When
I see the sign in Clintonville--Sonora: Medium and Spiritual Advisor--swinging
from a white hangman's post between Duda’s Street Rods and Muscle Cars and The
Chicken Shack, I stop and turn the car around to read the rest of it. I sit there for a minute wondering who in
this low rent, barhopping, misdemeanor charge of a town would dangle a claim
like that on Main Street. I shift the
lever to drive. Who in Clintonville has
the need to believe it, or the will to resist it?
I pull a u-turn and drive on.
The air coming through the open
window is dense, cool and humid. It is
light in my head, but it aches all along my windpipe and down into my chest as
if I’d swallowed water the wrong way. I
turn right, off Main Street, go about a third of a mile and make a left across
from Gall's Memorials--with its sign still advertising April Sale. I pass into the dusk of a broad concrete
overpass (Clintonville's best graffiti going dark on the walls--a fish, I
think, big enough to be Jonah's whale) before a quick curve left and a sharp
rise takes me up through the gates of Sacred Heart Cemetery.
---
Norma's
grave has no crab grass, yet, but I'm afraid the Parks Department will let
everything go to seed. Up on the hill,
where grass is sparse and gaps fill in with pine needles, the older graves
gather violets, clover and plantain out of pollen blown up from the fields and
derelict lawns of Clintonville. If
anything, Norma would want violets (Every spring one shaded corner of our yard
saturates with purple, like a blotter soaking up ink, a display she’d always
forbidden me to violate), but crab grass is another story. She'd be on her hands and knees, the way she
was last Memorial day--dirt smudged across her forehead, white gloves making
her fingers useless--snapping off wilds without getting the roots. “The weeder,” she'd called out to me in
sudden alarm, like she’d cut herself and needed a bandage to stop the blood. She’d knelt there in the middle of the yard,
as if stranded, looking around more and more often at the metastatic weeds, and
she’d waited on all fours, head tilted in appeal for my word to release her.
"Forget about the weeding. Come in and have some lunch," I called
back to her through the screen on the kitchen window.
Then, slowly, straightening her
back, removing her gloves, finger by finger, brushing herself off in a fussy,
exaggerated, time gathering way, and then bracing herself on the weed bucket,
Norma rose to her feet.
"I almost lost track of
time," she said, bringing in the smell of grass and dirt with her. She was out of breath, and a violent, almost
purple flush soaked the little mounds of her cheeks. I turned my back then and cut the sandwiches,
feeling that dreadful purple spreading through my chest. That was after the first surgery, when they
didn't get it all.
I take what I need from the trunk:
trowel, watering can, a tray of purple violas (I should have planted bulbs last
fall when they set the stone), two soft cloths and grass shears. First, I clip the tall grass around the base,
where the town’s tractor doesn’t cut.
The blades are oily-blue and sharp, making a decisive shfft when they close under the tumbling
grass. After that I plant the flowers in
the neat rectangle of dirt.
"Violaceae corsica. I set them aside at the nursery," I
say. I don't say much more--a little
mumble of approval, maybe, as I make the holes and plant the flowers, covering
the roots with a trowel sweep and firming down the plants until the ground
resists. I water them and with what’s
left I wash away the dried dirt and the tight, gritty feeling from my
hands.
The warm, root-raw smell, recalls
childhood Easter Sundays, days when I would go outside without a coat for the
first time and feel naked, another downy chick in the sun swollen world of
spring--weeks of pure season before steak barbeques corrupted the air. Plain dirt resurrects those days like the
dust of a pulverized crystal ball, a magic bound to visions of the past.
I reach out for the watering can, as
though it were a charm against slackness.
The grackle droppings on the top of Norma's marker are next to go. I douse and soak three immense chalky white
and black streaks, wipe them away with my cloth, slowly rubbing the entire
stone down front and back, consonant and vowel, rough and polished, even down
to the dried-on cocoa-like residue along the base.
It is almost dark by the time
everything is back in the trunk. I let a
deep breath go for another day (an exercise like counting), expecting the
heaviness of my nights on the exchange, but breathing in a flutter of nerves as
I turn the ignition.
---
I
flip the headlights off as I corner the alley between Duda’s and The Chicken
Shack. It is dark and quiet, but up
ahead floodlights shine on a wasteland of tire-rutted dirt and rusting
cars. I park at the edge of Duda's lot
behind a Mach 1 set on blocks.
Across from the garage, outside the
rim of light, a small cottage recedes behind giant overgrown lilac bushes. Their fragrance hits me as I come up the
flagstone walk. Dim wavering light
shines through twelve pane cottage windows.
I stop in the middle of the walk and read the sign hanging on a post
like the one out on the street. In the
darkness, I press my face right up to it:
SONORA
Medium and Spiritual
Advisor
Speak with the
dead
For a moment the sign has the effect
of a billboard directing me to someplace I will never go, of public invitations
to tag and sidewalk sales that I will bypass without a look, of million dollar
sweepstakes in money-green envelopes I will throw away unopened. I turn away, but I don't leave. I am leaving Norma behind there in the
wavering light, her disembodied glow, abandoning her for reasons and good
sense, while I go home to silent rooms.
I turn again and grab the knocker
like a fool and knock. The sound makes
my heart jump as though I am inside and Sonora is the one knocking in the
night.
The doorknob turns. I thought I would at least hear
footsteps. Now I stand back a little and
quickly fold my hands in front of me.
Her face is shadowed, as mine must be through eight inches of open door,
until her right hand moves from behind the doorjamb and raises a slender candle
to the night. I'm staring at her and she
must be scared, not only because she has narrowed the door crack, but also
because she has spoken to me, saying what I'm not sure, and I haven't answered
her. She doesn't know that her sign and
her name and the candle in her hand intimidate me.
"Can I help you?" she
asks, trying on impatience over her fear, in a rich slightly raspy voice, no
gypsy accent--no mysterious 'I am Sonora, I have been waiting for you.'
"I saw your sign; is it too
late? I'm sorry."
"Well, that depends on what you
want."
A breeze combs the candle flame
forward and back. Her throat dims and
lights up orange again.
"I want to speak to
someone."
“Have they crossed over?"
I nod and rub the side of my nose
with my index finger.
She cracks the door wider, looks
around and up at the murky sky, as though for guidance, sniffs the air and then
swings the door wide open.
"No booze. That’s a good sign," Sonora says,
smiling, as though she knew I'd think she was consulting with the stars, and
she motions with her head for me to enter.
Her place is small. The front room is no more than ten by
fourteen. There is nothing in the middle
of the room. Everything sits on the
periphery--the white column candles on wrought iron stands, one in each corner,
an ottoman, against the back wall, piled with huge square pillows, and a shrine
on the far wall. The shrine is built in
three tiers, perhaps on crates, overlaid with richly colored fabric,
twenty-five or thirty green and blue glass votive candles on the first tier,
unframed photographs, rings and bracelets on the second, and on top bunches of
pampas grass and peacock feathers propped against the wall, with small white
bones scattered around them on the dark cloth.
There is a Persian rug on the open floor.
"Take off your shoes," she
says, moving past me, carrying the lamp off with her through a curtained
doorway in the back wall.
In the time I take my shoes off and
set them by the front door, she returns.
She takes two pillows from the ottoman, throws them down and motions for
me to sit down in the middle of the floor.
She sits on the other pillow and sets the candle on the floor between
us. Her face has settled on me,
registered itself now. She is younger
than Norma by seven or eight years. Her
hair is longer, lighter than Norma's chestnut.
Her face is relaxed, shaped elegantly, except for the nose, which is
almost blunt with shadow (in daylight, perhaps, her face is not as I see it
now), and her eyes are a dark color, giving her a calm expression--one moment
serious and the next, with a slight twitch of her lips, amused.
"Let me tell you a little about
what I do," she begins.
I feel free of expectation, blank as
the moment of decision at a funhouse just before you hand the man your ticket
and see the look on his face, the certainty that nothing in there is capable of
scaring a two-year-old, nothing capable of capturing even the over-the-top
specter of the facade. All the same,
there is little here--if only the name Sonora on her sign--that smacks of
facade. She is just a woman--no flowing
occult garments, no crystal ball—only a woman in candlelight.
"First of all, Mr.--"
"I'm sorry. Thornton.
Cliff Thornton."
"First of all, Mr.
Thornton," she says, "My name is Andre." Then apologetically: "I only use Sonora for the sign. My late husband's name. It brings people in." Her mouth curls slyly. "Everybody makes their deal with the
devil.
"The rest you can judge for
yourself. I channel spirits. Nothing will appear in ghostly form for
you. Spirits have no form. They don't necessarily shake chandeliers,
move objects, or make wind. The spirit
will speak through me. You may ask it
anything you like."
She says all this, even announces
her fee, with the modesty of a good door-to-door demonstrator, as though
offering goods that were tangible, beyond reproach, and a sale were just a
matter of need.
My right leg falls asleep. I shift, raising myself up on my hands and
reposition my legs.
"Who would you like to speak
with?" Andre asks.
"Look--" I begin.
"How long have you been
apart?"
"Ten months," I answer
automatically.
"Just ten months?" she
asks.
"Is that bad?"
"Well, it's just that the one
you wish to speak with may not have crossed over yet."
"I didn't know there was a
waiting period."
"Then why did you wait,"
she says, one eyebrow twitching as if she regrets how her words have come
across.
A sting travels up my nose and into
my eyes. From now on I will answer only
to the flame.
"I don't--" I begin. My eyes well up.
Her hand reaches across the flame
and rests on mine.
I pull away and rise to my feet.
I tell her why, blinking furiously.
"I don't believe in
spirits. I'm sorry--"
She, Sonora, Andre, the medium,
still in her cross-legged sit, looks up at me, serious again, and says,
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it the
way it sounded. I wasn't questioning
your--devotion. I only meant to ask why
you came on this particular night."
I look down at the candle on the
floor and say nothing.
Now she rises. "Well, that's all there is to it,
then."
She shows me to the door. I bend to pick up my shoes. I carry them out with me into the dusty yard.
"Clyde?" she calls after
me.
"Cliff." I turn around. She is leaning out of the doorway.
"Cliff. Have you ever been by yourself, you know,
doing something--shopping, driving, anything--and felt her presence so strongly
that you knew, absolutely knew, that she was there?"
It flashes immediately: the morning
I woke up, about a week before Christmas, and felt Norma's hand on my bare arm,
heard her voice, like an echo in my own head, call my name so clearly that I
answered her.
"I'll light a candle for
her. What is her name?"
"Norma," I say softly and
turn away for good.
She can light a thousand candles if
it will help, but I can't exhume enough desire to bring her back, not against
that last, long, death-defying week, not for whatever sweepstake-spirit- raffle
is behind Sonora's curtained door.
---
I
say the same prayer every night--not exactly a Dear-God-in-heaven. It is more like a flicker of conscious hope
as I pull back the covers--that sleep will happen instantly. I lay my head on the pillow facing out, and
by a miracle, before I can even flip back the picture book of thought, learn
its sweet, repetitious phrases, savor my idiot's lapping tongue of brain
waves...
I wake up out of a dream at about
four a.m. The whole thing took weeks, or
so it seems on this side of sleep. I
want to remember all of it, every sacred moment, write it down and mark a red
letter on my calendar, tell everyone I meet about it, like the story of my
life. I dreamed about Norma.
She was in the cemetery pulling
crabgrass by her tombstone.
"Have you seen Mr. Gall,"
she asked, looking up. She didn't spring
to her feet and rush with tears of joy to embrace me. All the emotion stuck in my throat. I opened my mouth, told her how I loved and
missed her, but no sounds came out. I
looked her over for any trace of the grave or of illness.
"Look what he's done to the
stone." She pointed.
I read the inscription out
loud: "She lived beyond the call of
purple, because she never knew the difference between a grackle and a Brewer's
black bird.”
"That is the curse of the
grackle," read another voice inside of my own voice. "Unless she finds the sacred shrine of
Norma, the grackles will continue to leave droppings on her grave."
Then I was reading from a book in
the voice of Mr. Gall (from Gall Memorials), and we were not at the cemetery at
all, but in the sunny, mahogany paneled room of an old house:
"How do the grackles
know?" I asked.
"They are much more intelligent
than people think," Norma said, her eyes set in dismay, like the word
dismay. I could see it on the page I was
reading.
"They're smart because they've
interbred with crows. See how there is
no purple in their feathers when the sunlight hits them?" Gall raised a bony finger at the passing
flock of bow tail grackles. "But
they have one weakness. You can find the
shrine by counting the number of droppings on the tombstone..."
We were back in a cemetery--not the
one in Clintonville, a secret burial place in the woods behind the old
house--counting off a pace for every grackle dropping. Suddenly, at the edge of the grove there was
the shrine, all piled up with smooth, polished stones. There was a candle, just blown out. We could see the trail of smoke rising from
the wick, and knew that someone had been there.
From a niche in the altar, a talking
skeleton mask, with polished stones for eyes and teeth, told us that we had
just missed Norma, the lady of the shrine.
But Gall, and the other Norma, who would not embrace me, and I all felt
her presence. I could see the dark hem
of her cloak disappearing on the pages of the book that somebody was reading.
---
About
mid-morning at the nursery, while I think about the dream, snap yellow leaves
off of the annuals, untangle the trailing ends of hanging fuchsias, on a high
from balmy, soil rich, green house air--a customer at my shoulder asking
timidly about the variety of tomato in an unmarked tray--I try to straighten
out the problem of two Norma's by visualizing her face, to compare it with the
face in my dream, but I cannot frame it, cannot see her face at all.
I don't know how long I stare, face
blank as dawn, at beefsteak tomato plants, unable to think of a single word
that means the same as the rosy, gathered flesh of the giant fruit, the violent
flush in the little mounds of cheek I picture in my mind. The woman stares back, open mouthed, on the
verge of a suggestion, when I hear myself say, "Sweepstake."
I
hunt down an unopened bottle of Seagram’s, the only thing that ever helped
Norma’s menstrual cramps, take it with me into my bath and drink it all. I cap the empty pint and float it in the tub
with me. The belly of the bottle, like
the hull of a rusty barge, runs aground over my waving chest hair seaweed in
the Bay of Sternum.
A photograph of Norma is on the edge
of the tub, beside my head. I left the
nursery without a word, came right home when I couldn't picture her.
I've heard of people passing out
drunk in their bathtubs and drowning, but I'm not that drunk, or even
sleepy. Everything is numb. I can't tell if the water is hot or just
warm. Warm enough, because my cock is
swelling. I guide the empty bottle to
the pass between my knees, unscrew it and try to force the head and shaft
through the mouth and down the narrow neck, but it won't go. The bottle starts to fill and sink. I take up a rhythm with my hand, and
eventually, after many minutes of thumb-cramping, monotonous, half-hearted
pulling, I come, insensibly, as though I've had a shot of Novocain in my groin.
Later, from the couch (I don't
actually remember getting there, naked, damp, boozy, from the bathroom) I watch
the happy occupied square of the TV screen--the electric, jangling shows (total
winnings cash and prizes for the champion; a year's supply of consolation for
the loser), and the low key, every day intrigue of the soaps--and I drift in
and out of sleep, which feels best, cozy as a day years ago when I stayed home
with flu, and also slept, Norma's light feet padding around me, a cherished
sleep, through "One Life to Live” and “General Hospital”, somebody’s
wedding and a confrontation, snipping entire scenes with the weight of my
eyelids, both crucial and insipid dialogue, through the syndicated re-runs of
shows with laugh tracks, until the staccato theme of the news at six--my
Seagram's numb expired--jolts me, clear-headed, upright.
---
I
go a little bit earlier tonight, at sundown.
When I knew that I was going back, I
panicked like a teenager trying to cover the whisky odor: ablutions of Listerine, scourings with tooth
paste, finally a hot shower to cleanse my pores, cold at the finish to close
them off. I even stopped at Cumberland
Farms on the way to pick up spearmint gum.
"You changed your mind,"
Andre says, leaning forward, her cheek pressed to the doorjamb.
I haven't changed anything except my
clothes.
She lets me in, looking down at the
mat inside the door. I leave my shoes
there.
Andre leads me with a touch on the
arm to her shrine.
"There is Norma's flame. Do you notice anything?"
I shake my head, but amidst thirty
milky, golden tongues of the wonder that is fire (matter feeding shape,
movement, heat, light) I see true violet under the transparent other-lights
that halo through and around her flame.
Andre doesn't tell me what she sees, either.
"Sit with me," she says,
again taking pillows from the ottoman. I
do what she tells me. I feel myself
going with her already, resting in the palms of her hands, absorbing my own
silence, the private quality of dim light.
I will answer her questions, tell her everything she needs to know,
close my eyes, wait and listen for her voice.
This is what she does. I channel spirits...
We sit facing each other, the candle between
us in the center of the room. I shift my
pillow and the flame stutters.
"Do you have anything of hers
with you?" Andre asks softly, in a monotone.
"I didn't know I--wait."
In my wallet is the photograph I
went home to look for when I lost her face.
I had freed the snapshot from its frame, trimmed it down and tucked it
in a window slot. It was taken at
Plymouth Harbor almost three years ago.
Norma stands against the railing of the ferry, smiling self-consciously
at something I'd said, nothing I can remember now, or just at having her
picture taken in the sunlight with other people watching, a helpless
ID-photo-look-this-way-and-smile expression.
Andre leans forward, brings the
photo down close to the flame. I reach
out to stop her. She pulls back, looks
up at me in disbelief.
"I just want to see her. Relax."
She lowers the photo again.
"I'm sorry. For a second I thought--"
"She's beautiful."
Andre looks up at me. One eyebrow twitches for a moment as it did
last night.
"If people only understood that
nothing is forever, not even separation; that nothing but fear and unbelief
keeps them apart." She clasps the
picture between her hands, stretches her shoulders and head back. Her eyes glisten.
"Just believe and you can be
with her again."
She leans closer and reaches out to
me around the flame. I take her hands,
close my eyes. The photo comes between
my left and her right palm like a blotter.
Perspiration starts to seep like condensation out of my right hand.
For a long time there is quiet, no
mystical alpha hum wavering from behind a curtain. My mind goes black in the aimless focus that
comes before a sleep. I see or feel or
read thoughts which pass back and forth like plates at a table or trays of
potted hyacinths on sale over the counter at the nursery my trowel sinks again
into the dirt for something buried and I pull up roots to plant the roots over
the smell of dirt is a feeling that is passed over the counter in a tray of
photographs of people in the tray shuffle photographs to find the one of Norma
that was there before the photographs...
"Cliffy?"
The voice takes its volume out of
the last note of silence and the now scattered ramblings of my mind, of which
only a feeling, sweetness and loss, remains, and rises to the level of
hearing. Norma always called me Cliffy. There is sudden light, female tension in her
hands. I don't dare open my eyes.
"Yeh--" My breath, as though long held, bursts, like
a dog's at the teasing of a treat.
"Cliffy, you're
here." In her voice is the shyness,
almost surprise in it, like the last time she was lucid, when she looked at me
and I just held her hand the whole day, held her before she slipped frightened
into gibber and sleep.
"Norma?"
She squeezes my hands. I want to throw my arms around her.
"Norma," I say it again to
be sure. "It's you."
"Yes, I'm here. I've wanted to be with you...If I could have
spared you any of this you know I would?"
Her voice rises in a question, as though I might doubt her.
"I know, I know. I've just missed you--God. You don't know." I laugh, but it aches. I rub her knuckles, both hands, with my
thumbs.
"But you got here before it was
too late."
"Too late?" I look right at the sound of her voice
through my closed lids.
"Something is about to
change. I don't know what or when, but
it won't be long."
"Is there anyone?"
"I've been alone all this
time," she says, plaintively.
"Norma, if I'd
known..." I squeeze hard where I
know there'll be no pain.
"How could you know?"
I listen to her voice and see her
through the touch of her hands.
"How long?" I almost hold my breath.
An uncertain pressure comes back
along her fingers.
"Will there be time to talk
with you again?"
"There'll be time. Everything comes around in time. You just have to wait."
There is a long silence. It stretches out to the meeting of our hands,
the balance of our touch, like sudden strangeness or the chill after a good
sweat. I realize how little there is to
say, both of us alone, one flesh the other spirit. I reach back in my mind before the illness to
the last untainted shared experience, but I cannot say the words, cannot say do
you remember, not even to make her laugh or see her smile beneath my eyelids
once more. So I just say, "Smile
for me, Norma? I want to see you
smile. And tell me again that you're all
right."
"I am," she says, and I
can hear the little glistening sound her lips make curling up over her teeth
when she smiles. I lift her hands up,
bring them together over the flame and kiss them.
A longer silence follows. Her hands stop holding mine back. I let them rest, press them once to the rug
and draw my hands back into my lap.
After another minute I open my eyes.
Andre sits, face like stone, nose blunt, eyes in shadow.
Rising slowly, noiselessly so that I
don't disturb her trance, one step over my pillow, I back away, like a hunter
come across a sleeping lioness, and, with one eye on Andre--I don't want to
speak to her, break this silence at all--I reach down for my shoes, turn the
door handle, breath held.
The candles on the shrine cast a
still, joyous light. My movements hardly
cause a flicker. At the last moment I
remember the money and leave it on the floor beside her sandals.
---
A
few minutes before noon, Marge Tolleson watches me from behind the greenhouse
register, as suspicious of a ten-month widower in a hop-step-whistling mood as
she is worried over an ten-month widower with a
dragged-my-ass-here-so-I-wouldn't-shoot-myself demeanor, probably thinking
about the morning talk show she has seen on the warning signs of suicide and
wondering if she should mind her business, as she seldom does, or say something
to me before it is too late: feel foolish now, or guilty after I'm dead. Bless her heart, Marge looks out for me.
"Well," she says,
"This weather must agree with you Clifford."
I can't hold back my smile, both for
her mask and for my secret. I want to
tell her, everybody who has ears, to let them hear, but it would sound like I
was going over the edge (or like a dream, the kind that falls apart when you try
to tell it).
"Yes," I tap the counter. "It's perfect. I'm going out now to eat lunch, if
anybody--"
The greenhouse door opens. Andre walks in.
"If anybody needs me," I
look quickly back to Marge with all my attention, "I'll be out under the
trees."
I walk by Andre--avoiding her eyes
because I don't know how to look at her here, because Marge is watching--right
through the door, like a high school boy flustered to rudeness, a crush of
blood packed scarlet from my neck to my forehead. I wait outside for a moment, my back to the
door, expecting to hear it swing behind me.
When she doesn't follow me, I feel belief-shaken in this
better-than-money-back guarantee against coincidence that I would not allow
myself to believe in by staying inside and greeting her like my invited guest.
---
It
is a loose shade of spreading, tender bat-winged maple leaves, where I sit on a
wooden crate, lunch bag unopened between my feet, where Andre tells me how she
walked straight to the counter and asked Marge a question about transplanting
shrubs.
"'Oh, Mr. Thornton will
know. He just walked out the
door.'"
In the honest light of shade,
Andre's hair is darker than I imagined under the polarized, filament lightning
of candles. Her nose is upturned
slightly, not blunt (lopped off by last night's shadow), her face is pale,
hardly made up at all, so that freckles can just be seen--the way the unopened
buds of yellow hawkweed catch a trained eye gazing at a field--a simple
landscape, almost blank, with so much depending on her mouth.
"I'm sorry about leaving you
there; I don't know what got into me," I tell her.
"Well, it's my own fault
showing up like this. I should have
known..."
"Known what?"
She looks up at me, gestures in an
off-hand way, as if she shouldn't have to say it, as if she is here to bolster
my fragility, tend a young shoot:
Sonora, medium and spiritual advisor, nurtures the faithless.
"That it could be awkward for
you."
"Why should it be awkward for me?"
Andre flinches. Her arms fold into her breasts.
"I'm sorry," I tell her.
"It was a bad idea for me to
come here." Andre waves a hand over
my anger and rudeness, and she gets up to go.
"Why did you come here?"
"You left this," she says
pulling a paper rectangle out of her canvas shoulder bag. "It seemed important to you."
She hands me Norma's photograph, not
face up or face down, but vertical between two scissored fingers, and she
watches me, my eyes moving up and down from her watching to the angle of the
photograph, the glossy time-stilled image on one side and the white backing
crowded with blue penmanship, as if holding her breath.
"Thank you." I look up at her, put the photograph in my
breast pocket without looking at it.
Lines relax in Andre's forehead, but her eyes make a wish on my pocket. She turns to go.
"Andre?" The crisp edge of the photo pinches at my
left nipple through my shirt. "How
did you find me here?"
She turns around with that wry look,
and one eyebrow taking off at the end like an upturned wing, as if she's going
to say, 'I am Sonora, I speak with the dead to the lifeless, I seek out the
skeptical; this is what I do', only this Andre is not the woman of shrines and
voices of the once living. Her arms,
slender bridges to me, drop to her sides.
She looks down at the white crests of her feet, reaches into her breast
pocket and slides out another rectangle of paper between her fingers.
"My card."
"It was with the money you
left."
I sit back, hands on my thighs, my
legs turned out in a wide lax diamond, and laugh.
"You really had me going (you
could have pulled it off). Are you
hungry?" I ask, reaching for the brown bag.
"Yes," she says.
I motion for her to sit again on her
crate.
"Turkey and cheese?"
I hand her a badly wrapped
sandwich--cellophane ends matted in a lump at the center like a dead silken wad
in the middle of a spider's web--turning it sideways, too late to cover my
carelessness with fingers.
"Nice job," she says,
holding the sandwich out flat on her palms.
"You weren't supposed to look
at that. Actually nobody was supposed to
see that. I usually eat alone."
Andre's smile melts into a curious
search of the nursery behind me. Over
her shoulder the rim of a grassy field nourishes on full sunshine, immutable as
the tree that casts shade.
"Nobody eats with you?"
"I've always eaten alone. Even before--"
Andre takes a quick bite of her
sandwich, stares at the place where she has bitten.
"But sometimes, in the good
weather, Norma would bring lunch down with her from Lund’s Deli downtown. She worked at the bank right across the
street. You know the one in town."
Andre nods.
"Anyway, the sandwiches would
all be wrapped just so in butcher’s paper.
I start out okay, with the bread in the center. Then I start to fold, and well, no matter
what--"
"Don't make a case out of
it. I mean, who am I going to report you
to?"
We bite into our sandwiches. It strikes us funny at the same time.
Andre waves off my thought as she
finishes her swallow.
"Mm. No.
Come on." She touches the
back of her free hand to her lips.
"Even with food in my mouth there's still room for my foot."
"Look, it was funny. You speak to the dead. I haven't lost my sense of humor; and I don't
fall apart at the mention of her name. I
don't talk about Norma much, but it doesn't mean I can't."
Her eyes narrow. Little wrinkles gather around them, adding
warmth to her expression, the comfortable warmth of an afternoon in May.
"Maybe it's time you did."
"Maybe." I smile down at the dirt, tilt the sandwich
so that the edge where I've bitten lines up, more or less, with a snap of
twig. "You have a great voice. Like this woman in a hair commercial I wait
all evening for. That's what she says,
'maybe it's time you did', about some shade of blonde. I watch too much TV these days. Anyway, once in a while I think, if I'm in
town, that I see Norma, passing in a car, or in the checkout. It's like her form is out there, inhabited by
a completely different person, and she wouldn't recognize me if she looked
right at me. Is that ridiculous?"
Andre shakes her head. "It's natural. In a way she is out there."
A blackbird flies by, letting out
its hackle of a call and a big white dropping over the field. I smile, broadly, stupidly.
"What?" she says.
"Nothing. I'm laughing at something else. Bird shit."
She looks up, feels the top of her
head.
"Don't tell me--" Her face goes pink.
"No, not on you. You'd have felt this one believe me."
I point at the field.
"That happened to me once in
grade school during recess," she admits, and I know she's remembering,
feeling that warm white ooze soaking into her hair, because her face flushes.
"Children are cruel. I think that's
why I never became a teacher. I'm still
mortified at the thought of being shat upon by birds and being alone in a room
full of children."
"What did you become? I mean besides--"
"A mystic? Well, I'll tell you as soon as I know. I got married at nineteen to Arturo. Not the best idea, considering how much he drank. It took twelve years--well let’s just say on
the day he died I was praying for a way out.
One night he went out and never came back. The police showed up at my door the next day
to tell me Art had lost it in a car wreck."
Andre takes a bite of turkey and
cheese. I remember the juice boxes in my
lunch bag. I hand her one.
"Thanks," she says, sets
the sandwich in her lap and strips the straw off, pokes it through the eye in
the carton, sips. "My Aunt Rise
taught me to read palms and give séances.
She said I had the gift, told me stories about things I did when I was a
child, things I can barely remember, but I never did anything with it until Art
was gone. I even wondered if my gift had
something to do with his death, which was ridiculous I suppose. But that was what got me thinking about
reading palms and channeling spirits. I
had to do something.
"It took a while to get it
working. Now, I think of it more as a
kind of intuition. I mean, it's not all
supernatural. You'd be surprised how
much we pick up with our five natural senses, how much good observation can
reveal about people. Most people just
don't bother to notice. The difference
is just being able to focus on all the energy that comes your way, sorting it
out and reconstructing it in a sensible way.
Do you know what I'm saying?"
I look down at the twig in the dust,
as though somehow it's going to shelter me from her question. I clear my throat.
"I guess I never thought there
was much of anything to it before.
Norma’s cancer forced me to rethink a lot of things. Made me do some strange things too, like
mourning her before she was gone and feeling relieved when she finally
died. To see it every day, eat and sleep
with it, to watch her being metamorphosed into something else right before
me—or at least I thought so, when really it was me who changed. I lost her from the inside out. I'm ashamed that I let her become cancer and
death, because she was never that. I
wish I had always been strong enough to hold onto her through the anger and the
terrible pain she endured."
I keep going.
"Cancer is more a kind of knowledge than a disease. I really thought I knew the ground, until I
gave Norma up to it. I always thought it
was generous, but it takes more than it gives back."
I reach down and pluck at some
grass.
Andre looks to a place in the air
where her truth is clearly written. She
says, "Art's death was a shock, but near the end I'd come to believe that
to be free of him, either he or I would have to die. And though I wanted to deny it, I was better
off without him. It's taken me five
years to admit that, and worse even, knowing what you’ve lost, the fact that
his death probably saved my life."
"That’s part of the
knowledge," I say. "When life
is hell, there’s no hope of heaven, because I can't say I’ve ever believed in
any heaven but this life." I look up
through the leaves and branches to the bits of blue that make sky.
Andre says, "I fell somewhere
between heaven and hell. I was left with
a big house in Bolton, which I promptly sold, and an embarrassing sum from life
insurance. Though I haven't exactly been
ambitious, I've been able to do what I please."
"And you still use his
name?" I say, and take the last bite of my sandwich.
Andre looks up to consult her
airborne Ouija, where she also seems to store her reasons. "It's a mysterious name and I've always
liked it. And it's the one part of
Arturo I've chosen to keep. It's wrapped
up with everything I know about life and death and the spaces between. Why do you hold on to Norma?"
"Because I can't live with her
memory."
"I thought you couldn't live
without it."
"I used to think that."
---
The
first things I notice are the grackle droppings on Norma’s head stone. These two, one still slick as wet paint, the
other chalky, crumbling, remind me absurdly of Pharaoh's dream of plenty and
famine. I think of an
interpretation. For me one is present,
the other past. 'Will the dissolving
past swallow up the present?' Pharaoh asks Joseph. I wash them both away. There's very little to do here. The pansies are blooming strong and the grass
is clipped. I settle back on the ground,
hands behind my head, warmed by the earth from below and the last hour of
sunshine from above.
"Norma," I say, but I
don't feel anything in the wake, not silence, waiting, or pain, not even the
desire to be heard. I breathe deeply
enough to feel air swirl through my lungs and rise like a column into my
brain. In the waning sunlight, robins
hop, then stand rigid between the tombstones as if imitating the stillness of
stone. I don't feel Norma here at
all. Since the night I spoke to her,
held her hands and saw her smile without seeing, I have been able to envision
her the way she was before her illness (without the help of the photograph from
Plymouth), but I am unable to speak to her or feel her anywhere in my midst,
not even in the house, as though at once she had been restored to me and taken
far beyond my reach.
I take the photograph out of my
breast pocket and read the writing on the back:
Norma & Cliffy, Plymouth, October ‘04. I hear the voice from across the flame,
"Cliffy?" and I remember Andre examining the photograph close to the
lamp, then handing it back to me sideways, a subtle way of suggesting that I
look at both sides. I see now what she
wanted me to see. But, not a moment
before she had brought Norma back from the other side and returned me safely
from the foot of an abandoned, smoking shrine to the taste of shared
sandwiches. She was handing me a refund,
taking down her irresistible, life-seducing sign, snuffing candles, sweeping
away feathers, bones and pampas grass forever, and furnishing her empty room
for living.
The End
