Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  He wanted to make plans for putting her to bed, with something hot to drink; he tried to remember what his wife had done when her children might have been coming down with something, but he had never really joined in that activity. His wife had done it all. Before he had time to think of something, they were home. Wilma got out quickly and went into the kitchen. He closed the garage doors and went inside, expecting to find her; she wasn’t there, or in the dining room or living room. She must have gone straight upstairs, but he heard no water running in the pipes.

  She wasn’t in any of the bedrooms, yet he heard no noise from her bathroom, and saw no light beneath the door. He had been turning on all the lights; he didn’t want to call her, hoping that nothing was strange. He tapped on her bathroom door, then tried the handle, and it was locked.

  “Wilma?” he said into the smooth surface of the door. No answer.

  “Wilma?”

  “Oh, oh,” she said from within.

  She was in there, in the dark. He couldn’t understand, and tried to keep himself from theories. He did not want to go inside. His palms were wet because of the strangeness of it, and his pulse knocked dryly in his throat. He had chosen the locking knobs for the door, and knew how to open them; in the center of the outer knob was a little hole, and he needed something like a nail, or a big pin, or an ice pick to insert into the hole. Desperately he looked around the room. He didn’t want to take the time to go down to the kitchen, where he would be sure to find something suitable. But then he remembered that often, in the morning, he would see on Wilma’s pillow little black metal things as long as a kitchen match. Little bobby pins, made of crimped metal with their tips dipped in plastic. He found several in the drawer of her night table, took one, and bent it apart as he came back to the door. It worked; a little click and the knob turned. He brushed on the silent light switch as he went inside. Black into soft color, blues of towels, orange-buff garter snaps hung from a clothes bar. Wilma sat at her dressing table, still in her dancing dress, and he saw her back and the back of her black head, yet at the same time her face, open, white; green eyes stared back from the mirror, the green growing wider in her eyes as her pupils shrank into dots.

  “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

  She didn’t answer him. Her face was surrounded by black hair, as though she looked out of darkness.

  “Wilma?”

  “I’ve got something wrong with me,” she said.

  He had nothing to say. He was all dry inside, in his mouth and in his throat. Finally he heard his own harsh voice: “Where?”

  Wilma just shook her head, as if to say, What does it matter? “I’m probably dying,” she said.

  “Why do you say that?” He stepped forward as though to touch her, and she drew back from him. She was trembling all over. Her shoulders shook, then stopped shaking, then shook again.

  “How do you know?” he said. “Have you been to the doctor? Have you had an examination?”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” she said.

  “Wilma!”

  She shook her head.

  “What do you think is wrong with you?”

  “What do you think?” She tried to smile. “The worst thing there is.”

  “That isn’t something you can tell by yourself.”

  “At our age,” she said. “The symptoms. I have a list.”

  “We’ll go to the doctor,” he said.

  “No!” She really meant it.

  “You’ve got to go to the doctor to find out.”

  “No. I won’t be examined. I won’t be looked at. I don’t have to.”

  “How will you ever find out for certain?”

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing they can do anyway.”

  “Symptoms can be for anything,” he said. “What symptoms? You can’t tell by yourself.”

  She shook her head. “Inside me,” she said in a small voice, and pulled her knees together. “I didn’t want to tell you, but sometimes I get scared and I can’t stop shaking.”

  “Tomorrow I’m taking you to a doctor.”

  She looked at him closely, squinting out of her mirror at him. In her fingers she kneaded a Kleenex—narrow red fingers, with her rings loose and twinkling, and the tissue pulped, with streaks of black mascara on it.

  He felt that it would be wrong for him to plead or argue any longer; he couldn’t afford to waste the strength of his position by using up his words. Although he could argue with her, and in the arguing feel that he had a point to make, he knew that he must delay his arguments, and go through the terrible fright he could feel waiting in his body. He had to face that while she was not in front of him, and then he could make his plans. He must be careful with her now.

  Then things began to go his way; she slipped off her rings and opened a small jar of cream.

  “We’ll talk after we’ve changed, ” he said. She nodded without looking at him.

  He shut the door as he left, and stood quietly on the bedroom carpet, listening to see if she would lock the door again. In his pocket he squeezed the slippery bobby pin.

  He went to his bathroom, took off his jacket and shirt, and washed himself, his face moving in the mirror but not quite looked at. He never looked at himself very much, and he felt that if she were gone, it would be as if he were no longer seen at all; he would be invisible. He could not help considering the possibility that she might die, and his fear was so great he was nauseated, and his stomach hurt badly. What part of his life would be left without her? His mouth opened and he saw his false gums.

  No. She didn’t know what was wrong with her.

  He put on a fresh shirt and the scarlet smoking jacket she had given him, and went downstairs to wait for her. The possibility of her death was like a lens through which he saw their home. She had done everything. The white drapes across the front windows, the low davenport in a dark pattern flecked with gold, the deep carpet. Her piano. The marble coffee table, the tall, warm lamps on the end tables. The console phonograph with the little ivory Buddha on top of it, next to the ti plant in a terra-cotta bowl. All these things had meaning only because of her, that he see her among them. Without her the lamps would never be turned on, the piano and the phonograph would be forever silent, the ti plant would die of thirst. The very light would grow yellow and dusty, soiled like the lobby of a cheap hotel.

  No. He would be strong with her. For her own good he would take over, and make her see a doctor.

  When she came downstairs, she had put on a pair of goldcolored slacks and a sweater, and wore a white silk kerchief around her neck, its flossy ends gaily floating over her shoulder. She came over to him and kissed him.

  “I don’t want you to worry. It’s all in my mind,” she said. “Let’s forget it.” And so they didn’t mention it again. They played honeymoon bridge while the phonograph played a of records, and his remembering of it came in waves, faded out so that he was happy, then came back with a force that twisted in his stomach. He hadn’t lost his resolve. He would make her go to the doctor.

  On Sunday they didn’t mention it, but on Monday he made an appointment for her to see a doctor. When he picked her up after work, he told her he had made the appointment, and that she was to see the doctor in an hour. She didn’t answer, so he started the car and drove toward home. He thought, I don’t care what she says or what she does, she’s going to see the doctor. When they got home, she went upstairs without a word to him, and after fifteen minutes he went up after her.

  He spoke to the closed door of her bathroom. “Wilma?”

  As if in answer she sloshed some water around in the bathtub. He thought she wouldn’t answer, and so he said again, “Wilma?” But as he said it, she said something he didn’t catch, and he had to ask her what she’d said. The water splashed.

  The water calmed; he thought of a woman’s body in a bathtub, suddenly immobile, and the water moving silently up and down her skin as she breathed.

  “You already made the appointment,�
�� she said. Her voice was hard because of echoes, and cold. “You’re forcing me to go- “

  “Yes,” he said. The water began to run out of the tub. “It won’t do any harm to find out,” he said, louder, so she would hear it over the sounds of water.

  “You knew I’d have to go.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t break the appointment,” he said.

  “Not keep it after it was made.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” she said in a voice he wasn’t sure of—did she mean she would go this time, or not?

  “I’m not sure of anything,” he said. “Wilma?”

  “What?”

  “I’m scared, that’s why I had to do it. I’m scared of you being sick. Thinking you’ve got cancer. You probably haven’t got it. I was reading in Reader’s Digest…”

  “I read that.”

  “Well?” he said. Then she came out, wrapped in a bright robe, and put her hand along his face just for a second. Sweet, humid air enveloped him. She went to a closet for a dress.

  “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she said, and he went back downstairs to wait for her.

  When she came down, they went to the car without a word. He took her to the doctor’s office and sat alone in the waiting room while she was inside. He thought, Now what will I have to do? She has gone to the doctor. He tried to look at magazines, but they all seemed to be for children, or they were thick as catalogues, and his eyes could never settle anywhere in them, as though he were responsible for turning every single page.

  After a long time Wilma came out. She seemed not to see him; her face was disorganized, abstracted. Her eyes were deep—they seemed to have receded into her eye hollows, so that he noticed wrinkles and brown skin. The white collar of her dress was just slightly askew. When he touched her arm, she pulled away from him, and when he looked straight into her face it seemed full of cracks, like cracks in a mirror.

  “Come on home,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did he find out what’s the matter?”

  She shivered, skittishly drew her arm away from his hand.

  “He examined me,” she said, her voice growing deep.

  At home they had a light supper, which she prepared. She tried not to seem preoccupied with her visit to the doctor, but he read the silences, and after supper he asked again what the doctor had found.

  “He said I probably didn’t have cancer. That’s what he said, but what else could he say? He took a smear. They have to look at it in Northlee Hospital. A Pap test. I don’t believe anything he said. You remember Norma Walker? She used to have that little beauty parlor in her house? He never told her. Her sister knew, and she told me, but they never told Norma. They don’t tell the one that’s got it.”

  She got up from the table and walked quickly into the kitchen, then back. She was trembling, but when he got up to comfort her, she moved away from him, hugging herself with her own arms. He felt old and weak; he could think of nothing to do for her.

  “They can’t cure it,” she said. “They just let the air to it.”

  “Sometimes they do,” he said. “They do cure it. But how do you know that’s what you’ve got? Wait till the test comes back, anyway.”

  “They can’t do anything, really. I don’t think they know very much. I’ve know of cases, and heard about cases. You have to do everything yourself.” She looked at him seriously—a shrewd expression, as though she’d just figured it all out. “You can’t let them get ahead of you. You have to do everything yourself. Everything.”

  “Well, suppose you needed a little operation. Could you do it yourself?”

  “I’m the one to say I need such a thing, that’s what I mean. I’m not an animal! Ugh!” She shuddered again.

  “In a way you’re an animal,” he said, he thought reasonably.

  “I don’t care about that part of me!” she said. “I’ve been treated like an animal. Oh, haven’t I been treated like an animal! I’ve been thrown down, and knocked down…”

  “That’s different,” he said. “I know about…”

  But she ran over to him and put her arms around him. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Oh, Harvey! I don’t want to think about it. You’re so kind to me. I love you so much. Do you love me? I’m talking too much because I’m frightened about everything. In a minute I’ll stop talking about it. I don’t mind when you touch me—I don’t care what you do to me, you’re so kind.”

  “Yes, I love you,” he said.

  “Did you love your first wife?” she said.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think I ever did. It was all sort of practical. I don’t think I ever even told her I loved her.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “My God! Why did you marry her?”

  “I got her pregnant. And besides, I couldn’t think of anybody else.”

  “I loved my husband. I really did, at first. He did terrible things to me.”

  “We know all this,” he said. “Let’s not talk about those times.”

  “Yes. They’re ugly. Ugly.”

  He thought, Yes, they were ugly. He once knocked his wife down on the kitchen floor. It was Harvey Lake, age thirty-eight or so, didn’t like something she said and knocked her down flat on her back on the linoleum, right out there in the kitchen, on the linoleum rug that had been peeled up before the new vinyl tile could be laid down.

  He led Wilma into the living room and they sat together on the davenport. She let him comfort her.

  “Would you like something?” he asked. “Some coffee? Some hot chocolate?”

  “There’s some wine. Let’s have a glass of wine.”

  He went out to the sideboard and poured two glasses of the white port they drank occasionally, and later they watched television—one of the few shows they enjoyed, The Arthur Murray Party, where the people danced and were happy. When they saw a new step they tried it, too, along with the graceful dancers on the television.

  The next morning, after he let Wilma off at the Public Service Co., he called the doctor.

  “I don’t think it’s much,” the doctor said. “We’ll know more when the Pap test is back, of course. But to me it looks like a cystocele. That’s a hernia of the bladder. Not too much to fix. The bladder herniates into the vagina, which gives a certain amount of discomfort.”

  The doctor was young; his voice was brash and know-it-all. Wilma probably didn’t like him. Harvey, too, was a little shocked by his matter-of-factness. As though he were talking about a machine.

  “She needs an operation?” he asked.

  “Ought to have it fixed,” the doctor said. “A week, ten days in the hospital at the most.” The doctor was probably busy; he seemed impatient. “I told your wife all this yesterday.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Harvey said.

  That evening while Wilma was getting supper, the phone rang, and Harvey answered it. It was the young doctor, and he said, “I thought you’d want to know the test was negative. There’s just the repair that ought to be done. Now, I can schedule her at Northlee next week. Say Tuesday?”

  “You’d better let me talk to my wife,” Harvey said. “Can I call you back?”

  “Not tonight. Call me tomorrow morning.” The doctor seemed slightly disgusted at such unreasonable delay.

  “All right. Thank you, Doctor.”

  He went out to the kitchen, came up behind Wilma, and put his arms around her. His hands were shaking.

  “That was the doctor. The test was negative. You don’t have cancer,” he said.

  She jumped, and put her hands over her face. Then she retrieved her paring knife and the potato she had dropped into the sink. She said in a cool voice, “But I have to have an operation.”

  “Yes,” he said eagerly. “A week or ten days in the hospital at the most. A little repair is all. That’s what he said.”

  “Repair,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Well, it’s nothing too ser
ious. You’ve been in the hospital before.”

  “Only when I had my baby.”

  “You’ve been lucky. Anyway, he wants to schedule you for next Tuesday. I’m to call him in the morning.”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

  “What’s there to think about? It’s not really a serious thing.”

  “I’ll have to think about it. Don’t force me again.”

  She hadn’t turned to look at him, and he decided not to press her. She knew the facts; what more could he do? What could he tell her now? He had trouble getting a breath, and he stood there helpless, fascinated by her skill with the paring knife. She delicately peeled the potato in a spiral, so that the skin descended into the sink unbroken, like a little spring.

  That night he lay in the dark, his lips slippery and loose over his empty gums. He had never been a man to risk very much. He had never even played poker, and for the talent of risk he had substituted hard work and an honesty that was uncommon, even somewhat cowardly, that had at times lost him money. He had been eager to let the facts speak for themselves.

  For the rest of the week Wilma was moody, and he could understand that. One meal she’d eat too much, and the next, nothing but a mouthful. Sometimes she looked as though she’d been crying, but he never saw her cry. He’d catch her staring off into a corner, or at something a mile away through the wall. And the next moment she would be happy again, as though she had forgotten all about it.

  On Saturday she wanted to go dancing, as they usually did, and he thought it a good idea, if she was up to it; it would take her mind off what she must decide.

  “How do you feel?” he asked her.

  “Fine, really,” she said, but a shadow crossed her face.

  That night she wore an orange dress made of crisp, luminescent material, and he wore a sport jacket with a loud check in it, and a black bow tie. They always conferred about what they would wear. She sat close to him as they cruised toward the lake in the big car, and he wished the lake were a hundred miles away through the warm night, on smooth, deserted roads through tall pines. But soon they would arrive at the Blue Moon, where they would debark and be seen, and again he would dance as lightly as he could, using all his skill to smooth the way for her. How he worked to be adequate for her! Each step was a danger, but each step would also be a triumph.