The phone call came unexpectedly on a Monday morning.

“Miriam, I hate to have to give you some bad news.  We’ve hired someone else for the job.”

“Oh no!” Miriam exclaimed. “That is disappointing!”  But in a second she composed herself.  “Can you tell me who?”

“His name is Gary Provo,”  Rupert Jones intoned in his British accent.  “Thank you for not yelling at me, Miriam.”

“You know I wouldn’t do that,” Miriam said politely, perfunctorily.  But even in her dazed state she was puzzled.  Why would he think she’d yell at him?  Miriam was hardly a yeller.  Later, when she had yelled at him in a sense, she would remember this little exchange. 

“He’s got a collection of stories coming out this fall,” Rupert continued.  As head of the creative writing program at the big Midwestern university where Miriam taught as an adjunct, he brought a little taste of Oxford or Cambridge to the sprawling urban campus.

“We just felt he had an irresistible combination of things.  Irresistible.  He comes very highly recommended.  It wasn’t so much no to you as yes to him.  It was a very prayerful decision, I can tell you that.  It went back and forth, back and forth.  You did so well in the interview, we were all so proud of you, and that just made it all the harder.”

“I see,” Miriam said blankly.

“You know we value you enormously.  I’ll do everything I can to give you a good teaching schedule next year.”

She was eager to get off the phone.  She had conducted herself with sufficient dignity, but she could only hold on so long.  When she hung up, she burst into tears.  Pain coursed through her.  But at least she hadn’t cried on the phone.

It was difficult to go back to the university the next day.    The long-awaited opportunity for a real job, albeit a temporary two-year one, had evaporated for her.  Miriam knew such a job was no big deal, though that did not seem to diminish her desire for it.  It was essentially the same work she was doing now, and had been doing for a number of years, as an adjunct, only this had been a position, a real job with benefits, at more than twice what she was being paid now. 

There was a departmental announcement in her box about the writer who had been hired.  Miriam read through it quickly, and then she read it through more slowly. For one thing, she was surprised that they had hired a man.  For the past ten years, the university had been under a class action decree to redress past sex discrimination.  Miriam had heard Rupert say that if they had two roughly equally qualified candidates, they were required to hire the minority person, a woman or person of color.  She had known there might very well be better candidates than she — it was, after all, a national search.  But Miriam was not exactly a slouch.  And she was already here, doing the job, “enormously valuable,” as Rupert was always telling her.

Gary Provo, she read, had gotten his MFA from Iowa, and was currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford.  He had, as Rupert had said, a book of stories, his first, coming out in the fall.  He had published a couple of stories in literary magazines.  Up to that point, Miriam thought, their resumes were rather similar.  She too had been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she had published a collection of short stories with good national reviews, had had a number of short stories and non-fiction pieces in magazines.  But what stopped her in her tracks — she felt herself come to a halt — was that he only had one year of teaching experience.  That was it.   A deep frown formed in her brain and expressed itself on her forehead, which wrinkled into a puckered knot.

She brought the department announcement home to her husband, Ted, and together they tried to make sense of things. 

“Maybe it’s because he has a book coming out in the fall,” Ted said.  ”That makes him hot.  Your book has been out for several years — three, isn’t it? — so it’s not so hot.”

“Whose side are you on?” Miriam said.  “What really gets me is that I’m already teaching here.  Enormously valuable, according to Rupert.  This guy’s an unknown, unproved–stranger!”  

“Of course the other thing,” Ted said carefully, “is that they may think he’s a better writer than you.” 

“God!” Miriam said.  She looked at Ted bleakly.  Her whole sense of herself as a writer — what she had worked for, built up, accomplished — felt about to blow out the door.

Not that she didn’t believe other writers could be better than she.  She did!  She was the first to believe it.  She was always ready and willing to believe it.  “They” were better and she was nothing.  Or if not exactly nothing, then not good enough.  Not — fill-in-the-blank — enough. 

“But what about teaching!  He’s taught one year and I’ve taught twelve, thirteen, fourteen, I don’t even know anymore.  A lot.  And I’m a really good teacher!  How could they totally disregard teaching?”   

“Their prerogative, I guess,” Ted said sadly. 

“I’ve been screwed!”  Miriam exclaimed.  Her face flushed and stung as if someone had flung a glass of ice water at her.   

So that was that.  The decision was made, the committee had spoken, Miriam had not been chosen, life goes on.  Because it was only a two-year temporary job, a committee, rather than the full department, had made the decision.  Something must have come out in the interview that clearly defined the Gary guy as the superior choice.  Miriam thought back to her own interview.  They had pitched her a soft ball on the first question, asking her about teaching, of all things! She had told them how she had dealt with her graduate class that morning, and her answer impressed even her. She was in top form, and when it was over, she had a hard time imagining that she wouldn’t get the job. 

But she hadn’t gotten it.  What a shock!  Things like this were not supposed to happen to her!  Why not?  She had been around academia long enough to know that people — often the best people — got screwed all the time.   

But still, things like this were not supposed to happen to her!  WHY NOT?  Because, because, because…because she was nice!  She didn’t ask for too much (only a temporary job), she was an excellent, overly conscientious worker, cheerful, gracious, modest, supportive, a team player, reasonable, didn’t make waves….  She knew how to be nice.  Her whole upbringing had been about being nice.  Her mother had never articulated the reason a girl had to be nice and maybe had forgotten or never known it herself, having accepted it prima facie from her own mother.  But now Miriam grasped the underlying rational: to avoid getting hurt.  Her mother hadn’t taught her to be tough; she had taught her to be nice.  As if that could protect her.  And maybe it could, in a parlor.  But not in an English Department.  Nice was nice, but no defense against getting screwed.  In fact, it just made it easier, Miriam now saw.  Rupert had thought, since Miriam was always so nice, that she’d get screwed and say thank you very much!  If he thought of her at all.

Still, no use to get so worked up.  What good would it do?  Better to just wait and see what she would be offered for the coming year.  After all, Rupert had said he’d do his best to give her a good schedule.  She’d get over this…  Maybe she was over-reacting, even.  Miriam loved to be measured, reasonable, mature and she was not entirely comfortable with her present feelings of outrage. Better to just get over it and go on.

When she got the letter regarding next year from the creative writing office, she had been offered the usual three courses, but one of them was a night course in Rochester.  Rochester!  She’d have to drive an hour and a half each way at night in the winter!  And of course the salary was the usual piddley-shit adjunct insult, with no benefits.   The new man would be making more than twice what she would make, with benefits, to teach three courses and do a little advising.  Burn.

That night Miriam told Ted about the three courses and Rochester.

The next morning, Ted said, “You know, you might have a sex discrimination claim.”  He had slept on it, he said, because he hadn’t wanted to say anything right away.  He realized once he said it, there would be no turning back.  He knew Miriam, he said, and he knew she’d have to follow through.  In some ways Miriam was a plaintiff just waiting to happen.  All those years in the women’s movement.  Not that she was an angry radical, a time bomb just waiting to go off.  Mostly she got along just fine in the world, which she did not see as “us” and “them.”  On the other hand, she did tend to view things in feminist terms, to be testy about anything that smacked of sexism.  In that way, Miriam thought she was not different from most of the women she knew.

Sex discrimination.  It wasn’t as if Miriam hadn’t thought of that.  But she had put it out of her mind.  She didn’t believe that the committee had sat around thinking they ought to hire a man instead of a woman. Not in this day and age.  Not after what the university  had been through with the sex discrimination decree, having its consciousness raised in the most painful and public way. But the committee had been composed of four men and two women.  It didn’t seem exactly a coincidence that such a male-dominated committee would choose a male.  And they really did have to see Gary Provo as being far superior to Miriam in order to hire him over her.  Wasn’t it quite possible that they brought to their judgments of his writing vs. Miriam’s some male bias?  After all, these were men who had teethed on Joyce, Conrad, Melville, Hemingway.  

But Miriam wanted to be fair.  She didn’t want to leap to conclusions, especially polemical ones.  Miriam wasn’t particularly political.  She was too moderate by nature, too timid, maybe, too — reasonable.  Too nice. 

She could switch channels in her head, one perspective being “theirs,” Rupert and the committee’s (as if they were a rock group), that this was a simple matter: they had hired the best candidate, the best person (man?) for the job for reasons that made perfectly good sense, and she should just accept that and get on with things; and another perspective, being hers, that she had been screwed, that it had to do in some fundamental way with her being a woman, and that women were always in danger of getting screwed.  If you let them get away with it.  If you didn’t say Excuse me.  I think we have a problem here.

Because Ted was a lawyer, Miriam knew a fair number of lawyers, some of them women.  So by that afternoon, after a couple of phone calls, she had made an appointment with one of the best employment discrimination attorneys in town.  Betsy Airondale’s name kept coming up again and again.  She was, as a friend at the office of Labor Relations told Miriam, a person with a brilliant legal mind and a lot of common sense.  That, Miriam thought, was the combination she needed.

She and Ted went to see Betsy Airondale the following Monday.  Miriam had sent her the job advertisement, the two vitas, and a copy of Miriam’s book.  When Betsy came out to meet them, Miriam liked her immediately.  She had a kind, intelligent face, and a voice that was warm and low.  Miriam thought how much she liked women, at least women like Betsy Airondale.  She liked women who were unabashedly for other women.      

Betsy laid out the legal possibilities.  Sex discrimination would be hard to prove, because the burden of proof would be on Miriam.  Equal work for equal pay looked better; and there was some possibility of looking into some new contractual law regarding affirmative action.  She said one thing she could do was steer Miriam through the internal processes at the university.  They would recognize her name, Betsy said lightly but meaningfully.

“I just have to ask you one thing,” Miriam said at the end, as they were finishing up.  “I know it may sound ridiculous, but am I being ridiculous?  Am I off the wall?”

Betsy looked at her sympathetically.  “You know,” she said, “it’s sad that you have to ask that.  Women get screwed all the time, and then they think that somehow it’s their fault.  So no, you’re not crazy.”

Ah, Miriam thought.  I didn’t really think so.

A week had passed since she had gotten the letter about her appointment for next year.  The time had come for Miriam and Rupert to have a little talk.  He had noticed, he said, that Miriam hadn’t responded to the offer.  He could tell, he said, that she was unhappy.

“You’ve withdrawn a bit from things,” Rupert said. 

They were sitting in Rupert’s office, which was just around a partition from Miriam’s office.  They weren’t exactly friends, but they were “colleagues,” as Rupert was always so quick to say.  And he had been so lavish in his praise and support of her.  Why hadn’t he pulled for her in the committee meeting about the hire?  As director of the program, his opinion would have carried great weight. 

“You’re right,” Miriam said.  “I am unhappy.  I’m unhappy with my schedule for next year.  That course in Rochester — to have to drive that distance at night in winter!  I’m unhappy that I’m being paid basically subsistence wages.” She was warming up.  “I’m unhappy because I feel I’m better qualified than the man you hired for the two-year position.  I’m unhappy because you’re going to pay him more than twice what you’re offering me for essentially the same work!  I’m unhappy, Rupert, because I have a ton of teaching experience and he has only one year, and this is a teaching job, after all.  I’m unhappy that you’ve told me umpteen times how ‘enormously valuable’ I am, and you didn’t put your money where your mouth was.  So, yes, Rupert, I am unhappy!”

Rupert had gradually been shrinking back in his desk chair, as if the back might give way, like a secret door, and he’d be out of there.

“Miriam,” he exclaimed.  “I’m staggered!  Staggered.  After I’ve been so good to you!”

“Rupert,” Miriam said.  “Let me put it this way.  I feel I’ve been discriminated against.  Sex discrimination.” She might as well have pulled out a gun and pointed it at him, so alarmed did he look.  Despite the heat of the moment, Miriam observed this reaction cooly.  She relished a feeling she didn’t often have: righteous anger.  Power.  Standing up for herself.  “For starters, you and the committee completely ignored the affirmative action stipulation.”

“Miriam, I can’t believe my ears.  The way you’re turning on me.  After I’ve been so good to you!  I’ve always given you three courses every year, which is more than most of our adjuncts get.”

“That’s true,” Miriam said.  “And in the past I’ve been happy to have them.  I knew it was the best I could get as an adjunct.  This is my job, Rupert, what I do to make money.  And it wasn’t exactly one way, you know.  As you may recall, I’ve often filled in for full professors at a fraction of their pay.  Perhaps I was naive but what choice did I have?  You know how tight the market is, how many writers there are around here looking for teaching jobs.   And now you’re bringing in an unproven, unknown stranger to do the job I’ve been doing and paying him a lot more money.”  

“Miriam, I really can’t believe my ears.”  He shook his head in amazement.  “After I’ve been so good to you.”

“Rupert,” Miriam said in a steely voice, “I’m going to have to ask you not to say that again.”

 Miriam stood up.  “I’d say we’re at an impasse here,” she said.  “We’ll have to talk later.”  She had the feeling that she had lobbed a grenade into the room.  As soon as she stepped into the hall, she realized she had cystitis.  The urge to urinate was urgent and unnatural.  She hadn’t had a cystitis attack in twenty years, she contemplated as she peed furiously in the women’s room.  That little encounter had upset her whole metabolism.

 By 10:00 that night she was at an all-night pharmacy getting a prescription for a sulfur drug.  She told one of her women friends about her sudden mysterious attack, and the friend looked up “cystitis” in a new agey book that listed physical ailments and the emotional condition connected to them.  “Urinary infections,” the friend read to Miriam over the phone.  “Pissed off.  Especially at a member of the opposite sex.  Blaming others.”

Ah.  So. 

Still… blaming others.  Miriam brooded over this.  She was definitely pissed off at a member of the opposite sex, Rupert by name, but she didn’t believe in “blaming others.”  She did not see herself as a victim.  Perhaps she should really be blaming herself for what happened.  Or at least not blaming others.  Maybe she had it all wrong!

She called Ted at work.  Blaming others, she repeated.  “Does that mean I’m wrong to blame others?”

“If someone dropped a concrete block on your head…”

“Oh.  Okay.  Right. Got it.”

She thought of the beefy backs of the male professors in the department.  She remembered sitting behind them at a departmental lecture recently, and how they formed a veritable mountain of maleness in front of her.  She couldn’t see around them, couldn’t see the speaker.  She was sure they felt entitled to be there, to take up all the room. 

Oh this was awful thinking!  It was unfair, beneath her! Not all the men in the department had beefy backs!  Some, she assumed, were okay, fine even.  Weren’t they?  She wasn’t sure.  She realized that she didn’t trust a one of them.  And it was this maleness, this sense of power and entitlement that existed in the department that made her feel this way.  They were a dying breed, the middle-aged, aging men of the department, and they were holding on for all they were worth, which wasn’t much in some cases. But it was also true that things were changing.  New blood was flowing in in the form of women, younger men who were more enlightened, a few people of color, when they could lure them to Minnesota, not exactly a hotbed of multiculturalism.  

Maybe this was just a matter of ego.   Her pride was hurt.  Raised Southern and female, Miriam was not particularly comfortable with ego.  It made her feel guilty to have one, though have one she did.  She thought a lot, at times, of herself.  That had come, in part, from publishing her book, which some people loved.  They said they loved it, at least.  Not everyone, of course.  But some.  Although maybe that was just another variation on “enormously valuable.”  And then too there were just all the years — Miriam was well into her forties.  The years hadn’t counted for nothing.  She might have started out as a quivering mass of female insecurity but over the years something inside had solidified, gotten a grip.  She could feel this mysterious part of herself as if it were a rod inside her, holding her up.  There might be layers still of uncertainty, inadequacy, self-doubt — there were! — but she also sensed that rod inside as something solid forged by fire into metal.  

After her meeting with Rupert, Miriam got a call from the assistant director of the creative writing program.  They would be glad, he told her, to exchange the Rochester course for a graduate level memoir course in town if she liked.

She had moved the mountain an inch.

It’s not easy to move a mountain an inch.

But it was not enough.

Miriam was in her office.  It was awkward, because Rupert and she practically shared the space.  There was a partition between them, but they shared a common entrance, the only two people in that large room.  Miriam had always gotten along well with Rupert.  They had a genial, if remote, relationship. Oddly, given that she was accusing him of sex discrimination, Miriam found Rupert rather feminine, not gay, but feminine in a somewhat negative sense.  If he were a woman, she speculated, he might be accused of being overly sensitive, hysterical even.  That was the poet in him, a potentially lovely characteristic that had, unfortunately, to dwell in Rupert’s masculine personality.  She could hear him bumbling around in there, and finally he stuck his head around the corner and Miriam asked him to come in. 

“I’ve had a horrible week since we last talked,” he said.  There was a chair available, which students sat in when they came for conferences, but he didn’t take it.  He stood, towering over Miriam as she sat at her desk. He was large, tall, physically imposing.   “This has been very painful for me,” he said.  “I haven’t been able to sleep well.  The things you said really hurt me.”    Miriam had figured it would be painful for Rupert, who saw himself as a good guy who did the right things, liberal, sensitive, a poet after all, not that that guaranteed anything.  But Miriam knew a thing or two about pain herself.  She was fascinated, even as she sat pinned to her chair, in the way this had become HIS pain.

“Rupert, would you like to sit down?”

“No, no,” he said, “I just wanted you to know how badly I’ve been feeling about all this.”

Later, Miriam would remember this moment, not from what was said, but because of the body language, the way he didn’t give up the advantage of standing over her, talking down to her, as it were. 

“Rupert,” she said, “can you see this from my point of view at all?”

“Oh yes!” he said.  “I’ve been carrying on very active dialogues with you in my head.”

“And I with you,” Miriam said.  But neither of them seemed able to say anything now. 

There was a terrible weight in the room.  Both Miriam and Rupert were extremely somber.  Miriam felt crushed by the situation, of causing such a terrible dispute, of being in conflict with someone she had known so long, whom she had liked.  They had never been friends, but they had been friendly always, and they had worked together.  She wished he would sit down.  But she saw that that was the problem, in a nutshell.  He wanted, needed, and would maintain his “standing.”  He had his position; he wouldn’t back down. 

But neither would Miriam.  She knew as well as she knew her own name that she wasn’t going to drop it.  She was still flabbergasted at some level at the way she had been treated. She saw that she was making a choice.  She could choose to get over this, the way she was “supposed to.”  But why not, every once in a while, pick your battle – even if it costs you?

Rupert rattled on — she already knew the script — “enormously valuable…programmatic decision…prayerful…” and she sensed that he wanted to talk it away.  She knew Rupert, a highly verbal person, and she knew he would want to throw a lot of words into the air, but that he had no intention of doing anything.  Just a lot of “prayerful” words which would make him feel better.  But this wasn’t about self-expression.  It was about being screwed. 

“I’m going to write you a letter telling you my side of it,” Rupert said.

“I would appreciate that,” Miriam said. 

They were both exceedingly polite, grave, wary.

Sitting there after Rupert left, Miriam felt filled with pain.  It was excruciating to her.  She wondered if she would be able to go on.  She wondered if she was doing the right thing.  Wouldn’t it just be better to accept things, or go away?  Wouldn’t it be easier?  Or even just take the three courses and concentrate on her writing?  That was what she had always wanted, anyway — to write.  But how could she separate the life from the writing?  The writing had to come out of a self that she valued, respected, protected.  How could she write out of a life, a self, that she had allowed to be treated in such a sorry way?

But with a click on the remote control in her head, she switched channels. Of course the people who had made the hiring decision had thought they were making a good decision!  Rupert had explained their rationale, how the new man would bring new life to the program, an experimental perspective, and how the majority of the committee had felt they’d be extremely lucky to get him.  He came highly recommended.  And as for the teaching part, well, he was a good writer, so probably he’d be a good teacher. 

Miriam could see all that.  It made perfect sense, it was a valid position. She was always teaching point of view in her fiction classes, and here was a brilliant example of how the same story looked different depending upon who was telling it. She was sure Rupert had felt he was making the best decision for the program. As director of the program his opinion would carry the most weight – the committee would honor his recommendation, defer to his opinion.  She had expected him to stand up for her, to make it known how “enormously valuable” she was.  But he hadn’t done that. From his perspective, this wasn’t even about her.

Ah, there was the rub.  How could it not be “about her” when she was someone he knew, supposedly liked, respected, valued? She knew she was not supposed to take it so personally, but to her it was nothing but personal.  Rupert might pretend that it was all “objective,” or impersonal, but that was just an interpretation, not reality. That was guy talk.    

She had a gut level feeling that she wasn’t real to him in some way – as a person, as a human being.  He chose to fall back on the notion that he was being “professional,” as if that were some great value.  Objective.  As if there were such a thing!  He had said they weren’t supposed to take loyalty into account in a hiring decision.  Why not?  She didn’t expect him to hire her because they were friends; they weren’t friends.  But given that she was as qualified as Gary Provo, she did expect their association to count, for the human connection that came from working together all those years to matter.  But that was girl-think. She and Rupert were yelling at each other across a great gender divide.

On Betsy’s advice, Miriam began exploring the internal options for seeking some redress, meeting with people inside the university.  She was doing as much as she could on her own, to keep the attorney’s fees down. Betsy did not come cheap, and Ted, being experienced with how a lawyer’s time could add up, had told Betsy from the start what their ceiling was.  It was good to have a lawyer with you when you talked to your lawyer, Miriam thought. 

Miriam met with Jill Fredolf, the University’s EOAA officer.  Her job was to keep the university from being sued, so she might be interested in helping Miriam find an internal remedy.  

Jill was a tall, red haired woman in her fifties.  She had a serious, straightforward, almost sorrowful demeanor (all that sex discrimination, Miriam thought) but she was not without warmth or humor.  She seemed sympathetic to Miriam’s story, and asked the secretary to bring the file on the hiring to her office, because it would have had to pass through there.  There was, she discovered, a target goal of two women in the lecturer position at the university, so the committee had had to disregard that, something they were not supposed to do.  She read Miriam Rupert’s report giving the reason they had chosen a man over a qualified female candidate: “the committee’s preference, first of all, was for the high quality of his fiction – “truly masterful in craft and mature and generous in insight.”  In the space explaining why they had not hired the best female candidate, identified not by name but by number, Rupert had written that “her prose did not have the energy of Mr. X’s.”  Miriam and Jill looked at each other, raising their eyebrows in exactly the same way, as if they were a mirror image one of the other.

Miriam had not yet told Rupert whether she was going to accept the three courses for next year or not.  She hadn’t gotten the letter he’d promised, explaining his side of things, and she was trying to decide what to do.  Betsy had told her not to accept or turn down the courses until she had to, especially until she had met with Jane Steiner, the grievance officer, who was known as a strong feminist.  But on Tuesday, back in her office, she got a call from the assistant director of the creative writing program, wanting to know whether or not she was going to take the three courses offered.

“I can’t tell you until I’ve met with the grievance officer,” Miriam said.

In a few minutes Rupert came steaming into Miriam’s office.

“I hear you’re going to be talking to the grievance officer!  If you’re going to do that I’m certainly not going to put anything in writing.”  He towered above her.  Why doesn’t he just sit down, Miriam wondered tiredly.  She realized with a kind of slow amazement that he had expected all this to just go away.  Hearing the word “grievance,” realizing Miriam was talking to other people about the matter, people who might even see it her way, had raised his awareness a notch.  No doubt, Miriam thought, I have “hurt” him again. 

“If you insist on taking this through a grievance procedure,” he said, “things are going to come out that you’re not going to want to hear.”

Miriam sat at her desk.  The blood left her hands, her feet, her face; everything rushed to the core.  She felt in that core her true self, the self that knew better than her external self sitting in her desk chair, squelched down by the looming bulk of Rupert, what was going on.  “So now we have a threat?”

This clearly knocked him back a bit. He stood there, silent for a moment.  Miriam, observing, was fascinated by how they parried and thrust. He had stunned her into a moment of silence, then she had stunned him back.

“You’ve misunderstood me!” he exclaimed.  “It wasn’t a threat!  That wasn’t what I meant at all.”

But that was what it had felt like!  It had felt like – crude intimidation.  Things are going to come out that she wouldn’t want to hear…

What could he possibly mean?  It wasn’t as if he had any dirt on Miriam, no scandals, affairs, improprieties of any sort.  The only thing she could think of was that things would be said about her writing! 

“Rupert,” she said in a rather impassioned way, “people love my book and I don’t care what a few academicians think of it.”  As soon as she said it, it became true.  She didn’t care.  In fact, she’d be damned if she were going to let them denigrate her little book!

“Rupert,” she tried on a softer note.  “You must realize how vulnerable I am in this situation.  How isolated I am.  I need to talk to the grievance officer.  I have a grievance.  That’s the procedure.”

“Well,” he said grudgingly, “you have a right to do that, and no one can stop you.”

Miriam ached all over.  Another extremely difficult, painful scene.  

They agreed the next step was for her to talk to the chair of the English Department.  It was becoming clear that they could not talk to each other.

Miriam sat in Christopher Martin-Burke’s office, the chair of the English Department.  Christopher was another middle-aged Englishman.  He and Miriam had always had a pleasant enough relationship, though Miriam didn’t know him well.  Their main contact had come when Christopher had passed along to her a copy of a letter written by a couple saying they were funding a $1,000 scholarship for a graduate student in creative writing after seeing Miriam speak at the public library and being so favorably impressed.  That was in the good old days, when Miriam was so “enormously valuable” to the program.

Miriam reminded Christopher of her long history with the department, her good service and excellent reputation as a writer and teacher.  She’d never been a trouble maker.  Then she told him she planned to file a formal complaint with the University’s EOAA office.

Christopher listened quietly and seriously and said that he was basically sympathetic to her situation.  He said he saw it as an “adjunct” problem (“Right,” Ted said later, “similar to the galley slave problem.”) He had feared for years that some adjunct would begin to think the university owed him or her something. 

“Rupert told me that loyalty couldn’t be taken into account in a national search but it seems to me the opposite of loyalty has gone on here.  I was at a disadvantage because I was already here, available, known, an insider.”

“I’ve seen the insider passed over many times,” Christopher said.  “Familiarity breeds contempt” — as if that would make Miriam feel better.  “We can offer you the three courses plus some advising, which will increase your salary by $3,000.”

“I can’t accept that,” Miriam said.  “I’m making a formal request at this meeting for the exact same job for which you’ve hired Mr. Provo: three courses plus advising for two years, at the same pay.”

“Oh.  I see,” Christopher said. 

Miriam left him a copy of her EOAA complaint.  She had risen out of bed in a trance one morning at 5:00 am, and written it straight through, nine pages organized into the facts, background, and then taking the issues involved and addressing each one.  It had poured out of her with the speed and determination, the certainty of a locomotive.

She glanced back after she left Christopher’s office.  He was devouring her complaint, rather frantically she thought.  He couldn’t even wait until she was in the hall.  She felt some sense of satisfaction, that she had sent him scurrying so.

She walked over to the Administration building, and delivered the complaint to the EOAA office.  It was important to her to make a formal complaint.  Regardless of what came of it, she wanted it on record: I’ve been screwed!  Leaving the complaint with the secretary, she felt like Luther nailing the edicts to the church door.

The time had come for Miriam to read the story that Gary Provo had submitted.  In the downtown library she found the literary magazine where it had been published.  As she began reading, she felt light-headed and her palms began to sweat, the way they did when she was too near the edge of a high cliff or tall building.  Provo’s words seemed bathed in a golden light – the page itself took on a golden sheen. She thought she heard music, a soundtrack magnifying the moment with the poignant strains of violins. 

It was a great story!  The best story she had ever read!  No, that wasn’t true. But it was good.  Really good.  She felt faint. Provo really was a better writer than she…The committee had been right to hire him over her.  No matter that she was a good writer, a good teacher – this one story knocked her whole life to smithereens.

She fled to Ted’s office, which luckily was nearby.

“It’s over,” she said to him, sitting across from him at his desk, as if she were a client, which in a way, she was.  “I give up.  Uncle.  Provo is a better writer than me.”  She felt brave and hopeless.  It seemed important to tell the truth, not to lie to herself, no matter how it hurt.  She believed in honesty, after all.

“Well, you’re not exactly chopped liver yourself,” Ted said.  “Good, better, best.  You’re always telling me that these kinds of judgments are subjective.  Maybe someone else would like your writing better.”

Miriam listened.  She was regaining her equilibrium.  She remembered how strange she had felt reading his story, as if she might levitate, as if her worst fears had come true.  (Years later, she would reread the story, and admire it but also wonder at her earlier reaction – overreaction — how she was so willing to believe his writing was so superior to hers – as if God himself had penned it).

“You see what’s happening here,” Ted said.  “You’re buying into their position, their way of seeing things. X is so much better than Y.  Based on one story?  They give him a two-year job based on one story and no teaching experience?”

“He’s taught one year,” Miriam said. 

“Yeah, and you’ve taught umpteen and have a great reputation as a teacher.  And people did love your book, Miriam.  Just because that committee went for this one story of  Provo’s isn’t any reason to throw your whole career overboard.  Who you are.  What you’ve done.  What you stand for.”

“I don’t know,” Miriam said.  “It’s like I have two minds in my head.  One is mine — what I think of as my own — and that mind is screaming at me that I’ve been screwed, it makes the same arguments you’ve been making, that I can’t let them get away with this, that I have to stand up for myself.  Because if I don’t who else will?  And if I don’t stand up for myself, they get to define me.  They get to say who I am, what kind of writer I am, and somehow that will get incorporated into who I am — if I don’t say ‘No.’  No. Like I’m holding my hand out to stop them, to hold them off, to keep them from… hurting me… in some crucial way….

 “But I also have this other mind and it’s like it’s theirs, I see things their way, I see Provo is a better writer and it doesn’t matter about teaching, he’s hot and exotic and not from here.  So he brings new things to the program and that’s what they want.  And they get to say!  They’re the committee.  I’m supposed to accept their decision gracefully, even if I lose.  I know the values they’re operating under — I know them so well, it’s not as if I haven’t been around academia all these years.”

“Look, this is typical in lawsuits,” Ted said.  “You go up and down.  You have moments of doubt.  You see the other side.  Maybe you lose your nerve.  It doesn’t seem worth it.  But then you buck up.  You go back to what you believe.  What’s important to you.  And in this situation, even if you lose, it’s important that you stand up for yourself.  That you not let them run over you.”

“Okay,” Miriam said. 

Still, she had her doubts.  Oh the luxury of being right, of no ambiguity!  Self-righteously right.  That must be the best position to be in in the world!  To be screwed, unambiguously.  To be a clear-cut victim, to have black and white enemies, villains, sexist bad guys.  But Miriam did not have that luxury.  What she had was a position, a need, a hurt ego, pain and anger and… no small thing… the law.  Maybe it wasn’t sex discrimination — not blatant pure-tee out and out sex discrimination.  She doubted that it was.  Rather, it was subtle and hard to prove; maybe the men on the committee did subconsciously gravitate toward the male, relate and identify more with his fictional persona, a man, than Miriam’s, a woman.  That wasn’t such a stretch.  And the whole matter of judgment in writing!  She hated that.  Who was “best.”  And what about teaching?  Rupert claimed to care about teaching — he had a good reputation as a teacher himself — and then he completely disregarded that in terms of speaking up for Miriam. But Rupert was the quintessential company man.   And of course Rupert had all the power.  A tenured professor, director of the program, he had the system behind him — and Miriam didn’t stand a chance.  Well, she didn’t care.  She was going to take a stand, that was all.  She was going to say, Excuse me, there’s another point of view here, another way of looking at this. I beg to differ.  Just wanted you to know. 

A few weeks before the end of the school year,  Miriam was notified that she was one of four winners of a distinguished teaching award at the university.  The graduate students with whom she had worked had nominated her.  She was the only woman, and the only adjunct.  Rupert had written a letter of support (this before they locked horns) saying he had only the highest praise for Miriam as a writer, teacher, and colleague.  “I have the utmost trust in her abilities, and only wish we had a permanent position for her here.”  He closed with “I admire and value her enormously.”  The award ceremony was bittersweet for Miriam.  She was being honored for distinguished teaching, and yet she would not be back next year.  In her acceptance speech she thanked the students who had nominated her and written letters on her behalf.  She ended by saying that she thought teaching as a value was always vulnerable at a university that put too much emphasis on research and publication, and that she hoped the university would keep saying in various ways and through various acts that excellence in teaching actually counts.

(Oh how, oh how did I get into this situation! she couldn’t help thinking.  I’ve become my own worst nightmare – a self-righteous wounded pontificator!)

But if she hadn’t stood up for herself there would have been this bitter pit inside her, hard and scored like a peach pit.

And then the year was over, and Miriam had to pack up her books and files and move out of her office.  Her complaint was still in process, with no resolution in sight.  It was hard, walking down the steps of the English Department building for the last time.  The university had meant so much to her, it had been a big part of her life for many years, she felt she belonged there.  But it was not to be.

In July a letter came, informing her that while this was no admission of guilt, the English Department was offering her a one year contract for three courses and advising for the same salary that Mr. Provo was receiving.  She had “won,” sort of.  

Back she went to the university, back up the steps to the English Department in the fall, to teach her courses, and to sit around a conference table with Rupert and Gary Provo and the other creative writing faculty.  It was uncomfortable, sure, but Miriam needed the money, and she had, after all, really wanted this job. She thought she deserved it.

She and Rupert maintained a civil if strained relationship.  But basically they weren’t speaking to one another – not beyond what was necessary business.  They were both invariably polite and professional during these interchanges.  But no small talk, no greetings in the hall.

End of year.  Packing up again.  But then a surprise.  She had been looking around for another job, without much hope, and suddenly she was hired for the coming year to teach at a prestigious private college nearby.  She’d be paid twice what she had been paid as an adjunct at the university, receive benefits, and even have a title: Distinguished Visiting Professor.  It was only for a year (though eventually she taught there three years) but it made leaving the university a lot easier.  The chair of that English Department was another middle-aged man, only Irish this time instead of English.  His wife had loved Miriam’s book, as it turned out, and had prevailed on him to hire her.

Coda

As it happened, two years later, Miriam and Ted were flying to England when who should appear coming down the aisle of the 747 but Rupert Jones.  He was flying to England too, on the same flight.  Well, it was a big plane and once he was past their row, it shouldn’t be a problem.  Miriam kept her eyes in her book.  She and Rupert hadn’t spoken since Miriam had left the university, even when they were at the same parties or readings.  They had parted without ever making up.  Only what was this?  Rupert had the seat directly behind them!  Isn’t life entertaining!  Doesn’t life have a great sense of humor! He and Miriam ignored each other for the eight hour flight, as if they were strangers, which they now were.  But in Gatwick, while they were waiting for their luggage, Miriam made herself go over to Rupert and speak to him.  Why not at least try to be an adult?  They were able to chat amiably about their trips. Finally Miriam indicated she’d better get back to help Ted with the luggage.  “Thank you for speaking to me,” Rupert said.  Miriam was taken aback.  It occurred to her that he had been afraid to speak to her first.  Why was that?  He was afraid she might yell at him. “Thank you for not yelling at me,” he had said a long time ago, when he had first called to tell her they had hired someone else.  And of course she had ended up yelling at him, in a way.  He must think women are dangerous creatures about to blow up all the time, she thought in amazement.  

“Have a good trip, Rupert,” Miriam said.  And she meant it.  In that moment she forgave him, and she forgave herself.  When she walked away, she felt lighter than she had in a long time.

Miriam Batson is sitting at her desk in Minneapolis, looking out the window. Her husband Ted has left for work and she has the morning to herself, to write, before she goes off to the university to teach in the afternoon. Her study is on the second floor, and her view is of the parking lot of the grammar school across the street. The parking lot is covered with snow and cars are parked on the snow. It is a January day, mild and sunny.

While she looks out the window at the view she sees every day, she is thinking of Edith. Ee-de-ith, they always pronounced it, as if it had three syllables. When Miriam spoke to her folks in South Carolina over the Christmas holidays, they told her Edith was doing poorly — fluid around the heart. She had called a few days before Christmas, in the hullabaloo of shopping, wrapping, mailing – because she hadn’t sent any money to Edith in time to reach her by Christmas. She wanted her parents to take twenty dollars in a card over to her; then she’d send them the money.

“Oh we were over there just this morning,” her father said over long distance.

“I took her a gown with your name on it and slippers from me, and we gave her twenty dollars,” her mother said. In their old age twenty dollars counts to her parents.

“How was she?” Miriam asked, always frightened of what she’d hear. She felt, not for the first time, very far away. That’s when they told her Edith had fluid around her heart.

When Miriam hung up — after asking her parents to take twenty dollars from her over anyway and she’d put a check in the mail to them that day — she felt the kind of helpless feeling she gets when any of her people are in trouble. In her younger days, she had entertained fantasies of rescuing Edith from a life of old age and poverty — the life she was leading now. She imagined that one day Edith would come and live with her, wherever that might be. She hadn’t realized then that she would grow up and leave the South, that her visits home would be infrequent, and that she would not be rich. She sometimes thought of tithing a part of her income to Edith. A little extra money each month would surely help out. But she never did. She was afraid of starting something she couldn’t keep up, and of course there were always things she wanted to buy for herself.

***

Today she sits and looks out her window, and the trees are bare. It’s another day, another season, another year. The school children are inside, and the streets are quiet, covered with yellow leaves, which the city will sweep up soon, to prepare for the snow.

Edith came to work for them when Miriam was thirteen, in l960. When she asked her mother how they found her, her mother couldn’t recall. There was a network of sorts, white women passing around the names of black women who would work for them, be their maids. That was a long time ago, before Miriam knew the word “Black.” They used the word “colored” and considered it a kindness. They had always had maids, a string of them, essential to their existence it seemed. Neva was the first Miriam “remembers.” There is an old home movie of them visiting Miriam’s grandmother in Texas, and there Miriam is, one year old, learning to walk. There is Neva, who accompanied them on the trip to help their mother take care of Linda and Miriam. It is towards Neva Miriam stumbles. Neva, a handsome young black woman in a starched white uniform in the hot Texas sun, holding out her arms to Miriam.

Next came Bessie, who left them suddenly, to go up North. Or is that just her imagination? It seems there came a day when Bessie didn’t come to work, and when her mother called — or did she drive to Bessie’s house? — someone told them she had left, gone up North. Without telling them. Her mother hurt and angry. But Miriam was so young, and it is too nebulous a memory, like a dream that dissipates in the telling. What Miriam does remember is a big powerful woman, Bessie, in the red room, ironing. It is peaceful, a sunny weekday morning, and there is a string of rock candy growing in a glass. Bessie ironing and ironing, her forearms muscled and hard like a man’s.

Then there was Alma, a teenaged girl with long fingernails painted a shocking red. They were used to older maids, motherly types, and Alma was so young, dangerous, they sensed, for might she not have the same desires that they had, to go outside whenever they liked, to be free of work, to play? Miriam and Linda wanted to touch her painted fingernails, so long they curled over at the tips, and Alma let them. But those nails were unsettling, signaling as they did that maybe Alma didn’t want to be a maid, didn’t want to spend her days washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning.

After Alma came Carolyn, who worked for them many years. She didn’t live too far away, but of course her house was outside their neighborhood, behind a mill, in a field, a small white frame. She had children of her own, whom they’d see when their mother took her home. Linda and Miriam would eye those children, and they’d eye them back, curiously, but from a great distance. They’d ask Carolyn about them, but not too much. They didn’t want to know too much. They had those kids’ mama all day and their own mama too, a wealth of mamas, too many they knew. So they didn’t ask too much.

Edith came into their lives after Carolyn. Why did Carolyn leave? Miriam thinks she got a better job, not as a maid, but somewhere else. Where? Miriam doesn’t know. Carolyn and her mother kept in touch for awhile, then lost touch.

Edith didn’t have a family — perfect, from their point of view. They could be her family, she could give and give to them. She’d come in the basement door in some simple cotton house dress, and the first thing she’d do was change into her uniform, white with a blue or black apron, or, on special occasions, such as dinner parties, black with a white apron. She wore bedroom slippers at work, the backs crunched down so she could slip her feet in easily, those feet that hurt her with their hard knobs and bunions. Maids stood on their feet most of the day. It was only an infrequent job, like polishing the silver, that accommodated sitting down. She must have been middle-aged when she came to them. She was neither young nor old, and like Miriam’s own parents, she stayed that way for years.

Her parents were the kind of people who were good to their maids. They had nice manners where maids were concerned. But certain conventions had to be observed, were observed, without questioning. Edith never ate with them. She ate after they did, in the kitchen, and there were separate dishes for colored people, for Edith and Van, who did the yard. When they drove her home, she sat in the back seat, never up front with Miriam’s mother, and usually Miriam rode in the back too. When she got old enough to drive, Miriam always asked Edith to sit in the front seat with her (and she did, but did that make it Edith’s choice?). It was the mid-sixties then, and things were starting to change. Miriam would take her home to Sycamore Street, to her little house, her mother’s big Buick taking up the whole narrow, rutted street, and then she’d drive home, back to that other world.

***

Now it is spring. April, and because it has been a mild winter, the snow is all gone. There are feathery buds on the elms, and the children play in the schoolyard, sending up a din of noise, a long sustained note of exuberant joy.

Miriam’s mother called this morning with the news that Edith had died.

She had been sick with heart trouble for about seven weeks; in the hospital the last two. Miriam’s family didn’t even know it.

For the last several years Edith only worked for her parents on special occasions. Her parents could no longer afford to pay her regularly. Her parents kept in touch with Edith through Willie Mae, her best friend, unrelated family who lived down the street. Since Edith didn’t have a phone, they’d call Willie Mae whenever they wanted to reach Edith. It was Willie Mae who had called to let Miriam’s mother know.

After her parents could no longer hire Edith, Miriam always went over to see her whenever she was home. She’d call Willie Mae to let Edith know she was coming, and then she’d drive over to her place. They’d stand in her red dirt yard to visit, or lean against Miriam’s mother’s car. Once Miriam sat on Edith’s open porch; She never went inside Edith’s home. Miriam took her picture that day: Edith on the porch, sitting next to a huge Christmas candle, an outdoor yard decoration Miriam’s folks no longer wanted. That day Edith’s insurance agent came, a young white man, maybe ten years younger than Miriam, and while Edith went inside, he and Miriam sat on the bench on the shabby porch, and made polite, Southern conversation. Then Edith came out with her seventeen dollars, crumbled up bills in her old red wallet, and paid him, while he praised “Miss Edith” for being such a fine person and Miriam chimed in. That was the way they talked.

***

Miriam picks up Willie Mae and Buster on a Monday morning in July. She tries to get a good look at Edith’s house as she creeps by and she tries to remember if Edith ever lived in any other house in all those years they knew her. Did she live in this little shanty when she first came to work for them? Miriam forces herself to look at it. She’s been taught from an early age not to embarrass herself and others by seeing what is obviously there. But now she looks and sees. It is a frame rental house, the wood a faint blue, the simplest of structures. There is a worn path across the red dirt yard and rickety wooden steps lead up to the porch. Miriam would stop the car here and wait for Edith. She was usually ready, watching, but if she didn’t come right out, Miriam would go knock on the door. She’d never honk. She watched Edith come down those precarious stairs many times. Nothing to hold on to.

The last time she saw Edith she took her out to lunch. Miriam was home from Minnesota and she wanted to treat her, the way she would a favorite aunt or grandmother. She picked Edith up a little after one, and she was nervous. Miriam had never taken a black person out to lunch before in Greenville, where she grew up, where she remembered riding in the back of the bus as a child with Bessie and then Carolyn when they’d take Linda and Miriam to town. In her mind it was still l954 in South Carolina. She had grown up and gone away, time had passed, progress had been made, but Miriam couldn’t imagine that anything had changed in her hometown. She knew the rules so well.

But there they were, Edith and Miriam, going out to lunch. Such a thing wouldn’t have been possible when Miriam was growing up. It still surprised her that in Greenville Blacks had civil rights. Black people went about town the same as any white person, they ate in the same restaurants, they went to the mall, they had good jobs, their pictures were in the newspapers, they were anchors on the ten o’clock news. Even though Miriam took such things for granted up North, in Greenville it still surprised her. It always frightened her in that first instant to see black people where they never used to be. She was afraid for them.

Lost in her own hometown, which had grown and changed so much since Miriam lived there, she drove downtown, from habit and because she could find it. So many businesses had moved to the mall that downtown was now almost abandoned. Main Street, where her father had once had his radio and t.v. store, where the whole life of their town once thrived (white on one end, black on the other) might have been the Main Street of a town she never knew. She parked in front of what used to be the best department store, Ivey’s. The space had been subdivided into a number of little fledging stores, one of them a delicatessen. It was deserted inside and Miriam felt relief. She worried that Edith might feel ill at ease, since she herself did. But Edith seemed less self-conscious than Miriam. She had a demure way, passive and acquiescing, and yet, underneath, there was desire. Edith wanted things. Miriam knew it, had always known it. She had learned to read the signs, interpret, extrapolate. Edith wanted to be treated.

She ordered a roast beef sandwich. Miriam had only seen her eat at their house, and when they had beef, it was cooked well done, the way her parents, country people like Edith, liked it. The roast beef piled high on a French bun the white girl behind the counter handed Edith in a plastic basket was a shocking raw pink. But Edith took the basket. She was not about to refuse what was offered.

They sat at a little wrought iron table in ice cream parlor chairs. Edith had never been big, but now in old age she had shrunk. Gravity and hard work had forced her head down into her shoulders, which were small, but her breasts were still large. She had skinny bare legs and no hips to speak of. She was utterly familiar to Miriam, and yet unknowable somehow, as she watched her gnarled fingers pick up that big sandwich. Her eyes, which bulged as if from a goiter condition, never stayed on Miriam’s for more than an instant, as if she were shy or afraid to look a white person directly in the face (but it’s me, Miriam longed to say). They fell into one of their usual conversations, with Miriam soliciting information about Edith’s welfare: did she have enough coal for the winter, was she getting her food stamps, how was Willie Mae? Edith was a willing, even verbose talker, though hard to understand, speaking a kind of Southern black rural dialect that Miriam’s ear had grown unaccustomed to. The lunch seemed to be a success, and yet as they sat there, Miriam felt troubled. Why can’t we just be ourselves! something in her cried out, but of course that’s exactly what they were being, exactly who they couldn’t help but be.

As they were eating, two other people came in, a young white woman and a young black woman, in their twenties, on a coffee break. They must have worked together, perhaps at the Social Security office next door. Miriam felt shocked to see them, black and white together so casually in her hometown, and then she understood that some things had changed.

Those women were operating under a new order, and Edith and she, try as they might, belonged to the old order. They were the dinosaurs, the damaged ones, two about-to-become extinct creatures from another time, a different era. The world had changed for the better. But not in time for them.

***

Miriam pulls up in front of the house that she thinks is Willie Mae’s. She’s described it to Miriam, the one with the screen porch. This time Miriam doesn’t look, doesn’t stare. She pretends that where poor black people live is perfectly normal and perfectly fine, instead of the shame and crime that it is. She jumps out of the car and goes to the steps. The porch door is open. An old man is reading the paper on the porch and he hardly glances at her. Further into the house she sees a woman who she knows is Willie Mae. In her navy blue skirt and plain white blouse, she looks strong and stoic, a person of character. She calls to Miriam that she’ll be there in a moment, and Miriam nervously asks the man on the porch if he is Buster.

“Naw, Buster’s in there.”

Miriam sees another man, old, white haired, sitting at the table just inside, with a mug of coffee. He seems in no hurry, or maybe he’s having a hard time getting going. He nods and speaks to her.

Miriam knew from Edith that a man, Buster, lived with her, but the nature of this relationship was never made explicit. Was he a boyfriend or a roomer? Miriam wasn’t sure. She couldn’t tell. How little she knew of Edith’s life! All those years she came to their house, where she saw so much, but then she’d disappear, back into her own life, as if going through a door, shutting it behind her.

Miriam hangs at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Willie Mae. She has brought Willie Mae something, a frozen cooked turkey breast. Miriam hands it to her, stuttering out some instructions on how to defrost it. Willie Mae carries it back into the house, and Miriam hurries to the car, to open the doors for her and Buster.

Buster sits in the back, Willie Mae in the front. Buster is wearing a bright yellow acrylic sweater, and his eyes are red and rheumy, those of a sick man. Beside Miriam Willie Mae is very handsome, solemn, her white hair pulled back in a bun, a scattering of black moles on the milk chocolate of her sculpted face. When she glances over at Miriam, her eyes move quickly and searchingly, as if to assess. She sits straight in the seat, her hands on her arthritic knees. Miriam asks her if she got some rest over the weekend; she had sounded so tired on the phone. She tells Miriam she had to work two jobs on Friday, because one of the women she works for was fixing to go out of town and needed help getting her clothes ready. She had to stand on her feet all day, and she has trouble with them, swelling and aching like they do.

Miriam makes conversation, but what she really wants to know is How did Edith die? She wants to know. Finally she asks Willie Mae, and she tells Miriam, gravely and in sorrow, how Edith got sick and how her doctor wasn’t doing a thing for her, so Buster took her to his doctor, and he put her right in the hospital.

From the back seat Buster says, “I told him she was my sister.”

She had a cardiac arrest in the hospital, but they were able to get her heart started again, and then about two weeks later, she had another attack, and they couldn’t save her. “I hated to see her with all those tubes stuck in her,” Willie Mae says sorrowfully.

Miriam thinks about all those years she knew Edith, all the times she would come home from school and Edith would be there. Then she went away to college and then graduate school, and every time she came home she’d hear some noise from the basement in the early morning, the opening of the screen door or the start of the washing machine, and she’d rise out of sleep, throw on her robe and go down to see Edith. They’d embrace, laughing and talking. What would they say to one another? They’d use whatever words were at hand. It didn’t matter what was said. It was always that moment, the reunion.

Buster gives her directions out of town. She asks questions, hesitantly, about Edith. But if she doesn’t ask, how will she ever know? She gets the story of how Willie Mae went to live in Anderson County when she was a girl and stayed with Edith’s mother. Nothing is explained, elaborated on. Willie Mae answers, but she doesn’t tell much. Miriam hungrily asks about Edith’s mother: was she nice, a good woman? Oh she was nice all right. Did you know her father? I knew him. And you, Buster?

“I lived over in Anderson County too, we all went to the same church. This is her old stomping ground,” Buster offers as they glide through the quiet countryside.

Miriam wants to know more about Edith, more about her life and death, but she finds it hard to ask questions. She doesn’t know how much is too much; she doesn’t want to press or offend Willie Mae, who is, after all, doing her a favor. Miriam is afraid Willie Mae is accommodating her, as she has had to accommodate white people all her life. She has answered their questions, when she has had to, but she has kept much back. She won’t let Miriam in. Miriam asks her how many children she has: five, and twelve grandchildren, and she doesn’t know how many great grandchildren. She allows a dry laugh. Miriam asks her about her daughter, Diane, the one who has the good job in a corporation.

The country they are passing through was probably cotton fields at one time. Miriam can’t help but think of the history of this land. When she traced her family tree, she saw that there had been slave owners in their family. She had wanted to believe that her great grandfathers, who fought in the Civil War, were just small-time upcountry farmers, which they were, who wouldn’t have been able to afford slaves.

Now there is nothing planted here, just open space, broken by an occasional suburban brick house or doublewide trailer set far back from the road. Here and there an old wooden barn about to fall down. Miriam tries to see the land as Edith knew it as a girl, and she can’t think it’s much changed. They turn left off County Road 8 at Brown’s Country Store, and the road winds into woods, they rise and fall. This is the landscape Miriam loves best in all the world — even though it breaks her heart — this little piece of the upper Piedmont of South Carolina.

Then they are at the church, only Miriam is going too fast to make the sudden turn, so she drives on aways until she can turn around. Buster watches for her out the back window, but there is no other car on this road. When they get back to the church, Miriam is disappointed to see there is a chain across the drive, barring their way. She doesn’t know what this barrier will mean to their journey. But Willie Mae says they can walk. Buster will wait in the car. Later today he’ll go in for dialysis. Miriam looks back at him anxiously. She lets down the electric window.

From the backseat she gets the artificial arrangement of flowers her parents made; it has ridden upright and secure in a yellow plastic dishpan.

Up ahead is a red brick church with a modest white steeple. It is a newer looking church, maybe from the seventies, and Willie Mae tells Miriam, as they slowly walk up the asphalt drive, that they used to come to church here, in a different building, the one before this one. Behind the church is the graveyard. It has not been kept up. At the sight of it, Willie Mae sighs. She looks around. They stand at the edge of the burial ground, with its neglected air of past grief and parting, of rest and oblivion. There are old gravestones and wreaths gone to ruin, their silk bows paled by the elements, some of them toppled over. It is a small graveyard, edged on one side by forest, but through a few thin pines Miriam sees what seems to be a pasture, and maybe someone’s house.

“I hope I can remember…” Willie Mae says, stepping forward into the tall grass, looking around. “Seems it was over this-a-way….”

Miriam’s heart is in a clutch. What if they can’t find it? She hadn’t counted on this.

She looks around for a fresh grave, for evidence of a burial last spring, and suddenly her eyes find it, a raw red mound, small and obscure, camouflaged by dead flowers gone the color of fall. There is a little placard, close to the ground, a piece of typed paper protected by plastic, in a small rectangular metal frame: “Edith Earl”. She feels shocked. Edith doesn’t even have a gravestone. But of course Willie Mae said…. Still, Miriam reels from this discovery. No gravestone. Her place marked by something as insubstantial as paper, plastic, aluminum.

Willie Mae joins her. They stand for a moment looking at Edith’s grave. The arrangements from the funeral are in a collapse of decay. No one has been here since the burial. Silently, they begin to pull off the old dead wreaths with their long rusted metal legs. Miriam looks around and at the far end of the cemetery is a big pile of other old wreaths. She starts carrying the arrangements over to it, stepping through tangled vines and high grass, trying not to tread on any of the graves. She makes several trips, and then Willie Mae begins, tentatively, to pull out a long vine from the top of the grave. They haven’t brought gloves, but they pull up all the other weeds, which come up easily, willingly, from the soft earth.

Mostly they work in silence. Any conversation has to do with their task at hand. They know so well what to do it doesn’t have to be discussed. They will clear Edith’s grave, they will put things in order, they will secure the new arrangement. But the red dirt is too soft, the coat hangers go in with no resistance, and won’t anchor the flowers. Willie Mae and Miriam consider this situation. They begin to look around.

Miriam retrieves one of the old arrangements from the rubbish pile. Willie Mae takes it in her strong hands and bends the metal legs until they come apart. Together they are able to push the metal sticks through the arrangement down deep into the grave.

They stand then for a few moments in silence. To control her emotions, Miriam concentrates on the peacefulness of the countryside, the quiet of the graveyard. Beside her Willie Mae has her head bowed. After a little while, they start the walk back to the car.

Buster has the back door open. The car smells of cigarette smoke. He and Willie Mae exchange a few comments while Miriam backs out of the church drive and starts down the road. Then Buster says, “I just know Edith was smiling when she saw you coming. ‘Here comes my Miriam,’ she’d be saying. She sure did love you.”

“Yes she did,” Willie Mae echoes.

These words, so full of kindness, crack open Miriam’s heart.

Willie Mae and Buster allow her her grief. She struggles to compose herself, to drive the car. She fumbles for a Kleenex in her purse and wipes her eyes.

But Miriam can’t stop crying. She hardly knows what she’s crying for, it all seems so big, so deep. It’s Edith, her death, her life, it’s the whole thing, the whole South, the whole horrible history of it, the whole…the….

For a few moments she weeps as if she’ll never stop.

Then she is over it. The crying part, though not the sorrow.

Lost Lake

Miriam Batson’s mother had been living in the nursing home exactly one year in August.  For the first six months Miriam wasn’t sure either of them would live through it. Not that her mother was failing physically, dying (any more than usual).  Her mother was fine, physically, if you consider not being able to walk or remember “fine.”  The only medications she took were vitamins, an aspirin a day, and St. John’s Wort (Miriam’s suggestion — she began taking it too).  And the nurses there were even able to “train her bowels,” as they put it, conjuring up some strange images in Miriam’s mind.

When her mother first moved into Jackson-Wilkens, Miriam was careful never to use the term “nursing home,” always referring to it as “the residence” or “where you live now.”  But a week or so after she moved in, when Miriam and her husband Ted were visiting, Ted had “blurted out” (in Miriam’s opinion), “So how do you like the nursing home so far?”  Miriam had sent him such a blistering look that later they had remarked on it and laughed.  “I knew I was in trouble,” Ted said, “I just didn’t know why.”  Miriam’s mother seemed unfazed, though even with the ice broken in that way, Miriam herself continued to be unable to use the term around her mother.  Until, that is, one day about a month later, when her mother was complaining per usual about how she didn’t have any help, how she didn’t know how much longer she could go on living on her own, and Miriam, exasperated, had asked, “Well, Mother, where do you think you should be living?” Her mother had piped right up, “In a nursing home.”  Miriam, astonished and abashed, had exclaimed before she could stop herself, “But Mother, this is a nursing home!”  Then she had stammered, “a really nice one, of course, a really NICE nursing home….”  When her mother didn’t object, it occurred to Miriam that maybe she was actually relieved.  It was Miriam who couldn’t take it. 

The social worker at Jackson-Wilkens had told her that the adjustment to the nursing home could take from three months to a year, and of course she had been talking about Miriam’s mother’s adjustment.  But Miriam came to see that her own adjustment was going to take that long, if not forever.  Where her mother’s care was concerned, she was either in a rage or depressed or as grateful as a dog who prostrates itself in a servile position to show how unworthy it is, how needy, how unbearably happy to have a kind word or deed.  Miriam supposed she passed for normal, didn’t appear to be a mental case coming or going (often), but she seethed with emotions, caught up in micromanaging everything from her mother’s laundry (she did it herself after the residence laundry lost two pajama bottoms) to her mother’s so-called social life (taking her mother to “wine” and cheese, and conversing animatedly with anyone who could still hear and even those who couldn’t).  She had dreams at night of springing her mother from the nursing home, as if it were a prison to which her mother had been sentenced for life, which, in a way, she had.

 No, her mother wasn’t about to die, and neither was Miriam, except in some subtle hard-to-explain ways.  But it was a hard adjustment for them both.  At first, for the first few weeks, her mother was really angry, angry and confused.  She still had Miriam’s telephone number at that point (and three phones in her room, so she wouldn’t have to get up to answer the phone and risk falling) and she’d call up in the evening, “sundowning” the nurses called it, irrational, unreasonable, blaming, accusing, really ugly:  “Why have you done this to me?  You wouldn’t treat a dog this way!  Come get me!  Take me home!  I can’t believe you’d do this to your own mother!” and so on and so forth.  Hard to listen to.  Hard to argue with.  And of course the next day she wouldn’t remember.

But then things began gradually to get better.  Miriam got to know the nurses and aides, began to trust them to do their jobs.  The routine and regularity of the nursing home was good for her mother, though she never knew, day to day, what would happen.  Someone took her to her meals three times a day every day in her wheelchair, and while her mother could not remember this, Miriam could, which counted for something.  And by summer her mother seemed content more days than not and on an even keel most of the time.  She even began to participate a bit in activities, which was something she had balked at for the first many months.  A couple of times that summer Miriam would call up and her mother would be as happy and breathless as an excited girl: “You’ll never guess where I’ve been today!”

“Where?”

“Spartanburg.  Those girls I know in the Garden Club invited me to go.  We saw the most beautiful gardens and all those beautiful homes around Spartanburg I had never seen and then we had lunch out.”  Her mother was laughing, pleased with herself. 

Nevermind that she lived in Minneapolis now, and that Spartanburg was in South Carolina, about thirty miles from Greenville where her mother had lived her adult life, until Miriam moved her to Minnesota.  Miriam had gotten very good at extrapolating what she thought of as “the truth” (though who’s to say: Maybe her mother had been to Spartanburg that day).  The recreation therapists had taken a busload of residents for a ride, probably around the chain of lakes in Minneapolis.  Her mother had translated this into the garden club, Spartanburg, lunch out — though Miriam was almost 100% sure they had returned to the nursing home in time for lunch. 

“What a wonderful thing to do!” Miriam would exclaim.

It was really a very beautiful summer and many afternoons Miriam would wheel her mother outside, to the front patio of the nursing home, which had a wrought iron picnic table with an umbrella, and some comfortable patio chairs.  She’d sit with her, enjoying the day: temperature in the 80’s and low humidity, fresh air, the comings and goings of people from the nursing home, the big trees in front, green grass.  Special treats would be to see a crow land on the lawn, or a plane pass over.  Her mother was quite attuned to the sound of airplanes, which Miriam had grown acclimated to and hardly noticed.  But her mother, as soon as she heard the far-away roar, would begin scanning the skies, hoping to see the plane.  Those were pleasant times, peaceful times, and Miriam would marvel that they had landed safely themselves, after a long, bumpy, difficult flight.

Perhaps it was summer itself that prompted thoughts of getting away.   Often when they sat out front on a gorgeous summer day, her mother would ask Miriam, “When are we going to the mountains?”  One didn’t really go to mountains in Minnesota, but that was beside the point.  Miriam understood what her mother was saying: When are we going on vacation?  When, her mother was asking, are we going to indulge in the pleasure of plans and anticipation; when do we get to pack; when do we load the car and take off; when do we get to a place that is simpler, a cabin where all we have to do is sweep; when are we going to kick back and eat pimento cheese sandwiches in our bathing suits for lunch; when are we going to stay up late playing bridge; when are we going to get away from our regular, humdrum burdened lives and have some fun?  When are we going to the mountains?

Good question!  Miriam had begun asking herself the same thing.  She and Ted hadn’t had a vacation themselves that summer.  Ted was a solo attorney so there was no one to look after his practice when he was out of town, Miriam was teaching part of the time, and of course there was Miriam’s mother to look after.  Miriam found her thoughts roaming to former summer vacations, especially those when she was a child.  She felt, grumpily, that to be grown up was to forgo pleasure in some fundamental way.  She had been thinking all summer how little joy her life contained.  Joy, when she was a child, had come from what she thought of as “the elements”: sun, water, sand.  She remembered being surrounded by people all the time, her parents, sister, cousins, aunts and uncles, and honorary aunts and uncles.  The past seemed bright, crowded, exciting, just one wonderful treat after another.

Of course that wasn’t right.  Her childhood and youth weren’t completely fun.  Think about school.  Think about practicing piano.  Think about avoiding her mother’s displeasure.  Think about loneliness, excruciating shyness, boredom, self-consciousness, unconsciousness.

Still, they had had their share of good times, especially on summer vacations.  Her parents would rent a house at Myrtle Beach for a week every summer and boy was that fun.  How the four of them — her father, mother, Linda and Miriam — had loved going to the beach: driving through South Carolina all the way to the edge, the excitement rising, and then that first glimpse of the ocean, the first bare step onto hot sand, the first shock of waves against your skin, the bright hot sun… And then standing around on a balmy evening with a lot of other vacationers in Bermuda shorts waiting to get into a pier restaurant to eat fried seafood, nothing more on their minds than whether they might walk down the boardwalk later for an ice cream cone and a ride on the Ferris wheel.  

And then there were all the cabins. 

The first cabins Miriam could remember them staying in were state-owned ones at Table Rock State Park, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains about 45 miles north of Greenville.  The cabins were simple log structures with bare wooden floors covered with rag rugs, dark brown as if a part of the woods themselves, surrounded by pine trees.  They were up the hill from Table Rock lake, and Miriam remembered walking down the asphalt road with her parents and sister, Linda, to get to the sandy beach and swimming area.  How white their father looked in his swimming trunks, how strange to see him bobbing in the water.  Their mother was fleshier in her black one-piece, her hair revealing red tints in the sun, her fair skin freckling all over. She’d spread a blanket for them on the sand.  There was money for hot dogs and fries at the concession stand, for moon pies and chocolate covered ice cream on a stick.   

There was also “going to the mountains” — the Smokies or Gatlinburg or Pisgha.  Fall leaves every year, incredible, and in the winter, “the boys” — her father and his brother Perry — always wanted to drive up to the mountains to see some snow if they could.  And in the spring there were the rhododendrons and mountain laurel.   They’d stay in a motel or cabin.      

So Miriam knew what her mother was after when she asked when were they going to the mountains.  It was the natural, the necessary thing to get away.  She knew how much her mother would love to go to a cabin.  She wanted to go there with her, to try to recapture some of that pleasure that seemed just out of reach. 

Last summer she and Linda had tried to take their mother to a cabin up on Lake Superior.  Miriam had researched handicapped accessible places, and had rented a log cabin overlooking Lake Superior for three days at the end of August, when Linda would be in Minnesota.  But right before they were to leave, her mother had fallen several times, hurting her leg and bruising her whole face.  Those falls precipitated the move out of assisted living into the nursing home last August.  Instead of taking their mother to a cabin as they had planned, Linda and Miriam spent the vacation moving her to the nursing home.  And then the long, difficult months of adjustment for both Miriam and her mother followed. 

But now, a year later, hope sprang eternal.  Now that her mother was getting along so well, maybe Miriam could still take her to a cabin.  A juxtaposition rose in her mind: the nursing home, with its linoleum floors, the three shifts of nurses and aides, the occasional weeping or yelling of some demented resident, the meals eaten mainly in silence with strangers, the endless hours spent alone, the loneliness; and — a cabin.   Sunny days on the deck, meals eaten with people you loved, the silence of woods at night, open windows and cool air for sleeping in a real bed, not the hospital bed her mother had been reduced to, a lake shining blue through a stand of birch.                       

“When are we going to the mountains?” her mother would ask, pleadingly Miriam thought.

“People don’t really go to the mountains in Minnesota, Mother.  They go to the lake.”

“Well when are we going to the lake?”

“I’m looking into it.”

As indeed she was.  This lake, this cabin couldn’t be too far away and it had to be handicapped accessible.  Grab bars for sure.  Not easy to find.

Then a friend mentioned a resort about two and a half hours from the Twin Cities where her family went every year.  Lost Lake Lodge.  As soon as Miriam got the brochure, as soon as she saw its green leafy cover and the pictures of the split log cabins with decks facing a lake, she wanted to go.  She wanted to go, and she wanted to take her mother.

She called right up.  Lost Lake Lodge had a one-bedroom handicapped accessible cabin: $300.00 a night for the three of them, for Miriam would have to take Ted.  “Take” him, for he wouldn’t particularly want to go.  Going to a cabin with Miriam’s mother was not his idea of a vacation.  But Miriam needed him.  She could not lift the wheelchair in and out of the car by herself, plus she needed him to be there, family; she needed him to be there for her.  $300.000 seemed a lot for a night at a cabin, but it included breakfast and dinner at the lodge, and Miriam, gaining momentum, disregarded expense.  Her mother would pay for half of it out of the dwindling funds Miriam managed.  It was exactly the kind of place Miriam longed to go to and take her mother.  She reserved it for four nights at the end of August.

“Four nights!” Ted exclaimed.  “Isn’t that a little long?” leaving the rest “to be with your mother?” unspoken but understood.

“But why go if we can’t really get away and relax?” Miriam exclaimed.  “Anything else seems too short.”  She didn’t mention that she really wanted to go for a week.

Her mind was filled with fantasies of the great time they’d have at Lost Lake. How wonderful it would be, like old times…or if not old times exactly… because, after all, her mother was old and couldn’t remember diddley-squat…and granted, she needed a lot of caretaking… but she was still able to enjoy things, she still wanted to go to the mountains!  Miriam could take care of her for a few days, couldn’t she?  Four days wasn’t even that long. 

“Four days is way too long,” her support group friend Joanna told her at their weekly meeting.  The support group, “for friends and relatives of loved ones at Jackson-Wilkins,”  was actually a support trio: Miriam; Joanna, who was taking care of her grandmother, “Granma;” and Barb, who like Miriam was taking care of her mother, but who, unlike Miriam, came to the nursing home twice a day to feed her mother.  The next winter both these old ladies would die within a month of one another.  End of support group.  Well, it had been good while it lasted.

Joanna, who had more experience caretaking than Miriam, had tried taking her grandmother to the family cabin one year.  “It about killed me,” Joanna said.  “I couldn’t leave her alone for long, and I had to sleep in the room with her and get up a zillion times during the night because she was always having to pee. Plus it didn’t matter to her whether we were there or not.  She was past being able to enjoy it.   We came home early.”

Miriam was taken aback.   She couldn’t imagine cutting short their vacation.   

“Do yourself a favor,” Joanna said.  “Make it two nights. Your mother won’t know the difference.”

“I think she’s right,” Barb said.

Miriam went home and changed the reservation to two nights.  She had always found Joanna to be on the money, and Miriam had to admit she had trouble spending two hours around her mother, answering a million questions over and over.  Of course at the cabin it would be different, not like visiting her at the nursing home. But why not play it safe?   And why put Ted through four days of her mother?

Finally the day arrived when they were to leave.  A Sunday late in August, a beautiful summer day in the 70’s, after two days of thunderstorms and torrential rains.  The weather seemed a good omen.  Miriam and Ted packed the car, which didn’t take long, since they were only going for two nights, plus they couldn’t bring much, given how much room they’d need in the car for her mother’s things: the wheelchair would take up the whole back of their small station wagon; the portable bed rail that slipped under a mattress and couldn’t be folded to a smaller size; her mother’s suitcase which Miriam had packed the day before; her rolling walker; and of course the porta-potty, a bulky contraption with a bucket which they’d need to place next to her mother’s bed at night.  Miriam feared they might have to tie it on top.  

For several weeks, ever since Miriam had made the reservations, she had enjoyed being able to answer her mother’s query about going to the mountains with some specific plans, an actual date, which made her mother happy.  She showed her mother the brochure over and over.  It wasn’t clear to her if her mother could remember that they were going on a little trip, though sometimes it seemed she did. Miriam was so used to prompting her mother, filling in for her, faking that her mother was holding up her end of a conversation like always, that she wasn’t sure, really, what she supplied and what her mother did.  Miriam pondered how unpredictable her mother’s memory was, storing some things and erasing others, without too much rhyme or reason.  Sometimes her mother was uncannily sharp, her old self, and other times she couldn’t compute a thing.

On the morning they were to leave, Miriam called her mother at Jackson-Wilkens to tell her she and Ted would be over to get her after lunch.  But her mother had forgotten about the trip; it was news to her, but luckily good news: “What a nice surprise!  Are ya’ll sure you want to take me?  I don’t want to be a bother.”   When they arrived she was dressed in the periwinkle blue matching knit pants and top Miriam had put out for an aide to dress her in, and Miriam finished up her suitcase. The nurses and aides gathered around her mother in her wheelchair as they waited for the elevator, wishing her a good time, telling her to behave.  A resident going on a vacation wasn’t the usual thing.  Other residents sitting around in their wheelchairs seemed to eye them with envy, though Miriam was never sure how much most of them understood.  She cut her eyes at them guiltily, her heart twisting: I wish I could take you too.

Oh it was a dream come true!  A beautiful summer day, everything loaded in the car (even the porta-potty) and her mother buckled in in the back seat, thrilled to be going to the mountains at last.  They were gone by 1:30, right on schedule, and the drive went fine.  Her mother didn’t even have to go to the bathroom the whole way, much to Miriam’s relief, for that would have necessitated unpacking enough to get the wheelchair out, and she stayed awake, much to Miriam’s surprise, enjoying the scenery.  They pulled into Lost Lake Lodge about 4:00, and the cabin was everything Miriam could have asked for, a golden honey color with a fireplace and nice furniture inside.  After they had unloaded, they all sat on the deck, her mother in her wheelchair and Ted and Miriam in deck chairs, and Miriam got out the cheese and crackers and had a ginger ale with her mother while Ted had a beer.  It was just the way she had imagined, everything she had wanted, the beautiful lake down the hill through the whispering silvery green leaves of the birches, the late summer day with just a touch of fall in the air, her mother at a cabin again, relaxing on the deck. 

But after a little while, Miriam noticed that her mother had gotten very quiet.  She hadn’t said anything in maybe ten minutes and Miriam asked her if she was feeling all right.  She looked suddenly exhausted, and complained of being sick at her stomach, dizzy.  Miriam could see that her mother had crashed – even though she was sitting up in her wheelchair, there was a definite sense that she had crumpled somehow, melted down. 

Miriam, alarmed, wheeled her mother into the bedroom and helped her into bed.

“I feel sick,” her mother said.  “I think y’all better take me home now.”

Home!  They had just gotten there! 

“Maybe you’re just tired, Mother,” Miriam tried.  “It’s been a big day.  Why don’t you just lie here and shut your eyes for a bit and then you’ll feel better.”

“Who would ever have believed I’d act this way!” her mother berated herself. 

“What way, Mother?”

Her mother seemed confused.  “I don’t know.  Getting sick.”

 “You’re not sick, Mother.  You’re just tired.  Try to rest now.”

Miriam shut the door part-way and went out to the deck.  Ted raised his eyebrows at her in a question.  “I think she’s just tired,” Miriam said, “and maybe anxious.”  Her own anxiety level felt sky-high.  Like mother like daughter.

It was almost time to go over to the lodge for dinner.  Miriam hadn’t brought any groceries since their breakfasts and dinners were included at the lodge, and they could order lunch there, which Miriam planned to do.  She let her mother rest for twenty minutes more, but then they needed to go over before it got too late.

“Ya’ll go without me,” her mother said.  “Can’t ya’ll just bring something back over here for me?”

Miriam felt her stomach knot up.  What was going on?  She had a feeling her mother was just tired, disoriented.  Maybe she was hungry, needed something more to eat.  They’d have to go to the lodge for dinner.  Miriam got her mother up, into the wheelchair, and Ted rolled her to the car.  They’d drive the short way to the lodge and roll her mother in.  Maybe she’d feel better when she ate something.  Miriam’s head felt tight, as if someone were pinching her neck muscles at the base of her skull.

The lodge dining room was knotty pine with a view of Lost Lake.  The tables had white cloths and little yellow lanterns, and the menu was North-woodsy, walleye pike, sirloin steak.  And indeed, her mother rallied.  She ate some of her salad and a bit of her dinner, the most she ever ate, and Ted bless his heart entertained her with stories of his youth spent at his grandfather’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin.

“We’ve been coming to this place for fifty years,” her mother told him.  “We came last year, but someone already had our cabin so we didn’t stay.”

“Ahhhh,” Ted said.  “Well, it sure is a nice place.”

“Do you want dessert, Mother,” Miriam asked when the waitress appeared to clear their table.  “Maybe some ice cream?”

Her mother ate every bite of the ice cream and Miriam began to feel that maybe things would be okay.  “Back on track,” she said to Ted as he loaded the wheelchair into the car after dinner.  “This is harder than I thought.”

At the cabin she went through the ritual of getting her mother ready for bed: helping her undress and get on her pajamas, clean her face with cleansing cream, brush her teeth, pull down her pants so she could pee.  She and Ted stuck the portable bed rail under the mattress of the double bed in the bedroom.  Miriam would sleep next to her mother in the single bed, and Ted on the foldout Murphy bed in the living room.  “I’m sorry,” Miriam mouthed to him.

Finally her mother was in bed.  Only she was cold and fretting.  Miriam found another blanket.  She was exhausted herself, but sat out in the living room with Ted for awhile, trying to read, but with both ears cocked to the bedroom.  What if her mother tried to get up, what if she fell?  She’d break something for sure, a hip or arm, and then where would they be?   “It’ll be okay,” Ted said.  “She’s an old woman.  She’s not able to handle much any more.”

“How come I keep forgetting that?”

When Miriam went into the bedroom to check on her, her mother was breathing deeply.  Asleep, good.   But suddenly her mother let out a blood-curdling scream, half-sitting up in bed in fright, almost stopping Miriam’s heart. 

“It’s just me, Mother,” Miriam said quickly, going over to her and sitting on the side of the bed, taking her cold hand.  “We’re at the cabin and you’ve been asleep.”

Her mother looked at her groggily in the half-light from the bathroom.  “I thought a stranger was in the room.”

“Just me,” Miriam soothed.  “Now go to sleep.”  Her own nerves were still jangling, as if she were a bell that had been struck.

 Quietly Miriam put on her nightgown and got into the single bed. But in just a little while, as she was about to drift off to sleep, she sensed that her mother was sitting up on the side of the bed, about to topple forward.  Miriam leaped up.

“I have to pee.”

Miriam had put the porta-potty right by the bed, and helped her mother sidle over to it with the walker.  Her mother couldn’t even stand on her own.  She reminded Miriam of a loon, which was graceful and agile in the water, but unable to maneuver much on land.  Her mother was definitely out of her element, not only here, at the cabin, Miriam thought sadly, but everywhere now.

Miriam reached behind her mother and pulled down her pajamas.  She had to bend over a bit to do this, which put her face near her mother’s big butt. 

Back to bed.  But all through the night, eight or ten times, Miriam gave up counting, she would hear a slight movement and there would be her mother sitting on the side of the bed, about to get up on her own.  She couldn’t remember that she could no longer go to the bathroom by herself, that she needed help.  She wouldn’t say anything, no warning, so Miriam had to be alert and ready.  She lay stiff and terrified that her mother would try to get up and fall.  Back at the nursing home they had an alarm, an electric eye on a pole which they set at night.  If her mother raised up in bed, the alarm would go off, alerting someone to come.  But Miriam had declined to bring the alarm, figuring they shouldn’t have an alarm going off at night in the woods, possibly disturbing other guests in other cabins.  So Miriam had to lie awake or only half doze, ready to leap up at any moment.

How could anyone pee so many times during the night?  If she hadn’t been checked, Miriam would think her mother had a bladder infection.

Once Miriam fell asleep for a few minutes, long enough to dream that Linda had come to town and sold their mother’s house for $75,000, without asking Miriam or consulting with anyone about the market value.  She even arranged for their mother to go to Cleveland (Cleveland? A town they had no connection with) to visit a friend, and when she came back, Miriam was supposed to find her a place to live.  Miriam was furious!  She screamed at Linda, “You asshole!”  Then Linda and she had a “difference of opinion” about their mother, Linda saying their mother did much better around her, Linda – “she’s just a sweetheart” – and that she was more needy and dependent around Miriam.  Then there was a sad, tender part where Miriam was cradling her mother, comforting her….  The dream skipped to Miriam trying to help her mother cross a street, how would they ever get across, and on the other side was a bank, with steps, which they’d have to climb.…

Miriam woke with a start.  Her mother was sitting on the side of the bed.

Without a word Miriam got up and helped her onto the porta-potty, pulled down her pajamas, the big butt….

* * *

Morning at last.  Ah, morning.  Miriam’s mother was cold.  She had gotten hot during the night, and Miriam had turned back the extra blanket, but now she was cold, freezing, miserable.  “I can’t believe how I’m spoiling ya’ll’s fun,” her mother said.  “I don’t want to be a burden.”

But she was a burden, that much was clear.  Miriam was beginning to grasp at more than an intellectual level why there were three shifts at the nursing home.  She felt bleary-eyed and fatigued from lack of sleep, as if she’d been clubbed, and the day stretched out before her like a huge expanse of terrain she had to trek.  She went into the living room and got into the Murphy bed next to Ted, who was just waking up, having had a great night’s sleep. 

“I think we should leave after breakfast,” Miriam whispered.  “I didn’t get any sleep, and I don’t think she’s even enjoying it all that much. She seems freaked out, cold and anxious.   I don’t think I can take another night like last night.”

“Aw, baby,” Ted said, pulling her close.  “I’m sorry.  Are you sure?  Maybe you don’t have to decide right now.  See how she does at breakfast.”

She helped her mother get to the bathroom, pee (butt, etc.), get dressed, hair, teeth, make-up.  “I bet you haven’t gotten any rest,” her mother said.  She was always quick to assess Miriam’s physical state, and Miriam looked as if she had been up all night, which she had.  “I haven’t, much.”  Her mother: “What’d you have to do?” They loaded her and the wheelchair into the car, over to the lodge for breakfast, back to the cabin. It was only ten a.m.  She deposited her mother in a rocking chair in the living room (not easy to do, but then nothing concerning her mother was easy to do) with a view of Lost Lake, and there she simply sat.  Nothing to do, just like the nursing home.  She didn’t seem interested in the view of the lake.  Finally Miriam gave her the front page of the Sunday NY Times, which they had brought from home, and that seemed to satisfy her.  She actually seemed to look through it, maybe read something?  Unlikely, with her double vision, but maybe she looked at the pictures.  She used to like to read the Sunday paper at home, in Greenville.  After Miriam moved away she would be frustrated by the Sunday paper when she was home, so thin, over so quickly, nothing to read.  But her parents could make a whole morning of it, sitting in their laz-y-boy rockers.  Miriam saw just a shadow of that now, though unlike in South Carolina, her mother was bundled up with a heavy shirt over her clothes and a wool army blanket over her legs.

At Ted’s suggestion, he and Miriam walked around Lost Lake, which wasn’t a very big lake, but which was connected by a channel with a bridge over it to a huge expanse of water.  There was a nice woodland trail but Miriam was nervous about leaving her mother for very long.  “She seemed to do fine at breakfast,” Ted said.  “Maybe we should stick it out.”

Miriam stared at the lake, which was so blue and fresh in the morning.  She felt ragged and irritable.  “Well, we might as well stay through lunch,” she said. 

She decided to lie down for a little while when they got back to the cabin.  Her mother seemed set for the moment, maybe about to nod off herself.  She did sleep a lot over at the nursing home.  As soon as Miriam hit the bed, she was asleep.  But maybe ten minutes into her nap, she heard a familiar voice from the living room: “Is anybody out there?” Her mother meant the deck, where Ted was reading.  He and Miriam answered simultaneously.  “I have to go to the bathroom,” her mother said, “and I’m wondering how I’m going to do that.”  Miriam rose from her nap, because Ted couldn’t take her.  Miriam had to do it every single time; she must have a bladder the size of a pea.  

When Miriam pushed her into the bedroom to get to the bathroom, her mother said, “Is this where you slept?” 

“And you,” Miriam told her.

Her mother looked around her in confusion.  Miriam pointed out the bed she had slept in.  But her mother had never seen it before. 

“Where’s the bathroom?” her mother said in a worried voice.  It had taken her all year to recognize her room at the nursing home and there were still some days when it was unfamiliar to her.  She’d return from the beauty parlor upstairs, and tell Miriam, when she arrived, “I’ve just been here one day, you know, so I don’t really know what to expect.”  There were a hundred things to process every day that her mother couldn’t manage – couldn’t remember.  Miriam couldn’t imagine what that was like – each moment new, maybe scary, nothing familiar.

“I’m going to tell the manager to prepare our bill,” Miriam told Ted on the deck.  “We’ll leave after lunch.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“I don’t think I can take another sleepless night.  It’s not worth it.  It’s just too much for her.”

“If that’s the way you feel,” Ted said.

“I just don’t know,” Miriam said.    

Over to lunch.  They were the only ones in the dining room, since most people brought their own sandwich makings.  Out the window were the sounds of children playing in the swimming area, and the occasional clunk of a boat coming into the dock or a motor starting up.  All the lovely summer sounds of a day at the lake.

Her mother seemed fine, really, as fine as she ever was.  Observing her, Miriam thought that no one who encountered her briefly  – the waitress for example – would be able to tell that her mother had anything wrong with her except old age.  She compensated so well when she had to, in public, deferring to Miriam or Ted if she had trouble with any questions.   Ted was so nice to her, helping her order, something her mother was no longer capable of doing on her own (“I’ll have whatever you’re having.”).  But Miriam knew better.  Her mother got by on a life-time accumulation of coherency, but she could only keep it up for so long.  She was being overtaken by confusion, disorientation, dementia.   All Miriam could do was be kind to her.  To try to anticipate what would make her the least anxious and ill at ease.

She got up and went in to tell the manager to prepare their bill so they could leave after lunch.  But as soon as she went into the lobby, with its stone fireplace and bird’s nest on the mantle, she couldn’t do it.  She lost her nerve, her resolve.  She hated to cut the vacation short!  She had wanted to do this so much!  How could she leave so soon, after only one night!  If they left now, she knew with certainly that her mother would never go to the mountains again.

Miriam fled out the door, following the flagstones which formed a path down to the lake.  She walked out on an old abandoned dock beyond the swimming area.  She felt like flinging herself into the lake, sinking like a stone to the bottom.  She might as well drown – it seemed the only way out of her pain.  If they left now, her mother would never again sleep in a cabin.  Never again sit on a deck overlooking a lake. Never again feel the pleasure of a vacation.   All of that would be over for her.  It already was. 

Miriam lay down on the dock, feeling the weight of her heart, how it sank down down down into the dark, the cold.  She was so tired!  It felt as if she had been struggling for years – well, the three years she had been taking care of her mother.  She had been bailing and bailing, but still her mother was sinking, going down.  If only she could rest a moment….The worn wood of the dock felt so soothing, so warm.  She shut her eyes.  Summer days, lost lakes, memories, her mother, everything flowed together in the soothing murmur of water all around her. For some timeless time she floated there, neither asleep nor awake.  Maybe dying wasn’t so bad after all.  After the long struggle, the holding on.  But then the letting go….  The sense of being held up, received….

Miriam opened her eyes.  How blue and beautiful the sky was, a whole lake itself!  The blue of memory, the blue of forgetting, a whole blue lake of eternity, where nothing ever ended, nothing was ever lost.  She thought of her dead and felt them to be with her.  They floated through her memory like beautiful white clouds. 

Miriam got up and went back to the dining room.  Her mother had eaten a whole half of her sandwich, and she and Ted were carrying on a normal conversation, mostly Ted, but her mother was clearly entertained, enjoying herself.  

“Can we get them to wrap this for us?” her mother asked Miriam about the other half of her sandwich.  She always wanted to take a doggy bag home, couldn’t bear to leave good food on her plate.

“Sure,” Miriam said, and when the waitress came, Miriam said, “Could you wrap that for my mother to take, and would you tell the manager to prepare our bill.  We’ll be leaving this afternoon.”

Ted looked at her in surprise.  “I thought…”

“That was then,” Miriam said.  “This is now.” The now and the now and the now.   That was the mantra her yoga teacher intoned sometimes until the word blurred into nothingness, leaving them suspended in time, not past, not future, not even the present as Miriam usually thought of it, but in that other dimension – the now.

 It was not as if the trip were a terrible mistake.  It was that it was too late.  Her mother could no longer do this sort of thing.  Miriam couldn’t do it.  Now they’d concentrate on what was left.  They’d sit outside Jackson-Wilkens and watch the planes fly overhead.  She’d take her mother to wine-and-cheese on Wednesday afternoons.  There were still things left.   Pulling down her pants over her big butt, that would certainly go on.  The falls would go on.  Cutting a fresh nectarine and giving her mother slices would go on.  What they had left, what they had together, now.  What was not yet lost.

Her mother accepted that they were leaving that afternoon with no questions.  She couldn’t remember, after all, how long they had been there – a day or a month.  But she did get confused and somewhat fretful in the car on the way back. 

“Where did y’all leave your car?”

“This is our car, Mother.”

“Then where’s my car?”

“You don’t have one anymore.”

“I don’t!” (Indignant.)

“You’re eighty-seven years old.  You don’t drive anymore.”

“Well I could hire someone!”

Later:  “Miriam, do I have any help?”

“There are three shifts of nurses and aides where you live.”

“Where do I live?”

“In Jackson-Wilkens,” Miriam said.  She paused.  “The nursing home.”

Silence from the backseat as her mother absorbed this.

“Well, we had a wonderful trip,” she said.  And then, “What day is this?”

“Monday.”

“So that cabin rented from Monday to Monday.”

“Right.”

Miriam turned on the radio.  She was beginning to get barraged with questions and she was jagged from lack of sleep.  The questions had a tinge of anxiety, which Miriam found catching, or were totally confused, which made her sad, or were a bit belligerent, as if they were putting something over on her.  All Miriam wanted was to get back to the nursing home.   

“Boy,” Ted said as they neared the Twin Cities. “The traffic is really picking up!”

“That’s Greenville,” her mother said.

Of course the nurses were surprised – though not too, Miriam noticed – to see them back.  

“Is this where I live?” her mother said, looking around her, trying to place herself.

“Yes it is, Mother.  You’ve lived here for a year.  See your big laz-y-boy, and those hideous pictures of Linda and me when we were in college?”

“I don’t think they’re hideous,” her mother said.  “When will you be back?”

“Tomorrow,” Miriam said,  “I’ll be back tomorrow.”  Though she was already thinking of taking the day off.

“What will I do about dinner?”

“Someone will come take you in your wheelchair.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m 100% sure.”

Her mother looked skeptical.  “All right,” she said.  Then she said, “I love you, Miriam.”

Miriam paused in the doorway to behold her mother, whom she knew so well that she hardly saw her most of the time.  So that was it, really.  That was what it all came down to in the end.  Something so simple, really.

“I love you too,” Miriam said.  It was true.

The Student

Later, thinking about the student, Miriam couldn’t say when she first noticed him.  It was early in the term, that she was sure of, maybe even the first class or two, as the anonymous mass of new students, sixteen in this group, began to differentiate into individuals, as she searched, almost unconsciously, for someone to speak to, to speak with, a kindred spirit who would make it all worthwhile.  Of course Miriam, being if nothing else democratic, respectful of each and every one, would treat them all alike with an even hand; it was a point of pride that she didn’t show favorites.  But she had favorites, that much was clear.  She would later tell him, when he was in intensive care and she had driven up from the small liberal arts college in the country where he was her student to the Cities, to the big county hospital where he lay near death, that he was her favorite.  It was a death-bed scene, though he didn’t die.  Normally she would never have spoken such a thing, out of fairness to the other students.  But weeping all the way into the Cities, a forty-five minute drive, she had lost whatever control she normally had as a teacher, she was reduced to herself, a woman, weeping because he might die.  And she had told him, leaning over him a bit in his hospital bed, taking his hand which was yellowed with jaundice, that he, Brian, was her favorite.  It seemed incredibly important that he know.

But when did she first notice him?  Was it only in retrospect that she would think that he stood out, apart, that he was different in some indefinable way from the other students, bright ones all, but brighter, at least to her?  Of course on the surface he was like them, young, twenty-years old, an undergraduate at a very good Midwestern college.  It might have been that he was particularly interested in writing — she loved those students, the ones who really cared about it, the way she did.  There were others in the course who loved writing too.  But he, Brian, got in the habit of lingering after class, a particularly interested student who couldn’t quite get enough in class, who wanted to walk with her back from the psychology building, where, oddly, the writing class was held, to the English Department where her office was located.  She tried not to show favorites, purposefully not to walk out with him rather than some other student who might have wanted another minute of her time.  But they did fall into the habit of walking out together.  He had about him an eager quality that she found irresistible.  He found writing, literature irresistible, and she sensed too, without actually thinking about it, that he found her irresistible — or was it that she found him irresistible?  She did, it was true, irresistible in his youth, his eagerness, his brightness, his happiness.  For in truth, he was the happiest person she had ever met — was that true?  It seemed at times that he literally lit up — she had never quite seen that in anyone else.  And he was extremely open, at least with her, beguiling in his guilelessness.  He told, at her gentle questioning, for she was curious, how he had grown up all over the West, how his parents had divorced when he was six, how his mother had remarried when he was eight, divorced again, how they had moved every eighteen months or so, from one track house in some subdivision to another.  He seemed such a combination of the absolutely innocent, naive, untouched, unjaded, and also to have a surprisingly mature grasp on things, as if he were old beyond his years.  He reminded her of a puppy somehow — she didn’t mean it in a condescending way — but he was that adorable to her with his blond hair, his bright eyes, the way he’d light up at the sight of her.  Late one afternoon about halfway through spring term, when she was walking to her car, far away, across a green field, someone was waving at her, someone was running, it was Brian, on his long loping legs — he had on shorts and hiking boots, an odd combination — and she could tell from the way he sprinted towards her that he felt pure joy at the sight of her — and she felt the same.  Joy.  Pure joy.

They might just as well have embraced.  But of course they didn’t, they walked together to his car, which was closer than hers.  It was an incredibly beat-up huge old Pontiac, with multicolored doors, replaced no doubt as they fell off, and painted in crazy colors.  He was so proud of it.  He had even given it a name, “Mabel.”

It had brought her great pleasure to see him that day.  She often felt lonely at the college.  It wasn’t just that she was an adjunct, hired part-time and not part of the regular faculty, or that she lived in Minneapolis forty-five miles away.  It was that everyone was so busy, she herself was so busy and they were all, students and faculty alike, so so busy that it left her feeling lonely, isolated.  Maybe that was part of why she liked him — he had told her one day in her office of how he felt isolated from others.  He was feeling down, and she urged him to get some counseling, revealing, as she sometimes did to students whom she sensed needed a little extra nudging in that direction, that she herself had been in therapy at various times (was now) and that it was a great luxury to go in and talk for an hour about oneself.  She had laughed a little, lightly.  He told her how he had to work twenty to thirty hours at the Subway in town in addition to his student job, along with taking three academic courses at this very demanding school.  He had dropped out the previous year — here he alluded to a drinking problem, hard to believe in someone who looked so angelic — he had wanted to get that under control.  He had no time, she discerned, for relaxing, goofing off.  He was under pressure, that much she could tell, and he was fragile too, she thought, someone so open, so able to talk about his feelings.  He skipped the preliminaries and talked to her directly, as if they were friends. 

The class sessions were over at 12:20 and he’d walk with her back over to her office — she found she looked forward to that little time with him.  They always talked about class, about what the readings had been, his reactions to other student stories.  And then they’d part at the steps to the English building — for she was always rushing off to meet someone for lunch — she was lonely but she kept up quite a social schedule — and he’d go off to work or wherever — he lived in town, not on campus – not too unusual but a little — he wasn’t like the other students in some way.

Later, along with many other questions she would ask herself, Miriam would wonder if the whole class had known that day, before she found out.  She liked to think of herself as one who noticed, who paid attention, who was able to see — of course all that would come under doubt too — but thinking back, she thought maybe the class was subdued that day — it was hard to say, hard to remember.  At any rate, whatever the mood, she had carried on, proceeded with the stories under discussion, and it was only after class, when two of the students, Peter and Steve, walked out with her that she learned about Brian. 

She had noticed, of course, that he wasn’t in class — and he had missed the previous class on Tuesday, which was a bit surprising, because his story was due that day — it was an advanced short story class — but it wasn’t terribly unusual (though a little) for a student to miss two classes in a row — but what was unusual — she noted it subconsciously as the two students escorted her out — was that they walked with her down the hall without speaking.  They were both silent, and Miriam fell silent too, without knowing why.  It was only when they were outside — it was May, a beautiful spring day after the long Midwestern winter and near the end of the term — the lilacs were in bloom, lots of them, that seems important — that Steve, the smaller, darker, more serious one spoke.

“Have you heard about Brian?”

She was taken by surprise.  “No,” she said, “I mean I know he hasn’t been in class the last two times.”

“He tried to commit suicide,” Steve said, and she could feel that he was watching her, delivering the news cautiously and regretfully.  He knew she’d care.

“No!” she gasped.  “Is he all right?” 

The student was pained and yet eager to tell.  The news couldn’t be suppressed, it had to burst forth.

“There’s a lot of damage to his internal organs.  He’s not expected to live through the night.”

Something in Miriam collapsed.  Her body remained standing in the bright daylight — but some part of her — her essence — swooned and fell to the ground.  It left her standing there, a hollow shell, maintaining social appearances.

Her mind, left atop the empty shell, struggled to understand.  A lot of damage to internal organs?  She had an image of him eviscerating himself somehow.  She didn’t understand.

“He took a massive dose of Tylenol.  It destroys the liver…”  and, as if he regretted being the one to tell but had to do it, “and he cut himself and tried to hang himself.”

Miriam reeled back.  She remained standing there, but inside she reeled back in horror — everything in her cried out to have it not be so — to run the tape backwards, to the day before — to undo this news, this deed.  How could it be?  Not Brian!  She had never met anyone so happy!  Of course he might be more than that — she assumed he was — after all, on the questionnaire she had asked the students to fill out at the beginning of the term, he had written, in response to the final, open-ended question “Tell me something important about yourself” about pain — but in a highly abstract philosophical manner – he was a philosophy major — and it had seemed such typical teenage angst — and yet, for all that, he could light up with joy like no one she had met. 

She thought of the last time she had seen him — a week ago — when he told her the news after class that he had gotten the summer internship for which he had applied, and for which she had written a letter of recommendation for him.  She had realized, as she was writing the letter, that she didn’t know him all that well — or was it that she had some –reservations.  It was just that she hoped he would be all right for the job, since she was saying so glowingly that he would be.  But forced to confront him in writing, she realized she wasn’t exactly sure — she knew that he had had that drinking problem, for one thing.  It was a job at an agency in town where he would be counseling younger kids gone awry — and something in her didn’t want him around troubled youth.  

He had been so happy about the job that day.   She had never seen anyone so happy over so — in a way — little.  He was ecstatic.  Now everything would fall into place, he exclaimed.  Now he was set for the summer.  Walking beside her, he had practically bounced.  She went along with his enthusiasm, happy for him.  She was gratified that she had played a role.  She felt strongly about him, but in a way she had regretted having to speak for him, for she sensed, even then, without totally understanding it, that she didn’t know enough about him. She wondered, for example, if he was on drugs.  He hadn’t told her so.  Drinking yes.  But he wrote such strange surrealistic stories.  Refreshing compared to the usual student fare, but was he high when he wrote them?  She didn’t ask him, though once in class she did allude to it in a joking way — as if, through humor, she could deflect some truth, maybe, that she didn’t care to deal with or dilute what she sensed, making it harmless in the process.

She felt a strong need to get away from Steve and Peter.  She thanked them and walked back to her office in an altered state.  Everything else had fallen away.   She had to get to the Cities, she had to get to the hospital, she had to see him.  Don’t let him die!  She was not religious, not given to prayer, and it seemed wrong to pray now, cheap, kind of, but maybe this was prayer, this “Don’t let him die” chant that had started up in her head, her heart, her whole being.  She would cancel office hours — thank goodness she didn’t have another class — and drive to Minneapolis, to Hennepin County Hospital, where Steve and Peter had told her he had been taken by ambulance the previous night.   He was too sick, too near death, for the little town hospital.  Nothing, she felt, could stop her.  It was if she had received news of a family member, she felt that compelled to go to him. 

She ran into a senior member of the department in the hall, a white-haired man who had been nice to her and whom she liked.  “A student of mine tried to kill himself,” she blurted out to him breathlessly.  “That’s too bad,” he said rather noncommittally and asked her a few questions.   He did not seem shaken.  Miriam recoiled.  It occurred to her that this might be old news for him.  He had been at the college for many decades, he had seen a number of students try to commit suicide.  The school, in fact, had sort of a covert reputation along those lines, attracting as it did such intelligent, original students, some of whom were bound to self-destruct.  It didn’t seem to interest him very much. “Who is it again?” the professor asked, and when Miriam told him, he shook his head, unable to place him. 

 As soon as Miriam got into her car, the privacy, she began to cry.  She didn’t know if Brian were dead or alive — incredible.  She was weeping and driving — everything had changed in the way it can, suddenly — and it can’t be put back — she felt in an incredible state — she wondered if it were safe for her to drive — she just had to get there.  She couldn’t think of anything else.  Don’t let him die, don’t let him die.

 

The huge county medical center was right in downtown Minneapolis, intimidating in its size and fortress-like facade.  Miriam had never had cause to enter it before.  She parked in a dim, multilevel ramp, the perfect place to get raped and murdered.  Normally she was fearful in such ramps, but now she thought that if someone did approach her with rape and murder on his mind, he would find out that his little agenda was sawdust compared to hers.  If he caused her one moment’s delay she would strangle the life out of him with her bare hands.  Inside the hospital she located the information desk.  Brian was in intensive care, on the eighth floor, and she took the elevator, feeling intensely focused, as if she were a bullet that had been fired.  She didn’t know what she would find.  At the nurses’ station, she explained that she had come to see Brian K…. The nurse on duty asked if she were family.  “No…” she stammered, “I’m his professor.”  “He’s around that corner and to the left,” the nurse said, waving Miriam in the direction. 

Miriam hesitated.  She hadn’t really expected to be admitted so easily, to be able to see him.   Her heart beat hard as she went down the hall.  There on a hospital bed in the hall lay Brian, breathing, asleep, alive, a sheet pulled up to his chest.  He wasn’t even in a room, just an open, indeterminate space, all by himself.  Miriam crept up to him and looked into his face.  He was so young!  Like the Pieta, the beautiful sad body of Jesus in Mary’s arms.  She had never seen him so close, never stared at his face like this before, and she drank him in, even as she felt she shouldn’t, a face was private, she was violating his privacy by looking at him when he was asleep.    Scraggly whiskers sprouted from his chin, touching in their blond sparseness.   He looked poised at some halfway point between boy and man, as if he could tip either way.  There was a yellow tint to him — the failing liver.  But he was breathing, he was alive.  Miriam felt like weeping again.  She drank him in with her eyes. You’re alive, alive.  He couldn’t die.  The thought of it was like a rip through her whole self.  Her own life, she realized, would be permanently rent if he died.  He was so young, there was so much ahead of him, he didn’t even know….  He had tried to kill himself.  How could he try to destroy what she herself valued so much, loved, even?  It didn’t seem possible, the whole thing had a nightmare feel.  She pulled up a little plastic chair nearby and sat by his bed, keeping watch.  It surprised her that no one else was around.  Of course there was no family in town, they’d have been called, they’d be coming, she assumed, but would have to arrange air flights, all that.  How must his mother feel, what must she be going through?  She put her head in her hands and supported its surprising weight.  And probably the staff wouldn’t let in any of his friends, other students.  But they let her in, his teacher.  Oh why couldn’t she have saved him?  She watched his chest rise and fall, and she had never been so thankful for anything in her life.   She couldn’t bare that he die this young, that he die by his own hand.  There was a rope burn around his neck where he had tried to hang himself — someone had spread a greasy ointment like Vaseline on it. And his wrists were bandaged.  He had tried so hard to kill himself!  It had had to take place over time — not some spontaneous decision, but several attempts, hours of trying, and she felt, instinctively, how he would have felt like a failure as he failed to die, how he would feel that he couldn’t even do this one thing right.  The weeping rose in her again.  Oh Brian!   He was stirring, waking up.

She stood beside him.  He was coming to.  He opened his eyes.  His hands were folded one atop the other on his chest, and she put her own hand on his.  She felt his warm yellow skin, shocked that she had actually touched him.    But she had to.  He looked up at her. “Miriam!” he spoke her name and his eyes lit up, the old joy at the sight of her.  He had called her by her first name from the start, not Ms. Batson or Professor Batson as most students did.  “I came as soon as I heard,” she said.  “They let me see you because I’m your teacher.”  She was looking into his face, his eyes, drinking him in.  She had expected someone so near death to be groggy, but he was perfectly alert, totally clear she saw.  She didn’t know what to say.  “I missed you in class today,” she tried, smiling into his eyes.  “That’s two missed classes in a row, you know,” and she raised her eyebrows in mock-warning, a take-off on the role of stern professor.  “I’m sorry,” he said seriously, missing the joke, piercing her heart.  He was always so quick to apologize, to accept blame, to want to please.  “Oh god, Brian,” she said.  “I wish I had known.  I wish you had called me or I had called you when you weren’t there on Tuesday.   I didn’t realize!”  

“It all just caught up with me,” he said.  “I had gotten so behind in everything.  I didn’t see another way out.”  He paused for a moment.  “Would you do me a favor? Would you call Margo at YouthWorks and tell her she can hire someone else for this summer if she needs to.  In light of what’s happened.”  She nodded her head.  She kept her hand on his. “I’ll return those two books I borrowed from you,” he said. “All the time I was trying to kill myself, I was worried about how you’d get your books back.” “Oh Brian!” she said, “it’s all right, don’t worry about it, it doesn’t matter.” And then, because it felt so urgent that he know, that she tell him, she said, “You’re my favorite, you know.”  His eyes widened in a kind of exhausted surprise.  For a long moment they both absorbed this news in silence.  Then, very delicately, he stroked the top of her hand where it rested on his hand with his thumb.  They hung there in that moment.  Miriam stared down at their hands, mesmerized by his thumb which she had never looked at before, how masculine it was but also still slender in its youth, slightly stubby with the nail cut or chewed too close, exposing the quick.  She wanted to cry her heart out — you’re alive, alive!  That seemed the most important thing, the only thing.  “I’m so glad you’re alive,” she said finally, when she could stand it no more.  He nodded his head and shut his eyes.  “I wish I were dead,” he said.

Miriam was not unacquainted with depression.  And not just “from the literature,” as they say.  She knew what it felt like to want to die, or maybe more precisely in her case, to want not to be alive.  She had had those moments.  Who hasn’t?  But she saw that on the continuum of despair, Brian had traveled much farther than she ever had and it shocked her.  It bewildered her.  He was not out of the woods yet, she learned from the little crowd of students who had gathered in the intensive care waiting room.  The next twenty-four hours would tell.  His liver, struggling.  Not out of the woods yet — where did that expression come from?  Those woods frightened her — how dark and deep they seemed, how lost one would be in them.  And then there was the fact that he didn’t want to live.  She had assumed, naively she now saw, that he’d be as happy to be alive as she was that he lived.  But he still wanted to die.  Miriam plunged down a dark hole.

She sat with the students, listening to them.  Some were from the college and six or seven were high school students.  Immediately Miriam knew, seeing them, especially the high school students, that they were into drugs.  They looked normal enough, in that they weren’t punked out with orange spiked hair and multiple body piercings, but there was about them an air of secret, clandestine lives, a facade of passing that didn’t quite obscure the sense that all was not as it seemed.  She bet they lied to their parents and were home as little as possible. 

The college students were harder to peg.  They were typical of the students at the college, in that they were unusually bright, good looking kids, each one accustomed to succeeding, standing out, taking oneself seriously as a Self.  One, a handsome/pretty young man, introduced himself to her as “Matthew” and made a point of telling her that he was “not just a friend” of Brian’s.  What did he mean?  Miriam assumed some sort of sexual relationship, though she hadn’t imagined that Brian was gay or bisexual.  But of course that age was given to sexual experimentation, confusion, ambiguity.  It was sort of cool at the college to be bisexual, and of course Brian was very attractive physically, with his bright good looks, his boyish energy, his mixture of innocence and experience. 

From the students Miriam learned that he had first tried to hang himself in the woods near the campus, but like some kind of black comedy the rope broke, burning his neck, and in the fall he twisted his ankle.  He hobbled back to his room in the off-campus house he shared with several other students and slit his wrists.  He must have been drunk, someone speculated, because he passed out, but then he woke up, still alive.  Somehow he went out and bought 350 Tylenol and took them, and left a note on his door, “I’ve finally gotten to sleep so don’t disturb me.”  He hadn’t been able to sleep for four days, one girl said.  Miriam began to get a picture of the life he led outside her classroom. 

The chaplain of the college appeared with a woman whom she introduced as Brian’s mother, Karen, and an older woman, Barb, who was his grandmother.  They had just arrived from Tennessee, had been in to see Brian, and now wanted to say a few words to the waiting students.  Miriam introduced herself, explained her role as Brian’s teacher.  “Oh I’ve heard about you from Brian!” Karen exclaimed, reaching out for Miriam, who embraced her.  Karen was about Miriam’s own age, maybe a few years older, though it was hard to say, for Miriam saw that Karen lived a different life from herself.  Miriam hadn’t had children, she fancied herself a writer, she taught in college, she had a thin veneer of sophistication, whereas Karen, she saw, was just folks, the real world, a divorced somewhat overweight middle-aged woman in a pants suit, someone without pretension and very many options.  Miriam shook the hand of the grandmother, a woman in her seventies, still vital and weathered into a kind of tempered steel.  She was wearing a royal blue sweat suit and Nike’s, sensible traveling clothes Miriam noted. 

Karen made a little speech to the waiting students, thanking them for their support.  She referred to God several times.  She seemed to know what to do, what to say, how to act.  Miriam was impressed.  How did people shift gears so quickly, rise to the occasion?  Yesterday for all she knew her son was doing fine, and now he was lying in intensive care, having tried to kill himself.  How had Karen felt, getting the phone call, having to get on a plane and fly here, not knowing if Brian would be dead or alive when she arrived?  Miriam could hardly stand it.  She had missed out on motherhood herself, and maybe it was just as well, she often thought.  She didn’t have the guts for it.

Miriam and her husband Ted went to a neighborhood restaurant that night, moderately expensive with white table cloths and good stylish food.  There were several things on the menu which Miriam could not pronounce.  They came here often, especially when they needed relatively easy respite.  Sometimes simply a good meal — planned, prepared, and cleaned up by someone else — helped.  Miriam ordered the lamb shank because it came with mashed potatoes.  Comfort food, and Miriam needed comforting.

She told Ted the tale of getting the news, of her mad dash to the cities, of spending the afternoon at the hospital, meeting the students and Brian’s mother and grandmother.  The life and death drama of it all.  Ted listened with interest and empathy, but he didn’t know Brian, and after a while they moved on to other things, a relief in a way.  Miriam felt that she couldn’t really convey the intensity of her feelings about what had happened, nor was she sure she would want to.  She hardly understood it herself.  She was aware that if another of her students had tried to commit suicide, she would have been shocked, saddened, but she didn’t think she would have responded as she did to Brian.  She was surprised at herself.  All her usual reserve, considerable, had crumbled.  She didn’t tell Ted how she had told Brian that he was her favorite.  That seemed too personal, something she was still absorbing herself.  But every now and then, over dinner, she’d trace again in her mind that moment when she had told him and how he had stroked her hand lightly with his thumb.  She felt a kind of thrill remembering that moment, and she wondered if she were in love with Brian.  She accepted that one could be in love, by degrees and in various ways, with many people and never even have to realize it too consciously.  What did it mean, anyway, to be in love with someone?  There was a chemistry, certainly.  She wondered if there had been something sexual in the way their hands met, in that surprising touch.  Sexual seemed the least of it, however, off the mark, too simplistic, missing the point.  It had been so intimate, that was it, as if for that moment they had touched.…  It had been a moment like no other Miriam had ever experienced.  She didn’t believe in souls, exactly, she shied away from the term, especially in writing.  Whenever a student used it — a not infrequent occurrence — she’d write in the margin, “not sure,” or if she felt like it, simply, “no.”  “Soul” was so overused, so hackneyed really.  Miriam turned up her nose at it, thinking it too imprecise, vague, easy, really.  “Our souls touched.”  The stuff of romance writers.  But she had felt, for that moment in the hospital today, that she and Brian had touched if not souls exactly, then selves, their true selves, outside all the normal boundaries, rules, and roles.  They had touched.  Touched.  It was not something she would ever talk about to anyone else, even Ted, to whom she told most everything.  Because to try to describe it, to explain it, would kill it, destroy it, like trying to catch a bubble.  Pop.

She and Ted had been married for — what, now?  Thirteen years.  A long time, also short.  Miriam had been twenty-nine when they met, Ted, twenty-six.  They had lived together, wary in a way and in no hurry, for four years before they wed.  Miriam looked back on those young people they had once been as if they were like her current students, fledglings whom she viewed with affection and hope, aware of how far they had to go, how much they needed to learn.  She and Ted had been so young for so long, typical of their generation, she supposed.  They had postponed the adult milestones as long as possible.  A lengthy maturation.  Their faces in their wedding pictures (they had been married in a civil service ceremony at the courthouse, down playing the whole thing) looked surprisingly innocent to her now, especially Ted, who was almost baby-faced then.  He had just finished law school, Miriam was trying to be a writer, they hadn’t thought of themselves then as particularly green, but Miriam knew they had been.  Now here they were, middle-aged or at least solidly on the cusp, a number of things behind them, a lot of options closed, choices made, possibilities squandered.  They were well into the realm of consequences.

Did they ever touch?  Certainly they did, usually on Sunday mornings now, their own private church service.  But did they ever  break through all the layers of habit, familiarity, routine and comfort, actually, to really touch?  Miriam thought of the finger of God reaching out to David’s in the Sistine Chapel.  That electric connection. That intimacy.  Maybe that was only possible when things were new, or in a life or death situation.  It wasn’t that the thrill, exactly, was gone, it was just that it got buried under so much stuff: the stuff of a life together.  Miriam knew she was loved.  She found this both expected and extraordinary.  She understood that at the end of her life, she would know with complete certainty that she had been loved — deeply, truly, fully.  It was incredible, really, to be so loved.  Ted told her all the time: “I love you.  I can’t believe how much I love you.”  And she loved Ted.  Love permeated their lives.  Love familiar, known, experienced, cherished.  But it was no longer new.

Miriam remembered when love was new, brand new.  Not with Ted — she was too old at twenty-nine when she met him for love to be new, but new when she was twenty herself, and he wasn’t even her first lover, she had had sex before him, but he was her first love.  She had had boyfriends, crushes, flings, but she loved this boy, this young man — Tom.  She had felt incredibly happy in his presence, sure of herself, strong and right.  It had been spring then too.

Another May day, in Chapel Hill, where she was a senior in college.  Her Russian literature class, the desk chairs with their worn patina of wood scattered around the classroom.   Before class, the windows open, the smell of spring in the air, and a young man, asking her if he could borrow her Daily Tarheel.  She looks at him, at his brown eyes with the gold in them, and later, when they’re lying in bed, she’ll see that there are gold freckles under his eyes.  He will always be to her some lovely blend of brown and gold.  He has a full shock of dark brown hair, rich and warm, burnished somehow, she likes his looks, looks forward to seeing him the next class, and she senses with certainty that he is interested in her, the borrowing of the newspaper just a ploy.  He asks to borrow it again the next class, and she’s ready, she’s on to him, there is that delicious subtext, they know what is going on, what is going to happen, where this will lead, and it is delicious, because you can’t be sure, after all, she thinks she knows, but maybe she’s wrong, maybe it’s not what she thinks at all….  It is as delectable as running into the ocean, the shock and thrill of it, and then lying on the warm sand beach, the way she will lie in his arms before too long.

And so it goes.  They become lovers, and she loves him.  She loves his gold brown eyes, the gold brown freckles, his auburn hair with its glints of gold, his golden warm voice, like syrup.  She likes his humor, his lilting laugh, his golden warmth in the way he loves her.  He seems to see her the way she’s always wanted to be seen, known, the way she knows herself to be, now that he has shown her.  They’re perfect together, everything is easy, right, it will go on forever.

Another spring day.  She’s walking towards campus in the bright beautiful morning down the street where she rents an apartment in the top of an old house.  Stevens Street.  And there he is, Tom, at the other end of the street, walking towards her to meet her.  They don’t run towards one another and embrace, like lovers in a cigarette commercial or a French film.  They walk slowly and deliberately towards one another, looking at one another, smiling with a perfect understanding.  This is the most perfect moment of her life, Miriam will sometimes think.  She plays it over and over in her head, relishing the feeling of that moment when she saw that he had come to meet her and how they walked towards one another, looking each other in the eye.  She had felt joy.  Pure joy.

It ended, eventually, as those things tend to do.  It didn’t even last that long.  Several months, though it felt like a lifetime.  And then she was going away, to graduate school, and he still had a year left at college, but it wasn’t that.  It was — what?  He stopped loving her, was what it came down to.  Not that he ever betrayed her or was in any way cruel to her, but he cooled off, he lost interest, he moved on.  It had run its course, was all.  Though it took her years to get over it, being the way she was.  And after that, she wasn’t young in the same way any more, the way she had been on that spring morning when she walked down Stevens Street, and saw him walking towards her, and felt that pure joy.  It wasn’t a matter of blame.  She had to grow up sometime.  She couldn’t be an innocent forever, someone had to break her heart, it was inevitable, she was aching for it, the normal thing.  But too bad, really, that some parts of us have to die.  They die, they’re killed, we kill them, they’re gone, but don’t they live in us still?  Some little vestigial heart of them, still?

Miriam called the nurses’ station the first thing in the morning to hear how Brian had fared overnight.  She had spent a tortured night full of strange, nightmarish dreams, fearing he had taken a turn for the worst, fearing he might die.  Having seen him the previous day, she didn’t believe that he would die.  But then why had they had said at the hospital that the next twenty-four hours were crucial?  She didn’t know a thing about the liver, about how the body could fail, be defeated, give up.  She didn’t know much about anything, she realized, even though she called herself a teacher.

The nurse on duty said Brian was still in critical condition, but his pulse and blood pressure were better.  He was on oxygen because he had developed some congestion during the night, and they didn’t want him to develop pneumonia.   When Miriam went over to the hospital in the afternoon, she learned from his mother that Brian was out of danger, beyond the immediate crisis.  But he was still severely depressed.  Mostly he slept, exhausted from the events of the past few days.  Occasionally his mother or grandmother would go in to see him, and once Miriam did, but he was asleep so she didn’t wake him.

 It was the weekend and Miriam went about her life on one level, but on another level, a deeper level, she was preoccupied with Brian, mourning him in a way.  So there had been a death, of sorts, after all.  She found herself wanting to be alone, and she was glad when Ted had to go into the office on Saturday.  She was freer to talk to Brian in her mind.  There was a lot she wanted to say to him, but it wasn’t on the level of “conversation” — in real life, in person, what would come out would be platitudes or diluted or I-don’t-know unsatisfactory somehow.  What she longed for — what she could only have when she was by herself — was some deep and meaningful conversation from the heart.  Because a lot was in her heart.  But she couldn’t imagine getting it out into words –  it didn’t seem appropriate — so intense and personal, so urgent and necessary, like prayer.

On Tuesday Miriam had to return to her “real” life, to teaching her two classes at the college.  She had been at the hospital a lot over the weekend, she couldn’t seem to stay away, she wanted to be there.  She had seen Brian a couple of times, but each time he was so sleepy that she just stayed a few moments.  He had insomnia; his sleep schedule was reversed.  Miriam felt like shouting at someone (who?) “Just get him on a regular cycle, so he sleeps at night and is awake during the day!”  But of course it wasn’t as simple as that.

 She informed the students in Brian’s class of how he was and they absorbed the news soberly, but then they all moved on, to the course work of the day.  When she walked around campus, she felt a strange absence, knowing that she would not see Brian.  It made her sad to think that he wouldn’t be returning, that things couldn’t go back to the way they had been.  Or appeared to be.  Karen had said he wouldn’t be returning to the college.  She was taking him home to get him away from bad influences, give him a fresh start.   Miriam looked up his address in the student directory, and drove by the house where he had rented the room, where he had nearly died.  It was a shabby run-down affair, beyond the typical student housing in its disrepair.   But Brian wouldn’t have cared about that.  He would have been happy to have the place, to be off-campus, to be independent.  She thought of the pain he had felt there those last few days leading up to his suicide attempt.  All around the house the lilacs were blooming their hearts out.  There was no sign of “Mabel.”  Karen had said they were selling the car.

When Miriam got back to the cities that afternoon, she went by the hospital to see Brian.  She had collected some books from her office that he might like, and had bought him a journal and some pens. 

She found him sitting in a chair in his hospital room in his hospital gown and robe.  His body, it seemed, was making a miraculous recovery.  His liver had regenerated, something that could happen in the young.  And he seemed very “up.”  Exuberant the way he used to be.  He leaped up when he saw her, he seemed about to embrace her, he was so happy to see her. “I feel like I’ve come back,” he said to her.  “I realized I was going to live, so okay!”  He smiled his beautiful smile.

It all sounded so convincing, honest and true.  Miriam wanted to believe it was true.  But she didn’t trust it; she’d been burned before.  He still seemed so fragile, so at risk.  She knew the world was going to be a tough place for Brian.  She wanted to say some of what was in her heart — she had so much she wanted to say to him, to try to tell him, to teach him — but she held her tongue.  She wanted to say how she knew a lot of healing and grieving would have to go on with him… but maybe now wasn’t the time, he wasn’t strong enough, he seemed so happy…  She wanted to spew out a ton of words….  If she could just say the right things…but there was too much to say, it was too intense, she was too shy, reserved.  What she really wanted to do was hold his hand.  She was surprised at the intensity of this desire.  To hold his hand, not to speak, but to be in communication with him that way, communion really.  What she felt was beyond words.  She thought again of that moment when she had placed her hand on his, of how they had touched.  Everything was being said then that needed to be said, only through their hands.  But she couldn’t imagine taking his hand now.

Another visitor came in, a girl from his philosophy class at the college, and Brian seemed glad enough to see her.  He was nice to her, but Miriam wished the girl hadn’t come.  She wished that she could be alone with Brian.  She had this big wound that could only be healed by being in his presence.

She stood to go, feeling awkward.  Brian walked her to the door.  There was something graceful about him, gracious.  They paused there for a moment to say goodbye.  She felt that they weren’t exactly these two awkward bodies, these two awkward people standing there, a twenty year old student and his forty-six year old teacher, but two old – that word — souls, two selves, outside of time and place.  He was taller than she was, and slender like a boy.  She felt like leaning against him, drawing comfort from his beating heart.  She felt that impulse again, to take his hand, but it seemed too strange, inappropriate, she wasn’t sure what it meant or that he’d understand.  And, she reminded herself, he’s just a kid, and a pretty messed up one at that.  She didn’t want to do anything to confuse or damage him further.  But maybe he was both, a temporal being and an eternal one.  Maybe he saw that she was too.

He couldn’t sleep at night and so he would read.  Miriam loved how he loved reading, how excited he got about literature.  He thought Miriam’s book of short stories, which she had given him, was “fantastic” but he thought the first story was too disjointed.  He was sharp.  Miriam encouraged him to write in the journal she had given him — childhood memories.  His psychiatrist at the hospital had told him he was good at intellectualizing but that he had trouble with his feelings (Did they all say that?).  He couldn’t sleep, he had insomnia, a lot on his mind.  And Miriam would wake up at night too, three a.m., four a.m., thinking about him.  She would carry on long intense conversations with him.  She thought of other students she had had, and realized that she had loved a lot of them.  She had loved them and raised them during the term, and she had tried to teach them…not just the subject of the course, and certainly not anything about how to be, how to live — she hardly knew herself — but she had held them in her heart somehow.  That was the best she could describe it.  For awhile they had been hers.  And then she let them go.  That was the natural order of things.  They’d finish her course, she’d say goodbye, they’d move on, and some of them would keep in touch, but she wasn’t a big part of their lives anymore, if she ever was.  But in Brian’s case, the natural order of things had been broken.

She went over to the hospital nearly every day. He was in a psyche ward now, and one day she found him at a table in his robe and pajamas, still with a yellow glow to him, though his liver was recuperating well.  He had his books and journal there on the table, and he was taking some psychological test which he put aside when she sat down.

“I’m going to start electric shock therapy on Wednesday,” he said.    “We saw this film on it. It isn’t the horrible stuff of One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest.  The thing is, I’m feeling good and don’t think I need it.  But they say the depression is still in me, and will cycle back up.  So they hope the electroshock will knock it out.  I can’t take drugs yet because of my liver…  I may have some memory loss from the shock treatment, but nothing major.”

Miriam nodded her head.  She hated to think of it, to think of him, Brian, getting jolted in his head, some of his memory being blown out, any part of him being destroyed.  Don’t forget me, she thought. 

“I’ll guess I’ll be going back to Tennessee after the treatments,” he said.  “That’s what Mom wants me to do.  She’s afraid to leave me up here by myself.  And I don’t really want to go back to the college.  Too many bad associations.”  He was rubbing lotion on his arms where the jaundice made him itch.

“What do you think you’ll do?”

“Maybe get a job as a waiter for awhile.  I might try a gay bar because I’d get better tips.” He laughed slyly.  “I can’t drink for six months, the doctors say.  No alcohol or drugs.”

“You know,” Miriam said suddenly.  “You might be able to stay with us for a little while after you get out of the hospital.  Have a little vacation, in a way, before you get on with your life.”

A dream formed in her mind, of Brian in their guest room, a clean quiet place.  She’d take care of him, fix him good meals, he’d relax in the backyard, walk around the lake, sleep through the night and grow well.  She’d look after him and he’d be okay.  She’d make sure.

“That’s really nice of you,” he said.  “I do think I’ll stick around for this concert that going to be in town on June 11, Lollapollooza.  Do you know about it?”

Miriam thought she had heard of it, but she didn’t know much about rock concerts.  Too old, too out of it. 

“Won’t there be a lot of drinking and drugs there,” she asked. 

“Not for me,” Brian laughed.

“Are you sure you can handle it?  I mean, being around a lot of using like that?”

“It’s true I like to party,” he said, “and I’ve been pretty wild in the past.  You know, I used to get high to read the stories for your class and then I could see several levels of meaning in them.”

“Oh Brian!” Miriam exclaimed.   “Don’t you know you’ll mess up your mind, your fabulous mind,” she couldn’t help adding.

“I choose to do them,” he said.  “I have this desire to experience heightened states of consciousness.  But I’m in control of that decision.  I want to eventually try them all, but only when I can handle them.”

“Really, Brian.  You seem so at risk without even realizing it.”

“It’s just that I feel so well now.  It’s so different from when I was depressed.  I actually feel better and happier sober than I did when I was high.”  He was talking a little fast, animatedly.  “I’ve been into drugs pretty heavy.  When I had marijuana around, I smoked it continuously.  I’ve even dealt drugs, LSD and marijuana.”

Miriam wanted to put her hands over her ears.

“I still want to go further with LSD.  That’s one experience I want to pursue.  I know people who see things — different realities — and I want to experience that.”

“Brian, you sound chemically dependent.”

“No!” he said emphatically.  “Drugs are something I choose.  I never did any stuff because I had to.  It was always a choice.  Even when I abused them, it was my choice.”

“But why would you choose to do that!” Miriam said.  She felt a kind of despair rise in her.  “To abuse.”

 Brian must have caught her tone.  He didn’t answer. 

“I don’t understand that at all,” Miriam said shaking her head.

“Well, I do worry that maybe it might do a number on my memory later.  I met this woman in group here who has memory problems from using LSD twenty years ago.” 

“We’re talking about your whole life here,” Miriam said, “the rest of it.  How you can blow it.  I don’t want you to blow it.”

“I don’t either,” he said softly.

“Our minister back home knows an educational psychologist who we think would be the perfect mentor for Brian,” Karen was saying.  She and Miriam were having a cup of coffee in the hospital cafe.  “Brian’s searching for some religious guidance — for Christian faith.”

It was true Brian was searching for something.  Developing his spiritual side might actually be the answer, if there were any answers.  Miriam imagined him going back to Tennessee, being “saved,” even born again.  Mouthing horrible platitudes about putting his life in God’s hands.  But of course, even as she was thinking this, even as she nodded and smiled into Karen’s earnest face, she knew she was being both a snob and an ignoramus.  She had been raised Southern Baptist herself, but had come to see conventional religious beliefs as sophistry, something simple people used to console themselves, a form of denial regarding the way things really were.  You lived, you died; that was it.  Heaven was for softies, for people who couldn’t face it.  Even as she thought these thoughts, Miriam knew they were foolish, shallow.  Without even realizing when it had happened, she had become the worst kind of skeptic — someone who dismissed the whole spiritual realm of being.  Brian was reading C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters.”  Miriam hadn’t read any religious thinkers since college.  She had taken a Religions of the World course in college, and been attracted by the readings.  She had even, when she was young, imagined that she’d grow up to be a missionary.  The options for women “back then,” in the fifties when she was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, had seemed so limited: wife, of course, but if that didn’t work out, teacher or nurse and for a select few, missionary.  There were women missionaries, Miriam knew, which meant you could be true to your gender, i.e., good, self-sacrificing, and still have some adventure in your life.  Travel to Africa, that sort of thing. There was something appealing—freeing — in the image of a single woman wearing ugly oxford shoes and plain sexless clothes ministering to unsaved Africans.  She had also, briefly, during her adolescence, in that small window of time before she actually got it that she was female and all that that implied, imagined becoming a preacher.  Not that she knew any women preachers.  But the idea of preaching, standing up in public and talking to people about the really important things — the state of one’s soul, one’s relationship to God, the eternal, even  — had stirred her.  She had been drawn to it mightily.

She had become a writer instead.  It hadn’t been an accident; it was actually the right thing for her.  Not because she was especially good at it.  But because writing was a way of talking about the really important things in a way that suited her.  Literature addressed human experience, pain and suffering, good and evil, and sometimes joy without having to resort to dogma and something as slippery as faith.  Still, she admired, envied even, spiritual people.  She understood that there was more than she could grasp, perhaps an underlying order and meaning.  A higher power perhaps.  She wasn’t able to sustain her belief in this for very long.  But this suicide attempt of Brian’s had raised a lot of questions.  She tried to sort it out, to make some sense of it.   She believed, for starters, that clinical depression, such as Brian had, was biologically based.  Chemicals were messed up in his brain.  But she also believed it was a disease, in some sense, of the soul.  At least in Brian’s case.  For she felt in him a tremendous battle going on, between good and evil, the devil and God, if you will, his corporal and spiritual self.  She was surprised to find herself interpreting along these old testament lines.  But it seemed to her that he was struggling to decide which way he’d go, who he’d become — she felt in him such a spiritual side and then, at other moments, he just seemed an immature, self-absorbed kid who wanted to do drugs, regardless of what it cost him and his family and friends.  This idea of staying on for the Lollapollooza concert confounded her.  After all he had been through — and put others through — why would he make the decision to stay on in Minnesota and go to this rock concert?  Miriam didn’t get it.  She understood it intellectually — the concert meant a lot to him, he wanted to be there, not miss it, hear the music, see the scene.  But in light of having almost killed himself, it seemed a frivolous, somewhat foolhardy desire.  Why take the chance?  Why put himself in temptation’s way?  Did she almost say, Devil’s way? Brian did not seem to have great control, from what she could tell.  But when she had asked him about it, what he said had made sense.  He didn’t want to become “a cripple,” as he put it, after this suicide attempt.  He felt it was important for him to prove that he could handle it.  And it would be a way of bringing this phase of his life to some closure — to say goodbye to some people.

It made sense.  He sounded so reasonable.  He was so serious and thoughtful, she had to take him seriously.  She respected him, even though she wanted to dismiss him.  She felt his youth, his openness and honesty, his striving to have an authentic self, to be his own person, to build a life.

But another side of her feared he was chemically dependent.  He might talk a good talk — and he did — but Miriam was afraid of drugs.  She didn’t believe that he could control them.  She had never wanted, herself, to experience other realities through chemicals.  Reality as she knew it was plenty to deal with. 

Brian could get out of the hospital on passes now, and so Miriam invited him over for dinner one night.  She bought some nice Porterhouse steaks, some potato salad, butterleaf lettuce for a salad, and that morning she made a banana cake, singing to herself as she stirred and baked.  She picked him up at his C2 ward at the hospital at 4:00.  The staff person on duty shook Miriam’s hand, and said he wanted to meet Brian’s teacher.  He went to get Brian, who had just showered.  He came out bouncy and almost wet — he was obviously excited and eager, with that kind of enthusiastic quality that got to Miriam — he seemed a little hyper, and maybe nervous, a little high strung.  He hugged Miriam, which surprised her.  She got the feeling he had thought about it and decided it was okay to hug her.  It didn’t seem entirely spontaneous, but something that he consciously wanted to do.  Miriam found him very dear.  He was touching to her in his youth, his masculine assertiveness which seemed still a bit green, tender.  She felt like a girl around him, a bit flustered herself, and yet she also knew herself to be his teacher, somehow responsible for him, his well-being.

He seemed a little wound up as they left the hospital, eager to please, polite in the extreme.  At home he sat in the back yard talking to Ted while she worked in the kitchen, icing the banana cake, making the salad.  It was a beautiful day — just what she had wanted — and out the window she could see just his feet in his white Nike’s, big like a puppy’s.  He was stretched out in the chaise lounge.  She heard the murmur of his and Ted’s voices.  She had a feeling of great peace and comfort; at least for the moment, all was well.  What would it have been like to have a son, to have him home from college, to see his long legs stretched out on the chaise lounge?   She thought how much she wanted to treat Brian, to give him this beautiful evening, to feed him.  Ted grilled the steaks, and Brian ate his down to the bone, really enjoying it, while Miriam watched, feeling happy — the guy seemed starved!  He reminded her of the baby birds she had tried to save when she was little, until you learn you can’t.

He thanked Miriam several times for the dinner as she drove him back to the hospital.  He always had such manners, such a sense of appreciation and gratitude.  They stopped by the hospital housing where his mother and grandmother were staying, so that Miriam could say goodbye to Karen and Barb, who were leaving in the morning.  They found Karen standing in the hall chatting with another woman about a trip they were planning to Target later that night.  Miriam noted the sense of camaraderie about the place, as if the family members there were in a dorm again, bonded because each was experiencing a crisis, with all the attendant emotions, the intensity and drama, the compassion and support.  There was something almost addicting in it.  Miriam wondered if she was addicted.  

Brian walked Miriam back to her car.  Then he’d be returning to his room in the psyche ward.  He had complete freedom to come and go now. But even as Miriam watched him walk away on his long legs, she couldn’t help wondering if he would indeed go back to his room.  She couldn’t help thinking that he might kill himself.  He might just walk off into the night and die.

Monday.  She had had Brian over for dinner on Thursday and when she took him back to the hospital that night, she had asked him to call her, they’d get together sometime, she’d have time.  And she hadn’t heard from him since.  It was only Monday, but Miriam felt the same way she used to feel when she was waiting for a man to call.  Waiting and waiting.  Obsessed, really, she noted with bemusement.  What was going on over there at the hospital?  She was still anxious at some level that he wasn’t okay, that he’d try to kill himself.  But she also knew it wasn’t that.  It was that she wanted him to want and need her as much as she wanted and needed him.  To want that special bond, that intimacy.  Again she thought of that moment when they touched, when something passed between them.  She knew she should back off, begin to let go, but her mind was preoccupied with him, with wanting him to call.  It puzzled her.  She hadn’t realized that she was still susceptible to these feelings, fantasies even.  She would never cross a line with him, but some deep part of her wished that they could just exist outside of time, outside of their real lives, society.  She wondered what it would be like to go to bed with him.  How young he would be, how excited, and she could be the older, more experienced woman, the teacher.  That had often been a fantasy of hers, when she was younger, free and single.  It never worked that way — she was always, even in actual scenarios, the student.  But what would it be like to make love to him?  This in some world outside of all the messy details, the fact that he was suicidal, fragile, vulnerable, twenty, and she, married.  She felt ashamed of herself for such fantasies.  What would Ted think, it would hurt him, and what would Karen, Brian’s mother, think, for god’s sake.  His teacher lusting after him.  Miriam shook her head to try to clear it.  These were only fantasies, she told herself, no one would ever have to know.  And in the fantasies she was not exactly her self, not her temporal self exactly, but some eternal self.  In actual time, she felt how she was growing older — she was almost middle-aged, she was losing her sex appeal.  She had heard that in menopause, a woman’s lips get thinner.  The world looked on her, she felt, as a nice married lady but didn’t give her a second thought.  She felt, intuitively, that Brian did notice.  But then he was at that age, he noticed anything in a skirt.  He radiated sexual interest, pheromones, and Miriam was responding to that, she supposed.      Maybe those invisible airborne molecules were just wafting around him all the time, and she had got a snoutful.

Finally she called him in the afternoon, and woke him up.  He sounded terribly groggy; maybe he was sleeping off the effects of the electric shock treatments.  Miriam felt confused, off-balanced.  Was she getting to be a nuisance?  Was he trying to give her the hint to back off?  She wasn’t used to being so off-base, so outside her normal bounds.  It occurred to her that he wasn’t obsessed with her the way she was with him.  But then she hadn’t tried to kill herself!  He had gained so much power in that way, he had created a situation in which her normal boundaries were stripped away.  She had had to call, even when she knew she shouldn’t, because she was so confused about what to do, about “supporting” him, letting him know she cared. She hung up, mystified at finding herself in such a situation. 

It was Wednesday before he called back.  Miriam noted, intellectually, that that was good, that he was showing good judgment, really, if he even thought about any of this.  He was more appropriate than she was!  He had a life to resume, friends his own age, and a heck of a future to figure out.  It was right that Miriam be a piece of that, but only a small piece.  She began to think of when he would leave Minneapolis, return to Tennessee and what a relief that would be for her. 

 The Lollapalooza concert was on Saturday night.  He’d be getting out of the hospital on Friday, staying with friends in St. Paul for the concert, and then he’d be leaving on Tuesday.  He had had his airline ticket sent to Miriam’s and she would bring it to him when they got together on Monday to say goodbye. 

Miriam bought a new black bra for the occasion.  Not that she had any intention of Brian seeing it.  It was just that he had stirred something in her, some desire to be desirable, to be available again.  To be young, a young woman again.  She no longer knew if she was a good looking woman (had she ever been?).  Ted said she was, but he had to, didn’t he? 

 Lollapalooza.  What did the word even mean?  Miriam didn’t know.  Maybe it was just an expression of a mood, a feeling, a generation.  X?  Alternative rock, whatever that meant.  Miriam had read about it in the newspaper: “spring break for the alienated.”  Nine hours of music with a main stage and second stage, with a bazaar of ethnic food and clothing.  It sounded fun, if you were twenty years old.  Bands like Primus, Alice in Chains, Dinosaur Jr., Arrested Development (of all things).  Brian had loaned Miriam an Alice in Chains CD, trying to educate her regarding his music.  Who was the student now?  The music was strange, black, heavy, hopeless.  She couldn’t listen to it for long. 

She tried not to think too much about the concert over the weekend.  It was in God’s hands, even though she didn’t believe in God.   At least it was out of her hands.  Maybe Brian was right to go.  He had the right instincts, to be who he was, to do what you do when you’re twenty years old and full of uncertainty.  He was certainly no fool.  But Miriam wasn’t sure which part of him would win out.  She felt as if she were holding her breath, even as she went about her business.

Waiting.  Waiting and waiting.  Not just waiting to hear about Lollapalooza — though she was waiting for that — but other waiting,     waiting specific and vague.  Specifically, she was waiting to hear if her new book, a memoir, would be accepted by a prestigious New York publisher.  It had been there over five months now.  Waiting.  There had been an exciting break in the waiting when the editor she had sent it too had called out of the blue two months ago to say she had just started the manuscript, and “loved it.”  Then nothing.  Nothing, that is, except waiting.  It put Miriam’s nerves on edge.  Every day she expected, feared, dreaded finding the manuscript returned, all her hopes dashed just like that.  It reminded her of infertility treatment, all those months of trying to get pregnant, waiting to see if she would start her period, and then trying again, more waiting, and so on and so on.

Waiting was underestimated as a human scourge.  She recalled reading a line somewhere, “most of life is waiting.”  How true.  She felt she was always waiting, that life was not really happening yet, but would when the waiting was over.  It never was.  She admired people who plunged ahead, who leaped in, who gathered no moss.  She was not one of them.  Her own tendency was towards caution, conservatism, timidity even.  Lollapalooza indeed.

Being a writer consisted so much of waiting, isolation, boredom.  Or was that only Miriam?  She tried to set up the conditions for writing that she thought she needed: blocks of time, solitude. And then was bored, lonely and depressed.  It was hard, day in and day out, year in and year out, to pull out of her imagination and memory fresh material.  Most of the time what she had to say seemed dry, obvious, predictable, stale.  But occasionally, something would burst forth — something rich, funny, sad, alive.  Out of all that deadness.  But it was unpredictable.  She thought sometimes that the very deadness, that waiting and infertility, were necessary for the alive thing to burst forth.  But she paid a price.

Waiting, boredom, depression.  All the fun things!  Often her soul felt  — to borrow Joyce Carol Oates’ description – as flat as a playing card.  When did Joyce Carol Oates have time to feel that way?  She was so busy bursting forth with books all the time.  Miriam could tell her a thing or two about flat souls.  How did life get so circumscribed?  A long marriage, middle-age, choices made, options closed.  You work so hard to be secure, mature, safe, out of crisis, and then you die of boredom.  Hard to get it right.  She wished she could “do” something: burst out, run away, have an affair.  Commit suicide?  That would be dramatic, and humans needed drama.  Maybe she was having withdrawal from Brian’s suicide attack.  It had been like a drug.

He didn’t do drugs, he didn’t drink at Lollapalooza.  He hadn’t even had that great a time, it seemed, maybe because he couldn’t use.  He had said goodbye to his old friends, and realized in a way, how little there was there. 

He and Miriam were talking on the phone Sunday night, making plans to get together Monday for one last time before he’d fly home to Tennessee on Tuesday.

 Monday dawned hot and humid.  Summer had arrived, as full blown as the leaves on the trees.  Miriam dressed in a sleeveless blouse and a skirt with birds on the material, and underneath, her own little secret, the new black bra.  She felt sexy and it was great.  Great!  She hadn’t died yet.

She picked him up at his friends’ apartment around one, a brownstone on Grand Ave. in St. Paul.  He was bleary-eyed, washed out looking — but of course he had stayed up most of the night of the concert and was worn out from that.  Miriam saw that he was growing a little beard, like a goatee.  It looked a little ridiculous, as if he couldn’t quite pull off having a beard. And yet it did make him look different, older somehow.  He was no longer the boy on the cusp she had had as a student last spring, when the lilacs were in bloom.  

Brian was all excited because he was going to see his ex-girlfriend Sam — short for Samantha — that night. 

“Maybe I’ll get laid,” he said gleefully, and Miriam laughed. 

“So tell me about you and Sam,” she said.

“We were quite in love for awhile,” Brian said.  He gave a tremendous yawn.  Miriam wondered if he was really awake yet.  “But I didn’t want to go steady over the summer — this was last summer — and she ended up falling in love with someone else.  An older man, thirty-five.  I’d really like to sleep with her again, mainly to get laid.  Not that I don’t like her and am not attracted to her and all that — but…”

Good, Miriam thought.  It’s good he’s horny, a good sign.  Horny was the opposite of depressed

“I don’t really like to play the field,” he confided.  “I like to be in love.”  And again he yawned.

“Do you need a nap,” Miriam asked. 

“Oh, I think I’ll revive around Sam,” he said, and Miriam had to laugh again.  She in her secret black bra wasn’t too stimulating, but Sam would be!  Just as it should be.  Well, Ted would be the beneficiary. 

Miriam took him to a restaurant for a late lunch, her last chance to feed him.  He had a psychiatrist appointment at the hospital at three.   She noted that she was glad there were some time constraints.  She had errands to run this afternoon, things to do.

 She double-parked outside the main entrance of the hospital.  “You know,” he said, “the doctors here still marvel over me. ‘The miracle person’ they call me, because I survived such a serious suicide attempt.  I know it had to be God or some higher power.” Miriam nodded.  For once there were no words in her mind, nothing left to say.  She reached over to embrace him, to say goodbye.  She held his warm alive body, his warm alive self.  He got out of the car and waved to her through the window.  She watched him walk away.  There was something jaunty in his step, something optimistic, a young man walking into his future on long, loping legs.

Swimming, Snow

For Miriam the winter of her father’s death would always be juxtaposed with a summer day.  It was Saturday, Labor Day weekend, and she had ridden her bike down to Lake Harriet, near their house in Minneapolis, to the north beach, just beyond the bandstand, where her husband Ted had his sailboat tipped up on shore to clean the hull.  Miriam had meant to help with the scrubbing; she had good intentions.  But as soon as she saw the water, she wanted to go swimming.

She hadn’t been swimming all summer.  She didn’t know why.  It was just that she was always so busy.  Doing what?  She tried to think.  Before her the lake sparkled in the sun.  She had just finished teaching a summer school course, and she was working part-time at a bookstore.  Then there was Ted, a high-maintenance husband, and lots of women friends, and of course there was writing.  It was like a demanding, beloved child.  She waded into the water. 

She struck out through the sailboats bouncing lightly on their buoys.  She passed two female mallards who were swimming there too.   Up above the sky was a resplendent blue.  Snow-white clouds, cumulus now, would be thunderheads by evening.  She floated for awhile on her back, the sun on her face.  Then she commenced swimming again.

 She had spoken to her parents in South Carolina just that morning.   Her father had sounded fine, though she noticed that he didn’t linger on the phone, as if he found it too much effort to call across the miles about the Southern heat, his tomatoes, Miriam’s trip that morning to the farmers’ market.  Oh! she remembered him saying, I wish I could have gone with you!  Well, Miriam wished too. 

After she hung up, she had felt disturbed, restless, and she had a strong feeling that she should get to South Carolina.  She had gone upstairs and looked hard at her calendar.  She marked off five days in October when she could go.  At that moment she remembered a dream:  both her parents had died suddenly, in a plane crash.  They had dropped out of the sky and were gone.  Then she was in their old house having to go through their things and dispose of what had been her parents’ material life.

Now, swimming, Miriam lost track of time and distance.  But suddenly something frightened her, a dark shadow passing over.  She jerked up, trying to touch bottom that wasn’t there.  How far away the shore was!  There was the tipped up hull of the sailboat, a large portion of which was now a bright blue, the rest a dull green, and Ted’s tiny figure bent over a bucket.  But the shadow?  Looking up, she saw that a plane had passed over.  With her head in the water and earplugs, she hadn’t heard it. 

When she returned to the beach, she was pleasantly tired.  She spread her towel on the sand and lay down.  The sun warmed her, smiling on her.  So this is what it is like, she thought happily, to relax.  Relaxation was not a big part of Miriam’s life.  She was always in a hurry, always busy, always striving, achieving, or at least trying.  It had to do, she thought, with being a woman, living in a city, in the last decade of the century.  Then she was asleep.

When she woke it was late afternoon.  She felt deeply refreshed, as if she had traveled to some distant restful place.  Her limbs felt loose and light.  Her mind empty and clear.   She couldn’t remember such a feeling of well-being.  She told herself she would come swimming again, soon.

When she came in from her lunch break at the bookstore the next day, she immediately encountered a difficult customer.  Most people who bought books were polite and good humored, but this woman was the exception.  She had ordered a book which was listed in Books-in-Print at $17.95 and now that it had arrived, the price was $19.95.  And she was insisting, in a querulous sort of way, as if Miriam were trying to cheat her, that she only pay $17.95.  The phone rang.  Dan, another clerk, was nearby, and Miriam, dodging, motioned him over to handle the woman while she took the phone. 

To her surprise, it was Ted.  His voice sounded thin. “I didn’t know whether I should call you right now or not… but…your mother just called.  Your dad fell in the bathroom and they’re taking him to the hospital.”

Miriam was very calm.  She was taking it in, trying to figure it out.  Her father had fallen in the bathroom?  Her father never fell.  But maybe he had slipped in the shower.  And was he hurt?  She felt some strange sensation of lightness, but also, she was holding herself very still.  It seemed important not to jump to conclusions.

“I just had a moment to talk to your mother,” Ted explained, “because the paramedics were there and they were just taking him out.”

Paramedics?  Taking him out?

“She must have called 911,” Ted said.

Out of the corner of her eye Miriam saw Dan dealing with the difficult customer.  The world around her was still there.  But all her attention was focused on Ted’s voice, trying to hear what had happened, what it meant.

Fallen in the bathroom.  Paramedics.  Hospital. 

“Miriam,” Ted said, “it looks as if he collapsed.  He might have had a heart attack.  It doesn’t look good.

“Maybe you should come home,” Ted said.

It wasn’t obvious to Miriam what she should do.

“We won’t know anything for awhile,” Ted said.

Miriam was very calm.  She hung up the phone.  She tried to think what to do.  Should she go home now or not?  Maybe he had just fallen in the bathroom.  Maybe he’d be home by that night.  He wasn’t the kind to get hurt.  She started downstairs.  She was considering not telling anyone at the bookstore about the phone call.  She would go right on selling books, as if nothing had happened.  Wouldn’t it then be, in some way, that nothing had happened?

Before she could get to the stairs, a customer grabbed her.  She wanted to find a book with a certain poem in it by Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Miriam led her to the poetry section and looked with her through a few anthologies.  She tried to find Edna St. Vincent Millay in the individual poets section but she couldn’t think whether her last name would be S, V, or M.  Miriam felt very confused about that.

Finally she found the Collected Poems.  She handed it over.

As soon as she got downstairs, the phone was ringing and ringing.  Out of habit she picked it up.  A customer wanted to know if a book he had ordered had come in.  Miriam went back upstairs to the special order shelf, but she couldn’t remember what book he had mentioned, or his name.  She was kneeling by the special order books, but she couldn’t remember what she was looking for.  Dan was looking at her.  She looked up at him. 

“I just got a phone call that my father has collapsed,” she said, “and they’re taking him to the hospital.”  Her hands started to shake.  They were shaking in front of her, trying to find the book the name of which she had forgotten.

It was saying those words — my father, collapse, hospital — that had done it.  Once they were loosed, she couldn’t get them back.  She couldn’t stop them.

Dan was full of concern.  Didn’t she want to go home? Miriam asked him to pick up line 2 and help the customer who was waiting.

Five, maybe ten minutes had passed.

Then she was in her car, driving home.  She was crying, but at the same time, her mind was working quietly, efficiently.  She was thinking what she needed to do if she was going to have to go to South Carolina.  When she pulled into the garage, Ted was there.  When he saw Miriam, he burst into tears.  Miriam was surprised.  She had never seen him cry that way.

Your uncle Perry will be the one to call, Ted told her in the house.  Miriam had gotten her calendar, she had asked Ted to call the airlines to find out about flights.  She made a list of names and phone numbers of appointments and commitments that would have to be canceled.  She would leave the list with a friend if she had to.

They were sitting at the dining room table when the phone rang.  Her uncle Perry cleared his throat, he gathered himself.  “Miriam,” he said into her ear, “he didn’t make it.” 

 “He didn’t,” Miriam repeated dully.  

Her uncle, a retired doctor, related how he had met the ambulance at the hospital, how they had worked on her father, how they weren’t able to save him.  He had never had any heart trouble, but it was that sudden thing.  The heart stops.  Stops.    He and Miriam’s mother had gone in and viewed the body, and now they were home.  Not an hour had passed. 

Miriam asked to speak to her mother.  “He was just fine,” her mother said in a perplexed voice.  “We had had lunch and were getting ready to take some letters that hadn’t been picked up Saturday to the post office.  He said ‘I have a little headache and I’m out of aspirin.’  I gave him a Tylenol to take.  He went into the bathroom to get ready and five minutes later, when I called to him, he didn’t answer.  I found him stretched out on the floor.  I tried to revive him with a wet washcloth.  I put a pillow under his head.  But I couldn’t find a pulse.  I called 9ll — I didn’t waste any time.” 

Miriam told her mother she wasn’t sure she could get a flight out that afternoon.  But two hours later, she and Ted were on a plane to Greenville.

 She was flying to Greenville because her father had died, just as she had always known he would, and never for a minute believed. She had first started fearing her father’s death when she was about fourteen.  She would get up at night and stand in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom to make sure he was still snoring.  He was forty-five when Miriam was born, and in school she had come to understand that he was an “old” father.  He didn’t seem old in any way, but still, she was afraid she’d lose him before she was ready.  She was forty-three now, and he would have been eighty-eight on September l7, fifteen days after he died.  And while it was true that she was still not ready to lose him, and never would have been, she was grateful that she had had as long as she did to grow up before he died.  It was only in the last year or two that Miriam had felt her own maturity somewhat in place. 

She felt composed in a numb sort of way, aware of everything around her and yet at a remove.  Her job now was to get to Greenville and all her energy was directed towards that goal.  It seemed important to get there as soon as possible, important that Miriam be there that first night to help her mother turn down the antique oak bed, the bed her husband would inhabit no more, after fifty-eight years of marriage.

Miriam and Ted were sleeping in an upstairs bedroom and when Miriam turned on the light in the bathroom that first night home, the radio came on.  It was an oldies station, rock ’n roll.  Miriam stood transfixed in the bathroom, feeling her father’s presence, and for the first time, his absence.  He was the one who had rigged up the radio to turn on with the light.  When he shaved in this bathroom, he wanted the radio on.  More than anything else, radios bespoke her father.  During her growing up, Miriam’s father had had a radio and t.v. store on North Main Street.  Their house had always been full of radios and t.v.s. 

 It was just like her father to have that radio on.  When her folks would visit them up North, it was always a joke between Miriam and Ted about how her father would want a radio or t.v. on the whole time.  Once they took her parents to some fancy townhouses on the North Shore which had no radios or t.v.s, and her father had withdrawal symptoms.  Was she making it up to say he went out to the car to listen to the radio?

At any rate, when the radio burst on in the bathroom, with so much volume, it was her father all the way, and it broke Miriam’s heart.  She went crying into Ted in the bedroom, and she was laughing too, for her father had been something of a character.  She knew she was in for a hard time then, because she needed to turn that radio off and she knew that when she did…. Well.  Her father would never be there to turn it on again.

Miriam cried and cried.  The radio played and played.  I can’t turn it off, she wept to Ted, I just can’t.  I can’t.  But she wanted to. 

You don’t have to, Ted soothed.  You can always turn it back on.

She knew.   She knew.  But she was beginning to know something else.  Her father was dead.  Each moment was another moment separating her from his living, breathing self.  He had been alive a few hours earlier.  Nine hours ago, he was alive!   And now.  Now his hand, which she knew so well, would never again be there to turn that radio on.  Not after Miriam turned it off.

She turned it off.

The next morning, the house was full of people.  The kitchen began to fill up with honey baked ham, sliced turkey, casseroles topped with potato chips or cheddar cheese, pound cake.  There was so much to do that Miriam barely had time to miss her father.  She had to write up an obituary, find a photograph for the newspaper, help her mother with all the decisions, and meet the mortician, a handsome man about her age who remembered buying stereos as a teenager from her father.  Her aunt Grace and uncle Perry and cousin Henry and his wife Clarice came over, and they all sat down to a big Southern lunch.  Only once or twice did Miriam look up to see where her father should be sitting at the head of the table, where he always sat.

At the mortuary that afternoon, Miriam, her mother and Ted looked over the caskets.  They were all in a showroom, as cars might be, and they had discreet cards in them with the important information, the cost.  There were Rolls-Royce caskets of shiny dark mahogany, there were Cadillac caskets of highly burnished metal, and there were a few Chevrolets and Mercuries, but nothing approaching a Toyota.  Miriam noticed some huge object that turned out to be a vault, and learned that not only did one need a casket, one needed something to put the casket in.  Ted pulled her aside at some point and asked if anybody had considered cremation.  Miriam was aware of that option herself, but she doubted that her mother would go for it.  It might seem too Northern a thing, and Miriam was sure her mother was going to bury her father according to some internal idea which didn’t need to be articulated.  Miriam didn’t know how to bury the dead, and if her mother did, that was fine with her.

Later that afternoon, Miriam and her mother returned to the mortuary to make sure that the body had been laid out properly.  Miriam was afraid to see her father.  But at the same time, she wanted to.  She hadn’t seen him since last March — six months!  Maybe it would have been different if she lived in the same town, if she had seen him every few days.  But now she needed to see her father’s face again.  She had always liked being with her father.  His presence, his abiding love and complete approval of her had made her feel welcomed in the world, buoyed up.  What more could a child ask for, and she was still her father’s child.  She still needed his love.

It didn’t look like him.  At first Miriam thought there had been a mistake, and of course the heart leaps, maybe it’s all a mistake!  Maybe he didn’t die.  But of course it was him, and gradually, after the initial shock, she saw that it was him, or some form of him.  His little glasses looked right, and his forehead and his white hair, which he was so proud of, but from the nose down, it might have been someone else.  The mortuary had done something strange to make him look — she didn’t know what.  For one thing, his mouth was shut.  That seemed odd, for him.  He had on his best dark suit and a tie Miriam had given him, and one hand was laid across his middle, rather formally.  It was his hand, Miriam could see that.  That she knew.  She knew those hands, and they were his, and nothing the mortuary did could change them.  They were her father’s hands, and they were dead.  They would never rise again in all that animation that was his, all that joy.  All that caring, all that tending, all that fixing, all that doing.  All that love. 

Miriam wanted more than anything else to go back to the mortuary alone and spend time with her father.  In that confused and hectic time, this need rose like a mountain out of the mist, vivid and undeniable.  A mountain of need.  There were so many people around, there was so much going on – but where was her father?   He was missing, and if she didn’t separate herself from everything else, if only for a little while, she would lose him in the commotion.  She told her mother of her need.  Arrangements had to be made.  It wasn’t easy.  Her mother needed her car to go to the beauty parlor to get her hair done before the funeral the next day.  Miriam’s sister and her husband were driving down from Virginia and Miriam’s mother thought Miriam should be there when they got in.  Her father’s old gold Plymouth station wagon was a dubious means of transportation.  Mostly it sat in the backyard like an old horse put out to pasture.  Ted and her mother were afraid for Miriam to drive it to the mortuary.  But Miriam had to go, that much was clear.

The station wagon drove like a boat, but it carried Miriam all the way across town.  She went into the room where her father lay, and she shut the door behind her.

II

When Miriam got back to Minnesota after the funeral, fall was in the air.  She had been gone two weeks and she couldn’t remember where she had left off exactly or what she had to do.  But it was all waiting for her.   Right away she had to start teaching as an adjunct at the university and working at the bookstore, where the best seller was a little book called “Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much.”  And of course there was the book she was writing, which lay beached on her desk, out of water, stranded, dying from lack of attention.

Miriam started right in on everything.  It was her life, after all; she had no choice but to live it.  When someone would ask her how she was doing, she wasn’t sure what to say.  People kept telling her what a big thing it was, how difficult to lose a parent, and she worried if it were big enough for her — how big was it supposed to be, and how did such a loss manifest itself?   She had expected to be demolished somehow, but she was coping very well.  In fact, she was doing so well she sometimes had to remind herself that her father had died.  Still, her brow felt contracted, as if in concentration. 

 It was several weeks before she found time to walk around Lake Harriet, bundled up against a sharp wind that splashed waves high up on the north shore. The water had taken on a steely color.  She could not imagine ever swimming in it.  She thought back to that last summer day when she had gone swimming, and a feeling of incomprehension came over her.  Overhead, Canadian geese were winging their way South in formation.  There was something in their cries that stopped her in her tracks.  She looked up.  She shook her head.  She couldn’t answer.

 It was just that she was so busy!  She was always rushing here and there, trying to do so much, like everyone else.  But then one day she wore her blouse wrong side out, and not long after that at the grocery store when the young man asked her plastic or paper, she said paper, and when he asked her carry out or drive up, she said drive up.  When she pulled into her garage at home, she saw the number they had given her there on the front seat.  She had forgotten the groceries.   But those were the kind of things she might have done before her father died, she told herself.  She always had a lot on her mind, only now she had more. 

Her mother had wanted Miriam and Ted to have something of Miriam’s father’s, so Miriam had taken his wrist watch, which had stopped working, and which she kept now in a change purse in her desk drawer.  She was not able to take it out.  Ted had gotten her father’s little pocketknife, which he had had for maybe fifty years.  It was always with him, either on his dresser top at night or in his pocket during the day.  Her father was handy and she had seen him use it to repair rabbit ears on the t.v., open a stuck sardine can, cut twine for mailing a package, or do any of the innumerable other things her father did to repair the world.  Ted was glad to have it.  It was a pretty little knife, ivory with streaks of gold, small, with a good feel in the hand. 

Ted had it down at the dock with him the day he took the sailboat out for the winter.  As he was trimming a tattered telltale, the pocketknife leaped from his hands and jumped into the water.  Miriam could only stare at him in amazement when he told her.  He felt so miserable about losing it, but Miriam couldn’t help saying something along the lines of how her father had had that knife for fifty years and Ted couldn’t hold on to it for ten minutes.  She regarded him across a great divide: his father hadn’t died. 

After that, she often thought about the knife.  She couldn’t get it out of her mind.  How she wished to have it back!  It was always leaping like a little silvery fish, leaping into the dark water, and what she couldn’t get around was that it was gone.  Gone!

Even though it was getting so cold, she circled Lake Harriet nearly every day, going round and round.  She stared at the lake in a new way.   Now it contained her father’s little knife.  How was it, she wondered, that her father’s pocketknife had traveled all the way from South Carolina to jump into Lake Harriet a few blocks from her house?  The lake, looking particularly gray and remote, offered no answers.

In November the lake began to freeze.  It started with crystals around the edges, then thin panes spread out over the surface, which children threw sticks and rocks onto while they could still break through.  But one day the temperature plunged sharply and Miriam hurried down to find the lake freezing solid.  It was happening and nothing could stop it.  As she walked around the lake, her face burning with cold, the freezing sheets of ice pitched high thin notes like a tuning fork.  She had read somewhere that tuning forks had a mysterious quality, wherein if you held several of them up in a room, and struck only one, the others would sound as well, absorbing vibrations through the air, answering in kind.  Miriam felt the sounds coming off the lake reverberating in her, and something in her answered back in that high keening tone: Gone!  Gone!  

 She had meant to get her bulbs into the ground well before it froze, but she was very late this year.  Thus she found herself on her knees one frigid day, the earth cold and hard, brown paper sacks of tulip and daffodil bulbs by her side, wearing her old green garden gloves, spading holes into which she sprinkled bone meal.  As she set the last bulb into the ground and covered it up, suddenly she began to weep.  Her father had loved gardening.  He was always growing something.  His old metal watering can came into her mind and the strips of white undershirt he had used to tie his heavy tomato vines to stakes.  He was wearing a white undershirt when he died; the paramedics had had to cut it open to get to his heart.  She wept into her garden gloves, smearing her face with dirt. Her father was gone!  She would never see him again!   How was this possible?  It was not possible.  How could she stand it?  She could not stand it.  She got creakily to her feet.  She went in the house and washed her face.

 It began to snow in December.  At first there were just a few light dustings, against which the earth battled back, but then it began in earnest, seriously, with great determination.   Standing at the window, watching the snow swirl and float out of the sky, vanishing the familiar world, Miriam felt despair.  It was as if she came from a country where it never snowed; how she longed to return to that green land!  Of course she knew snow, she had lived in Minnesota for a long time, she liked snow, she even liked winter, sort of, but now it weighed her down.  It made her long for sleep. 

One wintry afternoon she was driving home from her class at the university, listening to MPR.  It was snowing and Miriam was afraid to drive in snow, but she pushed on, just as everyone around her on the freeway was doing.  She tried to concentrate on Michael Friezen’s voice.  Though she had never met him, she was very fond of him; she often thought of him as her best friend, at least when she had the radio on.  She loved how he read poetry, how he was so appreciative of the seasons, and most of all, how he loved music.  Today’s selections, he began, were in honor of the snow, which was falling so gently, so softly, covering everything over, falling — and here he quoted Joyce — “upon all the living and the dead.”  He had chosen the “Four Last Songs” of Strauss to begin the afternoon’s program.  The songs, he explained, were concerned with serene confidence in eternity and immortality. “In them,”  he said deeply, “the voice is allowed to soar within an exceptionally wide compass, giving the impression of an instrument with vocal qualities.”

 Before Miriam was ready, the music began.  The first chords struck several slow funereal notes, against which broke a clear pure soprano, as if the human heart had been translated into sound.  This voice lifted higher and higher, seeking to escape the bounds of earth, taking with it all grief, all sorrow, and it tore Miriam from her moorings, lifting her, too.  She was weeping.  She was weeping so much, in fact, that she needed to pull off the freeway.  She maneuvered her way out of the speeding traffic — sliding forty miles per hour through the snow — and stopped.  She stopped.  Cars zoomed past her; she put her face in her hands and wept.  Her father was gone.  She would never see him again.   This simple truth rose up in her.  It opened up in her, it opened her up.   An inner life, which she was hardly aware of, but which nevertheless was going about its work, had chosen this moment to make itself known.  Most of the time she skimmed along on the surface, trying to keep head above water.  But now she sensed fathoms.  She sounded the depths.

 Miriam and Ted flew to South Carolina to be with her mother for the first Christmas.  It shocked Miriam to see how her mother had aged since her father’s death.  For many years he had been the old one; now her mother’s turn had arrived.  She would be seventy-nine in January.   There were all the questions of her mother’s old age: could she continue to live alone; and if not, where should she live?  And how to fix the glove compartment door of her old Buick, which kept falling open, which Miriam’s father would have fixed.  Walking across the uneven winter grass of the cemetery, holding onto her mother’s arm to keep her from falling, Miriam hardly thought of her father at all.  She was thinking instead of how old and shaky her mother had become, of whether they should get her a microwave and if she could master it, and of the approaching day when Miriam would fly away, again.

 When Miriam returned to Minnesota in January, she looked around her in surprise.  Having gotten through fall and the holidays, she had expected to be let off the hook.  But her father was still dead.  He was going to go right on being dead forever. 

  Now began the days of deepest winter: four degrees below zero; ten below.  The world was monochromatic, stark, shut down.  She thought back to that summer day; she had been innocent then, as green as a leaf.  It was harder to make herself go down to the lake now.  But still she went.  It lay so still and frozen.  Impossible to believe it could ever be the inviting blue of summer.  Everything was cold.  Miriam was cold.  She turned down invitations when she could.  The weather was as good an excuse as any; no one much liked to go out, especially in the dark cold night.  Now was winter: solitude, privacy, silence, snow. 

She quit her job at the bookstore.  She needed the money but she couldn’t afford to make it.  She spent her days making soup, black bean, vegetable beef.  She sat in a rocker for hours, listening to music: Beethoven’s symphonies, Brahms, Chopin.  Outside the snow glittered in the crystal-cold air.  When she taught, her students moved her: their beauty, their youth.  She took long baths, fragrant with oils, pungent with salts.   She was silent and still, watching the birds at the feeder. 

Deep one night she dreamed of her father.  He wasn’t old, as she had last known him in life, or even young but rather no age at all — just himself, outside of time.  They were in the garden, planting shrubs.  He had on his garden gloves, old soft ones of cotton ticking.  How happy she was to see him!  What comfort in being with him again.  Miriam knew that she was dreaming.  She knew that he wouldn’t be staying.    But for now they were in the garden, planting green things.  

Miriam awoke.  She went to stand at the window.  Below, the garden was covered with snow, a dark radiance in the night.   Under its glow, flowers and bulbs were sleeping through this long winter’s night.

 Miriam went in for a massage.   The masseuse was an ex-nun named Joan with arms like a fullback.  She had Miriam undress completely in the bathroom of her suburban ranch house and lie face-down on a massage table in an extra bedroom that had been converted into a quasi-New Age den.  Joan and Miriam made small talk at first but then they both fell silent.  It felt good to Miriam to have her back massaged with such power.  All her muscles, knotted from the long cold winter, were being smoothed out under the force of Joan’s strong hands.  Outside the windchill was minus forty-four degrees; but inside, Miriam, feeling naked and small, was warm.  She buried her face in the hole in the massage table.  Every now and then Joan would stop, and simply rest her hand for a moment on Miriam’s back, as if Miriam were a baby, and Joan was reassuring her.  Miriam began to cry.  The weeping rose from deep in her body, from a physical place she didn’t even know existed.  It was as if Joan had released these tears from Miriam’s tissues.  She didn’t so much think the words this time as feel them: He’s gone.  Never again.  Above her Joan rested her hand lightly on Miriam’s sobbing back.  

“‘Tis very warm winter when one’s in bed,’” Ted says to Miriam.  They’re in bed and it is very warm.

“Who said that,” Miriam asks.  He majored in English, and often surprises her with quotes.

“Jonathan Swift,” he says, taking her in his arms.

“Tis,” she says, kissing him softly.

  She’s neglected Ted over this long winter of her father’s death.  It’s as if she’s been away, though of course she’s been here all along.  Still, she hasn’t quite been able to notice him in some way, though she understands that he has been noticing her, watching and waiting for her all through this long cold time. 

She does notice him now, notices the pleasing smell of his neck, notices his large hands on her bare back, the way he tilts her chin to kiss her, the quickening taste of his tongue.  Let’s face it, lovemaking for Miriam sometimes seems just another “thing-to-do” on her apparently endless list.  But not today.  On this frosty Sunday afternoon when it’s too cold to go outside, she wants only to burrow — into the house, into the bedroom, into the bed, into Ted.  Though maybe he is burrowing into her.  It is sometimes hard to tell.

Then there comes the moment, as they progress, when her body tenses, becomes taut, like an instrument, a stringed instrument against which a bow is being drawn, now, releasing one high sweet note.  And once again, Miriam is weeping.  This time the weeping comes from such a deep place that Miriam can’t tell if what she feels is pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow.   

Ted folds her to him. 

 Miriam begins swimming in an indoor pool which is in a kind of glass dome.  It has a running track on the floor above which is encircled by walls of windows, a lot of light flooding down on the water.  She goes as often as she can.  She has the time.  She’s slowed way down; swimming helps her do that.  Maybe it’s the ritual of it, how it takes a solid hour to go there, undress, swim, shower, dry her hair, and all that time she isn’t even thinking.  She never hurries.   She remembers how her father, raised in the country, used to like to sit on the porch.  Just sit!  He might have the radio on or he might not.  He wouldn’t do a thing.  Just be.  Swimming gives Miriam some of that same feeling. 

Today she has the pool to herself, perhaps because of the forecast.  Twelve more inches of snow; no one wants to be out in a blizzard.  But it wasn’t snowing when Miriam left home, and she wanted so much to go swimming.  Now she enters the water, feeling the pleasure of her crawl.  Arm over arm, legs flutter kicking behind her, she moves smoothly and lightly through the blue water.  She does lap after lap, as if she could never tire.  Memories float through her: summer days at Table Rock Lake where she grew up swimming, her father’s leaping pocketknife, sailing with Ted on his J boat.  She’ll swim in Lake Harriet again this summer.  She’ll make a point of doing so, and not just once. 

She stands up.  She is all alone.  It is perfectly quiet.  Up above through the glass dome she sees that it is snowing.  The snow is coming down in big beautiful flakes.  Before her the water is calm and blue.  She begins to walk through it, slowly, trailing her hands.  She moves in slow motion, watching her fingers part the water in incandescent waves. 

And now she’s aware of a presence.  She is not afraid.   She understands that she is being watched over, guarded.  Or maybe it’s only the snow.  It has the feel of snow — beautiful, silvery, silent, filling the air.  This is what angels are like, she thinks.  And this is what snow is like.  How it falls and falls, how it blesses us. 

You’re gone.  I’ll never see you again. 

But this time she doesn’t cry.  She walks in the water, trailing her fingers, looking up at the snow.