Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  I certainly did not intend to pronounce the words feminine hygiene spray in front of Hubert.

  Flirt wasn't very smart about skunks. I had to think that smarts had something to do with it, since Dandy never got skunked when she did. He stayed out of the way while Flirt barged right in, nose first. Poor brave Flirt: dashing home with stinging eyes, a face full of toxic odors, and her fur imbued with the bitterness of it.

  Waldo was outside with Flirt, the tomato juice, the feminine hygiene spray, the hose, and a bucket. The boys stood on the back steps watching the unsavory process from a safe distance, and I delivered sponges and scrub brushes to Waldo. Just for a while, I forgot all about Hubert.

  After two thorough washings of Flirt, Waldo said, "It's still pretty bad. There is no way she can sleep inside tonight."

  Ezra said, "But Dad! What about the coyotes?"

  "What about them?"

  "We saw a coyote just yesterday. They like to eat dogs, you know."

  "Only puppies," Waldo said.

  I returned to the kitchen and saw Hubert gripping the table's edge with white-knuckled fingers. His face was mottled with red blotches, like an uneven sunburn. His beard had levitated up his chin. Oh, shit, I thought, he's allergic to salmon. I've never heard of anyone being allergic to salmon.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Is there a train any time soon?"

  "In about thirty minutes, but if you're having a reaction we need to get you to the ER for some epinephrine."

  "I'm afraid I am reacting rather badly. To the skunk."

  "Oh," I said, unreasonably relieved.

  He got up unsteadily, and looked around. "Is there a bathroom nearby?"

  I showed him the way upstairs and then returned to the action out back. I said to Waldo, "Hubert is upstairs heaving, I think."

  "Sensitive sort."

  Henry said, "Is he barfing his brains out?"

  "Quiet, Henry," I said. "We're not going to mention it when he comes down."

  Ezra said, "He might like you to mention it. He might want to tell us all about it."

  "You mean the way you do, Ez?" Waldo said.

  A smile crept over his lower face. "Yes, just like that."

  Hubert returned. The red blotches were gone and he was whiter than fresh snow.

  "Shall we go to the train now?" he said. Hubert smiled weakly at Waldo and the boys. "This has been a most delightful meal. I am so gratified to have finally met you all. I'm sorry that we did not have the opportunity to discuss your friend Abelardo. I think it would have been so enlightening. But alas, that will have to wait for another time."

  "It's a shame about the skunk," Waldo said. Hubert cringed at the word. "Unfortunately, Flirt is a bit stupid about skunks. We're all getting used to it, I'm afraid. Probably not a good sign."

  "I could never get used to it," Hubert said. "I have an unfortunately sensitive nose, and a problem with stenches."

  Ezra said gleefully, "Like Christina the Astonishing!"

  Henry said, "Can you levitate?"

  Waldo said, "That's enough, you guys."

  Then Ezra asked when he would be coming back. "God only knows," Hubert replied.

  We drove almost the whole way to the station without a word. I wanted to inquire after his well-being but could not figure out how to do it without reference to either skunks or vomit, so I said nothing at all. It was Hubert who broke the silence.

  "Your sons are remarkably sanguine, my dear."

  "Huh?"

  "I have an ancient horror of skunks. Did you know that skunks can shoot their odoriferous liquid up to twelve feet? And they have exceptional aim." He shook his head as if considering yet another example of human fallibility.

  "They've gotten Flirt a few times. More than tonight."

  Hubert leaned slightly forward in his seat. He appeared to be scanning the road for obstacles. Then we parked at the station, and while we were waiting he told me a long and rambling story of getting sprayed by a skunk one night after an argument with Martin, who had locked him outside their cabin, and how miserable he'd been. Though it ended up being a pivotal moment in their relationship. Eau de skunk was for Hubert the diabolical equivalent of Proust's madeleines. After the incident with the skunk and Martin, Hubert had burned all the clothes he'd been wearing.

  I leaned forward and inadvertently hit the horn button on the steering wheel. Honk! pierced the silence in the car, shattered the darkness, and startled us both.

  "Sorry," I said. "Here comes the train." The twin lights were bearing down from the north.

  "Please tell your sons I do not resemble Christina the Astonishing in any significant way."

  "Consider it done," I said.

  The train groaned to a stop. Hubert embarked and said, "Will I be seeing you at the club soon?"

  "Where else would I go?" I asked. The question was not rhetorical.

  "Nicaragua?" Hubert said. The train pulled away and drowned us out.

  The boys must have prevailed on Waldo to let Flirt sleep inside, because when I got home she was asleep on an old towel in the kitchen, with the door shut.

  20

  Half the State of Maine Is Serious

  WALDO BROUGHT ME COFFEE the next morning. "Flirt still stinks," he said. It was barely six.

  "Oh, the ambient air, how it stunk,

  And put Dandy and Flirt in a funk.

  But who would have thunk

  That a black and white skunk

  Could cause such distress to a monk?"

  "That is nothing short of brilliant," I said. The morning was pinkish in color. Grackles and swallows were singing back and forth, or antiphonally, as Hubert would say.

  "You're losing your grip, Al."

  "Why shouldn't I like your rhymes?"

  "Because they drive me nuts. How would you like to have misspent your youth thinking of rhymes for Trojan and anatomy and marijuana?"

  "Nitrogen? Lobotomy?" I said. "See how helpful I could be?"

  "It's a curse. I put Flirt out. Don't let her back in today."

  "I should call Hubert today. To make sure he's okay. What do you think?"

  "Give him a day off, is what I think," Waldo said.

  What I did not say was my dream. I dreamed that Abelardo and I were eating fruit off a helium-filled tray, and I watched him bite into a strawberry with bright green flesh. Electric green. He'd said, "Maybe your cherry will be blue."

  W

  It should have felt strange not to tell Waldo my dream, but I did not even want to. I wanted to tuck it somewhere safe and secret.

  Then it was the evening. The pine planks of the kitchen table were rutted and worn smooth with use; the stains were a Braille guide to the history of our meals and the reinvention of the wheel.

  Waldo was catapulting red and green grapes from a spoon, and then a fork. This worked only when the utensil had a sufficiently arched handle. First he placed a green grape on the handle end of a spoon lying on the table, and then he hit the bowl of the spoon and sent the grape flying. He marked where it landed with a small green Post-it. He repeated the operation with a red grape, and then again with both colors of grape but using a fork.

  "I don't know the relative density of the grapes," he said. "And I haven't even bothered to weigh them. But it's important to see if there is a difference."

  "You always have to have an extra set of variables, don't you?" I said, because suddenly it seemed true.

  "I'm just trying to set up controls for the experiment," Waldo said.

  "Waldo, we need to talk," I said.

  "Talk away. We have nothing much to do except prepare for my only brother's wedding, an event which I hear has flummoxed half the state of Maine."

  "Please be serious," I said.

  "Half the state of Maine is serious."

  "Waldo!"

  "Sorry, I'm all ears." Whenever he said this, and it was something he'd said regularly over the years, Waldo took hold of his lobes and flapped them back and forth.


  "So what is going on, and who is Sheila?" I said.

  "You asked me about Sheila a while back. I don't know any Sheilas."

  "Fine. The woman you're seeing. She-who-is-not-me."

  He said softly, "Her name is Shirley."

  "Shirley? Not Sheila?"

  Waldo's voice was positively sepulchral. "It's just a name."

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck you. I almost let myself believe everything was okay because you said there was no Sheila. Fuck you. Fuck everything."

  "Everything is okay," Waldo said. "This is not the end of the world." It wasn't entirely or even almost true that I'd believed everything was okay. It was true that I'd played mental games, constantly weighing, on some imaginary scale of justice, the possibility of a real-life Sheila against the possible damage of driving Waldo away with my paranoia. After Edith Dilly, and after the end of the Edith Dilly affair, I had been hypervigilant and even, for a time, afraid of the dark. I'd thought I'd wanted Waldo to be sorry, terribly sorry, but the few times he'd mouthed those words, it was such terrible acting—l ike Unfelt Bathos—that I relinquished the thought. And finally, it was exhausting to be so miserable, and Waldo was so tender to me, passionate and funny, often simultaneously. So we went on, and I had reined in the melodrama. So I believed.

  "Then what is it the end of?"

  "It's not the end of anything," Waldo said.

  I said, "How about the end of you and surely Shirley?"

  "There was never an and between me and Shirley."

  "Please don't get grammatical," I said. "Is there an and between fuck and suck?"

  Next to the catapulting fork and spoon was a knife that had not been part of the experiment. I picked it up and balanced it lengthwise on the tip of my index finger.

  "You see this knife?" I said. "I don't know whether to use it on me or you."

  "Put it down, Al," Waldo said. "It's a butter knife, for Christ's sake."

  "You're always the voice of reason, aren't you? You think I'm hysterical," I blubbered.

  Upstairs all was silent. I had not said good night to either of the boys, a serious omission.

  Waldo said, "Al, I never claimed to have a lock on reason. You're putting words in my mouth. Again. I wish you'd stop telling me what I'm thinking."

  "Fine, fine, fine. I don't know what you think. I just know that whatever you're thinking, it makes me feel terrible that you love this Sheila/Shirley. I want to know about her."

  "Don't you think it would be better to know nothing?"

  "No. And even if it were, I don't care."

  Sometimes it was shocking how a house filled with children and dogs, as well as uninvited rodents and insects, and surrounded by a countryside full of nocturnal creatures, hungry owls and roaming skunks, could be so terribly, terribly silent.

  "Who is she?"

  "Someone from the office. Not this office, from the Texas office. She'll be going back there soon."

  "You're having an affair with someone from Texas?

  "Don't be that way, Al."

  "What way?"

  "Snide."

  "Do you love her?" I said.

  "Al, I love you. I'll always love you. But you're not a child and I can't tell you that everything will always be fine, because I don't know that."

  "What about Ezra and Henry? Are you going to abandon them too?"

  "I'm not abandoning anyone!"

  "Just tell me if you love her." My nose was running the way it always did when I cried.

  Waldo sat very still, and I cried noisily. He had never been particularly responsive to crying, one way or the other, but it felt better to cry. It was something I wanted to do.

  "No," he said. "I don't love her. We have sex. I'm not proud of myself. It was a mistake. Honestly, Al. This—you—are what I want. Please let me make it up to you."

  "You sound like a fucking contrite politician."

  "That was low."

  "You deserve it. I don't want you to see her again. Not ever."

  "She's in the office, Al."

  "I don't care. I don't care if she's the men's room attendant."

  Suddenly I was squeezed dry as last year's toothpaste.

  "Can we go to bed, Al? I promise you, this will be fine."

  "Fuck you."

  "I know."

  Crying is like sex in this one way, that I always sleep well afterward. Or maybe it's not well, maybe it's just very deeply, deeper than the Marianas Trench, deeper than the Mammoth Caves, deeper than Hegel and Kierkegaard put together.

  Then it was the evening before the day before Dick's wedding to Sydney. The rehearsal dinner was on Friday night at the yacht club, and the wedding was on Saturday in the nineteenth-century stone church on Slow Island, where Sydney's family had a house, a bunch of houses, and some of them had indoor plumbing. We were not optimistic about the weather. Winter lingers for a long time in Maine, and then it segues into a spring that is often indistinguishable from winter except that it is muddier. But not always.

  Following upon spring comes blackfly season, also known as June. Only the tropics had bugs bigger than Maine's. Except, so I was told, on Slow Island. According to Waldo, who probably heard it from Posey, the wedding was being held this particular weekend in June so that Sydney—and Sydney's mother, the formidable Gabriela Sweet—could be sure that Cousin Harold would not show up. Harold had been in love with Sydney since they were young, but now he was a terrible drunk who had a penchant for making scenes at family events and complaining bitterly about the terms of his grandfather's will. He also had a permit to carry a gun. But Harold was brilliant as well, and that week in June he would be in Los Angeles filming Jeopardy! That date had been set and confirmed months ago; his mother, Sydney's Aunt Grace, a morose widow, had promised that Harold would be safely on the other side of the continent. If Sydney and Gabriela knew one thing, it was that Harold had long harbored the ambition to compete on Jeopardy! and win a fortune to compensate for the one he had been so cruelly cheated of.

  Waldo flew up a day early to be with his brother and then go to the rehearsal dinner. I packed the boys' new suits. I wrote out the instructions for Dandy's medications for Bogumila, who had agreed to keep the dogs. This was a huge volte-face for her. For years she'd refused to let the dogs into her yard, on account of her precious chickens. Now, although her chickens were still precious, she had changed her mind, and not one of us knew why. Although I had my suspicions; I thought a fox was involved.

  The night before the boys and I left, Ezra walked in his sleep, all the way down to the basement. I would never have known, and certainly he would never have known, had he not walked directly into Waldo's model for the Home Harvest-Helper, the pieces of which stood in angry disjuncture in front of his workbench. It was meant to be Dick's wedding gift, once it was perfected.

  I didn't hear the crash, I regret to say, but I heard Flirt barking, and continuing to bark, and after her barks had entered my dream and morphed into a distant stormy ocean we were trying to reach, I finally woke up and knew something was wrong. I found Ezra seated at the kitchen table drinking milk from a coffee mug. Above his left eye was a scrape oozing delicate red droplets.

  21

  A Wedding on Slow Island

  IT WAS LATER THAN I'd planned when we arrived at Catamunk. After playing several rounds of My Grandmother's Trunk and then counting all the Moose X-ing signs past the border, Ezra and Henry had finally fallen into sleep.

  All was silent when we arrived at Posey's. I lugged the boys inside, tucked them in, and went upstairs. It didn't matter how carefully I tiptoed, the stairs always creaked. I climbed into the top bunk in Waldo's old room. He slumbered noisily on the bottom one.

  Once, long ago, I had told Waldo I thought it odd that not only did he still sleep in the bunk bed of his youth, but I was expected to sleep in it as well. "Other people graduate to bigger beds—double beds, for instance—when they grow up and get married. That is normal."

  Waldo had said he liked his bunk bed, and
that I could have the top bunk any time I wanted.

  "What I want," I'd said, "is to sleep in the same bed with you."

  He'd said, "But we do that every night. This will spice up our nightlife."

  "Well, at least you didn't say our sex life," I'd said.

  Strangely, I came to like the bunk beds too. When I climbed the rickety ladder to the top bunk, into that secret space between the musty linen and the ceiling, the years dropped away. I don't know exactly what age I dropped to, but I know it was an age before responsibilities. I slept well up there in the stratosphere.

  It seemed late when I awoke, up there in the stratosphere, and I panicked. Not Waldo. Waldo did not move when I climbed down from the top bunk and almost stepped on his face. He did not move when I knocked over the rickety bedside table with my flailing foot. The table fell to the floor. A splintered board came loose from its back, and its single drawer fell open and spilled its contents.

  Finally Waldo moved and turned his head to look at the commotion. "Amazing," he said. "That drawer has been stuck closed for years."

  Scattered across the rutted wooden floor and the worn carpet were the ace of spades, the ten of hearts, an opened package of Viceroy cigarettes, one of those plastic eggs containing Silly Putty, and two Sheik brand condoms. What had not spilled out were two hard candies that had melted and were eternally adhered to the bottom of the drawer. Sheiks were not Waldo's brand.

  Posey was in the sunny yellow kitchen, finishing up the breakfast dishes. She looked me up and down and up again.

  "Have you seen the boys this morning?" I said.

  "Not only have I seen them, but I fed them breakfast hours ago. Ezra is a brave little man."

  "Do you know where they are?"

  "With Mr. Cicero."

  "And where is Mr. Cicero?"

  "They went down to the beach. They needed to collect rocks."