Catherine’s eyes widened in surprise. “That’s it? You don’t want to talk about it?”
“Not really. Do you?” Harry could see that his answer had thrown Catherine off her script.
“What about closure?” she asked.
“I think it’s been closed for a while.”
“I was hoping you’d move out of the house,” she said in a small, wavery voice.
Harry laughed. “Why would I move out of my house?”
“Our house,” she corrected him. “We live in a community-property state.”
“I bought the house before we were married.”
“The house has doubled in value. I picked it out. My father says I’m entitled to half the appreciation.”
“Since when is your father a lawyer?”
“He knows about these things.”
“Is this what you meant by ‘closure’?”
“I don’t want this to get ugly, Harry.”
“Divorce is ugly,” Harry answered, putting his cup on the counter. “I have to go. The pool man is waiting for me.”
“Is he getting rid of the fish?”
Outside, the air was uncharacteristically crisp and clear. Somewhere, high above, Harry had the sensation of winds sweeping the sky clean.
He found Joe Fisher standing, naked, in the pool, his back to Harry as he slowly raised and lowered his arms. All around him the fish swirled, occasionally butting their heads against his flesh. Harry couldn’t decide whether to be afraid—the man was clearly nuts—or angry, so he settled on a mixture. “Hello?” he asked.
Fisher turned slowly, like a man with whiplash. “Friend,” he greeted Harry, slowly raising an arm.
“Can I ask?” Harry asked.
“Testing a theory. On a reef, a big fish pulls in and these guys rush over to eat him clean. It’s called symbiosis. One species helping another.”
“I know what symbiosis is,” Harry answered, folding his arms over his chest. Why did people always assume he was more ignorant than he was, and how could Joe Fisher stand to let the fish get so close to his dick?
“What we need to do is get these fish used to humans. Once they understand that I don’t have any barnacles or algae growing on my skin, they’ll stop bugging me.”
“How long do you think that will take?”
Fisher shrugged. “I’ve been here half an hour and they’re still munching.”
Harry tilted his head to the side. “Can I ask you a serious question?”
“Shoot.” Fisher ducked. “Ha, ha. Just kidding.”
“Are you, like, crazy?”
“People have said so.”
“Have any of them been wearing white coats?”
Fisher pirouetted slowly, trailing a boa of fish. “One or two, but don’t you have to be a little crazy to get out of bed in the morning? I mean, otherwise, the news is pretty bad.”
Harry was inclined to agree, but he didn’t want to be aligned with someone like Joe Fisher. He rolled up his pant legs, sat on the edge of the pool, and cautiously lowered a leg into the water. A few stragglers bumped and bit his leg, but he forced himself to keep it in the water. If you were prepared for it, the bite wasn’t so bad.
“Anyway, how sane are you?” Fisher asked, prancing like a satyr, half man, half goat, one leg up, one leg down. Harry tried not to look at his prick flopping through the water. “You live in a big house you never leave. You don’t seem to like your wife. You’re famous, you’re rich, you’re good-looking, but…” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe I’m not a people person,” Harry said.
“Everybody is a people person.”
“What makes you such an expert?”
“I’m a student of humanity.”
“Are you married?”
Fisher shook his head.
“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
“Negativo. I realized a long time ago that most of life’s problems could be traced back to sex. Getting it, losing it. Getting it again. Losing it again. If I stopped having sex, I’d no longer be sending all that useless energy into the world.”
“Are you serious?”
“Never more.”
“Do you jerk off?”
“I used to, but then I decided it was like saying you’re a vegetarian who eats chicken.” He took a breath and submerged himself underwater. A few bubbles escaped to the surface.
Harry watched his gold hair undulate gracefully under the water, like sedge grass in the sea. “Are you lonely?” Harry asked when he reemerged.
“Sometimes. But then I go to a meeting.”
“What kind?”
“It doesn’t matter. Alcohol. Sex. Drugs. Food. It’s all the same. What matters is being in a room where people are not full of the usual shit. You’d be surprised how life-sapping the superficial can be.” He tilted his head, one eye closed—piratelike—against the glare of the sun. “You should come with me sometime.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Me neither.”
“Isn’t that, like, against the rules?” Harry remembered a controversy a few years earlier when people started using AA meetings to hook up.
“The rule is, there are no rules. That’s the beauty.” Fisher looked down into the water. “Look at that.”
Harry craned his neck to see better. A few of the more stubborn fish were staring lidlessly at Fisher’s leg, as if they were expecting it to suddenly grow a barnacle. “I don’t see anything,” he said.
“Exactly,” Fisher agreed. “They stopped biting.”
“Wow,” Harry said.
“People think fish are stupid, but they can learn from their mistakes.”
Somewhere, over the euonymus hedge, a house door slammed. Harry felt the muscles on his shoulders tense as his wife’s feet crunched on the gravel of the driveway. Her face, furious, squinched, and red, rose above the hedge. “You haven’t heard the last from me, Harry Harlow.” For a brief second, he thought she was going to stick her tongue out at him. Instead, she turned, slammed a car door, and was gone.
“That’s my wife.” Harry looked at Joe Fisher. “She’s leaving.” He started to add a pronoun. Me. She’s leaving me, but then Harry thought better of it. “When’s the next meeting?”
18
sophia was standing in front of a bulletin board outside the ICU, contemplating the implicit heartbreak of an ad for a size 20, never-worn wedding dress when the social worker whom she disliked approached.
“How are you?” the girl asked. Her braided hair lay inert and obscene across her shoulder, like a fat black sausage.
Sophia let herself sigh theatrically. She was so weary of the question. “Terrible,” she answered. “But thanks for asking.” She turned her attention back to the bulletin board but the girl refused to go away.
“Have you considered getting some support?”
For a second, Sophia had the confused idea that the girl was talking about support hose, those stockings that kept every thing smooth but left her feeling as if her organs had been smushed. She shook her head, partly to dislodge the image that was tempting her to giggle.
“People say it helps,” the girl said.
“I’ll think about it,” Sophia promised.
When she got home that night, the girl’s voice was on the answering machine, leaving the address of the next meeting of PALOC (Parents Accepting the Loss of a Child). Against her better judgment, Sophia wrote down the details. The next day, she waited for an excuse not to go. When none appeared, she found herself driving to a Methodist church off Wilshire Boulevard in the middle of rush-hour traffic. I don’t have to do this, she kept telling herself, even as she pulled into the mostly empty parking lot. Six o’clock, she checked her watch, the hour of heading home from work and starting supper for the family. But not in this crowd.
The meeting room was depressive-functional—metal folding chairs, a chalkboard with no chalk, a Mr. Coffee, and a can marked CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME with a smiley face next to it. Racial
ly, it was a surprisingly diverse group—black, white, Asian, Hispanic—a regular UN of grief. But Sophia recognized certain shared traits—a sad, ducking way of entering the room, as if to avoid a cobweb. But also a flicker of defiance, that wondered, Why me? What had they done to bring on this fingerprint from hell? There wasn’t even a word for what they were. Mothers without children. It left them feeling marked. Cursed. Into every life a little rain must fall? Fine. Let a job be lost. A tire blow. A ceiling fall. But not this. And if it must be, let it happen to someone else. Not me.
Only one woman, a youngish redhead with the soft body and engorged breasts of a recent mother, had her husband with her. It did not surprise Sophia that men avoided that room. When she told Darius she was thinking of going to the group, he had looked horrified.
“Why?” he asked.
“It can’t hurt,” she had answered, unsure if that was actually true.
Some of the women smiled in Sophia’s direction. She wondered if they recognized her from television and that awful day when the cameras had caught the family ducking in and out of the hospital, but decided against it. They were smiles of complicity for the newcomer, meant to make her feel included, but all they did was make her feel raw on the inside, scraped free of the skin she had worked so hard to grow over her wound. Maybe it had been a mistake to come.
At fourteen minutes past six, a plump woman with frizzy white hair bustled into the room like someone who was chronically late. She smiled vaguely at the faces turning her way. Her name, she announced in between pants, was Helen. Sophia exhaled noisily at the coincidence. Helen was a nurse. She got the idea for PALOC four years earlier, when her only child, a five-year-old boy, had drowned at a birthday party in a swimming pool teeming with children. Helen was not at the party. She had volunteered for overtime that weekend. The pay—time and a half—was too good to turn down and she was saving up for a trip to Sea World, an obsession her son had developed after seeing the movie about the whale and the little boy that had been so popular that year.
“For years,” Helen said, rocking back and forth from the heels of her feet to her toes, “I blamed every one—the children in the pool, my husband for not wanting to go to the party, the other parents for watching only their children, the EMS workers for not getting there sooner, the hospital administrators for asking me to work overtime, the people who made the film about the whale, the whale. I even blamed Timmy for going swimming in the first place. He was only a ‘guppy,’ but he thought he was a great swimmer because that’s how kids are, isn’t it?” Helen surveyed the room, looking for agreement. Sophia was surprised at how inattentive most of the women appeared, but then she realized that they must have heard this story many times. Only the redhead was sitting on the edge of her seat, a look of ecstatic sympathy animating her features. Go on, her body language screamed, then what happened?
“I think that’s what we love about our children,” Helen continued, “they don’t know they aren’t good at things. In Timmy’s mind, he was a shark, and that’s why it’s so easy for me to understand what happened next. He was in the shallow end, where he’d promised his mommy he’d stay, but over there”—she gestured toward an imaginary pool, somewhere in the back of the room—“in the deep end, he could see the older kids playing and he probably thought, That looks like fun…so he started heading toward them, using the doggie paddle, the only stroke he really knew.” It alarmed Sophia to see Helen mimic a dog swimming, cupping her pudgy hands and moving them back and forth in a digging motion.
“What I can’t understand,” Helen said, the sweetness draining from her voice, “is what happened next. He drowned in only five feet of water. Five feet! Did Timmy panic when he realized how far he had wandered from the shallow end? Did he start to thrash around and call for help? What did the children around him think he was doing? I guess I’ve spent a thousand hours watching kids play in the pool and I’ve seen it again and again—there’s always one who likes to pretend he’s drowning. ‘Help! Help!’ he’ll yell, breaking your heart with worry until you get there and he starts laughing and smiling, as pleased as punch that he fooled you. Maybe that’s what the kids thought Timmy was doing. Maybe that was why nobody took him seriously. They probably didn’t even know him because he didn’t really have a lot of friends. He was a little shy and a little overweight. That was one of the reasons we were so pleased that he had taken an interest in swimming. We thought it might help with the weight. And when he got invited to the pool party, you should have seen how happy he was….”
As she spoke, her face flushed a deep red, as if she had been exercising vigorously. She reached into her purse, took out a white Kleenex, and blew into it loudly. Sophia thought of her own Helen. Would it have been easier to lose her at five, instead of sixteen? Five was such a good age. The best, really. Old enough to be out of diapers and bed wetting but still filled with the awe of the world and still needing you to explain it. By sixteen, you have a glimmer of the way they will abandon you, seeking love in the arms of boys or respect from adults against whom you will be unfavorably compared. Even as you know it is right—children who stay forever coddled in the family home seem particularly pathetic—it breaks your heart a little. No, Sophia decided, she should count herself lucky compared to this wreck of a woman; not only did she still have Miranda, she had the luxury of seeing her Helen almost whole. Almost an adult.
She smelled him before she saw him—a mixture of alcohol, unwashed clothes, and the raw-onion smell of old body odor. She turned to look. A thin, pale man with several days’ growth of a scratchy white beard was sitting at the end of Sophia’s aisle. Her stomach flopped at the smell but after a few seconds, she let herself glance at him again. His once-white T-shirt was gray and misshapen, his tan corduroy pants were filthy, and he exuded a frightening fury. At first, she assumed he had mistaken the meeting for Alcoholics Anonymous, but some of the women seemed to recognize him. If one could call the look of revulsion that passed over their faces recognition.
“Of course,” Helen continued, “the person I blamed the most was me. I was Timmy’s mommy. I should have been there, looking out for him, but I wasn’t. And no matter how many ‘grief counselors’ have told me again and again that it wasn’t my fault, it was. I know it. You know it. We all know it. If I had been there, there is no way Timmy would have drowned.” Helen began to weep openly. A woman jumped out of her seat to put an arm around her. The man on Sophia’s aisle crossed his arms and let out a sigh of contempt. Something in her was gratified by his attitude. She had a lump in her throat from Helen’s story, but a part of her resented having her emotions stirred, the way she would hate herself for crying at a sad song or a sentimental movie. She might have left, had it not required squeezing past the crazy man.
Finally, Helen’s tears subsided and she looked up, surprisingly calm and composed. “That’s what we’re about here at PALOC,” she said, “having a place where you can break down and cry and nobody is going to judge you. Nobody is going to tell you ‘Move on,’ or ‘Put the past behind you.’ You don’t have to put on a brave face or say you’re sorry for crying your heart out. We know it’s not easy. We know what it’s like to have friends who don’t want to see you anymore because you’re too much of a downer, or lose your job or your spouse because you can’t pick yourself up and move on. For some of us, it’s not possible. Not now. Not ever. You might not always feel that way, but if that’s how you feel right now, well, we are here to support you.” Everyone in the room applauded, except Sophia and the man in her aisle.
“I see there are some new people in the room tonight,” Helen said, looking directly at Sophia and then the redhead. “If you would like to get up and say something, we welcome you.” Sophia shook her head slightly and looked at the floor, but the redhead stood and eagerly walked to the front of the room.
“Hello, my name is Kathy.”
“Hi, Kathy,” the crowd responded.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,”
she began in a gush and then stopped herself, suddenly aware of how wrong her words sounded. “I don’t mean happy…what I mean is, I’m happy to have found a place.” She looked to her husband for help, a large lunk of a young man with huge hands and feet, whose short hair and fit body made Sophia think he was, or recently had been, in the military. He continued to stare at the ground. Kathy took a breath and started again. “All my life, all I wanted was a large family for me and Craig. Nine months ago, it seemed like God had answered my prayers, when I found out I was pregnant with Melissa.” She touched her stomach when she said the girl’s name, as if the fetus were still swimming around in her amniotic mush. “I did every thing I could for Melissa. I painted her room pink and filled it with dolls, I ate a lot of vegetables and took all the right vitamins and I prayed all the time, thanking the Lord for sending us such a gift but for some reason, I was sick all the time throwing up with terrible head aches, and my body kept swelling up, getting bigger and bigger.” She looked at her own hands in wonderment, as if they belonged to someone else. “I knew God intended women to have pain in childbirth as punishment for what happened in Genesis, but he didn’t say anything about before birth. I had to quit my job as a dental hygienist because every thing about the job made me throw up. People were nice at first, the dentist I worked for told me to take my time, go home if I needed to, but by the fourth month of my pregnancy, I could only work an hour a day. After that, I just stayed home, lying in bed, watching television and eating as much as I could to keep the nausea away.
“The only thing that made it worthwhile was feeling Melissa kick in my belly, knowing that she was there, waiting to get out and say hello to the world. One day, about a month before my due date, I noticed that Melissa hadn’t kicked in a while. I thought, Oh, well, that’s fine, she’s just resting, getting ready for the big day, so I didn’t really think anything about it. And that is one of things that bothers me to this day, because my doctor said to me after the whole thing happened, ‘Why didn’t you tell me she had stopped kicking?’ But how was I supposed to know? Melissa was my first baby.
And Sometimes Why Page 18
