I took her hints of suicide—“I don’t have to play this hand,” etc. — seriously. We spoke of failure and she got better. I can’t claim a cure, but she got better. She showed some initiative, stopped wringing her hands, moved to Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, got a job teaching school, put her children in the excellent public school system of North Carolina, and even began writing poetry. She sent me a postcard showing the beach and the dunes of Kitty Hawk. It read: “Did you ever walk on a beach in December in a gale. The winter beach is lovely.” Later she sent me a poem she wrote called “Spindrift,” about the spindrift of the waves being like the spindrift of the heart, etc.
Now, admittedly there is still some cause for alarm here: Ella setting too much store by walking on a winter beach and writing a poem about spindrift. There are at least a thousand women poets in America, mostly in California and New England, who walk on beaches and write poems about spindrift, spindrift of the waves, spindrift of the heart. Beware of women poets who write about spindrift. There is a certain peril in this enterprise. She could easily shoot herself down. The winter beach and the spindrift, relied on too much, could let you down. But at least I understood her and she me. We transmit on the same wavelength. She was functioning, living, not trembling, taking herself less seriously, had come to terms with failure. Her children were doing well in school, were happy, had not yet fallen prey to the miseries of adulthood.
Cure? No. What’s a cure in this day and age? Maybe a cure is knowing there is no cure. But I helped her and she me. She gave me a gift which I liked. I still have her two volumes of Feliciana Farewell on my shelf.
So here she is two years later.
She had called earlier, saying she needed my testimony in an industrial liability case, that it meant big bucks.
Big bucks? That didn’t sound like Ella.
I am waiting on the porch when she shows up. She arrives in a Nissan pickup with gun racks in the rear window. She’s wearing an elbow cast. The driver stays in the truck, a fellow in a yellow hardhat. I ask her if he’s going to wait for her.
She laughs. “Don’t worry about Mel. Let’s go inside.”
I follow her in. The change in her is startling. Her hair is cut short, dyed pinkish-blond, as crimped and stiff as steel wool. She’s wearing long shorts, the kind that pull up over the stomach, and she’s got a stomach, but the bottoms are rolled up high on her thigh. Her clear plastic shoes have openwork over the toes. Jellies, I think they’re called. About two dollars a pair from K-Mart. She looks like a Westwego bingo player.
It seems she has returned to Louisiana, gotten a job with Mitsy, the local nuclear utility at Grand Mer.
Now I’ve got nothing against Westwego types — they can be, often are, canny, shrewd, generous women, good folks. But there’s something about the way she plays the part — yes, that’s it, she’s playing it and not too well, somewhat absentmindedly.
But I’m fond of her. When she makes as if to give me a hug, I give her a hug. She’s bigger.
“How you doing, Doc?”
“I’m fine. I’m glad to see you.”
“I hear you been having trouble.”
“Yes. But I’m all right now. Do you have trouble?”
“Old Doc. You always been my bud.”
“Thanks, Ella.” It’s time she let go, but she hugs me tight, a jolly, nonsexual hug, like a good old Westwego girl.
“Dear old Doc. Tell me something.”
“All right.”
“You getting much, Doc?”
“What? Oh.” Well, so much for the spindrift of the heart. “What happened to your arm, Ella?” I ask, holding her off to take a look.
“You’re not going to believe this, Doc.”
Maybe I won’t, but it’s a relief to get her into a chair, aggrieved and telling me her troubles.
I am wondering about Mel out in the truck.
She goes into a long rigmarole about getting abused by her superior at Mitsy, a person named Fat Alice, who beat her up and broke her arm — and then getting fired. She wants to sue Mitsy for a million dollars and wants me to testify about her mental health.
“The real boss, who is also her boss, says he knows you,” she concludes.
“Who is that?”
“Mr. Beck. Albert J. Beck.”
“Bubba Beck? Yes, we went to high school together. Don’t you remember him? He was all-state quarterback.”
“Will you call him?”
“Yes. What is it you really want, Ella?”
“I want my old job back and I want him to tell Fat Alice to leave me alone.”
“All right.”
“Tell him also that thanks to Fat Alice I was also exposed to radioactive sodium and have been rendered sterile.”
“All right.”
I reach Bubba at home. Although I haven’t spoken to him for twenty years he doesn’t seem surprised.
“How you doing, Ace?” asks Bubba.
“I’m fine. I have a patient here with a problem. You might be able to help.”
“Let’s have it, Ace.”
I summarize Ella’s complaint.
Bubba speaks at some length.
“Thanks, Bubba. I’ll get back to you.”
I hang up and take a look at Ella. She’s got one leg crossed over the other, is frowning mightily at her thigh, squeezing it from the bottom to make the top, which is somewhat quilted, tight. She plucks something on her skin.
“Ella,” I say.
“Yes?” she says, looking up with mild interest.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Fat Alice is FA413-T, a rather low-grade robot which vacuums the floor and monitors the room air for particles?”
“So what?” cries Ella. “She still got me cornered and broke my arm and subjected me to radiation poisoning.”
“Ella, you were not even in the primary coolant unit. You worked in the secondary unit with non-radioactive sodium.”
“She still pushed me!”
“Ella, listen. You’ve got your job back if you want it. What is more, you’ve been promoted. You are now Fat Alice’s superior.” What Bubba told me was that Ella, whose job was hardly more demanding than Fat Alice’s — reading dials and noting molar concentrations of chemicals — could now periodically remove Alice’s software cassette and run it through the magnetic cleaner. “Do you want your job back?”
Ella claps her hands. “Wow,” she says, and starts around the desk. “You were always my bud.”
“Okay, hold it, Ella. I want to show you something.”
An idea occurs to me just in time, and I get a book and hold the book between me and Ella. “I want you to look at something.”
“Anything, Doc! Anything at all.”
The book is Feliciana Farewell, her gift of three years ago, the yearbook and our year. I open it to the group picture of our class, only twenty or so boys and girls standing in a tight little trapezoid, each with the fixed, self-obsessed expression of high school seniors. The world lies ahead, the expression says, and who am I?
It is by way of being a quick study, a little test, as crude and inconclusive as palpating an abdomen for liver cancer.
I’ve used it before. Most people, I daresay nearly all “normal” people, will seek out themselves in the photograph, usually covertly, but I can watch their eye movements. As a matter of fact, there is a laser device which can track and print out the eye movements until the eye settles on its prey. Which is me? How do I look? People are generally self-conscious, either shy or vain, like General Jeb Stuart, whose last words were “How do I look in the face?”