The Folded World Read online

  There, she said. Now will you please come inside?

  Charlie pulled over on Road Four and turned off the ignition. There he sat, watching the snow, thinking how pretty it was, and what a shame it was to be afraid of it. He raised the parking brake. Out in the cold air, he saw the cheap windows of all the cheap houses of Norris Park, most dark, some filled with televisions. Everybody was safe inside. Everybody deserved a home and to feel safe. If you thought about it, everybody deserved a hot lunch too and fur slippers and the opportunity at least once in life to have a bath drawn for him. Every human being deserved those things just for putting up with the basic indignities of life, but maybe it was enough to have a house, a roof that protected you from the snow, and a sidewalk you could walk on. He laughed, thinking about how, on a recent excursion to the mall, Opal had whispered—as if it was the most intimate secret—that what she really loved was a good milkshake. To watch her drink one. He should have thanked her, making him feel so tenderly, that a grown woman could still be completely consoled, as they sat in the shadeless canopy of the Orange Julius.

  He dragged the large bag of salt from the backseat. He tore a hole in the lining and made a spout. The shadow of a small animal crossed into the snowy darkness. Hoisting the rock salt over his shoulder, he walked across the street to Opal’s yard. The yard was covered with a thin blanket of unbroken snow and the house was dark but for one small light in the back. He shook the salt out onto the driveway and the walk. It poured out diamond-like from his shoulder. He was trying to be quiet. He felt very happy. Physical work was good. But he felt much bigger than just this. He swung the spout of the bag back and forth. The air was fresh and cold and the sky was clear now and there was nobody out but him.

  On his way back to the car, he noticed that the walkway of the house next to Opal’s was also untended. In fact, most of the sidewalks on Road Four were neglected, and the street itself was unplowed. He retreated back to the pool of streetlight, appraised the scene, popped a stick of gum in his mouth. Then, laughing to himself, he started in on the neighboring sidewalks. He moved up the street, pouring the salt off his shoulder. And then he just kept going, over to the next house, through the window of which an old woman was asleep in a chair. He paused, smiled at the slant-eyed cat that switched its tail in her lap. By the door was an old rusty shovel, and he put down the sack of salt to give the old lady’s sidewalk a quick once-over with the shovel, and then he sprinkled the salt on top. Despite the cold, he was sweating and warm. Before turning around, he shoveled the next walkway, too. And the one after that. It took a long time. And on his way back to return the shovel, he sprinkled the sidewalks on the other side of the street with rock salt as he walked, and when he turned around and looked back, the whole block was glittering. He threw the empty sack in the backseat, dusted his hands, and got in the car.

  As he drove away, he happened to glance back at the mustard-yellow house to see her face, staring at him with a strange, prescient expression, just before she dropped the curtain.

  Her father killed himself with a shotgun. He did it midday behind the bee cages on the farm they had shared alone together for nineteen years. Midday, as if it were just another chore. When she heard the shot, she came out wiping her hand on a dishrag, and knew in her heart that her life had changed. But she felt nothing—no feeling at all.

  Even though the property was just a piece of scratched-up dirt and shrubbery, the old man had put up a wall around it with broken glass on the top, as if it were a palace. The old man loved his bees more than anything, and he wouldn’t let Opal touch them or go near them. Neither did he touch her anymore, though he used to let her sit astride his knee when she was little and he was different and they had their breakfasts that way.

  As far as Opal could remember, she’d never been embraced. Not out of love or kindness. Except by the occasional school nurse if she cried. Her father never embraced her. Nowadays, when her father had to pass her something, he was careful to be sure their fingers didn’t brush. The few times they bumped into each other in that dark, close house, the old man shrieked. She began to think she had some kind of disease or contagion that her father wasn’t telling her about. Whenever she went into town in his ridiculous green truck with the old-fashioned grill and headlights like goiters, she was sure not to touch anyone, lest she pass it on.

  On the farm, she took care of the chickens and gave them names and talked to them in her loneliness, and when she was finished with her chores she spent the afternoons asleep underneath the chokecherry tree, watching her father tend to his bees in the smoke, like a man fighting with his imagination. At night, her father would sit in a straight-backed chair and talk about the government and the urban conspiracy and Jew doctors in laboratories and the military-industrial complex.

  When her father started to get ill, with what turned out to be death, he began to destroy things. He was like a bear with a toothache. He knocked down the outhouse with his bare hands and broke it up and burned it. He burned his bed and then he burned hers and she had to sleep on sofa cushions on the floor. He said there was a plague in the house and everything had to be burned.

  Then he turned to the chickens. The chickens stood there, stupidly pruning their feathers and pecking at their feet, while their brothers and sisters were butchered. He made her go to the store in town and ask for an obscure salve that made the pharmacist laugh. Finally, Opal told her father that he needed a doctor. And yet he wouldn’t go to no goddamned Jew doctor.

  She knew it was her fault somehow. The thing that was unpalatable or unhealthy about her had finally spread to him, despite his best attempts. After all, they shared the same air in that small, close house, they sat in the same chairs, and she prepared his food and washed his clothes. They shared the same dirty blonde features, the same sorts of behaviors that made people avoid them, and she tried hard to listen to his ideas and to adopt them. She loved him. He was her daddy. But perhaps love was the agent that bore the disease.

  When a position opened up at the local college to be an errand girl for a lady academic, Opal applied. She wanted to earn some money so that her father could be taken care of. He was getting worse. Once or twice, he’d even been unable to get out of bed and neglected his bees.

  Her father hated academics almost as much as he hated Jews and doctors. But if there was one group of people he hated more than academics and Jews and doctors, it was lady academics. Still, Opal dropped out of high school and went to work for the lady academic. Her father promptly stopped speaking to her. He kept speaking, but he stopped speaking to her. Only she could have told the difference.

  Turned out, Opal liked the lady academic. The academic was portly and her hair was laced with gray. She walked around the office and joked about her portliness and joked with the other young researchers she had working for her and the other young researchers looked back up at her with shy apprentice love. The lady academic joked with Opal right off the bat and made her sit right outside her office at a little desk, and instead of making Opal get her coffee, she got Opal coffee, and took her around by the hand and introduced her by name, and Opal felt that fat warm hand in her own long after she went home in the evening.

  The lady academic was a scientist. She was studying sound waves. Opal herself felt very supportive of the project, because she appreciated sounds and music and had a keen ear. Finally, for the first time in her life, she was happy, working at the university. She was involved in something important. Out of that house and in the clear, dogwoody air of that campus, she spied the trembling image of a desirable future. Also, she loved the lady academic. No one had ever been voluntarily that nice to her. Sometimes Opal even waited across the street in her green truck, just to make sure her portly boss got across campus safely in the evening, tip-topping back and forth like a teacup full of buttermilk.

  There was a dean at the college, a tall, skinny man with chapped skin, who came in to check on the lady academic and prowl around the office. He would come in and wh
ine at the lady in his nasally, academicky voice and ask where the results of her study were and how she was spending her money and couldn’t they share their Xerox machine with the philosophy department. And because the lady academic was so good-natured, she would humor the dean and sit there and bear his nasally ignorant comments. From her desk just outside the office, Opal could hear the dean whining on and on, and she would sit there making up retorts to his comments, and sometimes she would become so angry by the time he left that she’d be drenched in her own sweat.

  The dean always paused and looked Opal up and down on his way out. He looked her over like she was dressed in rags. Opal was used to being humiliated, but there was something about the dean’s style of humiliation that was particularly unbearable, and she came to believe that he was trying to sabotage the sound wave project.

  One day, the dean came in looking particularly constipated and particularly chapped. He stormed into the office and began making threatening statements and references to some comment the lady academic had made in a meeting. Opal could hear from her seat outside the office. The lady academic was, as usual, patient and endured the dean and listened to him. But when the dean left, she came out of her office and stood there looking after him with tears of anger in her eyes.

  That pencil-dicked beaurocrat! she shouted.

  All the young researchers laughed. Their boss looked at them and laughed and laughed until she cried a little. They all had a good laugh over that—he probably did have a tiny pencil dick. The lady academic wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Then they all went back to work.

  Everybody except Opal.

  That night, she stayed late at the office by herself and composed a letter. It was a letter to the dean.

  The letter to the dean began very civil and articulate and altogether academic, but as the night wore on and she kept writing, it got angrier and angrier, as if she was possessed. She decided to tell the dean what they really thought of him. All of them! Everybody on campus! She recorded all the comments she’d heard in the hallways and the bathroom stalls, and she even included the comment about his pencil-dickness because it just about summed him up perfectly. As she wrote, she felt her father looking over her shoulder and laughing in agreement, and putting in a couple good zingers of his own. She wrote in a rage. She wrote in a fury. Voices from the air contributed. Late at night, she sat back, finished. Then she slipped it under the dean’s door and went home to bed.

  That night, she got another migraine. It was so bad that even the sound of her own breathing hurt her, and the snoring of her father sawed at her brain. She could hear the bees outside in their cages, making their ceaseless devouring noises. The next morning, she could not get out of bed. Every point of light was a green point of pain. Her father’s significant footsteps walked across her body. By sunset, the headache moved off and left her wrecked.

  She did not go into the office for a week. Then she returned, feeling better. But when she walked into the office, no one was there. There was a sense of abandonment in the room, and things were orderly and museum-like. Panicked, she ran into her boss’s office. The woman was there, taking things out of her desk. When she looked up at Opal, her face became pale. But then, after a moment, she smiled.

  Hello Opal, she said.

  Hello ma’am, said Opal. Where is everybody?

  At home, said the lady academic. She looked out the window at the campus and the blossoms on the fine, historic-looking trees. After a long moment she said, Why, they’re at home celebrating. We’ve finished our sound-wave project!

  Oh! cried Opal. That’s great.

  I know it. I’m going to go out and eat me an entire cow. I’ve gotten too skinny, don’t you think?

  No, said Opal. You look just right.

  The woman turned back to her business and Opal stood there.

  Well, said Opal. I guess I’m done here then. Got to find a new job.

  Yep, said the woman.

  Oh, said Opal. What did you figure out about sound?

  The lady academic stopped and put down her papers.

  We figured out that sound doesn’t always exist, she said. That it goes off and on. Like a firefly’s light.

  Like a firefly, hunh?

  Like that.

  We keep bees, Opal said.

  You told me that once, replied the lady.

  Fireflies don’t make honey.

  No sir they don’t! They don’t even make fire.

  Opal laughed at that. Then, straightening her sweater, she turned and walked out the door of the office. But the lady academic called out to her. Opal turned around. To her alarm, the woman was walking straight toward her. She was coming very near to her. Opal fought the urge to make fists at the ready. She did not know what to do, being this close to somebody.

  The woman put her arms around Opal. Bye Opal, she said. Opal could smell the strong sweet smell of her hair and she could feel the lumps in her figure and the movements of her ribcage as it went up and down with her breathing. The woman held onto her and even though Opal’s hands were too inexperienced to respond and hung there at her sides, she felt she was still participating in the embrace. She felt that something bad was being taken out of her with that embrace. She felt she was being leeched or confessed or healed. She knew that the lady academic would teach hundreds of students, would make hundreds of discoveries and win awards, but perhaps the most remarkable thing she would ever do in her whole life was what she was doing just then.

  Down the hall, a baby’s whine. Alice shifted on the bed. She exhaled.

  “Still awake?” said Charlie.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The clock was ticking in the kitchen. It was an extraordinarily quiet night.

  “Why so quiet?”

  “The snow,” said Alice. “The snow makes everything quiet.”

  Charlie pulled his arm out from under her neck. “No. I mean you.”

  “Why am I quiet? I don’t know.”

  “You’re angry that I went out.”

  “How can I be angry? How can I be angry now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Alice shrugged. “Now that I know her.”

  “Didn’t you want to?”

  “I wanted to very much. It was a very moving story.”

  “But—”

  “But now she’s in me.” Alice rolled away. She put her cheek against her arm. “People are right not to want to know about what they don’t see. What can you do? It must drive a person crazy, a life like that. To never be hugged. To never be touched by your own father—”

  Alice paused. She closed her mouth and neither of them said anything for a moment. Alice also had never been touched by her own father. With one arm, she groped along the windowsill, behind the snowglobe, where she kept her cigarettes. She drew one out of the flattened pack with her lips.

  “Hey,” Charlie said. “I don’t think you should smoke in the house anymore.”

  “Just this once.” She shoved open the window, lit the cigarette, and inhaled majestically.

  “I’m not comfortable with this. I thought you would quit for good after the twins.”

  Alice exhaled. “Do you touch her?”

  “Who? Opal? Do I touch Opal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you kidding? Of course not.”

  “I mean, in a friendly way, here and there, on her shoulder or something.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t think she would respond very well to anything like that. She gets very squirrelly sometimes. She’s—a sick person, Alice. She doesn’t trust a lot of people, with all she’s been through.”

  “I think it must be awful, to never be touched. To only be embraced once in your whole life. That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”

  “But it’s got a happy ending.” Charlie was up on one elbow now, his expression one of reassurance. “It’s about finding love and kindness in unlikely places.”

  Alice dropped the cigarette into a glass of water
on the windowsill.

  “Right,” she said. “See? I just wanted one drag.”

  “Alice. You seem so—” Charlie licked his lips. “This—kids, parenthood—no one can prepare you. I’m dead tired all the time. And you. For months now you’ve hardly even been outside. And the winter. Getting frustrated doesn’t mean you love them any less, you know. Why don’t you get out and do something fun for yourself?”

  Alice laughed, louder than she meant to. “When?”

  “At night. You could even try going back to school again. Why not? I could watch the girls a couple nights a week. Plenty of parents take classes at night—”

  “You’re home at six, seven sometimes. Later and later it seems. It’s unpredictable. And then sometimes, you go out again—”

  Charlie paused. “It doesn’t have to be school. Just something you enjoy. For yourself. A release. A book club. What do you say?”

  Alice turned over, pulled his hand over her chest and cradled it there between her breasts.

  “All right, Charlie,” she said. “Yes, that’s a good idea. I’ll go out and do something for myself.”

  “It’s a damned good idea.”

  Charlie lay there expectantly, ready to talk, but instead she moved his hand down the side of her body. She placed his hand between her legs. Then she pressed her hips backward, and immediately he hardened, almost fainting.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered.

  She didn’t say anything. Turning toward him, she ignited, expanded, becoming physically enormous in his arms. He felt his words and his plans falling headlong into her like wind to a fire. There was something about her that night, the way she made it seem that they made love on an empty planet, the stars burning holes in his back.

  Rain? She pressed her hand to the window. Rain? She turned and looked at the twins propped in their wingchair. They blinked back at her. Did rain mean, they seemed to ask, that they would not be going outside? Packed into their pink snowsuits, they looked stiff and bloated as starfish. Frances was sliding slowly down the cushion. Alice turned back to the window. “No,” she said aloud. “Of course the rain won’t stop us.” In defiance, she hoisted the collapsed doublewide stroller and held it trembling in the air. Evelyn sighed. The rain would not stop them because Today was for Mommy and They were already all dressed and Besides a little rain never hurt anyone.