“Will you look up Fletcher when you get there?” Maggie asks.
Brid seems unprepared for the question. “You want me to?”
“No.” She says it without hesitating. The idea of them together in Boston while Maggie waits for him here is unbearable.
“Don’t worry,” replies Brid as if she has read her thoughts, “he was never interested in me, even before he met you. Not that I didn’t try.” The comment is made with such nonchalance that Maggie almost doesn’t register it. Before she has a chance to respond, Brid has already moved on. “Hell, forget it. Can’t let the past fuck up your perspective, right?”
Maggie thinks of the kinds of things one is allowed to say just before parting. She wants to share something in return, something to make Brid stay a bit longer. Not Wale’s phone call; she couldn’t bring herself to mention that. Her late period, perhaps. No, to tell Brid would make it too real.
“Goodbye,” says Brid, giving her a squeeze. Into Maggie’s ear she says quietly, “There was a time, I think, when we might have …” But she seems not to know how to finish, and she laughs in a self-defeated way. “Oh, never mind.” She pulls back. “It’s no big deal. Goodbye!” She gives her a kiss on the cheek, then a surprising look of regret.
Maggie didn’t know regret was something Brid could feel. Regret rests on hopes and dreams, an ideal you reach for and fail to find. Regret’s about living in the shadow of an inner gleaming you that Maggie’s never quite found in herself. Until now she hasn’t thought of Brid as someone with a self like that either. People are different from each other, though. It seems like some kind of breakthrough to apprehend this simple fact, but Maggie doesn’t feel much wiser than before. Why that look of regret on Brid’s face just now? It’s too late to ask. She’s ensconced with her daughter in the Toyota, and the two of them are disappearing down the drive.
Monday morning, Maggie tries calling Gran again. Again she gets no answer. One more day, she thinks, and she’ll drive to Syracuse to see what’s going on. To distract herself from the thought, she begins to clean, compelled by the idea that at last everything in the house can go where she wants it. From now on, each speck of dirt will be her dirt, the mess no one’s but her own. She tries to focus on the cobwebs hanging from the ceiling and the scum in the toilet bowl, even while she feels a building anger with Fletcher, with Brid, with all those who have left these tasks for her. Cleaning, always cleaning, since the first day she was here. Her body grows sticky with sweat and dust even as the house becomes pristine.
Just before lunch, there’s a knock at the front door. By the time she gets downstairs, the mailman’s pickup truck is pulling out of the driveway and a parcel sits on the porch, the size of a shoebox and wrapped in brown paper. Even before she identifies her name above the address, she recognizes her father’s handwriting. The paper seems to take forever to remove.
Inside is a cardboard box, and in the box is a letter along with a little statue made out of fired clay. Maggie turns the figure over in wonder. It’s a long-haired woman eight inches tall, muddy brown and unglazed, mounted on a short pedestal of rough cement. The limbs are stubby, the body shaped in such a way as to suggest the woman’s wearing a robe. Thick lips have been painted on her face, and there are black dots for eyes, while a hairline crack runs around her waist. The thing looks crudely made, and Maggie’s surprised that it survived the journey intact. Setting it down, she turns to the letter and begins to read.
August 13, 1972
Dear Maggie,
Enclosed is a gift for you made by a friend of mine, Yia Pao the potter, whom I mentioned the last time I wrote (“Yia” is an honorific given to Hmong men when they become fathers, in keeping with the race’s respect for parenthood). I fear he is at risk of falling in with bad company, so I have taken him under my wing. I like to think it due to my influence that he has begun to fashion the likenesses of saints. I told him Saint Clare was your favorite when you were a girl, because she was the patron saint of television, so he made you a statue of her. I hope she brings you comfort.
I know I was wrong to leave for Laos in anger as I did. I should have seen sooner that you’re no longer a girl but a woman leading her life, and that your life is not with me. Now I am trying to make amends through service. “By their fruits you shall know them,” we are told. We’re all His vessels, sealed up in ourselves and opaque to each other but transparent to Him.
Some would take the happenings in Laos as proof there is no God. I’ve seen the little moments, though, the generosity of strangers, the love of families, and find recurrent proof that God exists. In America we put our faith in technology and progress, but there are things that modern life doesn’t apprehend, a beauty not created by human hands, beauty that persists even when it can no longer be perceived.
So much has happened since I wrote in May. I’d like to tell you about it, but I don’t wish to impose. I received no response to my last letter, and I have given up hope of a reply, concluding that you were telling the truth when you said you wished no correspondence. Indeed, Gran has mentioned that you said the same to her. However, she did provide the address to which I’m mailing this parcel. I hope you will forgive both her and me.
The first time she reads it, she’s barely taking in the words. Then she checks the parcel and sees it’s postmarked August 14, a week before his missed phone call to Gran. So the letter proves nothing about whether he’s all right. There’s no hint of anything to come, no mention of trouble, unless she counts the reference to Yia Pao falling in with bad company.
Carrying the letter and clay figure to the kitchen, she sets them on the counter and dials Gran’s number. A man picks up. It’s Uncle Morley, and he turns sarcastic when he realizes it’s her, calling her the prodigal granddaughter. Then he says Gran has been sick. Just a stomach bug, but she got dehydrated. She’ll be out of the hospital by tonight, and the family is taking good care of her; Maggie shouldn’t worry her little head about it. He asks if she wants to leave a message, and she says no, desperate to get off the line. She’ll try again tomorrow when Gran’s back home.
With the phone returned to its hook, she picks up the statue and takes it to the living room. When she was a girl, she and her father had a ceramic likeness of Saint Clare atop their television set, because it was said that placing one there was supposed to improve reception. Now she tries perching the clay figure on top of the silver TV. It takes some time before she can get the balance right. If Brid were here, she’d make some remark about hopeless superstitions, or perhaps she’d simply say that whatever gets them PBS is fine with her.
That evening, George Ray doesn’t come to dinner for the second night in a row. Looking out from the mud room door, she can see his silhouette pass back and forth across the barracks window. She should tell him that Brid has left, that it’s safe for him to enter the house, but she stays inside and eats cold cereal standing up, then returns to cleaning. When she goes to the bathroom, she begins to close the door behind her before realizing she doesn’t have to. Leaving it open, she keeps an ear out for the telephone or a car in the drive. Right now Fletcher might be with Cybil. They could be eating at some fancy restaurant. He might be sleeping with her. Maggie should go and make a pass at George Ray to get even. No, it’s a petty thought. Besides, why does she think she’d have any more luck than Brid?