Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  The sun was up as she rolled by the now barely recognizable outposts of her childhood, but the air was so full of water and the clouds so thick that she might as well be driving through a grotto, barely lit and far below the surface of some distant sea. She kept driving west, heading in the approximate direction of Lafayette, then began taking every turn she came to. Once she passed a bleary-eyed farmer sitting at the end of his driveway in a Dodge pickup, but apart from that, she saw no one. She drove and drove, and when she realized she was lost, even right there in the middle of a county she had lived in for just about every scrap of her life, she pulled off down a lane, cut the lights and engine, and got out. She put on her hat and walked the length of a short field of spindly-looking beans she would have been embarrassed to claim, past chest-high, mud-spattered corn that didn’t look much better. She kept walking, teeth clenched again, breathing through her nose, trying to think and not being able to get beyond the condition of the corn, the color of the sky, the character of the cold rain. She stumbled and put her hand on wet, rusty barbed wire. Shivering, rain spattering the back of her sun-browned hand as she held it on the length of jagged wire, leaning over, teeth grinding, the long years all fisted up inside her, she looked at the veins on her wrist and had her thought: bloody and clear. But she took deep breaths and rejected it and pulled her hand away.

  Shivering now, suddenly tired or awake enough to recognize that she was chilled, she stuck her foot ankle-high in the edge of a small lake that was forming in the high grass, squeezed at her soaked blue dress, and wondered what good it had done her and was doing her now besides acting as a sponge. This image, that she was dressed in a big blue sponge and tromping around in the rain, helped ease her teeth apart and set a hint of curl to her lips. She thought of the turquoise roadster skidding and swerving for her on the road back from Ottawa, then of Janie riding the L of her dreams, and then of the ridiculous speech she had thought of making to Noah under the crab-apple tree but had only said a few awkward words of, and the curl grew into a smile that exploded straight into a sob. Look at you carrying on, Ghost Girl, she thought, wiping at the mess of rain and hair and tears that her face had become. She stepped backward into pure high-water-content Indiana mud and then gave up, crossed her arms over her chest again, threw her head back, and felt it all come down.

  VI

  and soft green passages and blurry lemon highlights

  Later it seemed like a mist had fallen in front of Zorrie’s eyes, and when it cleared, whole herds of years had again gone galloping by. This troubled her more than it had in the past, this coming wide awake to the evidence of time’s ruthless determination: this figure thrown back to her from the mirror, with its splotches and thick ankles and twisted fingers and thin gray hair. For the first time she registered that she had started to move gingerly, was creeping almost, that her balance had gone somewhat haywire, that she sometimes even dreaded the morning and the tasks that lay ahead.

  In an attempt to compensate, she redoubled her efforts in the field, waking earlier than she ever had and heading for supper only when the birds slowed their singing. Still, she was well aware that throwing long hours at the problem didn’t keep her from inadvertently knocking down more corn stalks than she should have or feeling the strain when she lifted something as inconsequential as a half bale of straw. So when she cracked a bone in her forearm falling backward off the corn bin, she wasn’t terribly surprised that Evan Newton, her new hired hand, asked Lester to drive over and speak to her about slowing down. Lester, who had been pulled permanently off his own tractor by a bad back and arthritis, cleared his throat, shoved his hands in his pockets, and reminded her that he was eight and a half years younger than she was but still old enough to know all too well that bodies that had spent most of their lives out in the field wore out.

  “It’s time, Zorrie,” he said.

  “Time for what?”

  “Time for you to ease off a little.”

  “You mean time for me to sit in at the television and work crosswords or play Bingo with the other old carapaces at church.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you might as well have,” she said, rapping a knuckle on her cast and, making a show for Lester’s benefit of how hard it was, sitting down.

  She hired Evan’s brother Blake and bought herself a six-speed John Deere riding mower and a pair of what Kmart referred to as “summer yard gowns.” In one of these things, which was more or less a double-length pillowcase with the appropriate holes cut out of it and gloried up with about a dime’s worth of lace, Zorrie oversaw her reduced field of operations, whacked her sickle at horseweed and anything else coming up where it wasn’t supposed to, and, as soon as she got her arm out of its cast, rode her mower around.

  For some years she had looked with more than moderate disdain upon her neighbors who sat crook-backed and flop-armed astride the extra-padded yellow plastic seats a John Deere came equipped with and droned back and forth and around for hours, just so at church or at the bank or anywhere they saw each other they could have the upper hand in conversations about their lawns. Many times Zorrie, who for years had thought lawn work should always stand about tenth on the list, had been treated to commentary and insinuations about the objectionable state of her grass, which had resulted in her getting out her old push mower even less frequently. Now, though, as she rode around on her new machine, with its easily adjustable mechanisms, its various well-thought-out safety features, and, yes, its more than comfortable seat, she had to admit that she had, as Candy Wilson gleefully observed, “caught the bug.” So much so that when she discovered that even in first gear she could cover all the currently mowable space in a day and a half, she turned the woods between her property and Noah’s into what Blake said would look just like a park if she plopped a couple of benches in it.

  The expansion of her lawn got her thinking about her garden, which was in a sorry state. Her last push in the fields, not to mention her arm, had resulted in its transformation into a pitiable thing that probably wasn’t much interest even to the groundhogs. The last time a garden she was involved with had looked this bad was when she was a newlywed and had taken it over from Harold. Even then she didn’t think there had been quite this many weeds. So she pulled and dug and salvaged and stretched string and replanted and watered and by early August had a dirt pantry worth talking about. There were corn and peas to freeze and beans to be canned. On a whim she’d put in jalapeño peppers and found she enjoyed the taste of them cooked and sprinkled generously over a slice of frozen pizza or in a toasted cheese sandwich, though when she offered this delicacy up to Evan and Blake they just looked at each other, then at the sandwiches, then mumbled something about getting back to work.

  Lester called one evening in late August and said he and Emma were going down to the state fair the next day and wondered if Zorrie would like to come along. It had been years since she’d been to the fair, and at first she was put off by how much it had grown. For one thing, you had to park about a mile from the entrance, so that all you saw as you walked up were cars parked in endless dusty rows. Then there were the crowds. There had always been a lot of activity at the fair, but either there were more people in attendance or there were more displays and rides and food stalls packed into the same space. Lester said he thought it was probably both. Emma suggested they go over and see the pigs, that last year it had been quieter there.

  The hog barn was not only quieter but somewhat cooler, and Zorrie started to relax as soon as they’d walked in. The big sows and boars lay asleep in piles of sawdust or snuffled at their food buckets or looked dreamily out at them with their intelligent eyes. In one empty stall, a group of small girls was sitting at a card table playing Go Fish, with a pair of drowsy grandparents looking on. There were children everywhere, most of them in shiny boots and sharp Wranglers, tapping confidently at their animals with prods. The show ring was at the far end of the barn, but the sound of the announcer carried easily over th
e crowd. Occasionally they could hear scattered applause. Aerosol spray cans were in use to keep smells down.

  Zorrie said she wished she hadn’t given up keeping stock, but Lester felt she’d let go of a fair amount of trouble when she did. Zorrie, thinking of Mrs. Thomas, said it hadn’t been all that bad, that there’d been some good company that had come along with it. Lester inhaled and said he wasn’t sure if good was necessarily the word, then added that if it was a question of company, she’d do as well or better to get herself another dog. This comment was made lightly, and Zorrie knew Lester hadn’t thought before he said it and shouldn’t have had to, but she went quiet for a minute just the same. Oats had died a very old, sweet, toothless dog more years before than she cared to count, but Zorrie still missed her terribly. Every now and then, when she wasn’t thinking, and sometimes when she was, she clicked her tongue and called out Oats’s name.

  They ate deep-fried steak sandwiches and deep-fried Bermuda onions and deep-fried green tomatoes and deep-fried elephant ears at a picnic table that had a view of the rotating lights of the carnival rides. Lester said they ought to lower themselves down into the deep fryer and be done with it, and Emma said she felt certain she was about to start perspiring corn oil, both of which remarks made Zorrie laugh. She struck up a conversation with a couple from Jasper who were at the fair as part of a church group, though where the rest of their group was they didn’t know. The couple were very tall with small, curious faces and had huge plates of beef barbecue sitting in front of them. They raised flowers out of a row of greenhouses on the back of their property and had taken advantage of the church trip to the fair to celebrate their tenth year in business. They didn’t say very much more about it, beyond a few comments about bulbs and tulips, but listening to them, Zorrie got an idea she chewed on the rest of the day and all the way home. She thought about it as she sat, exhausted, eating a celery stick in her chair in the living room that night, and again the next morning before she went out to water. After breakfast, before getting started on the windows put off from the day before, she took out her atlas and started flipping through the pages.

  At lunch she looked at an old copy of National Geographic that had an article on the tulip industry of Holland. She spent a long time peering at the rows of orange and yellow and pink and red tulips and at the windmills and canals and people on bicycles and beaches along the seacoast. She read the article that accompanied the pictures carefully. There was a mention in it of clouds gathering over rough waters. That evening she opened her old cigar box and, without touching the tin of Luna powder, pulled out her packet of letters from Harold. She had tied them up with string so many years before that she couldn’t remember having done it. Among them was the announcement she had received of Harold’s death. She read it through twice, then opened her atlas again and traced a line with her finger down from Amsterdam to The Hague and out into the waters of the channel beyond.

  She bought a suitcase, applied for a passport, signed on with a tour, and left Halloween Day. Blake took her to the airport and stood smiling in his dark blue Pioneer Hybrids hat at the gate as she walked down the tunnel and onto the plane. A stewardess greeted her with a bright “Happy Halloween” and pointed her to a seat next to a man who, despite the pressed suit he was wearing, looked like he ought to be out on a football field. As she got settled, a small boy walked by, wearing a black cape and plastic vampire fangs.

  Even though she changed planes three times in three places she had never been, it seemed like she never really quite left her seat, that the next twenty-three hours were spent in the dim light one row in front of the smokers, next to large men or women in jogging suits or fidgeting children, far from the windows and their views out onto dark or light nothing. She wondered if Harold had ever gotten his plane this high, or at least high enough so that down to him had seemed, like it did to her in that shuddering fuselage, as distant as up. But sitting there, riding through what the deep voices of the pilots referred to as pockets of turbulence, some of which elicited gasps from her fellow voyagers, Zorrie was pleased to discover that the prospect of falling from the sky did not bother her as she had feared it might. If something happened, it would all be over and that would be that. She slept soundly almost all the way from New York to Amsterdam.

  So strange did the following days seem to her that she barely registered the other members of the small group she was part of. It was rainy and cool and everything in the city seemed to glitter. They rode a boat on the canals, ate fried potatoes with mayonnaise, and went to the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, where Zorrie stood for a long time in front of a little painting of a goldfinch tethered to a perch and another of the city of Delft, with its buildings reflected in silvery water. She had seen her share of paintings before, but these seemed of a different order, works birthed into the world by another process entirely, one that must have involved much patience and many years. She was surprised, because she had not done it in so long, to find herself humming as she stood there looking at the chained bird and at a pair of tiny women talking together in dark dresses as Delft rose across the river beyond, and after a minute realized it was “Love Me Tender,” which had been playing on the canal boat.

  She had slept so little the night before that she almost didn’t go along for the visit to the house of Anne Frank, then found herself so transfixed by the narrow stairways and low ceilings and photographs of Anne and her family that when the group had free time on their last day in Amsterdam, she stood in the long line and climbed up to the secret annex again. On the bus ride down to the American Cemetery at Margraten she read the copy of Anne’s diary that she had purchased in the gift shop, and even as she followed along with the group on their tour of the fields of white crosses, she found herself thinking not of Harold, who had left nothing behind to be buried except in a cigar box that had stopped glowing years ago, but of the young girl, soon to die in unspeakable circumstances, who had written, “Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”

  The final day, the group went to Scheveningen by the sea, and while most of her fellows were content to sit over Dutch waffle cookies and cups of hot coffee and write postcards and watch the rain, Zorrie went out onto the beach and down to the water and did not mind one bit that she had no umbrella or that her good shoes got quickly soaked. This time she did think of Harold, for if some small part of him lay under a sprinkling of worn-out Luna powder, not to mention in the treacherous folds of her heart, the rest of him was somewhere out in the deeps before her.

  Although she had stood that time probably no farther than a hundred yards from mist-shrouded Lake Michigan, she had never seen anything larger than a good-sized pond before, and she had certainly never seen waves. Over and over again they rushed up the wet sand toward her, only to pull away again. Everything smelled of salt and depth. There were shells and gleaming curls of seaweed at her feet and gulls over her head. A boat with an orange sail gusted off along the horizon. She tried to follow it all with her eyes and found it brought to mind a windy day and a field of young green wheat, but the white-capped green waters before her never stopped moving, or roaring, so the comparison couldn’t hold. What she had before her was unlike anything but itself. And it struck her that if this marvelous surface was what Harold had fallen through and disappeared under, it wasn’t all bad. The fires that had ripped him out of the sky would have been instantly doused and the plane cooled. Harold and his fellows would have ridden down to their rest through bubbles and currents and cold, soothing water into a world of quiet wonder.

  “Full fathom five, thy Harold lies,” Zorrie said aloud. “Of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes.” The words had come to her, across the ocean and over the ponds and lakes of time, from Mr. Thomas’s classroom. She couldn’t remember what followed, only the ending, and standing there in her wet, sandy shoes, she realized that the watery strangeness before her spread unimpeded from channel to sea to oceans bigger than any atlas could indic
ate or any conversation cover. It made the earth and the air that enveloped it seem bigger, for it was made of eternity, and eternity was what held all things, including her. She had imagined that at some point during the trip she might cry, but in truth if it was just rain and salt spray on her face or tears she couldn’t have said.

  As she sat later after a hot shower over her own cup of coffee with Anne’s diary on the table before her, she tried to imagine whether she would have been brave as the fires grew and the waters rushed up toward her, or as the walls of her hiding place grew smaller and the Germans came nearer, but found she was too tired to pursue it. There was a bouquet of blood-red dahlias on the table by the sugar bowl. Lights were coming on, and the darkening sea filled the window beyond. A mirror in a heavy frame hung next to an ornate clock, and a waitress was slowly filling cups with tea. All of it looked like something that could hang on the wall next to the paintings she had admired at the Mauritshuis. When one of the guides came and stood a moment beside her and tried to engage her in conversation, Zorrie just smiled and shook her head.

  On the plane out of Amsterdam she sat next to a middle-aged American woman named Ellie Storms. Ellie had soft, tired-looking features and long, complicated hair that she touched at from time to time. She was from Kansas City, Missouri, though she had family near Evansville, Indiana, where she often visited. When Zorrie heard this, some of the feeling she had had, standing on the beach with the wind-hoisted sprays of salt-rich moisture scoring her hands and face, returned to her, and it suddenly seemed more important than anything to talk about home. Sitting in her narrow seat far above and half the wide world away from the corner of Clinton County where she had taken the majority of her life’s breaths, the people who had made up the texture of her days seemed rare, even precious, and she found herself talking about them as if they had all accomplished wondrous things. Snow lilted down out of the skies she evoked, great oaks shook and crashed, hot dogs sizzled deliciously, and bonfires roared. Her time in Ottawa was a part of it. Her work alongside Janie and Marie—who in the end had quietly succumbed to a heart attack the previous autumn, and not to the cancer she had fought so cheerfully for so long—became hushed and lovely. Hank Dunn, long since retired, went whooshing forever down the quiet roads in his patrol car. Everything she spoke of seemed informed by beauty. Death had nothing to do with it. Not even for those who were dead. Life was everything. Ellie nodded and listened. At one point, she reached over and squeezed Zorrie’s hand.