Ultraviolet

by Suzanne Matson

  She almost bolts for it, but then she happens to look down the row and catches Paul’s eye; he’s nine years older than she, about to begin his last year at Woodstock. He is grinningly his tall, tanned, belted self, and gives her a wink and then goes cross-eyed on purpose to make her smile, and though she doesn’t smile back, he has had his effect. He has changed the moment, and it no longer seems possible to break free.

  ***

  After dinner she finds her apartment, the one with the KATHRYN AVENUE sign her grandsons bought her at Seaside, Oregon, from the Pig ’N Pancake restaurant gift shop. It has made the move to Boston with her. Her new place is four doors down from the dining hall; sometimes she is off by one door. But this is her door and her sign, although someone has filled her studio apartment with all new things, furniture that doesn’t belong to her. Someone has moved her out while she was at dinner eating beef stew and pear crisp. She sits in the not-her-chair, feeling her chest go shallow. They have disposed of all the things her daughter bought her after moving her across the country. Someone has decided she needs to go.

  Her grandson Michael, who drives, comes for his visit. He times them after her meals because he dislikes sitting in the dining room with her tablemates. She doesn’t blame him. Whenever a new person, a young person, joins them, the tablemates huddle in like vultures. They clamp their beaks around the young life and pull and tear for shreds of the world. Her grandson takes his place on the couch and puts on the animal videos they watch together. An old blind horse led around by his friend the goat. A mother deer licking spikes from the fur of an orphaned Labrador puppy. They usually fill her heart with tenderness. Michael tells her he hopes she will feel better soon, his way of saying that no one is taking and replacing her furniture. His mother must have warned him. Kathryn stares at the screen that she begins to see is her own television by her own table and her grandson plies the remote from where he is stretched out on her own sofa, asking her if she prefers Animal Odd Couples to videos of sea turtles. She does not prefer. She does not. She does. She is disappearing, just as they have decided that she must, moving her furniture out in an hour’s time, then back again so her grandson will suspect nothing. If he found out he would help her, so they keep him from finding out. He just wants to know if sea turtles are better than—what. What. What are they better than?

  Samantha arrives later and explains again how the furniture heist was real to her, Kathryn, but was not real. Her daughter is calm about this and so is her grandson flicking the channels, spelling p-u-p-p-i-e-s one letter at a time into the bar that says search. She doesn’t know how he does that. When he’s not around and she tries getting the puppy channel she always winds up with the news or the Catholics. They are mostly Catholic at her new building. They have lived in the neighborhood all their lives and gone to grammar school with some of the people they now eat with in the dining room. They went to Mass and drank from the same cup.

  Yesterday Samantha took her to Shaw’s and they picked out two cards, one for a tablemate who hasn’t been well, and one for her brother Paul, who is about to turn one hundred. She and Michael and Samantha are going to go to his birthday party next week in Ohio.

  “Only I shouldn’t go anymore,” Kathryn tells Samantha.

  “Why not?”

  “Because of all this.”

  “What’s this?”

  “This cracking up.” And she means it. She should not ruin anybody’s hundredth-birthday party by cracking up in the middle of it.

  “But this is it. You won’t see him again. He won’t travel and you can barely travel. This is your last chance.”

  To see him alive, Kathryn adds for her. Her tall, belted, buckled, always smarter-than-she brother. Who teased and teased.

  Though he did bring her egg custard when she was lying in the infirmary at Woodstock, her fingernail pressing moons in the pads of her thumbs, her throat full of razor blades. Her mother always made egg custard when she had a cold. “This will slip right down,” she’d say.

  ***

  “Eat your pudding,” says Miss Smithson after supper, when everyone else has been excused.

  “It makes me gag, miss.”

  “Children are going hungry in this country, children are mere skeletons, and you will not waste a good pudding.”

  Kathryn sits alone at the table in the commons, the light left burning for her alone. The chocolate pudding has a skin on the top of it that is like the skin on the milk when they boil it to get out the germs. That’s the part she gags on. Her mother doesn’t make her eat what she says she can’t eat. Her mother is so far away at the mission in Dhamtari that a letter takes more than a week, sometimes two. They talk to each other in an echo chamber, Kathryn telling about things that are over and disappeared before her mother hears about them. Then her mother answers back about something Kathryn can barely remember.

  But she gets news of her thirty-two rabbits. They are all living in the row of pens the groundskeeper built. They are all being fed and send their love.

  Alone in the commons the shadows are uncommonly long. She knows they are just shadows, not ghosts. She doesn’t know a single dead person and thinks that the old British ghosts in this school would not bother with a new American girl who doesn’t like the skins on puddings. She rolls up the skin on her spoon and tries to scrape it on the lip of the dish so that the spoon is clean enough to try the pudding. She tells herself this is boring to ghosts, a girl scraping a spoon, making small clinks in the silence.

  ***

  Kathryn acknowledges that the shower curtain is her shower curtain and not the shower curtain of the new person they tried to move into her apartment when she was at dinner. Samantha picked out the attractive aqua-patterned print just as she picked out the other new things the apartment needed. She comes every day and tidies up the circulars Kathryn picks up in the lobby and makes herself coffee and washes the cup.

  At the hospital last week, they told her she hadn’t had a real stroke, just a mini-stroke, and they didn’t see any damage to the brain. Back at the apartment Kathryn had gone to every corner, reacquainting herself with the things Samantha had brought in big Target bags. Everything looked nice. Everything went together, bought as it was in one fell swoop, and her daughter kept tight control over clutter. Her old apartment in Tacoma had piles of things she was meaning to get to, like the letters from disabled veterans, Native American students who needed funds for college, and children with cleft palates. She had tried to help them all, taking turns, sending one twenty-five-dollar check a month, and saving the rest of the letters in a stack to work through. She wrote in block letters on the check memo lines, NO GIFTS BACK, because she wanted all twenty-five dollars to go to the children and Native Americans and veterans, but they sent them anyway, the address labels, the key chains, the Christmas cards, dream catchers, and plastic crucifixes—With our thanks to you. Then there were the stacks of old bills for shredding, and the stacks of circulars she meant to read. Her daughter pitched it all before the move. As Samantha filled trash bag after trash bag, Kathryn had wanted to grab her wrists and say Stop it right there, but when it was all gone and the tables and counters were clear she couldn’t remember what it was she felt so attached to. It was like being given back time. The circulars and mail and papers represented hours and hours she owed people, and Samantha had wiped away the debt in ten minutes.

  “The place looks nice,” Kathryn tells her.

  “Does it look like home?” Samantha asks.

  Kathryn makes the face that she uses to mean, Not really. Samantha turns away and finds a balled-up tissue and puts it in the garbage, though Kathryn had intended to use it again. She replaces rolls of tissue on the shelf in the bathroom from her grocery bag. Samantha is always refilling, replenishing. Kathryn is always saying thank you.

  Before the hospital, Samantha had come to visit her in the apartment as usual. Kathryn woke up in her armchair and was glad to see her. She tried to say that—I’m
glad to see you. It had come out as if someone took her sentences and snipped them into syllables and shook them in a bag. And Samantha said, let’s take it slower, and asked if she could understand her. And Kathryn said yes, and it was a sound that attached itself to a real word and had a meaning. Then Samantha asked her what she had for lunch and Kathryn said, ar loo rum ta de. They looked at each other, and Samantha said, let’s give it a minute. And then Kathryn wanted to ask her if she had come from work, and said, od him bay see foo—and shook her head and tried to start over—sa zeh eh ra meh nug. And that’s when Samantha said, let’s go to the emergency room.

  But it wasn’t a stroke. It wasn’t the event Kathryn had been waiting for every day since turning forty-nine, her mother’s age when first paralyzed. Sometimes when Kathryn walked, one side suddenly drooped, a little curtsey. It lasted a second. That wasn’t a stroke, either.

  ***

  When Kathryn’s mother was dead, and her father was dead, and her oldest brother, Russell, was dead, Russell’s widow, Bertha, sent her a letter, wrapped in a sheet of paper blank except for Bert’s careful handwriting, I think you should have this.

  The letter was from her father, written to Russell and Bertha the day after her mother died. It chronicled the events in careful detail—her father was an expert record keeper. He always logged which sermon he had preached on a given Sunday in the small notebook he kept in his breast pocket. He made lists of congregation members absent, and whether they had good reason or no reason. He added salient facts about the service—who had complimented the sermon, whether a visiting dignitary of the church had come to share their fellowship, or a returning missionary had made a presentation of maps and slides and artifacts.

  In this methodical way, he began the letter by noting that he and Mamma had had a nice lunch talking about Paul and Beulah’s upcoming wedding, only a week away. Mamma had been awfully excited about the prospect of seeing everyone. Many hands were taking part in the preparations. Mamma could no longer prepare a dish, but she went over the lists of things her sisters were bringing to Beulah’s family home in Elida. Mamma expressed the hope that her cold would be entirely gone by then. They decided that she should nap, to speed this recovery. He helped her from the wheelchair to the bed and made sure she was comfortable. He worked a crossword puzzle from the living room couch and looked in from time to time. Her sleep was more restless than usual, but he attributed this to the fact that she’d been poorly all week—her chest congested, her sinuses filled. At four o’clock a visitor had come to the door, Mrs. Yoder from the congregation, saying her husband had been taken to the hospital for chest pains. She was in a state. He saw nothing for it but to offer to drive her to the hospital. He looked in on Mamma; she was breathing in a labored fashion. He roused her enough to tell her he’d be back shortly, and to ask if he could do anything for her before he left. He couldn’t make out her reply, her voice thick with sleep and congestion, but he thought it better to let her drift back to sleep than to wake her more. He returned two hours later to find Mamma’s eyes half open and her breathing shallow and rattled. The doctor came immediately and said she’d had another paralytic stroke. She never focused her eyes properly after that moment or said another word to him. Dr. Heller said there was nothing either of them could have done even if they’d been at her side when it happened. He was stunned that he hadn’t been, that he’d been at Mr. Yoder’s bedside instead, who was believed to be suffering from indigestion. But, of course, he’d had no way of knowing. His dear companion of thirty-two years and their own Mamma had been returned to her Christ that night. Kathryn came home from Goshen College the next day, and he found it difficult to describe to them the extent of her shock. He tried to comfort her, though she didn’t seem to want him, and he listened for her movements everywhere in the house because the depth of her silence worried him. But together they were bearing up and taking comfort in the Lord. He was, as ever, their loving father, etc.

  The letter Bertha turned over came as a shock. Kathryn remembered those days and she didn’t. The wedding had gone forward the day after the funeral. For Kathryn, it was a sleepwalking affair; the service for one melting into the service for the other, the organ and hymns for both one long dirge. She had chosen the dress her mother was buried in because no one else knew which was her favorite, and she had kissed her cold face as many times as she could before they pulled her off.

  Now Bertha, who had sent her the letter, is dead, beside Kathryn’s buried brother, Russell. Paul’s wife Beulah is dead. And his second wife, Carol. Paul is not dead, and is waiting for his birthday card from the president. He plans to play golf on his one hundredth birthday. He took up French tapes and workbooks in his nineties to keep his brain fresh, and every day he jogs one slow lap around his apartment complex in Liberty, Ohio, when there is no snow on the ground. When there is snow he marches in place in the living room, a man of disciplined habits like their father. He was married again three years ago to a slightly younger widow in his Bible study group (a woman Kathryn has never met, and who, she understands, is not doing too well) and cooks for her and makes sure she takes her pills.

  ***

  In Oregon, all the men grew Centennial beards timed for the day the state turned one hundred, also the year Samantha was born. It was an extraordinary thing to see the husbands transform into lumberjacks over the course of a few weeks, even the ones who wore suits to work.

  Carl’s beard made him look a little like an Old Order Mennonite. The beard and the hearkening back to her unsmiling great-uncles and grandfather in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, made Kathryn nervous. She’d married Carl for his unlikeness to all that, for the fact that her father couldn’t size him up, or make sense of his union politics and Finnish socialism and cheerful good humor. Apart from the Mennonite overtones, Carl looked good in a beard, but she didn’t like the way it felt against her skin when he crossed the divide of their twin beds to embrace her. After the divorce, she missed him sometimes.

  When he died, she took him back, as if the divorce gap of fourteen years after the marriage of twenty-eight years had never happened, so that these days she feels more widow than divorcee. They chat once in a while. He takes a seat in her apartment, looking the way he did when he first took a seat at the counter where she waitressed. He chides her for not having loved him, and she says she did, sometimes. She asks if he stayed faithful when he worked out of town, and he shifts his eyes and almost disappears. He sharpens back into himself on her couch, and accuses her of never wanting him in that way. She says that’s not one hundred percent true. She asks why he let himself get old, a passive lump. He says he couldn’t help it; he was old. And so on.

  Now she is six years older than he lived to be, so she guesses he has the last laugh about who’s old and who’s not. Paul is undeniably old but still belts and buckles and marches in place. The birthday card Kathryn picked for him has a satisfying 100 right in the middle, so round and full. When they talk by phone he goes on about his many wholesome habits, but Kathryn has no time for sibling irritation anymore. He is the last one who knew her when she had thirty-two rabbits, the last who knew their mother’s sadness and their father’s righteousness, the last who knew that as a child she gagged on the boiled milk and her arms crawled with eczema. They can sit side by side and hear the same notes of the Indian cuckoo, smell the same damp Woodstock dormitories, fear the same piano teacher, feel the same burning rap across the knuckles when they miss a note.

  She dreads getting on the plane and her apartment vanishing when she turns her back on it, but her daughter and grandson will be with her and her son, Steve, will fly from the other coast and meet them. She hasn’t seen her son for four months, and she likes it better when he is real and not just an idea in her head. Just like she likes Samantha being real. She knows Samantha tries hard to stay that way, but also needs to be at work or home with her family, which adds up to more than ninety percent of every day. It’s always when she’s gone that they repl
ace Kathryn’s furniture. They will not stop until they have her out on the curb, and Samantha will be nowhere to be found when it happens, which is their plan.

  ***

  In the days ahead, Samantha comes and goes many more times than usual, and Kathryn likes this, but she doesn’t like the way her daughter looks so worried all the time, or the arguments they have about the attendants here—Samantha so trusting, so willing to be duped. And though she likes it that Samantha decides one night to sleep over on her couch, she doesn’t like it that after deciding to do this, she puts her head between her hands and begins to cry. The air goes out of Kathryn, witnessing this. She goes to the couch to sit by her child and stroke her long hair and put her arms around her. She knows to hold on patiently, waiting for her daughter to say what’s the matter. Samantha crumples over sideways, sniffling, and Kathryn hands her a tissue from the supply she always keeps in her pocket. Could it be a teacher who scolded her? Trouble with a friend at school?

  “What is it, Sammy?” She pats her shoulder.

  Her daughter says nothing, and Kathryn presses again, still patting. It’s something, all right. Something is worrying her.

  Samantha raises a tear-stained face. “Everything’s okay.”

  “But it’s not. I can see.”

  “It’s just work. I’m a little behind. But it’ll be fine.” Samantha straightens and blows her nose.

  Something sharp jabs at Kathryn as her daughter flashes from child to adult—unemployment always Kathryn’s worst fear, after all the layoffs, the strikes. All the times the household budgeting envelopes were empty and they still owed the orthodontist, the gas bill, the piano teacher.