“I can’t.”
“Okay,” she says. “Well.”
The slide shakes again, and I feel a solidness on either side of me. I peek, see two legs in light green doctor pants sticking out in front of mine.
“We’ll go down together,” she says, her breath warm in my ear. “Is that all right? I’ll hold on to you. We’ll go slow.”
“Okay.”
She puts her arms across my chest and drags me up onto her lap, my legs straight out on top of hers.
“You’re going to need to let go.” Like it’s no big deal, just the next thing to do, and I peel the fingers of one numb hand, then the other, free. For just a moment there’s panic—I am holding on to nothing—but she puts one warm hand over both of mine, holds them tight against my tummy.
“Okay,” she says. “One two three.”
On three, we are moving, my eyes shut again. She is right, we go slow; it feels like a long time that we are squeaking and shuddering along. There’s a lot of giggling from the ground. Finally we stop, and I open my eyes. We are at the bottom, the part where the slide flattens out, and there is a ring of kids staring at us.
“Good job,” says Lucy. I scramble off her lap and stumble a couple of steps on wobbly legs. She stands first on one leg and then the other, shaking down the cuffs of her pants that have bunched up from sliding.
I can’t believe she went down the slide. Right through my pee.
“Your pants,” I tell her, pointing to wet patches on the fronts of her thighs from where I was sitting. She looks down at them and laughs.
“These scrubs have seen much worse.” She talks just to me, as if no one else is here, although everyone in the park is watching. “I think we need some ice cream before we go back, what do you think?” She holds out her hand and I take it, and we walk through the parting crowd of kids.
“I don’t remember the right things,” I say when we’re walking back with our cones. Chocolate for me, mocha chip for her. I wanted the frozen lemonade in the green stripey cup, but they don’t start selling it until the first day of spring. That’s next week, Lucy said, and it was almost a promise.
“Memories can be funny,” she says.
“I’m trying.”
“I know.”
“What if I never remember?” I murmur it into the cold ball of ice cream.
“Well,” says Lucy. “Sometimes that’s how it goes. If you remember, then you remember. If not, then you just go forward.”
“Why am I staying in the hospital?”
A pause, then: “They’re just trying to find the right place for you to live.” She stops, crouches in front of me with a napkin. I close my eyes for the rough brush of the paper. “There’s chocolate up your nose, how did you do that.”
“Why can’t I go back to Clare?” Her face blooms in my mind.
“Who’s Clare?” The napkin slowing down, then moving away. I open my eyes; Lucy is looking puzzled.
“I live with her. Lived.” I know this is true, both live and lived. “I can go there.” It’s the first memory that has pulled me like a magnet, the first one I’ve wanted to keep. Somewhere there is a home, a place where I am loved and wanted.
“Clare who?”
“She lives on the hill near my school.” I can see the stone buildings, the fields. “She’ll be worried about me.”
“Good to know.” Lucy stands up again, her voice brisk and happy. “I’ll tell them that they need to find Clare.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
Clare
GLORIA AND I ARE ON our way to our doctors this morning, sitting next to each other in the transport van. Everyone at Oak Haven uses the same cluster of specialists. Mrs. Donovan, who has a neurology appointment, is across the aisle.
“Another Bed Bath & Beyond,” Gloria comments as we jolt over the potholes on the highway. “Have you been in one of those? Just between us, beyond means the kitchen.”
Roscommon is not ten miles from here, and yet it might as well be ten thousand; the van never takes us in that direction. I wonder if the cottage is still there, if it’s occupied, and if any of the things that I left are inside. The things I’ll never use again, the iron pots hanging on their hooks and the shed full of gardening tools. I like to think of them being used, but I suspect they are rust-flaked and woolly with cobweb, and that the house stands dark and empty. Eighteen years can cause a lot of ruin.
I shut the door that last day like it was any other day, without a hint of good-bye. Isn’t that always the case: we never know when things are ending. I was pulling on my gloves as I went down the front steps, and almost immediately slipped and broke my hip on the icy path. It was only luck that brought the postman by an hour or so later, toiling up the hill toward the just-built clump of houses at the top, his white truck jammed with Christmas catalogs and packages, or I might still be lying there.
“This was all wilderness,” says Gloria. “Remember?”
Indeed I do. Roads that used to be rude paths, that used to be nonexistent, are now orderly concrete thoroughfares populated with doughnut shops and nail salons. The Depression-abandoned factory buildings that hulked empty-eyed on the horizon for decades have now been torn down or rejuvenated into condos and offices. There are businesses that didn’t exist back when I was in the world: shops for mailing packages, stores for cell phones.
I’d been chopping firewood the day before I fell, but all anyone saw in the hospital was a little old lady. The social worker who evaluated me after my hip replacement had made no secret of her surprise that I’d been living on my own. Her voice was slightly curdled with reproof, as if I ought to have packed up my things and relinquished my care to the state when I turned eighty.
The doctors’ offices are in one of the converted factories, rough brick outside with the name of the mill painted in fresh white below the unused chimneys. Funny how certain words take on an undeserved cachet: this was probably a foul-smelling, deafening, asphyxiating place to work, but now Stewart Mills sounds posh.
“Industrial chic,” says Gloria, as if she’s reading my mind.
Inside, the building is all plastic and carpet and chopped-up spaces; from the doctors’ waiting room, you can hear a dentist’s drill through the thin partitioning wall.
“About the same,” says my doctor, reviewing my latest ultrasound. She turns the computer monitor to show me. The first time she’d shown me an ultrasound picture, I’d expected color and, well, a picture. Now I know better. She brushes the screen with her finger, naming the structures: here’s your heart—and this is your aorta. The image is grainy black and white and meaningless to me, but I understand the basics: that tunnel of black is a big artery, and the lakes of black are the chambers of my heart, and the mottled brightness on the shore of one of the lakes, cozying up to the wall of the tunnel, is the thing that doesn’t belong.
It’s not that the thing has moved; it’s that my body has expanded to embrace it. About the size of my little finger, it is part of me now; it’s been there much longer than my time on earth without it.
“Still no symptoms?” says the doctor. “No pain, shortness of breath, cough?” I shake my head. “Well, so far so good then.”
She’s made it clear, in a gentle but unflinching way, that this two-inch piece of wood will probably be the thing that takes my life. She’s explained that it’s embedded in the wall of the main artery coming out of my heart, and that someday, very likely without warning, the weakened vessel will burst. All my blood will spill into my chest cavity, in a few quick pumps of the heart muscle, and I will die. She’s kind; she doesn’t use words like burst or spill. But she couldn’t quite hide her excitement the first time she found it, a restrained doctorly thrill at the oddness of it, the diagnosis of something she hadn’t imagined possible. She hadn’t expected anything like it, although she’d seen the scar on my chest and I’d told her the story. You’ve had this in there how long? she’d asked me twice after the first ultrasound. Well,
it’s a bit of a miracle, isn’t it.
Everything else about me is stable too. No medication adjustments.
“You’re the healthiest patient in my practice, Clare,” the doctor pronounces. “If you’d never had this—event—I think you’d live forever.” She knows the event in its barest details. “See you in six months,” she says as the nurse leads me out to the waiting room.
Gloria’s cranky, nearly silent, on the ride back.
“That teenager told me I’m killing myself with salt,” she says, finally, when we are about a mile from Oak Haven. “It makes the fluids back up into my lungs. He said I’m drowning myself from the inside.”
The bus takes the corner hard; Mrs. Donovan’s walker skitters a few inches toward us across the aisle. Gloria puts a hand out to stop it as the vehicle straightens out.
“Is it too much to ask that the person telling me I’m going to die have one gray hair on his head?” She answers herself. “I don’t think so.”
We pass another doughnut shop, with its orange and pink sign. We have two more of them to pass before we reach Oak Haven. I tried one of their glazed doughnuts once; it had a pretty good taste, but was full of air and made the inside of my mouth slick, as though I had sucked on a spoonful of lard. But the Oak Haven staff can’t get enough of these doughnuts; there is always an open box in the common room.
“What does he expect me to do?” Gloria demands. “Throw away perfectly good food?” She’s had sausage at every breakfast in the last week, sneaking it in and dropping it onto her cardiac diet plate of scrambled egg whites.
“Well, maybe you could eat just a little at a time,” I suggest. “Sausage keeps.”
“I try.” She is close to tears. “But it reminds me of home.”
I know all about things that remind you of home, and the longing for them. I pass her a tissue from the folded mass of them I keep in the cuff of my sleeve.
“Drowning from the inside,” she says, removing her glasses. “What a thing to say.” I take the glasses from her lap before they slide off, and hold them while she blots her eyes. “What did your doctor say?” she asks, muffled, into the tissue.
I haven’t told Gloria about the splinter, and we haven’t gotten to the event in my oral history.
“No change.” I see she is fumbling on her lap for her glasses, and hand them to her. “I’m just really old.” She snuffles a laugh.
Is it worse or better that I’m not coasting down the long hill toward the end of life but instead could flick off like a light switch and die at any minute? I could go in the middle of a conversation. Probably better for me, worse for anyone who might be with me when that happens. Or for anyone who is aware it might happen: that foreknowledge would be an unpleasant burden to confer on another person. I’m not sure I’ll tell Gloria that part at all.
* * *
WHERE DID I leave off?
You were preparing for the high school entrance exams. You wanted to be Marie Curie.
Ah yes.
* * *
THE YEAR I turned ten, the country plunged into a dark tunnel. The Great Depression. Rhode Island had been sliding into it for a while—a mill closing here, a factory shutting down there—but when the real collapse came it was all at once and it was terrifying. Businesses of all kinds closed in a great rush, and day by day everything and everyone looked a little poorer, a little shabbier. Even with the four boys lost the year before I was born and the three that stayed babies in the stiff brown photographs on the mantel, that left two brothers and their wives and children, Michel, my parents, and me. A lot of mouths to feed. No one had an extra penny, and what pennies there were did not get spent on books. After a year or so of hanging on and spending savings, my father had to shutter the shop, and for the first time in my memory, he went out to work. He stayed away all day and came home dirty and taciturn.
In this bleak era my mother’s garden stopped being an indulgence. She’d always reaped huge harvests that far exceeded what even our large family could consume, and what she didn’t cook or give away she’d bottled, against my father’s protests at the prospect of what steam might do to the books. She simply opened the kitchen windows to let out the clouds of vapor, and each harvest added more rows of jars to the crude shelves along the walls in the basement. They stood a dozen deep on the wood, and then when the shelves were full, lined up below them, a friendly battalion along the cool earthen floor.
I can see now that it was a gift driven by sorrow. Thrust into a strange place surrounded by a language she did not know, she’d poured her grief and loneliness into that bit of ground, anointed it with her magic tea and transformed her sadness into bounty. And then when the world collapsed, my mother’s garden saved us. My brothers dug clams at the shore, and joined other men and boys fishing the river, but still some days we ate only from the cellar. We were humbled by the Depression, but we would not starve.
* * *
IT’S ODD THE things I remember, while so much else has slipped away. The dim jewel glow of the jars in the dark cellar. The shape of my father’s boots, cracked softly over the arch, where he used to leave them just inside the door. The cobbled street that ran in front of the bookshop, the stone domes washed by rain into a gleaming pattern. The cloud of lint rising from my brother Michel’s sweater as he pulled it off over his head, home from a long day at the mill. The bone-deep misery of cold from winter days and nights without wood or coal. That particular memory not so random. The body doesn’t forget cold like that.
* * *
INTO THAT LONG tunnel went my girlhood. Went all of us, trudging forward without knowing when it would end, if it would end. My father’s clean, soft hands hardened, collected and kept dirt under the fingernails, and all of us grew thinner and our clothes more threadbare, mendings done over previous mendings until the garments were as much darning thread as fabric. I stayed in school as long as I could, longer than I should have, until shame drove me away. What had seemed important before—my mother’s worries about my headstrong nature and my chances of marrying well, my own dreams of scientific discovery and academic glory—was meaningless in this new gray world. There could be no plan, no future. There was just today, and then the next today, and the next, like a string of dirty beads.
It seemed that one morning I was parsing sentences and the next I was at the bobbin scramble in front of the mill, crowding with the hopeful hordes as the foreman threw handfuls of hard cardboard bobbin tubes into the air. If you were lucky enough to grab one, and if the one you got had a paper curled inside with an X on it, that meant you worked that week. When the foreman began tossing, the crowd erupted. Boys dove and fought for the tubes. I was tall and caught one in midair; it was slapped out of my hand. I went home empty-handed from the first scramble, but rarely again after that.
I started as a doffer, replacing bobbins on the spinning frame, quick enough at that to be hired on as a regular. Weave room work paid a higher wage, but that was a lofty goal: grown women worked there, not girls. But one morning as we streamed into the mill, a foreman pointed to me and waved his arm toward the weaving-room doorway. I looked around and didn’t move—he couldn’t mean me. I was fourteen, had been there only a few months. I couldn’t see his expression behind the kerchief he wore over his lower face to keep from breathing the lint. He waved his arm again in a more emphatic arc: he did mean me. A current of grumbling broke out, audible even over the machines that had started up. Don’t mind them, said one of the back-boys as I passed. They’re jealous is all.
I was by far the youngest in the weaving room. The women didn’t greet me; the one who trained me demonstrated once, speaking rapidly without meeting my eyes, and then left me there. Old biddies, said the quill boy who’d been watching. He took the shuttle from me: Just push this out like so, push in a full one, hold here hold, now break it off and get the other ready. Although he could have been fired or docked for it, he stood with me and showed me the timing, until I could do it myself. Then he winked keep y
our eye out and ran to pull a quill from the loom beside me.
From then on I worked in the clackita-clackita-clackita roar of the machines, you can’t imagine how loud, turning between the two looms assigned to me, watching the shuttle, mist showering down from pipes above to dampen the lint. A workday lasted all day, fourteen hours, and it was mindless, thoughtless work. It needed to be: the body did the work, and a thought could impair the rhythm. A dropped stitch or smash would mean the fabric would be classed as a second, which paid half as much as a first.
When a group of weavers took a meal break they huddled together, gossiping and laughing; they did not look at or talk to me. Some of my old schoolmates worked in the spinning room, but they were cool to me now that I was a weaver. I began taking my shift break outside the back of the mill, on a tiny exterior staircase there. I would sit on the landing with an apple and a book. Many days there was no apple. I often found myself staring out over the open pages of my book, not reading or thinking, watching the traffic move along the streets while the sound of the mill thrummed through me.
A year of that, and then another. I was no longer the bookseller’s cherished daughter, snatched back from death by the Holy Ghost for an important purpose in the world. My father was a laborer, laying stones in Roger Williams Park for the Works Progress Administration. My oldest brothers had joined a CCC camp in Indiana. Michel and I were millworkers, working and sleeping, nothing more. I turned sixteen without celebration, another workday.
Walkouts and strikes were sweeping the nation that year, a froth of violence starting in the Deep South and roiling toward us. Many workers wanted a strike at our mill too. Michel was one of them. His voice floats to me across the years: We have to take what we need, instead of waiting for it to be given. And my father’s answer: When you have children to feed, you don’t have the luxury of ideals.
We leave shadows of ourselves in the places where we change. I left a girl in the classroom, and another with her chin on her hands, gazing over downtown Providence from the dormer window. Another thin ghost stands in the mill, blinking in the fall of lint. They’re all with me still, an abandoned regiment flickering separately in the back of my mind, as if I am still living all those lives at once. They won’t die until I do. Or maybe they never will. Maybe the places they inhabit are their own, in a timeless void sealed away from me and from each other, where they go on forever.
The Possible World Page 14
