The Collected Stories Read online

  She says she can’t predict when a thing like that will happen. She says sometimes she will meet a person and know then and there how and when that person will die. She knows these things for facts, but she says she would never say as much out loud.

  I have heard Warren try to get information out of her, saying, “You see any reason I shouldn’t get a Harley?” I have done it, too—watched her closely as I unveil plans for next year.

  I know her insights are back because of last week in Little Egypt. It was the two of us in there, Chatty dozing in the rocking chair, me reading a book about—what else?—dogs. Then Chatty sat up straight; she opened her eyes and said in a firm voice, “Get back in your body right now!”

  Who are you talking to? I said.

  She had a letter from a cousin days later. The cousin’s husband had had a heart attack. He had flat-lined in the CCU, until to everyone’s amazement he had suddenly come to life, conscious. He told the medical team that he had left his body and gone to visit his wife’s cousin. The day, the time, corresponded. “I was talking to my cousin’s husband,” Chatty had told me that night.

  Without faith or courage, I hope she would do the same for me.

  I told her about the dream I had the night my last dog died. I was out of town that night, asleep in a small hotel. My dog came to me in the dream, and he said aloud, “It’s time.”

  I didn’t tell her about the night my mother died, a night I dreamlessly slept through the night in the room right next to hers. But then, my mother never slept with her head on my stomach, or licked my face awake.

  “Tell you about my neighbor,” Chatty said. “We all of us despised him, the way he cheated us out of water when he tapped into our lines to fill his swimming pool in summer. When he sent his children over to collect for a cause, it seemed to us unlikely that the money his children collected ever left his house. He ran for the school board to keep blacks out of the schools, and sold faulty garden equipment to a young couple new in the community.

  “So when he was taken to the hospital by ambulance one night, the only flowers that followed came from his immediate family. He lay in a coma for weeks. Then he was back, seen leaning on the arm of a nurse, walking the shaded paths through the woods wearing a surgical mask—an affectation, most of us thought—waving at his neighbors along the way.

  “One who didn’t hold a grudge had a conversation with him, and passed along the news that since the coma he often couldn’t think of the word he meant to say, and the word that came out in its place was government. He was not aware that he said it, according to the neighbor who had heard him say that he would like to put his boat in the government and do some fishing.

  “And we took it up, inviting each other over for government and coffee. Children were told that when a man and woman loved each other, the government brought them a baby. At backyard cookouts, the neighborhood refrain was, ‘Put another government on the grill.’

  “And we wondered why ‘government’ was the word that he said. Couldn’t the word that came into his head as easily have been grasshopper? Or galoshes? Or ghost?

  “Some of us saw it this way: there was a morning we walked our properties, taking in the damage the ‘government’ had done in the night. We saw broken trees and downed lines, flooded gullies and drowned flowers. And as we cleared away debris, it seemed to us that even though he didn’t realize what he said when he thought he was using the word that he meant, when he invoked for protection from all that was ungovernable the word that he did, the son of a bitch was right.”

  A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to take up more room in a room.

  “Where are we?” I one day asked Warren, who said, “In a little country south of Canada, and just this side of Mexico, in a state the size of this table, in a town the size of this ashtray.”

  I still couldn’t tell if Warren liked me. Always there is a point when you can tell, when most people can tell. It takes longer for me. And then I’m angry with them, for it being so hard to tell. And whose fault is that? I think this is another assumption I have made a life without. I am like those people who hold grudges for what someone has done to them in a dream.

  Always, we are asking here, What does a thing mean? And being asked back, What do you mean? Whereas I like to say things just to say them, because they are pleasing to say, to remember and say, “There is a tiny cove on a lake in the Sierras and I sat in its sand one late summer night when the air didn’t move but was clear and dry and the lake barely lapped and the only thing that moved was a passenger ferry set forth from the other side that was strung with lights like a flirty Parisian barge and made no noise but kept coming closer,” a consolation then, and now.

  In the library, I found these words in the margin of an old copy of Vogue:

  Why, then, did you engender me?

  We didn’t know.

  What didn’t you know?

  That it would be you.

  Warren again. In approximation of Beckett.

  A clipping from a tabloid paper: A woman in West Virginia carried her unborn baby for more than forty years. It calcified outside the uterine wall. When questioned by reporters, the woman said, “As long as the child is inside me I haven’t lost it.”

  A friend of mine tried to get pregnant and found out she could not. I said, “The world doesn’t need more babies,” and she said she wasn’t going to do it for the world.

  The only time the word baby doesn’t scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.

  I brave shower after shower in which the stacks of gifts divide clearly into gifts from moms and gifts from non-moms. The moms give practical items with safety as a theme: a net to keep a crawling child from slipping through the railing of a deck, a mirror that affixes to the dashboard of a car so the driver can see the infant in the car seat behind, a dozen earnest gadgets to “babyproof” a house.

  Whereas I will have chosen a mobile to hang above the crib, baby animals painted on china discs—a breath sends them swinging against one another with a sound to wake a baby down the block.

  Here’s a good baby story; it happened in the Caribbean sea. A woman went into labor after her husband’s small fishing boat sank, and the current pulled them apart. He would later be rescued and reunited with his wife, but there was no sign of him yet when the woman’s life preserver was not enough to hold her above the water. She panicked, scanning the horizon where she thought she saw a squall, the water churning with storm. It moved toward her, closing in till she could make out leaping forms; it looked to her like hundreds of leaping fish. She bobbed in the waves, enduring contractions, and the school of dolphins moved into formation around her. Later she would learn that they can locate a BB with their sonar, so it was no trouble for them to detect her daughter, about to be born.

  The woman screamed when a phalanx of dolphins dove and then surfaced beneath her, lifting her above the level of the sea. But as she pushed her baby out she saw that they were there to help her, and because the dolphins were there, her daughter didn’t drown.

  The dolphins held their position, a buoyant grid beneath her, and kept the mother and daughter safe until human help arrived. Had help not come so soon, might the nursing mother dolphin have offered her richly fatted milk to the baby?

  “They were sent to me by the Holy Father,” the woman would tell her husband. “He wanted our baby to live.

  “The dolphins chattered like little children,” the woman said. “When my baby was born, the dolphins went wild. They bobbed up and down; their smiles were so beautiful!”

  In gratitude, the woman named her daughter Dolphina Maria. The dolphins slipped away through the waves, intercessors supporting humankind on the sea, allowing us to return to land cleansed of our sins. Deep inside their bodies float the few bones left from the hind legs they once had on land.

  It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunk
en man took her place. He leaned into me and said, “I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you—”

  “My eyes are blue,” I said.

  At the beach with Karen. Seed pods, corn cobs, smashed clams, horseshoe crabs, starfish, cartilage, bird tracks, “sea snacks.”

  A passing thought: “Can a woman hurt you as much as a man?”

  “Worse,” I tell her. “They understand you better, so they can hurt you worse.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she says.

  “Nothing pulls weeds faster than frustration.” I walked the rows of vegetables in the garden, and without having planned it, kneeled to pull up weeds, the right way, by the roots. It is a satisfying task—a tangible improvement, an instant fix. I fell into a kind of trance moving along the rows, improving the lives of beets.

  In the drawer of my mother’s night table, under the emptied bottles of pills, were two pages torn from a women’s magazine. One page was a kind of consumer’s guide, a chart of deadly combinations, which pill taken with another would make you sick, or worse. Depending on your point of view, it was cautionary or how-to. The other page was what I quoted a moment ago, a list of suggestions for chasing off a gloomy mood. “Spend time in your garden. Nothing pulls weeds faster than frustration.”

  But wait—maybe I am confusing this page with the page I found in her night table drawer the time she tried to quit smoking. And she did quit smoking, and what a time that was. I was in the seventh grade. I would ask her for permission to do something, and before I could get the question out she would have snapped back the answer—No! Years later, I heard a joke that brought this back. I say to you, “Ask me what is the secret of comedy.” You get as far as, “What is the secret—” and I cut you off with, “Timing.”

  Yes, I went through her night table drawers, her dresser and closets, too. What simple taste she had. Everything she wore was unadorned. A cable in a cardigan came to seem festive. Plain black pumps. Unfrilled slips. Not drab-classic. She wore a lot of white.

  You told me you had dressed the same since you were back in college, the khaki pants and Oxford-cloth shirts. Never bohemian, certainly no beret. Cast against type. One is tempted to say you don’t look like an artist, but that is like the man who introduced me to his friend and told him I was talented, and his friend said back, “She doesn’t look talented.”

  Did you ever paint a portrait of a woman you didn’t like? There is a portrait I saw—the one that hangs in the Tate—where I thought you must hate the woman. Hatred is a passionate involvement. It’s worse not to care for a person at all. Or is this a notion I hold onto to flatter myself?

  My mother picked out all my clothes. We never went shopping together. Often what she bought was too small for me, too tight, as though she thought of me as being smaller, or wished that I was.

  I said to her once, “My friends all wear their mothers’ clothes,” and she said, “Ask me when you’re older.” I got older, and asked again.

  I only ever wore one thing that was hers, not that you exactly wear a purse. I carried an old brown purse she had thrown away. I took it out of the trash and hid it in my closet. On weekends, I took it, empty, to department stores. I brought it home filled with tightly rolled clothes of my own choosing. “I’m going shopping with my mother,” was my private joke on a Friday; I’d come to school on Monday in a stolen sweater set. If she asked where a dress had come from, I had friends my size. I wore the stolen clothes maybe two or three times, then stuffed them in the donation box at the church on the way to school.

  When my mother died, I was her size. I could have worn any of her clothes at any time. Instead I packed them in shopping bags, and drove them to the Goodwill drop. Then I had only the fear of seeing derelicts wearing my mother’s clothes, her ghost in neighborhoods she didn’t visit, alive.

  One of the counselors here asked a single loaded question. She asked me if anyone deserved that kind of loyalty. The loyalty that would require the end of my life, as well. And it was the first time I believed the claim that you can help a person more by asking the right question than by giving them the answer.

  And didn’t one of your paramours do the same thing? Was that the woman you painted, the one I thought you hated in the portrait in the Tate? You didn’t give her a name in the title of the portrait. You gave reporters no comment when your lady friend was found. I read she left no note—that is, if it wasn’t an accident. But maybe she sent you a note, not that it is my business.

  My mother wrote her note on a page of notebook paper, from a notebook I had used to do my homework in. Her note was four lines long. She left behind directions for what to do with “the body.” She insisted there be no memorial, no mention of “this death.” The note was signed and dated. There was no salutation; it was a document, nothing personal. It must have been taken by the coroner or by the police. The note was eventually returned to my father. And now it belongs to me.

  I have not told the staff that I am writing this letter to you. Not when they are keen to get me talking about her. Might not a counselor gently point out the irony of our letters? Mine too long, hers too short. Might not a counselor suggest that the letter I am writing to you is the letter my mother should have written to me? Letting me get to know her. Trying to win me over.

  My favorite suicide note has been fairly widely reported. It was left by a fellow who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge: “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”

  “San Francisco,” my mother once said, “is the only city that demands you love it.” And she did. She wanted to keep other people alive to see it. She wanted them to have her organs, transplanted. Apparently she didn’t know that the pills she took would destroy them.

  I wonder what makes you angry, what happens when you are. Have you ever destroyed a canvas? You are not, I have heard, or I have read, a drinker. Does it take its toll in silence? Do you get angry with yourself? Are you, like me, your own worst critic? How do you let something out into the world when it’s a sure thing someone out there won’t like it?

  You’re good, my mother seemed to say to herself, in fact, you’re very good. You’re just not good enough. My mother refused to show anyone her paintings. After a while, she stopped painting at all. What was left of her gift was the argument she had with the painter who came to paint our house and was unable to mix “her” blue.

  Chatty’s gentleman caller was due to arrive. Back in her room, I brushed green eyeshadow on her, but she said it made her look like she ate colored babies for breakfast. I painted on the palest lip color. “I’d sooner ride a hog to Memphis,” she said.

  “The Hindus have a word for this,” Karen said, watching the makeup lesson. “Overexcitement. They say that when your pulse races and you get flushed and anxious, the person is bad for you.”

  “He was trained to get us overexcited,” Chatty said. “By keeping himself still? By holding the best part back, and suggesting it? The best actors do that.”

  “Three dogs are put in a room,” Warren says, and the rest of us hunker down.

  “An architect’s dog, a doctor’s dog, and an actor’s dog. Each dog is given a pile of bones and told they’ll be given one hour.”

  Chatty blots her lips as Warren continues. “The architect’s dog arranges his bones into a Cape Cod saltbox house. The doctor’s dog arranges his bones into separate piles by species. The actor’s dog—”

  “Hand me that eyebrow pencil?” Karen says.

  “The actor’s dog eats all his bones, fucks the other two dogs, and asks to go home early.”

  “He’s not an actor anymore,” Chatty says. “He teaches. In a university.”

  Suddenly I am no longer jealous of her; I wilt at the thought of the earnest exchange of information, explanations of the way things work and who invented what.

  Karen tells me about her trip to town with Chatty. “I found a ten-dollar bill
on the grounds,” Karen says, “and she told me you said it’s bad luck to keep found money, I should spend it right away. So we sign ourselves out and call a cab. We get the only slow cab in the history of cabs. We miss three lights in a row, and the driver says into his rearview mirror, ‘You’d better buckle your seat belts.’ And Chatty says, ‘Why? If we have an accident, I’ll be out of the car before you hit anyone.’

  “I didn’t see anything in town I wanted to buy, but Chatty insisted I spend the money,” Karen says.

  Karen and I have the same shopping problem. You could set me down in Paris, I would not find a thing to buy, if what I was there to buy was something for myself. To shop for yourself requires you to know yourself. I shop for myself by default, dressing in black (though the day we met for tea I had taken a chance on gray), buying only things I have bought before that fit. I can’t even think about the choices posed by makeup. To try to pick a shade of foundation is to end up in a place like this. What is peach and what is pink, what is sallow and what is fair? Skin is skin, to me, though of course you would disagree. You would know what shade of lipstick a woman should wear—a blue-red or coral, a brown-red or frost. I wonder what color you would dress me in. The moment I think a thing like this I no longer need to rouge.

  But send me to find a gift for someone else, I’ll show you what I can do. Christmas is never a problem for me. Most years I finish my shopping in the fall and throb until December. Although there was one year I did no shopping until December, and that with my father, in a leather store in San Francisco, for a person we had never met who was going to be our host for the holidays three thousand miles away.

  My mother had died in November, on the day the United States shot off a five-megaton nuclear blast underground in Amchitka, Alaska. It caused the largest earth tremor ever produced by man. It registered 7.4 on the Richter scale, and I felt the shock in our hundred-year-old house.