The Folded World Read online

  It was said that very wise men, in certain Eastern traditions, could become so peaceful that they transcended their selfhood and disappeared. When they walked, even the heaviest of them left no footstep. On Sundays, they had walked—Charlie and his father—long walks, across yellow meadows with yellow grasses, to go buy milk or butter or black licorice and a newspaper, which they would promptly shed of everything but the sports section and the funnies, and bring it back the long way, by the stream, sitting to read a while, so that by the time they got home the carton of milk was beaded with sweat, and his mother would look at them unalarmed, for she knew they had volunteered for the errand not to be helpful but to steal away together. Charlie remembered them both, his past mother and past father, as having wonderful, clear presences, strong arms, healthy appetites, and good health that was born of a lack of neurotic worry. They disliked sweets and movies, and appreciated days that were windy. At moments, they would exchange between them significant looks that connoted an enormous man-and-wife universe that Charlie stood outside of. He and his little brother would stare at this mysterious man-and-wife intimacy, their chins resting on the kitchen counter. Charlie did not know what his mother and father talked about alone. They were always quiet when he walked into a room. With his bright eyes, he kept casting from face to face to catch the secret. He kept waiting to be old enough. But now, he knew, it was nothing you could be told. It was what he had with Alice. That was the secret—love. You were a child until you felt it.

  He crumbled up the wrapper of his McMuffin. He tried to believe that Alice was already back on the bus, freed from her mother, studying her textbook. Standing, he realized that across the aisle, through the leaves of a plastic plant, a girl was staring at him and had been for some time. He noticed her because her eyes were the color of amber, almost yellow.

  “Hi there,” he said.

  She paused a moment, eyes glowing with interior purpose, her hands wrapped tight around a soda cup. Finally, she looked away. For a moment, her loneliness was bright and alive to him. A human blaze.

  Although when they met again, he would not remember seeing her that day, somewhere inside of him he always remembered her eyes and her loneliness.

  Alice and her mother drove downtown, passing the boarded-up storefronts and the churches and pawnshops and marquees, all of it looking pretty and cheerful in the autumn sun. The sky snapped shut and then opened brightly above the fast moving clouds. The hospital, with its steam stacks, manufactured clouds in the distance. The car was as old as Alice, and dragged its undercarriage against every bump. Alice looked over at her mother, whose hands were clasped on her skirt. Her legs faded into the shadows under the dashboard. The woman’s face was covered with a soft down of tiny hairs, an aging woman’s fur. Hanging from the downy lobe of her ear were gold clip-on earrings that glinted cheaply. Suddenly Alice was struck with a feeling of great, stupid warmth. It was as if something solid and hard in her chest had shattered into big sticky pieces and her heart had become stupid and floppy, like the soft-boiled yolk of an egg. Her eyes welled with emotion. Her Mama was ill, and going to the hospital.

  “I like your earrings, Mama,” Alice said. “They’re pretty. Where did you get them?”

  “Do you?” The woman’s hands went reflexively to her ears. “I ordered them from a television show.”

  Alice nodded, but she wasn’t listening because she had suddenly become so stupid and content, a little girl, and was now only floating along in the car, herself cloud-like and quiet, as she passed the old preschool where she had learned to count. Nothing separated her from the landscape, and she did not criticize the junkiness of the storefronts and she did not remember any other incident of her mother being sick and needing rescue, and if right then someone had asked Alice, Where do you live, she would have said, Gloucester. She looked over at her mother again, her eyes wet, remembering a pretty young woman bending toward her with a cookie. They had been so often alone—no grannies, no grandpas, no cousins. The woman bending down with a cookie was so pretty, it could not have been her fault. If anyone had said it was her mother’s fault, she would have punched him in the mouth. The heat of this loyalty burned up the absence of the father.

  “Maybe I don’t need the procedure,” Marlene said suddenly. “I feel much better. I think I’ve flushed myself out. Do you suppose that smoke is from the morgue?”

  They were across the street from the hospital at a red light, and Marlene was looking up at the steam rising out of the top of the hospital. Alice stared across at her mother in the passenger seat. The cloudy feeling tripped away and suddenly it was as if it had never existed. She felt her consciousness gather itself back to a vibrating point the size of a pinhead. Her sight sharpened, and just then the street fell into shadow.

  “Absolutely not,” said Alice. She pushed on the gas with her toe. “I’ve come all this way, and you have an appointment.”

  “Just, just—Just do me one favor, Alice, and drive around the block.”

  The light changed. Alice pulled toward the hospital.

  “Alice,” cried her mother. “For Chrissakes.”

  “Mother. You have an appointment.”

  “Just once around the block!”

  The car idled in the roundabout. Above them, a glowing sign read Emergency. Marlene got out without saying a word. She walked shakily up to the entrance, holding her overnight bag, her back erect. The stupid cloudy feeling was completely gone now and Alice felt no pity whatsoever. She watched her mother struggle with the hospital door. She had come all the way to Gloucester on the first day of classes and her mother was going to get that damned procedure if she had anything to do with it. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard, noting that she was well ahead of schedule. In an hour, she’d be back on the bus.

  By the time Alice entered the hospital, she discovered that her mother had left the lobby and gone up ahead without her. Alice maneuvered the corridors, passing nurses concentrating below tiny lights, until on the third floor she came quite suddenly upon her mother in a chair.

  “Are you lost?” said Alice.

  “No, of course I’m not lost,” said Marlene. “I’m here, aren’t I? Are you lost?”

  Alice shifted the Canon in its sack from one shoulder to the other. “Have you spoken to someone?”

  “Of course I’ve spoken to someone. What do you think, I’d just sit here?”

  Alice sat down beside her mother. The waiting room was barely recessed from the hallway, just a collection of plastic chairs and a side table. A dark-skinned orderly flew across their view pushing an empty gurney.

  Mother and daughter sat in a hostile silence. Alice contemplated the idea of reaching over and squeezing her mother’s hand in reconciliation. She knew she should do this, but at the moment had no access to a feeling that could sincerely motivate such a gesture. If she did it (squeeze her mother’s hand), she knew her mother would snap at her. Her mother was waiting to snap at her right now but she couldn’t because they weren’t speaking. Her mother would want to punish her first. For something. For not driving once around the block. For having been soft and stupid and sweet for a moment over the earrings and then changing, like the daylight on the windy street, back into a cruel and abandoning daughter. Marlene would punish her for having been made to confess that she bought the earrings from a television program (Hello, this is Marlene? From Gloucester?), for being the sort of woman who had the time to do such things, for being so excited to see her daughter that she made herself up. Love had always made Marlene angry. Most likely, she wanted to punish Alice because she loved her.

  Alice uncrossed her legs, tapped the armrest, and just as she was about to do it, to take the high road, to reach out and take her mother’s hand, a nurse came swiftly around the corner and called her mother’s name.

  Stupidly, clumsily, Alice reached out. She nearly tipped her chair over reaching. How sincere it was now, now that the nurse in his green scrubs was calling so harshly for her mother. But Mar
lene had already stood at the sound of her name, and Alice’s hand only grazed the fabric of her mother’s skirt.

  “You can come with me, Ms. Bussard,” said the nurse.

  Marlene turned to her daughter, who now stood beside her, pale. She smiled and then put her hand on Alice’s shoulder. This was the decisive gesture. Her mother had won. She had won doubly, for now she was going to be put under anesthesia and very slightly possibly die, never to return, and Alice would always be left with her own last act of intransigence.

  “Thank you for coming, darling,” Marlene said. “You can go now.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t drive you around the block,” said Alice.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I love you,” said Alice.

  “This won’t take long,” said the nurse. “It’s a very standard procedure. She’ll be awake in an hour or two.”

  Alice nodded. She licked her lips. “You know what? I’ll wait right here. I’ve got my book. If it’s only an hour or two. I can catch the next bus. The three o’clock.”

  “Oh,” said Marlene. “What are you reading?”

  “Foundations of English Literature. For my class. I’m enrolled at Cross Community, actually.”

  “Oh, how wonderful. How interesting,” said Marlene. “Good for you. I bet you’ll get an A.”

  “A gold star,” said Alice, smiling.

  “A gold star.”

  The nurse coughed into his fist. He swept the clipboard demonstratively down the hallway. Marlene followed him. Next to the nurse, she looked very tall and elegant and defined against the white hallway.

  She was awoken by a different nurse some time later. She had been dreaming when the nurse clasped her arm with hard fingers. Alice jumped and wrenched herself away. The nurse stood back. She was a big-boned woman with a braid.

  “Are you Alice Bussard?”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “I mean no.”

  “Your mother’s been awake for some time now, waiting for you.”

  “She’s done?”

  “Of course she’s done. It’s a very simple procedure, really.” The nurse smiled thinly. “Would you like me to show you to her room?”

  Alice rubbed her eyes. She had the unpleasant feeling that the nurses had been ridiculing her while she slept. She looked down at her crotch where the English Canon lay open wantonly. Alice closed the book and stood. What sort of English student would she make, she wondered then, falling asleep over the Canon? She smoothed the front of her coat. Following the nurse into the hall, she passed a window that looked out on to Gloucester, and stopped short. The sky was darkening, and across the city, lights rippled windily.

  “My god. What time is it?”

  The nurse looked at her watch.

  “Five thirty.”

  “Five thirty? Five thirty?” Alice put her hands to her head. Then she patted her coat as if looking for a wallet. “I’ve got to catch my bus.”

  The nurse stopped. “Do you want to go to your mother’s room then or not?”

  “I do. I do. I’ll come.” Alice shuffled behind her, combing back her hair with her fingers. In fifteen minutes, at five forty-five, the bus would take her back to the city and she could reach the campus—if she ran—she would run, she would make it—by seven. She followed the nurse to her mother’s room, where Marlene was reading a magazine upside down.

  “Hell-o,” said her mother. She was propped up on a pillow.

  “The anesthetic’s not exactly worn off,” said the nurse.

  Alice sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing her eyes. “How do you feel?”

  “Exshellent,” Marlene beamed at the nurse. “They’ve tied me in a bow!”

  “Who’s going to drive her home?” the nurse asked, flipping a page of her clipboard and touching the tip of her finger to her tongue. “Since you’re catching your bus.”

  “Bush?” said Marlene. Then she put her hand to her forehead. “Is your clash tonight Alish?”

  “Pardon?” said the nurse.

  “Sheeze in college.”

  Alice looked at her mother. The woman had one hand on her forehead, but seemed in the cheerful dimness of her eyes to have forgotten why it was there. She lowered her hand and looked contentedly out the small window at the night over Gloucester. Alice reached over and took the magazine out of her mother’s hand. She turned it right side up and then gave it back to her mother.

  “I’ll take her home,” said Alice.

  “Fine,” said the nurse.

  “Whash wrong?” said Marlene.

  “You were holding the magazine upside down,” said Alice.

  Marlene slapped her thigh under the hospital blanket and laughed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Alice softly. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll stay with you.”

  “We always do have a nishe time together,” sighed her mother, trying to effect a philosophical expression. “We always do. I wash good enough for you. Besides, he wasn’t going to marry me. I never told him I wash pregnant. That wash just one big lie I told you.”

  The nurse clicked her pen shut.

  “She’s doing fine,” she said. “That I.V. will come out in an hour and all you have to do is put her to bed. She’ll just have to be more careful about mixing medication in the future.”

  Alice sat and watched as her mother fall asleep, her lips softly parting. She removed her coat and looked down at her plaid wool skirt, feeling the spine of safety pins with which she had tried to close the zipper. It was a costume. It did not even fit. In a minute, she would go call Charlie on the pay phone and tell him. She went to the window and watched the lights of Gloucester shimmering in the night. Beyond the city was the ocean. There was only one ocean in the world. It was the same big ocean, no matter how far across the world you went.

  The grandmother sat straight up in bed. The strap of her nightgown fell from her liver-spotted shoulder. She looked around the moonlit room, sniffing the air. What was that smell? Pleasant, faint, long-ago. A retired smell, like that of sassafras or pepsin or rosewater. Something she hadn’t smelled in years that made her well up with tender memories. The smell had woken her from her sleep, and yet now, in the clarity of night, it faded. The grandfather clock ticked downstairs. She could hear her daughter snoring down the hall. She thumped the night table for the lamp switch. Then she stopped, erect with realization. In the oval mirror opposite, she saw herself, small and cabbage-colored in the moonlight. Slowly, radiantly, in the mirror, the old woman smiled.

  The apartment was pitch black. Alice reached for the curtains, thrust them aside, and leaned against the sill. The autumn night was cool, but she was damp with sweat. Her mouth tasted sour. On the street below, under the canopy of trees, a black car idled under the streetlights. She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand. The car pulled away from the curb, the full moon sliding down its hood.

  She turned forward, suspicious of something. The black car? The rustling canopy of bat-colored leaves? She smoothed her duvet and tried to curl up against Charlie, who rolled over leadenly. From the back of the house came a soft slamming sound, a loose shutter. She propped herself up on her elbows. But just as she did so, her stomach contracted. She twisted her body toward the trashcan, thinking that she would vomit. Suspended that way for a long moment, hanging off the bed with a spool of saliva on her lips, she waited, confused.

  She sat up and looked out the window again. The street was empty and normal. Everything seemed normal and yet terribly changed. She felt her forehead. Was she ill? Something she’d eaten? She lay back down, comforting herself by stroking her own arms, but her skin bore a strange hypersensitivity. She could almost feel the individual hairs moaning in their shafts. The scent, in the crook of her arm, was of Band-Aids, a touch of white wine. Bile rose in her throat. She threw aside the covers and slapped a hand over her mouth. But soon the urge passed again, and she sat on the edge of the bed, swinging her feet, feeling better. Charlie was still asleep. She tried whistling a little. But
the whistling sounded lonely and strange.

  Then, just as she was about to get up and do something useful, for soon enough now the sun would be up, suddenly it came, all the warm viscosity, spilling into her hands. She leaned over the trashcan and tried to guide the vomit into the can. It splattered on her feet and on the floor.

  Charlie lifted his head from his pillow.

  “Honey?”

  Alice slumped down against the mattress and sat cross-legged on the floor, wet hands open in her lap. She lifted a finger, unsure if she was done. Her ears were ringing, her heart palpitating, her head ached. She felt exhausted like a woman having worked all day and night and all day again—lifting, loving, scrubbing, crying, coddling, stirring, shushing …

  “Oh my God,” Alice whispered. Her hands moved across her belly.

  Charlie threw off the duvet and came slapping across the floor to her. He knelt next to her and grabbed her shoulder. Dizzy, he fell to the side.

  “Alice, honey. Are you all right? Are you sick?”

  She looked up at him. His enormous ears stuck out like wings in the moonlight. His eyes were gluey with sleep. She reached up and touched the side of his face. What a strange time to meet, she thought tenderly, in the middle of the night, someone you knew so well. What strange things could be revealed to you, almost insensible things, that they should be happening to you, innocent you, who was just a minute ago asleep like child. The wind rose up, making the trees dance in the window behind him.