Bound

by Antonya Nelson

  Cattie had begun braiding together the city as Catherine recalled it, one curious strand at a time, today aided by the icy blur the windshield view provided her. She knew that the bakery Oliver had opened last fall was previously the place where Catherine’s father had bought his cars. Catherine had gone there with him every few years, dressed up, in order to trade for the latest model. Catherine’s mother didn’t believe in American-made cars, but her dad’s dad was a Ford dealer, so for once he got his way. “He was brand-loyal,” Catherine had told her, smiling wanly at Cattie.

  Apropos of nothing obvious, Catherine now turned to Cattie and asked, “Do you think it’s pathetic, to only have lived here?”

  “No,” Cattie said.

  “You know that apartment downtown? Misty and I rented it under an alias. It was both our names. Catherine Mueller.”

  “My name,” Cattie said.

  “Yeah!” Catherine said happily. “I just realized that.”

  The sleet was slacking off, and the wipers, which had been straining all along under its attack, suddenly broke free and smacked away again.

  “Funnily enough,” Catherine said, “it was Misty who left Wichita, not me.” And she was crying then, although Cattie didn’t know why. Another of those two-sided things.

  Funnily enough, she said to herself, knowing her mother would also have found the phrase amusing.

  CHAPTER 14

  PROFESSOR EMERITUS YASMIN KEENE passed away on a stormy March evening, “peacefully in her sleep,” according to the obituary. Catherine couldn’t fathom the woman going peacefully anywhere. She pictured the scary black walking stick, thrashing wildly about as its owner swirled below it into the afterlife. Like somebody sucked into a cesspool. It was an image she would have happily shared with Cattie, had they been alone in the car, but refrained since they weren’t. Yasmin’s funeral service was being held at the same cemetery where Catherine’s father had been buried. “Same place where I learned to drive,” she chose to announce as they headed there.

  “I had a driving lesson at a graveyard,” Cattie offered. Funnily enough, they’d taken to saying to each other. She and Catherine sat in the back seat of Oliver’s vehicle, while Oliver and Grace Harding occupied the front. Those two were like the parents, Catherine thought; every now and then her husband shape-shifted very briefly in her mind, to an old man, and when it happened she felt a strange spasm in her chest. Shame, or something akin to it. Pity? She was about to postulate aloud that Misty might have gotten the cemetery driving idea from Catherine’s family, and also that Misty herself had seemed to be someone born with the ability to drive. But then she realized that Misty had died in a car, and held her tongue. The irony was notable, but not necessary to point out.

  “I could teach you to drive,” Oliver offered. Catherine and Cattie exchanged glances; so far as they could remember, he hadn’t been alone with the girl since the first night she’d spent at their home.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Yasmin Keene’s son the physician had called Catherine to tell her the news, then requested her mother’s phone number so that he could notify her at the nursing home. Yasmin’s daughter the professor of gender studies had written the obituary, citing Grace Harding as a survivor and “esteemed colleague of many years.” Yasmin’s son the curator of an art museum in Tulsa brought Yasmin’s genius grandchildren to pay a visit to Dr. Harding at Green Acres. Yasmin’s daughter the lesbian psychologist planned to endow a scholarship at the local U in her mother’s name.

  Catherine sighed, staring at the back of her own mother’s head. When she died, what would Catherine have to offer as a legacy? Not only had Catherine not accumulated particular status or honors, her mother’s only two potential grandchildren had been aborted, without her knowledge, decades ago. At the cemetery, Dr. Grace Harding’s plot already existed, right next to Catherine’s father, name and birth date engraved with an empty space beside it, waiting like a blank on a quiz to be filled in.

  When Catherine told Cattie that they were going to a funeral, she’d made it clear the girl did not have to join them. “I’d like you to come,” she confessed. “For one thing, I think it’d be nice for my mom to get to know you better.” For another, she did not say, I would relish the company.

  Cattie was amenable. The whole idea of family was a novelty to her, a curiosity she had some unbiased interest in. Maybe she already understood that Catherine liked to have her around, that when Cattie was with her, she had an ally. Maybe the girl would grow as fond of Catherine as Catherine had grown of her. This wasn’t the child she would have given birth to, she knew that; there’d have been rebellion and annoyance, from that child, by this point—anything but alliance. Yet Cattie was a teenager for whom Catherine had a lot of affection and understanding. Without consulting Oliver, they’d gone together and gotten tiny matching tattoos on their ankles, simple yellow and brown sunflowers, a tiny green stem with a single leaf.

  “Kansas state symbol,” Catherine said. “I always loved sunflowers.”

  Cattie nodded. “Yeah, not too feminine, for a flower.”

  “Hairy,” Catherine agreed. “Woody.”

  Oliver thought tattoos were vulgar.

  Now Catherine remembered something. She was about to mention it, the car trip her parents and she and Misty had taken to Colorado, during the summer of the bicentennial. The trip where the three Hardings had loaded down their traveling companion with more information than she’d known what to do with, one bit of which concerned sunflowers, the appealing way they always faced and followed the sun, a living demonstration ongoing alongside the two-lane highway as they traveled west.

  Her mother the feminist, Catherine thought, might have appreciated having a not-girly girl. She might have enjoyed somebody like Cattie, or Misty, for that matter, had she been around early enough to influence them, love them. They might have been much more rewarding as daughters to Professor Grace Harding. She might have been able to shape them into citizens like those offspring of Yasmin Keene, serious people with unflinching facial expressions.

  Yasmin’s children had had their mother cremated; her ashes would be placed, fittingly enough, in an outdoor vertical structure like a bookcase. Her children’s father rested just above her on that marble shelf system, a man she’d never married nor lived with, but who’d remained the children’s dutiful father nonetheless. Nylon Parker the Third, he was named; Catherine had forgotten about him, his timid presence now and then at some social occasion, a man who took up half the space of his partner, both literally and figuratively. Catherine wondered if the urn that held him was also smaller than Yasmin’s.

  Nylon Parker the Fourth began the series of comments that would comprise Yasmin’s internment ceremony. Catherine had been handed the script her mother wished to contribute, a paragraph-length document that read more like a curriculum vita than a eulogy, and which contained not one shred of wit, affection, anecdote, or warmth. Yet she knew that her mother had loved Yasmin. What else could it be named? Even now, standing in a stiff wind wearing the same black dress she wore to every funeral she’d attended as an adult, Dr. Harding seemed better prepared to deliver a lecture than to offer mourning. When Catherine’s father had died, she’d not cried publicly. She’d stood in the same outfit then as now, surrounded by many of the same personnel, stoic and composed. Later Catherine had found her with her head on the kitchen table, inconsolable, unable to stop sobbing. Yet when Catherine fell upon her in sympathy, prepared to join her in a cathartic tender moment, her mother had turned a distorted and inflamed face at her, furious at having her privacy breached. “Go away!” she’d screamed at Catherine. “Leave me alone!”

  It seemed she would never be the daughter her mother might have wished for.

  The four children offered their thoughts, as did a few of the surviving generation of professors and administrators who had made up the university’s former society. There was chuckling affirmation of Yasmin’s crusty personality, acknowledgment of her
dedication and drive. Her children all commented on how fierce she’d been, and how much they’d resented and then been grateful for her tough love. Her colleagues had similar emotions; they respected her ferocity, they appreciated her contributions even as they sometimes found themselves on the wrong end of the stick. “Literally,” Catherine whispered to herself. That horrible walking stick.

  Then it was Catherine’s turn to speak. She stepped forward, leaving her mother to lean on Oliver, and read what Dr. Harding had written, the list of accolades and honors and successes. They’d already been mentioned, more or less, so the group merely nodded. Then Catherine paused, looking up from the flapping paper in her hand. To Nylon Parker the Fourth, she addressed her final remarks: “Your mom terrified me,” she confessed. “Really. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t like me very much. I was not her kind of girl. Not her kind of person at all, actually. But she loved my mother. And I know my mother also loved her, and needed her, and will miss her. Your mother made a lot of contributions to the community, like everybody here is saying, but she also meant a whole lot to my mother. My mother can’t say so, but it’s true.” Can’t, and wouldn’t, Catherine knew. Tough, she said in her head to her mother. Tough titties.

  She chose not to step back next to her original spot beside her glowering mother but beside neutral Cattie; she had been naughty, and she now sought shelter. The girl pulled her hair from her face and squinted curiously. As another speaker stepped forward to add to the collection of comments, Cattie said in a low voice to Catherine, “Was there a funeral for my mother?”

  Oliver had expected his ex-wife Leslie to attend the internment, since she’d taken classes from Dr. Keene when she’d matriculated at the U, passing through women’s studies in her meandering quest for self-knowledge, but he didn’t anticipate Miriam’s being with her. And at first he hadn’t recognized the man who accompanied them, a tall guy wearing a gray driver’s cap. It was like Miriam to do something inappropriate like bring a date to a funeral. And then to cling to the man as if in heat, as if she simply could not wait to return to bed.

  Then Oliver realized who the man was. The tattooed Adonis. Who, today, was dressed exactly like Oliver himself. Respectable citizen. Mourner. Miriam glanced at her father challengingly, tongue in the handsome guy’s ear. So Oliver hadn’t been doing her a favor when he disposed of the trash. In her black pea coat and tight black pants she resembled an aging male rock star, complete with taunting expression and dark-circled eyes, the hovering notion of concealed weaponry.

  She certainly seemed capable of setting off a bomb in his life. She and her sidekick.

  Beside the two of them, Leslie gazed serenely around herself, her usual bland smile on her lips. She’d greeted Dr. Harding by putting her cheek to either side of the woman’s face, a strange gesture suggesting both Europe and felines. His ex-wife, the French kitty. Again and again, she’d insisted that Dr. Harding would enjoy a treatment at the spa, imploring Oliver to recommend it, to bring his mother-in-law to her. But he knew otherwise. Grace would never allow herself an indulgence like the one Leslie offered; she would decry anybody who chose to commit time or money to such a thing. Like Oliver, she’d been raised in the years following the Great Depression, back when depression meant a national economic crisis rather than a personal psychological one. Her generation, his, had been schooled in selfless rather than selfish acts. Leslie could not be expected to understand Grace Harding’s stubbornness on the subject; she’d been born later, in an easier decade that had followed that tough one.

  Moreover, undressing in a small room to allow another person access to her body could never be anything but a medical procedure, at this point, for Grace. When her husband had died, Oliver understood, so had her sensual life. That had been almost ten years ago, at a time when she was younger than he was now. In the past, he might have congratulated himself on not having succumbed to the calcified ways of his old nemesis, this by-marriage relative. But over the past weeks he’d come to respect her resolute obstinacy. It seemed less like a limitation than a virtue, character-wise, these days. He knew exactly how she would respond, and why, and she was dependable as a result. He was learning to admire dependability, given how much seemed in flux around him. His wife and her new pet the teenager; his unsettling daughter with her arsenal of ticking information about him; his Sweetheart, who was returning fewer and fewer of his messages, with whom he hadn’t been alone in more than a week.

  There were these two Italian bread-makers who were conducting classes in sourdough. Something about the way the Sweetheart had spoken about them …

  When Oliver had last said he loved her, she’d murmured assent rather than enunciating the words. It had been a mistake to fantasize about leaving Catherine for the Sweetheart; in the logic of love’s magical thinking, sending his wife away with her new venture—her sudden parenthood of Cattie Mueller—had doomed the plausible reality. How remarkable it was that lovers ever found one another; how astonishingly unlikely it was that they would endure as a couple past the fitful business of first-blush lust and sweaty secret assignations. He’d allowed himself to envision a future with the Sweetheart, one in which Catherine joined the ranks of his ex-wives, that exclusive club. He had fancied himself lucky that Cattie had arrived to offset his departure, the crisis of the orphaned girl effectively trumping that of the philandering husband. Could he actually have thought that he’d blame the girl for coming between him and Catherine?

  Yes, he could. Now he looked toward the girl; she looked right back, as usual.

  When Catherine departed from the written remarks Grace had provided, when she chose to conclude the dignified send-off with a gushy rush of sap, Oliver felt like seconding his mother-in-law in her grunting disapproval. “Hopeless,” he leaned over to announce in her ear. “Absolutely hopeless. Dr. Keene would have understood, I’m sure.”

  He’d never have been brave or kind enough to do such a thing in his previous relationship with the woman. But he thought she appreciated his words now. Now that she had none of her own to offer in return. He vowed that when she died, when it was he at this cemetery standing before the stone that would bear her finished official data, surrounded by whatever-number of her remaining acquaintances, he would recite her worldly accomplishments, those and nothing more. People of their generation, people who’d been raised on the prairie or in the Dust Bowl, who’d performed their jobs in service of the greater good, did not require a public airing of, or praise for, their feelings. A lot could be said for not saying anything.

  They all looked alike, soldiers. They all looked like Randall. So Cattie saw Randall everywhere, the military uniform entering the liquor store, exiting the grocery, a whole parade of them marching past East High. “PTSD,” she would whisper to herself; his friend who’d celebrated himself to death. How else to explain? Who didn’t have some version of that very same affliction? Down the empty road he’d walked, grown smaller, and then disappeared, like the vanishing point. A person could do that: walk away. At another grave, across the flat expanse of markers, a soldier stood among others on the bright green Astroturf. Randall, Cattie thought. No longer did it shock her to see him all over the place; it was him, and it wasn’t him. Metaphysical. Syllogistic. This one at the cemetery had insinuated himself somehow into a family situation in Wichita, Kansas. Just as she had. And now they were both attending funerals. Tomorrow she would see him picking up a prescription, or jogging on a side street, or doing some other ordinary thing. For as long as there were soldiers wandering the world in his uniform, Cattie would see him.

  He’d been at the press conference when the serial killer was finally caught, two weeks earlier. There at the sidelines, off-camera yet present while the officials were giving their endless bragging speeches and the cameras were clicking, the young man standing at attention, eyes focused straight ahead, at nothing. It took forever to get to the point—so much talking, so many thanks, such a lot of grandstanding and self-congratulation—and yet the soldie
r stood without blinking or yawning, without moving or mocking, there beneath a limp flag. In the audience, the victims’ families: spouses and children, bereft, vindicated, enraged. Middle-aged, miserable, ordinary. But Cattie kept waiting for the soldier to reappear, that steady fellow

  “It’s always the guy next door,” Catherine had said at the breakfast table the day after the announcement, studying the grinning face on the front page of the newspaper. “That gap between his teeth is disgusting.” The killer had small eyes made smaller by his smile.

  “He looks stupid,” they said at the same time.

  Across the cemetery the other group was disbanding, the soldier among the last to step away from the coffin and the Astroturf. That funeral’s ritual was timed only a few minutes’ pacing ahead of the one Cattie attended. She would hang back, too, because she didn’t want to get any closer to the soldier. She didn’t want him to transform into a specific other person who definitely was not Randall.

  SUMMER

  CHAPTER 15

  HE TURNED SEVENTY in late July, and Oliver was determined not to care. His wife was due home from Colorado by evening, and his Sweetheart did not know that today was his birthday. Long ago he’d told her he was born in December, and she’d nodded knowingly, smug about her intuition concerning his zodiac sign, unwilling to notify him of the literal May-December relationship she thought they shared. She was a Taurus. Her generation, or maybe just her current demographic, believed in astrology.