“It’s a bad part!” she cried. “It’s a really bad part!”
There was no answer for this. She wept. Eventually her tears would stop. It was a necessary first step on the way to. making an uneasy peace with a truth that was never going to go away.
He held his daughter and listened to church bells on Sunday morning, floating across the September fields; and it was some time after her tears had stopped before he realized that, like Church, she had gone to sleep.
He put her up in her bed and then, came downstairs to the kitchen, where Rachel was beating cake batter too hard. He mentioned his surprise that Ellie should just cork off like that in the middle of the morning; it wasn’t like her.
“No,” Rachel said, setting the bowl down on the counter with a decisive thump.
“It isn’t, but I think she was awake most of last night. I heard her tossing around, and Church cried to go out around three. He only does that when she’s restless.”
“Why would she…?”
“Oh, you know why!” Rachel said, angrily. “That damned pet cemetery is why! It really upset her, Lou. It was the first cemetery of any kind for her, and it just… upset her. I don’t think I’ll write your friend Jud Crandall any thank-you notes for that little hike.”
All at once he’s my friend, Louis thought, bemused and distressed at the same time.
“Rachel-”
“And I don’t want her going up there again.”
“Rachel, what Jud said about the path is true.”
“It’s not the path and you know it,” Rachel said. She picked up the bowl again and began beating the cake batter even faster. “it’s that damned place. It’s unhealthy. Kids going up there and tending the graves, keeping the path.
fucking morbid is what it is. Whatever disease the kids in this town have got, I don’t want Ellie to catch it.”
Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends’ marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery-the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic.
And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.
“Honey, it’s just a pet cemetery,” he said.
“The way she was crying in there just now,” Rachel said, gesturing toward the door to his office with a batter-covered spoon, “do you think it’s just a pet cemetery to her? It’s going to leave a scar, Lou. No. She’s not going up there anymore. It’s not the path, it’s the place. Here she is already thinking Church is going to die.”
For a moment Louis had the crazy impression that he was still talking to Ellie; she had simply donned stilts, one of her mother’s dresses, and a very clever, very realistic Rachel mask. Even the expression was the same-set and a bit sullen on top, but wounded beneath.
He groped, because suddenly the issue seemed large to him, not a thing to be simply passed over in deference to that mystery… or that aloneness. He groped because it seemed to him that she was missing something so large it nearly filled the landscape, and you couldn’t do that unless you were deliberately closing your eyes to it.
“Rachel,” he said, “Church is going to die.”
She stared at him angrily. “That is hardly the point,” she said, enunciating each word carefully, speaking as one might speak to a backward child. “Church is not going to die today, or tomorrow-”
“I tried to tell her that-”
“Or the day after that, or probably for years-”
“Honey, we can’t be sure of th-”
“Of course we can!” she shouted. “We take good care. of him, he’s not going to die, no one is going to die around here, and so why do you want to go and get a little girl all upset about something she can’t understand until she’s much older?”
“Rachel, listen.”
But Rachel had no intention of listening. She was blazing. “It’s bad enough to try and cope with a death-a pet or a friend or a relative-when it happens, without turning it into a… a goddam tourist attraction… a F-F-Forest Lawn for a-animals… “ Tears were running down her cheeks.
“Rachel,” he said and tried to put his hands on her shoulders. She shrugged them off in a quick, hard gesture.
“Never mind,” she said. “You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about.”
He sighed. “I feel like I fell through a hidden trapdoor and into a giant Mixmaster,” he said, hoping for a smile. He got none; only her eyes, locked on his, black and blazing. She was furious, he realized; not just angry, but absolutely furious. “Rachel,” he said suddenly, not fully sure what he was going to say until it was out, “how did you sleep last night?”
“Oh boy,” she said scornfully, turning away-but not before he had seen a wounded flicker in her eyes. “That’s really intelligent. Really intelligent. You never change, Louis. When something isn’t going right, blame Rachel, right? Rachel’s just having one of her weird emotional reactions.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No?” She took the bowl of cake batter over to the far counter by the stove and set it down with another bang. She began to grease a cake tin, her lips pressed tightly together.
He said patiently, “There’s nothing wrong with a child finding out something about death, Rachel. In fact, I’d call it a necessary thing. Ellie’s reaction-her crying-that seemed perfectly natural to me. It-”
“Oh, it sounded natural,” Rachel said, whirling on him again. “It sounded very natural to hear her weeping her heart out over her cat which is perfectly fine-”
“Stop it,” he said. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
“Yes, but we’re going to,” he said, angry himself now. “You had your at-bats-how about giving me mine?”
“She’s not going up there anymore. And as far as I’m concerned, the subject is closed.”
“Ellie has known where babies come from since last year,” Louis said deliberately. “We got her the Myers book and talked to her about it, do you remember that? We both agreed that children ought to know where they come from.”
“That has nothing to do with-”
“It does, though!” he said roughly. “When I was talking to her in my office, about Church, I got thinking about my mother and how she spun me that old cabbage-leaf story when I asked her where women got babies. I’ve never forgotten that lie. I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”
“Where babies come from has nothing to do with a goddam pet cemetery!” Rachel cried at him, and what her eyes said to him was Talk about the parallels all night and all day, if you want to, Louis; talk until you turn blue, but I won’t accept it.
Still, he tried.
“She knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It’s perfectly natural. In fact, I think it’s the most natural thing in the w-”
“Will you stop saying that!” she screamed suddenly-really screamed and Louis recoiled, startled. His elbow struck the.
open bag of flour on the counter. It tumbled off the edge and struck the floor, splitting open. Hour puffed up in a dry white cloud.
“Oh luck,” he said dismally.
In an upstairs room, Gage began to cry.
“That’s nice,” she said, also crying now. “You woke the baby up too. Thanks for a nice, quiet, stressless Sunday morning.”
She started by him and Louis put a hand on her arm. “Let me ask you something,”
he said, ‘“because I know that anything-literally anything-can happen to physical beings. As a doctor I know that. Do you want to be the one to explain to her what happened if her cat gets distemper or leukemia-cats are very prone to leukemia, you know-or if he gets run over in that road? Do you want to be the one, Rachel?”
“Let me go,” she nearly hissed. The anger in her voice, however, was overmatched by the hurt and bewildered terror in her eyes-! don’t want to talk about this, Louis, and you can’t make me, that look said. “Let me go, I want to get Gage before he falls out of his a-”
“Because ‘maybe you ought to be the one,” he said. “You can tell her we don’t talk about it, nice people don’t talk about it, they just bury it-oops! but don’t say ‘buried,’ you’ll give her a complex.”
“I hate you!” Rachel sobbed and tore away from him.
Then he was of course sorry, and it was of course too late.
“Rachel-”
She pushed by him roughly, crying harder. “Leave me alone. You’ve done enough.”
She paused in the kitchen doorway, turning toward him, the tears coursing down her cheeks. “I don’t want this discussed in front of Ellie anymore, Lou. I mean it. There’s nothing natural about death. Nothing. You as a doctor should know that.”
She whirled and was gone, leaving Louis in the empty kitchen, which still vibrated with their voices. At last he went to the pantry to get the broom. As he swept, he reflected on the last thing she had said and on the enormity of this difference of opinion, which had gone undiscovered for so long. Because, as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world.
Taxes were not so sure; human conflicts were not; the conflicts of society were not; boom and bust were not. In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time. Even sea turtles and the giant sequoias had to buy out someday.
“Zelda,” he said aloud. “Christ, that must have been bad for her.”
The question was should he just let it ride or should he try to do something about it?
He tilted the dustpan over the wastebasket, and flour slid out with a soft foom, powdering the cast-out cartons and used-up cans.
10
