The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Now she heard a siren, but only gradually understood the sound, from back toward the rest stop. She scrambled to her feet and they moved off quickly down the row as if informed by their own panic. The siren became louder, then stopped abruptly. She continued to run, holding her hands and the bag up against the slapping of the leaves. There was an image of Donald explaining himself to the police, who she hoped would call Laurel despite Donald’s usual cagey aplomb. But then Donald passed away with her breathlessness and her flayed brain began to play the rest of the Stravinsky Donald had truncated, then she tripped on a clod of earth and fell sprawling in a bare row where the corn turned direction. Now she was far enough from Route 80 so that she no longer could hear the trucks, only the crows, as the one had become five, and she twisted her neck for a look as they passed over, apparently discussing her. Perhaps the police could see the birds far out in the cornfield and guess that she was there, but she hoped they would believe the “small red car driving east.” The sun was warm in the narrow clearing and she moved her upper body into the shade. She drew out the cranberry juice, drank it, then looked at the Boy Scout compass, deciding to head west along the wider row after a rest. She curled up, noting the earth smelled like a damp board after rain, then more heat. She looked at a dirty hand and thought idly with a smile, despite the pain, that for the first time in her life she did not know where her next shower was coming from.

  Clare slept for a few minutes but was startled awake by her first dream in several months. She was a girl again, out in her row-boat on Burt Lake, and Dr. Roth was on the dock calling out and asking her why she had died. That was all there was to the dream and then she awoke. The pain had localized toward the right side of her head and within it Dr. Roth continued to call after she woke up. Clare was difficult to push off balance and ignored the phenomenon which was not unlike certain other symptoms of classic migraines. Besides, she liked Dr. Roth very much; he was not only her doctor and confidant, up to a point, but also had been Zilpha’s doctor. Dreams are no respecter of time and Dr. Roth couldn’t have been more than a child when Clare was a girl in a rowboat. She turned over and thought, at the very least, she had had her first dream since Zilpha died; two weeks later when Clare’s dog died her sleep had become even blacker. The dream wasn’t ominous to Clare: death simply didn’t hold her interest, but there was the nagging angle of Dr. Roth who Clare at the very moment realized she had been in love with for a brief period.

  This recognition jolted her to her feet and she continued to head west, wondering if “maize” and “maze” were somehow connected. She normally walked a great deal because she was essentially claustrophobic and walking made the world appear larger. The fact that the field offered no variation was moot. Dr. Roth’s lighthearted question meant something different to her than might appear. Once, when they had a drink after a library board meeting, he had said that most of his patients were already dead, and life herself was merely a technicality that allowed them to get up in the morning to collect a paycheck. They shared this sort of acerbic wit that made them both somewhat mistrusted in what are known as the better circles. The characteristic was harder on Dr. Roth than on Clare because this sharp wit, added to his slowness to write unnecessary prescriptions, limited his practice to those who desired honesty in medicine.

  But on another evening after another library board meeting, when they had had to deal with a group of evangelical nitwits who wanted The Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse-Five banned from public consumption, Dr. Roth had looked up from his melancholy brandy and said, “You should be careful. You’ve lived your life with the kind of will that could later cause a lot of problems.”

  “I know it,” she had said. But she didn’t know it; the statement only brought forth the familiar feeling of an unpleasant truth.

  That was half a year ago and the morning after, when she heard Donald pull out of the driveway she began to weep, an act so strange to her she couldn’t pinpoint the event that had made her weep before. A few weeks later both Zilpha and Clare’s dog had been diagnosed, Zilpha with lung and the dog with fibroid cancer.

  Down toward the end of the row the greenness narrowed and blurred, and then there seemed to be a line of taller greenery. Her pace quickened in wan hope for a change of view, but she slowed down as the pain redeveloped with the swiftness of pace, though luckily enough the pain had moved to the left side of the head where it was more confinable. On the left side Clare could reduce the pain to a diffuse green light, then work consciously on reducing the dimensions of the light. The only side effect was that her sense of time became utterly jumbled, which was vertiginous but preferable to the pain. During one of these seizures, and at this particular state, the best she could do was to remember to feed the dog. Out in the field all that was required was to walk a straight line.

  In fact, she thought she was moving within the heart of time. Normally she stood aside and lived on her comments to herself on what was happening to her, but when the pain moved to the left she moved inside herself, and this had the virtue of being novel within the framework of suffering. The pain was always a moment behind her as if she stood on the platform of a caboose watching the world go away. There was a sudden impulse to pray but she found the act embarrassing because, of course, she could see herself praying. As a child up near Petoskey on summer vacation her parents had allowed her to go to Daily Vacation Bible School with the maid’s daughter. The maid was a mixed-blood Chippewa but her religion was Evangelical. Clare’s parents had once discovered their daughter out in the garage praying over a three-legged cat that lived in the neighborhood. This was viewed as highly amusing and became part of a repertoire of “Clare stories” her parents shared with their friends during the rites of the martini hour. Now, to her surprise, this made Clare angry. What was the point of being angry at her parents for something that happened forty years ago, but then what was so funny about a child praying for a three-legged cat? In defiance she dropped to her knees but couldn’t think of anything to say so got up again. Dr. Roth should see her now. He liked to think that, all efforts of the glitz media to the contrary, life is Dickensian, and that pathos is invariably the morning’s leading news item. Clare with dusty knees and a verbless prayer would, no doubt, amuse him.

  It had taken Dr. Roth several years to set Clare straight over the fact that Donald was an anti-Semite, albeit a quiet one. Clare had invited Dr. Roth and his wife to a large dinner party and late in a rather boozy evening Dr. Roth had made an acid but very funny comment about Richard Nixon which everyone had laughed at but Donald, to whom Nixon was an object of reverence. “Golly, but you guys can be smartasses,” Donald had said, and the table had become so quiet that Zilpha had plunged courageously ahead with a lame joke. When everyone left Clare was instantly furious, partly at herself for letting the first incident pass. Years before, they had been visiting friends in Palm Beach with the real purpose of the trip being to pick up the dog from other friends. They had all eaten dinner at the Everglades Club and their host had proudly announced that the club was off limits to Jews. Clare had merely said that she found the fact odd just twenty-five years after World War II and let it drop, though the comment put everyone on edge. Before bedtime Donald had said something critical about her dinner behavior, admitting quite pompously that he agreed with the club policy. She had only looked at him and said, “I see.” Next morning the joy of picking up the yellow Labrador, who was being given away for littering the pristine lawn with stray coconuts and palm fronds, made her overlook the issue.

  Curiously, Dr. Roth was remote and analytical on the subject of anti-Semitism. He had grown up in Ann Arbor in a sheltered academic family, and after medical school had married a Jewish girl from Memphis whose family had been in the country from well before the Civil War. His experience was limited to a number of minor incidents similar to the one with Donald. He tried to tease his way out of Clare’s questions by saying that being Jewish couldn’t be as bad as being a manic depressive or a woman,
and his wife was all three. When Clare insisted, he finally admitted that his own Jewish experience could be likened to her acute migraine, not in the degree of pain but in the utter uncertainty of when something unpleasant was going to occur. The incident could be a small item in the paper, say an inept political statement, or the recent suicide of one of his favorite authors, Primo Levi. The condition of being Jewish bred a perpetual wariness shared by all minorities, and the wariness tended to become an irksome cliché in life unless one was careful. The true burden of awareness had been carried by his parents’ generation where the threat was all too specific.

  One late afternoon over drinks he said something that disturbed Clare, to the effect that they shared an economic condition that was out of sync, and definitely out of sympathy with ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the rest of the world, and they had to walk an extremely narrow line not to die from being rich freaks. He asked how Clare and Donald got their home and she said it had been a wedding gift from her mother. Dr. Roth said his own home had come from his father-in-law on the same occasion, and when had either of them given more than nominal consideration to the purchase of anything—food, clothing, wine, books, cars, vacations? He said he would have gone mad long ago without the single day a week he spent as a volunteer at Detroit Receiving, a hospital that serviced the black ghetto and the poorest whites. Then he noticed a hurt look quickly pass across her face before she could conceal it.

  “What about me?” she said.

  “Oh, your reading in unpleasant areas and your migraines keep the tips of your toes in the real world.”

  “That’s not very much, is it?”

  “It’s usually enough. Our sort doesn’t need a great deal of consciousness to get by. Most often sending a check will do.”

  “I’m not leaving this shitheel fern bar on that sour note.” She signaled the waiter for another glass of wine. Clare swore on the order of once a year. “This can’t be another monkey occasion.” She was referring to a benefit ball they had attended, the purpose of which was to raise money for new accommodations for the chimpanzees at the Detroit Zoo. Donald was in Atlanta for a few days and Dr. Roth’s wife had entered a manic shopping phase that could best be resolved in New York City. Zilpha had only recently died and Dr. Roth thought it important for Clare to get out of the house. Unfortunately they were seated at a table with two self-important General Motors executives whose wives ignored everyone, and an exhausted neurosurgeon whose wife obviously wanted to be at a zippier table. Despite a normal aversion for talking shop in front of laymen, Dr. Roth and the neurosurgeon began some heavy-hearted joking on the effects of crack cocaine on the nervous system of newborn infants, the neurosurgeon’s punch line forcing everyone to drink hard and fast.

  “We’re going to have to look at Detroit as a vast rookery for psychotics,” the man said.

  “What’s a rookery?” a GM wife asked.

  “A breeding ground. Our dominant product is psychosis. It’s moved ahead of automobiles.”

  “That doesn’t speak well for the future of the work force,” an executive huffed.

  “Not unless you’re producing worker-tested automatic rifles,” Dr. Roth quipped.

  That evening had been effectively deadened and in the shitheel fern bar they tried to work themselves out of the hole that they had dug.

  “I’m tired. Can’t you look in your catalogue of piths and gists?” Dr. Roth was referring to a ledger Clare had started at the university and continued to the present where she recorded passages of literature she cherished. Dr. Roth had been amazed at Clare’s ledger, the range was boggling, all recorded in a neat, almost lapidary script, from Aeschylus down to E. M. Cioran, with a preponderance coming from the early modernist period in world literature from 1880 to 1920. Her intended but never finished senior honors thesis was to be on Apollinaire and there were many translated quotes, but her temperament seemed to have been most captured by Rilke. Dr. Roth’s own sense of balance had been disturbed when he came across Yeats’s notion to the effect that life was a long preparation for something that never occurred.

  “My piths and gists don’t work since Zilpha and Sammy died.” Sammy was the name of the female Labrador. In an instant Clare relived Dr. Roth’s stricken look when he had stopped by late one afternoon for a drink and found her and Zilpha listening to Beethoven’s last quartets while Zilpha held the fat, stinking, cancerous Sammy on her lap, smooching with the dog, hugging its bulk to her breast, both of them within a month of death.

  “I’m thinking hard,” Dr. Roth said. “Let’s not come to this place again. It’s full of binge shoppers trying to sedate themselves. Now, I know you have an aversion to anything Oriental as being too passive, even though you’re utterly passive yourself. A Wayne State University student suffering from obvious malnutrition said it to me. The general notion is that the only use for today is today. The only reality you are ever going to get is the ordinary one you make for yourself. In other words, there’s no big breakthrough.”

  “That’s awfully grim. Does that mean there’s no Christmas on earth? And what does he do with the information?”

  “The ‘he’ is a ‘she.’ I gave her ten bucks and made her promise she’d go eat a good meal. Then I loaded her up with vitamin samples. I don’t know what she does with this information. I only know she doesn’t take care of herself.”

  “Can I make a donation?” Clare had become nervous.

  “Not at the moment. Perhaps later when a donation doesn’t mean you’re delaying doing something about yourself.”

  “When you say ‘doing something about yourself’ it sounds like psychobabble. You know the big section in Borders Bookstore that covers self-improvement.”

  “Pathology can only be imaginative up to a certain point. If you like, I’ll work on the sentence.”

  °

  Clare found herself nearly at the end of the row and presented with a barrier she hadn’t allowed herself to comprehend while thinking about Dr. Roth. It was a dense thicket, apparently as impenetrable as any of the topiary hedges she had seen in England and France. The thicket grew into the cornfield so she couldn’t turn right or left. She stepped back twenty feet for a better view and thought she could make out the top of a cottonwood; as her breathing calmed she was sure she heard flowing water, then she remembered that a mile or so before they reached the rest stop there had been a creek or river named after a cow—Guernsey, she thought. Her watch said that had been over two hours ago which didn’t seem possible. A creek crossed at seventy miles an hour in a split second doesn’t look threatening, but now she felt tears welling up. She had expected a barnyard and farmhouse at the end of the row, and now the compass said that was a possibility only in a southerly direction since north was the interstate. Millions of women merely leave their husbands; why had she fled? She swallowed with difficulty, wishing she had saved some of the cranberry juice, then looked up at the thunderheads, their edges lined with silver from the descending sun. She sat down and made traceries in the dirt with the compass bracket. She had an impulse to discuss the situation with Zilpha but she felt that would further loosen her tenuous grip. Laurel was a better choice.

  “Laurel, you little bitch, this is partly your idea. What do I do now?” There was an urge to be angry, cheap, vulgar.

  “You could have waited until Davenport and taken a cab to the airport when Dad was in the shower.” This was so like Laurel who was matter-of-fact even in the cradle.

  “I knew the pain was coming and I lost my good sense.” The pain was increasing a bit with the tinge of self-pity so she stiffened up. At the clinic one of the first lessons was never to adopt a “why me?” attitude which might precipitate a collapse.

  “You know very well your good sense is bullshit. Remember when I came home from college years ago and said that you act as if you’re living three feet from yourself? You were angry but it’s true.”

  “I suppose so, but let’s get back to the situation right now. I’m si
tting here in the dirt and I don’t know what to do. Like most people I’m only prepared for the life I’ve already lived, none of which included this sort of thing.” Clare remained cool with this admission. On all the trips she had made to beautiful places with Zilpha they had never camped out, though twice they had bought a lot of expensive equipment that was donated to the Boy Scouts on return. Laurel and her husband had backpacked everywhere, even in the winter on cross-country skis.

  “For Christ’s sake, Mother, you’re going to have to toughen up. You said you read that book on camping I sent. You’re going to have to get some water in your system to avoid hypothermia. You know that from a lifetime of tennis which I always thought was a waste of time. You might have to go back to the rest stop for water.”

  “I refuse. It looks like it’s going to rain. My bag is canvas so maybe I could catch some water.”

  “It’s important that you crawl into that thicket to stay dry. No matter how warm it is now, if you get wet you’ll be cold by nightfall. Don’t drink any water from that creek unless you find a way to boil it. If you get desperate, don’t forget why you’re doing this. I’d say you’re in for a long night unless you’re willing to hoof it back to the interstate; I hope you’ll come to spend a few months with us.”

  “That’s kind of you but I have my heart set on Paris.”

  “That’s silly of you. Paris isn’t the same as it was thirty years ago. You’ll be disappointed.”