Marry or Burn (31 page)

The cremation occupied Shelley's mind for a long time. She
wanted to see where they cremated the dogs and cats at the clinic, but our father wouldn't take her. She took the encyclopedia to her room and made her own study of the subject of fire on flesh. Because what if the person being cremated was sentient? How did anyone know what went on when you were dead?

“She set fire to herself!” Karen told Lois on the phone. “I did not,” Shelley said. “I didn't catch on fire, did I, Jenny?” But she had not let me in the room when she rolled up her sleeve, struck a match and held it to the skin of her elbow long enough to raise a blister that opened and reopened in the ensuing weeks, being on a moving joint.

After that she went to see a therapist, an old woman from Karen's meetings and marches. In the therapist's bathroom, where Shelley once went to throw up, there was a cartoon of a naked woman on horseback. The woman carried a flag with a broken bomb on it. Shelley told me about it. Hearing us, Karen explained that the woman on the horse was Lady Godiva, who, being in fact an early activist, had ridden naked through a town in order to make her husband lift a tax on his people. “How come?” Shelley said. “Why would that make him?”

For once Karen had no explanation. Shelley got the encyclopedia and reported that it was a legend. “Shelley honey, lighten up,” said Lois. “Somebody did something like that or there wouldn't be a legend.”

When Lois was told a bad enough story from the newspaper, she crossed herself. I noticed that; I liked to see the little shake of the torso she gave once she had brushed off some threat. Nobody in our family had a religion except Karen, with her one rule, but we were allowed to have one if we wanted to, and I prayed to everything, from the stars to the giant statue of a dairy cow on the trip to Carnation Farms. I prayed to our fish circling the bowl with its gracious trailing fin, and occasionally to the
point of light on the old TV when you turned it off. On camping trips I prayed to the tent flap, arched like a church window when the flashlight shone on it from outside. I prayed to all possible candidates for messenger to or from our mother. For what did I pray? A prayer was not so much a specific petition as a mental drone, unsought and surprising in its arrival, a fit of abjection with a luxury to it, a drama attaching to oneself, however invisible it might be to others.
Tell her to come back. Just once to see Shelley.

 

ANY NUMBER OF women at home with their kids answered the phone in the dark afternoons of Seattle. So a lot of us heard the things talked about in Karen's kitchen in the '80s, and I wonder how many think about them the way Shelley and I do when we see kids get off a school bus in the rain. In our minds nuclear war existed in a kind of Magic 8-Ball, coming to the surface along with the numberless sentient beings, the ozone hole, Scrabble words scattered by the phone cord. Stevie Wonder on the stereo singing “Higher Ground,” or, when Shelley started piano lessons, Glenn Gould playing and humming an infinity of ascending and descending notes that never quite turned into a song but made Shelley roll her head and goggle her eyes and sing them in a way we agreed was the right match.

She was seven. I was four. I wished to become Shelley, reading words and music, knowing how to find out what people meant, when to argue, when to be unafraid, when to grow cold and faraway. But without tears: Shelley wouldn't cry the way I did, even when she hurt herself. She remembered everything, as I did not. I did not connect a repeating vague bleakness in certain rooms and at bedtime with any condition of my own. I thought I would always have to look for a sign and ask,
Are we sad?

Rain streaked the windows; our father, stooped and silent,
was somewhere sewing up a dog; our mother's body had gone up in flames; warheads could melt the flesh off your bones—yet Karen laughed, she cooked, she followed her rule. Why? Why protect the spider?

What about the things the spider had to trap and eat alive or it would starve?

“Hoo, you got her there!” Lois crowed.

“Shelley, we can't save everything we want to.”

At the end of the day when our father came to pick us up, Karen would open the oven to let out the smell of her casserole so he would stay for dinner. “Oh, John, just let the girls finish their game,” she would plead. Or, “Shelley's almost finished her homework. And Jenny's so cozy. She's under the table in the fort. Shh, I think she's asleep.”

I liked to think our mother would have been the same way, had Karen been the one who died.

Uncle Cal liked to tell people he had spent years in a commune with four hungry guys and two sisters with feathers in their hair, who painted their toenails and played the guitar and knew how to cook. “Those two,” he said. “They would make enough food for ten people and you better go out and find ten or it hurt their feelings. So they could feed 'em
to-fu
.”

Karen said Cal was the reason for the women's movement. She said the place was not a commune but just a big student house with rooms rented out and a shared kitchen.

They each had a day to cook the meals, but our mother Kathleen had been the best, Karen and Uncle Cal agreed. She was the youngest, but she could put a big meal together in twenty minutes and every so often she broke loose and cooked
meat.
They argued about who in the house had eaten it openly and who in secret.

I could picture somebody at a skillet, spatula in hand. Meat
sizzling. Her feet were bare, her back was to me, the blond hair hanging down.
What did she look like?
Pictures of her had turned into something lined up on the bookcase with the goldfish bowl and the cat anatomy book. In the big, framed one, our father's favorite, she stood in the snow on her cross-country skis, waving a gloved hand. But the hair was pushed up under a wool hat and a blot of glare took out the eyes behind the glasses.

Once when I was lying in the upstairs hall dangling my Slinky through the banisters, into my ear on the floorboards came her voice calling up the stairs: “John?” When I told Shelley, she said the sound was not a voice, and if a voice, not our mother's. But she got down and put her ear on the spot.

When I was four it is said that I would demand the commune story. “Talk about meat!” I saw them all laughing and I couldn't figure out why the person who had singled herself out, the best and fastest cook—why the one who had known they all wanted meat was the one who died.

Also, at that age I couldn't figure out where our father was, in the house story. I didn't have the concept of marriage getting started in a specific place and time, with separate lives leading into it, and some choice involved. At the same time, I knew there were weddings. When the obligation was laid on the bride and groom I wasn't sure.

Even today I find myself thinking something of the sort, about Karen and Cal and others. People their age. Nobody our age. Maybe this is what everybody feels about the previous generation, and it isn't that something has changed.

Straight out of the commune they had their kids, so that by the time Shelley and I were in the house, our cousins were in high school. No one would have expected Dylan and Ricky to sit down at the kitchen table in the afternoon and talk about bombs and kidnappings and hikers lost in whiteouts. And at home,
although he would hear us out on the news of ill-treated dogs who partially ate the baby when some infernal relative left them alone with it, our father gave no sign that these things held even enough interest to make somebody want to dispute them.

In time Shelley too no longer sat and listened. “Oh, dear, I've done it again,” Karen would say when Shelley backed away from the table. I could tell she worried about Shelley, whose report card said that while she read at a tenth-grade level in the second grade, she took no part in the majority of activities and picked her hangnails until they bled. We knew some of this to be true, but Karen said, “This makes me mad.” She called the teacher. “I'm her
aunt
,” Karen said, making a face at the word for our benefit. She held the phone away from her ear so we could hear the pitch of the teacher's high explaining voice. “Well, I wondered,” Karen answered her. “I wondered if you were familiar with that.”

The day came when we both had an interest to take us out of reach of the phone cord. Our cousins gave us their old Donkey Kong, one of the early versions that froze on the screen and had to be shaken and blown on until you spat, which Shelley played so much she could see the little geometric gorilla running up ladders in her sleep.

“In a dream,” she told me, “you play a whole lot better. I can get him to do stuff. I can get him up a ladder”—her eyes narrowed over the control pad—“that
keeps going
.” Her mouth stayed open with the lips bound over the teeth, which was a sign that she wouldn't stop when it was time to feed the dogs—that was our job after school, because although he lived mostly at Karen's now, one of them, Ben, was our dog—and she wouldn't stop to read me
Wonder Woman
in the fort under the table, where we would have spent every afternoon if the choice had been mine. There I had sworn that once, at the edge of the blanket that hid
us as she read, two bare feet had come to stand, with toenails the color in the bottle of polish that still sat on a mirror tray in our bathroom at home.

“They did not.”

“They did so. I saw.”

Then I felt bad, because while I had not made up the voice in the floorboards, I had made up the feet, and into Shelley's eyes as she tried to force some proof of the vision came the blank look I hated. The day was over. Now she wouldn't do anything except advance through the levels of Donkey Kong until our father came from the clinic to take us home, where she could go to sleep and follow the ladder up to wherever it went.

“He's not supposed to get away,” I reminded her. By this time I too was in school, finally I knew something. “Mario's supposed to catch him.” There was a hammer in the game that I could hardly ever pick up, though Shelley could, every time. Mario was supposed to use it to save the girl from Donkey Kong.

“This ladder just keeps on going,” Shelley said. “I'm going to see.”

Even awake she was good enough that our cousins, coming and going with their quick feints as if to sock us, their grins, their loud soccer cleats, would stop to watch her play. Up the ladder the gorilla went, clasping the girl. When they were watching, Shelley played so fast that our dog Ben would look up and whine, and I would have to get up off the rug and hook her sweaty hair behind her ears.

 

SHELLEY GAVE UP the advantage of having learned to read at three, and quit high school. For a while she groomed trails in a couple of state parks and then she got a job with the Highway Department, driving a survey van. Then suddenly she was so thin she had to hold up her jeans with a belt, and talkative,
always scratching her head and revising some plan. On weekends she helped out at our father's clinic. She was good with the dogs in particular, but she had developed a theory that people should not own them. An animal should not have to live indoors with people, doing their will. Where should it go? my father asked gently, the way he talked to owners when they were distraught. She didn't know where it should go. Because the wild dog had been changed by us, so that it was no longer safe without us. “You're putting too much energy into this, honey,” said Karen, who had taught us to think about these very things. She tried to hold Shelley's hands to keep her from scratching her head, where you could see scabs in the part.

Then Shelley was going to learn to play the drums. She drove all the way to Portland to buy a set of drums you could get anywhere, and soon after that she fell prey to something.

We got a call from her survey team. The guy on the phone said they were in an emergency room in the suburbs and Shelley was with a nurse, describing for the third time the scrambling legs and thumping tail of a dog they had found run over beside the road. It was not as if this was the first dog they had come upon on the state highways. In the background I could hear Shelley's voice raised over another, quieter voice. “It wouldn't be a bad idea for you to get over here,” her co-worker said.

After that she gave up talking and spent six months curled up in a facility where I went with my father and Karen to see her whenever they would let us.

A label might have contained what was wrong with her within two borders, and made it clear that others had had the same thing happen, but nobody provided one. As it was, the thing wrong seemed unlimited, and hers alone. A private effort, a tiring, unnecessary pioneering, fiendish in a quiet way, like hiding
while people searched for you, or going to bed to dream about a ladder.

And then, as the doctors had said she would, she got better. She woke up, left the low, quiet building, went for her GED, and applied to college because she had to do that before she could go to vet school. And she did learn to play the drums, and played in a serious band made up of surveyors, the ones who had taken her to the emergency room.

Once she was out, she got back the energy she had had for doing a thing without stopping. Only now she was practical; she was going to get her hands on the severed paws and the crushed spines.

I was more like my mother—or like the woman Karen told me had been my mother, who although she had wanted, with Karen, to consider the worst that can happen, had never for a minute wanted to be on intimate terms with it. “You girls are both like her, in your ways,” Karen said. “She felt things. She was not at peace. But who says we're supposed to be, in this life?”

If we were not, still Karen liked to go over the past at enough length that it lost the force of secrets and misery and diffused itself in words, like the words that spiraled protectively around the frog. “Your father was an awful mess. I didn't know what he might do. A poor old guy had just been in the paper, driving off the floating bridge into the lake. You don't remember.”