by Amity Gaige
“Charlie?” he called into the dark living room. “You there?”
She did not respond, but he heard her breathing. He heard her teeth against the glass. The last of the orange sun could be seen through the trees in the orchard.
“I think you forgot the tonic,” he said.
He stepped into the darkness also and searched for the light switch, but he could not find it. He kicked the leg of a chair. Then, swiftly and completely, he felt as if he was in his parents’ house, walking inside through the darkness of his parents’ house as a boy. He tried resisting the sensation but instead the years rushed away and left him eating a peanut butter sandwich in that distant kitchen, rain falling softly outside. In his ear, the ticking of that old familiar clock shaped in the face of a cat.
Then, standing trapped in the middle of darkness, the memory completely revealed itself. For this is what had happened, then, in the darkness: his foot had struck something. Not a chair. Something else. He looked down, the shape emerging out of shadows. The peanut butter sandwich tumbled through the air and fell soundlessly beside his mother’s body. Her eyes closed and her face slightly greasy with makeup, she wore atop her head the little green hat he’d given her for Christmas. It was as if she had gotten dressed up and then died there on the floor, after arranging herself with arms crossed over her heart. Staggering, gasping, he backed away. He felt pain in the back of his head and realized he had backed into the wall trying to get away from the body, and then he lurched to his left and knocked a lamp off the table, which flashed blue as it crashed to the floor. Just then his mother’s eyes opened. She turned her head to the side and smiled at him.
It’s all right, Buddy, she said, sitting up. It’s all right. I was just pretending.
A lamp lit the room.
“It’s dark in here,” Charlotte murmured, turning back to the window.
Clark pushed himself away from the wall. His eyes adjusted, the room reassembled, and he clearly saw now the figure of Charlotte sitting in a chair by the window in lamplight. His hairline was damp with sweat. Cautiously, he pressed his foot around on the carpet.
“You all right?” she said, not turning around.
He fell into a chair beside her. Mother is dead, he said to himself. Everyone who is dead is dead. And there’s nobody here but us. The rest is a trick of the mind. He looked at Charlotte. The sun had gone all the way down by then. He could not imagine a single approach to the story.
PRETENDING
Clark sank into a chair in the back of the room and looked around. At the front of the room, Gordon Stanberry’s face was illuminated by the overhead projector. Scrawled on the blackboard behind him were the words “Welcome Back to School.”
Looking around, Clark found his colleagues vaguely unfamiliar. Who were these tanned, sexually-satisfied-looking people? During the school year, these same women were stiff and white-lipped, and Clark had often sat alone in the faculty room to avoid their tense, spittily, salad-flecked chatter. Now he could hardly recognize them. They lay against the children’s desks with their large brown arms, sometimes casting backward looks at him, smiling and curious, as if they had just realized he was a man. He was having a difficult time listening to Stanberry, who was engaged in a very complicated recitation of rules and regulations for the impending school year, vast in its variation: Red day lunch at noon, Green day no gym, Orange day fire drill, Yellow day let’s all take our pants off. Clark stared out the window.
Things were getting worse by the minute. The room was small and close, and his breath started coming faster, and he briefly indulged the conviction that Stanberry had barred the door. Red day yellow day ah ha ha ha ha. Only that morning, when Clark had to get out of bed for the in-service day, did he realize what a tremendous feat getting out of bed could be, a feat for the gods. He snapped to attention. Would anyone notice? Would anyone notice the bags under his eyes and the expression of pure panic? He felt possessed.
Several nights previous, his sense of disorientation in the house had become so strong that he called his sister, Mary, who under almost no circumstance was a sympathetic ear. He wanted to inquire very discreetly if she had been having trouble sleeping too, if she had been having some resultant questions about the properties of sleep versus waking, if she had felt not like Mary but like some uncooperative actor playing the part of Mary? Had she heard sneezing in her pantry? Contented burping down the hall? Did she feel like she was going a weensy bit nuts herself? But when he called, her belligerent husband, Jerome, had answered the phone by shouting Yes? Yes? and after quickly hanging up, Clark pictured an enormous hairy hand reaching into Jerome’s bedroom window and dragging him out by the foot. How he had managed to hide all this from Charlotte was beyond him. He wanted to believe that she heard things in the house too. But if not, what? The blinking, uncomprehending stare. The loneliness of the truth. You’re crazy.
“Clark?”
He raised his head. Standing over him was Mrs. Ormerod, the aged health teacher.
Clark looked around him.
“Are we done?” he said.
Mrs. Ormerod laughed. There wasn’t anybody left in the room.
“God,” said Clark, rubbing his eyes.
“Some daydream you must’ve been having,” said Mrs. Ormerod. “Either that or a Stanberry-induced coma.” The old lady leaned against Clark’s desk, shaking her head. “Listen. Let’s go. Why don’t you give Mrs. O a ride? I’m out your way.”
Clark looked up at Mrs. Ormerod’s cap of white hair. He liked Mrs. Ormerod. She had a truncated plastic torso she carried under her arm during the school year, with little red ovaries and a real anal opening through which she occasionally thrust, for some pedagogical reason or another, bottle cleaners. She had been one of the few teachers who was nice to him the previous winter when he’d taken over for the ailing Mr. St. Paul. Clark nodded, and they walked through the empty halls into the bright late-summer sunlight.
They drove together past the small houses of Clementine, past the corner stores with kids holding orange and purple freeze-pops and staring as they passed, winding their way up out of the small concavity in which the town was built. People sat clustered in the shade of small trees, reaching into coolers, talking softly. Each street was like a sovereign nation, and people looked normal and cheerful separately, but when you put it all together, the town didn’t quite make sense to Clark. Two children on bicycles darted out across the street.
“You like our little town so far?” asked Mrs. Ormerod.
“Sure,” said Clark, braking hard. He nodded his head. He thought hard about what to say.
“It’s rough to be the new people. Hard to break in.”
“True,” said Clark. “That’s true.” Clark looked out the window, then glanced over at Mrs. Ormerod. “Hey,” he said. “Mrs. Health Teacher. I’ve got a question for you.”
“Shoot,” said the old lady. “Is it about sex?”
“Not really,” said Clark. “Is there any sort of illness that has—” he smirked as if to discredit his own question, “hallucination as a symptom?”
“Sure,” said Mrs. Ormerod. “Senility, for example.”
“No, no,” said Clark. “For somebody my age. What if somebody, say, my age, is confused a lot. He isn’t sleeping well, so he mopes around all day. You know. Sometimes he’s so tired he can hardly even listen to what anybody’s saying. And his mind is lazy and kind of apathetic and follows any crazy thought that comes along. I mean some really crazy thoughts…”
“Well,” said Mrs. Ormerod. “Is there particular hardship in his life? Particular events? Stress?”
“No. Not anymore, that is. Why?”
“Well, maybe he’s just sad.”
“Sad?” laughed Clark. “Sad?”
“Stressed-out. Pushed. And probably pretty tired from, you know, not sleeping. Sleeplessness can induce hallucination.” Mrs. Ormerod laughed back uncertainly. She withdrew a Kleenex from her sleeve and wiped it across her brow.
Suddenly Mrs. Ormerod leaned forward and peered through her glasses.
“Will you look at that,” she said, pointing.
They were coming up quickly behind a small, motorized vehicle on the shoulder, going at a dangerously slow speed. The rider of the vehicle turned around and blinked against the wind, pasting her hair back with one hand.
“Oh my God,” said Clark.
“Sure is a strange thing to do,” said Mrs. Ormerod. “Ride a tractor in a nice dress. Now why would a person do a strange thing like that?”
Clark rubbed his hand hard against his brow.
“You know that lady?”
“Yes,” said Clark. “That’s my wife.”
“That’s your wife? On that little tractor?”
“It’s a lawn mower,” said Clark.
Mrs. Ormerod opened her mouth. Then she stuck her head out the window and brought it back in, just as they blew past.
“What in heaven’s name is she doing on the road with a lawn mower?” marveled Mrs. Ormerod, looking back.
Clark didn’t say anything.
“Well for Pete’s sakes stop,” cried the old lady. “Back up. Let’s ask her.”
Clark brought the car to a stop, then rolled backward until pulling even with the tractor mower. Charlotte sat straight and primly upon it with both hands on the wheel and her purse hanging from her shoulder. Clark rolled down his window.
“Charlotte?” he said.
She looked over at him. It was Charlotte, all right.
“Hello, Clark,” she said, rolling past.
Clark pulled forward. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Hello, Charlotte!” shouted Mrs. Ormerod from the passenger seat. “It’s so nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you. We love having your husband at our school!”
Charlotte nodded and waved. They were moving slowly alongside each other, the mower chugging along the shoulder. Oncoming cars flew past with open, staring faces in them.
“What are you doing on that tractor?” called Mrs. Ormerod.
“It’s a sit-down mower,” said Charlotte. “A Power C-465 with an adjustable rotor.”
“Well, it’s very nice.”
“Clark got it at the Agway. It was very expensive. We never use it, so…”
“So…” said Clark.
“So I decided to get out and take it for a spin. It’s kind of like a second car, really.”
“OK, get off,” said Clark. “Pull over and get off right now.”
“No,” said Charlotte. “I’m doing something.”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m having fun,” said Charlotte archly.
“You know what?” shouted Mrs. Ormerod over the wind, “I ought to go get myself one of those!”
The two women shared a laugh.
Clark steadied his voice. “Cut it out,” he said. “You are not crazy.”
“Oh yeah?” Charlotte leaned over close enough to put her hand on the window. Her seed pearl necklace jostled against her neck and her chin trembled. “I’ve got my problems too, Clark. I’ve got things that need attention too. You don’t even notice anymore.”
“Watch out,” shouted Clark.
Charlotte jerked the mower to the right, just missing the pothole. She looked back. “Jeez,” she said. “This thing handles nicely.”
“People,” Clark rasped. “People will see you.”
“People!” cried Charlotte, her purse strap falling down around her wrist. “I don’t know people. I don’t know anybody. Nobody talks to me. This town is creepy! Nobody talks to me or says hello or asks me how I am. Not once! I live on a deserted island, Clark. With you.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Are you all right, dear?” asked Mrs. Ormerod, reaching out her hand.
“She’s not crazy,” said Clark numbly. “She’s just pretending.”
“That’s right,” said Charlotte. “I never get to be the crazy one.”
“Who on earth would want to be crazy?” crowed Mrs. Ormerod.
“Don’t knock it ’til you try it,” said Charlotte.
Behind them, several cars had gathered and were trailing at a snail’s pace. The driver in the front car leaned on his horn.
“Fine,” Clark said in a low voice, setting his jaw. “All right. You want me to just drive away and leave you? Is that what you want? Since you’re so completely alone?”
Charlotte looked off at the passing trees. She smoothed down the fluttering collar of her dress.
“No,” she said quietly. “At the present moment, I’m lost.”
They drove on next to each other for another moment. Nobody said anything. They began to climb a hill.
“Hey. Lean forward a little,” suggested Clark.
In his rearview mirror, he could see a growing line of cars going up the hill behind them, windshields glinting. The man behind them tried to pass, and was forced back into line by an oncoming truck.
“Up here,” said Clark, pointing. “Up here you can take a right. Go all the way up and take another right. Do you know your way home from that little farm? Near to the TV tower?”
“Yes,” said Charlotte. “All right. Yes. I think so.”
“All right,” said Clark, looking out at her warily.
“All right,” said Charlotte.
They drove along side by side for another moment.
“So I’ll see you at home?” said Clark.
“Yes,” said Charlotte. “I’ll see you.”
“So nice to meet you!” cried Mrs. Ormerod.
“You too,” said Charlotte.
He could see her in his rear view mirror, rising up over the crest of the hill, gripping the small wheel. The way she looked, going so slowly, it was like a mirage. A distortion. Like somebody rising up out of heat.
THE NEXT LIFE
The seniors did not swim in the water so much as wrestle with it. They slapped at the surface with long, ropy arms. They swam with their heads buried in the water, legs trailing behind in a dead way, and when they swam the backstroke, they reached behind themselves tentatively, as if walking backward down a long staircase. Sometimes a bathing cap would sink under the surface altogether, only to reappear after a long moment, followed by a hardened paunch or a set of breasts cresting out like a chain of islands. Watching them from the poolside grass, Clark decided that in the next life, he wanted to be born with gills. Underwater, as in dreams, a body has no weight and no consequence. In the next life, he didn’t want to be bound to dirt and houses and names and other things that sink.
These days, these very last days of summer, Clark slept for one or two hours before sunrise, at which point he would rise and dress for the pool. He liked the house in the early morning. It was very quiet then. No coughing. No crying. The voices, the spirits—whatever they were—were late to get up, almost as if they were just regular, lazy people. They left him alone in the morning.
He’d leave the house before Charlotte awoke. He had become ashamed of himself, but shame was not a teaching feeling, nor was it sociable. When he left Charlotte asleep, pressed to her side of the bed, hair trailing behind her on the pillow, she sometimes smiled in her dreams, and it made him glad to see her smile, and he also knew she was smiling in a reality untroubled by his presence.
That morning, towel over his shoulder, he’d walked through the yard, past the lawn mower with its For Sale sign hung askew from the handle, and down the middle of the road to the busy street at the foot of the hill. He could hear his bare feet slap across the macadam. It h
ad not yet rained, and the ends of the leaves were beginning to curl up and yellow.
He arrived to the pool just as the seniors paraded in, in full dress, the men wearing seersucker pants and blue shirts thin and flat as rice paper. The women’s hair, permed into fine gray aureoles, was rather like clusters of heliotrope. It really got to Clark, how they were dressed up to go to the pool. Clark himself had come shirtless, which now struck him as obscene. In an hour and a half, it would no longer be Senior Swim but Public Swim, and the whole raucous town, people like him who had their whole lives left to swim, their whole lives to take their shirts off, would come and steal this little peace.
The seniors did not speak much to each other, and they were not friendly to him. This made sense. Why should dying people be friendly, when they can finally be however they please?
He had not come to bother anybody. He sat on the grass, looking down at his feet. He watched the pool water through his toes. Late the previous night, his four millionth sleepless night that summer, it occurred to him that he had never thought about death. He never thought about what death was really like. As a child, death is introduced to a person in black, ragged cloaks—a kind of villain. Then, some night, some sleepless night in that person’s twenty-ninth year, watching the moon rise in the sky like some fabulous prize, it occurs to him that death is just the other thing that can happen. One of two indifferent options. He had acquired a new appreciation for the morbidity of philosophers and artists. He had acquired an appreciation for the attractiveness of death to crazy people. He looked up at the sky. It seemed very close. Where did the sky begin if not right above your head? All the dead walking on top of your head and shoulders, murmuring and conferring and coughing. His own mother walking up and down his back, mutely shouting her instructions, as the audience in the cineplex cautions the hero. He moved his stiff neck under the weight.
A child walked onto the pool grounds, carrying a pink towel tied with a string. He hesitated at the mouth of the gate, talking to himself, scouting the grassy ridge. Once he fixed on a spot, he walked along the deck with his eyes on it. He did not walk so much like a boy, but more gravely, like someone who spends a great deal of time gazing at equations. Under his thick glasses, his eyes appeared large and rabbit-like, and his hair still showed the tines of a comb. It was the little boy from the volleyball court. Judy’s brother—James Nye.
