test

by test

  For a moment, she thinks he's going to go on holding on to the door of her car, but then his hands slide off and he backs up. She waits until he turns to start around the back and she jams her purse under the boxes of samples piled on the seat behind her. Her right hand turns the key and falls to the gear shift. Her left hand goes back to the steering wheel. She looks in the side view mirror. Over at the passenger door. Maybe he's rethinking his decision. Maybe he's offering her the chance to rethink hers. She looks out over the hood, seeing nothing. The idea that something is wrong with him that has nothing to do with gas cans or money has just occurred to her. My God, she thinks.

  But when the door on the passenger side opens, it's not the Indian she talked to. It's another one, a big teenage girl, big, maybe two hundred pounds in gray sweat pants and a maroon sweat shirt and a wide swath of hair that drapes to her hips. She is talking rapidly in a language that sounds like bird imitations as she opens the door, and then, gathering her hair and throwing it like the pelt of a large black animal over one shoulder, she pulls herself inside and wedges herself on the emergency brake between the seats. The back of her head is pressed against the roof, and her shoulder is inches from Sarah's cheek, a shoulder that is about the same size as Sarah's thigh. Before the blanket of

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  hair slides forward, Sarah gets a glimpse of her face: flat, fierce, and bruised with pimples, unhappy looking. She calls out sharply and another Indian, a boy about the same age but half the weight, with quick, deer-like eyes, climbs in and slams the door. In the rearview, Sarah sees no sign of the old man.

  The big girl rotates her head toward Sarah, staring out black-eyed at her through a crack in the drape of hair.

  "What are you doing?" she snaps. "Go."

  Sarah puts it into first, apologizing when her hand knocks the big girl's leg. She pulls out of the drive-up lane, turns left and left again. At the corner she stops and leans forward to see past the girl's hair for traffic. It is starting to rain. The boy presses back in his seat on the other side as if he does not want to be seen, and this fact, that he appears to be unhappy about being in the car, that he looks almost as if he's the one who has been bullied into it, is reassuring to Sarah. She decides to ignore the feeling that something odd is going on between the two teenagers and that they are wrapped up in it and giving every indication of not wanting to deal with her. It is, after all, her car.

  "Sorry about the boxes in the back," she says. "I just started this job last month and until I know all my samples, I have to carry them with me. It's not a bad job, though," she says. She wants to talk. "All I have to do is take samples of sandstone around to the galleries to see if they want to order it for their displays and table tops, that kind of thing. It's pretty easy, I guess. At least I don't have to dress up."

  The big girl leans forward, trying to make room, her hand gripping a Kleenex in a fist pressed to her knee. Sarah waits while a faded red Ford truck crosses the intersection. There are children in the back, peering between the wooden sideboards, sucking on popsicles and holding a blue plastic tarp over their heads to keep off the rain.

  It occurs to Sarah that the big girl has been crying and is close to tears again.

  "So. You guys run out of gas?"

  The big girl lifts so that Sarah can shift into first. As they turn onto the main street, it begins to really come down. Sarah turns on the wipers. She hears the boy on the other side rolling up his window and reluctantly she rolls up her own. The air in the car is very close. Mixed in with the smell of the big girl's hair, a musky, animal smell so thick it's almost a touch, she can smell the bag of her mother's soiled bed sheets in the far back. She has been meaning to take them to the laundry, let the people there deal with them, but she wishes now she had just thrown them out. "Sorry about the smell," she says, as she slows down in front of the gas station and puts on the blinker. "My mother's been sick."

  "What are you doing?" The big girl has braced herself on the dash.

  "I'm going to the gas station." Sarah looks at her and leans forward, trying to see around her to the boy. "Don't you guys need to buy a gas can?"

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  "A gas can?" The big girl hits her forehead on the mirror, knocking it askew. The boy reaches for the dashboard and pulls himself forward.

  "Our baby boy died last night." When Sarah looks past the black curtain of hair, she sees a face as white as the moon. "We need to go back to St. Mary's Hospital for the release papers," he says. "We forgot to sign them. We were bringing my dad back to the hospital and we ran out of gas."

  Sarah turns off her blinker and drives past the gas station. Without knowing it, she has her right hand on the girl's arm, her fingers curled into the blanket of hair draped over it, lost in the black. She has nothing she knows how to say. She wants to tell them she is sorry, but she is always saying she is sorry lately. Sorry to everyone, for everything. Sorry, sorry. Even when she doesn't care one way or the other. And though she does care this timecertainly she cares, my God, she can feel it pinching and swelling in her throatwhat difference would it make to say it aloud? Sorry for the mess, sorry for the bother She's always apologizing. Why? Because she has to. Why? Because. She drives several blocks without really knowing she is driving, before she realizes she does not know what hospital they're talking about. She's never heard of St. Mary's. The only hospital she knows is Holy Cross, where she takes her mother, who has Alzheimer's, for tests. She wants to tell them this. She wants to tell them she knows what hospitals are like. She looks at the big girl and sees that her eyes and mouth are pressed shut, her whole face shining. The boy is leaning against the door, holding the handle. They are half her age, but they are depending on her to shut up and get them there now, they are trusting the fact that they have said enough, that despite being a white person, she must be competent enough to at least get them there without making them explain that, too. They probably know where it is by heart. They probably know it better at this moment than they know who they are anymore or what they are doing in a car that smells like stone sealer and soiled sheets. "I don't know where the hospital is." It comes out in a burst, like a confession, almost a wail.

  But here is something they can fix, something they have the answer for. She keeps asking "Which left? The next one? You mean here? At this light?" and they say yes or no and point out the streets. The rain has stopped and they have opened their windows to let in air. They are all three craning forward, leaning into each other, the girl's forehead nearly touching the mirror, the boy holding onto the dash. They are looking younger by the minute, too young to know enough to cry, too young to believe something this bad could happen to them. There's an urgency, as if what has happened hasn't yet, as if it is there still ahead before them, waiting for them to change it. When the entrance sign to the hospital comes into view, they point and half shout it out. Sarah puts on her blinker.

  "Shit! They're not there!"

  "Where? Who?" cries Sarah. "Is this the wrong place?" But the big girl is

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  talking in Indian and the boy is staring up at the building, his liquid black eyes blank, the muscles around his mouth working. Sarah drives through the parking lot and pulls up to the emergency entrance door beneath an overhang.

  "I'm not sure what's going on," she says, but the big girl and the boy have already left. They are running up the ramp to the door.

  Sarah leans over and pulls their door closed. The hospital is flat-topped three-story, small for a hospital, and covered with some kind of dark vine that has managed to crack through the cement skirt surrounding the building. On the second and third floors, air conditioning units poke their backsides out the windows, and where the vines have parted below the casements, Sarah can see yellow stains. Inside the glass doors are a gurney and wheelchairs folded in a corner and beyond that a metal handrail and a black rubber mat leading up a ramp into a pale blue hallway. She can imagine what it's like inside. She realizes the wipers are still going and turns
them off. She pulls out into the parking lot, turns the car around so that she will be facing the exit and returns to the same place but on the far side of the emergency lane. After a moment, she turns off the ignition.

  She leans back to breathe in the smell of the rain-washed pavement, and catches the smell from the back seat again. There's probably a dumpster behind the building, but if they come back while she's gone, they may think she's left them. Besides, doesn't she have a right to carry dirty sheets in her car if she wants? She can't afford buying new ones for her mother every week. What they need is a washing machine. She has one in her apartment in California, but her mother has always done laundry kneeling on a pillow beside the tub in her attic, drying the wash on clothesline strung from the low rafters. "Don't tell me I'm getting too old for work," she would mutter, her rump jiggling against the tub, her voice striking the porcelain. "Besides, if I bought one of those things, you'd go to school every morning smelling like a damn piece of machinery. You and your little sisters don't want that, do you?" No, Sarah had thought at sixteen, slouched against a steamer trunk, flipping angrily through a Vogue. We want to smell like moldy insulation. Now, of course, the debate over modernizing is moot. Her mother wouldn't know what a washer and dryer looked like now, let alone how to turn them on. Sarah's mother is in bad shape. When Sarah first came home, thinking that her sisters were exaggerating, that her visit would be only temporary, she found every inch of the attic strung with clothesline, the place like walking into a ruined game of cat's cradle. The laundry turned out to be down in the garage, several weeks' worth hidden in the back seat of her mother's old station wagon, the smell like something dead when Sarah opened the door. And that was only the start of what she's found since. She leans her head back and closes her eyes, then pulls her list of clients' names out from under the boxes in the back. She is hoping for a sale today. When she first took the stone job, she saw herself pulling down contract after contract. She saw herself

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  coming home from the galleries to make phone calls and write up orders, too busy to even think. But although hiring Mrs. Andrews to look after her mother has been a godsend, her job, it turns out, is a mistake. She's no good at selling. She talks too much, for one thing. She keeps bringing up personal problems, they keep spilling out of her at the wrong timea weakness she doesn't remember having before she moved back home with her motherand people forget why she's standing in their gallery holding a thirty-pound box of samples. Sarah does not want to talk about her problems, especially with her clients, but she forgets. At one gallery, a place full of Mexican ironwork and Guatemalan textiles and dried flower arrangements, she ended up sitting at the owner's insistence on a $10,500 bed in the display room, trying not to get the Navajo blanket wet while the woman ran in the back office to get Kleenex. She looks at her watch10:00, plenty of timethen raises her head to look over at the emergency entrance. It is not much of a hospital. It looks worn down, almost grimy. It is probably the one all the local Indians use.

  Sarah stares at the dashboard and then back at her list. She has recently begun to have nightmares about driving her mother to the cemetery, of circling a cul-de-sac in a wealthy suburb, looking for a pair of iron gates that have vanished. Sarah doesn't need a shrink to analyze it. On bad days, she knows she's going to be relieved when it's over In her mother's lucid moments, which occur only rarely, mostly when Sarah is unprepared for them, even her mother has admitted it. Sarah sometimes suspects that even Mrs. Andrews will be relieved, despite her heavily starched speeches about God's will and the personal rewards of helping people. Although Sarah usually comes home to a fairly tranquil scene nowadays, when she drives off to work she often imagines Mrs. Andrews luring her mother into the basement and then jamming the door with a kitchen chair. Mrs. Andrews in front of the TV set at the far side of the house, her orthopedic shoes off, her ears plugged with cotton, the volume on high.

  This is not true, of course; Mrs. Andrews has come from the day-care agency with the highest recommendations. When things get crazy, she is quick to remind Sarah that she has handled people like Sarah's mother for over thirty-two years. Besides, if Mrs. Andrews did not want the job, she could say so and leave. She could take her money and go. Still, there are times when Sarah watches Mrs. Andrews folding herself stiffly into the taxi at the end of a day and can't imagine the poor old woman doing anything else but rolling her eyes all the way home, panting with the relief of being freed. Sometimes Sarah can see herself at the funeral doing the same thing. Other times she can see herself bawling her eyes out. She has imagined her mother's funeral so often and in so many different ways lately that she knows when it finally happens, whether she cries or not, she will probably not be able to feel it for a while.

  Sarah raises her head, wondering what she is feeling now. She squeezes her eyes shut and then opens them wide. What in the world is she doing? As if she

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  thinks that for everyone all deaths are equal? An infant or a mother, one no less than another, all of them ending the same way, in a kind of numb relief, a rough-and-tumble circus of the emotions that suddenly stops, with nothing? She can feel the blood rush to her face. She crushes the list and throws it under the seat. "Wake up," she hisses through her teeth. And when she looks over at the hospital, as if on cue, she sees the big girl coming down the emergency hallway towards the entrance at a near run, blasting the doors apart with both hands.

  The big girl stops short, her mouth drops open and her husband blunders into her from behind. He is holding an enormous vinyl pocketbook and he steps back to brace the door for a rigid-looking old woman in a brown sweater coming behind him. Sarah guesses it must be a relative, his mother, perhaps, or an aunt, and she leans over to the passenger window, waving. "Here I am." The big girl takes the old woman by one elbow and the boy takes her by the other and, nearly lifting her off her feet, they hurry across the emergency lane towards the car. Sarah glances at the back seat. She'll have to re-pile the sample boxes to make room or dump them in the parking lot and come back for them later, but before she can get out, the big girl climbs in and then the boy, handing the pocketbook to the old woman and then pulling her in onto his lap. Sarah's too surprised to suggest anything. Everyone leans towards Sarah, sucking in, and the boy manages to get the door shut. It is a very tight fit.

  "They've taken him," says the big girl. She is out of breath. "She signed the release paper and they took him."

  "I had to sign it," says the old woman in a shrill voice. "You weren't there. How was I to know you'd run out of gas?" She is clutching the dash with one hand and her huge pocketbook with the other, looking in the direction they will go next, her face inches from the windshield. When she turns, Sarah is shocked. She is withered in the face. The eyes remind Sarah of her own mother's eyes, black as raisins pushed deep into cookie dough. With difficulty Sarah gets past the big girl's knee to the key.

  "Where do you need to go?"

  "She thinks they took him to the funeral home," says the big girl.

  "They did take him to the funeral home," snaps the old woman. "Swan's Funeral Home. I remember. That's what they told me."

  "Okay," says the boy. "Let's go there. Oh, God," he cries, his voice leaping. "I forgot to ask. I don't know where Swan's is."

  "You what?" The big girl rotates her head, aiming the "what" like an arrow.

  "I know where it is," says Sarah quickly. "I think it's just up the block." She pulls out to the street and asks if it's clear. The boy tells her it is, but he is so crushed by his wife and the old woman that he probably can't turn his head to look. She leans forward over the wheel. All she can see is the side of the big girl's face, a flat boulder outcropping veiled in black, and beyond that, the old