Return Trips Read online

Meaning Miss Goldstein. “No, not for another week,” Mrs. Lawson tells her. “You had a good trip?”

  “Fabulous! A miracle, really. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  Hanging up, Mrs. Lawson has an uneasy sense that some impersonator will come to work in Gloria’s place.

  But of course it is Gloria who is already down on her knees, cleaning the kitchen floor, when Mrs. Lawson gets there the following day.

  And almost right away she begins to tell Mrs. Lawson about the wild life tour, from Mount McKinley, seemingly the focal point of her trip.

  “It was really weird,” says Gloria. “It looked like the moon, in that funny light.” She has a lot to say, and she is annoyed that Mrs. Lawson seems to be paying more attention to her newspaper—is barely listening. Also, Lawson seems to have aged, while Gloria was away, or maybe Gloria just forgot how old she looks, since in a way she doesn’t act very old; she moves around and works a lot harder than Sharon ever does, for one example. But it seems to Gloria today that Mrs. Lawson’s skin is grayer than it was, ashy-looking, and her eyes, which are always strange, have got much paler.

  Nevertheless, wanting more attention (her story has an important point to it) Gloria raises her voice, as she continues, “And every time someone spotted one of those animals he’d yell out, and the man would stop the bus. We saw caribou, and these funny white sheep, high up on the rocks, and a lot of moose, and some foxes. Not any bears. Anyway, every time we stopped I got real scared. We were on the side of a really steep mountain, part of Mount McKinley, I think, and the bus was so wide, like a school bus.” She does not tell Mrs. Lawson that in a weird way she liked being so scared. What she thought was, if I’m killed on this bus I’ll never even get to a doctor. Which was sort of funny, really, now that she can see the humor in it—now that the lump is mysteriously, magically gone!

  However, she has reached the dramatic disclosure toward which this story of her outing has been heading. “Anyway, we got back all right,” she says, “and two days after that, back in Fairbanks, do you know what the headlines were, in the local paper?” She has asked this (of course rhetorical) question in a slow, deepened voice, and now she pauses, her china-blue eyes gazing into Mrs. Lawson’s paler, stranger blue.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Lawson obliges.

  “They said, BUS TOPPLES FROM MOUNTAIN, EIGHT KILLED, 42 INJURED. Can you imagine? Our same bus, the very next day. What do you think that means?” This question too has been rhetorical; voicing it, Gloria smiles in a satisfied, knowing way.

  A very polite woman, Mrs. Lawson smiles gently too. “It means you spared. You like to live fifty, sixty years more.”

  Eagerly Gloria bursts out, “Exactly! That’s just the way I figured it, right away.” She pauses, smiling widely, showing her little white teeth. “And then, that very same afternoon of the day we saw the paper,” she goes on, “I was changing my clothes and I felt the calf of my leg where there’d been this lump that I was sort of worried about—and the lump was gone. I couldn’t believe it. So I guess it was just a muscle, not anything bad.”

  “Them leg muscles can knot up that way, could of told you that myself,” Mrs. Lawson mutters. “Heavy housework can do that to a person.” But Gloria looks so happy, so bright-faced and shiny-eyed, that Mrs. Lawson does not want to bring her down, in any way, and so she adds, “But you sure are right about that bus accident. It’s a sure sign you been spared.”

  “Oh, that’s what I think too! And later we saw these really neat big dogs, in Fairbanks. I’m really thinking about getting a dog. This man I know really likes dogs too, last night we were talking.” Her voice trails off in a happy reminiscence.

  Later in the day, though, thinking about Gloria and her story, what she and Gloria said to each other, Mrs. Lawson is not really convinced about anything. The truth is, Gloria could perfectly well get killed by a bus in San Francisco, this very afternoon, or shot by some sniper; it’s been saying in the paper about snipers, all over town, shooting folks. Or Gloria could find another lump, some place else, somewhere dangerous. Missing one bus accident is no sure sign that a person’s life will always come up rosy, because nobody’s does, not for long. Even Miss Goldstein, in China, could fall off of some Chinese mountain.

  In a weary, discouraged way Mrs. Lawson moved through the rest of her day. It is true; she is too old and tired for the work she does. Through the big street-floor windows she watches the cold June fog rolling in from the bay, and she thinks how the weather in California has never seemed right to her. She thinks about Charles, and it comes to her that one Charles could change into the other, the same way that first Charles in such a sudden way turned violent, and wild.

  That thought is enough to make her dread the end of her work, and the day, when although it is summer she will walk out into streets that are as dark and cold as streets are in Alaska.

  You Are What You Own:

  A Notebook

  I can’t leave because of all the priceless and cumbersome antique furniture that my manic mother had flown out from St. Louis—at what cost! My inheritance: it weighs me down as heavily as my feet, a part of me. Like my husband, who is also heavy, to whom I am connected, whom I cannot leave. Where do I end? And he begin? In this crazy, hot California weather we both are sticky. We are stuck.

  Our house is perfectly box-shaped, the way a child would draw a house. “A real house house,” we said, laughing at our first sight of it. We were trying to convince ourselves that we took it because it is so amusing, not because it is the only one near the university, Stanford, that we can afford. An expensive box, it costs exactly half of Carl’s instructor’s salary. Half the floor is living room, one-fourth kitchen, one-eighth each bathroom and bedroom. It makes a certain sense, if you think about it.

  It is hard to walk through the living room, though, without bumping into something: small French tables, English desk, baroque Spanish sofa. My legs are bruised regularly. I think my mother would be surprised to see where the precious furniture has landed, crowded into a redwood box. But now she is depressed (Lithium does not work, with her), and she is not shipping any more furniture, or travelling. She does not believe in sending money.

  An interesting thing about the walnut desk and the rosewood table is that they both have broken left feet. I should have called Air Express, or someone, but I wasn’t sure whom, and I didn’t like to complain. Mrs. Nelson, our neighbor, sighs whenever she comes over from across the street to look at the furniture, which is as often as I don’t see her first and hide in bed. “Such lovely pieces,” she sighs. “We’ve got to find a really good workman to repair them.” If I told her that we couldn’t afford a really good workman, she would not believe me. People with lovely furniture also have money, Mrs. Nelson believes.

  So many of the people in my life seem to be over-sized. Mrs. Nelson is one of them. An enormous pale woman, large pale-blue eyes and a tight white mouth, she stands in the doorway, filling it, with her heavy arms hanging across her chest, nothing about her moving but her eyes; her gaze moves ponderously all over the room, from one broken leg to another, all over the dust, and settles at last on me. The weight of her eyes is suffocating. I become hotter and thinner and messier than I am.

  “A really good workman,” she says. “You can’t just let nice things fall apart.”

  I can’t?

  At another time when she was manic, my mother sent me a lot of clothes, and they are what I wear, worn-out C. Klein shirts and jeans, old sweaters and skirts (A. Klein, B. Blass). My yellow hair tight in a bun. Skinny and tense, with huge, needful eyes. A group of artists lives in a big old shabby house down the block. Artists are what I believe they are. Mrs. Nelson says, sniffingly, “Gays,” but to her that might mean the same. “Gay artists” surely has an attractive sound to me. In any case, they all wear beautiful bright loose clothes. I am in love, in a way, with all of them; I would like to move over there and be friends. I want to say to them, “Look, these clothes aren’t really me
. I ruined my only Levis in too much Clorox. I will loosen my hair and become plump and peaceful. You’ll see, if you let me move in.”

  When Carl is at home he is often asleep; he falls asleep anywhere, easily and deeply asleep. His mouth goes slack; sometimes saliva seeps out, slowly, down his blond stubbled chin. Once I watched a tiny ant march heroically across Carl’s face, over the wide pale planes, the thick bridge of his nose, and Carl never blinked. We have a lot of ants, especially when I leave the dishes in the sink for a couple of days, which I have recently begun to do. (Why? Am I fond of ants?) Ants crawl all over the greasy, encrusted Haviland and Spode, and the milk-fogged glasses that Mrs. Nelson refers to as my “crystal.” At least that stuff sometimes breaks, whereas the furniture will surely outlast me.

  I could break it?

  Awake, Carl talks a lot, in his high, tight voice. And he does not say the things that you would expect of a sleepy fat blond man. He sounds like one of the other things that he is: a graduate student in psychology, with a strong side-interest in computers. He believes that he is parodying the person that he is. When I give too many clothes (all my old Norells) to the Goodwill, he says, “If only you were an anal retentive like me,” thinking he is making a joke.

  Carl complains, as I do, about the bulkiness of our furniture, the space it takes up, but I notice that he always mentions it, somehow, to friends who have failed to remark on it. “A ridiculous piece of ostentation, isn’t it?” he will say, not hearing the pride in his own voice. “Helen’s mother shipped it out from St. Louis, in one of her manic phases. She’s quite immune to Lithium, poor lady.”

  But one Saturday he spent the whole day waxing and polishing all the surfaces of wood. He is incredibly thorough: for hours his fingers probed and massaged the planes and high ornamental carvings.

  How could I have married a man who looks like my mother? How not have noticed? Although my mother’s family was all of English stock, as she puts it (thank God for my Welsh father, although he died so young that I barely knew him), and Carl’s people are all German. Farmers, from the Sacramento Valley. I thought my mother would be mad (a German peasant, from a farm), but she likes Carl. “He doesn’t seem in the least Germanic, not that they aren’t a marvellous people. He’s a brilliant boy. I’m sure he’ll be a distinguished professor someday, or perhaps some fantastic computer career.” And Carl asks her about the hallmarks on old silver, and I wonder if I am alive.

  I devise stratagems to keep Carl from touching me, which sometimes he still wants to do. Unoriginally, I pretend to be asleep, or at dinner I will begin to describe a headache or a cramp. Or sometimes I just let him. God knows it doesn’t take long.

  Carl ordered some silver polish from Macy’s ($14!), silver polish that an ad in the Chronicle said was wonderful. It came: a whitish liquid with a ghastly sick smell. Carl spent a perfect Saturday (for him), polishing all the silver and feeling sick.

  When and why did I stop doing all the things that once absorbed my days? The washing polishing waxing of our things. When Carl said I was obsessional? No, not then. When I couldn’t stand his tours of inspection? Perhaps. When I noticed that he often repolished what I had done—so unnecessary; I was an expert silver-polisher in my time. Is this my sneaky way of becoming “liberated”? (I know that I am still a long way off.)

  Mrs. Nelson is obsessed with the “gay artists” down the street. (So am I, but in a different way.) There are two girls and three boys in that house, and Mrs. Nelson knows for a fact that there are only two bedrooms. So? The only time she got her face in the front door, collecting for the Red Cross (they all hooted, “We gave at the office”; not very funny, she thought), she distinctly did not see a couch where a person could sleep. So? I tell her that I don’t know. I find the conversation embarrassing, and I do not mention the possibility of a rolled-up sleeping bag somewhere. Nor do I mention the nature of my own obsession with them: how do they get by with no jobs, and where (and how) did they leave whatever they used to own?

  This insane climate has finally made me sick—physically, that is. In the midst of a February heat wave some dark cold wrapping rains came down upon us, rattling the window-panes of our box-house and the palm leaves outside, and I caught a terrible cold with pleurisy and a cough, so that it seemed silly to get out of bed. Carl said he thought it was an extension of my depression (I am depressed? I thought my mother was). He told me to stay in bed, and went whistling into the kitchen to clear up dinner dishes and make breakfast.

  • • •

  Carl is delighted that I am sick; he is in love with all my symptoms. What does this mean? He wants me to die? No. He wants to be free to do everything that he thinks that I should do, and that he should not want to do, but he does. Yes.

  I think I married Carl because he said that I should. I have always been quite docile, until I stopped washing dishes on time and polishing things—but perhaps that was further compliance. It was what Carl wanted me to do all alone?

  He brings in a tray. “Now, how’s that for a pretty little omelet?”

  Then, as suddenly as I became sick, I am well, and the rain is over and it is spring and I am in love with everyone I see: the beautiful garbage collectors and the butcher and especially the extra boy in the house down the street, who must sleep in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. He has long, pale-red hair—he is beautiful! One Saturday while Carl is polishing the silver I brush down my hair and go for a walk and there he is, the red-haired boy, saying Hi, so warmly! I walk on, after saying Hi also, but I feel that now we are friends. I give him a name—John—and from then on we have long conversations in my mind.

  On another day I see a girl coming out of their yard, a dark-haired girl. We, too, say Hi to each other, and I think of her, too, as a friend, from then on. Her name is Meg, in my mind, and we, too, talk.

  Looming Mrs. Nelson caught me napping. “My, your things look so nice, since you took to working on them,” and her pale eyes glitter as though they, too, were polished. I do not tell her that it is Carl who does all that; it seems a shameful secret.

  • • •

  I point out to Carl that we would have more money if I got a job. He tells me that there are almost no jobs for anyone these days.

  That is true, but it is also true that he does not want me to work.

  For his computer course Carl is working on a paper. The title seems most ominous to me; it is called “The Manipulation of Data.” Manipulation? Really? He reads paragraphs to me aloud, usually when I am reading something else. I think that Carl would like us to be more nearly interchangeable with each other, but he is becoming more and more unreal to me. I regard him from my distance, and it seems odd that we know each other, unspeakably odd that we have married.

  In a charitable way I try to think of a girl who would be good for Carl, and I imagine a young girl, probably a junior in college, who is also studying psychology and computers. They could do everything together, read and cook and eat and polish everything in the house, all day long, on Saturdays.

  My mother is right: Carl will be a distinguished professor. But I am surely undistinguished, as a wife.

  The spring is real, though, wild and insistent: yards full of flowing acacia, fields of blossoms, and wild mustard as bright as sunshine, and light soft winds.

  Mrs. Nelson sighs because there are only three stem wine glasses left, and it occurs to me how little I know about her life. Who and what was Mr. Nelson, and was she sad when he died? But it seems too late to ask.

  • • •

  I tell John and Meg (in my mind) that I think perhaps Carl and I bring out each other’s worst qualities, and they agree (such wise gay artists!). I try to tell Carl that, but he says I am simply depressed. I am not depressed, really.

  Watching the flowers grow, I go for many walks, smelling, breathing air. One day when I come home and find Carl asleep on the sofa, quite suddenly I am mortally stricken with pity for him, so fat and unhappy and unloved, and in that illuminated in
stant of real pain, I understand that he is boring because I cannot listen to him. And if I can’t love him and listen, at least I could leave? I rush into the bathroom, crying, but he doesn’t wake.

  In my head John and Meg both say, “You could probably get something in the city. Or at least you’d be up there.”

  “But what about all the furniture?” I ask them.

  “That’s easy,” they say.

  Dear Carl,

  I think we have been making each other very unhappy and that we should not do that any more, and so I am going up to San Francisco to look for a job. I took $ 500 from our joint account, but I will pay back half of it when I get a job. Please keep all the furniture and things, because I really don’t want them any more, but don’t tell Mother, in case you write to her.

  Love (really),

  Helen

  P.S. I think it would be nice if you gave Mrs. Nelson a silver tray or a coffeepot or something.

  Return Trips

  Some years ago I spent a hot and mostly miserable summer in an ugly yellow hotel on the steep and thickly wooded, rocky coast of northern Yugoslavia, not far from the island of Rab. I was with a man whom I entirely, wildly loved, and he, Paul, loved me, too, but together we suffered the most excruciating romantic agonies, along with the more ordinary daily discomforts of bad food, an uncomfortable, poorly ventilated room with a hard, unyielding bed, and not enough money to get away. Or enough strength: Paul’s health was bad. Morosely we stared out over the lovely clear, cool blue water, from our pine forest, to enticing islands that were purplish-gray in the distance. Or else I swam and Paul looked out after me.

  Paul’s problem was a congenital heart condition, now correctable by surgery, but not so then; he hurt a lot, and the smallest walks could cause pain. Even love, I came to realize, was for Paul a form of torture, although we kept at it—for him suicidally, I guess—during those endless sultry yellow afternoons, on our awful bed, between our harsh, coarse sheets.