“I haven’t heard you say anything laughable yet. I didn’t really expect you to change the world, Carl.”
“No?”
“I mean, I believed you meant it, and I believed in you, but that’s not why I married you.” Lord no. I married him for his touch, it struck me, and the sound of his voice, and a thousand other of those things I thought I couldn’t exist without. It also struck me that I had never truly expected to change the power structure but that I had liked hanging out with people who thought they could. It was, I would have to say, inspiring.
“Do you think I’m having a mid-life crisis?”
“No. You’re only thirty-three. I think you want to change jobs.”
So we decided he should try it. He could start by getting a job in a plant store to learn about it, and drive the cab at night. That way we could save some money for a small store to begin with. He would have less time with me and Martine, but it would be worth it in the long run. Except he didn’t do it right away. He liked to sit on things for a while, like a hen.
That summer we scraped together the money to send Martine to a camp run by some people we used to hang out with in the old days, and since it was a camp with animals, sort of a farm camp, she took Mooney along. Her third night away she called collect from Vermont and said she had something very sad to tell us. From her tragic voice, for an instant I thought they might have discovered she had a terminal disease like leukemia, and how could they be so stupid as to tell her—they were progressive types, maybe they thought it was therapeutic to confront your own mortality—but the news was that Mooney was dead. Someone had left the door of the guinea pigs’ cage open the night before and he got out and was discovered in the morning in a nearby field, most likely mauled by a larger animal. I sounded relieved and not tragic enough, but fortunately Carl had the right tone throughout. At the age of eleven she understood a little about the brutalities of nature and the survival of the fittest and so on, but it was still hard for her to accept.
Martine is a peacefully inclined, intuitive type. She would have felt at home in our day, when peace and love were respectable attitudes. We named her after Martin Luther King, which nowadays seems a far-out thing to have done. Not that my estimation of him has changed or that I don’t like the name, only it isn’t the sort of thing people do anymore. Just as, once we stayed up nights thinking of how to transform the world and now I’m glad I have a job, no matter how boring, and can send her to camp for a few weeks.
Anyway, the people running the camp being the way they were, they immediately bought her a new guinea pig. Aside from her tragedy she had a terrific time, and she came home with a female pig named Elf, who strangely enough looked exactly like Mooney, in fact if I hadn’t known Mooney was dead I would have taken Elf for Mooney. I remember remarking to Carl that if things were reversed, if Mooney had been left at home with us and died and we had managed to find an identical bullet-shaped replacement, I might have tried to pass it off as Mooney, in the way mothers instinctively try to protect their children from the harsher facts of life. But Carl said he wouldn’t have, he would have told her the truth, not to make her confront harsh reality but because Martine would be able to tell the difference, as mothers can with twins, and he wouldn’t want her catching him in a lie. “You know she has such high standards,” he said.
In the dead of winter, even colder than in Percy’s era, Martine told us Elf wasn’t eating. Oh no, I thought. Déjà vu. The stillness, then the stiffness, wrapping it in the shoebox, burial at sea ... Nevertheless, what can you do, so I made an appointment with the vet, the same old arrogant vet—I didn’t have the energy to look for a new one. I was feeling sick when the day arrived, so Carl took off from work and went with Martine and Elf.
“There’s good news and bad news,” he said when they got home. “The good news is that she doesn’t have a dread disease. What’s wrong with her is her teeth.”
I was lying in bed, trying to sleep. “Her teeth?”
“You’ve got it. Her top and bottom teeth are growing together so she can’t eat. She can’t separate them to chew.” He gave me a demonstration of Elf’s problem, stretching his lips and straining his molars.
“Please, this is no time to make me laugh. My stomach is killing me.”
“What is it? Your period?”
“No. I don’t know what.”
“Well, listen—the bad news is that she needs surgery. Oral surgery. It’s a hundred twenty-five including the anesthetic.”
“This is not the least bit funny. What are we going to do?” Martine was putting Elf back in her cage, otherwise we would have discussed this with more sensitivity.
“Is there a choice? You know how Martine feels—Albert Schweitzer Junior. I made an appointment for tomorrow. She’ll have to stay overnight.”
“I presume you mean Elf, not Martine.”
“Of course I mean Elf. Maybe I should call a doctor for you too.”
“No, I’ll be okay. What’s a stomachache compared to oral surgery?”
“I don’t want you getting all worked up over this, Chris.” He joined me on the bed and started fooling around. “Thousands of people each year have successful oral surgery. It’s nothing to be alarmed about.”
“I’ll try to deal with it. Ow, you’re leaning right where it hurts.” Martine came into the room and Carl sat up quickly.
“She’s looking very wan,” she said.
“Two days from now she’ll be a new person,” Carl said.
“She’s never been a person before. How could she be one in two days?”
“Medical science is amazing.”
“I have no luck with guinea pigs.” She plopped into a chair, stretched out her legs, and sat gazing at her sneakers. I noticed how tall she was growing. She was nearly twelve and beginning to get breasts. But she wasn’t awkward like most girls at that stage; she was stunning, willowy and auburn-haired, with green eyes. There was sometimes a faint emerald light in the whites of her eyes that would take me by surprise, and I would stare and think, What a lucky accident.
“Maybe none of them live long,” I said. “I doubt if yours are being singled out.”
“They have a four-to-six-year life span. I looked it up in the encyclopedia. But in four years I’ve gone through almost three.”
That night I had such terrible pains in my stomach that Carl took me to the emergency room, where after a lot of fussing around—they tried to send me home, they tried to get me to sleep—they found it was my appendix and it had to come out right away. It was quite a few days before I felt like anything resembling normal, and I forgot completely about Elf’s oral surgery.
“Chris, before we go inside, I’d better tell you something.” Carl switched off the engine and reached into the back seat for my overnight bag. He was avoiding my eyes.
“What happened? I spoke to her on the phone just last night!” I was about to leap out of the car, but he grabbed my arm.
“Hold it a minute, will you? You’re supposed to take it easy.”
“Well what’s wrong, for Chrissake?”
He looked at me. “Not Martine. Jesus! Elf.”
“Elf.” I thought I would pass out. I was still pretty drugged.
“She got through the surgery all right. We brought her home the next day. But ... I don’t know whether she was too weak from not eating or what, but she never started eating again. And so ...”
“I never liked that doctor. How did Martine take it this time?”
“Sad but philosophical. I think she’s used to it by now. Besides, she was more concerned about you.”
“I’m glad to hear that. So where is the corpse? At sea again?”
“Well, no, actually. That’s why I wanted to tell you before you went in the apartment. The temperature has been near zero. The river is frozen.”
“Just give it to me straight, Carl.”
“She’s wrapped in some plastic bags on the bathroom windowsill. Outside. The iron grating is hold
ing her in place. I was going to put her in the freezer with the meat, but I thought you might not care for that.”
“Couldn’t you find a shoebox?”
“No. I guess nobody’s gotten new shoes lately.”
“And how long is she going to stay there?”
“They’re predicting a thaw. It’s supposed to get warm, unseasonably warm, so in a few days we’ll take her out to the park. Anyway, welcome home. Oh, there’s another thing.”
“I hope this is good.”
It was. He had found a job working in the greenhouse at the Botanical Garden.
Since Martine never brought the subject up again after the thaw and the park burial, I assumed the guinea pig phase of her life was over. Two weeks after she returned from camp that summer, the super who had loaned us the spade and shovel for Percy came up to say there was a family in the next building with a new guinea pig, but their baby was allergic to it and couldn’t stop sneezing. Maybe we wanted to do them a favor and take it off their hands?
Martine and I turned to each other. “What do you think?” I said.
“I’m not sure. They’re a lot of expense, aren’t they?”
“Not so bad. I mean, what’s a little lettuce, carrots ...”
“The medical expenses. And you don’t like them too much, do you, Mom?”
I tried to shrug it off with a blank smile. I looked at Mr. Coates—what I expected I’ll never know, since he stood there as if he had seen and heard everything in his lifetime and was content to wait for this discussion to be over. I wondered how much of a tip he would get for the deal. Nothing from us, I vowed.
“I’ve noticed,” Martine said. “You don’t like to handle them. You don’t like small rodents.”
“Not a whole lot, frankly.” They looked to me like rats, fat tailless rats. For Martine’s sake I had wished them good health and long life, but I tried not to get too close. When she was out with her friends and I had to feed them, I used to toss the lettuce in and step back as they lunged for it. I didn’t like the eager squeaks they let out when they smelled the food coming, or the crunching sounds they made eating it. And when I held them—at the beginning, when she would offer them to me to stroke, before she noticed how I felt about small rodents—I didn’t like the nervous fluttery softness of them, their darting squirmy little movements, the sniffing and nipping and the beat of the fragile heart so close to the surface I could feel it in my palms. “But they don’t bother me so long as they’re in the cage in your room.” Which was true.
“You could go over and take a look,” said Mr. Coates finally. “I’ll take you over there if you want.”
“Maybe I’ll do that, Mom. Do you want to come too?”
“No. I know what guinea pigs look like by now.”
“What color is it?” Martine was asking him on the way out.
“I don’t know the color. I ain’t seen it myself yet.”
I didn’t pay any more attention to Rusty, named for his color, than I had to the others. I made sure to be in another room while Martine and Carl cut his nails, one holding him down, the other clipping—they took turns. Martine started junior high and got even more beautiful, breasts, hips, the works, with a kind of slow way of turning her head and moving her eyes. She also started expressing intelligent opinions on every subject in the news, test tube babies, airplane hijackings, chemicals in packaged foods, while Carl and I listened and marveled, with this peculiar guilty relief that she was turning out so well—I guess because we were not living out our former ideals, not changing the world or on the other hand being particularly upwardly mobile either. Carl was happier working in the greenhouse, but we still hadn’t managed to save enough to rent a store or qualify for a bank loan.
At Martine’s thirteenth birthday party in May, we got to talking in the kitchen with one of the mothers who came to pick up her kid. I liked her. She was about our age, small and blonde, and she had dropped out of school too but had gone back to finish and was even doing graduate work.
“What field?” I asked. I was scraping pizza crusts into the garbage while Carl washed out soda cans—he was very big on recycling. In the living room the kids were dancing to a reggae song called “Free Nelson Mandela,” and the three of us had been remarking, first of all, that Nelson Mandela had been in prison since we were about their age and in the meantime we had grown up and were raising children and feeling vaguely disappointed with ourselves, and secondly, that dancing to a record like that wouldn’t have been our style even if there had been one back then, which was unlikely. Singing was more our style. And the fact that teen-agers today were dancing to this “Free Nelson Mandela” record at parties made their generation seem less serious, yet at this point who were we to judge styles of being serious? The man was still in prison, after all.
“Romance languages,” she said. She was playing with the plastic magnetic letters on the refrigerator. They had been there since Martine was two. Sometimes we would use them to write things like Merry Xmas or, as tonight, Happy Birthday, and sometimes to leave real messages, like Skating Back at 7 M. The messages would stay up for the longest time, eroding little by little because we knocked the letters off accidentally and stuck them back any old place, or because we needed a letter for a new message, so that Happy Birthday could come to read Hapy Birda, and at some point they would lose their meaning altogether, like Hay irda, which amused Martine no end. This woman wrote, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.”
“What does that mean?” Carl asked her.
“‘In the middle of the journey of our life.’ It’s the opening of The Divine Comedy. What it means is, here I am thirty-five years old and I’m a graduate student.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said Carl. “I admire your determination. I’m driving a cab, but one day before I die I’m going to learn to do topiary, for the simple reason that I want to.”
She said what I knew she would. “What’s topiary?”
He stopped rinsing cans to tell her.
I never read The Divine Comedy, but I do know Dante goes through Hell and Purgatory and eventually gets to Paradise. All the parts you ever hear about, though, seem to take place in Hell, and so a small shiver ran up my spine, seeing that message on the refrigerator above Happy Birthday. Then I forgot about it.
In bed that night I asked Carl if he was serious about learning topiary. He said he had been thinking it over again. Since he had gotten a raise at the greenhouse, maybe he might give up the cab altogether, he was so sick of it, and use the money we’d saved for the store to study landscape gardening.
“Well, okay. That sounds good. I can work a half day Saturdays, maybe.”
“No, I don’t want you to lose the little free time you have. We’ll manage. Maybe there’s something you want to go back and study too.”
“I’m not ambitious. Why, would I be more attractive, like, if I went to graduate school?”
“Ha! Did I hear you right?” He let out a comic whoop. “I don’t even remember her name, Chris. Listen, you want me to prove my love?”
That was the last time. The next day he came down with the flu, then Martine and I got it, and just when we were beginning to come back to life he had a heart attack driving the cab. He might have made it, the doctor said, except he was alone and lost control of the wheel. They told me more details about it, just like a news report, more than I could bear to listen to, in fact. I tried to forget the words the minute I heard them, but no amount of trying could make me stop seeing the scene in my mind. They offered me pills, all through those next insane days, but I wasn’t interested in feeling better. Anyhow, what kind of goddamn pill could cure this? I asked them. I also kept seeing in my mind a scene on the Long Island Expressway when Martine was a baby and we were going to Jones Beach. About three cars ahead of us over in the right lane, a car started to veer, and as we got closer we could see the driver slumping down in his seat. Before we could even think what to do, a state trooper appeared out of nowh
ere and jumped in on the driver’s side to grab the wheel. Sirens started up, I guess they took him to the hospital, and a huge pile-up was averted. Watching it, I felt bad about how we used to call cops pigs. That sounds a little simpleminded, I know, but so was calling them pigs. And now I wondered how come a miracle in the form of a cop happened for that person and not for Carl, which is a question a retarded person might ask—I mean, an out-of-the-way street in Queens at eleven at night ... It happened the way it happened, that’s all. A loss to all those who might have enjoyed his topiary. I do think he would have done it in his own good time. If only we had had a little more time, I could have taken care of him. I wouldn’t have been a miracle, but I would have done a good job. The way he vanished, though, I couldn’t do a thing, not even say goodbye or hold his hand in the hospital or whatever it is old couples do—maybe the wife whispers that she’ll be joining him soon, but I have no illusions that I’ll ever be joining him, soon or late. I just got a lot less of him than I expected. Another thing is that the last time we made love I was slightly distracted because of the graduate student he admired for her determination, not that anything transpired between them except some ordinary conversation, but it started me wondering in general. Stupid, because I know very well how he felt, he told me every night. Those words I don’t forget. I let them put me to sleep. I lie there remembering how it felt with his arms and legs flung over me and can’t believe I’m expected to get through decades without ever feeling that again.
So I did end up working half days on Saturdays. In July Martine was supposed to go back to the camp run by the progressives and pacifists, where she had always had such a great time except for her tragedy with Mooney, and I didn’t want to begin my life alone by asking for help.
“I don’t have to go,” she said. “If we don’t have the money it’s all right. I don’t think I even feel like going anymore.” My beautiful child with the tragic face. Now she had something worthy of that face.
“You should go, however you feel. When you get there you’ll be glad.”
The Melting Pot Page 13