by Amity Gaige
Copyright © 2007 Amity Gaige
Production Editor: Mira S. Park
Text design: Natalya Balnova
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Gaige, Amity, 1972-
The folded world / by Amity Gaige.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-504-4
1. Social workers–Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3557.A3518F65 2007
813′.54—dc22
2006020691
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
i have bent my burning ear to a tulip
and it told me all about you.
—T.W.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Epilogue
part
one
At the moment she was born, five hundred miles away, a small boy, his mouth ringed with jam, paused in his play on the carpet. The boy was gripping a wooden block in one hand and his enormous ear with the other. He’d been suffering from a head cold, and as often as not when he worried he grabbed one of his handle-like ears for comfort, but now he looked up at the winter sun, stilled. Something had—what was it?—changed! He looked around, but his life’s campaign was still the same: a play pen, a faded Persian carpet with a salty fringe, a swollen-bellied mother shuffling her cookie sheets in the kitchen. The boy pressed his hands to the carpet and stood, using his diapered rear as counterweight. Carefully, he turned around. Nothing was different, and yet the world was completely changed. He swallowed, tempted to cry. The hand went automatically to the ear—O the soft, sinewy ear. He rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. A flock of geese flew across the sun, one by one repeating the form of their shadow in a way that seemed to him now terribly worthy of attention. The sun pulsed, hot on his blonde head, and the paisley of the carpet pulsed, and the room smelled vividly and wonderfully of sun damage, and he felt, all at once, like a struck match, and that was the first time he ever thought of Alice.
She herself grew up to have pale skin the erased color of a white rose. Her eyes, once blurred with myopia, became dark and arrow-like and almost Asiatic by the time she reached adolescence. By then she was attractive, slightly overweight, and a bookworm. Even after she’d been liberated from the wearing of eyeglasses, she still pushed habitually at the invisible frames. Fat as a child, she grew round in womanhood. By the time she was twenty, she no longer seemed physically incomplete. She still hid behind her hair, still wore an expression of hesitance that no longer suited a grown woman, but with her battered purse and outward sloping eyes she did not ask to be made more of than she was. In fact, at times, she seemed unaware of her own body, such as happens to people who read too much.
She had grown up nowhere but in Gloucester, and many years after she had left it, a layer of salt remained fused to her skin. She lived all her years in a tall pink house in Gloucester with her mother, an exceedingly tall woman with a wintry complexion. Her mother was full of advice, having thought long and hard about the little issues life so ungenerously sent her, when she could have been capable of thinking of great things. Instead, her mother was full of advice about little things, how to get things for free by complaining, when not to buy fish—little warnings, for example how deceptively dangerous was the tomato, as well as public door handles, parking lots, and, most of all, the intentions of men, in particular as their corrupted art of promise-making.
Alice listened to all this advice for many years without believing any of it. Then, one day when she was just twenty-two, still for some reason living in Gloucester in that tall pink house with her mother and one ancient cat, and working as a salesgirl, she realized in one horrible, epiphanal crush that she never ate tomatoes, often avoided public door handles and parking lots, and that she distrusted fish, men, and promises. In fact, she had unconsciously added a whole new generation of niggling rules to her mother’s: neither did she ever walk home the same way she’d come, or cross under ladders, or say her own name on Sunday. These precautions did not suit her temperament, which was in fact much less contrary than her mother’s, and which was greatly influenced by the inkling that her life had already been lived in Fate’s milky blue eye. But the fact that no great tragedy had yet befallen her and her mother made their rules seem effective. As for love, it sat obediently under a cloud of suspicion. In the years since she graduated high school, several young men from her high school had come around asking for her with their broad shoulders and their damp shirtsleeves and only twice had she ever accepted a date, which involved staring across the chasm of the bucket seat at a boy who had once been star of the basketball team and now worked all day installing bird barriers. She could not bear him—not he himself, he was kind—but rather the nunish feelings he inspired in her, which made her feel marked for a cool life, neat and lustless, like a woman born with physical perforations, who at the edge of her sexuality is snapped neatly apart from it.
These realizations disturbed her greatly. Still a bookworm (those million nights in the parlor with her mother), now she looked down at the book in her hand and felt betrayed by the life she was losing to it. From her earliest memories, she had lived much of life in someone else’s story, so absorbed she often forgot to drink and sleep, for so pleasantly abstract was her heavy body when she read. Pleasantly abstract was her fatherlessness and the sooty looking fishy smelling town out the window. But perhaps, in so behaving, she had forgotten to become someone actual. There hadn’t seemed to be a need to become someone actual in Gloucester. She was not modest, she simply had not yet occurred to herself. Many of her friends had occurred to themselves. Claudette was in nursing school and several others had gone thither and yon to colleges where boys sang together under arches and rode racing shells along rivers in unison, like gorgeous slaves.
So gradually, sitting by the picture window with her mother reading, Alice began to feel a kind of heat or heated opening, some beckoning accident in time. She began to feel a greater distance between herself and her mother. For she herself was only twenty-two years old, not an aging woman. She was not an aging research librarian with frown lines who collected sherry glasses and spoke constantly of the time she had once seen the Charles Bridge in Prague with a wealthy aunt. No, she was an attractive young woman with a young woman’s living hungers, and after her epiphany, everything in Gloucester began to look shabby. The poor children in their yearly summer haircuts jousted in the grease-stained street with curtain rods they’d found in trashcans. The tall skinny tenement houses stood like starving girls in party dresses.
And so she decided to leave Gloucester and live on her own in a nearby city and get a job and maybe take night classes. The fact that she had never attended college was a damp, heavy clod in her heart. She did not remember why she had not gone to college right after high school. She had been one of the most promising students in her English classes. Yet all she
remembered was walking arm and arm down the hallway with Claudette, and then Claudette disappearing like a bride into the glittering cosmos, and then the poor children playing with her old curtain rods.
He became a long distance runner. Slim and wiry, golden haired, the only thing out of line about him were his ears, which stuck out jughandlelike from his head. He had the energy of a coil or spring, and was often coming out of sunsets, coming out of hazelnut bushes—he was a pleasant surprise like that. In his hometown, in the heart of the heart of the Middle West, he had been the president of his high school class. Even the candidate he’d run against had voted for him. He loved to be surprised, for such was the immunity to horror that results from a completely happy and cloistered childhood. Cursed with narrow shoulders, and smallish hands, he made up for this lack of burliness with a tremendous good nature and a talent for self-mockery, and in this manner became the darling of many a schoolyard bully, for at heart he had no fear, while they had much.
But for someone so cheerful, so without anxiety, he led a rather solitary daily life. After all, he was a long distance runner, and he was busy with secret missions that were revealed even to himself at the last minute. He was always running home late with a fistful of flowers for his mother to make up for last time. And what had made him late? Some small marvel—a hedgehog, struggling across train tracks, entrancingly fat. When a thing happened, such as a hedgehog, it was the only thing that happened. Events glowed in a funnel of his attention. He was not accustomed to saying no or to not looking. Therefore he was late everywhere, waylaid by everything. He loved his grandmother, his veteran council; he loved women, but without a gentleman’s stiffness. He was free-given, blank, and attracted to hilltops. He could be seen striding on his strong thin legs, running across the wide streets of Mattoon with his book bag, his hair flopping over his eyes. He was a gush of air—a pleasurable, fleeting, shudder of youth. He was Mercury running on the disintegrating edge of time.
He could have been anything. He was so cooperative and Midwestern, he could have been part of anything. His father was a successful businessman at Xerox, and his younger brother was sure to gladhand his way toward similar success once he returned from his prodigal year as a ski instructor. But he himself did not want to grow up to sell things and process things and prorate things and get great satisfaction from the plushness of his lawn. He did not want to feel alive only when traveling at great speeds. He did not want to manage life or hover above it or make copies of it. He wanted to live it, with other people. He wanted to have his hands in it.
His life had been filled with the smell of bread and laundry, he knew that. He suspected that the difference between his life and other lives could plumb an ocean. He was acquainted with few poor people and only one madwoman—a lady with a moustache who sat in the shade of the gas station. Every time he passed these people, even as a child at the skirt of his mother, he experienced a temporary, almost vertiginous thrill at life’s enormous breadth. For perhaps life was not nearly as well-taught as it was in Mattoon. Perhaps he himself was not only a well-fed boy who slept under a handmade quilt. Perhaps he, and everyone, was more. More beautiful, endlessly corruptible—he did not know. He simply wanted to find the seam between his life and the life of the madwoman in the shade. The idea enlivened him so much that he caught each glimpse of mystery and saved it, the years racing by beautiful and four-seasoned, until one year after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history from his small Midwestern college, he felt he had a sufficient burden, and decided to move east, to a real city, and earn his master’s degree in social work.
She took her two black suitcases from Gloucester to the city. Staring out of the grimy bus window, her mother getting smaller and smaller, she wondered about the future and what the future might hold. She sat at the edge of her seat, scanning the blur for this hidden majesty, until a great failure of imagination made her drowsy. She leaned back, holding a bag of carrot sticks that her mother had packed for her. Carrot sticks. She reached instead for the candy bar that lay on the floor of her big black purse. Chewing the nougat, shoving at the bridge of her nose, she took a book out of her purse. She opened the book. Comforted by the familiar smell of trapped winter in the crease, she began to read. The months previously intended for wooing the cosmos were spent instead in this bent posture.
Certain Fridays, he had long, half-philosophical, half-hysterical conversations with his friends in bars, and Charlie Shade, his fingers folded before his mouth, precociously doctor-like, listened and bargained and laughed in the center of them all. It was the fall of his second year of graduate school, and he liked it: his classes, his classmates, the gritty, bus-fumed city, his little crow’s nest of a bachelor’s apartment high up on a windy corner in an old gray house. He liked New England. He didn’t even miss the Midwest and its river-dipped willows and its silence and all the people that he knew. But all the while he felt a nagging impatience. This wasn’t it either, he thought, wasn’t it really. He itched the back of his neck, under his collar. Where was the seam? Where were all the adjacencies? The collisions? Where did lives touch in a less casual way?
He himself did not drink. Just like his father Glen Shade, he had never touched a drop. This had caused some awkward moments for Charlie in high school, but gradually he got away with it as he got away with everything. There wasn’t any moral to his not drinking and he did not object to drinking in general. He got along with drunks quite well. But on Friday nights such as these, his classmates getting drunker and more confessional, falling across him like a half dozen suitors, Charlie felt such a great pull away from them that it nearly bent him backward, outside, toward the door. He wanted to run. He wanted to run a longer distance than he’d ever run, and he wanted to arrive finally. He wanted to arrive to it, whatever it was—life perhaps—life, rather than the thought of life. He wanted to feel not light but sun, not cold but winter; he wanted to be slapped by the thing standing right in front of him. It was always just over that hill, over that hill. He smeared the bar window clear with his hand. The red and purple sun was illuminating the downtown street and all the cold windows opposite, and just then a girl in bulky snow boots stepped into his view.
She was entirely overdressed for the weather in boots, mittens, and a hood. The only visible body part was a rather petulant chin. She was causing trouble out there in the five o’clock foot traffic. It was her manner of walking. One long stride, almost a leap, followed by several shorter steps, as if crossing a brook on stones. Charlie smeared the window clear again. What the heck was she doing? Another nutso, someone nearby him slurred. We’re surrounded by them. Everyone at the table turned to watch the girl’s erratic progress. As she lurched past the basement bar, dark wavy hair, like steel shavings, lolled out of her hood. In recognition—a soft, private, interior popping—Charlie understood: She’s trying not to step on the cracks, he said.
Why the fuck is she not stepping on cracks? somebody cried.
Charlie watched. I guess she’s got her reasons.
What you so moony about Charlie, someone else crowed. You’re not even drunk.
She’s pretty, slurred Garvey Sudd.
Ya! Pretty strange maybe.
You want me to go get her for you Charlie? Garvey shouted, standing and upsetting his barstool. I will, I’ll go get her.
Charlie felt very quiet and very still. He felt something was being revealed to him. He did not want anybody to go get anybody. He just wanted to watch. He did not feel desire born but relieved. He felt something lift from the back of his head—a door—out of which a thousand bat-like metaphors flew shrieking away. He touched his hand to the glass. The girl passed out of sight.
She read books late into the night, eating stacks of vanilla crèmes. She decided that anything that didn’t have chocolate in it was low fat. Sometimes she missed, especially when overhearing arguments, her mother. She missed the safety of being someone who attempted little. She even missed Gloucester, but not much. She sometimes mis
sed her eyeglasses, for now every once in a while in the city a man would catch her gaze, say something flirtatious, and she lacked anything to hide behind. She didn’t want to go on a date with anybody just yet. It would have been too awful to sit across a guttering candle from a bank teller or mechanic or volleyball coach, watching his potential melt, struggling with her own waning lack of interest: his fault/ my fault. She was one of those people for whom disappointment caused a shutdown of the entire grid; it almost rendered her mute. Was she simply afraid that real people were less real than people in books? Not just people, but the world. Was she afraid of a world that spun on and on with no theme and no denouement and no author’s hand to reassure her? But she wasn’t afraid! she insisted to no one, kicking back the sheets on her single bed, sending a small bookslide onto the floor. She wasn’t afraid! She was prudent. She was waiting for her cosmic instruction. How else was one supposed to know how to proceed with something as bare-assed as a lifetime?
Her apartment was narrow as a shoebox and dark all day. But she liked it anyhow because it was hers and she decorated the walls with old postcards and book covers. By day, she worked as a receptionist for a dentist and listened to the distorted confessions of anesthetized patients. She tried to wean herself—unsuccessfully—of her superstitions. She saved up money for college classes. She spoke to her mother daily, then weekly, once or twice even letting the week go by, practicing a kind of emotional calisthenics. After a while, it appeared that she had successfully escaped Gloucester. And her mother did not die, and did not very often guilt her, and with a pang sometimes Alice heard new names peppering in her mother’s speech. Sometimes, opening a fresh book, Alice would say to herself: This is the last book. This is the last story that is not my own.