The Solace of Leaving Early (12 page)

The female GUN causes no one any harm. She is quite tall and splayfooted, and is prone to wearing ghastly combinations of polyesters in primary colors, along with the omnipresent Sensible Shoes. If she has moles, she doesn’t remove them. Her work is often brilliant, but overlooked, owing to her general demeanor and lack of star-quality, but she never engages in bitterness or regret, partly because she spends most of her energy on her cats. (Cat hair is a problem for the female GUN, along with her own hair and the hair that springs up from various growths, all of which elude her observation.) Her students find her to be smart and lively, but weird, and she is not especially close to anyone, either students or colleagues. She needs no approbation—which is good, because the male GUN (of the predatory variety) often receives her share of merit pay, while abdicating service on various committees to her superior organizational ability.

Langston sat back and reviewed her work. It was accurate, detailed, precise. But she kept hearing her Grandma Wilkey’s voice in her head, saying, just before she skewered someone, “Mind you, this isn’t a criticism—just an observation.” Langston rested her chin on her fists and stared at the pages. In Bloomington she had felt no conflict over this project; she had, in fact, felt justified, clever, as if she were in the grips of a small, social revelation. She had meant to say, from her solitary position in the minefield of graduate school,
I see you; you have been witnessed
. Now it was beginning to look to her as if she could title the work
Just an Observation
.

She paced the length of the attic. What was happening to her? How had this occurred so quickly, this slide into mediocrity? Two months ago she would have been sitting at her desk in her apartment, completing the description of the one of the Types from the list she’d made, but not yet vanquished:
The Man with the Wide Bottom;
or
The Connoisseur of Pulp Mysteries;
or
Gunther: The Protofeminist
. Had she become one of them, one of the bland townspeople, uncritical, afraid to speak?

Vocatus atque non vocatus
: bidden or unbidden, called or not called, there he was again, suddenly, his face so clear in Langston’s mind she stopped pacing and closed her eyes, at once trying to shake and to preserve the vision. Her Perfect Reader. How could she have ever considered working without him? For two years she had kept at bay the certainty that all was lost when she lost him; now a bead of sweat coursed down her spine like a snake. Everything that had happened over the past month had contained the same message. She lay down on her bed, her breathing shallow, and waited for the feeling to pass.

*

The one who is conscious of himself as an individual has his vision trained to look upon everything as inverted. His sense becomes familiar with eternity’s true thought: that everything in this life appears in inverted form
. Langston had just finished reading this sentence in Kierkegaard, sitting in her attic window, hoping the rain would come and break the heat. The afternoon light on Chimney Street was beautiful, dappled, she had even begun to feel a bit sleepy when she saw them turn the corner and emerge from the shadows off Plum Street.
What am I seeing?
she thought, squinting. And then,
Are those
children
on the corner?

Chapter 11

THE TRINITY

“There are a great many ways we may relocate ourselves,” Amos wrote in his notebook, working again on the question of Christ’s immediacy, and what it might mean in daily life. He had been pondering the notion of shaking the dust off one’s sandals and leaving the village (three of the four Gospels advise it). No. Not relocation, that wasn’t what he meant. He wanted to suggest space and relocation, but of the internal variety. Perspective, that’s it, that’s all. One’s perspective is the village one occupies, and if one is treated badly in one’s own home, if one is denied comfort and wisdom, fleeing is an option. “And don’t take the dirt with you,” he wrote. “You won’t need it where you’re going.” He crossed it out.

*

He was a terrible writer, Amos knew; he couldn’t possibly construct an adequate or coherent sermon; and he was sick to death of the people in his church. These feelings astonished him, but he couldn’t deny them. The length of time since Alice’s funeral could still be measured in days, and the night before, Buck Gossage had called him and asked if Amos could come over right away. Buck’s wife, Lucy, was in trouble, he said. Amos, fearing the worst, fearing that marriage isn’t merely the death of hope (as Woody Allen put it), but literal annihilation, jumped in his old Volkswagen Rabbit, inside which the roof-covering had come unattached such that Amos had to shift gears while somehow keeping the sticky black vinyl off his face, and drove dangerously fast out to the Gossages, taking curves like a teenager and once nearly hitting a possum that was doing nothing but lying in the road. When he arrived at their double-wide, Lucy had her head down on the kitchen table sobbing, while a rottweiler in a kennel outside barked hysterically.

And what was wrong with Lucy? She had wasted her life, as it turned out, married to Buck and raising kids (and now grandkids). She didn’t know herself, she was never given the time to discover her true loves in the world. Maybe she was destined to be someone, to do something, but never got the chance. And what would her obituary say, should she die in the next week: “She kept a clean bathroom”? or “Her brownies were quite moist”?

“What is it you wish you had done?” Amos asked, a bit gobstopped.

Lucy wailed, “I don’t know, I don’t know, that’s the
point
.”

Buck, standing behind Lucy and rubbing her shoulders, shook his head at Amos. “No, now see, that’s—don’t ask that question. ’Cause I already did and nothin’ good comes of it.”

“I don’t know what I should have done, and now it’s too late! I’m too old, I’m forty-eight and I’m not pretty anymore and never will be again. Have I traveled? No. Have I seen Paris, France? No. Will I ever? We took back a second mortgage on this house to buy him a boat,” Lucy said, raising her tear-streaked face and hitching her thumb at Buck, who continued to stand behind her, miserable. “A
boat
. In
Indiana
. I had three daughters and now I’ve got six grandkids and every damn one of them takes their meals out of my kitchen. And I’ve got to be on call to babysit night and day, never a day off, or else the grandbabies might get left alone or with strangers or strapped in their car seats outside a bar, there’s no telling. And now I have made up my mind, Buck Gossage, and I’ll say it again: I am not leaving this table until my life changes, come hell or high water. Y’all ruined it, you can fix it.”

For a moment Amos had been tempted to look around for a camera. Surely this was a joke. Lucy and Buck Gossage had been in church nearly every Sunday Amos had been in Haddington. They had known Beulah Baker their whole lives, and had seen Beulah standing at the Sycamore Grove Cemetery on her arthritic hip, and Lucy was going on strike because years before she’d chosen to get married and have kids, rather than listen for her vocation?

“How should Buck go about changing your life, Lucy? I mean really, seriously, I’d like to know, and I’m sure he would, too.”

Buck shook his head again,
wrong tactic,
and Lucy stared at Amos, chin quivering, as if her last hope had betrayed her.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, swallowing. “But it’s all his fault, somehow.”

Amos leaned back in his chair. “Yes, I’m sure it is. I’ve come to believe the marriage vows should include, in the ‘Will you love him, honor him, etc.’ section, a simple question: ‘Will you love him when he stands in the way of your heart’s deepest desire?’ or ‘Will you love him when the fact of him absolutely ruins your joy?’ Something like that.”

Lucy wiped her face with a napkin. She and Buck were silent.

“Buck, best of luck, here,” Amos said, rising. “Lucy, I think you need to shift your perspective a bit. That’s the only advice I can give you.” And he’d walked out the door (no one offered him a thank-you) into the hot, delirious barking of the caged dog.

*

“Finitude,” he wrote, “is the contradiction of the infinite, or anything which is subject to the laws of entropy, decay, and extinction. And for us, for human beings, I would include in the definition a consciousness of the perishing of each moment of existence. Or, more simply: the de-mand made upon us, as a species, at every moment, to choose one thing instead of another. We might imagine that we are on a boat, and that the prow of the boat penetrating the water is the choice made, or the present thing, and that the wake following the boat is what is
not
chosen, the absent thing: tiny wave upon wave, a body growing wider and wider, finally dissolving into the universe in ways we cannot fully perceive. What is present is finite; what is absent is infinite.” He crossed it out.

*

Just a little perspective, that was all he was asking of the world. Consider this, he would say: one bullet hole and one flesh wound (the wound matters, don’t think it doesn’t) in a woman. A tall man, a lovely man with a flat place on the back of his head. The back of the man’s head separates from the front in an egregious physical event. The man and woman fall. Their children are watching. Blood (their mother’s, of course) has hit the children. The setting for this drama is a rented house, a house that belongs to someone else, a third party. Said third party (Nathan Leander, one of the wealthiest landowners in two counties) wants to rent the house to someone else, and
there
. There is the place one could achieve a bit of perspective, if one were so inclined, because imagine there are few, maybe only two, left to tidy up this affair. One is an aunt, Jack’s mother’s younger sister (but not a young woman, not at all), and Alice’s mother. Beulah’s qualifications are scant. Here is something they must face: after the bodies are removed, who will clean the carpets and walls, so the house can be rented again? Robbie Ballenger called Amos and asked if he thought it appropriate to just hire the firm who did such things without mentioning it to either Gail or Beulah, although the cost would appear in the itemized bill.

“It’s a franchise, like a maid service,” Robbie explained. “Mostly migrant women happy for the work. Pays well.”

Migrant women?
“Do you mean Hispanic women, immigrants?”

“Yeah, used to be migrants. They used to pick tomatoes for Nathan Leander, seasonal people. You know. Now they live here year-round.”

Amos had closed his eyes and tried to imagine it, living in a foreign country, either uncomfortable with the language or completely mute, no extended family. Rural Indiana is a hard place not to be white and Protestant, with a reliable history and pedigree. And here you are, a woman with children to support, unable to find work except on a cleaning crew.

It was a small house. One level: a small vestibule, a living room/dining room with windows that looked out on a cornfield. Everything painted white, walls and trim, by Nathan, for convenience. A kitchen, and next to the kitchen, the one bathroom. A hallway, two bedrooms, side by side. Amos had been there once, just to talk.

“Amos, that house is a mess,” Robbie said.

“Yes. Yes, just go ahead and hire them. And leave it off the bill; the church will pay.”

*

Or this: a moving truck. Who hires it, who moves her things out, where do they go? Without parents, who says, “The children must have this _______ every single night, or they can’t sleep. Take it first.” Where are her nightgowns, her blue pajamas with the white clouds, her hairbrush, the book she was reading? Where is the wedding album, the baby books, who will store them for Madeline and Eloise, who could bear it? And where is
it
? Where is that little cup made of hair? Because it had become, for Amos, the one thing in the world he would steal. (Hair is strong and beautiful, and mostly resistant to the elements and to decay.)

*

One of the first things Amos did after finishing his M.Div. was buy the DSM-III, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Third Edition,
in hardcover. (There had been a fourth published since—he didn’t want it.) He was full of hope, and believed he’d run into, in his work as a pastor, all sorts of interesting maladies. Morbid narcissism, malingering, phobias, severe anxiety disorders, sexual fetishes—he was ready for all of them. And over the years his pastorate had been a little sick, maybe, yes; some were anxious and most were afraid of something, and a few had sexual proclivities best not discussed. There were thin people and fat people, and no place he lived escaped the ironclad rule of social work or social ministry: if you can imagine it, it’s happening in your town. But by and large the people who came to him had the most mundane ailments. They were bored or stuck, they had gum diseases, or were victims of the Trinity, as Amos once referred to it in his journal: Lonely, Heartbroken, and Afraid to Die.

Amos hadn’t had much call to look at the DSM-III in the past few years (it was heavy, for one thing, and there was almost nothing of substance in it), but a few days ago he took it down. Suddenly, he was faced with an actual condition, a diagnosis of real gravity: post-traumatic stress syndrome, pediatric. He read the entry many times. He copied it into his notebook for good measure, then memorized it. The girls would have to be watched for a month to be certain, but they seemed to have every symptom. He, AnnaLee, Beulah, Lillian Poe (the therapist in Jonah who was treating the girls)—they were all hopelessly out of their depth.

He stood, stretched his back and walked downstairs, then outside for air, and the mountain cur pups next door began to whine and jump against the chicken wire fence his neighbor Vicky had constructed to keep them contained. Amos walked over to the fence, leaned over and rubbed their heads. They were fat and spotted, with hard, smart little faces. Amos was attached to all of them; they had a spirit he admired. But he was too old and had lived too long not to see dogs when he looked at them—desperate dogs and dogs at the ends of chains, hysterical, barking dogs, caged—and then it occurred to him. It wasn’t the dog at the end of the chain that told the story, it was the one that broke free, the one barreling full-tilt down the dark street, just about to turn the corner where an innocent person was making her way home. That dog would find us come hell or high water. Alice heard it, didn’t she? She had just enough time to look it in the eye, and raise her gun, and leave her children, God help them, to Amos.

“Hush,” he said to the pups. “It’s late.”

*

The next day Beulah opened the door of the mobile home and stepped back, inviting him in. Amos blinked, adjusting to the darkness inside. He’d known her since his first days in Haddington, but had never been in Beulah’s house before. It looked exactly like the home of a woman long-widowed, someone serious but not excessively so. To his right was an eat-in kitchen; yellow walls, white linoleum, dark cabinets. This end of the mobile home had many windows, and the light on the kitchen table was so bright he could see swirls of water drying on the surface. The living room walls were covered in pressed-wood paneling, and the combination of that with the dark green carpeting made the room feel like a cave. A sofa, covered in a rough tweed, a glider rocker, an antique coffee table and an old television filled the living room, leaving just a narrow path back to the bedrooms. Beside the glider rocker was a single bookcase, floor to ceiling. All the shelves were lined with books, and there were more packed in horizontally. Amos stopped a moment and studied the titles. Fiction, almost all by women. One shelf devoted to the Brontës, Jane Austen, and Amos’s own favorite novelist, Virginia Woolf. The next shelf was more contemporary, and tended toward the hopeful: Anne Tyler, Lee Smith, Amy Tan, Gail Godwin. And on the bottom shelf (what to make of this?), A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Francine Prose, and Shirley Jackson.

“. . . make you a cup of tea, but I can’t seem to find—” Beulah was saying from the kitchen.

“Oh, don’t bother. I’m fine. Really.” Amos stood, his head nearly brushing the ceiling, and walked toward the kitchen.

Beulah looked up at him and Amos realized for the first time, in the unrelenting light, that she was going blind. A certain milkiness, the way she looked just slightly past him, gave her away. In a matter of seconds he’d added it all up in his head: her Social Security checks, her arthritis, her maddeningly slow driving. They couldn’t stay here.

“Should I take anything back to the girls, when I meet them? Anything to eat or drink?” Amos asked, hoping she’d say yes, hoping for any diversion.

Beulah shook her head. “They’re not eating much. They’ll eat if I tell them to, but I’m hesitant to force them.”

“No. No, I’d think not.”

“I’ll take you back there.”

Amos followed Beulah down the hallway. There was a place at the crown of her head where she’d forgotten to comb her hair. The waistband of her dress was crooked, and her ankles were swollen, but she walked without limping. He made a mental note to ask someone why the floors in her hallway might feel spongy, and what could be done about it.

Beulah knocked on the last of the three hollow, chipboard doors, then waited a moment. “Madeline? Pastor Townsend is here to see you. Can we come in?” She opened the door without waiting for an answer.