by Mark Slouka
The chair feels loose against my back; I’ll have to look at it one of these days. I don’t know what to do, really. It’s like I can’t breathe suddenly, yet there’s air all around. It’s not like I believed in much these past years. Something, I thought. Now I don’t know. I can’t tell you if they’ll be back in front of my house Monday morning, and if they are, if I’ll have the strength to look through my own living-room window, and if I do, if I’ll be able to stand what I see; if it will be the bossy one missing, or the one who always stands by the corner with her mother, or the one who scraped her knee on the wall last spring . . . The paper had their names, but the truth is I didn’t know their names.
IT WAS A beautiful evening, beautiful: Calm, appropriately chill for early November, the sky above the hills steeping through the range of blues to black; I remember noticing how cold my fingers felt and thinking how good it was to work and that tonight, finally, we might get our frost. I could hear the cars down the hill, and then a while later the train. At some point the sirens started, then stopped, and I heard the bells from the church and then sirens again and when I looked up it was dark and I couldn’t tell the sky from the hill anymore.
The world doesn’t care for us—we pass through its rooms like ghosts. You can hear it, sometimes, laughing, celebrating, and when we take our leave it’s no more than the shift of air through an open door that someone forgot to close. And I ask you, what was the point—of the smell of basil, the pumpkins, the building up of love? Tell me. And where do we go? And how could it possibly be forever? And who could blame the person who, seeing how it is, simply refuses to play?
IT WAS JOHN, out on his recovery walk, who told me, though if I’d seen him first I suppose I might not have heard at all. I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding them, the baggy one with the huge earphones, the one who walks as if his body were borrowed, the one who always looks confused. They’re always walking—carefully, somehow, like snails testing the air for something familiar—away from whoever it is they were, I guess. Half-pardoned. I’ve learned to check before I leave the porch, pretend not to hear when they call my name. I’ve never been completely sure where they come from. If the same faces didn’t repeat you’d swear they’d filled the world by now, a river out of Brewster.
Everyone’s figured it out but John. Whenever John sees me he’ll call out in that over-hearty, “talking to people is part of your therapy” voice and just stand there until I can’t stand it and have to turn and be surprised to see him standing there and he’ll say, “How’s the garden coming sure looks good from here” or “How about that Obama, you think he can hold on?” and we’ll chat inanely about tomatoes or the venality of the Republican Party until I say, “Well, gotta get back . . .” and he’ll say, “Well, bye for now,” and then we do it again the next time.
This morning I looked but everything seemed fine. I didn’t see him until he was right there, damn near on top of me. I started to turn around, instinctively, and then, trying to cover up, called out, “Good morning, John, little chilly this morning, isn’t it?” and he said, “Sure is, but what’re you gonna do?” And then, “Terrible what happened last night, isn’t it?” about how some Mexican lady and her daughter had been killed by an illegal as they were coming out of the dance studio across from the bridge, the new place, did I know it? and I said yes, and he said well, right there.
“Real shame,” he said. “For a while they thought the mother might make it.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Couldn’t save her, I guess.”
“No, I mean . . .”
“Oh. Pretty much what you’d expect.” He made his hand into a wobbling jug and guzzled from the thumb, and at that moment—this is what a coward the mind is—I remember thinking that I’d seen people use the same gesture, without the wobbling, to describe talking on the phone, speaking into their pinkie, and thought, drinking—a kind of calling, I suppose, for some, and if the phone wobbled would it be a drunk making a call? . . . and only then returned to his voice saying, “Like he didn’t see the turn at all. Goin’ so fast he put half the car in the studio.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Pretty terrible, all right. I heard they lived just over here, on Nooner. Strange, right? You and I probably saw them a hundred times. Maybe a thousand times.”
“Yeah,” I said.
John looked at the browning vines of the morning glories wound into the fence. For a terrible moment I thought he was going to say something about the garden. “I heard he just sat there,” he said.
I looked at him.
“I mean when the cops got there,” he said. “The guy. Sirens everywhere, cops are yellin’ for him to get out of the car, and he just sits there, perfectly calm. Like he’s trying to remember something he had to do. When they opened the door he threw up.”
He shook his head, as if disagreeing with something. “Terrible thing, but what’re you gonna do, right?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Boy, you got that right.” And then: “Well, I guess I better be going.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He was halfway down the fence when he turned around. “Hey, maybe you can bring some of these flowers down there. I mean, you should see it down there. They got those, you know, what do you call ’em, those cement kind of things you see by the highway all set up.”
“Barricades.”
“Can’t even see ’em anymore, all the stuff people have brought.” He paused, then raised his hand like a Hollywood Indian, absurd to the last: “Well, bye for now.”
AND WHAT WOULD I do there, my recovering friend? Shake my head, offer my opinion? Shall I say a prayer over the shards? Lay my hand on the splintered studs? It’s all makeup, all of it. The child is dead, she doesn’t need my flowers, and God doesn’t deserve them.
It’s done. The cops have hosed off the pavement, pulled the pocketbook out of the weeds. There’s nothing to do. If there were any justice left it would shrivel and die at the injustice of it all and all you can think to do is go out and buy a drugstore dinosaur and stand around with that sad mime look on your face, that respectful museumgoer’s look on your face, listening to the guy from the Kiwanis Club and the three-hundred-pound checkout girl from the A&P go on about how just the other day, and if only they’d thought, and why them, of all people, all the time wondering if you’ve stayed long enough and whether it’s OK to check your phone.
I’ve seen it before: the low wave of bubblegum-colored trash, the semi-literate messages tacked to the plywood—“We Love You, Well Always Remmember You,” the mothers with their stick-on nails . . . and I don’t think I can stand it again, I want to take a shovel to your heads you liars, how soon you’ll forget her, how soon you always forget—a year from now you won’t remember her name. No, you want to bring something, bring something you’ll remember: Bring the unwashed hood and bolt it to the pavement; bring an arm and lay it down.
A LIGHT RAIN this morning. Now it’s still, gray, the season clamping tight. I couldn’t sleep last night, or read. . . . Sometime after three I walked out on the porch and the sky was still clear and I could see the dark bulk of the hill above the tracks and I just stood there in my shirt, letting myself be cold. As I turned to go back I noticed the pumpkins on the top step, but when I tried to pick one up my thumb punched right through the cold pulp to the space inside and I thought to myself, I have to take them out to the compost pile, I have to take them out with the ashes and the kitchen trash.
That numbness, that feeling of being outside the world—I hadn’t expected to know it again, to feel something slowly suffocating in your chest and yet to feel as if it’s not your chest at all. . . . To see your hands holding the paper, washing your bowl. I hadn’t planned on missing her again. My baby.
IT WAS LATE afternoon that I carried them out to the back. A cold day. I had to take them one at a time, holding them underneath where the meat still held and carry them around, the fangs gone soft, th
e cheeks purpled with rot, the eyes collapsed to slits. I placed the first one down by the heap, then went back for the second, trying not to look at it. When I set it down a soft black cloud of midges came from around the stem-top opening and I just swung the shovel and cleaved it in half, then again, and again, with the flat and then the blade, slicing eye from eye, crushing them back into pulp, into nothing, into nothing we could ever recognize or know, crying like a child now because yes, there are times when the world’s too much no matter how long you live.
And I dropped the shovel and picked up the fork and stabbed it into the waist-high hill to make a space and at that moment the hot heart of the pile breathed out into the cold—a sigh of dark loam and ashes and leaves and turning rot—unbidden, undeserved, like a last sob before sleep.
August
WHEN I THINK BACK ON OUR FIVE SEASONS AT THE LAKE, I see my father reading in the big wicker chair that usually stood in the corner under the lamp with the green shade but which he’d drag in front of the fire on chilly days. He was a great reader, my father: at ease, engaged, capable of sitting for three hours at a stretch without feeling the need to get up or move about, almost immobile except for now and again a small inward smile or a slight tilt of the head in anticipation of the page’s turning. Sometimes I’d see his arm swing like a crane to the little table at his side. He’d pick up the glass with three fingers, begin to bring it to his lips—all this without once looking up from the page—and stop. And the glass would just hang there, sometimes for a minute or more, and I’d make bets with myself on whether it would complete its journey by the time he got to the bottom of the page or be returned, untouched, to the table.
My mother read too, though differently. For days or weeks she would read nothing at all, or nothing but the newspaper, then suddenly take a book off the shelf, pull a chair next to my father’s, and disappear. She read with an all-absorbing intensity that I understood completely and yet still found slightly unnerving, her stockinged feet drawn up underneath her. Hunched over the book—which she’d hold tight to her stomach, forcing her to look straight down—she’d look like she was protecting the thing, or in pain. No smile, no cup of tea, no leg thrown easily over the other—this was less a dance than a battle of some kind, though what was being fought for, or by whom, I could hardly guess. Two days after it had begun—during which time my mother would often drag a chair out to the shore after breakfast, or retire to one of the hammocks my father had strung about the place, in which she would lie, straight-legged, smoking cigarettes, holding the book above her head—it would be over. I would find her lying in the hammock, staring up into the trees, the book tossed on the grass beside her.
It was in our second season on the lake that my father shot the dog with Mr. Colby’s gun and Mrs. Kessler fell in love with the man who lived in the cabin on the other side of the lake. He was much younger than she was, which was very important, and everyone talked about it those two weeks whenever they thought I couldn’t hear, changing the subject to food or asking me if I’d seen the heron by the dam as soon as I came closer. She’d made a spectacle of herself, which made me think of glasses even though I knew what it meant, and really it was a bit much, this carrying on in plain view. Everyone seemed angry about it, and though my parents and the Mostovskys and some of the others didn’t have much to say, I could always tell when people were talking about it by the way they would look slightly off to the side, shaking their heads, or the way they’d shrug their shoulders, like they didn’t care, or the way some would lean forward while others, giving their opinion, would lean back luxuriously in their Adirondack chairs.
I knew it was probably wrong and shameful for a married lady to fall in love with somebody, and particularly somebody younger, but the truth is that I liked Mrs. Kessler. She’d come across me once while I was working on one of my many forts in the woods and kept my secret, and sometimes when Harold Mostovsky and I spent the long, hot afternoons feeling around in the water with our toes, trying to walk the pasture walls that had disappeared when the lake was made, we would look up to see her sitting on the shore watching us, her arms around her legs, and when she saw we’d seen her, she’d give a hesitant little wave, raising her hand a bit, then a bit more, as though not sure how high she should bring it, and we’d go back to what we were doing. It never bothered us having her there, and then at some point we’d look up and she’d be gone.
Though I never saw it myself, I was told Mrs. Kessler lost her head so completely that at night she’d walk down to the lake just an hour or two after dusk and get into the rowboat and row across to the other man’s cabin while Mr. Kessler sat reading by the green lamp in their cabin. (I wonder what Kessler’s reading, I heard Mr. Černý say. Must be good.) That she’d sometimes stay for hours and hours, not caring what anybody thought, and that Mrs. Eugenia Bartlett had sworn she’d heard the creak of her oarlocks as she rowed back through the mist early one morning just before dawn.
My mother, I remember, seemed almost lighthearted that second week in June, waking early, surprising me with special meals like apricot dumplings and kašička with drops of jam, asking my father about things in the newspaper. She threw out the stacks of magazines and junk that had collected under the sink and swept out the cobwebs and the bottle caps and the mouse droppings that looked like fat caraway seeds and the bits of mattress stuffing and lint from last winter’s nests. One fresh morning after a night of rain she came home with the trunk of the DeSoto crammed with planting trays and seeds and bags of soil and fertilizer and sixteen hanging flowerpots and a paper bag with sixteen hooks to hang them on. In the backseat of the car were four carton bottoms filled with flowers. Except for the marigolds, I didn’t know their names. Some were purple and white, like pinwheels, others a dark velvety red, still others the color of the sky just before it gets dark. They seemed to soak in the spotted light that came through the windows, trembling with life. She was going to garden, my mother said.
I saw my father looking at my mother as she pointed out to us all the things she’d bought, then started to drag one of the cartons out of the car. Here, let me get that, he said.
We carried the cartons down to the shady, tangled grass by the water, placing them side by side so they made a long, lovely rectangle, then returned for the bags of soil and the tools. It was midmorning. The air was warming quickly. A few people had gathered out on the float in the middle of the lake, and we could hear them laughing. My father carried out the card table my mother said she wanted to work on, and for the next few hours, while my father drilled holes into the south wall of the cabin and screwed the hooks into them, my mother and I transplanted the flowers into the hanging pots, filled the seed flats with soil, and sprinkled the tiny seeds from the packets into furrows we made in the dirt with the eraser end of a pencil. When my father was finished he asked if there was anything else my mother wanted him to do, but she said no, that he’d done a wonderful job with the hooks and that we could do the rest on our own, couldn’t we, and I agreed.
My mother talked more that morning than I could remember her talking in a long time. She asked me about school and said how happy she was we had a cabin on a lake and how she hadn’t liked it at first because it reminded her too much of home but that she saw things differently now and loved it as much, no, in some ways even more than the countryside she had known as a little girl. And she told me a little bit about the war and what that had been like, and about a certain square in Prague with benches and flower beds and giant twisted oaks, and how she still remembered that square as well as a certain churchyard a few minutes away, and when a particular burst of laughter carried over the water she looked at me and said, “People can be silly, can’t they, complicating their lives for no reason, don’t ever complicate your life, promise me that,” and though I didn’t know what she meant, I said I wouldn’t. Later, as we were planting the pinwheel flowers in the new pots, pressing down the soil with our fingers so the roots would take, she told me she’d made som
e mistakes in her life but that it was never too late to understand things and that she understood things now and that she had never been happier than she was at that moment. She suggested we take a break for lunch, but later, when I found her in the hammock, smoking, she said she was a little tired, and it wasn’t until the next day that we finished and by that time some of the flowers in the cartons, which we’d forgotten to water, had wilted badly.
I was reading in my room that evening after dinner when I heard my mother get up from the wicker chair and go into the kitchen. I heard the refrigerator door open and close, then the quick clink of glass against glass. I heard the water in the sink, then the creak of the wicker again. “What time is it?” she asked my father.
It took a second for my father to move his book to his left hand and, holding his place with his finger, push up the sleeve of his sweater. “Half past nine,” he said.
“Almost time for him to go to bed,” my mother said. There was no answer. A few minutes later she was up once more.
“You think she’ll do it again?” she said from somewhere by the window.
“I think she might,” my father said in his I’m-reading voice.
“What could she be thinking?” said my mother.
“Pretty much what you’d expect, I imagine.”
“I don’t think it’s just that.”
“I never said it was.”
“Time for bed,” my mother called. I pretended I couldn’t hear. “What’s he doing in there?” said my mother, and walking over, she knocked on the wood plank door to my room. “Bedtime,” she said. They were quiet for a few moments.
“She’s a fool,” said my mother. “I thought she had more sense, throwing everything away like this.”
They were quiet for a long time.
“I don’t know that you want to stand by the window like that,” my father said.