“Doña Isabel!” the boys were calling out my name. If nothing else, my boys now needed me more than ever. Some good might still come of what I had done for my own reasons. I kissed my little Benito’s head and whispered, “Here we go!” No matter that Don Francisco had recorded the wrong name in the official documents. I had wanted a whole new life, so why not have a new name to go with it? Up the swaying gangway I climbed, toward the sloping deck where my boys and Don Francisco were waiting for me.
3
Alma turns into their driveway after seeing Richard off at the airport, and the sight of their house gives her a hollowed-out feeling in the gut. On the radio, the guys on Car Talk are having a grand old time. Do they ever get depressed? she wonders. Does one brother ever turn to the other and say, Jesus, I can’t go on and talk about carburetors, not today, I can’t!
Their house looms before her, a lot of wood, a lot of glass, very Vermont. They bought it from a couple who were divorcing after doing the usual crazy thing: Having marital troubles? Have a baby. Build a house. Alma remembers, now that she is about to go into it alone, that she didn’t want to buy it. That she thought it was bad luck to buy a house from a couple that hadn’t made it, that Richard had talked her into it, as he often did, by being reasonable. The house was cheap, considering the state’s increasingly expensive real-estate market. “The chicifying of Vermont,” Tera calls it. For weeks after they moved in, Alma did cleansings while Richard was at the office. Cleansings don’t have a lifetime guarantee, she is thinking. Maybe she should begin by cleansing the house again before she tries to write a novel in it?
A horn toot-toots. Claudine’s SUV going by. She recognizes Alma’s car. Probably wondering why Alma is sitting halfway down her driveway looking at her own house.
If only you knew, Claudine, Alma thinks. Her down-the-road neighbor, Claudine, is one of the people Alma could never become, which makes her sad or used to anyhow. Competent, the mother of two darling little girls who are as good-looking as she is, Claudine stayed home with them when they were little, loved it; now works part time as a real-estate agent, loves it; has read all of Alma’s books, loves them. If things get bad, Alma can call up Claudine and become friends. Maybe it will rub off on her, Claudine’s talent for happiness.
This is nothing new, Alma reminds herself, this terror whenever Richard leaves for any trip that’ll take him away overnight, though it’s never really made sense. Unlike the monkey experiment Alma once read about, she wasn’t torn from her mother’s side as a baby and placed in a cage with a mechanical lookalike that delivered shocks whenever Alma climbed into its arms. But clinging to her capricious Mamasita had created its own kind of trouble: never knowing when she’d be given the tit, when the dart. Though Alma had figured it out soon enough.
That was a half century ago, Alma tells herself now, recognizing Richard’s tone of voice in her head. Richard has no patience with adults who go on and on about what their parents did to them. “Everyone’s going to make mistakes!” he always says after some confessional moment by a troubled friend almost derails a lively and fun supper party. The saga of a wicked-witch mother. An alcoholic father revisited. They will be brushing their teeth after the guests have left, and almost always Alma will be the one championing such courage. “We all so seldom talk to each other about what really matters,” she’ll say to Richard, spewing toothpaste suds on her side of the mirror.
“That’s what really matters?” he’ll reply after he’s done brushing, rinsing, and patting his mouth dry. Even in this, Alma thinks, Richard has the cleaner windshield.
And now her cleaner windshield is gone. She drives the rest of the way down to the house and gets out of the car. Upstairs, a boatload of orphans and their hopeful rectoress are waiting to cross the Atlantic with a crazed visionary.
Alma decides not to go inside just yet. Instead, she heads across the back field to Helen’s house.
“HELEN, IT’S ME!” Alma hollers, after knocking at the back door and turning the knob. She doesn’t want to scare the half-blind old woman who’s not expecting her at this hour of the morning. Usually, Alma tries to come once or twice a week in the late afternoon for an hour and read to Helen. Lately, Alma has fallen off, letting weeks go by, which she feels bad about, but tells herself it doesn’t really matter. Claudine and another woman on their road alternate days checking on Helen and reading her the necessaries: her mail, the local gossipy paper she likes, and anything else she might ask them for. Alma is supposed to do the frills, as Helen calls them. Some good book. Sometimes Helen asks Alma to read something she has written, which is sweet of her, and Alma has obliged a few times but stopped because Helen always falls asleep. But then Helen also naps for Toni Morrison and Robert Frost, so Alma doesn’t feel so bad.
“Is that you, Alma?” Helen calls out. Her voice sounds wobbly, croaky, as if maybe she’s coming down with a cold.
“Yeah, it’s me, Helen,” Alma says, trying to figure out where Helen is since she isn’t in the kitchen in back where she usually hangs out all day. Helen is sitting at her telephone-table seat that reminds Alma of being a kid. Amazing to think that forty-some years ago that item was shipped down to a little backwater dictatorship. Some stuff, like bubble gum, found its way everywhere, even back then.
“Hi, dear,” Helen says, her voice brightening. She’s looking in Alma’s general direction. Helen’s hazelish eyes have that cloudy look of the planet Earth seen from outer space. And though Alma knows Helen’s vision’s almost gone because of glaucoma, Alma always feels as if Helen does see her. “I do, dear,” Helen has told her when Alma has mentioned this feeling in the past, “with the eyes of my heart.”
“What a nice surprise!” she says now, like she means it, but there’s something in her voice that doesn’t sound like the Helen Alma is used to.
“Everything okay?” Alma asks, wondering if Helen will tell her. Her old friend is not a complainer and avoids ever mentioning any problems in her life—even when Alma has pressed her. Helen doesn’t want to dwell on the negative, Alma can accept that, but sometimes she has the feeling that Helen is afraid people won’t come back if she doesn’t make them feel better.
“I’m fine, especially now that you’re here. Let’s go on back to the kitchen and get us some tea. If you’re not in a hurry?”
“No, no,” Alma assures her, holding back on trying to help as Helen pulls her walker over and leans into it, struggling to her feet. There’s an extra heaviness in her movements. Maybe she has gotten an upsetting phone call and that’s why she was at her phone seat. The AIDS caller from a few weeks back pops into Alma’s head—but that woman has since been taken into custody and committed somewhere, Tera caught her up. Better not bring up something upsetting and make Helen feel unsafe and even more fragile.
“I’m surprised to see you so early, dear. What time is it anyway?” The radio usually keeps her posted. But the radio is off. Another odd detail. Helen, not being predictable.
“I’m giving myself a day off,” Alma tells her. Helen knows all about Alma’s writing schedule—how Alma makes herself sit at her desk, come muse or not. Helen, however, also knows the truth—the only person Alma has told. She has given up on her novel. Instead she is reading and brooding about some orphan kids crossing the Atlantic. She has told Helen the whole expedition story.
“A good thing to give yourself a day off,” Helen is saying now, tentatively, as if she doubts that’s what Alma is up to and is giving her a chance to refute it. Helen is standing in the little corral of her walker, catching her breath from the exertion of getting up. It makes Alma feel tender to see the old woman in there.
“What about you, Helen. What are you up to? I always find you in your kitchen.”
“You’d be surprised,” Helen says, chuckling. “If you’d come any earlier, you might’ve found me in the bedroom in my nightie.”
“All alone or with a honey?” Alma plays along. Helen has alluded to her past, a long-ago rocky marriage and
a son, who periodically drops off the face of the earth and then reappears. Alma has gotten the story mostly from Claudine, whose husband’s a “local boy” and so knows all about the old-timers in town. For almost fifty years, Helen worked at the high school in the lunchroom and saw several generations in this town go through their adolescence; she retired when she started going blind. Everyone loved her so much, they gave her a little parade on her last day of work. Small towns. You gotta love them.
“A honey at my age, ha!” Helen is laughing, as she clumps around the kitchen, making tea. Alma loves to watch how Helen finds things, her hands tentative, but somehow landing true, like a puzzle piece that snaps in place. “How’s your honey doing, by the way?”
“He’s gone away on an assignment.” Alma tries to keep her voice even. She doesn’t want Helen to think the real reason she came over on a Saturday morning was to get away from her own loneliness. “It’s one of those projects his company has in different countries.” Alma goes on to tell Helen about the green center, as they sip from their chipped mugs. Probably because Helen is blind and bumps into things, a lot of her cups and plates have chips in them, but at least she doesn’t have to see them. In their house, Richard is always holding up his favorite bowl or martini glass and saying, “So what happened to this?” “Why is it always me?” Alma has countered. For the next five months, she is going to have to be careful. If something breaks, she will not be able to convince Richard that he might have done it.
“So he’s going to be gone for a while, is he?” Helen wonders.
“Uh-hum.” Alma takes a sip of her tea, swallowing down that weepy feeling.
“Any time you feeling lonesome you come over here, you hear?”
“Thanks, Helen, I will.” Helen can tell. Of course, Helen can tell. Just like Alma can tell that Helen has got something on her mind. “Helen, you’d tell me if something was wrong?”
For a moment, Helen looks unsure as if she has been caught keeping something to herself, but then she smiles, bemused, the old Helen. “I’ll try,” she says, almost shyly. “You, too,” she adds, turning the conversation back to Alma. “A woman can get blue without her man.”
“And with him, too,” Alma reminds her. Helen has heard about Alma’s dark moods of the last few months. “Don’t you worry,” she has told Alma. “God has a plan for you. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open so you don’t miss it.”
Unlike other religious people who can drive her nuts, when Helen mentions God, Alma just does an instantaneous translation in her head—God as a metaphor for the stunning, baffling, painful, beautiful spirit of the universe—bypassing the whole thorny question of whether God even exists, and instead dealing directly with the little quandaries that really are the places people get stuck in for life.
“He wanted me to go with him, and maybe I should’ve, Helen, but … I don’t know.” If indecisiveness hits her now, Alma is a goner. She’ll be on a plane tomorrow.
“Maybe you needed him out of your hair so you could hear yourself think,” Helen offers. For a moment, Alma wonders if Helen is talking about her own solitary life—her difficult husband, who disappeared ages ago; her on-again, off-again son who reappears whenever he wants. “Sometimes you need to be alone so you can hear that quiet, little voice of God inside.” Helen’s voice is hushed, as if she’s hearing it now.
“Hmm,” Alma puzzles. Did she really stay to hear the baffling, painful spirit of the universe inside her? “It’s just that I lied to him, Helen. I told him I was staying to finish my novel.”
Helen smiles, bemused again. “He’ll understand,” she says. “Goodness gracious, saving the world isn’t for everybody. You’ve got your own work to do.”
Has she misrepresented Richard, Alma wonders. He isn’t saving the world. Just greening one tiny bit of it. The bit of it that has her country’s name on it. She should have gone with him if only for that reason. As for saving the world? Alma used to tell herself that writing was a way to do that, but deep down she has to agree with Helen that “you can’t use a tractor to weed the garden.” Literature does one thing; activism and good works do another. But Alma doesn’t want to keep plaguing Helen with her self-doubts right now, especially when her old friend doesn’t seem herself. If nothing else, Alma wants to give Helen the pleasure of thinking that right here, right now, all’s well with the two of them anyhow.
They sit together, quietly sipping tea, the muted sun coming in through the curtains and giving the paneled room a reassuringly oldfashioned sepia look. All is well. “It’s good to be here, Helen.” Alma reaches for the spotted hand, which startles at first at her touch, but then holds Alma’s hand back.
AS ALMA IS GETTING ready to go, perhaps because she broached wanting to help, Helen asks if Alma might be stopping in town anytime soon.
“Sure,” Alma tells her. That was going to be her next stop after leaving Helen’s. So as not to have to go home to a place where everything reminds her of Richard. “You need some groceries?”
“Claudine got me all supplied yesterday. It’s a prescription. Over at the drugstore.” There are actually two drugstores in town, some chain just out of town and Peters’ Drugs downtown, which Alma knows is the one Helen means. Mr. Peters is another local “boy,” only a little younger than Helen. “It’s been called in,” Helen explains, as if the doctor did her a special favor by doing this. Helen reaches for her purse hanging from the back of her chair, burrowing in it for her wallet.
“Pay me later when I bring it,” Alma tells her.
“You sure?”
“You stiff me, Helen, and I’ll make you sit through Paradise Lost again!” Alma had had some misguided idea that since Milton was blind, Helen would somehow feel connected to his work. Plus, Helen is Christian, there was that. But Milton and Helen were not a match. Alma actually only read the first two books, skipping whenever she’d hear Helen sigh. Finally, Helen had her stop. “Is it too depressing?” Alma had asked. “No, it’s not that. It sounds like those Congress hearings on C-Span,” Helen had laughed. All those devils double-talking must’ve been what turned Helen off.
She’s laughing now at Alma’s threat, and Alma is laughing, too, feeling her mood lifting. Five months, five years, they’re going to make it, Helen and Alma. They’re going to stare that old loneliness in the face until it backs down and turns into productive and soulful solitude.
But when Alma picks up Helen’s prescription, she is not so sure. Helen on Paxil? So, it’s not as easy as it looks. Of course, Alma has no business reading the label on Helen’s little bottle, but she was surprised when Mr. Peters rang it up and she had to hand over a bunch of twenties. She finds herself wishing Helen had told her before dishing out top dollar for antidepressants. If nothing else, Alma could have offered her stash, which have, no doubt, disintegrated into the soil by now. One more bit of human trash littering up HI’s green world.
AFTER DROPPING OFF HELEN’S prescription, Alma spends the day running all the errands she hasn’t gotten to in months. By the time Richard returns, the torn shower curtain will be replaced, the overgrown houseplants repotted in new pots, the portrait of Ben by his artist girlfriend (actually, Lauren’s already an ex) matted, framed, and hung.
It’s not until late afternoon that Alma finally enters her house, bracing herself for its eerie tranquillity. Beeps on the answering machine, messages! And there’s a sizable packet of mail she just picked up from their box on the road. Groceries to put away. Busy work—today she welcomes it.
The message machine is full of hang-ups, weird open-line sounds. Just what Alma needs now that Richard is gone: the AIDS caller back at it or some thief checking to see if anyone’s home. Alma now wishes she’d left Richard’s curt male voice on the machine. Maybe she can borrow Claudine’s Dwayne to come over and tape a new message.
Between the hang-ups the other messages are reassuringly normal: a reminder of a dentist appointment, a book Alma requested is in at the library, some lady getting back to
Richard about bags of raked leaves from the hospital grounds he had called about. He must have forgotten about them. Alma will surprise him with her resourcefulness, pick them up, lay them on the garden. There’s also one from Lavinia, just calling to say hi, which probably means Veevee just called her about the saga of the saga; and one from Tera, about their plan to get together next weekend, an overnight, which Tera better not cancel, as Alma has nailed down a great big stake of solace on her friend’s being around for a couple of days. The final one is from Claudine, cheery but uncharacteristically vague, could Alma call her back please, it’s about … well, Helen. So Alma’s hunch was right! Something is wrong with Helen. Why didn’t Helen tell her directly? Alma feels a pang of jealousy at Claudine’s being the preferred one. True, Claudine is also the dependable one, there every other day. Still, Helen knows Alma loves her and cares about her problems.
Alma dials Claudine’s number, venting on the numbers, punch-punch-punch, punch-punch, punch-punch, but when Claudine’s message machine clicks on, Alma hangs up, then keeps hitting the redial, over and over, while putting the groceries away. Finally, she stops when she realizes she’s behaving like Mamasita! “The apple does not fall far from the tree,” Helen always says whenever some local kid gets in trouble, a saying that Claudine uses a lot, too, whenever she reports on the antics of her two clone daughters.
Claudine, Helen, it’s struck Alma before: how alike they are. Determined optimists. Somehow, though, Helen being older, struggling to keep that kind of attitude through almost eight decades instead of just three and a half makes Alma gravitate toward the old woman more than toward Claudine. Besides, Helen is poor, not poor poor—she does own her one acre, “more or less,” with its ramshackle farmhouse—but like Tera, Helen is on a tight budget. Alma has always preferred poor people to rich ones, probably a guilt holdover from coming from a place where you’re not offered that gray area—the middle class—a buffer zone where you can live a decent life and not feel like it’s coming off the hide of someone whose yearly food money equals last night’s tab at a fancy restaurant.