Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  Might it also have been that glow, she wondered as she drove, the glow they had worn on their hands and faces and clothes, that had robbed her of Harold? Had that glow stolen her child, kept another from taking root, and somehow grabbed up her husband too? Had he been looking at a luminous clock face on the plane that had carried him down to the water? Had the walls of her insides been set to light by the powder she had drunk, when all within should have been warm and quiet and dark? Had that glow stolen Hank and Bessie? Had it reached back in time, taken her parents, and replaced them with her aunt? Had it seeped out the windows and across the fields to the Summerses’ house and stolen Virgil’s wits from him? Had it hurt Opal? Noah? Poor dear Janie, she thought. Poor dear Marie. Poor all of us.

  She worked herself up enough that she had to pull over outside Remington and get out and walk around. She had just sunk her heel into some ditch mud and stepped partially out of her brown shoe when a turquoise coupe with its radio blaring went by. It honked. Zorrie waved. She knew she had heard the song before. She thought it must be Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly. She couldn’t keep them straight, although she knew that one of them was dead. The car swerved one way and then the other, like it was dancing for her, and then it honked again and sped straight on. As she watched it vanish, she smiled. For there, just down the road from Ottawa, it was—Janie’s roadster, a turquoise car made to dance for her across the concrete. And whether at the wheel it was joy or some of that old hope her aunt had so hated, it made her want to move her feet. To wave her hands. Right there on the road, she did both these things. She whistled and hummed snatches of different songs she had heard and felt so calm by the time she got home that it did not seem strange to her that rather than taking the old tin of powder straight out into the backyard to bury it and set the dark world of the worms aglow, as she had intended when she first drove out of Ottawa, she simply moved aside the cigar box to uncover the copy of Virgil’s Montaigne that she kept under it, tucked the card from Janie back into the yellowed pages, and, humming and grinning, closed it all up.

  A quick inspection of the old Victrola she and Harold had sometimes propped open to play scratchy songs by singers she couldn’t remember confirmed that it was beyond repair, so she bought herself a new record player. The man who sold it to her said he would throw in some LPs, but when he started pulling out Beethoven and Bach, she said it wasn’t funeral music she was looking for—what she had in mind was what they played at drive-ins and on the radio.

  “Ah,” said the man. “You’re looking for the King.”

  The machine was bright red and portable and had a built-in speaker that was loud enough, when Zorrie turned the volume all the way up, to make her teeth rattle. She listened to Elvis Presley in the kitchen, Pat Boone in the living room, the Beach Boys in the basement, and the Chordettes in her bedroom. When she wasn’t listening, she was often whistling. She wished Gus could hear her on “Mr. Sandman” or “Hound Dog,” as she thought her technique was much improved. She rarely tapped her feet or swayed her shoulders when she had the music on, but she sang along to some of the songs and snapped her fingers frequently.

  She was not, though, able to fully recapture the feeling she had had on the road back from Ottawa, and no matter how loudly she played Pat Boone or Buddy Holly, Janie and Marie and the whole lost world they represented kept swirling around her. It was a chance remark by Ruby, made while Zorrie was helping her hang laundry, that gave shape to her scattered thoughts about the two women. Zorrie had been humming what she only later realized was “That’ll Be the Day” when Ruby said, “Noah’s Opal used to hum like that while she hung.” There wasn’t any more to it, and when they were finished, Zorrie went home, but that comment followed by some thinking about the friendship Janie and Marie had built and made last across so many years, even unto death, all the while reaching out their hands to others, like her, which was surely a kind of love, an important one, was what she would credit with her decision to take a drive one rainy afternoon a few days later in the direction of Logansport. And while she did not on that first occasion go so far as to turn in when she came to the sign for the state hospital, she did slow down and peer out the window up the hill to the scattering of rain-dark buildings, in one of which Noah’s great love, his Opal, passed her nights and days, and imagine what it might be like to call on her, say a kind word, and reach out her hand. That might have been it, just that one look and the thoughts and feelings that went with it, but two weeks later, after she realized that she wasn’t much turning on her record player anymore, and that her foot tapping, if not her whistling and humming, felt like it had run its course and the gift of music might now better serve someone else, she got in her truck and drove over again.

  Lester had that morning told her about a blueberry farm outside Logansport that his wife, Emma, had visited the previous weekend, so Zorrie stopped there on the way. It was a bright day, and the rows smelled earthy and sweet. Some of the berries had split and others had clearly been bird-pecked, but there were many more that were smooth, shiny, and whole. Zorrie picked with her right hand until it got tired, then switched to her left. The tips of her thumbs and forefingers grew sticky, and although she didn’t eat many as she picked, as others around her clearly were, she did every now and again bring one quickly up to her lips. She filled a bucket and a small basket she’d lined with red-checked plastic and, carrying this latter in one hand and her LPs and record player in the other, walked through long, freshly painted halls behind a young nurse with a kind smile to the West Ward of the Logansport State Hospital and Opal’s bed.

  “You got yourself a visitor, honey, and she’s got something exciting for you,” the young nurse said, helping her to sit up and fussing with her pillows. She turned to Zorrie and whispered, “She’s had a spell or two recently and is having some new treatments to help, so she might be feeling a little wore down.”

  “I’m not sleepy, Maggie,” Opal said, fixing her eyes first on the nurse and then on Zorrie. Her eyes were a darker blue than Zorrie had ever seen in a face, as dark as the ripe berries she had brought, and they didn’t seem to blink.

  “That’s fine, honey,” the nurse said. “This is Zorrie Underwood. She’s from over near where you lived in Clinton County before you came to us here. She brought you blueberries and a record player and wants to visit. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You two enjoy yourselves.”

  The nurse walked over to a bed on the other side of the room, whose occupant appeared to be completely covered by a gray blanket. Whoever it was began to shake when the nurse came close and bent over her.

  Opal looked at the basket of blueberries, then back up at Zorrie.

  “I’m Opal,” she said.

  “Pleased to know you. I live on the farm next door to the Summerses,” Zorrie said. “I’ve been there for a long while now. A good long while.”

  “Is that the record player you have brought me?”

  “It is. Your nurse says you’ll have to have permission to use it. Do you think you would enjoy having it? If they say you can use it?”

  Opal brought a hand slowly up to the side of her face, pressed it firmly against her cheek, shut her eyes, and didn’t open them for so long that Zorrie started to think her visit might be over before it had gotten started. Which, it struck her, might not be the worst thing. The night before, as she had lain in her own bed, with her own eyes closed, she had said to herself, more than once, “I just want to see her. I just want to do a kind thing.” Now, standing here by a practically brand-new record player and bag of LPs she wasn’t entirely sure why she was giving away, with a basket of blueberries in her hand, in front of a woman who had been hospitalized for longer than Zorrie had lived on her farm, in a facility that had once been called the Northern Indiana Hospital for the Insane, in which patients quivered under gray blankets or shuffled in the halls, “I just want to do a kind thing” did not seem like much. And she’d had her look.

  She stepped over, set the blueberries on a ta
ble by Opal’s bed next to a box of tissues, and turned to go. As she did so, Opal spoke.

  “I’m not sleepy, Zorrie Underwood. I just got my eyes shut because of the colors. I’m grateful for the gift. I like music, and the doctor is an accommodating man. On Friday afternoons is when I’ll play it. Please sit down.”

  There was a worn-out-looking wooden folding chair leaning against a radiator behind the table. Zorrie pulled it out, unfolded it, and set it up near Opal’s bed. She put her purse in her lap, crossed her ankles, and said, “Thank you.”

  “When you shut your eyes, you’re in a cave all your own making,” Opal said.

  Zorrie looked at Opal, shut her eyes, thought about caves, then opened them. Opal was looking at her again with the same unblinking stare as before. Zorrie wondered if during her time at the hospital she had taught herself to take all her blinks at once, maybe late at night, when the halls were empty and she was surrounded by the moans and murmurs of her fellows.

  “Do you like blueberries?” Zorrie asked.

  “Almost as much as I like music,” Opal said. She spoke warmly in a voice that had retained much of what must once have been a great freshness, but her eyes did not blink and she did not smile. Her face, which had clearly once been terribly handsome, had lines in it that made Marie’s and her own seem baby smooth, and she had an angry rash on her forehead. There was something off about her mouth. Zorrie suspected they had given her false teeth.

  “You sure do have pretty eyes,” Zorrie said.

  “Pretty like the bright blue skies are these eyes, Zorrie Underwood.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m friendly with Ruby and was with Virgil before he passed. It was my husband Harold’s place before the war. You must have met him.”

  Opal looked at her. Poetry or no poetry about skies, it looked like she had blueberries in her eye sockets instead of pupils.

  “My Harold got shot down in Holland during the war. I took over the farm. It isn’t much, but I expanded some and have a good man to help run it. He’s been around the area awhile. You might have known him too. Lester Dunn. He does most of the running lately, to tell the truth. Most of what I’ve been doing’s running around.”

  Zorrie bit at the inside of her lower lip, uncrossed her ankles, and recrossed them.

  “Noah’s told me about you. He used to work with Harold sometimes. He likes your letters. It’s about the only thing he likes in this world, as far as I can tell. He showed me one once about a whirlwind. They always said around home that you were the sharpest pin in the cushion. Harold said you were as smart as a principal.”

  “I’d like to be buried in a dirt mound,” Opal said.

  Zorrie bit her lower lip again.

  “They bury all kinds of things in there. That’s where you can find pottery and oyster shells. Child toys too, nice ones with jeweled beads. There are also quite a number of sundry charred articles, each wearing its own black coat. It would be warm and quiet in a dirt mound. You could lie there a long time. The snow could fall and cover the whole wide world and there you would lie.”

  “I like that,” said Zorrie.

  “ ‘Out of this sun, into this shadow,’ ” said Opal.

  “That’s pretty. Is that something you thought up?”

  “Well, Zorrie Underwood, that’s more or less by an author. You will not find it in the Bible. It’s not in any devotional. I used to like to say it the other way around, ‘Out of this shadow, into this sun,’ but that is not the way the author wrote it down. It’s harder the way she wrote it, but prettier and more true. Sometimes I get under my blanket and pretend that’s where I already am. Under the ground, I mean. I told Phoebe Nelson what I do sometimes, and now she does it all the time. Maybe now on Friday afternoons we can do it with your music.”

  “Wouldn’t that be too noisy?”

  “Oh, no, we would play it soft.”

  Zorrie looked over at the bed with the gray blanket and imagined what it would be like to have warm dirt piled on top of her. No coffin, just dirt. Warm and soft. The King crooning quietly while she melted away.

  “I had a friend they put into a coffin not too long ago. But it was a nice one, I’m told. All fresh and white. I’ve got another friend who might be going there soon,” Zorrie said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “They were ghost girls. Over in Ottawa, Illinois. I guess I was one for a while too.”

  “Ghost girls, Zorrie Underwood?”

  “Because after work we would glow in dark places like movie theaters.”

  “Or like in my cave!”

  “Yes, just like that.”

  “Why, that’s a beautiful thing.”

  “Yes, it was. While it lasted. For a short while. A long time ago.”

  “Don’t you glow anymore?”

  “Not in many a year.”

  “Maybe I’m a ghost girl, then, too.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  Zorrie then told Opal about Ottawa and the Radium Dial Company and her days with Janie and Janie’s family and Marie. She told her about how even if the paint they had worked with eventually stopped glowing, it remained hot, and some of what had gotten inside you slithered into your bones and stayed there and never left even after you yourself had. She told Opal that she had swallowed spoonfuls of the paint when she was pregnant, and now feared she had hurt her own baby and did not know what she might have done to herself. She thought Opal, who had sucked in her breath like she wanted to speak, might offer some opinion or thought on all this, but instead she said, “They used to let me milk the cows in the dairy.”

  “Don’t they anymore?”

  Opal shook her head, shrugged, and let her hands flop in her lap.

  “They tell me I am not doing well. They have obliged me to cut back on some of my customary pastimes. I have detailed everything to do with it in letters to my husband. It is distressing to us all, and I expect him to file a complaint.”

  Opal paused a moment, leaned forward, then said, “But do you know what the truth is, Zorrie Underwood?”

  Zorrie shook her head.

  “They are correct in their diagnosis. I am undeniably not all in all respects that I could be. It is correct that I be administered to. It is correct that visits from my husband are counterindicated. The doctor is both accommodating and just. It is appropriate that I should roll heavy balls and swallow chalky tablets and grasp after fruit that always escapes my hands. I have explained this to my husband too.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “He spends all his time thinking about you. Has done all these years.”

  Opal’s face seemed to freeze, as if a coating of ice had suddenly settled on it. Then her dark pink tongue curled out, touched at something under her nose, stayed there a moment, then went slowly back into her mouth.

  “Apart from the new rules and procedures, do they treat you well?” Zorrie asked.

  “Oh, yes, Zorrie Underwood. We watch television. And we play games. And now we will listen to the records you have brought me on that shiny red record player. In addition, they let us hang out feeders for the hummingbirds. My, Zorrie, I do enjoy the sight of a little hummingbird.”

  At this, Opal, whose eyes had not once left Zorrie’s, broke into a quick, tight-lipped smile that threw a pretty light up into her eyes but was gone almost as quickly as it had arrived. A moment later, she put her hand back up to the side of her face, turned her head, and looked out the window. Oaks and maples shivered slightly in a breeze. Two sparrows and a cardinal flicked by. Zorrie could still see the cardinal’s red—which was almost a perfect match for the record player’s—when she looked back at Opal. She could still see it a few minutes later when she stood to leave.

  “It was sure nice to finally meet you, Opal,” Zorrie said.

  Opal, who had again shut her eyes, waved with her free hand and said, “It’s a cave all your own, Zorrie Und
erwood. Whether you glow in it or you don’t. It’s a cave behind your face. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”

  Zorrie thought about caves and shadows and blueberry eyeballs so much that evening that she did not sleep well and had nightmares she remembered when she woke up. She tried to chase them away by turning on the radio she had bought on her way home when she started to worry that she might after all miss being able to play something, but all she pulled in was static and she turned it off. For some time she’d had Oats in the house with her at night, and in the morning, as she sipped coffee and nibbled on toast, she told her about her dreams, about how she’d seen Oats running over soft earth that seemed to want her to stop and settle, and about how she had been back in the blueberry patch but couldn’t pick anything because the bushes were alive and screamed if you touched them.

  “What do you think of that?” she asked Oats.

  Oats lifted her ears and made a noncommittal squeaking sound.

  Zorrie got Oats her breakfast, then took the rest of the blueberries she’d picked over to Ruby, who thanked her and said she’d make a pudding and freeze the rest. She asked Zorrie what she planned to do with hers, and Zorrie said she didn’t know, then said that in fact she hadn’t got any for herself, that she’d picked them all to give away.

  Ruby looked at her out of the corner of her eye, then said, “Well, Noah did say you’ve been acting strange.”

  “I went up to Logansport,” Zorrie said.

  Ruby either wasn’t surprised or didn’t act it. “How is she?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Zorrie. “I didn’t know how to tell.”

  “I never knew either most of the time.” Ruby took a berry out of the bucket, rolled it back and forth between her thumb and index finger, then popped it into her mouth. She sighed and said, “That’s been a lifetime ago, and here it still is.”

  “She talked a fair amount about caves. She said she wanted to be buried in a dirt mound like the Indians.”

  “That was always her kind of talk. Virgil enjoyed it immensely. Said she was someone he could converse with. Of course Noah did too. Enjoy it, I mean.”