by Kent Meyers
I watched until he dribbled to a stop, his eyes once more watching out the window, the acrid light out there. Then words went from my lips before I even formed them.
That didn’t get you far.
His head jerked as if the wheelchair were electrified.
Keep that up, I said, we’ll have to buy a new carpet.
The back of his head, with its neat barber cut above the flaccid neck skin, went still as a fly sensing the swatter. That’s all. I told my mother I’d take a leave-of-absence from my job to come down and stay with her.
Ohnononono, Sophie, she protested. You can’t quit your job. People depend on you.
This although she’d just let out a small cry, like a squeezed cat, to be sure I knew how much her knees hurt when she rose from her chair to get another cup of coffee.
I rolled my eyes. Paint laid on canvas. My job—I sat behind a desk at a personnel office and pushed forms at people. I spent years studying literature and psychology, hoping to find an explanation for myself, then concealed the degrees in order to get a job that would prove I didn’t amount to much. I took some satisfaction in knowing what I was doing, but my mother bragged to friends how her Sophie was helping people. Convincing herself my life had turned out well.
But your hips, I said.
Oh. That—she shooed the air—I manage.
The house’s rafters creaked. She let me argue until I’d committed myself—then closed the door: Well, I guess I could use your help. But only if you’re sure. Because your job, you know. And I do manage. I don’t get around like I used to, but—
I let her talk. Let her show her art to an empty room. I only cared about his dying.
Instead, she died first. Abandoned me once more to him, yet managed to be blameless. I had the feeling cancer hadn’t found her, she’d found it. Gone seeking, plucked it from the air of the house, the history in its rooms, then pretended ignorance when she found her stomach swelling, complained querulously of back pain and of gaining weight—and only when she was past all cure did she go to the doctor, who told her of the tumor heavy as a child pressing against her spine.
A tumor? I cried when she told me. Can’t they cut it out?
She misinterpreted my despair, pretended to be strong for me: It’s too far gone, Sophie.
It was too familiar—that shaking of the head, that oh-well-what’s-to-be-done? The boy who cried wolf, the martyr who sighed sorry. Her eyes teared up. I couldn’t stand to have my sympathy elicited, even by a dying mother. I walked into the kitchen, snapped on a burner, put water in the teakettle, and listened to the bubbles hiss.
Five weeks later she died, and there I was, alone with him. I thought to sell the house, let the money disappear into a nursing home, and walk away. But for a few days I had to do my mother’s duties. Either that or let him sit in his own stink and starve—which would raise suspicions. So I did what I had to until I could arrange to abandon him.
It’s hard to think a body can be half-destroyed. If he’d had to move by halves to where he wanted to go, like Hercules chasing the tortoise, and then found his joints locked, his muscles paralyzed—or if, when he tried to talk, he’d been able to speak the nouns and prepositions but not the articles and verbs, or the consonants but not the vowels—then I would have remembered the halfwayness of his body, that good left side. He wouldn’t have surprised me then. But a face that sags on one side and has all its nerves and expressions on the other isn’t seen in halves. The sagging part seeps into the healthy part. I saw a full face, stricken, not two half-faces, one diseased, the other good.
So he surprised me. I was retrieving a glass of water from the TV tray off which he ate his meals when suddenly his left arm shot out faster than I could see, and his hand closed around my wrist. His strength was astonishing, and it wasn’t even his dominant arm. My bone hurt. Water sloshed over the lip of the glass and wet my wrist and the back of his hand. I almost cried out, but I clamped my throat down on the words: habit returned.
Out of his ruined face he stared at me. And I forgot the long discipline of my eyes. I looked directly into his. The first time in years. In years and years. One would have thought his stroke was infectious, that it had passed through his body into mine, cutting off my brain’s connection to my limbs. I was a little girl again. The present had folded itself into the past, and there she stood, my earlier self.
Sometimes in summer I’ll watch the nighthawks flying. They sweep low, in random, graceful flocks, each bird branding its individual pathway through the evening air, wings flicking like the offbeats of a song, as if it is the bird that is the counterpoint to birds, the bird that shows other birds an opposite way to fly that exists between the beats of normal flying. And there are times when I catch a single nighthawk’s wing beat, when the bird is tipped at just the right angle so that the orange horizon turns the white wing bars orange, too, and the wing is arched in the upper blue, and the moment, the flicking, offbeat wing, expands to become forever, an opposite time caught out of time, so that it never ends.
It was that kind of neverness and everness—except that it was ugly. Ugly: surely the first word in any language, a grunt of dismay that the world could be so wrong and so surprising all at once. An ugh made into an adjective: an ugh-ly thing, an ugh-ly moment, an ugh-ly grip upon one’s wrist.
Then it all broke down. Because I looked into his eyes for the first time in years—and what I saw was dust. Can eyes be dusty? They were. He was trying to speak. His throat worked, saliva collected at the corners of his mouth, his tongue moved in his skull, and his grip on my wrist was the kind of bright, illuminating pain that made me understand the crazed, redemptive light in the eyes of martyred saints in paintings—but also why a trapped animal would chew its own leg off. But beyond it all, above it, underneath it, was the dust: the lid of his right eye sagging like a fold of chicken skin, and behind that lid his brown-maroonish pupil. Like a piece of leather torn from the dusty cover of an old, unread book.
His yellow smell filtered up to me. His breath puffed from his moving mouth, warm and stale. The saliva gathered, pooled, crept over his lip like a thin, shy animal sneaking from a humid cave. His grip tightened even more, and his tongue strained randomly between his teeth, but he didn’t speak. Of course he didn’t speak. That dusty eye was pleading for something the way dust pleads—mute, plaintive—but it was nothing but dust, a dried-up, tiny-rivered, going-nowhere eye. The frizzy-haired girl relaxed her fist inside my throat. In this house, where only the floor joists had ever spoken, where only the timbers and hinges had ever complained, I could speak. Silence had at last caught up with him. He’d promoted it, and now it had taken him. Grown, like cancer, into and around him. But left me free.
Thirty-two years old, and my voice had finally been returned. A fairy tale. Well, they’re vicious stories, fairy tales. I didn’t struggle. I reached down with my other hand to the TV tray and felt for the napkin there, not letting my eyes leave his. I lifted the napkin, dabbed water off the back of my caught hand. The water on his wrist I left.
There, I said. You’ve gone and made a spill.
He shook his head as if by centrifugal force he could dislodge the words from his brain and fling them from his mouth. I feared the drool would spray, but it clung to his jaw. I could almost see the words. Are words that are formed, but never spoken, words? Or are they like Bishop Berkeley’s silent tree? Was he trying to assert himself? Or was his urgency of a different kind—to ask forgiveness, maybe? I watched the words almost form on his tongue and realized they were mine. Whatever I said they were, they were. Or if I refused them, I negated them entirely: they never were, had never been.
His throat convulsed, his dusty eyes protruded, his mouth opened and wetly closed. His grip tightened into a cruel telegraph trying to imprint a message through my skin. I didn’t struggle. I had two good hands. I could have thrown water into his face, slapped him. Numerous things. What use? I had my voice. And his. I pictured the words inside his mind collaps
ing wing-on-wing, syllable-on-syllable, phoneme-on-phoneme in dusty, twitching heaps.
I know just how you feel, I said.
I paused to see what he understood. Dust devils twisted in his pupils.
We can stand like this until your grip gives out, I said.
I held the napkin out to him. We both knew he couldn’t take it. I watched the water roll down his wrist, between the hairs on his forearm, slow as a stalking summer fly. The glass in my hand magnified sunlight in a round, shaking ring across the walls and floor. It bent around corners. A shadow of light.
He let go. Turned his face away. Rubbed his arm on his pants to dry it. I stood a moment more, then turned, the glass by my side. I moved within a shimmering ring of light that wrapped itself around me tighter and tighter as I withdrew from the window until it disappeared—as though my body were its source and had pulled it back inside.
When I first came back, my mother had prepared my childhood bedroom for me. She displayed it with a flourish, done up in pinks and pastel blues, and frills. I was supposed to remark how wonderful it was, how much effort she’d put into it, and her hips bad, arthritis in her joints. But as far as I was concerned, it was all just evidence: she’d always known, and was now giving me the childhood I’d never had, without acknowledging anything.
Wonderful, Mom, I said. But I’ll sleep in the basement.
Her face fell. I picked up my luggage and walked from the room. As I did, I brushed against the doorknob, and the hinges squealed like a hurt animal. The sound pinned me. Then I remembered the present: daylight, the adult body I stood in. I forced myself to step into the hall. On the other side of the doorway, I turned. My mother stood in the center of my old bedroom, disappointment stretching her face.
How can you live with that noise? I asked.
But I’d rejected her pinks and blues, and she was impervious to the question.
I guess I just ignore it, she said.
I guess you do.
I turned away and carried my luggage down the steep basement steps. I was the only one in the house who could navigate them. Halfway down, I realized: He was a carpenter. Surely he knew how to stop a squealing hinge. He hadn’t cared. Had he wanted her to know, to prove she wouldn’t do anything? Or worse, did he imagine her awake? Was that part of it?
The next time I went past that bedroom, I steeled myself, then pulled the door shut. I heard my mother in the kitchen stop moving. The house itself quit breathing. Then things resumed. After that we pretended the locked room didn’t exist. A fairy-tale room.
But when he grabbed my wrist, and I saw the words floating in all their dusty disintegration behind his eyes, I began to see how life carves patterns in its offbeat randomness. Reversals balance out sometimes. What had been taken from me was being given back. I stepped into my mother’s shoes completely. I brought him meals, took him to the bathroom, endured it all, showered and dressed him, wheeled him into the sunlight to let stray dogs sniff and growl at him and neighbors chirp their greetings. I did everything but talk to him.
From the door of the living room I watched him watch the world. I saw what he saw, and I saw him seeing it. I was the fly on the wall, buzzing with old lyrics, unforgotten, a reservoir he’d given me. So many words. Then one afternoon I saw him watching two high school boys in pickups riding up and down the street, smoking their tires and sticking their heads out the windows to call and laugh and grin at the girls who sat beside them. One of the girls had long hair that swirled in the pickup’s wind and obscured her boyfriend’s vision.
I saw his head move to follow her as she went by. I didn’t even know I was speaking his words until I heard them in the room:
Love to get that little bitch where she couldn’t get away.
It was so real. Like ventriloquism: as if the words came from where he sat. His good hand curled around the wheelchair’s arm the way a touched caterpillar curls, and little creases appeared on the back of his neck as he stiffened. The pickups reached the end of the block and continued on, and we were staring at a world un-moving. Then, in my own voice, I said:
Too bad for you. A baby could get away from you.
I turned on my heel in that brilliant, new-made silence. Even the house, I thought. Even the house’s voice is mine.
I went to the bedroom my mother had turned into a lie and opened the door and took down everything she’d put up: the pink curtains and bedspread with their matching lace, the glass angels hanging from the ceiling, praising on their strings, the rainbow stickers on the windows casting plastic light in arcs across the floor. I piled it all on the floor. Then I got in the car and went to the grocery store for cardboard boxes. Elise Thompson, who checks groceries there, so slowly she could be memorizing them, asked what I was doing with the boxes.
Putting things in boxes, I told her.
Oh. I thought maybe you were moving.
I’m not, I said.
I put everything—sheets and curtains and suffocated angels—into the boxes and taped them shut. I stacked them in a corner. Then I struggled with the mattress and box spring, dragged them across the floor, got them upright inside the closet, shut the closet doors, and taped them shut, too, gray seams of duct tape like bandages running floor to ceiling. I took the bed frame apart, hauled the pieces down the basement steps, then returned to the almost-barren room: walls, and a window with a rollup shade, a little desk and a chair, the boxes in the corner, and a single prism I’d left to spread thin, roving light. An anchorite’s cell.
Only one thing left: I pried the pins from the hinges of the door, then set the door inside the room against the wall. Like everything else, it had always been a lie: lie of frills, lie of lace, lie of locks and latches.
I made tea. The first cup I cooled and iced and took to him sugared, with a straw. I set it on his TV tray next to his good hand. I kept my fingers on the glass, my wrist within his reach.
Tea, I said.
And for him: I don’t want tea.
It was delicious, saying his words, my wooden puppet, for him.
You’re welcome anyway, I said.
He stared at me, his smirchy eyes astonished and afraid. I returned to the kitchen, heated the water again, put the bag in my cup, poured the boiling water over it, stood dipping. Chinese connoisseurs use tea leaves again and again, until only the faintest flavor remains, an echo of taste receding, like something barely recalled from a dream. I set the bag on the counter, went to the emptied room with the cup, sat at the little desk there. In its varnished surface I saw the wavery reflection of myself in a world of wood. I set the cup down, arranged a piece of paper, uncapped a pen.
All afternoon I wrote. I sipped tea, using the same bag over and over, the flavor becoming, if I really paid attention, more delicate each time, though it was only Lipton. The prism circled on its string, the rectangle of light revolved, the house’s rafters creaked, the windows watched. Time disappeared. The tea weakened with the weakening light until I may have only imagined its flavor, making it up as it touched my tongue. When darkness was complete outside, the cup empty for the final time, I rose and pulled the shade, then returned to duty, making supper, shaking extra salt in, setting it before him. I had him tell me it was far too salty, then told him if he didn’t like it, he could cook his meals himself.
Once he stuck his finger in his ear.
I said, for him: How’s that for irony? I’m a one-armed man with two good ears.
He took his finger out.
He can’t leave, can’t call for help. I’m free to take him among his former friends. They tell me how wonderful I am. I demur, of course. But what would he say if he could protest? That I’ve stolen his voice? I’ve given it back. If I interpret wrongly, who will judge the error? I would have to speak the protest for him—therefore interpret it first. But if the protest stems from my interpretation, what meaning can the protest have? The convolutions amaze, delight. And what if what is spoken is always truer than what isn’t, even if it’s false? I get
lost in logic and what-ifs.
Whatif, whatif, whatif. It looks like an Arabic word, desert, palm trees, an oasis surrounded by dunes. One might say: In the middle of the desert, I came upon a whatif. And squatting by that whatif was an ifnot. What would an ifnot be? I can see it running away on all fours, monkeyish, but I don’t know what it is. Whatitis, whatitis. Whatwhatwhat is a whatitis?
Across the street two of Marge Germaine’s nephews are shingling her roof. I hate the sound of hammers. Marge waddles out occasionally, then turns and calls, inviting her nephews in for cake or ice cream. They shrug, look at each other, wondering how much of their fat aunt’s time to waste, then untie their nail aprons and descend. He’s been watching the slow progress of the shingles up the decking. He used to spend all day on roofs, barebacked, then every evening return home smelling of pine and galvanized nails, asphalt and roofing felt. It never left his skin.
I wheel him outside. Marge, calling to her nephews, turns. She lifts her hand and waves.
Good morning, Sophie, she calls. Good morning—
She never says his name. She seems to think that being voiceless requires being nameless. I reply for both of us.
Good morning, Marge. Good morning—
Marge turns back to her nephews. I call to them for him: How’s the work going?
The older one, his nail pouch hanging from his fingers, the hammer dangling from its hook, shrugs and looks at me, though I’m not really the one who asked.
