by David Gates
THE MAIL LADY
I wake again in our bedroom, vouchsafed another day. May I use it to Thy greater glory. In the dimness, a throbbing line of sunlight along the bottom of the window shade stabs the eye. So the rain has stopped at last. (Memory spared. Reason spared, too, seemingly.) When I turn away, my sight is momentarily burned black, and I can’t be certain whether I’m truly seeing Wylie’s features in the photograph on the nightstand or simply remembering them. I close my eyes again, and in afterimage the fierce light reappears.
The radio’s on downstairs and I hear that sweet song, now what on earth is that called? Sweet, sweet song. Our station comes all the way from Boston, and seems to be the one certain refuge anywhere on the dial. We still try the classical station from time to time—back in Woburn, we never deviated from WCRB—but lately we find it awfully heavy going. (I have it: “Edelweiss.”) Now I hear a rustle of sheets. Alice is in here, making up her bed. And checking on me. I don’t open my eyes. A pat to her pillow and she’s gone.
In the first weeks after my shock, I slept fourteen, sixteen hours a day, they tell me. The brain, as they explain it, shutting down in order to repair itself. It’s the queerest idea: one’s body simply shoving one aside. These days I’m down to eight or nine hours (not including my nap in the afternoon), so I assume that much of what could be done has now been done. The key is to be thankful for what’s come back. But try as I will, it frets me: I had been, for my age, an active man. Taking care that each season’s duties be done. Trees and shrubs pruned in the spring, leaves raked and burned in the fall. I would sleep six hours a night, seldom more, and wake up—if not refreshed, at least ready for what might be required. Now, in effect, I’m a child again, put to bed early and hearing the grown-ups through a closed door. Like a child, too, with these sudden storms of weeping. I’m told they could still come under control.
Stroke: a stroke of the lash, for chastisement and correction. Yet something gentle in the word as well.
The next thing I hear is Alice down in the kitchen, so I must have dozed off again. Or, God help me, had a vastation. I can hear the stove making that snapping sound, like a dangerous thing. Then it goes silent again, or nearly so, when it lights. I say nearly so because I seem to hear the ceaseless exhale of gas and the rumble of blue flame burning. Just after my shock, my hearing became strangely acute (unless I was imagining it), as if in compensation for what I can only describe as the cubist way I was seeing things. Yet although my eyesight has returned to normal—thank You, Lord—that acute sense of hearing seems not to have been repossessed. So perhaps something else is being compensated for. I pray it’s not some cognitive function that I’m too damaged to understand has been damaged.
Still, sharp as my hearing may be, it’s impossible, isn’t it, that I could hear a gas stove burning all the way down in the kitchen? Or—terrible thought—is what I’m hearing, or think I’m hearing, the hiss of unignited propane racing out of the ports spreading, expanding, filling the house? Well, and what then? Would I shout for Alice—who, being downstairs, may have been overcome already? Would I struggle up out of bed and try to make my way down the stairs after my new fashion, bad foot scraping along after good foot and cane? Or would I simply lie here and breathe?
Well, hardly a cheerful reflection with which to begin the day.
And good cheer—not mere resignation—is required of us. To be unhappy is to be in sin: I’m certain I’ve read that somewhere or other. Though perhaps it was the other way around. That would certainly be easier to swallow, but so trite that I don’t see why it would have made an impression. Now, what was my point? Good cheer. I had wanted to say, it is available to us. Freely offered. We simply need to know where to look. And where not to. Back when Wylie was a little girl and Alice and I would have our troubles (I’d like to believe we never allowed them to darken her childhood), I used to say to myself, But on the other hand, you have Wylie. Though there were times when even that didn’t mean what it ought to have meant, and at such times I would have to be stern with myself and say, You must think of Wylie. All this was before the Lord came into my life.
It’s been many years, of course, since Wylie has lived at home. And many years, too, since Alice and I have had words. So things happen as they were meant to, and in the Lord’s good time. Though I dread sometimes that I will pass on before I know, with my whole heart, that this is true. When in a more hopeful frame of mind, I think the Lord would never allow it, and that His plan for me includes revelations yet in store.
Certainly Alice hasn’t presumed to question (in my hearing) the dispensation that now binds her to a piece of statuary in the likeness of her husband. (Now, that, I’m sorry to say, smacks of self-pity.) In sickness and in health, she must remind herself daily. She has never complained about being unable to leave me alone. Or about the friends who have stopped visiting. (We have seen the Petersons once!) Her strength shames me, much as I like to think that these past months have made shame a luxury. (I have even been, God help me, incontinent.) And from little things I overhear, I gather she’s quietly making her plans for afterward. I’m afraid to ask about the details, and ashamed that I’m afraid. Isn’t this something she’s owed: a chance to talk with her husband about what must be on her mind constantly? What may in fact have been on her mind for years, since even before my illness (as she calls it) the actuarial tables were on her side. Although we’ve always taken pride (I know it’s blamable) in not being like the generality of people.
It was my conversion, of course, that made me odd man out for many of my working years. Research chemists tend to be a skeptical lot anyway, and our company was particularly forward-thinking. We were one of the first, you know, to have moved out to Route 128. Eventually I decided it was best to steer clear of certain discussions. As much as lieth in you, Paul tells us, live peaceably with all men. Poor Alice, meanwhile, has had to go from being the wife of a hot-tempered drinker to being the wife of a religious nut, so-called. I remember one day, shortly after my life had been transformed, I walked in on her ironing one of Wylie’s school skirts with the telephone wedged between ear and shoulder. “I’ll tell you, June,” she was saying, “I don’t quite get it, but I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.” Then she noticed me in the doorway and drew a hissing in-breath as her arms shrank into her ribs and the receiver clunked to the floor.
Up here we’ve found our neighbors more congenial politically than the old crowd from work, if not so well informed. The mail lady has told Alice that no one in town gets so many magazines. The people we know, other retirees mostly, take Modern Maturity and the Reader’s Digest. The younger people, I imagine, scarcely read a newspaper; Alice was dismayed to learn that only two families in town get Time. But of course she can make conversation with anybody, right down to the neighbor woman, that Mrs. Paquette, whose talk even in the summertime is mostly about how she can no longer stand New Hampshire winters. She was over again the other morning—or was it earlier this morning?—for coffee and chitchat. Which is what her life amounts to, as far as I can see, though what can my life seem in her eyes? I could hear them all the way downstairs.
“Well, if anything should happen to Lew,” Alice was saying, “Florida’s the last place I’d go. And I would certainly not go out and inflict myself on Wylie and Jeff.”
I thought about the word anything.
I thought about the word if.
“I think I’d try and get myself one of those new little apartments over in Concord,” she went on. “Have you been by there?”
I knew the place she meant. Brown brick and brown window glass. I’d had no idea that she’d even noticed it, let alone that it loomed so large.
I wake again when Alice comes in and sets my tray on the dresser. How long have I been asleep this time? I struggle up to a sitting position—now, that’s something I couldn’t have done a while ago!—then she wedges the triangular pillow behind me and I collapse back on it. She’s taken to saying that I’m in t
he lap of luxury, getting my breakfast in bed. Can she think I don’t understand (and don’t understand that she understands) the truth of what’s happened to me? To which good cheer is still the only adequate response—but true cheer, not this lap-of-luxury business. She hands me my eyeglasses, then walks over and tugs down on the string with the lace-covered ring at the end. Up goes the shade, and I sit there blinking like a nasty old owl, the white hairs on my knobby chest curling out between the lapels of my pajamas. How can she stand this, unless she looks with the eyes of love? Or unless she no longer truly looks. She places the tray across my thighs, the living and the dead. Orange juice, Postum, All-Bran and half a grapefruit. And this morning, a gaudy blossom from one of her gloxinias floating in a juice glass.
“Austerity breakfast,” I say. Yesterday was a bacon-and-eggs day; I am not allowed two in a row.
“Posterity?” she says.
“Aus-ter-i-ty,” I say, furious. I point to the food. “Austere,” I say.
“Ah,” she says, giving me a too-energetic nod. Can’t tell if she’s understood or not.
“On in the world,” I say, a question.
“The world?” she says. “The news? Oh, they had the most awful thing this morning.”
“Hear TV going,” I say, meaning I didn’t.
“The TV?” she says. “Yes, they were talking more about that airplane.”
“Jet with a bomb,” I say. We’d seen the report last night.
“Well, now they’re saying that those people who were sucked out of that hole?” She makes parentheses with her hands to suggest a hole three feet across. “They’re saying that they apparently were not killed when it went off. They found out they were alive all the way down.”
“Out you’re alive,” I say. Meaning, Well, that’s one way to find out you’re alive. I was making a joke out of her theys. Which I suppose was heartless. Though what hurt, really, could it do? Who, for that matter, could even understand me? Alice cocks her head and squints, then just barges on. “And that poor woman was pregnant.”
Enough and more than enough of the world-news roundup. I want her out of here now. Smear food all over my face in peace.
“I’m going to let you eat your breakfast before it gets cold,” she says, though there’s nothing to get cold but the Postum. “Do you need anything else, dear?”
I don’t bother answering. But when I see her going through the door, away from me, I find that I’m weeping. It’s one of the peculiarities: my body’s heaving with sobs, the tears are rolling down my cheeks and off my jaw, yet really I feel not a thing. Or so it seems to me. I command the crying to stop: no use. Something undamaged in me is observing all this but can’t get out of its own silent space to intervene. Quite a study in something, if you could get it across to anyone.
After the fit passes, I take my time eating. Obviously. (Now, there’s a joke at my expense!) What I mean is, I’m dawdling to put off the process of dressing myself and getting myself downstairs. Dr. Ngo (you pronounce it like the fellow in James Bond) suggested to Alice that she convert the dining room into a bedroom, but I wouldn’t hear of it, and Mrs. Midgely backed me right up. (These therapists call you by your first name, but as soon as I was able to make myself understood I let it be known that it was to be Mr. Coley and Mrs. Midgely.) “If he can do it once,” Mrs. Midgely said, “he can do it every day.” Going up and down stairs and dressing yourself are what they’re keenest on your learning.
Most days, though, it hardly seems worth the struggle—a way I must fight against thinking. I’ll sit in the living room and look at television, or read a magazine or work a crossword puzzle. A great mercy that my vision has straightened out again; at first I saw only parts of things, and letters and words refused to stay in their proper order. A mercy, too, to have been muddled enough in my thinking at the time that this didn’t alarm me. Nowadays I’m able to read everything from the National Review to our local newspaper. I even read the Neighbors page, about people we don’t know being visited by their grown children from out of state, and the notices of church suppers and bingo games we can no longer attend. Not that we ever did. To have ended up in a town where our nextdoor neighbors live in a trailer (it is kept up nicely) with a Virgin Mary sheltering in a half-buried bathtub—it’s not what we had expected of life.
Now, stop right there and listen to yourself: when will you awaken to your abundant blessings? Which continue to be abundant. This, I have come to believe, is part of what the Lord means to tell me. My stroke is part of our long conversation.
I’m sitting on the bed trying to pull on my socks one-handed when I hear a car slow up. I grip the four-footed cane with my good hand, rock a little to get myself going, shudder up to a standing position and go thump-scrape, thump-scrape over to the window. When I finally get there, I see the mail lady pulling away from our mailbox in her high, big-tired pickup truck. Toolbox on it the size of a child’s coffin. Sometime during the winter, I’m not clear just when, it was while I was still in the hospital, I remember Alice telling me about the mail lady towing that roughneck Bobby Paquette’s car out of the snow on Lily Pond Road. (This is the neighbor woman’s nephew.) Alice says her truck’s equipped with a winch and I don’t know what-all. A male lady indeed. Mrs. Laffond looks like a movie cowboy, sun-scorched and slitty-eyed. And that short hair doesn’t help matters. Now, Wylie when she was growing up was something of a tomboy, too, but always looked feminine. An outdoor girl, perhaps it’s better to say. Always enjoyed bicycling, played softball on the girls’ team. If back then there’d been the agitation you see today over the Little League (and now even on into the high schools), Wylie would’ve been first in line, I’m sure. But for the sake of being modern, not mannish. Mrs. Laffond, though. It’s nothing to see her in garageman’s getup: green gabardine shirt and trousers to match. There was a Mr. Laffond, but he left for parts unknown. (Small wonder, wouldn’t you say?) Supposedly he drank. It would be entirely their own business, of course, if children hadn’t been involved. Two little girls and a boy, Alice says. The one thing these people seem able to do is breed, if that’s not an unchristian observation.
“The mail’s here,” Alice calls from down in the kitchen, over top of the music. “Are you done your tray?”
She’ll find out whether or not I’m done my tray, as she puts it, when she comes back upstairs, not sooner. I won’t have all this hollering in the house.
When I finally do get myself down to the living room, I find Alice working away with her plant mister.
“Don’t you look spruce this morning,” she says. I have on a pink oxford shirt and my gray wool slacks, neither spruce nor otherwise. “You know,” she says, “I was thinking. You’ve been cooped up in here for days with the rain and all. Why don’t we bundle you up warm and walk down together and get the mail? I think the fresh air would do you good.”
“Sea a mud,” I say. Just look at that driveway. They were supposed to have brought in a load of traprock last fall, but they didn’t come and didn’t come, which seems to be the way it goes up here. And then the ground froze, and then I had my shock.
“Such a beautiful morning,” she says.
It’s one of those early-spring days when you begin to smell the earth again. Painfully bright blue sky and the sun giving a false warmth. The branches of the bare trees seem silvery. Once I get down the steps, I stop and work open the buttons of my overcoat to let the air at my body, though what’s wrong with me has nothing to do with the body. Halfway down the driveway I stop to rest, take Alice’s arm to steady myself, and poke the muddy wheel rut with one of my cane’s rubber-tipped spider legs.
“Get in out,” I say, meaning You’ll never be able to. “Moon vehicle need the moon vehicle.”
“Moon vehicle?” Alice says. “Why are you saying a moon vehicle, dear?”
“Truck the truck,” I say. What I’m trying to get across is the mail lady’s pickup truck. I float my good hand up to show the tall tires. No use. Oh, I hate these times
when Alice thinks I’m making no sense and I am making sense. But this is serious business, this situation with the driveway. To keep out of the mud, Alice has been driving along the edge of the grass, which is tearing up the lawn and now we’ll have that on our hands, too, getting someone in to reseed it and roll it. On her hands, I suppose I mean.
The mail lady has brought a telephone bill, a letter from Wylie and the new Smithsonian. Good: there’s this afternoon taken care of. Alice tucks the envelopes inside the Smithsonian, and we start back. It’s become our custom to save the opening of the mail for when we get back to the house.
“Why, I think that’s a robin,” Alice says as we start back. “See? In that maple tree? No, over there—that’s an oak tree.”
Something or other flies off in the direction of the Paquettes’.
“I’m certain that was a robin,” she says.
“So be it,” I say. The way my mouth works now, I seem to be saying Soviet. This walk will have been enough and more than enough. I make her stop to rest three times on the way.
When we’ve finally gotten my things off—I manage the coat all right, but the overshoes prove too much—we go into the living room so we can sit comfortably over the mail. I open the telephone bill, and she opens Wylie’s letter. Our old division of responsibilities: the human side for her. Though now my responsibilities are only ceremonial.
