“Black Acre,” read a crude sign with an arrow, when she opened them again. And at the next farm, “Pressure washing. Moss removal. Rabbits.” The sun had withdrawn. Her drowsing mind surveyed the few cars being drawn along the road with them, each with its toy figures inside, into a still landscape of ploughed fields, house trailers spellbound in fog, and flocks of wet sheep. The fog lifted on a sudden acre of llamas, grazing in the mud under thin rain and their own rainbow. At that house there were a dozen cats on the porch and more scattered in the little field with the llamas, watching the grass. Stretching, May pointed them out to Cole. “I thought cats hated the rain.”
“These cats are half wild,” said Cole, who had never been in the area before and had no special knowledge of animals.
At the hospital Cole decided very quickly what something was and what to do about it. He had to. All surgeons did this, he claimed; they all decided in this way. Pronounced, May said. If so, he said, that was what was required of them.
“Uh oh, she’ll never let you get away with that,” her friend Leah used to say when he came out with one of his assertions. And now May had to wait for them, even solicit them, so the valve would open to let in a quick, hot jet of his old pride in himself. His old lordly certainty—how could she have tried to break him of it?
By the time they crossed into Canada the rain had stopped and the sun was out. From his booth the customs agent looked into the car without interest, though with a certain weary probity. May felt his glance pass over her, full of knowledge of the things people tried to get away with. His gray face—how did the old shave those seams and moles?—and red-rimmed eyes. This would be a good job for an old person who had to have a job. A widower whose apartment was stale with a lone man’s neatness. His fingers were the color of cement, and as he questioned Cole, one of them absently, tenderly rubbed the furrow beside his mouth. May leaned forward in her seatbelt and met his eyes.
A bolt of something in the eyes—of being a man in a booth, old, on a quiet border—traveled into her. It took her breath away. To dispel the feeling, when he had nodded them through she said lightly, “You know, I’m turning into one of those people who get messages in their fillings.” Cole didn’t answer. Since his heart attack he had trouble paying attention. “All of a sudden,” she persisted, “I’ll get a message. I got one just now. Why would I keep having this feeling of . . . I don’t know what?”
But when she turned to look at the old man she saw that for the blond girl at the wheel of the next car he had shed his tragic calm and produced a grin and a jaunty wave. She sat back, her startled relief complicated by a need to pull down the visor and look at herself in the mirror.
“It’s a mystery to me,” Cole said, without asking what message she might have received. He pointed at a sign. “Twenty-five kilometers. Are you awake? This time can you tell me before the exit?”
“You think it’s my age.” She was fifty-five. “But maybe I’m supposed to do something.”
“You’re doing something, you’re teaching. Plus keeping track of Nick. A full-time job.”
“I don’t mean that, I don’t mean my job, I mean . . .”
“You mean maybe you’re supposed to get through to the president?”
“Maybe I am. It could be I have secret information.”
He still went with her to spy movies and thrillers. And he would sit through a comedy, and laugh, in places. He wouldn’t watch anything serious now. No “drama.” Not long after his bypass she got hold of a questionnaire, “How’s Your Mood? Ten Character Basics,” in a magazine her students were passing around. These surveys were in all the magazines because it was the year of the mood ring. The high school girls joked about the rings but it was true that they were freshly conscious of their own natures, registering in color from the heat of skin. May showed the questionnaire to her friend Leah and they filled it out on Cole. A low score indicated optimism; Cole’s, in Leah’s firm tally, was close to the highest. Laughing in movies had saved him two points.
“This puts him in greenish-gray,” Leah said, describing the result to May’s daughter Vera. “Mud color. That’s bad. And he—you know him, he thinks he’s fooling everybody. Hey, I bet you have a mood ring on you.”
“I do not! And I think it goes all the way to black.”
Vera was on leave from the hospital ship that had been her home for a year. She had arrived in tinted glasses, a leather midi skirt with a slit, and platform lace-up boots. “Wow,” Leah and May had said together, hugging her at the airport. “You’re the one I’d want for my nurse,” Leah said.
“Nurse-practitioner. So tell me about Daddy. And Nick. But not till we get to the car. Hey, look at you. My two favorite women. Mom, you look great. I thought you’d look like a truck hit you.”
“Wait till you see your dad,” Leah said. “Oh, not that anything happened to him. What am I saying?”
“Daddy.” May thought if Vera cried even Leah would cry, and that would be the end of them. But she didn’t, she said, “OK, so you don’t look all that great,” and put her arm around May and squeezed her to her side as they walked.
Sometimes, of late, May would feel a dire unrest pulsing from the person ahead of her in line at the grocery store. Sometimes she wondered how anyone in the aisles carried the simple load of the hidden family that was going to eat the groceries, or of no family, no one.
But then a blast of euphoria would hit her, at the sight of certain faces on the street, certain gaits, a dog wagging for its nondescript master, the way a woman pushing a grocery cart of her earthly goods stopped to light a cigarette—a sense of the strength it took to live and the shocking but finally satisfactory ways so many found to do it. This dizzy, momentary approval of everything that met her eyes frightened her because it might be similar to what Nick experienced with drugs, and who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t seek it out?
It was her age. All of it. She was at that age. Although some of it might be that she was quitting smoking again.
Her older daughter, Laura, who wrote for the newspaper and had this year won a prize for her series of articles about midlife, had given her a spiral notebook and told her to write down whatever came to her on these occasions. Laura knew of May’s solemn ambition as a child to be a writer herself. And later, in high school, May’s prize. May had won it for her project on Hooverville. For each of several invented residents of that encampment she had imagined a life story. May would be the first to admit that the students in her own English classes wouldn’t even try to get away with such a thing. They had tape recorders; they recognized the preeminence of reality. Absurd as it was, the work of a fifteen-year-old locked in daydream, May had never thrown away the sheaf of onionskin with its brass-plated paper fasteners. Laura had found it and taken it into her possession. Laura was the repository of particular facts about each member of the family, the one trusted not to make light of some unlikely honor or some forgotten pledge or aspiration. “Who knows what you might do with it, if you write down these ideas you’re having.”
“Hardly ideas.”
“OK, it will help you,” Laura said.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know,” said Laura. “Just try it.”
Right away May lost the notebook, and that was the end of that. She hoped it wasn’t lying around somewhere in the school building; she didn’t want her students finding “ninth grader changing baby in bthrm, patience, happiness, slvr thumb rings,” and screaming out, “That’s Mrs. Nilsson’s handwriting!”
May had not always been a person who went back and forth, readily exchanging one mood for another, or sank under the weight of an apprehension of the future, or looked at a question from all sides. At one time she had been single-minded. She had been a person who acted, who seized what seemed defensibly hers.
“Wasn’t I?” she asked Leah. “But you didn’t know me when I was young and wild.”
“I’ve known you long enough.”
In l
ove, for instance. An experience, May had found to her surprise, so enveloping at times as to exclude even the lover. She had been in this state with Cole, long ago. Alone in the spangled dark of shut eyes, she had counted over the coins of her passion. But there—the man in the bed with her. Ah, back into his arms, words found, tokens given to stand for the inner state of blank, electrified being.
With Cole, at that time, it was almost always night. Night and secret. May could remember opening her eyes and watching for a long time in the dark as his hands, chapped from too much washing in the strong surgical soap, took shape on the blanket like lights slowly coming on. He was a surgery resident and she was twenty years old, a day student at the state university, working in a lab at the medical school.
They would lie in bed listening to news of the war. They were always in bed, as she remembered it. She was still living at home and she could concoct explanations for her father but her stepmother knew why she was away at night. Of course she did.
She liked the way his hands lay half closed; she liked to feel herself moving very slowly in an element heavier than the air of her real surroundings. She felt at once old enough to stand up to anyone who tried to advise her, and ignorant of the simplest thing, ignorant of how to do all the things she was going to be expected to do. She would look out of her suspended, revolving self at his hands, as if she were looking out of a casement window. Then she would close the window and be in the shuttered room of happiness.
They were not married and did not know they would be. She was eight years younger than he, an eternity to both of them. There was a woman expecting to marry him, someone May had to deprive and punish. She had no reason to honor the woman’s claim on him; she knew her only by sight, in the corridors of the hospital.
Cole did not seem to her to have a role to play in this contest, even though he had started the whole thing by letting her kiss him on the cheek, just grazing the mouth, the day the nurses brought in a birthday cake for him. And by following her after that, down to Receiving in the basement where she picked up lab supplies, and kissing her again and maneuvering her into an alley behind packing crates on dollies, against a wall, and pulling up her sweater and going into a ravenous hunt all over her. The quiet, the severe—whether shy or arrogant—Cole Nilsson. The blue-eyed, piano-playing, much-chased Cole Nilsson, who was spoken for. Engaged. And then gasping with her less than a week later in bed.
May was surprised at her determination, unyielding as a child’s: he had to come to her. Marriage, having children—she didn’t think of any of that. He had to come to her.
There was a black telephone on his bedside table. How many times his hand went out to clamp it during the night, when the hospital called. The telephone was part of the scene of their bed, with the little clock reflected in its black side. One night when the phone rang it was his fiancée, asking if she could come over. She was a resident too, just finishing up in the ER after midnight. “It’s so late,” Cole told her. “I have to operate in the morning.” He dropped his hand across his eyes and when he replaced the receiver he did it softly. “She’s a good person,” he said distinctly, into the dark. “You’re practically a child. I’ve got to—I’ve got to . . .”
May agreed. He needed time. And she argued that if she was able to understand this need, then surely his fiancée, with her hair hanging coiled in one of those woven nets, and her lipstick, and her lab coat pulled tight over her low-slung rear because she walked with her hands in her pockets, so what if she was smart, the only female resident, lots of people were smart—these opinions May did not include—surely she would have to understand it. The good person he was always describing would be patient with the trouble he was having.
They went on in the dark, in this ancient conversation.
He did not need to see her face to know the falseness of what she was saying, or that it didn’t matter to either of them who was good and who wasn’t. They thought only, at this stage, of each other’s bodies. Or not even of each other’s, but of theirs together. They were dimly aware of a force shoving out from each of them, clearing things in its way.
In those days they screamed at each other. Or at least May screamed at Cole. She had reason: for months the woman he was supposed to marry could not be told, because of his anguished, irrational loyalty, and when she was told, she would not relinquish him. Finally she had to, but not before she made her own scenes. Even May felt sorry for her as she went about bringing the locomotive of her approaching wedding to a stop.
What would the patients have said, May sometimes wondered, people with heart trouble who sat respectfully on the examining table while Cole blew on his stethoscope to warm it, if they could have seen and heard these two women, the sobs, the sidewalk ultimatums, and behind them the chorus of medical students and nurses and orderlies who never appeared to take notice of them but knew their story each step of the way?
But the cancellation of his marriage was not the solution it had promised to be. Cole was free, but May had already embarked on a joyless period of seeing several medical students and a history professor from her anarchist study group. The country was not at war but the war colored everything; irresponsible private lives, most of them, were beginning to draw down and hide themselves. Plans had to be serious. Cole was standing ready to join the Medical Corps if war was declared. May opposed entering the war. She was the secretary of her study group; each Tuesday they met at a different apartment off campus where they drank muscatel, read Kropotkin, and discussed the anarchist position on war.
One thing she had learned in the study group was that she was not dependably an anarchist, across the board, and even her pacifism left much for the others to scrutinize. Where was the courage pacifism would require, the pure motive to protect others that she had believed hers by nature? She knew Cole thought her young and selfish, and resolute, and bold: the college student he had followed—who had lured him with a laugh in an elevator, as he recalled it—down onto the Receiving dock. A laugh and a personal remark, which he considered inappropriate.
This made her laugh in later years. “Inappropriate!”
“You have a funny ear” was what she had said in the elevator, out of an unaccountable wish to tease, possibly even humiliate him. She had not even thought it before she said it. Then she clasped her hands behind her, leaned back on the padding—they were in one of the padded freight elevators—and laughed. She was not a person who laughed at anyone else. She would have said she was kind, often entrapped by her sympathies.
This was before she knew his perfectionism, the strictures he placed on himself. Flushed, he had joked, “My defect.”
“Well, I’m glad you have one.” Would she have crossed the little space of the elevator, touched the folded-down rim at the top of his ear? He claimed she had.
“No, I’d remember that.”
“I remember.”
Of the study group he said, “You’ll go to jail if you’re not careful. You don’t know who those kids are.”
“Some of them are professors. They’re people who don’t want you killed, that’s who they are. And if you didn’t even have the nerve to tell her the truth all that time, how do you think you could fight?”
“It’s the Medical Corps, May.”
“And I never see you. I saw you more when you were engaged to her.”
“I’m a resident. Don’t light that. Don’t smoke those, May, for God’s sake.”
They kept this up: they locked each other out of apartments and hotel rooms; storming away from her he ran his car, his prized ’33 Ford with the first dashboard radio, off a ramp sideways and bent the axle; they threw dishes, or May did, against the iron radiators of his apartment. They did a lot of drinking, as others were doing all around them, despite or because of the fact that the country was heading for war. Cole’s perfect record as a resident received some black marks.
Then they got married and Cole went off to war. May got a job interviewing conscientious objectors for th
e Civilian Public Service, men sent to plant trees on the coast and fight fires. At times the war was not even in the headlines. The luck of war passed back and forth inexplicably between the sides. The bomb fell on Hiroshima. Cole came back and finished his residency and after that they had Laura. These events seemed to take no time at all.
They put that earlier period into civilized words; they said in later years how lucky they were to have stayed together after starting off in that headlong way.
Out the window the mountains drew closer. They wore patches of stubble but the slopes did not seem to be logged as heavily as the ones lining the valley on their own side of the border. That side fell away. May felt as if she had put down heavy grocery bags.
“I love this so. Being gone.”
“We’re right here,” Cole said.
“So we are.” They drove under the shadow cast on the little one-street town by dark green mountains.
The hotel had three or four wings in different architectural styles, none of them finished, or if finished already falling into disrepair, as if the designers had set out several times with high hopes and then lost interest. Yet the sprawling buildings, connected to the small, vaguely Georgian center like full-grown young still suckling, were not precisely a failure. They were defiantly persisting, not all wrong. The lake in front was confidently beautiful, a calendar lake, disappearing in mist at the far side. Above the mist stood voluminous clouds, like buildings. All this was replayed in the water, a still, blue-green oil.
In the lobby a fire had been lit in the stone fireplace, and girls in aprons were laying white cloths on a long trestle table. Waiting while a line of Japanese couples slowly checked in, Cole watched the laughing, gossiping young men at the desk with a concentration familiar to May. One of them wore a rubber guard on his forefinger and was flipping through the same stack of papers on the counter over and over again. The other had the pair ahead of Cole almost registered, but his hand kept hovering above the stapler as he talked. They had a newspaper on the counter and they were talking about something in it. Somebody had disappeared. “Zip, zilch, nada,” said the one with the stapler.
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