3 ◆ Joan

THE MAN IN CHARGE of the gas station wore a green button that said

Jim

I Am Empowered

To Serve

You.

This made Joan think, as she had more and more lately, that something was happening to the country. It no longer had the solid feel of any place she was used to. Just the other night a man called the house to say that Joan’s family had been chosen from many potential applicants to receive a loan with which to pay down their debt. She pointed out that her family did not have any debt to speak of and that a loan, which was itself debt, could not be very accurately said to pay debt down. The caller replied that he was only reading what was put before him and that he did not wish to argue about the wording, which was not his.

“The pump won’t work,” she told Jim.

He was sawing open a cardboard box with a utility knife. Whether he was hostile or simply dedicated to his work was not for Joan to decide. Inside the box were cartons upon car- tons of cigarettes.

“When you put the credit card in, pull it out fast,” he said. “That’s what most people do wrong. They wait around and nothing happens.”

“I’m paying cash,” she said. “I’m just topping off my tank because tomorrow morning I have to drive to the airport. Can I pay you?”

The man frowned, a carton of Pall Malls in either hand. “After you pump, you can. Otherwise we don’t know how much you’re taking. And that’s nothing against you personally, but these days I’m afraid you have to suspect the worst of everyone. Treat them all as criminals and hope that somehow you might be wrong. To pay cash, here’s what you do: put in your card, and the pump will ask you ‘Cash or credit?’ and you push ‘Cash.’”

“I didn’t bring a card,” said Joan.

“Well, then it’s even simpler. All you have to do is push ‘Cash’ and then it will ask you ‘Credit or cash?’ and you push ‘Cash’ and ‘Enter’ simultaneously.”

“I did that,” said Joan. “I thought I did.”

“What’d the readout say?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the gray thing that gives you instructions.”

“I don’t know.”

“Obviously you’re not doing it right.” The man shoved the cigarette cartons into slots behind the counter.

“Can you help me?”

“I can’t leave the store,” said the man. “There is a toll-free number you can call.”

“Are you empowered to serve me or not?” said Joan.

“Well, I’m not supposed to, but I’ve seen you around. Just hold on a minute.”

Eventually the attendant pumped her gas and she paid. “Thank you, Jim,” she said.

On the way out of Chesley she saw thin white smoke climbing from the eaves of the house of a physician named Stephen Palomino. A ladder stood against the house, a half-timbered sprawl with a roof of red tile. Palomino himself was hurrying from the garage wheeling a hose trolley. Joan stopped the car in the road and got out.

“What is it, Steve?” she said.

Dr. Palomino parked the hose by a faucet on the side of the house. “I was stripping paint with a heat gun and now I think the house is on fire.” He dropped to the grass and groped for the coupling.

“Go up with the hose,” said Joan. “I’ll do this.”

She knelt and screwed the brass fitting onto the faucet as the doctor climbed the ladder. With her right hand gripping the valve of the faucet, she looked up and said, “Here it comes.”

The doctor fired a pistol nozzle at the overhang of the roof, but the spray was too fine.

“Take that off,” said Joan as cold water rained on her face. “Steve! Get rid of the nozzle!”

The hose twisted as the doctor wrenched the nozzle back and forth. “Clockwise, counterclockwise, I have no fucking idea,” he said, as if to himself. Joan was surprised to hear such language coming from a general practitioner, although come to think of it, she had heard him swear before. She looked away, and then the nozzle fell down and struck her on the shoulder.

“Sorry,” yelled the doctor, disappearing in smoke.

Joan rubbed her shoulder, waiting for the cloud to subside. “This is more like it,” said Dr. Palomino. “I’m going to drench the wood thoroughly.”

Joan looked at her car sitting in the road, lights on and motor running. She hoped that the fire had not penetrated the walls of the doctor’s fine old house. The heat gun lay on the grass by the hostas. Her teeth rattled involuntarily. At this moment every­thing seemed precarious. She wondered why random events sometimes carried so much meaning. Sheets of water ran down the wall. Then the doctor descended the ladder and helped her to her feet. He had tucked the end of the hose into the eaves trough so the water could run unattended.

“I’m glad you happened by,” said Dr. Palomino. “This is the second time we’ve helped each other.”

He meant the tornado they had survived years back, when Micah was three. The story made the newspapers because of the way the twister had blown Charles’s van, with Joan, Dr. Palomino, and Micah inside, through the wall of a silo. They rarely spoke about this now — it was embarrassing somehow — and Joan decided to think of it some other time.

“Forget heat guns,” she said. “Use chemical strippers.”

He kicked the gun into the plants. “I’m surprised they can even sell the damned things,” he said. “You’d think they’d be looking at a string of liability actions from sea to shining sea, if this is what happens. Of course, you have to use it right. But I can’t for the life of me think of anything I was doing that wasn’t strictly by the book.”

“Did you get my test results?” said Joan.

He closed his eyes. How many test results did he see on a given day? “I did. I did. And they’re nothing to worry about, as we say. Your swollen glands are just that — the temporary result of something.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” said Joan. “I can still feel them.”

Dr. Palomino touched both sides of her neck. “Let’s get you started on an antibiotic. There are some little blue ones I’ve been meaning to try. Right now, though, I need a drink. Are you going to be home tomorrow? I’ll bring a prescription over. I’ve always wondered where you live.”

“I’m going away for the weekend,” said Joan.

“Where will you be? I can call, or I can fax.”

She felt odd about naming the city and the hotel but reminded herself that he was her doctor and that everything should be aboveboard. The last thing she wanted was to be overtaken by some illness away from home. No doubt the prescription could be filled at some nearby pharmacy or perhaps at the hotel itself. She told him where she would be.

He repeated the name of the hotel — the Astrid — and said that he had never stayed there but had heard good things. She found his endorsement a little annoying. And then, as she turned to her car, he said the oddest thing. At least she thought he did, because she did not quite catch the remark, but it may have been “Oh, Joan, when are we going to get it on?” When she glanced back at the doctor he was turning the crank of the trolley to take up the slack in the hose. Joan drove away, puzzling over his comment, but realized with a reassuring laugh that what he had probably said was “Ah, Joan, how are we going to get along?” He must have been referring somehow to the unpredictable world in which they lived — a world in which small fires were ignited by accident and put out in haste and confusion — and nothing more.

When one is going away, it is normal to make some fleeting effort to help one’s partner. Even if nothing comes of it, the attempt settles the mind a bit for the departure, cleans the slate on which independent adventures may be written. So it was that Joan swung by Charles’s mother’s house in Boris after helping the doctor put out the fire in his eaves trough. That she suspected some token of intimacy had passed between herself and the doctor only made her more determined to act on Charles’s behalf. Then they would be even, although Charles would know about neither the possible remark nor its resolution in her mind.

Joan knocked on Colette’s door and watched through the glass as the old woman made her way across the room. Her hair was wild and white, and she carried a small iron dumbbell in one hand. Colette was known for having had three husbands die, as if this gloomy coincidence had brought her to a rare plane of existence, which maybe it had.

She’s the real thing, thought Joan, although she did not know what thing she meant.

“Come in,” said Colette. “I spent the day pulling up tomato plants and laying them on the brush pile, even though they’ve got the order on me not to.”

“Who does?”

Colette gestured vaguely with the hand that held the weight. “The town. They say it’s unsightly. But you can’t get anybody to come in here to take away brush. You can call them, and they say they’ll come, they’ll take a look, but they never do, why would they.”

“Charles and I would.”

“Why don’t you come tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s no good.”

“Well, make it soon. I’d like to get shook of it.”

She returned to her armchair and began raising and lowering the dumbbell. She asked if Joan had seen farmers in the fields on her way and then reminisced about how the combine had done away with the practice of tying corn into sheaves. The older women of the towns still measured their years by what the farmers were doing. Often there was a farm in their family history, and nearly as often that farm had disappeared into bigger operations. Abandoned houses were common, leaning toward the ground. These women must have known, as everyone did, that the towns had been cut loose from this condensed vitality, that the sowing and reaping taking place a mile away could be situated in the fields of California for all the good it did the towns. But Joan guessed they just chose not to think about it. And this made sense in a way, for by the time the towns were gone, these women would be too.

Joan said a prayer in her head: “Let the light fall equally on Colette as on her son and grandson and on Lyris, too. Let me underestimate not a single one, nay, let my faults be as visible to me as if they were under klieg lights. Grant that Meals on Wheels shall not be phased out but shall receive generous underwriting in our handful of days under the sun. Amen.”

Joan steered the conversation away from farming and gradually toward the gun that had belonged to Charles’s stepfather. Colette recounted the saving of the minister’s son. This was an old story to Joan, but she listened again. Colette could not understand after all these years how she had managed to catch up to the rolling car without slipping on the snowy street and falling under the wheels. She had put herself in danger, but it had been nothing more than she hoped anyone would have done for her children, Jerry, Tiny, and Bebe.

Tiny had been Charles’s nickname until eight years ago, when he had decided to put childish things aside. (It had to be eight years, because Micah was seven.) Joan had helped him choose which form of his given name he would use in this mature phase of his life. It seemed to Joan that in few decisions of such importance does the individual have complete freedom to choose, and so she had bidden him to take his time. Chuck was too stark, Charlie sounded like someone younger, Chas was out of the question . . . Charles it would be. And it was not long after Charles took his new name that Joan became pregnant with Micah. Experts would discount the connection, but Joan didn’t care, she considered nomenclature of the utmost importance. My name is Legion: for we are many.

Colette was still talking. There was a misunderstanding of how Charles had come to be called Tiny in the first place. This Joan had not heard before, and she told Colette to hold the story while she made coffee, as her eyes had chosen that moment to begin to ache for the want of caffeine.

Colette put down her weight and offered to make it herself, but Joan insisted, for she knew from experience what thin coffee her mother-in-law brewed. Colette could not help it; she had been born during the Depression, and lived still with remnants of a harsh childhood spent on the plains. A thirteen- ounce can of coffee lasted her weeks and weeks.

Joan went out to the kitchen to make the coffee. By the time she returned, Colette had fallen asleep. Joan touched her arm, and Colette stirred, ready to take up her story.

Charles’s stepfather had been drinking whiskey that night. He wandered outside to look at the sunset, leaving his glass half full on a TV table. When they found Charles, he was sitting on the floor beside three rubber lions and the empty glass. He was four years old at the time. Colette picked up the glass and asked Charles if he had drunk from it. The boy reached for the lions and said, “Family,” because he saw the three animals as mother, father, and cub.

Colette knelt beside Charles. “Did you drink from the glass?” she asked again.

“Tiny,” he said. “It’s tiny.”

No one but Colette knew what he meant. The whiskey had tasted like metal, like the tines of a fork.

“Tiney, he was saying, don’t you see?” Colette said. “Not tiny. Anyway, that’s the most I could make of it.”

“Poor little Charles,” said Joan.

“He was hammered,” said Colette. “But he wasn’t little. Even then he was a good solid boy.”

Joan gulped coffee. “What do you think about the gun? Maybe if you talked to Farina Matthews.”

And say what? Colette wanted to know. She had never gone begging to her neighbors and was not about to begin at this late date.

Dr. Palomino wandered through the cool hallways of his house, drinking scotch from a glass. He stood for a long time in the attic. The air was a little smoky. His family was out of town, having gone to see a production of Peter Pan. The water made a full and steady sound as it ran in the eaves trough. The doctor wondered whether he had actually asked that risky closing question or only considered it. But Joan had looked back; he’d said it all right. A doctor could not keep quiet — giving opinions was the essence of medical practice. Still, there was no need to give opinions on whom to get it on with, especially these days, when one never knew when one would be hauled before some hastily assembled review board. But if anyone would understand his carelessness in time of crisis, it would be Joan. The house had been on fire and he had let down his guard. He absolved himself, decided to move on.

Expectation gathered in his chest, ascended, and expanded in the hollow of his head. He had a destination, and the place seemed to know he did. Bookhaven sent a homing signal from across town: Come to me, Dr. Palomino. Resistance was necessary, it was part of the fun. Like a mummy called from the tomb, he walked, dragging bandages. Actually, he drove. Bookhaven was a pornographic book store run by a married couple named Gus and Loretta. The windows were painted hospital green. The doctor wore sunglasses and enjoyed the pathetic disguise as he prowled along the gauntlet of bright skin magazines. Never heavy, the doctor felt lighter still in the shop of filthy publications. Gus set up the projector in the back room, thirty dollars for the half-hour. What was thirty dollars to a doctor? Once he saw a four-thousand-dollar telescope on television, picked up the phone, and took delivery the next day. He used it once, to look at a cardinal on the clothesline.

The film was called Sandra’s Teeth. He had seen it many times.

It is a silent film. A woman wearing a sundress sits in the waiting room of a dentist’s office. This is Sandra. A receptionist looks up and speaks. The screen fills with printed words, white on a black background: What’s the problem, miss? Sandra smiles, revealing teeth so perfect they emit light. The receptionist’s eyes widen as she backs away from the desk, overturning her chair. It is all a little overdone. It is supposed to be overdone. She edges along the wall, disappears through a doorway. Sandra closes her mouth without losing the smile. Her eyes are calm and lustrous, and her hands settle in her lap.

Joan and Lyris were standing by the car in the dark when Micah came out to apologize for locking Lyris in the barn. He cried easily, so he would never be disturbed about anything for very long. Then it was Lyris’s turn to confess: she had worn a dress from Joan’s trunk and torn it, and she had broken the doors. Joan regarded her children fondly. Subconscious resentment, she thought. They are piling it on because I’m leaving. Yet she luxuriated in her capacity to forgive, to set their troubled minds to rest. Never does a person have so much power as when absolving children of their errors. Some parents, she knew, let the guilt of the children be, let it fester; how foolish they were to forfeit the chance. And children, of course, had very little capacity to release a parent’s guilt. It was a weight they could not manage. She put her arms around their shoulders and shepherded them to the house. Micah slipped away to play El Mono. The green dress lay by the suitcase on the kitchen table.

“I wore this in a workshop production of Into the Quagmire,” Joan told Lyris. “‘But what about me? When does my time come? When, Mr. Johnson? Tomorrow? The day after? In a fortnight?’ That was my big speech. Your father played the role of Mr. Johnson.”

“What was he like?”

“He had a graceful way of getting around the stage,” said Joan. “He would be in one place, and then he would be in another, just like that. He had false teeth, from a childhood injury. He was an idealist. He said he would never own property.”

“Did he know that I was born? Did he come and see me?”

Joan closed the tear in the sleeve so that the yellow backing could no longer be seen beneath the green. “He came to see you. But there was a documentary filming in Calgary and he had to go away.”

“What was it about?”

“I forget. Hydroelectric power or something like that.”

“Why didn’t you keep me?”

Joan took Lyris’s hands in her own. “‘Lo, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly: but these sheep, what have they done?’”

“Tell me in your words.”

“I’d rather not.” She released her daughter’s hands. “I mean, there are things I could say, and they’re probably even true, but they would sound false, saying them now. That I was young and alone, that I was mixed up — where do I get off saying such things? ‘Sinned’ and ‘done wickedly’ cover the subject pretty well.”

They sat for a long time without talking. Then Joan picked up her suitcase and carried it toward the door. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“A man came through the yard tonight,” said Lyris. “He had a metal detector and he’d been in the woods.”

Joan turned. “An old man?”

“No.”

“You be careful.”

“I didn’t mean to ruin your dress.”

“We can fix it. Don’t worry. Anything in that trunk is yours to wear.”

“Where’d you get it all?”

“When I left the theater, they told me to take whatever I wanted,” said Joan. “I guess it was their way of thanking me.”

Actually, she had taken the clothes without asking. But she couldn’t in good conscience tell her daughter that.

The dentist wears a white coat and thick black glasses. He directs Sandra to stand on a scale while he takes pictures. She hesitates, covering her mouth with her hands, but then loses her shyness. The dentist clicks away with a box camera. He works urgently, as if on the brink of a finding. Then he puts the camera on a desk and a dialogue panel appears on the screen: Get undressed! She looks leery, but he points to the diplomas on the wall and she relents: Oh well . . . if it’s for ­science. She unbuttons the dress and steps out of it, revealing an undershirt, a short slip. The dentist takes more pictures. Then he brings a small black music box down from a cupboard. He winds the spring, opens the cover, and places the box on a desk. A small ballerina turns slowly. Sandra shakes her head — this dentist must be out of his mind! — but even as she is thinking this, her body begins to move. The dentist takes his clothes off and joins her in an ardent dance. He lifts her over his head, lowers her lightly to the floor. She arches her long back and dashes around the examination room with her arms expressively behind her. This is Dr. Palomino’s favorite part of the movie.