Sweet Talk (6 page)

It was then that I knew I loved Officer Cook, the blackness of his huge wet boots, the tenderness of his large hands as he lighted the flares and placed them along the roadside. People died that night on Interstate 17, and we were alive. We were alive! I loved Officer Cook for having survived the double whump of my car smashing into his car, nose to tail, and tail to nose, and then having thought of something to say about it afterward. We hit him twice, the chicken and I, before we spun out again heading back down the road in the direction we had been going before the accident. It took me a moment to realize that we were
still moving and that the wheels had caught their traction again and needed an application of the brakes.

“Is it over?” I said to the chicken. When I lifted the towel, he was walking in small circles around the cage, looking for an escape perhaps. Poor creature, who in the early
A.M
. that day had been a resident of Old MacDonald’s Pet Shop eating yellow corn and practicing his ridiculous crow in front of cooing children.

The reason Officer Cook had been radioing for a tow truck was that another car had already hit the ice slick and had departed from the road. It had slid down a steep bank and been caught by drifts. The owner was standing now on the safe side of the guard rail waiting for the truck. He was a juggler, a college kid who had just driven four hundred miles on his way home from a Springsteen concert.

“I’m only twenty miles from home,” he said.

“Me too,” I said. “Twenty miles from home and ten miles from a big party.”

He had three snowballs and was tossing them in the air as we talked. He tossed them so high that they disappeared into the feathered darkness before they met his lightning hands again.

“You want a ride home?” he said. “Your car’s done for the night.” In fact, my car was going to need three thousand dollars in body work plus the four-hundred-dollar transmission job I had been postponing, and
therefore it was done forever. I looked down at his red Mustang held by snow.

“How do you know
your
car’s not done for the night?”

“My car didn’t hit a police car,” he said.

I don’t know why the TV crew didn’t put the juggler in the picture, maybe because they believed that the real story lay in the irony of a patrolman’s needing help. The crew arrived breathlessly, a van from a station in Binghamton. One of them had a video camera, and the other did the talking. Officer Cook, who was back in his car talking on the radio, got out in order to say, “We don’t want any more vehicles on this roadside. Move along now.”

Traffic was moving very slowly past us in the far lane, cars, an eighteen-wheel rig, their drivers invisible behind black glass, straining to see us, I imagined, our little tableau, a cautionary tale.

“How many cars involved here?” the TV man said.

“Three,” Officer Cook said, turning to get in his car.

“Anybody hurt? Anybody injured?”

“I don’t think so,” Officer Cook said. “Get off the road,” he said, and slammed his door.

Just then I leaned against the car so that I could prop my elbows on the roof, and my belt buckle broke into “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The TV man turned and took me in for the first time and then noticed the juggler, who by then was throwing five snowballs into the air and was all concentration.

“Did you hit the cop, or did he hit you?”

“I hit him,” I said. I could see the TV man thinking about it—here were a juggler in the snow, a cop with a wrecked car, and a woman who sounded like a brass band, maybe there was a story here—and then he shook his head no.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to his cameraman.

They jogged to the van, and before they got in I heard the TV man say, “I know there’s a better wreck somewhere down the road.”

I looked at the juggler, who dropped his hands and let the balls fall past him like tiny comets. “You fail the wreck test,” he said. “They’re looking for an A-plus wreck. They’re looking for something with bodies.”

The belt had arrived at the piccolo section of the march, the silvery shooting-star solo of the brave little instrument soaring above the heavy brass ones. The juggler and I paused to listen to it. We tapped our feet in the slush and kept time with our bodies. When the march was over, the juggler said, “Nice belt.”

The happiest person I met that night was the tow-truck driver. She was making lots of money in the bad weather and knew how to handle the roads. “My policy is people first and then their wrecks,” she told us. “You might have some aches and pains, or your feet might be froze.” So we got in the cab, the juggler, the chicken, and I, and rode one mile to the exit and a gas station, where we waited for the tow truck to bring in our cars.
Officer Cook had to stay behind and wait for a policeman to come and fill out an accident report. That was the last I saw of him until the eleven o’clock news.

At the station, there were already three other drivers waiting for their cars. We all still had that adrenaline high you get from a close call, and we kept taking turns describing our accidents. We kept embellishing as we went, so that the accidents got more frightening as we added the sounds of breaking glass (my taillights) and the screech of metal (the juggler’s bumper scraping the end of the guardrail), things you hear but don’t listen to when the car is still moving. Someone wanted to know if I was a veterinarian. In the spirit of the moment, I said, “Not exactly,” and they all looked skeptical—We’re all truth-tellers here, they seemed to say. “Actually, this is a birthday present for a veterinarian who lives in the country,” I said. That was true enough to make sense of where I was and how I happened to arrive there with a live chicken. I played John Philip Sousa for them. The juggler juggled some soda cans. We asked him what the hardest things were to juggle and he said, “Live lobsters.” A famous juggler in New York City had tried live lobsters once on a dare from someone in the audience, but the lobsters kept snapping at him. The chicken drank some water from a paper cup and, feeling more himself again, began to speak his peculiar chicken language.

In the end, I didn’t accept a ride home with the juggler, because I had decided he was probably doing a
little speed. Instead, I took a room at Koch’s Universe Motel, which had a giant neon sign depicting stars and spaceships. I gave the chicken to the tow-truck driver. She had three children who wanted a pet, and she was the only one at the gas station who promised she wouldn’t eat it. At eleven o’clock I got a glimpse of Officer Cook on TV. The camera panned over his car, pausing at the crushed front fender and the popped hood. Then it cut to him just long enough for him to say, “We don’t want any more vehicles on this roadside,” and then the report hurried on to the “better wrecks.” Just before Officer Cook got to the word “roadside,” I got a hazy look at myself in the background, separated from Officer Cook by the hood of his car and streaks of falling snow. There we were, together again. There we were, the two of us locked forever in the frame of a TV screen, bouncing off of satellites and caroming over the planet. We were still going places. We were leading off the transmission from earth in front of sports and weather, the late-night talk shows, and old movies. We were going to be up there with everybody who had ever been on TV. Truman and Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ. You name it. Pete Rose and Gloria Steinem. We were moving fast, already on our way to the moon. Pretty soon we’d be passing through the orbit of Mars, then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. We’d be going to Andromeda and who knows where else. What a vacation.

A confession now. What was I doing on the road with a live chicken and a musical belt? I was going to a party where I imagined that I would be noticed as an interesting person. The Poultry Woman. The Marching Band Woman. A woman you would like to discover at a party. There were going to be famous people at that party, Watkins Glen race drivers, glass sculptors from Corning, writers from New York City, maybe even athletes and actors. I was between jobs again and living alone. When I set out in bad weather I had a feeling. Something was going to change for me that night, something that was going to relocate me in the universe. Watching television in the motel, I thought about it. I was right. Something happened.

M
y mother cannot say the word
cancer
. A year ago, after an operation to remove a tumor at the juncture of her small and large intestines, she used the word
blockage
to explain what the problem had been. “The doctors have found a blockage in my intestines,” she told relatives who came to visit as she convalesced on the porch. “Now that it’s gone, I can finally eat again, thank God.”

My Aunt Ruda took me aside and said, “I want you to tell me the truth about your mother. Is she talking about an ulcer, or what?” Aunt Ruda is my mother’s sister-in-law. When I visit every summer, at the end of my teaching year, she has a new inventory of details about other people’s medical problems—grotesque incisions, ruined arteries, fatal blood clots, irradiated wombs. Aunt Ruda is overweight, plump with the stories of other people’s grief.

“Gemma, you mustn’t tell anyone what the operation was really for,” my mother said to me, and I saw the fear skate across her eyes, cold in the blue light of the kitchen’s fluorescent bulb. “If any of your aunts and uncles find out that it was something really serious, they’ll keep asking how I am.” I understood then how a question about one’s health can be like a sheath on a sword, hiding the real question: “When will you die?”

Now my mother and I visit as we always have the first night I am home in Ohio. We sit in front of the television in separate chintz-covered chairs, our feet propped on a shared footstool, a box of chocolate buttercreams on the table between us. This year, however, I have come home early to deal with what my mother says is a “new wrinkle.” For one year, she has led a healthy, normal life. She has gained weight, she has bought new clothes. She has visited me in California. But two weeks ago, during a quarterly checkup, something unexpected appeared in the X rays.

“You look healthy,” I tell her. “You look wonderful.”

“I feel fine,” she says. “I can eat anything.”

We invent a dessert menu for the next week. Chocolate mousse, peach Melba, apple spice cake, banana cream pie, cherries in cognac. In the muted light of the television screen, in the old hollows of familiar furniture, we feel protected.

• • •

Usually in June there is a milky haze lying among the wooded hills and the steaming crops—young corn, ripe wheat, silvery middle-aged oats. Today, the landscape surprises us with its sparkle and clarity, as if we have driven into the center of a crystal prism. I can see the way a slender leaf of corn ripples along its center vein. I can see the fanning seed head on a stalk of yellow wheat.

“Ironwort, tiger lily.” My mother gives me back names from my youth, identifying the wildflowers that lean frailly away from the edge of the road.

When I was a child, I suffered from frequent kidney infections, which my mother called “attacks.” It was not until years later, when I casually used the term during a college physical examination, that I recognized its benign absurdity. “An attack?” said the doctor. “A kidney
attack
?” At once, I saw the image it must have called up, of a scowling cartoon kidney, with thin arms and mitten-shaped hands carrying its muggers’ weapons. Now we drive back through the Ohio countryside. We are on our way home from the university hospital, where a second opinion has been offered on the spot that showed up on the X rays of my mother’s liver. She calls the spot a “development,” as if it is something promising, like a housing project. Her hands move quickly as she talks. The backs of them are tanned from her work in the garden. The palms, flashing white as she speaks, remind me of the undersides of maple leaves exposed
in a wind. With her hands my mother can make small houses, a street intersection, a car going out of control.

“Well, it just went poof,” she said once, explaining to my father and grandmother where the grocery money had gone and why we were having hot dogs once again for our Sunday dinner. “Like that,” she said, and her hands described baroque scrolls of smoke above her dinner plate. It seemed to me that with her hands she might produce, out of the imaginary smoke, an emerald bird, inside of which would be a golden egg, inside of which would be a lifetime supply of grocery money.

My father, ever mindful of my education, cast a meaningful eye my way and said, “Although a hot dog on a bun is not the feast we had all hoped for this afternoon, let us remember that it contains more protein than the average Chinese person eats in a week.”

“I am not a Chinese,” my grandmother said, looking sideways at my mother. “I am a Protestant.”

“I’ll need time to think about this new development,” my mother says now. “I’ll need time to plan.” My father has been dead for five years, and my grandmother three. Not long before he died, my father moved the family, without consulting anyone, from a large house on the edge of town to a smaller one near the center. He was thinking ahead to their old age, he told me. The smaller house was near drugstores and supermarkets, and closer to the hardware store he ran. It was near the hospital in case of emergency. The Christmas after he
bought the house, he drove me into the countryside to discuss the future.