David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

“Okay, if you’ll wash those, I’ll start the piecrust,” she said, opening the cabinet and handing Karen the colander.

“What happened to the boys?” Karen said, looking out the window. “I don’t see the truck.”

“Probably went someplace to measure cocks with the locals. Saturday in Vermont. You go buy a case of beer, then go over to somebody’s house and watch him work on his car. Paul is nothing if not assimilated.”

“Allen must be in seventh heaven,” Karen said. “He’ll have some real Americana to lay on everybody back at Time Warner. So is Paul serious about all this? Or is he just collecting material?”

“Material for a beer belly, maybe. Which he’s already getting. I don’t know, you’d have to understand Paul. Question is, does anybody want to understand Paul.”

“Well — you, presumably.”

“Right,” Faye said. “There’s always me. Listen, let’s get these pies in the oven, and maybe we can go for a swim.”

“That would be great.” Karen poured blueberries from the coffee cans into the colander, began running water, then turned the faucet off. “Wait. Why am I doing this?”

“Don’t go philosophical on me.”

“I mean, what are we washing off? They don’t use insecticide up there in the woods, do they?”

Faye looked out the window. “How would anybody know? If it’s not insecticide, it’s acid rain or God knows what. The deer come through and piss on them, I don’t know. Actually I think New York’s the only place a nature lover should really live. Put up your Ansel Adams calendar, and you’re in business.” She dug the measuring cup into the bag of flour, held her palm against the outside of the bag to level it off and dumped the flour into the mixing bowl. “Could you get down the Wesson oil? Up in that cupboard?”

Karen stood on tiptoes and craned her neck, tilting bottles to look behind them. “Canola oil?”

“Sorry, that’s what I meant. See, this isn’t the boonies. A mere twenty miles to the nearest supermarket.” Faye measured oil into the cup and dumped it over the flour. Then she held the cup under the faucet and measured water.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Karen said. “I thought you were supposed to mix the oil and water first and then keep adding flour to it.”

“It all ends up together anyhow,” said Faye. “I can’t put it together — it is together.” She measured out salt and baking powder. “Okay, we need room on that counter to roll this stuff out. Have you picked over those berries?”

Karen started moving junk off the counter. “You’ve got amazing counter space,” she said. “Even on the West Side the kitchens really aren’t big enough.”

“Counter space,” Faye said. “Sounds like what’s inside a black hole.” She fluttered her fingers and intoned the word in Twilight Zone baritone: “Coun-ter-space.”

Karen laughed.

“There’s a rolling pin in that drawer,” Faye said. “By the fridge? God, I actually own a rolling pin. If I had a bathrobe and curlers, I could give the boys a real American welcome.”

“This really is America, isn’t it?” said Karen. “The womenfolk in the kitchen and the boys out God knows where. Is this really what it’s like here?”

“Honey,” Faye said in her hillbilly voice, “this rot year is jes’ the tip of the osberg of what it’s lock year. It’s th’unstable sufface thoo which th’unwayry”—now she’d slipped into her black radio preacher voice and was rolling her eyes—“is lahble to fawel, at enna instant. Now, sistah—” Karen was laughing again. Faye stopped and looked out the window. “I don’t know,” she said in her own voice. “It’s a good question. I really have no idea what it’s like here.”

Faye sat on the bed and dug her right heel into her left heel to work her shoe off without having to untie it, pried the other shoe off with the bare toes of her left foot and stretched out on top of the quilt. She’d told Karen she was still feeling iffy, given her a towel and explained how to get down to the brook; she was going to lie down for half an hour, take the pies out, and maybe afterward she’d come join her. But the hangover was only part of it. She hadn’t seen Karen in, what, four years? Shouldn’t she be able to endure two days? It was quarter after one. She could nap until quarter of two, take the pies out, pick up around the house a little. That still left a lot of hours. She made a fist and started sticking out fingers: quarter to three, four, five, six … God, nine or ten more hours today, and at least another, what, five or six tomorrow. A minimum of fourteen more hours, and you’ve only gotten through — let’s see — maybe four hours last night and three or four today. Like a third of the way through.

She closed her eyes and started watching for the crazy thought, the one that meant she was asleep. Although examining each thought to see if it was crazy made it harder for the crazy one to come. She realized she was clenching her eyelids, relaxed them and felt her face get longer, all the way down to her chin: her jaw dropped, her teeth parted. This was the way your face needed to feel if you were to receive the crazy thought. She went down through her body, checking for tension; she found it, then relaxed it, in the neck, in the shoulders, in the stomach, in the buttocks, in the thighs, in the knees, in the feet. What was the term for them, those head-to-toe descriptions of women in medieval literature, in which lovers itemized their ladies’ attractions?

English 242, Beowulf to Chaucer. A seminar room with cinder-block walls, and windows you pulled down to open; like an oven door, except they stopped at an acute angle. Outside, blue sky, trees starting to turn. Fall semester, her junior year, first day of class. She waited to learn what name he would answer to, the one with the violin case and the wrinkled oxford shirt and the full lower lip, unsmiling. Then three unforgivable weeks of catching his eye and simpering. In those days, Ben practiced six hours at a stretch, and he dropped the class before midterms. But by that time — well, not what you want to be thinking about. This much was clear: she had been married to him, but he had never been married to her. It had all been an invasion of his privacy. And it had meant nothing the time he’d come with her to the vet’s to have poor, sick, old Bootsy put down; on a plastic sofa, in a waiting room that stank of disinfectant, he’d turned to her and said, “There’s always me.” So when he left and she learned that he was still growing inside her, she’d had him uprooted. She was still uprooting him, every day.

She checked for tension again, found clenched fists. So puzzling that after being in this body for thirty-odd years you still don’t know how to shut it down. Yet somehow it happens: the crazy thought comes, and that’s the last you know.

Faye set the pies on the counter and turned off the oven. She felt worse for having slept: the inside of her mouth tasted foul, and a pinpoint of headache was coming and going high on the left side of her forehead. She washed the mixing bowls and the rolling pin, ran water through the colander, wiped off the countertop. She took Paul’s book off the dining room table and reshelved it in the living room, between The Golden Bowl and The Penal Colony.

Down at the brook, Karen was sitting against the big beech tree, her hair wet, her shorts and T-shirt dry.

“Hi,” said Faye, seating herself on the big rock. “Looks like you found it okay. How’s the water?”

“Muddy. But nice. You going in?”

“No. I was being polite. What are you reading?”

Karen held up Jung’s Answer to Job.