by Sharon Heath
I called Mother immediately. She sounded as thrilled as I was, but there was a new ingredient in her speech that I found profoundly discomfiting.
I couldn’t help but ask, “Why are you laughing?”
At first, she sounded defensive. “Well, it’s good news, isn’t it? It must be that I’m happy.” But then she ended up confiding, “I can’t help it. Life seems a lot sillier ever since I landed on my head.”
I probably didn’t help matters much by commenting that life seemed a lot more nonsensical to me ever since I’d seen a nearly naked Cesar on stilt heels doing the bump with Fidel Marquetti, but at least we were able to move on from there, divvying up the work that had to be done before Gwennie came home. A night care nurse needed to be hired, a host of prescriptions to be filled, organic groceries to be fetched from Whole Foods.
But we agreed that there was one thing we couldn’t do on our own. The patient lift may have been delivered, but—insanely—it had not been put together; evidently, that should have been arranged ahead of time. I rang off and punched in Ignacio’s number. There was no way we could leave it up to Stanley to set up the vertical lift hoist on his own. My fellow Nobelist was the original absent-minded professor, and it was all too easy to imagine him bungling the assembly of the heavy contraption, ending up suspended upside down, one foot caught in a wire loop like the Hanging Man in Sammie’s Tarot deck. Which brought back to mind Assefa’s attempt to kill himself on an IV pulley at UCLA Medical Center. Which really didn’t bear thinking about. I pinched myself a few times on my fleshy upper arm, and that seemed to do the trick.
So here we were, Stanley and Ignacio and Mother and I, trying to figure out how to make the damned thing work, which hadn’t been helped by the men’s refusal to consult the instruction booklet first.
But once Ignacio applied his gift for sensate reality, the steel beast stood facing the bed like a ready servant, and it was decided that Mother would be Gwen’s stand-in (or in this case lie-in) as we sought to make sure Stanley knew what to do with its services once Gwennie arrived.
I insisted that this time we consult the manual.
“Okay,” croaked Stanley, reading aloud from the little pamphlet in his most froggish voice, “First, roll over.” That was fine, so far as it went. We took it for granted that we, the installers, were not ourselves required to perform any physical maneuvers. Mother obediently turned onto her side. “And now, slide sling under side features of hapless person, then roll over in opposite direction.” It dawned on me that the instructions had been written in one of those lousy translations of Chinese. I prayed that Mother’s new funny bone would hold still for the rest of the operation.
But it was Stanley who guffawed as he read, “Tuck excess material inside patient.”
I broke in quickly, “Under. They must mean under.”
But I could tell Stanley was teetering. “Encouraging neck strength, put padded support behind esteemed head of hapless one.” He snorted, then continued, “Put sling under two legs of hapless one and tie together for modesty of all.” He looked up, his bug eyes twinkling from behind his thick lenses. “Yeah, but what do we do with the other legs?”
Ignoring him, Ignacio struggled to tie together Mother’s legs without violating her privacy. Stanley and I kibitzed from the corner of the room. And all the while Mother issued forth a running series of objections. “No. Wait. Pull it down. It’s cutting into my thigh. No, now you’ve got it too low. Okay, that might be a bit better. This is like Goldilocks and the bloody bears.” Seeing Stanley grinning, she commented in a slightly injured tone, “I don’t know what’s so funny. He’s got me bound so tightly, I can hardly breathe.” I had to admit that she resembled nothing less than a trussed turkey.
Ignacio stepped forward to deftly sort out the ties and then activated the pump that set the whole thing in motion, Mother and all.
Once she’d been airlifted out of bed and onto the chair, Mother burst into high-pitched peals of laughter that went just over the edge. “Whee!” she giggled like a schoolgirl. And then, to make it even worse, “Again!” she cried.
Stanley and I exchanged a look. How in the hell was he going to do this in the coming days all by himself? And what in the world was wrong with Mother?
That night, I woke with a start. With a murmured, “Thirsty,” to an awakened Adam, I rolled out of bed and up the hall to the baby’s room. I turned on the dimmer just enough to see from the hands of the vintage Cat and Fiddle nursery clock that it was just a few minutes before 3:00 a.m. I’d learned from Siri Sajan that this preternaturally quiet hour had been dubbed by ancient Hindus the Amrit Vela, or Time of Deathless Consciousness. Reputedly, the perfect time to meditate. I considered it, but instead went down the staircase as quietly as a lumbering elephant, got my glass of water, switched off the alarm, and wandered out the French doors to the back garden, breathing in the poet’s jasmine growing against the quartet of trellised arches against the rear of our house. Another thick, tangled hedge of it sprawled across the redwood fencing at the property line. The air was alive with its perfume. I made my way under a canopy of stars and a full moon, framed by a shimmering corona.
I loved the reciprocity of the moon’s magnetism and a woman’s cycle, how that pitted orb regularly rolled our earth’s liquid envelope, maintaining the stability of our rotational axis, while droplets in our own troposphere framed this satellite nearly 240,000 miles away. No wonder humans had from time immemorial been moved to call the moon sacred names—Selene in ancient Greece; Coyolzuahqui by the Aztecs; Yrikh by the Canaanites; Queen Jiang by the Chinese; and in Ethiopia, Yuk. For me, a sacred chant of Callooh! Callay! would do—our child having been conceived under a Milk Moon in an act layered with lust and love.
The crickets were performing a percussive cantata as I shuffled out to inspect the patch of land where we’d yanked out our scraggly ryegrass the previous winter to plant dymondia—our own small contribution to water saving during SoCal’s endless drought. The ground cover had failed to take hold almost from the get-go, its leaves turning completely white before withering entirely. We’d tried again, Ignacio muttering under his breath as he’d inserted each little clump into the soil, swearing that he didn’t see what the fuss was about, there being many more practical plants to choose from. But I’d fallen in love with dymondia. When thriving, its silvery green carpet looked like something out of a fairy garden. Now, in the moonlight, I saw shiny little islands of it sending emissaries toward other solo clumps, the greener leaves bridging the dirt to make the connection.
There was a barely discernible rustling in the twining hedge of jasmine closest to me. Goosebumps rose up on my arms as a creature emerged from the dark. My hands made little fists as she paused, assessing my threat. I noted the telltale shape of her, her short tail and tall ears, but was mostly mesmerized by her intense greenish-gold eyes. I’d heard that Pasadena was home to bobcats, but I’d never seen one with my own eyes. Despite my anxiety, I nearly laughed aloud. Only days before I’d been afraid of being bitten by a mosquito, and now here I was, eye to eye with a creature that—if sick or rabid—would be more than capable of doing me grievous bodily harm. I knew I should back away slowly, make a ferocious noise. But I stood stock-still and stared. She stared back at me. I’d already taken in her bulging belly. Had she taken in mine?
I recalled Assefa’s story of his childhood encounter with a pair of kudus, those odd-eared, delicately striped antelopes of Africa that were given their sweet-sounding name by the Khoikhoi people. The grandfather of Assefa’s best friend, Girma—I believe the old man was called Demissie—had insisted on taking the two boys on an initiatory expedition into the forest. After an exhausting hunt, Assefa had ended up cradling the head of a dying kudu calf in his lap. He’d been convinced that the poor creature’s spirit had entered his own body at the moment of its death, only to give him strength, many years later, to break the nose of a khat-intoxicated boy who’d slashed Father Wendimu’s neck.
; I involuntarily shuddered and saw that the bobcat had noted my subtle movement. With a warning flash of her eyes, she darted back into the hedge and was gone.
I was trembling, but not from fear alone. What a gorgeous creature! I prayed that she’d find a place to bear her kittens in peace, that they would all find their way back to the San Rafael Hills, where they might stand a fighting chance of survival.
By the time I walked back toward the house, the clouds had covered the moon, and I nearly tripped on the edge of an uneven paver. There was no way around it: we humans were gifted with great ingenuity, but the low-voltage lights lining the path were a sorry substitute for the lustrous light of Selene.
My lack of sleep that night didn’t help much the next morning when I drove to join Mother at Stanley and Gwennie’s. If Gwen had looked unwontedly frail at the City of Hope, she seemed even more delicate in her familiar digs. Seeing this thinner, yellower, and balder incarnation of her previously hearty self drove home the truth that she was still a pretty sick puppy.
Despite growing up with a grandfather doing a slow shuffle toward death, it occurred to me now that I knew very little about aging. Then, I’d only been aware of the melty eyes, the grunted ugga umph uggas, the mystery map of soft lines engraved on the hands of my very favorite person on the planet. Since Grandfather couldn’t speak, he couldn’t tell me of his pain, his nostalgia, his dread of the great darkening to come.
But Gwennie could. Once Stanley had managed to move her from bed to chair as we’d all practiced—with only one tense moment when she dangled over-long in the air, with Mother, in the corner, tittering alarmingly—Gwen began to speak quite frankly about her concerns, fretting over the prospect of Stanley being left on his own to fend for himself, worrying that Callay might not have a habitable planet to finish out a decent lifetime, fearing she’d miss seeing the culture-shifting power of my scientific discovery put to use.
“There’s one thing I know for sure, Stanley,” she said, taking a moment to dab a tissue at the spittle that tended to collect these days at the corners of her lips, “You weren’t meant to live alone. A lot of men aren’t, but it’d be worse for you.” She skewed her body a bit and extended a hand toward the other side of the living room, which was piled nearly to the ceiling with copies of Living Reviews in Relativity, Reviews of Modern Physics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
She pointed a bony finger at her brother. “You’ve got to get yourself a woman when I go. It’s long overdue. You’re nearly sixty-years-old. You’re not exactly Prince Charming anymore, but you’re still a good catch. Time to get over Doris Abrantes. She’s not the only fish in the sea and hardly representative of the female of the species. Marrying a Nobelist would be a feather in any woman’s cap, and what you lack in grace would be made up for by intelligent conversation.”
Mother and I hardly knew where to look, but I did catch Stanley blushing. Honestly, I’d never given Stanley a thought in that department. Even with his slight geriatric stoop, he was still far taller than the average man. His Coke-bottle-lensed glasses magnifying his somewhat buggy eyes, his unusually long neck and tendency to hop when excited, made me forever think of him as the most intelligent, most endearing frog ever. But as I snuck another look, I saw that there was an appealing softness to the little paunch he’d acquired. The still-thick and shiny mane of hair that had turned silver over the years, which he wore a bit long and professor-ish, was actually quite attractive. But he also looked terribly tired. The bags under his eyes were more pronounced than usual, and the lines from his nose to his chin seemed etched more deeply. Gwennie’s illness had taken its toll on him, too.
I managed to convince him to take a nap in the den. Mother—verifying that I could stay a few more hours—excused herself for her scheduled hair appointment with Kelly Zhang.
I fetched a chair from the kitchen, and Gwen and I sat together side by side, our faces in and out of shade as a column of clouds paraded before the sun. We observed the happenings out the front window much as Grandfather and I would in the old days, watching the patterns made by birds flitting from branch to branch in our tree. But Gwennie was a heck of a lot gabbier than my mute grandfather had been. I listened with eyes as wide as a child’s as she spoke of her first love. The young have the hardest time imagining that their elders weren’t always—well, not to put too fine a point on it—old.
Gwennie took great pains to impress on me that the boy was the cutest guy she’d ever seen. “His name was Jack Green,” she reported, followed by a pregnant pause. Her face had a surprisingly kittenish expression for a woman who’d just barely cheated death. “Oh, just to think of him, Fleur! I get goosebumps to this day. His eyes weren’t green, like your Adam’s, but the color of starling eggs. He was Black Irish by heritage, with a dimple in his chin, olive skin, and the sleekest, blackest hair—a little like your Buster’s fur. He wore it long.” I sat without speaking as she sensuously stroked a pillow with her venous hand. “He was something of a hippie. Truth was, I was too. If I ever get my energy back, remind me to tell you about driving up the coast to Santa Barbara during a wildfire, peaking on acid.” I think my jaw actually dropped, for she added quickly, “Don’t worry. Really, it was lucky it was such a bad trip. It was the first and last time. The whole episode cured me of ever wanting to take psychedelics again.”
She took an orange from the bowl of fresh organic fruit Mother had placed on the side table and began to slowly peel it. Gwen was one of those people who have the knack of peeling an orange in one long spiral, and I stared, fascinated, as she muttered, “Where was I? Oh, Jack. And the demonstration. We were marching from UCLA to the Federal Building. The university was a helluva lot smaller in those days, probably about as big as Pasadena CC is now, and it seemed like the whole campus was there. The war was that unpopular. I wish we could whip up that much passion to end our endless wars in the Middle East.
“I was poor as a church mouse. Stanley was studying back in Philly, and our parents were still alive, barely getting by in this house. Thank God they’d paid off the mortgage by then. They knew about Jack, and I knew they had hopes we’d tie the knot. I also knew that Jack wasn’t the knot-tying kind. But I would have given anything to have something more with him.
“Anyway, we were about halfway through the march when I realized I had a problem on my hands. Well, not exactly on my hands.” She snorted, and then put down her orange to blow her nose. “It was my panties. They were so old that I realized the elastic was giving out. Right there on Wilshire Boulevard.
“I was mortified, but what could I do? I explained what was going on to Jack. God bless him, he didn’t bat an eye. Just said, ‘Let ’em fall, step out of ’em, and keep walking.’ And that’s exactly what I did, shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today,’ even louder as I did a little two-step on the sidewalk. Later, with Jack finally in my dorm bed with me, the two of us sharing a cigarette, we fantasized together about what the cops made of the pair of undies left behind on the street.” She sighed. “It was the last time I saw him. I heard he’d fallen for Penny Spheeris, the queen of the film department. She had all the confidence that I didn’t and ten times the looks. Curly black gypsy hair halfway down her back. She ended up directing The Decline of Western Civilization. About heavy metal. Not exactly my cup of tea. But then again, I surely wouldn’t have been one of hers.”
At that point, Gwennie looked so sad—and so tired—that I convinced her to let me airlift her back to bed. As a little snore escaped her, I found myself wondering what would have happened if pouring water onto my grandfather’s shrunken balls had actually achieved my goal of resurrecting him. I might never have even met Adam, who Sammie likes to call “your one-stop shop for everything good in your life.” I wasn’t sure I liked giving so much credit to one person, even the man I adored, but I had to admit her assignment had some merit. Though we quantum physicists like to speculate that choices not made are played out in an uncountable se
ries of multiple universes, I couldn’t imagine what would have happened to me without Adam comforting me at Grandfather’s funeral, introducing me to Stanley H. Fiske and quantum physics once Mother had hired him as my tutor because no school would accept me, and traveling all the way to Ethiopia to claim me as his own.
My hands traveled, as they tended to do these days, to my watermelon belly, which still never failed to strike me dumb with the oddness of incarnation on this extraordinary planet, where human creatures were gestated like baby butterflies in a giant wet chrysalis and where the processing of a billion bits of memory, perspective, and sensation simply ceased when the body housing its incarnation wore out.
My cell phone went off and I sped to pick it up before it could wake Gwen. It was Mother, laughing uproariously. “Do you think I should dye my hair blue? It would be a hoot, don’t you think?” Whispering, I wrung from her the confession that Kelly Zhang had insisted she call me to discuss it before going ahead with the coloring.
I walked down the hall. “Mother!” I hissed.
“Yes?” she squeaked.
“Get a grip. I’ve just put Gwen Fiske to bed. She’s fighting cancer. I’m going to have a baby. Do you really think blue hair is the statement you want to be making right now?”
Contrite, she seemed to regain her mind. “God, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I didn’t either. But then I recalled her neurologist mentioning in passing that emotional lability wasn’t an infrequent side effect of concussion.
Mother raised her voice. “Are you still there?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Her voice was leaden now. “I’m an idiot. You should get home and have a rest. This is a lot to ask of yourself right now.”