Clara at the Edge

by Maryl Jo Fox

  “Better than nothing,” Scotty mutters. He takes out his cell phone to call the sheriff before he realizes he needs more information. He puts it away.

  Frank is angry. “They weren’t very smart. It’s broad daylight. Who were they, anyway?”

  “A guy, a girl,” Clara is weary. “Two lost kids who needed money. Dawson somebody, Edie Porter.”

  Scotty looks hard at her. “Describe them.” She gives him the basics. He stares. “Good God! I’ve seen them in the casino. Just the other day, security pointed out a guy named Dawson who had a little con going at the blackjack table, but it fizzled. Dawson Barth—that’s it.” He claps his hand to his forehead. “I should’ve run them both out of town!”

  “I’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.” Clara’s voice is hollow.

  The fire truck shrieks as it comes closer.

  Frank is suddenly still. “The girl sounds like the one who got drawn into our skit last night. Bleached hair, body hardware, minimum clothes . . .” He pales.

  “That’s her.”

  An awkward silence falls over the group. Dimly Clara stares at Frank, who stares at Stella, who stares at Scotty. Stella slowly sets her fire extinguisher on the ground and brings her hands to her head, as if warding off a blow, as if finally her form of theater has yielded a result she would never have asked for.

  Frank stares at his mother. “For Christ’s sake, I can’t believe it.”

  A motley group arrives pell-mell from Desert Dan’s, having seen the fleeing car. Some guy says, “Wyoming plates, license 1-36-542-J. Heading south. Need any help?”

  “No thanks, we can manage,” Frank thanks them profusely The strangers head back to Desert Dan’s. Scotty writes down the license number.

  Clara lifts her head. “Wyoming plates. Yes.”

  Now Scotty can call the sheriff. Still unnerved, Frank glances helplessly from his mother to Stella to Scotty.

  Stella is moved by Clara’s silent confusion, sitting there on the ground, looking blankly out at the highway. The fire truck arrives. Firemen easily kill the lingering flames and smoke. The embers sizzle. Quietly, Stella asks one of the two firemen if he could look in Clara’s closet for any usable clothes.

  Clara adds in a small voice, “Other closets too.”

  The burly fireman soon comes out with a second pair of sneakers and a few changes of stinky, smoky clothes. “You’re lucky,” he says. Stella gratefully accepts the bundle. She will take it to the Laundromat. As they are leaving, the fireman says, “Looks like the arsonists ran out of fuel. You’ve still got your kitchen.” Clara looks at him, not comprehending.

  Frank takes Scotty aside, then squats beside his mother. “OK Mom, you’re welcome to stay at Scotty’s for as long as you want. He’s got lots of room.”

  Scotty says, “Sure thing, Clara.”

  Clara, frightened by this new development, looks uncertainly at her son.

  “It’s OK, Mother. You’ll be comfortable there. I’ll be there as much as I can. Scotty too, he’ll be there.”

  She nods, dazed.

  “We’ll take care of you, sweetheart.” Stella helps Clara stand, keeps her arm around her.

  The sheriff arrives. He talks quietly, first to Frank, then to Clara. She looks frightened of the sheriff, watches him carefully and, when it’s her turn, whispers something to him that makes the man look sharply at her. “Don’t worry, ma’am. We’ll do our best.” He drives off. They watch him go.

  After an awkward silence, everyone slowly shuffles away from the devastation, staying close together. Clara is the last to turn away, grasping her purse and her Greenpeace mug. She buries her face against Frank’s shoulder, refusing to look back at the ruins as they walk to his trailer cab parked in the Desert Dan’s parking lot. Frank drives his mother the short distance to Scotty’s. Stella and Scotty follow in Scotty’s car.

  Once they’re all inside, Stella says, “Let’s get that awful gas smell off you, dear.” Her voice is quiet. She leads Clara down the hall to one of Scotty’s bathrooms.

  Clara is momentarily stunned. The plumbing works! Hot water comes from the tap! No bottled water. Two washbowls. No camp toilet. Room to move around.

  Stella will take Clara’s canvas shoes and her gas-marred clothes to the Laundromat near her mobile home. Gently she helps Clara undress. Her movements are capable and unobtrusive. Clara is grateful, as she’s unsteady now, the shock of events finally hitting her.

  “Are you sure you’ll be OK?” Stella asks, unsure whether to leave her alone in the bathroom.

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Clara tries to sound brusque. In truth, she wants some time alone to absorb what’s happened. Soon after Stella closes the bathroom door, she is overcome with quiet sobs.

  Stella has lingered outside the door to hear just such sounds. She knows Clara needs her privacy now. To Frank’s and Scotty’s concerned expressions as they sit in Scotty’s barren living room, she mouths, “It’s OK.”

  Weeping, naked, Clara stands shivering in the shower, though the water is warm, almost hot. She scrubs hard with Scotty’s Dial soap and Head & Shoulders shampoo, inhaling the smell of these unfamiliar products deep in her lungs. The wasps! she thinks, panicked. They won’t get near me with these foreign smells. Where’s the Ivory soap and Prell? She feels powerless and confused. Where are my wasps? Where’s the purple wasp?

  Frank joins Scotty, who sits motionless on the couch. Stella puts Clara’s smelly clothes outside in a shopping bag, ready for the Laundromat, along with the other clothes the firemen saved. The open door allows two escaped wasps to come back in, buzzing loudly above the armchair, where Clara, now deodorized and squeaky clean but still shivering, has planted herself, wrapped in a light blanket. She’s wearing a pajama top of Scotty’s that hangs to her knees. At least two came back, she whispers to herself. Scotty and Frank are too distracted at first to notice the wasps, and when they do, just look blankly at each other and say nothing. The four wasps that stayed during the melee buzz around her head like a wobbly fan. None come close. They hate Dial and Head & Shoulders. Stinky stinky. She looks around. Six out of sixteen. They’ve all flown away, my wasps and my house. The purple wasp vanished too. She didn’t defend the house. She just flew away.

  She’s on the verge of tears. The purple wasp tapped on everyone’s wings separately, like Morse code. I saw her. And the wasps did nothing. They let those kids burn down my house. She pauses. Did the purple wasp tell the wasps to let the house go? Startled by this thought, blood rushes to her head and her face grows hot. She bursts into tears and is immediately embarrassed. Frank, Scotty, and Stella look at each other, then at her.

  Tonelessly, she says, “Frank, could you please bait the beef jerky jars with sugar water and set them outside? I’ve got to get the wasps back—if I can.” Her voice trails off. She hasn’t yet grasped that the jars would have exploded in the heat of the fire.

  “We’ve got you covered, sweetheart,” Stella says, nodding to Frank. He heads over to Desert Dan’s for some jars.

  Sweaty and pale, Scotty is stricken by his failure to run Dawson out of town. All he can do is putter around and smooth couch pillows. He asks if Stella needs help in the kitchen. She is focused and intent and doesn’t need any help, thank you very much. Scotty falls in a heap on the couch.

  Frank returns with two big olive jars, sets them up with sugar water, and puts the jars out in Scotty’s backyard. Grimacing at this unaccustomed sight on his tidy lawn, Scotty needs to retreat to his office to calm himself, rest in quiet. Gallantly he kisses Clara’s hand. “Make yourself at home, Clara,” he says. “Anything you want.” She thanks him, her eyes filling again as he shuts the door.

  “Such a sweet man,” she says to no one in particular.

  Frank knows that Scotty is not well, but this is no time to talk to his mother about it. He can barely face it himself. Scotty still won’t see a doctor. Frank sits with Clara in the living room while Stella heats canned soup and makes grilled cheese sa
ndwiches. Still stunned by the destruction, he studies his boots. “I wonder what they took,” he says.

  Her eyes are blank. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll have to wait a day or so before we can go through the ashes.”

  She looks dully at him. An awkward silence follows, and then she decides to tell him about the earlier screen-slashing incident.

  He listens somberly, leaning forward, elbows on his thighs. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Mother?”

  “I thought I could handle it. I didn’t want to bother you. Besides, he didn’t hurt me. He ran away when I told him to get out.”

  “That’s crazy talk, and you know it. He invaded your house and might have hurt you. For God’s sake, Mother, any harassment of a woman your age calls for strong action. Do you think you’re some kind of superwoman? Why open yourself to a random screwball? And this is the same guy who just burned down your house?” He shakes his head in dismay. He should have been with her! He should have been protecting his mother!

  She flares. “But he’s throwing his life away. He has no family. And his girlfriend is just as bad off. Her father killed her mother and ran off when she was just a kid. Her uncle told me about it. Both those kids are going to the trash heap if nobody steps in.”

  Stella stays in the kitchen, clattering dishes around.

  Frank speaks quietly. “This guy’s got to change his own life, Mother. The girlfriend too. You can’t do it for them. No one can change another person’s life. We have to do it by ourselves.” He sighs. “They sound like the students you used to take on. All those parent conferences, phone calls, weekend visits with them. Sometimes I thought you cared more about them than us.” He bites his lip. Bad timing.

  Her mind careens away from his words. “That’s utter nonsense,” she snaps. “This young man never even had a mother. She abandoned him and dreadful things happened to him.”

  He’s exasperated. “So, you think you can sweep into his life when he’s what—thirty?—and be his mom? His grandmother? For the young woman too? Really, Mother, you should think about that.”

  Clara’s exhausted. She’s in no mood to continue this talk. Warmed by the blanket, she leans back in the armchair and closes her eyes, effectively ending the discussion. From the kitchen, Stella senses a truce, or stalemate, and quietly sets out steaming bowls of Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches on TV trays. They sit huddled together in the living room. Conversation lags.

  Stella quietly washes the dishes, comes back to the living room, drying her hands with the dishtowel. “I’ve got to go,” she says to Frank. “My shift is starting. Your mother needs some rest.” She leans down to hug Clara, who hasn’t moved from Scotty’s armchair.

  Clara fondly touches Stella’s cheek. “Thanks for all your help.”

  Frank and Stella step outside for a minute. They at least need to touch base, after last night’s painful postmortem. She stands looking at the ground. He studies the ants still scurrying in circles. Silently, he bends down to kiss her cheek. She lifts her eyes to his. “So, where do we stand?”

  “This is a weird time to talk, but I’ll just tell you. I’m not cut out to be a leading man for you, babe. That’s the long and short of it. For your plays, you need to count me out.”

  She flushes, looking down. “What about otherwise?” she says in a thickened voice.

  “Otherwise, I’m your man. If you want me.”

  She throws her arms around him. “Is that all? Oh, I’m so relieved. I thought . . . I thought . . .”

  “You thought wrong.”

  They fiercely embrace, trying to be quiet. When he returns, his hair is tousled, lipstick smudges his mouth.

  Clara smiles up at him. “She’s a lovely girl.”

  Frank and his mother sit together on the couch, not needing to talk. They listen to scratchy Puccini on the Salt Lake station she finds on Scotty’s radio. Soon she closes her eyes and says she’s tired. He leads her to the guest bedroom, finds a light blanket for her. Later he stretches out on the couch.

  Her sleep is addled with dreams.

  In a tight black cloud, the lost wasps surge through the broken window and land on her head, full of surly threats. “What do you want?” she cries.

  “Open your eyes, or we will sting your eyeballs,” they say. “Open your mouth, or we will enter that long canal that begins in your throat and ends at your anus. Quit your stupid delays, or we will crawl inside your nose.”

  “I won’t let you do any of these things,” she cries. “What do you want from me?”

  “Stop your sniveling and turn to your son. Open the Heartbreak Room in your head that contains Samantha and your son, and just deal with it. These things are why you came to the desert, foolish woman. We don’t have forever.”

  In terror, she wakes. “Frank!” she yells. Stumbling over his boots, he comes running from the living room. She stands trembling by the bed, batting away nonexistent wasps. He puts his arms around her, his strong heart pounding against her ear. She embraces him with her small, thin arms. They stand like that for some time in the dark, saying nothing. He feels her frail bones, her fluttering heart. She feels his reassuring bulk. How long has it been since anyone has embraced her like this, since she has embraced her own son? Forever.

  “Oh, Frank, I’ve missed you so.”

  “I’ve missed you too, Mother.”

  The next morning, Frank is up before she is. Scotty did not come home. Stella has put Clara’s sack of clean laundry on the back porch. Frank has made coffee, toasted an English muffin for her, lathered it with peach jam, bought her a new Cran-Apple juice and cottage cheese for lunch. He’s got his hard-boiled eggs and toast. A halo of the six loyal wasps circles her head as she leaves the bathroom. He smiles. She looks like a tottering queen with the agitated creatures wobbling around her.

  “What are you grinning about?”

  “Nothing. The wasps around your head like that.”

  Too tired to question him further, she finds a cereal bowl in the cabinet and pours a little sugar water into it. The wasps leave her to feed from the cereal bowl. They’ve had no interest in Frank since the robbery, nor he in them. She opens the refrigerator and sees with pleasure the new cottage cheese Frank bought. But she has no appetite for it, not since she saw Edie plunge her small square hand with black fingernail polish into the carton and shovel great mouthfuls of the white curd into her purple-lipsticked mouth. Same for the Cran-Apple juice. She shudders despite her pity for the girl. Tomorrow will be time enough for cottage cheese and Cran-Apple juice.

  Spread with peach jam, the hot English muffin is delicious. She even wants another one. Frank has poured her a cup of strong coffee. They eat, saying little. She is grateful for his kind gestures. “Thank you for shopping,” she says. He nods.

  After they eat, he silently goes outside for about a half hour. She sees him sitting in the trailer cab, smoking his cigarette, the windows unrolled, his left arm hanging out the window, flicking the ashes. He sits motionless, staring at the horizon. It calms her to see him sit there, silently smoking. After a while, he douses the butt in the ashtray and flicks his Bic lighter open and shut for several minutes, his arm still hanging out the window.

  She recalls the rough ride down from Eugene, her satisfaction that she’d preserved a bubble of continuity by bringing the house and saving it from the demolition crew. Nothing would change, she had thought, except the outward circumstances of Jackpot. She would still have her cocoon. Bitterly she conjures up the smell of scorched wood and coughs.

  Restless, she turns on the portable radio by Scotty’s refrigerator and comes upon a talk show about Bush and Gore, interspersed with audio clips. Bush still can’t manage a clear sentence, while Gore pontificates. Jolted by the outside world, her temper flares. In the dead of summer, June2000, the news seems brainlessly placid, as if the whole world is tired of itself and can’t keep anything straight anymore. She doesn’t want to think about this nonsense and t
urns the radio off.

  Moving back to the armchair, she’s still stumped by the last clues to the New York Times crossword puzzle that she found stuffed in her purse. She’d been working on it all week. Usually she’s a crossword whiz. This one she can’t finish to save her soul. Morosely, she wonders if she’s heading for a stroke. She’s had headaches all summer, ever since the purple wasp stung her forehead twice and dizzy spells that almost made her lose her balance. She’s made no progress in confronting Samantha’s death. Frank, too, is still on hold. Will she die miserable and alone, as she fears?

  18 days left.

  She checks her purse. Her wallet is empty. Edie and Dawson took her cash but left her single credit card alone. Smart move—they can’t be traced. Shivering, she looks out the window and sees Frank still sitting in the trailer cab. It seems rude to watch him like that, so she pours a second cup of coffee from Scotty’s fancy coffee maker and walks aimlessly through the big, empty house with its featureless woodwork and cottage cheese ceilings. His house looks unlived-in.

  The purple wasp sits unseen on a bookcase shelf in the living room, registering everything that has gone on since the robbery and fire. The wasp never did abandon her. Whether the creature betrayed her is another matter.

  Frank finally comes in and sits on the couch, leafing through a Salt Lake Tribune on the coffee table as Clara glances through a Newsweek. Three more escaped wasps collide against a window, setting up a furious hum. Frank rouses himself and goes outside to sprinkle sugar water in a trail from the house to the olive jars. Clara’s right behind him.

  He never would have helped her before. Pleased, she shyly looks at him. He looks away with an embarrassed smile. They sit together on the back porch steps, waiting to see if the wasps will come to the new jars. And they do, circling lower and lower, as if sensing the sugar water inside the jars.

  “Come along now,” she says, watching the creatures hover over the mouths of the jars, as if smelling one jar, then the other.

  And they’re in, buzzing.

  For the first time, Frank smiles to see the disgusting creatures back where they belong. Clara sees his smile and can’t help smiling too. They both look away again.