World Enough And Time

I’M IN THE MARKET for a new set of parents for my daughter. I have been given six months to come up with my replacement. Half a year.

Yes, we’re certain.

Very sorry.

No, no hope.

At all.

And in the ensuing conversation, in the part where somebody might mention space-age medicine, risky experimental trials, or even good old-fashioned radiation, surgery, balding chemotherapy, all their expertise is brought to bear on fashioning suggestions, on stringing serious, straight-faced phrases into small, sad sentences: Put your affairs in order. Enjoy what’s left. And every blessed one of them forgets to say: We could be wrong. I can tell you, that would jolly well be my first line if I had a speaking part in this production.

One brave physician does have the nerve to say, These things happen.

“Apparently,” I say.

SO. SIX MONTHS.

I’m back in my hometown, staying with my sister Nancy, the hands-down favorite to replace me. For this first week my daughter, Rachel, is away at camp. A trial separation. Then she will come here, and we will both get used to the idea that she will go on living with Nancy after I am gone. That, or we’ll run off to Utah together in the middle of the night and leave death bound and gagged behind.

Rachel is twelve years old, and I am sixty. I have been working out the math for other people ever since she was a baby. No, I am her mother actually. Yes, it is unusual. Forty-eight, yes. No, it’s not impossible. The timing seems about as smart now as everything else I’ve ever done.

Like the timing of my husband’s death, which, although I didn’t choose, I can still occasionally believe to be my fault. There isn’t much that happens on the planet earth that I can’t make myself feel guilty for. Jake was killed on a rafting trip in western Canada six years ago: a case of rough water and mean rocks and a dozen different particulars of physics converging on a moment in a most peculiar way. That’s if you don’t factor God in.

WE GOT LUCKY with the summer camp; somebody dropped out at the last minute, and Rachel got the slot. I wanted her to have this breather. Plus, I want her to have some competing memory of this summer. I want her to have cows and campfires and a near miss with an old canoe, a case of poison ivy, or puppy love to tuck away for all the years when she is up against remembering.

Six months. Plus or minus. And with any luck at all Rachel could live another seventy or eighty years. Our joint life span might stretch thinly out across 140 years.

So here I sit, drinking lukewarm coffee in the last outpost on earth. I scan Nancy’s front lawn and look across the quarter mile of water to the houses on the far side of the pond, and I imagine I can flash messages with mirrors that could be under­stood by Boy Scouts in their bedrooms. I could summon children from their swing sets with this mirror Morse code, across the water and the new-mown lawns: HELP! SEND SUCCOR! I’m here living with my sister, and that is awful, and her husband, and that is awful, and with their dog, whom I cannot abide. And a whole troop of Cub Scouts carrying a canvas cot would storm the family room and spirit me away. Or maybe just one lean and sun-tanned Eagle Scout with merit badges covering his sash would row across in a canoe and carry me off to his pup tent. And, oh, dear God, let him be Roger Wilson, cocky and sixteen, and let me be in high school when he gets here.

SO IT SEEMS I have come home to die.

Where would you go?

Nancy has never left this town. She and Tom have two grown kids and two careers and a history of more trips to Hawaii and Disney World than I care to think about. I hardly saw them during all the years when I visited Johnstown only in my mind.

“Are you still reading that same book?” Nancy’s parcels crinkle as she walks across the room, her arms full of purchases. I call them “purchases,” these items bought and paid for, packaged up and carried home and laid out across the bed and talked about, then put away — for good, as far as I can tell. Purchase. The word makes me think of Louisiana and Manhattan and glass beads and salvation. Purchase. It’s a word to go a few rounds with. Get a purchase. Get a grip.

“Come see what I bought.” Nancy nods toward the bedroom, where we do our looking, and I follow. I am, after all, her guest. “You should come with me next time.”

“I should,” I say.

The last time we went shopping, I finished the first third of Little Dorrit. Nancy tried clothes on while I sat outside on the chair for husbands and read Charles Dickens.

“Remember Nelson’s department store?” I say.

I ask her these questions all the time. Do you remember the old library? She gets her books there. Remember the jun­ior high? She works there. Remember the church, the shoe store, the park? She buys her groceries where my memories are, conducts the business of her days smack in the middle of my past, stomps freely though the town with no respect for history. A boy I had a crush on in eleventh grade fills her teeth. The parking lot where Robbie Smyers let me out and drove off with Dolores Ruffner is where Nancy taught her son to drive. I am amazed at the idea that anyone could live their real life here. I think if I had never moved away, I would still be tripping over history every day.

“Oh, dear Lord. Tom will be home any minute, wanting his supper.” This is a line Nancy must have heard once in a movie. From what I can tell, she never cooks. On my few visits through the years, Tom has cooked chicken on the grill or we ordered pizza or Chinese. Now, most nights they go out for dinner. I stay home and scramble eggs, declining their gracious invitations. (They are unfailingly polite.)

I still can’t believe I’m here. I don’t know if they have invited me or my prognosis. I mean, I know it’s not their intention to grow old with me, and it is clearly their intention to grow old. They talk about it all the time. They want to buy a condo in Palm Beach, Florida. Nancy says you would not believe the gift shops there.

I ATTEMPT TO INTRODUCE our mother into a conversation. Our mother, now in a nursing home, she who no longer knows our names, our sins, our faces. Our mother, the woman who once told us she never wanted children.

“Water over the dam.” Nancy slams the silverware drawer shut.

I start to tally up the funerals of relatives I can recall.

“It does no good to dig that up again.”

I tell Tom a story about five-year-old Nancy: “Mother and Dad bought her a Kodak Brownie camera. She was in kindergarten. And then, when I left for college, they bought her a canopy bed. They never gave me anything, and they buy her a canopy bed with a real canopy.”

“You’re sleeping in that bed,” Nancy says.

“I’m not going to touch this one with a ten-foot pole,” Tom says and goes to get a refill from the half keg in the laundry room.

I FALL ASLEEP, and I am in a tiny dress shop with Nancy, and all the dresses cost twenty-seven dollars, and only I know our mother’s dead. Nancy keeps asking the clerk to show her more dresses, and I keep hissing to get her attention. Finally I whisper, “We have to leave. Our mother is dead, and we don’t have any money,” and all of a sudden we’re out in the middle of a big field in the dark, and in the distance I can hear the whistle of a train, and I think if we could just follow that sound back home, we would be safe. I start to run, pulling Nancy, but she drags her feet so that I am practically carrying her through the night.

I wake up in Nancy’s guest room, my heart pounding. I sit up to breathe, and then I hear the train whistle again, far off in the night, and all of a sudden I am the safest I am ever going to be. That lonely whistle takes me back to lying in a big iron bed beside my grandmother, fat and fast asleep and breathing loud and deeply, while far away, glamorous ladies in tight dresses and men in three-piece suits or army uniforms ride through the thickest part of the night in warm, noisy, yellow-lighted railroad cars, riding sentinel, blessing all the sleeping people on the earth. I hear the whistle blow again, the saddest and the safest sound I know.

Still, I need to put some distance between me and that dress shop and that dark, empty field. I get up and put my bathrobe on and try to slap my grandmother awake, but she will only suffer this resurrection fast asleep. She is a heaving mountain beneath clean, starched white sheets, laundered in her dungeon basement, fed through the mangle rollers by hand, and hung on the line to dry in bleaching sun and untamed wind. This woman will not be awakened by whistles in the night. I carry her out to Nancy’s eerie kitchen, sit her in a chair, and say, Now, then. She just sits there. And it occurs to me that, in the fifteen years I knew her, I never saw Grandma Chase do a thing. I never saw her watch tv or read or sew or ask someone a question. I spent a lot of time with her, but still she is one of those relatives I have gotten mostly secondhand. Every time I tell someone about them, I must rely on the stories of others who loved or hated them enough to make their histories up.

“Mattie, are you ok?” Nancy is standing in the doorway, looking worse than my imagined fifty-years-dead grandmother in the chair opposite. Nancy’s skin is yellow-gray. She doesn’t have her contacts in, and her eyes look lost. The right one wanders like it did when she was little.

“Oh, me? Sure. I was just trying to puzzle out Grandma Chase. The whistle woke me up, and it reminded me of when I used to sleep over at her house. Do you know, for the life of me, I can’t remember anything she ever did. Did she just sit her whole life out, or what?”

“What whistle woke you, Mattie?”

“The train whistle.”

“There’s no train, Mattie. There hasn’t been a train through Johnstown now for twenty years.”

“Maybe not, but there is still the whistle in the nighttime.”

“You should go back to bed,” Nancy says. She isn’t good at being up in the middle of the night.

“Everybody in this family always rested so much,” I say. “They took so many naps. They would lie down right after breakfast. Most of them were retired completely by the age of forty.”

“Mattie, they’re all dead,” Nancy says.

“Well, but when they were alive, they rested. Like us. We are a brood of resters.”

“Mattie, I’ve worked full time my whole life,” Nancy says. “Now go back to bed.”

“I am. I am. I just keep trying to figure them all out.”

“They’re gone, Mattie. All of them have been gone for years. They lived their lives the best they knew how. You have to stop living back there. Live today.” She speaks, then has the courtesy to wince.

Nancy turns and leaves the kitchen night to Grandma Chase and me.

I think she sometimes means well.

WHEN NANCY WAS SIX and I was eight, she told me that a witch lived underneath our bed and then would throw my pillow on the floor, where it would lie till morning. One day she tied a string across the middle of our room and said she would tear my eyes out if I put one foot on her side. The door was on her side.

When she was miffed, Nancy could be stone silent from after lunch till bedtime. She would play dead in fights, stop breathing, feign sincere unconsciousness until I begged and pleaded and promised I’d be her servant my whole life — a promise I now wonder have I kept.

She told our little brother Ricky if he wet his finger and put it in the electric socket, ice cream would come out. She promised if he jumped off the six-foot-high armoire, he could fly. Inspired by the first seat belts, she chained him to his tricycle and pushed him down a hill.

Oh, Nancy would give you anything. She was always generous. And she was mean.

I can’t tell you just what it all amounts to, but I do know that I am afraid of her to this very day.

“TOM AND I are going to have, like, a cookout,” Nancy says, and I try to make a mental list of things that are like a cookout: certain women’s magazines; my sister-in-law Bethy; cherry jello; marigolds; Wayne Newton; anything that happens in the basement of a Baptist church.

“It’ll be good for you,” she says, and I wonder in what way. “You can help me get ready. I think I’ll do a strawberry theme if I can find the right paper plates. I’ll make sloppy joes and put red food coloring in the ice cubes.”

“Do you feel like you had a childhood?” I say. I sometimes feel this sort of sudden rush of possibility in conversation.

“What do you mean?” Nancy says. “Of course I did. What kind of question is that?”

“The kind that wants an answer,” I say. “I’ve always been amazed at other people’s stories of their childhoods. By comparison, we grew up in a vacant lot. I remember once I read one of those exercises in a self-help book. It said to sit quietly and close your eyes and bring back one memory from childhood that was entirely happy, and I sat there half an hour and couldn’t resurrect a one. Oh, I could think of happy things, but when I played the story out, it always evolved pretty quickly to some reprimand or sad feeling or catastrophe. There wasn’t one ten-minute just-plain-happy memory there.”

“Well, it was all a long time ago,” Nancy says, as though this might have anything to do with it.

“LOOK, NANCY, I KNOW you and Tom aren’t young. I know you’d like to retire in a few years,” I say. “I know this isn’t your first choice.”

“Mattie, don’t be silly. We love Rachel, and we’d be happy to have her if it ever came to that. But you just concentrate on getting well.” She’s been giving me books about self-healing, mind over medicine, the implicit message being that if you got sick, it was your own damn fault.

“God only knows how long you might be with us,” Nancy says. “Besides, Rachel only has six more years until she goes to college.”

“Seven,” I say. “She was older when she started school.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

Sometime later, driving to the hospital, Nancy suggests that her daughter Tiffany might raise Rachel. I imagine Rachel being passed around among members of the family or Nancy’s church or our hometown.

“No,” I say. “No.”

“Well,” Nancy says. “OK.”

It makes me feel like I should spell it all out for her: Don’t give Rachel away, and please remember to feed her, keep her warm and dry, don’t let her date ax-murderers in high school. Not only must I marry these three people now together, but I must plan their life, leaving nothing to chance. I, who did so poorly with my own life, must now oversee a life for them while I am fully occupied pushing up daisies — or, more likely, being weighted down by them.

Or, I wonder, will it work that way? Do you still have the same worries about your kids after you are dead? Or do we imagine that on the day we die our children become indestruct­ible, invincible? How else do we sign last wills and testaments that give our children over to our relatives, for pity’s sake? I’m leaving Rachel to Tom, and I won’t let her ride to the mall if he is driving.

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