A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [46]
I got up that morning only because Howard told me I must. He came into the bedroom after his chores. “Emma is hungry,” he declared. “Claire’s diaper is soaked. Either you feed them or I feed them.” As always, he spoke in clipped sentences which went right to the heart of the matter. He was so good at fixing and managing, tending to details. The barn was as beautiful and clean a barn as could be found in all of Christendom. He pulled back the sheet, sat down, and put his hand over mine. “Why isn’t Claire toilet-trained? I’m having trouble with the irrigation rig again.” He pulled me up and held me with his arm around my shoulders. “Alice,” he said, “I need your help.”
I had forgotten that I was going to be naked. I looked at my feet first, and then at my breasts and my stomach and thighs and knees. I was a ghostly color, gray, as if I’d been stored in formaldehyde. I thought of the leg of lamb that we’d eaten a few days earlier. Nellie had put on my soiled canvas apron and gouged the bone from the meat, made gashes all over and stuffed them with slivered garlic, and then put the bleeding slab over hot coals. Sheep were animals who knew weariness and rest, hunger and thirst, the pleasure of a rotten melon. They had the instinct to care for their young, an instinct which looked exactly like love. And then I thought for an instant of Lizzy in her coffin in the ground. How strange to put someone in the ground! I couldn’t put Emma or Claire in a box and bury either one without losing my mind. I would still think of that body as the person, as the child who would be terrified and alone and smothered under all that dirt. I saw out the window Lizzy’s bones lying under her party dress, her short toe bones inside the patent leather shoes. No, I said to myself. Not that. I had to quickly shake my head as if I might possibly work like an Etch A Sketch, the contents of my mind forever erased with one or two jerks.
“Did I tell you?” Howard said, leaning over to find a clean undershirt in his drawer, “that a traveling salesman appeared out of nowhere after the funeral, trying to sell coffin insurance to Dan and Theresa?”
“Coffin insurance?” I said. “Well, you never know. You can’t be too careful.”
“What?” Howard asked.
“Nothing.”
“What did you say?”
“What?” I asked. I sat down. I was naked except for my socks. I had forgotten the order of things. I was a mother, and mothers were supposed to rise to the occasion because they had children to care for; they were to cook the stew in a crisis because there was no alternative to nourishment other than death. We were not to die until the youngest child graduated from college. Howard, how can I cook the stew when I don’t know what clothes to put on next? I wanted to ask. Maybe it was better if the children died first, because then a person could relax, stop worrying, and just take up grief.
“What are you doing, Alice?”
He occasionally said my name as if he were a viper, drawing out the S sound. There was a plastic tub on the dresser, underneath one of Howard’s dirty shirts. I had nothing on but my socks. That was butter, now soft and rancid, in the tub. I hadn’t remembered coming in the bedroom on the day Lizzy drowned, but I must have.
“Your children need you, Alice.” He hissed under his breath, right into my face, “Alicccce.” I could see that he was trying to bully me back to health. I might have done the same if he