Homeland and Other Stories Page 6

  "Why you?"

  "Is it something you'd be willing to do?"

  I thought about this. "Yes," I said. "If we'd decided to commit ourselves to the project, then yes, I would."

  Lena looked at me with such surprise I was overwhelmed by the wish that she knew me better. It isn't as though I hold back information. Usually I don't quite know how I feel about things until Lena asks, and often not even then. "It's only logical, isn't it?" I reasoned. "If it comes down to a choice between teaching Bryophyta and Lycophyta or saving the lives of our youth, there's just no contest."

  "And you would do that." She put her hand into my hip pocket and leaned on my shoulder as we walked. "No matter what ever happens, I'm so happy you told me that."

  The Lapis Lazulis had packed up and moved on by the time we reached their spot, but we resolved anyway to buy something to commemorate the day. We would acquire the two-headed Yolo Wonder at any price, if it was for sale. Lena stopped at each table, weighing in her hands the acorn squash and noble ears of corn, and holding up small maroon apples for me to bite. She was wearing purple, a color that nearly glows when she puts it on. A purple sweater, and a turquoise and lavender scarf. As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with color and the intensity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The important thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was gut rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved the space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.

  There are a few things that predictably give me joy. Watching Lena's face while we make love is one. The appearance of the first new, marble-white tomatoes in my garden is another, and the break of comprehension across a student's face when I've planted an understanding that never grew in that mind before. I'm told that seeing one's own child born is an experience beyond description, but knowing these things, I can just begin to imagine.

  That evening, little Melinda might have been enlisted in a conspiracy to make us parents. She ate her dinner without complaint, then rubbed her eyes in a dreamy and charming way, and went to bed.

  In the morning she awoke transmogrified. She sat in the middle of the living-room floor and displayed her vocabulary in a dizzying, vengeful series of demands. Her dark hair was wild and her temper fierce. Most ferociously of all she demanded Mommy, and over and over again some mysterious item called Belinka. My will was soon crushed like a slave's, but Lena held on bravely. She brought out the whole suitcase of Melinda's animals and toys, which we had been instructed not to do (just bring the things out one by one, her mother had advised, so she won't know this is all there is), and put on a puppet show as earnest as it was extemporaneous. Melinda was a cruel critic. She bit Lena on the hand, and crawled off toward the kitchen.

  By noon we were desperate. "Kids are always soothed by the outdoors," Lena said, and I did not dare doubt the source of her knowledge. I packed cheese and fruit and cans of root beer into a picnic basket, and would have thrown in a bottle of Jim Beam if we'd had it, while she called Ursula. "She'll love the idea," Lena assured me. "She's always complaining how she never sees her grandkids." Ursula lived sixteen miles away on a declining apple orchard and cattle farm.

  It cost us several damaged fingers to get Melinda into her car seat, but she gratified us by falling instantly to sleep.

  "Do you think maybe it's different when they're your own?" Lena whispered as we drove. I did not hazard a guess.

  The rural setting did seem to do some good. Melinda was no longer belligerent, only energetic. We carried her kicking and squirming, and providing commentary on the cats and cow flops, out to what Ursula called the "June orchard." She'd hired a neighbor to keep a picnic spot mowed all summer for the benefit of her grandchildren on the remote chance that they might visit. Ursula led the way in her stout garden shoes, swinging the picnic basket and pointing out blighted trees, their knotted trunks oozing sweet sap and buzzing with insects. Lena was right, she needed company.

  We spread the blanket and laid out the food, cracked open soda cans, and bribed Melinda with grapes. Her speed was a problem. Having postponed walking for so long, her crawl was proficient beyond belief.

  "Honey, stay in the short grass. There are blackberry briars and stickery things out there," Lena warned. But Melinda continued to streak out for the high brush like a wild thing seeking its origins. Between every two bites of my sandwich I dragged her back by the legs.

  "Well, here's to the new generation," Lena said, raising her root beer. She drank a long gulp, throwing her head back. Then she stood up suddenly, gazed at me with a look of intent misery, and spat out something that twitched on the grass. Ursula and I both leaned forward to look. It was a hornet.

  We watched, stupefied, as Lena sank to her knees, then sat down, and then lay full length on the ground. The valves of my heart slammed like doors.

  Anaphylactic shock is an impossible thing to expect from a human body: a defense mechanism gone terribly wrong. Normally the blood swells around a foreign protein to flush it away, but when that happens in every cell of the body at once it looks from the outside like a horror movie.

  I looked around for Melinda. She had reached the edge of the clearing and stopped, looking back at us with fearful expectation. "Get her," I shouted at Ursula, "and get some help, as fast as you can. If you need a car, take ours." I thrust the keys at her. Ursula knew as well as I did the urgency of the situation, but being the one with the most to lose, I suppose I needed to take command. Ursula scooped a hand under each of Melinda's armpits and ran for the house. I knelt beside Lena. Her face and throat were swollen, but she was breathing.

  "In my purse," Lena said quietly, and then she said nothing more, and I was afraid she was going to die. That those would be her last words: "In my purse." But then she said, with her eyes still closed, "That purple cloisonne case. Get that."

  I did so, having no idea why. I fiddled frantically with the clasp and then nearly dropped it at the sight of what lay inside. There was a cool, hateful-looking needle and a glass bubble of clear liquid.

  Lena told me, in a businesslike way except for occasional long pauses, how to attach the bubble to the needle, turn it once, and jab it into her arm. When I couldn't get her sleeve rolled up, she said to shoot through the shirt. My hands were shaking. It was mostly out of an aversion for operations like this that I went into the study of plants, leaving flesh and blood to others.

  Almost immediately she started to breathe more deeply. She lay still without opening her eyes, and I would have thought she was sleeping except for the tightness of her grip on my hand.

  "Have you always carried that?" I asked.

  She nodded.

  In three years of intimacy I had never seen these secret instruments. I thought the case contained some feminine thing that wasn't my business. Face powder, maybe, or tampons.

  "You could have told me," I said.

  "I've lived all my life with this thing," she said, and I tried to understand this. That some pains are our own. She said, "I didn't want you constantly worrying about it."

  I squeezed her hand to bring some strength into mine. I thought of the previous afternoon, of watching her, beautiful and permanent, against the continual loss of the Eel River. The things we will allow ourselves to believe.

  In the hospital, Lena's friend Dr. Cavanaugh warned me that although Lena was out of the woods she was even more visibly swollen than when I had seen her last, and would remain so for a while. It takes the body days, he said, to reabsorb the fluids it releases in such haste.

  Before I pushed open the door to her room I put in my mind the image of Lena swollen, but still I was startled. She didn't actually look like my wife, but like some moonfaced relative of Lena's.

  She smiled, turning the
moon to a sun.

  "Does that hurt?" I asked, sitting cautiously beside her thigh under the sheet.

  "Does what hurt?"

  "I don't know, your face. It looks...stretched."

  "Gee, thanks," she said, laughing. She took my wrist and laid her fingers lightly across my veins. Her hands were still Lena's hands, slender and gracefully curved. In bygone days they would have been the fingers of a movie star, curled around a cigarette.

  "Where's Melinda?" she asked suddenly, almost sitting up but restrained by the sheet that was drawn across her chest and tucked into the bed.

  "Ursula has her. They're getting along like knaves."

  "You know what I think? Immortality is the wrong reason," she said, and suddenly there were two streams of tears on her shiny cheeks. "Having a child wouldn't make you immortal. It would make you twice as mortal. It's just one more life you could possibly lose, besides your own. Two more eyes to be put out, and ten more toes to get caught under the mower."

  Lena's Grandfather Butler had lost some toes under a lawn mower once. And, of course, there was her lost sister.

  "You're just scared right now. In a few weeks life will seem secure again," I said.

  "Maybe it will. But that won't change the fact that it isn't." She looked at me, and I knew she was right, and I knew that for the first time she felt sure she would not bear children. I felt a mixture of relief and confusion. This was the opposite of the reaction I'd expected--I thought brushes with death made people want children desperately. My younger brother and his wife were involved in a near-disaster on a ski lift in northern Wisconsin, and within forty-eight hours they'd conceived their first son.

  "You're full of drugs," I said. "Cortisone and Benadryl and who knows what else. And that stuff I shot into your arm."

  "Epinephrine," she said. "You did a good job. Did Cavanaugh tell you? That's what saved me." She stroked my hand and turned it over, palm down. The wedding band stood out against the white hospital sheets like an advertisement for jewelry and true love and all that is coveted in the world.

  "What I'm saying is," I said, "this isn't the time to be making important decisions. Your head isn't clear. A lot of things have happened."

  "Why do people always say that? My head is clear. Because of what's happened." She laid her head back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling. The white forelock still bloomed above her forehead, but her beauty had gone underground. Dark depressions hung like hammocks under her eyes. I realized that now I had the answer to a ridiculous question that had haunted me for years, concerning whether or not I would still love Lena if she weren't beautiful.

  "Just being married, just loving one other person with all your heart, is risky enough," she said. This I knew. I lay down carefully on the bed, not with her, but beside her, with my head against the white sheet that on some other day might be drawn up to cover a face.

  By Sunday evening Lena was discharged on the promise that she would take it easy. She knew about the complex medications she needed to take, there was no problem there. She spent her days explaining antidotes.

  Once we'd gotten settled, Ursula brought Melinda over. It was several hours before the MacElroys were due to arrive, but I told Ursula I'd manage, and I did. Melinda's energy seemed spent, and perhaps the slight pall over the house made her feel as though she had done something wrong. She sat by the hearth in the living room driving a Barbie Doll over the bricks in a dump truck. I was reading Darwin. Occasionally I read short passages aloud to Melinda, and she seemed to appreciate this.

  "Nature red in tooth and claw," I told her, "is only one way to look at it."

  The principal difference between children and adults, I believe, is that children accomplish their greatest feats with little or no fanfare. Melinda looked at me strangely, then stood up and took five careful steps, and then sat down with a bump.

  I called out to Lena, "She walked!"

  "What?" Lena appeared at the door in her white robe.

  "Melinda walked. She took five steps, from there to here."

  A doubtful look crossed Lena's face, which was slowly regaining its original shape and becoming easier for me to read. "Are you positive?" she asked.

  Melinda looked gravely back and forth between us, apparently fearing she'd made another unknown mistake.

  "Oh, honey, we're proud of you," Lena said, crossing the room to pick her up. Melinda's knees spread automatically to straddle Lena's hip, and as she kissed the top of the baby's head my throat grew tight, seeing how right this looked. Lena was a mother waiting to happen.

  Both Lena and Melinda were asleep by the time the MacElroys arrived, which was probably just as well. Melinda might have been expected to give a repeat performance, and Lena's face would have given away the nature of our catastrophic weekend. I didn't tell them the whole story, only that Lena wasn't feeling well. There would be time later to go into it. For now, I didn't want to dampen the thrill of Melinda's having walked. They did not doubt my word for a minute, nor did they seem disappointed that they weren't there to witness it. They were unconditionally elated. So was Melinda. She collapsed groggily into her mother's arms, a warrior weary from battle.

  I fell into bed beside Lena with similar relief. Our house was our own again. We were ourselves.

  "What I really think," Lena said suddenly, long after I'd turned out the light, "is that having children is the most normal thing in the world. But not for us, because we're not in a normal situation. I haven't been facing up to it, but really, I could go at any time, and it wouldn't be fair to saddle you with that kind of responsibility."

  "Don't think about what's fair to me," I said. "Think of what you want."

  "I am," she said. "This is what I want." She turned over and faced me in the darkness. "You are."

  The light from the window behind Lena outlined the curve of her cheek with a silver line, like a new moon. I felt a strangeness in my chest, as though the muscles of my heart had suffered a thousand tiny lacerations and were leaking out pain.

  "You're sure?" I asked.

  "I'm sure."

  I pulled Lena into my arms and held her tightly, thinking of strange things: of diatomaceous earth and insects and the choices we make, and of eggplants, purple and bright in the sun.

  Quality Time

  MIRIAM'S ONE AND ONLY DAUGHTER, Rennie, wants to go to Ice Cream Heaven. This is not some vision of the afterlife but a retail establishment here on earth, right in Barrimore Plaza, where they have to drive past it every day on the way to Rennie's day-care center. In Miriam's opinion, this opportunistic placement is an example of the free-enterprise system at its worst.

  "Rennie, honey, we can't today. There just isn't time," Miriam says. She is long past trying to come up with fresh angles on this argument. This is the bland, simple truth, the issue is time, not cavities or nutrition. Rennie doesn't want ice cream. She wants an angel sticker for the Pearly Gates Game, for which one only has to walk through the door, no purchase necessary. When you've collected enough stickers you get a free banana split. Miriam has told Rennie over and over again that she will buy her a banana split, some Saturday when they have time to make an outing of it, but Rennie acts as if this has nothing to do with the matter at hand, as though she has asked for a Cabbage Patch doll and Miriam is offering to buy her shoes.

  "I could just run in and run out," Rennie says after a while. "You could wait for me in the car." But she knows she has lost; the proposition is half-hearted.

  "We don't even have time for that, Rennie. We're on a schedule today."

  Rennie is quiet. The windshield wipers beat a deliberate, ingratiating rhythm, sounding as if they feel put-upon to be doing this job. All of southern California seems dysfunctional in the rain: cars stall, drivers go vaguely brain-dead. Miriam watches Rennie look out at the drab scenery, and wonders if for her sake they ought to live someplace with ordinary seasons--piles of raked leaves in autumn, winters with frozen streams and carrot-nosed snowmen. Someday Rennie will read ab
out those things in books, and think they're exotic.

  They pass by a brand-new auto mall, still under construction, though some of the lots are already open and ready to get down to brass tacks with anyone who'll brave all that yellow machinery and mud. The front of the mall sports a long row of tall palm trees, newly transplanted, looking frankly mortified by their surroundings. The trees depress Miriam. They were probably yanked out of some beautiful South Sea island and set down here in front of all these Plymouths and Subarus. Life is full of bum deals.

  Miriam can see that Rennie is not pouting, just thoughtful. She is an extremely obliging child, considering that she's just barely five. She understands what it means when Miriam says they are "on a schedule." Today they really don't have two minutes to spare. Their dance card, so to speak, is filled. When people remark to Miriam about how well-organized she is, she laughs and declares that organization is the religion of the single parent.

  It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Miriam is faithful about the business of getting each thing done in its turn, and could no more abandon her orderly plan than a priest could swig down the transubstantiated wine and toss out wafers like Frisbees over the heads of those waiting to be blessed. Miriam's motto is that life is way too complicated to leave to chance.

  But in her heart she knows what a thin veil of comfort it is that she's wrapped around herself and her child to cloak them from chaos. It all hangs on the presumption that everything has been accounted for. Most days, Miriam is a believer. The road ahead will present no serious potholes, no detour signs looming sudden and orange in the headlights, no burning barricades thrown together as reminders that the world's anguish doesn't remain mute--like the tree falling in the forest--just because no one is standing around waiting to hear it.

  Miriam is preoccupied along this line of thought as she kisses Rennie goodbye and turns the steering wheel, arm over elbow, guiding her middle-aged Chevy out of the TenderCare parking lot and back onto the slick street. Her faith has been shaken by coincidence.

  On Saturday, her sister Janice called to ask if she would be the guardian of Janice and Paul's three children, if the two of them should die. "We're redoing the wills," Janice reported cheerfully over the din, while in the background Miriam could hear plainly the words "Give me that Rainbow Brite right now, dumb face."