Return Trips (2 page)

And she can feel the lump there, all the time. Probably growing.

Mrs. Lawson has told Gloria that she never goes to doctors; she can doctor herself, Mrs. Lawson says. She always has. Gloria has even thought of showing the lump to Mrs. Lawson.

But she tries to think in a positive way about Alaska. They have a cute little apartment right on the university campus, Sharon has written. Fairbanks is on a river; they will take an afternoon trip on a paddleboat. And they will spend one night at Mount McKinley, and go on a wild life tour.

“Fairbanks, now. I never did get up that way,” says Mrs. Lawson, told of Sharon’s invitation, Gloria’s projected trip. “But I always heard it was real nice up there.”

Actually she does not remember anything at all about Fairbanks, but for Gloria’s sake she hopes that it is nice, and she reasons that any place would be better than Juneau, scrunched in between mountains so steep they look to fall down on you.

“I hope it’s nice,” says Gloria. “I just hope I don’t get mauled by some bear, on that wild life tour.”

Aside from not drinking and never going to doctors (she has read all her father’s old doctor books, and remembers most of what she read) Mrs. Lawson believes that she gets her good health and her strength—considerable, for a person of her years—from her daily naps. Not a real sleep, just sitting down for a while in some place really comfortable, and closing her eyes.

She does that now, in a small room off Miss Goldstein’s main library room (Miss Goldstein has already gone off to China, but even if she were home she wouldn’t mind about a little nap). Mrs. Lawson settles back into a big old fat leather chair, and she slips her shoes off. And, very likely because of talking about Alaska that morning, Gloria’s trip, her mind drifts off, in and out of Juneau. She remembers the bitter cold, cold rains of that winter up there, the winds, fogs thicker than cotton, and dark. Snow that sometimes kept them in the little hillside cabin for days, even weeks. Her and Charles: that husband had the same name as the one she now has, she just remembered—funny to forget a thing like that. They always used to drink a lot, her and the Charles in Alaska; you had to, to get through the winter. And pretty often they would fight, ugly drunk quarrels that she couldn’t
quite remember the words to, in the mornings. But that New Year’s Eve they were having a real nice time; he was being real nice, laughing and all, and then all of a sudden it was like he turned into some other person, and he struck her. He grabbed up her hair, all of it red, at that time, and he called her a witch and he knocked her down to the floor, and he tromped her. Later of course he was sorry, and he said he had been feeling mean about not enough work, but still, he had tromped her.

Pulling herself out of that half dream, half terrible memory, Mrs. Lawson repeats, as though someone had asked her, that now she is married to Charles, in San Francisco. They live in the Western Addition; they don’t drink, and this Charles is a nice man, most of the time.

She tries then to think about the other three husbands, one in Oakland, in Chicago, in Kansas City, but nothing much comes to mind, of them. No faces or words, just shadows, and no true pictures of any of those cities. The only thing she is perfectly clear about is that not one of those other men was named Charles.

On the airplane to Alaska, something terrible, horrible, entirely frightening happens to Gloria, which is: a girl comes and sits in the seat next to hers, and that girl has—the lower part of her right leg missing. Cut off. A pretty dark-haired girl, about the same size as Gloria, wearing a nice blazer, and a kind of long skirt. One boot. Metal crutches.

Gloria is so frightened—she knows that this is an omen, a sign meant for her—that she is dizzy, sick; she leans back and closes her eyes, as the plane bumps upward, zooming through clouds, and she stays that way for the rest of the trip. She tries not to think; she repeats numbers and meaningless words to herself.

At some point she feels someone touching her arm. Flinching,
she opens her eyes to see the next-seat girl, who is asking, “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”

“I’m all right. Just getting the flu, I think.” Gloria smiles in a deliberately non-friendly way. The last thing in the world that she wants is a conversation with that girl: the girl at last getting around to her leg, telling Gloria, “It started with this lump I had, right here.”

Doctors don’t usually feel your legs, during physical examinations, Gloria thinks; she is standing beside Sharon on the deck of the big paddleboat that is slowly ploughing up the Natoma River. It would be possible to hide a lump for a long time, unless it grew a lot, she thinks, as the boat’s captain announces over the bullhorn that they are passing what was once an Indian settlement.

Alaska is much flatter than Gloria had imagined its being, at least around Fairbanks—and although she had of course heard the words, midnight sun, she had not known they were a literal description; waking at three or four in the morning from bad dreams, her nighttime panics (her legs drawn up under her, one hand touching her calf, the lump) she sees brilliant sunshine, coming in through the tattered aluminum foil that Sharon has messily pasted to the window. It is all wrong—unsettling. Much worse than the thick dark fogs that come into San Francisco in the summer; she is used to them.

In fact sleeplessness and panic (what she felt at the sight of that girl with the missing leg has persisted; she knows it was a sign) have combined to produce in Gloria an almost trancelike state. She is so quiet, so passive that she can feel Sharon wondering about her, what is wrong. Gloria does not, for a change, say anything critical of Sharon’s housekeeping, which is as sloppy as usual. She does not tell anyone that she, Gloria, is a cleaning person.

A hot wind comes up off the water, and Gloria remembers that tomorrow they go to Mount McKinley, and the wild life tour.

Somewhat to her disappointment, Mrs. Lawson does not get any postcards from Gloria in Alaska, although Gloria had mentioned that she would send one, with a picture.

What she does get is a strange phone call from Gloria on the day that she was supposed to come back. What is
strange
is that Gloria sounds like some entirely other person, someone younger even than Gloria actually is, younger and perfectly happy. It is Gloria’s voice, all right, but lighter and quicker than it was, a voice without any shadows.

“I’m back!” Gloria bursts out, “but I just don’t think I want to work today. I was out sort of late—” She laughs, in a bright new way, and then she asks, “She’s not back yet, is she?”

Meaning Miss Goldstein. “No, not for another week,” Mrs. Lawson tells her. “You had a good trip?”

“Fabulous! A miracle, really. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

Hanging up, Mrs. Lawson has an uneasy sense that some impersonator will come to work in Gloria’s place.

But of course it is Gloria who is already down on her knees, cleaning the kitchen floor, when Mrs. Lawson gets there the following day.

And almost right away she begins to tell Mrs. Lawson about the wild life tour, from Mount McKinley, seemingly the focal point of her trip.

“It was really weird,” says Gloria. “It looked like the moon, in that funny light.” She has a lot to say, and she is annoyed that Mrs. Lawson seems to be paying more attention to her newspaper—is barely listening. Also, Lawson seems to have
aged, while Gloria was away, or maybe Gloria just forgot how old she looks, since in a way she doesn’t act very old; she moves around and works a lot harder than Sharon ever does, for one example. But it seems to Gloria today that Mrs. Lawson’s skin is grayer than it was, ashy-looking, and her eyes, which are always strange, have got much paler.

Nevertheless, wanting more attention (her story has an important point to it) Gloria raises her voice, as she continues, “And every time someone spotted one of those animals he’d yell out, and the man would stop the bus. We saw caribou, and these funny white sheep, high up on the rocks, and a lot of moose, and some foxes. Not any bears. Anyway, every time we stopped I got real scared. We were on the side of a really steep mountain, part of Mount McKinley, I think, and the bus was so wide, like a school bus.” She does not tell Mrs. Lawson that in a weird way she liked being so scared. What she thought was, if I’m killed on this bus I’ll never even get to a doctor. Which was sort of funny, really, now that she can see the humor in it—now that the lump is mysteriously, magically gone!

However, she has reached the dramatic disclosure toward which this story of her outing has been heading. “Anyway, we got back all right,” she says, “and two days after that, back in Fairbanks, do you know what the headlines were, in the local paper?” She has asked this (of course rhetorical) question in a slow, deepened voice, and now she pauses, her china-blue eyes gazing into Mrs. Lawson’s paler, stranger blue.

“Well, I don’t know,” Lawson obliges.

“They said,
BUS TOPPLES FROM MOUNTAIN, EIGHT KILLED, 42 INJURED
. Can you imagine? Our same bus, the very next day. What do you think that means?” This question too has been rhetorical; voicing it, Gloria smiles in a satisfied, knowing way.

A very polite woman, Mrs. Lawson smiles gently too. “It means you spared. You like to live fifty, sixty years more.”

Eagerly Gloria bursts out, “Exactly! That’s just the way I figured it, right away.” She pauses, smiling widely, showing her little white teeth. “And then, that very same afternoon of the day we saw the paper,” she goes on, “I was changing my clothes and I felt the calf of my leg where there’d been this lump that I was sort of worried about—and the lump was gone. I couldn’t believe it. So I guess it was just a muscle, not anything bad.”

“Them leg muscles can knot up that way, could of told you that myself,” Mrs. Lawson mutters. “Heavy housework can do that to a person.” But Gloria looks so happy, so bright-faced and shiny-eyed, that Mrs. Lawson does not want to bring her down, in any way, and so she adds, “But you sure are right about that bus accident. It’s a sure sign you been spared.”

“Oh, that’s what I think too! And later we saw these really neat big dogs, in Fairbanks. I’m really thinking about getting a dog. This man I know really likes dogs too, last night we were talking.” Her voice trails off in a happy reminiscence.

Later in the day, though, thinking about Gloria and her story, what she and Gloria said to each other, Mrs. Lawson is not really convinced about anything. The truth is, Gloria could perfectly well get killed by a bus in San Francisco, this very afternoon, or shot by some sniper; it’s been saying in the paper about snipers, all over town, shooting folks. Or Gloria could find another lump, some place else, somewhere dangerous. Missing one bus accident is no sure sign that a person’s life will always come up rosy, because nobody’s does, not for long. Even Miss Goldstein, in China, could fall off of some Chinese mountain.

In a weary, discouraged way Mrs. Lawson moved through the rest of her day. It is true; she is too old and tired for the
work she does. Through the big street-floor windows she watches the cold June fog rolling in from the bay, and she thinks how the weather in California has never seemed right to her. She thinks about Charles, and it comes to her that one Charles could change into the other, the same way that first Charles in such a sudden way turned violent, and wild.

That thought is enough to make her dread the end of her work, and the day, when although it is summer she will walk out into streets that are as dark and cold as streets are in Alaska.

I can’t leave because of all the priceless and cumbersome antique furniture that my manic mother had flown out from St. Louis—at what cost! My inheritance: it weighs me down as heavily as my feet, a part of me. Like my husband, who is also heavy, to whom I am connected, whom I cannot leave. Where do I end? And he begin? In this crazy, hot California weather we both are sticky. We are stuck.

Our house is perfectly box-shaped, the way a child would draw a house. “A real
house
house,” we said, laughing at our first sight of it. We were trying to convince ourselves that we took it because it is so amusing, not because it is the only one near the university, Stanford, that we can afford. An expensive box, it costs exactly half of Carl’s instructor’s salary. Half the floor is living room, one-fourth kitchen, one-eighth each bathroom and bedroom. It makes a certain sense, if you think about it.

It is hard to walk through the living room, though, without bumping into something: small French tables, English desk, baroque Spanish sofa. My legs are bruised regularly. I think my mother would be surprised to see where the precious
furniture has landed, crowded into a redwood box. But now she is depressed (Lithium does not work, with her), and she is not shipping any more furniture, or travelling. She does not believe in sending money.

An interesting thing about the walnut desk and the rosewood table is that they both have broken left feet. I should have called Air Express, or someone, but I wasn’t sure whom, and I didn’t like to complain. Mrs. Nelson, our neighbor, sighs whenever she comes over from across the street to look at the furniture, which is as often as I don’t see her first and hide in bed. “Such lovely pieces,” she sighs. “We’ve got to find a really good workman to repair them.” If I told her that we couldn’t afford a really good workman, she would not believe me. People with lovely furniture also have money, Mrs. Nelson believes.

So many of the people in my life seem to be over-sized. Mrs. Nelson is one of them. An enormous pale woman, large pale-blue eyes and a tight white mouth, she stands in the doorway, filling it, with her heavy arms hanging across her chest, nothing about her moving but her eyes; her gaze moves ponderously all over the room, from one broken leg to another, all over the dust, and settles at last on me. The weight of her eyes is suffocating. I become hotter and thinner and messier than I am.

“A really good workman,” she says. “You can’t just let nice things fall apart.”

I can’t?