A wet sleeve slapped his cheek. I thought of his image on the springhouse wall. Wherever Mary was, he was in her eye. I thought of Mim, the keeper of Mary’s hearts. How Mary must dream of her too.
I spoke straight in the doctor’s face. “Go away.”
I bit the icicle in my mouth. As it broke, it released a compound that communicated bracken and dead leaves. You placed a live toad in my hand. You took me to the theater and whispered the name of the opera in my ear. Scrape of your beard. You had not shaved for the week of our holiday. At the hotel I lost my ring down the sink and cried. We shopped for old books in the rain, the drops when we ran across the street collecting on your hair on your black cap. On your wavy silver hair. On your sturdy cap. You called me “Mary.” You said, “Mary, what is memory?” I said, “We walked in the forest. I was following your gray dress. A leaf clung to your heel.” You smiled, a raindrop sparkling on your nose. We ran to the nearest café, shielding our packages, which were only wrapped in newspaper. Memory means feeling again. It is a matter of numbers. The deep, warm room. The smell of beer. The black strings of your cap at your pale throat. Memory means feeling that something is not for the first time.
She Hopes, but Not Too Much
(Get up. Dress. Wash up in the darkness. Downstairs light the lamp, the oven. Start the bread. The baby wakes. Feed him. Try to slide him off the breast without waking him up. It doesn’t work. Change him. Put the used diaper to soak. No time to soothe him to sleep again. Take him downstairs. Put him to play with the rolling pin. Knead the dough. Get the boys up. Make them wash. Send them to milk the cows. John doesn’t want to. Push him, threaten. Dad will get you. The baby cries. Pick him up, carry him on your hip. At last the boys go out. Holding the baby on your hip, start the eggs one-handed. Shell in the yolk. Bring the lamp closer to check. Baby leans over to grab at the egg bowl. Put him in his chair, where he struggles and cries. Soothing sounds while you pick the shell out of the eggs. Give him an apple. He gums it, throws it down, cries. Stir the eggs. Yesterday’s bread for toast. The boys come in, dirtying the floor. Shout at them, they know better. Make them sweep it. Jimmy complains, John didn’t do enough. He’s lazy. Do I have a lazy child. The baby wails, unbearable, pick him up and turn the toast, don’t let him fall in the oven. The boys squabbling. Is breakfast ready yet. Sam comes in from currying the horses and they quiet. Hear him washing up. Toast out now and bread dough in the pans. John get the butter, Jim, the milk. Baby back in chair. Give him some toast, he’ll choke. Take it away, he screams. Sam says, It’s bedlam. Comes in, says, It’s bedlam, why is this apple on the floor. There is a difference in the light now. It is dawn.)
“Lyddie,” said Mim, “I have a situation in my root cellar.”
(I haven’t put in all the interruptions. You’ll have to imagine those. Think of them as a noise that goes on without ceasing from one darkness to another. Sometimes all I’ve got at the end of the day is a huge emptiness. As if that’s been my purpose all along. So much effort for so many hours to sit at the table empty. So much work at last to shut off like a stove. Come to bed, says Sam. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I take the notebook out. I know tomorrow I’ll be tired enough to weep. Snap at the boys, turn ugly. Mother says I’m getting thin. I write: “I have a situation in my root cellar.”)
“What kind of situation?”
“The kind you see with your own eyes.”
“But I’ve got pies in.”
She gazed at me fixedly from under drawn brows.
“All right. Half an hour.”
We started up the hill toward her house. Mim still lived with her mother on the edge of her uncle’s farm. The rest of us had gotten married that summer, dropping, Mim said, like flies, or as if marriage, she also said, was a kind of TB. Me to Sam, Barb to Mel, Esther to Little Orie, who is probably the most cheerful man in Jericho. And Kat, surprisingly, to Barb’s brother, Joe. This was to bring her much grief, but not yet. That first summer she was so happy, she blushed constantly, laughing at the smallest things, a heat coming off her face that fogged her glasses so you couldn’t see her eyes.
Mim’s house was brown and sagging and gave off a smell of cabbage that reached halfway up the lane. Instead of a garden, it had a single hairy pumpkin vine that covered the ground outside in giant steps—a thing greedy for territory. I’d never liked going there, for Mim’s mother was a woman of a sorrowful spirit. As we drew near, she came banging out of the door. “What is it?” she cried, staring at us with her sore-looking, terrified eyes that bulged like gooseberries.
“Nothing, Mommy,” Mim said gently. “We’re going out back.”
“Out back!” her mother exclaimed, but she said nothing else, so we went around the house, stepping over the pumpkin vine, and Mim lifted the slanting door that led to the cellar. A little light came up the dirt stairs, along with a questioning yelp from Hochmut.
“Good dog,” Mim called down.
We went down the stairs, Mim pulling the door shut on top of us. “Don’t shout or anything,” she warned.
“Why would I?” I said, and stopped. The ceiling light shone on Hard Mary, seated on a crate, and Hochmut, standing guard by a foreign man who was tied up with a hose.
“Mim. What have you done?”
“I told you it was a situation.”
“Hi, Lyddie!” Mary said.
“Hi, Mary. But what have you done to him?”
The foreign man was young, much younger than Dr. Robert Stoll. He had long hair like snakes. His glasses were filthy, his face scratched and bleeding.
“I didn’t do all that!” Mim protested. “He came like that, mostly.”
The foreign man had a pile of sacking for a pillow. It did look as if someone had tried to make him comfortable, only he couldn’t move his arms or legs because of the hose.
He peered up at me through the smudges on his glasses. “Hey,” he said. “That’s true.”
“Quietly,” said Mim.
“That’s true,” the foreigner whispered agreeably. “I had some trouble getting here. In the forest? There was this, like, river? All she did was trip me when I got here, and Honey held me down.”
“Honey is what he calls Mary,” said Mim with distaste.
“My bad,” said the foreigner. “I meant Mary.”
I turned on Mim. “He’s from PI! You brought somebody from PI down here?”
“Uh,” said the foreigner. “I’m from Lancaster?”
“Shut up,” I told him.
“Hey, no problem.” He did his best to nod.
Mim regarded me with a steely expression. “The situation,” she said, “is that he needs to use the outhouse.”
“Miriam Ruth Hershey. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe what you’re saying. You brought him down here. If he needs the outhouse, you’d better take him.”
“I can’t.”
“Make Mary do it. She does whatever you say.”
“He knows her. He’ll play some trick.”
“I actually wouldn’t,” the foreigner said. “Promise. I really have to go.”
“You’re a married woman,” Mim said to me.
I could have shoved her.
“Please,” the foreigner said, writhing. “I’m dying over here.”
“Sometimes,” I told Mim, “I’m sorry I ever talked to you. I wish I’d left you alone when we were kids.”
“Fine,” Mim said brightly. “Here’s his outfit.”
She showed me a dress and cap. The dress was too long for her; it must have been her mother’s. “In case someone sees you on the way out there,” she explained. She told the foreigner we were going to untie him, but he’d better not try to run, as Mary was going with us, and she could break his arm.