He shook his head.

  “Ankeny? Hiawatha?” They had lived outside Cedar Rapids for not more than eight months.

  “Yeah! That woman. You know! She came every day. She had brown hair, and kind of a funny name. You know. Goddammit!”

  Anna knew. Elinor Onley. She felt her scalp grow warm at the roots of her hair. “I know who you’re talking about. What about her?”

  “Well, what was her name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Noley, it was, something like that.”

  “Daddy, it doesn’t matter.”

  “You say you were thinking about all those women, Bertha Carswell and those, well, I was thinking, too. Just kind of to remember the names.”

  “Onley. Elinor Onley.” She said it because she hated to imagine him shuffling through the names, testing his memory and finding evidence of age, or worse, but she hated, too, to say it.

  Childless, her hair knotted around a knitting needle on top of her head, always trousered, Elinor had swept into Anna’s new house on the day they moved in, and disconnected her. Right out from under the noses of Ike and Dolores, Helen and Claire and Susanna, Elinor Onley had prodded Anna through the door, chattering all the while, and taken her over to her place, where she lived in virginal socialist splendor with her brother. “At last!” she sang, “Somebody with a frontal lobe! Don’t contradict. I’ve been waiting for someone like you forever.”

  Her certainty that Anna was her predestined bosom companion was compelling, and her ordered, book-lined house was alluring. She worked in an electronics factory, was a graduate of Wellesley, prickled the side of the League of Women Voters, idolized Eleanor Roosevelt. She was the only person who had ever shamed Ike for mocking Mrs. Roosevelt’s looks. She referred to the path they pounded between their back doors as her “umbilical cord.” She never stopped talking, and Anna went from being perplexed to being fascinated to being enamored. Mama had instructed her, Dolores had complained and gossiped to her, sometimes Ike had ordered her around, and the children had asked her questions, but no one had ever talked with her as Elinor did, explaining and doubting and seeking her approval all at the same time. Ike wouldn’t have liked her except that she made an effort to charm him. Anna and Helen and Claire and Susanna spent entire winter evenings in Elinor’s kitchen, where she had a fireplace and kept toys and books for the girls.

  Then, Anna was not sure what happened. Elinor’s ardor cooled. Anna remembered saying something like, “I do think Ike’s right about that, though” (about what, she could not now recall), and seeing Elinor’s eyelids flicker with annoyance. Could that really have been it? Anna had expressed agreement with Ike’s admittedly rather Republican ideas before. At any rate, for some unknown reason the welcome had ended, Elinor had grown extremely distant, and before Anna could circle in again and find out what might be salvaged of their intimacy, Ike had taken a job in Ankeny, and they had moved away. It was the only time Anna had ever been plucked out of her family by such a friendship, and its uniqueness made the sudden end to it uniquely mysterious and shaming. The only person she could have mentioned the pain to was Elinor, and so she had never mentioned it. It seemed odd that to Ike she was only a name in a naming exercise, along with Constance Logan and Frank Hunt and Hack Maloney, representing no more than a button in a box of buttons.

  Ike rasped out a chuckle. “There was a crazy one!” His breath caught, and then he chuckled again. “She had that brother of hers scrubbed down to a shadow, all right! ‘Hoe between the rows, Dickie, and watch out for those shoots. How glorious to dine on our own baby peas!’ ”

  “Richard was a quiet man, Ike.”

  “How could anyone tell? He probably didn’t know, himself.”

  “Daddy, I—”

  “And she looked like a piece of beef jerky.”

  “Don’t talk about her!”

  “Well, she—”

  Anna jumped up. “I said don’t talk about her! Just don’t! Just don’t!”

  “That was nineteen thirty—”

  “So what! Go back to sleep! I haven’t slept all night! When do you think I’ll have time for a nap tomorrow? You think I can clean house all day, and cook meals, and run up and down the stairs, and argue all the time with the girls, not to mention listen to them day in day out, remember so and so, wasn’t it this and that, no you’re wrong, Mother you should blah blah, and then stay up all night like I was eighteen years old? I’m seventy-two! My legs hurt and my shoulder and everything else just about! And then I’ve got to sit here and listen to you make fun of the only friend I ever had? I’m sick and tired—”

  “She didn’t bid you a fond adieu when we moved to Ankeny! She didn’t even cross her yard to say good-bye!”

  “You remember plenty when it suits you, don’t you? Go to sleep. I’m going to bed.” Ike had shrunk into his pillow in the face of her wrath. He probably didn’t know why she was so mad. She didn’t either, but glorying in the power, she turned and thumped out of the room. In a moment she hit the hall switch with a decisive click, and plunged him into darkness.

  Anna stood at the back door, dressed. The churning set up by this name Ike had retrieved made her breathless. There had been an endlessness to her conversations with Elinor that she had adored, more safety in Elinor’s firelit kitchen than she had ever felt in her own. And Elinor pried. There was nothing so flattering as having your life pried into by someone whose own life fascinated you in turn. Certainly the worst thing about being old was that she would never know. In books and on TV there was always a letter or a dying explanation, but in her experience, motives were never explained. Few people could even remember what they’d been thinking then, and if you tried to remind them or prod them or tell them what you had thought, distance gaped wider, and even rudimentary cooperation came to seem a miracle. There were little burrs she had turned over for her entire life—slights she had been unable to forget, rudenesses unresolved, hurtful remarks that no one remembered uttering, but that had worked their way into her like shards of glass. Mama was like that before she died, brimming with the insults of a lifetime. Even Mama, who had embraced America alone, sixteen years old, in a pair of white gloves. Anna sighed. They were always left. No matter how much of the brain got washed away, little granite pinnacles of what people had said, how they had crossed the street or not come to the phone, stood glinting in the sunlight.

  Oddly, Ike didn’t figure in these recollections. Thoughts that brought her needlelike breathless pain were always of someone who had vanished twenty or thirty years before; things Ike had said or done that hurt shockingly at the time, that she had sworn never to forget, always to take into account, had been forgotten, had failed to figure in the account, did not affect anymore the mixture of exasperation and custom that was their marriage. (Did they?) That Helen had once laughed at a picture she bought and was proud of, and that Claire had accused her of always giving the twins Cokes when they were supposed to have juice rankled more often. Anna turned the lock and pushed open the heavy back door. The fog, perhaps, had diminished, perhaps had not been so thick after all. In any event, she could make out the garden, and it seemed open, fresh, alluring, free of indoor memories, maybe free of all memories except those of corn and beans and kale and chard, hoeing and watering and harvesting, life’s most innocent work.

  She was not as fanatical about a clean garden as Ike was, and in the past few years she had persuaded him to leave the old stalks, roots, and leaves on the ground over the winter. She liked to see them rot, turn black and soft, replenish the soil. And she liked to see in them the ghost of last year’s plantings. Something had gotten the peppers and, to a degree, the tomatoes. The leaves turned yellow and the fruits were small. They’d had glorious squash, though. Hot-dog sized zucchinis became torpedoes in a day, crooknecks inflated like balloons, there’d been pumpkins for every kid on the block, rolling in the dying garden like basketballs, more exciting in their exuberant way than carrots or corn. Potatoes were her favorites, but they’d stopped growing potatoes after Ike’s first heart attack. Potatoes were good every minute of the summer—easy to plant, quick to sprout, green and sparkling with white flowers, ready to eat as new potatoes, then heavy and moist like huge rubies when you dug them up in the fall. She also loved peppers in a good year, when they clustered eight or ten to a plant, and you could sit in the garden and eat them from your hand while the shade from the house made even August cool. There was broccoli, too, and cabbage. The solidity of cabbage always amazed her, its crisp resistance to the knife and then its cranial involutions as the two halves fell apart with a thump. And peas were good, and pole beans, too. And marigolds around the border, and muddy baseball-solid onions. Anna dug the toes of her shoes into the soil, wondering if she dared to plant a little early this year. It had been such a mild winter, and she had no feeling of blizzards lying in ambush. She bent down. You could almost work the soil already. She pulled up a couple of old zucchini stalks. Maybe they could do something with the raspberry patch this year, too. It had become so brambly and overgrown that she didn’t let the neighborhood children go back there anymore. God knew if there were any berries at all. Ike was a fruit person. For dozens of Junes he’d eaten nothing for breakfast except a bowl of strawberries, gritty sweet with granulated sugar. He always wanted to plant another dwarf something or a new variety of berry. Anna, though, saved her greatest fondness for simple green vegetables, flavors as daily as air and water.

  The shovel and hoe would be in the garage. In the predawn darkness it would be a pleasant blind work to dig a little and plan a little, corn where the peas and beans had been, tomatoes across the garden from last year, garlic and onions bordering everything. She shivered, having forgotten how chilly it was, even that it was chilly. When she lifted her eyes above the earth, she saw that the fog still settled in, and she could see nothing of the house except the light in the kitchen window. Upstairs, her room and Ike’s faced the street.

  She’d not gardened before Iowa, had in fact disdained Mama’s turnips and cauliflowers in favor of Papa’s mushrooms. Every summer, in the mountains above Kane where they had a small cabin, Papa would promise her fields of mushrooms, and for a few summers, anyway, there were none to be found. Papa was a city boy. There were terrific wildflowers, though: Indian paintbrush, wild iris, acres of poisonous cerulean lupine, buttercups and alpine daisies. There were meadows higher and more cleanly washed with air than she could have imagined had she not seen them, and there were the peaks, named by her four-year-old self, “Goose” (for the fire scar that curved like the neck of a Canada goose) and “Sun” for the way the ball of the sun in June teetered on the summit just before bouncing into the blue sky and bathing the cabin in light. Papa knew the names of flowers and trees and lichens and birds, but produced no mushrooms until the summer of Anna’s ninth year, when they came to a meadow near Teardrop Lake (as they called it), and had to find refuge from a sudden storm. Papa pulled her under a big overhanging rock and rubbed her hands between his to keep them warm. When the rain had blown across the mountain and the sun was throwing their shadows along the face of a big cliff, they finished up their sandwiches and stepped into the open. Bubbled out of the meadow grass by the hundreds were the pearly crowns of baby mushrooms. The thrust of peaks all around held them tilted, as in a hand, toward the sun.

  After that, they were mushroom psychic, and until going off with Ike, Anna had felt as if to wish for mushrooms was to have them. Later, Ike hadn’t liked mushrooms, and it seemed as though they were not something to be pointed out as attractive to little Helen or to Claire, who put everything in her mouth. Nothing twisted her with longing like thoughts of the mountains. She understood from Christine, who liked to backpack and had been to Yellowstone, the Tetons, and the Beartooths, that the strands of cobweb roads she remembered, and the cabins perched like dewdrops, and guest lodges no more permanent than little piles of sticks, were now hammered into the rock itself, weighted down by visitors. That was okay. Who didn’t deserve to see it? But it was finished for her.

  Whenever Ike said that life was too hard there, thinking of Abel and the ranch and the disease and death of cattle, Anna thought not of her first married years, but of Mama and Papa, who attained an Eastern smoothness of routine; ironing followed washing followed baking just as summer in the cabin followed school in town. One wore gloves for shopping and a smock for spring cleaning, and calicoes were folded and set aside in a rainbow of dresses-to-be. Ike’s life, she had always thought, would be hard anywhere, for he hadn’t the liking of routine that could eventually smooth it out, and she had no patience with his impatience. Her daughters’ childhoods had unraveled chaotically with the failure of the ranch, the uncertainty of the Depression, and then the war. Her own had been a tightly woven piece. She had fought to escape the strands that always looped her back to Mother’s rules, but now, at seventy-two, she still could not say what Helen and Claire and Susanna had fought for, or if they had won. And Christine? She shoved her gloved hands into the pockets of her coat. For forty years she had stood in her garden thinking of the mountains, as if earth called up rock, marigolds called up Indian paintbrush, robins called up bald eagles, the trickle from her hose called up the torrent of mountain creeks in June, and she was merely the point where everything touched. To the kitchen or the living room or the solitude of her bed, visions of the Big Horns, the Yellowstones, and the Absarokas would not come, but after a lifetime in the Midwest, she still half expected to look up from the soil she was working and see mountains against the sky.

  She glanced remorsefully at the house. Nothing about it indicated what Ike was doing in there, or how he felt, whether he was asleep, or if the medicine had worked. It would be dawn soon, though a somber one. She could call Helen, care for Ike by health-bringing daylight, forget how night and yellow lamplight had sapped him. Christine would come, and the dog, and Claire would take her shopping, and Susanna would bring home something from the bakery, and everything would bump along as usual, busy, tolerable. She fixed her thoughts on this—figures scurrying in and out of Ike’s room, handing him the paper, a book, hot chocolate, a pill, running him up and down the stairs, sitting him down and helping him up. She fixed her thoughts on it because she didn’t want the image of him as he had looked before, waking up, his eyes rolling, to capture any of them. But it did, and the more she conjured up bustle, the more frightened she grew, until she was stock still in the garden, cold again and afraid to move.

  Why did she fail to rise to the occasion of this illness, every day? Why did she meet every demand with resentment and reluctance, or take refuge all the time in gardening plans or sewing plans, or, lately, fruitless reminiscing? Why couldn’t she merely pay attention to Ike, her husband of fifty-two years, her patient, her charge? It seemed not a question of will but a question of thoughtlessness or stupidity. Or selfishness. Could a broken hasp will itself fast to the door? He was very sick. Obviously he was very sick and getting sicker, and she acted as if he were merely perverse. She thought of him dead, right now dead in the unspeaking bulk of the dark house, and a greater fear than the one that froze her pushed her toward the back door.

  He was groaning, sleeping but groaning. She dared not enter the room, but she could stand just outside and hear him, tossing, snoring, groaning. She went to the phone and unwrapped it.

  Just as she noticed her gloves, that she couldn’t dial with her gloves on, a voice said, “Hello? Who’s this?”

  “What? Hello? The phone hasn’t rung. Hello?”

  “Hello!”

  “What are you doing on my phone?”

  “This is George! Who is this?”

  He fell silent for her answer, but she couldn’t say anything. He could as easily have been standing beside her, have stepped suddenly from the closet and whispered in her ear. He would have been on the phone all night, waiting for her to pick it up. Anyone could have tried to call and been unable to reach her. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle, but still could say nothing.

  George chuckled. “Just tell me who you are,” he said. “Just tell me, tell me.”

  How could she have forgotten him, have unlocked the door and gone outside in the blanket dark and forgotten him?

  “Tell me. Tell me. Tell.”

  Had she locked the door downstairs? Was that her hand tonight that she remembered turning the bolt, the testing, with a little jerk, whether it caught?

  “Tell me.”

  She croaked, then enunciated, “My husband is dying, get off my line.”

  There were no clicks, no sounds except a cessation of George’s quiet breathing. In a moment, the dialtone blasted her ear. She took off her gloves and dialed Ike’s doctor, fingers trembling so that they jumped out of the holes. Dr. Jauss’s phone rang and rang. At last a voice clicked in, saying, “You have reached Dr. Edward Jauss. Dr. Jauss has been called out of town until Monday. Patients with emergencies are to call Dr. Simon Clayton, 281-4038. Others may leave messages after the sound of the tone.”

  She dialed again and reached another recording. “Dr. Clayton’s office. Thank you for calling. Office hours for today, Thursday, are from 10 A.M. until 3:30 P.M. Before 10 A.M., Dr. Clayton may be reached at Flowers Memorial Hospital, or you may leave a message and Dr. Clayton will call you as soon as he can. If you have had an accident, please go to the Emergency Room at Flowers Memorial and have Dr. Clayton paged.” The bell rang. Anna stumbled over the message, getting out only Ike’s name and the fact that he was not Dr. Clayton’s patient, when the bell rang again and the phone disconnected. She had not taken down the number. She dialed Dr. Jauss, listened to the recording, dialed Clayton again, drummed her fingers on the phone while the recording wound through the machine. At last. She spoke very carefully.