I don’t want some insurance company knowing I’m going to a shrink. A shrink seeing a shrink! It would ruin my professional standing.
That bridge was burned a while back, according to Mona. Izzy is no longer at the mental health practice she helped start. Even master sleuth Mona isn’t sure what all came down.
And she’s also stopped the meds she was on, Tilly adds. Mona says you can’t do that with those kind of meds. Tilly sighs, eerily still for a change, and then says, They had a huge fight. Those two, I tell you.
Antonia imagines Tilly shaking her head. It is odd that Izzy and Mona, the two therapists in the family, can’t apply their professional skills to getting along. You said it, Antonia agrees, so as not to append something negative and quotable that will get back to the others, bring on more bickering.
Anyhow, sister, screw them. How are you doing?
I’m okay. Antonia’s mantra of the last year. Somewhere she read that okay and Coca-Cola are the two most universally understood words. It depresses her to think the ties that bind are so flimsy. Even silence would be better.
But silence is all she gets when she addresses Sam these days. What she wouldn’t give for his voice coming from the afterlife, assuring her that he’s okay.
Her neighbor Roger is at the door. If I can be of any help? he offers. Kind of late for that, she thinks. Sam’s death was last June. Maybe the news just now reached him, like the light from stars?
I’m good, she tells Roger. A turn of phrase borrowed from her students. She always feels slightly bogus parroting them, as in her first years speaking English, tossing out an idiom, pretending she’d been born to it. Dream on. A phrase from her own student days.
Been hauling over to Ferrisburgh. Got to take what comes. Pays the bills anyhow. Roger is partial to sentence fragments; Antonia has to supply the rest. Every encounter, homework, a fill-in-the-blank test.
Broken English. The phrase once leveled at her and her sisters. She mended her broken pieces and ended up teaching Americans their own language, four decades total, three at the nearby college. What now, now that she has retired?
We shall see, her mother used to say. Que será, será.
Been meaning to stop. Them gutters—Roger nods at the pipe running the length of the house, right under the roof, full of twigs, leaves. Runoff from the roof, stuff collects.
I thought those were nests, Antonia says, laughing. Of course, she didn’t really think so, but Roger gets such a kick out of knowing more than the smarty-pants professors over at the college. One of her ways of being neighborly. Letting him have the last word—it worked most times with Sam.
In fact, Antonia doesn’t know how half the things in the house work. All state-of-the-art net-zero conservation systems Sam was so proud of. It’s like flying a 747, she’d complain every time he tried to guide her through all the levers and dials in the furnace room.
And you call yourself a feminist! her sister Mona is quick to point out. Mona’s default ringtone is sci-fi. The world is crazy, baby sister insists.
It’s The world is ugly, / And the people are sad, Antonia is tempted to tell Mona, from a Stevens poem I used to teach. But it has never worked to treat her sisters like her students. I don’t give a fuck who said so, Tilly has told her more than once.
I’ll get them cleared up for you, Roger offers. A complete sentence, his way of being neighborly, instead of a sympathy card.
Later that morning, there’s a knock at the door. Antonia checks the peephole, a new habit she’s not likely to break since she is alone. She can just make out a head of glossy black hair. Mario, one of the Mexican workers next door. She opens to the boy-size man, his soft brown skin unusual in pale-faced Vermont. Rare also for Antonia to feel tall in this country. For a moment she understands the self-assurance of those who can look down at another’s face. What comes with health care and good nutrition.
Mario doesn’t look old enough to be doing the milking next door. Roger might be breaking the child-labor laws. But then, he’s got bigger problems, like the immigration status of his farmhands.
Hola, doñita. They’ve met before. Soon after his arrival early this year, Mario cut his hand on a saw he didn’t know how to use. Lots of blood and Roger afraid to take him to the hospital, where the ER might call the ICE office. Instead, Roger called her. Didn’t he know about Sam’s death? I’m no doctor, she reminded her neighbor.
Not for the cut. To talk to him, calm him down, Roger explained. Small town. Everyone knows Dr. Sawyer’s wife is Spanish.
Not really Spanish Spanish, she used to correct them. But she’s given up trying to explain the colonial intricacies of her ethnicity. Soon after she and Sam married, one of his elderly patients stopped her at the grocery store to ask if he’d brought her back from one of his volunteer surgery trips, always written up in the local paper. Dr. Sawyer saving the world in Mexico, Panama, India, the Dominican, annoyingly shortening the name of her country. That, too, she’s given up trying to correct.
Hola, Mario. ¿Qué pasa?
El patrón, Mario says, jerking his head toward the hardscrabble dairy farm next door. He says you need some help.
Sí, por favor. She comes out to stand in the driveway. The ladder is already leaning against the side of the house. No car or pickup in sight. She didn’t hear a motor. Did he carry it across the pasture? It must be three times his height. Gutters, she says, pointing to the roof. She uses the English word, not out of any instructional motive, but because she doesn’t know the word for rain gutter in Spanish.
They have to be cleaned out, she explains. My husband, he used to do it. She can’t bring herself to pronounce Sam dead.
Mario takes off his cap, holds it to his heart. Mis sentimientos, doñita.
Antonia’s eyes well up. Somehow it gets to her more when the condolences are in Spanish. The roots go deeper. Small sips, she reminds herself, and nods up at the gutter. Thank you for your help. Call me when you are done, okay? She means to pay him for his trouble.
Okay, he says, that universal word. But instead of turning to the job at hand, he keeps standing before her, perhaps searching for another universal word.
Anything else you need, Mario?
Bueno, doñita, Mario hesitates, flashing her a megawatt smile—too bad about the teeth. Same back home in the DR, the poor with missing molars, rotted stubs. All that processed sugar. Everyone drinking Coca-Cola instead of the natural juices from the tropical fruits that abound. Yes, Mona, The world is ugly, / And the people are sad. Her mind is full of quotations, the slate never wiped clean, always the feeling that she is plagiarizing someone else’s wisdom.
Mario does have a favor to ask. Maybe when he has finished, la doñita can help him call his girlfriend?
Antonia feels the flicker of irritation. Isn’t she entitled to a grace period after a loss? She has no energy for extras. Duelo, they call it in Spanish: bruised and hurting all over. Mario, of all people, should know. In their cultures, a person in duelo is left alone.
In need there is no season, Sam would say. Reluctantly, she tells the young man okay.
Mario has one more question. Where will the birds lay their eggs now, doñita?
It takes her a moment to understand. It’s not a nest, she explains. Basura, trash. A nest requires intention. The difference between a home and a shelter. What is her house with Sam gone? A home, a shelter? She wishes she still had her students to ask. She is alone now with her intense need to get the words right.