Patchwork

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Eight-ten. You don’t want to miss sticky-toffee pudding.” She grinned as he grimaced.

  Jack roused himself from bed, fumbled through his duffel bag, and found a wadded shirt. He began to change into it. Then he reached for Nancy, who was slipping into her black running pants and clogs—her dinner outfit.

  “Actually there’s more news,” he said, holding her arm. “I have prostate cancer.”

  “What?”

  “The prostate,” he said.

  “Oh, Jack!”

  “They have to do some more tests, but they want to do surgery.” Nancy realized she was now sitting on the floor, clutching the side of the bed. He sat on the side of the bed, and she raised herself to sit beside him. “Maybe it’s not really cancer?”

  “The doctor did a biopsy. I should have waited to tell you after I get all the results.”

  She recognized her numbness, the clicking into detachment mode. The news would not sink in for some time. She started to tell him that he was crazy to travel overseas instead of going for surgery right away. But she refrained.

  She saw her emotions lying around her, in heaps, like children flung from a Maypole.

  Holding her tightly, he told her the details. He had been worried for some time. Perhaps he had come back to her out of a need, she thought, but it was also possible that he knew there was no time for recriminations and separation. Now she was called upon to exert that confidence she had imagined in herself, to say the right things. But she didn’t know exactly what. She was sitting in his lap, her head on his shoulder. Somehow they were now in the easy chair.

  “I won’t ever leave you again.” The words didn’t sound like hers. “I’m not just saying that,” she said.

  “I know. I’m not asking you to come back because of this.”

  “I wanted to come back anyway. You know I did.”

  “I was afraid to ask you, afraid it wouldn’t be authentic.”

  “Let’s not worry about the authentic. We’ve always pressured ourselves to be authentic. Let’s just be ourselves.”

  He smiled. “Whatever that means.” She rubbed his neck. “I missed you,” he said.

  “I’m glad.”

  He said, “I don’t want you to come home if you don’t really feel—”

  “Home? We have no home.” She ran her fingers through his hair. “You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean doom. Some people just live with it.”

  “Unless I have the Frank Zappa kind.”

  Nancy reached for her fleece shirt, but she wasn’t sure she was cold.

  “Bopsy,” Nancy said.

  “What?”

  “Mom pronounced it that way—when she had breast cancer. Biopsy. Bopsy.”

  “Bopsy, Mopsy and—Cottontail?”

  She slid from his lap and stood. “You know I love you,” she said. “It’s time that I hate.”

  Jack’s news hit her again. It was illogical, unreal.

  She wondered if Mick Jagger ever worried about his prostate.

  While Jack was in the bathroom, she roamed through a small paperback he had brought about the prostate. The walnut-sized gland—always described as a walnut, like something a squirrel would hide. The inconvenience of it, such a silly thing to harbor in one’s body. A tumor in itself.

  Her whole life with Jack was reconfigured in a couple of moments, its arc becoming a circle, like the circle implied in a rainbow or a sunrise.

  The downstairs dining room, looking out on the river, was almost deserted. Their table for two was in a corner across from the sideboard of fruit and pudding. The table setting included three china patterns, Nancy noticed.

  “The cuisine is strangely inventive here,” she told Jack. “Nouvelle Borderlands.”

  She chose an Italian eggplant dish with cubes of smoked tofu and a pasta called orecchiette—fat blobs like collapsed hats. Jack ordered the plaice. The pasta came with roasted potatoes and carrots on the side, while the plaice had mashed potatoes, carrots and courgettes.

  As they ate, Nancy talked rapidly, spilling out everything she had saved to tell Jack. They were ignoring his prostate, but her thoughts had adjusted like blocks of text rejustifying on a computer screen.

  “Do you like the plaice?” she asked.

  “It’s fine—I guess what you always called a charming, cozy hotel.”

  “I meant the fish.”

  He grinned. “If I’d said the fish was good, you would have said you meant the hotel.”

  They laughed. “Maybe you know me better than I thought you did,” she said.

  In the gray morning they walked, in rain gear, under the soft, dim sky. Jack had slept through the night and declared his jet lag deleted. Dumped. Vanquished. Atomized. But his eyes still looked tired.

  “The beans want sticking,” Nancy said to Jack in the garden behind Dove Cottage.

  “What?”

  “Dorothy wrote in her journal, ‘The Scarlet Beans want sticking.’ It’s the same way my grandmother talked. And my mother too. They grew scarlet runner beans, and they had to find sticks for the vines to hold on to. Dorothy wrote about William gathering sticks to stick the peas.”

  “You’re still thinking about your past,” he said, not unkindly.

  Nancy was thinking of the time Coleridge stopped in at Dove Cottage, while Dorothy and William were away. Coleridge went into the garden, picked some peas, and cooked them. He dressed them, he wrote in his notebook. Nancy’s mother used that word. She dressed eggs, dressed a hen. Nancy was pleased to find this cultural connection to her parents and grandparents, but she wouldn’t mention that to Jack now. Nancy followed him down the cobbled lane past Dove Cottage, where he occupied himself with taking photos of some small-animal skulls displayed on the side of a stone house.

  She said, “Did it ever occur to you that Wordsworth would have an accent, that he would have sounded like the Beatles?”

  “Give me a line.”

  “‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky’?”

  Jack tried it but didn’t quite get it right. They laughed. She wondered if he was remembering their other trip to the Lake District, but she didn’t ask.

  A World War II–era Spitfire appeared suddenly, low in the sky over Grasmere. Jack fumbled with his zoom lens and took several shots. “Damn,” he said. “I wanted to get it against that hill over there. I just got sky.”

  “There were fighter jets every day last week,” Nancy said.

  Early in their marriage, in their rural phase, Nancy grew vegetables. It seemed a moral obligation to grow something if there was good ground. But one night she found herself up at midnight preparing English peas for the freezer. And it occurred to her that she had left home in Kentucky to get away from the hard labor that had enslaved her parents. She was meant to use her mind. But her mind wandered, and she never had a successful career, because she shied away from groups, with their voluble passions. A career was more important to Jack, and she knew he sometimes felt a failure because he hadn’t exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

  Eventually they sold their place in the country. Jack craved the stimulation of artistic friends, and Nancy had grown restless. They moved to Boston, which Nancy loved for its history, and fell in with a set of articulate, intellectual dabblers. But she found something myopic in their ways, how they stirred and sifted the doings of the day as if they were separating wheat from chaff, passing judgments on everyone who came to their notice. Their gatherings, although bohemian, were little contests, a show of strained witticisms. They never made crude remarks or talked about sex or money, and they assumed that everyone in the nation knew who Susan Sontag was.

  “I should have made a big pot of chicken-and-dumplings, complete with the yellow feet sticking up,” Nancy told Jack once after a miserable dinner party when she had cooked fried chicken. “They would jump right in if it was Chinese. But if it’s Southern, it’s unacceptable.”

  Jack just sighed. “There you go again, Nancy. They ate.”
/>   “Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

  Kentucky wouldn’t release her. She wouldn’t let it. She fought Jack on this, and he always accused her of being held back by her culture. She and Jack had often been apart for considerable stretches of time—her many trips to Kentucky; a former job that kept her on the road; and then a serious separation a decade ago. She went to England then, too, but that trip held no good memories. It was only a midlife crisis, she and Jack assured each other, when they reunited. Then a few years back, her parents died, in a ghastly six-month period—cerebral hemorrhage and massive stroke. Nancy broke from Boston then and began living part-time in Kentucky while she reconsidered herself and waited for her grief to subside. She supposed that 9/11 freed her from her own personal grief, but she never said so, for fear of sounding melodramatic. After her parents’ farm was sold, that hard rural way of life that had endured for centuries passed away. Nothing held her there, except what Jack called the guilty-daughter syndrome, her conviction that she had betrayed her parents in a hundred ways and that she had never really explained herself to them.

  Now Nancy stood in Dorothy’s garden and gazed at the yew tree beside the house, a tree that had been there two centuries ago.

  Her parents were gone. Their farm was gone. She was herself. It was the twenty-first century.

  Heavy rain hit at lunchtime, but by afternoon it eased and the sky brightened slightly. They walked to Easedale, past Goody Bridge. The rain-swollen stream was rushing and high under the bridge. They walked along a boardwalk with the water lapping at the edges, then crossed a sheep pasture to the rocky trail that ascended the mountain. Tall granite fences, the ancient work of farmers and shepherds, made hard lines up the mountain. The rock steps of the path were carefully laid, now worn smooth by generations of walkers. The ascent up to Sour Milk Gill was not difficult.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Nancy asked Jack.

  “I’m O.K. Fine. Couldn’t be better.”

  “Maybe we should have trekking poles,” Nancy said, indicating a young couple with backpacks who were descending at a fast clamber, their metal-tipped poles clicking rapidly against the stones.

  “I knew I should have brought a cane,” Jack joked.

  “We’re not old,” Nancy said.

  They walked steadily for about a mile, Nancy following Jack’s lead. They paused just before a steep ascent and drank some water. Nancy stood on a large, smooth rectangular stone that served as a small bridge over a streamlet. As she gazed across at the waterfall, she thought she glimpsed her own image, outsized, with a halo, in the mist above the water. She felt she was in one of Coleridge’s “luminous clouds.” The sudden sensation faded as she said all this aloud to Jack. “The poets called it a ‘glory,’” she explained. “It’s accidental, not something that can be forced. It just swoops in, like a bright-feathered bird landing inside your head.”

  “I’ve read about that,” Jack said. “It’s caused by a tiny seizure in the brain.”

  “Well, then, I’m having a tiny seizure.”

  The path veered close to the tumble of the waterfall, which was known long ago as Churn Milk Force. Nancy, watching the crash and spray of water, suddenly felt a rare burst of anger as she pictured the days lined up ahead, days that could descend into a dark tedium. Churning through her mind was an intolerable parade of flash-card images—a hospital corridor, a shrunken body, falling hair, a coffin. She would not be able to endure it.

  “Stand still. I want to take your picture.” Jack lifted his camera and pointed it at her. “I like the way your hair seems to be in motion.”

  He fiddled with his lenses, paused to let a hiker past, and began snapping.

  “What are you thinking?” he said, shielding his camera in its case.

  She hesitated, unzipping her jacket partway. She heard a sheep bleat. “I was remembering when we were in the Lake District before,” she said. “In Kendal. Remember Mrs. Lindsay and how when she was small, the old people would tell about seeing Wordsworth walking around with his walking stick? Just think—we knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Wordsworth! I’ve never forgotten that.”

  “Only three degrees of separation.”

  “Isn’t that amazing?”

  “That’s important to you?”

  She heard the judgment in his voice. The “so what.” But she sped along.

  “Don’t you remember Mrs. Lindsay? I’ll never forget her.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I counted forty-eight dishes and pieces of silverware on her breakfast table.”

  “What a thing to remember,” Jack said. “You amaze me.”

  “Our minds are different.”

  He nodded, then zipped his camera into its pack. He moved away from the path and sat down on a large rock, his hand gesturing for her to sit beside him.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past year,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “We weren’t paying attention to each other—for a long time.”

  “I know.”

  “Because our minds are so different,” he said. “I get it now.”

  “We knew that.”

  “I know, but we were so busy going in different directions, we just didn’t make time. You were always doing your puzzles—I mean your scholarly studies.”

  “Same thing.”

  “And I was translating everything into some formal meaning.” He sighed. “What the hell am I trying to say?”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I just mean that the tracks stopped crossing. And we forgot to say hello.”

  “It’s pretty typical,” Nancy said, then laughed. “I hate that. I hate to be typical.”

  “Let me tell you something that happened,” Jack said, reaching for her hand. “I was in New Hampshire. Robert and I went to Franconia Notch. And I was overcome with a memory of when we went there years ago. Franconia Notch wasn’t at all the way I remembered it.”

  “You and I were together there with Grover.”

  “Grover.” Jack seemed about to blink out a tear. Grover had been his most beloved dog. “I remembered how we played hide-and-seek in the Flume. Grover and I hid from you. We had such a great time hiding from you. All those big boulders down there.”

  “The Flume was so narrow and dark,” Nancy said. “And I remember a man gave me a hint—where you were hiding. I must have seemed lost. But I found you.”

  “God, that was such a great memory.” Jack put his head in his hands. “And then I realized that all this time I’ve been hiding from you.”

  Nancy put her arm around him. “But it is a good memory. And Grover was at our wedding!”

  “Life was grand then,” he said.

  “It was very heaven.” Quickly she added, “Wordsworth.”

  At the top of the waterfall, the scene opened to the tarn, the small mountain lake leaking down the side of the mountain. The lake’s surface was shiny and smooth, the reflections of the surrounding mountains sharp. Except for the half dozen hikers in view, there was no sign of the modern world. The mountains—erratic brown-and-gray walls—rimmed the setting.

  “This is incredible,” Jack said. His camera case dangled from its strap, as if at a loss for pictures, as Nancy was at a loss for words.

  “Dorothy and William walked up here at night,” she said presently. “They walked everywhere at night. Even in the winter. In the snow and rain.”

  “I hope they had Gore-Tex,” said Jack.

  As Nancy pulled Hobnobs from her pack, explosive sounds burst from above—a pair of jet fighters blasting through the sky above the tarn.

  Jack scrambled for his camera. But the jets were gone.

  The trickle of the river was loud through the open window.

  “Let’s call Robert,” Nancy said.

  “Good idea,” Jack said, glancing at his watch. “He should be home now.”

  Robert and Robin were at the house in the White Mountains where Jack’s family s
pent summers. Robert did research at Dartmouth in molecular biology, and he had already published a paper of some significance on cell signaling.

  After Jack dialed a long series of numbers from his telephone card, Nancy took the phone. Robert answered on the second ring. Hearing her son’s voice filled her with an anxious pleasure. She sensed that whenever she talked to him she turned into a slightly different Nancy, seeing herself as he saw her. Now she turned into a giddy grandmother, silly, talking to her son.

  “Robin wants to keep her job,” Robert was saying. “She can work at home.”

  “I hope you’re happy,” Nancy said. “I hope this is what you wanted.” She wondered if they were still in love after two years of cohabitation.

  “Dad told me some news too,” he said.

  “Oh?” Nancy sensed Robert’s hesitation.

  “He said you were getting back together.”

  “Did he know that?”

  “You’d better ask him.”

  The coming together again seemed easy, she thought. Perhaps Jack’s good news and bad news had canceled each other out, leaving them in limbo. While Jack spoke with Robert, Nancy examined her face in the bathroom mirror. More and more, she resembled her mother. This used to frighten her, but she had come to find the recognition pleasant. She would say a quiet hello. Now, as she gazed into her reflection, she could remember the stages of her growth in photographs—the tentative baby-faced firstgrader; the saucy high-schooler; the college adventurer, with her brows darkened and thickened, her lipstick lustrous, her hair briefly beehived; her unadorned sixties personality (the “natural look,” it was called); the thinner, more angular face as her son grew up and she weathered. She could see all her faces morphed together, each peeking out of the other, the guises through which she had acted out the scenes of her history. And, too, she saw her mother’s turned-up nose and scared eyes; and her father’s square jaw; and her grandmother’s sagging jowls. She imagined other unknown faces of ancestors, and she saw her son, his mouth and warm coloring. And somewhere in her face was her grandchild.

  She heard Jack winding up his talk with Robert. Again, she remembered that first trip to the Lake District with Jack, at Mrs. Lindsay’s in Kendal. When Coleridge returned to England in 1806 from a long escape to Malta, he didn’t want to see his wife. He had gone to Malta to forget a woman he loved—not his wife, and not Dorothy. He returned to England after two years, intending to ask for an official separation from his wife, but he couldn’t bring himself to go home to the Lake District. He remained in London for months. And then when he did go, he delayed the reunion even further by stopping at an inn in nearby Kendal. After he invited Wordsworth to supper, people heard he was back. His family and friends rushed forth to see him, because he had been gone for two years, and they loved him. But he was afraid, afraid to go home.