by Amy Hempel
*
The woman I had run the midnight race in Central Park with—she left her house to a friend in her will, and did not tell the woman that she had done so. She made out the will when she was dying an early death, forgoing the gratitude of her friend, a single mother, who would inherit the house. She did not need to be thanked. It was so clean, the way she did this. Her generosity lived on after she died.
*
On a Tuesday morning Lois—still my favorite of the folks that I look in on—Lois asks if I have time to sign a petition with her. She suffers from early Parkinson’s, and is stoic. She has made me a kind of honorary daughter. I bring her a box of the Girl Scout cookies, and am happy to help. I open her computer and find the petition site she wants, and she shows me what she’d like me to sign. Hell, yeah—it’s a petition directed at Mariah Carey; the goal is to persuade her not to have live baby elephants and tigers “perform” at her wedding to the billionaire. As though someone who would think this is the way to celebrate vows would be swayed by a hundred thousand people who see the cruelty in these plans. I sign my name anyway, and write a message in the message box “for extra impact.” “Dear Mariah Carey,” I write. “Please do not use baby elephants and tigers in your wedding.” I click on Submit.
The moment you click on Submit, another petition pops up. It can be for something that has nothing to do with the awful thing you just said no to. Tonight the petition is about an alleged rapist who is about to be given a civic honor. I know nothing about the case, but sign it given the odds. Then sign one to stop the helicopter shooting of fenced-in wolves, a clean water petition for Michigan, and one for convincing a roadside attraction to donate its lonely elephant to a sanctuary where it can be amongst its kind. It’s interesting to note the plea that I can say no to signing, and turn away from to get back to the making of my day.
All the next day I receive thanks for what I signed and submitted, not from the organizations that sent the petitions, but from individual elephants and wolves: “Thank you from Toshi,” “Thank you from Eisha,” and I know I have not done enough, can never do enough for them.
*
“Dear Mariah Carey.” Just giving it another go. The diamond in her engagement ring weighs thirty-five carats and cost ten million dollars. What is worse is that she asked for it; she asked her fiancé for the ring that cost this much. And the next worse thing is that he bought it for her. Let’s not even start to think how that much money could have kicked poverty’s ass. I see that another entertainer, one more talented than she, refers to her now as Pariah.
*
In an unshaded city park I walk through sometimes, a young woman I have seen and said hello to before tells me that her divorce has finally gone through. We had never spoken about a pending divorce; I didn’t know she was married. But I congratulated her, and said what a relief it must be. Yes, she said, she felt so much lighter already. This is a big deal, I said, newly sage. We wished each other well. I wondered if there were children involved. Someone else might have invited her out for a drink. But I felt I had treated her news with respect, and isn’t that more than one often gets? Maybe the just-divorced woman was making a pitch for friendship. Maybe she was telling everyone she saw. Let a couple of months pass, and I won’t remember this woman got divorced. I am the one to tell a secret to; I won’t remember it no matter how incendiary.
*
Lois tells me that Native Americans use the yellow webs of the banana spider for fishing line. And that thirty-three percent of banana spiders are poisonous. It’s a strange stat to reckon with, and I don’t want to know more. In her yard, as in mine, giant dried-out banana leaves turn ashy and float about the lawn, coiled into the shape of a sawed-off plaster cast. Ghostly, and unnerving, there seems to be no end of them. No end, either, to the swordlike fronds that come crashing down from the too-tall palms. How can so many plants dry out when there is so much rain?
Lois is eager to tell me about karst. Her grandson studies geology, she says, and he wants her to spread the word. Karst goes along with frack quakes and other disasters brought on by pumping volumes of liquid into porous, rocky earth. Subterranean geology is a frightening field, she says, detailing the mounting incidence of karst-caused sinkholes and underwater caves, none of it good news except for the occasional supernatural beauty of cenotes that fill with the clearest water in beachy places like Tulum, in Mexico. What some of us in this state have to look forward to is not floating on our sun-bronzed backs in cenotes but our houses falling ninety feet into a suburban sinkhole with no time to do anything about it.
She says that karst is what’s left from the dissolution of limestone and other soluble rock, the rock that can layer over itself, its air pockets accruing to gather water that is forced into it in the search for oil and gas. That last I read on the Internet. The quakes this practice causes are growing in both size and frequency, Lois says, and scientists—including her grandson—have a saying: “Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings kill people.” I appreciate that kind of specificity.
An overturned egg carton is what quadrilateral karst looks like. The area in which karst quakes, like the one in Prague, Oklahoma, occur is spreading. Houses were destroyed where never before had such a thing been a threat. Now there are glaciokarst, thermokarst, cockpit karst, and parts of the central United States that hosted only tornadoes can feel movement underground.
Sink or swim, sinkholes or springs—the Blue Springs of High Springs, Florida, and the nearby Rainbow Springs, these are gifts from God. They stay at seventy-two degrees year-round, which is too cold, the locals say, for most gators to occupy. Even the giant turtles can turn out to be snappers, so maybe the Caribbean-colored springs are a test: are you the kind of person who can surrender to beauty or the kind who asks her braver friends to send her photos of their swim taken with underwater cameras?
Before I leave, Lois shows me photos of TTD sessions—Trash the Dress—in which underwater weddings in Mexico’s Riviera Maya cenotes are photographed. The cautionary note from the photographer who posts his floaty photos: “A wet wedding dress becomes heavy.”
Recently I watched a teenage couple swim. The young woman lowered herself into the clear blue springs and swam to the nearby mouth of the river where the water turns tannic—the word she used—from the decomposition of leaves. I walked along on the dirt trail alongside the springs. There is an actual line of demarcation between the benign, inviting springs and the suddenly opaque brown water in which it is impossible to see what is beside you.
*
There are stories about women who were found to be carrying a calcified fetus for upward of thirty years. The women had no idea this was the case. In the stories I heard, the women said they experienced no symptoms. Would they retrace their health for all of those years, newly able to attribute a mysterious lethargy or unexplained heaviness of spirit, a hesitation in the face of adventure? The point at which the fetus stopped growing would of course be a factor. What to do with the knowledge that your body turned against what was growing, rendered it a tumor, to use a term close to what it was.
The correct term is “lithopedion.” It means “stone baby.” Women can have a stone baby and still give birth to a healthy child. A woman in China was found to have the longest known case: for sixty-five years she had carried the calcified fetus. Second longest is believed to be the woman in Chile who, at ninety-one, found out she had carried one for more than sixty years when she got an X-ray after a fall. She said she could feel a lump on her stomach, and it reminded her of her husband and their unfulfilled dream of having a child. Apparently not every woman with the condition can have a child. On slow news days you can watch a feature on women like this. Of the documented cases, only a small percentage of the women chose to have the stone baby removed.
*
There must be a word for the state of going about your business without knowing something key, and with someone else knowing it, and knowing too that there could come a tim
e when you will know it. I think the name of this state is The Way We Live Now, or The Way Things Have Always Been, or the oldest narrative there is: Things Are Not as They Seem.
Things were not as they seemed at the home, of course. Yet despite having read the journalist’s book, I am not searching for the girl. If she is even alive, she would not be the girl I have lived with all these years. What does that make me, not posting her birthday on the website for the book?
*
I thought the woman in the waiting room called her son Tie-Dye. But when he jumped out of his chair and knocked into another waiting patient, she scolded him in the old-fashioned way, using his full first and middle names: “Tyler Dylan!” I had driven the ninety-year-old former CEO to the doctor when his grandson was unable to at the last minute. He asked me how much debt I thought his young doctor carried. He said you can’t graduate doctors who owe $300,000 in loans and put them to work for socialized medicine salaries. My neighbor across the street does not believe in going to doctors, he told me, even after I saw him getting his mail with a large bandage covering much of the back of his head. At this rate he might need to hire me, though I have never told him what I do. He has simply never asked, though he did ask if I would like to shower at his house when I mentioned the nonworking drains in mine.
Two things broke today in the cursed house. I say “curs-ed,” using two syllables. A man I once thought I liked struggled to say something ugly at the end, and what he came up with was calling me “the curs-ed seed from the curs-ed tree.” I like parting shots; you can’t take them seriously and they’re often pretty funny.
The things that broke today were the ceiling—a substantial leak—and the central air-conditioning unit, which I had asked the owners to replace when I learned how old it was, to which the owners rightly said, “It’s working now.” And in a dozen places on the roof, ferns are growing from the inside out, spreading in what looks like time-lapse photography. If everything could stop growing for a while! That’s what I wanted all those years ago when I didn’t yet know what to do with what was growing in me, and was trying to ride out recklessness and passion, rebellion and decisions based on what I knew at the time. And the question I still field is the one I still can’t answer: Could I have known what was happening at the home? Was there a way I could have found out? First, I would have had to have suspicions. But I was—we all were—self-absorbed. We wanted out, and we believed what we were told that would expedite our departures. None of us had the money that, we were told, would guarantee the babies would go to good homes. But we would find out how to get it! We agreed to this condition of our care and the care of what started out as ours, and I was not the only one who managed to meet the terms. When one is halfway presentable and young, there are many menial jobs waiting, and if you are a woman of her word, you can do what you signed on to do. As I do now with those in my quasi-professional care.
For months until the place was rebuilt, the home was char on the land. Nothing left but the adjacent apple orchard, far enough from the flames. A random camper told me about it; he had witnessed the fire, and thought to tell me about it as simply something he had seen, having no knowledge of the place in relation to me.
The fire—when I read what went on at the home, I thought the fire was purification, at least as much as destruction. Burn out the history, and burn out the proof. Burn hotter, and burn out the ghosts.
*
In scorching sun, I opened the door to my car and saw that the front seats were covered in swarms of ants. They had colonized the car, having found a French fry between the seats and dragged it up and over the console so that it was in the driver’s seat; salt trailed across the upholstery. I remembered a tip from a local, that should you find a swarm of ants, put down a trail of coffee grounds instead of spraying them with repellent. But I had gone to my car to drive to get coffee; there was none in the house. It was far from the worst thing to have happened in this place, but I didn’t think I’d have to face an infestation in the car.
“Oh, that shouldn’t happen,” said the climate change—denying neighbor from across the street. I had barely looked up from squashing the ants with napkins I’d found in the back, as yet unswarmed, seat, when there he was, and at ninety or eighty-eight years of age, how had he crossed our two yards and the street so fast?
“But it did happen,” I countered.
“Only in the last couple of years,” he maintained. He felt himself to be the neighborhood historian, and under the guise of Christian neighborliness, turned up more and more often with corny jokes. Recently he had distributed a self-published ring-bindered book that he had printed by hand in looping pencil. He had titled this gift A Patriarch Remembers Some of His Neighbors. Glancing through later, I would see that he blamed an ancient run of Peeping Toms down the block on the fact that the boys’ mothers “worked outside the home.” I skipped ahead to the last page, where I saw my name underlined as a new member of the neighborhood whom he had not yet gotten to know “well enough.”
“You look like you could use a humor break,” he said.
I was in for it. One could not avoid what was coming—a lame joke about a long-married Norwegian couple. Why Norwegian? Because he subscribed to a sort of Norwegian joke compilation. Maybe he was Norwegian. I kept my eyes on the ants in my car till the joke had crawled to its end. He said that I should feel free to come over anytime I wanted to hear another—“that is, if you can still hear,” he added, chuckling. Thinking, no doubt, that I too was infirm. Maybe that was what ants in your car signaled—a level of infirmity that itself was no joke, but that opened the gates for a cornball neighbor to welcome you into his decline. In his self-published, hand-printed book, the self-anointed patriarch remembered the attorney and his wife next door as people of “international kindness” who had hearts large enough to take in four homeless girls.
*
How long can one hold oneself away from those one loves most? The reasons can be persuasive, but what about the one who matters most, yet is findable neither here nor there? Wouldn’t that suggest that one place is as good as another?
When I think of her, I remember that part of the appeal of swimming in warm water is the amniotic quality when you float. I like to float facedown and pick twigs like toothpicks from the filters in the pool. You want to be careful if you go to clean a screen; tiny toads get trapped there along with palm meadows, the nicer way to say palmettos. When the clouds start to rumble, I leave the pool I was not supposed to swim in for two more days due to the extra chlorine added to knock out the thickening sludge.
*
Tornado alleys are getting bigger every year. It’s another result of “the controversy.” There is something to learn from the stunned people who see everything they own destroyed in minutes, and who build again on the same spot once heavy equipment has cleared the wreckage. What are these people made of? Courage and faith will take you so far. Is it a kind of nobility? I know they love the land, and it is home, and they don’t feel the land betrayed them, or God.
The local weather channel broadcasts the number of lightning strikes each hour in a storm. If this house is struck and I survive, you won’t see the owners hire a contractor to set reconstruction in motion. “Sustainability” is a word not often used anymore in the geological sciences, not in this part of the country. Instead, the word “resiliency” shows up, maybe the word “adaptation.”
Thanks to Lois pointing me in the direction of her interests, I learn about the Salton Sea in California. The dried-out seabed is home to geothermal plants that are daily increasing the number of earthquakes to a “swarm,” there on the southern end of the San Andreas Fault, which will likely travel north to wipe out Los Angeles. Those who work there know that what they do is a grave threat and that damage and loss of life would be extreme, but they keep on doing what threatens so many while geologists point to the bubbling mud in the ground beside the plant, a place where pressure is both aggravated and relieved. This little cir
cle of bubbling mud will make no difference to whatever is ahead that we will bring upon ourselves.
*
I have not spoken of Mr. Davis in a while. He is a row to hoe. The flirting is nearly constant, though he has not tried to give me diamonds, nor does he tell Norwegian jokes. Things go best with him when I can interest him in TV. We have begun to watch the true-crime shows in which people who do away with each other make stupid mistakes that get them caught: A disgruntled man in the Midwest delivers pipe bombs done up as packages to his rival business partners, killing them both. Then he sets himself up as the third bombing victim to remove himself from suspicion. But the package he said he found in his car’s driver’s seat, the one that exploded and injured him, was determined by forensics to have exploded in the passenger’s seat. Only because he called attention to himself was he discovered to have murdered his rivals.
*
And now a horror next door. The neighbor, the city attorney in his fifties, has been arrested for sexual abuse of two of his four adopted daughters. The mother was out of town when the news broke. Seven unmarked cars were parked in front of their house and in front of mine. The cars were there for most of the day, and it was not until the fifth hour that I saw two officers standing outside, wearing plain clothes and badges. They said they could tell me nothing more than that a police investigation was under way, and that I was not in danger. I had to wait until the next morning’s newspaper came out to learn the ugly news.
