by Claire Burch
was when they took her husband out of the bathroom in the hospital and sent him to the place in the other hospital where they do the finding out of what had happened for the report so fast that when Babe got to the first hospital with her brother, he was already not there any more so they had to go to the next place which was a morgue and fill out a lot of papers to see him and then when they saw him he wasn't alive at all and she couldn't remember what he had looked like on Tuesday.
So her brother took her home while she kept trying to remember what he had looked like. She was looking forward to getting home because she kept thinking well there would be a picture of him so naturally that would help her remember. He had split for a little while and said it would be better if she met someone else. So she had made herself do that. She had found another boyfriend and it seemed like that would be fine. But then he had come back and said "Could we try again?" and she said yes because of the children and because he had red hair and eyes the color of seaweed and could still - although that war was over, sing the song that goes "I'll get by as long as I have you. Though there be rain- and darkness too- I'll not complain- I'll see it through. Poverty may come our way it's true. What can I do? I'll get by as long as I have you." And because he was a good person and she still loved him.
There had been trouble and it was for a pretty long time so they had separated and he had found another place to live. Only it was confusing because he would keep coming home anyhow so it would seem like maybe it would sometime go back to how it had been before.
So she would decide to end her new life. But then he would go again and she would decide to begin again. Then he had also found it confusing.
When they took him to the hospital from his office it was one of the times he couldn't remember either what they were all supposed to do. They didn't know how to deal with that because they had never seen him at those times.
She hadn't seen him since Tuesday because the hospital and his shrink had said no visitors. She was just a little bit glad because when she would see him he didn't say anything, just went away for about what seemed five hundred and five years. All the years after the war she knew how to get him to come back from the sad silent blankness, but she was tired that week and let herself obey the authorities.
As soon as she got home some neighbor was there making a lot of tea. She looked for a picture of her husband and there were lots of them but her eyes kept blurring and all she could see was a faint outline.
Once, when they lived in the city, their cat Plutarch had eaten a mouse and left only its eyes on the kitchen table. After that sometimes there were nightmares of only eyes. Those had gone away but she began to think about it again.
The neighbors said the children were down the block with some other neighbors and should they stay there overnight or come back so she could tell them.
She didn't know what it was she was supposed to tell them but she said they'd better come home because it was way past bedtime.
When they came home she realized that it was important to tell them that their father had died only she couldn't tell them that he had done it himself at the hospital, so she said he was tired because it hurt so much so he had just closed his eyes and went to sleep where it wouldn't hurt.
Rachel was six and Sara was eight and Joanne was sixteen far away at the clinical treatment center.
They kept crying a lot and wouldn't stop so she put a cot in their room and her brother who was a doctor came upstairs and gave her an injection of something in her arm but she couldn't go to sleep because she kept imagining that the eyes in the picture downstairs were making noise.
The next week someone came from his office and cut all his credit cards in half.
The week after that it rained, or she imagined it rained.
The week after that she went to New York and visited the boyfriend she had begun to see after her husband had gotten an apartment and moved away. She had a nice lunch but burned a hole in the coffee pot by forgetting to turn off the stove. She imagined that it rained for four hundred and four days. Her big daughter Joanne came home but the doctors said she might do it too so to meet her at the airport and take her to another hospital. Babe did what they said because she had got too addled to trust her own instincts now. What she began to describe to herself as the eye noise was loud now. It had started the night her brother brought her home and she couldn't hear her heart beat or her voice or anybody else's voice without the eye noise starting to drown it out.
The place where Joanne stayed was a pretty nice hospital but they said they could only keep her for thirty days and as she was still likely to swallow a bottle of pills again, to take her to another hospital.
The other one was further away and every Thursday, Saturday and Sunday when Babe left, the lady locked the big door behind her with a funny clanking sound even louder than the eye noise.
Driving home on the expressway Babe sometimes took the wrong exit.
She made a scrapbook of his pictures and put all the letters of condolence in it and put his writing in a box with a ribbon and made a lot of spaghetti sauce.
When the eye sounds got too loud Babe would stuff her ears with cotton.
The next month she went to New York and visited her boyfriend only she couldn't have lunch at all and so many eyes were in the coffee pot that it boiled over and the new pot burned a little also. Part of her knew she was imagining the eyes but knowing that didn't help.
The children got bad report cards.
She put a bunch of old papers that made her cry in a brown manila envelope and left it against a bus stop because she couldn't throw it out, but someone recognised it because there was a old gas and electric bill left in the bottom by mistake and mailed it back.
The children stopped crying and got a box turtle.
They wouldn't let her big daughter have a box turtle so she didn't stop crying.
On Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, Babe would play checkers with Joanne in the Visitor's room.
Some of the checkers were missing so Babe started dreaming about bringing a box of what she still heard in her nightmares as the eye noise, and Joanne would use the red ones and she would use the black.
It didn't rain for what felt like about three hundred and thirty years but the barometer kept falling. Finally Babe went to an optometrist and got glasses so they could shield her eyes. She was afraid to put cotton in her ears because she needed to know if the children were hungry or if they needed help with their homework.
The next week she went to New York to visit her boyfriend and had lunch again but she vomited up the coffee in the sink.
She put the brown manila envelope with the old papers in a broken zippered old briefcase and left it at a bus stop again but when she got home some construction had started across the street and the sledge hammer kept slicing its way across their brains.
Sometimes she and the children watched the workmen eating their hearty lunch sandwiches.
Babe's parents and brothers and sisters came and cried on Sundays after she would come home from playing checkers with Joanne.
After a while she took the children to New York to visit her boyfriend and they went to see the movie about the Newport Festival and had pizza and sat in the park and a man who said he was a mythematician asked them for a quarter to get uptown.
She wrote a book about how to help people who have emotional disturbances and it got published.
The geodosic dome that they were building across the way turned into a geodosic eye in her nightmares. It didn't have any retina so it couldn't adjust to the dark and cried all night. Some times she wasn't sure if it was crying or she was. She'd make some spaghetti sauce and eat it and watch the eye from out her window wondering how she could get it to shut up.
She'd paint pictures of it with the children's watercolor set until the sun would come up and then the Eye house would stop crying but her pictures made so much noise that she put them in a brown manila envelope and left them against a bus stop and nobody sent them home. After what seemed about two hundred and twenty years the house was finished so the eye noise stopped and Babe could hear all the children's hearts still beating.
It was nice to hear regular sounds from below eye level so she took her big daughter home. In Babe's nightmares she had swallowed one of the eyes thinking it would taste like a Good and Plenty so she caught a bleeding eye ulcer in her stomach and couldn't stop hurting even when Babe read her Robert Louis S tevenson.
"When I was six and lay abed
I had two pillows at my head
and all my toys beside me lay
to keep me happy all the day."
It was okay she guessed Her box turtle died from being overfed Grandpa said, so
she buried it with Benny's kittens and her Martin Luther King picture in the
side yard and her sister and her did a Peace March to Washington around it and
sang a Joni Mitchell song.
It seemed like a hundred and twenty years later it was her birthday so summer vacation ended.
Well it probably wasn't as much of a summer as the other kids kids had but well
here goes.
She remembered how her parents had been smiling at her but her mother looked at her father funny and her father stopped smiling and didn't say anything, just put on his coat and went away for what seemed like six hundred and six years.
While he was gone her mother cried when nobody was looking at her but sang a lot of songs and smiled even more and even learned how to dance.
She gave Rachel and Sara TV dinners sometimes and they moved to a different place where they didn't know anybody.
There weren't many trees there - onlv luncheonettes and delicatessens like Tony's.
Her mother sang even more songs and smiled so hard she broke a tooth and had to keep putting chapstick on her lips.
Sara watched Electric Circus on TV.
She kept waiting for Christmas so she could ask Santa Claus if her summer vacation could end.
Footnote
Diverticulum: A structure which has arisen or developed from another larger one as the cecum, the air bladder of a fish, or the lungs of a vertebrate, all of which arise trom the intestinal canal. Diverticulum: a bypath.
Bypass: going around something. Not facing it. Like Babe had to do to keep moving and not give in to the feeling that she wanted to sleep forever.
Ma don't leave me here don't leave me here ma don't leave me here don't leave
me here ma don't leave me here don't leave me here ma don't leave me here ma
don't heave me leer don't leave me here ma don't heave me leer ma don't heave
me leer ma don't heave me leer don't heave me leer ma don't leave me here don't
heave me leer ma don't heave me leer don't heave me leer.
She was sixteen. She was in the hospital so she wouldn't swallow any more bottles of pills. All the hospitals always sent the records so the next hospital always said the same thing. It wasn't fair. But no more than that, though a few of them will probably become relics in some far off museum perhaps not even on this planet and those of future generations will raise a benign eyebrow at those folk who were gracious enough to record the few beauties that they saw and redeem what had happened into the freshness of a meadow.
Time time time what will become of them? (sung to some foolish, lilting tune ).