The end and beginnings of beings are unknown.
We see only the intervening formations.
Then what cause is there for grief?
SHRI KRISHNA
When Jane McAllister wakes at 3:00 a.m., she hears a faint groaning from the closet. She knows it’s the coat hangers.
The whispery moaning from the closet is neither a delusion brought on by her loneliness in Hope Springs, Oklahoma, nor a frightening spectre from the twilight zone. Rather, there is a scientific basis for the sound. Jane can now hear the murmurs of wire hangers; she has become receptive to sounds she might once have blocked out, just as canines can hear a dog whistle while their human masters cannot.
She has read that when the weight of clothing on wire hangers makes them sag, the hangers emit ultra-low-frequency sounds, deep moans and groans. Some sci-fi writer might spin a yarn about a woman who goes mad listening to coat hangers, but Jane does not feel as if she’s losing her sanity. No: she feels a bit like she did when she ate peyote buttons once with her chums in college and could see and hear everything for a few hours—could see the molecules whirling in the surfaces of tables, could see the rich blue paint that decades before had covered the walls but was now hidden beneath several coats of white.
A twinge tugs at her abdomen, and when Jane slides a hand under her nightgown, she thinks she feels a knot there, just above and to the left of her navel. Cancer? Probably not, she decides—cancer is not a disease of her family. More likely she could have a benign ovarian cyst or a simple polyp on her colon. But what if the lump is a fetus in fetu, like the horrid thing she saw the other night on the Discovery Channel?
One can live her whole life without knowing that inside her body are the remains of her own monstrous twin. The TV program explained that sometimes when a woman is pregnant with twins, early in the gestation period one fetus fails to develop, but rather than being expelled from the mother’s body, the stunted fetus is absorbed into the body of its twin, sometimes ending up in the abdominal cavity of the other baby. The absorbed twin has no brain but lives on as a mindless parasite, sucking life from its twin like a grotesque human tapeworm. The program depicted an eight-year-old boy who had a suspicious growth removed from his abdomen. The growth contained vestigial body parts: teeth, long black hair, flipperish partial hands and feet. The brainless growth with its long hair looked like a cross between a pile of gruesome detritus and a cannibal tribe’s shrunken head.
Jane lies there for a long time in the dark, her hand passing again and again over the thickness in her abdomen. Does she feel it move? She can almost see her twin, her mindless doppelgänger, its blind eyes staring in the dark.
After breakfast, Jane goes out into the garden to water the rear lawn. The woman who lives in the house behind hers pops out her own kitchen door and calls hello. Jane nods to her. Though she wishes to be neighborly, she knows she has never been particularly adept at making small talk. She figures the neighbors are probably curious about the California transplant who lives alone, reputedly a psychologist of some kind and the only registered Democrat on her block. She imagines they might make fun of her behind her back, suspecting “overly educated” people of snootiness.
Once she has placed the sprinkler in the center of the lawn, she heads back to the house, but just before her hand touches the doorknob, Jane hears a raspy greeting from the old lady who lives next door.
“Pretty day, isn’t it?”
Jane acknowledges that indeed the day is pleasant and adds, “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” the neighbor says, “but we had a terrible scare with Earl.”
Earl is the woman’s husband, a stoic-faced man who comes and goes in a pickup truck, a ball cap shading his weathered face.
“A scare?” Jane turns to the woman, sees loneliness and fear in her expression.
“He had a heart attack,” she says. “It’s a merkle he’s alive.”
Jane knows the woman actually said “miracle.” She learned this after awkwardly asking, “Excuse me?” the first few times she heard Oklahomans pronounce the word as “merkle.”
“I’m sorry, I had no idea,” Jane says, which is true. She has not heard an ambulance in the neighborhood recently; maybe the poor soul was stricken at the wheel of his truck. She does not ask for details, aware that she has to see clients at the clinic in half an hour.
“It’s a merkle” is a phrase Jane now hears daily, a refrain that resounds in Oklahoma like an ever-present echo. In Oklahoma a miracle seems to happen every twenty minutes. If a doctor performs a medical procedure that saves a patient’s life, the result is considered not the logical outcome of the treatment but rather a merkle. If a tornado highballs through the county but misses one’s own house, that close call is attributed not to chance but to a merkle. One sees knots of praying people on the television news every evening, praying for a merkle for this or that terminal patient or lost cause. When the merkle fails to materialize, the faithful in Jane’s new home state purse their lips and proclaim, “Everything happens for a reason.” Jane opens the back door to her house, pauses, and says, “Is your husband all right now?”
“We think so,” the neighbor says. “At times like this, I pray. I pray and pray.”
“I hope that works for you,” Jane says. She observes an instantaneous look of shock on the woman’s face. Jane realizes too late that, as far as this elderly Oklahoma Baptist is concerned, she might as well have said Eat Shit and Die. She suddenly regrets the sticker she ordered from a catalogue and just this week attached to the bumper of her car: STOP PRAYING AND DO SOMETHING. Jane hears the woman’s screen door slam.
Jane cannot help herself, she says a little prayer: Please, please, please, not another entire day of nothing but eating disorders. Already late for the clinic, when she approaches her car in the driveway she sees immediately that both rear tires are flat. She bends to examine one. Quite clearly the tire has been slashed. She wonders who would slash her tires and whether it was simply random vandalism. But then she sees that the rear window of her car has been soaped, and scrawled in soap letters is a crude 666. She has apparently been designated the neighborhood Antichrist. The stop-praying-and-do-something sticker has been revised by a black marker to read START PRAYING AND DO SOMETHING. If the sticker was intended to send a message to the community, the sticker revision and the sixes have sent her a return message: We don’t want your kind here. Rather than praying for a miracle, she calls triple-A.
Jane sits in the waiting area of the service station while her car’s rear tires are replaced, thinking that one thing she truly appreciates about Oklahoma is that—unlike San Francisco—it still has full-serve stations. Not only do uniformed attendants rush out to pump the gas and wash the car’s windows, but they actually offer to vacuum out the car, gratis. Each time she drives into a gas station here, she has the pleasant feeling of being in a time warp. She remembers sitting in the backseat of her family’s old Buick, smelling the intoxicating fumes of Shell, listening to her father chat with a white-capped attendant while hearing in the background the bonking sounds of heavy glass Coca-Cola bottles being released from coolers in the station.
After her car is outfitted with two new tires, Jane pulls the vehicle into the full-service aisle to get some gas. The attendant who pumps her gas gives her a strange look as he gestures at the 666 on her back window and calls out, “Can I wash that off for you?”
“Please,” she replies, forcing a smile and offering no explanation. As he scrubs off the numerals, he spies the ♥ “I San Francisco” frame around the license plate and approaches the driver’s side window, asking, “Are you from California?”
“Born and bred,” Jane says, then feels herself flush at the word “bred,” which seems a bit graphic.
“Were you ever attacked by birds?”
For a moment, Jane does not know how to reply to this astonishing inquiry. Finally she simply answers, truthfully: “I was viciously pecked in the head once by a huge black bird—a starling or a crow. I guess I was too near its nest.”
He nods, and Jane suddenly gets it. The guy must have seen Hitchcock’s The Birds on Turner Classics. He has no concept of what California is like, other than from movies and TV. To him, Jane’s home state is an alien land where savage avian attacks can happen anytime.
When Jane arrives home from the clinic, exhausted by six hours of bulimics, she catches a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror and is startled. Her face is simultaneously familiar and strange, and she pauses to look more closely. Maybe it’s just the hair, she figures—her hair is today giving her a strange appearance. In an attempt at frizz control, she became carried away with the flat iron, and now her hair is overly straight and sticks out at the bottom in an artificial manner. Her hair is balky even at its best, but in its fried-straight mode today, it looks like the hair one sometimes sees on African American women: coarse, artificially broom-straw straight, the ends sticking out from overuse of hot combs.
She sees that she looks a bit wild-eyed. Has she taken too much decongestant, or did she accidentally double up on her hormone tablets?
Only two days ago she saw a program about wild-eyed zombies in Haiti. The camera followed two live humans, lurching across the television screen, who were described by the narrator as zombies—not as “so-called zombies” or “zombie-like,” but flat-out zombies. Her hand stilled on the remote control when she heard that one. Zombies, weren’t they mythical creatures or figments? Why was the word “zombie” coming from the mouth of a network journalist? It seemed there were people in Haiti who died, were buried, but later came up out of their graves and walked among their neighbors, with vacant, dark-pupiled stares in their eyes, living but not quite with us. Do zombies breathe? Are they spirits, per se? Jane knows that the Latin word for “breath” is spiritus, so to be a spirit is in fact to breathe.
The program informed viewers that there was some basis in reality for the zombie phenomenon. Local witch doctors created the zombies to serve their own needs. First the medicine man chose a victim to poison—usually a local miscreant of some sort, a thief or an adulteress. After the wrongdoer was publicly excoriated for the crime, the shaman secretly administered a potion, one that immediately propelled the victim into a coma so deep it mimicked death. Tetrodotoxin extracted from the puffer fish was so virulent that, with a very low dose, the poisoned person was instantly paralyzed. This much Jane can easily believe, as she herself has twice been poisoned by something as benign as swordfish consumed in a tony restaurant. Each time, she ate a fresh and tasty seafood meal, but within hours she fell suddenly asleep, actually slumping over, laying her head down and falling into a deep slumber, like the guests at the party in Sleeping Beauty.
Shortly after his victims were buried, the Haitian witch doctor would return in the dark to the graves and exhume them. More often than not, the victims were still alive, remaining comatose. A couple of days later they would wake, stand, and walk, often with a vacant look in their eyes. As with other forms of suspended animation—be it from freezing in an ice pond or from cardiac arrest—loss of oxygen to the brain often resulted in damage to that organ. Some of the dug-up sinners returned to their communities, chastened and nicely frightened into compliance, but others were little more than dead bipeds on the move.
Toward the end of the month, Jane usually finds herself in the local Walmart. When she runs out of money, she economizes by shopping here, though she dislikes buying from this megachain. She takes out her checkbook to pay for a box of Sudafed, after first signing a form as if she were some sort of registered sex offender. Oklahoma, per the recent national trend, has outlawed over-the-counter sale of pseudoephedrine, one of the meth-cooking ingredients. One now has to face down the pharmacist and go on record before being allowed to relieve her own nasal congestion. After she writes a check, the amount appears on a lighted display above the cash register, along with the flashing words Waiting on approval. She cannot help herself, she points to the lighted letters and says to the pharmacy associate, “That sign is incorrect. It should say waiting for, not waiting on.” The clerk simply stares at Jane, his facial expression flickering between disinterest and malice.
Now the store’s PA system blares forth: “Surprise Dad with new power tools for Father’s Day! Our biggest sale of the year is taking place right now!” Oh, sweet Jesus, next Sunday is Father’s Day. If Valentine’s Day was once the most painful day of the year, this has now changed for the worse. All one needs for a really, really swell Father’s Day is for one’s own father to have committed suicide. Not only is she reminded again, as she is in some manner every day, that she no longer has a father, but there are of course the unspoken words from her father’s grave: I’d rather be dead than stay alive for a daughter like you.
As she leaves the pharmaceuticals department, Jane passes the greeting card section, where clumps of shoppers, primarily women, huddle around the Father’s Day cards, reaching over each other’s heads to select exactly the right message for dear old Dad.
Jane is bushwhacked by a devastating memory of something long forgotten. She sees herself as she was then, in her twenties, not yet married, browsing through racks of Father’s Day cards. An attractive man was standing next to her, also looking at cards, and Jane said, “Gee, it’s hard to find the right Father’s Day card when you can’t stand your father.” The man laughed appreciatively and gave her an appraising glance, and Jane blushed, proud of her irreverence. Even then, she was well on her way to becoming a Goneril or Regan, one of Lear’s bad daughters. And had not her father indeed gone blind like Lear, and had he not gone mad? Would it have killed her to be more like Cordelia, a better daughter—could she not have troubled herself to buy a loving Father’s Day card for the man who sired and supported her? But no, she was too busy being a rebellious little shit, too busy making what she thought were witty remarks as she flirted.
“Show Dad how much you care!” the PA system now exhorts.
She notices that she is shuffling from the bedroom to the kitchen. Yes, I shuffle, she acknowledges, listening to the swish-swish of the soles of her slippers as she slides like a geriatric case along the hardwood floors on the way to the stove for another cup of coffee. Christ, she does not even have the spirit to pick up her feet.
At the table, she flips to the obits as is her daily habit. She often jokes that her Irish blood drives her to do so: her mother always wryly referred to the obituaries as “the Irish sports page.” In any case, Jane can count on the newspaper to get her up to speed on who is still left on this earth and who has been recently added to the mounting pile of corpses that signifies her passage through middle age. When she was young, she never understood why her parents and grandparents indulged in major lamentations every time some superannuated matinee idol or has-been crooner dropped dead, but now she understands all too well.
The obits in Oklahoma publications are particularly strange, Jane finds. Seldom is the cause of death reported—which, other than the age of the deceased, is the most relevant information. No, rather than the cause of death, what is reported here is the church affiliation of the deceased. But of course, no one actually dies in Oklahoma. Jane has yet to see the word “died” in an obit in this state of the Union. Rather, what is reported is that Jim-Bob or Kyle or Misty “went to join the angels” or “was reunited with her Lord Jesus” or “sits on the lap of the Blessed Savior.” In today’s local newspaper, beneath the photo of a closed-eyed infant appearing post mortem, are the words “entered God’s playground.”
But now in the national obituaries segment she sees an equally terrible notice. She reads that a notable jazz singer from the 1950s escaped from his deathbed in the hospital and attempted to walk home, dying on the sidewalk, three blocks from his house.
Would she not escape from any Oklahoma hospital and walk to California to die? She envisions a grotesque reenactment of the Dust Bowl migration: Jane grimly forging toward California, desperate as a Joad to escape the parched environment of Oklahoma. No hospital in the Sooner State is strong enough to keep her here to die and be buried in the red dirt of Oklahoma rather than crawl home to expire in a field of golden California poppies.
A friend of Jane’s died when they were both barely girls, still in their twenties. The other girl died instantly in a car crash, and Jane and the rest of the girl’s friends attended the funeral. At first Jane thought the most horrible part of the event—her first funeral—was that her friend’s body was present, openly displayed in a casket carried right into the temple by six boys, brothers and young friends of the deceased. But far worse was the eulogy. The bishop delivered an interminable sermon that made Jane so angry she had to restrain herself from stalking out. From the things the man said about her friend—generic platitudes—Jane could tell he had not actually known the girl, perhaps never even met her, which was certainly no surprise, as her friend had detested the family’s religion. But rather than talking about her friend or even about loss and how to deal with grief, the bishop spent close to an hour expounding the doctrine that, according to the Book of Mormon, the entire family would be reunited in the afterlife, reunited in both spirit and body. It seemed her friend’s parents actually believed the whole family’s decayed bodies would miraculously reconstitute themselves and—presto, change-o!—turn up in the afterlife so the family could hang out together as if nothing had ever happened. She ground her teeth throughout the sermon, unable to prevent herself from mumbling whispered phrases every so often: Get real, Rev and In your dreams!
But she now cherishes the same dreams. It is true that since Mom and Sarge passed on, she can for the first time in her life accept the concept of her own death, and solely because she looks forward to being reunited with her parents and grandparents. In fact, blood seems truly to be thicker than water when it comes to the sweet hereafter, because Jane has not found herself continuing to miss her dead young friend. No, she just wants to see her parents again, the same parents she spent much of her life trying to get away from.
And, Mormonesque, she wants their bodies to be there, too—no ghostly ectoplasm for this gal. She wants the Other Side to be like the home movies that her family used to watch on Christmas mornings. In those black-and-white films, Mom was still a beautiful young woman in a short dress, with long, slim legs and genuine alligator pumps. Her father was then a man with forearms like anvils, and not from working with a personal trainer or rowing machines in a twenty-four-hour gym for narcissistic boys. No, her dad’s biceps, round and hard as coconuts, came from hard work, and his beautiful white teeth came from his parents, both of whom had full mouthfuls of straight white teeth when they went to their graves. Unlike Jane’s former husbands, Sarge never had to bleach his teeth or invest in porcelain veneers.
The first time in her childhood that she had what might be termed a philosophical discussion with her father was the day following Hemingway’s death. Still reading Nancy Drew mysteries at that age, she had certainly not yet read any of Hemingway’s work, but the author’s face was ubiquitous and his exploits well known. Jane was accustomed to seeing the man’s white-bearded face just about everywhere: frequently on the cover of Life magazine, in newsreels at the Sunday matinees, on TV documentaries on the family’s black-and-white RCA. Jane’s mother was still in the shower that morning while Jane and her father were perusing the newspaper together at the breakfast table, Sarge reading the sports page first, Jane feeling adult and sophisticated as she tented the front page of the Chronicle in front of her plate the way she had seen her grandfather do, even though she was reading only the comic strips. She had asked for some coffee, too, but her father just gave her a sour look and set a glass of milk near her plate.
There he was again, that writer guy with the bushy white beard, grinning at Jane from the front page of the newspaper, holding a rifle. She was brought up short by the headline.
“Dad,” she said, “Ernest Hemingway was killed in an accidental shooting.”
She was shocked by her father’s rude laughter. “It was no accident,” her father said, shaking his head.
“But it says—”
“I don’t care what the paper says,” Sarge said. “He’s a very proficient marksman, an experienced hunter. He obviously killed himself, the coward.”
Stunned, Jane said nothing for a few moments, then said, “Even if that’s true—that he killed himself—I don’t think that means he’s a coward.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sarge’s voice rose angrily. “People who do that are afraid to face life—they’re yellow.”
Jane has once again plopped herself in front of the television—a sad state of affairs, she knows. But she has yet to rustle up much of a social life in Hope Springs, and the town offers little in the way of entertainment or recreation for those beyond college age—that is, until people are ready to be shuttled over to the town’s “assisted living center.” A year and a half more before she can leave Hope Springs behind. When she agreed to come into the last two years of a four-year NIMH grant, not as a principal but as a consultant, she committed to stay the course for the entire two years of her clinical work in the university drop-in clinic. She is stuck.
Her evenings for the most part now consist of reading, reviewing notes she has made about clinic clients, or watching TV. As she looks under the pillows on her bed for the remote control, she thinks about the fact that no man has walked through the door of this bedroom—if one does not count the semi-toothless workman who came to install the plantation shutters—much less slept in this bed, since she moved to Hope Springs. Could this be the beginning of the end? She did not realize during the last love affair she had in California that the romance might indeed be the “last” love affair.
She looks at a man on the TV screen, a handsome actor in a network drama. His hair is blue-black, his haircut impeccably stylish. His flawless masculine jaw and cleft chin exhibit the perfect degree of five-o’clock shadow; his teeth are impossibly white, and when he smiles, dimples appear. His face says East or West Coast just as much as the Hope Springs males’ faces scream Oklahoma. As she stares at the actor, she becomes aware that she is actually drooling! Spit has not only trickled out of the corner of one side of her mouth but is making its way down her chin like a wayward tear.
She would like a relationship or “dates,” surely, but how is this possible in Hope Springs? The men here share only two types of faces among them. Type 1 men wear a ball cap, from which scraggly, mullet-like hair escapes in the back. The faces of Type 1 guys are sun-hardened, ruddy, furrowed by years of cigarettes and/or pooched out in one cheek by chewing tobacco. Type 1 men have rumbly voices and phlegmy-sounding laughs, and when they do laugh, one sees they are missing multiple teeth.
Type 2 men have faces one sees on TV news anchors in Oklahoma and on one’s affluent dentist or a neighbor who is a high school teacher. These men look like adult babies, their faces round and smooth, blank or vacantly smiling, their expressions as devoid of complexity as the face of a cooing infant. Type 2 is the face of the “Christian” family man, the man who takes his family to church every Wednesday night and twice on Sunday, who watches college and even high school football on TV or churchy programs on the Trinity channel, and who hates homosexuals and demonizes abortion. Doubt seldom marks the faces of these men; they accept everything as part of God’s plan.
Jane is driving across a bridge on her way to the dry cleaner, admiring the green canopy of trees lining the roadway. Summer in Hope Springs, though brutally hot, is more bearable than fall. This past autumn, she was driving over this very bridge when she noticed that the trees had uniformly lost their leaves, something that never really happened in California. She thought, All the trees are brown, and then, as she looked up through the windshield, and the sky is gray. “Oh, my god,” she said aloud, nearly losing her hold on the steering wheel. I never realized, she thought, never understood the meaning of that dopey song, before now.
And of course, it was California-dreaming that she was doing, whether she realized it or not. For most of her life, she had simply accepted that above her were blue skies and around her green trees. Never had it occurred to Jane that one could go for months on end seeing nothing but gray skies and brown trees, but she came to realize that such drabness was exactly what was in store for her here. She felt bad, then, for thinking that motley pop-rock group in the sixties was cheesy—clearly the Mamas and the Papas had known more than she had. She was forced to pull off the road to sit and weep like a Pentecostal in the car as traffic surged past her.
Now Jane feels chilled and shivers, her teeth clacking like cartoon dentures. Homesickness is like any other illness. Your muscles and bones ache; you keep checking your temperature. You sometimes fall asleep in a chair, suddenly, as if you are narcoleptic, and when you wake up, first you do not know where you are and then, when you remember, you choke up for an instant. You shiver a lot and wear coats and jackets even in the heat of the afternoon. Your brain is as slow and congested as a hair-clogged drain.
When she stops at a red light, looming in her peripheral vision to the right is an expanse of fire-engine red, and she turns her head and looks through the passenger-side window of her car. The enormous vehicle sitting in the lane next to her waiting at the light is not a fire engine at all, but a massive Coca-Cola truck on its delivery route in Hope Springs. Seeing the truck has the impact of a thudding punch to her abdomen, and she even doubles over at the wheel. She is transported back to the early 1960s, when her young father has taken a job with Coca-Cola. He could have gone to college on the GI Bill, but he already had a family to support, and he imagined he was too old for college, too out of step with those he believed to be sissy bookworms or frat boys.
As the Coca-Cola truck makes a turn and passes from view, the red truck is replaced in Jane’s mind by a mental image. On the roof of her family’s tract house stands Sarge: her strong young father with his muscled arms and his crow-black hair. He embraces a crimson figure; at first glance, they appear to be a couple engaged in a tango. But Sarge’s partner is a cardboard Santa, nearly as tall as he is. Santa winks an eye as he holds in one raised hand a bottle of Coca-Cola and waves the other gloved hand in a greeting to all who see him, his Coke bottle in profile like a torch against the sky. Sarge has brought the Santa home from the Coca-Cola headquarters and has climbed to the roof to place him there for the holiday season.
Now that her parents are gone—that horrible euphemism “gone”—Jane has difficulty thinking of even one negative trait either of them may have possessed. Just as, when they were alive, she was rarely able to think of anything she liked about her parents but could focus intently on their numerous transgressions against her, now she can rarely imagine either of them without first infusing them in her memory with a saintly glow and an aura of heroic beneficence. As an undergraduate in psychology, Jane first encountered the term “splitting.” She recognized herself immediately as one of those who see things only as black or white, never able to perceive any shades of gray. She sees her parents now like a holy vision at a shrine. Her mother’s beauty is intact, the straps of her alligator pumps wrapped around her lovely slender ankles, a red azalea corsage pinned to the lapel of her blazer for Christmas. Her father waltzes on the roof with Santa, forever young.
But her actual last image of her father is not of a young man home from the war, embracing a cardboard Santa on the rooftop. No: the last time she saw her father, he was prone on his four-poster bed, his face distorted by a plastic bag bearing the printed warning Caution, this is not a toy. And Sarge was playful to the very end. He had drawn an X through the calendar page for the day he took his own life, leaving a clearly legible note in his large scrawl in bold black fountain-pen ink, “I’m gone. Sayonara!”
Sunday morning follows a fitful sleep. Jane was awake again in the middle of the night, once more listening to the mournful clothes hangers in her closet. After she starts the coffee brewing, she opens the front door to retrieve the newspaper from the porch and blinks against the bright morning sun. She sees something she thinks cannot really be there but must instead be a pre-coffee trick of light: On her neighbor’s front lawn is a miniature circus tent—red and green striped with a scalloped flap opening in front. A yellow banner on the top of the tent ripples in the breeze.
When they were kids, she and her brother slept in the back garden sometimes, in a little kiddie tent that Sarge pitched for them on the grass. They were delighted to carry their sleeping bags from the house, along with flashlights and bags of marshmallows, and to fall asleep outside, the garden as thrilling and foreign as an oasis in the Sahara. As for a tent on a front lawn, in San Francisco a pile of dog feces or a homeless person foraging for aluminum cans would be more likely.
A bit of motion comes into Jane’s peripheral vision, and she turns to see the old man, Earl, lumbering across his front lawn, the habitual ball cap on his head, toting a plate of muffins. Earl, it seems, has rebounded from his heart attack, returned from the near-dead.
“Grandpa!” kids’ voices say in unison, and from the front flap of the striped tent pop the heads of two children, a boy and a girl. Jane did not know the neighbors had grandchildren, much less owned a lawn tent, and after learning of the old guy’s heart attack, she wasn’t too sure she’d see him again. Earl nods to her as he approaches the kiddie tent, and he says, “Mornin’ to you, ma’am.” Well, hell, maybe the old gal’s prayers have actually worked—maybe there has been a miracle.
After returning to her kitchen, Jane reads the obits while she drinks French roast to jolt herself awake. But she sees something through the kitchen window, a jerky movement behind the magnolia tree parallel to the driveway. Has she imagined the motion? Perhaps a squirrel has hopped from the roof, or maybe the two kids have ventured into her yard. But when she moves closer to the window and peers through the blinds, she sees there is a man in her driveway. A Type 1 man, to be precise. The man wears a Houston Oilers T-shirt stretched over his distended belly, the belly doubtless a result of huge quantities of Oklahoma’s miserable 3.2 beer. The predictable mullet hangs in a ponytail behind the Oilers cap on his head. But—this is too much—she sees that in place of one of his hands, he actually has a hook. A man with a hook is loitering in her driveway as if she is living out some creepy Internet legend. She pauses, wondering whether she should confront him, call the sheriff, or simply hope he will go away. Instead she continues to peer though the blinds. She sees now that the man holds a bucket with his hook and a squeegee in his hand, like one of the guys who shake down motorists for handouts back home in San Francisco. Trepidation gives way to annoyance, and she opens the kitchen door, not even self-conscious about wearing a robe and slippers.
“What are you doing?” she says, keeping her voice devoid of emotion, just as she does in the clinic. The question is somewhat inane, as Jane can clearly observe that the man is now scrubbing the back window of her car.
“I’m cleanin’ off that soaped thing on the back,” he says, pausing and looking up at her with deep brown eyes, his gaze as direct as a dog’s. “It ain’t right.”
Jane is alarmed to see that 666 has been scrawled a second time on her car’s back window. She assumes the man is excoriating her and says weakly in her own defense, “Someone else put it there.”
“I know that,” the guy says, setting the bucket down on the driveway and releasing it from his hook. “I know who did it. It ain’t right. I’m cleanin’ it off for you.”
Jane’s first instinct is to reach for her purse, figuring he either wants a handout or requires a tip, but something keeps her from moving. No, she realizes, the guy is just trying to be nice. Cash would offend him. I really am an alien here, she realizes—in Oklahoma a cash gratuity is not always the answer. She says thank you but then hears an astonishing thing come from her mouth, as if she were a Chatty Cathy doll from her childhood and someone pulled the string to make her speak: God bless you. She closes the door before he can laugh at her or see her blushing.
The obits behind her, she turns to the local segment of the newspaper and is immediately bombarded with Father’s Day items: local-color pieces about Oklahoma City anchorwomen and their fathers, Hope Springs’s mayor and his father. The Family Living section covers a Girl Scout father-daughter pancake breakfast. A photo of the Girl Scouts and their dads covers most of one page, and she finds herself looking closely at the faces of the fathers. Looking for what? she wonders. One cannot tell from examining the grinning faces of these fathers, some of whom have their arms looped around the shoulders of their daughters, which father beats his children, which one may go on to blow his brains out or suffocate himself with a plastic bag. She sees that one father is seated between two identical girls, freckled twins to the right and left of him, mirror images of each other save for the fact that only one girl is missing a tooth.
She touches her abdomen now, recalling the night when she thought she found a thickness there and wondered if she were harboring her own replicate, a fetus in fetu. Beneath her fingers thrums a pulse, warm and vibrant. She is not sure whether she feels the heartbeat of a miniature twin or the throb of her own pounding heart.