Ana Simo - Heartland

A scratching noise woke me up in the middle of the night on our third week in Elmira. I jumped out of bed, drenched in sweat, imagining it was Glorita’s front door. It took me a few seconds with my eyes open in the vibrating darkness to realize that it was now thirty years later and Glorita no longer existed. Someone by that name might live somewhere, perhaps even on the other side of town, in the muddy lowlands across from the river where the spics had moved, but my Glorita was no more. Glorita, who, I could now see, announced Bebe. Even if Bebe had never reminded me of Glorita. Why could I now glide in the dark from Glorita to Bebe, cause and effect, but still not backward? This was not normal. I listened to my ears in case there was a tiny palpitation, a sure sign, I had recently read, of an aneurysm. A lesion to the left or right lobe of my brain might explain why I could go forward, but not backward in this memory, and a lesion to the hippocampus or the middle temporal lobe why I had never thought about Bebe and Glorita in the same breath, as obvious as it now seemed. I was blinded by appearances. Bebe’s milk-white, peachy-creamy boobies (her words) and Glorita’s tanned, assertive earlobes with the old-fashioned half-moon golden earrings decorated with peacocks. So contrary in substance and flesh, yet so close to each other in my heart of hearts. I sat on the bed in the dark, in a Buddha pose, holding in my mind Glorita’s right earlobe and Bebe’s left nipple. Floating over the bed in ecstasy and revelation: elle est plongée dans un oubli étrange.

A grating sound brought me back to earth. I got up and looked out the window. McCabe was walking on the gravel path toward the front gate. A dark blue sedan pulled over silently. She slid inside. The car took off as noiselessly as it had arrived. Where was she going on a Tuesday at three in the morning, in a town that shut down the moment the sun set behind Round Hill? When I woke up the next morning, I thought I had dreamt it all. Until I got outside the gate and noticed the fresh tire marks.

At dinner, McCabe was uncharacteristically dry. Her soliloquy lasted no more than two minutes and covered only one subject: the severe cognitive disorder which had suddenly struck first-generation “new humans” on the eve of their fifth birthday; pending tests, they’d been isolated from their one- to four-year-old cohorts in the secret facility outside America where they were being raised. That was all. I pricked up my ears. She had not quoted her sources, as was her custom. “Where did you get all that?” I asked. “Everybody knows it,” she growled, baring her teeth. I knew she was lying. There was no word of this in the Times or the Journal . Was it fantasy, gossip, perhaps truth? But where did it come from? I had persuaded McCabe not to bring a cell phone or a tablet. After all, this was to be a period of healing. And Elmira was blessedly disconnected. McCabe didn’t receive any mail. Anything requiring her signature was FedExed to her overnight by her assistant, along with the daily Times and Journal , and returned by her immediately. There was no TV set in the house (the Judge hated them). Other than the two papers, the kitchen radio, locked on the Elmira station, was our only source of information. There was a phone in the kitchen and another one in the Judge’s study, but none in her upstairs room. Besides, the story that McCabe had just regurgitated sounded like a written report, not phone gossip. Could she have gotten it from the blue sedan driver, or from someone they had met? After that day, I began to listen carefully to McCabe’s dinnertime monologues. She was up to something and, stupid as it might be, I should know about it. Crime and punishment is a fragile mechanism that can be upset by even a microscopically unaligned event. Like Monsieur de la Trouille’s famous automaton, the one that was supposed to release a miniature guillotine over the neck of an equally tiny curé figure but, due to a .000001-mm misalignment on the guillotine’s dented wheel, instead sliced off the tip of Monsieur de la Trouille’s index finger, eventually provoking his death of septicemia at the Hôtel-Dieu. I read this in an antique clock magazine that my mother fished out of Judge Wilkerson’s garbage one rainy afternoon and put in my hands with the warning, “Don’t let the Judge see you reading this.” I must have been six or seven. “Why?” I asked. “I don’t want him to know I’m taking his magazines home,” she said, polishing the Judge’s desk with the kind of cheap wax that always has a slightly rancid smell, even when new. “But he threw them in the garbage,” I said. “Precisely,” my mother said, turning her back to me to signal that the matter was forever closed.

A few days later, when McCabe and I were eating stuffed Cornish hen, she suddenly burst into tears. Fat, abundant tears fell on her plate and began to liquefy the bird’s grease. I kept a sympathetic expression on my face while I observed the interaction between the warm, salty water emanating from her beady blue eyes and the slowly de-congealing grease of the hen. “I did not love,” she hiccupped. “Not deeply, I mean, not really, not the way I should have loved.” I controlled a tickle in my throat, a tremor in my stomach, afraid my own half-digested hen would shoot out of my mouth and hit the pervert on her reddening nose. Was she referring to Bebe? I dared not ask. I hoped she wouldn’t tell. I did not want to kill her in a rage. Besides, there was nothing on the table to kill her with. You don’t put out a carving knife for Cornish hen.

She was a brute, McCabe, particularly when she drank, and she had already polished off a bottle of the cheap red wine I got for her (given that she couldn’t tell the difference, was unwilling to learn, and mocked me when I tried to teach her, I reserved the good bottles for solitary consumption in my room, and drank water at table while she contentedly guzzled crap). Once before, drunk on the day after our arrival, McCabe had socked me in the nose after I broke the rule and mentioned Bebe. I lost consciousness. When I came to, McCabe wasn’t there. She had locked herself in her bedroom—her suite, really, because it occupied the entire upper floor of the house. The Judge’s only folly, as Monsieur de la Trouille would say, in an entire life of sobriety and civic uprightness, was to have knocked down all the partition walls on the upstairs floor shortly after his wife’s death, turning a warren of dark tiny rooms into a stupendous open space. I saw it briefly the day McCabe and I arrived, after which I forbade myself to go up the stairs to her landing, much less to knock on her door. Only once did I feel any desire to break this rule: when I got back on my feet the night she knocked me out cold. I almost banged on her door and kicked in her ugly teeth. I did not do anything of the sort, but only added another line to her indictment. Next day, her first on the job, Petrona came down from McCabe’s room holding in front of her, sleepwalker style, a bundle of vomit-soaked sheets.

The Little Ohio River, which is not a branch of the Ohio River, but of the muddier and narrower Wanetka, slices through Elmira in a fairly straight line. The east bank rises steeply for about half a mile in a succession of hills and meadows culminating in the one where Judge Wilkerson’s house sits. Geographically, this highest point is Round Hill, but Elmirans call the entire area by that name. It is here that the town’s masters used to live before the Great Hunger and where they still occasionally return. The successful doctors, lawyers and orthodontists (no dentists) near the river, the more serious money higher up, say, for instance, the CEO of the now defunct Krimble Dairy Industries, the biggest in the state, or the owner of the equally defunct ARCO Engineering Corp., who had a lock on all highway work in these parts. There was also a former state Governor or two, magically able to afford Round Hill after leaving office. Even higher up was whatever was left of the old money, entrenched in their hereditary estates, people like Judge Wilkerson and his wife, Myrna, whose family house this was, and whose great-grandfather built railways as far away as Chicago and Biloxi. The Judge and Mrs. Wilkerson used to visit New York once a year around Christmas, to meet with their portfolio manager and shop at Bergdorf’s and Paul Stuart’s, moderately, for they were not showy.