by Amity Gaige
Of course, as with all charmed people, there was an undercurrent of guilt for succeeding so completely. He did not notice the guilt but he noticed the ease.
But could he be blamed? He had never really failed at anything. Twenty-six years old, he had no enemies, he had never been fired or flunked or demoted, never even broken a girl’s heart. Once, in high school, he had been snubbed by a very pretty flutist in the marching band, but thereafter he rather enjoyed circling the marching band during track practice in the spring, watching the flutist in her starched white fez perform her militant steps in the wet grass, while he got to run around and around her in circles, like some sort of guilty sexual thought she was having. In college, he ran cross-country on a team that ranked second in the state, and his teammates voted him captain, and sometimes asked him to read the newspaper out loud on long bus rides home at night.
He could not remember a particularly keen disappointment in his life. He remembered leaving college for a week to return to Mattoon for his grandfather’s funeral, and how he was supposed to bring an umbrella to the cemetery but he forgot. When it began to rain, his father turned and said Goddamn it, Charlie, and they all stood there dripping in the rain listening to the minister, and a sodden crow had stood on a branch and yawed at his grandfather’s corpse throughout the ceremony. It was such a small thing, forgetting the umbrella, but when Charlie thought of his failures, that was what came up. The crow, the rain, the death of the grandfather, all seemed retroactively caused by Charlie forgetting the umbrella. And to have Glen Shade speak sharply to you, well you never forgot it.
But was that all? Surely his life could not have been that serene, that sane. Perhaps life in Mattoon was so quiet that you could not hear the failures. What if, he sometimes wondered, after such a life, he would never really know what it was to suffer? Could he ever really touch the seam? He did not know what it was like to be exiled to the other side. Sometimes, he fingered the paper envelopes of Haldol and Ativan, thinking he should try one. Perhaps they would give him a chance to understand, for a day or so, the molasses, underwater perception of a disabled and drugged mind. A mind so wholly desperate to perceive that it shut off.
For he did not find his clients apathetic, even the ones who greeted him with hardly a nod and whose lips seemed too heavy to smile. He did not believe they were indifferent and without passion. Rather, he believed they were some of the most passionate people in the world. Their particular passions drove them to a form of originality that was madness, and no matter what they said, they knew they were mad. Thus the soul shut down, in a sort of self-sacrifice, so that the body might go on, empty but alive. In order not to die of heartache. Such contradiction reduced these people to mere bodies—mute, passion-broken figures, moving from room to room, hour to hour, cigarette to cigarette. He was in awe. For it was a miracle they arose from bed each morning. It was a miracle they attempted to brave a single intersection, what with voices shouting at them to die, to perish, for it would be so perfectly easy to step in front of a bus. And why shouldn’t they? From their uncarpeted boarding houses and the poorly lit backrooms in which they worked as stockboys and envelope lickers and cage cleaners or in the buses they rode through the rain, why shouldn’t they? The future lay broken in a pile of splintered planks. Late those last summer nights, beside his wife’s swollen belly, Charlie asked himself What if you knew there would be none of it tomorrow, no Alice, no babies, nothing but random days of survival without momentum, only nicotine-yellow sunlight, pill bottles, dreamlessness, the barking of a hungry dog?
It was the lucky ones who were meant to take care of the unlucky. This was what his mother and father had taught him, but it was his air and his soil, and every child knew it unless someone taught him against it. The lucky were commanded to take care of the unlucky by God or by the rule of mercy that was left of God. And here he was—a soon-to-be father of twins, a lover of his wife, a man who had said, sitting across from his guidance counselor a decade earlier, that he didn’t know what he wanted to do but he guessed he just wanted to be good, and years later, all his boyhood friends off to big cities and developing nations, his brother sometimes disappearing for weeks only to come home with a small vocabulary of foreign words, a gold watch, or a habit of stretching that called to mind lions, and Charlie just as happy as all of them, happier even, to be earning twenty-eight thousand dollars a year and drinking out of recycled jelly jars. Happier to live in a small city that smelled of fish, and to run sometimes, all the way home, and to have the privilege of waking up next to her, she whose love lit his way to the untold places.
Just after the twins were born, Harriet had come to the door of Charlie’s office, holding a file. She pursed her lips and looked at him for a moment. Since he had returned to work, a father now, Harriet had decided to upgrade him from Champ to Chief. She’d even begun to salute him in the hallways. She sighed and tossed the file on Charlie’s desk.
“All right, Chief,” she said. “Here’s one for you. Do you like Southern girls?” Harriet winked. “Seriously, see me Monday with some major league ideas. I don’t want no farm team ideas.”
“I understand.”
“I knew you would.” She straightened the collar of her blouse. “And I always thought white people said cream rises to the top because cream is white.”
Charlie blushed. Harriet liked to watch it. Still, he was flattered—hard-boiled Harriet had fingered him as the primary for a tough case. Looking through the file, Charlie saw that the new client had a typical history, moving in and out of the usual systems: schools, church charities, a stint in the Army that had ended with a psychotic break, and a military hospitalization that must have been, after all that senseless chaos, a kind of relief. She had moved up north from Bellwood, Kentucky, looking for an aunt she never found, and in the process had developed an unfortunate fear of snow. Last winter, she’d been brought, psychotic and starving, to Maynard. A kindly neighbor had brought her to the hospital, and eventually she was assigned to the MTT program. Her assessment noted a host of negative symptoms: she was “apathetic,” “withdrawn,” and she showed “severe inability to establish or maintain a personal social support system,” which was evidenced by the fact that at the bottom of that very page, she had no one in the whole world to list under Emergency Contact. Hesitating over the blank, Charlie wrote his name. He put on his coat.
There were no trees in Norris Park. A developed lowland of mobile homes, the Park ran along a remote stretch of state highway. Charlie had never been there before. He had not known it existed. Lost on the pitted, unmarked roads, crumpled directions in his fist, he tried to steer while rolling down the window. He was approaching a young girl straddling a bicycle. The girl was standing at an empty crossroads, amongst shuttered identical homes, staring at his approach.
“Hi, sweetie,” said Charlie to the girl, who wore a big winter jacket and held a lollipop in the side of her cheek. “Could you tell me where Road Four is?”
The girl stared at him for a second. She took her lollipop out of her mouth as if to speak. It was one of the kinds you get for free at the bank.
“I’m looking for Road Four? Do you think you could—” Charlie glanced around the empty village, “—point me in the right direction? You think it’d be easy. You know, one two three four.”
Abruptly, the girl put her feet on the pedals and rode away, glancing once over her shoulder. Charlie stared after her, resisting the temptation to think, My girls would never … because he knew his girls would also never have to live in a place like Norris Park. He drove on, his red Toyota bouncing in the ruts. Each house was small as a truck and cast geometric matching shadows in the same direction. One or two properties were neatly kept, with plaster gnomes or pinwheels spinning in small gardens, but many had broken shades hanging inside the windows, a trodden piece of child’s clothing frozen into the yard. Finally he arrived at a low, mustard-colored structure. A propane tank sat on its side by the front door.
He pul
led up to the empty driveway, got out and stretched. As he did so, a figure moved away from the window. Charlie dropped his arms. His footsteps crunched the frost-hardened ground.
He knocked on the front door. When no one answered, he raised his fist to knock again, but a rather deep female voice just on the other side of the door said, “You’re not Harriet.”
Charlie lowered his hand. “No,” he said to the door, smiling. “I’m Charlie. I work with Harriet. We’re on the same team. I’ve just come to introduce myself—” He looked around. Elsewhere, a door slammed. He could hear the very loud sound of a television. “Opal Ludlow. Did I get your name right?”
The door opened. There stood a trim young woman holding a hammer.
“Hi,” Charlie said again, squinting into the plastic glare of the screen door. “I’m Charlie Shade. I’m from Mobile Treatment. Would you like to see my identification?”
The young woman did not reply. She stared at him. Then, self-consciously, in the shadow of her house, she drew her braid over her shoulder and stroked it, looking at him.
“May I come in?” said Charlie. “Even though I’m not Harriet?”
The girl came closer to the door. The first thing he saw when she stepped forward into the light was that her eyes were a surprising color, goldish, the color of sunlight on the ground. She was wearing a tent dress with a man’s cardigan over it. Her neck was strangely long and swannish, and her skin dense with freckles that blurred the edges of her lips. She pushed the screen door open with the hammer.
Charlie stepped into the room, which smelled of smoke and sardines.
“You smoke?” said Charlie brightly.
“Yeah,” said the girl, adding quickly, “I’m allowed to.”
“Sure, everybody’s allowed to. My wife smokes. Used to.”
The girl put the end of her braid in her mouth and lowered her eyes. She swung the hammer against her dress. She considered her own socks, then looked up. “They get that tobacco from the South, where I’m from.”
“Are you from the South?” said Charlie. “I’m from the Midwest myself. Would you mind setting down your hammer?”
The girl looked at the hammer and laughed shrilly.
“I forgot to put it down!” she said. “I was hammerin’ on something.” She gestured over her shoulder, into the dim kitchen, where Charlie could see burnt pans piled in the sink.
“You cooking something?”
“Yesterday,” said the girl.
“Already eat today?”
“Corn,” said the girl. She looked at Charlie’s clipboard. “C-o-r-n.”
Now Charlie blushed, putting his clipboard behind his back.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot to leave this in the car.”
The girl nodded. She pointed to a chair. “Sit if you want to.”
They sat. She didn’t have a sofa, only a small card table and two mismatched chairs and a dim, green-glass lamp casting a dim greenness on the table. All the windows were covered with pillowcases, and in an adjoining room he saw a mattress lying flat and bare on the floor.
“Hey, do you want your mattress raised up off the floor?” asked Charlie. “I bet we could find you a frame or a box spring, so you don’t have to sleep right on the floor, where it’s drafty.”
The girl looked up with a flash. “You know,” she said. “I already told everything about myself. I came into the clinic and they wrote it all down.”
Charlie shook his head. “No, you don’t have to tell me anything new. I’m just the one who comes around to say hello and drop off your medication. I just came to see how you were doing.” He took her medication out of his breast pocket and placed the small paper envelope on the card table.
“Good, good, I’m doing good,” said the girl, looking around, flopping her hand back and forth on the table. “They found me this house, they got me some medicine. I like the summer, but I don’t like the winter.” She looked outside.
“Why don’t you like the winter?” said Charlie.
“Snow,” she said. “And I don’t like spring neither.”
“No? Why not spring?”
“Rain.”
“You don’t like precipitation?”
“No, I just don’t like things falling out of the sky.”
Charlie laughed. The girl looked at him hard. He rubbed his mouth. Jesus, he thought, watching himself. You can’t let down. You can’t get too comfortable. Nobody around here was pretending. There was nothing charming or entertaining or artificial about it. Charlie looked around the room, imagining what it might be like to have to inhabit it day after day, critical, insensible voices poaching at you from the dirty corners. He tried to imagine it. He wanted to be able to drop down into her life.
“Does it hurt?” he said. “The rain, when it falls on you?”
“It does hurt,” she said. “And it makes a racket. And when it turns to ice, it bites.”
“The snow.”
“Yes sir. This is what brought me to your clinic. I hid inside one winter for two months and this lady I knew made me go to the clinic, and they gave me medicine for it. For the snow.”
“Good,” said Charlie, surprised she was talking so much. The assessment, he saw, had identified her so differently. Was it he who made her speak like this?
“And so I feel a little better but I still don’t like to go out in the winter. I had a nice neighbor who put salt on the road so the snow would melt fast. But that lady died. I prefer the summer. I’d move back south but you can’t go home again.”
“That’s what they say,” said Charlie.
She narrowed her eyes. “Who says that?”
Charlie inhaled and blew out slowly. “No one in particular. I’ve just heard it said.”
“Oh,” said the girl. She became absorbed in looking at her fingers, and Charlie took the time to look around the place.
“I was in the military,” said the girl, taking out a cigarette. “No shit.”
“Really?”
“They showed me how you land a plane on a destroyer. There were all these buttons and levers. The landing strip is only as long as a driveway. You gotta land the plane on that. Did you ever see it in a movie? They showed me how to figure the coordinates. Everybody’s got a quarter of the sky and you had to be like All right, Pilot you are at AR 12 approaching this or that. And then the Pilot would be like, Roger AR 12, and then he’d land his plane. My God,” said the girl, slapping the table and leaning in to Charlie, smiling for the first time. “It was amazing. You gotta see it for yourself.” She nodded, suddenly pretty with excitement. “Do you have kids?”
“Twins,” said Charlie. “Two months old. Girls.”
“Well, I was happiest when I was a baby and couldn’t put two words together. Since then, I have learned various philosophies that have confused my life.” The girl stopped and looked at him hard. “My father was a philosopher.”
“Really?”
“Well, he had a lot of philosophies. Mostly he used them to keep me out of sex education class.”
Charlie shifted in his chair and looked at the girl’s cigarette, which was almost burning her fingers. He’d spent enough time with mental patients to dread the introduction of the topic of sex. But she shook her head, moving on. He was having a hard time nailing her down. She did not seem withdrawn and apathetic to him.
“He was against the government. He was against God. He was against love. There wasn’t anything left. He crossed it all off.”
“Yourself,” said Charlie, suddenly uncomfortable, for he felt ill-prepared for Opal and he also felt ashamed, for he had clearly expected something different, something easy and slow and impressionable and Southern. “You can believe in yourself and your own morals. Your own convictions. Watch your cigarette.”
“I’m up to my ears in morals,” said Opal, laughing huskily. She waved him off. “That’s all they talked about in the military. Look where it got me.”
“I think what they taught you were rules. Rule
s aren’t the same as morality. A person can also—follow his heart.”
Opal looked at him hard again. Charlie couldn’t tell if she was looking at him with appreciation or contempt. The sun came out of the clouds and lit the room through the pillowcases. He could see in the fleeting light a flash of her almost yellow eyes. With a puff of smoke, the cigarette extinguished itself.
“Well,” said Charlie, looking down. “I talked to Harriet and she said you signed up for the employment workshop. She said you’re taking your meds and feeling up. So now that you’re doing so well, you might be able to get one of these transitional employment positions. I have a client, a cook for a university cafeteria—”
“I already worked at a university once.”
“All right. I have another client who arranges flowers.”
“Ha. For money?” Opal stubbed out her cigarette. “I’ve worked since I was five years old, OK? On my father’s bee farm.”
“All right. Maybe we can even see if you could do that again. If you liked it.”
“Hell no.” The girl leaned back and folded her arms. “I mean, hell no thank you. Anything but that. Something different maybe. Maybe after winter.”
“But you signed up last week,” said Charlie, fumbling through the papers on his clipboard. “Didn’t you?”
“No,” said Opal, shaking her head slowly. “No I did not.”
Charlie sighed. All of a sudden he was tired and wanted to be back at his desk listening to the whirring of the soda machine in the hallway and the sound of coins falling down into it. He stood. “Seems like, with all your work experience, you’d do really well at lots of things. But sure, when you’re ready. After winter’s fine. I’ll stop by again in a couple days with Harriet and we can talk about it.”
The girl was still sitting at the table. “I like you better than Harriet,” she said.
“Well, me and Harriet are a team and we’ll take care of you together.”
