The Corridors of Longing

Worship

As everyone at your Zoom meeting begins the odd goodbyes of isolation, Denise says, Would you like to see our butterfly collection?

None of the eight face-filled panels blacks out. Denise tilts her laptop so the camera shows the dining room wall behind her is nearly covered with hung boxes of butterflies. You count twelve, nine in each box. 108 butterflies that look, to you, identical.

It’s our best wall, Denise says. They come dry in the mail, then Harry moistens them and fixes them in place. He builds all the boxes himself.

She has never mentioned the butterflies at the meetings before the lockdown. You search the faces in the panels, looking for a match to your wonder. Two panels go dark.

We’re just getting started, Denise says. She stands, the room swaying through her camera. She carries the laptop closer to the wall. All of the butterflies seem to have the same deep blue with golden specks in a simple, consistent pattern. They have names, Denise says, beginning a slow pan across the boxes. If I turned these frames over, you’d see them on the back. They’re all the same species, but more like cousins than brothers and sisters.

Four panels are dark. Harry is in self-quarantine, Denise says, but so far, he’s fine. He has a new set to keep him occupied. He is so incredible with the tweezers and pins and the syringe."

She moves her laptop closer to the wall, holds it steady. You think of an atlas you once owned, how the biggest cities were enlarged in panels. We have so many walls, Denise says. The butterflies are raised on farms. They are plentiful. Eventually, we’ll be surrounded. Don’t these look well-cared for? Don’t they look as if they could fly?

You are alone with Denise. This virus will bring you back to her dining room for months, or longer, another wall sprouting something like an ivy of boxes. What she will show, and you will call beauty’s still life while those others who meet with you go quickly dark into their ordinary, private lives.

You vow to look up the species. To ask her now seems taboo, an interruption of worship. You imagine Harry busy with a new specimen, carefully restoring something dry and fragile under a brilliant light. While you stare and stare, all that is left of Denise is breathing.

Nursing

After our father left, my mother decided to become a nurse. She’d always taken care of him, she said, but now he was gone. She’d loved having babies to tend to, but now my sister was four, I was six, and my brother was eight, all of us old enough to manage a few hours a day with our unmarried aunt. Harry was a faithless prick, our mother said to her on the phone, her back to us as if that set her voice on mute. When she turned around, she smiled and said, Now we’re getting educated and starting over.

Our mother came home with thick books and samples of the things we’d seen at the doctor’s. She measured our height and weight. She took our temperatures. She wrapped a cuff around our arms and read the numbers for our blood pressure. While she listened to our hearts and lungs with a stethoscope, she said good or excellent or perfect.

She brought home a book called Human Anatomy. It was big and full of pictures like ones we had in our rooms, but my brother said there wasn’t a story. Oh yes, there is, our mother said. Let me tell you. She told us to lie down and be still so she could identify all the body parts. It sounded easy—arms and legs and knees and all the rest, but instead she named the bones—tibia and fibula, ulna and radius—while she tickled us and recited.

There are more characters, she said, and she started on all the places inside us, the things we had to imagine—kidneys, liver, stomach, lungs. She poked us softly as she found the spots, but my brother said, Stop and walked away.

She located the parts of my sister and me I’d never heard of—pancreas, gall bladder, diaphragm. She turned pages to show us the pictures in her book, but my sister had already begun to play with her dolls. You’re so sweet, she said to me each time she turned a page.

I was the only one who learned where my thyroid was and what it looked like. I was the only one who could put my hand over where my appendix was and know that a doctor could remove it someday, and I’d never miss it because it didn’t do anything anymore except get infected and make you sick. Vestigial, mother said. No longer with a function.

Enough anatomy, she said one evening. I need to practice the things I’ll be doing soon. Who wants to let me get an IV started?

Nobody, not even me, wanted to be stabbed by a needle. We’re not cars, my brother said when she asked again. We don’t need a fill-up. My sister began to cry.

It’s just a prick, she said, but we all shook our heads. It’s just a tiny prick and a slow drip. Before long, you’ll forget it’s there.

I said, None of us are hospital sick, but there’s a patient in my closet.

Pretend isn’t the same as real, our mother said, but she waited until I came back with the Barbie our father had sent for my seventh birthday, the limited-edition rubber one our mother had laid on her bed before saying, It looks like you-know-who.

Make her have something wrong inside her where nobody can see, I said.

Her esophagus, our mother said at once, and pointed. She’s so skinny because she can’t swallow her food. She sucked up water in her eyedropper and tried to get the doll to drink, but Barbie drooled and slobbered all over herself. See? our mother said.

All three of us got in close to watch. Barbie didn’t even move as the needle pushed into her hand. This is just to get things started, our mother said. To keep her hydrated until I learn how to do a feeding tube.

Poor Barbie, my sister said, but now our mother was smiling. She said she could learn everything else without us. That things were more complicated than names. What Barbie needed was a surgeon, someone she would be able to help when she learned enough to be a real nurse and she could hand the doctor the proper knives.

Sweetie

Our neighbors Peter and Christina have been training their dog in German. Nein! they say. Stopp! Bleib! I had to look that last one up to learn it means Stay.

The dog is a German Shepherd, but still. We thought it was a cute idea, Christina told my wife and me. My father suggested it. He was a boy in Germany before my grandfather moved everybody to Pennsylvania after the war. That’s how we ended up here, just a hop, skip, and jump to where he’s moved into a retirement community.

Cute or not, in June, three months ago, that dog, whose name is Rolf, bit me while I was at the mailbox. Not badly, just a nip. The dog bounced over while Christina stood in her yard as if leash laws were a well-kept secret, and for a second or two, I thought it was an opportunity to get acquainted. Then its hair stood up, it growled deep in its throat, and bit my arm.

Christina professed sorrow as I showed her my arm. She said, Bose hund twice, catching me off guard with what seemed to me a perfect umlaut sound. I’m so glad he didn’t break the skin. Rolf will learn as he grows. You’ll see.

The evidence of Rolf’s learning curve advancing was slow to reveal itself. Two weeks later, he bit my wife as she trimmed the rhododendron next to our house. She was wearing pants to keep insects, especially ticks, away, but she was surprised and then afraid. For no reason, she said. Like it was testing me.

The third incident was with our own small Chihuahua. Rolf had Sally by the throat in no time and would have killed her, for sure, if Christina hadn’t been right there hollering Nein! and Stopp! followed by a flurry of gibberish Rolf finally seemed to accept.

Nothing I said throughout July made any difference, not even stop, which, when I tried it with an accent, I thought might work. But I admit, after it bounded into our garage, and I had to sit in my car for a while until it lost interest, I looked up the German words for put down and euthanasia. And then, coming to my senses, I called the police.

So, Peter and Christina were served, and a hearing was scheduled, a silence opening between us. Peter and Christina spent most of their August evenings in their backyard loudly talking German to Rolf, maybe adding nuance to their commands or maybe, my wife, the pessimist, says, explaining the reasons why they hate us.

Look, they had a collie until last winter that they spoke to in perfect English. The kids of our neighbors on the other side played with it. So did we, even in our 70s not worrying about being knocked to the ground.

It was right after the collie died that Christina told us she and Peter had gone to one of those DNA web sites—My Heritage—and discovered they were nearly entirely German, 96%, the both of them, about as close to a perfect score as one of those tests ever claims. Plus, Peter chimed in, the other 4% came from places nobody would be ashamed of.

They observed a week of mourning for the collie, posting photos of the Lassie lookalike from puppy to just the week before it passed. Then Peter came home with the ten-week-old German Shepherd puppy.

It was early February, too cold for the screened-in porch, but Christina called us over to have a look, asking us to stay outside the door because the new dog, understandably, was a little high strung. She told us the dog’s name was Rolf and explained it meant famous wolf, nothing political like some of the other names they could have picked like Kaiser. Or Brunhilde, she added, Ha ha. Neither my wife nor I knew what expression we were supposed to muster, but Christina carried on. Don’t worry, she said, we’re getting right into training it. Do either of you know German?

By May, that screen door had a hole ripped in it. A bit of ugliness, Christina said, but at least it’s convenient, right? And Rolf doesn’t bother any of the other screens. She patted Rolf on the head and softly said liebling three times in succession. And then June began, and her sweetie (I looked it up) bit me.

At the hearing, Peter and Christina pleaded no contest. They paid a fine, but the dog stayed safe because the judge declared that even a second incident would only call for a larger fine and a stiffer warning. Unless it kills someone, their lawyer said, then all bets are off.

Here it is September and the dog seems to have made an accommodation. Sure, it snarls and issues low growls from deep in its throat that, if you’re busy, you have to learn to tune out. Likewise, we’ve learned to walk Sally out through the side door and down the street away from Peter and Christina’s house. The rest of the time we keep her inside, not much of an inconvenience with the weather turning colder.

We’ve planted a long row of forsythia along the border of our yard that faces Peter and Christina’s house. It will fill in quickly. A couple of years and we won’t even see them unless I keep it trimmed. Sure, for now, the dog crawls through the open spaces, but it seems to be ok with staying near the border, settling in the afternoon shade or basking in the morning sun. Rolf, when he’s lying nearby, mostly snuffles. He’s only a body’s length inside our yard, and only a dog’s body at that.

Cow

It snorts and stares at us, the sides of its white-spotted black body heaving. My two-year-old says cow and points. There isn’t a soul in sight—no neighbors gawking, no farmer chasing after and hollering out Bossie or Patches at this half-grown cow that suddenly bellows out a sound so long and mournful that my five-year-old crawls to me, spilling her teacup, and begins to wail, while the two-year-old loops her arms around my neck in a silent choke hold.

Two miles from anything resembling a farm, a cow in a Washington Street yard is more than an uncommon thing. Yet here it is—I want to say thundering, but that would be a lie—loping to a stop right in front of where my girls and I are having a tea party under the willow in our corner lot.

That cow isn’t leaving like I hope it