Memory Wall: Stories (11 page)

Pheko sits in the slide and lifts his son and sets him between his legs. Warm water rushes through their trunks and races down the slide and disappears beyond the first turn. Pheko takes off his son’s glasses and holds them in his fist.

Temba looks back at him, his eyes naked. “It looks very fast, Paps.”

“It sure does.”

Pheko looks down the steep channel into the first turn and then over the wall to where the pool looks very, very far below, the swimmers like little drowsy bees, the pure sunlight pouring through the windows, the traffic gliding noiselessly past.

He says, “Ready?”

“Ready,” says Temba.

A
LMA

Alma sits in the community dining room in a yellow armchair. Her hair is short and silver and stiff. The clothes she is wearing are not hers; clothing seems to get mixed up in this place. Out the window to her left she can see a concrete wall, the top half of a flagpole, and a polygon of sky.

The air smells of cooked cabbage. Fluorescent lights buzz softly in the ceiling. Nearby two women are trying to play rummy but they keep dropping the cards. Somewhere else in the building, perhaps the basement, someone might be howling. It’s hard to say. Maybe it’s only the air, whistling out of heating ducts.

A ghost of a memory flits past Alma: there, then gone. A television at the front of the room shows a man with a microphone, shows a spinning wheel, shows an audience clapping.

Through the door walks a big woman in a white tank top and white jeans. In the light of the entryway her dark skin is almost invisible to Alma, so that it looks as if a white outfit has become animated and is walking toward her, white pants and a white top and white eyeballs floating. She walks straight toward Alma and begins emptying boxes onto the long table beside her.

A nurse in a flowered smock behind Alma claps her hands together. “Time for fine arts class, everyone,” she says. “Anyone who would like to work with Miss Stigers can come over.”

Several people start toward the table, one pushing a walker on wheels. The woman in white clothes is setting out buckets, plates, paints. She opens a big Tupperware bin. She looks over at Alma.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says.

Alma turns her head away. She keeps quiet. A few
minutes later some others are laughing, holding up plaster-coated hands. The woman in white clothing sings quietly to herself as she tends to the residents’ various projects. Her voice rides beneath the din.

Alma sits in her chair very stiffly. She is wearing a red sweater with a reindeer on it. She does not recognize it. Her hands, motionless on her lap, are cold and look to her like claws. As if they, too, might have once belonged to someone else.

The woman sings in Xhosa. The song is sweet and slow. In a back room across town, inside a memory clinic in Green Point, a thousand cartridges containing Alma’s memories sit gathering dust. In her bedside drawer, among earplugs and vitamins and crumpled tissues, is the cartridge Pheko gave her when he came to see her, Cartridge 4510. Alma no longer remembers what it is or what it contains or even that it belongs to her.

When the song is done a man at the table in a blue sweater breaks into applause with his plaster-coated hands. The piece of sky out Alma’s window is warm and purple. A jetliner tracks across it, winking a golden light.

When Alma looks back, the woman in white is standing closer to her. “C’mon, sweetheart,” she says with that voice. A voice like warm oil. “Give this a try. You’ll like it.”

The woman places a foil pie plate in front of Alma. There is newspaper over the tablecloth, Alma sees, and paint and silk flowers and little wooden hearts and snowmen scattered here and there in plastic bowls. The singing woman pours smooth, white plaster of Paris out of her Tupperware and into Alma’s pie plate, wiping it clean with a Popsicle stick.

The plaster of Paris possesses a beautiful, creamy texture. One of the residents has spread it all over the tablecloth. Another has some in her hair. The woman in white has started a second song. Or perhaps she is singing the first song again,
Alma cannot be sure.
Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba,
she sings.
Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe.

Alma raises her left hand. The plaster is wet and waiting. “Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”

She thinks: I had somebody. But he left me here all by myself.

Kuzo inzingo zalomhlaba. Amanda noxolo, uxolo kuwe,
sings the woman.

Alma sinks her hand into the plaster.

Imogene is tiny, all-white. Spun-sugar hair, pale forehead, chalky arms. Imogene the Ice Queen. Imogene the Milk Princess. A black spiderweb is tattooed on her left biceps. She is a resource allocation manager for Cyclops Engineering in Laramie, Wyoming.

Herb is medium-sized, bald, and of no special courage. His smile is a clumsy mosaic of teeth. Veins trail like root formations down his forearms. He teaches molecular phylogeny to undergraduates. He and Imogene live in a single-story brick-and-cedar on five acres fifteen miles from town. Sage, most of it is, and cheatgrass, but they have a few cottonwoods in a dry creekbed, and a graveyard of abandoned tires Herb is trying to clear, and whole bevies of quail that sometimes sprint across the driveway in the early morning. Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full.

In September of 2002, Imogene swallows her last birth control tablet and she and Herb go out to the driveway so she can crush the empty pill container with the flat edge of the wood maul. This excites Herb: the shards of plastic in the gravel, the taut cords in Imogene’s throat. He has been thinking about children all the time lately; he imagines himself coming home from class to find offspring on all the furniture.

Over the next thirty mornings Herb and Imogene have sex twenty times. Each time, afterward, Imogene tilts her hips toward the ceiling and shuts her eyes and tries to imagine it as Herb described: vast schools of his sperm streaming through her cervix, crossing her uterus, scaling her fallopian tubes. In her imagination their chromosomes stitch themselves together with the smallest imaginable sound: two teeth in a zipper locking.

Then: sun at the windows. Herb makes toast. A zygote like a tiny question mark drifts into her womb.

Nothing happens. One month, one period. Two months, two periods. After four months, on New Year’s Eve, wind hurling sleet across the driveway, Herb cries a bit.

“I’m just getting the pill out of my system,” Imogene says. “This stuff doesn’t happen overnight.”

Then it’s 2003. Imogene begins to notice pregnant women everywhere. They clamber out of minivans at the Loaf ’N Jug; they hunker in Walmart aisles holding infant-sized pajamas to the light. A pregnant repairwoman services the office copier; a pregnant client spills orange juice in the conference room. What defects does Imogene have that these women do not?

She reads on the internet that it takes couples, on average,
one year to get pregnant. So. No problem. Plenty of time. She is only thirty-three years old, after all. Thirty-four in March.

At Herb’s prompting, Imogene begins sticking a thermometer in her mouth every morning when she wakes up. He plots her temperatures on a sheet of graph paper. We want, he tells her, to time the ovulation spike. Each time they have sex, he draws a little X on their chart.

Three more months, three more periods. Four more months, four more periods. Herb assaults Imogene’s peaking temperature with platoons of X’s. She lies in the bed with her toes pointed to the ceiling and Herb rummages around on top of her and grunts and the spermatozoa paddle forth.

And nothing happens. Imogene cramps, finds blood, whispers into the phone, “I’m a fucking Swiss timepiece.”

The university lets out. The brewer’s blackbirds return. The lark sparrows return. Imogene plods through the backyard filling her feeders. Not so long ago, she thinks, I’d be stoned in public for this. Herb would divorce me. Our crops would be razed. Shamans would stick garlic gloves into my reproductive tracts.

In August, the biology department administrator, Sondra Juetten, gives birth to a girl. Herb and Imogene bring carnations to the hospital. The infant is shriveled and squinty and miraculous-looking. She wears a cotton hat. Her skull is crimped and oblong.

Herb says, “We’re
so
excited for you, Sondra.”

And he is excited, Imogene can see it; he bounces on his toes; he grins; he asks Sondra a series of questions about the umbilical cord.

Imogene stands in the doorway and asks herself if she is generous enough to be excited for Sondra, too. Nurses barge past. Drops of dried blood are spattered on the linoleum beside the hospital bed; they look like tiny brown sawblades. A nurse unwraps the infant and its diaphragm rises and falls beneath the thin basket of its ribs and its tiny body seems to Imogene like the distillation of a dozen generations, Sondra’s mother’s mother’s mother, an entire pedigree stripped into a single flame and stowed still burning inside the blue tributaries of veins pulsing beneath its skin.

She thinks: Why not me?

Wyoming tilts away from the sun. Goodbye, wood ducks. Goodbye, house wrens. Goodbye to the little yellow warbler who landed on the window feeder yesterday and winked at Imogene before continuing on. The abandoned tires freeze into the earth. The birds make their brutal migrations.

“What about you two?” Herb’s brother asks. This is Thanksgiving, in Minnesota. Herb’s mother cocks her head, suddenly interested. Herb’s nephews clack their silverware against the table like drummers. “You guys thinking about kids?”

Herb looks at Imogene. “Sure. You never know.”

Imogene’s bite of pumpkin pie turns to cement in her mouth. Herb’s sister-in-law says, “Well, don’t wait too long. You don’t want to be rolling to flute recitals in a wheelchair.”

There are other moments. Herb’s two-year-old nephew climbs uninvited into Imogene’s lap and hands her a book
called
Big Fish, Little Fish
. “Biiig!” he says, turning the pages. “Biiiig fish!” He squirms against her chest; his scalp smells like a deep, cold lake in summer.

A day later Herb tugs Imogene’s sleeve in the airport and points: There are twins by some newspaper machines with tow heads and overalls. Maybe three years old. They are jumping on the tips of their toes and singing about a tiny spider getting washed out of a waterspout and when they are done they clap and grin and sprint in circles around their mother.

When Imogene was twenty-one, her parents were killed simultaneously when their Buick LeSabre skidded off Route 506 a mile from home and flipped into a ditch. There was no ice on the road surface and no coming traffic and her father’s Buick was in good repair. The police called it an accident. For two weeks Imogene and Herb stood in a variety of overheated, overdecorated living rooms holding Triscuits on little plates and then Imogene graduated from college and promptly moved to Morocco.

She lived three years in a one-room apartment in Rabat with no refrigerator and one window. She could not wear shorts or skirts and could not go outside with her hair wet. Some days she spent the whole day in her kitchen, reading detective novels. Her letters from that time were several pages long and Herb would read them again and again, leaning over the dashboard of his truck.

There are two kinds of pigeons here. There are the thick-looking ones, rock pigeons, the ones we see back home. They moan on the roof at night. But there are also these other pigeons
with white patches on their necks. They’re big birds and gather in huge wheels and float above the rooftops, dark and gleaming, turning up there like big mobiles made of metal. Some mornings crows divebomb them and the pigeons will start shrieking and from my bed it sounds like little airborne children shouting for help.

She never mentioned her parents. Once she wrote:
No one here wears seat belts.
Another time:
I hope you’re keeping bags of salt in the back of the truck.
That was as close as she came. Eventually she attached herself to a Peace Corps initiative and began working with blind women.

More than once in those years Herb stopped outside Destinations Travel in downtown Laramie and watched the four-foot plastic Earth turn in the window but could not bring himself to buy an airplane ticket. They had been dating only four months before her parents died. And she had not invited him.

He wrote his mundane replies: a hike to a lake, a new cereal he liked.
Love, Herb,
he’d conclude, feeling resolute and silly at the same time. He worried he wrote too much. He worried he did not write enough.

In 2004, after sixteen months of failing to get pregnant, Imogene tells her gynecologist. He says workups can be scheduled. Endocrinologists can be contacted. Urologists can be contacted. They have plenty of options.

“It’s not time,” he says, “to despair.”

“Not time to despair,” Imogene tells Herb.

“I’m not despairing,” he says.

They have AIDS tests. They have hepatitis tests. Two days
later Herb masturbates into an eight-ounce specimen cup and drives sixty-six miles east on I-80 to a urologist in Cheyenne with the cup in a little Christmas bag meant for office gifts because he and Imogene have run out of brown paper bags. The bag rides shotgun on the bench seat beside him, little Santas grinning all over it. His sample barely covers the bottom. He wonders: Do some men fill up that whole cup?

The same afternoon Imogene leaves work early to have carbon dioxide pumped into her insides. She has radio-opaque dye injected through her cervix into her uterus and all the way up her fallopian tubes. Then she is wheeled into an X-ray room where a nurse with peanut butter breath and Snoopy earrings drapes a lead apron over Imogene’s chest and asks her to remain completely motionless. The nurse steps away; Imogene hears the machine come to life, hears the high whine of electrons piling up. She closes her eyes, tries not to move. The light pours into her.