Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  "I don't understand how anyone can speak that language," she said. "All those r's and double l's, and then the waves over the ns." She pursed her lips just so, in a way that was identifiably un-Spanish, if nothing else.

  "It's really quite easy," I said, apologetically. "Muy sencillo."

  "Well, I have no interest in discussing anyone's fingernails. Dick, you can make your own drink."

  He did not move from his chair but shifted that intense gaze from his mother to me. Where was Waldo? Posey finally stood up and went into the kitchen and made Dick a drink. "One for you, Alice?" she called out. "The sun is over the yardarm."

  "No, thanks," I said.

  Just then, at long last, in waltzed Waldo and Stinkerbelle. "Fuck the lumber industry," he said vehemently.

  "Waldo, please," Posey said.

  "I would have been here half an hour ago if not for a lumber truck that tipped over."

  "Lumber trucks never tip over," Dick said. "They're too heavy."

  "Tell that to our friends on Route One."

  "It must have been something else."

  I saw Waldo opening his mouth and then stopping himself. In the four-plus months I had known him, I had never once seen him do that: think better of his words. I was moved by the gesture, and struck anew by my physical longing for him.

  It was dark by the time we sat down for dinner. Three, the ailing Waldo Fairweather III, served us white wine over ice cubes. Waldo said, "Alice's Spanish ancestors would roll over in their Spanish graves if they saw you doing that."

  "Not at all," I objected.

  "Alice has Spanish ancestors?"

  "Her mother is from Barcelona," said Waldo. Hadn't he told them about me, that they found this so surprising, so disturbing? It's not as if he'd said, Her parents are congenital idiots. Her brother's in prison for child molesting. "Didn't you and Mom go to Barcelona once, Dad?"

  "Ahem. That was before your mother. But we do have ancestors from Normandy," Waldo III said. "I think they spoke English." Later I learned that he'd said this in jest.

  But at this point I was no longer concerned with anyone's Iberian heritage, because Dick had started in on his corn on the cob. First he rolled the corn round and round on a whole stick of butter. Then, rapidly and thoroughly, he ate the corn. Anyone would have stared in an effort to understand just how his teeth were operating. To no avail. His jaw was a blur of motion. When he finished with a piece of corn, it was completely denuded of kernels. Not one remained. Even a goat would have been hard-pressed to find anything edible on that cob. Then Dick drank down his glass of wine, and started on another corn. By the end of the evening there was a neat pyramid of seven stripped ears of corn on his plate.

  That was the first time I'd met Waldo's brother, Dick, and since then I'd never thought of him without the image of those stripped ears of corn. What sort of woman could marry him? She was becoming interesting to me.

  The snow was gone in the morning, and it seemed entirely possible that Sheila, along with everything else, had been a figment of my overactive imagination.

  I brought Waldo his coffee and said, "When exactly is Dick getting married?"

  "Sometime in June. Posey knows the date. You really should call Posey."

  "Sometime in June? Sometime? This is not how people get married these days. They have to reserve the church and reception hall years in advance. And what about invitations? Don't they have invitations in Maine?"

  "Calm down, Al. It will all come in due time."

  I took a sip of coffee and almost spit it out. "Why didn't you tell me this coffee is mud?"

  "I like it, honey. I was about to ask why you decided to make it so strong this morning."

  "I didn't."

  "It'll be on Slow Island. That I do know."

  "That little island off the coast, near you guys?"

  "The very same."

  "Wait a sec. Isn't June blackfly season?"

  "It is," Waldo said, sadly.

  "You always say we can't go to Maine in June because of the dreaded blackflies."

  "And it's true, but there are no flies on Slow Island. You could say it's its chief asset."

  "No flies? How is that possible? I mean, flies fly. And if so, why hasn't all of Maine moved there?"

  "They would, but the Sweets own the whole thing."

  "Who are the Sweets?"

  "Sydney's family. Sydney Sweet."

  "So your soon-to-be in-laws are the only people in Maine who can safely venture out-of-doors in June?"

  "Exactly."

  Not Exactly a Chapter but an Interlude

  I CONSIDERED AT LEAST fourteen ways to start a conversation that would begin with Waldo's dispelling Gunnar's misinterpretation of the Sheila event and culminate in my resident panic taking a flying leap. There were serious flaws in all fourteen opening gambits, which ranged from (but were hardly limited to) False Assumptions to Begging the Question to Ad Hominem Attacks to Bathos to Hysteria.

  So I told Waldo I planned to write Lalo a letter.

  "Good idea. I always liked your letters. I'm sure he will too." We were sitting at the kitchen table. Waldo was eating pistachios and then lining up their shells, concave side down.

  "How many letters can I possibly have written you?"

  "Enough. Back in the dark ages you wrote me from California,

  "There was a lovely lass from California

  Where the girls are babes and the boys are hornier

  One happy day Waldo flew in

  Found himself Alice Ewen

  If you don't like this rhyme I have one even cornier."

  "Holy cow, Waldo. Where did that come from?"

  "Would it make you feel better to know I woke up last night pondering hornier and cornier?"

  "I don't know," I said. Because I didn't. What Waldo pondered in the middle of the night was as mysterious to me as the internal combustion engine. But infinitely more alluring.

  "The middle needs work," he said.

  "I just don't think Lalo is an e-mail type," I said.

  "That seems a safe guess. You're making assumptions, of course, but what else is new?"

  "Do you think Gunnar is an e-mail type?" I asked.

  "What does he have to do with it?"

  "Nothing. Except that he mentioned something the other day. About running into you at the Oyster Bar," I said.

  "When was this?" Waldo said. His row of pistachio shells crossed the table and was now coming back toward us, in the boustrophedon mode. I would have liked to point this out to Waldo, because one rarely gets an opportunity to use such a word, but now was not the time to wave my vocabulary flag, not if there was any hope for dispelling the dark shadow of Sheila.

  "I don't know. You were with someone named Sheila."

  "I don't know anyone named Sheila. Has it occurred to you that Gunnar could be hallucinating? Maybe it was a mushroom."

  "Maybe," I said. But the panic was still there, anthropomorphized into a miniature person sitting on the edge of a volcano, dangling her legs in the crater. And I never wrote the letter to Abelardo. I started twice, but instead of telling him about diagnosable virgin saints, I wrote about Waldo and the Sheila he didn't know; I wrote about being unable to forget about Waldo and Edith Dilly and how when I thought about it I often had to lean against a wall or a tree because the ground would become wobbly. Or my feet uncertain. I tore those letters up.

  And then, for days and weeks, life went on. I got dressed in the morning and wondered what I would make for dinner.

  For days and weeks, I did the laundry as always. I separated the whites and the colors and I got a perverse satisfaction from removing the accumulated lint from the lint tray in the dryer. I wondered if there was something useful that could be done with lint, if Waldo could think of something to do with lint. But Waldo was never there at the moment that I was doing laundry and considering the problem of all the unused lint in all the dryers all over America, and later on I never remembered to suggest that he might addr
ess this problem.

  I folded everyone's clothes and put the clothes away in the drawers. Waldo's boxers and the boys' superhero underpants and puppy underpants and airplane underpants. There was something eternally intimate about folding their underwear. Not the washing so much as the folding. And they had to be folded in a certain way, in thirds so that there was a flat center panel, rather than in half and then halved again to make a quarter. Socks were also important. I was of the line-them-up-roll-them-into-a-ball-then-fold-the-inside-sock-into-the-outer-one school.

  Every morning and evening I fed the dogs. I checked Dandy's gums and gave him his medications. He was off the medicine that required a syringe and latex gloves; now he was on prednisone. Waldo told me that Three had often taken prednisone for his allergies, and he'd liked it very much. He'd said it made him smarter. If it made Dandy any smarter, we couldn't tell. Usually in the afternoons I walked with Dandy and Flirt down the road to Susie's and up the road to Bogumila's. Sometimes I remembered to check them for ticks, but not often.

  Life just went on and sometimes hours went by without my thinking of Waldo and Sheila. Was it possible she didn't exist? Sometimes I wanted to know everything about them: how often, what they said, what she wore; I wanted to know how her body compared with mine in every way, from the length of her toes to the curliness of her pubic hair to the muscle tone of her upper arms to the wrinkles around her eyes. Did she have wrinkles? Did she color her hair? Did she shave her underarms? Years ago Waldo had told me how much he loved the soft silken hair of a certain woman's underarms. Did they cleave together, and were they now cleft? I wondered if her mother was alive. I wondered how much she knew about me. I wondered how much she knew about Ezra and Henry. Had Waldo ever shown her a picture of them? If she ever spoke of Ezra and Henry, if their names ever crossed her lips, I thought, I would be inclined to murder her.

  But most of the time, I did not think of Sheila, and I did not think of Waldo and Sheila. Most of the time, I did not even think about Abelardo, not even when I read about the virgin saints, their trials and tribulations and their wonders to behold.

  As in Brueghel, as in Auden, as in Ovid, the little people just keep going on with their daily tasks, their laundry and cooking and dog walking, while tragedy falls from the sky or happens in a far corner of the painting. So it was with us, the Fairweathers, little people driving the carpool to Little League games, running out at midnight for milk, and watching The Simpsons, while elsewhere in the world regimes toppled, innocent souls were slaughtered, smokestacks belched out their poisons, and rainforests were mowed down and hoovered up; while on at least two continents at any given moment humans slaughtered other humans in the name of religion. In VerGroot we questioned the wisdom of the DPW's acquisition of a new snowplow, and most of the time, I did not think about Waldo and Sheila.

  14

  Pink Gums

  WHOA, SUSIE! You scared me.

  I had been deep in the contemplation of the inside of my refrigerator. Then I'd stepped back and seen the dark outline of a person through the storm door.

  "I was hoping to find some hamburger in there," I said. I knew damn well there was no hamburger in there, or if there was, it had been in the fridge far too long to be safely edible.

  Susie let herself in. "Since when do you eat hamburger?"

  "I don't, at least not yet. It's for Dandy. Look at his gums," I said. I reached over and took hold of Dandy's lip and folded it back to reveal the pale flesh beneath. "Do these look pale to you?"

  "I didn't come over here to look at your dog's gums."

  "Please. Just tell me what you think. I don't call that pink. Do you call that pink?"

  "Fine. It's very pale pink, if you must know. Compared to what?"

  "I'll show you Flirt's gums."

  "I saw Gunnar at the town board meeting last night," she said. She sat in the one stable kitchen chair.

  "I thought you swore off board meetings, after the defenestration incident."

  "I know. I should have stuck to it. Then I started to feel sorry for Herc. He's too well intentioned for this world. He doesn't get that there are Machiavellian forces at work, undermining our little town government," Susie said. "So what is this about Waldo and some kangaroo?"

  Huh? I stared at my neighbor, my dear friend, at her translucent skin, at the tips of her eyes that dipped down and might give the unwary observer the false impression that behind this face was a hesitant soul.

  "What on earth are you talking about?"

  "I was talking to Gunnar after the meeting," Susie said.

  "About kangaroos?"

  "Isn't Sheila Australian slang for a kangaroo?" Susie said.

  "Not to my knowledge. But I've never been Down Under. Have you?"

  "Only in my dreams," she said.

  "Well, I hope you realize that Gunnar jumps to conclusions," I said.

  "He's worried about you."

  "Maybe he told you more than he told me. I'm not sure I want to know. Except I do. Okay, what did he tell you?"

  "That Waldo is having a thing with this Sheila, and that you are clueless."

  "Waldo doesn't even know someone called Sheila. Australian or not. I think it was mistaken identity. And. It's been years since Waldo has done anything like that."

  As far as I knew, Susie was the only person in VerGroot who knew about Waldo and Edith Dilly, and for years she had been good enough not to mention it, knowing how much it pained me. "Al, I hope you're right. But you do know that when it comes to their dicks, men are not rational. They're slaves to testosterone."

  "Are we so different?" I said.

  "Estrogen is a different kettle of fish altogether. Wait until you get hot flashes." She fanned her face with her hand and leaned back in her chair as if swooning.

  "Are you having one now?" I said.

  "No, this is just for dramatic effect," Susie said.

  I said, "Don't sex and love make us all act irrationally? Whatever hormones we subscribe to."

  "Oh, don't tell me—you're having a thing with the hagiographer?"

  "Not exactly. He's gay," I said.

  She looked genuinely surprised. "You mean you've actually considered it?"

  "Whoa, Susie. Let's talk about anything but that. How's your knee?"

  "It is brilliant," Susie said. She kicked up her leg and described a circle in the air with her foot. Not that I could see her knee through her blue jeans; not that she had been in the habit of doing leg kicks before her knee surgery. "I'm going to take the plunge and order my chicks. Do you think Dandy and Flirt will behave? Not eat them for breakfast?" Which explained Raising Chickens for Dummies, but little else.

  "Of course they'll behave," I said. "Are they going to be free range? What about all the airplane innards over there?"

  "I haven't decided. George doesn't know about the plan yet. It could be fun to surprise him," Susie said.

  "It could be..."

  "And there is still the question of the chicken coop."

  "I'm trying to picture you stepping out the back door and tossing chicken feed from your apron, like something out of Normal Rockwell."

  "You laugh, but when I was working at Chase I used to fantasize about chickens all the time. I would read McMurray's Hatchery weekly specials online secretly, just like porn."

  "Susie, what else don't I know about you? Please tell me now."

  "If I can think of anything, I'll tell you. But I'm still concerned about Gunnar."

  "I thought we'd exhausted that topic," I said.

  "We've barely started. Then there is Gunnar and you. Something truly shocking."

  "Oh, God," I groaned. "He's just imagining it anyways."

  "So you say."

  And then, to my immense relief, Ezra and Henry walked in the door and dropped their backpacks on the floor. Henry more or less followed the descent of his backpack and threw himself across Flirt's body. Ezra opened the refrigerator door.

  "Can you make us popcorn?" he said.


  I told Waldo that evening about Susie's plan to keep chickens; he immediately called her up and told her he would a design a chicken coop on wheels that could be moved around the yard in order to spread the fertilizing benefits of chicken poop.

  "Interesting. Why didn't you make one for Bogumila?" Susie asked suspiciously.

  "Bogumila's kind of rigid about certain things," Waldo said. "In case you haven't noticed. If they don't have movable chicken coops in Poland, then she can't have one in New York."

  I went with Flirt and Dandy to the woods, each of us sniffing our separate ways. They proffered an antler, a relic. Molted in the fall, to be grown anew in the spring. I pried it from Flirt's jaws. She didn't object. She may have already established that it wasn't edible. I wanted to bring it home to the boys, so they could feel its weight, and see the scars from battles over a desired female. Up in Catamunk they had seen moose in the early mornings, and they had seen pictures of moose engaged in fierce combat, heads down, the huge antlers of one thrusting and jabbing at his rival's equally huge headgear. But here in their own backyard, the same rituals, of seasons passing and of the struggle for domination, were being enacted, again and again. And each time, a memento was left behind, a further accretion in the natural world. I touched the smooth bony shaft of the antler, as well as the ridges near its base, where it had separated from its maker.

  I got home mere minutes before the boys returned from school.

  I loved that rush of energy, wind, noise, and all the smells that arrived home with the boys. I loved to hear the back screen door brusquely pulled open, then the main door pushed in as the screen slammed behind them. I loved the clatter of backpacks thumping to the kitchen floor and spilling their contents. Each day fell out an imperceptibly different assortment of the same old things: books, notes from teachers, bits and pieces of lunches. It had only recently dawned on me that they might not carry backpacks forever, and that there might come a time when they would not allow the contents to innocently clutter the kitchen floor.