Читать книгу Jairus's Daughter - Patti Rutka - Страница 11

Madison, Wisconsin

“Oh for chrissake!” Back in her apartment in Madison, Anna slammed shut the laptop and turned to the cat, who had just about figured out the rudiments of speech. “What good does it possibly do to be ‘saved’ if you’re so depressed you fall over your own feet?”

Anna kicked the cat’s green jingle play-ball and swept away some coffee cups and crumpled papers from her third-floor apartment desk as she continued to spout off about the e-mail from her high school girl friend Paula. Like her thoughts, Anna’s personal belongings took on a whirlwind life of their own. She was a pigpen unto herself.

“Anti-depressants, maybe? Therapy? Ya think? Might help a little. Why is it so many Christians have this disconnect between what they say they believe and how they conduct their lives? It’s as if once they’re saved, people expect Jesus to do all the work for them. Don’t they realize they’re creators within their own lives? I mean, if they can accept that Newton’s laws of physics work to keep their feet on the ground,” and here she paused in her tirade to make sure the cat was still listening, “why can’t they accept that the new laws of physics might actually work too, in terms of how their thoughts affect their lives? The observer has an affect on what is observed! The metaphor is so elemental! It’s not like if you say you have the power to create a lot in your own life that there isn’t room for Jesus anymore. Or like saying that you’re actually God. If God had meant us to fly he’d have given us wings, right? So goes the thinking. Man. People need to get help. Like psychotherapy, for example. Understanding how quantum physics works is a tool, just like therapy and medication and surgery are tools. God gave it all to us.”

If pressed here, she couldn’t have given a concise set of her beliefs about God, but she continued on her private rant. “That includes the ability to think creatively and positively. Which is something you’re definitely not capable of,” she said to the cat. The cat, if he had been able to think, would have wondered about the contents of the offending e-mail.

Anna shoved back her chair and headed for the shower. She didn’t really expect an answer from the cat, who showed large incisors in a yawn while stretching out a paw in her direction, but she had gotten so used to talking to herself out loud that she didn’t worry anymore about her sanity. The cat certainly didn’t seem to be a cocreator in his reality. After all, his brain was only the size of a tennis ball, so how much processing capacity could there be in there?

Anna hummed, “Good-bye Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all . . . ,” turned on the hot water in the shower, and watched the bathroom mirror steam over as she undressed and hung her pungent stable clothes on the back of the door. Stepping in, she wondered first why the last song she heard on the radio was always the one that stuck in her head. She had a theory that a woman could always tell what a guy had on his mind by knowing the words to the tune he was humming. Guys’ subconscious minds just worked that way. She regarded this as one of the best kept secrets women had; if men were aware women knew this, they would be more guarded about singing in the shower.

Her thoughts changed back to Paula, whose life seemed to have tanked. Anna feared Paula might actually do herself in, just from the e-mail she had sent. Husband in car sales with GM and the Big Three going south, one daughter pregnant at fifteen and the other one having joined a cult and changed her name, bankruptcy looming in the wake of the housing mortgage crisis . . . Paula’s list got grittier. But she was saved, Anna thought.

Out of the shower, she toweled off her toned and muscular body as she moved about the apartment. Cold Play cleared her head of Elton John, and she went over to the window to flush the room with spring air. Purple crocuses up next to the brick building across the street caught her eye. The cat came to sit on the window sill and began chittering at some cawing crows.

“You talkin’ kitty? Whatcha doin? Git those crows! Git those crows!”

She sometimes thought that if she didn’t have the cat to talk to, she might go off the deep end from loneliness. Just then the phone rang, and she picked up to hear a rich male voice in an accent she didn’t recognize.

“Miss Washington?”

“Yes?”

“This is Nir Tetzlah calling from the Ein Gedi school for Experiential Education.”

“The which? Um, where are you calling from?”

“Israel, Miss Washington, near Jerusalem. Ein Gedi is an oasis plateau in the Judean desert. Very beautiful.”

“Ah! Sounds lovely. You must have heard of me from my website.” The man’s Israeli accent made sense now.

“Yes, I have been looking for organizations like yours . . .”

“Well, I’m not exactly an organization, more like a consultant . . .”

“Yes, yes, that’s fine, I understand. But what I am getting at is that we have a school here, an outdoor school, much like your Outward Bound or your National Outdoor Leadership School—only much smaller, of course—and we need both a ropes element course and also a climbing site set up. We think we have found the area we want to use, and although it might be a little . . . um, argued? over . . .”

“Contested?” she interjected.

“. . . we need someone to plan it out and make it safe for our students to use within the safety standards of our organization.”

“Well, yes, that’s what I do. But you understand—my rates are higher than some out there . . .”

“Yes, yes, you shall not worry about that. We have several benefactors who want to see this come into being, and your reputation for precision in the inspection process is very good.”

Sounds all right, thought Anna.

“Well, I can’t say I speak much Hebrew, although I usually do a crash course before any foreign engagements. When do you want this plotted out? What kind of access does the public have to the area?” she added as an afterthought.

“This is all still under negotiation. The area we are discussing is the Gai ben Hinom valley just outside of the Old City . . . have you been to Israel ever?”

“No. But, uh, I read about it in the news all the time?” she offered.

“Yes, well. We do have that dubious distinction of being a news-making nation. We were thinking not until September or October.”

“You know, I have to leave the house right now, but that’s a distinct possibility. How can I get back in touch with you?”

Tetzlah gave her the contact number and reminded her of the time difference between Madison and Israel.

She hung up, considering the intriguing proposal. Just then the cat jumped down and started caterwauling, crouching low, as it half crawled, half scooted under the bed. Another tremor was starting—there had been a few lately, only 2–3 on the Richter scale, so slight they were barely noticeable. But the first time it had happened Anna and Jonathan had been in bed, each thinking the other was jiggling a foot. Then Anna noticed the ceiling fan shaking mildly, and said, “Is that you?” “No, I thought it was you,” he had replied.

So Anna had called in to the police department. Cold and precise, protecting the peace, they simply ascertained if she had suffered any property damage. When she had said no, they did divulge that several people had called in, and that she should not worry—so long as she hadn’t suffered any loss. The whole thing was peculiar, because Wisconsin was not exactly in a fault zone for earthquakes.

Anna looked up at the hanging light in the kitchen as it shook slightly this time. Global warming certainly was having odd and widespread effects.

After she’d run her calloused hands over the cat’s soft fur several times, Anna grabbed a cinnamon raisin bagel and gathered up her pack of climbing gear, alarmed the apartment, and took the stairs down two at a time. As she threw the climbing gear into the front passenger seat of the rattletrap Nissan, she groped for her cell phone in her shirt pocket so she could tell Jonathan about this most recent offer for work. She could already see his pursed lips and feel the weight of his silence. He had been trying to persuade her to let go of the out-of-state and overseas work, which took her away for longer than he wanted her to be gone.

“I have a geriatric car, a geriatric laptop, and a geriatric cell phone,” she muttered, as she fished out the phone, which had no photo ability and whose owner had no texting ability. “The least they could do is make a fake dial tone,” she groused.

For as often as she hated seeing other people using their cell phones when she righteously thought they should be focusing on their driving, she pulled away from the curb, punched in Jonathon’s number, and waited for his answer.

“Hey, luv, what’s up?” Her heart twinged when she heard his resonant voice, which sounded like it came from old oak caskets that had stored bourbon and been buried under a sunken vessel deep in the ocean.

“Hi! Just finished at the barn, and I’m on my way to the rock gym. Salvatore put up some new routes. Gotta check ’em out.”

“Can you call me later in the afternoon?”

“Sounds good. Then I’ll tell you about the new offer I just got in today. Pretty exciting, exotic—dangerous, even,” she dangled for him.

“Okay sweetie—hold it till later this afternoon. I’ve got an incoming call.”

As they hung up, Anna reflected on how much simpler life was before cell phones, and how much more in touch people had been. Cell phones certainly were useful in a number of ways, but people seemed to turn to obsessively calling one another even in a paradoxically arid landscape of personal contact. Cell phones had to be one of the most ironic technologies for communication in the twentieth century.

Dodging the ubiquitous bicycles of the campus town, she turned the car into what was locally known as the Cow Palace. For a number of years the large domed steel building on the southeastern side of the University of Wisconsin had housed cows for its agricultural program. Then it had been converted into an arena for music performances; a few years ago, a national climbing gym chain based in Baltimore had come in and purchased the building and built one of the premier rock climbing centers in the country. University students populated it, and it became a favorite of families wanting to entertain for their kids’ birthday parties, plus get their own kids exercising to combat the flood of obesity that had swept through America with burgers, chips, soda, and lattes. The nation was on a crash course with diabetes and resultant soaring medical costs, so the programs Anna taught were one way the trend was beginning to reverse, she believed.

She parked. Errant apple blossoms wafted on the air, settling like miniature lifeboats on the green sea-lawn. Anna kicked off her Birkenstocks and buried her toes in the grass as she floated towards the climbing center.

Entering, she called out, “Hey Charlie, how you doin’?” to the cleaning guy who was emptying out the paper recycling. Madison’s student population offered some diversity, but Wisconsin’s midwestern population was mostly white, barring some Hmong immigrants, so Anna always breathed a sigh of relief when she interacted with some real live people of different skin color like Charlie. The brief time she had spent in Baltimore checking out its rock gym she had experienced what it felt like to be a minority, and found it good for her soul.

“I’m arright, Miss Anna, ’n you?”

“Doing better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Any kids’ groups coming in today?”

“Them deaf kids due in today. Salvatore laid out some of the ropes upstairs.”

“Oh, right, forgot about that. Thanks.” She signed in her name and went in to the area with the lockers and toilets, took her harness and friction device out of the pack, and stashed them before heading upstairs to stretch out. She liked the set-up time in the gym because it gave her the chance to reflect, which she often didn’t have time for otherwise.

Sal, the climbing specialist from Spain whose parents owned one of the largest rock climbing harness companies in the world, was upstairs laying out ropes and hooking them up to the friction belay devices used for stopping someone’s fall. Sal secretly was the envy of every climber there, whether the employees or the regulars, because not only did he have a taut hard body, dark hair, and a delicious accent, but he was independently wealthy, so he could afford to travel the country and the world, designing rock climbing routes in gyms such as this. Whereas Anna liked creating climbing sites outdoors for organizations and schools, Sal preferred mapping out and bolting the specially constructed artificial rock holds people used for hands and feet on walls that were angled and textured with a spray-on concrete surface meant to mimic real outdoors rock. Apart from the occasional lustful eye they threw one another when they were bored or questioning their life choices, Anna and Sal had a high respect for one another and had given each other references often.

“Hey, Sal.”

“Hey, Anna.” He gave her a wan smile today.

“Sal, were you here just a little while ago? Did you feel that tremor?”

“Fon-kee, eh?” Correct vowel sounds occasionally eluded Sal.

“Yeah. It’s just weird. I guess we can’t have the rising sea level affect us here like in Bangladesh, but you’d think we’ve got our share of nature anomalies with the tornadoes and the flooding.”

“Where I am from, in Spain, it is very dry now, for several years. We have it in our fields and wells.”

“Maybe I’ll get there someday.”

“No, no, you should go to France, to Chamonix. I cannot believe you have not climbed it.”

“Don’t rub it in. Someday. Gotta come up with the money, or get a contract from someone over there. Hey, I just got a call to set up a climbing site for an experiential ed school in Israel, near the Dead Sea. Ever climbed in Israel?”

“Israel! Ha! What is there much to climb there, except on the heads of religious people? You be careful if you go over there. That is not a safe place.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for your concern. Now all I have to do is tell Jonathon.”

“Uh-oh,” he clucked at her.

“So we’ve got the deaf kids today?”

“Si. Remember, they can’t just talk when they want to.”

Anna nodded her head and laughed. They had an ethical dilemma teaching deaf kids to climb: in order for each kid to learn how to keep his or her peers safe when the climber was attached to the rope and climbing on the wall, the person holding the rope, known as the belayer, had to hold the rope and run it through a friction-creating belay device. Two hands had to be on the rope at all times, and in the event of a climber falling off the wall, the belayer was to crimp down the rope in the belay device so the climber’s fall would be arrested.

The trouble with deaf kids learning this was that they communicated with their hands. Usually Anna and Sal heard the soft soundings of deaf people, occasionally growing louder in excitement. But as they grew more excited and wanted to help their climbing partners, or look to an instructor for help, they would take their hands off the rope and begin conversing in American Sign Language. This was not a good thing for the safety of the climber on the rope.

Still, the instructors couldn’t exactly tell the belayers they couldn’t communicate. So it was a population-specific dilemma. Anna treasured these experiences; they made her a better instructor.

She recalled one of her tensest moments at an outdoor climbing site teaching a deaf kid, Aaron, to rappel. Rappelling was a counterintuitive activity that consisted of hooking a person up to a rope and telling him to walk backward off a cliff. One kid had actually vomited before going over the edge because he couldn’t bring himself to defy his elders and say “No! I won’t!” With Aaron, Anna had a safety rope on him for backup, and he was supposed to control his own rate of descent with the same friction device climbers used for climbing up rock. He began whimpering, “OhbyGot, OhbyGot,” his m’s voiced as b’s. His hands flailed, speaking what, she could only guess. Once she had convinced him to get his hands back on the rope and his face had changed back from ashen to pink, she had called the interpreter up and the two of them had successfully talked him backwards off the sixty-foot cliff.

Sal belayed Anna up the test routes, watching the well-toned latissimus dorsi muscles work in her back. She checked to make sure all of the holds were bolted in securely, no “spinners,” which could disconcert a climber at best, and at worst make him peel off the wall unexpectedly, usually getting scraped or banged up in the process.

“So when would this be? You going to Israel.” He lowered her off the climb.

“Probably not till the fall.”

“And you’re just here for the summer, teaching classes and working at the barn?”

“Yeah, some, and I’ll be writing the sports rag for the U.”

Between the rock climbing work and the riding lessons she taught at a stable dedicated to saving mustangs, Anna did well enough financially, but her family felt she underutilized her potential—meaning, she was too smart for what she was doing. She should have gone to Princeton for law. Jonathan saw the logic in this, and was generally on her family’s side, which didn’t sit well with her.

Jonathan wanted to marry Anna—he said. She resisted on a couple of counts. First, she wanted more from Jonathan. He made a good living, but guts to accompany the heart on his sleeve would have suited her better. He was reserved with his emotions—blocked, even, at times. Going into a relationship most women would think they could change this quality in a man, but instead Anna just observed.

Resistance came naturally to Anna, but her consistent refusal of Jonathan had more to do with evasion than obstinacy. While she could see herself being a mother, she couldn’t see herself being a wife. She had nieces and nephews she adored; she would have been loving, and an adequate disciplinarian. She knew how to keep someone safe. She could see herself being in charge of a relationship, such as mothering, or teaching a class, but she couldn’t picture herself surrendering to one. Jonathan compared her to a wrestler with all the right slippery moves. At least Jonathan was a good climbing partner.

Beyond what she intuited about the relationship she was in, Anna was hardly familiar with her deeper beliefs. She thought the popularization of Buddhism in America was a wonderful guideline for living, and was curious about Taoism, and what on earth all those people in China might believe; she admired some “New Age” concepts, or the metaphors for life presented by quantum mechanics; but she kept her nose focused very much in the culture of the present, even though technologically she was somewhat handicapped.

Her work-related travels to other countries were curios, dolls in local traditional costume collected and put in the closet of her mind. Had she been called on for any serious commitment or conviction of belief, she would have politely dodged the request. Philosophical arguments over beer held no attraction for her.

The notion of going to where people died daily for their beliefs in a land that had been fraught with strife and soaked in blood for millennia began to irritate her; she wasn’t capable of comprehending how seriously the inhabitants took religion. She supposed she should ask her friend Paula for some tips about the area, since the woman had made a couple of trips to the “Holy Land,” but she’d have to let some time pass before she sent out an e-mail. She was sick of the drama from that sector.

Sal lowered her down out of her reverie.

“All set then?”

“Looks good to me. Bring ’em on.”

She rehearsed in her head how the climbing lesson would go, but got stuck when she tried to apply the same technique to telling Jonathon that night that she intended to go to Israel in the fall.