Love and Sleep (62 page)
She was near naked. Diana. Virgin. Waiting to be known.
—
What do you want?
she asked.
Tremble not, gird up your loins. What would you know?
On hot August days it was strangely cool inside Arcady, if you kept the drapes partly drawn and the striped canvas awnings open; it sat calmly in the shade of its trees as though with eyes heavy-lidded and half closed. At night when the air cooled Rosie went around opening the drapes, letting in the night; sat there thinking before she turned on the lights.
"What color's this?” she said to Sam, and held up to her an oblong yellow card.
"Yellow."
"Right."
"What else?” asked Sam.
Rosie turned the card over, expecting some object colored yellow on the other side, but instead there were two tiny doll-figures, and the word
two
.
"Two,” she said. “See?"
"My turn,” said Sam, and picked up a card from the pile. A big purple and a big yellow dot. Sam named them, and turned the card over. A scissors, cutting a string. With purple handles. Sam tossed it down without interest.
All day she'd been torpid and cranky. Rosie had tried to get her out to play, but instead she lolled daylong in the dim living room, moving from the long leather couch to the floor to the tall chairs like a seal over rocks in a sea-cave. Then hours after bedtime she'd come down the stairs, wide awake, to the living room where Rosie sat thinking, and refused to go back, complaining of vague discomforts. Rosie felt her forehead. Hot? She couldn't think where the thermometer was. Knowing she should be firm, she had not been; she let her stay.
"Now you go,” Sam said.
Rosie picked another card. They were a set Mike had given Sam the week before, some sort of educational activity thing. Sam had insisted on playing with it. Rosie had glanced at the description on the box but hadn't grasped it. Colors, shapes, numbers, easy words. The one she picked up was a paintbrush spreading paint.
"What color?"
"Green."
On the back was a green tree. Okay.
"Mommy,” Sam said. “Do we believe in God?"
"Well,” Rosie said. “Um. I guess sort of."
"What's God?"
"Well God is sort of like Mother Nature. The reason why there are things."
"I love Mother Nature."
"So do I,” Rosie said, glad to have finessed that one. “What's this?” She held up a card that showed a little house, a chimney, a picket fence, a steeply pitched roof with the same scalloped shingles that the one they sat under had. The picture was crowded with geometries to name, its secret reason, rectangle, circle, octagon, star.
"Do you love Jesus?” Sam asked.
Rosie stared at her. “What?"
Sam shrugged, withdrawing the question, and studied her next card. Three little dolls, and the word
three
. Its corner was clipped. Did that mean something?
"Mother Nature and Jesus could marry,” she said. “Because Jesus is a boy."
"Sure,” said Rosie. She was looking at a card that bore the word
Purple
. On the back was a circus wagon, not purple, also made of tiny geometries, diamonds, squares, ovals, triangles. Like a sign of some kind, or a shrine.
"Your turn,” she said. She looked through the pile she had given herself. A lot of the cards had corners clipped; others had stripes, one or two or three, across the corner, where you might want to cut them, if you knew why you should. Some bore words,
he, do, us, go
. Sometimes a color card was all color, sometimes a paintbrush splash.
"Hon?"
"Does Daddy believe in Mother Nature?” Sam said. She held up her card. On one side a little doll walked over a bridge. On the other side, under it. “I win,” she said.
"I don't know if he does,” Rosie said. What the hell was with these cards, anyway? She picked up the box from the floor and looked again at the back. The Way Onward, said the box. Stimulates your child's sense of interrelationships while presenting the basic building blocks of perception. On the card she held was the word
Rectangle.
On the other side was a picture of the card that showed the little house with scalloped shingles and oval windows and diamond pickets. A picture of the card. The same little boy at the door, reduced in size, waving.
"Sam?” she asked. “You sure you want to play?"
Sam had fallen back against the pillows of the couch, her lips parted. Rosie stood, her cards spilling from her lap, and came to feel Sam's forehead again. O good lord. That really is a fever. Sam's eyes seemed clouded and absent. “Hon, I think you've got a fever. I'm going to go look for the thermometer and maybe some aspirin. Okay? Chewing kind. Okay? You rest."
Rosie looked at Sam's chest, no chicken pox rash; felt under her chin, no rising lumps of mumps, which anyway she'd had a shot for, or was that measles?
Rubella, that was it, that's measles. German measles. Rosie searched in the medicine cabinet for the children's aspirin and the thermometer. Since she had become a mom she had become reacquainted with the names of childhood illnesses she had forgotten since her own childhood. Rubella. Scarlatina. Beautiful names, somehow romantic, like the names of opera heroines or
quattrocento
painters. Impetigo, roseola. Where the hell is that aspirin.
St. Joseph. Why that name. Baby Jesus in his arms in the very ancient-looking picture on the label. And the thermometer right with it, neighborly, like glasses and book, pipe and tobacco, things didn't usually work out so well.
When she got back to the living room, Sam was breathing hard and staring at the rug. O please don't let it be something. She had Sam open her mouth. What were you supposed to tell? No pains anywhere, Sam angrily brushed away her mother's hands. But she did chew the tiny pink pill, and drank water thirstily.
"Let's play,” said Sam weakly.
"Oh, Sam."
Sam picked up her pile and looked down at them. “What's that?” she asked, but not of them. She lifted her eyes to Rosie, but didn't seem to see her, and down again at the cards; then she seemed to cast them away from her in spasmodic jerks, they slipped from her hands in a stream, colors, words, things, shapes and numbers. When they were all gone, her hands continued to jerk spasmodically, and then her arms and shoulders too. She seemed to have lost consciousness.
"Sam!"
Sam rolled over onto the couch face down, still twitching. Her head rolled against the fabric will-less as a doll's. Rosie tried to lift her, make her stop, but she wouldn't or couldn't, her body was rigid, intent on its spasms, unseeing.
Then it was over. Sam seemed to surface as from deep water: her released limbs made a big soft dance motion, and her eyes relit.
"What did you do, hon?” Rosie whispered. “Did you do that?"
But Sam didn't answer. She smacked her lips, and curled against her mother, an infant needing sleep.
"Hon?"
Breathing deeply, Sam slept.
Rosie lowered her to the couch. What in God's name. She felt Sam's head. Still way too hot. What was that. It had come and gone so quickly. Sam was prone to weird physical behavior, private self-involvement, inexplicable gesture. That was what it was. Was it?
She covered the sleeping child with a throw, and went to the phone. The number was where, in her book, her book was in her purse, where was her purse. Hell with it. She called Information, and only when she had the number and was dialing it did she think how late it was, and that the office would surely be closed.
Someone answered on the first ring.
"Dr. Bock's office?” she asked, surprised.
"Well no this is his service."
"Oh."
"You can leave a message and the doctor will call you. Is this an urgent matter?"
"I don't know,” Rosie said. A sort of darkness seemed to be assembling around her, through which it was hard to hear what people meant. “It's my daughter, who Dr. Bock sees. Sam. She's just had the weirdest symptom."
"All right,” said the voice. “Would you like me to beep the doctor."
"What?"
"I can send him a message where he is, to have him call in. Then he can call you. Can I have your number please.” Rosie gave it. “He'll call you as soon as he's talked to us."
She hung up.
Sam still slept, the unwilled rising and falling of her breast quicker than usual, making her appear, even more than she usually did asleep, to be in a kind of suspended state, kept alive by outside forces that pressed her lungs to take deep breaths, while her inert body lay heedless. Sleep.
Rosie was still standing watching when the phone rang violently, still turned up loud for Boney's and Mrs. Pisky's old ears, it always made Rosie jump.
"Yes."
"This is Dr. Bock. What's the problem."
"Oh okay, Doctor.” She looked around the corner at Sam still asleep. “Something weird, probably nothing,” she said, the very sound of the doctor's brisk kind voice dismissed terrors; yet a strangling lump rose too in Rosie's throat. She told him what happened.
"And you had noticed her getting a fever?"
"Yes, she seemed to be. Just before."
"Any other symptoms of flu or cold? Ear infection?"
"She said she felt funny. No coughing or sneezing or anything."
"Okay,” he said. “Okay."
He's going to say It's okay, it's nothing. Rosie knew it; it was as though she had already heard him say it.
"Can you bring her over to my office now?"
"Right now?"
"Yes. I can leave here shortly and meet you there. Is that all right?"
"Okay."
He was gone.
Dr. Bock's office used to be in the Ball Building in town, but not long ago he had moved out to a featureless mini-mall on the Cascadia road, a low-roofed air-conditioned complex he shared with two other doctors and a creepy Lebanese periodontist who liked to start up pointless conversations with her in the waiting room the doctors shared.
The compound was dark when she pulled in, except for a glaring floodlight keeping watch. Dr. Bock's window was dark. She had got here first.
Sam, who had slept the whole way, soothed by the thrum of the engine (her father was the same, a danger behind the wheel), awoke, round-eyed, mouth-tasting, where am I.
"Hi, hon.” She felt Sam's forehead: hot, but not feverish, probably, maybe; just the August night and the blanket Rosie had absurdly, prophylactically wrapped her in.
"Are we home?"
"Nope. Dr. Bock's."
"I don't want to."
"Only be a minute."
Sam squirmed in the blanket, beginning to seethe, in a minute she would boil. Rosie slid across the seat to her and enfolded her. “You just take it easy, hon. You want me to sing?"
"No."
"Sure.” She started a song. It was a mystery which ones turned out to be soothing ones. Michael row the boat ashore. Tell me the tales that to me were so dear, long long ago, long ago. Poor Mike: for some reason he had never learned or hadn't remembered the little nonsense songs of infancy, sleeping drops or laughing gas, tried and true; when he sang to soothe her, what he came up with were old advertising jingles, maybe he had grown up minded by TV. Halo Everybody Halo. To
look
sharp, and be on the ball; to
feel
sharp, anytime at all. Not that it mattered to Sam, the effect was almost the same. What would she think of them years from now when she found them in her memory along with the cow that jumped over the moon and Bobby Shaftoe gone to sea.
Asleep again, thank goodness.
What had they been thinking of, she and Mike, having a kid. Nearly impossible now to re-create the mood in which they had taken the plunge, decided to throw away the stuff, go to bed. One damn night was all it had taken, seemingly. Life and thought before Sam were out of reach now; that hospital bed had been a door, life on one side was one thing, life on the other side another.
A twist in the plot.
Where is the old fart anyway. She looked again at the radiant dial of her watch, changeless as a painted clockface. None of the lights that swept over them where they were parked slowed or changed direction; Rosie felt in her rib cage each one approach, and pass.
Before she had got pregnant, way before, she had had an idea for an art project, she thought maybe she even wrote it up once for credit in a film or photography class. What she had thought was that a willing pair of new parents could create a record like no other in the history of the world, a record that would be mysterious and awesome and even reveal something ultimate—there would be no way of knowing till it was done.
The parents would set up a camera and simple lights and a blank background. A movie camera, or a still camera from whose pictures a film could later be made. Every day, every single day, they would prop the baby up before the screen and take a picture. Every day, every single day the same framing and position. They'd have to continue through infancy and childhood, every day, like brushing teeth. Naked. Full body. By the time the child was grown (and rebelled, as she probably would) there would be some thousands of pictures, frames for a movie. String them together and run them at proper speed, and over the course of an hour or so you'd see a child grow. Subtly, unnoticeably from frame to frame, but cumulatively.
Hair and teeth would grow, legs would lengthen, fingers articulate; she'd stand, neck elongating, hair curling and darkening; teeth would go, and come again, changing her face, her character growing too and changing, evident in the face and body. Cuts and bruises would come and go in a moment, a broken ankle in a minute.
Life. Growth. Then what if the kid got interested, or if the parents could somehow force or inveigle the kid into continuing the thing. Then she'd grow older, more slowly but just as surely; breasts would come, and pubic hair; wrinkles, creases, oldness.
Maybe a big belly too. And suddenly two of them.
Or maybe not. Maybe the film would be short, not reach adulthood; stop suddenly, never to be resumed. Lights out. It could end up being not a general story (
Human Life on Earth
) but a particular tragedy.