“No,” she said casually, shrugging her shoulders. “There are always drugs around if we want them.”
I felt like dancing, but when I tried I could not lift my feet more than a fraction of an inch off the ground. Seeing Marta this way, I had forgotten for a moment the rows upon rows of gold chains around my mother’s ankles as she stood immovable in the station. I felt their weight, too. It was hard suddenly even to walk. I dragged my feet.
“I brought you a present,” Marta said, unwrapping it for me like a child who cannot control her excitement when giving, who cannot wait. “It’s a dress the Indians wear. You’ll look great in it.”
I looked up from my mother’s ringed hands. It was red and yellow with a design of fish and crabs and sea horses on it, and it had a wrap for the waist of navy blue cloth covered with zebras and trees. I unbuttoned my shirt.
“It must be very beautiful there,” I said, looking at the brightly patterned dress. “You must take me someday.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, looking at me, “it’s very beautiful.”
I touched her dark face. “You are my brown berry,” I said. “Promise to take me.”
She took my hand. “Please,” she whispered, “don’t make me love you.”
The next morning Marta began work on her senior thesis; she had been given an extension by the Dean of Studies, who had always been kind to her. I watched her write the first two sentences.
I patted the top of her curly head. “I’ve got a class,” I said. “I’ll bring you your lunch afterwards so you won’t have to go out.” She nodded and whispered in the tiniest voice, “Thank you, Vanessa.” She never looked up from the page.
The class met only once a week and so was longer than most others — three hours, I think. It was art history and, looking at slides in the dark, I found myself easily falling into the dreamy apple world of Cezanne, easily blocking out the teacher’s comments, which always dissipated my pleasure. I noticed, though, as I sat there that some of the paintings seemed to be losing their color, and the teacher, too, seemed to be fading.
After class I went to the cafeteria. I was happy to bring Marta a lunch not only of carrots and celery and crackers but also a sandwich, a muffin, food that did not crunch; she was eating everything again. Walking down the pine tree path from Central Dining I heard a great commotion. The path was white, as if it had snowed. I decided to ignore the frenzy, not realizing at first that it was coming from the place I was going. I saw a flashing light through the trees, suddenly a stretcher, a car of white, then a siren. There was a crowd of people outside Gushing. And I knew she was dead.
There is a tremendous country house, I am sure of it, somewhere in the heart of France or Maine or Sweden, with so many rooms it’s been easy to get lost, it’s been easy to be seduced, for each room has seemed more fantastic than the one before it. It’s been filled with things we could not have ignored, could not have looked away from. Each table, elegantly set, held great feasts. Music played. Music plays even now, and people dance. Others cry, for they want it never to end. I don’t cry. There are so many rooms to go through, it seems they will go on forever — each one different, yet strangely the same. But suddenly we are at the back of the house, and what we see there we have never seen before. At the back of the house, at the place where the rooms end, there is an enormous porch made entirely of crystal, where a beautiful woman sits smiling a most inviting smile. She is patient, for she knows there is no one who can resist her. I have turned my face from her many times, but now I look again. It is Natalie.
Riding in the speeding taxi to Vassar Brothers Hospital, I thought of my mother — how she hated cars, how she hated riding in cars, and most of all how she hated riding in cars that went fast. What she could not bear, I think, was how quickly the world passed before her eyes. She kept wanting to say stop, wait, not so fast. She disliked how objectively the car treated the landscape, not pausing for the barefoot children carrying pails in spring or slowing down for the milkweed pods that scattered in the wind. “Michael,” she said one day from the back seat, as we passed a rosy apple orchard and she turned back to look at it, “Michael, my teeth hurt. What shall I do?”
My father just said, “Hmm,” and I imagine then he went into a meditation about dentists. There was Dr. Ledbetter who had done that terrible root canal, Dr. Brand who had committed suicide, Dr. Ellis who had run off with a pretty patient. I pictured this seduction: he pressing his white coat, his firm thigh against her legs, lowering his fingers into her mouth, then down into her throat, spraying water on her arms, taking the cotton from the inside of her bleeding mouth, the sound of the drill. How many times did she come back, I wonder. How many noncavities were filled? When did they know it was love? And pity the poor dental hygienist who had secretly loved Dr. Ellis all along, witness to the whole affair.
All my father said in the end was “Dr. William Wheeler. He’s very good. I’ll make an appointment for you as soon as we get home.”
“But, Michael,” my mother said in her swimmy voice, “it’s not one tooth, it’s all my teeth. They hurt. The actual teeth themselves hurt!”
My father knew to pull the car over then, and as we took a long walk in the woods my mother’s pain began to subside. It had been her way of stopping the car. I think she hated what the speeding movement of the car suggested to her about life — that it was all going so fast and that we were doomed for the most part just to take glimpses, never really to see.
Very often my mother developed a physical hurt of some sort when she got into the car. I always thought she did this for us. We could understand a physical malady better than a mental one; it was a way to suffer the way other people did.
A loose tooth falls through time into my lap as I race to the hospital to Marta.
Picture her dead, I kept telling myself over and over. Picture her dead.
Racing through this January, I understood finally that my mother’s physical symptoms were very real because, as I flew by children dragging sleds through snow, I felt nauseated and dizzy. Pain cracked like ice in my head. I wanted only to stop, to examine the birch’s silver, to lose myself in a flurry of birds, in a community of ants, to skim the thick sleep of the woodchuck and rest there for a while.
By the time I got to Vassar Brothers Hospital, Marta had passed through the doorway into the last room, where she stayed, sleeping, able to see Natalie, I suppose, but not with her yet.
“She slit her wrists,” the doctor said, “like a pro. She knew exactly what she was doing.…” His voice did not fall like it naturally does at the end of a sentence, and I knew there was more. “She took at least thirty barbiturates,” he said in a soft voice. “She has slipped into a coma.”
Your hair waves a million times toward me — a lovely curling sea. I move close to you and bathe in its soothing motion as it rises and falls on my face. I could almost drown in it. I could almost become its darkness, forget about everything, forget about you, Marta, as you have forgotten about me.
I take one curl and pull it taut from her head. I wrap my finger around it, feel its oily film on my thumb and on the tip of my forefinger. I slip my finger into another curl, then another, let them recoil. I pull one, I pull two, three, tighter and tighter until her head nearly tumbles from the bed and into my lap. You do not protest; you do not object — you have become so unlike yourself.
I pull your curls and they recoil, falling back into their dark nest where fish seem to swim in and out of your tangled tunnels. Snails curl around your ears in tendrils, humming their snail sounds. And there are starfish, too, that dangle at your neck. Marta, in your hair is a whole world. I see as I look closer even the butterfly shrimp in your curls, plodding on, feeding on death, a scavenger like me. I pull another curl, then another. I watch them bounce back. Marta, why? Why? It is beautiful hair, alive on your head.