes into your bed,” Svalo told him after a while, “but as far as that goes, you never come into your wife’s bed either.”

  Bjoro said fiercely, “My wife doesn’t want me coming to bed with her.” Juko believed this, herself. I won’t let him in my bed! she was thinking, but in the silence, when those words didn’t speak themselves out of her mouth, she knew that she had been lonely for his weight lying by her in the night, his back against her hips, his whispering in the darkness. The loss of her husband’s company distilled itself into a pang of longing. It was her body, not her bed, that she didn’t want Bjoro coming into.

  When she spoke, finally, the words that came out were a bitter chiding. “I don’t have any interest in having sex. You’ve made that a hateful thing. What do you think? That if we lie in the same bed, we must have sex?”

  Then Dagmar said, nodding, “There’s nothing wrong with Juko keeping celibate, eh?” She thought and then she said, “Everybody knows how it is with women who miscarry, how their bodies go on feeling the effects of grief and they have to wait for that to be finished before they get pregnant again, or they’re liable to lose the new fetus, too. It seems to me, this is what Juko is doing, waiting a while, letting her body get over this grief, before she lets her husband into her again. There’s a healing that has to take place.”

  “In Bjoro, too, as far as that goes,” Svalo said, and Ĝan, nodding, told everyone that celibacy had a well-known value, especially in treating sexual matters.

  The silence after that had a different quality, the vague weight of satisfaction; probably the members of the Clearness Committee were thinking a little progress had been made. Juko couldn’t have said what the progress was. Something pent-up had been released; maybe that was all.

  They went on talking a little while more but it was no longer a counseling. Dagmar asked Juko if it was true, this gossip about Humberto marrying. “I heard it was Olava Morgan he was walking out with,” she told Juko. Kristina, without looking up from her sewing, said pointedly that Olava was a woman who had no interest in marrying. “People have too much empty space in their minds, that’s where this kind of stupid gossip comes from,” she said, mumbling in irritation.

  They drifted off to discussing the New World, and Humberto’s magical leading, and the Dream, gone out ahead of them to put a new landing party down in the southern archipelago. Bjoro listened to this talk dourly, not joining in. When Ĝan Sorensen asked him if it was true—from the face of the land there was no seeing the curve of it?—Bjoro gave back a harsh look. Juko thought he wouldn’t answer. But then he said, staring away from them all, “I think of the sky.” She saw that he was flushing slowly. He said bleakly, enigmatically, “It’s the lack of incurvature on the sky.”

  After the Clearness Committee people had gone home, Juko and her husband and her mother-in-law went on sitting silently inside the apartment. Juko drew her unclean laundry into her lap and began searching along all the seams with her thumb and forefinger as if she believed she might find a place where some stitching had come apart. She didn’t look at Bjoro, but felt him watching her hands.

  “I miss the settledness of things, Juko.”

  What did this mean? She wasn’t able to answer. Then he stood, grunting, and went down the ladder, out of the house. She began to fold the shirt and trousers, the towel and shorts, went on folding and refolding them in her lap while Kristina went on with her sewing.

  “What is it, anyway, this business about Olava Morgan marrying Humberto Indergard?” Kristina asked her finally.

  Juko looked at her. “I don’t know. Do you want me to ask Ĉejo?”

  “We ought to go over there and ask Humberto ourselves.”

  “That woman, his mother, doesn’t want me in her house.”

  “Oh, she can go to hell. What does she think—that the mother of Humberto’s sons shouldn’t come and see Humberto when he’s sick? She can go to hell. I always have liked Humberto Indergard but his mother must be a fool.” She looked at Juko. Her eyes were rheumy, the lids trembling, but the look she gave was hard and intent. “Where is that house he lives in, over in Alaŭdo, eh? We ought to walk over there now. We ought to sit down with Humberto and talk with him.”

  There was something Juko had wanted to say to her once-husband: She remembered the impulse but not the substance. What she felt now was her old determination to stay away. “I don’t want to go into Leona’s house, Kristina.”

  Her mother-in-law looked at her. Then she looked away. “Well, that’s an old matter, eh? Settled.”

  A heat rose up the back of Juko’s neck. “Yes. It’s settled. That marriage, that child’s life.”

  Kristina turned her head again, her mouth loosening sorrowfully. “Well, I don’t know what that old woman is thinking—” she said after a while. “—what s
he’s blaming you for.”

  Juko understood that this had nothing much to do with Leona Arntsen. After a long silence something yielded in her and she said without looking at Kristina, “Do you remember how a child will sleep tangled? How you want to straighten their bodies on the bed? My son Vilef slept so light—so light, Kristina. If I pulled his legs out straight, he always would wake and cry.”

  She didn’t know why this memory had come up in her; or why, in a few moments, an ancient, latent culpability came out of her mouth: “Some people think sailmenders and other space-going people should keep themselves childless; the rads are higher for people outside. Maybe Leona thinks I’m to blame for making that fey baby.” She grimaced—a concealing, joyless smile. “Or it may be she just blames me for not loving him more.”

  Kristina pulled her chin down. She said nothing, and then she said, “It’s bad luck, is all it is. You know my son has gone out in the boats for twenty years, eh? and both his children were born whole. Who does that woman blame for her grandson Ĉejo, born whole?” After a long silence she sighed. “Ah, Juko,” she said, as if this naming were a benediction.