The Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  “Oh no,” he said gently. “Oh no. You’re liking it, you are. I can tell.”

  And he was right, she was, in a strange way that denied her surroundings, the man’s disturbing smile, the smells of this bed. It was as if only the music and her body existed. His body—that was less real.

  When he raised himself slightly away from her again, she opened her eyes only long enough to see that he was taking a condom out of a drawer in the table that held the books and the phone. She closed her eyes again and let herself sink further down, or come more fully to the surface, she wasn’t sure which. Because he was so thin, his body wasn’t heavy, and when he entered her, the harshness was only brief. Right away he moved slowly, smoothly, and she knew without looking that he was paying attention to her, to what her body wanted, all on its own, without any heed to her mind, and she felt herself yield.

  And then before her inner eye, a tide of words leaped high and free, a chaotic joy like frothing rapids: truncate, adjudicate, fornicate, frivolous, rivulet, violet, oriole, orifice, conifer, aquifer, allegiance, alacrity…all the words this time not a crowding but a heavenly chain, an ostrich fan, a vision as much as an orgasm, a release of something deep in the core of her altered brain, words she thought she’d lost for good. It nearly deafened her (but not quite) to the other, more alarming wave—the groaning and happy cursing that came from Stan.

  “Oh shit, Story Girl,” he said as he pulled away and collapsed facedown beside her, one arm across her waist. Before falling asleep (quick as you’d fall from a ledge), he reached over and turned off the radio.

  The lamp, however, still cast its oval of tawdry light, straight down on Stan’s head, on his thinning dust-colored hair. And from a corner of the room, the cat’s eyes glowed accusingly at Saga. Together, the silence and the illuminated squalor filled Saga with shame and terror—terror at herself and at what she had allowed (not even passively) to happen.

  As she crept down the two flights of stairs, clutching the banister to keep from falling, hoping the dogs wouldn’t bark and wake Stan, Saga couldn’t help thinking of Uncle Marsden, of how much he worried when she went off on her own, of how truthfully she’d always told him there was nothing to worry about; after all, she was not a child. In that year after the accident, during all those therapy sessions and walking lessons and silly games with balls, she’d often thought of how people think they might wish for a second childhood. Well, she was here to tell them that no, that was nothing to wish for!

  She’d been glad, once she found her way back to Uncle Marsden’s (this time reassuring him falsely), that Stan did not know how to reach her. She had hoped never to see him again. But then other animals came her way, and within two months she had to call him. “Well well well, if it isn’t Story Girl,” he said, but he did not mention what had gone on between them. Almost as soon as she entered his house, however, he’d begun to put his hands all over her body. She made the mistake of thinking that if she told him what had happened to her—explaining how, because of the accident, she made mistakes in judgment sometimes—he might sympathize a little.

  He laughed. He said, “Right, so you’re a sicko and a slut. Next sob story? Hey, just kidding.” He winked meanly. But he had never touched her again, never even tried.

  “I AM EMILY ALMA TALAMINI. On my birth certificate.”

  “I am twenty-eight.”

  “I live in West Hartford. I live with David Hayward. David, the guy you just sent out to wait in the hall.”

  “This is…is this 1996?”

  These were some of the answers she gave, whispered because her throat still hurt, the day after her “real” waking up, the one she could remember. A young male doctor nodded and took notes, but it was the nurse who said, “This is wonderful. This is such good news, Emily. Now don’t try to move too much, okay?”

  When she asked why, the nurse said softly, “Because some of you isn’t quite moving yet. But it will, with some help. We just don’t want you to panic.”

  Saga realized then that the right side of her face felt swollen or numb, as if it had fallen asleep. She felt alarm when the nurse reached out to dab at that side of her mouth; was she drooling?

  Oh God, I’m a vegetable, Saga thought. David is going to leave me.

  And he did—but not before staying long enough that she’d come to believe he wouldn’t. Through the first month of therapy, after many long weeks in the hospital, he came for lunch every day and sometimes took an afternoon off to sit on the sidelines while she walked laps or worked her fingers around a tennis ball or practiced holding pencils and forks. She stayed at her mother’s house so she wouldn’t have to struggle up the two flights of stairs to the apartment she shared with David; often he drove her back after therapy and stayed for dinner. Sometimes Saga’s mother went out, to give them time alone. It was hard for Saga to go to restaurants; she hated being stared at. She had been back to their place only once, to point out what clothes and other items David should pack. He had carried her up the stairs, like a bride, and back down again.

  The David of her memory was mostly kind—she could remember arguments, though nothing ferocious or mean—but the new David was emphatically gentle and patient. Before long, this invalid treatment felt claustrophobic and creepy. Everybody around her hovered, and sometimes she had the strange feeling that there was something else they kept waiting for her to remember. The person she thought of as her reading therapist said more than once, “If new memories crop up, even suspicions you might have, let’s be sure we talk about them. Okay?” Saga thought of it as the knee-jerk okay: the tendency of her caretakers, along with the rest of the world, to finish nearly all their statements to her with a little “okay?” as if she were two years old and might have a tantrum at the slightest change of plan.

  One day when they were eating lunch and David leaped to retrieve the fork she’d dropped, Saga joked, “Stop being so nice all the time, would you? I want a boyfriend, not a Moonie or a guide dog.”

  David looked hurt. “But nice is what you need, honey. You need—you deserve a lot of nice.”

  “I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but normal is what I need. Truckloads of normal. If that’s possible.”

  He smiled nervously, silent at first, as if to imply that it wasn’t possible.

  “When you’re ready, we’ll get a new place,” he said. “I want a place with miles of books around all the walls. Maybe we could rent a little house out near the beach. I wouldn’t mind the commute. How about that for a dose of normal?” A tiny version of Uncle Marsden’s house: that had always been Saga’s fantasy. Though the part about the books made her sad. David was a librarian, so naturally he’d want that, but he didn’t seem to think about Saga, for whom books had become a chore—surmountable, getting easier, but a challenge rather than a refuge, a reminder of how the most ordinary things were no longer that, how in a way nothing was.

  It was a book that gave him away. Having missed a few recent lunches, he brought Saga a box of lavish takeout from a French bistro—roast chicken, green beans, and tiny red potatoes. A Styrofoam cup of chocolate mousse for dessert. He’d gone to the bathroom after setting the food on a table. Ravenous, Saga started in on the chicken. It needed salt. Thinking that there might be packets of salt in the paper bag David had stuffed in his satchel, she fished it out.

  Under the crumpled bag, which contained no salt, she saw two books: a biography of Truman Capote and a slim volume called How, Voyager? A Practical Primer for Moving Abroad.

  Abroad: a bold orange word, like a fat painted line down the center of a street, stretching out of sight.

  “Who’s moving abroad?” Saga asked when David came back.

  He looked at her blankly, and then he started to giggle.

  “Someone who’s a fool?” she said.

  Not even a smile remained on his face. “Maybe,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before. I didn’t want to upset you. Though I was thinking you could come if…”

>   “Where? Come where?”

  “Zimbabwe…. They need someone to train librarians. I saw the ad in a journal, and just to see if I could ever get…I didn’t think I’d really…” He added desperately, “I haven’t decided.”

  “Yes you have,” she said quickly, trying hard to keep spite from her voice. “It’s the decision you have to make, isn’t it? How in the world would I come to Zimbabwe when I can’t even get up the stairs to our apartment!”

  He had looked stunned, as if she were the one with the bad news, and she said, “I understand,” because she was just too tired to say much else. And it was true. Who wouldn’t understand?

  “You let him off the hook!” cried Saga’s mother when she heard the story. She was enraged at David and refused to speak with him at all the two or three times he called before he left. “What a coward. What a traitor. What a cad,” she would mutter. Saga thought that, objectively, her mother was overreacting; these days, people lived together all the time and then split up, over much less than this. But her mother was from a generation that hadn’t done it that way; and perhaps she was secretly most upset because David’s departure left her alone with her daughter’s plight. Perhaps, Saga sometimes reflected, her mother had already sensed that she would not be around much longer to care for her daughter. In any case, how could she have been foolish enough to think that David would stick around with a woman who just might become a permanent cripple and certainly wouldn’t ever again be completely “right” in the head, completely the woman he had known and lived with? Maybe it was true that people never changed, not voluntarily—but they could, Saga knew now, become altered. Changed from without if not from within.

  David told Saga he would write, and he did send three letters—his brief persistence almost valiant, considering that she sent not a word in reply. Over was over, that was one thing she’d always been blessed with knowing.

  Still, when Saga heard about (and, in rehab, witnessed) the ordeals of all the other patients who had taken a blow to the brain yet managed to survive, she wished that she could be one of those who’d lost a solid chunk of time from the past rather than bits and pieces of her ongoing life; her memory had come to resemble Swiss cheese. How much better, and more convenient, if she had just lost a definable wedge from that wheel of cheese, just the two and a half years in which she had come to know and love, and then live with, David.

  LUCKY THING HE’D WRITTEN DOWN his name and address. On this street, so many buildings looked alike—dark red brick, with steep stairs and big shaggy trees out front, rug-size gardens tucked behind black iron railings—and she couldn’t quite remember which one it had been. But here was the buzzer: Glazier, 1R. She rang a third and last time. Well, it was silly not to have called ahead.

  She sat on the top step and set her knapsack and the flowerpot beside her. It was late afternoon, the sun still fairly high in the sky now that the clocks had skipped ahead. She had two hours to wait till she could call Stan. Through an open window across the street, a trumpet played a jazz song that sounded familiar. That was her life: so much felt familiar yet fuzzy, just out of reach. Could Saga have learned to play an instrument now? There was a neglected grand piano in Uncle Marsden’s study; Aunt Liz had been the musical one. The children would crowd on the bench beside her and sing along while her hands romped through folk songs out of a green book used so often that many of its pages were held in with layers of jaundiced tape.

  A piano player. Imagine being a piano player. All those zillions of notes, like daisy chains, garlands and garlands all wound through your head. Even in Saga’s former life, her brain could not have managed that, no way.

  She unzipped a pocket on her knapsack, took out her notebook and a plastic bag of oatmeal cookies. She ate two while she looked at her list. She could go by the veterinary clinic where she’d taken the puppies; she should thank the vet, too, though she hadn’t brought him a present. If she did something like that, Stan would probably yell at her. He liked things done his way. But she could say thank you. He couldn’t object to that.

  She took one of the notices about the puppies and wrote a note to Alan Glazier on the back, telling him she would come by the next morning. She taped it to the bottom of the intercom box. Then she took out her notebook and, under THURSDAY MORNING, wrote, “Visit Alan Glazier, Thirty Five Bank St.” As she walked down the steps, the sun dipped below the roofline of the buildings across the street. The quick, surprising chill of evening rippled through the air.

  Saga was slightly relieved to find the veterinary clinic closed. She started back east, in the direction of the subway she would take, and found herself, after turning a corner, once again on Alan Glazier’s block. She’d come the opposite way this time, and she saw something new: a tiny shop at the bottom of a very skinny house. A bookshop.

  A string of bells jangled on the back of the door and, like a cuckoo springing from a clock on the hour, a man’s head protruded from behind a bookcase. “Hello,” he said quietly. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “Hello, yes it is,” said Saga.

  “Please let me know if I can help you.” The man had a pleasant accent of some British variety (like the jazz tune, familiar yet fuzzy). He crossed the shop with an armload of books and went about his work as if he were all by himself. Except for Saga, he was.

  Whenever she entered a shop, Saga was almost always happy to be ignored. Relaxing now, she looked around. On a wall toward the front of the shop hung several large, stylish pictures of birds (Audubon; this one she knew without effort, as he was a favorite of Uncle Marsden’s, two of his birds in the dining room). The most colorful one showed green and yellow parakeets. She looked them over closely. They were gorgeous.

  All of a sudden, she heard a loud squawk. “Oh!” she exclaimed.

  At the back of the shop, a door stood open to a garden. Through it Saga saw an armchair, on the back of the armchair a big red parrot.

  “Oh my. Is that your bird?”

  “She’s called Felicity, and no, I am hers.” The man with the accent walked through the door ahead of Saga and held out his arm. “Had your spot of sun?” he said to the parrot. She jumped right on and sidestepped rapidly up his sleeve, coming to rest on his shoulder. She leaned forward, like a bird dog, pointing toward Saga with her beak, and squawked again. The tone (if birds could have a tone!) was imperious, as if she were saying “You there!,” about to give a command.

  “I’d call her Marie Antoinette. Or Sheba. She seems like a queen,” said Saga. “Can I touch her?”

  “Scratch her just here.” He scratched Felicity behind one of her downy, unbelievably scarlet cheeks. To Saga’s delight, the bird allowed her to do the same.

  “Who could look at books with you here?” Saga said to Felicity.

  Felicity accepted her affection without comment.

  “It’s a trade-off,” said the man. “She’s an attraction but also a distraction. Some people come by just to see her—after a while they feel guilty enough to buy a book or two. She’s not the most efficient marketing tool, but she gives us a certain reputation. People walk in and say, ‘Oh so this is the place with the parrot.’” He stood still for a few minutes while Saga stroked the bird on his shoulder.

  “You’re lucky.”

  “I am indeed,” the man said. He did not realize that Saga had been talking to the bird. What a life she must have, this beautiful creature. Pampered, unthreatened, nothing to do but entertain and be entertained.

  “Maybe you could teach her to say, ‘Spend a little money!’” said Saga.

  The man laughed. “A clever student—that’s one thing she’s not.”

  “Can she fly?”

  “Yes.”

  “She doesn’t fly away?” Saga looked at the sky.

  “She never has. I’m not sure why.”

  “Maybe this is all she knows?”

  “Oh, but she strikes me as the kind of lass who leaps before she looks.” The man put a hand up to his shoulder; the bird
stepped on.

  Lass. Saga turned away to hide her smile. How like a fairy tale, that word. Rapunzel. A tall tower by a deep emerald lake. A dark green word, lass.

  As she turned, she saw the bookcase beside the armchair—right out there in the garden! It was filled with paperback books that looked as if they’d been read about a hundred times each. She saw Pride and Prejudice, she saw Middlemarch and The Quiet American. Titles she had seen forever on the shelves in Uncle Marsden’s house.

  “What if it rains when you’re not looking?”

  “These are the books everyone likes to read again and again, books you can lose because they’ll reappear the minute you turn your back. They replace themselves,” he said. Saga pictured this man with the dashing accent as the rescuer of Rapunzel. It wasn’t outrageous in the least. He was handsome enough, though neither tall nor dark. His skin and hair were faintly golden, or they had been once upon a time, and his hands were long and slim like the hands of a prince. Piano hands, Aunt Liz would have said. He looked to be several years older than Saga, maybe not too much older than Michael.

  “Can I sit here?” she asked.

  “Last I knew,” said the bird prince, “that’s what chairs were for.”

  “I don’t know any bookstores with chairs in gardens,” she said. “Or any gardens with bookcases.” She would have to tell Uncle Marsden about this place.

  “So now you do. Make yourself at home.” He left her alone then, carrying his glorious bird back into the shop. He needs a crown, thought Saga as she watched him go. He wouldn’t look the least bit silly. Even his posture was regal. She leaned back in the chair and looked straight up. Branches waved calmly; a few thin clouds flowed along like blossoms fallen in a stream. She would have to ask the bird prince for a card, to make sure she could find her way back. She reached toward the bookcase and took out a pink book with a water-stained jacket, poems by E. E. Cummings. She opened the book and let her eyes alight on random lines: I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing / than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. She read the entire poem, but then that sad leaden feeling descended, the reminder that reading was a labor, not a reflex, something she had to do with a conscious will, as if she were eight all over again. She remembered enough to be certain she’d never read anything terribly difficult, but she had been a fast reader. She would be again, Uncle Marsden assured her. Uncle Marsden knew a great deal, but the rest he bluffed. He’d never say he didn’t know. That was his biggest flaw.