The Crossings

by Deborah Larsen

  She thought of Chippewa Falls. Soon water pipes would be freezing and bursting both there and in Saginaw and in Idaho City. It would happen to people who could least afford pipe heaters and who certainly could not afford plumbers.

  While the depressed set up their light boxes and wept and felt claustrophobic in their IKEA-furnished co-ops, Sophie was in her chair outside on a warm and clear morning. She heard rumblings: salt trucks in St. Paul were at this moment making their way down an avenue on which both Sophie and Garrison Keillor had—at different times and separately—resided. Garrison Keillor, unlike the poor of St. Paul, could at least get out of there when he felt like it and write columns while sitting in San Francisco.

  Snowplows were breaking down in Omaha. People were stranded in cars in Buffalo. A friend who was simply retrieving the Harrisburg Patriot fell on black ice on her front stoop and broke both thin wrists. Sophie, in her pajamas, was reading about Charles Darwin in the sun.

  And Ted had actually e-mailed. First was his usual complaint: “WHY WON’T YOU TEXT ME? I hate frigging e-mails.” (She had already written him: “I don’t often text. Love, Sophie.”)

  “S.,” he had continued, “what’s the deal. Are you ready to come back? As for me, besides this crappy weather, I have strep or at least I think I do.” And three minutes later a text: “Thick yellow exudates are hanging from my uvula.” Like toy slime, Sophie imagined.

  Her momentary unease came, of course, from a feeling of guilt, something she had wrestled with all her life. How could she be happy when other people were miserable?

  Well, she could. Now, toward what she assumed was the beginning of the end of her life, she said certain things to herself. Such as: you cannot treat Ted’s exudates; you cannot fix everybody’s frozen water pipes.

  The very phrases stayed her sliding spirits. What couldn’t a good phrase do. In roughly the time it would take to readjust a silk skirt blowing around her legs in a wind, she shifted her thinking.

  Relative good cheer came back to her. She opened her book.

  She could write back to Ted and tell him to get away from the mid-Atlantic (which he would never do). Instead, she would suggest that he hurry up and get himself to one of those fancy doctors on Wisconsin Avenue in Friendship Heights.

  If Ted took her advice and went to have his throat treated, Sophie imagined a doctor opening the examining-room door to reveal Ted pacing. Dr. Miro—let us call him that—was in for a big surprise. Ultimately this fancy physician would be confounded, astounded, to see just how truly fancy a patient he had on his hands. Life was full of good jokes.

  God’s Face… a Blur

  Was it a good joke or a bad joke that Charles Darwin had turned up behind the door in her own suite of rooms? Sophie was not fancy, but Charles was fancy. Fancy exotic, with underlying floral notes of the dangerous unknown. What would this do to her?

  Though she was no longer a church-goer, she still had a strong sense that there was “something else,” though she wasn’t sure what to call it. Why did anything exist?

  She considered some of the scriptural texts she had heard from her childhood forward. Somehow she had picked up what had become a life-long habit of echoing certain phrases she admired. She would read a passage aloud, then repeat certain phrases. A one-woman Greek chorus.

  1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

  Chorus: …the face of the deep. . . .

  …while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. . . .

  Chorus: …swept over the face of the waters. . . .

  3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

  Chorus: And God saw that the light was good; 2

  After the light came the division of waters, the dry land, grass, herbs, trees, seeds, and fruits. Then came the “two great lights” and the stars. Winged fowls and whales appeared; then came creeping things and beasts and cattle and, finally, Adam and Eve. God and God’s human story-tellers in Genesis were for the young Sophie better than Walt Disney and all those moving paintbrushes.

  And then there was Job:

  38 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:

  2 ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

  3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

  4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.

  5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?

  6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone

  7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? 3

  Embarrassing. Embarrassing to think of these passages and to think of Darwin at the same time. Stuff and nonsense, wouldn’t Darwin have thought, that God should be Lord of the foundations of the earth and should have gone around measuring and sinking bases and laying cornerstones.

  Would Charles in private have said stuff and nonsense? Maybe: hadn’t he had the redundancy notion about God up against the earth long before Hawking and Dawkins? Or did he have the redundancy notion? Sophie wasn’t positive. Better keep reading, she thought, to make sure you see what he actually thought. Or to see what he thought he thought.

  What’s more, she really did not know Charles Darwin the man, the person, the human being. But she was drawn to someone who appeared to love his wife and his dog and who had perfectly organized specimen cabinets. The ones into which she had never closely looked.

  If she opened certain cabinets, what would fly out? Something that would squawk, something with talons, some sort of mockingbird? Maybe an Elegant Trogon would fly out—the one that sometimes nested in the Santa Ritas and, people reported, barked like a dog.

  The Elegant Trogan might bark: “Nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing else.”

  If she were honest, she would have to say that in some sense she had lost her grip on the beloved texts of her girlhood and that she could no longer imagine God. The face of the deep, the face of the waters—yes; those she could see. The velocity of waves, their foam tinges, their blues and grays, the way they collapsed—she could conjure up all of that.

  But God’s face. A blur. A blur, like the wings of a hummingbird in flight. If God is an abstraction, a blur, a force only—how could you really muster up any love for that. Sophie needed metaphor, if not a precise face.

  This was her crisis: for years she had lived with a blur. She didn’t want to live with it anymore.

  What then? Killing off the blur—didn’t that mean that there was nothing? No sacred order at all. What if there was nothing personally endearing on the move in the universe?

  What if the cosmos was not somehow shot through with lasting meaning or importance? What if it was absurd? Wasn’t suffering absurd? What did you do—grin and bear it? Some people did: those smiling depressives. Or those unwitting saints who simply worked hard to make this life better for people.

  Others got out the pistol and ball. Or got out the Dewars a thousand too many times. Or their lives were Netflix. Or they trudged through life with sore hearts. Thinking of this Sophie felt for people—“Ah, humanity,”— all walled in, bricked up. She also felt for herself.

  Yi, quit that. You’re beginning to sound like an opera. Ditch the Darwin, she thought. Go walk the sand paths or volunteer somewhere.

  And that would also be Ted’s advice if he knew what she was doing. You’re going to start in on science, now? He would light a cigar.

  She could see his e-mail, if he were to stoop to write another one: “Mama Sophia—for Christ’s sake.” She could hear him say it; he had perfec
t enunciation: you could always hear the “t” when he said “Christ.” His e-mail would continue, “Ditch the Darwin. Now it’s science. It’s always something with you. Good God. Just go get some exercise to bind your anxieties. Write a goddamn mystery. And besides, you’re alone too much. Why don’t you text more by the way. Aren’t there any cowboys down there to pal around with? I wonder if that isn’t why you moved out west in the first place, pulled what my shrink would call a geographic. Underneath the mystery you want to write are cowboys. Real men with effective lassos under that big sky. There are a few more like Richard out there—maybe. None of those east-coast effetes ever appealed to you, did they? Anyway, ditch the Darwin. Write your mystery. You were a poor professor most of your life. You served your time. Write a mystery. Stick some cowboys in. Make a few bucks for a change. And I’ll say one more thing: you’re still wearing that wedding ring. Is that your armor? Ditch that as well.”

  His imaginary e-mail was right. She was alone too much.

  “Another thing.” She imagined him typing. “Did anyone ever tell you that you are way too attached to the printed page? Paper? Think about it. One more thing. If there are some real men out west who don’t belong to someone else at this stage, real guys with grit and a sense of honor—do you think they’re going to sit still for, take a back seat to Darwin? Jesus.”

  Her Mother’s Daughter

  All right, she was alone too much. She needed company.

  But she would not ditch the Darwin. She was her mother’s daughter, though not as much as she sometimes wished to be.

  That mother who had developed a malignant brain tumor had also struggled up out of her hospital bed and gone to the bathroom to wash her hair. She wanted to be presentable, attractive.

  Sophie had walked into the room and seen Consuelo at the sink. “Mother, what are you doing?”

  “She’s washing her hair,” her mother said. “What does it look like?” She stood up straight. Water dripped down her face. Nevertheless, her stance had the tenacity and authority of a lion tamer’s.

  “You mean you’re washing your hair?”

  “Yes,” she said defiantly. “NO,” she said. “NO NO NO. SHE’S the one who’s doing it.” Then she looked repentant and said, “Don’t worry. It’s all right.”

  A few seconds later she said, “What does it like look like I’m doing?”

  That was before her speech deteriorated to the point where she called a horse an “elephant’s dog.” She had been trying to make bedside conversation with a friend who loved riding.

  Sophie would not ditch the Darwin. She would look right at the widespread anxiety he subliminally caused people. He was a problem—an unwitting confuser of persons. He was her elephant’s dog in a circus that had come to town. After the 4th of July, the circus might not pack up and leave. Where would her already shaky faith in “something more” be then?

  She imagined the town—her inner town—growing increasingly anxious and suspicious. When would the circus, its grotesqueries and mutants—the elephant’s dog, the huge-footed clowns—leave? The clowns had been seen on bar stools in two taverns. The clowns had been caught eyeing the town’s daughters and sons.

  The thought of the elephant’s dog, of her anxiety about Darwin, made her think of the dog, Polly. She went ahead in her reading to find out more about her.

  But the dog most closely associated with my father was the above-mentioned Polly, a rough, white fox-terrier. She was a sharp-witted, affectionate dog; when her master was going away on a journey, she always discovered the fact by the signs of packing going on in the study, and became low-spirited accordingly. She began, too, to be excited by seeing the study prepared for his return home. She was a cunning little creature, and used to tremble or put on an air of misery when my father passed, while she was waiting for dinner, just as if she knew that he would say (as he did often say) that “she was famishing.” My father used to make her catch biscuits off her nose, and had an affectionate and mock-solemn way of explaining to her before-hand that she must “be a very good girl.” She had a mark on her back where she had been burnt, and where the hair had re-grown red instead of white, and my father used to commend her for this tuft of hair as being in accordance with his theory of pangenesis; her father had been a redbull-terrier, thus the red hair appearing after the burn showed the presence of latent red gemmules. He was delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the attentions she required, such as to be let in at the door, or out at the verandah window, to bark at “naughty people,” a self-imposed duty she much enjoyed. She died, or rather had to be killed, a few days after his death. 4

  —Francis Darwin

  Urhund

  The white fox-terrier originally belonged to Henrietta, the Darwins’ daughter; but when Henrietta married and left home, Polly had attached herself to Charles. Emma wrote about how a litter of puppies had once been taken away from the dog and that subsequently Polly took the master of the house to be her “puppy”—a big one.

  Sophie began to daydream about Polly. She looked back at what Francis had written. The terrier “died, or rather had to be killed, a few days after” Charles’s death. She was buried under an apple tree.

  Henrietta said that Mr. Huxley (T.H.) had done a “geological skit” or sketch of Polly. Sophie hoped that it still existed: it did, and she found it amidst published family letters. The drawing has German labels and appears more evolutionary or morphological than strictly geological. Sophie discovered that it humorously referenced some now infamous sketches done by Ernst Haeckel, the comparative anatomist.

  Polly appears, charmingly, at the bottom of the sketch:

  5

  Polly. The primal dog.

  Pop-ups in the Book of the Desert

  Sophie had not thought she would be invited to join a group that gathered to read and to discuss ideas. One favorite occupation was to discuss certain articles in The New Yorker. How strange. A little comical. Rich. A surprise, a paper sculpture: a pop-up in the book of the desert.

  She thought she should get out of her chair and out of the house more. Do it. Get up. Move. Get out. Go.

  When she walked into the first meeting, there was Michael—the Michael she had met at Santos’s dinner party. He smiled at Sophie and raised his eyebrows.

  A few of them evidently knew each other. When the group broke up and most of them had walked out of the door, she heard a man call to Michael: “Here you are again, you, a pastor or a priest or a minister or clergy or whatever you were, or are—”

  “Assistant clergy,” Michael said.

  “You, Michael—the assistant clergy—here you are again, joining some of us who are atheists and agnostics.” The people who were left in the room, including Michael, laughed.

  “I like hanging with atheists and agnostics,” Michael said. “As a few of you know. I love some of them more than I love some clergy.”

  Outside, Michael was waiting for her. He extended his hand and Sophie shook it. He said, “Good morning. It’s Sophie.”

  “Yes. Michael. You’re—clergy.”

  He smiled. “Sort of. It appears that way.”

  “In which church do you serve? I was thinking—just thinking—of attending a service somewhere. I’m not really a church-goer anymore, but—”

  “Ah. It doesn’t particularly matter about where I serve or served. But you might try an Episcopal church. Or a synagogue.”

  He was maybe sixty and balding, slightly overweight. The hair he did have left was askew with static electricity and though he continued to smile, he looked unspeakably weary. As if something was killing him. As if he had just stepped off an all-night train—the one from Moscow to Budapest? And what had happened on that train? Had there been murders? What had he witnessed?

  Why in the world wouldn’t he want her to visit his church? Though Sophie wanted to ask him a hundred questions, she refraine
d. She was trying, trying, in her older age, to practice tact of heart when she sensed someone did not want to be intruded upon or kept standing for a long conversation.

  He said, “It’s good you’re here.” He extended his hand again and when she took it he held it firmly in his own huge one—for just a moment. And then he headed toward a bicycle.

  In the evening Sophie added baby spinach to hot pasta, ladled some onto a plate and slid a poached egg on top. Yi, cooking for one. Get out the pan, run water into it, put the gas flame under the pan, get out another pan, pour in some olive oil and so on—all for herself? How she had loved cooking for Richard.

  She ate at the island counter and thought about the rich and various aspects of countries situated near the limits of the torrid zone. Wasn’t she now living somewhere near the limits of it? Did the upper boundary of the tropics run just south of her? Until now, The Tropic of Cancer was to Sophie little more than a phrase, a Henry Miller ramble that often degraded women. Latitude and longitude. Had she ever been taught about these? She wanted more science in her life. All kinds of science.

  After a supper in which she felt the sharp edges of her aloneness, she took her half-full wine glass with her and stepped out onto the back patio. An almost preternatural stillness filled the desert.

  The last tinges of ashy rose began to fade from the shadowy folds of the Santa Ritas. These mountains—more pop-ups in the book of the desert. Jagged and now pink. There was a saying in southern Arizona: “When the mountains turn pink, it’s time for a drink.”

  But what else was it time for. Anything else besides a drink?

  Later, she looked up her coordinates. “Where am I?” the geography website read, and it went on: “Certainly this is one of the most basic questions we can ask about ourselves.”