How many people all over the world believed a son to be the gift tumbled most directly from the hand of God? Why did they believe that—women consulting doctors, climbing up temple steps in supplication? But May was getting away from the chronology, putting in her stubborn questions and opinions. Opinion: that was what Laura would leave out if she were to write the story.
Whoever or whatever provided Lorraine with her conviction, May thought, in the long run she deserved its rewards, for her loyalty. Half the time she and her husband paid Arne’s rent, as he went on gambling, flying to Reno on weekends. “It isn’t money, it’s luck. It’s chance. That’s what has the guy by the balls,” Lorraine said.
At Arne’s wedding May had to meet many members of his family, with whom she pretended her speech was worse than it really was. She had fallen into this restful disguise on more than one occasion. The family had assembled dutifully for Arne’s third wedding. It was held in Lorraine’s church because neither Arne nor Jackie had one. The parking lot was filled with squad cars, and an officer’s radio squawked and called him out in the middle of the vows. None of this deterred Lorraine’s minister, who conducted a brisk, smiling ceremony, during which Jackie’s boy and girl, in two thin, true strands of soprano, sang “You Light Up My Life,” and Arne became so lightheaded with emotion that he had to lean on the bride’s arm.
Jackie wore a full-scale wedding dress, as people did now for second and third weddings, and many in the church, not just May, got out their handkerchiefs when she appeared in the wide doorway with her father—who had had to be discouraged from wearing the button his lodge had given him saying “This is the last time I’ll do this”—and walked down the aisle with the stately, slightly tottering bride’s walk she had always had.
Among the guests was Jackie’s grandmother. She was May’s age, and drank so much champagne it looked by the end of the evening as if she and not May had had the stroke.
The reception went on and on because none of the cops would go home, and Jackie and Arne weren’t going anywhere because they had the kids with them; they were going home to Jackie’s house, where they had been living since the week they met.
Lorraine had more of a sense than the first wife of what had happened to Arne. She saw him as having been removed from the normal course of events, having a different row to hoe, as she put it. She saw him as the penitent he was. That was it.
She had always gone to some pains to observe Arne’s birthday, and when he got diabetes, even though it was mild at first, she was the one who made sure he had the kit and stuck himself in the finger and kept a log of his blood sugar. She kept track, she kept in contact, she did it for years.
At Arne’s funeral, May sat between Lorraine and Jackie, who occasionally leaned forward to smile at each other across her, through their tears. Lorraine’s church was being remodeled, so the funeral was held in an old Catholic church that now belonged to charismatics; they had removed the statues from their niches but took advantage of the kneelers. Jackie’s two children sang “He Will Raise You Up on Eagle’s Wings,” taught to them in one day by Lorraine.
Lorraine and Jackie stayed in the pew and each put an arm around May when everybody knelt down to receive the long and somehow extenuating benediction called down on them by the same cheerful man who had performed the marriage.
Laura and Vera were both overseas. From the nursing home where she had gone to live after her second stroke, May came with an attendant. By that time she really couldn’t talk, though her eyes could show her admiration for Lorraine’s growing boys, and she could take satisfaction in a bear hug from Lorraine’s husband, who was fatter now than Arne had been. She pressed Lorraine’s hand to her cheek as firmly as she could. She comforted Jackie—married and made a widow in a year, but if she could, May would have said to the tearstained Lorraine, You are the real widow.
To all of them she presented the attendant who had accompanied her from the nursing home, a tall, shy, sweet-natured boy named Sven.
Sitting in the pew she came to the conclusion that even when he got the Lord, Arne had not seen how things could be different, after all. He had said he did but he didn’t. He must have seen that things could not be different. Lay the cards down, lay them face down. They must be as they are.
That was how Laura might tell it.
SIX
Going to See the Bees: Sven
This was the day, and it whistled and snapped with the appetites of the first starlings. Before the sun cast any light in the room May woke up to the sound of the birds, and a voice she had been hearing in her dream.
“Dohn do it. Dohn do it.”
It was Renee, her soft Haitian English. And unmistakably, Sven’s voice. “Gotta do it, I swear to God it’s OK.”
Then both sinking to whispers, and Renee’s rising again in a moan. “No . . . dohn do it for them . . . I’m beg . . . they cahn make you . . .”
May had just gone back to sleep from lying awake in the middle of the night while Mr. Dempsey was being taken away. She didn’t have to guess, she knew whose room, astir with hushed effort and the balking wheels of the gurney, had slid the light under her door, though of course there was no sound from Dempsey to say whether he lived or died. Then she had fallen into a fitful sleep in which she was driving the car while pulling another car with a rope, keeping it alongside the one she was driving, with her arm bent uncomfortably out the window. Renee was somewhere out of sight, sadly, falteringly urging her, “Dohn do it.”
This was to be the day of the trip to see the bees. They were taking a ferry to the Olympic Peninsula, to a farm as pretty as anything you would ever see, said Charlotte, the day supervisor. Her brother-in-law was the farmer and beekeeper. Charlotte’s opinions could be off by many degrees. Still, the hope was born.
Sven was driving and there was plenty of room for Renee in the huge new van—a bus, this one was—but the supervisor had the say. “No matter her, I will take Jean-Baptiste for new shoes,” Renee said proudly when she got the news, with a look that was peculiarly hers, half bitterness, half surrender, as she opened the sleeve for May to put her arm in. But Renee was not stoical, her eyes slid to May’s calendar with its circled date, the date of going to see the bees, and she blurted something in French. A curse, May thought, though Renee’s fingers stayed light on her buttonholes.
May had yet to fasten her own buttons. Sleep still caught her in her chair or else moved out of reach for a week at a time, but she could talk a little now. Words took shape, to be guessed at by the others.
May held a position of her own, as most of them did. Knitter, Bible reader, cardsharp. May was Sven’s favorite. They all said she was, and privately she thought so too. No reason for it, but it had happened before; she had had students like Sven. Strays, uncoachable ballplayers, thin drifting boys too old for the class they were in, who conferred on her somewhere in the middle of the school year a half-surprised liking. At first Sven’s partiality had stirred up some ill will, but that had faded once it was clear May was not especially lucky otherwise, not the youngest or the soundest of them by any means, though not the worst off, either.
One or two had been there years, back to Reagan. She knew that from the angry, quavering political arguments that sometimes broke out in a little circle of the men. Two against two, two patchily shaved old men she called the CEOs, against the sawmill foreman trying to catch his spit and pointing with a stub of finger, and the new man, who had been a minister, Mr. Tower. Already May was not the most recent; she had been there since the first week of the dark New Year, the same day the carpenters got there.
The center was outsourcing rehab; where rehab had been, there would soon be a full-care wing with its own lounge. May had heard it from Charlotte. A private group had taken over rehab, and now they traveled four blocks in the van to a building with dentists’ offices and a ground-level suite labeled AMBULATION AND FINE MOTOR.
So, in some minds, added to the attention from Sven which she had to answer f
or, other changes too had come with May’s arrival: weeks of saws whining and plaster dust in the food, and sharp paint fumes making their eyes run. But she had managed it, eased her walker up and down the ramps a hundred times and then lost count, torn up the furious unmailed scrawls—“Can’t feel my arm”—to her daughter Laura.
If she had complained, Laura would have come from overseas and taken her back with her. Given an opening, she would do it now. Vera would fly in too, and they would pack her up and hand her over to the household of her son-in-law. For really that was what it was: Will’s big shady house in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, where Laura lived calmly. As May could not, in Will’s dominion. No, she could not. Nevertheless they would have their way, lift her out of the waters that were hers: the rain, the Sound, the snow-fed rivers, the lake where her child had died. There would be no way to stand up to the three of them.
No one would promise another stroke was not coming to finish her off. Or worse, not finish her. But for the time being she was holding her own. The walker had given way to a four-pronged aluminum cane with a wrist strap. Not long after that she had tackled stairs. Two, four, and finally six times a day she had practiced with a bored aide, and now they were letting her go up and down by herself. She had her place now.
And at last the sun had made it, a slim bright edge to the blinds every morning, with ladders clanking as the work moved outdoors, and a rain of pinfeathers from the routed starlings. Day after day she saw the birds waiting it out in the trees, eyeing the gutters and eaves as if their own numbers, their persistence, were known to them.
Warmed out of sloth, May revived; they all did. In the lounge they dragged their chairs in a gradual circle, following the sun, a few women who never got dressed running splinters into their heels in the no-slip socks. Even the face of the haunted Mr. Dempsey, who had lost all language, could be seen tilted to the sun with the right eye half closed.
Dempsey had been an early, ghostly friend to May. From the first day, she looked straight into the mutant grin he could wring from his cheek muscles but not get rid of. It took him five minutes to iron out the dimple under the cheekbone. Both hands dangled at his crotch, but eventually he managed to heave his torso against the wheelchair strap and reach out as May passed to dab her buttocks with the good hand.
His wordlessness had the appearance of consent, even choice; he did not cheat it by making so much as a sound. The drooping lid gave him a sagacious, carnal, forecasting look.
Dempsey had a son. A rich lawyer, Renee said. The son visited weekly, sometimes more, embracing him each time with shameless tears. The daughter-in-law came too, often with fudge, or a pie she would cut for him on the spot and share around the lounge. May noticed that for this woman Dempsey strained himself dark red to produce the grin.
A man with a sweet tooth, and a weakness for women. Dempsey had been a union official, May knew that much, a longshoreman. In her mind she took to carrying on with him the conversation they would have had—or she thought so anyway—about the two old reactionaries in the lounge, the CEOs. Listen to them, she said to Dempsey in her mind. What are they doing here if it’s every man for himself?
A painter had crouched for two days blowing off starling feathers and putting the new logo for the Center for Extended Care on signs and doors, and on the huge van, “CEC” in gold script with flourishes. To herself May pronounced it “Sick.” She made an effort to print her idea on a pad for Dempsey; there was no way he could tell what she was getting at but at least he smiled his canny smile. In the big new van, a dozen people could fit, in seatbelts, but fewer than that usually went. Four or five would go to church, six or seven to the mall. For special outings it was said they would have to draw straws, but May couldn’t see where such numbers would come from. The walkers and canes went into a well in the back. As many as three wheelchairs could go, collapsed by Sven.
The decision was Charlotte’s, and she liked to keep outings small. Even if they were to draw straws, Charlotte would make some final calculation. Her morning duties meant she had to come after them on a later ferry, bringing the picnic and a canvas bag bulging with the map game, packs of cards, and the drawing game no one would play.
Charlotte was often in a girlish huff but never hostile—you had to give her that, May thought. She was always in a state of fellowship, if anyone would respond when she rounded them up for Trivial Pursuit, or wolf-whistled after the men she was logging out to PT on her clipboard. Sometimes she stepped into the bathroom with one of her sign-up sheets while Renee was washing someone. At fifty Charlotte was the size of a sixth-grade girl; standing straight in heels she came up to Renee’s shoulder. She had been grooming Renee for more responsibility until the affair with Sven came to light. Charlotte would have the say. Whose turn was it? With a full staff there for the day, and an extra car going, there was no reason Renee and her little son couldn’t go too, but it wasn’t Renee’s turn.
To make up for it, the week before the trip Charlotte was friendlier than usual and tracked Renee down more than once in order to ask her spirited questions about Haiti. Not about what they saw in the papers, refugees drowning or Aristide or the present situation at all, but voodoo, and “those old dictators, those Papas.”
“I dohn know,” Renee murmured. Or she merely smiled and shrugged.
Once May knew she would be one of those going on the excursion, she dragged out volumes of the old Collier’s encyclopedia in the lounge. When she began to read, laboriously, it was all familiar from her students’ papers. Bees, the Human Eye, the Greek Myths. Hinduism, the Ku Klux Klan: she could vault down the alphabet of their favorites.
She studied the head-on enlargement of the worker bee’s face, the giant badge eyes, blind-looking, innocent. Poor hunched compelled undesiring female. No student had written about that, the sadness of the facial configuration of the bee. Bavaria, Behaviorism, Black Death. If she shut her eyes she could almost feel the school around her. The library’s humming fluorescent lights, the PA system. “First-period English, meet your rides in the parking lot.” The Ford station wagon she had held on to year after year for field trips.
Where was her car? Did she still own it?
That was something it did not pay to think about. The car. Herself at the wheel, on the way to plays and games, contests, the library downtown. Kids yelling and singing, the time in the car being the seriously anticipated part of the trip. All of them changing a tire beside the freeway. She had taught each of her children to drive, and the girls had been good drivers. Nick . . . for him the near-aliveness of a car, the force showing itself as obedience, had had to be tested. But she wouldn’t think about Nick either. She kept recollection to a minimum. Twenty years had taught her to sense the approach of a given scene by its aura, and to stop the drift toward certain occasions of the past. Almost always, if they stirred in their fog she turned her back.
When she couldn’t sleep, and without meaning to—foolish to begin planning in advance—she had put together a scenario for the visit to the beehives, and refined and embellished it until finally it produced the guilty satisfaction of a scene she might find herself gazing at in the art booths people set up now in the middle of the mall. One of those oils with no brushstrokes, propped on an easel. A field of high grass washing back and forth, here and there laid down like a rack of dresses. The group of them wading diagonally into the picture, leaving a deep track, May somehow having a wide, convex view of them from behind and above, and of a field with orchards in flower on two sides, though it was summer and not spring. The field having dropped steeply off, the whole dark blue Sound stretched itself before them. At the same time May was able to sweep the grassheads and the yellow and lavender weeds with her arms, and retie a straw hat around her damp neck, on her way to the village of white boxes in a shady corner of the field. The beehives.
It would be . . . glorious. Even Charlotte would recognize that it was glorious, and she would let them—let them what?
No. More likely after
the ferry ride and the drive they would pull up in front of a house, a tidy rambler with pinwheels in the yard, a Charlotte’s-sister kind of house. Climb down from the van on Sven’s arm. Limp around back to beehives lined up along an electrified fence keeping a pen of steers with drugged eyes out of the hobby orchard.
And the brother-in-law would lecture them just like the Discovery Channel about the habits of bees—industrious females and short-lived males, the signaling dance in the air, and all the furious instinctive packed-in group existence. All that. But not let them come close to see for themselves, for fear of liability, while instead of the hot dogs being briskly grilled by Charlotte’s sister, they would eat sandwiches marked by the dietitian with their names. But this was not the way to think about it, either, May told herself, any more than the first.
In fact the keeper of the bees might be a good-natured, oppressed fellow—married to a sister of Charlotte’s, after all—full of sad restraint, who saw from the beginning that they required nothing more of this outing than the view from the ferry deck and then two picnic tables and a jar of honey. But chewing his hot dog he would catch May’s eye, he would wink, stroll over to her where she sat, and invite her, and Sven with her, to ride on the old tractor with him. It would be Sven’s style to jump on, whatever Charlotte hollered at him. And then in some configuration allowing two to stand on the tractor with the poise of charioteers, out of reach of the great tires, the three of them would ride to the back of the orchard, through which a creek would be winding half buried in grass, to an old grove of lightning-killed trees where the escaped swarm, with the old queen who had banished herself, had their own kingdom, their queendom.
So May had imagined the visit to the beehives, in her room at the center with her eyes open in the green light of the digital clock.
Awake at all hours and pushing at the night where she lay under its intimate weight, she had made a kind of discovery, of the reverse of night, the obvious open day, and grown childishly possessive of it—the faithfully arriving unsingular daytime, into whose current she had swung her bare feet so many thousands of times. How she had been fooled, fooled into nonchalance by its familiarity! She of all people—whose students had joked about her making them read books so familiar by title that they believed they had already read them. “Sure I read Huckleberry Finn,” they always said, juniors in high school. “Way back when.”
Seven Loves Page 13
