The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Chou-fleur,” he said without looking up. His nickname for me. I thought it was magical of him to know who it was without seeing, but of course I realize now there was no mystery about it. I was the only inhabitant of the house small enough to make such a light pattering on the steps and such a short shadow across the floor.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, moving closer when I realized he wasn’t going to send me right back to bed.

  “Making labels for the shelves. They must be legible, you know this word?” I shook my head. “Easy to read, for the customers. But more,” he said, rolling the thick dark bead of ink off the nib. “They have to be beautiful.” He looked over his spectacles at me. “There is nothing worth doing that is not worth doing beautifully.”

  I nodded, vowing silently that I would always do everything beautifully, so that my father would look at me with his heart in his eyes. The way he looked at Michel when he brought home good marks from school; the way he looked at my mother every day.

  He finished Biography with a flourish, two curling switchbacks under the word, then blotted the card and set it aside to dry.

  “May I try?” I asked.

  “You haven’t used a fountain pen before,” he said, eyebrows raised.

  “I can do it, I know I can.” I always got the highest mark in my class for penmanship.

  He considered me for a moment, eyes narrowed and lips pursed, then smiled and patted the chair beside him. I climbed up and he slid an ivory card in front of me.

  “Geography,” he said, showing me the word on a bit of scrap paper. “You must keep the pen moving right through the word. Do you hear me? Do not stop. Keep the pen moving.”

  I curled my fingers around the cool shaft of the pen. Brought the point to the soft surface, moved it into the loop at the top of the G. The first letter went well, and I felt a warm spot of joy begin in my heart. I redipped the pen and tapped the extra ink from it, as I’d seen him do a thousand times, then tackled the rest of the word: -eogra. He was nodding. Birds were singing in my chest. Now the difficult open European lowercase p, just the smallest of notches to hint at the closure, before ascending to join to the h. Perfect! I was thrilled to see the black cursive appearing under my hand, and the warm self-congratulatory spot spread into a sunburst: I knew I could do it. But alas, I sneaked a look at my father, wanting to see the approbation on his face, and for just a heartbeat, I left my hand still. When I looked back, it was to see destruction, the y having leaked all over the rest in a giant stain of failure.

  I burst into tears. My father slipped the pen out of my hand and placed it back in the inkwell, pulled me onto his lap, and put his arms around me.

  “You are my darling,” he said, his beard scratching against my forehead. “And you are very good at many things. You will become good at many more. But you must avoid the sin of pride.” He held me away from him so I would see his seriousness and pay attention. “You must learn humility.” I nodded, the tears still falling, and he enfolded me in his arms again.

  Pride goeth before destruction—was that the first time I encountered that lesson? It seems I was always being taught it, while never learning it at all. There was a mark on the counter forever after, no matter my mother’s efforts with boiling water and lye.

  * * *

  WHEN THE SHOP was finally ready, the books went up into their places. My brothers and I made a line in front of my father, who would hand off a book with instructions—American History, Colonial Period—and we would run to put it on the appropriate shelf. Soon I didn’t even have to look at the cards in their brackets in order to get a book to its correct place. That Saturday made the bookshop ours. Well, perhaps not my mother’s. She stayed outside all day during the shelving, working on the patch of earth behind the shop.

  In Woonsocket she’d planted herbs and vegetables in boxes on the second-floor terrace. The Providence plot was not large, but it was much bigger than those boxes. It was filled with trash and weeds when we got there, but over several weeks she turned it into a garden. She cleared the rubbish and tore out the weeds and dug out the rocks, revealing a pale, packed oblong of weak city soil; then she knelt and turned her fork into it, nourishing it with pucks of horse manure from the street.

  Once she had the soil ready, she brought out the paper twists she’d carried from Woonsocket, containing seeds from previous harvests. She planted, weeded, and watered; she culled the seedlings, selecting the strongest and nurturing those, pinching pests from their leaves and feeding them with a tea she brewed from food scraps and grass clippings in a bucket in the sun. Before long, we had spring strawberries racing their runners across the ground between fat red clusters, then later peas and beans twisting their vines up the poles and melons swelling on the ground, followed by squash and winter lettuces coddled behind cold frames. At the bottom of the property stood a neglected cherry tree on which she lavished attention; two summers after the move to Providence, it stood heavy with fruit. Under her care, that small urban plot produced as well as an acre.

  As the only girl, I was pressed into service as apprentice, but her skills had not come down to me. My weeding was haphazard and incomplete, my housework slapdash.

  “You need to learn to manage a household,” she scolded, finding me reading among the shelves I was supposed to be dusting. “You’ll have to know these things when you have a husband and children.”

  “Maybe I don’t want a husband.”

  “You don’t want children? Don’t be silly.”

  I supposed children might be nice, but I wasn’t sure about the husband. How the two related was closely guarded information in those years.

  “When I’m grown, I’m going to read all day, and no one will tell me what to do.”

  My mother found that very amusing.

  “If that’s your goal, you’ll need to marry well, so you can have servants,” she said. “But then your rich husband will tell you what to do. So. Up with you and back to work.”

  More than weeding or cleaning, I disliked cookery. I resented squandering effort on a meal that was consumed and forgotten so quickly. I schemed to avoid it. My mother couldn’t tolerate waste; I used that virtue against her, making deliberate errors (salt for sugar in a pie, a spiral of yellow yolk staining egg whites intended for meringue) that produced reliable results: she’d cluck and dismiss me.

  When I look back on that time it seems an idyll, marred only by weekly Confession. My friend Mariette and I used to go together on Saturday morning, discussing our sins nervously on the way: I didn’t say a swear word, but I thought one, does that count? We fretted about transgressions that we practically had to invent in order to be forgiven for them. Trivial things: I said a bad word, I had an unkind thought, I talked back to my mother. We didn’t know about sin, but we were trained to feel guilty.

  My brother Michel told me stories of thin-porridge mornings and bread-and-dripping evenings from the years of his childhood, but the bookshop prospered in its new location, and I was shielded from want. The only daughter, personally invited back from death by the Holy Ghost, I was fussed over and indulged. There was no talk of my leaving school at twelve or fourteen the way my brothers had before me. I expected to sit for the entrance exams to the girls’ high when that time came, and I dreamed of more: university, a career as a scientist. Madame Curie was a woman, but she’d achieved two Nobel prizes. And as my father reminded me, she might have been born Polish, but she’d chosen to be French. The world seemed very wide.

  * * *

  THAT’S ENOUGH. THAT’S enough for now.

  You were just getting going. You sure?

  I’m sure.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  Lucy

  I BRING CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS BOOKS AND a foam-dart-shooting gun, a sphere made of plastic chain that expands and shrinks with a touch, things that Google told me were good gifts for a six-year-old boy. He doesn’t seem surprised to see me; not as surprised as I am to be there, sitting cros
s-legged on the carpet across from him in the playroom.

  Google’s mostly wrong about this six-year-old boy—he wrinkles his forehead at the books and inspects the gun politely, laying it aside without aiming or shooting it. He likes the sphere, though, pulling it open and collapsing it again over and over, examining the plastic links closely, as if he’ll be called upon to reproduce the item later.

  “They said we could go for a walk,” I say.

  Actually what the nurse had said was That would be great in the exasperated voice of an overwhelmed mom. Just have him back for hypnotherapy at four.

  “Hypnosis? For memory recovery?” It’s been proven fraught with error: subjects can be suggestible and provoking false memory a significant risk.

  “They’re thinking DID.”

  Dissociative identity disorder, the current name for multiple personality disorder. For a while after the 1970s blockbuster Sybil came out, doctors were finding in every neurotic or psychotic adult a traumatized child who’d splintered off personalities in order to cope. Overdiagnosis can kill even a real disease; the pendulum has swung far the other way, and now whether DID exists at all is a matter of controversy.

  “Jellicoe’s taken him on as his personal patient,” the nurse said. She lowered her voice. “You know how they get.” She meant how doctors can behave when there’s potential for publication. “Don’t forget to call him Ben,” she said as I went down the hall toward his room. “That’s part of his treatment plan.”

  I sneak looks at him now as we push through the front doors of the hospital (I half expect an alarm to go off). Can I see Karen in his little-boy features? My memories of her are only a handful, really—a strong jaw and a slash of white teeth when she laughed, no perceptible makeup, and the crow’s-feet just starting at the corners of her eyes. How was it that she hadn’t had a husband or partner? Why had she been forced to have a child on her own? Our conversations had been mostly about work, hadn’t touched on men or relationships at all. Surely they would have at some point. I feel again a sense of mourning, for the friendship we might have had.

  I’ve never walked on these streets before, only driven through. Only a couple of miles from the historic homes on College Hill, the area’s pretty bleak. Chilly sunlight glares off broken glass in the parking lots of a long strip of marginal enterprise: liquor store, check-cashing store, a windowless building with a sign saying Hot Wieners. I’m aiming for the ice cream parlor two blocks over that I’ve seen from the highway exit. But as we pass a scrubby-grassed little park, Ben slows down, looking through the fence. A set of swings and a slide, some children around Ben’s size chasing each other, and a perimeter of benches occupied by women holding to-go cups and cell phones.

  “Want to swing?” I ask.

  He steps through the gate, but instead of the swings he goes toward the slide, an old-fashioned metal one with a tall flaky-painted ladder that screams tetanus. There’s a short line of kids waiting at the foot of the ladder, and he joins them.

  He has barely said two words to me. It’s my fault, of course. I don’t know what to say, or how to say it. I don’t have a lot of interaction with children, apart from patients. With the children of friends or relatives, activities have always been clearly delineated and goal oriented: peekaboo, story time, diaper change.

  He’s anxious, I remember Karen saying. They wanted to give him meds but I said no fucking way. He manages fine, as long as he knows what to expect. He hasn’t seemed particularly anxious to me, just withdrawn. Cautious. As if he’s not sure whom to trust. I can only imagine what Karen would have said to the current putative diagnosis of DID. But of course if Karen were here, the point would be moot.

  I talk about death all day at work, and even consider myself rather good at dealing with the subject, but I haven’t been able to say anything to the boy about his mom. Is it because I knew her, or because he’s a child, or because I haven’t been to sleep yet, after my sixth overnight shift in a row? Maybe a combination of all those things. Maybe also without the white coat and the voice of authority, without established protocols, I’m unsure what I have to offer.

  I’ve asked myself what I might have wanted to hear after my own mother’s death. My situation had been very different: I’d been four years old, and the death had taken the form of a progressive absence, my mother getting thinner and sleeping more, then going away to the hospital, until one day there was the funeral. And I’d had continuity otherwise: my same dad and the same house, the same bedroom. Not long afterward had come a stepmother, Marybeth, with whom most of my childhood mom-memories had been made. I was left with early, fleeting fragments that might or might not have been connected to my mother—a window with a sunflower nodding below the sill, a warm hand dipping into the collar of my dress and pulling it straight, a bedsheet flung up in a laundry-fragrant bell of fabric. In my teens, tracking one of those memory pieces, I asked my dad who had made my birthday cake with the checkerboard pattern inside. I remembered the cake well, but not the mom or the party or even which birthday it had been. He’d looked stricken as he’d answered, Your mom. In a flash, I could see a grown-up hand pressing a biscuit-cutter into the center of a layer and lifting out a chocolate circle: Watch now, here’s the secret. Was that a real memory? My dad’s stark expression told me that more questions weren’t welcome.

  Had anyone even told Ben that his mother had died? I don’t recall how I was told. What I do remember is the day my stepmother decided to clean out my mother’s closet. It had been closed tight for two long years, and when she pulled the door open, the interior breathed out a delightful, nearly forgotten smell. Enveloping me, starting me crying, the snot flowing and filling up my nostrils so I couldn’t smell it anymore, which made me cry even harder. Marybeth putting her arm around me, pulling a tissue from somewhere. Oh honey, oh. Why don’t you choose something of hers to keep?

  I hear kids yelling, and look up to see Leo—Ben—at the top of the slide. He’s seated there like he’s going to slide down, but he’s not moving. His eyes are closed and he looks like he’s going to be sick.

  I’ve doubted the anxiety diagnosis? Well, here’s proof.

  “Hey,” I call up to him. “Are you okay?”

  He shakes his head hard no, and then his whole upper body ducks forward suddenly. Did someone push him?

  “Hey! Did that kid just push you?” I look around for the mother.

  The women on the benches are staring, but no one makes eye contact or offers help. One of them holds up her phone in landscape orientation, filming. Their expressions are so unengaged that it’s as though we’re already in a video that they’re watching.

  “Can you close your eyes and slide?” I call to Ben, trying for a casual, encouraging tone, but even I can hear the wheedle in it. “It’s really safe. I’ll catch you.”

  Niñera estupida, one woman says into her phone, a heatless narration to the person on the other end: I’m watching this idiot babysitter who let this little kid climb up the big slide and now he won’t come down.

  I’m not sure if Ben hears me pleading with him. He’s got his eyes squeezed shut, frozen ten feet above the ground, and—a chorus of eww breaks out from the kids clustered around the bottom of the slide—so terrified that he’s lost control of his bladder.

  Well, this was a genius move.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  Leo

  YOU CAN SEE A LOT from up here. There’s a tangle of sticks tucked beside a window on the second floor of a building across the street—a bird’s nest. I crane my neck, but I can’t see any birds in it. My body lurches forward suddenly and I reach up, grab the handrails. The kid behind me has pushed me hard on the back.

  “Fucking go,” he says.

  I hold the rails, resist him. I look over the side and my stomach swoops. A coldness breaks over me. It’s too high, I’m going to fall. It’s like I’m already falling, in midair with nothing above or below me and the wind rushing past.

  �
�What are you waiting for?” The kid pushes me again, and my head dips forward; my jaws clack together. A burst of pain—I’ve bitten the side of my tongue.

  “I want to go back.”

  “Nuh-uh,” he says. “There’s kids behind me. Just. Slide. Down.” The last three words are thumps, his kneecap between my shoulder blades.

  My eyes are closed, but I can feel the blue sky all around. Someone bangs on the slide and the metal vibrates beneath me.

  “Are you okay?” Lucy’s voice from below.

  “I want to get down,” I manage to say.

  “Just let go,” she says. “Just let go, and you’ll slide right down.”

  I shake my head. Even that small movement sends a wave of panic through me: I’m going to fly off, I’m going to fall. I don’t open my eyes. I just keep holding on to the rails; I grip very tight, the cold metal numbing my hands. My whole body is buzzing and light. There is a ping sound, a pebble on metal. Everything stops for a moment, cold terror squeezing my heart. And then—humiliation—I feel a warmth, and wetness.

  “He peed on the slide!” A girl’s voice.

  A refrain of eww and nasty.

  Oh for God’s sake. The scolding from below is so brisk and bossy I don’t realize at first that it’s Lucy. She’s not talking to me. A series of small jerks reverberates through me: the children are getting off the ladder. Now a measured jolt-jolt-jolt shakes the whole slide. Someone big is climbing up. The jolting stops and I hear Lucy’s normal voice, very close behind me.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi,” I whisper.

  “Do you think you can climb down the ladder if I’m right behind you?” she says. “I won’t let you fall.”

  A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to climb back down, but now I am frozen.