A Collision
Thizzz Mel frama trailer court ah got no fuckin water! — then the click of the disconnection, which her voice mail had picked up, too.
After the shot of blank fear at the accusatory tone of the voice, at its slurred phrasing and curse; after the thought that it wasn’t her dad, who, lowering his already low voice and stretching his syllables in a parody of from-the-south, liked to play stranger on the phone; after the dread that more fuckins, with some bitches, cunts and assholes were to follow; after the relief that they hadn’t, she exhaled and said to the dog, That happens in trailers, in 8 degrees with wind chill.
Then came some irritation that their phone number seemed especially vulnerable to mix-ups in some snarl of fiber optic web, and some suspicion that the new cordless phone, contributed to the household by a guest, wasn’t exactly a land-line anymore, something actually connected by a wire to other wires. Then came some guilt that she couldn’t help the man who had no fuckin water, not even to let him know that his message hadn’t reached the someone who could have done something about it, whose job it was, most likely, to restore his fuckin water. Nor did she know if the man thought as she did: it was ice, choking his pipes.
And probably she wouldn’t have gone on in that way, following a series of mental pictures that still bore the name Thinking, except that she had thought for a second there that it was her dad, and it had called up an image of her dad in a trailer with no fuckin water, except her dad wouldn’t have used such language and he knew that pipes froze, and had a method for dealing with them that included pouring boiling water from the tea kettle down the toilet, then going after the pipes under the trailer with a hair dryer on a long yellow extension cord, then wrapping the pipes in insulating tape and, as a precaution after, leaving the faucets dripping. The drips made frigid coins on the chrome, but at least they were not frozen.
Since she had that image, she saw its likeness attached to the slurred voice and found a scene in progress somewhere local and inside somewhere, but cold, of the man possibly drunk sprawled in a frayed armchair in front of a TV with cable calling up the trailer court manager — had he spent a day of labor in the frigid air and tried to warm himself in a hot shower? had he just taken a piss and tried to flush? had he had too many beers and then tried to fill Mr. Coffee’s reservoir? His might be the kind of frustration that leads to violence, or could, in some people.
In 8 degrees, having a basement, Caroline did have water, but she checked to be sure, and filled Ramón’s water bowl; it was actually a soufflé pot, but she didn’t cook that way anymore, not since she’d married Joe anyway, and his cholesterol.
Minutes had passed and she was later than she’d expected for the errands of picking up the wine and the milk and fetching the husband home, and, not wanting to leave the dog alone because he had just that afternoon chewed a button off her satchel, she leashed him and coaxed him to the car and into the back seat. Pleasure was there in using the keys, for having lost a set for the car and the house, she had finally that morning replaced it at the hardware store, with the help of a young man named Mike who had been so helpful and kind that she remembered him now, fondly.
Cold and dark, extremely cold, she thought, cold enough to freeze pipes in trailers. The Toyota, though, didn’t even complain. The roads were not slippery; frozen piles of slush hewed to the street curbs. No fine dust of snow, no thick flakes fell, or floated down.
*
Cars were hedging this way and that in the crowded intersection, some, like herself, trying to get into the parking lot behind the grocery store, and as she waited for an opening giving access to the lot across two lanes of traffic coming in her direction, she reached over toward the glove box for her wallet but — a jolt, the dog thrown forward between the seats, his jaw hitting her head, his whine of confusion, his struggling to right himself, tossing his head, bumping against her again, and a thud as of bone striking bone — but even confused, she trained her ear and listened, and heard with relief her own turn signal still blinking and no glass breaking.
Inside her skull her brain rocked in its viscous fluid; a vein stretched because of the rocking and then snagged on a bony protuberance, simple as a stocking on a twig, or a scarf on a splinter of desktop, and blood began to ooze there, quietly.
Then she looked behind and a white Honda pulled out of the lane behind her, crossed the lane beside, and pulled into the alley. Caroline followed, thinking there couldn’t be much damage. A tall short-haired blond woman got out of the Honda who looked familiar, vaguely, and then both were standing in the cold in the alley, and first one said, Are you okay? and then the other said it and Caroline said, My puppy dog’s a bit rattled, and the other was so sorry. They checked the bumpers. The Toyota’s dented license plate pointed to a bit of scratched paint next to it; reaching from the Honda’s bumper up to the stylized H was a dark smear, and beneath that, its license plate, punctured. Later Caroline realized the Toyota’s tail pipe had done that to the Honda’s license plate, pierced the official state letters of Y and Z. The Honda’s engine whirred oddly, like a refrigerator with something — dust — caught in the fan.
I’m so sorry, I was looking at the windows. The windows of the resale shop had attracted her attention because of the Art Deco lamps hanging there like balloons.
I thought maybe my blinker wasn’t on, but then I heard that it was — after.
No, it was my fault getting distracted like that —
The tall blond woman took out a notebook and wrote her name and phone number. The paper, thick and textured, came from between leather covers and among the pages were sketches in India ink. On the back of the page she gave Caroline was a sketch of a hand, open, relaxed, palm up, a left hand, whose fingers curled slightly. Caroline said, Don’t you want this? this sketch? Oh — the blonde woman peered closely at the sketch. No, I’ve got dozens like that, hands, I sketch them for practice. Then they exchanged various phrases regarding identification, where this one and that one worked, where their spouses worked, and when the tall blond woman named a local café then Caroline remembered having seen her there the Friday before, remembered having admired her hair cut, even having asked her, interrupting her busy to’s and fro’s, where she’d had it done, and remembered how its straw color shone in the dimmed lights, a summer shade in the early winter dark.
After the woman and her Honda had gone, Caroline stayed in the alley a bit longer, crawling into the back seat with the dog for a moment, to reassure him with a stroke on his head, but he seemed to wince a little, and his nose was bleeding, a little, so she dabbed at it with her glove, then watched as another drop of blood slowly oozed from one nostril. She pulled an old tissue from her coat pocket and dabbed a few more times, muttering to herself over his head, I thank the Lord Jesus that this wasn’t any worse.
Meanwhile, at home, the chrysanthemums, in light pink and deep burgundy, having been brought to the table on Thanksgiving, having held their bloom now for two weeks, continued to hold their moist postures although a few heads of flowers bent now as if in prayer, or gratitude for a long life, or perhaps it was fatigue.
*
Next morning there was a message from the tall blond woman on the voice mail, a long message about going to Chicago for the day and coming back late, after 11, but being home on Friday in case. The Honda must be okay, then, she thought. Then reading the scrap of paper she’d put with a magnet on the fridge door caused a slight rise of the brow, for the name she’d heard yesterday as a Scandinavian Olson was decidedly French, Blouson, a fashion word.
Joe was at his desk and she had errands but there was the question of the cleaning woman they had gained with their house-guest, whether she would actually arrive, given that she knew very little English and her English-speaking sister had gone to Chile. After Joe said, Where’s the leash? to alert the dog for an imminent walk, he wrote on a slip of paper, broadly phonetically, what she should say to Gabriela if she called; Caroline had no Spanish herself, only some French and some Koiné Greek from college New Testament studies: Ola Gabriela. José no esta. Por favor yame otra vez, en una media ora. She recited it, practiced it for him, since knowing no Spanish, how would she know how to say it?
Gabriela didn’t call as it happened and while Joe was off walking the dog, Caroline went on her errands, accomplishing fewer than she had intended due to the cold and how it made a person yawn, and long for a nap. But she was glad to come home with her small discovery: Girl Scouts had trained her to pick up litter, and not just outside either, so she was given to picking up things from the ground, or the floor, or the curb. When she picked up the paper in the discount store, obviously someone’s shopping list, a column of words with erasures and edits, she puzzled over it because she couldn’t read most of it, or even recognize the alphabet. It wasn’t Arabic; she recognized shapes of some Arabic characters from a decade-ago visit to the Alhambra. Some Asian language, then? Hindi, or Lao, or Thai? Not Vietnamese because it used the Latin alphabet. But, there are so many alphabets in the world! But it was clearly a list, one item following another down a sheet of notebook paper. The fourth set of characters had been crossed out; next to it was Wax, crossed out as well and replaced with Candle. Four more items marched down the page to another crossed out with Soap Box written beside it, and another where Loofah was crossed out and replaced with Sponge. Two more somethings finished the list, the last item wasn’t String but Thread. Different colors of ink suggested a spread of days, the list’s slow gathering to an excursion. Clearly somebody was setting up house! Joe would like this list, too, because wasn’t this the way it was in a university town in the U.S. of A. with a healthy population of international students?
When she returned to the house, Joe was at his desk and Gabriela was there at the sink.
Shame pulsed for a moment like white noise, but then other things drowned it out — the memory of the house-guest Benny for one, and how he had solved the problem of putting Caroline in a position of cleaning up after him for the six weeks of his stay: better he should pay someone else to scrub the toilets of his stains of urine or the sinks of his dots of shaving. It had been gracious of him to offer that, and keeping Camilla employed a little longer since she had cleaned his own house for years was the least he could have done for her. But then Camilla, who spoke English, had gone to visit other family in Chile, and had sent her sister Gabriela, and Benny had smoothed all of that over before he left them in her care, and never once did Caroline think the offer reflected on her housekeeping.
Linguistically clashing hellos broke the shame, too, as she noticed the tightness of Gabriela’s jeans, and wondered if they hurt. She imagined Joe noticing, too, Gabriela’s tight jeans, Gabriela’s leotard stretching broadly over Gabriela’s bosom for compared to Caroline, Gabriela was fulsome in shape. But Caroline dimmed that image right away, not wanting to think of Joe looking at Gabriela’s breasts, wanting rather to believe that Gabriela’s manner of dress had more to do with cleaning than being sexy, with not wanting clothing to get in the way, and there was something probably cultural about it, since she was from Chile and chances were against Puritans having had an effect there, or other kinds of Protestants, unless there had been missionaries in South America, a few Calvinists or Lutherans or Southern Baptists. Her mind slid into a sloppy generalization: Aren’t they all Catholic down there? But information curbed that tendency; she remembered that about one in five people on the planet were Muslim.
Then, moving towards the upstairs she was halted by an address: Mrs. Caroline! She turned and Gabriela pointed at the empty bottle of Murphy’s Soap. Mrs. Caroline? A form of address more foreign than Spanish. She realized Gabriela hadn’t addressed her directly before, hadn’t needed to, had communicated in Spanish with Benny and Joe. For a while, then, abruptly, Mrs. Caroline became who she was, the Lady of the House whose house someone else cleaned, someone from a foreign country, as far away as Chile, and she herself felt compelled not to clean her house very well because Gabriela needed the work.
Joe got ready to leave, but his leaving was preceded by some chat with Gabriela in Spanish, some laughing happy exchange; from upstairs Caroline heard the laughing, Gabriela’s high glee over some remark. He came upstairs then and kissed Caroline with just a suggestion of tongue and a raising of his eyebrows for seeing her later. Should they have an early dinner, he said, should they crawl between the sheets, share some horizontal time? She tilted her head aside and considered him, the slight stoop of his shoulders, though they were broad, the length of his arms, even the muscle memory deep in them of wrestling holds. Maybe, she said, though her smile said yes, and was the beginning of an afternoon of anticipation. Then Joe went off to teach the English majors something about poetry.
*
Since her sister was in Chile, Gabriela needed a ride home some hours later. Mrs. Caroline had directions; the sister Camilla had provided them earlier. Trying to ease the silence of the car by saying Left and Right, and getting in response some version of the words in Spanish, she was surprised at herself for not retaining them from one turn to the next. Still they could drive without words, and she turned this way then that until a turn up a hill where things became unfamiliar, and Gabriela pointed for a right up Birch Drive where the world became a winter pastoral, bare trees lined with frost, and Christmas lights visible through the back yards of large houses on the far side of the ravine that paralleled the road.
At the end of Birch Drive was a trailer court. Mrs. Caroline had known that Gabriela’s sister, her two daughters and husband, and now Gabriela, too, lived in a trailer. The trailers were small; there were no double-wides in this court: the lots were small; there were no frozen garden plots blanketed in snow. Following the one-way signs, Mrs. Caroline stopped for Gabriela’s Aqui, asked number eight? Non, Siete. A string of green lights around the window blinked slowly. Mrs. Caroline wondered if the pipes were frozen, tried to figure out how to ask but could only come up with Agua, and that after Gabriela had left the car.
Meanwhile, the logman came. Caroline had left a check tucked among the wood remaining from last winter, and he had unloaded the logs, stacking them on the east wall inside the garage. The dog would have done his job and tried to scare him off at his arrival, and when she came in from taking Gabriela home, he was trotting with purpose about the house from room to room, his hair all bristling and threat in his eyes. Good Dog, she said, doing your job, good dog. Having done his job, he climbed into his armchair and growled deeply; then, taking his ease, he rested his head on the arm of his chair.
Mrs. Caroline remembered how the house-guest Benny had played with the dog, leading him about by a twisted rope clenched in his teeth. Then she remembered a conversation they’d all had over dinner and wine about starting an academic program for Personal Assistants, offering certification for people like Gabriela and her sister, expanding their duties to the phone and the mail. The three of them at table, all certified and credentialed and degreed, perhaps to excess, played out their little joke for a while, projecting increased income levels for certified PA’s. But they gave readily to the diversion of the dog, and to the repetitions of his name — the fruit of a summer’s evening and its recitations in deep wine of Eliot and Stevens until they came to Pale Ramón Fernandez. They were as far as an ocean from Key West, but intervening was land not water. Ramón, Ramóne, Ram-o-a-n, like a high wind in bare trees, like freezing winds whipping around narrow trailers in narrow trailer lots — the orphan he was, the dog, saved from the shelter, young enough to be renamed but old enough to have become terrified of bearded men in short pants riding bicycles wearing hats, of brooms, of mechanical noises, of the garden hose.
Ramón grew calm in his security chair, then he left it and headed to Joe’s study, circling widely past the refrigerator; it had acquired a new flipping noise, perhaps due to Gabriela’s cleaning. Mrs. Caroline noticed a ringing in her ears, but attributed that, too, to the fridge: her head ached in an unfamiliar way; maybe she should eat something. Instead, she took out the small vacuum with the long hose and nozzle attachment and vacuumed underneath the fridge. Dust, coagulated, resisted suction, and taking Mr. Clean because Murphy’s was empty, on her knees she washed the pooled sludge of years with a sponge she held with a long pair of tongs. On her knees was a genuflection, and then it was a penance because wasn’t she a Sinner, too, especially sometimes ignorantly sinning about things both done and left undone.
*
Earth Shall Be Fair and All Men Sad and Wise — the line refused to be shaken off, not being a dusting of snow on her shoulders. She knew it was the last line of a Christmas hymn, and knew, too, that there were no indexes of hymns according to last lines. Forgetting was a generosity to herself; had she remembered Turn Back O Man, Forswear Thy Foolish Ways, a hymn for Lent, her mood would have shifted to irritation, to petulance; Turn back O Person, Turn back O PERSON. As it was, she merely replaced Men in that line with Be, emphasizing the subjunctive mood of a somewhere, sometime, where everybody lived, and all were sad and wise. But why Sad and Wise? Hadn’t she learned from Socrates that Wisdom was Happiness?
Humming a bit off-key the bit of tune for Earth being Fair, she returned the call from the tall blond woman, only to find she wasn’t at home. Mrs. Caroline left a message with the woman who answered, telling her the Toyota was fine, and the cost of painting the less than two square inches of paint scratched probably wouldn’t amount to the deductible, so from her side, there was nothing to worry about, but what about the Honda and its whirring noise? I don’t know, she said Her voice was cool, and had surprise in it, like touching the knob of the screen door in winter when your fingers are wet, finding they stick to the metal. Maybe this bit of her roommate’s business was an irritation, but maybe the two were just friends, or sisters, or cousins, or in-laws.
It occurred to Mrs. Caroline to ask if they lived in a trailer court and whether they had water, except she remembered then that the tall blond woman had been driving south on Gilbert Street. It also occurred to her that although yesterday’s visit to a trailer court with Gabriela had been on the north side of town, there were trailer courts to the south, and she’d come close to renting a trailer herself some eight years earlier. That long ago was three years before Joe. She hadn’t taken it in the end because the landlord had refused her the accommodation of a dog. At that thought she reached for Ramón, The Good Dog who moaned there at her side for ice or a biscuit or some play. The exchange of information with the cold woman dribbled to a frozen pool. After hanging up, Caroline put her arms around Ramón’s neck and whispered in his ear, For I will consider my dog Ramón, servant of the living God, whose service is in fetching the stick, who prays in pausing at street corners, whose nosebleed didn’t last very long at all.
*
The mail brought a card that morning from a salesperson Nancy who worked at Von Maur. Mrs. Caroline knew that sales people wrote such cards in order to gather a clientele of their own, to make personal connections and maybe even become something of an in-store personal shopper, a helper in the same league maybe as a Personal Assistant. The card referred to her recent purchase of slacks, and then referred to a previous purchase of plaid pants, with the hope that Mrs. Caroline had kept the receipt so she could come in and get a price adjustment, since the plaid pants had since gone on sale.
But she didn’t in general buy plaid things, except jackets. Had she bought some plaid pants? She began to search her closet for something she didn’t think she had bought. What plaid pants?
Her mental processes slipped into neutral as the plaid pants became an emotional obsession, and finding them became a project of something that, if completed, would save her. Out from the closet came half a dozen jackets, or blazers they were called sometimes, maybe just on men. Things slipped about on the bed losing the grip of hangers. Then came blouses of various kinds, skirts and what pants she had that she hung and there were no plaid pants. Had she worn them? She consulted her legs for the memory of plaid; could the knees remember, or the ankles? How had they fit, the plaid pants that she hadn’t bought? Maybe they were in the box she used for things to be altered? But she wouldn’t have paid full price for something that had to be altered. She went to the box for altering things and upended it and just as she’d suspected there were no plaid pants retaining their tags from Von Maur. When she suddenly started shaking, and when it went on for a few minutes, and then it stopped, she wondered if she’d had too much coffee.
Joe came home to find her sitting on the bedroom floor surrounded by piles of garments. What are you doing? She said she was looking for something she hadn’t bought. Say again? So she did, and felt suddenly as though the search were a kind of betrayal, like looking everywhere for a former lover because you know he’s not to be found. Absence is like that, she thought, looking and looking will never convince you that something you know is gone is gone.
But Joe thought something else, though he voiced no judgment. She looked small in a flood of clothing; he had a twinge of a feeling of danger, that something might be wrong. Like his wife, he thought in whole sentences, generally, sometimes they were questions, rhetorical questions that voiced his worry to himself. You’re looking for something you know isn’t there? Why would you do that? Is something missing in your life? What can I do for you? Without answers, he watched her, and then he began to study her for signs of a lack, some need he could meet that went as far beyond logic as this heap of garments and he decided to turn aside from the thought that he was in some way inadequate.
*
As she read the obituaries in the local paper the next day, Mrs. Caroline got the sinking feeling about the tall blond woman being dead—in an accident probably, on the interstate, where there were semi tractor-trailers and the Honda was so small, and the tractor-trailers made so much wind as they passed, and the Honda was so light, and what about the survivors left behind and what if there had been a mechanical failure, like a frozen water pump in the engine, or ice in the gas line that made for sudden deceleration with panic, then a surge, as unexpected again, as a semi passed —
It didn’t occur to Mrs. Caroline that all of that event with Ramón in the backseat and then tossed into the front might have had consequences for herself, was making consequences at that moment in her skull, in a minute pool that was gathering in volume between the meningeal layer of dura and the arachnoid matter resident of her skull.
Did I kill her by voice mail? she whispered to the newspaper. The line of causality distended itself from the dim consequence of a wrong number in a message on the voice mail to errands delayed by some few minutes, and backwards in time to emptying a bottle of wine, to having Benny the house-guest who had watched Joe on the old phone as its cord curled and it fell to the floor.
If only Mrs. Caroline, whose Earth was still Fair, if cold, having been jolted into Sadness, could have been ushered into the deep darkness of Wisdom. But only the chrysanthemums sang their demise on the table in scattered petals, a few gracing with degeneracy the spread pages of the paper. Only a vein in her skull continued its secret pooling above the brain and below the bone. Only Ramón moaned in his doggy lust for crunching on ice. Only the heating ducts exhaled into the room; it was a kind of consolation.
Caroline couldn’t see herself telling Joe any of this. Neither did she remember for days that the hymn lyric spoke of All being Glad and Wise.