Alice Hoffman Page 6

  It was a Thursday afternoon, and as I worked I couldn’t help but overhear the preschool reading group. Frances was reading Andersen’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” in which the pious heroine is nothing like the Goose Girl in the Grimms’ tale. There were no heads nailed to the wall in this story. No cases of mistaken identity that weren’t easily rectified. A few of the mothers eyed me. I suppose there might be toddlers who continued to have nightmares from my time in command of story hour. No wonder their mothers wanted me kept at a distance. If I spoke, anything at all might drop from my lips: blood, frogs, death wishes, desire.

  I kept to my files. I was in the A’s all afternoon. Before long my brother’s name came up. I hadn’t seen him in weeks; now it was as though I had stumbled upon him, face-to-face. I was surprised Ned had ever been to this library, when the university facility was so superior. The science library in the north quad ranked alongside the University of Miami’s collection, the result of a major donation by an Orlon alum who had invented a plastic attachment for failing kidneys. But my brother indeed had a library card here, and as it turned out, he had used it. I slipped his card into my backpack to look at later on.

  When I went home, the wind had risen. A hot wind. I parked and got out. I had the sense of being lost that I often had here, as though I’d been transported to Florida by means I didn’t understand. I’d blinked and my life had disappeared. There was Giselle, sitting in the weeds, her tail flashing back and forth. My familiar. She followed me in the door, and when I sat down on the couch, she leapt up and stared at me. The wind came through the screens and made the ceiling fan spin, though it was turned off. I took out my brother’s library card and Giselle tapped at it with her paw.

  Knock, knock. Who’s there?

  I couldn’t imagine my brother reading anything but scientific journals and texts. Yet he had withdrawn the complete Grimm’s fairy tales not once, but twice. He’d actually had to pay an overdue fine. What would he have done with such stories? Why on earth had he wanted them? I’d had to force him to read them to me when we were children. Please, this one. That one. Not one about Death. He’d always had some comment to make: Genetically impossible for men to turn into beasts. Ridiculous to imagine that a woman could sleep for a hundred years. Absurd to think the dead could speak in rhymes and the living could make wishes that came true. But the logic of fairy tales was that there was no logic: bad things happened to the innocent, children were set out in the woods by their parents, fear walked hand in hand with experience, a wish spoken aloud could make it so.

  I fed the cat, then took a cold bath. The blisters were still on my skin. To me they looked like flecks of snow. I shivered in my tub of water and watched the light fade. I had gone to Lazarus Jones because I thought he could help me understand what had happened on that January day when I was a child. Her very last moments, that’s what I was interested in. Did a person’s life flash before her eyes, all she’d had and all she’d lost? Or was it the last few instants that mattered most of all? Did the immediate past last forever, a tape that kept playing somewhere in the universe? Was the last thing my mother saw a sheet of ice? Was she listening to the radio, singing along? I suppose what I really wanted to know was if she despised me for the wish I’d made, whether it was possible in any way, in any world, for her to ever forgive me.

  I let the water in the bath drain, and after I dressed I went outside. It was still hot. Too hot to breathe. The wind rattled, knocked things about. The palm fronds smacked against one another. Giselle followed me out and went to sit beside the hedge, waiting for the moles that sometimes wandered onto our lawn. I wondered if this would ever feel like home. If anything ever would. I wondered if this book was my brother’s defining secret, or just a small part of who he truly was.

  Far away, there was thunder, a common enough occurrence in Florida, something most people ignored. I thought of Ned surrounded by a whirlwind, like the nucleus of an atom, trapped within itself. I thought of him walking into the Orlon Public Library looking for answers, still trying to understand what we did wrong. I wanted to telephone my brother and say, Tell me the truth. Do you believe a wish can kill? Do you believe we could have changed something that night, stopped the ice from falling, stopped our mother from getting in her car? If we’d run along the road till she turned around, woken from sleep and called the police with a premonition, would she still be alive? Tell me, brother, could we have done anything differently, you and I?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fire

  I

  That is the difference between love and obsession? Didn’t both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn’t you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn’t every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?

  Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn’t find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn’t go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, Dear you, good-bye from me. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you’d known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you.

  I tried to define what was happening to me. I had decided never again to drive out to the Jones orchard, and yet I could see the map that led there simply by closing my eyes. I often had lunch with Renny in the school cafeteria, but despite the salad in front of me, all I could taste was an orange, the sweet kind with the reddish rind, the sort that to me looked like ice. My mouth puckered. My heart raced. I thought of all those silly lovelorn girls I’d known in high school, and for once felt a bit of compassion. Foolish creatures. Foolish me. At night I dreamed of things that were dangerous: snakes, stepladders, horses’ heads nailed to the wall. When it rained I stood by the window, looking for lightning. There were music students who lived down the street and when they practiced in the evenings, the sound of the oboe made me weep, the piano forced me to cover my ears. I suppose I had begun to feel something, just an itch. Just a sting. That was the problem. I was such a novice I didn’t understand what it meant when I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, when my racing thoughts were too often of Lazarus Jones.

  Since I didn’t believe in love, I soon enough defined my state as a delusionary preoccupation. Obsession. An emotion that should be tied up and taken out with the trash, replaced by more serious, less affecting thoughts. I turned to work, or what little there was of it at the library. But even there my obsessive nature took over. I pretended to be cheerfully busy, entering information into the computer, dusting and ordering the shelves, but in fact my new, rather prurient interest was looking up people’s reading habits. It was disgusting, really. An invasion of privacy, a petty crime of the soul. I’d begun by looking up my brother’s card; now I couldn’t seem to stop. That was my nature, to take something bad and make it worse.

  I looked up which novels my physical therapist most enjoyed, thick nineteenth-century tomes in which problems weren’t easily solved with exercise and diet. I saw that Matt Acres, owner of the hardware store, preferred biographies of adventurers, men who left behind their safe and settled lives. Dr. Wyman’s teenaged daughter, who was home for the summer from private school in New England, had read all of D. H. Lawrence. People in the Orlon Home for the Aged most often requested travel books for places they would surely never see: Egypt, Paris, Venice, Mexico. My mailman was reading poetry; no wonder what little mail I received was crumpled and stained. The griddle cook at the diner, who made a terrible omelet and even worse blueberry pancakes, read Kafka, in German.

  If Frances York had known what I was doing, I would have been fired on the spot. What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul. I knew Frances’s philosophy. It was not our job to monitor the books our patrons withdrew
any more than it was our duty to alter their reading habits. I liked Frances and respected her, but I wondered if she would have hired me in the first place had she known who I really was. I was poison long before I’d started snooping around. Would she have felt safe with a person who knew more about the effects of arsenic than she did about the Dewey decimal system? A death addict and a thief who didn’t know wrong from right, white from red? At least now I’d had Peggy come by to help color-code my clothes; I knew enough to wear white blouses and black skirts to work and to leave my red clothes at home. But I was still me, hidden by sensible shoes, by skirts past my knee and button-down blouses.

  Thankfully, Frances had no reason to suspect any of this. I was a model employee: polite to our patrons, cheerfully running books out to those who were housebound or in the hospital. I even made a weekly trip to the home for the aged with a box of travel books. Could anyone have discerned I was not to be trusted? Not for a second. Well, maybe those mothers from the nursery group, they seemed to know, but I wasn’t counting them. I avoided the children’s section as a matter of fact. The bright illustrations, the rhymes, the high hopes, all made me nervous. Child patrons always wanted something: directions to the bathroom, a drink of water, a sequel to a book that doesn’t have one.

  The children’s section was where the tall windows were, and the sunlight filtering through in pale streams revealed how filthy the shelves were. There were dust motes everywhere. I ventured into that section one morning with a mop and a sponge. At least it was a school day, and there were no children around. Only me.

  By accident, I found the book my brother had taken out.

  Or perhaps there were no accidents; perhaps I saw the book out of the corner of my eye, and my brain processed the discovery in some deep place I couldn’t reach. However it happened, I turned and there it was, not put back properly, askew on the shelf. It was an old edition of Grimm’s, black with silver lettering. The pages smelled watery; when I held the book up to my nose I sneezed. Tears in my eyes. So what? I just happened to pick it up. I just happened to sit on the floor cross-legged and thumb through the pages.

  One story in particular had clearly been a favorite, perhaps of my brother, with dog-eared pages and a coffee stain or two. It was “Godfather Death,” one of the stories I’d hated and had always passed by. In this tale, whenever Death stands at the feet of an ill person, that person belongs to him. To trick Death, a good doctor, the kind hero, turns the ill person around so that Death is at the head and therefore cannot take him. Fairy-tale logic can be intractable or fluid, and the hero never knows which it is. Especially if the hero is a rational man. This one is.

  One more time and I’ll take you instead, Death says, but the doctor is a scientist through to his soul, a believer in order and in the rightness of things; he cannot accept this is the way the game of life and death is played. There have to be rules, and he is convinced that all he needs is to reverse Death’s direction. But when the doctor saves the girl he loves by turning her around to avoid her fate, Death scoops him up instead. Then and there. No explanations, just a single final act. A life for a life.

  Is this the way the story ends? Not in Andersen’s tales surely, where right and might win out, but this is Grimm.

  There is a single, simple rule to the game played between the doctor and Death, one the doctor-hero has ignored: When it comes to death, heads or tails matters not. There is no escape in the end.

  It’s a sad tale, one that defies logic and thumbs its nose at any reasonable man’s attempt to impose order on the natural world. That my brother, of all people, would choose this obscure, dark story to read and reread was in itself a puzzle. I thought about the way he’d called to me when I’d stood out on the porch, watching our mother drive away. Turn around, that’s what he’d wanted me to do. If I had, would Death have passed us by?

  Just when I thought my brother was determined to avoid me — I’d hardly seen him since my strike — he and Nina invited me to their house for a party. I’d been so taken aback when Ned called that I’d said yes when in fact I’d meant no. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to a party outside of events at the library in New Jersey, and I’d arranged all of them. I’d come to realize that I was comfortable speaking only to people who’d experienced disaster, at least in a secondhand way, like my physical therapist, Peggy, whom I occasionally met for coffee. And of course Renny, not that he was a friend, not even close. Now I’d gone and committed myself to a party of mathematicians and scientists.

  It turned out to be an annual event, filled with professors and graduate students from both Nina’s and Ned’s departments. Getting there was a trial for me; I took one wrong turn after another on those curlicue roads that cut through the campus and all looked alike. I realized then, I hadn’t once been invited over to my brother’s house since my arrival in Florida, and I thought this strange. I wondered if my sister-in-law held something against me. Or maybe it was Ned.

  The house my brother and Nina owned was modern, glass and stucco, set on a cul-de-sac on the far side of the Orlon campus — faculty housing of the highest quality. No wonder some of the best minds chose to teach at Orlon; life here was pleasant, a fact that rubbed me the wrong way. I could feel the numbness in my fingertips, the clicking in my head when I pulled up to park. In times of stress, my symptoms intensified. I got out of my car and walked up the neat path. Nice lawn. Nice flowers. I was thinking about Lazarus Jones. I shouldn’t have been, but after a week I was still burning. I could see happy graduate students through the bay window of Nina and Ned’s house. I felt as though I had arrived from an alternate universe. Call it New Jersey, call it desperation, call it whatever you like.

  I went immediately to the bar set up in the den. I poured a large glass of red wine for myself, probably the good stuff. It looked like mud to me. While I was getting myself a drink, and then another, I could tell how devoted my brother’s students were to him; I overheard one say that Ned would be the head of the department when Dr. Miller, the current chair, retired. Several voiced their disappointment that Ned would be taking the next semester off from teaching, something I didn’t know, in order to concentrate on his research.

  Nina’s students were more reserved, until they started in on the wine; then they were wild. They had a slew of drinking games with mathematical rules I couldn’t understand. They also seemed devoted, only more quietly so; I could see into the kitchen, where they had gathered around Nina as she dished out bouillabaisse, homemade, I was told, which shocked me. I had assumed someone as theoretical and removed as Nina wouldn’t know how to cook. But, of course, cuisine was probably just another equation to her: clams to tomato sauce, basil to pepper, rum to lemonade. My previous apathy toward my sister-in-law had turned into hostility. Why hadn’t she invited me here before, made her bouillabaisse for me? Perhaps she saw me as another project of my brother’s, one of many that took up time and energy with little or no return for his efforts.

  I stayed out of the kitchen and close to the bar. One graduate student in meteorology took a fancy to me. He introduced himself and followed me around for a while. I was wearing the red dress again, that must have been it. The graduate student, Paul, had heard about my lightning strike and wanted to talk about my effects. Was I dizzy? Weak in the knees? Did I have migraine headaches? Lasting psychological effects? Would I like a bowl of bouillabaisse, a glass of punch? How was sex affected, this was what he yearned to know. Hotter? Colder? There was the myth of hypersexuality, duly noted, half believed. Would the rearrangement of my electrical impulses take my partner’s breath away, bring him closer to the brink of the world we knew?

  This was a little too personal. I thought we’d speak of the weather, the heat, perhaps the student’s classwork, not the edge of the known world. I spied my brother across the room. I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked older, unkempt, thinner. Had I not noticed that he’d lost most of his hair, that his shoulders slumped? Yet he seemed to be enjoying himsel
f. He was talking with several other professors, laughing at someone’s joke. I wondered if he’d found happiness in logic, in this well-ordered world created from scratch in a land where there was no ice. Perhaps Death stood outside the windows in Orlon. Perhaps he couldn’t get through the glass.

  I excused myself and left the graduate student to his own kind. The bar had only beer and wine, and I needed something stronger to get through the evening. I went into the kitchen, found the liquor cabinet, and poured myself a whiskey. My grandmother had liked whiskey now and then, and I had sometimes joined her in a drink. Tea and whiskey, our cocktail of choice. We liked to sit in the parlor and watch snow fall; we played “I spy with my little eye” long after her vision was failing and I was far too old for such games. Now I raised my glass and drank to my grand-mother’s memory. Someone who had loved me in spite of everything, no matter who and what I was.

  It was because of the way I missed my grandmother that I drank the whiskey so fast, then turned to the window when I did. It was because I was a failure in each and every thing I undertook, including being a guest at a dinner party, that I happened to spy someone standing in the grass. Was that chaos theory, or simply chaos? If an ice age could be triggered by trivial shifts in the earth’s orbit, what might be wrought by a woman in tears? It was dark in the yard, and at first I thought I was seeing a statue. She was wearing a white dress, and she wasn’t moving. But it was Nina, my brother’s wife, the mathematician, weeping.