The Salt Garden
Alma turns up the heat, stirs the clear water in the red enamel pot, adds more salt, stirs, adds. She’s making a supersaturated solution: re-making it. She made it already, at lunchtime, with Carol, but she didn’t remember that you had to boil the water and she just used hot water from the tap. Nothing happened, though Alma had promised that a salt tree would form on the thread they hung down into the water, suspending it from a spoon laid crossways on the top of the glass.
“It takes time,” Alma said. “It’ll be here when you come home,” and Carol went trustingly back to school, while Alma tried to figure out what she’d done wrong.
This experiment thing is new. Alma isn’t sure where Carol picked it up. Surely not from school: she’s only in grade two. But they’re doing everything younger and younger. It upsets Alma to see them trying on her high heels and putting lipstick on their little mouths, even though she knows it’s just a game. They wiggle their hips, imitating something they’ve seen on television. Maybe the experiments come from television too.
Alma has racked her brains, as she always does when Carol expresses interest in anything, searching for information she ought to possess but usually doesn’t. These days, Alma encourages anything that will involve the two of them in an activity that will block out questions about the way they’re living; about the whereabouts of Mort, for instance. She’s tried trips to the zoo, sewing dolls’ dresses, movies on Saturdays. They all work, but only for a short time.
When the experiments came up, she remembered about putting vinegar into baking soda, to make it fizz; that was a success. Then other things started coming back to her. Now she can recall having been given a small chemistry set as a child, at the age of ten or so it must have been, by her father, who had theories in advance of his time. He thought girls should be brought up more like boys, possibly because he had no sons: Alma is an only child. Also he wanted her to do better than he himself had done. He had a job beneath his capabilities, in the post office, and he felt thwarted by that. He didn’t want Alma to feel thwarted: that was how he’d attempted to warn Alma away from an early marriage, from leaving university to put Mort through architectural school by working as a secretary for a food-packaging company. “You’ll wake up one day and you’ll feel thwarted,” he told her. Alma sometimes wonders whether this word describes what she feels, but usually decides that it doesn’t.
Long before that period, though, he’d tried to interest Alma in chess and mathematics and stamp collecting, among other things. Not much of this rubbed off on Alma, at least not to her knowledge; at the predictable age she became disappointingly obsessed with make-up and clothes, and her algebra marks took a downturn. But she does retain a clear image of the chemistry set, with its miniature test tubes and the wire holder for them, the candle for heating them, and the tiny corked bottles, so appealingly like doll’s-house glassware, with the mysterious substances in them: crystals, powders, solutions, potions. Some of these things had undoubtedly been poisonous; probably you could not buy such chemistry sets for children now. Alma is glad not to have missed out on it, because it was alchemy, after all, and that was how the instruction book presented it: magic. Astonish your friends. Turn water to milk. Turn water to blood. She remembers terminology, too, though the meanings have grown hazy with time. Precipitate. Sublimation.
There was a section on how to do tricks with ordinary household objects, such as how to make a hard-boiled egg go into a milk bottle, back in the days when there were milk bottles. (Alma thinks about them and sees the cream floating on the top, tastes the cardboard tops she used to beg to be allowed to lick off, smells the horse droppings from the wagons: she’s getting old.) How to turn milk sour in an instant. How to make invisible writing with lemon juice. How to stop cut apples from turning brown. It’s from this part of the instruction book (the best section, because who could resist the thought of mysterious powers hidden in the ordinary things around you?) that she’s called back the supersaturated solution and the thread: How to make a magical salt garden. It was one of her favourites.
Alma’s mother had complained about the way Alma was using up the salt, but her father said it was a cheap price to pay for the development of Alma’s scientific curiosity. He thought Alma was learning about the spaces between molecules, but it was no such thing, as Alma and her mother both silently knew. Her mother was Irish, in dark contrast to her father’s clipped and cheerfully bitter Englishness; she read tea-leaves for the neighbour women, which only they regarded as a harmless amusement. Maybe it’s from her that Alma has inherited her bad days, her stretches of fatalism. Her mother didn’t agree with her father’s theories about Alma, and emptied out her experiments whenever possible. For her mother, Alma’s fiddling in the kitchen was merely an excuse to avoid work, but Alma wasn’t thinking even of that. She just liked the snowfall in miniature, the enclosed, protected world in the glass, the crystals forming on the thread, like the pictures of the Snow Queen’s palace in the Hans Christian Andersen book at school. She can’t remember ever having astonished any of her friends with tricks from the instruction book. Astonishing herself was enough.
The water in the pot is boiling again; it’s still clear. Alma adds more salt, stirs while it dissolves, adds more. When salt gathers at the bottom of the pot, swirling instead of vanishing, she turns off the heat. She puts another spoon into the glass before pouring the hot water into it: otherwise the glass might break. She knows about this from having broken several of her mother’s drinking glasses in this way.
She picks up the spoon with the thread tied to it and begins to lower the thread into the glass. While she is doing this, there is a sudden white flash, and the kitchen is blotted out with light. Her hand goes blank, then appears before her again, black, like an afterimage on the retina. The outline of the window remains, framing her hand, which is still suspended above the glass. Then the window itself crumples inward, in fragments, like the candy-crystal of a shatter-proof windshield. The wall will be next, curving in towards her like the side of an inflating balloon. In an instant Alma will realize that the enormous sound has come and gone and burst her eardrums so that she is deaf, and then a wind will blow her away.
Alma closes her eyes. She can go on with this, or she can try to stop, hold herself upright, get the kitchen back. This isn’t an unfamiliar experience. It’s happened to her now on the average of once a week, for three months or more; but though she can predict the frequency she never knows when. It can be at any moment, when she’s run the bathtub full of water and is about to step in, when she’s sliding her arms into the sleeves of her coat, when she’s making love, with Mort or Theo, it could be either of them and it has been. It’s always when she’s thinking about something else.
It isn’t speculation: it’s more like a hallucination. She’s never had hallucinations before, except a long time ago when she was a student and dropped acid a couple of times. Everyone was doing it then, and she hadn’t taken much. There had been moving lights and geometric patterns, which she’d watched in a detached way. Afterwards she’d wondered what all the talk about cosmic profundity had been about, though she hadn’t wanted to say anything. People were very competitive about the meaningfulness of their drug trips in those days.
But none of it had been like this. It’s occurred to her that maybe these things are acid flashes, though why should she be getting them now, fifteen years later, with none in between? At first she was so badly frightened that she’d considered going to see someone about it: a doctor, a psychiatrist. Maybe she’s borderline epileptic. Maybe she’s becoming schizophrenic or otherwise going mad. But there don’t seem to be any other symptoms: just the flash and the sound, and being blown through the air, and the moment when she hits and falls into darkness.
The first time, she ended up lying on the floor. She’d been with Mort then, having dinner in a restaurant, during one of their interminable conversations about how things could be arranged better. Mort loves the word arrange, which is not one of Alma’s favourites. Alma is a romantic: if you love someone, what needs arranging? And if you don’t, why put in the effort? Mort, on the other hand, has been reading books about Japan; also he thinks they should draw up a marriage contract. On that occasion, Alma pointed out that they were already married. She wasn’t sure where Japan fitted in: if he wanted her to scrub his back, that was all right, but she didn’t want to be Wife Number One, not if it implied a lot of other numbers, either in sequence or simultaneously.
Mort has a girl friend, or that’s how Alma refers to her. Terminology is becoming difficult these days: mistress is no longer suitable, conjuring up as it does peach-coloured negligées trimmed in fur, and mules, which nobody wears any more; nobody, that is, like Mort’s girl friend, who is a squarely built young woman with a blunt-cut pageboy and freckles. And lover doesn’t seem to go with the emotions Mort appears to feel towards this woman, whose name is Fran. Fran isn’t the name of a mistress or a lover; more of a wife, but Alma is the wife. Maybe it’s the name that’s confusing Mort. Maybe that’s why he feels, not passion or tenderness or devotion towards this woman, but a mixture of anxiety, guilt, and resentment, or this is what he tells Alma. He sneaks out on Fran to see Alma and calls Alma from telephone booths, and Fran doesn’t know about it, which is the reverse of the way things used to be. Alma feels sorry for Fran, which is probably a defence.
It’s not Fran that Alma objects to, as such. It’s the rationalization of Fran. It’s Mort proclaiming that there’s a justifiable and even moral reason for doing what he does, that it falls into subsections, that men are polygamous by nature and so forth. That’s what Alma can’t stand. She herself does what she does because it’s what she does, but she doesn’t preach about it.
The dinner was more difficult for Alma than she’d anticipated, and because of this she had an extra drink. She stood up to go to the bathroom, and then it happened. She came to covered with wine and part of the tablecloth. Mort told her she’d fainted. He didn’t say so, but she knew he put it down to hysteria, brought on by her problems with him, which to this day neither of them has precisely defined but which he thinks of as her problems, not his. She also knew that he thought she did it on purpose, to draw attention to herself, to collect sympathy and concern from him, to get him to listen to her. He was irritated. “If you were feeling dizzy,” he said, “you should have gone outside.”
Theo, on the other hand, was flattered when she passed out in his arms. He put it down to an excess of sexual passion, brought on by his technique, although again he didn’t say so. He was quite pleased with her, and rubbed her hands and brought her a glass of water.
Theo is Alma’s lover: no doubt about the terminology there. She met him at a party. He introduced himself by asking if she’d like another drink. (Mort, on the other hand, introduced himself by asking if she knew that if you cut the whiskers off cats they would no longer be able to walk along fences, which should have been a warning of some kind to Alma, but was not.) She was in a tangle with Mort, and Theo appeared to be in a similar sort of tangle with his wife, so they seemed to each other comparatively simple. That was before they had begun to accumulate history, and before Theo had moved out of his house. At that time they had been clutchers, specialists in hallways and vestibules, kissing among the hung-up coats and the rows of puddling rubbers.
Theo is a dentist, though not Alma’s dentist. If he were her dentist, Alma doubts that she ever would have ended up having what she still doesn’t think of as an affair with him. She feels that the inside of her mouth, and especially the insides of her teeth, are intimate in an anti-sexual way; surely a man would be put off by such evidences of bodily imperfection, of rot. (Alma doesn’t have bad teeth; still, even a look inside with that little mirror, even the terminology, orifice, cavity, mandible, molar.…)
Dentistry, for Theo, is hardly a vocation. He hadn’t felt called by teeth; he’s told her he picked dentistry because he didn’t know what else to do; he had good fine-motor coordination, and it was a living, to put it mildly.
“You could have been a gigolo,” Alma said to him on that occasion. “You would have got extra in tips.” Theo, who does not have a rambunctious sense of humour and is fastidious about clean underwear, was on the verge of being shocked, which Alma enjoyed. She likes making him feel more sexual than he is, which in turn makes him more sexual. She indulges him.
So, when she found herself lying on Theo’s broadloom, with Theo bending over her, gratified and solicitous, saying, “Sorry, was I too rough?” she did nothing to correct his impression.
“It was like a nuclear explosion,” she said, and he thought she was using a simile. Theo and Mort have one thing in common: they’ve both elected themselves as the cause of these little manifestations of hers. That, or female body chemistry: another good reason why women shouldn’t be allowed to be airplane pilots, a sentiment Alma once caught Theo expressing.
The content of Alma’s hallucinations doesn’t surprise her. She suspects that other people are having similar or perhaps identical experiences, just as, during the Middle Ages, many people saw (for instance) the Virgin Mary, or witnessed miracles: flows of blood that stopped at the touch of a bone, pictures that spoke, statues that bled. As for now, you could get hundreds of people to swear they’ve been on spaceships and talked with extraterrestrial beings. These kinds of delusions go in waves, Alma thinks, in epidemics. Her lightshows, her blackouts, are no doubt as common as measles, only people aren’t admitting to them. Most likely they’re doing what she should do, trotting off to their doctors and getting themselves renewable prescriptions for Valium or some other pill that will smooth out the brain. They don’t want anyone to think they’re unstable, because although most would agree that what she’s afraid of is something it’s right to be afraid of, there’s a consensus about how much. Too much fear is not normal.
Mort, for instance, thinks everyone should sign petitions and go on marches. He signs petitions himself, and brings them for Alma to sign, on occasions when he’s visiting her legitimately. If she signed them during one of his sneak trips, Fran would know and put two and two together, and by now not even Alma wants that. She likes Mort better now that she sees less of him. Let Fran do his laundry, for a change. The marches he goes to with Fran, however, as they are more like social occasions. It’s for this reason that Alma herself doesn’t attend the marches: she doesn’t want to make things awkward for Fran, who is touchy enough already on the subject of Alma. There are certain things, like parent-teacher conferences, that Mort is allowed to attend with Alma, and other things that he isn’t. Mort is sheepish about these restrictions, since one of his avowed reasons for leaving Alma was that he felt too tied down.
Alma agrees with Mort about the marches and petitions, out loud that is. It’s reasonable to suppose that if only everyone in the world would sign the petitions and go on the marches, the catastrophe itself would not occur. Now is the time to stand up and be counted, to throw your body in front of the juggernaut, as Mort himself does in the form of donations to peace groups and letters to politicians, for which he receives tax receipts and neatly typed form letters in response. Alma knows that Mort’s way makes sense, or as much sense as anything; but she has never been a truly sensible person. This was one of her father’s chief complaints about her. She could never bring herself to squeeze in her two hands the birds that flew into their plate-glass window and injured themselves, as her father taught her to do, in order to collapse their lungs. Instead she wanted to keep them in boxes filled with cotton wool and feed them with an eyedropper, thus causing them – according to her father – to die a lingering and painful death. So he would collapse their lungs himself, and Alma would refuse to look, and grieve afterwards.
Marrying Mort was not sensible. Getting involved with Theo was not sensible, Alma’s clothes are not and never have been sensible, especially the shoes. Alma knows that if a fire ever broke out in her house, the place would burn to the ground before she could make up her mind about what to do, even though she’s in full possession of all the possibilities (extinguisher, fire department’s number, wet cloth to put over the nose). So, in the face of Mort’s hearty optimism, Alma shrugs inwardly. She tries hard to believe, but she’s an infidel and not proud of it. The sad truth is that there are probably more people in the world like her than like Mort. Anyway, there’s a lot of money tied up in those bombs. She doesn’t interfere with him or say anything negative, however. The petitions are as constructive a hobby as any, and the marches keep him active and happy. He’s a muscular man with a reddish face, who’s inclined to overweight and who needs to work off energy to avoid the chance of a heart attack, or that’s what the doctor says. It’s all a good enough way to pass the time.
Theo, on the other hand, deals with the question by not dealing with it at all. He lives his life as if it isn’t there, a talent for obliviousness that Alma envies. He just goes on filling teeth, filling teeth, as if all the tiny adjustments he’s making to people’s mouths are still going to matter in ten years, or five, or even two. Maybe, Alma thinks in her more cynical moments, they can use his dental records for identification when they’re sorting out the corpses, if there are any left to sort; if sorting will be a priority, which she very much doubts. Alma has tried to talk about it, once or twice, but Theo has said he doesn’t see any percentage in negative thinking. It will happen or it won’t, and if it doesn’t the main worry will be the economy. Theo makes investments. Theo is planning his retirement. Theo has tunnel vision and Alma doesn’t. She has no faith in people’s ability to pull themselves out of this hole, and no sand to stick her head into. The thing is there, standing in one corner of whatever room she happens to be in, like a stranger whose face you know you could see clearly if you were only to turn your head. Alma doesn’t turn her head. She doesn’t want to look. She goes about her business, most of the time; except for these minor lapses.
Sometimes she tells herself that this isn’t the first time people have thought they were coming to the end of the world. It’s happened before, during the Black Death for instance, which Alma remembers as having been one of the high points of second-year university. The world hadn’t come to an end, of course, but believing it was going to had much the same effect.
Some of them decided it was their fault and went around flagellating themselves, or each other, or anyone else handy. Or they prayed a lot, which was easier then because you had some idea of who you were supposed to be talking to. Alma doesn’t think this is a dependable habit of mind any more, since there’s an even chance that the button will be pushed by some American religious maniac who wants to play God and help Revelations along, someone who really believes that he and a few others will be raised up incorruptible afterwards, and therefore everyone else can rot. Mort says this is a mistake unlikely to be made by the Russians, who’ve done away with the afterlife and have to be serious about this one. Mort says the Russians are better chess players, which isn’t much consolation to Alma. Her father’s attempts to teach her chess had not been too successful, as Alma had a way of endowing the pieces with personalities and crying when her Queen got killed.
Or you could wall yourself up, throw the corpses outside, carry around oranges stuck with cloves. Dig shelters. Issue instructional handbooks.
Or you could steal things from the empty houses, strip the necklaces from the bodies.
Or you could do what Mort was doing. Or you could do what Theo was doing. Or you could do what Alma was doing.
Alma thinks of herself as doing nothing. She goes to bed at night, she gets up in the morning, she takes care of Carol, they eat, they talk, sometimes they laugh, she sees Mort, she sees Theo, she looks for a better job, though not in a way that convinces her. She thinks about going back to school and finishing her degree: Mort says he will pay, they’ve both agreed he owes her that, though when it comes right down to it she isn’t sure she wants to. She has emotions: she loves people, she feels anger, she is happy, she gets depressed. But somehow she can’t treat these emotions with as much solemnity as she once did. Never before has her life felt so effortless, as if all responsibility has been lifted from her. She floats. There’s a commercial on television, for milk she thinks, that shows a man riding at the top of a wave on a surfboard: moving, yet suspended, as if there is no time. This is how Alma feels: removed from time. Time presupposes a future. Sometimes she experiences this state as apathy, other times as exhilaration. She can do what she likes. But what does she like?
She remembers something else they did during the Black Death: they indulged themselves. They pigged out on their winter supplies, they stole food and gorged, they danced in the streets, they copulated indiscriminately with whoever was available. Is this where she’s heading, on top of her wave?
Alma rests the spoon on the two edges of the glass. Now the water is cooling and the salt is coming out of solution. It forms small transparent islands on the surface that thicken as the crystals build up, then break and drift down through the water, like snow. She can see a faint white fuzz of salt gathering on the thread. She kneels so that her eyes are level with the glass, rests her chin and hands on the table, watches. It’s still magic. By the time Carol comes home from school, there will be a whole winter in the glass. The thread will be like a tree after a sleet storm. She can’t believe how beautiful this is.
After a while she gets up and walks through her house, through the whitish living room which Mort considers Japanese in the less-is-more tradition but which has always reminded her of a paint-by-numbers page only a quarter filled in, past the naked-wood end wall, up the staircase from which Mort removed the banisters. He also took out too many walls, omitted too many doors; maybe that’s what went wrong with the marriage. The house is in Cabbagetown, one of the larger ones. Mort, who specializes in renovations, did it over and likes to bring people there to display it to them. He views it, still, as the equivalent of an advertising brochure. Alma, who is getting tired of going to the door in her second-best dressing gown with her hair in a towel and finding four men in suits standing outside it, headed by Mort, is thinking about getting the locks changed. But that would be too definitive. Mort still thinks of the house as his, and he thinks of her as part of the house. Anyway, with the slump in house-building that’s going on, and considering who pays the bills, she ought to be glad to do her bit to help out; which Mort has narrowly avoided saying.
She reaches the white-on-white bathroom, turns on the taps, fills the tub with water which she colours blue with a capful of German bath gel, climbs in, sighs. She has some friends who go to isolation tanks and float in total darkness, for hours on end, claiming that this is relaxing and also brings you in touch with your deepest self. Alma has decided to give this experience a pass. Nevertheless, the bathtub is where she feels safest (she’s never passed out in the bathtub) and at the same time most vulnerable (what if she were to pass out in the bathtub? She might drown).
When Mort still lived with her and Carol was younger, she used to lock herself into the bathroom, chiefly because it had a door that closed, and do what she called “spending time with herself,” which amounted to daydreaming. She’s retained the habit.
At one period, long ago it seems now, though it’s really just a couple of months, Alma indulged from time to time in a relatively pleasant fantasy. In this fantasy she and Carol were living on a farm, on the Bruce Peninsula. She’d gone on a vacation there once, with Mort, back before Carol was born, when the marriage was still behaving as though it worked. They’d driven up the Bruce and crossed over onto Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron. She’d noticed the farms then, how meagre they were, how marginal, how many rocks had been pulled out of the fields and piled into cairns and rows. It was one of these farms she chose for her fantasy, on the theory that nobody else would want it.
She and Carol heard about the coming strike on the radio, as they were doing the dishes in the farm kitchen after lunch. (Improbable in itself, she now realizes: it would be too fast for that, too fast to reach a radio show.) Luckily, they raised all their own vegetables, so they had lots around. Initially Alma was vague about what these would be. She’d included celery, erroneously, she knows now: you could never grow celery in soil like that.
Alma’s fantasies are big on details. She roughs them in first, then goes back over them, putting in the buttons and zippers. For this one she needed to make a purchase of appropriate seeds, and to ask for advice from the man in the hardware store. “Celery?” he said. (A balding, fatherly small-town retailer, wearing braces on his pants, a ring of sweat under each arm of his white shirt. Still, the friendliness was tricky. Probably he had contempt for her. Probably he told stories about her to his cronies in the beer parlour, a single woman with a child, living by herself out there on that farm. The cronies would cruise by on her sideroad in their big second-hand cars, staring at her house. She would think twice about going outside in shorts, bending over to pull out weeds. If she got raped, everyone would know who did it but none of them would tell. This man would not be the one but he would say after a few beers that she had it coming. This is a facet of rural life Alma must consider seriously before taking it up.)
“Celery?” he said. “Up here? Lady, you must be joking.” So Alma did away with the celery, which wouldn’t have kept well anyway.
But there were beets and carrots and potatoes, things that could be stored. They’d dug a large root cellar into the side of a hill; it was entered by a door that slanted and that somehow had several feet of dirt stuck onto the outside of it. But the root cellar was much more than a root cellar: it had several rooms, for instance, and electric lights (with power coming from where? It was details like this that when closely examined helped to cause the eventual collapse of the fantasy, though for the electricity Alma filled in with a small generator worked by runoff from the pond).
Anyway, when they heard the news on the radio, she and Carol did not panic. They walked, they did not run, sedately to the root cellar, where they went inside and shut the door behind them. They did not forget the radio, which was a transistor, though of course it was no use after the initial strike, in which all the stations were presumably vaporized. On the shelves built neatly into one wall were rows and rows of bottled water. There they stayed, eating carrots and playing cards and reading entertaining books, until it was safe to come out, into a world in which the worst had already happened so no longer needed to be feared.
This fantasy is no longer functional. For one thing, it could not be maintained for very long in the concrete detail Alma finds necessary before practical questions with no answers began to intrude (ventilation?). In addition, Alma had only an approximate idea of how long they would have to stay in there before the danger would be over. And then there was the problem of refugees, marauders, who would somehow find out about the potatoes and carrots and come with (guns? sticks?). Since it was only her and Carol, the weapons were hardly needed. Alma began to equip herself with a rifle, then rifles, to fend off these raiders, but she was always outnumbered and outgunned.
The major flaw, however, was that even when things worked and escape and survival were possible, Alma found that she couldn’t just go off like that and leave other people behind. She wanted to include Mort, even though he’d behaved badly and they weren’t exactly together, and if she let him come she could hardly neglect Theo. But Theo could not come, of course, without his wife and children, and then there was Mort’s girl friend Fran, whom it would not be fair to exclude.
This arrangement worked for a while, without the quarrelling Alma would have expected. The prospect of imminent death is sobering, and Alma basked for a time in the gratitude her generosity inspired. She had intimate chats with the two other women about their respective men, and found out several things she didn’t know; the three of them were on the verge of becoming really good friends. In the evenings they sat around the kitchen table which had appeared in the root cellar, peeling carrots together in a companionable way and reminiscing about what it had been like when they all lived in the city and didn’t know each other, except obliquely through the men. Mort and Theo sat at the other end, drinking the Scotch they’d brought with them, mixed with bottled water. The children got on surprisingly well together.
But the root cellar was too small really, and there was no way to enlarge it without opening the door. Then there was the question of who would sleep with whom and at what times. Concealment was hardly possible in such a confined space, and there were three women but only two men. This was all too close to real life for Alma, but without the benefit of separate dwellings.
After the wife and the girl friend started to insist on having their parents and aunts and uncles included (and why had Alma left hers out?), the fantasy became overpopulated and, very quickly, uninhabitable. Alma could not choose, that was her difficulty. It’s been her difficulty all her life. She can’t draw the line. Who is she to decide, to judge people like that, to say who must die and who is to be given a chance at life?
The hill of the root cellar, honeycombed with tunnels, too thoroughly mined, fell in upon itself, and all perished.
When Alma has dried herself off and is rubbing body lotion on herself, the telephone rings.
“Hi, what are you up to?” the voice says.
“Who is this?” Alma says, then realizes that it’s Mort. She’s embarrassed not to have recognized his voice. “Oh, it’s you,” she says. “Hi. Are you in a phone booth?”
“I thought I might drop by,” says Mort, conspiratorially. “That is, if you’ll be there.”
“With or without a committee?” Alma says.
“Without,” says Mort. What this means is clear enough. “I thought we could make some decisions.” He means to be gently persuasive, but comes through as slightly badgering.
Alma doesn’t say that he doesn’t need her to help him make decisions, since he seems to make them swiftly enough on his own. “What kind of decisions?” she says warily. “I thought we were having a moratorium on decisions. That was your last decision.”
“I miss you,” Mort says, letting the words float, his voice shifting to a minor key that is supposed to indicate yearning.
“I miss you too,” says Alma, hedging her bets. “But this afternoon I promised Carol I’d buy her a pink gym suit. How about tonight?”
“Tonight isn’t an option,” says Mort.
“You mean you aren’t allowed out to play?” says Alma.
“Don’t be snarky,” Mort says a little stiffly.
“Sorry,” says Alma, who isn’t. “Carol wants you to come on Sunday to watch ‘Fraggle Rock’ with her.”
“I want to see you alone,” Mort says. But he books himself in for Sunday anyway, saying he’ll double-check it and call her back. Alma says good-bye and hangs up, with a sense of relief that is very different from the feelings she’s had about saying good-bye to Mort on the telephone in the past; which were, sequentially, love and desire, transaction of daily business, frustration because things weren’t being said that ought to be, despair and grief, anger and a sense of being fucked over. She continues on with the body lotion, with special attention to the knees and elbows. That’s where it shows up first, when you start to look like a four-legged chicken. Despite the approach of the end of the world, Alma likes to keep in shape.
She decides to take the streetcar. She has a car and knows how to drive, she can drive perfectly well, but lately she’s been doing it less and less. Right now she prefers modes of transportation that do not require any conscious decisions on her part. She’d rather be pulled along, on a track if possible, and let someone else do the steering.
The streetcar stop is outside a health-food store, the window of which is filled with displays of dried apricots and carob-covered raisins, magical foods that will preserve you from death. Alma too has had her macrobiotic phase: she knows what elements of superstitious hope the consumption of such talismans involves. It would have been just as effective to have strung the raisins on a thread and worn them around her neck, to ward off vampires. On the brick wall of the store, between the window and the door, someone has written in spray paint: JESUS HATES YOU.
The streetcar comes and Alma gets on. She’s going to the subway station, where she will get off and swiftly buy a pink gym suit and two pairs of summer socks for Carol and go down the stairs and get onto a subway train going north, using the transfer she’s just stuck into her purse. You aren’t supposed to use transfers for stopovers but Alma feels reckless.
The car is a little crowded. She stands near the back door, looking out the window, thinking about nothing in particular. It’s a sunny day, one of the first, and warm; things are too bright.
All at once some people near the back door begin to shout: Stop! Stop! Alma doesn’t hear them at first, or she hears them at the level of non-comprehension: she knows there is noise, but she thinks it’s just some teenagers fooling around, being too loud, the way they do. The streetcar conductor must think this too, because he keeps on going, at a fast clip, spinning along, while more and more people are shouting and then screaming, Stop! Stop! Stop! Then Alma begins to shout too, for she sees what is wrong: there’s a girl’s arm caught in the back door, and the girl herself is outside, being dragged along it must be; Alma can’t see her but she knows she’s there.
Alma finds herself jumping up and down, like a frustrated child, and screaming “Stop! Stop!” with the rest of them, and still the man drives on, oblivious. Alma wants someone to throw something or hit him, why is no one moving? They’re packed in too close, and the ones at the front don’t know, can’t see. This goes on for hours which are really minutes, and finally he slows down and stops. He gets out, walks around to the back.
Luckily there’s an ambulance right beside them, so the girl is put into it. Alma can’t see her face or how badly injured she is, though she cranes her neck, but she can hear the noises she’s making: not crying, not whimpering, something more animal and abandoned, more terrified. The most frightening thing must have been not the pain but the sense that no one could see or hear her.
Now that the streetcar has stopped and the crisis is over, people around Alma begin muttering to one another. The driver should be removed, they say. He should lose his licence, or whatever it is they have. He should be arrested. But he comes back and pushes something at the front and the doors open. They will all have to get off the streetcar, he says. He sounds angry, as if the girl caught in the door and the shouting have been someone else’s fault.
They aren’t far from the subway stop and the store where Alma intends to do her furtive shopping: Alma can walk. At the next stoplight she looks back. The driver is standing beside the streetcar, hands in his pockets, talking with a policeman. The ambulance is gone. Alma notices that her heart is pounding. This is how it is in riots, she thinks, or fires: someone begins to shout and then you’re in the middle of it, without knowing what is happening. It goes too fast, and you shut out the cries for help. If people had shouted “help” instead of “stop,” would the driver have heard them sooner? But the people did shout, and he did stop, eventually.
Alma can’t find a pink gym suit in Carol’s size, so she buys a mauve one instead. There will be repercussions about that. She makes it onto the subway train, using her spurious transfer, and begins her short journey through the darkness she can see outside the window, watching her own face floating on the glass that seals it out. She sits with her hands clasped around the package on her lap, and begins looking at the hands of the people across from her. She’s found herself doing this quite often lately: noticing what the hands are like, how they are almost luminous, even the hands of old people, knobby hands with blue veins and mottles. These symptoms of age don’t frighten her as a foretaste of her own future, the way they once did; they no longer revolt her. Male or female, it doesn’t matter; the hands she’s looking at right now belong to a middle-aged woman of no distinction, they’re lumpy and blunt, with chipped orange nail polish, they’re clutching a brown leather purse.
Sometimes she has to restrain an impulse to get up, cross the aisle, sit down, take hold of these alien hands. It would be misunderstood. She can remember feeling this way once, a long time ago, when she was on a plane, going to join Mort at a conference in Montreal. They were planning to take a mini-vacation together after it. Alma was excited by the prospect of the hotel room, the aroma of luxury and illicit sex that would surround them. She looked forward to being able to use the bath towels and drop them on the floor without having to think about who was going to wash them. But the plane had started to lurch around in the air, and Alma was frightened. When it took a dip, like an elevator going down, she’d actually grabbed the hand of the man sitting next to her; not that it would make any difference whose hand you were holding if there really was a crash. Still, it made her feel safer. Then, of course, he’d tried to pick her up. He was fairly nice in the end: he sold real estate, he said.
Sometimes she studies Theo’s hands, finger by finger, nail by nail. She rubs them over her body, puts the fingers in her mouth, curling her tongue around them. He thinks it’s merely eroticism. He thinks he’s the only person whose hands she thinks about in this way.
Theo lives in a two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise not far from his office. Or at least Alma thinks he lives there. Though it makes her feel, not unpleasantly, a little like a call girl, it’s where she meets him, because he doesn’t like coming to her house. He still considers it Mort’s territory. He doesn’t think of Alma as Mort’s territory, only the house, just as his own house, where his wife lives with their three children, is still his territory. That’s how he speaks of it: “my house.” He goes there on weekends, just as Mort goes to Alma’s house. Alma suspects he and his wife sneak into bed, just as she and Mort do, feeling like students in a fifties dorm, swearing each other to secrecy. They tell themselves that it would never do for Fran to find out. Alma hasn’t been explicit about Theo to Mort, though she’s hinted that there’s someone. That made him perk up. “I guess I have no right to complain,” he said.
“I guess you don’t,” said Alma. It’s ridiculous the way the five of them carry on, but it would seem just as ridiculous to Alma not to go to bed with Mort. After all, he is her husband. It’s something she’s always done. Also, the current arrangement has done wonders for their sex life. Being a forbidden fruit suits her. She’s never been one before.
But if Theo is still sleeping with his wife, Alma doesn’t want to know about it. He has every right, in a way, but she would be jealous. Oddly enough, she doesn’t much care any more what goes on between Mort and Fran. Mort is thoroughly hers already; she knows every hair on his body, every wrinkle, every rhythm. She can relax into him with scarcely a thought, and she doesn’t have to make much conscious effort to please him. It’s Theo who’s the unexplored territory, it’s with Theo that she has to stay alert, go carefully, not allow herself to be lulled into a false sense of security: Theo, who at first glance appears so much gentler, more considerate, more tentative. For Alma, he’s a swamp to Mort’s forest: she steps lightly, ready to draw back. Yet it’s his body – shorter, slighter, more sinewy than Mort’s – she’s possessive about. She doesn’t want another woman touching it, especially one who’s had more time to know it than she’s had. The last time she saw Theo (here, in this apartment building, the impersonal white lobby of which she’s now entering), he said he wanted to show her some recent snapshots of his family. Alma excused herself and went into the bathroom. She didn’t want to see a picture of Theo’s wife, but also she felt that even to look would be a violation of both of them; the use, by Theo, of two women to cancel each other out. It’s occurred to her that she is to Theo’s wife as Mort’s girl friend is to her: the usurper, in a way, but also the one to be pitied because of what is not being admitted.
She knows that the present balance of power can’t last. Sooner or later, pressures will be brought to bear. The men will not be allowed to drift back and forth between their women, their houses. Barriers will be erected, signs will go up: STAY PUT OR GET OUT. Rightly so; but none of these pressures will come from Alma. She likes things the way they are. She’s decided that she prefers having two men rather than one: it keeps things even. She loves both of them, she wants both of them; which means, some days, that she loves neither and wants neither. It makes her less anxious and less vulnerable, and suggests multiple futures. Theo may go back to his wife, or wish to move in with Alma. (Recently he asked her an ominous question – “What do you want?” – which Alma dodged.) Mort may want to return, or he may decide to start over with Fran. Or Alma could lose both of them and be left alone with Carol. This thought, which would once have given rise to panic and depression not unconnected with questions of money, doesn’t worry her much at the moment. She wants it to go on the way it is forever.
Alma steps into the elevator and is carried up. Weightlessness encloses her. It’s a luxury; her whole life is a luxury. Theo, opening the door for her, is a luxury, especially his skin, which is smooth and well-fed and darker than hers, which comes of his being part Greek, a generation or two back, and which smells of brisk sweetish chemicals. Theo amazes her, she loves him so much she can barely see him. Love burns her out; it burns out Theo’s features so that all she can see in the dimmed apartment is an outline, shining. She’s not on the wave, she’s in it, warm and fluid. This is what she wants. They don’t get as far as the bedroom, but collapse onto the living-room rug, where Theo makes love to her as if he’s running for a train he’s never going to catch.
Time passes, and Theo’s details reappear, a mole here, a freckle there. Alma strokes the back of his neck, lifting her hand to look surreptitiously at her watch: she has to be back in time for Carol. She must not forget the gym suit, cast aside in its plastic bag at the door, along with her purse and shoes.
“That was magnificent,” says Alma. It’s true.
Theo smiles, kisses the inside of her wrist, holds it for a few seconds as if listening for the pulse, picks up her half-slip from the floor, hands it to her with tenderness and deference, as if presenting her with a bouquet of flowers. As if she’s a lady on a chocolate box. As if she’s dying, and only he knows it and wants to keep it from her.
“I hope,” he says pleasantly, “that when this is all over we won’t be enemies.”
Alma freezes, the half-slip half on. Then air goes into her, a silent gasp, a scream in reverse, because she’s noticed at once: he didn’t say “if,” he said “when.” Inside his head there’s a schedule. All this time during which she’s been denying time, he’s been checking off the days, doing a little countdown. He believes in predestination. He believes in doom. She should have known that, being such a neat person, he would not be able to stand anarchy forever. They must leave the water, then, and emerge onto dry land. She will need more clothes, because it will be colder there.
“Don’t be silly,” Alma says, pulling imitation satin up to her waist like a bedsheet. “Why would we?”
“It happens,” says Theo.
“Have I ever done or said anything to make you feel it would happen to us?” Alma says. Maybe he’s going back to his wife. Maybe he isn’t, but has decided anyway that she will not do, not on a daily basis, not for the rest of his life. He still believes there will be one. So does she, or why would she be this upset?
“No,” says Theo, scratching his leg, “but it’s the kind of thing that happens.” He stops scratching, looks at her, that look she used to consider sincere. “I just want you to know I like you too well for that.”
Like. That finishes it, or does it? As often with Theo, she’s unsure of what is being said. Is he expressing devotion, or has it ended already, without her having been aware of it? She’s become used to thinking that in a relationship like theirs everything is given and nothing is demanded, but perhaps it’s the other way around. Nothing is given. Nothing is even a given. Alma feels suddenly too visible, too blatant. Perhaps she should return to Mort and become once more unseen.
“I like you too,” she says. She finishes dressing, while he continues to lie on the floor, gazing at her fondly, like someone waving to a departing ship, who nevertheless looks forward to the moment when he can go and have his dinner. He doesn’t care what she’s going to do next.
“Day after tomorrow?” he says, and Alma, who wants to have been wrong, smiles back.
“Beg and plead,” she says.
“I’m not good at it,” he says. “You know how I feel.”
Once, Alma would not even have paused at this; she would have been secure in the belief that he felt the same way she did. Now she decides that it’s a matter of polite form with him to pretend she understands him. Or maybe it’s an excuse, come to think of it, so he will never have to come right out on the table and affirm anything or explain himself.
“Same time?” she says.
The last of her buttons is done up. She’ll pick up her shoes at the door. She kneels, leans over to kiss him good-bye. Then there is an obliterating flash of light, and Alma slides to the floor.
When she comes to, she’s lying on Theo’s bed. Theo is dressed (in case he had to call an ambulance, she thinks), and sitting beside her, holding her hand. This time he isn’t pleased. “I think you have low blood pressure,” he says, being unable to ascribe it to sexual excitement. “You should have it checked out.”
“I thought maybe it was the real thing, this time,” Alma whispers. She’s relieved; she’s so relieved the bed feels weightless beneath her, as if she’s floating on water.
Theo misunderstands her. “You’re telling me it’s over?” he says, with resignation or eagerness, she can’t tell.
“It’s not over,” Alma says. She closes her eyes; in a minute, she’ll feel less dizzy, she’ll get up, she’ll talk, she’ll walk. Right now the salt drifts down behind her eyes, falling like snow, down through the ocean, past the dead coral, gathering on the branches of the salt tree that rises from the white crystal dunes below it. Scattered on the underwater sand are the bones of many small fish. It is so beautiful. Nothing can kill it. After everything is over, she thinks, there will still be salt.