by Laird Hunt
The first time he took her into town, they ate steaks, peas, and mashed potatoes with passable gravy and continued their driveway conversations about the vicissitudes of weather and high school basketball and crop yields and rural police work. Zorrie brought up some of her neighbors, including the Summerses, and Hank smiled. Hank had known Virgil well and spoke of him with great respect. His decline and death had robbed the community of one of its most consistently refreshing constituents. “I used to just stand there and listen to him, there wasn’t anything like it. One time he got going about the achievements of Julius Caesar, or I don’t know which one it was, and he went on, with about as much detail as if he’d been there gobbling the grapes down himself, for at least an hour. He knew everyone’s names like he was talking about what was going on over at the Elks lodge. He got all worked up. I’m pretty sure he told me what they ate for breakfast. You couldn’t beat it with a stick. Funny thing was, it never had a nickel to do with showing off.” Hank leaned back in his chair and shook his head as if he was picturing it. Zorrie said that was the way she had always seen it too, then added that she wasn’t sure Noah had felt the same.
“Hard to say,” Hank said. “I’ve never known a son who admired his father more, that’s the truth. But the truth there gets shipwrecked on the shores of their old family complaints. I know that remains the case. That Opal he lost is still more or less the blood beating through his veins.”
Hank seemed to know three-quarters of the restaurant, so their conversation was interspersed with a fair number of greetings and light remarks and frequent interpellations from the elderly waitresses, who seemed always to be moving forward with pots of coffee or heavily laden plates in their hands. Zorrie enjoyed these interruptions, enjoyed how easily Hank moved his focus from one person to the next, how in consequence she could get in steady doses, which seemed more and more necessary the longer they sat there, of telling herself that there was nothing wrong with what she was doing, that in fact she wasn’t doing anything at all, and that even if it was something, which it was not, it would be all right. Everything would be all right. It was just dinner. She was over fifty years old now. She was a big girl. Two of these dinners later, however, during a lull in a conversation about Pioneer versus Champion yields, Hank reached across the table, put his hand over hers, and squeezed gently. She did not react immediately, even smiled at him, rotated her hand, and squeezed back. But when a moment later she pulled her hand away, picked her napkin up off her lap, and said they had better go, she felt it with a finality that seemed in retrospect, as she sat on the porch that night with Oats breathing noisily beside her, to have been built into the proceedings from the moment Hank had pulled up in her driveway with his pretext and big laugh and pleasantness and easy words about the weather.
Hank himself helped Zorrie to confirm this hypothesis when he drove over the next evening, knocked on her door, accepted the glass of iced tea she handed him, and said, “I knew I didn’t have a chance from day one.”
“But you kept on.”
Hank winked. “I thought it was worth it.”
“Why? Why was it worth it?”
“I guess that’ll be for someone else to explain to you, Zorrie. I’ve been dealt out.”
Zorrie had thought of several things to say to Hank the next time she saw him, several approaches to elaborating on her request to be taken home, her suggestion as they pulled up in her driveway that it would be best and easiest if he didn’t call on her again, at least not in the way he’d been doing. She had gone so far as to imagine herself taking his arm or touching his hand as she spoke to him, as she tried to explain things, standing out by his car or walking with him along the lane in the orange evening with the sun sliding down the sky. That there was very little substance to these imagined explanations, these glosses on feelings she didn’t have more than the odd word or two for, seemed painfully obvious to her now under the bright kitchen lights, so she simply said what the better part of it boiled down to anyway: “I’m sorry, Hank.”
“No sorry to it. Like I said, anyone could have seen you were thinking elsewhere. I just tend close enough toward stubborn to keep on even when I’m close to certain it won’t do me any good. Which is fortunately not necessarily the worst trait to have when it comes to sheriffing.”
Hank laughed, but not loudly and not for very long. Zorrie picked up her glass, looked at the sugary slush at its bottom, set it back down again, and said, “Elsewhere?”
They both looked out the window. There was a breeze running through the young leaves, making them shiver, and long shadows careened across the yard. Oats was off at the fencerow, barking and digging after something. Soon the expanding foliage would completely obscure the view, but now it was still possible to see a corner of the Summerses’ green roof through the trees.
“Harold, Hank. My husband. If it’s anywhere I’m looking, it’s at his memory, at him.”
“Of course. That’s some of it, always will and should be. That part I had thought through. You said yourself you’d found some peace to that. A bushel full of years can do that for you.”
Zorrie nodded. She had said something to that effect at one of their meals. And now she realized that she had meant it. Had felt it for some time now. When she called Harold to mind these days, what answered was mostly soft, like the few flecks of powder left to glow in the cigar box, and bore only the faintest resemblance to even the tatters of anything as big as longing.
“I suppose you know that’s not what I meant,” said Hank.
Zorrie started to protest, then stopped.
Hank smiled. “There’s things that get half said plenty loud enough when we don’t think about it. Things that slip through the cracks. Line items we got on our minds have a tendency to come out whether we know or like it.”
“Well,” said Zorrie.
“Yes, well, Zorrie, and I thank you sincerely for the tea and for all our nice talks and evenings,” said Hank, nodding, standing, stepping towards the door.
All right, Zorrie thought, shrugging at the fact that her cheeks were burning, that they’d likely been bright apple red when she’d said her goodbye to Hank, then shrugging again when she said aloud to her empty kitchen, “So there it is, and even Hank Dunn knows it, and what good exactly will it do you?”
Precious little, it seemed to her over the coming weeks. In fact, the most significant outcome of this admission of what she understood was woven closely together with the slow shifting of her feelings about Harold was that, despite her concern about Ruby, who was swimming into the final stretch of her own silver stream, she found herself going down to the Summerses’ less frequently than she had before, and that when she did, she wasn’t always up to being what she felt was acceptable company. One evening as she was walking toward the house to pay a visit, she saw Noah leaning against the south barn wall, head bent over what she knew must be a letter from his great love, the blood Hank had said was still beating through his veins. Over the years since Virgil’s death, Zorrie had often thought of that night when she had stood outside his room, speaking to him through the door. Watching him work his eyes hard over the piece of near-crumpled paper in his hands, knowing he could not without this great labor make the words reveal their secrets to him, thinking of all the other letters it stood for and with, she turned quietly around.
She went home. She peeled more potatoes than she could have eaten in a week. She gulped at a tall glass of water. Some of it spilled out the corners of her mouth and slid down the sides of her chin and landed on the faded front of her yellow dress and felt cool there. She touched at the spots with her thumb and index finger and wondered if water spilling out of the corners of your mouth was a kind of weeping. When she and Harold were first married, she had knocked over a glass of something. The wet line had run off the table and fast down the waxed cloth and onto the floor, and Harold had said, “You’ve made the table cry,” and she had said, “It’s tears of joy,” and Harold had said, “Then they must
be mine, Mrs. Underwood.” He had smiled then, such a smile, a smile to light the room, the day, the world entire, forever and ever, amen. She tried to lift the corners of her own mouth, but the tears there that were not tears but just water from the tall glass stopped her.
The phone rang. She stood feeling at the cool spots on her dress for as many rings as she could bear before she crossed the room and picked it up. Even after she cleared her throat, her voice wasn’t ready to be used yet, so she waited there silently with the receiver pressed hard against her ear. The light crackling on the line seemed a language, like the wet in the corners of her mouth, that she might understand if she could only learn to listen harder. By and by the crackling gave up on her and coalesced into a voice that sounded like it was calling up from under a bridge or the bottom of a well. “Hello? Hello is that you, Ghost Girl?” the voice said.
It took Zorrie so little time—barely more than a few hours, and no getting turned around—to reach Ottawa that after she had passed its outskirts, it seemed as though it wasn’t just the miles but the decades that had been gobbled up by her Ford and that she should head for the abandoned barn and get ready to start thinking about sleeping on old straw and how she would best present herself for a job she desperately needed but knew nothing about. That none of them had really known anything about. This is what she thought when, the late afternoon of the day after the phone had rung, she stood beside Marie in front of Janie’s grave in the Saint Columba Cemetery. The light gray stone had been planted in the earth so recently that, although Janie had been put into the ground nearly a year before, it still wore a dark collar of ruffled earth. Marie, who had detailed the difficult circumstances of Janie’s death on the phone, now told Zorrie about the graveside service and the large group of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and children and friends who had gathered to say their farewells, and about the warm rain that had drizzled down like sweet syrup while the minister spoke, and the rainbow that had arisen as they were all walking back to their cars. She said that because of how bad things had been for Janie at the end, there had been no viewing, but it had been a pretty white coffin, the one in which she was now sleeping below their feet, just about as pretty as Janie had been when Zorrie had known her now long ago. Marie put her hand on the crenellated top of Janie’s marker and closed her eyes a minute, then opened them and pointed out across the cemetery in the direction of the graves of the other girls whose bones were now glowing beneath the earth. It was said that the Luna powder stopped its shimmering after a while, but Marie didn’t fully believe it.
“Maybe up here we stop seeing it, but not down there, down there they’re all still lit up,” she said.
They drove then to a café near the courthouse and sipped watery coffee and picked at slices of rhubarb pie as they filled each other in about some of the bend and twist of their lives. Marie said they had often worried that Zorrie wouldn’t be able to find her way, that even her beloved Indiana wouldn’t help her climb up out of the hurt that anyone with eyes could see had had a hold on her back then.
“Truth is, I did more of the worrying,” she said, tapping with her fork at the side of her cup. “Janie said she thought you’d make it through. That you’d keep finding things worth finding. And look at you, driving your own truck and running your own farm. You’ve had a life. How right she was.”
Before Zorrie could protest, could tell her about standing with water spilling out of her mouth by the kitchen sink when the phone had rung, Marie gave out a laugh that brought back memories and said she’d had herself a man, one of those nice-looking ones who had always been mooning around in the old days, but he hadn’t ever been better than half a husband or a quarter of a father and had left the picture long ago. Janie had done a bit better in the man department, but not much. A tear bloomed up in the corner of Marie’s eye when she said this. She must have felt it slide sidewise and down one of the wrinkles the decades had branded her with because she reached up and stopped it just before it looked set to skid down the line of her cheekbone. She said she hoped whoever had invented tears had taken out a patent, because there was big money in them.
“What do you think? Would you invest in a tear company?”
“I’m already a principal shareholder.”
“You and me both, Ghost Girl. You and me both.”
Marie then took a bite of her pie and a drink of her coffee and told Zorrie about how Janie had thought for a long time that she was in the clear, only for the aches in her jaw and neck and then in her extremities—ones that so many of the other girls had experienced—to set in. They had taken first one of Janie’s legs and then the other. The treatments they inflicted on her had robbed her of her hair, which had been so thick and still brown, and seeing it go first by the strand and then by the clump had been one of the hardest things for both of them.
Despite Janie’s voluminous family, which had never stopped growing, it had been Marie who Janie had most wanted with her at the end. Although they had quarreled when more and more girls at the plant started getting sick and Marie gave her notice but Janie would not, they had later reconciled and become better friends than ever. They had stayed as close as sisters over the years, had practically raised their children together, and often joked that they ought to have married each other and not the feckless husbands who had ultimately had such small parts to play in their lives.
“She talked about you, Ghost Girl,” Marie said after a young waitress with a limp that seemed somehow a part of their conversation had poured them out more coffee. “She had about a thousand friends, but there toward the end your name came up more than once. You know she kept that pearl you found for her? I lost my shell many a year ago, but she always had that pearl. It sits now over yonder in a box at her oldest daughter’s house. We both of us wondered what you had gotten up to, what curveballs you’d been thrown, which ones you’d swung at and missed. Which ones you’d hit. I said she didn’t worry about whether you’d made it, but she did worry some that maybe you’d got yourself touched by the paint too, and though I told her you hadn’t been there long enough to get into any trouble worth mentioning, we both said we ought to track you down and make sure. We always had it in mind to pick up the phone, since there couldn’t be too many Zorries in the phone book out your way, or any way for that matter, but it kept not getting done, and then things got so bad. I’m only just now catching up.”
Marie stopped and looked at Zorrie, her head cocked to one side. Zorrie realized that a question had been put to her, and thought she better try and answer it, but when she opened her mouth, nothing emerged. Marie waited a while and then shrugged and said, “Well, you’re still here breathing God’s good air, and so am I. For a little longer anyway.”
At this Zorrie’s eyes came up quickly from the coffee she had been stirring and studying, in hopes perhaps of finding in it some way to speak about Harold and fish hooks. Marie said that, yes, the cancer, close kin to the one that had ruined Janie and so many of the other girls, had now made its mark on her dance card too, and that she would be starting treatment soon. Her own prognosis was generally positive, but she had seen up close what kind of a weapon it was she now had aimed at her and was feeling motivated to get things done. Sitting there with Zorrie, their good friend of a minute from the old days, was one of those things. She cried, and Zorrie took her hand and cried along with her, then after a while reached in her purse and brought out the card Janie had sent her.
“I remember that,” Marie said, wiping at her face and nose and laughing a little out of embarrassment.
“She sent it to me must have been six or seven years back.”
Marie took the card, turned it over, squinted, shook her head. “You could get whiplash trying to watch time go by. Did you sign up for that? I know I never did. Time’ll spin your salad for you. My lord, yes it will. She finally got herself up there. She did indeed. Didn’t stop talking about it for a week.”
“I thought about trying it out myself.�
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“Did you?”
Zorrie said it hadn’t happened, that she’d gotten stuck in sand. Marie said she knew what that was like. Said it didn’t need to be quicksand to pull you in. As they took a turn through the old downtown, past the soda shop that was now a laundromat, and the old cinema where they had once seen Marlene Dietrich all lit up on the big screen in her silky gowns, then the plant where they had sucked on candy and painted their clock faces and pointed their brushes and blown kisses at their future doom, Marie said she wanted Zorrie to understand that talk of tear patents and quicksand notwithstanding, both she and Janie had lived good, happy lives. They had talked on this a great deal.
“I wasn’t there for the very last minutes, but Janie’s brother told me she went to her grace with a smile on her lips, and I believe it too. She said she’d ridden shotgun to joy in too many of life’s roadsters to get mournful about it at the end. You were a happy memory for her, Ghost Girl. For both of us.”
Zorrie put the card on the dashboard where she could see it and looked at it frequently the next morning on the drive home. In saying her farewells to Marie, she had asked if there was anything she could do to help her in what she now had to face, and Marie had answered that Zorrie had already done it just by making the drive and standing with her at Janie’s grave and remembering them both and listening to her rattle on. She had her grown children for the hard days, and Janie’s family would not forget her either. As Zorrie put the key in the ignition, Marie asked her, again and more directly this time, if Zorrie was all right, and this time she found the words to shape a reply. Although Marie had reassured her that a few swallows of the Luna powder she and Janie and so many others, unlike her, had gobbled practically by the barrelful for years would not have hurt a baby, and that babies were just sometimes lost, Zorrie could not help wondering if the beautiful powder had in fact found a way to wound her too.