The time traveler's wife (42 page)

and "Mama!" and "No, no,
no..." All night the cicadas and the tree frogs of my childhood pulsed
their electric curtain of sound and the night light made her skin look like
beeswax, her bone hands flailing in supplication, clutching at the glass of
water I held to her crusted lips. Now it is dawn. Mama's window looks out over
the east. I sit in the white chair, by the window, facing the bed, but not
looking, not looking at Mama so effaced in her big bed, not looking at the pill
bottles and the spoons and the glasses and the IV pole with the bag hanging
obese with fluid and the blinking red led display and the bed pan and the
little kidney-shaped receptacle for vornit and the box of latex gloves and the
trash can with the biohazard warning label full of bloody syringes. I am
looking out the window, toward the east. A few birds are singing. I can hear
the doves that live in the wisteria waking up. The world is gray. Slowly color
leaks into it, not rosy-fingered but like a slowly spreading stain of blood
orange, one moment lingering at the horizon and then flooding the garden and
then golden light, and then a blue sky, and then all the colors vibrant in
their assigned places, the trumpet vines, the roses, the white salvia, the
marigolds, all shimmering in the new morning dew like glass. The silver birches
at the edges of the woods dangle like white strings suspended from the sky. A
crow flies across the grass. Its shadow flies under it, and meets it as it
lands under the window and caws, once. Light finds the window, and creates my
hands, my body heavy in Mama's white chair. The sun is up. I close my eyes. The
air conditioner purrs. I'm cold, and I get up and walk to the other window, and
turn it off. Now the room is silent. I walk to the bed. Mama is still. The
laborious breathing that has haunted my dreams has stopped. Her mouth is open
slightly and her eyebrows are raised as though in surprise, although her eyes
are closed; she could be singing. I kneel by the bed, I pull back the covers
and lay my ear against her heart. Her skin is warm. Nothing. No heart beats, no
blood moves, no breath inflates the sails of her lungs. Silence. I gather up
her reeking, wasted body into my arms, and she is perfect, she is my own
perfect beautiful Mama again, for just a moment, even as her bones jut against
my breasts and her head lolls, even as her cancer-laden belly mimics fecundity
she rises up in memory shining, laughing, released: free. Footsteps in the
hall. The door opens and Etta's voice.

"Clare? Oh—!"

I lower Mama back to the pillows, smooth her
nightgown, her hair. "She's gone."

Saturday, September 12, 1998 (Henry is 35,
Clare is 27)

Henry: Lucille was the one who loved the
garden. When we came to visit, Clare would walk through the front door of the
Meadowlark House and straight out the back door to find Lucille, who was almost
always in the garden, rain or shine. When she was well we would find her
kneeling in the beds, weeding or moving plants or feeding the roses. When she
was ill Etta and Philip would bring her downstairs wrapped in quilts and seat
her in her wicker chair, sometimes by the fountain, sometimes under the pear
tree where she could see Peter working, digging and pruning and grafting. When
Lucille was well she would regale us with the doings of the garden: the
red-headed finches who had finally discovered the new feeder, the dahlias that
had done better than expected over by the sundial, the new rose that turned out
to be a horrible shade of lavender but was so vigorous that she was loathe to
get rid of it. One summer Lucille and Alicia conducted an experiment: Alicia
spent several hours each day practicing the cello in the garden, to see if the
plants would respond to the music. Lucille swore that her tomatoes had never
been so plentiful, and she showed us a zucchini that was the size of my thigh.
So the experiment was deemed a success, but was never repeated because it was
the last summer Lucille was well enough to garden. Lucille waxed and waned with
the seasons, like a plant. In the summer, when we all showed up, Lucille would
rally and the house rang with the happy shouts and pounding of Mark and
Sharon's children, who tumbled like puppies in the fountain and cavorted sticky
and ebullient on the lawn. Lucille was often grimy but always elegant. She
would rise to greet us, her white and copper hair in a thick coil with fat
strands straggling into her face, white kidskin gardening gloves and Smith
& Hawken tools thrown down as she received our hugs. Lucille and I always
kissed very formally, on both cheeks, as though we were very old French
countesses who hadn't seen each other in a while. She was never less than kind
to me, although she could devastate her daughter with a glance. I miss her.
Clare.. .well, 'miss' is inadequate. Clare is bereft. Clare walks into rooms
and forgets why she is there. Clare sits staring at a book without turning a
page for an hour. But she doesn't cry. Clare smiles if I make a joke. Clare
eats what I put in front of her. If I try to make love to her Clare will try to
go along with it...and soon I leave her alone, afraid of the docile, tearless
face that seems to be miles away. I miss Lucille, but it is Clare I am bereft
of, Clare who has gone away and left me with this stranger who only looks like
Clare.

Wednesday, November 26, 1998 (Clare is 27,
Henry is 35)

Clare: Mama's room is white and bare. All the
medical paraphernalia is gone. The bed is stripped down to the mattress, which
is stained and ugly in the clean room. I'm standing in front of Mama's desk.
It's a heavy white Formica desk, modern and strange in an otherwise feminine
and delicate room full of antique French furniture. Mama's desk stands in a
little bay, windows embrace it, morning light washes across its empty surface.
The desk is locked. I have spent an hour looking for the key, with no luck. I
lean my elbows on the back of Mama's swivel chair, and stare at the desk.
Finally, I go downstairs. The living room and dining room are empty. I hear
laughter in the kitchen, so I push the door open. Henry and Nell are huddled
over a cluster of bowls and a pastry cloth and a rolling pin.

"Easy, boy, easy! You gonna toughen 'em
up, you go at 'em like that. You need a light touch, Henry, or they gonna have
a texture like bubble gum."

"Sorry sorry sorry. I will be light, just
don't whack me like that. Hey, Clare." Henry turns around smiling and I
see that he is covered with flour.

"What are you making?"

"Croissants. I have sworn to master the
art of folding pastry dough or perish in the attempt." "Rest in
peace, son," says Nell, grinning.

"What's up?" Henry asks as Nell
efficiently rolls out a ball of dough and folds it and cuts it and wraps it in
waxed paper.

"I need to borrow Henry for a couple of
minutes, Nell." Nell nods and points her rolling pin at Henry. "Come
back in fifteen minutes and we'll start the marinade."

"Yes'm."

Henry follows me upstairs. We stand in front of
Mama's desk. "I want to open it and I can't find the keys."

"Ah." He darts a look at me, so quick
I can't read it. "Well, that's easy." Henry leaves the room and is
back in minutes. He sits on the floor in front of Mama's desk, straightening
out two large paper clips. He starts with the bottom left drawer, carefully
probing and turning one paper clip, and then sticks the other one in after it.
" Voila" he says, pulling on the drawer. It's bursting with paper.
Henry opens the other four drawers without any fuss. Soon they are all gaping,
their contents exposed: notebooks, loose-leaf papers, gardening catalogs, seed
packets, pens and short pencils, a checkbook, a Hershey's candy bar, a tape
measure, and a number of other small items that now seem forlorn and shy in the
daylight. Henry hasn't touched anything in the drawers. He looks at me; I
glance at the door almost involuntarily and Henry takes the hint. I turn to
Mama's desk. The papers are in no order at all. I sit on the floor and pile the
contents of a drawer in front of me. Everything with her handwriting on it I
smooth and pile on my left. Some of it is lists, and notes to herself: Do not
ask P about S. Or: Remind Etta dinner B's Friday. There are pages and pages of
doodles, spirals and squiggles, black circles, marks like the feet of birds.
Some of these have a sentence or a phrase embedded in them. To part her hair
with a knife. And: couldn't couldn't do it. And: 7/7 am quiet it will pass me
by. Some sheets are poems so heavily marked and crossed out those very little remains,
like fragments of Sappho:

Like old meat, relaxed and tender no air
XXXXXXX she said yes she said XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Or:

his hand XXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXX in
extreme XXXXXXXXXX

Some poems have been typed:

At the moment all hope is weak and small. Music
and beauty are salt in my sadness; a white void rips through my ice. Who could
have said that the angel of sex was so sad? or known desire would melt this
vast winter night into a flood of darkness.

1/2379 The spring garden:

a ship of summer swimming through my winter
vision.

4/6/79

1979 was the year Mama lost the baby and tried
to kill herself. My stomach aches and my eyes blur. I know now how it was with
her then. I take all of those papers and put them aside without reading any
more. In another drawer I find more recent poems. And then I find a poem
addressed to me:

The Garden Under Snow for clare

now the garden is under snow a blank page our
footprints write on clare who was never mine but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty a crystalline blanket she waits this is her spring this is her
sleeping/awakening she is waiting everything is waiting for a kiss the
improbable shapes of tubers roots I-never thought my baby her almost face a
garden, waiting

Henry: It's almost dinner time and I'm in
Nell's way, so when she says, "Shouldn't you go see what your woman is up
to?" it seems like a good idea to go and find out. Clare is sitting on the
floor in front of her mother's desk surrounded by white and yellow papers. The
desk lamp throws a pool of light around her, but her face is in shadow; her
hair a flaming copper aura. She looks up at me, holds out a piece of paper, and
says, "Look, Henry, she wrote me a poem." As I sit beside Clare and
read the poem I forgive Lucille, a little, for her colossal selfishness and her
monstrous dying, and I look up at Clare. "It's beautiful," I say, and
she nods, satisfied, for a moment, that her mother really did love her. I think
about my mother singing lieder after lunch on a summer afternoon, smiling at
our reflection in a shop window, twirling in a blue dress across the floor of
her dressing room. She loved me. I never questioned her love. Lucille was
changeable as wind. The poem Clare holds is evidence, immutable, undeniable, a
snapshot of an emotion. I look around at the pools of paper on the floor and I
am relieved that something in this mess has risen to the surface to be Clare's
lifeboat.

"She wrote me a poem," Clare says,
again, in wonder. Tears are streaking down her cheeks. I put my arms around her,
and she's back, my wife, Clare, safe and sound, on the shore at last after the
shipwreck, weeping like a little girl whose mother is waving to her from the
deck of the foundering boat.

NEW YEAR'S EVE,
ONE

Friday, December 31, 1999, 11:55p.m. (Henry is
36, Clare is 28)

Henry: Clare and I are standing on a rooftop in
Wicker Park with a multitude of other hardy souls, awaiting the turn of the
so-called millennium. It's a clear night, and not that cold; I can see my
breath, and my ears and nose are a bit numb. Clare is all muffled up in her big
black scarf and her face is startlingly white in the moon/street light. The
rooftop belongs to a couple of Clare's artist friends. Gomez and Charisse are
nearby, slow-dancing in parkas and mittens to music only they can hear.
Everyone around us is drunkenly bantering about the canned goods they nave
stockpiled, the heroic measures they have taken to protect their computers from
meltdown. I smile to myself, knowing that all this millennial nonsense will be
completely forgotten by the time the Christmas trees are Picked up off the
curbs by Streets and San. We are waiting for the fireworks to begin. Clare and
I lean against the waist-high false front of the building and survey the City
of Chicago. We are facing east, looking toward Lake Michigan. "Hello,
everybody" Clare says, waving her mitten at the lake, at South Haven,
Michigan. "It's funny,"

she says to me. "It's already the new year
there. I'm sure they're all in bed." We are six stories up, and I am
surprised by how much I can see from here. Our house, in Lincoln Square, is
somewhere to the north and west of here; our neighborhood is quiet and dark.
Downtown, to the southeast, is sparkling. Some of the huge buildings are
decorated for Christmas, sporting green and red lights in their windows. The
Sears and The Hancock stare at each other like giant robots over the heads of
lesser skyscrapers. I can almost see the building I lived in when I met Clare,
on North Dearborn, but it's obscured by the taller, uglier building they put up
a few years ago next to it. Chicago has so much excellent architecture that
they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible
buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff. There isn't much
traffic; everyone wants to be somewhere at midnight, not on the road. I can
hear bursts of firecrackers here and there, punctuated occasionally with
gunfire from the morons who seem to forget that guns do more than make loud
noises. Clare says, "I'm freezing" and looks at her watch. "Two
more minutes." Bursts of celebration around the neighborhood indicate that
some people's watches are fast. I think about Chicago in the next century. More
people, many more. Ridiculous traffic, but fewer potholes. There will be a
hideous building that looks like an exploding Coke can in Grant Park; the West
Side will slowly rise out of poverty and the South Side will continue to decay.
They will finally tear down Wrigley Field and build an ugly megastadium, but
for now it stands blazing with light in the Northeast. Gomez begins the
countdown: "Ten, nine, eight..." and we all take it up: "seven,
six, five, four, THREE! TWO! ONE! Happy New Year!" Champagne corks pop,
fireworks ignite and streak across the sky, and Clare and I dive into each other's
arms. Time stands still, and I hope for better things to come.