At paradise gate, p.21
At Paradise Gate, page 21
“I think you’ll be okay. This isn’t like before, is it?”
He shook his head, but hopelessly, she thought, as if it’s not being like before was another bad sign.
“I’m going to call the doctor, then an ambulance.”
He shook his head again.
“Yes! It’ll be much better!”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital again.”
“Now you’re making me mad! They’ve got equipment there and people who know what to do!”
He breathed, said nothing.
“Do you want to—” But she stopped herself. Her fear of the very word was frantic.
Still Ike did not speak.
Anna sat down beside him on the bed. Suddenly she was more curious than afraid. Once, when she was alone in the mountains back of the ranch, a rock under her left foot had given way and plummeted down a little ravine, twenty-five feet, nothing, but enough to kill her, as she realized even while shifting her weight, dropping to the right. Another time, in the car, someone had crossed into their lane. Only Ike’s reflexive turn onto the shoulder saved them, and even so, the other car, out of control, fishtailed, spun, and skimmed the air off Ike’s door. She had seen a tornado, been followed in the street, stumbled in front of an oncoming bus. Each time, the light of her own mind seemed marvelously bright, seemed to slam hugely into the event, the long-awaited event, and now here she was. Ike too. A hammer had fallen to the floor beside him when workmen were making repairs in the rafters at the printshop. Abel had tried to push him out of a hayloft window when they were kids. Diving once, he had seen the board with his open eyes millimeters from his face. The high board. He had had a heart attack, gone into surgery. Here he was. She stood up, arranged his covers. “Can I make you more comfortable, Daddy?”
He shook his head. He said, “Talk.”
Anna cleared her throat. She began, “I saw Esther Paully today. She seems better. Remember I told you about her falling on the ice up the street by Harmon’s. Remember? It’s a sin the way that boy of theirs gives the snow a lick and a promise all the time and never really clears the walk. You’ve got to be a tightrope walker . . .” She paused and took a deep breath. What had they talked about in fifty-two years? “Christine—” Now, there was a tightrope. “I think I’ll make a couple of sweaters for the twins. It’s late in the season, but Helen saw a darling pattern, and I could finish two for their birthday. It’s funny. You don’t think we loved them less than Christine, do you? They were so rambunctious, but we always thought they were as cute as can be, don’t you think? You had them out there throwing balls and batting . . . they got into stuff all the time . . . It is natural to get mad, don’t you think? Claire never thought . . .”
Ike groaned, tightened his lips. He seemed uncomfortable but also angry, and in the midst of everything, a gloriously familiar annoyance overtook her. “I never get mad,” she had often said to him. “It’s you that always makes me mad!” Now she was mad! With resentful luxury, she let her gaze drift over his angular and anxious form, let herself think that he was about to burst out, impatient, full of vexation and complaint. She had been floundering, frightened, but now she was irritated. She almost smiled. “Daddy!” she said, “sit up! I’ll help you. The doctor says that’s much better, and it’ll relieve your discomfort! There’s no sense in being more uncomfortable than you have to be. I mean it! And I’m going to call the doctor and get you an ambulance, I don’t care what you say. I’m not going to stand by and watch you d—, get sick again, really sick, when I know you could be helped.”
He looked her directly in the eye. She squirmed slightly. “Well yes,” she went on, “I suppose you could die, but only if you want to! Now, just because you think it’s Seth’s hundredth birthday today and a hundred is a nice round number doesn’t mean you can give up. Seth isn’t a hundred, he’s only ninety-nine, and anyway, even if he were, that’s not your family. Always, the whole time we’ve been married, whenever you’ve said, ‘My family,’ you’ve meant them. That’s always made me just as mad as Tucker! We’re your family! And today isn’t anyone’s birthday, and if it were, there wouldn’t be any round numbers. You’re only seventy-seven. That’s not very old when you come to think of it. People are always living into their nineties and dancing and driving to Mexico with groups on the bus. Or taking up musical instrument repair or something.” She took a deep breath and twisted her faltering anger tighter. “Besides! We need you! You’re the only man we’ve got. How can you just give up? How can you? I can’t stand it! Without you around, Helen and Claire and Susanna will just eat me alive. Don’t you turn away from me!” But he did anyway, his face white and shocked from the bitterness of her tone, or from the profundity of his “funny feeling.” For once no pugnacity answered hers. “Daddy!” But it didn’t come out insistent, it came out imploring. “You don’t have to give in. Not going to the hospital is just a way of giving in. It’s going to be a lovely spring. When I was outside in the garden this morning, the soil was already thawed, even warm almost. I could get out there and plant spinach tomorrow and have it come up, I’ll bet. I was thinking about the brambles, too. Christine could get back there with gloves and prune it all down in an afternoon. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind a bit. And Margaret Lacina’s friend, that gym teacher from the school, offered to do our dormant spraying when she does Margaret’s. It’ll be time for that soon. We could have a wonderful garden this year, Ike, lots of flowers and fruit. You know how you used to say that some year we were going to have rain every other day between six and seven and then sunshine all day long?” She stopped. It was too much to promise that this would be the year. “Christine will be glad to dig for me. She can do a few rows before she goes back Sunday. We could have Early Alaskas by the end of May, and good Buttercrunch. I don’t even have to buy spinach seed, there’s all that Bloomsdale from last year.” Her voice tapered of itself into silence.
Ike said, “What I like is that oakleaf stuff,” and she could have leaped all over that, promising row upon row of the pale green lettuce, hand dug, hand planted, hand thinned, cultivated daily, mulched with yellow straw, new straw like a percale sheet, nothing moldy or odorous, straw you could walk on in your bare feet, except that his voice was so full of effort that she had a sudden horrified vision of herself heaping things on him.
She sat down at once, afraid of looking down, of leaning enormously over him. She bit her lower lip, and said, “That might come up right away, Daddy, let me call the hospital!” Ike shook his head. He was hollow at the temples. When had she gotten so much bigger than he? Was there a moment that passed unnoticed, when she could have ceased feeling overtopped, surrounded, invaded, muscled here and there, when the balance changed and she could have stepped back, sat down, eased away? Had her self-defense, out of habit, gone on too long? She had always felt breathless in his family, as if he and Abel and all the big-shouldered brothers and sisters were using up the air, and now she found herself holding her breath, watching his lips and nostrils, afraid of stealing something from them. She shook her head briskly to clear it. It failed to clear. She said, “Why not?” but not so he could hear.
Did she really promote herself at his expense? Of course Helen had always preferred Ike, everyone knew that, but setting aside such bias, had she been one of those wives and mothers who oozed into the cracks of a man’s thoughtlessness and preened ever so discreetly, who let herself be seen coping, who gave up the last word when his last word was blatantly foolish, who fortified an impregnable position with looks and silence? She could remember the satisfaction of being right, but also the horror of being continually encroached upon by a handsome man, a youngest son, an athlete, a person not of limitless self-confidence but of limitless self-sympathy, who didn’t know how not to be the center of his own attention. Which was true: victimized or victimizing? Would Ike know? She dared not ask.
He seemed to be breathing more easily. Voluntarily he shifted over onto his back, and then pushed himself up against a pillow by the bookcase. It was a great effort but also somewhat of a relief. His breathing eased further, his face cleared. She said, trying not to demand anything, “Do you feel a little better?” It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she had called the doctor already, that he would be here in an hour, but she dared not. When he got there she would pretend that he had come of his own accord. Ike pushed the newspapers irritably off the bed, and Anna did not allow herself to pick them up, so vivid was the thought of herself stiff with self-righteousness, grunting a little for his benefit, in the way she had picked up after him all these weeks and years.
Oh, but it was too bad that he of all people should die! No one had inherited the playfulness of his wit, the dimple in his chin, his generosity; in each daughter and grandchild, he was mitigated, twisted, faded. She said, “And Daddy, Christine’s going to have a baby in the fall!” She said it like a promise and he heard it like a fact.
He smiled but nodded, as if that was her department, and she stood up, suddenly more fearful. “At least it doesn’t hurt, does it, Daddy? That’s a good sign. It would hurt, I think.”
“It hurts.”
Anna bit her lower lip and looked out the window. The bluejay, oddly, was still there in spite of the violence in the room. When she looked back at Ike, his eyes were closed and his body had loosened a little. That was that. She stood still and did not say anything.
After a time, a deathly silent time, the phone rang. Anna turned gigantically, like an elephant turning, and left the room. It was Christine. She said, “I still can’t find Nelson, Grandma. Has he come back?”
“No, honey, I don’t think so.”
“Well, don’t worry. I ran into Aunt Claire and we’re going to look with the car for a little while. Are you all right? How’s Grandfather?”
“Nothing to worry about.”
“Okay.”
“Nothing to worry about at all.”
“Do you want one of us to come there?”
“No.”
“Grandmother—” But Christine thought better of herself, and Anna was able to put down the phone. In a moment—funny the properties of a mere moment—she was sitting in Ike’s old chair. If she closed her eyes, she got that bowl sensation again, except that now it was not merely Ike in his bed, the walls, the books, the window, the half-open closet that curved around her, but everything else as well—the fanning streets with their ranks of homes, the spreading cornfields that rolled into hills in the east, flattened in the west, came to ponds and rivers and lakes, turned to deciduous glades, evergreen forests, wheat, acres of nodding sunflowers, rough pasture, and rose, far far away, to that dazzling rim of mountains. In her backyard in Basin, as a very little girl, she would sometimes get this same sensation, of being the pinpoint focus of a tremendous space. She would tumble in her mind the words Big Horn Basin over and over until they were meaningless, or until one or the other of them popped out of the phrase. She would think of Mama’s washing basin, think of her tiny self, living, sitting up, lying down, at the bottom of the basin and the sides rising up just like the mountains on every side.
She was very tired. It was better to open her eyes and sit, exactly in that place, a few feet from the closet door that could not be closed, a few inches from the wallpaper she really could not stand, exactly in that time, at the end of one life and the beginning of another. She held her eyes open until they watered, staring at Ike’s body propped neatly among the pillows. The irreducible, practical fact of him was oddly reassuring. Something had to be done with him, and thus, something would be done with her. And not only would she be taken care of, she would be forced by circumstances to walk and talk and bathe and cook and sew and dress and have opinions. The occasion for these activities would call them out of her automatically. Her eyes watered, Ike blurred, but that didn’t make him less clearly there.
Then her eyes closed. Sleep was the most tempting thing, but she was afraid of dreams and afraid of being caught by her vigilant daughters. Asleep! Daddy dead only a few minutes! Not cold yet! Not stiff! What can she have been thinking of, babble babble. The right sort of person would try to get them on the phone, wait for them at the door, run screaming out of the house. And could you sleep in the same room with death and not dream of it? She placed her palms one at a time on the arms of the chair and tried to stand up, but her wrists and calves drooped like putty. Her thighs would not lift, her hips stuck fast to the seat of the chair. Of the past thirty-six hours she had slept almost none, but how could she sleep now? The doctor would need to know, and a funeral home, the coroner? Some county department of health? Everyone! She was the bearer of news! Bearing it properly was a matter of pride, of respect to her husband and her life with him. She willed herself to the phone but managed only a half dream about dialing in which she could see her own fingers going round and round and even hear Helen say, “Hello.” When she woke up she realized that she was still in the chair, still had all of those steps to take, those numbers to dial. It was impossible that she should not do this! Impossible that her head should drift back against the chair, her mouth drop open! Was she dying too? It was something like the fatigue after eight or nine hours of labor, except that there would be no baby to take matters upon itself, to bend her to its own will. The darkness of sleep closed in on her like despair, and even as she relaxed her spirit sank in remorse. Her last thought before total somnolence was that, having failed Ike so consistently for fifty-two years, it was only to be expected that she would fail him in the end.
It was a sleep of absolute fatigue, the sleep of a stone. At first she did not dream, merely felt the presence of the room, the event of death, her own regret. Then, for a while, she felt nothing. The dream burst upon her like sudden daylight. She had on a brown bathing suit and she was treading water. Ike was nearby, and seeing his shoulders just beneath the surface of the water reminded her of her own neck and shoulders, her whole body drifting downward in the blue. The day was bright and beautiful, as only a day on earth could be. For once she was a no less powerful swimmer than Ike, but the strength in her limbs felt like grace. It seemed she could tread water for eons, reveling in the sun on her face and the water circulating around her ankles and elbows and waist. Ike was right there, but the glory of her own pleasure was so consuming that she didn’t have much attention to spare him. And then the whales came. At first she was afraid and glanced over at Ike in alarm, but they came too quickly for her to speak. They were so enormous that Anna didn’t know where one ended and the other began or how many there were. They seemed to lift the sea on their backs and she was afraid that one would swim beneath her. As soon as she had the thought, one did. She rose and rose. Water streamed off her shoulders and breasts and legs, then off the glistening dark hide of the beast, which she felt come up under the backs of her thighs and then her calves, lifting her still higher. Then it plunged downward, leaving her bobbing in the surf. Another came and lifted her again, and another. It was the most exhilarating feeling she had ever had, the mix of water and sunlight and speed and the sense of being cared for by the whales. She awoke in a whirl of delight.
Even though she instantly realized where she was, what had happened, what was still to come, the dream would not let her go. The feeling of having been tossed by the whales seemed to tingle in her limbs, and the joy of discovering that the whales meant her no harm pleased her at the same time she knew they were the whales of her own mind. She shifted position to evade an imminent throb of pain, and realized that for the first time in years, she had just dreamed of herself as slender again, and strong, forgetful of her body, as in fact young! That of course was the miracle of the dream, that the nerves of this body had buzzed with youth in spite of themselves, that she had not simply remembered what it was like to be young, but that somehow she had been young.
She sighed and sat up. Not happy, exactly, but still astonished by her dream, by the rise of the whale’s back through the shining veil of water, the smoothness of it against the backs of her legs. Hair was falling in her face. She reached and twisted it up again, then straightened her dress. No one had come home, no one had found her sleeping. When Christine came in, or Helen, or the doctor, she could go to the top of the stairs and call whoever it was up. She or he would know by Anna’s manner, by the tone of her voice, and no one would be taken by surprise. That was the gift she would give them—the moment of foreknowledge in which the best self could be recollected. What she was afraid of was the coming night, a multitude of rooms cavernous around her, perforated with doors and windows, but her fear was a distant one. Anyway, perhaps Claire would come over from her house, where she was alone every night, and stay for a few days. Or Susanna. Or even Helen. It was true. Each of her daughters checked windows and doors and burners and faucets every night, turning out the lights and leaving a trail of dark rooms behind her. Each one habitually did what Anna was about to do for the first time in her life. How did they learn? Would they show her? She thought with a start that now she was a “widow.” She would watch them. She would learn. Maybe, after all these years, Christine could teach her to drive a car.
She went to Ike and arranged the coverlet over him, pulling it up to his rib cage and over his hands. For now she was a little squeamish about touching him or moving parts of his body, but she did not mind looking at him. His death was remarkably complete. In the summer, maybe she would go out west. March would come first, of course, and April and May, every day without Ike, every day full of second thoughts and broken habits with nothing to replace them. She could feel the beginnings of grief already, always a physical sensation, always the same, the throat and neck and back stiff and outraged, as if a sheet of metal had been hammered into your tissues and now hampered your movements. It was perfectly familiar, the one act you practiced all your life and never improved at. It would be a cold spring no matter what the temperature. She would look around and ask herself what love was and if she had ever loved Ike, and her answer would be different every day. Perhaps they had never been suited, but yes, she loved him right now.
