by Tatjana Soli
Why shouldn’t one grow to love the time one is most accomplished, most experienced, most importantly most oneself? Why shouldn’t there be an unseemliness to the twenties and thirties, the bareness of personality, raw, like uncooked meat, pure hormonal drives that canceled individual choice?
Claire was in her own fool’s paradise with Minna, no mirrors to remember the lines on her face, no dissenting, disapproving outside. Minna telling her what she wanted to believe, filling her mind with fictions. She felt like a yogi deep in the forest, meditating on the heart of the universe, hidden and yet connected with everything.
* * *
Minna and Claire ate dinner on the living-room floor by kerosene lamp: cheese, crackers, and fruit. They ate like nomads, campers, travelers passing through a place they would not soon return to. Moths circled the room and singed their wings at the top of the lamp’s glass chimney, leaving behind a smell like burnt hair. A large one hit the lamp and fell to the floor. He was furry brown, as big as a hummingbird. Minna picked him up in her hand and lofted him out the window. The gay gentleman will be safe now. Claire smiled, but then her amusement turned to confusion—had that happened before, or had it happened in the book? In the distance, they heard the wail of sirens.
“Tell me about Joshua.” It had been so long—hours, days?—since they last spoke that Claire was startled as much by the sound of Minna’s voice as the meaning of her words.
“I’d rather not—”
“I must know for the final ceremonies. That is the reason you are healed.”
* * *
Earlier that evening, they had drawn the wooden gate across the driveway entrance in preparation for the possibility of fire reaching them, never even considering escape. They wanted to prevent invasion—even at the cost of their lives. Unspoken that they both felt in an enchanted place, untouchable. A stiff gust pressed against the walls, the windows, the doors.
“The smoke is heavier. It’s getting closer,” Claire said. “Are we safe?”
They went out on the lawn and saw that the night stars had disappeared in long, clotted valleys of smoke. Something hot landed on her arm, and she swatted it, thinking it was a mosquito. She lifted her hand to discover a piece of hot ash.
“The wind’s coming our way.”
Sirens circled closer, the wailing stoppering their ears. Through loudspeakers she heard garbled orders for an evacuation. The roof of the ranch house was thirty-year-old shingle, the sides wood, a tinderbox.
“What should we do?” Claire said.
Minna shrugged. “Go swimming, Agatha.”
“Who do you mean?” From the novel, Claire understood enough that a renaming indicated a change of allegiances.
Minna went into the dining room and came out holding the two silver candelabra that Hanni had brought from Germany and had given to Claire on her wedding day. She dropped them in the deep end.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked, as Minna brought stacks of china and submerged them on the shallow steps. Soon, the two women were throwing in bundled sheets full of clothes. Claire took all her jewelry and dropped it in a pillowcase, tied it off, then plunged the whole thing under the diving board. Minna wrapped Raisi’s samovar in blankets, taped it, and immersed it. They worked feverishly until all the valuables were underwater. Smoke lay heavy all around like fog.
Claire unzipped her shorts and stepped out of them. She waded into the shallow end, past the red, blue, and gold crystal wine goblets, wearing only T-shirt and baggy underwear. Minna came back out of the house wearing the necklace Claire had given her, shorts, and a cropped tank top that showed the hard roundness of her belly. Claire did not point out that if they were in need of rescue, or even if they perished in the fire, Minna would be better served covered to the eyes of the world.
They sat on the bottom steps in the shallow end, knee to knee, as if at a corner table at a restaurant, resting their chins on the surface of the water, alligator-style, enjoying a horizontal view of their fiery world. A curtain of orange flame appeared above the farthest treetops. A dread thrill that maybe the orchard would abandon Claire since she wouldn’t abandon it. Her nose filled with the candied smell of burnt citrus. The last thing she saw was the glint of Minna’s necklace under the water before she closed her eyes against the stinging air. The world shuddered a final contraction. Goldfish nibbled against her ankles as Minna hummed.
“He is coming,” she said.
“Now?” Claire said, thinking of Minna’s distended belly.
“Jean-Alexi. To run the farm.”
Claire’s mind itself caught flame, thinking of the phone calls and the man with the sliding voice like silver coins that she had talked to. The island boy of Minna’s unrequited love. “If there’s anything left,” Claire said, trying not to show her excitement.
“Can I touch it?” She motioned toward Minna’s stomach.
“Yes, Agatha.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?”
“She is the saint that cured you. Jean-Alexi will take her dues.”
Silence, and then Minna guided Claire’s hand underwater. A shudder of electric happiness ran through Claire because new life was joy no matter its source. She put her other hand underneath Minna’s belly, as if she were holding it aloft, as if she alone were cupping a world for safekeeping. Minna was right. No use planning. The future would find them.
* * *
The flames skipped over the ranch.
The wind changed direction, sparing most of the orchards. Famished, they got out of the pool, prune-fingered and stiff, and went into the kitchen to get something to eat. In the arctic light of the open freezer, they spooned mouthfuls of melting ice cream directly out of a gallon container into their mouths.
In the morning, Claire discovered a dozen blackened shingles on the roof, like rotted teeth on a Halloween pumpkin. An acre of citrus trees had turned to ash. Walking down the burnt rows, she found the coaled bodies of parrots.
Chapter 17
They had been alone together so long, had gone through illness and healing, Claire could no longer tell the difference between her white and Minna’s black.
Chapter 18
Claire was Lazarus, come back to cranky life. Health had a slow gestation—she imagined a butterfly breaking wetly, clumsily, from her cocoon. The first glance of insect ugliness until the sails of wings unfurled, a veil of beauty hiding raw, violent birth. If illness was one kind of birth, returning health was another. Each a distinct new incarnation.
Her thoughts floated, both detailed and nonsensical as in a dream. The risk of normal thinking was as daunting as a sheer-faced summit, unapproachable. Concentrating on the mundane—grocery shopping, oil change for the car, fertilizing the orchard, the arrival of the new foreman, Jean-Alexi—beyond her. She dreamed of Raisi, relived her childhood apartment in the most minute detail—the carved armoire with the bear’s mouth open where she used to hide grapes.
Where was that armoire? She would have given anything to look at it now. Why in the barn, why hidden? But then Claire lost herself again in contemplation of the clouds.
Had she pushed too many responsibilities onto Minna’s shoulders, while allowing herself to revert to this childlike state? She felt as if she would split open at any moment and burst into flower. She had a mystical, almost supernatural feeling that something of immense importance was about to happen, either in her thoughts or outside in the physical world. Although the boundaries between the two were becoming less and less separate. Any manhandling on her part would interrupt what was preordained.
The doctor had explained this was chemo brain, this fog, the aftereffects of the drugs, and that she should not become paranoid. All enlightenments written off in one fell swoop as chemical imbalances. She scorned the doctor. Were his conclusions, his “probabilities,” any less fantastic than Minna’s magic figures and her elixirs?
Too, she began to suspect Forster’s motives, his sudden insistence about running the farm. Probably
his Katie had talked him into finally selling, and Claire was the last obstacle. She was beginning to see through Mrs. Girbaldi’s perfidy. Hadn’t she been one of the first to sell out? What could she possibly understand about being linked to the land? Neither Gwen nor Lucy would ever be persuaded of the ranch’s value. No, the truth was that she was seeing more clearly than ever before.
* * *
Events were happening around her, unwinding like constellations, that she knew she would have to face. The screaming train of Minna’s swelling belly, the likely paternity, was a fast-approaching future. Nothing like the approach of a child in one’s life to mark time into neat, tidy increments of necessity. Which bedroom would be the baby’s room? Birth a summons, not an invitation. Would that be a suitable excuse to delay selling the farm?
Another part of the constellation—Claire’s emptying house, the implausibility of Minna’s explanations. Why should her beloved things be packed away in the barn? Where, again, was the armoire? She daydreamed the grapes turned to raisins in the bear’s mouth. Woke up in a panic. Why had the roses in the garden been torn out and green beans, tomatoes, ragged ears of corn, planted instead? Were they preparing for some sort of Armageddon? Why no electricity and only intermittent phone? Why had the farm become a place only fit for ghosts? Fruit hardening on the trees; juice distilled into sour syrup; earth turned graveyard. Claire took a pinch of dirt on her tongue but spat it out, the taste turned alkali.
At the time each change occurred, she accepted it, so that all became part of what already was and thus acceptable. The frog who overlooked her own boiling. Chemo fog. Minna so logical and persuasive that Claire accepted that she had been abandoned by everyone: Mrs. Girbaldi away on a cruise; Forster busy with a new business venture. The girls’ calls always came when she was in the tub or taking a nap, which was most of the time. Tiredness such as she had never imagined, and she prayed it was a precursor to health. Minna warned that they would pressure Claire about selling the farm. Paranoia? The only way Claire could gauge how far things had gone off-balance was to imagine the circumstances through Gwen’s eyes. Through her prim, judging eyes, none of this would do.
But all that was a diversion. Claire’s real attention was focused inward, on her own resurrection, the swell of health tending her toward the mystical. Hadn’t she been healed by magic, after all? She broke down in tears at the sight of returning golden, downy hairs on her forearms. The tissues in her mouth healed, and she could again chew. So unexpected, so delightful, the fading of the specter of death. As if it were a thing that could be overcome, denied, and forgotten for all time.
She looked with benevolence on the sun rising, the smell of sage scrub in the air, the shush of new leaves on the trees. Even Minna’s strangeness, her lack of joy at the new life within her, could not blemish Claire’s happiness. Her own pregnancies had been the most contented times of her life. Although she could not shake the light feeling inside her head—a constant vertigo that kept her from moving too quickly—she was able to sit for hours, caught in the sounds of birds, wind, caught in stillness. How to explain that each vestige stripped from her revealed itself to be less? As if she could finally take flight. She knew she would have to return to the mundane, but just not yet.
* * *
Minna broiled a large piece of steak in a roasting pan, and the smell of its cooking drove Claire into a frenzy, a sure sign she was getting better. She stood at the sink, turned on the KÄLTE faucet, drank deep gulps of the icy water, the only thing she could fill herself with freely. They sat at the bare kitchen table across from each other, the sole light from candles, the flames flattening with each breeze. Minna poured herself a large glass of red wine. Dark rings shadowed her eyes; she looked weary.
“Are you sure you should drink that?”
“Why not?” The flame’s light contorted Minna’s features, making her beautiful one moment, ugly to the point of fright the next.
“Your condition.”
“I don’t know what you’re meaning.” Minna plopped a large cup of the elixir in front of Claire so that it splashed on the wooden table.
“I’d like a little wine tonight.”
“That’s up to me.”
“Please,” Claire said, a stab of impatience. But she nodded, drinking the mixture down, already grown faint and tired from the coming effect of it. Hadn’t Minna already led her so far, didn’t it seem clear she knew better?
“What will you do, eventually? Go back to your family?”
“Don’t know.”
“Back to Berkeley?”
“Ready for me to clear out already? Want to wipe away all traces of me now?”
“No, no. I’d like you to stay here for a while. With the baby.”
Minna rose and slammed the roasting pan down on the table. “Don’t think that’s likely. Gwen will throw us both out on our ears soon.”
“The steak smells good,” Claire said.
“Doesn’t it?”
Minna speared the piece of meat, then attacked it with a hefty cutting knife, slicing a large piece and putting it on one plate, cut-ting a smaller piece and placing it on another. Claire knew better than to expect any vegetables on the side or salad or even bread. Again, a flash of impatience. She would broach the subject of taking over the cooking now that she was getting stronger. Maybe even insist on inviting over Mrs. Girbaldi for a meal when she returned from her cruise. But all in its time. When Minna was in a good mood. If it came to that, would Claire know how to deliver a baby?
“I’m so hungry,” she said.
Minna set down the two plates on her side of the table and began to cut the meat, stuffing pieces in her mouth and chewing as she glared at Claire.
“I suppose you want some?”
Claire nodded, weak from the meat aroma and her hunger. So tired from the elixir it was an effort to keep her eyes open, keep her head from rolling on the table. “The carved armoire? The dining room table. Can we put them back in the house? I’ve changed my mind.”
Minna cut more pieces, chewed them down and swallowed, following each with a gulp of wine. “You must’ve eaten like this all your life.”
Claire’s head, so unbearably heavy, rocked back against the wooden rung of the chair. “Forster used to make barbecue on Sundays. For a while the girls ate only vegetarian, then fish.…”
Minna let out a long, slow chuckle. “Quite a luxury—imagine choosing not to eat.”
“You know how kids are…” Claire said, on the verge of tears. “About the armoire…”
Minna put her fork down and leaned close to her. The flame stretched her face into a long mask. “Do you know what real hunger is? I want you to feel it.”
If only Claire could focus, she knew that Minna was revealing her own biography through the body.
“Oh, che, I’m afraid that medicine has gone to your head and made you sick. Best not eat just now. Vomit make me a lot of work.”
Claire laid her head down on the table, willing herself back into the escape of sleep.
“I might just finish both pieces,” Minna said. “Eating for two, after all.”
Claire’s impatience burst into flame, hunger making her reckless. “What do you mean? Two?”
Minna gave a broad smile, her mouth full of food. “Eating for you and me, che, what else?”
“There’s someone else here. Why don’t you speak it aloud?” Claire felt utterly helpless.
“You are just beginning to understand how it is,” Minna whispered.
* * *
Claire staggered to her bed, which Minna had moved inside again. She now insisted they sleep separately. A nightmare woke Claire near dawn. She was being pursued, but her legs were so heavy she could not move. She banged on a door to be let in, but no one would answer. Then she was inside a house, struggling with a door to be let out. It was unclear whether she wanted in or out, but all the time the pursuer was catching up with her. She woke with a cry in her throat and lay on the bare mattress, wish
ing the nausea away, the stabbing of her stomach, the flutter and cramp of her intestines. Minna had urged her to wear a scarf, wrapped tight around the abdomen, so that she would not feel this pain she claimed was a spirit, but that Claire recognized was simply starvation.
Like a thief, she limped down the steps to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a large round of cheese.
Sitting on the floor, paring knife in hand, she cut off hunks and shoved them into her mouth. But the cheese was too thick, too creamy. Starvation had dulled her taste buds. She gagged, then heard the soft pad of footsteps stopping behind her. It seemed Minna never slept anymore.
“What do we have here? A little mouse?”
Claire shrugged, past explanation. Guilty, dirty. As if she had let Minna down somehow.
Minna crouched down, stroked her cheek. “Is my doudou getting better?”
“I’m hungry.”
“What about I make us some toast and eggs to go with that cheese? Would you like that?”
Claire nodded, ashamed, wondering if she had made the whole thing up, as Minna helped her up into a chair.
“The world is a hard place, my doudou, without mercy. But I will take care of you. I will be merciful.”
* * *
The next day passed without incident, Minna feeding her so that she grew strong enough to walk around the house and then outside on the lawn and into the garden. She was ashamed of her doubts, her suspicions. With new energy, Claire took an interest in the orchard. What she saw hurt her—trees that had been nurtured for years now overgrown, the unpicked fruit going to ruin. She tried to see the farm in its new state as not necessarily a bad thing, but rather a regression to its former state of wildness.