Norman Rush - Mortals

“She needed this child. She was volunteering to baby-sit for all her married friends and she was falling in love with their children. They could do no wrong. She would baby-sit for a twenty-one-month-old holy terror who would go through the apartment dismantling it. But after each depredation, like tearing the knobs off the stereo, he would toddle over to her holding out the thing he had torn off as a gift, giving this darling smile. Or he would go into the bathroom and grab a container of shampoo and come out and give it to you as another gift but leaving a trail of spilled shampoo all through your living room. Of course Ellen doesn’t keep the caps screwed on. But anyway the child would be picked up and she would slowly discern her apartment was in ruins. She had been in a dream. I met one of the children who pushed her over the edge, a darling little girl, just a toddler. When she came over to be baby-sat she brought along a whole menagerie of stuffed animals. Going to sleep meant collecting them into a heap and lying down on top of them. She had fantastic names for them. When I asked her about her animals she said, ‘I use them as friends.’ Ellen wrote the names down so she could refer to them correctly on the phone. They had a phone relationship. Look at this. I’m at her desk now and here’s a card with the names of the animals. Here they are … Snartz, Gwinty, Pobeel, Woot, Fard and Dardena. Don’t you love Dardena? How is St. James College?”

He knew what he wanted from this conversation. He wanted to attract her and he wanted some evidence that he was succeeding. He wanted to hear that she was keeping her personal footing in all the upheaval around having a baby, particularly as the proposition might apply to her. He wanted her to miss Botswana, if that was possible. He wanted to hear what it felt like to be back in the States, if she liked it there. It was probably fortuitous that she had gone to Florida, which, if he was any judge, she was going to find boring and extreme, culturally. That was what he hoped. He had to say something about school. There was nothing attractive going on. The pigs were dead.

“School is fine. No big changes.”

“I think she’ll be a good mother. My fingers are crossed. Do you know what cradle cap is?”

“Some type of bonnet for a child? No idea.”

“No it’s a scalp condition. It’s like a crust. It’s unattractive. Newborns get it. You’re supposed to leave it alone, not be scrubbing it or oiling it every minute. Ellen can’t leave it alone.

“She just has to calm down about this baby. I think she will. Her breasts are immense. She was never large-busted, Ray. She was like me …”

So far, her attitude to the new baby wasn’t alarming. It was unromantic.

“What is going to happen to this child? I suppose it’s a good thing it’s a girl. They say they’re easier. This child is not a good sleeper.”

There was one other item he needed from this conversation. He needed to know if there was any chance that she had been in contact with Morel, any sign suggesting it.

“Well, anyway. America. I have to say Davis was right about one thing, unless it’s just this particular neck of the woods. I think it’s all over. He was right about credulism reigning and spreading. That means religiosity …”

“I figured,” Ray said.

“Credulism,” she said. She seemed to love the word. “The country is in a religious frenzy of some kind. Everybody has Jesus bumperstickers saying one thing or another. Anybody who thinks religion is going the way of the goatee is in for a shock. I don’t know how happy Ellen is going to be, living around here. The local people have a feeling against single mothers, I gather, that she’s run into, because the day she put a sticker on her bumper saying God Is a Single Parent someone twisted her windshield wipers so that they had to be replaced. She sees a connection, but who knows. Also the kind of religion that’s around is kind of gruesome. One sticker has the image of a hand with a nail through it and the text says His Pain Your Gain. On Monday if you go someplace for fast food the cashier just automatically reaches out for your church bulletin so they can give you your ten percent off. Is anything happening at the embassy?”

“Not a thing.”

“Have they found Dwight Wemberg?”

“No.” That was a true statement.

“I think about him. I wish you could find him.”

“What would I do if I did?”

“Well, help him. Put him up. I don’t know.”

“Concretely, though …”

“Find out what he needed you to do. Intervene for him.”

“Well, it’s a fantasy.”

“It’s so pitiful, love coming to an end that way, the way it does. This separation from you is so painful, Ray, because it brings up … you know what I mean. It’s like a rehearsal.” She was insanely truthful.

He was in pain. He said, “You mean the final separation. I know, I know. Look, don’t talk about it. I want you back here, my good girl, my love …” An odd sound came out of him.

“Stop, I’m crying,” she said. “Wait a minute till I find some Kleenices … I know I had some, a new packet.”

The love of a woman with a funny mind is the definition of paradise, he thought. The word Kleenices was, of course, plural for Kleenex. It was an old item between them, but he hadn’t heard it for a while.

“Here we are,” she said. “I knew I had some. I put them in my purse, unbeknownst to me. This is what I want. If I die first, this is what I want you to do. Take my ashes and put them in an urn on the coffee table and then every now and then lift the lid and shout the latest down into it, whatever is going on.”

“Then you do the same.”

“Don’t say it. I can’t stand it if you die first. It’s worse if you die than if I do.”

“Please don’t say that and please let’s not have this conversation when you’re there where I can’t hold you.” Save you, was what he meant.

“I’m wretched without you,” she said, her voice very low.

His breathing was easier, distinctly.

She was irreplaceable. That was the problem. She was uniquely funny. Now his mind was flooding with moments and episodes that proved it. They had stayed overnight at the Tshwaragano Hotel in Serowe where the management was bell-mad and rang a ship’s bell for every meal, including breakfast at seven. And they had dragged in dead tired at three in the morning and gotten to bed and then for no reason someone had begun banging the bell at five-thirty, waking them, and he had asked why in hell they were doing that and she had said, “They’re practicing.” And when he had noticed in the paper that Belfast and Beirut had become sister cities, she had said, “What do they do, exchange rubble?” He remembered being with her in a diner when they were dating, before he’d had any notion about how funny she was, and when she was being offered a second cup of coffee by the waitress she’d said, “Oh no thanks, if I drink that I’ll be up all day,” making the woman laugh. And when he’d wondered aloud what the correct name for a male ballet dancer was, she had said ballerino . And then when he’d mentioned that physicist who had concluded that the universe was made up of just three kinds of matter, she’d said, “Yes, I know, ether, phlogiston, and ectoplasm.” She liked to deny that she ever farted. And when he’d been passing by the bathroom when she was in the tub and he’d heard something suspicious and said, “Did you fart?” she’d said, “Certainly not. I was just submerging my head to belch.” And when he’d once remarked, “Wasn’t that a particularly virtuous lunch we had,” she’d said, “It was more than just virtuous, it was actually unpleasant.” And then she’d said one morning, “If I make us stop drinking coffee and only make tea, will you start hating me?” and he had said no and then she had said, “Well then, if I keep making us coffee and forget about tea, will you stop hating me?” That one was slightly ineffable. They had an idiom together. That was it. She was the author of it. He was never funny. Except that she had laughed when he described her chest as the Globe Theatre, a literary nothing, his pinnacle. He had to escape this.