Once, in Lourdes
Page 30
“Are you sure?” Vera speaks like a good teacher, strict but fair. “Really, think about it. Are you absolutely free of doubt?”
I look out at the lake, from which the gleam of pink is already gone. The sky is white. Birds squawk like nasty girls in the lavatory telling lies about someone they’ve decided not to like. “Life or death, compadres! Count on me. Either way I’m with you.”
“To die, even?”
“The group rules.”
“Kay,” says CJ, “there is no one like you.”
“That’s what they say about God,” I say, and they laugh as if it’s funny. I feel their relief, which wouldn’t be so intense if they didn’t love me. Vera and Saint guide me into the warmth between them. Vera strokes my hand. Saint kisses the side of my face. CJ’s eyes are fixed on me, as if I’m about to say something important.
Vera stands up to check the horizon then returns to her place. I sit with my eyes closed, as if I can somehow make the sun stand still.
Then one of the sounds floating in the back of my mind swirls up as a siren. I cover my ears, but it gets louder. The ground starts to shake. My friends stand up while I’m squeezing my knees to my chest against whatever it is—a real live earthquake in our pseudo California? The thundering hooves of the Four Horsemen, the end of everything for everyone? I tuck my head between my knees as we were taught in grade school in the event of a nuclear bomb.
“What the fucking shit?” says Vera.
I look, eventually. Dim across the field, a pair of faint lights might be headlights. There’s the pulsing red of police. A siren wails in measured beats.
Vera eyes CJ. “Good work,” she says.
“What? I didn’t do that!”
“Yes, you did. Your damn smoke signals.”
CJ hits his head with the flat of his hand. “Fuck me!” He’s almost crying. “But it died down almost immediately. Oh God!” He looks doubtfully down the row of us. “They can’t see us. We could run,” he says.
“Why? Nothing’s changed. Except time of death.” Vera wipes her hair out of her eyes. Her voice is firm and cool. She stands up, then one at a time we rise and stand beside her on the edge of the bluff, lined up like good schoolchildren. We join hands. Red Rover, Red Rover, let Jesus come over.
I have my chosen place beside Saint, but I’m absurdly irritable and everything makes it worse. The birds sound squabbly, mean-spirited. The siren subsides with a dying wail, but the engine roar is as loud as our discussion of whether to link arms or hold hands. I hate it all.
A police car emerges out of the fog, then men with red fire extinguishers. We watch through the fence as they attack the trash can. We entwine our arms, ending in held hands. If we can hold on we’ll fall right next to one another. Below, the rocky beach is in shadow, but the field of light on the water is spreading fast.
“One, two, three!” Vera blurts it, a goof. Her teeth are chattering.
CJ giggles.
“Ready?” she says, and gives my hand a friendly shake. A kiss moves along the row, CJ to Saint to me to Vera, like Pass the Orange.
“It’s like a little kid’s birthday party.”
“We’re being silly.”
“It’s time,” says Vera.
I love that my arms are squeezed between Saint’s arm and his side and Vera’s arm and her side. I am more than included. There’s nothing, no one, to whom I am not connected—this lake, that tree—because we are four together, 4EVER, heads raised to the intensifying light with death snapping at our feet. “Let’s count to three,” says Vera, “then I’ll say ‘go.’ ”
“As usual,” CJ hoots. “Little Napoleon!”
A second car enters the lot.
“Fuck-shit,” says Vera.
Behind us, red canisters train the last of their contents on the smoldering trash can. There’s a continuing hiss, a tower of smoke. But louder in my ears are the intake and expulsion of our breathing. On either side of me, Saint and Vera bend their knees like divers. Saint says, “Holy Mary mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
“Now! Go!”
I feel the thrum of the force of their intention, its manic holiness. Then through my closed eyelids comes the red hotness of sun. My four-strong body starts to expire head by head, till there’s only mine dripping sweat. I know what happens to an eye when its mate is blinded, and to a Siamese twin when its sibling dies. I also know the sound of a tennis ball when it hits the exact middle of the racket, its firm, sweet sound. Like Lot’s disobedient wife I turn around. Alone on a tennis court, Gary Landry is practicing his serve. And while I’m not, even for a moment, a pillar of salt, my legs won’t move. In the face of the thought of being forever alone, stranded on the island of myself, I let go of my friends’ hands.
They leap and there’s the rush of wind. For a moment I seem to be falling with them. Then a low-voiced moan rises to my ears. CJ, curled in a fetal ball on the ledge at my feet: “I know, I know, I know, I know! My innate cowardice.” One of his feet hangs over the edge as if he’s still daring himself. His hand is balled into a fist under his cheek, such a sad, helpless hand. “He let go. I would have done it, but he let me go! I’ll never, never forgive him.” He heaves another moan. “Was there a crash? A splash? I didn’t hear anything.” I sit down beside him, taking fast, hard, sharp breaths that seem to clang against the back of my throat. In my ears, over and over, sounds the scream that didn’t come from our friends. For now, it’s all I can hear.
Then “Hey,” says a man. “There’s somebody over there!” Heavy steps tread the grass. “Couple of kids!”
“Wouldn’t you know.” That’s Vera’s father, uncharacteristically nervous-sounding. “Motherfuckers.”
“Vera?” That’s Vera’s mother, wailing as if she already knows. “My sweet, beautiful girl?”
But I am not Vera, I’m Kay Campion, scratching as if for a handhold in the dry, stony earth of the ledge. To hang on to the moment for as long as it will allow, I lie down beside CJ and put my lips to his springy curls. His arms enclose my waist. Beautiful, appalling, the shades of Saint and Vera hover in the warming air.
—
Afterward, after the confusion and the crying and the search for whom or what to blame, after school started and I wouldn’t leave my room, and Elise went off to college, and CJ got into his car and just drove away, without a note or a word, my family moved to San Diego. Where they could play golf the year round and I could get “distance” on the calamity—they assumed or at least hoped. San Diego was on the far side of the moon from Lourdes, a gentle, barely perceptible slope to the beach. The white sand was as soft as sugar, the ocean warm and salty. Its water held me up better than the lake’s; I could swim out until I couldn’t see shore. I lost weight; so what? Arlyn and Dad urged counseling—gently, respectfully, I’ll give them credit. But I had no interest in “moving on”; I hated the very words. Toward what or where should I be moving? I didn’t want to change or weaken what I felt for my lost friends. I didn’t even want to forget that I couldn’t save them.
But they were already gone, Elise said in one of her letters. I don’t mean to put them in any kind of box, but I think they were fated, you know? Like Romeo and Juliet? It would have taken a miracle!
But that was it. I’d wanted to work a miracle. We were in Lourdes, after all.
Our first few months in San Diego, Arlyn and Dad walked on tiptoe around me, as if I were terminally ill. Then postcards from CJ started coming to our house, from Zurich, Jerusalem, Bombay, Kyoto. He was questing—on a track that might lead him somewhere. That spring, without anyone’s urging, though the parental units were pleased and relieved, I applied to a community college, and got in without a single credit for my senior year of high school. A miracle of sorts, someone might have said. The following year, at Berkeley, I took a course in Eastern religion, and we were assigned a book Saint had read, In Search of the Miraculous. Disappointingly, it was a little dry, and I didn’t see why,
for the Miraculous, you had to go East, but I loved the title, which described my own quest. In my dorm room I wanted Mary, mother of God, to appear haloed before me with the living bodies of my friends in her holy arms. I wanted my mother to come for Parents’ Weekend and say she was proud of me, and lie about how beautiful I was, and smart, etc., or just hold me hard and tight in her formerly big arms. I wanted, and I still want, to live in a world where miracles can happen, not constantly but every once in a while. I want to watch someone with hideous facial boils drink from the fountain at the entrance to our Haight and jog away, clear-skinned. I want the world’s parents to understand their children, or at least try to understand, or at least not harm them while they try to understand themselves. I want to change our story.
Yes, my Saintly, I have many wants. I’m stuck on the wheel of birth and rebirth.
And every once in a while I think maybe that’s the miracle—that days pass in their dailiness, years go by, and I’m still on the wheel. I remember August 1968 in Lourdes, Michigan, with a clarity that refuses to fade. Sometimes I’ll even wake in the dark with a burning sensation on my leg where the tattoo abides, and I weep for what’s lost, which, in bad times, I’m on the brink of returning to. But I can’t, or I don’t, since on the edge of the bluff that summer dawn, I chose not to die. And so I was born.
For my friends, then and now
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank, first, my agent, Lauren MacLeod, who said yes to this manuscript that I’d been working on for twenty years, and then—so quickly!—found a place for it in a house where they lovingly and painstakingly edit the books they publish. In this regard, I want to thank my editors Cindy Spiegel and Annie Chagnot, who went over not only every line but every character interaction, and made it a better, deeper book. Thanks also to my assiduous copy editor/fact checker Jennifer Prior, who noticed discrepancies and inaccuracies almost too small for the human eye. And to Beth Pearson, who managed the copyediting and proofreading—with all its demands and complexities—with a graceful and easy expertise.
Special thanks to the brilliant and warmhearted women in my writing group—Rosellen Brown, Janet Burroway, Garnett Kilberg-Cohen, Tsivia Cohen, Maggie Kast, Peggy Shinner, and S. L. Wisenberg—who penned their comments on multiple drafts without saying, “I thought this was finished?” or “I’m sorry but my eyes are starting to glaze over.” Then there is Joyce Winer, who is no longer in the group but has commented on my work and encouraged me over many years with her usual wry acuity. And, of course, Barry Silesky, my beloved husband, whose faith in me runs wide and deep.
Thank you, Purdue University, and especially the English department, and within that the creative writing program—original members Patricia Henley and Marianne Boruch—which hired me to teach fiction with the first, now much rewritten, chapter of Once. Thanks also to members of Purdue’s Center for Artistic Endeavors, headed by my colleague Don Platt, who granted me a fellowship and thus a free semester to work on this book.
And thanks from the bottom of my heart to my parents, Myron and Ruth Solwitz, ninety-eight and ninety-three, respectively, who have never flagged in their encouragement of their at times wayward daughter, and have been good enough to stay alive for some well-earned naches.
BY SHARON SOLWITZ
Once, in Lourdes
Bloody Mary
Blood and Milk
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SHARON SOLWITZ is the author of a novel, Bloody Mary, and a collection of stories, Blood and Milk, which won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from Friends of the Chicago Public Library and the prize for adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Several of her stories have been featured in Pushcart Prize anthologies and The Best American Short Stories. Other honors for her individual stories, which have appeared in such magazines as TriQuarterly, Mademoiselle, and Ploughshares, include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, the Nelson Algren Literary Award, and grants and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Solwitz teaches fiction writing at Purdue University and lives in Chicago with her husband, the poet Barry Silesky.
sharonsolwitz.com
Facebook.com/sharon.solwitz
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