World and Town (7 page)

“I brought a towel,” he announces suddenly. “And a wet suit.” He toes his bag, leaving a dimple in it. “A concession to middle age.”

“Are you thinking about a swim?” When there could still be ice floes in the water? Now this does make her wonder about his mental competence. He can’t be serious.

But he is. “With company, I hope. Do you own a wet suit?”

“Maybe you’d like to come in first?”

A belated invitation, half hospitality, half avoidance: Whether or not Carter is still his old self, she is no longer the Hattie who would dive into any kind of water. Time’s made a sensible creature out of her.

Carter gives a Carter Hatch shake of his head, though—with a back and forth so subtle, it could almost be a tic. How used to being read he is—to people divining his thoughts. (The Gnome, people called him in the lab; and later, she heard, the G-nome, though it was Anderson who was working on the genome, not he.)

“I heard you’ve retired from the saving of our nation’s youth,” he says suddenly.

Just teasing, she knows, and yet she bristles. “The youth do need our help, Professor.”

He smiles. “You’ve grown testy in your old age, Hattie.”

Testy.

“And what about you? What have you grown?” She’s trying to tease—trying not to be
testy
.

“Stupid—I’ve grown stupid.” Another smile. “Sweet and slow, as they say.”

“Oh, Carter,” she says. “You’ll never be sweet.”

Inviting return fire, she thinks. But he just sinks into himself a moment—his irises as blue as ever, though she can’t help but look for the arcus senilis around his corneas, and finds it: that faintly milky edging that midlife will bring, like a sea of memory rimming one’s worldview.

“And if I do not own a wet suit?” she goes on, more gently.

“But everyone knows that you do.”

“So why did you ask?”

“Bashful, I guess.”

To which she smiles in spite of herself—charmed and glad to have been charmed. Glad that he’s managed to charm her. “And what if I had a cold? You are impossible.”

“Unlike you, Miss Agreeability?”

“Yes.”

“
Bú duì,
” he says. “
Bú duì, bú duì, bú duì.
” He winks. “How’s my pronunciation?”

She laughs.

Her wet suit is packed away who knows where. For while she does start swimming early in the year, she doesn’t start this early; whatever the neural circuits for sanity, hers are still firing. Bureaus. Baskets. Reedie. Reedie. It’s worse than looking for her keys, which she brilliantly keeps on a designated hook, painted red. Reedie. Joe. Lee. Is it not too much, all this death? Reedie. But, ah—there. She changes self-consciously—feeling more naked than she has in many years—trying not to notice the clamminess of her crotch. Middle age! When one is not surprised by one’s age, one is surprised by one’s youth. This sudden alacrity of her body, for example, as unexpected as it is undignified. She’d have sworn herself past this, but there go her nipples, bobbing up from the soft of her breasts like corks.
My life’s companion
Lee used to call her body, back when it was failing her; now Hattie squinches her own
life’s companion
into the thick neoprene skin. She feels like an armored sausage as she hunts for the neoprene cap that goes with the suit. Neoprene aficionado that she’s become, she even has insulated booties.

The complete walrus look
, Lee would say.

“Sorry to be slow.” Hattie finally reemerges.

But look: No Carter. No book bag.

Is it not just as well? She traipses over to the side yard and squints out past the Chhungs’, toward the lake—sensing, through the dry chafe of the neoprene, the even pat of the sun. The life-giving sun, with which she began her fall, back when she taught. Her house has what’s called a distant water view, and it is distant indeed—too far to make out a swimmer even if she had on her distance glasses, which she does not. She does not think of going in for them, though, or for her binoculars, either—having her pride, after all. Or, all right, call it
an emergent characteristic
. Still.

Hattie a tad less batty
. She admires some willow trees across the way—their yellow-green flaring against the gray-brown of the other trees. And look at how the birches have woken up, too! Their white trunks spawning a bright mauve haze of new twigs and buds. How empty the house when she goes back in, though, without the dogs—how strangely big, as if it would echo if she were to say anything. Of course, it wouldn’t, really; it’s a small house. And what would she say anyway?
Behold my insulation—?
How much more likely that she’d start hearing other people’s voices—Joe’s, for example:
You always were well insulated, Hat. Probably you had to be
.

She works off her cap, then goes back out and calls the dogs.

Come back!

She unzips her suit.

C
hhung is putting in a garden. It’s back behind the trailer, so you can barely see it from the road, and from the house, Hattie can only make out the north end of the work. But there he is, sure enough, digging away with his son. On weekends in the beginning, but more recently on weekdays, too—a surprise. Shouldn’t the boy be in school? And what a big garden they must be putting in—big enough to feed the family and more, if it works. She can’t help but wonder if it will, though, given the light level down there; it’s pretty dark. If they were anyone else, discouragement would be coming in by the cubic yard. But instead there they are, on their own. People hesitating a little to step forward, maybe—or so Hattie guesses, extrapolating from her own hesitation. Not that she’s not sympathetic. She’s sympathetic, of course. But she knows, too, from her teaching days how the troubles this family has seen are unlikely to have ended in America. Why would they have moved to Riverlake if they were thriving? And who knows, maybe the Chhungs know something the locals don’t, anyway. What can be grown in a spot like that. Maybe they know.

Possessed as they may be of some ancient Cambodian wisdom?

The shovel is so much more substantial than Chhung, it looks to be wielding him. The boy is more equal to his spade. Not that he’s so tall—Hattie puts him at maybe five foot six or seven. Still, taller and stockier than Chhung—and stronger, too—he digs easily. With a signature style, even, a certain exaggeration, as if he’s not only working, but making a show of his work. Imagining, as workers will
—Imagine!
Joe would say—that he might not appear to be working hard enough. His whole body lifts; his elbow knifes high; his shovel bites hard. Chhung is wearing assorted sports clothes, including green nylon pants and a rust-and-white training jacket, as well as a straw hat with netting draped over it. The boy is wearing city clothes—no straw hat with netting for him. Instead, he wears a backward baseball cap over his ponytail, and to go with it a fat gold chain and earrings. A blue basketball jersey with some shine to it, and jeans so baggy they threaten to fall down. It’s a city fashion Hattie never could understand. How do you walk with your crotch at your knees? But never mind. He’s a handsome boy, with a chisel to his face and a slash to his brow—a boy who would break hearts, if there were any around to break. For now, he devastates the no-see-ums.

He and Chhung don’t stop work often, but when they do, the boy generally jabs his shovel into the dirt the way Chhung does, so that it stands straight up. Every now and then, though, when his father’s not looking, he stands it up on its point, steadies it with his palm, then lifts his hand free quick enough that the thing just thuds. Then he looks off. Relaxing the ciliary muscles of his eyes, Hattie guesses, not to say his back—and who could blame him? This is not an easy job, what with the soil so wet, and clay besides. Even uphill from the Chhungs’, Hattie’s had to lighten her soil, dig in some compost; roots rot on her all the time. Probably she’ll put sand in under her garden one day, the way Greta did, for drainage. But how about Chhung? Who’s going to tell Chhung how he should really try sand? Someone, she thinks, should tell Chhung.

The girl brings the baby over, and at first it just clings and clings. When she sits it down in a pile of dirt, though, it begins to play and pretty soon wants to investigate the hole. Chhung yells and swats at himself; the girl tries to distract her charge, which is dressed in a frilly blue blouse and some overlong red pants, one leg of which stays rolled up fine. The other, though, seems bent on showing off its fine bunchy length.
Hecq!
the girl cries, swatting at the flies.
Hecq! Hecq! Hecq!
Clapping her hands, so the baby’ll switch direction, which works. Everyone watches, relieved, as the child crawls on one knee and one foot, bottom high in the air, away from the pit.

Then it veers back toward it again.

Chhung throws a shovelful of dirt at the girl’s toes, making her back away. He jabs at the ground, comes up with another shovelful, and for a moment seems about to heave that load at the baby. But instead, he stops and looks up at the sky, which is a wash of whitish blue—streaky, as if someone’s just squeegeed it, and about as inspiring as a whiteboard, when you come right down to it. Still, Chhung sets his shovel aside, crosses a hump of dirt, and picks the baby up. The baby’s crying and arching its back with frustration, but Chhung swings it like a pendulum, its pant legs a-dangle, as he calls up to the trailer. The woman hurries out with a bottle. She’s a slip of a thing, in black pants and a white blouse; the blouse has puff sleeves. Her hair is shoulder-length and wavy, her skin darker and smoother than her husband’s, and her face a little rounder, with hooped cheekbones like the fairy wings of a child’s Halloween costume. A lovely woman, and yet not nearly as lovely in her features as in her movements—in that simple way she makes her way down onto the milk crate, for example, and then down again, watching where she steps. Careful even in her hurry. The earth is packed down at the bottom of the step now; it’s not the mud pool it was when Hattie first went calling. Still, the woman picks her way across it as if across the mud she is aware is not there. Quickly—not wanting to appear to be dawdling, it seems—and yet somehow with the grace—the steady but light concentration—of a dancer.

She reaches the pit as the girl swoopingly reclaims the baby from Chhung, standing it up on its feet. The baby stops crying and, its fists gripping the girl’s fingers, starts to step. One foot, then the other. Then the first foot again. Concentrating. Feet planted wide, and each step a stamp, as if there were a bug it wanted to shmush. Its hips loop around, hula hoop–style. Still, it goes on, determined; it doesn’t seem to mind even the pant legs, though when they get caught underfoot, the waistband pulls and the girl has to stop to roll the things up—a bit of a project, now that they are caked with mud. Still, she rolls, only to have them fall back down; they drag like the ankle cuffs of a chain gang. More steps. Chhung says something. The woman nods reassuringly; the girl answers reassuringly. The boy swats. The girl walks the baby away from the pit, swiveling her body as if in imitation of it. Planting her feet so wide, she looks to be wearing a diaper, too. She holds her head down.

And with that, peace returns. Chhung and the boy work; the woman slips away. Hattie resumes painting—wetting her brush, contemplating her composition.
What now?
A moment of puzzlement, and then a
How about this?
It’s no substitute for Joe and Lee, but it’s something. Her hand begins to move; Annie launches a fierce and protracted attack on poor Reveille’s tail as Cato takes a nap. He lies on his side with his legs stuck out straight—his arthritis. She’ll get him a warm compress in a minute.

B
y day three, the hole—a trench, really—is a lot bigger. A car and a half long, maybe, and deep enough to bury a vehicle up to its windows. The dirt piles along its edge are so high that Chhung and the boy can’t throw the dirt clear of them anymore; they’re piling it onto a piece of cardboard instead, and sliding that up an incline. It’s an excruciating procedure to watch—like farm life before not only the invention of the wheel, thinks Hattie, but the deployment of the ox.

She finishes her current composition with disappointment.
Three flat boards with thorns sticking out
, her father would have said—a graceless thing. Ah, well. She feeds the dogs, bags up some old
Nature
magazines for recycling, then ventures downhill with a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow’s rusted out in one corner, an ancient thing left behind by Joe’s uncle when he moved north some years ago—back when Joe was wondering if it was enough to have moved, first out of the city, and then out of the suburbs; back when he was wondering if they shouldn’t move north like his uncle, too. Which Hattie did, of course, in the end: Here she is. But it was one of the differences between them that Joe was always looking to retreat from the world, whereas Hattie was looking for something else.
To regroup
, Lee said once.
To reconcile your contraries and, one day, to fructify
.

Fructify?

Well, whatever, as the students used to say. And who knows why Hattie brought the barrow with her when she moved.
A little retentive, are we?
Lee would have laughed—Lee who held on to nothing.
You know, I have no last will and testament
, she said, bald and weak, toward the end.
But I bequeath to you my comments; may you remember them always
. She opened her stick arms like a pontiff blessing a crowd; her I.V. line hung down.

Lee.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, Hattie’s always liked wheelbarrows. Their unassuming usefulness, and the feel of them, too. She’s always liked the spread of their handles spreading her arms—opening her heart, Adelaide, the new yoga teacher, would probably say. As if in stretching one’s pectorals one stretched one’s spirit, too. This wheelbarrow squeaks and rattles the whole way down Hattie’s driveway, though. Something’s loose; the tire’s flat; the handgrips have split. It’s work to push the thing even downhill. She wouldn’t give it to anyone else. So why give it to the Chhungs, then? Is it not insulting? She does not feel spiritually stretched by the idea, quite the contrary. She feels spiritually contracted, and by the time she reaches their drive, is half thinking to head back home.