Viney remains seated. Her eyes drift from the place mats and cutlery to the kitchen clock and coatrack to the colander of new-washed cherry tomatoes next to the sink. They remind her of the rubber balls the girls used to bounce when they played with their jacks on the floor under this table only yesterday, rubber balls attached to rubber bands stapled to balsa wood paddles that the boys loved so, those cheap playthings from Tinkham’s Five and Dime, established 1881, out of business since 1980.
Another question is forming. Was he ever mine?
The church bell is ringing; Bud must have already reached Pastor Huw. Soon everybody in town will know.
Viney gets up. She dials the Williams house and asks Hazel to summon Bonnie. (So quiet in her grief, Viney reflects after hanging up the phone, as if she already knew. It was the same when her mother went.)
She telephones Larken and Gaelan up in Lincoln—work numbers, home numbers, cell phones. But all she gets are their recorded voices, so she leaves a brief message, Please call me, honey, it’s important, after every beep.
She calls her daughters—Julie up in Omaha, Janey in Salt Lake—and leaves more messages; they are both at work and won’t be home until later. Her third daughter, Haley, the only one still here, doesn’t have an answering machine. Viney knows for a fact she isn’t home. It’s Randy’s weekend with the kids; he lives in Crete and Haley is driving them up there now. It’s fine. It’s not as though Welly was her father. Viney will talk to her tonight.
It’s only after she finally hangs up the phone, turns off the oven, and starts putting the vegetables away that she sees the answers to her questions: He wanted to die. He was not hers. They never really belonged to each other.
The church bell, she notices, has fallen silent.
They never did ring that bell for Hope.
Gaelan is in the dark. His cell phone is off.
He is at the movies, watching the naked, coiled figure of Arnold Schwarzenegger unfurl on the big screen. The sparks are flying. The sizzling force that bore the Terminator from the future to the present zigzags across the desert, igniting tumbleweeds, exploding grains of sand.
Gaelan has seen this movie three times already: with Mara, one of his paramours, on opening weekend; a second time with Jeff, his personal trainer at Y; and then again with Larken a couple of weeks ago. He is seeing it for the fourth time, alone, because staying home by himself on a Friday night was a prospect too depressing to consider.
Gaelan derives great comfort and inspiration from Arnold’s projected presence. Arnold is no great actor—Gaelan owns every single one of Arnold’s movies (even The Jayne Mansfield Story) and watches them with the sound on mute—but he is a great bodybuilder, a marvel of physical solidity. He can stand in his skin like no one else.
Gaelan tries to imagine what it would be like to move through the world with that sure, weighted grace. He still marvels at Arnold’s body, which has changed so much since his Conan the Barbarian days. Gaelan’s physique has changed too, since he emulates Arnold in all things related to bodybuilding. As Arnold has embraced a leaner aesthetic, so has Gaelan. When Arnold modified his routine, diet, and supplement regimen in the interest of replacing bulk with length, Gaelan followed suit.
Even though Arnold’s fame and sphere of influence have grown—he is the governor of California, he is married to a Kennedy, and it is not difficult to imagine that someday the laws of the land will bend to Arnold’s upbeat, indomitable force, enabling the possibility of a foreign-born commander in chief: President Schwarzenegger!—Gaelan maintains the status quo sensation of being connected to his long-term hero through his dedication to bodybuilding—albeit at a much humbler level. Usually this is reassuring.
Tonight, however, Gaelan is bothered by evidence that indicates that, however much his commitment to physical fitness aligns him with the former Mr. Olympia, his life is lagging.
Another lover has left his bed. Sleep is elusive. Fall is coming. He is still being stalked by the silent killer.
On the big screen, Arnold has just acquired his wardrobe: tight leather pants, jacket, boots. Here comes the bit with the rhinestone sunglasses. The audience laughs. Gaelan pops another Mylanta.
If only Larken didn’t have that regular thing on Fridays; she would have seen this again. Maybe she’ll come out with him tomorrow night.
After the initial burst of rain and tears, Bonnie feels better. She is calmed by thunderstorms, and although she’s a bit worried about the Williams girls, she remains intent on her archival duties.
What she does notice eventually is the sudden silence, a cessation of wind, dwindling rain. Bonnie disengages from her work and opens the door.
Outside, it has turned winter. The temperature has dropped to freezing. The outgoing gasses from Bonnie’s lungs condense instantly, hanging suspended in the air before her. They begin to form a small cumulus cloudbank just beyond her lips that grows and grows with each accelerating exhalation. The ground is white, knobby, studded with hailstones the size of golf balls, and yet when Bonnie looks up she sees that, miraculously, none of the whirligigs have suffered the slightest bit of damage. They begin to spin slowly as she stares at them. There is no wind.
Bonnie practices her own form of augury: As if retrieving a fallen plum, she plucks up a hailstone and puts it in her mouth. It is energetically charged and has a peculiar taste: equal parts iron, salinity, and shoe polish. A chemical reaction commences; as her saliva comes in contact with the hailstone and it begins to dissolve, there is a flash of contained light within Bonnie’s oral cavity; her cheeks are briefly aglow.
She starts walking across the lawn, gingerly at first, for she is barefoot and the hailstones are hard, jagged in places, so cold that they sear her skin. But as soon as the telephone inside the big house begins to ring she takes off running, slipping as she goes. She is almost at the bottom of the porch steps when the front door creaks open and Hazel appears, grayed and indistinct behind the summer screen, shrouded in her housedress.
“He knows now, doesn’t he?” Bonnie says. “He knows where Mom is.”
“I suppose he does,” Hazel replies kindly, her eyes filling with tears. Holding the screen door open and gesturing Bonnie in and out of the cold, she looks down and exclaims, “Oh, dear heavens, child! Look what you’ve done to your feet.”
Larken is mincing celery into eighth-of-an-inch cubes; these will go into the carrot and raisin salad. Minced celery is one of the special ingredients that makes Larken’s dinner guest prefer her carrot and raisin salad above all others. Larken’s other secret: She presoaks the raisins for half an hour in a mixture containing a cup of hot water, a generous splash of orange juice, a dash of lemon juice, a teaspoon of vanilla extract, and whispers of cinnamon and powdered ginger. After the grated carrots, plumped raisins, and celery are mixed with swirls of clover honey, Larken adds the final touch: a protein-enriching sprinkle of sesame and hulled sunflower seeds, unroasted, unsalted, organic.
The pasta is almost done. Larken pours two cups of frozen baby peas into a colander; she will drain the pasta on top. She tends another pot on the stove; it contains a special concoction that she perfected after searching dozens of special-diet sites on the Internet. Larken’s dinner guest is lactose-intolerant, and much trial and error finally resulted in a no-cheese sauce that is not just palatable, but truly tasty. Among other ingredients, Larken uses turmeric for the distinctly cheddarish orange that is a requisite visual element of macaroni and cheese.
She stirs the sauce, which is smoothing and thickening nicely, and consciously takes in a deep breath. Everything is going to be fine. She was an angry, nervous wreck when she got home—not the spiritual state in which to prepare food for a loved one. Larken meditates quietly over the pots of steaming pasta and warming sauce, praying that none of her previous agitation has contaminated the food.
She arrived home much later than she’d hoped. As if that pain-in-the-ass university party wasn’t enough, there was the sudden and unexpected a
rrival of her menses—resulting in the need to make an unplanned visit to the drugstore as well as her scheduled stop at the video store—and the stinging shame of imagining what kind of impression she made on the new dean. Traffic was unaccountably congealed—as if the cars themselves were languishing in the heat—and checkout lines were long and infuriatingly slow. As soon as she got home, she kicked off her shoes, turned on the window air conditioner full blast, unloaded the bags, and got right to cooking.
She didn’t see the blinking light on her answering machine. She might not have listened to the messages even if she had noticed; Larken hates the assaulting, intrusive necessity of a ringing phone—has hated it since childhood, when phone calls from Dad’s patients came in at all hours of the day and night—so she keeps the ring tone on her home phone constantly muted.
Phone calls to Larken’s home number are invariably the obligatory, predictable kind: from colleagues, telemarketers, Gaelan, Viney, and rarely, her baby sister. The only other people of significance in her life these days are her upstairs neighbors, and when they need to communicate, they either bang on the floor with the broom handle or holler down the stairs.
They are not hollering now. In fact, it is unusually quiet. There’s music playing, but the volume is uncharacteristically low, and there are no footfalls. Maybe they’re out—although that too would be atypical at this time on a Friday.
Larken’s abdomen is in spasm. The cramps have arrived in full force and she feels as though she is carrying a belly full of bundled rebar. She has already bled through two superabsorbent sanitary pads. She’d best put on a fresh one now, before her guest arrives.
Larken’s apartment—part of a house built in the early 1900s—is situated a few miles from campus in a part of Lincoln that is old, well established, and lushly treed. About half the homes in this neighborhood are owned by single families; the other half have been divided into apartments, in this case, three: on the first floor are Larken’s one-bedroom and an oddly configured studio (overpriced, hard to rent, currently vacant); the other apartment is a three-bedroom that takes up the entire upstairs. Larken has use of the front porch, which gives her ample space for growing potted flowers, vegetables, and herbs. The bathroom and kitchen have been carved out of other rooms and are not original to the house—they are very small—but the living room remains intact and entire: spacious, with a tiled fireplace, bay window, hardwood floors, and blue-hued stained glass windows that lend the rooms a cool, calm, sanctified light on even the most suffocating and windswept days of summer. Larken’s bedroom is behind massive sliding doors in what was once the dining room.
Larken loves her apartment. She has lived here for ten years. She hopes to live here forever.
Overhead, there are sudden signs of habitation and movement: two sets of heavy footsteps offset by the rapid staccato thumping of a third, much lighter individual. Voices are conferring in low tones. Larken cannot ascertain the content, but she perceives a definite tension in the female voice, evidenced by an antagonistic emphasis on the consonants. It’s easy to imagine the words being accompanied by hand gestures: jabs, punches, slices, slaps.
Larken’s upstairs neighbors, Jonathan Schwartzmann and Mia Hinkley, moved in five years ago. Mia is forty, and possessed of a complicated personal history and a serrated temperament—manifested outwardly by multiple tattoos, aggressively plucked eyebrows, and a Southern accent that she tries hard to conceal. Mia is a performance artist. Larken receives frequent invitations to events in which Mia is a participant; she attends them when it’s unavoidable. There’s authentic passion in Mia’s theatrical offerings, but Larken finds her presentational style odd (it manages to be both self-congratulatory and masochistic), her work disturbingly raw and unformed—like beef tartare.
Jon is thirty-five, holds a lecturer position in the university’s English department, and will almost certainly be awarded tenure soon. He’s already published two critically acclaimed novels and a memoir. Larken wants academic glory for Jonathan even more than she wants it for herself.
Jon and Mia met in England when Mia’s band, Cunt Julep, played a gig in the neighborhood skittles pub where Jon did his writing. (He was the only customer remaining after they finished their first song.) Although their first encounter makes for a hilarious, romantic anecdote, one that Jon loves to tell and Larken loves to hear, they insist that their marriage was a pragmatic affair, a formality undertaken strictly for the papers so that Jon could work in the States.
On the subject of conception, Jon and Mia have remained mum. It’s entirely possible that they didn’t intend to make a baby; nevertheless they made one, soon after their arrival. In Larken’s memory, the U-Haul truck was still parked on the street and they’d only unloaded half their boxes when they went at it on their bedroom floor. Mia is expressive during sex. There’s a zoo-animal, primate-in-estrus quality to her coital vocalizations, so Larken knows she heard the sounds that accompanied the conception of Jon and Mia’s child, who was born nine months to the day after they moved in.
Larken checks the clock; it is six and everything is ready. Upstairs, the music is being turned off, keys are being jangled, two low and civilized voices are conferring in indecipherable tones. A third voice—high and chirpy—penetrates layers of insulation, aged wood joists, subflooring, and support beams and shouts, “Come ON Jonafun! Come ON Mia! It’s time to GO!”
A door slams. Feet are heard descending the stairs; the sound suggests a small pony who has not yet mastered quadruped grace but is making a determined effort to do so. Larken hurries to the door, arriving breathless and opening it soon after a loud and insistent knocking begins.
“LARKEE! HI! HAPPY FRIDAY!”
Only one thing occupies a larger place in the heart of Professor Jones than the pre-Renaissance paintings of the Flemish masters: Jonathan and Mia’s daughter, Esmé Veronica Hinkley-Schwartzmann.
“Hi, peanut!”
An exquisite mess of downy white-blonde hair, unlaced shoes, smudges, and jam stains, the love of Larken’s life looks like a sherpain-training. Her possessions take up more room in the foyer than she does. In one hand, she clasps a canvas grocery bag that barely contains her menagerie of beanbag creatures and finger puppets—unicorn, wolf, dragonfly, Orca whale, turtle, crow, moose, gecko; the other hand grips the handle of her suitcase.
“IT’S MOVIE NIGHT!”
Esmé catapults her thirty-eight pounds up and into Larken’s arms. Larken buries her face in Esmé’s tangled hair; it is a dizzying mix of odors: crayon wax and Elmer’s glue. A bit of glitter anoints Esmé’s left earlobe.
“What’s your pick this week?” Esmé whispers.
“You’ll see,” Larken whispers back, “after Mommy and Daddy leave.”
“I just KNOW it’s gotta be Nemo.” Esmé snuggles closer, imprinting Larken’s cheek with something sticky. Then she wiggles down to the floor.
“You want help, sweetie?”
“I can do it,” Esmé insists, and starts dragging her bags into Larken’s apartment, fanny first.
Jon is coming down the stairs; he carries Esmé’s rolled sleeping bag and pillow.
Larken is always struck by the contrast between Jon’s body and his manner of moving: buoyant, fluid, brisk. Accordingly to Mia, Jon is forty-seven pounds overweight and, even given his age, is a poster boy for heart disease. Jon endures with seeming good nature Mia’s frequent public reminders of the derision he endured as a pudgy child and her constant efforts to restrict his caloric intake. Larken thinks Jon’s body is just right; to her, he has the solid, upholstered look of a leather armchair in a cozy sitting room next to a crackling fire in the middle of winter.
“Larken,” Jon says, striding across the foyer and leaning in to kiss her cheek. “Happy Friday.”
“How was your day?”
“Well, let me see … By mid-morning, I’d become obsessed with the lint balls on my cardigan; around lunchtime, I felt a divine calling to clean the bathroom mirror, which got me
wondering if this is the sort of getup a real writer would wear; and by three-thirty I was seriously considering going to Hobby Lobby, buying several hanks of yarn, and teaching myself to knit.”
Larken laughs. She loves Jonathan’s voice.
“Ah! You’re amused. But men invented knitting, did you know that?”
“I did not. You are a fountain of information.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a fountain of something, that’s for sure.”
It’s not just Jon’s working-class accent and distinctly Brit-speak manner of expressing himself. His voice reminds Larken of a dinner roll, the kind with faint indentations across the top, perforations that can be eased apart so that, when newly warmed, they fan open, like miniature books.
“In short,” Jon continues, “it was a plodding day. A fits-and-starts day. I did manage to establish an especially brilliant place for a semicolon.”
Larken laughs again. “I can relate.”
Mia appears on the second-floor landing, listening to her cell phone. She’s wearing one of her signature outfits—an oversized, striped, vintage men’s pajama ensemble that gives her the look of someone who’s either just emerged from a rehabilitative stay at a sanitarium or lengthy incarceration as a prisoner-of-war. She moves as if keeping time with a dirge.
“How about you?” Jon asks, casting Mia a look. His voice remains chatty; his expression clouds. “Did you get your grades in?”
“I did.” Larken infuses her own voice with an extra dose of jollity. “I am student-free for two whole weeks.”
“Congratulations. Please tell me that you ended up failing that girl.”
“Misty? Had to. It ended badly. There was name-calling involved.”
Jon clasps Larken’s arm. “God, Lark. I’m so sorry. Students can be such shits.”
Mia has arrived at the bottom of the stairs. She is still listening intently to whoever is on the other end of the phone. Waving and mouthing thank you to Larken, she continues her one-woman funeral procession through the foyer and out the front door.
Sing Them Home Page 9
