Barbara Kingsolver (4 page)

Hallie was headed for a war zone. She walked straight through the puddles, dragging me along, and I had to stretch out my legs and drench my shoes to keep up with her. When Hallie was intensely excited she had a wild-animal look to her that could stop people in their tracks. A vibration came from her skin, like a bell that has just been struck. Her hair was long and reckless, curling wildly in the humidity. Every part of my sister could stir rebellion. I was thinking that if anything happened to her I wouldn’t survive. I couldn’t see that there would be any method, or any point.

As long as I held Hallie’s arm she would still be here, she wouldn’t be climbing into the truck, turning the key, driving south through Arizona and Mexico and the perilous places farther on, wouldn’t be stopped at a roadblock by men who might blandly shoot her in the head for being twenty-nine years old and alone and female, wearing blue jeans, carrying antihistamine pills in her glove compartment. It seemed like a chain of events I could hold back, there in the parking lot, with the bones of her elbow securely gripped in my hand.

Her little beat-up pickup looked impossibly loaded, like the tiny burros you see in postcards carrying elephant-sized burdens without complaint. I wasn’t worried about the truck. I asked where she’d put her antihistamines. We knew of a photographer who’d been shot,
ostensibly for running drugs, because he had a baby-food jar of aspirin and vitamin tablets in his camera bag.

Hallie said her pills were no place easy to find.

I put my head on her shoulder. “What if our houseplants die?”

“They won’t,” she said. Hallie knew I wanted easy answers.

I lifted my head again and she stared at me, thoughtfully. The sky had cleared. The early-morning light behind her head was orange, making her hair glow, and she looked like an angel. She never had any idea how she looked to other people; she thought she was plain.

“If the flea beetles start getting at the ones on the porch,” she said slowly, “dust them with Celite.” Hallie worked for the Extension Service and answered the Garden Hotline, 626-BUGS. For a period of years ending on that day, garden pests were her life.

I hugged her with all the strength in my arms. “Hallie,” I said, “could you please just change your mind now and not go?”

“You really love me, so you want me to stay here and keep the suburbs safe for geraniums.”

“I know how I ought to feel,” I said. “I just don’t.”

Her breath expanded her chest against my arms, and I thought of the way a tree will keep on growing after a fence is wired around its trunk. The unbelievable force of that expansion. And I let her go.

She started up her truck and waved from the corner, not a mournful gone-forever wave but a chin-up wave like you see in the World War II movies, where everybody is brave because they all believe in the same thing. I told myself because I had no other choice that Hallie would do all right. That we were both going to live.

I walked the six blocks home under dripping trees and a sun that was already too hot. Across the street I heard a woman say to her companion in an odd accent, “It’s the
Desert
Museum. I had understood him to say the ‘dessert museum,’ and obviously I was expecting something quite different.” I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension. What I felt wasn’t pain but a hollowness, like a drum with the skin stretched tight. It took me five minutes to
get our front door open, because everything in Tucson with moving parts gets cantankerous in the rainy season. Hallie had meant to put graphite in the lock before she left.

A white balloon left over from her going-away party followed me from the living room into the kitchen. It was the size of a head, and had lost some helium so it hung at eye level, trailing its string along the floor like a tired old ghost. Static electricity drew it along behind me. I swatted it away from my head while I plundered the refrigerator. I found some red bell peppers that had been absurdly expensive at the health-food market, and washed one and ate it standing up in the kitchen. After that I found a paring knife and went to work on a cucumber. I didn’t feel like cooking breakfast just for myself. Carlo was at the hospital and I had no idea when he was due back.

The phone rang and I jumped, I suppose because I felt guilty for standing in the kitchen eating costly vegetables. I was afraid it was going to be somebody with garden pests, but they’d already turned off the Garden Hotline. It was Hallie calling from a pay phone this side of the border to tell me she’d forgotten to graphite the lock.

“I knew you’d call about that.” I was filled with a strange joy because she felt the same way I did: that we couldn’t survive apart. I just stood still for a minute, giving Hallie’s and my thoughts their last chance to run quietly over the wires, touching each other in secret signal as they passed, like a column of ants. You couldn’t do that kind of thing at international rates.

“There’s a library book, too,” she said. “Those Baron Münchhausen stories. I found it in with my books when I was cleaning out my room.”

“I know. I saw it. I’ll take it back today.”

“That book’s got to be overdue, Codi. You were reading it in the car a month ago when we drove to Bisbee.”

I took a bite out of the cucumber and chewed before answering. I wanted this phone call to last forever. I wanted to recall every book we’d ever read aloud together while driving. “You’re right. It’s overdue.”

“Take it back and pay the fine, okay? Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Miss Patty Hearst the Second.” I heard her trying not to laugh. Hallie was intellectually subversive and actually owned a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s
Steal This Book
, but by nature she was perversely honest. I’d seen her tape dimes to a broken parking meter.

“Apart from moral reasons, they’ll cancel your card.”

“I don’t know why you think I’m such a library outlaw. I’m all paid up over there.” I munched on the cucumber. It wasn’t that different from eating an outsize apple, say, or a peeled peach, and yet anyone looking in the window would judge me insane. “Don’t worry about me, Hallie,” I said finally. “Just worry about yourself.”

“I’m not worried about myself. I’m the luckiest person alive.”

It was an old joke, or an old truth, grown out of all the close shaves she’d walked away from. Bike wrecks, car wrecks, that kind of thing. I’d always been more or less a tragedy magnet, but Hallie was the opposite. One time she started out the door of the old science library at the university, and then turned around and went back in because she’d left her sunglasses by the microfiche machine, and two seconds later the marble façade fell off the front of the building. Just slid straight down and smashed, it looked like Beirut.

Hallie didn’t believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving.

We’d had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson—her first year, my last—and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I’d wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I’d planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central
American refugees. After that we’d have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic.

I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government’s blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only
maybe
wrong, whereas communism was
definitely
. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left.

Now she had one—she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades—and so I guess she
was
lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.

I loved her for feeling so strongly about things. But I’d watched Doc Homer spend a lifetime ministering his solemn charity to the people of Grace and I’m not sure whose course was altered by that, other than Hallie’s and mine, in a direction we grew to resent. It’s true that I tried myself to go into medicine, which is considered a helping profession, but I did it for the lowest of motives. I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinion, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a great height.

I
’d agreed to move into the guesthouse on the
condition that I wasn’t going to impose on Emelina’s family life, but apparently her life was beyond imposition. She sent John Tucker over in the morning to fetch me for breakfast.

He stood tentatively outside my screen door, unsure of what to do with all his limbs. “Mom says she’ll break your face if you don’t come over for breakfast.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, following him back to the house. John Tucker was the most appealing kind of adolescent. I couldn’t begin to picture the man he would soon become—armpits and arrogance, scratching the back of his neck, throwing a baseball. Out of the question. He was wearing a cap to cover what looked like an overly enthusiastic summer haircut.

“I know you don’t have anything to eat over there yet,” Emelina said. “Everything was closed, yesterday was Sunday. Today you can get on your feet. J.T. called from El Paso and said to be sure and give you a kiss.” Emelina buttered a piece of toast and handed it to Mason, who was four going on five. “Glen, don’t put jam on your
brother. If you want to wear plum preserves today that’s your nickel, but not Curtis’s. Curty, honey, don’t hit. John Tucker, help him with that, will you?”

“He called from El Paso?” I prompted. Conversations with a mother of five are an education in patience.

“Yeah, he’s in Texas. He’s got to stay for an investigation. So are you going to be able to stand living in that shack?”

“It’s not a shack, Em. It’s nice out there. I like it.”

“Codi, honey, there was goats living in there at one time. And Grammy lived there too, before the goats. But she said she got the ague in her bones and she decided she had to move in upstairs.” Grammy was J.T.’s mother, Viola Domingos.

“Mom, make Glen stop,” Curtis said.

“Glen, for heaven’s sakes, just eat that toast and put it out of its misery. The bus is going to be here in a minute and you don’t even have your shoes on.”

“No, but I know where they are,” Glen declared.

“Well, go get them.”

“School doesn’t start till next week,” I said, alarmed that I might be wrong. I was always having dreams like that.

“No, but they’ve got this summer thing for kids. They go up there to the river park and shoot each other with bows and arrows or something. Tomorrow’s the last day. So you think you’ll like it out there? We make enough noise over here to raise up the quick and the dead.”

“It’s fine. I used to live three blocks from a hospital ambulance entrance.” I didn’t add: with a man who reattached severed body parts for a living. I buttered my toast, holding my elbows in close and keeping an eye out for wayward jam knives. “So what kind of an investigation?”

“Oh, J.T.? He put sixteen cars on the ground outside El Paso. A derailment. Nobody got hurt. Oh shoot—John Tucker, honey, will you take the baby in the living room and watch him a minute? I can’t hear myself think.”

John Tucker took the baby from Emelina’s lap and carried him
under one arm into the next room. The baby waggled his arms and legs like a swimmer in green stretch pajamas.

“Okay. Mason, sweetie, put your feet up here on my lap and I’ll tie your sneakers for you.” Emelina took a gulp of coffee. “So they all had to give a urine sample—J.T., the fireman, the brakeman, and some other person, I can’t remember who. Maybe another engineer. It all had to happen within a half hour of the accident; the company made a very big deal out of that. J.T. says, here they were out in some cow pasture with sixteen boxcars of frozen mixed vegetables scattered from hell to breakfast, and all the damn supervisor cared about was making sure which person pissed in what jar.”

The boys seemed unmoved by this off-color narrative. Having Emelina for a mother would neutralize the thrill of swear words.

“You know what, though,” she said, looking startled. “Damn. We were just joking about drug tests, the day before yesterday. Grammy made a poppyseed cake for Curty’s and Glen’s birthday and J.T. said…”

“Mo-om.”

“I’m sorry, Curtis, I forgot. He doesn’t want us to call him Curty. Their actual birthday was yesterday.”

I wanted to hear the rest of the derailment story, but this conversational flow was akin to freeway driving in L.A.; you don’t back up. “Well, happy birthday,” I said. “You boys get handsomer every time I see you, you know that?”

Curtis’s ears turned red.

“You can say ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ can’t you? Codi, they’ve all been asking me when you were going to get here till I thought they’d turn blue in the face, and now they’re acting like they were raised outside in a pen with the dogs.”

“That’s okay.” I felt a little intimidated myself. Even though I’d kept up with the family, it was inconceivable that in my absence from Grace Emelina could have produced this whole blue-eyed tribe of human beings.

“Mom, can I sleep put in the pen with Buster tonight?” Mason asked.

“No sir, you can’t. So when we were eating that cake, J.T. was saying how he’d better not have an accident on the railroad, because poppyseeds show up some way on the drug test.”

“That’s true, they would.” I reconsidered this. “He’d register positive for opiates. Poppyseeds are related to heroin. Is he going to be in trouble?”

“No, they know it wasn’t his fault. It was a sun-kink or some darn thing with the rails. The drug test is just to cover their ass. You know who else was on the train? The other engineer and the brakeman were both guys we went to school with, you might remember them. Roger Bristol and Loyd Peregrina. Loyd lived up at Whiteriver for a while but he’s moved back.”

I paid attention to my heart rate, to see if it would react in any way to this information. It didn’t seem to.

“Aunt Codi, say something in Greece,” Glen said.

“In Greek,” Emelina corrected, giving me an apologetic look. “I already told them you looked like a fashion model and had lived overseas. They think you know David Bowie.”

“Your mother exaggerates,” I said.

Glen didn’t seem too disappointed.

“So, Em, if I’m going to live here do I have to buy a pair of those silver loafers from the Hollywood Shop?”

She nodded seriously. “I’m pretty sure they won’t let you teach down at the high school without them.”

The school bus honked outside. “Okay, scoot,” Emelina said. “Mason, give me a kiss.”

The boys stampeded out the kitchen door, all legs, leaving the baby beached on Emelina’s lap. His eyes roamed anxiously around the quiet kitchen, taking in the emptiness.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I’d felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There’s such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it’s like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

“So what’s new?” she asked.

“I don’t know, everything. I don’t think Grace has changed, but it feels different. There’s a lot I don’t remember.”

Emelina smiled. “I know what you mean. Senility strikes.” It was an odd thing to say; Doc Homer’s exact problem was that his mind had begun to roam in alarming new pastures.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, some things never change.” She leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Grammy still collects figurines of Elvis.”

I had to laugh. We’d known J.T.’s mother as children, of course—people here spent their childhoods tearing through the homes of their future in-laws—and I remembered her living room, which we used to call the Elvis Museum. She denied that the ones that were whiskey bottles were whiskey bottles. She’d always told us aftershave.

“So it’s all over with Carlo? Or just a vacation?”

“I don’t know. Over, I think. It’s taken me all this time to figure out he’s not going to tell me the secret to a meaningful life.” I was serious. I’d loved Carlo best when he provided me with guidance.

“I used to think the ideal husband would be Doctor Kildare.”

“Carlo’s an emergency-room surgeon. A man that decides which way to sew a thumb back on would have a good hold on life, wouldn’t you think? I just assumed it would rub off.”

“Gross,” Emelina remarked.

“I think it was his eyebrows. You know how he has those kind of arched, Italian eyebrows?”

“No, I never got to meet him. He was always at the hospital.”

That was true. He was shy. He could face new flesh wounds each day at work, but he avoided actual people. “Well, he had this look,” I said. “He always seemed right on the verge of saying something that would change your life. Even when he was asleep he looked like that.”

“But he never did?”

“Nope. It was just his eyebrows.”

I did miss him, or at least I missed being attached to someone in theory. Carlo had beautiful hands and a legendary sense of direction.
Even when we were in Venice, where the tourist books advise you that “part of the Venice experience is wandering the narrow
strade
until you find yourself lost,” We wandered but never got lost. The man had a compass needle in his cerebral cortex. And for all that, he’d still in the long run declined to be the guiding star I needed. Just as my father did. My father was dying on me.

Emelina collected the plates and cups. She stood up and tied on an apron over her bathrobe, miraculously keeping the baby situated on her hip throughout the operation.

“Well, you’re no worse for the wear of five children in fourteen years,” I said, and she laughed, probably not believing it. Emelina was noticeably pretty. That combination particular to Grace, the pale blue eyes and black hair, never failed to be arresting, no matter how many versions of it you saw. The eyes were a genetic anomaly—in the first hours after birth, the really pure specimens of Grace’s gene pool were supposed to have whitish, marblelike irises. I’d seen pictures. Doc Homer had written it up for the
American Journal of Genetics
, years ago.

“And John Tucker’s a teenager,” I said. “Are we that old?”

“I am. You’re not.” She started to clear the table with one hand. “Every minute in the presence of a child takes seven minutes off your life.” I took the baby from her and she said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“They’re your treasures, Em. You’ve got something to show for yourself.”

“Oh, yeah. I know,” she said.

The baby’s name was Nicholas, but nobody called him anything but “the baby.” I’d read somewhere that the brain organizes information in sets no larger than four—that’s why Social Security and phone numbers are subdivided; possibly four children’s names were the limit on parental memory. I sat in the rocker and settled nameless Nicholas on my lap, his head at my knees. My long thigh bones exactly accommodated his length.

Emelina scraped toast corners into a blue enamel pail and ran a sinkful of hot water. “I don’t think I could stand to let Mason go off
to kindergarten next year if it wasn’t for the baby. It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.”

“I remember you saying you were calling it quits after four.”

“Famous last words.”

While I watched her move around the kitchen, my fingers tingled with the pleasure of stroking the baby’s fine black hair. It was longer by several inches than his big brother John Tucker’s; someone had taken shears to that boy with a vengeance. Probably Emelina. A woman who beheaded her own chickens would cut her kids’ hair herself.

Emelina washed and rinsed the plates and set them into the wire rack to drain. I sat feeling useless, though Nicholas seemed comfortable and was falling asleep on my lap. When that happens you feel them grow heavier, as if relaxation allowed them to be flooded with extra substance. A constriction ran across my lungs. I’d come close to having a baby of my own once, but I thought of it now so rarely that the notion of myself as a mother always caught me off guard.

In spite of the heat outside, Emelina’s dishwater was fogging the window. A little collection of potted plants stood in a row on the windowsill. Prayer plants. I was struck with a sudden, forceful memory of Emelina’s grandmother’s house. Hallie and I called her
Abuelita
too, though of course she was no relation, and the old woman called us “the orphan girls,”
huérfanas
. Nobody ever thought we could understand Spanish. The house had a stale, old-lady smell, but we loved her boxes of “pretties”: cast-metal carts with broken wheels, lead soldiers, huge washers and carriage bolts, every species of unidentifiable metal part. Her dead husband was a blacksmith. There were also boxes of ancient dress-up clothes in satiny fabrics as brittle as paper. Our best playroom was the sunny alcove crammed with plants where we stalked lions through the parlor palms, dressed in our finery, more glamorous than Beryl Markham and the Baroness von Blixen could have managed to be in their dreams. We confronted real dangers in the form of rickety iron stands holding heavy, breakable pots and fragile plants. The
African violets were furred like pets, and the prayer plants had leaves like an old woman’s hands, red-veined on the back, that opened wide in the sun and folded primly together in the shade.
Abuelita
instructed us to sit and watch them, to try and catch them in the act of closing their leaves. Hallie always waited the longest, patient for enlightenment long after Emelina and I had returned to our rowdy diversions.

“You know, I’m so used to J.T. being gone,” Emelina said, bringing me back. “I think he’d be underfoot if he were here. I’d give us about ten days, then I’d probably shoot him. Husband murder in Grace, oh boy.” She seemed to be answering a question, however circumspectly, that I wasn’t sure I’d asked.

“How long has he been on the railroad?”

“Just since the mine shut down, which was…” She frowned at the glass she was drying, decorated with white pigs in red bow ties. “Ten years, about.”

“They used to always say they’d hire again up there when the price of copper went up.”

“Well, you know, that’s talk. Nobody’s waiting around anymore, Now it’s pecans and plums. And the railroad, thank God for that. I think we could live off the orchards if the boys didn’t eat like horses and outgrow their shoes every ten days. Get this, now they’re too fashion conscious to wear each other’s hand-me-downs. Remember when boys didn’t give a shit what they wore? We never should have got satellite TV.” She turned around, drying her hands on her apron. “Is that rascal gone to sleep? Thanks. Codi. I’ll take him upstairs and put him down for his nap.” She lifted the baby onto her shoulder like a sack of valuable flour. “You got big plans for today?”