“Look,” murmured the Unicorn, pointing past the waves to the layer of kelp. “Dolphins.”
I looked. Beyond the breakers, cleaving through the rumble that broke with flecks of uneasy white, three black spears separated the water.
“Since once I sat upon a promontory, and heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back … the rude sea grew civil at her song,” recited the Unicorn quietly.
I turned to him.
“Shakespeare.” His voice was low. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
I turned back to the water. A black arc curved in the sunlight, power cruising smoothly, a pony for the daughters of the sea. I closed my eyes. I heard the pounding as the breakers soared. I could see, in the very roaring of the sound, the whitecaps as the ocean wrestled underneath them, furling and tumbling in its churning pelt of green. I opened my eyes. Far to the west stretched the rust-brown thickness of the kelp. One, two, the dolphins curved, the gilded hair of their ghostly riders melting into the spray.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Pennyroyal
Dear Diary: It turned out to be an incredible surprise. He opened the door sort of with a flourish and said, Guess what, I’m making dinner for you. He had bought every kind of vegetable. I thought we could have a big salad, he said. We cut up the vegetables and two kinds of lettuce and he made spaghetti with this sauce from a jar he had bought at a gourmet market. We sat on the couch with our plates of food. I was very nervous. I picked at little pieces of jicama and cauliflower and ate only a couple of bites of pasta. Mostly the dinner seemed to be for decoration.
Then, with the TV on, we wrapped around one another and started to neck. He was a little resistant; his plate was in his lap, but then he put it on the table and he didn’t resist at all and a little later he pulled the futon out and we made love and he said, Leslie you are very kind and understanding and you know what—I think I’m beginning to trust you.
I felt very close to him and even though it was the same kind of unfulfilled love that we always made, I felt that something had broken and a part of him had yielded—given—and he was reaching out and allowing me to press against a part of his being that he had boarded up and sheetrocked over.
That Sunday I went for a long and leisurely run, and then I drove to the jacuzzi and soaked in it for a while as dusk fell and the salt smell rose in the air. The phone rang while I was microwaving a potato for dinner.
“Hi, it’s me,” said Cornelia dully.
I carried the phone into the kitchen and turned off the microwave.
“I have something to tell you.” She made a sound in between a grunt and a short, cynical laugh.
“What?”
“You will not believe this. I am now pregnant.”
“You’re kidding!” I said.
She gave the grunt-laugh again.
“From who?” I asked.
“Just some ridiculous guy.”
“What guy?”
“You will not know him. I was with him just this one time.”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
“I cannot believe it,” she said.
“Have you told him?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you sure you’re pregnant?”
“I am sure.” Again she pronounced it shoe-er. “I did this test—from the supermarket.”
“But those tests can be wrong.”
“Ya, but this is not wrong. I am sure this is not wrong.”
“Well, what are you going to do?”
“I will get an abortion. This is why I was calling you. Do you think you can drive me?”
“Of course I can. When?”
“I will call tomorrow. I think it has to be two more weeks.”
“Oh, boy,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Ya, me too,” said Cornelia.
We were both silent for a minute. “Who was the guy?” I asked again.
She snorted. “Tom. Bob? I don’t know. These American men, they all are having these short names.”
“Didn’t you use any birth control?”
“No. We did not make sex.”
“What?” I said.
“Ya, I am telling you. We did not make sex.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. I wanted to get this straight. “You didn’t have sex.”
“Ya.”
“So then, how is it that you’re pregnant?”
“It happened anyway.”
“How?”
She exhaled loudly over the line. I couldn’t tell if she was impatient with me for not understanding or impatient at herself. “Ya, he was touching on me. Then—I guess he was not prepared either—he … came? Is that how you call it? Not inside me. Outside. I guess he was excited. It was on the beach.”
“On the beach?” I repeated.
“Ya. We were doing this under a towel.”
“Oh.”
“Ya. So. This is the story. Great, huh?”
“Well,” I said. “I guess it happens.”
“Ya,” said Cornelia. “It happened the same to a friend of mine in Germany. No sex.” She uttered a sharp sound, meant to be a laugh. “This is not sex, this is also a sheddo. Very funny, huh?”
I stared across my living room, the light fading outside, the potato waiting on its carousel, half-cooked inside the microwave.
Cornelia and I took a walk on the weekend. We stayed on the coast highway, up on the sidewalk next to the cliffs, and every truck and motorcycle that swept past gave us a honk.
“I am telling you, this is ridiculous!” Cornelia flung her hands in the air and turned to the road. “Every guy who is driving a truck is like this! And they are all with mustaches! I think this is incredible!”
“Don’t forget the motorcycles,” I said.
“Ya, and the motorcycles. More horses. These are small horses, the trucks are the big horses.”
“Well, maybe it’s us,” I suggested. “Maybe it’s the way we’re dressed.”
“Ya, and how are we dressed? This is nothing sexy!” She gestured down at her long, limp sweatshirt and faded tights. Her hair was in a ponytail with a bulky neon-pink elastic. She was a little fatter than usual, which I supposed was from being pregnant, but it was nothing anyone else would ever notice. I had on blue jeans and an old cotton sweater which, though well worn, was still a bright peacock blue.
We did our best to ignore the hails and the calls. We were more concerned with her abortion. She had come up with another idea—oil of pennyroyal. “The children that I babysit for—their mother is doing this aroma therapy.” She pronounced it serapy. “I told her that I could not babysit on this Tuesday in two weeks, I had to go for an abortion, and she said maybe I should do this penny royal and if it does not work then I can go for the abortion.”
“Penny royal?” I repeated. “What’s that?”
“I only know it is this oil. You can get it in the health-food store. She said I should go there and buy it and take a couple drops with a big glass of water two times every day for five or six days and then I will be bleeding and this will be a miscarriage.” She pronounced it mis-carry-age. “And if it doesn’t work, I will go for the abortion.”
I digested this in silence. “So what you’re saying is that this penny royal will give you a natural abortion.”
“Right.”
We were walking on top of the cliff. The sea rolled below us, serpentine waves lapping the shore in half-mile-long unbroken lines. The sand stretched dark brown and flat and hard, shiny with reflected light where the water made it wet. Here and there a flat slab of concrete jutted garishly into the air, stained by the rust of its metal supports.
“I still can’t believe you got pregnant,” I said.
“I guess I am very … fertail.” She turned to me.
“Fertile.”
“Fer-tail,” Cornelia tried again.
“Fer-tile” I said. “Tile, tile.”
“Fer-tile,” repeated Cornelia. “Like what Raul is doing.”
�
�Right.” I looked at her sharply. Why Raul? Was that who it was? “But you don’t actually say tile, you say till.”
“Fer—” Cornelia struggled, “—tail,” she said again.
“Till,” I corrected. “It’s a hard word.”
“Ya, we skip it,” said Cornelia. Her arms swung along above the pink of her tights.
“Who’s this lady?” I asked.
“The mother of these two children. She has studied this aroma therapy. She has people coming to see her and she gives them different kinds of special oil.”
“And does it work, this penny royal?” I broke it up, like she had, into two words, but somewhere I remembered it as pennyroyal, a wildflower, but maybe I was wrong.
“Ya, she says she has never done it herself or with anyone she knows, but she knows other people who did it and it worked.”
“So are you going to do it?”
Cornelia nodded. “Ya, why not? I think I am.”
I sat facing the green mesh netting of a tennis-court fence. Muriel smacked a tennis ball back and forth on the other side. Her partner was tall and sandy-haired. His name was Patrick and she knew him through one of her clients.
Patrick had pale legs with hair on them. His tennis socks looked hot and thick. He returned Muriel’s balls gracefully, but with the kind of effort that made you worry he was going to miss. Muriel shot around the court, her white skirt bouncing. She laughed and called out and swatted at the ball.
She was quick. I watched her scurry and run. She liked tennis. Her large inky palms wrapped the racket and the balls, her long legs swallowed up the court. Lunging and listing, she intercepted, foiled, bounded forward and back. She was a tigress; the hunt not a capture but a holding off.
I closed my eyes. At sixteen, I had started playing tennis after the piece of glass. It wasn’t my idea. I would spend my evenings massaging the lump on my foot and, after weeks of watching from the corner of his eye, my brother strode through the door of my room, whirled me a tennis ball, and yelled out, “Catch!”
I let go of my foot and swiped at the ball. We both thought I would miss. I didn’t.
“Tomorrow I’m getting you a racket,” said Greg. He paid for it with his own money. “Forget it,” he ordered at my protests. He took me to the tennis courts. They were asphalt, a dull green. He threw balls at me. “Look, Leslie, look. You’ve got to see. If you see properly, you can do it.” He flung ball after ball at my racket, and then spent hours hitting with me. The arch in my foot did not hurt. Whacking fuzzy balls was a far cry from pliés, but it gave me focus, concentration, and pretty soon I did it better than a lot of people around.
The following summer I taught at a camp. That was when the glass came out, like a geyser, shocking everyone, including me. Had I harbored such a stowaway? It had done me out of dance, but had it also lived in me, stealing refuge all that time? I was now some sort of medical miracle. I had run around a tennis court, I had walked, slept and bicycled—with a shard of glass on a holiday in my foot.
The doctor gave my mother the piece of glass. My brother asked to look at it and taped it in the family photo album, next to pictures of me dancing. My mother protested: The lump stopped the album from closing. My brother overruled. Used to giving in to men, my mother complied.
The latch on the gate to the tennis court clanged as Patrick and Muriel appeared around the fence. I stretched and yawned. “Well,” I asked, “did you have fun?”
Muriel zipped the cover on her racket. “Lots.”
Patrick smiled.
Muriel held her hand out to Patrick. “Thanks, pal,” she said. “Call me again.”
Patrick pumped Muriel’s arm with well-mannered gusto. “I will of course do that.” He had a funny accent. I frowned.
“Where is he from?” I asked Muriel as he walked off.
“He is Swee-dish,” said Muriel, lilting exaggeratedly.
“Isn’t he going to have lunch with us?”
“He has rehearsal.”
“For what?” I imagined a play, with Patrick robed as some Germanic figure or Hamlet, the Dane.
“A concert. He plays guitar. Classical.” Muriel put on her terry warmup jacket. We crossed a wide lawn to the clubhouse.
Muriel picked a table near a potted dracaena, looking out on the shorn green slope of the golf-course fairway. The spikes of the dracaena caught on her terry jacket as we sat down. “What do you want to eat?” said Muriel. “It’s on my mom.”
“Are you sure that’s okay?” I asked.
“Sure. I don’t eat at this place that much. She’s glad I come here at all.”
I ordered a tossed salad and ice water. Muriel had a shrimp sandwich. It came with white bread. She sent it back.
“You’re something else,” I said, poking at a tomato in my salad.
“You should get what you order,” said Muriel. “I said whole wheat. I meant it.”
A busboy brought the remade sandwich. He had a pink, burned face with reddish freckles. His hair stuck up in spikes, like the dracaena. Muriel took the toothpicks out of the sandwich and dug her fork into the shrimp. She emptied half of the sandwich of its filling and then picked the second half up in her hands. She took a big bite, put the sandwich down, and scraped the shrimp out with her fork.
“Aren’t you going to eat the bread?” I asked.
Muriel shrugged, chewing. “It’s terrible. Country clubs never make good sandwiches.”
“Oh,” I said. “So who’s Patrick?” I changed the subject.
“Donald’s partner’s brother,” said Muriel.
“Oh,” I said again. I figured Donald was her client. “Is Donald’s partner Swedish?” I asked.
“Guess so,” said Muriel.
I took a sip of my water. “How well do you know Patrick?”
“Not well,” said Muriel.
“Is he nice?”
Muriel shrugged. “Nice?” she repeated, stacking shrimp and bits of celery on her fork. “Nice in what way? His tennis is nice, his manners are nice, and he’s nice because he doesn’t bother me. So I guess,” she concluded, crunching a mouthful of ice, “that makes him nice, huh?”
I said nothing.
“What you’re getting at is, if he’s that nice and that harmless, why don’t I go out with him,” said Muriel. She was getting thunderous.
I took in a breath and held it, as though to make the thunder stop.
“Why is that an issue, Leslie? Huh? Why?” Muriel’s voice was sharp. “What is everyone so worried about? You, my mother, everyone! I can’t stand it!” Muriel banged her folded napkin on the tabletop.
I let the breath out. “That’s not what I was getting at,” I said.
“Forget it,” said Muriel. “Everyone’s a goddamn fucking busybody.” She turned the check face up and wrote her mother’s name at the bottom.
We walked back across the lawn to the parking lot. Muriel’s canister of tennis balls clattered to the asphalt as she fumbled for her keys. I picked it up.
“So,” said Muriel. “How’s Cornelia?”
Here we go, I thought. Muriel unlocked her door. I wondered what to say. I slid into the passenger seat of the yellow Mercedes. “Well?” said Muriel. “Have you heard from her?”
“Of course I’ve heard from her,” I answered.
“So what’s going on?” Muriel needled me. “Is she sane yet?”
I waited till Muriel had started the engine. “She’s pregnant.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Muriel. “What a fool.”
“Muriel, cut it out,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I can guess,” said Muriel.
I held the door grip and stared out at the road. It was all getting to be too much.
“Well, it’s definitely one way to get a green card,” Muriel commented.
I snapped. “Shut up, Muriel!” I screamed.
Muriel raised her eyebrows. Then she laughed. “You’re such a little angel, Leslie. You’re out to help
everybody, aren’t you?”
I felt sick. “Muriel,” I said dizzily, “I can’t believe what’s happening. I can’t believe that you would be so stuck … and small-minded … that you would let this all happen.”
“Let what all happen?” asked Muriel.
I felt myself gasping. It was a sick kind of gasp, like when you weren’t getting enough air or there was some kind of horrible poison in the air. I shut my eyes and held the door grip tighter.
“Let what happen?” prodded Muriel.
I opened my eyes. “Stop the car,” I said. “Stop the car, Muriel. Right now.”
Muriel gazed at me, amazed. “What the hell for?”
“Because I want you to,” I commanded.
To my surprise, Muriel pulled onto the shoulder. I was still dizzy. “Muriel,” I said slowly. “There is something wrong with you. There is something very wrong with you.”
Muriel shot me an incredulous stare. “What the hell are you talking about?”
I took a deep breath, gulping. I nodded. “I mean it, Muriel,” I said. “There is something really wrong with you.”
Muriel’s eyes had narrowed.
“You …” I fumbled. “You are so … judgmental. You won’t do anything, be anything, risk anything. You can only judge. Why? Why do you need to be that way?”
Muriel’s eyes stayed narrowed. The ring of keys to the Mercedes vibrated in the running ignition.
“It’s like … you’re … afraid to live,” I said. “You won’t get off the fence and live. You can only sit on the fence and judge.”
Muriel’s head was now raised, her lips tight. I stared at my lap, still clutching the door grip.
“Cornelia got pregnant,” I said, my voice shaking. “I’m going to take her for her abortion.” I paused, and took a breath. “You would tell me not to do that, not to get involved, not to help Cornelia. But I have to help her.” I looked up at Muriel. “To me, it’s reaching out. Giving something. A tiny shred of something. Whatever I have. I can’t close up and turn away.”
Muriel waited before answering. She had put her hand on the parking brake release. “I never said not to take her.” She twisted the lever and pushed down on the gas.
I sat on my couch for a long time afterwards, looking ahead but seeing nothing, not even the pine cones Cornelia had put on the windowsill so many months ago at Christmas. The house creaked as darkness fell and the frame contracted. The phone did not ring. I sat, listening to the little animal sounds outside—the meow of cats, a volley of yips from R.B.’s chihuahua—and the churning and dying of engines as cars parked and left the curb. There was no life indoors, around my couch; I was a person who did not stir, did not move, did not live, for the duration of those few hours. I sat, listening.
The Shadow Man Page 25