“Acapulco?” she says. “Brazil?”
Francis laughs. “I’m at a place called Mighty Mike’s Mobil Station and Auto Parts.” Francis loves all gas stations and all auto parts. His voice sounds lush and green even though he is about to describe a car breakdown. He was driving one of the men home from work when the car died at an intersection. They had to push it two blocks to get to Mighty Mike’s, but when they got there, the two mechanics were out on calls, so he and the man, Dean Brown, are going to see whether they can fix the car themselves out in the parking lot.
“I’ll hold dinner,” she says.
“That’s okay. We can eat out of the machines here.”
“It’s lasagna,” she says. “It’ll still be fine when you get here.”
“No, really,” he says. “I’ll be fine here.”
After they hang up, she says to herself, “And how was your day, Marguerite?” “Well,” she says to the window. “The cat climbed up the draperies and left a trail of loopy threads all the way to the top. That made my heart beat. The handle fell off the snow shovel that I had purchased at great savings from K-Mart during the Blue Light Special. There was the Kalculating Kat problem, the floor fiasco, and the imaginary missing bloody toe. If I had somebody to tell these things to, I think I could make them into good stories.”
Here is the cheerful almost-family scene. John, Barbie, and Marguerite are playing Parcheesi at the kitchen table. Everyone had two helpings of lasagna and no one has a cold. The cat is in the fourth chair, fat and sleepy, seventeen pounds of Kitty Meat Bites. Outside it is dark and the wind skims down the hill and throws puffs of grainy snow at the windows, but here a warm light glows near the yellow walls and begonias bloom red on the windowsill as two children in homemade robes grow sleepy over a Parcheesi board.
“You cheated,” John says to Marguerite. “You moved your man eleven spaces and you only rolled a ten.”
“Cheater,” says Barbie, rocking from side to side in her chair.
“Well, I’ll just have to move it back a space,” Marguerite says.
“Cheater, meater, feeter,” Barbie says.
“No, you lose your turn.”
“No, I don’t,” Marguerite says. “And you know why, sweetie? Because I’m the mother. I made a mistake, I miscounted, and now because I am the mother, I am moving back eleven spaces, although in a fair and friendly game, I would have to move back only one space.” Now the phone is ringing. “All right, I lose a turn.”
Francis tells her that Dean Brown’s wife has picked them up at the gas station and taken them both to the Browns’ house. The Browns have fed him a delicious pot roast (he says this loudly so that the Browns will hear his appreciation) and now they have offered him the sofa for the night, but of course they will drive him home if he really wants them to, but then how would he get to the garage in the morning.
“Weet, beet, keet,” Barbie is saying.
Pauline Brown takes the phone and says, “He won’t be any trouble, Marguerite.” The Browns do not have any children. Marguerite has a momentary vision of their childless house—the high-tech gadgets, the expensive furniture, no dust.
“Teat, eat, sheet.”
“Barbie, stop that rocking!” she calls. Too late. The chair slips sideways as Marguerite lunges after it, but Barbie is already on the floor and taking the huge breath that precedes a scream.
“Marguerite?” says Francis from the dangling receiver.
Marguerite scoops Barbie up with one arm and picks up the phone with the other. “Listen, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Barbie screams. “I don’t think any of you should drive on a night like this.”
“Everything all right there?”
“Everything is all right. Just a little fall.”
Marguerite hangs up and sits on the chair, stroking Barbie’s elbow until she stops crying. John says, “You can move eleven spaces if you want to, Mom.”
The closet is deep and dark. Behind the clothes, under the shelves that hold shoes and stored linen, there is a niche just large enough for Marguerite and the feather tick. As she follows Barbie upstairs, past the bedroom where the closet is, she thinks of how pleasing it will be to take the satiny comforter from the foot of the double bed and curl up in the niche. The closet smells good. All the closets in the house smell of clove-stuck oranges, the fragrance of her childhood—pomanders made the way her mother used to make them. Floating on the feather tick, she can evoke images of what it was like to be seven, in summer, and reading a book. Or she can be a single woman, in Tahiti, lying in the shade of a coconut palm, the sea breeze lifting the hem of her white dress like butterfly wings.
“No, no,” Barbie says. “I. Think. I. Can. Like that.” They are lying on Barbie’s bed again, against the pillows, while Marguerite reads The Little Engine That Could.
“I. Think. I. Can. I. Know. I. Can.” Marguerite makes her voice grind out the words slowly as she imitates the sound of a locomotive struggling uphill. Now that she has the rhythms right, she feels Barbie settle into the crook of her arm. “Ithink. Ican. Iknow. Ican.” The little engine gathers speed. It goes faster, and faster, and faster, uphill past childhood, youth, middle age, past alcoholism, divorce, the drug addictions of her children, old age on a fixed income, rising prices, drought, floods, blizzards, the cold wind that blows everything away.
“That’s enough for tonight,” she tells Barbie.
“You put a worm once in Daddy’s spaghetti,” John says. She has come down to watch the last ten minutes of a program with him. Now during the commercial break, while two hysterical housewives run headlong across a kitchen floor, pushing mops soaked in competing cleansers, John is suggesting that she has no sense of humor. “Daddy thought it was funny,” he says. “He didn’t scream at you.”
“I wasn’t mad because you played a joke. I was mad because I thought Barbie was hurt.” Besides, there was paint on the carpet, there was paint on the wall. She thinks of Francis sitting down to a hand of hearts and a scotch on the rocks with the Browns. Dear Francis, since you are very far away, I will write you a letter. What I did today: I made pomanders for the closets. Also I went to the big closet twice and just sat there, hunched up, rubbing my shin bones. I hid from my own kids. Some mother, huh? “It was a pretty funny joke, John.” But John has already turned back to the TV and is laughing at a woman who has just dropped her evening bag into a soup tureen.
“This is not a bad life,” she continues. “We have a nice little house, and plenty to eat, and only as many debts as we think we are going to be able to pay. We are doing much better than most people living in the last quarter of the twentieth century.”
A deep and unusual silence has slipped into the house. She notices it the moment she flicks the kitchen light and stands near the darkness of the doorway. It is not just the stillness of sleeping children but a special quiet that she realizes has been there for some time, underneath her footsteps as she moved about the house, stacking books and magazines, plumping up pillows. She goes to the back door and looks out. What she has been hearing for three days, without really hearing it, is the wind. The wind blowing swirls of snow down the slope of the back hill, throwing drifts across the driveway, making ridges of ice in the street, where the salted snow melted and refroze. The sound is gone now and there is only the deep silence of snow and of a small full moon high above the stand of trees at the top of the hill. She takes her coat, hat, and muffler from the hook by the door. Except to shovel the walk, she has not been outside for three days.
The snow has frozen over and her feet make soft noises as they break through the thin crust. She walks uphill toward what will be the backyards of four new houses. In the lives of her children the construction of these houses will mark time and change. Her breath rises in frosty puffs, like signals, as she turns to look downhill. There is something serene about the geometry of her neighborhood—the dark rectangle of houses, the snow-glazed roofs. There is no one to see her, although for a moment she imagines that
she has been spotted from one of the darkened windows and that a stranger is preparing to send her coded messages, using the flash of a mirror in the moonlight. “Who’s there?” she cries in the theatrical voice she used to read Barbie “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” but the words slide away into the deepness of the snow and she is not certain that she has spoken.
She walks along the crest of the hill and stops. Behind her there is a curve of footsteps arching along the hill and back down to the house. In front of her there is a large stretch of virgin snow. She takes a leaping giant step forward and then sits down and leans back carefully into the snow, keeping her feet together and her arms by her sides, so that she is lying quite straight and looking up at the soft shadow that curls along the face of the full moon. She begins to move, pushing her arms out across the snow and bringing them up toward her head, then down to her sides. She moves her legs across the snow in a scissors motion—out, then back.
Marguerite, aged twenty-nine, mother of two, is making a snow angel.
In a moment she will be so cold that she will have to stand up and go home. She will have to scuffle around on top of the angel to obliterate the evidence of this whimsy. But now she lies deep in the snow and moves her arms and legs very slowly. She moves with the slow rhythm of the moon moving across the sky. She moves with the slow beat of the stars pulsating their light to stars in other galaxies. She has a pair of white wings and a white skirt. She has white moonlight and the clean white frost of her own breath, and now, alone on the hillside in the white universe, with the shadow of her own footsteps reaching back to the house like a lifeline, Marguerite feels the calm of a great and voluptuous sigh.
Dog Heaven
Every so often that dead dog dreams me up again.
It’s twenty-five years later. I’m walking along 42nd Street in Manhattan, the sounds of the city crashing beside me—horns, gearshifts, insults—somebody’s chewing gum holding my foot to the pavement, when that dog wakes from his long sleep and imagines me.
I’m sweet again. I’m sweet-breathed and flat-limbed. Our family is stationed at Fort Niagara, and the dog swims his red heavy fur into the black Niagara River. Across the street from the officers’ quarters, down the steep shady bank, the river, even this far downstream, has been clocked at nine miles per hour. The dog swims after the stick I have thrown.
“Are you crazy?” my grandmother says, even though she is not fond of dog hair in the house, the way it sneaks into the refrigerator every time you open the door. “There’s a current out there! It’ll take that dog all the way to Toronto!”
“The dog knows where the backwater ends and the current begins,” I say, because it is true. He comes down to the river all the time with my father, my brother MacArthur, or me. You never have to yell the dog away from the place where the river water moves like a whip.
Sparky Smith and I had a game we played called knockout. It involved a certain way of breathing and standing up fast that caused the blood to leave the brain as if a plug had been jerked from the skull. You came to again just as soon as you were on the ground, the blood sloshing back, but it always seemed as if you had left the planet, had a vacation on Mars, and maybe stopped back at Fort Niagara half a lifetime later.
There weren’t many kids my age on the post, because it was a small command. Most of its real work went on at the missile batteries flung like shale along the American-Canadian border. Sparky Smith and I hadn’t been at Lewiston-Porter Central School long enough to get to know many people, so we entertained ourselves by meeting in a hollow of trees and shrubs at the far edge of the parade ground and telling each other seventh-grade sex jokes that usually had to do with keyholes and doorknobs, hot dogs and hot-dog buns, nuns, priests, preachers, schoolteachers, and people in blindfolds.
When we ran out of sex jokes, we went to knockout and took turns catching each other as we fell like a cut tree toward the ground. Whenever I knocked out, I came to on the grass with the dog barking, yelping, crouching, crying for help. “Wake up! Wake up!” he seemed to say. “Do you know your name? Do you know your name? My name is Duke! My name is Duke!” I’d wake to the sky with the urgent call of the dog in the air, and I’d think, Well, here I am, back in my life again.
Sparky Smith and I spent our school time smiling too much and running for office. We wore mittens instead of gloves, because everyone else did. We made our mothers buy us ugly knit caps with balls on top—caps that in our previous schools would have identified us as weird but were part of the winter uniform in upstate New York. We wobbled onto the ice of the post rink, practicing in secret, banged our knees, scraped the palms of our hands, so that we would be invited to skating parties by civilian children.
“You skate?” With each other we practiced the cool look.
“Oh, yeah. I mean, like, I do it some—I’m not a racer or anything.”
Every morning we boarded the Army-green bus—the slime-green, dead-swamp-algae-green bus—and rode it to the post gate, past the concrete island where the MPs stood in their bulletproof booth. Across from the gate, we got off at a street corner and waited with the other Army kids, the junior-high and high-school kids, for the real bus, the yellow one with the civilian kids on it. Just as we began to board, the civilian kids—there were only six of them but eighteen of us—would begin to sing the Artillery song with obscene variations one of them had invented. Instead of “Over hill, over dale,” they sang things like “Over boob, over tit.” For a few weeks, we sat in silence watching the heavy oak trees of the town give way to apple orchards and potato farms, and we pretended not to hear. Then one day Sparky Smith began to sing the real Artillery song, the booming song with caissons rolling along in it, and we all joined in and took over the bus with our voices.
When we ran out of verses, one of the civilian kids, a football player in high school, yelled, “Sparky is a dog’s name. Here Sparky, Sparky, Sparky.” Sparky rose from his seat with a wounded look, then dropped to the aisle on his hands and knees and bit the football player in the calf. We all laughed, even the football player, and Sparky returned to his seat.
“That guy’s just lucky I didn’t pee on his leg,” Sparky said.
Somehow Sparky got himself elected homeroom president and me homeroom vice president in January. He liked to say, “In actual percentages—I mean in actual per capita terms—we are doing much better than the civilian kids.” He kept track of how many athletes we had, how many band members, who among the older girls might become a cheerleader. Listening to him even then, I couldn’t figure out how he got anyone to vote for us. When he was campaigning, he sounded dull and serious, and anyway he had a large head and looked funny in a knit cap. He put up a homemade sign in the lunchroom, went from table to table to find students from 7-B to shake hands with, and said to me repeatedly, as I walked along a step behind and nodded, “Just don’t tell them that you’re leaving in March. Under no circumstances let them know that you will not be able to finish out your term.”
In January, therefore, I was elected homeroom vice president by people I still didn’t know (nobody in 7-B rode our bus—that gave us an edge), and in March my family moved to Fort Sill, in Oklahoma. I surrendered my vice presidency to a civilian girl, and that was the end for all time of my career in public office.
Two days before we left Fort Niagara, we took the dog, Duke, to Charlie Battery, fourteen miles from the post, and left him with the mess sergeant. We were leaving him for only six weeks, until we could settle in Oklahoma and send for him. He had stayed at Charlie Battery before, when we visited our relatives in Ohio at Christmastime. He knew there were big meaty bones at Charlie Battery, and scraps of chicken, steak, turkey, slices of cheese, special big-dog bowls of ice cream. The mess at Charlie Battery was Dog Heaven, so he gave us a soft, forgiving look as we walked with him from the car to the back of the mess hall.
My mother said, as she always did at times like that, “I wish he knew more English.” My father gave him a fierce manly scratch behind th
e ear. My brother and I scraped along behind with our pinched faces.
“Don’t you worry,” the sergeant said. “He’ll be fine here. We like this dog, and he likes us. He’ll run that fence perimeter all day long. He’ll be his own early-warning defense system. Then we’ll give this dog everything he ever dreamed of eating.” The sergeant looked quickly at my father to see if the lighthearted reference to the defense system had been all right. My father was in command of the missile batteries. In my father’s presence, no one spoke lightly of the defense of the United States of America—of the missiles that would rise from the earth like a wind and knock out (knock out!) the Soviet planes flying over the North Pole with their nuclear bombs. But Duke was my father’s dog, too, and I think that my father had the same wish we all had—to tell him that we were going to send for him, this was just going to be a wonderful dog vacation.
“Sergeant Mozley has the best mess within five hundred miles,” my father said to me and MacArthur.
We looked around. We had been there for Thanksgiving dinner when the grass was still green. Now, in late winter, it was a dreary place, a collection of rain-streaked metal buildings standing near huge dark mounds of earth. In summer, the mounds looked something like the large grassy mounds in southern Ohio, the famous Indian mounds, softly rounded and benignly mysterious. In March, they were black with old snow. Inside the mounds were the Nike missiles, I supposed, although I didn’t know for sure where the missiles were. Perhaps they were hidden in the depressions behind the mounds.
Once during “Fact Monday” in Homeroom 7-B, our teacher, Miss Bintz, had given a lecture on nuclear weapons. First she put a slide on the wall depicting an atom and its spinning electrons.
“Do you know what this is?” she said, and everyone in the room said, “An atom,” in one voice, as if we were reciting a poem. We liked “Fact Monday” sessions because we didn’t have to do any work for them. We sat happily in the dim light of her slides through lectures called “Nine Chapters in the Life of a Cheese” (“First the milk is warmed, then it is soured with rennet”), “The Morning Star of English Poetry” (“As springtime suggests the beginning of new life, so Chaucer stands at the beginning of English poetry”), and “Who’s Who Among the Butterflies” (“The monarch—Danaus plexippus—is king”). Sparky liked to say that Miss Bintz was trying to make us into third-graders again, but I liked Miss Bintz. She had high cheekbones and a passionate voice. She believed, like the adults in my family, that a fact was something solid and useful, like a penknife you could put in your pocket in case of emergency.
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