Wide Blue Yonder

by Jean Thompson

  I don’t know, sir.

  Well, I’ll tell you what I do know. I didn’t break it. Your mother didn’t break it. Frank says he didn’t break it. So that leaves you. What do you have to say about that?

  His knees went cold. There was something he was supposed to say. Only one something in the whole universe, and everthing else was fatal. He imagined that one right thing like the Holy Ghost, a bird circling away overhead out of reach. Daddy was waiting. He tried to think pure thoughts. He prayed that the bird would descend and light on his head and show him the way but his tongue couldn’t come up with even the taste of a right word. He didn’t break the bowl. At least he didn’t think he did. But he knew that wasn’t the right thing to say. If he said Yes, he did it, he could just take his punishment and get it over with.

  But wouldn’t that be a lie? And what if that was the trap that was waiting for him, telling a lie because it came out of your mouth so soft? Mamma looked at Daddy and Daddy hitched his pants up, getting impatient. Then the Holy Ghost flapped right down on him and he knew the answer was to convince himself he really and truly broke the bowl.

  It wasn’t that hard. He thought of all the ways it could have happened. He was trying to reach the raisin box and the bowl was in the way. Mamma told him to stay out of the raisins. Once he sneaked some when nobody was watching. And there were times he opened the cupboard doors and looked at the raisins, and plenty more times when he thought about looking at them. So it was easy to imagine how it might have happened, and from there to how it had happened. He saw the bowl from underneath, its smoothness and the lip or shelf that marked its rim. It looked a little like a flying saucer, if you were to see one from upside down. Then it wobbled and grew larger and slowly vibrated itself into the waiting air.

  I did it.

  What’s that, boy?

  I broke the bowl. I went to eat the raisins and I broke it. I’m very sorry, sir.

  He felt himself shining with white truth. He was dazzling. For just that one moment, he shone. There had to be a punishment now. But he was unafraid, clothed as he was in his new righteousness.

  Daddy spoke. So you disobeyed your mother.

  He didn’t like to think of it that way but he had to nod, yes.

  This bowl will never be whole again. It’s broken, just like your immortal soul.

  He sniveled a little imagining his poor soul, all sad and cracked.

  Now the difference between this bowl and you is that Jesus Christ has the power to restore you. If you let him. If you cast out pride and humbly repent. Do you want Jesus Christ to heal and cleanse you?

  Oh, he did. The bowl of his soul. He saw it rise up on white wings.

  Are you willing to sacrifice for Christ’s sake?

  Frank came in the front door from school, whistling. He looked around, the air went out of his whistling, and he went back out.

  It was a new question. Another something out there in the universe. But this time he knew what to say: Yes!

  So Daddy led him down to the basement. Mamma sang Bring Forth the Royal Diadem. They stretched him out on a long table and Daddy prayed as he drove the spikes through his hands. They raised him up on the cross and he looked into the whitest light. It made his head split with pain. He screamed and tried to get away from it. A hot thread burned from ear to ear and the water poured from him so his skin wept and his teeth melted. Daddy said Oh hallelujah hallelujah and heaven was descending

  But no. That was just the Treatment. It turned the inside of his head into blank whiteness and he knew he was leaving something out. There wasn’t one thing he could know for certain. Except the Weather, which was always there. So he sat in his usual place on the couch, hunched forward to watch the words scroll by like perfect clouds.

  What Went Ye Out into the Wilderness to See?

  Most of my work is with people who want to quit smoking or lose weight. That’s the bread and butter. Then there’s your compulsive habits: counting floor tiles, cracking knuckles, hair pulling. Plus a few more you don’t want to hear about. I do stutterers. And agoraphobics, folks who get nervous about leaving the house.”

  Elaine said, “How do you get the agoraphobics to come to your office?”

  “Well, the really serious cases, I’ll go see them. And we use tapes a lot.”

  She was somewhat distracted by the agoraphobics, the thought of them peering out from behind their shy curtains, but she soldiered on. “How about, ah, less specific problems?”

  The hypnotist—hypnotherapist, she reminded herself, he preferred that—was ready for the question. “Low self-esteem and assertiveness issues. Lack of focus. Goal-setting. Grieving.”

  Elaine stopped herself from nodding, and got down to business. “I want to be happy.”

  “Of course.” Waiting, visibly, for her to say more.

  “No, that’s really it. I want you to hypnotize me into being happy.”

  He was doing his professional best to understand. “What behaviors are preventing you from achieving happiness?”

  “None. There’s nothing in the world keeping me from being happy except me.”

  The hypnotist guy—she decided that was how she would think of him—considered this. He was a neat, slim young man, prematurely balding. There was something reassuring about the pale dome of his forehead. It was reminiscent of laboratories and operating rooms, of scientific industry and verifiable knowledge. Although his pleasant office was a marvel of indirect lighting, earth tones, and framed landscape photographs, wheat fields and ocean waves, chosen for their pretty, restfully vapid effect, Elaine supposed, she wasn’t ready to be lulled into any peaceful, prehypnotic mood. She felt anxious, and more than a little silly. She said, “I know you don’t dangle a gold watch in my face, at least I think I know that, but I hope you don’t mind my asking, what is it exactly that you do?”

  “I gradually relax you so that you lose that layer of conscious attitudes, defenses, and anxieties. Then I can speak directly to your mind. Don’t worry, you’ll be entirely aware the whole time. I won’t make you cluck like a chicken or anything.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But let me try and clarify. How do we define happiness, how do we quantify it? Say we undertake a course of therapy. How do we know if it’s been successful?”

  “I’m not sure,” Elaine admitted. “I don’t know if happiness is just the absence of unhappiness, or if it’s something more positive. And I suppose there’s a kind of continuum, from contentment through happiness to ecstasy. I’d settle for the middle of the spread. You know?” The hypnotist guy’s bald head stayed immobile. She tried again. “By any rational, objective standards, I have a good life. There are things I might wish were different, but honestly, I have nothing to complain about. I just want to turn some knob in my brain so that I can appreciate it without worrying that it’s not enough, or that some disaster’s going to come along and punish me for enjoying myself.”

  “If you feel you might be clinically depressed …”

  Elaine shook her head. “No. I’m discontented. I’m apprehensive. There’s a difference.”

  “All right. How does being discontented and apprehensive feel? Physically, I mean.”

  She considered this. “Dense. Slow. Droopy.”

  “So we need to speed you up some.”

  “You could throw in a little weight loss too, if you wanted,” said Elaine, trying to make a joke out of it. She was never going to admit to anyone that she was doing this.

  The hypnotist guy laughed. “Why don’t you close your eyes.”

  “What, right now?” She thought there should be more prelude or preparation or something. It was alarming.

  “Sure, right now. Give it a whirl.”

  With her eyes shut she felt even more ill at ease and unhypnotizable, on guard against whatever she irrationally imagined was about to attack. There was a space of silence filled with her own cautious breathing. Then another silence. Elaine was tempted to cheat and sneak a look. Then his v
oice crept into the silence and took everything over. She hadn’t remarked his voice as anything special before, but now it seemed enormous, as full of growling power as a car engine yet subtle as smoke.

  “I want you to lean back until your head rests against the cushion. Yes. Now some deep breaths, each one starting as far down as you can reach. And every time you let one out, I want you to feel yourself getting a little lighter. A little freer. Each breath a little slower. That’s good. And Elaine?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t try so hard.”

  From there he asked her to imagine herself walking down a long flight of stairs, and at every step she was to relax a little more. That was fine, that was the sort of thing Elaine expected. Nothing flashy. Relax her toes, her ankles, her knees, and so on. She kept thinking how normal she felt, how she was probably one of those people who couldn’t be hypnotized. Pelvis, ribcage, shoulders. The stairs led down through a kind of tunnel, arched with brick or stone, and at its end was a floating, green-gold light, indistinct but promising the rarest sort of beauty, a garden, perhaps. Or something less contained than a garden, some impossible storybook landscape whose forms and colors were as delicate and improbable as if they were made of blown glass. The colors washed into paler and paler shades, into white. That floating light was joy, and each step on the staircase brought you a little closer. The important thing was to realize that the staircase went on forever.

  “Elaine? You can open your eyes now.”

  She couldn’t at first. She had forgotten how. When she did open them there was a moment of disappointment so pure she could have wept, at being back in the normal world. The pretty office seemed harsh and wrong, or she herself was wrong, until some lens slipped back into place and she saw things as she always had.

  “How do you feel?”

  Elaine raised both hands and touched her face with her fingers. It felt cool. “All right. I guess I’m all right. Was that it? Was I hypnotized?”

  “Yes ma’am. I’d say you were.” His pale forehead nodded. He seemed pleased.

  “It wasn’t exactly what I expected. It was … Was that you talking the whole time? I wasn’t sure.”

  “That depends on what you heard.”

  The hypnotist guy smiled and picked up a brochure from his desk. “If you’d like to consider a complete course of treatments, this will give you information about fees and payment options.”

  She walked out into the ordinary afternoon, which either was no longer ordinary or else it never had been. Surely he couldn’t have hypnotized the whole world? There was an edge of almost fluorescent green to the trees where the late sunlight hit them. Since the heat had broken, it was now possible to stand outside without making immediate plans to get under cover. An invisible bird called from a tree, its voice a liquid question. An airplane passed overhead, as slow as any bee, arcing downward to land.

  When she started the car and attended to all its mechanical demands, gear shift, parking brake, accelerator, she had to do so consciously, as if she had been stripped of some bodily habit that allowed her to do such things without thinking. The Service Engine Soon light went on, winking at her like a joke she’d heard a dozen times and was still supposed to laugh at. Right then and there she decided she was going to trade the car in.

  Teeny had left a message on Elaine’s answering machine. This in itself was an unheard-of thing. And Teeny’s voice was strained and hesitant, even filtered through electricity: Would Elaine mind calling her? Soon?

  Perhaps something had happened to Frank, but no, she wouldn’t be on the A-list even for drastic news. She tried to think if she’d inadvertently offended them. There was always the Harvey situation, but that was hardly the sort of thing Teeny would get audibly distressed over.

  Teeny must have been expecting her because even her hello was abrupt. “Elaine, thank God. I was hoping you could stop by for a little while this afternoon.”

  “Is something wrong?” Elaine asked, concerned, but annoyed at all the drama.

  “Is Josie there?”

  “Yes, she’s in the shower. What about Josie?”

  “Oh, I’d really prefer to sit down with you. Just a little heart-to-heart. How’s two o’clock?”

  “You and Frank and me?”

  “Frank’s playing golf. This is just girl talk.”

  Teeny must have had one of her soap operas in mind, where people had nothing better to do than trek around having heavy conversations. What in the world had Josie done anyway, and why would Teeny care? Josie wasn’t going with them to Aspen, but they’d settled all that, hadn’t they? Had there been some kind of flare-up?

  As soon as Elaine agreed to see Teeny, she regretted it. It was Sunday and she’d planned on catching up on her bookkeeping. When Josie came slouching downstairs later, her hair sleek and wet, Elaine tried to gauge the chances of getting any information out of her. Josie responded to Elaine’s good morning with a noise that did not require her to open her mouth. She communed with the refrigerator for a time, snared an orange soda, and headed back upstairs.

  So Elaine dressed in her smartest black linen jacket and pants, hating that she was dressing up for Teeny, hating even more that Teeny would be decked out in something preposterous but four sizes smaller. She wondered if the hypnotist guy could help her with Teeny, like make her invisible. Simple posthypnotic suggestion.

  One hour, she told herself, backing out of the driveway. No, forty-five minutes, and she begrudged even that much. Frank and Teeny lived in Panther Hills, in the new house Frank had built to go along with his new life. Elaine would have liked to say the house was vulgar but in fact it was a very nice house, she would have liked to live there herself if there weren’t places like India in the world, or, more to the point, if she were someone who could ignore the existence of places like India.

  Frank employed a landscaping service so that laborers came out to plant and water and tend to the weeping cherry and daylilies and ornamental grasses. The house itself was low and expansive. The front door was a marvel of inlaid wood and asymmetrical glass. The doorbell had a sound like a Buddhist temple gong. Elaine listened to it echo through the vasty corridors of the game room, sunroom, master suite with full-size fireplace, and so on. Elaine had only come here to deposit Josie or pick her up, back when Josie was making her increasingly reluctant weekend visits. Once, when Frank wasn’t home, Teeny had given her a tour, and Elaine had admired the hand-painted Portuguese tile, granite slab kitchen countertops, had even been granted a peek at the enormous, pilow-decked, salmon-and-cream California king bed where Teeny and Frank disported themselves. She had liked Teeny better for showing her the bed, for not even thinking there was anything indelicate about doing so.

  Elaine rang the bell again and the echoes died away. Just as she was about to leave, annoyed, the door opened and Teeny, already talking before she was visible, said, “Sorry sorry sorry, I was all the way back in the laundry room,” as if that was a reasonable place to be when you were expecting guests, then poked her head around the door and waved Elaine inside.

  “Thanks so much for coming.” Teeny’s tone was serious, even hushed. Some of her tawny hair was clipped into two peculiar, asymmetrical tufts, one over her left eyebrow, one over her right ear. She was wearing a lime green tank top and a short white pleated skirt, red-and-green-striped jute sandals. She resembled something Elaine couldn’t quite put a name to. A tennis-playing parrot, maybe. “Would you like a drink? I’ve got stuff for margaritas.”

  Elaine said No thank you, and Teeny offered iced tea, white wine, Kahlúa, milk, diet Sprite. “Iced tea,” said Elaine, resigning herself to raising a glass with Teeny. Teeny led her to one of the rooms they’d run out of names for. Gallery? Porchette? Garden nook? It was furnished with pale green wicker and glass-topped tables and Elaine took a seat opposite one of Frank’s discarded beige polo shirts, which she eyed mistrustfully, as if it might be capable of speech. Beyond the French doors was the pool, with its hallucinatory blue
water, and Frank’s enormous gas grill, suitable for preparing haunches of beef. Elaine wondered if they entertained much. Frank had never been the entertaining type.

  Teeny returned with the iced tea on a tray, whisked the shirt away with an apologetic fuss, and waited until Elaine had raised her drink to say, “You know Josie was over here last night.”

  Elaine said she wasn’t aware of that. Goddamn the girl.

  “Oh, yes. She asked if there was a time she and a couple of her girlfriends could use the pool without disturbing us. And since we were going to Joliet with the Rhineharts to the riverboat casino, we said sure, come on over. Although Frank would appreciate it if Josie wanted to spend some time with him.”

  “Of course,” Elaine murmured, bracing herself for whatever was to come. But Josie was safe at home. The house was still standing. What, then?

  “So she came over to get the house key and the security code and she was as sweet as pie, and promised they wouldn’t make any sort of mess, or get into the liquor, and I have to say she was as good as her word. We’d left some Cokes and chips out for them, and they washed the glasses and put the garbage away and hung up the towels. But when we got home, and were getting ready for bed, I turned the covers down and there was no bottom sheet on the mattress.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Elaine, feeling grateful, mostly. She’d been expecting something like stolen jewelry.

  “I found the sheet in the dryer, And I know if it was my daughter having some kind of lesbian affair, I would definitely want to hear about it.”

  Elaine didn’t laugh because there wasn’t anyone to laugh along with her. One-on-one against Teeny’s belligerent seriousness, she wasn’t sure she’d prevail. “Did you tell Frank any of this?”

  “Oh Lord no. I had to pretend the housekeeper messed up.”

  “You know it’s possible it wasn’t a girl she had over here, but some boy. In fact it’s more than likely. I’m sorry about the sheets.”

  Teeny’s face pulled in two directions, like her sprouting hair, relief and indignation. “A boy?”