A Private State: Stories (17 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

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BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 109
The third drawer, too, was full of seeds. She plunged both hands in and let the kernels shimmer through her fingers. She couldn't bring herself to look at clothes in other drawers. The thought of Conrad's underwear was somehow sad beyond words.
He was on a rant and would come back grimed and blade skinny, quoting Heidegger at the top of his lungs and lighting cigars he didn't finish. The others would retreat to their rooms, as if to wait out a sirocco, while staff would spend three days convincing a shrink that Conrad was indeed a threat to himself and society, and then he'd be inside, doped within minutes, and, when he woke from the drugs, given crayons and paper, unless he told a ward nurse she looked just like Eva Braun.
Alice sank down on the edge of Conrad's bed. Her hand dented his pillow and touching it released some scent of Conrad, the smell of perpetual medication, as distinct as cabbage but different. Sparrow song filtered through the window panes. Had she known, Conrad asked her once, that when you touch the nest of a loon it never returns? Then he'd said, as if the second thought made perfect sense alongside the first, that glass wasn't a true solid. It was nothing more than dense liquid.
Alice called in sick the next morning and barely made the train to New York. Looking out at suburbs, she remembered that she hadn't checked to see if the paper in the door had been disturbed. Nor had she called the super. It came as a relief to realize she had more critical things to think about.
After a bit of jiggling, her father's door opened onto the front hall. First, Alice was conscious only of the sense of dust. Not that anything looked or even smelled fusty. It was just clear that a settling had taken place.
The apartment was handsome, clubby, full of leather sofas. There was a hint of something fastidious, too, in the curtains' elaborate swags and the tiling in the kitchen. Though it was clear
 
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a man had lived here, he wasn't a hapless man or one unaware of appearances. It was an apartment whose owner expected to have vases and porcelain examined for signs of wear or grime.
The lawyer referred to the apartment as a problem. He'd counted its liabilities on white fingersutilities, maintenance, taxes. Quietly nibbling at the inheritance. Capital burning up every day. A decision, he said, had to be reached. He thought Alice cracked. How could anyone be so careless?
Thinking of Wawa, Alice thought the lawyer had a lot to learn about being cracked. Money was all well and good, but Alice would have exchanged toys and trips and dresses for an adult or two who'd let the messier things slip through, even encouraged a breathless, irrational fight now and then. It was the tolerance for chaos that kept her at Wawa more than anything, she thought: there, at least, was room for the inexplicable, the deviant. Her parents had been so tentative on those topics, especially her father. Even the forks here were wrapped in sheaths of felt.
His clothes were also probably still here, just as neatly stowed. In the bedroom, she sat on the bed, but that struck her as a little forward and she moved to the chaise longue. When she'd stayed over, she slept on a sofa in the living room. Her father was so quiet, she'd never even heard running water. She'd never seen him brush his teeth and couldn't now remember their color and shape. In the morning, he'd prepare a tray with toast and juice, then perch on the sofa in his dressing gown to chat with her as she ate. Why couldn't she remember his teeth?
Feeling like she'd unclicked the rope guarding a museum display, Alice edged open a bureau drawer. Bound to sheets of cardboard with a ring of blue paper, the shirts lay there in crisp stacks. Alice picked a yellow one and, sniffing the clean cotton, slipped off the band of paper. She peeled away her sweater and blouse. The fabric almost itched, there was so much starch, but the shirt nearly fit her. Her father had been a small man. She started to cry then and the sound was like a bird's, a bird with something caught
 
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in its throat. Alice cried and felt she was looking at herself crying at the same time, which made it impossible to cry deeply.
She stopped, rolled the cuffs, and yanked open another drawer. Suddenly, she began to search, moving through pullovers, handkerchiefs, and balled-up pairs of socks, everything preternaturally neat, as if he had known someone would come snooping, looking to pocket some hidden treasure. To unearth some life whose traces he'd quietly tucked away.
Her head in the closet, her nose full of the smell of his wellbuffed shoes, Alice sat down, stunned and heavy with surprise. Fingering the lace of a wing tip, breathing hard, Alice thought how stupid she'd been. In retrospect, it was so obvious. It was the lack of certain things, not their presence. No letters in his papers. No photos of anyone but Alice. But most of all, it had been the deep and quiet gap between them, becoming deeper the older she grew.
Taking off his shirt, she caught a glimpse of herself in the oval of the mirror. She saw the white cups of her bra, the apple-round heft of her breasts. This was probably the only time a woman's breasts had revealed themselves in this room. How strange they should be hers. Alice jerked on her sweater and bundled the yellow shirt in her bag.
Watching New Jersey through scratched glass, Alice wondered if her father had some unacknowledged friend. Had there been a face at the memorial service that looked especially sad? Perhaps there were things he would have liked from the apartment. She remembered then what her father had said just before he mentioned the blush the shape of France. He'd said, with a certain wonder, that he'd never expected her to become a pretty girl. He himself had been such an awkward boy.
Alice sprang from bed before the alarm could blare. On her way out, she bumped into one of the new neighbors at the mailbox, a stiff fan of letters in his hand. As she crossed the street, Alice
 
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became aware she wasn't even curious if the man was Schiff or Macalester, kind or suspicious. It didn't matter. There was just so much you could know about most people. Alice walked through the square below a canopy of city birds, watching people cross the park. A breeze ruffled the hair of men marching to jobs entwined with interest rates. A woman led a cascade of dogs on leather leashes.
Then near the fountain, Alice saw Conrad scattering plumes of pigeons as he walked. Everyone gave him plenty of room. He probably smelled fantastically bad. He stopped to talk to particular birds, as if lecturing dim but willing students. Suddenly, from across the square came a long twist of silver ribbon, something lost from a clutch of balloons, kinking its way above the hosta beds. Conrad scowled at it as a crown of pigeons flapped around his head. Through the nervous iridescence of the birds, he shouted: ''Falcon! Raptor! Accidental!"
Alice walked toward him. He did stink, reason enough to avoid him, it was true. But it wasn't only that which made people circle away. Conrad was one of the few who grasped that the sky could open and down swoop the fastest creature on earth, even if it looked, at first glance, like ribbon for an invisible gift.
She moved a bit to the side to continue watching him. It would have been simple, even on the brink of enjoyable, to call, "Conrad, it's me, Alice! The Kennedy lesbian!" People, if they'd heard, would have darted even farther out of range. He might have stared right at her and not been able to tell if she were Byron, Lévi-Strauss, or Nixon. But he also might have chosen to know her. She imagined his fierce glare, the grunt, the pointing finger and all that those gestures entailed: a drawing between them of some wavering line of connection.
She realized then, as the spring breeze gathered strength, tossing her hair and flustering the red tulips, that the connection had nothing to do with Wawa. Conrad had spotted her from the start as another accidental. Someone, like her father, who'd gotten
 
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blown to a climate that somehow wasn't right. A bird thumped down to seize a crumb at Conrad's feet. Alice glanced at her watch to see how late she was going to be for work, and when she looked back, he was gone. Her legs tensed, ready to bolt after him, until the idea arrived that Conrad wasn't her worry anymore. Alice watched pigeons settle back to their strutting anxiety at the base of the fountain, which the wind, quite powerful now, had curved into another shape entirely. Then she walked into the wind herself, arms spread wide and gathering speed until it seemed she was flying past the trees and statues, caught somewhere between panic and joy, nearly as free as the other birds of Philadelphia.
 
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Mercury
That glow, grace thought from her seat on the porch, that pink and hazy one, had to be Venus. Mercury would be sharp and spiky, not the planet for a hot, still end of summer in the Catskills. Amos, the dog, nudged her sweaty knee. Grace sipped wine she'd poured into a coffee mug, then told Amos that yes, James would be here soon. James, her husband, was driving up from New York and would arrive, as always, on time.
In the field below the house, the llamas, Leon Elwood's latest experiment, began their fussy bleating. Elwood was their nearest neighbor and the man who'd sold them this piece of an Upstate dairy farm. He told Grace the animals' skittish temperaments were signs of intelligence, but Grace thought it was more than that. They resented it a little, this life in a setting so much less dramatic than the Andes.
Next week, James and everyone she knew expected her to return to Manhattan to teach her fourth-grade boys. But this morning, Grace had phoned Mr. Conklin, the head, to say she wasn't coming back. Before he started to bluster, there'd been a spell of shocked silence and Grace thought, "There, you could jump in there and say, actually, I don't mean
this
year." She'd never done anything so hasty in her life. People like her who'd grown up on farms in Illinois were supposed to be patient and strategic, calm through drought and fire. But up here, only the
 
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second summer she'd spent in the country since her childhood, she'd become aware that something in her city life had gone dangerously empty. The students weren't the problem. Their purity of focus was admirable: to be as unruly as possible without being sent home by lunch. It was more that her appetite for days with scheduled edges had abruptly died.
It was invigorating, this sudden impulse toward uncertainty, but it was going to be a tricky weekend. Just after Grace spoke to Conklin, James called to say he'd invited the Chiltons. Barney, their black Lab, had just been put to sleep. They needed Company. What the hell, Grace had thought. It might be satisfying to fall apart in front of the most zipped-up couple they knew. It was so hot they might not even react when she said, ''I am not going back to New York." What she was going to do next and how much it involved James was still unclear. And for someone so pleased about the openness of the future, she'd been thinking a great deal about the past.
Grace felt even less steady when she heard, deep in the valley, the roar of James's Pontiac. Amazingly, city thieves ignored it. James said thieves already drove better cars; they didn't need to break into a wreck. Grace thought James was wrong. Sometimes people just destroyed things. Last year, she killed a lot of bugs for the orderly rows of onions, beets, and squash in her garden. At first, she'd even had murderous plans for the rabbits. This year, however, she let the fencing sag, and they'd eaten everything since peas.
Elwood had an elaborate scheme for their removal he said even vegetarians would approve of, but Grace didn't bother, although his advice was often good. She thought of farmers as people as mute and rawboned as her parents, but Elwood was moody and railed against the weather. Sometimes he wore tie dye, sometimes polo shirts. Unlike James, who always wore oxfords.
Her husband's pale button-down glowed in the dusk, envelopes from banks and brokers clamped under one arm. "Traffic all the way up 17," James said. The son of a judge, he had chosen adver-
 
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tising over politics and had a flair for shampoo slogans. He also read the paper and recycled it. He remembered her mother's birthday. Lucky woman, friends cried.
But this hot and quiet summer, Grace's desire for the unpredictable began to flare. "Let's move to San Francisco," she'd said in July. "Why?" James had asked, ''Aren't you happy, Grace?" then looked so sad she couldn't say more. Every time she tried to move toward the subject of possible change, he looked lost. She began to fear that the marriage, like her work, had dried to something rattling and pale.
He came to the porch and kissed her neck. Amos scraped and whined around his legs. Grace sniffed the starch and highway on his shirt, and under that, the subway's staleness. She used to love his scent, but under all the travel could not find it on him now. "You smell like wine," he said. "The Chiltons are a wreck about the dog." James kissed his wife's hair and said, "Not only do you smell like wine, you smell like a field." Grace had lain in the orchard that afternoon, but didn't tell him what it was like listening to a sparrow hector a hawk. She'd tried to translate experiences like that before and he would smile and say, "My farm girl." After James went to get clean, Grace found herself pouring more wine and thinking about the first time they'd seen this land, two years ago, at the end of October.
The ground of the orchard was spongy with fallen fruit. The valley spread itself before them, speckled wedges covered in cows and pine. It was land that had nothing to do with Illinois' brown and sober cultivation, and from the start, Grace liked it. James, too, was fresh with new direction, wanting a place away from shingled houses on Long Island where his parents spent August flushed with gin and sun. Grace watched him on the hillside, already stiff with ownership, a weekend pioneer.
Elwood noticed her look and she glanced away, ashamed to be seen judging. While James walked the boundaries that marked Elwood's land from what could be theirs, he said, "I saw a panther

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