The branch, the room, the woman

3

........................The woman

She never talked. She came in and did what she had to do and clanked syringes and whistled through her teeth and grunted if he felt particularly heavy that day, or maybe if she was tired. He remembered a time when she had talked. One day she came into the room -- it was the morning visit, because she served coffee, and its smell galloped around the small place like an unbroken brown colt. She cleaned him and rearranged the sheets and folded him forward to plump up his pillows. She said, Your brother Michael slept as still as a little mouse. Why you can never sleep peacefully I swear I just don't know. He couldn't see her. He could hear the fake violence of her fists, beating at pillows that were all air arranged around cheap feathers. Thwamp! Thwamp! her fists went. Then she pulled the pillows high against the headboard and put her hands on his shoulders and let him fall back among the softness. He looked for her face but already she had turned to get the food ready. He was an easy boy, Michael, she said with her back still to him. Right from the start, when he came right on time and with all the agony and everything it was still over in three hours. But you -- She opened a box of the white, soft, sweet paste that always was served first on the early visit. She dug a spoon into the exact center of it, as she always did, and carved out a perfectly concave shape, the female mold of the spoon's bowl. The paste was the same. You could repeat what it was and never get a hold on the description. It was white, and soft, and sweet. There was nothing else to it. It slipped over his tongue and seemed to glide down his oesophagus unaided. You fought me, I swear you did. Ten hours -- you were no closer to being born than at the start. Oh, I cursed you, I did. God forgive me, I hated you then. She poured coffee for him. She blew on the deep umber liquid and little waves appeared on the surface of the liquid and lines appeared around her mouth and eyes when she blew. She opened a small receptacle and poured milk from it into the coffee and that cooled it further. She held it to his lips and he drank without stopping to the end of the cup. Still, things come all right in the end, I expect. And you were always a good eater, I'll say that for you. On that particular visit she said nothing more. When he had finished eating she cleaned him up and then went to the trolley and rattled tin things on the tray so he would know the medicine was coming. The other time she talked, he was pretty sure it was a different season, although this was a long time before he decided to start measuring the trend of days by the reach of the branch's shadow. It was probably the late visit. The room was somber -- not dark out but the shine of day had dimmed suddenly, as if clouds shrouded the sky outside. When he looked he couldn't tell because the sky was the same color it always was, only dulled, perhaps by smoke or the layer of grime on his window. She did nothing to the flowers so it was not the middle visit. She cleaned him and fed him only. She served him no coffee. Most likely the late visit. Putting things back on the trolley. There were times when we could have changed it I thought. Didn't you? He could not see her in the mirror. She was bent over the tray and too far behind for him to catch her on the periphery of looking-glass. You said you would. You used to promise me that much. Not that it was just you. I've accepted that, she continued. I've accepted a lot of things. My obsession with zinnias. My endless cheerfulness. That probably made you laugh. You saw right away where that came from. How the daily things just -- just left me stunned, like a caught fish. She dropped his fork and spoon into the "soiled" bin. It made a sound like gunfire. She moved into his line of sight now, opening the little container in which lay, like two sterile eggs from a small oblong hen, the pills he took before sleep. The late visit, then. That didn't mean you couldn't make accommodation. When I got pregnant, you were so sweet. But when the child came, well, we lost it right then, didn't we? It was like, there was no time for courtesy anymore. No time for imagining the forms of the other person. She tilted his chin up and placed on his tongue the first pill, then its partner. The water was in a clear glass and she tipped this so fast and efficiently that the pills were gone, swallowed before he knew they were in his throat. He didn't even cough. We lost our form, she said. And how could we change after that? He had trouble sleeping that night. Her words came back to him at odd intervals, the way she'd phrased her questions which were not questions; alone, or linked only to a qualifier, an adverb. Time for imagining. Saw right away. After. Endless.

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Table of Contents

Tension

January 1997

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