How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  “And some fortuneteller has hung out a shingle upstairs from the florist. Madame Kissmyaski. There’s a new chotchke shop that calls itself Lourdes. The next thing you know we’ll have holy Indians, chanting . . .”

  “They’re here already. Shaved heads, yellow robes. Clara, their music is extraordinary, Mixolydian, I think.”

  Clara groaned. “Godolphin will become a . . . Destination.”

  “Vaut le detour.” Into the honey pot went the finger with all its germs. Into the curved mouth now. Clara stood up, glared at Val, kneed away her chair... and moved around the table, and bent to taste those sticky lips. Oh, my love, my living love: what we might have missed.

  “Darling! You have a patient, I have a class . . .”

  “They’ll wait,” loosening her robe, loosening Val’s robe; and Val knelt; and Clara felt the lips and their honey.

  During the next few months bed-and-breakfasts multiplied. Herb sellers unfolded tables on the sidewalks and sold twigs and powders. The Godolphin police were reluctant to chase them away. A new restaurant opened—Mirabile.

  What could Clara do? She had a practice to maintain—she was, after all, their household’s chief support. Besides, she loved medicine. One day at the hospital she ran into the Russian doctor. He was a cardiologist, it turned out. Over coffee he told her that his own practice was flourishing. “For years I nearly starved,” he said. “Now they run to me, the congestives, the infarcts. And you know what?” and he leaned forward until his big nose almost touched hers. “A lot of them—I make better.”

  Well, a little notoriety; and then renewed confidence—Clara could explain it all. A few successes, more confidence... “I have been Selected,” the cardiologist preened.

  That night: “There’s this Committee,” Val said. “Erecting a statue.”

  “To you?”

  “Well . . . of me. Don’t frown that way, darling. I told them I wouldn’t pose.”

  The Committee engaged a sculptor anyway—an art student willing to work cheap. She installed the statue in the park at the top of Godolphin Hill, and chiseled V-A-L-E-R-I-E into the pedestal. Clara consulted their lawyer, who said that a suit would be a waste of money. First names were common property.

  Val’s photograph was off-limits, though. Most undertakings were content to reproduce the Statue on their signs. But the Statue didn’t really resemble her. A windswept woman in vague draperies leaned forward like a ship’s figurehead, her hands clasped in front of her bosom in a prayerful posture that Valerie would have died rather than adopt.

  “One of those talk programs wants an interview,” she reported to Clara.

  “Over my dead body.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  It was late at night. Val was already in bed, reading and smoking; Clara was struggling out of her clothes. She had gained weight during this confusing time. “Would you really like to be interviewed?” she growled, trousers halfway down her fat thighs. “Become a thing of the media? Belong to the public?”

  Val blew smoke in that inviting way; amazing that an exhalation could accomplish so much. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Mostly I want to belong to you.”

  “You already belong to me. Mostly?” The old arrow, Val could still fling it, straight to the heart.

  “It may be that I owe a debt to people of faith,” Val sighed.

  If you want to talk about debts, thought Clara . . . but she held her tongue.

  Val went on. “Willy-nilly, I have been touched by the divine.”

  “Balls. You are an ordinary woman who happens to have died.”

  Their gazes locked. Their twenty-year history seemed to float in the space between them, seemed to rock there, like a phantom child. And whatever would she have done without Valerie, Clara inwardly moaned while maintaining the ferocity of her expression, trying to anyway, apparently failing, for Val, no longer lofty, said, “Publicity would be a horror. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Well,” forgivingly.

  “You see, we musicians . . . we all once wished to be virtuosi.”

  Clara, who had still not stepped out of her trousers, hobbled over to the side of the bed and sat down and took Val’s silken hands in her coarse ones. “Such a charming wish.”

  So Val refused to grant interviews. A few more businesses sprang up without her cooperation; they succeeded without her connivance. But whenever she shopped at the Farmers’ Market, as she had always done (it operated every Thursday during the good months, in back of Town Hall), she was trailed by a little crowd, eyes glinting with excitement, buying exactly what she bought: arugula, mulberries when she could get them, strong cheese—she knew which dairymen managed to bypass pasteurization.

  Val ignored these followers. But during the second summer the farmers bought a plaster-of-Paris copy of the Statue, which they planned to display each week in a different stall. “If you don’t smash that thing,” she said when she saw it, “I will push my collapsible cart to the supermarket at the other end of town, and this troupe will plod after me, and what will you do with your mulberries then?”

  Several shoppers heard Val’s threat, and one who came into the office with a feverish child reported it to Clara. Clara’s pen halted briefly over her pad. Then she tore off the prescription and handed it to the mother. “You forgot to sign this,” the woman complained.

  At home, “That must have been a virtuoso performance,” said Clara.

  Val knew what she meant; of course she did; gleefully she handed Clara a brown paper sack. “From the farmers.” Inside was the statue, in five pieces.

  “My sweet sweet,” said Clara, voice hoarse.

  And afterwards, after the long shudders; after the brief slumber; after the playful coda, fingers idly stirring, Val said: “This was worth dying for. Though all I felt that night was that I was turning into . . .”

  “Yes?” Val had not been able to remember, not until now. “Marble?”

  “No . . . Something slurry, with stones.”

  “Macadam,” Clara recognized.

  The stream of visitors continued even in cold months. Some merchants argued for a parking facility. Clara led the opposition at Town Meeting.

  “Don’t thunder, darling,” Val advised.

  So Clara pleaded: “Let pilgrims travel in the pilgrim way,” she said. “On two legs or on four.” Her faction prevailed. The Town decided that instead of providing parking it would operate a shuttle bus, The Donkey. The Donkey made stops at the new Repertory Theater, the Sculpture Garden, Godolphin Square, and the Fabric Emporium, which boasted no connection with the miracle but drew customers anyway, probably because of the quality of its merchandise.

  Brown-skinned men born in Brazil drove The Donkey. The Godolphin school system made room for the drivers’ children and for other new children. The high school orchestra thrummed with unfamiliar expressiveness. The Town soccer team won the State Championship; and citizens, popping corks in Godolphin Square, hugged people they had never even said hello to.

  Ten years later Clara and Valerie still proclaimed themselves unremarkable. They worked, gardened, paid taxes, entertained friends, practiced their mild vices, made their annual visit to Spain.

  That season they indulged themselves: they bought a case of remarkable wine. It came by ship. Valerie arranged to have it delivered in the middle of the night.

  “I don’t want to unbalance our local wine shop,” she told Clara. “I’m still a bit of a trend setter.”

  And so, one October night, there crept up the hill an unmarked truck, pale as the moon. It drove around to the back of the house. Clara watched from an upstairs window. She felt the night’s chill. Valerie was not wearing a coat, though. She was dressed in her usual combination of long skirt and tunic. She owned this outfit in a dozen shades of gray. It could have been the uniform of a religieuse; it could have been the signature costume of an advertising executive. She opened the bulkhead doors, and then crossed her arms over her chest, for warmth. The two
strong men who emerged from the truck carted the case down the stone stairs and into the basement. They came up again. One tipped his cap. The other knelt on the ground and kissed her hem.

  He did. He did that. He did that suggestive thing. It was different from admiring the Statue or buying mulberries. In the open window Clara wondered whether any past moment in her life was worth remembering or any future one worth enduring; for if Valerie had turned into a figure not to be exploited but to be revered, to be worshipped—maybe even to be assumed—then she would never lie beside Clara in a double grave with a single tombstone. Their dusts would never mingle.

  The men left. Valerie raised her face. It was still the face of a mischievous boy. She grinned profanely at her lover.

  “Oh, get yourself inside,” barked Clara, and, in her relief, slammed the window so hard that a pane cracked.

  In the summer they often sit in the yard with their few friends still living, under a plum tree which long ago stopped bearing fruit. Almost thirty years have passed since the night of the kiss. They are old women now—remarkable at last, just for being so old, and for maintaining independence and health, though Valerie has undergone several surgical scrapings of her colon, and they have lost count of the nights that Clara, too breathless to climb the stairs, has slept on the living room couch.

  They talk, sometimes getting it muddled, of the past: the illness, the death, the recall. Mostly, though, they talk about other things. A yellow columbine striped in orange has sown itself in their yard. It reminds Valerie of a cat they loved; and she wonders about crosskingdom matings. The boy next door has a rock band that practices in the garage. They listen, mystified. They read poetry to each other.

  Tourists continue to come, trolleying in from Boston, strolling under the flourishing maples on Jefferson Boulevard. These sightseers attend the repertory theater and dine in the restaurants. At Godolphin Square they buy books and old stamps and antique buttons. They journey to the top of the hill—some on foot, some on The Donkey—and walk around the Sculpture Garden. Amid new welded abstractions and rough nudes, the Statue gets little notice. But few visitors leave town without stopping at one of the booths at the bottom of Calderstone Lane and picking up a pot of Revive!, an anti-wrinkle gel, or a bottle of Godolphin Ardor. It’s an oily purple liquid rumored to contain opium and absinthe and nicotine, and it tastes like resin; nonetheless, it’s a favored souvenir. Some people even drink the stuff.

  Eyesore

  At the candy works—a rundown set of buildings near the unused railroad tracks—chocolate nuggets coated with lilac were still made partly by hand. That fossil factory! Franny got to know it when she was still working for the Godolphin Weekly Times. Everything—the tracks, the shacks, the unburnished machines, the women in pink dresses stained with brown—was exactly as it must have been seventy years earlier except that the current employees spoke Cambodian. Even two years after writing her article Franny could still smell the overpungency, a child’s idea of a perfect birthday cake, sugar and chocolate only, who needs flour?

  She was nearly invisible in those days. Nobody noticed her. The oblong face with bumpy features was about as memorable as a paper bag. The glasses made the face even more indeterminate. She owned half a dozen corduroy pants, brown like her hair and eyes, and six sweaters, likewise, and a few pairs of sneakers.

  Franny began to step out of the shadows on a morning during her twenty-seventh year when an article in a science journal caught her attention. The article said that an exceptionally thin new contact lens had been developed, a lens that could be worn by easily irritated eyes. Franny looked up at her shelf of detective novels and Balzac and wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to gaze at something or even someone without the intervention of spectacles. She looked down again, and read the names of the research team, and saw to her unsurprise that they were associated with a Boston teaching hospital. She found through the telephone book that one of them maintained a private practice. She made an appointment.

  The lenses felt good. “No itching yet,” she wrote to her mother in November. When she went home for the Christmas weekend she bared her unmediated eyes to her family. Her mother said she looked nice, and her brother’s wife mentioned something about make-up when the two of them were putting away the dishes.

  Franny’s great-aunt gave her two velvet blazers for Christmas, one plum and the other cranberry. She put on one of them over the brown dress she was wearing, and instantly acquired the higgledy-piggledy look of a bag lady. But back again in her Godolphin apartment Franny tried on the blazers again, over nothing. This time her flesh reflected the silken glow of the jackets’ linings. Her breasts glistened like a sultan’s mistress. Her newly exposed eyes, above all this brilliance, seemed vulnerable.

  Franny remembered her sister-in-law’s remark. She visited a cosmetic expert.

  A few strokes of the expert’s pencil produced glittering orbs and sensuous eyebrows.

  Franny learned to use the pencil.

  And now things happened fast. The world of low-fat diets and high-impact workouts was waiting to claim her. Back Bay department stores teamed garments in a tempting way—a skirt, a sweater, a cape artfully flung. Who could be blamed for wanting the whole kaboodle? A new wardrobe took shape within Franny’s closet: pants and jackets and shirts, in various deep reds.

  “There’s an army of fashion consultants taking over the world,” she told her boss one morning.

  He looked at her appraisingly. He was in his early sixties. He had been publishing and editing the paper for three decades. On behalf of the Godolphin Times he valued Franny’s almost-presence—he knew that people felt safe with her, that they told her things. Her feature articles took weeks to brew, but they paid off in circulation. She did straightforward journalism as well; she had covered vendettas in the Massachusetts Legislature and scandals in Harvard laboratories. He could send her to local fires and accidents. Now, he supposed, he could send her to fashion shows. “What color do you call that blouse?”

  “Claret, I think. Maybe port.”

  “Are you being distilled?”

  Franny laughed; and he noticed that it was not the old headducking whinny but a new laugh, eyes meeting eyes, lips turning up as if aware of something nice about the person she was facing. “I did get one outfit in earth tones,” she confessed. “To be buried in.”

  “Yes, well, not too soon, I hope. I have an assignment for you. That new soup kitchen, Donna’s Bowl . . .”

  “Donna’s Ladle.”

  “. . . Ladle, it’s attracting an Element, shopkeepers say. Homeless who take the streetcar in from Boston, and have a meal at the Bowl, Ladle I mean, and then beg our citizens for money, even badger them.”

  “Stemming, it’s called.”

  “If you say so. Will you check it out?”

  She nodded, becoming again the old Franny, self-forgetful, ready to search for a story beneath ragged details. Plain? Maybe; he didn’t mind; he was rather a colorless man himself.

  Franny was just beginning the article on stemming—had spent several afternoons aslant in doorways, watching the panhandlers—when a bigger story broke. There was a murder in Godolphin—the first of the century.

  She got to the scene about fifteen minutes after the body was discovered. The police were already deploying themselves, and floodlights glared at the apartment-house vestibule where the body still lay. Franny saw her boss standing on the roof of a parked car. She climbed up beside him. She was wearing pants and a brown sweater and her glasses—it was three o’clock in the morning. Her notebook was under her arm.

  They had a terrific view of the hair splayed on the tiled floor, the layers of coats, the blood.

  “It’s that derelict,” said Franny.

  “One of the Ladle’s patrons?”

  “She came to town before the Ladle,” Franny said, not looking at him, memorizing the corpse. The woman had hulked around Godolphin for about a year. Perhaps Franny had seen her most r
ecently yesterday, perhaps last week. She’d had yellowish skin and yellowing white hair and pale blue innocent eyes, and she sometimes sat on a bench in front of the library, holding a mirror between her upturned face and the sun, plucking her hairline.

  Franny and her boss stood shoulder to shoulder on top of the car. “Lieutenant Suarez says she was robbed,” he told her. “And then hit with a blunt instrument. Or vice versa. Do you want this story?”

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s a mortified family somewhere.”

  He squatted as if he had a cramp, and jumped, none too gracefully, into the street. He didn’t offer to help her down. He was gallant by nature, but he knew his limitations.

  Franny found out that the murdered bag lady had been the bedeviled daughter of a respectable family. The shamed relatives wanted to hide, to gag themselves, to burrow into the ground . . . to talk. They talked to Franny. Wearing the earth-toned garments, Franny sat in the New Hampshire home of the victim’s sister, noting photographs, houseplants, needlepoint: trophies of a tended life. An ancient mother mutely quivered in a plush chair.

  “. . . never right, brilliant though she was. Brilliant! No one could manage her.” The sister’s fingers rested on her cheekbones and her thumbs curled under her jaw as if she wanted to remove her head with her own hands and hurl it into the fireplace. “The time I found her with no clothes on sitting in the basement washtub. She killed Dad, her doings did. Ma might as well be dead.” The surviving parent trembled faster. “You understand,” the sister told Franny, hot-breathed.

  Franny supposed she did understand. Mostly she saw. She saw a child, confused by patterns to begin with, becoming terrified by embroidered flowers that seemed to move and a rug whose coil was striped. And those normal souls who happened to be the crazy girl’s family—Franny saw them rigidly watching her hinges loosen and her lid pop off: how could she scream like that?

  The editor of a national monthly magazine followed Franny’s series on the murder victim and her family. Then the editor telephoned with an assignment.