Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

  Later, when Ellie had shut her eyes and sunk back into her chair, it occurred to Zorrie that even though she had spoken of Evan and Blake, Lester and Emma, Candy Wilson, Harold and a number of his fellow departed, she had not once mentioned Noah. Dear Noah. Closing her own eyes, her head warm from the wine she had taken in her high spirits with the dinner of sorry peas and sorrier chicken, she wondered about this omission, wondered how so much, even things you desperately wanted to hold on to, faded from memory, while other things burned their traces so deeply they never left you. The shame of her rejection and the foolishness and guilt she had felt for having incurred it with her presumption and attempt at a kiss under the crab-apple tree in her blue dress were still very much with her, still made her wince or pull up short from time to time. If only she had stayed home that day. If only she hadn’t worked at her hair and pinched at her cheeks and put that dress on. Noah had been devastatingly kind when she had made it clear why she had come to stand waiting for him with her arms crossed under his crab apple. When she had reached out her hands and placed them for an awkward second on his shoulders while his own remained implacably at his sides. So that although he had then spoken, the emphatic immobility of his arms and hands had already offered up all the answer her petition required. The meals had stopped, as had, though much more slowly, her gazing with longing down the lane. But this hadn’t kept Zorrie from continuing to think about Noah over the years that had elapsed since that day, from still holding him gently, so gently, in her mind.

  She had been thinking about him, she now realized, when she looked at the narrow buildings along the canals, when the bus whirred along the long, flat roads, when she was standing before the painting of the stoic little finch and the waters of the channel, when she told Ellie about those she had known and loved and lost in her life: Bessie, Gus, Virgil, Ruby, her beloved, long-dead Harold, even her long-dead aunt, whom she had lain beside beneath the Christmas tree, and the parents she had barely known. She thought about Noah ever more alone and retreated from the world, surrounded by his letters and sunk into his own thoughts in the shed he had built around the ruins of the barn, around that bit of wall with those irreversibly conjoined names on it, and could still feel that pull in her gut, which, even linked as it was now with her shame and guilt, she relished as much as she ever had.

  During one of his outbursts at the table, when he had started to resign himself to the fact that they weren’t going to come and get him and take him to Logansport, Noah had said it didn’t matter how infrequently you laid eyes on your loved one, that you could still love her fiercely, that love and distance were not incompatible, were not necessarily “an inverse.” He had then quoted a poem or part of a poem that Opal had seen in a book on French poets—left by a visitor to the hospital—and sent him:

  My heart is the same as an upside-down flame

  The words, Noah said, had been arranged to form a picture of a heart. Zorrie had often thought about that heart since Noah had told her, with her arms crossed back around her blue dress in the wake of her failed attempt that day, that his wife was still alive even if her poor, good husband wasn’t, and that maybe she better not come down to the house with his dinner anymore. As she began to doze, she wondered if when you rode in airplanes, love, even old impossible love, sent hearts tumbling end over end.

  In the weeks and months following her trip, things seemed to need to grow quieter in Zorrie’s life. The winter was long and extra cold, and she didn’t get out much beyond church and trips into town. Once she let Evan convince her to go over to the high school and watch a ball game, but while she cheered with the home crowd whenever their team scored, and did enjoy watching the young bodies run up and down the court with their bright uniforms and orange ball, she found herself completely worn out when she got home and declined to go again. She preferred to spend her evenings in her chair, occasionally turning on her television to watch the news or a movie, or even working a crossword.

  One evening while she was debating whether to open up a can of corned beef or just have half an apple for her supper, there was a knock on the door. She pulled it open and found Noah standing there, holding out a small white box. She opened it onto a stained-glass blue jay Noah said she could hang in the window to catch the afternoon light. Then he thanked her for having sent Opal the scarf covered in tulips, which Zorrie had picked out in the gift shop of the Mauritshuis. Opal had written Noah about it and called it the prettiest thing she had ever seen. Noah said he had had a dream or two recently about Zorrie riding out on the ocean, and had wondered how she was getting on.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t think I better, Zorrie,” Noah said.

  She hung the jay in the south window. She liked the bits of blue it threw onto the windowsill and dining room table and how it constituted a handsome counterpart to the glass cardinal she knew hung in Noah’s own south window.

  In early March, she set up the grow lamp and started seedlings in the basement. As the little green heads pressed their way up through the moist dirt, she felt some of her energy returning. When it was time, she set to work in the garden, but got discouraged when she found the rototiller difficult to handle. Lester told her she was probably still worn out from racing around the world, but she wondered. The crisp spring air seemed colder than it ever had, and the wind more cutting. More than once as she put in her early garden she stopped in the middle of what she was doing and went inside to stand a moment by the stove or one of the radiators. Before long, though, she was back outside and picking up the shovel or hoe.

  By late April the garden was in shape: pale green rows coming out of the black dirt behind the irises, daffodils, and tulips she’d brought back as bulbs from her trip. One morning a young tabby turned up and wove her way through the brilliant greens and yellows to rub herself, like so many cats before her, against Zorrie’s leg. The cat had a sore eye and a soft, insistent meow. Zorrie reached her hand down and felt the bones sticking up out of her back and the way the small frame shivered as she held her fingers against it. She brought her out some milk and sliced turkey. When she was finished, she took hydrogen peroxide to her eye. The cat seemed exhausted and more or less slept through her treatment. That evening Zorrie propped open the porch door and put water in a bowl, and the next morning she found the cat curled up and snoring on a worn blanket in the corner.

  As the days warmed, she felt she had her stride back and spent respectable stretches in the garden or on her mower. She returned to keeping what she called work hours and was usually out and about when Blake or Evan drove by and, though she had begun allowing herself occasional naps, generally still vertical when they left at the end of the day. She did note, however, that when she listened to Blake’s reports on the farm, she asked plenty of questions but rarely wished she had been out there.

  In June she got a letter from Ellie Storms. Ellie had had a hard time settling back into her life in St. Louis after her time in Europe and found herself, as she contemplated stacks of receipts and documents that needed her attention, wanting to turn her mind to pleasanter things. She wondered how Zorrie was doing now that she was home from her own trip. After a day or two of thinking about it, Zorrie wrote back. At the start of the letter she had just meant to fill Ellie in on her doings, but before she’d gotten much beyond the appearance of the tabby, who was now more than mildly pregnant, her pen took a turn and she started writing about how she’d been tired lately, couldn’t hold on to her hoe, was taking rests she wasn’t proud of, and just generally wasn’t as motivated about getting her work done. She had often thought of Anne Frank, who had stuffed her short life with so much wonder, while here she was, having been granted many more years, just going through the motions like she was a ten-penny wind-up doll. The world, she wrote, felt like it was slipping straight out of her fingers, that its contours and particulars were falling away. She felt like a beach or like the sand dunes she had once gone for a walk on and didn’t know wha
t shape she would be in the next time a wave or some wind decided to saunter by. She closed by referring to their talk on the airplane, about how grateful she was that Ellie had listened to her ramblings with such generosity.

  Ellie wrote back the next week, and Zorrie read the letter several times. In her neat, sloped hand, Ellie talked about how it seemed right and natural to slow down, that she had studied about it at school and seen the truth of her studies reflected in her own parents and in the world around her. The body was a beautiful mechanism, and part of that beauty lay in its precariousness, its finitude. Ellie thought mortality was a good thing, as it kept the earth and its wheel of wonders in true. She said that she knew it was easy to talk about but quite another to make the acquaintance of its symptoms, and she understood that it was probably hard, especially for someone who had always been so active, someone who had, “in her golden years, thrown open the doors of her world, taken to the skies and soared above the waves.” Zorrie worried for a long time over what to write back and made several starts. None of them seemed to express much at all, let alone how the letter had made her feel, and she finally fetched Janie’s old postcard from its home of many years in Montaigne, glued it carefully to a piece of heavy, folded paper, and before she put it in an envelope with Ellie’s address on it, left off any explanations and just wrote, “Thank You.”

  Later that summer, when lack of energy became shortness of breath and the blur at the edges of her vision began to creep in, Zorrie found herself thinking more frequently of Ellie’s letter than just about anything else. She would lie down on the daybed, turn her back to the room, think of throwing the doors open, and look at the white wall. After a time, she was amazed to see that the depths she had sensed by the shores of Lake Michigan and that she had ascribed to the green waters of the sea at Scheveningen were shimmering right there in front of her. Occasionally Harold or Ruby or Virgil or Janie would come and sit on the edge of the bed, put a hand on her back, and say her name. But mostly she would just lie there, very still, turning it all over in her head.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Claudia Clark’s Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform and Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, as well as Carole Langer’s documentary Radium City, were all essential to understanding and writing about luminous dial painting and its tragic aftereffects. I also kept A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, The Histories of Herodotus, The Essays of Michel Montaigne, and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank close to me as I wrote.

  I was encouraged and supported in this endeavor by many, including but not limited to, the three Hoosiers in the dedication, Eleni Sikelianos, Eva Sikelianos Hunt, Lorna Hunt, Anna Stein, Morgan Oppenheimer, and Liese Mayer. Thank you all.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from the French. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy’s Bridge Prize. His reviews and writings have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many others. He teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

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  First published in the United States 2021

  Copyright © Laird Hunt, 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-536-1; eBook: 978-1-63557-537-8

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