Shelter in Place (16 page)

“There is a group,” she said. Here she crossed the room and sat next to me. “Out at the college. They've been writing. They visit her. They want to organize. They have run out of patience. That's what they say. How they sign their letters.
We have run out of patience
.”

“With what?”

“With all of it, Joey. But most of all with the violence.”

“Funny,” I said. “Funny that these women who've run out of patience with violence have chosen my mother as their hero.”

She looked at me with such irritation and disappointment. Why did I provoke her? I hardly needed the explanation. I resisted because it was my mother. Because of Tess, because there was something in her that frightened me, a thing I didn't want and wasn't ready for. Not for the change, nor for the disruption, nor the inevitable complication of our lives. Not even in the name of revolution. I didn't want my mother to be a hero, to become a symbol of some ill-conceived and miniature revolt. I resisted for those, and for a thousand other reasons.

But mostly I just wanted things to stay as they were. Because I was my father's son.

“Not funny at all,” she said. “They think what she did is what should have been done. And what should
be
done. That she was defending another woman, defending two children who could not defend themselves. They think she should be released from prison.”

“So they want to change the laws.”

“They think the laws should change, yes. But that's not what they're primarily interested in.”

“What are they primarily interested in, Tess?”

“Action.”

“Action. So a bunch of girls from the college, all of whom have run out of patience, will roam White Pine with hammers dangling from their belts?”

She despised me when I spoke to her like this.

“They don't know yet, Joey. They don't know what they'll do.”

“I see. And they go to visit my mother for what? Advice? Leadership? Inspiration?”

“I don't know. She told me about them yesterday. And now I'm telling you.”

“And now what?”

“She wants me to meet with them.”

“Meet with them.”

“Go out to the college, yes.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure. To see what can be done.”

“As her emissary.”

“I don't know exactly.”

“And will you go?”

“Yes. With you. We'll go together.”

“Is that the word from on high?”

She nodded.

“Why? Why would I do that? Why would you?”

She sighed her exasperated sigh and looked out at the trees while I watched her and waited.

“Because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a fucking bar. Neither do you. And because, Joey, I am angry. Because I am angry in a way you can't possibly imagine. You can try, but you cannot understand it. Just like I try to understand you or what has happened to your family. I try but I can't. It is the kind of anger that comes from too much fear. Do you understand me? Just like your mother. And just like her, I don't want to ignore it. I won't. I would rather fucking die.”

“I don't know,” I said. “What is the it, Tess?”

She walked over to the fire. “The things they do,” she said. “The things they're allowed to do. What we accept. What we endorse. What we celebrate.”

I watched her.

“Accept, endorse, celebrate. Is that some kind of a slogan? Something the women without patience stamp on their T-shirts?”

“Fuck you. It's not them. It's your mother.
She
said it.”

So, the master, the guru in chains, was at work on her proverbs.

“She says it?”

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“That we're complicit.”

“In what?”

“Violence, Joe.”

“Violence.”

“Against women.”

“We accept, and endorse, and celebrate it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. And please stop with the sarcasm. Please. I know I don't have to explain this. I know you agree.”

“Of course,” I said.

“So then what?”

“The idea of her in there inventing herself as some kind of prophet.”

“Not a prophet. But so what? You'd rather she goes soft in there watching Jenny Jones?”

“I'd rather she's not in there at all.”

“Well, she is. So if this is what she's doing, so what? Why does it make you so angry? Why do you hate it, Joey? You should be proud.”

“Proud?”

“Yes. To have a mother like her. To know you come from someone so strong.”

That expression on her face, the one I loved most. All that life, all that determination. I was tired of arguing. I didn't know why I was angry. Not then, not precisely. Or why I was resisting. I fell back into the couch, gave it up and closed my eyes.

“Now what?” I asked. “What happens now?”

“I've seen it, Joey. Don't forget that. I watched you break your hand. I know what's in you.”

“That was different,” I said.

“What's the difference?”

“That was for you.”

“So is this,” she said.

Y
esterday, late afternoon, the electric rise. An hour before the sun falls through the trees and I'm sprinting hard through the clearing chasing an elk into the woods. I'd pulled all the pots up onto the counter and was scrubbing them as if they weren't clean already, sweating from the work and the steam, when I saw it feeding. And then I was out there in the cold, in my jeans, barefoot, shirtless, not feeling anything but my own liquid body gliding through the thickening purple air. If you'd seen me from the window, you'd have thought I was after blood, but all I wanted was to be next to the animal or part of it somehow. If I'd had any idea at all what I was after, which I probably didn't then. I was just running, so happy and full of sky, certain I could catch the thing and put my arm over its thick, hot neck, or maybe ride it, wrap myself around its back, feel its warm belly against my thighs, push my face against its fur. I ran off the trails, deeper and deeper into the tangle of branches and shadows. The animal was long gone, but I ran on until I had no more breath and the full night had come. But still the rising and I lay down in the underbrush and buried myself in damp leaves until I was nothing but a pair of eyes pointed upwards. The ground was as warm and soft as our bed and I stayed there writhing, shivering with all the power I felt, my fingers slowly clawing at the earth, my hands opening and closing like cats' paws and I thought, Fuck Tess, who needs her, I'll go find the woman with black hair and blue eyes where nothing is hidden, her plain, pale face, rosy farmer cheeks, the sweet green pears, hard pucks of cheese, and I will carry her home over my shoulder and show what I have within me.

When I made it home I was cold. My feet were bleeding. Long, deep scratches across my chest. Leaves in my hair. I went to bed and stained the sheets and now I can hear them turning in the wash.

There's sunlight in the clearing and I am alone again, waiting for whatever I will do next.

W
ill you go again eventually?” Tess asked.

“Of course, I will.”

“May as well go now then.”

So up the hill, along the Spine, down the valley, onto Prison Way, into the parking lot, through the check-in, the metal detector, the hallway, to the visit room, to my place at the table.

You think memory is enough. But then you're there and see how wrong you are. It's something else entirely. Intensity of sound, rush of color. Smell. Sometimes it's too much for me.

It seems I'm missing most of the filters. Or they work only half the time. The older I get the brighter the light, the louder the sound. It is worse now, but it has always been this way. As long as I can remember. A shirt tag like a tack in my neck. A seat belt edge like a blade across my shoulder. Paralyzing jackets. Everything irritating. Nights when the sounds get louder and louder. Angry pipes. Complaining trees. Pine needles hissing in the dark. Baying coyotes. Mice in the eaves. The tawny owls calling, Joe, Joey, Joseph, Joe, Joey, Joseph. Come home, come home, come home.

Cities terrify me. All the motion, all the people, all the talk. Chattering and chattering and chattering. The saturation. The grime. How do you stay still? How do you keep it out? How do you keep from drowning? Interior, exterior, the light, the color, the noise, the smell, every moving part, the intuition, the animals, the cars, the fear, the trees, the glass, the desire, the food, the smoke, searing meat, need, elbows, hideous people, vulgar, shuffling, lurching people.

All of it comes in one liquid mixture pouring through me fast. A wide and steady stream in ever-changing colors blasting from a toppled hydrant. When it comes, I cannot stop it. On the bus it pours into my mouth. Subways are worst of all. I have terrible dreams of those subterranean trains, in the tunnels where there is no escape, no natural light. Locked inside where there is no relief, no sky, no air, no exit. The adrenaline comes. The sweat follows. My body vibrating the way it does on dark corners, in bad alleys, footsteps behind me, when a fight is inevitable. It is the adrenaline of war. And soon my whole face is gone. I am left with a dark oval, a void, the stream flowing in.

And even here, so far from any city, before the quiet woods, where no cars can be heard, no neighbors can be seen, still the noise rises. The needles, relentless birds, the rain, buckets of shattered glass against the windows, against the roof, the pipes like choking old men.

When it happens now, when the filters fail and I'm afraid I may die, I go into the guest bathroom and I draw the blinds. I close the door and push a towel along the bottom crack to block the light, to block the air the way Claire and I once did in the bathroom we shared in Capitol Hill, when we were kids and she wanted to smoke our mother's Marlboros.

I turn the lights off and lie on my back and I stay there in the cold dark until it passes. Until the noise has vanished, and the sense that it might kill me has gone.

These days, it's the only thing I know to do.

I stay there in the stillness with my sister Claire and I wait.

I'
d driven out to The Pine and was waiting for my mother at one of those tables, its legs riveted to the floor.

“Everything's a weapon,” Seymour told me more than once.

And then there she was, Seymour escorting her in. Which was a shock. Though it shouldn't have been. The odds were good, I guess. He nodded. Gave me that look of his—all at once tender and contrite and apologetic and wise. It was strange to see them together. Or strange to see them come in from somewhere else. It suggested a life without me. Not really a suggestion, I guess. Because that's just what they had, isn't it? The two of them inside. Me out. I imagined them entering a dinner party. Bustling in from a cold night, pulling off their coats, their scarves. Sorry, everyone, for being late, traffic was terrible. That kind of thing. A happy couple. They were no couple, of course, but the intimacy was undeniable. They shared a world that I did not. The routines, the food, the gossip, the texture of the place.

I don't know why it surprised me. Why I hadn't considered any of that before. It takes me time with these things.

I'm slow to see the obvious.

Seymour left her at the door. The first time I'd seen her in a month, maybe more. She looked healthy. Strong. Her hair was longer, parted in the middle and pulled back into a ponytail, the way she'd worn it when I was younger, the way she'd worn it in all the photographs of her life with my father before us. Her posture had changed again. She had always been a graceful woman, but now she moved with what seemed to me an affected slowness. Her chin slightly cocked, a subtle, condescending smile. A dancer walking onstage, not yet dancing, just finding her mark, preparing, but even in the preparation there was theater. She'd lost color in her face, but she wasn't sickly the way she'd been in those first visits. The whiteness of her skin making her eyes appear bluer.

She held me.

“Joey,” she whispered, “Joey,” as if we were anywhere, as if I were her child home from school. I liked the normalcy of her voice, the strength of her arms. I think I had been afraid that she was dying in there, that she would be withered and emaciated, that a woman like her could do nothing but die in a place like that.

“You look good,” I said.

We both sat.

She touched my face. “I am, Joey.”

“I'm glad. I hear you've become a revolutionary.”

She laughed. “Is that what you hear?”

To see her like that, flashes of the other person, of the other time, it made me happy. As simple as that. The way that only relief makes me happy.

“Tess,” she said. “She's lovely, Joe.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“I do.”

“Don't fuck it up.”

I laughed. “So you no longer think I'm wasting my life living here in White Pine?”

She shrugged. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“On your life here in White Pine.”

“What does that mean?”

“I think you know what it means.”

“Tell me. I'd like you to tell me,” I said.

She sighed. “Joey. Do you want to be a bartender the rest of your life? Do you want to stay here? Never go anywhere else, never do anything.”

“I'm happy. Bartending, living with Tess. We're happy.”

“Is she?”

There was the cold edge.

“You seem to think you know. Why don't you tell me about Tess. Now that you know her so well.”

I couldn't stop myself.

“Don't be a child, Joey.”

“Tell me about her.”

She held my eyes for a long moment. “All right. No. No she's not happy. She is restless. And if you try to stop her, you will lose her.”