by Kate Walbert
Big worries his arm.
“Oh,” he says.
He doesn’t sleep so good, he’ll tell you. His nights have become second days. Dark days. Morning the beginning of night, or sleep; eyes closed and dreaming, lightly, or is it deeply then? He has purple circles under his eyes; she has purple circles under her eyes. She sits on the side of his bed against the plastic guardrail but then she cannot; then she’s too tired and simply has to go to sleep.
“I simply have to go to bed,” she says.
“Who the fuck told you not to, Helen?” he says.
He’s not mean that way. He might say fuck off but those are just words. He’s gotten into trouble, he’ll tell you, with his words, but he is a sweet boy, the sweetest boy. On the subway once he would not hold the pole and she insisted. She insisted that he hold the pole, Big with no idea how big he was, how much he would hurt people if he knocked into the crowds and toppled anyone over and when she insisted he said, “Fuck you, Helen! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
* * *
The pages from the mother book were tacked all around the classroom. She moved from one to the next: circles within circles within circles. Every mother a circle: eyeless, many-eyed, small, large, but a circle nonetheless. “A Mother Is Someone Who Goes to Work,” one read. Thomas A., his circle drawn with a thick, red crayon. It may have been a door, she supposed, or a window, or anything else to look through, to walk out of, to walk into: she thinks of Thomas A.’s mother, Dominique, a woman rarely seen, certainly not last week or the week before at the penny drive—all those pennies! Other mothers lugged bags of change they did not need to support something they were not entirely clear on: she wonders what Dominique thought when she read Thomas A.’s definition, whether she felt proud or horrified, whether she imagined all the unwritten lines above and beneath Mrs. MacIntyre’s scrawl, or whether she moved on to Lily P.’s and laughed, thanking God at least not for that; she was not a mother who took naps.
“A Mother Is Someone Who Bakes Bread,” Jose F.; “A Mother Is Someone Who Takes Too Long,” Stephanie D.; “A Mother Is Someone Who Drives a Car,” Edith J. Helen studied each one as Max, folded into the tiny chair at the tiny table, listened to Mrs. MacIntyre and took notes.
* * *
Helen stands with the crowd on Twenty-third—hair so fresh, blown dry and dyed a mink brown, that in the midst of the crowd you might think she was someone you recognized from somewhere, a restaurant or a college reunion.
She stands with the rest of them arrested by the spectacle, shading her eyes to look up at the wonder of it: thousands of something that seem to have invaded the cloudless sky. She supposes they are unidentifiable; they are certainly other. Inexplicable though everyone wants to explain. To Helen they look like tiny, shimmering tears in the fabric of the blue sky. Poetic, she laughs. It is such a blue sky; such a remarkable day.
“I think they’re amazing,” a beautiful girl next to her says. Twenties or so, bracelets up her arm and other piercings. “They look kinda fishy, like a school of fish you see in the water, minnows, when the sun hits right,” she says.
“What?” someone says.
“She thinks they look like fish,” someone else says.
“Oh,” the person says.
Helen does not want to move; no one does. What will happen next? Will these things land? Explode? Continue to hover? She has stayed too late at Lucy’s salon, lulled by Lucy’s offer of tea, by the decorative chandelier, by Lucy’s collection of coffee table books and her good cheer. Lucy had made her promise to return by way of Twenty-third, to see if what had been happening was still happening. But she has a grocery list in her pocket. At 5:00, the millionth babysitter she has found to watch Big in the afternoon will have to leave and she’ll take over, helping Big practice his script, practice his math, practice his flute, practice his staring. They’re working on it: they call it the Staring Olympics.
You’re going to stare straight into my eyes for three minutes and then you’re going to tell me exactly what color my eyes are, she’s said. You’re going for the gold, she’s told him.
“Brown,” he says.
“No, gold,” she says.
“Your eyes are brown,” he says.
“Right!” she says.
“You love dogs,” he says. “You love dogs more than cats. You said it. You said you hated Slinky.”
“Oh, Big,” she says. “I loved Slinky. You know I loved Slinky. Slinky was the best cat ever.”
“No, you love dogs more,” he says. “You said it.”
“I did,” she says. “I wanted to make you feel better.”
She touches his arm in the spot where it is okay sometimes to touch him and still he flinches, as if he’s been burned.
“Dogs or cats?” he says.
“You!” she says, staring, though he has already turned away.
* * *
“They’re humming,” an old lady says. “Listen, they’re humming,” she says, and the group surrounding them quiets down but there’s no humming to be heard. “Never mind,” the lady says. “Must have been me.”
“You hum?” a man says. He’s in a shiny business suit, the kind you buy at a closeout sale. He has already told everyone that he’s missed the job interview anyway but he doesn’t give a shit because there’s no way in hell they’d hire him and he was only going because of his wife or his mother or his social worker or someone. He’s jittery, possibly high, but he looks fresh and clean in his shiny suit and gives the whole gathering an air of legitimacy, Twenty-third and Eighth not known for its business suits.
“My grandmother used to do that,” the beautiful girl says.
“What happened to her?” the old lady says.
“Oh, I don’t know. She died,” the girl says.
No one takes their eyes off the sky and the quivering slivers of light that may or may not be inhabited.
“I’m sorry,” a few of them say at once.
“It’s okay,” the beautiful girl says. “I was, like, six or something.”
Helen wonders how long she’ll stand here, watching, not the beautiful girl—she will be here forever, and when she’s gone, another will take her place—but her, Helen, promising student of Romantic poetry (the lark!), wife to Max, mother to Big. She should be on her way but also she should stick it out; to leave now would be to miss something important, she thinks, or worse: to never have been here at all.
* * *
The villagers run to the trees but they are fools because who is going to find them afterward? Big says. They will all be gone, bones washing up to shores of every continent and do they in these circumstances? He wants to know. He’s been meaning to ask, he says, and she thinks, circumstances, and Big’s so big.
But she says, I don’t know, and thinks: It’s 3:00 A.M.
“Anyway, you are and so is Max—” he says.
“Oh,” she says.
“And you are in the highest trees and reaching down to me and trying to pull me up but I’m too big and it’s getting higher—”
“What?”
“Are you fucking deaf? The water!” he says. “Sorry, Helen,” he says.
“Are you wet, sweetheart?”
“Maybe,” he says.
She gets up and says, “Please continue,” as she strips Max’s twin bed and puts the cowboy sheets in the bathtub to soak and wash in the morning. He says she can’t hear him in the bathroom but she calls out I can, I can! and so he keeps talking and she returns with fresh sheets and makes the bed, checking the comforter for any wet spots and finding none tucking it in beneath the mattress and wedging it through the plastic guardrail and he is almost to the good part, he says, and she says, All right, all right, I’m listening, sweetheart. And she does. She sits on the edge of his twin bed and does; close up to the guardrail, she listens.
* * *
Smith was Reginald Smith, and though you’d think he’d ask to be called Reg, he did not. She stood at the door to his office, waiting, e
mbroidered bell-bottoms and a cotton shirt bought along the boardwalk of the Jersey Shore; she also wore one of those shrinking hemp bracelets on her wrist, though she’d had half a mind to cut it off before school started and now, noticing, felt how childish it must look, the bracelet, how utterly ridiculous.
His jokes fell flat because they were not funny but she loved him for trying, and she loved him for everything. Professor Smith? she asked, and he said yes and invited her in and she sat in the chair across from his desk and he stood or leaned over her to look at what she had written or what she was proposing to write, something about the letters between Dorothy and William Wordsworth, something about platonic ideals or some other hogwash, and Helen remembers and wants now to knock on the office door again, to interrupt this silly girl and this no doubt intelligent man to say, Don’t bother. Or, Love her. Or, Take her with you. Or, something else she can’t think what.
It is bright in the room. Certain nights Big can’t have the lights out.
“So, what happened?” Big says. He is awake after all.
“Nothing,” she says. “I just left.”
Sometimes, when she is so tired, she tells Big everything.
* * *
At first she didn’t see it. I’m not seeing anything, she said to the guy beside her. A guy is right beside her, and they are standing very close as strangers sometimes do in crowds. He is about her age but not her type but still she would like to lean on him, to put her head on his shoulder. Her scalp still burns. The dye has seeped into the gray roots—something about opened follicles—and covered the gray like so many shovels of dirt on a patch of bright white snow. But she knows the burning will pass.
“There,” he says, pointing. She squints and looks again. She might see something: squiggles. But they might be dust motes, or those things in your eye when you look straight at light.
She stares anyway, willing herself to see: the Staring Olympics.
She wants to be a person who sees, who believes in things, like Bigfoot, or God. She studies these persons and asks them lots of questions, which they happily answer before tiring of her—she can tell when people tire of her. So many questions! It’s not that she wants to run them down, she just wants to understand—for instance, the Holy Ghost, she’ll say. Who is he? Or is it He? Sometimes, in the middle of it, she won’t be able to help herself—do you like cats or dogs?—she’ll ask, just to hear. Most people who believe in things prefer dogs, she’s told Big. It’s true.
* * *
Mrs. MacIntyre had said she understood the shock of it but that she knew from children. Mrs. MacIntyre had said there was no doubt in her mind. Helen listened but then she did not: “A Mother Is Someone Who Doesn’t Listen”; “A Mother Is Someone Who Makes It Up.”
Nearby, on the bulletin board, Helen sees The Boston Globe article of the circus as promised. She stares at the photograph and feels a sharp burning behind her eyes she refuses to give in to: “A Mother Is Someone Who Does Not Give In to That Shit.” The paper is aged. In the picture a little-girl Mrs. MacIntyre wears a white pinafore and what look like lace-up boots. She holds hands with her best friend, the chimpanzee Charlie Darwin. The chimpanzee towers over her, its eyes kind. They wear matching cotillion gloves. Behind them the big sign for MacIntyre & Farrell casts a shadow on the ground as a llama crosses in the background, oblivious.
* * *
When Helen returns from Lucy’s, Big looks online for anything else he can learn of Helen’s story, which sounds crazy to him, entirely unbelievable. But there they are! Scratchy images of slivers of light hovering over Twenty-third, schools of air minnows, flashing fish, captured by scores of handheld devices and already posted. Many in number, hundreds, possibly thousands, and looking, in any shot, like so many etches of absence—as if someone has taken a pen and scratched at the sky. Videos on YouTube show more of the same: flickers, hovering, a suggestion of something but, why? What? On the television, local news anchors do not quite know what to say: they speculate that this clear phenomenon might have to do with sun glancing off the wing of an ascending jet out of Newark, a kind of shattered prism effect, they say, similar to the phenomenon of heat mirages: the time the Taj Mahal hovered over the East River.
On NY1 they believe this might have to do with ongoing testing near the Hudson, testing of a confidential manner but nonetheless testing, as confirmed by the Twenty-second Precinct, which, when called, forwarded all inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security, causing a temporary overload and shutdown of the switchboard system that frankly, according to experts brought into NY1, is of far greater concern than a little inexplicable activity over Twenty-third Street.
“Well,” Big says after hearing it. “It is true.”
“I told you,” Helen says. “No one knows. They have more theories than Heinz has beans.”
“They’re idiots!” Big yells. He watches the news with his arms wrapped around his hairy legs. He wears long gym shorts as if he has just been to basketball practice but he has not just been to basketball practice. He has been in his room eating Halloween candy, the floor littered with wrappers although she had expressly told the sitter to watch for that. Hadn’t she said, expressly, to watch for that?
But this is much earlier and now she is tired and Big is tired and she thinks maybe he has finally fallen asleep. She leans against the guardrail, waiting. Somewhere on the bookshelves are the rest of her textbooks. Out the window is the moon. And the truth is she could be anywhere; she could be anywhere at all.
CONVERSATION
The women, new friends, are gathered in the home of Mary Chickarella, or Chick, as she’s known—one of the faster set, formally introduced to Dorothy at the club ballroom-dancing finals. There, Chick and her husband, Georgie, had Lindyed to a second, while Dorothy and Charles took a third with a waltz. The two had golfed since then, once or twice, though Chick’s handicap, she’d be the first to tell you, was in the single digits—Mary “Chick” Chickarella one of the more frequent names engraved on the trophies and silver bowls in the glass case outside the ladies’ lounge, even the huge Regional Cup with its ornate handle and tiny, twenty-four-karat-gold woman arrested in midswing on the top.
“It’s going to be a rap session,” Chick had said when she called Dorothy. “You know, about what’s going on.”
“Vietnam?” Dorothy had asked.
“The war? Are you into that?”
“No,” said Dorothy, who wasn’t, truly, though Frank’s long hair and ID bracelet kept it close.
“My friend Jean’s coming from Philadelphia,” Chick continued. “She’s a Big Sister there. It’s quite a scene. She says you won’t believe what comes up. Scratch the surface, she says, and it bleeds.”
* * *
Dorothy arrives with flowers. She couldn’t think what else to bring and Charles’s garden is in full June bloom, iris and delphiniums, the geraniums that reseed and grow wild in the mulched paths. These are the days he disappears within it, Lucy at his side like a small, turbulent shadow. The other children are gone: Frank at college, Claudia backing out of the drive too quickly on her way to flag-twirling practice, or student council, or one of the endless clubs she has recently joined, anticipating, she says, the brutalities of college admission. Only Lucy remains, her glasses smudged and sideways, her knees bruised and scabbed. According to Piaget, she’s in an exuberant cycle—nine to ten—though to Dorothy she remains a puzzle: restless, skinny as a twig, given to writing notes of apology and despair, often in verse. At times, Dorothy has found them slipped beneath their bedroom door, as if an urgent message has just been delivered from the front desk or principal. The last one, a poem, had been scratched in ink on the corner of a notebook page, lined and blue, then torn out and folded many times over. It was something about the earth tilting on its axis—she couldn’t remember what else, she told Charles later. Get her a Feelings Jar, Charles said, he still of the opinion that this had helped Frank and Claudia and their constant squabbling.
&nbs
p; God, don’t remind me, Dorothy said, knowing too well that a Feelings Jar spelled disaster.
* * *
Chick’s house is, as Dorothy would have guessed, an interesting color, set off from the other houses of the development by its suggestion of purple and its festive summer wreath—pussy willows and a tiny, tarnished bell attached to a dangling ribbon. At her hip stands a cement animal, a narrow, long-snouted dog with a gaping mouth. Within its jaws someone has wedged an ashtray, now congested, and a plastic rose.
Chick opens the door in golf skirt and top, her hair newly cropped and bleached.
“Dorothy!” she says. “Entrez!”
Chick turns and disappears into the foyer’s darkness; Dorothy follows, a bit off-balance. She had expected light and air, houseplants, but here is a hint of the Orient, and the smell of something new—she might well turn the corner and find the other women sprawled on silk pillows, the air thick with a druggy, opiate smoke. She has read about this kind of thing, watched the evening news. But no, the women gathered in Chick’s living room look fine, friendly enough. They sit on folding chairs pulled into a circle, the indigenous furniture pushed to the walls, bright green and hung with prints of birds.
“Sissy,” Chick yells toward the next room, where a black woman in a white uniform appears intent on polishing an already gleaming mahogany table. “She’s the last of us!”
“Am I late?” Dorothy asks, turning back to Chick. “I couldn’t find the—”
“You’re fine,” Chick says. “Perfect.”
She claps her hands.
“Ladies,” she says. “Here’s the Dorothy I mentioned. Terrific dancer. Three children, I think. Three?”
Chick looks at Dorothy, who is suddenly aware of Charles’s flowers in her hands.
