Carter Clay (2 page)

Whenever M.B. Milhause has found herself in a group in which people trade stories of their lives' most dramatic moments—such stories used to arise often in the box-cramped room where M.B. and her work chums took coffee breaks, and M.B. still hears them at the hairdresser, at the doctor's office—at such times, M.B. has always trotted out her Ferris wheel story.

In the late 1940s, M.B. told her Ferris wheel story with shivers, all the while hugging at her skinny arms. Back then, she was the youngest girl working a Marshall Field's makeup counter, and while she told her tale she shook her head back and forth, auburn pageboy whipping across her face à la Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis: “Oh, kid,” she said, “I was
scared!”
In the fifties, her delivery became languorous—perhaps an effect of the more elegant look she took on when she married Lorne Milhause and Field gave her Elizabeth Arden. In the late sixties, M.B. cut her hair short and tried to quit smoking and ran the less chic but much larger Revlon unit. The Ferris wheel story grew zippy. In 1982, Field eased her out. That was when the story turned grim. That was when M.B. began to use the recent death of her mother as a lead-in. Sometimes, after she finished, she felt that she had tainted her mother's memory, and she had to leave the room.

Why'd I tell that old thing again? she would wonder. Really, she never felt that she got the story right. Really, at least half of
the importance of the story lay in her memory of the stars that night—whirlpools of color, though surely some of the color had come from the lights of the Ferris wheel.

M.B.'s Ferris wheel story involved a night in her childhood—back when M.B. was still “Marybelle.” Marybelle and her brother, Dicky, and their mother and father were finishing a tiresome visit to relatives in Miles City. On their way back to Sheridan, for miles and miles, the children watched a brightly lit Ferris wheel slip tantalizingly in and out from behind Wyoming's late-night hills and buttes.
Couldn't they stop? Please, couldn't they stop if they passed it?
Marybelle and Dicky were terrified that the Ferris wheel actually sat on a road other than the one they were driving on, or that it would be closed before they arrived; indeed, by the time their father finally pulled off onto the bumpy bit of range-land where the thing sat, the operators—two men living out of a trailer—were about to shut down for the night.

Marybelle's mother—a tiny woman; slap of a red birthmark on one cheek—would later lament:
“We shouldn't never have got on that ride. I smelled the alcohol on that fellow's breath! What was I thinking?”
But the ride was lovely at the start—the red and blue lights, the stars, the music, the warm breath of summer air that played over Marybelle's bare legs and arms. She wanted the ride to go on and on, never end. But then, when it
did
go on and on, the fun began to drain away because, somehow, she knew that such pleasures ought not to last so long that a person began to wonder:
how long can a pleasure last before it stops being a pleasure?

Even then, Marybelle was good at pretending, and for quite a while she acted as if she had not noticed that her mother had turned around in the gondola that the two of them shared. Eventually, however, Marybelle's mother poked her, and demanded, “What's Dad saying?” and so Marybelle had to turn and look, too.

In the gondola at her back—their faces both lurid and shadowed with lights and fear—Marybelle's father and Dicky shouted words that could not be heard over the Ferris wheel's music and machinery; still, it was clear that the pair made gestures toward the ground.

What was it?

Because of the dark, and the thick growth of sage, Marybelle and her mother required several revolutions of the machine before they spied the white socks of the Ferris wheel operator, and understood that he lay in the brush, knocked there by one of the gondolas.

“Hey!” they shouted. “Help!”

Though visible through the window of the trailer, the other operator did not hear their cries, and later, when she was grown up and told her Ferris wheel story, M.B. always said, “Who knows what would've happened if some joyriders hadn't come along and stopped?” She imagined her family going up in flames, ignited by the Ferris wheel's constant turning. She imagined them hurtling off into outer space. Or the Ferris wheel tearing away from its bonds, rolling across the hills of Wyoming, faster and faster, taking the family toward the crash of death—

None of M.B.'s versions of the Ferris wheel story mentioned how the joyriders laughed when the ride was finally brought to a stop, and Marybelle and her mother had to hustle straight to their own automobile because, in her fright, Marybelle had wet the seat of the gondola, and both her own skirt and her mother's were soggy across the back. That was M.B.'s secret; and besides, it always turned out that her audience was scarcely interested in M.B.'s role in the story. What people really wanted to know was: Did the operator die? Recover?

When she first began telling the story, M.B. answered truthfully: she did not know. She did not even remember the man's being retrieved from the brush. She remembered only her sense that she and her family had been saved from death, and that she had been embarrassed by her wet skirt. In time, however, she came to see how her audiences' needs shaped their response to her tale, and when people asked, “What about the operator?” she learned to answer, almost as if surprised, “Why, he was killed
instantly
, of course.”

M.B. is now sixty-three. She cannot recall when she stopped caring about the Ferris wheel story, but she is very much aware that for the past two years she has offered it up only as a means of
not
telling anyone how, on what was to have been her and Lorne's first morning in their Palm Gate Village condominium, she had reached across to Lorne from her side of the bed and found the cold and rigid object that sent her running up and down the second-floor balcony, calling,
“Anybody! Help, please! Anybody!”

“And just think: you wouldn't have needed to be at all afraid if you'd truly been walking with the Lord back then!”

So said the smiling little organist from Vineyard Christian—no more than four days ago—when M.B. told her the Ferris wheel story. And why did M.B. tell it, then? Was there a lull in the social hall conversation?

No matter.

Today, M.B. is empty of any story at all.
Oh
is the only word M.B. knows today, and here, in the silent hospital room assigned her granddaughter—what will M.B. do if the girl wakes and asks for her parents?—M.B. does not allow herself even to form the word with her lips, let alone make its sound:
oh.

Across the hall, in that bright box of a room that houses M.B.'s daughter, Kitty, it is all tap and rattle, the whir and the suck and gurgle and murmur and the babble and the click of those well-meaning brutes (metal boxes, drip lines, lengths of black hose, plastic tube, wires) that monitor and drain and sustain what remains of Kitty since she was thrown some fifty feet and her skull slammed into the asphalt of Post Road.

Here, the relative quiet presses its hand across M.B.'s mouth. Here, each breath that comes from the gray, bandaged girl in her slab of bed—each and every breath must be heard, registered, attended to by M.B. so that the next may come. This is all that M.B. knows. Here, where the only windows are walls of glass that open onto the glare of the nurses' station, it is eternally twilight, and M.B. does not even understand that morning has come again until she sees the aide motion to her from the other side of the window.

A tiny woman with fuchsia lipstick and almost matching hair, the aide holds up a rumpled doughnut and a cardboard carton of orange juice. “Breakfast?” the aide mouths, then smiles in sympathy as she taps her wristwatch to indicate that M.B.'s fifteen-minute visit is almost up.

Morning again?
Yesterday
morning—M.B. does remember that indigestible clump of time because yesterday morning certain people led her out of this building and into the bright day and then into a smaller building where she was asked to look at the body of her son-in-law. Yes.
Yes
is what M.B. had to say. Then she walked back to the first building to listen to doctors and meet with the mortician, talk casket, plot, flowers. She could not do that now: talk. Even last night, when silver-haired Pastor Bitner of Vineyard Christian came by to speak of accepting God's will, and of her son-in-law's meeting with Jesus and Lorne and his other loved ones in heaven,
rest your mind on that, Marybelle
, even then, M.B. felt herself falling, and Pastor Bitner's sentences were no comfort, they were branches, and as M.B. fell, the branches broke against her, snap and snap, snap.

Oh! A terrible mewing rises from the girl's barred bed. The noise sends M.B. hurtling from her chair and straight toward the door. Her heart gallops in her chest. Her ears ring. And then she forces herself to begin the journey back to the nightmare bedside.

Doesn't it seem a sacrilege that her shoes bark like seals when she walks on the hospital linoleum?

“It's all right, kid.” M.B.'s whisper is hoarse. “It's all right.” Gingerly, she tugs at the bed's top sheet, eliminating the shadow caught in a wrinkle there. Anyone seeing the patient would imagine: not bad. A few tubes in, a few tubes out, a nasty scrape on the cheek, a broken hand. M.B., however, has been told: bad.

“Kid,” she says, “sorry, kid.” Because the last conversation she had with the patient was an angry one.

Jersey.

Really, M.B. scarcely knows this Jersey. When Jersey and her parents arrived at M.B.'s condominium, both M.B. and Jersey hesitated, then shook hands.
Shook hands!
But what else could M.B. do? She had seen the girl four times in her life. Baby, toddler,
shy kid at Lorne's funeral, and, finally, the gangly girl of this summer's visit.

As soon as M.B. knew the trio was coming to Florida, she had bought a pot-holder loom for Jersey. As a girl, M.B. had loved making pot holders in the summer. “Oh, thanks,” Jersey said when M.B. brought the loom out to the dinette, “that's nice,” but Jersey did not leave off her game of chess to make a pot holder, and M.B.'s feelings were hurt and so she asked—her voice scratchy with irritation; she could hear it herself!—“But how can you play chess alone, Jersey?”

The girl had a disconcerting tendency to look M.B. straight in the eye, then glance away as if she had seen something embarrassing. “I play as well as I can for both sides,” she said. Then she shrugged a shrug that was an exact replica of the lifetime of shrugs that M.B. had received from Kitty, and so maddened M.B. beyond words.

Now, however, the girl cries MEW! MEW! Her lips work back and forth, and, heart aching, M.B. presses her hand against the girl's forehead. Is there a fever? Through the mandatory gloves, M.B. cannot tell. Would there be a fever?

Once, Kitty yelled at M.B., “You never remember anything!” but she was wrong. The cries of Kitty's daughter remind M.B. of the shrill alarum of the killdeer that roam Palm Gate Village's golf course. And she first recognized those plump-bodied, spindle-legged birds on the golf course from a memory of the gravel roads of her childhood: handsome, irritating, the killdeer ran ahead of her bicycle, and cried and cried as if they did not even know how to fly; but that was a trick, M.B.'s father had said, a hoax meant to draw your attention away from the killdeer's nests.

Really, M.B. remembers many things. When the aide comes to knock on the window again, then indicates with a swivel of her head that she is setting M.B.'s doughnut and juice on the nurses' station, the carton of juice in the aide's hand reminds M.B. of the small square house picked up by the twister in
The Wizard of Oz
and dropped upon the Wicked Witch of the East.

After a last glance at her granddaughter, M.B. stands and heads for the door. Identity smeared by weariness and fear, she
claps her palms to her sternum to still the sudden rattle that she assumes comes from inside herself but is in fact a cart passing by the nursing station with a clatter of glass on metal.