Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

MY WIFE isn’t local. She finds it alarming that so much of where we live is named for someplace else: Pompey, Fabius, Marathon, Mycenae, Euclid, Cicero, Tripoli. Here — Syracuse and Lebanon, Rome — in the center of the state of New York, where it often snows in May and always in April, three hundred miles from Manhattan, the children are entitled. Whether they are kissed for their beauty or scalded in punishment, whipped with a belt or beaten by fists or sung to at dawn, and in a mobile home or a three-floor Colonial with central chimney and hand-adzed joists, they are the young and we allow for them in the hamlets and the trailer parks, in the yellow-brick Victorian synagogue, in the farmhouse turned by candles and chrome-plated cross into a church.

I am the man in the unwashed dark blue truck who comes up the snow-sealed rural road or into the street behind the boarded-over tannery. If your child can’t come to school, the law demands that someone bring the school to him, and I am the carrier of entitlements, with my briefcase scuffed like cheap shoes, and my long thick overcoat and clumsy gloves, with a white metal toolbox in the back of the truck that I fill each day with textbooks and ruled coarse paper, and the forms I turn in to the board every night. I am the education they must send. In Smyrna and Coventry, Lower Cincinnatus and New Berlin, I’m the chance.

At eleven in the morning, while thick wet snow fell without sticking onto crocuses and daffodils, I drank reheated coffee sweetened with condensed milk and light brown sugar by a woman too embarrassed to look at my face. She wore polyester pants with a black and white check, a man’s gray sweatshirt over a heavy flannel shirt, and big slippers lined with synthetic fur; on top of each slipper was the face of a dog with a long pink tongue. She wore no socks, and the chapped rough redness of her ankles was an intimacy between us. She was feeding soft wood — scraps of lumber, chunks of pine — to a big, hot wood stove. I could smell the almost-kerosene of the creosote in her stovepipe.

Her face was wedge-shaped, and soft. Inside her fat, and under her thinning light hair, within the smell of smoke and cheap deodorant, a shy, myopic thirty-five-year-old woman was waiting for my verdict on her twelve-year-old girl. I said, “Thank you for the coffee,” and while she looked at her painted-over Hoosier cabinet, I said, “Myrna’s a bright girl. I’m not sure about her social studies, but I think that’s only because she didn’t finish the chapter. She could do it.”

“I’ll mind her.”

“I spoke to her about it.”

“I was the same age as her when I—” She pointed at her soft belly. Her fair skin was red. I saw tears behind her thick glasses.

“Not with Myrna.”

She shook her head. “That would have been too young to be her. No. It was a baby bore itself early and dead. A, you know, miscarriage. I remember my grandmother — I lived with them. My mother didn’t have the strength for any more kids, so she give me to them. My grandmother told me to thank Jesus it was dead. I didn’t think of nothing like that, though. I cried and cried. I wanted that baby. I was like her. Twelve.”

“So she’ll have the baby?”

“I believe she will,” she said. “Lord willing and her strength all right. She’s a strong girl.”

“Well,” I said. “I thank you for the coffee. I’m very pleased with how Myrna’s doing with her studies. Will she go back to school?”

“Oh, yes,” her mother said. “I’ll be helping with the baby. She has to go on and live out her life. We can afford another mouth.”

“Fine,” I said. “Good. And the father?”

“Myrna’s?”

“Her baby’s.”

“No, they’re too young,” she said. “He’ll have to live with his own mommy and daddy.”

I remember how I looked at the crazy lenses of her thick glasses and then nodded. I remember being angry with myself for being surprised. I smiled my good-byes.

In the truck, I scribbled my report. I saw Myrna at the window over the long front porch. She waved like a little girl. She was a little girl. So I waved back. For the principal and the board of education, for all whose rules — and weren’t they right? — required that a pregnant schoolgirl in her seventh month stay home, I waved. She would come to school with her baby anyway, and her friends would surround her, and certain teachers, even, would smile their applause. She would be heroic to them, and her trophy would be eleven years and eleven months away from a pregnancy leave and a visiting teacher like me. I wondered if one day I would teach Myrna’s child and sit in my truck and wave to her like this.

When I arrived at the hospital, they were removing lunch dishes in the corridor. Outside Intensive Care, in the small lounge, people sat to wait, and they all looked as though they wanted to smoke. I hadn’t smoked in a dozen years, and the NO SMOKING sign always made me wish for a cigarette. I buzzed and they asked who I was. I told them, and that I was there for Leslie DuBois — say “Du-Boyce”—and they admitted me. I always found myself wishing they wouldn’t. In her room, one of eight in a large squared doughnut of such rooms surrounding the ICU nurses’ station, Leslie lay. I called, above the hiss and click of her ventilator, “How’s the spider?” I had told her that she looked arachnoid, nested in the IV feed lines and ventilator hose. Her tired eyes blinked several times, and the urgent O of her mouth, which was taped about the thick tube that went down her throat and breathed for her, twitched.

She wrote to me. On the Invisible Pad, with its gray pudding of undersheet, and its clear plastic topsheet that lifted to erase what she wrote with a mute pen, a pointed red wooden stick, Leslie wrote, in crooked block lines, NOT SPIDER FLY. Leslie DuBois had taken most of the pills in her parents’ house. She had telephoned her doctor. So she’d lived. No one was certain when her brain would tell her lungs to breathe out carbon dioxide, or remind her legs to bear her weight, so Leslie, who had lived, lived here. And she was required to be entitled to me: they forced me at her, and she wrote to me on her Invisible Pad, and I called back above her ventilator, and then, for twenty minutes or so, we played school.

I said, “The Jersey Devils are the Cinderella team in the playoffs this year!”

She wrote, GRETZKY IS GOD.

“Wrong team,” I called. She sweated long rivulets. She shuddered under the workings of the ventilator as if she were a ragged-running car. “Your metabolism needs tuning,” I yelled.

Gray-blue pale, dank of hair, smelling sour and showing in her eyes how embarrassed she was when I bent close, she tore the cover up, then wrote HATE HOCKEY.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I do too.”

She tore and printed. LOVE U.

“I love you, Leslie,” I said. “But you didn’t do your homework, did you?”

HATE POEMS.

“Gotta read’em. Gotta graduate on time.”

WHY?

“Because when you get better you’ll want to go to college. Stay up all night doing homework about poems. That’s why.”

BOLOGNA.

“Nothing wrong with your spelling,” I called. I found on her crowded night table the Xeroxed sheet I had given her. We were doing Keats’s sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” which after that first line goes on to worry “Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” I said, “Leslie. You had fears that you might cease to be.”

Her intensely dark eyes — the pupils looked all-black to me — swung up to lock with mine. LIFE NOT POEMS, she wrote.

“Poems are life. They can be. They can be about life. Very respectably. Very persuasively.”