A Map of the World (34 page)

In another lull she said, “Wouldn’t it be handy if you could take your eyeballs out, let them get on with the long tiresome work of crying?” We had laughed a little before our losses brought us down. “What am I going to do, Howard?” She kept asking that same question again and again.

I said I didn’t know. I can’t say how long we wept and then how long we lay quietly. I knew that time was passing only because the moon kept rising. We lay on the floor sniffling. She was awfully heavy in the crook of my arm. I could feel her eyelashes on my neck and her breath through my shirt. I was afraid to move, afraid the slightest change might make her go away. When the moon passed over the windmill she hoisted herself up and looked into my face. Where her glasses had gone I can’t say. “Sometimes I just want to die,” she said in that soft way under her breath. “I just want to die so I can go where Lizzy is. Sometimes it seems a punishment, as if I’m trapped on earth.”

I pulled her back down and kissed her dark hair. “No,” I said. “It’s all right here.” I hated to think that she wanted to die. Everything about Theresa radiated goodness. A person could understand her uncomplicated sorrows. I could feel her relaxing again into my chest. We would get up in a minute. I would turn on the glaring porch light and we’d resume our life. We were tired, and finally insensible. I could hardly lift my head. We must have both slept for a while. Perhaps she also thought she’d break away in the next minute, and the next, and like counting sheep, the exercise put her to sleep. It felt good, to sleep. For the first time in what
felt like months I slept soundly. Her skin smelled so fine as I drifted off. I don’t think I dreamed about anything but her strange, foreign smell.

In my memory, when I go back to that night, the clock does not tick. The only thing that moves is the night sky. On the porch that means nothing to us. We were leaden, spellbound, like Shakespearean lovers who have drunk a potion. When she woke, sitting up in alarm, I turned and pulled her back to me. That action surprised me as much as anything. I knew her movements in my sleep. That I was lying on the floor in the middle of the night with my wife’s friend, my neighbor’s wife, my children’s playfellow’s mother, did not seem to matter. “I need to go home, Howard,” she said into my shirt.

“Stay.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. She hovered over me, stroking my cheek with her knuckles. I didn’t want to wake up. I unfolded her hand and brought it to my lips. She let me. She smiled, as if it was an indulgence, allowing me to kiss each finger, one by one. I made a point to smell her skin as I kissed. It came to me that hers was the fragrance of an early spring morning. It wasn’t the efforts of a genius soap manufacturer. It seemed to me that it was her own scent, that smell of fresh loamy earth and light. “You smell nice,” I uttered. “You smell like spring dirt.”

She laughed out loud and then quickly put her small hand to her mouth. “Coming from you I take that as a compliment.” She shook her head. “Dirt.” She leaned down. I thought she was going to kiss my forehead. “Dirt,” she said again. “I love that.”

We may both have thought of Alice. Theresa may have considered for an instant that she would have to tell Alice what I had said, that it bore repeating. I thought how Alice often accused me of calculating milk price supports when I was making love to her. She was far away and seemed inconsequential. I dismissed her.

“Please don’t tell me what I smell like,” I said.

“Rain,” she murmured. “How about that? You smell like rain.”

“Ah, rain.”

She traced over my eyebrows and eyelids, down along my jaw, brushing slowly over my mouth. I watched her. She outlined my lips with one finger before she came away. The night seemed as if it would go on
indefinitely if only she would again rest against my chest. We would talk of dirt and rain. It was she who held the charm, who could make not only the clock but also the moon stop. I don’t know if she was weighing the importance of the night against real life. I wanted her to touch me, to keep stroking my face. I shut my eyes and I could still feel her next to me. Her smell was more intense without sight. “Howard,” she said finally. I knew there wasn’t much time left. I pulled up slowly. I put her loopy curls behind her ears. “How do you get a comb through this hair?” I asked. She laughed with abandon, without stifling her pleasure.

I held her face and she smiled in that hopelessly breathless way. I guess I knew there would only be that one instant to kiss her. I hesitated, seeing the night in the distance, already a memory. The desire I felt for her could only always be seen as good. She was beautiful and wise, her voice and song, her face and laugh, a salve. “Theresa,” I breathed into that kiss. I held on as long as I could, moving inside her mouth, all brightness, tongue to tongue. Her eyelashes fluttered like a small animal’s heartbeat, against my cheek.

When she pulled away I followed her mouth. “That’s all,” she whispered, gently pushing me off. We bent our heads together, knowing full well the reason for stopping. I helped her to her feet and then she let go. She nodded. That was the signal. I went to get Audrey. I walked up each stair, one by one. The night vanished quickly behind me. I considered as I moved, going down, returning to the porch, to see if that pocket of time and space was still there. The girls were sprawled all over each other, arms and legs in a tangle. They were damp, heavy. None of them woke as I moved them around. Audrey chewed and groaned. She had curly hair like her mother’s. She was warm in my arms. I couldn’t help looking at her, also seeing her in a way I hadn’t before. I held her carefully, this child, Theresa’s child. I made my way slowly down the hall, telling her that I was taking her home.

Theresa was already outside on the lawn, shifting from left to right foot, back and forth, the way a person does in winter. She was holding herself around the waist. She’d found her glasses. The nearly full moon, waning now beyond the chicken shed, made the world seem cool. She ran between the rows of dead corn, and I followed, unable to keep up with
her. When we got to the edge of the property I handed Audrey over. She didn’t need to tell me not to come farther. I watched her trudge with her load along Mrs. Klinke’s hedgerow. When a dog barked up the street I went down on all fours, expecting the lights to come on in the houses. The people would stream into their backyards, looking for the trouble.

When I opened my eyes the next morning I was in my own bed. Alice’s clock said 3:30. The sun was shining on the ceiling in long, pale rectangles. It took me a minute to realize that the clock must have run down long before. I imagined Alice looking through the walls of the jail, through the metal windows, across the waking city, over the fields, to our bed, to me. I imagined her wistful smile, and her voice, her sarcastic, “What are you going to have for lunch today? I
know
you like that fruit salad!”

I could tell by the slant of the sun that I was already an hour late for milking and still I lay looking at the ceiling. I remembered the night before with absolute calm, what both Alice and Theresa had remarked was my strength. Theresa and I had wept until we were finished. I had held her, wondering if it was true that a sorrow like hers, like ours, could eventually fade. I think I hoped that it wouldn’t. I hoped that we would always be able to walk onto the porch, just the two of us, when everyone else was conveniently absent. I hoped that we would always be able to dip into that current of sadness.

I suspect I knew then, lying in bed, that we could no longer wait, according to Rafferty’s instructions. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when our lives began to unravel. In a snap I can trace the wrongdoing straight back to Alice. Like Theresa, I resist that temptation. I know it is not honest or fair to place all of the blame on my wife. That morning I did not get right up. I lay thinking that years from now if someone came across a chronicle of Alice’s life, the summer of Lizzy’s death would be the one period of time that stood out. She would be the great-great-grandmother who spent several months in jail. The ancestor who abused the boy. Future generations could blame their bad traits on her. It seemed cruel, that her afterlife was already determined. If I was noted it would be only in relation to Alice. Her husband. Perhaps being the faceless name next to the fleshed-out ignominious great-great-grandmother is an even crueler
fate. I lay under the sheet, watching the morning pass. I knew how much energy it was going to take to catch up with the work. It was then that I first said to myself, I can’t do it.

I wasn’t surprised when Theresa didn’t come down on Saturday. It was late by the time I started chores. I was swabbing Maggie, an older cow who picked fights if she felt put upon, when Emma appeared in the aisle. The girls rarely came out in the morning and she startled me. “What do you want?” I said. I must have been speaking in accusing tones because Maggie turned to look at me.

“I didn’t do anything,” Emma whined. “Why aren’t you done yet, anyway?”

I stood slowly. My insides burned and ached as I inched to an upright posture. “Guess I’m tired,” I said.

“Where’s Theresa?” Claire called from the doorway.

“When is Mama coming home?” Emma said, tugging at my shirt. “I forget when you said she was coming back.” My daughters were still wearing their pajamas. Emma’s were so worn the print of the material was gone. You could see through to her skin. Alice might get convicted and spend years serving time. With all the skill Rafferty could muster he might not be able to fight the boy in his three-piece suit and the abused doll that had had to endure atrocity, real and imagined, in court case after court case. I had abstractly considered the possibility that Alice might not get out of prison for years. I had not yet thought about what we would actually do if she was to be held captive for the better part of our lives. I was confused so early in the morning by what had happened in the night. It came to me as I stared at Emma’s shabby pajamas, that I thought I knew Theresa and that my knowledge was based on a feeling, not anything more reliable than a blind man indelicately pressing on a face with both hands to get a sense of its form. I had thought at one time that I knew Alice, but that knowledge also had proved to amount to nothing. She probably knew me more than I wanted to be known. I felt very tired. I didn’t know if I had ever loved anything. I guess I couldn’t have said what it meant to love someone. We had a life together. Alice was my wife. Those things suggested an illusion and implied love. I have since wondered
if a person can know how deep a thing goes without getting outside of it, without taking it apart, without, in fact, ruining it. I could have one night with Theresa, more tender than any Alice and I might have together, and still Alice would exert herself. My wife would slip away, I would lose her, but she would still have a hold. The certainty of those things made me feel sick. I leaned over, thinking I might vomit into the gutter.

I made my way down the aisle, going laboriously from cow to cow, the four milking units working at the same time. If Alice was convicted we might live our lives on parallel tracks. She on the inside, the girls and I on the outside. We would visit at regular intervals. She might get to come to Emma’s eighth-grade graduation. She’d shuffle along in her manacles for the first outing of her prison life. The evening news would cover the touching story. I wondered then if Alice’s present imperturbable state might not last her for the rest of her days. She might insist upon my release, calmly laying out for me our divorce, the name of my future wife, the training necessary for my new occupation. She might think I could leave her to be counted at the wake-up call day after day until she died of a prison epidemic. She might spend a good part of her time writing Emma and Claire, reminding them of that dog caught on its leash, wound around the tree. The dog was the one thing I managed to save.

“Daddy,” Emma grumbled, “I said, ‘When is Mom coming home?’ You aren’t even listening to me.”

“September,” I said. “October.”

“How many minutes?”

I did a quick calculation. If she got out in six weeks, in the middle of September, which certainly wasn’t going to happen, but if she did, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of forty-three thousand minutes. That sounded manageable. “Forty-three thousand,” I said.

“Oh.” She was satisfied. She stooped down to pet a kitten she’d tamed. “Do you think cats know how they look?” she asked. The scruffy white one in her hands had a black nose, one black eye and a black circle on its back.

“No,” I said.

“I wouldn’t want her to know she’s ugly.”

If I’d been in the mood it would have been time for an allegory. I kept moving down the aisle. My father used to tell me the story of my great-grandfather, solely as a scare tactic. I was the only child and worse yet, a son. My father had to tell me what could go wrong in life so that I stood a better chance of avoiding the pitfalls. There was no reason for me to repeat anyone else’s mistakes. He was determined I make something of myself. The great-grandfather seems to have had a nervous breakdown after his third wife discovered she was pregnant with his ninth child. The two other wives had both died during or shortly after pregnancy. The grandfather took sick, is how the lesson came down to me. My great-grandmother supported the family by taking in laundry. Months later, long after the baby was safely delivered, the old boy came to his senses. When he fully understood what he had done to his family, how he had humiliated them and abandoned them, he died on the spot. So the story goes. I think my father needed to tell me about him not because it was family history, but because it taught the horror of Shame, the goodness of Duty.

I interrupted my rhythm of washing the udders and slipping on the milking units to watch the girls climbing barefoot on the hay bales in the corner. I didn’t know how they could stand the sharp tufts on their feet. The cows swished their tails and stamped. There’s a Bible verse my mother always used to say: “In the day of prosperity there is a forgetfulness of affliction: and in the day of affliction there is no more remembrance of prosperity.” She used to say things like that when I was going about my ordinary business. Memory does not serve a person well, is what I got out of that one. Not twelve hours had passed and my memory of the night before was changing. It was dispiriting, to think that something that had seemed good was going to go through several revolutions in my mind. The girls, already dirty so soon in the morning, had come to the barn to remind me that nothing is ever simple. I could insist to myself that the evening was one thing—two people responding to sadness. That’s how I aim to remember it. I also imagine that Theresa and I are each other’s best secret. Both of us probably think back to that night when we are in need of consolation and the idea of love. On the porch with the
moon climbing ever higher I had thought that I loved her and that there couldn’t be anything wrong with loving her. In the morning light I knew that it was treachery to think so.