David Gates: The Wonders of the Invisible World

Up here we’ve found our neighbors more congenial politically than the old crowd from work, if not so well informed. The mail lady has told Alice that no one in town gets so many magazines. The people we know, other retirees mostly, take Modern Maturity and the Reader’s Digest. The younger people, I imagine, scarcely read a newspaper; Alice was dismayed to learn that only two families in town get Time. But of course she can make conversation with anybody, right down to the neighbor woman, that Mrs. Paquette, whose talk even in the summertime is mostly about how she can no longer stand New Hampshire winters. She was over again the other morning — or was it earlier this morning? — for coffee and chitchat. Which is what her life amounts to, as far as I can see, though what can my life seem in her eyes? I could hear them all the way downstairs.

“Well, if anything should happen to Lew,” Alice was saying, “Florida’s the last place I’d go. And I would certainly not go out and inflict myself on Wylie and Jeff.”

I thought about the word anything.

I thought about the word if.

“I think I’d try and get myself one of those new little apartments over in Concord,” she went on. “Have you been by there?”

I knew the place she meant. Brown brick and brown window glass. I’d had no idea that she’d even noticed it, let alone that it loomed so large.

I wake again when Alice comes in and sets my tray on the dresser. How long have I been asleep this time? I struggle up to a sitting position — now, that’s something I couldn’t have done a while ago! — then she wedges the triangular pillow behind me and I collapse back on it. She’s taken to saying that I’m in the lap of luxury, getting my breakfast in bed. Can she think I don’t understand (and don’t understand that she understands) the truth of what’s happened to me? To which good cheer is still the only adequate response — but true cheer, not this lap-of-luxury business. She hands me my eyeglasses, then walks over and tugs down on the string with the lace-covered ring at the end. Up goes the shade, and I sit there blinking like a nasty old owl, the white hairs on my knobby chest curling out between the lapels of my pajamas. How can she stand this, unless she looks with the eyes of love? Or unless she no longer truly looks. She places the tray across my thighs, the living and the dead. Orange juice, Postum, All-Bran and half a grapefruit. And this morning, a gaudy blossom from one of her gloxinias floating in a juice glass.

“Austerity breakfast,” I say. Yesterday was a bacon-and-eggs day; I am not allowed two in a row.

“Posterity?” she says.

“Aus-ter-i-ty,” I say, furious. I point to the food. “Austere,” I say.

“Ah,” she says, giving me a too-energetic nod. Can’t tell if she’s understood or not.

“On in the world,” I say, a question.

“The world?” she says. “The news? Oh, they had the most awful thing this morning.”

“Hear TV going,” I say, meaning I didn’t.

“The TV?” she says. “Yes, they were talking more about that airplane.”

“Jet with a bomb,” I say. We’d seen the report last night.

“Well, now they’re saying that those people who were sucked out of that hole?” She makes parentheses with her hands to suggest a hole three feet across. “They’re saying that they apparently were not killed when it went off. They found out they were alive all the way down.”

“Out you’re alive,” I say. Meaning, Well, that’s one way to find out you’re alive. I was making a joke out of her theys. Which I suppose was heartless. Though what hurt, really, could it do? Who, for that matter, could even understand me? Alice cocks her head and squints, then just barges on. “And that poor woman was pregnant.”

Enough and more than enough of the world-news roundup. I want her out of here now. Smear food all over my face in peace.

“I’m going to let you eat your breakfast before it gets cold,” she says, though there’s nothing to get cold but the Postum. “Do you need anything else, dear?”

I don’t bother answering. But when I see her going through the door, away from me, I find that I’m weeping. It’s one of the peculiarities: my body’s heaving with sobs, the tears are rolling down my cheeks and off my jaw, yet really I feel not a thing. Or so it seems to me. I command the crying to stop: no use. Something undamaged in me is observing all this but can’t get out of its own silent space to intervene. Quite a study in something, if you could get it across to anyone.

After the fit passes, I take my time eating. Obviously. (Now, there’s a joke at my expense!) What I mean is, I’m dawdling to put off the process of dressing myself and getting myself downstairs. Dr. Ngo (you pronounce it like the fellow in James Bond) suggested to Alice that she convert the dining room into a bedroom, but I wouldn’t hear of it, and Mrs. Midgely backed me right up. (These therapists call you by your first name, but as soon as I was able to make myself understood I let it be known that it was to be Mr. Coley and Mrs. Midgely. ) “If he can do it once,” Mrs. Midgely said, “he can do it every day.” Going up and down stairs and dressing yourself are what they’re keenest on your learning.

Most days, though, it hardly seems worth the struggle — a way I must fight against thinking. I’ll sit in the living room and look at television, or read a magazine or work a crossword puzzle. A great mercy that my vision has straightened out again; at first I saw only parts of things, and letters and words refused to stay in their proper order. A mercy, too, to have been muddled enough in my thinking at the time that this didn’t alarm me. Nowadays I’m able to read everything from the National Review to our local newspaper. I even read the Neighbors page, about people we don’t know being visited by their grown children from out of state, and the notices of church suppers and bingo games we can no longer attend. Not that we ever did. To have ended up in a town where our nextdoor neighbors live in a trailer (it is kept up nicely) with a Virgin Mary sheltering in a half-buried bathtub — it’s not what we had expected of life.

Now, stop right there and listen to yourself: when will you awaken to your abundant blessings? Which continue to be abundant. This, I have come to believe, is part of what the Lord means to tell me. My stroke is part of our long conversation.

I’m sitting on the bed trying to pull on my socks one-handed when I hear a car slow up. I grip the four-footed cane with my good hand, rock a little to get myself going, shudder up to a standing position and go thump-scrape, thump-scrape over to the window. When I finally get there, I see the mail lady pulling away from our mailbox in her high, big-tired pickup truck. Toolbox on it the size of a child’s coffin. Sometime during the winter, I’m not clear just when, it was while I was still in the hospital, I remember Alice telling me about the mail lady towing that roughneck Bobby Paquette’s car out of the snow on Lily Pond Road. (This is the neighbor woman’s nephew.) Alice says her truck’s equipped with a winch and I don’t know what-all. A male lady indeed. Mrs. Laffond looks like a movie cowboy, sun-scorched and slitty-eyed. And that short hair doesn’t help matters. Now, Wylie when she was growing up was something of a tomboy, too, but always looked feminine. An outdoor girl, perhaps it’s better to say. Always enjoyed bicycling, played softball on the girls’ team. If back then there’d been the agitation you see today over the Little League (and now even on into the high schools), Wylie would’ve been first in line, I’m sure. But for the sake of being modern, not mannish. Mrs. Laffond, though. It’s nothing to see her in garageman’s getup: green gabardine shirt and trousers to match. There was a Mr. Laffond, but he left for parts unknown. (Small wonder, wouldn’t you say?) Supposedly he drank. It would be entirely their own business, of course, if children hadn’t been involved. Two little girls and a boy, Alice says. The one thing these people seem able to do is breed, if that’s not an unchristian observation.