Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories (57 page)

I inherited the Cape Cod house, and Milo comes to visit every summer. He and I and my two sons always pay a visit to Bosky’s. The wild-animal preserve has dwindled to one desperate moose, one raccoon, and those poor foxes, or some other pair. The snake has retired and the agouti is gone, too. But the farm in back continues to flourish, and the ponies get new straw hats every season. My kids have outgrown the place but they understand that old Milo is to be indulged.

A white mustache coats Milo’s upper lip. His hair, also white, is still long. His hairline has receded considerably, and he’s subject to squamous carcinomas on the exposed brow. Advised by his dermatologist, he covers his head. In the winter he sports a beret, in the summer a cloth hat with a soft brim.

Today, wearing the summer hat and a pair of oversize cargo pants that look like a split skirt, he is riding one of the ponies. That saddle must be punishing his elderly bones. Maybe he’s trying to amuse my sons. Certainly they are entertained. When he reaches the far side of the ring they release unseemly snickers. “Granny Wild West,” snorts one. “Madame Cowpoke,” returns the other. Meanwhile Milo is bending toward the kid who’s leading his pony—eliciting a wretched story, no doubt; offering a suggestion that may change the boy’s life or at least make his afternoon a little better.

I’d like to smack both my sons and
also
smoke a cigar. Instead I inform them that Milo represents an evolved form of human life that they might someday emulate or even adopt. That sobers them. So I don’t mention that he was once valued and then exploited and then betrayed and finally discarded; that, like his displaced parents, he adjusted gracefully to new circumstances.

We stand there, elbows on the railing, as Milo on his pony plods toward us. We smile at him. Within the rim of his bonnet, his face creases; below the soapy mustache his lips part to reveal brown teeth. He is grinning back at us as if he shared our mild mockery of his performance: as if it were his joke, too.

W
HEN
C
ORNELIA
F
ITCH RETIRED
from the practice of gastroenterology, she purchased—on impulse, her daughter thought—a house beside a spring-fed pond in New Hampshire. She did not relinquish the small apartment of her widowhood, though—three judicious rooms with framed drawings on the gray walls. This apartment, in the Boston suburb of Godolphin, was a twenty-minute walk from the hospital where Cornelia had worked; and her daughter lived nearby, as did both of her friends; and at Godolphin Corner she could visit a good secondhand bookstore and an excellent seamstress. One of Cornelia’s legs was slightly longer than the other, a fault concealed by the clever
tailleur
. “Do you think there’s anybody what’s perfect,” her aunt Shelley had snorted when, at fifteen, Cornelia’s defect became apparent. Aunt Shelley had lived with the family; where else could she live? “You’re a knucklehead,” added that gracious dependent.

The place by the water—Cornelia had had her eye on it for years. It reminded her of the cottage of a gnome. “Guhnome,” Aunt Shelley used to miscorrect. The other houses in the loose settlement by the pond were darkly weathered wood, but Cornelia’s was made of the local pale gray granite, sparkling here and there with tiny golden specks. It had green shutters. There was one room downstairs and one up, an outdoor toilet, a small generator. Aquatic vines climbed the stones. Frogs and newts inhabited the moist garden.

She spent more and more time there. At the bottom of the pond, turtles inched their way to wherever they were going. Minnows traveled together, the whole congregation turning this way and then that, an underwater flag flapping in an underwater wind. Birches, lightly clothed in leaves, leaned toward the pond.

There was no beach. Most people had a rowboat or a canoe or a Sunfish. They were retirees like Cornelia, who passed their days as she did—reading, watching the mild wildlife, sometimes visiting each other. Their dirt road met the main road a mile away, where a Korean family kept a general store. Thompson the geezer—Cornelia thought of him as a geezer, though he was, like her, in his early seventies—sat on his porch all day, sketching the pond. Two middle-aged sisters played Scrabble at night, and Cornelia joined them once in a while.

“I worry about you in the middle of nowhere,” her daughter, Julie, said. But the glinting stones of the house, its whitewashed interior, summer’s greenness and winter’s pale blueness seen through its deep win dows, the mysterious endless brown of the peaked space above her bed … and pond and trees and loons and chipmunks … not no where. Somewhere. Herewhere.

“C
ORNELIA, GOOD SENSE
demands that we treat this,” the oncologist said. “A course of chemo, some radia—” He paused. “We can beat it back.”

She stretched her legs—the long one, the longer. She liked her doctor’s old-fashioned office with its collection of worn books in a glass-fronted case. The glass now reflected her own handsome personage: short hair dyed bark, a beige linen pantsuit, cream shirt. A large sapphire ring was her one extravagance. And only a seeming extravagance, since the stone, though convincing, was glass. The ring had been Aunt Shelley’s, probably picked up at a pawnshop. But the woman who now wore this fake article was a woman to trust. People
had
trusted her. They’d trusted her with their knotty abdomens, their swollen small bowels, their bleeding ceca, their tortuous lower bowels. Meekly they presented their anuses so she could insert the scope and guide it in, past the rectum, the sigmoid, the descending colon …

“Cornelia?” He too was reliable—ten years younger than she, a slight man, a bit of a fop, but no fool. Yes, together they could beat back this recurrence, and wait for the next one.

“Well, what else can we do?” she said in a reasonable tone. “Will you ask your nurse to schedule me?”

He gave her a steady look. “I will. Next week, then.”

She nodded. “Write a new pain-med scrip, please. And the sleeping stuff, too.”

O
N THE WAY NORTH
she stopped at Julie’s house. The children were home from day camp—two enchanting little girls. Julie hugged her. “How nice it’s summer, I’m not teaching, I can be with you for the infusions.”

“Bring a book.” She hated chatter.

“Of course. Some lunch now, what do you say?”

“No thanks.” She touched her hair.

“And there’s that lovely wig, from the last time,” Julie said, shyly.

They waved good-bye: younger woman and children in the doorway, older woman in the car. It was a lovely wig. A bumptious genius of an artisan had exactly reproduced Cornelia’s style and color, meanwhile recommending platinum curls—hey, Doc, try something new! But she wanted the old, and she’d gotten it. There wasn’t much she’d wanted that she hadn’t gotten: increasing professional competence, wifehood, motherhood, papers published; even an affair years ago, when she was chief resident—she could hardly remember what he’d looked like. Well, if Henry had been less preoccupied … She had failed to master French and had lost her one-time facility with the flute. She was unlikely to correct those defects even with a remission. She had once perforated a colon, early in her career—it was repaired right away, no complications, and the forgiving woman remained her patient. She’d had a few miscarriages after Julie, then given up. Her opinions had been frequently requested. She’d supported Aunt Shelley in that rooming house, so messy; but the old lady, who liked bottle and weed, refused to go into a home. At retirement Cornelia had been given a plaque and an eighteenth-century engraving. Novels were okay, but she preferred biographies. If she hadn’t studied medicine, she might have become an interior designer, though it would have been difficult to accommodate to some people’s awful taste.

She stopped at the general store and bought heirloom tomatoes, white grape juice, a jug of water. “The corn is good,” advised the proprietor, his smile revealing his gold tooth.

“I’ll bet it is. I’ll be in again tomorrow.”

Now the tomatoes nestled in the striped bowl on her kitchen counter. For a moment she regretted having to leave them behind, their rough scars, their bulges. Then, eyes wide open, the knowledgeable Cornelia endured a vision: emaciation, murky awakenings, children obediently keeping still. She squinted at a bedside visitor, she sat dejectedly on the commode, she pushed a walker to the corner mailbox and demanded a medal for the accomplishment, she looked at a book upside down. The mantle of responsible dependency … it would not fit. With one eye still open, she winked the other at the tomatoes.

She changed into her bathing suit and took a quick swim, waving to the Sisters Scrabble and the geezer. Back in her house she put on jeans and a T-shirt, tossed the wet suit onto the crotch of a chokecherry tree. What should a person take for a predinner paddle? Binoculars, sun hat against insidious sidelong rays, towel, and the thermos she’d already filled with its careful cocktail. Pharmacology had been a continuing interest. “I’ll swallow three pills a day and not a gobbet more,” Aunt Shelley had declared. “You choose them, rascal.”

Cornelia pushed off vigorously, then used a sweep stroke to turn the canoe and look at the slate roof and stone walls of her house. Just a little granite place, she realized; not fantastical after all. She had merely exchanged one austerity for another. She thought of the tomatoes, and turned again and stroked, right side, left, right … Then, as if she were her own passenger, she opened a backrest and settled herself against it and slid the paddle under the seat. She drank her concoction slowly, forestalling nausea.

Sipping, not thinking, she drifted on a cobalt disk under an aquamarine dome. Birches bent to honor her, tall pines guarded the birches. She looked down the length of her body. She had not worn rubber boat shoes, only sandals, and her ten toenails winked flamingo.

The spring was in the middle of the roughly circular pond. Usually a boat given its freedom headed in that direction. Today, however, the canoe was obeying some private instructions. It had turned eastward; the lowering sun at her back further brightened her toenails. Her craft was headed toward the densely wooded stretch of shore where there were no houses. It was picking up speed. Cornelia considered shaking herself out of her lethargy, lifting the paddle, resuming control; but instead she watched the prow make its confident way toward trees and moist earth. It would never attain the shore, though, because there seemed to be a gulf between pond and land. No one had ever remarked on this cleavage. Perhaps it had only recently appeared, a fault developing in the last week or two; perhaps the land had receded from the pond or the pond recoiled from the land; at any rate, there it was: fissure, cleft … falls.

Falls! And she was headed directly toward them. All at once a sound met her ears … plashing not roaring, inviting not menacing, but still. As the canoe rode the lip of the new waterfall she stood up, never easy to do in a boat, more difficult now with substances swirling in her veins. She grabbed an overhanging bough, and watched in moderate dismay as her vessel tipped and then fell from her, carrying its cargo of towel, paddle, binoculars, sun hat, and almost-empty thermos.

What now? She hung there, hands, arms, shoulders, torso, uneven legs, darling little toenails. She looked down. The rent in the fabric of the water was not, after all, between water and shore: it was between water and water. It was a deep, dark rift, like a mail slot. She dropped into it.

Into the slot she dropped. She fell smoothly and painlessly, her hair streaming above her head. She landed well below the water’s surface on a mossy floor. Toenails still there? Yes, and the handkerchief in the pocket of her jeans. A small crowd advanced, some in evening clothes, some in costume.

“Cornailia,” whispered her Dublin-born medical-school lab partner. How beautifully he hadn’t aged. “Dr. Flitch,” said her cleaning woman, resplendent in sequins. “Granny?” said a child. “Cornelia,” said a deer, or perhaps it was an antelope or a gazelle. She leaned back; her feet rose. She was horizontal now. She was borne forward on an animal along a corridor toward a turning; the rounded walls of this corridor were sticky and pink. “Rest, rest,” said the unseen animal whose back was below her back—an ox, maybe, some sort of husband. They turned a corner with difficulty—she was too long, the ox was too big—but they managed; and now they entered a light-filled room of welcome or deportation, trestle tables laden with papers. She was on her feet. “Friends,” she began. “Sssh,” said a voice. Some people were humbly hooked up to IVs hanging from pine branches. They ate tomatoes and sweet corn and played Scrabble. Some were walking around. I’m chief here, she tried to say. She lay with a feathered man. “Don’t you recognize me, Connie?” He presented his right profile and then his left. That boiled eye … well, yes, but now she couldn’t remember his name. She was on her back again, her knees raised and separated; ah, the final expulsion of delivery. Julie … She was up, dancing with a rake, holding it erect with lightly curled fists. Its teeth smiled down at her. She saw her thermos rolling away; she picked it up and drank the last mouthful. She kissed a determined creature whose breath was hot and unpleasant. “I’m a wayward cell,” it confided. The talons of a desperate patient scratched her chest. Then the breathable lukewarm water enveloped her, and she felt an agreeable loosening.

A sudden rush of colder fluid, and the room was purged of people, apparatuses, creatures, animals. Everyone gone but Dr. Fitch. Her tongue grew thick with fear. And then Aunt Shelley shuffled forward, wearing that old housedress, her stockings rolled below her puffy knees, a cigarette hanging from her liver-colored mouth. How Cornelia and her sisters had loved climbing onto Shelley’s fat thighs, how merrily they had buried their noses in her pendant flesh. “Scamp,” she’d say with a chuckle. “Good-for-nothing.” No endearment was equal to her insults, no kiss as soothing as the accidental brush of her lips, no enterprise as gratifying as the attainment of her lap.