Body and Bread (25 page)

“Of course, this will be difficult for Terezie, but as your mother, she…” Then I realize why she’s asking. I take several steps then bend over, queasy. I hit my thigh, raise back up, squeeze breaths. Finally, I walk over and lean into her face. “Think about your parents, for God’s sake. How dare you suggest something so hideous?”

“But I
am
thinking about them,” she says calmly. “They’re the reason. But please, you can’t ever say that.”

“How could your death possibly be something your parents would want?”

“Dad sold his bookstore, Mom’s giving up her job, and they’re moving to Minnesota of all places, he’s losing his kidney, they’re bankrupt and the house is being foreclosed, your brothers have filed a lawsuit, Uncle Cyril’s gone crazy, and Mama doesn’t know how she’s going to pay him back. Besides, after the transplant there’ll still be tons of bills, but the doctors won’t promise anything. What would you do?”

Youth’s essence is intensity. In spite of her failing kidneys, Cornelia invites watching, touching, her body carrying its subliminal desire to procreate. Each cell and follicle pulses, moist and animate. Sam, I realize, was only a few years older. “Thank you, Cornelia,” I say, “for telling me.” I cup her cheek. “Now you have to listen very carefully. I understand why you feel helpless. You’re right that the situation is serious. Harming yourself will only aggravate the problem. The fact that you want to protect your parents is admirable, but your death at your own hands will only ensure their suffering.”

“But if I was gone, they’d be able—”

“Thirty-three years ago my brother died, Cornelia. Thirty-three years, and I’m not the same person. At fifty-four, I’m still grieving. Please don’t do this to your parents.”

“But I can’t just do nothing,” she says, bending over until her head rests in her lap.

“Sit up,” I say. “Come on. Here, dry your face.” I pull a handkerchief from my sleeve. “I have an idea,” I say, “but I have to work out a few details. If I promise to tell you everything in no more than one month, will you trust me? Will you wait?”

The tower clock chimes. When she hugs me, the rhythm of her breath echoes inside my head, my chest.

When I close the door to my office, something in my stomach feels like ice, my mouth goes dry then fills with saliva. Darkness everywhere, except one tiny bit of yellow light. I’m sitting by a fire on an angled floor, inside a rock shelter carved out of rattlesnake-infested cliffs. The Lower Pecos winds below; pictographs cover the back limestone wall. The headless white shaman is leaving his shadowed mortal body. He’s got cat feet and paws; feathers cover his arms. When his twelve-by-twenty-four-foot image steps off the wall, I’m not afraid. He flies above me, his body spread like an airplane. I expect chants or animal calls, but instead Cornelia says, “If I was gone…” A master switch snaps, and I’m sitting in my office chair, orchids on the windowsill, university email messages waiting on my computer screen. Rescued by Cornelia.

C
HAPTER 16

1968

S
AM GRADUATED
from the university in May and worked at Family Health Services arranging foster care for abused children, counseling unwed mothers, and helping people find jobs. To supplement his caseworker salary, he drove a cab three nights a week. Stubble shaded his muscular cheeks and chin. “My tribute to the Rolling Stones,” he said, wisps of sun-streaked hair barely reaching a knotted rubber band at his neck.

Sometimes I stayed overnight in his and Terezie’s Austin apartment, a stop only a half-hour outside my usual route. Terezie, who would complete her degree in music education that fall, never talked about the miscarriage, and I didn’t ask about it or about other children.

Labor Day weekend, Sam convinced me to stay until Sunday. Friday, Terezie and I watched him play intramural football on the University practice field. When we got home, Terezie got a phone call from an elementary school principal saying she’d been hired for the spring. Sam was so excited he hopped in the car and brought back a bottle of champagne. “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism,” he said. “Here’s to you, babe,” and he clinked our glasses. After we’d drunk most of the bottle, he pulled her to the piano, and she played “The Tennessee Waltz” while we sang, her thick fingers mechanized, her foot tapping the pedal. We got hamburgers and chocolate malts at Dirty’s and watched
Night of the Living Dead
and
Rosemary’s Baby
at the Chief Drive-In.

I slept on a daybed in the front room. Cyril woke me when he arrived Saturday at 6:00 a.m. Sam grabbed two graphite rods with spinning reels from behind the curtains next to me and his metal tackle box from the bedroom closet. I pictured him standing in our farm creek, catching that bass with his hands. He’d said I was the curled mouse we’d found inside the gullet, my babies the tiny clams.

They hung coffee cans of limburger bait on strings around their necks. Giddy as boys playing hooky, they banged their way to the door.

When Terezie got up an hour later, I asked if she had a project for me. She tried to change the subject, but I insisted, saying I couldn’t keep coming unless I pitched in. We decided to paint the kitchen, a space small enough for us to finish in a few hours. While she bought the paint at a store on the drag a few blocks away, I cleared out small appliances and dishes from the counter and shelves and took everything off the walls. I was taping around the window when she came back.

“Look,” she said while setting a sack and gallon of paint on the front room floor. “Since the shelves don’t have doors, I bought this paper”—a blue Delft design—“to go with this yellow, my favorite. Is it too bright?”

I started scrubbing dirt and grease. “I hope Sam likes it,” I said.

“Your mom won’t. That’s for sure.” She stood back, gazing around the room. “I can’t put it all together the way she does.” She shrugged. “Looks great, right?”

“Sure does,” I said, not knowing how I really felt, except disappointed for not being more honest. Terezie didn’t know how to be anything else.

“Are you going to marry Saul?” she said facing the wall, her paintbrush busy.

“Probably not,” I said, surprising myself. I’d finished cleaning shelves and reached for a brush.

“Why do you live at the compound then?”

I took a breath, determined not to censor myself. “I thought it would give me a place to slow down and think.”

“Do you believe in evolution?” She dipped her brush in the paint, dragged it across the rim.

“I’m not the kind—”

“Do you interpret the Bible literally?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I’ve been studying Eastern religions.”

“And Coptic. Why?” She stood on her tiptoes, reaching for a corner. “Are you planning to be a preacher?”

“No, that’s not why—”

“A diplomat?” She turned around. “Maybe a politician?”

I laughed. “That’s a lot of questions.”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Well, truthfully, I guess I don’t know. I just want to study for awhile.”

She looked at the floor then began painting again. “What makes you want to stay with us so much?”

I stopped moving. Terezie was the truth scavenger. And me? I was wearing a mask.

One October evening when I arrived as planned, Sam’s voice came through the door telling me to come in. When I did, I found him in an apron juggling four tomatoes. “Follow me,” he whispered, his voice wavering with each arm stretch. “We’ve been,”—he paused to reach for a wobbled toss—“banished to the kitchen.” Bobbing, grunting, he finished in slow motion, miraculously clutching two in each hand. “George is studying,” he said, motioning toward the next room where Terezie, surrounded by books, sat on their bed. Mozart played softly from a radio on a table. Leaning into a circle of lamplight, Terezie scribbled on a legal pad in her lap.

“You’re in charge of the salad,” Sam said, nudging me forward, dropping tomatoes into my arms.

As I made the garlic, oil, and olive juice dressing, Sam slid a pan into the oven. “What are we having?” I asked, stirring, ready to rinse lettuce.

“Christ’s messenger, the bird of peace.” He used a mixer to whip cream he’d poured into a bowl. “I shot them Saturday with a friend.” He stuck his finger into the white peaks, then poked it, cream-covered, into his mouth. The bowl went into the refrigerator next to sliced strawberries. “Just call me Killer.” He knew I disapproved of hunting, but raising the issue was pointless. He thought it was fine as long as he ate everything he shot.

He asked about my class. While he basted the doves, I asked his opinion of Confucianism. I carried a pocketsize copy of the
Tao Tê Ching
in my purse.

“Tao’s the way to go,” he said. He closed the oven door, wiped his hands on his apron, then took plates and glasses off the cupboard shelves. “I’m not a fan of kow-towing to your elders. You might’ve noticed; I’m not good at it. What do
you
think?”

I told him my professor had said that great ideas were like buried seeds waiting to sprout in a better climate and that Confucius and Lao Tzu would outlast Mao Tse-tung. “Lao Tzu’s teachings on gentleness and humility are as important as the Sermon on the Mount.”

Sam leaned against the counter, folded his arms. “Does your boyfriend agree with that?”

“No,” I said, taking place mats out of a drawer.

“You think gentleness and humility can be political?”

“I don’t know. Our system certainly needs them.”

“Nietzsche thought those with power ignored morality. If that’s the case, how long can any religion last?”

Nietzsche was my private signal to change the subject. “Think the doves are ready? You burn it, you still eat it, mister.”

While we set the table and served the plates, Sam sang, “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train.” He and Terezie had heard Janis at a pub. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Barefoot, he danced me around the narrow dining area, bumping chairs, walls. I felt like Anna in
The King and I
.

“Sam!” Terezie shouted from the bedroom. “Could you keep it down, please?”

I’d forgotten she was in the apartment. At least, for awhile, I’d had a happy Sam to myself.

“Nice moves,” he whispered, grinning. After he twirled me, I patted his cheek then clapped. “Dinner is served,” he called toward Terezie. Halfway to the bedroom, he threw his palms on the floor, his feet in the air. He walked on his hands to his wife.

On each of my three November visits, I found Terezie alone, her purple eyes red-rimmed, her t-shirt and shorts wrinkled, food-spotted. “That son of a bitch,” she fumed the first time, “he hasn’t been home in two days.” When she cried, I awkwardly hugged her, then cried too, made coffee. We tried to watch old movies on TV, or she tinkled concertos on their mottled upright. Sometimes, she’d sit quietly in an old rocker, a row of Czech puppets watching from a shelf. I’d try to say something funny about Sam, and she’d almost laugh.

Each time, he appeared the next morning before we were up, the scratch of his key bringing exhausted relief. He brushed aside Terezie’s accusations, his expression all animated flattery, his hands bearing a gift: the first time, a wheel-shaped bottle of perfume; the second, a snake’s rattle, milky, tough as a toenail; the third, a book about saints.

While Terezie glanced at the book’s sketches, he rubbed her feet and told stories about his late-night passengers: an unemployed court reporter looking for a buyer for his screenplay; a guy camping at Barton Creek who’d never been in a cab. “It pays to be friendly,” Sam said. Terezie fried eggs; I made more coffee. After he’d eaten and while I washed dishes, he carried his wife into their bedroom, kissing her chest. “Hello,” I yelled at the closed door, ready to rap it with my fist. “Excuse me, you’ve got company.” I imagined his taut flanks, her sensual mouth. Then I packed my things and propped their front door open as I marched away.

Some days, Sam skipped work, dozing or staring at the TV. One mid-November night, the three of us sat in lawn chairs on their apartment’s backyard deck, talking late. Sam, barefoot, in blue jean shorts, finished a six-pack. As his speech slowed, he became more physical: catching a fly in his fist, tugging his ponytail. His body smelled rank, addictive, while he massaged Terezie’s neck. He told stories about his job at Family Health Services (“A little boy cuts himself tattoos; one’s a smiley face, I kid you not”), and recited a line from Gogol’s “Overcoat” (“This Person of Consequence had only lately become a person of consequence, and until recently had been a person of no consequence”).

“I don’t know if I can go back,” he said.

“Is it really that bad?” I said, trying to imagine what he faced. Droves of desperate people must have expected help. They probably blamed him for their messy lives, calling him a bureaucrat. How ironic was that?

He stood, slapped his stomach, grabbed another beer. “Here’s to man, and the son of man, which is a worm.” He clinked my bottle, drank. “Hey, you still with the preacher?”

“Saul,” I corrected.