Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  “Do you want some more, Mom?” Helen asked.

  “One of those girls that comes, she says she’ll take the dog,” Lenore said.

  Helen swallowed. “I think it would be good,” she said.

  “That’s it then. She’ll take him tomorrow.”

  “Is she just going to see how it works out or what?”

  “No, she wants him. She lives in an iffy neighborhood and the dog, you know, can be impressive when he wants. I think better now than later. He’s only five, five next month.” She knew the dog’s birthday. She laughed at this.

  The next day, when Helen came home from school the dog was gone. His bowls were gone from the corner near the sink.

  “At least I have my slipper back,” Lenore said. She had it in her hand, the red slipper.

  Helen was doing her homework. She was a funny kid, Lenore thought, there she was doing her homework.

  “It’s almost over for me,” Lenore said. “I’m at the end of my life.”

  Helen looked up. “Mom,” she said.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “I’m a nihilist,” Helen said. “That’s what I’m going to be.”

  “You can’t think you’re going to be a nihilist,” her mother said. “Are you laughing at me? Don’t you dare laugh at me. I’m still your mother.” She shook her fist.

  “Mom, Mom,” Helen said, “I’m not laughing.” She began to cry.

  “Don’t cry,” Lenore said dully.

  Helen looked down at her textbook. She had underlined everything on one page. Everything! Stupid … She’d be stupid in Florida too, she thought. She could think about Florida only by being here with her mother. Otherwise Florida didn’t really exist.

  Lenore said, “God is nothing. OK? That’s Meister Eckehart. But whatever is not God is nothing and ought to be accounted as nothing. OK? That’s someone else.”

  Helen didn’t speak.

  “I wasn’t born yesterday,” her mother said. “That’s why I know these things. I wasn’t even born last night.” She laughed. It was snowing again. It had been snowing freshly for hours. First sleet, then colder, then this snow.

  “Helen,” her mother said, “would you get me a snowball? Go out and make me one and bring it back.”

  Helen got up and went outside as though hypnotized. Sometimes she behaved like this, as though she were an unwilling yet efficient instrument. She could have thoughts and not think them. She was protected, at the same time she was helping her mother do her job, the job being this peculiar business.

  The snow was damp and lovely. Huge flakes softly struck her face and felt like living things. She went past the bush the dog had liked, pushed her hands deeply into the snow and made a snowball for her mother, perfect as an orange.

  Lenore studied this. “This is good snow, isn’t it?” she said. “Perfect snow.” She packed it tighter and threw it across the room at Helen. It hit her squarely in the chest.

  “Oh!” Lenore exclaimed.

  “That hurt, Mom,” Helen said.

  “Oh you …” Lenore said. “Get me another.”

  “No!” Helen said. The thing had felt like a rock. Her breasts hurt. Her mother was grinning avidly at her.

  “Get two, come on,” her mother said. “We’ll have a snowball fight in the house. Why not!”

  “No!” Helen said. “This is … you’re just pretending …”

  Lenore looked at her. She pulled her bathrobe tighter around herself. “I’m going to go to bed,” she said.

  “Do you want me to make some tea?” Helen said. “Let me make some tea.”

  “Tea, tea,” Lenore mimicked. “What will you drink in Florida? You’ll drink iced tea.”

  That night Lenore dreamed she was on a boat with others. A white boat in clear, lovely water. They were moving quickly but there was a banging sound, arrhythmic, incessant, sad, it was sad. It’s the banger, they said, the fish too big for the box, that’s what we call them. Let it go, Lenore begged. Too late now, they said, too late for it now.

  “Lenore!” she cried. She went into Helen’s room. Helen slept with the light on, her radio playing softly, books scattered on her bed.

  “Sleep with me,” her mother said.

  Helen shrank back. “I can’t, please,” she said.

  “My God, you won’t lie down with me!” her mother said. She had things from Helen’s childhood still—little nightgowns, coloring books, valentines.

  “All right, all right,” Helen said. Her eyes were wild, she looked blinded.

  “No, all right, forget it,” Lenore said. She shook her head from side to side, panting. Helen’s room was almost bare. There were no pictures, no pretty things, not even a mirror. Plastic was stapled to the window frames to keep out the cold. When had this happened? Lenore wondered. Tomorrow, she thought. She shouldn’t try to say anything at night. Words at night were feral things. She limped back to her room. Her feet were swollen, discolored, water oozed from them. She would hide them. But where would she hide them? She sat up in bed, the pillows heaped behind her back, and watched them. They became remote, indecipherable.

  It became morning again. Mother … Earth … said someone on the radio.

  “An egg?” Helen asked. “Do you want an egg this morning?”

  “You should get your hair cut today,” Lenore said. “Go to the beauty parlor.”

  “Oh, Mom, it’s all right.”

  “Get it trimmed or something. It needs something.”

  “But nobody will be here with you,” Helen said. “You’ll be home by yourself.”

  “Go after school. I can take care of myself for an hour. Something wouldn’t happen in an hour, do you think?” Lenore felt sly saying this. Then she said, “I want you to look pretty, to feel good about yourself.”

  “I really hate those places,” Helen said.

  “Can’t you do anything for me!” Lenore said.

  Helen got off the bus at a shopping mall on the way back from school. “I don’t have a reservation,” she told the woman at the desk.

  “You mean an appointment,” the woman said. “You don’t have an appointment.”

  She was taken immediately to a chair in front of a long mirror. The women in the chairs beside her were all looking into the mirror while their hairdressers stared into it too and cut their hair. Everyone was chatting and relaxed, but Helen didn’t know how to do this, even this, this simple thing.

  Sometimes Helen dreamed that she was her own daughter. She was free, self-absorbed, unfamiliar. Helen took up very little of her thoughts. But she could not pretend this.

  She looked at the woman beside her, who had long wet hair and was smoking a cigarette. Above her shoe was a black parole anklet.

  “These things don’t work at all,” the woman said. “I could take the damn thing off but I think it’s kind of stylish. Often I do take the damn thing off and it’s in one place and I’m in another. Quite another.”

  “What did you do?” Helen asked.

  “I didn’t do anything!” the woman bawled. Then she laughed. She dropped her cigarette in the cup of coffee she was holding.

  The washing, the cutting, the drying, all this took a long time. Her hairdresser was an Asian named Mickey. “How old do you think I am?” Mickey asked.

  “Twenty,” Helen said. She did not look at her, or herself, in the mirror. She kept her eyes slightly unfocused, the way a dog would.

  “I am thirty-five,” Mickey said delightedly. “I am one-eighteenth Ainu. Do you know anything about the Ainu?”

  Helen knew it wasn’t necessary to reply to this. Someone several chairs away said in disbelief, “She’s naming the baby what?”

  “The Ainu are an aboriginal people of north Japan. Up until a little while ago they used to kill a bear in a sacred ritual each year. The anthropologists were wild about this ritual and were disappointed when they quit, but here goes, I will share it with you. At the end of each winter they’d catch a bear cub and give it to a woman to nurse
. Wow, that’s something! After it was weaned, it was given wonderful food and petted and played with. It was caged, but in all other respects it was treated as an honored guest. But the day always came when the leader of the village would come and tell the bear sorrowfully that it must be killed though they loved it dearly. This was this long oration, this part. Then everyone dragged the bear from its cage with ropes, tied it to a stake, shot it with blunt arrows that merely tortured it, then scissored its neck between two poles where it slowly strangled, after which they skinned it, decapitated it and offered the severed head some of its own flesh. What do you think, do you think they knew what they were doing?”

  “Was there something more to it than that?” Helen said. “Did something come after that?” She really was a serious girl. Her head burned from the hair dryer Mickey was wielding dramatically.

  “These are my people!” Mickey said, ignoring her. “You’ve come a long way, baby! Maine or Bust!” She sounded bitter. She turned off the dryer, removed Helen’s smock and with a little brush whisked her shoulders. “Ask for Mickey another time,” she said. “That’s me. Happy Holidays.”

  Helen paid and walked out into the cold. The cold felt delicious on her head. “An honored guest,” she said aloud. To live was like being an honored guest. The thought was outside her, large and calm. Then you were no longer an honored guest. The thought turned away from her and faded.

  Her mother was watching television with the sound off when Helen got home. “That’s a nice haircut,” her mother said. “Now don’t touch it, don’t pull at it like that for godssakes. It’s pretty. You’re pretty.”

  It was a ghastly haircut, really. Helen’s large ears seemed to float, no longer quite attached to her head. Lenore gazed quietly at her.

  “Mom,” Helen said, “do you know there’s a patron saint of television?”

  Lenore thought this was hysterical.

  “It’s true,” Helen said. “St. Clare.”

  Lenore wondered how long it would take for Helen’s hair to grow back.

  Later they were eating ice cream. They were both in their nightgowns. Helen was reading a Russian novel. She loved Russian novels. Everyone was so emotional, so tormented. They clutched their heads, they fainted, they swooned, they galloped around. The snow. Russian snow had made Maine snow puny to Helen, meaningless.

  “This ice cream tastes bad,” her mother said. “It tastes like bleach or something.” Some foul odor crept up her throat. Helen continued to read. Anyway, what were they doing eating ice cream in the middle of winter? Lenore wondered. It was laziness. Something was creeping quietly all through her. She’d like to jump out of her skin, she would.

  “You now,” she said, “I believe that if Jesus walked into this house this minute, you wouldn’t even raise your eyes.”

  Helen bit her lip and reluctantly put down the book. “Oh, Mom,” she said.

  “And maybe you’d be right. I bet he’d lack charisma. I’d bet my last dollar on it. The only reason he was charismatic before was that those people lived in a prerational time.”

  “Jesus isn’t going to walk in here, Mom, come on,” Helen said.

  “Well, something is, something big. You’d better be ready for it.” She was angry. “You’ve got the harder road,” she said finally. “You’ve got to behave in a way you won’t be afraid to remember, but you know what my road is? My road is the new road.”

  Like everyone, Lenore had a dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked. There were billions upon billions of people, after all, it wasn’t out of the question.

  “The new road?” Helen asked.

  “Oh, there’s nothing new about it,” Lenore said, annoyed. She stroked her own face with her hands. She shouldn’t be doing this to Helen, her little Helen. But Helen was so docile. She wasn’t fighting this! You had to fight.

  “Go back to what you were doing,” Lenore said. “You were reading, you were concentrating. I wish I could concentrate. My mind just goes from one thing to another. Do you know what I was thinking of, did I ever tell you this? When I was still well, before I went to the doctor? I was in a department store looking at a coat and I must have stepped in front of this woman who was looking at coats too. I had no idea … and she just started to stare at me. I was very aware of it but I ignored it for a long time, I even moved away. But she followed me, still staring. Until I finally looked at her. She still stared but now she was looking through me, through me, and she began talking to someone, resuming some conversation with whoever was with her, and all the while she was staring at me to show how insignificant I was, how utterly insignificant …” Lenore leaned toward Helen but then drew back, dizzy. “And I felt cursed. I felt as though she’d cursed me.”

  “What a weirdo,” Helen said.

  “I wonder where she picked that up,” Lenore said. “I’d like to see her again. I’d like to murder her.”

  “I would too,” Helen said. “I really would.”

  “No, murder’s too good for that one,” Lenore said. “Murder’s for the elect. I think of murder … sometimes I think I wish someone would murder me. Out of the blue, without warning, for no reason. I wouldn’t believe it was happening. It would be like not dying at all.”

  Helen sat in her nightgown. She felt cold. People had written books about death. No one knew what they were talking about, of course.

  “Oh, I’m tired of talk,” Lenore said. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m tired of thinking about it. Why do we have to think about it all the time! One of those philosophers said that Death was the Big Thinker. It thinks the instant that was your life, right down to the bottom of it.”

  “Which one?” Helen asked.

  “Which one what?”

  “Which philosopher?”

  “I can’t recall,” Lenore said. Sometimes Helen amused her, she really amused her.

  Lenore didn’t dream that night. She lay in bed panting. She wasn’t ready but there was nothing left to be done. The day before the girl had washed and dried the bedsheets and before she put them on again she had ironed them. Ironed them! They were just delicious, still delicious. It was the girl who loved to iron. She’d iron anything. What’s-her-name. Lenore got up and moved through the rooms of the house uncertainly. She could hardly keep her balance. Then she went down into the cellar. Her heart was pounding, it felt wet and small in her chest. She looked at the oil gauge on the furnace. It was a little over one-quarter full. She wasn’t going to order any more, she’d just see what happened. She barely had the strength to get back upstairs. She turned on the little lamp that was on the breakfast table and sat in her chair there, waiting for Helen. She saw dog hairs on the floor, gathering together, drifting across the floor.

  Helen felt sick but she would drag herself to school. Her throat was sore. She heated up honey in a pan and sipped it with a spoon.

  “I’m going to just stay put today,” Lenore said.

  “That’s good, Mom, just take it easy. You’ve been doing too much.” Helen’s forehead shone with sweat. She buttoned up her sweater with trembling fingers.

  “Do you have a cold?” her mother said. “Where did you get a cold? Stay home. The nurse who’s coming this afternoon, she can take a look at you and write a prescription. Look at you, you’re sweating. You’ve probably got a fever.” She wanted to weep for her little Helen.

  “I have a test today, Mom,” Helen said.

  “A test,” Lenore marveled. She laughed. “Take them now but don’t take them later, they don’t do you any good later.”

  Helen wiped at her face with a dish towel.

  “My god, a dish towel!” Lenore said. “What’s wrong with you? My god, what’s to become of you!”

  Startled, Helen dropped the towel. She expected to see her face on it almost. That was what had alarmed her mother so, that Helen had wiped off her own face. Anyone knew better than to do that… She felt faint. She was thinking of the test, of taking it in a few hours. She took a fresh di
sh towel from a drawer and put it on the rack.

  “What if I die today?” Lenore said suddenly. “I want you to be with me. My god, I don’t want to be alone.”

  “All this week there are tests,” Helen said.

  “Why don’t I wait then?” Lenore said.

  Tears ran down Helen’s cheeks. She stood there stubbornly, looking at her mother.

  “You were always able to turn them on and off,” Lenore said, “just like a faucet. Crocodile tears.” But with a moan she clutched her. Then she pulled away. “We have to wash these things,” she said. “We can’t just leave them in the sink.” She seized the smudged glass she’d used to swallow her pills and rinsed it in running water. She held it up to the window and it slipped from her fingers and smashed against the sill. It was dirty and whole, she thought, and now it is clean and broken. This seemed to her, profound.

  “Don’t touch it!” she screamed. “Leave it for Barbara. Is that her name, Barbara?” Strangers, they were all strangers. “She never knows what to do when she comes.”

  “I have to go, Mom,” Helen said.

  “You do, of course you do,” her mother said. She patted Helen’s cheeks clumsily. “You’re so hot, you’re sick.”

  “I love you,” Helen said.

  “I love you too,” Lenore said. Then she watched her walk down the street toward the corner. The day was growing lighter. The mornings kept coming, she didn’t like it.

  On the bus, the driver said to Helen, “I lost my mother when I was your age. You’ve just got to hang in there.”

  Helen walked toward the rear of the bus and sat down. She shut her eyes. A girl behind her snapped her gum and said, “‘Hang in there.’ What an idiot.”

  The bus pounded down the snow-packed streets.

  The girl with the gum had been the one who told Helen how ashes came back. Her uncle had died and his ashes had come in a red shellacked box. It looked cheap but it had cost fifty-five dollars and there was an envelope taped to the box with his name typed on it beneath a glassine window as though he was being addressed to himself. This girl considered herself to be somewhat of an authority on the way these things were handled, for she had also lost a couple of godparents and knew how things were done as far south as Boston.