Signs and Wonders Read online

  Alix Ohlin

  Signs and Wonders

  Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person, a novel, and Babylon and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” Born and raised in Montreal, she teaches at Lafayette College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

  www.alixohlin.com

  ALSO BY ALIX OHLIN

  Inside

  Babylon and Other Stories

  The Missing Person

  A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, JUNE 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Alix Ohlin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  These stories originally appeared in the following publications: “Signs and Wonders”(as “Stranger Things Have Happened”) in Failbetter; “Forks” (as “Midnight, Tuesday”) in The American Scholar; “Robbing the Cradle” in Washington Square; “The Stepmother’s Story” in The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, eds. Jacqueline Kolosov and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (Lewis-Clark Press, 2008); “The Idea Man” in Southwest Review; “Who Do You Love?” in Five Chapters; “The Teacher” in Daedalus; “Vigo Park” in TriQuarterly; “The Only Child” in Ploughshares; “You Are What You Like” in Gulf Coast; “The Cruise” in World Literature Today; “The Assistants” (as “These Foolish Things [Remind Me of You]”) in Southwest Review; and “Fortune-Telling” (as “Chinese Restaurant”) in Columbia.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Ohlin, Alix.

  Signs and wonders : stories / by Alix Ohlin.

  p. cm.

  “A Vintage contemporaries original.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-94864-9

  1. Short stories. I. Title.

  PS3615.H57S54 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011050885

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  Front cover photograph © Tony Tilford/Nature Picture Source

  Author photograph © Michael Lionstar

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

  —CARSON McCULLERS,

  The Ballad of the Sad Café

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Signs and Wonders

  Forks

  Robbing the Cradle

  The Stepmother’s Story

  The Idea Man

  Who Do You Love?

  The Teacher

  Vigo Park

  The Only Child

  Three Little Maids

  You Are What You Like

  A Month of Sundays

  The Cruise

  The Assistants

  Bruno

  Fortune-Telling

  Acknowledgments

  Signs and Wonders

  So the important thing to know from the start is that she was miserable. She hadn’t always been, of course. She’d gotten married in a flurry of sex and promises, wearing a white dress so hideously confectionary that she felt like a parody of herself, a joke told in crinoline and lace, and even that made her happy, because it was silly and she knew they’d laugh about it later. Which they did. Then they had a baby, who was beautiful and perfect, then later on became less beautiful, less perfect, in fact troubled, for a time Ritalin and methamphetamine addicted, but subsequently, amazingly, pulled himself together and managed, despite the rocky years, to graduate from college and find a decent job at a zoo, tending to the turtles.

  Which brings us to the misery, twenty-six years on. On the day she discovered she was miserable, Kathleen was forty-nine years old and a tenured professor of American literature at a college in suburban Philadelphia. Her husband, Terence, was fifty-two, and also tenured, in the same department at the same school. Their son, Steve, had been clean for three years. The mortgage had been paid. Financially, emotionally, and logistically, things were going pretty well. She and Terence were in a meeting, discussing whether or not to allow English majors to graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. Tempers on this topic ran high, as they almost always did; the professors were a testy bunch, desirous of offense. Terence, the chair, argued this requirement was retrograde, absurd; everyone knew that English majors nowadays went on to marketing or advertising or law school.

  “That’s true,” Kathleen said wearily, feeling obligated to support her husband. At one time, she’d worked hard to stake out her own positions, to be seen as objective and fair. She soon realized, however, that no matter what she said she would always be perceived as taking Terence’s side; even when she voted against him, this was interpreted as some kind of obscure but Machiavellian strategy the two of them had cooked up together. So she opted for the path of least resistance, which was to pretend, both at work and at home, that Terence was the most brilliant person she knew.

  “Now, I love Shakespeare,” he said. Kathleen wondered if this was true. She hadn’t seen him read a book, any book, for pleasure, in the last decade. What he truly loved was reality television. He liked to root for the schemers and alliance forgers, praising them for their cunning amorality. Play the game, he would urge them out loud in the den, his voice tight with drama.

  “I could happily spend the rest of my days,” he went on, “reading the plays and sonnets over and over again. But I’m a scholar. And we’re not preparing scholars, by and large, after all.”

  “Surely you don’t mean to suggest that only literary scholars need to read Shakespeare?” Fleur Mason said. “Surely even you, Terence, aren’t that hostile to literature?”

  Her even you hung in the room’s ensuing silence. In this group there was no such thing as a passing remark; each one was noted, parsed, enshrined. Fleur Mason looked right at Terence and didn’t flush. Young, square-shouldered, and passionate, she wore ruffled skirts and lace blouses and a gold cross on a chain; she seemed like someone who’d spent her childhood alone in a room, writing poems about trees. She didn’t belong to today’s world but refused, violently, to admit it.

  “Surely even you, Fleur, aren’t so defensive and small-minded as to think that questioning literature’s practices is the same as being hostile to them,” Terence said smoothly.

  It was almost five, and the others looked indiscreetly at their watches, anticipating blood-sugar crashes, child-care crises, cocktails tragically delayed.

  “Maybe this is more than we want to get into right now,” Kathleen said diplomatically, for which she received a few grateful glances. But not from Fleur and Terence, both of whom were breathing hard.

  Another half an hour passed, with no resolution reached on the Shakespeare requirement. Finally, after some in the room progressed from stuffing papers into their bags to standing up and moving to the door, Terence tabled the issue and adjourned the meeting, promising that next month they would communally endure the punish
ment of having to discuss it again.

  Kathleen went back to her office, hoping to wrap up a few things, but all she could think about was her feverish irritation with Fleur Mason. It was ridiculous for her to be so difficult, so adamant. She obviously had to know that letting Terence have his way was the easiest course of action for everyone. Fleur had, in fact, always driven Kathleen crazy. She was single and thirty-seven and appeared to have no life outside of her job. She had a laugh like a demented clown’s; it rose too suddenly and lingered too long. There was also the profound and unforgivable stupidity of her name.

  By six thirty everyone else had left, including Terence, who played squash with his friend Dave on Tuesday afternoons. Fleur’s office had once been Kathleen’s, and she still had the key. She walked down the hall, let herself in, and stood there for a moment, energized with hate. The room smelled like dust and Yankee Candle. There were framed New Yorker cartoons with literary jokes on the walls. And there was this: Fleur kept a bird in her office. God only knew why this was allowed but she’d brought in the bird—it was a parakeet—one semester when she was, she said, spending more time here than at home, and didn’t want it to be lonely. Now the bird was a permanent fixture, chirping all day long. Fleur put a blanket over the cage before leaving, and the bird went to sleep. Or so she said. When Kathleen lifted up the blanket, it wasn’t sleeping, just staring back at her with tiny, waxy, jelly-bean eyes. She opened the office door—there was no one around—and then the cage. She reached in and grabbed the bird in her hand, and in the instant before she threw it out into the hallway, where it confusedly took flight, its yellow wings scraping the walls, she could feel the frenzied, angry beating of its miniature heart against her palm.

  She went home and cooked shrimp scampi, which she ate while listening to Terence hold forth on Shakespeare and the irrelevance of canonical literature in today’s digital world. When she glanced outside, a cardinal was sitting on the branch of an elm tree, looking back at her. She thought of the parakeet, trapped in the hallway of the Humanities Building or, alternately, flying around the campus, making its yellow way through a world it had never before seen. She felt remorseful, but also still corked with hate. Not a single thing had been exorcised from her soul.

  At that moment, she understood—how belatedly!—that she detested not Fleur but herself, her own life, and most particularly her husband and his relentless occupation of that life. And that she’d hated all of this for a very long time.

  “Terry,” she said.

  He cocked his head at her, birdlike, chewing. Sometimes conversation seemed like something he’d read about in a magazine, never experienced firsthand. To him, her preferable role was that of mute audience. Anything she said in response, even her agreement, was liable to piss him off, and he’d storm away from the table, never clearing or washing the dishes, to scour the cable channels.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  For days she kept this knowledge to herself, clutching it to her body like a money belt. I hate my husband. She’d been fighting it for so long! Now that she knew, her relief was tempered only by the dread of telling him, then leaving him. She could picture so perfectly the scenario of her escape: she’d buy a little condo and furnish it simply but cozily, in reds and yellows, and she’d have fresh flowers and no stereo system or flat-screen TV, none of the consumer electronics Terry spent his weekends shopping for. But it was hard, if not impossible, to imagine how to get from here to there. His anger was scorching, and his speeches long-winded; she’d have to budget days, more likely weeks, to let him get it all out.

  Then, one Sunday afternoon, Steve called to say he’d received a job offer in California—head turtle-keeper at a large municipal zoo—and was moving across the country to take it. Both Kathleen and Terence were happy for him, and not a little surprised that he’d managed to do so well.

  “It’s weird,” Terence said when he got off the phone, his face thoughtful. “It’ll just be the two of us now.”

  “It’s been the two of us for a while,” Kathleen pointed out.

  “I know, but now it seems like he doesn’t really need us anymore. He doesn’t need”—Terence’s gesture encompassed the house, the living room, the framed photographs, all the archival, institutional memory of the family—“any of this.”

  And from the way he said this—because, after all, as a professor of literature, she paid attention to the placement and nuance of words—she knew Terence was every bit as miserable as she was. So she spoke, for the first time in years, with genuine affection.

  “Honey,” she said, “let’s get divorced.”

  They stayed up late making plans, more excited about this stage of their lives than anything since their honeymoon, practically. They couldn’t stop expressing surprise and joy at these revelations; the discovery of shared misery was nearly as thrilling as that of mutual love had been. Terence said he wanted to take early retirement and drive a motorcycle to Central America. What a cliché, Kathleen thought. Then, realizing his behavior no longer implicated her, that she didn’t need to be concerned, she told him it sounded like a great idea.

  Because it was still the middle of the semester, because they wanted to sell the house and each buy a new one, because the start of a new life was a luxury that ought to be relished, they decided not to rush it. They spent spring break with their real estate agents, looking at houses in different neighborhoods. They stopped eating dinner together, and sometimes Kathleen just had a bowl of cereal and read a magazine, while Terence went out for a burger with his friend Dave. Dave had never been married, started drinking at noon on Saturdays, had false teeth, and believed himself irresistible to women. What Terence saw in him was a mystery, but she no longer—thank God—felt required to plumb its depths.

  The week after spring break, Kathleen was at home grading papers when the phone rang. A man identifying himself as a police officer asked for her by name.

  “What’s this about?” she said.

  “I’m afraid there’s been an accident,” he said. “Your husband is at the hospital.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “It’s hard to say,” he said.

  “What do you mean? Is he okay?”

  “He’s not able to give us a statement at this time. I think you’d better come down right away.”

  When she got to the hospital, the officer was standing outside the room she’d been told was Terence’s, along with a doctor and a rail-thin young man in a dirty hooded sweatshirt whose connection to the situation was unclear. They all started talking at once, and Kathleen stood there unable to understand any of the cacophony—questions, explanations, complications—until finally her teacher instincts kicked in and she said, “Stop. All of you.” She pointed at the cop. “You first.”

  “Your husband appears to have been the victim of a crime,” he said. The guy in the hoodie tried to interrupt, but Kathleen shushed him. “From what we understand, he was waiting at the stoplight by the Everton Mall when an individual wearing a ski mask entered the vehicle and asked Mr. Schwartz to exit. Mr. Schwartz appears to have refused. An altercation ensued.”

  “You’re saying Terry was carjacked? At the mall?”

  “As you know, there has been an escalation of violent crime in this area,” the officer said gravely, “linked to the increased presence of illegal drugs.”

  The guy in the hoodie could no longer be contained. “I’m coming out of Sears and I see this guy dive into your husband’s car. He’s yelling ‘Pterodactyl! Pterodactyl!’ and grabs your husband and pulls him out and starts beating him and then he leaves him in the middle of the road and screeches off in the car and he actually, uh, runs over your husband when he drives away.”

  “Pterodactyl?” Kathleen said.

  “I think he was hallucinating—you know, tripping?” the man said. “My theory is that in his mind he was being pursued by this, like, animal, and getting away from it was the top priority?”

  “Your husband�
�s injuries are quite severe,” the doctor added. They were in a rhythm now, this information committee, filling in the picture for her. “He’s nonresponsive at this time.”

  “You’re saying he’s unconscious?”

  “He’s in the state you might know as a coma,” the doctor said.

  “Jesus,” Kathleen said. “Can I see him?”

  All three men nodded, as if giving her their collective permission.

  Inside the dim, white room, Terence lay swaddled in tubes and gauze. Between the bandages, his skin looked bloated, purple, etched with rupture. He was Franken-Terry, a monster version of himself.

  “Dear God,” she said out loud. The machines beeped. She couldn’t bring herself to touch him or even say his name.

  The department gathered round. Everyone came to the hospital bearing flowers, cards, audiobooks. Lots of audiobooks. It seemed to have been universally agreed upon that the sounds of literature would bring Terence back to consciousness, a notion that Kathleen found both touching and ridiculous. She herself pictured his brain as rotten and pulpy, fruit that had been dropped on the ground. Playing books on tape seemed hardly adequate. It would be like reciting Beckett to a flesh wound.

  But she thanked everyone and accepted the gifts with all the graciousness she could muster. Still, she couldn’t help feeling she was just playing a part. She and Terry hadn’t told anyone of the impending divorce. For one thing, they’d wanted to wait until the semester was over; for another, knowing that the gossip would rise in the halls to storm force, they each wanted to enjoy the secret knowledge of this surprise for a little while before unleashing it. The desire to spite their colleagues was one goal they still shared.

  In a gesture meant to be kind, the department arranged for someone to take over not only Terry’s classes but also hers. Kathleen called both real estate agents and told them they had to stop looking at condos. Her world shrank to the house and the hospital room, an orbit of two planets. At the hospital, she played Terry tapes—who knew, they might help—that were mostly, it turned out, of Shakespeare plays. Everyone had taken his profession of love for Shakespeare seriously. So Kathleen lost herself in the recitation of Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, leaning back in the room’s only chair, her eyes closed. Sometimes she forgot where she was, but then she would open her eyes and see this broken, silent mummy entombed by machines. It was impossible to know how much of him was still there. The doctors said there was some brain activity but couldn’t specify what this actually meant or how long the coma would last. It’s a waiting game, they liked to say, to which Kathleen always responded, “Game?” They’d smile wryly, then leave the room.