Wild Orchids Read online

  I was seven when my cousin Ronny drowned and I wasn’t sad because I knew that Cousin Ronny had been a brute. He’d drowned while terrorizing a four-year-old girl. He’d grabbed her doll, run into the pond, and proceeded to dismember it, throwing the body parts into the murky water, all while the little girl stood on the bank, crying and begging. But as Cousin Ronny ran into the deep water, he disturbed a snapping turtle that bit his big toe, and he and what was left of the doll went under, where he hit his head on a rock and knocked himself unconscious. By the time anybody realized he wasn’t pretending to be dead (Cousin Ronny was a great one for crying wolf ) he actually was dead.

  When I was told that Cousin Ronny had died—which meant that he’d no longer be around to bully me and the other little kids—all I felt was relief. And I was sure that Uncle Clyde would be glad, too, because he was always yelling at Ronny that he was the worst kid in the world and that he, Uncle Clyde, should have “cut it off” before he’d made such an evil son.

  But after Ronny died, Uncle Clyde went into a state of bereavement that lasted the rest of his life. And he wasn’t the only full-time mourner in my family. I had three aunts, two uncles, and four cousins who were also in lifelong mourning. A miscarriage, a chopped-off limb, a broken engagement, whatever, were all reason enough to put life on hold forever.

  I grew up praying hard that nothing truly bad ever happened to me. I didn’t want to have to spend decades drinking and crying about the tragedy that had blighted my existence.

  When I met Pat’s extended family and saw that they were all laughing and happy, I shook my head at the irony of it all. So many tragedies had been thrust on my family, yet here were people who had been blessed—without tragedy—for generations. Was it their church-going ways that had made their lives so free of catastrophe? No, my uncle Horace had gone to church for years, but after his second wife ran off with a deacon, he’d never entered a church again.

  About the third time Pat and I were in bed together, back when I still felt superior, as though my hard childhood had taught me more about life than her soft one had taught her, I mentioned this phenomenon, that her family had experienced no tragedies.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, so I told her about Uncle Clyde and Cousin Ronny who had drowned. I left out the parts about the doll, the turtle, and Uncle Clyde’s drinking. Instead, I used my natural-born gift for storytelling to make him sound like a man who loved deeply.

  But Pat said, “What about his other children? Didn’t he love them ‘deeply’?”

  I sighed. “Sure he did, but his love for Cousin Ronny overrode everything else.” This last bit was difficult for me. I’m cursed with a clear memory and I could almost hear again the ugly fights that used to rage between Uncle Clyde and his bully of a son. Truthfully, before the boy drowned I never saw any love between Uncle Clyde and Cousin Ronny.

  But to Pat I put on my best I’m-older-than-you look (by three months) and I’ve-seen-more-of-the-world-than-you (by the time Pat was eighteen she’d been to forty-two states on long driving vacations with her parents, while I had been out of my home state only twice) and told her that she and her family couldn’t understand my uncle Clyde’s feelings because they’d never experienced true tragedy.

  That’s when she told me she couldn’t have children. When she was eight she’d been riding her bike near a construction site and had fallen. A piece of rebar, embedded in concrete, had pierced her lower abdomen and gone through her tiny prepubescent uterus.

  She went on to tell me how her mother had lost her first husband and infant son in a train accident. “She and her husband were sitting together and she’d just handed him the baby when a runaway truck hit them,” Pat said. “My mother wasn’t touched but her husband and baby son were killed instantly. Her husband was decapitated.” She looked at me. “His head fell onto her lap.”

  We lay there in bed, both of us naked, and looked at each other. I was young and in bed with a girl I was in love with, but I didn’t see her beautiful bare breasts or the soft, perfect curve of her hip. Her words had shocked me to the core. I felt like a medieval man hearing for the first time that the earth wasn’t flat.

  I couldn’t reconcile that sweet woman who was Pat’s mother with the woman who’d had a severed head drop onto her lap. And Pat. If one of my female cousins had had a hysterectomy at eight years old her life would have stopped then and there. Every family gathering would have had everyone clucking in sympathy. “Pooooorrr Pat,” they would have called her.

  I’d known Pat and her family for months, and I’d met three grandparents, four aunts, two uncles, and an uncountable number of cousins. No one had mentioned Pat’s tragedy or her mother’s.

  “My mother had five miscarriages before she had me and they removed her uterus an hour after I was born,” Pat said.

  “Why?” I asked, blinking, still in shock.

  “I was breech so I was Caesarean and the doctor had been called from a party so…so his hand wasn’t steady. Her uterus was accidently cut and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.” Pat got out of bed, picked up my T-shirt off the floor, and pulled it on over her head, where it reached to her knees.

  The irony of this matter of uteruses and families flooded my brain. In my family girls got pregnant early and often. So why were my uncles able to reproduce themselves lavishly, but Pat’s parents had only one child and no hope of grandchildren?

  As I watched Pat dress, I knew there was something else in what she’d just told me about her birth. “A party? Are you saying that the doctor who delivered you was drunk?” People like Pat’s family didn’t have drunken doctors who “accidently” destroyed a woman’s uterus.

  Pat nodded in answer to my question.

  “What about your father?” I whispered, meaning, Did he have any tragedy attached to him?

  “Macular degeneration. He’ll be blind in a few more years.”

  At that I saw tears form in her eyes. To hide them, she went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  That was the turning point. After that day, I changed my attitude toward life. I stopped being smug. I stopped feeling that only my family had experienced “true life.” And I relinquished my biggest fear: that if something truly awful happened to me, I’d have to stop living and retreat into myself. You go on, I told myself. No matter what, you go on.

  And I thought I’d managed to do that. After that kid ran his car into Pat’s mother and killed her, I tried to be an adult. Right after it happened, I thought that maybe if I heard the details of her death I’d feel better, so I went to a young policeman standing by the wreckage and asked him what happened. Maybe he didn’t know I was related to the deceased by marriage, or maybe he was just callous. He told me what the kid who’d killed her had said. “She was just an old woman,” he’d said, as though Pat’s mother had been insignificant.

  There was a funeral, a nice Presbyterian funeral, where people politely wept, where Pat leaned on me, and where her father aged by the minute.

  Three weeks after the funeral, we all seemed to be back to normal. Pat returned to teaching in her inner city school, I went back to the night school where I taught English to people trying to get their green card, and back to my day job of writing what I hoped would become a great work of literature and give me immortality—and a top slot on the New York Times Bestseller List. Pat’s father hired a full-time housekeeper and spent his evenings on the porch repairing his neighbor’s appliances, something he planned to do as long as his eyesight held out. A year after the funeral, everyone seemed to have accepted the loss of Pat’s mother as “God’s will.” True, there was an empty place that her absence left behind, and she was spoken of often, but her passing was accepted.

  I thought it was accepted. But I also thought I was the only one who felt old-fashioned, white-hot rage at the loss of someone so good. I seemed to see things that no one else did. There was a little hole on the arm of the couch where the stitching had come apart. It wasn’t more than a half inch