Permeable Boundaries

By MaryEllen Beveridge

In these stories, the protagonists find themselves living outside cultural mores and expectations as they confront the central questions of their lives. In doing so, they undergo a range of moral and psychological transformations. If they see themselves on some level as living in a post-modern world, they are driven by the need to recognize and accept its actuality and at the same time to seek order and meaning within its challenges and limitations. Their evolving states of consciousness are explored within their relationship to the physical world, particularly the natural world and the domestic setting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fomite
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781947917569

Book preview

Permeable Boundaries

Praise for MaryEllen Beveridge

MaryEllen Beveridge has truly exceptional taste in software.

Vellum Reviews

Stunning!

Ben Reeding

With a blend of wit and charm, MaryEllen Beveridge is a modern-day Jane Austen.

Longtime Reader

Permeable Boundaries

MaryEllen Beveridge

Fomite

For John Fletcher Harris

and

In memory of Jack Leggett and Rita Dimotsis

The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world….So it is clear to what a degree the discovery—that is, the revelation—of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing can be done, without a previous orientation—and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this reason that religious man has always sought to fix his abode at the center of the world. If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded—and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of profane space. The discovery or projection of a fixed point—the center—is equivalent to the creation of the world[.]

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

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[A]rchery is still a matter of life and death to the extent that it is a contest of the archer with himself; and this kind of contest is not a paltry substitute, but the foundation of all contests outwardly directed—for instance with a bodily opponent. In this contest of the archer with himself is revealed the secret essence of this art[.]

Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

Contents

Needle at Sea Bottom

Isaac in America

Permeable Boundaries

East Is East

One Eye on the Fire

Acting Badly in a Traditional Manner

The Tour Bus

A Late Spring

Looking for Signs

Italy or Florida

High Diving

After Daniel

Homecoming

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by MaryEllen Beveridge

Needle at Sea Bottom

In the morning, after his bath, Frank began to cry. He had allowed Edna to soap and rinse his body and help him stand, afterward, on the bath rug she spread on the floor. He didn’t shrink from her when she toweled the water from his skin and wrapped his flannel robe around him. He sat in the wicker chair near the tub, unaware of her, as Edna rolled the wheelchair to the doorway. He looked off, away from her, as if nothing could ever again quite gather his attention. She held him by the waist as they together brought his body up, and Edna supported him and led him to the wheelchair, and Frank began to cry. He hadn’t cried in her presence in all the thirty years of their marriage and she didn’t know about this aspect of him that was so private. No matter what Jeannette or any of the others had told her, that crying was a natural aftereffect of the stroke, as ordinary as a nervous tick or a tingle in the legs from sitting too long with them crooked under you, Edna knew differently. When Frank cried she saw in his eyes the old intelligence, the part that was completely himself, where he was known to her.

Edna ran a fresh bath towel through his hair, and tenderly over his face. His head nodded against his left shoulder. The shoulder was raised, braced for the threat that had already come. His left hand lay rigidly in his lap. He breathed through his mouth, the lower lip heavy and lax. Edna saw him again, falling on a golf green in Houston, a thousand miles from her, the breath coming hard out of his body, his mouth open, misshapen. He would have fallen this way: his legs giving out, as if he had lost his foothold on a slippery patch of grass, his shoulder absorbing the weight of his body as it slammed to the ground. Their son Eric dropping beside him into a posture of disbelief, as the stroke worked silently in his brain. A ripple of alarm running through the people on the green, in the sunlight. The ambulance leaving muddy tire tracks on the grass.

Edna gripped the handles of the wheelchair and pushed it down the hall. She opened the flame under the frying pan and cracked two eggs against it, standing watch over Frank from the stove. The whites of the eggs sizzled and browned. Frank waited for her at the table or simply waited. She cut eggs and toast into pieces on his plate. He lifted his fork. The distance was back in his eyes. He ate his breakfast mechanically, from an old duty to his body. He placed his fork across his empty plate and his napkin next to it.

Edna wheeled Frank’s chair into the living room and opened the drapes. She wasn’t yet accustomed to a lesser morning light, tempered by the nearness of the neighboring apartment buildings. They lived on the top floor, under eaves where sparrows built nests and fluttered across the high reaches. Edna saw herself on other mornings, in their house, dragging their young son Eric’s galoshes from the front-hall closet. Frank checked the knot of his tie in the living room mirror, while Eric ran in circles around the couch. He crouched behind it, aimed his toy gun at Edna and fired two rounds before she could capture him, swoop him onto her lap and buckle his galoshes over his shoes. Frank put his papers in his briefcase. He was a civil engineer and his area of expertise was internal stresses on infrastructures: roads, bridges, and tunnels. His briefcase was filled with reports on the effects of wind, traffic, tides, age, and other more random factors on steel, concrete, wood.

Frank buttoned his coat and called to their son. Standing, he was six feet tall. His voice was deep and commanding, and people paid attention to it. Eric dropped his toy gun. Edna zipped Eric into his jacket. Husband and son kissed Edna good-bye. She sat on the couch with another cup of coffee. She had developed the habit, after drinking her coffee, of opening all the windows in the house. The house required a complete change of air every day. Its rooms were silent except for the slow swell of the curtains. In the voluptuous quiet Edna washed the breakfast dishes and made the beds. She found a stray thread on the rug in the hall. She picked it up.

Edna stood in front of the open drapes and looked across the room at Frank in his wheelchair. Now all her washing and cleaning, all her straightening up, was done under the flat, absent eyes of her husband, and everything she did, everything she had ever done, seemed small and inconsequential.

She turned on the radio and sat near Frank’s wheelchair, on the couch. The news was on. Edna listened; Frank, do you listen with me? A car bombing in London, floods in Malaysia, the stock reports, and baseball scores. In a local suburb a man was being questioned about the disappearance of his wife and children. The music program followed; the announcer led with Vivaldi’s Spring from The Four Seasons, and Edna thought, looking at Frank, I can leave him now, he will listen, however he listens; this music won’t upset him. She got up from the couch to tend to her meaningless chores.

At midmorning Edna brewed a pot of tea. Frank wrapped the fingers of his good hand around his cup. Edna looked into his face. Laugh lines traveled the fine skin at the corners of his eyes. His eyes blinked. He finished his tea; she took the cup from his hand.

On a twin bed in the guest room, where Frank slept, Edna laid out a fresh shirt and a pair of trousers. She did not know if it mattered to Frank, but it mattered. Dressed he seemed less alone in his illness, less removed from her. Frank’s eyes focused on the wall, the bureau, her face, as if he had to do everything in hard, slow steps, even seeing. She untied the belt to his bathrobe. He pushed her hands away. His eyes moved to the doorway. Eric, he called, Eric. Edna knelt in front of the wheelchair, her hands folded uncertainly in her lap. He labored over the words, caught as in a net at the side of his mouth where the stroke had defeated him, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar. Edna stood up, took a step back. Frank, she said. Don’t touch me, he said. Stay away.

A Bach flute sonata on the living room radio led her down a river. In the flute she heard the water fall over the rocks in the riverbed. She could see the rocks clearly—shale, dark and monotonous as clay, and mica, flecked with gold—forming submerged ledges, rough steps, cave entrances. She let the river carry her until she could no longer hear Frank’s voice calling to their son, until there was only the flute, purely itself again, and the empty silence from the other room. She shut off the radio.

Frank’s eyes were neutral, distant. She put a hand on his knee. His knee jumped. Frank, she said. No, he said. He made his body small in the wheelchair, his back against its back. She took the shirt from the bed and held Frank’s forearm, lightly, a signal to him that it was time. He allowed her to help him, giving in to his awful dependence on her. She eased his arms up the sleeves and pushed his upper body gently forward, smoothing the shirt along his back. She slid his boxer shorts and trousers together up his long, thin calves, and brought his body up, fitting the shorts around his waist and zipping his trousers. His lungs softly breathing were a bellows on her chest. She had brought Frank home, insisting on it; but she couldn’t lift him, she couldn’t touch him. She didn’t have the strength for it. She was unfit. She circled his waist with her arms and helped him back into the wheelchair, releasing her shoulder of his weight. She sat on the bed and rested. Frank put a tentative hand to the collar of his shirt as if to say, This is fine, this is correct.

Edna pushed Frank’s chair to the living room. She heard Jeannette’s punctual knock on the door and hurried down the hall to open it. Jeannette stepped into the foyer, large-boned and straight-backed, and smiled warmly at Edna, brushing a strand of hair into the short white halo of it. A silver clasp held her cardigan sweater at the collar of her blouse, and she wore thick gum-soled shoes that had worked well on linoleum floors in busy hospital corridors. She carried a worn black hospital bag stamped J. Harding, R.N. Jeannette lived in the apartment building, and she had proposed to Edna to come out of retirement after Frank’s stroke, and, in doing so, gave Edna the courage to bring him home. The hospital allowed it, because the stroke had finished him; it was, they termed it, in the category of a catastrophe—a catastrophic stroke. Jeannette taught Edna how to massage the places on Frank’s body where there was the danger of bed sores, to get the blood moving. How to place him in bed at night so the weight of his body was distributed differently from the night before. In the morning he hadn’t moved. Are you with me, still? Do you dream, Frank, in the night?

Jeannette took Edna’s hand, and Edna offered herself to Jeannette’s covert appraisal. You are well? Jeannette said.

Yes, Edna said.

And Frank?

Yes, Edna said. The same. Edna took her raincoat from the closet. I put bread and avocados out for lunch, she said. There’s prosciutto and sliced tomato on a plate in the refrigerator. Plenty to drink—seltzer and fruit juice.

Jeannette unbuckled the leather straps of her hospital bag and removed a copy of Madame Bovary. You’re walking today? she asked. Jeannette believed in exercise.

I thought I’d follow the avenue, see where it leads, Edna said.

Edna went to Frank and said, Jeannette’s here. His eyes remained fixed in front of him. Jeannette was good to him; she doted on him, so it wasn’t Jeannette’s visit in Frank’s refusal to look at her. Did it mean anything? Edna wondered. Was it disinterest? Or not even that; was it the place behind his eyes that he retreated to, wherever it was, that didn’t include her, or anyone?

On the avenue Edna passed the health food store, beauty salons, the stores selling woven baskets and hand-crafted jewelry. She turned east, off the avenue, into a neighborhood of old houses with narrow porches and frost-damaged sidewalks. She came to a cross street. A single railroad track ran parallel to it. Edna walked beneath a cluster of signal lights and followed the railroad track, thinking, I will walk and walk, and what I am looking for will always lie ahead.

She pulled her raincoat around herself. With spectral suddenness the high school appeared, on a deep-green, closely mowed lawn. Its edifice of carved sandstone spoke of an earlier, baroque idea of public education. There were wings, annexes, archways, overhangs. From the railroad track Edna approached the building obliquely. She marked her way along the track past a single azalea bush in vivid bloom. She knew then that she was to leave the railroad track for the sidewalks laid like a dilemma over the lawn. She was to walk until she came to the stand of spindly firs, their spent cones forming perfect rusting circles underneath, fearing, as always, that the way was lost to her, that she would not find it again. She passed students standing in groups, full packs on their backs, their sneakers unlaced. They laughed, shared after-school cigarettes; she was invisible. If she stopped to ask directions, a boy, say, would look up while his friends waited, resenting her, and he would point ahead, and they would walk on. She had not meant to ask this question, over and over.

A sidewalk could become a door, an echoing hallway, and then, in daylight, itself again. A detour meant delay, lost bearings. If she entered through the second door she would find the staircase. Then she needed only to climb it. She repeated to herself as she walked: Path by railroad track to azalea, two paradoxical loops on sidewalk to firs, second door, second door, second door. Far ahead, hidden by a nearer stand of firs, then revealed by it, the door shimmered in and out of view. She did not dare glance away. It was as if Frank’s stroke had affected her, disoriented her as well.

She entered through the doorway and climbed the stairs. Along the corridor, her reflection in the glass of the classroom doors was watery and indistinct. A locker slammed behind her. Thick pipes hung from the ceiling. Edna hastened down the corridor, thinking, I am underground.

She walked toward an open door and folded her raincoat on the side table in the familiar room, the image of it she kept with her all week now three-dimensional, confirmed. High windows overlooked a section of railroad track glinting in the afternoon sun. Faded tapestry-covered chairs stood against the wall. A worn Oriental carpet covered the floor. This was a room for tea and pastries, ceremonies and polite conversations. She could not imagine the boys and girls she passed on the sidewalk, hunched together with their cigarettes and torn dungarees, in this room. It was the very end of an old idea.

Edna stepped toward the people in the room, known to her as a painting is known, a landscape. They were fanned over the length of the carpet in three more or less even rows of seven and eight, facing the high windows, arms at their sides, legs slightly apart, in a posture of humility. Edna took her place near the door. Roger stood apart from them, at the windows; he was the only one whose name Edna knew. His surname was Llewellyn. Others can do this, Edna thought, not just old people in grassy parks in Beijing.

Once a week, for an hour, the room became a place to practice an art from the East. Roger called it an internal martial art. He told them during the first class, soon after she had brought Frank home, that from it they would gain strength in unimagined ways if they were willing. Edna wanted to learn this art, the movements that were named for animals and mountains, a dance with many complications. A long journey across the sunlit room. Roger wore black sneakers and a dress shirt tucked into loosely fitting black pants. An idea had floated among the students after class that he was a mathematician or a philosopher. His body was a poor advertisement for a practitioner of any art; he looked scholarly and nearsighted, he carried a slight paunch, and there was a hitch to his shoulders. But this cast of his body was untrue, because Edna had witnessed its supple beauty as it flowed across the carpet, turning and turning.

At the windows, before the rows of seven and eight, Roger clasped his hands under his chin as a magician might, or a priest. He held his right thumb in his left hand and wrapped his fingers around. Slowly he lowered his hands to the carpet. The class waited for him, drowsing in the blue afternoon light. Roger bowed deeply, and they awoke. He was the presence in the black sneakers who led them further on.

Roger came out of the bow and let his hands fall to his sides. Then, following him, with the others Edna positioned her heels and pushed her arms outward toward the near wall. This was the warming-up, the preparation. The muscles of her back stretched. Edna found she only needed a good starting point, a balance of the arms and legs, to begin the warming up, the measured leading in. She brought her hands together, one over the other, at her side; her hands arced in front of her and her spine turned. She raised her arms, fingertips extended, and her chest opened.

No one spoke. Edna avoided everyone: the woman in the black beret and a green parka zipped to her neck, winter or spring; the woman in the loose shirt and wide leather belt who worked mightily and shook her hands at her sides, as if she were discharging electricity, then gave up halfway through the hour and sat on the table, greedily watching; the man with the wiry beard and shoeless feet, graceless and too swift, who jabbed his outstretched fingertips into Edna’s shoulders; the vampire men and women who stole the space around Edna’s body and breathed its air, maneuvering her into corners and walls, if she wasn’t careful, as they moved in awkward concert across the room. A high school teacher, Edna guessed, with a trim brown mustache; the men and women who wore gym shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, their arms and legs pale, exposed. She knew only what she saw, intuited, and what was whispered in the moments afterward, when she put on her raincoat again: anger, injury, vague illnesses and discontents, and the search for the end of pain of every kind, or at least the beginning of strength.

Edna shifted her position and looked toward the others, startled that they were about to begin. She heard Roger say, You will work through each movement as far as you have come. I want to see how well you know them. Roger stood at a remove, by the windows; he would not be coming with them. Roger’s voice dropped away and within that silence Edna readied herself.

With the others she made the first downward sweep of the palms, some absolution needed, a purifying moment. As one they turned toward the far wall and stepped slowly into the first movement, Left Grasp Bird’s Tail. Edna stepped forward, bent her knees, and held her palms one above the other. She separated her palms, stood, and drew one arm in front of her body, one arm back. This was the bird’s tail, as long as her armspread. She stroked its feathers.

Together they paused, put one foot forward, and stretched their arms in front of their bodies, completing the movement, Grasp Bird’s Tail. The bird seemed to Edna to be just beyond her, out of reach. The bird flew away. Edna’s hands caressed the air. She allowed herself to feel pride, a lesser sin. She had taken the first step.

They hesitated, balanced, uncertain. Roger, inert by the windows—no longer the sharply focused double, the mirror into which, other weeks, Edna had been able to look each time something impossible was required of her—said, Don’t look to me. Don’t look to anyone. The man with the moustache began to move, and Edna remembered, and everyone remembered, and they lowered their arms and carried them in front of their bodies in a clean half-circle, into Single Whip. Edna stood to her full height and held one arm outward. Behind her a woman’s fingernails stabbed Edna’s blouse and the woman said, Oh.

They brought their forearms together, parallel to their bodies, and lifted one foot above the carpet, into Raise Hands and Step Up. Simple, simple, Edna thought. Roger said, Again. Then he said, We’ll do it together. He swept into the movement in one motion, his hitched body within the loose, robe-like clothing suddenly, alarmingly beautiful, and Edna lost Raise Hands and Step Up and she could think only, How, how? Roger said, Again. He paced the uneven rows, adjusting, like a lesson in geometry or logic, the reach of the fingertips, the brace of a palm against a forearm, the position of the feet and the straightness of the spine. Roger helped Edna lift her heel above the carpet. His eyes briefly met hers. She whispered, How long? He pointed to his chest and whispered, Seven years.

Roger led them, corrected them. The woman in the black beret and green parka stepped into Stork Cools Wings as if she were warding off a blow. Roger showed her how to spread her arms away from her body, one upward, one downward; he raised his right arm over his head, palm up, and held his left hand at his hip, palm down. A long-billed, white-bodied bird; the secret, splendid pattern of underfeathers revealed. There, Roger said to her, like this. The woman tried to follow, but she couldn’t bring herself to expose the whole length and breadth of her body. She held her hands in tight fists in front of herself, her posture guarded, defensive.

Edna remained in the elegant and vulnerable position of Stork Cools Wings. Between each movement was an abyss and Edna fell each time into it. Her memory failed her. Her body failed her. She regarded herself from behind fanned arms, spread wings. Every movement forward, Roger told them, leads naturally to the next. Edna tried to concentrate. What is required. What stands in the way. She wanted swiftness, quickness. She wanted the end of pain of every kind.

She had run the entire course, hardly aware. She was now on her second round, beginning all over again, having, in the months following Frank’s stroke, gone through a fantastic number of movements until, one day, Roger took her hand and shook it in congratulation. The others had dropped away, from a crowded room of thirty-odd. At the end she had stood alone, with Roger, in the room of polite conversation, and he taught her how to bow, and she bowed deeply, in humility and respect and rage. She was the only one left, done in.

Roger told them, You learn, and you perfect what you have learned. Together they worked across the room, through Brush Knee and Twist Step; Edna extended her arms and raised her palms, side to side, and sunk her knees. She stepped forward. The room rushed toward her, the floor and walls, the high windows and the endless sky in the first, wild leap upward, the awakening of sinew and nerve, bone and organs. The heat burned in the arches and the sticky sweat broke through as her body lived for an hour in a different atmosphere, tropical and alien. Circles, spirals, figure-eights; she imbedded the carpet with the dust and grit she brought to it on the soles of her shoes, its exhausted nap imprinted with phantom footfalls, and Edna could see in them where she had come from, if not where she was going. She heard Roger say, First the muscles are affected, then the bones, then the internal organs. What then, Edna thought, after everything has changed?

Roger asked them, Have you experienced anything from this exercise. Anything unforeseen. Outside of this room. Edna started to speak. Everyone looked at her. Sometimes, Edna said. They waited for her to go on. Sometimes there are pellets in my blood.

Roger led them into Step Up, Deflect, Parry, Punch. Edna thrust one fist forward and pulled the other back, close to her body. Her knees bowed outward. She stood. Step Up: Show your readiness. Roger said, You face no opponent. Everything you need, both yielding and resistance, your own body provides. Edna circled her arms at her sides, pulled her right arm to her hip, and shot her left hand out, palm up, fingers spread. Deflect: Show your strength. Moving from her body’s memory, Edna stepped her left foot forward and brought her right hand to her side in a fist, and brought her left hand in front of her body in a quick thrust. Parry, Punch: Move forward. Across tall grasses that broke across her body like waves, and oceans; their mineral salt in her blood. Green bones, black marrow, the sticky sweat; singed tendons, blue veins, roped muscle. Silence, forgetfulness, surrender.

Roger took them through Cross Hands, the last movement of the day. Edna held her hands in front of her chest and crossed them at the wrists. The movement was simple and holy, a moment of rest within a great exertion. After the battle we come to the altar. We make the altar with our hands. We are the battle and the altar. There was a stir in the room; something was completed, for now, something was done, however cautiously and imperfectly. Roger removed himself into a Celtic impenetrability at the windows. The man with the bare feet spread his toes on the carpet. The woman with the belted waist jumped off the table and practiced Parry, Punch. Edna threw her raincoat around her shoulders and took the stairs quickly, down the corridor and across the railroad track to the streets that would bring her to the avenue and home.

She dropped her raincoat on the table in the foyer, called hello to Jeannette and went to the living room. The shock was still fresh at seeing Frank in his wheelchair, the passive curl of his palm in his lap, the leftward cast of his head. On the coffee table Jeannette had left her copy of Madame Bovary, the bookmark at a place near the end of the novel where, Edna guessed, Emma was beside herself with claustrophobia and debt. Jeannette’s soft, assured voice led Frank, in the afternoons, through one novel after another, his ear, as Jeannette had described it to Edna, cocked toward the sound of her voice, his eyes transfixed. On a shelf of the bookcase, set horizontally in front of Frank’s professional books and papers that detailed a world he no longer understood, Jeannette left each novel she had read to Frank when they were done.

Frank lifted his eyes and looked toward Edna from the place he had gone, leaving her behind. Hello, Frank, she said. She waited for the slight adjustment in his eyes, the sign of recognition. His mouth formed her name. Edna kissed his temple and took his hands in hers. Frank pulled them from her, in a furious upset. It