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By Root 395 0

How am I going to handle this?’ I’ve come to stand for everything bad. I think he sees me as evil. I tell him, ‘Look, I don’t have to belong to Holy Basis to be a good woman. I try my very best,’ I say. ‘Is it my fault I’m not religious?’ I never have been, not since I was seven and they gave me this book of children’s Bible stories, this jealous God throwing tantrums, people having to sacrifice their children, everybody always in the wrong. I didn’t like it. See, it’s not that I don’t believe. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, it depends on when you ask me. What the trouble is: I don’t approve. I’d rather not be associated with it. It’s against my principles. ‘I try to manage without all that,’ I say, ‘and really, it’s harder to be good if you do it without religion. Give me an A for effort at least,’ I tell him …”

“But then how come he said all that on TV?” Jake asked.

I had trouble breaking off my train of thought. I said, “What?”

“Said you was a good woman.”

“Oh … did he? I don’t know, I guess he just meant I wouldn’t have robbed a bank.”

“Then why didn’t he say you wouldn’t have robbed a bank?” said Jake. “What his words were, you’re a good woman.”

I looked at him.

“Maybe he sees things different now you’ve left,” said Jake. “Or more likely, you just had him figured wrong to start with. I mean, it could be he really does believe you’re good, and worries what that means for his side. Ever thought of that?”

“Well, no,” I said.

“Women,” said Jake. “They can’t understand the very simplest little things.”

We rode along in silence, threading down an avenue of lights as blurred and dazzling as a double strand of jewels.

14

One morning in the fall of 1974, I was mixing Jiggs some cocoa and dreaming at the kitchen sink. My mother said, “Charlotte, I don’t feel so well,” and I said, “Oh?” and reached for a spoon. Then I said, “What, Mama?”

“I don’t feel so well.”

“Is it flu?” I asked her.

“I think it’s something more.”

“I see,” I said, and stirred the cocoa around and around, watching bubbles travel in circles. Then I said, “Well, the … yes, the doctor. We’ll go to the doctor.”

“I’m afraid to go to the doctor,” my mother said.

I laid the spoon aside. I watched the bubbles continue to skate, slower and slower. Then I happened to glance over at my mother, who was sitting in her lawn chair hugging her stomach. It was true that she seemed unwell. Her face had sharpened; her eyes had moved closer together somehow. I didn’t like the set of her shoulders. I said, “Mama?”

“Something is wrong with me, Charlotte,” she said.

I had Julian drive us to the doctor. By suppertime she’d been clapped in the hospital; by eight the next morning she’d been operated on. I waited for word on a vinyl couch that stuck to the backs of my legs. When Dr. Porter and the surgeon walked toward me, I jumped up with a smacking sound. The surgeon arrived first and developed a sudden interest in a still life hanging behind me. “All we did,” he said over his shoulder,” “was close her up again.” I didn’t like his choice of words. I stayed stubbornly silent, clutching my pocketbook.

“There was nothing else possible,” Dr. Porter said. “I’m sorry, Charlotte.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“It’s c.a.,” the surgeon told me.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Well, thank you very much.”

“You can see her in a while,” said Dr. Porter. “Are you by yourself?”

“Saul is coming.”

“Well. I’ll be in touch.”

I sank back onto the couch and watched them go. I thought that walking in those thick-soled shoes would be like wading through a sandbox. Then I noticed Saul plunging down the corridor, his face remote and luminous. He passed me, paused, raised a hand to his forehead and returned. “What’s c.a.?” I asked him.

“Cancer,” he said, sitting down.

“Oh, I see. Of course.”

He opened his Bible to the ribbon marker. Halfway down the page, he suddenly stopped and looked over at me. We stared at each other blankly, like two people at the windows of separate trains.

———

After my mother returned from the hospital, her bedroom became the center of the house. She was