The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (25 page)

“Ma’am? I can take that.”

It had taken Helene several minutes to complete the form. In the
afterlife
of the widow, time itself moves haltingly.

The stubble-jawed man glanced through the form. Helene had been aware of him watching her, overseeing her effort as if he knew how difficult this small task was for her.

He was breathing through his mouth, like an asthmatic. She wondered if this was a result of his being wounded—
disabled
. And his sloping shoulders, and slightly curved back—a certain wariness in the way he held himself, physically—suggested pain, or the anxious expectation of pain.

Still he was taller than Helene by several inches, and seemed protective of her.

The thought came to her
He, too, has been wounded. Of course, he understands.

And, with a sensation of relief
Maybe it was meant—I would meet a friend today in this melancholy place.

All of Helene’s friends—relatives, neighbors—had known her husband: and she could not bear seeing them, and seeing her grief reflected in their faces, as in a cruel fun house mirror.

The stubble-jawed man stood close to her. This might have been accidental but Helene did not think so. She could smell his clothes, his hair—that needed to be washed. A salty-sweaty smell of his body—the man inside the secondhand, rumpled clothes—that was comforting to her, and not unpleasant.

Her own skin was rubbed raw, and had become painful to the touch, by her frequent showers, which had begun during the hospital vigil when she’d showered twice a day, to rid herself of the strong hospital odor. And her hair, to which the hospital-smell still clung, in Helene’s imagination—her poor hair, that had been so thick and glossy, a rich mahogany color, less than two months ago, now falling out, thinning. . . .

She saw the clerk’s practiced eyes move quickly down the page. She felt a small frisson of satisfaction, or of apprehension—now he would see that in fact she’d driven a considerable distance, and that she lived in Quaker Heights.

“Ma’am—is it ‘Mrs. Haidt’? Thank you!”

She hesitated. Was it accurate, or logical, that there could be a
Mrs. Haidt,
if there was no
Mr. Haidt
?

“‘Mrs. Haidt’—yes. But please call me ‘Helene.’”

“‘Helene.’ That’s a beautiful name.”

A warm sensation rose in her throat, into her face. She smiled in confusion like one who has been pushed too close to a mirror, who cannot see.

“Good to meet you—‘Helene.’”

The stubble-jawed man surprised her by reaching for her hand and shaking it vigorously. His fingers were strong and decisive and she had to resist the instinct to pull away. She didn’t quite hear his name—Nicolas? Jelinski?
Zelinski?

“Just—‘Nicolas’ is fine.”

“‘Nicolas.’”

This seemed to her a beautiful name, too. She was certain that she’d never heard it before, in quite this way.

“Next time call us, Helene. There are Helping Hand pickups every three weeks in Quaker Heights.”

It was so, she’d seen such pickup vans in her neighborhood—Rescue Mission of Trenton, Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries—possibly even Disabled Veterans of New Jersey Helping Hands. In this terrible recession there was much poverty, homelessness.
In the ninth year of a folly of a war in which few American citizens believed any longer, yet which continued like a great grinding wheel crushing the innocent in its mechanical turning, there were many
disabled.

“Yes. Yes. I will. . . .”

“You can ask for me, will you? ‘Nicolas.’”

“Yes. ‘Nicolas.’”

There was a precarious intimacy between them. Helene felt that if the stubble-jawed man were to touch her again, she would become faint.

Now I must leave. Exactly now.

But hearing herself say instead, in a bright curious voice: “I see that you’re reading Euripides. . . .”

“Trying to.”

He was embarrassed, was he?—self-conscious suddenly.

“‘Eur-rip-id-des’—that’s how you pronounce it?”

“Yes. ‘Eu-rip-id-dees.’”

She thought of telling Nicolas that she’d once taught Greek tragedies in an introductory literature course in a small liberal arts college in Minneapolis—she’d taught Euripides’
Bacchae
and
Medea
. A wave of vertigo came over her, a sense of her old, lost life.

But she didn’t want to sound boastful. “Are you a—student?”

“Not now.”

“But you were—where? When?”

“Before I went in the service, at Rutgers. And, for a few months, after I was discharged.”

“You were in the army?”

“I was in the army.”

His smile was pained, his eyes were veiled, evasive. His words were uttered as if to echo Helene’s—she hoped not in mockery.

Yet she persisted: “And was it—a war?”

“Yes, ma’am. ‘It was a war.’”

More clearly the man’s remark echoed Helene’s awkward words, in mockery.

War
might mean—what? Afghanistan? Iraq? And before these—the first Gulf War?

Beyond that was the Vietnam War—but Nicolas was too young for the Vietnam War. Helene tried to calculate dates, years. . . . She wondered: had the intimacy between them been rent, so quickly? Or was it deepening, in the intensity of their awareness of each other?

She felt her face beat with blood, this was the first emotion she’d experienced since her husband’s death that was not raw pitiless grief but something finer and more hopeful.

“I—I’m sorry, Nicolas. I didn’t mean to . . .”

She spoke so softly, he had to relent.

“No, ma’am. Just that—there’s things I’d rather not talk about, right now.”

“I understand. Of course.”

Of course: he has been wounded. Disabled.

His eyes!

She’d off ended him, unwittingly. She saw the stiffness in his mouth, the pained half-smile.

She knew, she must leave. She’d been lingering too long in this place. (Fortunately, no one had come in since she’d arrived. Just once the phone had rung, but Nicolas had made no effort to answer it, which was flattering to her.)

Since her husband’s death—seven weeks, five days before this bleak November afternoon—Helene found herself in a kind of
afterlife
in which she often misspoke, miscalculated and misstepped. Often she wasn’t sure if she had spoken aloud since most of her speech had become interior, accusing and despairing, warning—
Why am I here, what has brought me here? This desolate place—why?

Even before her husband had died, during the hospital vigil of nine days in which his doctors had assured her he’d been steadily “improving,” these words had begun to assail her.

And now since his death the answer came bluntly, cruelly—
Why not here? Here is as good as anywhere.

It was so: there could be no reason why the widow should be in one place and not another since all places were identical now: equidistant from her lost home.

“Would you like a receipt, ma’am? For tax purposes?”

Ma’am
. Why did he not say
Helene.

“Thank you, no. That isn’t necessary. . . .”

She’d been fumbling with the belt of her Burberry coat, that had loosened at her waist. All of her clothes fit her loosely now, even this coat.

In the
afterlife
of the widow there is the fear, like the fear of stepping too close to the edge of a high building, or an abyss, of
stumbling, falling—making a mistake that will be irrevocable. The warning came to her
Say good-bye to him now. You must not embarrass yourself further.

“You sure, ma’am? It’s my job, I’m happy to do.”

She was sure! That this man would assume she would want to claim a tax deduction for so modest a donation—forty dollars’ worth, she’d estimated on the form—was insulting to her.

Coolly she said good-bye to him, and turned to leave. Now that the magical intimacy between them was shattered, like a torn cobweb, Helene wanted to escape quickly. She hoped Nicolas would understand that she too had been off ended.

How to get out of this place! Almost, Helene couldn’t find her way, though she’d managed to make her way in. No choice but to pass through a gauntlet of mirrors: a half-dozen mirrors, leaning against furniture and against a wall: reflecting the widow’s blurred and disjointed figure in a sequence of jerky images like a poorly sliced film.

At the front door she heard the gravelly-voiced clerk call after her a belated
Good-bye
. And again
Thanks, ma’am.

This was hateful to her—
ma’am.

Quasi-respectful, yet cruel.

She was not so very old—was she? Forty-six is not
old.

Too young for widow. Too young to lose your husband
.

Oh, but he died too young! What a tragedy.

She was tugging at the damned door, for at first it would
not open. She’d given no sign of hearing the man’s words for they were perfunctory and impersonal and she’d had enough of Helping Hands.

For a moment, outside, Helene couldn’t recall where she was—this unfamiliar neighborhood of run-down buildings, cracked and littered pavement—where had she parked her car?—compulsively a widow searches her handbag, in craven terror of losing her
keys.

If the widow loses her
keys,
the widow will be doubly, trebly bereft—homeless, afoot.

Across the street was a weatherworn stone church Helene hadn’t noticed before. Once a church of some distinction, judging by its size and the impressive masonry of its facade, but now its front door had been painted a jarringly bright yellow and there was a matching yellow sign with fire-engine red letters
EMMANUEL BRETHREN CARING & SHARING
—this too was a charitable organization of some kind, a soup kitchen, or a homeless shelter. A half-dozen individuals—men, dark-skinned, judging by their appearance homeless and derelict—had assembled on the steps, awaiting entry.

The
walking wounded
of America. Helene felt a stab both of guilt and of dread, that they would see her.

A sudden revulsion came over her, for such places—
caring & sharing, helping hands. Disabled.

Quickly she walked to her car. After the stifling interior of Helping Hands even the tainted air of Trenton smelled fresh to
her. Overhead the November sky mottled with storm clouds like soiled upholstery drew her eyes upward, in relief and exaltation.

“Never again! But this once, it was right.”

She could not have said why she was so happy. Like one who’d narrowly escaped a terrible danger.

By dusk, in a crawl of traffic on northbound route 1, she’d returned to Quaker Heights.

2.

Not the next day, nor the next, but on the third day.

For some mysterious
turn
had happened in the previous night, in sleep—and when the widow awakened, at first dazed, confused, not knowing where she was—(and why alone)—a new resolve came to her, fully formed, incontestable.

“Yes. Of course!”

Morning and into early afternoon she spent feverishly sorting through her husband’s clothing to bring a selection to South Falls Street, Trenton: several shirts, a handful of neckties, an Icelandic cableknit sweater, the beige cashmere blazer that was so beautiful, she could barely bring herself to remove it from the closet.

Her heart felt torn, when she touched the blazer. Pressed her face against it. Then thinking
But it will make someone else happy. He would want this.

“Hello?”—boldly this time Helene entered the dim-lit thrift shop, knowing beforehand that the door was heavy and required
being pushed-against with the weight of her slender body. And with breathless laughter for she gripped unwieldy garment bags in both arms, so long they trailed on the ground.

He
was taken by surprise.
He
stared at her with a look of startled recognition—“Ma’am? Is it—Mrs. Haidt?”

It was a pleasure to Helene, to see how surprised Nicolas Zelinski was, that she’d returned.

And so flattering, he remembered her.

Quickly he came to her, in his loose limping stride, to take the heavy garment bags from her and lay them on a table.

“You’re back! Is it—‘Helen’?”

“‘Helene.’”

Nicolas was staring at her. She saw not the quick-flashing smile that had verged upon insolence but another sort of smile, of recognition.

And the intimacy of recognition: for each was revealed to the other, in the cluttered and twilit interior of Helping Hands.

“Yes—I thought—I would bring a few more things. I . . .”

Helene’s heart beat rapidly with relief, that Nicolas Zelinski had not forgotten her. For she’d been thinking of him a good deal, since the other afternoon.

She’d driven from Quaker Heights on route 1 south into Trenton in thunderous traffic, eighteen-rig trucks and massive SUVs careening past her in the left lane, and throwing up skeins of spray onto her windshield, yet she hadn’t been intimidated; at the Market Street exit she hadn’t hesitated. A wild sort of
elation, or recklessness, had guided her. The maze of one-way streets through derelict neighborhoods had not fazed her.

To her disappointment Helene saw that Nicolas wasn’t alone this afternoon—he’d been setting up a display of small rugs, with the help of a coworker, a burly black man. The two had been struggling with odd-sized rugs that were intended to be spread out in a fan-like, imbricated fashion on the floor and on a wall to a height of about three feet; their faces shone with perspiration. Not one of the rugs was even reasonably attractive and Helene had the impression that the men hadn’t been working well together and that her interruption was welcome to both.

Nicolas introduced Helene to his coworker Gideon—(Gideon’s surname was African-polysyllabic, passing by Helene like a floridly-feathered parrot)—telling him that Helene had brought a clothes contribution to Helping Hands just the day before.

“Not yesterday—Monday. I was here on Monday.”