ALSO BY SUSAN SCHOENBERGER
A Watershed Year
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Susan Schoenberger
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union, Seattle.
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
eISBN: 9781477872796
ISBN-10: 1477822798
ISBN-13: 9781477822791
LCCN: 2013922974
Cover design by Anna Curtis
For Kevin
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #2
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #3
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #4
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #5
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #6
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #7
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #8
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #9
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #10
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31 Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #11
CHAPTER 32
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #1
Brief bits of memory remain:
—Stiffness in my legs as I balanced on the second fence rail to feed the chickens.
—A too-bright sun searing my aching head.
—Clothes rough against fevered skin.
—Eyelids so heavy they pulled me into darkness.
I’ve been told that my sister, Darlene, found me on the ground and carried me into the house. My cheek must have been mashed against a button on her overalls, because I remember waking up and rubbing the welt on my face when she put me down on the davenport, but then my arm felt so tired I had to let it drop. That sensation—of strength draining out of me like water from a bathtub—has stayed with me all these years. The virus set in quickly, shutting down limbs that had just that morning propelled me into the spiraling oak in the backyard, the one I wasn’t allowed to climb.
“You’ll break your neck up there,” my mother had said, little knowing that my arms and legs needed a challenge before they would be permanently decommissioned. She had walked back into the house yelling, “Why the Lord saddled me with two tomboys I’ll never know.”
Darlene was ten, four years older than me and therefore four times as smart, and so thoroughly a tomboy that she was sometimes mistaken for an actual boy. She refused to wear dresses except to church and she stomped around the farm in a pair of Daddy’s old work boots. I admired everything about Darlene—how she had chopped her hair into a bob with a pair of rusty scissors in the shed; how she shrugged whenever my mother told her that boys didn’t find dirty fingernails attractive; how she read extensively about airplanes and engineering and could take our old radio apart and put it back together. Daddy never seemed to mind her boyish ways, but my mother fretted about them endlessly. Darlene just had her own view of the world.
“Don’t you feel like you could reach out and grab one?” Darlene said one summer night while we were lying on our backs on the hillside behind the farmhouse looking at the stars. She stretched her arms toward the sky and made little pincers with her thumb and forefinger around a star, so I did the same.
“Darlene?”
“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”
“We’ll always stay here, right? You, me, Mom, and Daddy.”
“I’m going to fly airplanes when I grow up,” she said. “But I guess I’ll come back and sleep here when I’m done for the day.”
“You promise?” It worried me to think about Darlene zooming around in the sky without the rest of us, dodging the stars, which she wouldn’t be able to see in the daytime.
“I promise, Vivi. Now let’s go inside before Mom has a conniption.”
I remember Darlene crying before they took me to the hospital, which more than anything made me realize I was truly sick. The word “polio” had been mentioned in my presence during periodic quarantines, but I don’t remember if I knew what it meant. I only knew that I felt terrible—so terrible that I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t cry. I didn’t have the strength to worry about what was happening to me. I just wanted to escape from the pain in my back and my head; sleep seemed like the only release.
When I woke up in the hospital, my parents were hovering over me with looks of pure anguish on their faces. They told me the doctors were sending us to another hospital so that I could get better, and patted my hands and placed clammy palms on my burning forehead. I was already having trouble breathing. I remember hearing my mother pulling air audibly into her lungs as if she could compensate for my struggling.
I don’t remember the ride to the polio ward in Syracuse, but I remember the moment they placed me into the iron lung, closing it around my slight body and fixing the rubber collar around my neck so that it made a seal. I couldn’t see most of the machine, but I could feel the instant relief as I gave over the newly difficult work of breathing to a device much more capable than I was. It seemed miraculous. Weeks later—after we had slipped into a bizarre routine of daily visits and strange forms of physical therapy—my mother sat down next to my iron lung and put her hands on both of my cheeks.
“Vivian, sweetheart,” my mother said, her eyes red from crying. “We have something very hard to tell you.”
“What?” I said. In those weeks after I fell ill, my mother often looked like she had been crying, so I wasn’t all that concerned.
“It’s Darlene,” she said, choking over my sister’s name. “She didn’t make it.”
“But you said she could come to see me when I was better.”
“No, Vivian,” my mother said. “She had polio like you, except she’s gone now. Gone to heaven.”
My mother still had her hands on my cheeks. My father stood on the other side of me, one hand on the top of my head, as if they could somehow cushion the last part of me that still functioned on its own. I don’t know that I have ever felt worse, or more sorry for myself, than on that day.
Darlene, I later learned, contracted polio the day after I did. I could never ask my parents to give me the details of her illness, because I knew they couldn’t relive them in the telling. They needed me to focus on surviving, because losing both of their children was inconceivable; even at six I knew that. I had to preserve whatever reason for living they had managed to retain.
And so I fought to resume the life I once led—albeit without Darlene. I couldn’t wait to ride a bike, go on picnics, swim in the lake near our house, and catch fireflies again in the midsummer dusk. It was not all that uncommon for children with polio to regain their ability to breathe
and move just before Jonas Salk’s vaccine became widely available in the mid-1950s. Some were in wheelchairs, others in braces, but they still moved independently through the world. I had no doubt I would be one of them.
My favorite visitor—besides my parents—was Dr. Mitchell. He was tall, and young for a doctor, and had Clark Gable hair, and he always brought me a lollipop when he came to see me.
“Hiya, peaches,” Dr. Mitchell said one day after my parents left for their lunch in the hospital cafeteria. He took the lollipop, which was cherry, and smashed it into pieces with a metal instrument on the rolling cart next to my lung. I couldn’t manage a lollipop by myself, but I could suck on small pieces as long as someone was there to make sure I didn’t choke. He placed a bit of the candy on my tongue.
“Are we going outside?” I asked him. The staff sometimes took groups of us out to the patio in nice weather, wheeling our bulky machines on their gurneys through the hospital’s wide doors.
“It’s raining, sweetheart,” he said. “We can’t take you out there today. You’d rust like the Tin Man.”
I laughed and stuck out my tongue so that he could place another small piece of the lollipop on it.
“But I do have some news for you,” he said. “We’re going to give your lungs a chance to start working on their own again. Wouldn’t you like to get out of this thing once in a while?”
I thought about it for a moment. I hated being trapped inside all the time, but whenever the nurses opened the lung to change my clothes or clean me or adjust the various tubes that handled bodily functions I no longer even thought about, I would battle for every breath. The muscles that once expanded and contracted without a conscious thought had atrophied. It was like trying to breathe underwater.
“I’m not sure,” I told Dr. Mitchell. “What if I can’t?”
Dr. Mitchell had been writing on my chart, but he looked back toward me, his face the picture of sincerity.
“We won’t let anything bad happen to you, Vivian,” he said. “I promise.”
When Dr. Mitchell left, I remember wondering how anyone could promise such a thing. I understood from listening to my parents that no one even knew how polio was transmitted or why some people died from it while others were left relatively unscathed. Only years later was it clear that polio could travel from person to person through infected food or water, and that most people exposed to it didn’t even show symptoms. Darlene and I somehow ended up in the small group for whom the virus destroyed motor neurons, causing paralysis and respiratory failure.
I could turn my head and see a long row of iron lungs just like my own in the special ward created for them, and it occurred to me that back in olden times I would have died instead of being placed inside a machine that did my breathing for me. Just as suddenly I realized that nothing had changed inside my brain. Even though I couldn’t use my body, I could think and speak as clearly as I had before, and I wondered for the first time what I was missing in first grade.
A few days later I had my first session of independent breathing. The idea was to coax my muscles into remembering how to function and to increase the time I could spend without the lung breathing for me. Some patients learned to breathe on their own during the day and only had to sleep in the lung at night when they couldn’t actively control their muscles. If I could breathe on my own for even short stretches of time, my parents might be able to take me home. Dr. Mitchell and a staff of nurses stood near my head and released the collar as an orderly unlocked the lung and slid the metal casing down.
The first minute or so wasn’t difficult, because I had done it before—I could hold my breath at least that long—but beyond that I strained with my neck muscles to pull air into my mouth. I recall seeing the doctor’s look of concern after I squeezed my eyes shut—the signal that I couldn’t take much more. I sighed with relief when the lung began pumping again. In the weeks following I was able to breathe for up to five minutes on my own, mostly through sheer force of will, but I couldn’t seem to get beyond that, and I began to dread those sessions, even if Dr. Mitchell came to cheer me on.
He later sat down with me and told me that the virus had destroyed my ability to breathe independently and that my condition was irreversible.
“So I won’t get any better?” I asked him, truly surprised because of all the encouragement and attention I had received in the hospital.
Dr. Mitchell put his hand on the top of my head. “Your body won’t get better,” he said. I wanted his eyes to be bright with tears, the way they would have shown such a scene in the movies, but he was only solemn and subdued. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a good and productive life.
“This,” he said, patting my head, “is not damaged at all. And this is where the world exists anyway. Don’t ever forget that, Vivian.”
I didn’t forget it. I never could. Sometimes it was the only thing that kept me alive.
CHAPTER 2
As Holly ran the vacuum under Vivian’s iron lung, she tried to imagine a hospital ward filled with long rows of them, their inhabitants breathing in and out with stunning regularity. She wondered how many of those patients, besides Vivian, were still alive so many decades after the wards had closed.
“Listen, you can’t go wrong with cash for gold right now,” Vivian said loudly enough to be heard over the vacuum. She turned her head, the only part of her that emerged from the machine. “You missed some crumbs . . . follow my eyes . . . right there . . . People need the extra cash, and they don’t mind getting rid of broken earrings or bracelets. It’s a public service in a way.”
Classic Vivian, Holly thought as she vacuumed. Always assuming she knew how the ambulatory conducted their lives based on what she viewed on television.
She turned off the vacuum and wound up the cord. Vivian had had very little personal experience with jewelry, broken or otherwise, Holly thought, although she did sometimes ask one of her volunteers to put earrings on her for special occasions.
“You sound like a commercial,” Holly said over one shoulder as she wheeled the vacuum to its home base in the hall closet. “And from experience I can tell you that cash is never extra. At least not in my house.”
Vivian blew a stray hair away from her face. “I have a good feeling about this, and Bertram Corners needs a new business to perk up that miserable little downtown. This place will have a retail operation, too,” Vivian said. “So you’ll meet with him, right?”
Holly came back into the living room, tucked her hair behind her ears, folded her arms, and looked down at Vivian. She sighed. “What’s his name again?”
“Racine,” Vivian said. “Like the city in Wisconsin.”
“Is that his real name?”
“I think so.”
“I only ask because growing up I had a friend named Niagara whose parents thought it was cute to name their child after where she was conceived. If everyone did that, my name would be Bertram.”
Vivian snorted. “Bertram, ha!”
Holly smiled, gratified as always when she made Vivian laugh. She picked up a hairbrush from a tray near the heavy steel gurney that supported Vivian’s iron lung and brushed the hair around Vivian’s face. Her blond highlights were growing out, revealing a band of white around the hairline, which, Holly thought, rimmed Vivian’s face aptly, like a nun’s wimple. Vivian’s life-sustaining machine—though it looked more like a one-man space capsule than a lung and wasn’t made of iron, as its name suggested—had cloistered her more effectively than any religious institution.
“You’re assuming I’ll do it,” Holly said, knowing full well that she would agree. She couldn’t say no to Vivian, with whom she shared a bond that went way beyond her volunteer status, though she couldn’t quite name it. They weren’t family, weren’t the same age, or in remotely the same circumstances. They weren’t colleagues either. But when Holly spent time with Vivian, she felt she was in the presence of a spirit akin to her own. They shared a peculiar mix of sentimentality and cy
nicism, as well as a mutual love for avocados.
“This is a rare opportunity, Holly. You’d be helping me out, and you can earn some extra money—I’ll pay you for the time you put in. The boys will be ready for college before you know it.”
“I help you because I’m your friend,” Holly said. “You don’t have to give me anything.”
“But I worry about you.”
Holly flinched at the irony of that statement coming from a sixty-three-year-old quadriplegic who hadn’t been able to breathe on her own since she was a child. She picked up the water bottle with a straw that Vivian used to stay hydrated and took it to the kitchen to replace the tepid water with cold. She could see from the kitchen window that it had started to rain. When she returned, Vivian was still talking as if Holly hadn’t left the room.
“. . . and you know my track record,” Vivian was saying. “I just need an extra set of eyes and ears—and maybe some working arms and legs—to watch over the store.”
“I could do that without being paid,” Holly said. “Just to help you out.”
The rain began coming down so heavily that Holly had to raise her voice to be heard inside Vivian’s small Cape. When the first clap of late-summer thunder hit, both Holly and Vivian, out of habit, looked toward the ceiling to see if the ancient brown water stain had grown, even though the roof had been fixed long ago. It troubled Holly that no one had ever painted over the stain, which was about the shape and size of a Frisbee.
“Of course I need to pay you. It may take a lot of your time on the weekends, especially right after the store opens,” Vivian said. “Water, please.”
“I’m not a lawyer or anything,” Holly said as she held the straw up to Vivian’s mouth. “Am I supposed to pretend I’m your assistant? Your accountant?”
Vivian took a long sip, then pushed the straw aside with her tongue. “You just make sure that Racine takes me on as an investor. Then you handle the paperwork, help find a location, and supervise the operation. He’ll be more on his toes if he thinks I’ve got someone watching out for me. It’s the way of the world.”
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 1