Saving the World (12 page)

“I'm fine, especially now that you're here. Let's go on back to the kitchen and get us some tea. If you're not in a hurry?”

“No, no,” Alma assures her, holding back on trying to help as Helen pulls her walker over and leans into it, struggling to her feet. There's an extra heaviness in her movements. Maybe she has gotten an upsetting phone call and that's why she was at her phone seat. The AIDS caller from a few weeks back pops into Alma's head—but that woman has since been taken into custody and committed somewhere, Tera caught her up. Better not bring up something upsetting and make Helen feel unsafe and even more fragile.

“I'm surprised to see you so early, dear. What time is it anyway?” The radio usually keeps her posted. But the radio is off. Another odd detail. Helen, not being predictable.

“I'm giving myself a day off,” Alma tells her. Helen knows all about Alma's writing schedule—how Alma makes herself sit at her desk, come muse or not. Helen, however, also knows the truth—the only person Alma has told. She has given up on her novel. Instead she is reading and brooding about some orphan kids crossing the Atlantic. She has told Helen the whole expedition story.

“A good thing to give yourself a day off,” Helen is saying now, tentatively, as if she doubts that's what Alma is up to and is giving her a chance to refute it. Helen is standing in the little corral of her walker, catching her breath from the exertion of getting up. It makes Alma feel tender to see the old woman in there.

“What about you, Helen. What are you up to? I always find you in your kitchen.”

“You'd be surprised,” Helen says, chuckling. “If you'd come any earlier, you might've found me in the bedroom in my nightie.”

“All alone or with a honey?” Alma plays along. Helen has alluded to her past, a long-ago rocky marriage and a son, who periodically drops off the face of the earth and then reappears. Alma has gotten the story
mostly from Claudine, whose husband's a “local boy” and so knows all about the old-timers in town. For almost fifty years, Helen worked at the high school in the lunchroom and saw several generations in this town go through their adolescence; she retired when she started going blind. Everyone loved her so much, they gave her a little parade on her last day of work. Small towns. You gotta love them.

“A honey at my age, ha!” Helen is laughing, as she clumps around the kitchen, making tea. Alma loves to watch how Helen finds things, her hands tentative, but somehow landing true, like a puzzle piece that snaps in place. “How's
your
honey doing, by the way?”

“He's gone away on an assignment.” Alma tries to keep her voice even. She doesn't want Helen to think the real reason she came over on a Saturday morning was to get away from her own loneliness. “It's one of those projects his company has in different countries.” Alma goes on to tell Helen about the green center, as they sip from their chipped mugs. Probably because Helen is blind and bumps into things, a lot of her cups and plates have chips in them, but at least she doesn't have to see them. In their house, Richard is always holding up his favorite bowl or martini glass and saying, “So what happened to this?” “Why is it always me?” Alma has countered. For the next five months, she is going to have to be careful. If something breaks, she will not be able to convince Richard that he might have done it.

“So he's going to be gone for a while, is he?” Helen wonders.

“Uh-hum.” Alma takes a sip of her tea, swallowing down that weepy feeling.

“Any time you feeling lonesome you come over here, you hear?”

“Thanks, Helen, I will.” Helen can tell. Of course, Helen can tell. Just like Alma can tell that Helen has got something on her mind. “Helen, you'd tell me if something was wrong?”

For a moment, Helen looks unsure as if she has been caught keeping something to herself, but then she smiles, bemused, the old Helen. “I'll try,” she says, almost shyly. “You, too,” she adds, turning the conversation back to Alma. “A woman can get blue without her man.”

“And
with
him, too,” Alma reminds her. Helen has heard about
Alma's dark moods of the last few months. “Don't you worry,” she has told Alma. “God has a plan for you. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open so you don't miss it.”

Unlike other religious people who can drive her nuts, when Helen mentions God, Alma just does an instantaneous translation in her head—God as a metaphor for the stunning, baffling, painful, beautiful spirit of the universe—bypassing the whole thorny question of whether God even exists, and instead dealing directly with the little quandaries that really are the places people get stuck in for life.

“He wanted me to go with him, and maybe I should've, Helen, but … I don't know.” If indecisiveness hits her now, Alma is a goner. She'll be on a plane tomorrow.

“Maybe you needed him out of your hair so you could hear yourself think,” Helen offers. For a moment, Alma wonders if Helen is talking about her own solitary life—her difficult husband, who disappeared ages ago; her on-again, off-again son who reappears whenever he wants. “Sometimes you need to be alone so you can hear that quiet, little voice of God inside.” Helen's voice is hushed, as if she's hearing it now.

“Hmm,” Alma puzzles. Did she really stay to hear the baffling, painful spirit of the universe inside her? “It's just that I lied to him, Helen. I told him I was staying to finish my novel.”

Helen smiles, bemused again. “He'll understand,” she says. “Goodness gracious, saving the world isn't for everybody. You've got your own work to do.”

Has she misrepresented Richard, Alma wonders. He isn't saving the world. Just greening one tiny bit of it. The bit of it that has her country's name on it. She should have gone with him if only for that reason. As for saving the world? Alma used to tell herself that writing was a way to do that, but deep down she has to agree with Helen that “you can't use a tractor to weed the garden.” Literature does one thing; activism and good works do another. But Alma doesn't want to keep plaguing Helen with her self-doubts right now, especially when her old friend doesn't seem herself. If nothing else, Alma wants to give
Helen the pleasure of thinking that right here, right now, all's well with the two of them anyhow.

They sit together, quietly sipping tea, the muted sun coming in through the curtains and giving the paneled room a reassuringly oldfashioned sepia look. All is well. “It's good to be here, Helen.” Alma reaches for the spotted hand, which startles at first at her touch, but then holds Alma's hand back.

A
S ALMA IS GETTING
ready to go, perhaps because she broached wanting to help, Helen asks if Alma might be stopping in town anytime soon.

“Sure,” Alma tells her. That was going to be her next stop after leaving Helen's. So as not to have to go home to a place where everything reminds her of Richard. “You need some groceries?”

“Claudine got me all supplied yesterday. It's a prescription. Over at the drugstore.” There are actually two drugstores in town, some chain just out of town and Peters' Drugs downtown, which Alma knows is the one Helen means. Mr. Peters is another local “boy,” only a little younger than Helen. “It's been called in,” Helen explains, as if the doctor did her a special favor by doing this. Helen reaches for her purse hanging from the back of her chair, burrowing in it for her wallet.

“Pay me later when I bring it,” Alma tells her.

“You sure?”

“You stiff me, Helen, and I'll make you sit through
Paradise Lost
again!” Alma had had some misguided idea that since Milton was blind, Helen would somehow feel connected to his work. Plus, Helen is Christian, there was that. But Milton and Helen were not a match. Alma actually only read the first two books, skipping whenever she'd hear Helen sigh. Finally, Helen had her stop. “Is it too depressing?” Alma had asked. “No, it's not that. It sounds like those Congress hearings on C-Span,” Helen had laughed. All those devils double-talking must've been what turned Helen off.

She's laughing now at Alma's threat, and Alma is laughing, too, feeling her mood lifting. Five months, five years, they're going to make it,
Helen and Alma. They're going to stare that old loneliness in the face until it backs down and turns into productive and soulful solitude.

But when Alma picks up Helen's prescription, she is not so sure. Helen on Paxil? So, it's not as easy as it looks. Of course, Alma has no business reading the label on Helen's little bottle, but she was surprised when Mr. Peters rang it up and she had to hand over a bunch of twenties. She finds herself wishing Helen had told her before dishing out top dollar for antidepressants. If nothing else, Alma could have offered her stash, which have, no doubt, disintegrated into the soil by now. One more bit of human trash littering up HI's green world.

A
FTER DROPPING OFF HELEN'S
prescription, Alma spends the day running all the errands she hasn't gotten to in months. By the time Richard returns, the torn shower curtain will be replaced, the overgrown houseplants repotted in new pots, the portrait of Ben by his artist girlfriend (actually, Lauren's already an ex) matted, framed, and hung.

It's not until late afternoon that Alma finally enters her house, bracing herself for its eerie tranquillity. Beeps on the answering machine, messages! And there's a sizable packet of mail she just picked up from their box on the road. Groceries to put away. Busy work—today she welcomes it.

The message machine is full of hang-ups, weird open-line sounds. Just what Alma needs now that Richard is gone: the AIDS caller back at it or some thief checking to see if anyone's home. Alma now wishes she'd left Richard's curt male voice on the machine. Maybe she can borrow Claudine's Dwayne to come over and tape a new message.

Between the hang-ups the other messages are reassuringly normal: a reminder of a dentist appointment, a book Alma requested is in at the library, some lady getting back to Richard about bags of raked leaves from the hospital grounds he had called about. He must have forgotten about them. Alma will surprise him with her resourcefulness, pick them up, lay them on the garden. There's also one from Lavinia, just calling to say hi, which probably means Veevee just called
her about the saga of the saga; and one from Tera, about their plan to get together next weekend, an overnight, which Tera better not cancel, as Alma has nailed down a great big stake of solace on her friend's being around for a couple of days. The final one is from Claudine, cheery but uncharacteristically vague, could Alma call her back please, it's about … well, Helen. So Alma's hunch was right! Something
is
wrong with Helen. Why didn't Helen tell her directly? Alma feels a pang of jealousy at Claudine's being the preferred one. True, Claudine is also the dependable one, there every other day. Still, Helen knows Alma loves her and cares about her problems.

Alma dials Claudine's number, venting on the numbers, punch-punch-punch, punch-punch, punch-punch, but when Claudine's message machine clicks on, Alma hangs up, then keeps hitting the redial, over and over, while putting the groceries away. Finally, she stops when she realizes she's behaving like Mamasita! “The apple does not fall far from the tree,” Helen always says whenever some local kid gets in trouble, a saying that Claudine uses a lot, too, whenever she reports on the antics of her two clone daughters.

Claudine, Helen, it's struck Alma before: how alike they are. Determined optimists. Somehow, though, Helen being older, struggling to keep that kind of attitude through almost eight decades instead of just three and a half makes Alma gravitate toward the old woman more than toward Claudine. Besides, Helen is poor, not poor poor—she does own her one acre, “more or less,” with its ramshackle farmhouse—but like Tera, Helen is on a tight budget. Alma has always preferred poor people to rich ones, probably a guilt holdover from coming from a place where you're not offered that gray area—the middle class—a buffer zone where you can live a decent life and not feel like it's coming off the hide of someone whose yearly food money equals last night's tab at a fancy restaurant.

This is where Richard is right now—her homeland, where buffer zones are in short supply. Alma starts punching in the airline's 800number to hear that automated voice of comfort tell her the plane has landed, having successfully evaded the Scylla of mechanical failure
and the Charybdis of terrorists. Dear Richard, her love, her only one, is going to help create a whole new space for her countrymen, a green center, where they can enjoy clean air and viable rivers and forests full of songbirds that summer in the United States. But Alma knows her countrymen. They're going to want cell phones and sneakers for their kids with heels that light up when they take a step and houses with satellite dishes and cable TV. How will they react when they learn that's not at all what Richard has come to deliver in the name of HI?

Alma feels a pang. A loved one moving through a world of people who do not love him, who would smash his skull for the cash in his money clip or blow up his plane for a God he doesn't believe in. Even with her stepsons, Alma can't bear to see them depart, thus the many good-byes, the walk to the door, the walk to their cars, with shopping bags of snack food they don't really want. Alma wonders how Helen feels having her son drop off the face of the earth, Claudine's description. Like watching the
María Pita
sail off that windy November day, past the Tower of Hercules, heading south and west, the crew working the ropes to get the sails angled just so, the ship becoming smaller and smaller, until it cleared the horizon, and was gone! What a gloomy evening that must have been, back at La Casa de Expósitos, Nati and the remaining boys trying not to notice the many empty spaces at the long table. In her own darkening house several blocks away, Doña Teresa might have wondered if she'd done the right thing, letting her boys go on this questionable expedition.