by Kate Walbert
Yet if asked she will say James’s death was her 9/11.
“We all have our very own,” she’ll say. “Don’t you agree?”
* * *
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The next time Tweedledee steps away from the others, approaching alone, the Big One with the bandaged hand hanging back as if on lookout.
“Did it hurt?” she calls to him. “Am I toxic? Infectious?”
“I’ll ask you to read the sign, Mrs. Morrisey,” says Tweedledee.
“It’s a free country,” Margaret says.
“Not exactly,” he says. Clearly there’s a manual on How to Speak to the Protesters and/or the Criminally Insane.
“I’m not interested in the bodies,” she says. “It’s the wildlife I’m after.”
“Camera’s forbidden,” he says.
He stands, square and sharp against the autumnal reds, his camouflage humorless, stuck in the sole season of winter. If she could see his eyes she predicts she would see embarrassment there, but they remain mirrored lenses, and anyway she is wrong: he is doing his job.
“Glorious day,” she says, but he doesn’t bite.
“So you can shoot them but you can’t photograph them? I find that ridiculous. Ridiculous,” she calls out to the Big One. “Does it still hurt?”
She grips the camera with her dirty fingers, though it is looped around her neck and going nowhere.
“You’re trespassing, Mrs. Morrisey. This is Government Property.”
She plunks down in Tweedledee’s shadow, her arms crossed.
“In Sweden there’s no such thing,” she says, squinting up. “You can camp anywhere. It’s allowed. You could take a walk across the entire country if you wanted and no one could say, private property. I’d call that democracy, wouldn’t you?”
He looms over her like a man mountain—trees and shrubs the pattern—his mirrored glasses the stone at the top, the place of the vista that from a distance could be snow, or water; bright, regardless, in the glaring sun. She waits as he gestures to the Mute Ones, to the Big One with the bandaged hand. They are all tired of her, it’s clear, and bored. They step forward, unlocking their handcuffs, clicking and unclicking as if they’d rather be elsewhere. Even Tweedledee wipes his forehead in an exhausted, parched gesture. She thinks of how he sees himself now, how he pictures himself—soldier or statesman—protecting the all of us from God knows what: nothing; everything: an old woman with a camera. He protects is all, he’s like a postage stamp or a flag; a symbol bought and sold, something with an adhesive strip to stick on an automobile bumper or football helmet—thirty-seven cents or a dollar ten in the big bin at Rite Aid.
The handcuffs are tighter than she would have imagined, and she finds herself humming the only song she can think to hum: “Amazing Grace,” knowing, even while humming, how ridiculous she sounds, how outdated it’s become, even quaint: peace. She thinks to mention this to Caroline, to somehow explain: What she is trying to do is to aim for something real, she’ll tell her, something that is not just an approximation of real.
Here the two of us, she’ll say, the all of us: the soldiers, the protester, were all from a scene already enacted; so that even my own inclination to be—
Caroline interrupts. “To what?”
The fine has already been paid, though this time they fingerprinted—“Ma’am,” Tweedledee had said to Caroline. “Tell your mother to keep her mouth shut.”
Be, Margaret says now. “To be.”
“Or not,” says the Millionaire.
“When did everything stop being real?” Margaret says.
“Don’t bring James into it.”
“He would have—”
Caroline plugs her ears; she might be eight again: a girl in braids and kneesocks, six missing teeth so that she could no more blow a bubble than recite Pope, though James, a teacher at heart, had tried for weeks.
“I don’t care, Mother. I mean, I do, but at some point you have to put yourself first.”
“Like hell.”
“What?” Caroline unplugs her ears.
“I said, I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know you don’t care.”
The bubble burst, the lopsided attempt. James picked it himself out of Caroline’s braids, though Margaret had still given him a scolding and threatened the back side of the hairbrush. James put it all in his Feelings Jar, a jar that, in its earlier life, contained dill pickles.
I was just trying to DO SOMETHING. I was just trying to teach her how to blow bubbles and you got so mad you could spit.
“I am just trying to Do Something,” Margaret says, though Caroline is busy looking for dinner inspiration, for anything other than pasta. “You don’t care to understand. It’s like everything. Conversation, for example, is now just approximations of opinions adopted from other opinions that were approximations of opinions, et cetera, et cetera. I’m just trying to be real when everything is an approximation.”
But this is not true, exactly. Death is not an approximation. It is completely real; it is unchangeable, forever—an approximation of nothing. Hadn’t she seen it that first time she’d found the base, the barracks, the military galaxy? Where had she been going? She can’t remember anymore. She was lost, she knew, had taken to driving, punching the radio to listen to men and women discussing God knows what, anything to drown out her own inside voice. Use your inside voice, she used to tell the children, meaning quiet. Softly. Hers shouted now; tore its hair.
She had followed the convoy of jeeps, had stopped across the highway with the other cars, curious at the rows and rows of them idling like so many school buses by the chain-link fence that surrounded the complex of guard towers and apartments and houses and a post office there in the middle of nowhere, or everywhere: soybean fields, corn crops, a V of geese heading south, and somewhere else, just beyond, an abandoned barn where starlings roost in rotted eaves and a boy necks or smokes or pings his pocketful of stones one by one against the glass, wanting breakage: all boys do. At the center sat the plane, exceedingly complicated, wings folded and a scissored tail—more like a jackknife than anything that could fly—and from it soldiers transporting bodies, their families there to receive them, to take them back as real, as dead.
“This is no approximation,” Margaret says. “This is what that idiot has the audacity to hide: the one thing true in the mess of it,” she says, attempting to name it all for Caroline, who some time ago surrendered, running the sauce jar under hot water, her back to Margaret though presumably listening.
Now she turns, her hand dripping.
“I hear you, Mother,” she says, popping the lid; she forks a noodle from the boiling pot and holds it out to Margaret. “Finito?” she asks.
* * *
Margaret dreams of James. In this one he steps out of the Cape Cod surf (those were the years!) wet and gleaming; he is as he was, a young man, a boy who loved books, who copied passages in letters to his mother, certain things he believed she might like, understanding her taste, he once wrote, in these matters.
Dear Mother, his name is Professor Burns, which is ironic, because he smokes like a chimney and even when not keeps the cigarette, somehow lit, behind his ear. There’s a rumor his hair once caught on fire and he lost his place in his notes and for the rest of the semester kept one step ahead of the syllabus oblivious. He is a little odd, but I like him and this is my favorite class. I don’t know if I love poetry or just love the way he talks about poetry. I don’t know if I just love that anyone can talk about poetry at all how many years later and still weep. Yes, he weeps. Or did the other day after his lecture on Byron. A few of the girls went up to console him; maybe it was just a ploy (ha-ha).
Here he is! Margaret thinks in her dream. Look, here he is! He’s been swimming—that scamp—all along!
She hears the waves roll out behind him, the crash of it so clearly. She is fearful he might decide to return to that riptide; how often has she warned him it could
carry you for miles! But, no. He walks toward her, the sun behind him dazzling. He is a perfect boy, a young man of promise without a single broken bone, nothing to be mended, stitched; strong-hearted. He takes no medications, she could tell you, and on that repeatedly filled-out form that has so many boxes in which to check yes he checks no, no, no, no! every time. He is no more an approximation than a red tulip in May, and here is the great joke of it: He is Real!
A delicious pain, almost sexual, wakes her. It is the great cruel trick of the night: to wake alone, regardless. She can scream or cry if she wants—Caroline’s gone home, and Harry is deaf asleep. She elbow-props herself to watch him breathe, he the father of her children, the great love of her life. He floats into outer space in his bubble. It will burst, eventually, and he, like the rest of them, will be gone.
To where?
An approximation of this, perhaps, or the curl of a shell, the color of leaves, a gesture; here but somewhere deep within.
James had once asked her what she believed; this toward the end of him, she remembers, or close enough. And she might have lied; she might have given her boy something more.
“Nothing,” she had said, already furious. “Absolutely nothing.”
He sat in the chair by the window. She had brought a blue shawl and oatmeal cookies she would set by the door for visitors.
“You’re an original, Mom. I’ve meant to tell you,” he said.
“Thank you, darling,” she said, wanting to hear more and wanting him to stop. She stood by the edge of his bed; she liked to stand there. She even liked this room, or well enough, on the quiet floor, with its view over the low rooftops to the sliver of river when the light went right, which happened more often now, in this season. It had been autumn; the sun low, at a slant. That she found it too difficult to look at him she couldn’t explain.
“And I forgive you your trespasses,” he said.
“Hallelujah,” she said.
If she had looked she would have noticed the blueness of the shawl, how odd to see him wrapped in blue.
“I hope you’re wrong,” he said.
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“If you are, I’ll come back and rattle the windows,” he said. “Think of it as my ‘so there.’ ”
* * *
The windows more than rattle; so there. The wind more than blows. And somewhere else the terrified children must listen for what else—the cavalry, the infantry, the artillery—what had James taught her? Nothing. Everything. The names run together to a pooled point, the way blood will when the heart stops beating, when the machine stops. The machine stopped.
That she gets out of bed and dresses is almost beside the point. She no longer needs to write a note. She throws on loose clothing and goes, forgetting her empty camera—It was just like in the movies! she told Caroline. The soldiers rolled out the film and flung it in the garbage! They called her bite his wound!—forgetting her purse, backing the station wagon out the long drive to swerve down the once-dirt road toward the highway. At this hour there’s little traffic, and she can speed as much as she likes, the cornfields and rows of soybeans saluting as she passes; in the end her only ally, the landscape, the actual black dirt of the country. Government property, my ass, she thinks.
Her headlights flood the woods she turns in to: wild, brush grown, skunk cabbage in the hollows and arrowheads to be found; the all of it disturbed by this strange, Halloween wind. There might be children behind the trees, trick-or-treaters, Frankensteins and ghosts and ghouls shaking the skinny limbs of the aspen saying, I’m here! No, here! But they’d be flushed out, of course, by her, by the klieg lights on the landing field: in case of emergencies, no doubt: the jackknife slicing the air into ribbons, the families the only witness to the dead.
And what had she planned, anyway? To whom would she have shown her pictures? Harry? Caroline? Absent friends?
She parks near the guard tower and slams the door. The steel latticework seems to glow in the moonlight, rising to the little booth of their tree-house watch. She might see breath on the glass, it is that cold and not so far up, or frost; she knows he is in there and she could find him if she climbed.
When did it become the boy she is after?
* * *
Does a radio play? Does he write a letter home?
She wants to know where he’s from, what he studied in school. She’s interested in his early artwork, she could tell him. Elementary. Preschool, even. Did he begin with circles? Those circles! And then slowly, no; she had seen it in her children and her children’s friends and her grandchildren, even. The loss of circles, eventually. Don’t despair, she could tell him. It happens to everyone.
She would like to know where he sat in the cafeteria—with the popular children or off a little by himself, like her James, his sandwich crushed from his book bag, a tuna fish on white bread or maybe peanut butter. Did his mother include notes? An I love you, or Hi, Handsome! Perhaps he was not a son who required encouragement; perhaps he did fine on his own. His were not elaborate tastes—she can guess this—nor particularly demanding. He seemed fine with what he got until he wasn’t; and when he wasn’t he didn’t complain. He made plans—how to leave, how to get out, how to make do, survive.
Was he interested in trains? Did he play a musical instrument?
Margaret stands at the fence looking in. The worst thing, she would tell him, is that she can no longer distinguish stars; when I think I have found one it moves out of view, just metal in orbit or a transportation vehicle. There are no longer fixed points by which to determine my direction, she would tell him. How can I ever again make a wish?
You are not responsible, she would say. It is shameful what we’ve done to you. We should all of us be ashamed.
“You are just like the rest of us,” she says. “You are only trying to Do Something.”
Does Margaret shout this or whisper? It no longer matters. She is suddenly tired and aware that she should go. She’ll return home the way she came, driving back through ye olde et cetera to her rightful place beside Harry: Margaret Morrisey, mother to Caroline and the dead one, James.
Hormones, she’ll tell Caroline, by way of explanation.
I miss him, too, Caroline will say, by way of apology.
“Goodbye,” Margaret calls to them, though none can hear for the crack crack crack; the hunters particularly ravenous at dawn.
RADICAL FEMINISTS
Beatrice Wells is on her way to Bryant Park with her boys, ice-skating, Saturday afternoon, when she bumps, literally, into Jonathan Fontaine, his hair, though thinner, still as his name would suggest, puffed, coiffed, as if Jonathan Fontaine has just stepped out of a zany French farce. She’s grazed his hand with the rusty blade of her ice skate—it’s been forever since she’s used them, high school, when she would go with friends to Crowfield to play crack the whip, she the lightest, the most daring, the first one to be spun out, to go the farthest, flung—and there’s blood. She dabs at it with a snotty Kleenex she finds shredded in the pocket of her parka, apologizing and apologizing as Jonathan Fontaine stands with his limp hand in hers; she forgets who she’s tending for a moment and spits on the Kleenex to rub harder.
“Gross,” Charlie, her older son, says. “That’s disgusting, Mom.”
“It’s all right,” Jonathan Fontaine says, by way of reprimand. “Your mother and I go way back,” he adds, and something about the way he says it makes Beatrice want to cry, and so she does, secretly, using the other half of the shredded Kleenex for herself.
The day has turned warm, too warm for late December. Throngs of desperate shoppers swarm the scarves, the tiny glass animals, the candles they don’t need nor would anyone else want at the dozens of outdoor holiday kiosks encircling Bryant Park. Within them skaters glide over the frozen pond, assembled a few months earlier by Santa’s elves and open to the public free of charge, as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald sing a jaunty duet from speakers camouflaged among the bare sycamores, the tr
ees’ gray limbs garlanded with Christmas lights and electrical cords and deflated, errant balloons. Tourists mingle and watch, hoping to report New York back home—detachment, concentration, angst—like the guy who skates alone in the center of the rink, his fur vest of unknown animal origin, his hands scissoring the air like beaks, his stretchy black tights, his balls two grapes on a plucked stem. Near him girls fresh from the American Girl Place with Kit, the child of the Depression, or Tabitha, child of the civil rights movement, or Esmeralda, child of Cuban immigrants, clutched in their arms balance and glide on wobbly ankles, delighted with their dolls’ hair, newly set at the store’s beauty salon, their dolls strapped into tiny chairs as women wearing white lab coats and surgeons’ gloves tugged at the accumulated knots of too much girl attention, too much girl love. Now they all beam out, organized.
“Please,” Jonathan Fontaine is saying, the wind tousling. “A flesh wound. I’ll live.”
“So funny, of all people,” Beatrice says, looking up at him. The two stand across from one another, fairly close, Beatrice’s boys leaning in hip to hip.
“Boys,” Beatrice remembers. “This is Jonathan. Mr. Fontaine.”
Jonathan Fontaine reaches to shake Charlie’s hand, and then Sam’s. He is a slight man, not much taller than either of her sons: they could take him down, she thinks, imagining it: Jonathan Fontaine impeccably dressed—some fashionable well-cut coat and a bright red scarf purchased at Barneys or Saks, the color, if a shade or two higher, of his flushed cheeks—wrestled to the gravelly path, pinned on his back. The boys rightly sense he has no children or any understanding of their language and customs; they will last three minutes tops before pulling at Beatrice’s arms, before spying one of the outdoor Ping-Pong tables and begging to play. Go ahead, Beatrice will say to them. Don’t kill your brother, Beatrice will add to Charlie. Five minutes, Beatrice will call, watching as her boys hurry away.
