Women & Other Animals (27 page)

"Mrs. DeBoer." A nurse appeared beside her.

"What the hell did they do to my leg?" Charlotte asked, in a weak

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voice she didn't recognize as her own. The surgical tubes had ruined her throat. An antibiotic drip invaded her through a needle stuck just above her wrist. Charlotte resisted an urge to give it a yank and disengage herself. Andrea pulled the bed sheet over Charlotte's knee with long, smooth fingers, the nails painted translucent icecream pink. Charlotte pulled off the bed sheet again to expose the atrocity.

"It was gangrenous, Mrs. DeBoer. The doctors had to amputate." The nurse looked not at her, but at Andrea.

"Don't you remember, Mom?"

"I remember I came in here with two legs. If I'd thought you'd send me home with one, I wouldn't have come." Charlotte's whole body felt waterlogged, but she refused to sink. "Look," she said to Andrea. "Look at what they've done.''

"These are for pain," said the nurse, offering her a tiny plastic cup.

"I don't need your damn pills." Charlotte's eyes watered at the strain of speaking.

"Doctor's orders are for you to take these. You don't want to make a fuss, do you?" The nurse had wide cheek bones, shaved and painted eyebrows.

"All right, give me the pills and go to hell." As the nurse left, Charlotte turned to Andrea. "I suppose your sister knows I'm here."

"Liz came while you were in surgery."

"She was here?"

"She was here for thirtysix hours. You saw her in the recovery room. You kept telling her she was named after your mother."

"Is she coming back?"

"She's in court this morning. It's only her second case ever and she can't miss it. She'll come back from Chicago as soon as she can."

Andrea stepped out, saying she wanted to get some coffee. Charlotte didn't acknowledge her leaving, but missed her the instant she was gone. Had Lily been milked?

she needed to ask. Had somebody fed the chickens? If nobody fed them, they'd start pecking apart their own eggs. Ragweed, pokeweed, and burdock would eclipse her tomato plants within a week. They held you prisoner in these places with no regard for what you had at home. And she didn't like the Page 183

way colors of objects faded into one another here. She liked her colors strong and separate: the greens of ryegrass and alfalfa, the blue of sky, the darkness of garden soil, and the colors of cows. Brick and white Herefords. The pure black of a Black Angus. Her fawncolored Jersey against the grasses of her field, against a clear horizon.

Jersey milk had the highest fat content so it tasted the best and it made good butter. Charlotte used to make ice cream for her daughters, but when the girls got to be teenagers, they wouldn't eat butter or ice cream—they'd even skimmed the cream off the milk they used on their breakfast cereal. Two decades later they were still keeping themselves skinny like little girls, like starved Jews. Their underdeveloped muscles hung slack on thin arms.

"I should have had sons," she mumbled.

"What'd you say, Mom?" Andrea had come back and was sitting beside the bed. Charlotte wanted to say something less mean, but she didn't know what. Feathered sections of the girl's hair yearned toward her bony shoulders. When Andrea was young, she used to wear her hair long in a braid the way Charlotte still did.

"Who's milking Lily?" Charlotte asked.

"You told me to let the calf back in with her. Remember? That was a sweet little calf. What do you call him?"

"Veal. I was going to butcher that calf out for veal this week." Charlotte turned to see Andrea's reaction.

Andrea rolled her eyes. "Mom, do you have to say that sort of thing?"

The girl faded and grew distant. A bloodpurple stripe of headband rose from her hair, then plunged beneath it. Charlotte struggled to stay conscious. "Oh?" she said.

"I suppose you're a vegetarian now?"

Thick snakes of poison ivy grew up around the biggest oak in her stand of woods by the road. The vines slithered into the branches, unfurling triple green leaves in every splotch of sunshine, sucking the life from her tree. Clouds of ash and rage pressed on Charlotte from all sides, gray and suffocating. She lifted her axe and chopped at the vines, but the axe was dull and it bounced. She swung again, and again the axe flew off. When she glanced down, she discovered Page 184

that she had cut off her leg below the knee. She dropped her axe and sat up in her bed, eyes wide open.

She was alone, thank God, not that she believed in any God. She clutched the edges of the hospital bed and waited for her heart to stop pounding. For more than fifty years her dreams had done this to her. More than fifty years ago, as a girl, she had left the Netherlands and come to Michigan, but each morning she still had to adjust to what felt like a strange, new country. At home, she got right up and made coffee and eggs. Lying useless in this hospital was worse than enduring the burn. She'd been in agony then, but she'd been home and she'd refused to feel sorry for herself. After all, she had been spared the terrible pain her parents must have suffered at the hands of the Germans who arrested them in their newspaper office in Amsterdam. Before they were taken, she'd been sent to her father's brother in America. Her mother had said Charlotte could come home when the occupation was over, but by that time there was nobody to go home to. From the age of eight, Charlotte was dressed up and taken to the Dutch Reformed church with her cousins on Wednesday evenings and twice every Sunday for the routine care of her soul. But Charlotte's parents had been communist and atheist, and Charlotte honored them by never giving in to the minister's temptations of forgiveness and rescue from hellfires.

Charlotte's Uncle Peter—Andrea and Elizabeth called him "Grandpa Peter"—told her as a child that nobody knew what had happened to her parents, but Charlotte had read the letters written to Peter just after the war. Someone had seen soldiers put her parents on a crowded eastbound train in the middle of the night. Since then Charlotte saw her parents in every one of those concentration camp pictures, a blurred mother with shriveled breasts, a father with dark holes for eyes.

"Where's my leg?" Charlotte asked when the daytime nurse came in, with another plastic pill cup.

"You remember, Mrs. DeBoer. It's been amputated."

"I asked
where's
my leg. I sure as hell noticed you cut it off."

"It's probably in the lab."

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"What are you people going to do with it?" Her voice had recovered and was her own again.

"You'll have to ask the doctor, but they usually incinerate necrotic tissue after a biopsy." The eyebrows snapped up and down like little whips.

"Oh, that's just fine, Nurse. You've got a crematorium here, too?"

"Ma'am, I just want you to take your pain medication." She left it on the bedside table.

"Well, I won't have my leg burned, damn it!" Charlotte shouted after her. "Tell the doctor he's not going to burn my leg!"

When Andrea came in that evening with her hair pulled into a small, shiny ponytail, Charlotte was desperate to communicate. She leaned out of bed toward the girl, her face turning hot as she started to speak. "Andrea, these Nazi doctors—they want to burn my leg, toss it in the furnace like a piece of garbage."

"Well," said Andrea, "I guess it's for sanitary reasons."

"I've got a right to that leg. Call your lawyer sister! Ask her what I can do!"

"Mom, her name is Elizabeth. You should say her name."

"Maybe I'd say her name if she'd visited me once in three years."

"She was just here. And she was at Grandpa Peter's at Christmas."

"She hasn't come to the house for three years."

"Have you invited her to the house?"

Charlotte leaned back against the pillows. "Did those bastards even try to save my leg?"

"Of course they tried, Mom. It was full of infection. Why didn't you go to the doctor when you first burned yourself?"

"They're all a bunch of Doctor Mengeles. Just look what they've done." Charlotte nodded toward her leg but stopped herself from looking and held up her chin stoically.

On her last morning in the hospital, Charlotte came out of the bathroom on crutches to find Andrea sitting beside the bed. The sun had risen while Charlotte was using the toilet.

"So, how are we feeling today?" Andrea asked, her voice cheery. Sometimes the girl talked to Charlotte as she would a stranger, as Page 186

though her own mother were some goodworks charity case. Nonetheless, Charlotte was feeling oddly sentimental this morning.

"I was just remembering, Andrea, that you used to ask me to squirt milk into your mouth right out of the cow." Charlotte had a clear picture in her head of Andrea in a red snowsuit sitting in clean straw in the barn. The steam rose off the warm milk.

Andrea stared. "I don't really remember that."

"You were three. You watched me squirt milk into the cat's mouth, and then I aimed the teat at you. You used to love Jerseycow milk."

"I don't want to talk about it, Mom." Andrea adjusted herself in the chair.

They waited out a silence. Charlotte finally sat on the edge of the bed. "They can't burn my leg, Andrea. Did you call your sister?"

"You know, I figured Elizabeth would just say you were crazy and forget about it, but she is actually working on it."

"Fine."

"She says we're claiming religious objections. Strict Jewish law requires people to be buried with their limbs. You buy a regular cemetery plot for the leg, and you join it later."

"I'm not Jewish," said Charlotte.

"But she figured you'd be willing to say you were."

"Fine." Charlotte considered telling the girl she was grateful. At times she would have liked to tell Andrea about everything, about her frightening dreams, about her parents being noble and selfless and murdered by Nazis.

"But there's another problem, Mom. I just talked to the social worker. You've got no insurance, and by the time you get the prosthesis, the hospital bill is going to be upwards of twenty thousand dollars. You can't get Medicare, because you and Dad were selfemployed and never paid in, and you can't get any public assistance as long as you own the land and the livestock."

The blood stopped in Charlotte's veins. "They can't take my property."

"Mom, somebody's got to pay the doctor. Liz and I don't have much right now, but the social worker said we can make a payment plan and chip away at it."

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"I don't want your money." Charlotte's regular farm losses had eaten up what money she used to have in the bank. "Does your sister know about this?"

"Not yet."

"Don't you tell her."

"Why?"

"Just swear you won't tell her."

"Okay, fine, I won't tell her."

Charlotte paused. "Did they cut off my leg just so they could steal my property?"

"Don't be melodramatic, Mom. They're not trying to steal your farm. You could probably sell it for two hundred thousand, maybe more. Then you could buy a smaller place, closer to town, closer to me. Your place is too hard to keep up."

"You think that's what I want to do, 'keep up' a place?"

"You can sell just a part of it, then."

"What am I going to sell, the pasture? The house? The hayfield? Next time I'll just let myself die and you and your sister can sell and be done with it." She felt her eyes watering, but she knew she wouldn't cry. She hadn't cried since she was eleven and Uncle Peter told her she would never go home.

"Maybe the woods," suggested Andrea. "Actually, I talked to a real estate agent today. You could sell the woods near the road."

That night, at home, Charlotte dreamed her stand of woods by the road caught fire. The smoke curled through the branches, thick and deadly. The trees had burned so that each one she touched turned to ashes and shivered to the ground. The raspberries, the morel mushrooms, the dogtooth violet, all were burnt to dust. Only the poison ivy remained, immune to the heat, failing in dumb coils from the disintegrating trees, groping along the floor of the woods. Her parents stood perfectly still, staring out at her as if from a photograph in black and white. A wind blew them into powder and they sifted away. Her leg was in place, until it too fell as dust to the woods' floor.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, a month after she'd gotten the new leg, both her daughters were coming to supper. In the last few Page 188

weeks, she'd dreamed repeatedly of the girls as babies, dressed in white wool, squirming from her arms, wiggling toward open doors, heating ducts, laundry chutes.

At first she just watched them crawl away, but then she urgently tried to gather them together, as though they were limbs she needed to piece into one body. On Saturday evening, Elizabeth arrived for dinner first, but she sat in the driveway in her lowslung, shiny car the color of broken egg yolks, waiting for Andrea.

Andrea briefly hugged Charlotte, hung her coat on a hook, and headed into the kitchem. Elizabeth mumbled a greeting, then hugged her own skinny body as she walked around the living room, reaching out and touching book spines, the arms of chairs, dusty window ledges. Elizabeth's hair was pulled up and held loosely by a gold barrette. The girl held her head proudly, as though she were continually rising above something.

"Your hair is darker," said Charlotte. "It used to be blond."

"It was this color when you saw me last Christmas at Grandpa Peter's. And the year before that."

"You two need to see each other more than once a year," said Andrea from the kitchen. She emptied saucepans into chipped bluewillow serving dishes and carried them to the table. Elizabeth lifted curtains and peered out through each of the windows. Charlotte kept her westfacing curtains closed now, so as not to see the sign advertising "Wooded Glenn Estates," a subdivision going up on the property she had sold in order to pay the goddamned hospital bill.

"You're getting along so well on that prosthesis, More," said Andrea, once they sat. "We knew you would, didn't we, Liz?"

"Like hell you did." Charlotte spooned herself a generous portion of stuffing. She presided at the end of the table, a daughter on either hand. "You said I wouldn't be able to 'keep the place up.'"