I told her about my husband and Ruby and my mother and I told her everything and I was so tired by the end of it and my chest was shaking and I exhaled and I felt a little relaxed and Ruth, with her concerned and respectably wrinkled face and her silk blouse and pale lilac trousers and the scent of rosemary haloing this emphatically wholesome situation called her life, Ruth looked at me and said, Would you like to call someone, dear? And all I could do was agree with her because it would have been nearly impossible or possibly illegal or at the least difficult to disagree with her wholesomeness— I said, Okay, and she brought a rotary phone out and the only number that came to mind was the number my mother would write in Magic Marker along my forearm when she sent Ruby and me out to play—Just in case, you can never be too careful—and sometimes you couldn’t tell her fours and nines apart—Thatsanine, notta four—and Ruby and I would mimic her later, Thatsanine, thatsanine, we’d say this invented word to other kids who had no idea and we’d smirk at each other and run through sprinklers to wash off the Magic Markered number, and we’d say, We’re never going back now, she’ll never find us now, but we always went back and we always remembered the number and I don’t know why I dialed that number that afternoon at Ruth’s house, but I dialed it as if I had finally found the case she’d meant by just in case, and just like that there was a skeptical Hello on the line and I said, It’s Elyria.
Oh…, my mother said. Elyria? Huh.
I’m okay, I said.
I thought you might be, she said, you always seem to manage. Where is it you went?
New Zealand.
Well, that’s pretty far.
We were quiet for a moment and she said, Are you still there?
Yes.
You know, there was a moment there we all thought you were dead. Is that what you wanted us to think?
I realized it was early evening there, so she’d maybe only had a few afternoon vodkas. I told her that I didn’t want anyone to think I was dead, that I just wanted to leave.
You know, Elly, I really thought you’d be over all this by now. It’s been six years.
I stared at Ruth’s whitewashed china cabinet.
Hello? Are you there?
I’m here, I said.
Well, don’t you have anything to say about that, Elyria? Anything?
About what?
You leave on the anniversary of — you know … It’s always been about Ruby for you, even the marriage — you know that — everyone knows that. I’m just the only one that will say it.
She laughed a little and audibly sipped something.
That’s not what it’s about. I didn’t — I didn’t even know it was … But I must have known it was, I realized, somehow, I must have known. I let the silence settle.
Are you there?… Elyria?
I’m here, I said, but I knew, increasingly, I wasn’t here, and I felt that able-to-weep-and-be-seen version of myself that I’d been with Ruth hardening again, like warm caramel left to cool.
For the record, I told him not to cancel your cards, that was his idea, Elyria, because he didn’t care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his. Do you see how twisted he is now? Marrying his dead student’s sister? A decade between the two of you? That never struck you as strange?
But my mother didn’t know what it was like to be in the diner with the sudden sense that was made between that professor and me, when we were not yet a husband and a wife, but a young woman and a young professor, people who suddenly had something that the other needed, a possibility, a particular balm, and I still don’t know how to adequately describe it or understand it, but it made everything make sense, made getting married make sense, made the guaranteed and steady supply of loss in every life make sense, and then it all changed, somehow, or killed itself, or wandered out and never came back, and that was why I had left, not Ruby, not the lack of Ruby—
I think I need to go, I said, because I was done being reminded of the difference between us, and I hung up the phone and Ruth came back into the room and asked me if I felt better and I said I did feel better because I had turned back into the woman who could fold herself up like an acrobat and store herself away, packed like a body bent inside a cannon, and my face went back to its cool, normal state, not its warm, wet, and helpless animal state and she said, You look better, dear, maybe that’s all you needed, just to talk to your mother for a moment, and I said, Yes, thank you. That was all I needed.
29
When the black truck slowed and stopped I realized this truck had slowed and stopped for me before — there was that empty-nested woman, that little bird for herself.
I got in and she said, And where are we headed today, mademoiselle? And she smiled. I felt guilty that she was smiling because I knew I was going to tell her that I had lied, there was no farmer husband and I was going nowhere, over and over, always going nowhere.
I don’t mind going … anywhere, I guess.
Well, she said, and I braced for it, the question that was going to lead to an answer that would lead to a confession that wasn’t nice and wasn’t comfortable—
What does your husband think of you going just anywhere by yourself?
I lied, I said, I didn’t come here with my husband. He doesn’t even know where I am, and once I said all that I felt myself lighten but the atmosphere in the truck darkened because it’s disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this, too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers, because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake, and it’s not pleasant to remember that we have all believed other strangers’ lies, and even though almost every living person knows this, in a way, it’s still not the best thing to bring up in polite conversation. If the widow had asked, I would have told her the rest of the story, the grey meat of it, but she didn’t ask. She put the truck in drive and drove and she didn’t ask me why I’d gone through all this trouble. Probably a more powerful part of herself was telling some less powerful part to just leave it — leave it—the way I’ve heard people tell their dogs to stop being interested in stinking gristle on a hot sidewalk.
She let me out at a visitors’ center in a town that seemed close to nothing, just cliff faces and bridges over narrow rivers. Someone can help you in there, tell you where you should go, and I was thankful that she was right — inside there was a wall tacked with flyers, one said Bakers Needed, and another said Farmhands Needed, and there were other needs, needs I either couldn’t meet or didn’t want to meet, but one just said Live on Waiheke Island, Live in Paradise! and I liked that it didn’t ask anything of me, just told me what to do, emphatically. Lodging and meals for labour, many skills needed, so I took the flyer off the board and called the number and a woman answered—Do you mind weeding, housekeeping, laundry, light repairs? — and even though I did mind those things I had realized by sleeping in sheds and parks and yards that Werner wasn’t totally wrong and wasn’t totally right: I’m not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don’t need me. So I told the woman I didn’t mind any of those things and she said I could come whenever, and that’s how easy it was to find a makeshift life, a life blind to the past and future.