I See You Everywhere

by Julia Glass

  Eva Hesse died of cancer when she was thirty-four. Hers was brain, mine is breast. Mine has not spread—not detectably. They caught it early, and I am considered, even at thirty-seven, lucky. True, compared with Eva. So far at least.

  Crossing the mountains from Denver, I keep my face turned toward the window. I want to avoid idle talk from my neighbors, but the scenery on this flight plan happens to be spectacular. In sunlight, the slopes resemble green velour: in some places rumpled like a cast-off gown, in others sedately corduroyed—wherever the paper companies deploy their platoons of ridgepole saplings, forests resolute with monotony. Clem talked about the paper companies with venom. Their power is supreme, she said. They control everyone in these parts, from journalists to fishing guides—even the clergy. They might as well be God; come to think of it, she said, they are.

  At this remove, the terrain takes on a brainlike texture, and maybe that’s what makes me think of Eva. But mostly the connection is Clem; the last time I saw her, we were looking at Eva’s sculpture.

  Among the other passengers, I make my way down to the tarmac. Descending an open-air stairway to the bright hot roar of an airfield makes me feel significant, like a starlet or queen: even today it feels shamefully wonderful, the fragrant heat after hours of anesthetizing chill. Wonderful, the searching faces behind the windows reflecting the mountains. Wonderful, so much blue sky pressing so close, the sun on my newly unprotected head. I am letting my new hair show, curls where it used to be straight, reddish blond where it used to be the greenish gold of hay. I am glad to be out from under the airless helmets I wore for months. When the wind touches my scalp, the sensation is startling, cool and astringent.

  On the ground, I turn full circle and see the mountains from below. They seem to lean in right at the edge of the airstrip, as if a child drew them there, upright and pointed, crowned with snow even in August, extruding from the earth like whales breaching water. Then I look for Buzz.

  On the phone, he asked if he should hold up a sign, but then he remembered he’d be in his uniform, coming from work. Here he is, sure enough, polyester pants and short-sleeved shirt the brown of walnuts, a color to flatter no one; on the shoulder patches, a poorly stitched elk. He is younger than I imagined—a boyish twenty-eight at most: just the age to make me feel indignantly old.

  I wave.

  “Louisa?”

  “Buzz.”

  He says my name again. He shakes my hand. “Not too bumpy, your landing?”

  “Fine. For once I sat on the right side of the plane. For the view.”

  “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  I nod, and he asks if I checked any bags. When I shake my head, he says, “Wagon’s out front.” I can tell that he considered hugging me but decided against it. “Oh!” He reaches for my bag. “Slow on the manners here.”

  Not till we’re in the car (the same brown as his uniform, the Game and Fish seal on both front doors) does he say how sorry he is about my sister’s death, how he never knew her real well as a person but worked with her, of course, and thought she was one of the smartest women—“oh,” he blushes, “smartest people”—he’s ever met, how everyone here is in shock.

  When I thank him, I feel strangely clearheaded. So far, the hardest I’ve cried was in Denver, between flights. I couldn’t contain it, and there was no place in that airport, not a restroom, not a news shop, not a single flightless lounge, where I could be alone to cry. I had known for twelve hours. Now I feel a callow relief, as if I’ll never cry again, as if I’ve inhaled a potent wintergreen balm.

  “We’ll drive through the park,” says Buzz. “It’s a little longer, but phenomenal this time of year—well, any time of year, as you can guess.”

  I thank him again, remembering how the pilot wished me, along with everyone else, a beautiful stay. That much, unavoidably, it will be. Beautiful.

  “The boss says you can have this car while you’re here, no problem.” I thank him a third time. “We put you in Dubois. About twenty minutes from where she lived. Clem’s place,” he adds, as if I wouldn’t know who. “I was there a couple times. She had this great cookout last summer.”

  “She liked to party,” I say.

  “Play ball, too. She was a great shortstop. She tell you about the team?” He is warming up, getting his bearings on this terrible task he’s been stuck with. I envision Clem’s colleagues—biologists, lab technicians, the bureaucratic charlatans she railed against whenever we spoke—all of them drawing straws and this poor guy coming up short. Because in the three years she lived here, she worked long hours. Outside the lab she knew hardly a soul; so she said. For a year or more, she’d been having an affair; I knew this only because I’d grilled her. She said it was mildly scandalous and never mentioned his name. Not Buzz, I decide; he’s attractive in a preppie, duckhunterish way, but she’d never have gone for his eagerness to please, his habit of jumpy self-affirmation. Or perhaps that’s just his nervousness at being with me.

  Clem was physically reckless, her all-or-nothing soul sealed tight in a cactus veneer. The men she liked—a small battalion, and they always liked her back, fell hard for her hardness—were brawny, outspoken types, or sure of themselves in some other way. Buzz reminds me more of my ex-husband, Hugh: dependable, polite. I’d bet his toenails are clean and close-trimmed, his feet soft and white as shrink-wrapped supermarket mushrooms.

  Dubois is more than an hour from Jackson, through a slash in the mountains called Twogwotee Pass. Most of the vehicles we pass are trucks: pickups or semis or flatbeds stacked with flayed trees. Most of the pickups carry guns or dogs or both. The main drag of Dubois—its only commercial street—is Wyoming’s retort to Walt Disney. On the right, a motel with a hulking plaster bear out front. On all fours, that bear stands eight feet tall. His mouth is open in a livid roar; his teeth drip with blood the color of Paloma Picasso’s signature lipstick. Across the street, side by side, the animal clinic and car wash. You enter the clinic through a bison skull, tall as a house. Next door, on the roof of the car wash, a bull moose looks imperiously up and away toward a red-rock butte. His plastic hide flashes back sunshine. The store where you’d buy your ammo, your flies and tackle, announces itself with a fishing pole taller than a streetlamp, dangling a speckled trout the size of a marlin.

  By the time we get there, Buzz is talking about how the grizzly team works, how other teams that share the lab in the wildlife station study other animals, even plants. He takes for granted the surrounding fun-house menagerie, ducking without comment below the arch of tangled antlers that beckons guests to the hotel he’s chosen for me. Beyond this savage curio, it could be any old charmless pit stop on any old frontier back road.

  “Beds are comfortable,” he says, reading my look. He insists on carrying my bag. “I got you rooms across from each other—lucky, this time of year.”

  “It’s fine. We’re very grateful.”

  My parents will arrive tomorrow. Coming from Rhode Island, they had a harder time booking flights than I did from New York. It took poor Dad a few hours to make sure the boatyards were covered; August is a never-ending rush.

  The room is larger than it would be in the same hotel back east, and the view is generous: red butte and a canopy of cobalt blue, a sky to depend on. I have a cement balcony with two lawn chairs and, inside, a small refrigerator, which I hope will be filled with small hits of strong booze. I am beginning to drink again, and loving it. During chemo, when it would have made me puke, the unremitting sobriety seemed like an insult thrown in for sadistic good measure. So when Buzz asks if there is anything he can do, anything at all, I hand him the ice bucket from the bathroom. He looks happy. I have learned, just recently, to give people things to do in a crisis. Accepting favors is an odd form of mercy.

  After he comes back with my ice, he hovers outside the door. “A couple of us were hoping you’d have dinner with us? Later’s fine if … or if you’d rather not, if you’re too tired …”

  “That’s so
kind of you,” I say. “Thank you.” I tell him I need a bath and that I want to visit my sister’s place—just for a minute, just to see it. I don’t tell him I need to call the police, call Ray, call a doctor to cancel a checkup I’m supposed to be having tomorrow back in New York.

  “Yeah. Sure,” says Buzz. “I’ll take you out there after dinner. You’d get lost if you tried it alone.”

  “Don’t think I don’t know how strange this must be,” I tell him. “I feel sorry for you—for all of you. It’s not—” I’m going to say it’s not their fault, but he interrupts me.

  “Oh no. Yeah—no. Everybody feels just awful. I mean for you.”

  And for Clem? I wonder. Do they feel awful for her? Did she make any enemies, people who are secretly relieved she’s out of the way?

  After I close the door, I switch on the bathroom light. I look at myself in the mirror. “You,” I say to my reflection, and I touch it on the nose, “you are now an only child. That’s right.” Which means, I realize (sick at the glint of relief in my bitter sorrow), that I inherit everything. There will be no showdown over who gets what, the kind of scene that’s played too many times in the theater of my father’s large, acquisitive family. Silver demitasse spoons from all the major national parks. Among other antiques, a highboy just like one at Monticello. The arrowheads our great-grandfather found while plowing his Minnesota fields (Clem would have wanted those). The Spanish Colonial armor, the trunk of raccoon coats, the tarnished silver cups and faded satin rosettes—dozens—won by cows my mother showed at state fairs during her midwestern youth. Complementing those trophies, dozens of medals won in all the wars fought by my father’s long chain of military ancestors (a chain he broke, with reluctance and then relief, after West Point refused his flat feet). It looks as if I’ll inherit all that, and this too: the privilege of dealing, by myself, with our parents’ eventual senility, terminal illness, or both. Unless they outlive me.

  I notice how, in fluorescent light, my scalp gleams unattractively through my new hair. Unless they outlive us both.

  I start running a bath. Tub, toilet, and sink are all a gleeful Bermudian green. I empty a tiny bottle of bubble bath into the water, a tiny bottle of Smirnoff into a glass packed with ice. The steam rises in a cloud of brittle evergreen; it smells like a cat I loved as a child, a gingham cat stuffed with pine needles. Every time I slept with that cat, a needle would poke through a seam and jab me awake. But I never gave up on its thorny love; I mothered that cat till the strained seams along its ears finally burst, disgorging its dry brown innards.

  I peel off my clothes and get into the tub when it’s half full. I watch the froth rise, from both sides, to bury my shins, my thighs, my navel, my knees. I slump down till the suds cover the scar on my breast and cling to my neck like an Elizabethan ruff. I lean forward, turn off the taps, lie back. I close my eyes and stay that way, sipping vodka, until the water feels chilly and the bubbles thin to a milky scrim like aimless, inconsequential clouds. As my body comes back into view, I suddenly want to know about hers—what she did to it, where it is right now, what there is left to see. I want to see Clem’s body.

  The last time I saw her, in Washington, she made fun of my wig.

  “You know, that thing makes you look like one of the Supremes. A lily-white Supreme. Or Doris Day. Like any minute you’ll break into song—like, ‘Que Sera, Sera.’ ”

  I laughed. “You try it on for size. I don’t mean the wig.”

  “Oh, we all get it sooner or later, long as we’re not struck down by a falling rock or a sniper. It’s the world we’ve made, no mystery there. But if it were me, I’d shave my head.”

  “And what, flaunt it? Remind everyone of their biggest fear?”

  “If cancer is your biggest fear, you’re doing all right,” said Clem.

  Long ago, I realized that idealism had turned my sister into a crank. But her company made me happy—and I still had glimpses of her inviolate tenderness, deep inside her shell. And honestly, I was relieved when she made fun of how silly I looked, because I did look silly. Like most women in my predicament, I’d tried on dozens of wigs looking for my old familiar self in the mirror—couldn’t I hang on to her?—before I saw that the only thing to do was treat this cover-up like a masquerade or a disguise. I chose two: a long auburn pageboy, very Glenda Jackson, and the one I wore that day, a canary bubble that swooped along my jawbone. My friends told me I looked camp or chic or risqué; I looked nothing of the kind, but it was their job to say so. Not Clem’s. Clem picked her own job: calling classmates from grad school who’d gone into medical research. She asked them for the more complicated truths about my drugs, and then she told me, not a single word minced. Risk of leukemia, atrophied muscle and memory, sandblasted liver, neuropathy, menopause early and mean. No having babies. For that, for telling me what I was up against as bluntly my doctors would never have done, I felt grateful.

  I order the Home on the Range BBQ Platter and eat every bite: pulled pork, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and coleslaw. I eat every shred of iceberg lettuce, every sawdust wedge of tomato in the salad. I rip a roll in two and drag it through the gravy left on my plate, the bottled dressing in my bowl. I can tell my hunger makes them uneasy. When your only sister kills herself, you are not supposed to eat like John Wayne at the hoedown. I can’t help it. I eat not just to console myself but to do something I can do well when my mind has shut down or would like to. (“Everyone has a mindless thing they excel at,” Clem once said. “Yours is eating, mine is sex.” I gave her a dirty look and said, “How do you know mine isn’t sex as well?” “Because you react like that,” she said. “Because you’re clearly jealous. But listen, eating’s nothing to sneeze at.”)

  The place we’re having dinner would be called a coffee shop in New York; in Dubois, it’s a family restaurant. So the menu declares, as if this claim makes it extra-appealing: all those babies in booster chairs, screeching just for the joy of it. The food is fine—I have coconut custard pie for dessert, with a scoop of chocolate ice cream—but I could have wished for less light. The four people who brought me here share the rancid raw-oyster complexion of people who haven’t washed or slept or laughed for days. Besides Buzz, there is Sheldon, a veterinarian; Vern, a tall storky man with cratered skin; and Dave, Clem’s field assistant, a summer intern from Bozeman. Buzz told me Dave is the one who found Clem. Now that I’ve met him, I have no idea how to ask how my sister died. He’s just a kid, wide-eyed and baffled. I’m sure my parents know how she killed herself—they spoke with the police—but never in a million years would I ask them.

  Sheldon talks the most. He tells me a story about how, back in the spring, they performed surgery on a captive cub to correct a heart defect. Clem did the byzantine paperwork to get the procedure approved (permission, absurdly, to save the life of an animal protected by the Endangered Species Act). They found a cardiac surgeon who, just for the novelty and the publicity, talked Sheldon through the operation. They had all kinds of machinery and special expertise. The risks were significant, that was a given. The bear died on the table.

  “It was supposed to be a big story in National Geographic. But without a happy ending …” Sheldon stops when he becomes aware that Buzz and Vern are frowning at him. I want to tell him to go on, just to have time fill up with talk. It doesn’t matter that I heard this whole story from Clem just before I saw her in Washington. She called me the day after the surgery. She sounded miserable, wiped out, defeated. But she never mentioned it again, so neither did I.

  “I think,” Sheldon says now, “well, I think she identified with that bear. I think she felt she died with it somehow. I think she thought it had something to do with her karma. She wasn’t really the same after that.”

  Vern rolls his eyes. “Clem wasn’t no Buddhist, Shel.” Vern is a botanist. Clem bought her jeep from him, and the two of them sometimes went dancing. Just platonic, she said, but Vern had a blues soul. I look at him now and know why it was platonic, no matter how
charming and smart the guy was. He wasn’t good-looking enough. Clem was vain that way.

  “Karma in the generic sense,” says Sheldon. I remember now how Clem told me, early on in the job, that Sheldon was a good vet but an arrogant SOB. All these people—people I imagined I would meet if I came out to visit Clem—are falling into place, fitting the portraits she drew in our phone conversations, portraits that made me laugh. (Where is the pencil-pushing boss with the comb-over and the macramé ties? Where is the tattooed woman who studies mountain lions but shrieks at the sight of a spider?)

  “All I know,” says Dave, “is like, day before yesterday, she packed for a week in the field. She had me order this new set of hiking boots from that store she likes in Jackson. She said purple, no second choice, and asked for these special all-weather liners. Man, that is so, like—like it makes no sense, does it?”

  “Yeah,” says Buzz. “Yeah, she was makin’ the usual plans. Like tomorrow’s game. She told me she got the dogs, even the Not Dogs for you, Sheldon.”

  I didn’t ask them for explanations or theories. I guess they assume that reaching for reasons will make me feel better. I feel, instead, sort of lofty, as if I am floating above them (despite the leaden food in my gut). Three and a half higher degrees at this table and none of these eggheads knows what even the cheapest TV movies do: that suicide, when it succeeds, wears other well-laid plans. Sort of like a flashy wig.