Julia nodded again.
“I don’t see how a man can do that—leave his wife and children,” Carmen said. She stirred her tea a little more. “There’s just so much you can’t do anything about, isn’t there? Except pray.”
Julia said nothing. She knew Carmen would do that with or without her encouragement, had probably already done so, in fact.
Carmen took a bite of her salad and chewed thoughtfully. “The zoo was an interesting place,” she said after a few moments, “but I liked the mall a lot better. In fact, I don’t think I ever want to go to a zoo again.”
Julia took another piece of bread onto her plate. “Why is that?”
“All those animals,” Carmen said, “living there just so people can come stare at them. It doesn’t matter how nice it is and how well they take care of the animals, it’s just not . . . home, you know? It’s not a very happy place.”
So now she was feeling sorry for elephants and tigers and orangutans. Julia should have foreseen this. Anyone with Carmen’s history would have strong feelings about the importance of a real home.
Julia thought of trying to inject a little humor: Hey, how about a little rugged optimism here? Or prayer—you’re good at that. You can pray for an earthquake so all the animals will get loose. But the moment didn’t call for humor. She saw Carmen’s journal, tucked inside her shoulder bag hanging on the back of her chair. “But you liked the animals, didn’t you?” she said to the girl. “May I see your pictures?”
“They’re not done yet,” Carmen said. “I’ve got to fill them in some more.” But she got her journal out, opened it, and passed it across the table. On the page was a picture of a meerkat standing upright on its hind legs, holding its front paws together primly. Its upturned mouth simulated a smile. An amazingly good drawing, which was no surprise to Julia, for she had seen the girl’s pictures before, and Jeremiah’s long before that. Besides the caption Meerkat, the only words on the page were coming out of the animal’s mouth, in a cartoon bubble: Best burrows are in Africa, not D.C.
“There’s one on the next page, too, but it’s not as good,” Carmen said. Julia turned to it and saw a red panda eating bamboo leaves. Above its head, another cartoon bubble, and inside this one: Take me home to China.
Julia flipped through other pages and saw rough sketches of an oryx, a siamang, a Przewalski’s horse. Naturally, Carmen would choose out-of-the-ordinary animals to draw. She smiled and handed the journal back, then took out her own and opened it. “Your journal is going to be a lot more fun to look through than mine. Here’s my page about the red panda.” She read her summary aloud: “Red panda. Resembles raccoon. Long, bushy tail—covers itself when sleeping. Native to China. Eats bamboo leaves. Adult leads solitary life. Endangered species.”
She stopped there, deciding not to read the last part: Cub born last year died at 3 wks. Survival rate for cubs born in captivity 50%.
• chapter 16 •
PEOPLE LIVING THEIR LIVES
As the trip north unfolded in front of her eyes, Julia began to recognize the moments she would carry with her through life. This is one, she would say to herself. You will remember this.
She continued to record facts about the places they visited, but in one sense the trip, the real one, was unrelated to the expansion of her mind concerning historical and cultural matters. There was that part of the trip, of course, but the sights and sounds and heritage of the Northeast, though constantly before her, were thrown into a secondary role. They were like eye-catching sets and costumes in the play, worthy in their own right yet no substitute for the text—or for what could be called the greater beauty of a play: the subtext.
Being together twenty-four hours a day cast a spotlight on Carmen’s idiosyncrasies. For example, her attitude toward food continued to be purely practical with little anticipation or in-the-moment enjoyment, as if she knew eating was necessary for life, like sleeping or breathing, but certainly nothing to spend time thinking about. She ate slowly, only small portions and one food at a time, moving clockwise around her plate, turning the plate so that what she was eating was always closest to her.
From an analytical point of view, it didn’t fit with Carmen’s history. If food had often been hard to come by, as Julia knew it had, it seemed that one would fall into the habit of eating quickly, without regard to order, and in larger quantities, not knowing when or if the next meal would come. But Julia had quit analyzing, had simply come to accept it. Carmen was what she was.
Though she ate as if out of duty, she always expressed gratitude. She did occasionally remark on the color or texture of a food, but rarely the taste. She often ordered whatever Julia did, perhaps to spare herself the trouble of choosing. What seemed to interest her most at mealtimes was observing other people.
Whenever they ate at a place with self-seating, Carmen always chose a table in close proximity to a couple, sometimes without children, sometimes with, for she was interested in both couples and children, separately and as families. She was fascinated by the idea of marriage, as only the unmarried were. If the couple appeared to notice her, she would turn surreptitious. If they didn’t, she would stare, but only in moderation and all the while managing never to lose her way in a conversation with Julia.
In hotel rooms, she had set ways of behaving. The first thing she always did in a new room was to look for the Gideon Bible and place it on the nightstand. Then she would scout out the facilities in the hall—ice machine, laundry room, stairways. And there were other rituals, too—the two glasses of water she always drank upon rising every morning, the five-minute showers, the one hundred sit-ups. She always hummed as she brushed her teeth.
At night she liked to put on her pajamas early. Before bed, she washed her face with soap, laid out her clothes for the next day, and hung her head over the trash can as she brushed her hair. When she finished with her hair, she looked as if she’d undergone shock treatment, but by morning it was always back in place, in a manner of speaking.
Sometimes she read her New Testament or the Gideon Bible in bed, sometimes on the floor, sometimes in the morning, or night, or both. And some days Julia didn’t see her read at all. She slept on her side, with a pillow over her head. At times during the night Julia heard what she thought was whispering, whether praying or dreaming or merely talking to herself she didn’t know.
There was no predicting her television preferences. She might watch the news with Julia, only halfway listening as she did something else, but commenting from time to time: “Be sure your sin will find you out.” “Politicians sure don’t seem like the smartest people on earth, do they?” “She’ll never get a fair trial.” At other times she would flip through the channels and find a movie like Old Yeller or a documentary about glassblowing or the Dead Sea Scrolls, and sit riveted through the whole thing.
The night before they left Philadelphia, she ran across Nanook of the North on television, a cinematic relic that captivated her, even though there wasn’t a scrap of dialogue, only primitive-sounding music and printed captions to accompany the grainy black-and-white images. She moved to the foot of the bed for a closer view. After it ended, she said, “What contented, resourceful people the Eskimos are. Their lives are so . . . unfettered.” She talked at length about the building of the igloo, especially the little window of clear ice. At times like this, Julia found it hard to think of her as an adult.
And then, with hardly a breath, she somehow segued from igloos to the tour guide they had met in Philadelphia that day—a fortyish woman with only the shortest stubble of black hair, like iron filings, and dark exotic eyes. The way she moved and used her hands made you think she must have taken ballet lessons. And the best part: her name tag said Carmen. She told the group that today was her first day back at work after cancer treatments. “I feel honored to share my name with somebody like that,” Carmen said now. “Such courage! Can you imagine how much of that she must have? I never knew how beautiful a bald woman could be.”
&n
bsp; Julia was getting used this sort of thing. It was humorous, really, to think they had spent a day and a half touring the historic district of Philadelphia—had seen an original copy of the Constitution, had watched reenactors sign the Declaration of Independence, had walked through the Liberty Bell Center, had visited the Betsy Ross House and the U.S. Mint—and yet what was Carmen exclaiming over? A cancer survivor and an ancient film about Eskimos.
Not that she didn’t appreciate the other, sometimes to an embarrassing degree. At one point that afternoon, after gazing for a long time at the inscription on the Liberty Bell—Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land and unto all the Inhabitants thereof—Carmen had spread her arms wide and said, “A Bible verse on the Liberty Bell! We live in the best country in the whole wide world.” Under the high ceiling, surrounded by all the stone and glass, her voice had reverberated quite loudly. People had looked at her curiously, but some of them smiled. One older woman even said, “Amen, honey!” Julia was surprised that Carmen hadn’t asked everyone to join her in singing “God Bless America.”
• • •
THEY arrived in New York City on a clear, sparkling afternoon and found the Warwick Hotel. Their room was on the eleventh floor, on the front of the building, overlooking the Avenue of the Americas. Julia pulled back the curtain at the window and looked down at the street crawling with traffic, relieved that they had made their way through it in one piece.
Across the street, facing the hotel, was an office building. Julia could see a woman watering a hanging plant in one office, a group of people around a table in another, and, higher up, a man standing at the window holding a cell phone. She wondered what kind of life those people led, working in a place like that, in a city like this. She wondered if any of them had been working there on 9/11, if they still had bad dreams about what might fall out of the sky. She wondered if any of them could imagine living in a small stone house in a small Southern town and teaching at a small university.
Once Carmen had scouted out the hallways, they walked to a restaurant the concierge recommended and then down toward Times Square. I’m really in New York City, Julia kept telling herself. The crush of people, the babble of languages, the chaos of yellow taxis, the skyscrapers, the smells of streetside food and gutters and bodies—she had read about it all, seen it on the news and in movies, had always supposed it would feel claustrophobic and dangerous, but it didn’t. It felt . . . exhilarating was the only word that came to mind, although that sounded a little too dramatic.
Judging from the look on Carmen’s face, she was as swept away by the city as Julia was. Strangely, during all the time she had lived in the Northeast, she’d never been here before. They didn’t talk as they walked. They would have had to shout anyway.
• • •
THE next day they covered miles on foot. Central Park, Carnegie Hall, all the way down Fifth Avenue to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and back to the Museum of Modern Art, where they spent most of the afternoon. It wasn’t a famous work by Picasso or Matisse or Seurat that most intrigued Carmen, but an enormous tapestry titled The Thousand Longest Rivers in the World, with the names of all 1,000 rivers in order, from the Nile to the Agusan, neatly embroidered with cotton and linen thread onto canvas.
It was near the end of the afternoon when they saw it, taking up most of a single wall in one of the gallery rooms. Frankly, it didn’t interest Julia—it didn’t look like art to her. If she wanted a colorless, orderly listing, she could read a telephone book. Besides, she had been on her feet long enough and was ready to get back to the hotel room. But Carmen planted herself in front of it and studied it, turning her head from side to side as she scanned each line. A teenage boy dressed in all black wandered up and stood beside her.
“Okay, number one,” Carmen said, “this Alighiero Boetti guy, however you say his name, has shown a very high level of commitment here. I’ll give him that. To start with, it must have taken a long time just to research all the rivers and make sure he had them in the right order. I mean, who measures rivers anyway?”
Carmen pointed to the printed description mounted on the wall. “It says he started it in 1976. Before everybody had computers, right? So hats off to you, Mr. Boetti.”
Two middle-aged women stopped to listen. “Number two,” she continued, “I sort of have a hard time believing a man really did this. I mean, really? Sitting down with a needle and thread?”
A young couple with a baby joined the group. The man had the baby strapped to his back like a papoose. “Is this a tour?” he asked the teenage boy.
“Number three,” Carmen said, “if this Mr. Boetti really did do this, and if he was a real artist, I sure hope he did some other things to show off his talent because, to be honest, this just seems a little . . . well, pedestrian to be in an art museum.”
She stepped closer and checked the printed information again. “It says he finished it in 1982, so, number four, what took him so long? Did he have to keep ripping out stitches and doing them over?”
By now two other people had come along. Julia glanced back and saw a uniformed guard moving in their direction, looking nervous as he talked into his lapel.
“And, number five,” Carmen said, “I wonder if somewhere along about here”—she paused and pointed to the Potomac, which was number 460—“he was tempted to just revise his plan and make it The Five Hundred Longest Rivers in the World? And his poor wife, if he had one—can’t you just hear her? ‘Hey, Al, can you please quit sewing and go mow the yard?’ But single-minded Mr. Boetti says, ‘Not now, honey, I’ve got to finish the Monongahela.’”
Someone laughed. “But, number seven,” Carmen said, “you’ve still got to give the man credit for setting a monster goal and sticking with it.”
“That’s only number six,” the teenager in black said, “and you already said that anyway.”
Carmen didn’t miss a beat. “Just seeing if you were listening. Okay, then, number six, think of all the . . .”
The guard stepped forward and placed a hand between Carmen and the tapestry. “You’re standing too close to the art,” he said sternly. He had a round, flushed face, and his uniform jacket was so tight it looked like the buttons were about to pop off. “And we need to keep things moving, too. No congregating allowed. We have fire codes.”
Somebody behind Julia said, “Well, good grief, you mean there’s a law against standing in an art museum?” and for just a moment they all stared at the guard, who must have wondered if he should call for reinforcements. But then they began dispersing.
Carmen looked at his name tag. “Maybe you can help me out, Sherman. Do you know whether this artist, Mr. Alighiero Boetti, embroidered this whole thing by himself?”
Sherman looked at the tapestry as if he’d never seen it before, but then gathered himself, rocked forward on his tiptoes, and spoke with authority: “If it says he did it, then he did.”
As they walked away, Carmen said, “Well, I think he hired somebody to do it. Probably a woman.”
• • •
THAT night after dinner they walked to the Majestic Theatre to see The Phantom of the Opera, and then they rounded out the day by sharing a piece of white chocolate blueberry cheesecake at Roxy’s in Times Square.
Carmen had two bites, said that was enough, and pushed the plate toward Julia. She liked the overall experience of the show, she said, and thanked Julia for the whole day, then added, almost apologetically, “But Phantom of the Opera is really sort of a vapid story, isn’t it? I mean, fantasy is fine and all, but this plot is full of holes. Like, what does the Phantom do all day and how does he stay alive? And, seriously, how could the girl fall in love with somebody like him? And how did his face get all messed up anyway? Did I miss that part?” She laughed. “I know, I’m probably the only one in the world who doesn’t like it. The woman sitting next to me said it was her tenth time to see it.”
The funny thing was that Julia didn’t like it either. She liked the grandeur and glamor of it—t
he costumes and the sets and the masquerade scene and the experience of sitting in the balcony at a Broadway show—but the whole time she had been wishing the music weren’t so boringly melodramatic, the story so complicated and sketchy at the same time. Even the name of the female lead annoyed her—Christine. She couldn’t say what was wrong with it, but by the end she thoroughly hated it. She thought Christine and the creepy Phantom deserved each other. If they ever came to New York again, she would get tickets to something like West Side Story.
Back in their hotel room, Carmen put the finishing touches on her sketches from the day while Julia watched the news—the usual recitation of worldwide misfortune, with one exception: a man convicted of murder, having already served eight years of a life sentence, had been found innocent and set free. Or maybe that was the worst story of all, to think of what he and his family had been through during those eight wasted years. And then there was the weather report—more bad news, with nothing but rain and cold temperatures in the immediate forecast. Julia turned the television off. She was suddenly very tired.
“Here, want to see my sketches?” Carmen said. She handed Julia her journal.
Julia studied the drawings at length. The first was an old woman they had seen in the art museum, leaning on her pronged cane in front of Andy Warhol’s thirty-two soup cans. The other three were people they had seen along the streets that day—a toothless vendor selling gyros, a tall African man with a gigantic yellow snake wrapped around his shoulders, and a teenage girl with orange hair and combat boots, wearing an elf costume and carrying a sparkly wand.
Julia went through them once, slowly, then again. “They’re good,” she said. “Very good.”
Carmen was brushing out her hair now. “You could spend all day here just watching the people.”
Julia laughed. “True, and I guess we know one thing now—there are freaks in other parts of the country besides the Deep South.”
To See the Moon Again Page 19
