I followed Tess out the front door, turned off the porch light, sat next to her and pulled the blanket around our shoulders.
“Cheers,” she said and held her glass out not to me, but to the street, to the neighborhood, to the night. And I did the same, both of us facing forward. There may or may not have been a clink, but we certainly committed a drinking sin. No meeting of the eyes. I suppose it will come as no surprise that I am superstitious. What’s stranger? The sense that I am inhabited by a long-taloned bird, that black tar spreads through my veins, or that I knock three times on wood whenever it occurs to me that Tess will never return home?
There was a streetlight on the corner, yellowing the sidewalk. There were all our neighbors’ houses, each small like ours, and most in better states of repair. Across the street was a white house set farther back on the property than all the others on Mott. What space it lost in the backyard, it gained in the front. And in that space was a neat garden. Perfectly staked and rowed, flower beds framed with redwood planks. Paths made of wood chips. Nearly all of it was dead or dying that time of year on the north coast of Washington State, but it was clean and cared for, and held such promise for the spring.
As we sat beneath the blanket, we watched a tall man appear. Or perhaps the better word here is materialize, because there was no arrival, no door opening and closing, no light coming on, no footsteps. He was just, all at once, present. He carried a plastic bucket, and walked the rows stopping here and there, kneeling to break a stem, or pull a weed. He was slightly stooped, with dark hair that fell into his face. Even Tess, who never hesitated to speak to strangers, said nothing. And the longer we were silent, the more it felt as if we were watching something we shouldn’t have been. Observing some intimate ritual. As if we were spies, peering into the man’s house, watching him bathe, or pray, or masturbate. Having not announced ourselves, having not called to him, Hello, neighbor, a simple courtesy, a warning: beware, you are not alone. A cough, even. Some gesture.
But we kept quiet. And after walking each row and filling his bucket, he upturned it onto a compost pile and disappeared around the side of the house.
So what? A man comes out to do a bit of gardening at night. Stranger things have happened. Yes, that’s true. But Tess was thrilled by it, and so I was too. You should have seen her eyes when she turned to me.
“The night gardener,” she whispered.
She loved mystery. And so she made him a character. Even if he was no one to us, and, really, makes no difference here.
It’s the most fundamental thing I know about being alive: Everything that lasts is invention followed by tenacious faith.
52.
What do you know so far? You have a man alone in a pretty house of glass and wood, an isolated house at the end of a long, unpaved, spruce-lined driveway.
Occasionally he walks to a town he refuses to name, but mostly he stays at home. At one time he lived here with a woman named Tess Wolff, but she is gone now.
Where has she gone?
Will she return?
Why did she leave?
All good questions, to which I do not have answers.
What else? This man we know in turns as Joe, Joey, Joseph March, when he was twenty-two years old, fell madly in love with Tess Wolff. I do not know a truer phrase than fell madly in love. To fall madly. To fall madly into love. It has been overused and corrupted by a world that destroys good phrases with overuse and commerce. A lazy, stupid, regressive world that beats the meaning from words, beats them to death, until they are only noise, only filler. And I know I sound like a crank, I know. Still, I’m saying take a second and consider the phrase, is all. Nowhere have I read a better description of what happened to me. I fell madly in. Pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition. Flawless. A mad falling. See what happens to me? Derailed again. My whole life derailed. The updraft, the downdraft. The drugs kick in, but there are no drugs. Without warning they come, these wild highs, this, the good madness, comes on like fast fire. And how do you expect me to stay on track when I’m alive like I am now? That’s the point. I am always derailed. Forgive me, for today I am discursive. What a word that one, too, what sound, what meaning. Discursive, digressive and meandering. And baroque too. And absurd. But what can I do? It comes on and I am changed. Never believe in solidity of self.
They are so clear to me. The present, the past, Tess, and Seymour Strout, you, the Night Gardener, the Trampoline Girl, my murdering mother, my struggling father. Days like this I see all the threads, each square-knotted to a different finger, the whole story, my whole life, each a red thread.
But do you follow me?
Tess would tell me if she were here.
You would tell me if I knew who you were.
I will try to get back to it. I will try to return through the muck of today’s construction to some kind of sense. It’s so difficult with my brain firing like this. You’ve seen what happens.
Half my life cycling the tar, the light, the bird, the upswing.
Can you imagine how Tess felt?
It’s no wonder she left.
In 1991, a young man, a boy really, falls madly in love with a young woman. Summertime on the Oregon Coast. Straight out of college. Sunsets and sex. Joy and light. And then the shattering, inconceivable news. The boy’s mother has committed a brutal, bloody, spectacular, incomprehensible crime. Anne-Marie March, mother of two, homemaker, nurse at Harborview Medical Center, takes a hammer to Dustin Strauss’s skull. In front of his children. In broad daylight. In a parking lot. She has no criminal record. No recorded history of mental illness. The summer has ended. His mother is in the news. Local, then national. His mother is in jail. His mother is in prison. And all along, from the first hammer blow, it seems, there are those who make her a hero. The strong defending the weak from the bullies of the world. From a man who beat his children, who beat his wife. Did the despicable coward deserve his fate?
This woman, this supposed monster, underpaid and overworked, a nurse of twenty years, treated countless women and children for terrible injuries sustained at the hands of husbands and fathers and brothers. Women who returned to the hospital, time after time, often holding those very hands. Women who would later turn up dead. A State reluctant to get involved in family affairs. Anne-Marie March had had enough. There is a limit and these things do not happen in a vacuum. In myriad ways we grant these men permission. This same culture that destroys language, destroys women. And yet the jury of her peers, composed of three women and nine men, could not see beyond the number of blows. Once, yes. Twice, or even three times. But seven times? No, seven times suggests something else. Cruelty, malice, or worst of all, intent. No one, ladies and gentlemen, deserves seven blows. And so Anne-Marie March will spend her days in the White Pine Penitentiary. While men go on beating their wives and children, while the State keeps on keeping out of it. For some a hero, for others a monster, a shrew. The lazy world, which insists with Christian zeal on the solidity of self, stamped my mother evil, and Anne-Marie March faded from the news.
53.
On the porch one evening. The two of us watching the Night Gardener gardening. Tess saying, “I want to see her alone.” We had been out to The Pine together, the two of us, and sometimes the three of us, a number of times and in various combinations. Me alone, my father alone, but never Tess alone. My mother was always better, and she was always the same. Physically, she was stronger. She seemed to glow. Her spine had straightened. Still, her eyes remained flat. The coldness deepened, the distance more profound.
It was her old toughness without the warmth.
What happens exactly? Physiologically, what happens? To the eyes, I mean. How do they brighten? How do they dull? Whatever it is, hers were awful. And combined with the way she held herself away from me, her questioning, as if I were some stranger, one of her many acolytes seeking advice, come for an audience with Empress Anne-Marie.
&n
bsp; I often had the impression she was preparing to leave. Even if that’s the one thing she wasn’t doing. And yet every visit the same feeling. Talking to her I saw the light of interest go out. Click, and off it goes. Like one of those old TV sets. The picture drawing in from all sides to a pinpoint of light.
When we were kids, Claire used to blow at the last instant like it was a candle.
My mother drawing away just like that. But in the slowest motion. Visit after visit, an incremental contraction.
No one else saw it. The others, my father, Tess, they talked about her health. It drew them closer. An intimacy built around a shared love for my mother. Love is the wrong word. I loved her too. So what’s right? An enthusiasm? A belief? A faith? Yes. And me? No, not quite. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy the routine. The silent sage. The found-truth-and-God-in-prison routine. Not if the God she found had stolen all her warmth. Had stolen her from me.
What I saw when we came to visit was the slow disappearance of my mother. She was being replaced by something else, something foreign.
Anyway, we weren’t the only visitors. Right away she had fans. She showed us the letters. The small gifts. Dream catchers, and coasters and poems mounted on cardboard. Mostly women. Men too though, which, while he’d have never said it, troubled my father.
Dear Mrs. March, you are a hero. Dear Mrs. March, It’s about time. Dear Mrs. March, There is a limit to what we will accept, is there not? Ma’am, I have no pity for that man, whose name I will not write. My pity is for his widow, and for his children. And now they are free, while you are not. Dear Mrs. March, Without you, I would not have found the courage to leave. Dear Mrs. March, Every night I dream of leaving, and each morning I find myself here in the same bed, with the same man, and I cannot find the courage to do anything but make him breakfast. Dear Anne-Marie, I’m fifteen. I read about you in the paper. My father is a rich man. Last year he broke my collarbone. He is in the living room. You are in jail. Mrs. March, when I was a boy my father killed my mother. I saw your photo in the paper and I am glad for what you did. Dear Mrs. March, Should I kill my boyfriend? Dear Ms. March, We are a group of women. Dear Ms. March, We have run out of patience.
The letters came and came and came.
My mother turned from nurse to killer to heroine.
Tess and I on Mott Street, the two of us working together at The Owl.
My father our neighbor.
Claire gone.
We say it all the time, but it’s true, isn’t it? How quickly things change, how quickly the foreign becomes familiar.
Often I forgot where my mother was and what she’d done.
One can’t always imagine the hammer. One can’t always imagine the cell. Times she was just my neighbor over the hill.
On the porch that evening. The two of us watching. Night Gardener gardening. Tess saying, “I want to see her alone.”
“Sure,” I say.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it doesn’t. Why would it bother me?”
She shrugs.
Of course it does. Someone else has taken her attention. My love is looking out the window.
But I say, “Sure, Tess. Go see her. She’d like that. With Claire gone.”
“With Claire gone?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not trying to replace anyone, Joe.”
The rest may be approximate, but I’m sure of that line. I hear it so clearly.
She hangs her arm around my neck the way she did, the way I loved. She presses her mouth to my ear. “Maybe I’m going to ask permission to marry you. Maybe I’m going to make my intentions clear.”
And I thought, she has not come here for me.
54.
When Tess returned from her first visit alone, she said, “That woman is extraordinary.”
We were at the bar and I was getting ready for the rush, filling the reach-in, cutting limes, moving buckets of ice. She had her elbows on the service end. She was bouncing on her toes. So young, so giddy.
I kept at it. Marrying vodka bottles, arranging glasses. I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t know why it worried me so much. Why it made me unhappy. It should have been the opposite, right? But it frightened me.
Tess is dressed for work. Either tight jeans and a black tank top, or a black miniskirt and a white tank top. One of those two combinations. A little owl over her right breast. Lots of dark makeup around her eyes. Her hair all mussed the way she did it then. She could have climbed out of bed, put on a bathrobe and made a killing. But she truly was something those nights. And as happy as she was, it only made it worse. Or better. Depending on your point of view.
“How is she?”
“She’s great, Joey. She’s fucking great. She’s incredible.”
“What’d you talk about?”
“Everything. You and me. What we’re going to do. My life. My family. The letters she gets, her visitors.”
I looked over at her. “What are we going to do, Tess?”
She laughed. “That’s between me and your mother.”
I’m slicing limes. Plastic handle. Riveted. Blue. Serrated edge. White cutting board. Each lime is six pieces in five moves. I’m fast with the knife. I was a good bartender. Excellent, really.
What else? I’m five foot eleven. And I was a little over six feet with the work boots. And then the thick rubber mats gave me another two inches. I’d been a solid high-school athlete. Shortstop and guard. I kept in shape. Running on the beach. Carrying kegs. Some dumbbells and a bench in the garage. A pull-up bar. I was sturdy like my dad. I still have his shoulders. The point is that back then I was at the height of my power. Behind the bar I was tall and I was strong and next to Seymour Strout I looked like a child.
This night I’m thinking of, he’s walking toward us. I’m back there cutting those limes and Tess has a plastic sword pinched between thumb and pointer and she’s stabbing cherries, which drives me crazy. I don’t like anyone messing with my bar. Not even Tess, but I let her do it.
At the time, I don’t know why I’m so irritated. I’ve got that tight, cold feeling in my spine, which moves upwards into the back of my neck. My vertebrae are compressing, a long and narrow accordion closing, tightening. When that happens, I want to take a hammer to the Pabst mirrors. But I keep it down. I keep quiet. I go about my work. I don’t know if Tess notices. When she’s happy, I don’t think she notices much of anything. She loves to jump on me when she’s like this. And usually that’s what I want more than anything. To have her climbing all over me like an orangutan. But tonight I wish she’d just shut up. I’m nervous. I don’t like that she’s gone to see my mother alone. I don’t like that she’s so happy about it. That she’s so enamored with her. I don’t know why that is, other than to say I felt betrayed somehow.
Then Seymour Strout walked in.
A little about Seymour. He’d played on the defensive line for the U of O.
“Nearly went pro,” he liked to say.
Seymour was one of those guys, the biggest dude I’d ever stood next to in my life. The biggest I’ve ever known. Six-six, two-eighty. People asked all the time.
“Six-six, two-eighty.”
Said it quick as radio code.
He was always hot and always sweating, so he wore a white towel around his neck. He bought packs of them out at Kmart. He kept them clean. Never frayed. If he found a run, or a hole, or a stain, he’d say, motherfucker, and replace it. Man he loved that word. After Oregon, he joined the Army and got out two years before George Senior stormed the desert. He kept his head shaved and was always mopping at it with the towel. He liked to smoke outside even if back then you could smoke wherever the hell you wanted. Like most people who work in that world, he too had a thing for ritual. Plus he was ex-military.
You should have seen him on winter nights sta
nding out front beneath that neon owl. Cold as hell and he’s sweating in his black T-shirt and towel, a Virginia Slim between his lips, smoke and vapor coming off him like some kind of swamp creature. As my dad used to say, he was something else, that guy.
When Seymour worked, he worked the door. He kept the peace, that’s for sure. Anyone got out of line, got loud, gave us shit, started a fight, he ended it fast. And usually just by giving the problem his attention, taking a few steps in the appropriate direction. He was polite. That was his threat. “Excuse me, sir,” he’d say to some sophomore English major, “would you mind lowering your voice?” You’ve never seen anyone shut up so fast. Or, if he happened to be at the bar at the right time, “Excuse me, sir, you seem to have forgotten to include a gratuity.”
I really came to love that guy. We both did.
I tried so hard not to. I tried so hard to hate him, my mother’s keeper, but he was too gentle, too serene, too funny, too kind.
Tonight Tess says, “Hey, Strout,” and gives him a big smile and they slap hands. It’s a thing they started doing. A high five before work. I pour him a shot of Smirnoff and a tall Coke chaser. Same start to every shift.
He’d usually come straight from the prison and I’d ask, “How is she?” And he’d say something like, “She’s great, J,” or, “Better than ever, brother.” And we’d leave it at that. But today, Tess being in the mood she’s in, having had a few already, she says, “Why don’t you let her out, Strout? How do you sleep at night?”
The accordion compresses. Seymour looks at me from behind his Coke. Big fist around the glass, the glass in front of his mouth, his brown eyes turned down at me, that tender expression of sympathy and sadness.
Shelter in Place Page 11
