The Folded World

by Amity Gaige

  They told him to pick her up and give her the Heimlich. It was there, embracing her from behind, his ear against her shoulder blade, her small hard rump in his lap, that he heard the sirens.

  Abruptly, he placed her on the sofa and went out the door. There he waited, thoughtless before the alternating lights, until two young men leapt out of the ambulance, nodded, and walked inside.

  Charlie stood outside watching through the open door. From there, he saw the men lift her off the couch and he saw her bobby socks dragging along the carpet. Her braid swung back and forth as they pumped at her, one standing by holding a defibrillator and watching, his expression that of a young man thinking about something else entirely—a song he liked, the advantages of a better bicycle. Charlie closed his mouth and swallowed. He was supposed to be like them—calm, disengaged, effective. For example, if he had been smart, if he had been good at this job, he would have called Harriet himself as soon as he got the first page.

  He looked at the watch on his throbbing wrist. A cry escaped him, both from the physical pain and from the time. His wrist bone protruded, broken. And for what? For what? Because look, there she was, sitting upright on the couch, her eyes fluttering back in her head, the front of her dress a dark wet circle. The young medic had his hand on her shoulder, and was rubbing it softly. The other medic came to the door, peering out into the night at Charlie, who was revealed by a single floodlight.

  “You all right?” the medic asked him, stepping out into the night.

  “Yeah.” Charlie put his left hand in his pocket.

  “You coming with us?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie.

  They lay Opal on a stretcher. Charlie held the screen door for them. As her small face passed by, blurred with freckles, she stared up at the sky, where she must have seen, through her death-haze, the snow. Perhaps she thought she had made it and was dead. In death it would always be snowing. Death would be full, perhaps, of whatever you feared most, except you wouldn’t be afraid anymore. Scorpians. Doberman pinschers dragging snapped chains behind them. Beheaded Arabs. Your own uncle raping you, bees in his hair. The people who once loved you most, loving you no more.

  Alice and the babysitter sat in silence. The girl was studying the carpet, rubbing her hands together between her legs.

  “Are you cold?” said Alice.

  The girl looked up. She had hair the color of amaretto. The Christmas lights still left up on the windows illuminated her hair in snatches. She wore a fuzzy pink turtleneck sweater.

  “No,” said the girl. “I’m fine.”

  Alice turned away. A car approached, then passed away down the street. She stood and smoothed the front of her dress. Brightly, she went to the shelf where the snow globe sat.

  “Ever seen one of these?” she asked the babysitter, shaking it.

  She held the globe up in front of the girl. Inside it, the eternal snow swirled. Two figures appeared—two children—building a snowman.

  “Neat,” said the babysitter sincerely.

  Alice put the snow globe back on the shelf. “So you’re all set with the bottles and things? And you know how to turn on the mobile?”

  The girl nodded.

  “The song is a little annoying. Ba-deedee ba-dee. But after a while you just don’t hear it.”

  The girl smiled, shrugging her shoulders. “I know.”

  “Sorry we don’t have cable. But you’re welcome to use the phone or read any of my books or anything you want. The twins really should sleep almost the whole time, since I just put them down. They sleep a lot, babies. They just—sleep.”

  The girl once again said nothing. She bent her head and pulled the tube of her turtleneck over her glossed lips, teething it gently.

  Alice looked out the window. “The night tonight,” she said softly. “Sort of like a snow globe. Isn’t it?”

  She did not wait for the girl’s reply. She stood and walked into the kitchen and bent over the sink, clenching the taps. Her knuckles were white. She was having difficulty breathing. Out of the presence of the babysitter, her heart ached, groaned, as lake ice groans when it melts. She was sobbing into her hand. He was more than an hour late. It was dark and snowy. There would be no date. She looked down at her new dress, and clawed at the knot on the waist.

  “Goddamn it,” she whispered.

  In the bathroom, she undressed. She hung the dress on the back of the door.

  “Joanne,” she said, emerging in a sweatshirt and jeans from the hamper. “You can go home now, OK?”

  Joanne peeled her sweater from her mouth. “Go home?”

  “It’s snowing pretty hard. I think my husband and I will be staying in tonight.”

  The girl, standing, seemed resigned. “All right,” she said, accepting the twenty-dollar bill that Alice placed in her hand. She walked across the room to the door and opened it herself.

  “Good night,” said Alice.

  The girl turned around on the landing, and a look of concern flitted across her young face, a look that suggested she had just understood something about being a woman or being a wife or wanting things at great cost. Her brow furrowed. She ran her hand across the top of the staircase railing.

  “Have a good night,” the girl said.

  “You, too,” said Alice. “Say hello to your Mom and Dad for me.”

  The tenderness of the girl’s naive concern softened something in Alice. Alone, waiting, she suddenly became calm. He was now so late that she could give up hoping.

  In their bedroom, in the moonlight of their first January, the twins were sleeping deeply. Their chests rose and fell so slightly. They appeared so motionless as to be painted, the light from the nightlight glowing moonlike upon their faces. Frances’s arms flapped once, and then the infant fell back into her timelessness. Alice’s envy of them made her sad. To envy a being without knowledge or experience! She tried to resist it, yet she envied them, and even though she resisted it, she had the wish that they would never grow up. How trite the thought was, and how inescapable. To be that still, to be without expectation, to sleep that deeply, nothing but a watery darkness to dream about, perhaps the sound of footsteps, a cough, a church bell. The pleasant shameless warmth of urination. The smell of your sister’s head. A shadow passing across the room.

  Before she knew it, she had the phone in her hand.

  “Mother,” said Alice. “It’s me.”

  “Alice? Alice. My daughter Alice? That charming little girl who used to live with me?”

  Alice ran her finger across the top of the old kitchen wainscoting, smiling. She could almost picture her mother waking up from her evening nap, wiping her mouth, pouring the cat off her lap.

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Hello.” Marlene yawned on the other end. “This is an unexpected pleasure, to hear from you. It’s been a while. Not that I’m complaining. I never complain.” Marlene snorted. “It is, however, wonderful to hear your voice. I was just dreaming about the pond where, as a girl, I used to chase bullfrogs. Aren’t memories funny? Piano keys you never play. Is it snowing there?”

  Alice looked at the floor. She covered her mouth with her hand. In a moment, the urge to cry passed. Don’t cry, she instructed herself. You are twenty-five years old. A mother and a wife. At this same age, her own mother had raised her all by herself, unmarried, penniless, and disowned by her family. Alice steadied her voice.

  “I was just thinking of you, is all. I was thinking maybe you could come down soon. Not just for the day. Stay a week or something. I know you hate the bus, but—”

  “For Chrissakes,” cried Marlene. “What took you so long? I was waiting for you to ask. I’m a grandmother, dammit. The girls at the library think those children are a figment of my imagination.”

  Alice laughed. “I was trying to do it by myself. I wanted to do it myself.”

  “You don’t need to do it all by yourself.”

  “You did it by yourself.”

  “And it was hell. I
nearly tossed you in the Bay.”

  “Mother!”

  “Of course I’ll come. Give me time to arrange it. It will be so lovely, us girls hanging about. I’ll take care of them, while you get to have some time to yourself. Take a bath. Read a book. Have you been able to read, Alice darling?”

  “A little.” Alice bent her head. “Not much.” In her memory, the big pink house arose again, this time covered in shadow. The big, rangy seagulls of Gloucester circled the cold sheds. “Are you sure you want to come? I mean, you have your own life.”

  “But I don’t want it,” protested Marlene, laughing.

  Just then, the door opened at the foot of the apartment stairwell.

  “Thank God,” Alice said without meaning to. “Mother, I have to go. I have to go.”

  “Call me soon, dear. We’ll make a definite plan. Call me soon, Alice!”

  Alice hung up the phone. She ran to the top of the apartment stairs. Below her, down the dark staircase, the door opened with a gust of snow. She realized that no matter how blatantly he had broken their date, no matter that he had not even taken one moment to call her, she just wanted him to come home now, to come home.

  The figure below looked up at her in the flickering hall light.

  It was the schoolteacher, the short little miserable-looking schoolteacher who lived downstairs.

  The schoolteacher stared up at Alice with a mixture of irritation and hopefulness. It was almost as if he hoped Alice was there waiting for him, although he also knew that she wasn’t.

  “Oh,” said Alice. “Hi.”

  The schoolteacher sniffled, rubbed his nose with his wrist. Of course, he thought, there you go, she thought I was someone else. The expression on her face was one of such disappointment. He wanted to hide from that expression. Of course she was not waiting for him. No one was waiting for him. Not even a dog or a cat. Not even Beckett. He had loaned his copy of Watt to the boy who’d had a nervous breakdown. The schoolteacher jammed his key in the lock.

  Alice opened her mouth. The man disappeared inside his dark apartment. Just before he shut the door behind him she saw, beneath a bald light bulb, a tall shelf of books. She stepped down one stair.

  “Wait,” she said, her voice echoing in the stairwell.

  The door to the schoolteacher’s apartment slammed, sending a rain of paint chips to the hallway floor.

  Alice shrank back into her own apartment. Hand on the doorknob, she stood frozen for a moment just inside. Then she took the snow globe off its shelf and heaved it across the room. It landed with a crash against the wall, but did not shatter.

  January.

  Ice.

  Distant music.

  Christmas lights.

  Car wheels spinning.

  In the nursery, a baby whined, awoken. Below, a key scratched in the front door. Footsteps pounded up the first flight of stairs. Alice, lying prone on the floor, her head on her arm, was watching a small pool of water form beside the glass globe. Inside, the snow fell sideways, but the girl and the boy and the snowman did not seem to notice.

  It had taken a long time to read and understand the menu. The effort of this and of being in a place they could not afford had cast them into silence. Now Charlie was eating his salad energetically, making appreciative sounds and wiping his mouth with his good hand. The other hand lay bandaged in his lap.

  After a while, Alice set down her fork.

  “For god sakes, Charlie. It’s just a salad.”

  He looked up, vinaigrette on his lips. He set down his fork. They both looked out the window at the glittering darkness. The waitress came to take their salad plates.

  “I showed a lady a picture of you. She said you had kind eyes.”

  “Oh yeah?” Charlie smiled. “What lady?”

  “You don’t agree?” Alice held a spoon before his face. He saw his face cradled in a spoon, his features distorted and not kind. “A lady who tells the future. A psychic.”

  “You did not,” said Charlie.

  “I did too. I went and got my future told this week. Ten dollars.”

  “Where?”

  “A little place in between the shoe store and the Italian bakery. She sits at the window behind a heavy purple curtain. It’s all very theatrical. Sometimes you can catch her reading a detective novel.” Alice took a sip of water. “To test her, I took off my wedding ring, and I made up a fake name and a fake birthday.”

  “Where were the twins when you did all this?”

  “Oh I just left them crawling around in the street.” Alice rolled her eyes. “They were in the stroller, Charlie. In the stroller.”

  “All right.”

  “There was this—this kind of jingly jangly music in the background, and I expected a bunch of concubines to come out and fan me with palm leaves. It was weird. It was sexy.”

  “Jesus, Alice. What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, not her. The whole gesture. Submitting like that. Laying your hand—your bare wrist—across a table—” Alice paused, her napkin to her mouth. She remembered the tremble of the psychic’s lips, tasting a bitterness, and the twins beginning to cry, invisibly afraid, and how she grabbed her coat and ran, ran ran ran. She did not tell him this. She had wanted to make the story better than it was.

  “What a racket,” Charlie said. “People like that prey upon people less intelligent than yourself. Because of course there is no prewritten fate. You, me, that fortune-teller, God even, nobody knows. It’s black out there.”

  “It’s pink.”

  “Mm?”

  “The color of the universe is pinkish, actually. Not black. If you average all the colors. So I’ve read.”

  “You know what I mean. Arbitrary.”

  “What sort of arbitrary universe takes the trouble to be pink?”

  Charlie squinted at her.

  “Oh I agree with you, Charlie. All right? I agree! It’s a racket. That’s what I starting this whole thing by saying. I just want to tell you about my stupid adventure.”

  They were quiet. Again, the waitress came over. She filled their glasses with water. Charlie kept his eyes in his lap.

  “You confuse me,” he said softly. “When I leave home in the morning, you’re nice and warm and familiar. And when I come home, you’re all razzed. You’re like freaking Elizabeth Taylor. ‘Clink! Clink! Clink!’ Sometimes I don’t know where you get these ideas. Do you get them in books?”

  “There,” Alice said, leaning over the expensively white table, “You just gave yourself away. You think I have to steal my ideas from books. You don’t think I can make them up all by myself?”

  “Of course I do. Of course.”

  “I decided, last week, that if I had to live inside a house, if I had to live inside, I would live way inside. I would live the life of the mind. Of the imagination! I could become a true eccentric.”

  “You bring up last week because I didn’t show for our date.”

  “I bring up last week because I had a great realization,” sniffed Alice. “And because you didn’t show.”

  “I’m sorry I made you unhappy.”

  “Oh stop,” Alice said. “Quit poking around for the soft spot.”

  “I’d like to comfort you.”

  “I don’t want to be comforted by you these days.”

  “By your husband?”

  “You can’t have both, Charlie. You can’t make me feel bad and then make me feel better. You lose credibility.”

  “You make me feel bad sometimes. You make me feel better.”

  “Well, then, I guess a marriage really takes four people. Two people to put it together and two more to tear it apart.” Alice picked up a piece of bread. “We’d better eat this bread,” she said. “It looks free, but its cost is actually subsumed by the rest of the menu.”

  “No,” Charlie said, pointing. “We don’t finish conversations like that. Other people can talk like that. You’re starting to care too much about how our conversations sound. It’s like,
it’s like you write them while I’m away.”

  “Then how do you know the lines so well, if only I write them?”

  “See, there you go. When did you become so clever?” Charlie tried to smile. “You know what they said about Cassius.”

  “No, I don’t know what they said about Cassius. I never went to college, remember? Who was Cassius? Wasn’t he some boxer?”

  “Don’t. Don’t,” Charlie’s fist struck the table, making the candlelight gutter. “Don’t lie about yourself. I know you!”

  Alice looked around. She smoothed her hair.

  “Lower your voice please,” she said.

  “When I am working with clients, with anyone, somebody suffering because, say, voices have told him to freeze himself or burn himself or walk into the ocean, or some woman is so ill she can’t move—cannot move—from the floor of her apartment, do you think I am thinking only of that person? Of that freezing man or that woman on the floor? Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I guess I would hope so.”

  “Then you don’t know a hell of a lot about me.”

  The waitress came then, setting down their dinner plates. No one spoke.

  “I understand about them,” said Alice. “The man freezing, the woman. It’s hateful for me to be jealous of them. When I found out about Opal—I felt terrible, being angry you were late. What did I matter in the face of all that? I feel terrible and small-hearted when I’m in competition with them.”

  “But you aren’t in competition with them. It’s you, you, everywhere. Everything I am capable of doing is because of this. Because of love. And I have to believe love increases—hope increases—when you give it—”

  “—Away?”

  “You can’t give it away. It’s love. You make more by giving it.” Charlie took her hand across the table, firmly. “We do the same things when we’re apart. We both take care of other people. Maybe you can think of our time apart as time spent parallel to each other. Maybe you wouldn’t feel so lonely.”

  It must have been the word lonely. The combination of low and only. Alice began to cry.