Кейт Браверман - A Good Day for Seppuku

Eric follows her into the vegetable and herb plots, noting where she keeps the shears, gloves, trowels, shovels and baskets. She demonstrates how the beans must be cut, the tomatoes and strawberries picked and stored. He’s a polite boy, shy, serious and attentive — a city boy, excited to be standing where vegetation rises enormous over his head. Jack in the Beanstalk. Yes, it is true. Behold. This is the birth of cities and epics. The grain you hold in your palm is the history of this planet.

“What about the vet?” Eric asks. “Do you go to Dr. Sutter’s clinic?”

Barbara Stein tells him that she doesn’t. It’s an odd admission and she regrets it.

“What if she gets sick?” Eric asks. He stares at her grey tabby. He’s concerned, “Okay, but if it’s more than fifty dollars, just put Grace to sleep,” Barbara Stein tells him.

The boy is stunned. Her new neighbor is a surgeon from Philadelphia. The doctor had bought Professor McCarty’s house, and his wife virtually gutted it. Their family made what they term a quality of life move. That’s what the doctor’s wife, Amanda called it. Barbara Stein isn’t sure what this means and she doesn’t ask.

The McCarty house was a sequence of maple, ash, hemlock, oak, and cherry. Walls were made from two hundred-year-old barns and doors salvaged from churches and government buildings, courthouses and town halls. The ceiling beams were once railroad ties. Now the interior of the house is a uniform light oak. Any surface that can be coated has been painted white. Glass and marble have been installed over the hemlock and cherry. The railroad ties are gone, replaced by a series of skylights.

“It’s a bare beginning,” Amanda said, urgency and threat in her tone.

On the few occasions they’ve met, Amanda spoke incessantly about her personal crisis. During mandatory student orientation, Amanda discussed the possibility of a second life, simplifying her life and changing her life — as if those concepts were interchangeable. Amanda did not mention her son. Eric sat in silence and looked out the window.

Mrs. Stein was tempted to tell Amanda that only the simple simplify their lives, and having a second life was more typically characteristic of psychotics. The only plausible verbal description was, in her opinion, changing your life. But behavior modification lacks immediate gratification and happens, if at all, one imperceptibly slow detail at a time. Then Mrs. Stein recognized she had little to say to Amanda.

The doctor and his wife send Eric to buy eggs, transmit information about the state of Maple Ridge Road, and inquire if she needs anything from town. They would prefer to ignore her entirely, but Barbara Stein has a certain status in Woods End. They volunteer their boy as intermediary.

“Mrs. Stein, I’m not sure I can handle putting Grace down,” he says, uncertainly.

“People make too much ado about animals,” Mrs. Stein says. “They should spend more time on babies and less on kittens.”

“That’s not what my mother says,” Eric tells her.

“How old is your mother?” Barbara Stein asks.

“Forty-seven,” Eric replies.

Mrs. Stein laughs. “You mean thirty-seven,” she corrects.

“No, she’s forty-seven. We just had her birthday. I lit the candles myself. Math is my best class,” Eric assures her.

Barbara Stein doesn’t think it’s possible that she and Amanda are the same age. When she’s with the doctor’s wife, she feels matronly, arthritic, and peripheral. Amanda is lithe and eager within her entirely discretionary universe. She plays tennis, goes to yoga classes, and hosts a bridge game on Tuesday afternoons.

When Amanda decided she wanted a garden, she simply ordered one. A landscaper from Buffalo came with a soil expert and drawings, two men to dig and a crew to fence. Her ornamental plum trees were put into the earth larger than Mrs. Stein’s are now, after fifteen years of growing, of wind and ice storms, of what happens when you take an idea and let the elements define its destiny.

When Barbara translates this process into human terms, she thinks of her daughter. Lena is her name now. Her West Coast working name. She’s been Lena for more than a decade. Lena doesn’t want to live unconsciously, but rather one incremental step up. She wishes to inhabit an enormous post-op, permanently on the cusp of surgery. Lena, under the squalid palms of Los Angeles, in her private version of a recovery room, waking from an operation, calling out for Demerol and morphine and getting it. Nurses are eager and competent. They bring syringes, adjust pillows and smile.

Lena, in an apartment by a bay studded with fragile vertical palms that seem superimposed, stitched unconvincingly into the landscape. Lena, in her invented perimeter where it’s artificially cold and hushed, the bleached white of nurses’ uniforms and anesthesia. Lena wants to be in that post-op zone forever, at the edge of coming to and then being put under again, to float in her own inland sea. For her daughter, every day feels like surgery. Sunlight cuts like a razor and must be avoided. Each morning she is knifed and stitched. Night is an abuse. Gravity and air sting and wound her. Voices startle her and she trembles. That’s why she gives herself injections for pain.

Elizabeth is a heroin addict and a prostitute. The order is important. If heroin were dispensed freely, Elizabeth would not be selling her body. Elizabeth would not be HIV positive. Elizabeth has AIDS now. In the clinic, the nurses and technicians believe she’s a criminal, a woman without rights or even the privileges of the terminal. It takes Lena three hours to ride the buses to the hospital. They arbitrarily cancel her appointments and deliberately misplace her chart. They pretend they don’t remember her. Lena waits shivering in corridors through their entire shifts. They want her to die.

Barbara Stein thinks about order and disease as she drives, as highways change numbers and there’s nothing for her to see anymore. It’s a journey she takes every summer.

She remembers searching for Elizabeth in Idaho, in fields of barley and alfalfa. She tried to find her in Kansas City in regions of corn and soy beans. In between were rocks, gravel, abandoned farmland — derelict barns and boarded shut bars, the metal shells of gas stations going to rust. Then the interchangeable motels, anonymous restaurants, featureless towns and ersatz suburbs that might be San Diego or New Jersey.

She avoids cities with their boulevards that could be Baltimore or Dallas. American streets with shops’ racks of cheap faux leather yellow and green jackets and rice bowls and back-scratchers from China no one wants or needs. Stores that have Going Out of Businesssigns on display windows the day they open. Night is worse. Every shop is locked behind black iron grates. In between are bars lit by flashing red neon. It’s the standard greeting of the great superpower. Buy some junk and get drunk.

Barbara Stein could only afford motels on the margins of cities and in strips along interstates. The designated areas for travelers on budgets. This was what America wanted for itself — a subterfuge of monolithic uniformity. This’s the mirror in which America looks at her face and concludes that she is normal.

Elizabeth couldn’t bear looking at her own face in its entirety. Elizabeth’s skin was blossom subtle, not delicate but rather rare like certain fabrics— thick silks, pure light wool and cashmere. Elizabeth has a spring face and her dark brown hair smells like espresso and harbors. When Mrs. Stein held her daughter, she breathed in her skin.

Elizabeth at thirteen and fourteen, before she ran away, had the scent of a river — the Ganges or Nile, with all the intrigues intact. She was the reason for pilgrimages and shrines, why people read texts beside vases in museums, why they collect pebbles from beaches, tiles from temples, and why they take photographs.