“I was put through to Mr. Coin a couple of times, but he hung up.”
She laughs. “James is not a big talker.”
“I’d really like to have a chance to meet him.”
She looks skeptical. “We don’t like to upset our clients.”
“I think Mr. Coin’s family and mine might be connected in some way.”
“He’s got Medi-Cal,” she says suspiciously.
“It’s not like that. I’m not after money.”
She looks down at her desk and shuffles some papers, signaling that she is done with the conversation.
“When is the last time he had a visitor?” Walker says.
She makes a show of looking through the appointment book, then gives up the charade. “You’re the first.”
James Coin is wheeled into the common room by a tattooed orderly whose shaved head shines. He bends over the chair and speaks softly to James, then hands him a small object that looks like a garage door opener. “You press this if you need me, Mr. James. I’ll come for you fast.”
James is thin. More than thin. His clothes hang limply as if there is no actual body beneath them. The angular contours of his knee bones press against the material of his slacks. His skin is waxy and liver-spotted, his fingers curl against his palms. Surprisingly, he has a full head of hair, the leached color blond goes to with age. He does not look at Walker but instead stares at the blank wall opposite, and Walker cannot be sure the old man is aware of him.
He is not certain how to begin. In his work his conversation is strictly with the dead. Someone turns up the television and then quickly adjusts the volume. Walker reacts to the sound, but the old man does not. Maybe he is deaf, Walker thinks, but then remembers that the orderly spoke to him.
“My name is Walker Dodge,” he begins, speaking too loudly. He looks for a sign of recognition, sees none. Of course, James would have been a little boy when his mother worked the oranges and he would no more recognize the name than those of the many other farms where she must have found employment during that time. Walker realizes, too, that if the name does register with the old man, it would certainly not elicit the heart-quickening reaction that Walker felt sitting in that chilled basement among his family records. Rather, the connection between James’s family and his own would stir troubling memories. James moves his mouth as if he is about to say something but he is just worrying his gums. Walker reaches into his briefcase and takes out the photograph he’s printed off the Internet. He touches James’s shoulder lightly. James looks at him, and then his gaze falls on the picture. This is the first indication of interest he has shown, but Walker cannot tell what the man feels. When James looks away, Walker senses he has done something terribly aggressive, as if the photograph were one of maimed bodies rather than this man’s mother and his siblings. He turns the picture over and lets it rest on his lap. He explains his story, tells James about the article in the poetry book, about the coincidence of finding Mary Coin’s name in the work rolls, about the tiny suspicion that he knows is absurd but that he cannot banish: that Mary Coin was important to his grandfather in some particular way. The man’s silence makes Walker feel as if he is on a disastrous first date and he says more than he intends. He talks about his difficult experience with his father, about George’s death. Occasionally he stops talking, waiting to see if James will give him some sign that any of this information registers. James says nothing. Still, there is something about the man’s silence that feels attentive, as if the quiet is a manner of being and not the result of a deteriorating mind. And for reasons Walker cannot explain, he feels drawn to James, who looks to be only a few years older than Walker’s father was. The two men grew up experiencing the same history but from opposite sides of fate.
Walker glances around the room. A few plastic tables and chairs. Generic floral paintings hanging on the walls. A box of toys for visiting grandchildren. When George became ill, Walker’s sisters wanted to move him to an assisted-living facility. They chose one and sent Walker the brochure. The home was a mock-Georgian manor sitting on acres of land. Welcoming outdoor furniture and games were set up on the evenly cut grass as if the residents were in the habit of taking afternoon strolls and challenging one another to games of lawn bowling. George took one look at the brochure and refused to waste the money.
“My father never knew his mother,” Walker says. He thinks of his children, of Alice. “It’s a terrible thing not to know your parent.”
The orderly appears. Walker realizes James has signaled that he wants to be taken back to his room or some other safe place where he will not be attacked by the past or by a deranged college professor who has invented a false history to fill some maw in his life.
“I’m sorry,” Walker says to the orderly. “Maybe I tired him out.”
The orderly puts a hand on the old man’s back. “We’ll take a rest now, Mr. James.” He unlocks the wheels of the chair, turns it around, and rolls James out of the room.
Walker drives back to his motel, feeling disconsolate. He was optimistic when he thought he might stay the night, that James Coin might have important things to share and that Walker would speak with him a second time, maybe even make arrangements for further visits. He gathers his bag and goes to the front desk to check out. Upset about the bungled meeting and the possible harm that he inflicted on a sick old man, he takes a sheet of university stationery out of his briefcase and writes James a thank-you and an apology. He has no way of knowing if tomorrow, when James receives this letter, he will remember who Walker is.
Mary
29.
Santa Clarita, California, 1982
Mary sat on the examining table, wearing a flimsy piece of paper that was supposed to be a robe, listening to the doctor explain things to Ellie and Trevor as if Mary would not understand. The doctor’s fists were balled up in her lab coat pockets as if someone had told her that she moved her hands too much when she talked.
“But her numbers were down,” Ellie said in the tone she used with difficult customers at the Pharma-Save she managed or with wrestling coaches who didn’t play her twin seventeen-year-old boys to her satisfaction. She had recently tortured her hair into a permanent, and her curls jumped around like little girls desperate to go to the bathroom. Mary felt a sadness open up inside her not on account of the foolish disease that was making a repeat appearance but because of how dearly Ellie wanted those curls when she was a girl. It was strange how you knew from the very beginning what would happen in the end. Toby had the seeds of his death in him from the get-go. Ellie was a girl determined to get what she wanted even if she had to wait fifty years to do it. The problem was that no one wanted to admit that the story was already written. Well, she supposed that was what they called foolish hope.
“There are studies that link a good attitude to a positive result in certain circumstances,” the doctor said, “but this is all anecdotal. Stomach cancer is particularly intractable at this stage.”
“English, please,” Ellie said. She was as smart as they came and she could knock someone down a notch by playing Okie and pretending she couldn’t understand what they were talking about. She’d turn their assumptions about her ignorance right back on them like a boomerang and end up getting what she wanted. If Della or June were here they would act as if the doctor’s words had the authority of God. Those two would travel from their homes in Bakersfield as soon as Mary called for them, but she had not told them about the new round of illness; she was not ready for their fuss. James was driving a long haul to Michigan. He was always a solace to her, and although she didn’t like him driving an eighteen-wheeler all those hours with no one to keep him company, she was glad he wasn’t here now. He was never comfortable around people, and the hustle of a hospital where nurses checked your most private areas without even introducing themselves would make him miserable. And she did not want to contend with that wife of Ray’s who had a habit of turnin
g someone else’s tragedy into her own for the sake of attention. For now, she wanted Ellie and Trevor near her: Ellie, because she was a fighter and Mary didn’t have a lot of fight left in her; Trevor, because Mary never wanted him to be alone with bad news. She would never forget the day he ran back through the camp where they had stopped after the car was fixed, waving a newspaper in the air, screaming, “Mama’s been shot! Mama’s dead!” The improbability of seeing his mother in the paper had made him lose all reason and it took a while before he realized that the big black spot on her forehead in the picture was just ink. Once he’d calmed down, she’d told him he had better give that paper back to whomever he got it from because she didn’t have five cents to pay for it.
That was the first time she’d ever seen herself in a photograph. It was a queer feeling to study the face of a woman who looked like a stranger and have to remind herself that the stranger was her. It made no sense, as if her features were just shapes on a face that did not add up to the person who was in her mind’s eye when she thought about herself. And what did a face have to do with it? A person was just feelings that came and went like clouds drifting across the sky and decisions that sometimes ended up to be good and sometimes bad. But this woman in the picture was someone who looked a certain way and would never change. Like a table or a shoe. Back in those days, Mary had stopped considering her looks and hadn’t seen herself in a mirror for months. She’d felt angry at the woman in the picture for being so thin, and ashamed that her children were dirty, and, oh, all right, a little bit excited because now her kids were jumping up and down, yelling about how their mama was in the newspaper, and other women from the camp came to see what the noise was about. But later, when she was alone, she felt something else that made fear and shame and pride a lie: she felt jealous. She was envious of the woman in the picture because that woman had not had to suffer the future that began the moment the photographer got into her car and drove away.
Ellie wrote notes on a pad that had one of those infernal happy faces on its bright yellow cover. Mary wondered how she had lived long enough to end up in a world where people thought a cartoon drawing of a smile could make your problems go away. As Ellie peppered the doctor with the questions on her list, Mary thought about how her daughter liked things to be orderly. Ellie’s house was too tidy as far as Mary was concerned. It was the kind of clean that shook a finger at you when you sat in a plumped-up chair or put your hand on a freshly waxed table, warning you not to leave any evidence of yourself. The Wrestlers—which is what Mary called the twins—skulked through the rooms like cat burglars, careful not to unsettle things. Ellie’s husband, Valerio, worked nights on highway construction, so his presence was noticeable only as clues, his dusty work gloves in the utility sink, a bowl rinsed clean on the drying rack—he knew who he was married to. Mary took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Soon she would be living in that house. It would be the first time in sixty years that she would have to submit to another woman’s rules.
Trevor stood behind Ellie, bowing his head as the doctor spoke. He was a big man used to hunching and stepping back so others could see. As the doctor delivered the bad news, he covered his eyes the way men did when they wanted people to think they were simply tired, but Mary saw his shoulders shake. She would have given anything to be able to hop off the examining table and wrap her arms around him, but she didn’t have that kind of agility anymore, and her robe would certainly fall off, which would do Trevor more harm than good. He didn’t question what the doctor said; he didn’t have the imagination to expect more than what was in front of him. It was her fault, Mary thought. You can’t raise children the way she did and tell them that they can be the president of the United States if they just work hard enough. She’d always told her children the truth. The sharp and dissatisfied ones like Ellie and Ray shut their ears to her and wanted what they wanted. The quiet ones like Trevor and James listened closely and believed what Mary told them more than she wished they had. Trevor was a good son and a loyal man, a quality that had kept him with women who loaded all their unhappiness onto his broad back like he was a mule and then left without collecting their baggage. There were times when it would have done him good to be more defiant like Ellie because it took a little bit of ill humor to make yourself up out of nothing. And Ellie was a good daughter in her way, which was the way of making decisions about the right route to take to get from here to there or where a person ought to live out the end of her life.
Well, there was nothing Mary could do about that, either.
Doris also said that Mary would not know who she was until she lost the things in her life. Mary thought it was not something a girl should have to hear on her wedding day. And now, sitting in this examining room, she knew her mother had been wrong. The hard bargain was that you lost and you lost and still you didn’t know.
Ellie kept asking questions, trying to find some loophole in the doctor’s logic, as if it were purely a grammar mistake that stood between Mary’s life and her oncoming death. The doctor’s answers were all versions of the same information: Mary’s best, her only hope, was further treatment. Further treatment. Mary shut her eyes as if to block out the idea. She’d had enough of the sucking tiredness and the vomiting and tingling hands and not being able to stand cold and then not being able to stand heat and her tongue feeling like an eel inside her mouth. She’d had enough of her scalp hurting. And where would the money come from? It cost too much to keep her alive, and for what? A few more months? If there was one thing Mary could say for herself it was that she knew what was worth a dollar and what was not. When Ray was a boy, he used to tell her she could split a penny into four parts. He didn’t say this with admiration because he wanted things—a toy truck he saw in the store window or second helpings when there was hardly enough to go around the first time. When she denied him, anger took over his body, and he would hold his breath until he turned blue, and she’d have to smack him on his back.
“But I don’t feel sick,” Mary said suddenly.
Everyone in the room turned to her as if they had forgotten she was there.
“You’re sick if you feel sick,” she continued, “and I’m feeling as good as I did yesterday and the day before. So we can stop all this and go home.”
“Mrs. Coin,” the doctor said. “The tests show—”
“The tests are one side of the story.”
“I’m afraid that they are, unfortunately, the truth,” the doctor said.
“Aw, honey,” Mary said, suddenly feeling sorry for the doctor. “The truth isn’t the unfortunate one in this room.”
“Mother, now you’re just being mean,” Ellie said.
“Give me my clothes,” Mary said. “I’m going home.”
30.
People always talked about the body betraying a person in illness, but Mary did not believe the body had intentions. It was just a thing that worked until it broke down. People were the fickle ones. This is what she thought as she watched Ellie unload the trunk of her Tercel. Collapsed boxes that had once held aspirin and latex gloves destined for drugstore shelves were now going to be filled with everything that Mary had ever owned.
When she had woken up that morning in her trailer, made her bed and turned on her coffeemaker, Mary had been aware of everything as if she were watching another woman perform these tasks. There’s that dying woman brushing her teeth. There she goes lifting the blinds. There she is cleaning the grease off the stove because it is rude to leave a place dirtier than you found it.
Ellie came inside, set down her awkward load, wiped her forehead with the back of her arm and started to reassemble the boxes with packing tape. She wore her blue smock from the drugstore. “There’s no shortage of boxes in this world. Everything comes in a box, if you stop to think about it,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s strictly true,” Mary said.
Ellie looked at her mother. “Don’t fight me on this, Mam
a,” she said.
“Who’s fighting?”
“You can’t stay here anymore. You probably shouldn’t have been living on your own for as long as you have. That’s my fault, I guess.”
“If you give in to a little cough you give in to everything,” Mary said. Of course, this hadn’t been the case with Toby or Betsy, or, in the end, with Doris herself. But some things were right even though they were wrong.
“Valerio and I want you to live with us,” Ellie said. “The boys have already cleared out a room. They’re excited to bunk together just like when they were little.”
“Those boys are too big to fit in one room.”
“It doesn’t do for you to be alone now.”
Now, Mary thought. Time was always being split between then and now. Then she had been a child in Tahlequah. Now she was a mother in California learning how to care for babies. Then Toby had been alive, now he was dead and she’d had to bury him and accept other men into her bed for reasons besides love. Then she had seven children. Now she had six. Except this separation of time was a false one. Because you never stopped being one thing when you became the other.
“So,” Ellie said, “where would you like to start, Mama? I thought we’d start with the kitchen cabinets. You sit down and don’t do a thing.”
It went on like that all day. Ellie asked what Mary wanted to do about the cookbooks and then in the same breath mentioned how out-of-date those dog-eared books were and how no one in her right mind should be cooking with that much butter anyway and no wonder half of America suffered heart attacks and weren’t people just getting fatter and fatter? Or she pretended to consider where, in her living room, Mary’s green Naugahyde recliner would look best when Mary knew there was no amount of money in the world that would convince Ellie to let that chair in her house. It had belonged to Mary’s third husband. She’d divorced Tom Ducette, a drinker she’d had to get rid of after he laid an angry hand on James, and met Nelson Hendricks when she worked at an industrial laundry. He loved to bet on the horses and he loved his awful cigars, but otherwise he was a decent enough man to keep company with, and he could make her laugh. On the weekends he sat in the recliner, holding his radio to his ear and listening to the races, bouncing in his seat as if he were the winning jockey. And then one day he stopped bouncing. She buried him and decided that she was done with husbands.
Mary Coin Page 20
