She was beautiful. That is a fact. So beautiful Oscar could take her face and turn her into a superheroine, into Rocket Bride, and think he was only drawing a beautiful woman, no one in particular. He gave Mrs. Sweatt, abandoned wife, powers that might have made her life bearable. Maybe not. Maybe they’d have been a burden, a constant reminder. Did Rocket Bride want simply to leave, her gown a netted heap on the ground? Say, forget it, I’m taking my honeymoon solo? Crime can take care of itself; injustice will have to continue unabated without my help. I will drink blue drinks and dance alone. I will love myself.
But you cannot fly away from people who have flown away from you; you cannot fly into your own arms. Mrs. Sweatt’s husband had left her, James himself was growing away and away. Once you have been left you are always left; you cannot leave your leaving.
Mrs. Sweatt did not lift into the air like Rocket Bride, even though I liked to imagine she did. She died in the hospital, or on the way there, and that was only the end of the story. All night long she’d been dying on that gaudy flowered sofa, where she napped, where she waited for James to come home from school, where she spent her solitary nights. That sofa already missed the dip of her back, the way her legs were too short for her body. The way she hid those short legs with her full, high-waisted skirts.
I see her rocketing into the sky, not in a wedding dress but in one of those skirts, so big it blossoms up and haloes her. Not defiant, as Oscar had drawn her, but pensive, full of plans.
She is looking for an aerial view.
There she goes, into the thin air that wraps around the heads of statues, not the sludge near the ground that we usual people must make do with. Everyone stands up as she leaves, though she’s flying away from us and can’t see. She just knows. Do we miss her yet? Our heads are thrown back, mouths wide as bowls, ready for her to drop something into them. Maybe she’ll write something in the sky with her vapor; maybe the vapor will use her up entirely. She levels off, inclines her head toward the ground. She’s so far away she can see everything and everyone, she’s made them all neighbors this way, her long-gone husband and the President of the United States and Orson Welles and she can’t tell the difference between the people and the buildings, the Washington Monument is just a stop sign from this altitude. It’s like she’s turned everyone on earth into tacks on a child’s map, each marking our own place. That far up she can see the slow curve of the earth. She sweeps closer, so she can see what we’re wearing, the color in our cheeks. James is here, in this crowd of people watching her, and she can barnstorm him, run a hand over his head without disturbing anyone else. We don’t even feel the breeze of her skirt as it flutters by, as she reaches down and touches his hair and his chin. Even now she straightens his collar, not on tiptoes this time. Only she can do this for him.
There’s James below. Really, he doesn’t look so tall, so unwieldy. He looks handsome and manageable. An aerial view is not the whole story, it’s a gloss, an abstract, a beautiful, beautiful summary.
In the end, she died as most of us do, absolutely still, earthbound.
The Boy in the Bed
Mrs. Sweatt’s body was sent to Iowa, to be buried in her family’s plot. “We’d like to come to the funeral,” Caroline had said when she called to make arrangements, thinking she’d send Oscar out, since she felt too pregnant to travel. But Mrs. Sweatt’s mother said that wouldn’t be necessary. Funerals were not a tradition their family observed.
That upset Caroline; it seemed heathen. But she couldn’t hold a funeral herself, and she couldn’t sway Mrs. Sweatt’s family, and so the body was buried in Davenport, without ceremony.
“Terrible,” said Caroline, and it was terrible. “But at least she’s back in Iowa.” She said this as though Mrs. Sweatt had just gone home to visit friends, stare at her old high school, have a drink in her favorite bad bar. As if being dead were like getting pregnant while unmarried, and Mrs. Sweatt had to disappear until the trauma was over.
“When you think about it,” Caroline said, “Iowa is not such a bad place to be.”
I talked my way back into the house that Saturday, by insisting that the only thing that would make me happy was doing the Stricklands’ housework for them during their difficult time. This was a statement of fact.
Caroline was suddenly hugely pregnant, pink-cheeked and pretty. “Write to James, why dontcha,” she said. “He’ll be there awhile. At least a couple of weeks.”
“I’m planning to go to Boston tomorrow,” I said. “I figured I’d take the bus.”
“Nice of you,” she said. “He could use some company. Oscar will drive you to the bus station.”
“Oh, that’s not—”
“No. He will. Don’t argue. Well, shall we sit?”
“How about laundry?” I said. My unoccupied hands made me nervous, as if I needed to prove that I was here for one purpose: housework. “There must be plenty to do.”
“Most people I would tell no,” she said. “But I know you won’t be happy unless I say yes.”
“That’s right,” I said.
There was plenty of laundry. Oscar’s paint-spattered clothing, some of the cotton men’s shirts Caroline wore instead of maternity smocks. Two shirts and a pair of pants belonging to James, which I set aside for hand washing to save wear since they were so expensive. It was the last of his laundry for a while; now that he was in the hospital, he’d dirty nothing. I didn’t know where Mrs. Sweatt’s clothing had gone.
“Have you been to see James?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I want to, but my doctor says stay put till the baby comes. Which should be at any moment. You don’t know how to deliver a baby, do you?”
“Why? Are you feeling—”
“No. I just thought maybe you might have read a book on it,” she said, as if baby-delivering were a knack, like refinishing furniture, that people picked up for the pleasure of doing. “I feel very pregnant, and I feel like I will be very pregnant forever.” She sighed. “Luckily there’s a cure for it.”
“Has Oscar been to Boston?”
She leaned on the dryer. “Just once. He gets nervous. Thinks I’ll go ahead and have the baby without him. Once the baby comes, everything will be easier.”
“I admire your optimism,” I said.
“I hate suspense,” she said.
A line of socks waited for their matches on the top of the dryer.
“These poor socks have lost their spouses,” said Caroline. She picked one up and talked to it. “Poor widowed sock.”
“It’s true,” I said. “Socks mate for life. Socks and swans.”
“But you can’t just throw them out, can you? I always introduce them to another abandoned sock.” She picked up two lone socks and began to roll them together.
“Still,” I said, “they’re never really happy.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Caroline. She unrolled the socks and held up both to inspect them. “Wash them together enough, and they grow to look like each other. Just like an old married couple.” Then she rolled them back up and threw them in the basket.
“A sock love story,” I said. “I’ve never before thought of the laundry as romantic.”
“Everything’s romantic,” she said. “But I suspect you’re a cynic.”
“No doubt.”
“Peggy,” she said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I said. I snapped a pair of Oscar’s pants so the wrinkles flew out, then began to fold.
“No possibilities?”
I folded clothing double-time to show that I did not care to talk about it.
“Hmm,” she said. I didn’t know what she was hmming about. “You should try it,” she said.