“Oh, it’s so elegant,” she said to Ruth. And that silly phrase went on booming through her brain for hours afterwards, as if it had great import, as if it were the last sound anyone would hear and needed urgently to be decoded, emphasized properly, absorbed.
She remembered the scene as if they were fixed: Ruth coming toward them, a silver tureen (wedding gift from Charlie’s aunt) of vichyssoise in her hands; Davy reaching over to touch one of the buttercups; Lottie standing behind her chair surveying the table with a sense of well-being. “Oh, it’s so elegant.”
Immediately after she spoke, they all heard the terrible sound of some substantial thing crashing and shattering. She was at the bathroom door at once, or else Simon was there and then she was there. He was standing at the door of the bathroom looking dazed, his hair wet, alcohol dripping down the sides of his face. She thought it was dripping down the sides of his face, down the temples, down near the earlobes. The dump jar was in shards on the floor.
She grabbed a handful of napkins and mopped at his forehead.
“Did you get it in your eyes?”
She carried him into the bathroom and turned on the shower full force. As he wriggled and screamed, she held him faceup under the cold water.
“Did it go in your eyes?”
He was sobbing.
“Did you swallow it? Did you drink it?” She began to shake him.
By now he was wet through to the skin and shivering despite the warmth of the evening. Coughing, gasping, Simon tried to turn his face out of the way of the oncoming cold water but Lottie held him tight.
“Mama, you’re drowning him!” Davy cried in an anguished voice.
Lottie yelled to Ruth, “Call the rescue squad! The number’s on the wall, next to the telephone.”
“Mama! Mama!”
“You get out of here!” Lottie yelled at Davy. “There’s no room! There’s glass all over the floor!”
Davy began to cry.
“Shut up!” she said. “For God’s sake, shut up!” She could hardly hear herself over the boom in her brain.
They spent the night in the hospital, Lottie walking back and forth between the emergency room where they were observing Simon and the fluorescent-lit waiting room, where Ruth and Davy sat propped up against each other, asleep. A drunk who was also waiting was having a loud argument, although he was alone. One of the overhead lights was broken and flickered on and off.
The pediatrician, who looked to be six months pregnant, had been very crisp with Lottie, although perhaps that was her way. When she took Simon into an examining room, she seemed reluctant to have Lottie follow her.
Half an hour later an administrator came out and asked Lottie a series of questions, writing the answers on a printed form. Had this child ever had an accident before? Had he been in the hospital before for any reason? Had the other children had accidents? He looked at Ruth and Davy.
“What do you take me for?” Lottie asked sharply.
The man seemed surprised. “I ask everybody the same questions. They’re on the form.”
Lila and Ted showed up at one, smelling faintly of beer. Lottie noticed that Lila’s red blouse was misbuttoned.
At three in the morning Jake came in wearing his tuxedo, his face tight. He hurried past her into the emergency room.
Lottie stood apart. The light flickered on and off in the harshly lit room and after a while she closed her eyes. She wished she could close her ears. She kept hearing the phrase, “Oh, it’s so elegant,” with the emphasis now on this syllable, now on that, as if it were coming out a megaphone, as if it were the only thing real. How long she stood she didn’t know. She wasn’t sleepy but she felt very odd and strained, as if she hadn’t been to bed for days. She waited although she forgot for what.
When Jake came back, he touched her cheek.
“He’s sleeping,” Jake said. “He looks all right to me.”
“Who knows,” Lottie said.
The next few days she stayed home and stood guard over Simon. Were his steps slurred? Was he bumping into things? She watched him as he ate, looking for signs of gagging or vomiting. She asked him about double vision but she could not make him understand. Usually eager for her attention, Simon seemed uncomfortable with her worried shadowing of him. He avoided her. Lottie could not stop herself. She continued to be hounded by that vapid phrase, “It’s so elegant,” and occasionally she would see it—cut in granite, as if on a gravestone.
Although Simon never showed any ill effects from the accident, Lottie continued to feel grim. If only she hadn’t come home. Jake said coming home was a gracious act. He reminded her that she had gone a few months earlier to the emergency room with a neighbor whose two-year-old son had eaten the shiny black berries of a deadly nightshade plant and had to have his stomach pumped. And hadn’t she choked on something herself, Jake asked her, and nearly drowned when she was a girl? She called her parents and had an uncharacteristically long conversation with her mother, although Lottie never mentioned Simon except to say that they were all fine.
She went to work and finished her experiment and sent in the results, but she got little pleasure from proving herself right and the journal’s referees wrong. And her sleep was disturbed by nightmares. In a recurrent one she was exposed to radiation from a leak in her lab and lost all her hair and her vision. She wore a purple Afro wig and mirrorlike sunglasses. Behind them her eyes were gone, replaced by two of the boys’ bright marbles: one agate, one cat’s-eye. She would wake shuddering and Jake would hold her until she quieted. Although he counseled patience, she could not imagine ever being herself again.
Just before Labor Day the editor phoned to tell her off the record that her revised paper would be accepted. She did feel vindicated—not a bad feeling. She knew she would feel expansive when she received the referees’ crow-eating reports. Jake said they should celebrate now as well as later and so the six of them piled into the car and went to Randy’s Grill for cheeseburgers and milk shakes.
Afterwards Jake wanted to take a walk in the marshes. Lila had planned to sort out her books and wall hangings that evening—in a week she was entering Swarthmore (not so far away, her mother told herself)—but agreed to go along “for old times’ sake.” They put on their galoshes and rubbed their hands and faces with mosquito repellant. The dogs could hardly stand still as they waited for Lottie to unlatch the gate to the backyard; they whimpered in ecstasy.
It had been a hot day but there was a slight breeze now and it was pleasant to walk through the cool, dank marsh. The flashlights Jake had brought in the backpack were unnecessary because the sky was drenched with stars. Ruth was walking on the far side of her father, a little apart. It occurred to Lottie that she would always be there, a little apart. Lottie looked away.
Jake and Lila were trying to explain something to Davy. Simon tugged at Lottie’s hand because he wanted to hear, too, and for a moment she held him, then let him tug free.
Jake held a tube of rolled-up star charts which he was waving for emphasis. Davy was pointing up at the milky sky and Jake was shaking his head. “Nobody knows that. By the time the light reaches us, the star may have changed or disappeared or exploded even. Something may have happened.”
It didn’t make sense to Davy.
“It’s like a photograph of someone taken years ago.” Jake handed the star charts to Ruth and took his wallet out of his pocket. He got a flashlight from his backpack.
“There’s you at six months. Would you recognize yourself? It’s nothing like you now.”
Davy said his hair was still the same color.
Jake sighed. “Here’s my father, your grandfather. He’s dead twenty years, may he rest in peace. He looks fine in the picture, doesn’t he?”
Davy said querulously that he didn’t understand.
Jake flipped to another picture. “Look, there’s your mother, way before any of us knew her.” He shone the flashlight on an old photograph that was torn in several places and then repaired
with tape that had yellowed and contracted so that the various parts of the picture were no longer exactly aligned. It was Lottie standing in front of her parents’ house in a light summer dress her grandmother had made for her; her head was markedly cocked.
She wondered if she had taken this uncharacteristically awkward position deliberately, for some reason she could no longer remember, or whether she was simply self-conscious at the time about being photographed; it was also possible that the inclination of her head had resulted from the tape’s having shrunk.
“How old are you here, Lottie? Eight? Ten?”
Lottie watched Jake and Davy examine the photograph. Davy was upset—Davy, who was younger and smaller than the girl in the photograph. She longed to comfort him, to explain the stars and herself to him, to be able to tell him that even when she eventually disappeared, like the stars, she would still be his mother for all time.
She took the photograph from Jake and held her flashlight to it. She was still obviously a child, but how old she couldn’t say. As she looked at the pale face and thin arms and legs, the still undeveloped and slightly asymmetrical child’s body, a dreadful feeling came over her in the bright marsh, of disconnectedness, as if she were herself some strange taped-together creature, the likes of which had never been seen before.
NOTHING HUMAN
“Dear,” she calls out. “Did you wash your hands after you peed or whatever you did in the bathroom?”
It is four o’clock in the morning. She is lying on her back in the double bed in their dark cabin on the AmaDolce cruise ship on the Main River, or the Rhine River, or the Moselle, they all feed into each other anyway. With her husband she is on a tour of romantic castles and medieval towns, most of them meticulously reconstructed after World War II. Bamberg and Würzburg and Miltenberg and Rothenburg …
Barefoot, without his contacts in, he is inching his way back to bed, one hand moving crabwise along the wall that separates the bathroom from the bedroom, the other hand—he is bending forward—feeling over the bedclothes for the pillow. He is a very tall, bulky man, and the tight quarters and the blackness—they cannot see each other—make him uneasy.
By the movements of the mattress, she feels him enter the bed: a mild wave rolls under her as if they are not on a ninety-three-thousand-ton cruise ship but on a raft.
“I never wash my hands in the middle of the night,” he whispers.
“You don’t? Really? Why not?”
He adjusts the pillow, brings the sheet and cover up to his chin. “I don’t want to wake myself up.”
They speak as if they are in different time zones, he whispering, she talking in a high-pitched, brittle voice. “But you’re up! You woke me up! What is all this sotto voce stuff? Why not just wash your hands?”
“Sorry! I’m trying to be quiet.”
“Well, washing your hands doesn’t make any more noise than peeing—or whatever you did.”
“Peed, that’s what I did … if you must know.”
“I didn’t ask what you did. Why didn’t you wash your hands, that’s what I asked you. We went over this years and years ago, and you said you understood and you got it and you promised!” She rises on her elbows, sliding her head up along the wall. Her hair is dyed a dark chestnut color with “warm” highlights, her “natural” color, more or less. She is a small, fine-boned woman, slender, agile. In her fantasies, she can still be mistaken for the feisty forward she was forty-five years earlier on the Bryn Mawr women’s soccer team.
“Not at night. I can’t recall the conversation exactly but I never would have said I’d wash my hands at night. During the day, it’s arguable. But at night, sometimes I get up three, four times during the night, I’m not washing my hands. It interferes with the flow.” He feels a breeze. Maybe she has tossed her half of the blanket in his direction? “Hey, what’re you doing? Are you hot or something?” He hears or imagines he hears an exasperated sigh. “Where you going?”
In her peach-colored shortie nightgown, she makes her way gingerly around the foot of the bed, holding out her small flashlight, which projects a soft white tire of light. Because of the flashlight and her bantam weight, she has an easier time getting around the cabin than he does. As soon as they first entered it, he seemed like Alice when she’s ten feet tall. The cruise manager told them there were no larger accommodations: this is a one-size-fits-all ship.
Democratic, she told the manager.
Procrustean, her husband said, after they left the manager’s office.
At the moment, she finds herself relishing the rare tactical advantage, although she is confused by the feeling: she loves this man; their marriage is not ordinarily a battle. Why is she being so bitchy?
“Where you going?” he repeats. He demands.
“Where do you think I’m going? Out for a swim?”
Inside the bathroom, she does not turn on the overhead light—too bright—but instead sets the flashlight sideways on the metal sink. In the semidark, she drops the toilet seat, which he has left standing (the water looks dark, so probably he was peeing), and drops the toilet seat lid as well—why risk dispersing any noxious microorganisms up into the air when she flushes? And she will flush; just now, she does not feel like peeing into his pee. (Although the tainted water is a love gift: he doesn’t flush during the night so as not to wake her.) She flushes vehemently, then jiggles the handle several times—and when the sound of water stops, flushes again. After which she sits down and pees. Flushes. In the faint light, she washes her hands for the exemplary twenty seconds, maybe twenty-five.
When she opens the bathroom door, he is snoring.
“For God’s sake, put on your CPAP machine!”
There is a momentary pause, then he continues snoring.
Scanning with her flashlight, she makes her way past the mahogany-veneered built-in closet and drawers, the small strip of desk, atop which is the large computer/television screen—which she can’t quite figure out how to use. He somehow easily manages to get live pictures of the water in front of them as the ship moves and also of other boats coming at them; and porn, he gets that as well, with sound. The sound is the important part, he says.
It occurs to her now that he couldn’t have been whacking off in the bathroom. He is more comfortable doing it sitting down, and even if he were standing up facing the wall, say, with his iPad placed on the toilet tank, he needs sound. Those ecstatic female gasps, sobs, screeches—he cannot come without them. Although, thank God, he doesn’t need them in real life: she happens to be a quiet comer. And those dramatic shrieks certainly would have awakened her.
And he is a considerate man.
And an honest one: if he had been jerking off, and she asked him, he would have told her.
Could it really have been his peeing that woke her? And then she was lying there waiting to see if he would wash his hands. Lying in wait. What is going on with her?
Maybe she woke on her own, with a sense of tension.
From a dream?
She vaguely remembers something … about dogs. Or rodents. Dog-rodents. Was she being chased? By German shepherds. With rat faces and long sharp incisors. Yes?
At the window she pulls back the heavy brocade outer curtain, and then the gauzy inner “privacy” curtain. There is no moon. Only black water and, at a little distance, the shore. Maybe she imagines the shore. At least there looks to be some banked-up area. Between towns there are long stretches of riverbank. She feels momentarily apprehensive, imagines herself a shadow running beside that black water looking for a thicket of trees, a hole in the ground, a pigsty—any place to hide.
Not the cruise she had wanted—she would have preferred Basel to Amsterdam, with the small romantic towns and castles brief interludes. But they had been nervous about going to Germany, and so had put off making arrangements until only the Nuremberg–Trier cruise was left. She had put off making arrangements. He has never been an adventurous traveler, prefers summering in the Berkshires, which he always d
id with his late wife. A physicist, he is at home in starry space, and with invisible particles and waves, but he can’t bear getting lost on the road, especially in a foreign country. Why can’t everyone speak English?
And so when they travel, she occasionally books them on tours, where the chance of anything out of the way befalling them is small. She is not a fan of tours. Feels chaperoned.
She can remember only once going on a tour before she met him. It was to visit medical facilities in Costa Rica, with her first husband, whom she’d met in the Peace Corps in rural South Korea. She was teaching English and some Spanish and learning Korean—she loved languages, still does, not only tracking down the tangled roots of words, but also exploring the dark cave of her mouth, finding the strange places she has to put her tongue to get the sounds right. He was purifying drinking water and trying out different methods of irrigation. So young, what were they? Twenty-three. They’d married in a traditional Korean ceremony, , a gyeolhon, and then, back in the States, had a Jewish wedding. Became physicians together, did residencies in pediatrics, and worked for the “underserved” in New York City. Summers they’d spent practicing in Nepal, Yemen, Mali, Botswana, Nicaragua—schlepping their two daughters with them. It had been the life her husband and she had wanted, useful and, now and again, thrilling.
While she is not up for roughing it any longer, she is not exactly ready to watch summer stock either; she wants at least to see the world; and once they arrive at wherever her second husband has agreed to let her take him—northern Spain, Sicily, Turkey, even China and Hanoi (each year they have gone on at least one trip and they have been married ten years) he is usually pleased. They are both pleased. They are especially easy and loving—even romantic—on vacations.
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