Bliss and Other Short Stories Part 5

When I hear the last of Joellen's people leaving-when the singing stops-I take off my headphones and go down to the kitchen. Jo-ellen is putting some gla.s.ses into the sink; she hums a gospel tune as she squeezes a stream of dish soap into the hot water, and sweet, scalded citrus perfumes the air. Her steel-string guitar leans against the table, an upright lady with hard, lacquered hips. When I scratch my fingernails across the strings, Joellen turns to me and smiles.

Joellen always looks sleepy and elated after one of her meetings. I take this as proof of a great burden-or, at least, an overabun-dance-of a kind of happiness I simply don't understand. I have seen other faces stirred by the distress of a single, powerful emo-tion and one, closer to home, by the toxins of insanity. But Joellen's face is transformed-made radiant-by nothing more complicated than the presence of divine love.

"Beth," she says. "I hope you weren't disturbed. It was a good one tonight."

"I wasn't disturbed."

Joellen nods. She retrieves gla.s.ses, swabs them with a dishcloth and sets them in rows on the drainboard. "You should join us some night. If you want to, I mean. You're invited." "Oh I know!" I say, hating the bright tone I use with her. "May-be I will."

But I know I won't.

It's not just because I don't believe-I struggle, at difficult mo-ments in my life, to believe in something-but because, unlike Jo- ellen, I'm not saved. Though lost, I don't feel I'm even a candidate for search and rescue. Keeping my own counsel (and counseling myself rarely), my idea of heaven, when I look up, is a fall sky pierced by a wavering arrow of Canada geese, making their way in a clam or of intuitive wisdom. They, at least, always seem to know where they're going.

But then, so does she.

I met Joellen when I answered her ad requesting a roommate. I'd moved in with a stranger once before-a woman in her twenties, same as me-but hadn't liked it: she was a complete slob and there wasn't enough privacy, besides. So I was relieved when Joellen walked me through her s.p.a.cious apartment in the big turn-of-the century house. She took me upstairs, showing me a long, carpeted hallway, a bathroom, and the two bedrooms. There was a little room at the end of the hall Joellen used, she said, for sewing and knitting and for "less temporal" kinds of contemplation.

"Really?" I asked, interested. "Like TM?"

I had tried meditation: By night, mantric syllables floated through a revolving door in my mind. But eventually I gave it up (as I give up most things), preferring to let my thoughts drift, unblocked and unaltered, toward oblivion.

Joellen smiled. She lifted a loop of golden hair away from her face and I was embarra.s.sed, suddenly: I'd apparently asked something personal. Then I got a feeling-a premonition.

"Meditation, sure-and prayer. Do you pray?" she said.

"Well, not really," I replied, thinking Oh, G.o.d. "Not if you mean pray pray." She continued to smile at me, and I made a business of looking around the room. The little there was to see-white, un- adorned walls, high ceiling, one small gothic window tucked into the eave-confirmed the fleeting impression I had had upon enter ing: this was a nun's room. A cell.

Back downstairs, Joellen faced me with folded arms. "I'm born again," she said. "Not a church lady, though." Grinning, guiding me to the door: "It's not a requirement and I don't proselytize. But think about it. Call me when you've made your decision."

As I walked to my car I felt certain-a certainty born out of envy of whatever appears to be certain in others-that as a maker of de cisions, Joellen had it all over me: what to embrace, how to live; things I couldn't get my arms around. I settled myself into the cold car, feeling a bitter affinity with the iron-cold steering wheel, the dim windows, the engine that hung onto its cold-weather cranki ness all year.

But-after an hour and a half at home, I called Joellen and told her I'd be glad to move in as soon as possible. *

Joellen's friend Julian is over. Joellen is chopping celery and carrots for stock. I've already cracked the chicken bones and got them boil ing and Julian's sitting at the kitchen table, strumming his guitar.

He's working on a new song about Jesus-not the watchful Jesus I encountered in catechism cla.s.ses at Saint Theresa's but a strangely unambitious Christ with an exposed, burning heart; a Jesus who, in Julian's phrases, waits, ever patient, at the threshold of a closed door.

Julian doesn't talk about the life he led before being saved, but his face, spoon-narrow and sandblast-clean of what must have been a plague of acne, looks a perfect portrait of dissolution purified. And his voice, as if to compensate for a backslider's mumbles, hits you with an evangelist's lung-power: a nearly white mustache bristles in the wind of his zeal.

"I'm real pleased to meet you," he shouted when we were intro duced. "Real, real pleased." He held my arms just above the elbows and sort of shook me, as if expecting fruit to fall from my upper branches. After that, I'd try to arrange it so that we said h.e.l.lo from across the room.

Joellen found this strategy transparent-and amusing. "Julian's a wild man," she said between gulps of laughter. "The boy's a pea- picker."

In truth, I was annoyed Joellen had noticed my jitters: I'd been threading my way through her friends as I would have worked the shallow, muddy waters of a pond in my bare feet, poised to leap away from any touch of clinging Christian pa.s.sion. But while I appreci ated their respectful distance and charitable smiles (on behalf of my smudged soul?), I also felt a puzzling-and paradoxical-disappoint ment at feeling left out. I noticed how they were with one another: unironical, genuinely cool, gentle. So-didn't I count? Wasn't I the perfect candidate for some of this love, despite my armor?

"Of course you count," Joellen says. We've moved upstairs and are sitting in opposite corners of the couch beneath the gothic window in what I've begun to call (to myself) the Last Supper Club. Joellen's knitting is in her lap. Downstairs, Julian struggles with his song, his skinny voice as abrasive as the smell of simmer ing stock.

"Of course you count. But people don't expect you to be some- one else. You're you." Joellen shrugs to show me how simple this is.

"You're Beth." She reaches over and takes my hands in hers and I flush like a child; I register a child's mixed feelings of pleasure and alarm at being seized.

"I know," I say, lamely. I lower my eyes but feel Joellen's on my face like a light.

Joellen pulls another heap of wheat-colored wool from her bag and resumes knitting. My hands, left to their own devices, are idle, so I weave the fingers into a knot, take a breath, and begin to tell her about my sister, Lauren.

This is the story I tell: *.

Lauren's three years younger than I am and lives at home. She sleeps (we think) between two and four hours a night and spends her days pacing the house, smoking, and ranting. If she comes to the dinner table at all, she brings a book and reads instead of eating. She seems to live mostly on snacks. Medication keeps her semi-normal, but she'll never be right.

"Never right-if you want to put it that way," one of her first doc-tors told us. "But manageable, certainly." My mother and father and I were sitting in his office at Mercy Hospital. Lauren was incarcer-ated, at that time, in a distant wing of the building.

Lauren had been unmanageable, more or less, since she was fif-teen. It began with prolonged fits of weeping followed by week-long silences, and nightmares from which she seemed unable to fully awaken. In photographs, she seems to shrink toward the edge of the frame, her face raw with fear, alert to a kind of suffering the camera cannot help but catch.

"Well, for G.o.d's sweet sake," my father said. "Manageable? What the h.e.l.l does that mean? She's only just turned seventeen."

Mother sat quietly, hands folded, her gaze resting lightly on the doctor-no doubt, erasing him. She would hire another doctor. Then another.

"I wish I had better news," the doctor said. "I really do. But schizo-phrenia tends to deepen." He frowned. "I can give you that she'll have periods of lucidity, but it's in the nature of this disease, in the long run, to be unpredictable, and degenerative."

(Lauren's nonstop talking, her rages, her disappearing act after she's spit her pills into the trash for a few days running: very un-predictable. Her long, one-sided conversations with Jimi Hendrix: very deep.) But Lauren does indeed have her lucid moments-lucid but skewed, full of random sharpness.

One morning when I was still living at home, Lauren came into my bedroom carrying two mugs of tea. Placing these on the bed-side table, she flipped on the light. I don't usually get up at five but I struggled to sit up, accepted the mug of tea Lauren thrust at me, and waited while she smoothed the sheets and rearranged the blan-ket over my knees. I couldn't see her eyes-Lauren always wears shades-but a smear of dark flesh showed beneath the black rim of each lens: two half-moons in negative, proof of my sister's enforced vigilance, the stamp of her virtual sleeplessness.

And then she did something that splashed me like a spray of sleet: she smiled-the smile that I had nearly forgotten, and missed, and which squeezed my heart now, painfully.

"Hydroponics," Lauren said. "I've been thinking about it all night. You can grow things without putting them into the ground. Think of it!" She drank some of her tea, fumbled a cigarette out of the pocket of her robe, and lit up. "Think of it."

"Sounds good," I said.

"Sounds good to you now, but who knows how you'll feel about it later?" The smile was gone. "In six weeks, when summer is here, how will you feel then? I know plants belong to the earth. Is it wrong to subvert nature, or so common that we simply don't see it? I won't always be able to live here, not after Mom and Dad are dead. This house is so small." Lauren stared into her cup, drew it close, and puffed a little smoke into it, thickening the luxuriant steam. "I'm going to grow vegetables hydroponically and live off them. I'm not going to kill any more animals. I refuse-"

She looked toward the still-darkened window and moved her head slowly from side to side; too slowly for wonder, too slowly, almost, to signal a negation.

"I'm so worried," she whispered.

"What about, baby?"

"Oh, vegetables and fruits. How the s.p.a.ce keeps changing in this house, stuff like that." She took a deep drag and dropped the half-smoked cigarette into her cup. "My room's just about ready for hy-droponic gardening. If I had more windows, more sunlight, I'd be set. I'd never have to leave the house. I wouldn't have to worry about dirt or drought or root suffocation. But it's wrong."

"What is, Laurie?" I took a sip of Lauren's bitter tea and braced myself for the ride.

"The roots. The prairie. They're living creatures, you know. There's no difference in things. Like in Kafka's story: it wasn't revulsion or piety or even purity, it was that the hunger artist couldn't find what he liked to eat. Think of that. If he had, he would've stuffed himself. And the pictures I've seen-you can see everything: in hydropon- ics, the roots hang down in the water, floating like tentacles, they glisten like intestines. Nothing is hidden. You think it is, but it isn't.

It can't ever be. That's where we're wrong. That's where the hunger artist was wrong."

I felt myself pulling away from her craziness. Perfectly natural- but there was a stain on it, a smear of infidelity.

"Laurie," I said. "Baby. It's okay. I'll always be here even if-"

Lauren put her fingers over my lips.

"Listen to me," she said. "Nothing is hidden forever. Hiding means disappearing and then reappearing, an inside-out thing.

You think it's difference, and growth, but it isn't. It's all one thing.

And one day you look in the mirror and don't know who the h.e.l.l you are. Trust me."

Lauren stood up, smoothed the place where she'd been sitting and collected the cups. "Or don't," she said. In a few minutes I heard her running the water for the first of her half dozen daily showers.

I finish my story. Joellen has added two inches to the arm of the sweater she's knitting, and now she lets her hands drop into her lap. "Lord," she says, and looks at me. "You will hate me for what I am going to say."

"No! I wouldn't-"

"Beth, it's all for the good."

I am lost, and I say so.

"Everything that happens-even the bad things, maybe even es pecially the senseless, evil things-they're for the good."

I told my boyfriend, Hank, that I was feeling unsure about where our relations.h.i.+p was going; and I hedged by adding that I needed some time to figure that out, when in reality I didn't really need any time-I knew it was all but over. We'd met on a blind date and after two months I felt we were going nowhere special. Not that I blamed him; he hadn't been any more particular than I had. But I would have liked it if he'd wanted me more-or wanted more of me, and been willing to dig for it. The fact that he didn't, that we seemed rapidly to be approaching the status of people who smile and nod and move on when they meet in the supermarket-that made me so sad. To save my own feelings, I turned it on him.

Hank looked mournful. "It's my fault," he said. "I know it is."

"No," I said. "It's no one's fault. Really."

"You're mad, aren't you?"

I waited to speak until the surge of guilty anger had pa.s.sed. "No," I said. "But, Hank, I'm going to get mad pretty soon."

He nodded. "I knew it."

We were sitting in his truck in the parking lot of a hill-town cow-boy bar called the Ranch Hand. Every time the door opened, smoke and noise spewed into the night. Two men stumbled out now and wandered to the side of the building. They unzipped, then p.i.s.sed against the Ranch Hand's yellow-painted cinderblock. One of the men rested his forehead against the wall and groaned while the oth-er laughed and sang along with the music that thumped through the wall.

Hank said, "Those guys could use the john. They don't have to come out here."

"They probably just like the wide-open s.p.a.ces," I said, feeling un-reasonably cross. "Where the buffalo roam and all that."

"You really are mad, aren't you?"

"Maybe I am. Maybe you should just take me home."

Which is what I wish I'd said the week before.

On that night, we'd stayed at the bar until eleven o'clock, then driven-both of us more than a little drunk-over to Sawmill Falls. The falls begin as a noisy stream that widens as it runs steeply down-hill through the woods. There's a pool at the site of the old sawmill, about halfway to the bottom. With the fluid confidence of the ine-briated, I ran ahead of Hank and found the place.

A tremendous, frightful torrent of water lashed through the trees, white in the moonlight, but the pool itself was a deep, dark, open eye. Kicking off my boots, leaving my clothes where they dropped, I leaped into s.p.a.ce, pulling my knees tight against my b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the last moment and cannonballing into the water.

An ice-blade of sobriety sliced through the alcohol as I dropped into the middle of the pool's cold, dark silence. Then the small of my back crunched on sand and I kicked free of the ball I'd made of my body. Pus.h.i.+ng off hard, I arrowed to the surface. Hank was ap-proaching the ledge I'd jumped from.

"Come on in, the water's freezing," I called.

Ignoring this, Hank gathered my clothes together.

"Hey! Don't wrinkle that blouse," I yelled. "I spent all afternoon ironing it."

"Sorry."

"Ha-ank, I'm jo-king," I sang.

"Okay."

"Why don't you come in? I'll show you how to do the back-stroke," I said, and demonstrated: flipping onto my back, I glided to the opposite side on long, elegant strokes. By the time I'd wiped the water from my eyes, Hank was lighting a cigarette, his face flar-ing paper-white in the lighter's flame.

"Hey, cowboy," I shouted across the water. "Get your boots off. This offer expires at midnight."

Hank peered into the dimness of the forest but there was no one to see or hear us.

"Hank," I called, "please come swimming with me."

Hank slowly took off his jacket to my cheers and catcalls. But- "You can use this to dry off with," he said, dropping his jacket on the rocks. "Come on, Beth. Come on, now. You're drunk."

My arousal totally chilled, I inched back across the pool frog-wise and climbed onto the ledge. Hank had turned away primly, just as if he'd never seen me naked. And considering that we've always made love in the dark, I thought, maybe he never really has. I picked up his jacket and brushed it over my body, observing as I did so Hank's back, a dry expanse of white cotton with a single curlicue of dark piping lazing between the shoulder blades: the s.h.i.+rt was a gift from me. I slipped on my underwear and jeans and slicked the hair from my face.

"Okay, honey, I'm decent now," I said. "I don't know what came over me."

"h.e.l.l, that's all right," Hank said, and turned around.

Which is when I placed my hands on his chest and pushed him into the water. *

I finish browning hamburger and onions and pour canned toma toes and beans over them, then add chili powder, ground c.u.min, red pepper. The sound of guitars drifts down from upstairs; Joellen's and Julian's voices penetrate the Last Supper Club's closed door: a fervent and painful harmony.

"They're pretty bad," Hank says from his seat at the table. He smiles, looking hangdog, and I know he thinks it'd be nice if I agreed. But I don't; in fact, I surprise myself by taking offense at his remark: what business is it of his?

And why am I cooking dinner for this guy?

Ever since I nearly drowned Hank at the falls-I did not know he couldn't swim, and in fact I had to jump in and pull him out- I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to close him out of my life in less lethal ways. At the moment, though, he's stuck to my hull like a barnacle.

Joellen walks into the kitchen holding an empty gla.s.s in each hand.

"Something smells wonderful. h.e.l.lo, Hank, what's new?"

Considerable shuffling from Hank's corner. I smile into the pot and throw in some black pepper. I wonder if Hank realizes he doesn't have to work for an answer here. When he speaks, I remember that his shyness, his wanting to do and say the right thing, is what I first noticed, and liked, about him.

"Oh, you know. This and that," he says. "Listen, by the way, I wanted to ask you about something. I've been reading about near- death experiences? You know, when people die for a few minutes and then come back?"