SIX
Molly LaChance feared dolls' eyes, the blue foil eyes of chocolate rabbits, bathrooms, the musty smelling hallway at the entrance to their second floor apartment, voiceless phone calls, wind, nights with too many spinning stars, and two or three of the men her mother had dated since the divorce.
There was a man with a gold crown inset with a star-shaped emerald. His hair fell in oily dark strands, like braids, and he ate only vegetables. Jerusalem artichokes, kale, alfalfa sprouts, and the awful saw-dusty bulgar. Once he had a boil on his arm and she knew it was from pickled beets.
He liked to hug her. He was genuinely warm and gentle and never too distracted to play. Yet he made her angry insisting that Ken and Barbie had retired their motor home, making it into a shack for their pigs.
He kept pigs though he did not eat them. Once he slaughtered one for them and the bacon that he made made a noise whenever they cooked it, a low squeal. The noise reminded Molly of the sound Emma made when she made love. Groaning then squealing on the chirping bedsprings.
In the morning the emerald star man always awoke before them and sat bare-chested in blue jeans in the kitchen, drinking raw eggs and wheat germ and orange juice made in the blender.
"He's just an old hippie," Emma explained to Molly once.
Forever after, Molly thought of his as a moundy brown animal with great slow jaws and blunt, scaly teeth. There was a temptation to connect the image with sex, but Molly was careful not to burden herself with fears. "You should never burden yourself with fears," her mother had said once. "Not of sex, not of anything... It isn't fair to say so, but that's what I've done. I'm only now learning to crawl from under."
Molly understood. She and her mother could talk. Once on her grandfather's farm, a mink had crawled from under the long wood pile. The sun burnished it auburn, there were diamonds floating on the water of the pond. Hippopatamous meant river horse.
Molly loved the river, softball, geography, younger children, David Cassidy, her father, the etchings of William Blake, and Jack Flynn.
Her father had remarried a smily woman with fat legs and macrame hair ties and two other children, one older, one younger than Molly. They were all vegetarians, sometimes it seemed the whole damned world was vegetarian. Even Emma ate only chicken and fish. Lacto-ovo: it sounded like health education class.
The ovaries were two pale apples at the top of a white tree with curved trunks that had the texture of octopus legs, but were pearly and soft.
"The roots are your pubic hair."
Emma laughed when Molly said this, but she meant it, sort of. In the bathtub, pubic hair softly waved with the movement of the water. It was a wise old goat's beard, it was like the flowing weeds under the river. It was smooth and secret when it first came.
Lactation should have sounded nice, but it was an icky idea. A baby sucking on you, just like some men do. She wanted to understand how it could be nice, but instead she thought of Eva, the name she gave the Tiny Tears doll her mother had saved her.
Eva had a little bottle like they feed mice with. The nipple was a nub, almost a tiny tube, and Eva closed her scary, sad eyes when you laid her back and fed her.
Emma had no breasts anymore. There were scars there now, two pale pink hooks like someone had underlined where her breasts were. Emma explained how they took much of the muscle too. She said "they took it" and the way she said it sounded like in a dream. Sometimes when they would talk while Emma took her bath, Molly looked at the scars and her mother's chest, and the way the skin was tight against the flat bone made her seem brave and vulnerable both. Emma was plucky looking.
"She's a plucky lady," another of Emma's boyfriends told Molly. He was the English professor and he wore black suits and cleared his throat alot. He gave Molly the book of Blake prints and she loved them right away and he seemed to like that, even though she wasn't so interested in the poems that were supposed to go with them, like the one about the tiger which her mother had read to her about eight hundred times before.
Still, plucky was a good word, like skipping rocks on the river, and the drawings were real weird and scary in a happy way, with colors that looked like colored chalk does after a rain.
The English professor cooked icky stuff, like snails and noodles with smelly sauce and water chestnuts that itched your teeth when you bit them. All of Emma's boyfriends seemed to cook, but only the English professor grunted and kept saying, "Ah, that's good, that's good," when they made love.
And he didn't like to play with her like the hippie did. He was always blinking and drinking white wine so cold that it made the sides of the wine glasses sweaty and wet. Sometimes when they drank wine together, he and Emma looked at poems they had typed to each other the night before. Though they never said anything real, there were times when the poems made them hold hands and look at each other. Molly looked at the poems whenever she felt like it, but they didn't make much sense. There were things about people with flowers the size of their faces, and baskets of fallen leaves brought in the night, and a fairly nice one that had a story about a woman and her daughter who couldn't play the piano.
Molly knew that was about them.
"I'm not serious enough for him," Emma said when the professor went away.
"You're always serious...too serious..." Molly told her.
"No, I mean he wants to marry someone," her mother explained.
She laughed then like she had laughed once when they went through Syracuse and Molly told her that there was where her life would be, in the city, near the tall buildings. It wasn't a laugh that was making fun, it was more sort of surprised, and it was one of those things that Emma remembered to tell her boyfriend--either the hippie or the professor--later at night, when she thought Molly was sleeping.
Molly didn't want her mother to marry anybody but her father or Jack Flynn. David Cassidy was who Molly herself would marry, although she really knew it wasn't true, and she was always kind of thought he was queer even when she liked him. He was way too nice, like people sometimes are, especially at school or at family parties, but she kept thinking of him a lot, so she didn't give up on making him her fantasy.
Fantasy was what you called it when it couldn't be true. Like marrying her father again, now that he was with Bethany and the two vegetable eaters. It couldn't be so, even though you wanted it, and even though he was starting to love them more than he did her. More than both of them.
Jack Flynn was a fantasy because her mother only really knew him when she was little and he was bigger already. But he still was a better fantasy because he lived around there and came back to visit his family; and also because she had liked him even before she began to play softball on the team, or before she even knew that her mother ever knew him.
He was such a fox. She saw him on television first and also had his picture in a scorebook, which she tore out and put up on the corkboard with David Cassidy and a bunch of other weirdos she couldn't even remember liking.
Sometimes, when he pitched against the Yankees, they would put the camera so you looked right into his face when he was starting to pitch, and you saw the blue eyes blink as he got the signals, saw him nod when he was ready, and then saw him lift his leg up and kick so you thought he would fall over as he came down on the mound and let it go, making an L in the dirt with his front spike.
He was so cool. Like when there was a homerun against him how he would watch it go out, real blank like, and then turn back and hold his glove way out in front of him with a stiff arm, waiting for the ball to start pitching again. You knew he was angry, but you also knew he was smart enough not to show it.
"It was a million years ago," Emma said, "and I really knew his family better than him. He probably doesn't remember me. They had a lot of troubles, that family did."
"All families have troubles," Molly said. "That's the way they are."
Her mother looked at her the way she did whenever something she said was supposed to be eerie. That was one problem with living with Emma, she was always looking for eerie things you said.
Oncce there was supposed to be something eerie about what she said about Jack Flynn. It was when she was almost ten and she had just discovered him, the year before she began to play softball and he was still with San Diego. Flynn was pitching against the Phillie's, his old team, and they were really bombing him. Molly got madder and madder each time they showed McNamara in the dugout, chewing away at his tobacco and just looking out at Flynn with innocent eyes, never blinking.
Flynn was real sweaty. He kept parading around the bottom of the mound after each pitch, wiping his eyes with his glove, taking his hat off and putting it on again; and when he pitched, he scrinched his eyes up tight and weary, like he was looking for some way to fool the batter. It was Mike Schmidt, Molly remembered, because she liked him too, sort of, since he looked like somebody real.
Anyway, there was Flynn, all tired and getting beat bad, and with McNamara just watching. Flynn pitched to Schmidt and he hit a long, long foul ball that just sort of disappeared into the stands like a pigeon flying away, nice and easy.
Emma was sewing something in her chair, a dinky needlepoint or something. She was supposed to be playing Othello with Molly, but that was okay since she was watching Flynn-boy anyway.
This catcher they called Hamburg threw out a new ball to Flynn, all the while talking and joking with Schmidt. It was like they knew Schmidt was going to hit a homer and they were just sitting around there, the three of them, waiting for it. Even the umpire was talking and laughing.
So Flynn got the ball back and walked off the mound to rub it up and check it like they do. Next thing you know, he's windmilling his arms over his head, like he's trying to loosen them up, and even then McNamara is only watching.
"He looks like a drowning man," Molly said.
Now why was that supposed to be eerie? It was a pretty normal thing to say, if you asked Molly, what with Schmidt and Hamburg and the ump laughing there, and McNamara chewing his cud, and the whole infield and outfield just staring into Flynn's back while he sweated away out there, down seven runs.
Still Emma thought it was eerie, so eerie she had to go and tell grandma about it on the phone when she called.
"Yes! The Flynns, Mom," Emma said. "From over by Massena, the one who was a river guide over near Alex Bay... Isn't that something? I mean, sometimes I think the child is positively eerie. She has a kind of vision, you know..."
Molly did not know.
"Yes, I know about the brother, Mom...That's the point!"
Sometimes Emma was meaner to her mother than she was to Molly, it was like she thought grandma didn't know anything.
Finally, Schmidt tripled, the ball thumping into the cushioned outfield fence so hard and low that it didn't even roll back, and Winfield had to go and dig it out of there like it was a lost Easter egg. Meanwhile there's Schmidt again, this time talking and laughing with Rader and the umpire at third, with two more runs in and Flynn drowned for sure, even though all five runs were unearned because of the error earlier.
McNamara came out to get him and even then Flynn jogged back in to the dugout, his glove held high next to his chest.
So nothing was really so eerie, you know.
"He's still gonna win twenty games, and those runs don't count against his ERA because of the error," Molly told her mother, making it sound pissed off because she was in a way. Both because of the eerie crap and because Flynn got knocked out.
"How do you learn all that?" Emma asked.
"It's easy!" she snapped, because she was still pissed about the weirdness of her mother, and about Flynn. "They tell you all that crap on teevee, and there's books you can read..."
"I don't like that talk," Emma said. "I don't like that word from you."
"It's just math, Mom, just math... They have it on the baseball cards..."
"Yes, it's a regular tutoring session," Emma said in her weird way.
"Math and reading and some geography thrown in..."
Molly had to laugh. Emma was weird and a creep but she could make you laugh. She went back to sewing at the different herbs on the sampler.
Probably going to frame it and hang it in the kitchen, Molly thought, she's just weird enough.
Still in all she gave Emma a baseball card of Flynn for her birthday in the fall. It was the one from the World Series year--not his rookie card, that was worth bucks and hard to find--but it was the only one without his hat, and he looked real young and goopy like they did back then in the sixties, not boss like he did when he went to Philadelphia in the seventies and started to let his hair grow long and wavy.
Emma kept it in her purse with the other pictures in her wallet, which made it okay.
"You met him once, you know," she told Molly. "You were just a little girl, and we went to his mother's funeral. He said hello."
"No! I didn't know that!" Molly snapped and stomped off. What a dip she was sometimes, Emma was, she wouldn't tell you anything until you about crapped your pants.
Flynn and Emma stood by the stone a long time. The gravedigger carried the black doughnut of the hose down the gravel path, scritch-scritching his way to the little stone shed, where he locked the hose away.
"I always come to see her," Flynn said.
Emma did not know what to think.
"She was a good old girl," he said, and bent to touch the stone.
"That's a load of crap, Flynn," Emma said. "Don't pose like that. Say what you mean and let it take care of itself. You're better than all that..."
"Than what?"
"Than who you pretend to be. Jack the Witness..."
Flynn had to laugh. It was Emma who was posing. She had pulled the nickname out of the hat like Little Molly Magician, letting him know she knew all about him. Some New York writer had tried to stick him with the nickname in 1970 after he had lost a no-hitter to Singer, the second such loss in two years and a record as far as anybody could tell, although it turned out not to be, only a record for modern time.
Stoneman had got him in '69 and then Singer in '70, and the writer was trying to make it a big thing, because of the angle: "Flynn witnesses but never gets one."
It went away long before he got his in '72, although somebody dredged it up again in September when Pappas no-hit the Padres and Flynn was supposed to start but got scratched because of the arm.
Emma could have known it from then, or she could just be some kind of Baseball Annie with a numbers jones. But he didn't think her the kind.
The gravedigger scritched along the cinders again on the way to his car.
"I loved her," Flynn said, "even though I never figured her out. She got kind of lost in my old man, you know. Drowned..."
"That's better," Emma said.
"Glad you think so," Flynn said and turned from the stone.
"Where to now?"
"Willard," Flynn said. "Got to visit old Willard Walker at the hospital."
Emma looked benignly on him.
He thought Emma thought the cinders reminded him.
Out on the warning track, finding the clown's eye in the high sun.
"How's your daughter?"
"She'd love to see you, you're her hero."
"Let's see her after Willard."
"She's with her father. You remember."
Pale mint, Flynn remembered. Doctor and nurse in mint caps, the nurse hating him for being there, her eyes burning dark above the mint green mask. The doctor coming in, late and distracted, he too in mint down to the booties that covered his shoetops.
"Howdy, Karen...Flynn."
Still the nurse stared at him.
They weren't going to let him in there, Flynn had to throw his weight around to get the doc to agree, and then again to get the hospital administrator to do his job and follow the doctor's orders.
"My Dad had a bird dog," Flynn told the doctor, "and when he put it down, he went in there with it. I can at least do the same with my own. There's doctors in this world who will agree with that if need be..."
"It's Karen's decision," the doc said. He wore those half-moon auburn glasses that made him seem sad-eyed, a raccoon. He was putting Flynn off.
"You want me there?"
Karen peeped and began to cry. It was the only time he was mad at her. If she wanted this so damn much, why should she cry now?
She cried because she knew what it was, he knew. He could not fault her. Maybe she was made of spun-sugar and department store dreams, but a woman felt this, he knew. It was not right to hurt her.
"Honest to god, honey, I won't if you don't," he said softly.
"I do," she peeped again. "It's just that I think you'll hate me for it."
Flynn looked at the doctor.
"I'll make some phone calls," he said.
They wheeled the little cart to the table, a two wheel cart like a battery charger, it too mint green and dull chrome. There was a bottle a little larger than the bottle from a blender, set down into the chrome cup halfway. The wire-reinforced translucent hose was coiled within a cloudy plastic bag to keep it sterile.
The nurse helped Karen get her legs up in the chrome stirrups, and she was kinder with Flynn's wife than she had been with him. Karen was trembling, she said it was cold there and she was shivering in a rhythm, although a film of perspiration coated the blond, delicate hairs of her upper lip. She looked pale and afraid without her makeup, with her blond hair covered by the sterile cap. She nipped at her lips with her fine, white teeth and she squeezed Flynn's hand. Where she bit at her lips they flushed pink, the pink washing over the whitened indentations where she had bit.
Flynn felt an incredible longing wash over him. He wanted to get her away from here, get her where they could be alone together and he could hold her as he had when they first knew each other. There were less people than he had imagined there would be--only doc and the angry-eyed nurse--but still it was too glaring there, too public for something so intimate.
The OR lights shone yellow on the green linen. It was exactly the light of a night game: full, metallic and oddly softened.
Oh Karen, he thought, this had better be right for you.
The nurse extended the starched green shroud of the sterile field out from Karen's hips. It was as if she were attached to a kite, a taut green square of sailcloth. The doc stood on the far side of the sail, staring inward to her center, looking with distracted interest on the preparations, his hands held before him, the surgical gloves like skin about to be shed.
Flynn felt discordant images. Karen leaning over the aisle seat of an aircraft, handing him a drink, the fabric of her skirt tight and pressed smooth as the flap of the sterile field. The child he could not imagine, the fetus a kidney bean, a small, tumbling astronaut moving weightless through space.
The doctor grunted to the nurse and she peeled back a green covering from a tray of chrome steel instruments. Karen's hand gripped him hard.
"We'll dilate first, darlin', just like normal..."
People, when they worked, tended to talk in a drawl. It was something Flynn noticed.
The nurse smiled once at Karen. At least it seemed like a smile from what you could see from her eyes and the flesh around the mask. Then she gave all her attention to the doctor.
Flynn gave all his attention to Karen's eyes. The cart and the blender bottle were still there in sight, although the doc had hootched it over with his leg, maybe to get it closer to where he would work, maybe to keep Flynn from seeing.
Karen looked up at him like from underwater, trusting now, already a little uncomfortable as the doc opened her with the chrome rods.
"They'll be some discomfort, darlin'..."
The doc paused, stopped still. Looked at Flynn.
"If you even think you're losing it," he said sternly, "If there's the least tremor in your gut, I want you the hell out of here. You understand?"
Flynn nodded yes.
"Good," the doc said. "It's this little lady I care about now, Flynn, and I don't care if I never see a damn cent from you."
It was right, Flynn knew. The doctor had done what he had to, and now he was getting back at the implied threats Flynn had laid on him when it all started. It was right. There were times Flynn had done the same thing. Someone hits one off you and then rubs it in with a Mr. Kodak trot around the bases. You wait if you have to, sometimes months, sweet as can be, then throw him a little chin music because that's what you have to do.
Face ball, Flynn knew.
He nodded to the doc again. Karen rubbed his hand, soothing him, for chrissakes, can you imagine. He touched her cheek.
He didn't know how he felt. No man can ever know before it happens, he'd found that out, talking around. I mean, either you think of the thing like a little homounculus, a pint-sized little you all white and bald, or you think of it like something important that you cannot remember. Serious and sweet, and even happy, but you're damned if you can remember.
That was why he wanted to be there, to remember and--as much as the nurse or the doc might not believe--to be with Karen. He'd seen enough of doctors to know that their show wasn't all it was cracked up to be in the reserved seats. They knew diddlesquat, most of them, and the good ones would be honest enough to tell you.
Tendonitis, rotator cuff, hyperextended whatsis. It was all guesses and being around for awhile.
"Don't matter how they do you," Wolfman used to say. "Use steroids or herbal tea, use knives or little chinamen needles in your neck... It's all the same, man, mistakes and magic, magic and mistakes..."
The compressor had the sound of an electric trolling motor, a sweet little humming engine. The doc fumbled with the wrappings of the hose like a kid with a Christmas present; he studied the fitting for the vacuum, tinkering with it like someone tinkers with the family Hoover.
"Here we go, Karen," he said. "You will feel it, darlin', but it won't be nothing you can't stand. Just a sensation of voiding, if you know what I mean."
Flynn knew. Drowning. The little lima bean man would let go in a whoosh and come tumbling through the tube in a tide of blood and salty fluid. He would come tumbling down into the center of the universe, the Milky Way, another star gone wrong, a comet briefly appearing, a footnote on the stats.
Poor Karen, he thought, as he heard the liquid enter the jar. She had discussed it with the girls, with Flynn, with the girls again; it wasn't right yet, they were still moving around too much to settle down yet. It was a mistake and this was the right thing to do; when they did it, they wanted to have it right. They needed something more than a place between flights.
The lights went down on the emerald park. He cut the trolling motor and drifted into the shallows. The air died and the kite sailed downward. The tail of the comet streamed off in a flash of diamond ice and sparking dust.
It was alright. He loved her, and he felt sorry whenever she felt sad afterward.
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