“Makes me mad. Honestly, they’re so clueless. I’m sorry, Helen.” Mickey is not her fault, but Alma did bring Tera over.
“What for? No, no, no,” Helen adds, refusing to let Alma feel bad about the conversation. “I’m sure I agree with what they say. But all that angry talk. It’s just like that book you read me.”
She must mean Paradise Lost, all those devils arguing, but it’s funny how for Helen, all books seem to melt into one book, which is sometimes Paradise Lost and sometimes The Bluest Eye and sometimes the Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Alma takes Helen’s hand. “So you’re okay with your decision?” All week, one way or another, Alma has been asking Helen this question.
“Yes,” Helen says, almost shyly, like she didn’t know she’d elected an option that would get her this much attention. “When I heard what all they had to do just to buy me a few more months, it just wasn’t worth it.”
“I can understand that,” Alma tells her, knowing she probably would have chosen the opposite, believing as she does in plots she can revise, endings she can rewrite. Unless, of course, the story is over, the expedition completed, Balmis’s mission accomplished, Isabel’s name misremembered, and the child carriers all but forgotten, their names briefly noted in some dusty tome in the library. “Anything you need, you let me know,” Alma squeezes Helen’s hand. She’s thinking about Helen’s Paxil. The way Mickey talks, he probably won’t buy his mother anything that makes money for the drug companies.
“I will,” Helen squeezes back.
“Anyone you want me to call …” Alma hints. She doesn’t want to bring up any sad memories. And Helen will know what Alma is offering. She has always read between Alma’s lines. Why it’s always been hard for Alma to believe that Helen is really blind.
“I think Claudine’s got the phone calling all covered.” Helen laughs again.
“Nothing you’re worried about?” Why does she keep insisting? Alma should shut up. But she has known Helen long enough to read between her lines, and Alma thinks she has spotted some fine print.
Helen hesitates. “Only thing I suppose I worry about is … well, Mickey. He’s just had some hard times. I hope he’s going to be all right.” She sounds not sure, as if she needs a second opinion.
“Is he in trouble?” Alma asks.
“Yes and no,” Helen confides. “His wife’s been ill, you know. Mental disease. And sometimes she’s brought him down with her.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe he can get some help?”
Helen sighs and shakes her head. “You just heard what he thinks of doctors. And he’s not mental, I’m not saying that. Just gets some strange ideas. When I try to talk sense into him, he goes off. Always comes back, though, always with a present in his hands.” She smiles, remembering those homecomings. The brass and rosewood flatware, the little Dutch clogs, the fan with the painted butterflies.
“It hurt him, losing his father,” she goes on. “Up and left us just like that. Mickey took it hard. And I wasn’t much help. Had to put Mickey in foster care while I got myself together. But like the song says, amazing grace. I don’t know where I’d have ended up without it. But Mickey never did forgive me. Said I wasn’t a mother to him. At school, I can’t say he got in with the wrong crowd, as he was the troublemaker. Dropped out.”
Alma stares at her old friend point-blank. Incredible to think that her strong-as-a-rock Helen was once a bad single mom. But then sweet Jesus came and put her back together again. No such luck for her son.
“Next I knew, Mickey’d joined up. I thought the Marines would be good for him, give him the discipline he needed. But I guess there, too, he went places and saw things that hurt him some more, never was the same again.”
Helen seems suddenly bereft, as if she just got the really bad news, a cancer that can destroy her peace of mind: her son will not fare well in the world she is leaving behind.
“I’m sorry you’ve had this worry, Helen.” Alma wishes her old friend had confided in her before. What would Alma have done? Introduced Mickey to Tera, she supposes. Maybe Mickey would have learned from Tera how to marshal personal hurt into purposeful action.
“I hope I’m not fooling myself,” Helen pauses to catch her breath. All this sad talk must be tiring. “But I think he’s okay now.” It’s really a question. She wants Alma’s reassurance. Alma doesn’t want to lie to Helen, but she wants her friend to be at peace in the time left her.
“I don’t know Mickey well enough to say,” Alma hedges. Helen waits. Her face is a mask of worry she wants Alma to take off. Alma hesitates. “He seems fine to me, Helen, he really does.”
“You think so?” Helen’s face tilts up, even though they are sitting side by side, holding hands. It is the face of a child gazing up at an adult with a look of total trust.
Alma takes a deep breath. “Yes, I do.” And then, lest Helen’s keen vision see through Alma’s bluff, she adds, “He told me about winning that calf.”
Helen laughs. “Oh yes. My oh my, was that boy ever proud.”
“He said he won it with something he wrote about the four Hs. Heart, head, hands, but he couldn’t remember the fourth H.”
“Health,” Helen says right off. “Head, heart, hands, and health.”
That’s not an organ or a part of the body, Alma is thinking. But it’s not surprising that it’s the one H that Mickey would forget, given the kind of life he has led and the difficult days that lie ahead.
ON THEIR WAY OUT, Tera needs to use the bathroom. Alma is waiting in the entryway when Mickey approaches from the kitchen, flan plate in hand.
“Guess I didn’t like it,” Mickey says, nodding at the empty plate.
There was over half a flan left after Alma spooned out his serving! “You ate the whole thing?”
He grins, watching her. He seems to get a kick out of shocking her. “I put what was left over on one of Helen’s plates,” he admits finally. Alma has noticed how prompt Mickey is about returning her plates and platters, as if he’s trying to prove his honesty, the showy scrupulosity of the shoplifter, paying for the gum after stuffing his pockets with candy bars. “That was some good—what’d you call it?”
“Flan, a kind of custard.” Alma braces herself for his usual question. Last few times, he has asked if the recipe is from her native land.
It’s odd how he never mentions Alma’s country by name, as if he’s not real sure where she comes from, some foreign place where the Marines have landed, no doubt, though probably not during his watch or surely he’d remember the name. But since quite a few of Helen’s gifts have come from places like Thailand, Indonesia, Korea, Alma imagines Mickey did most of his invading in the Far East, probably served in Vietnam, he’s that vintage.
Each time he asked, Alma was glad to prove him wrong. The polenta was Italian. “Actually, it’s sort of like cornmeal mush.” The potato salad, pure Indiana. “From my husband’s family.” She wanted him to know there was a man with a clan in her life. Alma hoped Mickey would imagine a big, beefy Midwestern guy such as he knew in the Marines, instead of her pale, lanky Richard who’s half blind without his glasses. She doesn’t know why Mickey’s question should make her feel defensive, when the guy’s probably just being curious about her background. She supposes it’s resentment that Mickey doesn’t even know the name of her country, wariness that she is about to be trapped by a label that leaves out a big part of who she is.
The last time before the flan, the polenta time, Mickey hadn’t even registered what Alma had said about the dish. He’d gone off on one of his non sequiturs, same vein as his co-rant with Tera this afternoon. “I bet lots of people in your country don’t get much to eat. They get sick, they die. Life is cheap.” Alma had bristled at the implication that she was some corrupt, exiled native because here she was, not only eating well but doling it out to neighbors, while “her people” were dying off like flies. But as he went on talking, Alma realized that Mickey was trying to voice some deep uneas
e. He and his wife—his first mention, Alma noted—had been working to wake people up, to face the facts. “Until she got sick.” In fact, Mickey was apologizing for inequities—misguidedly to her. He wasn’t some gung-ho former Marine; he was a maverick in his politics as he was in his personality, a man who’d been transformed by what he’d seen. Had he been a more coherent fellow, Alma would have pursued the topic. But instead she’d just nodded and taken back her dish.
But this time, he hasn’t asked if the flan is a native recipe, and he’s still holding on to her dish, as if Alma has to come up with the magic word to get it back.
And maybe that’s why she thinks of it. “Health,” she tells him smartly. There is something about this man that makes her want to get him back. She doesn’t even want to imagine what his fellow Marines might have done with his personality type.
Mickey laughs. He gets it, without Alma explaining, as if the same ability that he requires of listeners to connect his loose dots, he has for their random thoughts. “Hot damn, you’re right. Head, heart, hands, and health. What do you want for your calf?”
Her calf? Mickey grins. Slowly, the boy is surfacing, the boy who won a prize calf for his essay on the four Hs. It takes Alma a minute to work out his meaning: what does she want as a prize for coming up with the fourth H?
“I want my dish back,” she tells him, holding out her hands.
“Ta da!” he says, setting it down with a flourish on her uplifted palms.
TERA AND ALMA DECIDE to go out to dinner, Alma’s treat, she tells her friend. She wants to be out and about among people. All week, she has been housebound, except for visiting Helen and running er rands, not knowing how to introduce herself into social situations without Richard.
The fax phone rings as they’re setting out.
Alma runs back in, just in case the fax is from Richard.
November 13, 2004
TO: Alma Rodríguez FAX: 802-388-4344
FROM: Lavinia Lecourt Literary Agency FAX: 212-777-6565
Dear Alma, Just got back late last night from the regional booksellers’ conference, so I’m in the office trying to catch up on the pile on my desk. I called you before I left, as I knew I’d be seeing Veevee at the conference and she’d ask. Since you didn’t return my call, I assume you are avoiding me.
Rather than trying to chase you down by phone or put you on the spot, I’m faxing you the enclosed contract. Veevee sent it over—prior to the conference—after her assistant noted that the due date (already extended twice) was the last day of the past year, and still no manuscript. I can’t keep making excuses, Alma. Veevee very kindly (took some arm twisting, believe me) agreed to one last extension, but that’s it.
You’ve got to level with me. Do you want my agency to sign this new contract? Will you be able to deliver by the end of next year? My credibility and yours are on the line. I would love to continue representing you, but I’ve got to know where I stand.
Please think about it and let’s talk at the beginning of the week.
Reading Lavinia’s fax, Alma feels that old anxiety perking in the pit of her stomach. Her writing career’s about to go up in smoke, and now it’s not history taking a wrong turn, it’s her, adrift in purposelessness, self-doubt, second-guessing, all the ills attendant to petite souls in crisis.
And it’s not just Alma, who will pay, but the people who love her, who will feel the deeper gloom. Life ain’t easy; some people can’t even take it, as Richard would say, so why make it harder on everybody? What were those lines from Dante that Papote used to quote, back when he could remember things? Some story about a father in a dungeon with his kids, all of them being starved to death, but the kids being kids are clueless. They don’t know that tonight there will be no supper, tomorrow there will be no lunch. But the father knows, and when his kids ask him why he looks so scared the father decides not to alarm them. “For them I held my tears back, saying nothing; I calmed myself to make them less unhappy.”
So what do I tell Lavinia? Alma wonders.
That she’s sorry. That she has lied. That she lost heart. That she got distracted. That she started listening to the songs of the losers. The still sad music of humanity that’ll drown out any story. The terror reports from Tera. HI’s feasibility studies, flow charts and graphs, a whole industry of help to stem the tide of human misery. The AIDS caller. Isabel and the orphans, the helpless, the powerless, on whose backs civilization carries itself forward, for the greater good.
So what does she tell Lavinia?
The truth is going to bring the card house down on her head, turn the wheel toward the edge, and her guardrail is gone, her clean windshield is far away, Helen is dying, and she’ll owe Veevee & company a hell of a lot of money.
“You want to talk about it?” Tera has come down to the basement room where Richard keeps his little office. The fax machine is still rolling out page after page of the contract, all that fine print full of promises Alma is not going to be able to keep.
“Not really,” Alma says.
“Not from Richard, right?”
Alma shakes her head. “From my agent.”
“Oh.” Tera, Alma knows, does not believe in agents. Literature should be free, along with medical care. There’s enough money to go around to be charging people for listening to the song of the species. Alma is inclined to agree with her, especially now when she is in a free fall toward Veevee’s bottom line, fifty grand in the red, and her only song a stupid refrain going through her head, What do I tell Lavinia?
• • •
THE HARD DAY’S NIGHT Cafe sits right next to the creek, a small purple house with star cutouts in the shutters. It’s a soulful place owned by former hippies, who feature a lot of vegetarian dishes. Soft lights, hanging plants, loose and laid-back, Alma half expects to find reefer on the menu. Commune morphed into funky cafe. Alma loves to come here with Tera. It reminds her of her pre-Richard days when she fancied herself a woman on the verge of a great breakthrough.
Tonight she feels distracted. But she rallies. Otherwise she is going to get all the help she doesn’t need from Tera. They order a bottle of wine instead of their usual individual glasses. Why not? “It’s been a hard day’s night for days,” Alma jokes with the young waitress, who smiles wanly. “Have you noticed,” she asks Tera when the girl departs, “how the young people don’t get our jokes anymore?”
“I know,” Tera agrees. “I’ll tell a joke in class and I’m the only one laughing.”
Alma remembers to ask about the Buddhist in Tera’s department. “How’d he do as a lecturer?”
“Evaluations were glowing,” Tera tells her. “Kids loved him.”
“I assume he talked to them? I mean you said he was almost moribund in his silence.”
“No complaints. Everybody did really well in the class. All A’s.” They look at each other, the same thought going through their heads, the same giggles bursting out. Soon they’re laughing too loud. Alma looks around. Better keep it down. She still has to live in this town after Tera is gone.
The restaurant is almost empty. A cold night mid-November. The two women have the waitstaff mostly to themselves. They’re making Alma nervous, constantly alighting by their table, asking if everything is okay.
“Don’t ask her that!” Alma says, pointing to Tera. The young woman who seems to be their assigned waitress looks from one tipsy broad to the other, smiling awkwardly. “She might just tell you,” Alma tries to explain.
Tera swats Alma with her napkin. Alma grabs her wineglass just in time. It strikes her that they’re back in yesterday’s arena, that charged moment when Alma was mean and Tera was Tera. But now they’re laughing at themselves, which is probably how they’ve managed to stay good friends now going on a third decade.
In the same light vein, Alma tells Tera about Mickey’s imitation of Tera’s drumroll as he put the platter back in Alma’s hands. “By the way, did you get a chance to give him your pamphlets?”
“He would
n’t take them.” Tera sighs. Alma can just imagine the scene. “I tried to tell him that these were resources he could tap if he needed to. He said he could take care of Helen himself just fine.”
Oh yeah? “He doesn’t have a great track record.” Alma wishes she hadn’t brought up the subject. They’re both quickly sobering.
Tera pours herself another glass of wine; Alma shakes her head, no, she doesn’t want any more. Somebody’s got to drive them home. “I guess it’s like you said yesterday, most people want to stick their heads in the sand.”
That’s what Alma said? Her pronouncements always sound ridiculous in somebody else’s mouth, especially Tera’s.
“I told him I’d just leave them in case he wanted to look them over, and it was like I was going to dump contaminated waste in his backyard. He said he didn’t want them around.”
“Oh, Tera,” Alma says, touching her friend’s arm. Alma can tell Tera is—hurt is too strong a word—baffled. It’s rare that her friend meets someone who’s more enraged than she is. Secretly, Alma is thinking, this might be good for Tera. “Don’t take it personally. Mickey’s a hard nut to crack. I guess he hasn’t had an easy life.” Alma discloses her conversation with Helen. How Helen wanted to be reassured that Mickey would be all right.
As Alma is talking, Tera’s gaze strays: something has caught her mind’s eye. “I have this feeling, I don’t know, that Mickey is up to something.”
“What?” Suddenly, Alma’s alarm feelers are out. A prodigal son, a dying mother, a difficult past, a score to settle. A plot so easy to assemble, you’d think, nah, nobody would try that. But an odd person might. Mickey might. “You mean, he’d try to hurt Helen?”
“No, actually, I think it’s more that Helen has asked him, I don’t know. You know Mickey became a nurse after he left the Marines?”
How do people find out these surprising things about strangers they’ve just met whom Alma has known for years? Okay, she hasn’t known Mickey, but she has known his mother, and Alma only just found out this last week that Mickey was an ex-Marine, which seems like something a mother would let a friend know about her son. But then Helen has never talked much about Mickey, and Alma has always respected Helen’s silence, willing enough to fill it up with her own complaints and quandaries. “So what does Mickey’s being a nurse have to do with Helen?” Alma has already worked out the plot herself, but she wants a different ending.