African violets, refrigerator magnets, photo of Mary Esther, jar for sugar, jar for rice, cookbook, unwashed eggbeater left out on the counter.
But she was tired of renting. She thought they should own a home of their own. Single people and couples came through her office, arranging home loans, and lately they had made her sick with envy.
She wanted another child. Somehow her tears were mixed up with this particular desire. There was a boy out there who wanted to be born. His name was already Theo. Patsy had noticed Saul gazing at her with desire a few minutes ago, and that look had pleased her.
With the softest of all possible motions, she hoisted Mary Esther onto her shoulder, carried her upstairs, and put her into her crib, kissing her on the forehead lightly, because it was so hot. Mary Esther called forth kisses. You kissed her without thinking, the way you breathed in air. Patsy touched her own forehead, gauging the depth of her sweat. Though she liked to sweat, the heat was beginning to get to her. Clothes were an irritation wherever they touched her in this heat, and so, automatically, she took her shoes off in the bedroom and left her blouse unbuttoned. Her wedding ring was an irritant against her skin, but it was who she was, as intimate as her own thoughts. As a dancer, Patsy practiced objectivity about bodies. Before the era of Mary Esther, whenever the warm weather arrived, she and Saul had walked around the house naked whenever they could, creating opportunistic situations for lovemaking, but that had ended. You couldn’t do that in front of a toddler: trauma and bitterness for decades, years of therapy, would result. Still, she would miss it. She would miss her animal-self, the beating of her heart, the feeling of her body, wholly body, fluttering its sleeves, walking through space, through the rooms, all the air on her skin, small eddies and bouquets of air. The pride of it, the power and certainty.
She made the bed and straightened up the baby’s things in the nursery. She collected some of the dirty laundry from the floor, first in her closet and then in Saul’s. Lifting one of his undershirts, she smelled him on it, that scent of vinegar and intelligent anxiety and friendliness. She carried the laundry down to the basement and dropped all the underwear into the washing machine. She could have done her tasks in pitch darkness— she knew where everything was — but on second thought, she flipped the light switch. Then she reached down to the dehumidifier.
She hardly felt anything, really nothing more than a solid blow of electrical current through her body, like a punch after anesthetic, but, as impersonal as it was, it held her for a moment before it threw her to the floor. Her first thought was, “My baby. Mary Esther. Don’t let me be dead.” Lying on the basement floor on her back, she saw the branching water pipes, and she heard the water gurgling through them. She saw the floorboards above her, the beams, the inconsequential slats.
She had been hit, she thought, by a small panel truck. A rusty urban truck, the size of a dog kennel, doing its hardscrabble tasks. But what was a truck doing in their basement? Near the laundry tubs? She would have to tell someone about the panel truck in the basement. But that was delirium, that thought — the afterburn of electricity scattering from her bare feet through her arm and then up into her brain. She put her hand to her eyes. The coldness of the basement floor against her back was, second by second, more than she could endure. Why hadn’t Saul ever fixed the damn humidifier? He simply hadn’t. She pushed herself upright and placed her feet, one after the other, on the waiting dirty stairs. They creaked. Wanting to get her blouse buttoned before she passed out or Saul and Harold returned, she made her way through the hallway into the kitchen and then up to the second floor, and she leaned down to pick up the remaining laundry in the bedroom, and when a second fit of dizziness took her, she dropped slowly, in extended slow motion, like a special effect, to a sitting position on the rug. Outside, a bird was singing, roaring hallucinating chirps, a terrible noise, music through saturated cotton.
After propping herself up, Patsy dazedly took off her blouse and put on a T-shirt, the clothes feeling like dream-stuff to her, dream-clothes on her suddenly clammy skin. Very tentatively, she stood up, grasping the windowsill for balance. She was okay. Rather quickly, she felt fine. She knew that it was eighteen minutes after one o’clock without looking at her watch. The electric shock had done that to her. She would never need a watch again in her life. She would always know what time it was. She went into Mary Esther’s room; with the shades drawn, even in this heat, the baby was still sleeping soundly, making tiny baby-snores. When she looked outside through the dusty glass, she saw the Bruckner Buick balloon above the treetops, and, on the front lawn, sitting next to his bicycle, Gordy Himmelman, holding the side of his broken head. Was she hallucinating again? No, he was back. Now he was always back.
Through the thick blanket of heat, she navigated her way out to where Gordy Himmelman was sitting. She didn’t think he had brought his gun this time. Where the bruises were, he had swelled up. He looked like a cartoon of a man with a toothache, or a boxer after eight rounds. As she approached him, she couldn’t think of what to say or what to do. So she just stood there in front of him.
“Don’t nobody around here ever wear shoes?” Gordy Himmelman asked, not looking up.
Patsy looked down at her feet. “Guess not.” Then she added, “It’s summertime.”
He nodded in agreement. “Okay,” he said pleasantly, pounding the grass with his fist. You could convince him with logic.
“Hi,” she replied. She sat down on the lawn next to him. She noticed that he gave off a powerful smell of rotting sugar beets, or vegetables left forgotten in the back of the refrigerator. “I was in the basement,” she said. “Just now. There’s a bad dehumidifier down there, it’s not grounded or something, and the electric shock. . I was. . it threw me to the floor. I didn’t know electricity could do that. I was almost. .” She couldn’t think of the word. It was nineteen minutes past one. Now it was twenty minutes past one.
“Yeah?”
“I was almost. .”
“Killed?”
“Yes. No. Killed with electricity. But there’s a word. .”
“Electric-chaired.”
“No, that’s not the word.” She thought she would faint again, so she put her head between her knees. The blood rushed to her brain. “ Electrocuted. I finally remembered it. Gordy, what are you doing here?”
“Dude.” He shook his head with exasperation. “Everybody keeps asking me that. Can’t I have some company?”
“So what else is happening, besides you?” Patsy asked, interested suddenly in all aspects of life. “You didn’t bring that gun again, did you?”