Кристина Клайн - A Piece of the World

I don’t believe her. She is living the life she wants to lead. But I don’t really envy her, either. Even without an infirmity it would be hard to adjust to these narrow streets clotted with buildings and pedestrians and endure incessantly clanging streetcars, blaring horns, squealing brakes, music drifting from doorways, human chatter. The Boston sky, watered down by lamplight, is never completely dark. I miss the thick, star-sprayed blackness of Hathorn Point at night, the soft glow of gaslight, the moments of absolute quiet, the view of our yellow fields and the cove and the sea in the distance, the horizon line beyond.

RAMONA AND EVEN Harland, bless him, are more than generous, but when it’s time to leave, I am ready to go. The day of our departure is brilliantly sunny. Snow is melting into puddles in the streets. Yellow and purple crocuses in the park have burst overnight through the slush. I’m in my tiny bedroom, tucking my few belongings into my suitcase, when there’s a rap at the door. “It’s Sam. May I come in?”

“Sure.”

When he opens the door, I look up. His eyes are sparkling and he has a huge grin on his face. “So are you nearly ready?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, hurry up then.” I hold up a long skirt and fold it in half. “We don’t want to miss the train.”

He wavers in the doorway, half in the room and half out, his hand on the knob. “I’m not ready to go back.”

I look up in surprise. “What?”

He presses his forehead against the door and sighs. “I’ve been thinking. If I’m going to spend my life in a tiny place in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, I want at least to see something of the world.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been doing?”

“I think I’m just getting started,” he says.

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around this. “So—you want to stay on with Ramona and Harland? Have you asked them if they mind?”

“Actually, Herbert Carle has offered me a position as a mail clerk in his company and a room in their house. So I wouldn’t need to stay here.”

It dawns on me slowly that he’s been hatching this idea for a while. “Why haven’t you told me about this?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“But what will . . . how will . . .”

“You’ll be fine,” he says, as if reading my mind. “I’m going to escort you to the station. And then I’ll turn right around and go to work.”

“Well, what about the farm?”

“Al and Fred can manage. Anyway, it’ll be good for Fred to step up and help out more—he’s been the baby of the family for too long.”

I feel stung. “You’ve thought this through.”

“I have.”

“Without even consulting me.”

He squirms in the doorway like a dog being scolded. “I was afraid you wouldn’t approve.”

“It’s not that I don’t approve. It’s that I . . . I . . .” What is it, exactly? “I suppose it’s that I feel . . .”

“Abandoned,” he says. It’s as if we both realize it at the same time.

My eyes fill with tears.

“Oh, Christina,” he says, coming over and putting a hand on my arm. “I’ve only been thinking of myself. I wasn’t thinking of you at all.”

“Of course you weren’t,” I say, choking on the words. I know I’m being melodramatic, but I can’t help myself. “Why should you? Why should anyone?” Turning away from him, I reach for a folded handkerchief in my suitcase and weep into it, my shoulders shaking.

Sam steps back. He’s never seen me like this. “I’m being selfish,” he says. “I’ll come home with you on the train.”

After a few moments, I take a deep breath and dab my eyes with the handkerchief. Outside the window I hear the clatter of a streetcar, a honking car. I think of Mamey’s wanderlust. Her desire to see the wider world. Her frustration that no one in the family seemed to share her ambitions. Why shouldn’t Sam stay in Boston? He has his entire life ahead of him.

“No,” I say.

“No . . . ?”

“You shouldn’t come home.”

“But you—”

“It’s all right,” I tell him. “I want you to stay.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod. “Mamey would be proud.”

“Well, I’m hardly sailing around the world,” he says with a smile. “But perhaps Boston is a start.”

Sam, as promised, escorts me to the station and puts me on a train. He looks so young and handsome and happy standing on the platform, waving good-bye as the train pulls away.

As Boston recedes into the distance, the domestic concerns that have receded from my thoughts swim back into focus: How is Mother’s health? Has she been sleeping well? Did she manage the cooking? I think about the dirt I’ll find in the corners of the kitchen, the piles of laundry that no doubt await, the ashes piled up in the range. The mule, the cows, the chickens, the pump behind the house . . . I look out at the horizon—horizontal bands of color, black to blue to russet to orange, a line of gold and then blue again. Heading north is like going back in time. When the train pulls into Thomaston it’s cold and muddy and gray, exactly how Boston looked when I arrived there several weeks ago.

A FEW MONTHS after I’ve returned, Mother sits me down at the dining room table, a letter in her hand. Papa stands behind her in the doorway. “Sam and Ramona would like for you to go back to Boston to be evaluated. The Carles know a very good doctor who—”

“Yes, she mentioned it,” I interrupt. Now that I’m home again, back to my familiar routines, Boston seems very far away. The disruption of my chores, the effort of the journey, not to mention the almost certain painfulness of the procedure and the far from certain outcome: It’s hard to imagine why I would put myself through such an ordeal. “I said I’d consider it. But honestly, I don’t think there’s any point.”

Mother reaches for my wrist and grasps it before I can pull away. She turns it over, revealing raised red strips on my arm. “Look. Just look at what you’ve done to yourself.”

I’ve started using my elbows, my wrists, my knees to lift heavy pots, balance the teakettle and fill it with water from the pump, lug it to the range. My forearms are striped with burns. Partly for this reason and partly because over the years my arms have become thinner and more sticklike, I hide them as often as I can in voluminous sleeves. I yank my arm away, slide the sleeve down to cover it. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I get along fine, Mother.”

“If it continues getting worse, you will not be able to walk. Have you thought about that?”

I busy myself brushing some crumbs on the table into a pile. Of course I’ve thought about it. I think about it every day when I navigate the fourteen-foot-long pantry by using my elbows along the walls.

“Do you think you’ll get along fine when your legs don’t work at all?” she persists.

“It’s decided,” Papa says abruptly. We both turn to look at him. “She’s going to Boston, and that’s the end of it.”

Mother nods, clearly surprised. Papa rarely asserts his opinion with such force. “You heard your father,” she says.

It seems there’s no use arguing. And who knows, maybe they’re right—maybe something can be done to reverse or at least slow my decline. I pack two equally weighted bags to help me keep my balance, and Al borrows a neighbor’s car to drive me to Portland so I won’t have to change trains by myself. When I reach Boston, Sam and Ramona pick me up in Harland’s brand-new sky-blue Cadillac sedan and drive me to City Hospital on Harrison Avenue in the South End—a stately brick building with giant columns and a turreted dome—where I’m admitted for a week’s “observation.”