Carter Clay (18 page)

You cannot imagine what it's like—

So begins the little speech that M.B. Milhause practices while sitting at her kitchen table, applying Plum Cider polish to her fingernails, and trying to ignore the bone-jarring sounds that periodically reverberate in the stairwell closest to #335.

When my husband died—

I am sixty-four years old and suffer from a variety of ailments myself—

A shuddering crash—that might be the best description of the stairwell's noises. Sounds sufficiently alarming that they cause certain Palm Gate Village residents to open their doors and call out in frightened voices, “Anybody hurt?”

Jersey's echoey reply—“Just practicing moving my wheelchair on the stairs”—of course brings offers of help, and makes M.B. indignant. As if M.B. would not help the girl move her chair if she wanted help!

To her would-be helpers, Jersey calls, “No, thanks! This is something I have to do on my own.”

Which is
not
true. M.B. would like to print up an announcement indicating that it is not necessary for the girl to practice manually moving her chair up and down the stairs—a procedure that involves her having to slide out of her chair and onto her bottom, then haul her body up or down a step, then haul the chair up
or down onto the step beside her. All this when there is an elevator ten yards down the balcony, for heaven's sake! M.B. feels certain there have already been complaints to the association about her having a person under nineteen living with her, and why the girl should torture everyone with all that worry and racket is beyond reason.

“It's important to know how to do it, in case I ever get stuck someplace. Say there's a fire and the elevators don't run.” So Jersey insisted, and she just laughed when M.B. told her there was bound to be trouble with the association.

Well. Another stroke of Plum Cider, then M.B. half-rises from her chair to take a peak out the window. She cannot see the top of the girl's head yet, which means it will be a good ten minutes until she returns.

She sits. Dips the brush back into the polish. Wipes the excess back into the little bottle before she makes her next stroke. One wide stroke for the middle of the nail, then over the top—so, so carefully—and then a stroke on each side. She has done this hundreds, thousands of times, yet the rule presents itself to her anew each time, and she finds this annoying. If she did not think of the rule, would she botch the job? No. But still the rule comes, will not let her alone.

Other rules: Cut the stems of roses at an angle the minute you receive them. Use bleach to get rid of tea stains in your cups. Encourage large mums by the removal of early buds. A pea-sized dab of petroleum jelly worked into freshly cleaned skin will do as much for the complexion as the most expensive of lotions—

It seems to M.B. that she could have looked back on her life and judged it a good life if only these last years had turned out differently. Everything that she and Lorne worked for is in place—retirement in the perfect retirement home with everything just so—but the set is being used for the wrong story, a story of disaster, the set rearranged into ugly angles to make paths for a wheelchair.

What no one at all seems to understand: M.B. must protect what little she has left. These demands upon her from Jersey and Katherine will make her run out of life even sooner.

I do the best I can but, of course, I'm not equipped—

She caps the bottle of nail polish. Stands. Smiles.

Perhaps it is her nature, and cannot be helped, that, all day long, M.B. lies to her God. She would be startled if you pointed this out to her. Ask M.B. if her God knows all and she will say,
of course
; still, she persists in going about #335 in a rage over this or that—while smiling for her God-audience. For God, she pretends that she has done all she can for Katherine. Though she has moments when she asks forgiveness for her drinking, most of the time M.B. believes that if her makeup is right, and her clothes are ironed, and she wears a spot of Chanel No. 5 behind each knee, God, too, will construe the wine she takes from the cupboard as, say, a graham cracker, a piece of fruit. Just as now, watching M.B. take a glance out the window, walk to the guest room, and, using her elbows to protect her damp nails, remove the girl's little red book from under her pillow—God will view M.B.'s reading as a sign of responsible parenting.

M.B. That
is what M.B. looks for in the journal, but does not see.

On the stairs, the girl's chair booms, then shudders. Boom, shudder, then silence as the girl rests in preparation for the next riser.

Grants.
M.B. recognizes that name. The Grants live downstairs. But, no, after she reads half a page, M.B. realizes that Jersey is writing about a family of scientists and their study of the evolution of finch bills—finch bills!—in someplace called Galapagos.

That would be about Kitty.
M.B.
? No
M.B.
but M.B.'s eyes do alight upon a
Grandma.

Who did the girl call a jerk? M.B.? Lorne? Pat Robertson?

“
Com-ing
,” M.B. calls. That will be the girl at the door. Carefully, carefully, using her elbows, M.B. sets the pillow back in place on top of the little book.

Beyond the storm door, binoculars held up to her eyes as if M.B. is some giant bird she longs to see, Jersey waits. Her face is red, and she breathes hard from her exertions.

“Very funny,” M.B. says through the screen.

“M.B.”—Jersey grins and points to the way M.B. struggles to turn the door's little knob with her palm in order to protect the wet polish—“M.B., you're denying yourself the use of your opposable thumb!”

“Oh, hush.” M.B. holds the door for the girl. “Joan Rivers you ain't, kid.”

“You might want to know”—the girl lowers her voice as she rolls her chair over the threshold and into the hall—“a bunch of people are out there. On the balcony. I think something's up.”

After a quick peek out the door, M.B. grins at Jersey. “Probably a party, and, of course, I'm not invited! Hah!” she says. “Hah! But I got me an idea.” She gestures for Jersey to follow her to the guest bathroom, where she steps into the tub and with a great show of care—shoulders drawn up, finger gesturing for silence—slowly slides open the frosted window that lets out onto the balcony.

From the hall, Jersey whispers, “What do you think it is?”

M.B. turns, shakes her head. “Not a party, kid. Looks like it's that Mr. Welty. Like his calendar's out of date.”

From the tub, M.B. narrates: First, the debate over whether to call the man's children in Illinois, or the manager. Next, the
arrival of the manager with a key. Then, the hushed entrance of an ambulance into the parking lot.

From her spot in the hall, Jersey can hear the loose rattle of the folded gurney's parts as the attendants make their quick trip up the stairs; and, a few minutes later, the whisper of the gurney's freighted wheels as the attendants guide the body along the balcony and into the elevator for the trip down.

“Is he dead?”

“I think he is, kid.”

When M.B. finally leaves the tub, she discovers that Jersey has moved herself off to the guest room. “So”—M.B. peeks in at the guest room doorway—“I guess that'll be me one of these days if I'm not careful.”

Jersey looks up from her journal. That'll be all of us one of these days whether we're careful or not, she thinks; however, she knows it would be impolite to say such a thing to someone whose “day” is probably much closer than her own, and so she just smiles at her grandmother, and returns to her writing.

Before receiving the Chinese journal, during the course of her life, Jersey has purchased or received: one journal of leatherette the color of olive wood, one of handsome paisley, several plain numbers picked up at drugstores or OfficeMax, one of quilted lavender calico (a gift from M.B.), one of corduroy, one—a gift from her friend Erin—of green rep cloth atumble with golden retrievers chasing after gay red and yellow balls.

Before the accident, each time a new journal came into Jersey's life, she put it on the table beside her bed. Every night, before sleep, she cracked the stiff binding and wrote for fifteen minutes. Such discipline made her feel strong. Journal-writing threw loneliness into relief, yes, but in the act of writing, loneliness could be transformed into
aloneness
, which felt not merely less onerous but sometimes even desirable.

After a few weeks of disciplined journal-keeping, however, a night invariably came when she carried the latest journal out of her bedroom with the notion that she might make her writing
time pass more quickly in front of the television set. Or, looking for company, she carried the journal down to the jumble of a room her mother and father called their study. That evening would soon enough be followed by an evening when the journal could not be found, and by the time the thing turned up again (behind a bookcase, under a pile of magazines, deep in the crack of a sofa and covered with crumbs and dust), another had taken its place, the promise of day following day was marred, and so she let the rest of such journals remain a blank.

The Chinese journal has led a different life from its predecessors. The Chinese journal's pages are swollen like old dollar bills, soft and worn and dingy with much handling. This journal no longer shuts tight. Not just opinions and information and stories, but the physical facts of lead and ink and finger-grime have leavened the journal's pages.

The Chinese journal is a refuge. It is also a vehicle that takes Jersey closer to her parents. Even the simple act of accumulating detail brings them near; so much so, in fact, that when thoughts do not come to the girl, she sometimes copies into the journal bits of text from library books: hints for the family of the brain-injury patient; tidbits regarding mitochondrial DNA; the horrible but oddly consoling news that children incapable of feeling pain have been known to push their own eyeballs right out of the sockets. Really. That pain in Jersey's tethered spinal cord, there is a reason for it.
Really.

Jersey appreciates the way in which facts help a person make sense of the world. Facts have implications, yes, but they can also break free of their implications and sit on a table before you, neat as any cup with a sliver of reflection dancing on its rim. Facts may vary with the times, and that in itself is a fine thing, isn't it? With facts, a person can expect advancement. Once upon a time, Aristode—Father of the Scientific Method—did some careful observing and deduced that dirty rags generated mice. Other splendid thinkers were convinced that nasal secretions came from the pituitary gland. “Pituitary,” Jersey has noted on the sixty-third page of her Chinese journal, “originally meant ‘slime.'”

Jersey enters the details of the death next door, then goes on to record the fact that, because he checked the appropriate square of his driver's license, today parts of her father now wander through the world in other people.
What
parts, Jersey does not know. Would she want to know? No. Instead, she tries to wrap herself up in the general notion that he is out there. Tries to make that a comfort. Someday, on the street, perhaps a nice young woman will glance Jersey's way through Joe's cornea. Or maybe, right now, the cells of Joe's liver assimilate the nutrients from a beloved boy's lunch, store his sugar and glycogen and keep him in the world.

Surely, Jersey thinks—though she does not write this in her journal—surely there is a sense in which this means that her father is not totally dead.

Such is her frame of mind on a Wednesday night outside of Vineyard Christian when she glances up and catches sight of the tree trimmers across the way, and she thinks: a vision.

In part, this is because, initially, she does not see the tree trimmers themselves—only the blue and red balls that are, in fact, the men's baseball caps. Visible, then not. Like something tossed up and down in ocean waves. For one happy moment, those dots of color form a sign of a previously unknown wholeness adrift in the world, and, heart leaping with the possibility of the impossible, she puts out her hand to M.B., and breathlessly points—

“Tree trimmers,” M.B. explains. She and Jersey are on their way to the Wednesday night service and potluck. “Things are always growing here. You can't stop them.”

Of course. Now Jersey, too, can make out one of the men, his T-shirt, his jeans. She understands that he rides a ladder, and that the ladder is attached to a truck obscured by a high hedge of white oleander.

The hour is five-thirty. Five-thirty in the afternoon in early May, with the Florida sky blazing such a nacreous white that the fronds of the big palm trees flash in an afterimage on the eyes. That sky—it is a duplicate of the sky in the charged mural with which Joe Alitz once covered an entire wall of Jersey's Arizona
bedroom. Joe painted that mural just after Katherine published
Rethinking the Evolution of Birds
, a refutation of much of the work that had made Joe famous. A tension-causing bit of decoration. Begun and completed while Katherine lectured in Rome, the mural contained two examples of what Joe considered to be the oldest known bird,
Archaeopteryx.
Befeathered in hypothetical blues and greens, the mural's
Archaeopteryx
perched on cycads, while
Pterondons
careened above the horizon; and, for a moment, Jersey hears the swish and crash of the trimmers' falling branches as the sound of a grand sauropod lumbering through the mural's swamp. She replaces the small boy who bends to retrieve his toy car—there, in the right-hand corner of her field of vision—she replaces him with the mud-brown paint her father hoped would suggest sediments fine enough to immure the bones of
Archaeopteryx.

“We'll just wait outside until the others get seated,” M.B. says. She stops on the sidewalk near the parking lot and lifts her chin in greeting or defiance—Jersey cannot tell which—as a small family passes by and into the church.

Because it is Wednesday, many of the women who enter the church wear oven mitts (plain, calico, in the shape of fish and lobsters and cacti) to protect their hands from the hot dishes they carry. Many of the parishioners smile at Jersey and M.B. as they pass by the pair and into the church. Do they acknowledge her only because she is A Girl in a Wheelchair? Jersey alternately does her best to smile back, to pretend she and her chair are not really there. She is there, of course. Each time the others open the church door, Jersey feels a puff of air-conditioned air.

This is the recipe affixed to the lid of the cake pan that rides in Jersey's lap. The girl notes that M.B. decided against revealing
her secret frosting (fifteen Pearson's mints laid across the cake's top just before it comes out of the oven) and opted, instead, for writing across the bottom of the recipe card, “Chocolate icing always a nice addition.”

“Mrs. Milhause?” Down the steps of the church taps a sweet-faced old fellow in a suit the color and texture of wasps' nests. He smiles at Jersey and, as if they were already inside the church, whispers, “They're getting started inside. Can I help this young lady?”

M.B. nods, then says to Jersey, “See him?” She points toward the church parking lot. There, a very large bald-headed man doffs a cowboy hat in their direction.

M.B. waves at the man, then whispers, “He look familiar?”

Jersey stares at the man's wrists and neck, how they strain against the snaps on his western shirt when he stoops to retrieve the Stetson hat he has dropped in the gravel. Like the man's jeans, the shirt appears an insufficient package. The effect is cartoonish: the bull got up in the clothes of the cowboy.

“He works over to Fair Oaks,” M.B. whispers. “An aide.”

Jersey nods, yes, he was in the room the last time Dr. Mukhergee came to test her mother. She just did not recognize him in this getup, this location.

In an effort to ignore all looks from the parishioners, once she and her chair are parked behind the last row of pews (and M.B.), Jersey squeezes her eyes to slits. She transforms the shifting members of the red-robed choir into embers pulsing in a grate. This is a trick with which she formerly amused herself when her parents took her to the symphony (the rich wood of the stringed instruments, the black of the musicians' dress clothes, the musicians' gestures—all metamorphosed into a monarch butterfly, fresh from the cocoon and drying its wings with small throbs of movement).

Still, Jersey cannot help registering the fact that Pastor Bitner looks so much like poor St. Tom from outside her mother's office building in Seca. St. Tom, of course, was always somber. St. Tom
had a low and lovely voice—really, a better voice for sermonizing than that of Pastor Bitner.

“Folks,” Pastor Bitner is saying, “let's not have any confusion about this. Genesis 25:23 says, plain as day, that the Lord told Rebekah, even before Esau and Jacob came into the world, that the
elder
—that is,
Esau
—would be ruled by the younger! So when we see Jacob and Rebekah arrange for Jacob to receive the blessing of Isaac, what we are seeing is their
fulfillment
of God's plan! Jacob and Rebekah
lie
! Yes, they do! We can't call it anything less than an out-and-out lie when Jacob pretends to be someone he is not, can we? When he drapes the kidskins on his hands and neck so his father will mistake him for the hairy Esau, he
lies.
Rebekah, aiding him,
lies.
But in no way does the Bible suggest that Jacob or Rebekah should be
censured
for their lies! Jacob and Rebekah do that which makes the prophecy of
God
come true, hence their actions find approval with the Lord.”

Pastor Bitner goes on to list other examples of sanctified lies (Rahab the harlot's concealment of Joshua's spies from the king of Jericho; Joseph's hiding the golden cup in Benjamin's pack) and how those stories just might be taken as endorsement for the use of deception in fighting the godless abortion promulgators of today.

Three times, Jersey leans forward in her chair to whisper to M.B., “You can't believe
that
!”

M.B. does not respond, but, after the third time, Pastor Bitner meets Jersey's eyes and holds them for a moment—which is something, it occurs to her, that poor St. Tom could never do.

Once, Jersey went to the university with her mother to pick up a batch of papers at Earth Sciences, and she witnessed her mother's attempts to stop the students from heckling St. Tom. He was outside Earth Sciences, preaching in the middle of a ring of students, and as Jersey and Katherine came down the building stairs, Katherine pulled Jersey to a stop.

“How'd you get to be fucking Tom the Baptist, anyway, man?” one of the student hecklers shouted, and another:

“Hey, Tom! Your wife satisfies, man!”

“Kegger at Tom's after the baptism, everybody!”

A handsome boy wearing a baseball cap backward entered the ring on his knees, teasing, “Baptize me, Tom, man! Come on, man, let's do it!” At this, the crowd roared with laughter. Jersey could feel her mother's anger toward the hecklers rise, and she thought, as she had many times in the past, that, yes, it was nice that her mother liked to defend underdogs, but it was also scary. “Let's go, Mom,” she pleaded, but then the boy on his knees wrapped his arms around St. Tom's legs, almost toppling the man, and Jersey's mother flew down the steps, her black bag banging against her thigh as she broke through the circle, and grabbed the big boy by the sleeve.

“Knock it off!” she cried.

A horrible moment: that big boy rising to his full height, his cheeks going bright red with embarrassment, and then fury, before he drawled, “Hey, why don't you go fuck yourself, bitch?”

Several people cheered the boy's suggestion. Jersey's mother glared at them, and then—trembling, but still a little scary-looking herself—she turned back to the boy and said an uneven, “Yeah, and why don't you act like a human being, you big ding-dong?”

Ding-dong
made the boy and his admirers whoop with derision. St. Tom—oblivious—continued his crisp and crazy litany: “If John Locke were here,
he
would come forward. Where are the Jesuits? I'm not asking that ten Jesuits come forward. I'm only asking that one Roman Catholic priest step out!”

Slowly, Jersey approached the circle. Her mother had set down her bag and now stood with her hands outstretched to the boy. “How would you feel,” she asked in a low voice, “if your dad were sick, and some kids came and made fun of him?”

Hisses and boos and obscenities were the answer from the crowd. Jersey's mother lowered her head, and shook it; but then she took a deep breath and she raised her face and she smiled a terrible smile. “Oh, I get it,” she said. “I get it now. Before, I didn't realize you were all a bunch of assholes.”

Unlike
shit, asshole
was a word that Jersey had never heard her mother say, and the fact that she said it, just then—it frightened Jersey so that she began to weep.

Most of the students stood silent while her mother made her way out through the circle and wrapped her arm around Jersey's shoulder, but soon they were tittering again, and by the time the pair had begun to make their way to the parking lot, a good number of the students were hooting. Katherine's own eyes jiggled with tears, but as she and Jersey walked, she said in a fierce voice, “Just don't you be ashamed of me, Jersey Alitz. Don't you dare be ashamed.”

“I HATE THIS CHURCH!”

Jersey, digging her pencil into the pages of her journal, apparently makes enough noise that she attracts the attention of M.B., who now sits, neck craned, glaring over the back of the pew at the girl.

Jersey pretends to be unaware of her grandmother's gaze—but then she hears Pastor Bitner ask, “Do we have any newcomers with us today?” and she hisses—while M.B. rises to her feet—“M.B! No!”

“Why, Marybelle Milhause, we know you!” Pastor Bitner says with a laugh, and a number of other people join in. Then, still smiling, Pastor Bitner explains that he is only teasing Marybelle; Marybelle has brought along her granddaughter today. “Jersey. A lovely young lady, and she's away back there!” Pastor Bitner tilts his head to the side to smile around M.B. to Jersey. “Hi, neighbor!” says Pastor Bitner, and the others turn and smile, and say “Hi, neighbor!” too.

What a relief when the congregation turns away to greet an entire family of newcomers; mom, dad, daughter near Jersey's own age, all on their feet, healthy and whole. The young dad hoists a tiny, adorable girl in rucked-up skirt and ruffled underpants. Ah, says the congregation, in automatic delight; while Jersey recalls a little mnemonic device taught her by her dad:
My very educated mother just served us nine pizza pies.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.