The place by the water—Cornelia had had her eye on it for years. It reminded her of the cottage of a gnome. “Guhnome,” Aunt Shelley used to miscorrect. The other houses in the loose settlement by the pond were darkly weathered wood, but Cornelia’s was made of the local pale gray granite, sparkling here and there with tiny golden specks. It had green shutters. There was one room downstairs and one up, an outdoor toilet, a small generator. Aquatic vines climbed the stones. Frogs and newts inhabited the moist garden.
She spent more and more time there. At the bottom of the pond, turtles inched their way to wherever they were going. Minnows traveled together, the whole congregation turning this way and then that, an underwater flag flapping in an underwater wind. Birches, lightly clothed in leaves, leaned toward the pond.
There was no beach. Most people had a rowboat or a canoe or a Sunfish. They were retirees like Cornelia, who passed their days as she did—reading, watching the mild wildlife, sometimes visiting each other. Their dirt road met the main road a mile away, where a Korean family kept a general store. Thompson the geezer—Cornelia thought of him as a geezer, though he was, like her, in his early seventies—sat on his porch all day, sketching the pond. Two middle-aged sisters played Scrabble at night, and Cornelia joined them once in a while.
“I worry about you in the middle of nowhere,” her daughter, Julie, said. But the glinting stones of the house, its whitewashed interior, summer’s greenness and winter’s pale blueness seen through its deep win dows, the mysterious endless brown of the peaked space above her bed … and pond and trees and loons and chipmunks … not no where. Somewhere. Herewhere.
“CORNELIA, GOOD SENSE demands that we treat this,” the oncologist said. “A course of chemo, some radia—” He paused. “We can beat it back.”
She stretched her legs—the long one, the longer. She liked her doctor’s old-fashioned office with its collection of worn books in a glass-fronted case. The glass now reflected her own handsome personage: short hair dyed bark, a beige linen pantsuit, cream shirt. A large sapphire ring was her one extravagance. And only a seeming extravagance, since the stone, though convincing, was glass. The ring had been Aunt Shelley’s, probably picked up at a pawnshop. But the woman who now wore this fake article was a woman to trust. People had trusted her. They’d trusted her with their knotty abdomens, their swollen small bowels, their bleeding ceca, their tortuous lower bowels. Meekly they presented their anuses so she could insert the scope and guide it in, past the rectum, the sigmoid, the descending colon …
“Cornelia?” He too was reliable—ten years younger than she, a slight man, a bit of a fop, but no fool. Yes, together they could beat back this recurrence, and wait for the next one.
“Well, what else can we do?” she said in a reasonable tone. “Will you ask your nurse to schedule me?”
He gave her a steady look. “I will. Next week, then.”
She nodded. “Write a new pain-med scrip, please. And the sleeping stuff, too.”
ON THE WAY NORTH she stopped at Julie’s house. The children were home from day camp—two enchanting little girls. Julie hugged her. “How nice it’s summer, I’m not teaching, I can be with you for the infusions.”
“Bring a book.” She hated chatter.
“Of course. Some lunch now, what do you say?”
“No thanks.” She touched her hair.
“And there’s that lovely wig, from the last time,” Julie said, shyly.
They waved good-bye: younger woman and children in the doorway, older woman in the car. It was a lovely wig. A bumptious genius of an artisan had exactly reproduced Cornelia’s style and color, meanwhile recommending platinum curls—hey, Doc, try something new! But she wanted the old, and she’d gotten it. There wasn’t much she’d wanted that she hadn’t gotten: increasing professional competence, wifehood, motherhood, papers published; even an affair years ago, when she was chief resident—she could hardly remember what he’d looked like. Well, if Henry had been less preoccupied … She had failed to master French and had lost her one-time facility with the flute. She was unlikely to correct those defects even with a remission. She had once perforated a colon, early in her career—it was repaired right away, no complications, and the forgiving woman remained her patient. She’d had a few miscarriages after Julie, then given up. Her opinions had been frequently requested. She’d supported Aunt Shelley in that rooming house, so messy; but the old lady, who liked bottle and weed, refused to go into a home. At retirement Cornelia had been given a plaque and an eighteenth-century engraving. Novels were okay, but she preferred biographies. If she hadn’t studied medicine, she might have become an interior designer, though it would have been difficult to accommodate to some people’s awful taste.
She stopped at the general store and bought heirloom tomatoes, white grape juice, a jug of water. “The corn is good,” advised the proprietor, his smile revealing his gold tooth.
“I’ll bet it is. I’ll be in again tomorrow.”
Now the tomatoes nestled in the striped bowl on her kitchen counter. For a moment she regretted having to leave them behind, their rough scars, their bulges. Then, eyes wide open, the knowledgeable Cornelia endured a vision: emaciation, murky awakenings, children obediently keeping still. She squinted at a bedside visitor, she sat dejectedly on the commode, she pushed a walker to the corner mailbox and demanded a medal for the accomplishment, she looked at a book upside down. The mantle of responsible dependency … it would not fit. With one eye still open, she winked the other at the tomatoes.
She changed into her bathing suit and took a quick swim, waving to the Sisters Scrabble and the geezer. Back in her house she put on jeans and a T-shirt, tossed the wet suit onto the crotch of a chokecherry tree. What should a person take for a predinner paddle? Binoculars, sun hat against insidious sidelong rays, towel, and the thermos she’d already filled with its careful cocktail. Pharmacology had been a continuing interest. “I’ll swallow three pills a day and not a gobbet more,” Aunt Shelley had declared. “You choose them, rascal.”
Cornelia pushed off vigorously, then used a sweep stroke to turn the canoe and look at the slate roof and stone walls of her house. Just a little granite place, she realized; not fantastical after all. She had merely exchanged one austerity for another. She thought of the tomatoes, and turned again and stroked, right side, left, right … Then, as if she were her own passenger, she opened a backrest and settled herself against it and slid the paddle under the seat. She drank her concoction slowly, forestalling nausea.
Sipping, not thinking, she drifted on a cobalt disk under an aquamarine dome. Birches bent to honor her, tall pines guarded the birches. She looked down the length of her body. She had not worn rubber boat shoes, only sandals, and her ten toenails winked flamingo.
The spring was in the middle of the roughly circular pond. Usually a boat given its freedom headed in that direction. Today, however, the canoe was obeying some private instructions. It had turned eastward; the lowering sun at her back further brightened her toenails. Her craft was headed toward the densely wooded stretch of shore where there were no houses. It was picking up speed. Cornelia considered shaking herself out of her lethargy, lifting the paddle, resuming control; but instead she watched the prow make its confident way toward trees and moist earth. It would never attain the shore, though, because there seemed to be a gulf between pond and land. No one had ever remarked on this cleavage. Perhaps it had only recently appeared, a fault developing in the last week or two; perhaps the land had receded from the pond or the pond recoiled from the land; at any rate, there it was: fissure, cleft … falls.
Falls! And she was headed directly toward them. All at once a sound met her ears … plashing not roaring, inviting not menacing, but still. As the canoe rode the lip of the new waterfall she stood up, never easy to do in a boat, more difficult now with substances swirling in her veins. She grabbed an overhanging bough, and watched in moderate dismay as her vessel tipped and then fell from her, carrying its cargo
of towel, paddle, binoculars, sun hat, and almost-empty thermos.
What now? She hung there, hands, arms, shoulders, torso, uneven legs, darling little toenails. She looked down. The rent in the fabric of the water was not, after all, between water and shore: it was between water and water. It was a deep, dark rift, like a mail slot. She dropped into it.
Into the slot she dropped. She fell smoothly and painlessly, her hair streaming above her head. She landed well below the water’s surface on a mossy floor. Toenails still there? Yes, and the handkerchief in the pocket of her jeans. A small crowd advanced, some in evening clothes, some in costume.
“Cornailia,” whispered her Dublin-born medical-school lab partner. How beautifully he hadn’t aged. “Dr. Flitch,” said her cleaning woman, resplendent in sequins. “Granny?” said a child. “Cornelia,” said a deer, or perhaps it was an antelope or a gazelle. She leaned back; her feet rose. She was horizontal now. She was borne forward on an animal along a corridor toward a turning; the rounded walls of this corridor were sticky and pink. “Rest, rest,” said the unseen animal whose back was below her back—an ox, maybe, some sort of husband. They turned a corner with difficulty—she was too long, the ox was too big—but they managed; and now they entered a light-filled room of welcome or deportation, trestle tables laden with papers. She was on her feet. “Friends,” she began. “Sssh,” said a voice. Some people were humbly hooked up to IVs hanging from pine branches. They ate tomatoes and sweet corn and played Scrabble. Some were walking around. I’m chief here, she tried to say. She lay with a feathered man. “Don’t you recognize me, Connie?” He presented his right profile and then his left. That boiled eye … well, yes, but now she couldn’t remember his name. She was on her back again, her knees raised and separated; ah, the final expulsion of delivery. Julie … She was up, dancing with a rake, holding it erect with lightly curled fists. Its teeth smiled down at her. She saw her thermos rolling away; she picked it up and drank the last mouthful. She kissed a determined creature whose breath was hot and unpleasant. “I’m a wayward cell,” it confided. The talons of a desperate patient scratched her chest. Then the breathable lukewarm water enveloped her, and she felt an agreeable loosening.
A sudden rush of colder fluid, and the room was purged of people, apparatuses, creatures, animals. Everyone gone but Dr. Fitch. Her tongue grew thick with fear. And then Aunt Shelley shuffled forward, wearing that old housedress, her stockings rolled below her puffy knees, a cigarette hanging from her liver-colored mouth. How Cornelia and her sisters had loved climbing onto Shelley’s fat thighs, how merrily they had buried their noses in her pendant flesh. “Scamp,” she’d say with a chuckle. “Good-for-nothing.” No endearment was equal to her insults, no kiss as soothing as the accidental brush of her lips, no enterprise as gratifying as the attainment of her lap.
A scramble now, a rapturous snuggle. One of Cornelia’s sandals fell off. Her forehead burrowed into the familiar softness between jaw and neck.
“Stay with me,” she whispered. Something was pawing at her … Regret? Reproval? Oh, get lost. This was bliss, this sloppy and forgiving hug. Bliss, again, after six dry decades. “Stay.”
It could not last. And now there was no one, no relative, no friend, no person, no animal, no plant, no water, no air. Cornelia was not alone, though; she was in the company of a hard semi-transparent sapphire substance, and as she watched, it flashed and then shattered, and shattered again, and again, all the while retaining its polyhedrality, seven sides exactly—she examined a piece on her palm to make sure, and it shattered there on her lifeline. Smaller and smaller, more and more numerous grew the components. Expanding in volume, they became a tumulus of stones, a mound of pebbles, a mountain of sand, a universe of dust, always retaining the blue color that itself was made up of royal and turquoise and white like first teeth. The stuff, finer still, churned, lifted her, tossed her, caressed her, entered her orifices, twirled and turned her, polished her with its grains. It rose into a spray that threw her aloft; it thickened into a spiral that caught her as she fell. She lay quiet in its coil. Not tranquil, no; she was not subject to poetic calm. She was spent. She was elsewhere.
SOMETIME LATER the geezer rowed out to the middle of the pond. He had been watching the drifting canoe for the last hour. A person’s business was a person’s business. He saw that his neighbor was dead. He tied the prow of the canoe to the stern of his rowboat and towed her ashore.
These stories originally appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “On Junius Bridge” in Agni; “Day of Awe” (as “To Reach This Season”), “Home Schooling,” “The Noncombatant,” and “The Story” in Alaska Quarterly Review; “Aunt Telephone,” “Chance,” “Elder Jinks,” and “Granski” in Antioch Review; “Allog,” “Capers,” and “ToyFolk” in Ascent; “Binocular Vision” and “Inbound” in Boston Globe Magazine; “Settlers” in Commentary; “The Ministry of Restraint” and “Vallies” in Ecotone; “The Coat,” “How to Fall,” “Jan Term,” and “Lineage” in Idaho Review; “Self-Reliance” in Lake Effect; “Hanging Fire” in Massachusetts Review; “The Little Wife” in Ontario Review; “Relic and Type” in Pakn Treger; “Mates” and “Unravished Bride” in Pleiades; “If Love Were All” in turnrow; “Girl in Blue with Brown Bag” in West Branch; and “Purim Night” and “Rules” in Witness.
“Inbound,” “Day of Awe” (as “To Reach This Season”), “Settlers,” “The Noncombatant,” and “Vaquita” were published in Vaquita (University of Pittsburgh, 1996). “Allog,” “Chance,” “ToyFolk,” “Tess” (as “Tess’s Team”), and “Fidelity” were published in Love Among the Greats (Eastern Washington University, 2002). “If Love Were All,” “Purim Night,” “The Coat,” “Mates,” “How to Fall,” “The Story,” “Rules,” and “Home Schooling” were published in How to Fall (Sarabande, 2005).
“Chance,” “Allog,” and “Self-Reliance” were selected for Best American Short Stories in 1998, 2000, and 2006, respectively. “Mates” and “Elder Jinks” were included in the Pushcart Prize volume in 2001 and 2008, respectively. “Hanging Fire” and “The Story” each won the O. Henry Prize and were included in that annual in 1978 and 2003, respectively. “Vaquita” was reprinted in 20: The Best of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
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