Jennifer spread her small, competent hands on the table. “I’d like to know, if you don’t mind, what happened that terrible night. And what you remember about Brandon.”
Elsbeth finished her sausage and drank her beer slowly. She was tempted to order another drink, but never in her life had she drunk more than one and she didn’t think this was the time to start. “My English is not so good.”
“Your English is fine,” Jennifer insisted.
Elsbeth tried to convey to this woman who was strange, but also not strange, what had happened that night. Jennifer looked relieved to hear about the vial poured into Brandon’s drink. Elsbeth considered withholding that, but she thought she owed the woman this much. She recalled the stages of shock and shame and public humiliation she and Kathe and Clara and Renate had experienced. Clara had a broken collarbone. Renate lost several front teeth. She and Kathe became pregnant. All of them continued to have nightmares. Both she and Kath had been ostracised by their families.
“And the soldiers? I mean the ones aside from Brandon, weren’t they called to account for their actions?” She could hear Sergeant Mackie saying alleged actions.
“I would not know what investigation the Army held. We did learn, when we finally found an American lawyer, that the other three men have transferred out of the country.”
“How is your case proceeding? Do you have a court date?”
“They say we need the DNA. The Army says it can’t get genetic evidence without the soldiers’ permission.”
“So you’re left in limbo.”
Pastor Schmitt didn’t believe in limbo, but indeed his daughter found that to be her precise place of residence. She shrugged to Jennifer.
“And as for me, since Brandon has died, there is no DNA, only the truth as I know it.”
Jennifer thought of the embryos again. Four of them. Would they have to sacrifice one to identify DNA? Would she do such a thing?
Willi came screaming to his mother like a siren. Jennifer thought of the whining police cars in World War II films. She looked away. She didn’t want to see the child’s eyes, his jaw. She didn’t want to see Brandon in this pub.
Willi was reading a picture book about dinosaurs. His aptitude for science pleased Jennifer. She wondered if the school would place him in her class in a few years?
“Another glass of juice?” she asked as she walked from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel.
“No thank you,” he smiled up at her from the dining room table.
“How about you?”
Elsbeth glanced from her book, Of Mice and Men, a novel she was studying in her English class at Arizona State University. “Oh, no thanks Jennifer. Now remember, you promised to let me cook the dinner tomorrow.”
“You have your studies.”
“You have your job. Besides, I wouldn’t have my studies if it weren’t for you.”
“Well, this isn’t your Pacific dream. I always wonder if you’re happy in the desert.”
“They say it rains all the time in Seattle. OK if you’re a fish, but Willi would hate that. Besides, I’d have no friends there.”
Jennifer smiled and turned back to the stove, unconsciously running her hands over her belly.
“And to think,” Elsbeth said, “if we lived up there, how far Willi would be from his little sister Amelia.”
Jennifer stirred the pasta sauce. “Amelia,” she whispered, talking through her love.
The Palace of Physical Culture
I love to watch naked women. I would enjoy men, too, but they’re not allowed into the ladies’ locker-room. Watching is the best part of each day at the Y. Of course the glance must be discreet, you don’t want people thinking you have designs on them or the handbags they leave behind when they shower. Actually, most women are curious: comparing, contrasting, worrying, admiring. In this reunion of exiles, long separated by civilised attire, I decide that naked assembly promotes democracy because, after all, most of us have the same basic equipment. We stare at ourselves, at what we might become, at what we once were: big bottoms, little bottoms, pregnant bellies, surgical scars, buff thighs, silvery stretch marks, shaved legs, hairy armpits, tattoos, bunions, pink nipples, red nipples, brown nipples, pierced nipples.
My dear brother gave me a summer pass to the Y this June when I turned forty. A complicated present. Yes, I’d been planning to exercise as soon as I found time. But, was he saying I looked fat? Did he notice the way my leg stiffened after sitting through a long movie? Was this a use-it-or-lose-it ultimatum? No, honestly, he insisted. He worked out himself and just thought I’d enjoy it. What a thoughtful gift. Maybe he wanted me to live longer.
By July, whenever I enter the locker-room, I anticipate the familiar, curiously welcoming potpourri of disinfectant, sweat, moisturiser, deodorant and talcum powder. Today I spot Mrs Hanson slowly rolling support nylons over the amazingly irregular shape of her left knee. I hold my greeting until she has pulled the pantihose to her waist.
“So, how’s the new hip?” (A macabre question, I would have thought a month ago, but now it seems as natural as the frequently asked, “What’s your pulse rate?”)
“Good, good,” the old woman nods with pleasure. “I got through all the kicking and treading.”
I savour the smell of Mrs Hanson’s apple-mint soap.
“And the waterjacks. All of it,” she beams.
On first encounter, Mrs Hanson is an oddly diaphanous figure: wispy halo of curls atop white, bulky shoulders; thighs and hips so much loosely packed ricotta cheese; breasts sagging like the flesh of a plucked turkey. Who assigned me a locker across from this enormous old woman? She’s hardly what I consider a fitness muse. For a while, I am annoyed by the whole Senior Aqua Class who usurp bench space, noise space, shower space in mid-day, when joggers and weightlifters need to slip in and out over tight lunch breaks. Can’t the water birds reschedule for three in the afternoon? Or is that nap time, prime canasta hour, the perfect part of the day for a sloe gin fizz and a little virtual sex? In truth, I grow petulant.
Then I study the naked Mrs Hanson. Dignity is the only word for her movement in the nobly earned flesh of those pale arms and legs. Her walk is light and graceful, despite a limp, which I soon understand is from her second hip replacement. I’ve learned a lot about Mrs Hanson this month, about how she still goes ice fishing on Lake Minnetonka in February, about how she lives alone, but likes to visit the “elderly ladies” at a nearby retirement home, about how she plans to be walking perfectly by September, so she can visit her grandson in San Francisco for her eightieth birthday. Usually, we have a long chat, but right now Mrs Hanson is hurrying off to “take an old dear to the doctor.”
Today’s class is “Stretch and Strengthen.” Surrounded by the studio mirrors—glass and human—I enjoy the initial deep breathing and arm raising, but soon feel like a cartoon of a decrepit ballerina. Forty years old, what am I doing here? As a child, I thought forty was ancient. I remember telling myself that there would be no point in visiting the library after forty, because I’d be almost dead, anyway. Now, I am head of a branch library and go to the gym every lunch hour.
At first this class looks easy—swinging pink baby weights back and forth, up and down. I sign up to swell my self-confidence and because I like the Salsa music.
Within two weeks, I am using the green, three pound weights. Once, on a double espresso day, the macha five pound ones.
A new instructor stares at me.
“The lady in the back row,” she calls, “don’t swing your weights. Concentrate on lifting and lowering. To the beat.”
Today’s music is speedy rap.
“That’s it,” she says, “you can feel it now. Lift and lower. You’ve almost got it.”
Almost?
My arms are sore. Sweat pearls on my forehead. My coif is losing its fure. Smelly, wet hair drips around my headband in humiliating strings.
“Just eight more,” exhorts Brunhilda-the-Brawny.
; Defiantly, I pause to sip water.
“Just seven more,” she cajoles in that cheerful-earful voice, effortlessly pumping her own ten pound weights. “Seven. That’s it. Six. Come on, five …”
Whenever I skip a work-out, I feel that old childhood remorse about missing Sunday Mass. And when I keep my new exercise schedule, I imagine the Sacrament of Penance erasing sins of sloth and gluttony. Sick, I know this is sick, the transfer of Catholic schoolgirl guilt into menopausal health guilt. But first I’ll deal with the body, then I’ll tackle the bad attitude.
Marta, the Otter, and her mother Rosa are laughing in the locker-room when I return, exhausted from class. Luckily, it’s never hard to hold up my end of the conversation with Marta, who eagerly keeps me apprised of her progress on the Otter Swim Team.
This nimble six year old has the taut, androgynous shape of an archer’s bow and—while she casually surveys the older bodies as if she’s shopping for a puberty outfit—Marta tells me that having mastered the crawl, she will learn to dive this week.
Quiet, self-contained Rosa is her daughter’s mirror image. Lean and dark as Marta, but virtually silent each afternoon as she helps Marta into her striped yellow suit and purple cap. At the moment, Rosa has retreated to the corner studying a computer science text.
“Mama is going to be a business executive,” Marta tells me.
Rosa rolls her wise, twenty-five year old eyes. “Graduation. An office job maybe.”
Since June, I’ve discovered much about Marta and a little about her mother, such as although Rosa grew up in Cuba, she never learned to swim. Now, every day, she wilts in the chlorinated steam on the bleachers, peering as her daughter bobs in the big pool. I cannot imagine how, as a single mother, Rosa manages to work as a janitor, attend junior college and escort Marta to the gym, but I get the impression that Rosa and Marta believe swimming is as important as eating.
In early August, I begin a Circuit Class, which my brother warns, is only for serious exercisers. I understand why, within five minutes, when we commence a gruesome rota of one minute ordeals: push-ups, weighted butterfly lifts, star jumps, bicep curls, step straddles, tricep hinges. Our respite after seven of these in-place routines is to sprint back and forth across the gym five times. Then we continue the torture circuit on the other side of the room—squats, back curls, double crunches … The single pleasure here is the vibrant beat of reggae music.
Despite the virtues of this invigorating work-out, I find my glance wandering toward the fashion show. Toward the plump blonde in black lace exercise brassiere and stripped pedal pushers. The young Islamic woman performing jumping jacks in baggy sweatshirt and black scarf. Isn’t she baking in there? Then there’s the brave, solitary man in his veteran university shorts and threadbare t-shirt. Concentrate, I scold myself, zen into an alternative state. Attitude. You in your body. You are your body.
When I return from Circuit Class, a pouting Marta stands by the locker, dripping from her yellow stripes onto the floor.
My first thought is not about this little one, but about Mrs Hanson, whom I haven’t seen yesterday or today. Is she OK? It’s too early for her San Francisco trip, right?
Soon, Marta’s sullenness fills the room.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Nothing,” Marta mutters, wringing the purple rubber swim cap in her strong little hands.
Marta’s mother shrugs and returns to her heavy textbook.
“Didn’t you have a good swim today?” I try again.
Silence.
Suddenly, I remember. “Did you make it? Did you swim from one end of the pool to the other without stopping?”
Head down, Marta glowers at her turquoise toe-nails.
“Answer the lady,” instructs Rosa gently.
“Stupid!” exclaims Marta. “What’s the point of getting all the way across? You just have to swim back.”
Grinning, Rosa encourages, “It’s the next stage in learning.”
“You can’t talk,” Marta snaps, “you won’t even stick your foot in the water!”
Often I am given free reminders like this that I would flunk motherhood. How will she answer?
Rosa is spared because a tall, red-haired woman has just appeared from the shower, a white towel around her waist. We are all surprised by the left side of her chest, by the long red scar, the missing breast. Marta moves forward for a better look. Rosa and I glance away, maturely pretending to busy ourselves with important thoughts. Marta continues to stare and when I turn back, the woman has noticed Marta. She bends down to the little girl and winks. Marta puts her hand over her heart and winks back. They both break into wide smiles.
It is the last day of August and I am leaning on the registration desk renewing my membership, when Mrs Hanson hobbles up behind me to sign in.
“Hello! I was worried,” I say hectically, then note the cane. “Oh! Are you OK? What happened?”
A little fall, she explains, as we walk gingerly together toward the locker-room. I hold the door open, wincing at her ragged gait. She’ll never make it to San Francisco at this rate.
“Your grandson,” I ask. “Did you visit him?”
Deftly, she slips into her waterbird suit. “Well,” she sighs, “there’s good news and bad news.”
I hate this expression, but have never heard it uttered with Mrs Hanson’s charming fortitude.
“The bad news, of course, is the fall. I had to postpone my visit until December.”
I nod, waiting.
“The good news is that he’s taking me down to Disneyland for Christmas!”
“How wonderful,” I say, that and a few other empty phrases, as she proceeds purposefully with her cane toward the pool.
My favourite class is step aerobics. Maybe because the teacher plays Aretha and Bonnie Raitt and La Belle. Never before have I felt graceful. Yet here I accomplish knee lifts, hamstring curls, side leg lifts, V-steps, diagonals, L-steps, repeater knees, side lunges, back lunges and turn steps. Before joining the gym, I lived in my head, which seemed roomy enough, with space for yesterday, today and tomorrow, but I couldn’t go back to residing there full-time. Not now that I’ve located all these bones and muscles, some of which I know by nickname: abs, glutes, pecs, lats.
While my classmates’ speed and strength can be amazing, the most impressive folks are the rubber people. I watch agog as they stand up straight, bend at the waist, and place their palms on the floor. Some women sit on the mat, hold their legs wide apart and put their arms flat on the ground between their knees. Then there are the neck stretchers. How do they get their ears to touch their erect shoulders? You’d think a librarian’s head would be heavy enough to cooperate with gravity. I’ll never be Ms Pretzel, but I am pretty good at the stand-on-one-foot-and-bend-the-other-back-to-your-bottom routine. My balance is improving and I enjoy the pull on my “quad” as I now fondly call it.
After all that fancy stepping, I deserve a long shower. Melting under the hot water, silently humming a new Queen Latifa song, I am blissfully alone, but surrounded by other women washing and shaving, by mothers cleaning children’s ears, teenagers shouting gossip to each other over the noise of the pipes. Showering is the simple, perfect pleasure. Paradiso … Ah, divine heat massages new, old muscles; cleansing water sprays away the dregs of menstruation, the sweat of anxiety and exercise. I shampoo my grey-blond hair and feel face, shoulders, body growing relaxed and alert. A sudden image of Mom in middle-age—emphysema, arthritis, migraine headaches, complete set of ill-fitting dentures. Did such a memory provoke my brother’s birthday gift?
“Hi!”
A small voice interrupts the drying of my ten exceedingly clean toes.
“Hi, yourself,” I say, “how’s it going?”
Marta waits expectantly. Finally I look up, notice Rosa standing beside her in a glossy red swim suit.
“You?” I ask.
Marta answers for her mother. “She promised.”
Rosa renders her characteristic shrug.
“She promised once I made it across the pool, she would come swimming.”
“I said,” Rosa corrects her nervously, “I would stick my foot in the water …”
I begin to congratulate her, to say something motivating, and then realise I can’t say anything at all because I am on the verge of tears.
Rosa saves me, “Eh, I figure, at my age, it’s about time.”
Japanese Vase
“You look good,” he says, “Slim. Well.”
The first words to his daughter in four years. As he collapses in the overstuffed chair, she notices that he is not well. Not slim. Two-hundred-fifty pounds on five foot ten. All these years his weight has trailed her like Claudius. She is sad, repulsed, confused that she could ever have been so fearful of this man, her father.
He plops a packet of snapshots on the coffee table and surveys her apartment. He takes in the Indian wall hangings, small Guatemalan rug, purple gladiolas in the plum Japanese vase.
Does he remember the vase? Does he remember when he brought it back for her in high school? Or was it college? She does not remember.
He regards the vase, puzzling. When he notices her noticing him, he shifts his glance.
“An electric typewriter,” he says, considering her neat desk from a distance. He will not go closer. He has never intruded. “But I guess you need it for your work.”
Can he imagine the months it took to convince herself that she needed an electric typewriter to be a good union organiser? For surely she could organise on the falling-apart model from college with the semi-colon missing. Easy enough to insert that extra dot over the comma. How many semicolons does a good organiser need in one day?
“Yes,” she says, “it’s useful.” She sweeps her blondness back in the plastic clasp. Strawberry blond, like his hair before baldness invaded. “Would you like an omelette or scrambled?” she asks knowing already that an omelette will be too effete and trying to recall how much milk to put in scrambled.
The Night Singers Page 8