23

Enter the water! Swim away!

Liz March dreams chaotic dreams. The women – they are all women in her dreams, although her class of wannabe flight attendants was one-third men – the women are dressed in mock uniforms, suits, suits, suits: gray and navy, with scarves at their throats in intricate knots they learned from a booklet given away at Nordstrom’s. Enter the water! Swim away! The shouts echo, funhouse effect. Her heart hammers, she knows that she is dreaming, yet she struggles to swim upward and out of the dream, to bed, to the frosty summer sheets, the birds atwitter out the open window, Neil’s shower needling the suburban quiet. During training Liz was not embarrassed to shout with gusto. She had been a leader. Where did she come by all that moxie, all that Amazonian certainty?

Now she is a woman who can’t find the words to break up with a man she doe not love. Can’t find them, as if she possessed the words once and did not tend to them, did not realize how much she would need them. She is a woman who has fallen in love with a child not her own. Fallen the way you fall for children. They worm their way in.  

She is a woman who thinks, We have made remarkable progress. We. Meaning women. FS 101 won’t fade away. Feminist Studies 101. Facts lodge in her brain. An estimated 50,000 women are trafficked into the United States every year to serve as sex slaves. She is a woman whose chief fantasy is sex slave.

We have made remarkable progress, but the work remains. Out there and in here.

Women like Liz still wear bikini briefs that are printed with the words, I do BAD things. There were so many jokes about the cockpit. As if they were the first wannabe attendants who thought of that.

Yesterday she told her therapist that she intends to take a vacation from therapy. That she is looking forward to something: a road trip in summer, ear-splitting music and a little junk food, a Moon Pie or two, that vast sky over the piney woods when you can sense that the lake is there even though it’s not visible yet, navy blue, crystalline from afar.

Lake Michigan. A gorgeous cleft. Sailboats like downy feathers.

Her heart resounds normally against the full body pillow left there by Tommy’s mother and unashamedly adopted by her. She feels right about taking Tommy. His best friend has gone to his grandparents in Wisconsin for the summer; he’s at loose ends. She and Tommy will go on with their quest for the perfect cloud. For a few days. A few free days. A few days away from the jets sculling above O’Hare. A few days: it’s on the tip of her tongue.   

Neil sits beside her on the bed. On his way out. One hand on her shoulder, jiggling his keys with the other. It’s the first day of summer school, the very last chance for Liz to tell him that she plans to pack up Tommy and drive to the farm today.

She tried to leave – alone – right after Emma’s birthday. She said, “I feel like I made a mistake. I don’t belong here.” Rehearsal she practiced with her therapist, except in the therapist’s office she said, assertively, “I made a mistake,” not “I feel like I made a mistake.”

Neil withdrew, pouted. He poured himself a drink and dimmed the lamps. She perched on the sofa arm, as if prepared to dash out of the townhouse. He calculatedly sat down on the sofa, patted the place beside him, and when she sat down, he laid his head in her lap. He said, “Liz, honey. I don’t want to lose you. What can I do?” And, “Don’t you think we’ve been through enough loss?”

Liz goes stupidly weak where it counts when he says honey. Tommy was at a movie and due to be dropped off any minute. Neil kissed her palm, and inside her elbow. She moaned. They went into their bedroom and jammed a chair back under the doorknob – Tommy has been known to pick the lock with a library card – and she threw up her skirt and he peeled her panties down and what they did was satisfying in its brevity.

It’s not about love. But she still likes it.

She arches her bottom and wiggles, but Neil does not go for sex in the AM and once he has groomed himself for work, he won’t want to do it again.

“There’s a meeting,” Neil says, “After my classes.”

“I – we – were thinking of going somewhere today anyway.”

“Where?”

“Out to my Dad’s place. In the country.”

 “It’s a long way.”

 “Not quite three hours.”

 “So you’ll be back late?”

 “I guess so.”

“You guess so.” Neil is whispering and his voice when he whispers is like what Liz calls lobotomy music, New Age fluff that can sooth all inner beasts. His whisper is one of the sticking points. He checks his watch.

“Got to go,” Liz says, beating him to it.

She hears the splat of the fridge door after he’s picked out a yogurt shake he’ll drink in the car, the garage door sliding haltingly open, his tires whisking on concrete, good morning tossed out the car window to the neighbor who is, she steels herself for it, about to start up his lawn mower.

If only she had a dog that would lie contentedly on the bed, warm body, loyal, adoring. Yesterday – and the day before – Tommy and she stopped by the animal shelter and filled out the forms expressing intent to adopt a puppy and they were allowed to go into the glass booth and play with abandoned puppies of their choice – puppies who had no idea yet that they were abandoned, plump, innocent puppies, mongrels and mutts. Part this or that. They had agreed ahead of time to fabricate a story on the forms. They pretended to be aunt and nephew. On the way out of the caterwauling shelter – the concrete block building smelling of kibbles and soiled cat litter and Lysol – Tommy play-punched her shoulder and said, “That was fun, Lizard. I want a dog.”

She pulls on a black T-shirt, takes her ledger and a pen from the bedside drawer. Her accounts are messy and she needs to catch up. Day by day, to keep the wolf of financial chaos and ruin from the door, she enters every penny spent. The phone bring-brings and she hesitates, thinking fucking telemarketer, but she picks up, finally, and it is Joe.

Without preamble, he says, “I’m going to sell the Skylark.”

“You sound so convinced.”

“The Skylark makes me think about the past. I don’t want to do that. I want a pickup. Something to haul manure and mulch.”

“How’s Ems? Have you talked to her?”

“She’s having a good time. She’s going on.”

“Going on?” That seems obvious – we are always going on, with or without loved ones, on to trouble, floods and fires, the onward march. People do go on. Enter the water! Swim away!

 “To Locarno. You haven’t heard from her?”

“No biggie.” What a relief it’s been – not being required to explain herself to Ems. She’s taking a little break, that’s all, a little break from her mother. From the pressure to do something with her Comm degree. From being the liar, house on fire.

“I’ve been thinking about blueberries, Liz. Who would have thought? Goddamn blueberries are getting to me.” He takes a deep breath. “I want to white-wash that barn.”

Whew. For Joe, this is positively long-winded. “What about the shop, Dad? What about – your life?”

“Here’s a plus-feature you’ll approve of. I don’t need that high-tech lamp you tried to get me to buy. There’s more light out here.”

“Tommy’s coming, too.”

“Fine, fine. Benny’s talking about coming out. With his sister.”

The thought of Benny and me makes her hesitate. It’s beginning to sound like a lot of face time. “Are you all right?”

 “I’m good.” Joe laughs.

Liz has not heard that rueful laugh in years.

They pack for a week. She writes a note for Neil, tucks it under a candlestick. We’ll stay overnight if that’s all right. Call me if you want to talk.  – Liz

No love, no hearts. No sweetie-pies.

 

           

The long driveway has a bright green grassy hump down the middle and pulverized gravel in the ruts; she eases down the drive, fearful that the hump might damage the underside of her car.

”Will Sophie be there?”

Liz said, “I hope not.” She turns the A/C off and rolls her window down. “I didn’t mean that. Mean Minnie said that.”

Tommy said “Lizard. Sophie must feel bad.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“She’s your sister.”

“As you would say: Duh.”

Evergreen trees sway in the breeze. Ditto, tall magenta thistles.

“Can we buy an inner tube? Does he have cable?”

A raccoon waddles across the drive; Peggy Lee streaks in front of the car and into a field of khaki-colored papery weeds. Joe has utopionized the place, but disorder is about to take over; perhaps it already has. Bits of trash are caught in the wire fence; she would have to fish that out today. And then they arrive, in the gravelly lot beside the crooked house, and a golden retriever spurts out of the barn behind the house, out of the shade into sunlight, and Tommy yells, “A dog! There’s a dog here!” He punches the seat belt buckle and lunges for the door handle. Liz has to screech, “Wait, goddamnit.” He presses his nose against the window.

What he does not notice is the red-headed man in the buff. He forks some earthy substance – she’s not sure what – onto a garden plot. He turns and slips efficiently into a long plaid shirt, but not before she spies the nimbus of coppery pubic hair, his muscular thighs. Damon Ray Dillon. Hired hand. She knows the highlights of his story, crash-course given her by Joe.

When she has parked, Tommy runs to the quiveringly happy retriever. It’s touching how child-like Tommy seems around dogs. He has never had a pet. And now he does. For they will stay, somehow she knows this, her intuition is kicking in, smoking, and she declares inwardly, We will be here a while. Perhaps it is the land of milk and honey, after all, Erewhon. Insects whir and buzz. Bees and bluebottles. Hornets and ladybirds. Cicadas. Black-eyed Susans pitch up against a free-standing wrought-iron gate. Blue skies incline to the woods, the orchard, the fields, at perfect angles. She gets out and leans back into the car and rummages in a tote bag for a tube of sunscreen. She lobs it nonchalantly to Damon Ray Dillon.

 

 

24

 

Retired science teacher Ada Richman called herself a wise crone back then, in Locarno, in the seventies. Ada had known all about the school, its systems, and how to circumnavigate them. She provided hiking maps, the loan of a Raleigh 3-speed, and advice on avoiding pregnancy. Now she sits upstairs in the youth hostel owned by her grandson, in an elephantine overstuffed chair, a stick figure the size of a twelve-year-old, brittle, her snowy hair in a bob, her spectacle frames pink plastic. “I still have my eyesight,” she says to Emma, “but I listen to books on tape.” Her voice creaks. She directs Emma into the pared-down guest room, with its chaste Swiss single bed, and Oh, Emma is chaste. She is sorry to say that in Glendalough she drank herself tipsy, talked too much,  and George deposited her back at her bedroom door and touched her hair, tucked it behind her ear. That was it. Later she thought: he didn’t want to take advantage of a woman who’d been drinking.  Now Ada directs her into the kitchenette, where Emma mixes drinks – Ada loves a sherry hot toddy in a teacup scattered with alpine flowers.

“Do you still make those long lists?”

Emma says, “I ought to.”  A list might be called for, those journal entries, forays into selfhood.  

Within silky wrinkles, Ada’s eyes reach out voraciously. “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”

Emma has come with questions, the way you might seek out a psychic or astrologer. “Sophie, of course.”

“It’s not only that,” Ada quavers.

On the first floor of the hostel, young people make a merry hum, eating noodles and writing postcards at pine tables. The hum travels up the wooden steps to the dormered salon, where she and Ada sip their toddies and pick at delicate sandwiches. The whistle of the evening birds in the tree beyond the open window is somehow dispiriting to Emma. Too much darkness about to descend.  For some reason, she remembers that moment when she was smoking on the catwalk and Joe knelt at his tomato patch. Right after Chanti died. She thought, So this is it. This is the way your life will be.

Ada wants to know about Joe. And when Emma warily tells her – how Joe seems to have lost whatever joie de vivre he once had – Ada frowns, her powdery face creased like a drawstring purse.   

“Joe was always sad,” Ada says. “Like a birthmark. I’m more concerned about you. You’re worried because you haven’t talked to everyone at home. That’s not traveling, Emma. Traveling requires letting go of all that. It will change you if you let it.” She set her teacup down too hard; it trembled in the saucer.  “Can’t you be married and have adventures?”

“It’s hard,” Emma says meekly. “That depends.” Which is to say, That depends on what sort of adventure you want. Sensual gamble in a near-stranger’s bed? Breaking trail on a mountain? Quitting a job that has served you well for thirty-two years?

All those winter evenings when she pored over guidebooks and maps, she never expected to feel this small and defeated. The burst of goodwill she felt with George in Glendalough shrinks to a memory the size of a postage stamp.

She wants to protest – Joe wasn’t troubled! He loved that life! As if to ameliorate her scolding, Ada pats Emma’s hand and says, “Stop thinking about everyone at home. Find another teacher, Emma. It’s hard to always be the teacher, isn’t it? Sometimes you want to be the pupil.”

Emma changes the subject, sort of. She tells Ada Richman about visiting Trinity College, the Book of Kells. She can’t help but say, “I missed Joe then.” With a horseshoe-shaped pillow around her neck, Ada, wise woman on Emma’s hero’s journey, falls precipitously into a doze, snoring.

Not ready for sherry-laced sleep, not ready to lie abed cataloguing troubles, Emma decides to go downstairs among the young people and check her e-mail. Tiff writes from a public library in a town near Yoho National Park:

I always love love at the start, Emma.

Russ is sweet. He makes me feel like Botticelli’s Venus.

We won’t get into all the violence that preceded her birth.

We’ll talk soon. Hugs, Tiff

 

And Zubin writes, headmaster at their old school. Before she left home she had written him an upbeat note about Joe’s defection.

Let me know when to expect you

and I’ll meet your train. With bells on. Cheers -- Zubin

 

 

25

With bells on.

She wants that. Someone to meet her train. With bells on.

The narrow-gauge Swiss train winds around the mountains as if it were ornament flung there by a vexed goddess, a vertiginous ride.  She shares the car with three giggling portly German women. They pass around a thermos cup and sing drinking songs.

If you write novels, you need geography. “No prose is written out of place,” a colleague of mine posits in an essay for the Blackwell Companion to American Fiction.  When I proposed this novel to my (then) editor, I was manic with geographical possibilities: Emma would travel to Poland, to Amsterdam, to the Cuban Jazz Festival. She would fall in love and she and her lover would be like that friend of mine on the Oregon coast, whose lover made a killing in the stock market in the eighties, robust with disposable income, good health, and free to travel. I was on sabbatical. I was ostensibly free.

But Benny needed me. After Chanti died, Benny sank into a well of despair. If you are the loved one of someone depressed, there is a delicate balance to be struck, a balance I’m almost always on the verge of tipping too far one way or the other. When I go away – and I’m away right now, back in Dowdyville – I never turn my cell phone off, for fear he won’t be able to reach me. He likes to know I’m reachable. But when I’m gone, he likes that, too. His dignity remains intact. (It’s like crying when you live alone – there’s no one to ask you why and you can purge and purge and come up smiling. See Outtakes for a list of all the advantages of living alone.) Benny walks the winter Chicago streets, putters in his studio, drives out to the farm to be with Joe – all without me. “No kid gloves” has become his watchword. Sometimes he can’t stop the tears when he says it.

To be near Benny that summer, I wrote a draft living in a monastic room overlooking Ashland Avenue. I took my breakfast with the hospitable friars in the institutional dining room, with its thin paper napkins and condiments on a rubber wheel in the center of each table. It was fine. When a journalist asked Ray Carver whether he needed a particular place to write well, Carver said, “Wherever I am is fine.”

I’d kept detailed notebooks in Ireland and Switzerland and England, trips I took with husband #2. The one who died before his time, run over by a bread truck as he waited for me on his bicycle outside a patisserie in Victoria.  We’d gone to Vancouver Island to watch whales. Here’s part of a poem I wrote about us: 

You stroll and kiss around

the alleys in the leaf and cork of spring.

You in your harem pants,

he in paisley suspenders,

his white shirt pearly,

bloused beautifully in the moonlight,

his hand on your silk waist –

there is no other word for what he does but possession.

Dreams of your old souls

sing out romance like an old radio.

 

The poem was pasted into the moleskin notebook from our trip to Switzerland.  I felt lucky to have kept detailed notes. But reading the notes could bring on sadness when I least needed that.  I had to separate myself from what had happened to him, to us, to make use of the place details. With writing, in the best of times, you cook up your sorrow into a blues song.

I still daydream about Cuba, wearing tropical sundresses and falling for a conga drummer; I still peruse the website for the jazz festival in Havana; I still talk to Steve and Ewa Yarbrough about the jazz clubs in Krakow, where they summer.  Jazz was once integral to this idea, but that has passed away now. All things seem possible at the start of a novel; I love the flush of that. The glow, the choices. It’s like love. Now I think, When Benny is better, when this book is finished – the future still means something to me, it does. Let the good times roll. 

We’re on that Swiss train. With Emma. It’s a mostly sunny day. Out the sparkling windows, the Italian mountains near Domodossola are greenly dragon-like and soothing, coming from Geneva and its prim gray stone fortresses, its straight-laced manners. Ada Richman and her scolding. Her all-night snoring.

Far below, light on the river Toce shines like silver. To arrive at the Swiss villages along Lago Maggiore the train passes through Italy. Emma feels free to love the run-down train stations now that Joe is not there to complain that things never work right in Italy.

In the next valley, mountain weather blows up. Mountains and trees, train tracks and stucco homes, are layered in too much gray rain, like a painting gone wrong, about to be covered with gesso for a new start. What happened to the blaze of sunlight she was to arrive in? The German women sharing her car have grown quiet, their silliness having run its course. What she would give to have Joe squeeze her hand. She resolves to telephone him – she’ll describe the school. The town. And she’ll ask him about his strawberries, his blueberries. She wants to hear his voice.

In spite of the rain, it’s hot when she steps down into the train station. 

Zubin appears, a pumice-colored nylon rain coat belling out behind him. His eyes light up when he recognizes her. She sets her luggage down. People scurry around them, a girl dragging a rag doll in a pinafore, backpackers. There is the determined metallic whoosh of umbrellas opening. Timidly, he kisses her cheeks: “Buona sera, buona sera.” His warm clean-shaven cheek rubs against hers.

 “Joe sends his best,” she fabricates. 

“Why didn’t he come with, Emma? I want the whole truth.”

“Sophie needed one of us to stay.” In a rush, she says, “I still wonder if I should go back, for her. But with Joe, it’s about this property, too. Acreage he inherited. A farm and strawberries. Strawberries and light. He wants more light.”

He holds both of her hands through this overzealous tweedle. He says, “What about the light of Emma? No hiding that.” Then he assumes the burden of the luggage and leads Emma to his van, a school vehicle.

Nearby, under the stone colonnade of the train station, the backpackers are helping each other drape plastic over their packs, ducking from the rain that slices rudely, horizontally, under the stone colonnade. Emma darts into the passenger seat. She flings back the hood of her rain jacket. After a minute she realizes that Zubin is speaking to the backpackers. He opens the driver’s door and says, “Let’s give these kids a ride, all right? It’s sopping out.”

“Of course,” Emma says.

They shove their backpacks into the cargo space and they hop into the back seat. Laughing. Happy to be dry. They are an American couple, from Vermont. Undergrads at Middlebury. Their knees and arms and faces as brown as walnut shells from backpacking all month. They chatter with Zubin. They have been to Zermatt, to the climbers’ cemetery, to the beer garden that seems to hang precipitously above the valley. They extol the virtues of the apple strudel, the view of the Matterhorn. Zubin has a certain ease, drawing them out. That must come from working with teenagers all his life. The rain is sloppy, voluptuous. Their hostel isn’t far.

Before they get out, he says, “We’re right up the mountain. School of the Lake. If you need anything.”

School of the Lake.  Her third job. 1972. With Joe March in his ceramics studio, his hands ghostly white with clay and slip. He loved every little thing she did. He had been charmed.

The boy and the girl – they are that young, perhaps nineteen – say, “Thank you, grazie, thank you! Ciao!”

 Emma and Zubin wend their way up the mountain to the school. “Such enthusiasm,” he says. “Weren’t they wonderful?”

“Yes. Their voices were musical.” She misses her girls.

“It’s almost dark.” Zubin pats her hand twice – gently – and says, “We could have a drink and then go around the corner for dinner later. The ristorantes near the school have improved since your time. Or – if you’d rather rest?”

Emma says, “We used to say, ‘There’s plenty of time to rest when you die.’” And then she’s cut to the quick. Sorry, sorry. For the word die is no joking matter.

“That’s the Emma of old,” Zubin says. Tallowy light from the ristorantes lashes through the rain. At the crest of the road, the school looks the same. A whitewashed wall, a wrought iron gate that he has left open, a granite piazza within. The big copper beech. Around the perimeter, rhododendrons break apart in the rain like tissue blossoms. She has imagined this moment for a long time: the return to herself as a young woman. Zubin pulls the van to the side door of the headmaster’s house. 

“We also used to say,” Zubin grins, and his grin seems shy to her, “Anything worth doing is worth doing in excess.” 

 They stand fumbling on the porch in the rain under a lamp and then he has unlocked the door and whisked her inside to the dry hall that smells like wood and wallpaper and books and velvet drapes steeped in lemon scent or apple. He smokes a pipe. The smell is apple-scented tobacco. Like an aftershave. Emma hangs her rain jacket on a brass hook, a chickadee. Her heels knock on the floor. She glances into a full-length mirror and her hair curls in fine tendrils, her cheeks are rosy. She’s wearing her favorite shade of blue.

He hangs up his coat and says, “Now we have a decision to make. I know you wanted to stay in Old Larch, in your room. It’s all made up. But that was before --? It’s just that it might feel rather empty over there without Joe. Without the students.”

Firmly, Emma says, “I want to stay in Old Larch.”

 “I understand.” He clears his throat. “A drink first, though? Up here, this way,” Zubin says, shaking his hair – it is his glory; he must be proud of it. He leads her up a short staircase, deeper into the house than she has ever been. 

Emma goes into the powder room adjacent to the study and softly shuts the door. It is a room free of a woman’s touch. Dark walls, dark hand towels. Above the light switch hangs a bright orange serigraph of a buffalo, remnant of his youth in Wyoming; he went to Harvard on a scholarship in the sixties. But his life has been here for decades, here and England, where his ex and daughter live. A sigh later, she washes up, decides against re-braiding her hair – she likes its disarray – and when she hears the music, Miles Davis, she goes to the unexpected pleasure, now, of traveling alone.

The study contains a maple desk, a leather sofa (and Emma is appalled by leather furniture no matter how many times she tells herself that the animals were not killed for the leather, and in any case, she still wears leather shoes), pictures of his daughter Bert in theater costumes, two wingback chairs upholstered in a bookish print.

Zubin wears linen slacks and a white dress shirt and tie. The tie printed with scenes of London. When he notices her checking out the tie, he loosens it and says, “Bert – she gave me this. In better times.” He rubs his hands together, gives her an inquisitive look. There’s something almost feral in his body language, as if he’s not accustomed to having a woman in the room. “What shall we drink?”

“What do you have?”

He opens the low door of a maple cabinet, Art-Deco antique, the drawer pulls half moons of chrome, reminiscent of sequined veils on black hats, cigarette holders. Reminiscent of black-and-white movies she would watch on the Late Show with her mother after they moved to Chicago. (Lonely times, but Emma definitely does not want to make that connection.) Transported, she is the outsider observing herself, imagining the totems that will, in future, conjure this moment. Art-Deco half-moons. His coat in the wind. The scent of pipe tobacco. 

They settle on a liqueur from Greece. “A gift from one of our parents.”

Emma sits in a wingback chair before unlit gas logs. Books and back issues of the TLS are stacked on a stout coffee table. She approves of his eclectic reading matter. A book about poker players’ luck, a biography of Lillian Hellman. Into Thin Air.

“We were almost children back then, weren’t we? And now, I’m an elder sage. Oh, I pause before carefully putting on my glasses when I speak to the students at assembly. I hope I give them something. Something valuable. It’s hard being a young person now. Don’t you think?” Almost as an aside, he says, “I still enjoy teaching. I teach one section of Geography.” He hands her a glass. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” Emma says.

Zubin takes the wingback opposite her. He unties his cap-toes, slips them off, and invites Emma to get comfy. She has worn her hiking boots to keep from packing them and she unties the double bows and sets aside the stiff hot boots.

She has wanted companionship.

And now she has it.