Like Life (9 page)

“My name is Miller,” said the man, sternly, secretively. He wore a suit, and his tie was loosened. “I’m here to pick up the cat my wife brought in this morning for surgery.”

The woman blanched. “Yes,” she said, and she didn’t ask for a first name. “Gooby Miller,” she said into the microphone. “Gooby Miller to the waiting room.” The man had taken out his wallet, but the woman said, “No charge,” and went over and tapped things into her computer for a very long minute. A young high school kid appeared from the back room, carrying a box in his arms. “The Miller cat?” he said in the doorway, and the man in the suit raised his hand. The boy brought the box over and placed it on the counter.

“I’d also like to speak with the veterinarian,” said the man. The woman in the white shoes looked at him fearfully, but the boy said, “Yes, he’s waiting for you. Come right this way,” and led the man back into the examination room, the door to which blinked brightly open to let them in, then shut behind them like a fact. The box sat all alone on the countertop.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked Jane.

“Yes. I’m here to pick up my cat from the groomer. My name is Konwicki.”

The woman reached for the microphone. “And the cat’s name?”

“Fluffers,” said Jane.

“Fluffers Konwicki to the waiting room.” The woman put the microphone down. “The cat’ll be up in a minute.”

“Thanks,” said Jane. She looked at the cardboard box at her elbow on the counter. The box said
DOLE
PINEAPPLE
. She listened for scratching or movement of any kind, but there was none. “What’s in the box?” she asked.

The woman made a face, guilty with comedy, exaggerated. She didn’t know what sort of face to make. “Gooby Miller,” she said. “A dead cat.”

“Oh, dear,” murmured Jane. She remembered the children she’d met earlier that day. “What happened?”

The woman shrugged. “Thyroid surgery. It just died on the table. Can I help you, sir?” Someone was now bringing out Rex the poodle, who went limping toward his owner with a cast on his front foot. It was all like a dream: Things you’d seen before, in daylight, were trotted out hours later in slightly different form.

After Rex was placed in a child’s toy wagon and wheeled out of the vet’s, the groomer appeared bearing Fluffers, who looked dazed and smelled of flea dip laced with lilac. “He was a very good cat,” said the groomer, and Jane took Fluffers in her arms and almost peeped, “Thank God they didn’t bring you out in a pineapple box.” What she said instead was: “And now he’s all handsome again.”

“Found some fleas,” said the groomer. “But not all that many.”

Jane quickly paid the bill and left. Dusk was settling over the highway like a mood, and the traffic had put on lights. She
carried her cat to the car and was fumbling with the door on the passenger’s side when she heard squeals from the opposite end of the parking lot. “Fluffers! Fluffers!” They were a child’s excited shouts. “Look, it’s Fluffers!”

The boy and girl Jane had spoken to that morning suddenly leaped out of the station wagon they’d been waiting in across the lot. They slammed the back doors and dashed breathlessly over to Jane and her cat. They had on little coats and hats with earflaps. It had gotten cold.

“Oh, Fluffers, you smell so good—yum, yum, yum!” said the girl, and she pressed her face into Fluffers’ perfumed haunches and kept it there, beginning to cry. Jane looked up and saw that what little light there was left in the sky was frighteningly spindly, like a horse’s legs that must somehow still hold up the horse. She freed one of her hands and placed it on the girl’s head. “Oh, Fluffers!” came another muffled wail; the girl refused to lift her face. Her brother stood more stoically at her side. His face was pink and swollen, but something was drying hard behind the eyes. He studied Jane as if he were reorganizing what he thought was important in life. “What is your name?” he asked.

IT
WAS
a little thing, just a little thing, but Jane decided not to risk the audition after all. She phoned Bridey and apologized, said she was coming down with a bug or something, and Bridey said, “Probably got it from that Heffie, always taste-testing the way she does. At any rate, I hope you’ll come over for dinner sometime this week, if possible,” and Jane said that yes, she would.

And she did. She went the following Thursday and had dinner with Bridey and Bridey’s husband, who was a big, gentle man who did consulting work for computer companies. He was wearing a shirt printed with seahorses, like one her ex-lover the
toymaker had worn when he had come east to visit, one final weekend, for old times’ sake. It had been a beautiful shirt, soft as pajamas, and he’d worn it when they had driven that Sunday, out past the pumpkin fairs, to the state line, to view the Mississippi. The river had rushed by them, beneath them, a clayey green, a deep, deep khaki. She had touched the shirt, held on to it; in this lunarscape of scrub oaks and jack pines, in this place that had once at the start of the world been entirely under water and now just had winds, it was good to have a river cutting through, breaking up the land. In the distance, past a valley dalmatianed with birches, there were larger trees, cedars and goldening tamaracks—goldening!—and Jane felt that at last here was a moment she would take with her into the rest of life,
unlosable.
There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

After dinner she actually went to a Community Chorus rehearsal with Bridey and sang through some of the exercises with everyone. When the sheet music was passed out, however, there wasn’t enough to go around. The director took attendance and gazed accusingly out at the sopranos, saying, “Is someone here who isn’t actually supposed to be?” Jane raised her hand and explained.

“I’m afraid this is not allowed. If you want to be in the chorus you must have already auditioned.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jane, and she stood and gave her sheet music back to the choir director. She picked up her purse, looked down at Bridey, and shrugged unhappily.

“I’ll phone you,” mouthed Bridey.

But it was nearly Christmas season by the time Bridey phoned, and Jane was very busy at the store. There were lots of special holiday dips and cheese rolls, and they were trying to do gift wrap besides. In the midst of it all Heffie announced she was quitting, but the day she did she brought in a bottle of champagne, and she and Jane drank it right there on the
job. They poured it into Styrofoam cups and sipped it, crouching behind the deli case, craning their necks occasionally to make sure no customers had wandered in.

“To our little lives,” toasted Heffie.

“On the prairie,” added Jane. The champagne fizzed against the roof of her mouth. She warmed it there, washing it around, until it flattened, gliding down her throat, a heated, sweet water.

She and Heffie opened a jar of herring in cream sauce, which had a messily torn label. They dug their fingers in and ate. They sang a couple of Christmas carols they both knew, and sang them badly.

“
Let every heart prepare him a room
,” sang Heffie, her mouth full of fish. The world was lovely, really, but it was tricky, and peevish with the small things, like a god who didn’t get out much.

“Surfing,” said Heffie. “You gotta get away from these plains winters and go someplace with waves and a warm current.” Inside the deli case, the dry moons of the cheeses and the mucky spreads wore their usual plastic tags:
HELLO
MY
NAME
IS
. Jane reached in and plucked out the one that said,
HELLO
MY
NAME
IS
Swiss Almond Whip.

“Here,” she said to Heffie. “This is for you.” Heffie laughed, gravelly and loud, then took the tag and stuck it in one of her barrettes, up near the front, where the hair was vanishing, and the deforested scalp shone back in surprise, pale but constant, beneath.

               
YOU
HAD
TO
GET
OUT
of them occasionally, those Illinois towns with the funny names: Paris, Oblong, Normal. Once, when the Dow-Jones dipped two hundred points, the Paris paper boasted a banner headline:
NORMAL
MAN
MARRIES
OBLONG
WOMAN
. They knew what was important. They did! But you had to get out once in a while, even if it was just across the border to Terre Haute, for a movie.

Outside of Paris, in the middle of a large field, was a scatter of brick buildings, a small liberal arts college with the improbable name of Hilldale-Versailles. Zoë Hendricks had been teaching American History there for three years. She taught “The Revolution and Beyond” to freshmen and sophomores, and every third semester she had the Senior Seminar for Majors, and although her student evaluations had been slipping in the last year and a half—
Professor Hendricks is often late for class and usually arrives with a cup of hot chocolate, which she offers the class sips of
—generally, the department of nine men was pleased to have her. They felt she added some needed feminine touch to the corridors—that faint trace of Obsession and sweat, the light, fast clicking of heels. Plus they had had a sex-discrimination suit, and the dean had said, well, it was time.

The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall
singing “Getting to Know You”—both verses. At the request of the dean, the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, “Fine,” and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. There was too much effort with the eyeliner, and her earrings, worn no doubt for the drama her features lacked, were a little frightening, jutting out from the side of her head like antennae.

“I’m going out of my mind,” said Zoë to her younger sister, Evan, in Manhattan.
Professor Hendricks seems to know the entire sound track to
The King and I.
Is this history?
Zoë phoned her every Tuesday.

“You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.” Evan was a part-time food designer for photo shoots. She cooked vegetables in green dye. She propped up beef stew with a bed of marbles and shopped for new kinds of silicone sprays and plastic ice cubes. She thought her life was “OK.” She was living with her boyfriend of many years, who was independently wealthy and had an amusing little job in book publishing. They were five years out of college, and they lived in a luxury midtown high-rise with a balcony and access to a pool. “It’s not the same as having your own pool,” Evan was always sighing, as if to let Zoë know that, as with Zoë, there were still things she, Evan, had to do without.

“Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here,” said Zoë on the phone. She used to insist it was irony, something gently layered and sophisticated, something alien to the Midwest, but her students kept calling it sarcasm, something they felt qualified
to recognize, and now she had to agree. It wasn’t irony.
What is your perfume?
a student once asked her.
Room freshener
, she said. She smiled, but he looked at her, unnerved.

Her students were by and large good Midwesterners, spacey with estrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese. They shared their parents’ suburban values; their parents had given them things, things, things. They were complacent. They had been purchased. They were armed with a healthy vagueness about anything historical or geographic. They seemed actually to know very little about anything, but they were extremely good-natured about it. “All those states in the East are so tiny and jagged and bunched up,” complained one of her undergraduates the week she was lecturing on “The Turning Point of Independence: The Battle at Saratoga.” “Professor Hendricks, you’re from Delaware originally, right?” the student asked her.

“Maryland,” corrected Zoë.

“Aw,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “New England.”

Her articles—chapters toward a book called
Hearing the One About: Uses of Humor in the American Presidency
—were generally well received, though they came slowly for her. She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them—she didn’t trust things written in the morning only—so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day, its moods, its light, was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for over a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

The job she’d had before the one at Hilldale-Versailles had been at a small college in New Geneva, Minnesota, Land of the Dying Shopping Mall. Everyone was so blond there that brunettes were often presumed to be from foreign countries.
Just because Professor Hendricks is from Spain doesn’t give her the right to be so negative about our country.
There was a general emphasis on cheerfulness. In New Geneva you weren’t supposed to be critical
or complain. You weren’t supposed to notice that the town had overextended and that its shopping malls were raggedy and going under. You were never to say you weren’t fine thank you and yourself. You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier, saying, “If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I’m going to slit my wrists.”

But now, in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoë was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home, even, and ask personal questions. Now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.