Disturbances in the Field (31 page)

Instead of taking the limousine home we ride in Don’s and Gabrielle’s Volkswagen bus. With them in the front seat is a stunned Cynthia, acne fading, body thinning—soon she will be a lithe but less subtle version of her mother. Well-bred Roger, away at Amherst, phoned us yesterday to speak his piece with a somber grace, and I bet with no prodding from his parents. Althea sits with Victor and me, and in the back, Phil with his old friend Henry, who sniffles for the whole trip, I don’t know whether from emotion or the icy weather. Henry also suffers from allergies but it is February, a chill parody of all our Sunday afternoon picnics, pleasure-bound via this old bus, six children boisterous in the back. Today no one is asking how much longer, no one even speaks. Today so many warm live bodies capsuled against the cold are no match for the Long Island fields so richly sown with corpses, richer now.

George rode with Nina, so she would not be alone. She told me, later, that in the evening, after leaving us, they went to his apartment and made love, to feel better. She had not made love with him in so long, since Esther’s wedding, perhaps? She wasn’t quite sure. Oh no, there was that time after our Seder of last year. George had mellowed, she said. Well, naturally. I would have loved to hear exactly how, every blow-by-blow detail, but of course she didn’t go into all that. She did mention that afterwards he wept and said he had loved me best of all the women he had known, and should have married me when he had the chance; then this terrible tragedy would not have happened to me. He can be so obtuse. And tactless. It was not even true. He hadn’t loved me best and he hadn’t had the chance.

Since Don’s muffler had broken on the way out, making that awful clanking noise, he couldn’t take the highways but drove through a succession of drowsy towns, past small half-timbered neo-Tudor houses with rooftops trimmed in snow and shrouded front lawns—the same snow that had coated the windshield of the chartered bus and slicked the macadam beneath its skidding tires. There had been a while, early in the morning, when the sky was flat, the color of dusty pewter, like Victor’s face, but soon the sun came out. And now the snow glistened innocently in the crisp Northeast winter light. Every line on the horizon was drawn with a knife edge. Not a soul was out in the pretty towns; maybe they were all in church: Sunday morning. In this stillness and beauty, this probably specious serenity, I spied out the window an incredible thing.

Victor had his arm around me; on the other side he held Althea’s hand. All morning Victor had held me up, his hand on my shoulder or pressing at my waist, nudging his limping sleepwalker in the right direction. Always the touch of him, so I never felt alone. His shouting and moaning were over. Now it was he who took care. Chivalrous, to break the heart. He had turned on the water in the shower and handed me the soap. He zipped up my skirt as I stood before the mirror, arms hanging useless with amnesia; he knotted the woolen scarf around my neck. When he found me standing in front of the wide-open window gazing up at the sky, he gently drew me away and shut it. Maybe he thought I was going to jump. I had no thought of jumping; I was entranced by the flight pattern of a great flock of birds against the pewter sky, and thinking, Evelyn, Evelyn. No plane fast enough? Tomorrow, you wired. But I wanted you yesterday. Too vague, Evelyn, unattached, light, fey. Vivie was magic like you yet she would have made it on time. She had more guts. The birds kept circling, first in a shapeless mass, then they formed a dense triangle, then a slender V. They beat their wings hard in unison and abruptly coasted in unison, as if their patch of sky had uphills and downhills. I tried to count them as they circled: nineteen, seventeen, nineteen again, no, twenty—hopeless. I tried to see whether the same one was always the leader and another one always the last, but that was hopeless too; their swoops were quicker than my eye, and dizzying. I tracked one who kept falling out of formation and lagging behind, then made frantic efforts to catch up, a spastic agitation of the wings. Sometimes he succeeded, but more often he lagged so far that the circling group would catch up with him instead, and for a while he would travel in the front ranks, till some weakness or perversity made him slip back again, and again batten his wings desperately to rejoin. They circled the same patch of gray sky so many times—were they as hypnotized as I? Did they have the illusion of progress or was it their recreation, their rehearsal for migrating south? Strange that they hadn’t already gone. Victor drew me from the window and closed it. He told me to put on a little make-up, for my own sake—I would be glad of it, later on. He forgot nothing, even that my pride would survive my children, and perhaps my grief.

Assembled by Victor, and held by him, watching the towns pass by from the window of the Volkswagen, I see the thing. Incredible, yet I do see it.

Most of the pretty half-timbered houses trimmed in snow are fronted by broad lawns sloping down towards the road. At the edge of one snow lawn, near the sidewalk, is a clump of metal garbage cans; and lying in the snow, partly hidden by the cans, is a woman’s body in gentle repose, curved on one hip. Only the lower half is visible. She is wearing something pink and light, a nightgown or slip (a smok?) that ends halfway down her thighs. Her legs are slender, fair-skinned, and bent slightly at the knee. It might have been a painting by Victor: it had that reverence for detail, that cool accuracy and sinuosity of line. Odalisque. She does not move.

I swivel my head to keep her in view, but in a moment she is blocked by a stand of trees. Then gone. But not from the inner eye. A white woman half-draped in pink, embedded in snow. A woman who has stumbled and fallen while taking out the garbage and will instantly pick herself up? A discarded doll, a heap of garbage artfully arranged to resemble a female form? I don’t think so. A half-clothed woman, lying out in the cold. By choice? Or by design, accident, circumstance, necessity?

I may be dreaming. But there are the commonplace houses, the diurnal sun, the raw sounds of the broken muffler and Henry’s sniffling. There is Victor’s hand on my right arm, the heads of our friends in the front seat, Althea’s profile on my left, sharp as a cameo. The woman was as real as any of this.

After a while it occurs to me that we are fellow creatures also in the most ordinary sense. “Don, we have to turn back. I saw a body in the snow.”

Tactful disbelief. They think shock has brought delusion. But in the end they humor me. Don turns around and the morning rewinds on the spool of road. “Say when, Lydia.” I manage to locate the house, the lawn, and the garbage cans, but the body is gone. Their troubled concern is not for the woman but for me; to ease them I say very little, making sure to sound controlled and sane.

Once out of the town I whisper to Victor, “There was. I swear it.”

“I believe you,” he whispers back.

Where did she go and what will happen to her? During the long trip home a cold curiosity spins bizarre possibilities. They unwind to infinity like broad white ribbons, rippling strips of snow, snow ribbons wrapping up the world till the world is a covered ball, all done up in satin snow, sealed and ready to be given over. Surrendered.

I
DISCOVERED, TAPED TO
the side of Alan’s desk that faces the closet, a picture postcard of some white stone structures in the Mesa Verde, in Colorado. The card showed a tall ladder connecting two levels of the Indian settlement nestled in an enormous cliff against an azure sky. Alan had drawn a circle around the ladder in red Magic Marker, then drawn an arrow going across the card and the light maple of the desk to another circle, where he wrote, “7/13/76.” More than once I had told him that he could write on his desk in pencil, but please not with Magic Markers, which is why he did it on the hidden side.

Millennia ago, perhaps while Thales across the sea was pondering how to measure the pyramids, the Mesa Verde was the site of a thriving, self-sufficient Pueblo Indian community, eventually conquered and abandoned. Early in this century, two men on horseback happened upon its remains. Imagine their surprise, to round a bend and find extant, in those vast copper-and-ochre-colored cliffs, white buildings tucked in the cavernous hollows dug by wind and rain. The cliffs themselves are separated by deep ravines, creating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle split apart. The stone dwellings, in their linear, geometrical groupings, foreshadowing Euclid, are lucid and harsh, with rock for floor and rock for ceiling. Above on the mesa, their roof, the Indians cultivated crops, scaling the cliff by an obscure path of carefully bored finger- and toeholds, a path indecipherable to outside marauders.

We climbed that perilous ladder, 7/13/76—Victor and I and the little ones, off on a three-week jaunt while Althea and Phil were back East in camp. Below us was a bottomless chasm. “Don’t look down,” the forest ranger warned. “Keep looking straight ahead, at the person directly in front of you.” Directly in front of Vivian was a retarded boy of about fourteen who moved clumsily, and I feared he would make a false move and topple us all. I saw us hurtling through the cubist landscape like falling rocks. Earlier, the boy had tossed a rock down and we never heard it come to earth. He lumbered up one step at a time like a young child, unwilling or unable to go on till he felt each rung of the ladder firm beneath both feet. With every step the ladder trembled. But he didn’t make a false move. He managed as well as anyone else, and up on the grassy mesa at last, I felt like falling to my knees and thanking him, as you might thank an indifferent god who has spared your loved ones out of pure caprice.

In the pottery and artifacts of the Pueblo Indians recurs the motif of a serrated line. After much study, said the forest ranger, archaeologists have concluded that the motif represents teeth. Because of their particular diet (and with no dentists, she added coyly), the Pueblo Indians must have suffered greatly from decaying teeth. So the image for their intractable pain finds its way repeatedly into their art.

I suppose the Magic Marker could be scrubbed off as in the past, but really, what would be the point? What is the point of so many minor restrictions? Most of them are concerned with the setting of precedent and habit, presupposing long life. I should have let him draw all over his room, if he chose. Drink milk straight from the half-gallon container. Live on pizza. Crawl into our bed in the middle of the night way past the age of four. For his whole life, if he liked. I also should have let him do things related not to setting precedents but to my own discomforts: keep a pet mouse, ride his bike alone through Central Park, see
Star Wars
for the fourth time. Refine his tastes? For what? And I should have gotten him the Adidas sneakers he craved, immediately, not put it off till the snow melted because I was busy, not said they were vastly overpriced and wouldn’t Keds do as well.

One wall of his small room is painted midnight blue and dotted with all the stars in the heavens, each constellation clearly labeled in his slender, neat letters. He writes like a draftsman, Victor used to say. Several weeks have passed and the Beatles records still lie scattered on the bed like huge coins. I select one at random to play while I limp around. When he first played
Abbey Road
for me, he pointed out how the songs ran into each other; despite their different moods, they were connected musically, thematically, like a suite. He didn’t use those words, naturally, but that was what he meant. I was impressed and pretended I hadn’t noticed. Vivian remarked that the songs on one side of the
White Album
were connected too: they were about animals. “Animals?” said Alan. “Sure. ‘Blackbird.’ ‘Piggies.’ ‘Rocky Raccoon.’” Alan looked closely at the record label. “Three out of nine.” “Well, still,” said Vivie. I stuck up for her. I thought she had a point. Tenuous, but a point. “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” was certainly animal-like, though I didn’t suggest that aloud. “Blackbird” is playing right now—it has a feathery, airy grace. “Blackbird singing in the dead of night, Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise. You were only waiting ...”

The spy story is on his desk, the spies in their three-piece suits scribbling notes on the Magic Slate in the bushes of Central Park oblivious, forever now, to the danger they risk. But so is the danger, forever now, forestalled. Also on his desk is the report he was writing about Egypt. “Religious Beliefs” is the heading. “The ancient Egyptians believed that when a person dies and goes to their Day of Judgment, their life is put in a balance scale and in the other side is a feather called The Feather of Truth, and if the person’s life tips the scale even a little bit then he does not go to heaven.” A winsome notion of truth, compressed into a feather, far from the Truth we were led to envision: solid, unbudgeable, forbidding, and quite lacking in charm. Evidently for the Egyptians it was the lies that were heavy.

The old
Ranger Ricks
can go to the school library. The baseball cards should really be given to his friends—they are valuable, I understand—but since I don’t want to see his friends I drop them in the metal wastebasket, where they make a hollow, accusing thud.

There on a shelf is that stupid wooden pig. Flat, barely an inch in depth, only the vaguest outline of a pig, it is a small bank designed by one of New York’s less prescient shop teachers. Its legs—front two and back two merged—can hardly support it. If you move the shelf the slightest bit, it tips over. I move the shelf. The slit on top is too narrow for nickels and pennies: a dimes-only bank. But there is no provision for getting the dimes out, no secret cloacal exit, only that one thin slit on top. And being so flat, the bank fills quickly. Like doing penance, you need to turn the pig over and shake out the dimes one by one, which requires a certain strength of character. I would occasionally shake out a few for bus fare. Alan could empty the whole bank. Every child in the seventh-grade woodworking shop made the same pig and brought it home this past Thanksgiving, which means that in thirty-three families dispersed through District 3, someone shakes out the dimes, humming or cursing, depending on temperament.