T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

It’s cold — raw — and she tightens the parka around her. She’s about to say something inane like “That’s nice,” when Richie jerks the branch from the turtle’s mouth and brings it down hard on the slick gleaming carapace, not once but twice. He’s lifting it again, lifting it high, when she steps forward and takes hold of the end of it so quickly she surprises herself. “What are you doing?” she demands, her voice gone harsh in her throat.

To his credit, he doesn’t resist, and the stick is hers now, to drop in the grass at her feet while the turtle, hissing, thrashes its head back and forth as if it can’t pinpoint the source of the threat. “Thing doesn’t deserve to live,” he says, and his eyes are unfocused, fully dilated, as if he’s dreaming on his feet. “They’re just trash anyway. They kill fish, ducks even. They—”

“No,” she says, cutting him off, “no. They belong here. They have a right to live just like everything else.” She wants to go on, wound up all of a sudden, angry out of all proportion, but he’s already turned his back on her, stalking across the grass in his high-heeled boots — purple, purple boots — and she’s left there with Seldy. Who has nothing to say. Her best friend’s daughter, a girl she’s known since she was in the cradle, and she has nothing to say. Miriam wants to invite her up to the house for tea, a bagel, a good long chat about dropping out, about fashion and respect for nature and life in the Village— freaks, they call themselves freaks —but she finds, in that moment, that she has nothing to say either.

[I remember stopping by one year on spring break and finding Miriam in a lawn chair out on the fringe of the ball field, wrapped in an old sleeping bag, keeping watch over a pair of nesting turtles while a pickup game went on behind her. I must have spent an hour crouched there beside her, catching up on things as the turtles patiently extruded their eggs as if time had gone back a millennium and there were no lawnmowers or automobiles or boys with sticks and rocks and baseball bats poised to annihilate them. And where was Sid? Working. Always working. He’d had his reverses on the stock market and elsewhere, a tough year, but he was still a member of the tin knockers’ union and always had work. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even know turtles existed.]

And it’s another day, a year further on, Susan at Rutgers and loving it, or at least liking it, or so she says on the odd nights when she bothers to call, and Miriam has just got off the phone with her cousin Molly, who lives in Connecticut now and whose youngest — Mark, just twenty-four — has had some sort of nervous breakdown. Or worse. He’s been in treatment since he was a teenager and nobody wants to call it schizophrenia because you don’t come back from that. They say it runs in families, and when Miriam comes to think of it, Molly’s father was no mental paragon, scared of his own face in the mirror, hearing voices, talking nonsense half the time. She just thanks her lucky stars her own children turned out normal, though sometimes she wonders about Les, out there on the West Coast, unmarried at thirty and running with a fast crowd, restaurant people, bar people, people who use drugs and don’t go to bed till the sun rises.

She pushes herself up from the table, aching in her joints — and there’s a sharp pain in the calf of her left leg, a kind of thrilling or buzzing that goes away almost as soon as she puts a name to it. She actually pads to the stove and lights the burner under the kettle before she realizes it’s not tea she wants. Or a cigarette either. The house is a mess — she’s never been much of a housekeeper, except on special occasions, holidays, dinner parties, when she can get herself motivated — but she’s in no mood to start sifting through the papers and magazines and books, the pots and pans and dead and dried-up flowers that seem to accumulate like drift, that will one day bury the house like the sands of Arabia and no one here to care one way or the other. From the window she can see the wall of the paddleball courts, which are empty at this hour on a weekday, and beyond them Rose Shapiro — eighty and stooped — pacing the beach as if she were making her way across the steppes of Russia like poor Dr. Zhivago, and the sight only depresses her the more. You marry, have children, cook, clean, get sick, get old, pace the beach till you can’t even remember who you are anymore. That’s life. That’s what it is.

It is then that she thinks of the canoe. Susan had it out last summer once or twice, but aside from that it’s just sat there inert for as long as she can remember. She’s suddenly seized with the idea of it, its smooth white skin pressed to the belly of the water, clouds scudding by overhead, the release of it, gliding, just gliding. She makes herself a sandwich at the kitchen counter, pours juice into the thermos, selects a paperback from the shelf in the den and goes out into the day and the sunlight, which flares with sudden brilliance, feeling as if she’s going off on an adventure. The lake gives back the sun in a fine glaze of light. There’s a ripple of wind across the water, an infinity of scalloped black wavelets riding out as far as she can see. Birds spangle the grass.

She has some trouble with the combination lock — it’s just rusty, that’s all — and then, once she’s got the chain free and tries to flip the boat over, she finds it’s unaccountably heavy. There’s no one to see her, really, aside from Mrs. Shapiro, who barely glances up from her own shoelaces, but still she feels embarrassed to think that she can’t even flip over a canoe, a thing she must have done a hundred times when she was a girl. Is she really that old and weak? She sucks in her breath and gives it another try, like one of those puffed-up Russian weight lifters in the Olympics on TV, and there it is, like a miracle, right side up and thumping reverberantly to the ground. The sound echoes out over the water and comes back again, thrilling with the chatter of birds and the soughing of the breeze in the branches overhead. It’s April. She’s fifty-eight years old. And her feet, her bare feet, are in the water now, the canoe hovering before her and threatening to tip first one way and then the other until all at once she’s firmly planted in the seat and the paddle is working in her sure tight grip and the shore retreats behind her.

It’s a joy. A lark. And almost immediately she finds her rhythm, the motion — dip and rise and dip again — coming back to her as if it were ingrained in her muscle memory, and maybe it is, though it’s been more years than she can count. She feels the sun on her face and when she shifts position it wraps itself across her shoulders like an electric blanket, warming and gentle. By the time she thinks to look back to where her house sits reduced on the horizon, she’s nearly to the far side of the lake. What she’s thinking is that she should do this more often — get out, enjoy life, breathe the air — and she makes a promise to herself that starting tomorrow, she will. It’s not even noon yet when she lays the paddle athwart the gunwales and unwraps her sandwich, pastrami on rye, just letting the boat drift, and isn’t this the best pastrami on rye she’s ever had? The canoe rocks. She lies back, for just a moment, and closes her eyes.

When she wakes, she can’t imagine where she is, despite the evidence all around her. It takes her a minute, so inured is she to her own home, to her kitchen and den and the walls and doors and ceilings that contain her, to come fully to herself. The sun is gone, the clouds bleeding across the sky. And the wind is stronger now, damper, sweeping out of the south with a scent of rain. She’s not wearing her watch — she left it home for fear of getting it wet — and that further disorients her, as if to know the time would put everything back in its place. Nothing for it but to paddle, but which way? She can’t see the shore from here, not through the low-bellied clouds — as best she can figure the canoe must have been carried all the way down the lake while she dozed. All right. She’ll just orient herself, that’s all. She swivels round, scanning both shores till she finds a fixed point, the pale white tower of the seminary all the way up on Stony Street emerging suddenly from the clouds and the canopy of the distant trees, which means she has to go in… that direction, there, behind her now. She feels the relief wash over her — at least she knows where she is — until she reaches for the paddle, or the place where the paddle was, and finds it gone.