Referred Pain: Stories Read online

  Nancy snatched up the towel and swooped down on the bird, but it lifted a few inches off the floor and she jumped back, startled. Determined, she pursued it again and again, stealing up quietly then pouncing, but the bird kept eluding her by inches. Finally, with a last, desperate striving, it soared up, through the dining room, into the kitchen, and disappeared.

  Rosa clenched in frustration. If only Brian were here, he would do it. He might even enjoy crushing it between his palms. To think she could ever long for Brian.

  “It’s organic,” said Nancy. “It’s going to die and rot and smell, wherever it is.”

  The rustle began again, but more like faint scraping on a wall now. It seemed to come from the refrigerator. Trapped, nibbling? She looked hopelessly at Nancy.

  “Don’t worry, it couldn’t get in there.” As if to show Rosa how foolish her fears were, Nancy opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of pineapple juice, poured some and drank it. Then she clambered up on a counter and peered behind it. “It’s back there,” she reported. “Not moving. It must be dead. Give me the broom and I’ll sweep it out.”

  “Where do you keep the broom?” Rosa asked humbly.

  “In the broom closet, where else? Over there.”

  Still perched on the counter, Nancy maneuvered the broom along the back and side of the fridge until the bird was in full view, brown, dusty, inert. She climbed down and knelt to tap it softly with her fingers.

  “Better not do that. If you wake it up we’ll have to go through this all over again. I’ll just sweep it onto the dustpan.” Through the length of the broom Rosa could feel the tiny body. Death made it lighter, less substantial. She carried the dustpan out the kitchen door and slid the body to the grass. Nancy followed her out and bent over the bird, while Rosa slumped against the door, breathing in the summer air. The mist had lifted. The air held the scents of grass and sea, the trees were lush with the fullness of July. The tire swing suspended from a low branch swayed slightly. At last she looked at the bird, feeling some pity.

  She’s dithered so long that it’s too late. She could have the baby and leave it with Roger. She’d always be its mother, though. Later on it would ask about her, where is she, who is she? Can she do that to a child? How did this all happen? How could she let it happen?

  “It’s dead,” Nancy said. Her perpetual gravity seemed fitting now.

  “Yes, it’s too bad.” And she’d made a fool of herself in front of the child besides, over a stupid bird.

  “We killed it.”

  “We didn’t kill it. It got hurt from bouncing around the house. If it hadn’t been dumb enough to fly down in the first place it would still be enjoying its free life.” The way Nancy stared at her made Rosa ashamed. “Look, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t handle it, okay? It’s not like I wanted it to die.”

  “I’m going to bury it,” said Nancy.

  “Where?”

  “Right here.” She chose a place directly under the tire swing, where the grass had been worn away by years of the scuffing of children’s feet, and the dirt was soft. She dug fiercely with her fingers.

  “Can I help you?”

  “No. I can do it myself. I’ve buried things before. Two turtles. Then I’m going to have a funeral, and you’re not invited because you don’t really care. Anyway, you’re not part of the family.”

  Rosa was stunned. She went inside and gazed absently in the freezer and cabinets to see what might be around for dinner. She had never hosted a dinner party—the most she’d done was have a few friends over for pizza and beer. She didn’t know how to begin, and even as she pretended to peruse the contents of the fridge she knew she’d end up calling the store in town, giving Roger’s name and asking for suggestions. The child was right. She had no business here. What stretched ahead made her shudder. Not because she couldn’t do it—she wouldn’t always be as inept as she’d been with the bird—but because she saw herself learning to do it all: the baby, the dinners for friends, the houses. The life ready-made that had been lurking, waiting to tug her in while she groped at dreams, and the dreams had been ready-made too.

  And now she doesn’t know what to do. There must be something else, some open space to flee to. But wherever she looks, there is only fear. Fear rings everything in sight like a hoop of fire. And she has set the fire herself.

  Sightings of Loretta

  DEATH’S INTRUSION LEFT BENNETT a widower in his mid-fifties. An awkward age. Too young for the slow fade, but on the late side to contemplate a fresh start, even had he been one for fresh starts. An age to make your peace with what you have, some would say. Bennett had made his peace early on. He had watched others in his generation wrestling with their lives, locked in the grip of shadowy alternate selves, and felt lucky that he wasn’t prone to restlessness. Except with Susan gone his settled life was in rubble, like those sturdy old buildings that implode in a matter of seconds, with one quick astonished shudder.

  He attended a meeting of the grief group his friends urged on him. “I buried my husband a month ago,” a red-haired woman said. Others referred to losing their mates, as if through carelessness, though they still spoke to them now and then. Bennett listened politely but felt he had had nothing to do with what happened. He had not even buried Susan; she was cremated, by request. She had done it all while he watched, handling her illness in the efficient way she handled everything, until one day her hold loosened and she said, “I’m going,” as if announcing a trip, then closed her eyes and spoke no more.

  My wife left me, would have been the truthful words to say when his turn came—words he’d been vaguely afraid he might have to speak while she lived. He didn’t say them, and he didn’t return. Instead he set about going through her things—Susan was a prodigious saver. He used to wince at the mounds of catalogues, magazines, souvenirs, and quaint flea market gleanings cluttering every surface. Over the years he’d nursed fantasies of sweeping away the clutter, and those images gave him a voluptuous pleasure of which he was quickly ashamed. He didn’t want her gone. He only longed for clean, bare surfaces. When he saw that his fantasies might soon become a reality, he felt no pleasure at all. Let her live, with all her mess, he murmured, staring up at the ceiling.

  Maybe to chastise himself for his thoughts, he didn’t attack the most visible piles first but went for the closets and drawers, where the results would yield less satisfaction. Remarkable, what she’d kept: a Campfire Girl manual with cookie recipes and instructions for the proper angle to wear the feathered beret. A forty-year-old certificate for excellence in archery? She’d never mentioned that talent. Susan had been a commercial artist; her oversized files spewed pre-computer detritus. Bennett expected he might brood and weep as he fingered the crackling transparencies and stiff boards with designs for book jackets and brochures. But working his way through her leavings (evenings and weekends—he couldn’t neglect his job at the newspaper) did not conjure up thoughts of Susan. Rather, he fell into reveries of his first girlfriend, the one he’d loved when they were six. Loretta.

  Ten years ago, he thought he’d lost her. His sister, Helen, had called, as she did every few weeks to “keep in touch”; she considered this fitting for brother and sister, though clearly her heart was no more in it than Bennett’s. He knew something was on Helen’s mind by the way she curtailed her usual script. Instead of asking about Susan and the boys, she said, “I heard some bad news. I thought you might want to know.”

  “What?” He thought of their remaining old uncle, then, senselessly, of his two sons. From the next room, as if to reassure him, they let out a whoop for the basketball game on TV. Tomorrow they would all be driving up to New England for Richard’s college interviews.

  “Loretta. She was in a freak accident.” Helen’s tone wasn’t contemptuous, as it usually was when she mentioned Loretta. It had the piety reserved for tragedy. “A taxi jumped the curb and she just happened to be there. In that exact place, that exact time. Of all the bizarre—”

  “D
ead?”

  “No. But it’s pretty bad.”

  He sank down on the bed, shoving aside the clothes Susan was folding. He could have sworn Helen enjoyed that moment of suspense, letting him think she was dead. It was intolerable, unacceptable, that Loretta might be dead.

  “Her parents are in shock. What a thing to happen, I mean at this point in their lives …” Now the words rushed out as if she couldn’t bridle her eagerness.

  “What about the child?”

  “She’s fine. She was in school. And she has her father, of course.” A pause to let this information register: since Helen had never left their childhood neighborhood, she kept abreast of all developments. “Good thing, too, I’d say.”

  “You never told me she was married.”

  “I guess I thought you knew. It was last year. Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.”

  He could hardly jot down the name of the hospital, his hands were trembling so. When Susan asked what was the matter, he stared in her direction but saw nothing. “A childhood friend,” he muttered. “I should go see her.” He went to the closet for his shoes.

  “Bennett, it’s ten-thirty. You can’t visit a hospital now.”

  “Oh. Tomorrow then.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow, remember?”

  He went into the bathroom and locked the door, and Susan knew enough to let him be.

  During the trip north he drove so slowly that Susan persuaded him to let her take the wheel. While the others went to explore the campuses, he lay limp on the motel bed. She might die. He was assailed by waves of missing, in advance, her erratic appearances in his life. They were like those rare moments of grace that descend out of the blue, on a crowded train, or on the beach, or when the mind wanders from a book—unsought, exhilarating, swiftly gone. But in an obscure corner of the soul, you waited for them. They gave meaning to everything else.

  They grew up on a street of attached two-story row houses, each with a modest brick porch and five steps skirting a narrow strip of grass, where some mothers—not Loretta’s and not his—planted rhododendrons. It was a mild New York backwater, in the city but not quite of it, just after the war; the mood was relieved and placid. That would last barely a decade, but everyone lived as if it would last forever. The children on the street were known to all, and the romance of Bennett and Loretta amused the neighbors. They must have looked sweetly absurd, he imagined, walking to school with heads bent in earnest conversation, their mothers taking turns accompanying them. Only his older sister mocked. “Bennett has a girlfriend, Bennett has a girlfriend,” Helen sang out, hands on her hips, tossing her head so her long braids twirled. “Are you going to marry her, Ben?”

  What on earth they might have talked about he couldn’t remember. What do six-year-olds talk about? At that age, his own boys talked about TV heroes and rocket ships; they stood at construction sites transfixed by massive machines rising to claw at the air or kneeling to dump dirt. He couldn’t picture them feeling about anyone as he had felt about Loretta. His memories of their time together were more palpable than anything that had happened since, as if carved in high relief against a flat surface. Prowling for treasure in the empty lot on the corner, before they were called in for supper. Squeezing into one swing in the playground. Forbidden forays off their small block. Her changeable face, with its blue-gray eyes and halo of rampant dark hair, was superseded now by the faces she took on later. But he remembered her steady tantalizing gaze: a promise to carry him off somewhere new and exotic, a landscape more glorious than what surrounded them. Come away, it beckoned. Come with me. Together they floated in a bubble of excitement and ease. They weren’t imitating their parents; their parents didn’t hold hands and whisper in the twilight, or lick the same ice-cream cone. And they had seen few movies. They were inventing romance.

  The intensity faded—they were scolded for some escapade, their idyll shattered—and soon they were simply friends. Special friends, with the neural bond of those who grow together into consciousness. And with unquestioned trust, a trust that wrapped Bennett like a shield as they ventured out. The summer before high school, he confided his fears. The school was huge and forbidding; the kids would come from distant neighborhoods. How would they fit in?

  “It’ll be fine, you’ll see,” she said. “There are bigger things to worry about. Like what’ll we do with our lives.”

  “What do you mean? What we’ll be?”

  “No. I mean what to do. How to live right. How to be not like our parents and everyone else around here. Dead inside.”

  “You think they’re dead inside?”

  “Look at them. They’re not aware of anything. They just want to be safe and comfortable and have things never change. That’s not a real life.”

  He laughed uneasily. “Okay, maybe. But we’re only fourteen years old. First we have to get through high school.”

  “Everyone does that somehow. It’s what comes later that’s hard.”

  She was right. Everyone does it. They found their separate paths. Loretta ran with a crowd of girls who smoked and wore too much makeup and disappeared into spare rooms at parties. Bennett took a more studious route. When they met walking home from school or over math homework, they were like family members from far-flung branches: they might veer apart, but the roots stay entwined. He defended her when other boys told crude stories. “She’s not like that. I know, I grew up with her.”

  “Ever get any?” they asked with a smirk. If they only knew the fantasies she spun when they were alone—but he wouldn’t dream of telling. She longed to be an anarchist heroine like Rosa Luxembourg—a history teacher had told her story and Loretta became entranced. She wished she’d been born an Amazon. Maybe they could run away to Paris and sit in cafés drinking Pernod. What was Pernod? Bennett interrupted over the trigonometry books. She wasn’t sure herself, but it was what artists drank in cafés. Bennett didn’t know how serious she was, but he liked listening and understood that she needed him to listen. “Cut it out,” he told the boys. “I don’t believe any of that crap.”

  At the senior prom she appeared in a navy blue slinky dress—he thought it didn’t suit her lanky, big-boned body—while most of the girls wore pastels with wide skirts. Bennett’s date, in peach-colored taffeta, was a pert blonde he’d invited almost at random; had she refused, he would have asked another who would do as well. He knew he was good-looking in a conventional, even-featured way, and while he wasn’t a star athlete or a fast talker, he was generally liked and could produce enough quips to keep a conversation going.

  Loretta danced with one boy after another and let them pull her close and grind their hips against her. While his own date chattered with her friends near the punch bowl, Bennett claimed a dance. “Why are you acting this way?” he whispered. “They’re all looking at you.”

  “Because it’s fun.” She laughed with her mouth wide open, teeth flashing, the braces she had hated long gone. Her lipstick was a shade close to purple. She looked him straight in the eye—she was nearly as tall as he. “Why, you jealous?”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said automatically. “I just mean, remember who you are.” Those were words his mother often spoke in a stern voice. They puzzled him—who was he? And why must he unremittingly remember? But if he wasn’t sure what they meant, he knew when they should be used.

  “I’m finding out. How else can you find out if you don’t try different ways?”

  He frowned, and Loretta gave another teasing laugh. “Remember in biology, Mr. Cargill said all the cells in the body replace themselves every seven years? You really become a totally new person. That could happen, I don’t know, ten times if you live long enough.”

  “It doesn’t happen all at once,” he told her, “like when a bell rings. It’s staggered. So you’ve always got some of the old and some of the new.”

  “I didn’t mean literally. God, Benno, I should really teach you a few things.”

  Provoked, he wondered if he to
o should pull her close and grind his hips against hers, but that would feel all wrong. No matter what she said, she was the same Loretta, almost like a sister. No, more than a sister. There was no word for what she was to him. This new gaudy girl was just a pose.

  They went to college on different coasts—Bennett stayed close to home, Loretta headed west. He wished her well, hoped she wouldn’t get into trouble finding out who she was, and moved on. The tide of life claimed him, and in time Susan, blonde and affable, did too.

  A year after they were married, Susan lay on the couch with a magazine balanced on her huge stomach and said, “I just can’t move. It’s too hot, and I feel like this is going to pop any minute. But you go.” Some of her old college friends were giving a party, a send-off for volunteers going to Mississippi to work on voter registration. “One of us ought to be there, at least.”

  “If it’s popping any minute, maybe I should stay home.”

  “I don’t mean literally. Anyway, I can always call. Go on, Ben. Please?”

  When he reappeared, ready to leave, she said, “Oh, not a tie, sweetie. It makes you look like Clark Kent. It’s not that kind of party.”

  He was glad, when he arrived, that the scorned tie was in his pocket. No one else wore one. Several of the men were in shorts, and the women wore flowered shifts and sandals. The apartment was so crowded that the air-conditioning, if it existed, had no effect. Bennett was drifting around with a can of beer in his hand when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “Could that be my old Benno?”

  Loretta threw her arms around him. It was nearly ten years since he’d seen her, and her gestures seemed larger. She herself seemed larger, occupying space with authority—maybe it was the mass of hair piled on her head, or the gleaming bare shoulders, or the clunky beads and long silver earrings. Her body had density, her face glowed.

  She introduced the black man standing beside her as Jim. Bennett hadn’t realized they were together. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” she said, and slipped her arm through Jim’s. He was very dark, with a bushy Afro, small wire-rimmed glasses, and a mild, inquisitive expression. He wore a green and black dashiki and heavy wooden beads that matched Loretta’s.