The Done Thing
Page 12
Maisie, it’s getting harder not to pace. Duane Pelly’s begun to. He does it day and night.
Every letter you wished your life was different.
I understood that.
Not once did you wish my sister back.
You couldn’t have moved me if you did. If wishes were horses, Clarence.
February became March. Small brown birds returned from whatever warm place they had wintered. I kept Maisie busy. She told you everything. I gave her a haircut. (I wish I could see that, you wrote, the before or the after. It’s fair to say I just wish I could see you.) Her boss promoted her to manager. And, because poor Maisie didn’t know how jealous you could be, I sent her on a date and on a second and then a third. I named her fellow Lawrence. Maisie had known him a little in high school. He’d filled out well these five years since graduation. (I won’t stop you from doing what you want. You’ve got your whole life ahead and a beautiful world to live it in. I have no claim on you and I guess that’s how things should be between us, since I don’t have much of a claim on life either. Just please be careful. Don’t fall too hard. I sound old now. I never want to sound old to you. But trust me. Nothing’s worse than loving someone when they decide they want to do you wrong.
And for what it’s worth I’ve never met a Lawrence worth trusting.)
For her birthday, Kath threw a mystery wine tasting. She put out four bottles with brown bags over the labels. Everyone sniffed and oohed and wrote down words like loamy. Pammie was driving and wouldn’t touch the stuff. “Besides, Trish would judge me forever if I wound up loving the Franzia.” She lay Trish out like a lure I knew better than to snap at. I said only that I happened to enjoy Franzia’s hint of charcoal and that judging by the strawberry wine coolers I’d spied in their sophomore dorm, neither Trish nor Pam was in any position to judge. Pammie laughed, and that was good to hear. All the Gs had secured babysitters for the night so we were able to properly converse. At the evening’s end, Kath revealed the four bottles were exactly the same; one opened just before the pour, one two hours in advance, one four, one six. I’d enjoyed myself so thoroughly that it seemed clever instead of a know-it-all trick.
Cutout tulips cropped up in Riverview, patients’ names inked down the stems.
It was spring in Stemble too.
You wouldn’t believe the bugs in here. Ants and mites and roaches and whatnot. They lay their eggs in winter and every March there’s a hatching. Stemble can’t (or maybe won’t) fix it. It’s not bugs they’re interested in exterminating.
This year Enright’s started collecting them. He keeps bugs in his cup till he has enough for a trial. Judge and jury, a whole mess of roach lawyers. Pretty funny, I guess, since you know what they say about lawyers. But what gets me is that Enright’s this brick wall of a man and he always picks the biggest roach for defendant. I hear him measuring. And every trial the roach’s guilty. Enright kills it right away. Just a bug underfoot. Then he goes after the rest of them and the next day it starts all over, Enright filling up his cup.
We each only get the one. I wonder what Enright drinks from.
With enough time gone for the change to be believed, I told Kath I’d convinced the bird watchers to switch their meetings to Sundays. Could I drop in again at linners? I asked her Monday on a walk. She cawed and improvised a jig right there on the street. At the Claverie house, the children looked strange and half-starved, husked for spring from thick sweaters.
“Glad you’re here,” said Blue with his warm, unguarded smile. He was bound to be the easiest; I didn’t have to meet his eyes.
“You’ve been keeping well?” Pam asked, like I was a cut of beef and apt to spoil.
“I’ve been busy,” I said and I thought of Marjorie. The half of her mouth that could manage it smiled sometimes when she saw me. Every weekend. I’d had the desk man find a chair for her room. His name was Arthur, but Call-Me-Art. He said Marjorie was lucky to have such a good friend, and I didn’t correct him. Every visit, I switched off Marjorie’s TV. You were so dead set against the box and maybe your mother felt that way too.
“I’m glad,” Pam said. In the softening of her posture I saw that she’d been tense. I hugged her. Everything would be all right. She was so much prettier when she smiled.
April came. I paid for another six months of post box use.
The linner after April Fool’s the littlest Claveries flopped about, playing possum. Midway through the month, I filled out my annual petition to visit and mailed it to Stemble. You were plenty smart, Clarence. You’d be suspicious in its absence.
Call-Me-Art stopped asking for my ID.
When positioned by her left hand, Marjorie’s right regained the ability to hold a weak fist.
Pamela’s sunny self returned. Her laugh carried across the Claveries’ backyard on Saturdays and across the tables when we met downtown for dinner. Every Thursday, when I called her apartment, the phone rang four times and went to voicemail. The first time I let out a small, undignified cackle. I’d never been so happy to be wrong. Either that or she’d chosen, Clarence. She was past you now and glowing. And still in Maisie’s post box your letters came, two, three times a week, hungrier than ever before, desperate and pecking, like birds to bread crusts.
24.
Dear Maisie,
What breaks a man is thinking about the Death House. After that last appeal they move you there until they do it. I’ve never seen it. No one in the pods has. They built it out of sight so everywhere we look we’re looking for it. It’s coming and we don’t know when. Not knowing where’s another extra to keep us up nights. They designed it that way on purpose. They do everything on purpose.
There’s a dirt track that runs by the pens where they put us “outside” for exercise. Rumor says it leads up to the Death House. Guards know, of course, but they aren’t telling. They aren’t supposed to talk about the “terminal proceedings.” (They do though. Westin gets his rocks off telling us how Nuz was a foamer.)
Nuz used to tell me not to think about it. “Shut off that goddamn Doc brain.” But these days I can’t. Something’s up. My lawyer’s working up our oral arguments for the ninth circuit (realistically my last shot). No date’s set but you can’t keep things secret in Stemble and everyone knows it’s soon. You can tell when they start treating you decent.
I haven’t told you about the showers. We get stripped before leaving the cells and are marched down the pods in our cuffs and our briefs. Shower’s a single stall that’s too small to sit down in (I have no idea how they fit Enright in at all). No taps, just a spigot that’s up way too high to reach. The guards control the water after they lock you in. We’re supposed to get a full ten minutes. We hardly ever do. Some of them (this guy, Doer, he’s the worst) flip the water off and on the whole time or crank it way too hot or wait till I’m all soaped up and stop the water so I itch like crazy until the next time.
Today was shower day. Doer was there. I got the regulation ten minutes. He even rapped on the pane with a two minute shutoff warning.
And last Sunday Chaplain Crowler made sure to stop at my door. Most weeks I don’t even get a nod. This time he asks, “How are you faring, son?”
Now Crowler’s the one who told me a few months back my Mom was sick. They cuffed me and walked me to his office and none of the guards would tell me what was going on. Crowler kept me waiting forever. Then he comes in and tells me Mom’s had a stroke, that her doctor “isn’t comfortable” with the idea of being on my call list and the home she’s at now has a policy against collect calls, no exceptions. Crowler says all I can do is write. And pray, of course. But it was late in the week. I’d used up my stamps. He wouldn’t let me buy even one extra. “Commissary’s Tuesday, Inmate.” Crowler had all these diplomas up in his office. Believe me, I get why he took the glass out of the frames.
And this is the man who started calling me son. It always happens this way. It happened with Nuz. Stemble isn’t kind, not ever, but for Nuz’s last few months o
fficers were sons of bitches only when they had to be. Don’t go thinking it’s guilt for what they’re going to do to me. They just know I’m about to spend a bunch of time with my lawyer.
Before they took him to the Death House (“transferred,” that’s what they call it) Nuz drove me crazy practicing his last words. Only when the TVs were on and he’d whisper. Nuz wasn’t the brightest. In a place as loud as Stemble it’s the quiet sounds that stand out.
Maisie, I’m afraid all the time now. I try to be brave with my daughter who I know has a lot on her mind. But Stemble’s harder to take than ever now that I’ve begun to flinch at loud noises. I’m only going to say this because I feel that we have a closeness between us. If I am crossing a line with you please pretend that I never asked. I know I promised I never would, but my daughter has sent me a bunch of pictures of herself and her husband. I need some beauty in my life (and a flirt like you has got to be pretty; please don’t be offended). Would you consider it? A good death would be old and in bed with the people I love around. The fact of it is I know I’ll die bad. I’m not asking for pity, only for a chance. Please let me have what matters in my sight as long as I can.
25.
Of course Maisie would give you what you wanted. She was barely out of her teens, after all, and it takes most girls the bulk of their lifetimes to learn a proper no. The obvious course of action was Flamingo at Green Mother Grocery; I’d casually modeled Maisie after her in so many respects. I gathered enough groceries to make my visit seem legitimate. I stood in Flamingo’s line. She’d cut bangs in her pink hair, very short and blunt across her forehead.
“Looking good,” I said, indicating the hair. Though like her crooked teeth, it shouldn’t have. “It suits you.”
Flamingo nodded and finished ringing up the woman in front of me, banging the register drawer shut with a quick swivel of her hips. My own sometimes clicked now when I walked; I could go weeks without having reason to remember they were also hinged for side to side. The peaches I was pretending to need advanced down the belt. My favorite fruit. Barbra only liked them baked into pies. She was a funny kid. Hated their skins. She called them fuzzifruits. “You know,” I said, smiling at Flamingo, “I was just telling my mother the other day how absolutely darling you were. Ma, I said: there’s a checker at Green Mother Grocery who is just the darlingest thing.” Darlingest. The perfect word, grandmotherly and benign. “Your hair color. What do you call it?” I tugged at a strand of my own, bottle browned.
“Pink?”
A businessman sidled into line behind me, his tie loose for the lunch hour. He unloaded his basket. One of those bento boxes they’d begun to promote and two cans of ginger cola. He caught me eyeing his purchases and set the plastic divider between us.
“Just pink, dear? I’d have said it was magenta. I was just trying to describe it to my mother. I said: Ma, it’s just the richest pink. It didn’t grow in that way, did it?” It’s easy to get away with things when you’re pretty, Barbra used to brag. We both know how well that worked out, Clarence. If she’d lived, Barbra would’ve learned. It’s even easier when you’re old.
Flamingo had the laugh Barbra should have got: airy, fragile, sweet as a meringue. “God no. It’s dyed.”
“Mine too.” I forced a conspiratorial giggle. I laughed like I had no intentions, like there wasn’t a Polaroid camera in my purse.
Bento Box coughed behind me.
“Bless you,” I said and turned back to Flamingo. “You should get him on that echinacea you set me up with. I hardly coughed all winter.”
Bento coughed again, this time louder than was fully necessary.
I ignored him. My best beam for Flamingo. “Pink dye! I’ll have to tell Ma next visit. She’s very old-fashioned. She just about lost her wig when my daughter pierced her ears again.” I pinched my own ear way up at the top to show Flamingo where.
Bento gathered his lunch and switched lanes.
“My poor little girl. Ma’s still going on about it. If God wanted an extra hole in your head . . . but that’s Ma. I don’t think she’d ever believe how pretty you look.” Flamingo beamed. Her own mother probably nagged her about the hair. She didn’t get compliments much. She might be the kind of kid a prettier sister outshone. She handed me a receipt.
“I wonder if you’d be willing to let me take your picture. You know how it is with mothers. I’m sixty-three, but I still love to prove her wrong.” I set the Polaroid on the counter.
“I’m not sure if I’m comfortable—”
“It won’t take a minute. Please, my mother’s in the hospital.” I wasn’t thinking of Ma. I was thinking of Marjorie. “Bedbound. I take this camera everywhere so I can show her beautiful things.” I could start to, actually. It might do your mother tremendous good. And I could tell it was a fine idea, practical and kind, from the way Flamingo wavered.
Her okay came so quiet I almost missed it. She tucked a pink strand behind her ear. No piercings, just like Pam. I wondered if she was also scared of needles. The light was imperfect, but the smile just right, lilting and coy. “Tell your mother Meifen hopes she gets well soon.”
“Meifen,” I said, like I was testing the pronunciation. Really, I wished she hadn’t told me.
“It was my name at the orphanage.” She indicated her fundraising jar. The find-my-birthmother trip to China. “The Lennarts got the idea it meant Willow so that’s on my passport and diplomas and stuff.”
I shook the Polaroid like that would wave away the memory. Another picture, much older: Hyun-Ay in my safety deposit box, ten times more bow than her dark hair merited. It sometimes bore remembering: even without you, Clarence, my life could have bifurcated badly. Our Hyun-Ay, grown and sour beside a tip jar, saving for the homeland we’d cut her from on the strength of our wishing. We’d decided to call her Lucille Renate, for Frank’s mother and my own. It wasn’t the prettiest name—though as a nickname Lucy had a sweet ring to it. We’d thought it would help her feel connected to the Germanic family that she would never look like. I unclasped my pocketbook. Kath had read an article about the hackers and credit cards; our Monday walks now included a stop at the bank to withdraw cash for projected weekly expenditures. One hundred and eighty-six dollars into the China jar, along with a handful of change.
“No way,” said Meifen, her shock more charming than formal thanks could ever be. I wondered if she was going to hug me; only Pam really did that anymore. But she held very still, eyes on the money in the jar. “No way.” No smile. No exuberant flutter of hands. And I saw then that there was discomfort in her stillness. The camera and then the cash; she could tell something about me was off. I drew an uneasy breath. Meifen had got into the store’s patchouli. I focused on the Polaroid. That hair of hers plumed into view, the brightest pink your life had left. Her form congealed from photographic fog, solid as the knowledge: for all your remaining days her picture would hang cherished in your cell. For all mine I’d drive out of my way to do my marketing; my bread would be white and wholesome as Styrofoam, my peaches mealy and bruised. I would bite the mush spots first, every blot a reminder. I could never go back to Green Mother Grocery. I had wronged a child born Meifen.
26.
The Mississippi ran high that year, a very fine spring on the heels of an adamant winter. I had to change my preferred Riverview parking spot; the car overheated quickly if left too long in the sun. In the hallway, a nurse peeled a flowering paper tree from Marjorie’s door, replacing it with a sunglasses-wearing construction paper sun. All these visits and this was the first time I’d encountered the changing of the guard.
“Very cheerful,” I said with a nod. There’s a trick to small talk: to avoid awkwardness and fawning, simply make an accurate observation. Human ego will translate it into a compliment every time.
“Thank you,” said the nurse. An enormous, appreciative smile. I supposed in her profession compliments were sometimes thin on the ground. I edged past her into Marjorie’s room. Some nothing just to the lef
t of the door held her rapt. Her tongue tipped out. It lolled and curled. She rippled it into a cloverleaf. Pam’s favorite party trick. There’s a gene for that, one that neither Barbra nor I had. I guess I knew now who Pam got it from.
“Marjorie,” I said. I stood just inside the door. I liked to wait until her eyes fixed on me before approaching. It would be terrifying having me appear out of nowhere. I was very aware of the nurse in the hallway. No chart in her hand but plenty of colored paper. If something seemed off about me, she would jot it down for sure. I tried again. “Marjorie. Hi, Marjorie. Hello.”
I must have sounded desperate and that desperation must have carried; the nurse joined me, popping from the hallway like a cuckoo from a clock. “Look, Margie.” She pointed, something we’d been sure to instruct Pamela it was never polite to do. “Your pal is here. Your buddy . . .” She raised a prompting eyebrow.
“Lida,” I said without thinking. Or rather, I was thinking Margie, buddy, pal. That and the paper cutouts. The woman sounded like she’d rather be teaching Montessori.
“Your Lyla came to see you!” Her own name tag read “Holland.” Unusual name like that, she ought to have a bit more care with other people’s. I stepped into the room as if to prove I had a right to be there. If Holland would just skedaddle, I’d show Marjorie Pam’s teeth. We had developed our small traditions. Every visit we went through my purse. The stroke hadn’t scrambled her completely, not by a long shot. Your mother was sharp as tacks. Some things she gripped. Others she let drop. She never held my house keys. Always your letters. Always Pam’s teeth. Never things that didn’t matter, pencils and pocket change. This week I’d brought Polaroids. Not Meifen, on her pink-haired way to Arizona. But things about town that had struck me: a funny fat pigeon, a woman in an extraordinary church hat, a tray of donuts frosted in outrageous pastels.