On the beach, people read books about Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocide. This was to add seriousness to a trip that lacked it. One was supposed not to notice the dark island boys on the other side of the barbed wire, throwing rocks.
sam liked only the trampoline and nothing else. There were dolphin rides, but he sensed their cruelty. "They speak a language," he said. "We shouldn't ride them."
"They look happy," Kit said.
Sam studied her with a seriousness from some sweet beyond. "They look happy so you won't kill them."
"You think so?"
"If dolphins tasted good," he said, "we wouldn't even know about their language." That the intelligence in a thing could undermine your appetite for it. That yumminess obscured the mind of the yummy as well as the mind of the yummer. That deliciousness resulted in decapitation. That you could understand something only if you did not desire it. How did he know such things already? Usually girls knew them first. But not hers. Her girls, Beth and Dale, were tough beyond her comprehension: practical, self-indulgent, independent five-year-old twins, a system unto themselves. They had their own secret world of Montessori code words and plastic jewelry and spells of hilarity brought on mostly by the phrase "cinnamon M&M's" repeated six times, fast. They wore sparkly fairy wings wherever they went, even over cardigans, and they carried wands. "I'm a big brother now," Sam had said repeatedly to everyone and with uncertain pride the day the girls were born, and after that he spoke not another word on the matter. Sometimes Kit accidentally referred to Beth and Dale as Death and Bale, as they, for instance, buried their several Barbies in sand, then lifted them out again with glee. A woman on a towel, one of those reading of genocide, turned and smiled. In this fine compound on the sea, the contradictions of life were grotesque and uninventable.
Kit went to the central office and signed up for a hot-stone massage. "Would you like a man or a woman?" the receptionist asked.
"Excuse me?" Kit said, stalling. After all these years of marriage, which did she want? What did she know of men—or women? "There's no such thing as 'men,'" Jan used to say. "Every man is different. The only thing they have in common is, well, a capacity for horrifying violence."
"A man or a woman—for the massage?" Kit asked. She thought of the slow mating of snails, hermaphrodites for whom it was all so confusing: by the time they had figured out who was going to be the girl and who was going to be the boy, someone came along with some garlic paste and just swooped them right up.
"Oh, either one," she said, and then knew she'd get a man.
Whom she tried not to look at but could smell in all his smoky aromas—tobacco, incense, cannabis—swirling their way around him. A wiry old American pothead gone to grim seed. His name was Dan Handler, according to the business card he wore safety-pinned to his shirt like a badge. He did not speak. He placed hot stones up and down her back and left them there. Did she think her belotioned flesh too private and precious to be touched by the likes of him? Are you crazy? The mad joy in her face was held over the floor by the massage-table headpiece, and at his touch her eyes filled with bittersweet tears, which then dripped out of her nose, which she realized was positioned perfectly by God as a little drainpipe for crying. The sad massage-hut carpet beneath her grew a spot. A heart could break. But perhaps, like a several-hearted worm, you could move on to the next one, then the next. The masseur left the hot stones on her until they went cold. As each one lost its heat, she could no longer feel it there on her back, and then its removal was like a discovery that it had been there all along: how strange to forget and then feel something only then, at the end. Though this wasn't the same thing as the frog in the pot whose water slowly heats and boils, still it had meaning, she felt, the way metaphors of a thermal nature tended to. Then he took all the stones off and pressed the hard edges of them deep into her back, between the bones, in a way that felt mean but more likely had no intention at all.
"That was nice," she said, as he was putting all his stones away. He bad heated them in a plastic electric Crockpot filled with water, and now he unplugged the thing in a tired fashion.
"Where did you get those stones?" she asked. They were smooth and dark gray—black when wet, she saw.
"They're river stones," he said. "I've been collecting them for years up in Colorado." He placed them in a metal fishing-tackle box.
"You live in Colorado?" she asked.
"Used to," he said, and that was that.
on the last night of their vacation, her suitcase arrived like a joke. She didn't even open it. Sam put out the little doorknob flag that said "wake us up for the sea turtles." The flag had a preprinted request for a 3 a.m. wakeup call so that they could go to the beach and see the hatching of the baby sea turtles and their quick scuttle into the ocean, under the cover of night, to avoid predators. Hut though Sam had hung the flag carefully, and before the midnight deadline, no staff person woke them. And by the time they got up and went down to the beach it was ten in the morning. Strangely, the sea turtles were still there. They had hatched during the night and then hotel personnel had hung on to them, in a baskety cage, to show them off to the tourists who were too lazy or deaf to have got up in the night.
"Look, come see!" cried a man with a Spanish accent who usually rented the scuba gear. Sam, Beth, Dale, and Kit all ran over. (Rafe had stayed behind to drink coffee and read the paper.) The squirming babies were beginning to heat up in the sun; the goldening Venetian vellum of their wee webbed feet was already edged in desiccating brown. "I'm going to have to let them go now," the man said. "You are the last ones to see these little bebés." He took them over to the water's edge and let them go, hours too late, to make their own way into the sea. That's when a frigate bird swooped in, plucked them, one by one, from the silver waves, and ate them for breakfast.
Kit sank down in a large chair next to Rafe. He was tanning himself, she could see, for someone else's lust. His every posture contained a strut.
"I think I need a drink," she said. The kids were swimming.
"Don't expect me to buy you a drink," he said.
Had she even asked him to? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passers-by? Who told you that?
when they finally left La Caribe, she was glad. Staying there, she had begun to hate the world. In the airports and on the planes home, she did not even try to act natural: natural was a felony. She spoke to her children calmly, from a script, with dialogue and stage directions of utter neutrality. Back home in Beersboro, she unpacked the condoms and candles, her little love sack, completely unused, and threw it in the trash. What had she been thinking? Later, when she had learned to tell this story differently, as a story, she would construct a final lovemaking scene of sentimental vengeance that would contain the inviolable center of their love, the sweet animal safety of night after night, the still-beating tender heart of marriage. But, for now, she would become like her unruinable daughters, and even her son, who, as he aged stoically and carried on in bottomless forgetting, would come to scarcely recall—was it even past imagining?—that she and Rafe had ever been together at all.
* * *
The Juniper Tree
the night robin ross was dying in the hospital, I was waiting for a man to come pick me up—a man she had once dated, months before I began to—and he was late and I was wondering whether his going to see her with me was even wise. Perhaps I should go alone. Our colleague ZJ had called that morning and said, "Things are bad. When she leaves the hospital, she's not going home."
"I'll go see her tonight," I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I would make it so. It was less like integrity, perhaps, and more like magic.
"That's a good idea," ZJ said. He was chairman of the theatre department and had taken charge, like a husband, since Robin had asked him to. His tearfulness about her fate had already diminished. In the eighties, he had lost a boyfriend to aids, and now al
l the legal and medical decision-making these last few months, he said, seemed numbly familiar.
But then I found myself waiting, and soon it was seven-thirty and then eight and I imagined Robin was tired and sleeping in her metal hospital bed and would have more energy in the morning. When the man I was waiting for came, I said, "You know? It's so late. Maybe I should visit Robin in the morning, when she'll have more energy and be more awake. The tumor presses on the skull, poor girl, and makes her groggy."
"Whatever you think is best," said the man. When I told him what ZJ had said, that when Robin left the hospital she wasn't going home, the man looked puzzled. "Where is she going to go?" He hadn't dated Robin very long, only a few weeks, and had never really understood her. "Her garage was a pig sty," he once said. "I couldn't believe all the crap that was in it." And I had nodded agreeably, feeling I had won him; my own garage wasn't that great, but whatever. I had triumphed over others by dint of some unknowable charm. Now I was coming to realize that a lot of people baffled this guy, and that I would be next to become incomprehensible and unattractive. That is how dating among straight middle-aged women seemed to go in this college town: one available man every year or so just made the rounds of us all. "I can share. I'm good at sharing," Robin used to say, laughing. "Well, I'm not," I said. "I'm not good at it in the least."
"It's late," I said again to the man, and I made two gin rickeys and lit candles.
Every woman I knew here drank—nightly. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for the stray voltages of mother-love in the very places they would never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another. I was the only one of my friends—all of us academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base (or so we imagined it)—who hadn't had something terrible happen to her yet.
the next morning I dressed in cheery colors. Orange and gold. There was nothing useful to bring Robin, but I made a bouquet of cut mums nonetheless and stuck them in a plastic cup with some wet paper towels holding them in. I was headed toward the front door when the phone rang. It was ZJ. "I'm leaving now to see Robin," I said.
"Don't bother."
"Oh, no," I said. My vision left me for a second.
"She died late last night. About two in the morning."
I sank down into a chair, and my plastic cup of mums fell, breaking two stems. "Oh, my God," I said.
"I know," he said.
"I was going to go see her last night but it got late and I thought it would be better to go this morning when she was more rested." I tried not to wail.
"Don't worry about it," he said.
"I feel terrible," I cried, as if this were what mattered.
"She was not doing well. It's a blessing." From diagnosis to decline had been precipitous, I knew. She had started the semester teaching, then suddenly the new chemo was not going well and she was lying outside the emergency room, on the concrete, afraid to lie down inside because of other people's germs. She was placed in the actual hospital, which was full of other people's germs. Then she'd been there almost a week and I hadn't made it in to see her.
"It's all so unbelievable."
"I know."
"How are you?" I asked.
"I can't even go there," he said.
"Please phone me if there's something I can do," I said emptily. "Let me know when the service will be."
"Sure," he said.
I went upstairs and with all my cheery clothes on got back into bed. It still smelled a little of the man. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there, every muscle of my body strung taut. I could not move.
But I must have fallen asleep, and for some time, because when I heard the doorbell downstairs and pulled the sheet off my face it was already dark, though the sun set these days at four, so it was hard ever to know just by looking out the window what time it might possibly be. I flicked on the lights as I went—bedroom, hall, stairs—making my way down toward the ringing bell. I turned on the porch light and opened the door.
There stood Isabel, her left coat sleeve dangling empty at her side, and Pat, whose deep eyes looked crazy and bright as a dog's. "We've got the gin, we've got the rickey mix," they said, holding up the bags. "Come on. We're going to go see Robin."
"I thought Robin died," I said.
Pat made a face. "Yes, well," she said.
"That hospital was such a bad scene," said Isabel. She was not wearing her prosthetic arm. Except in pieces choreographed by others, she almost never did anymore. "But she's back home now and expecting us."
"How can that be?"
"You know women and their houses," said Pat. "It's hard for them to part company." Pat had had a massive stroke two years ago, which had wiped out her ebullient personality and her short-term memory, but periodically her wounded, recovering brain cast about desperately and landed on a switch and threw it, and she woke up in a beautiful manic frenzy, seeming like the old Pat, saying, "I feel like I've been asleep for years," and she would stay like that for days on end, insomniac and babbling and reminiscing, painting her paintings, then she'd crash again, passive and mute. She was on disability leave and had a student living with her full time who took care of her.
"Maybe we all drink too much gin," I said.
For a moment there was just silence. "Are you referring to the accident?" said Isabel accusingly. It was a car crash that had severed her arm. A surgeon and his team of residents had sewn it back on, but the arm had bled continually through the skin grafts and was painful—her first dance afterward, before an audience, a solo performed with much spinning and swinging from a rope, flung specks of blood to the stage floor—and after a year, and a small, ineffectual codeine habit, she went back to the same surgeon and asked him to remove it, the whole arm: she was done, she had tried.
"No, no," I said. "I'm not referring to anything."
"So, hey, come on, come on!" said Pat. The switch seemed to have been thrown in her. "Robin's waiting."
"What do I bring?"
"Bring?" Pat and Isabel burst out laughing. "You're kidding, right?"
"She's kidding," said Isabel. She felt the sleeve of my orange sweater, which I was still wearing. "Hey. This color looks nice on you. Where did you get this?"
"I forget."
"Yeah, so do I," said Pat, and she and Isabel burst into fits of hilarity again. I put on shoes, grabbed a jacket, and left with them.
isabel drove, one-armed, to Robin's. When we arrived, the house was completely dark, but the street lights showed once more the witchy strangeness of the place. Because she wrote plays based on fairy tales, Robin had planted in the yard, rather haphazardly, the trees and shrubs that figured most prominently in the tales: apple, juniper, hazelnut, and rose shrubs. Unfortunately, our latitude was not the best gardening zone for these. Even braced, chained, and trussed, they had struggled, jagged and leggy; at this time of year, when they were leafless and bent, one couldn't say for sure whether they were even alive. Spring would tell.
Why would a man focus on her garage when there was this crazed landscaping with which to judge her? Make this your case: no jury would convict.
Why would a man focus on anything but her?
We parked in the driveway, where Robin's own car was still parked, her garage no doubt locked—even in the dark one could see the boxes stacked against the one small garage window that faced the street.
"The key's under the mat," said Isabel, though I didn't know this and wondered how she did. Pat found the key, unlocked the door, and we all went in. "Don't turn on the lights," Isabel added.
"I know," whispered Pat, though I didn't know.
"Why can't we turn on the lights?" I asked, also in a whisper. The door closed behind us, and we stood there in the quiet, pitch-black house.
"The police," said Pat.
"No, not the police," said Isabel.
"Then what?"
"Never mind. Just give it a minute and our eyes will adjust." We stood there listenin
g to our own breathing. We didn't move, so as not to trip over anything.
And then, on the opposite side of the room, a small light flicked on from somewhere at the far end of the hallway; we could not see down it, but out stepped Robin, looking pretty much the same, though she had a white cotton scarf wrapped and knotted around her neck. Against the white, her teeth had a fluorescent ochre sheen, but otherwise she looked regal and appraising and she smiled at all of us, including me—though more tentatively, I thought, at me. Then she put her finger to her lips and shook her head, so we didn't speak.
"You came" were her first hushed words, directed my way. "I missed you a little at the hospital." Her smile had become clearly tight and judging.
"I am so sorry," I said.
"That's O.K., they'll tell you," she said, indicating Is and Pat. "It was a little nuts."
"It was totally nuts," said Pat.
"It was standing around watching someone die," Isabel whispered in my ear.
"As a result?" said Robin, a bit hoarsely. She cleared her throat. "No hugs. Everything's a little precarious, between the postmortem and the tubes in and out all week. This scarf's the only thing holding my head on." Though she was pale, her posture was perfect, her dark-red hair restored, her long thin arms folded across her chest. She was dressed as she was always dressed: in black jeans and a blue sweater. She simply, newly, had the imperial standoffishness that I realized only then I had always associated with the dead. We pulled up chairs and each of us sat.
"Should we make some gin rickeys?" Isabel asked, motioning toward the bags of booze and lime-juice blend.
"Oh, maybe not," said Robin.
"We wanted to come here and each present you with something," said Pat.
"We did?" I said. I'd brought nothing. I had asked them what to bring and they had laughed it off.