And then, while Martha was lying there on the pew, but not in a coffin, something fell out of the air and landed with a little thud on her belly. She was so comfortable she didn’t move, though she wanted to see what it was. Another thud, this time on her left shin, and then another on her right foot. She took one hand from behind her head and felt on her belly to see what it was. It was a pair of things, round and firm, but giving, with two little stick bits. She lifted them high to see. They were cherries. Two firm round beautiful dark red cherries, plump and ripe, connected by their stems, straight off the tree. She dangled one in her mouth, pulled it from the stalk with her lips, and bit. Sweet thick juice, rich, full-bodied, flooded across her palate. Such cherries! Thud, thud, thud. They were falling faster now, all over her, on her head, on the soft underside of her angled arm, on her face, on her breasts and legs, gathering now in piles between her feet. Cherries falling so thick and fast she could no longer see the ceiling because the air above her was black with cherries. Hills of cherries grew into mountains, rivers of cherries poured through her hair, cherryslides flowed from her body to the floor. Martha tried to think how many cherries there were, how much weight, but she couldn’t think, her mind was full of cherry showers, the sweet deep fragrance of them dissolving any attempt at logic, her open mouth catching, teeth bursting them open in little explosions of pleasure.
She lifted both hands and caught them and stuffed them into her mouth. She was hungry for cherries, greedy for cherries, her mouth and chin ran with the red juice. She swung her legs down and sat up and shuffled aside the cherries on the floor to make room for her shoes. The whole church was full of cherries. Every horizontal surface was piled high with them—the seats, the communion table, the piano, the pulpit, the pews.
However would she clean them all up? However would she explain it to Kate and the maintenance committee?
Martha slipped down in her seat, tipped back her head, and started to laugh. She laughed and laughed. She couldn’t stop laughing. She laughed until she cried, and she cried so hard that she had to blow her nose. When she looked up from her sodden hankie, she could see the ceiling again, and it still needed painting.
GRIEF was like a disease. Sandra was having a relapse, telling Kate things she had told her before.
“I wasn’t there,” she said miserably. “He died on his own. Not even a nurse. Nobody should have to die alone.”
“I know. It was very difficult.”
“They didn’t ring me! I don’t think they even knew until afterward. They said it was very sudden. I didn’t have time to say goodbye.”
“I know, it’s hard,” said Kate, putting mugs and milk on the table. “But some things are meant to be. And you’d been saying goodbye ever since the diagnosis, all those walks on the beach, the camping, the theater outings. All those wonderful special things you did because you had some warning.”
Unexpected anger surged through Sandra.
“Stop sanitizing it! You know what I mean! I should have been there.”
Kate was curiously resistant.
“Jack liked his own company. Perhaps he preferred it that way. Perhaps he wanted to spare you.”
Tears prickled. “I’m his wife! Well, I was his wife. He would have wanted me there. I know he would.”
“I called on Jack the day before he died,” said Kate. “Remember? Just a quick visit on my way home. He told me he’d had enough. The pain was bad, he wanted to go. And he could see you were tired. He just wanted it over. It was a gift, Sandra, that he didn’t linger too long. There are worse things than dying.”
“But I wanted to be there!”
Kate stopped pouring tea, stood up, and put her arms around her.
“I know,” said Kate. “I know you did.”
SANDRA was caught. She had agreed to have Kate’s son, Jeremy, to stay while his parents were away for the weekend, but she had forgotten about a colleague’s fiftieth birthday party.
Sandra was fond of Jeremy, who was witty and enterprising, and felt badly that she had double-booked.
“Sorry, mate,” she said. “But I have to go out tonight. I’ll find someone to come and be with you.”
Jeremy snorted. “I can look after myself.”
“I’m sure you can. But I feel responsible.”
“Mum and Dad leave me home alone all the time.”
“Oh, right. For weeks at a time, no doubt. So you can throw wild parties and still have time to clean up.”
Jeremy grinned. “Once they came home and I had the whole class there. We were all drunk.”
Sandra cuffed him softly.
“You are so full of it, my lad. Your mother won’t even let you walk to school by yourself.”
Jeremy sighed. “I know. Tell her to ease up, Sander. I’m nearly a teenager.” Kate had always been a little over-protective.
“OK. I’ll see what I can do. But no promises.”
Jeremy danced around the table singing, shaking his finger at his imaginary mother.
“Naughty Kate, naughty Kate! Won’t let Jezza stay up late!”
Sandra browsed through the Yellow Pages. She had often envied Kate and Tony their parenthood, but as Jeremy got bigger and louder she wondered if she would have had the stamina.
She had never had to find a babysitter in her life. How did you know if one was reputable? She rang the friends she and Kate had in common whom she felt able to ask, but they were busy doing other things. If she didn’t find someone soon, she’d have to miss the party.
Sandra called Kate’s mobile. Kate couldn’t think of anyone else who would be free at such short notice.
“Martha? What about Martha?” Sandra said. “She doesn’t have too many commitments.”
“I wouldn’t make assumptions,” said Kate. “But yes, ask Martha by all means. Jeremy doesn’t know her very well, but he’ll cope.” She had a few words with Jeremy and then hung up.
Sandra dialed Martha’s number.
“Martha, I know this is out of the blue and very short notice, but I’m looking after Kate’s son for the weekend. I forgot I have to go out for a couple of hours. Would you be able to help me out? I’m happy to pay you, of course.”
“How old is he?”
“Twelve. Old enough to look after himself, really, but I don’t want to leave him on his own. He won’t be any trouble. He’s been glued to the Internet all day. All you’ll have to do is prize him off at bedtime. I checked with Kate. She’s fine about it.”
“Should be all right. He’s not a baby. At least he can wipe his own bum.”
“Well, yes, I’m sure he can.” Was Martha joking or was it a serious consideration? Sandra wasn’t sure. “Thanks, Martha. I’ll pick you up at six.”
MARTHA and Jeremy eyed each other up and down. The boy from next door who had come to keep Jeremy com pany gave him an exaggerated wink. Sandra sent him home and kissed Jeremy on top of his head.
“Won’t be long, mate. You can use the computer till ten, then you have to go to bed. Behave yourself. Thanks, Martha.” She was off.
Martha could not settle in Sandra’s house. It was all hard surfaces and straight lines, and so uncluttered she could hardly breathe. Even the carnations on the dining room table had an angularity to them. She stopped reading the magazine and went to stand by Jeremy, who was surfing the Net on Sandra’s computer.
When Martha came to look, Jeremy, accustomed to adult ignorance, showed off, leaning back in his chair with the mouse on the desk in front of him at arm’s length. Click click click. Martha couldn’t keep up, but she knew that this was a way to find information, any information, all information, anywhere in the world. She pulled up a chair.
“Slow down a bit, Jerry. Show me how it works.”
Jeremy groaned. “I’m looking for cheat files for my new game.”
“You can do that anytime.”
Jeremy groaned again. Martha ignored him. He zoomed the mouse around the pad a few more times.
“What do you want
to know?”
“I want to find out about knitting. Get some patterns and that. Find other knitters.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes up so only the whites showed and turned his face toward her.
“They don’t have that stuff on computers.”
“Yes, they do. I know they do. Come on, Jerry.”
“What will you pay me?” Martha did not flinch.
“I’ll give you ten bucks to show me how it works. For one whole hour. But you’re working for me. You got that? Because I’m paying you. I’m paying you to teach me properly. So just start at the beginning, and go slow.”
“Fifteen.”
Martha pulled up closer. Jeremy felt Martha’s heat radiating onto his skinny arms. She was burning like the sun.
“Ten, ya lazy little bludger.” To Jeremy’s surprise she took a ten-dollar bill from her bra and waved it under his nose. “All you have to do is sit on your bum and talk. It’s not like you’re mowing the lawn or anything. If you don’t want it, I’ll ask that neighbor kid who was here before, Anthony, whatever his name is.”
Jeremy caved in.
“OK.” He looked at his watch. “But at eight-thirty-four exactly you have to stop and leave me alone.” He knew better than Martha that it would be hard to stop. He took a deep breath and spoke slowly and deliberately, as though quoting from a book.
“This is called the desktop. And all these little icons are like the drawers in your desk. And in the drawers are folders, and in each folder are programs or documents.” Martha was surprised at how clearly and logically he explained it. Jeremy in turn was surprised that Martha seemed to understand, though she had some trouble with the mouse. Martha had gone to the free lessons at the library the week before, but she didn’t tell Jeremy that.
After Martha had mastered search engines, downloaded some feather-stitch patterns that took her fancy, and looked at instructions for argyle socks, he showed her a chat room.
“You can call yourself anything you like. And never give your real address. Else they’ll come and get you one day, and rip off your stuff.”
“What should I call myself?’
“I dunno.”
“Madmartha,” keyed Jeremy, and looked around at Martha to see a fleeting dismay. Then she grinned.
There were three people in the chat room: Sockittome from Canada, Wendy in the UK, and Fiddlesticks in New Zealand. Martha was pink with excitement.
“Get Madmartha to write this,” said Martha. “How do you get a knitted horse to stand up by itself?”
“No one will know that.”
“Do it.”
Jeremy was bored, but he did as he was told. He was watching the clock at the corner of the screen. A reply ap peared from Fiddlesticks in New Zealand. Martha clapped her hands and started to read aloud.
“’How big is it?’ Tell her it’s as big as—hey, what happened?”
The screen flickered and the desktop reappeared. Jeremy had closed the browser. Martha stared at the screen.
“Time’s up. It’s eight-thirty-five. I gave you one minute for free. You owe me ten bucks.”
Martha handed over the ten dollars with a peculiar look on her face. She stood up and put her chair back under the table. Then she took his face in her hand, turning it so she could look him in the eye. She squeezed his cheeks in a pincer grip so that his mouth puffed into fish lips.
“Do you know what, Jeremy Big Fat Joker? That is the first time I have ever talked to someone in another country. And I wanted the answer to that question because I’ve been having trouble with my horse. You can play computers any bloody old time you like, here or at your place, and I hardly ever get a chance. You are a giant green snot.” She reached out and pressed the big button on the computer. She wasn’t sure what it did, but it looked like a good bet. The screen died. She looked at her watch.
“Well, look at that. Eight-thirty-six, and I’m thinking you need an early night. There are some magazines under that coffee table if you want to read for a while. But no more computer, that’s for sure.”
She thought he would protest, but he didn’t. He looked shamefaced. Good. Let him learn to respect his elders. When he meekly shut the bedroom door she turned on the computer again. Eventually she remembered how to manage searches. She couldn’t find the chat room again, but she had fun frolicking through knitting sites.
October
IT WAS A LONG WAY to Wollongong, on the east coast. Sandra had traveled a day early to avoid the six A.M. flight, but it took most of the day to get there all the same. The grumpy cab driver, then that unexplained delay at the airport. Sandra scored a window seat—she liked to be tucked out of the way of food carts and passengers—and the seat next to her was empty. But the aisle seat was occupied by a young businessman with a laptop who, though he looked like an experienced traveler, was distinctly agitated during takeoff and landing. His nervousness was contagious. She could hear a loose buzzing noise behind the window next to her head. Was the plane about to disintegrate? Then the wait in Sydney for the transit bus, the long traffic-slowed ride to Wollongong. In the stuffy university flat, her presence seemed no more significant than a beetle’s. She threw her bags on the bed and opened the windows to let in the breeze. Her first conference since Jack’s death. No one to call and say she had safely arrived.
She wasn’t giving a paper. “Just going for the ride,” she had said to Kate. “It’s textiles based—‘Material Girls: Fabric and Feminism’—though I’m more interested in the history.” She would not confess, even to Kate, that of all the events in the four-day program it was the daylong knitting workshop that had captured her attention. Although she had never been good with her hands, she wanted to have another try. Some inner self was dissatisfied. Perhaps handwork of some kind would answer it.
Sandra had found that she was losing interest in words. She could barely articulate to herself the sense of widening gap, a crevasse between what she wanted to say and what she could express, the yearning for which she had no language. Words had always been enough in the past; words, she had frequently said to her students, could do anything, take you anywhere. In the beginning was the Word. Words had no limitations; with words you could tunnel through mountains of theory, construct arguments like suspension bridges. She would recount her joy as a six-year-old discovering that the words she spoke were only one language, that there were hundreds of other ways of saying the same thing, often with more nuance.
Language and literacy, she said to her students, were a powerful combination, giving access to all the information in the world. Words were energy, dynamic: they moved around, through, over, under. At this juncture she would turn and write on the board, “over my head,” “think things through,” “understated,” and invite further contributions from the class.
Sandra was a word gobbler. In her childhood she had read compulsively, everything from cereal boxes to her father’s law books. All her life she had stuffed words into herself—books, articles, conferences, workshops. At times her brain ached with distension. Her whole body was pinched and pinned by words: the backache from being too long at the computer, the pain of hands pounding at the keyboard. She had been making and unmaking words her whole life, floods of words that threatened to overflow the poor channels she made for them and spill across the flat Australian plains of her life, swirling with mud and debris. There were times she wished she could stop the flood, wished there were another way to say things.
She dragged a heavy, student-proof steel chair out onto the balcony, ordered food from a take-away, and sat in the evening with an orange juice poured from “breakfast provided.”
But the fact was that words had their limitations. There were some things in life, feelings, experiences, for which there were no names. There were no words for the joy she had shared with Jack, and no words for losing him. No words for this mindlessness, this absence.
Jack had enjoyed words, too, but Jack was different. If Sandra was awash with words, Jack had nurtured his.
His words were short and stumpy, firmly rooted. Not often bitter. And Jack was funny; he had thrown his sense of the absurd like a life preserver to Sandra when her rivers of words threatened to drown her. Jack’s words, slow grown, nourished by deep silences, were rarely wasted. His first draft was almost always his last. Sandra had to sift and strain, edit the flotsam and jetsam that poured willy-nilly with the intended meaning. Revise, revise, she told her students, and followed her own advice. But she could find no words at all for this inner space, the vacuum inside the hard, bright glass of her existence. She hadn’t written anything since the onset of Jack’s illness, relying instead on old habits, old secondhand words for her lectures. Her teaching had become dishonest.
She had not slept well the night before her departure for Wollongong and went to bed early. The mattress was bumpy, her hip hurt. And then something started stinging her face. She slapped at it a few times before turning the light on to find that her sheet and pillow were covered with tiny black moving spots. They were too small to distinguish legs. Where had they come from? Had she brushed a web on the balcony, dislodged a nest of baby spiders?
She threw back the sheet and looked for telltale signs, but there were none. She squashed as many as she could see, leaving smears like pen marks on the white sheets, some of them dark red with her blood. She tried again to sleep.
It was impossible. They were in her hair now, crawling on her scalp, and there seemed to be more than before. It was a nightmare; she was tired, half crazy with lack of sleep. Her face burned and itched. At three in the morning she showered and washed her hair, put on fresh clothes, and remade the bed. For half an hour she had relative peace, then the crawling started again. Finally, as it grew light, the sensations diminished. She slept for an hour but awoke scratching her face. The black spots had disappeared, but her face was red and swollen with evidence. She showered again, ate a Granny Smith from the fridge, and plastered on her makeup thickly to cover the welts.
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