The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Her skin was moist and her breathing harder as the darkness of the path ahead yielded to a lighter shade of gray. There was a hissing, clicking sound which could have been a flying saucer had she not recognized the sound of irrigation sprinklers from the golf course near their home. The cornfield gave way to another huge field she guessed must be soybeans, the sprinklers tossing water into the moonlight as far as she could see to the east. Off to the north were the soundless lights of trucks and cars on Route 80, with the illusion at that distance that they were traveling slowly, creeping toward Chicago or back west toward Omaha. There was a two-track lane between the soybeans and corn and she walked south for a while, hoping to see the light of a farmhouse. She wanted to hear the dog bark and there was nothing, but she suspected everyone must be asleep by now. She followed a thumping in the ground to a tall thicket of grass and weeds growing up around the main outlet and valve for the irrigation system. She slid in a big puddle but maintained her balance, the water pleasantly icy on her hot feet. Where the main pipe curved up and out of the ground there was a wheel to turn the water off and on, and a large connecting pipe to the field, out of which came a steady gout of water from a bad fitting. Clare cupped her hands, pausing to let their warmth cut the water’s icy edge to avoid the onset of a headache. The water was clean and marvelous after the tea-colored sludge from the creek and she stooped there drinking until she felt a little bilious. She slipped off her blouse, skirt, panties and bra, bathing herself slowly with her hands. She did not feel remotely sorry for herself which there had been a trace of earlier. Dr. Roth had a theory that self-pity was the most injurious emotion to mental and physical health. In the small desert town near the pain clinic a trinket store sold T-shirts that read, “The Pain People,” which they all bought with irony and humor.

  Clare let the breeze dry her off. People used to say “buck naked” and that’s what she was, with more than a twinge of desire for Dr. Roth at the moment his image shifted out of the dark in connection with Dostoevsky. She felt quite free to think about making love to him because she knew it would never happen. It would break the etiquette of their affection for each other. For an uncharacteristic few seconds she thought that any farmer would do, or even the trucker who ate the four-pound hamburger, but certainly not Donald, who would not be caught dead out here unless he was bent on buying the farm. She was nearly dry and thinking about nothing in particular except how smooth and strong her body was for her age, when Dr. Roth arrived again. She had told him about the Dostoevsky incident at the bar of the Townsend Hotel and was miffed when he began laughing.

  “Life is so unforgiving when you’re nineteen,” he said.

  “And that makes my sad tale funny?”

  “If it’s not funny by now you might have to shoot yourself. That’s what I mean by unforgiving. Actually, if you shoot anyone it should be the psychiatrist. All he did was try to lower the ceilings.”

  “I suppose he was tired of the anguish of hundreds of nineteen-year-olds.”

  “Then he should have gotten the fuck out of the business. You have to remain vulnerable to treat the vulnerable.”

  “I’m not so sure he could have said anything valuable.”

  “Of course he could. He might have said that neurotic intellectuals can be as dangerous as cheese-brained fraternity boys. He could have said if you really wanted the guy you could have closed the deal before you read all the books, but it probably wouldn’t have been a good idea.”

  “But I didn’t know I could have closed the deal.”

  “That’s ladylike bullshit. You knew that on a particular level. I think it’s intriguing that you wanted to fuck someone for their mind. I sure could have used that at nineteen.” Dr. Roth nearly blushed at this, the first mention of sex between them, albeit abstract.

  “I would have been twenty-six at the time, already an old lady for a nineteen-year-old.” She was going to let him fry for a moment.

  “That’s not the way it works. I’d feel more comfortable talking about religion.”

  “I remember when I wrote about Apollinaire that he said Jesus held the world’s high-altitude record. Is that religious enough?”

  “It’s definitely safer. We always like to think we’re on the verge of danger when we’re nearly immobile, don’t we?”

  “I suppose so. It’s nice to hear that you think of yourself as no more adventurous than me.”

  “Now it’s my turn to suppose so.” He had become strained and distraught. “That’s what is finally unforgiving. All of this mythological freedom we grow up on which we usually get to express standing around in a field wearing a baseball mitt. Or sailing a quarter-million-dollar sailboat down the Detroit River hoping the water won’t corrode a hole in the bottom.”

  On the long walk back to her nest Clare remembered that Apollinaire left his wife by merely getting on a train and disappearing, but the idea of her own escape was too obvious to attribute to the poet. The beauty and dread of time was that nothing was forgiven. Not a single minute. The years she had spent in consideration of this act were not only lost, irretrievable, but the recognition of the loss was so naïve as to leave her breathless. And she lacked the convenient excuse of children to care for, or the most central excuse of all, poverty. The bondage for most women was not enough money to live on, especially if there were children. And for men there was the perpetual bondage of work and debt, to which was added so frequently a level of spending far beyond their means. In Clare and Donald’s class it meant something quite different. Donald had explained several personal bankruptcies after Black Monday. A number of their club members had been making five hundred thousand a year but regularly spent seven hundred. This fact dumfounded Clare whose extravagances were limited to a good bottle of wine a day and rare books. On vacations she liked deluxe hotels but flew tourist class, which had always irritated Donald. She liked to send the difference to a charity so that it wasn’t a matter of being an unpretentious skinflint.

  Her brother Ted always seemed a more elegant version of Donald and tended to avoid seeing her except around the holidays when it was pro forma. He had been to Hazelden in Minnesota three times to dry out, and the last trip was to the Betty Ford which still didn’t do the trick. What finally worked was a panel of doctors’ absolute guarantee that he’d die within a year if he continued drinking. His three failed marriages and obsession with racing sailboats in the Great Lakes and the Caribbean had diminished his trusts by two-thirds, until he was forced to live quite modestly. Clare had loaned him a great deal of money over the years and this made Donald quarrelsome. Her brother liked to make her feel guilty by repeating that she had inherited all the good genes from their father, while he was stuck with the unstable propensities of their mother. Unfortunately, Dr. Roth had said, that was a possibility. The bottom line, Clare thought, was that her brother had been a bully since he was an infant, and had tended to bully himself into the middle of any misery he could find. To an unimaginable degree he had ruined his life and caused a great deal of pain to his wives and children. He was a living poster child for the evil potential of inherited wealth.

  Clare was absurdly happy when she reached her nest, as if returning home from a tiring day. She tended to the remaining embers of the fire, bringing them to life with dry grass and sticks. There was a lightness in her body brought about by the fact that she did not give a flat fuck if she ever saw her brother or Donald again. It was as simple as that. She repeated the phrase “flat fuck” with the avowed intent to take up swearing as a pressure valve. The phrase was used by April, a rotund woman Clare and Zilpha met up near Pellston the October before on an outing. It was at a small county park on a lake, the autumn colors so stridently lovely as to approach banality, with Sammy swimming through the red and yellow leaves on the lake. When Sammy finished swimming she came up to Clare and waited patiently for Clare to pick the wet maple leaves off her back, then rolled vigorously in the dust and ashes of a campfire site. Zilpha had started a fire in the small
Weber grill they traveled with, using the dry split oak that was kept neatly tied in a bundle. From home Clare had brought the salad, the dressing, and a pheasant Donald had shot at a hunting preserve near Holly. The pheasant had looked a bit lean so she had split it in half before daylight that morning, puréed butter, fresh thyme and sage and forced the mixture gently up under the skin while Donald was already barking on the phone in the breakfast nook.

  April was driving down the gravel road when she blew a tire with a shotgun sound not fifty yards from them, and Sammy rushed into the woods, remembering the few times she had been used as a bird dog in her youth. April got out of the car with her five-year-old daughter, a chubby miniature of her mother.

  “I can’t believe this fucking shitass car,” April hollered with a volume that brought Sammy running back from the woods.

  Zilpha and Clare went to her aid. There was a bald spare tire but no jack among the hundreds of returnable beer cans in the trunk. Zilpha got the jack from the Toyota and swiftly changed the tire which amazed April. Zilpha’s husband was a car buff, and before their marriage had ruptured into boredom they had restored a number of old cars together.

  “Lady, you could get a job in a flat-fucking garage,” April said. She continued to talk, bearing down on the day’s problems, with every sentence peppered with phrases polite folks think of as filth. Zilpha and Clare couldn’t help but begin to laugh and April said she was sorry but she always talked that way. Meanwhile the child was off throwing a stick into the lake for the dog, her voice pealing out, “Bring it back, you son-of-a-bitch.” Clare asked April if she’d like a drink or something to eat. April said she had just had lunch but “I could use a fucking drink to turn the day around.”

  They sat at the picnic table drinking white wine with Clare getting up now and then to tend the broiling pheasant, watching the child wrestle with the wet dog. April was a local and worked as a barmaid up the road. Her ex-husband was a welder in Detroit but was in jail on assault. She had had his checks garnished but he wasn’t getting paid in jail so times were hard. Zilpha took down the information, saying that her husband might be able to look into it. Then April said, “Where do you gals work?” and there was an embarrassed silence.

  “We’re sort of housewives,” Clare said, and April said she had tried that once but it “bored the shit out of me.” She liked working in the bar because you could shoot the shit with the customers, and if you got a little horny you could always find someone. Clare had set out a small wheel of Camembert and cut a wedge for the daughter who was eyeing it. The child smelled the cheese, announced loudly that it smelled like poop and ran off again with Sammy. When April left she thanked them profusely, took one more swig from the bottle of wine and said, “You fucking ladies got it all.” When she was gone their laughter was mixed with a little melancholy. The pheasant was delicious and Sammy got a chunk of raw shin bone of beef that had been packed for her in a cellophane sack.

  That had been their next to last outing before Zilpha’s diagnosis had come, right after Thanksgiving. In early December they went off to a spa near Tecate in northern Sonora, just a few hours south of San Diego. The trip had its moments but the diagnosis was too fresh in mind to try to ignore. After the first day of group exercise they gave up the program in favor of hiking in the mountains, most of the time well off the marked trails.

  They had been at the spa together a decade earlier, and since then it had vastly upgraded its facilities, and the clientele had become a bit more hard and glitzy. One evening in the dining hall Zilpha said, “We’re all the same here,” and it was true. Other than a dozen men there were nearly ninety women, between the ages of forty and sixty, but a concentration around fifty. More than age, the women seemed to be fighting a malaise of fatigue and dissociation, of free-floating anxiety so deeply ingrained as to be invisible to the bearer. The regimen of a vegetarian diet and relentless exercise in a lovely setting far from home, the source of the gray-area angst, worked quite well, and within two days spirits were lifted. It was a break, not a cure, a shifting into a pleasant neutral where the body’s exhaustion supplanted the brain’s dreary machinations. Unfortunately, given the death sentence of Zilpha, the function of the place was too clearly scribed, so they took refuge in the mountains, packing along water bottles, hard-boiled eggs and oranges, descending in the late afternoon to start a fire in the fireplace and drink a glass of wine before dinner. Clare had been thrilled to discover that their small villa had once been used on a regular basis by Aldous Huxley, one of her earliest reading enthusiasms. Zilpha was a steady reader herself but disliked Huxley’s brittle intelligence which reminded her of her husband. At dinner every evening Zilpha would look out over the assembled ladies and whisper, “Don’t you wish April was here to sweeten them up?”

  One afternoon they were sitting on a boulder halfway up Mount Cuchama when a Pacific front swept in over a distant ridge and within a few minutes they were looking down at the roiling tops of clouds with far less security than is felt in an airplane. They were excited and girlish at the experience, noting the occasional hawk or raven that would pop up through the clouds, circle around, then dive back down into the moving fleece. “These clouds aren’t comforting enough for the afterlife,” Zilpha said, just before they heard a rattle of stone and a ragged, desperate Mexican man appeared before them. He gestured at his mouth in hunger and they handed down a remaining orange and hard-boiled egg from their perch on the boulder. The man pocketed the food, smiled, bowed and scampered up the steep mountain at an alarming rate, with physical verve that Clare pointed out none of the fitness instructors could have managed. Zilpha became depressed that the man was headed for America and might be disappointed, then she began coughing so they headed down the mountain.

  Clare sat before her fire and decided that at last she was ready for sleep. She felt a trace of something new and feared she might be like a patient emerging from an asylum, using a cornstalk as a scepter, and saying, “As of today I’m giving up control of the entire world and all of its inhabitants.” A half-dozen fireflies had gathered in the darkness around her green cave, and the tiny beams seemed to trace the convolutions of her thought. Life outside the asylum was not necessarily more pleasant. It could be, but it didn’t have to be. She tried to recall what her beloved Camus said about “terrible freedom,” that once you decided not to commit suicide, whether physically or figuratively, you assumed the responsibility of freedom. The thought blurred with a firefly’s movement past her nose. She curled up fetally, rejected the position and stretched out strenuously on her back until there were bone crackles.

  When she woke up a few days before this trip she noted that her feet were getting old, and laughed. She met Dr. Roth down-town for lunch because it was his volunteer day. He looked grim in the foyer of the Caucus Club and she feared a bad morning at the hospital, but it turned out an auto dealer had called to tell him his wife was intent on buying the same car she had bought the day before. The restaurant seemed suddenly inappropriate so they walked down the street and bought two Coney Islands apiece. Clare admitted she had never eaten one in her life but found the frankfurters covered with onions, mustard and chili quite delicious.

  “You just saved a hundred bucks,” he said, examining a splotch of mustard on his necktie. Clare had always insisted on the check.

  “Too bad they don’t sell these out our way.”

  They ducked into a bar, had a quick beer and removed the mustard from his tie. When they left and began walking again it was by common consent they decided not to be witty.

  “What would you think if I left Donald?”

  “I’d think you were sane”—his reply was quick—“but that’s as much as I’ll say. When did this come up?”

  “About seven years ago. Why won’t you say any more?”

  “Because I’ve seen dozens of divorces in my practice and the act is so utterly intimate that outside advice only confuses the issue. Also, anything I’d say would be an abridgment of
your freedom.”

  “I understand that. I’ve actually reduced it to an abstract principle.” She hesitated, feeling foolish.

  “Let’s have it. Don’t leave me hanging. This will be a first.”

  “I want to evoke life and he wants to dominate it. Is that too simple?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ll have to spend an evening with that one. When are you going to do it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well I don’t believe you don’t know. In the ten years we’ve known each other you’ve mentioned a number of places you’d like to live. Let’s see, there was Flagstaff, Minneapolis, Durango in Colorado, Pendleton in Oregon, and Duluth. And the obvious Paris.”

  “You have a remarkable memory for my nonsense.”

  “I’ve never been to any of them, but when you’d mention a place I’d look it up in the atlas and think it over.” He was nervous with this admission and looked at his watch. It was then that she understood that at one time, at least, he had cared for her. They walked on in silence for a few minutes, her heart swelling in her throat. When they reached her car he hugged her and rushed off.

  Clare was sinking into the ground, into a point well past sleep, or so she thought, with her body sweet, warm, deadened, giving itself up to the bed of leaves and grass, the green odor transmitting a sense she belonged to the earth as much as any other living thing. I don’t need to change. I’m just this. Her brain had grown larger, its outer reaches vertiginous, grand, so that she could move within it as if taking an evening walk. She understood that she had been abandoned there by her mother and father, Donald, her children, Sammy and Zilpha, and that only being abandoned by Sammy and her children was natural. Zilpha was torn off the earth, taken away. Donald had disfigured himself beyond recognition and bore no resemblance to the man she in innocence had once been proud to love. Her mother smelled of allspice, martinis. Her ears smelled of gin. Be careful because they’ll always try to put their thing in you, dear. No matter what they say, that’s what they’re trying to do. Her father had said, Clare, look at your mother and don’t drink anything stronger than wine, and she hadn’t except an occasional brandy. But when she slept in her birthday tent out by the grape trellis with the English setter, Tess, the dog had growled when her mother covered her in a mink coat, then she heard her mother vomit in the yard. Her legs were so thin and she died a year after him, unable to stand on thin legs still smelling of gin after death, beside him in the cemetery Clare could not bear to visit. Now she would, to say goodbye. As a child puzzled by age she’d say, Why is Dad older? Why does he say, Take the best bite first? We went for a drive that took all day from the cottage to a man’s farm near Gaylord to get Tess bred. We dropped her off and he didn’t want me to see it so we went to town for lunch. Mother was in the hospital so I got to eat French fried potatoes, then we went to see the Hartwick Pines, the biggest trees left, then we went to the wilderness where there were only huge old stumps. He said all but a few white pines five feet thick were cut down. They’re like the buffalo, but I didn’t understand. At Christmas he gave me a silver dog whistle with three small diamonds set in it because I could make the setters mind. Sit, stay, come, heel, slow. I never got to go hunting. My brother hated it. Girls don’t hunt, he said. My brother hit the dogs with a stick and got spanked. He would always hit me but Mother said I did the bruises myself to make my brother look naughty. The clock said three and I didn’t hear Sammy’s breath and I knew she was gone. It was May and the lilacs had just come out. I wore my nightgown and put on my hiking boots. I carried her down the hall and Donald looked out of his bedroom door and I said, Go back to bed Donald this is my dog. Out at the end of the garden I began digging and it was more than an hour before the hole was deep enough. I got down in the hole chest deep and could see that dumb bastard Donald staring at me out the kitchen window, then he went away. I lifted Sammy in after I kissed her goodbye and covered her with the dirt, and sat down out of breath. At Zilpha’s grave they covered the dirt with a rug of fake grass the color of grass in Easter baskets.