With nights like these, the hour she spends each day skipping through life becomes her raft. Marco yells, “Big steps, ladies, shoot those knees up to the moon!” and they march around in circles, they sashay from side to side, they skip through an obstacle course of hula hoops. One Wednesday the headbanded woman skips so exuberantly that centrifugal force sends her crashing into a wall, which her head strikes with a hollow whomp that echoes off the cinder blocks. In its wake, the woman lies motionless, her mouth opening and closing like a fish.
Marco asks her, “Can you speak?” as the woman struggles to get something out.
“No,” she says weakly.
The women gather around to help their classmate to her feet, Ruth among them and suddenly piping up, insisting that they not move her. And while they wait for the paramedics, Ruth holds traction on the woman’s head, Mr. Lindquist having insisted that she always keep her first-aid card current. It was the duty of women who hitch their carts to older men, he said, just in case they ever needed CPR.
“Or the kiss of life,” he said, poking her.
And now, bracing the woman’s head between her palms, Ruth looks down at the face and is ashamed. . because even after all these weeks she doesn’t know the woman’s name, she simply hasn’t paid attention. Angela, the other women chant as they try to call their comrade back into the world, her lips testing and rejecting many of the common prefixes as if she cannot decide which word it would be worth her breath to speak. “Angela,” Ruth repeats with them, holding the woman’s head and stunned by the thought of what this skull in turn might hold, the whole contents of a woman’s life.
“Angela, say something,” she says.
LATER, WHEN RUTH HEADS HOME on the bus, she’s the only passenger except for one rumpled soul asleep on the back bench seat. Marco’s talking at her across his shoulder: “Jeez, if I’d known you were a nun, I would of asked you sooner what you think.” After Angela had sprung to her feet and, with a smack of her hands, announced that she was ready to get back to work, and after they’d insisted against her wishes that she ride off with the paramedics, the women had remained in a circle around Ruth and would not disperse until she came up with some plausible reason why she’d let them think that she was deaf.
“Oh. .” she demurred, before seizing on the first explanation that came to mind, “for spiritual reasons I took a vow of silence.” And from the way the women turned away from her in the locker room when she undressed, it dawned on her: they thought she was a nun.
“What I think about what?” Actually, Ruth finds herself relieved not to have to be the deaf woman anymore, having long ago worn out her repertoire of shrugs and gestures.
“You know, the Virgin — come on, I know you’ve looked. Looks like some kind of chemical oxidation to me, if you rub your fingers on the concrete they’ll come up a little purple on the tips. But then I figure, what’s the difference between oxidation and a miracle anyhow? It’s like a rainbow — you could explain a rainbow using numbers. But when you look at it you don’t think about numbers. The first thought that pops into your head is miracle.” This last word Marco pipes through the trumpet of his fist, his pinky and ring finger wiggling.
“So what do you think?” he repeats.
“About the Virgin? I’m not sure what she is.”
Marco cocks an eyebrow her way through the rearview. “I thought you nuns were in the business of being sure.”
“Actually, I’m not a nun.”
They are stopped at a light, and now Marco turns around with his blue sleeve draped over the driver’s seat. “Then what are you?” he asks.
Ruth shrugs, thinks about it.
Finally she says, “I guess I am only a skipper through life.”
THROUGH THEIR INQUIRIES with the meat cutters’ union, BioFinders comes up with a man who matches one of Ruth’s fragments, a man with whom Prairie Rose one day announces she has been corresponding.
“I think he’s the one. He knows you, Ma.”
“What does he know?”
“He knows the way you blink when there’s something you don’t want to talk about. The pretend-blink. The way you shut your eyes and leave them closed too long, like you’re hoping the world will go away and leave you alone.”
Like her, Prairie Rose says, he is broad-shouldered with brown eyes and auburn hair. Like her, he favors flannel shirts and boots. Like her, like Prairie Rose Horowitz, who has made Ruth crawl into the closet to witness something, the computer gleaming like an eyeball in between them.
“Can’t you shut that thing off?” she says. “I thought you wanted to talk.”
“No, I wanted you to come in here and see this.”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know if this is such a good idea. I read about men shanghaiing girls all the time using these computers. Before you know it you’ll end up God-knows-where in some motel.”
In the cramped space, Ruth tries to pivot around so she can crawl back out of the closet. But Prairie Rose says, “Wait a minute, this is why I called you in here. He’s sending us a picture. He’s gonna prove who he is before he makes you say who you are.”
Ruth is on her hands and knees, and now she crab-walks sideways back in the direction of the screen, which ticks and hums as dots assemble at the top of it. Then the dots become lines, and the lines thicken into an oblong: the brow, the white of the eyes, the head angling one ear their way. Some strange bright speck contorts its shape.
“What’s that?” Ruth asks.
Prairie Rose inches toward the screen and squints.
“I think he’s got an earring.”
The jowls appear, the mouth, the neck. An older man, jovial but wattled. The computer has turned his features uniformly gray. Nothing about him jogs any atom of her memory. It’s pretty hard to imagine this gray blob pulling off the fwap-fwap trick.
“Thank God Mr. Lindquist never took it into his head to get an earring.”
They kneel on the floor, peering at the image. And finally, when the face is all there, Prairie Rose turns to her mother and asks: “Well, what do you think, Ma? Is that him?”
HAPPINESS IS A CHEMICAL IN THE BRAIN
Is it not possible for good manners to exist alongside physical pleasure? Whenever I think of my husband’s mistress, the person who pops into my head is the former president of France. He had his mistress and he also had his life as a statesman. His country and his many women. Not mind over body, but mind and body dropped into separate pans of the scale. And the pans both resting on the air. The air that will let neither drop.
Not that I have much faith in the air’s good intentions. I happen to have a disease of the sort that will not kill me, a fact that strikes me as unfortunate because, more than death, I am afraid of the whining sap who might emerge from the medley of my pains. In my view, the air is full of chemicals, and as for the mind — well, the mind is a dog that the body walks on its short leash.
That’s how I came to sniffing like a hound for any possible mistress who crossed my path. I sniffed Daphne my neurologist and I sniffed Julie, the carpenter who built the ramp that would get me into the house once I could no longer walk at all. But Julie announced straight off she was a lesbian, and she even showed me a picture of her lover, and their child who was born with spina bifida and who wears braces on her legs.