A Map of the World (33 page)

The weeks passed. I had lain in bed on the night of the Fourth and listened to the firecrackers going off in the subdivisions. Our Independence didn’t seem like much of a victory. There was a storm one morning at the end of July. I went out on the porch and watched the rain come down. According to the gauge there was six-tenths of an inch. Around noon the sun came out. The steam rose from the damp earth and by
evening the soil was dry. The soybeans grew fairly well with my attention and the irrigation. All the sheep were dead. The cows lay under the oaks in their pasture in the heat of the day and chewed their cuds. Theresa used to say that the animals were blessed because they did not have the capacity to know or plan or remember. They didn’t seem blissful as they chewed. They endured endless passing hours. They endured the daylight and the dark of night. Their blessing was probably wasted on them, as I suppose so many of our blessings are wasted on us.

The last night Theresa came down wasn’t much different from any of the other nights that had come before, except that we had the previous accumulated nights and days behind us. Although she seemed unflagging, she must have been worn out after those three weeks. She had told me earlier, at lunch, that Dan was in Chicago for the weekend, at a convention of museum directors. We had laughed at the image of him at a black-tie banquet in the main hall of the Field Museum, having cocktails with the presidents of the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. We said we were sure that he too was laughing at himself honorably representing the Dairy Shrine. I had said again at lunch that I hadn’t seen Dan in well over a month. “He’s working all the time. Spinning his wheels,” Theresa had said under her breath.

I was in the kitchen that evening when she brought the girls home. Emma came running to the porch. She shouted from outside, “Can Audrey stay over?” Theresa opened the door and set the bag lunch down on the kitchen table. Before Theresa could say no, I said, “That’s fine with me.” I’m not sure what I was thinking, or if I had even heard the request. The girls wrung each other’s hands. Audrey alternately clasped Theresa around the waist and jumped to her shoulders, beseeching her to say yes. I realized, too late, that Theresa could not allow her only daughter to stay in our house. The idea was absurd. We both spoke at once. “I would miss you too much, Audrey,” Theresa said. I was saying that it probably wasn’t a good night for it after all. She and I turned to each other as we were talking. I think we understood what had gone through the other’s mind.

“Wait,” Theresa said. “Settle down.” She put her hands on Audrey’s shoulders and made her keep still. “You girls get ready for bed and play in Emma’s room while Howard has his dinner. Then we’ll go home. Audrey
can stay some other time. We’ll plan it—no, no complaining. You’ve got your chance to stay for a while.”

Everyone seemed to think, with very little protesting, that it was a tolerable compromise. We went upstairs. Emma first, and then Audrey and Theresa. Claire and I brought up the rear. There were baskets of laundry in the bedroom. I was afraid she might offer to take the dirty clothes home. She passed by and looked in without saying anything. As they got ready there was chipping and chattering. They made the house sound like a menagerie. There was peace in the commotion. I helped Claire into her pajamas and brushed her teeth. I put my clarinet together and stood in the doorway of Emma’s room with the reed in my mouth, watching my neighbor brush my daughter’s hair.

“How do you get a comb through your curls?” Emma asked Theresa.

“Well,” Theresa said, “I shampoo every morning. When it’s wet I quick brush it. All I have to do is let it dry and it comes out like this. If I brush it or comb it when it’s dry it gets frizzy. It sticks out—it’s big and awful.” She bit her lip as she smiled at me, over the top of Emma’s head.

“Really?” Emma turned to me to check if what Theresa had said could be true. My daughter’s hair and simple body were made of straight lines. I’d never given much consideration to our friend’s thick loopy curls, but I could see how they might be interesting to someone who had been bald for her first two years of life.

“Do a song for us, Daddy,” Claire shouted.

“I think I’ve forgotten,” I said. I hadn’t practiced in several weeks. I was going to sound rusty. While I put the reed in place I thought through my repertoire.

“I didn’t know you played,” Theresa said.

“I don’t really,” I said. “I just, ah—”

“ ‘Sing Me a Happy Song’!” Claire cried. “That’s my favorite.”

“ ‘We Can Work It Out’!” Emma demanded. “Or, ‘Morning Has Broken’! My dad,” she said to Audrey, “he knows all the songs.”

I played badly. Theresa continued to brush Emma’s hair. The three girls sat politely and listened. When I was done Theresa tucked them in the same bed. “Goodnight,” they called. We paused at the door. “Goodnight,” we said.

We went downstairs, the two of us. We could hear them plotting their riot. Theresa said she didn’t think they’d last long, that they were tired. I looked through the bare cupboards trying to find something to offer her. There was milk in the refrigerator. “I’m fine,” she said. “You eat.” She fed her family skim milk, not our whole milk with the cream sitting in a lump on the top. She always insisted it was milk to bathe in, not to drink.

“Go ahead,” she said, gesturing for me to sit at my own table, in front of the sack she had brought. She opened the cupboard, reached up for a glass, went to the sink, and poured herself some water. I looked in the bag. There were two bacon and lettuce and tomato sandwiches. The toasted wheat bread was saturated with what was undoubtedly low-fat mayonnaise. There was a bunch of grapes, carrot sticks, cold cooked beans in a baggy, and three chocolate chip cookies. I didn’t know what to call Theresa anymore. What should I say to her, this person who didn’t fit in any category I knew of. Friend, I suppose she was, although I’d never had a friend before who had gone to such lengths. I should say thank you. That hardly seemed enough.
I don’t know what I’d do without you
, while true, was going too far.
You are good to me
, was corny. It was awkward, all of a sudden. In the amount of time it took me to look in the bag I no longer knew what to say. I should say something. Here I was so hungry, eating her food, food that she’d made expressly for me. She had drunk some of her water and was looking slantwise at an ant slugging along the linoleum with a crumb.

“That was nice for Emma and Claire. Upstairs, putting them to bed.” I cleared my throat. “This is awfully good.”

She nodded, keeping her eyes on the ant. She kept watching it while I bolted her sandwiches. I couldn’t think what we had talked about over so many lunches. I half wanted to get away.

“Thank you for making this,” I choked.

It was with some difficulty that she tore herself from the ant and turned her gaze on me. There was a whole wad of bread in my mouth, bulging in my cheek. I stopped chewing. I don’t know how it happens that two people can find themselves lost in an ordinary kitchen. The old clock, the hum of the refrigerator, the fan going in the living room—nothing was making noise anymore. The table, the cluttered counter top, the full compost bucket by the sink, the chatter from upstairs—everything
fell away. We were caught in an empty place. It was just the two of us, shining at each other.

It wasn’t until she shook her curls, put her hands to her face, that we looked away. She was breathless and flushed, as if she’d run a long distance right to our table. I stared up, chewing. “It’s just a mess,” she wheezed. “Alice felt responsible for Lizzy. My friend Albert talked to me about—what did he call it?—‘the quality of mercy.’ The quality of mercy. He talked about how mercy blesses the giver and the receiver. The way he said it was beautiful. I’ve tried hard to think how Alice must feel. I wouldn’t want to trade places with her, not for a minute. She’ll always feel responsible, won’t she, nothing we can say will make her think she shouldn’t have done something different. I say that to myself, ‘the quality of mercy,’ when I’m despairing. I say those words as if I’m doing the rosary and I know, Howard, I know that embracing your family will bless me.”

She was trying to catch her breath and talk all at once. “What am I saying? Of course I’d change places if it meant Lizzy would be alive. But do you see what I mean? It would be so convenient to use Alice as a great big depository: The ‘Alice did it’ dump. That’s tempting—very tempting. My sisters have fallen into the trap but I’m not going to, Howard. I’m not going to. They say that Alice deserves to be locked up. If I disagree, they give each other knowing looks—a ‘We know Theresa’s sick in the head’ look. I made the mistake of telling one of them that I feel responsible for Alice. I think they were about ready to commit me. But I do feel responsible for her, because I could have prevented the charge, because Lizzy’s—death gave Carol Mackessy the spark she needed. You feel beholden to me for the food and the baby-sitting. I can’t stand it! Could we please stop seeing it in these terms? We belong together, that’s how I think of it. Your girls are helping Audrey, they’re helping me get through the day. Sure, sure, it would be nice if Dan could wake up, if he could step out of himself long enough to realize that Alice is actually in jail because the community is going through a purging ritual. I just feel—well, mute half the time. Dan will drop over dead working before he figures out that the way through grief is grief itself. He’s fighting it with all his strength because he thinks it will kill him.”

I was eating as fast as I could, tearing the grapes off their stems. I
should tell her that she was more than adequately helping me get through hour after hour. Going up to her house was on a par with climbing out of the pit of hell. The time in her kitchen was what I looked forward to every day. I sat on the chaise up there just so I could hear her sing. And I looked forward to her coming down at night too, seeing her for just a minute when she brought the girls home. The need was both startling and obvious. It was something I guess I should have known. The need I had, for her, for Theresa Collins, was so clear I couldn’t see straight.

“They’re quiet up there,” she said. “They played so hard today I guess I’m not surprised. Let me go make sure they’re okay.” She moved across the room to the stairs. I had forgotten what it was like, to be drawn to a person. I didn’t know how I could have stood in the doorway day after day looking at Theresa without actually seeing her as I was now. I’d forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once you know what the pull of gravity feels like. And you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.

When she came back down I was at the sink, waiting.

“I don’t want to leave her,” she murmured. She stood across the table from me. “You know that.”

“Stay a little longer,” I said. “I’ll carry her up the hill. I’ll carry her home in a minute.” I mentioned that it was cooler out on the porch and that there was a moon.

“I don’t care about the moon,” she said.

“Come out on the porch.” I could feel her behind me as I went, feel my blood drawn to my back.

“I need to go home,” she whispered.

We stood in the middle of the dark porch, on the rag rug that Alice has always especially liked. “Sometimes,” Theresa said, “I’m certain about the goodness of God. Sometimes I’m sure that Lizzy is in safe keeping. But tonight, I’m really scared, Howard. Tonight, everything feels as if it’s tipping. Tonight,” she said, coming closer, “it’s so confusing. Everything feels dangerous because of you, and at the same time everything feels dangerous except right where you are.”

She flew into my outstretched arms, hit hard, and stayed there. That is how I remember it. I meant to draw her in and she was already against
me. “They put her in the ground,” she cried into my chest. “It was hot, that yellow windy night she was buried. It was blowing, blowing. I couldn’t stop them from burying her. I couldn’t stop it.” We held each other, swaying back and forth. She was so heavy, too heavy to hold up. We sank to the hard porch floor, nothing between us and the stone but the thin rug woven from old jeans and shirts. We held each other against each fresh racking sob as it came.

Chapter Fourteen

——

I
LEARNED EARLY ENOUGH
, when I was six, that the world is a sorrowful place. Our neighbor, Peter Nicols, was messing around on the tracks a few blocks from home. He got electrocuted by the third rail. With the windows open that summer I occasionally heard his mother. She made an exhausting noise. I thought she was singing up and down the scale even though I knew what she was doing had no relation to music. It scared me for years after, that the boy had been alive one minute and was dead the next. It was unacceptable. How was it that he couldn’t take back a one-second mistake? After all this time it still seems impossible that a person can be killed instantly, without knowing. I tried to say to Theresa the night she came down that I had not yet been able to get beyond the shock of Lizzy’s death. I didn’t know that she was gone unless I thought hard about it. “I don’t understand,” was what I managed to say.

We lay on the rug for a good part of the night. We held on to each other. We had to thrash, with the sadness. It was inside us, beating inside us. We couldn’t hold still. When we thought we were at last done we’d slowly work up to begin again. It was a cycle that didn’t seem to have an end. At one point Theresa cried, “I don’t think we’re ever going to finish,
that we’ll ever get to the bottom of this great, fathomless reservoir.” I couldn’t see past the moment either. I didn’t know how we’d be able to stand up, dust ourselves off, go home.

Every now and then in a sudden calm she lifted her head and spoke. Early on she said, “When I account for my children, like a mother duck, I think, Audrey is in the den, Lizzy is in the ground. How many times do I have to say Lizzy is dead, before I’ll know it? How many times? When people ask me how many children I have I need to say two. Because I still have two, don’t I? I always sound flustered and the people get mixed up and embarrassed. Oh, but one is dead, they’ll finally figure. But I still have two children. Lizzy is still my child.” She lay back against me and it continued, the rolling and thrashing and sobbing. “It feels like we’re only the husk for some wild thing tearing around inside us,” she wailed.