by Richard Ford
“We’ll see,” she said. My wife is a chartered accountant and tends to see the world beyond her small circle of intimates and close family as a dedicated negotiation, pro versus con, profit versus loss, give versus receive—though not evil versus good. These views have not left her cynical—only skeptical. In her heart she’s generous. “You’ll get whatever’s coming to you, whatever it is,” she said. “Tell her I send her warm wishes—if she remembers me.”
“She does,” I said. “She’ll appreciate that. I’ll tell her.”
It was cold in Minneapolis, a city I have always liked from afar for what seems to be its down-to-size, polished and sturdy optimism. We occasionally routed ourselves through there on the way to Clare’s mother’s in Portage la Prairie, taking the ferry across the lake to Wisconsin.
I was outside the Comfort Inn in my overcoat, looking up to a few squads of hurrying southerly ducks, when Berner drove up in a dented blue Probe, rust adhesions scabbed around its wheel wells and across its hood and roof. She rolled down her window. “Hey, big boy. Got time for a quickie? A quickie’s all I’ve got.” She looked terrible. Her face, smiling up through the window, was mustard color. The puffiness from thirty years ago was gone, as was the girlish down on her jaw. Her eyes looked played out behind a pair of oversize red-frame glasses—the kind older women wear to look younger. She was thin—almost as when we’d been young. She looked like an elderly woman whose teeth were large for her mouth. Her flat face appeared to have fewer freckles because of her makeup. Her once frizzy hair was gray and sparse.
“I just have to drive back by the house,” she said, once we were going. “It’s not far. I forgot my oxy-whatever. Then I thought we’d go to Apple-bee’s. I’m comfortable there. You know?”
“Wonderful,” I said. She wore a clear shunt taped on top of her right hand—for her chemo. Everything she did was requiring a large effort and difficulty—including seeing me. Her car was a jumble inside. A dirty green chenille bedspread covering the bucket seats. The radio was taken out. A strip of duct tape was patched over a gouge in the dashboard vinyl. The back seat held a tire and some jack equipment. Berner had on a long quilted purple coat that wasn’t new, and white furry boots. She gave off a pronounced hospital smell—rubbing alcohol and something sweet. She was clearly very sick, as she’d said.
“I’ll take my pill once we’ve eaten.” She was negotiating Saturday morning surface-road traffic near the mall. “I’ll have thirty good minutes. Then I’ll have to get home. Get you back to the hotel. Or else I’ll start driving backwards and upside down. I’m an addict now. I never was before. It’s cured my allergies. That’s pretty good.” She smiled. “Did you recognize me? Yellow’s my new fall shade. It’s ’cause my liver’s snafu’d. That’s what’s going to escort me out, I guess. It’s supposedly okay.”
“I recognized you,” I said. I didn’t wish to seem sober sided if she wasn’t. “Is there anything I can do?”
“This.” She leaned back in her seat as if something in her middle had bitten her. She breathed in deeply, then out deeply. “Unless you want to teach me math. I thought it’d be good to learn math again before I died. I used to be good at it, remember? It’s all different now. Dying must make you thirst for knowledge. As well as other things.” She smiled. “I’ve missed you. Sometimes.”
“I remember,” I said. “I’ve missed you.”
“Of course, you have a memory. I can’t seem to find mine.” She turned and looked at me seriously as if I’d said something I hadn’t. Her look was meant to represent warmth toward me. To welcome me and make me know she missed me. “I remember you, though,” she said and raised her chin in a way that was like our father more than her. It was a gesture of mine, as well. I experienced a sudden pang of longing then—to be young, for all of life to have been a dream I would wake from on a train to Seattle.
“So you like being Bev?” I had not touched her yet, but I clumsily reached and patted her shoulder, which felt thin under her quilted coat.
She coughed harshly and fanned her face. “Oh, yes,” she said and swallowed what she’d coughed up. “I’ve been Bev fifteen years. It’s my normal. Poor ole Berner fell down under the bus someplace. Couldn’t keep up with my pace.”
“I like it,” I said.
“Dad didn’t do so good with Bev. I thought I’d give it a try. They were just kids, you know? Both of them.”
“No, they weren’t,” I said, not expecting myself to speak to this so harshly. “They weren’t at all. They were our parents. We were the kids.”
“Okay. Touché,” she said, driving. Her hands were red and raw looking. “Don’t you say that? Touché? Touché olé?”
“Sometimes.”
“Touched,” Berner said, and nodded and smiled tolerantly. “I’m touched. I’m touched in the head. So are you. We’re twins. The zygote doesn’t forget.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We are.”
Berner’s house was a newer white double-wide down a straight, narrow lane of other double-wides, most newer with neat, tiny yards and single saplings wired to the ground and sporty cars parked in front on the curbless hardtop, and TV dishes on all the roofs. Children were out on Saturday morning. Enormous silver jets rose into the fall sky a mile north of us. Their engines made little noise as they disappeared.
Berner pulled into a paved drive. A small man stood at the end of the trailer, feeding lettuce leaves into a raised wire rabbit frame inside which several fat gray and white rabbits pressed forward into the little opening.
“There’s the most patient white man in the world, and the world Scrabble champion. He’s tending his flock.” She opened her door out and encountered trouble moving her legs from under the steering wheel. “Just give us a little push, hon.” Berner looked pained and was straining. “Hard to get me going once I’m stopped. I won’t be a minute.” She’d begun speaking with a soft southern accent as we got close to her house. “We’re not married,” she said back down inside the car. “But he’s the best husband I never had. I had to get a good one once, right? He’s shy.” She stood up stiffly and looked toward the man, who was latching the pen door. He wore cowboy boots and jeans and a nylon windbreaker and the kind of bright red cap my students wore, but his was on straight. “I forgot something,” she called out to him. He looked at her but didn’t answer. “My fix,” she said and with difficulty began walking toward the front steps to get her medicine.
Down the lane in the chilly sunshine, many of the other trailers, which were long-side-face-the-street, had American flags flying on aluminum poles in their yards—as if someone had sold everyone a flag. Berner’s yard lacked its flag. Some lawns had paper placards in the grass advocating whatever the residents believed in. ABORTION KILLS. MARRIAGE IS A SACRAMENT. NO TAXES. It was all catching on in Canada—with the government: the nervous American intensity for something else. The inevitable drift northward of everything.
The small man in the red cap and boots stepped to a second rabbit cage and began feeding in more lettuce from a silver mixing bowl at his feet in the grass. His windbreaker had a Confederate flag stitched to its back, and some lettering underneath that I couldn’t read. He was shrunken and tough and angular and dried out—older than Berner by a lot. A religious person, long saved, I imagined, watching him through the windshield’s sunny glare. Somewhere would be a motorcycle. A giant TV. A bible. Everyone had stopped drinking years ago, and were now waiting. It’s what happened to them, I thought. Ending here, this way. It had become my habit to champion my own course in life, as if mine could teach everyone something. It wasn’t so admirable, since it couldn’t. Least of all my sister, who’d taken her life into her own hands, and accepted it. I didn’t know what to call her, I realized.
The small man closed the second pen and carefully latched it. He bent and picked up his silver bowl and looked at the car while he was leaning. Then he stood up and stared straight at the reflecting windshield. Possibly he could see me in the seat, waitin
g for Berner—waiting for Bev. He raised the bowl in a gesture of greeting, smiled an agreeable smile I didn’t expect. He turned and walked in a stiff, dignified way to the corner of the trailer and was gone. He didn’t see me gesturing back. He didn’t want to meet me. I understood perfectly well. I was late on the scene.
In the car headed to Applebee’s, Berner seemed improved. She’d put on more makeup and exuded a cherry smell and had begun chewing gum. She’d brought back to the car a Cub Foods plastic grocery bag with—I guessed—whatever she planned to give me inside it.
She turned on the heater and informed me she was cold all the time, couldn’t get warm to save her life. She scratched at the clear tape keeping the shunt fixed to the back of her hand and shook her head when I noticed it. She seemed to want to push her wide tongue out between her lips, which I took to be a manifestation of the drugs. She also spoke less in her southern accent now that we were away from the trailer. “He’s from West Virginia,” she said. She was thinking about the man who was not her husband, and being amused by him. Ray was his name. He was a dear. He knew everything about her and didn’t care. He’d been in the U.S. Army a long time, but was retired. She’d met him in Reno and he’d moved her out to the Cities a decade ago. He’d had a brother here. The trailer was her almost wedding present. He raised the rabbits “for the table,” and cried every time he had to harvest one. They went to a church. “Of course, I don’t believe anything. I just go to humor him and to be nice. He knows I’m officially Jewish on our mother’s side. Though I’m non-observant.”
She said she’d become interested in China and its growing dominance; was worried about “illegals,” taxes, 9/11, “the threat.” She remembered Clare’s name and that she was an accountant. She said she wished she could visit us and knew Windsor wasn’t that far from the Cities. She said she and Ray had both been for Obama. “Why not? You know? Something different.” She asked me if I’d voted for him. I told her I would’ve if they’d let Canadians vote. Which made her laugh, then cough, then say, “Okay. You’re right. There’s a good point. I forgot you left our country behind. I can’t blame you.” Once again, she knew nothing about my life, wouldn’t have cared to at that point. She was working steadily to cling to some semblance of herself for me. All we had together were our parents—fifty years ago—and each other, brother and sister, which we were trying to make the most of, at least one morning’s worth. She seemed, for that time we were in the car, to be able not to seem sick, not bitter that our lives had gone so askew and unfairly for her (now, especially). She seemed to locate an old self, to look at me with her former skepticism and love, which made me feel young and naive compared to her old and wise. I liked it. I was glad Clare hadn’t come. Though it was not how I’d featured things. I’d thought of a trailer; but after that, a sick room with lowered lights, a TV without sound, a dresser top filled with medicines, oxygen, the haze and aroma of death all around. This was better. Under different, more promising circumstances we wouldn’t have cared to spend a day together. It was death’s lenience.
“You know”—we were turning into the Applebee’s lot, crowded with Saturday mall-goers in and out of big SUVs, and motorcycles and pickups—“I always tell myself, ‘Remember this. It may not be this way in six months.’”
“I’m not so different from you there,” I said. “We’re still the same age.”
“But you don’t know how many times that’s turned out to be true. In my life? Six months has been a lifetime.” She looked at me stonily, her jaw muscles working under her beige flesh, her tongue restless in her mouth.
“I do know,” I said.
“Well,” she said and sighed again the resigned way. Once when she’d sighed, it had always been with impatience. “I’m trying very hard to resist this gradual dying. It may not seem like it. But I am. I feel like”—she stared down at the keys in the ignition, reached one finger and gave them a pointless jingle—“I feel like, sometimes, my real life hasn’t even started yet. This one hasn’t been up to standard, you might say. Which is nothing you caused. I walked off down that street all by myself that summer. Remember?”
“I do,” I said. “I remember it clearly.” I did.
“Do you regret not having any kids?” She’d begun staring out at the traffic on the access road. A large bus pulled past, bound for the mall, its windows full of women’s faces, all framed by short haircuts. She clicked off the engine and the heater. Outside the noise was muffled but constant.
“No,” I said. “I never thought about it. I guess I see enough kids.”
“It’s the end of the line, then,” she said, triumphantly. “The Parsons line ends here in the Applebee’s lot. Almost.”
“Clare and I say the same thing.”
“You feel like you’ve had a wonderful life? Now that I’ve told you about how I feel? It’s okay to say you have. I’m glad.” She turned her face toward me and for that instant showed no sign of strain, only relief. Her face would look that way to me forever.
“I accept it,” I said. “I accept it all. I married the right girl.”
“We all accept it. That’s not an answer.” Her dry lips wrinkled and she looked with displeasure back at the bus gone past. “What choice do we have?”
“Then, yes,” I said. “I have had.” Though I wasn’t sure I thought that.
“I’m your big sister.” She sniffed in mindfully. “You have to tell me the whole truth. Or I’ll come back and haunt you.” She smiled to herself, pulled up her door handle and began again to move her feet painfully out. “I can do it myself this time,” she said. We stopped that talk then and never returned to it.
* * *
In Applebee’s we sat by a big window that looked out on her rusted car, which was more battered than I’d thought, with its bent Minnesota license plate and its rear bumper snapped off. No other cars in the lot looked like it.
Berner seemed jolly, recovered from our grave talk, as if this clamorous, TV-distracted, kitsch-cluttered jangle was just what she needed and knew its mission was to make the terminally ill forget their woes. She kept on her purple coat, which needed dry cleaning.
She took her gum out, wrapped it in a paper napkin corner, and set it on the window sill. She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn’t drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic. I ordered a glass of wine to make myself relax and to be in the spirit.
“Did I say,” she said (she had the plastic grocery bag beside her in the booth), “that I’m not going to commit suicide? I forget what I told you. Chemicals is the shits.”
“You didn’t mention that,” I said. “I’m glad to hear it though.” I held up my wine to toast her.
“One suicide’s enough for a family of four,” she said. We’d only been sixteen then, and in no position to take command of much. The site of our mother’s resting place was one more thing I’d relinquished. “I’m not really fixated on them much,” she said, letting one finger—on which was a tiny, badly faded tattoo of a cross—stroke the stem of her glass, as she perused the menu, which showed bright-color pictures of the things you could order. “Sometimes I think about them and their big robbery.” (She emphasized the word.) “I have to laugh. All of us just spinning off like that. It was the event of our lives, wasn’t it? A great big fuck-up, and everything piled on top.” She squinted behind her glasses and leaned up on her elbows and stared at me to let me know precisely what it meant to her that she was on the way out of her troubles. I felt awful about her, and for her, and I couldn’t do anything to fix anything.
“It leads you nowhere to think about it,” I said, which was the minimal truth.
All the young waitresses had begun raucously singing “Happy Birthday to You”—to some elderly customer across the restaurant. Other customers had begun rhythmically clapping. The University of Minnesota football team was playing on twenty TVs. There had been occasional cheering, then gr
oaning about that.
“No,” Berner said. “It truly doesn’t.” She looked away from her martini, as if she’d just heard the singing and clapping. “It’s a secret we share, isn’t it? With the whole world. Letting things slip. It connects us up to the rest of humanity. That’s my take.” She smiled for no apparent reason. I remembered her writing to me as her life was commencing: We feel the same and see things the same. She’d already begun sharing the world then, whereas I hadn’t. I’d been abandoned in it. I wondered if I was somehow deceiving her now, in some way that mattered. Was I giving to her my real, most genuine self? Was it true what I’d said about my life? I wanted not to deceive her. It was all I had to give her, and it had always been a preoccupation of mine—given my past, and that I’m a teacher, where you’re always acting but trying not to. It’s never clear, since we all have selves to choose among. “Maybe you have a hidden wild streak,” she said. “And maybe I have a hidden regular one. A tame one.” She’d let her mind stray onto some interior conversation we weren’t exactly having.
“Probably,” I said and sipped my wine, which was stale. “At least half of that’s maybe true.”
“Okay.” She lowered her eyes. She’d caught herself straying off. Her brown-and-gray hair was thin in front and brushed severely back. She’d applied rouge when she’d gone inside her house. Her ears were pierced, but she was wearing no earrings. Her lobes were pale and softened. “And are you still the chess man?” she said and smiled at me to designate she was paying attention now.
“No,” I said. “I teach it. I was never good at it.”
She looked around suddenly as if our food was arriving. Her soup. My salad. Though it wasn’t. “Speak of the devil,” she said, and lifted the Cub Foods sack and set it on the table. “So.” She sighed and took out of the sack a sheaf of white notebook pages that were dry and hole-punched and tied together with what looked like stiffened bits of shoelace that were a color not so distant from Berner’s skin. “I didn’t want to send this to you.” She set her hands down on top of the pages to keep them close, then looked at me and smiled. “I didn’t know if I’d like you. Or if you’d like me, and would even want it.” She sighed again, this time very deeply, as if something had defeated her.