“So what girlfriend do you mean?” I asked, beginning to feel stirrings of from-outer-spaceness in my memory.
Eddie said, “Oh, you know, some girl I met traveling.”
The penny dropped. I said in worry, “Not Denise?”
Eddie jumped a mile and shouted, “Don’t tell me you know her too!”
“No . . . no . . . Ralph had mentioned . . .”
“Oh, great. Bigmouth or what? You try to trust people.” He sat down on the bed with a plump of I-give-up. Then he bent down and took his tennis shoes off, tying the laces together and setting them down on the bed beside him. Leaning back, he put one hand on my ankle, then felt around in the covers for a free patch, making a big deal of how uncomfortable it was. Finally he said, “Look, could I just get in? Cause, totally, brother and sister, and – look me in the eyes?”
I didn’t look him in the eyes, but he said nonetheless,
“Need.”
I made an elaborate flapping gesture to imply his getting in was a matter of no concern or interest. It was funny how angry it made me. Had he not manipulated me into it, I would have been overjoyed to huddle in bed with Eddie.
He clambered over me triumphantly and slid in. Then he:
“But the point about what Ralph with his blah blah space monster cruelty that just upsets me till I’m ready to tear my head off with pliers and I don’t know why you’re even listening to this secondhand account of bull I totally ignored –”
ALIEN SPACECRAFT SECTIONS (continued)
Argument
The big light comes down her face, the shadow focuses. Denise
Cadwallader falls into the creatures’ overwhelming hearth of love.
She is returned unharmed after no apparent lapse of time, but
in the following months becomes disruptive at kindergarten.
Upon the death of her mother, she is sent to a boarding
school in Hampshire, where she is very unhappy.
2. Santa Clara, California, 1965
1She wakes sitting in the middle of the highway. There are no cars.
1.1The Pontiac’s tilted where it’s parked with two wheels on the grass.
1.2Mummy’s still asleep. Mum’s poorly.
2When she tries to walk to the car, she falls down.
2.1When she tries to walk to the car, she falls down.
2.2If you lie on the highway, the yellow broken line steps up and up, teasing you into the hungry sky.
2.3It was a white bean and she loved it. She tries to walk to the car.
3When she wakes up again, she’s balled up in a Mexican blanket on the car’s back seat; they’re driving. Bunny Betty’s fallen on the floor and she can’t reach. She begins to grizzle, and Mum says, “Deesey?”
Deesey quiets. After a little, she says, “Bunny Betty fell.”
Mum says, “I’ll get her when we stop, my treasure. I can’t stop now, I don’t feel well and it’s late.”
Deesey looks at Bunny Betty, lying ears down with her feet up on the hump. She tells her to sleep, and almost remembers something which makes her look up at the dark car window, its dull wedge of reflected light, but doesn’t remember after all and shifts onto her back, humphing.
She says, “Mummy? Will you be poorly for a long time?”
Because Mum doesn’t answer, she listens to the car groan. She says, “Mummy?” again.
Mum says, “I might be, Deesey. We have to be patient. Were you afraid when I was sleeping?”
“No.”
“I won’t sleep in the car ever again with you, I do promise.”
Deesey kicks her feet loose from the blanket. She says, “If I don’t be patient, won’t the bean not come back?”
“What bean?”
“There was a bean, and you were asleep and it flew me, and you didn’t know when you sleeped.”
“Slept,” her mother says. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I don’t feel well. Can you tell me about the bean tomorrow?”
“No. Tomorrow it’s a secret.”
“Well, I’ll never know then, will I?”
Her mother takes the turn for their exit. Deesey gets up on her knees to watch as they pass the giant revolving ice-cream cone on Mr. Tasty’s roof.
She doesn’t think about the bean again for a long time.
BUT
1Suddenly, she’s a brat.
1.1Every night she must sleep with Mummy, then she must sleep on Mummy’s floor, then she must sleep in the closet on the heaped linen.
1.2“Cause, I throwed the cup, cause, but it went in the clock. Cause it’s a bad cup and I was killing it.”
1.3Sometimes she won’t come out of the road.
2“Denise has trouble distinguishing fantasy from the truth.”
2.1“Discipline deficient.”
2.2“She is good at communicating with other children, but sometimes a bully.”
2.3“Please call me to arrange an informal meeting.”
3He is uniformly yellow and his eyes are glossy wet leaves, his mouth an X. The light shudders gently as if idling. Where the yellowperson steps, the floor dimples and briefly holds cloven prints. The wall’s silver inconstant surface reflects a tot in pigtails, paralyzed with the mouth agape to show sparse teeth.
3.1“Wake up, baby, you’re having a bad dream. Deesey? Deesey, it’s only a naughty dream.”
4Her mittens are safety-pinned to her coat, because she will lose them.
4.1The fat pencils have to say “Barbie,” and they must be pink.
4.2She can write her name now in joined-up letters.
4.3She is a loved child. My child is loved, no one has ever harmed her.
SO
The office is furnished with beanbag chairs and red plastic kiddie tables. A teddy bear has a pink heart stitched to its chest. In one corner is a bulky desk, flanked by two office chairs, in which the child psychologist and Karen Cadwallader face each other. She is restless, has declined to take off her coat, scowls. One hand is at her rib cage, kneading in an habitual gesture, probing the spaced bones. She tells herself, No one put a gun to your head, to come here.
“Well, let’s hear your ideas first, and then I’ll give you my ideas.”The child psychologist folds his hands.
Karen Cadwallader sighs. “I don’t know that I have any ideas. She’s very clever. That can be problematic.”
“You’re . . . British?”
“Yes. Yes, actually, I thought, we moved to America about the time this began. And of course her father is still in Britain.”
“Why of course?”
“We work.”
“And would you say . . . was that about the time you began to feel ill?”
“That’s not connected. She doesn’t know: work doesn’t know. I haven’t felt tempted to make it a mainspring of my life.”
“You know, children notice much more than we realize.”
Karen feels this escaping into some awful irrelevance. She wants to protest, she’s six, she doesn’t know mummies die. She can’t know, she’s six, don’t make it worse than it is.
She says stiffly, “I didn’t come here to talk about me.”
For the remaining thirty minutes they discuss Karen Cadwallader’s marriage, her early youth, her uterine cancer. She never had much faith in the radiation treatments. They caught it early, she should have had a chance, but there’s no right and wrong. She winds up with a phrase she’s rehearsed tirelessly in her mental practice runs of finally telling Peter: “I can’t take it so terribly seriously, the dying part. I’m a doctor myself, at the end of the day, it’s rather old hat.”
The psychologist waits her out. It’s a probing silence that Karen physically opposes, squaring her shoulders in her now-baggy raincoat. When it is plain she will say nothing more, he rebuts gently: “Even doctors have feelings.”
She catches her breath, feels idiotically that she’s betrayed something. It’s a feeling she recognizes from her occasional dreams about being kidnapped by the KGB, the truth serum drea
ms. In those she is lying strapped to a bed – naked, what else – and she has already talked. It’s done beyond remedy: she is going to die in disgrace.
She summons up a flip, professional tone, fires back: “No, you see, I’m a medical doctor.” And the time’s up, she can frown apologetically at her watch –
and gather her things to go.
There’s still time to get into her office at Bulwer-Sutton Industries if she takes the freeway.
She phones her husband from the office for privacy’s sake: privacy meaning no Denise. It’s a trade-off because office conversations are automatically recorded: theoretically someone combs these hours of tapes for suspicious exchanges. Since only senior staff have the clearances to listen to the tapes, however, and senior staff are far too busy to waste time in this fashion, Karen prefers to believe the tapes rot in a safe.
Peter answers on the first ring. He’s per usual guarded, speaks rapidly to get it over with. She lets him rabbit on, hums to imply listening, dreads her turn. But when he has related the intricacies of his latest actuarial project, he winds up breathlessly, “This must be costing you.”
In the ensuing silence, she grips the receiver with all her strength. Her face collapses into a rictus of grief. She knows she has yet again failed to tell him, that she will die before he learns she was ever ill, that this is all wrong: she is cruel.
Perhaps it’s because she’s in the office, but she’s unhappily visited by the burly shade of Jack Moffat. It’s a fantasy that’s plagued her these six months.
Jack Moffat is her husband. It’s him she comes to with her troubles.
In some versions of the fantasy, the Jack Moffat figure dissolves in a frenzy of activity: he is fixing everything. In some he just enfolds her in his arms. For this purpose, he is always wearing a voluminous coat, into which she disappears, gratefully, probably bloody fainting.
Karen, you hardly know the man, she tells herself, as if it were really anything to do with Jack, after all.
“I’ll let you go,” Peter says.
She blurts: “Darling, there’s Denise.”
“What? What about her?”
“Well, she’s been upset, she’s in trouble at school –”
“I don’t know what you want me to do about it from 3,000 miles away.”
She begins to speak but he breaks in:
“I am 3,000 miles away.”
She begins to speak but he, angrily:
“Be fair.”
She does not say, Look, I am dying, you’ll have to take her. She does not say, Be kind to me, for Christ’s sake, I’m in pain. She does not say, I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.
She will not plead to be missed.
She says, “I won’t keep you.”
And then she gathers her things to go.
– to get home to pay the sitter: “Good night, Elaine, thanks ever so much!”
– to lean at the kitchen table drinking cold black coffee poured from the morning’s pot, but she must
carry on after all regardless at the end of the day
– to change her clothes standing next to the washing machine, start the next load and take the stairs in three goes
count to ten and rest and count to ten and rest and
The damned mirror waits at the top.
“Careworn” is putting it mildly.
Someone loved that face once. Someone went down on one knee. He went into debt buying that crone a diamond ring. Karen, my dear, it boggles the mind.
ONCE
1It was always raining and it was always dusk.
1.1It must be when we lived in London: this must be that grotty bedsit.
1.2He had always already had one drink. In those days, people held hands.
1.3“I’ll remember this as the happiest time of my life.”
2It’s real love plus my first real job.
2.1Even the waiter has to hear her callow boast: “We work at the Hospital for Tropical Medicine.”
2.2You could say we worked: twenty hours at a stretch, and how you laughed at any damn thing, that exhausted, when you stood up your heart lost its footing. Every light swam.
2.3“I bet he won’t serve us now. Look at his face, he thinks we have germs.”
3Two unbeautiful science graduates hold hands in a wet meadow. A cloud drifts across the sun, extinguishing its glamor. When the gloom is complete, the scientists walk away, as if satisfied by a job well done.
3.1Then we lived together in the rainy darkness for ten years.
TEN YEARS LATER THEN
4In a Chinese restaurant in Monterey he whispers: “History.”
4.1She puts down her fork, startled from her food reveries.
4.2“History, Karen. You have heard of it?”
4.3He flags her with his new prop, his broadsheet newspapers even at the dinner table (her mother would forbid it, but oh, just please don’t bring up class).
4.4Yes, Peter, everybody knows Dad was a lorry driver, what else? Oh, you had to work while everything just fell in my lap.
4.5She is almost crying. She pleads, crumbling a wonton: “Well, tell me about history, then. What’s it all about?”
4.6He looks at her with no love in his eyes, showing her the no love, in retaliation.
5Tells her, slowly, with a viciousness, “It’s about conscience.”
5.1And he starts up, he leaves without his coat.
5.2The Washington Post lies crumpled on his plate in all the grease.
5.3A blotch spreads through the headline: KENNEDY PLEDGES TROOPS FOR INDOCHINA.
6Alone on the bus, she held his coat in her lap.
“Some things are beyond me, do you understand? I can’t judge.”
“Oh, it’s not for us to question why. Too right, Karen.”
“You wouldn’t even be saying this five years ago. You just . . . regurgitate.”
“You weren’t working on germ warfare five years ago.”
“Non-lethal,” she cries. “Oh, how you can not see.”
“Well, I believe you, thousands wouldn’t.”
“But, that’s what it is. That’s what it is. I can hardly believe this fuss when all I would do, at worst, is give the Russians a bad cold.”
“Oh, my God, Karen. I thought you were cynical. Not stupid. I never thought you were that stupid.”
– but, after all, we were only standing in a Holiday Inn bathroom in dirty terry robes to have that historical exchange, and I was only this same homely swot, nobody: only five foot two! In fact, my bare feet were cold on the tiles and that distracted me from your important history, thinking I had best buy slippers. But I wanted to protest,
I’m a good scientist. I’m just a good scientist.
She said, “Let’s just please just get dressed.”
Deesey:
When you were born I didn’t want to hold you. They’d washed you but you still smelled, and I thought, I can’t do this. I’ll have to get a nanny. You were too much like other newborn things, like the rabbits and baby mice, all the wet infants with their squashed faces we bred for experimental purposes. I don’t know why things are born. I didn’t make it so that things are born, for experimental purposes. But I wouldn’t dare to be a mother to anything, I didn’t realize but that’s how it was, I wouldn’t dare. Something about the sins of the fathers. I do realize no one wants to dissect you for medical science, I’m not crazy! But I couldn’t hold you like a mother, I was nervous of touching you. Now I know how it was for that silly waiter; I have germs. Somehow I must have, I have germs. Now I’m so tired, I can’t think what I mean I’m that tired.
She leans against the foul mirror, damning her awful sweat, the sickness, the tedious, tedious pain that she can’t stop fearing. Tells herself, Don’t try to puzzle it out, you don’t have that kind of mind.
You were a good scientist.
And then she gathers her things to go.
And you remember how they wheeled her down hospital corridors, Deesey, you envied her
for being given a ride in bed. You ran behind as if you’d catch her, and she wouldn’t die. You must save her but they’re so fast. Your feet jarred you. And you remember double swinging doors which close to form a word, and this picture is what comes to mind when you think of death.
And that picture of a very little girl, in a coat whose nautical buttons twinkle
in a big smelly new car, stopped on the highway in windy desert
Mum has pulled over to the breakdown lane just in time.
Deesey be good I’m, she says, struggles;
and falls asleep.
The little girl tugs Mum’s limp arm. She announces, “You wait here, Mum, I’ll go call for the nambulance.” When the child has opened the door, though, she just perches sobbing in the car’s small light.
And the big light comes down her face. The shadow focuses.
“– so, he’s telling me all this shit and I’m, whoa, dude, slow down. It’s, you remember when Dad went away the first time and it was like, I got to ride in front? In the car? You ever remember things like that?”
Eddie was lying propped on an elbow, smoking menthol Dorals and flicking the ash into his tennis shoe. I was sitting up with my arms crossed over the frivolous nightgown. By then I had given up waiting for Eddie to leave and was tolerating his rant with listless stoicism.
I said, “Dad was never away the first time. He always went away.”
“I don’t care about fucking fact.” Eddie bugged his eyes at me. “But you would never remember that cause you were so his pet.”
I flinched. “Was I?”
“Jesus Christ! Were you. Now it can be told, Chrysa, there was some untoward too-pet element, which . . . Like, maybe that’s why Mom never really liked you.”
I said, “I wasn’t in reality his pet.”
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 13
