B000FCJYE6 EBOK (13 page)

“I know,” I said. “They’re being very kind.”

“No they’re not,” she snapped. “They gossip. Old bunch of magpies. Come in here and kiss your cheek, no business doing that. They haven’t said a thing to you in what, all these years? No business. Whether Kate’s a skinny little bird or what.”

She stared at me with her sharp little eyes. I had always loved Oma, but now I loved her hopelessly. I felt as if I could just stay here in the kitchen forever while she said all the right things. She patted my hand.

“She just came that way, is all,” Oma assured me, standing up and busying herself with a dish towel. “She’ll be a tall, lovely thing, just like you. All in good time. Some of those ladies would do well to be a little not-so-plump themselves, no? Now,” she proclaimed, skimming over the compliment. “You need to eat something.” She made me a sandwich and perched on the edge of her chair to watch me eat it. She had cut the crusts off.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I have to do something.”

She looked at me, her back very straight. “I have to, yes, like you have to take care of Kate? That is who I am. And you will have to get Esau now, and bring him home.”

“When he’s well enough,” I said, nodding.

“He was always well enough. It was Arnold made it hard to care for him. Too many sad men,” she said. “You cannot love everybody at once.”

Horrified, I pressed the pads of my fingers into the crumbs on my plate. I wanted another sandwich. I wanted to eat all the casseroles.

“You think I’m unkind?” she asked. “He was my son. I know who he was.”

The percolator sighed with relief, having at last finished a new pot. She stood up to pour us a cup. “He was a man who wanted all your love and did not want any of your love. He would give you all of himself and then could not give you any. You cannot dance like that always and forever. There are other dances to be doing.”

She sat. “Esau is not his father,” she said abruptly. “He is all love.” She sipped her coffee. Thoughtful, she added, “He does not want to die.”

“Sometimes he thinks he does.”

“No, but he doesn’t. That is his biggest word for a thing. He doesn’t have a big enough word. When he has a word, it will be better. He will say, I don’t know,
awful
or
horrible
or something. He will say— what is it—
desperate.
But it will be all right, because he will have you. He will have us. It is like when I was learning English, yes?” She laughed suddenly. “Opa was making us speak only just English in the house. I hated him. For two years I hated him. He would pick fights, just to make me practice fast English. Because I have a temper and he has no temper. So he would pick my temper. And I would get so mad.” She laughed and sighed, putting her hand on mine. “Oh, Claire, you can’t think how silly. I would be yelling, but I would run out of words and start yelling in Deutsch, and the children laughing because they didn’t know what I was saying and Elton holding his hands over his ears, saying, ‘
Ohne Deutsch!
English only, Mrs. Schiller!’ And with such a grin on his face, I can’t tell you. Oh, it was awful, I would just burst into tears.”

The doorbell rang. “Oh, for Christmas sakes,” she said, taking one last swipe at the table with her dish towel. She stood and pointed a finger at me. “Now, no more laughing for us. It won’t do.” She pursed her lips, turned on her heel, and went down the hall.

I was standing on the front porch in the late afternoon when Opa pulled up in the driveway. Donna Knutson stepped out of the passenger side. We waved to each other, and I tucked my hand back into my armpit to warm it. I realized I was standing there without my coat and it was snowing. I reached up. My hair was wet, so were my cheeks. I watched Davey plod up the long driveway in boots that were clearly not his own. From behind me, a shriek, and Kate exploded out the door, down the steps, and launched herself at her best friend, screaming, “Davey!” They toppled into a heap of snow and had to be extracted.

Donna joined me on the steps, and we watched them meander their way up the driveway, waving their hands in animated conversation.

“I wonder what they talk about,” I said. “Times like this.”

Donna shook her head. “Lord only knows. How are you, Claire?”

She didn’t turn her face to look at me. I liked Donna. She was a person I very much liked. She always made me think of the word
solid,
in her men’s flannel shirts with her hair pulled back into a braid. Until today, I’d never seen her wear a dress, and even now she stood with her feet planted apart, her arms crossed over an enviable bosom in a shirt-waist the color of melted chocolate. She was beautiful in some strange way. She wore no coat and a pair of fleece-lined mukluks.

“To tell you the truth, honey, I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.

From the corner of my eye, I saw her nod. “Least you’re sane, then. I would’ve worried if you’d said you were fine.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, surprising myself and her. She looked at me.

“Well, damnation, Claire. Of course we’re here.”

Kate and Davey approached, Kate tugging at Davey’s hand with the unspent hysteria of a child who has held still for an entire day.

“Kate, wait,” Davey commanded. He was the most serious child I had ever seen. He addressed Kate almost always as “Kate,” using the informal “Katie” only rarely. He took her very seriously. When they played, he listened carefully to Kate’s plans and then hunkered down on his miniature cowboy boots and said, “Okay. What we’ll do is this.”

“Hello, Mrs. Schiller,” he began, then seemed to get stuck. Worried, he glanced at his mother. She nodded.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, very formal, very slow. He then walked up the steps and wrapped his arms around my knees for what seemed to him an appropriate period of time. He tilted his face up to me and added, impulsively, “Really really.”

I bent down and hugged him. “Thanks,” I said.

He let go. Kate, who had been very patient, said, “Okay.”

“Okay,” I replied.

“We’re going in now.”

“Okay.”

They tumbled in the door.

Opa came up the steps. “You coming inside? I wouldn’t, I were you.” “In a while,” Donna said. “Awful nice of you to give us a ride.”

“Pleasure.”

He hadn’t been gone but a minute when he returned with two drinks and my coat.

“Almost five.” He smiled at me and hung my coat over my shoulders. “Now, you keep her out of that goddamned kitchen, is what,” he said to Donna.

“Will do.”

“We’ll have supper shortly, when all these fool people leave.”

“Davey gives you any trouble, you send them on out here.”

“Nah. We’ll play ’em some poker, keep ’em busy.”

Donna laughed. “Have your head, you do.”

The door swung shut and slammed behind Opa, echoing into the empty street. The sun was down. Night hovered just over the horizon, the thick dark hesitating at the edge of town.

We sat down on the porch swing, and the frozen iron links creaked under our weight.

“You know what it feels like?” I finally said. “Feels like I’m waiting.”

Donna said nothing. She took a swallow of her drink and pushed us gently with her toe.

“That’s what it feels like,” I said. “Like I’m waiting for something to happen. What for? The funeral? The man’s already gone and died. So then what?”

Donna nodded. “That’s a bitch,” she said.

“And what now, you know?”

She nodded again. “More life.”

“Right. Nothing but more life.”

She understood perfectly. We sat and drank. Night snuck closer, slid down a little farther over the rooftops, then held itself still, like a child trying to creep out of a room unseen.

“You know what it reminds me of?” I stopped, half afraid of what I was about to say. “It reminds me of getting married.”

She let out a short bark of surprised laughter. “Yep. I hear that.”

“That day you suddenly realize it. Not the day you do it, you don’t know what you’ve done right then.”

“Lord knows.”

“But later. What, a year later?”

“’Bout that.”

“You realize, Oh my Lord, what have I gone and done.”

“And there you are,” she said.

“There you are.”

“And now what.”

“Exactly. Exactly.”

“And now more life.”

We laughed for a long time. Night tripped over the telephone wires and fell heavily into the streets as we laughed.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, catching her breath and squeezing my knee. “And then you look at them, sitting there.”

“Sitting there.”

“And that’s all they’re gonna do, then. You got babies crawling up your legs and they’re sitting there. They want dinner, and what, that’s it, forever. Dinner and babies.”

We crowed.

“Hell, I’ll tell you,” she said, shaking her head. “Start to think they
are
dead, just sitting there dead with the television on, and then you start to wish they
were
dead, just so something would happen. Not really, but it crosses your mind, from time to time. My mind, at least, can’t speak for yours. But then, shit. Whaddaya do then, right?”

I tipped my head back, trying to get some air. I felt as if I’d gotten the wind knocked out of me. “Right,” I finally breathed. “What then.”

“Leave a big hole in your life, no matter how you cut it. No matter what we say.”

I pictured all of us sitting in the living room, a hole cut out where Arnold was.

“Holes,” I said. “There’s holes all over the house. Where he sat down. Where he played cards, at the table.”

She took a swallow. My drink was gone. I wanted another one.

“Hole in the bedroom,” I said, staring out across the street.

“Yep,” she said after a pause. “One there, for sure.”

In the dark I felt her glance at me. I stared steadily ahead. The neighbors across the way were sitting down to supper. The yellow light shone on the snow, a long square. A squirrel skittered across it, weightless, and disappeared into shadow again.

“I was thinking about that this morning,” I said. “Last night. Whenever.”

“Slept much?”

I shook my head. “I was up last night talking with Elton. Listening. I’d rather listen to him talk than me, Lord knows. And I can’t—” I gestured toward my mouth. “I can’t find the words.”

I laughed lightly and winced. In the laugh I heard my mother’s laugh, the fragile southern bell of her pained laugh. I straightened on the porch swing.

“So I was thinking,” I said, feeling a little off center, as if I had to remind myself what I was thinking even though it was the only thing I could think about. “The bedroom. In my head. It looks like a hole, in my head. It’s like I’m picturing it”—I held my hands up, cupped at the sides of my face, feeling my voice rise—“like a tunnel, down the hallway, and it ends in this
hole.
This nothing. This
stupid, empty space.
”

Silence hung, and then was swept away by a small cold breeze. Embarrassed, I wiped the spit from my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, shit, Claire,” Donna said in disgust. “You got a hole in your life. Say what you need to say.”

I didn’t need to say anything for a minute, I guess. I watched the woman across the street push back from the table and go into the kitchen. I watched her lean her hands against the sink and look out the window, her face tired, and it seemed for a second as if we were face to face. Maybe she’d gone to the kitchen to get something and paused because she wanted to be alone for a minute. Maybe she was tired of him talking to hear himself talk. Maybe she was tired of his silence.

“But see, look,” I said, gesturing at the woman with my glass. “He’s not dead, is he? She’ll turn around, and there he is, holding her place. He’ll be in bed, holding her
place,
her
place
there, all heavy and breathing.” I broke off, not knowing what I meant.

Donna looked at me. She took my glass, stood up, went in, and came back out with two more drinks.

“Oh, honey,” she sighed. She sat down carefully, making sure I had a grip on my glass before she let go. “Let’s get drunk.”

We watched the woman pull herself up to the table and put her napkin on her lap.

The next day they buried my husband.

I say they buried my husband because I did not. I may have killed him, but I did not bury him in the ground.

There is something about a coffin. It is a big, long box.

It is the first thing you see when you walk into the church. It is the only thing you see, the only thing you are aware of, besides the lilies. You are sickened by the scent of lilies, which, despite specific instructions, are everywhere. Everywhere.

Each of you present loses awareness of the other. There is no time now, there are only a few minutes left, and each of you must go inside your own grief alone. First you begin your walk down the aisle. Then you disperse like a shattered atom.

There is the coffin, a long, dark box, and inside the box is your broken husband, and the lilies are crawling down your throat, closing in as you go, gagging you with their sticky pollen, their fake spring, their cheap dime-store perfume.

Your child clings to your hand and begins to whimper like an infant. You are viscerally aware of her, or more, of it. She is not a person, but a thing that is yours, ferociously yours, another part of your body, resisting forward motion, a damp and whimpering limb. This is reassuring. As you walk down the aisle, she clings to your leg like ivy, like a curled fetus, and you drag her along, she is trying to climb up you, back inside you, and this too is reassuring, as if it should be this way, has always been this way, the disgusting wet fertile rot smell of the lilies and the child pawing at your skirt, your crotch, as you slog up the aisle toward the box wherein your husband lies, dead and ever present, rotting and growing, and the thick air of the church makes it an effort to walk, and faces with eyes in their heads turn toward you in some vaguely bridal ritual until you reach the front pew, where you sit and watch the edges of the lilies’ petals brown and curl in the human heat.