Any Bitter Thing (4 page)

Before Harry Griggs had a name, when he was still the unidentified voice at the other end of a 9-1-1 call reporting a body in the road, Drew and Mariette referred to him as the “bad Samaritan.” A guy who met the barest minimum requirement of human decency before taking off—to a party? to a meeting that couldn’t wait?

We were sitting on our porch, Drew and I, a humid Friday evening two weeks after my homecoming. Mariette was there, too, adding to our quiet. Paulie, her son, was toddling after a neighbor cat crossing the lawn.

“I wonder what it looked like,” I said.

Drew raised his head, alerted. It had always been my habit to think out loud, but now my husband took my habit as “faulty thinking” or “lack of concentration,” symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

“Death,” I said. “What exactly did the bad Samaritan see? What does death look like, I wonder.”

Mariette eyed me carefully. “Pretty gruesome, I’m guessing, which is why the guy decided to slink off like a scared dog. Paulie! Leave that poor creature alone!”

“No white light,” Drew said. “No heavenly hosts singing about the river Jordan.” Which, as he knew, was exactly what I was wondering, and he wasn’t going to discuss it. Over the summer we’d built a house of cards that we’d learned to live in without breathing, and this kind of gentle, preemptive strike had become our normal mode of communication.

Mariette said, “I hold him just as responsible as that ponytailed sociopath who hit you in the first place. Paulie! Quit that!”

“Besides,” Drew said. “You weren’t dead. Sitting around wondering what death looked like is pretty much beside the point.”

Drew and Mariette exchanged a look. They were sitting together on the porch swing, a united front. Clearly, they had made a pact to stop humoring me, no longer pretending to believe that my accident had opened a misty portal through which stepped my long-dead uncle. Since my return home they’d been treating me like a mental patient on furlough, and now I was inching toward the one subject deemed “unproductive” by the harried in-house rehab counselor with sixty-five other patients. According to him, the circumstances of my accident—gross physical injury, plus the emotional toll of two separate parties leaving me on the road like a squashed frog—had compelled me to substitute an earlier, insufficiently “processed” trauma in
order to dodge the one at hand. Hence, my dead, beloved uncle speaking to me from the celestial reach. The sorrow you know being preferable to the sorrow you don’t.

How Jungian of you
, I said to this guy when he floated his theory, and that was pretty much the end of our rapport. I far preferred conversing with the night janitor, a three-hundred-pound Samoan with a complicated love life and seven dogs.

“Daddy’s here!” Paulie said, pitching himself toward Charlie, who was just getting out of his car. Big and bearish, Mariette’s throwback husband emitted an aura of durability that his customers found reassuring. He owned a McDonald’s franchise in Stanton, and in his starched shirt and razor-creased pants looked like a man who loved his work. We liked to tease him for his obliging ways, his antique manners—but in truth he reassured us, too. “Who wants beer?” he said, swinging a six-pack out of the backseat and tucking Paulie under his free arm.

Mariette raised her hand. “I’ll take one.”

He set Paulie down and began to pass the bottles around, but when my turn came his ease deserted him. He held the bottle to his meaty chest as if protecting me from harm.

“It wasn’t that kind of rehab, Charlie,” I said. “A beer won’t kill me.”

He blushed, averting his eyes. “I’ll get you a glass,” he said, ducking into the house.

“He’s a little nervous,” Mariette said kindly. “People don’t know what to do.”

“You make this sound like a wake,” I said. “You’re the one insisting that I didn’t die.”

They swiveled their heads toward me.

Mariette said, “We miss you.”

Looking at her made me lonely. My accident had occasioned a paradox of loneliness: I felt most bereft around those who loved me best.

“Just for the record,” I said, “the bad Samaritan didn’t
slink
off. I heard his shoes”

Charlie reappeared in time to catch the whiff of tension. He offered me the glass, then decamped to the other end of the porch, where he settled into a metal rocker, unwilling to take sides.

“You still set on going back, Lizzy?” Mariette asked. I would be heading back to school on Monday to resume my duties as guidance counselor to the student body of Hinton-Stanton Regional High School. Mariette, whose science classroom was just down the hall from the guidance office, considered me unprepared for active duty.

Drew, of course, agreed. “She could wait another month and nobody would fault her,” he said.

Over the summer they’d become accustomed to speaking of me in the third person. The two of them were watching me intensely but trying to disguise their focus, looking all around me as if I just happened to emit an aura they found mildly interesting. off in the distance I could hear the intermittent traffic on Random Road, a steady whine of cars on their way to someplace else.

“Why should I wait?” I said.

Too much crying, went the unspoken argument. Too many moments of “lack of concentration.” Too much appearing to be in a place other than the place my body happened to occupy.

“I hardly even need my cane,” I said. “I’m a medical miracle.”

“Rick screwed up all the sophomore schedules over the summer,” Mariette said. “You’ll have nothing but a mess to clean up.” She moved to the porch railing now, the better to gauge my reaction. “You could stay out till Thanksgiving,” she said. “Even the minor snags will be sorted out by then.”

“I miss the kids.”

“They miss you too, kiddo. They’ll live.”

I got up, hobbled off the porch, and began a round of step-ups, using the ground and the bottom step, up and back, over and over, barefoot and without my cane. My knee throbbed, but it felt good to feel something.

“As your husband,” Drew said, “I forbid you to go back.”

He was joking, of course, but nobody laughed. There was a tinge of alarm in his voice that reminded me of the days early in our marriage when our every interaction burned with significance. You can’t live that way indefinitely, though; eventually we had to relax and become the same kind of married as everybody else. I climbed back up the steps, leading with my good leg. I sat on the top step, my back to them. Paulie scrambled up to join me, digging his hard shoes against my shins.

“Give Auntie Lizzy a kiss, Paulie,” Charlie said. “Auntie Lizzy needs a big fat kiss.” A gentleman like his father, Paulie obliged, squashing his pink, drooly lips against mine. Then he left me, swooning into Mariette’s lap.

In the ensuing silence we listened to the sounds of a summer already tainted with the specter of fall: the occasional drop of an acorn, spent lilies rattling with seed pods. I put up my hand. “Listen.” We all heard it, a flock of geese barking like sled dogs, high above our heads and hidden in a great smudge of dusk.

“What, Auntie?” Paulie asked.

“Geese.” I closed my eyes and tried to conjure the muscular beat of their wings.

Drew came to sit next to me on the step, taking a long pull on his beer. Everybody scanned the sky.

“On nights like this,” Drew said, “you feel like nothing has ever happened. It’s just
now
, breathing in and breathing out.”

I turned to him. “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said. He smiled at me, and I put my hand on his. Such moments were fleeting and often ambiguous, sufficing over the long haul only
for people who didn’t need much. But they reminded us that we’d been in love once, could be again.

The neighbor cat returned, eyeing Paulie, who was falling asleep against Mariette’s chest.

“Remember the cats, Mariette?” I said.

“The bachelors,” she said listlessly. All summer long it had been remember this and remember that. I’d worn her out.

“We never had cats,” Charlie said. “My mother always said they were too sneaky.”

“The truth is,” I said to one and all, “I had a visitation.”

“The truth is,” Drew said quietly, “you live here with us, on Earth.”

“We should get going,” Mariette said, hoisting her son, who had collapsed against her, blissfully unconscious. Paulie couldn’t be woken, and I envied him that.

“What am I supposed to do?” Drew asked our friends. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

“Just wait,” Charlie said. “Wait it out.”

“I feel like a ghost myself,” I said. “Nobody can see me.”

I’m so lonely
, I wanted to tell them.
I woke up so monstrously lonely.
I slipped into the house, bringing the cat with me. The air inside was warmer, what Father Mike used to call “close.” In the living room, among Drew’s large-format photographs of house fires and bridge collapses and construction sites, hung a framed snapshot of Father Mike. He is looking off to the side—at me, in fact—his face soft in the magical light of afternoon; but there is another light present, too.

Mariette’s mother took this picture in the foyer of her farmhouse, catching him near an oversized window that let in an abundance of light. He had come to fetch me for supper, so he looks hungry, a little. I had spent the afternoon in the Blanchards’ parlor, sewing shoes—moccasins, to be precise—my first skill. One or two afternoons a week Mrs. Blanchard put some
rockabilly on the stereo and set us to work: Mariette and me, and sometimes Mariette’s little brothers, Buddy and Bernard.

He looks hungry, but also bemused, like someone about to open a present. We had just taught him how to sew a shoe. I hadn’t wanted to leave the Blanchards’ house, so Mariette, stalling, said, “Show him,
Maman.”

He laughed, red hair falling over his forehead as he inspected the heaps of shoe parts. “I wouldn’t know up from down,” he said, grinning. “Our girls are the experts. Right, Vivienne?”

“Yes, Father,” she agreed. “They’re the experts, our little chickens.”

Experts.
I pronounced this my favorite word, ever, right on the spot. And so we were. Our ritual was to gather in Mrs. Blanchard’s parlor, choosing a fat, glinting needle and a strand of rawhide from her neatly coiled skeins. Each of us claimed a leather glove—fingerless, shaped to our right hand, darkened with sweat. Next, we lugged a pair of buckets from the foyer, the aroma of freshly soaked leather radiating skyward. After stiffening the rawhide by running it back and forth against a block of wax, we pulled an upper from one bucket, a lower from the other, and lined up their matching holes. Our task called for concentration, strong hands, and sometimes silence. Over and over, we threaded the rawhide through the holes in a piecrust stitch, evenly fluted along the toe end of the shoe. The heel end—a shapeless flap—would be someone else’s job back at the factory.

Thirty-six shoes to a case. Crimp, thread, pull. Crimp, thread, pull. Crimp, thread, pull. Mrs. Blanchard dispatched the final tying off in a stupendous
thwip thwip
, fingers flying. Mariette and I were slow by contrast, the little boys nearly useless, but this was piecework, time really was money, and though Mrs. Blanchard sewed five shoes to our one, we often made the difference between meeting quota and not.

They could arrest her for that
, Mrs. Hanson said more than once, but left it at that because Mrs. Blanchard was a pretty woman who had married a drinker. Mrs. Hanson was right, of course. The work was highly illegal, a kind of magnanimous sweatshop, really. But who could mind if Father Mike didn’t? We sewed sometimes for entire afternoons, the music boosting production, peanut-butter sandwiches stacked on a platter, all of us drunk on Mrs. Blanchard’s company and the music and the heady smell of leather and oil.

Why did Mariette and I never recall these times? We were nine years old on the summer afternoon of this photograph; by fall I would be taken from there; by winter would come news of Father Mike’s death. How had we allowed the most lighted days of our childhood to fade behind us, unremarked?

He crouched before me that day, picked up my hands and kissed them, admiring the calluses. “This,” he said, “is the working girl’s stigmata.” He was proud of my hands, and I guessed it had something to do with his memories of farm life on Prince Edward Island, where children learned how to do, to make, to fix, to solve. I rested my hands in his, palms up, showing him one more proof of how lucky he was to have me.

“Hey,” said Buddy. “I’m an expert, too.”

“You too, young man.”

“And me.”

“And you too, Bernard.”

“Show him,
Maman,”
Mariette said.

“It’s easy! It’s easy!
Maman
, make Father Mike sew a shoe!”

“Make him,
Maman!
”

“Oh, brother,” he said, releasing my hands, which meant yes, and there was a pleasant rippling of voices as he sat down and allowed Mrs. Blanchard to guide his fingers through a glove. His small hands looked bigger when he tried to take a stitch. The little boys leaned close, expecting magic, but the hands that could
turn wine to blood had no aptitude for piecework. Mariette and I giggled till we had to cross our legs to hold our pee. Finally he sprang up, and to our blank astonishment, began to sing.
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog
, he sang with Elvis, making moony eyes at Major, the Blanchards’ earnest basset hound. Father Mike’s cassock swung back and forth from his hips, and we all got up to dance, the shabby parlor quivering with movement and raised voices.

I remember this. All this sweetness.

Back then Mrs. Blanchard had a burbling, contagious laugh, and as she danced with her children, side-stepping the forbearing dog, I was visited by the most unexpected wish for a mother. Father Mike had tried to keep my mother alive for me, but it was like hearing about Rapunzel or Snow White, a seamless beauty who lived in the realm of imagination. I’d never thought to envision her as someone who might cough or sigh or open a breadbox or sew a shoe. But I did at that moment, watching Father Mike move across a parlor rug littered with shoe parts and dog hair, because of how his face looked in the warm bath of a woman’s laughter.