Ordinary Miracles
Across the street I see her wrapped in a bolt of flame. Blue as a ribbon of unclouded sky, it circles and caresses her but she does not burn. The edges of the flame curl into luminous red and yellow tendrils that snake out around her, and crackle and snap like the small explosions popcorn makes in a hot pot. Shadows dance on the grey aluminum siding of the house behind her.
“Louisa.” The word bursts from me involuntarily. Her hand flutters in a wave, but she makes no other sign, gives no indication that something unusual is happening. As always, her characteristic expression of mild confusion has a childish quality, exaggerated perhaps by her round cheeks and the slightly squashed proportions of her face. Maybe she doesn’t know, hasn’t noticed, she is consumed by fire.
I wave back, smile with as much friendliness as our acquaintance requires — she lives across the street and a block to the east from me — and keep walking. Through the neighbourhood that showed so much promise when Eliot and I bought our house here after the war. But instead of moving upscale, as we anticipated, it has remained steadfastly working class.
Sometimes we discussed moving, buying a smaller house in a better part of town, but Eliot’s salary as a grade-school teacher never expanded enough to accommodate our plans, so we stayed here, where shabby, dented, multicoloured houses cling to the side of a steep hill. Some structures have a better foothold than others; the less successful ones gradually slide down the slope. With a sigh, foundations ease and walls shiver, wallpaper buckles, cracks spider up walls and across ceilings. I sometimes wonder what trickles down the hill besides garden sheds, trees, and silt.
Imagine, I say to myself half a block further on as I pass the house that lost its front porch to fire last week, dark and dusty shadows of flame still visible on the white clapboard. I saw a glow, heard a murmur that ran the length of the block like tongues of light licking through dried grass, and finally the fire trucks came, sirens blaring. Imagine — Louisa!
As I balance on the curb waiting to cross the street the road in front of me seems to waver for an instant. Small grey and blue and umber pebbles embedded in the surface sway. A dizzy spell, perhaps, or will the road part in front of me as the sea did before Moses and the Israelites, toss the pebbles and the bright, shining vehicles that rush over them upward, arcing through the day’s clear air? I look again; the road is still, traffic thins. I cross the street.
It’s amazing, my thoughts still on Louisa, amazing where you stumble on miracles. Never where they might be expected, in the vaulting hollow shadows of a church or the determined discomfort of a pew. I know, I’ve put in my time on bended knees, forehead pressed against my gathered hands, thoughts whittled to a fine, direct pointedness. “Lord, please grant me this ….” I have prayed, and watched new wrinkles pucker across my knuckles while waiting for my prayers to be answered, reading in the wrinkles’ patterns the passage of time.
In church even God seems muted and subdued. No rods slithering into serpents these days, no loaves dividing parthenogenetically to feed the necessary hungry. Sanctity’s weight and seriousness leaching all likelihood of miracles from the words of the scripture.
Church miracles aren’t what I’m thinking of, nor the minor ordinary felicities that pass for miraculous nowadays: retrieving a pair of matched socks from the dryer, knowing with unwavering certainty who is on the other end of the phone line before they speak. These do not qualify.
I mean the sort of thing that sends a jolt of electricity along your nerves, perms your hair, and casts the world anew. So that everywhere your eyes rest there is the soft sheen of inviolability.
Like Eliot catching lightning. Six different times he was almost struck by it. He would come home from a golf game shaking his head. “This close,” he would say, holding up his right hand, only the width of a shadow between thumb and forefinger. “This close.”
Then he would tell me how it had happened; caught suddenly in a downpour he would huddle beneath a tree with his golf buddies and watch rain fall silver through the air, the greensward ebbing away from beneath his feet as gently as the tide easing out. Then there would be a crack, and beside him, “This close,” a hole in the earth, charred grass, and the smell of burning.
But I hardly expected after forty-three years of marriage that one summer Sunday while he was wrestling with weeds in the back yard that light would flow to him from the ice-blue sky and he would reach out and catch it.
I heard a snap like brittle wood splintering, then a flight of song spun through the air. Peering through the kitchen window I saw Eliot’s figure cut through the cloudless expanse of the sky like a comet’s tail.
I hurried out to where he lay supine. In his right hand he held a butter knife, in his left hand the fruits of his labours. Dandelions, goose grass, and creeping Charlie had fallen in a surprising halo around his head. Wiping my hands on a terry dishcloth — I had been washing the lunch dishes — I bent over him. “Eliot,” I said. “Eliot.”
His eyes opened as quickly as that. His gaze pierced me, some of the electricity caught there. Sparks shot from his eyes.
He smiled at me, that diffident, somewhat shy smile. When he opened his mouth, the amalgam fillings in his teeth were black singularities on gleaming white enamel. Song burst forth, wave on wave of benediction and praise. I had never heard such sounds. My legs crumpled beneath me, I was on my knees beside him, the terrycloth wound tight in my hands. After a moment I had to stop up my ears. I couldn’t stand it any more, the promises and prophecies spilling out of him. When I unlocked my ears his mouth was a black hole, silence absorbing sound. He lay motionless.
I understand how Eliot could have been a vessel of holiness. For sixty-eight years he lived in the world, and on the day he died he was as trusting as a four-year-old. He refused to believe anyone would actively cause another person grief, nor did he bring pain to another if he could help it.
But Louisa? Whose whole existence is unmitigatedly a testament to all that it parochial and trivial? Bingo is her catechism, Elvis Presley her patron saint. Her conversation is a distillation of gossip and hearsay.
She claims to be husbandless, but I have inadvertently seen her wrapped in someone’s arms. I turned my eyes away from that dark space where the white flesh of her skin burned, though not before a tremor ran down my spine.
Corpulent is an accurate description of her, her skin rolls and puckers with joy, with zest, with abandon. She is flesh incarnate. In summer it gathers above the waistband of her shorts and flows over her knees in waves.
While I was walking down the street that day — on my way to the bank, so it would have been after ten o’clock on a weekday, and Louisa still in a bathrobe, long after her children must have left for school — I saw her entwined with a man, their limbs as tangled as kudzu. I couldn’t see into the shadows where the two of them lingered just within the barely-open front door of her house. A glimpse, a breath, I looked away and the moment passed.
Still, the white expanse of Louisa’s flesh, the shudder of movement stayed with me. Standing in line at the bank, my deposit slip carefully filled out, I saw her luminous thigh, felt her skin yielding and soft as bread dough, soft as water, and the word carnal came to me. I shivered and pushed the sensation away.
And once, at a Ladies’ Auxiliary Benefit for hungry children, she cornered me, her face bright with revelation. A paper plate piled high with cocktail sausages, potato salad, fried chicken balanced in one hand, she chewed on something tucked in her cheek as she talked to me. Her earrings and necklace were shiny, purple plastic, the same shade exactly as the pantsuit she wore. Her children tore around the room shrieking and throwing bread rolls.
“Did you know,” she breathed, “that Walt Disney was frozen when he died and when they find a cure for cancer they’ll melt him and fix him up?” What could I say to this? I smiled with as much civility as I could muster. Imagine, I murmured.
“Yes,” she nodded. Too late I realized my error. Like flame blooming on top of a struck match, her conversation ignited, metastasized.
To stop myself from saying something rude I focused on the bright pinpricks of oil that dotted the pores of her nose, the lines of lipstick that had smudged into the grooves of her front teeth, the dark hairs bristling along her upper lip.
I know for a fact that all her living room furniture is sheathed in plastic, and that her children are feral, raised on TV and instant noodle dinners. Their skin has taken on the carroty hue of the cheese powder. How can she, mired as she is in superstition and credulity, how can she be a conduit for holiness?
I walk through the parking lot of the local grocery store thinking about this question. As I approach the store, two glass doors slide open; I enter the store and am embraced by cool air.
Since Eliot’s passing I shop less frequently and always in the middle of the day. I don’t want the worry of young thugs lurking behind bushes at night waiting to snatch my malnourished purse. I don’t want to run the risk of a broken hip, a hospital stay, lying flat on a bed while fluid osmoses into my lungs and life ebbs out. When I mentioned this to Louisa once — how did it slip out? — her round face folded horizontally into a smile, she opened her mouth and let loose a braying laugh. “I don’t think you need to worry about that,” she said. “An old war horse like you.”
Since Eliot’s death the days loom longer. Bridge games and afternoon teas have fallen off. I still receive invitations, but I have lost the ability to concentrate. I lose hands even if I hold all the trump cards. I lose track of someone’s niece halfway through a circuitous story. “Pardon?” I say vaguely and watch a chill settle on the narrator’s face.
Inside the grocery store I pause for a moment. The cool air of the air conditioning makes my head swim after the heat outside. I shop here because it’s a short walk from my home. Before Eliot died, we would drive across town to a larger, newer supermarket, one with wide, welcoming aisles and a staggering selection. There were delicacies like raspberry vinegar, rosewater, and foods that sound like methods of space travel: tofu and quark.
This is a less flamboyant store; the food here is more utilitarian. Beneath other odours there is always the faint smell of rotting vegetables. Louisa shops here, too. I have seen her barreling along with two or three of her children dangling from the shopping cart, their hair uncombed, their clothes grimy. They quarreled and squirmed, reaching out to grab, and sometimes drop, packages, tins and boxes.
The only shopping cart I can locate has a spastic wheel that wobbles crazily. I have to bear down hard to keep it from veering left or right. Up the aisles I trundle past disposable diapers, TV dinners, boxes of neon-coloured cereals. Tuneless music drifts through the air. In one aisle a jar of mustard has fallen and shattered; a bright yellow sun blooms on the speckled floor amid shimmering chips of glass.
The image of the sun brings Eliot to mind; I picture where he must surely be, basking in the Glory of God, a radiance of almost solar intensity. Suddenly a familiar voice invades the scene — Louisa. A broad smile splits her face. Hiya, Eliot. She slaps him heartily on the back. How ya doing?
Well, hello Mrs. Roberts, he says, sounding pleased to see her.
Want a cig? On her T-shirt sprawls the message: Angels do it divinely, written in pink, flowery letters. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes, slips it open and holds it out to him.
Thank you, he says. They light up and settle back on the puffy clouds that serve as chairs.
No. Standing in the condiments aisle the impulse to cry out is overwhelming. Eliot — your asthma!
How did Louisa get into my daydream I wonder, just as the shopping cart’s broken wheel swerves abruptly, jerks me out of my reverie and almost carries my groceries into a tower of mayonnaise topped by a sign: Today’s Special, $1.89. I stop for a moment to right the cart and get my bearings. Ahead of me is the produce section. Something for a fruit salad I decide and maneuver the cart past the dairy section, towards the mounds of strawberries, the pyramids of oranges.
I pick up a cool McIntosh apple and cradle it in my palm, debating how many to buy. While I stand lost in thought Louisa’s face swims up towards me and stares out from the apple’s gleaming surface. Riveted, I return her gaze. Why you? I demand.
She doesn’t answer. For several seconds I stand staring, but nothing more happens. I’m on the point of returning the apple to the pile when she smiles at me, a smile as beautiful and effortless as rainbow-coloured clouds of gas spreading across the surface of a puddle, a smile of utter acceptance.
It’s easy for you to smile, I think bitterly. You’ve got Eliot all tied up for eternity. And what am I left with? I’m left with standards — never talk with your mouth full, always say please and thank-you. I did what I thought was required, I say to her. I followed the rules and what did it get me? My husband dead, my life destroyed. While you, who wouldn’t know sterling from plate, a venial from a mortal sin, you stand in the street swathed in grace and utterly oblivious. Why?
Then I notice small glints of light. Drops of condensation on the apple? I rub it against my sleeve, but when I look again the points of brilliance are still there. I peer closer and see they are paths of light running down Louisa’s face, tears streaming over her cheeks like flame shooting along a trail of spilled lighter fluid.
Suddenly an ache grips me on the right side, just below my ribcage. I put down the apple and walk away from the grocery cart, leaving it stranded in the middle of the aisle.
When I step out of the store, a cloud of humidity, like a second layer of clothing, settles on me. My face, my arms, my legs are wrapped in heat.
I walk slowly through the parking lot and cross the street. At the corner I find myself following the cracked, pitted sidewalk that leads to Louisa’s house. As I mount the wooden steps to her door, they creak and shift beneath me. The blue paint on the house is blistered and peeling. I knock three times.
Louisa opens the door. Her face looks puffy and fragile, as if she has just woken up or has been crying. For an instant her expression is blank, then a flash of puzzlement flits through her eyes. If she were to ask me what I was doing here I wouldn’t be able to answer. But she doesn’t ask, she smiles and steps back into the darkness.
I follow her down a long, shadowed hallway towards a rectangle of light. The squabble of children’s voices swims toward us through the dim air.
The kitchen’s sudden light dazzles me. Leaning against the doorframe I pause to let my eyes adjust, and for a moment the three children who are playing in one corner of the room fall silent; their expressions wary, they stare at me.
Louisa drops into a chair, its seat and back covered in red vinyl that has split and been patched with duct tape, its legs curved bars of chrome, like chairs I have seen in cheap restaurants. With her foot, she nudges another chair away from the table for me. The grey linoleum floor is chipped and stained. I think of my own gleaming, waxed floor, of my spotless, echoing, empty kitchen.
In the centre of the table sits a large, dented saucepan. Louisa nods for me to sit down and spoons something from the pot into a chipped white plastic bowl that she pushes across the table to me.
I glance at her. Tongues of flame dance around her head, her shoulders, fainter and more delicate than the blaze this morning. I hear the full, fat sound that drops of water make when they explode on a hot surface. She smiles again, a crooked, off-centre smile, and begins to spoon food into her mouth.
Across the room the children start to bicker again, their voices swirling up like song. The bowl in front of me holds a lump of porridgey noodles covered with clotted orange-coloured cheese sauce. I understand the throb in my side is hunger. I pick up the spoon and eat.
Melanie Dugan
1993