Louisa Meets Bear (11 page)

Corrine begged me to tell her parents they had to stay in a hotel. “I can't have them in the house,” she cried. “Lily might be trying to talk to me. She might not talk to me if they're around.” So she and I stayed at her house, Corrine sleeping in Lily's little bed, punching my arms and screaming when I insisted on washing the sheets before she put them back on, me in Lily's Barbie sleeping bag at her feet.

The night before the funeral, at the funeral parlor, Corrine's mother whispered to me, “Louisa, darling, see if you can get her to do something with her hair for tomorrow.” Corrine had pulled up a chair so she could sit next to the coffin. She was holding Lily's hand, talking softly to her. I knew that she was telling Lily not to be scared. From across the room, Corrine's hair looked matted, as though it were knotted and then stuck to her head with something sticky.

In the morning, I laid out clothes for Corrine and told her to be sure to wash her hair. I heard the shower go on and then, a minute later, go off. When Corrine walked into the room, her hair was dry. I swiveled her around, back toward the bathroom, turned the shower on, and guided her under the water.

“Close your eyes,” I said, pushing her head under the nozzle. Something that looked like brown rust flowed over her shoulders. Jesus, I thought, is that Lily's blood still in her hair?

I got into the shower with her, squeezed shampoo into my palms, and lathered her scalp. I rinsed, lathered again, and rinsed. Then I surveyed the mass of her hair. It was horribly knotted. I reached for a bottle of crème rinse, put a handful in, waited a minute, and rinsed. I could hardly see or feel any difference. I continued adding crème rinse and rinsing until I'd used the whole bottle. Then I took a washcloth and started washing the rest of Corrine: her feet, the back of her knees, between her legs, under her arms.

By the time I got her out of the shower, she was sobbing. I dried her off with a towel, wrapped her in a second one, pulled down the toilet seat cover, and sat her down. For fifteen minutes, I tried to comb the knots out of her hair. Then I went down to the kitchen and got a bottle of vegetable oil. I rubbed oil into Corrine's hair and attempted again to comb. Slowly, I got out some of the tangles. She never stopped crying and I was sure that some of it was because I was tearing at her hair.

“It was awful,” I tell you. “I finally got a scissors and cut out the remaining knots. Then I had to wash her hair again because of the oil. I tried to make her look presentable by using mousse and hair spray to cover the spots where her scalp showed through, but by the time we got to the funeral parlor, she had undone all my work by pulling again at her hair. She looked like someone from the back ward of a loony bin. When her mother saw her, she nearly fainted.”

We're sitting at the kitchen table. You're drinking beer. I'm sipping tea. My suitcase is still by the front door. You're staring at me as though you're not quite taking in what I'm saying.

“How did you get in the shower?” you ask.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you have your clothes on?”

I look at you, trying to figure out what it is that you're getting at.

“Answer me. Did you or did you not have any clothes on?”

“Of course not. I wouldn't get into a shower with my clothes on.”

“You mean you were washing Corrine while you both were naked.”

“What the hell are you suggesting?”

You get up from the table and head to the bathroom. The toilet flushes, and then I hear our shower running. I bang on the door before letting myself in. “Listen,” I say. I am yelling. “You can't make wild accusations like that and then walk out of the room.” I am so enraged, I'm near to tears.

You don't respond. For a moment, I think you are singing. Then I realize that you have the shower radio on. “Who do you think you are? I've just come back from my best friend's child's funeral and you pull this shit!”

It's not a song; it's a dog food commercial. I pick up a bottle of your very expensive aftershave and hurl it at the side of the tub. The glass shatters into glistening green shards and a sickly smell mixes with the steam.

*   *   *

Of course, we make up. “I was tired,” you say. “You know how irrational I get when I'm tired.”

I buy you a new and even larger bottle of the aftershave. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I shouldn't have thrown it no matter what you said.”

But I can't shake it, the sense of something debased and dangerous between us, the feeling of betrayal that you used what I told you about Corrine's grief against me, the sound of the bottle shattering, the shards of sticky green glass. What if you hadn't headed into the bathroom? What if we had stayed in the kitchen? Would I have reached for the teapot filled with boiling water?

I play this scene over in my mind. You say,
You mean you were washing Corrine while you both were naked.
I say,
What the hell are you suggesting?
Your hands rest palms down on the table. I reach for the kettle. You track my arm as it moves through the air.

*   *   *

Once, during the month before I pack up my things, you say about Lily that it was God's will.

We're sitting in an Indian restaurant. You're dangling a forkful of vegetable samosa next to your mouth.

“God's will? It was God's will to have a blood vessel burst in her brain?”

You bite and then put your fork down with a clank. I watch you chew. “Yes,” you say. “That's what I believe.” You set your jaw and stare at something behind me. I can't tell if you really believe this or are saying it to provoke me.

The waiter arrives with a tray of chapatis and chutneys. A doughy mist rises between us.

If I had to put my finger on when I decided to leave, it would have to be that moment before the chapatis when you evoked the possibility that reasonable people, and perhaps even you yourself, could view Lily's death as redeemed by her ascent into heaven, whereas I could see only the dumbness and bruteness of nature—the only redemption if I excise that dumbness and bruteness in myself. And, for me, this bruteness has been most bald-faced with you, in this love of ours that had become, if we are honest with ourselves, an exchange of cruelties.

Your father bequeathed you this God when you were a child and I think this is what you love most about him, that he gave you this idea you might turn to later in life of a God who could shepherd you, as he believed he'd been when he stopped drinking—an inheritance richer than all the T-bonds and blue-chip stocks you gather now in your portfolio. My father has no God. No stories of Jesus washing the feet of Mary Magdalene or throwing the money changers out of the temple. What my father has are concepts, concepts that, despite his own failings with my mother and then me and I suppose now Juanita to imagine another person's experience, he did try to teach me: tolerance, compassion, justice. For the most part, he succeeded, and, for the most part, I have learned to be grateful to him for showing me that one can fashion one's life at whatever ethical level one chooses. At other times, though, it seems that my belief in the origins of human life in a primordial soup leaves me with only my bestiality. At these times, I understand why the fundamentalists have fought so hard to keep the theory of evolution out of the schools—that what's at stake are not the scientific facts but how we see ourselves and what we aspire to be.

*   *   *

You already know that at first I went back to New Haven because when I sent you a letter asking you to forward my mail, you did. What you probably don't know is that I've since moved back West, into Corrine's house by the ocean, and that I'm living alone there now since she's in Puerto Rico with a man she met when her brother and I insisted she get away for a few weeks. Her parents have been a wreck, calling me when they can't reach her, and I spend a lot of time reassuring them that the change of scenery, not living here where Lily died, is good for her.

I never finished my degree. “ABD,” as my father says, “Louisa's All But Dissertation.” It just seems unnecessary for my work (I'm now the manager of the bookstore where I worked when I lived here after you left me in Ocean City and I then left Andrew in New York), which, unfortunately, involves more time handling accounts and dealing with salespeople than reading books. “What I need,” I tell my father, “is not a PhD in English but a bookkeeping course.” In the little spare time I have, I've been working on some poems, a handful of which I've published in journals that no one except other poets ever read. From time to time, I hear from Andrew. He's married, though the way he writes about his wife makes me think that the marriage won't last long. Don't worry—I know better.

I've heard through someone who knows someone who works with you that you have a serious girlfriend and that she is tiny and smart and some sort of doctor. The news hurt (actually, it hurt a great deal), but it came also as a relief, a relief to know that you have moved on and that somehow that must mean that I have too.

As for me, I have friends, some of them men who I know pine for more, and on the rare occasion I go to bed with one of them. I am for now, though, too frightened of my capacity to pour boiling water on someone's hands to do more than a one- or two-night sort of thing.

What I miss most is sleeping with you. Not sleeping with you as it was at the end but sleeping with you as it was at the start, before we hurt each other, when you adored my smell and I could see your angel wings.

Now I sleep in Lily's old room with her troll collection and the butterflies Corrine painted on the walls. I have thought about moving, out of the fog, to the sunny side of town, out of Lily's bed, to a clean white room with a bed meant to hold a man and a woman. Just not now. Not yet.

 

1978

 

Lion Eats Cheetah Eats Weasel Eats Mouse

At first, we named everything: the apartment, Andrew's leather jacket, my car. Andrew's leather jacket, we named Raoul. “Raoul and I will be home around ten,” Andrew would say, and I would imagine Andrew and some unbearably good-looking Latin male, narrow-shouldered, long-torsoed, with a shade of stubble and a lot of bruised lip, both of them wearing leather jackets with collars of chocolate fur. My car—the Datsun I'd brought from Ocean City to New York, which had developed a crack in the dashboard (the crack we referred to as the San Andreas Fault) and rust seeping up into the trunk—we called the Quake. “Gotta get the Quake some new shoes,” I'd say. Or, “Time to give Quake a bath.”

In the winter, the kitchen became infested with mice and I became consumed with Percy Green, a black kid whose story was spattered across the papers. Deathly afraid of mice, I would not go into the kitchen in the mornings until Andrew had gone before to remove any carcasses and hide the traps. As for Percy, in the beginning the story read scholarship kid from Washington Heights, shipped off to Hotchkiss on an alumni fund grant, gunned down on the street by a brutish white cop. Standing on a footstool to do the dishes, afraid a mouse might scamper out from under the cabinets, I would study the countertop TV, flipping channel to channel for more local news, and then turning the faucet off and wiping my hands on the sides of my jeans when the pictures of Percy Green floated onto the screen.

“They're more scared of you than you are of them,” Andrew swore about the mice. It was morning and I was crying. “I feel so stupid,” I said. “I can't stand to even think about them, the way they slip through cracks and have those soft flexible bones.” Mostly, though, what I was crying about was me: that since moving in with Andrew I had become a person who had to do the dishes standing on a footstool and who huddled in a ball on top of the bed.

Andrew fingered the fur on Raoul's collar, and then swung the jacket over his shoulders. Leaning into the bookshelf, he blew dust off a tiny pre-Columbian figure—an animal man with a distended belly and no eyes—he'd brought back from his summer travels and that now stood guard by his turntable. Already his mind was on the next thing. “When will you be home?” I asked, hating my whiny tone.

“Late.” Andrew lifted his book bag. Taxiing for takeoff, he moved into the hall.

“How late?”

“Late. Don't pressure me, Louisa.” He enunciated the three syllables of my name as though it were something distasteful he was picking up with a crumpled paper towel. “It's ten days to exams.”

I'd known Andrew was in his last year of law school when I moved in with him but I'd not known there were mice in the apartment. Afraid I might break into a messy gurgly sob, I chewed the braided silver chain dangling over my nightgown, comforting myself with the memory of the night Andrew had given me the necklace. He'd lit candles, long shadows blanketing the room as he laid the silver over my breastbone, explaining how the necklace had been made by a man who lived in the same village as the shaman Don Juan in the Carlos Castaneda book. When he'd lifted my hair to fasten the clasp, I had felt linked to the mystery at the center of the universe.

“You're acting like a baby.” Copper wind chimes clanged wildly as cold air rushed into the apartment. “A colossal baby,” he added, before shutting the door.

*   *   *

At the private girls' school where I worked as an assistant librarian, two of the girls looked at me blankly when I asked what they thought about the Percy Green story, and a third, her eyes outlined in purple, said, “That guy who shot a cop?”

“No, I mean, yes.” I tried to explain. “But he didn't shoot the cop. He was shot
by
the cop near Riverside Park.” Then, later in the week, the story began to shift. Reports came that Percy was apprehended in the midst of an assault, the victim a Pakistani man visiting his engineering-student brother. Percy had a knife; the Pakistani man had a camera and a subway map.