She’s gesticulating and carrying on a private conversation and seems to be very busy. Finally she says, “No, I don’t think so.”
“My joints hurt,” I tell her. “I need some fresh air. And I need company.” Craftily, I say to her, “Without a companion, I might fall down. I might not get back up. You never know.”
“Oh, all right,” she says, her nursing instinct rising to one of her many surfaces. Even crazy people want to help out. “Oh all right all right all right.” She puts on a pair of tennis shoes that Wesley bought for her yesterday, and we set out into the residential Minneapolis autumn, with me slightly ahead of her so that I don’t have to smell her. Has she forgotten how to bathe? She’s had opportunities here, bathtubs, showers, and soap — running water, both hot and cold. We amble down toward Lake Calhoun. Out on the blue waters of the lake, some brave fellow has one of those sailboard things and is streaking across the surface like a human water bug. Here onshore, the wind agitates the fallen leaves, whipping them around. It’s October. My hips are giving me trouble today, and of course the lump in my right breast still remains there, patiently hatching.
“Do you think of the past?” she asks me. “I do. I wanted to call you on the telephone, you know,” Corinne tells me, suddenly lucid, “once I moved away, after Jeremy was born. All those years ago. But I couldn’t. I was a mess. I was ashamed of myself. I’m a heap of sorry.”
“Oh, I didn’t mind,” I say, before I realize that she might misunderstand me. “We thought you were in a state.” Then she tells me that she suffered panic attacks as a young mom — did I remember this? Of course I did — and that all she could do was escape from here, from the marriage and the child and the house. It’s her old story. She repeats it all the time. Contrition is a habit with her now.
“Nature tricked me,” she says. “I gave birth to a baby boy, and I didn’t love him, and I was so ashamed of myself that I left town. I went to work in Tulsa in an emergency room,” she says, knowing I know all this, “and I worked there for years, and the people came in night after night, and, Dolores, you can’t imagine these poor people, knifed and shot and slashed and choked. Their hands were broken and their mouths were bloody and bullet holes pierced them, and some of them had been poisoned, and the rest of them were bent over and groaning, and you know what happened then?”
“You forgave yourself?” I ask. I wish she would change the topic. I wish she wouldn’t dwell on any of this. She doesn’t know I’m capable of murder.
“No. I lived with it. I saw things. I heard things. I got bloodied with the blood of strangers all over me. People screamed right into my face from pain and confusion. I saw a woman whose boyfriend had forced her mouth open and made her swallow poison. A person shouldn’t see such terribleness. Her stomach had started to burn away before we got to her. When the police questioned the boyfriend, he said that she had told him to go fuck himself and that no woman was going to speak to him that way without consequences. So he did what he did. A manly thing to do. He had her name tattooed on his arm. With a heart! She survived that time, somehow. Two months later he killed her with a knife while she was sleeping. At least he was done away with in prison, later on, stabbed in turn. I think they call that karma. Thank goodness!”
By now we have made our way to Thirty-Sixth and to the fence surrounding the cemetery, whereupon Corinne loses her train of thought, as she does in all the subsequent walks we take together. When she collects her thoughts, she says, out of nowhere, “I hate them.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Capitalists,” she says, and suddenly I’m not following her. “They’ve made my life miserable. They’ve made me a crazy person. You can talk about the victims of Communism all you want, but as a woman I’m a victim of Capitalism, because did I tell you how they took away my pension? I had a pension, and they gave it to investors and the investors invested the money in bogus real estate and bundled something-or-others, and so I ended up with nothing, bereft, broke, a ruined person, no pension, plus I was crazy and alone, and meanwhile the capitalists were accumulating everything and coming after me in their suits. Have you ever seen how they live? It’s comical.”
“I agree with you, Corinne,” I tell her, because I do. By now we are inside the cemetery, and we stop, because overhead in the sunlight a bird is singing, a song sparrow. We walk on quietly until we come to my husband, Mike’s resting place.
Michael Erickson
1937–1967
Next to him is the space in the sacred ground where I’ll be casketed in a couple of years. I love this cemetery. I do. I come here often. It’s so quiet here under the balding blue sky with its wisps of white hair, and as we’re looking down at the grass and the leaves, serenaded by the song sparrows, Corinne falls to her knees, smelly as she still is, a human wreck. She mumbles a prayer. “Wesley’s daddy,” my former daughter-in-law cries out, “God bless him, rest in peace, forever and ever and ever.” She’s so vehement, she sounds Irish.
This is how I know she’ll take care of me once I’m incapacitated. Slowly, on my bad knees, I get down too. How lovely is her madness to me now.
—
We get back to the house, and that night the capitalism theme starts up again at the dinner table. We seem to be a household of revolution
aries. This time it comes from Jeremy, who before dinner walks into the kitchen barefoot, holding his iPhone. I am sitting, drinking tea. He’s sixteen or seventeen, I can’t remember which. Usually he and I talk about space aliens, and I pretend they exist to humor him and bring him around eventually to Jesus, but tonight he’s looking at something else. He’s wearing his Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, and I notice that he’s growing a mustache and succeeding with it this time.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” he says to me. I don’t mind his use of obscenity. Really, I don’t. It tickles me, I can’t say why. “Grandma Dee, do you like elephants?”
“I like them very much,” I say. “Though I’ve never known any one of them personally.” We’re seated at the kitchen table. Astrid is making dinner, Wesley is in the garage doing something-or-other, and Corinne is upstairs cooing in front of the TV set. I don’t know where Lucy is — reading somewhere in the house, I expect. “They are among the greatest of God’s creatures,” I say. “I understand that they mourn their dead.”
“So look at this fucking thing,” he says, pointing at the little phone screen.
“It’s too small. I can’t see it.”
“Want me to read it?” he asks. What a handsome young man he is. I enjoy his company. It’s so easy to love a grandchild, there’s no effort to it at all. Besides, his face reminds me of my late husband’s face just a little.
“Sure,” I say.
“Well, see the thing is, it’s about elephants being killed and like that.”
“What about them?” Astrid asks, from over by the stove. “Killed how?”
“Okay, so in Zimbabwe, which I know where it is because we’ve studied it in geography, anyway what this says, this article, is, they’ve been, these people, these Zimbabweans, putting cyanide into the water holes in this, like, huge park, to kill the elephants. And these fuckers have access, I guess, to industrial cyanide that they use in gold mining—”
“Jeremy, please watch your language,” Astrid says demurely. She’s dicing tomatoes now.
“And they’ve been, I mean the poisoned water hole has been, like, killing the little animals, the cheetahs, and then the vultures, that eat the cheetahs once they’re dead, so it’s, like, this total outdoor death palace eatery, but mostly the cyanide in the water holes has been killing the elephants.” He gazes at me as if I’m to blame. I’m old. I understand: old people are responsible for everything. “Which are harmless?”