by Ursula Hegi
Despite the heat, Kurt was painting rapidly, but suddenly his brush caught between two slats and fell down on his brother’s side. “Verdammte Scheisse” he cursed. He hesitated. If he were to reach across the fence, he’d get paint on his clothes, and if he were to go around it, Manfred might accuse him of trespassing in yet another letter. Just then the boy stood up and ambled toward Kurt’s brush, dragging his rope behind him. As he squatted to pick up the brush by the bristles, he managed to get more paint on himself than any of us would in a week of painting. Laughing aloud, he handed the brush to Kurt and reached up with both fists to wipe his eyes.
“No,” Kurt warned, “you’ll get paint in your eyes.” He reached across the fence and held the boy’s arms away from his face. “Don’t move,” he ordered. “You hear?” Heavily, he ran to the end of the fence, where we stood near the mailboxes, watching but not interfering as he looped back on his brother’s side of the land. There he untied the rope from the boy’s waist and led the boy down to the pond. “Hold still,” he said, and made him sit on the grassy bank.
Johannes opened his mouth wide and splashed water at his uncle. Bending over the boy, Kurt washed the paint from his face and ears, from his sturdy neck and arms. Water ran down Kurt’s shirt, down the boy’s front, and the air was hot and moist with the scent of cut grass and roses.
Finally Kurt shook his head and laughed with the boy. “Look at the two of us,” we heard him say. “Smeared with paint… and soaking wet. We may as well jump in.” He untied the boy’s shoes, then his own, and set them side by side.
We watched the two of them swimming in the center of the pond, beyond the confines of the fence. Kurt would dive, his long body leaving a cleft in the water as he’d submerge himself, and then the boy-man, Johannes, beaming and blowing water from his mouth, would stretch out his round arms and swim beneath his uncle. There they would lie, hover just beneath the surface like some antediluvian creatures, weightless, exuberant, studious. We’d wait for them to surface, and we’d suck air into our lungs to breathe for them.
Gradually, they would rise and then repeat their ritual, their stately bodies hanging one above the other, oddly sensual yet innocent, serious yet pleasureful. We saw their families step from their houses, Helga first, then Manfred, then the wives and the other children. Along opposite sides of the fence, they walked toward the pond, even Petra, whose voice usually carried farther than others. When Johannes and his Uncle Kurt emerged for air again, they didn’t look surprised that they had an audience—-it was, rather, that it didn’t seem to matter to them as, once more, they heaved their large, graceful bodies beneath the surface, floating in a domain where feuds and intolerance—and even our concern—could no longer contaminate them.
The Juggler
My daughter loves a man who is turning blind. He is as tall as Zoe; yet, when he talks with her, he fastens his gaze to some place above her. His name is Michael, and he is the counselor at the elementary school where Zoe teaches. Though he can still see shapes, he can’t make out details. Zoe has told me all this on the phone. She has also told me that, in another year, Michael won’t even see shapes anymore.
The first weekend of October, she brings him across the Cascades to visit me in Coeur d’Alene. When she climbs from her car to embrace me, she looks radiant, face flushed, long hair tangled from driving with her window open. One hand on the small of her back, Michael enters my house as if leading her. He has the kind of profile I’ve seen on antique coins, and he moves like a dancer—a slow-motion version of a dancer—lithe and muscled and graceful.
After dinner, we drive to Spokane to see a movie, Mona Lisa. In front of the Magic Lantern Theater, a bearded man with a jester’s hat is tossing one tricycle wheel and two flowerpots into the air. His pants are too big for him, and his tapestry vest covers part of his rumpled shirt. As the basin and swords come tumbling toward him, he laughs, hurls them back up, one long braid flapping across his back. The instant he drops the basin, I grasp Michael’s shoulder, steer him and Zoe past the man, up the stairs of the theater.
Zoe settles him between us in the last row, and when the film starts, she translates the images on the screen for him. In the darkness, her whispered words form veils that obstruct the film. Where my elbow touches Michael’s on the wooden armrest, it feels stiff. It’s a stiffness that spreads: into my shoulders, my chest, my belly. Here I thought I had done all the letting go, had prepared myself for it since the day Zoe took her first uncertain step away from me, but it never occurred to me that I would turn her over to someone who’d need her this much.
She’s whispering to Michael, and though I try to ignore her voice, I’m gradually drawn into its pulse, until it becomes part of the film. “Sshhh,” someone hisses in the row behind us, but my daughter continues the rhythm of her interpretation.
I don’t want the film to end.
In the late morning, Zoe and I pack the cooler for a canoe trip, and the three of us drive along the west shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene to the mouth of the St. Joe River. Led by my daughter’s voice, Michael helps us lift the canoe from the roof rack and lower it into the water. While she paddles in front and I steer, he sits on a boat cushion in the belly of the canoe. Face raised toward the sun, one hand trailing in the water, he seems oblivious to the flashes of bottle-green light that filter through the layers of slow current.
“Are you still taking that carpentry workshop?” Zoe asks me.
“Wednesday evenings. Yes. I built two flower boxes.”
“Great.”
“Now I’m working on bookshelves.”
“That’s what I never have enough of—shelves.”
“If these turn out all right, I’ll build you some.”
Dead trees jut into the river. Along the banks grow birches and oaks, and behind them are either clearings or denser stands of trees whose leaves haven’t turned yet. I want to tell Michael how it will look here in two weeks, want to describe the reds and yellows I remember from other autumns, but I don’t know how to offer something he hasn’t asked of me.
When we pass three new cottages with huge windows facing the St. Joe, Zoe describes them to Michael. “Mom and I used to canoe here long before they were built. Behind them in the woods are railroad tracks, where we once found a pink freight train.”
Michael tilts the side of his head toward me. His hair is curly, thick. “A pink train?”
I nod. And realize he can’t see me. “Cotton-candy pink,” I say.
“A hopper,” Zoe adds. “It’s been there for a long time. Mom and I climbed up the metal ladder in back and sat on top, eating peanuts. I wonder if it’s still there.” With her paddle she grazes a clump of reeds. “Mom, look. You can breathe through those reeds if you ever have to hide under water.”
“Hollow reeds,” I explain to Michael.
He laughs. “Thanks. I’ll remember that the next time I want to hide under water.”
Zoe turns, smiling at him with so much light in her eyes that I have to look away. “You never know when you’ll need it.”
“As a kid, Zoe was very good at hiding.” I switch the paddle to my left hand, pull it faster through the water. “So good that she wanted to be a detective.”
“Cut it out, Mom.” My daughter grins.
“Tell me more,” Michael says.
“I became her main target. She spied on me brushing my hair, spied on me rehearsing for concerts.”
“It’s called surveillance, Mom. Besides—you gave me plenty of material. It was a year after the divorce, and you were just starting to date.”
“Starting, yes, and thinking everyone but I knew the rules.”
That year after her father left, Zoe baked almond cookies for me, convinced me to take ice-skating lessons with her, conspired with some of the musicians from the symphony to surprise me with a party on my thirtieth birthday. Sometimes I felt Zoe and I were growing up together. Other times I felt as though I were eleven and she thirty. She would stay up late to ke
ep me company while I practiced the cello; often she’d fall asleep on the living-room sofa, fingers curved into her palm as if she were holding on to something.
“The one place I didn’t follow Mom was the tree out back.” Zoe leans back and, briefly, lets her head touch Michael’s shoulder. “We have this tree, a cottonwood, white and huge. Mom would climb up there, sit for hours.”
“It was a wonderful tree.” I rest the paddle across my knees. “A comfortable tree. The neighbors never quite knew what to make of me sitting in the branches, but Zoe understood that I needed to be alone.”
“My father’s grandmother had thirteen kids,” Michael says, “and whenever she wanted to be alone, she brought up her apron and covered her head.”
Zoe laughs. “She was probably wringing her hands.”
“Sometimes,” I tell Michael, who is turning toward my voice, “sometimes I woke up before my alarm went off in the morning, because Zoe was staring at me in her detective mode.”
“You’re lucky I switched career plans, Mom.”
“Was that before or after you wanted to be an actress?” he asks her.
“Before. Actress was next. Then lawyer. Then actress again.”
Michael and I both laugh. I like him —Or, rather, I could like him, if only he were not turning blind. Or if he were not with my daughter. I want more for Zoe.
The air feels crisp against our faces, the sun just strong enough to keep the chill from us. When a motorboat speeds past us, we rock sideways in its wake. We pass mudflats, cut through patches of scum formed by sawdust and spiderwebs. Ahead of us the right bank is covered with piles of logs that snag the river. Two small tugboats are tied to a dock.
I describe them to Michael. “Those tugs are used to push the logs to Coeur d’Alene and the lumberyards.”
As Zoe tells him about the railroad tracks from the mountain and the trains that bring the logs down, she raises her hands and her words construct the railroad bridges that span the valleys between the hills.
All at once I want to know what it is like for Michael. Enveloped in my daughter’s voice, I close my eyes and tilt my face toward the sky. Against my skin, the sun feels different: fuller; orange-warm. Beneath me, the canoe sways in the shallow waves that slap against its hull. Safe behind the backs of my daughter and her lover, I sit without sight, drawn into the pattern of their voices, into the sounds of the river, the rocking of the boat. A rail of shadows flits across my eyelids. Is this what Michael sees right now—that rapid sequence of bars? Or does everything appear to him in shades of gray?
“Would you like your jacket?” Zoe asks Michael.
“No. This is good. The way it is.”
I squint. Trees divide the sphere of sun as it emerges and vanishes behind them.
We paddle for another half-hour before turning the canoe back. Waves catch us from the left as a motorboat passes, shift us toward the bank where a wooden rowboat, its green paint chipped, has been pulled into the marshy grass. Low and thin, the afternoon sun casts a slow path across the water as it takes on the sheen of pewter. A few streaks of light still flit across its surface, bounce off the tree stumps that rise from the river, their bottoms sodden, their tops bleached silver-gray. As we approach the lake, the water opens in front of us like a fan. For as long as I can, I follow the current with my eyes, reluctant to lose the river in the lake.
Michael takes a shower while Zoe and I sit in the breakfast nook, a bottle of red wine between us. It’s the first time since her arrival that we’ve been alone, and suddenly I don’t know what to say to her.
“Well?” She leans her elbows on the table, frames her face with her hands.
“He’s bright and funny and very attractive….”
“But?”
I know it would be better not to—still, I say it. “He won’t always be like this.”
A sudden bitterness darkens her eyes.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”
She pushes her right thumbnail beneath her left, clicks them back and forth. We sit silently, until she blurts, “You remembered that train … the color… finding it.”
“Yes…”
“You did not see it today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That train was still there for you today. Michael will remember things too.”
“It’s more than that, Zoe.”
“If you knew him —”
“He’ll need you. Far too much.”
“That should feel familiar, then.”
I see us skating on the frozen surface of the pond, see her sleeping on the sofa with her hands in fists, and feel the sum of my old needs spiral around me as if I were inside a child’s spin-top.
“I’m sorry.” My daughter’s hand shoots out, alights on my wrist, cold and weightless, pulls me back.
I shake my head, keep shaking it.
But she keeps holding on to my wrist.
“I didn’t know it was like that for you,” I say.
Michael comes from the bathroom, his hair still damp. After that, I’m never alone with Zoe, and when they get ready to leave in the morning, her embrace feels flimsy, rushed. Long after her car has vanished, I stand in my driveway, waving. A lean wind moves through the purple mums in my flower boxes. The sun of late summer has stretched deceptively long into autumn, and the sudden shift feels like winter. In my arms, the tightness is back, and I rub them as I walk back into the house, where I listen to Vivaldi’s Echo Concerto and brew a pot of ginseng tea that I forget to drink.
At noon, I drive to Spokane for a rehearsal. The concert is only three days away, and while we practice, I’m totally immersed in the music, but as soon as we finish, I’m back to worrying that I said all the wrong things to my daughter. I lock my cello inside my car, walk up the steps to the skywalks, a maze of glass tunnels that span the downtown streets between the second floors of stores. I buy a scarf for Zoe at The Bon, gloves for myself at Nordstrom’s.
As I head back out to the skywalks, the clouds are darkening, and the only bursts of color come from the pavement below me, where the juggler is flinging about two swords and a tin washbasin. His baggy pants are tucked into yellow rain boots, and he’s wearing his jester’s hat again, each tassel a different color. While most people rush past him, a few stop. I stand transfixed, my palms against the glass wall. Whenever he drops something, he smiles and reaches down and juggles once again, pulling items from his mess of other stuff—always two of one kind and one of another: two bowling pegs and one picture frame; or two lampshades and one iron skillet—an uneven swirl without grace. And without fear. Fear of being ridiculed, for one. Of being wounded. If I could describe him to Michael, I would start with the lightness the juggler evokes in me, and I would tell Zoe that I want to believe in faith and risk and a world where you can stand beneath the gray October sky and flash your own colors through the air like a magician.
For Their Own Survival
That second winter without his wife, Sam Fulton returned to the Mexican village at the tip of the Baja, where rock formations continued to throw themselves into the ocean as if the land refused to end.
“I’ll go crazy if you ever leave me,” Liz had told him there on the beach next to the amber cliffs the day they had arrived. High above them in the bright-blue sky three vultures had floated as if attached to kite strings, their V-shaped wings without motion, waiting in this isolation with unending patience—beauty, even—as they tricked the hot white sun into their wings and snagged it in their feathers until they glowed blood-red.
“I love you so much, I’ll go crazy if you ever leave me.”
It wasn’t the only time she’d made him promise he’d always be with her, but it was the time Sam kept coming back to whenever he tried to figure out why—after all her fears of losing him —she’d been the one to leave, after eleven years of marriage. The last thing they’d done together was the trip to Cabo San Lucas. It had been her idea to charter a fishing
boat the day before they returned to Chicago, and when she hooked a marlin, the fishing pole left bruises on the insides of her thighs.
She would have lost the huge fish if he hadn’t taken it for her and guided it through its last thrashings. In the water close to the boat, it looked iridescent and shining. It was different from any other fishing he’d done, far more exciting—like becoming a woman’s first lover. When he’d met Liz, it had taken her so long to give in to him: she’d kept slowing him down, and he’d had to start all over again as if advancing in loops, though always a little further ahead and more certain of her.
As he hauled the marlin from the water, its color drained until it looked almost black. With the help of the mate, he tied the huge fish to the back of the boat, where it hung, dark and slack, its long spike harmless. That night he had their catch fried at the palapa restaurant across from the harbor, but Liz ate only the beans and rice and spoonfuls of fresh salsa. They drank margaritas until their lips burned from the coarse salt on the rims of their glasses, and when he made love to her on the mattress he’d carried out onto the terrace of their room, she kept her eyes shut. Her entire body tasted of salt. Her skin felt hot from the sun, and though he touched her cautiously, his fingers left long, white traces that vanished after he raised his hands from her.
The rest of the marlin he had frozen and shipped back to Chicago, but they never broiled the fillets with slices of lime and cilantro leaves as he’d planned. The wrapped packages were still in their freezer when Liz told him she wanted to live alone.
“I’ll go crazy if I stay with you.”
He held up one hand to block those words that, ironically, had reversed upon themselves. “Not like this—you can’t say it like this.”
“I don’t know,” she said when he insisted on knowing why. “I don’t know, Sam.”
They used to do everything together: travel, hike, swim, take care of the garden and their two dogs. After they’d cooked gourmet dinners and gone for long walks, they’d often read aloud to one another—passages from biographies and travel journals—content in the house they’d designed and built on the side of a hill with a view of Lake Michigan. At times they congratulated themselves on their wise decision not to have children. “I’m glad we live in a time period,” he would say, “where this is an accepted choice for women.”