Читать книгу The Fifth Woman - Nona Caspers - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe book I’m reading belonged to my first lover, Michelle. At the top of one page, she has written her name and the date, then three dark arrows pointing down.
The line Michelle is pointing to says that it has not rained in Lima since 1940, but when I think about the statement it seems impossible. I read the line again, and yes, that is what the poet says. She must be making it up, but I think about the people waiting every day for the rain; they wait for the water to enliven everything, to make their world wet and green and soft.
An aberrant heavy cloud rests above my backyard. I can hear Larissa’s contralto voice quaver through the screen door, off-key. She is inside the house cleaning. She makes up songs about her day, or the sky, or something she’s noticed on our street.
The last time I saw Michelle, she was in the middle of the sidewalk outside our old apartment building, balancing on one leg and waving at me. I was already walking down the street away from her. I was walking briskly, happily, thinking about the unexpected November sun and feeling my body move down the street, the concrete under my tennis shoes, the air made even more pleasant by the smell of renegade fall jasmine and ferns from our neighbor’s garden. The sun blew straight at me, and I had to squint through a yellowish haze. There was a moment of blindness, and then I created a frame of darkness all around me, as if I were looking through binoculars. There was a slight change in temperature, a shift in light; the air pressed against my forehead. Michelle called my name, or I turned, sensing something, and then she called my name. She stood on one leg. She was waving.
Earlier that morning we had been counting the ants on the kitchen table. November rains had been making the cold air damp and, until the sun appeared that day, no one had wanted to be outside except for the hard-core bicyclers, like Michelle, and the newly transplanted or visiting Northerners whom you could see wearing short sleeves in the park. Above the table a large window opened to the neighbors’ pastel houses, their palm trees, the sky. We lived on the first floor of a four-unit building, in a one bedroom with a large kitchen/living room; the couch and the table stared at each other across an expanse of red and orange, a rug we’d found at Thrift Mart.
The ants had arrived with the rains, only a few, scattered on the windowsill, trekking up and down the frame, a reckless band of nomads. “Ants,” Michelle had said that first day, staring at the windowsill as if she’d forgotten ants existed. She stood with her foot on a chair like she often did, her hands wrapped around her cereal bowl, drinking her leftover milk. The next day there were considerably more of them and they had traveled to the table. The table leaf on one side was stuck upright and we often forgot to clean thoroughly in the crack. Those first two mornings Michelle washed up the ants, I think, but then it rained again at night and the next day there were more.
The ants on the table that last morning had formed a long line from end to end. On my way to the bathroom I had glanced over and there the ants were, glistening in the sunlight, which was already unusually strong. Now, we watched a stream of them that appeared to be running in a continuous loop over and under the table. Michelle was watching from one side and I was sitting across from her watching from the other side.
“This has become a problem,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. From my angle, the ants appeared as a glint of black, and then a black moving line, bulbous bodies perfectly tuned to each other, a crazy black ribbon as if they were wrapping the table as our gift. “They’re not hurting anything. Seems like they’re pretty happy.”
“Happy?”
“Well, you know.”
She got up and went to the sink and drank a glass of water. Michelle tried very hard to drink as many glasses of water as she could during the day, and she tried very hard to get me to drink as many glasses of water as I could, because we had read articles about how people who drank water lived longer and had more resilient skin and inner organs. Nevertheless, our hearts were not in it—we’d forget that water had anything to do with us, and then one of us would get a headache or feel inexplicably funny and the other would say, usually Michelle to me, have you been drinking water?
After Michelle drank the water she burped, and patted her chest as if she were her own baby. She tied a gold ribbon, left over from last year’s Christmas wrapping, around the bottom of her jeans so they wouldn’t get caught in her bike spokes, and while she did this I looked down at the top of her head, a mop of black hair, and I thought, Michelle is a mop of hair.
I remember that thought, but I can’t remember what we did about the ants that morning. I can’t remember if we washed off the table before we left, or if, when I got home from the hospital and then the morgue later in the day, I washed them off. Had they gone of their own volition?
We had moved to that apartment building in the City two years earlier from the northern Midwest; our neighborhood was in a district that averaged an annual 185 sunny days, though there are many more sunny days in other districts. Of those days only half start out sunny, and very few of them are in November. The City gets twenty inches of rain annually, and 90 percent of those inches in November through March. But it was fog, which sometimes posed convincingly as rain, that blocked the sun more often. We did not know anything about fog when we moved to that part of the City; when we moved to the City we believed that most days were sunny and pleasantly cool everywhere.
But even in our foggy district the weather was benevolent and supportive, compared to the violence of the weather in the Midwest. We could bicycle to the park in our jackets. We could walk outside most any time without thinking seriously about the heat or the cold, the way we were used to thinking about heat and cold, the way heat and cold can form a solid mass at the center of your thinking and then explode. We never listened to the weather reports and forgot for the most part that there was any weather, except for on those few really cold, damp days.
One neighbor in the building Michelle didn’t like. She had appeared early on, outside the building with her girlfriend. A few months later we saw her walking up the stairs without the girlfriend and down the hall past the landlord’s flat. She was a young art major studying somewhere in the City and had a tattoo around her very thin neck, a single thin black decapitation line. She was Chinese, like the landlord, and spoke elegantly in English with almost no accent, but she was quiet and we were quiet and unsure about whom we could talk to or who wanted to be left alone. She never made eye contact; she often wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and her black hair fell over her eyes. “I don’t like her,” Michelle said once, which took me by surprise. We were dining on bowls of parsley, pea greens, and carrot tops, because the local market had had a sale and we were Midwesterners and sick of eating regular salads.
“You don’t know her,” I said.
“That’s true,” she said. “I don’t know her and I don’t like her.”
I fell silent. The light in the room was artificial; the windows were black and it was raining. What a wind bellowed outside! And what a great job the windows did keeping the wind and rain out. That apartment did a great job at many things, but was expensive for two midtwenties women with mediocre-paying jobs, which is why we stayed home a lot.
“I’ll tell you why,” Michelle continued. “I don’t trust people who wear hoods or floppy hats.”
I can see now that Michelle probably wanted me to fight with her, something I hadn’t done for a long time, perhaps because I had grown tired of it or perhaps the weather had made me complacent. I chewed on a carrot top and set down my bowl. “People hide for a reason,” I said. “Your favorite poet hid in her bedroom and drawing rooms.”
“I may not have liked her,” Michelle said, “in person.”
Later that evening, Michelle and I pretended the rug was a lake or a pool and we were synchronized swimmers. Michelle had performed on a high school synchronized swimming team called the Aqua Belles. She put on music, classical, and we got into position and pointed our toes and tucked into a tub or a half tub. We rolled onto our backs and shimmied in opposite directions; we linked our feet above us in a bridge and then dropped dramatically under the imaginary surface.
“I think,” Michelle said, after we’d climbed into bed and kissed goodnight, “when we’re old, we’ll be together.”
“I can’t even imagine being old,” I said, though I wish I hadn’t.
She was a confident chewer. Sometimes her confidence and strong opinions made her seem arrogant or foolish, and other times they made her seem large, like a sun or meteor or a boulder on a green hill, or an acacia in full bloom off the highway. She was good with maps. She knew how to sew. She was a sultry kisser. In the night, she’d reach over and rest her hand on the top of my head, sometimes give it a little shake.
What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?
Just before the arrival of the ants, we had put a note under the door of the building manager, Ronald Chang, asking if we could have a new refrigerator. He wrote back the following:
Girls. Not broke, don’t fix.
Another time he left this note:
Girls. Someone coming. Pipes.
Another time:
This is clean bug day, girls. Under sink.
We pinned the notes to our refrigerator, which was not broken but was old and small and refused to freeze ice cream.
Ronald Chang lived above us. He had grown up in Shenyang, migrated to the City twenty years earlier, and worked at the Golden Lotus in Chinatown. Was he the owner of the restaurant? We could hear him going in and out of his apartment and up and down the stairs. We could hear his television and his conversations in Cantonese on the telephone. When he saw us he smiled and said hello very loudly, as if he had to speak English at a forceful volume if we were to understand. We often had the feeling that we were not real to him, the way you feel when you are visiting another country. The inhabitants are a little fake, and you think you can do or say whatever you want because you are more or less on a stage set. But, fortunately or unfortunately, he also was not all the way real to us. It took years before the City lived in my bones and I could see myself as a fellow member, a citizen of the City.
Some things I can’t remember. I can’t remember if we had plants in that apartment, or if Michelle liked houseplants. I can’t remember the exact sound of her voice, or where she parted her hair, or what she smelled like. I can remember the bike she rode, a ten-speed Cannondale, yellow, and how she brushed her teeth with baking soda and once used a wet wipe to damp down her hair when we were biking and it was falling in her face.
“Someday I’ll have my own woodworking business,” she said once, and then a week later pondered going to medical school. The second year we lived in the apartment, while she was working construction full time, she signed up for French, astronomy, and pottery classes.
“How are you going to do all that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she sighed. A week later she had to drop all three.
She was a dreamer. She was egotistical, romantic, manipulative. I loved her.
In the vacant houses where she helped build kitchen cabinets and lay wooden floors, she often found odd items, like the poetry book with the three arrows pointing down to no rain in Lima since 1940. She would show these items to me and collect them in our large living room closet. The day she told me she didn’t like the neighbor, she had found a long thin piece of wood on which someone had written in black pen:
This is your leg, I love
Your lips, a dove
One shoe
One rack of lamb for you
Two turtle gloves
Etc. all down the wood.
From the same construction site she had already brought home a black leather wallet left behind inside a drawer. A horse head was embossed on the front flap. Someone had left a note in the wallet, written in navy blue eyeliner.
To Jim: I hereby solemnly and gratefully swear to pay back every penny of the $600 I owe you. Have a nice day. Lisa.
Lisa had drawn a symbol next to her name and we couldn’t agree on what it signified. I thought it was a special kind of stylized letter M. Lisa M. But Michelle saw an unclosed heart.
After we disagreed about the wallet, we went to bed and pretended we were sexual strangers. Michelle pulled the sheet over her head, and I could see her breath tent and cave. “What color are my eyelashes?” she asked, which is the kind of question she often asked in the middle of the night. “Michelle, brown. They’re brown. Now go to sleep,” I said.
But they were red brown, like the bark on cedar trees, like California redwoods.
There is something that happens when you live in a nice apartment in a pleasant neighborhood in my city, even in the less sunny neighborhoods. Especially if you grew up queer in an inhospitable place, though you may not have recognized the margins until you left. You start to feel as if you exist in your own separate country—the City is almost an island—and you can do whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. You start to feel as if, for example, you might be able to fly off the ocean cliffs without a glider, or that you could live solely on sprouts and carrot tops, or that you could careen down the hills on your bicycle without a helmet during rush hour. You start to feel, even though you know the feeling is not true and that the laws of the physical universe have not been altered just for you because you live in this fabulous city in this nice apartment, that you cannot be touched by normal human tragedy.
The evening before the ants arrived, someone knocked at our door. The neighbor Michelle didn’t like had lost her rat. We went to help her find it, trolling up and down the stairs and hallway to her apartment, and then down into the basement and laundry room. We went up and down the street. It had misted most of the day and in the dim evening light the street and sidewalk looked black and oily.
“Hey, what color is your rat?” Michelle suddenly asked.
It struck me that she often asked questions I never thought to ask. I had assumed the rat was white and so I had been looking for a white one, but what if the neighbor’s rat was brown or black? I thought it odd that we hadn’t asked before.
“White,” the neighbor said.
“What’s its name?” Michelle asked.
“Whitey,” the neighbor said.
She was quite beautiful, despite decapitation, with bright black eyes and wide, friendly cheekbones.
“Whitey,” Michelle started calling. “Whitey, Whitey, Whitey.”
There was a certain kind of sadness in her voice; I could hear the sadness even though she was loud, which she could be in public; the sadness seemed to drift over the streets and vanish. We circled the building searching in all the interstitial spaces, tamping down the damp weeds and coarse grass beneath stairwells and between buildings with our shoes.
After searching for a long time Michelle threw from her pocket into the street a rock she had collected at her work site. “The rat’s dead,” she said too loudly. I saw the young woman pull her hood further over her face. I remember feeling embarrassed, and angry, not because Michelle was rude, necessarily, but because she felt so at ease saying what we all thought. I felt I had to resist her somehow.
“Rats are resilient,” I said. “They’ve lived in worse situations.”
Michelle clamped her hands over her ears as if she couldn’t bear my point of view, something I’d only seen her do a few times. “Dead dead dead,” she shouted, and stomped off back toward the apartment.
Before she reached the door, she turned around and looked for me. I remember thinking, for a moment, that I would go inside. But then I turned away. Maybe I was still angry, or maybe I felt sorry for the neighbor, or maybe I wanted to prove something to Michelle. But I stayed outside searching for the rat for another hour. Then I sat on our front steps in the dark with the beautiful neighbor in silence. I might have put my hand on the back of her neck.
When I finally went inside the apartment, Michelle was not in the kitchen or in our bedroom or living room.
Then I heard a sound in the bathroom—it wasn’t a sound I had heard very often in the three years we were together, maybe a few times. Michelle was crying. In a minute she washed her face, and came out of the bathroom, and climbed into bed. Suddenly I didn’t feel angry. And even though I didn’t understand, I put my arms around her, and I whispered in her ear, “If you ever get lost, I’ll find you, Michelle. My little Whitey.”
That last morning I was a block away. The morning sun and air fell on my shoes, my arms, my face. The concrete glistened. Our neighbors at the end of the block grew jasmine and ferns in front of their house. That street was full of trees, and flowers planted around the trees, and people spraying Maxsea fertilizer. My work was only four blocks away, across the park, and I never had to hurry.
Michelle was carrying her orange helmet because she had left her bicycle at the site and planned to ride home early and make us dinner—I remember seeing orange. She yelled, “Don’t forget to buy cinnamon!” For months we would put cinnamon on our toast, and then for months we would have no cinnamon. We would look and look and then we would say, “Someone needs to buy cinnamon.” And then we’d forget. I did most of the grocery shopping.
Michelle was standing on one leg, clowning, or was she showing off? She looked so solidly there—she looked bound to the concrete: her rangy hips and low-slung work jeans and T-shirt. Her brown round arms.
The ants were winding their ribbons around the table or were washed up under our sponge and drowning in the kitchen sink.
When I arrived at work, the boss was out ill and the phones were ringing and ringing. Between calls I sat in my office chair and typed and edited several articles and letters. At three o’clock, exactly at three, the phones suddenly quieted. I looked at the clock, and then I looked out at the trees and the shadows moving over the trees. I didn’t have much thought, or the thoughts I was having were buried deep in those trees.
At 3:15 the phone in my office rang. I picked it up and heard our neighbor the art major’s voice. She has found her rat, I thought, and for a moment I ballooned with gladness for her. What a feeling that must be, to find a lost animal, even a rat, that you had loved and cared for daily and then suddenly lost and thought vanished forever.
She spoke very slowly and carefully, measured and loud, the way the landlord did, as if she were afraid I would not hear her the first time and she would have to repeat the words and that would be unbearable.
“Your girlfriend is hurt,” she said. “You come home now.”
Very few people speak in direct imperatives, except on television commercials, and then the sentences are usually happily directing you to buy some product. I hung up the phone. I couldn’t move. I sat in my office chair next to the phone for what felt like a long time but was probably only a few seconds.
As it turns out, the connection between rain and the appearance of ants in one’s home is a myth. This I read in “House-Infesting Ants and Their Management.” As a group, ants are the most difficult household pests to control, and treatment methods such as spraying ant trails can make the problem worse. The best solution, according to the article, is to keep your house meticulously clean so the ants have no resources. Ants are social insects, and when they find resources they release a chemical letting everyone know where to feast. Although most ants consume a wide variety of foods (they are omnivorous), certain species prefer some types of foods and some even change their preferences to the preferences of the homestead. Common ant species include the fire ant, carpenter ant, thief ant, odorous house ant, crazy ant, little black ant, tramp ant, pyramid ant, big-headed ant, acrobat ant, ghost ant.
The article said nothing about ants coming in from the rain or cold, or about the danger of ants, except those ants that sting or eat the wood, and of course no one wants ants to infest her food supply.
I wonder if I would remember anything about that day if Michelle were still alive. Or about the Chinese landlord and his notes, or the man we never saw. I wonder if I would remember the morning sun, the sidewalk, the jasmine and ferns, Michelle carrying her orange helmet. I wonder if I would remember the run home through the park, the beautiful play of light and shadow, the majesty of the eucalyptus trees, and the four pillars of sunlight that streamed through them from the top of the hill. I was running and breathless and then boom—four pillars of light, filled with dust and floating debris, appeared, and I ran through the momentary warmth and shimmer.
When I reached our street—it could not have taken me more than five minutes—I didn’t have to ask any questions. There was a small crowd of pale, vibrant-looking people who must have been my neighbors, and then five or six police officers, and a man in a car weeping, and a paramedic who grabbed my arm as I pounded on the ambulance door just after they raised her into it on a hydraulic gurney. She was wrapped in a blue blanket so she would not get cold. Michelle died in the ambulance, and by the time I reached the hospital, was already heading for the morgue.
I believe the ants we had that November were odorous house ants. Tapinoma sessile. They live under stones or boards in walls or under floors. They eat sweets, meat, dairy products, seldom have swarming seasons, do not bite, do follow trails and are about one-eighth of an inch long. They resemble fire ants, but when crushed emit a pungent rotten coconut smell.
A trail of cinnamon on the windowsill and countertops will deter ants. Ants don’t like cinnamon.
Someone told me that cinnamon also prevents high blood pressure and heart attacks; you should eat a spoonful of cinnamon every day.
After Michelle died, I knew I had to move out of the expensive apartment. I would sit on the sofa and stare at the table and out the window—I thought if I waited long enough in one sitting, the ants would return, and she might become undead. She had been a willful person. The air would be gray and solid, a gray wall of winter fog, and then suddenly Michelle would walk out of the fog, looking straight at me, smiling, exhausted, happily exhausted and almost home. Time might change its mind and go backward, just this once. We see it in movies. We read about it in the Bible. I had grown up on the story of Lazarus. Even if she were bloody and decayed, I would have welcomed her. Maybe she didn’t know that.
My fingers went numb. Sometimes my lips also went numb.
The day was officially described as follows: sunny and calm with highs of seventy degrees and a twenty-degree drop in temperature in the evening. A perfect seventy degrees. No fog or wind—or at least, on the City weather reports for that day, no fog or wind was recorded.
