World And Town Part 3

He laughs his old laugh, with a drop of his jaw-as if he just has to make a show of his hearty pink tongue and scattered gold crowns. "That's my Hattie, ever sweet and obliging. You know what I remember most about Chinese?"

When he arches his brows, they make little familiar tents, too-pup tents she always thought them. An expression Carter himself taught her, although not for his eyebrows, of course, but for the real pup tents he and his brothers used to pitch in their backyard.

"Bu du!-wrong! You loved to say that. You never said, 'Try that one more time' or 'You need to purse your lips' or 'Try touching your tongue to your palate.' You just said, Bu du!"

"Well," she says, collecting herself a little-Carter did always make you have to collect yourself. "I suppose no one else ever told you you were wrong, did they?"

"Bu du." His crow's-feet are more p.r.o.nounced than his frown lines, she's happy to see; and his plaid s.h.i.+rt is missing its second b.u.t.ton-so that's why the two unb.u.t.toned b.u.t.tons. White thread ends sprout from the flannel like the hairs that could be sprouting from his ears but, she sees, are not. "Many people told me. You just wanted to tell me yourself. Though here's what I've been meaning to ask you all these years-why you never said it to Reedie. He told me that to him you always said, Hn bang!"

"Well, you know." She gestures vaguely. "Reedie."

"Did you hear he got killed in a car accident last November?"

"Reedie?" She freezes.

"Driving drunk. Hit a beech tree. We tried to reach you, but no one knew where you were."

"Oh my G.o.d."

"I'm so sorry to be the one to tell you."

And indeed, where was Judy Tell-All to warn her? Shouldn't Judy Tell-All have warned her?

"No," she says. "No."

"I'm sorry," he says again. "And here you were right in Riverlake. As we would no doubt have heard had Reedie's ashes been buried here and not elsewhere."

"No."

"His wife said it was his unequivocal choice to be buried with her family." He looks off. "Dear Sheila. I heard about Joe, by the way." He stops. "The Turners told me."

She waves a hand.

"I'm so sorry. Two years ago?"

She nods.

"So young."

She nods again, or thinks she does. If there is any point in bringing up Lee, she can't anyway.

"Joe was a good man." Carter hesitates in his Carter-like way-not looking away, as other people do, but fixing on her again instead. "It was a shock, as I hardly need tell you."

Reedie's death, he must mean. Anyway, she cries and cries.

Really she should ask him in, but Carter has already settled himself, leaning back against the porch railing as if against his desk. His elbows are bent, and his shoulders raised up, one hand sitting to either side of his hips. Much the way that a dog or cat sits, according to a little neural sub-routine, he arranges himself the way he always has; he's ready to talk. And even as her chest heaves, she finds that her arms and legs have answered his on their own, crossing themselves and leaning sideways against the doorframe as if in his office doorway. It's the force of habit-these patterns embedded, no doubt, in their very Purkinje cells. A disconcerting idea, in a way. And yet what a comfort it is right now-knowing the same dance, and knowing that they know it. It's a comfort.

"I used to tell him it wasn't worth trying to catch up to me," he begins. "That there was nothing to catch up to. But he had that idea, and it made him feel pressured."

She nods, numb.

"He didn't care about Anderson. I guess Anderson was too far out of his league."

"Anderson he wors.h.i.+pped."

"Precisely. But me." He laughs a short laugh, pressing his long fingers into the railing, which flakes a bit; it needs paint. "I guess he thought anyone should be able to catch up to me."

"You really think it was your fault?"-her mouth talking without her.

"No."

"You just wonder"-her s.h.i.+rt sleeve is rough-"if you contributed."

"Yes." Carter's voice still falls like an ax, but there is something new in his gaze-something lanternlike and reflective. "There are few subjects about which one dares generalize these days, but if I may in this instance: The death of a brother does give one pause." He exhales. "And wonder how one contributed, as you put it. He had his own lab at the end, you know. He was doing good work-AIDS research. NIH loved him."

"So I guess he caught up to you, by the end."

"I would have said pa.s.sed me. But as you know, we see what we see."

"World makers that we are, you mean."

"Yes." Carter hesitates, his eyes on her, then says again, "He always felt pressure"-a backtrack so uncharacteristic that, upset as she is, she can't help but notice. People used to say his train of thought really was like a train-that he made his stops and moved on. She's never known him to wander, as others do, after what he used to call the wraith of an idea. Not that it much matters if he does now-since when are the people we admire most like trains anyway?-except that Hattie remembers what people said about his father-he's slipping-and how that haunted Carter. Dr. Hatch is slipping. Is that why he retired? It is hard to believe that he'd be slipping in any noticeable way at sixty-seven. And yet maybe that was the idea, to get out before anyone noticed-before anyone could say that about him.

"I brought a towel," he announces suddenly. "And a wet suit." He toes his bag, leaving a dimple in it. "A concession to middle age."

"Are you thinking about a swim?" When there could still be ice floes in the water? Now this does make her wonder about his mental competence. He can't be serious.

But he is. "With company, I hope. Do you own a wet suit?"

"Maybe you'd like to come in first?"

A belated invitation, half hospitality, half avoidance: Whether or not Carter is still his old self, she is no longer the Hattie who would dive into any kind of water. Time's made a sensible creature out of her.

Carter gives a Carter Hatch shake of his head, though-with a back and forth so subtle, it could almost be a tic. How used to being read he is-to people divining his thoughts. (The Gnome, people called him in the lab; and later, she heard, the G-nome, though it was Anderson who was working on the genome, not he.) "I heard you've retired from the saving of our nation's youth," he says suddenly.

Just teasing, she knows, and yet she bristles. "The youth do need our help, Professor."

He smiles. "You've grown testy in your old age, Hattie."

Testy.

"And what about you? What have you grown?" She's trying to tease-trying not to be testy.

"Stupid-I've grown stupid." Another smile. "Sweet and slow, as they say."

"Oh, Carter," she says. "You'll never be sweet."

Inviting return fire, she thinks. But he just sinks into himself a moment-his irises as blue as ever, though she can't help but look for the arcus senilis around his corneas, and finds it: that faintly milky edging that midlife will bring, like a sea of memory r.i.m.m.i.n.g one's worldview.

"And if I do not own a wet suit?" she goes on, more gently.

"But everyone knows that you do."

"So why did you ask?"

"Bashful, I guess."

To which she smiles in spite of herself-charmed and glad to have been charmed. Glad that he's managed to charm her. "And what if I had a cold? You are impossible."

"Unlike you, Miss Agreeability?"

"Yes."

"Bu du," he says. "Bu du, bu du, bu du." He winks. "How's my p.r.o.nunciation?"

She laughs.

Her wet suit is packed away who knows where. For while she does start swimming early in the year, she doesn't start this early; whatever the neural circuits for sanity, hers are still firing. Bureaus. Baskets. Reedie. Reedie. It's worse than looking for her keys, which she brilliantly keeps on a designated hook, painted red. Reedie. Joe. Lee. Is it not too much, all this death? Reedie. But, ah-there. She changes self-consciously-feeling more naked than she has in many years-trying not to notice the clamminess of her crotch. Middle age! When one is not surprised by one's age, one is surprised by one's youth. This sudden alacrity of her body, for example, as unexpected as it is undignified. She'd have sworn herself past this, but there go her nipples, bobbing up from the soft of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like corks. My life's companion Lee used to call her body, back when it was failing her; now Hattie squinches her own life's companion into the thick neoprene skin. She feels like an armored sausage as she hunts for the neoprene cap that goes with the suit. Neoprene aficionado that she's become, she even has insulated booties.

The complete walrus look, Lee would say.

"Sorry to be slow." Hattie finally reemerges.

But look: No Carter. No book bag.

Is it not just as well? She traipses over to the side yard and squints out past the Chhungs', toward the lake-sensing, through the dry chafe of the neoprene, the even pat of the sun. The life-giving sun, with which she began her fall, back when she taught. Her house has what's called a distant water view, and it is distant indeed-too far to make out a swimmer even if she had on her distance gla.s.ses, which she does not. She does not think of going in for them, though, or for her binoculars, either-having her pride, after all. Or, all right, call it an emergent characteristic. Still.

Hattie a tad less batty. She admires some willow trees across the way-their yellow-green flaring against the gray-brown of the other trees. And look at how the birches have woken up, too! Their white trunks sp.a.w.ning a bright mauve haze of new twigs and buds. How empty the house when she goes back in, though, without the dogs-how strangely big, as if it would echo if she were to say anything. Of course, it wouldn't, really; it's a small house. And what would she say anyway? Behold my insulation-? How much more likely that she'd start hearing other people's voices-Joe's, for example: You always were well insulated, Hat. Probably you had to be.

She works off her cap, then goes back out and calls the dogs.

Come back!

She unzips her suit.

Chhung is putting in a garden. It's back behind the trailer, so you can barely see it from the road, and from the house, Hattie can only make out the north end of the work. But there he is, sure enough, digging away with his son. On weekends in the beginning, but more recently on weekdays, too-a surprise. Shouldn't the boy be in school? And what a big garden they must be putting in-big enough to feed the family and more, if it works. She can't help but wonder if it will, though, given the light level down there; it's pretty dark. If they were anyone else, discouragement would be coming in by the cubic yard. But instead there they are, on their own. People hesitating a little to step forward, maybe-or so Hattie guesses, extrapolating from her own hesitation. Not that she's not sympathetic. She's sympathetic, of course. But she knows, too, from her teaching days how the troubles this family has seen are unlikely to have ended in America. Why would they have moved to Riverlake if they were thriving? And who knows, maybe the Chhungs know something the locals don't, anyway. What can be grown in a spot like that. Maybe they know.

Possessed as they may be of some ancient Cambodian wisdom?

The shovel is so much more substantial than Chhung, it looks to be wielding him. The boy is more equal to his spade. Not that he's so tall-Hattie puts him at maybe five foot six or seven. Still, taller and stockier than Chhung-and stronger, too-he digs easily. With a signature style, even, a certain exaggeration, as if he's not only working, but making a show of his work. Imagining, as workers will-Imagine! Joe would say-that he might not appear to be working hard enough. His whole body lifts; his elbow knifes high; his shovel bites hard. Chhung is wearing a.s.sorted sports clothes, including green nylon pants and a rust-and-white training jacket, as well as a straw hat with netting draped over it. The boy is wearing city clothes-no straw hat with netting for him. Instead, he wears a backward baseball cap over his ponytail, and to go with it a fat gold chain and earrings. A blue basketball jersey with some s.h.i.+ne to it, and jeans so baggy they threaten to fall down. It's a city fas.h.i.+on Hattie never could understand. How do you walk with your crotch at your knees? But never mind. He's a handsome boy, with a chisel to his face and a slash to his brow-a boy who would break hearts, if there were any around to break. For now, he devastates the no-see-ums.

He and Chhung don't stop work often, but when they do, the boy generally jabs his shovel into the dirt the way Chhung does, so that it stands straight up. Every now and then, though, when his father's not looking, he stands it up on its point, steadies it with his palm, then lifts his hand free quick enough that the thing just thuds. Then he looks off. Relaxing the ciliary muscles of his eyes, Hattie guesses, not to say his back-and who could blame him? This is not an easy job, what with the soil so wet, and clay besides. Even uphill from the Chhungs', Hattie's had to lighten her soil, dig in some compost; roots rot on her all the time. Probably she'll put sand in under her garden one day, the way Greta did, for drainage. But how about Chhung? Who's going to tell Chhung how he should really try sand? Someone, she thinks, should tell Chhung.

The girl brings the baby over, and at first it just clings and clings. When she sits it down in a pile of dirt, though, it begins to play and pretty soon wants to investigate the hole. Chhung yells and swats at himself; the girl tries to distract her charge, which is dressed in a frilly blue blouse and some overlong red pants, one leg of which stays rolled up fine. The other, though, seems bent on showing off its fine bunchy length. Hecq! the girl cries, swatting at the flies. Hecq! Hecq! Hecq! Clapping her hands, so the baby'll switch direction, which works. Everyone watches, relieved, as the child crawls on one knee and one foot, bottom high in the air, away from the pit.

Then it veers back toward it again.

Chhung throws a shovelful of dirt at the girl's toes, making her back away. He jabs at the ground, comes up with another shovelful, and for a moment seems about to heave that load at the baby. But instead, he stops and looks up at the sky, which is a wash of whitish blue-streaky, as if someone's just squeegeed it, and about as inspiring as a whiteboard, when you come right down to it. Still, Chhung sets his shovel aside, crosses a hump of dirt, and picks the baby up. The baby's crying and arching its back with frustration, but Chhung swings it like a pendulum, its pant legs a-dangle, as he calls up to the trailer. The woman hurries out with a bottle. She's a slip of a thing, in black pants and a white blouse; the blouse has puff sleeves. Her hair is shoulder-length and wavy, her skin darker and smoother than her husband's, and her face a little rounder, with hooped cheekbones like the fairy wings of a child's Halloween costume. A lovely woman, and yet not nearly as lovely in her features as in her movements-in that simple way she makes her way down onto the milk crate, for example, and then down again, watching where she steps. Careful even in her hurry. The earth is packed down at the bottom of the step now; it's not the mud pool it was when Hattie first went calling. Still, the woman picks her way across it as if across the mud she is aware is not there. Quickly-not wanting to appear to be dawdling, it seems-and yet somehow with the grace-the steady but light concentration-of a dancer.

She reaches the pit as the girl swoopingly reclaims the baby from Chhung, standing it up on its feet. The baby stops crying and, its fists gripping the girl's fingers, starts to step. One foot, then the other. Then the first foot again. Concentrating. Feet planted wide, and each step a stamp, as if there were a bug it wanted to shmush. Its hips loop around, hula hoopstyle. Still, it goes on, determined; it doesn't seem to mind even the pant legs, though when they get caught underfoot, the waistband pulls and the girl has to stop to roll the things up-a bit of a project, now that they are caked with mud. Still, she rolls, only to have them fall back down; they drag like the ankle cuffs of a chain gang. More steps. Chhung says something. The woman nods rea.s.suringly; the girl answers rea.s.suringly. The boy swats. The girl walks the baby away from the pit, swiveling her body as if in imitation of it. Planting her feet so wide, she looks to be wearing a diaper, too. She holds her head down.

And with that, peace returns. Chhung and the boy work; the woman slips away. Hattie resumes painting-wetting her brush, contemplating her composition. What now? A moment of puzzlement, and then a How about this? It's no subst.i.tute for Joe and Lee, but it's something. Her hand begins to move; Annie launches a fierce and protracted attack on poor Reveille's tail as Cato takes a nap. He lies on his side with his legs stuck out straight-his arthritis. She'll get him a warm compress in a minute.

By day three, the hole-a trench, really-is a lot bigger. A car and a half long, maybe, and deep enough to bury a vehicle up to its windows. The dirt piles along its edge are so high that Chhung and the boy can't throw the dirt clear of them anymore; they're piling it onto a piece of cardboard instead, and sliding that up an incline. It's an excruciating procedure to watch-like farm life before not only the invention of the wheel, thinks Hattie, but the deployment of the ox.

She finishes her current composition with disappointment. Three flat boards with thorns sticking out, her father would have said-a graceless thing. Ah, well. She feeds the dogs, bags up some old Nature magazines for recycling, then ventures downhill with a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow's rusted out in one corner, an ancient thing left behind by Joe's uncle when he moved north some years ago-back when Joe was wondering if it was enough to have moved, first out of the city, and then out of the suburbs; back when he was wondering if they shouldn't move north like his uncle, too. Which Hattie did, of course, in the end: Here she is. But it was one of the differences between them that Joe was always looking to retreat from the world, whereas Hattie was looking for something else. To regroup, Lee said once. To reconcile your contraries and, one day, to fructify.

Fructify?

Well, whatever, as the students used to say. And who knows why Hattie brought the barrow with her when she moved. A little retentive, are we? Lee would have laughed-Lee who held on to nothing. You know, I have no last will and testament, she said, bald and weak, toward the end. But I bequeath to you my comments; may you remember them always. She opened her stick arms like a pontiff blessing a crowd; her I.V. line hung down.

Lee.

Anyway, for what it's worth, Hattie's always liked wheelbarrows. Their una.s.suming usefulness, and the feel of them, too. She's always liked the spread of their handles spreading her arms-opening her heart, Adelaide, the new yoga teacher, would probably say. As if in stretching one's pectorals one stretched one's spirit, too. This wheelbarrow squeaks and rattles the whole way down Hattie's driveway, though. Something's loose; the tire's flat; the handgrips have split. It's work to push the thing even downhill. She wouldn't give it to anyone else. So why give it to the Chhungs, then? Is it not insulting? She does not feel spiritually stretched by the idea, quite the contrary. She feels spiritually contracted, and by the time she reaches their drive, is half thinking to head back home.

The Chhung men, though, have already come around the side of the trailer to greet her. They stand side by side-the boy half a head taller than Chhung-resting their shovels in just the same way, as if per some regulation. Then Chhung says something, and the boy goes back to work. He doesn't slow down until Hattie actually approaches, and then it's the gauged pause of the underling: Chhung may be taking this chance for a break, but his son is aware that his interest is not called for, and certainly no excuse to slack off. Chhung, on the other hand, unties his net and flips it back over his hat. He casually lights up; the cigarette tip flares, the bright ring travels. A large crow flaps through, cawing way up high above them, where there's sun; Hattie can see the light on its wings when it banks, but it doesn't cast a shadow because they're already in shadow.

"h.e.l.lo," she ventures. It's colder and damper down here than at her place; enormous white toadstools gleam in the dark woods. She s.h.i.+vers. "Excuse me. Sorry to bother you. But can I give you this?"

The boy watches, his fingers and clothes streaked with dirt. He sports dirt-edged Band-Aids on his hands, like Chhung.

"Thought maybe you could use it," she says.

"Tank you," says Chhung.

"I hope it will be a help." The flies are worse down here, too, with no wind. Hattie waves her hand in front of her face, but even so a no-see-um flies smack into her mouth. Of course, if she chose to reconceive the thing, she could probably find it not unlike a sesame seed. Instead, she spits it out.

Chhung takes a drag on his cigarette and, in a kind of answering gesture, blows smoke out his nose. Two wispy streams float up, obscuring his face. "Tank you," he says again.

"You're welcome." Hattie has a look at the work-in-progress. The layers of dirt are clear as the layers of a cake-an icing of topsoil atop a gravelly mix, then clay and clay and clay such as Hattie knows well. If you pick that clay up, you can squeeze it into a ball; and if you let go of the ball, you will behold a beautiful impression such as could make a real fossil find in a few million years. For now, though, the clay is mostly a premium seal-all. The bottom of the pit is about as dry as the floor of a car wash.

"That soil is heavy," Hattie starts to say. Before she can broach the subject of sand, though, Chhung has signaled to a window of the trailer. The girl peeks out from behind a lilac curtain; Chhung barks something, giving a swipe of a finger. The girl's head disappears then, only to materialize, complete with body, from around the corner; her mother and the baby accompany her. They present Hattie with a cardboard box of raisins, as well as a clear plastic box of something that looks like orange peels packed in sugar. The red Khmer script on the cover is all loops and squiggles, with an English translation below, in green: SWEET CHILI MANGO STRIPS.

"Thank you." Where the plastic box is sealed up with tape, Hattie pockets it and opens the raisins instead; she offers the girl and woman some. Naturally, they will not accept any until she's had one herself. But then they each take a couple, shyly. The girl rolls several between her fingers, as if making spitb.a.l.l.s; the baby leaves off its bottle, leans out of the woman's arms, and opens up its molarless mouth. Aren't they concerned about choking? Apparently not. The baby kicks; the girl softens a few more raisins; the baby placidly picks the raisins out from the girl's outstretched hand. Not cramming them all in or h.o.a.rding them, as Josh would have, in those soft chipmunk cheeks of his. Just calmly picking them out, one by one, as if demonstrating the use of an opposable thumb; and what fine focus we h.o.m.o sapiens have! Courtesy of the foveal cells of our maculas.

Hattie watches, amazed.

"A-muhmuhmuh," says the baby. The baby's drool is brown with raisin juice.

The woman is shy and still; her spirit abides within, Hattie's mother would say. A tiny woman-even Hattie dwarfs her. They exchange smiles as, between raisins, the baby goes back to drinking something that looks a lot like cola: some dark brown liquid, anyway, with lines of bubbles running up the length of the bottle. The girl is plain beautiful. She has her mother's smooth skin and hoop cheekbones, and her mother's high, wide forehead, too-a winds.h.i.+eld of a forehead-but with lovely lifting brows of her own, and a decided lilt to her full mouth. She looks as though she were not born, originally, but somehow blown, still soft, down into the world through a tube. And then what life was blown into her! Her brows lift and fall, her nose wrinkles and smooths, her lips purse and pop wide. And behind those gestures something more flickers-wariness, interest, boredom, confusion-a liveliness of response Hattie remembers from her teaching days. How she's missed this, she realizes-how she's missed young people in general. So many little gunning planes, as Joe used to say, on such highly interesting runways.

"You're welcome!" the girl says now, even as she shrugs her shoulders and ducks her head-embarra.s.sed to have been effusive. Hattie introduces herself. And, suddenly forthright, the girl introduces herself in return: So-PEE her name is. People call her Sophie all the time, because her name is spelled S-o-p-h-y, but actually her name is So-PEE, meaning "hard worker"-not exactly what she would have picked herself, but anyway. The woman is Mum.

"Which really is her whole name." The baby takes another raisin from Sophy's hand. "She's from the country, where they have names like that. Not like a real name. It just means like grown-up or something. Mature. Like, nothing."

Chhung retires to the trailer, swinging his arms; he has the air of an overseer headed to his desk. Sophy accepts some more raisins.

"I think I get what you're saying," Hattie says. "It's like 'Ma'am.' "