The Accidentals Read online

  “I don’t need to. I know it by heart.”

  “Go!” she commands.

  THE MAN IS back up in the tree working on that one big limb. It crashes down, raising a cloud of dust when it falls. Some agitated bluebirds dip and swoop overhead. Four squirrels hightail it across the street from the Purvises’ yard to the sanctuary of mine.

  I pull a light jacket from the closet, tie it around my waist, and get a bottle of water and the can of Mace I carry in my purse when I teach at night. I go into the bathroom and pee. I snatch some Kleenex from the box on the back of the toilet, why I don’t know. Having no chain, I cut a section of twine. Then I race out the door.

  When I get back across the street, the men do not look at me. I do not take this personally. I am spoiling this job; this job is all they have.

  I walk up to the trunk of the tree the man is cutting and sit down. I know I’m supposed to do something else, but I can’t think what it is. I can’t figure out why I’m holding the twine.

  The men turn to me in horror. What’s the abuela loca doing now? They shout at the man above to stop. He makes a gesture of disgust and lets the chainsaw go slack on its rope. It dangles directly over my head. One of the men, the foreman, wipes his forehead with the back of his arm, walks up to me, and delivers a long row of syllables I don’t understand. Here I am, fluent in Greek and Latin and Arabic. I can examine a piece of papyrus and give you its age within twenty years, but, idiot that I am, I’ve never learned Spanish. I assume he is telling me to move. I shake my head no, I won’t, I absolutely will not move an inch. I flap my hand at the men to go away, por favor, leave me alone.

  The foreman then goes and knocks on the Purvises’ door and when they open it, he points at me. I sit with my legs crossed, leaning slightly forward. I now wish I’d brought a pillow to put between me and the sharp shingles of the tree trunk. Pine has the roughest bark of almost any tree; plus, these trees are so massive there are deep crevasses between the shingles. Sitting here, I don’t know what’s going to happen next; I just feel something has turned, something is just beginning.

  How do I describe my wildness, the enraged coil of my body against the tree? I can only say it’s beautiful, like something thrown away by accident, then found against all odds, a piece of water in the sea.

  My sister has returned to me.

  Mr. Purvis comes out and tells me to get off his property, but I don’t, I won’t. I just stare straight ahead, don’t even turn my head to look at him. Nobody’s taking out this tree! He talks at me for a while; he even approaches, puts his withered hand on my shoulder. I shrug him off, point my can of Mace at him, and raise my eyebrows. He backs away, heads back to the house, shouting over his shoulder, “You’re crazy, lady, you’ve gone plumb crazy.” It strikes me that, after all these years, he doesn’t even know my name.

  In a while a police car rolls up, and two policemen wearing creased uniforms get out. They come up into the yard slowly, as if they’re ashamed of what they are about to do, as well they should be. “Ma’am, you’re trespassing on this property,” one says. By this time, some neighbors from down the street, a young couple whose names I can’t recall, are drifting by, walking their dog. They stop just after they pass the Purvises’ yard and stand quietly, watching.

  “Do you see these beautiful pine trees?” I shout in their direction. “They’re going to cut down every last one of them.” They look sympathetic and worried until I add, “and here I have an extinct bird nesting across the street.” Then they jerk on their dog’s leash to move her along. The dog, bless her, wants to get in on the action and pulls them in my direction. But they walk away, eyes lowered, dragging the dog. The dog gags, barks once, then twice, as if to say she’s on my side, goodbye and good luck.

  “Ma’am, we’re going to have to remove you from this property,” the policeman says, moving in. “You can’t be here.”

  “Well, I am here,” I say.

  Picture this: The workers clustered together in a semicircle in a corner of the yard. The Purvises framed in their picture window, the paint peeling around the edges, two pigeons on a roost.

  Now I point my can of Mace at the policemen. I say, “You’ll have to come through this first, you fucking bastards.”

  Their eyes widen. They move to either side of me and take me from behind, by the arms, pulling them back and hurting me, really hurting me. I tell them I am a member of the Audubon Society, there is an extinct bird to consider. I accuse them of police brutality. One pries the Mace from my fingers, the other pulls the handcuffs from his belt. Him I kick.

  As they drag me toward the police car, an old woman bursts out the front door of my nice neighbors’ house next door. I know who she is, though her name escapes me; she’s Cleveland Johnson’s mother. She came to live with him and his wife, Alita, years ago. Cleveland’s in the biology department; I’ve known him and Alita and their two sons for years now, though their sons are now men out in the world, carrying with them (I hope!) that smattering of Latin I taught them. Every winter I miss those sweet little boys who shoveled my driveway. In the summers I miss sitting outside and listening to them shoot hoops. Now, I only see them on holidays.

  “HOLD UP, NOW!” Cleveland’s mother calls out, bustling down the street in her fuzzy blue bedroom slippers. “Hold up!”

  The police and the men in the yard turn their attention from me to her. She’s limping a bit in her slippers, but she’s coming fast.

  “Listen here,” she says, huffing and puffing. “Nobody needs to take a person to jail for trying to save a tree. That’s silly.”

  One of the policemen opens the car door and tries to push down my head. “She was threatening a police officer.”

  “She most certainly was not,” Cleveland’s mother says. “I’ve been watching the whole thing. Look at her. She’s a professor at Vanderbilt. She’s not threatening nobody. If it comes to it, I’ll testify to that. Fact is, I think it may just be the other way around. Um-hum. Yes sir.”

  The policeman loosens his hold on me.

  “I’m her neighbor, let me take her home,” says Cleveland’s mother, moving in to take my arm. “My Lord, she’s almost as old as me. There’s such a thing as senior abuse, you know.”

  “You’ll be responsible for her?”

  “Course I will. I’ve been knowing this sweet lady for years. Come on, honey, let’s go.”

  Cleveland’s mother leads me back across the street, and I ask her to come in. She pushes me down on the sofa and asks if I want her to fix me a cup of tea. I say I’d rather have a bourbon. Will she join me? She says she believes that under the circumstances she will. Do I have any Coke to mix with it? While I’m fixing the drinks, she draws the living room drapes so we won’t have to look at the trees coming down.

  Boom, they go. Boom, boom, boom. They shake the house, rattle the dishes in the sink.

  Cleveland’s mother settles on my sofa with a sigh and I tell her to put her feet up, make herself at home.

  She sheds her blue slippers and puts her swollen, knobby feet on the coffee table. “These feet. Sometimes they hurt so bad I’d like to cut them right off.”

  I hand her the drink. “Thank you for saving me from jail.”

  “Jail’s no place for you,” she declares. “No place for much of anybody except the most no-count of the no-count. I could tell you stories.”

  When June calls later that night and I tell her what happened, she sighs and says, “At least you tried. At least you have a friend. That’s one more than I’ve got right now.”

  IN A WEEK, all that remains of the Purvises’ pines are jagged three-foot stumps. In the place of the trees, a giant aluminum sculpture of a deer has sprung up in the middle of their denuded yard. It has sharp points where the joints come together, the points where it was assembled. It’s so blinding that when the sun strikes it in late afternoon I have to draw my drapes as I continue to write on this infernal essay, whose subject has come to elude me.

  The
Carolina Parakeet is long gone. But who knows? Maybe it will return next spring, maybe the remnants of a cracked egg remain right there in my very yard inside the old water oak or scattered among its tangled roots.

  And really, the bird’s the lucky one, balanced on the farthest ledge of time, splendidly aloft, proof positive of the universe’s capacity for . . . what am I trying to say? Surprise? Joy? Because anything can happen, you know, anything at all. There is a living world underneath the one we see: the giraffes’ dance, the voice underwater.

  LATER, I WILL walk down to Cleveland and Alita’s. Cleveland’s mother called this morning. She’s fixing a pot of red beans and rice. Sometimes, often really, I imagine June and I making coq au vin the way we did that first time, making a bloody mess of it with Dad’s cherry bounce, that god-awful stuff. The three of us at the kitchen table. How beautiful we appear, like a picture. Our father behind his paper, my sister and I, girls together, setting the table, putting the dish on, sitting down to eat the good hot food.

  How I’d cracked the glass, put the plates away dirty! It is a treacherous thing, to turn away from one’s own sister.

  Now, as I labor on with this infernal essay, it is hard for me to remember how June looks as a grown woman. But her girl face, it still perches as clear and bright in my mind as a strange and unexpected bird, a blaze of feathers.

  25

  June

  OKAY, SO HERE’S HOW IT WENT: THE DOCTOR PUT HIS hand on my shoulder and shook his head. The latest chemo hadn’t worked: there’d been no remission, we’d just have to wait and see. In the elevator on the way down to the parking garage, Jim put his arm around me, told me he didn’t know what to say, but then he went on to say the regular things: he loved me, he was sorry. I reached over and pulled a long dark hair from his jacket, blew it into the air.

  So there I was, doing my dead-level best (pun intended) to enjoy my final days on earth. I’d gathered my neck pillow and comforter and built myself a nest on the living room couch. I only asked for one thing: a fifty-one-inch smart TV to replace the dinosaur box that just wouldn’t die. I wanted Netflix and HBO and Amazon and Pandora. I wanted high-def, surround sound.

  In the mornings I turned on the Cooking Channel, salivating over apple and potato hash, salmon slathered in miso and maple syrup, almond pound cake with raspberry glacé. It was December and dark came early with the cold New Orleans drizzle. In the afternoons, I dozed. Jim drifted in and out, working nights, sleeping until ten, paying the bills, feeding the dogs, fucking Helen behind my back. She came by every other afternoon, bearing one of three monstrous mutations of cream of mushroom soup casseroles (French green bean with fried onion rings, tuna and English pea with fried onion rings, corn and bacon with fried onion rings), all of which I thanked her for and deposited in the fridge for Jim to eat. For me, I instructed him to buy only vegetables, which I threw into a big pot with some water every few days and let bubble until they made a reddish brown broth, which I sipped from the time I woke up until the time I got into bed at night. It wasn’t that I had hopes of being healed by a vegan diet or anything that silly; it was just that the soup was the only thing I could stand the taste of.

  Jim and Helen waited, moving in and out of the house like cats with lizard tails hanging out of their mouths. Their eyes took on an identical cast, a slight smokiness that made them look like they had simultaneously developed cataracts.

  The dogs drifted in and out too, whining, putting their heads under my limp hand, sensing something under the limpness, not sure whether it was decay or the remote possibility of a romp.

  So we waited. We all waited, day after day, week after week, locked in an endless orbit of hospice nurses and supervised showers and pajama changes. The nurses kept asking me to tell them about the pain on a scale of one to ten. They kept trying to give me pills of many colors—deep crimson, twilight pink, yellow rose of Texas—but when I pushed myself up from the couch to use the bathroom or make my soup, my body seemed to slosh with too many poisons already. I could smell them in my oily urine, in my night sweats. I could taste them on my tongue, feel them burn ulcers in my mouth. They eroded my ashy fingers, which itched, oddly, underneath the nails.

  The weeks turned into a month, then two months. During chemo, I’d stayed busy. I’d gotten out of the house and made friends. I’d been driven back and forth to the clinic by cheerful volunteers, chatted with my bald, eyelashless chemo chums on the phone about nausea and marijuana. I’d spent whole days vomiting. I’d gone to Tupperware-like parties to select wigs and scarves and, for those who needed them, breasts, giggling with my new friends when a wig looked particularly hideous, trying them on backward, sipping sparkling cider in wineglasses. Now I was back at home, alone for all intents and purposes, drooping like a cut mimosa leaf, too weak to even visit Noel down at Cape Canaveral or play ball with my dogs. Dying was boring me to tears.

  Jim insisted on calling Grace. He told her the latest, then handed the phone to me. She was crying on the phone, crying hard, as if something had broken open. I said it was okay, I was resigned; maybe there were some wild adventures ahead on the other side, maybe I’d come back to haunt her. I laughed when I said it, but she just cried harder.

  “June,” she said, “something is happening to me too.”

  “What? What do you mean? Are you sick?”

  She took a shaky breath. “There’s a black hole between what I want to say and the words. A gap. My brain. It’s like the night sky: cold and dark and empty. I can’t think what to say in class, I can barely write a sentence.”

  I began to laugh. What a runt of a problem! A touch of memory loss. What a humbug!

  I said, “The sky’s not empty. It’s full of stars and satellites and space trash.”

  “To me it is.”

  I said, “You been hugging any trees lately?”

  TWO DAYS LATER Grace called back. Before I could say hello, she blurted out that she had Alzheimer’s. The tree episode had been her first such incident; the second had occurred just yesterday when she set fire to a poster of an aborted fetus during a demonstration by an anti-abortion group on campus. “I was sick to death of looking at those things,” she said. My professor sister now had a police record! Plus, she’d started seeing whole flocks of Carolina Parakeets in her yard. They were everywhere she looked. When I laughed and said good for her, good for the trees and the birds and the burned poster, she began to cry. She was a basket case, her brain had gone on the lam, she couldn’t even write a simple essay, she was going to have to retire and spend long winter afternoons by herself. She would have to go to one of those awful Alzheimer’s places, which would bankrupt her because she hadn’t had the good sense to buy long-term care insurance.

  THE NIGHT GRACE called, I dreamed I was floating farther and farther out, past the pocked moon, past our speck of a solar system, out past the whole night sky, seen and unseen, until I teetered on the ledge of the blue-black darkness beyond, almost tipping over, almost letting go. Grace was right, I thought, it is empty. This is how we leave our home, blindly and alone. Laika in her space capsule.

  But no sooner than the thought of the little dog popped into my head (do you know she barked for five hours up there before dying in that thing?), I felt something move against my body: a persistent tickle, making me squirm and thrash about in my sleep. (Was it one of the dogs, just then drawing closer in the cool night?) After a while, though, it became something more than a tickle. It became an irresistible pull, a suction, as if I were a piece of lint being vacuumed up off the floor.

  And then, how can I explain it? I just turned, from there to here, from the ledge overlooking the hungry dark back to the green world of you come and you go, you laugh and you cry, you get what you want and you don’t get shit. The turn was smooth but sudden, as though I’d been caught in midflight by an invisible thread and spun back into some vast fabric.

  When I landed, it was in a tree. A messy kerplop of a landing. A flap and a flutter, a bit of a squawk e
scaping my lips.

  WHEN I WOKE up the next morning, I felt clear for the first time in two years. I got up and made myself a cup of coffee and it tasted right. I walked out into the backyard and was surprised that it was warm. My dogs’ ears went up and they came running. They jumped up on me and I didn’t fall down.

  Holy cow, I thought, maybe I’m going to live. What a hoot! What a kick!

  I waited a month. I felt better and better. My tongue stopped burning. My nails turned pink. I could smell again: coffee and cheese and burned onions and dog farts, cherries and soap and orange marmalade. I went back to the doctor, and he ran the tests and said yes, something had happened, he didn’t know what, he didn’t know why. He didn’t know how long it would last. I should be cautiously optimistic. Miracles happen.

  That afternoon I told Jim the gig was up. He needed to move out and leave me to live or die in peace. He could have Helen and her miserable casseroles. All I wanted from him was the house and a sizable amount of money.

  Jim, who had gotten pudgy and pasty-faced from his nonstop diet of additive-laden, high-sodium casseroles, cried and told me how sorry he was. He didn’t know how it had happened, his falling in love with Helen while I was dying. He couldn’t believe it himself.

  Over the next week, he left in bits and pieces, forgetting the most essential items, like his shoes, almost as if he didn’t really want to go. When he and a friend from the newspaper came for the last things, the heavy things, and were carrying his desk out the front door, Jim missed the one step down, a step he’d taken up or down thousands, maybe millions of times. He broke his ankle in two places, threw up in the azalea bush next to the door. After taking Jim to the hospital, the friend, grim-faced and apologetic, came back and loaded the rest by himself. I held the door and warned him about the step.

  After the last load was out, I drove to the store and got some chicken and wine and garlic. Then I came home and poured myself a glass of cabernet and made myself some coq au vin, which I hadn’t done in a zillion years.