“Chaucer?” Laura had asked before the move.
“That’s right. Our house is on the corner of Third and Chaucer.” The corner of threes and old tales. Ed had imagined himself a soothsayer, reading the signs: There will be three chances and a host of strangers. Jung saw three as something nearly complete—nearly, but not quite. A baby or two will complete them.
Laura drops a teabag in a mug, sun on her lean face.
“I’m playing hooky so I can stay home with my sexy wife,” Ed says.
“I don’t believe that for a minute, Dr. Malinowski.” Still, she’s smiling when she sits down at the table, and she flips open the cover of one of the reports, years 1922–23. Her eyes scan the pages as she feigns reading. She turns to a spread of photos showing the teachers’ offices and sitting rooms. “Is that a taxidermied hawk?”
“Yes.” It was the first thing he noticed, too, a hawk coming down from flight, wings wide over a piano. “Maybe it was meant to be motivating.”
Laura laughs. “Is it still there?”
“I haven’t found any taxidermy. And most of the buildings in this report are condemned or gone.”
Laura reads with new interest. “Oh, God. The physician’s report—poor John Holland. He died from drinking indelible ink.” She turns the page. “The ranch produced eighty-three turkey eggs! And they had three geese. Look at all this—four hundred and ninety-two bunches of parsley? A ton of rutabagas? I didn’t even think rutabagas were real.”
“The ranch isn’t there anymore.”
“What about the choir?”
He shakes his head. The beading and painting and embroidery, the woodshops and metal-working—those activities are as absent as the farm and the ranch. Rooms that once were classrooms and studios now stand empty but for the residents. “It’s ironic, really,” he tells Laura. “The same ideological do-gooders who’re attacking our current circumstances claimed the hospital was exploiting patient labor back then. It was easier to disband the programs than to pay the patients more, so they just did away with everything.”
“But you knew that going in.”
“I didn’t know it was this bad.” Ed flips back to the list of teachers in the Industrial Department. “Look at their subjects—carpentry, printing, sewing, basket and hammock weaving, broom making. My patients would love to have the opportunity to do just one of those things.”
Laura runs her finger down the list. “They must be so bored.”
“They are, and the state won’t give me the money to hire teachers, so I’m thinking about putting some of the higher-functioning patients into leadership roles. Like Penelope. I could get her to do a reading group.”
“Oh, good. You’re going to get Penelope’s help. Genius move, Doctor.”
“Stop it, Laura.”
“No, I mean, I’m impressed. Nearly twelve hours without mention of her name? You do realize you were able to lullaby me to sleep with just your native war weapon last night, right? No hospital tales featuring our favorite damsel in distress. And here you are in the kitchen of your own home at”—she turns and looks at the clock on the stove—“nine a.m., and you’re just now bringing her up? I think it’s a new record.”
“She’s my patient.”
“She’s more than that.”
“She’s sixteen. She’s a kid, and she’s a ward of the institution I run, and she’s drawn the shortest fucking straw possible. Giving a shit doesn’t make me a bastard.”
Laura is quiet for a moment, and then she says, “I shouldn’t be jealous of your patients, Ed. You have to recognize the truth in that, at least.”
— —
An hour later, Ed knocks on the door of Laura’s studio. She resisted using it at first, insisting it was the baby’s room, but finally, she unpacked her canvases and easel and paints. Still, she painted the walls a child’s creamy yellow, and she keeps her supplies much tidier than she did in their old apartment, ready always to move. “I’m just borrowing the space until the baby comes.”
She doesn’t respond to his knock, and Ed opens the door to see her sitting on the stool at her easel, clouding a sky. She paints mostly landscapes, which helped convince him that the natural beauty of Montana would quiet her initial reservations about the move. The room is full of paintings inspired by the local scenery—the Elkhorn Mountains covered in snow, Mount Helena rising up in the middle of town, Prickly Pear Creek and Ten Mile, their cottonwoods flaring yellow in the fall—but she swears she likes none of them. “Too clean,” she says sometimes. “Too nice. They’re nothing more than pretty pictures, and the view can do that by itself.” She won’t let him take any to his office, won’t let him hang any in the house.
“Laura,” he says quietly.
“Go to work, Ed.”
He looks over her shoulder as the canvas’s sky transforms from blue to gray. The blue is still there, but as part of thunderclouds now. He’s always loved to watch her paint.
“I can’t paint storms here,” she says. “The blue always wants to come back.” She tips her paintbrush with black, swirls it with white on her pallete, returns.
Ed knows better than to touch her when she’s painting. “Would you stop for a minute?”
The sky grows darker, the thick anger of a summer storm, and then she raises her brush and drops it in a jar of turpentine. She turns to face him. There is blue paint in her hair, a tiny smudge on her right cheek.
Ed kneels in front of her. “I’m sorry I have to give the institution so much of my attention right now, and I know I’ve promised this before, but it won’t always be this way. When we get the funding figured out and I can get my proposal together, it’ll be better. I promise. And I have a solution in the meantime, a way for us to see each other more often and to put some of your worries to rest.” He is nervous as he speaks, torn. What he’s about to suggest may solve some of Laura’s concerns, but it may open even more—not just with Laura but with his staff and his patients and himself. Still, he knows Laura needs to see him make a real sacrifice. She needs more than stones. “What would you say to coming out once a week and teaching an art class to a group of patients? You know they need activities.”
She squints at him. “This feels like a trick, Dr. Malinowski.”
“Well, clearly, I’m manipulating you with invisible behavioral techniques, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in your best interest.”
She smiles. “I’ve never taught.”
“You’ll be a natural.”
“I know you’re just doing this to smooth things over. You’re going to regret it tomorrow morning.” He regrets it already. But she is standing and pulling him to his feet, wrapping her hand around the back of his neck, bringing her mouth to his. His desire supplants his misgivings, and he follows her to their bedroom, where they make love twice. He gives himself over to his family for the rest of the day—his wife and the child he’s sure they’re making. Like Laura said, regret waits until morning.
Chapter 3
— Laura —
I’ve taken a job at a little clothing store downtown. Just a couple of day shifts during the week. If the art class at Ed’s institution actually happens, I can easily work around it.
He doesn’t know I’m working, and I see no reason to tell him. He would see it as lowly, as he did my job at Sally’s back home, and I don’t want to have to defend what I love about working in a shop. I tried to explain it for two full years, and he never saw my work as anything more than a waste of time. “We don’t need the money,” he’d argue. “You should be home painting.”
I tried to tell him it was about the people—something he should’ve understood—but he still saw those people as beneath me. Or else he saw me as beneath them. “It’s not like you’re friends with the customers, Laura. They see you as a glorified servant.”
When he sold me on his new job in this place, he used the money as another bargaining chip: “You won’t have to work.” He said it again and again, as though work was the ha
rdest part of my life.
“I want to work,” I told him. “I like to work.”
He is too prideful for jobs in the service industry, and I suppose I’m too prideful to sit at home painting all day. I haven’t earned that life yet, and I am used to working. My mother worked through the beginning of her illness, and when both my parents were sick, they insisted it was a lesson for me in resilience and strength. “You’ll provide for yourself, Laura,” my father said. “Above all else.” He died a year after my mother. I was sixteen.
Plus, it’s lonely there, alone in that house.
I’ve opened my own checking account so Ed won’t question the deposits. The money sits there untouched, waiting for something.
The owner of the shop is an ex-dancer named Miranda. Rows of bangles on her wrists announce her movements, and she is always layered in scarves, even in the summer. She has little in common with Sally back in Michigan, but she reminds me of her all the same. The air of prestige that all clothing store owners seem to share. The insistence on quality and aesthetics. They have different styles but the same expectations.
I bought one dress here before I took the job—a pale yellow shift to wear to dinner on Ed’s and my anniversary. “You have good taste,” Miranda said when I brought the dress to the counter, and then after just a few minutes of conversation: “Would you like to work here?”
I am often the recipient of random gifts and favors from strangers. Sally’s offer came in a similar manner. I think I must wear my dead parents on my face, something forlorn and lost. I usually say no to the gifts and favors, but I take the job offers.
Miranda’s store is downtown on Last Chance Gulch, a street I didn’t believe existed until I saw the signs myself. This was a miners’ town, the last chance for many. Old kilns still hunker in the hills, shafts and tailings. I’m trying to paint these scenes, but they feel flat and contrived, as though the paint knows I’m a stranger.
The shop is familiar, at least.
The bell over the door chimes, and I look up to see a young man in this women’s clothing shop. He looks confused.
“May I help you?” I ask. The pub is three doors down, I imagine I’ll say. The sporting goods store is two blocks up, one over. He is handsome, with giant brown eyes, a couple days’ stubble, shaggy hair. Ed keeps everything tidy—hair and beard and body—and I’ve made myself forget that I once liked the stink and sloppiness of other men.
“My mother,” he says. “Is dead?”
“Oh. I’m so sorry. What do you need?”
“Clothes,” he says. “It’s open-casket.”
Sally taught me the questions to ask of customers, a different set for men than for women.
“What was her favorite color?”
“Blue.”
“That’s mine, too,” though I prefer yellow. “Do you know her size?”
He shakes his head, terrified.
“Do you know how tall she is? About how much she weighs?”
“Five-two. Barely a hundred pounds. She was tiny,” he says, holding a hand just below his shoulder. “Tiny.”
I’m familiar with tiny dead mothers. Mine didn’t have a casket.
I lead him to a rack of blue dresses halfway between matronly and sexy. I want his mother to be this way—laced around the edges yet slinky about the hips.
“Yes,” he says when I pull out a small. “That’ll fit her.”
I get him panty hose and apologize that we don’t carry shoes.
“They said her feet won’t show.” The feet are so important. How can we disregard them in death?
The shop feels cold, though the spring sun shines warm outside. I wrap this dead mother’s items in tissue paper and slide them gently into a bag.
“How much?”
“It’s on the house,” I tell him. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“No,” he says, “let me pay you.”
I shake my head in refusal, and he lingers for a moment.
“It’s all right,” I say. “Really.”
He thanks me quietly, a formality his mother likely taught him. When someone offers to pay, try to protest, but give in easy. Then the bell over the door is ringing, and he is gone.
I add up the purchase and circle the total on the receipt, write my name at the top. I get a twenty-five percent discount, and Miranda will take the money out of my next check. Buying a dead mother’s dress is a good use of the income I’m making here, and I imagine telling Ed how meaningful the job can be. I helped a man pick out his mother’s burial dress today, I would say. And I bought it for him. I made one piece of this painful moment in his life more bearable. I’d like to tell Ed. But I won’t.
— —
A week later, the same man comes in. He’s cleaned himself up, and the confusion is gone from his face.
I’m hanging new earrings on a rack. “Hello again.”
“Oh, good,” he says. “You’re working.” He walks straight to me, and I am suddenly nervous. His handsomeness is more pronounced today, and I can smell his aftershave, good and wholesome.
“I wanted to thank you for your help.” He hands me an envelope and then holds out his hand. “I’m Tim.”
“Laura.”
His hand is rough and callused, like that of my old boyfriend Danny, the firefighter Ed stole me from. Kind and strong, doting and a bit dumb, Danny was no match for Ed’s intellect and humor, his bravado and voice. Ed sang to me the first night we met, jumped onto the stage of the bar to sing with the band, to me. Poor Danny was gone in less than a week.
But I miss his hands sometimes.
“How are you holding up?” I ask Tim.
“All right,” he says, then shakes his head. “I’m surprised how unprepared we were, you know? I mean, she was sick for a long time. We knew she was dying. But then when she actually died—we didn’t know what to do.” He starts playing with a pair of earrings. “Sorry. That was probably a rhetorical question. I can’t answer those anymore, all the idle chatter and the how are yous. I actually answer now.”
“That’s probably good,” I say, remembering the same honesty after my parents died, my inability to smile and say, I’m fine. Thank you. Sometimes I wish it’d stayed. “Your bullshitting skills will come back soon enough,” I tell him. “Appreciate the honesty while you have it.”
He looks ready to ask me how I know, and I am ready to tell him, but the door chimes and an older woman walks in.
“Thank you,” he says again. “It was good to meet you, Laura.”
I watch him walk out, and I welcome my new customer. She needs a gift for her granddaughter, and we walk together through the store. I show her sweaters and necklaces and scarves. A pale pink taffeta skirt. A peasant blouse. But I am thinking about Tim’s face and hands and honesty.
Chapter 4
Penelope closes the door to Ed’s office and takes her regular seat in the chair on the left across from his desk. She keeps her journal open and her pencil in her hand. Ed knows she’ll take notes during their session, for use in all sorts of things—poems, songs, stories. “Do you ever just use them for yourself?” he asked her once.
“All the time, Dr. Ed. That’s why I write them down. The other stuff is auxiliary.”
“Most sixteen-year-olds don’t use the word auxiliary.”
“Most sixteen-year-olds don’t live in institutions.”
“Fair enough.”
She is always reminding him that she is disabled, and he is always forgetting.
Ed met several epileptic patients before Penelope, but their epilepsy was part of a greater diagnosis. Coupled with Down’s or severe retardation, seizures were just one more abnormal behavior in a life where abnormal was ordinary. But Penelope’s only diagnosis is epilepsy. Save for her above-average IQ and her love of old poetry, she is a perfectly normal teenager.
For the first several months of their individual sessions, they focused exclusively on the physical and emotional factors that seemed to predict Penelope’
s seizures. Physical: dehydration, lack of sleep, caffeine. Emotional: anxiety, sadness, frustration. Of the physical, they’d tackled dehydration and caffeine—water in place of coffee and soda. She keeps a jug with her most of the time. Regarding sleep, there is nothing they can do. She sleeps in a dormitory with twenty other patients, all mid-to-high-functioning but still noisy and animated through the night. There are no private rooms in Boulder. Sleep deprivation is part of the package.
They’ve tried to work on the emotional pieces, but those are trickier. Penelope has some grasp of the patterns to her anxiety and frustration, but even with most of the stimuli identified, there is no guaranteed way to avoid it. Her parents are her biggest triggers, and packages arrive from them nearly every week. The packages cause anxiety, and their absence causes even more. The girl’s sadness is mostly elusive, arriving and departing without warning. Penelope’s seizures are as frequent as they were before Ed’s arrival.
Today he’ll push something new. Jack Sorenson, a former colleague back in Michigan, recently sent him a paper on a study done with a group of high-functioning epileptics at Howell. Sorenson had designed individual behavioral models that required each patient to engage in valued activities previously avoided due to seizure activity. One patient was prescribed daily bicycle rides (a fond memory from his youth); another was given a job in the institution’s kitchen baking bread (something she’d done regularly for her family before the onset of epilepsy). Engagement in these activities supposedly gave patients the power to reframe and recontextualize their lives. “Nothing to put in the bank yet, but seizure activity is down in all but one case,” Sorenson wrote in his accompanying letter. “Worth a shot on your girl. Let me know how it goes. Still can’t believe you’re way the hell out there in Montana.”
Penelope looks around the office. Sun pours through the windows at Ed’s back, touching her arms and shoulders. He watches her eyes drift from his overfilled bookshelves to the filing cabinets to the wall where he’s hung three of Laura’s earlier paintings, work she did back in Michigan. A portrait of his father painted from a photo: Fred stares just past the frame, his cheeks gone jowly, his blue eyes bounding out of his wrinkled face. A slightly abstract painting of Ed’s mother at the stove in his childhood kitchen. The last is his favorite—the great oceanic shore of Lake Michigan where his family has a cabin. Simple lines focused more on the dunes and pebbles than the water. He grew up there, spent his summers wind-chapped and sunburned, hair bleached blond and arms sinewy as rope from all the swimming. He and Laura honeymooned there, too. Laura painted the shore for him as a wedding present.
The Behavior of Love Page 2