Homeland and Other Stories Page 5

  Lena is a specialist in toxicology and operates a poison hotline at the county hospital. People from all over the state call her in desperation when their children have consumed baby aspirin or a houseplant or what have you, and she helps them. It might sound morbid, but no one could be more full of the joy of life than Lena, even where her job is concerned. She is magnificent at parties. Her best story is about a Gila monster named Hilda, which served a brief term as the pet of the Norman Clinderback family. Hilda was an illegal gift from an uncle in Tucson, and crossed our nation in a fiberglass container of the type meant for transporting cats. The Gila monster, by all rights a stranger to this part of Indiana, is a highly poisonous lizard, but is thought by most experts to be too lazy to pose a threat to humans. The incident precipitating the call to my wife involved a July 4th picnic in which Hilda was teased beyond endurance with a piece of fried chicken. Hilda had a bite of Norm Junior's thumb instead.

  Of course, the story ended happily. Lena wouldn't make light of someone else's grief, having suffered her own. Another thing that runs in her family, besides the white forelock, is a dire allergy to the stings of bees and wasps. In childhood she lost her sister. Suddenly and incomprehensibly this child passed over from life to death before Lena's eyes while they sat in the yard making clover necklaces. Lena could die by the same sword. Theoretically, any outdoor excursion that includes my wife could come to tragedy.

  But it was this aspect of her life that led her into the study of toxic reactions, and it was through the poison hotline that we met. I called because I had gotten diatomaceous earth in my eye. I don't know exactly how it happened, whether I rubbed my eye while I was working with it, or if it was carried by a gust of wind--the powder is light. What I remember most clearly is Lena's voice over the phone, concerned and serious, as if there were nothing on earth more important to her than preventing my cornea from being scratched.

  If things had gone another way, if I hadn't gathered the courage to call back the next week without the excuse of a poisoning, I might have become one of her stories. Instead, I became her husband. I called and explained to her what I'd been doing with diatomaceous earth, since I thought she might wonder. The name is poetic, but in fact this substance is a lethal insecticide. I was dusting it onto the leaves of my eggplants, which had suffered an attack of flea beetles and looked like they'd been pelleted with buckshot. I'm fond of eggplants, for aesthetic reasons as much as any other. "Really," I said to Lena, my future wife, "could anyone ask for a more beautiful fruit?" Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.

  Our courtship was very much a vegetable affair. By way of thanks I invited her to see my garden, and to my amazement she accepted. She had never grown vegetables herself, she said, and it impressed her to see familiar foods like cabbages rooted to the earth. I showed her how brussels sprouts grow, attached along the fat main stem like so many suckling pigs. She seemed to need to take in the textures of things, brushing her hands across velvety petals, even rubbing my shirt sleeve absently between her thumb and forefinger as if to divine the essence of a botanist. I promised to cook her an eggplant rollatini by the time of the summer solstice. But before the shortest night of the year I had already lain beside Lena, trembling, and confessed I'd never held anything I so treasured.

  Lena says I was the first poison victim ever to call back, except in the case of repeat offenders. And to think I nearly didn't. A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

  Diatomaceous earth, by the way, isn't dirt. It's a remarkable substance made up of the jagged silicon skeletons of thousands of tiny sea creatures. It feels to a human hand like talc, but to insects it's like rolling on broken bottles. It lacerates their skin so the vital juices leak out. This is a fearful way to die, I'm sure, but as I sprinkled the white powder around the leaves on that spring day I wasn't thinking about the insects. I was thinking of eggplants, heavy and purple-black in the midsummer sun. I believe that try as we might to see it differently, life nearly always comes down to choices like this. There is always a price. My elderly neighbor is fond of saying, as he stands at his mailbox riffling through the bright-colored junk mail: "If there's something on this earth that's really for free, I'd pay everything I got to know what it is."

  Lena thought that rather than just hypothesizing it might be a good idea for us actually to try out a baby for a weekend. The more I thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. In fact, I thought maybe it ought to be a requirement. In any event, our friends the MacElroys were happy to oblige us with their daughter Melinda. They offered to drop her off Friday evening, and head post-haste for Chicago.

  MacElroy teaches zoology and has an office next to mine. Our college is small; the biology department is comprised solely of the two of us, one ambassador each from the plant and animal kingdoms. MacElroy came here from a state university, and thinks this is extremely amusing. Sometimes in the restroom he will stand at the next urinal and say, "Shall we convene a departmental meeting?"

  What is not a joke, to the MacElroys, is that at the age of twenty months Melinda still doesn't walk. At first they were evasive, saying, "She's shy about walking." This soon eroded into outright defensiveness, and from there they went the sad route of trying everything, from specialists in pediatric orthopedics to "Ask Dr. Gott." All the tests that money can buy have been run on Melinda. The doctors all say the same thing: that she is fine, bonewise, and that every child has her own timetable. And still the MacElroys entertain nervous visions of Melinda packing her bags someday and crawling off to college.

  Early on Friday afternoon, Lena called me from her office at Poison HQ. "What have you got for the rest of the day?" she asked.

  "Office hours," I said.

  "What's the chance some student will drop in?"

  "There's a chance," I said. I looked around my desk and considered the odds. I have ferns and bromeliads in my office, a quietly carnivorous Darlingtonia, a terrarium full of the humid breath of mosses. I spend a good deal of time alone with them. "A meteor could strike the Science Building, too," I said.

  "I've traded shifts with Ursula so we can play hooky for the afternoon." Lena sounded breathless. "We might as well enjoy our last hours of freedom, before we take on the awesome responsibilities of a child," she said. Less than ten minutes after hanging up the phone, she was honking the horn outside my office. We set out for the Covered Bridge Festival.

  I should explain that this is not a festival in any normal sense, but a weekend during which the residents of southern Indiana drive about celebrating the fact that there are numerous covered bridges in the vicinity. One can enjoy them in any order. My own favorite is the one at Little Patoka, on the Eel River.

  "One of the pros," Lena said as she frowned slightly over the steering wheel, "is that our schedules are so flexible. I could always arrange my shift on the poison line around your classes."

  "Assuming your staff doesn't all have a crisis at once."

  "There will always be Ursula," she said. Ursula was a good friend of Lena's, a widow in her sixties, and the only other member of the poison hotline team who had neither procreated nor cleaved from his or her spouse in the previous year.

  "Think of it," she said. "It's perfect. On the days you have evening classes, I could work days. The other days, I could work nights."

  "And when would we talk to each other?" I asked.

  "On weekends. And whenever you've taken poison."

  Little Patoka is about half a mile from the river. We parked in town, where a small fair had been drummed up along the road running out from town toward the bridge. Against the backdrop of harvested fields and roadside tangles of poison ivy and goldenrod, tables were piled high with local produce: handwoven baskets and corn-husk dolls, clear jars of clover honey, giant pyramids of pumpkins. There was an outstanding display of locally grown vegetable oddities. One was labeled "Two-Headed Yolo Wonder Bell Pepper," and really that is ve
ry much what it looked like.

  As we walked away from town the tables began to keep their distance from one another, and were laden with more unexpected items--the efforts of people who had come from out of town. One young couple, who were selling jewelry, evidently traveled in a VW van to take advantage of occasions like this. They might have been expecting more from the Covered Bridge Festival. They seemed a long way from home, both in terms of geography and era. The woman had pale hair and eyebrows and wore a long skirt and a great deal of dangly jewelry. The man seemed estranged, sitting apart on a folding chair, concentrating on repairing the small silver mechanism of a necklace.

  "I'm Earth," the young woman said. "And this is Jacob. We're from Sacramento. This is really lovely country." She seemed hungry to talk.

  "It is," Lena agreed.

  "We see a lot of country, but what you have here is something special," she told us. "I read auras. People are at peace here." She stopped then, apparently arrested by the sight of my wife's face, and I wondered momentarily about auras. "Your eyes are exactly the color of lapis lazuli," she said. As proof she held up to Lena's temple a smooth, blue oval that matched like a third eye.

  I took the necklace when the young woman held it out to me. The stone had a rubbed, comforting feel. I couldn't help thinking that it was shaped very much like a prosthetic eye. For a long time I thought glass eyes were complete and spherical, like real ones, but they are not. I turned it over and read the tag on the back, which was marked with the number 45. This price startled me. There is some persistent part of my soul that expects the products of nature to be free of charge.

  "It's beautiful," Lena said, "but we're just out for a stroll today, really." The young man gave us a hostile look from his folding chair.

  "We didn't bring our checkbook," I added for emphasis.

  "That business about my eyes was just a ruse," Lena told me once we'd gone on our way. "I do feel sorry for the way they must have to live, but you can't buy things on that basis alone. And that hokum about auras! When half the people around here are completely torn up about one thing or another."

  "Old Jacob looked like he was ready to hit the high road back to civilization," I said.

  "I guess what I resent is the manipulation. You notice she handed the necklace right to you."

  If Lena hadn't spoken up I might have bought it, and not because I felt I had to, either. "It was true about your eyes," I said. "At least that much was sincere. The color was an exact match."

  "Really," Lena said. "That blue."

  We didn't speak for a while. Then I said, "I know 'azul' means blue. The blue...what? What's 'lapis'?"

  My wife works the New York Times crossword puzzle without fail, and knows about the roots of words. She has worlds of knowledge that amaze me. At one time she was torn between a career in poison or something more literary.

  "Stone," she said. "It's Latin."

  "Of course. Like a lapidary shop."

  We walked past an unattended pile of pumpkins. "Lapidary," she said, nodding. "And dilapidated."

  "Unstoned?"

  She laughed. "I guess it means the stones are falling out. Like an old rock fence." There were fences like that by the legion in southern Indiana. If we wished to do so, we could probably spot half a dozen from where we stood.

  "Did you know that Ron Emerson and Gracie are separated?" she asked. She knew Ron from the hospital, and Gracie had worked as a secretary in my department before taking maternity leave.

  "That's something new," I said. "A baby and a split-up."

  "I know. It's almost like divorce is some kind of virus going around, and there's no vaccine you can take. For a while it looked like babies might be the antidote. But I know that isn't true." We were in sight of the covered bridge now, and the long row of trees that marked the course of the Eel River.

  "Lots of people are like Ron and Gracie," Lena went on. "If they're in trouble to begin with, then after a baby they don't have a prayer of working things out. There's never time."

  I didn't offer an opinion. I was content to walk beside Lena and hold her hand while she thought this through to the end. My own thoughts were completely different. I was thinking that I belonged in this place, among these fields and rivers and covered bridges. I have spent my entire life in small Indiana towns: I grew up in one, was educated in another, and settled at last in a third. My sisters come to visit from far-flung cities where they enjoy extraordinary foods and philharmonic orchestras--Seattle, Atlanta, Cleveland--and they say that, looking back, they can't imagine how they lived with such limited opportunities.

  I suppose I accept these limitations without much question. There are always surprises. I was raised in a home of harsh religion and more children than there should have been, and I grew up expecting little in the way of affection, much less Lena. To my mind, a life spent among burgeoning fields is not always, is not necessarily, a life of limitation.

  "On the other hand," Lena said, "it's scary to think of being old, and having missed the chance. I guess it's reasonable to want to pass yourself on. It's the nearest thing to living forever."

  "In a genetic manner of speaking," I said.

  "But then, I'm sure my parents thought three kids were enough to guarantee them immortality, and it may not turn out that way."

  Lena was her family's only hope of passing on its DNA. There was the sister who had died, and a much younger brother who became sterile in his teens as a complication of mumps. He and his wife recently adopted Korean twins. To the great credit of my in-laws, though, they never put pressure on Lena. They are uncommon people who love their children without possessiveness or a need to interfere. They astonish me continually, and yet Lena doesn't seem to appreciate what she has. She reads the books, like everyone else, on how to overcome the heartbreak of a dysfunctional family, and says things like "Well, you know my Grandfather Butler did drink." I suppose it's like being beautiful; when every other woman on earth is lamenting this or that physical flaw you can't very well admit you don't have any. But it bothers me sometimes that she takes this love for granted. As if everyone in the world had parents who'd call up while you're out for a birthday dinner and sing the Happy Birthday song in three-part harmony, counting the dog, into your answering machine.

  My own parents are still living, like Lena's, but they do not communicate. They once communicated over issues surrounding their children, and then they communicated over which channel to watch. Now they have bought a second television set, smaller than the first, and the two stand side by side. My father sits in a chair next to my mother's in the evenings and watches the sports, without sound.

  We reached the bridge. Lena dropped my hand and walked ahead of me without speaking. When a bridge reaches this age, it's important to listen to what it has to say to you, as you walk through it. The river below our feet made a wistful, continuous sigh, and our steps were like whispers. The wood of the floorboards was soft with age and had the dusty smell that carries for me all the confused nostalgia of youth, and barns. When we came out the other side, the day seemed brighter. Sunlight picked out the colors of the trees on the opposite bank of the river.

  "Look at this," Lena said, "beauty and the beast, all rolled into one." It was a remarkable caterpillar, the size, shape, and color of a bright kosher dill, with blue suction cups for feet and yellow knobs on its back. It was creeping up one of the bridge's structural timbers, and Lena was entranced.

  "What's it going to be when it grows up?" she asked. Insects were not my department, but Lena always placed absolute faith in my knowledge of the natural world, and for this reason I read a great deal.

  "A cecropia moth," I guessed. "I don't know anything else that would warrant a caterpillar that big."

  She looked up. Over our heads were unpainted eaves, sheltered by the tin roof of the bridge, and a full archaeological record of barn-swallow nests. "Do you think it's going up there right now to make its cocoon?"

  I assessed the caterpillar's rate
of speed. "Maybe by tomorrow afternoon."

  She watched it with intense concentration. "I wish I could weave a cocoon around myself and change into something beautiful," she said at last.

  I looked at Lena's profile, framed by an auburn halo of honey locust and red oak leaves, and the Eel River running forever away. "In heaven's name," I asked, "what would you change yourself into?"

  "Somebody more definite," she said. "The kind of person who's very sure, on the inside, of what she wants to be."

  As we walked back toward town her spirits seemed to lift again. A dog ran up to us from nowhere, and Lena spoke to it in such an encouraging tone I was sure it would follow us home. It did follow us, but only until a family with young children crossed our path going out toward the bridge. The dog was fully grown and even showed some gray around its muzzle, but it tripped and panted and seemed to have the intelligence of a puppy.

  "Can dogs be retarded?" she asked me, laughing, and then suddenly looked thoughtful. "Could Melinda be, do you think?"

  "No, I don't think so. They're just showing natural concern. Everybody is afraid their child will have something wrong with it." MacElroy had told me that before Melinda was born his wife forgot to turn off the electric blanket one night, and spent the next three months worrying about brain damage to the fetus.

  "I think I could handle it. Really, I do, don't you?" With the toe of her boot she kicked an apple that lay in the road. It rolled in a wide arc into the weeds. "What we're looking at is the prospect of a new person coming to live with us, right? And, if we were placing an ad for a roommate, we wouldn't say, 'Imperfect or handicapped people will not be considered.'"

  "I never thought of it that way," I said.

  "What would be hard, though, is that it would take so much more effort than I've ever counted on, over the long term. A lot more than a regular baby. One of us would probably have to give up our career. I suppose me."