Here on Earth

by Alice Hoffman

  “Who are we talking about?” Gwen asks.

  Gwen always does that—listens when you don’t want her to, ignores you whenever there’s something you want her to hear.

  “No one,” March tells her.

  “A figment of our imagination,” Susie insists on adding. “Or some of us, anyway.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gwen says tartly. “Like I know what you mean.”

  “She means she’s a know-it-all,” March says, but inside she’s thinking, Lucky for me that you don’t understand. Lucky for you.

  They’ve left plenty of time to get to the service, and yet somehow they’ve managed to be late. The parking lot is already crowded when they pull in, and why shouldn’t it be? Judith Dale had a lot of friends, from the library, where she’d been a member of the board for ages, and from the garden club, which did so much to beautify the town, and from St. Bridget’s as well, where she volunteered in the children’s ward two nights a week, reading stories and playing games of Candyland.

  March remembers wondering why it was that Mrs. Dale didn’t have children of her own. She’d asked her once, when it was late at night and she’d been sick with a fever and Mrs. Dale had been sitting up with her, spoon-feeding her rice pudding and endless cups of tea.

  “That’s not what was intended for me,” Mrs. Dale had told her.

  What Mrs. Dale had meant by that, March never quite understood. Was it God she was referring to, or the hand of fate, or the choices she herself had made, perhaps a long time ago? At any rate, there were sides of Mrs. Dale which were secret, and sides which were not. She liked rain, and children, and going off by herself on holidays from which she brought back small tokens as gifts: pretty matches, hair combs, mints with pink and green candy shells. She believed in home cooking and in the supreme beauty of yellow roses, six dozen of which March has ordered for this service. The scent of roses is sweet and ripe and sorrowful, making March dizzy as she goes to sit in the front row of the chapel, between Gwen and her father’s old law partner, Susie’s father, the Judge.

  The Judge is tall, six foot four, and so imposing that some people say there are criminals who confess at the mere sight of him. But today, he seems a shakier version of himself; he will be seventy-two next month and his age shows, in his large hands, which tremble, in his pallor and his faded blue eyes. He keeps one hand on March’s, but for whose comfort, even the Judge isn’t certain.

  Since there’s not room in the pew for everyone, Louise Justice, the Judge’s wife, is sitting directly behind them. Every once in a while she leans forward and pats March or the Judge on the shoulder.

  “This is such a shock,” she whispers, again and again.

  Judith Dale left instructions for the service to be simple, just as the marker she chose for herself is to be a plain gray stone. Gwen had no idea how depressing such a service could be. She is sitting up straight, studying the closed coffin. She actually seems frozen in place, her skin white as ice. With her spiky hair and her excess of mascara, she looks fairly ghoulish. Several people who have come up to give March their condolences have avoided Gwen completely, or have shaken her cold hand without saying a word.

  Now, while Harriet Laughton is giving the final address, on behalf of Judith Dale’s friends on the board of the library, Gwen leans close to her mother. For one brief moment, March thinks her daughter wants a hug.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Gwen whispers.

  “No,” March says, even though the scent of roses and the heat inside the chapel are cloying. “You won’t be.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Gwen insists. It’s the smell of death that’s getting to her. It’s the very idea. “Oh, boy,” she says, sounding scared.

  March and Gwen make their way out of the pew; then March circles an arm around her daughter and guides her into the aisle, toward the door. She can hear a murmur of concern: the voices of Judith Dale’s friends, kindhearted volunteers from the library and the hospital.

  “You just need fresh air,” March tells Gwen.

  Gwen nods and gulps, but she feels like she may not make it. She manages a dash for the door, and when she races past Hank—who is in the last row, along with Ken Helm, who considered Mrs. Dale one of his favorite customers, and Mimi Frank, who cut Mrs. Dale’s hair—he looks up in time to see Gwen slipping out of the chapel, quick as a shadow. It’s not often you see someone you don’t know in the village, and Hank has the sudden urge to get out of his pew and follow this girl. She looks so distressed, and she’s beautiful besides, but Hank isn’t the sort to storm out of a funeral service. He stays where he is, seated beside one of the vases of yellow roses March ordered from the Lucky Day Florist on Main Street. He’s wearing his one good white shirt, a pair of black jeans he hopes don’t look too beat-up, and his boots, which he polished last night. He borrowed a tie from Hollis, who has a closetful of expensive clothes; he combed his hair twice.

  All the same, Hank has a shivery feeling under his skin, in spite of how overheated the chapel has become, and when the service is over, he’s one of the first to leave. This way, so quick to be out the door, he’s more likely to get another look at the girl. And he does—she’s over on the curb, so dizzy that she needs to keep one hand on the fender of the hearse, for balance. Three crows are flying above the parking lot, making a horrible racket. The sky is so flat and gray Gwen has the urge to put her arms over her head for protection, just in case stones should begin to fall from the clouds.

  Six strong men—Ken Helm, the Judge, Dr. Henderson, Mr. Laughton, Sam Deveroux from the hardware store, and Jack Harvey, who installed an air conditioner for Mrs. Dale last summer—help to carry the coffin from the chapel. Just seeing them struggle with its weight brings tears to Gwen’s eyes. Here she is, with her short skirt and her hair all spiked up, looking like a perfect fool, completely unprepared for real life. Well, ready or not doesn’t matter. Something is about to happen. Gwen can feel it. Time itself has changed; it’s become electrified, with every second standing on end.

  Gwen can see her mother now, in the doorway of the chapel, a look of heartbreak on her face. Here comes the coffin, carried even closer. This is not the sort of thing that usually affects Gwen; she has a talent for blocking out bad news. All she has to do is shut her eyes and count to a hundred, but she’s not closing her eyes now. Oh, how she wishes she had stayed at home. How easy it would have been to go on thinking about nothing, to ignore death and fate and the possibility that a life can easily be shaken to its core. That is how you know you’ve left childhood behind—when you wish for time to go backward. But it’s too late for that. Whether Gwen likes it or not, she’s here, under this gray and mournful sky, and her eyes are open wide.

  5

  After the cemetery, and the buffet supper at Harriet Laughton’s house—where March is called poor dear at least a dozen times, and Gwen is asked so often whether something is wrong with her eyes that she finally goes into the Laughtons’ powder room to remove her mascara with a white washcloth—March phones Ken Helm, who always says no job is so odd he can’t get it done, and asks if he’ll drive them back to the hill.

  “Not that way,” March all but shouts when she realizes Ken intends to take Route 22.

  “Gee whiz, Mom.” Gwen can’t believe how touchy her mother has become. “What’s the difference?”

  “About two bucks,” Ken Helm says, deadpan as always. “That back road is one slow shortcut.” Ken stares into the woods. “Make a tree sound and its fruit will be sound. Make a tree rotten and its fruit will be rotten.”

  Intrigued, Gwen leans forward. “Meaning?”

  “We’re all responsible for ourselves, aren’t we?” Ken takes the bumps in the road easily. “And what we harvest.”

  “Are you trying to tell us that orchard of Mrs. Dale’s needs work?” Gwen asks. “Is that your point?”

  “No,” March says. “He’s letting us know that you pay for what you get. Two dollars more, for instance, for the back road.”

&nb
sp; “That’s it,” Ken says. “Matthew 12:33.”

  It’s twilight when they reach the house, which means it’s still a sunny afternoon in Palo Alto. Richard is probably in his office, on the far side of the quad. Sunlight streams in from the west at this time of day; the windows are so high Richard has to use an iron rod in order to pull down the shades. He needs to take care at this hour; the specimens he keeps lined up on the window ledge are susceptible to light damage.

  The house on Fox Hill is cold when they get inside, but before March bothers with checking on the heat or lighting a fire, she goes to phone Richard. She’s still wearing her jacket; her purse strap is draped over her shoulder as she dials. She feels a little desperate, perhaps even more than a little.

  “How about some tea?” she calls to Gwen.

  “Fine,” Gwen says, throwing herself into the easy chair patterned with roses.

  “No, I mean, you make it. Please.”

  March simply wants her daughter out of the room. She wants to be alone with her husband and be told that she continues to be the same exact woman she was when she kissed him goodbye at the airport. She wants to hear him say it out loud, because at this moment, standing here in this house, she doesn’t feel the same. If she weren’t such a rational creature, she’d think the night air was calling to her; she’d believe there were still peepers in those muddy puddles, even though this isn’t their season. Her heart is beating in a different rhythm here; faster, a dangerous pace.

  Richard had visited her during those years when she was waiting for Hollis, but she never made anything of it back then. She’d been friendly with his sister, Belinda, and Richard was the sort of kind, slightly dazed person to whom charity came naturally. He rescued lost dogs and stopped for hitchhikers, so it made perfect sense that he’d come to call on March, bringing candy and books, as if getting over Hollis was not unlike recuperating from some horrible illness.

  March might have never noticed that Richard was courting her, in his own mild way, if not for the night of Alan and Julie’s wedding. The wedding was held on New Year’s Eve, the year March was nineteen, and by then March could barely feel anything. She could stick a pin in her finger and not even bleed. She could go without eating for days and not feel hunger. She could stay up all night with no need for sleep. The only indication that she was alive at all was that the new shoes Mrs. Dale had insisted she buy hurt her toes.

  On the night of the wedding, March was alive enough to overhear many of their guests whisper their opinion of her. What a sorry thing she was, that’s what they were saying. Wasting away, growing old before her time. Only nineteen and look at her, so pale and gray she was little more than a ghost. Look at her hair, with all those white strands. Look at the way her hands had begun to shake. To console herself, March drank five glasses of Mrs. Dale’s champagne-laced cranberry punch, then gave in and danced with Richard. Richard was so tall that March couldn’t look him in the eye as they danced, and perhaps that was best, since she would have been extremely surprised to discover how ardent his expression had become.

  Then a senior at Harvard, Richard spent his days at classes and his evenings doing good deeds, volunteering at a shelter—where he folded laundry and mopped floors—and tutoring freshmen students who were overwhelmed by their class work. If not for March, he wouldn’t have returned to Jenkintown at all, since he and his father were no longer speaking. That he came back so often, March had convinced herself, was simply because she was another one of his projects. But on the night of Alan’s wedding, as she danced with him, she realized this wasn’t the case. It was the way he held his arms around her and the slow sound of his breathing which informed her that pity was not Richard’s motivation. Actually, it never had been.

  After Alan’s wedding, Richard began to appear several times a week. He brought March boxes of apricots and books from the library. He presented her with potted tulips from Holland and fancy Vermont maple syrup. Often, when Mrs. Dale had the night off, Richard insisted on coming to the house to cook dinner. Alan’s new wife, Julie, who couldn’t fix anything more complicated than a grilled cheese sandwich, acted as his assistant, dicing peppers and carrots, stopping only long enough to take March aside and whisper that she’d be crazy to let Richard Cooper get away from her now.

  March watched Richard sometimes, as he sat in the living room and read from one of his textbooks, and he looked so familiar and comfortable that she felt like weeping. She allowed him to kiss her, and she kissed him back, but when she went up to her bedroom and stood at her window to watch the road below, it wasn’t Richard she was looking for.

  “You probably shouldn’t come here anymore,” she finally told him one day when the air outside had turned meek, the way it often does before a storm. “I’ll never be in love with you.”

  She thought he’d be hurt when she said this, but instead Richard took her hands in his. He was going off to Stanford, for graduate work, and he wanted March to go with him. He’d had a last bitter argument with his father, which concerned Mr. Cooper’s interests in a logging company that was destroying a species of wood spider so tiny it was invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the fight was about greed and love, the sort of brutal argument that can get you written out of your father’s will and drive you three thousand miles away.

  Richard had nothing to lose by asking March to marry him, and he wasn’t destroyed when she said no. He was a biologist, after all, with a specialty in entomology, and he knew what reversals often happened in a single life cycle. He sat beneath a palm tree outside his rented apartment in Palo Alto and wrote to March every week, and she wrote back from her bedroom on the second floor. She informed him that the leaves were changing, and that his sister Belinda no longer seemed interested in anything but her horse, and that the hunting ban had been lifted on the hill, so that shot-guns could be heard all day long. She told him much more than she would have imagined, and revealed herself in many ways, although she did not write that she often woke from sleep with tears in her eyes, or that she sometimes heard Hollis’s voice inside her own head.

  After she finally stopped waiting for Hollis, Richard was there, right on time, when she arrived in San Francisco. In fact he’d gotten to the airport two hours early, and had been awake since dawn. That first night in California, March slept in his bed. It is the bed they still have; the headboard is more than a hundred years old. Richard found it in a junk shop in Menlo Park, but actually it’s quite a good piece, fashioned of golden oak. March has often wondered why anyone would have ever gotten rid of such a wonderful bed; if, perhaps, the previous owner had died or if he’d loved someone so completely he couldn’t bear to sleep in the same bed once she’d gone.

  Richard is stretched out on that bed when March phones, his thin, angular frame completely relaxed. Though it’s late in the day in California, he’s just getting around to reading the morning paper. He appreciates the topsy-turvy in life; he’s always believed, for instance, that mutation is good for a species. If he’d been someone who was easily convinced by statistics, rather than a man who rejoiced in the odd and unprecedented, he would never have gone after March in the first place.

  “I’m so glad you’re there,” March says when he picks up the phone.

  Richard laughs. “Well, I can’t say the same for you.”

  “It’s awful here,” March says. “That’s for sure.”

  “That’s why we left,” Richard reminds her. “Did you see your brother?”

  “He wasn’t at the funeral, and I don’t have the heart to go looking for him. Although, I guess I really should.” Then out of March’s mouth comes a thought she’s been thinking all day: “Hollis wasn’t there either.”

  She can hear Richard breathing; it’s almost as if he’s in the same room. She shouldn’t have mentioned Hollis.

  “I didn’t ask about him,” Richard says, “did I?”

  After March had married Richard and soon after she discovered she was pregnant, Judith Dale finally told her that
Hollis had come back. He had been living above the Lyon Cafe for some time, spending a great deal of money, impressing everyone in town with his new financial status. March remembers how she sat there in the backyard after that call from Judith; her chair was beside the lemon tree, and her feet, which had swollen with her pregnancy, were soaking in a basin of cool water. She dialed Jenkintown information, then phoned the Lyon, and she did it all quickly, before she could stop and think. When she asked for Hollis, she was told he didn’t have a phone, although the bartender who answered was willing to go upstairs to get him. She waited, completely unaware of the scent of lemons. She didn’t notice that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  It took exactly twelve minutes for the bartender to retrieve Hollis from his rented rooms. As soon as she heard his voice, March panicked. She listened to him say Hello twice, and then she hung up. After that, she was nervous every time the phone rang. Had he guessed his caller was March? Had he cared? All through her pregnancy she felt sick to her stomach and trapped in some deep, irrevocable way. When her doctor informed her that her blood pressure was elevated and she needed to spend at least six hours in bed, on her left side, she wasn’t surprised. She was affixed to this place and to her own body; anchored by flesh, blood, and her own exhaustion, she dared not fight her condition. She slept away mornings and afternoons, so dreamy she didn’t hear the birds in the trees or Richard’s voice when he tried to rouse her from sleep.

  On the day when Hollis phoned her, March had just woken from a nap, and at first she thought she was still dreaming. March, he said. That’s all he said at first, her name, and she had to sit down before she could listen to more. Why did you leave? he asked. Why did you do this to us?

  Don’t be mean, that’s what she said to him, forgetting where and who she was, at least for the moment.

  You’re the mean one, he’d said to her. It’s you.

  They spoke every night after that, hushed and secret calls, conversations so passionate their words burned. March was seven months pregnant, but that didn’t keep her from calling him. For some reason, she thought it could go on and on that way, but then he made it clear that he wanted her to come back to him. He’d fly out and get her or messenger a first-class ticket. March looked out at her lemon tree. She could feel the baby inside of her moving, and that’s when she knew she couldn’t go. Hollis, however, seemed incapable of understanding that she was too far along in her pregnancy to pack a suitcase and leave.