By herself May could think. She turned over the events of the morning. The voices in the hall, Mr. Dempsey. The freeway, the rush down the empty lanes at the terminal, the young woman who ran up to Sven. How she ran pell-mell across the asphalt, angry, with the paper bag in her hands . . .
May gasped. Her heart did something unpleasant, probed her chest rudely twice, three times, and then began to hammer.
She went as fast as she could, past Tower stretched out on a window seat, snoring with his hand on his stained vest in a vague ecclesiastical gesture. She thought of saying, “Help me. Come with me,” but she went on by herself.
Sven was back at the table, refereeing while Nita and Nalda played a game piling their hands together and pulling them out. Frieda had turned her back disgustedly. May dropped the cane a second time. With difficulty, sitting down to do it, she rescued it from under the table, and when she sat up the blood had all run to her head. That was good. “Van,” she said to Sven, with some force. “Van.” She stabbed her finger downward. She rolled her eyes and grasped the table.
“Uh oh,” he said. “Stay up here, why don’t you, if you’re sick. You can lie down.” He pointed at Tower asleep.
“No.”
“No? Over there’s the restroom.”
“No. Van.” She made her eyes fierce. She was making him let her. She was his favorite.
They both considered the likelihood of her falling down the stairs. She knew him. She saw him consider that it would be a choice, of a kind, if she were to fall down the stairs. She saw him decide, against his own interests as the one who would be blamed, to let her go. For no other reason than because she wanted to.
But he stood up. “I’ll come with you.” He rummaged in his pocket for the keys.
“No.” She waved a finger admonishingly, like a teacher, with a nod of her head to indicate the twins. The twins could not be left. They could wander and disappear. At the center they wore wanderers’ bracelets that beeped if they approached a door.
“Stay here!” Nalda cajoled. “Watch this!”
May set off. She went slowly, keeping her back straight and her dragging leg firm so that Sven wouldn’t follow her. She managed the stairs, and used her cane all the way to the middle of the half-empty car deck before she discovered she had come out of the stairwell on the wrong side, so that she had to circle the bay to find the van at the end of the line of cars. With her good left hand she fought with the lock on the rear door.
In the well was the paper bag the girl had handed to Sven. Who was she, in the uniform—hadn’t she been wearing a uniform? A khaki uniform like Renee’s. Was she a guard like Renee? But not like Renee. Renee in the doorway saying, “Dohn do that,” in despair.
There were two cardboard boxes in the bag, each the size of a large book, heavily bound with duct tape. She took them out of the bag and turned them over in her hands. She didn’t shake them, she didn’t need to.
How would he do it? How pass the boxes to whoever was waiting for him? He would find some excuse to stop. Easy to pull into a gas station or a parking lot. None of them would get out, just Sven with his packages. There was nobody else in charge, nobody with them to see what Sven did, or protect him. Nobody would even remember he had stopped. Or if they did they wouldn’t say; he was counting on their approval of him, their vain, hopeless liking.
She went around to unlock the door on the passenger side. Standing on the step she got the glove compartment open and looked among the little paper cups. Maybe there would be a nail file or a penknife so she could open the boxes.
Lying on the maps was Renee’s gun.
So Sven was going alone. He was going to drop them all off at Charlotte’s sister’s, to see the bees. He was not going to hand the packages off on the way, he was going to make up something and while they were looking at chunks of honeycomb or drinking their Gatorade he was going to drive away in the van. He was going to meet somebody in person, on that man’s territory. In one of the machine shops clustered around the shipyard, or in a guard’s booth, or in one of those warehouses full of barrels and catwalks that she knew from the movies. And for this he would be paid, wasn’t that right? Of course he was going to do it that way.
After a bit she got one box slit open using the car key. Exactly. Exactly. In neatly taped plastic bags, and like cornstarch, but looser.
She dug in her tote bag for her wallet. She always had cash in her wallet, she didn’t let them get near it in the center to investigate. Right now she had four hundred dollars. She would give it to Sven when she told him what she had done, and furthermore tell him what she had in the bank. “It’s yours,” she would say. “But use it for your life.” She should have done it long ago. Why hadn’t she helped him? She should have told Renee. Renee could have made him take it, told him, “Have it, she want you to have it.”
“What are you doing?”
By this time she wasn’t doing anything, just holding on, looking over the side of the car deck at the water. The sun rings could not be seen. Here the water hissed up pale green, closer, and swarmed and doubled back in confusion, though you did not feel it in the motions of the ferry, which were broad and regular.
“Threw—over.” She showed him with her hands.
Sven looked at the empty paper bag, and at her, long enough to test what she said, and then past her, his eyes making a wild sweep of the whole car deck. He shook his head. His hand ran up and down the steel upright with paint rusted into sharp edges, and then with both hands he grabbed it and leaned out as far as he could to scan the water. His face around the thin-skinned nose had turned the marble color of his fingers. He dropped from the upright and slumped against the van, and for a second May was relieved, until he said, doubling over, “God, God.”
A sound issued from her, a voice. “No, ’Ven. Don’t—do.” No consolation, no proof she could offer that his life, all postponement and longing so far, would shake itself free.
She was going to go on, hand him the money she had in her fist, but he spread his fingers on his forehead and plucked as if there were strings there. He blew his breath out twice and said, “I’m dead. They’ll kill me.”
Her knees gave. Over the thrashing water her eyes focused out and out as if her sight could escape her and go on, but it had to come back to him crouched in front of her. Of course. He would arrive without the boxes and they wouldn’t believe him. Of course. Of course. They’ll kill me.
What had she done?
She pressed her fists into her ribs. He didn’t move his hand from his eyes but he said, “Wait a minute. Wait.”
No way to make up for it. May tottered, as she had when the boxes lay on the green water bobbing away. Sven unbent his body and she made ready for him to hoist her up in his arms and cram her over the sill into the water. Get rid of her.
“Calm down,” Sven was saying. “Calm down.” He was catching her as she swayed. Now his face was dead white, with dull ovals where his fingers had pressed, but he spoke with a dazed reasonableness. “All right. I see. I getcha.”
What had taken the place of crying, with May? She wanted to cry but where tears would have come from she had an inner forceps working on her. She wanted to say she had gone crazy, she could not think straight, not anymore, she had made the awful mistake of thinking she could reason and act, she was sorry, she would be sorry from now on. She could make her lips move but not produce a sound. Her fingers were squeezing the folded bills while her legs, like poles in loose holders, shifted her with the sways of the ferry. The ferry was slowing down. Sven took her by the arm and shoulder. The engines thundered harder, the gulls flashed by, their open beaks making no sound over the proud mechanical roar.
“You stay here. I’m going back up, I got a friend of mine watching the others. Hey now, wait a minute. You sit. Sit.” She nodded dizzily. “Don’t move. Calm down.” It occurred to her he thought she might die on him now. He boosted her into the van. His eyes squinted past her as she rallied her good hand and pressed
the bills into his pocket. “Wrote me a note? Hey, a note about it. Jesus, calm down.” Humbly she pulled herself up by the seatbelt, gasping for air. Her heart had pirated her lungs. She would sit down and let shame burn tunnels into her until she was ash.
“You stay here. I’ll bring the others.” His voice was tired and hard.
Righteous, awful woman, she was keening to herself. Awful, awful woman, why were you born? But it was not anything so righteous, what she had done.
She let herself think so, finally. It was not anything for the good of other people, poor or rich, those people she knew waited angrily, desperately, in the little city of shipyard workers and sailors, for the cocaine or heroin or whatever it was—or perhaps they merely waited in seeming indifference, like the starlings in the trees, though not, not ever, expert in their greeds and refusals as the starlings were. No, she had not done it to spare those people.
If only she had Mr. Dempsey now, to sit beside her. Mr. Dempsey . . . Samuel . . . I have done the wrong thing.
She had not been able to think it through. She sat for a long time and then she opened the door. She climbed down slowly and squeezed between the van and the car in front of it, catching her pants leg on the license plate. Finally she got the door on the driver’s side unlocked. Throwing her cane into the back she climbed heavily into the driver’s seat. There, as if a hand had been laid firmly on her to dispense with all the lurching in her mind, she came into possession of herself.
She had the sensation of driving. Driving her own car, as she had—could it have been only months ago?—when she was a woman with plans to visit her daughters, and time to spend at the movies and at restaurant tables with wine before her, a woman of the world—but, oh, had she not insulted the world, said inexcusable things about it? That she was tired of certain restaurants. Tired of pigeons on her balcony. Her own balcony! Pigeons! With their low thrilled note so tender compared to the spit-spit of the center’s starlings—and even that note a sound she had come to listen for—slow, aggrieved pigeons, occasionally leaving a mess on the open gangway, which might have been a path down a green field for the spasm it caused her to think of it now, above the courtyard in the quadrangle where her building had been, still was. Where an old man she never met used to come out and grasp the rail of his two-foot balcony like a sea captain, and search the sky.
Tired of the way people drove.
The steering wheel in her hands surprised her. A simple thing, ring an inch thick, obeyed by a machine weighing tons. You would never suspect the satisfaction you would find in a thing like that, or that you had been longing for it. If only she could sit forever without being seen, holding the wheel and giving it sturdy turns. With both hands on it she put her head back in an envy of everyone who could drive, everyone not herself.
But that sank away. Something had approached her as she sat vacant and still. Now it entered. By its weight it seemed to be sadness, but if that was it, it was the ecstatic sadness she had last known—when? In the Depression. Twelve or thirteen, she would have been, leaning out the open bathroom window on a cold night with her hair in a towel.
Dark would have fallen, silencing the voices in the house, blotting up the echoes of the talk at dinner, of falling wages and crop failures and lynchings. The dark sky, the moon coming up would send a sad thrill along her cold arms. How tenderly she pitied the family downstairs, her parents and sister, along with anyone else not herself! She was going to be a scientist, not a tired well-meaning doctor in practice like her father, but the possessor of a laboratory and the means to pass out to everyone the cures she discovered. Or she would be a writer, or be singled out in some manner to hold power, to bring a halt, all over the country, to this downward rush. Even though downstairs all was as it should be, must be, her mother and father in their appointed places, her mother working on an article about the starving veterans who had set up camp in Washington, D.C., until the army marched on them.
But May would not be like her mother, with her petitions, her picket signs. If people were still brutal by then, she would be in a position to talk them out of it, and give them jobs. They wouldn’t have to be thieves or hobos anymore, or drink themselves to death.
The moon was hers, she could almost squeeze it like the lemons they had given up buying, and pour it down her throat, while steam ran off her head and arms into the cold air. But that was when the peculiar sadness would strike. Unaccountably struck from her rapture, she would begin to wonder why it was she went through soaping herself all over and wrapping a towel around her so many thousands of times, when the moon was a thing, rising unaware of any human, alive or dead, and how many humans shivered looking on it at that very moment, with their strange bulging organs of sight? Who could they be? Who could she be? Why should they exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide and live? And she would wish to cry but find no tears, only her own blankness, her blank body in a towel—visible in the mirror if she glanced over, a pinkish solid with maps of bath powder on it. She shrank from her body. Even then it did not always obey her. It woke her up at night, it demanded sensations. She really didn’t want it to be hers, to be her.
This was a sadness that called for an expelling motion, for flinging the water out of her hair, running on wet feet, throwing herself on the bed.
Her sadness now was the same, half a grave suspicion, half an odd, satiating, invited pleasure. It had an authority, a cold, like witch hazel on the skin. Where had it come from into her, making some sort of blind directive motion like a semaphore? This way.
Their lateness. They were late onto the ferry. They were last. The van was last in line. Behind it the open Sound, and all would be explained, and Sven come to no harm.
She had it now, as she had not when she made her way down the steps with her cane and her plan. He had left her the keys.
She was still leaning back resting, in this state in which she could know and wonder, before she sat up smartly and looked at her watch, rolled her window down and leaned over to get the passenger window. Even with the windows open the van would wonder and pause, with that machine ignorance, that sad poetry of the machine, that obedience, and pitch up—she was guessing—before it nosed down with the weight of the engine.
Very likely she would try, through the open window—she was strong on one side anyway, from the machine they had made her row all spring—she would try mightily to push herself up to the surface where the million rings were sparkling. She would not waste time ashamed of trying; her body would try for her. A body was possessive of itself, blood racing like this at the amorous speed she remembered from nicotine. No one could say, for another, what was despair and what the fiercest pleasure.
There was the clutch for the thinking foot, the gas for the heavy one. That was good. With the clutch out the left foot could push the other. Her fingers stayed awake on the key. Ignition, she said to herself.
A man in neon orange would come skidding across the oily deck the minute the engine turned over. But she had always been efficient, in a car. In her dream she had driven two cars at once! Her body would remember for her, answer for her, loyal current down the left arm crossed under the wheel and wobbling the gearshift. She didn’t look in the mirror at the ferry’s open bay to gauge the distance she had to accelerate.
Jam it into reverse.
The van lunged, with a roar she felt more than heard, the tires spun and caught. The van hit the chain flying, she felt a hideous resistance and then a skid as the chain gave at the latch and sent her sideways, and she felt the bump and shock of space to the back wheels, and the tilt into air.
She was pulled to the clean kite-spool, she was herself! She could feel her teeth and the roof of her mouth with the tongue clamped on it, and the nail beds on her fingers on the steering wheel, she could feel the hairs on her head.
SEVEN
One Life: Anna
Maybe she was not a human being. Maybe she was a silkie, like the creature that came up out of the sea and asked for the baby, in her mo
ther’s song.
“Sing your song!”
“It’s not mine, it’s an old, old song,” her mother said.
As if she knew what May was thinking, her sister Carrie said, “The silkie’s a man.”
“It is not.”
Now she was humming “Down in the Valley,” so Carrie said, “That’s the one I want.” They were standing on the table in their stocking feet, having their hems pinned. The leaves of Simplicity pattern rustled as they turned. Her mother’s quick, thin fingers dipped in and out, her red hair bobbed as she hummed.
“‘Hang your head over, hear the wind blow,’” May joined in, waving off flies with her toe from the plate heaped with store-bought gingersnaps.
“Quit it, May.” Carrie pushed her.
May started over, louder. “‘Down in the val-ley, the valley so low, hang your head ohh-ver—’” and she swayed, being turned by her mother’s hands. Hot sunlight lay on the table, a long tray of it for them to stand in.
“May’s bothering me again. Why does she have to sing when you sing? And she tries to stand right where I’m standing.”
Just as her mother said, “I don’t really think she does,” everything in the room ran together in sparks, arcing and spinning—table, plate, her mother’s fingers weaving pins into cloth. May almost fell. The sun had done it, making a puddle of fire on the table when she looked down.
I’m in there, she said to herself. I’m in there where the sun is water, that’s why I’m hot, I’m down in it, tiny and made of gold, or fish-silver, swimming. I don’t have to go to school ever again.
“Your daughter Carrie was clever,” the teacher said. Mrs. Pitt. She said it after school to May’s mother, who was only passing the time of day, not looking for a narrow-minded analysis of her daughters, either one, as she told their father at dinner. “I enjoyed having Carrie,” Mrs. Pitt went on. “But May . . . Now May, I was saying to Mrs. Olafsson in the second, May Harkness has a bit too much respect for herself. The child—” But there Mrs. Pitt had stopped, or there May’s mother with her dark eyebrows drawn together had stopped her.
Seven Loves Page 16
