Mercy Train

by Rae Meadows

  “They make us all work?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the younger ones get taken in like they say. This boy Nicholas,” he said, “from my ward. Thirteen about. Went to Iowas. He ran away, took freight trains back, and tried to break back into the asylum.”

  “How come?” Violet asked.

  The boy shrugged again and worked his toe against a dried spot of chewing gum. “Missed it, I guess. He wouldn’t talk nothing about it.”

  “You,” Mrs. Comstock said, looking down at her manifest. “Violet, is it? Go on over with the other girls, now. We’re getting ready to board.”

  IRIS

  Breasts. All the hoopla over breasts.

  From her top drawer Iris pulled the mastectomy bra and silicone breast forms—her explants. The prosthetics were a peachy flesh color (there had been three skin tones from which to choose) with surprising heft; they looked like chicken cutlets with nipples. Nipples! She had laughed, aghast, when she’d first pulled them from their case. Good Lord, she’d spent a lifetime trying to hide her own. She’d gone with the forms that slipped into the bra instead of the ones that rode against her skin. Her scars had been fresh at the time, and it had been hard to imagine anything rubbing against them, particularly in the unseemly August heat. Not to mention she hadn’t exactly seen the point.

  Iris slipped the explants into the pockets of the bra and strapped the whole thing on. She felt armored, her wasting body less vulnerable. When the long-haired girls had thrown their bras in the trash can at the 1968 Miss America pageant, Iris had been chasing after a newly toddling Samantha, driving Theo to band practice, picking up dry cleaning, planning a dinner party for Glenn’s golfing friends and their wives. What women had time for this theater? she had wondered. She understood the meaning of the protest and agreed that, in theory, yes, women should be valued for their whole selves, not just their looks. But at the time Iris didn’t feel the need for liberation. She didn’t even mind wearing a bra, she thought snidely. She’d known what she was getting into when she married Glenn, and she’d wanted to be a mother. She had chosen her life, hadn’t she?

  The blinds lifted away from the window in the breeze and then clacked back down, again and again, a somnolent rhythm. Maybe she would need to turn on the air conditioning after all. The humidity was making her bangs curl up and out into little wings. Outside the seagulls cried their why, why, why, why, Sanibel’s background noise. She pulled a white cotton tunic over her head, its neck high enough to hide both bones and scars. It had been a gift from Samantha last year after the surgery. She had always been a thoughtful girl. Of course she is coming down here to be with me, Iris thought. She chose a pair of black capris and then found a belt—cinched tighter by the week—and slipped on her sandals. Getting ready depleted her, but she was glad to prepare for her daughter’s arrival. It was time to go to the market.

  * * *

  What would Samantha like? As a girl she’d loved blueberries, shortbread, grape juice, fried chicken. As a teenager, Diet Coke. But maybe she didn’t drink that stuff anymore, so overly cautious, hysterical even, women were these days when they were pregnant. Coffee, wine, Brie, even cigarettes then—and her children had turned out just fine. Iris strolled through the produce aisle. Bananas. Avocados. Cantaloupe. Strawberries. Lemons. Radishes. Artichokes. She wanted to provide abundance. It was the least she could do.

  She felt a wave of nausea as she passed the meat section. It was like morning sickness, this aversion to different foods she had now, this lack of hunger. At forty, pregnant with Samantha, she had felt an unbearable weight of exhaustion, her joints aching from the beginning, and for months she’d been unable to stomach much more than lemonade and salty potatoes. She’d resented being at the mercy of her body, resented the baby—she sensed it would be a girl—and, after dropping Theo off at school, had often gone home and hauled herself back into bed and hadn’t risen until it was time to pick him up. She had never admitted any of this to Glenn. Glenn had thought another baby was what she wanted—didn’t all women?

  * * *

  Iris could not recall hearing her mother say “I love you.” She hadn’t felt unloved, but she had often felt she could never get quite enough of what she needed from her mother, who doled out affection in frugal portions. Her mother had offered gruff hugs and the occasional kiss on the top of the head as comfort, usually accompanied by “Buck up, Iris. It’s not that bad.” Nothing, in her mother’s eye, had ever been that bad. Not the chickenpox, or cod liver oil, or a sprained ankle, or a dead bird, or a broken heart.

  As much as Iris had wanted to be a different kind of mother, she, too, had been stingy in telling her children she loved them. It had felt forced and vaguely embarrassing to utter those words, and then it became something they just didn’t say to each other, not part of the family currency. How repressed, she thought now, how inexcusable.

  Iris wheeled her cart to the checkout line. When she looked up, the woman in front of her made her catch her breath. It was Henry’s wife. Iris had seen her once before, had noticed the beauty in the one-shouldered white gown, the night she’d met Henry, at a fund-raiser for the Friends of “Ding” Darling Wildlife Refuge. She, Kathleen, had been his research assistant in the early sixties and had dropped out of her graduate program to marry him and mother their three boys. Iris knew little more about her—Kathleen was a subject they had spoken around most of the time—but she felt intimidated, bested. Henry had made his choice. Iris devoured the details of this woman, her slightly tanned skin, her muscular calves—tennis, probably—her champagne-colored hair pulled sleekly back. She had quick, feminine movements, an air of quiet confidence and sophistication. She was tall and slender and wore a French-blue shirtdress and leather thong sandals that looked like they’d been picked up in Saint-Tropez. As she stowed her credit card, she smiled politely at Iris, without recognition, and left with her purchases tucked neatly into a single bag.

  “Buck up,” Iris said to herself. “It’s not that bad.”

  * * *

  She remembered an evening she and Henry had spent in her condo. Kathleen was away visiting one of their sons in Boston. He’d cooked a porcini risotto in her kitchen, the sight of which, along with the fine Cabernet they were drinking, made Iris feel radiant. She had never been cooked for by a man—Glenn hadn’t even known where the pans were—and here Henry was completely at ease, joyful even, as he stood stirring, ladling warm stock into the pot.

  “My daughter-in-law’s latest round of fertility treatments didn’t take,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. She must have been devastated. How did Theo sound?”

  “Oh, he was fine. He sounded more upset at failing than the actual not getting pregnant part. Besides, I think Theo is secretly pleased.”

  “You don’t think he wants kids?”

  “I think he’s scared, like everyone is. But it’s the selfish streak. The sacrifice seems too great for him for so little a perceived reward.”

  “Not everyone should be a parent.”

  “I know. But I think it would be good for him. I fear he’s veering down a hardened path. I’m sorry to say he’s become a cynic, my son.”

  “It’s the generation, I think. Benjamin is like that. Golf and the office are his priorities. His wife is a distant third.”

  “You said he’s the most like you.”

  Henry laughed. “So he is. Eighteenth-century British texts were my golf. Here, taste this. More salt?” He blew on the rice in the wooden spoon and held it out to her.

  “Oh, boy. Delicious. I just melted.”

  “I’ve got you right where I want you,” he said.

  Iris retrieved their bowls from the table.

  “Go on with what you were saying,” he said.

  “I just think being a father would bring Theo back to his essential goodness.”

  “How you remember him as a boy.”

  “Maybe that’s it. At least he’d be closer allied with the human rac
e. It would be humbling for him.”

  “That it is. Think of how big my ego would be if I hadn’t had kids.” He smiled. She laughed. He stopped stirring to refill her glass. He held her cheeks in his hands and kissed her nose.

  “This is wonderful, isn’t it?” he said. “I feel I am home.”

  After dinner, they sat on the couch drinking ginger tea, talking about what they rarely talked about.

  “At some point it got too late to make changes. Or to question. To talk about the things I found lacking in our marriage after we’d been together thirty, forty, fifty years? I felt that if I went pecking around, the exposure would be too much and we’d lose what had been pretty good for a long time.”

  “Couldn’t it have gotten better? If you’d been honest with her?”

  “It’s true, I suppose. But I’m not much for taking risks. Aside from this”—he pointed to her and back to himself—“I’m a bit of a coward. Why do you think I went into academia?”

  “Good old tenure,” she said.

  “I guess I liked having tenure with Kathleen, too.”

  Iris grabbed his hand with a passion new to her, roused by this man whom she loved. “Henry, we’re too old for pretty good, aren’t we?”

  “‘Guilt … ’tis the fiend, th’ avenging fiend, that follows us behind with whips and stings,’” he said, his mock baritone a weak attempt to conceal his sorrow. “So said by one Nicholas Rowe three hundred years ago. It’s aptly poetic and savage, I think.”

  She tucked her feet under herself and did not ask again about his wife. She must have felt it already, knew what she could never unknow, that she would not be with him in the end, that he was not hers. Iris was the raft in the water, but Kathleen was the riverbank. No matter how he clung to Iris now, how warm and safe they felt together, swirling about, their arrangement was temporary. Eventually he’d have to swim ashore.

  * * *

  “Iris, is that you?”

  Iris looked up from loading her groceries in the car. It was Susan Harrison, her realtor—brassy hair, French manicure, tinkling gold bangles on her wrists—clacking on tiny heels in her direction.

  “Susan. How nice to see you.”

  Susan pushed her big sunglasses up to the top of her head. Her face froze when she saw how much Iris had deteriorated since she’d seen her a month before. She smiled too broadly, her teeth bleached inhumanly bright.

  “Here, let me help you with that.” She swooped the bag from Iris’s hands and set it in the trunk.

  “I’m not dead yet,” Iris said.

  “Oh, Iris, I didn’t mean to imply anything,” she said, her palm pressed to her tanned and freckled cleavage.

  “Sorry. It was a joke. I’ve been meaning to call you, actually. My daughter arrives tomorrow. I’ll leave her your name.”

  A blank smile bisected Susan’s face.

  “About selling the condo.”

  “Yes, yes, for sure!” she said too eagerly. “Whatever I can do.”

  She thinks death might be contagious. “Happy shopping,” Iris said.

  “You take care of yourself,” Susan said, hustling away.

  Iris sighed, worn out from the minefield of a trip. Her body felt floppy and rigid at the same time. She sank into the hot front seat and slid her hand under her bra to scratch her scars. She wished dying weren’t so damn tiring.

  * * *

  The phone was ringing as she walked in the apartment with the last bag of groceries, but she stopped to click on the air-conditioning anyway—of course it wouldn’t be the last time. What was she thinking this morning? This was Florida.

  “Hello?” She breathed heavily.

  “Mom? Are you okay? You took so long to answer.”

  Iris rolled her eyes at Samantha’s echoing of her brother.

  “I just walked in the door,” she said, but then regretted her curtness. “I’m fine, honey. I was at the store. Getting ready for your visit.”

  Visit. Well, what am I supposed to call it, Iris replied to herself in her head, as she slumped into the glider chair.

  “My flight’s coming in a little earlier than I told you. Three o’clock. Are you sure you’re okay to drive to Fort Myers? I can take a shuttle or cab or something. I wouldn’t mind at all.”

  “Samantha. I can pick you up. I would like to pick you up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Do you still drink that Diet Coke?”

  Iris felt her weakness lift a little in the cool air.

  “Yeah,” Samantha said. “I’m not supposed to. I told Jack I quit but I still do.”

  “Good. I got some for you, just in case. I won’t tell on you.”

  “The baby is crazy today. Rolling around. Jabbing me with her elbows.”

  “Theo was like that. I’m convinced his personality was set by the time he came screaming out, butt first.”

  “You know they don’t deliver breech anymore. Automatic C-section. God, I really don’t want a C-section.”

  “You’ll be fine. I’m sorry I won’t be there, though.”

  “You might? You don’t know.” Samantha’s voice grew shrill.

  Unspoken was how long Samantha would be staying, how long Iris would live. Iris did not want her daughter’s martyrdom.

  “I’m sorry to pull you away from your work,” Iris said.

  She was astounded, sometimes, by what her daughter could make with her hands and raw clay. Where did talent come from? Iris wondered if she herself had some latent ability that was never activated. Gardening or chess or watercolors or poetry. She couldn’t even knit, though her mother had tried to teach her again and again.

  “I had to stop the wheel,” Samantha said. “My belly made it too awkward.”

  “You’ll start up again soon after the baby. You must make yourself get back to it. Remember that. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. Before Theo I was a whiz at the harmonica.”

  Samantha laughed. “I’m not worried,” she said. “I’m already anxious to get back to work.”

  Iris closed her eyes against a headache that pressed behind her eyes.

  “You don’t know what you’ll be like. You can’t know.”

  She could sense her daughter chafe. It seemed they always reached this point, this brittle place.

  “You’ll be fine,” Iris said again.

  * * *

  Iris’s mother had been an orphan who’d never known her parents. It had not been a secret, but neither had it been openly discussed.

  “Do you think about who your parents might have been?” Iris had asked her once, as they had fished for rock bass on a late summer Sunday afternoon. The sun burned their arms and faces, while their feet were numb in the river water. Iris didn’t care much if her line got a nibble, but she loved to sit next to her mother, listening to the rush of water over the smooth stones in the shallows, relishing the moments of cool and clarity when clouds obscured the sun’s glare. And her mother, here, with her.

  “Why, sure,” her mother said. Her hair was gray and pulled back in a ponytail. She only wore it down when she went to bed. “About my mother sometimes. But there’s not a lot of use in it, is there?”

  “Maybe she was a movie star,” Iris said.

  Her mother laughed. “I don’t think so. They didn’t have movies in the eighteen hundreds.”

  Iris wanted to know what the orphanage had been like—she imagined white rooms with tall windows and nuns floating down quiet hallways—but her mother was vague and deflective. “I don’t remember much about it,” she would say. “That was a long time ago.” At age eleven she’d been taken on as kitchen help at a small private hospital in Wisconsin, where she had learned how to make all those fussy desserts. She’d lived and worked there until she was eighteen, married Samuel Olsen, and moved across the border to Minnesota.

  “There’s no way of finding out?” Iris pressed. “You could write to the orphanage maybe and ask about who she was.”

  “We should get going,” her mother
said, winding the reel of her fishing rod. “It must be well past two. I need you to shell that batch of peas.”

  “Just a little longer. Please? I haven’t even caught one yet.”

  Her mother laughed. “Your worm’s been off your hook for an hour.”

  Iris could feel time moving on, her mother already going over what needed to be done back at the house. There wouldn’t be time for this again for a long time with fall closing in.

  “You have ten more minutes,” her mother said. “I mean it. Don’t be late.”

  “Do you think Bobby Bergesen will ask me to the dance?” Iris asked, in a transparent attempt to forestall her mother, who had already picked up her basket of fish and was dusting off her skirt.

  “Iris,” she said. “All my information on the matter comes from you. Do you think he’s going to ask you to the dance?”

  “No. Maybe,” Iris had stuttered. “I don’t know. He waved to me in town the other day.”

  Her mother shook her head, always flummoxed by Iris’s theatrics.

  “I wouldn’t worry so much about it.”

  “But I like him,” Iris had said, putting her palms to her cheeks.

  “Boys will come and go,” her mother had said, less to Iris than the river.

  Iris remembered even now how there had been no conviction in her voice, no weary “mother knows best” authority, only opaque wistfulness, a window into which Iris was not privy. She wondered if on some level all mothers were ciphers to their children. She wondered if having children was a way to try and understand one’s own mother, to bridge the unknowability. How she wished she could know her mother now. Iris didn’t believe in heaven, but lately she indulged a childish notion of seeing her mother again. She liked the idea of the two of them being old women together.

  Iris unhooked her bra and shimmied her arms out of the straps. It fell heavy into her lap.

  Outside on the landing was the familiar trudge of the mailman—redheaded Albert, who never wore a hat in the sun and never thanked her for the check she left for him every Christmas—the clang of her metal mailbox closing, and then his retreat.

  Iris wondered what her mother would have thought about Samantha’s now living in Wisconsin. It was a return of sorts. Her mother would have liked that her granddaughter made things, that she was an artisan.