Charles Baxter: There's Something I Want You to Do

She was competent and assured with child rearing, calm in the face of infant tantrums. On Sunday morning, next to me, Astrid would read the travel section, pencil in hand, naming far-flung places we would go someday. In this household, confusion was dispelled. Now we had pedestals. Things like clarity and plans and pleasure and love went on top of them. What luck I’d been given, I thought. Here was all this day-in-day-out whoopee. Astrid brought all surfaces to an unlikely shine. Jeremy stopped yelling all the time and began to grow. Teeth, toddling, jabber, talk.

New toys appeared. The divorce went through without Corinne wanting any custody whatsoever or getting any. Astrid and I married, and pretty soon we had ourselves another child, a startlingly beautiful daughter. Lucy. A new path, the next stage.

Corinne called Jeremy when he was grown enough to talk, but she couldn’t manage to see him, or so she said in her jumbled, haphazard way. She was too delicate, and she claimed her strings were too tightly strung for ordinary social life. Visits would put stress on her immune system. Anyway, she couldn’t manage them, or so she said. Jeremy suffered from this absence, but when it became permanent, he didn’t suffer anymore because Astrid had taken over the mom chores with such competence and love. So Corinne called instead of visiting, and mostly she wrote letters.

My God, those letters! Moms aren’t supposed to write letters like that. The coffee spills, the anarchic handwriting, the paragraphs without topics, the sentences without subjects and verbs. Jeremy’s letters back to Corinne were full of the news of his childhood. After a while, his letters became very halfhearted, quoting baseball statistics. He wrote them with decreasing frequency.

The time when Corinne went on daytime TV, the show was about runaway moms. She sat on the stage with three other women. What made her willing to appear there, I’ll never know. For the first ten minutes, the foppish host of the show and the question-askers from the audience sounded reasonable and sympathetic, but by the end of the hour, they were indignant. Out in the peanut gallery they were pointing fingers and shouting at the runaway moms, and others applauded and woofed when the accusations concluded. I only heard about it from a neighbor who watches TV all day and who said that Corinne’s hair was darker than she remembered it, with gray streaks.

I felt terrible for Corinne, for her eager incompetence and wish to be on national television. I could imagine her befuddled face as she sat there being razzed by hooligans in the studio.

Dolores, my mother, came to live with us in the spare room upstairs right before Corinne left. She said she’d help with Jeremy, and she did for a while. Mostly she stayed up there knitting and staring out the window, checking for strangers to our neighborhood, including door-to-door salesmen. On Thursdays she would go to her bridge club and on Friday nights to Bible study. Despite her name ( dolores means “sad” according to the Latin), my mother is quite upbeat. Take a chance on life is her motto. She and Astrid bonded immediately. She has tried to keep it a secret from me, but I know my mother was and is interested in extraterre strials (although she is a registered Republican) and believes that Jesus will be back any day now. She imagines that we are in the end-time and must meet the challenges of life with Christian dignity.

Astrid humors her, though they avoid this topic when I am in the room.

My mother’s help was not required after our daughter, Lucy, was born. But Lucy was never any trouble at all. She could have raised herself. She came out of the birth canal with an accusing look on her face directed at me.

Jeremy is seventeen and has a tattoo of a Japanese word on his left calf. I still don’t know what it means, and he won’t say. On his hip is another tiny tattoo, a grinning gremlin, hands on hips. It’s illegal for children and adolescents to get tattoos, but he evidently got them in a low place known only to his set. I read Jeremy the riot act that time he came home with the Japanese character but was treated with amused, affectionate scorn, as if I were a historical artifact. Get this: in deep winter he’s been known to wear a sweatshirt, jeans, and flip-flops outside. Summer clothes in a snowstorm — a pretense of immortality. He wants to be a young god as they all do and defy the seasons. In Minnesota that’s a brave stand, and many teenage boys take it. Therefore he’s wildly popular. He has several hundred friends and is constantly texting them. His face has some of the sweet beauty of his mother, Corinne. The three women in the household dote on him. They comb his hair and would tie his shoelaces for him if he’d let them. His little sister sketches his face when he is sitting down. Imagine the possible result: a spoiled brat. However, he’s not really spoiled, just blasé. Naturally he smiles all the time, having done nothing to earn all this love. He looks past me as if I were a footnote.

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The point is, Corinne is back in town, and we have a situation on our hands. She has sent a postcard saying that she will be arriving by bus, and so I take a few hours off from work at the garage to go downtown to get her. Explanations for her arrival? None. Some idea of what the agenda might be? Not a clue. Her arrival has no more rationale than her departure did all those years ago.

Although I am not secretive by nature, I have told no one else in the house about Corinne’s reappearance. When I arrive at the Greyhound station on Hawthorne Avenue, I enter the doors and smell that rich bus-station smell of humus mixed with nitrates. You feel like editorializing on humanity when you enter a bus station. But you don’t, because Corinne is already sitting there, waiting on a bench. She has two brown paper bags with her. Soiled clothes are peeking out of the tops of the bags, sweaters and unmentiona bles, and she’s staring at the wall clock.

And here I must try to describe my ex-wife in her current condition.

Imagine a beautiful woman of middle age who has somehow gone through a car wash. She has dried out, but the car wash has rumpled her up, left the hair going every which way, and on her face is a dazed expression and she has new parallel lines on her forehead and crow’s-feet around her eyes. Life has worried and picked at her. But that’s not the point. The point is that she’s still beautiful to me, which is strange. It’s counter to common sense.

She’s wearing a pink sweatshirt with the name of a TV show printed on it. It’s the TV show she was on and where she was mocked. The show’s name is the name of the small-minded and mean millionaire host with the thin mustache. Corinne looks up at me as I take her hand. She stands audibly. She kisses me on the cheek. For that instant her warm lips are familiar. I feel an antiquated tingle.

“Wes,” she says, “I knew you’d save me.”

“Haven’t saved you yet, Corinne,” I say, trying to laugh it off. She smells of french fries and hamburger and ketchup. A fast-food smell. The poor soul. What’s happened to her? “How are you?”

“How am I? As you can see.”

I don’t say anything in the face of the incomparable wreckage she presents.

“Well,” she says, “is the inspection over? Would you take one of these bags? I’ll take the other.” She picks up one of the aforementioned bags, and when I look down I see that her shoes are split at the seams. Through the hole in her left shoe, toes are visible.

My first wife has become a bag lady, and here she is.