Naomi passed by the stacks of mammalian flesh cut into portions wrapped in tight plastic. She lingered at the fish counter to contemplate the blackness of the mussels, the glistening dislocated stripes of the mackerel, the rosy pinkness of the salmon fillets arrayed on the ice. Here were animals still with their eyes on, red snapper and Mediterranean black bass. In a tank of greenish water, lobsters swam with halting deliberation; she pursed her lips and gave a furtive salute, her fingers held like claws.
When her grocery cart got full, Naomi made her way back through the store. Slowly, purposively, every so often she returned something to the shelf where it belonged. In this manner, shopping and un-shopping almost equally, she kept her cart a little over half-full. By always seeming to be doing exactly what the other shoppers were doing she drew no attention to herself, even when she had been there most of the morning.
Toward the end of this time, Pindar was also in the supermarket, watching his daughter’s strange method of perpetual shopping. He had found her note on the kitchen table, saying that she was going for a walk and then to the market to pick up a few things.
When he spotted her in the store, he went back to the entrance and got an empty carriage, as this would allow him to observe and follow her without seeming like a stalker.
Wheeling his carriage through the store, Pindar couldn’t think of what to shop for; it was impossible to remember anything that he needed or wanted. Finally he took a couple of bottles of spring water in order not to seem like some crazy guy with an empty carriage and a head full of panic. It was expensive water, in dark blue bottles. But that tiny load seemed unnaturally Spartan, so he added an onion, a single can of tuna fish. Now he looked divorced. Or widowed. This terrified him. All he wanted was a certain consuming camouflage so that he could keep an eye on his daughter.
In the cereal aisle, Pindar watched as Naomi put a box of Froot Loops back on the shelf. Keeping a fair distance, he followed her to the soaps, where she returned the Palmolive dish detergent and the Cascade, taking a box of S.O.S scouring pads in exchange. She was absorbed, not in her shopping but in something more inner, and she did not see her father as he slowly trailed her through the store. He wondered if her mood was ending now, as her carriage was getting emptier. She looked as though she was gathering herself up for something, preparing to give or receive.
When Naomi had at last unburdened her carriage of all but a box of dark chocolates with an elephant on the cover, Pindar came up behind her and gently tapped her arm.
She turned to him. “Dad.” She smiled. “Land of plenty.” She swept her arm to indicate the well-stocked shelves. She seemed stronger after a night’s sleep. Her face, still covered with open scratches, showed no signs of healing.
“Sweetie. Shall I take you home? Have you got what you need?”
Naomi had gotten what she needed, actually, though she didn’t know how to explain to her father that what she had wanted was to be submersed in the bounty that is the American supermarket, a place she normally avoided. The impersonality, the anonymity, the luscious and disgusting excess—this was the way she had learned over the years to relocate herself after harrowing travels: to wander under the canned music facing the onslaught of the possible, fingering the redundancies of choice until she could stop listening to what was bothering her, in this case the sad smell of the hopeless babies in the Romanian orphanage. Instead, she remembered the boy in the countryside, walking his bony cow at the end of a rope, and the gentle way he asked her if she wanted to buy the cow’s bell.
“Is it time to go?” Naomi asked.
“It’s noon,” Pindar said. “Celia’s making lunch for us. Is there anything you crave?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Everything,” she clarified, smiling.
“Those chocolates?”
“Could you? I don’t have a cent on me.”
Later, after Pindar had driven Naomi home and she had gone upstairs, he and Celia stood in the kitchen beside the coffee machine, whose hissing sounds they were ignoring.
“Easily a couple of hours,” Pindar said. “Taking things down and putting them back.” He explained how Naomi hadn’t reshelved items she had just taken, but the things at the bottom of the carriage, which she had taken earlier.
“Did she put them in the right places?”
“As far as I could make out. Is that a good sign?” He paused then added, “It wasn’t that she was caressing the objects, but she could have been. What do we do? Do we ask her about it? What do we do about her face?”
“Do we know anyone who does tropical medicine?” Celia asked.
“It was Eastern Europe, my love, not the tropics.”
“I know. But it looks so raw and burning, her face. And she looks so thin. What if it’s leprosy? Do you think it’s leprosy?”
Celia called her own doctor and was terrified when she got an appointment for Naomi that same afternoon.
It wasn’t leprosy. Or not real leprosy, though that might show up in the future. It seemed to be a strep infection, from being scratched by babies at the orphanage. Naomi came home from the doctor with antibiotics, a regimen of vitamins and food. If she ate properly, the doctor predicted, her face would be healed in a month or six weeks, in time for her brother’s wedding in June. Or at least healed enough for makeup.
That evening, after dinner, curled up in the corner of the living room couch, Naomi told her parents that she had, in fact, spent three days and nights in Logan Airport before calling them, needing, she said, some halfway atmosphere, someplace that was neither here nor there. She had not been the only inhabitant, she said. Each night she saw a dozen others, some with bags, some without, most of them as friendly and wary as she was. She slept one night on a pew in the chapel, part of another night in the handicapped stall of one of the women’s restrooms in Terminal B. Most of the seats in the waiting areas had armrests—to keep people like herself from stretching out—but there were some where the armrests could be folded out of the way. If anyone asked her what she was doing, she simply said her evening flight had been canceled and she was waiting to fly out the next morning. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go home to her parents, she told them, it wasn’t that at all. Rather, it was that she thought she might break apart at the difference between the squalor of the orphanage and the cozy beauty of home. When the airport finally began to feel alien, she said, and when she noticed how acrid and gray and tasting of burnt kerosene the air was, then she knew it was time to pack up her things, time to go back home.
* * *
—
PLACING BRASS VASES of flowers along the midline of the set table in the garden, Pindar called out, “Celia! I have a sexual imbalance here.”
“Not now, darling. Now is not the moment.”
“No, no. On the table. I have black-eyed Susan, goatsbeard, and some early Queen Anne’s lace. We need another man. Do you think bachelor’s button would do? Is the jimsonweed in bloom?”
Celia saw the implications of choosing either a traditional bachelor’s flower or a fatally toxic, if lovely, member of the nightshade family. Walking over from the drinks table, she said, “You are a mischief and a nasty old goat. Pull yourself together. Besides, the Jimson of jimsonweed was not a man, it is a contraction of the word Jamestown.” She gave him a kiss. “I know you can find something.”
Pindar considered the two standing candelabras, which he had carried out from the dining room. It was too early to light the candles, but when else would he have a moment? He lit them and rekindled his pipe; he sucked on it sharply, then exhaled, surrounding himself with smoke. Up on the roof his daughter Sara was waving to him. Golden girl. Only she could crouch that way, utterly comfortable with her knees up to her ears, for hours at a time. Whenever she was up there she looked as though some joint or ligament had been put on backward. Perhaps it came from consorting with scorpions.
* * *
—
SARA HAD SPENT a lot of time with scorpions, though mostly in the abstract—that is, they were mostly dissected. As a biologist she had looked at how they grew and shed their skins, their cuticles. This was the wonderful ancient problem of any animal whose skin was also its skeleton: how to grow larger when you were covered with a solid coat of armor that could not grow. The solution for scorpions was the same as for insects, crabs, lobsters, and their kin. The answer, of course, lay in folding. The trick was to grow an intricately folded soft new skin just inside the old one, then to break and burst through that old armor, and finally to expand and smooth out the new covering, later hardening it. Many of the scorpions, when their new skin was hard enough, would glow with a brilliant blue or green fluorescence under ultraviolet light. The evolutionary advantage this might confer was not yet known, but it did make them easy to find in your room at night, if you had the right sort of flashlight.
Sara had loved this uncanny glowing of the scorpions, and much of her research involved studying their fluorescence. Their strange flexibility she found frightening but also captivating. Every move seemed part of a ritual dance.
Perhaps it was her Jesuit friend Dennis’s fault that soon after she got her doctorate she left the laboratory, left biology altogether. “Misspent was my youth,” she wrote him. “So horribly. Not to have read Milton, Chaucer, Ovid, or anyone else, versed only in the autistic jargon of science. Every night and afternoon in the lab, also every noon and morning, pouring toxic liquids back and forth. Hoping for flashes of beauty.”
The life of the scorpion—or of any other being—must be more, she thought, than the little gears and cogwheels of mechanisms that allowed it to happen. She felt that the mechanisms were preventing her from seeing the animal in itself, the True Scorpion. For too long she had been looking at the animal as an endpoint of processes, biology explained by chemistry explained by physics—the ever-smaller effects and causes embedded in one another like Russian dolls until some last tiny quarklike nubbin was all that could be imagined.
Sara knew other biologists found “beauty” in scientific explanations, but to her this was just beauty by analogy. Real beauty could be perceived only by the senses, never the intellect. What the intellect could see was only “as if.” When her friends exulted about the beauty in science or in a mathematical proof, they meant a sparseness, “economy” they called it, ideas pared down to the leanest, most miserly utilitarian form. But such a Spartan lack of ornamentation, such meanness, was almost never found in the beauty of the natural world. The beauty of nature, she felt, contained a generosity of uselessness. Unnecessary decoration, a wondrous too-muchness. When Sara recognized that thinking like this meant she was a lousy scientist, she saw that it was time to get away from the lab, to get away from killing things and breaking them down in order to see how they worked. It was time to pay attention to people, their stories, their ideas.
For a while she strutted about the laboratory with the clarity of her resolve to quit. Unable, though, to completely let go of the scorpions, she had written a piece for a popular science magazine about scorpions in the ancient world. Too soon, it seemed as though she were an authority on the topic. She wasn’t any sort of expert; it was just that few other people were writing on the subject. In any case, now she was out of the lab and had received a fellowship to write on scorpions in present-day folklore.
* * *
—
CELIA TOUCHED THE flapping tablecloth to quiet it. She liked having the long table out in the garden; its dislocated formality was inviting and puzzling. This pleased her, as did the way the cloth seemed to heave on its own every so often. But still some bother twinged; it had been insinuating itself all week into the spaces of her mind, darkening the edges of even the sweetest thoughts.
Celia, too, felt that their son, Adam, had become veiled with the approach of his wedding to Eliza. She thought this was probably as it should be. Couples on the eve of their wedding turn inward, she knew this, but she was sad that he had stopped sending his poems to Pindar and herself. She hoped it was because he was writing privately to Eliza, but she was not sure.
At sixty-one Celia Cohen found herself suddenly at the age when if she greeted friends only slightly older, she would find their skeletons grinning back at her. What, she would think, so soon? And she would wonder how much she had in common with those bony, blear-eyed faces. Her shoulders were rounded from years of joyful hunching over books, and she feared decay and breakage as well as her tendency toward all-over roundness, which led her to perform calisthenics every morning. If the day was fine she would also go into the woods and practice some once martial, but for her peaceful, art.
For the past year Celia had felt the need to test her memory, so she set herself the task of learning two lines of a poem every day. Of course she lost her keys, her glasses, but this seemed as much a part of the aging process as graying hair. She was not at all concerned with memory of things and where they hid themselves. It was memory of the written word she was after. She wondered if she was also forgetting two old lines a day. Or perhaps more. Was the outflow greater than the inflow? Or was it just a slow leak? She checked for brain failure due to age or tumors by examining all the senses: Could she still find wild strawberries in the woods? Could she tell one salvia from another by the feel of the fuzz on its leaves? Or taste the difference between a blackberry and a black raspberry? Could she still determine where an old book had been published by the smell of its ink? During the day her garden-calloused fingers would try to feel the wood grain of her desk, underneath all the papers stacked there. She would test herself in other ways, too, trying to see if she could remember the faces of students who wrote asking for letters of recommendation. This last was the hardest.
Whenever she could take the time from the English department, Celia would garden. At first she would resist, but then once she was down and dirty, perhaps because of the oxygen coming from the plants themselves, perhaps because she was dealing with the fecundity of the underworld and all its roots and thus the etymology of bloom, perhaps because it made her look forward with such radiant hope—she didn’t know what it was, but once she had started digging and planting she could not get herself to go back to the house until the light was gone. Most of the time she saw her garden as shaggy with wanting, weeds overgrown with their own delight. Occasionally, though, small corners of terrain or even single plants seemed to approach some ethereal ideal, as when one day a friend had left on her front porch an immense dahlia of impossible color, a sort of smoky rose gold, aureate.
* * *
—
IT WASN’T THAT Celia didn’t like dinner parties; she loved them. The emotional fields hovering among the guests—these stood out for her like strands of colored smoke. Not only the erotic forces, but all the other psychic currents she saw as neon strands of cat’s cradles, glowing as though they were external neurons, which—if one paid enough attention—one could untangle and weave into a narrative of the emotions. It was easy to do this about other people, especially strangers, but so hard to unravel the strands of oneself.
She loved parties, but she felt insufficient with all those lawyers coming to her house, inspecting. The floors were clean, everything glowed, but she didn’t know what they would be expecting. Did this mean they would now come over for Thanksgiving? And would she have to go to their Christmas festivities?
She would be correct to Philippa and Stephen, but she didn’t want to be implicated. Just because the young couple had connected, that was no reason for their parents to zipper up, one tribe to the other, and so on back through the generations. Such zippering, such sudden relatedness, was too abrupt. She knew that her thoughts were venomous and mean-spirited and that probably the Barlows didn’t want this zippering any more than she did. Yes, some sort of marriage ceremony needed to be invented where such mixing was stopped, a kidna
pping, say, followed by a single joining, with no spread or seepage back through the older generations. She saw that she was championing the idea of elopement.
* * *
—
SARA HADN’T REALLY told her parents much about her friend Dennis; nor had she talked of him to Naomi. But she had finally mentioned him to her brother a few weeks earlier. “Wait a bloody minute!” Adam had said. “You’ve been with this guy for a year and none of us have even glimpsed him? What’s going on? Is he married?”
“Nope.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing at all. I’m mad about him.”
“You’ve got to bring him, then. This means a lot to me. Will he come?”
“Do you mean to the dinner or the wedding?”
“Both.”
“I’ll ask.”
* * *
—
SARA’S FRIEND DENNIS Lombroso wasn’t married. He was a Jesuit priest. For a year she had been making clandestine visits to him in his cottage in Newton at the girls’ school where he lived and served as chaplain. She would drive her red Toyota across the river late at night and park under the old oak trees by the stone wall. Trying not to look furtive she would unlock the iron gate, whose rusted hinges she oiled from time to time. Then she would hurry through the chaplain’s garden with its disheveled roses and slip in through the kitchen door.
Early in the morning she would glide away, dressed but unshowered, still smelling of sex. Driving home to her apartment in Somerville just over the Cambridge line, she would wonder how many of those schoolgirls were sweet on young Father Dennis, with his Mediterranean skin, his green eyes, his clipped black beard.
The Garden Party Page 3