Louisa Meets Bear (23 page)

Shortly before midnight—eighty-seven days after her mother, Raya, walked in front of a bread truck that sent her soaring diagonally across the street, her flight halted only by the crash of her head into the door of a parked car, leaving her locked in another reality that Marnie imagines sometimes as a long deep sleep during which the body tends to itself (though, in Raya's case, with the help of tubes going in and out of her orifices) while the mind wanders through a cineplex infinitum, and, at other times, as a terrible and lonely claustrophobia, akin to being trapped in a mine shaft with limbs pinned by the walls and air sweet from lack of oxygen—Marnie lifts her rather substantial leg over the edge of the tub and dips a big toe into the steaming water.

When the doorbell rings, Marnie, still soaking, is jolted from a reverie (her work: the way she finds the kernels for her children's stories) about a creature, swift and cunning like a wood thrush with a crest of plumules a peacock would envy, who flies into a dank, bat-ridden cave to retrieve a key to … to the universe.
Damn you
, she thinks, both about Ben, her ex-husband, and the only person who would visit without calling, and Julio, the night doorman for whom Ben once did some free printing work, who lets Ben come up without announcement.

Damp under her terry-cloth robe, Marnie pads through the living room with its bay window from which if you lean far out and look west you can see a patch of the Hudson and unlocks the sequence of bolts Ben installed before moving out nine years ago. Then, at twenty-six, she'd been a young divorcée; now the building houses a half dozen other women of Marnie's age also with a marriage behind them.

Ben hands Marnie a bag of kosher Chinese takeout. His dark hair is flecked with snow. With the collar of his leather jacket turned up over his thick neck, he looks like a Jewish version of an Irish thug from a thirties movie, only an inch or two taller than Marnie but with shoulders twice as broad; indeed, some of Ben's printing shop clients (Marnie thinks of Mesoni—a guy rumored to have used Mob connections to get the contract to grind the city's used subway cars into spools of wire) suggest something B-grade, a world where the action passes in warehouses, landfills, and container-ship yards.

“Ellie?”

Ben nods and follows Marnie into the kitchen. He leans against the counter while she fills a teakettle.

“What happened?”

“She's back to wanting to keep it. The social worker told her they take the baby right after delivery—to make it easier on the mother. She came home bawling her eyes out, that she can't go through with it, can't let them cut the umbilical cord and then that's it.” Ben shudders.

“Is she just upset or do you think she means it?”

“I don't know. She's got that midwestern bullheadedness where there's a right and a wrong and nothing in between. It was that way with the abortion; she wouldn't even consider it.”

Ben helps himself to a beer from a six-pack he left in Marnie's refrigerator last week. Marnie refrains from commenting on the irony of Ben talking about Ellie's bullheadedness given that it is his refusal to marry a woman who's not Jewish despite his loving Ellie and her tearful pleas that she'd happily convert that has led to this plan that she'll give up the child. From the demise of their own marriage, Marnie knows that Ben's religious commitments are an immutable subject—that although he was aware from the outset that she lacked religious feeling, that her mother's perfunctory hand-waving about the holidays had left Marnie with no more than a mild sentimental attachment to the rituals, the family seders having seemed as secular as Christmas trees, he couldn't accept her wish after a year of their marriage to cease keeping a kosher home. “Why do I have to participate in your Jewish practice?” Marnie had cried. “Why can't you do that independently of me?” Unable to face another year engaged in traditions that felt meaningless to her, she'd suggested counseling with a woman rabbi from the Columbia Hillel. A week later, she and Ben had sat side by side on the rabbi's chintz couch while the rabbi gently explained that the heart of Judaism is in the home and Marnie felt her own heart miss a beat and then pound out of control as she realized how mistaken she'd been to think that Ben's religious life could, like the printing business he'd taken over from his father and his passion for the track and Miles Davis, be part of his private sphere.

Marnie takes out plates and serving spoons. “And if she keeps the baby, what will you do?”

Ben spears a fried wonton with a chopstick. “I always told her I'd support her and the baby if she wants to keep it. I just won't be the father.”

“How can you
not
be the father?”

“I won't live with them. I won't give the baby my name.”

Marnie opens the other boxes: chicken with cashews, beef submerged in brown sauce, sesame noodles. Ben eats quickly with his bushy brows furrowed. When the kettle whistles, she pours hot water into mugs and joins him at the table.

“I told her, I told her before I even slept with her, that I could only marry a Jewish woman. She laughed and said I'd be an old man before she was ready to marry and what made me think she'd ever marry me.”

Marnie smiles. On the one occasion she met Ellie, she'd liked her—a skinny girl with a long red braid and a
SLAUGHTER THE POLYESTER
button who'd come to New York to study with the Feld dance troupe, worked nights in a copy shop on upper Broadway, and rode Rollerblades to work. The only way Marnie can imagine Ellie eight months pregnant is as a child's line drawing with sticks for arms and legs and a striped beach ball for a belly.

Ben puts down his fork and wipes his mouth with a paper napkin. His eyes trace Marnie's skin from the vee in her robe up to her forehead. He purses his lips as though to say,
See, look what you set in motion
, and then reaches out to touch Marnie's cheek.

*   *   *

Marnie wakes in the middle of the night. Ben breathes heavily, a shade short of a snore. Without looking at the clock, she knows it's 3:52—the insomniac's witching hour. All week, she's bolted awake at exactly this time, a sudden waking without dream fragments or the residue of sleep. Instead, there have been a flood of memories, as if her mother's coma (the jellied surface of Raya's brain having been shaken so hard, the neurologist explained, it was left bruised and bleeding), falling less than a year after the death of Marnie's father, Thomas, has unleashed a swarm of images from a hidden fold in Marnie's own cortex.

Tonight, the memory is of a painting her brother, Alan, made some twenty years ago of the family as a table setting. It was the one year they had all been in high school together, spaced like stepping-stones across the grades: David and Alan, with nearly two years between them but due to quirks of the district's age rules only one grade, then Sam, fourteen months younger than Alan, and finally Marnie, who'd tagged along by skipping a grade so she'd landed a year behind Sam. In Alan's painting, her mother had been the plate, her eyes and nose rising from the white expanse like the woman in the moon, her hair still thick and black. Her father, dressed in a brown suit, jagged on one side to form the serrated edge of the blade, was the knife. David, then a senior, brainy and always brooding, either about his college applications or an argument with Nancy, his girlfriend who was already planning their wedding for four years hence, was the fork, set off far to the left of the canvas. Sam, whom everyone still called Sama, had been a long-legged soup spoon with a haze of marijuana smoke billowing around her hair and an arm draped over Marnie, cast as a plump cross-legged teaspoon with her nose in a book. Alan had painted himself as a goblet with a hollowed-out, oversized head filled with milk. Without a word about its implications, her mother framed the painting and hung it in the dining room, where Marnie had felt compelled each dinner to examine it anew.

Now Marnie can't recall when the picture disappeared. Perhaps the year after Alan's suicide, when Marnie was the only kid left in the house (David by then a junior at Princeton, Sam in her first year at Berkeley) and her mother threw herself into redecorating: tearing down the original fireplace mantel, ripping up the kitchen linoleum, turning the three empty bedrooms into a library, guest room, and ironing room, and then painting all the walls a brutal white that she left bare of photographs and pictures.

Ben moves onto his stomach, his head turned toward Marnie. He blinks his eyes, shuts them, and then opens them wide. “What's the matter?”

“I can't sleep.”

He reaches a hand onto Marnie's hip, rubs little circles with his thumb.

“I'm taking the nine o'clock bus to Rapahu and Sam's flying down from Boston so we can have a meeting about what to do with my mother.”

“What to do?”

“David says we're going to have to move her to a nursing home—that the hospital won't keep her more than a hundred and twenty days. Sam wants to talk about how long we'll keep her alive on the tubes.”

Ben turns onto his back, props a pillow under his neck, and switches on the light. Marnie feels a surge of love for him; even Decembers when Ben would work until midnight for weeks on end printing holiday cards, he'd always welcomed her words, always made her feel that nothing was more important.

“It's going to be a mess. David sees this through his doctor eyes: we have to use all measures to keep our mother alive. And you know Sam. She defends radical ideas like they're starving children. When she was at Berkeley, she was a research assistant for this feminist political science professor, Hildie Something-or-other, who wrote an article about a feminist interpretation of the politics of dying. She keeps quoting this professor about the medical-slash-patriarchal oppression of women.”

“This is why people write living wills.”

“She'd been trying to get my mother to write one, but it obviously didn't happen in time.” Marnie shifts onto her side. “Sam thinks this professor's son is some sort of legal expert on the subject and might be able to advise us on what to do when there isn't anything in writing, but she's been dragging her feet contacting him.”

“Why's that?”

“God knows. Maybe he's one of her spurned lovers or maybe she's delaying the fight with David.”

“Did your mother ever talk about what she'd want?”

Marnie feels irritated: Is she imagining this or is Ben interrogating her? She leans back, presses her eyes with the flats of her fingers. Her mother's face floats into her mind. She's dangling a plastic rain bonnet like the ones sold in restroom vending machines. The rain bonnet is not a mystery. With David handling Raya's doctors, Marnie has taken over the indomitable paperwork for the insurance claim. This week, a second police report arrived in a mustard envelope. In the report, a boy described Raya as wearing a plastic scarf over her hair.

Marnie thinks about telling Ben about the report and what the boy wrote but Ben is stroking her arm and saying, “Shhh, try to go back to sleep,” and her limbs are growing heavy and her thoughts drift like clouds past Ellie with her beach-ball belly, past her father in his jagged brown suit, past her mother and the dangling bonnet.

*   *   *

Marnie scans the waiting room of the Rapahu station half expecting to see someone she knows, but only the blind man who runs the newsstand looks familiar. Yesterday, on the phone, she'd tussled with David about wanting to take a cab to his house rather than having him pick her up—this being a classic interaction with David, who snatches at any opportunity to give something tangible to his sisters while avoiding knowing too much about either of them. Now, with the sun breaking through the white winter sky, Marnie decides to walk the mile and a half to David and Nancy's house.

In the eighteen years since Marnie graduated from high school and moved away, Rapahu has changed very little. Main Street still sports the florist shop owned by her now-sister-in-law Nancy's parents and run these days with the help of Nancy's younger sister; the pharmacy owned by the Stephens family, whose son had for a while been one of Sam's many boyfriends (at sixteen, he'd been renowned for his Milk Duds box filled with Seconals, Darvocets, and Valium, but is now, Nancy has hinted, “very into his recovery”); the appliance store where Marnie's parents and Nancy's parents and, more recently, David and Nancy bought their dishwashers, refrigerators, and stoves.

Despite its familiarity, Marnie has always experienced the town as alien: the expectation of enthusiasm for Masonic raffles and Girl Scout cookie drives, the tinsel and spray-painted pine-cone wreaths wrapped around the lampposts and the town's two stoplights the Monday that follows Thanksgiving, the low buildings dwarfed by the expanse of the sky. Not until the summer after she turned eleven—a lonely stretch when Sam had a boyfriend from David's class with whom she spent her waking hours learning to smoke cigarettes and roll joints, and David started a lawn-mowing business with Alan as his assistant and the goal of buying his own stereo by the fall—had Marnie understood that her feeling of being a foreigner accidentally laid-over in Rapahu was connected to her mother.

At the beginning of the summer, Marnie had fallen into a routine, sleeping each day until noon, spending the afternoons stretched out on a beach blanket in the backyard listening to the radio and tanning her legs, reading late into the night. This dreamy pattern broke midsummer when Raya announced that she and Marnie were going to paint the upstairs bedrooms. Each morning at six thirty, Raya would shake Marnie awake so they could work in the early cool: laying tarps, sanding woodwork, rolling and rerolling walls, painting trim with an array of small slanted brushes.

While they painted, Raya talked—first in snatches as she had always done when any of her children would ask about her past, but then, as the days went on and the paint seeped into their skin and the heat rose in August and Marnie mastered painting even window frames, in longer and longer stretches. Each episode of her mother's life attached itself to the place they were working. In Alan's room, there was the story of how Marnie's parents had made the move from the Upper West Side to Rapahu on her father's insistence shortly after his promotion to director of sales at Little Falls Paper, where he'd clawed his way from a salesman in the Bronx to the top of his heap.