And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  Sophia had laughed at the story. “You don’t understand,” he’d said, “there I was, all puffed up, thinking that the old man still had something left if a woman that good-looking would talk to me, and it turns out she was a bloody hooker.” He was right. She hadn’t understood. Now she did. She leaned over to pick up the phone in the bathroom. They hadn’t spoken since she’d left Los Angeles two weeks ago. Maybe this would be a good opportunity to reconnect. She dialed the number of their house. It rang and rang. When the answering machine clicked on, she hung up. In Miranda’s last e-mail, she had hinted that Darius might be seeing someone. Sophia had not asked for details. She tried to think of someone else to call, but knew that most of her friends would listen to the story, laugh a little, and then wonder if Sophia was losing it in New York. The only person who would receive the story the way she wanted was Harry Harlow, whose guilt was so deep and wide, he would laugh, take her side, be glad to hear from her—do anything she asked—but she willed herself not to call. Harry was a habit that needed breaking. Maybe that was the real problem with being so alone in the world, she thought, turning on the hot-water tap with one of her toes. If there’s nobody to share the small stories, the series of unconnected moments that, taken together, constitute a life, how do you know you exist?

  The next morning, Sophia packed her bags and took a cab across the park to Micheline’s apartment. The Frenchwoman had left only that morning, but already the house seemed guiltily abandoned, as if its owner had been compelled to leave town hurriedly for unsavory reasons. A wire coat hanger lay on the floor, the waste basket overflowed with dry cleaners’ plastic, a half-drunk cup of coffee sat on the counter. Sophia opened the refrigerator. Micheline had said she could help herself to whatever was in the kitchen, but eating another woman’s cheese reminded her too much of the nights her mother brought leftovers home from the restaurant. She threw the perishables away, pushed perennials like Dijon mustard to the back of the refrigerator, and put the nonperishables in a plastic crate she stored at the back of the closet. She had wanted to do the same thing with Helen’s bedroom. Seeing her deodorant on top of her bureau had felt too painfully immediate—as if she might walk in any minute. But Darius wouldn’t hear of it. He hadn’t even wanted Maria vacuuming in there. You know how much dust is made of human skin cells?

  Do you hear yourself? You’re crazy.

  She shook her head like a wet dog to dislodge the memory.

  In Micheline’s bedroom, she labeled the framed photos with yellow Post-Its, stowed them under the bed, stripped the sheets, gathered the towels, and squeezed into the elevator for the basement. For so many years, she had resented the endless, Sisyphean drudgery of housework, but now she relished having a chore. Sliding quarters into the washing machine slot, she felt young again, like when she was in college. She thought of her mother and how every birthday she would say, bewildered, “But I don’t feel fifty,” or sixty, or most recently seventy. Sophia had always felt sorry for her. How could one get to be her age and be so clueless? But now that she herself was closing in on those ages, she knew exactly what her mother meant. Sophia did not feel forty-five, a neither-here-nor-there age. She felt twenty-six. Young, sexy, still ready for adventure.

  Back in the apartment, she tried to restrain herself from going through Micheline’s closet, but her resolve lasted only an hour. “Nosey, nosey,” Darius would have said. “Healthy curiosity,” she’d have answered. You’ve got to stop these imaginary conversations with your potentially ex-husband, she chided herself. The clothes were surprisingly high quality, but odd colors for the designers—fuchsia or citron, instead of their characteristic browns and blacks. Sophia thought of the aqua raincoat she’d seen Micheline pack the night they met. Were they the colors she preferred or the only ones left at the end of the season, when every thing went on sale?

  The phone rang. All morning, Sophia had listened as Micheline’s voice instructed people to call her on her cell phone in Paris. When the ringing stopped, Sophia experienced a pang of loneliness so intense, her eyes watered as if from physical pain. She opened her address book to find the scrap of paper with Coleman Kramer’s name and phone number. He answered on the first ring.

  “Hello?” Only it sounded a lot like “Yellow?”

  “Coleman Kramer?”

  “You got ’im, unless you’re trying to sell me something.”

  “I got your number from Micheline Theroux.”

  “Micheline!” She could hear the memory of sex in his voice. “How is the great lady?”

  “Not so good, actually. Her father had a heart attack.” Why had she relished throwing water on the man’s lust like that?

  “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry to hear it. I thought those frogs never got heart attacks.”

  Sophia suppressed a guffaw. She’d had the same thought about Franco smugness regarding the cardio-protective qualities of red wine, but never would have said it out loud.

  “So what can I do for you, friend of Micheline?”

  “She said you teach art.” Was he always in such a good mood or was he flirting with her?

  Coleman Kramer sighed. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I’m looking to take a class.”

  “Well, you are out of luck for Advanced Painting and Drawing at the LeBraun School. We only have three weeks left in the semester and then I’m on sabbatical.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Are you any good?”

  “I was once told I had an eye, but that was a long time ago.”

  “‘Just an eye, but what an eye.’”

  “Cézanne,” Sophia answered.

  “Oh, shit. An artist who knows her art history,” Coleman answered, “no wonder you can’t paint.” Sophia laughed.

  “What the hell. Come for the next few classes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “What’s the fun of working if you can’t fuck with your bosses?”

  30

  miranda had always assumed she was a city person. But life in the middle of nowhere surprised her. After two months of living with Jason, she woke up, turned to mold the length of her body—neck, shoulders, stomach, legs—into his, and suddenly realized she was happy.

  “What’s wrong?” Jason asked.

  She must have stopped breathing. “Nothing,” she answered. “I’m happy.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I am. What kind of a freak is happy in the middle of an Alaska winter?”

  Jason stretched. “Actually, this is the end of an Alaskan winter.”

  The first few days had been the hardest. After Jason left in the morning, she’d go back to the cabin and throw herself into cleaning. But even without a dishwasher or vacuum cleaner, two adults can generate only so much dirt. On the second day, she discovered Frontier Skills sandwiched on the bookshelf between a dozen romance and espionage novels. Written in cheerfully ungrammatic prose by Barbara Olatz, a Norwegian woman whose husband, “Fred,” trapped the region north of Fairbanks for thirty years, Miranda was captured by the first sentence: When Fred and I arrived, I was as green as the willows on the banks of the Tanana River. She read the book in one sitting. And then again the next day. And the next. Until she had read the book five times. From Barbara, she learned (in theory) how to cure meat; properly split a log; tan animal skins with their own brains; preserve blueberries, cranberries, and rosehips; brew homemade beer; tell moose scat from bear scat; keep toddlers amused at thirty below—water thrown in the air will land as frozen marbles—and the best time of year for getting your moose—first week in October, after they’d been eating the whole summer. Winter moose was nothing but bone and gristle. “The dogs will hardly touch it,” Barbara sniffed.

  Truthfully, most of the skills Barbara wrote about presupposed a basic knowledge beyond anything Miranda possessed. Harvest your barley early. What barley? In the McMartin household, Sophia had done all the cooking and gardening. Miranda thought of her domestic ignorance as something temp
orary, even charming, like one of those city sophisticates too busy to bother, but now she felt a kind of retroactive shame for her ignorance. How did she think all those meals got prepared year after year? Now, with so much time on her hands and Barbara Olatz at her side, she was determined to learn something useful. Mixing mortar out of peat moss or chopping up dead mice for bait were out of the question, but after two days of trial and error, she did figure out how to make biscuits in the wood-burning stove. The trick was a steady temperature. For this, Barbara suggested a wet log. The water slows the fire. Plus, the moisture will help in cooking. That’s how the French get their bagetts [sic] crusty on the outside, and airey [sic] on the inside. The book also included twenty-two ways to cook moose, a good thing, as their main source of protein was the cache of moose Jason’s father had sent over the week before she arrived. Miranda found the meat stringy, like cheap stew, but if you cooked it for long enough, it wasn’t half bad.

  In the afternoons, Miranda wrote letters. Mostly, she wrote to her father because she knew he read them aloud to Helen. She had brought her laptop with her, but after the battery died, Jason refused to let her recharge it using the generator, which ran on diesel (four dollars a gallon).

  “Longhand was good enough for Thomas Carlyle,” he’d exclaimed.

  Miranda had been so nonplussed by the Carlyle reference, she’d been momentarily struck dumb.

  “If you can’t, you can’t.” Jason softened his tone. “Just try.”

  Miranda sharpened her pencil and began to write. The words came so slowly, it gave her plenty of time to think about what she was saying. Somewhere between the emotion and the transcribing, she could see that most of what she thought she wanted to say was ill conceived. When she’d left California, she thought her mother had been on her side and her father had been against her. Now, she couldn’t tell whom to be mad at—her father, for leaving her mother so quickly after Miranda. Her mother, for leaving her father alone with Helen. Helen, for getting on the motorcycle in the first place. True, Miranda had been the first to leave, but that was within the natural order of things. Children leave. Parents are supposed to stay.

  She threw out the early drafts, berating them, and decided to keep her letters focused on things. She wrote about the dogs and their personalities, all of whom she fed while Jason skinned animals in the garage. Mathilda is such a princess. Archibald is not to be trusted. Gus makes me laugh. She wrote about the gaseous green fog of the aurora borealis at night, the heady abundance of stars, the strangers who came to look at the cabin for buying, and the men and women who lived in the surrounding area. She worked hard at finding original turns of phrase to describe the cold and snow but often failed. Even Barbara had been challenged in that department. I kept thinking God was playing a joke with all that cold my first year. But the next year, it was the same. If I was going to make it, I could see I’d have to accept it. The next week, I traded four martens with an Inuit woman who taught me how to sew an anorak from a wolf Fred had trapped near Deadman’s Gulch.

  Once a week, Jason took her by snowmobile to Judy and Pete Volker’s double-wide trailer, fifteen miles away. The Volkers ran a generator 24/7, and if the weather was good, they could get an Internet connection from the satellite on top of their trailer. Miranda gave them the password to her account. If an e-mail arrived for her, they’d print it out and have it waiting for her. They refused to take any money, so each time Miranda went she gave them a bar of the expensive chocolate she had brought with her. She was sorry to see the chocolate go and was pretty certain they read the e-mails based on the motherly way Judy Volker sometimes engulfed her in her wide, soft arms, but those were small prices to pay for regular updates from the outside world.

  She sat at the dining room table determined to reply to her father’s last e-mail. But every thing about it troubled her more than most.

  Hello Sweetheart:

  Thank you for your last e-mail. You wouldn’t believe how much it means to me to hear from you. As you know, I was opposed to your leaving, but hearing how wonderfully stimulating Alaska has been for you, I see that I was being selfish. (That was what your mother always said.) I wanted you around, so I assumed staying was the best thing for you. What I am trying to say is, I am happy you are happy. (I am always telling my students to get to the point—I guess I should take some of my own advice.)

  We are well around here. Helen is all moved back into her old room. She’s got a very fancy motorized bed that will actually do exercises for her. I should get one for myself! To make room for it, I gave her old bed to the people who moved into the Beaudells’ house. I met them one night when I was walking Monty. They are a young couple with two small children. It made me remember how excited your mother and I used to get whenever a new couple moved to the neighborhood with children either your age or of babysitting age. Apparently, the father invented the Internet, or something like that—when they said the name of the website, they looked at me like I should be impressed, but honestly I had no idea. When they mentioned the house was much bigger than their old one and that they had no furniture, I said I had a bed I was throwing away and would be grateful if they’d take it. The next day, two men showed up and moved the bed from the hallway.

  You asked in your last e-mail how I spend my days. Honestly, not that different from before. Your uncle Fergal and his wife, Siobhan, came to visit. I tried to tell them it wasn’t a good time, but they wore me down. It was surprisingly good to see them. You should see how their son, Danny, has grown. I am back to teaching a class this semester. Jack thought it would be good for me, and, truthfully, I am grateful for the distraction.

  When I am away from the house, Wendy, a Jamaican lady who used to be a nurse, watches Helen. I’ve never seen anyone so reluctant to move. I’ve already fired two workers, however, so I am striving to be less judgmental. The first one lasted only a day. When I came home and checked on Helen, her catheter had come undone and the bed was soaked in urine. I asked the woman how long it had been since she checked on her, and she said, “Five minutes.” When I observed that the sheets were already cold, she acted like I was the one at fault. It definitely gets on your nerves, the way they sit there all day watching soap operas. Then if you ask them to do something, like run a vacuum, they say, “Oh, no. That’s not my job.” Thank God for Maria. BTW, will you ask your mother why Maria doesn’t cash my checks? It’s been six weeks. Every time I ask, she blushes and backs away from me.

  Did you ever meet Molly, the poetry professor from Montana? Thin, dark, curly hair, looks a little like Joyce Carol Oates, but not quite so intense? Well, she has become a good friend. No, not that way. I guess she had to take care of her sick father for several years, so when she heard what I was doing, she has come over a few evenings to play Scrabble and help keep me company. She’s not quite up to snuff in the Scrabble department, but who is, compared to you?

  What do you hear from your mother? I want you to know how sorry I am for how every thing has turned out between us all. I do miss her. But don’t tell her that. I think it would just make her feel bad, and she deserves a break from all this.

  At night, I read your letters to Helen in her room. I am sure she loves hearing every thing.

  Sometimes I think your mother was right. It probably would have been fine to keep Helen in a place where they are trained to take care of people in her condition. Maybe soon I will need to take her back. If something happened to her here, I don’t think those ladies would have half a clue about what to do. Assuming you could tear them away from the television. I have thought of disconnecting cable service, but the thought of them sitting blankly, staring at the wall, is even worse.

  Your mother always said I didn’t see half of what she did around the house. It’s true. Her roses have gone all black and spotty. I went to Home Depot to ask for advice, but the girl in the gardening department was as ignorant as I was. She just read the label out loud to me. That’s corporate globalization for you.

  Well, th
at’s all for now. You mustn’t worry about Jason’s father. I am sure he likes you fine. As a parent, it can be hard to believe anyone is good enough for your precious darling but in the end, what you want most is for your child to be happy.

  Lots of love,

  Daddy

  P.S. If you speak to your mother, please don’t tell her about the roses. Or Molly. You know how she worries.

  Miranda remembered Molly well. At one of her parents’ semi-regular Christmas parties, Molly had gotten tipsy and told Helen how lucky she was to have such a “top-drawer” father. Molly had studied poetry at Cambridge and thought she could say things like “top-drawer” without anyone noticing. But the phrase had become a joke between the sisters. Thereafter, anyone they considered even remotely pretentious was labeled “top-drawer.” The fact that Molly was circling Darius, using the excuse of a dead father, made Miranda’s stomach fall. He was as defenseless as a mackerel on a beach when it came to women.

  More troubling were his hints about Helen and her condition. The women who cared for her sounded awful. In the beginning, Darius had used a service that hired nurses to watch Helen, but the cost had been prohibitive. The social worker at the hospital had hooked him up with an informal network of caregivers who took their salaries as cash at the end of the day. Rationally, Miranda had always agreed with her mother—Darius was deluding himself about Helen’s condition—but on some level, she had been glad of those delusions. It gave her license to feel the same way at times, despite what the doctors were saying. Hearing him suddenly fatalistic about Helen made Miranda feel terrible.