Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire

by Hegi, Ursula

  “If the crone has a heart attack,” he said, “you can sing at her funeral.”

  “What a great idea.”

  To Helene she said, “What does that woman want from me?”

  “The same thing she wants from all of us. A piece of our lives.”

  “Right. Well, this is a part she can’t have. Stanley is like a brother to Nate. He takes care of things for all of us. He knows where everything is. It’s like—like being with the younger Nate all over again.”

  “Maybe that’s how Nate keeps you.”

  Pearl nodded gravely. “Maybe he believes that. Except I wouldn’t have left him. Not for getting old … Or ill.”

  “I know.”

  “Stanley and I haven’t done anything that Nate hasn’t wanted for all of us.”

  “There are different ways in which people can live together.…”

  “I adore Nate. How many men would be that understanding? He knew what I needed long before I missed it… so he chose someone who is loyal to him.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me?” Pearl smiled. “I have grown awfully fond of Stanley. His mind and his body.”

  On his way home from work, when Robert stopped to check his mailbox, he glanced toward Miss Garland’s door, hoping that she wouldn’t come out and detain him. Relieved that her door remained closed, he started toward the elevator when it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen her in days. Usually she’d open her door at least a gap when he’d pick up the mail and ask him about his work, his parents, and, lately, about Yvonne in a voice that was both coy and hurt as if he’d betrayed her by marrying.

  Just yesterday Pearl Bloom had mentioned that Miss Garland hadn’t been watching her in the greenhouse. “Probably because I blinded her with my breasts. I wish I’d thought of it sooner.”

  Robert hesitated, then knocked on Miss Garland’s door. No sound. When he tried the knob, it turned. The door moved a bit before it stopped. “Miss Garland? It’s me, Robert. Are you there?” When he leaned against it, it yielded a little further. Whatever blocked it appeared to be soft. That’s when he noticed the odor. He gagged at the sudden image of rice, moist and white and swarming. Dead people turn into rice Robert dear Robert dear—

  He wanted to yank the door shut. Instead he stared at the old woman who’d become slighter with age. Yet he did not see her as she was there on the floor, but as she had been, alone in that apartment, feet in embroidered slippers, head tilted toward any sound that might come from the hallway. She arranges chewy bars of peanut brittle on a flowered plate. Makes maple ice cream by drizzling syrup over a bowl of new snow. But then he saw her falling. Crawling toward the door for help.

  How long did she lie there before she died?

  Did she call out for me?

  When did I last visit her?

  Six years, he realized. Six years since she’d sent him that note, asking to meet with him. For official reasons, she had written. And when he’d arrived, her eyes had been cloudy with shame, and it had taken her a while to come out with the words.

  “I thought I had enough saved, but—It’s almost gone, my rent money.”

  “No one needs to know,” he’d assured her.

  “I never expected to live to eighty. And look at me now. Ninetytwo, Robert dear.”

  “I’ll talk to my parents. I’m sure they’ll want you to stay.”

  “I can’t imagine why …” She faltered. “… why I keep surviving people much younger than me.” She raised her face toward him, her skin the texture of dry bread, and fidgeted with the top button of her blouse. “It’s against all laws of speculation.”

  And because he no longer had any of his childhood love for her, he knew he had failed her. Failed her terribly with that absence of love. “I don’t want you to worry. Will you promise me that?”

  Without telling his parents, he had instructed his bank to make monthly transfers to her account, buying his freedom from further visits. But those contributions—easy enough before his marriage—had become a strain now that he had a wife. So far he’d postponed telling Yvonne because he had figured Miss Garland wouldn’t live much longer. What if he’d brought on her death with that thought?

  When the morticians arrived to claim the body, her rigid form—covered with a white sheet on the stretcher—looked solid, heavy, as if resisting her final evacuation from the house that had inspired her stories of gala balls, of dashing beaus and of a young fiancé who had preceded her into death, wearing her diamond ring on a bracelet she’d braided from her hair. Robert stood aside to let the stretcher pass him. When he stepped into the apartment and turned on the light, he felt shifted into an earlier time: her living room was unchanged except for a fading of colors as though she had managed to do here what she could not accomplish with her body—preserve it the way it had been. Dead people turn into rice, Robert dear. What Greta had called the fussy old lady smell still hung about. That, and the smell of rotting flesh.

  Since he’d never been invited into Miss Garland’s bedroom, he felt as if he were betraying her as he entered. Shabbiness furnished the room: the thin mattress, the scratched chair by the window, the dresser where she had placed a framed picture of him, tilting him right back to the spring morning his father had taken that photo on the dock. Seven? I must have been seven. Waking early to find his father in the hallway about to leave with the camera his mother gave him for Christmas. Asking: “Where are you going, Vati?”

  “Out on the dock. To take some pictures of the house.”

  “Can I come?” Asking yet expecting his father to say no and rush from him toward whatever his father was usually rushing toward.

  But his father nodded. “If you can get dressed in five minutes.”

  Near the dock, skeleton branches stuck from the water, blackshiny beneath the surface, silver above. Pockets of mist. Leaves floating close to shore.

  “Are you warm enough, Robert?”

  Nodding, though chilled. Feeling closer to his father than usual. Because he had asked. “Are you warm enough, Robert?” And then his father pointing toward the paling sky, toward the faint echoes of stars. Naming them quickly. And already the panic of not remembering if his father were to ask him tomorrow. The panic of not being enough for his father. But it didn’t show in my photo, that panic. Because I was already figuring out my own ways of being a man. Different from him.

  On Miss Garland’s windowsill stood an ivy plant, still healthy, though dry, next to a shoe box filled with the pictures Robert had colored for her as a boy, old tenants’ society newsletters: Please, don’t drag sand into the lobby from the beach! Please, shake your umbrellas before bringing them into the building! Please … Please … Please … Tucked beneath the newsletters was a yellowed envelope, ROBERT BLAU printed on it, containing funeral instructions and the money for her burial, the one responsibility she must have rated higher than rent.

  As he closed the box, Robert wondered if the ghosts of her invented past would stay in her apartment, confined to this space, and he suddenly found himself smiling as he concluded that they might as well. After all, they were no more peculiar than the people who already lived in the Wasserburg, starting with his sister who healed others; Pearl Bloom who lived with both a husband and a lover; Buddy Hedge who could pull Christmas from his closet any day of the year; Fanny Braddock who rubbed herself against men in the elevator; even he who was married to a woman so beautiful that just looking at her filled him with dread that she was about to leave him.

  It was evident that Pearl took pride in the powers of her bare breasts, and she liked to retell that story of Miss Garland staring at her from across the courtyard. With each telling, the interval between the flashing of her breasts and the old woman’s death decreased until, finally, it shrank into one incident—Miss Garland clutching at her throat, falling, while Pearl pulled her robe closed—and the gossip in the Wasserburg would carry that story beyond its walls until it became yet another one of the town’s stories about Stefan Bl
au’s house that the children of Winnipesaukee would grow up with, the story about the ancient woman who was struck dead by the sight of the hussy’s breasts.

  Now that Pearl lived on the first floor, Helene missed the message system they had established via pipes and dumbwaiter; but she realized soon that her daughter-in-law was quite helpless when it came to matters of the kitchen, and she encouraged her to borrow whatever she needed. Soon the dumbwaiter was in operation again—one knock: open the dumbwaiter; two knocks: come to the window—transporting sugar and apples and sponges and soap and whatever else Yvonne forgot to buy. Like Pearl, Yvonne never returned anything.

  “Must have something to do with the apartment beneath us swallowing things up,” Stefan joked.

  “At least Pearl meant to return things.”

  “Yes, for over thirty years.”

  “She has given so many gifts to the children. And to us.”

  “But never what she borrowed.”

  “More than she ever borrowed. While Yvonne doesn’t reciprocate.”

  Yet, if others talked about her daughter-in-law, Helene defended her. Because of Robert. One afternoon she saw Yvonne pour fresh milk into a bowl, dip a dustcloth into it, and wipe the leaves of a rubber plant until they glowed. To squander food on a plant—even only a few pennies’ worth—struck Helene as excessive and embodied everything she distrusted in her daughter-in-law.

  Yet, when she mentioned it, Yvonne struck back. “Stuffing food into people is more of a waste than rubbing it on plants.”

  Both women felt something so volatile beneath their first clash that they retreated quickly, alarmed where this could have taken them. From then on, Helene tried not to notice Yvonne’s wastefulness. But how could anyone miss it? Before Robert’s marriage, they’d never had any water problems in the Wasserburg. But Yvonne used too much soap, too much water, causing Mrs. Perelli’s kitchen sink in the apartment below to fill with foam that bubbled up from the drain.

  When Danny Wilson explained to both women that an older house with two-inch drains and half-inch water pipes wasn’t set up for that kind of water use, Yvonne asked why they didn’t change over to larger pipes.

  “Why don’t you suggest that to your father-in-law?” Mrs. Perelli told her.

  Yvonne turned to Danny. “Not if it’s an ignorant question. Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me why.”

  When Danny wrote to Tobias, he told him he liked Yvonne’s directness. “At least with her you know she won’t ask the same stupid question twice. She listened closely when I explained to her about the plumbing and what it would take to redo a house that size. Mrs. Perelli, though, she’d love to blame Yvonne for anything.”

  Rosalie Perelli continued to be suspicious of Yvonne, and for good reason, it turned out, because Yvonne Blau dyed a bath mat to match her yellow towels and hung it out one night right above the Perellis’ wash line. Nothing had ever happened to their laundry, but that morning Rosalie Perelli discovered yellow drips in four of her bloomers.

  “Like pee stains,” Mrs. Perelli complained when she appeared at Yvonne’s door with her bloomers, eyes furious in her lined face. “I insist that you replace these.”

  Yvonne frowned. “How do I know they are not pee stains?”

  “They probably were,” Robert said when he heard about it, and they laughed together. He adored her quick wit, her straight way of delivering outrageous lines. With her, you didn’t always know if she intended to be funny because she could say things like that with the most serious expression.

  One morning, she got him to dance the tango with her while still in his socks by telling him it was part of New Hampshire marriage law. “Really. If one of us wants to dance, the other one has to.”

  “You’re so good at making things up.”

  “In other countries it’s not dancing but something else, like herding goats or making cheese.”

  He spun her around, her face at the same height with his, and she drew him to the bed, pressed her forehead against his.

  “Stay home with me,” she said.

  Soon, she longed for clear soups.

  For paper-thin slices of meat without gravy.

  For salads and raw vegetables.

  For white bread instead of the solid Graubrot that her mother-in-law baked.

  Most of all she longed for small portions. For herself. Even more so for her husband. But his mother kept urging seconds on everyone, and he eagerly accepted, while Yvonne could barely swallow as she watched him distend his body even more. As soon as she’d get him back to their own apartment, she’d throw out the leftovers that his mother invariably wrapped for his lunch.

  One evening, when she slammed the lid back on the trash can, words finally burst from her: “She’ll stuff you with that German food until you’re too heavy to move, until no one else wants you.” His eyes were so frightened that she stopped herself. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  But his mother’s food made her think of everything she’d heard and read about Germans. Weighty. Humorless. Orderly. And not just the food. But also that German way of getting things done right away. And in only one certain way. As her mother-in-law did. Suddenly she felt ashamed thinking about her mother-in-law that way. Hadn’t she always formed her opinions based on what people did as individuals?

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “We can eat here, at home,” Robert said. “You and I.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Do you know that?”

  He felt hungry. So hungry that his entire belly was aching. “Let’s not talk about it right now.”

  She nodded. “Maybe it would be nice to be alone more … together, I mean, you and I.”

  When Greta made her next trip to Boston, Yvonne asked her to buy cookbooks and a set of pots with copper bottoms. For five weeks she retreated from the pattern of family dinners and labored over meals that refused to turn out the way they looked in the pictures. Though Robert pretended to enjoy the meager rations that were usually dry and bland, he felt ravenous. After Yvonne presented him with his breakfast of oat flakes and sliced fruit, he’d stop at the bakery, get a dozen uglies, devour five or six of them on the way to work, and finish the rest with the salad she’d packed for his lunch. He began to stash food at his clinic, and before returning home for dinner, he’d fix himself a couple of cheese sandwiches.

  He thought about food almost constantly. Sometimes, to keep from eating, he’d escape into the tub. After filling it halfway, he’d lower himself into the warm water as it rose to the top of the high rim. In the tub he felt weightless, agile even. He’d add some hot water. Swish it across his body with his hands. Add more. He’d postpone getting out of the tub till the steam had cleared from the hexagonal tiles and the water had turned lukewarm. When he’d climb across the enameled rim, he’d hate the way his flesh moved, the way his stomach got in the way as he bent to dry his legs. Straightening himself with a sigh, he’d reach for the ointment on the shelf and spread a thin coating on the insides of his thighs where they were usually chafed from rubbing against each other. He’d rinse the sulphur smell of the medication from his hands and take his bathrobe from the hook by the door.

  But the hunger would be waiting for him. Stalled. But not subdued.

  Worried about being hungry after his next meal, Robert would eat far more than he used to, and he’d get so afraid of food that the only thing to stop that fear was to eat even more, leaving him disgusted with Fatboy who presses himself against his insides, keeps him imprisoned, demands more as he pushes his flesh, his skin outward. Fatboy who has him on his knees in front of the toilet, one finger down his throat. He had discovered vomiting one evening in college when he’d eaten so much that he had to throw up. Instantly, he’d felt better. That instant release. A lightness, even. After that he’d started doing it on purpose, figuring he could eat all he wanted now without gaining weight. Without consequences. Oh, but there were consequences. He knew that now. Knew it wit
h each drop of water that splashed from the bowl into his face.

  Many times he had tried to exorcize Fatboy as though he were an evil spirit; but, just like an evil spirit, the image of his fat self kept haunting him, threatening to reclaim him. To ward Fatboy off, he’d gone on fasts and long walks. Anything to keep Fatboy away. Yet, he was constantly aware of Fatboy, waiting for him to fail so he could take his place. Whenever he became self-conscious, he felt Fatboy behind him. He didn’t have to turn around to know what Fatboy looked like—he knew: his features, his body, only bigger as in the fat mirror at the fair. The crowd files past Fatboy who sits on a ridiculously small stool, wearing a sequined shirt and tight-tight trousers. His rolls of flesh quiver with each laborious breath. Laid out in front of him is a display of cakes, fifteen different kinds, baked especially for him every day. Steadily, he eats one after the other, wiping powdered sugar from his lips and chins.

  Always an audience.

  Incredulous eyes fasten on Fatboy’s bulk with fascination and horror. That’s what they’re here for: not to see the bearded girl or the beagle with two heads, but to watch Fatboy expand in front of their eyes.

  When Yvonne burned hard-boiled eggs and lost two kettles to charred bottoms, Robert tried to laugh with her about the mishaps; but he was relieved when she decided that cooking was tedious and let him talk her into resuming their dinners with his mother and father.

  Though he worshiped his wife, even worshiped the sound of saying “my wife” when he introduced her, he tried to prolong those evenings with his parents. To be alone with Yvonne was confusing. Complicated. Sometimes he was afraid to comply with her request to play the piano for her at night—“Just for me, Robert”—but when he did, he became so immersed in the music that he felt surprised, invaded even, when he glanced up and discovered the desire in Yvonne’s eyes. But he had already learned to keep himself at the piano, resisting his longing to take her into his arms because he knew her desire would vanish as soon as he held her.