The Visiting Privilege (29 page)

Helen felt sick but she would drag herself to school. Her throat was sore. She heated up honey in a pan and sipped it with a spoon.

“I'm going to just stay put today,” Lenore said.

“That's good, Mom, just take it easy. You've been doing too much.” Helen's forehead shone with sweat. She buttoned up her sweater with trembling fingers.

“Do you have a cold?” her mother said. “Where did you get a cold? Stay home. The nurse who's coming this afternoon, she can take a look at you and write a prescription. Look at you, you're sweating. You've probably got a fever.” She wanted to weep for her little Helen.

“I have a test today, Mom,” Helen said.

“A test,” Lenore marveled. She laughed. “Take them now but don't take them later, they don't do you any good later.”

Helen wiped at her face with a dish towel.

“My god, a dish towel!” Lenore said. “What's wrong with you? My god, what's to become of you!”

Startled, Helen dropped the towel. She almost expected to see her face on it. That was what had alarmed her mother so, that Helen had wiped off her own face. Anyone knew better than to do that…She felt faint. She was thinking of the test, of taking it in a few hours. She took a fresh dish towel from a drawer and put it on the rack.

“What if I die today?” Lenore said suddenly. “I want you to be with me. My god, I don't want to be alone.”

“All this week there are tests,” Helen said.

“Why don't I wait, then?” Lenore said.

Tears ran down Helen's cheeks. She stood there stubbornly, looking at her mother.

“You were always able to turn them on and off,” Lenore said, “just like a faucet. Crocodile tears.” But with a moan she clutched her. Then she pulled away. “We have to wash these things,” she said. “We can't just leave them in the sink.” She seized the smudged glass she'd used to swallow her pills and rinsed it in running water. She held it up to the window and it slipped from her fingers and smashed against the sill. It was dirty and whole, she thought, and now it is clean and broken. This seemed to her profound.

“Don't touch it!” she screamed. “Leave it for Barbara. Is that her name, Barbara?” Strangers, they were all strangers. “She never knows what to do when she comes.”

“I have to go, Mom,” Helen said.

“You do, of course you do,” her mother said. She patted Helen's cheeks clumsily. “You're so hot, you're sick.”

“I love you,” Helen said.

“I love you too,” Lenore said. Then she watched her walk down the street toward the corner. The day was growing lighter. The mornings kept coming, she didn't like it.

On the bus, the driver said to Helen, “I lost my mother when I was your age. You've just got to hang in there.”

Helen walked toward the rear of the bus and sat down. She shut her eyes. A girl behind her snapped her gum and said, “ ‘Hang in there.' What an idiot.”

The bus pounded down the snow-packed streets.

The girl with the gum had been the one who told Helen how ashes came back. Her uncle had died and his ashes had come in a red shellacked box. It looked cheap but it had cost fifty-five dollars and there was an envelope taped to the box with his name typed on it beneath a glassine window as though he was being addressed to himself. This girl considered herself to be somewhat of an authority on how these things were handled, for she had also lost a couple of grandparents and knew how these things were done as far south as Boston.

M
iriam was living with a man named Jack Dewayne, who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew, and his students adored him. They called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shirts to class. People were mad for Jack in this town. Once, in a grocery store, when Miriam stood gazing into a bin of limes, a woman came up to her and said, “Your Jack is a wonderful, wonderful man.”

“Oh, thanks,” Miriam said.

“My son Ricky disappeared four years ago and some skeletal remains were found at the beginning of this year. Scattered, broken, lots of bones missing, not much to go on, a real jumble. The officials told me they probably weren't Ricky's but your Jack told me they were, and with compassion he showed me how he reached that conclusion.” The woman waited. In her cart was a big bag of birdseed and a bottle of vodka. “If it weren't for Jack, my Ricky's body would probably be unnamed still,” she said.

“Well, thank you very much,” Miriam said.

She never knew what to say to Jack's fans. As for them, they didn't understand Miriam at all. Why her of all people? With his hunger for life, Jack could have chosen better, they felt. Miriam lacked charm, they felt. She was gloomy. Even Jack found her gloomy occasionally.

Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack's roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why he particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack's alley, all right.

“Here's something for you, Jack,” Miriam said. “You'll appreciate this. Beckett described tears as ‘liquefied brain.' ”

“God, Miriam,” Jack said. “Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it's a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”

Then the phone would ring and Jack would begin his daily business of reconstructing the previous lives of hair and teeth when they had been possessed by someone. A detective a thousand miles away would send him a box of pitted bones and within days Jack would be saying, “This is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who didn't do drugs and who was tall, healthy and trusting. Too trusting, clearly.”

Or a hand would be found in the stomach of a shark hauled up by a party boat off the Gulf Coast of Florida and Jack would be flown off to examine it. He would return deeply tanned and refreshed, with a crisp new haircut, saying, “The shark was most certainly attracted to the rings on this hand. This is a teen's hand. She was small, perhaps even a legal midget, and well nourished. She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would certainly have done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.”

Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental, and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn't turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

Jack had no idea that Miriam stole sheets and more. He liked Miriam. He liked her bones. She had fine bones and he loved tracing them at night beneath her warm, smooth skin, her jawbone, collarbone, pelvic bone. It wasn't anything that consumed him, but he just liked her was all, usually. And he liked his work. He liked wrapping things up and dealing with those whom the missing had left behind. He was neither doctor nor priest; he was the forensic anthropologist, and he alone could give these people peace. They wanted to know, they had to know. Was that tibia in the swamp Denny's? Denny, we long to claim you…Were those little bits and pieces they got when they dragged the lake Lucile's even though she was supposed to be in Manhattan? She had told us she was going to be in Manhattan, there was never any talk about a lake…Bill had gone on a day hike years ago with his little white dog and now at last something had been found in a ravine…Pookie had toddled away from the Airstream on the Fourth of July just as we were setting up the grill, she would be so much older now, a little girl instead of a baby, and it would be so good just to know, if only we could know…

And Jack would give them his gift, the incontrovertible and almost unspeakable news. That's her, that's them. No need to worry anymore, it is finished, you are free. No one could help these people who were weary of waiting and sick of hope like Jack could.

Miriam had a fondness for people who vanished, though she had never known any personally. But if she had a loved one who vanished, she would prefer to believe that they had fallen in love with distance, a great distance. She certainly wouldn't long to be told they were dead.

One day, one of Jack's students, an ardent hunter, a gangly blue-eyed boy named Carl who wore camouflage pants and a black shirt winter and summer, presented him with four cured deer feet. “I thought you'd like to make a lamp,” Carl said.

Miriam was in the garden. She had taken to stealing distressed plants from nurseries and people's yards and planting them in an unused corner of the lot, far from Jack's roses. They remained distressed, however—in shock, she felt.

“It would make a nice lamp,” Carl said. “You can make all kinds of things. With a big buck's forelegs you can make an outdoor thermometer. Looks good with snowflakes on it.”

“A lamp,” Jack said. He appeared delighted. Jack got along well with his students. He didn't sleep with the girls and he treated the boys as equals. He put his hands around the tops of the deer feet and splayed them out some.

“You might want to fiddle around with the height,” Carl said. “You can make great stuff with antlers, too. Chandeliers, candelabras. You can use antlers to frame just about anything.”

“We have lamps,” Miriam said. She was holding a wan perennial she had liberated from a supermarket.

“Gosh, this appeals to me, though, Miriam.”

“I bet you'd be good at this sort of thing, sir,” Carl said. “I did one once and it was very relaxing.” He glanced at Miriam, squeezed his eyes almost shut and smiled.

“It will be a novelty item, all right,” Jack said. “I think it will be fun.”

“Maybe you'd like to go hunting sometime with me, sir,” Carl said. “We could go bow hunting for muleys together.”

“You should resist the urge to do this, Jack, really,” Miriam said. The thought of a lamp made of animal legs in her life and
turned on
caused a violent feeling of panic within her.

But Jack wanted to make a lamp. He needed another hobby, he argued. Hobbies were healthy, and he might even take Carl up on his bow-hunting offer. Why didn't she get herself a hobby like baking or watching football? he suggested. He finished the lamp in a weekend and set it on an antique jelly cabinet in the sunroom. He'd had a little trouble trimming the legs to the same height. They might not have ended up being exactly the same height. Miriam, expecting to be repulsed by the thing, was enthralled instead. It had a dark blue shade and a gold-colored cord and a sixty-watt bulb. A brighter bulb would be pushing it, Jack said. Miriam could not resist the allure of the little lamp. She often found herself sitting beside it, staring at it, the harsh brown hairs, the dainty pasterns, the polished black hooves, all fastened together with a brass gimp band in a space the size of a dinner plate. It was anarchy, the little lamp, its legs snugly bunched. It was whirl, it was hole, it was the first far drums. She sometimes worried that she would start talking to it. This happened to some people, she knew, they felt they had to talk. She read that Luther Burbank spoke to cactus reassuringly when he wanted to create a spineless variety and that they stabbed him repeatedly; he had to pull thousands of spines from his hands but didn't care. He continued to speak calmly and patiently; he never got mad, he persisted.

“Miriam,” Jack said, “that is not meant to be a reading light. It's an accent light. You're going to ruin your eyes.”

Miriam had once channeled her considerable imagination into sex, which Jack had long appreciated, but now it spilled everywhere and lay lightly on everything like water on a lake. It alarmed him a little. Perhaps, during semester break, they should take a trip together. To witness something strange with each other might be just the ticket. At the same time, he felt unaccountably nervous about traveling with Miriam.

The days were radiant but it was almost fall and a daytime coolness reached out and touched everything. Miriam's restlessness was gone. It was Jack who was restless.

“I'm going to take up bow hunting, Miriam,” he said. “Carl seems to think I'd be a natural at it.”

Miriam did not object to this as she might once have. Nevertheless, she could not keep herself from waiting anxiously beside the lamp for Jack's return from his excursions with Carl. She was in a peculiar sort of readiness, and not for anything in particular, either. For weeks Jack went hunting, and for weeks he did not mind that he did not return with a former animal.

“It's the expectation and the challenge. That's what counts,” he said. He and Carl would stand in the kitchen sharing a little whiskey. Carl's skin was clean as a baby's and he smelled cleanly if somewhat aberrantly of cold cream and celery. “The season's young, sir,” he said.

But eventually Jack's lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent's coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face as expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.

The lamp was a great comfort to Miriam in the weeks following the accident. Carl was of less comfort. Whenever she saw him in the hospital's halls, he was wailing and grinding his teeth. But the crooked, dainty deer-foot lamp was calm. They spent most nights together reading quietly. The lamp had eclectic reading tastes. It would cast its light on anything, actually. It liked the stories of Poe. The night before Jack was to return home, they read a little book in which animals offered their prayers to God—the mouse, the bear, the turtle and so on—and this is perhaps where the lamp and Miriam had their first disagreement. Miriam liked the little verses. But the lamp felt that though the author clearly meant well, the prayers were cloying and confused thought with existence. The lamp had witnessed a smattering of Kierkegaard and felt strongly that thought should never be confused with existence. Being in such a condition of peculiar and altered existence itself, the lamp felt some things unequivocally. Miriam often wanted to think about that other life, when the parts knew the whole, when the legs ran and rested and moved through woods washed by flowers, but the lamp did not want to reflect upon those times.

Jack came back and Carl moved in with them. He had sold everything he owned except his big Chevy truck and wanted only to nurse Jack for the rest of his life. Jack's good eye often teared, and he indicated both discomfort and agreement with a whistling hiss. Even so, he didn't seem all that glad to see Miriam. As for herself, she felt that she had driven to a grave and gotten out of the car with the engine left running. Carl slept for a time in Jack's study, but one night when Miriam couldn't sleep and was sitting in the living room with the lamp, she saw him go into their room and shut the door. And that became the arrangement. Carl stayed with Jack day and night.

One of the first things Carl wanted to do was to take a trip. He believed that the doleful visits from the other students tired Jack and that the familiar house and grounds didn't stimulate him properly. While Miriam didn't think highly of Carl's ideas, this one didn't seem too bad. She was ready to leave. After all, Jack had already left in his fashion and it seemed pointless to stay in his house. They all three would sit together in the big roomy cab on the wide cherry-red custom seat of Carl's truck and tour the Southwest. The only thing she didn't like was that the lamp would have to travel in the back with the luggage.

“Nothing's going to happen to it,” Carl said. “Look at dogs. Dogs ride around in the backs of trucks all the time. They love it.”

“Thousands of dogs die each year from being pitched out of the backs of pickups,” Miriam said.

Jack remained in the room with them while they debated the statistical probability of this. He was gaunt and his head was scarred, and he tended to resemble, if left to his own devices, a large white appliance. But Carl was always buying him things and making small alterations to his appearance. This day he was wearing pressed khakis, a crisp madras shirt, big black glasses and a black Stetson hat. Carl was young and guilty and crazy in love. He patted Jack's wrists as he talked, not wanting to upset him.

Finally, continuing to assert that he had never heard of a dog falling out of a pickup truck, Carl agreed to buy a camper shell and enclose the back. He packed two small bags for himself and Jack while Miriam got a cardboard carton and arranged her clothes around the lamp. Her plan was to unplug whatever lamp was in whatever motel room they stayed in and plug this one in. Clearly, that would be the high point of its day.