Falling to Earth (18 page)

Mae lets the children spread out their games on the floor to keep them content inside and doesn't yell even if one of them bounces a rubber ball in the living room. When the kitchen is hottest at the end of the day, when she's given in and started opening up the house again and they're waiting for the evening breezes or the cold air following a rainstorm to shift the heavy air inside, she'll put the ice cream maker on a folded towel on the living room floor and let them crank themselves a cold dessert. “No, not out on the porch,” she says when they protest. “It's not so bad in here. Let Homer have a turn.” When they protest again and ask why they can't at least eat the ice cream on the porch, she says, “Same reason I told you before, same reason the porch swing is still in the garage.” She can see that Paul is rattled every time she has to remind the children, even though it was his idea in the first place to limit what they were seen to do outside the house. She sees that he's more rattled every day, rattled and baffled and unable to concede that his consideration and restraint have not been enough, that if anything people around town have begun to stare and talk as if they've taken a vote and decided somehow it's their right to do so.

Try not to mind the cracking paint on the porch railings. Mulch the vegetables so all they want is water. Ignore that loose shingle on the roof and grab quickly if you must at the grass growing between the bricks on the front walk. Silence the children when they become too boisterous or better yet, just shoo them inside.

It's her mother Mae is thinking about, more and more every day. Her mother she's reminded of when she pulls a blind down over a window or shuts a door. Her mother whose odd behavior they always seemed to need to hide with excuses. Mama who's been a little under the weather lately, thank you for asking. Mama who can't leave that cup until she's washed it twice. Mama who can't come downstairs, can't go to church today. Can't come to the door, she hasn't been well. Not quite herself these last few days. She'll be there next time, I'm sure. She'll be so glad you asked. Mama, always so busy, washing and rewashing every cup. Mama leave it, that's enough. Mama no one's looking in, let the curtains be.

They'd been so glad when Mae had found Paul. So glad, both her mother and father, when she'd married him. But more than that, they'd been relieved because it meant she could leave their house and her half-life of excuses. Mae married would be safe, they'd reasoned. Mae with a home and a family of her own would be Mae who'd escaped, whose life would never become a series of constraints. Mae had also felt a kind of relief, as if it had proved that she'd been right all along when she'd married Paul, that there'd been no need to fret, no need to worry that she'd be unable by degrees to see that a washed thing was clean, unable to make a bed just once or see a window without wishing it were wall.

It's not the same, she tells herself now. It's not shame or fear that makes her stay inside, although it amounts to the same thing if she's unwilling to pass an open window. Things would go back to normal, she and Paul had told themselves, or as close to it as circumstances would allow. The houses around them would get rebuilt and once folks had grass to cut again, porches to sweep, and work and school taking them downtown each day, things would be different. She and Paul could open the box they'd shut themselves in inch by inch and reassume their lives. But the box got shut tighter than they'd meant, and everything outside it has gone strange. A frightening truth has begun to enter Mae's head that Paul will never admit: that although they willingly withdrew and boxed themselves in, the town now means to keep them there. If she pushed to get out again, to claim her place among the survivors, it would be like being trapped again in the storm cellar in those first moments after the storm, but now with the weight of a hundred trees fallen across the doors to prevent her climbing out.

Mae moves close enough to the lace curtains on the windows at the front of the house to see that the woman is there again across the street, in the same spot she's been standing every day this week. There's no foot or automobile traffic, no one to see the woman but Mae, and it wouldn't matter if there were; she'd look through any car or person that got in her way, straight through to whatever it is she thinks she's seeing. What is it exactly that you're heaping on us? Mae wonders. How much more will it be? How big a house and how many coffins are you tossing up on the pile?

Mae is trembling now. It's the same woman she saw the first day when she was folding sheets with Lavinia in the yard, but it could be another. It could be one of any number of women each day, coming to take up the post and stare in turn. She hasn't told Paul and won't, and although Lavinia must know the woman keeps coming back, they've agreed somehow not to talk about it. Mae can feel her heart's beating turning to a throb, the reliable swell and collapse of her ribs shifting into jabs. “Yes, I see you. I see you,” she mutters. “Where were you a year ago?” she asks. “What were you doing? Not standing there, anyway.” Mae feels it then, for the briefest of moments she feels herself wanting to know who this woman is and who she has buried. How many places she set for breakfast the morning of the storm, how many eggs she cracked, how many chairs scraped her kitchen floor in turn when the food was hot and she'd called them all to sit and eat.

It's the sounds, Mae thinks, all the remembered sounds that are weighing on the woman. A screen door cracking shut. A fork dropping on an emptied plate. A toppled glass slopping milk on a tablecloth. It would be easier to bear somehow if it were gall or effrontery that made the woman stand there, but it's only anguish that has led her to Mae's house and let her imagine her dead children thumping down Mae's stairs and sitting at Mae's table. And now Mae is shaking and she's squeezing fistfuls of her dress so hard her knuckles have gone white. She should have gone over to the woman like she'd wanted to that first day out in the yard, just crossed the street and told her, “What you want is not here,” because it turns out that leaving her to stand there every day was the same as opening her door to ghosts.

Mae moves suddenly and snatches open the front door. She stands at the top of the porch stairs looking across the street at the woman, and when the woman doesn't move, Mae goes quickly down the steps, wondering what it is she is doing. She goes down the front walk and then along the sidewalk to the corner and stands there, opposite the woman, still wondering. The woman is not wearing a hat today and, at this distance, even in the bright sun light, they can see each other's faces clearly. Mae is about to call out to her when she hears Little Homer's voice calling, “Mama?” from the porch behind her. The woman's face changes then and she's staring hungrily past Mae at the porch, at Homer.

Mae hears Lavinia's voice then, saying, “Let your mama be. Come on inside.”

Mae can't move from where she is standing. She is ashamed and crying. “No, Homer,” she manages to call. “Go get your brother and sister and play outside in the yard a while.”

H
ere is Mae, before the children, before they were married, handing him an apple she has just twisted off its branch and saying, “This one.” Paul is taking her in, hardly breathing because he can't believe his luck. He can't quite believe that this creature in her swaying summer dress is smiling up at him that way. She's tilted her head just so and all he can see is one blue eye under her hat's straw brim. He's forgotten to reach for the apple and she's laughing at him, biting into it now herself. Here's Paul, all of twenty years to Mae's nineteen, following her around an orchard and panting for the joy of it because he knows this girl will be his. He could kiss her now, but he won't. Not just yet. He'll watch her a little longer instead and let her see it, let her see that she's made his breathing go shallow and quick, that he's barely blinking.

And here is Paul in his good suit, shoving his hands deep in his pockets and letting his heels strike the pavement hard so he can feel the jolt of each step in his spine. He wants to run, he wants to laugh. He pulls his hat down a bit more and lowers his face to hide his grinning because he knows he needs to keep this bubble inside until he reaches the lumberyard and can shout, “I got the loan, Johnny! I'm gonna build her a house!” And here he is, running now because John took hold of him by the arms and looked at him hard with something that was both loss and pride before spinning him around and shoving him back out onto the pavement, sending him running toward Mae and yelling after him, “I know a good lumberyard!”

Here is May, lying on the bed to feed the baby, and Paul watching from the edge of the bed unable, suddenly, to remember how they were before. The baby's jaw works, then slows, the red fist unfurls, and Mae takes her hand from the baby's back to reach for him. This is how they will be. And here they are locked together in the bed, barely moving because it's different for Mae now after three babies and Paul must wait first and hold her face till the moment her lips will open and she'll exhale against his mouth and her hips will begin to toss. “Who's my girl?” he says afterward, when she's laughing and pushing him away because they're both sweaty and he's kissing away the salt above her lips.

Here is the town, exploded and drifting back to earth, and Paul running toward Mae through the debris, desperate to reach Mae, who is core and substance and marrow lining bone. Mae who sees it's him through the muck he's been soaked in. Mae who is still standing, who for all that she's sobbing is fierce and is the reason the children are there to hug his legs.

And here is Paul now, watching Mae at the kitchen sink, thinking that she's slipped still farther away from him than she did yesterday and the day before. He's afraid to look at her much these days, or for very long at a time, because he knows she won't like it, that she'll feel she's being observed. The worst of it is that he can't say precisely what has happened. He thought at first that he was afraid of what he might see in her face, that she'd be angry or irritated or struggling to keep from crying. Then all that shifted somehow, and he realized he wasn't seeing anything at all. As if she were standing right in front of him but wasn't really there, like she'd managed somehow to crawl outside herself and all that remained was a shell in her exact likeness, left there as a diversion to give her time to get away.

He'd blamed it on the storm of course, but even if the storm was initially to blame it isn't anymore and he's grown anxious, casting about for something to hold onto, for a way to understand. They have been married enough years now that everything between them has changed and changed again. The children coming one by one, his father dying, John and Dora moving their family out to California. People moving in and out of a room he'd thought only he and Mae would occupy. He's carried the same image of Mae in his head through it all; that image of the girl in the orchard he's about to kiss for the first time with her eyes wide open and the scent of apples on her mouth, and now, sitting at the kitchen table, he finds he cannot conjure it. Or perhaps it's only that he's unwilling to try, afraid that the girl in his head will be closing her eyes and turning down her face, or worse yet, that she'll already have walked away.

He looks at his mother sitting across from him, entering sums with the stub of a pencil in her book of household accounts. She's thumbing back and forth, looking down her nose through her reading glasses, checking last month or last year against this one. She looks for all the world like she's still at the farm, sitting as she did when he was a child after supper at the kitchen table with one of these books that she'd bought through the years at the stationer's in town. The same books she kept rubber-banded together in the kitchen drawer at the farm that now lie rubber-banded together here in a drawer in his kitchen. For all he knows the pencil in her hand is the same one he watched her write in those books with when he was a child.

The same pencil writing in the same book spread out on the round kitchen table his mother brought along with her when she moved to town from the farm. Paul wants Lavinia to look up from her book and ask him something, ask him anything about his day. Who he saw and talked to in town, whether he'd liked the wilted lettuce salad they'd had with dinner because she'd made it with him in mind. If Johnny came through the door then, he'd sit in that chair there and say, “I believe I will,” when Mae asked if he'd have a slice of cake. Johnny, who fills a kitchen by himself. Johnny, whose legs steal all the room for stretching out under the table. Their father would laugh at him, slouched like that in his chair. He'd reach down and clap Johnny's leg like an old dog's haunch and tell him, “Sit up straight!” Their father, forever chewing a duck call the way other men chewed cigars, watching John fork the tender cake into his mouth, spreading out his hands and saying, “How about me?”

Paul drinks the last of his coffee and clatters his cup back so loudly onto its saucer that it makes Lavinia look up. He clasps his hands quickly under the table and squeezes them together hard to control their trembling. A moment later, Lavinia has looked back down at her book and Mae is taking his cup and saucer to the sink to wash them. Silence prevails, despite his having clattered the cup, despite Mae's sloshing it through the dishwater and setting it
chink
in with the rest of the dripping dishes, and despite the scratch of his mother's pencil in her book. He can't hear the children anywhere and doesn't remember where they are. He wants to ask, “Where are the children?” but he thinks he might shout it or that his voice will sound desperate, as if they truly are lost, and then Lavinia or Mae will look at him in astonished disbelief because he should know that, he should remember, because they just told him.