by Lydia Millet
There were allusions to Jainism and to African faiths—Àtúnwá, I was even able to decipher: a Yoruba belief in the rebirth of the ancestors.
KAY OFFERED to babysit Lena tonight while I went to the café to grab some dinner, to give me time out of the room. Lena was already sleeping when I got back after the meal and Kay and I talked in hushed tones, standing near the doorway.
She told me she was a med student and volunteered in a neonatal intensive care unit. There, she said, one of her tasks was “cuddling”—their name for holding babies, just as Lena had said. These were sick babies, some born without a chance of lasting, and they liked the touch of skin. Incubators and other machines weren’t enough.
“My shift was late-night,” she said. “You know, when the mothers were sleeping. Or some of the NICU babies didn’t have mothers who could hold them, they’d be addicts or occasionally they’d have died in childbirth.”
She’d hold one of these fragile infants and her next shift, if the infant had gone, she never followed up—it was the policy and she tried to observe it. But this part of her work had proved too much for her. Eventually it had driven her to antidepressants that didn’t work and she’d spun out and taken a leave of absence.
She was unfit to be a doctor, she said, shaking her head, but she’d wanted to be a doctor all her life.
“I don’t have much longer to decide, the program will give my place to someone else,” she said, and looked down at the floor to hide the fact that her eyes were filling.
She’s just a girl, I thought with a pang, grown up thin and sad. I wondered where her parents were, if they knew how miserable she was. Since I had Lena I see my own child in any young woman; before that they were only adults, but now they’re former children.
How did a young girl come to be alone in a cold motel, I thought, a row of rooms, because she was deemed mature enough? Not long ago she’d lived safely, I imagined, in her parents’ home, and now here she was, wretched. Alone.
Not everyone, really hardly anyone, is suited to the job of constant dying babies, I said to her as gently as I could. Most doctors wouldn’t be equal to that particular task … she nodded but I could tell she’d heard this before and it was useless to her, though she was too polite to say so.
I felt low after she went away and curled up next to my daughter in her bed.
DURING LENA’S BOUT with the flu I was more solitary with my thoughts than I am usually, and I don’t think it was healthy. I started to wonder if Ned did know where we were, if he’d known for ages, if I’d been wrong to think we were on our own the whole time. I felt more and more paranoid and I made up theories—he was watching us using satellites and GPS, he’d turned my laptop camera into a spy device.
In the movies it was easy.
The paranoia’s still with me, exaggerated and ridiculous as paranoia has to be. I live alongside it the way I would an unpredictable roommate. A suspicion rises that we’re not as far away from him as I assumed we were, that Ned hovers unseen. Then I reassure myself, which works mildly: the nervousness subsides, until it rises again.
He’s always known my parents’ telephone number—it’s the same number they’ve had since I was a child, I say to myself. So what if he called while Lena and I were there? It was Thanksgiving and I knew he might call, or worse. Our material circumstances haven’t changed, I tell myself, I have no real evidence of his proximity here at the motel.
It’s only that his voice—a warm South Carolina drawl that’s alluring until you detect the insincere overtone—and his manipulative conversation with my mother have infected me, exactly as he intended. It’s me realizing, hearing that voice for the first time in two years, that I’ve gone from what I thought was love to neutrality to dislike to open hostility. I’m contaminated by the discord between loathing Ned now and once having adored him: I remember my adoration acutely and wince. I don’t know how much is shame and how much is confusion. My former, deluded self was a loose construction of poorly angled mirrors and blind spots, I can see that now.
But Lena’s better. She woke up smiling and full of energy yesterday morning with no fever, and we’ve started lessons again. I’m relieved but out of sorts anyway, because besides my paranoia about Ned I’m also grappling to understand the staying of the guests.
In Lena’s and my case I know why we’re lying low. We have two scarce commodities: disposable income and my willingness to spend it on a dingy motel in Maine in December. I hold my willingness to pay for this cold privilege to be an idiosyncratic feature. But here are the other guests, also apparently willing and able to pay and stay.
They can’t all be in hiding from estranged husbands; they can’t all be, say, drug dealers on the lam. And even if they are all friends or relations of Don’s, that fails to fully explain their presence, short of a simultaneous eviction from their homes. It’s disorienting and is preoccupying me. Technically it’s none of my business, though, and I’m reluctant to broach the subject with Don.
And the college drug dealer with the five o’clock shadow has been making overtures to Kay. He approached her in the café this morning and offered small talk about genres of orange juice.
“Who likes the kind with orange pulp?” he asked. “Where are these orange pulp drinkers? I don’t want to drink the pulp. Do you want to drink the pulp?”
There was a certain expectant force to his approach that I recognized with curiosity. Pick-up lines have changed since the advent of Seinfeld; now they often take the form of one person asking another about a mundane detail, a baffling social or consumer habit. Maybe the idea is to forge an alliance in the face of seemingly senseless choices made by others. Anyway Kay shrugged at the orange-juice pulp opener, but she smiled at him.
Later she told me he isn’t a college drug dealer but a guy who makes and spends fortunes selling Hollywood movies to foreign markets. His youth combined with his skill in this realm makes him a prodigy at profit, a producer or studio executive or other dealmaker, I can’t recall the title she gave me. So he is rich, but not aimless or deranged, and his wealth, combined with the youth and good looks, makes it even more unlikely that The Wind and Pines would find itself by chance at the top of his list of winter vacation spots.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked her. “I mean, why here?”
I wanted to ask, Why are any of us here? Why here? But it was too pointed.
“Not sure,” she said, as though it was all the same where he was.
“Well, how about you?” I asked. “I don’t mean why aren’t you in Boston, I understand that. I mean how did you end up at this motel?”
Again she looked indifferent to the question but passingly curious about why it had been asked, the way a person might look if you asked them, with intense and focused interest, where they bought their toothpaste.
“I was here last summer,” she said, flipping through a magazine about trout. “I came back for the rest. It’s restful. You know. And Don’s such a nice guy. Isn’t he?”
“Don’s great. But last summer,” I persisted—because it was gnawing at me, the casual presence of everyone, their unlikely presence, their stubborn persistence—“how’d you find it in the first place?”
“Just the website,” she said, and put down the trout magazine in favor of a yellowing copy of Cat Fancy.
As she reached for it one of her long sleeves rode up, and I saw a red scar along the wrist.
BURKE CAME TO HELP with Lena’s lessons; he’s her tutor in botany. They planted seeds in a doll-sized greenhouse we put together from a kit, Burke bent over beside her, avuncular and kindly. The greenhouse has rows of light-green pots maybe two inches in diameter, a line of small lightbulbs and transparent plastic walls. It sits on our windowsill.
Lena had said she wanted to grow a beanstalk, so Burke brought her several kinds of beans to plant. He cautioned her the stalk might not be large enough to climb on; it might not reach the sky. She nodded and told him that was just as well, because she did
n’t want to meet a giant or a giantess, she didn’t want to hear a cannibal giant say “Fee, fi, fo, fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman.”
She isn’t an Englishman, she said to Burke, but she still thought the giant might want her, even if she’s a girl and an American. She didn’t want to hear that giant talk about smelling blood.
Burke patted her head.
“I promise, sweetie,” he said, “there won’t be any giants speaking to you from this beanstalk.”
As soon as he said it his face went pale. He stood there for a few seconds and sat down heavily on my bed, leaned over and stuck his head between his knees.
I was taken aback—Burke had seemed more solid and self-assured lately, seemed to require less comforting.
“Are you OK?” I asked, leaning over him, laying my hand against his back and taking it off self-consciously.
He looked up and nodded.
“Sorry,” he said. “Panic-attack type … sorry. I’m fine. Heading back to my room.”
Lena cocked her head, confused; I watched the door close behind him.
“Here,” I said, picking up a library picture book on plants, “let’s read this part about how seeds germinate. Most seeds contain an embryo and food package …”
IT OCCURRED TO ME, reading about the transmigration of souls, that my early assumption of some kind of nonhuman power or supernatural omniscience had been impressively unfounded. It might have been just a person’s thoughts that had got loose, the memories or knowledge base of, say, some overeducated, possibly unhinged individual whose stream of consciousness flowed along carrying the debris of a lifetime. Could be that Lena caught the ruminations of a scientist or scholar.
Maybe this is a ghost story after all.
Or maybe the information that’s now carried by so many frequencies just caught in her as it passed, lodged in her body—the live feed of a humble taxpayer somewhere, erudite but alive. Maybe some unseen field around my infant simply filtered particles from the immense cloud of content carried by those millions of waves that pass through us all the time.
THE SISTERS FROM Vermont, it turns out, aren’t sisters from Vermont: I’m bad at pegging guests’ identities. Their teeth aren’t even protruding, just large and blocky, and they’re cousins from somewhere on the mid-Atlantic coast near Baltimore. Both of them are named Linda, a name that’s common in their extended family; they’re in their early fifties, friendly, good-natured and hearty. One is an administrator at a university while the other is retired from her career at a famous aquarium in Florida where marine animals do tricks for crowds.
When the Lindas went to town for groceries today we hitched a ride with them. They dropped us off at the library so Lena could exchange her picture books—one of which is too young for her, about a bear who’s a splendid friend, the other of which turned out to feature cows rising in armed revolt. (They hold roughly drawn Uzis in their hooves; this puzzled Lena’s literal mind due to the cows’ lack of opposable thumbs.) To answer the question of the guests who don’t leave I have to be more outgoing than I have been until now, so I’m trying.
The Lindas, being friendly, are helpful in this chore. Big Linda, as Lena calls her, told us about someone she knew who was bitten by a bull sea lion. “Right on the keester, kiddo. And let me tell you it made a mighty broad target,” she chortled. She told Lena that performing seals at zoos and aquariums are not seals at all but sea lions; that some sea lions work for the U.S. Navy, finding things in the ocean; and that male sea lions can be four times the size of the females—weighing, put in the other Linda, up to one thousand pounds. That’s half a ton.
Lena calls the other one Main Linda because she met her first. Main Linda goes swimming in very cold water, Lena said to me, once every year to help raise money for the Special Olympics. Lena’s resolved to join her in one of these polar bear plunges, as she calls them. I have to restrain her from practicing.
The Lindas have embraced their nicknames.
When the two of us finished at the library we walked over to the local diner to have lunch. A beefy middle-aged man sat down beside us at the counter—beside Lena, I should say, with me on her other side. He ordered a Reuben, introduced himself as John and proceeded to engage her in a conversation about her gold and silver metallic markers. He was inoffensive, on the face of it, a neighborly fellow patron, yet I thought I detected something off-color in his expression as he glanced over the top of her head at me, a hint of a leer, some glint of beady self-interest.
So I hurried Lena at her lunch a bit. We shared a piece of sickly-sweet cherry pie for dessert, leaving bright jelly smears on the plate. Then we left, with the beefy man smiling after us as the door swung to.
Big Linda was waiting for us in her bulky car; Main Linda, who was buying birdseed in the hardware store down the block, remained to be picked up.
“Big Linda?” said Lena hesitantly, as we pulled away from the curb. “Do sea lions have really sharp teeth?”
While we waited in the car again, this time outside the hardware store, the two of them discussed sea lion dentition, a subject that was, to me, of limited interest. I sank into the warm seat in a half-dream, full of the sickly-sweet pie, grown even more sickly in retrospect, and mused on my attraction to the town’s librarian, who seems out of place here. He’s good-looking; his skin is a coffee shade but the geometry of his face seems less African than Eastern, maybe Malaysian or Indian, I don’t know. It’s noteworthy mostly because there aren’t too many colorful immigrants in this part of Maine—in some parts there are Somalis and Asians but around here most everyone I’ve seen is plain old white.
When Mainers rise up against immigration it’s often been Canadians they accuse of stealing jobs; once Maine loggers blockaded the Canadian border.
I stared out the window, which was fogged up and yielded no defined shapes, only hazy panels of white and gray. I realized I was thinking of sex, of the idea of sex or rather, to be precise, the idea of no sex—no sex at all. I mulled over my asexual existence as a mother, gazing at the foggy window, mulled over the asexual existence of many mothers, whose bodies, formerly toasted politely as sex objects when not worshiped outright, had been diverted from the sexual to the post-sexual. In the natural plumpness of motherhood they were summarily dropped by male society like so much fast-food detritus in a mall food court.
I wondered if it was impossible that I would ever be a sex object again, if I should embrace that impossibility or try to reclaim my status as a sex object—by, say, enrolling in pole-dancing classes as one of my old college friends had done after her divorce, enacting a middle-aged crypto-feminist stripper fantasy that seemed to keep her entertained.
I decided I wouldn’t enroll in pole-dancing classes.
After a minute along those lines I gave up thinking. As I swiped at the condensation on the car window I caught sight of the beefy man, John, walking toward us down the sidewalk from the diner. A light snow had just begun to fall and his slab of pink face was a blur, so I couldn’t tell if the small blue eyes were pointed in our direction; before the blur resolved he turned and disappeared through a door.
The falling snow made me want to shore us up snugly for the winter and brought a pang of homesickness for our house in Alaska, which had always been more mine and Lena’s than Ned’s, for all the time he never spent there. Ned should have gone, I thought, Ned should have left.
But I myself had chosen otherwise, no one had chosen my course of action for me, and so Ned had not left the house—rather I was the one who fled. I forsook my existence, my local friends, the belongings I’d slowly and carefully amassed over the years of my life up till then, most of which would mean nothing to him … I left it all, except for some file cabinets of photos and documents, a few boxes of books and a handful of childhood keepsakes I’d stowed in a small storage unit. I’d given up everything to keep Lena close to me and get us clear: nothing else had mattered.
This was still true, I reflected, still perfectly tru
e, my intent remained the same, it was my decisions that were questionable.
In our old house in suburban Anchorage—a city where every street was suburban except three or four downtown blocks—I’d kept us warm through several Alaska winters, Lena and myself, I’d cooked soup and stews and lasagna and other hearty foods in a kitchen shining with copper pots and brimming with heat … I’d loved it there, I’d arranged all the spaces exactly the way I wanted them. It had been a golden burrow.
All we had now was a small microwave, its walls cool and thin. People we hardly knew, though they were nice enough. The motel’s walls were thin too. I had no solid walls, I thought. Would a wind rise around us this winter?
A wind would rise, I could feel it already, rise off the gray ocean and howl at the thin motel walls.
And then there was my parents’ home, far nearer than the house in Anchorage, with its solid brick, wooden floors, and soft throw rugs, vines dormant on their trellises till spring. My mother would welcome us, I thought, if only I could shake this phobia of Ned, if only I could just face Ned and stand up to Ned, if I was willing to call Ned’s bluff.
Instead we were living in a room like a cardboard box, with no source of warmth except the wall heater. We were socked in, I thought, perched on the rim of the frigid Atlantic—unknown in a group of other itinerants passing through, their lives as opaque to us as ours must be to them.
This cold, flimsy box was where my irrational impulses had brought us, I thought, my formless certainties.
I HEARD THE YOUNG mogul pacing along the walkway outside the rooms this evening, pacing and talking on his cell phone. Lena was sitting in the bathtub blowing bubbles—she luxuriates in long baths, though without nagging she doesn’t bother to ply a washcloth—and I was reading a magazine in one of our two armchairs, the bathroom door cracked open between us. We’d had dinner early because of her bedtime, but most of the other guests were at the café.