Clara at the Edge

by Maryl Jo Fox

  “Now, that’s nonsense. We’ll come out. We’ll certainly see him at the Met. His girlfriend too, I bet.” He touches her cheek. “So first we go to Jackpot. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  She gives him a watery smile. “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “No we don’t, Haskell. We don’t have much time at all.”

  Puzzled, he looks at her.

  8 days left.

  chapter 22

  When Clara went chasing after the photos, the wasps guarded the burned house, especially the dishtowel drawer, where faded smells of Prell, Ivory, Secret, and Jergens were strongest. Frank, Stella, and Scotty knew nothing about these Clara smells, but they saw the wasps’ interest in that drawer. So they poured sugar water into lids and placed the lids in the open drawer, attracting three more wasps, making twelve total.

  In such cramped quarters, turf wars erupted over square inches, resulting in lost legs and torn wings. Losers massed on the counter and hissed. Winners strutted in little circles on the rice canister. Four of the most antic wasps became official mood lifters. They did lopsided dances on the counter and sudden plunges to the floor, but nothing cheered up the other wasps. The trouble was their new caretakers. Their smells were terrible—Frank’s Old Spice, Scotty’s Bay Rum, Stella’s Obsession. They just wanted Clara’s smells—Jergens lotion, Secret deodorant, Ivory soap, and Prell shampoo. Where was she anyway?

  One June morning when Frank was watching them snuffle up their sugar water, all twelve wasps suddenly rose in the air—zzzzz whoosh!—and vanished into the sky.

  “Come back!” he yelled, ripping Clara’s altered T-shirt off his head as he looked skyward. “Come back!”

  The creatures rose high in the sky, circling round and round as if to dive-bomb him any minute. He flailed beneath them, waving the T-shirt in the universal signal of distress. Heading north, the wasps disappeared without a backward glance.

  Frank was horrified. He hated the creatures, but he wanted them here for Clara. Every day he looked south on the highway, hoping to see Scotty’s white Mustang barreling up the road from Elko with Clara sitting beside her new friend. She’d never done anything as radical as steal a car or pluck a “friend” from a restaurant. He hoped this meant romance at last for his solitary mother. Or maybe her long-denied need for a boyfriend had addled her brain.

  He had no idea that the purple wasp had become a powerful hybrid that could blast open Clara’s entombed anxieties better than any simple wasp could.

  Scotty stumbled on a news story on the Internet saying that a huge swarm of wasps had arrived from the south to hover over Twin Falls, Idaho; no one knew why. Hundreds of other wasps had joined them, coming from everywhere and nowhere, it seemed. To the subtle observer, the swarm seemed guided by a unified intelligence. The wasps came by day to Jackpot, hovering along the highway as if waiting for someone. By night they returned to Twin Falls, forty-eight miles away, where they massed on flowered lawns and fed voraciously.

  Wherever they flew, the skies were full of tumult and confusion, heard as a terrible low hum. Startled homeowners thought the noise might be spy planes from a hostile country. Distracted farm workers, feeling something unusual in the air, picked fewer potatoes, threatening local profits. These odd reports briefly raised Scotty from his persistent torpor. He did computer searches for hours.

  Frank felt this unease too, so he took to reading Stella’s New Yorker to see if he could find the source of it for himself. In summer 2000, Kyoto seemed dead, suicide bombings were up, Arafat and Sharon remained deadlocked, the Americans could do nothing. The whole world seemed stalled, off-kilter. To Frank it was no wonder we had twelve wasps fighting turf wars in a burned-out house in Nevada.

  Even Frank the wasp-hater could see that the straggler wasps missed Clara. Why else would they hang around fighting over the dishtowel drawer? After all, his mother sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to them on the trip. She chatted with them every night as she brushed her hair. She treated them like people, he thought, embarrassed. Everyone else had swatted at them in their short desperate lives, tried to spray poisons on them, battered down their nests, and sent them homeless into the sky. Let’s face it. My mother is a nut case, and I’m getting there too.

  Over the years he’s seen her talk to a balky fire hydrant, a doorknob that wouldn’t unlock, plus the more standard leaves, moths, birds. He’s seen her kiss apple cores goodbye. With all this communion between animate and inanimate, he wonders if the grateful wasps sense trouble is coming and want desperately to keep her safe.

  6 days left.

  chapter 23

  Every morning for a week now in the canyon, Clara wakes up feeling like a vise has clamped her head. In her dream, she walks into the kitchen and the linoleum floor opens like a zipper. She peers down into a dark hole and sees Samantha’s head floating on an ocean of mud. Horrified, she seizes the head and wraps it in a towel. She takes it into the bathroom and washes the head lovingly with a warm soapy washcloth, carefully rinsing off the filth. She dries it and wraps a towel all around it. The head is silent, hasn’t said anything. She cradles the head while sitting in her rocker, rocking back and forth. She will do nothing in her life but cradle this head. “Thank you, head, for letting me do this,” she murmurs. Suddenly the head moves. She feels it moving. Trembling, she unwraps the head. The eyes are open, staring at her. “No!” she screams. Haskell comes running.

  With time running short, Lenore is desperately shaking up Clara’s brain at night, trying to dislodge scary dreams and moldy memories stuck for years in her Dream Jar. If she’s lucky, Lenore can screw the lid off and capture a dream like the abandoned head dream. The dream flies out in a little packet. Lenore grabs it and plays it over and over for Clara by tossing the packet from one hand to the other. Electric sparks fly from the packet and invade Clara’s head, lighting up the hideous dream in fluorescent colors that drive her crazy.

  Sometimes Lenore gets even more invasive: She can shrink herself to 1/16 of an inch and sneak into the unhealed wasp stings on Clara’s forehead. These stings are like little tunnels covered with loose scabs that never come off. Then Lenore can trample around in Clara’s brain, breaking tiny capillaries here and there. This makes Clara feel rushed and disoriented. Vandalism like this creates the healing tumult Clara needs to wake up and face her problems. At least that’s what Lenore hopes for.

  5 days left.

  Lenore is almost twelve inches tall now when she’s outside of Clara’s brain. Her legs are unnaturally long; her hairdo is piled up like a stack of pancakes on her head. Her skin is pure lavender. No more casual cowgirl: She means business in black leather pants, black alligator boots, and a black cowgirl shirt swirled with black sequins. She’s definitely impatient, and she’s scaring Clara to death. Fresh from Vegas or hell, Lenore spends hours in front of the mirror, simpering and primping with Haskell’s hair cream. He doesn’t know what’s with his hair cream disappearing. He just feels a breeze around his head sometimes. He forgets about it.

  Lenore gets bored and angry prancing around in the Winnebago by herself, since Clara and Haskell are often outside hiking or lazing by a stream, or going into Elko for supplies, leaving her alone in the hot camper until they return with their sacks of groceries. Her thin skin can’t take much sun. She burns painfully to ashy gray, so she’s stuck in the camper until dusk. Frustrated, she rolls up her sleeves and takes off her boots to cool down. Her hot skin is sticky and stinky.

  Lenore insists on sitting in Clara’s lawn chair beside the stream where she and Haskell like to talk in the evenings. Clara has to scrunch to one side of the chair to avoid touching the unpleasant creature. Lenore always sits on the side Haskell can’t see.

  “Why don’t you use the whole chair?” he asks, bemused.

  “Don’t bother with what’s not your business,” Clara snaps, cranky in a way that startles both of them. She’s got a terrible headache.

  “Wh
at’s wrong? I just asked you a simple question.”

  “Well, I gave you a simple answer, didn’t I?” She draws her legs up and covers herself with her new jacket, though it’s not cold in early evening.

  “Are you coming down with something?”

  “No, I’m not coming down with something.” Her tone is querulous, but her eyes dart around nervously. He understands again that whatever is on her mind is something only she can fix. But still he’s annoyed.

  “OK, I give up.” He lights a cigarette. He’s back to smoking. They are silent until Clara says she’s tired and wants to sleep. They go inside.

  What the hell is going on? It’s like she’s got her period again.

  Lenore, along with her growth spurt, has suddenly turned vegetarian. She tears up shrubs around their campsite, stuffing twiggy branches in her mouth, but the twigs are too rough to swallow. She badly tore her gums once. Horrified, Clara saw mangled bloody bark protruding from Lenore’s thin purple lips before she spit it out. She tried to get Lenore to gargle with salt water, but she wouldn’t do it.

  Haskell thinks a mule deer is tearing up things until he catches a glimpse of a shadowy small creature running away with a mouthful of leaves in its mouth. “What was that?” he exclaims, pointing.

  “What did you see?’ she asks, suddenly relieved.

  “I don’t know.”

  She puts her arm around his waist, cheered by his words. If he can see Lenore, then I’m not crazy.

  In Lenore’s early days, she liked tuna and hamburger. Now Clara tries giving her small salads and canned beets—but she wants no more food from Clara. It’s just as well: Her appetite is huge for a creature still smaller than a newborn baby. Sometimes pine needles stick in her throat and give her coughing fits, so Clara has to stick her finger down Lenore’s throat and dig out the prickly mass. Then she gets mad because Clara had to help. Lenore acts just like a teenager—except that she forages only at dawn or dusk, not all day long, on account of her sun sensitivity. At this rate, the landscape around them will soon be stripped. She even nibbles the lovely white bark of the quaking aspens, says it makes a good toothbrush. It’s true; Lenore never has bad breath.

  Clara’s in a rough patch all right. No matter how charming Haskell tries to be, she finds something to complain about. The problem is she’s scared to death of Lenore’s changes, plus she keeps dreaming that Samantha’s head is trapped under her kitchen floor and she can’t get it out. Her own head feels like it is splitting open these days. Like something is inside her head, gnawing, breaking.

  Haskell smokes outside. If the smoke comes Clara’s way, she coughs and her eyes water. His clothing and skin smell of smoke, plus his tongue and lips. He knows how she feels about it. Sandra hated his smoking too. “Sorry, Clara, I’ll try to stop.”

  But of course he doesn’t stop. He wakes up mornings with a hacking cough, just like Clara used to thirty years ago. At first she gave him deadeye stares. Now she just looks away.

  They are quiet this night, a clear tension between them. She’s lying on the couch, restless and out of sorts. She closes her eyes, trying to take one of her cat naps. He wanders outside.

  Lenore, bored, sneaks outside to annoy him as he sits there smoking. She jumps on the man’s head, giving him a throbbing headache. He thinks the headache is because the pasta salad they had for lunch went bad.

  Back inside, Lenore does aerial tricks above Clara’s head. She floats up and down like a helium balloon, blowing a lungful of Haskell’s cigarette smoke right in Clara’s face. She coughs, her head hurting so bad she wonders if she needs to go to the hospital. She doesn’t know that Lenore is sneaking into her head.

  Lenore’s got a new refrain and repeats it endlessly:

  “Down along the river, dark and deep, stumble all the old folks, blind as sheep.”

  “Shut up,” Clara says from the couch, her mood darkening even more. Haskell, back inside, thinks she’s having a dream. Lenore just laughs and repeats the refrain. Clara covers her ears with her hands. Lenore is Miss Universal Expert in Breaking Down Defenses by Being the Worst Brat Ever.

  Clara should have made the purple wasp stay in Jackpot the morning she ran off to find Arianna. Now the wasp has turned into this weird twelve-inch thing that stays glued to her like Krazy Glue even if Clara is thirty feet away. It’s like Lenore grew out of a hollow space between two of Clara’s ribs, a space oddly near her heart. “Damn her purpleness!” Clara murmurs.

  Lenore and Clara are engaged in fierce silent warfare about what happened around the time of Samantha’s death. Talk or no talk? So far it’s a stalemate.

  Restless, Clara takes up a new cause. She decides Haskell is undisciplined, so she sets up a schedule for him. If he wants to switch to nature photography, he should practice nature photography in different kinds of light. Say from nine thirty to eleven, two to three, and five thirty to six, right? Corralling Haskell will get her mind off Lenore. The schedule doesn’t even get off the ground.

  “Now see here, Clara. I’ll set my own schedule. You can’t tell me how to parcel out my days. I’ve been parceling out my days my whole life, and by God, no one ever told me how to do it.”

  “But I’ve watched you. You always shoot at the same time of day. You need shots in all kinds of light.”

  “Excuse me, but I thought we had a major get-acquainted session going here. I thought things between us were more important than work schedules. Back off, Clara. Either I do this myself or I don’t. It’s really none of your business.”

  She studies her fingernails. “Whatever you like,” she says blandly. But she knows he’s right. Her sudden mood shifts are driving them both nuts. Maybe it’s a chemical imbalance. She’ll up her vitamin doses. Maybe that’ll do the trick.

  He’s quiet too. Finally, in a fit of irritation, he says, “To hell with it,” and goes into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him, to prepare a box of photos for Arianna, accompanied by an explanatory hasty scrawl. He mails it on the sly, without Clara knowing, the next time they drive to Elko for groceries.

  Their little idyll is over. She clearly pines for her son. One morning in late June, they drive back to the Rancher’s Hotel and hitch Scotty’s white Mustang to the back of the Winnebago. Management had watched it for them.

  The trip to Jackpot is mostly silent. She wonders what he’ll think about the wasps—if they’re still there. He’ll think I’m stone-cold nuts and good riddance.

  About five miles outside of Jackpot, she tells him.

  “Wasps,” he says dully. “You’re telling me you have pet wasps.”

  “All my life.” She tries to sound light.

  He decides to just focus on the road.

  4 days left.

  chapter 24

  An unexpected sight greets them as the Winnebago lumbers across the vacant lot, hauling the Mustang. Frank, Scotty, and Stella are arranging glass jars around the burned-out house.

  “Why are they putting big glass jars around your house?” Haskell asks in wonderment.

  “I’ll explain later,” she says, her heart sinking. The wasps are gone!

  As the mini-caravan lumbers to a stop, they jump out and Frank grabs her in a bear hug. “I’ve been trying to call you, Mother! How great! This must be Haskell.”

  Introductions all around. Clara embraces Stella and then Scotty to much laughter and milling about. She steals dismayed glances at the charred skeleton of her house. Scotty absorbs the scene with the air of a kindly relative who stayed out too late last night.

  Frank and Haskell step away from the others to stand side by side and gaze intently at Desert Dan’s across the highway. Frank hooks thumbs in his belt; Haskell folds his arms.

  “So, Frank,” says Haskell. “I hear your mother has unusual pets.”

  “Don’t get me started,” Frank says under his breath. He briefly mentions the escaped wasps.

  Haskell chuckles. “Well, from what I’ve seen so far, your mother wouldn’t have any ordina
ry pets.”

  “You can say that again.” Frank smiles. He already likes this Haskell Roberts. Maybe his mother has met her match.

  Haskell gestures toward the destroyed house. “So that’s where you grew up.”

  Frank nods. “My dad built it.”

  “He must have been a great guy. She’s told me all about him.”

  A pale, mournful Darrell flashes into Frank’s mind. Unsettled, he runs a hand over his eyes. He’s not eager to talk about his father. Neither is Haskell.

  Frank and Haskell walk back to join the crowd. Clara walks briskly toward her son and warmly embraces him.

  Her voice is hushed. “Do you have a picture of your sculpture? I wish I’d seen the real thing before the buyer carried it off.”

  He looks intently at her, clearly pleased by her interest. “As a matter of fact, I do have a picture. Another buyer looked at my second piece yesterday and wanted to see a picture of the first one. I’ll show you when we go over to Stella’s.”

  “Oh, Frank, you’re on your way.” She claps her hands together.

  “It feels that way,” he says, grinning. “Could be just beginner’s luck.”

  Even Lenore is happy with the news. She claps her hands together in the bag, which is really hot in this heat.

  Frank, in a happy daze, wanders over to check on Scotty, who’s looking tired. Clara and Stella talk excitedly. Stella has resumed her quirky stage pieces at Desert Dan’s—now down to two minutes. She adds quietly, “But I’m not drawing customers into my pieces anymore unless I know them.” She swallows, her eyes filling. “Clara, none of us knew the girl—Edie. I’m guessing she was furious and humiliated when the bodybuilder made fun of her outfit. Because the very next day she and her boyfriend come to your house and they do a great job of robbing and burning it down. In a very personal way, I might add—all those family pictures on your dresser? I figure it was payback—the older generation can go to hell, as far as they’re concerned. Plus they needed money. No surprise there.”