Alice Hoffman - Here On Earth

March might have never noticed that Richard was courting her, in his own mild way, if not for the night of Alan and Julie’s wedding. The wedding was held on New Year’s Eve, the year March was nineteen, and by then March could barely feel anything. She could stick a pin in her finger and not even bleed. She could go without eating for days and not feel hunger. She could stay up all night with no need for sleep. The only indication that she was alive at all was that the new shoes Mrs. Dale had insisted she buy hurt her toes.

On the night of the wedding, March was alive enough to overhear many of their guests whisper their opinion of her. What a sorry thing she was, that’s what they were saying. Wasting away, growing old before her time. Only nineteen and look at her, so pale and gray she was little more than a ghost. Look at her hair, with all those white strands. Look at the way her hands had begun to shake. To console herself, March drank five glasses of Mrs. Dale’s champagne-laced cranberry punch, then gave in and danced with Richard. Richard was so tall that March couldn’t look him in the eye as they danced, and perhaps that was best, since she would have been extremely surprised to discover how ardent his expression had become.

Then a senior at Harvard, Richard spent his days at classes and his evenings doing good deeds, volunteering at a shelter-where he folded laundry and mopped floors-and tutoring freshmen students who were overwhelmed by their class work. If not for March, he wouldn’t have returned to Jenkintown at all, since he and his father were no longer speaking. That he came back so often, March had convinced herself, was simply because she was another one of his projects. But on the night of Alan’s wedding, as she danced with him, she realized this wasn’t the case. It was the way he held his arms around her and the slow sound of his breathing which informed her that pity was not Richard’s motivation. Actually, it never had been.

After Alan’s wedding, Richard began to appear several times a week. He brought March boxes of apricots and books from the library. He presented her with potted tulips from Holland and fancy Vermont maple syrup. Often, when Mrs. Dale had the night off, Richard insisted on coming to the house to cook dinner. Alan’s new wife, Julie, who couldn’t fix anything more complicated than a grilled cheese sandwich, acted as his assistant, dicing peppers and carrots, stopping only long enough to take March aside and whisper that she’d be crazy to let Richard Cooper get away from her now.

March watched Richard sometimes, as he sat in the living room and read from one of his textbooks, and he looked so familiar and comfortable that she felt like weeping. She allowed him to kiss her, and she kissed him back, but when she went up to her bedroom and stood at her window to watch the road below, it wasn’t Richard she was looking for.

“You probably shouldn’t come here anymore,” she finally told him one day when the air outside had turned meek, the way it often does before a storm. “I’ll never be in love with you.”

She thought he’d be hurt when she said this, but instead Richard took her hands in his. He was going off to Stanford, for graduate work, and he wanted March to go with him. He’d had a last bitter argument with his father, which concerned Mr. Cooper’s interests in a logging company that was destroying a species of wood spider so tiny it was invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the fight was about greed and love, the sort of brutal argument that can get you written out of your father’s will and drive you three thousand miles away.

Richard had nothing to lose by asking March to marry him, and he wasn’t destroyed when she said no. He was a biologist, after all, with a specialty in entomology, and he knew what reversals often happened in a single life cycle. He sat beneath a palm tree outside his rented apartment in Palo Alto and wrote to March every week, and she wrote back from her bedroom on the second floor. She informed him that the leaves were changing, and that his sister Belinda no longer seemed interested in anything but her horse, and that the hunting ban had been lifted on the hill, so that shot-guns could be heard all day long. She told him much more than she would have imagined, and revealed herself in many ways, although she did not write that she often woke from sleep with tears in her eyes, or that she sometimes heard Hollis’s voice inside her own head.

After she finally stopped waiting for Hollis, Richard was there, right on time, when she arrived in San Francisco. In fact he’d gotten to the airport two hours early, and had been awake since dawn. That first night in California, March slept in his bed. It is the bed they still have; the headboard is more than a hundred years old. Richard found it in a junk shop in Menlo Park, but actually it’s quite a good piece, fashioned of golden oak. March has often wondered why anyone would have ever gotten rid of such a wonderful bed; if, perhaps, the previous owner had died or if he’d loved someone so completely he couldn’t bear to sleep in the same bed once she’d gone.

Richard is stretched out on that bed when March phones, his thin, angular frame completely relaxed. Though it’s late in the day in California, he’s just getting around to reading the morning paper. He appreciates the topsy-turvy in life; he’s always believed, for instance, that mutation is good for a species. If he’d been someone who was easily convinced by statistics, rather than a man who rejoiced in the odd and unprecedented, he would never have gone after March in the first place.

“I’m so glad you’re there,” March says when he picks up the phone.

Richard laughs. “Well, I can’t say the same for you.”

“It’s awful here,” March says. “That’s for sure.”

“That’s why we left,” Richard reminds her. “Did you see your brother?”

“He wasn’t at the funeral, and I don’t have the heart to go looking for him. Although, I guess I really should.” Then out of March’s mouth comes a thought she’s been thinking all day: “Hollis wasn’t there either.”

She can hear Richard breathing; it’s almost as if he’s in the same room. She shouldn’t have mentioned Hollis.

“I didn’t ask about him,” Richard says, “did I?”

After March had married Richard and soon after she discovered she was pregnant, Judith Dale finally told her that Hollis had come back. He had been living above the Lyon Cafe for some time, spending a great deal of money, impressing everyone in town with his new financial status. March remembers how she sat there in the backyard after that call from Judith; her chair was beside the lemon tree, and her feet, which had swollen with her pregnancy, were soaking in a basin of cool water. She dialed Jenkintown information, then phoned the Lyon, and she did it all quickly, before she could stop and think. When she asked for Hollis, she was told he didn’t have a phone, although the bartender who answered was willing to go upstairs to get him. She waited, completely unaware of the scent of lemons. She didn’t notice that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

It took exactly twelve minutes for the bartender to retrieve Hollis from his rented rooms. As soon as she heard his voice, March panicked. She listened to him say Hello twice, and then she hung up. After that, she was nervous every time the phone rang. Had he guessed his caller was March? Had he cared? All through her pregnancy she felt sick to her stomach and trapped in some deep, irrevocable way. When her doctor informed her that her blood pressure was elevated and she needed to spend at least six hours in bed, on her left side, she wasn’t surprised. She was affixed to this place and to her own body; anchored by flesh, blood, and her own exhaustion, she dared not fight her condition. She slept away mornings and afternoons, so dreamy she didn’t hear the birds in the trees or Richard’s voice when he tried to rouse her from sleep.