by Tatjana Soli
“They took her to a clinic down in Baja,” Mrs. Girbaldi continued. “They fed her all this strange stuff—I’m not saying what, but let’s just say it was a struggle getting it down, and it would be illegal in this country. A month later, she went back to her doctors, and they examined her: the tumor was gone! They accused her of having it operated on. ‘How could I do that,’ Margaret asked, ‘when you all said yourselves it was inoperable?’”
The story hung, unremarked upon, Claire’s attention directed away as if Mrs. Girbaldi had burped.
Chapter 8
A week later, Minna invited Claire to her now transformed room.
The climate in California is ephemeral; the air brittle and self-effacing. Upon entering the room, Claire felt she had left her old world as she knew it. She understood for the first time the indolent pleasure of the wet and liquid air in those exotic novels that took place in the tropical corners of the world. Impossible to explain how a coat of paint could affect barometric pressure, but there it was. She was in a strange but longed-for land.
Two walls were painted dark greenish turquoise, a color that breathed the nearness of the ocean, its salty stick, the choking, crowding vegetation, and the torrential, silvered downpours of rain. Claire was positive if she touched these walls, her hand would come away slick, not with paint, but the breathing condensation of the equatorial climate. The walls modulated from light to shadow, as if one were looking down into the depths of a lagoon while sitting in a small, unseaworthy boat. A vertiginous experience that suggested to her the overwhelming feel of crossing a sea whose entrapping strands of kelp wrapped around rudders, propellers, anchors, hulls.
“You’re an artist, Minna.”
Claire had taken in only half of the room, and by far the half of lesser importance. The remaining two walls were painted a bold yellow, the color of blazing sun, bleached coral beaches, the stuccoed walls of mean villages. All manner of figures and symbols and words filled these two walls with a sense of menace proportionate to their unintelligibility. Claire reassured herself that it was only a matter of familiarity and comfort would surely follow. In a spirit of exploration, she excavated the nearest, largest of these words: OGOU BALANJO. Underneath it, smaller letters read SPIRIT OF HEALING. Then, like a bend in the road, a view that was formerly invisible presented itself: the drawing of a white woman, round-faced, with empty blue eyes and long strands of stylized, yellow hair. But one noticed this only much later because what riveted the attention was what she was holding—a salver at waist level, on which rested her two breasts. The chest area above the tray was blank as an unmarked map, scored only with two small X’s where the breasts should be, like the cartooned X-ed eyes of a dead fish. Above her head, written out in strips of Christmas tinsel, were the words SAINT AGATHA. Below her large, round, clawed lion’s paws were the painted words PATRON OF BREASTS.
“Is it magic?” Claire asked.
“It’s the beginning.”
“She’s me?” The figure was so monstrous—a mockery or a kindness, she couldn’t decide—that she felt unmoored as if punched. She stood there, stranded, as Minna waited to catch her swoon, helping her onto the floor. Claire kept looking up, hypnotized by the figure, who only grew in power when observed from that vantage.
“I’ve upset you?” Minna sat on the floor next to her and held her hand. “These are powerful majik, sanp. To heal you.”
Claire nodded, sickened and awed, mesmerized by the eyes of the woman, flat and placid. She felt that if she sat there long enough, looked hard enough, she would find the answer to many things that had eluded her. Meanings so covered by time and evasions and half-truths that they were all but forgotten. The more time she spent looking at Saint Agatha, the less fantastic, the more normal, she appeared, until it was Claire’s own bare walls, her timid Germanic landscapes and faded English botanical prints in the rest of the house that lacked reality.
“She’s beautiful?” Claire whispered, feeling unqualified to judge even that because the figure was so far beyond the dull concepts of beauty or ugliness.
“You like her!” Minna jumped up, excited as a schoolgirl, and waved her hands back and forth across the walls as she described her future plans for more drawings, as if the surface of the walls weren’t already buckling under their duty. Her happiness took away all Claire’s opposition, the menaced feelings of alarm. Of course, they were just drawings, primitive renderings no more powerful than pictures in a magazine, book, or cave. Harmless.
But after that first visit, Minna’s door again remained resolutely shut. Somehow Claire understood that the powerful contents needed to be bottled tightly, sealed like a drug or alcohol. The room was so foreign now that for all practical purposes it had ceased to exist as part of the rest of the house and became like the exotic grafting of the lion paws on Saint Agatha, or the grafting of more delicate fruit on rugged rootstock. As time went on, such permutations on the everyday began to seem more and more possible. Another of Minna’s pictures that Claire had barely had time to glance at on her way out of the room: a fish tail attached to a woman’s lower body. The house, too, had become mermaidized.
* * *
Gwen arrived, a combination of long rest weekend and inspection. She was pleased by the pristine quiet of the ranch house, disturbed by her mother’s waning appearance. She carried in a large box with a bow from the car.
“A present?” Claire opened it to find a Styrofoam head with a blond wig perched on top of it. “Oh, no.”
“You’re going to need it, so might as well get a nice one.”
All day long Gwen’s voice could be heard in the living room, on the phone to clients. Minna hid away, mostly in her room, presumably painting. “So she’s an artist now?” At night, Gwen drank down a whole bottle of wine while Claire sat on the sofa listening to her complaints about her underemployed husband, her long hours at the office. The bitterness in her voice left Claire exhausted.
They quieted when Minna left for a date with Don.
“Great. She’s here a couple months and has a movie-star boyfriend.”
“She’s had a more difficult life than she’s let on.”
“Those,” Gwen said, pointing her finger out the window at Minna’s disappearing back, “are the kind of women who get what they want.”
* * *
Saturday night Claire became feverish. After consulting with a nurse on the phone, Gwen helped Minna bathe her with cool washcloths, then watched as Minna brewed up an elixir that Claire eagerly drank down.
“What’s in that?” Gwen asked.
“My maman taught me folk medicine. Natural ways to bring healing.”
“Got anything for stress?”
“I can make something for you.”
Within an hour, Claire’s temperature was down, and she slept comfortably.
“I’m so glad we decided to hire you,” Gwen said.
“Do me a favor?” Minna asked.
“What?”
“Don’t trouble your mother with your problems. She talks about you and Lucy all the time. She worries. If she felt you were happy, it would ease her mind.”
Gwen weighed her options and decided not to be insulted. She had not let on her shock in the change she saw in her mother—the new frailness. It hit her full force, her mother’s mortality, so hard to reconcile with the steel-minded mother who had raised them. The idea of her failing to heal scared Gwen.
“Minna’s worth her weight in gold,” she said to Claire the next day.
“She fights with Paz. Octavio doesn’t trust her.” She tried to minimize her feelings for the girl.
Gwen wasn’t fooled. “She’s taking good care of you. I’m happy you’re in good hands.”
* * *
Living with the vicissitudes of her rebellious body, Claire lost her taste for ordinary diversions. Minna was her midwife, introducing a whole other way of existence. While Claire could no longer tolerate watching the news on television, or listening to Mrs. Girbaldi’s
neighborhood gossip, she could sit outside for hours watching the trees, her thoughts swirling like a leaf riding a swift current of air. The old urgencies of the farm, which had before so preoccupied her, Paz’s complaints, Gwen’s and Lucy’s constant dramas, all began to mercifully recede.
Time, too, lost its normal sequence. Minutes became dense, rich as whole lifetimes. Claire would leave an afternoon of daydreaming filled with ephemeral wisdom as if she had been away on a long year’s journey and come back with a box filled with treasure. But she had gone nowhere, traveled no farther than a few footsteps. She hated the word detachment, but there was that—a shifting as if from a northern to a southern exposure—the whole world appearing newly draped.
* * *
Still, when Claire went out into the judging world, to the hospital or more rarely to the grocery, she clapped on the wig that Gwen had bought for her, or she wrapped her head in the colorful scarves that regularly arrived like bouquets from Lucy, or she wore Forster’s old baseball cap, brim pressed low to her bare head, but this was for the world’s sake, not her own. Patients dressed as much for others as themselves. They knew the battle being fought, grew proud of their scars, but the nonsick were visibly relieved not to be confronted with rude reminders of mortality. So the diseased attended to their illnesses discreetly in their shrunken, compromised world.
Only at home did the world open out for Claire, spread its toes to dig down into the cool infinite. She loved to sit with her head uncovered, to feel the air move against her scalp, to be attuned to the exact moment a sunbeam touched her forehead, something that in her un-stripped-down state she had been oblivious to. It occurred to her, as dispassionately as watching a cloud cross the sky, that this deep joy she felt in the ordinary might be a prelude to her death.
In her more optimistic moments, she did not believe that the cancer would kill her, but she did feel privy to a great secret that changed everything else: namely, that someday, sooner or later, something would. This was the kind of impossible knowledge that one pays lip service to, but it was like explaining the feeling of being in love, or the pangs of childbirth, or the ache of fear or loneliness. One can only know such things from the inside out.
* * *
After a difficult night during which Claire hardly slept, Minna and she walked through the orchards earlier than usual, the tule fog dense as ever. Claire, bald-headed, dressed in a clownish, marigold-colored robe given to her by Mrs. Girbaldi, thought she must appear like a supplicant Buddhist nun.
“I hate the nights,” Claire said.
“I am always happiest in mornings and afternoons, never at night,” Minna said. “Ghosts haunt one then.” Suddenly Minna veered off and headed to an area that Claire had been careful to avoid. She dragged behind, trying to think of excuses not to continue.
“We’ve never walked here,” Minna said.
“Nothing of interest.” Claire stopped at the place the asphalt road gave out, but Minna insisted on walking down the gravel path.
The asphalt road faltered, crumbled into large bits of rock and gravel, further broke down to sand, then scraped into raw dirt and rough clay. Ants colonized part of the gully, and electric-blue thistle flowers crowded an uprooted eucalyptus, out of whose roots wild willow smothered the path leading to the wash.
Claire was torn between following and returning alone to the house when she heard Minna’s cry. Reluctantly she approached. Minna stood stricken in the clearing as if she had seen a gravestone. Claire coughed, ready to come up with some fatuous story, but Minna waved her off. She waded through the bracken and undergrowth, lush from neglect.
Claire had not visited the tree in years, and Octavio avoided cultivating a large area around it until it had become enchanted in its abandonment.
“We should be getting back,” Claire said quietly and futilely. With no sign Minna had heard her, exhausted, she sat on the ground, her back to Minna and the tree. “I’m feeling bad, if you care,” she shouted.
No response. Claire turned just in time to see Minna place her hand against the trunk, as if taking its heartbeat, as if searching for clues inside for the sad state of abuse on the outside.
“Minna!” Claire yelled, but the words pushed back down her throat. She closed her eyes and must have dozed off because she woke blinded and overheated by the sun. Minna glared down at her, eyes bleared, swollen. She knelt and with an outspread hand touched Claire as she had touched the tree, and Claire shrank away as if she were being branded with a bloody imprint.
“This is the God wood,” Minna said. “The tree of good and evil. Your tree of forgetting.”
“I don’t want this.”
“Pauvre amie. This is where it happened. A son who died here.”
“We don’t talk of it,” Claire whispered, as if their words might bring down the sky.
Minna’s eyes were bright with excitement. “This is why you stay.”
Claire turned away, aware now of footsteps and the sound of low voices. Five of the workers stood at the head of the road with their pruning tools, ready to begin the day. Like thieves, Claire and Minna stood and stumbled past them, Claire whispering, “Buenos dias” and “Discúlpeme,” covering her poor, exposed head with one hand.
When they reached the house, Minna pulled two lemons from her pocket. One lemon was rounded, with a deep cleft running through it so that it was like a crenellated heart, or perhaps two lemons that grew into each other’s space and conjoined. The other was blackened and hollow, a victim of hanging unpicked from the previous years.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked, horrified by the sight.
Minna shrugged.
“You can’t bring those in the house.”
“It’s only fruit.”
“Get rid of them.” Claire was enraged that Minna would defile the tree, disinterring the fruit, and at the same time shamed at her own irrational reaction. “How did you know?”
“Places are marked by what happened there. Sometimes they are cursed by bad luck, sometimes they become sacred, but either way they are marked.”
They did not speak for the rest of the afternoon. On schedule, the tule fogs rolled back in at sunset and blanketed the hot fields, cooled over Claire’s temper. They pretended, unsuccessfully, the blaze of the day and its events had never been.
Chapter 9
Syringes of Adriamycin the deep color of cherries or blood. Claire dreamed in red and woke with dry heaves. Methotrexate the deep yellow of egg yolks. Whole cocktails of medicines—mix the Taxol with the cisplatin, shake the Cytoxan with the fluorouracil. Face reddened and bloated, chest and arms rashed.
She woke with the conviction, like a toothache, that if she went in for her treatment that day, she would be weakened beyond the point of recovery. She picked up the phone and called Mrs. Girbaldi.
“Nan, tell me about that clinic.…”
Minna came into her bedroom, busy, hardly looking at her as she laid out Claire’s clothes and went back out. She was talking about saints and symbols she had looked up in a book to paint on her walls, walls that had long ago been filled. “Coming for breakfast, your ladyship?” Claire heard the slap of her bare feet down the hall and was still under the covers when she returned.
“Come on, sleepyhead.”
“I’m not going today.”
Minna stopped. “It’s not an either/or proposition.”
“I’m serious. I can’t do it today.”
“I’ll have to call the doctor. I’ll have to call Gwen.…”
“Please.”
“It’s my responsibility. My job. It’s your life we’re talking about, doudou. I would be negligent.”
“If I go today, it’ll kill me.”
“What if they don’t believe me…”
“You believe me,” Claire wheedled, grabbed Minna’s hand. The girls had pulled similar stunts when they were little, and she never once gave in. But she knew Minna was inexperienced. Claire schemed she could trade on Minna’s changeable hea
rt.
Minna hesitated, stroked Claire’s hair. “I’ll say we had car trouble. I’ll reschedule.”
“Not this week.”
“Don’t be greedy.” Minna stood thinking. “Get dressed for breakfast before I change my mind.”
They sat in the kitchen. Claire obediently stirred syrup into her oatmeal, drank her coffee, and poured more.
“I want to try a clinic in Mexico Mrs. Girbaldi told me about.”
“What’s going on with you?”
Claire sagged down into her chair. “I’m starting to forget what I’m living for. I want to go away somewhere exotic and forget … this.”
“Oh, che, exotic is on the inside. Back home, we sat around bored to death with all the green of the jungle, all the blue of the ocean. Each last one of us would have cut off our right arm to be in California.”
“But you could have left at any time.”
Minna drank her coffee. “Someday I will take you. A place very far, with steep mountains and waterfalls. Where the flowers open only at night. Their perfume is so strong you forget all the pain in your life.”
“If I make it that long.”
“You will make it. I’ll take in enough life for both of us. We are like those plants—I can only survive if you survive.” Minna got up to clear the dishes. “Now I have to go tell lies.”
* * *
Claire, giddy at her temporary freedom, did not question what Minna told the doctors. When the phone rang, Minna shook her head and let it ring. Then she made her own calls. An hour later, Claire saw Don’s car pull into the driveway, and her throat caught, thinking Minna would leave with him, but this time he drove all the way up to the house and wrestled three straw beach hats out of the trunk. Mrs. Girbaldi was in the backseat ready to go.
“What’s going on?”
When Don saw Claire, his face broke into that smooth, movie smile that revealed nothing. “Let’s go have some fun, little sweetheart.”
Mrs. Girbaldi patted her hand. “We’re going to go get a miracle.”
