Homeland and Other Stories Page 14

  "Magda," she says, "me too. I'm having a baby too."

  At the hospital Magda repeats to everyone, like a broken record, that she and her daughter are both pregnant. She's terrified they'll be given some tranquilizer that will mutate the fetuses. Whenever the nurses approach, she confuses them by talking about Thalidomide babies. "Annemarie is allergic to penicillin," she warns the doctor when they're separated. It's true, Annemarie is, and she always forgets to mark it on her forms.

  It turns out that she needs no penicillin, just stitches in her scalp. Magda has cuts and serious contusions from where her knees hit the dash. Leon has nothing. Not a bruise.

  During the lecture the doctor gives them about seat belts, which Annemarie will remember for the rest of her life, he explains that in an average accident the human body becomes as heavy as a piano dropping from a ten-story building. She has bruises on her rib cage from where Magda held on to her, and the doctor can't understand how she kept Annemarie from going out the window. He looks at the two of them, pregnant and dazed, and tells them many times over that they are two very lucky ladies. "Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws," he declares.

  The only telephone number Annemarie can think to give them is the crew dispatcher for Southern Pacific, which is basically Kay Kay's home number. Luckily she's just brought in the Amtrak and is next door to the depot, at Wendy's, when the call comes. She gets there in minutes, still dressed in her work boots and blackened jeans, with a green bandana around her neck.

  "They didn't want me to come in here," Kay Kay tells Annemarie in the recovery room. "They said I was too dirty. Can you imagine?"

  Annemarie tries to laugh, but tears run from her eyes instead, and she squeezes Kay Kay's hand. She still can't think of anything that seems important enough to say. She feels as if life has just been handed to her in a heavy and formal way, like a microphone on a stage, and the audience is waiting to see what great thing she intends do with it.

  But Kay Kay is her everyday self. "Don't worry about Leon, he's got it all worked out, he's staying with me," she tells Annemarie, not looking at her stitches. "He's going to teach me how to hit a softball."

  "He doesn't want to go to Buddy's?" Annemarie asks.

  "He didn't say he did."

  "Isn't he scared to death?" Annemarie feels so weak and confused she doesn't believe she'll ever stand up again.

  Kay Kay smiles. "Leon's a rock," she says, and Annemarie thinks of the pile of dirt he landed on. She believes now that she can remember the sound of him hitting it.

  Annemarie and Magda have to stay overnight for observation. They end up in maternity, with their beds pushed close together so they won't disturb the other woman in the room. She's just given birth to twins and is watching Falcon Crest.

  "I just keep seeing him there on that pile of dirt," whispers Annemarie. "And I think, he could have been dead. There was just that one little safe place for him to land. Why did he land there? And then I think, we could have been dead, and he'd be alone. He'd be an orphan. Like that poor little girl that survived that plane wreck."

  "That poor kid," Magda agrees. "People are just burying her with teddy bears. How could you live with a thing like that?" Magda seems a little dazed too. They each accepted a pill to calm them down, once the doctor came and personally guaranteed Magda it wouldn't cause fetal deformity.

  "I think that woman's blouse was silk. Can you believe it?" Annemarie asks.

  "She was kind," says Magda.

  "I wonder what became of it? I suppose it's ruined."

  "Probably," Magda says. She keeps looking over at Annemarie and smiling. "When are you due?" she asks.

  "October twelfth," says Annemarie. "After you."

  "Leon came early, remember. And I went way late with you, three weeks I think. Yours could come first."

  "Did you know Buddy wants us to get married again?" Annemarie asks after a while. "Leon thinks it's a great idea."

  "What do you think? That's the question."

  "That's the question," Annemarie agrees.

  A nurse comes to take their blood pressures. "How are the mamas tonight?" she asks. Annemarie thinks about how nurses wear that same calm face stewardesses have, never letting on like you're sitting on thirty thousand feet of thin air. Her head has begun to ache in no uncertain terms, and she thinks of poor old Leon Trotsky, axed in the head.

  "I dread to think of what my hair's going to look like when these bandages come off. Did they have to shave a lot?"

  "Not too much," the nurse says, concentrating on the blood-pressure dial.

  "Well, it's just as well my hair was a wreck to begin with."

  The nurse smiles and rips off the Velcro cuff, and then turns her back on Annemarie, attending to Magda. Another nurse rolls in their dinners and sets up their tray tables. Magda props herself up halfway, grimacing a little, and the nurse helps settle her with pillows under her back. She pokes a straw into a carton of milk, but Annemarie doesn't even take the plastic wrap off her tray.

  "Ugh," she complains, once the nurses have padded away on their white soles. "This reminds me of the stuff you used to bring me when I was sick."

  "Milk toast," says Magda.

  "That's right. Toast soaked in milk. Who could dream up such a disgusting thing?"

  "I like it," says Magda. "When I'm sick, it's the only thing I can stand. Seems like it always goes down nice."

  "It went down nice with Blackie," Annemarie says. "Did you know he's the one that always ate it? I told you a million times I hated milk toast."

  "I never knew what you expected from me, Annemarie. I never could be the mother you wanted."

  Annemarie turns up one corner of the cellophane and pleats it with her fingers. "I guess I didn't expect anything, and you kept giving it to me anyway. When I was a teenager you were always making me drink barley fiber so I wouldn't have colon cancer when I was fifty. All I wanted was Cokes and Twinkies like the other kids."

  "I know that," Magda says. "Don't you think I know that? You didn't want anything. A Barbie doll, and new clothes, but nothing in the way of mothering. Reading to you or anything like that. I could march around freeing South Africa or saving Glen Canyon but I couldn't do one thing for my own child."

  They are both quiet for a minute. On TV, a woman in an airport knits a longer and longer sweater, apparently unable to stop, while her plane is delayed again and again.

  "I knew you didn't want to be taken care of, honey," Magda says. "But I guess I just couldn't accept it."

  Annemarie turns her head to the side, ponderously, as if it has become an enormous egg. She'd forgotten and now remembers how pain seems to increase the size of things. "You know what's crazy?" she asks. "Now I want to be taken care of and nobody will. Men, I mean."

  "They would if you'd let them. You act like you don't deserve any better."

  "That's not true." Annemarie is surprised and a little resentful at Magda's analysis.

  "It is true. You'll take a silk blouse from a complete stranger, but not the least little thing from anybody that loves you. Not even a bottle of shampoo. If it comes from somebody that cares about you, you act like it's not worth having."

  "Well, you're a good one to talk."

  "What do you mean?" Magda pushes the tray table back and turns toward her daughter, carefully, resting her chin on her hand.

  "What I mean is you beat men off with a stick. Bartholomew thinks you're Miss America and you don't want him around you. You don't even miss Daddy."

  Magda stares at Annemarie. "You don't know the first thing about it. Where were you when he was dying? Outside playing hopscotch."

  That is true. That's exactly where Annemarie was.

  "Do you remember that upholstered armchair we had, Annemarie, with the grandfather clocks on it? He sat in that chair, morning till night, with his lungs filling up. Worrying about us. He'd say, 'You won't forget to lock the doors, will you? Let's write a little note and tape it there by the door
.' And I'd do it. And then he'd say, 'You know that the brakes on the car have to be checked every so often. They loosen up. And the oil will need to be changed in February.' He sat there looking out the front window and every hour he'd think of another thing, till his face turned gray with the pain, knowing he'd never think of it all."

  Annemarie can picture them there in the trailer: two people facing a blank, bright window, waiting for the change that would permanently disconnect them.

  Magda looks away from Annemarie. "What hurt him wasn't dying. It was not being able to follow you and me through life looking after us. How could I ever give anybody that kind of grief again?"

  The woman who just had the twins has turned off her program, and Annemarie realizes their voices have gradually risen. She demands in a whisper, "I didn't know it was like that for you when he died. How could I not ever have known that, that it wrecked your life too?"

  Magda looks across Annemarie, out the window, and Annemarie tries to follow her line of vision. There is a parking lot outside, and nothing else to see. A sparse forest of metal poles. The unlit streetlamps stare down at the pavement like blind eyes.

  "I don't know," Magda says. "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon."

  "There's no water on the moon," says Annemarie.

  "That's what I mean. A person could walk from one to the other if they just decided to do it."

  It's dark. Annemarie is staring out the window when the lights in the parking lot come on all together with a soft blink. From her bed she can only see the tops of the cars glowing quietly in the pink light like some strange crop of luminous mushrooms. Enough time passes, she thinks, and it's tomorrow. Buddy or no Buddy, this baby is going to come. For the first time she lets herself imagine holding a newborn against her stomach, its helplessness and rage pulling on her heart like the greatest tragedy there ever was.

  There won't be just one baby, either, but two: her own, and her mother's second daughter. Two more kids with dark, curly hair. Annemarie can see them kneeling in the gravel, their heads identically bent forward on pale, slender necks, driving trucks over the moonlike surface of Island Breezes. Getting trikes for their birthdays, skinning their knees, starting school. Once in a while going down with Magda to the Air Force Base, most likely, to fend off nuclear war.

  Magda is still lying on her side, facing Annemarie, but she has drawn the covers up and her eyes are closed. The top of the sheet is bunched into her two hands like a bride's bouquet. The belly underneath pokes forward, begging as the unborn do for attention, some reassurance from the outside world, the flat of a palm. Because she can't help it, Annemarie reaches across and lays a hand on her little sister.

  Bereaved Apartments

  THAT WOMAN in the gable-ended house is not all there.

  In the beginning there is nothing else for Sulie to think. Her other neighbor, Estelle Berry, who spends a good part of each day picking yellow leaves off her jasmine bushes and looking down the street, comes over and says like it's Sulie's fault, "If you ask me it makes the place look slummish. She's started setting them out on her porch under a door stop, to flap in the breeze."

  "Well, Mrs. Berry, it's just notes," says Sulie. "Maybe it's notes to the milkman."

  "Lord in heaven, child, you haven't lived here long enough to know. It's not to the milkman, it's to Him."

  For a dollar Sulie has changed a light bulb for the woman in the gable-ended house, whose name is Nola Rainey, and for free she has knocked down two paper-wasp nests from behind the ivy with a mop handle. In the eyes of the rest of the neighborhood, that is enough. Sulie is on Nola Rainey's side. But Sulie doesn't know the woman all that well, and when Estelle says Him, Sulie thinks she means Nola is leaving notes to God.

  So it's a surprise when, on another day, Estelle knocks on Sulie's door and sticks one of the notes straight into her hand. "This blew over on my jasmines. I won't tolerate litter on my shrubs," says Estelle. Her square-hipped figure in beige stretch pants marches away. Sulie reads:

  I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. YOU WILL BE SORRY BY AND BY. EVEN IF THE POLICE DON'T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO A WIDOW WOMAN. YOU THINK YOU ARE SMART GETTING AWAY WITH PRACTICALLY MURDER SCOT FREE AND YOU THINK I'M BLIND, WELL I'M NOT.

  YOURS TRULY,

  NOLA RAINEY (MRS. WM.)

  Sulie, who doesn't have what she would call friends here yet, decides to show the note to Gilbert McClure. She'll keep an eye out and be on the porch when he comes home from work. Gilbert McClure is the man she shares a house with, in a manner of speaking. It's divided, the way a house can be split down the middle when a landlord sees how he could get twice the rent for the same piece of pie, and makes it a duplex. There's doors that go right through between my bedroom and his living room, but they're nailed shut and painted over, she writes Aunt Reima. Mr. McClure's side must have got the real kitchen because mine's a closet with a hot plate. But it went vice versa on the bathrooms. And Aunt Reima writes back that yes she's heard those called "love's losts" or some people say "bereaved apartments," because, she supposes, each one is missing something it once had.

  Gilbert stands at his window, shaded by Nola's grove of date palms and old cedars, and mixes a gin and tonic. That woman must be sitting on ten thousand, easy, in antiques. He's seen plenty of things go in, and nothing come out. This girl who's moved in, Suzie or Sukie, has been over there. Inside. But there's no point in asking; would the child know a Dunand end table if it stood up and talked? She comes from West Virginia. If people are going to live in these beautiful old houses--going to own them--they could trouble themselves to do it right. Every house in his line of vision was built before 1940, but decked out in postwar picket fences and venetian blinds, like a gorgeous woman going to dinner in a fireman's jacket. God knows what modern junk they've got inside; that's their problem. And then there is Sukie, who doesn't put up venetian blinds but India-print bedspreads; apparently the sixties have just arrived in West Virginia. Treasures in Nola's parlor, he's willing to bet. He stirs his drink with a pencil-thin silver rod, knobbed on the end like a pistol: Prohibition era. The invisible layers of liquid in his glass mix and briefly lose their clarity. Really all he wants is a good look.

  If your neighbor is actually insane, I think you have a right to know. Sulie will ask Nola point-blank, she decides. They're standing in Nola's living room. Nola seems small among her overstuffed chairs, but she holds herself straight and her white hair is done up in a whorl at the back that stays put. She wears a navy-blue suit with brass buttons and wide shoulders, very clean, under a clean apron. She's been dusting. What she says, when Sulie asks about the notes, is: "He's broken into my house over two hundred times."

  Sulie's arms tingle on the insides. "Who has?"

  The feather duster twitches in Nola's hand like a living thing. "Some man," she says. "Or boy. I haven't seen him."

  Sulie looks at the windows with their rusted-out locks, hidden from the street by heavy foliage, and sees that this would be a snap if someone were of a mind. Sulie knows something of breaking and entering. "Have you called the police?"

  "On more than a dozen occasions," Nola declares proudly. "They have no interest in the elderly."

  Sulie says okay she'll have a cup of tea, when Nola offers it, although it's a warm day. The dark kitchen is filled with heavy things, left from a time when a woman needed muscles for cooking. Or needed a cook. Nola turns on the fire and it licks the brass kettle. She has to hold the heavy canister on its side and knock her palm against its bottom to free the last black leaves into the tea strainer. It must be hard for her to get to the grocery. I could offer to shop for her, for five bucks or something. Sulie realizes it isn't the money; she's drawn to Nola for other reasons.

  They drink warm, weak tea and then Sulie checks the phone, which Nola says has stopped working. It's just come unplugged. Sulie tries to picture in her mind's eye, picture him coming through the window, the person who would break into an old woman's house more tha
n two hundred times.

  "You're so able," Nola says. "When I was a girl we never suspected there was any need to know how to fix things." She laughs at herself, waves a hand in front of her face. "And you can drive a truck. I never learned to drive. My husband said I might slaughter someone's livestock for them. This was a long way from town once, this was Senator Pie Allen's ranch."

  Sulie smiles. "It's just a pickup. It's not hard to drive. I haul around my stuff in it. I do odd jobs, clean gutters, that kind of thing." She doesn't say what she used to do.

  "Oh, I can't imagine. Do you climb up on the ladders? It must be invigorating."

  "Well, I guess so." Sulie could leave, but Nola seems unwilling to part company. They return to the kitchen to look at Nola's toaster, which she claims has come unfrazzled near the plug. She says he has been meddling with it. But she doesn't go to the toaster, she walks straight to the tea canister, opens it, and cries, "Lord help me, he's stolen all my tea!"

  "Sulie, you have to bear in mind that Nola has been in that house for half a century," Gilbert explains. "We've all been wondering which of the two would fall apart first."

  "It seems like everybody's mad at her for letting the house run down. Everything on this street's got to be new-looking and just-so. I bet if you painted your gutters some color other than brown or off-white they'd come lynch you."

  "Just-so-ugly," he says. "But new-looking, yes."

  They're on the porch drinking sherry, compliments of Gilbert, who seems in a friendly mood. Sulie sets her glass on the low wall that divides the porch into halves. "Well, what else can Nola do but let it run down?" she persists. "She says she's got a son someplace but it looks to me like she's on her own."