by Sands Hall
Jeep had shrugged. “I’m screwed either way. Either way it’s a rotten decision.”
Lizzie had made shhing noises. Sue spoke urgently. “You have time. You can still change your mind. This is exactly why we call it a woman’s right to choose.”
But who had chosen? This should not be about what Lizzie wanted, what Lizzie thought Jeep wanted, what Lizzie thought Maud wanted. Maud kept turning phrases over in her mind to address this. But she felt in some morally reprehensible place. I didn’t sleep with him, she wanted to say. But she had slept with him. But that’s all we did. She felt gagged. The windows were closed, but Lizzie’s hair billowed out around her head as if blown by heavy winds; she gripped the steering wheel with straight arms, managing to look like both an injured angel and an avenging one.
Keeping her arms around Jeep, Maud stared out the side window through the heavily falling snow, at the passing scene of white fields and snow-covered farmhouses. She was enveloped by a wave of icy fear—how could she do it?—mixed with the old anguish—how had she gotten so old without a child of her own? With Lizzie as an example constantly before her, Maud had to recognize that women who really wanted a child went about getting a child, and in spite of her chronic sorrow on the subject, she had not done that. Now the be-careful-what-you-ask-for mantra had worked its magic. But she was too selfish, too used to calling her days her own. She couldn’t pay for it: the clothes, the stroller, the doctors. She would have to find a day job, day care, night care: How did one play the piano for a living, rehearse a play, with a child? She would have to abandon these things.
Yet women did this all the time. We do not know how you may soften at the sight of the child, Paulina said in The Winter’s Tale.
The silence often of pure innocence
Persuades when speaking fails.
Like being doused with freezing, then blessedly warm, water, the clutch of fear released. Briefly Maud floated through a blissful scene of motherhood.
“Where’s Theo?” Jeep suddenly asked.
Lizzie didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Less than three hours ago I dropped him at the Theibeaus’.”
Jeep’s cheek rested more and more consistently on Maud’s arm; she had fallen asleep. This was the time to question Lizzie about the wisdom of what had happened in the clinic with Jeep, to say what had happened—had not happened—with Jake. The minutes ticked by. I’m not sure Jeep wants to—The heater blasted hot air. About Jake, it’s not what you think—
The wipers moved back and forth, back and forth. As they turned onto the county road that led to Lizzie’s house, Jeep woke with a sudden moan.
Lizzie reached over to pat her thigh.
Jeep moaned again. “I had this thought. Oh, I don’t like this thought.”
Maud understood, instantly and precisely. “Sam.”
“What if he—”
“I’ll go,” Maud said.
“We were just there.” Lizzie’s voice was baffled and defensive.
“But I’ll need to borrow your car. Lizzie?”
Lizzie used the rearview mirror to look at her, finally. “Fine.”
“My battery’s dead,” Maud said to those eyes, green like a cat’s, eyes defensive and wounded. “Will you come, Lizard? Please? Both of you?”
“Can’t.” Lizzie pulled the car to a stop outside the house, yanked hard on the parking brake. To Jeep she said, “I’ll run you a bath.”
The week before, Maud had enjoyed the drive to Maggie’s place. This time, due to a low fog, and snow that turned to icy rain, it took almost six hours. She was grateful for Lizzie’s four-wheel-drive. For most of the drive, she held a one-sided conversation with the invisible companion in the passenger seat about her tendency to meddle in people’s lives, and about what had and had not happened with Jake.
No one answered her knock on the door of Maggie’s trailer. The Airstream was empty. The bedding, including the mattress, was gone. Smoke rose from the hogan. She had to walk almost completely around the log building before she found the entrance, covered with an army-issue green blanket.
The floor of the hogan was flattened, pounded earth. In the center a fire glowed in a jagged-edged, sawed-off bottom of a large oil drum, surrounded by patterned rugs. Sam lay on one of these, his body a barely visible mound beneath a blanket. Sara and Maggie, hooded with serape-like shawls, sat next to him.
Maud stood in the doorway, holding the blanket aside in one hand. “There you are,” Maggie said.
Something inaudible came out of Sam’s mouth. Sara leaned close to hear, then nodded. “Get in here, girls, don’t let what little bit of heat we’ve got escape.”
“It’s just me,” Maud began, but Sara put a finger to her lips. “Get in here, Lizzie. Good to see you, Maud. Glad you brought the girls again. Let that blanket down, Lizzie. It’s freezing out there. Sam made us take the door out so he could see the sun rise. Go on, Summer. Sit down next to Luna there.”
Maud let the blanket fall to behind her. The twilight of the hogan’s interior deepened. For a moment she saw her sister, walking towards Sam, sitting beside Sara. Hannah settled in next to Sara. Luna pressed her muzzle onto Summer’s lap. Maud moved, finally, into this mirage. She knelt next to Sam. As she took his hand his fingers moved, a trembling effort to pat her, and then were still.
Sara and Maggie watched, eyes dark within the darkness of their hooded faces. Sam’s skin was smooth, taut against his bones, made rosy by the fire: beautiful. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she made out a standing bicycle against one wall. A large, many-limbed piece of exercise equipment gesticulated beside it. The walls of the hogan were decorated with patterned rugs, interspersed with shiny posters. It took her a while to realize the significance of these posters, and who it was would have put them there: WASHINGTON REDSKINS, CLEVELAND INDIANS, FLORIDA STATE SEMINOLES, KANSAS CITY CHIEFS, ATLANTA BRAVES.
She took in the rest of the hogan: the packed earth floor, shelves of board and brick. Books, potsherds, miscellany. Magazines piled in an orange crate. Stove, unlit; a pail beside it. Desk, typewriter. Clearly Driver’s stuff. But where was he? She didn’t want to interrupt the quiet in the hogan to ask.
Every once in an impossibly long while the blanket covering Sam’s chest rose, receded. She understood why Maggie and Sara had included Lizzie and the girls, and Luna too. She felt them there; she willed them with all her might to stay. She wondered if there was any point to getting a doctor, and worried that she should call Lizzie to come. But there was no phone, not for many miles, and she didn’t want to leave. Time slowed, stopped. She had no idea how long they sat there. She thought she might have fallen asleep, her head nodding onto her chest, when suddenly the room filled with a breathless sense of waiting. Sam took a gasping breath. His eyes opened, stared. His fingers twitched inside her hand, his lips moved. Sara and Maggie’s heads were up, eyes open.
One Christmas Maud and Lizzie’s father had given them a glossy coffee-table book of medieval and Renaissance paintings. Maud, fourteen, had pored over them, fascinated by the story each painting seemed to tell. In one of them a group of people gathered around the bed of a man in tangled white sheets. His skin was white; his mouth was open. In an upper corner of the painting hovered a gray, wraithlike thing. She had understood, even then, that this was the spirit that had escaped the dying man. This next moment was like that: a presence hovered, benign, in the room, and then something moved, began to dissipate, like mist under sunlight. After a few minutes, there was a very small skin, smaller than Maud would have imagined possible, that had been Sam.
Maud held on to the cold fingers a few minutes longer. Sara unfolded her legs. Maggie said, “Driver’s out in his dig, asked us to send you along when you showed up.”
“I have to tell Lizzie.” Maud felt she should whisper, although Maggie had not. She also had rehearsal, a concern that seemed trivial. Although it was not trivial.
“It’s good Lizzie was here,” Sara said. “Even if she didn’
t know she was.”
The sleety rain had stopped. Mist rose from the footpath visible beneath the frosted earth. Maud headed out past the Airstream. She followed the snaking path down into the canyon, and then along the river bottom. The journey seemed far shorter than that first time. The ledge was almost impossible to see from where she stood, but a thin column of smoke lifted into the air, pallid against the dark, bulging brow of cliff. She climbed through scattered boulders, slipping and sliding in her thin dress boots—had it been only yesterday morning that she’d put them on at Jake’s house?—and walked towards the column of smoke. She stood on the kiva’s edge. Driver, wrapped in a blanket, sat brooding over a fire. He looked up. They studied each other.
“He’s gone.”
Maud nodded.
“You got here in time, then. Your sister come?”
She shook her head.
Driver broke some dry branches, fed these onto the flame. “You can come down.”
The rungs were slick. She held her mittened hands to the fire and after a silence said, “It seems like a kiva is the same as a hogan, almost. The shape. Where the fire is.”
Driver cleared his throat. “And what it’s used for. Though usually people don’t die there. That was Sara’s idea.”
Her mittens began to steam. “And maybe most hogans don’t have exercise equipment?”
“It’s not a church. It’s another room.” He shrugged. “I was young. Who knows why Maggie keeps that stuff? Like those posters. I thought I’d discovered the outrage.”
“Outrage?”
“You ever seen the little tomahawks on the helmets of the Seminoles? You seen the ‘chop’?”
Maud no doubt looked as blank as she felt. “Tomahawks?”
“Never mind.”
Maud crouched beside him. “Sara and Maggie pretended Lizzie was there. Luna too. I feel strange about that. Fooling him.”
Driver studied the fire. “While your ancestors were building cathedrals, grand phallic symbols of man’s hope to touch God by scraping the sky, mine were digging wombs into the earth, hoping to find God by burrowing into her. With similar success.” His smile was dry, ironic.
“I should go, Driver. I need to tell Lizzie.”
He put a hand out, but it took him a while to speak. “I think I was a little extreme.” He cleared his throat again. “It wasn’t right. Sam let me know.”
Somewhere a bird called, emphasizing how quiet it was. “I’m through with this.” Driver gestured around the kiva. “There’s thinking now it was cannibalism. That drove the Anasazi to hide out in cliff dwellings. People chasing others, boiling their heads in pots. It’s screwed me up for months, thinking about it. I’ve always believed it was spiritual”—he flashed his wry smile—“if it wasn’t drought. But the evidence is there. And all this time I’ve thought the Ancient Ones were perfect. Enlightened.”
“There are terrible people everywhere, Driver. In every time.”
“I’ve had to reorganize. This was not supposed to be a part of my culture. Of our ancestors. Those who would create that kind of fear. Or those who would spend their lives—their entire lives—running from that fear.”
“They’re not necessarily your ancestors.”
He shook his head. “I hate my thesis advisor. I thought this was a crackpot theory, but there’s more and more evidence. And I still have the dissertation to write.” He scrubbed at his face. “I slept here last night. Sam came this morning. He thinks it’s pretty funny you all tried to make Lizzie be in a place she wasn’t. But he appreciated it.”
Long ago, when Maud’s beloved and aged Siamese cat had not shown up for several nights running, after calling and calling for her Maud cried herself to sleep. In the first light of morning an oriental figure, swathed in blue and gold silk, wearing long brass fingernails, had appeared beside her bed. Don’t worry, this told her. I am fine and happy. Maud’s grief had disappeared. When she tried to tell others about it, however, she could hear how much like wishful thinking it sounded. Yet she felt a need to drip Sam’s dawn appearance through her realism filter, making sense of it as best she could with her occidental, empirical-evidence-needing mind.
She stood. “Lizzie arranged for me to get a baby this morning.”
He stared. “How do you mean, ‘get’ a baby?”
Maud explained. “It sounds preposterous. It does to me. I have about nine months to get used to it. My own sort of pregnancy, I guess. I’m terrified.”
“My first thought is, it would not be yours. But Sam made it clear—” Driver interrupted himself, walked a few steps away. The blanket hung off his shoulders; a corner of it dragged on the ground. “Sam made it clear no one can decide for someone else what is family. What is clan.” He ran a hand along the kiva wall, looked up at the glowering rock face. “I should talk to her. I’ll borrow Sara’s car.”
“I can show you the way to her house. But then I’ve got rehearsal. Even in these circumstances—everything depends on everyone else being there.”
He looked interested, making Maud realize how much of his time he spent being sardonic, superior. “I did a little of that. In high school. Maybe I could come watch.”
“I’ll have to ask. But I’m sure it would be okay.”
“Sara said you were a storyteller. Sam agreed.” He laughed. “I argued with her. An actress is a storyteller? But she made her points. When we forget the stories of our ancestors we have to reinvent the wheel, life after life.” He knelt and began to roll up his blanket. “I took this acting class. We did scenes, the teacher liked my work. And then there were auditions for this play. I didn’t get the part. I wasn’t cast at all. I drove through the cemetery in my pickup, drinking beer and knocking over tombstones.”
Maud nodded. “It’s awful to want a role that much. It seems impossible that life goes on. But it does. And it’s so unbelievable that the play does too—without you. You feel so bereft. Like you’ve lost something vital.”
“They didn’t cast me because I’m a fucking half-breed.” His eyes flew to meet her own, she was sure, startled ones. His smile was slow, rueful. “Ah. I had you convinced otherwise.”
“You had.”
He used a stick to scatter the coals.
“I’ll say you had.” She gave a little laugh. “ ‘It’s in our blood.’ All that. Speaking of acting.”
“Sara says it’s nothing but a chip on my shoulder, and who cares anyway. ‘We’re all half-breeds,’ she says. ‘Who isn’t?’ ”
“Scotch-Irish-English-German mutt myself,” she said, but he did not smile.
With the blanket no longer draping his shoulders, his hair pulled back off his face into a rubber band, he looked less like a historical cliché. He also looked terribly sad. She was reminded of times—when a role felt particularly right, or the process of the play was particularly good—how hard it was to close the play, to let go of the role.
“I guess I won’t be lashing Sam to the treetops,” he said as he followed her up the ladder. Surprised to hear a hint of laughter in his voice, she turned to look down at him. He wore what could actually be called a rueful smile. “Just as well. I had a fight with Maggie and Sara on my hands about that one.”
CHAPTER 29
LIZZIE
NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS ON LIZZIE’S FRIDGE
Fragmentation helps to establish space . . . the object can’t be introduced until the space has been created.
—BRAQUE
By the glow of the street lamp that stroked light across the bedroom wall, Lizzie tried to make out the features of the people in the photographs tacked beside the bed. Beside her, Ken—she was fairly sure that was his name—caught his heavy breath on a snore.
The photographs could have been of family, or of a happy group at a bowling alley or a picnic. Lizzie couldn’t tell. She turned her head. The pillow was so thin as to be almost no pillow at all, the cloth coarse with too much soap. He lay face up, teeth gleaming between parted lips. The light striped
the blanket at the level of their knees. A click and then a rush of air let her know that somewhere a furnace was pushing heat into the cold rooms of the little apartment Ken—was that his name?—called home.
She peeled back the blanket and slid a foot towards the floor. He rolled over and, murmuring, threw an arm over her.
“Going to the bathroom,” she whispered, and lifted the heavy arm. She gathered her clothes from the side of the bed and made her way into the kitchen, where she dressed quickly.
The door banged shut behind her. She stood for a moment, waiting to hear a voice, movement inside. She didn’t want to have to think of excuses, she didn’t want to have to defend her desire to escape. Although she had every reason—she had to get home to the kids, didn’t she? Shivering inside her parka, she looked up and down the street for her car, which was nowhere in sight. She panicked, until she remembered that she’d loaned it to Maud. She was driving Sam’s pickup. The beat-up white Ford, with its familiar bent front fender, was parked askew about two feet from the curb.
She started the engine, hunched over the steering wheel as if it had the power to warm her. Kids, she thought, and felt something wry twist her mouth. No, kids had not been a subject that had come up during the hours spent with Ken. They’d played five games of pool. She’d won three of them. Her victory had peeved him, but he’d hidden it well. And after all, it was her good mood that made her take him up on his request for a ride home.
The ancient defroster, running full blast, made no impact on the frosted windows. She got out and scratched at them with a scraper she found tossed behind the seat, remembering and ignoring Jake’s injunctions to do each window thoroughly. She wondered about the bets that would have been laid in the Billy Goat after she left—what else had Lizzie Maxwell done besides drive Ken—Ben?—the seven-odd miles to the little house in a row of identical little houses, lit by the evenly spaced street lamps that marched down this quiet, early morning street? She’d wanted something to take the taste of Maud and Jake out of her mouth, the twitch her mind had to do every time she thought about Maud in Jake’s bed, Maud in his kitchen, leaning against his counter, drinking his coffee, Maud riding beside him in his stupid car with the stuck door handle.