Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  "Is Deb picking you up?" I asked, and hoped the answer was yes.

  "No, I left my car here."

  "Goodbye, then."

  "We got sent home early, Mom. It was a snow day. You missed a snow day. But it's okay, because we went to Bogumila's and she let us sled on her hill and then showed us how to cook sausage." The words tumbled out of Henry faster than he could catch them. What great lungs my son had.

  "I didn't even know you liked sausage."

  "We do now. She cooks them in beer."

  "I suppose almost anything is good cooked in beer, or wine," Waldo said. "And how were the saints today?"

  "The saints? What saints? How is sainthood possible?" What was wrong with my voice? Why couldn't I control it?

  "Al? Are you okay? What's the matter?"

  "Nothing. Sorry. Just a weather glitch. My feet got very cold today. I had the absolutely wrong shoes."

  Waldo looked over and down at my feet. He raised his eyebrows and smiled with creeping self-satisfaction. "You wore those shoes?"

  "Unfortunately, yes."

  "Why? Don't tell me you had a hot date at the Fagfoggraphers Club?"

  "That's not funny."

  "Let's see these shoes, Mom," Ezra said. He leaned over the front seat. "Whoa, nice color."

  "I think so too," I said. "I realize that one's fondness for certain shoes is irrational. I just wish there were a way they could be more comfortable. Imagine if they could magically revert to flats when I have to walk thirty blocks."

  "Would that really be desirable?" Waldo asked. He was driving with his right hand, or rather a mere two fingers, on the wheel. Normally this bothered me terribly and irrationally. I did realize that this was a gender-specific trait, that all men and boys drove with only one hand, that it was something they could not help any more than they could help missing the bowl sometimes. Any more than I could help minding.

  Breathe deeply. Hadn't they all come to collect me at the train station? Wasn't that a gesture of domestic goodwill that I should not take for granted? It was a dilemma. One day Ezra and Henry would drive, and no doubt about it, true to their gender, they too would each drive with one hand on the wheel.

  "What?" I said.

  "Heels that went flat."

  "Absolutely."

  "Because I think it may be possible—what if you had a heel that telescoped out for a few inches, but could then slide back into itself to be much lower?"

  "Could you really do that?"

  "I'm thinking," Waldo said. "There would probably have to be some kind of latch, to fix the heel in either position. Or a retracting knob. Yes, that would be better."

  "Sweetie," I said. "The soles of those shoes are angled up for the high heels. It would be impossible to walk on lower heels with a tilted sole. You'd fall backward, or maybe forward."

  "Couldn't you have a flexible sole? Can I fool around with a pair of your shoes back at the house?"

  "I guess so. I mean, it would have to be a pair I didn't mind you screwing around with, right?"

  "Al, you have gazillions of shoes. You have more shoes than I have screwdrivers," he said.

  "Dad has more screwdrivers than the hardware store," Ezra said. "Or at least more kinds of screwdrivers."

  "Which is quite a difference," Waldo pointed out.

  "Sure, you can have a pair of shoes," I said.

  "How about us? Can we have some shoes too?"

  "Absolutely not."

  Back at the house, we sat down to dinner. "Hey, guys," I said, "I learned about some rather interesting saints today, called cephalophores. Any idea what they are?"

  Waldo said, "Saints who are head cases?"

  "No. And let the boys guess."

  "They'll never figure it out."

  "Give them a chance."

  Henry said, "Head must be right. Head-eater. No, head-bearing? A head-bearer? Something like that?"

  "Damn, you're good, Henry. I mean, darn."

  Henry said, "I don't get it. We all have heads."

  "It's actually about saints whose heads get chopped off, then they pick them up and carry them somewhere else. They bear their heads that way. There was one saint who was the oldest of twenty-four children—his poor mother—and when he was beheaded, he just picked his head right up and carried it a ways to a special rock near a fountain, where he laid it to rest, and you can still see the bloodstains on it, twelve centuries later." But it wasn't today that I'd learned of cephalophores. It was Abelardo who had told me. Why now?

  How many drinks had Gunnar plied me with at Grand Central? Suddenly my food was moving around my plate with no help from my fork.

  "I can't eat any more," I said.

  Waldo squinted at me and said, "Are you tipsy?"

  "Perhaps. I didn't think so, but now I wonder. I had a drink with Gunnar at Grand Central. My capacity apparently isn't what it used to be."

  "Used to be? When did you ever have capacity? You get high just looking at wine."

  "You know that's not true," I said.

  Waldo said, "How was Gunnar?"

  "He was fine. We talked about mushrooms."

  "It's a good thing the boys weren't there."

  Big fat snowflakes were still falling fast; I could see their progress as they passed through the beams of the light on the back steps. It was the kind of snow that wouldn't accumulate much. There was little hope of a snow day for the boys tomorrow.

  It was unusual for me not to finish a meal. I was a charter member of the clean-plate club. But there it was, food on the plate, untouched. It had to do with those two syllables: she and la. I couldn't think of anything to say to Waldo that did not include the word Sheila.

  Then Posey called, and in deference to my probable tipsiness, Waldo actually answered it, and I went upstairs to read with the boys.

  They must have read to me in my bed, and I must have slept, because it was hours later when, with his usual grace and ease, Waldo stepped out of his pants as they puddled into two rippling circles at his feet. No one else that I had ever known got out of his pants like that. I never knew if this was something Waldo had taught himself to do, or if this was a weird skill he had developed as a weird child, or if he had been born with it, like the birthmark above his butt crack. We never spoke of it, because if we spoke of it we would also have to address his habit of leaving his clothes where they fell. For a man who kept his tools in meticulous order, arranged in ascending size so that they resembled a musical instrument upon a pegboard in the basement, it seemed outrageous that he could not pick up his own clothes.

  As he stood naked at the window and before he came to slide between the sheets, I said, casually, "Do you know anyone named Sheila?"

  He said, "Why? Is that one of your saints?"

  "I asked you first. And there is no Saint Sheila, strangely enough."

  "Why is that strange?"

  "Because I think of it as an Irish name, and the Irish are so Catholic," I said. "So do you?" The longer this went on, the harder it was to appear nonchalant. I was clutching my elbows through the worn fabric of my plaid flannel pajamas. Several years ago Posey's friend's lingerie shop in Maine went out of business, and at the close-out sale, Posey had bought up her entire stock of flannel pajamas. I received a pair of red flannel pajamas the following Christmas and then again the next Christmas, at which time I recognized a pattern. Each winter I wore one pair constantly until the fabric disintegrated at all the key spots. By morning one of my elbows would be visible through the sleeve. Flannel pajamas made the best rags.

  "Do I what?" Waldo said.

  "Christ, Waldo. Know a Sheila?"

  "I think I met a Sheila once," he said. "At some company thing."

  "What was she like?"

  "How would I know?" he said. "What's with the inquisition?"

  "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I must be overtired," I said. And I rolled onto my side and opened up Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, which I had been reading for months. It was suddenly clear that I h
ad to stop right then because if the conversation continued in any of its possible directions, I would certainly mention that I'd heard Sheila's name from Gunnar, or else I would bring up the infamous Edith Dilly, a subject that was equally painful for both of us.

  "Oh, I forgot to tell you why Posey called," Waldo said. "Dick's getting married."

  "Dick? As in Dick, your brother?" Now this was something to wake a person up.

  "No, as in Dick at the post office," Waldo said. "What do you think?"

  "And you just forgot to tell me that? You don't think that's a little strange? Not to mention that it's your brother. Who's he marrying? Is it a woman?"

  "Yes. It is a woman," Waldo said, more defensively than I would have predicted. "It's the famous Sydney."

  "How can your brother get married?"

  "The same way everyone else gets married."

  Trollope was closed upon my finger and I rolled over. "Don't be disingenuous. He's not exactly normal. Has he ever been with a woman?"

  "I doubt it."

  "Marriage is a serious step," I said. "For the innocent." "Wait a second, Al. Do you think only female saints can be virgins?"

  "That's not what I said."

  "Maybe he's a secret Lothario, a Romeo of the North Woods."

  "There's nothing secretive about Dick," I said.

  "Unless he's so incredibly good at secrets that we have never once suspected."

  "Could you be so wrong about your own brother?" I said.

  "Probably not," Waldo said. "No, I think he is one of the truly guileless. You won't be surprised to hear that Posey knows her family, and in fact plays golf with her mother sometimes in Catamunk. So she approves as far as that goes."

  "Do you know this Sydney?"

  "It's possible that I met her sometime along the way. At the club. But I don't recall."

  I pictured a youngish woman as tall and lanky as Dick, someone who could be called beautiful if only she were not constantly bumping into furniture or slamming her finger in car doors or spilling her soup down her dress; someone who generally had food in her teeth and buttoned her shirts askew, but with lovely skin, and fingers as delicate as a bird's skeleton. Would that be the right person for Dick? Would they mesh like pieces of Velcro?

  13

  A Spectator Event

  THE FIRST TIME I met Dick, Waldo wasn't even there. It was because of terrible traffic on Route 1, which could have been predicted.

  Before that, I'd met Waldo in the spring of my third year in lovely Providence, my third year in that place of Roger Williams's refuge from the Puritanical Bostonians. Waldo was down from Cambridge and came to a party at my friend Michel's loft in Fox Point. He came with Martina Loomis, an eerily beautiful woman from the behavioral sciences department. She spoke with a foreign accent even though she was American, or so she said. She was already doing brilliant work with chimpanzees and sign language, and the use of metaphors. At the party, during which Michel brought out a particularly potent variety of Sin Semilla pot, Waldo and I talked about tides and water temperature at Rhode Island beaches, and the efforts to preserve and replant some sand dunes. He also told me that as a boy he had been a methodical hole digger. That is not the sort of information usually imparted, nor is it easily forgotten. While I was very susceptible to marijuana, Waldo did not seem the least bit affected. His sharpness only increased while the rest of us blurred.

  The next day he called me with two specific things to say. The first was that Martina was not his girlfriend, that her only love was chimpanzees. The second was to ask if I would like to take a walk that afternoon, with him and his bulldog, Stinkerbelle.

  "You have a bulldog?" I said.

  "She really lives with my parents, but Posey and Dad are in Alaska, and the kennel refused to take her."

  "Why are they in Alaska?" I asked.

  "Good question," Waldo said. "I guess because it's still the United States. They won't find any foreigners living there."

  "They don't like foreigners?" I said.

  "Let's just say they don't like foreign countries. Oh, they like England, in theory. But basically, if it's not Maine, it's suspect."

  "Now that sounds reasonable," I said. I didn't know what else to say. Who was this person so proud of his xenophobic parents?

  "So, do you want to?"

  "Want to what?"

  "Walk with Stinkerbelle and me."

  "Is it safe?" I said.

  "Oh my God, yes. She does whatever I tell her."

  "I should warn you," I said. "I'm not a dog person."

  "That's okay. Stinkerbelle is not a person dog," he said. Which I found funny. It seemed that I had already agreed to go for a walk with him.

  He arrived in an old wooden-sided station wagon, with Stinkerbelle sitting in the back seat. We drove out to Horseneck Beach and walked for hours. I couldn't bring myself to actually touch Stinkerbelle, who struck me as profoundly ugly, but by the end of the afternoon or rather the early evening, I was madly in love with Waldo. Or if not in love, then deranged with lust for him.

  He fashioned a skirt out of seaweed for me. He could walk on his hands. We talked about every fairy tale we had ever read as children. We told each other about a beloved grandparent, and wept for their loss. At the far north end of the beach Waldo pulled off his T-shirt and then stepped out of his pants and walked toward the ocean. Somehow, he convinced me to join him. I had never skinny-dipped in Rhode Island before, and suddenly it seemed a good thing to do before I graduated and returned to California, where skinny-dipping was not nearly as exciting, there being no aura of prevailing Puritanism to be counteracted. The water was freezing and the only reason I did not immediately run out screaming was this newfound desire to impress Waldo with my ruggedness, my worthiness to walk with a hardy New Englander. Happily, he did not stay in the water for long, and we both emerged blue at the extremities. I remember trying to avert my eyes from the sight of his penis, all wrinkly and curled up like a caterpillar responding to an alien touch. I tried, but I did not succeed.

  Many months later I went to visit Waldo and his family in Maine. They had two houses in Maine, one in Catamunk, where they lived year round, and, twenty minutes away, another one on a rocky spit of land called Bug Harbor, where they went in the summer. The Bug Harbor house had a generator, which they turned off at ten every night, without fail, without exception. I could understand one house in a chilly Atlantic state, but two seemed excessive.

  Waldo had gone to get corn for that evening's meal, because Dick would be home. "When Dick eats corn on the cob, it is a spectator event," Waldo had said. There were still times when I didn't know if he was kidding or not. And at those times I wondered what I was doing there in an old house in Maine with warped wooden floors and pictures of innumerable ancestors, each one looking more miserable than the next. Waldo left me with Posey. "Stay and bond with Posey" was what he said. Posey did not look interested in bonding.

  "Take Stinkerbelle with you," I'd said to Waldo. "Please."

  I said to Posey, "I'm looking forward to finally meeting Dick. Waldo's told me so much about him."

  "What exactly has Waldo told you?" she said, and fixed her pale blue eyes upon me.

  This was my own fault, and now what was I to say? That he was an idiot savant? That he could wiggle his ears and dangle a spoon from his nose? That he knew the Latin names for all the native North and South American fruits? That he was a virgin and a prude, more virginal than the purest nun and more prudish than a Lutheran spinster? "That he's incredibly smart," I said. "And very interested in farming."

  "Speak of the devil," Posey said, because just then a tall young man walked in. He looked like Waldo in a warped mirror, the kind that made you skinnier and slightly off kilter, and tinted you pink.

  "Dick, this is Waldo's friend Alice Ewen," she said.

  I started moving my hand in his direction, then retracted it when it became clear that Dick was not going to move from the door frame.

  "You're f
rom California, aren't you?" he said.

  "I am."

  "I'm going to go to California very soon. To look at avocado plantations. Of course they're native to Mexico, but they have been very successful at growing avocados in California since early in the twentieth century, when they realized how simple it was to graft the trees. The horticultural name is Persea americana but it has nothing to do with Persia; it's spelled differently. Do you know Wilson Popenoe? He went on expeditions all over Mexico and Central America to find the superior varieties."

  "We have a few old avocado trees in our backyard," I said.

  "They must be the Fuerte variety. Or they could be Hass, which was discovered by accident from a failed graft in 1935. Or they could be Rincon—they do well in Santa Barbara. Exactly how old are your trees?"

  "I have no idea," I said. "Older than me."

  "Wilson Popenoe once, in Guatemala, ate nothing but avocado pears for three days, in order to disprove a local superstition," said Dick. "He did many fine things for agriculture but he was never able to significantly reduce the size of the seed. I, however, am working on it."

  "Dick," his mother said. "Why don't you come in and let me give you a drink. I'm going to get a neck ache if you keep standing there."

  Dick looked down at his mother and squinted. Did they know each other? Like Waldo, he didn't resemble Posey, although in this instance they were dressed almost identically, in khaki pants and a faded polo shirt with the yacht club burgee on the chest. In one of his perorations on Posey's thriftiness, Waldo had told me Posey bought yacht club shirts only when a particular style was discontinued and being sold off cheaply.

  "I can see why Waldo likes you," Dick said, and came to sit on the chair next to me.

  "You can?"

  "Oh, yes. You can sail, you can speak Spanish, and you don't bite your fingernails."

  "Actually," I said, "I don't know how to sail. But I would love to learn."

  "And you don't really speak Spanish, do you?" Posey said.

  "I do speak Spanish, but not as well as I should," I said. "My mother was Spanish. I learned from her and my aunt." I wanted to add: I can't help it. It's not my fault.