Stones figured in many tales, inert minerals transformed into active participants. They induced love, they captured memories, they murdered ogres, they arranged themselves on the path so that Hansel could find his way home.
Some evenings, when Chris put his feet up on a particularly ugly brocaded ottoman and closed his eyes, Ingrid and Chloe and Lynne busied themselves in the kitchen making a pot of soup that would last a week. Lynne’s garden supplied herbs. Chloe threw in the chromite. Ingrid muttered some syllables. “That’s an incantation,” she invented.
“Are you a witch?” Chloe giggled.
“No, just a crone.”
“A glamour crone,” said Lynne. “Always New York beautiful.”
“Oh…it’s the eyeglasses,” said Ingrid hurriedly. “Here’s a Chinese proverb that will make the soup even better. Cutting stalks at noontime, perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice, each grain from hardship comes? I learned that from a healer on Mott Street.” It was only a slight exaggeration. She had found the proverb in a fortune cookie; in Chinatown what she’d learned was that there were elderly men whose impassivity seemed like friendship. In narrow store after narrow store, she’d heard Allegra recite her symptoms. The men pulled out little drawers and scooped up powders and leaves and poured the stuff into sacks and handed the sacks to her friend. Allegra boiled them into a tea.
“How does it taste?” Ingrid asked.
“Rank. Nauseating, like the chemo.”
Tonight’s soup, unadulterated except for the stone, was perfect. Ingrid put the stone on the windowsill, ready for the next meal.
When Lynne came home exhausted from teaching fourth-graders, Ingrid ordered her into the guest-room daybed and tucked the quilt around her. Mostly, though, it was Chloe who needed time off, time off from being an only child, time off from the helpless scrutiny of her parents. Then Ingrid spirited her away into the woods.
They walked along various paths. Just yesterday they had followed a trail to a little pond. Ingrid pointed to the knobs on the willows. Each was a tightly curled leaf, saving itself for next spring. “What goes round comes round,” Ingrid heard herself saying. “Death is the gate of life.”
“Don’t you ever die, Queen Giraffe,” ordered Chloe.
“I’ll die in my time, darling. Like everyone else.”
The child shook her head. “You belong to us,” she said, as if that conferred immortality.
And then in January the pellet plant was built and running, and Chris was free to return to the little office off the shop, and Ingrid was free to go back to her real life.
On one of their walks home together, they stopped to rest beside the Falls. “You’ll be glad to return to New York — theater, friends, fabrics, museums.”
“Fabrics?”
“I meant clothing. The walks in the neighborhoods, I know you love to do that, you’ve told me. Parties…”
She listened to him telling her what she was presumably feeling.
He said: “I spent a year in New York once, studying wood sculpture…”
“I remember. Your uncle was still alive.”
He nodded. “I liked the fresh mornings, the sound of the garbage trucks. But there is so much more that you like. Maybe we’ve kept you here too long.”
“Not at all,” she said politely, telling the truth and not seeming to. Let him think she wanted to leave. Let him never know what she really wanted.
Let him never know that she — with the wisdom of crones, of Mott Street medicine men, of memory-laden stones — knew what he wanted. He did not look at her breasts, her abundant hair, her eyes kept safe these days behind newly broken glasses. They had been born thirty years apart, he was thinking, she was thinking; and they had known each other all his life. They stared at a tree which would outlive them both. He wanted to bury his nose in the cleavage she had learned to hide. He wanted to say sweet words.
Instead he pressed his lips together to let no words escape. Stay with us was all he would have said. Stay in my sight. To keep wanting, and not getting — it was a satisfaction of its own. She was another house he would never build.
I cannot stay, she might have said. Oh, Chris. Oh, Lynne, oh, my Chloe, how sweet it sounds, how tender it might be. The four of us living a life, running two businesses, not getting in one another’s way. Danny visiting. Bees swarming.
But I see farther than you. I see myself weakening, getting querulous, not useless but not useful either. I see Chloe outgrowing Queen Giraffe. I see Lynne trying to conceal her boredom. I see you mourning the loss of your longing…And beyond that bearable future, there are less pleasant predictions; dirty pictures, you might call them. There’s a stroke, and you attach yourselves to the nursing home — not giving money, for I can pay; giving attention you dare not withhold. You cannot leave me day after day, strapped to a chair, calling for my dead child. Or perhaps, mobile, I’ll become a demented comic, wandering from floor to floor and stealing my neighbors’ false teeth. The home will call you like an annoyed principal. And there are worse scenarios — the illness of organs, who cares which organ or what illness so long as it doesn’t kill me as it should but instead keeps me in my room here, visited regularly by strong-armed nurses, the walls shaking with my strenuous attempt not to cry. I’ll scream — too late — for the bedpan. I’ll throw my stone at the laggard aide. Our dusty street will be invaded by the occasional ambulance. My body still alive but decaying visibly and audibly and odorously next to the kitchen will remind us to regret your invitation, my acceptance. The house will call us fools.
In a few days they drove her to the bus. Embraces all around, like other families. “I put the chromite in Fido,” said Chloe.
Ingrid looked at her for a while. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll use it. And on my spring visit I’ll bring it back to you.”
She boarded the bus. They waved and waved. She twisted her neck and watched them until the first curve took them out of her sight. Then, she guessed, Lynne and Chloe got into the car, while Chris kept his arm uselessly in the air.
Her Cousin Jamie
At their annual convention — they were both high school teachers — Fern and Barbara always got together at least once for coffee. Last year they had graduated to gin. Now, on the final night, they installed themselves at a little table in the hotel bar. They talked about this and that — about the decay of classroom decorum, of course; and about the tumblings that took place at this convention, once-a-year love affairs that saved many a marriage.
“Like emergency medication,” Barbara suggested.
“Relieving the flatulence of wedlock,” Fern expanded.
Fern in her fifties had a broad, unlined brow, clear gray eyes, a mobile mouth. She was fit, and her blondish hair was curly and short, and she wore expensive pants and sweaters in forest colors: moss, bark, mist…Really, she should have been considered handsome; she might even have been admired. But those athletic shoulders had a way of shrugging and those muscular lips a way of grimacing that said she expected to be overlooked. As for Barbara — wide face, wide lap — she was the kind of person people felt safe telling their stories to. Fine: she liked to listen.
No story had ever come from Fern, though. None seemed to be forthcoming tonight. The two women might have finished the evening in amiable silence — Earth Mother and Failed Beauty, drinking — if a certain colleague hadn’t walked swiftly past the bar toward the elevators.
Fern leaned forward. “Jamie!” she called, apparently too late. She leaned back again. “Oh well.”