Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Quickly M.R. said—as M.R. invariably said, at such times—(for M.R. could be relied upon to be gracious even when despondent, rash-ridden, and suicidal, the “good” woman in Andre Litovik’s snarled life who would one day be suitably rewarded)—that he should leave of course. As soon as he felt he must leave.

  She was not disappointed! She was not even surprised.

  And it was true, M.R. was “out of the woods”—discharged from Telemetry that morning and moved via wheelchair, though she could certainly have walked, to the general hospital on a lower floor.

  Released of his vow to remain with her Andre Litovik was both relieved and edgy, uneasy. You could see—(M.R. could see)—that his ears rang with the shrill percussive accusations of the wife—even as he seized her hand in a gesture meant to be playful and rubbed it between his two big hands.

  His breath smelled of something raw—garlic?—and the frost-eyes, netted in tiny broken capillaries—were alert, antic.

  “I don’t want to give you up, Meredith. But you can—you should—give me up.”

  “Oh but why—why would I do that?”

  She’d meant to be light, playful—but the words had come out wrong.

  So often, the words came out wrong.

  “It won’t be forever, I think. Maybe not so much longer.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Almost, M.R. was frightened. For did she want to live with Andre Litovik—really?

  It was intimacy that was the great risk. Not passion, yearning, envy, even sorrow—but intimacy, with another person. Andre had lived intimately if not always happily with his mysterious wife and his mysterious son and he had not lived with M.R. in such a way, not ever.

  And M.R. had not lived with any living person intimately since—she could not recall.

  “Andre? What do you mean—‘it won’t be forever.’ ”

  “Which words do you have difficulty comprehending, my dear? It—won’t—be—or forever?”

  Glaring at her, in a pretense of indignation that masked, M.R. knew well, a sudden unease, Andre took up his beloved New York Times, shook the pages and stared at columns of newsprint. The terrestrial life was so utterly foolish, vain, absurd and yet absorbing—no traveler to distant nebulae could resist.

  He pretended to read—in fact, he was reading—and M.R. lay carefully back in the bed staring at the IV line dripping fluid into her bruised arm thinking This too is a kind of marriage. This is not negligible.

  Though she was still very tired she felt elated, suddenly.

  He had come to her, in the crisis. That was the important fact, he’d come to her.

  Of course, he was going away again. But he would not remain in the house on Tremont Street for long. Rarely did Andre Litovik remain in one place for long. The wife might claim him, and the damaged son, but Andre couldn’t quite be captured by them, either.

  For hadn’t he told her, he’d been obsessed with mapping the Universe since the age of sixteen. Hadn’t he told her, nothing is so real for an individual accursed as he was as travel into the Universe—recording, calculating, mapping, predicting.

  One of his less technical papers was titled “The Evolving Universe: Origin, Age & Fate.”

  She’d tried to read it. She’d understood virtually nothing.

  She opened her eyes, the man was gone.

  Oh yes—frankly, this was a relief!

  Always a relief when the astronomer-lover departed. For now the woman could be herself—whatever diminished self.

  For now the woman would have, at least, enough oxygen to breathe.

  She’d forgotten to thank him, in her surprise that he’d come to see her—he’d brought flowers, very likely from the hospital gift shop.

  A hydrangea plant with bright dyed-looking blue blossoms like paper—near-identical to the hydrangea plant that Oliver Kroll had once brought her, that had dropped its leaves, turned to sticks and died.

  Though, if M.R. had known how to plant it correctly, and cultivate it, as Agatha might have done, the plant might be living still, and coming into blossom.

  The room was filling up with flowers. Speedy recovery cards. Too many to count. One of the potted plants—not a hydrangea, in fact—was from Oliver Kroll: Thinking of you & will try to see you soon. Oliver K.

  Another potted plant, which M.R. discovered belatedly, on the eve of her discharge from the hospital, was from her colleague G. Leddy Heidemann—exquisitely beautiful/sickly-smelling calla lilies.

  Sorry to hear of your illness & will remember you in my prayers & hope for your speedy recovery.

  Gordon H.

  Gordon H.! M.R. wouldn’t have known who this was except that there was, beneath the brief name, the man’s more formal name as well as his (endowed) University title.

  Was the card mocking? Were the calla lilies chosen for their sickly smell?

  Who could know?

  Mudwoman Bride.

  June 2003

  Because I am in love. Love is a slow bleed.

  At last, Mudwoman was being married.

  So many years in waiting! So many years in yearning.

  Now when it was almost too late, Mudwoman had been chosen.

  The bridegroom was one of the long-term patients in the Herkimer VA Hospital. He’d been a corporal in the U.S. Army in the Gulf War of the previous decade and had been terribly burnt and disfigured in the service of his country and his eyes—(if you could bear to look closely you could see from what remained that these were beautiful dark-hazel eyes threaded with blood-filaments)—had melted into his misshapen face.

  In the second year of his deployment he’d been so maimed. Ninety percent of Corporal Coldham was grafted skin, metal pegs, very fine titanium wires, and aluminum-and-plastic. His right arm was truncated at the elbow and held a hook like a sickle. Both his legs were truncated at the knees and fitted with prostheses. In his manually operated wheelchair he was a proud figure in U.S. Army corporal’s dress uniform and he was shorter than his bride by half but his shoulders were wide as those of a young ox.

  His hair had been singed from his scalp that was still pink like not-quite-cooked meat. His manner was tense with hope. As a lover he was tentative, tender. The fingertips of his remaining hand were light and fluid as the rapid flowing of tiny silver fish and with these fingertips the bridegroom “read” the bride’s face.

  You are beautiful to me

  The bridegroom did not speak in actual words but in a silvery flurry of sound. The bridegroom’s mouth was scar tissue that moved stiffly like calcified glue.

  The bride was eager to be wed. The bride was not a young girl any longer.

  Shivering as the bridegroom ran his fingertips over her face. She had to stoop to the bridegroom in the wheelchair, that he might run his fingertips over her face.

  I love you

  His ears had melted away also and in their places at the side of the misshapen head were whorls of twisted flesh. Holes in the molten-looking head like nostrils, seemingly unprotected.

  Mudwoman was shy. To speak into such ear-holes you must choose your words with care.

  Mudwoman was a tall gawky bird-girl. A bride at six feet in high-heeled shoes that teetered beneath her though the heels were old-fashioned and thick—the toes were rounded. And her legs were bare—muscled calves, stubbled with coarse dark hairs.

  How embarrassed Mudwoman was as a bride, without stockings!

  Hoping no one would notice.

  As in high school they’d noticed. Hair-y legs! Hair-y legs! came the hilarious muttered chant.

  Nothing personal for there were other girls so afflicted.

  Hair-y legs!

  The bride was being fitted into a stiff article of clothing like armor—a corset?—tightly laced up behind. Over her narrow hips, flattening her breasts, ever tighter!—the bride c
ould scarcely breathe.

  The wedding dress slipped over her head—carefully!—was of a translucent papery material, that would easily tear, or burst into flames. Layers of impracticably long and flaring and lace-riddled skirts and a five-foot train of papery lace dragging behind.

  The bride was being dressed by strangers with deft poking hands who behaved as if they were not strangers but had the right to touch her intimately. The name they called her was M—but it was not a name she knew.

  Muffled laughter, ribaldry. The women were happy for one of their kind being married though their laughter was sharp-edged, for it was Mudwoman being married.

  She believed that these women were supposed to be persons whom she’d known as girls but their faces too were melted and their names had long since vanished.

  They laughed at her for being in love—was that it?

  This wound that would not stop bleeding.

  In the season of her disgrace she’d been a volunteer at the Herkimer VA Hospital. That was how she and the corporal had met, very likely.

  She’d come to the VA hospital in the southern Adirondacks with her father Konrad who did volunteer work there and at the Carthage Vets Co-op. As a young man Konrad had been a conscientious objector in wartime for Konrad was a Quaker-pacifist and yet stricken with belated guilt, that other young men had gone in his place, out of ignorance and innocent enlisting in the military that he might be spared. And so, Konrad who was retired gave of his time and his spirit to the surviving-but-maimed vets in residence at the VA hospital and to the co-op in Carthage, on a cobblestone back street near the Beechum County Courthouse.

  Such a decision of her pacifist-father’s did not surprise Mudwoman who was beyond all surprise.

  Each Saturday driving with Konrad to the VA hospital in Herkimer.

  Some Saturdays, to the Herkimer County Psychiatric Facility which was just three miles farther.

  It was a good life. It was a life of service.

  It was the life that had happened.

  It was the life that happens to some of us, for whom a richer life has not been possible.

  It was a life in which you could sleep for ten, twelve, fourteen hours a night.

  Because I am in love Mudwoman wanted to plead. Love is a slow bleed.

  How it had happened precisely that Mudwoman was marrying Corporal Suttis Coldham she did not know but somehow, it had happened. And now Mudwoman was absolved at last of her desperate love for the other—the other man whose name she could not recall.

  The astronomer-lover, who had passed out of her orbit into the farther ranges of the Universe and if they were ever to meet again, light-years would have passed.

  A woman learns I can love one of them. If one of them will love me.

  The bridegroom could hear, to a degree. But the bride could not think what words to say to him, that would not be misunderstood.

  With his stiff-glue lips the corporal spoke.

  The helicopter was shot out of the sky. I woke in the hospital—I guess. I’m not really awake now.

  This is my dream, I guess.

  Corporal Coldham was much kinder than the other. He did not speak with the swagger and humor and threat of the other. Too long had Mudwoman endured the strain of a man of such intensity and so incandescent a soul and so it was a relief to her, the corporal was a blind man in a wheelchair with a melted-away face and no neck who would not judge her.

  This is my dream the corporal said. I am sorry for the wicked things that I did, the many lives I have taken, to bring this punishment to me.

  Mudwoman protested no, she was sure that it was her responsibility and not his. Those citizens who remain at home, whether pacifists or otherwise, while others, called “soldiers,” go to war in their place . . . All are responsible.

  But the corporal began to tremble, and to stammer.

  No. The many creatures I killed, in my traps and with my guns. The many creatures gutted with my knife. This is my punishment.

  There came a gurney on rickety wheels, that was meant to be a portable altar. Very awkwardly the bridegroom in his wheelchair and the bride teetering beside him were presented at the altar.

  There was a gathering of people, mostly in folding chairs though many were standing about in the aisles, smoking and laughing together as if they had wandered in from another place.

  The bride was frightened of misstepping and tearing her papery white gown. She was scarcely able to breathe for the corset squeezing her like a python’s grip. The bridegroom held himself erect as he could manage in the wheelchair in his U.S. Army corporal’s dress uniform.

  His eyes melting into the sides of his head gave an unnerving impression of a fish that can see in opposing directions simultaneously though in fact the corporal was blind.

  Yet possessed of blind-sight, the bride saw. For if she drew her hand before his face, his reaction seemed to indicate that yes, he could see—something.

  Shyly Mudwoman asked of the corporal Do you love me?

  Tenderly the man with no face said Yes. I am the one who loves you.

  It was kind of him not to have said Yes. I am the only one who loves you.

  It was kind of him not to have said Yes. I am the only one who dragged you from the mud, that was meant to have been your fate.

  It was time for Mudwoman to declare her love, too. But—the words stuck in her throat like mud.

  I love I love

  This was a life of service she’d embarked upon. Serving others does not involve love but only the availability of others to be served.

  Like a small boat without a rudder, or an oar. Where the stream takes you, you are taken.

  Not just stockings were missing from the bride, now the old-fashioned round-toed high-heeled shoes had vanished also.

  Her long narrow feet were bare and exposed, caked with dirt. Grime in her toenails. Her underarms had sprouted coarse dark hairs.

  Already the paper-gown had begun to tear. Already the elaborate lace train was torn and soiled.

  In an adjacent room, a vast hall, another ceremony was being performed. A woman sang “God Bless America” in a bold quavering voice.

  Now it was clear—someone was missing.

  At the altar, there was no one to marry the couple.

  Hurriedly to the altar there came the man—the father—to give away the bride. She saw Konrad’s kindly creased face, his winking smile and his eyes that forgave her. With a little sob of gratitude she linked her arm through his arm.

  It was Konrad who performed the wedding ceremony. Konrad in an old shiny-dark suit that hung on his shoulders, sizes too large. His silvery-white whiskers sprang from his jaws with a look of great dignity and pride.

  Do you take this man?

  Do you take this woman?

  Richer or poorer, sickness and health till death do you part.

  God bless this union.

  For even in Hades there are such unions. And blessed by God.

  The bridegroom was groping for the bride—his single hand was large as a club but the fingertips were gentle. He would pull blushing Mudwoman down to him, to mash his eager wet mouth against hers.

  It is what must be done to marry, to mate. To prolong the species.

  Happiness crept over her like paralysis.

  Mudwoman Finds a Home.

  June–July 2003

  . . . a secret weakness. Not a one of us has been spared.

  Often now he spoke to her. In places of solitude in which she hid herself like a wounded animal licking the poison-abscesses that have not—yet—killed it.

  He winked, and lay a finger against his nose. He spoke in a playful lowered voice so that Agatha would not hear.

  His voice—oh, she loved his voice!—so subtle the commingled tones of irony, teasing, solicitude and warmth fused together as in the notes
of stringed instruments—violins, cellos—conjoined in a single bar of music.

  As a girl, she hadn’t asked. What is the secret weakness.

  She had not wanted to be told the Neukirchens’ secret weakness because of course, Mudgirl had always known.

  “Daddy! Hello.”

  Or, more likely: “Konrad? Hello . . .”

  On the Convent Street bridge she began to shake.

  She saw that the bridge had been partly renovated: a new grid-floor, replacing the badly rusted old grid-floor; new steel supports shining in the sun like exposed nerves; the pedestrian walkway fortified by an inner railing . . . She was sure that this inner railing hadn’t existed, years ago.

  If you walked across the Convent Street bridge, traffic rushed past just inches away.

  And the outer railing was shaky. You would not dare lean against the outer railing.

  Below, the river was wide as she recalled, moving swiftly in little spasms of white froth and long rippling snaky currents over submerged boulders. Its origins high in the Adirondacks were mysterious to her—hundreds of small tributaries and streams hurtling together, into the Black Snake River.

  “Konrad! I’m sorry, I’d meant to call . . .”

  Her lips were dry, scarcely could she speak aloud. And often her sentences trailed off, since she so distrusted speech.

  Since her collapse when a vivid display of Northern Lights had erupted inside her head and in the same instant were extinguished, she distrusted her own speech and the speech of others.

  It is all so provisional. It is all so temporary.

  Not information you can share with others, readily. Nor do others much want to hear from you such information.

  We are all so provisional . . . Temporary.

  She gripped the steering wheel firmly. She would overcome this sensation of shakiness, unease. For hadn’t Mr. Nash said admiringly of Meredith Neukirchen that she drove good as a man.

  Such small prides, like beads of a rosary recalled through a life.