“No!” Codi says something else that he can’t hear. He washes the cast-iron skillet and sets it on the stove on low heat, to drive out the moisture. He goes into the living room, where he can’t see but can hear better. Hallie glances up as he walks past her in the hall, and she lowers her voice.
“Why do you have to have that exact sweater, Codi? Are you going outside? It’s not even cold.”
“Just bring me the black sweater. I mean it, Hallie, find it. It’s in the bottom of one of my drawers.”
After a long while Hallie comes back with it. He hears the bolt slide back, then lock again; the door was not open even for a full second. Hallie returns to her reading.
In another fifteen minutes he hears scrubbing. She is cleaning the floor. The toilet has flushed more than two dozen times. There are rules concerning all of these things.
Much later he watches without lamplight from the living room. The house is dark. Her curtain of hair falls as she leans out, looking down toward the kitchen. She comes out. The small bundle in her arms she carries in the curl of her upper body, her spine hunched like a dowager’s, as if this black sweater weighed as much as herself. When he understands what she has, he puts his knuckle to his mouth to keep from making a sound. Quiet as a cat she has slipped out the kitchen door.
He follows her down to the arroyo. She takes the animal path that cuts steeply down the bank. Round volcanic boulders flank her, their surfaces glowing like skin in the moonlight. She is going down to the same dry river where they nearly drowned ten years ago, in the flood. This tributary carved out Tortoise Canyon; it would be the Tortoise River if it had a name, but it never runs. It did years ago when he was a boy, hiking these banks to escape his mother’s pot-black kitchen, but now it does not run except during storms. The land around Grace is drying up.
He stands a hundred yards away from Codi, above her, in the shadow of cottonwood trees. She has reached the spot where the rock bank gives over to the gravel and silt of riverbed. Even in the semi-dark there is a clear demarcation where the vegetation changes. She stoops down into the low acacias and he can see nothing but her back to him, her bent spine through the sleeveless cotton blouse. It is a small white square, like a handkerchief. In better light he could photograph it and make it into that, or into a sheet on a clothesline. It’s shaking just exactly that way, like a forgotten sheet left out in a windstorm. She stays kneeling there for a long time being whipped like that.
Then her head pushes up through the fringe of acacias and she moves toward him, her face shining beautifully with its own privacy of tears. He sees how deeply it would hurt her if she understood what he knows: that his observations have stolen the secrets she chose not to tell. She is a child with the dignity of an old woman. He moves back up through the cottonwoods and into the house, into his workroom. He can’t know who she has buried down there but he can mark the place for her. At least he can do that. To save it from animals. Before he goes to bed he’ll cover it with a pile of stones, the heaviest he can move.
He pretends for a long time to be busy in his workroom, periodically coming out to feign a need in the kitchen. Where has he put the Piper forceps? Codi is emptied out and exhausted and still stays up half the night doing homework. Six volumes of the Britannica lie open on the kitchen table; she states that she is doing a report on the marsupial mammals.
So many times he comes close to speaking, but the sentences take absurd forms in his mind: “I notice that you’ve been pregnant for the last six months. I meant to talk with you about this earlier.” He would sell his soul to back up the time, but even if he could do that, could begin where he chose, he can’t locate the point where it would have been safe to start. Not ten weeks ago, or ten years. If he has failed his daughters he’s failed them uniformly. For their whole lives, since Alice died, they’ve been too far away to touch. It’s as if she pulled them with her through a knothole halfway into the other world, and then at the last minute left them behind, two babies stranded together in this stone cold canyon.
He can’t think of anything more to do in the kitchen, and she’s still working. There are dark depressions under her eyes, like thumbprints on her white face. She tells him she has a headache, asks for aspirin, and he goes immediately to the closet where he keeps the medications. He stands for a long time staring at the bottles and thinking. Aspirin would increase the bleeding, if she’s still hemorrhaging, which is likely from the look of her. But he would know if she were in danger, he tells himself. It was probably uncomplicated as stillbirths go; it would have been extremely small even at six months. She is so malnourished, he could have predicted toxemia, even placenta abruptio. He continues to stare into the closet, tapping a finger against his chin. He can’t even give her Percodan—it contains aspirin. Demerol. That, for the pain, and something else for the cramping. What? He wishes he could give her a shot of Pitocin, but doesn’t see how he can.
He returns to the kitchen and hands her the pills with a glass of water. Four pills, two yellow and two blue, when she’s only asked for aspirin, but she swallows them without comment, one after another, without looking up from her books. This much she’ll take from him. This is the full measure of love he is qualified to dispense.
He bends down again over the developer bath, his face so near the chemicals that his eyes water. The picture slowly gives up its soul to him as it lies in the pan, like someone drowned at the bottom of a pool. It’s still the same: plain shadows on dust. Damn. What he is trying for is the luminous quality that water has, even dark water seen from a distance. There is a surface on it he just can’t draw out of these dry shadows.
He straightens up, his eyes still running, and pats his pockets for his handkerchief. He locates it finally in the wrong pocket and blows his nose. He has manipulated this photograph in every possible way, and none of it has yielded what he wants. He sees now that the problem isn’t in the development; the initial conception was a mistake. He fails in the darkroom so seldom that it’s hard for him to give up, but he does. For once he lets go of the need to work his will. He clicks off the old red dwarf and turns on the bright overhead light, and the unfixed prints lying in the bath all darken to black. It doesn’t matter. The truth of that image can’t be corrected.
COSIMA
14
Day of the Dead
On the last Monday of October Rita Cardenal made three announcements to the class: she was quitting school, this was her last day, and if anybody wanted her fetal pig they could have it, it was good as new.
We’d plowed right through the animal kingdom in record time, having had nothing to look at in the way of protozoans. We’d made a couple of trips back to the river and had given due attention to the amphibians and Mr. Bad Fish, whose glass home grew more elaborate with each field trip and was now called the Frog Club Med. There were fern palm trees and a mossy golf green, and the frogs obligingly did high-impact aerobics all over everything. Now we were up to exploring the inner mysteries of an unborn mammal, which had to be purchased mail order.
But Rita hadn’t had the stomach to cut into hers, and I couldn’t blame her, all things considered. She was expecting twins. She said she was dropping out because she felt too tired to get her homework done; I feared for these children’s future.
Rita wore about half a dozen earrings in one ear and had a tough-cookie attitude, and I liked her. She’d been a good student. She seemed sorry to go but also resigned to her fate, in that uniquely teenage way of looking at life, as if the whole production were a thing inflicted on young people by some humorless committee of grownups with bad fashion sense. I was disappointed but unsurprised to lose Rita. I’d been watching her jeans get tight. The pregnancy dropout rate in Grace was way ahead of motor-vehicle accidents, as a teenage hazard. Rita was a statistic. On Tuesday I made my own announcement: we were doing an unscheduled unit on birth control.
The reaction in the ranks was equal parts embarrassment and amazement. You’d think I’d suggested orgies in s
tudy hall. There was some hysteria when I got to the visual aids. “Look, there’s nothing funny about a condom,” I said, pretending to be puzzled by their laughter. “It’s a piece of equipment with a practical purpose, like a…” Only the most unfortunate analogies came to mind. Shower cap. Tea cozy. “Like a glove,” I said, settling for the cliché. I turned from the blackboard and narrowed my eyes. “If you think this thing is funny, you should see the ridiculous-looking piece of equipment it fits over.” The guys widened their eyes at each other but shut up. I was getting the hang of this.
“Miss,” said Raymo. They’d never learned to call me Codi.
“What is it?”
“You’re gonna get busted for this.”
I finished my diagram, which looked somewhat more obscene than I would have liked. I brushed my chalk-dusty hands on my jeans and hopped up to sit on the tall lab bench that served as my desk. “I know some of your parents might not be too thrilled about this field of study,” I said, thinking it over. “I didn’t get permission from the school board. But I think we’d better take a chance. It’s important.”
“Okay then, tell us something we don’t know,” said Connie Muñoz, who had even more holes punched in her left ear than Rita. I wondered if this was some kind of secret promiscuity index.
“Shut up, Connie!” said Marta. (Pearl studs, one per earlobe.) “My dad would kill me if he thought I knew this stuff.”
“What you do is between you and your dad,” I said. “Or not. Whatever. But what you know is my business. Obviously you don’t need to put everything you know into practice, just like you don’t have to go spraying the fire extinguisher around because you know how to use it. But if your house is already on fire, kiddos, I don’t want you burning down with it just because nobody ever taught you what was what.”
Raymo shook his head slowly and said again, “Busted.” He drew the laugh he wanted.
“You know what, Raymo?” I asked, tapping a pencil thoughtfully against my teeth.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter a whole lot what the school board thinks.” This dawned on me forcefully as I said it. I understood this power: telling off my boss at the 7-Eleven, for example, two days before I left Tucson. The invulnerability of the transient. “There’s nobody else to teach this course,” I said. “And I only have a one-year contract, which I wasn’t planning on renewing anyway. I’m not even a real teacher. I’ve just got this provisional certification deal. So that’s the way it is. We’re studying the reproductive system of higher mammals. If I’m offending anybody’s religion or moral turpitude here, I apologize, but please take notes anyway because you never know.”
They were completely quiet, but toward the end of the day you really can’t tell what that means. It could be awe or brain death, the symptoms are identical.
“Miss?” It was Barbara, a tall, thin, shy student (ears unpierced), whose posture tried always to atone for her height. She’d latched onto me early in the semester, as if she’d immediately sniffed out my own high-school persona. “You aren’t coming back next year?”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m outta here, just like a senior. Only difference between you and me is I don’t get a diploma.” I gave them an apologetic smile, meant for Barbara especially. “It’s nothing personal. That’s just my modus operandi.”
The kids blinked at this, no doubt wondering if it was a Latin name they needed to write down.
“Your modus operandi is the way you work,” I said. “It’s what you leave behind when you split the scene of a crime.”
At Grace High I taught Biology I, Biology II, two study halls, and I also pinch-hit an algebra class for a fellow teacher who was frequently absent on account of a tricky pregnancy. My favorite class was Biology II, my seniors—Raymo and Marta and Connie Muñoz and Barbara—but on that day I had a mission and didn’t discriminate among souls. I gave everybody the lecture on baby prevention. Barbara, who was in my study hall and also in the algebra class, got to hear it three times, poor child, and I imagine she was the least in need.
It surprised me as much as the kids, this crusade, and I suspected my motives; what did I care if the whole class had twins? More likely I wanted to be sure of a terminal contract. After the last bell rang I erased the blackboard and stood for a minute sharing the quiet with the bones of my Illinois compatriot, Mrs. Josephine Nash. Our day was over. She gave me her silent, wide-jawed smile. Here was a resident of Grace who had never hurt me in childhood, didn’t make me rack my memory for her name (she wore it on her pelvis), had thrown no spitballs at me nor asked for extra credit, and didn’t suggest that I belonged in Paris, France, or a rock ’n’ roll band.
From the back of the room I could hear the frogs clicking against the sides of their terrarium, constant as a clock: up and down, up and down, exposing soft white bellies. This time next year there would not even be fish or frogs in the river; these particular representatives of the animal kingdom were headed for extinction. Whoever taught this class would have to write Carolina Biological Supply and order those stiff preserved frogs that smell of formaldehyde, their little feet splayed like hands and their hearts exposed.
I stood over the terrarium and peered down into it from above, like a god. The fish hung motionless in its small lake. Droplets of condensation were forming on the underside of the glass top. Getting ready to rain in there. I’d grown fond of this miniature world, along with the kids, and had added my own touches: a clump of bright red toadstools that popped up in Emelina’s courtyard, and a resurrection fern from the cliff behind my house. The terrarium was like a time capsule. I think everybody was trying to save little bits of Grace.
I slid the glass to one side, hating to disrupt the ecosystem but needing to feed the fish. The humid smells of mud and moss came up to meet my nose, and I thought of Hallie in the tropics. What would she do about these troubles if she were here? Well, stay, for one thing, whereas I wouldn’t. I had come here with some sense of its being the end of the line, maybe in a positive way, but I found I had no claim on Grace. Seeing it as “home” was a hopeful construction, fake, like the terrarium. I’d deal with Doc Homer insofar as that was possible in one year, and then I’d rejoin Carlo, or think about another research job; I had no specifics in mind. My future was mapped in negatives. Next year I could be anywhere but here.
I’d told Hallie about my bold, ridiculous little deposition on the pH of the river, and a few days later I’d had to follow up with the news of the river’s getting dammed—questions of pH being entirely academic. I felt humiliated. Eventually she wrote back to say: “Think of how we grew up. You can’t live through something like that, and not take risks now. There’s no getting around it.” She was admonishing me, I guess. I should have more loyalty to my hometown. I wasn’t brave; I was still trying to get around it. A good citizen of the nation in love with forgetting. I pelleted the surface of the water with goldfish flakes. In nature there are animals that fight and those that flee; I was a flighty beast. Hallie seemed to think I’d crossed over—she claimed I was the one who’d once wanted to dig in and fight to save the coyote pups. Emelina thought I’d been ringleader in campaigns to save stewing hens. In my years of clear recall there was no such picture. When Hallie and I lived in Tucson, in the time of the refugees, she would stay up all night rubbing the backs of people’s hands and holding their shell-shocked babies. I couldn’t.I would cross my arms over my chest and go to bed. Later, after my second year of med school, I’d been able to address their external wounds but no more than that.
The people of Grace would soon be refugees too, turned out from here like pennies from a pocket. Their history would dissolve as families made their separate ways to Tucson or Phoenix, where there were jobs. I tried to imagine Emelina’s bunch in a tract house, her neighbors all keeping a nervous eye on the color coordination of her flowerbeds. And my wonderfully overconfident high-school kids being swallowed alive by city schools where they’d all learn to walk like Barbara, suf
fering for their small-town accents and inadequate toughness. It was easy to be tough enough in Grace.
Well, at least they’d know how to use condoms. I could give them that to carry through life. I settled the glass lid back over the terrarium and turned out the lights. I would be long gone before the ruination of Grace; I had a one-year contract. Now I’d made sure of it.
Rita Cardenal called me up on the phone. She hesitated for a second before speaking. “I don’t think your old man has all his tires on the road.”
“It’s possible.” I sat down in my living-room chair and waited for her to go on.
“Did you tell him about me? About dropping out?”
“Rita, no. I wouldn’t do that.”
Silence. She didn’t believe me. To Rita we were both authority figures—but at least she’d called. “My father and I aren’t real close,” I said. “I go up to see him every week, but we don’t exactly talk.” A pregnant teen could surely buy that.
“Well, then, he’s got a slightly major problem.”
“What did he do?”
“He just sorta went imbalanced. I went in for my five-mouth checkup? And he said the babies were too little, but he was all kind of normal and everything?” She paused. “And then all of a sudden he just loses it and gets all creeped and makes this major scenario. Yelling at me.”
“What did he say?”
“Stuff. Like, that I had to eat better and he was going to make sure I did. He said he wasn’t going to let me go out of the house till I shaped up. It was like he just totally went mental. He was using that tape measure thing to measure my stomach and then he just puts it down and there’s tears in his eyes and he puts his hands on my shoulders and kind of pulls me against his chest. He goes, ‘We have to talk about this. Do you have any idea what’s inside of you?’ I got creeped out.”
Animal Dreams Page 14