Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry

by Elizabeth McCracken

  But she had no interest in dying. At least, she did not want to start soon. She felt her life was a course of study with the obvious terminal degree; to hurry it meant being somehow unprepared. She had asked them not to turn her in to the police, and Chris, who had softened a bit, said of course not.

  “You’re obviously harmless,” she said before she went to bed. Then she said, “Be careful. You live pretty dangerously.”

  Aunt Helen Beck said, “I have been living dangerously for some time.”

  That night, she took a brass candlestick from the whatnot shelf in the living room; she always had to take something to give to her next host—a little gift, an heirloom. It made her feel like the families really were somehow related.

  Leaving would not be easy. Usually, she left clean, as if each little life were a railroad car and she was simply walking through to the back. This time, she had left things behind: Georgie Beck, and information. She felt a wind across her legs; something new was starting. Aunt Helen Beck did not believe in fate, but she did think that you made mistakes according to what you wanted in your heart, and she could not understand what it was she wanted this time, what she was trying to tell herself.

  She stayed up all night, wanting to see the light playing off the silver trailer one more time; she forgot that the sun rose on the other side of the island. Intent on catching the sun itself she barely noticed the growing light, as if she were a detective intent on nabbing a single criminal when in truth conspiracy was all around her. Suddenly it was morning. Time to go, she thought; she certainly didn’t intend to face Chris and Ford again. Aunt Helen Beck picked up her suitcase, felt the candlestick roll in the bottom. Already she could tell she hadn’t taken enough.

  Outside the air was cold and wet. She began to walk down the hill, stepping sideways so she wouldn’t slip in the mud.

  “Hey,” she heard somebody say.

  It was Mercury. He stepped out from behind a tree, dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing the night before; a few hair clippings glistened on his shirt. Really, she thought, you could see why his mother kept his hair long: jug ears. Big as planets orbiting his head. Not a good-looking boy after all.

  He scratched the back of his neck. “Hello.”

  “Good morning.” Aunt Helen Beck set her suitcase down. “You’re up early.”

  He blinked at her. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was angry over the haircut.

  “You’re still asleep, looks like,” she said. “You’re grumpy.”

  He picked up a stone and turned it over in his hand. “Nope.” Then he looked at her. “My mother says I can’t come in till I grow some hair back.”

  “She left you out all night?”

  Mercury shrugged and nodded at the same time, stepping closer. Aunt Helen Beck leaned down in the mud and put a hand on one side of the boy’s head. He was damp to the touch, like something blown off a tree in bad weather. She saw in his eyes an old, familiar expression: I could go now, it wouldn’t make any difference, my family album might as well be the phone book, so long.

  She lightly took hold of one of those extraordinary ears—it was like a hand itself, like a purse, like something that could hold a great deal.

  “Tell me, Mercury,” said Aunt Helen Beck. “Tell me—are you fond of travel?”

  The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness

  The dog ran into the bar.

  “One of these days,” George said, “I’m going to get that dog drunk.”

  “Don’t you do it,” I told him. “I know many men who’ll protect that dog’s honor.”

  “This dog?” said George. He leaned sideways off his stool to scratch her head. “Go ahead and tell him, Millicent. Everyone else knows what a slut you are.”

  George liked to blame things on the dog. If a bad song came on the juke, if the bar ran out of chips, if he couldn’t find his coat, he yelled, “Millicent!” Sometimes, the dog came running in and George would bawl her out. “Millicent, don’t you know better?” The dog eyed him seriously, like somebody’s mother.

  Millicent sat out front of the bar sometimes like a human, leaning back on the step on her elbows, if dogs have elbows, if that’s what they were. She seemed to be waiting for conversation, and on my way out I’d stop and tell her a very sad story. A dog knows tragedy, broken love affairs, missing children. She was a sand-colored bitch with a whorled, nubby stomach.

  “Let me buy you a beer,” said George. He was a young kid compared to me, maybe thirty, with one of those fancy beards that frames only your mouth, looks sloppy but takes daily careful shaving.

  “I got to get going,” I told him.

  “Come on, Jake. One more.”

  I was becoming, for the first time in my life, a regular in a bar. Circumstances and George were to blame. Every Saturday, on my way to see my wife at the head-injury center up the street, I stopped for a drink. George was coming the other way; Mrs. Austin, Barb’s roommate, was his mother.

  Billy the barkeep set mugs down in front of us.

  “So how’s life treating you, Mr. J?” Billy asked me.

  “About now, just fine. You?”

  “Ah, not so good. This place in the summer, it’s crazy. I’m thinking about going home.”

  “Don’t do it,” I said. “What can your fatherland offer you that Cape Cod can’t?”

  He thought for a minute. “More women and fewer fish.”

  “There’s no fish in Ireland?”

  “Not on every fuckin’ matchbook, shopping bag, and menu.”

  “William,” I said. “I want you to do me a favor. Tonight after work, I want you to walk to the harbor and look out. Know what you’ll see?”

  “What.”

  “You’ll see a moon as solid as a potato, with all the salt of the stars and all the salt of the sea heading for it. That should make you happy.”

  George laughed. “Don’t listen to him, Billy,” he told the bartender. “Go home if you want.” He gave me a pat on the arm. “He’s a nice man, but he doesn’t understand anything about people.”

  This might have been true; the misunderstanding was mutual. Nobody knew what to make of me after Barb had her accident. I let my hair grow: I was fifty-five, white-haired, bald on top, and after a year, my hair brushed my shoulders. I dressed as neatly as I ever did—a necktie every day, I did my own ironing. I thought I looked fine. But when people saw me, they shook their heads.

  There was a reason for the hair. Not slovenliness, but this: Barbara cut my hair on our first date. I had known her for a while before, and when I came nervously through the door, she was bold enough to say, “Look at that hair.” She got out her scissors immediately. Once we were sweethearts, every time I saw Barb with scissors, I knew well enough to take off my shirt and sit down at the kitchen table. It had been years since I was in a barber’s shop.

  And besides, I hoped that she’d look at me one of these days, shaggy me, and she’d snap out of it, that I’d look so bad she’d have no choice. Stranger things have happened. I read in the paper that a man came out of a coma simply because his wife held his hand and barked like a dog.

  It had been a year since Barbara stepped out into the street in front of our apartment building and got knocked into a lamppost headfirst. The car got away, and most of Barb got away, too. When I came home—I was teaching—a neighbor had this to tell me: it was a blue Dodge four-door.

  At sixty, Barbara was the oldest patient at Bayside, by a decade; her roommate, Mrs. Austin, was about fifty. Most of the patients were young victims of their own or someone else’s recklessness: drivers who headed for phantom roads after too many drinks, motorcyclists who’d ignored the helmet law. You’d be surprised, though, at the recoveries. In the year I’d been visiting Barb, I saw dozens of kids carried in who within three months walked out. If you asked them, they might tell you they didn’t feel all there, though you couldn’t tell; some of them said that now they had to think hard before they spoke. Maybe that ended up to be to their advanta
ge, there’s no telling. If you were thick-skulled enough, you could bounce back completely in the first few months.

  Barb was holding steady, and the doctors predicted she would for the rest of her life. It always hurt to see people discharged from the place, so even in the summer, when I didn’t teach, I came on Saturdays. People were less likely to leave on weekends.

  Barb was now better than she had been at first; she talked some and one of her hands worked a little. The speech therapist agreed with the aides, insisted that most of what Barb said was just a collection of vowels with nothing behind it. I disagreed. She seemed to understand what was said to her, and sometimes answered with a certain look, a slow gesture.

  Brain-damaged, badly so, though those were words I hated even to consider, especially since there was no knowing what they meant. The brain is a mysterious mechanism, said the doctors, and when damaged cannot be steadied with a splint or understood at all.

  That afternoon, when I stepped off the elevator at the Bayside Head Injury Center, all I got was a giggle from the desk. Bayside was the only place anywhere in the state that had the facilities to take on a patient with Barb’s sort of injury. Anywhere else would’ve just stuck her in a bed, no therapy, no extra attention.

  “Hey, look,” said a guy at the front desk. “It’s the rock star.”

  I leaned on the counter. “You think so, eh? Think I look like a singing star?”

  “You look a mess, is what you look,” the head nurse said. “Honestly, Mr. Jackson, you’re not a young man.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

  I leaned on the nurses’ counter to put off the walk to Barb’s room; it was the hardest part of my weekly trip. The corridor was lined with young head-injury victims in their wheelchairs, a series of girls who looked weirdly alike. They were the bad ones; the ambulatory patients sat in the TV lounge or snuck smokes in the lobby. These were girls with faces off-center, one eye up at the ceiling and one at the floor, heads back, mouths startled open. Even the one black girl looked like the rest, as if their accidents made them sisters somehow. Every place you moved down that hall you caught somebody’s eye.

  “Barbara will be glad to see you,” the nurse said in a voice that implied that she herself was not.

  So I watched my feet on the way to Barb’s room, feeling more than I wanted to the beer that George had talked me into. Barb was asleep. It was two in the afternoon, and Mrs. Austin, George’s mother, had her face to me: she was in a coma, and they turned her every four hours, to avoid bedsores. She was a skinny middle-aged woman with a thin nose. I didn’t know her story. George and I didn’t talk about that. We didn’t talk about what happened in the room or what had happened before. Mrs. Austin’s radio was turned to the usual big-band station; an announcer was pitching a seafood restaurant.

  I kissed Barb hello on the forehead. Her hair was long now, too, so beautiful it embarrassed me. When I first knew her, her hair was naturally red and artificially curly. I suppose I told her I loved it curly. The color went out of it eventually, and she never had it dyed. After a while, the curls took on a yellow, brittle tinge from all the processing.

  Now it had grown free from the perms, steel gray, with just a hint of the old red. The small patch they’d had to shave had come in, too. The aides combed her hair away from her face and back to the pillow. Her hair looked rich and amazingly strong. There was a thin crease on her forehead, but it was from surgery and not the accident itself.

  She didn’t stir, so I just looked around the room I already had memorized. I saw Mrs. Austin’s potted hyacinth, the photo of me and Barb stuck over Barb’s bed. I ran my hand along the metal rail by Barb’s arm, then covered her hand with my own. Frank Sinatra was singing from the radio: Hey there, cutes, put on your dancing boots. There’s nothing like Sinatra to make a mortal man feel foolish.

  So I watched the machine that clicked out Mrs. Austin’s food, the gastronasal tube that fed her some sort of yellow liquid, a substance so creamy and familiar I felt by then I’d acquired a taste for it.

  Then the aides came in. “It’s time for Barbie to get up, stretch her bones,” said one. She had a faint accent and was pushing a wheelchair; the other, younger, walked to the far side of the bed.

  “I’ll wake her,” I told them. Barb was wearing a loose faded nightgown that I had brought in a few months before; it was hitched up near her hips. Amazing—I knew the muscles in those legs had given up, I knew they were not the legs that it was my pleasure once to know, and still they looked supple and sleek.

  I took her shoulder and shook it gently. “Barbara. Time to get up.”

  Barb’s eyes opened a little; she looked at me up and down, in slow motion, which was how she now did everything. Then she said something. Three distinct syllables.

  I smiled. “What’s that, Barb?”

  My wife repeated it. This time, I leaned my good ear into her. Her voice was lower and rockier than it had ever been, and all the consonants were shaved off.

  “She’s not saying anything,” said the aide.

  “Yes she is,” I said, embarrassed.

  “What’s it, then?”

  Barbara sighed, and let out one syllable at a time.

  “She’s saying,” I told them, “hello.”

  A lie, though I took heart in what she really said, because it meant she was paying attention. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little insulted.

  What she was saying was: you’re too fat.

  Every week, I took the bus to the Cape; now, in July, I rode with the tourists headed to the resorts or for ferries to the islands. There was a motel across from the center that offered special rates to the families of patients. George had stayed there once or twice, even though he lived just forty minutes away. “Can’t pass up a bargain,” he’d say, laying money on the bar to buy us drinks.

  Knowing George made things better. Six months before, our first meeting at Bayside had consisted of a few awkward moments in the room before he suggested a drink. Without ever discussing it, we somehow agreed never to visit the room at the same time again—hard to be friends at such moments, and besides, I don’t think either one of us wanted to be one of those sad people who clings to other sad people. We never mentioned Bayside when we were together, just sat and chatted and knew the other one understood, that there was someone else in the world as unlucky as ourself.

  I hadn’t yet taken advantage of the family rate at the hotel. There was a slim chance that they might not consider me family. I call Barb my wife, but we were never actually formally married—I wanted to; she wasn’t so sure. I met her through work. I taught history at a girls’ private high school; she was a guidance counselor there for two years before she decided the girls were too poisonous to help. This was something I loved about her, though I can’t tell you why it appealed to me: she did not much like other women.

  “I hate people who complain,” she told me.

  “Who do you like?” I asked.

  She told me she appreciated men, a no-nonsense crowd, in her opinion. She especially loved men who had bad teeth and sloppy table manners, who could not carry a tune but would try anyhow; men who didn’t seem like they were paying attention but did. She loved men who did not cover a bald spot with trickery, who bought their own clothing and looked like it.

  “Good heavens,” I said. “Who are these people?”

  “You,” she told me.

  The other people in our apartment building—mostly older folk—called us “the sweethearts,” and not kindly. We had lived together for just ten years. This was a fact I generally kept hidden from my family, saying only that my wife had decided to hold on to her maiden name. Barb had a grown son, but I had power of attorney. Now the son, Roger, called from time to time and said I should just give word if I needed anything. By which he meant money.

  I tried not to miss Barb too much, since she hadn’t exactly left me, but let’s face it, there was no easy way. I tried not to feel like she was an
utterly different thing in that bed; I wanted to believe that she was just Barbara, with a few alterations. But if there was a way to make me think that, I hadn’t figured it out.

  How can I say this without sounding hard? I hated visiting her, I really did. I was relieved when I left. I made myself stand there and talk to her for at least an hour and a half every visit, or stand there at least. If I could think of some little topic of conversation—something a neighbor had done, an interesting weather report—I would prattle on. Mostly I stood and looked. Sometimes I’d start to be serious, I’d be ready to say, Darling, this is a bloody shame for both of us, don’t think I don’t know that. But since talking to Barb felt like talking to myself, I could never do it. I’d try to hold her hand. Sometimes she held on to me, sometimes she pulled her restless hand back, let it wander up and down the edge of her blanket.

  The apartment, when I got home from Bayside, seemed as usual unfamiliar, shabby. I tried to keep it clean. I hadn’t the knack for it. For a while, I had a woman come in once a week, but it got to me. There were all my habits in plain view, and since our accident I’d been piling up the bad habits. A gallon jug of burgundy, a bottle of cheap whiskey, garnet rings from wineglasses all around. A teacup sat on the table, a cigarette stubbed out in its center. I’m not much of a smoker, but I succumb sometimes.

  I sat at the kitchen table, found a loose crumpled cigarette in my jacket pocket, and stuck it in my mouth without any idea of where a match was.

  I am a man of many small mistakes. I am not competent. This is not harsh self-judgment, it is a fact. I have burned food all my life; I wear spotted clothing without noticing; I botch household jobs. I can’t fill out a check right the first time. I am not an expert at day-to-day living. This can’t be turned into anything good—you can’t say I’m being cautious or that I’m thinking deep thoughts—there’s no excuse for why I do things this way. I never learn. Behind every picture hanging on my wall is a pattern of dark circles where the hammer hit before I managed to sink the nail.