Sometimes to keep herself awake she allows the sentences to follow a story line on her legal tablet, but for two days the stories have been going out of control.
Karen had found a dead cat in the street.
A strange man had followed Karen home.
Karen had called the police.
The police had not come.
Karen’s hair had touched the foot of the dead cat.
Karen had worn a blue dress.
The dress had belonged to her sister.
The sister had died in an airplane crash.
Megan has just crumpled up three sheets of sentences and is now writing a letter to the owner of Le Max: Dear Unhappy Lost-Cat Owner, I regret to inform you that I have reason to believe that your valuable and beloved pet has been squashed by a passing car in front of the Vista View apartment complex. If you are the sort of person who always likes to know what’s what, I imagine you will be grateful for this letter. If you are the sort of person who likes to be in doubt, I am sorry. Yours sincerely, A Resident.
Each of them knows Vera is pregnant, but no one mentions it. Vera and George drink Perrier water and Megan drinks wine, as the sauce simmers on the stove. They talk about Vera’s apartment building, George’s traffic system, and Megan’s language arts project. Everyone agrees that everyone else is working hard. Megan and Vera return to the kitchen to wash the lettuce, and George watches the news. Megan starts on the salad dressing, and Vera goes back to the living room. She and George stand at the window and discuss the prospects for an earthquake. They sound as if they are discussing the stock market.
“The San Andreas fault looks bad. The Calaveras looks bad, too.”
Megan steps out of the kitchen for a moment and observes the way they are standing, George’s elbow just brushing Vera’s blouse, their hair holding the red light of the sun. Vera calculates the projected angle of the telephone pole’s fall. “Look at those guy wires,” she says. “They’re already pulling it toward the living room.”
Megan steps back into the kitchen. George says, “If we’re in the living room when it comes, we’ll stand under that door frame.”
Megan sighs into the steam of vegetarian tomato sauce and takes shelter under a door frame in her head. George and Vera: for them life is full of definable problems with definable solutions. Don’t eat candy, don’t smoke cigarettes, don’t stand near the window when the earth is quaking.
Vera returns to the kitchen and asks Megan for flour to make the pasta. Vera is not making lasagna, which anybody can make. She is making manicotti stuffed with spinach and cheese, and she is doing it from scratch. George stays in the living room while Megan sits at the kitchen table and watches Vera rub eggs into the flour and roll the dough on the counter into paper-thin sheets. She works vigorously without getting flour on her blue silk blouse. Then she beats four eggs into a bowl of fresh ricotta cheese.
Megan begins to swing her leg and tap her foot. Megan is nervous and Vera is not, but then Vera is on Valium.
George comes into the kitchen, and Vera begins to drop the delicate sheets of pasta into boiling water.
George says, “It sure smells good,” and Megan says, “Vera wants to give us the kid, which I think is a crummy idea, what do you think?”
No one says anything.
George moves across the kitchen and leans against the counter and says, finally, “Well, I didn’t think we were going to be testy about this whole thing.”
Vera says, “We don’t have to talk. I thought we’d just eat, and after supper we can talk or not talk.”
Megan says, “George, why didn’t you think we’d get testy?”
George shakes his head and looks at the linoleum, as if everything is going over his head. Vera looks into the bubbling pot and begins to cry. She dips a slotted spoon into the pot and withdraws a piece of pasta. “Look at it,” she says. “It’s ruined.” The noodle slithers off the spoon and falls to the floor. In the water it has developed large fissures and bursting bubbles. “You gave me self-rising flour, you didn’t give me regular,” she says. She withdraws another puffed and exploded noodle, which also falls to the floor.
“Think of it as an accident,” Megan says. “I couldn’t help myself.”
Vera continues to cry and spoon noodles out of the pot until the floor looks as though it is piled with glistening rags. Megan watches George and George watches the noodles. Then he kneels and tries to scoop them up and put them back in the pot. “Don’t cry,” he says. He touches Vera’s beautiful blouse with a wet hand. “Don’t cry.”
Megan stands up, feeling a deep rage in her bones, as if her bones might hurl themselves across the kitchen and fall upon the two of them like clubs. “What about me?” she says. She waits for the rage to pass, and when it doesn’t, she sees that handfuls of ricotta cheese are flying across the kitchen. When she sits back down at the table, she says, “All I wanted was not to know.”
George has gone to Los Angeles again and Vera is no longer pregnant. Megan drove her to the clinic, waited in the waiting room, smoked cigarettes, sucked lemon drops, bought a ham (nitrite) sandwich from the machine, ate half, threw it away, thought about the transparent tube, the contents dropping into the basin, the basin emptied into the hospital garbage disposal, the copper pipes whooshing it toward the sea. Megan knows where those things go, because she asked about them after her fallopian tube was removed. Aborted fetuses, amputated limbs, benign tumors, everything goes back to the sea, rises into the air again as rain, and falls back to the earth. Not a bad ending if you can think of it that way.
Now as she lies in bed with a book in her lap, the springs begin to jiggle, the pictures on the wall move against their nails. The apartment groans like a sailing ship. This must be it: the big one. She leaps from the bed and considers the closet, the kitchen table, the door frame near the stairwell. She moves in a circle. She thinks of the gas main. She goes into the living room, and it is over.
Midnight and the local news has covered the quake, a minor tremor, only 5.0 on the scale, worse in high buildings than in low ones, but of no danger to human life. She lies in bed in the dark, feeling safe, feeling giddy, and thinks about the old woman who lives apart from her son on the twelfth floor of the Sunset Tower Senior Home, how she must have stiffened in her bed as the water glasses trembled on the tables, how she must have called out to her roommate, the thief, as the bed moved on its metal wheels, one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. Then Megan slides into sleep, where she may say something strange or terrible, which no one will hear, a message spoken to herself but kept forever secret.
The Battle of Fallen Timbers
Uncle Roofer was a big, friendly, gap-toothed man, a little heavy in the handshake, hot-tempered and smiling all at once. He owned a car dealership, a filling station, and a used-car lot. He had once played football for Paul Brown. When they talked about Uncle Roofer’s drinking problem, the members of my family always said that Roofer had never got past football. “Once you’ve played football for Paul Brown, you can’t go back to northern Ohio and sell family cars,” they said.
Uncle Roofer was a diabetic who drank bourbon.
Uncle Roofer was an alcoholic who ate lithium for lunch.
One day Uncle Roofer and the bourbon and lithium got into the same car and drove to a Browns game in Cleveland. On the way back, they met a concrete retaining wall.
We were living in Oklahoma then and had to fly back to Ohio for the funeral. My grandmother was living alone in Killbuck, Ohio, at number 7 South Mad Anthony Street. The street was named for General Mad Anthony Wayne, who had won the Battle of Fallen Timbers and secured the Northwest Territory against the Indians so that white settlers could take the land. When the origin of the street name was explained to me as a child, I had always got the impression that Mad Anthony Wayne had fought that battle on behalf of our family as if the white frame house on South Mad Anthony were already standing above the brick street and awaiting the arrival of our people from the
East.
The year that Uncle Roofer died my grandmother still had twenty years left of her life and was trying to figure out whether she could live alone with a bad hip, held together with steel pins, one leg now three inches shorter than the other and projecting slightly from her body at a strange angle. She had to take a bus to get to the town where my uncle had lived. When I think of her making that long rocking trip in autumn, over the hills that held the Killbuck Valley, into the fertile lake plain up north, when I think of her traveling by bus to the funeral of her only son, I think of how her leg must have stuck out into the aisle, of how she must have tried to pull it close to the seat whenever someone brushed by on the way to the bathroom. I think of how in her lap was a large black purse, hugged to her body against the sway and saw of the bus. It was late October, and she had brought sugared marshmallow Halloween candy for the grandchildren she would see at the funeral. From time to time, she touched the big purse in her lap and opened it to see if the marshmallow had been squashed during the trip. When we met her at the bus station, she smiled with joy at seeing the living.
“Look here,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of you.” She smoothed the cellophane lids of the boxes and handed them to me and my brother, each box containing twelve orange-and-black marshmallow cats. In our hands, we could feel the heat of her body on those boxes. By then my brother and I no longer ate marshmallow cats. We looked at each other with a secret gaze that said we would just have to pretend that we were still young enough to love that sweet-sweet candy, brought so far and with such care, by our grandmother on the day she had come to bury her only son.
After the funeral, we drove my grandmother back to the Killbuck Valley in a Lincoln Continental we borrowed from Roofer’s bankrupt dealership. The car had push-button windows and leather seats, which made us feel prosperous. No one mentioned Roofer, his good looks and his promise, his rise and decline, the possibility that his death was a suicide, a form of giving up. Instead, we listened to my father explain the Wisconsin glaciation, how it scoured the topsoil from Canada, gouged out the Great Lakes, and dropped all the good soil exactly where both sides of our family someday were going to live. Everyone nodded and listened and looked appreciatively out the windows, even my grandmother, who still was using two hands to hold the big black purse on her lap. Then my father got to the Ordinance of 1787, which drew straight lines where the roads would be, put a grid across swamps, sliced through hills, walked on water.
“Look at this roadcut,” my father said. “Only a man sitting in Washington would draw a road through here.”
He was detouring through the valley, taking the long way home, leaving the state road for a county road and a county road for a narrow curving road that followed a creek bed. “Now this road is a different story,” my father said. “This road follows an old Indian trail. This road was built by pioneers who had the good sense to read the land.”
“I guess you know we’re part Indian,” my grandmother said.
“No,” my mother said. “What part is that?”
“We’re part Wyandot,” my grandmother said.
“You never told me,” my mother said. “Who was Indian?”
“I’m full of surprises,” my grandmother said.
“Was this one of the Indians Mad Anthony Wayne ran out of Ohio?” my brother said.
“It was my great-great grandmother,” my grandmother said.
“I guess she wasn’t at the Battle of Fallen Timbers,” my brother said.
“I don’t know much about her,” my grandmother said. “She’s dead.”
“The Wyandots knew how to plan a good road,” my father said.
“Nobody ever tells me anything about my own family,” my mother said.
“I guess the Battle of Fallen Timbers was sort of like the Civil War,” my brother said. “Our own people took the land away from some of our other own people.”
“I always thought that it was Roofer who got the Indian blood,” my grandmother said.
“The Battle of Fallen Timbers was nothing at all like the Civil War,” my father said. “It was a skirmish on the frontier.”
“You could see it in his face,” my grandmother said. “He had high cheekbones. You could see it in his eyes sometimes.”
“He did have high cheekbones,” my mother said. “That’s what made him so handsome.”
Actually, Roofer had had chestnut-red hair and pink skin, an Irish look, but thinking of him as we swung across the valley and saw the tower of the courthouse appear through the trees, I began to think of Roofer as a Wyandot hunting bear and marking trails. There seemed to be agreement all through the car that Roofer had had high cheekbones and might have got the Indian gene my grandmother carried. We were all nodding thoughtfully as we pulled up before number 7 South Mad Anthony and noticed the chipping and alligatored paint on the old house. I knew that my brother and I were going to hurry upstairs to look in the vanity mirror and try to discover whether we looked like Wyandots. We got out of the car in silence and in that moment we concluded forever our family discussion of who Roofer had once been. We consigned him to history, as remote and faint as an old Wyandot trail. In the future, whenever we invoked his name, it would be in a kind of terse code: “Oh, that’s the kind of car Roofer used to sell.” “That’s the kind of play Roofer used to run.” These sentences always implied a larger story, but for us, when we were in the company of family, Roofer’s story had become untellable.
Snow Angel
Sometimes Marguerite likes to sit in the closet. It’s late afternoon and Francis isn’t home yet. John and Barbie are on their elbows in front of the TV screen, the casserole’s in the oven, the walk’s shoveled, there’s salt on the driveway, and Marguerite is sitting in the back of the closet on an old feather tick and enjoying the smell of oranges stuck with cloves. This morning there was a blizzard, which kept the children home from school, and when it stopped snowing it was still too cold to let them go out to play.
“Why can’t we?”
“You want your feet to turn to ice?” Marguerite said. “You want your nose to fall off?”
First they argued about slap jack, and Barbie screamed because John hit her hand every time she reached for the stack of cards. Then they fought over the talking Kalculating Kat, and John screamed because Barbie lifted the register grille and dropped the Kalculating Kat into the aluminum furnace duct. Barbie had to go to her room for an hour, and John spilled a five-pound sack of flour on the kitchen floor when he tried to make chocolate-butterscotch-raspberry-mint pancakes. Marguerite at the time was in the basement taking apart the aluminum duct. So it went. But now John and Barbie are laughing in front of the TV as cartoon birds are flattened by falling safes and cartoon dogs are blown apart by bombs that look like bowling balls. Marguerite can hear the sounds of wonderful catastrophe coming from the living room. It is good to be upstairs, sitting in the tropical darkness of the closet.
“Hey, Mom!”
What she wanted was a ten-minute snooze of an interlude. Instead she scuffles along under the palmy fringe of hanging pants and the door opens before she can stand up.
“Hi, sweetie,” she says to John. “What do you want?”
“What are you doing in the closet?”
“Just looking for an old pair of boots.”
“No, you’re not.” John opens his eyes wide like a storybook wolf. “You’re hiding.”
“What do you want, honey?”
“I caught you. You were hiding and I caught you.”
“Did you want anything in particular, sweetheart?” Marguerite is still on her hands and knees, looking up like a dog at her seven-year-old son.
John frowns with unusual seriousness and says, “You better come quick. Barbie cut off her toe.”
“How could you? How could you do this to your own mother?”
The blood is red poster paint, and the amputated toe is a piece of cat dung they pulled out of the litter box. There is a wail in Marguerite’s voice, so
mething fierce and primeval. Barbie begins to cry. She rubs paint into her eyes and cries harder.
“I’ll get the sponge,” says John, already on his way to the kitchen.
“You certainly will.”
She takes Barbie up the stairs to the bathroom. Barbie is four years old, not easy to carry anymore. When they get to the landing, Barbie stops crying and says, “Mommy, look what you did.”
Marguerite turns around. There is a wiggly red streak, from the bottom of the steps to the landing, where Barbie’s painted foot has brushed against the wall. “Fine. Now we’ve got painted wallpaper to go with our painted carpet.”
Marguerite is twenty-nine years old. She is not quite tall, not quite thin, and not quite blond. In high school she played second clarinet in the concert band. In college, she was treasurer of the Environmental Action Society. When she tries to think of the achievements in her life, she can think of nothing to boast about, not even some little thing that it would be pleasing to have slip out at a party. (“I didn’t know that Marguerite was a skydiver!”)
“The phone,” says John. “Daddy.”
“Will you go in there with Barbie and see if she can keep her head above water for two minutes?”
Standing by the wall phone in the kitchen, Marguerite looks through the window and watches the wind shake the stiff branches of an oak tree. The snow is gray, the sky is gray, and on the low gray hill that used to be part of a pasture, she can see the skeletal frames of four new houses. When she was a child, her parents’ backyard adjoined a small woods where she used to play. The woods is now a shopping mall. The parking lot of the shopping mall is famous for its drug deals.
“Generally a lousy day,” Francis is saying, but there are no broken nerve ends in his voice, no frayed tendons. “I’m calling to tell you where I am.”
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