Matthew M. Quick

Linda McCullough Moore

Were and Was

     Last night, sitting in the late night kitchen, she says why don’t we gather up all of the dog hair in the house and make a sweater. I say okay, but make her promise we will never—not one soggy time—wear it in the rain.
     I want to say, if Nellie were regular, I never would agree to dog hair sweaters or to half the harebrained projects we attempt, but I’m not convinced, or not entirely, that is in fact the case. I want to say, if she were regular, that I would be a more distracted sort of mother, but I know full well that I have pushed the border of distraction to caricature already, dipping back into the moment only long enough to fashion dog hair sweaters matted hard with glue when weaving fails. I want to say, if she were regular, I wouldn’t fight with God ... or not all the time.
     I look around the crowded train I’m riding on. I study the men’s faces, look directly, lack all subterfuge. No matter. They do not know I’m here. I think if she were regular, perhaps I would be as oblivious as they. I would read a magazine on this my fourth journey to Boston Children’s Hospital to stalk a man who wrote an article a dozen years ago about childhood MS research that he planned to do.
     Or no, no magazine. No train. If she were regular, I wouldn’t ride on trains at all; I wouldn’t even drive. I’d walk, slowly through the world, reading while I walked, reading what I liked. If she were regular, I’d never read nonfiction. I’d never look at men, drawn to their faces, bees to honey, on the street in passing, on rattletrap commuter trains.
     It seems today that I have settled on one face in particular for this fool’s errand of a journey. The man sits directly opposite wearing a black sweater over a broadcloth shirt, blue jeans, sneakers that look like they get the job done. I’ve looked over a dozen times, longish looks, longing looks. Still, he doesn’t know I’m here. It makes me frantic. I think that any minute he will gather up his briefcase and his glasses and his jacket and his hat and walk away. The idea makes me crazy. I want to ask a question that will make him want to stay.
     I feel sometimes that I will die if a breeze blows a certain way, if a certain man gets up and leaves a certain train. If she were regular, I would die. In a heartbeat, never turn a whisker. As it is, I must grab onto breezes and onto certain men on trains, and live, live like crazy.
     I take out my laptop, which clicks like an old telegraph machine when I am typing. He must at least register annoyance at the click-clack clatter. He has to know I’m looking at him. Like God, who has to recognize my battering ram when I come smashing at the metal gates at every hour of the day and night. I stare across the aisle at this random man. He’s just like God.
     He wears no wedding ring, but has a thick band on his right hand. So is he European, then? If there is anything more oblivious than an American man, it is a man from another country. He holds a few typed pages, which he reads, and then makes notes in a tiny notebook. He’s rustling around now. I’m too scared to look. He might be leaving.
     I don’t know if I can bear it. If she were regular, he would glance up and catch my eye, the first time I looked over, and he’d give me a goofy smile, or perhaps just a warm gentle one and pat the seat beside him, and I’d shake my pretty head (I would willingly be pretty) and smile a smile designed to let him know I would probably not be entirely opposed to a glass of wine together once we reached South Station.
     If she were regular, God would come to me on trains and planes and in Roman Catholic visions, in Eastern Orthodox and otherworldly dreams. He would not show up as others have—cold, unfeeling, strange—men from whom I must wrest salvation. I’m working up to palpitations; he only grows more calm.
     I hate him. I hate his cool reserve, his self-sufficiency that exactly suits his blonde Norwegian wife at home, or, that keeps him fully satisfied with no one. A little bit of print on a paper, a pen, a hat, and he is good to go in any kind of weather. If there’s anything more smug than he, I do not know it.
     He has five daughters who are so healthy that they must take emetics and narcotics to make them sick and, even then, they have the constitutions of a horse, of several horses. I have a vision of the five blondes mounted on their purebred stallions, riding down a beach, hair billowing out behind them. The horses canter, cutting into shore-side foam, their hoofprints vanishing as they appear, filling in with water, gently smoothed as though they’d never been.
     Nothing in their lives has consequences.
     I hate them. I truly do,
     A tall, gray-haired man, a physician by all appearances, sits down across the aisle from me. I know that it is he I should be focused on. He may well be the scientist I’m traveling to seek. I stop myself, but only just, from moving over to sit beside him, from saying, “The article you wrote, the hopeful one, about what your research might find a cure for—did you do it? Is it done? and may God strike you dead if you did something else instead.”
     I let him be.
     The Brownie leader told me when I picked Nellie up last night from her troop meeting that they went around the circle and each girl said what made them special, and one girl said her hair, and one girl said her rabbit hutch, and Nellie said what made her special was that she would not be living as long as the other Brownies would. And all the other girls tittered as girls do, and the Brownie leader told them death was serious, and so they talked about dead goldfish, then, and their grandfathers who had died, or who were slated to. They are compliant girls. They’re in the Brownies after all, which means they come from families who taught them early that if they are in company and someone wants to talk of death, or any other thing there is, then they should jolly well make a serious effort to come up with a comment on the subject.
     The man who sits across from me was never in the Brownies. He may have been in the Boy Scouts, but that hardly counts. Boy Scouts teach you how to live, as though the plan is that you will live forever. Only Brownies speak of death on school nights.
     It just happens, just like that. The man is gone. The seat he occupied is empty. There is not so much as a depression in the upholstered bench. I hardly can recall his face. I miss him like I never missed anyone before. I can’t stand losing people. I’ve told God that a thousand times. If there is one fact that He knows, it is that fact.
     If she were regular, I would not miss anyone again.
     Feelings would not carry over from one day to the next; there would be no relentless continuity. Emotions would be e-mails I deleted.
     Even as I sit here now, the blonde, healthy horseback riders on the morning beach disappear at the horizon, which I heard the other day is not a fixed point, after all. And just as fast, the beach is gone, the train is gone, and I am once again sitting at the kitchen table with an unconscionable amount of dog hair in several smelly heaps. A person couldn’t make a sweater out of it. God couldn’t make a sweater out of it.
     The scientist I went to see in Boston was dead, they’d told me. A suicide. Carbon monoxide. Such a smooth and wimpy way to go, I think.
     “We could make a fur ball, then,” Nellie tells me. “If we can’t do a sweater, we can make a fur ball. Where’s the Elmer’s?” She refers to every product by it’s trademark name.
     “Where’s the Tropicana?”
     “Where is the damn Log Cabin?”
     If she were regular, I wouldn’t have taught her to swear. I’m almost certain.
     “We could make a lovely fur ball,” Nellie is consoling me. “Say, have I told you, by the way, about the night time zoo?”
     “Why no,” I say. “I don’t believe you have.”
     “Oh yes,” she says. “Well, the reason is because I’ve only lately learned of it myself.”
     Her sentences, her diction, are always carbon copies of whatever book we’ve lost ourselves inside of. Mostly she just sounds like one of Roald Dahl’s people.
     “You see,” she says. “The animals are like heaven.” She pauses for punctuation. “They are there all the time, only we can’t see them, cause we are sound asleep. See, life is the sleep part. Heaven is the waked up part.”
     “But, the animals?” I say.
     “Oh, yes. I thought you might be interested in them. You see, Barbara” (since infancy, she’s called me by no other name), “when we are asleep at night, the street outside is full of animals.”
     “Raccoons?” I ask. I’ve always liked raccoons.
     “Phhhtt,” she snorts. “Think bigger. Elephants. Lions. Tigers. Bears.”
     We’re in the middle of The Wizard of Oz at the moment.
     “The whole street is crowded with them. It’s a way loud parade.” She glances up at me to gauge reaction. She’s been trying to explain heaven to me this whole summer, coming at it every way there is. She scrunches up her face. “You’re probably wondering about the shit,” she says.
     “I beg your pardon?”
     “I know you. You’re probably wondering about what happens to all the dropping things the animals leave out on the street at night, how come it’s always gone by morning.”
     “Well, I wasn’t, but I am now.”
     “I thought you might.”
     “So?”
     “I think I’ll just let you think about that a little while.” She reaches out to scoop the dog hair closer. “You know, we could give the fur ball to some child who doesn’t have a ball. We could tell her it is magic, just in case it would turn out to be. I wish that you could see the parade that goes by in the night. You see this tiger playing with the fire hydrant and you just wish you were outside. You really do. And the giraffes, they practically knock out the street lights about one time every night.”
     She asks me what I think of adding glitter to the dog hair paste.
I say, how can we not?
     If she were regular, I wouldn’t have glitter in the house, I wouldn’t be required to curse routinely when I see bits glinting on the floor, and, I almost certainly would not wake up in the middle of the night to wonder who we’ll give the dog hair ball to, or to roll, then, out of bed, and with no slippers on, go over to the window, pulling back the curtains on the night, to peer and listen, wishing, willing even one tired elephant to lumber by, one formerly ferocious grizzly, on his hind legs, pawing the night air, then dropping to all fours, as the lone giraffe takes one for the team, skull bones making street lights splinter, spattering a hundred, newly-minted miniatures of light, wincing, blinking, as the camel starts to laugh, then nodding, modest, clearly pleased.