The Whole World Over (22 page)

She had to pee badly. She let herself out of the gate, closing it behind
her, and walked quickly east, where she found a coffee shop open on a
corner two blocks away. After tea and a muffin, she called Uncle Marsden
collect from a pay phone. She told him she had stayed with that
friend, just as she'd said in her message. Oh, a friend from college,
someone she'd bumped into on the street. It was the first lie she had told
him since she'd moved into his house, perhaps the first real lie she'd ever
told her uncle. It surprised her, but she never took it back.

Some weeks later, she'd decided to go into the city again, this time for
no urgent reason. She found herself telling Uncle Marsden that she
might stay over, might visit that old friend again. She saw him consciously
holding his tongue, respecting her "boundaries." It was that
easy; her age won her freedoms that, after all, she deserved. Didn't she?
She took a sleeping roll she'd found in the top of a closet when she was
airing the upstairs rooms. Late that night, after a lot of trial-and-error
wandering, she found the spot again.

That time, the gate had been locked with a heavy chain. But the street
was deserted and Saga, driven by a mysteriously stubborn urgency,
would not be turned away. She tore the inside of a trouser leg on the top
of the iron fence, but she got herself over. Once inside, she felt a moment
of animal panic; with the gate locked, she was caged. But after she'd settled
in against the planters, this time with her bedding, she felt both
secure and free, the dark sky far above the pointed tips of the potted
trees. Occasionally, a couple would walk past deep in a conversation
they thought private on this quiet street, removed from the commerce
and brilliant glow at the heart of the city. Once, a dog sniffed avidly on
the other side of the fence; Saga heard an impatient owner yank and
scold, yank and scold. That was the closest she came to discovery—or
the closest she knew of. She slept in a surprisingly deep state of restfulness.
Sometimes when she slept there—not always, but often enough—
the moon's path would intersect with her avenue of sky, and then she
would be happy, strangely and unsentimentally happy. It was a kind of
happiness so much more felt than reasoned. Had she known this particular
feeling before her life had been—as others put it—derailed?

So she would return to this corner every so often as if it were her
home away from home. Each time, very late, she would climb the fence.
And then, very early, after watching to make sure the street was empty,
she would climb back over. One morning, Saga nearly fell onto a jogger
coming around the corner, but he merely swerved into the street, too
preoccupied with his exertions to care about where she had come from.

When it was warm, she might allow herself to stay here two nights in
a row. If she chose a Sunday, she could even sleep just a little bit late,
because the restaurant was closed on Mondays. Now and then, when
she was in the neighborhood putting up flyers for Stan, she'd spy on the
restaurant's life by day. Three café tables filled the little patio where she
slept, all occupied on pleasant days by stylish-looking diners. It made
her laugh out loud. The thought had crossed her mind, They are eating
in my bed! Goldilocks. She was a real-life Goldilocks, but older and far
more sly. Sly: that's what she was on those daring nights.

In her life with David—a life that, mercifully, she thought less and less
about—she had loved to dance. David had belonged to a Morris dancing
troop, and she had enjoyed watching him leap about with bells on
his knees (though the first few times, she had laughed so hard she cried).
But together, they had dressed up and gone to modest charity balls
(often for literacy causes, through David's library job) just so they could
dance. They'd even learned how to waltz. She remembered taking the
lessons but did not remember how to waltz.

They had played tennis. Neither played especially well, but they'd
had long, graceful rallies every so often. She remembered that, too, the
sweet give and take, the crisp hollow smack of the ball. When it was
warm, that was what they'd done with their Saturday mornings.

Now she lived what she thought of as the Life After. This life had its
own pleasures, not all of them different, but it was a life as meek as
milk, and in the midst of it this was her one defiant thing, sleeping outside
in a quite unlikely place where no one would have guessed to find
her. Sometimes she even thought of animals asleep in a zoo, in their
make-believe jungles and savannahs, meticulously cared for by day but,
sleeping at night, wild as could be in their dreams, watched by the silent,
all-seeing, all-forgiving moon.

ON MOST DAYS, GREENIE ARRIVED AT WORK
between six and
seven. George rose early by nature, just like his mother, so he
would go with her, taking along his favorite books or toys. They drove
down a sluice of narrow curving lanes, between walls draped in blossoming
vines, through the center of town and out again, up to the Governor's
Mansion. Greenie thought of it as a
ranchion.
Built on one level
only, a trainlike clustering of vast boxy rooms, it sprawled across a hill
overlooking the Rio Grande Valley.

George loved switching on the battery of lights in the kitchen and
later, if there was baking or roasting to be done, helping Greenie set the
oven dials. "I'm learning my hundreds!" he liked to proclaim to anyone
new he might meet.

They would play tapes and sing along together—Woody Guthrie and
Pete Seeger had joined Greenie's repertoire now—but sometimes George
would veto the music. Sometimes he had important things to tell his
mother while she kneaded dough, chopped vegetables, or mixed a marinade.
She had a sous chef and, when she needed them, other assistants,
but she still preferred to start her day working alone—or alone with her
son, even when it was trying.

"Diego's mom says Mr. McCrae made a really big mistake," he said to
Greenie that morning. "They put those fires on purpose, she said. Isn't
that pretty stupid to do?" He sat on a tall stool, spinning around, braking
himself with the counter, reversing direction. The stool creaked;
Greenie reminded herself to ask Mary Bliss for household oil.

"Don't pinch your fingers," she said. "You know, George, this doesn't
sound like it makes sense, but sometimes you have to light small fires to
stop bigger fires from starting. Or spreading."

George stopped spinning and looked at her as if she were nuts.

"It's like this," said Greenie as she pulled three bowls from a cupboard.
"You've seen how there are not just woods here but also fields,
big spaces with lots of smaller bushes, right?"

"No."

"Well, there are, and when the bushes and the dry grasses in the fields
and the canyons catch on fire, they can spread the fire to the forest, to
the bigger trees, much faster. So if you can get rid of the bushes by burning
them up first, with the firefighters watching, then you can . . . you
can stop them from spreading fire when no one's watching." She was
glad this explanation had no adult witnesses. It did not sound logical
and probably wasn't entirely accurate.

"So why don't they just chop the bushes
down
?"

"Good question. I guess it takes too long to do that. Burning's faster."

"But it didn't work because it made the fire bigger. So it was a big
mistake. Like Diego's mom said."

Greenie smiled at George. "Yes, I suppose she's right. But don't tell
that to Ray. A lot of people have already told him so—and it wasn't his
decision."

"But he's the boss of Mexico."

"New Mexico. He's the governor, which is kind of like the boss, but
he has a lot of helpers who decide things, too."

"Well, the helpers are big mistakers too."

She thought about trying to explain that the fires were the work of
the National Park Service, but she said, "Yes, George, you're right. And
they're sorry, and they're trying to fix it." Conversations with George
were often circular, and Greenie found them exhausting, but she envied
him his pure, uncluttered logic.

At seven-thirty, Consuelo arrived to pick up George. Consuelo Chu
was a large, grandmotherly woman who was married to Mike Chu,
Ray's head gardener. Consuelo's three children were in their early twenties,
and she liked to say that George was her "practice grandchild." On
weekday mornings, she took him to a playgroup in Tesuque, where the
children did more than occupy themselves with blocks and books. They
made collages from leaves and colored sand they collected themselves,
played soccer, and paddled about in a tall round pool. George's skin had
taken on a pale brown hue that made him look healthier and older than
he had in their city life. A dozen boys, all around George's age, were also
driven out from the city, but he had attached himself with fierce monogamous
loyalty to Diego, an older boy who hung around because his
mother and aunts ran the group. Diego's father worked at a ranch next
door, where sometimes the children were allowed to ride a pony.

In the afternoons, Consuelo would retrieve George and take him with
her on errands, buy him a sweet, and bring him back to the governor's
kitchen for lemonade or milk. On the nights when Greenie had to stay
late, to oversee a formal dinner, Consuelo would put George to bed and
wait for Greenie to return.

"Her name is like a sneeze," George had said the day he met Consuelo,
almost as soon as she was out the door. "Oh say oh
choo
!"

Greenie had not laughed so hard in months. "Consuelo, honey. It
means 'comfort' in Spanish. Lots of people have Spanish names here."

"Do I have a Spanish name?"

"George in Spanish is Jorge," said Greenie.

"Hor-hay! Hor-hay! Hor-hay!" chanted George. "Like horses eat
hay. That is so weird. Horse-hay. I like 'George' better."

Sometimes spending an evening or a Saturday with George felt like
hanging around with a talk show host while he tried out new jokes—
most of which were doomed to be tossed. After hours of his ingenuous
quips, Greenie would long for Alan's company, for the leavening of
adult intelligence. But rarely did she give in and call him. She wanted
Alan to stew, to miss her, to understand what he had given up—and to
see his way to joining them. Most therapists took off the whole month
of August; why didn't he come for August? All right, he'd said, he would
come for three weeks—but for part of that time he would take George
to see the Grand Canyon. Just George.

Greenie had not thought about how much she would miss being close
to her New York friends, even those with whom she had communed
almost exclusively by phone. Speaking on the phone across two time
zones and several ecosystems was not the same as speaking on the phone
when you could walk out the door into the same stale humid air, with
the same ruddy starless sky above your heads, the same sticky frost-warped
streets beneath your feet. And the time difference made it tricky.
She spoke more now to her single friends—to her surprise, Walter most
of all—than she did to her married friends with children.

Walter was in a state of proud anxiety, readying his apartment for the
arrival of a grown nephew from California. "An apprentice!" he told
Greenie. "I'm going to be like some Old World mentor, like those guys
who ran guilds in the Renaissance. Ergo, I am shelving pleasures of the
flesh—of which I must confess there have not been many—and I am
fluffing up my father-hen feathers. Nesting!" He told her that Alan had
been to the restaurant a few times since she'd left. "Lugubrious personified,"
he said. "And he always orders dessert. If he can't have you, at
least he can have your creations."

"But he
can
have me, Walter."

"No, my dear, I don't believe he can."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean that you refuse to see exactly what you've done. And it's a
good thing you've done, in my opinion. You've cut the line, you've chosen
freedom. I may live to regret saying this, but he is not worthy of you.
He is a perfectly okay guy, but he is a moper and an emotional tortoise.
Well, I have said
way
too much."

"Oh Walter, I know he looks that way now—"

"Honey, he will look that way till the cows come home unless something
pretty heavy falls on his head and rearranges his brain."

"Your proverbial piano, Walter?"

"The very one, my dear!"

In a strange way, Walter and Ray began to seem increasingly similar:
both loud and unabashed, both taking on the role of a second father
that Greenie was sure she had never implied she wanted. Alan, meanwhile,
seemed to have stepped back into the shadows. She wanted to
believe that his distance was a sign of respect and contemplation, but
unless he could tell her so, she had no way of knowing.

So Greenie's primary dose of face-to-face adult intelligence came at
about the time when Consuelo picked up George from the kitchen. That
was when Ray showed up.

The governor rose—without an alarm clock, he boasted—at dawn.
According to Mary Bliss, he began each day with a call to his ranch
manager, to check on his herd. Then he attended to e-mail, ate a hardboiled
egg, and went for a run. He came home, took a shower, and met
with his press secretary. He drank coffee and scanned the news as represented
in the
New York Times,
the
Christian Science Monitor,
the
New
Mexican,
and the
Albuquerque Tribune.
Then he had breakfast in the
kitchen with Greenie.

He came in that morning just after Consuelo and George had left.

"Damn but that kid of yours is smart. And damn if he isn't an insolent
puppy." Ray went straight to the household refrigerator, the one
where Greenie kept what she thought of as food-in-progress. "I say, 'Hi
pardner, how ya doin'?' and the little guy looks me straight in the eye
and goes, 'Mr. McCrae, fire does not beat fire. Water beats fire. Mom
says you're sorry, but sorry's not always enough.' " Ray laughed loudly.
"I take that on a might-as-well-be-empty stomach, I do."

"I'm sorry," said Greenie. "He's asked about the fires. I'm not very
good at explaining."

"Hell, nobody's any too good at explaining any of it now. And listen
to the man: Sorry's not always enough. As the voters may feel bound to
tell me come election time. Try saying the words
prescribed burn
to a
wall of TV cameras. Pretty damn lame as justification for burning down
two hundred houses. 'Got a light?' I heard one reporter say to another,
and you should've heard the yukkin' it up that spread through the
room." He looked at the clock over the sink. "So what did we have for
dinner last night? Seems about a week ago."

This was his morning ritual: he opened the fridge and rummaged
through the remnants of whatever Greenie had made for dinner the
night before, laid various items on the counter, and helped himself. He
loved cold soufflé, cold rice, cold potatoes, cold stew, cold soup, even
cold meat in a cream sauce that had congealed. Along with two slices of
whole wheat toast, he often ate these foods straight from their storage
containers, washing them down with a glass of milk. Unless he had an
early meeting, this was his breakfast of choice.

"Lamb chops! Ratatouille! Ooh, and . . . can I have whatever's in this
thingamawhosit, or is it something you're saving for later? Smells
dandy." He held up a plastic tub filled with something brown.

"That's leftover consommé. I used it in the sauce for the lamb. Help
yourself." Greenie winced as he spread the cold meat jelly on his toast.

Once he had composed his peculiar breakfast, Ray would take it to a
corner counter, away from Greenie's workspace. While he ate, he talked:
weather, movies, Greenie's history or even his own. Greenie went about
her work, letting him steer the conversation.

That morning, he said, "So before that little guy was born—Mr. Hose
Is Mightier Than the Torch—did you have a lot of sonograms, that
amnio-whadyacallit?"

"I did have a lot of sonograms, yes," said Greenie. "As a matter of
fact."

"And why was that?"

"If you want the gruesome details, they thought for a few months
that part of my placenta might be detached. It was amazing—I mean,
seeing him so much before he was born. It's like we got to know George
a little, spy on what he was going to be like before he was even born. So
amazing."

"Must be. And you saw his little heart beat?"

Greenie turned around to look at Ray. She never knew what he
would bring up. Ray's press secretary was pregnant; wouldn't it be just
like Ray to coax her through fears of early tests, as patronizing as he
was loving. "They had just improved the technology so we could see
it—or maybe hear it, I can't remember which—at six weeks. I'd known I
was pregnant for less than two. It was amazing. Terrifying."

When he said nothing in reply, Greenie turned around again. She had
finished dicing leeks and scooped them into a colander. She carried it to
the sink on Ray's side of the kitchen.

Ray set down the remnant of a lamb chop. "Greenie, you're prochoice.
I'd bet fifty head of my cattle, including Wally, my best bull. I
would."

She laughed and turned on the tap. "You're not getting me into this
argument, Ray."

"Oh honey, yes I am."

"Burnt lunch would not impress your Water Boys."

"Oh let 'em eat silage. They're the least of my worries these days. It's
the Fire Crew got my chaps all rucked up."

Greenie sprayed the leeks with cold water. She set the colander on the
drainboard. A thin layer of sand remained in the sink; spraying again,
she rinsed it down the drain.

"Okay, Miss Coolhead Duquette. Here's what." He held out a folded
copy of that day's
New York Times.
On the front page, she saw headlines
about Israeli politics, national unemployment figures, and accusations
aimed at her old city's child welfare agency. Nothing about the fires
in New Mexico or anything else of local interest. To the rest of the country,
the fires were old and distant news.

"What's what?" she said.

"You tell me how we are all so hot and bothered, so outraged, as well
we should be, when a child suffers torture at the hands of its parents,
but we defend the right to say to a kid in your belly who's already got a
thumping heart—who's got, according to
you,
a personality brewing—
'Sorry, bub, you're not wanted out here, so we're as good as turning you
out with the compost. You'll make a fine shrub, you will.' You're smart,
Greenie. You defend that logic. Convert me."