Her parents’ house still had the aluminum swing set in the backyard from when she was a girl, with the same slide, always dappled by the repetition of rain and soil. Their rooms were made up for them, complete with towels laid out on the bed, like a hotel. The boy was adored. Her decision was never questioned.
She found work at the elementary school, taking over temporarily for a music teacher who was having a baby. There was a lot of cardboard and glitter and toilet paper tubes, stopped at the ends and filled with beans for shaking. There was no epiphany, no rush of dark pleasure now that she was on her own; just “I’m a Little Teapot” during the day and dinners at home of macaroni and cheese with little cubes of hot dog.
When she first took out the viola, it sounded dry from the travel. Her mind would drift; her bowing arm would become heavy. There were certain steps to be taken, she knew, for moving on, like chopping her hair, doing something drastic, but not too ugly. Her mother urged her to meet people, to “build a foundation,” but she would not; she was comfortable, for the time, living in a blind spot, off the grid of where she had pictured her life heading.
And then one day, in February, a change occurred, marked by a dream. It was one of those dreams where very little happens, but something is injected under the surface, into the commotion of life, drugged by sleep. When she woke, she remained in bed for some time, seeing his face in the rumpled darkness, while falling snow and ice hissed against her window.
In the morning, she was still stirred, but with an added dint of sadness. Her husband had called her the night before, the way he did every Sunday, to ask about the boy and to inquire, nervously, about her plans. He told her that he hadn’t felt like seeing anyone else, meaning women, and then waited a long time for her to respond. He talked about his students. He wanted to know if she had heard that narwhals were in fact mythical. Did she know that brown cows can only make chocolate milk?
She focused on the slight breakage at the end of his questions, the great effort he put into pronunciation that could only be described as “toothy.” She had tried to imagine that this would be the last time that they would ever speak, even though she knew he would call again next week. She had imagined what it would be like to see his traits emerge in the boy as he grew, traits that she may or may not have taken for granted in the past. But there had been only weightless, drifting apathy, like the fatigue from artificial light.
She went outside to clear the snow from her car and then work on the layer of ice on the windshield wipers. You could sometimes forget that there was something to be uncovered once you got to chipping and scraping, as if the point were to just keep working until you hit the ground. Exhausted, she opened the car door and sat, freezing, behind the wheel. She looked at the gray sky, the corroded white of birch trees, through the hole of visibility that she had cleared on her windshield.
In her dream, the shop owner had been sitting behind the desk by the open stove, the same large desk that had been there when she worked for him, years ago. He was writing in some kind of financial log with his sleeves rolled up and his arms glowing in the light from the burning coals. He would not look at her. He would not speak to her.
She turned the key in the ignition and was blasted by cold air. Inside the house, she knew that her mother would be making coffee, while the boy ate his cereal in the kitchen, scrutinizing the cardboard box (why he could never put that kind of concentration into a real book, she would never know). If she left now, they might not even notice that she was gone.
By the time the hot air kicked in, she had already taken the exit off the highway and pulled into the gas station across the road from the old antique shop. She would wait for ten minutes, she told herself, and if she did not see the shop owner by then, then she would go home, call in sick to work, and come right back. She would sit there in her car all day if that was what it took.
She prepared herself to wait, but when she raised her eyes, he was already there—just a shadow behind the window of a pickup truck, rolling to a stop in the gravel parking lot in front of the shop. The man emerged, hulking in a gray overcoat, and walked to the shop door, where he kicked loose an icicle on the gutter. Her first impression was, not surprisingly, that he looked older—he had been in his fifties when she worked for him, almost ten years ago—but he still had the same broad carriage, the same security of strength. She could see his beard, now fully gray and trimmed close to his jaw. The rest of his face was hidden beneath the furred brim of his hat. She watched him unlock the door to the shop and disappear behind it, imagined him switching on the overhead lights and then going straight to the woodstove. Something knocked around inside her chest, half-winged and terrible.
She went about the rest of the day distracted, unable to focus on her regular tasks, as though she were still in that frozen car, peering through the narrow hole of cleared ice and snow. At school, she unlocked the storage closet and dragged out the xylophones and frayed squares of carpet for her students. She let the time pass in the clumsy gallop of misplaced mallets and little voices off-key. When the last school bell rang, she drove home, stopping by the neighbor’s house on the way to pick up the boy, who had been there since lunch. She must have strapped him in the car seat, she must have put his mittens over his hands, for although she didn’t remember doing so, he was there, dressed and asleep, by the time she pulled into the gas station again. The antique shop across the road did not close until six and it was not yet four, so there would be little chance of seeing him. Still, she sat, warming the tips of her fingers in the heating vents, just in case she caught a glimpse of shadow, some small sign that he was inside. That was all that she needed.
Half an hour passed. From where she was parked, she could see the items on display in the window—an iron-ribbed trunk, a stenciled child’s sled, a mirror reflecting the purpling clouds overhead—and behind them, a sliver of depth, the only suggestion of the space beyond. So far, nothing had crossed it, even though her eyes had remained fixed, pooling with concentration. When the child woke, he wanted to know where they were. He was hungry and cold. Allison turned on the radio, she dug through her purse for a candy, but the boy only began to cry. Defeated and annoyed, she drove home, determined to return to the spot in the morning.
But the next morning, she felt differently. With horror, she recalled the events of the day before and found each moment distorted by something that she now felt no connection to. Toward the man, the shop owner, for whom she’d waited so long to see cross behind the window, she felt only disgust. She would never go near the place again.
Weeks passed and the strangeness of the day had not returned. A freak reaction, she told herself, caused by stress, or the long winter. She developed a better practice schedule and, through regular use, her viola regained its familiar give, as if ripened. When she played, she dipped into something that was always streaming, moving like ants through the veins of a colony. There, she was all feelers, little bits of armor, a million tiny, uncrushable hearts. They poured from her instrument and found their way in swarms through the cracks in the walls, slipping outside beneath the skin of the trees, down into the earth, where the egoless are.
And then, on a day in March, she woke before sunrise and could not fall back to sleep. Her mother’s little dog was up, dancing its toenails against the kitchen floor, so she put on her jacket and clipped the leash to its collar. Outside, it was unseasonably warm. Her muscles relaxed and her mind wandered. She wished that she had someone to call other than her husband, whose conversation was still irritatingly stoic.
“We lost another chicken at the farm,” he would say. “Maybe you will have an answer for me by spring.”
She had tried to speak to her husband about the incident with the horse after it had happened, about how time had slowed and she had maneuvered her body to protect their son. About how she had felt that it had all happened before. This is where it happens.
“Adrenaline,” had been his response. “An amazing thing.”
But that wasn’t what she had wanted to talk about. She knew the mechanics of it as much as anyone. What she wanted was for him to ask her about something ridiculous, like her past lives, or if she ever flew in her dreams and, if so, whether she flapped her arms or kicked her feet. She wanted him to ask her about the people in her life who’d hurt her and for him to be surprised at her answer, impressed by the depth of her life before him. It wasn’t about revealing her soul—a word that she wasn’t sure if people were still using seriously, like Pluto—but about giving the tangential a place in their life, casually but also mindfully, just as one might start putting a feeder out for birds in the winter.
She let the dog put its weight into the leash, as if she could get away with following it, across town, to where the houses had shapelier gardens and names on the knockers, to the street where the shop owner lived with his wife. The windows of the house were thick with sleep, with gray-blue deafness.
She took a seat on the curb directly across the street from the slope of his front yard, where the crocuses were already coming up along the lattice under the porch, little wet paintbrushes of purple and yellow. The dog sat obediently and looked with her, working its nose against the wind. There was no bench, no view, no reason to be there. She should not have been there, but she waited as the cars came with their headlights spreading over the road and as birds dropped down and picked over the new ground. She waited for the light to turn on, and when it did, downstairs—a little yellow heart, beginning again—she stood up and walked back.
When she returned to her mother’s house, the boy had just risen and was looking for her with a watery, worried stare. He wanted her to pick him up, up, up, as if to break through the atmosphere.
4.
That fall, she wore the black necklace to the shop owner’s funeral. When she read his name in the obituaries, it did not register immediately. Was that really how it was spelled? Was that how it looked on paper? Because it was not how it felt, spun into malleable lint inside her mind. She wanted to know if it was him or just someone with his name.
She was shocked to see the open casket—as if it were something that he had consented to—and it shook her opinion of him, just a little. She considered reminding her husband, who still called every Sunday night, that she wanted to be cremated, but then wondered if that knowledge would somehow tie her permanently to him, “until death.”
She remembered, as a child, dreading the body of her grandfather, her son’s namesake—not because of its appearance, but because she feared that she would be expected to say something to it, a prayer that she had not been taught. Her six-year-old cousin, the only other child attending the wake, had huddled by the fireplace, shivering. I’m cold, he told the grownups, I’m too cold, and they shook their heads. You can’t take that kid anywhere, they had said. He’s always hogging all the attention.
Years later, during some unremarkable moment—sitting in school, or riding in the car with her feet on the dashboard—it had suddenly occurred to her that her cousin had been afraid of the body but did not want to admit it. What a terrible world, she had thought, and she still felt, from time to time, that a boy, who was probably scolded for saying things like “cross my heart and hope to die,” was expected to see a corpse and act accordingly. Stepping into the funeral home, she vowed silently to save the children, should there be any inside.
There was one, a little girl wearing a purple jumper over a black turtleneck, who swung her legs from a tall armchair while reading a paperback. She did not appear to need saving. Allison stood in a line to the casket. One moment, she was looking at the spider veins at the hemline of the skirt in front of her, and the next, she was over his face. Some nearby vent was pumping cool air, which, although odorless, she wanted desperately to avoid, like the puff of wind from under a train. The face before her looked pained, as if caught in the state of being about to swallow. A poorly executed clay figure; a creased sock at the bottom of the laundry basket. She felt the pressure to move along, so that someone who actually knew him could gaze, move their lips.
And then she was in front of the man’s wife, not realizing that she had entered another line. The wife had an open expression, a face of recognition, perhaps left over from the person who had been in front of her just before. The skin around her eyes was gluey, caked-over red.
“Oh, Allison,” she was saying. “Allison, Allison, Allison. Look how you’ve grown up. Thank you for coming.”
The line moved on. Conversation trickled as people willed themselves into circles, trying to place their connection to each other, like stringing beads.
“Do you know how it happened?” It was the girl in the purple jumper, leaning back in the chair, her arms spread wide in ownership.
“No,” said Allison. “Do you?”
“My mom said that his heart kicked it, but I don’t believe her because my dad looked at her weird when she said it.”
“You’re not afraid to be here?”
“Grandpa looks like the trees when they talk in cartoons,” said the girl, swaying dreamily. “They talk and then their faces just go back to looking like bark. That’s what I say.” She curled back the front half of her book and forced a sigh.
Allison walked home with her hands plunged into the pockets of her cardigan, digging into the give of the wool. She waited for a weight to lift, or to descend, some indication that her life was affected by the man’s death, but felt only the pain of her shoes where they rubbed, up and down. It was a Friday afternoon, still two more days until her husband would call, leaving openings in his speech, places where she knew she could lay out her decision and have it met tactfully and with absolution. She stopped to look up at the glint of a passing jet, which had been roaring inconspicuously through her head for some time. How lucky I am, she thought, watching the plane blink into the clouds, to still have someone waiting for me to make up my mind.
Arla Had Horses
In school, they were taught to use the phrase “I know someone who.”
“Don’t think of it as tattling,” Mrs. LaFlamme told them and she began to lower herself onto the floor. In order to sit on the carpet the way the students did, that is, Indian style, she had to lift one of her legs and place it with her hands over the other. This action inspired a childish wobble, in which she seemed to be testing her buttocks, to find which one would best support her. On Fridays, she wore light-colored jeans with elastic bands around the ankles, which reminded Renee of the denim scrunchie that her mother had twisted over her ponytail that morning, the scrunchie that was supposed to balance out her outfit, also denim. On picture day, Renee’s mother had insisted that she wear a dark green jumper to match the wallpaper in the downstairs hall, where the photo would be inevitably framed and hung. She had a plan, she had said, for the next seven years, and she spread her arms, indicating all the empty space on the wall. Renee’s mother had plans for a lot of things.
“Don’t use those scissors,” she’d say. “I have a plan for them.”
Her mother liked things to be a certain way, which could also mean that certain details, such as the particular wash of denim in her daughter’s outfit, or the weight and thickness of curtains, had a direct effect on her mood. She was “not a dog person.” Of this, she was the most vocal. Dogs, according to her, “were just undirected energy.” And so Renee was allowed to have a turtle, because the turtle was in possession of a brain that was much more to the point. Renee was not so sure of this, but she did appreciate the way that the turtle maneuvered a bit of lettuce into its mouth—purposely, like a sock puppet trying to eat a sandwich.
“I know someone who smokes a pipe when he walks his dog,” said a boy named Carter.
“I know someone who smells like smoke,” said another.
When it came to Renee’s turn, she pulled at the laces of her shoe. She had never missed an assignment and so, focusing on the straightness of these laces, in order to avoid the eyes of her teacher, she said, “I know someone who coughs and cou
ghs.” This “someone who” was actually her grandmother, who suffered from bronchitis, but the comment was awarded a very solemn nod from Mrs. LaFlamme. And so the class moved on, leaving Renee feeling a new sense of pride, for having gotten away with a lie that was not a lie, as well as the familiar guilt, which followed any sort of confession. She considered many things to be confessional: using the bathroom pass more than once, for example, or when she specified what kind of eggs she wanted at a restaurant.
“I like them to be a little runny,” she would say, although the explicitness of this statement made her cringe.
Her little fib caused a commotion later on, in the cafeteria, as the other students crowded around with their lunch trays, wanting to know who this coughing person was. It must have seemed to them very dark, indeed, to have a coughing person in one’s life, as if Renee had said that there was a ghost in her attic, or a hobo under her porch.
“But who is it?” they demanded, and Renee heard herself say that it was her stepfather, even though she did not have a stepfather, and then, because the lie had taken off, she added: “His lungs are black.” This shocked the children, but they also believed her, because their health teacher had just warned them of the dangers of smoking, had shown them slides of diseased body parts. One photo had showed a set of teeth, bared and yellow with nicotine. It was a disturbing image, not for the unhealthy color of the teeth and gums, which does not frighten children the way that it frightens adults, but for the uncanny absence of lips. The children gaped at her over their trays and made her promise to tell more stories the next day. This surprised Renee, first of all, because she rarely sought the attention of other children, and secondly, because she had not considered herself to be telling stories. It had seemed to her that she was merely making conversation, drawing from some deep reserve of untruths just to get through the moment until someone else decided to speak. The story had ended with her stepfather’s tongue falling out onto the hospital floor. It was also black. The doctors placed it in an incubator, next to the very small babies.
Prepare Her Page 2
