Marry or Burn (27 page)

“Well, that's him,” she said, coming in with reddened eyes. “So hey. Good-lookin', huh?” As if he were a child she had just sent off to school.

“Where'd he get a tan like that in Seattle? Poor thing, he had his sweatshirt on inside out.”

“He does that,” she said gruffly. “That's not because of me.”

 

YEARS PASSED. LYNNETTE was sitting on a bench at six o'clock in the morning. She had driven out before work to run the three miles around the little circular lake in the middle of the city, as she did every day. A windstorm had come through in the early morning hours, leaving twigs and branches strewn on the ground, but now everything was windless and quiet, and fog had dropped over the lake.

She described the morning to me: the heavy November fog enclosing everything, so thick that although ducks and coots swam into view, they were not
on
anything. Each of them was towing a long scalloped train of ripples behind it in the water-sky.

The serenity was unearthly.

The trees near enough to be seen stood out on the fog like runny letters. On the nearest one a heavy lower limb, snapped partly off in the storm, dangled from tree to ground forming an
h
, the broken small
h
. Lynnette was accustomed to regarding anything like that as a sign. She began listing to herself words beginning with
H
.
Horrible, hectic, harangue
.
Heat, hurt, hex
. Later, in the school library, she dragged out the big dictionary and leafed through the
H
section.
Hack, hang
.
Hideous, hubris
.

“H,” she told me solemnly on the phone, “is negative. Because that puff of air,
huh, huh!
—that little hawking thing—is for something we want to get rid of.”

“What about
help
? What about
hold, home, hope
?” I said. “What about
hedonism
?
Hospital
?”

“Shut up, smarty-pants,” she said. “I know, I know—
head, heart, hands, health
. That's 4-H. Bet you didn't know that.”

The gouge where the limb had been attached to the tree made her think of the words
partial birth
in the news. But the fact was that those images had been used up; she would not sift through them for her own work. What she was interested in at the moment was shape, as the framed, printed card on the wall said at her last show: the shape of urban event.

While she was studying the gouge in the tree, an elderly woman in a hooded sweatshirt stumbled out of the fog. She seemed to be getting herself untied from something rather than going strictly forward; the effort cost her little grunts each time her feet struck the ground.

“There's a lot of that,” Lynnette thought idly. “I wonder if I look like that.” At that moment she was sitting down because dimly, among the reeds close to shore a way back, she believed she had seen a duck murder another duck. When she caught sight of what was going on she had already slowed down, a little winded—she was getting over a bad, lengthy flu—and she ran in place watching it happen.

“Did you see that? I'm sure I just saw a duck
drown
another duck,” she called to a young man with sculpted calves, running hard, in shorts despite the cold. When I think of this man I always see the husband of Kate's neighbor. Roy Riley. Lynnette caught up to run alongside him. “It never did come back up! I thought they were mating but the duck just
stomped
the other one under. Kept biting it on the head! Do ducks have teeth?”

“Marauding duck,” the man said, not even glancing at Lynnette, having a radar, she realized mid-stride, for her age and her thick waist. He sped up, and shifted away from her on the path.

“I'm not after you, dude,” she called, speeding up herself and leaving his pumping calves behind with ease.

The next thing she did, to her mild embarrassment, was trip on a branch on the path. She didn't fall; she caught herself and
veered off in front of him to the ladies' room. She never had to pee when she ran, but she stood in the unlit cement alcove for a minute or two. After that she ran the long uphill curve. The line of trees at the top, where the bench was, took shape in the fog. She wasn't feeling right; she broke the rhythm of her run a second time and flopped down on the bench to get her breath.

The fog was unusually thick but now there was just enough sun coming up, working behind it, to put color into it here and there, a shell pink, a faint, downy yellow.

“There was something about it. I thought,
I'll kick myself if I don't just sit down for one minute and
look.” So she did; she leaned back on the bench and closed her eyes.

When she opened them a boy was standing over her, holding a red kayak on his head. “Hey,” he said, “sorry to bother you.” He shrugged a backpack down his arm onto the bench. “I'm going out in it. The fog. It's something, isn't it? Mind if I leave this here?”

“Go ahead, I'll be here. Guess I look like I'm down for the count,” she said, pushing back her hair. Then, lest he think her too friendly, she said abruptly, “Sure, leave it.”

“You don't have to watch it. This early in the morning I just leave my stuff,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. I'm resting.”

He smiled at her.
Well, he must be from somewhere far away
, she thought,
to smile like that
. He lowered the kayak into the water and got in, and prodded the bank with his oar. Lynnette said
oar
but it would have been a paddle.

Suddenly she got an unpleasant idea. “How will you see to get back, if you go out on the lake?” she called. Lynnette was not accustomed to worries of this kind, but he was young. He was a boy. She thought of us, she said, of Cyrus and me, because of our son.

“I'll stay out until it burns off. It'll burn off in an hour. Hey, don't worry. There's nothing in the pack, no drugs or anything,” he added with a grin, twirling the paddle over his head. “No bomb.” It was the year the bomb went off in the basement of the Trade Center. “It's bread. For the ducks.”

“I thought of telling him about how bread-paste in the craw starves a duck,” she told me. “I almost told him about the duck murdering the other duck. I didn't though, I caught myself. I thought,
Lately I'm so full of this creepy information.
Why? Why am I? It's getting into my work. And he's young. He doesn't need to hear it. Is that how mothers feel?”

When he had vanished onto the lake she leaned back again, and stayed so quiet that after a while a squirrel crept up onto the bench with her and began to poke at the boy's pack. It spun itself this way and that on the zipped pocket, from which it must have been getting the smell of bread. It got a claw into the zipper at one point, and hopped and pulled to get free, working the zipper down a tantalizing half inch as it did so. All the while its tail, not fluffy as the tails of squirrels looked from a distance, but spiked with thin hair with a little shoelace of skin inside it, switched ardently. It did not seem to know Lynnette was there.

As a girl in her father's store, sitting on the floor behind the counter hearing the chugs of the adding machine and nails being swept into bags, Lynnette said, she had gone in and out of a pleasant, canceled-out feeling like the one she had now. Finally the squirrel gave up and crouched on the pack, an expression so fixed and thwarted in its black eyes that pity for it swept over her, an intimation of its hurrying, single-minded life, a life that suddenly seemed to her such an ordeal that she was thankful the squirrel had no clear notion of it, connected as it was to whatever necessity among the gliding ducks had led one of them to
murder another. She thought of Travis and his squirrel hunting. No necessity there. How he, a man who wouldn't hurt a flea, had gotten up on cold mornings like this one when he lived here and driven into the river valley to shoot squirrels. How this had made him feel at home somehow. Home. Now the squirrel was digging furiously again at the pack, while she sat so still in her absorption that it never looked her way. She might have been a coat dropped on the bench, until the blast of a foghorn startled the animal and it raced off.

The long blast did not come from the little lake, of course; it came from the downtown waterfront, several miles away. Twice it sounded, rolling out over the city in a deep bellow. Lynnette waited; she had heard the foghorn a hundred times before but she could not remember if there were a prescribed number of blasts. She could make out the squirrel's tiny savage scratches all over the nylon of the pack.
This
, she said to herself.
This . . . what? I'm tired of the city
, she thought, without any particular antagonism.
I'm tired of people. I want . . .

For a long time no one ran by, and she gave in to a deep lassitude. Her eyes grew so heavy she came close to falling asleep in the quiet.

Then she came to and had a kind of hallucination. She saw, she said, the direction her art would take. She saw it in some detail.

She had been gazing at the colors in the fog, columns of them, deeper than the hints of sun. They were peeling off the bank or out of the water right in front of where she was sitting. They had the tense wavering of snakes charmed out of a basket, though it might have been only the fog that was moving.

She sat looking at them in a state of concentration. Her mind was exceptionally alive. The squirrel, not thwarted at all, had
come back and resumed its assault on the backpack. She turned her eyes to it and when she looked back that was the end of it, the colors, some prism effect in the water-laden air, were gone, there was not even a hint of them where the fog was curling off the reeds.

She didn't care, she had seen them, and seeing them she had made more than one decision. She didn't care any longer about the runner who had not given her a glance, or about anything she had been worrying about or planning.

She stretched. Streetlights across the lake were beginning to show amber in the fog. Standing up she put her arms out and sucked in deep breaths of chilly air. She still didn't feel like running but she thought lightheartedly,
I'll walk the rest of the way.

 

THAT NIGHT LYNNETTE dreamed the phone rang. This is the part she didn't tell me. It stopped after a couple of rings but a while later, in the slow registration of dreams, she decided to get up and answer it. She went and stood looking into her closet, with the feeling—something required of her that was beyond her, some untappable energy—that we agreed viewing our clothes on hangers often provoked in us, when something stronger came over her, some cold foreboding.

She took hold of the folding door to rest her head against it. When she reopened her eyes she saw someone lying on the floor of the closet. She looked for a long time—her dreaming mind reset itself several times—before she saw that it was Travis.

He was curled on his side among the shoes. He had on an old sweater of her mother's with the neck-tag showing. His back was to her, and the soles of his feet in socks with worn heels.

“Travis,” she whispered without moving. “Nobody told me you died.”

She put her hand out and touched the thigh, which she was able to do somehow without bending over. She would not have been able to bend over, hindered by that bulk of unease that was in her chest.

She ran her cold palm slantwise across the wale of the corduroy to a three-cornered tear she had repaired with iron-on tape on the inside of the pants.

Out of the ridges of the corduroy a grief came up into her such as she had never known in her waking life. At the same time the blunt edge of something heavy sank into place against her chest. The next minute, against her wishes and to her shock, whatever had hold of the heavy thing had levered it into her by some means without breaking the skin, and jammed it steadily forward. A sweat of trying to heave it out drenched her as it paused and sawed a little way back.

“I think I can hold it right where it is,” she said to Travis, but she was cold, she couldn't keep warm and hold it at the same time, or breathe and hold it.

 

IT WAS THE mailman who noticed the mail and the newspapers piling up. He had a thick envelope from a travel agency and he didn't want to leave it. He started to go on down the sidewalk but something stopped him. Lynnette's car was parked in front of the duplex. He knocked on the other door and a woman opened it. She worked at home; usually if Lynnette was going away this woman would take in the mail and water the plants for her. So she had been wondering. No noises from next door. She tried to make a phone call to Lynnette for the mailman, and then she called the police.

A patrol car arrived; a policewoman got out and knocked and tried the door, and without any to-do lifted up her leg and kicked it in, just as they do on TV. After a while she came back out onto
the porch and told the mailman and the neighbor, who were waiting together. “No sign she ever woke up. You can tell when it's quick.” The neighbor began calling the names in Lynnette's address book.

Why should I tell Kate this? She heard the outlines of it from me anyway at the time. Heart attack in youth. Comparative youth. Misfortune of a stranger. I'm the only link between them.

 

AND HOW WOULD anyone know what was dreamed?

And if there is a dream, why not a deep dream of peace, like the one Abou Ben Adhem awoke from?

If Lynnette had ever brought her novel to a conclusion, which Cy always said she'd have to before she could throw it away—though he was wrong, she threw it away anyway—probably it would have ended with a tearful reunion or a marriage. Remembering Travis always comforted her. But if this is nothing like what happened to her on her last night on Earth, it doesn't matter to me. It comforts me. Truth is not necessarily what we're after.