The Folded World Read online

  How did they punish him? They punished him by pretending he was dead. When he walked down the halls now, his glow was somehow ghostly or carcinogenic and no one spoke to him.

  Little did they know, in his apparent exile, Hal was not lonely. His world merely became more tightly secured—a smaller, denser, louder world of which he was the governor, jurisprudence, and standing army. He slept deeply now—long, worried-over, nights and days, his arm thrown over his eyes.

  Because he did not really harm Miranda, they could not expel him from school, so instead he was taken up to the veranda after school and beaten by some of his friends from the team, guys who had done far worse to a girl than tell her a story. They did not hurt him. That is, they hurt Hal but not Hal, and everybody was so supportive as he lay in bed with a concussion, his mother rubbing his hairless chest with Ben Gay and cooling his food with her own breath.

  There weren’t a lot of questions remaining about wrestling after that. Hal had not attended practice for weeks anyway. And so his mother didn’t make him return to school and his father didn’t make him return to school, though he did remember, in his fog, a visit from the miserable artiste English teacher, who was suddenly standing in the doorway of his bedroom, miserable lank hair wet with rain.

  Bon jour, said Hal, surprised.

  Bonjour, said the artiste, smiling miserably, Quel jour de merde, no?

  The artiste sat awkwardly atop the radiator. He pushed back his dirty hair and looked around the dark, wood-panelled room.

  Well, said the artiste. Maybe you’re wondering why I’m here.

  He sighed and opened his hands in a resigned teacherly fashion, and then proceeded to talk at length disregarding the use of periods. He said that he hoped Hal was feeling all right and that he would come back to school soon where he was missed (missed by whom?) but if by chance he did not come back to school, the artiste wanted Hal to know that life was school enough, and a brave enough man could teach himself by listening to himself (listening to whom?) and that many a young man throughout history had saved his life in this manner, although maybe it sounded weird for a schoolteacher to say you don’t need school. It started to rain outside and Hal watched the leaves pling backward. The artiste leaned forward a little. You were a good poet, the artiste said, his eyes wet. They let it rain there for a minute.

  Then the artiste said he guessed he was being overly personal here but he wanted Hal to know that he himself had seen hard times at Hal’s age, real dark times of bad thoughts and remarkable misery, and the only thing that had saved him, the only thing that made him feel that life was not a miserable franchise of hours, was the beauty of a word on a page. Everything else was imperfect.

  May I remind you? he asked.

  Hal scooted over on the bed and the artiste sat down, smelling of clove cigarettes and cheap Chinese food.

  Sit up, said the artiste. Would you please?

  Hal sat up. The artiste drew a couple words, with an affectionate flourishing motion. Then he said to Hal, Here.

  What? said Hal.

  I’m going to put this pencil in your hand.

  I don’t want it.

  Go ahead.

  I don’t know what to do with it.

  He covered Hal’s hand with his own. Hal felt the heavy added weight, and fought the urge to call out for help. But the sun was going down, and the room was taking on its tomblike quality, and so he let his hand be led.

  They sat there for a long time, drawing words together, the sun burning in its grooves. Closing his eyes, for he was so very tired, Hal gave in to the motions and curves that created, in their innocent, blind meandering, something that meant. This one shaped like a girl, this one shaped like a boat—were they accidents, or were they the one true salve of the burn? Something about the artiste’s fervor gave him faith, faith that when we died, we might not vanish altogether but be buried in our poems.

  Bedroom

  Headache

  Mother

  Evening.

  Autumn came with the sound of tubas and whistles and school buses blundering through the streets. A certain kind of light broke across the city in the mornings that stirred conviction. Plans were laid. Locks were broken open. The tacit became explicit. The mother said to the child I love you no matter what. In her mind, the child swore ferociously to get a gold star today, to be worthy. And Alice Shade stood by the window in a calf-length plaid skirt that she had not worn since she was a senior in high school, brushing out her hair.

  She was finding it funny that just as the children in their pullovers were going to school, so was she—twenty-four years old and a college freshman. Her class wasn’t until seven in the evening and she was already dressed. She turned in a circle, half-wanting Charlie to wake up. Then she could not help herself and fell into bed beside him and wanted to be looked at.

  “Charlie,” she said. “Charlie. I—um—I have something important to tell you.” She shook him. One eye opened. “The cigarette lighter—if you can believe it—was invented before the match.”

  He groaned, turned away.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Just wanted you to know.”

  She lifted the pillow off his head. Underneath, he lay flattened against the bed, pretending to be asleep. He was wearing his favorite red long johns with the trap door in front.

  “You look so cute in those jammies,” she said.

  He reached around and grabbed the scruff of her neck. She screeched, tumbling over.

  When he was upright and had her pinned on her back to the sheets he said, “They’re not jammies.”

  His face was imprinted with sheet wrinkles, his hair, stiff as flax, was mashed on one side. He smiled.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You sexy co-ed. Where did you get that skirt?” He let go of her wrists and sat back on his haunches. “Listen, don’t let any of those Jolly Rogers near you tonight. You promise?”

  Alice gazed upwards. “I only have eyes for you, my love.”

  “You’re goddamned right you only have eyes for me,” he said, laughing.

  He leaned down and kissed her.

  “I’m proud of you,” he said. “You’re going to be great at college. You’re great already. You deserve everything you can get in this world. It was made for people like you. You’re what God meant. That’s what I’ve decided. All the accidents, the atrocities. But you’re what he meant.”

  She pulled him close. Her arms around his neck, she watched his back move with his breathing. Pigeons scratched in the gutter outside. You never knew what you were pining for, she now knew, until you had it: someone to find you incredible, just once. Not what you did, but yourself as a fact—you, on a bed, in a room. His forehead met hers. His lips, warm and chapped with sleep, found her brow, her nose, the corner of her mouth.

  Beside the bed, the old rotary phone began to ring.

  “Don’t get it,” he said.

  She reached for the phone, “Hold on,” she said. “Stay there. Don’t move.”

  But as she brought it to her ear she felt the air charge with the sound of foghorns and the swiftly changing light of seaside places, and she heard the sound of cheap roller skates, and then she realized that the gust of memory was proceeding the voice of Marlene Bussard, her mother.

  “Good morning, darling.”

  Alice sat up. Charlie slid onto his elbow. In Alice’s mind, the high changing skies of Gloucester cast sunlight into the old china cabinet and its collection of sherry glasses.

  “Hi, Ma. How are you? Is everything all right? It’s so early—”

  On the other end, the woman sighed. “Ultimately yes. Yes, everything’s all right in the long run. But the short run. The short run is another matter. But tell me first, how are you? Wednesday says hello. She misses you.”

  “I’m good. Very good, actually. It’s good to hear your voice.”

  As she said it, Alice marveled that this was true. She wanted to brag to her mother. She wanted tell her mother about her night class.
She wanted to tell her what it felt like to have a man say You are what God meant. She thought perhaps she should not tell her about either, but all at once she knew it was already written that she would tell her about both. She remembered herself as a child, how she had carried her gold stars home from school as if they were cut jewels on velvet. There had always been some perversity in this, for they were only stickers, and her mother was never effusive, never said quite the thing she hoped, never a simple, nice thing that a child could see clearly without stepping backward.

  “And how is Charlie? Is he still enjoying his job at the nuthatch? I feel like I haven’t spoken to you in ages.”

  “You mean the hospital?” said Alice, turning her back to Charlie, who yawned and gave up waiting and slid off the bed toward the bathroom. Marlene sneezed. “Mother. If you’re allergic to Wednesday, then don’t pet her.”

  “She just leaps upon me. She assaults me.” As if she knew they were now alone, Marlene spoke more confidentially. “Listen, darling, I have a bit of news for you. I wanted to tell you—not to alarm you—I just got a call from the doctor’s office and they’ve told me I’m suffering from a toxic reaction from the drugs they gave me for that skin rash last month. The rash I got from listening to that homeopathist you-know-what. I wanted to tell you and not alarm you, mind, that I’m going to the hospital this afternoon and I’ll need to be pumped out or some such thing. They take a little tube and thrust it down my nose. It’s medieval. It will cost me five hundred dollars. For this, I pay them?”

  Alice stopped and listened carefully. “That sounds serious.”

  “Serious to whom?”

  “Will you be under anesthesia? Is someone going with you?” Alice fingered the back of her skirt where she discovered a silky panel of her underwear. The skirt was too tight. The zipper had split. “I mean, is someone going to take care of Wednesday?”

  “The other girls are at work of course. I’ve gotten the day off. I’ll take a cab to the hospital. If it goes well, I’ll be home this evening. But they may keep me overnight. If they like me.”

  “Is this—Is this related to the other thing? The mercury poisoning?”

  Charlie groaned loudly in the kitchen. Alice turned toward him and scowled. The mercury poisoning was before the rash; it was from eating too much tuna fish. And before that, a possible glaucoma. Crampings, poisonings, rashes … Alice knew well the litany of things that had gone wrong with her mother in the past year and a half since she’d left Gloucester. Sometimes it was all she and her mother talked about. She listened carefully to her mother’s health reports only because she believed they weren’t the true point of their conversations. She knew they were talking about something else, some deeper subject. But what? The failure of this true subject to reveal itself made Alice insecure—perhaps the little lump would lead to blindness.

  “I’ll come to Gloucester,” Alice said. “I’ll drive you to the hospital in your car.”

  Charlie stepped into the room, his mug limp in his hand.

  “What?” he said. “Today?”

  “Nonsense,” said Marlene. “It’s such a long trip.”

  “It’s not a long trip. You think it’s a long trip because you hate the bus. I don’t want you taking a cab to the hospital.”

  “No. Now look, I’m sorry I even told you.”

  Alice turned toward the window, her back to Charlie. “But what about Wednesday?” she said, almost shrilly. “Who will take care of Wednesday?”

  “All right,” her mother sighed on the other end. “Maybe you could sit with me at the hospital for a bit. You could hold my claw.”

  Alice looked behind her to see Charlie, silent, his back set rigidly, receding down the hallway to dress for work. She closed her eyes, relieved.

  “It’s settled then,” she said.

  The bus lurched and backed out of the lot, leaving Charlie staring after it, his ears pink with sun. She would not get back in time for her class, he had said. But she would, she would, she could go straight from the bus station up the hill to the campus on her return—look, she’d even brought the English Canon with her—a textbook the weight of a concrete slab.

  But now, at her feet, on the bus floor, the English Canon lay looking rather out-of-place. A man in the seat behind her was violently devouring an apple. The city receded behind the bus and the small towns passed by familiarly and Alice began to have the sensation of traveling back in time. She would not have been surprised to see the cuffs of her shirt grow, her limbs shrink, until she was the size of a child, and ribbons would sprout from her head, and that when she got off the bus someone would have to help her with her bag.

  She liked arriving to Gloucester via the highway. There was a big wind-scoured hill and then you came around it and blam, there was Gloucester below you, sitting at the feet of the slate gray ocean. Nothing breaking the horizon. Just foreverness. And all the milk trucks and oil trucks and bread trucks of Gloucester labored up and down the hills and hoards of seagulls hovered at the mouth of the swordfish cold sheds and covered the quayside cranes. And the working people could not stop working and winter was their favorite because it was harshest.

  It was a short cab trip to the tall pink house. When she arrived, it was only midday. Over the street, the clouds passed low and fast, and the street blazed with light as she stood there with the English Canon. The windows of all the tenement houses glinted. The houses were tall and without yards, the vinyl siding white and pink and pistachio green. Then the clouds swept over the sun and the street became dark as evening. It was so familiar, so physically known, that she almost felt her mind drowse; she placed her hand around the heavy doorknocker.

  But her mother was already there, behind the storm door. Alice was confused to see Marlene looking so well. Against the wintriness of her skin, her mother’s still-dark hair looked almost chic, hanging neatly just to her shoulders, both sides swept back with mother-of-pearl combs. She wore a new shade of lipstick. Alice balked, looking over her shoulder. But the cab had already disappeared.

  “I’ve made myself up!” Marlene Bussard laughed. “Isn’t that an eccentric thing to do? I don’t know why I did it. I was waiting for you, and so I made myself up like we were going to a party together.”

  Alice looked at her mother’s thin, erect body. She wore what she always wore: a straight navy skirt with sensible shoes, a high-collared shirt that was cinched at the wrists, a cardigan over her shoulders, the color of almond paste. Alice glanced behind her into the darkness of the house, the plants making exaggerated jungle shadows on the far wall.

  “Well,” Alice said, suddenly not wanting to go in. “Shall we get going?”

  “You don’t want a cup of tea first?”

  “Tea? I think we should go to the hospital, don’t you? Isn’t there some level of urgency?”

  Marlene sighed. She pressed her lips together and looked out at the windswept street. She had her Charles Bridge expression on.

  “Come on,” Alice said. “Go on and get your bag. No need to be scared.”

  “I’m not scared—” her mother said, but did not qualify.

  Marlene disappeared into the house. Alice could hear her talking in a low, threatening voice to the cat. She reappeared in the doorway with a small leatherette bag.

  “Well,” she said. “No need to drag it out I guess.” Now her expression was that of cheerful resolve. She sighed girlishly and just then, as if in cooperation, the clouds moved off the sun and bathed the street in light. Marlene inhaled through her nose. “What a beautiful autumn day,” she said. “For me, that is. Not for everyone surely. A beautiful autumn day according to me. At least for now.” Satisfied that she had whittled the statement down to the exact thing she wanted to say, Marlene looked at her daughter. “Shall we?”

  Thinking of moral relativism, Charlie ate his Egg McMuffin. He was wondering if, in the course of his studies and his work at Maynard, he was losing the ability to judge things. He could still judge things, but judgment
itself seemed empty, symbolic, inessential. He did not know anymore what good it did to judge a man who, for example, cut holes in the walls of his house because he thought it helped release the evil spirits. Surely holes were not good for houses, but neither were evil spirits. And how could you judge a girl for stealing all the money and clothes of a salesman as he slept in a hotel bed, when he stole from her by not caring who she was or wondering how she got that way? It wasn’t just his clients that made judgment seem decorative. Regarding Alice, he knew it was only her goodness and sense of loyalty that had made her do something stupid like go to Gloucester to rescue her mother again.

  They had grown up so differently. It amazed him to think of Alice—fat Alice—alone in an attic bedroom in the dead of winter, her mother listening to feminist musicals downstairs. Her father lost, or unknown; in Charlie’s imagination this man only existed at the diner counter in an Edward Hopper painting. Charlie’s own mother, Luduina, had spent her entire days keeping house so magically that he never saw her do it. He was nine or ten before he realized why the kitchen floor was wet each afternoon. She was constantly drawing something out of the oven, and it did not matter who you were, you could have some. One summer when Charlie was a boy, a laborer named Albin had been hired to help around the yard. Sometime during the course of the summer, it became known to the Shades that Albin had recently spent time in prison for beating his wife into unconsciousness. After this discovery, Charlie’s mother had treated Albin exactly the same. The man sat in her kitchen, square-headed and silent, eating her breakfast just the same as anyone. She did not call it relativism. She called it being Christian.

  As for his grandmother, she had taught him to take people seriously. For she did not want to be loved in the adorable condescending way one loves grandmothers. In her stooped, sciatic figure, in her many-pocketed aprons, she possessed a kind of awesome omnipotence; she was always there to catch it when the baby fell off the tire swing, always ready with a fistful of citronella at first cough; she swatted the back of your head before you swore. She was the best of men and the best of women. Remorseless and gentle, wise and solid. He had grown up around such people. And in the background, a whole platoon of cousins from Springfield who came to visit every Sunday, and his happy little brother Mark, who loved to percuss on an overturned bait tub outside the supermarket for money and then spend every last red cent of it on Lik-a-sticks.