Had a Good Time, page 5
“Are you all right?” Minnie’s voice slips in under the last chorus of the song. I look at her. She’s sitting up, too. I feel like a ship on an ocean of joy—I just want to holler out loud, “Ship ahoy!” And she turns her head to the wagon and she opens her mouth and sings with the others, Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around around. I can’t take my eyes off her. There’s straw caught in her hair and I want very much to lift my hand and take it out but I’m as paralyzed as ever. Then everyone is laughing and applauding themselves and the music is over and Minnie turns her face back to me.
And she winks.
I have, of course, no earthly idea what she means by this, exactly. But I dare now to think that I’m pretty much okay for the moment. With this very progressive girl. With this girl who would bust the trusts and still has it in her to wink. The madness of speech comes upon me again. “I’m going to vote in October,” I say, apropos of nothing but the chaos in my head. So I add, “Like I said before.” Which needs further explanation. “For women to vote,” I say, and I try to lock my jaw shut.
Miraculously, she seems to understand, even though I don’t. She leans close. “You’re right,” she says. “That’s just the way to waltz me around and around, Willie.”
I’m glad my jaw is still locked because I’m about to impulsively correct her about my name. But I stay quiet long enough to get what she means. How clever she has made me out to be. Then, inspired, I wink.
She smiles and turns away. “Aren’t you feeling a little bit chilled?” she says.
“No,” I say. I am, in fact, feeling quite flushed.
Probably from the rapid disintegration of my brain cells. I turn to see what Minnie is seeing and several other couples are opening their blankets and disappearing under them.
“Yes,” I say.
Minnie looks at me and of course I’m driven to explanations. “The valley gets chilly,” I say. “It’s all the orchards,” I say.“I think they somehow, the fruit trees, absorb the heat perhaps, to make it chilly. There’s no real statistics on that, however. It’s probably just Northern California. The climate, you know.” I stop myself at last. I’m breathless from this madness.
“So you’re chilly?” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
She reaches beside her and gently sets the flowers on the hay. She flashes open the blanket and lifts it and it settles over the two of us up to our shoulders and she says, “How’s that?” and I say, “Fine.”
We lie back to watch the night sky. We do that for a while, not saying anything, and we’re still not touching at all, except maybe just barely along the upper arms, though that might only be my imagination.
It is true that the Santa Clara Valley is like one big orchard. After the earthquake, Sunnyvale started wooing San Francisco companies to reestablish themselves down here, offering free orchard land to build on. That’s how the ironworks got started. But mostly it’s fruit trees up and down and all around. Which is where the wagons end up, now that the singing is done and the giggling and low talk and spooning have begun. We head out into one of the big apricot orchards.
There is still a smell of sulfur smoke lingering in the air from the curing houses. “You remember last year?” Minnie says.
I know at once what she’s thinking and I know it’s because of the night sky and the acrid smell.
She says, “When we were all waiting to pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet? Did you think that life on earth would come to an end?”
This happens to be a topic I know something about. When the astronomers decided that the tail was made up of deadly cyanogen gas I knew the numbers had to be in our favor, which was soon confirmed in news reports that plenty of people decided to overlook.
“Not for a moment,” I say.
“Not for a moment?” Minnie asks, real soft.
I blunder ahead. “The tail looked pretty substantial across the sky,” I say. “We passed through forty-eight trillion cubic miles of it and of course it was highly reflective of the sunlight. But you have to understand there was only about one molecule of poison per cubic yard, and since it takes ten thousand sextillion cyanogen molecules to weigh one pound—these were all known numbers well in advance of the encounter—then a little figuring would have told us that the sum total of poison gas the planet earth was about to pass through weighed barely half an ounce.”
Minnie’s arms emerge from beneath the blanket and she cradles the back of her head in the palms of her hands. She studies the sky and then says, “I was frightened for a while.”
And I understand at once how it is that even correctly gathered and accurately calculated numbers can sometimes be irrelevant. I also understand how much I adore this Minnie of the willow leg. I turn a bit onto my side, gently, without disturbing her gaze at the sky, so that I can look at her. And there is a comet of desire streaking through me, its tail thick with something much denser than Halley’s poison. I am suddenly desperate to touch this girl, just lay a hand on her arm or brush at her hair with my fingertips—something—but I have neither the courage nor the confidence. And I am seized by a plan.
Even as Minnie goes on about her fear of the comet. “No matter what the scientists announced,” she says. “Scientists are constantly saying things and taking them back.”
I think of her artificial leg lying between us, hidden beneath the blanket.
“It’s not a rational thing,” she says.
The leg is part of Minnie, but it really isn’t.
“We’re not always rational creatures,” she says.
So it stands to reason that a touch there would not constitute an actual offense, that is to say the flagrant act of a masher. Though it’s a leg, after all, which is a powerful part of a girl indeed, it’s not really a leg, it’s a piece of wood, it’s really as if you were with a girl who walked with a cane and you touched the cane, which is no offense at all, and yet, from my own private comet’s point of view, it is her own personal sweet willow leg and it is attached to her and so it would still be a thrillingly tender connection to her while at the same time being a connection that no one in the world would know about, not even her, especially under a blanket, and even if they did know about it, it’s not like touching the actual girl.
“Sometimes you have to face a difficult thing,” she says.
I turn my attention to my left hand, but the hand is only too willing to dash ahead and I glance down the length of the blanket, gauging the contours, and my hand slithers along humpbacked under the cloth, like a mole making for the roses, which in this case is a place just below her artificial knee.
“You think you might die,” Minnie says, “and even if that never was so, just the thinking of it is more or less the same.”
I am drawing near and I fix on her profile, edged in moonlight, though as beautiful as she is, my attention is elsewhere.
Moles are blind but they have other highly refined senses and so it is with my hand, which expertly arrives on the scene and lifts and curls and descends, slowly, delicately, and Minnie sighs and says, “I didn’t have it too bad, though.”
Then I touch her. Or it. Or more precisely her skirt, the cloth is rippled beneath my palm, and her wooden leg is further within, a distant thing still, which is all right, I am very happy.
“Did you know that people actually took one look at the comet and died?” Minnie says. “Heart attacks, mostly.”
My hand settles in. I surround Minnie’s leg. I even squeeze it, ever so faintly.
“There was a woman named Ruth Jordan in Talladega, Alabama,” Minnie says. “I read all this in the newspapers. She stepped onto the porch of her home and she looked and fell over dead. And there was another woman, in St. Louis, who was fine looking at the comet thinking it a cloud, but when they told her what she was seeing, she died.”
I squeeze Minnie’s leg again. And I realize I was actually thinking too much both those times, thinking about squeezing and thinking about having squeezed, and all the while I didn’t actually experience the act, so I squeeze her leg again, trying to concentrate just on feeling it. Then I move my way up to the knee and even across it—Zack said the wooden part goes far up—and I feel my way back down again, squeezing all along.
“Some were simply driven insane,” Minnie says. “Especially in Chicago, for some reason.”
Squeeze, squeeze, move along, squeeze some more. I’m a bit breathless now. I’m growing dizzy. I love her willow leg.
“Perhaps that’s just where the reporter was who wrote the story. But there were people on Chicago streetcars praying and weeping about the end of the world.”
Now I slow down for moment. I make the squeezes long and lingering. Here, sweet knee, take this long caress.
“That’s not necessarily insane, I suppose,” Minnie says. “Something more like religious ecstasy, I guess. But there were suicides. One woman, afraid of the gas of the comet, inhaled the gas from her lamp.”
Here, sweet thigh, just above the knee a long caress for you. And then another quick one further up, and then further down.
“Sometimes,” Minnie says, “we are compelled to embrace the thing we fear the most, don’t you think?”
But her face doesn’t turn to me with this question. It’s just as well. I wouldn’t be able to say much at the moment. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head in something like religious ecstasy.
“I can understand that, I suppose,” Minnie says.
I am vaguely aware of a stir, and I look down the length of the blanket and I nearly gasp. Mr. Mole is racing furiously up and down there, absolutely crazed. I watch for a moment in awe. Up and down the leg. Up and down. It’s my hand, I know. frenzied with love. It’s my own hand. I can stop it, if I choose. And so I do. I concentrate on my hand and I have this bad news for it and I send out the message, and it stops, my hand. Though it’s still lying on her leg. Okay. I let myself have this one last touch.
Minnie turns her face to me. “Weren’t you a little afraid, even for a moment?” she says.
“Yes,” I manage to say.
“That’s natural,” she says.
I gently move my hand off her leg and back to my side. I focus on catching my breath.
“Shall we find all the constellations?” Minnie says suddenly, lifting her face to the night.
“Yes,” I say. “I know something about that.”
And so we trace them out together, these patterns in the sky, and I count the stars that make them up while she talks about bears and archers and hunters with swords. And we go on to talk about this and that and we all sing some more songs after the others emerge from their blankets, and when the wagons have returned to the gates of the ironworks, I help Minnie down, grabbing her firmly at her waist, and for a moment it feels as if I am ready to waltz her around and around with her feet never touching the ground.
Though I don’t. The Model T is idling nearby and Minnie and I stand before each other, about to part. She says, “Thank you, Milton. This has been grand.”
“Yes,” I say. And at this moment it does not occur to me whatsoever that Minnie would want to see me again. But what do I know? My judgment is trustworthy only to the bottom of a column of figures. For Minnie takes a step nearer to me, and she dips her face just a little without letting her eyes leave mine, and she says, “You come call on me, all right, Milton?”
I am once again without words, but I manage to nod my head so as to say yes yes I will I will. And then she smiles a sweet slow smile and says, “Just for future reference, Milton. It’s the other leg.”
* * *
SEER’S DOPE MADE GOOD BY FRIGHT
Scared Hoosiers Die of Heart Disease Because Astrologer Said They Would
LOGANSPORT, IND., AUGUST 6—P. A. Graves, a local “astrologer,” two months ago made the prediction that during the next two years heart disease would become prevalent and that residents of Logansport would die on the street, sitting in chairs and while at work, and that no one with a weak heart could exercise violently withoutdying. He said that this condition would result because of the fact that Saturn has become a fixed planet and as such exerts a baneful influence on the heart.
The deaths of four persons in the past five days from the disease, coupled with the fact that there were seven deaths in July, has greatly excited many of the residents and the doctors are being besieged by hundreds of the ignorant for treatment. Physicians say that the excitement and the fear incident to the situation is doing much to justify the prediction.
from the front page of The Detroit Free Press
Sunday, August 7,1910
* * *
CARL AND I
Dearest Sweetheart
A line or two hoping they will find you all in good health as for me I am getting worse. I don’t think I will live long enough to see your dear face again.
Three nights after I married Carl Peterson, we watched Sarah Bernhardt die of consumption on a bed strewn with camellias. She was very beautiful, her face a sad white mask, her eyes enormous and dark, her voice rising from the stage and filling the Lyric Theatre, though as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier she was capable of barely a whisper, dying as she was from the tubercular bacilli breeding in her lungs. Her sins had been cleansed, Marguerite Gautier’s, by her suffering and by the goodness of her heart and by the sacrifice she had made, giving up for his own sake the one man she had ever loved. I grasped my Carl’s arm on the seat next to me as Maguerite died, for he was the one man I had ever loved and now we were married, on the previous Saturday, December 16, 1905, and the church was filled with red camellias. The newspapers said that Sarah Bemhardt slept in her own coffin, transporting it with her wherever she went, and she had died nearly twenty thousand times in her life, just as she was dying before us, and she took a cloth from her bosom as she lay on her deathbed, and she coughed terribly into it.
Now Carl has written to me from Attleboro that he is dying. He left for the sanitarium barely a month ago and he has lost hope. So quickly. The death is coming upon him very quickly. This sometimes happens. Like John Keats, who wasted and died at the age of twenty-six. The British writer Robert Louis Stevenson, on the other hand, resisted for decades before being overwhelmed. As Dr. Gilbert would say, the bacilli have found “fertile ground” in Carl’s body. Oh, had you only been as barren as I, my Carl.
He did not send me a view of the sanitarium. None of his postcards have been of this place I have never seen, where he will die. He says it is vast and made of gray stone the color of our birdbath. He could not resist a romantic postcard, even considering. Two lovers sitting at the edge of the sea and she has raised her parasol to shield what they are doing, but their silhouettes are visible. They are about to kiss. He put the postcard in an envelope so the postal carrier would not share his words. Dearest Sweetheart, he said to me. I grew weak at this. And he tried hard to put his bravery down on the card, going quite formal for a moment. A line or two hoping they will find you all in good health, he said. All in good health. Wholly in good health. Completely in good health. As I seem, in fact, to be, which gives me no comfort. As for me, he said, I am getting worse. I don’t think I will live long enough to see your dear face again.
He turned his face to me when we tucked the quilts around him in the backseat of the automobile that came to take him. He was as white as Sarah Bernhardt dying in the Lyric Theatre. As white as Marguerite Gautier. As white, I’m sure, as John Keats.I gave out John Keats’s book of poems this very morning to a sallow-faced boy at the library. I am a Carnegie Maid, dispensing the words of all the writers of the world, some still living, but destined to die at last, and most who have died already, some of this disease, some not. One in seven who dies in the world, dies of this White Death. Some leave words behind, some do not. I have kept all the postcards Carl has sent to me. They are in a teakwood box. He wooed me with postcards. And he continued to write them even after we were married. He would be at work and I would come home from the library before him, and waiting in the mailbox would be a card from him. Oh, you sweetheart, he wrote, in his love of a good catchphrase. This was not so very long ago. Oh, you daisy field and up along the creek on that log or under the big tree. Oh, you. I wish I could go there now and pick daisies with you. His face was white and his eyes were terrible dark when he left for Attleboro.
I must write him now in return. He will not let me come to visit. He says I’ve been exposed long enough to the contagion, he could not bear for me to get sick. And he doesn’t say it, but he’s ashamed of how he’s grown weak, how he’s lost so much weight. He has always been a man to take off his coat and roll up his sleeves and have at some physical thing. My only recourse is a penny postcard that lies before me now in the center of the little flattop desk in our bedroom. I’ve chosen a card from among the romance cards with all the come-hithering and the oh-no-not-now-sirs, but this is of a woman sitting with her hands clasped around a knee and her eyes are cast down and beneath her is the printed word heartbroken. I’m regrettingy the choice. The card was intended for a woman whose beau has not written to her, has not asked her to the dance. But I am, in fact, heartbroken. Carl will understand.
I look out the open window and across the yard to the sugar maple and to the laundry I’d hung this afternoon, the sheets and my nightgowns and underskirts and two of his dress shirts and I cannot look at his shirts. They lift slightly in a wisp of breeze and I cannot look. I’m finding more things I cannot look at in this house. The overstuffed armchair in our front room where he would read his newspaper of the evening. The porch swing. The cotton handkerchief near my feet. I wish I’d found it before I’d done the laundry. It was caught in the narrow dark space between the wall and his bed, near the headboard. It is folded tightly over the things he brought up from his lungs in his last days in our home. I can see the stains, the color of dried camellias. I found it an hour ago and dropped it at once and I washed my hands, as Carl would wish me to do.
