When asked, Meredith said she was an actress, and although her resume was a five-page, single-spaced listing of all the roles she’d played over the years in productions across the state, she knew actress didn’t describe it. Just as driving, which was what she was doing now, with her husband in the seat beside her, hardly fit the number of activities that made up that moment, only a fraction of which were related to the fact that her right foot pressed the gas pedal and her left foot hovered over the clutch in case she’d have to brake suddenly. Her hands were on the steering wheel and her eyes were sweeping the fields for signs of deer ready to bound out in front of her, but all of that was secondary. Primary was the thinking, remembering, talking, and regretting what she was talking about at the very same time she was uttering the words.
“You were so dazzled by all that glitz and show and just because they have the same kind of approach to medicine that you do, you sort of, I don’t know what happens to you.” I-messages, she was remembering. Put it in an I-message. “I don’t know what happens to you,” she said again, hoping that would suffice, and then she went right back to the accusations. “You relax or something. You just lie down and roll over and say yes to everything and you drag me into it and expect me to love them at first sight too and you’re totally oblivious to the fact that they’re despicable. They had nothing to talk about all weekend except the things they’ve bought. They’re consumers. Yes, they do alternative medicine, but they’re consumers first and foremost. Who cares about which kind of fucking bread machine? I hope you were bored,” she added.
“Watch it,” he said, because a tractor had just pulled onto the little two-lane road ahead of them.
She braked and then downshifted. “I see it.” But truthfully, she saw much more than the tractor that was pulling a round bale behind it. She saw the purple hills on either side of the valley, the black road cutting through the impossible green of spring fields that were suddenly naked after a blanket of snow, and the ribbon of mist made by the soft expirations of the newly plowed earth.
They could have taken the interstate, but Meredith liked Route 7, which passed through one small town after another, each with a tattered dignity that was different from the tattered dignity of the town just before it. She wanted to stop and get lunch or a cup of tea but each Main Street they came to was locked down, its store windows empty because customer was a word from the past.
“Were you?” she asked.
“Well, I will admit it wasn’t the most thrilling weekend I’ve ever had, but it was nice to get away and I liked seeing their place and I like them even though . . .”
“They’re really superficial,” she finished for him.
“We just hadn’t found the right things to talk about,” he explained in a voice that was patient from the many years of arguments like this one. “And with you slicing them up with your cold blue eyes, no wonder. Just relax. Give them a chance. Babs and Newlander . . . they do really great work, especially with diabetes, which is a huge problem around here.” He looked off to the horizon as though up in the low hanging clouds he could see it, diabetes, hanging like a blimp over the land.
“That couldn’t be his real name. What mother would name her son Newlander Forbes?”
Gregory didn’t hear the sarcasm. “An immigrant mother, one who had great hope for the new land she’d come to, that’s who. His mother was from Sicily.”
“Even so.”
“You’re impossible.”
“Only because you’re so gullible.”
She wished they could take Route 7 the whole way home, but the valley was now slowly and imperceptibly tilting them down into the flat plane where the city of Binghamton lay itself out like a drunken idiot and imposed bridges and highways and measureless amounts of concrete onto the riparian meadows of central New York. On the other side of Binghamton there was Elmira. Shopping centers, a tangle of signs. On the other side of Elmira the disastrous weekend at Babs and Newlander Forbes’s house came up again, but then they were traveling on the wider, straighter four-lane that so much more quickly brought them over to the western side of the state, and the old sympathies of their long married existence returned.
“It was awful, wasn’t it,” Gregory said finally. “What a mistake.”
And Meredith only kissed his cheek because he was driving and they were on another small road, this one taking them up through the hills to their own much higher valley and he had to be on the lookout for deer.
No, she wasn’t really an actress because she didn’t live in New York City or Los Angeles and she didn’t aspire to anything beyond the regional theater where there had been enough fine moments for her to have a following. But also, there was something else. Some kind of a wall. She wasn’t able to pass beyond a certain point. Her times “getting there” came and went; they couldn’t be counted on. And in the end they were only the occasional bright spots in a career that included many professional but uninspired performances. She’d never spoken about this to anyone, not even Gregory, because it would sound too bitter, too much like self-pity.
At thirty-one, she’d been an extraordinary Juliet to an adequate Romeo. Her secret was a technique she called mirroring, taking the passion she felt for her husband, back-dating it fifteen years, and directing it towards another man. At thirty-nine she’d been the nurse. Yet as the nurse there wasn’t anything to mirror.
‘Yea,’ quoth he, dost thou fall upon thy face?
Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit;
Wilt thou not Jule and by my holidam,
The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay.’
The woman who’d cackled over those lines had subtleties Meredith couldn’t reach. So she’d turned her into a buffoon and played for laughs rather than feeling.
At fifty-two she was the wife of Macbeth. That role too was close to her. She took the ordinary desire to tangle in a husband’s life and blew it up huge:
Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear.
In The Vagina Monologues, which she did the same year, she was “The Flood”:
Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953.
She was “on” for opening night, but after the reviews and congratulations, the sadness of the story trapped her and she could never again play the woman from the inside. Her empathy was too shallow; it was all used up the first night. And because she herself wasn’t a woman like that, and furthermore couldn’t imagine the private occasions that had created a woman like that, a certain squeamishness kept her outside the character. Still, she was a professional, so most people didn’t notice. But she knew, the director knew, and that’s what mattered.
Apart from acting, she was a cook and a gardener. She was also a bird watcher and had, with some success, become a student of bird language. And why not? She knew French already, but was she surrounded by people who spoke it? No. In the small rural outpost where Gregory had his practice, she was surrounded by birds.
Children might have helped. But they’d never gotten around to it. First, theater seasons had intervened and then there were Gregory’s loan payments from medical school. So it was the farmhouse that became the object of their mutual attentions. They fixed it up—remodel was a word Meredith would never use for fear of being lumped with people like the awful Forbeses—and now it was functional, though admittedly a bit odd. A large and luxurious bathroom replaced the cramped and ugly original that her character from the Monologues would have seen no reason to change.
They put a window over the soaking tub so they could look out on the wetlands, and on spring evenings they bathed and listened to nature’s opera, the “come hither” songs of male amphibians.
This evening, the wetlands would be sheeted with ice. The April weather had turned cold, so they carried armloads of firewood into the house along with their jackets and bags.
Home. Its familiar smell, the cat-clawed furniture, the dog-furred rugs. It was not a stylish place. Gregory kneeled at the woodstove in the chilly living room to start a fire, his comfortably pillowed and sweatered middle blocking the delicate structure he was building of paper, kindling, and logs. He held a match to it, and as the flame trembled he pursed his lips like a child at his birthday party and blew. It worked and soon the stove was throwing out heat. The drapes were closed against the night, soup was warming on the stove, and as they sat together and had their dinner, the two days they’d spent in the eastern part of the state were sealed over and forgotten.
But then it started. Wing beats in the wall behind the stove. How could a bird have fallen into a wall? Sometimes a grackle nested in the chimney and when the occasional one tumbled into the living room, flying in panic from rafter to rafter, they’d open the door for him to escape, but how could they rescue a bird in the wall? Hoping it would find a way out, they climbed the stairs to their bedroom. And lying side by side in the old iron bed frame, their heads cradled on familiar pillows, their hands clasped, they entered their separate dreams when suddenly over their heads there was scratching.
“Squirrels,” Gregory mumbled. They listened to them running between the joists until finally Gregory—because he was the one to do these things—heaved himself off the mattress, went downstairs, and returned with a broom, which he used to pound the ceiling. It worked. The squirrels got the message. But then, just as sleep was coming on, the sound began again. This time, Meredith turned to her side, draped her leg over her husband’s body, threw her arm across his chest, and hanging on as though she were rafting through an ocean of small disturbances, found her way back to the interrupted plot.
At 3:00 a.m. there was a new sound. They both woke up at the same time. In the exterior wall, something with very long teeth and an enormous appetite gnawed through the rigid insulation they’d installed last summer under the siding. “A rat,” her husband mumbled. “Everyone’s coming in because it got cold.”
At 4:45 Meredith gave up. Gregory’s breath had the steadiness of slumber, so very carefully she slid from the covers and tiptoed into the next room. When she turned on the light, the windows glared with accusing vacancy. She pulled a blanket around her nightgown and sat down in the upholstered chair.
It was 5:00 exactly when the birds began. She heard a song sparrow, a blue jay, a robin. Quietly, she lifted the window. Now she could hear a cardinal. As usual, it was singing loudest of all. But then the dull steady buzz of a chipping sparrow was just as loud. Meredith was puzzled. Both songs came from the same location. And now there was a robin at the very same spot. She counted the number of times the robin’s song was repeated and then she knew. Catbirds—but it was too early in the spring for catbirds—repeated songs once, and brown thrashers, the other mimics, repeated them twice. The songs she was hearing now were repeated four and five times, so it was the greatest mimic of them all, the mockingbird. They’d never had a mockingbird in their valley before.
At 5:30 when the light was general, she saw him, a gray bird with a long tail perched at the top of the spruce. Through the binoculars, his profile was distinct in the raw sun of early morning. She crouched below the sill and saw him tilt his head back, open his beak, and issue forth four times another bird’s song.
She watched as he imitated the loud commanding towhee and then the small, scolding wren. Each had equal complexity. There was no judgment, no slackening of enthusiasm.