White Dog Fell from the Sky

9



Some days, Alice talked to the emptiness in her womb as though it were an unfurnished room. Talking had never come easily with Lawrence. What formed in her mouth were the words, Which of us is flawed? Their eyes no longer met. Sex was sweaty and unappealing. Unlike some people who love to bury their heads in damp armpits, the thought of sticking to Lawrence in this heat was revolting.

It was Saturday afternoon, and Alice found herself talking to Lillian Gordon over the side fence. Lillian was wearing a turquoise two-piece lounge suit, her ears overstretched by a pair of heavy gold earrings. The two women stood in the wispy shade of a wild thorn that grew on Alice’s side of the fence. “When’s the baby coming?” Lillian asked.

“Never,” said Alice. “I can’t get pregnant.”

“My first miscarriage was in Kampala, Uganda,” Lillian said. She’d been five months along, she said, twenty-three years old. Her husband was out of town, and she began to bleed. She was afraid to go to the hospital, afraid to drive through the streets of a strange, volatile city. She’d nearly died. The next miscarriage was in Namibia. After that, she’d had at least one miscarriage a year, fourteen in all, until she was all used up. The babies grew to about four months, and then her uterus tipped them out. Her babies were buried all over the continent of Africa. Her voice was matter of fact. It didn’t change even when she said they would have survived if she’d been near a major hospital in London. Lillian Gordon was not the sort of woman who dispensed or received hugs, but Alice reached through the fence and touched her hand. She told her that she and Lawrence had decided that they didn’t really want children. It wasn’t true, but it was what she’d begun to say to herself, and it was better than crying all over the place.

“We’ve been asked to a dinner party at the Lunquists’,” she told Lillian.

“Tonight?”

“In an hour.”

She didn’t want to go. The only reason to say yes was knowing that she’d hear Hasse Lunquist play the piano. He was a sweet-tempered man who’d had his piano shipped out, courtesy of the Swedish government. He worked for Radio Botswana. His wife, Erika, worked in Lawrence’s section at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning.

Alice went inside to get ready. Lawrence was just stepping out of the shower looking happy and rosy. “Your turn,” he said. Daphne was asleep on the floor, gathering energy for the night.

“How long do dogs stay in heat?” Alice asked.

“Three weeks,” he said, but she could tell from the way he hesitated that he’d just made this up. She didn’t remember Lawrence ever saying, “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you just say you don’t know when you don’t? It’s okay not to know.”

“I told you the answer. I don’t know why that doesn’t satisfy you.”

She walked into the bathroom and stepped out of her clothes. The water trickled over her body. She imagined it sizzling with the heat in her. And then she thought of Lillian’s uterus. Fourteen times it had turned and poured her babies out, small worlds disappearing.

Once upon a time, Lawrence had told her that she had a beautiful body. Well proportioned, he called it, as though she were a horse. At thirty-one, her body was still young, but next year it would be less young. By then, all the auburn would be gone from her hair, replaced by gray. I’m young, she thought. I’m still young. I could still make milk, given a chance. I could make a baby if things were right between us. On the surface, it looked fine, but it wasn’t. She thought of the old aloes in the garden, their thick, elephantine gray-green whorls, the brown stalks reaching for the sky. Keeping history, Isaac had said.

But history didn’t matter to Lawrence. Layers—of time, or meaning—made him nervous. He didn’t talk about his childhood, about his mother or father, or his mother’s mother or father’s father, or any of the rest of his family. He had hordes of relatives, young, old, ancient. He didn’t mention his own history, or theirs. If he and Alice had a child, he wouldn’t care about the child’s history. He’d trim down memory as short as he kept his hair. He was a handsome, energetic man who each weekday morning took a shower, pulled on his safari suit, pulled up his kneesocks, shined his shoes, worked hard, came home for lunch, went back and worked hard, came home for dinner, ran at sunset to keep his body trim, invited people over who would help his career, went to bed, woke up, took a shower, and pulled on another safari suit.

This was not a reason for leaving someone. He was kind. He didn’t beat her. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d raised his voice. He didn’t look at her, but how many people did look at the person they lived with? She stood in the shower until she heard Lawrence, the water-usage monitor, tell her to turn the water off. She let it run awhile longer.

When she came out, he was sitting on the bed in his olive green safari suit, wearing kneesocks a darker shade of green. He’d bought this suit after they came out to Botswana, over the border in Mafeking at an Afrikaans department store. “You look quite the colonial,” she told him. She felt overheated and mean-spirited and couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t want him to touch her, not then, not later that night, not ever.

At the Lunquists that night was another couple. Judith and Stephen. Canadians. And a single man named Hal, a Brit, bald, wisps of hair above his ears, dark blue eyes. They were agriculture people. It was a relief to get away from the economists. Hal talked about trying to teach agriculture demonstrators new seeding practices. People in Botswana traditionally broadcast seed across the soil, and now the Department of Agriculture wanted farmers to plant seed in rows for higher yields. “The problem,” he said, “is that no one wants to change.”

“What makes people change?” asked Judith.

They were all drinking gin and tonics. Frosty glasses, heat pouring off their hands.

“Nothing,” said Erika Lunquist without energy. Small beads of perspiration clung to her brow, near her hairline. Her hair was dark, her back ramrod straight, her eyes a glacial blue. “People don’t change. They just keep doing what’s familiar over and over.” The room grew silent. She was talking about something other than broadcast seeding.

“I don’t agree,” said Stephen.

“It’s true,” said Judith. “People always go back to what they know. Give them one drought year, and they’ll be already saying this new method doesn’t work.”

“So what are we doing here?” asked Lawrence.

“I don’t know. What are we doing here, darling?” Erika asked Hasse, but there was no darling in her voice. It seemed as though they must have been fighting before everyone had come.

Their children were out in the garden. Out the window, Alice saw one turn and head toward the house, and the other two follow. They were barefoot, and they ran fiercely, elbowing each other out of the way. As the kitchen door banged shut behind them, Erika jumped. They came into the room: strange, wild children with pale eyes, like humans raised by wolves. Their feet were dusty, and their white-blond hair was tangled and thatched.

“Go into the kitchen,” Erika said to them. “Your supper’s there.”

“What about pudding?” asked the oldest, jumping up and down on one foot backward out of the room.

“Listen to them,” Erika said. “They sound like English boys.” But they didn’t.

During a lull after they’d left, Judith said, “Apropos of nothing, a disturbing thing happened to us two days ago. Our dog came home with a stomach wound.”

“An abrasion,” said her husband.

“Worse than an abrasion,” Judith said. “A dirty wound. Gravelly. His front paws too. Do Batswana generally dislike dogs?”

Alice looked at Lawrence. “What kind of dog?” she asked.

“A miniature schnauzer. With a cute little beard. We’ve kept him in the last two nights.”

“Where do you live?” asked Lawrence.

“A little way up from the Old Village.”

“That accounts for it then,” said Lawrence.

“For what?”

“For the fact that your dog hasn’t been in our yard the last two nights, making an ungodly racket, attempting to hump our dog.” He was holding his glass tautly and looked explosive.

“How do you know it was our dog?”

“I threw him out of the yard. These things happen when dogs are allowed to run loose and a man is deprived of sleep.” He laughed a little, a laugh of self-forgiveness, but no one joined in.

“You threw him?” said Judith.

“He didn’t seem to understand he wasn’t welcome.”

“You injured him,” said Stephen.

“You didn’t know what he was up to?” Lawrence asked.

Just apologize, Alice thought. All you need to do is apologize.

“No,” said Judith. “We just thought he was out sniffing around.”

A wash of laughter snorted out of Alice. It wasn’t funny. And then she was crying. She excused herself and went through the kitchen toward the bathroom. The boys were sitting at the table stuffing themselves with pudding. She went into the bathroom and shut the door. She splashed water on her cheeks, dried her face on a towel, and thought of walking home. She fled into the garden and stood under a banana tree, its big fronds waving like clown hands, beating in the hot wind. All he’d needed to do was say, I’m sorry, I lost my head. But would he ever do such a thing? Lawrence was never wrong. Never, ever. It was tiring living with a man who was never wrong. I don’t even like you, she said to him under her breath. It shocked her a little.

Politeness got the better of her, and she returned. There was an awkward silence when she walked into the room. They were already sitting down at the table, the Lunquists’ servant, Neo, passing dishes of food. Neither Judith nor her husband would look at Lawrence. Stephen studied his meat, cut it into small bites, and put each piece carefully into his mouth as though it might detonate. They were like people on a life raft, afraid to tip. The heat was undiminished.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alice saw the Lunquists’ cat dash under Hasse’s chair. It was a large black animal with long white whiskers, formidable, as wild-looking as their children. She took little notice of it until the crunching began. She looked down and saw that the cat had brought in a green lizard, which struggled in its claws. The lizard’s tail lay a few inches from it. “Hasse,” Alice whispered.

“What?”

She pointed.

“Oh, that. He seems to prefer eating when we do.” Crunch went the head.

Judith and Stephen talked dispiritedly about tours of duty they’d experienced elsewhere in Africa. Hal, who’d been sitting quietly, mentioned his mother’s visit, which was just over. He said that she’d found everyone in Botswana so friendly. Hal was as uncontroversial as a pan of warm milk. Alice could imagine him as a little boy, hopeful, anxious to please, outgunned by overbearing elders, stripped of his longings. Someone at work had told Alice that Hal and his mother had been invited to lunch at the house of an anthropologist who lived outside Lobatse. His mother had needed to use the outhouse during the visit. There’d been a rumbling of tin as she wedged her way in, and then the whole thing had fallen on its side. Hal would never tell this story. He would only try his best not to think about it.

After the Swedish cake and granadillas and coffee, Alice asked Hasse to play for them, assuming they’d all come listen, but she was the only one who followed him into the other room.

“What do you want to hear?” he asked, lifting the heavy lid of the grand piano and propping it open.

“A lizard-gobbling tune.”

“That sickened you.”

“Yes.”

“Well I’ll play something to soothe your nerves, shall I?” He sat on the bench and began the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique. The music was deeply reassuring, settled into itself, melancholy tinged with hope. The melody repeated itself an octave higher. Hasse lingered over this note, that one. He played beautifully, but Alice felt something aloof in it, some part kept in reserve, uncommitted. He had dark brown hair, a cleft in his chin, and intelligent-looking, heavily lidded eyes framed by round, rimless glasses. His mouth was the most expressive part of him, both lips full, a little amused—by himself? by the world? by Beethoven? He looked as though he’d play with a woman like that cat with the lizard. He leaned away from the keyboard and closed his eyes, then slowed down before beginning the more agitated middle section. He hesitated, opened his eyes, and stopped playing.

“What’s wrong?”

He looked at her. “Your husband is sleeping with my wife.”

She heard a sound inside her, like something falling.

A mixture of emotion played over his face: sadness, resignation, and a small touch of pity or triumph—was she imagining it?—that he was in control of this information and Alice was not. “You didn’t know?”

“No. I don’t believe you.”

“Observe.”

She thought about it a moment. “How long?”

“It began several months ago.”

“How did you find out?”

“She told me.” He didn’t say Erika. He seemed unable to utter her name.

He started the adagio again, played a few measures, and stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you.”

She shook her head. It could have meant yes or no.

“Why in god’s name did you ask us to dinner?”

“She asked, not me.”

“What for?”

“For appearances. For everything on the surface to look normal.”

Some bitter sound came from her.

“And you?” he said. “What will you do?” He stood up, came to her side, and put a hand on her shoulder. She closed her eyes, leaned into him a little. His hand was broad, music lingering in it.

“I don’t know.” The hurt and rage hadn’t come yet, just the burning shame.

“I’ve always liked your eyes,” he said. “Beautiful gray eyes. Would you like to meet sometime?”

She snapped to. “No,” she said.

“Perhaps I could make you happy.”

“I’m not looking for that.” Yes, she said to herself. Play me the way you play Beethoven. “I need to go,” she said.

They returned to the dining room, and a familiar-looking man wearing a moss green safari suit sat with his chair pushed back at an angle. The man had quietly festive eyes. “I’m ready to go,” she said to him. She watched what he did as they said good-bye, where his eyes went. She saw them slide gently under the cerulean blue sleeveless blouse of Erika Lunquist and heard a voice inside her say, This is what grownups do.