by Neil Hetzner
After the strength drained from Peter’s hug, Raoul collected the money bag and put it and Peter in his car. He deposited the receipts at the bank and Peter to his living room couch before driving slowly, safely home.
Chapter 22
Even as her mother’s disease had progressed, Dilly had not changed Bett’s Life Expectancy. Not the surgery, not the radiation, not the chemotherapy, nor the discussion of bone marrow transplants, nor the recent mention of amputation of Bett’s leg had made Dilly feel as if her mother’s L.E. should be lowered.
Until this morning it had been impossible for Dilly to project any end to her mother’s life other than that of a quiet falling to sleep sometime when Bett was ninety or more. When the occasional thought had come to her of how irrational it was constantly to adjust others’ life spans and yet keep her mother’s the same, Dilly had simply waved them away. She didn’t care whether her thoughts seemed irrational, she knew she was right. Her mother would live a long life. It was as simple as that.
In her thinking Dilly always skipped over the small selfish link which made it important that her mother’s life be long. She was her mother’s daughter. Of the four children, she was sure she most resembled Bett in body, genetic code, spirit and mind. In Dilly’s unacknowledged thinking, if her mother were to live a long life, she, Dilly, would be assured of many more years. She was like a small child hiding behind her mother’s skirt. Her mother would go first. It would not be for a long time. After another very long time she would follow. She was safe.
Dilly’s deep faith in her own longevity had been shattered that morning. In response to the breaking of that faith, she had left her children before they were ready for school, had left her husband without breakfast, had left the house in a turmoil to stagger through the quiet aisles of a convenience store grabbing at sugar wafers and bags of Mars candies. She had driven to the thinly graveled parking lot of Lerkun’s Pond where she now sat behind the steering wheel crying, eating cookies and candy, and watching the too tame ducks competing for the orange-hued cheese doodles spilling from the large-knuckled hands of an old man slowly walking along the gray froth-rimed edge of the pond. Dilly was eating and wondering what the ducks would eat if no one came. Did they even remember how to forage for themselves?
A few minutes after the old man left, Dilly got out of the car and walked to the water’s edge. As soon as they saw that she was carrying a bag, the flotilla of teal-headed drakes and russet-colored ducks altered course toward her. As they maneuvered closer and waited for whatever bounty was to come from the bag, the ducks burbled to themselves about their rights to certain positions. Their pushing and shoving and chattering, their neediness, angered Dilly. Out on the edge of the shifting half-moon of mallards were two small ducks swimming back and forth alone. Dilly cracked several cookies into small pieces and began to toss them toward the two at the back. After a couple of tosses she swore to herself and, after switching bag and crumbs to the opposite hands, began pitching the pieces with her right hand. In a rage she crushed a fistful of cookies until her hand held only dust. With an ungainly sweep Dilly hurled the crumbs toward the startled ducks.
That morning’s Boston Globe had reported the results of a study on left-handedness. Working from a sample of death records, the researchers had found that left-handed people died an average of nine years earlier than those who were right-handed. As she had read the report Dilly had felt all her ligaments lengthen and loosen. She had been unsure, were she to try to get up from the kitchen table, whether she would be able to do so. She saw herself trying to walk to the sink with the flopping ungainliness of a cheap marionette.
Nine years was an unbelievable price to have to pay for something as innocuous as being left-handed. Almost a decade’s punishment. For something one didn’t choose. Favoring one’s left hand wasn’t an exercise in free will. Almost a decade. The long breath between ten and twenty, grade school and college. How much had happened in those years. Nine. All but two of the years that Jessie had been alive.
Dilly couldn’t accept what she had been reading. The study must be wrong. The price was just too high. She went back to the beginning and made herself read more slowly. Some of the difference was explained by the greater number of accidents which occurred to left-handers trying to operate in a right-handed world. Especially automobiles. She tried to think if being left-handed had caused her to run over the shopping cart the day of Lise’s visit. When panic began to outrun Dilly’s thoughts, Dilly herself tried to outrun her panic by escaping from the house.
As she walked along the narrow path that circumnavigated the pond, Dilly used her right hand to draw cookies from the bag. In between bites she practiced drawing her name in the air while holding the stub of a sugar wafer as if it were a pencil. She would change. She would make herself right-handed. Somewhere in the attic was a box with a soft-sided penmanship primer in it. She would find the book and practice the exercises. Loops and strokes until her right hand was as adept as her left. It would be the same as going through a total immersion program to learn to speak German or French.
Laboring up a rise which formed the northern boundary of the pond, Dilly intermittently closed her eyes to visualize doing various tasks right-handed. She was encouraged to realize she already did some things that way. Shaking hands. Putting keys in the car ignition. Keys in the locks of the house doors. Starting the lawnmower. Turning on the television. Brushing the right side of her hair. She had mastered those important tasks. She would master others. She stuck the index finger of her right hand into her mouth and began to brush her teeth. Tucking the bag of food under her elbow, she used her left hand to drive a fork into a ham and followed by making slicing motions with her right. It felt very awkward. Too bad. They would just have to eat hacked ham for awhile. She switched the handle of a frying pan from right to left and using a cookie as a spatula tried to slide under and then flip two fried eggs. That was very hard. She would teach the kids to like scrambled. With the threat of salmonella they shouldn’t even be eating fried eggs anyway. Cholesterol, too. She began vacuuming up the muddy incline before her. That was easy. Washing dishes. She would put the drainer on the right side and switch to the left sink for the wash water.
The path curved back from the edge of the pond and grew steeper. Twice Dilly had to stop her practicing to use her free hand to grab hold of the early spring, slightly budding, gray-green shoots growing along the sides of the path. She took up a pen again. “Now is the time.” Not one of the letters came easily. She whipped her right hand in a number of circles as if she were twirling a lariat. She tried again. Dilly watched her right hand make jagged, erratic shapes in the cool, still air. “Now is the time. Now is the time. Now. Now. N N N N.” The N began to look like an N, but the eager student couldn’t figure out how to make the transition to the O. Her wrist wouldn’t bend the way she thought it should. She crushed her bag of food tightly to her chest and began again. “N N N No No…” When her foot slipped Dilly dropped the bag and threw both hands out to catch herself. Despite her efforts, she lost her balance, flailed, fell hard onto the muddy trail, and slipped backward several feet before her shoes found purchase against a small tuft of winter-sered grass.
Dilly lay on the mud feeling the earth’s magnet pull the heat from her body. She twisted her cheek against the cold wet dirt so that the tip of her nose just touched the ground. She smelled the incongruence of the sterility of winter’s sleeping earth intermingled with the faintest fecund yeast of early spring. Dilly lay still on the path until the shivering which had started as a chattering of her teeth spread throughout her body. She was left-handed. She would die early. Her mother was left-handed. Her mother would die early, too. Her mother had cancer. CANCER. Her mother, Her Mother was riddled with the unreason of her own cells. The bone of her leg was a nest for that errancy. Dilly had tried so hard, she had gone so fast, but the numbers could no longer be ignored. Take nine, a child’s life from seed to bicycle and baseball, take nine away from h
er. Take nine and nine and nine away from Bett. Take nine and nine and nine away and suddenly, oh so suddenly, the only thing left was a cipher. Her mother would be gone soon. All her years subtracted from her. Minus nine, minus nine, minus nine. That leaves zero. An L.E. of 0. Zero.
Dilly’s face grew hard.
No. Not zero. Something must be added back.
She pushed herself to her knees and went crawling forward toward the plastic bag filled with treats. She flung the bag away from her toward the pond. Let the damn ducks figure out how to take care of themselves. Humans had to.
Chapter 23
There it was again. Night’s newest ritual. The empty air after sleep left, quickly, loudly, in a rocket’s roar. The downy warmth of half drunk dreams gone in a flash. As if a window had been flung open to a winter’s thieving wind. Cold, clear, clean, empty, empty, empty air.
Peter switched on the crook neck lamp. A light that had been fine to read by when he went to bed was, at four a.m., too weak to push more than a small circle of darkness from his head. He switched the light off. He didn’t want the feeling of being exposed while the perimeter of the room remained in darkness.
Peter lay rigid in his bed trying to find some scrap of thought to knead. Something to supplant the emptiness. For years after his return from Vietnam, through the years of his marriage and its end, he would wake startled. Instantly alert, his mind would race with horrific images from jig-sawed dreams. In the last weeks, all that had changed. He would be awakened by the sound of memories rushing from his mind. The emptying scared him. He sought to keep image, color, sound from being hurled away by his night brain’s whirling. He was afraid that what was lost at night might not be found with the return of day.
Increasingly, Peter had found himself doing some task at The Retreat with fingers or eyes that held no memory. He had filled a bowl a thousand times with flour and egg and milk to make crepes. He had ladled a hundred thousand crepes into their pans and set them on the stove. But, lately, he would whisk the batter and have no sense if it were thick or thin. He would stare as the ivory puddles of batter bubbled and set in the thin flared pans. Lately, he would watch the edges turn to golden lace, yet, not know when to grab the long steel handle, no, how to flick his wrist so that the crepe would do a slow somersault in the heat shimmering air before falling back to the pan on its uncooked side. The memories of how to make a pair of golden crowns from the slicing of a lemon, or truss a chicken, or strip the fell from a rack of lamb had spun away. He would look at a picture of himself and Gaby and the boys kneeling in front of a sand dune and wonder in what life those strangers had been brought together.
For years, a strand of thought, as wispy but as sticky as a web, would hold to him throughout a workday. From making a roux through whisking a sauce to breaking down the steam table at the end of the night, his mind would play with memory. Chop it up. Stir it round. Whisk it. Flip it. Slice it. Peel it.
Hot green light cutting through jungle canopy. Turning plants to men. And men to plants. The bubble bursting sound of distant sniper fire. The enrapturing braid of smells of holy basil, coriander and nuoc mam in a six seat Da Nang restaurant. The smooth metal skull of an unexploded shell.
Lately, it had been so hard to hold an image. A snatch of thought would explode in incandescent white, then, as suddenly, like a burst shell at night, be sucked back into the empty black. A black too dark to see what destruction had been done. He would be left with nothing more than a fading thunder rolling away from him. And bone rattling fear. At the possibility of there being nothing in the dark.
Peter unwound himself from the twisted bedclothes. He wandered through the darkened house trying to recover something familiar. Each hulk of moon shadowed chair, each pattern-less plane of rug, each mass of black, be it cup or cruet or the gossamer gray of curtains, was unknown. He walked to the end of the family room where the full moon’s glow was brightest. For a long time he stood watch behind the darker edge of the window frame. In the old yolk yellow light, winter wounded spears of grass, looking like the bold slashes from a Japanese brush, frantically dashed ephemeral messages at the behest of the etesian winds. A skip of wind hit a pool of sand and ripples of grainy waves wandered outward. In fierce shaking the bare branches of a rosa rugosa remonstrated against the wind’s insistence. He continued to watch at the window even as his feet curled in pain. He watched the glow of the moon grow ever paler as if it, too, was being emptied of its essence. Peter watched until the work of the wind was finished, the grasses grew still, and their cryptic messages ended. The sand froze in the whorls of the last puff’s fingerprint. He watched until the thin red line of the sun shot its way through the buffer of the scrub pines.
He left the house before six o’clock. There was no traffic on the roads. Commercial Street, the heart of Provincetown, which, in season, was usually so crowded with visitors that it could take a car fifteen minutes to drive three blocks, was empty. As Peter drove slowly toward The Retreat, he looked at the windows of the shops of the town, which had been his home for almost twenty years, as if he were a tourist. Windows were either crammed with tee shirts and sunglasses and souvenirs or empty except for a minimalist’s handful of artfully arranged Italian shirts, New York paintings, New Mexico jewelry, or Texas boots. Peter stopped the car alongside the window of a bookstore. A staircase of black painted wood ran across the front of the window. On the highest step was displayed a hardbound copy of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. On the lowest step was a copy of the recently published last book in the Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit at Rest. In between were Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich.
Staring at the display, Peter was pleased to find a memory. He had read Rabbit, Run in college. He had admired the orotund writing, but he had been upset at the story. He had fought against Updike’s portrayal of Rabbit’s irresponsibility and selfishness. He had not been able to understand the story’s opening where Rabbit is so frustrated by his life that he gets in his car and drives through the night, map-less, relying on instinct, to get him to a better place. In the middle of the night Rabbit had lost his courage, turned around and returned, not to his house and family, but to his hometown, to his coach, to his memories of being a high school basketball star. Rabbit had had an old man’s memories and an old man’s overwhelming sense of irrecoverable loss and time’s thievery when he was just twenty-three. Peter thought of how Rabbit had lost his future to memories of his past, a fading glory binding him and how if he were to reread the beginning of the story now he would understand Rabbit’s run.
Peter parked the car behind The Retreat. In one corner of the lot, driven by the winds was a collection of sun bleached scraps of papers. Next to one of the railroad ties that defined the parking places were three empty beer bottles standing at attention in their cardboard container. Someone had sat in the dark and drunk the beers. Why someone? Peter asked himself why he thought it was someone? Why one? Why not more? Why not a couple, man and man, woman and woman, even woman and man? Walking through that windy night. Holding onto one another. Sharing a night. Making a memory. When was the last time that he had done that? Could he remember? What memories were left? How empty could a person become? What harsh winds had blown that had so cleansed his mind of memory?
Peter got out of the car. He started for the restaurant door, but after a few steps, he changed his mind and walked toward the container of empty bottles. Holding the litter in one hand, he bounced his keys looking for the one that fit the back door. One second, two, then, three. On that particular morning, the search took too long. On the third try, when the key didn’t surface, Peter turned, walked quickly to the car, threw the empty bottles on the floor of the back seat, drove to the bank, and removed two hundred dollars from the teller machine.
He was past the dirty white cinder block garage where Gaby worked before he saw a school bus. Despite all the roadside warnings of death and destruction, he drove Route 6’s straight shot across the lower Cape, at seventy. He was over the Bourne Bridge befor
e he thought to look at the canal traffic far below. Two hours after making his decision, if it was a decision rather than a response to an undeniable stimulus, he slowed for the Route 95 exit that would take him to Clarke’s Cove.
He should see Bett. He should call. He should call Raoul. He should turn around and return to The Retreat and its responsibilities. The shoulds plucked and picked at him with the persistence of a neurotic’s fingers at unseen lint, but at the very last moment he veered away from the exit and continued down the highway.
Not having any memories left to push away the nagging fingers, Peter concentrated his thoughts on holding his breath. After drawing the deepest breath and holding it, he listened to his pulse as it pounded just behind his ears. The exercise made him feel warm and very tired. I was during the twenty third inhalation that Peter crossed into Connecticut and began to feel safer.
An hour later, as Peter neared New Haven, the traffic grew heavier. Exhaust had colored the edges of the highway a cuprous brown. The road was cracked and crazed from having weathered too much traffic. New Haven’s skyline was much higher than he expected. On the harbor side there were tall bank and office buildings. The last time he had been in New Haven he was nearing the end of his cross country drive after having been discharged from the army hospital. For the second time that morning, he was pleased to find a memory. He chewed on its edges like a baby with a teething biscuit.
Back then, there had been a harbor filled with aging tankers and rusty scows. And toll booths. He realized that he hadn’t passed through any toll booths. Route 95 had been riddled with them. The closer one got to New York City, the more frequent were the stops. It had been as if the road were testing a driver’s desire for the metropolis. Now, the booths were gone.