Clara at the Edge

by Maryl Jo Fox

  Again Haskell looks dumbstruck.

  Arianna calls out. “Wait, Clara—I’m paying. This was a business lunch.”

  She refuses Arianna’s offer to pay, takes the credit card, and pays the cashier in cash. She’s tired of everyone questioning her sanity. She wants to get out of there. Haskell and Arianna are right behind her, also paying in cash. He takes Clara gently by the arm before she exits to the parking lot. Arianna discretely heads to the ladies’ room.

  He looks into her angry eyes. “Can’t you stay a little longer? We could walk around this afternoon. There’s a good city park, or we could drive to the mountains for a little hike.” He points to his RV, a late-model maroon Winnebago. “Arianna wants to see her cousin here before we leave for San Francisco. Or she could hike with us. Whichever you prefer.” His manner is courtly. She feels a little dizzy.

  It’s that armchair feeling again. She could lean right up against him as if he were an old leather armchair. What’s the matter with her anyway? She doesn’t have a Brain Room for this kind of thing. She just needs a friend. She takes a deep breath as tears well, falling down her cheeks. Astonished, she tries to wipe them away. He takes a fresh handkerchief from his shirt pocket and offers it to her. She dabs at her eyes. He puts his arm around her, which only makes her tears flow more freely. It’s mortifying. She doesn’t know why she’s crying. All those years. He smells like candy corn and sage. It’s the most delicious smell.

  “I like his smell too, especially the sage,” Lenore whispers from her bag.

  His voice is low. “I know it’s hard. You’ve been alone for a long time, doing everything alone.” His words only make her weep more, though she’s desperately trying to stop. “It’s hard to rely on your grown child. He needs to have his own life, am I right?” Silently, she nods.

  He speaks slowly. “I’m alone too. My wife died last year. I’ve been pretty much a basket case.” He has unobtrusively steered her outside the hotel for more privacy. Now he stares into the distance. “Her passing was hard. We were very close. We had no children together.” He clears his throat. “I finally had to shake myself out of the doldrums. That’s why I’m on this cross-country trip. Arianna’s been very understanding, a godsend.”

  Clara looks at him. He’s trying to smile. A little unsteady on her feet, she tips toward him for just a moment before catching herself and wiping her eyes for the last time.

  “I see,” she says.

  chapter 19

  So here she is, sitting in an RV with someone she just met. Arianna has disappeared into her cousin’s house on Pine Street. The reasonable part of Clara’s brain says she’s just overwhelmed by this turn of events. But she’s nervous. The cloth bag quivers in her lap. Curious, she brings it to her face.

  “Big ol’ puppy needs no harpy.”

  Slowly, she lowers the bag to her lap. Now you’re giving me behavior lessons? What foolishness is this?

  Haskell heard something like static coming from the bag—a voice? a recording? Looking bemused, he watches as Clara restlessly jumps up and explores the vehicle, running distracted fingers over the granite countertops, clear maple cabinets, leather couch, a very involved-looking stereo system.

  She purses her lips. Her friend Abigail Morton just had one of those small camper shells you attach to a pickup. The two of them fit just fine in a bunk bed during Shakespearean summers in Ashland. And Abigail’s camper was agile on the road. This thing would be a monstrosity to drive.

  She folds her arms. “Well, you’re hardly living from hand to mouth here.”

  He lets out a delighted laugh. “Actually, you’re right. It’s a bit much.”

  She leafs through a rack of reading material by the couch: New York Times, Art in America, Wired, Sports Illustrated, Cowboys and Indians. Glances into the bedroom—queen-size bed, coffee-colored duvet, gleaming ebony nightstands. She feels like a prairie dog let into the castle. If he has a Rolex watch, I’m out of here. She’s trying to find every excuse. She’s being idiotic and knows it.

  He gestures at his living quarters. “You like?”

  “Can’t say as I do.” She fixes him with a level gaze.

  He roars with laugher.

  She’s undeterred. “Your camper is very nice, but something smaller would get you better gas mileage.”

  Her plain speaking delights him, as does her smooth peach skin, her shiny hair springy with life. She seems fresh and untouched, absolutely straight arrow. Something about her makes him feel free and clear. He needs this feeling right now. But she’s carrying a burden of some kind too, something deep and unresolved. A minute ago, she picked up that bag with a staticky voice coming from it. A radio? he wondered, confused. She closed her eyes and shook her head at the bag. He was startled and moved by the gesture.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret, Clara. My sister insisted I get this rig. It’s a birthday gift from her, a rental. She wanted to do this big thing. She thought I’d mooned around long enough after Sandra’s death. I wouldn’t have picked this RV myself.” He nods. “It does not get good gas mileage.” This time they both laugh.

  She steals a glance at his watch—a Timex with plain large numbers and a black leather band. She lets out her breath, didn’t know she was holding it.

  Two days ago, she was calmly feeding her wasps in Jackpot. Tomorrow she expects to return to Jackpot, round up the few remaining wasps, and try again to salvage her life. For heaven’s sake, Clara, just settle down.

  Haskell could stand a good stiff Scotch right now, but he puts that thought out of his mind. A good walk would do. This unpredictable woman is intriguing. He wasn’t planning anything except to get out of New York for a while.

  Lenore needs some air, Clara decides, so she lays the cloth bag open on the floor. Lenore scampers back to the living area, joyfully leaps on the glass liquor cabinet, the leather couch, the media cabinet. It’s clear what she thinks of the RV. The creature touches a button on the media cabinet. The doors retract, and the TV goes through a dizzying channel shuffle.

  “Stop that!” Clara says.

  Haskell looks up from a map he’s reading. “What’s the matter?”

  “The TV. It’s malfunctioning. Don’t you see?” She points. The cabinet is closed.

  He had felt a sudden gust of air through the window, nothing more. He looks at her carefully. “You’ve been through a lot, Clara. What would you think of staying in Elko a few days just to take it easy? We don’t need to be in San Francisco right away.”

  Long pause. “You might have a point there.” What if he discovers Lenore? Would he think I’m crazy? That he’s crazy? Am I just imagining Lenore?

  He pulls up to a city park. “Join me if you want, after your nap. I’ll just be walking around out here.”

  Hearing his footsteps fade, she falls into a deep sleep on the couch. An hour later, she jolts awake. Lenore is twitching on the kitchen counter, asleep in her bag.

  Clara frowns, deep in thought. This unruly ultra-midget is pushing her in some way that makes her doubt her own sanity. She knew Lenore was trouble the minute she heard the “push you further” poppycock. Further into the unholy mess of Samantha’s death. She cringes, knowing she left Eugene to excavate that very thing.

  What a coward I am, she thinks as she puts on her lipstick in the bathroom mirror.

  Relieved to leave Lenore asleep in the RV, she joins Haskell in the park. Trying to act “normal,” she checks if he’s looking at her funny—he’s not. Gradually she feels more relaxed, more forgetful of the mysterious Lenore. She’s grateful for the dry, clear air, the shouts of children, for this unexpected man who acts so considerately.

  “Was the Winnebago comfortable? Is the weather too hot for you?”

  “Everything,” she says, “is fine.”

  She doesn’t believe it for a minute. What’s he hiding? He’s too perfect.

  They approach a play area softly floored with wood chips. Sharp cries ring out as children commandeer the swings, the cli
mbing bars, and big pipe tunnels. At the swings, a tall boy in scuffed clothes and dusty hair, maybe ten, crowds in line where three younger boys, about six or seven, wait their turn. Clara looks around, sees nobody who might be in charge of the interloper. She steps forward, makes eye contact with the boy, speaks firmly. “You need to wait your turn, young man. I think you know that.” He looks defiantly at her, gauges her look, swaggers to the back of the line. The younger children give her grateful looks.

  “You’re a pro,” Haskell says as the shrieking children race to swing highest.

  “I was a teacher. Grammar school, high school, briefly a principal.” She watches his reaction. After the Rolex test, will he fail the one about wanting trophy women?

  “Christ, Clara, my grammar school teachers were like angels to me.” He’s ready to tell a story, but she pulls away, her eyes darkening.

  “If you’re looking for angels, don’t count on me. I just like kids. That’s all. Do you have children?” she asks, forgetting he said he didn’t.

  His swift look is veiled. “No. No kids.” He looks away.

  She sees his pained expression. Maybe there’s more to him than I thought. Maybe I’ve been the superficial one.

  He glances sideways at her. So she’s not an angel. Maybe we’re more alike than I thought.

  After fetching Arianna, they buy groceries and drive to Lamoille Canyon, twenty miles southeast of Elko. Miles of massive cliffs and forest line the road into Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, the second biggest national forest in the country. Clara and Haskell have never heard of this place. Arianna says it’s usually deserted; she comes here whenever she can. The clean, dry air always clears her mind.

  They park on an overlook and start hiking down a nature trail that circles down to Lamoille Creek, then up again. As Clara inhales the smell of pine and the sound of water, her Oregon Brain Room flies open. It’s like coming home.

  Arianna happily points out a yellow-bellied marmot scurrying around. Clara sees a mule deer unmoving in the distance. Haskell finds a stand of elderberries and eagerly picks some to share.

  “New Yorker turns nature boy.” Arianna chuckles and goes ahead on the trail, taking pictures, disappearing from view.

  Clara and Haskell walk on in silence broken only by aspen leaves clicking in a pristine chorus. “Listen,” she says. They stop walking. “I could stay here forever.”

  Thumbs in his belt, he gives her a lazy smile and leans back on his heels. “Not New York City, right?”

  Shading her eyes, she looks at him. “Wouldn’t know. Never been there.”

  “Oh, baby, are you in for somethin’.”

  Suddenly she’s besieged by the memory of Dawson tying her roughly to the kitchen chair, Edie slurping Cran-Apple juice from the bottle, their wide-eyed stare when she cried, “Stay! My babies!” at the wasps’ delirious escape to the sky. Then the stink of gas on her clothes, the whoosh of fire shooting to the eaves, Dawson with tears in his eyes, angrily hugging her before he threw gas on her.

  By her held breath, he knows she’s experiencing something. “What?” He leans toward her.

  “Oh, those kids and what they did.”

  He touches her shoulder. “I wish I could’ve been there to protect you.”

  She lowers her eyes, not having heard such words in years.

  At dusk, the three of them are chatting amiably, stocking feet up on the coffee table, drinking purified water at Arianna’s insistence, Haskell knows, to delay the start of booze. Lenore is hiding under Haskell’s bed, listening. The vehicle is fragrant with mountain mahogany and bristlecone pine branches they brought in from the trail and draped on cabinets. In the fading daylight and beautiful setting, Clara resolves to put trauma to rest and just enjoy the evening.

  Revived and hungry, they set up a production line for a cold chicken salad. Haskell and Clara are tearing apart a precooked whole chicken they got at Albertson’s. Arianna slices four oranges, a handful of Kalamata olives, a red onion, and diced fresh rosemary. She flings each heap into a big yellow ceramic bowl already full of the shredded chicken and torn Romaine lettuce.

  Clara’s hands glisten with meaty juices. She watches him gnaw the gristle from a thigh bone, his chin glistening with grease. “You do that? Me too!” she exclaims, laughing. She gnaws on the other thigh bone. They laugh, watching each other tear at bones for a moment until Clara turns away, uncomfortable. Slow this down. This is not like you.

  Arianna makes a dressing of olive oil and lemon juice, throws in some sliced almonds, and mixes everything up. Haskell readies some sourdough rolls for the toaster oven. As the women watch, he pours a good white wine and cues up mellow jazz: Dexter Gordon, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, all the oldies—“You Go to My Head,” “Black Coffee,” “September Song,” “Out of Nowhere.”

  The jazz sends shivers up Clara’s spine. With jazz, she’s stepping into a foreign but infinitely inviting territory. Darrell mostly liked big bands—Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, The Andrews Sisters—“I’ll Get By,” “We’ll Meet Again,”—music evoking Pearl Harbor, ballrooms, large crowds, courage, winning, the country making sacrifices together. Darrell loved the era, though he was too young to serve.

  Jazz like Haskell’s calls up a completely different sensibility—intimate smoke-filled rooms, easy laughter, sensuality, a worldly music of loss and heartbreak, the listener finding solace in hard liquor and slow cocktails. Clara gets it right away. My stars, she wishes she’d known about jazz all these years.

  Talk is easy and slow, making no particular sense, and no one seems to mind. Haskell, his scarred face gleaming in candlelight, watches her as she slowly sips wine. He easily downs half a bottle of Chardonnay and opens another. Arianna gives him a look. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  Music, talk, and wine swirl together. Clara runs her fingers over the arms of the butter-smooth, cognac leather armchair. It’s like well-cared-for skin. So different from her plain rocker at home—burned up!—sliced from an oak tree, soothing only when rocked.

  He wonders what she’s thinking, stroking the armchair like that. So does Lenore, watching from the corner. The sun is down now.

  Arianna folds her legs onto the leather couch and firmly pushes up her horn-rimmed glasses. Wine glass in one hand, she relaxes her other arm on the back of the couch. “Nevada’s supposed to be an empty state,” she says lazily. “But it’s a madhouse out there: lizards, eagles, beavers, geese, snakes, mule deer, mountain goats, rats, spiders, hawks, jack rabbits—critter holes crumbling and springing up everywhere. It’s a predator’s feast.” She smiles.

  A little tipsy on her second glass, Clara nods to Arianna. “Drama on the ground, in our heads, the sky. Drama everywhere.” She scratches the unhealed wasp stings on her forehead. The itching is getting worse instead of better. Her forehead pulses. Maybe she should see a doctor.

  “Forget teeming nature,” Haskell says a little belligerently, plunking his empty glass down on the coffee table. “Nothing’s emptier than a room full of people you don’t care about. I’ve been to plenty of cocktail parties just to hustle a photo shoot. It’s a pretty lonesome business.”

  Arianna sips her wine. “When I was a teenager, I went around snapping photos of all our relatives when we got together. I didn’t like them very much. They were nosy and self-important. But in the photos they often looked lonely and insecure in a way I couldn’t see in real time. That fascinated me.”

  Haskell and Arianna get refills; Clara demurs. She’s not much of a drinker. She can’t even remember the last time she was with worldly adults, conversation ricocheting here and there. She’s like a starving person stumbling onto a well-stocked pantry. Her life for the last thirty years is beginning to look like a sensory deprivation chamber.

  They sit down to eat. The salad is delicious. They eat it all, along with sourdough rolls, the best they could find in Elko, Sara Lee’s Heat and Serve. Haskell lights more candles. The RV in evening light is an int
imate mountain retreat, sealed off from the world. More talk, more jazz to captivate Clara—Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, John McLaughlin, Gerry Mulligan, Carmen McRae.

  Arianna says, “I keep thinking about your house, Clara. It captures something about this country that people forget these days. Like let’s get back to basics, folks.”

  Clara makes a wry face. “Somehow I can’t see a nationwide stampede to own one-thousand-square-foot houses . . .”

  Arianna stares into her wine glass. “The country just seems lost somehow. People maxing out their credit cards, owning a hundred pairs of shoes, having weddings or bar mitzvahs or sixteenth birthdays that cost one hundred thousand dollars. It’s all getting crazy.”

  Clara warms to the subject. “With taxes squeezed, I think the president wants to put us back in the nineteenth century when we had little government to speak of. No paved roads, no national parks, no environmental protection, no Social Security or Medicare . . . just defense.” She’s silent a moment. “God help us if anything really bad happens. I don’t know if competent people are valued in government anymore. People come to Washington to line their pockets. No checks, no balances, no follow through.” She snorts. “Let’s hope the Middle East doesn’t blow up again.”

  Haskell rouses himself. “The Middle East is always going to blow up. Now and forevermore.”

  “I think you got that one right,” Clara says.

  “Let’s toast to the Middle East blowing up.” He has a gleam in his eye.

  Clara glances at him. “Well, I don’t want to tempt fate.”

  He’s adamant. “I don’t believe in fate. I believe in action and the consequences of action.”

  She’s unconvinced. “What actions? What consequences? Do you know something we don’t?” Is this a new side I’m seeing?

  He shrugs.

  “Haskell is talking rubbish, Clara. Too much wine. He gets this way.”

  “I’m fine.” He tips his empty glass to his niece.

  Rattled, Clara turns to Arianna. “So where do you call home, with all your traveling?”