Solitaire and Brahms

by Sarah Dreher

Strength for what? Did Connie know about the headaches? Had Fran told her? Fran wouldn't do that. Never.

  She might have told Jean, who told Connie. Nonsense, Jean didn't even like Connie particularly, certainly didn't trust her. She wouldn't gossip with her. Would she?

  "Hello?" Connie said, rapping on Shelby's head. "Anyone home?"

  "Sorry. I was wondering what you meant by that. Keep up strength. You know."

  "Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, we go to press with the August issue in nine working days. Hell time begins."

  Shelby laughed with relief. "You're right. I'd repressed it."

  Oh, God, what if Fran got her an appointment and she couldn't get off work? Or she couldn't get one? Or...?

  “Tell me,” Connie went on, "is it as crazy in your office as it is in the readers' room?"

  "Crazier, I'm afraid. You have to finish by the end of this week, but that's when the real chaos starts for us. I'll probably be working nights."

  Jean shook her head. "I don't envy you."

  "I do," said Connie. "As long as we have to be in hell, I' d rather do it on your salary."

  "Well, part of being in hell on my salary," Shelby said as she glanced pointedly at her watch, "is sometimes I have to miss these delicious meals."

  "What is the message here?" Connie asked. "Is it that we should play quietly like good little girls and let you eat?"

  "That would be nice."

  "OK," Connie said as she pulled her cards from her pocketbook. “Three-hand rotating dummy, no bid. I'll start."

  * * *

  Her desk phone rang. She picked it up. "Shelby Camden."

  "Hi. It's Fran Jarvis."

  Her stomach gave a lurch. "Hi."

  "I wanted to let you know I got you an appointment with a Dr.... Kinecki... for Thursday morning."

  Shelby felt cold inside. "This Thursday?" Her voice cracked.

  "I know, it's really short notice, but I think the sooner we get this over with, the better."

  "I guess you're right."

  She glanced up as Charlotte pushed away from her desk, gathering her pocketbook and briefcase. "Albany," Charlotte mouthed silently.

  Shelby gave her a wave. "Good luck."

  "Did you say something?" Fran asked.

  The door closed behind Charlotte. "My office mate's leaving for the day. I was just wishing her luck. She has to cover some kind of affair at the New York Governor's mansion. I don't know what."

  "Look," Fran said, "if you feel you need more time, I can change the appointment. I don't want you to feel pushed."

  "No, you're right." She hesitated. "Can you come...?"

  "I've already found someone to cover for me Thursday."

  "OK." She didn't want to hang up, didn't want to be alone with her anxiety. But there wasn't anything else to say. "Well, thanks…"

  "Shelby."

  "What?"

  "Talk to me."

  "I'm fine."

  "You're not fine," Fran said. "Your voice isn't fine."

  She took a deep breath. "I'm just a little apprehensive."

  "Apprehensive? Or terrified?"

  "Somewhere in between," she admitted.

  "Look," Fran said, "I'm scared, too. But we have to be rational about this. The chances are way in your favor it's nothing. And if it's something, there are a hundred things it could be, most of them not terrible."

  "I know."

  "Thursday's about information. We need more information, that's all. That's what we're going to get."

  "I know," Shelby repeated. She felt paralyzed and incapable of thought. There was a sound in her head like bees.

  "After that, we take things one step at a time. But I really don't have a bad feeling about this."

  "Good."

  "When you get home tonight, we'll go over the entire procedure so you'll know what to expect. It's absolutely painless, just boring."

  "Good."

  "You're tuning me out. I can tell,"

  "Sorry."

  "Well, stop it. It won't help and you'll just end up feeling alone."

  She was alone, she realized. She'd never felt more alone in her life. She forced herself to ask, "Fran, what if it's a brain tumor?"

  "I really, really doubt it. You're not dizzy, or having balance problems, or hallucinating the smell of burning rags. But if it is, we'll do what has to be done. Look, Shelby," she said in a soft, firm voice, "however this works out, I'm with you. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, I won't leave you alone in it."

  Relief and gratitude washed over her. "Thank you." She laughed a little. "I think I'm a mess."

  "What else is new?”

  "Hey," Shelby said, "there's no need to be insulting."

  “You sound better."

  "A little." She looked out the window, into the branches of the maple that stood in front of the building's entrance. A robin was building a nest. "I should get back to work."

  "Me, too. I'd hate anyone to bleed to death on my shift. Looks terrible on the resume. I'll see you tonight."

  “I have dinner with my mother.”

  "It's all right if it's late. Any time."

  “OK.”

  "Take care of yourself, Shelby."

  “You, too."

  She did feel better. Talking had connected her back to herself.

  Hanging up the phone, she leaned back in her desk chair and watched the progress on the robin's nest for a while. The female stayed by the half-built nest while the male brought tiny sticks and dried grasses. He'd drop them at her feet and immediately try to mount her. Mrs. Robin would shake him off, examine the building materials he'd brought, and declare them unsatisfactory. Knowing he wouldn't get what he wanted until she'd gotten what she wanted, he'd fly off to try again.

  When Shelby thought about her friendship with Fran—and she found she thought about it quite a bit—it struck her as strange and possibly a little disconcerting, but not in an unpleasant way. They‘d known each other three months, but enjoyed the ease and comfort of a much longer time of knowing. Though she'd been eager for Fran to meet her other friends, and though everyone had gotten along, she now realized that her friendship with Fran was something set apart from her everyday life. She really wouldn't mind if Fran didn't come to the engagement party. She wouldn't even care, really, if she skipped the wedding. Parties and rituals were part of mundane things, on the surface of life. Their friendship wasn't about all that. She wouldn't have asked her other friends to help her find out about the headaches. Not even Jean. As much as she liked her, she couldn't go crazy and start screaming with Jean. And she had the feeling she could easily go crazy and start screaming.

  What if she had to go into the hospital? There'd be no way of keeping this secret if that happened. And, once the secret was out, everyone—Libby, Ray, Connie—oh God, Connie—would have an opinion, and everyone would tell her and her doctor what to do, and do it now before you have a chance to consider it, and she'd lose the reins of her life entirely.

  She shook herself. One thing at a time. At least she could have some control over things in the immediate vicinity. She reached for her phone and dialed Penny's extension.

  "Everything I've touched today has gone wrong," Shelby said.

  Fran handed her a soda. "Really?" She indicated the space next to Shelby on the couch. "Feel free to stretch out. After all, this is a pajama party."

  Shelby swung her legs up. Fran sat in the chair across the coffee table.

  "I had a meeting with my editor, which ran over, which made me late for lunch, which meant they couldn't play bridge since Lisa wasn't in today—probably hung over—and there was no one to fill in for me, who was late, which caused no end of consternation among the truly bridge-addicted, namely Connie..." She paused to catch her breath. "Then I had to meet with Penny in the afternoon because she recommended a story that was just terrible—I mean it would take first prize hands down in a contest for the worst short stories of the 1962/63 season, no, the entire decade.
I made myself believe she did it as a joke, since I couldn't believe she would really like that thing, but she hadn't. Didn't. Liked it. So there we were, coming from opposite points of view, trying to reach some kind of consensus, which was impossible since we'd both chosen this particular day to be unyielding. I finally had to pull rank and reject the story. Which is what they pay me to do. So now Penny thinks I'm nasty and foolish, and I'm doubting my own judgment—if not about the story, at least about he-r-and I really hate these awkward, confrontational things we get into."

  "I imagine the news I dropped on you right after lunch didn't help much."

  She sipped her drink. "Yeah, I guess I was a little nervous."

  "No doubt," Fran said and gave her an 'I know you're understating but I'm pretending to let you get away with it' smile.

  "So then I had to spend the evening over dinner with my mother, planning The Wedding." She sighed. "The Wedding. You'd think it was a Presidential Inauguration."

  "I take it you're still not in agreement on it."

  Shelby laughed sharply. "In agreement? I don't even understand the damn thing. About the only thing we're in agreement on is that she knows everything and I know nothing."

  Fran raised one eyebrow. "I'll bet you know more about camping than she does.”

  "Anything Libby doesn't know anything about isn't worth knowing anything about."

  "That's her opinion." She smiled at her sympathetically. "You're in a mood."

  "I guess so. I know it's ridiculous, but she makes me feel so stupid."

  "Shelby..."

  "It's as if I'm the only person in the entire world who doesn't know how to do this stuff."

  "If everyone knew how to do this stuff, there'd be no market for Bride Magazine."

  Shelby twisted on the couch and rose up on one elbow to see her. "Are you sitting back there taking notes?"

  "Are you paying me forty-dollars an hour?"

  "I should be." She flopped back down and stared at the ceiling. "All I do around you is spill my guts."

  "Gee," Fran said, "I thought that was what friends were for. And all this time I could have been getting rich."

  "I'll bet you're the kind of person everyone talks to."

  "Hardly."

  "Sure, you are. You probably lock your door at the end of the day so you won't have to listen to people spilling their guts at you. It's probably why you don't have a television set."

  "I don't have a television set because I've just spent four years staring at television, when I wasn't soldiering. I wanted to learn to read again." She got up and took Shelby's glass and refilled it and gave it back to her. "What's the real problem, Shelby?"

  She pulled her knees up so Fran had room to sit beside her. "I don't know how to do this," she heard herself say.

  "Do what?"

  "Life."

  Fran swirled the ice cubes in her glass with one finger. "That's simple. It's always fourth down, eight yards to go. You punt."

  "Don't I wish?" She was glad Fran had sat where she could see her. It made her feel less confused, somehow. "There are rules. Millions of rules. Half of them I can't remember, and half of them I can't keep."

  "Don't forget, it was just people who made them, not God."

  "It's people who enforce them."

  She rolled the cold glass across her forehead. "I'm so tied in knots over this wedding... it's a thousand opportunities to fail."

  "Does that really matter so much?"

  Shelby glanced at her. Fran looked deeply serious. "It does when you have Libby for a mother."

  "I thank God every morning that Libby isn't my mother. Well, maybe not every morning. But everything you've said about her reminds me of a particularly nasty lieutenant we had at Fort Sam. He'd make you eat dirt and then kiss his foot in gratitude for the opportunity to do it."

  Shelby smiled grimly.

  "It was the Army. You expected it. There wasn't anything personal about it. A mother's a bit more personal than the Army."

  "Quite a bit." She rubbed the back of her neck. "God, I'm sick of talking about this. There's more to life than headaches and weddings."

  "I didn't know that," Fran said. "What else?"

  "Camping."

  "Want to go again?"

  "Yes."

  "This weekend?"

  Shelby shook her head. "I have a date Saturday night."

  "We'll go Friday, and come back Saturday evening."

  Date to camping she could do. But camping to date? "As soon as we can work it out, OK?"

  "Very OK."

  Shelby started to get up. "Sack time."

  "One moment, please," Fran took her wrist. "We're going to go over what you should expect on Thursday."

  She sat back down. "Do we have to?"

  "Yes, we have to. Because I can see you making it much worse in your mind than it really is, and I won't allow that."

  I hate this, Shelby thought as she stared at the unmoving shadow of the maple against the bedroom wall. She could get through Thursday. That was no problem. A couple of simple tests, an EEG, all of it painless. But it wasn't the pain she was afraid of. It was what it might be leading up to. There were some pretty scary possibilities, like tumors and aneurysms—though Fran was quick to assure her, if she had an aneurysm, she'd probably be dead by now, which was a comfort—and seizures and all kinds of horrors that would force her to cancel her life as she knew it and start over. But even if it was only tension... only tension, like being just a little bit pregnant... she knew perfectly well it wouldn't go away until she'd made some changes in her life.

  Changes. What changes? Her life was fine, going along the way it was supposed to, the way she'd always planned. So where's the tension? The wedding? She'd had the headaches long before they'd even talked about marriage. The job? Sure, she was afraid of making a mistake, but she'd lived her whole life afraid of making a mistake, what else was new?

  It wasn't fair. She'd finally gotten it right, finally arrived, finally made it to where she'd been trying to go since she was a child, and what was the payoff? Headaches and insomnia. If this was life's idea of a joke, it was a really nasty one.

  One thing at a time, Fran would say.

  Yeah, and what else was there to do in the deep, unformed hours of darkness between midnight and dawn? Especially that three a.m. to four a.m. period. That was a real killer. That was when the heebie-jeebies would get you if they ever would. When you weren't sure what time it was, or if day would ever come, or where you were or even who you were sometimes.

  Fran had said they might want a sleeping EEG, which meant staying up most of the night before. No problem. She was all set to stay up three nights before, all night, beginning now.

  This was terror. Pure terror. And depression. Oh, yes, let's not forget depression. How about anxiety? Or is that just terror on a smaller scale? No, terror is about now. Anxiety is about the future. Or is that apprehension? Apprehension, what a joke. Apprehension is a scraped elbow compared to this multiple-fracture, rib-crushing anxiety.

  She sat up and turned on the light. Might as well read. Might as well do something constructive with all these extra hours I've been given.

  Maybe Fran was still awake. Maybe they could talk or something.

  Shelby slipped out of bed and out into the hall. No light showing beneath Fran's door.

  Well, it was just as well. She couldn't go running to Fran with every little problem.

  She closed her door and locked it, wishing she could lock out the next few days and nights. She thought about making a drink, but something told her it wasn't a good idea. Drinking to sleep could lead to side effects.

  Maybe that was what caused the headaches. Maybe she was drinking too much. Maybe her sins were catching up with her...

  Be real. She'd had drinks, serious drinks, maybe ten times in college, once to excess in her junior year when she'd joined some sort-of friends for an illicit bash at the state park. She'd ended up terrified of being caught and thrown into jail
, maudlin about the friend who wasn't her friend any more, and sicker than a dog the next day. One of her hall mates had put her to bed, sat up all night with her, and refused to tell her—ever—what she'd said in her drunken ramblings.

  In graduate school it had been wine, and not much of that. She didn't want to be cotton-headed and miss something important, especially now that everything she was studying was relevant.

  She drank more now, of course. They all did. It was what career women, on their own for the first time, did. As if she were truly on her own, what with Libby checking in twice a week, keeping track of her every move. And Ray, and her friends... she was answerable to them all. That was how it was when people cared about you. You took their feelings into account, and when you had to take someone else's feelings into account you weren't really on your own.

  Which wasn't such a bad thing, she thought as she forced herself to get back into bed and turn out the light. It was better than being alone in the world.

  Fran was alone in the world, at least for now. In a new place, estranged from her family, separated from her friends. She'd put a life together soon, but until then... How did it feel? Did she like it? Was she lonely? Maybe she felt free. Maybe loneliness was worth that. Shelby realized she'd never asked. That was rude, as if she didn't care. And she did care. It was just that Fran always seemed so all right with where she was and what she was doing. She'd have to remember to ask.

  A bird twittered, a fluting sound. Robins. Next would come the sparrows, with the pewter pre-dawn sky. Once the light started, she'd be awake for good, and she'd have to go around all day with that gritty, metallic, half-sick, half-stupid feeling of no sleep. She turned on one side, then the other, then back on her back. The shadows on the wall faded. The window glass turned gray.

  "Oh, shit," Shelby said.

  She got up, bathed and dressed, and went to her car. The town was eerily silent, security lights glowing dim in stores, the landscape washed with gray. Mist hung over the fields and along the creeks. An occasional light burned in a farm house kitchen, but there was no one inside. Everything was lifeless, suspended, hollow, waiting.

  She drove until it was time to go to work.