A Private State: Stories (24 page)

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do was run to Lola, I followed him again. I stood there in the wind which pressed my shirt to my chest and watched him head toward the blind. He moved quickly, the nose of the rifle pointing down. As he came closer, the geese did a scared shuffle, and fluttered to another row in the field. He reached the blind and crawled up the short ladder to the opening in its side. I couldn't see him anymore. The blind had swallowed him. Then I heard the dogs.

My sister said Lola was in the library. The only person I could have told was talking to the grown-ups. He's got a gun in there, I tried to whisper to her. He's got a gun. My voice was caught somewhere behind my tongue.

My sister took the plate of cookies into the playroom. At least I could see the blind from there. Astrid and George were still in the best chairs. "Your father doesn't have a job," Astrid said. She was thirteen and fuller of curves than before. She hadn't once mentioned chemistry this year.

I whispered "Shut up" under my breath. George had raided the pantry for empty ginger-ale bottles and stacked them in a shaky green triangle on the table. My sister sucked her thumb. I sat in the window seat. From the corner of my eye, I saw that Astrid's skirt showed a lot of her thighs. I was sure then that she had menstruated.

I had learned the word this year. I decided then I would not menstruate; from the cool way the teacher talked about it, it seemed that this might be possible. But then I wasn't sure if I could do anything about it. I didn't think you could turn it back by swearing or hitting. I tried to imagine my mother having it but all I saw was a starfish stain on her chest, like the geese after they'd been shot. Then I heard it. A boom that if you didn't know better, you would think was thunder.

George's bottles crashed and rolled off the table. I ran out the playroom door to the edge of the field. My mother and uncle were running toward the blind. My grandparents and aunt stopped just where lawn gave way to corn. Lola stood just behind them. The

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geese had flown up in their great dark sheet again. The noise was everywhere. Then I heard another sound. It was the yelping of a dog.

My father stood by the ladder. He was staring at the dog, lying on its side. It flapped its tail slowly, a large blackish stain on its chest. It whined, a rusty sound. When my uncle pulled his hand away, it was wet and red. Lola said to me, metal in her voice, "Honey, back to the house." But there was a terrible mess down there, nothing she could fix. I ran past her.

My mother's lipstick was gone and so was one of her earrings. Hector's tail stopped flapping. I was sure it was Hector. For the first time I was sure.

My uncle took the gun from my father, whose arms looked like all their muscles had dissolved. My father didn't look angry, he didn't look sad. Clouds padded the sky and took the shine from his face. His hand had sat thick and hot on my hair. I didn't think it would have any temperature at all now. All the heat tilted out of him when he aimed the gun at Hector. I stood there and felt light as a corn husk, white and hollow as the wing bone of a goose. All I wanted was to run to my father and grab his hand and lift off from the field, light as feathers, into the sky.

"Why?" my mother cried, coming alive. She looked ready to grab the gun from my uncle and use it on my father. "Why?" she cried again. The geese were honking but they started to sink toward the field again, not scared enough to stop eating. I started to run, shouting as loud as I could, telling them not to land, to keep the sky dark with their wings, even though I knew that when I stopped yelling, they would wheel right back down to the ground, wings banking against the wind, as if nothing had changed.

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Mrs Pritchard and Mr. Watson

The Sun in Jamaica throws everything into relief, with a light that seems as tangible as gold or sand. Mrs. Pritchard has never seen her body quite so starkly lit. The freckles on her chest, comets of broken capillaries spiraling across her calves. The scar on her ankle, earned as a girl while tearing round a corner. She'd raced down a corridor in a cotton shift, the cool of a summer night tickling her skin through the cloth. She remembers the spill of blood, black in the half-light, that poured from the cut. It spouted with a kind of generosity, as if her body knew it could tap more. She twitches the pleat of her bathing suit to flick away a trickle of sand that's collected in the fold of the green skirt.

Calypso music bounces down to her from the snack bar. She smells something burning, something with a crisp, almost acid edge, maybe old thatch from one of the bungalows. These are the two signs the day is underway at the Black Moon Inn. The music and the smoke. She stares at the veins of her feet, which remind her of the raised and tangled roots of mangroves.

Except mangroves can expect to live a hundred and fifty years, and in all likelihood, I won't see sixty, she thinks. An illness is staking out her blood. Its name is long and sterile. When she repeats it to herself, she can't believe that something that odd and complicated has shown up in her broad-shouldered, fifty-eight-year-old body. When her doctor, a young man named Kaplan,

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first told her that the pinch in her neck meant far more than arthritis, she had thought Really, no thank you, I'd rather die of something plain. She will regret her thick hair; the most drastic of the therapies start on her return.

She's supposed to be resting down here, but her sleep is brittle. Everything seems terribly pointed, not calm at all. The creak of a beach chair splinters in her ear. She watches as the first of the leathery women with hair the same startling gold as her sandals constructs her palace on the beach: straw bag, amber bottles of oil, a paperback with a cover embossed in florid, metallic letters. Ravishing in their way, these women, but the conversation that floats across to Mrs. Pritchard is invariably flimsy. All their attention funneled into the preservation of their bodies, a chemist's acumen applied to diet. From her chair, in her tired, unsatisfactory body, Mrs. Pritchard wishes them a harrowing menopause; husbands and children and friends gone wrong.

Will bitterness speed the souring of her blood? The books she and Charles have read all hint at some vague fault on the patient's part. There is always the suggestion that anger, unacknowledged, calcified, malignant, is the problem involved. But Mrs. Pritchard can't remember the last time she turned down a chance to get mad: she's a woman who writes letters to congressmen. A woman who picks up trash on the street and puts it in bins, a woman who looks best while taking control of some philanthropic kind, plump and neat as a chickadee in her two-toned pumps and suit of bouclé knit.

According to the books, the environment of wellness is pastel. There are regimens of meditation, complemented with three making-of-amends a week. ''Charles," she'd asked, "what the hell is wheat-grass juice?" But all Mrs. Pritchard had been able to do at first was wail. How odd it had been to hear those terrible sounds coming from her in her clean home, with its gold-framed paintings, its handsome carpets.

Then had come the edgy optimism, the visits to soft-palmed

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homeopaths who talked about contaminants lodged deep in her liver and spine. Iyengar yoga. Artful arrangements on windowsills of quartz and malachite, healing stones. A vast and sympathetic empire of those who sold snake oil. She returned then to pink and somber Dr. Kaplan and his difficult newslots of chemo, syringes the length of kitchen kniveswhich had launched her on this next stage, this hollow watching. I have turned into an old, sick hawk, she thinks, knowing that close up, hawks are not golden or iconic but scruffy, feathers bent through failed attempts to snag their prey.

She closes her eyes. She listens to her pulse. She wants to leap up on the beach and hurl her book, a hefty biography of Augustine, at those sleek women. Then she wants to dump them from their chairs, see them blinking and tousled, the sand stuck in pale patches to their oiled hides.

But she's too tired. That, her neck, and a blurriness of vision are the twinges that remind her that her body's ill. Her mind has room for little else. Although no one would guess, she thinks, just looking at me, that I am anything more than a normally fading piece of middle-aged goods. She's aware, however, that most women her age don't find themselves staring at the broken-bubble texture of an English muffin, or measuring the pronged shadows cast by forks on tablecloths. Is this sudden attention what it's all about? The skin of her wrist flickers under the skating feet of a sand flea. It started at home in New York. Everything in the housethe nodding roses, Charles's socksseemed to glow in a spare, Dutch wash of light. Emmy, why is your handwriting legible, Charles asked abruptly, as if it were another symptom.

She's relieved that business has delayed Charles in the city. The extra time gives her a chance to think about why the stained, even teeth of the Korean greengrocer on 78th Street so intrigue her. Then there is that girl she sees on the subway, the one who clutches her black umbrella to her chest as if it were a cat, as if she wished it were a cat. And then there is the inn to absorb, much less

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the cloudy interior of the island. She is exhausted at the end of every day, although all she has done so far is perch herself on the edge of the ocean, drink fruit juice, and pretend to readher bookmark has moved a fingernail's width forward.

Down here, Mrs. Pritchard has jolted awake each night around twelve. She dreams of hospitals where Charles wanders down a green corridor. He drags the shiny, awkward apparatus of an iv behind him. Its needle is plunged into his wrist. "What's wrong?" she asks him, but he doesn't answer. The plastic sack is empty and has sucked his voice from him. When this happens, she lies very still in the sheets and listens to the scuffle of lizards in the rafters. This is also the time of night she hears the rumbling laughter of the staff: sober, handsome Jamaicans who nod and say "Good morning, ma'am" as they tug the bedclothes straight and align the knives at place settings. Late in the evening, they gather in the kitchen after the hotel's owner, Miss Carrothers, and her snappish tribe of dogs have gone to bed.

Mrs. Pritchard listens to the laughter, which she is not sure she would have noticed before her illness. It is a complicit sound, full of old jokes and wariness, that comes wafting up to her room. She imagines that the inn's kitchen smells of allspice and bleach. Aprons and jackets would loop on black pegs. The men and women, in regular clothes, lean their elbows on a wooden table, hands curled around squat brown bottles of Jamaican beer. Dominic, Tina, Melita, Joseph. She has no idea of their last names.

Dominic, the head waiter, was the one who fetched her from dinner when Charles called to say his deal was being troublesome. Dominic handed her the phone as if it were a thing of ritual weight. She said "Thank you, Dominic," with equal ceremony. After that, hearing Charles on the other end was a bit of a disappointment. His voice had never been one of his finer qualities. It was low but a little thin, and hearing him apologize, hearing the faint tinge of relief, she wondered why its slightness hadn't irritated her 'til now. Her own voice is her principal beauty. Her

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impatience with Charles, his fidgety hands, his forgetfulness with the toothpaste cup, all the small and constant irritations of domestic life, why does she feel these only now? Why is this all she notices, not his handsome feet, his tender way with the cat? Being sick has made me pettish, she thinks. An irascible old bird.

Dominic walks across the beach with a pad in his large hand. He has a lovely voice as well. His upright ease is a marvel in the slick, hummocked sand. How is it he does not look ridiculous in a bow tie and white jacket on a beach? His skin is the satiny chestnut of a valued saddle. Mrs. Pritchard loves how he scatters the jeweled blur of hummingbirds that whir above the wedges of the breakfast mangoes.

Now, he makes his morning rounds for the orders of fruit and juice, sweet wet things to keep the guests' skins plump with water. He has stopped to Mrs. Pritchard's right to ask one of the blonds for her choice today. The woman sits up straighter, and arranges her legs so the flesh falls just so. Dominic steps a few feet further off from those who invite potential improprieties. He frowns. He doesn't look at them directly when he says, "Good morning," but stares out over their inconsequential heads. As if his standards of conduct weren't perfectly clear.

It is this clarity that interests Mrs. Pritchard. He is the first person with whom she has felt like talking about her illness, not just its symptoms, but about the knowledge that she has no control over what is happening in her body. She has talked of it so often with doctors and relatives that all the words to describe her condition have turned dry and tasteless. Half the time, she feels like she's describing someone else's problem. She would like to tell Dominic what it's like to know, in your marrow, that dying is invading you and what that does to tastes and sounds, how crowded her head has become with scraps of old events. Why she thinks this particular man can understand this nest in her head she doesn't know.

It is harder to crack the talk open than she imagined. There is such a smoothness to his "Good morning, Mrs. Pritchard. Juice or

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