“Pamela Clare, I hope you’re not about to push one of those matchmaker sites.” My circle meant well, and their suggestions had been coming thick of late: did I know about suchandsuch a swing dance club? Or that soandso had a widower cousin to whom I could be introduced? It had been three years, and barely that.
“Oh please,” Pam said. “You’re matchless.” Pammie had a way with words that I doubted most people noticed. She liked to pause before rebutting, measuring precisely, and that built the illusion of soft-spokenness.
I gave a theatrical bow. “I really don’t need any of this,” I said, indicating the machines. They were so small now. “I hardly use the one at home,” I reminded Pam. The one she had written her high school essays on. Frank had been so excited buying it. He was mildly dyslexic and here was a machine that knew how to spell.
“That thing?” Pam grinned. “A shoebox has as much oomph.”
“It’s only ten years old.”
Pamela, luckily, did not inherit her mother’s barking laugh; hers trilled.
Together, we selected a computer.
At the register, I attempted to pay. Pamela rolled her eyes—the strange and green-flecked blue of vacation brochure oceans—and for a moment that made her look about twelve.
“It’s your birthday, Lida. We want to do this for you.” Every present is a kind of reflection, laying bare the giver’s hopes. So this was Pam’s payback for the flute, the oil pastels, the microscope, the chemistry set. At least she believed me up for it, never one of those tizzy widows, unequal to the challenge of setting a digital clock. Pamela carried the box to the car. She set the machine up at my desk. I was amazed. She only consulted the manual a handful of times. She taught me. This is how you fire it up. This is how you go online. We met her husband downtown for dinner. They didn’t let me pay for that either.
And then the evening found me—overfull of starch and chocolate—alone again in the townhouse. How absurd that I was the sole occupant of these six rooms, that I’d chosen the paint myself, that I had neighbors on either side instead of our vast yard where Frank had waged war on dandelions. But I’d been right to situate myself here. There was something to be said for a thriving neighborhood. On good days it felt a very fine thing to navigate the boutiques and cafés; on bad, the noise meant I was less alone. I stowed the Styrofoam shell of leftover paella in the fridge and went online so I could tell Pammie tomorrow that I had used her gift. I hunt-and-pecked my own name. We’re a shallow species. Everyone tries their own names first when they’re learning to type. Shallow, but not wholly egomaniacal. With a foreign language, I love you is the first phrase we need.
I clicked and waited. The screen changed.
I’d once heard that a woman’s name should appear in print only three times: on the occasions of her birth, her marriage, and her death. Even Ma had pshawed that one. But I understood the principle. Anonymity was the sign of a life cleanly lived. I was relieved when my name yielded few results. My position on the board of Pamela’s high school. An out-of-date listing of area orthodontists.
I typed in my husband’s name. A bow hunter in Idaho, apparently, shared it and offered guide services. My own Frank, the Internet noted, had placed ninth in his age group in a half marathon five years ago. I re-read his obituary. A photo topped it, taken ages before diagnosis. His favorite red shirt. Hair two weeks overdue for the barber. Cancer of the stomach. In lieu of flowers, donations. Survived by his wife, his beloved niece. And that was all. No hint of his unshakable calm, no lists of the nonsensical sayings he used to avoid swearing. The way he placed his hands wrong for dancing. So much for new technology.
I made sure to capitalize Pamela’s name. One dated link appeared for Pamela Lusk, listing her as co-chair of Washington University’s French Conversation Hour. Onscreen, a prompt inquired if perhaps I meant Pamela Luck.
Pamela Claverie. She’d taken Blue’s name.
And there they were in the Post-Dispatch: Pamela and Blue dressed for their wedding, grinning in oversized matching sunglasses. And that horrid headline. Love Is Blind. Appalling taste on the part of the reporter; I’d written to the editor and got not a peep by way of response. To just say it folksy like that, local blind man weds guide dog trainer, like it was a joke, like Blue hadn’t made a tremendous success of himself as a lawyer, like Pam didn’t graduate magna cum laude. For that matter, the girl I’d hired to take the wedding pictures had done a much better job of it than the pro from the Dispatch, even if I didn’t crack the album often. It had been a hard day—happy, yes, but hard. What to do about the aisle walking with Frank gone. Our family pew so sparse. And I was lousy at the small talk after. The whole time terrified I’d accidentally say something to Blue along the lines of You look fantastic, dear or I’ll see you after the honeymoon.
I didn’t search for Barbra. I chose not to. It was my birthday, and I simply wasn’t equal to the work of seeing how thoroughly she had vanished.
Instead, Clarence. I didn’t know what I was hoping for. A clock, maybe, counting down. A diagram of his eventual end. See this prisoner. This is who he killed. This is how. This is a needle. This is sodium thiopental, this pancuronium bromide, this potassium chloride. My mouth felt dry as crackers. His name on my screen, unbounded by cell bars. Clarence Lusk, Clarence Lusk. My mouse hovered.
Some sorrow-sap society for prisoners’ rights designed the page. Words marched backwards across the top, from right to left: Be a Penfriend. It’s the Write Thing. Be a Candle to Those in Darkness. Periodically, the tops of each letter burst into flame. A U.S. map. Prisons labeled with black dots. I could probably recite the address. Intensive Supervision Unit, Stemble Complex, Arizona State Prison, Judith, Arizona. He’d negotiated for three letters to Pamela a year; I’d acquiesced, knowing from my clients’ gummed-up sticky smiles the binges brought on by prohibition. I never wanted Pamela curious about him. I clicked on Arizona, and then on Stemble. An alphabetized list of inmates loaded. I had to scroll down to the Ls. The page loaded. Inmate 58344.
Hello out there.
I would like to hear from you, whoever you are.
I’ll answer every letter I get unless you’ve found religion and want me to find it too. I get a lot of that here. If you aren’t on some mission I can’t guess why you would choose to read this, but I thank you for doing it. I’ve been on death row almost twenty years for my mistakes. It’s everything you’d think. Mixed bag boring, lonely and, truth be told, scary. You can’t do anything about that last bit, but letters are company and company passes time. Time’s not something I’ve got a lot of left, just so you know. I’m running low on appeals and hope. So write. You’re likely to get me for life without having to promise the same. I’m a good correspondent. I hope you can see I still have a sense of humor. I’ve got to have something, right? And I just admitted I am afraid, so you know I am honest at least. I’ll never claim I didn’t do the things I’ve done. I won’t ever ask you for more than letters. I have paper. I get stamps through commissary. Just send words.
—C. Lusk
Of course I wasn’t going to write him. What could I possibly say? Any letter I sent, he’d shred as soon as he saw my name.
Dear Inmate.
I’m glad you’re bored, glad you’re lonely, glad you’re scared.
From this chair I can see two pictures of your wife. There she is, moon-faced, cradling your newborn daughter, their wrists still encircled with identification bracelets. And there: Barbra garlanded and serene in wedding white, and I look so young beside her. She smiles. The moles on her cheekbone and below her lips give the expression an air of frozen asymmetry. Sometimes I turn that snapshot face down. She doesn’t know what she’s marrying and I can’t stand the grin.
I won’t tell you about the pictures of Pamela we have framed. You don’t have the right.
I caught her once cutting into candids. The pictures I could never display because you were in them too. Pamela excised you. Scissors flashed. She skimmed Barbra’s silho
uette. Little Pam made neat work of it. And I had to stop her; not because you were a human father, but because on film you touched my sister. Waist, shoulders, belly. You never could let her alone.
“He had long fingers,” Pammie asked, “didn’t he?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” I lied to Pamela, Clarence. Not for your sake, but because her own fingers were long. Girlish like yours, but without the roughness at the knuckles. Still are. You’d have no way to know.
“And he bit his nails,” Pam said.
So did she. Frank and I had painted hers with foul shellac, but no use. That day, she stopped. Your daughter has lovely hands. She visits a manicurist weekly.
Her manicurist knows what you did.
Pamela tells everyone. I raised her to. No good comes from keeping it secret and it isn’t us who should be ashamed.
Her husband knows. Blue. You should see how he loves her. And he’s a courteous man, intelligent. When we first met he said I sounded like the kind of person who would know the names of stars and constellations. I don’t. He pretended to be impressed by my elementary school mnemonic.
“My very energetic mother just served us nine pizzas. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.”
“But Pluto might not be a planet anymore,” Blue said. “Don’t they think it’s an asteroid?” That’s the kind of person he is. He knows about stars, he thinks about them, even though he’ll never in his life see one.
And I bet you never knew that about Pluto, how much the universe has changed since you’ve been locked away from it. One whole planet less. I’m grateful for it.
And I’m grateful for Pamela. God, am I ever grateful. She works outside. Muck and dog hair all over. Every day to get to work, Pam crosses state lines. She calls me sometimes if there’s traffic on the bridge.
“Guess what state I’m in, Lida.”
“I bet you’re above the Mississippi. I bet you’re neither here nor there.” It’s not much of a joke, but it feels like one by dint of repetition.
Clarence, you will never joke with her. You will never cross another state line. I know your case; one more appeal and you’ll die in Arizona.
And before you meet the needle, know this: for years Pam wore tinted contacts that hid the strange blue eyes she inherited from you. You should know what she says when asked about her father.
He isn’t a factor in my life.
You killed a math teacher. Perhaps you remember the basics. This is how you multiply: factor, factor, product. You are nothing that made her. You should know she grew up quiet. You should know she sleeps with blankets curled around her, burrito-style, and that it’s not you, but dark birds, that plague her dreamscape. You should know that she speaks French and reads Braille; that she swims laps daily; that she’s allergic to ketchup and can’t abide the taste of cough syrup; you should know that for two Halloweens running I dressed her as blind Justice.
4.
I am one of those women who sleep deeply and well. A rare thing, I am given to understand.
My Frank was a restless sleeper, always fussing with his pillows. Pammie too. And they both dreamed, regularly, as I seldom did. At breakfast they swapped night-narratives, Pamela’s dark, swooping birds, Frank’s missed appointments in cities with origami skylines. It seemed a sorry sort of conversation, more verbal tennis than proper connection, her dream volleyed and his lobbed back. But I held my tongue. I had nothing to contribute. As I’ve mentioned: I rarely dream.
(About Pammie’s recurring birds: I consulted a dream dictionary about them once, at the public library on my lunch hour. Birds as the harbingers of freedom, as a call to listen to one’s own sacred self. The book’s pages had the cheap feel of newsprint and I hoped that no one spied me consulting that piffle.)
I mention all this because I did dream on the night of my sixty-third. I dreamed that I had somehow forgotten to remove Pam’s braces. She came to the townhouse, carrying the graduation briefcase I had given her, the briefcase she never needed for her job outdoors with the dogs. She spoke the names of my tools lovingly, scalar, Mathieu pliers. She had an Italian accent. What she lifted from the case didn’t match her words. An old hex key. A typewriter ribbon. She lay her head in my lap and opened wide. I didn’t have my gloves. Pam’s brackets peeled away like Band-Aids and then—the instant before I woke—my finger slipped through her incisor.
It was still dark out. I turned on my bedside lamp and cinched my thick, spongy robe. I have always invested in good cotton. Robes, yes, and sheets. Frank liked to tease. Spendthrift, he called me, and sensualist. But he understood, my Frank. When bad nights came, my small, safe luxuries could sometimes help absorb them. I smiled. In Stemble, there would be no robes. And sheets. Your sheets must be rough as shingles. I cinched my robe against the thought, Clarence. It wouldn’t do to dwell.
I ducked into the master bathroom, the one I’d had outfitted with good lighting and an antique tub. I’d hung the matching medicine cabinet myself, damned if I was going to be one of those widows who dithered at the prospect of opening their husbands’ tool chests. I opened its mirrored door and stood on tiptoe to reach the top shelf. Of course I’d fixed Pam’s teeth. They were lovely now. I had kept the plaster molds. Yes, there they were, the flawed set—upper centrals bucking, a cuspid descending askew—and the perfect one. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and held a mold in each hand, bookends of a job well done.
I had a third set of teeth. Up there on the shelf, all alone. The unpaired Before of Maisie Keller, pronounced underbite, cusps jagged as a saw. The mold highlighted her interproximal gaps; only her molars had grown in fully flush. Maisie Keller was a little Korean girl, an adoptee whose mother worked with Frank at Wash U. There’d have been good money in those teeth, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. She’d been in my chair getting her initial impressions made when the phone rang that terrible Tuesday about Arizona. I referred her to a colleague for treatment. Now here was an insomniac thought: Maisie Keller was out there somewhere. I could have looked her up. Instead of—I shuddered. I ran a finger along the smooth, chalky bow of Pam’s mouth-mold. Her gums had bled, a little, in my dream. And in my waking life, when I first set in the wires. What a mind I had. I returned the mouths to their shelves. I clicked the hinged mirror shut. It threw back my static-wild hair. Pouches beneath my eyes, the color of dirty fingernails.
There’d be no more sleep tonight. I made toast. I was running low on bread, and added it to the list beside the fridge, reminders to return library books, purchase decaf, pay the phone bill, re-attach a blouse button. I had time now, a blank, unrolling skein of it. I had begun to ration errands.
The microwave clock turned from 2:47 to 2:48. The oven clock read 2:48 too. A simultaneous switchover. I have always liked catching little moments like that. There’s a cleanness; the world feels briefly tidied. I stood sleepless and glazed beside the clocks. 3:00. 3:01. If all the clocks in my house aligned, I was doing okay.
If all my clocks aligned, I would allow myself to write you.
Just a thought. A preposterous little bet with myself. I was wide awake now though. No. Wild awake.
The cherry wood grandfather that dominated the front room read 3:01. The living room VCR agreed. Beside my bed, the alarm clock I no longer bothered to set read 3:01. My silver wristwatch’s hands—digital watches were for children; I liked the revolving grace of a proper clock—seemed close enough, as did my two office clocks, one red plastic and wall-mounted, the other Frank’s old desk set, a barometer and timepiece in one. As Pam had taught me, the computer was off for the night and surge-protected. It would take a good five minutes to fire up; an exception could be made. I was grinning now. I felt it in my cheeks.
But. There. On the guest room end table, Pamela’s old clock radio blinked and blinked. Twelve o’clock. Midnight, noon, midnight. I jerked the cord from the socket. Ages ago, Pam had covered the radio almost entirely with stickers. It was a wonder any sound came through. So very very Pamela
. At the onset of her awkward age, she’d layered stickers over everything—we’d had to sand and refinish her entire bedroom set. It was the same when she learned to write her name. For weeks we couldn’t allow her permanent markers. All through the house her name appeared in colored pencil. Pamela, Pammie, Pam; this is mine, and this, and this.
I turned the radio against the wall. What kind of woman makes decisions based on clocks? It was irresponsible, flopping about. The way Frank would have teased. Lida, he’d say, you’ve got a sharp mind and more guts than the village gut-monger. Just decide.
If I wrote you, I’d be sending a piece of myself; and you had no right to that.
And yet: you had no right to shrink from me.
Anything that came to you in my name you’d shred. I knew how things went with you. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know enough.
For most of my adult life I’d had a system to help make up my mind. When in doubt, I always opted for no. No required less fuss. No time. No expenditure. This process had always served me well. It was useful in its pure arbitrariness: any relief or regret in the wake of no hinted at my true desires. Even if I couldn’t articulate them, even if they were terrible to acknowledge, a gut response meant they could no longer hide. Which brought to light another feature of no. Unlike yes, no was simple to reverse.
5.
Sleep makes grapes of raisins. That was one of my mother’s sayings; she’d doled them out for big woes and small, easy as acetaminophen. And Ma was right. Sleepless, I felt dry and fully shriveled, old as Ma herself, eight years dead come December. We’d cremated her. Frank too. Everyone after Barbra, I cremated. The thought of another body in the ground. Still and wet, getting wetter. My horrible mind. I should have willed myself to sleep. There were tricks for it. Back in the day, we’d had an expert work through them with Pam. Too late for all that though. Instead, I took careful time with my face and my hair. I selected a shirt with a flattering cut. I was exhausted, yes, but I’d be flayed and fried before I’d look it in front of Kath Claverie.
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