Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories (16 page)

For years I produced installments of “The Denim Touch” for my daughter. Then, one night, she asked me a startling question: where did the princess go? It happened that earlier this particular week our family had lost a beloved dog to old age and buried him in the woods near our home.

I reminded her that the princess had turned to denim, and the prince was trying to turn her back. Yes, I know, my daughter said, but where
is
she? He is wearing her, I explained. Yes, my daughter said, but
where is she?

Perhaps because it was late, perhaps because I was still emotionally exhausted from the death of my dog, I confessed that I didn’t know. She was just nowhere, I supposed.

This threw my daughter into paroxysms of grief, and for the first time I was given to wonder why I had told her such a macabre story in the first place, or why such a story would even enter my head. Consumed with guilt, I apologized profusely, and blurted a final installment of the story, in which the princess is cured by a good witch and the couple become king and queen of all the land. Unfortunately, this was no longer sufficient, and from then on I read bedtime stories out of books.

Even now, however, I find myself lying awake on restless nights, devising new installments of “The Denim Touch.” I wouldn’t dare tell them to my children, who are grown, or to the children they might someday bear, yet I continue to invent them nonetheless. Perhaps they are a form of prayer: there is considerable comfort in this endless tale of impending resurrection, and since I claim no formal religious affiliation, the stories may fill a need I am not fully aware I possess.

Whatever the reason, when my wife reaches out and embraces me during the night, I am reminded of the loyal prince wearing his own wife, and I am able at last to sleep.

Mice

A doctor we know lived, as a little girl, out in the country, in a house on the edge of a forest not far from here. Because of its rural location, and because it was the only one for several miles around, the house developed a mouse infestation, and our friend’s family often found their stored food broken into and eaten.

Our friend’s father bought a number of mousetraps and placed them throughout the house. In time, several mice were caught and killed by the traps, and our friend went with her father to dispose of their bodies in the woods. The father removed them by their tails from a small cardboard box and tossed them out among the trees.

A child of the country, our friend was accustomed to the death of animals and accepted that it was sometimes necessary. Her father hunted deer and game birds, which they ate, and this did not bother her. But for some reason, the capture and disposal of the mice upset her greatly. She decided to trick her father and developed a plan: she would go into the forest and recover the tiny corpses, then bring them home and set them in the traps. This way her father would believe the mice were being eliminated, and she would have the satisfaction of knowing she had saved their lives.

The plan worked well all through the winter, when the dead mice could easily be found on the surface of the snow and their bodies were neatly preserved in the freezing air. But by spring it became necessary to allow new mice to be caught, owing to the difficulty of recovering the corpses, and to the problem of their rapid decomposition. Our friend became distraught: the lives of the mice were solely in her control, and so she had an obligation to continue saving them. But was it all right to allow new mice to be killed, to save the few she could? Or was it her responsibility to develop a better plan, one that would save all the mice? Her problems worsened when she grew ill and was confined to bed for a week. Though her health improved, she cried and cried, and neither her parents nor her doctor could understand why.

In time our friend grew up and she forgot about her plan to save the mice. She went to college and medical school, and became an obstetrician and fertility expert at the county hospital, which is where we first met her. Often, in recent years, she has administered drugs to women who encountered difficulty conceiving children, and these drugs sometimes result in high multiple pregnancies of five, six, seven or more. When this happens she strongly recommends that the patient permit her to abort several of the fetuses, so that the remaining few will be carried safely to term.

One morning she was performing this very procedure on a patient of hers and was overcome, inexplicably, by emotion. She laid down her instruments and stepped back from the table, then asked a young resident to take over. She left the room and sat very still and quiet in her office, and a strange fantasy occurred to her: she would take away the barely developed aborted fetuses, and incubate them and administer the most up-to-date care, and they would grow up like normal children and would be hers to keep, because she had been unable, despite all her knowledge and expertise, to conceive children herself.

It wasn’t long, however, before this fantasy struck her as unprofessional at best and sickening at worst, and many months later she successfully delivered her patient’s triplets. The patient never learned, and the doctor never told her, that the original procedure had been performed by someone else.

Tea

In the years after my father died, my mother took to a certain brand of tea, which she drank four times daily, once at breakfast, twice in midafternoon and once in the evening, after dinner. She drank it with milk and honey, though sometimes I saw her use granulated sugar, when the honey ran out.

This particular tea came in boxes of fifty bags, and every box came with a small pastel-colored ceramic circus figurine. It was a kind of promotion: I believe the tea was called Piccadilly Circus, and there were fifteen different figurines, a lion tamer, an acrobat, a human cannonball. Every once in a while I would be around when my mother unwrapped a new box and took out the figurine. It would sit on the table between us while we drank and sometimes she would pick it up and turn it over in her hand.

When my mother died and my sister and I sorted through her possessions, we found, in the back of the cellar, a pile of shoeboxes with numbers written on the top: 80, 100, 75. When we opened them we found the figurines. The numbers on top corresponded to the number of figurines inside.

It wasn’t like our mother to keep things; she was no pack rat. Because of this it seemed right to take out the figurines and count them, which we did. There were 420. Sitting there in the dusty cellar, I calculated: fifty tea bags times 420 boxes of tea was 21,000 cups. If each cup held about eight ounces of tea, that made 168,000 ounces, which divided by 128 ounces per gallon was more than 1,300 gallons of tea. In my head I expressed this in fifty-gallon drums, about twenty-five of them, stacked up in a big pyramid, and I pictured them stored out in the wind and cold on a cement lot, in back of an airport or warehouse somewhere, behind a tall chain-link fence.

It occurred to me that this was a measure of loneliness, all the tea my mother drank during the twelve years between my father’s death and her own. I wondered if she herself thought of it that way. In any event, when I am lonely, it is the pyramid of fifty-gallon drums that I think of, standing in a light snowstorm, with perhaps a little creamy brown tea leaking from the bottom of one of the drums and frozen into a dull, irregular pattern on the pavement below.

Deaf Child Area

At a bend in a winding country road outside town, there once lived a family whose only child, a girl, was born deaf. When the girl grew old enough to play outside on her own, the family had the county erect a yellow sign near the house which read
DEAF CHILD AREA
. The idea was that motorists would drive more slowly, knowing that a nearby child could not hear their approach.

By the time I was a boy, the deaf child had become a teenager, and after a while left town for college. She returned occasionally to visit, but for the most part was no longer around. Eventually she married and settled in a faraway city. Her parents, aware of the sign’s superfluity, wrote a letter asking the county to come take it down; and though the county promised to see to the matter, no workmen ever arrived.

At about the time I myself married, the deaf child’s parents retired and decided to move away to someplace warmer. They sold their house, and it was promptly bought by a local professor. The professor, however, was soon offered a position at another university, which he was obliged to occupy immediately. With no time to sell the house he had just bought, the professor hired a property management company to offer the house for rent. At this point it caught my attention. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and we had begun to worry that our small apartment would be unsuitable for raising a family. After a look at the house in the country, we decided to rent it, and soon moved in.

For several months we ignored the sign, which had grown old and battered, and at any rate had nothing to do with us. But as winter approached and my wife’s due date drew near, I noticed that her eyes lingered on the sign whenever we pulled into the driveway, and more than once I caught her staring out at it from our future child’s bedroom, which we had furnished and filled with colorful toys. One night, as we lay awake in bed, my wife turned to me and asked if I might remove the sign somehow. She realized she was being irrational, but nonetheless feared the sign might bring some harm to our baby, and she didn’t think she could sleep until the sign was gone.

This seemed perfectly reasonable. I got out of bed and dressed, then brought a box of tools out to the roadside, where I examined the sign. I saw that it had been bolted onto a metal post, and that I could simply remove the sign and leave the post where it stood in the ground. I did this quickly, and prepared to go inside.

But something compelled me to go out behind the house and find a shovel, which I used to dig the post out of the ground. The ground was cold, and the work slow going. When I finished, I took the sign and post and put them in the back of the car, and drove down to the lake, where I threw them out as far as I could into the water. They splashed onto the surface and sank out of sight.

When I returned home, my wife didn’t ask me where I’d driven. After that we slept comfortably, and did so every night until our child was born without illness or defect.