by Karen Karbo
“When will she be able to go home, do you know?” Mimi asked. She wanted to get the nurse to look up, so she could see if her eyes were filled with the special type of pity reserved for the relatives of the terminally ill, as opposed to just the temporarily hospitalized.
“Dr. Klingston will discuss that with you,” she said.
Mimi sank back into the loveseat.
If she’s out of surgery and resting comfortably, what’s the surgeon doing? Trading war stories with the boys by the water cooler? She tried to think what it was they did after surgery on television. Washed up, traded witty dialogue with the female love interest, also the scrub nurse. Unless the relatives of the patient were important to the plot, they were characterized as pitiful but superfluous.
She stared up at the television, bracketed to the ceiling. It was bigger and nicer than the one she had at home. It was turned to a cable station. She imagined they tried to stay away from the news and hospital shows. On the screen just then was a cheap game show that looked as though it was filmed in someone’s garage. There were two categories from which the contestants could choose their questions: Women Who Love Younger Men and Antibiotics. The contestants all had shiny faces.
A man came and sat across from Mimi on the edge of the other loveseat. Out of her peripheral vision he looked okay. He looked good. A little too beach boy for her taste, but you never knew. You had to give people a chance. His hairline was only slightly receding. He wore a striped polo shirt, and had a bright-blue coil of what looked like rock-climbing rope slung over his knee. The important thing was that he looked over twenty-five, straight, and not in the film business. She crunched up her stiff blond curls.
They both watched the game show.
“Streptomycin,” he said.
Mimi wondered what his tragedy was. Maybe his wife fell off the side of a mountain.
“Barbra Streisand,” said Mimi.
Their eyes met across the U.S. News & World Reports.
“Are you Mimi FitzHenry?” he asked.
No, better if he’s divorced.
“How do you know?” she asked lightly. She glanced over at the nurse with the crooked part, only half visible from behind the counter. She could hear the pen scratching fiercely. Maybe he’d spotted her and asked the nurse her name.
“What do you do?” he asked.
She liked a man who was direct. “Have you heard of Talent and Artists? I work with Solly Stein. We represent directors and writers. What do you do?” she asked, trying to make it sound provocative.
“I’m Dr. Klingston.”
“Oh, hi! Hello!” Her face boiled with embarrassment. “I’m Mimi, Shirl’s daughter. How, how –” She had only talked to him on the telephone. She slammed her knees together, arched her back, and struggled up from the loveseat. She shook his hand.
“– there was a fracture, as we suspected. Not much we can do for that. Got her on Dilantin, a seizure preventive. There was also a small epidural clot, which we evacuated. As far as the subdural goes, we’ll have to wait. They generally don’t manifest themselves for a month or so after the trauma.”
“She’s not, uh, dying?”
“She’ll be fine. Though there might be some memory loss, perhaps a slight personality change.”
“Personality change? We’re not talking Sybil here are we?”
The electronic doors swept open, admitting a man in suede shorts, plaid shirt, and hiking boots. He wore a red and white bandanna around his neck and a few shiny carabiners dangling from a belt loop. It was an Outfit. He bounded up to Dr. Klingston. “Hiya, Gary. Ready to bag some peaks?”
“Be with you in a minute, Todd.”
“Super. Gals are in the car.” Todd stared up at the television.
“How changed will she be?” Mimi noticed that Dr. Klingston’s mustache disguised the fact he had no lips. She didn’t trust a man with no lips. He glanced up at the television set. There were two new categories: Great Dictators and Reptiles. She wished they could talk in private. “Will she be able to do her découpage? Where you get a picture and, well, she likes to burn the edges, but you don’t have to, and then –”
“Giant salamander,” said Todd.
“Sure, sure. There may be some giddiness, headaches. We’ll have to keep an eye out. Some big exec from one of the movie studios was in here six months ago. Brain tumor size of a tangerine. Took half of his frontal lobe, he was doing a movie a month later.”
“That Mack Stoner?” asked Todd. “Got a deal with Mack Stoner is why I ask.”
MIMI FOUND SHIRL with a turban of snowy gauze wrapped tightly around her skull, eavesdropping on her neighbor. Her cheek was covered with a square of gauze. After the fan had struck her head it glanced off the side of the table, sending her just poured cup of scalding coffee into the air, splashing her cheek as she fell off her chair and onto her wrist. Her cheek was burned, her wrist broken.
She was sitting up, her head cocked toward the plastic curtain drawn between the beds. Shirl was a famous eavesdropper. In restaurants, ladies’ rooms, and beauty salons, and now, Mimi saw with relief, hospital rooms. The cheap curtain provided the illusion of privacy. The people on the other side were foreign. They were talking loudly about suppositories.
Mimi had not expected her mother to be sitting up. She thought there’d be tubes, high-tech monitors, sunken cheeks, and black eyes. Instead here was her mother as she might appear sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a white version of the orange turban she normally wore the day before her weekly hair appointment. The orange turban had coins on it. Even Shirl had a sense of how silly it was. She wore it only inside the house.
“Mom!” said Mimi. “God, you look really terrific. I just saw the doctor –”
Shirl’s faded brown eyes slid toward the curtain. “The wife of the caviar czar of the Valley,” she whispered. “He, the husband, imports for all the stars. He had a polyp in his nose.”
“Oh right. We have a bunch of clients who buy from him.”
“I forget you’re always mingling with the stars,” Shirl said. She rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders, which caused her to wince.
“How are you feeling?”
“Don’t ask me that. You don’t ask a girl who’s just had brain surgery that. Sore. My wrist hurts more than my head. It was divine intervention. I was about to go off program, don’t you know? I’d ordered those white chocolate dumplings in strawberry soup.”
“What program?”
“Weight Watchers.” She tugged at the roll around her waist through the blanket. “I hate it.”
“You look all right. You look like you never had surgery,” said Mimi.
“I’m dying,” said Shirl.
“You are not dying. He said you’re doing terrific.”
“He’s good looking, the surgeon.”
“He was sort of coming on to me. I mean, here I was trying to find out how you were and he was giving me the eye.”
“When Mimi sets her cap for a fella, look out,” said Shirl.
“Please be quiet!” came a foreign voice from the other side of the shower curtain. “Sick peoples here.”
Shirl patted the side of her head gently. “It itches like hell. I’ve got the nubs already. At least this solves what to do with my hair. You know I’m against coloring it, even though on you girls it looks fine.” Even though Mouse had been gone for almost sixteen years, Shirley still said, “you girls.” “That’s a nice blond on you.”
“Thanks.”
The thought crossed Mimi’s mind that maybe her mother was dying. That the lipless, rock-climbing Dr. Klingston was lying, or humoring her. Now that she’d adjusted to the hospital bed and turban, Mimi saw that her mother didn’t look exactly herself. She was bloated, her olive skin flushed. There were webs of broken capillaries on her nose, and crêpey pouches under her eyes, which Mimi had never noticed before. The whites of her eyes were too glittery. Opalescent. Drugs, thought Mimi. Morphine or something.
It b
othered Mimi that Shirl had been so unlucky. Accidents happened to people who attracted them. Hadn’t Fitzy been depressed for months before he died? Hadn’t business been down? Shirl had thought so. Shirl had confided to her little girls that their father was a magnet for misfortune. She had proof. Appliances that broke. Get-rich-quick schemes that only got them poorer quicker. An accident waiting to happen, that was Fitzy. Hapless and melancholy, his middle names. She should have known better than to marry a cleft-chinned black Irishman, Shirl always said. She laughed when she said it, but it was true.
Shirl was the opposite. She said everything she thought and thought everything she believed in was beyond reproach. She was untroubled and stalwart as a Maine woodsman, a true exotic to her friends, all beautiful, ambivalent Southern Californian matrons.
People set their clocks by Shirley FitzHenry. She lived in the same bungalow on Cantaloupe Avenue in Sherman Oaks for thirty-eight years. She had been watching the soap opera As the World Turns for twenty. Every year since the Korean War Shirl had her New Year’s Day party and sent out Groundhog Day cards. Every year she bought illegal fireworks in Tijuana for the Fourth of July, and put away all her white clothes the day after Labor Day. Year in, year out, she got smashed at her own dinner parties and waltzed with herself around the swimming pool, singing either “Yellow Bird” or “Ave Maria.”
Mimi hated the idea that the universe was perhaps paying her back for her incaution. That her mother should have been peering over her shoulder all this time instead of blithely telling off the timid Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the door and eating butter instead of margarine.
Shirl lay back on the pillows and closed her eyes. Mimi stared at her crinkled bluish eyelids. She was afraid of the silence. Hematomas formed themselves in silence, never when you were yukking it up.
“I talked to Mouse,” she said.
“My little world traveler. Does she still have that disease? You know, that fungus that makes her fingernails turn green?”
“She’s coming home,” said Mimi. “I thought she’d want to see –”
“She’s coming home? Not because of me.”
“What do you think? Of course because of you. There she is running all around bum-fuck Egypt Africa while you’re here –”
“Shhh, they may be Egyptian over there,” she said without opening her eyes. She rolled her head toward the curtain.
“I thought you said it was the wife of the caviar king.”
“Czar, caviar czar.”
“I thought you’d want to see her. It was pretty easy to track her down. You know, I call long distance all over the world for Solly. She’s in Zah-ear. She got married.”
Shirley’s eyes flew open. She sat straight up and said loudly, “Married? Mouse married?”
“Or maybe she’s getting married. The connection wasn’t too good.”
Shirl stared. “My baby. I thought all this time she was into that Women’s Lib.”
“She’ll probably want a big wedding. There’s really no other way to do it. I mean, my wedding could have gone bigger, but then I got married in the days when people didn’t really get married. I was sort of a trailblazer. You know me. If I was doing it today I’d have a sit-down, four hundred guests, the whole bit. I’d have more bridesmaids.”
“Your wedding was lovely.”
They never talked about the divorce.
MOUSE AND HER husband, boyfriend, fiancé, whatever, were flying in the same night as Bibliothèques, the third Tuesday of the month. Mimi debated. Should she cancel or not?
Bibliothèques was Mimi’s book group. Someone had suggested the name at their first meeting and it stuck. They thought it meant book-lover, then one of the members assistant-edited on a film shot in France and found out it meant library. They had been thinking of bibliophiles. There were ten of them, all film people, aspiring actresses, aspiring directors, and like that. Mimi was proud to be the only hyphenate, an actress-writer.
They read one difficult book a month, then met to discuss it. It had to be a book they wouldn’t read on their own. This was not a problem, since most of them only read and wrote coverage. Coverage was a one-page synopsis of a screenplay. This month was Mimi’s pick, Lust for Life. The meeting was held at the duplex she shared with Carole, which was why she was hesitant to cancel. The duplex was in West Hollywood, a great place for the price. Two big bedrooms, wood floors, high ceilings, no glitter in the stucco. The only drawback was the noise. All night, every night, disco music thumped and brayed up in the gay bars on Santa Monica Boulevard, a few blocks away. There was also the Special Police Task Force to Prevent Mimi FitzHenry From Ever Having a Good Night’s Sleep. At three o’clock every morning the police helicopter patrolled the alley behind the apartment. The whopp-whopp-whopp of the blades and the jillion-watt searchlight sweeping through her bedroom sent her hurtling from a deep sleep into an adrenaline overdose in a matter of seconds. No wonder she was a high-strung, stressed-out basket case.
She knew it was selfish to put her book group above the arrival of Mouse, but she did have to think of herself sometimes. Who’d kept an eye on Shirl all these years while Mouse had been living it up in Nairobi? Who called all over Zah-ear? It wasn’t like Mouse went out of her way for the family. Mouse had gone – supposedly for a semester – to Tunisia, on a study-abroad program through UCLA, then never came home. Who shipped her stuff over to her? Who tried to explain it to Shirl, who was still a mess nine years after Fitzy’s death and couldn’t understand why her baby, her Mouse, had left them?
Not that Mimi had the foggiest idea. Africa? Come on. In her book that was like suicide without the commitment. Why not just the Peace Corps? Two years, good stories, great pictures. Mouse could have gotten on in one of those –ibia countries, teaching the natives how to use video cameras. But no, she had to live there.
Mimi asked her boyfriend, Ralph, what he thought. Did he think she should she cancel and pick up Mouse and her fiancé at the airport?
Ralph told her she was a patsy. He said that people were too enslaved to their families. He asked her why she should rearrange her entire life around a sister she hadn’t received a genuine in-an-envelope-letter – postcards didn’t count – from in sixteen years. A sister who wouldn’t come to her wedding, even after she’d offered to pay her airfare. Ralph said, hypothetically, if you put one hundred strangers in a room, the six people you’d like the least would all turn out to be members of your own family.
What finally clinched it was that Mimi felt more guilty about Lust for Life. It had been her pick, and had turned out to be seven-hundred-something pages long.
Also, she had already cleaned the apartment.
Ralph arrived first, already whipped up and mad at the world. When he was in that state, which he was quite often, he looked like an angry baby. He had a downy bald head fringed with wispy oatmeal-colored hair, creamy skin, a simple oval face, and a mashed nose. He had full cheeks that got very flushed when he drank and not much of a chin. Mimi liked him because he made her laugh and knew the power of an unexpected flower arrangement delivered to her office in the middle of the afternoon.
He pushed past her, dumped his briefcase in the green butterfly chair by the door, hauled out a roll of photocopies of an article in Vanity Fair called “They’re New, They’re Hot, They’re Young!” about new film directors under twenty-five. Ralph obsessively searched for bad news to confirm his worst thoughts. Then he photocopied whatever he’d found and passed it out to prove how crazy the business was, as though anyone had any doubt.
“These clowns were just getting their drivers’ licenses when Lennon was shot. How can they direct anything? What do they know? Would you please explain it to me. I can understand how you’d keep giving movies to jerks who’d already made you some money, but what’s the appeal of these guys?”
“It’s another mystery of the universe,” said Mimi, punching his shoulder. He was wearing her favorite shirt, the pink and green Hawaiian rayon. It had that campfir
e smell of brushfires burning in the hills, the sad end-of-summer smell.
Coming up the steps behind him was his almost ex-wife, Elaine. Her expensive leather-soled shoes sounded like sandpaper on the plaster stairs. Elaine hardly ever came to Bibliothéques because she was always out of town on business, selling car FAX machines to corporate raiders. She also always seemed to have read whatever book they’d picked for the month. She had her master’s degree in Comparative Literature. She was a snob. “You’re so lucky,” she’d say, “reading Death on the Installment Plan for the first time.”
Even though Ralph and Elaine were officially separated, Mimi and Ralph kept a lid on it when Elaine was around. It was too weird and cozy, otherwise, too sort of Appalachian. Mimi could never bring herself to put an arm around Ralph or steal a kiss with his not-yet-ex looking on. She wasn’t sure Elaine even knew about them.
“I thought she was at a sales conf – ” Mimi whispered to Ralph.
“– she’s back earl –”
“– Elaine! Hiya!” said Mimi.
“What’s he yammering about now?” Elaine appeared at the door. She had long, bowed legs, waist-length hair the color and texture of dried twigs. “Have you ever heard anyone complain like this? I hope he isn’t like this in class.” Ralph was the instructor of How to Write a Blockbuster at Valley College, the class through which they had met.
“That’s a great skirt,” said Mimi. “I tried on a skirt like that at the Gap but it was too big. I mean the waist was too big. I’m into minis, but not, like thigh-high. It was one thing when we were sixteen. Even though I’m thinner than I was then. Some people have knees only God should see. Not that I’m one. Not that I believe in God. I mean, I believe in an energy –”
“– hi Elaine,” said Carole, appearing from the hallway. Behind her, Sniffy Voyeur, Mimi’s dog, swayed into the room. He was a big black and blond mutt, a remnant from her marriage. He trotted up to Elaine and stuck his long nose into her crotch.
“This dog is so needy,” said Elaine, batting Sniffy away.