Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “Nothing like a little bribery to overcome shyness,” the director said, winking at me, then turning, distracted, as three people approached her at once, asking questions.

  Jay touched my shoulder and I smiled at him, but he did not smile back. He coughed and looked away. Then he smiled downward, into his shirt collar. A voguish black woman in a sarong and a Batman sweatshirt brought him a plastic cup of coffee and he seized it and took a gulp, coughed, and set it down.

  “Break’s over,” a voice called. “Places.”

  “What’s the matter with Ollie now?” he murmured, his mouth still in his collar.

  “She’s tired. She doesn’t feel well actually.”

  “Then what the ... h-hell are you doing here?”

  I picked up the coffee cup and took a sip. “We came to see you. We thought you’d be delighted.”

  “Jesus, Ez, gimme a break. I’m trying to work here. You know this is no place for her. Especially when sh-she’s ...”

  “So weird?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “No, of course not. You didn’t have to.”

  Jay grimaced, then bent down and lifted Ollie’s face in his hands.

  “B-bye-bye, Olls. Daddy’s got to go back to work now. I’ll see you later, OK?”

  Ollie put her hands back over her face.

  “Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five ...”

  Jay stood up. He looked at me, an unfathomably sad look.

  “See ya later.”

  I took Ollie’s hand and pulled her gently up and walked her over to the monitors. I put my hand on the director’s shoulder. She turned away from her mike, grinned, shot us a thumbs-up.

  Jay walked us to the door, waved, then sprinted back to his chair. Someone was calling him.

  Outside, Ollie crumpled into a small heap on the gravel.

  “Come on, Ollie,” I croaked, exhausted. “Get up. We have to get you home.”

  Then I looked more closely at what she was doing. “Fifty-one, fifty-two ...” Ollie proudly held up her fingers for me to see, then snapped them, once, twice, just like the director.

  “Fifty-three,” Ollie added, and snapped again. She paused, her thin little face upturned, spattered with light. Her grey eyes were very clear.

  “This is count and count TV pictures, Mom,” she said. “They snap—and then a number. The picture jumps. It moves ahead. Do you see?”

  Chapter 3

  ON THURSDAY I explained the molecular effects of equilibrium to my Organic class at UGC, working at the blackboard. I wrote: “1. Changes tend to occur in the direction of lower potential energy with the evolution of heat energy. 2. Changes tend to occur in the direction of greater molecular disorder.”

  Next I considered, in chalk, the acids, strong and weak, swerving suddenly to a discussion of the environment. Lately I had been trying to make my lectures as topical as possible, since my students seemed so innocent of any political thought. These days I was feeling more and more like a famous professor I’d had at Harvard: trying to inject notions of morality into chemistry. It wasn’t really my style, but I felt a need to startle them.

  “You know what’s wrong with the world?” I cried out suddenly, turning from the blackboard. “And please note that the world I’m talking about is roughly synonymous with the scientific community—I’m talking about the absence of any connection between chemical research and the end products of research—like industrial chemical waste—and questions of social consciousness. In the case of gene manipulation or proliferation of combustible hydrocarbons, we have entered controversy without any program of ethical inquiry.”

  I paused. “Do you agree? Disagree?”

  The faces in front of me were affectless. They had all stopped taking notes. I shook my head at them, but went on, undefeated, searching for a concrete example.

  I wrote:

  CO2 + H2O → H2CO3(aq)

  on the blackboard and got them to think through a series of equations that broke down sulfur oxide to sulfuric acid, or nitrous oxide emissions combining with water to give nitric or nitrous acids, all of which produce acid rain.

  I wrote:

  H2CO3(aq) → H+(aq) + HCO3–(aq)

  I drew a picture of a lake with pointy waves, whitecaps. I told them it was a lake like any lake in upper New York State or New England, a typical one with no fish left in it. I talked about eastern Canada, about U.S. pollution entering its rain. I drew several large fat raindrops on the board, whiptailed as tadpoles. How does acid rain come to be? I asked in a very bright voice. The term, I said, did not simply mean rain with a pH of less than 7, did it? I asked for the pH of normal rainwater and wrote “5.6” on the board. Then I wrote “!!!!!!!!” after it. Then I drew a frowning face and circled it.

  I began to feel tired. What was I doing, trying to be Q, the crusader? I just wanted them to consider the facts. “As you can see,” I said, “normal rainwater is well within acid range, and this acidity is from dissolved carbon dioxide, coming from the small amount of carbon dioxide naturally present in air.

  “Now, however ...” I paused theatrically, then flipped off my left loafer and struck an empty desk with it. The shoe hit with an enormous bang. Everyone sat up. Everyone listened. “Now, however, data collected over the last twenty-five years show that rain and snow in North America are considerably more acidic than pH 5.6. Fish are dying,” I said directly to a startled boy in the front row. “Goddam fish are dying!” I drew an enormous cigar shape with fins and a gaping mouth, from which bubbles spiraled upward; then I drew large X’s where the eyes should have been. The bell rang. I wrote “DEAD FISH” next to the cigar shape.

  “We’ll continue our discussion of acid rain next time,” I said. “In the meantime, review your strong and weak acids. Get your goddam notion of equilibrium together.” I kicked off my other loafer and it ricocheted off my desk sideways and bounced off the corner blackboard. A fat boy hurried out of the classroom, protecting his head with his chemistry text.

  A favorite of mine, a girl named Rocky, gave me a high sign on the way out. “Hang on, Prof, tomorrow’s Friday!” she called out.

  I drove home. The house was dark when I walked in, but I could hear voices in the back. I snapped on a lamp and the hall light, and switched on the overhead light in the kitchen as I entered. It was an off-the-normal-schedule day—Jay had had to pick up Ollie from nursery school, because I’d had a meeting after Organic with my grad students.

  I found him standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, looking as if he’d been crying. On the floor, nearly under the kitchen table, Ollie sat comfortably, her little legs in red corduroy pants stretched straight out, a large cardboard box over her body. This box was her “TV” —she’d insisted that I paint it to look like a television set with knobs and dials and a cutout screen for her face. She sat within and watched things carefully through her “screen.” Occasionally she would imitate a quiz show host and cry “Let’s spin the wheel!,” utterly spooking me—but mostly she was silent. She followed me from room to room in this box, crashing gently into things, then backing up, humming, self-contained as a turtle.

  Jay clenched his fists and glared at me. “I want a di ... divorce,” he said in a strangled voice.

  I crossed in front of him, lifted the TV box gently from Ollie’s head, then knelt and kissed her hello. Then I stood up, opening drawers and cupboards, putting an apron on, lighting burners, opening the refrigerator.

  Jay stalked over, pulled me roughly by the arm. “Did you h-hear what I just said?”

  I shrugged free. “A divorce? Now just what difference would a divorce make to me? Today is—what—the second time you’ve had to pick Ollie up this year: I mean, who would miss you?” I paused and looked at him. “Us?”

  Jay’s lip curled. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. He closed his eyes and pushed air out from between his lips but no articulate sound came. The fierce expression on his face grew mild as he breathed. I watched him will his face and body
to relax.

  “Sh-shit,” he said, and exhaled lengthily. Then he grinned at me.

  I gestured at him with a small copper-bottomed pot. “Jesus. You can’t cook. You can’t talk. What the hell good are you?”

  The pot slipped suddenly out of my grasp, hit the floor and reverberated, gonglike, on the linoleum, spun wildly, then rolled leisurely over to Ollie, wobbled to a stop in front of her. Ollie applauded delightedly, then lifted the TV back on her head.

  Jay shot me another smile. I smiled back. He got up, crossed the room, and put his arms around me. “OK,” he whispered into my ear. He was still breathing carefully, as if he were counting exhalations. He said it all at once: “Forget the divorce. I want a w-w-wife.”

  Ollie trundled by us in her box, making her way to a little polished pedestallike table in the corner where she and I had piled up a motley cache of geological specimens: chips of red roof tile and stucco bits from the collapsing garage next door, three spherical stones, a trilobite from a museum shop, a sharp-etched skeleton of a fish embedded in shale, a sprinkle of driveway gravel, two bottle caps, a green cat’s-eye marble, a lump of creosote, a brain-shaped blossom of pumice.

  Ollie sang happily to herself. Little bursts of flatulence accompanied her progress.

  Jay stared after her.

  “R-raisins. I gave her too many, I g-guess.”

  Ollie lifted off her box, sighed deeply—then picked up each specimen, held it up carefully to the light, peered at it, kissed it, then flung it thoughtfully to the floor.

  He wouldn’t let go of me and I felt awkward standing aimlessly within his embrace. He put his face into my hair.

  “I want a wife,” he repeated, into my hair, his warm breath in my ear.

  Lately I’d noticed how our marriage derived its information about itself from hyperbole. Lately it was: “I want a divorce”; “I’m going to kill myself!”; “I can’t breathe!”; translating to quite pedestrian literals: “I need your attention now”; “I’m tired and hungry”; “You were mean to me.” Overstatement had numbed our power to affect each other. And Jay was, more than I, given to the dramatic. This was partially a function of his personality but also a natural result of listening to too much bad television dialogue.

  I waited out his lips on my ear, thinking about dinner. Jay laughed softly; the sound made me stand up straighter. He had a wonderful luxurious laugh, like a ripe fruit being peeled, slowly: a long, tropical, smoky rind, spiraling around me.

  I pictured the two of us standing there, wrapped around each other. Jay—tall and lanky, the planes of his thin face against mine, his wide blue eyes, lidded, head tilted downward. And me, not quite so tall, my red hair pulled back in a hasty elastic-bound ponytail, nose sticking out, eyes moving over his shoulder: Where was Ollie, what time did the battered kitchen clock say, what would I put on the table?

  Jay sensed my internal commotion and pulled back, looking at me. He shook his head.

  “N-nice, Esme.”

  He let me go, an injured look on his face, turned and flipped open a high squeaky cupboard, gingerly lifted out a bottle of vodka. He opened the dishwasher and took out a spotted glass, blew on it, and raised it to me.

  “I’m going to mix a drink. You want a little shot of H20 and CH3OH?”

  I plucked little pasta bow-ties and wheels, multicolored, from a covered glass lab beaker I kept near the stove. With the other hand, I put a pot filled with water on the stove to boil.

  “No, thanks. I’m not in the mood for a methanol cocktail.”

  I heard him open the refrigerator and rattle the ice cube tray.

  “So, OK, I missed one! What is it?”

  “I don’t know—wait: C2H5OH.”

  The ice cubes dropped into the glass.

  “Shit,” he said. “That’s probably potassium chloride.”

  I turned around to look at him. He stood, slouched against the counter, head cocked, stirring his drink with his left index finger. He winked at me and cocked his right index finger at me like a pistol.

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  It made me uneasy that he was plowing through my old chemistry textbooks, my biochemical short courses. Not because he’d learned that potassium chloride injected intravenously would stop the heart and leave no trace in the bloodstream—that struck me (in my morbid moments) as useful and cautionary uxorial information, a Merck Manual family kind of fact: but because I was under a not-entirely-benign scrutiny.

  I shook the pasta bow-ties onto the counter, then opened the refrigerator and took out a half-full jar of ready-made pesto with Paul Newman’s face on it, considered it skeptically, then poured a small dollop into a pan. I turned to the fridge crisper and took out tomatoes, slightly withered basil leaves, and a ferny knot of parsley, to beef up the sauce. I began to chop tomatoes on a pine cutting board shaped like a galloping pig.

  Jay was on the hunt for material. By day he was a technical director in television but by night he stood hustling for yuks in a surgical spot: he wanted to be a stand-up comic. He tried out his routines wherever they’d allow him on stage. He’d done every kind of gig from bar mitzvahs to the Café Blah Blah in the Valley. Once he’d even filled in at the Improv. It happened that he was pretty awful. For such a delicately constructed man, with such technical prowess, to have no sense of timing, to be so slow with audiences was unexpected and disheartening. But no one, especially me, had the heart to tell him. Let him have fun, everyone said. Of course they didn’t wash the flop sweat out of his Arrow shirts. The fact was, almost anybody I knew was funnier than Jay. He’d become desperate. And it wasn’t a matter of his stutter. When he stood up in front of a microphone, his stutter disappeared. The truth was that onstage, he just got boring.

  Sometimes I thought he was amazingly brave, the rest of the time I found myself resenting his vampirization of our intimate moments, the intrusion of his need for reassurance into every level of our lives. It had become difficult to tell joke-trolling from the real thing. Sometimes he seemed so obsessed that I’d become uncertain about his displays of emotion: were they real, or rehearsed?

  I’d come late to a friend’s birthday party at a restaurant—the friend had asked Jay to perform on the small supper-club stage—and walked in on my own words: an argument with my mother I’d had a week earlier on the telephone. People were chuckling, and Jay was holding an imaginary receiver to his ear, cocking one hip: “But, Mother, that’s the wrong end of the microscope!” Right after that he started doing Science Send-ups; he had a stable of characters, drawn from among my academic colleagues and professional acquaintances. He started doing me—or a burlesque version of me, mocked up and lab-coated and throaty. I was the Mad or Absent-minded Scientist; he was the Long-suffering Husband.

  I stirred the sauce, thinking about the night before. I’d gotten out of the bath and wandered into the living room, still steaming, wrapped in towels.

  Jay’s recorded voice soared: “How’d ya like t-to have a k-kid who talks like this: [a pause] ‘Sun hop top top the wind green’?” He repeated the string of words, then rewound the tape: Ollie’s treble voice rose on the tape saying the same words, undercut by his. Finally he looked up and saw me. He clicked it off, stumbled to his feet, and came toward me, his hands out.

  “Ez,” he said, “it’s not for a routine. I was just th-thinking out loud.”

  My damp turban unwound itself and I shook my hair free and ran a hand through it. I waited for a second, then opened my mouth, but he’d turned. He knelt down, popped the tape cassette out of the recorder, and flung it away. It bounced off a small palm tree in its terra-cotta pot in the corner.

  “It doesn’t matter!” he cried. “It’s n-not what you think at all.”

  He stalked off. I stood there for a while, rubbing the towel through my hair. Drops of water fell on the carpet as I moved my head back and forth.

  I didn’t mind that he was making a tape and I knew it wouldn’t be for a stand-up routine. It would be for Jay himself. It
would be just Jay talking, talking to the air, the empty clicking spool filling nothing up with his sounds.

  Talking about his daughter, who sat before her breakfast egg crying “Yellow” twenty times in a row, who followed her own feet around herself, around and around in faster, tighter orbits, who wore a painted cardboard box over her head, who chewed her clothes and talked to the sink. “Dream tub,” she said. “Sugar puppet. Drink. Drink. Drink.”

  I could understand how he’d pour his words onto celluloid, into any receptacle for his terror; what I couldn’t fathom was the silence between us about her. We could not find a path to the familiar descriptives, the words that could represent bent twigs, stacked stones, trail markers to the place where she started, this unprecedented being. Where we could begin to talk about her. And yes, I believed that place was where language itself began, under the twisted tree in the ancient kingdom—far away from the petty despots of syntax, where each new word fell, gold and perfect, unalloyed from the mouth. Something told me Jay and I were not going to find this path.

  I turned from the burbling sauce and prowled through the cupboards, looking for pistachios. I heard Jay behind me, filling his glass again. More ice rattle, then a shattering sound, cubes hitting the floor.

  “Shit—doesn’t anybody ever defrost this thing?”

  “It’s supposed to do it automatically.”

  I pulled a half-full bag of shelled pistachios from behind a Frosted Mini-Wheats box and shook a handful into the Cuisinart. I poured in some olive oil, added more basil leaves and two cloves of garlic and turned it on—just as Jay started to speak again.

  He stalked over and snapped the machine off.

  “I want to t-talk to you, Esme.”

  We faced each other.

  Jay set his drink down and put his hands out again beseechingly.

  “Tell me what’s going on.”

  I leaned against the counter.

  “I took her to that school interview,” I said slowly, “and the school was frightening to her. And to me. I took her to the doctor—he wants her on medication.”