by Haven Kimmel
Play The Odds, Never Do Anything On Principle: these were the two pieces of advice Cassie had received from Jimmy like an Old Testament blessing. They had filtered through to his wife as well, because Laura cited her chances of surviving the treatment of her cancer in a way that suggested anyone who held the hand would have folded. Laura saw no good end. “I would have cared for you if the situation were reversed,” she wrote, “I would have seen you through to the end. But to bargain for my life at your expense is untenable.” She also gave the reasons for her secrecy; the day, she wrote, that Buena Vista had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she had ceased to be Laura’s mother-in-law, the grandmother to Laura’s children, and had become instead the Dying Thing. “All that last year I read her life in reverse. When I thought of her as a young woman, when I thought of her in the kitchen rolling out pie crust, the picture in my mind of her at Christmas the year we gave her the photograph of all her loved ones gathered in a studio, in that ghastly light, I saw a woman who was always about to die. You will do the same, I suspect, now that I am dead, but at least you haven’t done it for the past year or six months, however long. At least we lived normally. When you said good-bye before leaving the house, you did it because you chose to, not because you were measuring out your affection against my death. When you sat talking with me late into the night in the kitchen, you were not coerced by our limited time. I withheld the information for no reason but this, and I doubt I even need to ask your forgiveness. I think you, Cassie, are especially prone to such silences, and will respect mine.”
Cassie looked up at the clock. It was two-twenty-seven, and she felt closer to a decision than she had for the last two days (The Way To Decide Is To Decide, Jimmy’s voice rang in her head), and because she was close to something, she went ahead and read the next section again, even though the pain it caused her had begun to seem formal. “And frankly,” it began, “I see no reason to fight to stay in this world. I could lie and say it’s poverty or the abuse of children or the destruction of the planet that makes me want to go ahead and die, or I could blame it on your father, which heaven knows I have done before and is closer to the truth. The truth is that I don’t want to spend another day with the cat, Miss Mittens. That’s for starters. I get up in the morning and she’s waiting right in front of my door to be fed. And so I open the can and feed her that smelly wet cat food, and she eats it, and then I pick up the bowl and cover it, because if I leave it on the floor it draws ants and probably worse things. And then Miss Mittens wants to go outside, and so I open the door and let her out, and go to wash out the cat-food can, and while I’m in the kitchen I hear her meowing at the door or tearing at the welcome mat, demanding to be let in. So I let her in, and she comes straight into the kitchen wailing for her food, so I take the foil off and set it down, and we begin the process again. I do this all day. I ask myself, Should I kill the cat? and the answer is, No, I can’t. But Miss Mittens never stops, except sometimes to nap, and not when I wish she would. If she is outside she wants in, and vice versa. If she is eating she wishes to cease eating and go outside, et cetera. If I set the food outside, she becomes confused and even more frantic and it draws bigger animals. And what I can read only as her deep dissatisfaction seems to me to be both projection and apt metaphor, and this knowledge is terrible, and life with Miss Mittens is no way for a grown woman to live. I ask myself, What does the cat want? And the answer seems to be, For the food to stay on the floor, and for a world with no doors. Surfaces, obstructions, thresholds. They pain Miss Mittens, and they pain me. The world was too much for me before I knew I was dying. But to face it with no hair or fingernails, with bleeding lips and diarrhea, to go blind as Buena Vista did and then die anyway, sweet Jesus, as she used to say. No thank you.
“And another thing is: Belle, like you, I used to believe that everything I saw had a secret in it, that it was a portal to an unseen world. I remember one afternoon during tornado season, this was many years ago. You girls were very small, in elementary school, and I was working at the library in Jonah, and a man came in and said there was a tornado warning for our county. (The man was Donnie White, by the way, who had a crush on me and I considered having an affair with him but didn’t, don’t worry that I’ll confess it later. I was always faithful to your father, even for the last twenty years, it’s no wonder I have cancer.) I dropped the rubber stamp I was holding, grabbed my purse, and ran out the door, I could think only that you would be frightened, that I had to get to you. When you were little, and I think this is true of almost every mother of young children, I was less afraid that one of you would die than that we wouldn’t all be together. I jumped in the old Jeep—do you remember that Jeep, the one I bought from the man at the grain elevator? Jimmy sold it?—and began the forty-five-minute drive like a woman possessed. I listened to the radio all the way, even though I couldn’t understand what I was hearing. What did the broadcaster mean when he said the funnel cloud was twelve miles west-southwest of Haddington? How was I to know which way was west when the sky was green and I have a terrible sense of direction? I tried to picture Haddington, the grid of streets, and to determine what lay west of it, but I couldn’t see anything in my head. I was driving down a straight country road, the one that man lives on who flies the model airplanes. The fields around me were perfectly flat. No corn was up yet. And there in a field, right next to me, a herd of deer was running under that unnatural sky, eight, twelve deer. They seemed to be running as fast as I was driving, sometimes leaping, and I know they were running for their lives, but I swear to me it looked like joy. Just then a transformer on an electrical pole in front of me exploded in a burst of blue, and I felt the explosion more than I heard it, the air seemed to have absorbed the sound. I lost sight of the deer when I came to a crossroads. I stopped at a stop sign (not the thing a woman possessed ordinarily does), and in front of me was a beautiful old farmhouse with a wraparound porch, the relic of an orchard on one side, a flowering hedge in the front. The backyard was enclosed with a black iron fence, and in front of the gate leading into the yard, a cloud was hovering. I don’t know how to say this. The air had gone flat and still, and there was a cloud. I don’t know what it was made of. And it just hung there, I thought to myself, That cloud is levitating, and in my mind I saw Saint Teresa. Do you see what this is leading to, how the storm and the deer and the cloud became the elements of transport, of ecstasy? Belle, I know that the word transport is somewhat lazy. I was in a car after all, and I was literally moving. Sorry. And then the lightning began to strike, hot bolts of it encircling the horizon, and it was so constant I couldn’t tell whether it was coming down from the sky or up from the ground. It looked more like a conductor’s baton, up and down, and a black cat leaped out from where it had been hiding behind the flowering hedge and ran toward a break in the lattice under the porch. I drove on, and when I was a mile from your school, I was stopped by police cars blocking the road. They told me I couldn’t continue on our road, a tree was down. I backed up, turned around, and approached your school from another angle. Again I was stopped; I couldn’t take that road, either. I didn’t complain—by that time I felt crazy, I believed in everything. I tried the third road and made it into the school parking lot, and that was when the sirens started. I remember thinking, What a lot of noise, the sirens and a train coming all at once, and imagine that, living in Indiana all those years and not recognizing what it meant, the sound of a freight train when I was nowhere near tracks. We weren’t hit by that tornado, but twenty-six people died in Dennison, which was barely a town to start with and was nothing when the storm was through. Every town has its own disasters. Down on the Gulf we had hurricanes, some places have avalanches or tidal waves, I hope that the disaster you face determines the life you live. Because here, at least as I understood it then, a tornado could pass right above my head or touch down briefly and drive a goat through an oak tree. I saw those things that day, I saw the secret, and there were countless such sights. There were. There aren’
t anymore. On the bus from New Orleans to Indianapolis, when I ran after your father and never made it home, we were passing through a crossroads in rural Louisiana and I saw a woman walking from her front porch across her yard toward a horse behind a fence, and the horse was walking toward her, too. The woman was middle-aged and heavy, pretty, and she was holding up the corners of an apron filled with apples, and every step she took toward the horse the horse took a step toward her. All I wanted was to stay right there until the two had met, until I witnessed whatever love or hunger pulled them together, but the bus drove on and I landed here, and in all the years since I never got to see that place again. I never saw New Orleans again, or my mother. I never took the two of you, although I swore I would. I imagine that the house on Rendon Street is still standing, that someone has painted it pink and blue, a few blocks from Bayou St. John. Heat, mosquitoes. There is nothing to see here. I have stared at the cattails on the edge of the pond until my eyes burn. I stand on the porch and there is the fencerow across the road, sometimes a hawk circling and dipping, I have worn this place out. Miss Mittens, doorways. Your father, the deer, the woman with the apples. I am tired of flossing, of hand lotion, of the food pyramid. Years before I knew I was ill I had already felt every single morning, rising from bed, that I had to get up and do something about my corpse. Kundera may have been correct, that we fear first our own annihilation and then our own dead body, but I lived the other way around. I am tired of cigarettes. I adore you, take care of each other. I don’t know what else to say.”
Cassie had read the letter so many times, and there was plenty in there, but Laura Withheld. She was a withholder, that was either her nature or had become so. The larger question, which was how her daughters should go about not living their mother’s life, was left unaddressed, and then there were the cigarettes. Laura claimed that when she wasn’t smoking a cigarette, she was thinking about doing so, and sometimes while smoking one, she mentally rehearsed lighting the next. While other mothers prepared for snow days by freezing loaves of bread and gallons of milk, Laura stocked up on filtered Camels. In the three days it took Laura to die, Belle had gathered up her mother’s possessions and put them in a box, now sitting at the top of the attic stairs, those things that were the clear line between a life being lived and a life vanished. Laura had been, for instance, on page 243 of Randall Jarrell’s No Other Book, and had underlined, of Marianne Moore, “she has widened the scope of poetry, if poetry, like other organisms, wants to convert into itself everything that is, she has helped it to.” Howlin’ Wolf’s Cadillac Daddy had been in the portable CD player in the kitchen, and Belle had left it there; the battered Cajun cookbook was off the shelf but not open. In the box at the top of the attic stairs were Laura’s hairbrush, toothbrush and special toothpaste for sensitive teeth, a bottle of pills (unmarked), her favorite lipstick shade—Night-Blooming Jasmine. Only the most intimate items went in the box. If they’d tried to erase their mother completely, they would have had to burn the house down. Cassie had returned from the hospital with Laura’s glasses and seashell earrings, as well as her wedding ring, which Laura had been wearing on a chain around her neck. A puzzle, the ring. But nothing pained Cassie more than the cigarette case, oxblood leather with the gold clasp worn dull, the thin silver lighter; Laura was bound to the case the way other people were to a watch or a religious medal. The hole in the air left by her death was here, in the kitchen, staring out the window at the finches darting to and from the feeder, her arms crossed over her chest, the cigarette case clutched in her left hand, a burning cigarette in the right. She was a woman who led with her hipbones, thin and tall and restless; she complained of her wavy black hair going gray in the center of her forehead, of her thin lips, her bottom teeth she called crooked as a dog’s hind leg. But for Cassie, Laura’s face was the human face, well constructed, orderly, staring out the window homesick and aggrieved.
Laura’s last attempt at quitting smoking had been years before, when she drove to Jonah to consult a hypnotist. The man, Marshall Something, Cassie couldn’t remember, had been overweight and top-heavy, a mouth-breather with a beard. A terrible thing, her mother reported later, to face the circle of his panting mouth in the midst of all that fur. His fat pink lips. Marshall sat down and told Laura what he was going to do. The primary focus Something Rising of his therapy, he said, was aversion, and many women had reported successful weight loss after he hypnotically suggested that they see highly caloric foods covered with maggots. This would also work with people who were attempting vegetarianism but still loved the taste of meat. Laura realized that Marshall had mistaken her for some other client and was preparing to hypnotize her into emaciation: Laura, curled like a cat in the corner of an overstuffed chair, an Anne Sexton double, her cold glance.
“Perceptually dead,” Laura had pronounced Marshall later, at home. Therapeutically blind or not, he had changed their lives. After explaining that she was not Betty Templeton, his two o’clock, and ergo not in need of his maggots, Laura asked him how successful hypnosis was for smoking cessation.
“It depends,” he’d said, resting his hands on his belly; Laura had imitated him, holding her own arms two feet from her waist.
“On what?”
He panted slightly. “On if you’re a smoker or not. If you are deeply and truly a smoker, you know it, and nothing will make you quit. If you’re a person who smokes and could also not smoke, it will work for you.”
Laura had paid him his thirty-five dollars and left without going under; she was a smoker, and she knew what would finally make her quit. Morphine, a sort of drowning, her own final fire. Cassie folded the thick letter and slipped it back into the envelope. Her mother and Belle thought Cassie didn’t know the meaning of the doorway, the door frame, the doorknob, they considered it a code. But Cassie knew; Belle had once quoted it in a letter. It was from a Martin Amis novel. “He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?”
Bleak, funny. And then Cassie had found this, photocopied from a book, unsourced, tucked into Laura’s journal:
THE FIFTH DETAIL: RATTLESNAKE KITE
For we have agreed that there are two different ways to come to knowledge: either we set out seeking the intelligence, or the intelligence seeks us. Sometimes It Is Difficult To Discern Whether To Move Or Stand Still: This Is A Discrepancy.
We spent many days in concern for edges, as you may recall: the edge of the desk, the door frame, the table, the tips of our fingers, beyond which was Space. What do we see, what do we know? We know that our hand displaces a particular amount of Space: that it occupies: that it ends.
We drove south in a particular midwestern state, and flatness gave way to cliff walls, mostly sheer stone, which rose up around us as we drove down. We began to feel the information seeking us as a repository, and so our openness was heightened; just at the moment we felt patent, we saw a coyote dead at the side of the road and stopped to examine it.
As we have established, Sudden Death Is A Discrepancy, and that information was abundantly present on the face of the dead animal. His feral nature was intact, visually. A high wind shifted his fur. The fur itself was remarkably delicate, and a high wind shifted it like a wheat field. We held our hand above the fur without per se touching it, and felt the movement of the fur in the high wind. The animal’s spirit had Something Rising flown; its hide existed as substantially as our own hand hovering above it. This was hard for us to synthesize. Cars passed us at a high rate of speed, and suddenly we saw ourselves as if from a great distance: our bodies kneeling at the side of a highway, above the dead coyote. The edge of the coyote, the edge of our bodies, the rock walls climbing above us into the greater space above. What about the unimaginable edges of the sun, which burned above us? How do we take into account the edges of the burning sun?
We left the coyote. The Corpse Is A Discrepancy That
Fades Over Time; The Fact Of Death Does Not. Farther down the highway, trying to integrate our recently acquired information, we saw something in the air, rising higher and faster than the sheer rock walls rose around us, something rising light and swift. We barely had time to make out its details. It was a red kite in the shape of a rattlesnake. We thought at first that it was yet held by a human hand, perhaps a child’s hand (as we ourselves held kites in days past), but it rose with a lightness and speed that suggested a lack of restraint or encumbrance. The Rising, Unencumbered Image Is The Soul’s Image. We again pulled our vehicle to the side of the road; we stood in the blazing heat, we watched the rattlesnake kite float free, carried first on one current of air and then on another, we watched it move as if directly toward the edge of the burning midday sun. Finally we saw the kite go up in flames.
The plane tickets lying on the kitchen table were to New Orleans, one for Cassiopeia Claiborne and the other for Laura Dubuisson Claiborne, leaving April first. Four days away. They were intended as a surprise; Cassie and Belle were going to make an early Easter basket for Laura, placing the tickets lightly in the crinkly plastic grass behind some Marshmallow Peeps. Cassie had reservations at the Maison Orleans, five days and four nights, and she’d even had matching T-shirts printed up with WWJE on the front, and on the back, WHAT WOULD JESUS EAT? Cassie laughed and shook her head, closed her aching eyes; it had been a surprise, all right. The six thousand dollars she had intended to spend on her mother in New Orleans had instead gone, all but a thousand of it, to Robbie Ballenger for Laura’s funeral. He hadn’t blinked when Cassie paid him in cash, although he must have been taken aback. Most people in the county didn’t pay him at all.